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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

SAM3 Self-Distillation for Fine-Grained GOOSE 2D Semantic Segmentation

Authors:

We describe our 4th-place entry to the ICRA 2026 GOOSE 2D Fine-Grained Semantic Segmentation Challenge, which reached a composite mean Intersection-over-Union (mIoU) of 69.73% on the official 1,815-image test set. Our model adapts the image encoder of a recent visual foundation model, Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM3), with a lightweight decoder. Beyond this, we contribute two techniques and one empirical finding: (i) a self-distillation scheme that re-uses SAM3 itself, prompted with ground-truth boxes, as a teacher on the classes where it outperforms our own model; (ii) an image-level multi-scale test-time augmentation scheme that restores multi-scale inference for a fixed-input-size model by rescaling the image rather than the model input; and (iii) the finding that an aggressive photometric distortion from a winning 2025 GOOSE 2D entry, transplanted onto our pipeline, is its single largest source of improvement.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

ComputeFHE: A Privacy-Preserving General-Purpose Computation Library

Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) enables computations to be performed directly on encrypted data while preserving data confidentiality. However, its practical applications remain limited by high computational costs and development complexity. This paper presents ComputeFHE, an open-source C++ library that facilitates the development of privacy-preserving applications based on the TFHE cryptosystem. The library provides encrypted integer and fixed-point data types together with arithmetic, logical, comparison, conditional, and oblivious array-access operations which allow developers to implement algorithms using a familiar imperative programming paradigm. ComputeFHE supports both conventional TFHE arithmetic based on standard two-input logic gates and an optimized Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU) architecture utilizing FHE-friendly logic primitives. Experimental results demonstrate significant reductions in the number of required bootstrapping operations, achieving performance improvements of up to 3.9x for selected operations. In addition, the library includes a simulation mode that enables testing, debugging, and complexity analysis without performing actual cryptographic computations while providing circuit complexity and bootstrapping costs. Built on top of OpenFHE, ComputeFHE offers a practical and accessible framework for developing and evaluating privacy-preserving algorithms and applications.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Reinforcement Learning for Computer-Use Agents with Autonomous Evaluation

arXiv:2606.24515v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Computer-Use Agents (CUAs) execute high-level user goals by perceiving and acting directly within graphical user interfaces. However, reinforcement learning for CUAs remains difficult because open-ended desktop environments rarely provide scalable, machine-readable reward signals: task success is often visually grounded and hard to specify with handcrafted reward functions or dense manual labels. We propose an RL fine-tuning framework that uses autonomous vision-language evaluation as a scalable supervision signal for GUI agents. Given a final screenshot and the original instruction, a Vision-Language Model judges task completion and provides terminal feedback without task-specific heuristics or manual labels during policy optimization. Because autonomous evaluators are imperfect, we model their feedback as a noisy binary reward channel and derive a noise-corrected reward estimator for Proximal Policy Optimization. Experiments across macOSWorld, Windows Agent Arena, and OSWorld show that corrected evaluator rewards outperform both zero-shot baselines and raw evaluator rewards, improving success rates by an average of 12.6 percentage points over zero-shot performance and 5.1 points over raw evaluator fine-tuning. These results suggest that autonomous evaluation can serve as a practical reward signal for RL in GUI environments when evaluator noise is explicitly modeled and corrected.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Sparsity Curse: Understanding RLVR Model Parameter Space from Model Merging

arXiv:2606.18521v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful post-training paradigm that surpasses Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) in eliciting reasoning intelligence and resisting catastrophic forgetting. Recent studies further reveal that RLVR induces highly sparse and off-principal parameter updates compared to SFT. This naturally raises the question: does such sparsity make RLVR models more amenable to model merging? If so, model merging would offer a scalable, training-free path to aggregate diverse reasoning capabilities from independently trained RLVR models. Surprisingly, we find the opposite, uncovering a sparsity curse: the sparse RLVR updates are spread farther apart in parameter space, forming near-orthogonal shortcuts that make aggregation inherently fragile. This is likely rooted in the stochasticity of RL optimization and the diversity of emergent reasoning patterns. Unlike SFT models that converge to shared, flat basins and merge naturally, RLVR models suffer severe degradation under standard merging methods. Through systematic empirical analysis of the update geometry, we characterize the mechanisms behind this failure and propose Sensitivity-aware Resolving Merging (SAR-Merging), a merging recipe tailored for the unique structure of RLVR parameter spaces. SAR-Merging resolves conflicts in overlapping update regions via Fisher Information-based sensitivity arbitration, followed by magnitude-aware sparsification and rescaling to preserve fragile reasoning pathways. Experiments on mathematical and coding benchmarks demonstrate that SAR-Merging substantially outperforms existing merging methods on RLVR models, enabling both single-task enhancement and multi-capability fusion.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Average Rankings Mask Per-Subject Optimality: A Friedman-Nemenyi Benchmark of EEG Motor-Imagery BCI Decoders

arXiv:2606.24394v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Electroencephalography (EEG) is the dominant non-invasive modality for brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), yet reliable decoding of motor imagery is hampered by inter- and intra-individual variability. A recurring claim is that one decoding pipeline, most often a spatial or Riemannian method, is broadly preferable. We test the weakest version of that claim under the most favourable conditions. Using the Mother of All BCI Benchmarks (MOABB) framework, we evaluated 1,056 decoding configurations (feature extractor x scaler x classifier), >340,000 subject-level model fits, across three public left-versus-right motor-imagery datasets (PhysionetMI, 109 participants; Cho2017, 52; Zhou2016, 4) and two frequency bands (8-15 Hz, 8-30 Hz). Every model is fit and tested within a single session of a single participant, the easiest regime, giving every pipeline its best chance. We apply the statistics standard for multi-classifier comparison: Friedman omnibus tests, Nemenyi critical-difference analysis and Wilcoxon signed-rank tests with effect sizes. Covariance tangent-space projection (cov-tgsp) and Common Spatial Patterns (CSP) are the strongest families, but their ordering is dataset-dependent and, on the largest and most heterogeneous cohort (PhysionetMI), statistically indistinguishable (Nemenyi p = 0.27; Kendall's W = 0.11). At the individual level the single best pipeline is optimal for only 35% of PhysionetMI participants, and nonlinear descriptors are best for roughly one third; matching pipeline to participant adds about seven accuracy points over the best fixed choice. The ranking is not an artefact of dimensionality, and classifier and scaler choices are secondary to the feature representation. Even in the easiest regime, no single pipeline dominates: a lower bound on the personalization problem and a quantitative case for participant-aware model selection rather than a universal decoder.

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

DrivingAgent: Design and Scheduling Agents for Autonomous Driving Systems

Many autonomous driving systems are increasingly incorporating foundation models to improve generalization and handle long-tail scenarios. However, this trend introduces two key challenges: (i) the manual and labor-intensive process of designing and integrating new models, and (ii) the lack of intelligent, dynamic scheduling mechanisms to meet strict real-time constraints. While Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents offer a promising avenue for automation, existing frameworks are ill-suited for autonomous driving. Specifically, they fail to distinguish between the fundamentally different requirements of system design and real-time scheduling, treat modules as opaque black boxes, and are not designed for continuous operation. To address these limitations, we propose DrivingAgent, a novel agent framework tailored to the dual challenges of autonomous driving system design and scheduling. In the design phase, DrivingAgent automates module development by interpreting system architecture, generating code, and validating modules via super-network training. In the scheduling phase, it employs a lightweight LLM trained with reinforcement learning to dynamically orchestrate system modules in real time, supported by a structured memory that integrates long-term storage with timestamped short-term context. Experimental results demonstrate that DrivingAgent achieves a superior speed–accuracy trade-off on both the nuScenes and Bench2Drive benchmarks.

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

Mood-Aware Music Recommendation: Integrating User Affective Signals into Ranking Systems

arXiv:2606.13858v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recommendation systems are essential in modern music streaming platforms due to the vast amount of available content. While collaborative filtering is widely used to suggest items based on the preferences of others with similar patterns, it performs poorly in domains where user-item interactions are sparse, such as music. Content-based filtering is an alternative approach that examines the qualities of the items themselves. Genre, instrumentation, and lyrics have been explored; however, relatively little attention has been given to emotion recognition. Since a user's emotional state strongly influences their music choice, incorporating mood signals offers a promising direction for personalization. In this work, we propose a mood-conditioned ranking framework that integrates user affective signals into the recommendation process via softmax-based sampling in the energy-valence space. We evaluate the approach via single-blind experiments in which participants compare recommendations from the proposed system against a baseline. The results indicate improved perceived recommendation quality, providing preliminary evidence for the effectiveness of incorporating mood-based inputs into music recommendations.

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

ANEForge: Python for direct computation on the Apple Neural Engine

arXiv:2606.17090v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: ANEForge is a Python package that programs the Apple Neural Engine (ANE), the fixed-function neural accelerator on every recent Apple device, directly and without CoreML. In production the engine is reachable only through CoreML, which treats it as a scheduling option: no configuration requires the ANE, and a model can silently run on the CPU or GPU instead. ANEForge compiles a lazy tensor graph, built from 58 fused operators and 19 native bridge operators, into a single ANE program. The program is dispatched through the same ANE daemon and kernel-driver stack as Apple's internal framework. Beyond inference, the package reaches the engine's native fused attention, streams int8, int4, and sparse weights, keeps decoder and optimizer state resident across steps, and runs the forward pass, backward pass, and optimizer update of training on the engine. A small fused program completes a call in about 90us, near the engine's 70us per-program dispatch floor, and a pretrained ResNet-18 forward runs end-to-end in 0.33ms. ResNet-18, a sentence encoder, and a Vision Transformer run end-to-end against framework references, and a Stable Diffusion U-Net validates its forward pass. ANEForge targets Apple Silicon under macOS 14 and later. Each release is verified against a recorded macOS and ANE-compiler version.

09.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-27

Sequential chemo-immunotherapy followed by standard versus reduced thoracic radiotherapy for older and/or frail stage III non-small-cell lung cancer: A randomized open-label cohort trial

Authors:

by Wei-Xiang Qi, Shuyan Li, Mengdi Wang, Huan Li, Feifei Xu, Lei Yao, Biao Yu, Linlin Chen, Gang Cai, Cheng Xu, Xianwen Sun, Zhiyao Bao, Jiayi Chen, Yi Xiang, Shengguang Zhao Background The appropriateness of concurrent chemoradiotherapy (cCRT) for older or clinically vulnerable stage III unresectable non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients remains contentious. Furthermore, the survival implications of de-escalating thoracic radiotherapy (RT) intensity in this population have not been conclusively elucidated. Methods and findings We conducted a phase II randomized, open-label, two-cohort (non-comparative) trial at a tertiary hospital in China (NCT05557552). Between September 30, 2022 and April 30, 2024, we enrolled 56 older and/or frail patients with stage III NSCLC who were ineligible for cCRT. The primary endpoint was the 1-year progression-free survival (PFS) rate estimated using the Kaplan–Meier method. Secondary endpoints included objective response rate (ORR), overall survival (OS), and safety. In the intention-to-treat (ITT) set, which included all 56 randomized patients who received at least one dose of study treatment, the 1-year PFS was 84.3% (95% confidence interval [CI] [70.3%, 98.3%]) in the standard RT group and 70.7% (95% CI [54.3%, 87.1%]) in the reduced RT group. In the per-protocol set (53 patients), the 1-year PFS was 82.9% (95% CI [68.9%, 98.8%]) in the standard RT group and 73.4% (95% CI [58.3%, 92.4%]), with a median follow-up of 24 months. Among 56 patients in the safety analysis set, 71.4% of patients experienced grade 3/4 adverse events (AEs) in the standard RT group and 53.6% in the reduced RT group. One patient (3.6%) in the reduced RT and three patients (10.7%) in the standardized RT experienced grade 5 AEs. The main limitations are the non-comparative design, small sample size, and lack of power to establish non-inferiority or superiority. Conclusion The current study suggested that reduced RT combined with sequential chemo-immunotherapy might be feasible for older/frail patients intolerant to cCRT, showing numerically similar survival outcomes. These exploratory findings warrant confirmation in larger, adequately powered randomized trials. Trial registration The trial had been registered on ClinicalTrials.gov on Sep 30, 2022.ClinicalTrials.gov NCT05557552

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

How to Score Experts for One-Shot MoE Expert Pruning: A Unified Formulation and Selection Principle

arXiv:2606.15716v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models reduce per-token computation through sparse expert activation, yet deployment still requires storing the full expert pool, making one-shot expert pruning a practical approach for reducing memory usage. Although effective, existing criteria are largely heuristic, and no single criterion is universally optimal. Thus, establishing a principle for selecting pruning criteria suited to different deployment objectives remains an important yet largely underexplored problem in one-shot expert pruning. To this end, we introduce a unified formulation for one-shot MoE expert pruning organized around three factors: routing frequency, gate weighting, and activation strength. The formulation yields a criteria selection principle: task-agnostic pruning should favor routed-token-averaged, gate-free activation-based criteria, whereas task-specific pruning can benefit from retaining routing-frequency and gate-weight information. Beyond this principle, the formulation also provides a systematic view of existing heuristic criteria and gives rise to two new task-agnostic criteria, Mean Activation Norm (MAN) and Mean Squared Activation Norm (MSAN). Across four representative MoE models and 16 diverse benchmarks, MAN and MSAN are consistently strong in the task-agnostic setting, obtain the top-two average ranks, and improve average performance by up to 8.8 points over the strongest baseline.

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

Variational Network with Wavelet-based UNET in Accelerated MRI Reconstruction from Under Sampled K-space Data

Fully sampled MRI requires dense k-space acquisition, leading to long scan times, reduced clinical throughput, and increased sensitivity to patient motion. Accelerated MRI addresses this by acquiring undersampled k-space data and reconstructing the missing information computationally. However, reconstruction from undersampled measurements is highly ill-posed and can introduce aliasing artifacts, noise amplification, and loss of anatomical detail. Although conventional parallel imaging and compressed sensing methods mitigate these issues, and deep learning methods have further improved reconstruction quality, preserving high-frequency structures under aggressive undersampling remains challenging. In this work, we propose a Variational Network with a Wavelet-based U-Net (W-UNet) for accelerated MRI reconstruction. The framework combines physics-guided iterative reconstruction with learnable multi-scale frequency representations. Standard pooling operations are replaced with Discrete Wavelet Transform and Inverse Wavelet Transform modules, enabling lossless downsampling while preserving low-frequency structure and high-frequency edge details. Integrated into the refinement and sensitivity map estimation stages, the proposed design improves artifact suppression, feature preservation, and reconstruction fidelity in both single-coil and multi-coil settings. Experiments on fastMRI knee and M4Raw brain datasets show state-of-the-art performance. Ablation studies further confirm the effectiveness of wavelet-based feature decomposition for accelerated MRI reconstruction.

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

When Smaller Wins: Dual-Stage Distillation and Pareto-Guided Compression of Liquid Neural Networks for Edge Battery Prognostics

arXiv:2601.06227v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Battery management systems increasingly require accurate battery health prognostics under strict on-device constraints. This paper presents DLNet, a practical framework with dual-stage distillation of liquid neural networks that turns a high-capacity model into compact and edge-deployable models for battery health prediction. DLNet first applies Euler discretization to reformulate liquid dynamics for embedded compatibility. It then performs dual-stage knowledge distillation to transfer the teacher model's temporal behavior and recover it after further compression. Pareto-guided selection under joint error-cost objectives retains student models that balance accuracy and efficiency. We evaluate DLNet on a widely used dataset and validate real-device feasibility on an Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense using int8 deployment. The final deployed student achieves a low error of 0.0066 when predicting battery health over the next 100 cycles, which is 15.4% lower than the teacher model. It reduces the model size from 616 kB to 94 kB with 84.7% reduction and takes 21 ms per inference on the device. These results support a practical smaller wins observation that a small model can match or exceed a large teacher for edge-based prognostics with proper supervision and selection. Beyond batteries, the DLNet framework can extend to other industrial analytics tasks with strict hardware constraints.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Dehaze-GaussianImage: Zero-Shot Dehazing via Efficient 2D Gaussian Splatting Representation

Existing single image dehazing methods are often constrained by computational redundancy in pixel-level optimization and the lack of physical interpretability in implicit neural networks. These limitations hinder the balance between representation efficiency and reconstruction fidelity. To address these issues, we propose Dehaze-GaussianImage, the first zero-shot framework that introduces 2D Gaussian Splatting (2DGS) into the image dehazing domain to break the traditional pixel-grid processing paradigm. Distinct from static convolutional neural networks (CNNs) or Transformers, our approach models hazy images as continuous and dynamically evolvable anisotropic Gaussian fields. Specifically, we propose a novel reconstruction-decoupling zero-shot learning strategy that embeds the atmospheric scattering model into the Gaussian parameter space. This strategy drives Gaussian primitives to adaptively split, clone, and prune during optimization, achieving geometric-level decoupling of the transmission medium and clear textures. Furthermore, explicit structure-preserving constraints are introduced to suppress artifacts commonly caused by traditional physical priors. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in a fully unsupervised manner with minimal parameters, highlighting the potential of explicit Gaussian representation for low-level vision tasks.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

High-Fidelity Video Compression based on Invertible Neural Transform and Implicit Conditioning

Learning-based video compression has recently achieved competitive rate-distortion performance compared to conventional video codecs. However, most existing methods rely on non-invertible analysis-synthesis transforms, with reconstruction quality subject to both quantization and transform approximation errors. This limitation becomes particularly restrictive at higher quality points, where quantization errors are small and transform-induced distortion dominates. To address this, we propose InnVC, an Invertible neural network based Video Codec for wide-range and high-fidelity compression. The core idea is to preserve an invertible main transform path prior to quantization, while injecting content-adaptive context through a compact implicit conditioning field. This decouples strongly correlated video content from harder-to-model fine details, allowing different components to specialize in complementary reconstruction tasks for more efficient compression. To further improve compressibility, we introduce a scheduled masking strategy that progressively concentrates informative content into fewer latent channels for more effective entropy coding. Experiments on the UVG and MCL-JCV benchmarks show that InnVC achieves strong compression performance over a broad quality range, being particularly effective in the high-quality regime, yielding BD-rate reductions of 21.66% in PSNR and 46.06% in MS-SSIM relative to x265 on UVG. To the best of our knowledge, InnVC is the first neural video codec covers operating poins from low bitrate to high fidelity within a single architecture scale, spanning more than 20 dB in PSNR.

15.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12

Evaluating cell type annotations in single-cell omics in the absence of ground truth

Accurate cell type annotation is essential for single-cell transcriptomics, directly shaping downstream analyses and biological interpretations. Yet, objective evaluation of annotation quality remains a major challenge. Here, we argue that a cell type or cell state label has practical utility only if it captures a molecular pattern that is reproducible across biological replicates. Based on this principle, we introduce inter-sample consistency (ISC), a quantitative framework to assess annotation quality in single-cell RNA-seq datasets. Unlike existing cluster validation approaches, ISC distinguishes annotations that generalize across samples and individuals from those driven by technical or unwanted variation, thereby providing principled criteria for annotation quality and transferability. When applied to published single-cell atlases, ISC reveals widespread reproducibility gaps and provides actionable guidance for repairing inconsistent annotations. Notably, ISC enables benchmarking of automated cell type annotation tools even when ground-truth labels are unavailable, providing interpretable metrics to guide their development and evaluation. Implemented as the scTypeEval Bioconductor package, this framework offers a broadly applicable resource for evaluating and improving cell type annotations in single-cell RNA-seq experiments.

16.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Voronoi Percolation: Topological Stability and Giant Cycles

arXiv:2601.00793v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the topological stability of Voronoi percolation in higher dimensions. We show that slightly increasing p allows a discretization that preserves increasing topological properties with high probability. This strengthens a theorem of Bollobás and Riordan and generalizes it to higher dimensions. As a consequence, we prove a sharp phase transition for the emergence of i-dimensional giant cycles in Voronoi percolation on the 2i-dimensional torus.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Precision-Aware Illumination-Disentangled Vision Transformer for Spacecraft 6D Pose Estimation

Vision sensors provide a lightweight solution for spacecraft proximity operations, but monocular spacecraft 6D pose estimation remains difficult under illumination variation, specular reflection, shadowing, weak texture, and background interference. These factors make local visual evidence spatially unreliable and can destabilize pose regression. This article proposes a Precision-Aware Illumination-Disentangled Vision Transformer (PAID-ViT) for robust spacecraft pose estimation.The proposed model separates pose-relevant structure tokens from illumination-sensitive appearance tokens, estimates patch reliability before pose aggregation, and uses foreground mask supervision to preserve silhouette cues. A parameter-free geometric recovery module converts normalized crop coordinates, log-depth, and a continuous 6D rotation representation into camera-frame rotation and translation. Experiments on SPEED+ V2, the SPEED+ validation/lightbox/sunlamp evaluation configuration used in this study, suggest that PAID-ViT reduces translation error and improves robustness in the challenging sunlamp domain, while ablation studies support the complementary roles of illumination disentanglement, reliability-aware token aggregation, mask supervision, and training-side regularization.

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

Pepti-Agent: An AI Agent for Peptide Design and Optimization

Therapeutic peptides occupy a valuable design space between small molecules and biologics, but their development requires satisfying several competing constraints at once: solubility, hemolytic activity, and nonspecific surface fouling are governed by overlapping sequence features, so improving one property often degrades another. Computational design addresses this by pairing generative models with sequence-based property predictors, iteratively proposing and refining candidates. However, these components are typically wired together as monolithic scripts that are difficult to inspect, extend, or reuse, and they often refine sequences by natural-language reasoning rather than by tracking the evolving multi-property state of each candidate. We present Pepti-Agent, a closed-loop, peptide-specific framework that exposes generation, property prediction, and single-residue mutation as independently inspectable Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools. A large language model controller invokes these tools and consults live predictor output between calls, so refinement is guided by each sequence's current property profile rather than by language reasoning alone. Task-specific PeptideGPT models generate candidates, ProtBERT-based classifiers score solubility, hemolysis, and non-fouling, and two interchangeable mutation operators propose sequence edits. By recording a per-step trace of controller decisions, predictor outputs, and accepted mutations, Pepti-Agent offers a reproducible substrate for benchmarking multi-objective design strategies and for prioritizing candidates for experimental validation.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Benchmarking Quantum Extreme Learning based on Gaussian Boson Sampling

arXiv:2606.15230v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reservoir models offer a hardware-efficient learning paradigm for noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices by exploiting untrained quantum dynamics as a fixed feature map and restricting optimization to a simple classical readout layer. We propose a quantum extreme learning machine implemented using gaussian boson sampling and an encoding strategy that achieves high classification accuracy while reducing optical resource requirements. Classical inputs are jointly encoded in the squeezing parameters and in the interferometer unitary, enabling sampling-based, highly nonlinear feature maps while leveraging large-scale GBS output statistics, which are conjectured to be classically intractable. We systematically compare multiple families of quantum features accessible in the same setup and find that photon-number sampling probabilities provide the best performance, consistent with their higher effective feature dimensionality. Finally, we benchmark against classical nonlinear baselines and analyse robustness under noisy scenarios, showing competitive performance with fewer trainable parameters and indicating practical promise for near-term photonic implementations.

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

When AUC Misleads: Polarization-Aware Evaluation of Deepfake Detectors under Domain Shift

Recent advances in generative AI, such as diffusion models and face-swapping tools, have enabled the creation of highly realistic deepfakes, leading to real-world harms including financial fraud and non-consensual explicit content. In response, deepfake detection has become an active research area, with recent methods increasingly focusing on improving generalization to unseen manipulations. This is typically evaluated using the Area Under the ROC Curve (AUC) measured separately across multiple datasets. However, such an evaluation fails to reflect real-world scenarios where detectors face a mixture of data sources and varying artifact types. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel metric, Cross-dataset AUC (Cross-AUC) that averages per-domain AUCs with a measure of prediction polarization for taking into account the robustness to domain shift. The polarization extent is quantified by the Wasserstein Distance between class score distributions. Cross-AUC not only assesses the generalization capabilities of deepfake detectors under domain shifts more realistically, but it is also interpretable as it better explains the reason behind a drop in performance. Experiments performed on seven benchmark datasets demonstrate its practical relevance.

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

HiMPO: Hindsight-Informed Memory Policy Optimization for Less-Entangled Credit in Long-Horizon Agents

Long-horizon agents rely on memory mechanisms to compress interaction history, but optimizing memory writing faces a distinct credit assignment challenge: a memory update may be rewarded or penalized due to downstream tool failures, noisy observations, or reasoning errors rather than its own contribution. This causally entangled credit can lead agents to discard useful evidence or preserve irrelevant information. We propose HiMPO, a Hindsight-Informed Memory Policy Optimization framework for assigning less-entangled credit to memory-writing actions in long-horizon agents. HiMPO first estimates the local utility of a memory update by comparing the task-relevant information recoverable from the previous and updated memories under the same pre-write state. It then uses hindsight relevance as a bounded retrospective filter that attenuates memory credit when local utility is not supported by the target outcome. The resulting memory-specific advantage is applied only to memory tokens, while trajectory-level rewards optimize the rest of the agent behavior. Across judge-based open-domain tasks and objective compressive-memory QA, HiMPO improves over strong memory-based and RL-based baselines while preserving compressed-context efficiency. Controlled interventions further show that HiMPO reduces blame leakage from tool-induced errors and improves attribution fidelity of memory updates.

22.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

Is level-1 blob reconstruction under the network multispecies coalescent easy?

Authors:

Hybridization is an important evolutionary process, commonly modeled by the network multispecies coalescent. Reconstructing evolutionary histories under this model is notoriously costly, even for level-1 networks where hybridization events are isolated from each other. The widely used methods that combine speed with statistical guarantees rely on quartet concordance factors computed for all subsets of four species, resulting in an o(n^4k) bottleneck that severely limits scalability to large numbers of species (n) and genes (k). Among quartet-based methods, NANUQ+ is notable because it decomposes the problem into two steps: first reconstructing a tree of blobs, which compresses each non-treelike part of the network, called a blob, into a single vertex, and second reconstructing the internal structure of each level-1 blob, specifically its circular order and hybrid vertex. Here, we investigate whether level-1 blob reconstruction is difficult once the tree of blobs is known. We present a fast and statistically consistent algorithm, called NetCS, based on two simple primitives: majority voting and merge sort, circumventing the bottleneck of computing all quartet concordance factors. In simulations, NetCS achieved comparable accuracy to NANUQ+ and was dramatically faster, enabling analyses of 200 taxa and 1000 genes in only a few minutes. Both methods attained near-perfect accuracy when given the true tree of blobs; however, their performance degraded in end-to-end pipelines due to errors in tree of blobs reconstruction. Strikingly, even methods that reconstruct level-1 networks directly struggled to accurately predict hybrid ancestry. Our results suggest that reconstructing level-1 blobs is unexpectedly easy once the tree of blobs is known, and that a major challenge for phylogenetic network inference lies in accurate tree of blobs reconstruction.

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

Geometry-Aware Style Transfer in 3D Gaussian Splatting

In this paper, we present a novel geometry-aware style transfer framework for 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) that simultaneously transfers appearance attributes and geometric structures. Unlike prior works that primarily focus on color-based stylization and often overlook structural adaptation, our method explicitly incorporates geometry adaptation through a decoupled optimization scheme that alternately updates color and geometry parameters. This strategy alleviates potential interference between color and geometry updates, leading to stable and consistent scene-level geometry transformation. The decoupled optimization is enabled by the proposed geometry-aware contrastive feature matching (GCFM). GCFM integrates RGB, depth, and edge cues into a contrastive objective and is employed in both optimization phases to effectively transfer structural characteristics from style images to Gaussian primitives. Extensive experiments show that our approach achieves superior performance in both qualitative fidelity and quantitative metrics, significantly outperforming existing 3DGS-based stylization methods. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/oweixx/gast}{https://github.com/oweixx/gast}.

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

SignNet-1M: Large-Scale Multilingual Sign Language Video Dataset with Downstream Benchmarks

Sign language models are typically trained on datasets captured under constrained conditions, with limited viewpoint, background, and signer-identity diversity, leading to poor robustness under real-world distribution shifts. We introduce SignNet-1M, a large-scale augmented dataset spanning ASL, CSL, and German Sign Language (DGS). SignNet-1M synthesizes realistic variations along three axes: (i) novel-view rendering (rotation and zoom) via 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), (ii) scene/identity editing via diffusion models for background replacement and signer substitution while preserving sign motion and linguistic content, and (iii) post-rendering augmentations that emulate capture and compression artifacts (e.g., pose/temporal perturbations and video-level corruptions) to better match in-the-wild recordings. Beyond data release, we provide a unified benchmark suite across downstream tasks (e.g., translation and recognition) and ablations that isolate each augmentation component. Experiments across backbones show that training with SignNet-1M consistently improves generalization under cross-view, cross-background, cross-identity, and post-rendering shifts, while maintaining strong in-distribution performance. The dataset, full augmentation pipeline, and benchmark are available at https://signnet.chatsign.ai/.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Bright Emission from Dark Sources in Hyperbolic Media

arXiv:2606.16071v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hyperbolic media enable ultra-strong light-matter interactions through their extreme field localization and small mode volumes, but low-loss realizations are fundamentally limited to the mid-infrared, owing to the long lifetimes of optical phonons in high-quality crystals. Here we show that bright emitters operating at visible or near-infrared frequencies can be used to generate radiation in this regime by inducing mid-infrared population dynamics, thereby creating a source in the hyperbolic frequency band without a corresponding dipole transition. We demonstrate that even a source with vanishing dipole and higher multipole moments - strictly non-radiating in any isotropic medium - becomes radiatively active in a hyperbolic environment. This enables visible and near-infrared control of light-matter interactions in polaritonic hyperbolic materials, establishing a new low-loss solid-state quantum optics platform.