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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

SceneConductor: 3D Scene Generation from a Single Image with Multi-Agent Orchestration

Generating complete 3D scenes from a single image requires inferring globally consistent geometry, object relationships, and environmental context from inherently ambiguous visual evidence. Despite recent progress in joint layout-and-mesh generation, existing methods often rely on holistic or weakly decomposed pipelines that entangle many factors at once and demand extensive scene-level supervision, limiting their generalization to complex real-world environments. We propose a multi-agent orchestration framework that decomposes single-image 3D scene generation into three structured stages: scene initialization, environment construction, and multi-agent refinement. The initialization stage extracts image-derived object masks, builds object-level 3D representations, and predicts an initial spatial layout to form a coarse 3D scene. The environment-construction stage then leverages this initialization together with point-map geometry to build an environmental scaffold of supporting surfaces, room boundaries, materials, and illumination. Finally, in the refinement stage, a planner agent identifies structural and visual inconsistencies, applies simple corrections directly, and dispatches specialist agents for complex localized revisions that are reintegrated into the global scene. To provide reliable structural initialization while reducing reliance on scene-level annotations, we further introduce a geometry-aware layout predictor supervised by sparse geometric priors derived from point maps. Unlike fully supervised layout generators, the predictor can be trained from segmentation-level data and generalizes robustly to diverse real-world scenes. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that our method consistently outperforms prior approaches in geometric accuracy, spatial consistency, and perceptual realism.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Super-Link Fragility in Asymmetric W-Class States under Quantum Noise

arXiv:2606.12307v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The asymmetric three-qubit W-class state $|\overline{W_3^L}\rangle$ defines an isosceles entanglement-network geometry, (a) two vertex-base (VB) links form stronger bipartite connections, (b) while the base-base (BB) link is weaker. This suggests that concentrating entanglement into a super-link may be advantageous for quantum-network tasks. Here, we show that this intuition is incomplete. We analytically compare the bipartite concurrence dynamics of the symmetric |W> state and the asymmetric $|\overline{W_3^L}\rangle$ state, which differ both in entanglement-network geometry and excitation sector under standard noise models. In the absence of noise, the concurrence hierarchy is C_{VB} > C_W > C_{BB}$. Under phase damping, this hierarchy is preserved for all noise strengths and no entanglement sudden death occurs. Under amplitude damping, however, the hierarchy is reordered. The symmetric |W> state becomes the most robust, while the base-base concurrence of $|\overline{W_3^L}\rangle$ vanishes at the finite threshold of parameter $\gamma$. We term this reordering as the Super-Link Fragility Effect. The same structural asymmetry that produces a stronger vertex-base link also makes it more vulnerable to energy dissipation when coupled with multi-excitation amplitudes. Under depolarization, the asymmetry advantage is erased, with $C_W$ and $C_{VB}$ sharing the same sudden-death threshold for some value of the parameter p, while $C_{BB}$ disappears earlier at some other value of the parameter p. The generalized amplitude damping channel continuously connects the damping-dominated regime to the pure-excitation limit, where the initial hierarchy is restored. These results show that entanglement robustness in $W$-class resources is controlled not by initial concurrence alone, but by the joint structure of entanglement-network geometry, excitation sector, and noise symmetry.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

On the Memorization Behavior of LLMs in Generative Recommendation: Observations, Implications, and Training Strategies

arXiv:2606.17276v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative recommendation (GR) has emerged as a promising direction for recommender systems. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly adopted for GR, as their rich pretrained knowledge is expected to help them generalize beyond common user behavior patterns that traditional memorization-oriented baselines can capture. However, existing LLM-based GR works largely ignore LLMs' well-known tendency to memorize, which, if present in LLMs fine-tuned for GR, would restrict their utilization of pretrained knowledge. In this work, we investigate this concern by examining one-hop memorization, where a model recommends items that are direct successors of items in the training data. We show that LLMs do this more than non-LLM-based GR models-in fact, the vast majority of their gains over GR baselines are actually on users whose target items can be predicted through one-hop memorization. We intuit that improving performance on the remaining users requires LLMs to learn richer item-item relations beyond one-hop transitions. To achieve this, we propose IIRG, a novel training strategy that teaches LLMs to capture: (1) collaborative relations derived from item co-occurrences across multiple hops in user sequences, and (2) semantic relations among items with similar themes, both of which can serve as useful recommendation signals. We show that IIRG significantly improves over LLMs trained solely with standard next-item prediction, with especially large gains for users whose test items are not covered by train-time one-hop transitions.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

The Inverse Born Rule Equivalence. On the Informational Limits of Real-Valued Amplitude Encodings and the Measurement of Quantum Advantage in Data Embeddings

arXiv:2602.21350v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: When does quantum data encoding provide genuine quantum advantage, and when does it merely rephrase a classically solvable problem? We prove an Equivalence Theorem demonstrating that any encoding mapping classical data to real-valued amplitudes, $\vert\psi_c\rangle = \sum_i c_i \vert i\rangle$ with $c_i \in \mathbb{R}$ and $\sum_i c_i^2 = 1$, composed with a data-independent parameterised unitary and computational-basis measurement, yields exactly the class of classical quadratic forms. We identify the geometric mechanism driving this collapse: the restriction to $\mathbb{R}$ forces a vanishing Berry connection, removing the complex phases required for data-dependent quantum interference. To operationalize this boundary, we introduce encoding diagnostics – phase complexity $C[\Phi]$ and mode-wise von Neumann mutual information $I[\Phi]$ – and link them to the information-geometric excess $\Delta g$. We show that for all real-valued encodings, $\Delta g = 0$ identically. We term the misidentification of such models as evidence of quantum computational power the Inverse Born Rule Fallacy. Supported by numerical experiments, our results establish that complex-phase structure is a strictly necessary condition for data-driven (Type~B) quantum advantage.

05.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

The $K$-th nearest neighbor random walk on a Poisson point process gets trapped

arXiv:2606.11271v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The $K$-th nearest neighbor random walk $(X_n)_{n \geq 0}$ on a homogeneous Poisson point process $\chi$ on $\R^d$ ($d\geq 1$), starts at the origin and at each step picks its next Poisson point among its closest neighbors according to i.i.d. labels having the same distribution as $K$. Our main result (Theorem 1) states that the number of Poisson points visited by $(X_n)_{n \geq 0}$ admits an exponential decay whenever the random variable $K$ has a bounded support (BS). In particular, the $K$-th nearest neighbor random walk visits finitely many Poisson points if and only if $K$ satisfies Assumption (BS). To prove it, we introduce the key notion of pioneer point which allows us to deal with the region of $\R^d$ already explored by $(X_n)_{n \geq 0}$. Still under Assumption (BS), we also prove an exponential decay for the Euclidean length of the trajectory performed by $(X_n)_{n \geq 0}$ (Theorem 2). Finally, and quite surprisingly, we exhibit an example of label distribution with bounded support for which the $K$-th nearest neighbor random walk discovers new Poisson points after a number of steps whose tail distribution is at least polynomial (Theorem 3).

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

Dango: A Strictly L1-Only Large Language Model for Studying Second Language Acquisition

We introduce Dango, a 1.8B-parameter large language model designed for controlled studies of L1-to-L2 (Japanese-to-English) transfer in second language acquisition (SLA). While previous studies have explored SLA in language models, they have predominantly relied on smaller or non-decoder models, limiting their ability to generate open-ended text and reducing their suitability as practical L2 simulators. We identify a key challenge when scaling models to this size: L2 contamination within the "monolingual" pretraining corpus used for L1 acquisition. To address this, we propose a filtering method to reduce premature exposure to English while preserving realistic, minimal exposure. We then fine-tune the model on LLM-generated L2-learning lessons to simulate the L2 acquisition process. Our evaluations confirm that Dango develops human-like L2 production patterns, outperforming both unfiltered and standard multilingual baselines. We release the model, data, and code to facilitate reproducible computational SLA research and learner-facing applications.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Exactly Solvable Quantum Model with Spin-Dependent Coulomb Interaction

arXiv:2501.05103v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this work, we report an exactly solvable quantum model featuring a spin-dependent Coulomb interaction, described by the spin vector potential \(\vec{\mathcal{A}} = k (\vec{r} \times \vec{S}) / r^2\) together with a Coulomb-type scalar potential \(\varphi = \kappa / r\) . The model is governed by the Schrödinger-type Hamiltonian \(\mathcal{H}_S = \vec{\Pi}^2 / (2M) + q \varphi\) in nonrelativistic quantum mechanics and by the Dirac-type Hamiltonian \(\mathcal{H}_D = c \vec{\alpha} \cdot \vec{\Pi} + \beta M c^2 + q \varphi\) in relativistic quantum mechanics, where \(\vec{\Pi} = \vec{p} - (q/c)\vec{\mathcal{A}}\) is the canonical momentum. We demonstrate two main results: (i) Just as the Coulomb-type scalar potential \(\mathcal{S}_Maxwell = \{\vec{\mathcal{A}} = 0,\ \varphi = \kappa / r\}\) is a local exact solution of Maxwell's equations on $r\neq0$, the gauge potential \(\mathcal{S}_YM = \{\vec{\mathcal{A}} = k (\vec{r} \times \vec{S}) / r^2,\ \varphi = \kappa / r\}\) constitutes a local exact solution of the Yang–Mills equations on the punctured region $r\neq0$. (ii) Both Hamiltonians \(\mathcal{H}_S\) and \(\mathcal{H}_D\) can be solved exactly in the presence of this spin-dependent Coulomb interaction. The resulting energy spectra are derived, and they naturally reduce to those of the ordinary hydrogen atom when the spin-dependent terms are neglected. Finally, we clarify the quantization conditions and the fixed-background interpretation of the model.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

QUIVER: Cost-Aware Adaptive Preference Querying in Surrogate-Assisted Evolutionary Multi-Objective Optimization

arXiv:2605.04267v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Interactive multi-objective optimization systems face a budget allocation dilemma: one can spend resources on expensive objective evaluations or on eliciting decision-maker preferences that identify the relevant region of the Pareto set. Moreover, preference elicitation itself spans modalities with different information content and cognitive burden, ranging from cheap, noisy pairwise preference statements (PS) to richer but costlier indifference adjustments (IA). We study cost-aware optimization under an unknown scalarization and introduce QUIVER (Query-Informed Value Estimation for Regret), a surrogate-assisted evolutionary multi-objective optimizer that adaptively chooses between objective evaluations and heterogeneous preference queries. At each step, QUIVER selects the next action by maximizing the expected decision-quality improvement per unit total cost. Across DTLZ and WFG benchmarks under synthetic decision-maker models, QUIVER achieves the lowest final utility regret on challenging WFG problems (utility regret of 2.14 on WFG4, 2.82 on WFG9: a 25% improvement over baselines), outperforming all single-modality baselines. We analyze how the optimal mix of PS and IA adapts to problem difficulty: on easy problems (DTLZ2), QUIVER selects 80\% PS queries; on hard problems (WFG9), it shifts to 35% IA queries. This adaptive modality selection demonstrates cost-aware preference learning in action.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

VeriGeo: Controllable Geometry Question Generation with Numerical and Analytical Verification

arXiv:2606.14176v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Geometry problem generation is useful for AI-assisted education and multimodal mathematical reasoning, but reliable synthesis remains difficult because the problem statement, diagram, constraints, and solution should be mutually consistent. Existing methods often trade off controllability and reliability: seed-based rewriting is flexible but weakly verifiable, whereas diagram-first construction improves validity but is less suited to arbitrary user-specified constraints. We introduce VeriGeo, a controllable geometry generation framework grounded in executable reasoning traces. Given user constraints such as target concepts and difficulty, an Author agent generates a problem and diagram, and a Solver agent produces a proof-aligned solution. Both agents use a shared action sequence that connects natural language, diagrams, geometric constraints, and proof steps into a verifiable representation. A three-stage pipeline checks numerical consistency, analytical realizability, and global consistency, using verification-guided reflection to repair recoverable failures and reject unrecoverable ones. Across five LLM backbones, raw generations frequently fail these checks, while VeriGeo repairs a substantial fraction of the invalid attempts. Supervised fine-tuning on 8.7k examples generated by VeriGeo achieves the best reported GeoQA performance among end-to-end multimodal LLM-based solvers, and obtains strong results on PGPS9K and MathVista-GPS, demonstrating the effectiveness of verified synthetic data for improving multimodal geometry reasoning.

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

Discovering Functionally Selective Brain Regions with a Deep Topographic Multimodal Model

arXiv:2606.09770v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Nearby neurons in cortex share similar response profiles, producing systematic spatial organization across sensory and cognitive systems. Recent topographic models reproduce aspects of this structure but remain unimodal and spatially constrain each layer separately, yielding fragmented maps that capture neither the contiguity of cortical processing streams nor their integration across modalities. We introduce Topo-Omni, a topographic multimodal model in which visual, auditory, and language/cognitive processing share a single contiguous in-silico sheet. Built by fine-tuning a pretrained foundation model with a spatial smoothness objective, this architecture develops clusters across modalities that are consistent with human neuroimaging, from sensory to cognitive systems. Driving or suppressing a cluster selectively biases or impairs perception, paralleling human intervention studies. Finally, we use our model to screen for novel clusters in-silico and discover new natural landscape and animal networks which we validate in human data. A single spatial principle thus organizes representations across modalities and processing stages, yielding testable hypotheses about cortical organization.

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

NeuronFabric: A Software Reference Architecture for On-Chip Transformer Training with Local Adam

arXiv:2606.16440v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Publicly documented accelerator architectures generally separate training computation from optimizer-state updates or rely on external memory and host orchestration. This paper presents NeuronFabric, a software reference architecture intended for future FPGA and ASIC implementations of transformer training with local Adam updates. A complete C# prototype implements forward pass, backpropagation, and Adam optimization without external machine-learning frameworks. The goal is to validate numerical correctness and memory requirements before hardware implementation. The evaluated model is a 334K-parameter autoregressive transformer (d=88, H=4, f=264, L=4, vocab=256) trained on the Shakespeare corpus. The BF16W configuration achieves evaluation loss 1.5426 after 80K samples, compared with 1.5224 for an FP32 GPU reference, while producing coherent character-level text. The paper introduces BF16W, which stores weights in BF16 while retaining Adam optimizer moments in FP32. This reduces memory requirements for on-chip training. A 334K-parameter FP32 model with Adam moments requires approximately 4.0 MB, matching the BRAM capacity of a Xilinx ZCU102 device. The BF16W variant requires approximately 3.34 MB, leaving memory available for activation storage. We describe the vocabulary-budget constraint observed during earlier experiments, quantify BF16W memory savings, and outline FPGA training as the next stage of development. No FPGA measurements are included in this paper. This publication serves as a public architectural disclosure and software reference implementation for future FPGA and ASIC exploration of the NeuronFabric architecture.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Unifying Quantum Smoothing Theories with Extended Retrodiction

arXiv:2510.08447v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Estimating the state of an open quantum system monitored over time requires incorporating information from past measurements (filtering) and, for improved accuracy, also from future measurements (smoothing). While classical smoothing is well understood within a Bayesian framework, its quantum generalization has been challenging, leading to distinct and seemingly incompatible approaches. In this work, we demonstrate that quantum state smoothing hinges on a uniquely quantum feature: the fundamental dependence of retrodiction on prior correlations. We introduce auxiliary systems into the prior belief to capture correlations formed during preparation and evolution and develop a comprehensive framework for quantum state smoothing based on extended Bayesian retrodiction. This framework identifies all previous approaches as different choices of the extended prior, and naturally extends it to other choices that have not been considered before. We also give an information-theoretic characterization of the choices of prior, in terms of the average entropy of the smoothed states. Our results establish quantum state smoothing as a fundamentally retrodictive process just like classical smoothing, with proper quantum features clearly identified.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Quality Over Clicks: Iterative Reinforcement Learning for Early-Stage E-Commerce Query Suggestion

Existing dialogue systems rely on query suggestion to enhance user engagement. Recent approaches mainly optimize generative models using click-through rate (CTR) models to align with user preferences. However, these methods are less effective in early-stage deployment scenarios, where click feedback is sparse and insufficient for training a reliable CTR model. To bridge this gap, we propose QualEQS, a quality-first iterative reinforcement learning framework for e-commerce query suggestion. We formalize actionable suggestion quality along three dimensions that directly affect downstream usability: answerability, factuality, and information gain. To continuously improve from online traffic without click supervision, we further propose group-level disagreement among candidate suggestions to identify ambiguous query contexts and mine hard training cases for iterative refinement. We also introduce EQS-Benchmark, a dataset of 16,949 real-world e-commerce queries for offline training and evaluation. Experiments show that our quality-based offline metrics correlate strongly with online performance, providing a practical evaluation recipe for sparse-feedback deployment. In both offline and online settings, QualEQS consistently outperforms strong baselines, yielding a 6.81% improvement in online ChatPV in a real-world enterprise-level conversational shopping assistant system.

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

Delta-Based Target Reformulation for Short-Term Electricity Load Forecasting Using LSTM and Transformer Models

Authors:

arXiv:2606.17692v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate short-term electricity load forecasting is critical for the reliable and economic operation of modern power systems, under non-stationarity arising from weather variability, calendar effects, and evolving consumption patterns. While deep learning models such as LSTMs and Transformers show promising performance, most existing studies focus on direct absolute load prediction without explicitly addressing target non-stationarity. Motivated by classical time-series differencing techniques in ARIMA models, this paper investigates a delta-based target reformulation for short-term electricity load forecasting using deep learning. Instead of directly predicting absolute load values, the proposed formulation trains models to predict the change in load between consecutive time steps, with final forecasts reconstructed using the last observed load. This aims to stabilize the learning target and reduce forecasting difficulty. Using multi-year, hourly real-world electricity load data from India, augmented with meteorological variables from the NASA POWER project and calendar features, this study evaluates LSTM and Transformer models under both formulations, benchmarking them against LightGBM. Experiments are conducted for hour-ahead and day-ahead horizons, assessing performance via Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE). Results show that delta-based reformulation consistently improves forecasting accuracy for hour-ahead prediction across all evaluated models, yielding MAPE reductions of over 50% compared to absolute formulations. For day-ahead forecasting, delta targets specifically benefit deep sequence models (LSTM and Transformer), while LightGBM remains competitive under the absolute formulation. These findings indicate that while delta reformulation is a powerful inductive bias for neural networks, its efficacy is model- and horizon-dependent.

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

PVminerLLM2: Improving Structured Extraction of Patient Voice via Preference Optimization

Motivation: Patient-generated text contains critical information on patients' lived experiences, social context, and care engagement, but remains largely unstructured, limiting its use in patient-centered outcomes research. Prior work introduced the PV-Miner benchmark and PVMinerLLM models for structured extraction. However, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) alone struggles with rare, fine-grained, and unevenly distributed errors, particularly in token-critical structured outputs. Results: We present PVminerLLM2, an improved set of LLMs for structured patient voice extraction that applies preference optimization to address token-critical errors beyond the reach of supervised fine-tuning. Our method introduces (i) a preference objective with token-level gated stabilization term that prevents degradation of absolute token likelihood under preference optimization, and (ii) confusion-aware preference pair construction to better capture low-separation distinctions. We further incorporate token-importance weighting and inverse-frequency reweighing to address token imbalance and class skew. Across multiple model sizes, PVMinerLLM2 consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving gains of up to 4.43% (Code), 3.50% (Sub-code), and 1.55% (Span), and outperforms baseline LLM trained with existing preference optimization methods. Availability and Implementation: The supplementary material, code, evaluation scripts, and trained models for PVminerLLM2 are publicly available at: https://github.com/Data-Mining-Lab-Yale/PVminerLLM2

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

CLoVE: Personalized Federated Learning through Clustering of Loss Vector Embeddings

arXiv:2506.22427v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose CLoVE (Clustering of Loss Vector Embeddings), a novel algorithm for Clustered Federated Learning (CFL). In CFL, clients are naturally grouped into clusters based on their data distribution. However, identifying these clusters is challenging, as client assignments are unknown. CLoVE utilizes client embeddings derived from model losses on client data, and leverages the insight that clients in the same cluster share similar loss values, while those in different clusters exhibit distinct loss patterns. Based on these embeddings, CLoVE is able to iteratively identify and separate clients from different clusters and optimize cluster-specific models through federated aggregation. Key advantages of CLoVE over existing CFL algorithms are (1) its simplicity, (2) its applicability to both supervised and unsupervised settings, and (3) the fact that it eliminates the need for near-optimal model initialization, which makes it more robust and better suited for real-world applications. We establish theoretical convergence bounds, showing that CLoVE can recover clusters accurately with high probability in a single round and converges exponentially fast to optimal models in a linear setting. Our comprehensive experiments comparing with a variety of both CFL and generic Personalized Federated Learning (PFL) algorithms on different types of datasets and an extensive array of non-IID settings demonstrate that CLoVE achieves highly accurate cluster recovery in just a few rounds of training, along with state-of-the-art model accuracy, across a variety of both supervised and unsupervised PFL tasks.

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

Reliability without Validity: A Systematic, Large-Scale Evaluation of LLM-as-a-Judge Models Across Agreement, Consistency, and Bias

LLM-as-a-Judge has become the dominant evaluation paradigm for language models, but judge validation in practice relies on exact-match agreement, a metric that does not correct for chance and systematically overstates discriminative ability. We present the largest systematic evaluation of LLM-as-a-Judge to date: 21 judges from nine providers across MT-Bench, JudgeBench, and RewardBench, evaluated under three protocols (agreement, consistency, bias audit) over 118 runs and approximately 541,000 individual judgments. Four findings emerge, consistent across the full cohort, including the April 2026 frontier: kappa deflation between exact match and Cohen's kappa is universal (33–41 pp on MT-Bench), judge rankings shift by up to 14 positions across benchmarks, high test–retest reliability (>0.95) coexists with severe position bias (>0.10) in two production-deployed judges (instantiating a consistency–bias paradox), and verbosity bias is small (

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

Generalized Kullback-Leibler Divergence Loss

In this paper, we delve deeper into the Kullback-Leibler (KL) Divergence loss and mathematically prove that it is equivalent to the Decoupled Kullback-Leibler (DKL) Divergence loss that consists of (1) a weighted Mean Square Error (wMSE) loss and (2) a Cross-Entropy loss incorporating soft labels. Thanks to the decoupled structure of DKL loss, we have identified two areas for improvement. Firstly, we address the limitation of KL loss in scenarios like knowledge distillation by breaking its asymmetric optimization property along with a smoother weight function. This modification effectively alleviates convergence challenges in optimization, particularly for classes with high predicted scores in soft labels. Secondly, we introduce class-wise global information into KL/DKL to reduce bias arising from individual samples. With these two enhancements, we derive the Generalized Kullback-Leibler (GKL) Divergence loss and evaluate its effectiveness by conducting experiments on CIFAR-10/100, ImageNet, and vision-language datasets, focusing on adversarial training, and knowledge distillation tasks. Specifically, we achieve new state-of-the-art adversarial robustness on the public leaderboard – RobustBench and competitive knowledge distillation performance across CIFAR/ImageNet models and CLIP models, demonstrating the substantial practical merits. Our code is available at https://github.com/jiequancui/DKL.

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

Toward Instructions-as-Code: Understanding the Impact of Instruction Files on Agentic Pull Requests

arXiv:2606.13449v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI-agents (e.g., GitHub Copilot) collaborate as teammates in different software engineering tasks, including code generation proposed through pull requests (Agentic-PRs). For better agent efficiency, developers create instruction files that guide the AI-agents, including how to navigate the project, locate the right components, run tests, respect best practices, and more. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between the creation of these instructions and the performance of AI-agents in creating better pull requests, which have a higher chance of success (i.e., the merge rate), address more complex tasks (e.g., code churn), and require less effort to be merged (e.g., time to merge). To this end, we analyze 15,549 agentic PRs from 148 projects in the AIDev dataset. Using the three dimensions, we compare each project before and after the creation of the instruction files. We find that specifying instructions for AI-agents does not necessarily lead to better results. With the instruction files, 27.7\% of the projects increased their merge rate by at least 20\%, while 26.35\% decreased it. The same observation is seen with the amount of changes (e.g., code churn, number of modified files) and with the efforts to merge an agentic PR (e.g., merge time and number of comments). From a first exploration, we find that projects that managed to increase their merge rate have substantially longer instruction files, which are also well structured into a higher number of sections and sub-sections. Our results motivate the need for research to assist practitioners in framing the development of instruction files as a software engineering activity (aka, Instructions-as-Code).

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

Quantum ring all-reduce: communication and privacy advantages for distributed learning

arXiv:2606.20344v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine learning models have scaled to unprecedented sizes, making training across distributed devices the de facto standard in the field. In this work, we explore how quantum communications can make distributed training both more communication-efficient and information-theoretically private, for both classical and quantum learning models. Ring all-reduce is the foundational communication primitive for large-scale distributed training. We present a quantum version that reduces per-link online communication by a provably optimal factor of two using pre-shared entanglement and superdense coding, without requiring the learning model or gradient computation to change. Beyond bandwidth, the primitive enables privacy guarantees that are information-theoretically impossible for any classical protocol, achieving composable {\epsilon}-secure aggregation, via verified entanglement, at a 2x overhead in GHZ copies. Our hybrid quantum-classical communication architecture yields simultaneous communication and security advantages for large scale distributed training, regardless of whether the learning itself is quantum or classical. Finally, we characterise quantum advantages in gradient conflict detection for server-to-client communication under bandwidth constraints, a setting that arises after ring all-reduce is completed, when full gradient broadcast to external clients is infeasible. Two variants of the problem admit different separations. For margin-based alignment testing (\textsc{GapIP}_{\tau}), the quantum advantage is quadratic in the margin parameter: \widetilde{O}({\tau}^{-1}\log P) qubits versus \widetilde{O}(\min(\{\tau}^{-2},P)) bits. For sign-consistency auditing against a private parameter matching (\textsc{TieAudit}_{\epsilon}), the advantage represents an exponential separation in communication complexity: \Omega(\sqrt{P}) bits whereas O({\epsilon}^{-2}\log P) qubits suffice.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

ASRU: Activation Steering Meets Reinforcement Unlearning for Multimodal Large Language Models

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) may memorize sensitive cross-modal information during pretraining, making machine unlearning (MU) crucial. Existing methods typically evaluate unlearning effectiveness based on output deviations, while overlooking the generation quality after unlearning. This can easily lead to hallucinated or rigid responses, thereby affecting the usability and safety of the unlearned model. To address this issue, we propose ASRU, a controllable multimodal unlearning framework that incorporates generation quality as a core evaluation objective. ASRU first induces initial refusal behavior through activation redirection, and then optimizes fine-grained refusal boundaries using a customized reward function, thereby achieving a better trade-off between target knowledge unlearning and model utility. Experiments on Qwen3-VL show that ASRU significantly improves unlearning effectiveness (+24.6%) on average and generation quality (5.8X) on average while effectively preserving model utility, using only a small amount of retained supervision data.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

RLRC: Reinforcement Learning-based Recovery for Compressed Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2506.17639v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action models (VLA) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities and strong potential in complex robotic manipulation. However, their large parameter sizes and high inference latency hinder real-world deployment, especially on resource-constrained platforms. To address this, we conduct a systematic empirical study of model compression for VLAs. Building on these insights, we present RLRC, a three-stage compression and recovery pipeline consisting of structured pruning, performance recovery via SFT and RL, and subsequent quantization. The RL stage incorporates a critic warm-up strategy and BC loss regularization to stabilize training and preserve policy behavior. RLRC achieves up to an 8 times memory reduction and 2.3 times inference speedup while maintaining the original task success rate. Extensive experiments across multiple VLA backbones show that RLRC consistently outperforms existing compression baselines, highlighting its effectiveness for on-device deployment. Project website: https://rlrc-vla.github.io

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Algebraic Dead Directions in LayerNorm Transformers: A Forward-Pass-Only Diagnostic at LLM Scale

arXiv:2606.19491v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pretrained transformers sit near singular minima of the loss, where the Fisher information metric degenerates along dead directions: directions in parameter space along which the directional Fisher vanishes. Locating such a direction normally needs a forward pass and an eigendecomposition of activations, or a sampling-based complexity estimate; none returns a direction computable from the network's parameters alone. We give one, for LayerNorm transformers. The inverse-scale direction $\gamma^{-1}/\|\gamma^{-1}\|$ of the LayerNorm affine is an exact algebraic kernel of the post-final-norm centred activation covariance, for any input distribution, and induces a corresponding dead direction in parameter space. It is read from the LN scale parameter alone, with no forward or backward pass and no eigensolve: the cheapest dead-direction read, specific to LayerNorm. We test it on $14$ pretrained transformers ($9$ LayerNorm, $5$ RMSNorm; $160$M-$35$B; language and vision objectives). At random initialisation the predicted direction matches the measured bottom singular direction (one forward pass, direct SVD) to four decimal places on $9/9$ LayerNorm models, and is correctly absent on $5/5$ RMSNorm models, which lack the mean-subtraction projector that creates it. On the trained checkpoint the covariance eigenvalue along this direction deepens by ${\sim}10^3\times$ and further dead directions open; the random-init-to-trained gap is a one-forward-pass, per-checkpoint readout of singular structure along the predicted coordinate. Two consequences follow in closed form: the residual stream's smallest singular value is preserved block-to-block on $13/14$ transformers measured on their own input distribution, the one exception (Gemma$4$-$31$B) a genuine dead direction the same read pinpoints; and the kernel direction's presence classifies a transformer's normalisation from the parameters alone.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Gaussian Light Field Splatting: A Physical Prior-Driven Vision Transformer for Unsupervised Low-Light Image Enhancement

Existing unsupervised low-light image enhancement methods often encounter local exposure imbalance and color distortion under complex non-uniform illumination. In addition, most Vision Transformers lack an explicit mechanism for modeling the physical priors of illumination degradation. To address these limitations, we propose GLFS, a Gaussian light field splatting-based Vision Transformer that integrates continuous physical illumination modeling from Gaussian splatting into the Transformer architecture. In GLFS, scene illumination is represented by a superposition of anisotropic Gaussian basis functions. Physics-guided biases are introduced into self-attention to adaptively infer a spatial gain field, enabling accurate and uniform restoration under complex illumination. To reduce color bias and structural degradation during enhancement, a color-vector angular loss and a luminance-edge loss are further developed. These losses enforce hue consistency and improve the structural fidelity of local details. Extensive ablation studies and quantitative evaluations show that GLFS provides clear advantages in illumination correction and detail preservation. It achieves state-of-the-art performance and offers a new representation paradigm for low-light image enhancement.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

MoDiCoL: A Modular Diagnostic Continual Learning Dataset for Robust Speech Recognition

Modern Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems have made remarkable progress on standard benchmarks, yet performance gaps have emerged under real-world distribution shifts, caused by recording conditions, accents, speech impairments, and noise. Existing datasets and benchmarks typically isolate these factors, which overlooks their co-occurrence in real-world applications. In this paper, we argue that model robustness can be treated as a dynamic capability that continually develops, and we introduce MoDiCoL, a Modular Diagnostic Continual Learning dataset designed for controlled analysis of linguistic content, speaker characteristics, and acoustic environments. Furthermore, we propose a real-world-inspired continual learning curriculum to simulate incremental updates and study how robustness is acquired, transferred, and forgotten. We evaluate three continual learning strategies and provide detailed insights into robustness under evolving conditions.