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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 (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

The Safety-Aware Denoiser for Text Diffusion Models

arXiv:2605.08116v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent work on text diffusion models offers a promising alternative to autoregressive generation, but controlling their safety remains underexplored. Existing safety approaches are geared toward autoregressive models and typically rely on post-hoc filtering or inference-time interventions. These are inadequate for effectively addressing safety risks in text diffusion models. We propose the Safety-Aware Denoiser (SAD), a safety-guidance framework in text diffusion models. The SAD modifies the iterative denoising process such that the text sample at the final denoising step is steered toward provably safe regions of the text space. This inference-time method can integrate safety constraints into the denoiser, avoiding computationally expensive retraining of the underlying diffusion model and enabling flexible, lightweight safety guidance. We evaluate the safety of the generated text using the SAD, with respect to hazard taxonomy, memorization, and jailbreak. Experimental results show that SAD substantially reduces unsafe generations while preserving generation quality, diversity, and fluency, outperforming existing methods. These results demonstrate that our safety guidance during denoising provides an effective and scalable mechanism for enforcing safety in text diffusion models.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

A Cryogenic Uniaxial Strain Cell for Quantum Devices

arXiv:2606.11485v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mechanical strain is a powerful resource for tuning quantum systems, but existing piezoelectric strain cells are generally optimized for fragile, high-aspect-ratio single crystals rather than the thick, square-profile chips typical of semiconductor quantum devices. Furthermore, adapting these cells for qubits requires accommodating dense RF and DC wiring while maintaining strict electrical isolation from high-voltage piezo actuators. Here, we present a piezoelectric uniaxial strain cell designed to homogeneously strain thick, square-profile substrates. We introduce a highly symmetric dual-chip loading configuration that effectively suppresses flexural deformation and shear stress. The cell integrates a high-density RF/DC interposer to support standard wire bonding and encloses the actuators in a grounded Faraday cage to prevent unwanted Stark shifts in the device layer. Finite element simulations confirm that combining stiff actuators with this symmetric mounting drastically improves strain homogeneity. Finally, we validate the apparatus experimentally by applying uniaxial strain to a 200 $\mu$m thick silicon die. Surface strain measurements demonstrate an applied strain of 215 $\mu\epsilon$ for 200 V applied piezo bias.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

What sentiment analysis can't see: Measuring whether customers were helped, and what went wrong, across 70,000 support conversations

Most companies read their customer support data at scale using sentiment analysis, which measures how customers sound rather than whether they were satisfied with the result. We tested a richer alternative on 70,450 support conversations from a leading online fundraising platform: alongside tone, we used GPT-5.4 to estimate each customer's satisfaction and to flag whether they reported a concrete problem, then validated all three readings against the 1-to-5 ratings customers left on the conversations they rated. The satisfaction estimate tracked those ratings far better than sentiment did, correlating at 0.47 against 0.36 and flagging unhappy customers with far fewer false alarms. The structured read also sees what sentiment cannot: tone and satisfaction disagree in 44% of conversations, a single "Neutral" label hides everything from quietly satisfied customers to ones who quietly gave up, and the largest group of all is "tolerated friction," customers who are satisfied but still reporting a fixable problem, a standing issue that no sentiment-based dashboard can surface. The broader finding is that LLM-based annotation can capture far more than the tonality of a customer's language, offering strong potential for new business metrics grounded instead in the customer's state (whether they were satisfied) and the cause of their problem extracted directly from the raw textual data of interactions and feedback.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

PolicyGuard: Towards Test-time and Step-level Adversary Defense for Reinforcement Learning Agent

arXiv:2606.12896v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL) are becoming increasingly popular, the security of RL systems deserve more attention and exploration. In particular, recent work has revealed that RL agents are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where a victim agent behaves normally under standard conditions but executes malicious actions when a specific trigger is activated. Existing backdoor defenses for RL either require access to the agent's internal parameters, operate only at the model or trajectory level, or are limited to specific attack types. To ensure the security of RL agents, we propose \texttt{PolicyGuard}, a test-time step-level backdoor defense which leverages Gaussian Process (GP) posterior variance and adapts pseudo trajectories to enable uncertainty computation for individual time step. Besides, we also provide theoretical foundations to explain the efficacy of GP posterior variance. Extensive experiments across seven RL games demonstrate that PolicyGuard achieves state-of-the-art detection performance in most cases, with average AUROC of 0.856 for perturbation-based attacks and 0.859 for adversary-agent attacks.

06.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-15

Activity-dependent adaptive deep brain stimulation improves gait in Parkinson’s disease

Authors:

Parkinson’s disease leads to a spectrum of locomotor deficits that vary in severity with the nature of daily activities and the fluctuating physiology of patients. Many of these deficits remain inadequately addressed by existing deep brain stimulation therapies that rely on activity-agnostic parameters optimized for cardinal motor symptoms. By contrast, therapies embedding activity-specific parameters have the potential to better address the entire range of symptoms. Here we expose physiological principles that enable real-time decoding of ongoing locomotor activities across motor fluctuations from the neural dynamics of the subthalamic nucleus. This decoding steered activity-dependent adaptations of deep brain stimulation therapies that improved locomotor deficits while preserving efficacy for cardinal motor symptoms across activities of daily living. Our activity-dependent framework provides a blueprint for next-generation neuromodulation therapies that continuously select parameters optimized to the behavioral context and fluctuating physiology of each patient. ClinicalTrials.gov registration NCT06791902 . Neural decoding algorithms that leverage physiological principles of locomotor encoding support activity-dependent deep brain stimulation therapies that improve locomotor deficits in people with Parkinson’s disease.

07.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15

Biological meaning in protein embedding space is resolution-dependent

Protein language model embeddings are increasingly used to organise biological sequences, yet how biological meaning is encoded within embedding neighbourhoods remains poorly understood. Using two independent hierarchical enzyme systems, carbohydrate-active enzymes and peptidases, we investigated how biological interpretation changes across embedding organisations aligned to different levels of biological hierarchy. Different embedding organisations give rise to distinct neighbourhood semantics. When aligned to membership-boundary resolution, embeddings robustly separated artefacts and unrelated proteins from members of the target category. However, embeddings aligned to functional-grouping resolution maintained compositional neighbourhood structure for multi-domain proteins spanning more than one functional or catalytic group. Finally, embeddings aligned to local-family resolution recovered compact family-like neighbourhoods, including families withheld from training, while weakening broader membership-boundary and functional-grouping relationships. Moreover, embeddings optimised toward the same level of biological organisation retain different biological relationships depending on optimisation trajectory employed. Together, our results show that proximity in protein embedding space has no fixed biological interpretation. Instead, biological meaning emerges across embedding resolutions through selective preservation of different forms of biological organisation.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

GILT: An LLM-Free, Tuning-Free Graph Foundational Model for In-Context Learning

arXiv:2510.04567v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are powerful tools for processing relational data but often struggle to generalize to unseen graphs, giving rise to the development of Graph Foundational Models (GFMs). However, current GFMs are challenged by the extreme heterogeneity of graph data, where each graph can possess a unique feature space, label set, and topology. To address this, two main paradigms have emerged. The first leverages Large Language Models (LLMs), but is fundamentally text-dependent, thus struggles to handle the numerical features in vast graphs. The second pre-trains a structure-based model, but the adaptation to new tasks typically requires a costly, per-graph tuning stage, creating a critical efficiency bottleneck. In this work, we move beyond these limitations and introduce Graph In-context Learning Transformer (GILT), a framework built on an LLM-free and tuning-free architecture. GILT introduces a novel token-based framework for in-context learning (ICL) on graphs, reframing classification tasks spanning node, edge and graph levels in a unified framework. This mechanism is the key to handling heterogeneity, as it is designed to operate on generic numerical features. Further, its ability to understand class semantics dynamically from the context enables tuning-free adaptation. Comprehensive experiments show that GILT achieves stronger few-shot performance with significantly less time than LLM-based or tuning-based baselines, validating the effectiveness of our approach. Our code is available at: https://github.com/yiming421/inductnode/.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

HadBalance: A Plug-and-Play Unified Global Geometric Prior Framework for Generalizable Biomedical Segmentation

Precise biomedical image segmentation is crucial for clinical diagnosis. Geometric cues (e.g., boundary, shape, and topology) can improve structural consistency, yet most are task-specific and lack a unified geometric foundation that generalizes across organs and modalities. We are motivated by the observation that several medical segmentation targets can be approximated as globally near-convex shapes. A convex region is one in which any two interior points can be connected by a line segment entirely contained within the region. In practice, medical targets may exhibit small local concavities or boundary irregularities; we refer to such globally convex-like shapes as near-convex. Motivated by this, we derive Hadwiger Shape Priors from Hadwiger's theorem as an interpretable global regularizer using three 2D measures: area A, perimeter P, and Euler characteristic chi, enabling transfer across organs and modalities. However, because medical datasets are shape-heterogeneous, enforcing near-convex priors uniformly can over-regularize non-convex anatomy with significant concavities, washing out concavities and fine details and degrading segmentation accuracy. To address this challenge, we propose Conflict-Aware Objective Balancing (CAOB), which integrates shape priors with segmentation in a gradient-aware manner. For each prior, CAOB removes only the gradient component that conflicts with segmentation while preserving the remaining aligned component, and adaptively regulates objective influences to prevent prior dominance. This enables stable use of shape priors on shape-heterogeneous data without erasing genuine concavities or fine structural details. We call this plug-and-play framework HadBalance.

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

The Measurement Gap in the Automation of EU Law: Benchmarking Doctrinal Legal Reasoning under the EU AI Act

Large language models now produce legal text of at least median quality, yet no existing benchmark can evaluate whether they perform doctrinal legal reasoning, which forms the interpretive core of legal work, rather than the ancillary, paralegal tasks that most current legal-AI evaluations measure. This measurement gap is not only methodological but legal: the EU AI Act makes "appropriate accuracy" a binding requirement for high-risk AI used in the judicial domain, yet that requirement cannot acquire operational content without the very doctrinal-reasoning benchmark the field lacks.

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

Emergent Bell Phase in an Electro-Nanomechanical Quantum Simulator

arXiv:2511.02613v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Suspended carbon nanotubes hosting electrostatically defined quantum dots allow for exceptionally strong and tunable electromechanical coupling as well as mechanical modes that can reach the quantum ground state of motion simply by cryogenic cooling. This makes them a unique platform for quantum simulation of electron-phonon coupling. Here, we propose an experimentally realisable setup with two such carbon nanotubes in parallel, each hosting four quantum dots. Our system not only exhibits phonon-mediated electron-electron attraction, but also supports a robust, maximally entangled Bell phase at mesoscopic scales shared across the subsystems. These features highlight its potential as a simulator of strongly correlated quantum systems.

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

Lower Complexity Bounds for Nonconvex-Strongly-Convex Bilevel Optimization with First-Order Oracles

Authors:

arXiv:2511.19656v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Although upper bound guarantees for bilevel optimization have been widely studied, progress on lower bounds has been limited due to the complexity of the bilevel structure. In this work, we focus on the smooth nonconvex-strongly-convex setting and develop new hard instances that yield nontrivial lower bounds under deterministic and stochastic first-order oracle models. In the deterministic case, we prove that any first-order zero-respecting algorithm requires at least $\Omega(\kappa^{3/2}\epsilon^{-2})$ oracle calls to find an $\epsilon$-accurate stationary point, improving the optimal lower bounds known for single-level nonconvex optimization and for nonconvex-strongly-convex min-max problems. In the stochastic case, we show that at least $\Omega(\kappa^{5/2}\epsilon^{-4})$ stochastic oracle calls are necessary, again strengthening the best known bounds in related settings. Our results expose substantial gaps between current upper and lower bounds for bilevel optimization and suggest that even simplified regimes, such as those with quadratic lower-level objectives, warrant further investigation toward understanding the optimal complexity of bilevel optimization under standard first-order oracles.

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

FlexiBrain: Resolution-Agnostic Voxel-Level Encoding for Native fMRI

arXiv:2606.11500v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The success of large-scale deep learning models in neuroscience is fundamentally constrained by severe data heterogeneity. Native fMRI data aggregated from diverse sources exhibit substantial variation in both spatial and temporal resolutions. Consequently, most existing frameworks rely on lengthy, rigid preprocessing pipelines that enforce uniformity across datasets. This practice introduces two critical limitations: (1) potential degradation of subject-specific anatomical information; (2) significant computational overhead, often requiring hours of processing per subject. Here, we propose FlexiBrain, a resolution-agnostic voxel-level encoding framework for native fMRI based on Mamba-JEPA. FlexiBrain defines patch sizes in real-world physical units and employs a dynamic patch resizing, thereby bypassing destructive spatial standardization while enabling direct ingestion of data in native space. We instantiate the framework using an efficient Mamba-JEPA backbone to model high-dimensional 4D fMRI signals. Across five diverse downstream neuroscience tasks, FlexiBrain consistently outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods, achieving gains of up to 12 percentage points without external data augmentation. Importantly, FlexiBrain functions as a seamless plug-in module, substantially reducing preprocessing costs and accelerating the development of robust voxel-level fMRI foundation models. Code is available at https://github.com/OneMore1/FlexiBrain.

14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Kemeny's constant minimization for reversible Markov chains via structure-preserving perturbations

arXiv:2510.24679v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Kemeny's constant measures the efficiency of a Markov chain in traversing its states. We investigate whether structure-preserving perturbations to the transition probabilities of a reversible Markov chain can improve its connectivity while maintaining a fixed stationary distribution. Although the minimum achievable value for Kemeny's constant can be estimated, the required perturbations may be infeasible. We reformulate the problem as an optimization task, focusing on solution existence and efficient algorithms, with an emphasis on the problem of minimizing Kemeny's constant under sparsity constraints.

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

Closing the Auto-Research Loop: An AI Co-Scientist for Production Search Ranking

arXiv:2603.22376v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present an AI Co-Scientist framework that closes the research loop for the production search-ranking system of a large online travel platform – pairing LLM agents with direct cloud-compute access so that idea generation, code implementation, GPU experimentation, and result analysis iterate end-to-end with a human scientist in the loop. The framework uses a hybrid agent architecture: single-LLM agents handle routine work, while multi-LLM consensus (GPT-5.2, Gemini Pro 3, Claude Opus 4.5) is invoked for higher-stakes decisions. On the production ranking task, a human-designed transformer baseline (V2) yielded $+0.118\%$ over a pre-transformer baseline (V1); the AI Co-Scientist's automated loop on top of V2 contributed an additional $+0.083\%$, for a combined $+0.201\%$ offline gain delivered in roughly one extra week of wall-clock time (single-run numbers; statistical limits discussed in the paper). The most useful AI proposals – unified long-sequence layouts, slot-type embeddings, and multi-phase learning-rate schedules – are standard practice in NLP and Vision but were absent from our production stack, suggesting that LLM agents can serve as cross-disciplinary connectors for ranking teams. We also report deployment context, negative results, and lessons learned.

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

RODS: Reward-Driven Online Data Synthesis for Multi-Turn Tool-Use Agents

arXiv:2606.19047v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-turn tool-use RL is bottlenecked by the rapid depletion of informative samples in static datasets. We observe that the gradient signal in GRPO concentrates on tasks with the highest rollout reward variance, a consequence of the Popoviciu upper bound. Consequently, samples near the agent's capability boundary – where successes and failures are roughly balanced – contribute disproportionately large policy gradients. As training progresses, this boundary continuously shifts, which gradually depletes the pool of informative samples in a static dataset. We propose RODS (Reward-driven Online Data Synthesis) to resolve this depletion. RODS closes the loop between RL training and data generation by repurposing the progress reward variance as a practical, zero-cost boundary detector that requires no extra inference beyond the rollouts already computed for training. It continuously identifies such boundary samples, synthesizes new multi-turn variants matching their structural complexity (e.g., API topology and dependency depth) via a skill-aligned resampling pipeline, and manages a dynamic replay buffer that co-evolves with the policy. Starting from 400 human seeds and maintaining an active training pool of ~800 samples, RODS achieves comparable performance to a 17K-sample offline pipeline while requiring roughly 20x fewer trajectories, and improves over fixed-data RL and environment augmentation in our controlled setting.

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

Bayesian Networks with Latent Time Embedding for Stage-Aware Causal Modeling of Alzheimer's Disease Progression

arXiv:2606.15784v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Alzheimer's disease (AD) progression is often described through the amyloid-tau-neurodegeneration, or AT(N), cascade. However, most longitudinal models represent this cascade either as a fixed sequence of biomarkers or as a black-box forecasting task. This makes it difficult to determine when biologically guided biomarker relationships influence future regional pathology. In this study, we introduce Bayesian Networks with Latent Time Embedding (BN-LTE), a Bayesian structural framework for stage-aware modeling of AD progression. BN-LTE estimates disease pseudotime from baseline biomarker profiles and constrains directed dependencies according to biologically plausible AT(N) ordering. Posterior spline-varying structural equations are then used to link initial multimodal measurements with future annualized regional tau-PET change. Across repeated subject-disjoint evaluations using ADNI data, BN-LTE shows strong spatial reconstruction of tau progression compared with the included forecasting baselines. Beyond spatial reconstruction, BN-LTE recovers posterior stage-varying AT(N)-constrained effects and identifies a mid-pseudotime window of amyloid sensitivity. This window is supported by model-implied g-formula contrasts, root-adjusted AIPW, mechanism-sensitive ablations, and robustness analyses across spline and prior specifications. Overall, these findings position BN-LTE as a Bayesian structural framework for forecasting tau progression while examining stage-dependent AT(N)-cascade mechanisms in observational longitudinal neuroimaging data. Our code is available at https://github.com/danleneurocom/BN-LTE.

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

ActionMap: Robot Policy Learning via Voxel Action Heatmap

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have advanced rapidly across backbones, training recipes, and data scale, yet the action decoder, which converts the backbone's hidden state into a continuous control signal, has barely changed and remains a single-point predictor across the majority of current VLAs. Whether implemented via autoregressive token bins, L1 regression, or flow-matching denoising, the resulting decoder treats the action space as unstructured, leaving the geometric proximity of neighboring actions unexploited during training. To advance this, we introduce ActionMap, a voxel heatmap action head that drops into an existing VLA in place of its native action decoder. For each new action, the head predicts a voxel heatmap over the action space, where each voxel directly stores the probability of the corresponding action. Across LIBERO simulation and real-world Franka manipulation, our heatmap head surpasses two architecturally distinct backbones at matched training steps (e.g., +8.2% over OpenVLA-OFT's L1 regression head on the LIBERO four-suite average), converges at comparable or faster rates on both backbones, and remains markedly more data-efficient at low training data. The cross-backbone consistency indicates that action representation is a real lever for VLA performance, distinct from further backbone or recipe scaling. Project Page: https://showlab.github.io/ActionMap/.

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

VLADriveBench: Evaluating CoT-Action Relationship in VLA for Autonomous Driving

Vision-language-action (VLA) models generate chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning alongside driving trajectories, but existing benchmarks evaluate only trajectory quality and do not assess whether the CoT is relevant, consistent, or causally connected to the driving action. We introduce VLADriveBench, a framework that combines observational metrics (mentioning, hallucination, contradiction, action alignment) with a CoT intervention protocol to provide complementary views of the CoT-action relationship. Applying VLADriveBench to three models across two architectures, we find that the two analyses can diverge sharply: ORION scores highest on observational alignment yet its CoT is epiphenomenal, while Alpamayo v1.5 scores lower yet its CoT is strongly causal, with visual salience gating the extent of CoT influence.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Learning a Sampling-Free Variational DNN Plugin from Tiny Training Sets to Refine OOD Segmentation With Uncertainty Estimation

Deep neural networks (DNNs) frequently fail to generalize to out-of-distribution (OOD) medical images because of variations in scanners and acquisition protocols. Retraining DNN models to address these distribution shifts is often impractical due to the high cost of acquiring and annotating new medical datasets. To address this, we introduce VarDeepPCA, a novel lightweight variational DNN framework designed to restore/refine degraded segmentation maps by leveraging intrinsic geometric priors. Unlike existing approaches that require target-domain data or extensive pre-training, our VarDeepPCA explicitly learns a distribution of valid anatomical geometries using only small in-distribution (ID) datasets. Theoretically, our novel variational learning framework leverages a reinterpretation of the softmax mapping to implicitly perform exact distribution modeling, thereby enabling computationally efficient, sampling-free learning and inference. This also enables VarDeepPCA to provide uncertainty estimates associated with its restored segmentation maps. We empirically validate our framework across 4 distinct clinical applications, using 14 publicly available datasets, involving segmentation of the myocardium, neuroretinal rim, prostate, and fetal head. Comparisons against 15 existing methods demonstrate that VarDeepPCA consistently restores segmentation maps produced by the existing methods on OOD data to (i) significantly improve anatomical plausibility of geometries and clinical utility of the segmentations, and (ii) significantly reduce errors, without needing any more training data than that used by existing methods.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Bridging Passive and Active: Enhancing Conversation Starter Recommendation via Active Expression Modeling

Large Language Model (LLM)-driven conversational search is shifting information retrieval from reactive keyword matching to proactive, open-ended dialogues. In this context, Conversation Starters are widely deployed to provide personalized query recommendations that help users initiate dialogues. Conventionally, recommending these starters relies on a closed "exposure-click" loop. Yet, this feedback loop mechanism traps the system in an echo chamber where, compounded by data sparsity, it fails to capture the dynamic nature of conversational search intents shaped by the open world. As a result, the system skews towards popular but generic suggestions. In this work, we uncover an untapped paradigm shift to shatter this harmful feedback loop: harnessing user "free will" through active user expressions. Unlike traditional recommendations, conversational search empowers users to bypass menus entirely through manually typed queries. The open-world intents in active queries hold the key to breaking this loop. However, incorporating them is non-trivial: (1) there exists an inherent distribution shift between active queries and formulated starters. (2) Furthermore, the "non-ID-able" nature of open text renders traditional item-based popularity statistics ineffective for large-scale industrial streaming training. To this end, we propose Passive-Active Bridge (PA-Bridge), a novel framework that employs an adversarial distribution aligner to bridge the distributional gap between passively recommended starters and active expressions. Moreover, we introduce a semantic discretizer to enable the deployment of popularity debiasing algorithms. Online A/B tests on our platform, demonstrate that PA-Bridge significantly boosts the Feature Penetration Rate by 0.54% and User Active Days by 0.04%.

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

Visualizing Uncertainty: Spatial Maps of Missing and Conflicting Evidence in Deep Learning

arXiv:2606.15767v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Understanding when and why deep neural networks are uncertain is crucial for deploying reliable machine learning systems in safety-critical domains. While existing uncertainty quantification methods provide scalar measures of model confidence, they offer limited insight into which spatial regions of an input contribute to different types of uncertainty. We propose a novel visualization framework, Uncertainty Activation Map (UAM), that combines Evidential Deep Learning (EDL) with Full-Gradient Class Activation Mapping (FullGrad) to generate interpretable spatial uncertainty activation maps. Our approach distinguishes between two fundamental types of uncertainty: vacuity, representing lack of evidence, and dissonance, capturing conflicting evidence between competing hypotheses. By leveraging the complete gradient decomposition property of FullGrad and the principled uncertainty quantification of Subjective Logic, our method produces theoretically grounded visualizations that highlight specific image regions responsible for model uncertainty. With this framework, vacuity and dissonance activation maps are generated by computing belief-weighted attributions, enabling identification of where models lack knowledge versus where they encounter ambiguous evidence. Extensive evaluations across multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework effectively addresses the critical gap between uncertainty quantification and explainability, providing intuitive visual feedback to assess model reliability in complex visual recognition tasks.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Gaming-Resistant Insurance Contracts for Autonomous AI Agents: Strategy-Proof Toll Mechanism Design

arXiv:2606.16326v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Paper A defines a time-consistent actuarial runtime that prices each side-effect-bearing action against a contractually fixed safe default and gates execution against a reserve budget. It treats the operator as passive. This paper makes the operator strategic. We characterise a five-attack space for autonomous AI-agent insurance contracts and prove when the actuarial runtime is gaming-resistant. Two attack surfaces – post-toll safe-default selection and within-boundary action splitting – are closed by Paper A's minimal-authority and no-splitting clauses. The remaining three require new contract clauses. First, common-control aggregation prevents cross-boundary re-routing from reducing toll below the boundary potential applied to total exposure. Second, interface failures such as invalid JSON are contract-relevant events, not safety wins: treating them as zero-toll safe defaults can reward unreliable models, while escalation fees reverse the incentive. We validate this interface-compliance theorem on committed cross-model traces from the companion empirical paper. Third, a model-identity menu with a componentwise-minimum penalty schedule makes truthful reporting of the deployed model weakly dominant. We then compose these clauses with Paper A's runtime guarantees to obtain joint incentive compatibility over the five-attack space. Finally, a two-parameter premium family discharges operator individual rationality and weak budget balance at the truthful equilibrium. The result is an incentive-compatibility layer for actuarial control of autonomous-agent side effects.

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

Root-Selecting Fixed-Point Inversion for Rectified Flows via Trajectory Straightness

Finding the initial noise that generates a given data sample, known as inversion, is a key component for downstream applications such as training-free image editing. Existing fixed-point inversion methods improve inversion accuracy by formulating each inversion step as a fixed-point problem, but they lack a principled mechanism for selecting among multiple fixed-point solutions that can arise in practice. We observe that different selections induce different inversion trajectories, leading to substantial variation in reconstruction and editing quality. For rectified flows, we further find that this variation is closely associated with trajectory straightness, motivating straightness as a principled selection criterion. We propose SelFix, a fixed-point inversion method that selects fixed-point solutions inducing straighter inverse trajectories while retaining convergence to an exact inverse root under standard local assumptions. Experiments on FLUX.1-dev and PIE-Bench show that SelFix improves fixed-point inversion, achieving stronger real-image reconstruction and better source-preserving prompt-based editing than prior inversion baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/seminkim/selfix.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

CloudCons: A Comprehensive End-to-End Benchmark for Cloud Resource Consolidation

arXiv:2606.13513v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Driven by conservative over-provisioning to guarantee service reliability, resource utilization in cloud data centers remains at low levels. To mitigate this, the forecast-then-optimize paradigm has emerged to optimize consolidation by anticipating future demands. While emerging time series foundation models promise to enhance this paradigm through zero-shot generalization, existing benchmarks focus solely on prediction error metrics. The actual decision utility of these advanced models remains unverified, rendering their practical value for downstream tasks uncertain. To bridge this gap, we propose CloudCons, a comprehensive end-to-end benchmark designed to evaluate forecasting models within the specific context of cloud resource consolidation. We build high-quality datasets that cover diverse workloads from Huawei Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Google Borg, capturing distinct service characteristics ranging from synchronized diurnal rhythms to stochastic, pulse-like bursts and high-frequency noise. We conduct an extensive evaluation of statistical, deep learning, and foundation models. Our experiments reveal a pivotal finding: while foundation models demonstrate superior zero-shot forecasting accuracy, this advantage does not inherently translate into better decision utility. Of practical significance, we systematically analyze how the selection of predictive quantiles acts as a critical lever. We provide actionable guidelines for calibrating these selections to balance the trade-off between resource efficiency and service reliability, offering vital insights for real-world deployment decisions.