Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25 DOI: arXiv:2606.25518

Fault of Our Stars: Behavioral Drivers of Rating-Sentiment Incongruence

Authors:

Ramanaish Abaiyan↗Ruththiragayan Sutharsan↗Kusal Amantha↗Anusan Krishnathas↗Asma Rauff↗Kovindarajah Sriyathurshan↗Patalee Narasinghe↗Nirasha Munasinghe↗Nisansa de Silva↗Sandareka Wickramanayake↗

When people share experiences online, they often express thoughts in two ways: a star rating and a written review. In sentiment analysis, ratings are widely used as convenient weak labels for textual sentiment, yet whether the two actually agree is rarely questioned. This study investigates sentiment-rating incongruence, where the sentiment expressed in review text differs from the sentiment implied by the assigned star rating, in Sri Lankan tourism attraction reviews. A dataset of 16,156 reviews from 2010 to 2023 is analyzed using a transformer-based sentiment pipeline that derives textual sentiment independently of assigned ratings. Incongruence occurs in 18.6% of reviews and falls into six directional patterns, with Conservative Rater and Obligatory 5-Star behaviors accounting for the majority of mismatches. Prevalence also varies across venue types, with museums showing the highest rates. Statistical tests, logistic regression, Random Forest, and SHAP analysis identify venue type, reviewer expertise, review length, and temporal factors as contributors to rating-text divergence. Overall, this study demonstrates that star ratings are not interchangeable with textual sentiment and should be validated before being treated as ground-truth labels in NLP.

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02.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2602.09533

Autoregressive Direct Preference Optimization

Authors:

Masanari Oi↗Mahiro Ukai↗Masahiro Kaneko↗Naoaki Okazaki↗Nakamasa Inoue↗

arXiv:2602.09533v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Direct preference optimization (DPO) has emerged as a promising approach for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, the widespread reliance on the response-level Bradley-Terry (BT) model may limit its full potential, as the reference and learnable models are assumed to be autoregressive only after deriving the objective function. Motivated by this limitation, we revisit the theoretical foundations of DPO and propose a novel formulation that explicitly introduces the autoregressive assumption prior to applying the BT model. By reformulating and extending DPO, we derive a novel variant, termed Autoregressive DPO (ADPO), that explicitly integrates autoregressive modeling into the preference optimization framework. Without violating the theoretical foundations, the derived loss takes an elegant form: it shifts the summation operation in the DPO objective outside the log-sigmoid function. Furthermore, through theoretical analysis of ADPO, we show that there exist two length measures to be considered when designing DPO-based algorithms: the token length $\mu$ and the feedback length $\mu'$. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to explicitly distinguish these two measures and analyze their implications for preference optimization in LLMs.

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03.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24645

Reachability and optimal-time certificates for quantum control

Authors:

Younes Naceur↗Lloren\c{c} Balada Gaggioli↗

arXiv:2606.24645v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Finite-time control is central to quantum technologies, yet rigorous limits on reachable targets and optimal control times remain largely unknown. We develop a framework for finite-time reachability and optimal-time certificates in constrained quantum control based on moment relaxations with implicitly time-dependent differential constraints. For fixed control horizons and control constraints, the method yields rigorous upper bounds on achievable terminal fidelities, lower bounds on the optimal control times required to reach them, and certificate gaps for benchmarking explicit control pulses. We demonstrate the versatility of our framework in three use cases: entangled-state preparation in two and three qubits, one-qubit gate synthesis across different control geometries, and excitation transfer in an $N$-qubit $XX$ chain. Our work establishes differential moment hierarchies as a practical tool for certifying reachability limits and optimal control times in quantum control, providing hardware-aware quantum speed limits while highlighting structure exploitation as a key ingredient for scalable certification.

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04.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2312.01265

The optimal sub-Gaussian normalisation for randomised monotone functions

Authors:

Thomas Anton↗Rabee Tourky↗

arXiv:2312.01265v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Let $\mathcal{M}$ denote the class of randomised monotone functions on $\mathbb{R}$ with values in $[0,1]$, and let $U_{\mathcal{M}}\colon \mathbb{R}_+\to \mathbb{R}_+$ be the minimal function for which $$ \mathbb{P}\left\{ \sqrt{\eta_f}\, \sup_{t\in\mathbb{R}} \left| f_Z(t) - \Exf{f_Z(t)} \right| \ge \varepsilon\sqrt{U_{\mathcal{M}}(\eta_f)} \right\} \le 2\e^{-2\varepsilon^2} $$ holds for every member $f_Z$ of $\mathcal{M}$ with finite effective sample size $\eta_f$ and every positive $\varepsilon$. We prove that for every $x> 1$, $$ \left| \sqrt{U_{\mathcal{M}}(x)} - \sqrt{\log_4 x} \right| \le 2 \min\!\left\{ 1,\, \frac{2 \ln(\e + \ln x)}{\sqrt{\ln x}} \right\}\,. $$ The optimal adjustment $\sqrt{U_{\mathcal{M}}(x)}$ matches $\frac{1}{\sqrt{2\ln 2}}\sqrt{\ln x}$ for all $x>1$, with residuals bounded as above.

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05.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2603.26557

MemBoost: A Memory-Boosted Framework for Cost-Aware LLM Inference

Authors:

Joris K\"oster↗Zixuan Liu↗Siavash Khajavi↗Zizhan Zheng↗

Large Language Models (LLMs) deliver strong performance but incur high inference cost in real-world services, especially under workloads with repeated or near-duplicate queries across users and sessions. In this work, we propose MemBoost, a memory-boosted LLM serving framework that enables a lightweight model to reuse previously generated answers and retrieve relevant supporting information for cheap inference, while selectively escalating difficult or uncertain queries to a stronger model. Unlike standard retrieval-augmented generation, which primarily grounds a single response, MemBoost is designed for interactive settings by supporting answer reuse, continual memory growth, and cost-aware routing. Experiments across multiple models under simulated workloads show that MemBoost substantially reduces expensive large-model invocations and overall inference cost, while maintaining high answer quality comparable to the strong model baseline.

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06.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25 DOI: arXiv:2602.11933

Cross-Modal Robustness Transfer (CMRT): Training Robust Speech Translation Models Using Adversarial Text

Authors:

Abderrahmane Issam↗Yusuf Can Semerci↗Jan Scholtes↗Gerasimos Spanakis↗

End-to-End Speech Translation (E2E-ST) has seen significant advancements, yet current models are primarily benchmarked on curated, "clean" datasets. This overlooks critical real-world challenges, such as morphological robustness to inflectional variations common in non-native or dialectal speech. In this work, we adapt a text-based adversarial attack targeting inflectional morphology to the speech domain and demonstrate that state-of-the-art E2E-ST models are highly vulnerable it. While adversarial training effectively mitigates such risks in text-based tasks, generating high-quality adversarial speech data remains computationally expensive and technically challenging. To address this, we propose Cross-Modal Robustness Transfer (CMRT), a framework that transfers adversarial robustness from the text modality to the speech modality. Our method eliminates the requirement for adversarial speech data during training. Extensive experiments across four language pairs demonstrate that CMRT improves adversarial robustness by an average of more than 3 BLEU points, establishing a new baseline for robust E2E-ST without the overhead of generating adversarial speech.

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07.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2602.07544

MUFASA: A Multi-Layer Framework for Slot Attention

Authors:

Sebastian Bock↗Leonie Sch\"u{\ss}ler↗Krishnakant Singh↗Simone Schaub-Meyer↗Stefan Roth↗

Unsupervised object-centric learning (OCL) decomposes visual scenes into distinct entities. Slot attention is a popular approach that represents individual objects as latent vectors, called slots. Current methods obtain these slot representations solely from the last layer of a pre-trained vision transformer (ViT), ignoring valuable, semantically rich information encoded across the other layers. To better utilize this latent semantic information, we introduce MUFASA, a lightweight plug-and-play framework for slot-attention-based approaches to unsupervised object segmentation. Our model computes slot attention across multiple feature layers of the ViT encoder, fully leveraging their semantic richness. We propose a fusion strategy to aggregate slots obtained on multiple layers into a unified object-centric representation. Integrating MUFASA into existing OCL methods improves their segmentation results across multiple datasets, setting a new state of the art while simultaneously improving training convergence with only minor inference overhead.

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08.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18 DOI: HASH:3a8ed4243032beead4e375cadf260517

Human Intuition vs. Computational Precision: Neurologists, Feature-based Models, and Deep Learning for Stroke Prognosis

Authors:

Herzog↗Blindenbacher↗Globas↗Haeberlin↗M. I↗Baumgartner↗Capecchi↗Inauen↗Sick↗Majoie↗C. B↗van Zwam↗…

Background: Prognostication in large vessel occlusion (LVO) stroke remains challenging. Although several prognostic models exist, their comparison to clinician performance, human-model interaction, and specific sources of human bias remain poorly understood. Methods: Using pre-treatment clinical and CT data from the MR CLEAN trial (n=500), six neurologists predicted three-month modified Rankin Scale (mRS) scores for 40 patients, both unaided and assisted by a validated feature-based model (MR PREDICTS). Human performance was benchmarked against MR PREDICTS and a multimodal, interpretable deep learning (DL) approach using raw imaging data. We explicitly assessed neurologists? ability to estimate model-required imaging features and identified systematic human biases. Models were additionally validated in a larger MR CLEAN trial cohort (n=404). Results: For predicting the full mRS distribution, standalone models achieved good ordinal agreement (MR PREDICTS quadratic weighted kappa (QWK) 0.51 [0.24 to 0.70]; DL model 0.49 [0.25 to 0.67]), significantly outperforming unaided neurologists (QWK 0.27 [0.10, 0.42]). Neurologists showed systematic overoptimism, predicting lower mRS scores than observed. Furthermore, there was poor accuracy in extracting imaging features. Raters? ASPECTS predictions deviated by 3.4 points from the confirmed scores, and collateral score accuracy was 44.6%. However, for predicting binary mRS (0-2 vs. 3-6), accuracy was comparable between unaided neurologists (64.17% [55.42% to 72.92%]) and models (MR PREDICTS 67.50% [52.50% to 82.50%]; DL model 63.16% [47.37% to 78.95%]). Model-assistance modestly improved and harmonized neurologists? predictions (QWK 0.41 [0.22 to 0.55]; binary accuracy 68.75% [58.33% to 78.34%]. Model performance remained robust in the larger cohort. Conclusions: Multimodal prognostic models outperform clinicians in predicting the full range of mRS outcomes, while human error in imaging assessment and systematic optimism bias are primary drivers of prognostic inaccuracy. End-to-end DL models eliminate human-input variability and hold strong potential as an automated second opinion to support prognostication and decision-making in acute LVO stroke.

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09.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.10069

Using Seismic Statistical Features and VQ-VAE to Improve Spatiotemporal Seismicity Predictability

Authors:

Wei Quan↗Denise Gorse↗

arXiv:2606.10069v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this paper we build upon a previous study in which we demonstrated, using XGBoost and earthquake catalogue data from Japan and Chile, that a set of 60 seismic statistical features (SSFs) had much greater predictive value than a set of 428 generic time series features from the tsfresh package. We here extend this previous work in two key ways, focusing on data from Japan as a large dataset is necessary in order to allow for the training of a deep learning (autoencoder) model. First, we move from whole-region prediction (considering, for each candidate event, the likelihood of an event M $\geq$ 5.0 anywhere in the region in the next 15 days) to localised predictions in which both the region of feature computation and the region of prediction are restricted to a circle of radius 24 km around the candidate event, and we show that performance remains excellent, similar to our previous whole-region study for the same area. Second, we here couple this proven set of SSFs, based on one-dimensional (catalogue) data, with a novel feature based on two-dimensional seismic maps, obtained by training a VQ-VAE model to reproduce such maps as output and identifying a measure of its error in doing so with a localised build-up of crustal stress. We show that while localised prediction based on SSFs can be effective alone, with test AUC values as high as those obtained in the case of Japan in our previous whole-region study, the inclusion of the new natively-spatial VQ-VAE-derived feature, top-ranked by SHAP analysis, can enhance performance and additionally appears to near-wholly replace the traditionally-computed $b$-value in terms of feature usage.

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10.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2412.08610

Competition and Diversity in Generative AI

Authors:

Manish Raghavan↗

arXiv:2412.08610v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent evidence, both in the lab and in the wild, suggests that the use of generative artificial intelligence reduces the diversity of content produced. The use of the same or similar AI models appears to lead to more homogeneous behavior. Our work begins with the observation that there is a force pushing in the opposite direction: competition. When producers compete with one another (e.g., for customers or attention), they are incentivized to create novel or unique content. We explore the impact competition has on both content diversity and overall social welfare. Through a formal game-theoretic model, we show that competitive markets select for diverse AI models, mitigating monoculture. We further show that a generative AI model that performs well in isolation (i.e., according to a benchmark) may fail to provide value in a competitive market. Our results highlight the importance of evaluating generative AI models across the breadth of their output distributions, particularly when they will be deployed in competitive environments. We validate our results empirically by using language models to play Scattergories, a word game in which players are rewarded for answers that are both correct and unique. Overall, our results suggest that homogenization due to generative AI is unlikely to persist in competitive markets, and instead, competition in downstream markets may drive diversification in AI model development.

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11.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2406.07435

Beware of Aliases – Signal Preservation is Crucial for Robust Image Restoration

Authors:

Shashank Agnihotri↗Julia Grabinski↗Janis Keuper↗Margret Keuper↗

Image restoration networks are usually comprised of an encoder and a decoder, responsible for aggregating image content from noisy, distorted data and to restore clean, undistorted images, respectively. Data aggregation as well as high-resolution image generation both usually come at the risk of involving aliases, i.e.~standard architectures put their ability to reconstruct the model input in jeopardy to reach high PSNR values on validation data. The price to be paid is low model robustness. In this work, we show that simply providing alias-free paths in state-of-the-art reconstruction transformers supports improved model robustness at low costs on the restoration performance. We do so by proposing BOA-Restormer, a transformer-based image restoration model that executes downsampling and upsampling operations partly in the frequency domain to ensure alias-free paths along the entire model while potentially preserving all relevant high-frequency information.

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12.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24164

Breaking Shortcut Learning for Cross-Trial EEG-Guided Target Speech Extraction via Two-Stage Training

Authors:

Wonchul Shin↗Inyong Choi↗Kyogu Lee↗

arXiv:2606.24164v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent end-to-end models for EEG-guided target speech extraction report impressive results, underscoring potential for neuro-steered hearing technologies. However, our analysis reveals that high within-trial performance can be driven by trial-specific EEG structure that acts as shortcuts for target selection, leading to poor generalization on unseen trials. To overcome this gap, we propose TRUST-TSE, a two-stage framework to mitigate shortcut learning. By introducing contrastive pretraining with attended-speaker negative sampling, we encourage the EEG encoder to capture fine-grained EEG–speech alignment while suppressing trial-identity cues. We also employ a confidence-weighted extraction objective based on EEG–source similarity to guide extraction using the learned representations. Experiments on KUL and DTU datasets show that TRUST-TSE outperforms end-to-end baselines under strict cross-trial protocols, addressing a key reliability bottleneck of existing approaches.

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13.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25 DOI: arXiv:2606.26041

How Robust is OCR-Reasoning? Evaluating OCR-Reasoning Robustness of Vision-Language Models under Visual Perturbations

Authors:

Yuxing Cheng↗Yuan Wu↗Yi Chang↗

Vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved strong performance on OCR-based benchmarks and increasingly focused on text-rich understanding, but their robustness under controlled visual degradation remains insufficiently understood. This gap is critical for OCR reasoning, where visual corruption can induce OCR errors and structural distortions, thereby introducing uncertainty into the reasoning task. To systematically study this problem, we introduce OCR-Robust, a benchmark designed for evaluating OCR reasoning robustness under visual perturbations. It contains 812 samples across two complementary subsets: OCR1.0, covering documents, scene text, receipts, handwriting, and mathematical content, and OCR2.0, focusing on charts, geometry diagrams, and tables. To enable efficient yet informative evaluation, we conduct a pilot study over 18 candidate perturbations and select 5 representative types at 3 severity levels each based on their impact and cross-model discriminability. We evaluate robustness using clean accuracy, Relative Corruption Retention (RCR), Worst-Case Retention (WCR), and a composite Corruption Robustness Index (CRI), and benchmark 18 models spanning proprietary systems, open-source VLMs, and OCR+LLM pipelines. Our results show that higher clean accuracy does not necessarily imply stronger robustness, and that models can suffer pronounced degradation in the worst case on OCR tasks that are sensitive to structure, and charts and tables are substantially more fragile than document-like inputs under perturbation.

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14.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25 DOI: arXiv:2606.22497

Benchmarking Vision-Language Models for Microscopic Plant Image Understanding

Authors:

Tianqi Wei↗Xin Yu↗Zhi Chen↗Scott Chapman↗Zi Huang↗

Microscopic imaging provides essential visual evidence for studying plant biology and pathology at the cellular and subcellular levels. However, existing benchmarks on vision-language models primarily focus on macroscopic plant imagery, while the microscopic domain remains underexplored. To address this gap, we present PlantMicro, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating vision-language models (VLMs) in microscopic plant imagery. PlantMicro integrates more than 5,000 images collected across diverse hosts, biological domains, and imaging modalities. Building on this diversity, we design a set of complementary tasks that capture different facets of microscopic image understanding. To support these tasks, we construct over 9,000 VQA pairs that systematically evaluate the capabilities of VLMs. Experiments on PlantMicro show that current VLMs struggle with fine-grained recognition and biologically grounded reasoning. For example, GPT-5 achieves 34.93% accuracy on the pathogen classification task, which is only modestly above the random-guessing baseline. The results highlight a significant gap in current VLMs' ability to comprehend plant microscopic images. PlantMicro provides a standardized foundation for advancing VLMs toward reliable and comprehensive microscopy-level plant understanding.

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15.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2507.21460

An Angular-Temporal Interaction Network for Light Field Object Tracking in Low-Light Scenes

Authors:

Mianzhao Wang↗Fan Shi↗Xu Cheng↗Feifei Zhang↗Shengyong Chen↗

High-quality 4D light field representation with efficient angular feature modeling is crucial for scene perception, as it can provide discriminative spatial-angular cues to identify moving targets. However, recent developments still struggle to deliver reliable angular modeling in the temporal domain, particularly in complex low-light scenes. In this paper, we propose a novel light field epipolar-plane structure image (ESI) representation that explicitly defines the geometric structure within the light field. By capitalizing on the abrupt changes in the angles of light rays within the epipolar plane, this representation can enhance visual expression in low-light scenes and reduce redundancy in high-dimensional light fields. We further propose an angular-temporal interaction network (ATINet) for light field object tracking that learns angular-aware representations from the geometric structural cues and angular-temporal interaction cues of light fields. Furthermore, ATINet can also be optimized in a self-supervised manner to enhance the geometric feature interaction across the temporal domain. Finally, we introduce a large-scale light field low-light dataset for object tracking. Extensive experimentation demonstrates that ATINet achieves state-of-the-art performance in single object tracking. Furthermore, we extend the proposed method to multiple object tracking, which also shows the effectiveness of high-quality light field angular-temporal modeling.

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16.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2602.02726

Vector Quantized Latent Concepts: A Scalable Alternative to Clustering-Based Concept Discovery

Authors:

Xuemin Yu↗Ankur Garg↗Samira Ebrahimi Kahou↗Hassan Sajjad↗

Large language models (LLMs) encode rich semantic information in their hidden states, yet it remains difficult to understand what information these internal representations capture. Latent concepts extracted from hidden states offer a promising direction for interpreting LLMs, but existing clustering-based methods face a trade-off: hierarchical clustering produces coherent concepts but is limited to small datasets due to its quadratic memory cost, while K-Means scales efficiently but may yield less semantically coherent concepts. We propose Vector Quantized Latent Concept (VQLC), a discrete concept learning framework that learns a codebook of latent concepts on frozen hidden states. Across 12 dataset-model settings, VQLC stays close to K-Means in computational cost, scales better than hierarchical clustering, and remains competitive in faithfulness, with the clearest gains on decoder-only models. LLMs-based evaluation, qualitative analysis, and a Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) comparison demonstrate that the learned concepts are interpretable and task-relevant.

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17.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10 DOI: HASH:358b871d04cf52bcc17a9675ffc21306

Developmental Associations Linking Childhood Trauma and Early Cannabis Use to Adolescent DNA Methylation and Psychotic-Like Experiences

Authors:

Trotta↗Liu↗Austin-Zimmerman↗Spinazzola↗Sideli↗Aas↗Rodriguez↗Li↗Leung↗B. M↗Zhang↗Sham↗…

Background. Psychotic-like experiences (PLEs) index early risk for psychotic disorders and are consistently associated with childhood trauma, yet underlying biological mechanisms remain poorly understood. DNA methylation (DNAm) may capture the biological embedding of early adversity, while adolescent exposures such as cannabis use may modify these processes. We examined epigenome-wide associations of childhood trauma and PLEs, tested the moderating role of early cannabis use, and evaluated DNAm as a potential mediator. Methods. We analysed data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), a UK population-based birth cohort. Childhood trauma was assessed prospectively and retrospectively. Epigenome-wide DNAm was measured in peripheral blood at ~17 years using the Illumina 450K array, and PLEs were assessed at 18 using a structured interview. Epigenome-wide association studies were conducted for trauma-DNAm and DNAm-PLEs associations in the final sample (n = 1,457), adjusting for demographic, biological, and technical covariates. Differentially methylated regions (DMRs) were identified using DMRff, followed by functional enrichment analyses. Cannabis use at 15.5 was modelled as a moderator with multiple imputation for missing data. Mediation was tested using the Divide-Aggregate Composite-null Test (DACT). Results. Childhood trauma was associated with widespread DNAm differences, primarily at the regional level, with enrichment in pathways related to cellular stress responses. In contrast, DNAm associated with PLEs was more limited and implicated loci involved in epigenetic regulatory processes. These signatures were largely distinct, and there was no evidence supporting mediation after multiple testing correction. Incorporating cannabis use altered the pattern and extent of DNAm associations, with stronger and more significant signals observed at both CpG and regional levels, although these did not translate into evidence of mediation. Conclusion. Childhood trauma and PLEs show distinct DNAm signatures in adolescence, with trauma-related DNAm reflecting broad stress-related processes and PLE-associated DNAm implicating regulatory mechanisms. We found little evidence that DNAm mediates the trauma-PLE association. Instead, adolescent exposures, particularly cannabis use, may distinctly influence trauma-related epigenetic variation with limited detectable downstream effects on PLEs. These findings support a context-dependent model of epigenetic risk and highlight the need for larger longitudinal studies to clarify causal pathways linking early adversity to psychosis.

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18.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2505.18201

Reinforcement Twinning for Hybrid Control of Flapping-Wing Drones

Authors:

Romain Poletti↗Lorenzo Schena↗Lilla Koloszar↗Joris Degroote↗Miguel Alfonso Mendez↗

arXiv:2505.18201v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Controlling flapping-wing drones requires controllers that handle time-varying, nonlinear, underactuated dynamics from incomplete, noisy sensor data. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly reinforcement learning (RL), have opened new perspectives for addressing such complex control problems through data-driven policy optimization from interaction with the environment. Yet purely data-driven methods are sample-inefficient, demanding extensive, sometimes unsafe exploration, especially without guiding physical models. This motivates hybrid AI-physics frameworks. This article proposes a hybrid model-free/model-based flight-control approach using the reinforcement twinning algorithm. The model-based (MB) component uses an adjoint formulation and an adaptive digital twin continuously identified from live trajectories; the model-free (MF) component uses RL. The two agents share knowledge via transfer learning, imitation learning, and shared experience between the real environment and the digital twin, coordinated by a policy referee that selects which agent acts in reality based on digital-twin performance and a real-to-virtual consistency ratio. The framework is evaluated for the longitudinal control of a flapping-wing drone, modelled as a nonlinear time-varying system driven by quasi-steady aerodynamic forces. The hybrid strategy is tested under three adaptive-model initializations: (1) offline identification from existing data, (2) random initialization with fully online identification, and (3) offline pre-training with biased parameters followed by online adaptation. In all cases, the hybrid framework improves performance, robustness, and sample efficiency over purely model-free and purely model-based approaches.

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19.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17872

AnchorKV: Safety-Aware KV Cache Compression via Soft Penalty with a Refusal Anchor

Authors:

Ning Ni↗Yingjie Lao↗

arXiv:2606.17872v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) outperform earlier architectures on generative inference and long-context tasks, but their large size introduces significant challenges in memory usage, energy cost, and on-device deployment. Since scaling pre-trained language models improves downstream capability [zhao2023survey], the key-value (KV) cache becomes a dominant inference bottleneck. Recent KV cache compression methods [jo2025fastkv,li2024snapkv,zhou2024dynamickv] reduce this cost by retaining only a subset of attention-relevant tokens. However, while these approaches preserve accuracy on benign workloads, their compression policies either fail to defend against jailbreak attacks [jiang2024robustkv] or degrade safety alignment under aggressive eviction. We propose AnchorKV, a drop-in modification to KV cache compression that biases token retention scores away from directions in key space associated with harmful prompts. AnchorKV constructs an offline safety anchor by adapting a difference-of-means representation engineering approach [arditi2024refusal,zou2023representation] to the layer-specific key projection space used in KV caching. Based on this anchor, a soft penalty token selection rule trades a small amount of utility for substantially improved safety alignment, while reducing to the original compressor when the penalty is zero.

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20.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2605.08934

From Mechanistic to Compositional Interpretability

Authors:

Ward Gauderis↗Thomas Dooms↗Steven T. Homer↗Kola Ayonrinde↗Geraint A. Wiggins↗

arXiv:2605.08934v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Mechanistic interpretability aims to explain neural model behaviour by reverse-engineering learned computational structure into human-understandable components. Without a formal framework, however, mechanistic explanations cannot be objectively verified, compared, or composed. We introduce compositional interpretability, a category-theoretic framework grounded in the principles of compositionality and minimum description length. Compositional interpretations are pairs of syntactic and semantic mappings that must commute to enforce consistency between a model's decomposition and its observed behaviour. We deconstruct explanation quality into measures of faithfulness and complexity to cast interpretability as a constrained optimisation problem, and introduce compressive refinement to systematically restructure models into simpler parts without altering their function. Finally, we derive a parsimony criterion under which syntactic compression theoretically guarantees more concise, human-aligned explanations. Our framework situates prominent mechanistic methods as subclasses of refinement, and clarifies why their compressibility heuristics tend to align with human interpretability. Our work provides a measurable, optimisable blueprint for automating the discovery and evaluation of mechanistic explanations.

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21.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18867

Strategic Feature Selection

Authors:

Jivat Neet Kaur↗Pratik Patil↗Divya Shanmugam↗Emma Pierson↗Michael I. Jordan↗Nika Haghtalab↗Meena Jagadeesan↗Ahmed Alaa↗Serena Wang↗

arXiv:2606.18867v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When algorithmic predictors inform resource allocation in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, these predictors must account for strategic manipulation of input features. The typical solution is to redesign the predictor itself to explicitly account for strategic interactions. In practice, however, decision makers are often constrained to adjusting coarser levers within existing prediction pipelines. For example, healthcare organizations often select which features to exclude based on perceived manipulability, while using standard regularization procedures to shrink the coefficients of retained features. In this work, we initiate a formal study of strategic classification through feature selection and its interaction with ridge regularization. Our main finding is that excluding individual features based on their manipulability alone is generally suboptimal. We provide a fine-grained characterization of the performance of a feature subset under optimal regularization, yielding new insights for policy design. Motivated by this characterization, we develop a practical algorithm for jointly choosing the feature set and the level of ridge regularization. Through a real-world case study on a healthcare payments benchmark, we illustrate how our algorithm can guide the design of coarse policy levers in practice. Our results provide a principled, practical framework for mitigating the effects of strategic behavior in algorithmic decision-making systems.

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22.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14375

Elastic Queries Reinforcement Learning: Self-Aware Policy Execution for VLA Models

Authors:

Ge Wang↗Xinyu Tan↗Xiang Li↗Man Luo↗Chengsi Yao↗Shenhao Yan↗Jiahao Yang↗Fan Feng↗Honghao Cai↗Xiangyuan Wang↗Zhixin Mai↗Yiming Zhao↗…

arXiv:2606.14375v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models are powerful action generators for robot manipulation, but they are typically executed with fixed inference and replanning schedules. This rigidity ignores the uneven difficulty of robot control: contact-rich or uncertain states may need more computation and fresher feedback, while easier states can often be handled with fewer inference steps and longer open-loop execution. We propose Elastic Queries Reinforcement Learning (EQRL), a framework that makes each VLA policy query elastic. A lightweight latent-schedule adaptor jointly selects the latent input, denoising budget, and action chunk length, without fine-tuning the underlying VLA model. To make scheduling difficulty-aware, EQRL trains a critic over the joint latent-schedule action and derives a state difficulty signal from critic ensemble disagreement. This signal guides compute toward difficult states, while a learned residual allows task-driven correction. We formulate variable chunk execution as query-level macro-action RL with chunk-dependent discounting and an amortized number-of-function-evaluations (NFE) budget. Across simulation and real-robot manipulation, EQRL reduces amortized inference cost while preserving or improving task success.

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23.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25 DOI: arXiv:2604.07904

Kuramoto Oscillatory Phase Encoding: Neuro-inspired Synchronization for Improved Learning Efficiency

Authors:

Mingqing Xiao↗Yansen Wang↗Dongqi Han↗Caihua Shan↗Dongsheng Li↗

Spatiotemporal neural dynamics and oscillatory synchronization are widely implicated in biological information processing and have been hypothesized to support flexible coordination such as feature binding. By contrast, most deep learning architectures represent and propagate information through activation values, neglecting the joint dynamics of rate and phase. In this work, we introduce Kuramoto oscillatory Phase Encoding (KoPE) as an additional, evolving phase state to Vision Transformers, incorporating a neuro-inspired synchronization mechanism to advance learning efficiency. We show that KoPE can improve training, parameter, and data efficiency of vision models through synchronization-enhanced structure learning. Moreover, KoPE benefits tasks requiring structured understanding, including semantic and panoptic segmentation, representation alignment with language, and few-shot abstract visual reasoning (ARC-AGI). Theoretical analysis and empirical verification further suggest that KoPE can accelerate attention concentration for learning efficiency. These results indicate that synchronization can serve as a scalable, neuro-inspired mechanism for advancing state-of-the-art neural network models. Code is avaliable at https://github.com/microsoft/Neuro-inspired_Phase_Encoding.

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24.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.17026

Bath memory as a precision resource in quantum transport

Authors:

Jos\'e Molina↗Sheikh Parvez Mandal↗Mahasweta Pandit↗Javier Prior↗

arXiv:2606.17026v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Structured baths can reshape transport fluctuations in mesoscopic quantum devices, yet a predictive criterion for when this enhances precision has been lacking. We propose a route towards such precision advantages by utilizing bath memory in coherent fermionic transport through a noninteracting quantum-dot chain. Using the Landauer-Büttiker formalism, we derive a dual impedance-matching condition that synchronizes the conductor mode splitting, boundary dissipation, and bath bandwidth, and sustains constructive multimode interference across the transmission window. The analytical predictions for the optimal bath bandwidths show excellent agreement with exact nonequilibrium Green's function calculations of the transport for Lorentzian, Gaussian, and Newns spectral densities. The prescription yields an optimal bath bandwidth at which the current Fano factor is minimized and the thermodynamic and kinetic precision coefficients are simultaneously enhanced beyond their Markovian limits. The alignment of the optimal precision regime with the experimentally accessible current Fano factor minimum thus provides a practical strategy for designing precision-enhanced transport in mesoscopic platforms such as semiconductor quantum-dot arrays and ultracold fermionic channels.

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25.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24543

Reasoning as Attractor Dynamics: Latent Memory Retrieval via Gibbs-Weighted Energy Minimization

Authors:

Kanishk Awadhiya↗

arXiv:2606.24543v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are traditionally viewed as autoregressive generators. However, from the perspective of collective computation, they function as high-dimensional Dense Associative Memories that store complex reasoning patterns as latent attractors. In this work, we investigate the energy landscape of mathematical reasoning. We posit that correct reasoning chains correspond to deep, wide attractor basins ("flat minima") in the model's output distribution, whereas hallucinations manifest as sharp, unstable local minima. To exploit this geometry, we introduce a retrieval mechanism based on a Gibbs measure of the trajectory's spectral entropy. By sampling multiple reasoning paths and weighting them by their inverse energy ($P \propto e^{-\beta E}$), we approximate the equilibrium distribution of the associative memory, effectively ``relaxing'' the system into a robust solution. Empirically, this physics-inspired mechanism improves Microsoft Phi-3.5 performance on GSM8K by 5.38\% (84.7\% $\to$ 90.1\%), demonstrating that inference is better modeled as a dynamic settling process into an attractor basin rather than greedy next-token prediction.

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