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

Prototyping an AI-powered Tool for Energy Efficiency in New Zealand Homes

arXiv:2509.05364v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Residential buildings contribute significantly to energy use, health outcomes, and carbon emissions. In New Zealand, housing quality has historically been poor, with inadequate insulation and inefficient heating contributing to widespread energy hardship. Recent reforms, including the Warmer Kiwi Homes program, Healthy Homes Standards, and H1 Building Code upgrades, have delivered health and comfort improvements, yet challenges persist. Many retrofits remain partial, data on household performance are limited, and decision-making support for homeowners is fragmented. This study presents the design and evaluation of an AI-powered decision-support tool for residential energy efficiency in New Zealand. The prototype, developed using Python and Streamlit, integrates data ingestion, anomaly detection, baseline modeling, and scenario simulation (e.g., LED retrofits, insulation upgrades) into a modular dashboard. Fifteen domain experts, including building scientists, consultants, and policy practitioners, tested the tool through semi-structured interviews. Results show strong usability (M = 4.3), high value of scenario outputs (M = 4.5), and positive perceptions of its potential to complement subsidy programs and regulatory frameworks. The tool demonstrates how AI can translate national policies into personalized, household-level guidance, bridging the gap between funding, standards, and practical decision-making. Its significance lies in offering a replicable framework for reducing energy hardship, improving health outcomes, and supporting climate goals. Future development should focus on carbon metrics, tariff modeling, integration with national datasets, and longitudinal trials to assess real-world adoption.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Squeezing Enhancement in Lossy Multi-Path Atom Interferometers

arXiv:2409.04091v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper explores the sensitivity gains afforded by spin-squeezed states in atom interferometry, in particular using Bragg diffraction. We introduce a generalised input-output formalism that accurately describes realistic, non-unitary interferometers, including losses due to velocity selectivity and scattering into undesired momentum states. This formalism is applied to evaluate the performance of one-axis twisted spin-squeezed states in improving phase sensitivity. Our results show that by carefully optimising the parameters of the Bragg beam splitters and controlling the degree of squeezing, it is possible to improve the sensitivity of the interferometer by several dB with respect to the standard quantum limit despite realistic levels of losses in light pulse operations. However, the analysis also highlights the challenges associated with achieving these improvements in practice, most notably the impact of finite temperature on the benefits of entanglement. The results suggest ways of optimising interferometric setups to exploit quantum entanglement under realistic conditions, thereby contributing to advances in precision metrology with atom interferometers.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Neural Phase Correlation

Authors:

Correspondence is fundamentally relational: it seeks the unknown transformation between two observations of a common scene, not the content of either. Yet the dominant learning-based methods do not represent the transformation as a first-class object in the architecture. They encode each image independently and let a learned similarity function or a deep decoder discover the mapping implicitly. Phase correlation is the canonical exception, measuring the inter-image relationship directly in the Fourier domain, but the rigidity of its fixed basis confines it to global translation. We introduce a learned generalization of phase correlation that lifts this restriction by learning the basis on which the transformation decomposes. The same algebraic primitive extends to dense non-rigid deformations and to unitary dynamics. On the ACDC cardiac-MRI benchmark the framework matches or exceeds prior published baselines on both registration directions. On CAMUS echocardiography it matches state-of-the-art without auxiliary scoring or adaptive-smoothness mechanisms. Applied to time-evolved wavefunction pairs of the 1-D quantum harmonic oscillator, the same framework recovers the Hermite-function eigenstates and the quantized energy levels of the unknown Hamiltonian from observation pairs alone.

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

From Frames to Temporal Graphs: In-Context Egocentric Action Recognition with Vision-Language Models

Action reasoning in egocentric video requires capturing fine-grained transitions of hand-object interactions, a task where general-purpose Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often struggle when operating directly on raw pixels. We propose to decouple visual perception from symbolic reasoning by converting videos into Temporal Action Graphs. In a multi-stage prompting pipeline, we first generate dense natural language narratives over short temporal windows as a semantic bottleneck, then formalize them into structured, open-vocabulary graph representations. On the EGTEA and Epic-Kitchens-100 datasets, the symbolic representation unlocks efficient in-context learning: few-shot graph demonstrations yield substantial accuracy gains over zero-shot frame and graph-based inference alike. Even in the zero-shot setting, graph-based reasoning remains competitive with pixel-based inference despite potential pretraining contamination favoring the latter. Across 11 open-weight VLMs from 6 model families ranging from 2B to 235B parameters, our findings indicate that current VLMs are more effective as symbolic reasoners than as direct visual observers. By projecting video into the language domain, we provide a scalable, fine-tuning-free alternative to end-to-end approaches that better leverages these models' latent reasoning strengths. The code will be made public.

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

Skill-Constrained Model Predictive Control for Resilient Manufacturing Supply Chains

arXiv:2606.17269v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In skill-constrained production-inventory systems, the qualified human capacity available tomorrow depends on training decisions made today: production requires certified workers, certifications decay unless maintained, and training consumes the same scarce worker hours that production needs now. We study a closed-loop skill-constrained model predictive controller that, at every shift, solves a finite-horizon mixed-integer program over production, inventory, backlog, and training, with binary predicted certification, hard production eligibility, and an interpretable terminal value that prices certified-capacity gaps at the horizon boundary; only the first-period action is applied before replanning. On synthetic, seed-controlled SkillChain-Gym scenarios - announced and surprise new-skill shocks, demand shocks, absenteeism, forecast- and availability-quality modes, capacity-boundary and training-rate sweeps, and negative controls - we evaluate the controller against production-only and maintenance-only ablations, static cross-training insurance plans, and a strong reactive heuristic, under an ex-ante locked configuration and paired statistics. The result is regime dependence, not superiority: no policy class dominates. Predictive control helps when skill or labor bottlenecks are forecastable early enough for training to complete; lean static insurance remains hard to beat under surprise shocks, near the demand-capacity boundary, and wherever pre-shock slack makes insurance cheap. Attribution ablations separate certification maintenance, re-acquisition of lapsed certifications, and greenfield skill acquisition. Forecastability, not adaptivity per se, decides when predictive control pays.

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

X-REFINE: XAI-based RElevance input-Filtering and archItecture fiNe-tuning for channel Estimation

arXiv:2602.22277v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: AI-native architectures are vital for 6G wireless communications. The black-box nature and high complexity of deep learning models employed in critical applications, such as channel estimation, limit their practical deployment. While perturbation-based eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) solutions offer input filtering, they often neglect internal structural optimization. We propose X-REFINE, an XAI-based framework for joint input-filtering and architecture fine-tuning. By utilizing a decomposition-based, sign-stabilized LRP epsilon rule, X-REFINE backpropagates predictions to derive high-resolution relevance scores for both subcarriers and hidden neurons. This enables a reliable optimization that identifies the most reliable model components. Simulation results demonstrate that X-REFINE achieves a superior performance-complexity-interpretability trade-off compared to the external perturbation-based XAI frameworks, significantly reducing computational complexity while maintaining robust bit error rate (BER) performance.

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

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

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

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

Time-multiplexed layer reuse for physical neural networks

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

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

On the Study of Biometric Spoofing Detection using Deep Learning

Biometric systems are increasingly deployed in security applications; however, they remain vulnerable to spoofing attacks, in which attackers exploit counterfeit biometric data to gain unauthorized access. This research evaluates the effectiveness of state-of-the-art machine learning models, MobileNetV2, DenseNet-121, Inception-v3, and Spoof Trace Disentanglement (STD) in detecting spoofing attacks within facial recognition systems. Using the CelebA-Spoof dataset, the study evaluates model effectiveness using metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 Score. Cross-dataset validation is carried out on the MSU-MFSD dataset to assess generalizability. The results show MobileNetV2 as the most efficient model, achieving 92% accuracy while balancing computational effectiveness, making it appropriate for real-life applications. Inception-v3 shows moderate robustness, while DenseNet-121 and STD struggle with generalization. The findings highlight the need for advances in domain adaptation and hybrid architectures to enhance biometric security systems.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Decoding Multimodal Cues: Unveiling the Implicit Meaning Behind Hateful Videos

Hateful videos have become prevalent on online platforms, highlighting an urgent need for effective detection. However, existing studies primarily focus on binary classification and fail to provide contextual rationales that reveal the implicit meanings behind these judgments, significantly undermining model explainability. To fill this gap, we aim to achieve explainable hateful video detection, enabling models to provide contextual rationales that integrate relevant evidence and logical reasoning alongside decisions. This approach can comprehensively enhance the understanding of video content and the explainability of the decision-making process. We first introduce two datasets, Ex-HateMM and Ex-ImpliHateVid, for explainable hateful video detection. Each dataset provides fine-grained annotations of multimodal harmful elements, along with contextual rationales. We then propose an Information Augmentation and Reasoning Enhancement (IARE) framework designed for explainable detection. The framework employs an information augmentation phase that leverages the multimodal chain-of-thought to integrate harmful elements, thereby enriching rationale evidence. Additionally, IARE incorporates a reasoning enhancement phase, in which Direct Preference Optimization guides the model toward correct reasoning paths and away from incorrect ones, thereby improving the logical coherence of its justifications. We conduct extensive experiments on the two datasets, comparing multiple baselines with our proposed IARE framework. The results demonstrate that IARE achieves state-of-the-art performance while also generating accurate rationales.

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

SuperThoughts: Reasoning Tokens in Superposition

Long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning improves LLM problem-solving but is computationally expensive due to sequential token generation. While recent works explore reasoning in continuous latent spaces to bypass discrete token generation, they often struggle with training stability and fail to scale to complex, long-horizon tasks due to lack of supervision signal. We propose SuperThoughts, which compresses pairs of consecutive CoT tokens into single latent representations and decodes two tokens per step via a lightweight Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) module. This preserves discrete token supervision at training time while doubling throughput at inference time. We finetune Qwen2.5-Math-1.5B-Instruct, Qwen2.5-Math-7B-Instruct, Qwen2.5-Math-14B-Instruct, and evaluate on MATH500, AMC, OlympiadBench, and GPQA-Diamond. With a confidence-based adaptive mechanism that falls back to standard decoding when uncertain, SuperThoughts achieves $\sim$20–30\% CoT length reduction while maintaining accuracy with minimal degradation (1-2 points accuracy drop on most tasks).

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

Context-Aware Feature-Fusion for Co-occurring Object Detection in Autonomous Driving

Object detection in autonomous driving requires precise localization and an inherent understanding of the relational context between co-occurring objects. In extremely complex heterogeneous environments rare classes, small-scale objects, and frequently appearing objects are difficult for standard object detection frameworks to handle. In this paper, we propose a novel framework called Context-Centric Feature Fusion (CCFF), which utilizes two attention-based modules, Local Context Fusion Module (LCFM) uses the RoI-to-RoI self-attention mechanism to resolve spatial interactions, mainly considering small and partially obscured objects, while Global Context Attention Module (GCAM) converts the co-occurrence of objects priors by pooling top-K RoI features into a global context attention token, avoiding the computational overhead of pixel-level global pooling. This fusion of local and object-centric global features yields contextualized embeddings that enhance classification results and co-occurring objects detection. Our method is evaluated on two datasets, Cityscapes and BDD100K which demonstrate significant improvement on relational consistency, achieving a Category-level Consistency Strategy (CCS) of 0.973 and 0.969, respectively. Furthermore, our approach produces substantial gains in small object detection (AP_S: 14.1%) and successfully recovers rare classes such as "Train" that are typically lost in large distributions. Our efficiency report shows that the framework processes images in real time with a 0.2 FPS overhead. The code is available at https://github.com/BinayKSingh/CCFF.

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

Neural ensemble Kalman filter: Data assimilation for compressible flows with shocks

arXiv:2602.23461v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Data assimilation (DA) for compressible flows with shocks is challenging because many classical DA methods generate spurious oscillations and nonphysical features near uncertain shocks. We focus here on the ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF). We show that the poor performance of the EnKF may be attributed to the bimodal forecast distribution that can arise in the vicinity of an uncertain shock location; this violates the assumptions underpinning the EnKF, which assume a forecast which is close to Gaussian. To address this issue we introduce the new neural EnKF. The basic idea is to systematically embed neural function approximations within ensemble DA by mapping the forecast ensemble of shocked flows to the parameter space (weights and biases) of a deep neural network (NN) and to subsequently perform DA in that space. The nonlinear mapping encodes sharp and smooth flow features in an ensemble of NN parameters. Neural EnKF updates are therefore well-behaved only if the NN parameters vary smoothly within the neural representation of the forecast ensemble. We show that such a smooth variation of network parameters can be enforced via physics-informed transfer learning, and demonstrate that in so-doing the neural EnKF avoids the spurious oscillations and nonphysical features that plague the EnKF. The applicability of the neural EnKF is demonstrated through a series of systematic numerical experiments with the inviscid Burgers' equation, the Sod shock tube, and a two-dimensional blast wave.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Controlled Chaos in 4D SCFTs

arXiv:2606.23785v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Chaotic dynamics play an important role in a number of physical systems. One of the qualitative hallmarks of this behavior is the appearance of a sufficiently "complex" spectrum of energy levels. This also makes it challenging to directly verify the onset of chaos in interacting quantum field theories. We present a class of 4D superconformal field theories (SCFTs) given by orbifolds of 4D $\mathcal{N} = 4$ Super Yang–Mills theory in which operator mixing in a controlled subsector is described by an effective spin chain in one spatial dimension with nearest neighbor interactions tuned by the marginal couplings of the SCFT. Tuning the marginal couplings results in a chaotic spectrum, while generically the spin chain exhibits Anderson localization. We diagnose the onset of chaos by analyzing the statistical distribution of eigenvalues of the dilatation operator, in particular properties such as eigenvalue level repulsion, spectral rigidity, and the spectral form factor. We also show that other diagnostics such as Krylov complexity sometimes do not faithfully capture this information. This structure defines a chaotic billiard in the target space of the stringy realization. We also comment on the large $N$ holographic dual description, where the controlled single spin chain approximation must be supplemented by multi-trace dynamics, i.e., the splitting and joining of multiple spin chains.

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

SVHighlights: Towards Extremely Long Sport Video Highlight Detection

While highlight detection for long-form videos is of great practical importance, most existing methods remain limited to short-form content, largely due to the absence of a suitable benchmark. To bridge this gap, we introduce SVHighlights, to the best of our knowledge, the first benchmark for highlight detection in extremely long sports videos, each exceeding one hour in duration, across multiple sports categories. SVHighlights is constructed from pairs of full-length sports videos and their corresponding official highlight videos using a dataset generation pipeline, enabling scalable label generation without conventional per-clip saliency annotation. The benchmark comprises 320 videos with an average duration of 2.00 hours and a total of 640.18 hours, substantially exceeding previous datasets. Existing methods also face fundamental challenges on long videos: models trained on short clips fail to generalize to hour-long content, and their clip-level scoring lacks the broader context needed to identify highlights. To address this and provide a strong baseline, we present TF-SELECTOR, a training-free segment-based approach that divides each video into context-aware segments by merging adjacent shots sharing the same semantic content, and predicts segment-level saliency scores using a large language model with multimodal inputs including visual captions, transcripts, and audio volume. Experiments demonstrate that TF-SELECTOR achieves superior performance across most metrics compared to Video Temporal Grounding (VTG)-tuned baselines, with improvements of +2.50 in HIT@1, +4.04 in HIT@K, and +2.95 in IoU. These results establish SVHighlights as a challenging testbed for long-form highlight detection and demonstrate that a simple segment-based strategy can effectively scale to hour-long videos.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Spin mixing induced dynamics of spinor solitons in $F=1$ Bose Einstein condensates

arXiv:2606.14231v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We explore soliton interactions in a homogeneous spinor $F=1$ Bose Einstein Condensate (BEC) in the presence of a magnetic field, focusing on dark bright dark and bright dark bright configurations. We investigate how these interactions depend on the phase differences among bright solitons and their influence during the dynamics. Our findings align with prior non spinor results, i.e., repulsion among in phase bright solitons and attraction among out of phase pairs in self repulsive atomic BECs. The potential bright soliton attraction, added to the short range repulsion of dark dark soliton interactions, can lead to bound states. However, we find that these bound states break in the presence of spinor interactions due to the particle exchange dynamics between the hyperfine states of the components. Additonally, we develop an effective classical model to describe the soliton dynamics, using a Lagrangian approach. The accuracy of the model is tested by comparing it against numerical simulations. Our results suggest that the proposed model captures the essential features of soliton behavior in the presence of spin interactions, and provides congruent soliton trajectories and interspecies particle exchange dynamics in most of the cases.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Cavity-enhanced superconducting response in an underdoped cuprate

arXiv:2606.18084v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Superconductors carry electrical current without resistance when paired electrons condense into a coherent macroscopic quantum state. In underdoped cuprates, evidence suggests that pairing-related correlations and superconducting fluctuations can survive above the temperature at which global coherence is lost, pointing to phase fluctuations as a key limitation on superconductivity in this regime. Motivated by recent demonstrations of cavity-modified collective states in quantum materials, we investigate whether superconducting coherence can be stabilized by engineering the electromagnetic environment of the superconductor. We study an underdoped YBa$_2$Cu$_3$O$_{7-\delta}$ thin film in a tunable terahertz cavity formed with a semi-transparent gold mirror. From temperature-dependent terahertz transmission measurements, we find that the cavity enhances the superconducting response below the critical temperature, with an increase of the inferred superfluid weight. The effect becomes more pronounced at smaller cavity lengths and is accompanied by an upward shift of the superconducting onset temperature. Calculations based on a cavity-coupled model for phase-fluctuating superconductors capture these trends and support an interpretation in terms of cavity-enhanced phase stiffness. These results showcase the potential of cavity engineering for designing emergent functionalities in correlated systems.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Attention and memory in Parkinson's disease: a discriminant analysis approach

Background. Cognitive impairment in Parkinson's disease (PD) is highly prevalent and heterogeneous. Assessing multiple cognitive domains is challenging and risks redundancy. This study evaluated whether a discriminant analysis approach could optimize the selection of specific tasks and measures for identifying attention and memory deficits in PD. Methods. Thirty PD patients and 25 cognitively unimpaired (CU) controls completed four experimental tasks: two assessing attention (flanker and spatial Stroop), one for recognition memory, one for working memory (n-back). Following group-level difference analyses, a discriminant analysis was performed to identify which tasks, and performance metrics possessed the highest sensitivity for distinguishing PD patients from CU individuals. Results. At the group level, PD patients exhibited significantly worse conflict costs in both attention tasks and lower sensitivity scores (d') in the recognition memory task compared to CU controls. The discriminant analysis revealed that time-based measures from the spatial Stroop task and the sensitivity score from the recognition memory task provided the highest discriminating power to differentiate between the two groups. Conclusion. These findings suggest that cognitive deficits in PD can be identified with high diagnostic accuracy using a targeted subset of metrics, eliminating the need for extensive and redundant neuropsychological testing batteries for attention and memory, without needing an extensive number of cognitive tasks for attention and memory.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

PathRouter: Aligning Rewards with Retrieval Quality in Agentic Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Agentic GraphRAG trains language-model agents to iteratively retrieve and reason over graph-structured evidence, enabling more accurate and context-aware decision-making by efficiently navigating complex information networks. However, outcome-only reinforcement learning suffers from answer-path reward aliasing, where correct answers may come from shortcuts rather than useful evidence paths. It also exhibits search-update ambiguity, as scalar trajectory-level feedback does not indicate which retrieval actions to adjust. To mitigate these shortcomings, we present PathRouter, a path-aware training framework for agentic GraphRAG. PathRouter jointly evaluates each trajectory along answer correctness and evidence-path overlap, yielding four trajectory categories with differentiated GRPO advantage scaling that suppresses shortcut reinforcement while preserving evidence-seeking behavior. For evidence-poor trajectories, a frozen gold-evidence teacher provides token-level KL guidance on reasoning and search-query tokens, excluding answer tokens to avoid direct response imitation. Experiments on six QA benchmarks across three model sizes show that PathRouter consistently improves answer F1 and evidence-path overlap, achieving average F1 gains of 3.1 on 3B and 4.9 on 7B models compared to a strong baseline.

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

RedactionBench

Large Language Models are increasingly applied to sensitive domains that require redaction of personally identifiable information (PII). While redacting PII is a data cleaning prerequisite, existing benchmarks conflate extraction mechanics with privacy semantics. A public phone number is not equivalent to a phone number in a medical record. Whether information constitutes a violation depends heavily on who holds it, why, and in what context, fundamentally differentiating redaction from simple entity recognition. Grounded in contextual integrity, we introduce RedactionBench, a manually annotated benchmark comprising 200 diverse documents across 11 domains, mostly seeded from real-world sources. We also introduce R-Score, a novel character-level metric that treats semantically similar redactions equally and nullifies shallow formatting choices, such as varying masking styles for phone numbers. Evaluations across Named Entity Recognition models, entity extraction Small Language Models, and frontier models equipped with agentic tools demonstrate that contextual redaction remains an unsolved problem. A human evaluation with over 80 users on RedactionBench reveals a stark dichotomy in privacy perceptions. Annotators show consensus with target labels for mandatory redactions (89.4 percent) and safe text preservations (94.1 percent), but fail to agree on contextual redactions (47.7 percent). This variance demonstrates the subjective nature of contextual privacy and motivates R-Score, which decouples contextual ambiguity from strict precision. We compare 35 models across families and report their performance in redacting PII. Finally, we release RedactionBench to establish a baseline for future privacy-preserving systems, hoping to inspire efficient model design and standardized evaluations.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

ProcessThinker: Enhancing Multi-modal Large Language Models Reasoning via Rollout-based Process Reward

Visual question answering increasingly requires multi-step reasoning. Recent post-training with reinforcement learning under verifiable rewards (RLVR) and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) can improve multimodal reasoning, but most approaches rely on sparse outcome-only rewards. As a result, they struggle to tell whether an incorrect answer comes from a small mistake late in the reasoning or from an unhelpful trajectory from the start. A common solution is to train a process reward model (PRM) for step-level supervision, but this typically requires large-scale high-quality chain-of-thought annotations and additional training cost. We propose ProcessThinker, a practical post-training pipeline that provides step-level process rewards without training an explicit PRM. ProcessThinker first rewrites reasoning traces into a step-tagged format for cold-start supervised fine-tuning, then applies GRPO with a standard format reward and our rollout-based process reward. Concretely, for each intermediate step, we sample multiple continuations from that step and use the empirical success rate (final-answer verification) as the step reward. This gives dense credit assignment and encourages reasoning steps that more reliably support a correct conclusion, helping reduce inconsistent or self-contradictory progress across steps – a key issue in logical reasoning. Across four challenging video benchmarks (Video-MMMU, MMVU, VideoMathQA, and LongVideoBench), ProcessThinker consistently improves over the baseline model Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

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

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

24.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-04

Beyond associations: Navigating the safety of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) in early pregnancy

by Andrew S. C. Yuen, Kenneth K. C. Man Pain and fever in pregnancy require treatment, but fetal safety concerns complicate analgesic choice. A recent PLOS Medicine study presents new evidence on the safety of first-trimester NSAID use and congenital malformation risk, but interpreting findings across studies is challenging. In this Perspective, Kenneth Man and Andrew Yuen highlight a recent PLOS Medicine study that presents new evidence on the safety of first-trimester NSAID use and congenital malformation risk, but discuss why interpreting findings across studies is challenging.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

When the Next Step Is Not One Step: Distribution-Aware Execution Modeling for Concurrent Go Programs

arXiv:2606.17508v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training a model to predict the next step in a concurrent program is harder than it looks: two runs of the same program from the same trace prefix can produce different next events, both valid, because the scheduler is nondeterministic. A model trained against a single label is learning to guess one outcome of a random process. We turn this around and use the nondeterminism as a training signal. We run each program many times, aggregate the observed next events into an empirical distribution, and fine-tune a 7B model to match that distribution with a KL objective. On 798 held-out predictions drawn from real production Go bugs (CockroachDB, Kubernetes, gRPC, etcd), fine-tuning on fewer than a thousand traces reaches 36.2% accuracy, ahead of Gemini 3.5 Flash used zero-shot (34.8%) and the same model without fine-tuning (28.6%). Distribution training matches cross-entropy on accuracy (35.8% vs. 36.2%) while reducing Expected Calibration Error from 0.205 to 0.169. We also derive a formal goroutine-leak signature for a class of select-blocked goroutines where P(GoUnblock)=0 holds by scheduler semantics, not by learning. We release the dataset, trained adapters, and all tooling.