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

Evaluation of Image Matching for Art Skills Assessment

While some individuals possess a natural talent for drawing, mastering this skill requires dedicated training and practice. Determining one's skill in the art of drawing requires proper comprehensive assessment. In this paper, we propose a method to measure drawing skill by by matching the hand-drawn image with the original template. Existing techniques often involve complex processes. However, advancements in computer vision allow us to train computers to perform these comparisons at a human-like level, thereby resolving the tedious and overwhelming traditional process. Using computer vision applications, determining image similarity involves identifying the level of similarities in an image with a reference image. We have implemented and analyzed the SIFT feature and Siamese network to measure image similarity. Our results indicate that it is feasible to assess art skill levels. Through feature analysis, we found that SIFT-based key point matching provides a more effective means of detecting drawing skills.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Why Commodity WiFi Sensors Fail at Multi-Person Gait Identification: A Systematic Analysis Using ESP32

WiFi Channel State Information (CSI) has shown promise for single-person gait identification, raising interest in its use for contactless biometrics, continuous authentication, and passive identification. However, the feasibility of multi-person identification on low-cost commodity devices remains unclear. A critical question is whether weak multi-person performance is primarily an algorithmic limitation, or whether it reflects a more fundamental sensing ceiling on commodity WiFi hardware. We address this question through a systematic empirical study using commodity ESP32 WiFi sensors. We evaluated six different signal separation methods–FastICA, SOBI, PCA-ICA, NMF, Wavelet, and Tensor decomposition–across seven scenarios spanning 1-10 people in both controlled and realistic indoor environments. To investigate beyond classification accuracy, we introduce three diagnostic metrics: intra-subject variability (ISV), inter-subject distinguishability (ISD), and performance degradation rate (PDR). In all methods, performance remains moderate (39%-56% accuracy), with limited evidence that algorithmic choice alone solves the problem. The best-performing method, NMF, reaches 56% accuracy, while all methods exhibit extremely high feature-space overlap (97%-99%), unstable within-subject representations, and marked environmental sensitivity. These findings suggest that, under commodity ESP32 CSI constraints, dense multi-person gait identification is limited more by sensing quality and spatial diversity than by the chosen separation algorithm. Our results have direct implications for security and privacy: they call into question the practicality of commodity WiFi CSI as a robust multi-user biometric primitive for authentication, while also placing important bounds on the passive identification capabilities achievable with low-cost off-the-shelf WiFi hardware.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Disagreement-Based Cross-Model Routing for Implicit Video Question Answering

We study multiple-choice video question answering on the ImplicitQA benchmark, where the correct answer is never explicitly shown but must be inferred from off-screen events, line-of-sight cues, causal structure, and cross-shot spatial layout. On this benchmark a single frontier video LLM already operates near its accuracy ceiling, and we observe that conventional self-consistency strategies – majority voting across repeated samples of the same model – can hurt rather than help, because the model's errors on hard questions are correlated. We propose disagreement-based cross-model routing, a pure inference-time procedure that requires no labels and no training. We triple-sample a native-video model (Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview) at temperature zero, exploit the genuine sample-to-sample variance of its video-processing pipeline to identify the roughly 20% subset of questions where the three samples disagree, and route only that subset to a second model from a different family (Claude Opus 4.8) that consumes uniformly sampled frames with adaptive thinking. On the 1001-question validation set with public ground truth – our main evaluation – the method improves AvgAcc by +1.43 over the best single sample of the primary model, with per-category gains concentrated on Motion & Trajectory (+5.49), Inferred Counting (+3.45), and Vertical Spatial Reasoning (+1.82) – the categories most dependent on cross-shot reference resolution. The same pipeline applied to the held-out 172-question CVPR 2026 ImplicitQA challenge test set achieves 82.03 AvgAcc / 79.71 MacroAvgAcc (+1.81 over the best single sample of the primary model), confirming the validation result on an independent split.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

VisChronos: Revolutionizing Image Captioning Through Real-Life Events

This paper aims to bridge the semantic gap between visual content and natural language understanding by leveraging historical events in the real world as a source of knowledge for caption generation. We propose VisChronos, a novel framework that utilizes large language models and dense captioning models to identify and describe real-life events from a single input image. Our framework can automatically generate detailed and context-aware event descriptions, enhancing the descriptive quality and contextual relevance of generated captions to address the limitations of traditional methods in capturing contextual narratives. Furthermore, we introduce a new dataset, EventCap (https://zenodo.org/records/14004909), specifically constructed using the proposed framework, designed to enhance the model's ability to identify and understand complex events. The user study demonstrates the efficacy of our solution in generating accurate, coherent, and event-focused descriptions, paving the way for future research in event-centric image understanding.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

BoRAD: Bootstrap your Own Representations for Multi-class Anomaly Detection

Reconstruction-based anomaly detection is attractive for industrial inspection, but scaling it from category-specific training to a one-for-all setting is challenging. A single model must reconstruct diverse normal appearances without copying abnormal details, which exposes two coupled failure modes: identical shortcut, where anomalies pass through the reconstruction path, and mis-reconstruction, where normal categories are confused with one another. We propose BoRAD, a label-free training framework that treats this as a representation-capacity allocation problem. BoRAD uses a shared learnable prototype bank to impose two complementary regularizers: spatial prototype alignment contracts local within-prototype variation to suppress anomaly copying, while prototype-relative global alignment preserves between-prototype structure and improves sensitivity to abnormal angular deviations. The prototype bank and prediction heads are used only during training; inference remains a standard teacher-student feature discrepancy pass, with no class labels, negative pairs, memory retrieval, or prototype lookup. BoRAD achieves competitive one-for-all anomaly detection performance, including 86.2\% mAD on MVTec AD, 80.7\% mAD on VisA and 73.1\% mAD on Real-IAD. Diagnostic analyses further show reduced anomaly leakage, improved normal-category separability, and stronger anomaly-normal score separation.

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

An Explainable AI Assistant for Introductory Programming Education: Improving Feedback Reliability with Instructor-AI Collaboration

arXiv:2606.12425v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Active learning is widely recognized as an effective approach for improving learning outcomes in introductory programming courses. However, insufficient instructional support often limits students' access to timely, personalized feedback, which is crucial for mastering foundational programming concepts. Although recent advances in AI, particularly large language models, offer scalable opportunities for feedback, concerns about explainability and reliability remain. In this paper, we present an AI-driven classroom assistant that leverages an explainable AI model to analyze student code, map logical errors to instructor-identified misconceptions, and deliver instructor-authored feedback, thereby grounding reliability in instructor-defined pedagogical knowledge. To evaluate the effectiveness of our framework, we conducted an expert evaluation to examine its alignment with instructor-verified feedback and deployed the system in a classroom setting to assess students' perceptions of its usability. Results indicate that the assistant can provide accurate, instructor-verified feedback to students while fostering a positive experience.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Agentic Collaborative Cognition for Zero-Shot 3D Understanding

Recent advancements have explored agentic zero-shot 3D understanding by reformulating it as video keyframe understanding with Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, existing methods face an intrinsic bottleneck due to the finite observation perspectives inherent in videos and the implicit perception of 3D scenes. In this paper, we propose a collaborative multi-agent framework that assigns a Planning Agent to handle high-level viewpoint planning and supplement novel perspectives, and a Perception Agent to explicitly summarize the 3D scene into a structured holistic cognitive map. Specifically, Planning Agent first analyzes this cognitive map to determine query-relevant viewpoints and supplements missing critical perspectives to ensure comprehensive observation. Subsequently, Perception Agent documents object-level attributes from these views by assigning consistent instance identifiers across viewpoints, thereby integrating fragmented observations into the holistic cognitive map. In parallel, it provides feedback to filter out mismatched candidate objects and guide subsequent viewpoint planning. Through this closed-loop iterative process, two agents collaboratively figure out candidates until Perception Agent determines that sufficient information has been captured to complete the task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on 6 benchmarks, with improvements of 11.1\% Acc@0.5 on ScanRefer, 14.6 BLEU-1 on 3D-assisted dialog, and 2.1 EM on SQA3D.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

InterleaveThinker: Reinforcing Agentic Interleaved Generation

Recent image generators have demonstrated impressive photorealism and instruction-following capabilities in single-image generation and editing. However, constrained by their architectures, they cannot achieve interleaved generation (text-image sequence), which has crucial applications in visual narratives, guidance, and embodied manipulation. Even the latest open-source Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) exhibit limited performance in this regard. In this paper, we introduce InterleaveThinker, the first multi-agent pipeline designed to endow any existing image generator with interleaved generation capabilities. Specifically, we employ a planner agent to organize the image-text input sequence, instructing the image generator on the required execution at each step. Subsequently, we introduce a critic agent to evaluate the generator's outputs, identify samples that deviate from the planned instructions, and refine the instructions for regeneration. To implement this pipeline, we construct the Interleave-Planner-SFT-80k and Interleave-Critic-SFT-112k to perform a format cold-start. Then we develop Interleave-Critic-RL-13k to reinforce the step-wise instruction correction capability within a generation trajectory using GRPO. Since a single interleaved generation trajectory may involve over 25 generator calls, optimizing the entire trajectory is computationally impractical. Therefore, we propose accuracy reward and step-wise reward, allowing single-step RL to effectively guide the entire generation trajectory. The results show that InterleaveThinker improves performance across various image generators. On interleaved generation benchmarks, it achieves performance comparable to Nano Banana and GPT-5. Surprisingly, it also significantly enhances the base model on reasoning-based benchmarks; for example, on 4-step FLUX.2-klein, we observe substantial gains on WISE and RISE.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Quantum Horizon: An evaluation of quantum computing as a threat to Bitcoin and Ethereum

arXiv:2606.14484v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum computing poses a real, broad-based, but bounded and substantially mitigable threat to Bitcoin and Ethereum. We separate the two quantum algorithms that public discussion routinely conflates: Shor's algorithm breaks the elliptic-curve signatures (ECDSA over secp256k1, BLS over BLS12-381) that authorize spending, whereas Grover's algorithm does not meaningfully threaten proof-of-work mining, which is protected by a merely quadratic speedup, fault-tolerant per-operation costs, a square-root parallelization wall, and difficulty adjustment. Folding hardware scaling, the falling resource requirement, a fault-tolerance readiness lag, and expert surveys into a single Monte-Carlo forecast yields a wide, bimodal arrival distribution for a cryptographically relevant quantum computer: about a one-in-six chance by 2035, near 30% by 2040, and about 60% by 2050. Exposure is concentrated and mostly migratable: of Bitcoin's roughly six million quantum-exposed coins only about 2.3 million are irreducibly at risk, while 50 to 65% of Ether sits at key-revealed accounts that can adopt post-quantum signatures. A timely migration beats even an optimistic 2035 machine, so the binding constraint is governance, not technology. A survey of the top twenty cryptocurrencies finds none fully post-quantum. Reproducible models accompany every quantitative claim.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

AudioDER: A Deduplication-Enhanced Reasoning Dataset for Post-Training Large Audio-Language Models

arXiv:2606.14591v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) have shown strong performance on a wide range of audio understanding tasks, yet they still struggle with complex audio reasoning. A practical way to improve such capabilities is post-training, whose effectiveness critically depends on the quality and diversity of training data. However, existing audio-language datasets often contain substantial redundancy, where many samples are highly similar in acoustic content and thus provide overlapping supervisory signals. Such redundancy not only increases annotation cost, but also limits corpus diversity and reduces the effectiveness of post-training. To address this issue, we propose a redundancy-aware data construction pipeline for building reasoning-oriented supervision for LALMs. Specifically, we first perform acoustic similarity-based deduplication across raw audio datasets to improve corpus diversity. We then integrate existing audio captions and question-answer pairs into a unified multiple-choice format. Based on these unified annotations, we leverage Qwen3-30B to generate chain-of-thought (CoT) rationales for reasoning-oriented supervision. Based on this pipeline, we construct AudioDER, a reasoning-oriented post-training dataset containing approximately 191k samples spanning sound, speech, and music. Each sample consists of an audio clip, a multiple-choice question, four answer candidates, an audio caption, and a CoT rationale. Extensive experiments show that post-training on AudioDER consistently improves the performance of Qwen2-Audio-7B-Instruct on multiple audio reasoning benchmarks, including MMAU-mini, MMSU, and MMAR. We hope AudioDER can serve as a valuable resource for advancing audio reasoning research and the development of more capable LALMs.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Learning ground state observables from quantum computing experiments

arXiv:2606.15983v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent theoretical progress has established conditions under which machine learning models can efficiently predict ground-state properties of gapped local Hamiltonians when trained on quantum-generated data. Previous experimental demonstrations in this paradigm, however, have largely been limited to small systems or highly structured states, due to the difficulty of preparing many-body ground states on quantum processors. In this work, we demonstrate learning from experimental quantum data generated from approximate ground states of the two-dimensional Heisenberg XXZ model with system sizes up to 115 qubits. We construct a dataset of single-site expectation values, two-point correlations, and 12-body loop correlations across the antiferromagnetic phase. We then train neural networks on this data and show that they can accurately predict spatially resolved observables for previously unseen Hamiltonian parameters, both within the training distribution and in an out-of-distribution regime approaching the phase boundary. Our results demonstrate the practical realization of learning from quantum data for an interacting two-dimensional many-body system at scale, motivating a path toward regimes where quantum processors could provide training data beyond the reach of classical approximation methods.

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

On the Smoluchowski-Kramers approximation for the hyperbolic $O(N)$ linear sigma model and its mean-field limit

arXiv:2606.15214v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the hyperbolic $O(N)$ linear sigma model, i.e. a system of $N$ interacting stochastic damped nonlinear wave equations (SdNLW) with coupled cubic nonlinearities, posed on the two-dimensional torus and indexed by a parameter $\varepsilon > 0$. We show that as $\varepsilon$ goes to zero (Smoluchowski-Kramers approximation) and $N$ goes to infinity (mean-field limit), each component of the solution to the SdNLW system converges to the solution to the stochastic nonlinear heat equation (SNLH) with a mean-field nonlinearity. We prove such convergence via two regimes: first with $\varepsilon$ going to zero to obtain the parabolic $O(N)$ linear sigma model, i.e. a system of $N$ coupled SNLH, and then with $N$ going to infinity; or first with $N$ going to infinity for each component to obtain the mean-field SdNLW and then with $\eps$ going to zero. As a result, we obtain a commutative diagram regarding the convergence from the hyperbolic $O(N)$ linear sigma model to the mean-field SNLH.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Stab-QRAM: A Clifford-Only Quantum Oracle for Affine Boolean Data

arXiv:2509.26494v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Oracle-based quantum algorithms require coherent evaluation of classical functions on superposed inputs, and in fault-tolerant architectures this cost is dominated by non-Clifford gates: generic lookup constructions incur $T$-counts that grow with the data size. Here we show that affine Boolean functions $f(\mathbf{x})=A\mathbf{x}+\mathbf{b}$ over $\mathbb{F}_2$ – the algebraic core of parity checks, linear feedback shift registers, and cipher linear layers – are exactly the functions admitting computational-basis-preserving Clifford oracles, and we develop this correspondence into Stab-QRAM, a compiler mapping a specification $(A,\mathbf{b})$ to an ancilla-free circuit of CNOT and $X$ gates with zero $T$-count. Via K\"{o}nig's edge-coloring theorem, the compiled schedule provably attains the minimum depth for its gate set. Case studies spanning Simon-type oracles, block-encodings of $X$-type coset operators, and syndrome extraction for CSS codes show one compiler serving the algorithm, primitive, and error-correction layers of the quantum stack.

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

FreoStream:Enhancing Stream Guardrails via Future-Aware Reasoning and Safety-Aligned Optimization

arXiv:2606.13737v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Stream guardrails enable token-level safety detection before full responses are generated. However, they often make overly conservative judgements and block those sensitive but safe tokens, which is known as over-refusal. Due to lack of full context, they also fail to detect implicitly harmful content from jailbreaking. To address these challenges, we propose FreoStream, a novel streaming guardrail framework. Specifically, FreoStream fine-tunes a LoRA module to perform Future-Aware Reasoning when the base guardrail detects unsafe tokens. The reasoning process follows a Future-Reason-Judge paradigm: predict the future, reason about the full context and give the final judgement. This design can effectively reduce over-refusal by incorporating the future information. Moreover, we introduce the Safety-Aligned Optimization module that extracts the safety-aligned component from the reasoning gradients to update the base guardrail model, thereby enhancing streaming safety detection. Extensive experiments on various safety benchmarks demonstrate that FreoStream achieves lower over-refusal rates and better jailbreak defense compared to existing streaming guardrails.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Quantum vortex in a fluid flow: negative effective mass and a novel mechanism for turbulence formation

Authors:

arXiv:2606.15803v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We explore the movement of a thin, circular quantum vortex filament within an infinite cylindrical pipe. The fluid surrounding the vortex ring moves through the pipe at a non-zero velocity denoted by $v$. Our study examines the energy spectrum $E = E(p)$, where $p$ represents the total momentum of a vortex ring. We have demonstrated that the function $E(p)$ significantly depends on the velocity $v$. The discovered spectrum $E(p)$ reveals the existence of states with both negative and extremely large effective masses. We also explored the hypothesis regarding the existence of coupled vortex pairs possessing finite summary effective masses. Every pair consists of vortices that possess both positive and negative masses, with the magnitude of these masses being unrestricted. In our model, the criterion for the appearance of these states is based on comparing two numbers. The first is seen as a quantum counterpart to the Reynolds number, while the second represents its critical value for a flow with a single vortex. We also explore how this studied effect might contribute to the emergence of quantum turbulence. This study discusses a method for determining the critical Reynolds number in quantum turbulence, using the proposed model as a framework. Here, we use a new quantization technique for classical closed vortex filaments developed by the author earlier.

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

HairLRM: Strand-based Hair Modeling via Large Reconstruction Models

The fundamental limitation of traditional strand-based modeling is not simply data scarcity, but the ill-posedness of inferring complex 3D fields from 2D imagery without structural constraints. This unconstrained regression leads to catastrophic failures in resolving both global occlusion (e.g., in ponytails) and local directionality (e.g., in curls), resulting in over-smoothed, plausible-but-incorrect geometries. To resolve this, we integrate the strong geometric priors of Large Reconstruction Models (LRMs) into the strand generation pipeline. Using the LRM mesh as a structural anchor, we employ a novel Dual Orientation AutoEncoder to lift coarse geometry into high-fidelity strands. By resolving vector field singularities through latent-space optimization and surface-guided refinement, our method effectively disentangles complex topological structures, setting a new benchmark for robustness and accuracy in hair reconstruction.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Low-Density Lipoprotein Cholesterol and Dementia Risk: Integrating Mendelian Randomization and Target Trial Emulation Within the Heart-Brain Axis

Background: The heart-brain axis links cardiovascular and neurodegenerative disease through shared vascular and inflammatory mechanisms. Although low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) is an established causal factor in atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD), its relationship with dementia remains uncertain, with midlife elevations associated with increased risk but late-life associations often appearing null or inverse. To address this cholesterol paradox, we integrated mendelian randomization (MR) with an active-comparator new-user target trial emulation. Methods: We applied a triangulated causal inference framework integrating two-sample MR with observational target trial emulation. Genetic variants associated with LDL-C were used as instrumental variables to evaluate Alzheimer disease (AD), dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), frontotemporal dementia (FTD), and any dementia (AnyDem), with causal estimates derived using inverse-variance weighted models and sensitivity analyses for heterogeneity and pleiotropy. In parallel, an active-comparator new-user design compared statin versus ezetimibe initiation among adults aged 60 years or older using propensity score (PS) overlap weighting and Cox proportional hazards models to evaluate cardiovascular and dementia outcomes. Results: Genetically predicted LDL-C was associated with increased risk of DLB (OR 1.65, 95% CI 1.30-2.10; p

18.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

A prognostic human brain network for diffuse midline glioma

Authors:

Diffuse midline gliomas (DMGs) are near-universally lethal tumours of the childhood central nervous system1,2. In animal models, DMGs form brain-wide integrated networks through neuron-to-glioma synapses3–6 and glioma-to-glioma gap junctional coupling3. This extensive connectivity robustly promotes the growth and invasion of DMG3–9 and other glial malignancies10–12 through paracrine mechanisms and direct neuron-to-glioma synapses. However, the organization and clinical implications of these connections in the living human brain remain to be elucidated. Here, we develop tumour network mapping to compute the brain-wide connectivity profile of DMG, defining a conserved brain network across pontine and thalamic DMG associated with patient short-term survival (DMG network). Tumour functional connectivity with the DMG network was independently predictive of patient overall survival across two external validation cohorts. Tumour growth mapped to DMG network-specific trajectories and peak in-network neurometabolic changes across development spatiotemporally aligned with the peak age incidence of DMG. Analyses of single-nucleus RNA sequencing data confirmed diverse synaptic gene enrichment in high-connectivity DMG. Strikingly, incidental surgical resection of high-connectivity thalamic DMG tissue conferred a significant survival advantage. Collectively, these data define a conserved and prognostically important brain network in children with DMG, consistent with the hypothesis that DMGs exploit otherwise healthy brain circuits to promote tumour growth. Tumour network mapping of diffuse midline glioma (DMG) defines a conserved and prognostically important brain network in children with DMG, consistent with the hypothesis that DMGs exploit otherwise healthy brain circuits to promote tumour growth.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Finite-Time Convergence of Distributionally Robust Q-Learning with Linear Function Approximation

arXiv:2510.01721v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Distributionally robust reinforcement learning (DRRL) seeks policies that perform well when the deployment transition model differs from the nominal model generating the data. Most finite-sample guarantees for DRRL are tabular, model-based, rely on generative access, or obtain function-approximation guarantees only under additional structure, such as linear-transition models or restrictive discount-factor conditions. We study discounted model-free robust Q-learning under an $(s,a)$-rectangular chi-square uncertainty set, with linear approximation of the robust Q-function, using only a single Markovian trajectory from an unknown nominal model. Our algorithm combines a target-network outer loop with a dual function-approximation scheme for the chi-square robust Bellman update. The dual procedure uses moment-tracking critics, suffix averaging, a fresh-evaluation stage for the variance-like moment, and a tunable smoothing parameter to have a Lipschitz-continuous chi-square dual gradient. We prove a finite-time convergence bound to the optimal robust Q-function up to approximation error, without imposing a small-discount-factor assumption. Our results help close a gap between the empirical use of robust RL algorithms and the non-asymptotic guarantees available for their non-robust counterparts.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

A pharmacometric grey zone reconciles high metronidazole resistance rates with bismuth quadruple therapy efficacy in Helicobacter pylori

Summary Background Metronidazole (MET) resistance in Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) exceeds 50-60% globally, yet MET-containing bismuth quadruple therapy (BQT) achieves &gt90% eradication in MET-resistant infections. We hypothesise this discordance stems from a structural limitation of two-fold dilution: a pharmacometric grey zone between the 128 and 256 &microg/mL breakpoints where treatable isolates are systematically misclassified as high-level resistance. Methods In a real-world cohort of 4610 treatment-na&iumlve children (2019-2024), checkerboard assays determined the bismuth-MET synergy factor (SF). Population PK/PD modelling simulated gastric MET exposure (AUC

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

Robust Instruction Compliance in Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2605.12655v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) in real-world use cases may need to adapt to external natural language instructions that interrupt ongoing behavior and conflict with long-horizon objectives. However, conditioning rewards on instructions introduces a fundamental failure mode as Bellman updates couple value estimates across instruction contexts, leading to inconsistent values when instructions interrupt macro-actions. We propose Macro-Action Value Correction for Instruction Compliance (MAVIC), which corrects Bellman backups at instruction boundaries by correcting the incoming instruction objective and restoring the continuation value under the current objective. Unlike reward shaping, MAVIC modifies the bootstrapping target itself, enabling consistent value estimation under stochastic instruction switching within a unified policy. We provide theoretical analysis and an actor-critic implementation, and show that MAVIC achieves high instruction compliance while preserving base task performance in increasingly complex cooperative multi-agent environments.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Multi-component Causal Tracing in Large Language Models

Causal tracing systematically intervenes on a large language model's (LLM's) internal representations to uncover and quantify the causal pathways linking specific inputs or computations to specific metrics of interest, quantifying the LLM's behavior. Building on previous single-component or single-layer studies, this paper presents a unified framework for causally tracing multiple components simultaneously. This framework systematically identifies the subsets of components (e.g., attention heads and multi-layer perceptron neurons) most critical to a desired target performance metric (e.g., accuracy and fairness). This is achieved by incorporating flexible interventions applied to a wide range of desired metrics. To address the combinatorial complexity of the multi-component problem, an efficient algorithm is designed that leverages soft interventions and a carefully designed metric transformation, converting the combinatorial search problem into a continuous one that can be solved efficiently under proper constraints, thereby generating proper binary decisions for selecting components. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method efficiently identifies subsets of the model's components that have a high impact on the target metric, outperforming existing baseline approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZiruiYan/multi-component-causal-tracing.

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

FAConformer: Frequency-Aware Convolutional Transformer for Auditory Attention Decoding

arXiv:2606.14120v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Auditory attention decoding (AAD) aims to infer the attended speaker from neural responses in multi-speaker acoustic environments and is a key problem for neuro-steered hearing systems. Although recent studies have achieved encouraging progress, existing AAD models still do not fully exploit frequency domain electroencephalography (EEG) information. In particular, most approaches introduce multi-band information through handcrafted feature extraction or direct cross-band feature concatenation, which mainly exploit frequency information at a shallow level and may overlook band-specific patterns and cross-band interactions. To address these limitations, this paper proposes FAConformer, a frequency-aware CNN-Transformer framework for AAD that explicitly integrates band-specific encoding and adaptive cross-band interaction. Specifically, FAConformer first decomposes EEG signals into multiple frequency bands and assigns each band to an independent CNN-Transformer encoder for band-specific modeling. The resulting band-wise features are then adaptively fused by a carefully designed frequency-aware attention (FAA) module that models cross-band dependencies by treating band-wise features as tokens. Further, band-wise auxiliary supervision (BAS) is introduced to prevent weakly contributing branches from being under-optimized during joint training. In this way, FAConformer performs frequency-aware modeling that more effectively exploits frequency domain information. Extensive experiments on two public AAD datasets with three decision-window lengths demonstrated that FAConformer consistently outperformed 12 competitive baselines, surpassing the current state-of-the-art model by 4.9%. Further analyses of band importance, ablation, and parameter sensitivity verify the effectiveness, robustness, and interpretability of the proposed framework. Code is available at https://github.com/wzwvv/FAConformer.

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

Advancing WordArt-Oriented Scene Text Recognition: Datasets and Methods

WordArt (artistic text) features highly customized fonts, textures, and layouts, making WordArt-oriented scene TExt Recognition (WATER) substantially more challenging than general Scene Text Recognition (STR). Existing STR datasets and methods, typically built around regular scene text and fixed-template inputs, struggle to scale to WATER. Thus, we aim to advance this task from both data and model perspectives. On the data side, we construct a 2M synthetic dataset, WATER-S, with the scale improved by hundreds of times compared to existing artistic text data. WATER-S consists of two complementary subsets. One rendered by an upgraded rendering pipeline (SynthWordArt), which provides highly accurate and controllable synthetic WordArt data. The other is generated by combining Qwen3-VL for prompt mining and Z-Image for image synthesis, which improves the coverage of realistic and diverse data. On the model side, we propose WATERec. It adopts an visual encoder supporting arbitrary-shaped inputs and an autoregressive decoder to model complex layouts, structurally breaking the bottleneck of fixed-template STR on WordArt. Experiments show that this architecture outperforms prior STR methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance on irregular texts such as WordArt. Together with WATER-R, carefully reorganized from existing real STR data, our strong baseline with the new synthetic data and model design reaches 90.40% accuracy on WordArt-Bench, surpassing both general-purpose and OCR-specialized vision-language models by a large margin. Code and data are available at https://github.com/YesianRohn/WATER.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Temporal2Seq: A Unified Framework for Temporal Video Understanding Tasks

With the development of video understanding, there is a proliferation of tasks for clip-level temporal video analysis, including temporal action detection (TAD), temporal action segmentation (TAS), and generic event boundary detection (GEBD). While task-specific video understanding models have exhibited outstanding performance in each task, there remains a dearth of a unified framework capable of simultaneously addressing multiple tasks, which is a promising direction for the next generation of AI. To this end, in this paper, we propose a single unified framework, coined as Temporal2Seq, to formulate the output of these temporal video understanding tasks as a sequence of discrete tokens. With this unified token representation, Temporal2Seq can train a generalist model within a single architecture on different video understanding tasks. In the absence of multi-task learning (MTL) benchmarks, we compile a comprehensive co-training dataset by borrowing the datasets from TAD, TAS, and GEBD tasks. We evaluate our Temporal2Seq generalist model on the corresponding test sets of three tasks, demonstrating that Temporal2Seq can produce reasonable results on various tasks and achieve advantages compared with single-task training on this framework. We also investigate the generalization performance of our generalist model on new datasets from different tasks, which yields superior performance to the specific model.