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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Second-Order Approximation of Limit Order Books in a Single-Scale Regime

arXiv:2308.00805v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We establish a first- and second-order approximation for an infinite dimensional limit order book model in a single (critical) scaling regime where market and limit orders arrive at a common time scale. With our choice of scaling we obtain non-degenerate first- and second-order approximations for the price and volume dynamics. While the first-order approximation is given by a coupled ODE-PDE system, the second-order approximation is described in terms of an infinite-dimensional stochastic evolution equation driven by a cylindrical Brownian motion. The driving noise processes exhibit a non-trivial correlation in terms of the model parameters. We prove that the evolution equation has a unique solution and that the sequence of standardized limit order book models converges weakly to the solution of the evolution equation. The proof uses a non-standard martingale problem. We calibrate a linearized model to market data and explain how our model can be used for deriving confidence intervals of portfolio liquidation values.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

AerialFusionMapNet: Online HD Map Construction with Aerial-Onboard BEV Fusion

High-resolution aerial imagery has recently emerged as a complementary modality for automated driving perception and has shown potential to improve birds-eye-view (BEV) scene understanding when fused with onboard sensors. Prior work demonstrated performance gains for online high-definition (HD) map construction through aerial-onboard fusion; however, conventional end-to-end fusion does not fully exploit the structural information contained in aerial representations. In this work, we introduce AerialFusionMapNet, a fusion-based mapping framework with a structured two-stage training strategy that explicitly enhances the contribution of aerial features within a unified pipeline. The proposed training scheme enables more effective integration of structural aerial priors. On the nuScenes geographic split, AerialFusionMapNet achieves up to 54.7 mAP, improving over prior aerial-onboard fusion baselines from 48.8 mAP by +5.9 absolute and +12.1% relative. The results suggest that structured training design, rather than increased architectural complexity, plays a more decisive role in unlocking the full potential of aerial imagery for online HD map construction. Code and trained models are available at https://github.com/DriverlessMobility/AerialFusionMapNet.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

DeMaVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Foundation Model for Generalizable Deformable Manipulation

arXiv:2605.31286v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Real-world household robots require Vision-Language-Action (VLA) foundation models that can acquire reusable manipulation skills across diverse objects, task conditions, and household environments. Deformable-object folding is a representative challenge, requiring robots to handle clothing items from random initial states across varying categories, geometries, materials, and scenes. However, existing VLA systems commonly train separate policies for different object categories, while naively mixed multi-task training often suffers from task interference and degraded performance. To move beyond category-specific folding policies, we introduce DeMaVLA, a VLA foundation model for generalizable Deformable Manipulation. DeMaVLA adopts a VLM backbone with an action expert and formulates continuous action generation using flow matching. To improve efficiency, the action expert is constructed by pruning every other transformer layer while preserving layer-wise alignment with the VLM backbone, reducing training and inference cost. DeMaVLA is first pre-trained on approximately 5,000 hours of selected real-world dual-arm demonstrations to acquire general manipulation priors. It is then post-trained on mixed folding data that aggregates self-collected demonstrations and corrective trajectories from real-robot failures across multiple folding tasks through a human-in-the-loop Data Aggregation~(DAgger) pipeline. Experiments show that DeMaVLA achieves competitive performance on RoboTwin 2.0 and strong real-world results on our household folding benchmark. These results highlight the value of scalable real-world data, efficient action generation, and corrective learning for general-purpose VLA policies in deformable-object manipulation.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Quantile-Free Uncertainty Quantification in Graph Neural Networks

arXiv:2605.04847v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Uncertainty quantification (UQ) in graph neural networks (GNNs) is crucial in high-stakes domains but remains a significant challenge. In graph settings, message passing often relies on strong assumptions such as exchangeability, which are rarely satisfied in practice, and achieving reliable UQ typically requires costly resampling or post-hoc calibration. To address these issues, we introduce Quantile-free Prediction Interval GNN (QpiGNN), a framework that builds on quantile regression (QR) to enable GNN-based UQ by directly optimizing coverage and interval width without requiring quantile inputs or post-processing. QpiGNN employs a dual-head architecture that decouples prediction and uncertainty, and is trained with label-only supervision through a quantile-free joint loss. This design allows efficient training and yields robust prediction intervals, with theoretical guarantees of asymptotic coverage and near-optimal width under mild assumptions. Experiments on 19 synthetic and real-world benchmarks show QpiGNN achieves average 22% higher coverage and 50% narrower intervals than baselines, while ensuring efficiency and robustness to noise and structural shifts.

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

A Multi-Domain Feature Fusion Framework for Generalizable Deepfake Detection Across Different Generators

Deepfakes are artificially generated images, audio, or videos that threaten privacy, security, and information integrity. Detecting such content is crucial for countering disinformation, as the latest models generate highly realistic content. While spatial- or frequency-based approaches achieve good detection rates on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs)-based generated deepfakes, they often struggle with recent diffusion model-generated images. In particular, existing approaches rarely exploit complementary multi-domain representations or systematically evaluate cross-generator robustness. To address these challenges, we propose a multi-domain deepfake detection framework called SGFF-Net (Spatial-Gradient-Frequency Fusion Network) that integrates spatial, gradient, and DWT (Discrete Wavelet Transform)-based frequency representations within a dual residual learning architecture. Experimental results show that the SGFF-Net achieves 98.95\% accuracy in intra-dataset evaluation and improves performance in both cross-model (70.46\%) and cross-paradigm (69.94\%) settings. Incorporating multi-source training and data augmentation further enhances robustness, increasing accuracy from 70.46\% to 79.80\% in cross-model evaluation, from 69\% to 78\% in cross-paradigm evaluation, and from 61.50\% to 75.80\% on real-world data. Unlike single-domain detectors, the SGFF-Net learns complementary forensic cues across spatial, gradient, and wavelet-frequency domains, resulting in greater robustness under cross-generator and cross-paradigm evaluation. The results further show that combining multi-domain representations with data diversity and augmentation substantially improves generalization, providing practical insights for developing more reliable deepfake detection systems.

06.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Routing Codes: High-Rate Quantum LDPC Codes with Short, Parallel Non-Local Connectivity

arXiv:2606.25330v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) codes are promising candidates for realizing large-scale fault-tolerant quantum computing. Although many codes with favorable theoretical parameters have been developed, their practical adoption must take hardware implementability into account. For mainstream quantum platforms such as superconductors and neutral atoms, the connectivity, the length of non-local couplings, and the complexity of wiring or atom rearrangement are key factors that dictate the difficulty of hardware realization. Here, we propose a new family of qLDPC codes, termed routing codes. Within this family, we find explicit instances whose encoding rates are comparable to those of bivariate bicycle (BB) codes, while systematically reducing qubit connectivity, shortening the length of non-local couplings, and, crucially, making all non-local couplings mutually parallel. This parallelism fundamentally eliminates wiring crossings in superconducting multi-layer architectures and drastically simplifies the scheduling of atom movement in neutral-atom arrays. Under circuit-level simulation, the weight-7 routing codes reduce the physical qubit overhead by approximately a factor of 8, compared to surface codes achieving a same logical error rate. These results establish routing codes as a hardware-centric qLDPC family that bridges the gap between theoretical optimality and near-term physical feasibility.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Benchmarking Cross-Domain Audio-Visual Deception Detection

Automated deception detection is crucial for assisting humans in accurately assessing truthfulness and identifying deceptive behavior. Conventional contact-based techniques, like polygraph devices, rely on physiological signals to determine the authenticity of an individual's statements. Nevertheless, recent developments in automated deception detection have demonstrated that multimodal features derived from both audio and video modalities may outperform human observers on publicly available datasets. Despite these positive findings, the generalizability of existing audio-visual deception detection approaches across different scenarios remains largely unexplored. To close this gap, we present the first cross-domain audio-visual deception detection benchmark, that enables us to assess how well these methods generalize for use in real-world scenarios. We used widely adopted audio and visual features and different architectures for benchmarking, comparing single-to-single and multi-to-single domain generalization performance. To further exploit the impacts using data from multiple source domains for training, we investigate three types of domain sampling strategies, including domain-simultaneous, domain-alternating, and domain-by-domain for multi-to-single domain generalization evaluation. We also propose an algorithm to enhance the generalization performance by maximizing the gradient inner products between modality encoders, named ``MM-IDGM". Furthermore, we proposed the Attention-Mixer fusion method to improve performance, and we believe that this new cross-domain benchmark will facilitate future research in audio-visual deception detection.

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

A Perception vs. Distortion Perspective on Score-Based Generative Channel Estimation

arXiv:2606.16815v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Driven by their remarkable success in computer vision and inverse problem solving, score-based models are increasingly applied to wireless communications, where they show promise across a range of physical-layer tasks. However, despite this growing interest, the current literature often lacks a rigorous analysis of when score-matching offers a tangible advantage over traditional discriminative learning. This paper aims to address this gap through the use-case of channel estimation, a fundamental inverse problem in wireless systems. We present a theoretically grounded interpretation of score-based channel estimation through the lens of the perception-distortion tradeoff, identifying the conditions where score matching excels as well as its key limitations. In particular, by modeling downstream wireless tasks (e.g., capacity maximization) as functionals of the channel estimation process, we quantify the excess risk incurred by standard distortion-minimization approaches. Extensive numerical results show that under high predictive uncertainty, the large excess risk gap can be offset by score-based estimation, enabling near Bayesian-optimal precoding via the learned posterior, whereas in the low predictive uncertainty regime, discriminative distortion-minimization approaches are preferable due to lower complexity and more efficient use of model capacity.

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

IterCAD: An Iterative Multimodal Agent for Visually-Grounded CAD Generation and Editing

Computer-Aided Design is pivotal in modern manufacturing, yet existing automated methods predominantly rely on open-loop, one-shot generation, creating a mismatch with iterative real-world practices. In this paper, we present IterCAD, a unified multimodal agent framework for closed-loop, interactive CAD generation and editing. We formulate the task as a multi-turn interaction between a multimodal agent and an executable CAD sandbox, covering three tasks: Drawing-to-Code, Text-to-Code, and Interactive Editing. To support this, we develop a data synthesis pipeline incorporating advanced industrial manufacturing features to generate standard-compliant multi-view engineering drawings, complex code-editing tasks, and high-fidelity interaction trajectories. We optimize the agent via progressive SFT followed by geometry-aware reinforcement learning with viable-prefix masking to enhance code executability and geometric fidelity. Finally, we introduce the IterCAD-Bench evaluation suite and propose the Chamfer Distance Tolerance-Recall (CD-TR) curve alongside its AUC-TR metric, establishing a survivor-bias-free standard that unifies code validity and geometric precision. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IterCAD achieves highly competitive performance across multiple benchmarks, significantly outperforming existing approaches in both code executability and geometric precision, while exhibiting superior capabilities in closed-loop iterative refinement.

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

IMPACTeen: Intentions, Manipulation, Persuasion, Annotations, and Consequences in Teen Communication Dataset

IMPACTeen is a dataset of textual social influence scenarios spanning interpersonal, media-based, and digital settings in an adolescent context. It contains 1,021 texts, 5,100 individual annotation records, and gold labels for social influence techniques, with each text annotated from five distinct perspectives: teenagers, parents, psychologists, communication experts, and teachers. The resource was constructed through constrained LLM generation, followed by a two-step human editing and validation phase aimed at ensuring youth-context realism. A multi-dimensional annotation covered influence presence, techniques, intentions, consequences, resistance, reactions, and annotation confidence. The dataset supports research on social influence detection, annotator disagreement, cross-lingual modeling, and the training and evaluation of language models. The dataset was created in Polish and is accompanied by a corresponding English version.

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

Robust Privacy: Inference-Stage Privacy through Certified Robustness

arXiv:2601.17360v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: An adversary observing a model's released prediction can infer sensitive attributes of the queried input, or even reconstruct representatives of the model's training data. The inference interface thus acts as a side channel for privacy leakage. We introduce Robust Privacy (RP), an inference-stage privacy notion inspired by certified robustness: if a model's prediction is provably invariant within a radius-R neighborhood around an input x with confidence at least $1-\alpha$, then x enjoys $(R,\alpha)$-Robust Privacy, under which we prove that any adversary observing the released prediction has at most $\alpha/2$ advantage in distinguishing x from any input within distance R of x. Building on RP, we formalize Robust Attribute Privacy (RAP), an attribute-level privacy notion that characterizes the set of sensitive-attribute values that remain compatible with a released prediction. On a classification task, RP increases the median length of the RAP-compatible inference interval from 23.50 to 29.96, reducing attribute-inference precision. Model inversion attacks, often treated as a training-stage threat, in fact rely on fine-grained signals leaked through the inference interface; RP masks these signals at the inference stage, reducing attack success rate (ASR) from 73% to 4% on a black-box inversion attack. This direct targeting of the leakage channel enables RP to dominate DP-SGD and randomized response in the privacy-utility tradeoff space: RP retains 98.4% accuracy at 21% ASR, whereas DP-SGD must drop accuracy to 61.7% to reach a comparable ASR. Across both experiments, increasing the smoothing sample size N strengthens privacy and improves utility together. Finally, we examine model distillation as a scope boundary and show that RP mitigates attribute-level and instance-level inference-stage privacy leakage, but not function-level extraction through model distillation.

12.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-09

Daily briefing: Trial to ‘de-age’ cells treats first person

Authors:

The gene-therapy trial aims to treat glaucoma by rejuvenating cells in the optic nerve. Plus, the mystery of how things freeze and encouragement to go out into the sunlight. The gene-therapy trial aims to treat glaucoma by rejuvenating cells in the optic nerve. Plus, the mystery of how things freeze and encouragement to go out into the sunlight.

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

Current World Models Lack a Persistent State Core

World models are increasingly regarded as a decisive step toward artificial general intelligence, yet modeling the physical world demands more than rendering convincing frames on demand: it requires an internal world state that keeps evolving over time, decoupled from observation, so that objects endure and events run to their conclusions whether or not a camera is watching, much as the moon holds to its orbit when no one is looking. This requirement is a blind spot of existing benchmarks, which reward surface properties such as fidelity, motion, and camera controllability while never asking whether a generated world keeps evolving once it is unobserved. We introduce WRBench, the first systematic diagnostic benchmark that treats camera motion as an intervention on observability and resolves evaluation into a human-calibrated chain that asks whether the camera executes the requested interaction, whether the scene stays continuous and identifiable while in view, and whether a returning target remains consistent with the event that was set in motion. Across 9{,}600 videos from 23 models spanning four control paradigms, one finding proves stubborn: current systems maintain the observed world as a tracking shot, resuming a returning target in the state at which it was abandoned rather than advancing the event while it went unseen. Because this failure recurs across control paradigms, model families, and increments of scale, robust world-state evolution does not follow from cleaner imagery, tighter control, richer geometric priors, or sheer parameter count We therefore argue that the stability of the physical state kernel and the consistency of worldlines under viewpoint intervention should become first-class objectives of world-model design, so that a world model captures how the world will unfold rather than how the next frame appears.

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

A novel Framework for Open-Vocabulary Multi-Object Recognition using CLIP

To address the limitations of existing open-vocabulary object recognition methods, including high system complexity, substantial training costs, and limited generalization capability, this paper proposes a novel Open-Vocabulary Object Recognition (OVOR) framework based on a streamlined two-stage strategy: object segmentation followed by recognition. The proposed framework eliminates the need for complex retraining procedures and labor-intensive annotation. After extracting object regions, object-level image embeddings and category-level text embeddings are generated using CLIP, enabling recognition over arbitrary vocabularies. To reduce dependence on CLIP and enhance encoding flexibility, we further introduce a CNN/MLP-based approach that extracts convolutional neural network (CNN) feature maps and employs a multilayer perceptron (MLP) to align visual features with text embeddings. The resulting embeddings are then concatenated for cross-modal matching. Finally, object recognition is performed through similarity matching between image and text embeddings. Experiments on COCO, Pascal VOC, and ADE20K demonstrate that CLIP-based image encoding achieves the highest average AP, outperforming current state-of-the-art methods. Meanwhile, the results reveal the potential of CLIP-independent image encoding as a promising alternative for OVOR.

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

Chronological Thinking in Full-Duplex Spoken Dialogue Language Models

Recent advances in spoken dialogue language models (SDLMs) reflect growing interest in shifting from turn-based to full-duplex systems, where the models continuously perceive user speech streams while generating responses. This simultaneous listening and speaking design enables real-time interaction and the agent can handle dynamic conversational behaviors like user barge-in. However, during the listening phase, existing systems keep the agent idle by repeatedly predicting the silence token, which departs from human behavior: we usually engage in lightweight thinking during conversation rather than remaining absent-minded. Inspired by this, we propose Chronological Thinking, an on-the-fly conversational thinking mechanism that aims to improve response quality in full-duplex SDLMs. Specifically, chronological thinking presents a paradigm shift from conventional LLM thinking approaches, such as Chain-of-Thought, purpose-built for streaming acoustic input. (1) Strictly causal: the agent reasons incrementally while listening, updating internal hypotheses only from past audio with no lookahead. (2) No additional latency: reasoning is amortized during the listening window; once the user stops speaking, the agent halts thinking and begins speaking without further delay. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of chronological thinking through both objective metrics and human evaluations show consistent improvements in response quality. Furthermore, chronological thinking robustly handles conversational dynamics and attains competitive performance on full-duplex interaction metrics.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Durability and Seasonal Variation in the Effectiveness of Nirsevimab over Three Seasons in Connecticut

Background Nirsevimab has been widely administered in the United States since 2023 to protect infants and young children from severe disease caused by respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). Although early post-licensure studies have shown high effectiveness against medically attended RSV infection, uncertainty remains about the durability of protection, effectiveness beyond the first RSV season, and the extent to which changing RSV seasonality influences real-world effectiveness. Objective To estimate the effectiveness of nirsevimab against medically attended RSV infection across three consecutive RSV seasons and to examine how effectiveness varies by season and time since immunization. Methods We conducted a test-negative case-control study utilizing electronic health records of infants and young children tested for RSV by polymerase chain reaction in outpatient and inpatient settings within the Yale New Haven Health System between October 1, 2023, and March 1, 2026. Effectiveness of nirsevimab was estimated using multivariable logistic regression, adjusting for age, weekly RSV activity, pre-existing risk factors, and other potential confounders. Variation in effectiveness was examined by season, encounter setting, and time since immunization up to 24 months. Results Overall, 17,755 infants and young children were tested for RSV infection, of whom 2,388 (13.4%) were cases and 15,367 (86.6%) were controls. The overall effectiveness of nirsevimab was 67.3% (95% confidence interval [CI]: 59.8, 73.3%) against all medically-attended RSV infections, 60.2% (95% CI: 49.6, 68.5%) against RSV-associated outpatient visits, and 88.9% (95% CI: 82.3, 93.0%) against RSV-associated hospitalization. Effectiveness against medically attended RSV infection declined across seasons, from 76.7% (95% CI: 60.5, 86.3%) in 2023/24 to 54.4% (95% CI: 33.0, 68.9%) in 2025/26. Lower season-specific effectiveness in later seasons corresponded with progressively delayed RSV activity over. Protection against RSV-associated hospitalization declined with increasing time since immunization, from 92.5% (95% credible interval [CrI]: 85.9, 96.4%) at 1 month, to 77.2% (95% CrI: 60.4, 87.6%) at 6 months, and 39.9% (95% CrI: 2.4, 63.3%) at 12 months post-immunization, after which effectiveness plateaued. Conclusions Nirsevimab remained effective against RSV-associated hospitalization through 6 to 12 months after immunization. Delayed RSV activity was associated with lower effectiveness, highlighting the importance of aligning administration with local RSV circulation.

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

Dziri Voicebot: An End-to-End Low-Resource Speech-to-Speech Conversational System for Algerian Dialect

Automatic speech and language technologies are still heavily biased toward high-resource languages, limiting their applicability to dialectal and low-resource settings such as Algerian Dialect. This language presents additional challenges including lack of standardized orthography, frequent codeswitching with French, and scarcity of annotated speech resources. This paper addresses the problem of building a complete speech-to-speech conversational system for Algerian Dialect. We propose a modular pipeline integrating automatic speech recognition, natural language understanding, retrieval-augmented generation, and text-to-speech synthesis within a unified architecture. This work is the continuation of our previous work on Algerian dialectal conversational systems Bechiri and Lanasri [2026], extending it from text-based dialogue modeling to full speech-based interaction. We constructed dedicated datasets for ASR, NLU, and TTS in the telecom domain and fine-tune pretrained models for each component. The ASR system is built on Whisper-based adaptation, while the NLU module combines transformer-based embeddings with a task-oriented dialogue framework. A neural TTS system is trained on a newly collected dialectal corpus to enable spoken response generation. Experimental results show strong performance across all components, including low word error rate for ASR, high intent classification and entity recognition scores for NLU, and stable speech synthesis quality. The proposed system provides a reproducible baseline for end-to-end conversational modeling in Algerian Dialect.

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

MOSIC: Model-Agnostic Optimal Subgroup Identification with Multi-Constraint for Improved Reliability

arXiv:2504.20908v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Current subgroup identification methods typically follow a two-step approach: first estimate conditional average treatment effects and then apply thresholding or rule-based procedures to define subgroups. While intuitive, this decoupled approach fails to incorporate key constraints essential for real-world clinical decision-making, such as subgroup size and propensity overlap. These constraints operate on fundamentally different axes than CATE estimation and are not naturally accommodated within existing frameworks, thereby limiting the practical applicability of these methods. We propose a unified optimization framework that directly solves the primal constrained optimization problem to identify optimal subgroups. Our key innovation is a reformulation of the constrained primal problem as an unconstrained differentiable min-max objective, solved via a gradient descent-ascent algorithm. We theoretically establish that our solution converges to a feasible and locally optimal solution. Unlike threshold-based CATE methods that apply constraints as post-hoc filters, our approach enforces them directly during optimization. The framework is model-agnostic, compatible with a wide range of CATE estimators, and extensible to additional constraints like cost limits or fairness criteria. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate its effectiveness in identifying high-benefit subgroups while maintaining better satisfaction of constraints.

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

Know Thy Reasoner: Not All Language Models Explore Alike

arXiv:2604.10827v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Compute scaling for LLM reasoning trades off exploring solution approaches (breadth) against refining promising ones (depth), yet why a given trade-off works, and why it often fails to transfer across models, remains unclear. We argue that the optimal strategy depends on the model's diversity profile, the spread of probability mass across solution approaches, and that this must be characterized before any exploration strategy is adopted. We formalize this with a framework decomposing reasoning uncertainty, deriving when depth-based refinement outperforms parallel sampling, and validate it across three model families at both inference and training. Our central finding is that the diversity regime dictates the strategy: low-diversity aligned models benefit from depth-based refinement with lightweight intrinsic signals, whereas high-diversity base models are often harmed by it, and instead need breadth or stronger signals to compensate.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

On Randomized Algorithms in Online Strategic Classification

arXiv:2602.06257v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Online strategic classification studies settings in which agents strategically modify their features to obtain favorable predictions. For example, given a classifier that determines loan approval based on credit scores, applicants may open or close credit cards and bank accounts to obtain a positive prediction. The learning goal is to achieve low mistake or regret bounds despite such behavior. While randomized algorithms have the potential to offer advantages to the learner in strategic settings, they have been largely underexplored. In the realizable setting, no lower bound is known for randomized algorithms, and existing lower bound constructions for deterministic learners can be circumvented by randomization. In the agnostic setting, the best known regret upper bound is $O(T^{3/4}\log^{1/4}T|\mathcal H|)$, which is far from the standard online learning rate of $O(\sqrt{T\log|\mathcal H|})$. In this work, we provide refined bounds for online strategic classification in both settings; our bounds depend on the Littlestone dimension $\mathrm{Ldim}(\mathcal H)$ of the hypothesis class $\mathcal H$ and the maximum degree $\Delta$ of the manipulation graph. In the realizable setting, we extend, for $T > \mathrm{Ldim}(\mathcal H) \Delta^2$, the existing lower bound $\Omega(\mathrm{Ldim}(\mathcal H) \Delta)$ for deterministic learners to all learners. This yields the first lower bound that applies to randomized learners. We then provide the first randomized learner that improves the known (deterministic) upper bound of $O(\mathrm{Ldim}(\mathcal H) \cdot \Delta \log \Delta)$. In the agnostic setting, we give an improper randomized learner that improves the regret upper bound to $O(\sqrt{T\log|\mathcal H|})$, matching the standard online learning rate. We also show a larger lower bound for all proper learning rules, demonstrating that improperness is necessary to achieve the optimal rate.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Reclaim Evaluation: A Lossy Memory Is Worse Than an Empty One

Authors:

A language model's memory can be worse than having no memory at all. Give a model a memory that kept a wrong conclusion but dropped the work behind it, and it emits that stale value as a confident answer; give the same model an empty memory and it abstains. Across seven models this direction never reverses, a clean kill condition that none breaks. We call this brittle memory: behavioral, not the near-immediate information bound beneath it; only its magnitude is disposition- and task-dependent, not its direction. We measure it with reclaim evaluation: compress a drifted interaction at a fixed budget, then test whether a correction recovers the known answer, scored against ground truth with no judge. Correctability is bottlenecked by whether the answer-determining source survives, not by capability. A one-line source-first policy (keep the recomputable source, drop the re-derivable conclusion) restores correctability at equal budget where that source is compact and identifiable; a length-matched control rules out added text as the cause. The hand-built oracle reaches 1.00; a one-prompt deployable version reclaims 0.49-0.88. The stake compounds: chained through a memory loop, a single dropped-source error corrupts a growing span of downstream steps and stays uncorrectable, while source-first holds to a bounded budget horizon. The wall and fix replicate across three deployed memory systems and on real dialogue (MultiWOZ), and past the budget where the source no longer fits, the fix fails silently unless the note records completeness. This is a controlled study of a mechanism, not a benchmark: judge-free exact scoring, matched-budget controls, and validators built to come out false. We release the harness, conditions, and validators.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

A Framework for Evaluating Agentic Skills at Scale

Agent skills – structured, reusable knowledge artifacts that augment LLM agent capabilities – have been rapidly adopted in industry, yet their cross-domain impact and use across commercial and open-source models remain under-studied, and no reusable methodology exists for evaluating an individual skill. In this work, we present an evaluation framework that lets a skill author construct realistic tasks to rigorously assess the aspects of a skill that matter most to them, and that estimates skill utility by solving those tasks. Further, we apply our evaluation approach at scale to 500 real-world skills, generating 1,000 tasks derived from the skills' content, along with instruction-following and goal-completion scoring rubrics. Using these metrics, we evaluate how 19 agent-model configurations, both proprietary and open-source, perform on the tasks. Our results show that models vary widely in how closely they adhere to the instructions encoded in skills, leading to substantial differences in their performance gains. Furthermore, we show that access to a skill significantly changes model behavior compared to the no-skill setup, providing an essential mechanism for encoding opinionated workflows into LLM agents. We release our evaluation dataset to support future work on agent skills.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Transformation Behavior of Images in Latent Space

arXiv:2606.24430v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Training of neural networks for histopathology classification tasks typically relies on data encoding into latent space, which reduces complexity and improves performance. There are several encoder networks available, either pretrained on general image datasets such as ImageNET, or specifically on histopathological images. Training of encoder networks should be adapted to downstream tasks, allowing encoding of biologic/diagnostic content while rendering networks invariant to label-irrelevant transformations. This paper investigates the effect of classical image transformation on the latent space, using networks provided by Lunit Inc. and Bioptimus, both focusing on pathological images, and by Meta Research Team. We assess variance of embeddings resulting from standard data transformations by comparing original and transformed image embeddings and by contrasting them with random, unrelated embeddings, using image tiles from hematoxylin/eosin-stained sections available in a colorectal tissue dataset and the publicly accessible TCGA dataset. Our findings show that embeddings of original and transformed images are closer to each other than to random embeddings, indicating robustness to transformations. However, they are not fully invariant, revealing that the encoder networks do not completely neutralize transformation effects in latent space, explaining why transformation-mediated augmentation of datasets can improve performance. Significant differences were observed between general and histopathology-specific encoder networks.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Multi-HMR 2: Multi-Person Camera-Centric Human Detection, Mesh Recovery and Tracking

Most advances in human mesh recovery (HMR) have focused on pelvis-centered recovery, overlooking metric 3D localization and detection accuracy in the camera coordinate system - two key factors for real-world applications such as human-robot interaction and social scene understanding. Current evaluation protocols often ignore these aspects, emphasizing per-person, root-centered recovery rather than camera-space perception. As a result, existing approaches rely on fixed camera assumptions or handcrafted post-processing, limiting their robustness and practical deployment. We introduce Multi-HMR 2, a simple yet robust DETR-based framework for Multi-person Camera-centric Human detection, mesh Recovery, and tracking. Multi-HMR 2 predicts a scene-consistent camera together with human meshes, enabling metric 3D localization without ground-truth intrinsics. Moreover, by distilling image-based memory features from SAM2, Multi-HMR 2 extends to tracking, achieving consistent identity association without video supervision. Despite its conceptual simplicity - no handcrafted components, no video input, and no ground-truth cameras - Multi-HMR 2 achieves state-of-the-art pelvis-centered performance while substantially improving detection accuracy and metric 3D localization.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Integrable Massless and Massive Fermions

Authors:

arXiv:2603.11172v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: One-dimensional integrable fermions can be classified into massless and massive regimes, and the $R$-operator for the latter can be constructed from that of the former. Here, I define integrable massless fermions by the simultaneous satisfaction of the Yang-Baxter equation (YBE) and Shastry's decorated YBE (DYBE) by the $R$-matrix. This notion is strictly more general than Maassarani's `free-fermion algebra', yet more restrictive than the notion of free fermions in exactly solvable quantum models or in integrable two-dimensional classical vertex models dual to quantum spin chains. Within this framework, there emerge two archetypal mechanisms for opening a spectral gap and generating massive fermions: (i) breaking time-reversal symmetry by coupling to external field, and (ii) introducing time-reversal symmetric interactions. These paradigms are realized, respectively, in the XY chain in a longitudinal field and in the Hubbard model, both of which possess non-relativistic, bivariate $R$-matrices. Integrability conditions on local Hamiltonians for both massless and massive fermions are identified, and schematic procedures for uniquely determining their $R$-matrices are proposed.