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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

QoS Improvement in Multi User Cellular-Symbiotic Radio Network Assisted by Active-STAR-RIS

arXiv:2401.08301v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this article, we employ active simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (ASRIS) to enhance the quality of 6G cellular network services. The network integrates commensal symbiotic radio (CSR) subsystems to facilitate communication between passive Internet of Things (IoT) users and active users, referred to as symbiotic backscatter devices (SBDs) and symbiotic user equipments (SUEs), respectively. Since the SBDs are passive, transmitting information to the SUEs poses significant challenges. To overcome this challenge, we harness the capabilities of massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) antennas within the base station (BS) to relay the information transmitted by SBDs with greater power. This scheme uses the non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technique for multiple access among all users, and potential interferences are eliminated using successive interference cancellation (SIC). The primary objective is to maximize the throughput between SBDs and SUEs. To achieve this, we formulate an optimization problem involving variables such as active beamforming coefficients at the BS and ASRIS, phase adjustments of ASRIS, and scheduling parameters between CSR and cellular networks. To solve this optimization problem, we used three deep reinforcement learning (DRL) methods: proximal policy optimization (PPO), twin delayed deep deterministic policy gradient (TD3), and asynchronous advantage actor critic (A3C). These methods were simulated, and the results demonstrate that A3C, TD3, and PPO have the best convergence speeds and achieve the highest increases in network throughput, respectively. Finally, the proposed scheme was evaluated using passive simultaneously transmitting and reflecting RIS (STAR-RIS), which demonstrated poorer performance compared to ASRIS.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

We Need to Rethink Benchmarking in Anomaly Detection

arXiv:2507.15584v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Despite the continuous proposal of new anomaly detection algorithms and extensive benchmarking efforts, progress seems to stagnate, with only minor performance differences between established baselines and new algorithms. In this position paper, we argue that this stagnation is due to limitations in how we evaluate anomaly detection algorithms. In current benchmarks, a trivial algorithm that only checks for extreme values in individual features performs competitively with state-of-the-art deep learning methods, despite failing on simple cases such as anomalies within an annulus of normal points. Moreover, existing benchmarks do not adequately reflect the diversity of anomaly detection applications, making it difficult for practitioners to reliably select algorithms for their applications. Consequently, we need to rethink benchmarking in anomaly detection. In our opinion, anomaly detection should be studied using scenarios that group applications sharing relevant characteristics, defined through a common taxonomy. Benchmarking within scenarios enables scenario-specific choices for preprocessing, metrics, and model selection, clarifying which advances transfer across similar applications and providing practitioners with reliable guidance for their specific contexts.

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

LangMAP: A Language-Adaptive Approach to Tokenization

Language-specific tokenizers improve tokenization quality and the downstream performance of models on those languages. However, using such a tokenizer comes at a cost: either a new model must be trained from scratch, or the vocabulary of an existing pretrained model must be adapted. We propose Language-adaptive Maximum a Posteriori (LangMAP) Tokenization, a tokenization scheme that extends the UnigramLM algorithm to the multilingual setting, producing language-specific tokenization from a single shared vocabulary. Notably, LangMAP can be used when training a multilingual language model from scratch or to adapt a pretrained model's tokenizer to individual languages without changing its vocabulary. While language labels are required at training time, a key feature of the algorithm is that it then performs language-specific tokenization at inference without knowledge of the input's language. Across 14 open-source tokenizers, 9 natural languages, and 9 programming languages, LangMAP improves morphological boundary alignment and, for all coding languages tested, alignment with abstract syntax tree (AST) leaf boundaries. In fine-tuning experiments, results are mixed: LangMAP improves target-language grammatical acceptability (MultiBLiMP) on the languages tested; its benefits are less consistent on knowledge-related tasks (Global-PIQA, Belebele).

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Reward-SQL: Boosting Text-to-SQL via Stepwise Execution-Aware Reasoning and Process-Supervised Rewards

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) trained with reinforcement learning (RL) have improved Text-to-SQL performance. However, RL-based approaches still struggle with complex queries due to two key limitations: insufficient stepwise execution-aware reasoning grounded in database feedback, and the lack of process-level rewards for guiding reasoning optimization. To address these issues, we propose CoCTE, a divide-and-conquer and execution-aware reasoning framework that progressively composes SQL queries through intermediate view validation and structured Common Table Expressions (CTEs), improving both accuracy and interpretability. To realize a CoCTE reasoning process, we develop Reward-SQL, a unified approach with three stages: (1) model initialization, which equips LLMs with structured CoCTE reasoning capabilities; (2) process reward design, which delivers fine-grained, execution-aware supervision; and (3) process-supervised RL and inference, which integrates process rewards into training and guides the inference stage by process rewards. This paper addresses the core challenges in Reward-SQL and makes the following contributions. We introduce a process reward model (PRM) that combines execution-aware trajectory scoring with entropy-based step weighting, providing dense and interpretable supervision across reasoning steps. We integrate PRM into both RL training and inference stages, stabilizing optimization and improving trajectory exploration with process-level signals. Experiments show that Reward-SQL significantly outperforms baselines with comparable model sizes, and exhibits strong cross-domain generalization.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Effective Gaussian Management for High-fidelity Object Reconstruction

This paper proposes an effective Gaussian management framework for high-fidelity scene reconstruction of both appearance and geometry. Unlike recent Gaussian Splatting (GS) pipelines that treat all primitives uniformly during optimization, our framework explicitly manages the attribute activation, representation and pruning of Gaussian. Specifically, our framework first introduces GauSep, a novel densification strategy that selectively activates Gaussian color or normal attributes to alleviate destructive gradient conflicts arising from dual supervision. We further propose GauRep, an adaptive Gaussian representation that dynamically adjusts spherical harmonics (SHs) orders and performs task-decoupled pruning to reduce redundancy at both the individual and global levels. To provide reliable geometric supervision for above mangement process, we additionally introduce CoRe, an regularized surface reconstruction module that distills robust normal fields from an SDF branch to the Gaussian representation through a confidence mechanism. Notably, the proposed Gaussian management is compatible with various reconstruction architectures and can be seamlessly integrated to improve performance while reducing size of the model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves superior or comparable performance in appearance and geometry reconstruction compared with state-of-the-art methods, while using significantly fewer parameters.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

M4FC: a Multimodal, Multilingual, Multicultural, Multitask Real-World Fact-Checking Dataset

Existing real-world datasets for multimodal fact-checking have multiple limitations: they contain few instances, cover on only one or two languages, focus only on one task, or rely on external news article sets for sourcing true claims. To address these shortcomings, we introduce M4FC, a new real-world dataset comprising 4,982 images paired with 6,980 claims. The images, verified by professional fact-checkers from 22 organizations, represent a diverse range of cultural and geographic contexts. Each claim is available in one or two out of ten languages. M4FC spans six multimodal fact-checking tasks: visual claim extraction, claimant intent prediction, fake image detection, image contextualization, location verification, and verdict prediction. We provide baseline results for all tasks and analyze how combining intermediate tasks affects verdict prediction performance. We make our dataset and code publicly available.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

LearnOpt: Recovering the Latent Cognitive Structure of Standardized Examinations via Knowledge Graphs and Constrained Optimization

arXiv:2606.15349v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Standardized examinations are typically treated as uniform syllabus coverage problems. We argue they are better understood as adversarial systems with stable latent cognitive structures diverging systematically from official syllabi. We introduce LearnOpt, which recovers this structure from historical question papers and generates personalized, time-bounded study plans. Applied to nine years of NEET questions (2016-2024, n=1,496), LearnOpt builds an exam knowledge graph from LLM-tagged questions, extracts a five-category latent skill distribution, and formulates study planning as a knapsack-variant optimization over prerequisite-aware subgraphs with Bayesian Knowledge Tracing. Central finding: NEET's latent skill distribution is stable within a syllabus regime (consecutive-year KL divergence 0.004-0.032 for 2016-2021, non-significant under permutation testing) but shifts significantly with NCERT's 2023 syllabus rationalization: pooling 2016-2021 (n=1,072) vs 2023-2024 (n=392) gives KL=0.040 (p=0.0005), with Elimination/Negation questions rising from ~20-29% to ~31-35%. Latent structure, while not permanently stationary, is piecewise stable, with shifts detectable and attributable to curricular events. Within either regime, subject predicts skill profile more strongly than year. An optimization evaluation, using one real and two synthetic mastery profiles, shows the skill-weighted objective produces a modest but real reordering of recommended topics over a mastery-conditioned frequency baseline. Applying the pipeline to JEE Advanced reveals a profile dominated by Multi-concept Integration (80.9% vs. 33.3% for NEET), with a JEE-vs-NEET divergence (KL=0.505) exceeding NEET's largest cross-subject divergence: exam tier shapes latent cognitive structure more than subject, which shapes it more than time within a regime. Code, knowledge graph, and annotated dataset are released publicly.

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

Agentic Electronic Design Automation: A Handoff Perspective

arXiv:2606.19795v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Electronic design automation (EDA) is inherently multi-stage and handoff-heavy. Design artifacts, flow scripts, and engineering decisions cross tool, session, and organizational boundaries before final implementation, signoff, or release. Each transfer carries explicit and implicit requirements that may not be fully captured by stage-local checks. LLM-based agents now invoke EDA tools directly, embed retrieved knowledge in executable scripts, and hand off state across sessions and stages. Once their outputs condition downstream engineering decisions, the transferred object must satisfy a handoff contract and meet the assumptions of its next consumer. This survey introduces handoff validity as its organizing principle. A handoff is valid when the transferred object satisfies the consumer's acceptance conditions and carries sufficient context, evidence, and provenance for downstream use. We review 82 systems and classify them into three boundary classes. Stage-Bound systems establish validity within a single EDA stage or bounded verification task. Flow-Bound systems preserve coherent workflow state across tools, invocations, and sessions. Organization-Bound systems maintain source grounding, provenance, scope, and admissibility across knowledge and authority boundaries. For each class, we analyze handoff contracts, handoff objects, coordination mechanisms, and open questions. These analyses motivate a five-layer EDA agent communication protocol (EACP), covering the agent discovery, agent message, tool invocation, workflow orchestration, and security and IP protocols. We aim to provide a common vocabulary and research agenda for trustworthy agentic EDA.

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

NTS-CoT: Mitigating Hallucinations in LLM-based News Timeline Summarization with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

The rapid updates of online news make tracking event developments challenging, highlighting the need for timeline summarization (TLS). Hallucinations, where LLM-generated content deviates from source news, still remain a critical issue in LLM-based TLS and are not well studied in existing works. To bridge this gap, we identify two primary types of hallucinations: unfaithful content during news summarization and information omission in date-event summarization. Then, we propose NTS-CoT, a novel framework that leverages Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to mitigate hallucinations in TLS. The framework consists of three key modules: i) Element-CoT to capture essential news elements for faithful summarization, ii) Date Selection to combine temporal saliency and event prominence for timestamp selection, and iii) Causal-CoT to infer causal relationships and reduce omissions in date-event summarization. Extensive experiments, including quantitative analysis on three TLS benchmarks and human evaluation, demonstrate that NTS-CoT outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, effectively mitigating hallucinations and improving LLM-based TLS performance. Our source code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/NTS-CoT .

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Plan, Don't Pose: Long Composite Motion Generation with Text-Aligned BFM

arXiv:2605.29906v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Text-to-motion (T2M) generation has broad applications in character animation, virtual avatars, and human-robot interaction. Existing methods typically generate pose trajectories or motion tokens directly from language, forcing a single model to handle semantic interpretation, long-horizon structure, and low-level physical realization. This coupling makes them costly and often unreliable for long, compositional, or semantically dense prompts. We propose Text2BFM, the first framework that aligns natural language with pretrained Behavioral Foundation Models (BFMs) for T2M generation without relying on heavy end-to-end motion generators. Text2BFM operates in the latent policy space of a frozen BFM, using it as an executable motion prior. A text-aligned variational behavioral bottleneck compresses BFM policy-latent sequences into compact motion representations that are compatible with language and preserve long-horizon behavioral structure. Generation is performed in this compact behavioral manifold with a lightweight conditional generator, and the resulting latent encoded behaviors are decoded into policy latents that drive the pretrained frozen BFM. By decoupling semantic planning from motion execution, Text2BFM achieves efficient, robust T2M generation and strong performance on long, compositional textual descriptions.

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

Dual-Uncertainty Guided Policy Learning for Multimodal Reasoning

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has advanced reasoning capabilities in multimodal large language models. However, existing methods typically treat visual inputs as deterministic, overlooking the perceptual ambiguity inherent to the visual modality. Consequently, they fail to distinguish whether a model's uncertainty stems from complex reasoning or ambiguous perception, preventing the targeted allocation of exploration or learning signals. To address this gap, we introduce DUPL, a dual-uncertainty guided policy learning approach for multimodal RLVR that quantifies and leverages both perceptual uncertainty (via symmetric KL divergence) and output uncertainty (via policy entropy) to guide policy updates. By establishing an uncertainty-driven feedback loop and employing a dynamic branch prioritization mechanism, DUPL recalibrates the policy advantage to focus learning on states with high perceptual or decisional ambiguity, enabling effective targeted exploration beyond passive data augmentation. Evaluated on diverse multimodal reasoning benchmarks spanning mathematical and general domains, DUPL achieves solid gains. It improves Qwen2.5-VL accuracy by up to $12.3%$ (3B) and $7.9%$ (7B), and Qwen3-VL-Instruct by up to $10.7%$ (4B) and $12.4%$ (8B), consistently outperforming GRPO, while seamlessly generalizing to alternative algorithms (DAPO, $+6.5%$ avg) and architectures (LLaVA-OneVision-1.5, $+4.7%$ avg). These results demonstrate that DUPL is an effective and generalizable approach for multimodal RLVR.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

SciHorizon-GENE: Benchmarking LLM for Life Sciences Inference from Gene Knowledge to Functional Understanding

Large language models (LLMs) have shown growing promise in biomedical research, particularly for knowledge-driven interpretation tasks. However, their ability to reliably reason from gene-level knowledge to functional understanding, a core requirement for knowledge-enhanced cell atlas interpretation, remains largely underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce SciHorizon-GENE, a large-scale gene-centric benchmark constructed from authoritative biological databases. The benchmark integrates curated knowledge for over 190K human genes and comprises more than 540K questions covering diverse gene-to-function reasoning scenarios relevant to cell type annotation, functional interpretation, and mechanism-oriented analysis. Motivated by behavioral patterns observed in preliminary examinations, SciHorizon-GENE evaluates LLMs along four biologically critical perspectives: research attention sensitivity, hallucination tendency, answer completeness, and literature influence, explicitly targeting failure modes that limit the safe adoption of LLMs in biological interpretation pipelines. We systematically evaluate a wide range of state-of-the-art general-purpose and biomedical LLMs, revealing substantial heterogeneity in gene-level reasoning capabilities and persistent challenges in generating faithful, complete, and literature-grounded functional interpretations. Our benchmark establishes a systematic foundation for analyzing LLM behavior at the gene scale and offers insights for model selection and development, with direct relevance to knowledge-enhanced biological interpretation.

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

A Pragmatic VLA Foundation Model

Offering great potential in robotic manipulation, a capable Vision-Language-Action (VLA) foundation model is expected to faithfully generalize across tasks and platforms while ensuring cost efficiency (e.g., data and GPU hours required for adaptation). To this end, we develop LingBot-VLA with around 20,000 hours of real-world data from 9 popular dual-arm robot configurations. Through a systematic assessment on 3 robotic platforms, each completing 100 tasks with 130 post-training episodes per task, our model achieves clear superiority over competitors, showcasing its strong performance and broad generalizability. We have also built an efficient codebase, which delivers a throughput of 261 samples per second with an 8-GPU training setup, representing a 1.5~2.8$\times$ (depending on the relied VLM base model) speedup over existing VLA-oriented codebases. The above features ensure that our model is well-suited for real-world deployment. To advance the field of robot learning, we provide open access to the code, base model, and benchmark data, with a focus on enabling more challenging tasks and promoting sound evaluation standards.

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

What Drives Test-Time Adaptation for CLIP? A Controlled Empirical Study from an Update Perspective

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) such as CLIP have become a standard backbone for open-vocabulary recognition, yet their zero-shot predictions remain vulnerable to distribution shifts encountered at deployment. Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) has recently been extended to CLIP as a lightweight solution, leading to a rapidly growing body of TTA4CLIP methods. However, empirical progress in this area has largely outpaced our understanding of what truly drives adaptation, where their gains originate, and under which shifts they remain reliable. In this paper, we take a step back from the pursuit of state-of-the-art accuracy and conduct a systematic controlled study of TTA4CLIP. We first organize existing methods into three unified paradigms according to what is updated at test time. We then introduce TTABC, an open-source TTA Benchmark for CLIP, which standardizes evaluation protocols and integrates more than 20 representative methods. Our controlled empirical analysis focuses on three key areas. First, we determine the driving factors in parameter-based methods, revealing that adaptation gains are primarily driven by test-time evidence and reliable proxies rather than heavy optimization. Second, we explore evidence utilization beyond heavy parameter tuning, showing that competitive and efficient performance can be achieved through cross- or current-sample evidence and lightweight prototype updates. Finally, we demonstrate that there is no silver bullet for TTA: no single adaptation paradigm is universally optimal, and the preferred paradigm depends on the nature of shift. We hope our benchmark and study provide a clearer understanding of the current TTA4CLIP landscape and establish a foundation for further research.

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

Layer-Resolved Optimal Transport for Hallucination Detection in NMT and Abstractive Summarization

Optimal transport (OT) has been shown to detect hallucinations in neural machine translation (NMT) by measuring the geometric distance between cross-attention distributions and a reference distribution, without any supervision. We extend this analysis to all six decoder layers of the Fairseq DE-EN model ($N=3{,}414$), showing that Wass-to-Unif and Wass-to-Data are complementary detectors specialised across hallucination types, that detection is concentrated in layers L1–L4 with L5 anti-predictive for subtler types, and that hallucinated translations lack the exploratory attention phase present in correct translations from the first decoding step. We further evaluate whether the geometric signal transfers to abstractive summarization faithfulness detection: our unsupervised OT detector on AggreFact ($N=1{,}116$) achieves $57.2\%$/$57.6\%$ balanced accuracy on CNN/XSum – above chance but substantially below supervised MiniCheck-Flan-T5-L($69.9\%$/$74.3\%$). This gap is principled: unlike NMT hallucinations, unfaithful summaries can attend correctly to source tokens while misrepresenting their content, a failure mode invisible to concentration-based OT metrics by construction. Structural experiments on T5-base confirm consistent decoder organisation across depth, with Layer~3 showing peak concentration and Layer~12 being most critical for generation quality. Together, the results establish OT on cross-attention as a reliable detector when the failure mode is source disengagement, a principled interpretability tool regardless of task, and fundamentally limited when faithfulness failures occur downstream of attention.

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

Chronological Thinking in Full-Duplex Spoken Dialogue Language Models

Recent advances in spoken dialogue language models (SDLMs) reflect growing interest in shifting from turn-based to full-duplex systems, where the models continuously perceive user speech streams while generating responses. This simultaneous listening and speaking design enables real-time interaction and the agent can handle dynamic conversational behaviors like user barge-in. However, during the listening phase, existing systems keep the agent idle by repeatedly predicting the silence token, which departs from human behavior: we usually engage in lightweight thinking during conversation rather than remaining absent-minded. Inspired by this, we propose Chronological Thinking, an on-the-fly conversational thinking mechanism that aims to improve response quality in full-duplex SDLMs. Specifically, chronological thinking presents a paradigm shift from conventional LLM thinking approaches, such as Chain-of-Thought, purpose-built for streaming acoustic input. (1) Strictly causal: the agent reasons incrementally while listening, updating internal hypotheses only from past audio with no lookahead. (2) No additional latency: reasoning is amortized during the listening window; once the user stops speaking, the agent halts thinking and begins speaking without further delay. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of chronological thinking through both objective metrics and human evaluations show consistent improvements in response quality. Furthermore, chronological thinking robustly handles conversational dynamics and attains competitive performance on full-duplex interaction metrics.

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

Aerial-ground LiDAR place recognition with patch-level self-supervised learning and expanded reciprocal re-ranking

LiDAR place recognition determines one's position on a prior point cloud map. The most studied ground-level LiDAR place recognition suffers from pre-visit requirements, incomplete coverage, and limited perspectives. Using pre-acquired, full-coverage Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) data as an aerial prior map overcomes these drawbacks, making cross-view place recognition necessary and advantageous. However, aerial-ground LiDAR place recognition faces significant challenges, including the domain gap between aerial and ground point clouds, and false positives during initial retrieval. To address these challenges, we present a novel retrieval and re-ranking framework for aerial-ground LiDAR place recognition. Based on the priors that neighboring point cloud patches share similar semantics with anchor patch, our retrieval network introduces patch-level self-supervised learning modules at multiple scales and integrates with scene-level learning to improve global feature discriminativeness between aerial and ground point clouds. Furthermore, leveraging the structured spatial distribution of ALS point clouds, we introduce an Expanded Reciprocal (ER) re-ranking algorithm to exploit neighborhood information maximally and refine each feature based on neighbor features, which are then used to update the similarity matrix for final ranking. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our retrieval network outperforms existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, achieving a 9.8\% improvement in average Recall@1 and a 3.2\% improvement in average Recall@1\% on the CS-Urban-Scenes, while also showing the best performance on the CS-Campus3D dataset. Additionally, our ER re-ranking algorithm further boosts the average Recall@1 by 4.9\% on CS-Campus3D and 10.2\% on CS-Urban-Scenes without additional training.

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

Efficient Financial Language Understanding via Distillation with Synthetic Data

Large instruction-following models are powerful but costly to deploy, particularly in finance, where labelled data are limited by confidentiality and expert annotation cost. We present an efficient framework for financial sentiment analysis through distillation with synthetic data, transferring knowledge from a large instruction-tuned teacher to compact student models. The framework is designed for low-resource conditions, where a small set of real examples are collected and labelled by hand. The framework then clusters the examples and uses the clusters to select seeds for generating synthetic examples via structured few-shot prompting. Experiments show that clustering-based seed selection yields more representative synthetic data than random sampling, enabling compact models to achieve strong performance with minimal supervision. Notably, on a more complex and noisy text domain, the compact model trained on the complete synthetic-seed corpus even outperforms the teacher model, while remaining competitive on formal text. The framework provides a practical route toward resource-efficient domain adaptation in financial NLP with minimal human labelling effort.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Wigner Cat Phases: A finely tunable system for exploring the transition to quantum chaos

Authors:

arXiv:2512.22169v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A quantum mechanical setting consisting of a frozen qubit composed with a fully thermalized chaotic system of N states is proposed, with potential relevance to quantum control. Observing the states of the composed system selectively retaining the states leads to the observation of novel localization in the subsystem. At a tuning parameter of 1.0, implying no selection, the system exhibits Wigner-Dyson level spacing statistics, indicative of quantum chaos. As the tuning parameter is reduced and selection occurs at a cutoff, the nearest-neighbor level spacing distribution develops heavier tails, a signature of suppressed spectral mixing and the emergence of non-thermal dynamics. In these regimes, the eigendensity develops a pronounced "cat-ears" structure, reflecting the formation of spatially localized bimodal eigenstates. These topological features persist without transitioning to Poisson statistics, indicating a transition from quantum chaos to a non-thermal, novel many-body localized (MBL) regime-referred to as Wigner Cat Phases. The proposed mixed random matrix ensemble offers a practical probe for sustaining this novel quantum localization setting. Results from our rigorous spectral statistics analysis show how "cat-ears" form in spectral densities based on the degree of selection or disorder and indicate that gap ratio statistics must be used with caution in detecting the full integrable limit due to the possibility of heavy-tailed Wigner-Dyson distributions.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Frozen Multimodal Embeddings for Personality and Cognitive Ability Assessment in Asynchronous Video Interviews

Predicting psychological traits from asynchronous video interviews (AVIs) is a challenging multimodal learning problem because labeled datasets are limited while each response contains high-dimensional visual, acoustic, and verbal signals. This paper presents our solution for the ACM Multimedia AVI Challenge 2026, which evaluates two tasks: Track~1 predicts self-reported HEXACO personality traits from personality-related interview responses, and Track~2 classifies cognitive ability levels from structured AVI responses. We treat the problem as a small-sample representation learning task. Instead of fine-tuning large pretrained models, we use frozen multimodal encoders, including CLIP for visual features, Whisper for acoustic features and transcripts, and RoBERTa, E5, and DeBERTaV3 for textual representations, followed by low-capacity downstream models. For Track~1, our trait-specific regression and late-fusion system achieves an average validation MSE of 0.2696, improving over the official baseline of 0.3334. Ablation results show a three-step improvement from a global model (0.3189), to per-trait modeling (0.2871), to per-trait late fusion (0.2696), corresponding to a 19.1\% relative MSE reduction over the official baseline. For Track~2, a compact subject-attribute baseline reaches 0.5781 accuracy, while our multimodal ensemble reaches 0.5313, both above the official baseline of 0.4062. We interpret this result as evidence of possible subject-attribute shortcuts in the validation split rather than robust cognitive inference from AVI content. Overall, our findings suggest that AVI-based psychological assessment benefits from trait-specific multimodal modeling, but cognitive ability prediction requires careful control of dataset shortcuts.

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

RetailBench: Benchmarking long horizon reasoning and coherent decision making of LLM agents in realistic retail environments

arXiv:2606.15862v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents have made rapid progress on short-horizon, well-scoped tasks, yet their ability to sustain coherent decisions in dynamic long-horizon environments remains uncertain. We introduce RetailBench, a data-grounded simulation benchmark for evaluating tool-using LLM agents in single-store supermarket operation. RetailBench models retail management as a partially observable decision process and is designed to support thousand-day-scale simulations. In this environment, agents must manage pricing, replenishment, supplier selection, shelf assortment, inventory aging, customer feedback, external events, and cash-flow constraints. We evaluate seven contemporary LLMs under representative agent frameworks over a 180-day evaluation horizon and compare them with a privileged oracle policy. Results show substantial variation across models: only a small subset survives the full evaluation horizon, and even the strongest LLM runs remain substantially behind the oracle policy in final net worth and sales outcomes. Behavioral analysis attributes these gaps to incomplete evidence acquisition, surface-level decision making, and the lack of a consistent long-horizon policy. RetailBench provides a controlled testbed for studying reliable autonomy in economically grounded long-horizon decision-making.

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

Prior-guided Fusion of Multimodal Features for Change Detection from Optical-SAR Images

Multimodal change detection (MMCD) identifies changed areas in multimodal remote sensing data, demonstrating significant application value in land use monitoring and urban sustainable development. However, literature MMCD approaches exhibit limitations in both cross-modal interaction and exploiting modality-specific characteristics. This leads to insufficient modeling of fine-grained change information, thus hindering the precise detection of semantic changes. To address these problems, we propose STSF-Net, a framework designed for MMCD between optical and SAR images. STSF-Net jointly models modality-specific and spatio-temporal common features to enhance change representations. Specifically, modality-specific features are exploited to capture genuine semantic change signals, while spatio-temporal common features are embedded to suppress pseudo-changes caused by differences in imaging mechanisms. Furthermore, we introduce an optical and SAR feature fusion strategy that adaptively adjusts multimodal feature importance based on semantic priors obtained from visual foundation models. Finally, we introduce the novel Delta-SN6 dataset, the first openly-accessible multiclass MMCD benchmark consisting of very-high-resolution fully polarimetric SAR and optical images. Experimental results on Delta-SN6, BRIGHT, and Wuhan datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art by 3.21%, 0.87%, and 1.32% in mIoU, respectively.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

A New Multi-Domain Benchmark for Micro-Action Recognition and Detection

Micro-actions are short-duration, low-amplitude subtle body movements at the whole-body level that can reveal latent intentions, involuntary reactions, and fine-grained affective changes. Our previous MA-52 benchmark has provided an important foundation for micro-action recognition, but it remains limited in scale, scene diversity, task coverage, and evaluation protocols. To advance micro-action analysis toward more realistic and comprehensive settings, we introduce MMA-82, a large-scale multi-domain extension of MA-52. MMA-82 expands the label space from 52 to 82 fine-grained micro-action categories and covers four distinct domains, including laboratory interviews, street interviews, psychiatric patient interviews, and emotion-rich television videos, resulting in 77,856 annotated instances from 454 subjects. Built upon MMA-82, we establish two core tasks: Micro-Action Recognition and Multi-label Micro-Action Detection. For recognition, we further define in-domain and cross-domain protocols, including few-shot and zero-shot settings, to evaluate model robustness, transferability, and generalization. Extensive experiments show that current methods still struggle with realistic micro-action understanding, especially under domain shift, long-tailed category distributions, and complex temporal localization. Beyond benchmarking, we investigate the relationship between micro-actions and emotion, showing that micro-actions are strongly associated with emotional states and provide complementary cues to facial micro-expressions for improved emotion recognition. These results demonstrate that MMA-82 serves as a comprehensive and challenging benchmark for realistic micro-action analysis and a valuable resource for human-centered AI. MMA-82 is available at https://github.com/LpyNow/MMA-82.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

The Acceptability of Three Co-Created Peer Support Interventions for People Living with Leprosy Reactions in Indonesia: A Mixed-Methods Pilot Study

Background: Leprosy reactions (LR) are immune-mediated complications associated with disability, emotional distress, and social isolation. We identified a gap in affected-individual-informed interventions that aim to improve the management of LR in healthcare settings. To address this gap, we assessed the acceptability of three peer-support interventions co-created with people affected by LR in Indonesia. Methods: Using an interactive learning and action approach, we co-created peer counselling, telesupport groups, and participatory video interventions which were piloted in an urban hospital and 13 rural community clinics. A mixed-methods design was applied with interviews, focus group discussions, and pre-post assessments involving four participant groups. Data were analyzed thematically using an acceptability framework. Results: One hundred participants were enrolled, and 92 completed the pilot intervention between November 2022 and July 2023. Qualitative findings showed that all interventions were acceptable. Peer counselling provided emotional reassurance through shared experiences and was perceived as trustworthy and supportive. Perceived burdens differed by setting, with time constraints in urban facilities and geographical barriers in rural clinics. Knowledge improved significantly among participants of peer counselling and telesupport groups in rural settings. Telesupport groups facilitated connection, information exchange, and continuity of care. Digital access and literacy limited participation for some, particularly in rural areas. The participatory video was perceived as reassuring and informative. Improvements in knowledge, attitude, practices, and mental well-being domain scores were observed among urban participants, but responses in rural settings showed less change. Participants and co-implementers reported increased self-efficacy, participants confidence to perform required behaviors within peer support interventions, with effects shaped by intervention and setting. Conclusions: The three co-created peer-support interventions were acceptable for individuals with LR in diverse healthcare settings. These outcomes highlight the importance and effectiveness of selective, and context-sensitive implementation of one or more peer-support modalities.