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

Mitigating Legibility Tax with Decoupled Prover-Verifier Games

Authors:
Yegon Kim↗Juho Lee↗

arXiv:2602.23248v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As large language models become increasingly capable, it is critical that their outputs can be easily checked by less capable systems. Prover-verifier games can be used to improve checkability of model outputs, but display a degradation in accuracy compared to a baseline trained only to maximize correctness – a phenonemon named legibility tax. We propose a solution by decoupling the correctness from the checkability condition and instead training a "translator" model that turns a fixed solver model's solution into a checkable form. This allows us to first train the solver to maximize correctness, and then train the translator to translate the solver into a checkable form while retaining the solver's answer. To accommodate this new objective of translation, we formulate a decoupled prover-verifier game (DPVG) where the equilibria correspond to faithful and checkable translators.

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

LLM-Evolved Domain-Independent Heuristics for Symbolic AI Planning

Authors:
Elliot Gestrin↗Jendrik Seipp↗

arXiv:2605.29649v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Heuristic search is the dominant paradigm in symbolic AI planning, and the strongest heuristics are the result of decades of work by planning researchers. Recent work has shown that large language models (LLMs) can design heuristics for individual planning domains, but no LLM-generated heuristic has so far worked on arbitrary planning tasks. In this paper, we use evolutionary search to produce the first LLM-generated domain-independent heuristics that exceed the hand-engineered state of the art. We let an LLM mutate parent heuristics written in C++, store candidates in a MAP-Elites archive keyed on informedness and speed and calculate fitness scores by blending coverage with solving time. To place the evolved programs in context, we additionally benchmark a broad set of hand-engineered heuristics on their informedness-speed tradeoff, which to our knowledge has not been done before. On unseen testing domains, our best evolved heuristic solves more tasks than even the strongest baseline, with our full heuristic suite spanning the Pareto frontier of said tradeoff. We also find that seeding evolution from the trivial blind heuristic outperforms seeding from the strong FF heuristic, even when the resulting program is itself an FF variant, and that LLM reasoning effort affects how often candidates compile much more than the quality of those that do. Because the evolved programs are plain C++, they slot into existing planners as drop-in replacements and inherit the soundness and completeness guarantees of the underlying search.

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04.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

pykarambola: Minkowski tensor morphometry of 3D structures

Authors:
Khurana↗Ishihara↗

Three-dimensional biological morphologies encode functional and physiological state, yet the directional, orientational, and topological properties of these shapes are rarely captured by morphometric tools available for bioimage analysis. Minkowski tensors are mathematically rigorous tensor-valued measures that encode surface curvature and directionality for objects of arbitrary topology, with tensor eigensystems that directly quantify elongation axes and anisotropy. A C++ implementation, karambola, computes Minkowski tensors for triangulated surfaces but is inaccessible within Python-based bioimage workflows. Here we present pykarambola, a pip installable Python package that accepts NumPy arrays and standard mesh formats and returns Minkowski tensors, including derived anisotropy and orientation quantities. A high-level label-image API converts 3D integer arrays into per-object Minkowski tensors in a single call, making pykarambola directly compatible with the output of widely used segmentation tools. An optional Cython extension accelerates graph-traversal steps of mesh initialization for large-scale analyses. Benchmarked on 1,584 adrenal gland meshes, pykarambola reproduces all 121 C++ karambola output features to near-floating-point agreement and, in the pure-Python build, is 2.8x faster at 28^3 and 1.5x faster at 64^3 voxel resolution, with speedups primarily attributable to karambola's sequential per-object file I/O. pykarambola is freely available as an open-source software package.

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05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

How Much Capacity Does EEG Denoising Need? Ultra-Compact Networks reveal Benchmark Saturation and Metric-Utility Gap

Authors:
Jasmeet Singh Bindra↗Siddharth Panwar↗

arXiv:2606.08594v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Deep learning EEG denoising architectures have scaled from tens of thousands to tens of millions of parameters, yet no prior study has isolated model capacity as the experimental variable or tested whether reconstruction metrics predict downstream neural-signal utility. We address both gaps by fixing architecture, loss, data split, and training recipe while sweeping only channel width from 1.05K to 40.26K parameters in a minimal depthwise-separable convolutional U-Net. Models were evaluated on the EEGDenoiseNet benchmark, cross-dataset BCI transfer tests, controlled baseline retraining, and downstream motor-imagery classification with five decoder families across all nine BCI Competition IV-2a subjects. Reconstruction performance saturated by 3-6.5K parameters, with post-elbow gains of at most 0.015 correlation coefficient per log10-parameter unit. An 8.46M-parameter baseline retrained under the same pipeline matched the 40.26K compact variant on EOG–a 200x parameter gap yielding no advantage–while a Patch-Transformer control reproduced the same diminishing-return shape. Downstream evaluation exposed a classifier-dependent metric-utility gap: reconstruction-optimized denoising significantly degraded CSP+LDA classification across all nine subjects and three artifact types (best denoised accuracy 0.547 vs. 0.612 noisy baseline; Bonferroni p=0.0488), persisting on naturally recorded trials (Delta=-0.047; BH-FDR q=0.0049). End-to-end neural decoders showed variable or neutral effects. Standard EEG denoising benchmarks are saturated far below current model capacity, and reconstruction metrics do not predict BCI utility. Ultra-compact models at 33-46 KB and 1.27-2.61M FLOPs/segment are practical for edge deployment. These findings argue for capacity-controlled evaluation, harder task-aware benchmarks, and mandatory downstream validation.

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

Grounded Chess Reasoning in Language Models via Master Distillation

Authors:
Zhenwei Tang↗Qianfeng Wen↗Seth Grief-Albert↗Yahya Elgabra↗Blair Yang↗Honghua Dong↗Ashton Anderson↗

arXiv:2603.20510v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Language models often lack grounded reasoning capabilities in specialized domains where training data is scarce but bespoke systems excel. We introduce a general framework for distilling expert system reasoning into natural language chain-of-thought explanations, enabling compact models to acquire domain expertise and the ability to generate faithful, grounded explanations. Rather than distilling only final outputs, we capture the full reasoning process, transforming opaque expert computations into transparent, step-by-step explanations. We demonstrate this approach in chess, a canonical reasoning domain where language models continue to underperform. Our 4B parameter model, C1, advances from a near-zero baseline to 48.1\% accuracy, outperforming all open-source models and most frontier proprietary systems. Notably, C1 surpasses its distillation teacher and generates solutions in two orders of magnitude fewer tokens than baselines. Unlike prior neural chess approaches that predict only best moves, C1 generates explainable solutions revealing strategic reasoning. Our pipeline combines supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning with theme-balanced data sampling for comprehensive tactical coverage. Master Distillation demonstrates how to inject expert-level knowledge into compact models for under-optimized domains, offering a recipe for unlocking RLVR where LLMs lack sufficient base capabilities.

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07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Analyzing the Narration Gap in LLM-Solver Loops

Authors:
Zunchen Huang↗Songgaojun Deng↗

arXiv:2606.19588v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Formal tools such as SAT and SMT solvers are increasingly embedded in language model reasoning pipelines when a safety or security critical question can be formulated in logic. Unlike chain of thought whose steps are sampled from the model distribution without formal guarantee, a solver produces a sound and independently verifiable answer. However, the soundness guarantee can be lost in the interaction between the solver and the model. The hybrid pipeline has three components: formalizing the question, deciding it, and narrating the result. Prior work has studied the formalization and decision, but not narration, which is the step that turns a formal tool's output into the user answer. To fill the narration gap, we first model the LLM-solver loop as a verified decision procedure. We further evaluate five open-sourced models under prompt injection, and we find certificate gating makes the solver verdict sound, while an adversary can invert a verified conclusion across phrasings and channels. We study the mitigation through hardened prompt that reduces injection significantly but cannot eliminate it and still suffers under adaptive attack. Combining the formal analysis and empirical studies, we show in the LLM-solver loop, robustness does not reach to the answer that the user finally reads.

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08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Cross-sectional study of the association between depressive symptoms and attentional bias to emotional stimuli in patients with acute stroke: Study protocol

Authors:
Yamashita↗Takizawa↗Koizumi↗Hamaguchi↗

Post-stroke depression affects approximately 30% of patients after stroke and is associated with delayed recovery in activities of daily living, reduced rehabilitation effectiveness, and poorer quality of life. Attentional bias modification may provide a low-burden, nonpharmacological approach for patients in the acute phase of stroke. However, before such an intervention can be implemented in clinical practice, it is necessary to clarify whether attentional bias is present in patients with acute stroke and depressive symptoms, whether cognitive function influences the manifestation of this bias, and which task and stimulus formats are most appropriate for assessment. This multicenter, cross-sectional observational study will enroll patients with acute stroke between 7-30 days after stroke onset. Depressive symptoms will be assessed using the depression subscale of the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale. Attentional bias will be measured under four task conditions based on the dot-probe task and the cue-target task, using face and word stimuli. Secondary assessments will include cognitive function, anxiety symptoms, activities of daily living, health-related quality of life, and clinical background variables. The aims of this study are to investigate the association between depressive symptoms and attentional bias in patients with acute stroke, compare attentional bias characteristics across task and stimulus types, and examine the potential influence of cognitive function on this association. The findings are expected to provide an empirical basis for designing future attentional bias modification protocols targeting post-stroke depression in the acute phase. This study has been registered with the UMIN Clinical Trials Registry (UMIN000059166).

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09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

InstantForget: Update-Free Backdoor Unlearning with Inference-Time Feature Reset

Authors:
Zhenyu Yu↗

arXiv:2606.15730v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Backdoor unlearning aims to remove a malicious trigger behavior from a deployed model while preserving clean utility. We study the update-free inference-time setting, where model parameters remain frozen. First, we audit a common projection assumption under oracle paired clean and triggered features. Projection succeeds mainly on BadNets and leaves WaNet, Blended, and SIG at 0.683, 0.888, and 0.941 ASR on CIFAR-10 ResNet-18. This failure is not explained by spectral compactness, spatial locality, or subspace misalignment. It is predicted by a logit-triplet gap involving the target margin, target-logit drop, and non-target logit rise. We then introduce InstantForget, a clean-calibrated gated reset that flags anomalous features with a Mahalanobis score and moves only flagged features toward a neutral non-target representation. With one fixed operating point selected on held-out triggered validation, InstantForget reduces average ASR to 0.071 across four non-adaptive CIFAR-10 triggers without triggered samples or parameter updates at deployment. It also reaches 0.981 detection AUROC and transfers to six of eight tested backbones. Reported failures under WaNet, ModelNet10 point blend, two backbone geometries, and adaptive feature-compactness attacks define the method's scope.

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

Reliability-Calibrated Edge-IoT Early Fault Warning for Rotating Machinery with a Physics-Guided Tiny-Mamba Transformer

Authors:
Changyu Li↗Huabei Nie↗Xiaoya Ni↗Lu Wang↗Lijuan Shen↗Kaishun Wu↗Fei Luo↗

arXiv:2601.21293v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) systems increasingly rely on distributed vibration sensing to support predictive maintenance of rotating machinery. In practical deployments, however, raw signal upload is costly and alarm decisions must be made locally under limited computation, changing operating conditions, and strict nuisance-alarm budgets. This paper presents a reliability-calibrated edge-IoT early-warning framework, in which a compact Physics-Guided Tiny-Mamba Transformer (PG-TMT) acts as the representation module and an extreme value theory (EVT) layer converts streaming anomaly scores into event-level alarm episodes. PG-TMT combines a depthwise-separable convolutional stem, a Tiny-Mamba state-space branch, and a lightweight local Transformer to capture transient, long-horizon, and multichannel degradation cues under batch-size-one inference. To improve auditability, temporal attention is projected to the frequency domain and softly aligned with analytical bearing fault-order bands. EVT calibration, dual-threshold hysteresis, and trimmed-tail fitting provide controllable false-alarm intensity even when healthy calibration data are imperfect. Experiments on CWRU, Paderborn, XJTU-SY, and an industrial pilot demonstrate that the proposed framework improves PR-AUC, reduces detection delay under a controlled nuisance-alarm budget, and remains robust to structured interference, metadata uncertainty, compound fault mixtures, and domain transfer. With a sub-1 MB footprint and Jetson p99 latency below 7 ms, the framework supports calibrated and interpretable early warnings for IIoT predictive maintenance.

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11.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22

EventHorizon: A Foundation Model for Clinical Flow Cytometry

Authors:
Medina Grespan↗Morrison↗O'Fallon↗Shean↗Spies↗N. C↗Ng↗

Flow cytometry is an essential tool for diagnosis of hematologic malignancies, but existing clinical workflows are highly dependent on expert manual interpretation. Existing machine learning approaches typically require extensive labeled data and are sensitive to variability in panel design, instrumentation, and laboratory workflows, limiting their generalizability. We present EventHorizon, a self-supervised foundation model for clinical flow cytometry that produces unified specimen-level representations from heterogeneous multi-panel data. EventHorizon employs a two-stage hierarchical transformer architecture with marker-aware tokenization, enabling seamless integration of cells measured across different antibody panels into a single shared latent space. We pre-train the model using a DINO-inspired self-distillation strategy with a variety of flow cytometry-specific augmentations on a dataset of more than 100,000 clinical specimens across 17 distinct panels. We evaluate the resulting embeddings on three clinically relevant classification tasks spanning common and rare panels, demonstrating that simple k-nearest neighbor probing of frozen EventHorizon embeddings achieves performance comparable to a fully supervised baseline model and a prior panel-specific self-supervised model. To ensure EventHorizon is not simply shortcut learning on features such as the markers/panels run for a given specimen, we perform a graph-theoretic analysis of EventHorizon's latent space which argues that specimen embeddings are organized primarily by biological diagnosis. Taken together, these results demonstrate that EventHorizon produces biologically meaningful, panel-agnostic specimen representations from clinical flow cytometry data which, with further development and validation, could provide a potential basis for scalable, reproducible diagnostic support across diverse clinical laboratory settings.

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

Skeleton Sparsification and Densification Scale-Spaces

Authors:
Julia Gierke↗Pascal Peter↗

The Hamilton-Jacobi skeleton, also known as the medial axis, is a powerful shape descriptor that represents binary objects in terms of the centres of maximal inscribed discs. Despite its broad applicability, the medial axis suffers from sensitivity to noise: Minor boundary variations can lead to disproportionately large and undesirable expansions of the skeleton. Classical pruning methods mitigate this shortcoming by systematically removing extraneous skeletal branches. This sequential simplification of skeletons resembles the principle of sparsification scale-spaces that embed images into a family of reconstructions from increasingly sparse pixel representations. We combine both worlds by introducing skeletonisation scale-spaces: They leverage sparsification of the medial axis to achieve hierarchical simplification of shapes. Unlike conventional pruning, our framework inherently satisfies key scale-space properties such as hierarchical architecture, controllable simplification, and equivariance to geometric transformations. We provide a rigorous theoretical foundation in both continuous and discrete formulations and extend the concept further with densification. By growing the skeleton successively instead of shrinking it, we allow inverse progression from coarse to fine scales. Densification scale-spaces can even reach beyond the original skeleton to produce overcomplete shape representations with relevancy for practical applications. Through proof-of-concept experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework for practical tasks including robust skeletonisation, shape compression, and stiffness enhancement for additive manufacturing.

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13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

MassSpecGym in the Wild: Uncovering and Correcting Evaluation Pitfalls in AI-Driven Molecule Discovery

Authors:
Hongxuan Liu↗Roman Bushuiev↗Ivy Lightheart↗Mrunali Manjrekar↗Anton Bushuiev↗Magdalena Lederbauer↗Filip Jozefov↗Yinkai Wang↗Soha Hassoun↗Josef Sivic↗James Taylor↗Runzhong Wang↗…

arXiv:2606.19624v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable benchmarking is critical for developing machine learning models for tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) based molecule discovery. Subtle issues in experimental design and model evaluation procedures can degrade the trustworthiness of such benchmarks and lead to erroneous conclusions. We conduct a thorough review of model evaluation issues in the recent MS/MS machine learning literature, using the standard MassSpecGym benchmark suite as a case study to illustrate the impact of these issues. We find evaluation issues in at least 17 of 26 papers reporting MassSpecGym benchmark results in the first year of its adoption. We isolate three classes of failures: (i) data leakage, (ii) shortcut learning, and (iii) implementation bugs and metric divergence. Through extensive experimentation and code replication, we quantify the impact of these issues and show how they corrupt the evaluation standards MassSpecGym was designed to enforce. We distill our findings into recommendations generalizable to MS/MS challenges, benchmarks, and custom evaluation setups. We also release MassSpecGym v1.5, an implementation of our recommendations in the MassSpecGym benchmarking suite which addresses the failure modes identified in this audit. MassSpecGym v1.5 is publicly available at https://github.com/pluskal-lab/MassSpecGym.

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14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Multimedia and Visual Analytics in the Agentic Era

Authors:
Marcel Worring↗Jan Zah\'alka↗Stef van den Elzen↗Maximilian T. Fischer↗Daniel A. Keim↗

arXiv:2504.06138v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Professional users need tools to help them gain actionable insights from large multimedia collections. Foundation models and AI agents have rapidly changed the playing field, and improving their accuracy, trustworthiness, and reasoning capabilities are active topics in the computer vision, machine learning, and multimedia communities. Most current research focuses on benchmark driven algorithmic improvements. The multimedia community is the place to go beyond algorithms and consider complete multimedia analytics systems that support professional users in their complex tasks and achieve a true teaming of humans and AI. Supporting users with machine learning and visualizations has been studied for decades in the visual analytics field. In this paper, we propose a framework to bring multimedia and visual analytics together and indicate how it could impact current and new multimedia analytics solutions. Additional information can be found at https://staff.fnwi.uva.nl/m.worring/analytics-model.html

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

JAMER: Project-Level Code Framework Dataset and Benchmark on Professional Game Engines

Authors:
Jianwen Sun↗Chuanhao Li↗Zizhen Li↗Yukang Feng↗Fanrui Zhang↗Yifei Huang↗Yu Dai↗Kaipeng Zhang↗

Current AI-driven game development has made substantial progress in asset generation, gameplay design, and web-based game coding, yet project-level code engineering on professional game engines remains largely unexplored due to the absence of large-scale datasets and deterministic evaluation methods. We present JamSet and JamBench, the first project-level game code framework dataset and benchmark built on a professional game engine. Our key insight is that Game Jam competitions, community events where developers build complete games under tight time constraints, yield thousands of open-source projects suitable for this purpose. Building on the Godot engine's text-based format and headless execution mode, we design a deterministic verification pipeline from file integrity to runtime behavior collection, distilling 8,133 verified projects from over 240,000 repositories. Of these, 300 manually verified projects form JamBench; the rest constitute JamSet. JamBench defines theme-driven generation and code completion tasks, evaluated through a pipeline combining compilation pass rates, Structural Completeness Score (SCS), and Behavioral Alignment Score (BAS). Evaluation of 9 frontier models reveals a capability cliff as project scale increases, with runtime pass rates dropping from 80.4% on small projects to 5.7% on large ones (Task2a). Code Agents improve compilation rates yet yield no gains in runtime behavioral quality, indicating that the bottleneck lies in architectural design rather than syntactic correctness. Experiments validate JamSet as effective training data. All data and code are publicly available.

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

Towards Pareto-Optimal Tool-Integrated Agents with Pareto Ranking Policy Optimization

Authors:
Junyi Li↗Xiaowei Qian↗Yingyi Zhang↗Wenlin Zhang↗Guojing Li↗Sheng Zhang↗Xiao Han↗Yichao Wang↗Xiangyu Zhao↗

Recent advances in tool-integrated language agents have significantly improved their ability to solve complex reasoning tasks. However, existing alignment methods predominantly focus on maximizing task accuracy, while overlooking auxiliary objectives such as tool-use efficiency, which are essential for practical deployment. To address this gap, we introduce ParetoPO, a two-stage multi-objective optimization framework for aligning tool-using large language models (LLMs) under competing objectives. In the first stage, ParetoPO leverages hypervolume-guided dynamic scalarization to adapt reward weights based on global Pareto frontier progress. In the second stage, it replaces scalarized learning signals with Pareto-ranking-based advantage computation, promoting nondominated trajectories through dominance-aware credit assignment. This design enables fine-grained, action-level optimization across multiple conflicting objectives. Experimental results on mathematic reasoning and multi-hop QA tasks show that ParetoPO consistently discovers policies with superior accuracy-efficiency trade-offs compared to static and heuristic baselines.

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18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Temporal Backtracking Search for Test-time Generative Video Reasoning

Authors:
Sejoon Jun↗Zheng Ding↗Huangyuan Su↗Weirui Ye↗Yilun Du↗

While test-time scaling has revolutionized reasoning in large language models, generative video reasoning remains bottlenecked by a single-shot paradigm. We demonstrate that searching over denoising steps cannot rescue logically flawed rollouts because spatial trajectories commit early in the diffusion process. Root-level Best-of-N (BoN) sampling is similarly inefficient: reasoning errors cluster early in the temporal axis, and resampling blindly discards verified upstream progress. To unlock effective test-time scaling for video models, we introduce Temporal Backtracking Search (TBS), which shifts the search space to the temporal axis. TBS transforms video generation into an iterative generate-verify-restart loop via three core mechanisms: (1) variable-K conditioning to resume generation from arbitrary clean prefixes; (2) temporal process verification to localize failures and extract valid restart anchors; and (3) prefix-based search to reallocate compute toward extending correct trajectories rather than root resampling. Across algorithmic, navigation, and robotics domains, TBS Pareto-dominates matched-budget BoN. In a strict out-of-distribution setting where one-shot generation collapses (0.7% for BoN), TBS achieves 22.7%, with every solved episode stemming from a restarted branch. Ultimately, TBS reveals that the local reasoning competence of video models far exceeds what single-shot rollouts indicate, providing a scalable test-time framework to unlock it.

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19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

BusterX++: Towards Unified Cross-Modal AI-Generated Content Detection and Explanation with MLLM

Authors:
Haiquan Wen↗Tianxiao Li↗Zhenglin Huang↗Yiwei He↗Guangliang Cheng↗

The rapid advancement of generative AI has substantially improved image and video synthesis, amplifying the risk of multimodal visual misinformation. Recent MLLMs have shown promise for transparent AI-generated content detection through reasoning and explanation, yet existing approaches largely treat image and video forensics as isolated tasks, leaving cross-modal synergies underexplored. To address this, we present BusterX++, a unified MLLM for joint image and video detection with interpretable reasoning. We also introduce GenBuster-Bench++, a meticulously curated, difficulty-aligned benchmark containing balanced image and video samples spanning recent generation models and diverse real-world scenarios. Using this controlled setting, we revisit the widely adopted $SFT \rightarrow RL$ post-training paradigm. Notably, our findings demonstrate that a single-stage, pure RL strategy driven strictly by sparse outcome rewards consistently matches or surpasses a strong SFT+RL baseline across both unified and single-modality settings. Our key insight reveals that SFT imposes lower policy entropy, which restricts the policy search space and dampens exploratory freedom. In contrast, single-stage pure RL maintains higher policy entropy throughout training, effectively unlocking the spontaneous emergence of cross-modal capability transfer between image and video forensics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BusterX++ achieves state-of-the-art performance, highlighting the powerful potential of RL for unified cross-modal visual reasoning.

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20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Universal Dynamical Response to Slow Driving in Chaotic Systems

Authors:
Nachiket Karve↗Nathan Rose↗David Campbell↗Anatoli Polkovnikov↗

arXiv:2606.23810v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose a unified perspective on classical and quantum chaos based on the stability of a system's stationary states under slow driving. We probe this sensitivity via the system's susceptibility to the average protocol speed, which we call the ``speed-Fisher information," and relate it to irreversible entropy production in the system. We show that chaotic dynamics manifests as a divergence of the speed-Fisher information with the protocol time, and that this response is controlled by the perturbation's low-frequency spectral weight. This approach to chaos applies to both classical and quantum Hamiltonian systems, and naturally extends to non-Hamiltonian classical flows. We illustrate this framework with simple classical and quantum examples, along with a non-Hamiltonian flow that qualitatively exhibits analogous low-frequency spectral behavior.

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21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

SLEEPING-DISCO 9M: A large-scale pre-training dataset for generative music modeling

Authors:
Tawsif Ahmed↗Andrej Radonjic↗Gollam Rabby↗

arXiv:2506.14293v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present Sleeping-DISCO 9M, a large-scale pre-training dataset for music and song. To the best of our knowledge, there are no open-source high-quality dataset representing popular and well-known songs for generative music modeling tasks such as text-music, music-captioning, singing-voice synthesis, melody reconstruction and cross-model retrieval. Past contributions focused on isolated and constrained factors whose core perspective was to create synthetic or re-recorded music corpus (e.g. GTSinger, M4Singer) and arbitrarily large-scale audio datasets (e.g. DISCO-10M and LAIONDISCO-12M) had been another focus for the community. Unfortunately, adoption of these datasets has been below substantial in the generative music community as these datasets fail to reflect real-world music and its flavour. Our dataset changes this narrative and provides a dataset that is constructed using actual popular music and world-renowned artists.

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

The Data Manifold under the Microscope

Authors:
Marios Koulakis↗Constantin Seibold↗

arXiv:2606.15760v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A significant gap exists between theory and practice in deep learning. Generalization and approximation error bounds are often derived for simplified models or are too loose to be informative. Many rely on the manifold hypothesis and on geometric regularity such as intrinsic dimension, curvature, and reach. Progress requires insight into data-manifold geometry and suitable benchmarks, yet existing options are polarized: analytic manifolds with known geometry but limited applicability, or real-world datasets where geometry is only coarsely estimable. We introduce a benchmarking framework for studying data geometry. We repurpose and extend dSprites and COIL-20 with additional transformation dimensions and dense, axis-aligned sampling, and pair them with finite-difference estimators that recover curvature, reach, and volume at near-ground-truth accuracy in a regime where general-purpose estimators are unreliable or difficult to deploy. The framework is intended as a controlled testbed, useful as a calibration environment for geometric estimators and a sandbox for probing theoretical assumptions. To illustrate its use, we present two application studies, namely assessing the scaling behavior of the bounds of Genovese et al. and Fefferman et al., and tracking the layer-wise geometry of a $\beta$-VAE, highlighting the behavior of current bounds and the value of controlled benchmarks for guiding and validating future theory. A reference implementation is available at https://github.com/koulakis/manifold-microscope.

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

SAMA: Semantic Anchor-aligned Augmentation for Unified Low-Resource Multimodal Information Extraction

Authors:
Quanjiang Guo↗Chong Mu↗Jiazhou Pan↗Ming Jia↗Ling Tian↗Hui Gao↗Zhao Kang↗

Multimodal Information Extraction (MIE)-covering tasks such as Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (MNER), Relation Extraction (MRE), and Event Extraction (MEE)-is essential for understanding multimedia content but remains constrained by severe data scarcity. Although data augmentation is a promising remedy, existing approaches are impeded by coarse cross-modal alignment and fragmented, task-specific designs that fail to exploit shared semantic knowledge. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Semantic Anchor-aligned Multimodal Augmentation (SAMA), a unified framework for generating high-fidelity, task-aware synthetic data. SAMA constructs structured semantic anchors from ground-truth labels to guide a Collaborative Multi-Experts Multimodal Large Language Model (CME-MLLM), which integrates a Universal Adapter for shared semantics with Task-Specific Adapters to produce diverse yet constraint-compliant textual samples. For image synthesis, SAMA employs an Anchor-Preserving Diffusion mechanism that uses anchor-weighted prompts and latent conditioning to maintain critical semantic anchors while diversifying visual contexts. To eliminate the need for manual verification, SAMA further introduces a Dual-Constraint Filtering module that selects synthetic samples based on both cross-modal consistency and anchor fidelity. Extensive experiments across benchmark datasets for MNER, MRE, and MEE demonstrate that SAMA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art augmentation baselines under both fully supervised and low-resource settings, underscoring its versatility, robustness, and effectiveness.

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24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Instantaneous-Frequency EEG Microstate Dynamics Stratify Motor Subtypes in Parkinson's Disease

Authors:
Nobukawa↗Watanabe↗

Parkinson's disease (PD) is clinically heterogeneous, yet objective electrophysiological markers of its postural-instability/gait-difficulty (PIGD) and tremor-dominant (TD) motor subtypes are lacking. We tested whether the temporal dynamics of instantaneous-frequency (IF) microstates in resting-state electroencephalography (EEG) distinguish these subtypes from each other and from healthy controls (HC). In a publicly available cohort (OpenNeuro ds007526) comprising 28 HC and 97 PD patients classified as PIGD (n=50) or TD (n=47), the spatial distribution of the IF was reduced by principal component analysis and modeled with a Gaussian hidden Markov model, yielding three recurrent microstates. Per-participant mean dwell time, occupancy, and state-transition probabilities were compared across the three groups and, within PD, correlated with clinical scores. We found that the dynamics of one microstate varied systematically across groups: its dwell time, occupancy, and self-transition probability increased monotonically from HC through TD to PIGD, while outgoing transitions decreased, so that the state became an increasingly persistent attractor. For dwell time, all three pairwise contrasts survived correction (HC versus PIGD, Hedges' g=1.06; HC versus TD, g=0.59; PIGD versus TD, g=0.40). None of the dynamic indices was associated with clinical severity, disease duration, or medication dose within PD. IF-microstate dynamics thus stratify the PD motor subtypes along a graded continuum without tracking continuous disease severity. The approach offers a candidate objective EEG marker for motor-subtype stratification, complementing spectral characterizations of PD.

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25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

MultiMem: Measuring and Mitigating Memorization in Multi-Modal Contrastive Learning

Authors:
Wenhao Wang↗Franziska Boenisch↗Michael Backes↗Adam Dziedzic↗

arXiv:2606.22220v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Memorization in machine learning models enables high performance on rare in-distribution samples by capturing their atypical patterns. However, it also causes harmful retention of noise and outliers, degrading generalization. While memorization has been extensively studied in both supervised and self-supervised learning in the vision domain, it remains unexplored in multi-modal contrastive learning. We address this gap by introducing MultiMem, the first metric designed to quantify memorization in multi-modal contrastive learning. Through our systematic analysis, we demonstrate that cross-modal semantic misalignment has the strongest influence on memorization, with text being the dominant modality driving memorization, followed by video, image, and audio. We show that targeted augmentations applied across all modalities effectively reduce memorization as measured by our MultiMem metric and improve model performance. Overall, this work establishes the first framework for measuring and mitigating memorization in multi-modal contrastive learning, preventing harmful data retention and contributing to higher-performing models.

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