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

daVinci-kernel: Co-Evolving Skill Selection, Summarization, and Utilization via RL for GPU Kernel Optimization

GPU kernel optimization represents a paradigm where functional correctness is assumed and execution efficiency is the objective. We present daVinci-kernel, a reinforcement learning framework that couples skill discovery with skill exploitation through a dynamically evolving skill library. daVinci-kernel jointly trains three agents sharing one LLM backbone: a Skill Selection Agent that retrieves relevant techniques via BM25 and LLM reranking, a Policy Agent that generates multi-turn CUDA/Triton kernels conditioned on selected skills, and a Skill Summary Agent that distills successful rollouts into reusable skills. Candidate skills are added only after execution-based verification confirms reproducible speedups. All three agents share a single LLM backbone, are initialized via a structured SFT cold start on diversity-filtered data, and are then jointly optimized end-to-end with multi-turn REINFORCE and per-agent advantage estimation. On KernelBench, daVinci-kernel-14B achieves 37.2%, 70.6%, and 32.2% on Level 1, Level 2, and Level 3 under the Fast$_1$ threshold, outperforming the strongest prior RL-trained model, Dr.Kernel-14B.

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

Where to Place the Query? Unveiling and Mitigating Positional Bias in In-Context Learning for Diffusion LLMs via Decoding Dynamics

While In-Context Learning (ICL) is extensively studied in Autoregressive (AR) LLMs, its mechanism within Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) remains largely unexplored. Unlike AR models restricted by unidirectional causal masking, dLLMs intrinsically utilize bidirectional attention, offering extensive spatial flexibility for query placement. Unfortunately, current practices conventionally inherit AR-style trailing-query templates, often overlooking the structural paradigm shift. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis unveiling that query position is actually a first-order variable in dLLMs. Through empirical decoupling, we demonstrate that positional variance impacts generation quality on par with example semantic quality. Internally, this positional sensitivity stems from a spatial ``Recency Effect'' in attention flow and task-dependent shifts in decoding trajectories. To mitigate this instability without ground-truth labels, we reveal that traditional single-step confidence ($C_{decoded}$) fails in dLLMs. Instead, we propose Average Confidence ($\overline{C}$), a novel metric tracking the iterative decoding process. By establishing the foundational spatial ICL baselines, we introduce Auto-ICL, a training-free adaptive routing strategy that dynamically optimizes query placement, robustly approaching oracle performance across heterogeneous reasoning and perception tasks.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Steady-State Noise Signatures of Lindbladian Exceptional Points

arXiv:2606.13377v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Exceptional points (EPs) are non-Hermitian degeneracies at which two or more eigenvalues and their corresponding eigenvectors coalesce. In open quantum systems, exceptional points can arise in the Lindbladian governing the dissipative dynamics. Their signatures have so far been mainly identified in finite-time observables, such as transient currents, while steady-state average currents generally provide no direct evidence of the underlying exceptional-point structure. In this work, we demonstrate that signatures of Lindbladian EPs can nevertheless be accessed in the steady-state regime through current noise. We derive general expressions for current correlation functions within a Lindblad master-equation framework and show, in particular, how exceptional points affect their behaviour as a function of the time delay. We illustrate these results with the paradigmatic example of two interacting qubits coupled to two reservoirs, where the steady-state noise clearly distinguishes overdamped, underdamped, and critical regimes. Our results establish current correlation functions as a steady-state probe of Lindbladian EPs in open quantum systems.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

STEAM: Squeeze and Transform Enhanced Attention Module

Channel and spatial attention mechanisms introduced in earlier work enhance the representational capabilities of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) but often increase parameter and computational costs. While recent approaches focus solely on efficient feature context modeling for channel attention, we aim to model both channel and spatial attention comprehensively with minimal parameters and reduced computation. Leveraging the principles of relational modeling in graphs, we introduce a constant-parameter module, STEAM: Squeeze and Transform Enhanced Attention Module, which integrates channel and spatial attention to enhance the representation power of CNNs. To our knowledge, we are the first to propose a graph-based approach for modeling both channel and spatial attention, utilizing concepts from multi-head graph transformers. Additionally, we introduce Output Guided Pooling (OGP), which efficiently captures spatial context to further enhance spatial attention. We extensively evaluate STEAM for large-scale image classification, object detection and instance segmentation on standard benchmark datasets. STEAM achieves a \(2\%\) increase in accuracy over the standard ResNet-50 model with only a meager increase in GFLOPs. Furthermore, STEAM outperforms the leading modules, ECA and GCT, in terms of accuracy while achieving a threefold reduction in GFLOPs. The code will be made available upon acceptance.

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

SEVRA-BENCH: Social Engineering of Vulnerabilities in Review Agents

arXiv:2606.13757v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) reviewers are increasingly used in pull-request (PR) workflows, where their approvals help decide which code is merged into a repository. This raises a question that benchmarks for static vulnerability detection or code generation do not address: can an automated reviewer reject a malicious contribution when the attacker controls both the code change and the accompanying PR text? We introduce SEVRA-BENCH (Social Engineering of Vulnerabilities in Review Agents), a benchmark that measures how often an automated reviewer approves such adversarial pull requests. Each malicious PR in SEVRA-BENCH is built from a real project commit that previously fixed a vulnerability listed in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) database. We automatically invert that fix to restore the original vulnerable code and submit it as a pull request wrapped in one of 15 social-engineering framings, which vary the claims made, the supporting evidence, the urgency conveyed, signals of prior approval, and appeals to authority. SEVRA-BENCH contains 1,062 malicious PRs drawn from Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE)-linked fixes across the top 10 entries of the 2025 Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) Top 25. In a realistic setting, we evaluate 8 current LLMs as code review agents on PRs that introduce vulnerabilities previously reported in public disclosures. Our results reveal a sharp gap in security capabilities between closed- and open-source models. We hope SEVRA-BENCH will serve as a valuable resource for advancing open-source models and narrowing this gap.

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

String dynamics of a (2+1)D U(1) quantum link model on a digital quantum computer

arXiv:2606.19601v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The (2+1)D U(1) pure gauge theory always exists in the confining phase, with strings of non-zero string tension giving a characteristic linear potential between static charges. This makes it a useful testing ground for quantum computing methods designed to study string dynamics of confining gauge theories. Here we implement a minimal U(1) quantum link model on a quantum computer with qubit degrees of freedom representing the dual height variables of the model. This facilitates an efficient realization of plaquette interactions and enables effective calculations of real-time dynamics that are inaccessible to traditional quantum Monte Carlo. A specifically tailored lattice geometry is chosen to match the heavy-hexagonal geometry of the IBM quantum hardware used here, minimizing non-adjacent qubit interactions. By performing quantum quenches from a simple initial string state, we probe the transverse quantum fluctuations of the string before it thermalizes. Our experimental results from digital quantum simulations, with up to 112 qubits, show good agreement with reference tensor-network calculations at short times and with thermal averages at long times. Near the phase transition, the quench dynamics exhibit large fluctuations of the initial string that extend across both spatial dimensions of the lattice. Nonetheless, our error-mitigated estimators from the quantum hardware also give accurate predictions in that regime, with noise-induced violations of local gauge symmetries comparable to finite-bond-dimension tensor-network results.

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

Modality-Aware Feature Matching in Visual and Vision-Language Applications: A Comprehensive Survey

Feature matching is a cornerstone task in computer vision, essential for applications such as image retrieval, stereo matching, 3D reconstruction, and SLAM. This survey comprehensively reviews modality-based feature matching, exploring traditional handcrafted methods and emphasizing contemporary deep learning approaches across various modalities, including RGB images, depth images, 3D point clouds, LiDAR scans, medical images, and vision-language interactions. Traditional methods, leveraging detectors like Harris corners and descriptors such as SIFT and ORB, demonstrate robustness under moderate intra-modality variations but struggle with significant modality gaps. Contemporary deep learning-based methods, exemplified by detector-free strategies like CNN-based SuperPoint and transformer-based LoFTR, substantially improve robustness and adaptability across modalities. We highlight modality-aware advancements, such as geometric and depth-specific descriptors for depth images, sparse and dense learning methods for 3D point clouds, attention-enhanced neural networks for LiDAR scans, and specialized solutions like the MIND descriptor for complex medical image matching. Cross-modal applications, particularly in medical image registration and vision-language tasks, underscore the evolution of feature matching to handle increasingly diverse data interactions.

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

i1: A Simple and Fully Open Recipe for Strong Text-to-Image Models

Diffusion models have consistently driven progress in text-to-image generation. However, it is challenging to attribute recent progress to specific modeling and data choices: state-of-the-art open-weight models provide limited ablations, and do not disclose their training data and full training details. The research community needs fully open (weights, data, and code) models as a foundation for further research; yet existing fully open models still fall significantly short of leading models in performance. In this project, we conduct a systematic investigation of the modeling and data design choices in text-to-image diffusion training and inference with 300+ controlled experiments totaling 700K+ TPU v6e hours. Our experiments highlight several empirical findings (e.g., equal weighting is a strong default for mixing curated datasets) and simple design decisions (e.g., larger text encoder adapters improve performance with minimal added parameters) for training strong models. Guided by these insights, we train i1, a 3B-parameter text-to-image diffusion model using only publicly available datasets. i1 is competitive with leading models on five representative benchmarks (GenEval, DPG, PRISM, CVTG-2K, and LongText), and outperforms the best existing fully open model by 29.5 absolute percentage points on average. We provide the i1 checkpoints, training and inference code, and the data processing pipeline. Together, our findings and the i1 recipe establish a practical foundation for future open research in text-to-image diffusion models. Our code is available at https://github.com/zlab-princeton/i1.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Grammar of the Wave: Towards Explainable Multivariate Time Series Event Detection via Neuro-Symbolic VLM Agents

arXiv:2603.11479v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Time Series Event Detection (TSED) aims to localize semantically meaningful events in time series data, with critical applications in high-stakes domains. Unlike statistical anomalies, events are often defined by natural-language descriptions with internal temporal-logic structures across multiple physical channels. However, in real-world settings, dense event annotations are expensive to obtain, making purely supervised learning difficult. We introduce Language-guided TSED, a setting where a model is given textual event descriptions and must ground them to intervals in multivariate signals with little or no labeled data. To address this problem, we propose Event Logic Tree (ELT), a knowledge representation framework that converts linguistic descriptions into structured temporal logic over signal primitives. Building on ELT, we present SELA, a neuro-symbolic VLM agent framework that iteratively grounds primitives from signal visualizations and composes them under ELT constraints, producing both event intervals and faithful tree-structured explanations. We further release a real-world benchmark across energy and climate domains with expert knowledge and annotations. Experiments show that SELA improves over supervised fine-tuning and existing zero/few-shot time series reasoning baselines.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

PoseGAM: Robust Unseen Object Pose Estimation via Geometry-Aware Multi-View Reasoning

6D object pose estimation, which predicts the transformation of an object relative to the camera, remains challenging for unseen objects. Existing approaches typically rely on explicitly constructing feature correspondences between the query image and either the object model or template images. In this work, we propose PoseGAM, a geometry-aware multi-view framework that directly predicts object pose from a query image and multiple template images, eliminating the need for explicit matching. Built upon recent multi-view-based foundation model architectures, the method integrates object geometry information through two complementary mechanisms: explicit point-based geometry and learned features from geometry representation networks. In addition, we construct a large-scale synthetic dataset containing more than 190k objects under diverse environmental conditions to enhance robustness and generalization. Extensive evaluations across multiple benchmarks demonstrate our state-of-the-art performance, yielding an average AR improvement of 5.1% over prior methods and achieving up to 17.6% gains on individual datasets, indicating strong generalization to unseen objects. Project page: https://windvchen.github.io/PoseGAM/ .

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

EFIQA: Explainable Fundus Image Quality Assessment via Anatomical Priors

arXiv:2606.20108v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Image quality control is vital for a wide range of downstream applications. Deep learning-based image quality assessment methods typically train classifiers on dataset-specific quality labels, inheriting two limitations: (1) generalization is tied to the labeling criteria of the training set and (2) these methods cannot provide spatial feedback on where the quality is degraded, lacking explainability. In this work, we propose EFIQA, a framework that requires no quality-related supervision and produces spatial quality maps by design. Rather than learning ``what is degradation" from human-annotated labels, EFIQA learns ``what should be there" by leveraging anatomical priors. For fundus photography, we instantiate this as a two-stage approach, by first training an unsupervised anomaly detector via masked anatomical inpainting to identify regions of missing vasculature, and then distilling this prior knowledge into a shallow adapter mapping features of a frozen foundation model to precise quality maps. External-dataset evaluation demonstrates that this label-free approach with minimal adaptation achieves better performance and explainability compared with supervised methods across benchmarks with different quality criteria, highlighting its potential for real-world applications.

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

Continuous-time Optimal Stopping through Deep Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.17545v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Simulation based solvers for optimal stopping problems must discretize the stopping decision. Under classical dynamic programming, a coarse exercise grid with only a few stopping opportunities can materially undervalue the optimal expected reward, whereas on a very fine grid, approximation errors accumulate through the backward recursion. To remove this limitation, we develop a new reinforcement-learning inspired algorithm that enables us to learn the exercise rule at arbitrarily fine time resolution. Our CARLOS (Continuous-time Adaptive Reinforcement Learning for Optimal Stopping) algorithm utilizes an aggregate deep neural network (ADNN) to learn a joint space-time decision boundary. Starting from a coarse time grid, we progressively increase the frequency of stopping opportunities, while in parallel training the ADNN to refine its timing-value estimates. We moreover design an adaptive sampling strategy that gradually concentrates training effort near the stopping boundary. Benchmarked results show that CARLOS delivers higher prices than existing Bermudan solvers, approaching the American upper bound, and achieves high computational efficiency relative to non-RL comparators.

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

AnchorEdit: Maintaining Temporal Consistency in Multi-turn Image Editing via Causal Memory

Multi-turn image editing is essential for iterative design, yet current models often struggle with identity drift and error accumulation over successive steps. While existing research leverages video priors for consistency, their reliance on bidirectional attention is fundamentally misaligned with the causal, sequential nature of interactive editing. In this paper, we propose AnchorEdit, the first autoregressive (AR) diffusion-based framework designed specifically for high-resolution, long-term multi-turn editing. AnchorEdit bridges the gap between video priors and causal inference through a three-stage training curriculum: identity-preserving sing-turn pretraining, causal AR forcing fine-tuning with a novel self-rollout strategy to mitigate exposure bias, and consistency distillation for efficient 4-step generation. During inference, we introduce a memory mechanism to anchor the initial subject identity and ensure stable extrapolation across extended editing trajectories. To evaluate performance, we provide a new high-resolution multi-turn editing benchmark designed to stress-test long-horizon stability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AnchorEdit achieves state-of-the-art results, maintaining exceptional subject fidelity and instruction following even over 10+ interaction rounds.

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

VikingMem: A Memory Base Management System for Stateful LLM-based Applications

arXiv:2605.29640v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models have revolutionized interactive applications; however, their finite context windows pose a critical data management challenge for maintaining stateful, long-term interactions. Existing memory approaches often rely on simplistic extraction methods that lead to incomplete memories or use rigid, single-purpose memory extraction prompts tailored to a single use case, such as chatbots. Consequently, they lack generalizability and perform poorly across diverse downstream tasks. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Memory Base, a novel data management paradigm for managing the persistent state of long-term interactions. It is characterized by three core principles: selective extraction of high-value memories from raw information streams; inherent statefulness and evolution, where memory content is progressively summarized, corrected, and temporally weighted to prioritize recent interactions; and a generalizable abstraction paradigm designed for robust transferability across diverse applications, including education, recommendation, and agent memory. Building on this foundation, we present VikingMem, an end-to-end Memory Base Management System implemented on the VikingDB vector engine. VikingMem materializes this paradigm through interconnected event and entity abstractions. It features event-centric memory extraction to selectively handle complex information streams, while entities are dynamically updated by events to achieve stateful evolution. Using temporal compression via a topic-wise timeline and time-weighted recall, the system progressively produces high-level summary memories, prioritizes recent items, and compresses and fades older ones. Extensive evaluations on long-term memory benchmarks demonstrate that VikingMem outperformes baselines by up to 30% in memory retrieval effectiveness while maintaining the low latency essential for interactive applications.

15.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-12

General-purpose large language models outperform specialized clinical AI tools on medical benchmarks

Specialized clinical artificial intelligence (AI) tools are entering medical practice despite scarce independent evaluation. We quantitatively evaluate two clinical AI tools, OpenEvidence and UpToDate Expert AI, built on large language models (LLMs) against three frontier LLMs: GPT-5.2, Gemini 3.1 Pro and Claude Opus 4.6. Our evaluation has three stages: (1) 500 MedQA questions testing medical knowledge, (2) 500 HealthBench items measuring alignment with clinicians and (3) the real clinical queries (RCQ) benchmark, built from 100 de-identified queries from physicians to a general-purpose language model in a live clinical environment. For the RCQ benchmark, 12 US clinicians performed randomized, blinded review of model outputs, producing 1,800 model–question annotations. Frontier LLMs outperformed clinical AI tools in all three evaluations. Clinical AI tools performed comparably to auto-enabled Google Search AI Overview on the RCQ. These findings highlight the need for independent, real-world evaluation of AI tools before they enter clinical settings. In an independent evaluation, frontier large language models outperformed specialized clinical artificial intelligence tools on medical knowledge, clinician alignment and real-world clinical queries.

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

Examining the Usage of Generative AI Models in Student Learning Activities for Software Programming

arXiv:2511.13271v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The rise of Generative AI (GenAI) tools like ChatGPT has created new opportunities and challenges for computing education. Existing research has primarily focused on GenAI's ability to complete educational tasks and its impact on student performance, often overlooking its effects on knowledge gains. In this study, we investigate how GenAI assistance compares to conventional online resources in supporting knowledge gains across different proficiency levels. We conducted a controlled user experiment with 24 undergraduate students of two different levels of programming experience (beginner, intermediate) to examine how students interact with ChatGPT while solving programming tasks. We analyzed task performance, conceptual understanding, and interaction behaviors. Our findings reveal that generating complete solutions with GenAI significantly improves task performance, especially for beginners, but does not consistently result in knowledge gains. Importantly, usage strategies differ by experience: beginners tend to rely heavily on GenAI toward task completion often without knowledge gain in the process, while intermediates adopt more selective approaches. We find that both over-reliance and minimal use result in weaker knowledge gains overall. Based on our results, we call on students and educators to adopt GenAI as a learning rather than a problem solving tool. Our study highlights the urgent need for guidance when integrating GenAI into programming education to foster deeper understanding.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Beyond Case Law: Evaluating Structure-Aware Retrieval and Safety in Statute-Centric Legal QA

arXiv:2604.06173v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Legal QA benchmarks have predominantly focused on case law, overlooking the unique challenges of statute-centric regulatory reasoning. In statutory domains, relevant evidence is distributed across hierarchically linked documents, creating a statutory retrieval gap where conventional retrievers fail and models often hallucinate under incomplete context. We introduce SearchFireSafety, a structure- and safety-aware benchmark for statute-centric legal QA. Instantiated on fire-safety regulations as a representative case, the benchmark evaluates whether models can retrieve hierarchically fragmented evidence and safely abstain when statutory context is insufficient. SearchFireSafety adopts a dual-source evaluation framework combining real-world questions that require citation-aware retrieval and synthetic partial-context scenarios that stress-test hallucination and refusal behavior. Experiments across multiple large language models show that graph-guided retrieval substantially improves performance, but also reveal a critical safety trade-off: domain-adapted models are more likely to hallucinate when key statutory evidence is missing. Our findings highlight the need for benchmarks that jointly evaluate hierarchical retrieval and model safety in statute-centric regulatory settings.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Disentangling adiposity-related and non-adiposity-related genetic pathways for type 2 diabetes

OBJECTIVE To identify circulating proteins associated with type 2 diabetes (T2D) risk through pathways not fully explained by body mass index (BMI), and to assess therapeutic actionability. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS We applied GWAS-by-subtraction within a genomic structural equation model to European ancestry summary statistics for T2D (74,124 cases, 824,006 controls) and BMI (n = 681,275), partitioning T2D liability into BMI-related and BMI-subtracted components. We then performed proteome-wide Mendelian randomization (MR) using cis-protein quantitative trait loci from four plasma proteomics cohorts: ARIC, deCODE, Fenland, and the UK Biobank Pharma Proteomics Project. Prioritized proteins passed sensitivity analyses with alternative MR methods and were supported by colocalization evidence. Tissue-resolution regulatory support was assessed using cis-eQTL colocalization across GTEx and pancreatic islet, subcutaneous adipose, and whole-blood resources. Actionability was evaluated using the druggable genome and Open Targets. RESULTS GWAS-by-subtraction attenuated the genetic correlation between BMI and BMI-subtracted T2D from 0.54 (SE 0.02) to 0.35 (SE 0.02). Proteome-wide MR prioritized 29 proteins for BMI-subtracted T2D. Thirteen showed eQTL colocalization in at least one tissue, implicating liver and intermediary metabolism (GCDH, NOTCH2), pancreatic islet biology (CTRB2, MANBA), adipose and Wnt signaling (RSPO3, GALNT3), and whole blood regulatory signals (PAM, SNUPN). Sixteen proteins were classified within druggable-genome Tiers 1-3, and five had existing Open Targets compounds. CONCLUSIONS Integrating GWAS-by-subtraction, proteome-wide MR, and colocalization nominated 29 proteins associated with T2D liability not fully explained by BMI. These findings highlight genetically supported targets for follow-up studies of T2D therapies that complement weight-centered approaches.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

VieSpeaker: A Large-Scale Vietnamese Speaker Recognition Dataset Beyond Visual Dependency

Speaker recognition has advanced rapidly with large-scale training datasets, yet Vietnamese remains under-resourced, with existing corpora limited in scale and acoustic diversity. Most large-scale datasets rely on facial cues to link speech with speaker identities, restricting data collection to recordings where speakers appear on camera. We propose a face-independent dataset construction pipeline and introduce VieSpeaker, a large-scale Vietnamese speaker recognition dataset. Our approach leverages textual metadata and large language model reasoning to infer speaker identities from transcripts and contextual information. VieSpeaker contains approximately 902 hours of speech from 4,715 speakers. Experiments show that models trained on VieSpeaker achieve improved robustness and generalization compared to existing Vietnamese datasets. This work demonstrates the feasibility of face-independent dataset construction and provides a new direction for building large-scale speech resources.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Decomposing Prediction Mechanisms for In-Context Recall

arXiv:2507.01414v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a new family of toy problems that combine features of linear-regression-style continuous in-context learning (ICL) with discrete associative recall. We pretrain transformer models on sample traces from this toy, specifically symbolically-labeled interleaved state observations from randomly drawn linear deterministic dynamical systems. We study if the transformer models can recall the state of a sequence previously seen in its context when prompted to do so with the corresponding in-context label. Taking a closer look at this task, it becomes clear that the model must perform two functions: (1) identify which system's state should be recalled and apply that system to its last seen state, and (2) continuing to apply the correct system to predict the subsequent states. Training dynamics reveal that the first capability emerges well into a model's training. Surprisingly, the second capability, of continuing the prediction of a resumed sequence, develops much earlier. Via out-of-distribution experiments, and a mechanistic analysis on model weights via edge pruning, we find that next-token prediction for this toy problem involves at least two separate mechanisms. One mechanism uses the discrete symbolic labels to do the associative recall required to predict the start of a resumption of a previously seen sequence. The second mechanism, which is largely agnostic to the discrete symbolic labels, performs a "Bayesian-style" prediction based on the previous token and the context. These two mechanisms have different learning dynamics. To confirm that this multi-mechanism (manifesting as separate phase transitions) phenomenon is not just an artifact of our toy setting, we used OLMo training checkpoints on an ICL translation task to see a similar phenomenon: a decisive gap in the emergence of first-task-token performance vs second-task-token performance.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Reinforcing Dual-Path Reasoning in Spatial Vision Language Models

Spatial VLMs have made substantial progress in geometric perception, yet complex spatial reasoning requiring multi-step inference over depth, distance, and scene relations remains challenging. Moreover, different spatial queries call for fundamentally different strategies: some are best addressed through purely linguistic, step-by-step deduction, while others require explicit 3D grounding before quantitative inference. We present Dual-Path Spatial Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning for Spatial VLMs (SR-REAL), a unified framework that equips a spatial VLM with two complementary reasoning paths: Language-Only Reasoning (LOR), which performs step-by-step linguistic deduction, and Detect-Then-Reason (DTR), which detects 3D geometric cues (e.g., centers or bounding boxes) via region tokens before explicit geometric inference. SR-REAL begins with a cold-start supervised fine-tuning stage that constructs LOR and DTR chain-of-thought supervision and exposes a region-to-3D interface, followed by RL that optimizes the policy model with accuracy and format rewards; for DTR, a discrete center-based detection reward further refines geometric alignment. Across diverse spatial benchmarks, SR-REAL significantly outperforms spatial VLM baselines: (i) a single RL-trained model supports both reasoning paths, with DTR excelling in region-aware tasks through precise 3D localization and LOR enhancing general spatial reasoning; (ii) jointly training both paths fosters mutual reinforcement; (iii) high-quality, blended cold-start data is crucial for stable RL optimization; and (iv) the model generalizes across datasets and domains without per-task tuning, demonstrating positive transfer between LOR and DTR.

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

Runtime Analysis of Cartesian Genetic Programming in Evolving Boolean Functions

arXiv:2606.15923v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cartesian Genetic Programming (CGP) is among the practical and popular forms of Genetic Programming as it uses a graph-based representation of programs. This paper presents a first runtime analysis of CGP in evolving Boolean functions using complete training sets. We prove an asymptotic bound $O(n D^5)$ for the expected number of fitness evaluations of CGP to construct a conjunction of $n$ inputs using at most $D \geq n-1$ binary gates, a minimal function set, and even with a strict survival selection. When the non-strict selection is used, the bound is improved to $O(n D^4)$. Our analysis reveals interesting characteristics of CGP induced search, which have been only observed empirically. In particular, enabling the acceptance of equally good solutions, including those with connected gates non-contributing to fitness, can lead to a speedup, and consequently a better asymptotic time bound. In contrast to conjunctions, we also prove a negative result which shows that CGP requires exponential time to evolve an exclusive disjunction. Experiments evolving conjunctions complement our theoretical findings. The use of incomplete training sets is found to further reduce the average number of fitness evaluations while maintaining a good level of generalisation.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

MinhwaNet: Faithful but Insufficient Object Grounding in Korean Folk Painting

Authors:

Korean folk painting (minhwa) is built from a small vocabulary of auspicious symbols, a tiger for protection, a pair of birds for marital harmony, a peony for wealth, that recur across many of its painted genres. This suggests an obvious computational approach, identify which symbols appear in a painting and read the genre from the inventory. Working with a public corpus that pairs whole paintings, eight-field bilingual curatorial captions, and a separate set of expert object crops, we find that this approach does not work. A model given only a list of which symbols a painting contains predicts the genre far worse than a model that fuses the image with the curatorial text, and forcing the genre representation to be object-grounded actively hurts accuracy. The visual evidence on which the genre prediction rests is nonetheless localized and inspectable. A leakage-safe object evidence map projected from a part-level detector is spatially faithful to where curators isolated symbolic objects and to a patch-based surrogate's own gradient saliency. We name this configuration a faithful-but-insufficient dissociation. The part-level explanation is honest about what the part-level model sees, yet the genre target turns on how symbols are arranged rather than on which ones appear. The same lens separates a content label that survives transfer to held-out source institutions, genre, from a style label that does not, era, a prediction we confirm on two further labels in the corpus. We release the multimodal system, a worked-example reading of one painting's evidence map against its catalogue, and a set of evaluation cautions that recur in long-tailed heritage collections.

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

WAND: Windowed Attention and Knowledge Distillation for Efficient Autoregressive Text-to-Speech Models

Recent decoder-only autoregressive text-to-speech (AR-TTS) models produce high-fidelity speech, but their memory and compute costs scale quadratically with sequence length due to full self-attention. In this paper, we propose WAND, Windowed Attention and Knowledge Distillation, a framework that adapts pretrained AR-TTS models to operate with constant computational and memory complexity. WAND separates the attention mechanism into two: persistent global attention over conditioning tokens and local sliding-window attention over generated tokens. To stabilize fine-tuning, we employ a curriculum learning strategy that progressively tightens the attention window. We further utilize knowledge distillation from a full-attention teacher to recover high-fidelity synthesis quality with high data efficiency. Evaluated on three modern AR-TTS models, WAND preserves the original quality while achieving up to 66.2% KV cache memory reduction and length-invariant, near-constant per-step latency.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Measurement Plasticity: Sensor-Level Adaptation for Vision-Language Models

We propose Multi-View Physical-prompt (MVP) for Test-Time Adaptation (TTA), a forward-only framework that moves TTA from tokens to photons by treating the camera exposure triangle (i.e., ISO, shutter speed, and aperture) as physical prompts. At inference, MVP acquires selected multiple physical views using a source-affinity score, evaluates digitally augmented variants of each retained view and filters the lowest-entropy predictions, and aggregates predictions with hard voting. This selection-then-vote design is simple, calibration-friendly, and requires no gradients or model modifications. On ImageNet-ES and ImageNet-ES-Diverse, MVP outperforms digital-only TTA on both Auto-Exposure and a combination with conventional sensor control. MVP remains effective under reduced parameter candidates that lower capture latency, demonstrating its practicality.