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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

KANLib – An Modular, Extensible and Fast Kolmogorov-Arnold Network Implementation

arXiv:2606.17927v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to traditional multilayer perceptrons by replacing linear weights with learnable univariate functions. Despite their theoretical advantages in interpretability and expressiveness, practical research of KANs remains difficult due to high computational costs and inconsistent feature support across existing frameworks. This paper introduces KANLib, a modular, extensible, and computationally efficient framework for developing and evaluating KAN architectures. KANLib unifies core concepts from existing implementations, including PyKAN, EfficientKAN, and FastKAN, within a consistent software architecture that emphasizes flexibility, feature parity, and high performance. The framework supports two basis function types, adaptive grid rescaling, grid extension, and fine-grained architectural customization while maintaining compatibility with standard PyTorch workflows. Experimental evaluation on the California Housing benchmark demonstrates that KANLib reproduces the predictive behavior of established reference KAN implementations while achieving competitive computational efficiency. Furthermore, the framework enables the exploration of architectural variations beyond standard KAN formulations with only minor impacts on predictive performance. Overall, KANLib provides a robust foundation for future research on scalable and extensible KAN architectures.

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

A Hybrid GNN-FEM Framework for Phase-Field Fracture Simulation. Physics-Preserving Hybridization for Generalizable Surrogate Modeling

arXiv:2606.19378v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scientific machine learning (SciML) has emerged as a promising approach for accelerating simulations of complex physical systems, yet achieving physically consistent and generalizable predictions for nonlinear, history-dependent problems remains a central challenge. In this study, we propose a hybrid GNN–FEM framework for efficient and generalizable phase-field fracture modeling. While phase-field approaches provide a robust variational framework for simulating complex crack evolution, their high computational cost limits practical applications because they require solving coupled, nonlinear, and history-dependent systems within an incremental finite element procedure. To address this challenge, a graph neural network surrogate is integrated into the conventional staggered scheme, replacing the phase-field update at each load increment while retaining the FEM-based displacement solver to enforce mechanical equilibrium and boundary conditions. By preserving the incremental solution structure, the framework remains consistent with history-dependent fracture evolution without requiring the surrogate to approximate the full solution trajectory. This selective surrogate strategy emphasizes the identification of a physically meaningful and incrementally structured learning target, rather than relying on brute-force data generation to learn the full fracture process. The proposed framework achieves strong generalization across varying geometries, loading conditions, material properties, and discretizations through dimensionless feature design, a graph-based formulation on mesh-based domains, and a physics-informed loss derived from the governing phase-field equation. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the hybrid approach reduces computational cost while maintaining accuracy compared with conventional FEM, and exhibits robust predictive performance across diverse problem settings.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

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

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

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Mental-R1: Aligning LLM Reasoning for Mental Health Assessment

arXiv:2606.13176v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mental health problems such as anxiety, depression, and suicide remain urgent global challenges, where timely and accurate assessment is critical for effective intervention. Recently, large language models have been explored for mental health assessment. However, existing general-purpose post-training methods do not align with the cognitive processes of human assessment, which may lead to unreliable reasoning outcomes. To bridge this gap, we propose Cognitive Relative Policy Optimization (CRPO), a reinforcement learning framework tailored for the mental health domain. CRPO extends group relative policy optimization by integrating stage-dependent uncertainty modeling into the policy optimization process. Specifically, we introduce a stage-wise entropy regularization mechanism that encourages broad exploration in early reasoning phases and progressively enforces confident decision-making in later stages, mimicking the human cognitive shift from uncertainty to certainty. In addition, inspired by cognitive appraisal theory, we formalize cognitive reasoning stages, thereby guiding theory-grounded interpretable inference. Experiments on 8 mental health datasets show that CRPO achieves an average improvement of 10.4 percentage points in weighted F1-score over the best reinforcement learning baseline. Furthermore, the CRPO-trained model Mental-R1 demonstrates clear advantages compared with existing large language models on reasoning-intensive cases, suggesting that CRPO enhances reasoning capabilities for mental health assessment.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

MMed-Bench-IR: A Heterogeneous Benchmark for Multilingual Medical Information Retrieval

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) in clinical settings increasingly requires multilingual retrieval against predominantly English evidence corpora. Multilingual medical retrieval demands three capabilities: cross-lingual alignment, concept discrimination, and evidence retrieval. However, existing benchmarks evaluate these only in isolation, leaving the interaction between biomedical expertise and multilingual coverage unmeasured. We introduce MMed-Bench-IR, a benchmark designed to disentangle these axes across 6 languages and three structurally heterogeneous tasks: (1) cross-lingual medical QA retrieval with 6,127 queries grounded in the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), (2) concept discrimination over 4,975 confusion sets at three difficulty tiers, and (3) multilingual evidence retrieval for RAG with 2,040 quality-assured queries. The three tasks share zero concept and query overlap by design, ensuring that aggregate scores reflect genuine capability breadth. Evaluation of ten systems across six paradigm families reveals severe cross-lingual failure: biomedical encoders that score 0.818 nDCG@10 in English drop to 0.056 in Japanese, a gap that English-only benchmarks cannot detect.

06.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

ReCal: Reward Calibration for RL-based LLM Routing

arXiv:2606.12479v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) routing has emerged as an effective paradigm for leveraging the complementary strengths of multiple LLMs through dynamic model and reasoning-strategy selection. Recent reinforcement learning (RL)-based routing methods further improve routing quality by optimizing routing policies from interaction feedback. However, they still struggle to provide informative and comparable learning signals under heterogeneous tasks with varying difficulty. In practice, multiple objectives (e.g., correctness, format behavior) are aggregated into a single scalar reward, leading to ambiguous credit assignment and conflicting optimization signals. Moreover, reward signals exhibit significant variability across instances, where some instances produce higher or more variable rewards, introducing optimization bias that favors trivial samples over informative ones. To address these issues, we propose ReCal, a \underline{Re}ward \underline{Cal}ibration framework for RL-based LLM routing. We first introduce a hierarchical reward decomposition mechanism with component-wise advantage estimation. We further propose a distribution-aware optimization strategy that calibrates optimization variability through variance-aware reweighting and per-dataset normalization. Experiments on seven datasets demonstrate that ReCal consistently improves routing performance, and training stability over baselines. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ReCal.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

TRIDENT: Breaking the Hybrid-Safety-Physics Coupling for Provably Safe Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.18308v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safe coordination in networked cyber-physical systems forces learning algorithms to simultaneously handle hybrid discrete-continuous actions, hard training-time safety constraints, and physics-governed dynamics. We show that these three features form a directed cycle of biases that defeats any naive composition of off-the-shelf modules, and formalize this as a three-way coupling lemma. We then introduce TRIDENT, the first MARL framework whose three components are co-designed to cancel each leak: a Richardson-Romberg gradient correction reducing Gumbel-Softmax bias from O(tau) to O(tau^2), a Lyapunov-constrained sequential trust-region update enforcing per-iterate feasibility, and a physics-informed residual critic that decomposes value rather than reward. We prove an O~(1/sqrt(K)) convergence rate to a constrained Nash equilibrium and an O(sqrt(K)) cumulative-violation bound. On multi-UAV mobile-edge computing, autonomous intersection management, and a hybrid SMAC variant, TRIDENT cuts training-time violations by 95.5% over MADDPG and 76.3% over MACPO, while improving reward by 13.5% over the strongest unconstrained baseline.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

CrossFlow: One-Step Generation Across Latent and Pixel Spaces

Most diffusion and flow-matching generators define the prior, probability path, and prediction target in the same representation space. Latent diffusion improves efficiency by moving this path into an autoencoder latent space, but the final sample is still produced by a separately trained decoder. This separation creates a mismatch: the generator is optimized for latent-space prediction, while final quality depends on how the decoder handles generated latents that may differ from clean encoder outputs. We introduce CrossFlow, a cross-space flow formulation that maps noisy latent inputs directly to pixel-space images. The key technical step is a velocity-free one-step objective: the latent trajectory defines the training path, but the supervised prediction is an image rather than a latent displacement. This lets one model act both as a one-step latent-to-pixel generator and as a decoder replacement for latent diffusion pipelines. On class-conditional ImageNet-1k at $256\times256$, CrossFlow-XL achieves 1.62 FID with one function evaluation. Ablations show that the latent encoder and pixel-space perceptual and adversarial losses are important for fidelity. These results indicate that cross-space flow objectives can combine the efficiency of latent representations with direct pixel-space supervision, without requiring a separate decoder at inference.

09.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-15

Environmental “knees” and “wiggles” as strong stabilizers of species’ range limits set by interspecific competition

by Farshad Shirani, Benjamin G. Freeman Whether interspecific competition is a major contributing factor to setting species’ range limits has been debated for a long time. Theoretical studies have proposed that the interactions between interspecific competition and disruptive gene flow along an environmental gradient can halt range expansion of ecologically similar species where they meet. However, the stability of such range limits has not been well addressed. We use a deterministic mathematical model of adaptive range evolution over a continuous habitat to show that the range limits set by interspecific competition are unlikely to be evolutionarily stable if the environmental optima for fitness-related traits vary (almost) linearly in space. That is, in a linear environment without a dispersal barrier or a third (or more) species, the range borders formed between two competing species constantly move towards the weaker species. We demonstrate that environmental nonlinearities such as “knees” and “wiggles”—wherein an isolated sharp change or a step-like change occurs in the steepness of a trait optimum—can strongly stabilize competitively formed range limits. The stabilization mechanism relies on the contrast that such nonlinearities create in the level of disruptive gene flow to the peripheral population of each species, and succeeds when an additional process, such as Allee effects, prevents the establishment of an infinitesimal population in the presence of an abundant competitor. We show that the stability of the range limits at these nonlinearities is robust against moderate environmental disturbances. Whether strong disturbances such as rapid high-amplitude climate changes can destabilize such range limits depends on how the competitive dominance of the species changes across the nonlinearity. Therefore, our findings underscore the importance of assessing species’ competitive ability when predicting responses to climate change, and identify geographic regions where established range limits are likely to persist as well as regions where shifting limits may eventually stabilize.

10.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

segSHAPE: RNA secondary structure prediction from nanopore direct RNA sequencing

RNAs adopt complex structures that regulate key biological processes, making accurate structure prediction essential. Chemical probing coupled with Nanopore direct RNA sequencing (DRS) offers a route to single-molecule structural inference, but current tools are limited by inaccurate signal-to-sequence alignment, which degrades modification-rate estimation and downstream structure prediction. Here we introduce segSHAPE for RNA secondary structure prediction from Nanopore DRS data (both RNA002 and RNA004 chemistries), a probe-agnostic framework that improves signal alignment using prior information of basecalling and per-read signal baseline shift correction, learns position-specific k-mer raw signal parameters, and estimates per-nucleotide modification rates with an unsupervised anomaly detector. On three public RNA002 DRS datasets spanning different chemical probes (AcIm, NAI-N3) and RNAs from 421 to 1552 nt, segSHAPE achieves the highest F1 score and Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) on all RNAs, exceeding the strongest baseline by 3.4 to 5.8 percentage points in MCC. It additionally captures the ligand-induced conformational change of the thiamine pyrophosphate (TPP) riboswitch RNA directly from RNA002 DRS data using the DEPC probe. On a public RNA004 DRS dataset, segSHAPE improves over the sm-PORE-cupine baseline by 17 ROC-AUC points in modification rate estimation and by 6.7 MCC points in structure prediction. These results establish segSHAPE as a unified, probe-agnostic pipeline for RNA structure prediction from Nanopore DRS data.

11.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-13

Testing the reliability of AI-generated protein structures

Authors:

Although AlphaFold2 and its competitors have demonstrated remarkable abilities to predict protein structure, more work is needed to explore the limitations of these methods. Here we investigated the reliability of AlphaFold2 and ColabFold by creating a set of realistic but false protein sequences, using ColabFold to predict their structure, and then asking how often the program produces a high-scoring structure for a sequence that does not represent a protein. We determined that AlphaFold2 has a very small but non-zero false positive rate, estimated here at approximately 1 in 435 if one uses a threshold pLDDT score of 70 to define positive predictions. We also discovered, serendipitously, that some high-scoring sequences in the human genome were not false positives, but instead were previously unknown and un-annotated pseudogenes. These latter findings indicate that some well-established human annotations of protein-coding genes may have incorrectly extended the 5-prime untranslated regions too far. They also suggest that the false positive rate of AlphaFold2 is low enough that almost any high-scoring structure, even in a noncoding region, is worthy of further investigation.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

RaBiT: Residual-Aware Binarization Training for Accurate and Efficient LLMs

arXiv:2602.05367v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Efficient deployment of large language models (LLMs) requires extreme quantization, forcing a critical trade-off between low-bit efficiency and performance. Residual binarization enables hardware-friendly, matmul-free inference by stacking binary ($\pm$1) layers, but is plagued by pathological feature co-adaptation. We identify a key failure mode, which we term inter-path adaptation: during quantization-aware training (QAT), parallel residual binary paths learn redundant features, degrading the error-compensation structure and limiting the expressive capacity of the model. While prior work relies on heuristic workarounds (e.g., path freezing) that constrain the solution space, we propose RaBiT, a novel quantization framework that resolves co-adaptation by algorithmically enforcing a residual hierarchy. Its core mechanism sequentially derives each binary path from a single shared full-precision weight, which ensures that every path corrects the error of the preceding one. This process is stabilized by a robust initialization that prioritizes functional preservation over mere weight approximation. RaBiT redefines the 2-bit accuracy-efficiency frontier: it achieves state-of-the-art performance, rivals even hardware-intensive Vector Quantization (VQ) methods, and delivers a $4.49\times$ inference speed-up over full-precision models on an RTX 4090. Code is available at https://github.com/SamsungLabs/RaBiT.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Proximal Policy Optimization for Amortized Discrete Sampling

arXiv:2606.15793v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper explores policy gradient algorithms for training stochastic policies to sample from structured discrete probability distributions under the Generative Flow Network (GFlowNet) framework. Building on extensive theoretical connections between GFlowNets and entropy-regularized reinforcement learning, we derive equivalents of standard policy gradient algorithms for training GFlowNets, as well as experimentally explore their various methodological aspects, including baseline training and advantage estimation. Most importantly, our work is the first to derive and successfully apply proximal policy optimization to GFlowNets, showing its improved convergence speed and data efficiency compared to standard GFlowNet training objectives on benchmarks ranging from synthetic energies to molecular graph generation.

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

XConv: Low-memory stochastic backpropagation for convolutional layers

arXiv:2106.06998v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Training convolutional neural networks at scale demands substantial memory, largely because intermediate activations must be stored for backpropagation. Existing remedies (checkpointing, invertible architectures, or gradient-approximation methods such as randomized automatic differentiation) either add significant computation, impose architectural constraints, or require non-trivial code changes. We propose XConv, a near-drop-in replacement for standard 2D and 3D convolutional layers that addresses all three: it preserves standard backpropagation, imposes no architectural constraints, and integrates into existing codebases with minimal changes. XConv exploits the algebraic structure of convolutional weight gradients, storing highly compressed projections of the activations rather than the full tensors and approximating the gradients via multi-channel randomized trace estimation. The number of probing vectors sets a memory-accuracy tradeoff and recovers the exact gradient in the limit. We establish convergence guarantees and error bounds for the estimator, showing that its gradient-error variance is comparable to that of stochastic gradient descent. Empirically, XConv matches exact-gradient methods across classification, generative modeling, super-resolution, inpainting, and segmentation, with gaps that narrow as the number of probing vectors grows, while reducing activation memory by a factor of two or more when convolutional activations dominate, and remaining computationally competitive with optimized convolution kernels at larger batch sizes. At half precision the gradient-approximation error falls to the rounding floor, so XConv adds essentially no error beyond that of low-precision arithmetic. The savings matter most where activation memory rather than compute is the binding constraint, such as high-resolution and volumetric training and on-device finetuning.

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

Formalizing and Mitigating Structural Distortion in LLM Attention for Zero-Shot Graph Reasoning

arXiv:2606.15633v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise for reasoning over Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs). However, applying LLMs to graphs requires linearizing their structure into sequences, introducing distortion rooted in the graph bandwidth problem. While this distortion has been shown to degrade performance, it is often attributed to prompt design or model scale, leaving the underlying mechanism unclear. In this work, we show how rotary positional embeddings turn graph linearization into bandwidth-dependent attention decay, suppressing attention between graph-adjacent nodes that are forced far apart in the serialized sequence. This shifts the focus of LLM-based graph reasoning from prompt engineering and scaling toward correcting attention misalignment. Motivated by this analysis, we propose Graph-aligned Language Attention (GaLA), a lightweight, inference-time modification for LLMs. GaLA biases attention toward graph-adjacent nodes while preserving the LLM's sequential inductive biases. Across TAG benchmarks, GaLA improves performance with negligible overhead, demonstrating that distortion is a correctable bottleneck in LLM-based graph reasoning.

16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

How far have we gone in Generative Image Restoration? A study on its capability, limitations and evaluation practices

Generative Image Restoration (GIR) has achieved impressive perceptual realism, but how far have its practical capabilities truly advanced compared with previous methods? To answer this, we present a large-scale study grounded in a new multi-dimensional evaluation pipeline that assesses models on detail, sharpness, semantic correctness, and overall quality. Our analysis covers diverse architectures, including diffusion-based, GAN-based, PSNR-oriented, and general-purpose generation models, revealing critical performance disparities. Furthermore, our analysis uncovers a key evolution in failure modes that signifies a paradigm shift for the perception-oriented low-level vision field. The central challenge is evolving from the previous problem of detail scarcity (under-generation) to the new frontier of detail quality and semantic control (preventing over-generation). We also leverage our benchmark to train a new IQA model that better aligns with human perceptual judgments. Ultimately, this work provides a systematic study of modern generative image restoration models, offering crucial insights that redefine our understanding of their true state and chart a course for future development.

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

Evaluating deep learning models for fault diagnosis of a rotating machinery with epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty

arXiv:2412.18980v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Uncertainty-aware deep learning (DL) models recently gained attention in fault diagnosis as a way to promote the reliable detection of faults when out-of-distribution (OOD) data arise from unseen faults (epistemic uncertainty) or the presence of noise (aleatoric uncertainty). In this paper, we present the first comprehensive comparative study of state-of-the-art uncertainty-aware DL architectures for fault diagnosis in rotating machinery, where different scenarios affected by epistemic uncertainty and different types of aleatoric uncertainty are investigated. The selected architectures include sampling by dropout, Bayesian neural networks, and deep ensembles. Moreover, to distinguish between in-distribution and OOD data in the different scenarios two uncertainty thresholds, one of which is introduced in this paper, are alternatively applied. Our empirical findings offer guidance to practitioners and researchers who have to deploy real-world uncertainty-aware fault diagnosis systems. In particular, they reveal that, in the presence of epistemic uncertainty, all DL models are capable of effectively detecting, on average, a substantial portion of OOD data across all the scenarios. However, deep ensemble models show superior performance, independently of the uncertainty threshold used for discrimination. In the presence of aleatoric uncertainty, the noise level plays an important role. Specifically, low noise levels hinder the models' ability to effectively detect OOD data. Even in this case, however, deep ensemble models exhibit a milder degradation in performance, dominating the others. These achievements, combined with their shorter inference time, make deep ensemble architectures the preferred choice.

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

Performance-Driven Environment Abstraction with Multi-Timescale Learning

arXiv:2606.17377v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study performance-driven environment abstraction for decision-making in large Markov decision processes. Rather than preserving geometric or topological structure, we seek abstractions that directly optimize decision quality. We model abstraction as a controlled approximation obtained by aggregating the state space and enforcing a shared action distribution within each aggregated state. For a fixed partition, we establish a performance guarantee that separates value-function approximation error from the loss introduced by action sharing. Guided by this analysis, we develop a multi-timescale reinforcement learning framework that jointly adapts the policy and a tree-structured environment abstraction. The resulting algorithm refines and coarsens regions of the state space based on Q-value discrepancies, balancing performance against abstraction size and complexity. Empirical results demonstrate substantial state compression, improved sample efficiency, and faster replanning compared to actor-critic baselines.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Phase-space microscopes for quantum gases: Imaging conjugate variables and momentum-weighted densities

arXiv:2603.29568v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Quantum gas microscopes offer unprecedented insights into quantum many-body states of cold atomic gases. Here we introduce concrete protocols for extending quantum gas microscopes to measure in phase space, by mapping momentum onto auxiliary degrees of freedom and using positive operator-valued measures. We distinguish between two distinct operational modes. In the Husimi-Q phase space microscope, position and momentum are jointly measured; in this mode the fundamental quantum noise is distributed between position and momentum. Conversely, the averaged-mode phase space microscope extracts the spatial dependence of averages of the momentum density (and its moments); these averages can be retrieved with arbitrary spatial resolution. We illustrate the utility of these techniques in diverse physical settings.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

SkillHone: A Harness for Continual Agent Skill Evolution Through Persistent Decision History

arXiv:2606.08671v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agent skills extend language-model agents with task-specific procedures, scripts, and references, but the tasks and environments they target continually change. Existing methods improve skills in bounded runs and retain only the final artifact, discarding the decision history that later agents need to interpret prior revisions, evaluations, and rejected alternatives. We introduce SkillHone, a harness for continual agent skill evolution grounded in persistent decision history. SkillHone pairs skill revisions with evaluation-side evidence that supplies practice feedback, recording structured histories of diagnoses, revisions, evidence, and outcomes. Role-separated subagents run candidate skills on practice probes with redacted reporting and propose revisions informed by prior decisions, enabling cross-session refinement without rediscovering past rationale. On deep-research benchmarks, SkillHone runs without a pre-integrated search stack and outperforms the commercially backed deep-research agent by 15.8 points on GAIA and 3.2 points on WebWalkerQA-EN, while also exceeding prior skill-evolution methods. We further deploy SkillHone on internal tool-mediated analysis scenarios, where it improves accuracy by an average of 18.8 points across seven settings.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

The Geometry of Phase Transitions in Generative Dynamics via Projection Caustics

arXiv:2606.13191v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continuous-state generative samplers, including diffusion and flow-matching models, evolve through continuous reverse-time dynamics, yet their samples often undergo abrupt qualitative changes: trajectories commit to modes, semantic alternatives collapse, and small perturbations in narrow time windows can produce large downstream effects. This paper develops a geometric account of such phase-transition-like behaviour. We view denoising as gradient descent on a free energy landscape and show that sharp transitions arise near projection caustics, where the nearest-point projection onto the data support ceases to be unique. Motivated by this perspective, we introduce the Critical Boundary Detector (CBD), as practical diagnostics for score-direction instability. Across toy models, standard diffusion models, and latent text-to-image diffusion models, CBD localises mode commitment, predicts intervention-sensitive windows, and supports targeted control in geometrically sensitive regions. Our results connect geometry of data and dynamics of diffusion generation.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

MetaPlate: Counterfactual-Guided RAG-LLM Tool for Personalized Food Recommendation and Hyperglycemia Prevention

arXiv:2606.10120v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Postprandial hyperglycemia is a key risk factor for metabolic disorders; however, existing dietary guidance is often static, impractical, and insufficiently personalized, providing recommendations that are difficult to follow or not impactful. While recent advances leverage continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) and machine learning to predict glycemic responses, these approaches are largely predictive and lack actionable guidance. Moreover, recommendation systems are often misaligned with user goals and require extensive input. We present MetaPlate, a counterfactual explanation (CF) guided, context-aware decision-support framework that generates personalized meal recommendations to mitigate postprandial glucose excursions in healthy adults. MetaPlate integrates multimodal data, including CGM readings, wearable-derived physiological signals, and user-provided meal inputs from $25$ individuals to model pre-meal context. A machine learning model predicts glucose response, while a CF optimization module adjusts meal composition modifying macronutrient amounts to maintain glucose levels within a target range ($\leq 140$ mg/dL). An LLM-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) layer enhances interpretability by producing human-readable recommendations using constrained search of the USDA food database. We evaluate MetaPlate via a structured expert-in-the-loop assessment with registered dietitians (RDs), comparing performance before and after prompt refinement. Results show improvements in meal realism, portion suitability, and recommendation likelihood, with expert feedback indicating a shift from clinically implausible outputs to actionable, contextually appropriate recommendations. Our findings emphasize the importance of domain knowledge and structured constraints in LLM-driven systems and highlight the potential of MetaPlate as a real-time personalized dietary decision-support tool.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

RepWAM: World Action Modeling with Representation Visual-Action Tokenizers

This work presents RepWAM, a representation-centric world action model (WAM) built on representation visual-action tokenizers. Existing WAMs typically inherit reconstruction-oriented video tokenizers from pretrained video generation models. Although these tokenizers preserve visual fidelity, pixel reconstruction alone provides limited guidance for learning instruction-following dynamics that connect future prediction with robot control. To address this, we explore a semantic visual-action latent space for representation-centric world action modeling. Specifically, we train a representation visual-action tokenizer that maps visual inputs into aligned visual and latent action tokens. We then pretrain our WAM to jointly model future visual states and the latent actions that connect them under language instructions, followed by adaptation to real robot trajectories for closed-loop manipulation. Experiments on real-world manipulation tasks and simulation benchmarks show that RepWAM delivers strong performance across diverse manipulation settings, while ablations highlight the value of semantic visual-action tokenization over reconstruction-oriented alternatives. These results establish representation visual-action tokenization as a promising foundation for world action models and a step toward generalist robot policies. Code and weights will be available at https://github.com/wdrink/RepWAM.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Gradual Fine-Tuning for Flow Matching Models

arXiv:2601.22495v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fine-tuning flow matching models is a central challenge in settings with limited data, evolving distributions, or computational constraints. While recent work has produced significant advances, particularly in the area of reward-based fine-tuning, current methods fail to demonstrate both theoretical correctness as well as strong empirical results in terms of stability, efficiency, and diversity preservation. In this work, we propose Gradual Fine-Tuning (GFT), a simple yet principled annealing-based framework for fine-tuning flow generative models when only samples from the target distribution are available. For stochastic flows, GFT defines a temperature-controlled sequence of intermediate objectives that smoothly interpolate between the pretrained and target drifts, provably approaching the true target as the temperature approaches zero. We analytically demonstrate that sample generation after GFT can be made substantially more efficient with the use of arbitrary (e.g., optimal transport) couplings, as well as by utilizing few-step inference methods. Empirically, GFT significantly improves convergence stability, while maintaining or improving generation quality, training speed, and generation diversity compared to other fine-tuning methods. Our results position GFT as a simple yet theoretically grounded and practically effective alternative for scalable adaptation of flow matching models under distribution shift.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Exploring the relationship between human-centric AI and firm idiosyncratic risks

arXiv:2606.24224v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Despite the extensive discussions of human-centric AI (HCAI) in Industry 5.0, its effects on firms' idiosyncratic risks (IR) remains underexplored. This is an imperative issue for firms navigate financial risks during the current technological revolution, as IR reflects investor reactions to corporate heterogeneous AI strategies and implementations by isolating firm-level stock volatility from systematic factors. Integrating situated AI theory with social-technical systems theory, we conceptualise HCAI as a situated AI strategy that reduces AI-related ethical risks and fosters AI-Human synergies in firms' business operations, ultimately reducing IR by aligning with stakeholders' diverse expectations. Moreover, socio-technical factors, namely digitalisation, operational efficiency, executive shareholding, and CEOs with IT background, may moderate the HCAI-IR relationship. Using a multi-source panel dataset of Chinese listed firms from 2015 to 2023, we find that HCAI is associated with lower firm IR. Furthermore, digitalisation and executive shareholding strengthen this risk-reducing effect, whereas operational efficiency and CEOs with IT background surprisingly attenuate it. Our findings offer theoretical contributions and practical insights for both ethical AI governance and firm financial risk management in the AI era.