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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Humor Style Drives Laughter, Topic Shapes Acceptability: Evaluating Bilingual Personal and Political Robot-Delivered AI Jokes

Authors:
Anna-Maria Velentza↗Anne-Gwenn Bosser↗

arXiv:2606.13256v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Humor plays a central role in human social relationships, and recent advances in computational humor create new opportunities for integrating humor into human-robot interaction (HRI). While large language models (LLMs) can generate diverse forms of humor, it remains unclear how humor style, joke content, and language preference shape perceptions of robot-delivered humor in group settings. In this exploratory study, we employed a mixed factorial design in which participants evaluated AI-generated jokes delivered by a robot in a university classroom. We examined the effects of humor type (Affiliative, Self-Enhancing, Aggressive, Self-Defeating) and joke content (person-related vs. political) on perceived funniness and appropriateness, as well as preferred language. Results show that humor type significantly influences funniness, with Aggressive and Affiliative humor rated higher, while joke content primarily affects appropriateness, with person-related jokes preferred over political ones. Language preference was shaped by both joke content and participants' self-reported fluency and humor practices.

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02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Closing the Approximation Gap in Simulation-free Latent SDEs

Authors:
Henry D. Smith↗Brian L. Trippe↗Scott W. Linderman↗

arXiv:2606.16138v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recovering dynamical systems from noisy observations is a recurring challenge across scientific domains, including neuroscience and physics. Latent stochastic differential equations (SDEs) address this by modeling the system as an unobserved state that evolves according to a learnable SDE and generates the observations. Variational inference (VI) provides a tractable objective for fitting latent SDEs. Traditional VI algorithms evaluate this objective by numerical simulation over a time discretization, trading fidelity for computational cost. A recent class of algorithms, simulation-free VI, sidesteps this tradeoff by parameterizing the posterior through its instantaneous marginals rather than its drift. In this work, we show that the efficiency of existing simulation-free VI algorithms comes at a price: their parameterizations restrict the approximate posterior to a subset of the SDEs available to simulation-based methods, degrading posterior inference and parameter learning. We propose Helmholtz-SDE, a simulation-free VI algorithm that closes this gap by optimizing over path laws compatible with a prescribed collection of marginals. Helmholtz-SDE recovers dynamics more faithfully than prior simulation-free methods, with the largest gains under high posterior uncertainty. It further matches the performance of simulation-based VI at a fraction of the runtime.

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

Pyramid Self-Contrastive Learning for Single-shot Test-time Ultrasound Image Denoising

Authors:
Jiajing Zhang↗Bingze Dai↗Xi Zhang↗Yue Xu↗Wei-Ning Lee↗

The inherent electronic and speckle noise complicates clinical interpretation of ultrasound images. Conventional denoising methods rely on explicit noise assumptions whose validity diminishes under composite noise conditions. Learning-based methods are usually pretrained in a limited image domain using a labeled dataset, which implies inevitable domain shift in complex in vivo environments. This study proposes a Pyramid Self-Contrastive Learning (PSCL) framework for test-time ultrasound image denoising without pretraining. Given multiple noisy samples from only one-shot imaging, PSCL disentangles anatomical similarity and noise randomness into separate pyramid latent spaces. The clean image is then decoded from the anatomy space while discarding the noise space. We first apply PSCL to synthetic aperture ultrasound (SAU), where an Aperture-to-Aperture loop serves as a self-supervised proxy task to ensure denoising fidelity. Simulation experiments, including noise levels from 0 to 30 dB and inclusion geometries from simple to complex, demonstrated improvements of 69.3% in SNR and 34.4% in CNR. The in vivo results showed 84.8% SNR and 25.7% CNR gains using only two aperture data of the heart in six echocardiographic views, liver, and kidney. PSCL delivers clear images across diverse imaging targets and configurations, paving the way for more reliable anatomical visualization without domain shift and pretraining costs.

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04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Non-asymptotic Tail Bounds for the Kostlan–Shub–Smale Field: Tensor PCA and Spherical $k$-Spin Complexity

Authors:
Jean-Marc Aza\"is↗Federico Dalmao↗Yohann De Castro↗

arXiv:2606.17665v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper builds a hierarchy of explicit, non-asymptotic tail bounds for the supremum of the Kostlan–Shub–Smale (KSS) random field on the sphere, and applies it to two problems: Spiked Tensor PCA and the landscape of the spherical $k$-spin model. For Tensor PCA, we study the non-asymptotic statistical limits of estimating a rank-$R$ symmetric signal tensor of order~$k\ge 3$ and dimension~$d\ge 3$ from a single Gaussian observation at signal-to-noise ratio~$\lambda$, through the profile maximum likelihood estimator, the MLE restricted to normalized rank-$R$ tensors of coherence at least~$\kappa$. Our analysis uses a single reduction: a deterministic geometric inequality (the Tube Method) and a rank-reduction step bound the estimation error by the supremum of the canonical KSS field, which the Kac–Rice formula turns into a Gaussian integral against the expected absolute characteristic polynomial of a shifted Gaussian Orthogonal Ensemble, controlled in turn by the four explicit tail bounds of our hierarchy (three from a Mehta–Fyodorov representation, one from a Ben Arous–Dembo–Guionnet large deviation). The same reduction yields two results, each with explicit constants. For estimation, a finite-$(k,d)$ error bound recovers the asymptotically optimal rate~$\sqrt{d\log k}$ of Perry, Wein and Bandeira, with explicit dependence on the rank~$R$ and the coherence~$\kappa$. For the landscape, a two-sided non-asymptotic bracketing of the annealed complexity of the spherical $k$-spin Hamiltonian recovers the Auffinger–Ben Arous–\v{C}ern\'y complexity function in the high-dimensional limit.

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05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Excess mortality in Germany during 2020-2023: A descriptive age-stratified analysis

Authors:
Sauter↗

This study investigates excess mortality in Germany in the years from 2020 to 2023 and its temporal alignment with reported COVID-19 deaths. The analysis uses annual and weekly all-cause mortality data and linear baseline trends derived from pre-pandemic years. Possible effects of demographic and population changes on baseline trends were also examined. Excess mortality was analysed over time and across age groups. Excess mortality was observed in all investigated years, rising from 2020 to its highest value in 2022. In absolute terms, the age group [≥]80 years accounted for the largest proportion of excess deaths throughout the study period. After 2021, elevated mortality relative to baseline was also observed in younger age groups down to 15 years of age, although absolute numbers remained substantially lower than in older groups. No evidence of excess mortality was observed for individuals younger than 15 years. Periods of excess mortality were temporally aligned with waves of reported COVID-19 deaths. In 2020, cumulative excess mortality after calendar week 11 closely matched reported COVID-19 deaths (43 876 vs. 41 835 deaths). Weekly excess mortality, reported COVID-19 deaths and wastewater viral load, when available showed strong temporal synchrony, although excess mortality increasingly exceeded reported COVID-19 deaths during later pandemic waves. Temporal patterns differed from the typical seasonal mortality peaks commonly associated with influenza epidemics during the early months of the year. In 2023, excess mortality declined substantially, possibly indicating a return to mortality levels before the emergence of SARS-CoV-2.

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

LLM-ODDR: A Large Language Model Framework for Joint Order Dispatching and Driver Repositioning

Authors:
Tengfei Lyu↗Siyuan Feng↗Hao Liu↗Hai Yang↗

arXiv:2505.22695v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Ride-hailing platforms face significant challenges in optimizing order dispatching and driver repositioning operations in dynamic urban environments. Traditional approaches based on combinatorial optimization, rule-based heuristics, and reinforcement learning often overlook driver income fairness, interpretability, and adaptability to real-world dynamics. To address these gaps, we propose LLM-ODDR, a novel framework leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for joint Order Dispatching and Driver Repositioning (ODDR) in ride-hailing services. LLM-ODDR framework comprises three key components: (1) Multi-objective-guided Order Value Refinement, which evaluates orders by considering multiple objectives to determine their overall value; (2) Fairness-aware Order Dispatching, which balances platform revenue with driver income fairness; and (3) Spatiotemporal Demand-Aware Driver Repositioning, which optimizes idle vehicle placement based on historical patterns and projected supply. We also develop JointDR-GPT, a fine-tuned model optimized for ODDR tasks with domain knowledge. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets from Manhattan taxi operations demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms traditional methods in terms of effectiveness, adaptability to anomalous conditions, and decision interpretability. To our knowledge, this is the first exploration of LLMs as decision-making agents in ride-hailing ODDR tasks, establishing foundational insights for integrating advanced language models within intelligent transportation systems. While the current framework incurs higher computational costs than traditional methods, we show that parallel decomposition and model distillation can reduce latency to production-viable levels for deployment.

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07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

RT-VLA: Real-Time Vision-Language-Action Models via Knowledge Distillation

Authors:
Xiangyu Huang↗Zhenlin Hua↗Han Zhou↗Shounak Sural↗Ragunathan Rajkumar↗

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown strong potential for end-to-end autonomous driving by jointly modeling visual perception, language reasoning, explainability and action prediction. However, their large vision-language backbones and reasoning modules introduce substantial inference latency and thereby prevent their deployment in the unforgiving reality of the road networks. We propose RT-VLA, a lightweight, distilled VLA model that transfers the driving and reasoning capabilities of the state-of-the-art SimLingo model into a compact student through multi-level supervised distillation. RT-VLA preserves language-based reasoning and supports post-hoc explanation through offline language analysis of safety-critical driving moments without adding latency to real-time control. Compared to the SimLingo teacher, RT-VLA maintains competitive closed-loop driving and language reasoning performance while reducing inference time by 44.8X in vision-only mode and 7.9X in vision+language mode. These results suggest that supervised distillation is a practical approach for building real-time, explainable VLA-style autonomous driving models.

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08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

RadSEM: A Finding-by-Finding Metric for Clinical Consistency in Radiology Reports

Authors:
Zhenhong Yang↗Zhuoyun Liu↗Jintao Fei↗Wen Tang↗Shichao Quan↗Jun Zhao↗Jun Xu↗

arXiv:2606.17062v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Radiology report evaluation must distinguish clinical compatibility from surface similarity, because negation, laterality, or normal-abnormal polarity can reverse a finding. We propose RadSEM (Radiology Sentence-Level Evaluation Metric), a constrained LLM-assisted metric for reference-based evaluation of radiology Findings. RadSEM rewrites reference and generated reports into ordered atomic finding sentences, each expressing one site-finding proposition. It then performs contradiction-constrained many-to-many matching: incompatible pairs such as "effusion" and "no effusion" receive no credit, while compatible granularity differences can receive partial credit. A deterministic stage weights pairs by part-whole and abnormal-detail relationships, counts unmatched findings, and produces an abnormal-focused weighted F1 score. Thus, the LLM supports structured rewriting and local alignment rather than acting as an opaque judge. We evaluate RadSEM with SSREE, a controlled monotonicity stress test built from 2,448 de-identified reports expanded into five graded corruption levels. RadSEM achieves Kendall tau_b of 0.957, all-pairs concordance of 97.8%, adjacent concordance of 95.0%, and strict five-level ordering for 81.9% of reports, outperforming radiology-specific and general text metrics while avoiding the failure in which polarity-inverted reports regain lexical overlap. On the same SSREE set, RadSEM outperforms the Ref-anchored RadSEM-Alt policy, improving adjacent concordance from 90.7% to 95.0% and strict ordering from 67.2% to 81.9%. On a 599-triplet synonym/antonym subset, RadSEM prefers synonyms in 597 cases (99.67%). These results suggest that explicit finding units, contradiction-aware matching, and abnormal-focused deterministic scoring make report scoring more interpretable and sensitive to clinically meaningful errors. Code is available at https://github.com/jdh-algo/RadSEM.

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09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

G-IdiomAlign: A Gloss-Pivoted Benchmark for Cross-Lingual Idiom Alignment

Authors:
Fengying Ye↗Yanming Sun↗Runzhe Zhan↗Zheqi Zhang↗Lidia S. Chao↗Derek F. Wong↗

Idioms are difficult to transfer across languages due to their non-compositionality and weak surface-form grounding, making literal mappings unreliable. We present G-IdiomAlign, a gloss-pivoted benchmark where each idiom is anchored by an English gloss from Wiktionary. We further construct a high-confidence reference alignment set for reproducible evaluation. G-IdiomAlign supports two protocols: (1) a controlled Multiple-Choice Idiom Equivalence with typed distractors for error attribution; and (2) a Gloss-Contrastive Generation contrasting No-gloss and With-gloss inputs to isolate the effect of an explicit semantic pivot. Across diverse LLMs, a bias to literal translation is a dominant failure mode, especially when the target is a low-resource language. Glosses consistently improve Gloss-Contrastive Generation under an embedding-based semantic proxy, but performance remains modest, indicating substantial headroom in the open output space. Subsequent analysis on Qwen3-8B further suggests that cross-condition differences are concentrated more in attention heads than in layers, while better With-gloss generations coincide with stronger gloss anchoring.

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10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Level of Physical Activity and ApoE Status - Effects on Alzheimer's Disease and on Mortality

Authors:
Ma↗Cheng↗Shao↗Zamrini↗Sui↗Tsuang↗D. W↗Logue↗Ahmed↗Kokkinos↗Faselis↗C. J↗…

Background: Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD) affect over 7.2 million Americans aged 65 and older, with the APOE-4 allele representing the strongest known genetic risk factor. Physical activity (PA) has been associated with reduced dementia risk, but its interaction with APOE genotype remains poorly characterized in large, genomically informed cohorts. Methods: We conducted a retrospective cohort analysis using linked genomic, survey, and longitudinal electronic health record data from the VA Million Veteran Program (MVP). Veterans aged

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

Improving Visual Token Reduction via Rectifying Distortions for Efficient Multimodal LLM Inference

Authors:
Hyeonwoo Cho↗Donghyeon Baek↗Yewon Kim↗Bumsub Ham↗

Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable success in vision-language tasks, yet the quadratic computational complexity arising from the vast number of visual tokens incurs significant memory and latency bottlenecks. While visual token reduction (VTR) strategies have been explored to mitigate this burden, existing methods overlook the positional and attentional consistency between the full and reduced sequences, resulting in a distorted representation. To this end, we propose RESTORE, a novel VTR framework that rectifies the positional and attentional distortions while maintaining efficiency. Specifically, we present a simple yet effective calibration method that restores lost visual attention by augmenting attention weights based on relative distances. We also introduce a distinctive anchor selection for token merging to mitigate information loss during feature averaging. Experimental results on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently improves the accuracy of various reduction methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance while maintaining computational efficiency. Project page is available at https://cvlab.yonsei.ac.kr/projects/RESTORE

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12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Fabric Image Demoiréing Benchmark from Synthesis to Restoration

Authors:
Pengchao Wei↗Xiaojie Guo↗

Fabric moiré is a sampling-induced aliasing artifact caused by the interaction between fine textile patterns and camera sensor grids, producing structured interference that severely degrades image quality. Unlike screen-induced moiré, which stems from strictly periodic display lattices, fabric moiré is intrinsically more challenging due to the broadband and semi-periodic nature of textile weaves. The heavy spectral overlap between intrinsic texture and aliasing components renders fabric demoiréing substantially more ill-posed. Consequently, existing models trained on screen moiré datasets generalize poorly to these complex textile patterns. Despite its practical importance, fabric image demoiréing remains underexplored and lacks standardized benchmarks. We present the first comprehensive benchmark for fabric image demoiréing. To address the difficulty of acquiring pixel-aligned real-world pairs, we develop a physically motivated synthesis framework and construct a large-scale dataset comprising 16,050 paired multi-resolution fabric images with controllable aliasing severity. Furthermore, we customize a baseline model, which establishes promising performance on the proposed benchmark dataset with strong generalization ability. Our benchmark provides a standardized platform for advancing research in fabric image demoiréing.

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13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

DRFLOW: A Deep Research Benchmark for Personalized Workflow Prediction

Authors:
Md Tawkat Islam Khondaker↗Raymond Li↗Muhammad Abdul-Mageed↗Laks V. S. Lakshmanan↗Issam H. Laradji↗

arXiv:2606.18191v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep research (DR) systems are increasingly used for complex information-seeking tasks, but existing works mainly focus on generating reports and summaries. In contrast, many enterprise tasks instead require an agent to identify concrete workflows which is a sequence of action-steps. For example, rather than summarizing budgeting policies, an agent should be able to determine the steps needed to answer a question such as: "How do I request new headcount given a fixed budget?". Therefore, we introduce DRFLOW, a benchmark for evaluating personalized workflows predicted by agents from heterogeneous sources. Each task requires the agent to identify relevant evidence from scattered sources, then use that evidence to predict the correct action-step sequence for the user's task. DRFLOW contains 100 tasks across five domains, with 1,246 reference workflow steps grounded in more than 3,900 sources. We define seven diagnostic metrics covering factual grounding, step recovery, structural ordering, condition resolution, and personalization. We further present DRFLOW-Agent (DRFA), a workflow-oriented reference agent to predict personalized workflow. We show that although DRFA improves over strong baseline agents (upto 10.02% average F1 score), there is substantial room for improvement remains across these workflow metrics, indicating that predicting complete and correct personalized workflows remains a challenging frontier for deep research.

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14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

LiveStarPro: Proactive Streaming Video Understanding with Hierarchical Memory for Long-Horizon Streams

Authors:
Zhenyu Yang↗Kairui Zhang↗Bing Wang↗Shengsheng Qian↗Changsheng Xu↗

Despite the remarkable progress of Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs), current online architectures still struggle to simultaneously process continuous video streams, decide autonomously when to respond, and preserve long-horizon contextual memory. These obstacles undermine real-time responsiveness and cause severe forgetting throughout prolonged interactions. In this work, we introduce LiveStarPro, a live streaming assistant that is designed for proactive video understanding over long-horizon streams. The design of LiveStarPro rests on three complementary components. The first component is Streaming Verification Decoding (SVeD), an inference framework that identifies the appropriate response timing through single-pass perplexity verification, thereby eliminating the dependency on explicit silence tokens. The second component is Streaming Causal Attention Masks (SCAM), a training strategy that enforces incremental video-language alignment over variable-length streams. The third component is Tree-Structured Hierarchical Memory (TSHM), a recursive memory architecture that organizes evicted historical information into event chains and consequently enables efficient retrieval from effectively unbounded video streams. To facilitate a comprehensive evaluation under realistic online conditions, we further present OmniStarPro, a large-scale benchmark that spans 15 diverse real-world scenarios and that extends to hour-scale streams for the assessment of long-term recall. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LiveStarPro consistently surpasses existing methods, attaining a 28.9% improvement in semantic correctness and an 18.2% reduction in timing error, while its streaming key-value cache further yields a 1.58x inference speedup over the same model without caching. The model and the code are publicly available at https://github.com/sotayang/LiveStarPro.

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

BRDFusion: Physics Meets Generation for Urban Scene Inverse Rendering

Authors:
Yi-Ruei Liu↗Jie-Ying Lee↗Zheng-Hui Huang↗Yu-Lun Liu↗Chih-Hao Lin↗

Inverse rendering of urban scenes from captured videos enables numerous applications, including content creation and autonomous driving simulation. Physically-based rendering methods follow and control lighting physics, but suffer from reconstruction and rendering artifacts. While generative models produce realistic videos, they offer limited consistency and controllability. We present BRDFusion, a unified framework that combines two complementary models for inverse and forward rendering. Specifically, BRDFusion recovers explicit, consistent scene properties with physical modeling and alleviates optimization ambiguity with generative priors. During forward rendering, the physical model provides controllable rendering from the scene configuration, and the generative model denoises and fixes artifacts. Therefore, our method produces high-quality videos while allowing precise control, outperforming baselines in real and synthetic scenes. Moreover, BRDFusion supports novel-view relighting, night simulation, and dynamic object insertion/editing. Project page: https://shigon255.github.io/brdfusion-page/

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16.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Very large cliques in a scale-free random graph

Authors:
Carlo De Ambroggio↗Umberto De Ambroggio↗

arXiv:2606.18722v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this short article we consider a preferential attachment random graph model with edge steps, studied by Alves, Ribeiro and Sanchis. Starting with an initial graph $\mathbb{G}_1$ formed by a vertex with a self-loop attached to it, the model evolves as follows. At every subsequent (discrete) time step, either with probability $p$ we add a vertex to the graph and connect it to exactly one of the older vertices selected with probability proportional to its degree, or with probability $1-p$ we add one edge between two existing vertices, both selected (independently) with probability proportional to their degrees. Let $\omega(\mathbb{G})$ be the clique number of a graph $\mathbb{G}$, i.e.\ the number of vertices in a largest complete subgraph of $\mathbb{G}_{}$. Alves, Ribeiro and Sanchis showed that, for any given $\varepsilon>0$, we have $\omega(\mathbb{G}_{2t})\geq t^{\frac{1-p}{2-p}(1-\varepsilon)}$ with high probability (i.e.\ with probability tending to $1$ as $t\rightarrow \infty$). Here we strengthen this bound by showing that, for any function $f:\mathbb{N}\mapsto \mathbb{N}$ that satisfies $f(t)\rightarrow \infty$ as $t\rightarrow \infty$, with high probability \[\omega(\mathbb{G}_{2t}) = \Omega\left(t^{\frac{1-p}{2-p}}\Big(\log^{\frac{1}{2-p}}(t)f(t)\Big)^{-1}\right).\]

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

When in Doubt, Plan It Out: Committed Small Language Model Deliberation for Reactive Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Nathan Gavenski↗Juarez Monteiro↗Francisco Galuppo↗Adriano Veloso↗Odinaldo Rodrigues↗

arXiv:2606.16995v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) policies often degrade in unfamiliar environments because they lack explicit deliberation. We propose Plan, Align, Commit, Think (PACT), a hybrid architecture that combines a fast, reactive RL policy with a slow, deliberative Small Language Model (SLM) planner. PACT invokes the SLM asynchronously to generate and validate candidate action plans. Once a plan is verified through simulation as safe, feasible, and complete, it is executed directly, bypassing the RL policy without retraining or modifying it. Evaluated on three FrozenLake configurations of increasing difficulty, PACT outperforms all baselines while relying on a 2B-parameter SLM backbone, suggesting that deliberative planning and reactive execution are more powerful in concert than either is alone in these settings.

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18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Pre-Training for Simulation-Based Science: A Study on Jet Foundation Model Training Objectives

Authors:
Ibrahim Elsharkawy↗Joschka Birk↗Vinicius Mikuni↗Wahid Bhimji↗Gregor Kasieczka↗Benjamin Nachman↗

arXiv:2606.14870v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Foundation models (FMs) trained on large datasets and fine-tuned on downstream tasks have emerged as a powerful paradigm in AI for science. Industrial FMs are typically trained using self-supervision with masking due to the lack of labels. In many scientific domains, accurate simulations are plentiful and facilitate large, labeled datasets. This opens up new possibilities for pre-training. We present a systematic comparison of pre-training methods using the OmniLearned High Energy Physics FM framework. We test supervised classification, flow-matching generation, and self-supervised masked particle modeling. All models are pre-trained on the JetClass dataset and fine-tuned on two representative downstream tasks, top jet classification and JetNet conditional generation. Among other observations, for classification tasks, we find that pure classifier pre-training is optimal when downstream labels and model capacity are plentiful, but combining it with self-supervised masked particle modeling (MPM) is uniquely powerful in the low-finetuning label regime. Flow matching-based generative pre-training seems to provide little benefit for downstream classification, and interestingly, for downstream generation, we find that flow matching must be in the pre-training objective to see a significant finetuning advantage, hinting at the orthogonality of classification and generation tasks. That is, for a model to transfer to both generative and classification downstream tasks, it must be pre-trained on both. This study provides a template for controlled scaling analysis of pre-training objectives for foundation models in simulation-based sciences.

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19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

When Errors Become Narratives: A Longitudinal Taxonomy of Silent Failures in a Production LLM Agent Runtime

Authors:
Wei Wu↗

arXiv:2606.14589v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM agent systems increasingly run as long-lived autonomous runtimes: scheduling jobs, calling tools, maintaining memory, and pushing results to humans. We present a longitudinal study of silent failures in one such system: a personal-assistant agent runtime in continuous production since March 2026, with roughly 40 scheduled jobs, 8 LLM providers, a tool-governance proxy, and a knowledge-base memory plane, defended by 4,286 unit tests and 827 governance checks. Over eight weeks we documented 22 incidents with full root-cause postmortems, in which one meta-pattern – a failure whose error signal never reaches a human in actionable form – manifested at least 28 times. We derive a five-class, mechanism-oriented taxonomy: (A) environment and platform quirks, (B) design-assumption mismatches, (C) error swallowing and dilution, (D) chained hallucination and fabrication, (E) operational omission and forensic blind spots. Class D is unique to LLM systems and the most dangerous: the system does not merely fail to report an error – the LLM transforms it into fluent, plausible narrative delivered to the user. We term this fail-plausible: gray failure's differential observability escalated – the observer is not just blind, it is convincingly lied to by the failure itself. Three findings: about 70% of silent failures were caught by human user-view observation, not tests or audits; a retrospective audit of 15 incidents found 0% ex-ante prevention but 87% regression blocking – audits are regression engines, not prediction engines; incident latency (13 hours to 60 days) tracks failure mechanism, not code complexity – the longest-lived failures lived in the seams between components, where no test runs. We describe the resulting defense framework and distill design principles for agent systems whose failures are loud, attributable, and boring. All postmortems and artifacts are public.

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

Statistical Properties of Training & Generalization

Authors:
Itay Lavie↗Noam Levi↗Yonatan Kahn↗

arXiv:2606.20299v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep learning has managed to evade numerous intuitions from classical statistics to achieve unprecedented performance on a number of real-world tasks. In this article, we investigate the key features and surprises of deep learning from a physics-informed perspective, taking care to point out and justify where possible the many choices inherent in constructing a deep learning model. In particular, we review the phenomenon of neural scaling laws and discuss their interplay with the constraints and inductive biases which may be present when applying machine learning to problems in physics.

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21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

On the Residual Scaling of Looped Transformers: Stability and Transferability

Authors:
Shaowen Wang↗Bingrui Li↗Ge Zhang↗Wenhao Huang↗Shen Yan↗Jian Li↗

arXiv:2606.18524v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Looped (weight-tied) Transformers apply a shared residual block $N$ times ($h \leftarrow h + \varepsilon\,f(h)$, same $f$ at each step), increasing effective depth without adding parameters. Prior depth-scaling analyses prescribe $\varepsilon = 1/\!\sqrt{L}$ for depth-$L$ residual networks. We show that this is insufficient for looped architectures: weight sharing makes residual updates correlated across iterations, requiring the stronger scaling $\varepsilon = 1/N$. For multi-layer blocks ($L$ unique layers looped $N$ times), we derive a factored parameterization $\varepsilon = \lambda/(N\!\sqrt{L})$ that separates the two sources of growth: $1/N$ controls the within-layer loop correlation, and $1/\!\sqrt{L}$ controls the across-layer variance. A key consequence is that the optimal learning rate depends only on the number of unique layers $L$, not on the loop count $N$, enabling direct hyperparameter transfer from small to large $N$ without retuning. Experiments on looped Transformers confirm that $1/N$ scaling improves trainability and yields better loss than $1/\!\sqrt{N}$ scaling across loop counts.

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

Structure-Semantic Co-optimized Latent Diffusion Model for Fast Visual Anagram Synthesis

Authors:
Xiang Gao↗Yunpeng Jia↗

Visual anagram is an intriguing form of art creation wherein a single image presents different conceptual interpretations under transformations such as flipping or rotation. Recent work has achieved visual anagram synthesis by leveraging pretrained text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models, yet still suffers from several key limitations including computational inefficiency, suboptimal aesthetic quality, and weak semantic fidelity and expressiveness. This work focuses on generating visual anagrams with substantially improved visual quality at minimal computational cost, thereby advancing intelligent creation of illusionary digital art. To increase image resolution while reducing time overhead, we adapt the cutting-edge parallel denoising algorithm from pixel-based T2I model to the adversarially distilled latent-based one, and accordingly propose a structure-semantic co-optimization (S2CO) framework to counteract the consequent visual degradation. As the core of our approach, S2CO framework comprises three key innovations: (\romannumeral1) null-text structure alignment optimization; (\romannumeral2) semantic enhancement optimization; (\romannumeral3) attention-guided noise fusion. Building upon these components, our method dubbed S2CO-Anagram is able to generate higher-resolution anagram images with noticeably superior visual harmony and semantic faithfulness than related SOTA approaches, all while achieving substantially faster inference speed. Code will be publicly available.

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23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Would you still call this Dax? Novel Visual References in VLMs and Humans

Authors:
Ada Defne T\"ur↗Gaurav Kamath↗Joyce Chai↗Siva Reddy↗Benno Krojer↗

Vision-language models (VLMs), like human learners, are frequently exposed to new visual concepts, but how they map novel visual references to language after exposure remains largely underexplored, particularly when those references contradict prior knowledge from pre-training. To study this, we present the Novel Visual References Dataset (NVRD): 19,176 images spanning 90 visual concepts across different levels of visual novelty, each with up to 20 increasingly perturbed versions of the original object to probe generalization. Unlike prior work on visual augmentations of familiar concepts, NVRD comprises entirely novel, open-ended stimuli constructed from scratch, mirroring how humans encounter genuinely new concepts. We evaluate 3 open- and 2 closed-source models alongside 2,400 human judgments for direct human-model comparison, and find that (i) models struggle to acquire novel concepts in-context when they contradict prior knowledge, and (ii) while models and humans show correlated sensitivity to visual perturbations, models significantly overgeneralize, extending learned labels to stimuli that humans reject. We contribute NVRD as a corpus and benchmark for research on visual concept learning in both humans and machines.

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

GenTrack: A New Generation of Multi-Object Tracking

Authors:
Toan Van Nguyen↗Rasmus G. K. Christiansen↗Dirk Kraft↗Leon Bodenhagen↗

This paper introduces a novel multi-object tracking (MOT) method, dubbed GenTrack, whose main contributions include: first-a hybrid tracking approach employing both stochastic and deterministic manners to robustly handle unknown and time-varying numbers of targets, particularly in maintaining target identity (ID) consistency and managing nonlinear dynamics, second-leveraging particle swarm optimization (PSO) with some proposed fitness measures to guide stochastic particles toward their target distribution modes, enabling effective tracking even with weak and noisy object detectors, third-integration of social interactions among targets to enhance PSO-guided particles as well as improve continuous updates of both strong (matched) and weak (unmatched) tracks, thereby reducing ID switches and track loss, especially during occlusions, fourth-a GenTrack-based redefined visual MOT baseline incorporating a comprehensive state and observation model based on space consistency, appearance, detection confidence, track penalties, and social scores for systematic and efficient target updates, and five-the first ever publicly available source-code reference implementation with minimal dependencies, featuring three variants, including GenTrack Simple, Strengthen, and Super, facilitating flexible reimplementation. Experimental results have shown that GenTrack provides superior performance on standard benchmarks and real-world scenarios compared to state-of-the-art trackers, with integrated implementations of baselines for fair comparison. Potential directions for future work are also discussed. The source-code reference implementations of both the proposed method and compared-trackers are provided on GitHub: https://github.com/SDU-VelKoTek/GenTrack

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25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Wavelet Matrix Product States for Quantum Fields

Authors:
Molly Kaplan↗Antoine Tilloy↗

arXiv:2606.23823v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce a variational method to solve continuum quantum models with discrete tensor network techniques. The method leverages wavelet matrix product states (wMPS): matrix product states built on top of sufficiently regular ($N\geq 6$) Daubechies scaling functions. These states live in the continuum field theory Fock space, have finite energy density, and can be optimized with standard algorithms, without restriction to free theories. Further, exploiting the multi-resolution analysis built into wavelets, and its quantum circuit description, we can iteratively refine wMPS to obtain accurate approximations at arbitrarily fine length-scales. We showcase the efficiency of the method on the Lieb-Liniger model, computing energy density and correlation functions.

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