Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22 DOI: HASH:4a421ce7950d3b5b8848335d31f575b8

Characteristics and Outcomes of Gene-Elusive Dilated Cardiomyopathy

Authors:

Cannie↗Bakalakos↗Syrris↗Protonotarios↗Lorenzini↗Guttmann↗O'Mahoney↗Savvatis↗Sekhri↗Mohiddin↗S. A↗Kaski↗…

Background and Aims Genetic testing in dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) guides risk stratification and family screening. Likely pathogenic or pathogenic (LP/P) variants are identified in approximately one-third of patients, leaving many without a genetic diagnosis. Cohort studies suggest that "gene-elusive" patients have a lower risk of adverse events. This study aims to better characterise this group and identify factors associated with adverse outcomes. Methods Consecutive and unrelated DCM patients undergoing genetic testing and returning no LP/P variants were retrospectively recruited and compared to two control cohorts of DCM patients carrying LP/P variants in LMNA and TTN for a primary composite endpoint of end-stage heart failure (ESHF) or malignant ventricular arrhythmia (MVA). Results Among patients without prior MVA, the composite endpoint occurred in 36/423 (8.5%) gene-elusive, 14/39 (35.9%) LMNA and 11/100 (11%) TTN cardiomyopathy patients (log-rank p

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02.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17250

Rethinking Groups in Critic-Free RLVR

Authors:

Yihong Wu↗Liheng Ma↗Lingfeng Xiao↗Muzhi Li↗Xinyu Wang↗Yingxue Zhang↗Jian-Yun Nie↗

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a central paradigm for post-training large language models. Existing critic-free RL methods typically generate a group of rollouts for the same question to estimate value baselines for advantage computation. However, this design suffers from data inefficiency, group synchronization barriers, and inflexibility with structured rollouts. In this work, we revisit the role of the ``group'' and show that its underlying function is not merely to estimate baselines but to prevent false penalties on negative samples. Building on this insight, we propose negative token filtering, a simple and effective strategy that enables stable single-rollout training. We apply it to two batch-level advantage methods, achieving comparable performance on reasoning tasks and stronger performance on agentic tasks relative to group-based RL techniques.

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03.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2605.17062

The Range Shrinks, the Threat Remains: Re-evaluating LLM Package Hallucinations on the 2026 Frontier-Model Cohort

Authors:

Aleksandr Churilov↗

arXiv:2605.17062v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Spracklen et al. (USENIX Security '25) showed that code-generating large language models hallucinate package names that do not exist on PyPI or npm at rates ranging from 5.2% on commercial models to 21.7% on open-source models, creating an attack surface for slopsquatting – the registration of malicious packages under hallucinated names. We replicate their methodology on five frontier code-capable LLMs released between October 2025 and March 2026: Claude Sonnet 4.6, Claude Haiku 4.5, GPT-5.4-mini, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and DeepSeek V3.2. Across 199,845 paired Python and JavaScript prompts validated against PyPI and npm master lists, we measure overall hallucination rates between 4.62% (Claude Haiku 4.5) and 6.10% (GPT-5.4-mini) – an order-of-magnitude compression of the inter-model spread observed by Spracklen, but not a retirement of the threat. Beyond replication, we identify a set of 127 package names (109 on PyPI, 18 on npm) that all five evaluated models invent identically; following coordinated disclosure with PyPI Security and Socket.dev, 53 of these (41 on PyPI, 12 on npm) remain registrable by an attacker after each registry's existing defenses, constituting a model-agnostic supply-chain attack surface that no single-model study can reveal. We further document a Python-over-JavaScript hallucination asymmetry that inverts Spracklen's 2024 finding, identify a Haiku-below-Sonnet inversion within the Anthropic family, and observe a Jaccard-similarity peak between DeepSeek V3.2 and GPT-5.4-mini (J = 0.343) suggestive of shared training-data origins.

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04.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.12099

ISAP-3D: Identity-Slot Aligned Part-Aware 3D Generation

Authors:

Junlin Hao↗Haoshuai Fu↗Xibin Song↗Wei Li↗Ruigang Yang↗Xinggong Zhang↗Jinchuan Zhang↗

Part-aware 3D generation aims to synthesize structured objects with semantically meaningful components, yet often suffers from structural ambiguity due to identity-layout entanglement. Existing methods either infer part identity and spatial layout implicitly, which can lead to unstable part allocation (e.g., slot swapping or part merging), or rely on strong layout conditions that are difficult to obtain in practice. We attribute this ambiguity to identity-slot permutation freedom: without explicit identity-slot alignment, the correspondence between semantic parts and generation slots is not identifiable during training, allowing multiple slot assignments to fit the same supervision and leading to inconsistent decomposition. Based on this insight, we argue that stable part-aware generation requires identity-aligned one-to-one slot modelling. We therefore propose an identity-slot aligned framework, ISAP-3D, which anchors each part with semantic identity tokens and performs identity-conditioned one-to-one layout prediction, followed by layout-conditioned geometry synthesis. Structured local-global conditioning maintains identity alignment across semantic, spatial, and geometric stages. We also construct a part-level dataset with a unified semantic protocol to enable learnable and consistent identity-slot alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate improved structural stability, controllability, and robustness over state-of-the-art part-aware generation baselines.

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05.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10 DOI: HASH:72995a88209f62b99755476a60d944dc

Is level-1 blob reconstruction under the network multispecies coalescent easy?

Authors:

Dai↗Molloy↗

Hybridization is an important evolutionary process, commonly modeled by the network multispecies coalescent. Reconstructing evolutionary histories under this model is notoriously costly, even for level-1 networks where hybridization events are isolated from each other. The widely used methods that combine speed with statistical guarantees rely on quartet concordance factors computed for all subsets of four species, resulting in an o(n^4k) bottleneck that severely limits scalability to large numbers of species (n) and genes (k). Among quartet-based methods, NANUQ+ is notable because it decomposes the problem into two steps: first reconstructing a tree of blobs, which compresses each non-treelike part of the network, called a blob, into a single vertex, and second reconstructing the internal structure of each level-1 blob, specifically its circular order and hybrid vertex. Here, we investigate whether level-1 blob reconstruction is difficult once the tree of blobs is known. We present a fast and statistically consistent algorithm, called NetCS, based on two simple primitives: majority voting and merge sort, circumventing the bottleneck of computing all quartet concordance factors. In simulations, NetCS achieved comparable accuracy to NANUQ+ and was dramatically faster, enabling analyses of 200 taxa and 1000 genes in only a few minutes. Both methods attained near-perfect accuracy when given the true tree of blobs; however, their performance degraded in end-to-end pipelines due to errors in tree of blobs reconstruction. Strikingly, even methods that reconstruct level-1 networks directly struggled to accurately predict hybrid ancestry. Our results suggest that reconstructing level-1 blobs is unexpectedly easy once the tree of blobs is known, and that a major challenge for phylogenetic network inference lies in accurate tree of blobs reconstruction.

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06.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.01621

Goal2Pixel: Grounding Goals to Pixels for Vision-Language Navigation

Authors:

Muyi Bao↗Yuxin Cai↗Hang Xu↗Zongtai Li↗Jinxi He↗Jingfan Tang↗Chen Lv↗Ji Zhang↗Yaqi Xie↗Wenshan Wang↗

Vision-language models (VLMs) have become a common foundation for vision-and-language navigation in continuous environments (VLN-CE). Yet most VLM-based methods cast navigation as low-level action prediction, an interface that is ambiguous, tied to short-horizon motion primitives, and inefficient due to repeated VLM querying. We propose Goal2Pixel, a pure pixel-based paradigm that reformulates VLN-CE as navigable pixel grounding. Rather than predicting actions, Goal2Pixel uses the image plane as a unified spatial interface between VLM reasoning and robot motion: the model predicts a visible navigable pixel to the agent, which is back-projected into a 3D waypoint for forward navigation. For non-forward actions, we append auxiliary directive regions to the image plane, where the left/right/bottom regions are interpreted as turning left, turning right, and stopping, respectively. To enable long-horizon navigation, we propose a visibility-aware keyframe memory for compact and informative history representation. To adapt pretrained VLMs to navigable pixel grounding, we introduce semantic embeddings and coordinate-aware auxiliary losses. Goal2Pixel achieves competitive state-of-the-art performance while requiring fewer VLM inference calls than prior methods. On R2R-CE Val-Unseen it achieves 54.1% SR and 52.5% SPL with just 7.75 VLM calls per episode, 6x fewer than the 46.62 required by direct action prediction at 32.9% SR. The same trend holds on RxR-CE.Project Page: https://baobao0926.github.io/Goal2Pixel/.

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07.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2508.02158

Robust Detection of Planted Subgraphs in Semi-Random Models

Authors:

Dor Elimelech↗Wasim Huleihel↗

arXiv:2508.02158v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Detection of planted subgraphs in Erdös-Rényi random graphs has been extensively studied, leading to a rich body of results characterizing both statistical and computational thresholds. However, most prior work assumes a purely random generative model, making the resulting algorithms potentially fragile in the face of real-world perturbations. In this work, we initiate the study of semi-random models for the planted subgraph detection problem, wherein an adversary is allowed to remove edges outside the planted subgraph before the graph is revealed to the statistician. Crucially, the statistician remains unaware of which edges have been removed, introducing fundamental challenges to the inference task. We establish fundamental statistical limits for detection under this semi-random model, revealing a sharp dichotomy. Specifically, for planted subgraphs with strongly sub-logarithmic maximum density detection becomes information-theoretically impossible in the presence of an adversary-despite being possible for some planted subgraphs in the classical random model. In stark contrast, for subgraphs with super-logarithmic density, the statistical limits remain essentially unchanged; we prove that the optimal (albeit computationally intractable) likelihood ratio test remains robust. Beyond these statistical boundaries, we design a new computationally efficient and robust detection algorithm, and provide rigorous statistical guarantees for its performance. Our results establish the first robust framework for planted subgraph detection and open new directions in the study of semi-random models, computational-statistical trade-offs, and robustness in graph inference problems.

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08.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18687

Spatially Stratified Distillation for Heterogeneous Radar Place Recognition

Authors:

Sagun Singh Shrestha↗Samuel Harding↗Abdelwahed Khamis↗Saimunur Rahman↗Peyman Moghadam↗

Scalable, all-weather place recognition increasingly relies on heterogeneous radar place recognition to bridge diverse hardware platforms. A notable application is matching queries from cost-effective 4D automotive radars against high-fidelity reference maps built by dense spinning radars. This process is fundamentally limited by the extreme sparsity (and narrow field-of-view) of the 4D sensor, which captures only a fraction of the structural density present in the spinning radar database. Prior efforts address this issue by unifying different radar signals. That is, projecting both signals into a common representational space. Yet, they suffer performance degradation in multi-session environments. In this paper, we propose spatially-stratified distillation (SSD); a strategy that replaces standard uniform distillation with an asymmetric spatial alignment derived directly from physical radar returns. In regions where both radars exhibit overlapping returns, SSD enforces strong feature alignment. Crucially, in sparse regions where the 4D student lacks returns but the teacher contains valid structure within the shared field of view, SSD applies heavily discounted distillation weights. Extensive evaluations of the recent HeRCULES dataset demonstrate that SSD significantly outperforms prior place recognition methods, achieving state-of-the-art results on its challenging dynamic sequences.

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09.

Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-19 DOI: HASH:94ac5b68d83bfa9e240af5c3bffeb9c7

Optimized R2 retroelement complexes for DNA insertion into plant genomes

Authors:

Kimberley T. Muchenje↗

Traditional approaches for DNA insertion into plant genomes using Agrobacterium tumefaciens result in random integration. Newer genetic engineering methods based on nucleases, prime editors, transposases and recombinases extend capabilities but remain constrained with low efficiencies, off-target integration or limited payload size. Here we adapt the avian Taeniopygia guttata R2 protein (R2Tg) for targeted DNA insertion into plant genomes by engineering R2Tg expression cassettes and RNA payloads carrying intron-disrupted reporters, with optimized ribosomal DNA homology arms and untranslated regions. In Arabidopsis thaliana protoplasts, Nicotiana benthamiana leaves and Solanum lycopersicum seedlings, our R2Tg editor system achieves targeted insertion of full-length payloads ranging from 2.2 kb to 5 kb. In Nicotiana benthamiana leaves, integration occurs, on average, at 1 copy per genome, which is 30 times more efficient than that achieved by Cas9 homology-directed repair. This work establishes an R2Tg ribonucleoprotein platform for targeted DNA insertion into plant genomes, using a multicopy genomic safe-harbor site to enable efficient addition of multikilobase genes. R2 retrotransposons are used to integrate DNA into plant and crop 25S ribosomal DNA sites.

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10.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15115

Diversity-Driven Offline Multi-Objective Optimization via Nested Pareto Set Learning

Authors:

Yiyi Zhu↗Yaolin Wen↗Xiang Xia↗Xin An↗Hanyi Si↗Xiang Shu↗Yangde Fu↗Liang Dou↗Hong Qian↗

arXiv:2606.15115v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-objective optimization (MOO) has emerged as a powerful approach to solving complex optimization problems involving multiple objectives. In many practical scenarios, function evaluations are unavailable or prohibitively expensive, necessitating optimization solely based on a fixed offline dataset. In this setting, known as offline MOO, the goal is to find out the Pareto set without access to the true objective functions. This setting suffers from the out-of-distribution (OOD) issue, where the surrogate model is not accurate for unseen designs. Due to the OOD issue, surrogate errors may cause the optimizer to select solutions that do not lie on the true Pareto front and are biased toward its extremes. To address this, this paper proposes Diversity-driven Offline Multi-Objective Optimization (DOMOO), which aims to find out a diverse and high-quality set of solutions. First, DOMOO incorporates an accumulative risk control module that estimates the potential risk of candidate solutions and alleviates the OOD issue between the training data and the generated solutions. In addition, a nested Pareto set learning (PSL) strategy is proposed to jointly learn preference and PSL parameters, then optimize them, enabling adaptation to diverse Pareto front geometries. To further enhance solution quality, we design a diversity-driven selection strategy that extracts a representative and well-distributed set of final solutions. To achieve this diversity-driven selection strategy, we propose $IGD_offline$, a tailored indicator for the offline setting that considers both diversity and convergence, and avoids the bias of hypervolume indicator. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks show that DOMOO achieves the best average rank across tasks in both convergence and diversity among the compared methods.

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11.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16532

Dual-Granularity Orthogonal Disentanglement for Generalizable Audio Deepfake Detection

Authors:

Zhuodong Liu↗Hugen Lv↗Xiangyu Li↗Chunhong Yuan↗

arXiv:2606.16532v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audio deepfake detectors often fail to generalize across speakers, as they learn speaker-identity features rather than synthesis artifacts, known as implicit identity leakage. Existing methods address this but incur architectural complexity or training instability. This paper proposes a dual-granularity orthogonal disentanglement framework enforcing feature independence at two levels: sample-level cosine orthogonality captures directional decorrelation, while batch-level cross-covariance regularization eliminates linear correlations across embedding dimensions. A curriculum disentanglement schedule progressively strengthens the orthogonality constraint without auxiliary networks or adversarial dynamics. Experiments on ASVspoof 2019 LA, ASVspoof 2021 DF, and In-the-Wild datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves 1.35%, 7.88%, and 21.58% equal error rates (EER), respectively, surpassing gradient reversal disentanglement by 2.60% absolute on cross-dataset transfer.

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12.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2506.18756

Semantic-Preserving Prompt Hijacking: A Black-Box Adversarial Attack on Auto-Prompt Optimization

Authors:

Chong Zhang↗Xiang Li↗Jia Wang↗Shan Liang↗Haochen Xue↗Xiaobo Jin↗

LLMs increasingly integrate auto-suggestion optimization modules, enabling them to rewrite and display user input before generating the final response. While this design aims to enhance transparency and trust, its process of autonomously selecting a single best result from multiple candidate solutions allows attackers to hijack this optimization process by inducing subtle, imperceptible semantic shifts. To address this, we propose a semantic preservation hijacking attack method based on black-box conditions: Adaptive Greedy Local Search. This method hierarchically decomposes the input text, masks key language units, and dynamically adjusts candidate replacement words at predefined semantic checkpoints. This maximizes the deviation between the model output and the original intent while strictly maintaining semantic similarity to the original text. Experimental results on commercial and open-source LLMs demonstrate that, under the same semantic similarity constraints, this method achieves a higher attack success rate than existing attack methods in over 2400 test cases. Code is available at: https://github.com/franz-chang/DOBS

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13.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12601

Dual-State Slot Attention: Decoupling Appearance and Identity for Video Object-Centric Learning

Authors:

Sieu Tran↗Duc Nguyen↗Hao Vo↗Khoa Vo↗Ngan Le↗

Unsupervised video object-centric learning aims to decompose dynamic scenes into persistent, object-level representations without supervision. However, existing slot-based methods struggle to maintain stable object identity in challenging settings such as rapid motion and partial occlusion. First, they typically encode both the per-frame appearance of an object and its identity across frames in a single slot vector, creating an objective conflict that leads to slot swapping: reconstruction requires sensitivity to transient visual changes, whereas temporal consistency requires invariance to them. Second, the token renormalization used in Slot Attention can amplify weakly attending slots, allowing them to absorb tokens from other objects and destabilize slot-to-object correspondence. We propose Dual-State Slot Attention (DSSA), a fully self-supervised framework that addresses these limitations by separating appearance from identity and by reducing spurious updates from weakly matching slots. DSSA decomposes each slot into a local state for per-frame appearance and an identity state for temporally stable object information, thereby aligning reconstruction and temporal consistency with separate representations. The identity state is updated through a learned recurrent transition that acts as a temporal filter on the local state, while competition-modulated aggregation (CMA) down-weights updates from weakly matching slots and prevents them from absorbing tokens from other objects. Experiments on MOVi-C, MOVi-D, and YouTube-VIS demonstrate that DSSA consistently improves segmentation quality and temporal consistency over prior methods, while also yielding stronger downstream object recognition and video dynamics prediction. Code and models will be made publicly available upon acceptance.

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14.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11542

Pretrained self-supervised speech models can recognize unseen consonants

Authors:

Chihiro Taguchi↗\'Eric Le Ferrand↗Hirosi Nakagawa↗Hitomi Ono↗Kanji Kato↗Emily Prud'hommeaux↗David Chiang↗

Modern pretrained self-supervised automatic speech recognition models are trained on large-scale audio data to encode speech into contextualized representations. However, their training data are heavily skewed toward high-resource languages with little data from low-resource languages, raising concerns about the potential underrepresentation of typologically uncommon speech sounds such as click consonants primarily found in Khoisan languages. This leads to our central research question: Can these models recognize click consonants as accurately as other speech sounds? To address this question, we fine-tune and compare pretrained self-supervised speech models (Wav2Vec2 and HuBERT) on data from two click-rich Khoisan languages (G|ui and West !Xoon). Our results reveal that the fine-tuned models consistently recognize clicks more accurately than non-clicks, suggesting that self-supervision enables generalization across human speech sounds including rare phonemes.

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15.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18588

Splaxel: Efficient Distributed Training of 3D Gaussian Splatting for Large-scale Scene Reconstruction via Pixel-level Communication

Authors:

Wenqi Jia↗Zhewen Hu↗Ying Huang↗Yu Gong↗Stavros Kalafatis↗Yuke Wang↗Wei Niu↗Chengming Zhang↗Ang Li↗Sheng Di↗Yuede Ji↗Bo Fang↗…

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables high-fidelity and real-time 3D scene reconstruction, but scaling training to large-scale scenes requires optimizing hundreds of millions of Gaussians across multiple GPUs. Existing distributed approaches either partition scenes into isolated regions, causing global inconsistency, or rely on global Gaussian-level exchanges, which lead to substantial growth in inter-GPU communication and quickly dominate iteration time. We propose Splaxel, a communication-efficient distributed 3DGS training framework based on pixel-level local rendering and global composition. Instead of synchronizing Gaussians, each GPU renders its local subset and exchanges only partial pixel values, maintaining mathematical consistency while keeping communication cost stable as the scene size increases. Splaxel further reduces pixel-level redundancy through geometric and transmittance visibility prediction and improves GPU utilization via conflict-free camera-view consolidation. Evaluated on large-scale datasets with up to 120M Gaussians, Splaxel achieves up to 7.6$\times$ speedup over the state-of-the-art distributed 3DGS framework while preserving high reconstruction quality.

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16.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14318

Sectional Curvature for Kantorovich-Wasserstein and Hellinger-Kantorovich Geometries

Authors:

Karl-Theodor Sturm↗

arXiv:2606.14318v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We derive an explicit formula for the sectional curvature of the space ${\cal M}(M)$ of finite measures on a Riemannian manifold M. The space ${\cal M}(M)$ is equipped with the Hellinger-Kantorovich metric $HK$. Even in the case M=R^n, the curvature is comprised of two parts: the `lifted part' is negative, and the `twisted part' is positive. It will be analyzed in detail for the multidimensional torus. Our general approach to sectional curvature in geodesic spaces also leads to new insights into the curvature of the space $P_2(M)$ of probability measures on M equipped with the Kantorovich-Wasserstein metric $W_2$.

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17.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.13911

Overhead Wildlife Locator (OWL): Benchmarking Weakly Supervised Learning for Aerial Wildlife Surveys

Authors:

Isai Daniel Chac\'on↗Zhongqi Miao↗Bruno Demuro↗Caleb Robinson↗Rahul Dodhia↗Lasha Otarashvili↗Jason Holmberg↗Kirk Larsen↗Howard Frederick↗Nathan J. Pamperin↗Pablo Arbel\'aez↗Juan M. Lavista Ferres↗…

Automated aerial wildlife surveys increasingly rely on deep learning, yet standard object detectors require bounding-box annotations, reported to be up to seven times slower and three times more expensive to produce than point-level labels. To address this bottleneck, we introduce the Overhead Wildlife Locator (OWL), a weakly supervised density-estimation framework with three variants: OWL-C, a fully convolutional model for high-throughput screening; OWL-T, a Swin-augmented hybrid for heterogeneous, cluttered scenes; and OWL-D, built on a frozen DINOv3 ViT-H+/16 encoder with a DPT-style fusion decoder. We benchmark all three against POLO, YOLOv11n, and YOLOv11l across five public aerial datasets, from sparse fixed-wing savanna surveys to dense UAV paddock imagery, and against the published HerdNet baseline on its native Delplanque split. OWL-D sets a new state of the art on Delplanque (0.934 AP vs. HerdNet's 0.840) and records the highest AP on four of the five datasets. Performance is regime-dependent: on the extreme-density SheepCounter UAV dataset the hybrid OWL-T leads (0.978 AP) and the convolutional variants attain the lowest counting error, whereas the foundation-based OWL-D degrades, indicating which variant suits which survey type. We further validate operational readiness on the Alaska Department of Fish and Game's 2022 Central Arctic Caribou census: under cross-herd and cross-temporal transfer, OWL-C fine-tuned on the 2017 Porcupine Caribou Herd split attains F1 = 0.965 on a held-out patch test set, with a signed count error of +3.1% aggregated across the released test patches. We release the OWL code, model weights, and the annotated Porcupine Caribou Herd 2017 (PCH) and Central Arctic Herd 2022 (CAH) patches, the first open patch-level datasets for large-scale caribou aerial surveys, at https://github.com/microsoft/MegaDetector-Overhead.

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18.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2605.08523

Machine-learned, finite temperature Fermi-operator expansions suitable for GPUs and AI-hardware

Authors:

Stanislaw Kowalski↗Christian F. A. Negre↗Anders M. N. Niklasson↗Kipton Barros↗Joshua Finkelstein↗

arXiv:2605.08523v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present several finite-temperature recursive Fermi-operator expansion schemes based on the second-order spectral projection (SP2) method. Our approach builds on a previous observation that the electronic structure problem, as formulated through a recursive SP2 expansion, can be mapped onto the architecture of a deep neural network. Using this perspective, we generalize SP2 to finite electronic temperatures by constructing machine learning models that determine optimized recursive expansion coefficients. The same approach is also applied to the prediction of the electronic entropy for fractional occupation numbers. The coefficients are trained for a specified chemical potential and electronic temperature and are not available in closed analytical form. However, by employing an appropriate affine rescaling strategy to the Hamiltonian matrix, we eliminate the need to retrain the model for different temperatures and chemical potentials. Our approach avoids explicit diagonalization and relies solely on highly optimized matrix-matrix multiplication kernels. Compared to state-of-the-art diagonalization, we achieve an order-of-magnitude speedup in the single-particle finite-temperature density matrix calculation for small and moderately sized matrices on modern GPUs and dense matrix multiply units.

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19.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.05861

LLMCodec: Adapting Video Codecs for Efficient Weight Compression of Large Language Models

Authors:

Rui Wang↗Yan Zhao↗Li Song↗Zhengxue Cheng↗

arXiv:2606.05861v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The rapid development of large language models(LLMs) has led to remarkable advances in natural language processing. However, the increasing scale of these models introduces substantial challenges in terms of storage, transmission, and deployment. Though great efforts have been devoted to model compression and quantization, existing methods often rely on fine-tuning or calibration data, which exhibit limited generalization across different tensor types. In this paper, we argue that video codecs offer a promising solution for LLM compression, due to their inherent compatibility with matrix structured data, configurable compression strategies, and the availability of highly optimized, off-the-shelf implementations. Therefore, we present LLMCodec, a video codec-based LLM compression method that integrates affine quantization with the recent VVC/H.266 video codec. Beyond VVC, we further compare a range of video codecs and encoding profiles to evaluate their impact on compression performance. Experiments on different models demonstrate the robustness and generality of LLMCodec. Notably, on LLaMA-3-8B at 2-bit precision, LLMCodec reduces perplexity by over 1.5x and improves downstream task accuracy by 21% compared with the existing method.

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20.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19629

RIVET: Robust Idempotent Voice Attribute Editing

Authors:

Dareen Alharthi↗Bhuvan Koduru↗Rita Singh↗Bhiksha Raj↗

arXiv:2606.19629v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Voice attribute editing models modify characteristics such as age and gender while preserving speaker identity. In large-scale speech datasets, however, attribute annotations are often noisy or inconsistent, which can cause conditional generative models to produce unstable edits. In this work, we show that idempotency provides an effective mechanism for improving robustness to noisy labels. An idempotent operator is one for which repeated application does not change the result, i.e., f(f(x)) = f(x). Enforcing this property acts as an implicit regularizer that reduces sensitivity to mislabeled examples. We introduce RIVET, a training framework that incorporates an idempotency objective to improve robustness to label noise. We evaluate RIVET under controlled label noise and on the GLOBE dataset with naturally noisy annotations. RIVET improves editing success and better preserves speaker identity than standard training, showing that idempotency improves robustness in voice editing models.

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21.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17090

ANEForge: Python for direct computation on the Apple Neural Engine

Authors:

Spencer H. Bryngelson↗

arXiv:2606.17090v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: ANEForge is a Python package that programs the Apple Neural Engine (ANE), the fixed-function neural accelerator on every recent Apple device, directly and without CoreML. In production the engine is reachable only through CoreML, which treats it as a scheduling option: no configuration requires the ANE, and a model can silently run on the CPU or GPU instead. ANEForge compiles a lazy tensor graph, built from 58 fused operators and 19 native bridge operators, into a single ANE program. The program is dispatched through the same ANE daemon and kernel-driver stack as Apple's internal framework. Beyond inference, the package reaches the engine's native fused attention, streams int8, int4, and sparse weights, keeps decoder and optimizer state resident across steps, and runs the forward pass, backward pass, and optimizer update of training on the engine. A small fused program completes a call in about 90us, near the engine's 70us per-program dispatch floor, and a pretrained ResNet-18 forward runs end-to-end in 0.33ms. ResNet-18, a sentence encoder, and a Vision Transformer run end-to-end against framework references, and a Stable Diffusion U-Net validates its forward pass. ANEForge targets Apple Silicon under macOS 14 and later. Each release is verified against a recorded macOS and ANE-compiler version.

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22.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2603.21563

Counterfactual Credit Policy Optimization for Multi-Agent Collaboration

Authors:

Zhongyi Li↗Wan Tian↗Jinju Chen↗Huiming Zhang↗Yang Liu↗Yikun Ban↗Fuzhen Zhuang↗

arXiv:2603.21563v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Collaborative multi-agent large language models (LLMs) can solve complex reasoning tasks by decomposing roles, but reinforcement learning for such systems is limited by credit assignment: shared terminal rewards obscure individual contributions and can encourage free-riding. We introduce two optimizer-agnostic credit assignment methods for converting joint outcomes into agent-specific learning signals. Counterfactual Credit for Policy Optimization (CCPO) estimates an agent's marginal contribution by comparing the realized joint outcome with a counterfactual outcome where that agent is removed. Self-Evaluated Credit for Policy Optimization (SEPO) uses constrained self- and peer-evaluations as a verifier-anchored credit signal while keeping the external task outcome dominant. Both operate at the reward-construction layer rather than as policy optimizers, producing role-specific rewards or advantages for GRPO, GSPO, or REINFORCE++. We instantiate these credit signals in a sequential Think–Solve setting and evaluate them on mathematical reasoning benchmarks. Results show that explicit credit assignment often improves dual-agent reasoning, especially on MATH500 and several out-of-distribution settings, while gains vary across models and datasets. Our code is available at: https://github.com/bhai114/ccpo.

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23.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13605

Distribution-Agnostic Robust Trajectory Optimization via Chance-Constrained Reinforcement Learning

Authors:

Yashdeep Chaudhary↗Roberto Armellin↗Harry Holt↗Marco Sagliano↗

arXiv:2606.13605v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents a distribution-agnostic robust trajectory-optimization framework based on chance-constrained reinforcement learning. The uncertainty is represented here through initial conditions and process noise, with the only requirement being that it can be sampled. A deterministic nominal trajectory is first computed offline, and reinforcement learning is then used only to robustify that baseline through a structured affine closed-loop correction law comprising a feedforward control adjustment and time-varying feedback gains. Probabilistic feasibility is enforced empirically through rollout-based upper-tail quantiles, while terminal dispersion is regulated through covariance-feasibility penalties. The framework is assessed on two materially different trajectory design problems. The flagship case study is a three-dimensional multi-impulse Earth-Mars transfer, where the learned policy is benchmarked against a recent robust trajectory-optimization reference under Gaussian uncertainty and then evaluated under bounded uniform uncertainty and under process disturbances not seen during training. The second case study is a stochastic atmospheric pinpoint rocket landing problem, used to assess portability to a short-horizon continuous-thrust setting with drag, mass depletion, and glide-slope constraints. The results show that the proposed framework can remain competitive in upper-tail fuel cost while preserving probabilistic feasibility, and that the same robustification scaffold can be carried across heterogeneous spacecraft trajectory planning problems without redesign of its core stochastic-control structure.

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24.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17410

Attention Alignment Between Humans and Vision-Language Models

Authors:

Isaac R. Christian↗Udith Haputhanthrige↗Hanna Hornfeld↗Declan Campbell↗Samuel Nastase↗Taylor Webb↗Michael Graziano↗

Visual perception depends on top-down goals and bottom-up sensory mechanisms. Vision-language models implement both, allowing us to treat each component as a separable hypothesis about what drives where we look. We compared spatial attention maps from six vision-language models against human fixation heatmaps recorded on 200 images during two tasks (general description and social captioning). The six models spanned a 2$\times$2 factorial of CNN vs.\ ViT encoders crossed with LSTM vs.\ Transformer decoders, plus Molmo 7B-D and Qwen3.5 9B. We found that both decoder and encoder architecture shaped alignment, but decoder choice dominated. LSTM vs.\ Transformer decoders increased alignment by 40–50 percentage points (80–87\% vs.\ 40–59\% of the human noise ceiling). In contrast, CNN vs.\ ViT encoders contributed a secondary 5–20 point advantage depending on decoder family, with CNN-LSTM the most aligned model overall (85–87\%). Despite their alignment advantage, LSTM-decoder attention maps were spatially diffuse and minimally task-differentiated; ViT-Transformer, the weakest in alignment, showed the sharpest spatial concentration and strongest task differentiation. A hemispatial-neglect simulation confirmed that ablating attention impacted LSTM decoders more than Transformer decoders. In an exploratory extension using TRIBE-simulated synthetic neural responses, fixation alignment and neural relevance dissociate: CNN-Transformer attention maps better predicted synthetic brain activity despite lower fixation alignment, with attention maps best predicting early visual cortex. Together, top-down and bottom-up components trade off what they predict in behavioral and synthetic neural data.

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25.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.18132

Knowledge Reutilization in Meta-Reinforcement Learning

Authors:

Yuan Meng↗Bo Wang↗Juan de los Rios Ruiz↗Xiangtong Yao↗Zhenshan Bing↗Fuchun Sun↗Alois Knoll↗

arXiv:2606.18132v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Meta-reinforcement learning enables fast adaptation by extracting shared structure from related tasks, but existing end-to-end methods often couple task inference with embodiment-specific control. This coupling can obscure non-parametric task semantics, reduce sample efficiency, and limit cross-agent reuse. We propose a meta-knowledge reutilization framework that learns task-level knowledge on a dynamics-simplified agent and transfers it to heterogeneous agents. The framework uses a Bayesian non-parametric prior to organize latent task modes and a high-level policy to generate task-level magnitude guidance. To bridge reusable task knowledge with different embodiments, we introduce a semantic-magnitude interface and a lightweight temporal adaptor, which convert frozen meta-knowledge into temporally aligned subgoals for embodiment-specific low-level controllers. Experiments on multiple locomotion agents show that our framework reduces final-step tracking error by 94.75% – 99.79% compared with recent state-of-the-art baselines and achieves comparable deployment performance with about 23.8% of their interaction data.

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