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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Second-order PACF asymptotics and discrimination between fractional Gaussian noise and $\operatorname{FARIMA}(0,d,0)$

Authors:
Chunhao Cai↗

arXiv:2605.31416v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fractional Gaussian noise and $\operatorname{FARIMA}(0,d,0)$ have the same long-memory pole $|\theta|^{-2d}$ and hence the same leading PACF law $\alpha(n)\sim d/n$. We show that this agreement breaks at the first non-universal order. For $0

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02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

RLCSD: Reinforcement Learning with Contrastive On-Policy Self-Distillation

Authors:
Leyi Pan↗Shuchang Tao↗Yunpeng Zhai↗Lingzhe Zhang↗Zhaoyang Liu↗Bolin Ding↗Aiwei Liu↗Lijie Wen↗

On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) provides dense, token-level supervision for reasoning models by aligning a model's own distribution with the distribution it produces under privileged context, typically a verified solution. However, we show that the learning signal drawn from this distributional gap concentrates on style tokens rather than task-bearing ones, as the hinted model tends to produce more direct, shorter outputs. We term this pathology privilege-induced style drift, which destabilizes training or causes response length to shrink. To address this, we propose RLCSD (Reinforcement Learning with Contrastive on-policy Self-Distillation), which mitigates this drift by contrasting the teacher-student gap under a correct hint against that under a wrong hint, suppressing the style shift that conditioning on a hint tends to induce regardless of correctness, and yielding a signal that is more concentrated on task-bearing tokens. Experiments on Qwen3 (1.7B/4B/8B) and Olmo-3-7B-Think across mathematical and logical reasoning show that RLCSD consistently outperforms GRPO and prior OPSD methods. We further show that the contrastive principle is general: it plugs into existing OPSD methods to improve them, and its underlying insight extends to the broader cross-model on-policy distillation setting.

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03.
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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04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

When AI Says "I have been in similar situations": Synthetic Lived Experience in Peer-Like Caregiver Support

Authors:
Drishti Goel↗Violeta J. Rodriguez↗Daniel S. Brown↗Ravi Karkar↗Dong Whi Yoo↗Koustuv Saha↗

Caregivers often turn to online communities for informational and emotional support. In these spaces, peer supporters frequently draw on personal narratives to respond to emotionally complex caregiving situations. As LLMs are increasingly designed as peer-like sources of support, they introduce a critical tension: AI can provide immediate, private, and nonjudgmental support, but it cannot authentically possess the lived experiences that make human peer support meaningful. Yet, when prompted to sound peer-like, LLMs may generate language that implies lived experience. This creates a synthetic lived experience paradox: the same experiential language that may make AI support feel warm, relatable, and peer-like can also falsely position the system as someone with lived experience. We examine this paradox in the context of family caregivers of people living with Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementias (ADRD). Drawing on caregiver support exchanges from online communities and prompted peer-like responses from three LLMs – LLaMA, GPT-4o-mini, and MedGemma – we analyze how human peers use personal narratives and how AI incorporates similar narrative forms. Psycholinguistic analysis shows that peer responses used significantly more first-person and past-focused language than peer-like AI responses. Qualitatively, we identify seven types of personal narratives in human peer support and show that AI often captures their emotional work, but can fabricate experiential grounding. These findings reveal a narrative authenticity gap: peer-like AI can generate synthetic lived experience without the real experience that makes peer support meaningful. We argue that caregiver-support AI systems need mechanisms to distinguish supportive peer-like framing from fabricated lived experience, ensuring that models can offer warmth and validation without falsely positioning themselves as experiential peers.

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05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Closing the Social-Semantic Gap: SPSD for Edge-Based Prompt Compression in Cloud LLM Inference

Authors:
Abhinit Sen↗Ajeet Kumar↗Manaranjan Pradhan↗

arXiv:2606.19364v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The prefill stage of Large Language Model (LLM) inference is a growing contributor to cloud-scale energy cost. Many consumer-support and conversational prompts contain social scaffolding: politeness markers, apologetic preamble, repetition, and rapport-building language that is important for human communication but carries low marginal information for machine reasoning. We call this discrepancy the Social-Semantic Gap. We present SPSD (Sentiment Preserving Semantic Distillation), an edge-based pipeline that compresses user prompts using a 4-bit quantised Small Language Model before transmission to a cloud-deployed LLM. Evaluation on a 248-prompt corpus using Gemma-2-2B-Instruct (Q4_K_M) as the SLM and Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct as the cloud evaluation model yields a mean input token saving of 99.9 tokens per distilled call, with all 146 distilled calls yielding positive savings. Response quality, assessed by blind LLM-as-judge scoring across 121 pairs, is non-inferior to the raw path within a pre-specified 1-point margin on a 15-point rubric; the judge awarded 43 percent ties, 28 percent distilled wins, and 29 percent raw wins. Cosine similarity is mixed: mean 0.682, median 0.712, with 54.1 percent of pairs above the 0.70 reference threshold. Safety-critical domains are conservatively routed to passthrough via rule-based gates. Per-call net energy saving is estimated at 70-270 uWh under stated assumptions. SPSD shows that on-device prompt distillation can reduce cloud LLM input-token cost while preserving response quality within a practical non-inferiority margin.

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

Fine-Grained Open-Vocabulary Object Detection with Fined-Grained Prompts: Task, Dataset and Benchmark

Authors:
Ying Liu↗Yijing Hua↗Haojiang Chai↗Yanbo Wang↗TengQi Ye↗

Open-vocabulary detectors are proposed to locate and recognize objects in novel classes. However, variations in vision-aware language vocabulary data used for open-vocabulary learning can lead to unfair and unreliable evaluations. Recent evaluation methods have attempted to address this issue by incorporating object properties or adding locations and characteristics to the captions. Nevertheless, since these properties and locations depend on the specific details of the images instead of classes, detectors can not make accurate predictions without precise descriptions provided through human annotation. This paper introduces 3F-OVD, a novel task that extends supervised fine-grained object detection to the open-vocabulary setting. Our task is intuitive and challenging, requiring a deep understanding of Fine-grained captions and careful attention to Fine-grained details in images in order to accurately detect Fine-grained objects. Additionally, due to the scarcity of qualified fine-grained object detection datasets, we have created a new dataset, NEU-171K, tailored for both supervised and open-vocabulary settings. We benchmark state-of-the-art object detectors on our dataset for both settings. Furthermore, we propose a simple yet effective post-processing technique. Our data, annotations and codes are available at https://github.com/tengerye/3FOVD.

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07.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Collapsibility in Multiparametric Models of Random Simplicial Complexes

Authors:
Jon V. Kogan↗

arXiv:2606.15276v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study collapsibility in the multiparametric models of random simplicial complexes, namely the lower and upper models. In the upper model, we improve upon a result of Farber and Nowik, and assert that the homology is a.a.s concentrated in a single dimension by proving that the complex collapses to that \di. In the lower model, we prove that the complex a.a.s collapses to the \di\ with maximal non-trivial cohomology. We then compare this threshold to the ones derived previously for the special cases of the clique complex (by Kahle) and the Linial-Meshulam model.

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

Low-Rank Tensor Completion Based on Fractional Regularization with Ky Fan p-k Norm

Authors:
Shan Fan↗Feng Zhang↗Jianjun Wang↗Xi-Le Zhao↗Tingwen Huang↗

This paper addresses low-rank tensor completion (LRTC) by proposing a novel nonconvex surrogate, namely the ratio of the tensor nuclear norm to the tensor Ky Fan p-k norm (TNPK), to accurately approximate the tensor tubal rank. The TNPK possesses appealing properties, including scale invariance, parameter flexibility, and the existence of closed-form solutions under specific choices of p and k. With specific parameter settings of p and k, it reduces to the ratio of the tensor nuclear norm to the tensor Ky Fan k norm (TNK) or the ratio of the tensor nuclear norm to the tensor Frobenius norm (TNF). We construct a LRTC model and, under the tensor null space property (NSP), prove that low-rank tensors are local minimizers of the proposed model. Moreover, we derive the proximal operator of the Ky Fan p-k inverse-norm and further develop an efficient alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithm with guaranteed subsequential convergence under mild conditions. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets validate the superior performance of our method against state-of-the-art competitors.

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09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

A Comparative Study of Pretrained Transformer Models for Quranic ASR: Speech Representations, Label Formats, and Dataset Composition

Authors:
Nabil Mosharraf Hossain↗Riasat Islam↗Unaizah Obaidellah↗

arXiv:2606.19747v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quran Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) aims to convert Quranic recitation into text, enabling applications such as aided memorisation tools and Quranic search engines. However, existing ASR models often exhibit high Word Error Rates (WER) on user-recited verses and lack full coverage of the Quranic corpus. This paper presents a systematic empirical study of domain-specific fine-tuning of pretrained Transformer-based models for Quranic ASR, using advanced speech feature extraction methods: Wav2Vec2.0, HuBERT, and XLS-R. These models apply self-supervised learning by masking portions of input audio and using Transformer architectures to learn context-aware speech features. The pretrained models are fine-tuned on a filtered Quranic dataset exceeding 870 hours of professional and user recitations. Through comprehensive ablation studies across feature extractors, output label formats, training strategies, and clip durations, we identify the key factors that affect transcription accuracy in this domain. Our best-performing configuration achieves a WER of 0.08 on the EveryAyah subset and 0.11 on the combined EveryAyah+Tarteel setting, representing roughly a five-percentage-point gain over the Citrinet baseline (WER = 0.163) while reducing combined-model training time from 140 hours to 40 hours. Arabic text without diacritics yields the best fine-tuning results, and Wav2Vec2-XLSR-53 provides the strongest overall representation. Future work includes improving dataset quality and developing phoneme-aware models to extract deeper speech feature representations for Tajweed-sensitive applications.

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10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

CoMo: Learning Continuous Latent Motion from Internet Videos for Scalable Robot Learning

Authors:
Jiange Yang↗Yansong Shi↗Haoyi Zhu↗Mingyu Liu↗Kaijing Ma↗Yating Wang↗Gangshan Wu↗Tong He↗Limin Wang↗

Unsupervised learning of latent motion from Internet videos is crucial for robot learning. Existing discrete methods generally mitigate the shortcut learning caused by extracting excessive static backgrounds through vector quantization with a small codebook size. However, they suffer from information loss and struggle to capture more complex and fine-grained dynamics. Moreover, there is an inherent gap between the distribution of discrete latent motion and continuous robot action, which hinders the joint learning of a unified policy. We propose CoMo, which aims to learn more precise continuous latent motion from internet-scale videos. CoMo employs an early temporal difference (Td) mechanism to increase the shortcut learning difficulty and explicitly enhance motion cues. Additionally, to ensure latent motion better captures meaningful foregrounds, we further propose a temporal contrastive learning (Tcl) scheme. Specifically, positive pairs are constructed with a small future frame temporal offset, while negative pairs are formed by directly reversing the temporal direction. The proposed Td and Tcl work synergistically and effectively ensure that the latent motion focuses better on the foreground and reinforces motion cues. Critically, CoMo exhibits strong zeroshot generalization, enabling it to generate effective pseudo action labels for unseen videos. Extensive simulated and real-world experiments show that policies co-trained with CoMo pseudo action labels achieve superior performance with both diffusion and auto-regressive architectures.

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

ASTRA: A Scalable Next-Generation ATCO Training Simulator with Autonomous Simpilots

Authors:
Ethan Chew↗Enjia Wu↗Iruss Eng Wei Yeow↗Ian Weiqin Lim↗Ranen Sim↗Brandon Koh Ziheng↗Kaleb Nim↗Caden Toh Jun Yi↗Wei Dong Soin↗Darius Kai Keat Koh↗Galen King Yu Tay↗Prannaya Gupta↗…

arXiv:2606.18319v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Air Traffic Control Operators (ATCOs) are vital in ensuring the safe, orderly, and efficient flow of air traffic, yet training capacity is constrained by reliance on specialized human trainers known as simpilots, who must role-play both pilots and ATCOs in a simulated airspace. Existing automated solutions rely on Western-centric speech models that perform poorly in Singaporean operational contexts, with off-the-shelf systems exhibiting Word Error Rates (WER) of up to 107.80% on Singaporean-accented aviation speech. We introduce ASTRA, an end-to-end training simulator that automates these simpilot roles through a pipeline that transcribes ATCO speech, interprets instructions, and generates appropriate pilot and ATCO responses using locally adapted voice models. Our fine-tuned Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) pipeline reduces WER to 23.45%, substantially outperforming existing approaches in this domain. Beyond traffic simulation, ASTRA incorporates an AI-assisted performance evaluation framework that assesses trainee radiotelephony communications across accuracy, brevity, and completeness, achieving post-optimization scores of 91.7%, 88.2%, and 86.9%, respectively. Built on open-source foundations such as DSPy and Unsloth, this approach enables scalable, standardized ATCO assessment while reducing instructor workload.

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12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Binary Tracking for Spatial QA and Navigation with Open Vision-Language Models

Authors:
Dongbin Na↗Chanwoo Kim↗Soonbin Rho↗Giyun Choi↗Gangbok Lee↗Dooyoung Hong↗

arXiv:2606.16902v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work addresses spatial question answering for service robots traversing long egocentric routes. Given a query such as "where can I find a dry cleaner on the way back home?", the system returns a metric coordinate that downstream navigation components can act on. Prior Spatial Question Answering approaches leverage retrieval-augmented agents built on closed-source models such as GPT-4o for path exploration. However, robots operating in the real world often cannot reliably depend on online closed-source models due to network instability, communication latency, and deployment cost. It creates a need for open-source based Spatial Question Answering approaches that can run onboard the robot, yet prior research in this direction remains limited. This work proposes BinTrack, a simple yet effective, fully open-source spatial-localization agent that leverages the temporal ordering of a robot's trajectory. BinTrack performs a binary search over the trajectory segments between two anchor landmarks identified from a query. It improves overall accuracy by up to 22.8% over other open-source implementations and even matches the reported closed-source model result on the global category of the SpaceLocQA benchmark, the most challenging setting that has so far required strong reasoning agents such as GPT-4o. Furthermore, its optimized inference strategy consistently yields more than a 1.5x inference speedup over previous approaches. Finally, this work releases GangnamLoop, a novel and practical multi-trip outdoor benchmark collected by deploying a real quadruped robot on public streets with the anonymization policy. It revisits the same locations under different outdoor conditions and pairs the robot's low viewpoint with the human owner's. The source codes and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/ndb796/BinaryTracking

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

World Model Self-Distillation: Training World Models to Solve General Tasks

Authors:
Sebastian Stapf↗Pablo Acuaviva Huertos↗Aram Davtyan↗Paolo Favaro↗

Pretrained video generators are promising visual world models that exhibit emergent task-solving abilities; however, their reliance on detailed textual descriptions limits their direct use for planning and decision-making. Existing approaches either outsource this reasoning to language or vision-language models, or rely on supervised fine-tuning with paired task-execution videos, which are costly to collect and difficult to scale. We propose a scalable framework that elicits task-solving ability in such models by combining self-distillation with reinforcement learning. Given an unlabeled scene image, a vision-language model generates a candidate task and a detailed step-by-step solution. The solution conditions a pretrained video diffusion model, the Demonstrator; we distill its behavior into an Executor conditioned only on the image and a short task prompt. This transfers execution knowledge from caption-guided generation to instruction-conditioned task solving without curated task-video supervision. We further improve the Executor with reinforcement learning from VLM feedback, exploiting the asymmetry between judging whether a sampled video satisfies a task and generating the solution. Experiments on our proposed WorldTasks-Benchmark and the DreamGen robotics benchmark show that the Executor surpasses the Demonstrator under our VLM-based evaluation protocol and transfers competitively to robotic tasks.

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

Mapping Geopolitical Bias in 11 Large Language Models: A Bilingual, Dual-Framing Analysis of U.S.-China Tensions

Authors:
William Guey↗Wei Zhang↗Pierrick Bougault↗Vitor D. de Moura↗Jos\'e O. Gomes↗

Large language models are how hundreds of millions of people now encounter contested political questions, raising a subtle measurement problem: a model that simply agrees with whatever it is told can masquerade as biased, contaminating any claim that models hold political opinions. We address this by importing balanced keying from survey psychometrics, posing each proposition and its swapped reverse and signing the response so acquiescence cancels and genuine conviction accumulates. The result is a reproducible, quantitative instrument that maps geopolitical stance across 11 models and 2 languages (19,712 responses). Developer origin, query language and issue domain emerge as three near-equal, additive factors; every model, including those built in the United States, leans more Pro-China in Mandarin; and two models with identical agreement bias are told apart, one neutral, one biased. We release it as an open, interactive tool that extends to any contested-opinion domain.

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15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Unleashing Emergent Fermions with Rydberg Atom Simulators

Authors:
Hanteng Wang↗Xingyu Li↗Shang Liu↗Yingfei Gu↗Chengshu Li↗

arXiv:2606.19444v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rydberg atom simulators, in both analog and digital modes, have attracted significant recent interest due to their versatile geometric reconfigurability. In this work, leveraging this feature, we propose two complementary approaches, one for each mode, to characterize emergent fermions in critical quantum many-body systems. In the analog mode, we assemble the Rydberg atoms in a "developable" (namely, preserving local couplings) Möbius band geometry to realize antiperiodic boundary conditions, where fermionic states reside. Spectroscopic measurement in this sector then reveals universal energy ratios of the bosonic and fermionic states. In the digital mode, we carry out a fermionic version of Kibble-Zurek ramping with a quantum circuit, directly addressing the fermionic scaling form. Reconfigurability allows an exponential speed-up of this task, with an $O(\log L\log\log L)$ circuit-depth overhead. Our work establishes the Rydberg atom simulator as a uniquely powerful platform to attack the notoriously difficult issue of experimentally probing emergent fermions that are nonlocally defined in a bosonic system.

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

Time-multiplexed layer reuse for physical neural networks

Authors:
Kohei Tsuchiyama↗Andre Roehm↗Takatomo Mihana↗Ryoichi Horisaki↗

arXiv:2511.00044v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Physical neural networks (PNNs) are promising candidates for next-generation computing, but existing demonstrations remain several orders of magnitude smaller than modern digital neural networks, whose recent advances have been driven by rapid growth in trainable parameters. This situation resembles the constraints of early digital neural networks, which led to ideas around parameter reuse. We investigate what similarly efficient hardware architectures may look like, focusing specifically on the common bottleneck of slow re-adjustment of the weights in PNNs. We propose the Time-Indexed Deep Alternating Layers Network (TIDAL-Net), which occupies an intermediate regime between recurrent and deep neural networks, specifically aimed at the scales and restrictions of common PNN prototypes. TIDAL-Net leverages the timescale separation found in many PNNs between fast forward dynamics and slowly trainable weights and biases, using layer-by-layer time multiplexing to increase effective depth while limiting implementation cost. Numerical experiments on image classification and natural language processing tasks show that TIDAL-Net improves performance with only minor modifications to conventional PNNs.

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

Do Foundation Models See Biology? Evaluating Attention Coherence with Spatial Transcriptomics in Glioblastoma

Authors:
Dilakshan Srikanthan↗Amoon Jamzad↗Paul Wilson↗Nooshin Maghsoodi↗Robert Policelli↗Gabor Fichtinger↗John F. Rudan↗Parvin Mousavi↗

Whether attention maps from pathology foundation models capture genuine biology remains unknown, yet this question is critical for clinical trust and regulatory approval. We propose a spatial transcriptomics-based framework for orthogonal, hypothesis-free evaluation of attention and apply it to five pathology foundation models (CONCH v1.5, UNI v2, Virchow2, GigaPath, H-Optimus-1) and a ResNet50 baseline. Using attention-based multiple instance learning, we train single-task and multi-task models to predict five molecular alterations in glioblastoma on the CPTAC cohort, validate on an independent TCGA cohort, and evaluate biological coherence of attention maps against 87 transcriptional signatures using co-registered Visium spatial transcriptomics data from 18 samples. Internally, no single encoder dominates across all tasks, and external validation inverts internal performance rankings. Attention maps show a five-fold enrichment gradient from pathways (Cohen's d=0.329) to individual genes (d=0.055), indicating that attention captures emergent multi-gene transcriptional programs rather than individual molecular events. Spatially smooth attention maps do not imply biological coherence, and different encoders attend to distinct biological compartments. Our framework provides objective, quantitative assessment of what foundation models learn from histopathology, moving the field beyond qualitative saliency map review.

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18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Beyond the Training Distribution: Evaluating Predictions Under Distribution Shift and Selection Bias

Authors:
Annie Ulichney↗Amanda Coston↗

arXiv:2606.14506v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Understanding how a prediction model will perform in a new environment before deployment is essential to preventing harm when algorithms inform decision-making. Two common sources of model performance degradation are (i) covariate shift, where the target covariate distribution differs from the source, and (ii) selective labels, where the observability of outcomes depends on historical decisions. We study pre-deployment model evaluation under the joint presence of covariate shift and labeling of outcomes selectively based on observed features. In particular, we present a double machine learning procedure for estimating the target risk of an arbitrary black-box prediction model under a general loss function. We show identification of this estimand under standard assumptions and derive a bias-corrected estimator based on the influence function of the target risk. Finally, we evaluate our estimator through experiments using the eICU electronic health records database, showing that it tracks the true target risk more accurately than methods that address either selective labels or covariate shift alone, as well as baselines that combine standard plug-in approaches.

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19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Multi-Agent Systems are Mixtures of Experts: Who Becomes an Influencer?

Authors:
Franka Bause↗Jonas Niederle↗Martin Pawelczyk↗Rebekka Burkholz↗

arXiv:2605.25929v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The effectiveness of multi-agent LLM deliberation depends not only on the agents' individual predictions, but also on how they communicate and collaborate. We study this mechanism through the lens of Friedkin-Johnsen (FJ) opinion dynamics, a tractable model for analyzing stubbornness, influence, and opinion change in multi-agent systems that captures empirically observed deliberation patterns. We show that the FJ parameters are input-dependent, turning multi-agent deliberation into a mixture of experts. This perspective implies that multi-agent systems can outperform single agents and static ensembles when routing reflects agent competence. Since competence is latent in practice, we analyze how influence is established through observable proxies: agents' self-assessed confidence, their perceived confidence, and initial alignment with other agents' views.

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20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

A Controlled Benchmark of Quantum-Latent GAN Augmentation for Brain MRI

Authors:
Syed Mujtaba Haider↗Silvia Figini↗

Medical image classification is often constrained by limited labeled data, motivating generative augmentation; recently, quantum generative models have been proposed for this purpose, frequently reporting accuracy gains. However, such claims are typically based on single training runs, do not match the parameter budgets of the quantum and classical generators, and do not characterize the data regime in which any benefit appears. We present a controlled benchmark that isolates the contribution of a quantum generator to brain-MRI augmentation. Images are encoded into a KL-regularized latent space in which a conditional Wasserstein GAN with gradient penalty is trained using either a variational quantum generator or a classical generator of near-identical parameter count (1648 vs. 1632). Synthetic samples are decoded and used to augment a pretrained classifier across labeled data fractions from 5% to 100%, evaluated over eight random seeds with paired significance testing (with multiple-comparison correction) and with intraset diversity and latent-distribution analyses. Across all fractions, no augmentation variant significantly outperforms real-data-only training, and the quantum and classical generators are statistically indistinguishable. Any low-data benefit behaves as regularization rather than faithful data expansion:synthetic samples are off distribution and severely mode collapsed precisely where data is scarce, and the quantum generator is no more diverse thanits classical counterpart. We release the protocol as a testbed for rigorous evaluation of quantum generative augmentation in medical imaging.

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21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

An Angular-Temporal Interaction Network for Light Field Object Tracking in Low-Light Scenes

Authors:
Mianzhao Wang↗Fan Shi↗Xu Cheng↗Feifei Zhang↗Shengyong Chen↗

High-quality 4D light field representation with efficient angular feature modeling is crucial for scene perception, as it can provide discriminative spatial-angular cues to identify moving targets. However, recent developments still struggle to deliver reliable angular modeling in the temporal domain, particularly in complex low-light scenes. In this paper, we propose a novel light field epipolar-plane structure image (ESI) representation that explicitly defines the geometric structure within the light field. By capitalizing on the abrupt changes in the angles of light rays within the epipolar plane, this representation can enhance visual expression in low-light scenes and reduce redundancy in high-dimensional light fields. We further propose an angular-temporal interaction network (ATINet) for light field object tracking that learns angular-aware representations from the geometric structural cues and angular-temporal interaction cues of light fields. Furthermore, ATINet can also be optimized in a self-supervised manner to enhance the geometric feature interaction across the temporal domain. Finally, we introduce a large-scale light field low-light dataset for object tracking. Extensive experimentation demonstrates that ATINet achieves state-of-the-art performance in single object tracking. Furthermore, we extend the proposed method to multiple object tracking, which also shows the effectiveness of high-quality light field angular-temporal modeling.

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

NVMOS: Non-Verbal Vocalization Quality Assessment in Speech

Authors:
Jialong Mai↗Jinxin Ji↗Xiaofen Xing↗Wencui Liu↗Xiangmin Xu↗

arXiv:2606.15888v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Non-verbal vocalizations (NVs), such as laughter, sighs, and coughs, are important acoustic cues for emotion and intent. Existing speech quality assessment methods typically focus on overall naturalness, while non-verbal TTS evaluations mainly examine whether a target NV appears with the correct type and position. However, the perceptual quality of NV events themselves remains underexplored. To address this gap, we construct an NV-MOS dataset containing outputs from multiple NV-TTS systems and naturally occurring NV samples, with ratings collected from three acoustic experts on a perceptual quality scale. We further analyze audio-capable multimodal large language models such as Gemini and find clear inconsistencies between their scores and expert ratings. These results suggest that general-purpose multimodal models cannot reliably replace human judgments for NV quality assessment. We then propose NVMOS, to our knowledge the first model that can reliably predict the perceptual quality of NV events in speech. Experimental results show that, with a local NV-event focusing module, NVMOS reaches expert-level or stronger agreement with human MOS.

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

Leadership as Coordination Control: Behavioral Signatures and the Recovery-Advantage Boundary in Multi-Agent LLM Teams

Authors:
Haewoon Kwak↗

Team science holds that leadership is contingent: it helps only under specific conditions, and capable, autonomous teams may need none at all. We ask the analogous question for multi-agent LLM teams: under what measurable conditions does process-level coordination control add value, and do those conditions match what team science predicts? We use behavioral signatures (majority lock-in, exploration, recovery from an incorrect round-0 consensus) and per-action ablations, clean because each controller is an explicit action set, not a monolithic prompt. We operationalize three classical leadership styles (transactional, transformational, situational) as controllers over a shared action vocabulary (explore, revise, accept, synthesize). A matched controller with the same actions but an arbitrary rule recovers no better than majority voting, so the theory-derived rule, not the vocabulary, does the work. Across four task regimes and three open-weight model families, no controller dominates by accuracy, as the contingency view predicts: transactional control matches a shared round-0 vote on all 12 (model, regime) combinations to within 1.3pp, and gains appear only on the one combination where the round-0 majority is unreliable (llama-4-scout social; situational +8pp over flat). A recovery-advantage account, tested with four boundary probes, says a controller beats plain interaction only where the round-0 majority is unreliable, the task is recoverable, and undirected interaction does not already repair it. These regions map onto contingency theory (leadership substitutes, path-goal redundancy, the situational readiness gap), so a largely null accuracy result is what the theory predicts, not a failure of the controllers. We read process-level coordination control as a contingency to be measured and theory-mapped, not a leaderboard to be topped.

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

DynaWM: Dynamics-Aware Distillation with World Model and Momentum Targets for Smooth Locomotion over Continuous Stairs

Authors:
Haidong Hou↗Zhangguo Yu↗Hengbo Qi↗Jianlin Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.24089v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in control have enabled bipedal-wheeled robots to traverse slopes and single-step obstacles, yet long staircase traversal remains challenging as current teacher-student frameworks suffer from weakened dynamics-aware representations and incomplete terrain geometry encoding. To bridge this gap, we propose DynaWM, a dynamics-aware representation learning framework. To enhance terrain encoding capability and enable transparent assessment, we introduce a world model as a regularizer to enforce forward-dynamics awareness, preserving comprehensive terrain geometry while facilitating hierarchical encoding visualization. To stabilize knowledge transfer, we employ a momentum target encoder to provide consistent distillation targets, preventing dimensional collapse from non-stationary teacher updates. Evaluation of the learned representations through Principal Component Analysis (PCA) visualization and quantitative metrics reveals that our encoder hierarchically captures terrain geometry with higher terrain encoding capability, leading to enhanced terrain adaptability and motion smoothness. Experimental results in simulation and real hardware demonstrate that our method achieves superior terrain adaptability and motion smoothness, enabling bipedal-wheeled robots to overcome diverse continuous stairs, as shown in Fig. 1.

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