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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

NTIRE 2024 Challenge on Image Super-Resolution (x4): Methods and Results

Authors:
Zheng Chen↗Zongwei Wu↗Eduard Zamfir↗Kai Zhang↗Yulun Zhang↗Radu Timofte↗Xiaokang Yang↗Hongyuan Yu↗Cheng Wan↗Yuxin Hong↗Zhijuan Huang↗Yajun Zou↗…

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2024 challenge on image super-resolution ($\times$4), highlighting the solutions proposed and the outcomes obtained. The challenge involves generating corresponding high-resolution (HR) images, magnified by a factor of four, from low-resolution (LR) inputs using prior information. The LR images originate from bicubic downsampling degradation. The aim of the challenge is to obtain designs/solutions with the most advanced SR performance, with no constraints on computational resources (e.g., model size and FLOPs) or training data. The track of this challenge assesses performance with the PSNR metric on the DIV2K testing dataset. The competition attracted 199 registrants, with 20 teams submitting valid entries. This collective endeavour not only pushes the boundaries of performance in single-image SR but also offers a comprehensive overview of current trends in this field.

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02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Deep Learning-Driven Inverse Design of Doherty Power Amplifiers Using Pixelated Combiners and Dual-State Impedance Synthesis

Authors:
Han Zhou↗Haojie Chang↗David Widen↗Christian Fager↗

arXiv:2606.18395v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The output combiner of a Doherty power amplifier (PA) integrates load modulation, impedance matching, and phase compensation within a single network, making its design and synthesis highly challenging. In this paper, we propose a three-port Doherty combiner design methodology that combines deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), pixelated layout representations, and genetic algorithms (GA) with dual-state impedance synthesis to address both peak and back-off power conditions. As a proof of concept, two GaN HEMT Doherty PA prototypes incorporating three-port pixelated combiners are designed and fabricated. Both prototypes achieve a measured saturated output power exceeding 44.2 dBm with peak drain efficiency above 71.2% within 2.6-2.8 GHz. Furthermore, a drain efficiency as high as 64% is measured at the 6-dB back-off level. After applying digital predistortion, each prototype achieves an adjacent channel leakage ratio (ACLR) better than -51.3 dBc.

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03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Machine-learning clustering of close-in exoplanet populations: links to pebble accretion

Authors:
Yi Duann↗Anders Johansen↗Haiyang S. Wang↗H. Jens Hoeijmakers↗

arXiv:2606.11737v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Close-in exoplanets exhibit a wide range of orbital architectures and physical properties shaped by both formation conditions and migration processes. Although population-synthesis models predict distinct planetary populations, establishing a quantitative connection between observed exoplanets and synthetic populations remains challenging. We investigate the intrinsic organisation of close-in exoplanets using physically motivated dynamical parameters and connect the resulting populations to pebble-accretion formation pathways. A two-stage Gaussian mixture model (GMM) is applied to an observed sample of close-in exoplanets, performing unsupervised probabilistic clustering in a feature space dominated by dynamical descriptors of planet-star interactions. The resulting clusters are mapped onto a pebble-accretion synthetic population within a statistically motivated three-dimensional parameter space. Formation-related quantities, including gas availability, gas fraction, and ice-rock mass ratio, are then used to interpret the mapped populations. We identify statistically supported sub-populations without imposing predefined classification boundaries, including very-massive gas giants, hot giants, warm-Jupiter-dominated systems, and lower-mass giants. The mapped synthetic populations reveal systematic differences in formation timing, gas accretion, and solid growth histories. In particular, very-massive gas giants are preferentially associated with earlier formation epochs than hot-giant and warm-Jupiter-dominated populations. These results demonstrate that physically motivated machine-learning approaches can provide a statistically robust framework for linking observed exoplanet populations to theoretical planet formation pathways.

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

Physical Atari: A Robust and Accessible Platform for Real-time Reinforcement Learning on Robots

Authors:
Khurram Javed↗Joseph Modayil↗Gloria Kennickell↗Richard S. Sutton↗John Carmack↗

arXiv:2606.19357v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We built a robot called the Robotroller that actuates an Atari CX40+ controller and a device called the Atari Devbox that renders the game frame and the reward signal from the Arcade Learning Environment on a screen. The Robotroller and the Atari Devbox, together with an off-the-shelf camera and a desktop computer, constitute a system that can be used to study reinforcement learning algorithms in the physical world. We call the full system Physical Atari. In this paper, we detail the key decisions that make Physical Atari a robust and accessible platform. To make the system robust, we designed the Robotroller so that all movement is done through bearings, which reduces wear. Additionally, we wrote software that monitors the state of the servos at a high frequency and intervenes to limit stress. To make the system accessible, we used affordable off-the-shelf components and parts that can be manufactured using consumer 3D printers. Physical Atari can be built for under $1,000 and has been used for weeks of non-stop reinforcement learning experiments without any mechanical failures. We used it to validate that reinforcement learning algorithms can learn directly on robots and show that even small distribution shifts between learning and deployment can significantly degrade the performance of policies. Our results underscore the importance of on-device adaptation for strong performance on robots.

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05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Kalman Linear Attention: Parallel Bayesian Filtering For Efficient Language Modelling and State Tracking

Authors:
Vaisakh Shaj↗Cameron Barker↗Aidan Scannell↗Andras Szecsenyi↗Elliot J. Crowley↗Amos Storkey↗

arXiv:2602.10743v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: State-space language models such as Mamba and gated linear attention (GLA) offer linear-complexity, parallelisable alternatives to transformers, but their linear state updates limit expressivity and robust state tracking. We close this gap from a probabilistic angle, casting sequence mixing as exact Bayesian filtering with the Kalman filter as the core primitive. Classical Kalman filters give principled state and uncertainty estimates but are viewed as inherently sequential; we show that reparameterising them in information form turns their updates into an associative scan - so the per-token recurrent update is non-linear (a Möbius/precision recursion) yet remains temporally parallel. The resulting Kalman Linear Attention (KLA) layer is a drop-in sequence mixer that performs time-parallel probabilistic inference, carries an explicit belief-state uncertainty, and is strictly more expressive than GLA-style linear updates at the same computational cost. This expressivity translates directly into stronger state tracking: KLA solves permutation-composition ($A_5$) tasks that linear SSMs and attention cannot, while staying scan-parallel. As a drop-in primitive it also matches or improves on modern SSMs and GLAs across synthetic token-manipulation and zero-shot commonsense benchmarks, and is among the first stacked Bayesian-filtering primitives trained at the billion-token scale.

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

Ensembles of Large Language Models for Identifying EQ-5D Studies in PubMed Based on Their Abstracts

Authors:
Zhyar Rzgar K. Rostam↗M\'arta P\'entek↗J\'anos Tibor Czere↗Zsombor Zrubka↗L\'aszl\'o Gul\'acsi↗G\'abor Kert\'esz↗

The rapid increase in scientific publications leads to the fact that manual study screening in systematic literature reviews (SLRs) is increasingly resource consuming, inefficient, and inconsistent. Classifying studies that clearly report health-related quality-of-life results, such as EQ-5D data, requires a high level of clinical interpretation and poses challenges for human reviewers. This study investigates the use of Google's Gemini and Gemma large language models (LLMs) in automating EQ-5D detection in the PubMed biomedical database based only on published abstracts. A multi-phase framework is proposed that integrates few-shot prompting, weight ensembling aggregation, and a soft stacking meta-classifier. Nine LLMs are evaluated on a dataset of PubMed studies manually labeled by two experts regarding EQ-5D reporting. The weighted ensemble of gemini-2.5-pro, gemma-3-12b, and gemma-3-27b obtained a 0.74 weighted F1-score and 0.74 accuracy, exceeding individually attained results. The ensembling of top-performing models improved the balance between precision and recall compared to individual models, while the soft stacking approach provided greater reliability and interpretability. Feature analysis shows that the probability results from the models are important in guiding the final predictions. The findings suggest that an ensemble-based LLM setup is a reliable and scalable approach for automating screening in biomedical research.

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07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Visual-Seeker: Towards Visual-Native Multimodal Agentic Search via Active Visual Reasoning

Authors:
Zhengbo Zhang↗Changtao Miao↗Jinbo Su↗Zhaowen Zhou↗Chunxia Zhang↗Xukai Wang↗Ruiqi Liu↗Kaiyuan Zheng↗Jiansheng Cai↗Bo Zhang↗Zhe Li↗Shiming Xiang↗…

arXiv:2606.15231v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in many visual tasks, but they often struggle with factual grounding when confronted with complex, open-world scenarios. While recent multimodal deep search agents attempt to address this issue by utilizing external tools, the visual-native search paradigm remains underexplored. Existing methods primarily rely on simple images with explicit semantics and text-only evidence trajectories, limiting the agent's ability to perform multi-hop, cross-modal reasoning and search. To address these limitations, we propose Visual-Seeker, a visual-native multimodal deep search agent via active visual reasoning. Rather than treating vision as a static input, our agent actively attends to fine-grained visual details, dynamically harvests visual evidence throughout the search process. To unlock its visual-native potential, we design an active visual reasoning data pipeline and synthesize 5K high-quality multimodal trajectories for model training. Extensive experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance across five challenging multimodal search benchmarks, even surpassing several proprietary models, validating robust visual-native reasoning and search in real-world web environments. The code and data can be accessed at: https://github.com/ZhengboZhang/Visual-Seeker.

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

How Seemingly Inconsequential Design Choices Dictate Performance of LLMs in Pathology

Authors:
Kian R. Weihrauch↗Thomas A. Buckley↗William Lotter↗Arjun K. Manrai↗

General-purpose large language models (LLMs) are routinely used as baselines when evaluating specialized pathology models on whole-slide images (WSIs). Because WSIs exceed contemporary model context limits, LLM baselines routinely use small, high-magnification patches processed independently via majority voting, without systematic evaluation of seemingly inconsequential design choices such as patch size, patch count, and magnification. Generalist LLMs have consistently underperformed specialized systems, reinforcing the perception that domain-specific training or architectural adaptation is necessary for pathology tasks involving WSIs. Here, we conduct a systematic factorial analysis of four input design factors: inference mode, patch size, magnification, and patch count. We demonstrate that prior studies have overstated the gap between specialized models and general-purpose LLMs by choosing non-optimized input configurations. On the MultiPathQA benchmark, switching to a single balanced configuration (large patches at lower magnification, processed jointly) raises GPT-5 from 15.1% to 39.5% on cancer-type classification (TCGA) and from 38.1% to 62.9% on organ classification (GTEx). Per-task optimization yields further gains up to 43.9% (TCGA) and 71.6% (GTEx). The same configuration generalizes to two other models and to a fully held-out CPTAC cohort, where it improves Gemini 3 Flash by 23.4 percentage points without any task-specific tuning.

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

Probabilistic Signature Inversion: Learning Conditional Distributions from Truncated Signatures

Authors:
Junoh Kang↗Kiseop Lee↗Bohyung Han↗

arXiv:2606.15332v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The signature transform is a principled feature map for continuous-time paths, valued for its uniqueness and universality. Recovering a path from its truncated signature is, however, structurally ill-posed because the truncated signature map is not injective. We therefore reframe truncated signature inversion as a probabilistic problem – learning the conditional distribution of a path given its truncated signature – and adopt a signature-conditioned flow matching model as a practical estimator. This probabilistic formulation elucidates the fundamental difficulty of inversion: Bayes reconstruction error quantifies the irreducible uncertainty remaining after conditioning on a statistic. We derive the Bayes-optimal error under linear statistics, obtaining a closed form for log-GBM and numerically tractable formulas for log-fBM and OU, yielding a concrete theoretical baseline for model validation. This baseline upper-bounds the Bayes error under truncated-signature conditioning, since truncated signatures provide richer information than linear statistics. Experiments show that empirical reconstruction errors under linear-statistics conditioning faithfully align with the theory-derived baseline, while errors decrease when the statistic is replaced with truncated signatures. Moreover, generated paths faithfully recover the conditioning signature while preserving key distributional and temporal structures, indicating that the estimator is well-calibrated to the target conditional distribution. Together, these results establish a well-posed probabilistic framework for truncated-signature inversion, with applicability demonstrated on real financial data beyond the parametric process families covered by theory.

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10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

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

Authors:
Ruishan Fang↗Siyuan Lu↗Chenyi Zhuang↗Tao Lin↗

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.

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11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Dynamic Free-Rider Detection in Federated Learning via Simulated Attack Patterns

Authors:
Motoki Nakamura↗

arXiv:2604.04611v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Federated learning (FL) enables multiple clients to collaboratively train a global model by aggregating local updates without sharing private data. However, FL often faces the challenge of free-riders, clients who submit fake model parameters without performing actual training to obtain the global model without contributing. Chen et al. proposed a free-rider detection method based on the weight evolving frequency (WEF) of model parameters. This detection approach is a leading candidate for practical free-rider detection methods, as it requires neither a proxy dataset nor pre-training. Nevertheless, it struggles to detect ``dynamic'' free-riders who behave honestly in early rounds and later switch to free-riding, particularly under global-model-mimicking attacks such as the delta weight attack and our newly proposed adaptive WEF-camouflage attack. In this paper, we propose a novel detection method S2-WEF that simulates the WEF patterns of potential global-model-based attacks on the server side using previously broadcasted global models, and identifies clients whose submitted WEF patterns resemble the simulated ones. To handle a variety of free-rider attack strategies, S2-WEF further combines this simulation-based similarity score with a deviation score computed from mutual comparisons among submitted WEFs, and separates benign and free-rider clients by two-dimensional clustering and per-score classification. This method enables dynamic detection of clients that transition into free-riders during training without proxy datasets or pre-training. We conduct extensive experiments across three datasets and five attack types, demonstrating that S2-WEF achieves higher robustness than existing approaches.

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12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Geodesic Calculus on Implicitly Defined Latent Manifolds

Authors:
Florine Hartwig↗Josua Sassen↗Juliane Braunsmann↗Martin Rumpf↗Benedikt Wirth↗

arXiv:2510.09468v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Latent manifolds of autoencoders provide low-dimensional representations of data, which can be studied from a geometric perspective. We propose to describe these latent manifolds as implicit submanifolds of some ambient latent space. Based on this, we develop tools for a discrete Riemannian calculus approximating classical geometric operators. These tools are robust against inaccuracies of the implicit representation often occurring in practical examples. To obtain a suitable implicit representation, we propose to learn an approximate projection onto the latent manifold by minimizing a denoising objective. This approach is independent of the underlying autoencoder and supports the use of different Riemannian geometries on the latent manifolds. The framework in particular enables the computation of geodesic paths connecting given end points and shooting geodesics via the Riemannian exponential maps on latent manifolds. We evaluate our approach on various autoencoders trained on synthetic and real data.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Fusion of Pervasive RF Data with Spatial Images via Vision Transformers for Enhanced Mapping in Smart Cities

Authors:
Rafayel Mkrtchyan↗Armen Manukyan↗Hrant Khachatrian↗Theofanis P. Raptis↗

In this paper, we present a deep learning-based approach that integrates the DINOv2 architecture to improve building mapping by combining (possibly erroneous) maps from open-source platforms with pervasive radio frequency (RF) data collected from multiple wireless user equipments and base stations. Unlike prior methods, our approach leverages a vision transformer-based architecture to jointly process both RF and map modalities within a unified framework, effectively capturing spatial dependencies and structural priors for enhanced mapping accuracy. For the evaluation purposes, we employ a synthetic dataset co-produced by Huawei. To address the challenges associated with real-world data imperfections, we introduce controlled noise to its RF data so as to simulate real-world conditions. Additionally, we develop and train a model that leverages only aggregated path loss information to tackle the mapping problem. We measure the results according to three performance metrics: the Jaccard index (intersection over union, IoU), the Hausdorff distance, and the Chamfer distance. Our design achieves a macro IoU of 65.3%, significantly surpassing (i) the erroneous maps baseline, which yields 40.1%, (ii) an RF-only method from the literature, which yields 37.3%, and (iii) a non-AI fusion baseline that we designed which yields 42.2%. The comparative evaluation highlights the limitations of relying solely on RF data or on spatial data, as well as the effectiveness that AI can have on fusing data towards enhancing smart city mapping accuracy. We further validate our method on real-world data from the Oslo region, complementing the synthetic evaluation with a real deployment setting, where our best fusion model reaches 64.9% macro IoU. We additionally outline a strategy for deploying the model over larger areas by tiling the region with overlapping windows.

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14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

TSAssistant: A Human-in-the-Loop Agentic Framework for Automated Target Safety Assessment

Authors:
Xiaochen Zheng↗Zhiwen Jiang↗David Tokar↗Yexiang Cheng↗Alvaro Serra↗Melanie Guerard↗Klas Hatje↗Tatyana Doktorova↗

Target Safety Assessment (TSA) requires systematic integration of genetic, transcriptomic, target homology, pharmacological, and clinical data to evaluate potential safety liabilities of therapeutic targets. This process is labor-intensive and expert-dependent, posing challenges in scalability and reproducibility. We present TSAssistant, a human-in-the-loop multi-agent framework that decomposes TSA report generation into a workflow of specialized subagents: Research Subagents that each ground and cite a single TSA domain, and Synthesis Subagents that integrate findings across domains. Subagents retrieve and synthesize evidence from curated biomedical sources through standardized tool interfaces and produce individually citable, evidence-grounded sections, with behavior shaped by a hierarchical instruction architecture that separates coordination logic from domain expertise and user intent. To complement these soft constraints, programmatic execution hooks and persistent memory stores enforce hard constraints across the workflow, while an interactive refinement loop allows experts to review and revise individual sections with full conversational context preserved across iterations. Rather than a single holistic comparison, we decompose report quality into reproducibility, evidential grounding, task-level accuracy, and controllability under expert oversight, finding high reproducibility and grounding, substantial agreement with the human reference, and net-positive expert-driven refinement.

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15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

A Neuromorphic Trigger for Efficient Audio Event Detection

Authors:
Benjamin Hatton↗Oliver Rhodes↗Luca Peres↗

arXiv:2606.17775v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Efficient processing of continuous audio streams remains a key challenge for real-time and resource-constrained systems. This paper introduces a neuromorphic trigger for audio event detection, based on a spiking neural network (SNN) that selectively gates input to downstream models. The proposed trigger acts as a low-cost front-end, identifying salient audio segments and forwarding only these to a more computationally intensive model for tasks such as classification. The trigger is implemented as a lightweight fully connected SNN and evaluated on two representative tasks: Anomalous Sound Detection (ASD) and Sound Event Detection (SED). For ASD, the trigger achieves a one-second segment-based F1 score of 0.97 on a class-agnostic form of the URBAN-SED dataset, demonstrating high reliability in identifying relevant audio regions. For SED, the trigger is combined with the Dang classifier on the DCASE 2017 Challenge Task 2 dataset, showing a potential $42.6\times$ reduction in FLOPs while reducing the lower bound of the event-based error rate from 0.41 to 0.25. These results highlight the potential of neuromorphic triggers as real-time, energy-efficient front-end filters, enabling substantial reductions in computational cost.

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

Formalize Once, Edit the Rest: Efficient Lean-Based Answer Selection for Math Reasoning

Authors:
Ji Feng↗Zhouxing Shi↗

With large language models (LLMs) increasingly applied to mathematical reasoning, formal proof assistants such as Lean can be leveraged to verify reasoning outputs with machine-checkable rigor, enabling use cases such as answer selection in test-time scaling with K sampled candidate answers. However, employing Lean requires that LLM outputs, originally in natural language, first be formalized. Existing Lean-based answer-selection work uses an autoformalization model to generate a formal statement in Lean for each candidate answer independently, incurring a significant computational cost. We propose BASE, a base-and-edit pipeline that formalizes a single base candidate per problem and derives the remaining K-1 statements by editing the answer expression in place. To facilitate this, we train a rewriter model LEANSCRIBE to localize the answer in the base formalization and generate a reusable edit function for the other K-1 candidates. BASE simultaneously improves selection accuracy and reduces formalization cost - a Pareto improvement that holds on all 12 (dataset, solver) configurations across four benchmarks and three solvers, cutting autoformalizer calls by about 5x at K=8, with the reduction expected to become larger as K grows. Code is available at https://github.com/ucr-rai/base-and-edit.

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

Learning What to Say to Your VLA: Mostly Harmless Vision Language Action Model Steering

Authors:
Hyun Joe Jeong↗Gokul Swamy↗Andrea Bajcsy↗

arXiv:2606.12299v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models provide a natural language interface to robot control, but the mapping from language to behavior is often brittle and unintuitive: semantically similar instructions can induce drastically different behaviors, while some capabilities may not be elicitable through prompting alone. As a result, both human instructions and zero-shot language models can fail to reliably steer VLAs toward successful task execution. In this work, we propose a framework that interactively searches for language sequences that improve closed-loop VLA task performance, distills these sequences into a test-time language feedback policy (LFP), and learns an improvement head that predicts when language steering will improve performance. We conformalize this improvement head to prevent harmful steering interventions, where the LFP decreases task performance relative to the original instruction on out-of-distribution scenarios. Crucially, our approach operates on arbitrary frozen pre-trained VLAs, requiring neither access to the original training distribution nor fine-tuning of the underlying model. On seen environments, our conformalized LFP improves base VLA performance by 24.7% in simulation and 65.0% in hardware. On visual and semantic perturbations, our conformalized LFP has strong harmlessness guarantees, and produces recovery behaviors not observed with open-loop prompting.

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18.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

Infectious Disease Forecasting via Physics-Informed Machine Learning

Authors:
Hart↗J. C↗Smith↗McMahan↗Rennert↗

Infectious disease transmission evolves as a dynamic process shaped by biological mechanisms, population behavior, and intervention policies, yet public health responses are often driven by lagging indicators. Accurate short- and long-term disease forecasting is essential for the timely deployment of intervention strategies, healthcare capacity planning, and uncertainty-aware, risk-informed decision-making. To address this challenge, three broad classes of forecasting models have traditionally been used: statistical, machine learning, and mechanistic approaches. However, each of these modeling paradigms faces fundamental limitations. In particular, traditional statistical models often lack the flexibility needed to capture complex disease dynamics, machine learning approaches require large, high-quality data streams, and mechanistic models are notoriously difficult to calibrate. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel physics-informed machine learning (PIML) framework for forecasting infectious disease dynamics. Our approach simultaneously forecasts new case and hospitalization counts, along with other key epidemiological quantities such as the time-varying reproduction number. This is achieved through the design of a machine learning model and estimation strategy regularized by a system of differential equations that encode disease dynamics of the SIHR model, thereby bridging the gap between purely data-driven and mechanistic models. We demonstrate the proposed methodology through in-depth numerical studies and an application to COVID-19 data collected in the state of South Carolina.

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

Structured Adversarial Camouflage via Voronoi Diagrams

Authors:
Jens Bayer↗Stefan Becker↗David M\"unch↗Michael Arens↗J\"urgen Beyerer↗

Pixel-wise adversarial patches are computationally heavy and often visually detectable, limiting utility in security-critical systems. We present adversarial Voronoi camouflage that optimizes only seed-point locations under fixed, printable palettes using a soft assignment, producing structured, splinter camouflage-like patterns without additional regularization. Evaluated on person detection with COCO-style AP@[.5:.95], naive placement (Inria -> COCO) performs comparably bad, while garment-level application via segmentation mask (3DPeople) results in a significant AP drop. The attack transfers to out-of-domain backgrounds and across detector families (YOLOv9/10/11/12), indicating robustness in black-box settings. Repainting with different palettes largely nullifies the effect, and single-color tweaks show limited tolerance (

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20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

The Perceived Fragility of Explanations in Audio Models: Manipulation of Attribution with Unchanged Predictions

Authors:
Piotr Kit{\l}owski↗Dominik Wi\k{a}cek↗Mateusz Modrzejewski↗

arXiv:2606.14466v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper investigates the fragility of post-hoc explanation methods in audio deepfake detection. While previous work on explanation manipulation focused on images using standard $L_p$ metrics, we introduce a psychoacoustic framework that optimizes inaudible perturbations to decouple model attributions from final classifications. We evaluate this vulnerability across state-of-the-art architectures under strict prediction-preserving constraints. By evaluating the manipulation cost through domain-specific perceptual audio quality metrics alongside explanation alignment criteria, our framework demonstrates that an adversary can systematically distort automated explanation heatmaps while preserving the predicted deepfake label. Full code available at: https://github.com/cncPomper/Audio-XAI

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

Fair Online Resource Allocation

Authors:
Christopher En↗Yuri Faenza↗Andrea Lodi↗Gonzalo Mu\~noz↗

arXiv:2606.18679v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the problem of fair online resource allocation, motivated by applications such as refugee resettlement and airline scheduling, where agents arrive sequentially and must be assigned to facilities with limited capacities. We introduce a model that maximizes the overall welfare subject to resource constraints and a Lipschitz fairness requirement, which ensures that similar agents arriving in the same batch receive similar expected outcomes. We first analyze the offline problem, proving that the value of the optimal fair allocation is at least an $\Omega(1/\gamma)$ fraction of the optimal unfair allocation, where $\gamma$ is the fairness coefficient, thereby bounding the price of fairness. For the online setting, we propose an algorithm based on dual mirror descent that enforces fairness constraints within batches while estimating optimal dual variables. We prove that this algorithm achieves sublinear regret relative to the optimal offline fluid benchmark. Finally, we validate our theoretical results using real-world data from the Refugee Economies Programme, demonstrating the algorithm's performance and examining the trade-offs between welfare maximization and fairness enforcement.

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22.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-17

In silico characterization of lysis and host-recognition modules in Staphylococcus aureus bacteriophage genomes

Authors:
Hasugian↗I. A↗Alifiyah↗N. I↗

Background/aim: Antimicrobial resistance in methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) requires precision non-antibiotic therapeutics, yet phage lytic efficacy is poorly predicted by phenotypic assays, as shown by paradoxical biofilm responses. This study characterized the genomic architecture of lytic S. aureus bacteriophages, focusing on the conservation of the lysis module and the variability of host-recognition modules, to provide a rational basis for phage candidate selection. Materials and methods: Twenty-two complete S. aureus phage genomes were retrieved from NCBI GenBank. Genomic features were extracted with custom Biopython scripts. Lysis (endolysin, holin) and host-recognition (tail fiber/receptor-binding protein) modules were annotated and validated by InterPro domain analysis, with disrupted endolysins resolved by tBLASTn. Phylogeny was reconstructed from large terminase subunit (TerL) sequences using maximum likelihood. Results: Genome size spanned three classes, from 17.5 to 148.6 kb. The LysK-type endolysin (CHAP, Amidase, SH3b) was highly conserved, whereas tail fiber/RBP genes were detected in only 14 of 22 phages. Domain analysis reclassified two proteins annotated as endolysins as virion-associated peptidoglycan hydrolases, and identified two independent mechanisms, HNH endonuclease insertion and intron splitting, that interrupt lysis-module genes and confound automated annotation. Maximum likelihood analysis recovered a strongly supported, highly conserved core clade with EW and SA13 as divergent lineages. Conclusion: Lysis modules are conserved whereas host-recognition modules are variable, indicating that host recognition rather than the lytic enzyme is the principal determinant of host range and the more rational target for phage selection and engineering.

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23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

A 3D Isovist World Model – Revealing a City's Unseen Geometry and Its Emergent Cross-City Signature

Authors:
Xuhui Lin↗Stephen Law↗Nanjiang Chen↗Kunyao Li↗Tao Yang↗

arXiv:2606.03609v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Embodied agents that navigate cities rely on world models that predict how their surroundings will change as they move. But for navigation, what matters is not what the buildings look like; it is where the agent can go. Most world models nonetheless predict appearance, learning how a scene looks rather than the space an agent can move through. Those that do target geometry, such as bird's-eye-view occupancy grids, flatten the three-dimensional environment onto a ground plane, discarding the above-ground and multi-level structure that shapes real navigation. What is missing is a predictive target that captures the navigable geometry an agent actually traverses, without photometric entanglement and without collapsing the third dimension. Our key idea is to model the open volume between buildings, the negative space, encoded as a 3D isovist: a spherical visibility-depth map recording the distance to the nearest surface in every direction. We introduce an embodied world model that predicts the next isovist from a short history of past isovists and a movement action. The prediction is formulated as a depth residual so the decoder inherits sharp building edges, trained with self-rollout scheduled sampling to keep corrupted context on the geometry manifold, and equipped with a persistent latent bird's-eye-view spatial map for cross-path consistency. Our central finding is emergent and unexpected: a single city-blind model trained on Manhattan and Paris develops a cross-city spatial signature, with city identity linearly decodable from its temporal latents far above single-frame baselines, so the signature lives in the learned dynamics rather than in appearance. The representation is lightweight, interpretable, and reproducible, offering a geometric substrate for spatial reasoning in embodied AI, robotics, and urban analysis, released with an open dataset and pipeline.

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

Stubborn: A Streamlined and Unified Reinforcement Learning Framework for Robust Motion Tracking and Fall Recovery for Humanoids

Authors:
Xiao Ren↗Yuhui Yang↗Zongbiao Weng↗Zhijie Liu↗He Kong↗

arXiv:2606.12814v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent reinforcement learning approaches have shown great promise in improving humanoid motion tracking performance and achieving fall recovery under disturbances. However, most existing works treat motion tracking and fall recovery as different tasks and require multi-stage training with specialized recovery rewards and/or separate recovery policies. Moreover, existing reinforcement learning-based methods often terminate training episodes immediately after severe tracking failures, limiting recovery-oriented exploration in unstable or fallen states. To address the above issues, we propose Stubborn, a streamlined and unified reinforcement learning framework to achieve robust humanoid motion tracking and fall recovery. Specifically, Stubborn uses an asymmetric Actor-Critic architecture and consists of three major components. First, a yaw-aligned tracking representation is adopted to reduce sensitivity to global drift and heading disturbances while preserving gravity-related balance information. Second, we introduce a Bernoulli-based probabilistic termination mechanism that enables the policy to encourage exploration of fall-recovery behaviors under varying failure modes. Third, we propose a probabilistic termination and tracking-error-driven strategy that dynamically reshapes the sampling distribution based on tracking performance, increasing the training efficiency for difficult motion segments and unstable states. Extensive comparisons with SOTA methods and ablation studies show that Stubborn achieved competitive performance, and the proposed probabilistic termination mechanism and adaptive sampling strategy contributed to the performance and robustness gains. For real-world demonstrations, please refer to https://aislab-sustech.github.io/Stubborn/.

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25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Spectral Analysis of Molecular Features: When Richer Features Do Not Guarantee Better Generalization

Authors:
Asma Jamali↗Tin Sum Cheng↗Rodrigo A. Vargas-Hern\'andez↗

arXiv:2510.14217v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The spectral properties of feature embeddings offer critical insights into model generalization and representation quality. While deep learning models are widely used for molecular property prediction, kernel methods remain competitive in low-data regimes, yet their spectral behavior is largely unexplored. We present the first comprehensive spectral analysis of kernel ridge regression across diverse representations-including molecular fingerprints (ECFP), pretrained transformers, graph neural networks, and 3D descriptors-evaluated on QM9 and 3 MoleculeNet benchmarks. Surprisingly, richer spectral features do not consistently yield better generalization performance, contradicting common representation heuristics used in self-supervised learning (SSL). Across 4 spectral metrics, only ECFP-based kernels show a strictly positive correlation with performance. Transformer and global 3D representations exhibit mixed behavior, whereas local 3D representations show consistently negative correlations. Truncation analysis further emphasizes this disparity: for local 3D representations on thermodynamic targets, fewer than 2\% of eigenvalues (and occasionally as few as 0.02\%) are needed to recover 95\% of performance, whereas ECFP and transformer kernels require significantly more. By demonstrating a strong dependence on both task and representation, our results challenge the heuristic that richer spectra inherently improve generalization, providing new guidance for evaluating representations in SSL and in label-limited scientific tasks.

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