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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

PROTECT-90: A Fault Dataset for Power System Protection

arXiv:2606.24298v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The increasing interest in data-driven methods for power system protection is accompanied by a lack of standardized, publicly available high-voltage waveform datasets that enable transparent and reproducible evaluation. To address this gap, this paper introduces the PROTECT-90 dataset, an open electromagnetic transient (EMT)-simulated reference benchmark for high-voltage fault studies with consistent digital-fault-recorder-like measurements, publicly released with this work. The dataset comprises 9,022 physically consistent short-circuit simulation episodes generated on a standardized 90 kV double-line topology with systematically documented domain randomization of grid operating points, line parameters, and fault conditions. For each episode, synchronized three-phase voltage and current waveforms are recorded at eight measurement locations and released together with structured, machine-readable metadata describing fault type, fault location, inception time, and operating conditions. All modeling assumptions, parameter ranges, and data-generation procedures are explicitly documented to ensure transparency and cross-study comparability. By combining physically grounded EMT simulation, balanced scenario coverage, and open accessibility, PROTECT-90 establishes a standardized foundation for reproducible benchmarking of protection-oriented signal processing and learning-based methods.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Cortisol Stress Response is Associated with Iron Status in Pregnancy

Background: Iron deficiency (ID) affects up to 40% of pregnant women in the third trimester, even in highly resourced and iron-supplemented populations, with adverse consequences for maternal health and long-term offspring development. Psychological stress may compromise iron status through hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) axis dysregulation and inflammation, but no study has directly examined cortisol in relation to iron status across human pregnancy. Objective: This longitudinal study examined associations between HPA function and maternal iron status across pregnancy and tested whether IL-6 and CRP mediated the relationship between cortisol and ferritin across gestation. Methods: One hundred sixty-eight pregnant Black women with Medicaid insurance completed up to four laboratory assessments across pregnancy. Salivary cortisol was measured before and in response to the Trier Social Stress Test, yielding basal and reactive cortisol indices. Serum ferritin, IL-6, and CRP were collected at each visit. Trimester-specific regression models examined cortisol reactivity in relation to ferritin; linear mixed-effects models with moderated mediation tested whether basal cortisol predicted ferritin via inflammation. Results: Higher cortisol reactivity was associated with lower ferritin specifically in the third trimester (std. {beta} = -0.197, p = .004). Higher basal cortisol predicted a steeper IL-6 rise across gestation (p = .002), and IL-6 was positively associated with ferritin (b = 0.236, p = .006), consistent with inflammatory iron sequestration. The indirect effect of basal cortisol on ferritin via IL-6 was statistically significant, and higher basal cortisol was negatively associated with cortisol reactivity in the third trimester. No pathway was observed through CRP. Conclusion: Greater cortisol reactivity predicted lower third-trimester ferritin, a pattern that suggests cumulative iron depletion, atypically sustained HPA reactivity in late pregnancy, or both. To our knowledge, this is the first prospective study linking cortisol reactivity to iron status across human pregnancy, identifying maternal stress physiology as a novel target for understanding and addressing gestational iron deficiency.

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

DN-Hypo-Pipeline: An AI-Driven Workflow for Hypothesis Generation via Large Language Models and Scientific Explanations

arXiv:2606.08532v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A scientific hypothesis is the first step in research and undergoes experimental validation, yet it also reflects a deep understanding of and reasoning about scientific phenomena. We introduce DN-Hypo-Pipeline, an AI-powered workflow based on large language models, designed to support structured scientific thinking and hypothesis generation by leveraging scientific explanations as prior knowledge. This pipeline assists researchers in deriving novel hypotheses from existing literature. Given the explanandum (i.e., the conclusion) of a research paper, it identifies underlying laws, theories, and principles, and reconstructs a new, yet-to-be-verified explanation for the observed phenomenon. We evaluated DN-Hypo-Pipeline in the field of data science modeling using three highly cited papers. Statistical inference, supported by both LLM-as-judge assessment and human expert evaluation, demonstrates that our pipeline is more effective than direct generation methods. Additionally, we validated the two highest-scoring generated hypotheses by developing corresponding novel algorithms, which outperformed the baseline models presented in the original papers. Beyond application in data science, DN-Hypo-Pipeline provides a theoretical framework that not only encompasses theory-guided data science modeling methods but also reveals a more fundamental structure of the modeling process. Moreover, this approach is essentially a generalization of theory-guided modeling, offering potential for extension to other domains and across a broader range of scientific disciplines.

04.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22

Multivariate Random Forests for Cross-Modal Multi-Omics Integration

Multi-omics studies are widely used across many areas of biomedical research. In many diseases, some signals are shared across data types, while others are strongest in a single omics layer. Current multi-omics clustering methods often either merge all data types into a single representation, which can blur biology that is strong in one layer, or rely on linear structure that may miss more complex relationships across data types. We introduce multiRF, a random-forest-based method that handles complex data types and separates shared and modality-specific structure for multi-omics data. multiRF learns sample similarities across omics layers from multivariate random forests, combines them across data types, and uses the resulting weights to estimate the part of each omics layer that is predictable from the others. The remaining residual is treated as modality-specific signal, allowing shared and modality-specific similarities to be clustered separately. In simulations, multiRF recovered shared clusters as well as or better than established integrative methods while more reliably separating modality-specific signal under nonlinear data structures. In TCGA head and neck squamous cell carcinoma, the shared component aligned with the main subtype structure across established reference classifications, while gene- and miRNA-specific components revealed additional immune and developmental biology. In the ADNI cohort with matched blood DNA methylation and structural MRI, the shared cross-modal aging signal was associated with future conversion to mild cognitive impairment or Alzheimer's disease, and a DNAm-specific residual signal showed exploratory additional information. These results show that multiRF can recover a common disease axis while retaining biologically meaningful signals specific to one data type. multiRF is available as an open-source R package at https://github.com/novawz/multiRF.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Automated jailbreak attack targeting multiple defense strategies

arXiv:2606.16751v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of tasks. However, their safety remains a critical concern due to their susceptibility to adversarial prompt-based attacks. In this paper, we present UNIATTACK, an adversarial testing framework designed from a defense-oriented perspective to systematically construct effective black-box attack prompts. Unlike prior approaches that rely on static templates or iterative model-specific tuning, UNIATTACK extracts minimal but high-impact attack features from diverse existing attacks, optimizes them via a specialized attacker LLM, and composes them into flexible templates through automated refinement process. This feature-centric construction enables one-shot attacks that generalize across multiple models and safety categories, providing a practical tool for assessing LLM robustness. Our evaluation results shows that compared to the baselines, UNIATTACK achieves an average attack success rate (ASR) improvement of 64.63\%-248.82\% on models deployed with multi-layered defense mechanisms and it only takes 0.03\%-4.96\% cost of the baselines. UNIATTACK artifact is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/UniAttack-Artifact-30F1.

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

Stable Menus of Public Goods: AI-Enabled Progress

Authors:

arXiv:2606.16989v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Using an open problem from the EC 2025 paper "Stable Menus of Public Goods" as a testbed, we conduct experiments to understand the effectiveness of different AI-for-EconCS research workflows. Specifically, we study three questions: Does providing human intuition in the prompt help? Does automated multi-turn interaction help? And, does an LLM outperform a first-year PhD student? Regarding the first two questions, we provide evidence for the following workflow suggestions: (1) prompting with human intuition can encourage the LLM to have better "taste", (2) multi-turn workflows help when the pipeline encourages "ambitious" steps. Regarding the third question, using an unpublished manuscript written by the paper's senior authors prior to collaborating with the first-year PhD student, we compare the effectiveness of the LLM with that of the first-year PhD student, and find that the LLM is slightly less effective.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Optimizing Incomplete, Large-Scale and Sparse Multi-Graph Matching in Bioimaging

Multi-graph matching is a fundamental problem in computer vision. Our work is motivated by a challenging application in bioimaging, where dozens or even hundreds of 3D microscopy images of worms must be brought into correspondence. Existing datasets do not cover this large-scale regime, and virtually all existing methods are inapplicable because they assume a complete or dense problem setting. To support further research, our first contribution is a new large-scale dataset based on problem instances from bioimaging. Our second contribution is a comprehensive analysis of the two main multi-graph matching paradigms: direct and permutation synchronization-based formulations. We argue, in part by proof, that practical large-scale methods must explicitly address problem sparsity and incompleteness. Since standard permutation synchronization approaches fail in this setting, we further introduce a sparse permutation synchronization paradigm. Our final contribution is GREEDA, a general method for sparse and incomplete problems that can be instantiated across cost orders and paradigms. While our paper focuses on objective functions up to quadratic order, GREEDA is inherently generalizable to arbitrary orders. On larger, sparse instances, GREEDA outperforms competing methods in both objective value and runtime. For example, for moderately-sized problems based on 30 worm images GREEDA produces a high-quality solution within 2 minutes, whereas competitors require at least half an hour and yield far worse results. On smaller dense problems, GREEDA remains on par with leading methods while being an order of magnitude faster.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

NoContactNoWorries: Estimating Contact through Vision and Proprioception for In-Hand Dexterous Manipulation

arXiv:2606.24450v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Perceiving physical contact is fundamental to dexterous manipulation. While robots often rely on dedicated hardware tactile sensors, humans exhibit a remarkable ability to infer contact by integrating visual information with an innate sense of their body's pose and movement. Inspired by this embodied perceptual skill, we investigate whether a robot can learn to infer contact from vision, an approach that also offers a scalable alternative to tactile hardware specifically for binary contact estimation, which faces practical challenges in cost, fragility, and integration. We present NoContactNoWorries, a transformer-based multimodal framework that fuses RGB-D vision with the robot's proprioception to infer binary contact states as a pseudo-tactile signal for hand-object interactions. We validate by training a single contact prediction model on multiple objects and show that the inferred contact signal supports downstream reinforcement learning agents for in-hand object reorientation, generalizing to novel objects. Experiments in both simulation and on a real-world robot validate our approach, highlighting the feasibility of inferring contact from vision and proprioception. Project Page: https://soham2560.github.io/no-contact-no-worries/

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

BioPIE: A Biomedical Protocol Information Extraction Dataset for Experiment Understanding

arXiv:2601.04524v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Understanding biomedical experiments provides a foundation for downstream tasks, e.g., laboratory automation, and facilitates effective cross-disciplinary communication. Two challenges, High Information Density (HID) and Multi-Step Reasoning (MSR), pose unique difficulties for precise experimental understanding. Extracting structured knowledge, e.g., Knowledge Graphs (KGs), is an effective approach to address the HID and MSR. However, existing biomedical datasets for structured knowledge information extraction are limited to a general or coarse-grained level, hindering fine-grained experimental understanding. To address this gap, we introduce Biomedical Protocol Information Extraction Dataset (BioPIE), a dataset providing procedure-centric KGs that capture entities, actions, and relations at a scale sufficient for reasoning across biomedical protocols. We evaluate information extraction methods on BioPIE and implement a question answering system leveraging the dataset for validation, demonstrating improved understanding performance on test sets as well as on the HID and MSR question sets.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Attention Sinks in Diffusion Transformers: A Causal Analysis

Attention sinks – tokens that receive disproportionate attention mass – are assumed to be functionally important in autoregressive language models, but their role in diffusion transformers remains unclear. We present a causal analysis in text-to-image diffusion, dynamically identifying dominant attention recipients per timestep and suppressing them via paired, training-free interventions on the score and value paths. Across 553 GenEval prompts on Stable Diffusion~3 (with SDXL corroboration), removing these sinks does not degrade text-image alignment (CLIP-T) or preference proxies (ImageReward, HPS-v2) at $k{=}1$; only under stronger interventions ($k\!\geq\!10$) does HPS-v2 exhibit a metric-dependent boundary, while CLIP-T remains robust throughout. The perceptual shifts induced by suppression are nonetheless sink-specific – $\sim\!6\times$ larger than equal-budget random masking – revealing an empirical dissociation between trajectory-level perturbation and semantic alignment in diffusion transformers. \footnote{Code available at https://github.com/wfz666/ICML26-attention-sink.}

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Plasma proteomics reveals clinical and mechanistic heterogeneity among individuals who develop coronary artery disease

BACKGROUND: Individuals who develop coronary artery disease (CAD) are clinically and mechanistically heterogeneous, and understanding this variation is crucial for precise risk stratification and tailored interventions. However, the molecular mechanisms that connect these two kinds of heterogeneity remain unclear, limiting progress toward biologically grounded risk stratification and targeted interventions. Here, we investigated the heterogeneity of individuals who develop CAD by leveraging plasma proteomic signatures, placed individuals along continuous metabolic gradients and revealed the molecular programs underlying these patterns, thereby linking mechanistic variation to clinical heterogeneity. METHODS AND RESULTS: From 42,803 UK Biobank participants, including 3,713 individuals who developed CAD within 10 years (incident CAD), we first identified a 320-protein panel from 2,923 baseline proteins that improved prediction of incident CAD beyond clinical risk scores. Using reverse graph embedding, we reduced the proteomic data to two dimensions and mapped each incident case onto the resulting two-dimensional latent proteomic space. These proteomic dimensions show significant associations with cardiometabolic and kidney-related clinical markers. The patterns were replicated in the EPIC-Norfolk study. Phenome-wide Cox regression analyses further linked these proteomic dimensions to 10-year incidence rates for various diseases, including type 2 diabetes, obesity, and chronic kidney disease (CKD). Furthermore, adding the proteomic dimensions to clinical variable-based Cox regression model improved prediction of 10-year incidence of CKD and other diseases, demonstrating the value of proteomic dimensions beyond conventional clinical risk factors. Moreover, individuals with prevalent CAD (diagnosed before proteomic sampling) exhibited high, metabolically adverse dimension values, indicating that these axes capture cumulative metabolic burden. Pathway enrichment analyses implicated altered extracellular matrix organization and immune programs among the proteins contributing to the proteomic dimensions. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings demonstrate that plasma proteomic signatures can dissect the heterogeneity of individuals who develop CAD in continuous phenotypic gradients, improve prediction of CAD and comorbidities, and map underlying biological mechanisms.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Correct When Paired, Wrong When Split: Decoupling and Editing Modality-Specific Neurons in MLLMs

Although Knowledge Editing provides an efficient mechanism for updating the knowledge of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), we find that current paradigms still suffer from an important yet remain underexplored issue : editing decoupling failure, where entity-related knowledge can be updated when the model is triggered by multimodal inputs (text–image query pairs), however, it often reverts to outdated pre-edit facts when the paired inputs are split into unimodal ones. Our in-depth empirical analysis reveals that the entity knowledge in MLLMs is not stored as a unified representation, but is instead distributed across disentangled modality-specific pathways. As a result, updates biased toward multimodal queries fail to propagate effectively to unimodal circuits. To bridge this gap, we propose DECODE, which explicitly disentangles and localizes modality-specific neuron groups for targeted knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DECODE consistently achieves effective knowledge updates under different modality triggers, thereby mitigating editing decoupling failures.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Intelligent Skin Cancer Detection Using a Multispectral Metasurface and a Hybrid

Skin cancer is among the most prevalent malignancies worldwiAdbe satnradcitts early detection is essential for improving patient survival and reducing treatment costs Conventional dermoscopic and visual imaging techniques are primarily limited to the visible spectrum and often fail to capture subtle spectral signatures associated with early stage malignancies This study proposes an innovative framework that integrates a multispectral metasurface for imaging with a hybrid deep learning architecture based on Convolutional Neural Networks and Vision Transformers The designed metasurface enables noninvasive acquisition of rich spectral information highly sensitive to tissue alterations while the hybrid CNN ViT model simultaneously extracts local and global features to robustly classify skin lesions Simulation-based evaluations demonstrate that the proposed method achieves approximately 98 accuracy 95 percentages sensitivity and 99 perentage specificity surpassing conventional RGB-based and single-architecture approaches Qualitative analyses using attention maps reveal that the model focuses on clinically relevant lesion regions improving interpretability Overall the results indicate that combining metasurface based multispectral imaging with hybrid deep learning can introduce a new generation of diagnostic tools in dermatology and pave the way for portable fast and highly accurate clinical systems

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

PISA: A Pragmatic Psych-Inspired Unified Memory System for Enhanced AI Agency

arXiv:2510.15966v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Memory systems are fundamental to AI agents, yet existing work often lacks adaptability to diverse tasks and overlooks the constructive and task-oriented role of AI agent memory. Drawing from Piaget's theory of cognitive development, we propose PISA, a pragmatic, psych-inspired unified memory system that addresses these limitations by treating memory as a constructive and adaptive process. To enable continuous learning and adaptability, PISA introduces a trimodal adaptation mechanism (i.e., schema updation, schema evolution, and schema creation) that preserves coherent organization while supporting flexible memory updates. Building on these schema-grounded structures, we further design a hybrid memory access architecture that seamlessly integrates symbolic reasoning with neural retrieval, significantly improving retrieval accuracy and efficiency. Our empirical evaluation, conducted on the existing LOCOMO benchmark and our newly proposed AggQA benchmark for data analysis tasks, confirms that PISA sets a new state-of-the-art by significantly enhancing adaptability and long-term knowledge retention.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Service-Induced Congestion in Memory-Constrained LLM Serving

arXiv:2606.15555v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In large language model (LLM) serving, each request accumulates persistent graphics processing unit (GPU) memory during service as its key-value cache grows with every generated token. Under high concurrency, aggregate memory usage therefore increases endogenously over time: the service process itself creates future capacity pressure. When memory capacity is exceeded, systems evict active requests, discarding cached state and restarting them later, which wastes computation and reduces throughput. We develop a discrete-time dynamical model of memory-constrained LLM inference that captures admission, memory growth, and eviction under continuous batching. In the saturated-input regime, the system admits both eviction-free fixed points and limit cycles with evictions. For homogeneous workloads, we show that the eviction-free equilibrium is unstable and that, except for a Lebesgue-measure-zero exact-capture set, the system converges to a unique worst-case limit cycle that is asymptotically stable outside this exceptional set, with throughput losses as large as 50%. For heterogeneous workloads, we prove a stability criterion in the two-class common-input setting and explain how the survival-polynomial mechanism generalizes to multiple classes and heterogeneous-input lengths. Under an input-dominated scaling regime, coprime decoding lengths stabilize the eviction-free equilibrium, while non-coprime lengths create synchronized modes that drive instability. These results characterize when workload heterogeneity desynchronizes completions and helps stabilize memory-constrained serving. More broadly, we identify service-induced congestion as a structural instability mechanism and derive scheduling design principles for sustaining high throughput.

16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Understanding Cross-Sensor Feature Variations for Generalizable 3D Perception

Radar-camera BEV perception often suffers from degraded performance when evaluated across datasets, as changes in driving scenes, sensor configurations, and environmental conditions can alter both the input observations and the internal fused representations. This work studies this issue from the perspective of source-domain variation modeling, aiming to improve the robustness of BEV-based 3D detectors without relying on target-domain samples. We introduce a framework that characterizes visual scene variations in the frequency domain and uses them to synthesize diverse source-domain views. By comparing the resulting fused BEV representations, the framework further captures how image-level variations influence multi-modal BEV features. These variation patterns are then used to regularize the detector, encouraging the learned fusion space to remain stable under latent scene changes. The proposed method is applied only during training and leaves the inference pipeline unchanged. Experiments on cross-dataset radar-camera 3D detection between View-of-Delft and TJ4DRadSet demonstrate consistent improvements over multiple BEV fusion backbones, and the gains remain effective when a small amount of target-domain data is available.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Benign overfitting beyond prediction: The ordinary least squares interpolator

arXiv:2309.15769v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in deep learning have highlighted the phenomenon of benign overfitting in overparameterized statistical models, sparking significant interest in understanding its foundations. Owing to its simplicity and practical relevance, the ordinary least squares (OLS) interpolator has become a key object of study for gaining theoretical insight into this phenomenon. While the properties of OLS are well understood in classical underparameterized settings, its behavior in the overparameterized regime – unlike that of ridge regression or the lasso – remains comparatively less explored. We contribute to this growing literature by deriving new algebraic and statistical results for the minimum $\ell_2$-norm OLS interpolator. In contrast to much of the existing work, which focuses on prediction risk, we center our analysis on parameter estimation and inference, which are fundamental for many statistics and causal inference applications. Specifically, we establish overparameterized analogues of (i) the leave-$k$-out formulas, (ii) the omitted variable bias formula, and (iii) the Frisch-Waugh-Lovell theorem. Under the Gauss-Markov model, we further extend the Gauss-Markov theorem and analyze variance estimation under homoskedasticity in the overparameterized setting. Collectively, these results provide a systematic framework for studying parameter estimation and inference in overparameterized linear models, offering a novel perspective on benign overfitting beyond its implications for prediction.

18.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-21

Machine learning evaluation of gene expression-based ALS subtypes across brain and blood tissues

The clinical and molecular heterogeneity observed in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) presents a challenge for diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment. RNA sequencing of post-mortem brain samples from ALS patients has identified several subtypes with distinct molecular signatures. We sought to evaluate these subtypes across diverse tissues and datasets and assess the feasibility of supervised machine learning models for sample classification. Unsupervised clustering and pathway analysis were performed to confirm the presence of ALS subtypes in motor cortex samples. Three machine learning strategies were then used to create models based on post-mortem motor cortex expression data of 112 people with ALS from the London Neurodegenerative Diseases Brain Bank. These models were subsequently improved through feature selection and evaluated in independent cohorts from motor cortex (n = 257, NYGC ALS Consortium) and blood (n = 96, Macquarie University Neurodegenerative Disease Biobank) samples. Multi-class linear discriminant analysis (LDA) models were then used for subtype classification. Clustering of ALS post-mortem motor cortex samples confirmed the presence of three subtypes: neuroinflammation (ALS-Neu), extracellular matrix organisation and muscle contraction (ALS-OxA), and synaptic and neuropeptide signalling (ALS-SNs). Among all machine learning strategies, random forests produced the most accurate and stable models for binary classification (~93% accuracy across the three subtypes). After feature selection, random forest models were able to classify samples from an independent post-mortem motor cortex cohort in their respective subtypes (AUC of ~0.98 across the three subtypes). When these models were evaluated in blood using LDA, we found consistent clustering patterns, with samples aligning in the same subtype regions of the post-mortem motor cortex samples, with ALS-SNs being the subtype in which samples were classified with the highest confidence (LDA class probability ~86%). Moreover, classification for this subtype improved when blood samples were collected closer to death. Our findings support the presence of three gene expression-based ALS subtypes in motor cortex samples and the utility of machine learning strategies for subtype classification. We also observed that the subtypes identified in the brain partially match those in the blood, with samples from the late stages of the disease more likely to be correctly predicted into the ALS-SNs cluster. This suggests a longitudinal effect in subtype identification that requires further investigation.

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

Real-Time Interactive Music Generation via Data-Free Streaming Consistency Distillation

arXiv:2606.24307v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Interactive music and live performance relies on real-time human expression, but modern generative music AI remains largely absent from this domain due to its prohibitive inference latency and offline rendering paradigm. To provide pioneer musicians with a novel medium for interactive composition, we should fundamentally change these static models into dynamic, playable instruments. In this paper, we propose a framework that bridges this gap. To achieve the low latency required for live interaction without sacrificing structural coherence, we formulate distillation within a streaming autoregressive latent space. Our approach gets rid of the need for expensive paired audio-latent datasets by utilizing prompt-only inputs to synthesize teacher-guided, chunk-wise trajectories on the fly. Because live instruments require high acoustic fidelity, we introduce music-aware consistency objectives, which combine latent, spectral, and temporal-difference losses, to preserve crucial qualities like timbre, transients, and rhythmic stability during accelerated single-step streaming generation. Implemented via parameter-efficient adaptation, our distillation reduces generation steps to achieve a low real-time factor. Crucially, by operating as a continuous autoregressive stream, the system can seamlessly assimilate dynamic human inputs on the fly, allowing users to instantly steer the musical trajectory without interrupting the audio flow. Ultimately, this work recontextualizes generative text-to-music models not as passive prompt-and-wait systems, but as responsive instruments, opening new frontiers for live human-AI musical co-creation.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Current World Models Lack a Persistent State Core

World models are increasingly regarded as a decisive step toward artificial general intelligence, yet modeling the physical world demands more than rendering convincing frames on demand: it requires an internal world state that keeps evolving over time, decoupled from observation, so that objects endure and events run to their conclusions whether or not a camera is watching, much as the moon holds to its orbit when no one is looking. This requirement is a blind spot of existing benchmarks, which reward surface properties such as fidelity, motion, and camera controllability while never asking whether a generated world keeps evolving once it is unobserved. We introduce WRBench, the first systematic diagnostic benchmark that treats camera motion as an intervention on observability and resolves evaluation into a human-calibrated chain that asks whether the camera executes the requested interaction, whether the scene stays continuous and identifiable while in view, and whether a returning target remains consistent with the event that was set in motion. Across 9{,}600 videos from 23 models spanning four control paradigms, one finding proves stubborn: current systems maintain the observed world as a tracking shot, resuming a returning target in the state at which it was abandoned rather than advancing the event while it went unseen. Because this failure recurs across control paradigms, model families, and increments of scale, robust world-state evolution does not follow from cleaner imagery, tighter control, richer geometric priors, or sheer parameter count We therefore argue that the stability of the physical state kernel and the consistency of worldlines under viewpoint intervention should become first-class objectives of world-model design, so that a world model captures how the world will unfold rather than how the next frame appears.

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

World Tracing: Generative Pixel-Aligned Geometry Beyond the Visible

Image-to-3D methods often trade off faithfulness and completeness: depth estimators are anchored to input pixels but stop at the visible surface, while image-to-3D models generate complete shapes that are often misaligned with the input. We introduce World Tracing, a generative pixel-aligned geometry representation that predicts 3D points aligned with observed pixels while completing geometry beyond the visible surface. For each input pixel, World Tracing predicts an ordered stack of camera-space 3D points, where the first layer represents the visible surface and subsequent layers represent front-to-back intersections with occluded surfaces. We instantiate this representation with a world-tracing diffusion transformer, WT-DiT, which treats multiple geometry layers as separate denoising tokens coupled through factorized and global attention. WT-DiT is trained with pixel-space flow matching and a mixed noise schedule that balances visible-surface reconstruction with occluded-geometry generation. World Tracing achieves strong performance on visible-surface reconstruction and complete geometry generation across object, scene, and dynamic benchmarks, outperforming both depth predictors and image-to-3D generators. It also preserves 2D-to-3D correspondence, enabling text-driven 3D scene editing, geometry-conditioned novel-view video synthesis, and training-free integration with textured-mesh generators.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

BrainDINO: A Brain MRI Foundation Model for Generalizable Clinical Representation Learning

Brain MRI underpins a wide range of neuroscientific and clinical applications, yet most learning-based methods remain task-specific and require substantial labeled data. Here we show that a single self-supervised representation can generalize across heterogeneous brain MRI endpoints. We trained BrainDINO, a self-distilled foundation model, on approximately 6.6 million unlabeled axial slices from 20 datasets encompassing broad variation in population, disease, and acquisition setting. Using a frozen encoder with lightweight task heads, BrainDINO supported transfer across tumor segmentation, neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental conditions classification, brain age estimation, post-stroke temporal prediction, molecular status prediction, MRI sequence classification, and survival modeling. Across tasks and supervision regimes, BrainDINO consistently equaled or exceeded natural-image and MRI-specific self-supervised baselines, with particularly strong advantages under label scarcity. Representation analyses further showed anatomically organized and pathology-sensitive feature structure in the absence of task-specific supervision. Our findings indicate that large-scale slice-wise self-supervised learning can yield a unified brain MRI representation that supports diverse neuroimaging tasks without volumetric pretraining or full-network fine-tuning, establishing a scalable foundation for robust and data-efficient brain imaging analysis. Code is available at https://github.com/mclwu22/BrainDINO

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Evolving Programmatic Skill Networks

arXiv:2601.03509v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study continual skill acquisition in open-ended embodied environments where an agent must construct, refine, and reuse an expanding library of executable skills. We introduce the Programmatic Skill Network (PSN), a framework in which skills are executable symbolic programs forming a compositional network that evolves through experience. PSN defines three core mechanisms instantiated via large language models: (1)~\opreflect for structured fault localization over skill compositions, (2)~progressive optimization with maturity-aware update gating that stabilizes reliable skills while maintaining plasticity for uncertain ones, and (3)~canonical structural refactoring under rollback validation that maintains network compactness. We further show that PSN's learning dynamics exhibit structural parallels to neural network training. Experiments on MineDojo and Crafter demonstrate robust skill reuse, rapid adaptation, and strong generalization across open-ended task distributions.

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

Token-Level Entropy Reveals Demographic Disparities in Language Models

We ask whether demographic identity, signaled by a name alone, systematically reshapes the generative distribution of a language model. Measuring full-vocabulary Shannon entropy at temperature zero across six open-weight base models and 5,760 implicit sentence-completion prompts (e.g., "Tanisha walked into the office on a Monday morning and"), we find that Black-associated names produce higher first-token entropy than White-associated names across all six architectures - opposite to the output-level homogeneity bias documented under explicit demographic prompting (Lee et al., 2024) - and Black-associated names always produce greater entropy above identity-neutral baselines than White-associated names ($\Delta\Delta > 0$ in all six models). Women-associated names co-occur with lower first-token entropy (DL-pooled $\hat\beta = -0.041, p = .019$) and more homogeneous outputs ($\hat\alpha = +0.024, p < .001$) than men-associated names - a pattern convergent with homogeneity bias; race and gender effects are additive. Instruction tuning does not attenuate the race gap (matched-format DL-pooled $\hat{\beta}=+0.153$). Running the same templates with explicit group labels instead of names yields null race effects in 10 of 12 models where implicit probing is significant - establishing that probing methodology is a primary determinant of which distributional structure is recovered.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

The Algorithm Is Not the Behavior: Learned Priors Override Look-Ahead in a Chess-Playing Neural Network

arXiv:2508.21380v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent mechanistic work has uncovered learned algorithms within neural networks, from modular arithmetic to search and planning in game-playing agents. But does algorithmic structure guarantee algorithmic behavior? We investigate this in Leela Chess Zero, the strongest neural chess engine, where prior work identified learned look-ahead. By extending the logit lens to its move-selecting policy network, we discover that correct puzzle solutions-including immediate checkmates-often appear in intermediate layers but are systematically overridden in the final output, a phenomenon we term "forgotten puzzles". Replicating prior analyses on these positions, we find that look-ahead operates normally-future moves of the correct continuation are represented, causally important, and linearly decodable-ruling out a failure of the algorithm itself. Instead, late layers increasingly shift toward prioritizing safe play over aggression. To test whether this shift drives the override, we steer the model against these preferences and recover 61.7% of forgotten puzzles, providing causal evidence that safety priors override algorithmically computed solutions. These findings demonstrate that algorithmic structure does not guarantee algorithmic behavior: a model can internally solve a problem and still output the wrong answer.