Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2603.12261

The Latent Color Subspace: Emergent Order in High-Dimensional Chaos

Authors:

Mateusz Pach↗Jessica Bader↗Quentin Bouniot↗Serge Belongie↗Zeynep Akata↗

Text-to-image generation models have advanced rapidly, yet achieving fine-grained control over generated images remains difficult, largely due to limited understanding of how semantic information is encoded. We develop an interpretation of the color representation in the Variational Autoencoder latent space of FLUX.1 [Dev], revealing a structure reflecting Hue, Saturation, and Lightness. We verify our Latent Color Subspace (LCS) interpretation by demonstrating that it can both predict and explicitly control color, introducing a fully training-free method in FLUX based solely on closed-form latent-space manipulation. Code is available at https://github.com/ExplainableML/LCS.

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02.

Nature Medicine 2026-06-25 DOI: HASH:a15a2219f2959762ed15cf9aae43ff46

Teclistamab-based induction treatment in transplant-eligible, newly diagnosed multiple myeloma: a phase 2 trial

Authors:

Marc S. Raab↗

Advancements in frontline therapies have substantially improved outcomes in newly diagnosed multiple myeloma (NDMM); however, many patients will not achieve deep responses and will relapse. Teclistamab, a BCMA×CD3 bispecific antibody, in combination with daratumumab, has demonstrated strong efficacy in relapsed/refractory multiple myeloma versus standard of care as early as first relapse. This ongoing phase 2 GMMG-HD10/DSMM-XX (MajesTEC-5) study evaluates teclistamab-based regimens in transplant-eligible NDMM. In this prespecified pooled analysis of three cohorts, 49 patients received teclistamab/daratumumab/lenalidomide (Tec-DR; arms A and A1) or Tec-DR with bortezomib (Tec-DVR; arm B). Primary endpoints were incidence and severity of adverse events (AEs) and serious AEs; secondary endpoints included overall response rate (ORR), minimal residual disease (MRD) negativity and MRD-negative complete response (CR). The current analysis spans the induction and autologous stem cell transplantation phases until the premaintenance timepoint. Grade 3 or 4 treatment-emergent AEs (TEAEs) occurred in 91.8% (45/49); most were hematologic (lymphopenia (59.2%; 29/49), neutropenia (59.2%; 29/49) and leukopenia (18.4%; 9/49)). No grade 5 TEAEs were reported. Serious AEs occurred in 55.1% (27/49); pyrexia (12.2% (6/49)) was most common. Any-grade and grade 3 or 4 infections occurred in 81.6% (40/49) and 36.7% (18/49), respectively, the most common grade 3 or 4 infections being COVID-19 and pneumonia (6.1% (3/49) each). Cytokine release syndrome occurred in 67.3% (33/49); all were grade 1 or 2, all resolved and none led to discontinuation of any study treatment. No treatment-related immune effector cell-associated neurotoxicity syndrome (ICANS) events occurred. Across arms, the MRD-negative CR rate was 91.8% (45/49) by the premaintenance timepoint; the MRD negativity rate was 100% in evaluable samples at postinduction cycle 3 (1 × 10−5 (46/46)), cycle 6 (1 × 10−5 (46/46) and 1 × 10−6 (46/46)) and premaintenance (1 × 10−5 (40/40)); the ORR was 100% (49/49). Total median stem cell yield was 8.1 × 106 per kg. Data support the feasibility of Tec-D(V)R induction in transplant-eligible NDMM, with a consistent safety profile compared with individual regimen components and notable early MRD negativity rates. ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT05695508 . In the ongoing phase 2 GMMG-HD10/DSMM-XX (MajesTEC-5) trial in patients with transplant-eligible, newly diagnosed multiple myeloma, induction with the BCMA×CD3 bispecific engager teclistamab in combination with daratumumab plus lenalidomide, with or without bortezomib, had a similar toxicity profile to other bispecific regimens with an encouraging and deep response rate.

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03.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19591

A BART-based approach with hierarchical strategy for Vietnamese abstractive multi-document summarization

Authors:

Vu Nguyen Nguyen Xuan↗Huy Ngo Quang↗

In this technical report, we focus on solving the challenge of Vietnamese multi-document abstractive summarization, introduced in the International Workshop on Vietnamese Language and Speech Processing (VLSP) 2022. We choose to follow the popular hierarchical approach, i.e. condensing each document followed by aggregation and summarization. We propose a novel yet simple strategy to shorten documents that is driven by the golden summary, thus ensuring high correlation between stages of the hierarchical approach. Our method achieves a ROUGE2-F1 score of 0.2468 on the VLSP's public test set, and can produce fluent and concise summaries. Additionally, we utilize external sources for extra data, which greatly enhances the quantity of data for Vietnamese multi-document summarization. The additional data is made available for the community.

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04.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25 DOI: arXiv:2606.24963

Curvature-Guided Mixing for MLLM Adaptation

Authors:

Jinglong Yang↗Jiaxuan He↗Wenjian Huang↗Zhan Zhuang↗Jianguo Zhang↗

Fine-tuning Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) on specialized tasks often leads to catastrophic forgetting of their general capabilities. Existing model merging methods to combat this are often heuristic or use sub-optimal objectives. We propose CurvatureGuided Mixing (CGM), a theoretically grounded framework that merges pre-trained and fine-tuned models. CGM formulates a joint optimization objective and uses a second-order (Hessian) approximation of the loss landscapes to analytically derive an optimal, closed-form "soft mixing" ratio. This ratio intelligently blends parameters based on their relative task-specific curvatures. We also introduce CGM$\dagger$, a robust "hard mixing" variant that performs sparse parameter selection guided by a novel, curvature-aware score. Experiments on LLaVA-1.5 and Qwen2.5VL across multiple downstream tasks show that CGM and CGM$\dagger$ consistently improve the trade-off between task specialization and general knowledge retention over existing methods. Code is available at github.com/zzsyjl/CGM-ECCV-2026.

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05.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20359

Train, Retrieve, or Both? A Four-Arm Head-to-Head for Correct Statutory Citation on the Ontario Residential Tenancies Act

Authors:

Ali Asaria↗Tony Salomone↗Deep Gandhi↗

arXiv:2606.20359v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-represented tenants, landlords, and help-desk staff need to be pointed at the provision of law that actually governs a question, with a correct statutory citation. We study this task on the Ontario Residential Tenancies Act, 2006 (RTA) and its core regulation, asking the operator's question empirically: is fine-tuning enough, or is hybrid retrieval needed? We run a four-arm head-to-head on Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct (base zero-shot, LoRA SFT-only, RAG-only, and an SFT+RAG hybrid), scored on citation exact-match (section+subsection) over a small, human-verification-pending real eval set. The base model cannot cite the RTA and SFT-only mis-recalls sections; retrieval is essential and drives hallucination to zero by construction; and the SFT+RAG hybrid scores highest at 0.481 exact-match with zero hallucinated citations. Its edge comes from SFT making provision selection more robust to the higher-recall candidate sets that hurt zero-shot RAG. Notably, this cheap bge-small hybrid matches or beats a pipeline built on bigger, specialized retrieval models (a larger embedder and a cross-encoder reranker), and a larger/improved training set does not help either: strong statutory-citation performance here does not require specialized retrieval models or more data. The artifact zeroes hallucination and clears the lift-over-base bar but does not reach the aspirational 0.70 exact-match target. All results are on a small, human-verification-pending real eval set and are reported as preliminary.

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06.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14218

Universal Manipulation Exoskeleton: Learning Compliant Whole-body Policies with Real-time Torque Feedback

Authors:

Litian Liang↗Jingxi Xu↗Xinda Qi↗Yujun Cai↗Houzhu Ding↗Luqi Wang↗Zhixin Sun↗Jyh-Herng Chow↗Ming Yang↗Mark Cutkosky↗

arXiv:2606.14218v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For robots to work safely in household environments, they need to be compliant and react to torque and force feedback during contact. However, the majority of existing data collection pipelines still lack the ability to capture force and torque data for learning active compliant policies. In this paper, we present Universal Manipulation Exoskeleton (UME), an upper-limb exoskeleton that provides real-time haptic torque feedback while recording whole-arm configurations and joint torque signals for teleoperation. With transparent torque feedback, human operators can even unsheathe kinematically constrained objects while blindfolded. UME is low-cost, lightweight, and portable. Equipped with an embedded IMU, it enables teleoperation for mobile manipulation. With our proposed universal retargeting algorithm, UME can teleoperate a range of robots, including the 7DoF OpenArm, 7DoF Franka, and 6DoF X-ARM. We demonstrate that this combination of capabilities enables learning bimanual, whole-body, and active compliant policies that operate effectively in highly constrained spaces. The learned robust autonomous policies achieve high success rates across a variety of tasks, including long-horizon mobile manipulation, force-mediated box flipping, visually occluded box pushing, and space-constrained tabletop manipulation. Videos, code, and additional information can be found at https://ume-exo.github.io.

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07.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12 DOI: HASH:6eac42a10b535c1aa6f4a0b625581fae

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

Authors:

Kugler↗Mujumbusi↗Pickering↗Muhumuza↗Akugizibwe↗Obicho↗Apangu↗Umo↗Nuwamanya↗Ashraf↗Atim↗S. A↗…

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.

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08.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.18162

Periodicity, type $II_1$ factors and free Poisson laws in interacting Fock spaces

Authors:

Vitonofrio Crismale↗Yun Gang Lu↗\'Eric Ricard↗

arXiv:2606.18162v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We show that the von Neumann algebra generated by position operators in a 2-periodic interacting Fock space is a type $II_1$ factor. On the probabilistic side, we prove that the squared position operators have a Marchenko-Pastur distribution with respect to the vacuum state, yielding a natural realization of free Poisson laws within this framework.

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09.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13178

Loss-Shift Transfer via Bayes Quotients

Authors:

Vasileios Sevetlidis↗

arXiv:2606.13178v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transfer learning is usually studied as a consequence of distribution shift. This paper identifies an orthogonal failure mode in which the data distribution is fixed and the loss changes. This setting is called loss shift. A loss determines which information in \(X\) is Bayes-relevant, and two losses may therefore require different representations even under the same joint law \(P(X,Y)\). The idea is formalized using Bayes quotients, which allow losses to be ordered by refinement. In the Bayes-quotient formulation, strict refinement gives an immediate qualitative obstruction. A source-minimal representation for a coarser loss is insufficient for a strictly finer target loss. For finite-output log loss, this obstruction becomes an exact quantitative identity. The excess risk is the conditional information about \(Y\) discarded by the representation. Experiments in controlled, learned, synthetic-image, and real-image settings show the predicted effect, i.e., classification-equivalent representations can have different optimal log-loss performance under a fixed data distribution.

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10.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2605.31219

Latent Geometric Chords for Query-Efficient Decision-Based Adversarial Attacks

Authors:

Ei Hmue Khine↗Yao Li↗Jiebao Sun↗Shengzhu Shi↗Zhichang Guo↗Boying Wu↗

While decision-based black-box adversarial attacks present a severe security threat, current methodologies suffer from fundamental limitations. Pixel-wise attacks frequently introduce unnatural, high-frequency visual artifacts, while latent-space frameworks are confined by the limited search space of low-dimensional manifolds and inherent reconstruction flaws. To resolve these limitations, we propose Latent Geometric Chords (LGC) for Query-Efficient Decision-Based Adversarial Attacks alongside a variant, LGC-H. At its core, LGC navigates decision boundaries by executing a curvature-aware geometric search within a compressed semantic manifold. To guarantee high visual fidelity and circumvent dimensionality bottlenecks, we introduce a Residual-based Adversarial Generation (RAG) mechanism. RAG isolates semantic perturbations as geometric chords and superimposes them directly onto the original source image. RAG substantially resolves baseline reconstruction flaws and effectively doubles the permissible search space dimensions. Experimental results demonstrate that LGC achieves robust cross-dataset transferability and substantially outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Notably, our method, LGC, minimizes perturbation magnitudes while achieving state-of-the-art visual fidelity–with a Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) exceeding 0.99 and a Learned Perceptual Image Patch Similarity (LPIPS) below 0.01 at 5000 queries–and sustaining high attack success rates under stringent perceptual constraints, successfully compromising adversarially trained robust models. The source code is available at: https://github.com/eihmuekhine/Latent-Geometric-Chords.

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11.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17299

Examining the Limits of Word2Vec with Toki Pona

Authors:

Daniel Zhenhan Huang↗Hongchen Wu↗

Word2Vec's effectiveness at generating semantic embeddings has been widely validated, yet it has been tested almost exclusively on languages with large vocabulary inventories. This study examines whether Word2Vec can successfully capture semantic relationships within an extremely reduced vocabulary using data from Toki Pona, a constructed language with approximately 130 words. We sourced 1.4 million sentences (7.95 million tokens) from the Toki Pona community for training. Approximately 23% of sentences in the corpus contain non-Toki Pona tokens such as named entities, loanwords, and neologisms. To investigate whether this linguistic noise enhances or hinders performance – a topic rarely addressed in word embedding literature – we trained two distinct models: one retaining these incidental tokens and another filtering them out completely. Evaluation was conducted using quantitative methods measuring word proximity to semantic category centroids, automated silhouette scores via agglomerative clustering, and qualitative analysis utilizing representational similarity matrices compared against English. The results indicate that while sparse, non-core tokens do not affect the relative structure of the learned embeddings, they actually draw similar words closer together in the vector space. Importantly, Word2Vec's effectiveness depends more on distributional patterns than lexicon size even at this extreme lower bound.

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12.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24774

Revealing Training Data Exposure in Vision Language Large Models via Parameter Gradients

Authors:

Zhihao Zhu↗Hongyi Tang↗Yi Yang↗Ahmed Abbasi↗

Vision-Language Large Models (VLLMs) trained on massive crawled corpora raise pressing copyright and data-provenance concerns. These concerns are particularly acute in healthcare, where patient medical images paired with clinical reports demand rigorous privacy safeguards. However, existing training data detection methods either fail in cross-modal scenarios or rely on superficial output signals with insufficient discriminative power. We introduce GradAudit, a gradient-based auditing framework that examines internal optimization dynamics rather than treating VLLMs as black boxes. Our approach builds on a key observation: model parameters converge to regions where gradients on training samples become stable and well-aligned, whereas gradients on non-training samples remain noisy and inconsistent. By analyzing these gradient signatures, GradAudit achieves strong separability and detects genuine image-text associations learned during training, not merely individual modality membership. Empirically, across both medical and general-domain datasets, GradAudit substantially outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both pretraining and fine-tuning VLLMs. In a case study employing copyrighted content, we show that existing training data detection methods not only underestimate the extent of unauthorized data usage, but that this underestimation becomes more pronounced as models become more recent and more advanced.

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13.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16783

Gen-VCoT: Generative Visual Chain-of-Thought Reasoning via Diffusion-Based RGB Intermediate Representations

Authors:

Zhiqiang Zhou↗Junliang Dai↗Xu ling↗

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) excel at visual reasoning but rely on text-based chain-of-thought (CoT), lacking interpretable visual intermediates. Existing methods use opaque tokens or external tools, missing key properties. We propose Gen-VCoT, a framework using expert vision models to generate RGB images as reasoning intermediates. It has three stages: visual grounding (SAM segmentation), geometric reasoning (Marigold depth maps), and semantic reasoning (Qwen2-VL integration). An adaptive router selects reasoning depth. Evaluations show Gen-VCoT improves spatial (25% better) and depth (50% better) questions, but may hurt simple factual queries. Text CoT outperforms visual intermediates on CLEVR (91.2% vs 62.5%), showing task-dependent optimal representations. Gen-VCoT establishes a new paradigm for interpretable multimodal reasoning.

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14.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.12364

On Subquadratic Architectures: From Applications to Principles

Authors:

Anamaria-Roberta Hartl↗Levente Z\'olyomi↗David Stap↗Pieter-Jan Hoedt↗Niklas Schmidinger↗Lukas Hauzenberger↗Sebastian B\"ock↗G\"unter Klambauer↗Sepp Hochreiter↗

arXiv:2606.12364v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transformers dominate modern sequence modeling, but their quadratic attention incurs substantial computational cost. Subquadratic architectures offer a scalable alternative. However, it remains unclear which designs yield the most effective sequence models. We compare three leading approaches: xLSTM, Mamba-2, and Gated DeltaNet. We evaluate these models on tasks with complex dependencies: (1) code-model pre-training, (2) distillation of code models from large language models, and (3) pre-training of time-series foundation models. Across these settings, xLSTM delivers the strongest overall performance. To explain xLSTM's advantage, we present a unified formulation and analyze the underlying architectural mechanisms, focusing on state tracking and memory dynamics. Our results show that xLSTM enables more flexible and stable memory correction via its gating scheme. We corroborate these findings on controlled synthetic length-generalization tasks. Overall, our findings indicate that xLSTM's gains on complex tasks stem from robust state tracking and accumulation.

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15.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2507.17853

Detail++: Training-Free Detail Enhancer for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Authors:

Lifeng Chen↗Jiner Wang↗Zihao Pan↗Beier Zhu↗Xiaofeng Yang↗Chi Zhang↗

Recent advances in text-to-image (T2I) generation have led to impressive visual results. However, these models still face significant challenges when handling complex prompt, particularly those involving multiple subjects with distinct attributes. Inspired by the human drawing process, which first outlines the composition and then incrementally adds details, we propose Detail++, a training-free framework that introduces a novel Progressive Detail Injection (PDI) strategy to address this limitation. Specifically, we decompose a complex prompt into a sequence of simplified sub-prompts, guiding the generation process in stages. This staged generation leverages the inherent layout-controlling capacity of self-attention to first ensure global composition, followed by precise refinement. To achieve accurate binding between attributes and corresponding subjects, we exploit cross-attention mechanisms and further introduce a Centroid Alignment Loss at test time to reduce binding noise and enhance attribute consistency. Extensive experiments on T2I-CompBench and a newly constructed style composition benchmark demonstrate that Detail++ significantly outperforms existing methods, particularly in scenarios involving multiple objects and complex stylistic conditions.

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16.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2508.04427

Decoding the Multimodal Maze: A Systematic Review on the Adoption of Explainability in Multimodal Attention-based Models

Authors:

Md Raisul Kibria↗S\'ebastien Lafond↗Janan Arslan↗

arXiv:2508.04427v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal learning has witnessed remarkable advancements in recent years, particularly with the integration of attention-based models, leading to significant performance gains across a variety of tasks. Parallel to this progress, the demand for explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) has spurred a growing body of research aimed at interpreting the complex decision-making processes of these models. This systematic literature review analyzes research published between January 2020 and early 2024 that focuses on the explainability of multimodal models. Framed within the broader goals of XAI, we examine the literature across multiple dimensions, including model architecture, modalities involved, explanation algorithms and evaluation methodologies. Our analysis reveals that most studies are concentrated on vision-language and language-only models, with attention-based techniques being the most commonly employed for explanation. However, these methods often fall short in capturing the full spectrum of interactions between modalities, a challenge further compounded by the architectural heterogeneity across domains. Importantly, we find that evaluation methods for XAI in multimodal settings are largely non-systematic, lacking consistency, robustness, and consideration for modality-specific cognitive and contextual factors. To address these gaps, we not only synthesize findings from the surveyed works but also incorporate a complementary analysis that integrates recent and emerging advances driving multimodal explainability. Based on these insights, we provide a comprehensive set of recommendations aimed at promoting rigorous, transparent, and standardized evaluation and reporting practices in multimodal XAI research. Our goal is to support future research in more interpretable, accountable, and responsible multimodal AI systems, with explainability at their core.

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17.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22 DOI: HASH:da8e27274e0988e297172ba4f2ddf085

A Parent-Generated Framework of Early Connection: Findings from a CBPR Qualitative Study

Authors:

Fuller↗Duby↗More↗Winter↗Lanoff↗Loveless↗Mejias↗Smalls↗Solomon↗Srinivasavaradan↗Thibert↗Vargas↗…

Background: Early relational health (ERH) constructs are derived fromresearch observations rather than lived experiences. This study foregrounds diverse parent voices to examine how they describeconnectionwith their young children. Methods: Usingcommunity-based participatory research (CBPR),this study was co-designed withparent leadersfromReach Out and Read. A semi-structured interview guidewas co-designed,and parent leaderssubsequentlyconducted and transcribed 18 interviews with parents from their networks.Researchersanalyzed transcripts using Reflexive Thematic Analysis.Member checking sessions with parent leadersinformedthe analytic framework. Results:Sixorganizing principleswereidentified.(1) Parent-child connection begins with an instinctual sense of responsibility.(2)Connectionebbs and flows as parent and child adapt to one another through dailyactivities.(3) Family circumstances, including family structure, cultural expectations, and intergenerational values, directly shape this connection. (4) Parents' own upbringings and past relationships indirectly shape how they connect with their child. (5) Forconnectionto grow, parents must show up physically and emotionally for their children despite competing demands. (6) Parentsgrow through engaged parenting, and that growth feeds back into the connection, creating a self-sustaining cycle of relational health.Conclusions:Our analysis generated twoconstructs underspecified in ERH frameworks.Parents described their sense of responsibility as immediate and instinctual, preceding an emotional bond.Parentsdemonstratedtheir agency in deciding what to carry forward from their relational histories, a pattern this study termsrelational legacy. Integrating parent-generated language into ERH measurementresearchmay shape a more comprehensive picture of ERHreflectinghow families experience connection.

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18.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19682

Vortex: Multi-Modal Fusion System for Intelligent Video Retrieval

Authors:

Duc-Tho Nguyen↗Hieu-Hoc Tran-Minh↗Khanh-Hoa Lam↗Hoang-Nhut Ly↗Huu-Phuc Huynh↗Thanh-Tien Tran↗Trung-Nghia Le↗

This paper presents Vortex, the multimodal video retrieval system developed by our team, FocusOnFun, for the Ho Chi Minh City AI Challenge 2025, designed to advance intelligent multimedia search and temporal reasoning. The system integrates adaptive keyframe extraction, multimodal metadata generation from vision-language and speech models, and a hybrid retrieval strategy that fuses CLIP and SigLIP2 embeddings through Reciprocal Rank Fusion to balance global and fine-grained semantics. To enhance interactivity, Vortex incorporates Rocchio-based relevance feedback and a multi-stage temporal search mechanism for sequential event alignment. Built on Milvus and Elasticsearch, the architecture enables scalable indexing and efficient retrieval. Evaluated in the official competition, our FocusOnFun team's system achieved a score of 79.6/88 (90.5\%) in the Preliminary Round and was further evaluated in the Final Round, achieving an `Excellent' overall performance with `Outstanding' results in the question-answering (QA) task. This demonstrating the complementary strengths of CLIP and SigLIP2 and confirming the effectiveness of the hybrid retrieval approach. The system establishes a robust foundation for future research in intelligent, context-aware, and interactive video retrieval.

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19.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14657

HPSv3++: Scaling Reward Models Across the Full Spectrum of Diffusion Model Capabilities

Authors:

Yijun Liu↗Jie Huang↗Zeyue Xue↗Yuming Li↗Ruizhe He↗Haoran Li↗Shijia Ge↗Siming Fu↗

Reward models guide text-to-image (T2I) systems toward outputs aligned with human preferences. However, typical reward models such as HPSv3 are trained on pre-annotated data from earlier T2I models, without accounting for quality discriminative shifts arising from evolving model capabilities and reinforcement learning (RL) iterations, limiting their broader applicability. In this work, we propose HPSv3++, a reward model framework that elevates the HPSv3 model for varying T2I model capabilities and their RL iteration changes across the full capability-iteration spectrum. Specifically, we first introduce HPDv3++, a 212K dual-dimension preference dataset annotated for text fidelity and aesthetic quality using a recent high-capability (Qwen-Image) model with human supervision. We then propose a two-stage training framework. Stage 1 employs data-aware orthogonal gradient projection to incorporate diverse aesthetic perception from HPDv3++ while preserving the original effective human preference knowledge in HPSv3. Stage 2 further leverages unlabeled data from T2I models spanning different capability levels and RL iterations, and introduces a joint capability-iterations conditioned signal for the reward model together with a standard deviation-driven unsupervised guidance mechanism, strengthening reward model across the capability-iteration spectrum. HPSv3++ achieves state-of-the-art preference prediction, outperforming HPSv3 9.8% on HPDv3, 5.5% on GenAI-Bench, while achieving 79.1%/88.1% on our proposed HPDv3++. When used for T2I RL training, it consistently improves GenEval scores across diverse T2I models, demonstrating its wide-range capabilities. The code is available at https://github.com/PlantPotatoOnMoon/HPSv3-PlusPlus.

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20.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2605.29641

Experimentation for Different Scheduling Policies on Queues: Mixed Differences-in-Q Estimators Based on Little's Law

Authors:

Nanshan Jia↗Ramesh Johari↗Nian Si↗Zeyu Zheng↗

arXiv:2605.29641v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In data centers, tasks are dispatched to various servers to evenly distribute the workload. When a data center considers implementing a new scheduling algorithm, it typically conducts an A/B test prior to deployment to assess the real-world impact of this new method. However, a straightforward A/B test might be interfered with so-called ``Markovian'' interference. We utilized the Differences-in-Q estimator, as developed by Farias et al. (2022), and introduced mixed Differences-in-Q estimators grounded in Little's Law. We show that our A/B testing methods significantly reduce bias and variance when testing various scheduling policies. Extensive simulations were conducted under scenarios like non-stationary arrival rates, heterogeneous service rates, and communication delays. These simulations highlight the robustness and efficacy of our A/B testing approach.

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21.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2602.13379

Unsafer in Many Turns: Benchmarking and Defending Multi-Turn Safety Risks in Tool-Using Agents

Authors:

Xu Li↗Simon Yu↗Minzhou Pan↗Yiyou Sun↗Bo Li↗Dawn Song↗Xue Lin↗Weiyan Shi↗

LLM-based agents are becoming increasingly capable, yet their safety lags behind. This creates a gap between what agents can do and should do. This gap widens as agents engage in multi-turn interactions and employ diverse tools, introducing new risks overlooked by existing benchmarks. To systematically scale safety testing into multi-turn, tool-realistic settings, we propose a principled taxonomy that transforms single-turn harmful tasks into multi-turn attack sequences. Using this taxonomy, we construct MT-AgentRisk (Multi-Turn Agent Risk Benchmark), the first benchmark to evaluate multi-turn tool-using agent safety. Our experiments reveal substantial safety degradation: the Attack Success Rate (ASR) increases by 16% on average across open and closed models in multi-turn settings. To close this gap, we propose ToolShield, a training-free, tool-agnostic, self-exploration defense: when encountering a new tool, the agent autonomously generates test cases, executes them to observe downstream effects, and distills safety experiences for deployment. Experiments show that ToolShield effectively reduces ASR by 30% on average in multi-turn interactions. Our code is available at https://github.com/CHATS-lab/ToolShield.

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22.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16753

P3B3: A Multi-Turn Conversational Benchmark for Measuring European and Brazilian Portuguese Variety Bias in LLMs

Authors:

Rafael Ferreira↗In\^es Vieira↗In\^es Calvo↗James Furtado↗Iago Paulo↗Diogo Tavares↗Diogo Gl\'oria-Silva↗David Semedo↗Jo\~ao Magalh\~aes↗

As Large Language Models (LLMs) become embedded in everyday communication, capturing regional linguistic variation is essential for reliable and equitable language use. In Portuguese, European (pt-PT) and Brazilian (pt-BR) varieties remain unevenly represented, with pt-BR dominating in data quantity, while LLM preference for Portuguese variants remains underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce P3B3, an expert-curated language variety agnostic benchmark of conversational prompts, along with an evaluation framework for measuring variety bias and controllability. Experiments on several models show that most LLMs exhibit a strong bias toward pt-BR, with variation in controllability across models. These results highlight the need for more balanced multilingual representation across language varieties.

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23.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.23892

REALM: A Unified Red-Teaming Benchmark for Physical-World VLMs

Authors:

Yifei Zhao↗Qian Lou↗Mengxin Zheng↗

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used as perception-reasoning backbones for embodied intelligence in safety-critical physical systems, where perception or reasoning errors can lead to unsafe decisions or actions. Although many red-teaming methods have been developed to probe VLM vulnerabilities, their evaluation remains fragmented across datasets, metrics, and threat models, making direct comparison difficult and obscuring whether observed differences arise from stronger attacks, more vulnerable models, or incompatible evaluation settings. Existing chatbot-centric red-teaming benchmarks mainly standardize jailbreak and content-safety evaluation, but they do not systematically capture physically grounded functional failures or cover red-teaming methods that target physical-world VLMs. This raises the key challenge of comparing diverse attack methods under a unified protocol while targeting the same scenario-specific failures. We introduce REALM, to our knowledge the first unified red-teaming benchmark for physical-world VLMs. REALM integrates 12 red-teaming methods, 3 model-agnostic defenses, and 13 VLMs under a practical black-box threat model with shared datasets and metrics. To align adversarial objectives across attack families, REALM introduces an agentic target-generation pipeline that constructs shared, scenario-specific, and physically grounded attack objectives for each scene, enabling fair comparison of diverse red-teaming methods under aligned adversarial goals. Our evaluation shows that text and typographic injection attacks induce the most failures, multimodal co-optimization yields the strongest visual-perturbation transfer, single-pass attacks approach iterative methods at much lower cost, and model scale alone does not confer adversarial robustness. Code is available at https://github.com/UCF-ML-Research/REALM.

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24.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25 DOI: arXiv:2606.24935

SEMIR: Topology-Preserving Graph Minors for Thin-Structure Segmentation

Authors:

Luke James Miller↗Yugyung Lee↗

Thin-structure segmentation–power lines, cracks, lane markings at 1-3 pixel width–requires preserving connectivity that standard representations preclude: patching severs continuous structures and conventional superpixels merge thin targets into background before classification. Topology-aware losses penalize connectivity breaks at the objective level but cannot recover what the representation has already destroyed. We propose SEMIR, a framework that replaces the pixel lattice with a parameterized graph minor whose contraction map preserves thin-structure connectivity under the contraction criterion. The minor collapses millions of pixels into tens or hundreds of boundary-aligned supernodes, enabling full-resolution inference without patching at scales demonstrated up to 21 MP in this paper; a lightweight GNN classifies the reduced graph and an exact map lifts predictions to pixel resolution. One pipeline–identical architecture, features, loss, and GNN hyperparameters across all dataset–matches or exceeds domain-specific baselines on TTPLA (power lines), CrackSeg9k (pavement cracks), and SkyScapes Lane (aerial markings) on Dice, IoU, and Boundary F1 while reducing mask fragmentation by at least 4.6x relative to SLIC at matched inference.

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25.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15085

An Integrable Token Mixing Layer from the Generalized Yang Baxter Equation

Authors:

Snigdha Chandan Khilar↗

arXiv:2606.15085v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The YB Mixer is a sequence token mixing layer derived from free fermion and generalized Yang Baxter structures. It applies a core principle from integrable systems where a local algebraic constraint guarantees global computational stability. By using the Ising exchange algebra the mixer creates a free fermionic structure that acts as an exactly norm preserving orthogonal map. This algebra also produces commuting transfer matrices which allow inference to be order free and adaptable to any variable budget. To ensure the model can generalize to longer sequence lengths it uses a spectral circulant generator. This generator maintains the crucial orthogonal and commuting properties of the system. The result is a highly stable and mathematically grounded architecture for sequence processing.

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