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

The Perils of Agency: How Developers Perceive, Prioritize, and Address Risks in Agentic AI Products

Authors:
Hao-Ping Lee↗Jessica He↗David Piorkowski↗Thomas Serban von Davier↗Jodi Forlizzi↗Sauvik Das↗

arXiv:2606.15485v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic AI systems act autonomously, use tools, adapt to context, and operate in complex real-world environments. However, these same characteristics can create or exacerbate product risks. We studied how industry developers (n=35) perceive, prioritize, and address the risks in their agentic AI products. We found that developers' perceptions of risk were closely tied to the qualities that made the product agentic, such as autonomy, tool use, and usage in a real-world context. Developers prioritized product and business risks before considering downstream societal risks like job displacement and end-user privacy. This prioritization also impacted developers' ability and motivation to mitigate agentic risks. Finally, developers lacked mature controls for containing agentic risks, often relying on constraining the same characteristics that make agents useful: e.g., autonomy and goal complexity. These findings reveal a capability vs. risk control tension in agentic AI development: developers need to address risks that emerge from agentic capabilities, yet they currently have limited support for doing so without constraining agentic functionality.

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

Repurposing a Speech Classifier for Guided Diffusion-Based Speech Generation

Authors:
Rostislav Makarov↗Timo Gerkmann↗

arXiv:2606.20457v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Classifier guidance is a way to control diffusion generation by using a noise-conditioned classifier to steer the sampling process toward a target class. One drawback of classifier guidance is that it requires two separately trained models: a classifier and a diffusion model. We therefore study a more compact alternative in which a conventionally trained speech classifier is repurposed as the backbone for diffusion generation. Starting from a frozen noise-conditioned classifier in log-Mel space, we attach a lightweight subnetwork that reuses intermediate classifier representations and train only this subnetwork under a Denoising Score Matching objective. Our work shows that a pretrained classifier can be repurposed for conditional generation, providing an appealing bridge between discriminative modeling and conditional speech synthesis resulting in high speech quality within a single-backbone model, with reduced memory footprint and computational cost.

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03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Digital programming of spin correlations in a fermionic lattice quantum simulator

Authors:
Yann Kiefer↗Lars Fischer↗Zijie Zhu↗Konrad Viebahn↗Tilman Esslinger↗

arXiv:2606.13772v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Analog quantum simulation provides a highly controlled platform to study diverse quantum many-body phenomena. However, current methods for state initialisation are limited to thermal ensembles or uncorrelated product states. Here we present a hybrid approach that complements analog preparation with a digital quantum-gate protocol. This approach enables the engineering of target states with specific, long-range spin-correlations from the same initial resource state. By applying collisional gates to adiabatically prepared and filtered four-fermion singlet chains, we program diverse spin-correlation patterns, including that of a Heisenberg chain. We measure the spin correlations using a sequence of quantum gates followed by singlet-pair measurements. Our method paves the way to the targeted preparation of strongly correlated states of matter.

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05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

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

Authors:
Xuanguang Liu↗Lei Ding↗Yujie Li↗Chenguang Dai↗Zhenchao Zhang↗Mengmeng Li↗Ziyi Yang↗Yifan Sun↗Yongqi Sun↗Hanyun Wang↗Lorenzo Bruzzone↗

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

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

Proact-VL: A Proactive VideoLLM for Real-Time AI Companions

Authors:
Weicai Yan↗Yuhong Dai↗Qi Ran↗Haodong Li↗Wang Lin↗Tao Jin↗Xing Xie↗Hao Liao↗Jianxun Lian↗

Proactive and real-time interactive experiences are essential for human-like AI companions, yet face three key challenges: (1) achieving low-latency inference under continuous streaming inputs, (2) autonomously deciding when to respond, and (3) controlling both quality and quantity of generated content to meet real-time constraints. In this work, we instantiate AI companions through two gaming scenarios, commentator and guide, selected for their suitability for automatic evaluation. We introduce the Live Gaming Benchmark, a large-scale dataset with three representative scenarios: solo commentary, co-commentary, and user guidance, and present Proact-VL, a general framework that shapes multimodal language models into proactive, real-time interactive agents capable of human-like environment perception and interaction. Extensive experiments show Proact-VL achieves superior response latency and quality while maintaining strong video understanding capabilities, demonstrating its practicality for real-time interactive applications.

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07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

DemoDiffusion: One-Shot Human Imitation using pre-trained Diffusion Policy

Authors:
Sungjae Park↗Homanga Bharadhwaj↗Shubham Tulsiani↗

arXiv:2506.20668v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose DemoDiffusion, a simple method for enabling robots to perform manipulation tasks by imitating a single human demonstration, without requiring task-specific training or paired human-robot data. Our approach is based on two insights. First, the hand motion in a human demonstration provides a useful prior for the robot's end-effector trajectory, which we can convert into a rough open-loop robot motion trajectory via kinematic retargeting. Second, while this retargeted motion captures the overall structure of the task, it may not align well with plausible robot actions in-context. To address this, we leverage a pre-trained generalist diffusion policy to modify the trajectory, ensuring it both follows the human motion and remains within the distribution of plausible robot actions. Unlike approaches based on online reinforcement learning or paired human-robot data, our method enables robust adaptation to new tasks and scenes with minimal effort. In real-world experiments across 8 diverse manipulation tasks, DemoDiffusion achieves 83.8\% average success rate, compared to 13.8\% for the pre-trained policy and 52.5\% for kinematic retargeting, succeeding even on tasks where the pre-trained generalist policy fails entirely. Project page: https://demodiffusion.github.io/

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

Hierarchical Advantage Weighting for Online RL Fine-Tuning of VLAs from Sparse Episode Outcomes

Authors:
Tongyan Fang↗Siyuan Huang↗Naiyu Fang↗Ganlong Zhao↗Zhongjin Luo↗Jianbo Liu↗Xiaogang Wang↗Ying Dong↗Hongsheng Li↗

arXiv:2606.17043v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When pretrained VLA policies are fine-tuned through online RL, each rollout episode produces only a single binary outcome (success or failure), yet the actor update requires per-transition supervision. Existing approaches commonly reduce this sparse outcome to a single scalar reward or advantage signal, which conflates distinct forms of transition-level feedback and provides limited guidance once basic task success becomes achievable. First, a single scalar signal conflates the two objectives of viability and efficiency; once basic success is achieved, the binary label provides no gradient to distinguish efficient completions from slow ones. Second, real-world rollouts mix autonomous and intervention segments; naively assigning episode outcomes across these boundaries introduces incorrect credit assignment. To address these issues, we propose Hierarchical Advantage-Weighted Behavior Cloning (HABC), which trains separate critic heads for these two objectives on different data subsets and combines their outputs with a state-adaptive balance. A state-adaptive gate $g_t$ merges their one-step advantages, prioritizing viability when success is uncertain and shifting to efficiency only when viability is high, and converts the result into per-transition weights on the actor loss. Intervention-aware credit assignment further restricts outcome labels to segments executed by the current policy, preventing supervision from leaking across intervention boundaries. In real-robot experiments on three contact-rich bimanual tasks, HABC raises success from supervised fine-tuning (SFT) baselines of 36%, 44%, and 12% to 92%, 88%, and 38%.

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09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Genome-wide colocalization of body fat distribution GWAS and subcutaneous adipose eQTLs identifies SNX10, DGKQ, and CBX3 as candidate causal genes for cardiometabolic disease

Authors:
Iqbal↗M. S↗

Background: Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified hundreds of loci associated with body fat distribution, yet the causal genes and regulatory mechanisms through which these variants exert their effects remain largely unknown. Expression quantitative trait locus (eQTL) colocalization provides a powerful framework for identifying genes whose expression is genetically coregulated with complex traits. Methods: We performed a genome-wide colocalization analysis integrating waist-hip ratio adjusted for body mass index (WHRadjBMI) GWAS summary statistics from 694,649 individuals (Pulit et al., 2019) with subcutaneous adipose tissue eQTLs from the Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) Project v8 (N = 581 donors). GWAS coordinates were lifted from GRCh37 to GRCh38 to enable direct alignment with GTEx data. We incorporated CAVIAR fine-mapping results to overcome the limitation of FDR-significant eQTL filtering. Colocalization was assessed using the approximate Bayes factor framework (coloc.abf) across 335 independent genome-wide significant loci. Results: Of 2,897 locus-gene pairs tested, 489 (16.9%) showed strong colocalization (PP.H4 > 0.8) and 618 (21.3%) showed moderate evidence (PP.H4 > 0.5). The strongest colocalization was observed for SNX10 (sorting nexin 10; PP.H4 = 1.000), a recently characterized regulator of adipocyte differentiation and female-specific diet-induced obesity. Other top hits included DGKQ (diacylglycerol kinase theta; PP.H4 = 0.9999999), an emerging pharmacological target for insulin resistance, and CBX3 (chromobox 3; PP.H4 = 0.9999974), an epigenetic regulator linked to cardiovascular disease. Established adiposity genes including GRB14 (PP.H4 = 0.681) and KLF14 (PP.H4 = 0.590) were recovered, validating our approach. Several loci exhibited extensive allelic heterogeneity, with 50 genes colocalizing at a single chromosome 3 locus. Conclusions: Our analysis provides a comprehensive map of adipose tissue gene regulatory mechanisms underlying genetic risk for body fat distribution. The identification of SNX10, DGKQ, and CBX3 as high-confidence candidate causal genes advances the translation of GWAS associations into mechanistic understanding and therapeutic targets for obesity-related cardiometabolic disease.

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

Privacy from Symmetry: Orthogonally Equivariant Transformers for LLM Inference

Authors:
Alexander Yukhimchuk↗Andrey Shulga↗Mladen Kolar↗Martin Tak\'a\v{c}↗

arXiv:2606.16461v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Running large language models locally is often impractical, pushing inference on sensitive text to third-party providers. Split inference partially mitigates this by keeping tokens on the client and sending only hidden representations, but these representations can still be recovered via nearest-neighbor search against the public embedding table. We propose an orthogonal obfuscation procedure in which the client multiplies embeddings by a secret orthogonal matrix before transmission. To enable correct inference under arbitrary rotations, we introduce ConjFormer, a transformer variant that is exactly $\mathrm{O}(d)$-equivariant via a lightweight normalization change (scalar RMSNorm) together with blockwise orthogonal conjugation of all linear weights. As a result, the server performs the full forward pass entirely in the rotated basis and never observes unrotated hidden states. Experiments on GPT-2 and Llama 3.2 1B models fine-tuned on PubMed show that orthogonal obfuscation eliminates direct cosine nearest-neighbor inversion and reduces token recovery from over 35% top-10 to at most 1.3%, while increasing perplexity by only 0.4% after fine-tuning. These results indicate that enforcing symmetry at the architectural level can provide a practical defense for privacy-preserving LLM inference without noise injection or heavy cryptographic machinery.

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

EventVLA: Event-Driven Visual Evidence Memory for Long-Horizon Vision-Language-Action Policies

Authors:
Ganlin Yang↗Zhangzheng Tu↗Yuqiang Yang↗Sitong Mao↗Junyi Dong↗Tianxing Chen↗Jiaqi Peng↗Jing Xiong↗Jiafei Cao↗Jifeng Dai↗Wengang Zhou↗Yao Mu↗…

Memory remains a critical bottleneck for long-horizon robotic manipulation, as standard Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies often fail when task-relevant cues become occluded or unobservable over time. While existing memory-augmented methods utilize historical context, they either suffer from severe information bottlenecks, incur high latency via decoupled dual systems, or rely on unselective buffers that accumulate massive visual redundancies. To address these limitations, we introduce EventVLA, an end-to-end framework founded on the concept of sparse visual evidence memory that comprises two core components: foundational visual anchors to retain initial and short-term contexts, and a dynamic Keyframe Evidence Memory (KEM) module. Specifically, KEM directly predicts future keyframe probabilities from the VLA's latent embeddings to autonomously capture and store sparse, task-critical visual events. This foresight-driven mechanism empowers the policy to dynamically evaluate the future causal utility of current observations, preserving transient visual evidence before it becomes unobservable. Furthermore, we propose RoboTwin-MeM, a diagnostic benchmark specifically designed to evaluate non-Markovian manipulation tasks with interactive visual evidence. Extensive evaluations show that across 17 memory-requiring simulation tasks and 4 real-world bimanual tasks, EventVLA achieves an average success rate improvement of +40% over state-of-the-art memory-augmented VLAs.

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12.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-10

A mean-field model of neural networks with PV and SOM interneurons reveals connectivity-based mechanisms of gamma oscillations

Authors:
Farzin Tahvili↗

by Farzin Tahvili, Martin Vinck, Matteo Di Volo Classic theoretical models of cortical oscillations are based on the interactions between two populations of excitatory and inhibitory neurons. Nevertheless, experimental studies and network simulations suggest that interneuron subclasses such as parvalbumin (PV) and somatostatin (SOM) exert distinct control over oscillatory dynamics. Yet, we lack a theoretical understanding of the mechanisms underlying oscillations in E-PV-SOM circuits and of the differences with respect to the classical mechanisms for oscillations in simpler E–I networks. Here, we derive a biologically realistic mean-field model of a canonical three-population E-PV-SOM circuit. This model robustly generates oscillations whose features are consistent with experimental observations, including the relative timing of PV and SOM activity and the effects of optogenetic perturbations. By reducing the model to a linear analytical form, we demonstrate that gamma oscillations emerge directly from the cell-specific connectivity of the three-population circuit. This connectivity motif alone accounts for experimentally observed phase relationships, with PV activity consistently leading that of SOM neurons. Together, this mean field model identifies a distinct structural mechanism giving rise to oscillations in canonical E–PV–SOM circuits and provides theoretical primitives for constructing large-scale, cell-type-specific models of cortical dynamics.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

GRIP: Feedback-Guided Prompt Retrieval for Large Multimodal Models

Authors:
Garvita Allabadi↗Matteo Sodano↗Roberto Estev\~ao↗Yuxiong Wang↗Vikram Adve↗Emre Kiciman↗Ranveer Chandra↗

In-Context Learning (ICL) has become a powerful mechanism for adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to new tasks without fine-tuning. Extending this concept to Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), Multimodal In-Context Learning (M-ICL) relies on retrieving relevant examples, such as images, captions, or question-answer pairs, to guide predictions across tasks like classification, captioning, and visual question answering (VQA). Most existing approaches select in-context examples based on feature-space similarity, assuming that semantically similar samples provide the most useful context. However, our systematic analysis reveals that this assumption does not always hold: visually similar examples are not necessarily those that most effectively enhance in-context learning performance. To address this, we propose the Guided Retrieval of In-context Prompts (GRIP), a learnable vision-only retrieval framework that leverages feedback from LMMs to identify examples that truly improve model predictions. GRIP learns to distinguish beneficial from detrimental in-context examples through contrastive training, refining retrieval beyond pure similarity. Across three multimodal tasks, namely classification, captioning, and VQA, GRIP improves consistently over similarity-based retrieval on Qwen2.5-VL-7B, with its strongest gains in classification on Idefics2-8B. Moreover, we demonstrate that retrievers trained with feedback from one open LMM can be transferred to other models without retraining, including closed-source GPT-4o and Gemini, enabling scalable and cost-efficient deployment of M-ICL. Code will be published upon acceptance.

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14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Thermodynamic Value of XOR-Game-Induced Side Information in a Szilard Engine

Authors:
Piotr \'Cwikli\'nski↗

arXiv:2605.12044v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a Szilard-type thermodynamic valuation of side-information channels induced by Bell-type correlations. In each round, a two-level working system is thermalized with a degenerate Hamiltonian, so that its physical microstate is a uniform classical bit. A trusted referee embeds this bit into a finite two-player XOR game, and a correlation resource produces a compressed controller bit. The controller uses only this compressed bit as side information for feedback. The construction is formulated first for arbitrary finite XOR games. The referee encoding makes the game-winning event equivalent to correct prediction of the physical microstate. Consequently, the induced side-information channel is binary symmetric, with success probability equal to the XOR-game winning probability of the supplied behaviour. The reversible Szilard feedback value is therefore fixed by the mutual information between the microstate and the controller record. Optimizing over local, quantum, and nonsignalling behaviour sets turns the corresponding game values into local, quantum, and nonsignalling thermodynamic ceilings. The construction is an effective-channel valuation, not a claim that Bell nonlocality is thermodynamic fuel. The controller receives only the compressed prediction bit, not the auxiliary variables that define the game. The thermodynamic costs of the referee, the correlation resource, and the preprocessing are not included. When controller-memory reset is included in a full cycle, the net work is non-positive, consistently with the second law.

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15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

SAMark: A Self-Anchored Text Watermarking with Paragraph-Level Paraphrase Robustness

Authors:
Jiahao Huo↗Wenjie Qu↗Yibo Yan↗Kening Zheng↗Jiaheng Zhang↗Xuming Hu↗Philip S. Yu↗Mingxun Zhou↗

Semantic-level watermarking (SWM) improves robustness against text modifications by treating sentences as the basic unit. However, robustness to paragraph-level paraphrasing remains difficult because such attacks globally disrupt watermark signals by changing sentence order. In this work, we propose SAMark, a self-anchored watermarking framework that removes the dependency on sentence order by establishing a step-independent green region in semantic space. To improve detectability, we introduce a multi-channel hyperbolic scoring mechanism that amplifies watermark signals while suppressing noise from weakly aligned candidates. We further propose a diversity-aware filtering strategy that combines hard filtering with soft regularization, extending beyond simple n-gram repetition filters to address semantic redundancy. Experimental results show that SAMark achieves up to 90.2% TP@FP1% under typical paragraph-level paraphrasing attacks, outperforming the strongest prior baseline by more than 30% on average, while maintaining generation quality competitive with unwatermarked text and breaking the robustness-quality trade-off that limits prior methods.

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17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

G-IdiomAlign: A Gloss-Pivoted Benchmark for Cross-Lingual Idiom Alignment

Authors:
Fengying Ye↗Yanming Sun↗Runzhe Zhan↗Zheqi Zhang↗Lidia S. Chao↗Derek F. Wong↗

Idioms are difficult to transfer across languages due to their non-compositionality and weak surface-form grounding, making literal mappings unreliable. We present G-IdiomAlign, a gloss-pivoted benchmark where each idiom is anchored by an English gloss from Wiktionary. We further construct a high-confidence reference alignment set for reproducible evaluation. G-IdiomAlign supports two protocols: (1) a controlled Multiple-Choice Idiom Equivalence with typed distractors for error attribution; and (2) a Gloss-Contrastive Generation contrasting No-gloss and With-gloss inputs to isolate the effect of an explicit semantic pivot. Across diverse LLMs, a bias to literal translation is a dominant failure mode, especially when the target is a low-resource language. Glosses consistently improve Gloss-Contrastive Generation under an embedding-based semantic proxy, but performance remains modest, indicating substantial headroom in the open output space. Subsequent analysis on Qwen3-8B further suggests that cross-condition differences are concentrated more in attention heads than in layers, while better With-gloss generations coincide with stronger gloss anchoring.

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18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

FitVTON: Fit-aware Virtual Try-On via Body-Garment Size Control

Authors:
Yiqun Ning↗Ao Shen↗Chenhang He↗Lei Zhang↗

While diffusion-based virtual try-on has achieved impressive visual realism, most methods treat the task as 2D inpainting, prioritizing texture preservation over physical plausibility. Consequently, they often produce plausible-looking images that fail to reflect authentic garment fit across diverse body shapes. We present FitVTON, a Fit-aware virtual try-on model on different bodies in the wild. FitVTON encodes garment-body size through structured text prompts, and learn from simulated try-on triplets from parameterized garment model. To improve the fitting effects over garment silhouettes, we introduce two auxiliary head to predict the masks for both the garment and the exposed body. We further introduce a texture rectification stage to improve realistic appearance from simulated data. To evaluate the fitting fidelity, we curate a real-world dataset, FittingEffect3K, combining VLM-based scoring protocol. Both subjective and quantitive experiments show that FitVTON demonstrate authentic fitting fidelity, with significant sizing accuracy and shape preservation over state-of-the-art methods while maintaining competitive image quality. Project Page: https://zenoning.github.io/FitVTON/.

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

CAPRA: Scaling Feedback on Software Architecture Deliverables with a Multi-Agent LLM System

Authors:
Marco Becattini↗Niccol\`o Caselli↗Matteo Minin↗Roberto Verdecchia↗Enrico Vicario↗

arXiv:2606.18976v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated assessment in software engineering education has advanced significantly for code grading and essay scoring. However, reviewing software architecture deliverables, which requires analyzing structural completeness and requirements traceability, has not yet been fully automated. Applying Large Language Models (LLMs) to this task requires robust architectures to ensure technical feedback is accurate and reliable for students. This paper presents CAPRA (Configurable Architecture Proficiency Report Assessment), a multi-agent LLM system that analyzes software architecture deliverables to generate personalized, template-compliant LaTeX feedback. As a core design choice, CAPRA coordinates multiple specialized agents and employs a Python-based microservice for multi-modal document extraction, utilizing PyMuPDF and vision-enabled LLMs (specifically gpt-4o) to parse text and UML diagrams. To ensure educational reliability and mitigate hallucinations, CAPRA introduces a deterministic Evidence Anchoring step using fuzzy matching via normalized Levenshtein distance, along with a ConsistencyManager agent that cross-verifies, deduplicates, and merges findings. System performance is assessed using a structured eight-criterion binary evaluation taxonomy covering: (i) extraction completeness, (ii) feature validation, (iii) issue grounding and severity detection, (iv) recommendation specificity and traceability, and (v) template and tone compliance. A preliminary empirical evaluation on 10 student reports shows that CAPRA satisfied 88.8% of the evaluated criteria under a strict two-rater aggregation rule, achieved moderate inter-rater agreement with human evaluators (kappa = 0.582), and processed each report in slightly over 4 minutes. While these results support the viability of LLM-supported architectural feedback, human oversight remains essential for subjective assessment dimensions.

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20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

HPSv3++: Scaling Reward Models Across the Full Spectrum of Diffusion Model Capabilities

Authors:
Yijun Liu↗Jie Huang↗Zeyue Xue↗Yuming Li↗Ruizhe He↗Haoran Li↗Shijia Ge↗Siming Fu↗

Reward models guide text-to-image (T2I) systems toward outputs aligned with human preferences. However, typical reward models such as HPSv3 are trained on pre-annotated data from earlier T2I models, without accounting for quality discriminative shifts arising from evolving model capabilities and reinforcement learning (RL) iterations, limiting their broader applicability. In this work, we propose HPSv3++, a reward model framework that elevates the HPSv3 model for varying T2I model capabilities and their RL iteration changes across the full capability-iteration spectrum. Specifically, we first introduce HPDv3++, a 212K dual-dimension preference dataset annotated for text fidelity and aesthetic quality using a recent high-capability (Qwen-Image) model with human supervision. We then propose a two-stage training framework. Stage 1 employs data-aware orthogonal gradient projection to incorporate diverse aesthetic perception from HPDv3++ while preserving the original effective human preference knowledge in HPSv3. Stage 2 further leverages unlabeled data from T2I models spanning different capability levels and RL iterations, and introduces a joint capability-iterations conditioned signal for the reward model together with a standard deviation-driven unsupervised guidance mechanism, strengthening reward model across the capability-iteration spectrum. HPSv3++ achieves state-of-the-art preference prediction, outperforming HPSv3 9.8% on HPDv3, 5.5% on GenAI-Bench, while achieving 79.1%/88.1% on our proposed HPDv3++. When used for T2I RL training, it consistently improves GenEval scores across diverse T2I models, demonstrating its wide-range capabilities. The code is available at https://github.com/PlantPotatoOnMoon/HPSv3-PlusPlus.

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21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

When Calibration Fails the Vulnerable Hospital: Federated Conformal Risk Control via Risk-Curve Shrinkage

Authors:
Nafis Fuad Shahid↗

arXiv:2606.20115v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Conformal risk control (CRC) provides distribution-free guarantees on segmentation quality by calibrating a prediction-set threshold on held-out data. In federated deployments, the standard approach pools calibration scores across sites into a single threshold. We provide the first quantification, on real multi-institutional brain tumor data (FeTS-2022, 1,251 subjects, 20 institutions), showing that this naive pooled CRC protects the average hospital but violates coverage at 40% of individual institutions, with the worst site exceeding the target false-negative rate by 7.8 percentage points. The naive alternative, per-site local CRC, largely restores coverage but inflates prediction sets by 83x, rendering them clinically useless. We propose a shrinkage-based federated CRC protocol: each site transmits only its empirical risk curve (G scalars) to a server, which computes a shrinkage-regularized threshold per site. A single hyperparameter n0 smoothly trades worst-case coverage for prediction-set efficiency; leave-one-site-out sensitivity analysis identifies n0=19, achieving 2.7/20 violations at 2.0x stretch. We further show that direct Lagrangian optimization of coverage budgets fails, concentrating risk on vulnerable hospitals, and that the finite-sample correction term is essential: removing it triples violations. The marginal CRC guarantee is preserved by construction under the stated site-mixture assumption; per-site coverage is validated across four targets with three seeds. No patient-level images, masks, or per-volume scores leave any site.

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22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

EDoF-NeRF: extended depth-of-field neural radiance fields using a coded aperture camera

Authors:
Yoshiyuki Shirasaki↗Ryoichi Horisaki↗

We propose a method for extending the depth-of-field (DoF) to construct high-fidelity neural radiance fields (NeRF) – an emerging technique for rendering photorealistic novel views from a dataset of images captured at different viewpoints, based on implicit neural representations. The trade-off between DoF and light quantity is inherent not only in conventional cameras but also in NeRF, since the datasets used by NeRF are captured by these cameras. To address this issue, we introduce a coded aperture placed at the camera pupil, preserving spatial frequency components under defocused conditions. We develop a camera model incorporating coded apertures into NeRF, allowing direct input of coded images and enabling the generation of novel views with an extended DoF. We validate the proposed method, termed extended DoF-NeRF (EDoF-NeRF), through simulations and experiments, demonstrating its superior performance compared to conventional aperture cameras.

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23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

GLACIER: A Multimodal Student-Teacher Foundation Model for Molecular Property Prediction

Authors:
Emily Nguyen↗Yongchan Hong↗Harsh Toshniwal↗Yan Liu↗Andreas Luttens↗

arXiv:2606.11382v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep learning models facilitate the discovery of molecules with tailored properties among billions of candidate compounds. However, the computational burden to develop and deploy state-of-the-art models continuously increases, limiting their scalability. Most large-scale models are unimodal in nature and overlook the potential to leverage complementary molecular data modalities. To address these shortcomings, this paper introduces the Graph-Language Alignment for Chemical Inference and Exploration using Representations (GLACIER) model, a student-teacher framework that integrates molecular graphs, SMILES strings, and physicochemical descriptors to learn rich molecular embeddings. Our framework consists of three stages: (1) we pretrain three student encoders on 100,000 drug-like molecules: a message-passing neural network for molecular graphs, a transformer-based encoder for SMILES strings, and a multilayer perceptron for physicochemical descriptors, (2) we fuse these student modalities using a novel Finsler geometry-aware module, and (3) distill complementary knowledge from large teacher models, including MiniMol and MolFormer, into a single lightweight model via contrastive learning. We demonstrate that GLACIER is a robust framework that delivers high predictive performance and computational efficiency in complex molecular property prediction tasks. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/eemokey/glacier.

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24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

A2SG:Adaptive and Asymmetric Surrogate Gradients for Training Deep Spiking Neural Networks

Authors:
Yechan Kang↗Yongjin Kweon↗Mingyeong Seo↗Sohee Park↗Yeonguk Jeon↗Jongkil Park↗Hyun Jae Jang↗Jaewook Kim↗YeonJoo Jeong↗Suyoun Lee↗Seongsik Park↗

Training deep spiking neural networks (SNNs) remains challenging due to sharp loss landscapes and temporal inconsistency caused by surrogate gradients. To address these challenges, we propose a unified framework: adaptive and asymmetric surrogate gradients A2SG. The adaptive gradients adjust an effective window for spatio-temporal adaptation, reducing spatial gradient variation and maintaining directional consistency of gradients over time. The asymmetric gradients reflect neuronal dynamics by assigning larger gradients to neurons with higher membrane potentials, and we prove that they yield lower variation than symmetric surrogates. Our analysis further establishes a direct connection between local gradient variation and the curvature of the loss landscape, providing a principled explanation for how A2SG promotes convergence to flatter minima and improves generalization. We conduct extensive experiments on diverse models, including CNN-based and Transformer-based SNNs, across various tasks such as image classification using both static and neuromorphic datasets, as well as segmentation. The results demonstrate that A2SG consistently improves accuracy and energy efficiency, establishing it as a general and reliable solution for training deep SNNs. Our code is available at https://github.com/KIST-NCL/A2SG.git.

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

SVoT: State-aware Visualization-of-Thought for Spatial Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Chao Lei↗Yanbei Jiang↗Markus Hiller↗Zhijian Zhou↗Xunye Tian↗Krista A. Ehinger↗Nir Lipovetzky↗

arXiv:2606.11770v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spatial reasoning remains a challenge for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), as it requires reliable multi-hop inference over both intermediate states and state transitions. Current studies often leave intermediate states unverified and treat state transitions as implicit processes, which limits reliability in multi-hop spatial reasoning. To address this, we propose State-aware Visualization-of-Thought (SVoT), a reinforcement learning framework that generates interleaved, verifiable intermediate states and visualizations. SVoT integrates transition reasoning chains into the generation processes, enabling the model to verify action preconditions and effects through interleaved textual and visual reasoning. We train SVoT via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), instantiating verification through reward design and evaluating the efficacy of different fine-grained rewards. As existing benchmarks reduce state transitions to single-variable updates, substantially simplifying the problems, we establish five domains by extending classical environments and introducing two novel domains, Pacman and Gather, that require multi-object interactions and numerical reasoning. These domains support systematic evaluation of multi-hop spatial reasoning with quantitative verification of generated intermediate states and transition reasoning. SVoT with transition-aware supervision achieves state-of-the-art performance across the introduced domains, yielding up to a 65% absolute accuracy gain on out-of-distribution test sets.

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