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

Multi-view feature High-order Fusion for Space Weak Object Detection and Segmentation

Weak objects are common in images and videos of space applications. However, it is hard to learn proper representations from their limited appearance information. Inspired by multi-view learning, we develop simple multi-view attentions, treating their outputs as multi-view features. We also propose a multi-view feature high-order fusion method (MHF) to aggregate more accurate and richer features of weak objects. Our MHF extends the commonly used low-order feature fusion method to higher orders. It enhances the model's capacity to capture relevant and complementary information about weak objects. This is achieved by introducing high-order multi-view features perception and a recursive task-contribution gated selection of multi-view features. The new operation is highly flexible and customizable. It is compatible with various variants of multi-view feature representations. We conduct extensive experiments on two newly constructed space science datasets and an open, large-scale satellite video dataset. Our MHF serves as a plug-and-play module and significantly improves various vision transformers and convolution-based detection and segmentation models. We achieve all state-of-the-art accuracies on both tasks across three datasets. Our MHF can be a new basic module for visual modeling that effectively represents weak objects in terms of multi-view learning. The code will be available at https://github.com/Kingdroper/MHF.

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

Online Shift Detection and Conformal Adaptation for Deployed Safety Classifiers

Authors:

arXiv:2606.11949v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present an online monitoring system for distributional shift in deployed safety classifiers, using calibrated sequential statistics to detect when a classifier has moved out of distribution. Upon detection, a conformal abstention layer adapts decision thresholds to recover a target error rate epsilon=0.1. In a pre-registered factorial evaluation (4 classifiers x 5 shift conditions x 20 seeds x 2 window sizes, 800 cells), the system achieves 86.6% valid detection (693/800, 95% CI [84.1%, 88.8%]) with mean latency of 39.5 steps. Detection holds across three ground-truth regimes: synthetic onset (86.6%), real temporal jailbreaks (85%, 17/20), and GCG adversarial attacks. Weighted conformal prediction recovers up to 39 pp of lost coverage for DeBERTa (ESS=46/300) but collapses for all other classifiers (ESS~300): logistic density ratio estimation achieves perfect source/target separability in high-dimensional embedding spaces, clipping all importance weights to the floor. DeBERTa shows a gradient from effective correction (paraphrase, ESS=46) to near-total collapse (adversarial suffix, ESS=206). PCA to 32 dimensions breaks the collapse, recovering 33 pp for Llama Guard and 21 pp for ShieldGemma. Variance decomposition reveals classifier (eta^2=0.243), shift type (eta^2=0.237), and their interaction (eta^2=0.185) all contribute substantially to detection latency variance (all p

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Speeding up the annotation process in semantic segmentation industrial applications

arXiv:2606.19934v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current machine learning models commonly require large and well-annotated datasets. However, the annotation process often becomes a bottleneck, with increased complexity leading to higher chances of human errors. Within this context, our goal in this paper is to leverage unsupervised algorithms to improve data annotation efficiency for complex semantic segmentation problems in industrial materials science. Previous research has quantified labeling time and others explored unsupervised methods. However, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to quantify how much unsupervised algorithms accelerate the labeling process. We aim to validate the extent to which this laborious process can be accelerated, focusing on semantic segmentation tasks that involve annotating each pixel of high-resolution images, such as the microstructure characterization challenge in materials science. Specifically, we demonstrate that by using unsupervised computer vision algorithms, the time required for the labeling process can be reduced from 170 hours to 37 hours, achieving an approximate reduction of 78\%. The dataset we work with includes large images of dimensions 1280x959 and 960x703, which further increases the complexity of the annotation task. Despite these challenges, we create and share the largest public steel microstructure segmentation dataset to date, available under MIT License with permanent DOI, contributing a fully annotated, high-resolution dataset to the field. Additionally, this is the first work to compare the labeling time from scratch (a common approach in previous studies) to the labeling time when using these unsupervised algorithms as a pre-annotation step. Furthermore, we provide a Deep Learning model trained on this dataset, validated by field experts, and deployed in an industrial setting, serving as an initial benchmark for this public dataset.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

The Algebra of Units: From Buckingham's Pi-grec Theorem to Latent-Variable Learning

arXiv:2606.16737v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Engineers often measure many quantities-speed, pressure, temperature, length-expressed in different physical units. The Buckingham Pi-grec theorem states that these variables can always be combined into a smaller set of dimensionless numbers whose values fully determine the system's behaviour. Identifying the appropriate dimensionless groups has traditionally required expert knowledge and physical insight. This paper shows that they can instead be discovered automatically from data, without prior knowledge of the governing physics. The key observation is that, after logarithmic transformation, measurements collected under different scalings of the same system lie on a low-dimensional manifold whose geometry is determined by the underlying dimensionless groups. Singular value decomposition (SVD) identifies this manifold directly from data. A subsequent search over integer-exponent combinations recovers candidate dimensionless quantities, while a repeating-variable filter retains only those constructed from the machine's characteristic scales. This procedure recovers familiar engineering groups, including the flow coefficient, head coefficient, and Mach number, while excluding equivalent but less interpretable alternatives. The method is demonstrated on a synthetic compressor dataset containing 16,000 measurements. Starting from raw dimensional variables and no physics input, it recovers the correct dimensionless groups to numerical precision and reproduces the compressor performance map with an error below 0.01%. More broadly, the work reveals a close connection between classical dimensional analysis and modern data-driven learning. Both rely on the same underlying algebraic structure, suggesting new approaches for building physical models that are simultaneously interpretable, scalable, and data-efficient.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Effective discrete-modulated continuous variable QKD under general attacks

arXiv:2606.20346v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continuous variable quantum key distribution via discrete modulations ensures information-theoretic security using standard telecom technologies, providing affordable and scalable quantum communications with simplified classical postprocessing. However, existing security proofs against general attacks often rely on restrictive assumptions, such as a bounded dimension for coherent states, or require impractically large block sizes. In this work, we develop a finite-size security analysis that removes these limitations while incorporating realistic experimental features. Our approach combines the dimension reduction technique, a security proof based on the marginal-constrained entropy accumulation, and a trusted detector model accounting for the receiver imperfections. We report positive key rates in the finite-size regime for relevant block sizes of the order of $10^8$. These results contribute to narrowing the gap between theoretical security proofs and practical implementations of discrete-modulated continuous variable quantum key distribution protocols.

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

Semantic Segmentation of Node and Edge Diagrams for Assistive Technology

In this paper, we present a novel set of related models for semantic segmentation of node-link diagrams. These diagrams are frequently used to represent mathematical graphs, relationships between concepts, and flowcharts. Such diagrams are difficult to access non-visually; while some assistive interfaces have been designed for node-link diagrams, they rely upon a machine-readable representation of the diagram, whereas such diagrams will generally be made available as bitmap images. Our compact deep learning models show excellent quantitative and qualitative performance on a large synthetic dataset of node-link diagrams, reaching per-pixel accuracy over 93\%.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Entity Binding Failures in Speech LLM Reasoning: Diagnosis and Chain-of-Thought Intervention

Speech Large Language Models (SLLMs) underperform their text counterparts on complex reasoning. We reveal that this gap is not a uniform cognitive deficit. Evaluating two architecturally diverse SLLMs, we show speech-to-text (S2T) matches or exceeds text-to-text (T2T) on spatial, syntactic, and factual tasks. Yet on logical tasks requiring entity tracking, S2T accuracy collapses to chance. We diagnose this as an entity binding failure: continuous speech features blur precise entity-property associations during implicit reasoning. To validate this diagnosis, we introduce Entity-Aware Chain-of-Thought (EA-CoT), a lightweight inference-time intervention forcing SLLMs to enumerate entities and bind them to claims before reasoning. EA-CoT bridges the gap, even when spoken names are misrecognized, yielding up to a 24.4 percentage-point accuracy gain. Ablations confirm the gains stem from explicit semantic binding, reframing the gap as an elicitation failure rather than a missing capability.

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

Humanoid Everyday: A Comprehensive Robotic Dataset for Open-World Humanoid Manipulation

arXiv:2510.08807v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: From loco-motion to dextrous manipulation, humanoid robots have made remarkable strides in demonstrating complex full-body capabilities. However, the majority of current robot learning datasets and benchmarks mainly focus on stationary robot arms, and the few existing humanoid datasets are either confined to fixed environments or limited in task diversity, often lacking human-humanoid interaction and lower-body locomotion. Moreover, there are a few standardized evaluation platforms for benchmarking learning-based policies on humanoid data. In this work, we present Humanoid Everyday, a large-scale and diverse humanoid manipulation dataset characterized by extensive task variety involving dextrous object manipulation, human-humanoid interaction, locomotion-integrated actions, and more. Leveraging a highly efficient human-supervised teleoperation pipeline, Humanoid Everyday aggregates high-quality multimodal sensory data, including RGB, depth, LiDAR, and tactile inputs, together with natural language annotations, comprising 10.3k trajectories and over 3 million frames of data across 260 tasks across 7 broad categories. In addition, we conduct an analysis of representative policy learning methods on our dataset, providing insights into their strengths and limitations across different task categories. For standardized evaluation, we introduce a cloud-based evaluation platform that allows researchers to seamlessly deploy their policies in our controlled setting and receive performance feedback. By releasing Humanoid Everyday along with our policy learning analysis and a standardized cloud-based evaluation platform, we intend to advance research in general-purpose humanoid manipulation and lay the groundwork for more capable and embodied robotic agents in real-world scenarios. Our dataset, data collection code, and cloud evaluation website are made publicly available on our project website.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

An End-to-End Hybrid Framework for Rumour Detection in Low-Resources Algerian Dialect

The rapid growth of social media has intensified the spread of rumours. This issue is more challenging in the Algerian context due to the informal and code-switched nature of dialectal content, the scarcity of annotated resources, and the limited effectiveness of standard Arabic NLP tools on dialect text. This paper presents an end-to-end rumour detection hybrid framework for Algerian dialect social media content. We build a domain-specific annotated dataset by combining real social media posts, synthetic data, and the FASSILA corpus, with automatic labeling based on a similarity-based annotation process. A transliteration pipeline is also introduced to generate parallel datasets in Arabic script and Arabizi. We evaluate multiple approaches, including classical machine learning, deep learning, transformers, and hybrid models. Experimental results show that a hybrid approach combining transformer embeddings with a classical classifier achieves the best performance, reaching an F1-score of 0.84. We also find that domain-specific pre-training is more important than model size, with social media-trained models outperforming larger models trained on formal Arabic corpora. These results demonstrate the feasibility of rumour detection in low-resource Algerian dialect settings.

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

CADET: Physics-Grounded Causal Auditing and Training-Free Deconfounding of End-to-End Driving Planners

Authors:

arXiv:2606.14438v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: End-to-end (E2E) autonomous-driving planners trained by imitation are prone to statistical shortcuts: they associate scene elements that merely co-occur with expert actions (a roadside object, a building facade) with driving decisions, rather than the variables that causally determine them. Such causal confusion silently compromises reliability in long-tail scenarios, and it is difficult to detect, because prevailing open-loop metrics (L2 displacement and collision rate) are dominated by ego status and do not indicate whether a planner depends on spurious cues. Existing remedies based on causal-intervention training require retraining large models and cannot audit a planner that is already deployed. We present CADET, a training-free framework that audits, benchmarks, and repairs spurious reliance in pretrained E2E planners without any parameter update.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Data-Forcing Distillation: Restoring Diversity and Fidelity in Few-Step Video Generation

Recent progress has shown promise in distilling multi-step video diffusion models into efficient few-step students. Among them, Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) and its successor DMD2 achieved strong generation quality and fast convergence. However, due to the nature of the reverse Kullback–Leibler (KL) objective, these methods exhibit two persistent failure modes: a substantial drop in sample diversity, and visibly over-saturated outputs that deviate from real-video appearance. In this work, we propose Data-Forcing Distillation (DFD), a simple post-training framework that restores diversity and fidelity in DMD with only a single-line of code change. At its core is the teacher score discrepancy to guide the student toward the real-data distribution, pulling it to missing modes (mitigating mode collapse) and away from problematic modes absent in real data (avoiding over-saturation). We provide an in-depth theoretical analysis of our framework and validate our approach on text-to-video, image-to-video, and autoregressive video generation. With only 100–300 steps of finetuning, DFD effectively restores diversity and fidelity on both Wan2.1-1.3B and Cosmos-Predict2.5-2B model, resolving the over-saturation artifacts with significantly better video dynamics and appearance, and even outperforms the teacher model.

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

Human-Enhanced Loop Modeling (HELM): Agent-Based Finite Element Modeling of Concrete Bridge Barriers

arXiv:2606.12025v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Finite element (FE) modeling of safety-critical infrastructure such as bridge barriers requires high-fidelity nonlinear dynamic analysis, yet the current FE modeling process remains labor-intensive and lacks automation. This paper presents the Human-Enhanced Loop Modeling (HELM) framework, a collaborative human-agent protocol that decomposes long-sequence finite element modeling into discrete, visually verifiable checkpoints across geometry generation, boundary condition definition, and material assignment. The framework is demonstrated through a 20-case matrix of reinforced concrete bridge barriers under MASH TL-4 and TL-5 lateral loading conditions, interfacing specialized agents with two widely used commercial FE softwares, i.e., ANSYS and LS-PrePost. Experimental results show that HELM improves the baseline autonomous modeling success rate from 20% to 75%, with agent-level pass rates for geometry and boundary condition tasks approximately doubling. Error analysis reveals that spatial reasoning and algebraic logic limitations constitute the primary failure modes, underscoring the value of structured human-in-the-loop intervention for modeling automation. The complete agent design code and prompts are open-sourced and can be accessed at: https://github.com/SimAgentDev/Ansys-LSPP-AgentKit.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Anatomically Conditioned Recurrent Refinement for Topology-Aware Circle of Willis Segmentation

Segmenting the Circle of Willis (CoW) from Magnetic Resonance Angiography (MRA) is challenging due to complex topology and thin vascular structures that are prone to fragmentation. Standard Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) often fail to capture these topological constraints, resulting in "broken vessel" artifacts. To address this, we propose the Anatomically Conditioned Recurrent Refinement U-Net (AC2RUNet). Our architecture decouples segmentation into two streams: a Static Stream that extracts invariant anatomical features and a lightweight Dynamic Stream that iteratively refines topological errors over time. We further introduce a dynamic curriculum learning strategy that transitions from high-recall geometric supervision to topology-aware constraints. Validated on the TopCoW dataset, AC2RUNet substantially reduces Hausdorff Distance (4.72 mm vs 9.17 mm) and Betti number errors (0.19 vs 0.40), improving topological connectivity over the nnU-Net baseline while maintaining comparable volumetric Dice.

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

Oops, Wait: Discourse Tokens Matter in Reasoning Model

Recent studies suggest that even data-efficient training with ($\simeq$1K) reasoning trajectories can induce non-trivial reasoning capabilities in large language models through post-training. Such training corpora often contain iconic tokens such as "wait", "so", and "alternatively", which frequently appear in reasoning trajectories and may play a role in this process. This paper focuses on characterizing observable token-level patterns in post-training and a case study of how data-efficient supervised fine-tuning (SFT) differs from, and falls short of, large-scale post-training. To this end, we first identify tokens that correlate with correct answers along reasoning trajectories across models and training setups. We then focus on the distribution and (functional) roles of the "wait" token to primarily study the model trained in a data-efficient manner compared with the counterpart. Our study finds that discourse tokens are associated with correctness and a reasoning accuracy jump, even in data-efficient SFT. This suggests data-efficient SFT can partially reproduce discourse-token patterns to mimic meaningful reasoning behavior, but the patterns are less aligned with high-confidence answer transitions than those from large-scale post-training.

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

EvoArena: Tracking Memory Evolution for Robust LLM Agents in Dynamic Environments

Large language model (LLM) agents have achieved strong performance on a wide range of benchmarks, yet most evaluations assume static environments. In contrast, real-world deployment is inherently dynamic, requiring agents to continually align their knowledge, skills, and behavior with changing environments and updated task conditions. To address this gap, we introduce EvoArena, a benchmark suite that models environment changes as sequences of progressive updates across terminal, software, and social domains. We further propose EvoMem, a patch-based memory paradigm that records memory evolution as structured update histories, enabling agents to reason about environmental evolution through changes in their memory. Experiments show that current agents struggle on EvoArena, achieving an average accuracy of 39.6% across evolving terminal, software, and social-preference domains. EvoMem consistently improves performance, yielding an average gain of 1.5% on EvoArena and also improving standard benchmarks such as GAIA and LoCoMo by 6.1% and 4.8%. Beyond individual tasks, EvoMem further improves chain-level accuracy by 3.7% on EvoArena, where success requires completing a consecutive sequence of related evolutionary subtasks. Mechanistic analysis shows that EvoMem improves evidence capture in the memory, indicating better preservation of complete evolving environment states. Our results highlight the importance of modeling evolution in both evaluation and memory for reliable agent deployment.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

From Concept-Aligned Tokens to Vulnerable Features: Mechanistic Localization of Jailbreaks

Jailbreak attacks expose a persistent failure mode in safety-aligned LLMs: models can be pushed into harmful behavior, but the internal representations enabling this shift remain poorly localized. Recent mechanistic safety studies often explain such behavior through broad representational objects, including global refusal directions, activation steering vectors, and refusal-related SAE features. We instead ask whether jailbreak vulnerability can be traced to finer-grained, prompt-conditioned SAE feature subgroups. We introduce a token-driven mechanistic pipeline that decomposes the residual stream of Gemma-2-2B into Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) features and identifies feature subgroups associated with unsafe behavior. Using single-category unsafe examples from BeaverTails to reduce cross-category interference, we extract harmful concepts from adversarial responses and align them with concept-relevant prompt tokens through subspace similarity. We then apply three feature-grouping strategies: cluster-based, hierarchical-linkage, and single-token-driven, to identify SAE feature subgroups across all 26 layers. Finally, we amplify the top features in each subgroup and evaluate the resulting generations with a standardized harmfulness judge. Single-token-driven grouping achieves harmfulness comparable to full cluster-based grouping, showing that individual harmful prompt tokens are sufficient to localize vulnerability-relevant SAE feature subgroups without relying on broader cluster-level aggregation. These subgroups appear across early and mid-to-late layers, with stronger concentration in mid-to-late layers, where targeted steering exposes specific model vulnerabilities. Overall, our results suggest that jailbreak susceptibility can be traced to sparse, token-localized SAE feature subgroups, complementing prior accounts based on broad adversarial, refusal, or steering directions.

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

Beyond Reward Engineering: A Data Recipe for Long-Context Reinforcement Learning

Long-context reasoning is an essential capability for large language models, particularly when they are deployed as autonomous agents that must reason over lengthy trajectories. Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently emerged as a dominant paradigm for improving this ability, yet existing work largely focuses on reward engineering while diverse training data remains scarce. We revisit this problem from a data-centric perspective and show that a simple yet effective data recipe alone, paired with a minimal outcome-based GRPO setup, suffices to substantially improve long-context reasoning. Our recipe targets three complementary task families – retrieval, multi-evidence synthesis, and reasoning – for which we construct and curate eight datasets totaling ~14K examples. Experiments on three models (Qwen3-4B/8B/30B-A3B) yield average gains of +7.2/+3.2/+6.4 points across seven long-context benchmarks, surpassing prior RL training sets. We further demonstrate that these gains transfer to agentic tasks, where continuing RL training on an agent-tuned model with our data recipe improves GAIA by +4.8 and BrowseComp by +7.0 points. We will release our datasets to facilitate future research.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Crypto x AI, AI x Crypto: A Survey

arXiv:2606.13892v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The intersection of crypto x AI is spawning papers, products, online posts, and companies. All the surrounding buzz, though, obscures what exactly has been done, what the opportunities and challenges are, and what open questions deserve attention. This survey paper asks what AI can do for blockchain-based technologies (broadly construed as "crypto") (crypto x AI), and vice versa (AI x crypto). We systematize existing work, summarize key takeaways, highlight open research questions, and offer a perspective on pervasive industry misconceptions, concluding that AI and crypto are still in the very early stages of meaningful integration.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Silhouette-Guided Animal Art

Generative AI has advanced the ability to render photorealistic or artistic images, yet it remains limited in a key aspect of human creativity: interpreting ambiguous shapes. This phenomenon, rooted in pareidolia, allows humans to perceive meaningful forms in random patterns such as clouds, stones, or leaves. To computationally replicate this imaginative process, we introduce Visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Visual-RAG), a framework that generates animal art directly from natural silhouettes. Our method retrieves structurally similar animal shapes from a curated corpus of 28,586 high-quality silhouettes and uses them as reference exemplars to guide diffusion-based generation with ControlNet and IP-Adapter. Ablation studies confirm that shape Context with RANSAC provides the most accurate alignment, while removing shape standardization reduces the inlier ratio to just 13.4\%, underscoring the importance of structural fidelity in Visual-RAG. A user study with 12 participants evaluated the outputs in terms of aesthetics, silhouette fidelity, and overall impression. Results reveal that while Visual-RAG provides plausible interpretations, challenges remain in achieving high perceptual impact. This work lays the foundation for computational pareidolia, showing how machines can contribute to the early stages of imaginative discovery.

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

Uncertainty Decomposition for Clarification Seeking in LLM Agents

Recent position papers argue that the classical aleatoric/epistemic uncertainty framework is insufficient for interactive large language model (LLM) agents and call for underspecification-aware, decomposed, and communicable uncertainty representations that can unlock new agent capabilities such as proactive clarification seeking and shared mental-model building. Practical deployment constraints – black-box APIs, interactive latency budgets, and the absence of labeled trajectories – rule out logprob-based, multi-sampling, and training-based methods, leaving prompt-based estimation as the most viable family for surfacing such signals at deployment time. We answer this call with a simple prompt-based decomposition that separates action confidence from request uncertainty (u), enabling the agent to ask for clarification when the task specification is ambiguous. To evaluate it, we introduce two clarification-augmented benchmarks (WebShop-Clarification and ALFWorld-Clarification) in which 50% of tasks are deliberately underspecified, and systematically compare the proposed decomposition against ReAct+UE and Uncertainty-Aware Memory (UAM) across five LLM backbones (GPT-5.1, DeepSeek-v3.2-exp, GLM-4.7, Qwen3.5-35B, GPT-OSS-120B) on these variants together with the standard WebShop, ALFWorld, and REAL benchmarks for fault detection. Averaged across the five backbones, the proposed decomposition improves clarification F1 on ALFWorld-Clarification by 73% over ReAct+UE and by 36% over UAM, and leads clarification F1 on every backbone on WebShop-Clarification and on four of five backbones on ALFWorld-Clarification, indicating that the gains generalize beyond a single LLM.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Synthetic Resonance: A Framework for Growth-Oriented Human-AI Relationships

arXiv:2606.18265v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As human relationships with artificial intelligence systems become increasingly frequent and sustained, existing language and theory fail to accurately capture the nature of these affiliations. Common descriptors such as mutual understanding, connection, or friendship risk anthropomorphizing systems that lack subjective experience, while dominant frameworks tend to reduce AI to either a tool or a threat. In this paper, I introduce the concept of synthetic resonance as an integrative framework for understanding human-AI relationships. Synthetic resonance describes how relationships humans define as meaningful can emerge between a human and an AI system without the need to attribute shared feelings or mutual awareness. I argue that synthetic resonance is best understood as a structured, dynamic pattern of interaction that can produce a sense of relationship without the presence of a second experiencing subject. By clarifying this distinction, the concept of synthetic resonance offers a more precise way of conceptualizing human-AI relationships and highlights their potential value and ethical implications. I also call for more research that tests the processes and outcomes of synthetic resonance.

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

Elastic ODYN: Differentiable Optimization for Infeasible Control and Learning in Robotics

arXiv:2606.16564v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robotic systems routinely encounter conflicting objectives, modeling errors, and degenerate contact conditions that render quadratic programs (QPs) infeasible. Yet most optimization solvers and differentiable QP layers assume feasibility, leading to numerical failures, unstable gradients, or solver breakdown when constraints cannot be simultaneously satisfied. We present Elastic ODYN, a primal–dual non-interior-point QP solver that handles infeasibility through smooth squared-$\ell_2$ elastic relaxations. The resulting formulation remains well posed under ill-conditioning and degeneracy, supports warm starting, and converges to closest-to-feasible solutions when no feasible point exists. A lightweight refinement stage recovers physically meaningful dual variables from the elastic solution. Building on this framework, we develop Elastic OdynLayer, a differentiable QP layer with stable gradients under infeasibility, and Elastic OdynSQP, an infeasibility-aware SQP method that resolves inconsistent subproblems and intrinsically infeasible optimal control tasks through selective constraint relaxation. We evaluate the framework on benchmark QPs, singular contact mechanics, differentiable parameter identification, and quadrupedal and humanoid trajectory optimization. Across all settings, Elastic ODYN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art elastic QP solvers in robustness, warm-start performance, and convergence reliability, enabling optimization, simulation, control, and learning beyond the feasibility assumptions of existing methods.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Seeing Through Occlusion: Deterministic Arm Kinematic Correction for Robot Teleoperation

Markerless, single-RGB-D-camera motion capture provides a low-cost and non-invasive alternative to conventional marker-based systems for robot teleoperation; however, depth estimation often degrades in the presence of self-occlusion, particularly during upper-limb motion. This paper presents an Arm Kinematic Correction (AKC) method that improves depth estimation by enforcing geometric constraints based on constant arm lengths. The proposed approach reconstructs occluded joint depths by leveraging wrist positions and predefined arm lengths via a deterministic formulation based on the Pythagorean theorem, thereby avoiding the need for complex probabilistic modeling or parameter tuning. Experimental validation against a Vicon reference system demonstrates reliable performance for both static and dynamic joint motions, evaluated using root-mean-square error (RMSE) and Pearson correlation. Furthermore, motion-mapping teleoperation is successfully demonstrated in both simulated and physical robot environments. The results show that AKC enhances robustness and preserves anatomical consistency under long-duration, severe self-occlusion, even when paired with less reliable temporal filters, highlighting its practicality for real-time applications such as robot teleoperation and human-robot interaction.

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

DemoDiffusion: One-Shot Human Imitation using pre-trained Diffusion Policy

arXiv:2506.20668v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose DemoDiffusion, a simple method for enabling robots to perform manipulation tasks by imitating a single human demonstration, without requiring task-specific training or paired human-robot data. Our approach is based on two insights. First, the hand motion in a human demonstration provides a useful prior for the robot's end-effector trajectory, which we can convert into a rough open-loop robot motion trajectory via kinematic retargeting. Second, while this retargeted motion captures the overall structure of the task, it may not align well with plausible robot actions in-context. To address this, we leverage a pre-trained generalist diffusion policy to modify the trajectory, ensuring it both follows the human motion and remains within the distribution of plausible robot actions. Unlike approaches based on online reinforcement learning or paired human-robot data, our method enables robust adaptation to new tasks and scenes with minimal effort. In real-world experiments across 8 diverse manipulation tasks, DemoDiffusion achieves 83.8\% average success rate, compared to 13.8\% for the pre-trained policy and 52.5\% for kinematic retargeting, succeeding even on tasks where the pre-trained generalist policy fails entirely. Project page: https://demodiffusion.github.io/