Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18 DOI: HASH:2ae2df1f9e233e8f0043332f5cd29921

From Paper Letters to an Integrated Digital Workflow: Improving Efficiency, Reliability, and Engagement in Health Guidance

Authors:

Kakizaki↗Hirafuji↗Araba↗Yoshida↗Aoki↗

Background: Post-checkup health guidance in Japan has traditionally relied on paper-based communication and manual administrative processes. These workflows are time-consuming, prone to transcription errors, and can delay timely engagement with health guidance recipients. Objective: To assess whether replacing a paper-based workflow with an integrated digital system using Microsoft Access, robotic process automation (RPA), and web-based responses could improve administrative efficiency, operational reliability, and engagement among health guidance recipients. Methods: This single-site quality improvement initiative redesigned the existing letter-based workflow. Access served as a central interface for managing recipients and generating guidance letters. RPA (EzRobot) automated repetitive clerical and billing-related tasks. A web form accessed via a QR code enabled recipients to respond digitally. Outcomes included manual administrative handling time per case, occurrence of transcription-related errors, health guidance completion rate, and guidance duration distribution. Results: Following implementation, staff active handling time per case decreased from approximately 10 minutes to less than 1 minute (approximately 30 seconds), while automated RPA execution typically required about 4-5 minutes per case without staff input. No transcription-related errors were detected during the post-implementation observation period. Health guidance completion rates improved from 28.3% to 39.2% (chi-square test, P=200 days decreased from 30.5% to 20.9% and cases with >=240 days decreased from 13.6% to 8.9% (R4 n=59, R5 n=158). Conclusion: An integrated Access-RPA-Web workflow was associated with improvements in administrative efficiency and operational reliability in post-checkup health guidance while retaining human verification and exception handling. This pragmatic, non-AI-dependent approach may offer a useful model for process-level improvement in preventive care settings.

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02.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15507

Frame-Conditioned Moral Computation in LLaMA 3.1-8B-Instruct: A Mechanistic Interpretability Audit of Ethical Reasoning

Authors:

Ali Dasdan↗Manan Shah↗W. Russell Neuman↗Chad Coleman↗Kund Meghani↗Safinah Ali↗

arXiv:2606.15507v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Behavioral audits of Large Language Models on moral prompts measure what the model says, not the internal computation producing it. We use Transluce, an AI-driven mechanistic-interpretability platform, to examine LLaMA 3.1-8B-Instruct on 54 moral prompts in four batteries: 17 dilemmas, policy, and meta-ethical questions (B1); 6 role-playing scenarios (B3); and a controlled trolley contrast varying the switching mechanism with people fixed (B4, 15 prompts) or identity attributes with mechanism fixed (B5, 16 prompts). Two complementary metric families, five cluster-level metrics and a six-metric neuron-level panel, converge on a Situational Anchor Effect: domain-specific representations dominate the top of the activation list across every battery. The model's ethics-labeled capacity stays essentially constant; its salience (rank, priority, top-of-list presence) is highly sensitive to the interpretive frame the prompt selects. The B4-vs-B5 contrast confirms the model attends to whichever surface feature varies: aggregate ethics metrics are indistinguishable, but the dominant non-ethics distractor mirrors the design. A multi-temperature audit identifies a candidate ethics neuron (L16/N3837) stable across temperatures; a cross-model behavioral proxy on two frontier models yields preliminary evidence of divergence in self-reported moral focus, consistent with an Alignment Wrapper in which RLHF re-orders surface text without removing underlying domain-first frames. We unify these as Frame-Conditioned Moral Computation: the prompt's surface vocabulary selects a feature manifold, and the moral conclusion is downstream of that selection. Behavioral alignment must be supplemented by Mechanistic Alignment: a research program asking whether ethics-related features can be shown causally privileged under controlled frame variation, not merely loud in the explanation.

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03.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17350

Do Large Language Models Always Tell The Same Stories?

Authors:

Thennal DK↗Hans Ole Hatzel↗

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled the generation of high-quality prose, yet the question of whether these models are capable of generating diverse outputs remains contested. In this work, we investigate the diversity of LLM-generated stories through the framework of narrative similarity. Using a contrastive framework and a dataset of human-written stories and prompts from r/WritingPrompts, we collect narrative similarity judgments across 10 representative LLMs, utilizing both human evaluations and three different automatic annotation methods. Our findings reveal a consistent trend: LLM-generated narratives are consistently more similar to each other than human-written stories are. We demonstrate that frontier models in particular converge on a ``mean'' generic narrative that approximates individual human stories but lacks the collective diversity of human authors. Finally, we show that common mitigation strategies, including negative prompting and temperature scaling, fail to meaningfully address this homogeneity.

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04.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14679

Optimal Hidden-Target Learning for Online Inventory Optimization on General Convex Sets

Authors:

Anthony Pineci↗Yunzong Xu↗

arXiv:2606.14679v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Online inventory optimization (OIO) is online convex optimization with physical memory: inventory carryover makes the feasible action set depend on the past. A natural principle, used in stochastic inventory learning and recently in OIO under a single linear capacity constraint, is to maintain a hidden target chosen by an online learner and implement its projection onto the currently feasible order-up-to set. We prove that this simple principle is optimal for OIO on arbitrary bounded convex capacity sets. With online gradient descent as the base learner, the method improves the best known regret guarantee for OIO on general convex sets from inverse to inverse-square-root dependence on the common-demand probability, and we prove a matching lower bound. The same principle gives the first polylogarithmic regret guarantee for strongly convex losses and the first dynamic regret guarantee adapting to Euclidean path variation on general convex capacity sets. The analysis introduces a norm alignment principle: the right state variable is the distance from the hidden target to the feasible set, measured in the same norm as the projection. Under norm alignment, this distance evolves pathwise as a scalar queue, with target movement as arrival and common demand as service. This reduction to one-dimensional queue control resolves the state dependence and extends the guarantees to general convex capacity sets, beyond the reach of prior productwise approaches. Experiments on synthetic and real-world inventory data corroborate the theory.

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05.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17376

Contactless Respiratory Monitoring on Heterogeneous Mobile Robots: A Multimodal Edge-Computing Framework

Authors:

Milind Rampure↗Shadman Sakib↗Haley Patel↗Zahid Hasan↗Nirmalya Roy↗

Respiratory-rate (RR) monitoring is a critical component of remote triage and victim assessment in emergency response, disaster recovery, and infectious-disease scenarios, where minimizing physical contact can reduce responder risk and improve operational safety. However, field deployment of contactless RR monitoring remains challenging due to variable illumination, posture changes, platform heterogeneity, and the impracticality of wearable sensors in hazardous environments. In this paper, we present a modality-adaptive contactless RR monitoring framework for heterogeneous mobile robots with onboard edge computing. The proposed system combines brightness-adaptive sensor selection across RGB, thermal, near-infrared (NIR), and low-light cameras, keypoint-guided chest ROI extraction for posture-robust monitoring, and a signal-quality-index (SQI)-based filtering mechanism for reliable respiratory estimation. We implement and evaluate the framework on three robotic platforms spanning quadruped and wheeled locomotion and multiple edge-computing architectures. Experiments conducted across diverse lighting conditions, subject poses, and robot-to-subject distances demonstrate that the framework generalizes across platforms without per-platform algorithmic retuning, while revealing modality-specific operational boundaries. RGB provides the broadest coverage up to 8m, NIR remains effective up to 6m, thermal is reliable only at short range, and low-light sensing supports monitoring in complete darkness up to 8m. Overall, the results demonstrate the feasibility of multimodal contactless RR monitoring on mobile robots and support its use as a foundation for autonomous triage and victim assessment in hazardous search-and-rescue settings.

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06.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2603.29247

MemRerank: Preference Memory for Personalized Product Reranking

Authors:

Zhiyuan Peng↗Xuyang Wu↗Huaixiao Tou↗Yi Fang↗Yu Gong↗

LLM-based shopping agents increasingly rely on long purchase histories and multi-turn interactions for personalization, yet naively appending raw history to prompts is often ineffective due to noise, length, and relevance mismatch. We propose MemRerank, a preference memory framework that distills user purchase history into concise, query-independent signals for personalized product reranking. To study this problem, we build an end-to-end benchmark and evaluation framework centered on an LLM-based 1-in-5 selection task, which measures both memory quality and downstream reranking utility. We further train the memory extractor with reinforcement learning (RL), using downstream reranking performance as supervision. Experiments with two LLM-based rerankers show that MemRerank consistently outperforms no-memory, raw-history, and off-the-shelf memory baselines, yielding up to +10.61 absolute points in 1-in-5 accuracy. These results suggest that explicit preference memory is a practical and effective building block for personalization in agentic e-commerce systems.

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07.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18826

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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08.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20531

VisDom: Sparse Novel View Synthesis with Visible Domain Constraint

Authors:

Mariia Gladkova↗Tarun Yenamandra↗Edmond Boyer↗Robert Maier↗Tony Tung↗Daniel Cremers↗

Sparse novel view synthesis (NVS) remains challenging due to the ambiguity of recovering 3D geometry from few input views. While NeRF- and Gaussian Splatting (GS)-based methods perform well with dense supervision, they often overfit in sparse settings, producing floating artifacts and inconsistent geometry. Silhouette consistency is commonly used as a regularizer, but it remains insufficient, as silhouette-consistent regions can extend beyond the true object geometry. We introduce VisDom, a learning-free geometric constraint that augments classical carving-based visual hull reconstruction by enforcing a minimum multi-view visibility requirement. Specifically, we define a visible domain as the subset of 3D space observed by at least $K$ views and use it as an additional filtering criterion on top of standard silhouette-based reconstruction. This provides a stronger spatial prior in sparse-view settings. We integrate VisDom into both implicit (NeRF) and explicit (GS) pipelines by restricting volumetric sampling and guiding Gaussian placement during optimization. Experiments on three challenging datasets show consistent improvements in sparse-view NVS, enabling high-quality object-centric reconstruction from as few as four input images. Our method is domain-agnostic, requires only silhouettes, and introduces no learned parameters, making it a simple complement to existing approaches. Applying VisDom on top of GaussianObject further improves performance on Omni3D and MipNeRF360, while matching or surpassing it at 22 $\times$ lower training cost.

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09.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2512.02318

COGNITION: From Evaluation to Defense against Multimodal LLM CAPTCHA Solvers

Authors:

Junyu Wang↗Changjia Zhu↗Yuanbo Zhou↗Lingyao Li↗Xu He↗Mingkui Wei↗Junjie Xiong↗

arXiv:2512.02318v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper studies how multimodal large language models (MLLMs) undermine the security guarantees of visual CAPTCHA. We identify the attack surface where an adversary can cheaply automate CAPTCHA solving using off-the-shelf models. We evaluate 7 representative MLLMs on 18 real-world CAPTCHA task types, measuring single-shot accuracy, success under limited retries, end-to-end latency, and per-solve cost. We further validate our findings through a supplemental external dataset and an adaptive-attacker setting with session memory, while also analyzing the impact of task-specific prompt engineering and few-shot demonstrations on solver effectiveness. We reveal that MLLMs can reliably solve recognition-oriented and low-interaction CAPTCHA tasks at human-like cost and latency, whereas tasks requiring fine-grained localization, multi-step spatial reasoning, or cross-frame consistency remain significantly harder for current models. By examining the reasoning traces of such MLLMs, we investigate the underlying mechanisms of why models succeed/fail on specific CAPTCHA puzzles and use these insights to derive defense-oriented guidelines for selecting and strengthening CAPTCHA tasks. To validate these principles, we present a proof-of-concept by hardening a vulnerable CAPTCHA type using our guidelines. We demonstrate that incorporating fine-grained localization and implicit counting reduces the success rate of state-of-the-art MLLMs from over 95\% to 0\%, confirming that structural changes can effectively mitigate the threat. We conclude by emphasizing the urgent need for CAPTCHA redesign as MLLM capabilities increasingly threaten existing defenses. Code Availability (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20406852).

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10.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11347

Annealed Entropic Allocation for Ranking and Selection

Authors:

Xin Fei↗Juergen Branke↗

arXiv:2606.11347v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose Annealed Entropic Allocation, an annealed weighted soft-min framework for sequential budget allocation in ranking and selection. The central idea is to replace the non-smooth maximin large-deviation rate objective with a weighted log-sum-exp surrogate that aggregates challenger-specific pairwise scores through soft-min weights, mitigating hard switching when several challengers are nearly active. To improve finite-budget discrimination, we incorporate the saddlepoint approximation – a sub-exponential correction derived from refined pairwise tail asymptotics. Because these corrections are sub-exponential and the smoothing parameter is annealed to zero, the surrogate preserves the same first-order large-deviation target as the classical maximin formulation. We show that the surrogate converges uniformly to the hard minimum, that the soft-min weights concentrate on the active challengers, and that, under fixed weights, the induced target allocation map is continuous on the simplex interior. Numerical experiments on Gaussian and exponential instances demonstrate competitive performance, especially when multiple challengers are nearly tied.

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11.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17471

ReRAM-aware Model Finetuning addressing I-V Non-linearity and Retention Errors

Authors:

Ching-Yi Lin↗Shamik Kundu↗Arnab Raha↗Sahil Shah↗

arXiv:2606.17471v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Traditional CPU, GPU, and NPU architectures are increasingly limited by the von Neumann bottleneck. While In-Memory Computing (IMC) using ReRAM crossbar arrays offers a high-density, energy-efficient alternative, its practical deployment is constrained through their non-idealities. Existing hardware-aware training frameworks often require training from scratch, which is computationally prohibitive for modern large-scale models. In this work, we propose a finetuning-based hardware-aware training algorithm that enables robust DNN deployment on ReRAM with minimal training overhead. Our approach mitigates I-V non-linearity by applying a range-shrunk sinh transformation and incorporates retention errors directly into a regularization loss during the finetuning process. We evaluate our framework across models and tasks such as image classification and question-answering (QA). Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves similar accuracy on large-scale models like ResNet18 and DeiT-Tiny as the base model. In-case of ImageNet for MobileNetV3 families the technique has only less than 2% accuracy degradation. Further, applying the technique on the SQuAD v2 dataset results in only 1 point degradation of F-1 score.

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12.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17 DOI: HASH:b57b4288dd9142d14f75f4a7ba4b834e

Cross-Device Adaptation of Mirai for Mammography-Based Breast Cancer Risk Prediction

Authors:

Sistig↗Rothstein↗J. H↗Gadgil↗Achacoso↗Alexeeff↗S. E↗Gerstley↗L. D↗Klein↗R. J↗Margolies↗…

Fine-tuning can adapt pretrained medical imaging models to new clinical datasets, but device-specific domain shifts may limit generalizability. We evaluated Mirai, a mammography-based deep learning model for breast cancer risk prediction, in a large screening cohort containing Hologic and General Electric (GE) full-field digital mammography systems, including GE Premium View (GE PV) and Tissue Equalization (GE TE) post-processing software. Native Mirai showed lower performance on TE images than on Hologic or PV images. Fine-tuning on TE images improved TE performance, particularly for short-term risk prediction, but substantially reduced performance on Hologic images, consistent with catastrophic forgetting. To mitigate this effect, we developed a device-invariant model using interleaved multi-device sampling and conditional adversarial training. This approach largely restored Hologic performance while maintaining improved TE performance, providing better robustness across heterogeneous imaging platforms. Comparison of cumulative and annual risk AUCs over a five-year time horizon further showed that performance gains were driven mainly by short- and intermediate-term predictions. These findings highlight both the value and dangers of device-specific fine-tuning and support balanced domain-adaptation strategies for deploying mammography-based risk models across diverse clinical imaging environments.

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13.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.17020

FusionRS: A Large-Scale RGB-Infrared Remote Sensing Dataset for Dual-Modal Vision-Language Foundation Models

Authors:

Jiaju Han↗Ben Zhang↗Xuemeng Sun↗Qike Zhang↗Yuxian Dong↗Chengyin Hu↗Fengyu Zhang↗Yiwei Wei↗Jiujiang Guo↗

Remote sensing vision-language models have advanced Earth observation understanding, but most existing work remains centered on RGB imagery, leaving the complementary information in infrared data underexplored. Infrared images provide distinctive cues, including thermal intensity structures, object boundaries, and illumination-invariant scene features, which can enrich visual-language learning beyond conventional RGB observations. However, a large-scale RGB-infrared-text dataset for remote sensing vision-language modeling is still absent. To address this gap, we introduce FusionRS, the first large-scale RGB-infrared-text dataset designed for dual-modal vision-language learning in remote sensing. FusionRS is constructed by translating diverse public RGB remote sensing images into infrared-style counterparts, forming aligned RGB-IR image pairs. Each pair is associated with conventional scene captions and IR-aware captions that explicitly describe infrared-specific visual properties while preserving semantic content. Based on FusionRS, we train dual-modal vision-language foundation models for RGB-IR joint understanding. We first train CLIP-style models for RGB-IR-text alignment, and then fine-tune generative VLMs for dual-modal RGB-IR captioning. Experiments show that FusionRS improves RGB-IR alignment, infrared-to-text retrieval, and dual-modal captioning over RGB-only and non-IR-aware training settings. Ablation studies further verify that IR-aware captions are crucial for strengthening infrared-language alignment, highlighting the importance of modality-specific textual supervision for more scalable RGB-infrared remote sensing vision-language representation learning.

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14.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16074

PVminerLLM2: Improving Structured Extraction of Patient Voice via Preference Optimization

Authors:

Samah Fodeh↗Linhai Ma↗Ganesh Puthiaraju↗Srivani Talakokkul↗Afshan Khan↗Elyas Irankhah↗Sreeraj Ramachandran↗Ashley Hagaman↗Sarah Lowe↗Aimee Roundtree↗

Motivation: Patient-generated text contains critical information on patients' lived experiences, social context, and care engagement, but remains largely unstructured, limiting its use in patient-centered outcomes research. Prior work introduced the PV-Miner benchmark and PVMinerLLM models for structured extraction. However, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) alone struggles with rare, fine-grained, and unevenly distributed errors, particularly in token-critical structured outputs. Results: We present PVminerLLM2, an improved set of LLMs for structured patient voice extraction that applies preference optimization to address token-critical errors beyond the reach of supervised fine-tuning. Our method introduces (i) a preference objective with token-level gated stabilization term that prevents degradation of absolute token likelihood under preference optimization, and (ii) confusion-aware preference pair construction to better capture low-separation distinctions. We further incorporate token-importance weighting and inverse-frequency reweighing to address token imbalance and class skew. Across multiple model sizes, PVMinerLLM2 consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving gains of up to 4.43% (Code), 3.50% (Sub-code), and 1.55% (Span), and outperforms baseline LLM trained with existing preference optimization methods. Availability and Implementation: The supplementary material, code, evaluation scripts, and trained models for PVminerLLM2 are publicly available at: https://github.com/Data-Mining-Lab-Yale/PVminerLLM2

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15.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2603.04895

How Does the ReLU Activation Affect the Implicit Bias of Gradient Descent on High-dimensional Neural Network Regression?

Authors:

Kuo-Wei Lai↗Guanghui Wang↗Molei Tao↗Vidya Muthukumar↗

arXiv:2603.04895v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Overparameterized ML models, including neural networks, typically induce underdetermined training objectives with multiple global minima. The implicit bias refers to the limiting global minimum that is attained by a common optimization algorithm, such as gradient descent (GD). In this paper, we characterize the implicit bias of GD for training a shallow ReLU model with the squared loss on high-dimensional random features. Prior work (Vardi and Shamir, 2021) showed that the implicit bias does not exist in the worst-case, or corresponds exactly to the minimum-$\ell_2$-norm interpolating solution under exactly orthogonal data (Boursier et al., 2022). Our work interpolates between these two extremes and shows that, for sufficiently high-dimensional random data, the implicit bias approximates the minimum-$\ell_2$-norm solution with high probability with a gap on the order $\Theta(\sqrt{n/||\lambda||_1})$, where $n$ is the number of training examples and $\lambda$ denotes the spectrum of the data covariance matrix. Our results are obtained through a novel primal-dual analysis that carefully tracks the evolution of predictions, data-span coefficients, as well as their interactions, and show that the ReLU activation pattern quickly stabilizes with high probability over random data.

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16.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17545

Continuous-time Optimal Stopping through Deep Reinforcement Learning

Authors:

Cosmin Borsa↗Michael Ludkovski↗

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

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17.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16617

Sycophancy as Material Failure under Pushback Loading: A Multi-Axis Characterization Across Three Loading Cases and up to Seventeen Material Charges

Authors:

Ferdinand M. Schessl↗

Sycophancy in LLMs is documented across 70+ papers, but expert agreement on construct boundaries remains low (ICC=.184; Ye et al., 2026). The construct fragments because behavioral classification depends on which surface form is privileged. We adopt a materials-science framing: conversation as test specimen under load, LLM-model as material charge, pushback as progressive load, stance-flip as material failure. We characterize this failure across three loading cases (debate n=1000; false-presuppositions n=3400; ethical-setting n=3400; 10-17 material charges per case; 7800 specimens total) using 14 turn-level axis-measurements spanning velocity, damage accumulation, frame-drift, brittleness, and direction stability, plus three speaker-resolved axes from an independent pipeline. The measurements are Hooke-coupled ($\sigma = E \cdot \varepsilon$ analog) and reproduce across loading cases with effects up to $|r_{rb}| = 0.35$ on debate; the sign structure adds a second pattern: the ethical-setting case inverts the velocity and accumulation blocks. Variance composition partitions into two profiles: debate is charge-dominated (brittle-fracture-like: the material grade decides), false-presuppositions and ethical-setting are topic-dominated (creep-like: the load decides); the ratios (2.03 vs 0.13/0.17) are estimator-dependent, for debate even in direction. Cross-judge reliability (GPT-4o vs Haiku 4.5) shows debate scoring is judge-robust (Cohen's $\kappa = 0.88$) while false-presupposition scoring is judge-sensitive ($\kappa = 0.36$) – a caveat single-judge benchmarks must report. This is the methodological move Ye et al.'s diagnosis calls for: a multi-axis characterization that does not depend on which surface form of the construct one privileges.

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18.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18515

Exponentially many initializations to avoid barren plateaus

Authors:

Ankit Kulshrestha↗Ricard Puig↗Diego Garc\'ia-Mart\'in↗Lukasz Cincio↗Ilya Safro↗Zo\"e Holmes↗M. Cerezo↗

arXiv:2606.18515v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Barren plateaus are stated as an average-case phenomenon: pick an ansatz, initialize it naively, and concentration follows. This has led to the common view that a potential cure for barren plateaus is simply to initialize the parameters more carefully. Here we show that the situation is subtler. We introduce a first-moment framework that gives a simple operator-level diagnostic for when an initialization may escape the fully concentrated barren-plateau fixed point, and for comparing the biases induced by different initialization strategies. Our framework recovers several known initialization schemes such as identity and Gaussian initialization, but also shows that barren-plateau avoidance is highly non-unique. Indeed, many shifted, biased, and non-symmetric parameter distributions can avoid concentration, and these choices need not be equivalent. In fact, our results show that one can generate exponentially many families of inequivalent initialization strategies. Then, our numerics indicate that different first-moment-distinct initializations can lead to different attained minima, suggesting that avoiding barren plateaus via smart initializations can trade the exponential concentration problem for the challenge of selecting the right trainable pocket amongst many options.

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19.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17539

Reinforcing Dual-Path Reasoning in Spatial Vision Language Models

Authors:

Yatai Ji↗An-Chieh Cheng↗Yang Fu↗Yukang Chen↗Han Zhang↗Zhaojing Yang↗Wei Huang↗Ka Chun Cheung↗Song Han↗Vidya Nariyambut Murali↗Pavlo Molchanov↗Jan Kautz↗…

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

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20.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11507

SceneMiner: Identity-Preserving Multi-Task Fine-Tuning for Unified BEV Scene Mining

Authors:

Abdalmalek Aburaddaha↗Venkatraman Narayanan↗Keval Thaker↗Samir A. Rawashdeh↗

Mining hard, safety-critical scenes from driving logs is bottlenecked by the absence of difficulty labels, and no single proxy, collision risk, trajectory ambiguity, or semantic rarity suffices to find such scenes on its own. We present SceneMiner, a unified, camera-only bird's-eye-view pipeline that emits complementary mining signals from a frozen vision-language backbone in a single forward pass, with no LiDAR or radar: a retrieval embedding for text-prompted scenario search, a multi-label scene-tag distribution, and a continuous physics-based risk score (a motion forecast is a byproduct, not a contribution). Building such a multi-head model exposes our central finding, a failure mode we term cross-task interference: adding or upgrading one head shifts a shared activation stream and degrades weight-frozen sibling heads, so freezing parameters alone is insufficient. Our contribution, identity-preserving multi-task fine-tuning, removes this interference by zero-initializing every new sub-module and freezing every parameter that feeds the shared stream. The mining heads are thereby preserved bit-identically while training only ~102k parameters. The tagging head reaches mAP 0.4614 (micro-F1 0.5557) on 20 scene tags by pooling each scene into 32 visual tokens, and the embedding head supports text-prompted retrieval, validated qualitatively. Code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/sceneminer_anonymous-64E5

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21.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.02847

Sharp log-Sobolev inequalities on finite cyclic groups

Authors:

Xinyuan Xie↗Haonan Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.02847v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Let $\mathbb Z_n$ be the cyclic group equipped with the uniform probability measure $\pi$, and let $A_{\psi_n}$ be the Laplacian with word length \[ \psi_n(k) = \min(k,n-k). \] We prove the sharp log-Sobolev inequality \[ Ent_{\pi}(f^2) \le 2\pi(f A_{\psi_n} f), \qquad f:\mathbb Z_n \to [0,\infty), \] for every $n \ge 4$. The proof is inspired by the recent work of Frank and Ivanisvili[FrankIvanisvili2026] on a sharp log-Sobolev inequality for nearest-neighbor simple random walk. We use their cubic-majorant reduction, which turns the problem into a 3rd moment estimate; the new point is a blockwise 3rd moment estimate adapted to the word-length multiplier. The same 3rd moment argument also recovers the log-Sobolev inequality for Poisson-semigroup on the circle, first proved by Weissler[Weissler1980]. The same sharp inequalities were also obtained recently by Yao[Yao2026] by a different method.

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22.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18584

Speech-Driven End-to-End Language Discrimination towards Chinese Dialects

Authors:

Fan Xu↗Jian Luo↗MingWen Wang↗GuoDong Zhou↗

Language discrimination among similar languages, varieties, and dialects is a challenging natural language processing task. The traditional text-driven focus leads to poor results. In this paper, we explore the effectiveness of speech-driven features towards language discrimination among Chinese dialects. First, we systematically explore the appropriateness of speech-driven MFCC features towards CNN-based language discrimination. Then, we design an end-to-end speech recognition model based on HMM-DNN to predict Chinese dialect words. We adopt attention to extract the discriminative words related to different Chinese dialects. Finally, through a CNN, we combine the word-level embedding and the MFCC-based features. Evaluation of two benchmark Chinese dialect corpora shows the appropriateness and effectiveness of the proposed speech-driven approach to fine-grained Chinese dialect discrimination compared to the state-of-the-art methods.

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23.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.13748

FedSPC: Shared Parameter Correction for Personalized Federated Learning

Authors:

Kannanthodath Induchoodan Ajay Menon↗Christian Prehofer↗Yunfei Xu↗Toru Hirano↗

arXiv:2606.13748v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Personalized federated learning (PFL) is one of the important approaches in federated learning for addressing statistical heterogeneity while enabling client-specific adaptation. Many PFL methods split the model into shared and personalized parameters, which are jointly trained on each client. However, this creates an optimization issue: shared parameters are updated by clients optimizing different local objectives, which can lead to inconsistent shared updates and weaken the shared representation. To address this problem, we propose Federated Shared Parameter Correction (FedSPC), a modular correction method for PFL. FedSPC applies control-variate correction only to the shared parameters of a given PFL method, while leaving personalized parameters unchanged. It can be integrated into three common PFL settings: shared feature extractors, shared classifiers, and fully shared models with local regularization. Experiments on CIFAR-100 and Tiny-ImageNet with ViT, ResNet-34, and VGG-11 show that FedSPC improves performance across representative PFL methods, including FedPer, FedRep, FedBABU, LG-FedAvg, and Ditto.

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24.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2509.18428

Latent Action Pretraining Through World Modeling

Authors:

Bahey Tharwat↗Yara Nasser↗Ali Abouzeid↗Ian Reid↗

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have gained popularity for learning robotic manipulation tasks that follow language instructions. State-of-the-art VLAs, such as OpenVLA and $\pi_{0}$, were trained on large-scale, manually labeled action datasets collected through teleoperation. More recent approaches, including LAPA and villa-X, introduce latent action representations that enable unsupervised pretraining on unlabeled datasets by modeling abstract visual changes between frames. Although these methods have shown strong results, their large model sizes make deployment in real-world settings challenging. In this work, we propose LAWM, a model-agnostic framework to pretrain imitation learning models in a self-supervised way, by learning latent action representations from unlabeled video data through world modeling. These videos can be sourced from robot recordings or videos of humans performing actions with everyday objects. Our framework is able to transfer learned knowledge across tasks, environments, and embodiments. It outperforms models pretrained with ground-truth robot actions and other similar pretraining methods on the LIBERO benchmark and real-world setup, while being efficient and practical for real-world settings.

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25.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17867

A Quantitative Analysis of Multimodal Biomarkers in Alzheimer's Disease

Authors:

Antonio Scardace↗Daniele Rav\`i↗

Despite increasing adoption of multimodal approaches in Alzheimer's Disease (AD) research – aimed at integrating molecular, structural, clinical, and genetic biomarkers to enhance disease characterization – the relationships among these modalities remain poorly understood. A systematic analysis of their dynamic interaction is essential for improving disease modeling, identifying redundant assessments, and reducing patient burden and acquisition costs. In this paper, we present a quantitative analysis of multimodal AD biomarkers by integrating tau-PET, structural MRI, cognitive scores (MMSE and CDR), and APOE4 data from 789 subjects drawn from the ADNI dataset. In our analyses, we (A) quantify cross-modal mutual information and explained variance to assess redundancy and predictive dependencies; (B) examine associations between tau topologies and structural atrophy across brain regions to select informative ROIs; (C) perform a statistical decomposition of the tau-cognition association into atrophy-related and atrophy-independent components; (D) and identify a dominant neurodegenerative trajectory that aligns with cognitive decline. This study provides a systematic characterization of cross-modal relationships, improving the interpretability and selection of biomarkers in AD. Code is publicly available at: https://github.com/antonioscardace/Multimodal-AD.

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