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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

DeepJEB++: Foundation Model-Driven Large-Scale 3D Engineering Dataset via 2D Latent Space Augmentation

arXiv:2606.12994v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Data-driven engineering design is constrained by the lack of large-scale 3D datasets that pair geometry with physics-based performance labels. In particular, existing 3D data augmentation techniques have limitations in preserving subtle and diverse geometric variations, and it remains difficult to automate the subsequent simulation-labeling process, where boundary conditions vary depending on the generated geometry. We present DeepJEB++, a foundation-model-driven data-augmentation framework that expands a small seed set of jet engine brackets into a large, simulation-labeled 3D dataset under constrained resources. Our key idea is to augment in the data-rich 2D latent space, then transfer to 3D. In Stage 1, we fine-tune a pretrained 2D latent diffusion model on multi-view renders and synthesize novel views by latent interpolation, retaining manufacturable designs through a vision-language-model (VLM) quality filter. In Stage 2, the validated images are lifted to 3D meshes by a domain-adapted generative foundation model. In Stage 3, an automated pipeline recognizes the load and bolt interfaces on each mesh and assigns finite-element labels – mass, stress, and displacement – without manual intervention. We assess augmentation quality along three intrinsic axes: manufacturability, label fidelity against the SimJEB ground truth, and distributional consistency. Starting from fewer than 400 seed designs, DeepJEB++ yields 15,360 simulation-labeled 3D brackets – a 40x expansion – using a single GPU per stage. The dataset will be made publicly available to support reproducible engineering-AI research.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

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

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.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

A Deep Generative Model for Resting-State EEG Synthesis and Transferable Representation Learning

arXiv:2503.02636v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Resting-state EEG provides a non-invasive view of spontaneous brain activity, but extracting meaningful patterns is often limited by scarce high-quality data and reliance on manually engineered features. Generative adversarial networks (GANs) can synthesize neural signals and learn transferable representations directly from raw data, a dual capability that remains underexplored in EEG research. Here, we introduce REST-GAN, a GAN-based framework for resting-state EEG that combines adversarial training with an auxiliary self-supervised reconstruction objective to support signal synthesis and unsupervised feature extraction. Although trained only on raw time-domain signals, without explicit frequency-domain or sensor-topographic supervision, the generated time series reproduced key temporal, spectral, and connectivity properties of real EEG. In band-power feature space, generated samples showed high precision and recall across eyes-open and eyes-closed conditions (EO: 0.91/0.67; EC: 0.87/0.65), while group-average spectral coherence matrices showed low mean absolute differences from real data across frequency bands (~0.01-0.03). The representations learned by the model's critic transferred to independent resting-state demographic classification tasks, outperforming models trained directly on raw EEG and showing competitive performance relative to a recent EEG foundation model, while requiring substantially less training data and computational resources. These findings highlight a computationally efficient, architecture-driven strategy in which generative models serve not only as EEG signal generators, but also as unsupervised feature extractors. This approach may support more data-efficient EEG analysis while reducing reliance on manual feature engineering. The implementation code for REST-GAN is available at: https://github.com/Yeganehfrh/REST-GAN.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

NRITYAM: Language Models Meet Art and Heritage of Dance

Language models have become essential tools in shaping modern workflows. However, their global effectiveness hinges on a nuanced understanding of local socio-cultural contexts. To address this gap, we present NRITYAM, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating the cultural comprehension capabilities of language models in the context of global dance traditions. NRITYAM comprises 9,260 carefully curated question-answer pairs spanning 12 languages, making it the largest dataset dedicated to evaluating cultural knowledge in dance. The dataset has been developed from the ground up through close collaboration with native dance artists and native speakers of the languages, who authored and validated culturally relevant questions specific to their regions. We evaluate a broad set of models, including large language models, small language models, multimodal large language models, and small multimodal language models. As a multilingual and multicultural benchmark, NRITYAM sets a new standard for evaluating the ability of AI systems to understand and reason about traditional performing arts. Detailed dataset samples are available at~\url{https://github.com/niladrighosh03/NRITYAM}.

05.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Time-dependent averages of a critical long-range stochastic heat equation

arXiv:2411.09058v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the time-dependent spatial averages of a critical stochastic partial differential equation, namely the stochastic heat equation in dimension $d\geq 3$ with noise white in time and colored in space with covariance kernel $\|\cdot\|^{-2}$. The solution to this SPDE is a singular measure and was constructed by Mueller and Tribe in [MT04]. We show that the time-dependent spatial averages of this SPDE over a ball of radius $R$ at time $t$ have different limits under different space-time scales. In particular, when $t\ll R^2$, the central limit theorem holds; when $t=R^2$, the spatial average is a non-Gaussian random variable; when $t\gg R^2$, the spatial average becomes extinct.

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

BrainPro: Towards Large-scale Brain State-aware EEG Representation Learning

arXiv:2509.22050v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Electroencephalography (EEG) reflects underlying brain states, whose activities are distributed across brain regions and manifest as spatial patterns on the scalp. Learning these spatially structured, state-related patterns requires consistent spatial representations across datasets. However, existing EEG foundation models are typically based on self-attention, which does not preserve location-specific information and struggles to align signals recorded with different channel configurations. Moreover, brain states contain both shared and state-specific regional activity, suggesting that learning neurophysiologically plausible, state-aware representations can complement the shared representations targeted by current models and improve downstream decoding. To address these limitations, we propose BrainPro, a large EEG model that combines a retrieval-based spatial learning mechanism for cross-layout spatial alignment with a brain state-decoupling module that learns both shared and state-specific representations through parallel encoders and region-aware reconstruction. Pre-trained on a large EEG corpus, BrainPro achieves state-of-the-art performance across nine public BCI datasets spanning emotion, motor, speech, stress, mental disease, and attention tasks. Analyses of spatial filters, channel-drop robustness, and encoder contributions further validate the effectiveness of its spatial alignment and state-aware pathways. These results show that BrainPro achieves improved interpretability of learned spatial patterns and produces representations that benefit diverse EEG decoding tasks.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

The Cost Geometry of Belief: finite-resource inference under noisy observation

arXiv:2606.21585v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A finite machine's digital twin of a system observes the territory through finite, noisy sensors; we model its coherent output as a belief, a probability density over states, the Bayes posterior, never a point. Certainty, the perfect twin, is denied twice, by observation and by physics, both read off the Fisher information. To make this finiteness geometric, we model what it costs to change a belief: a belief-cost geometry, optimal transport in Wasserstein space reweighted conformally by Fisher information. The framework rests on two posed commitments: that revision cost is a scalar price on transport (the arena), and that the price is honest: one nat costs the same length everywhere. Honesty selects the Fisher reweighting because transport demotes the Fisher information from the metric ruler of distinguishability to the slope of entropy, the move that sets transport apart from Fisher-Rao. From these two postulates, three results follow on the conformal class (essentially location-scale), all invariants of one change of cost unit. A wall: a well-posed inference rejects certainty to infinite distance as soon as the cost dominates the Fisher information (necessity conjectured beyond power laws). An honest family: the eikonal price where each nat the same length everywhere, is equivalent to proportionality U=cJ, the Fisher family. A rigidity: these geometries are hyperbolic, and the Stam bound crowns the Gaussian, the most hyperbolic location-scale belief; -1/4 is one image of a relativity of cost. The cost of reaching a given precision then has a geometric cost floor diverging at certainty. Thermodynamics fixes the cost unit and motivates the framework; the results are geometric, in nats.

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

Modeling Day-Long ECG Signals to Predict Heart Failure Risk with Explainable AI

arXiv:2601.00014v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Heart failure (HF) affects 11.8% of adults aged 65 and older, reducing quality of life and longevity. Preventing HF can reduce morbidity and mortality. We hypothesized that artificial intelligence (AI) applied to 24-hour single-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) data could predict the risk of HF within five years. To research this, the Technion-Leumit Holter ECG (TLHE) dataset, including 69,663 recordings from 47,729 patients, collected over 20 years was used. Our deep learning model, DeepHHF, trained on 24-hour ECG recordings, achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.80 that outperformed a model using 30-second segments and a clinical score. High-risk individuals identified by DeepHHF had a two-fold chance of hospitalization or death incidents. Explainability analysis showed DeepHHF focused on arrhythmias and heart abnormalities. This study highlights the feasibility of deep learning to model 24-hour continuous ECG data, capturing paroxysmal events essential for reliable risk prediction. Artificial intelligence applied to single-lead Holter ECG is non-invasive, inexpensive, and widely accessible, making it a promising tool for HF risk prediction.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Neural Variability Enhances Artificial Network Robustness

arXiv:2606.13801v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural responses in cortex exhibit substantial trial-to-trial variability in response to repeated stimuli, while peripheral sensory neurons respond far more consistently, leading many to wonder whether stochasticity may carry meaning. Existing work has argued that noise and signal correlations may be optimized for discrimination in animals, whereas artificial neural network (ANN) studies have shown similar benefits of noise in machine learning tasks, although most ANN work has neglected the effects of correlations. Here we investigate whether correlated noise improves the robustness of artificial neural networks to adversarial attacks and naturalistic image modifications. Using the covariance of activations under modified versus clean inputs, we find that structured noise may significantly improve network robustness. Robustness to naturalistic image modifications benefits most from structure, but this structure transfers poorly across modification types. In contrast, noise structure from adversarial attacks can generalize to other kinds of attacks. These results suggest that structured noise in ANN activations generally improves robustness, establishing a biologically plausible strategy for creating robust artificial neural networks that only relies on local information.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Experimental straintronics in nanotube quantum dots

arXiv:2606.12180v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) are narrow ribbons of graphene with atomically precise edges and a single quantum transport channel, at experimentally-relevant dopings. This makes them ideal systems to harness quantum transport straintronics (QTS), i.e. using mechanical strain to control accurately quantum transport. We present QTS data from three single-wall carbon nanotube quantum dot (SWCNT-QD) transistors over a broad range of in-situ tunable and reversible uniaxial strain ($\Delta\varepsilon_mech\approx$ 0 to 3 %). We first present the nanofabrication of the suspended SWCNT transistors whose channel lengths are $\approx$ 30 nm. The channels are strained by moving gold clamps holding firmly the nanotubes. We present detailed charge transport data, $dI/dV_{B} - V_{B} - V_{G}$ and $dI/dV_{B} - V_{B} - \Delta\varepsilon_mech$, showing a large mechanical-gating effect of the SWCNT-QDs. The precise reversibility of the data, and their agreement with QTS theory, confirms that the tubes are strained elastically. We demonstrate that the mechanical control of the QD doping is not due to capacitive-gating effects, but to quantitatively predictable bandstructure changes including a strain-tunable bandgap. This precise mechanical control of the doping and bandgap of SWCNT-QDs could find applications in qubits, condensed matter physics, and homojunction molecular transistors.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

InfoNCE Induces Gaussian Distribution

arXiv:2602.24012v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Contrastive learning has become a cornerstone of modern representation learning, allowing training with massive unlabeled data for both task-specific and general (foundation) models. A prototypical loss in contrastive training is InfoNCE and its variants. In this work, we show that the InfoNCE objective induces Gaussian structure in representations that emerge from contrastive training. We establish this result in two complementary regimes. First, we show that under certain alignment and concentration assumptions, projections of the high-dimensional representation asymptotically approach a multivariate Gaussian distribution. Next, under less strict assumptions, we show that adding a small asymptotically vanishing regularization term that promotes low feature norm and high feature entropy leads to similar asymptotic results. We support our analysis with experiments on synthetic and CIFAR-10 datasets across multiple encoder architectures and sizes, demonstrating consistent Gaussian behavior. This perspective provides a principled explanation for commonly observed Gaussianity in contrastive representations. The resulting Gaussian model enables principled analytical treatment of learned representations and is expected to support a wide range of applications in contrastive learning.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

SENTRY: SAM2-Enhanced Neighbor-Aware and Temporally Reasoned Memory for Visual Tracking

We revisit the memory update mechanism in SAM2-based visual object tracking and identify confidence-only mask selection as the dominant cause of drift under occlusion, rapid motion, and distractors. We introduce SENTRY, a training-free, plug-and-play, refine-before-write module that validates each memory update for short-horizon temporal consistency before committing it. SENTRY aggregates diverse segmentation hypotheses per frame, backtracks them into short tracklets, and uses neighbor-aware cycle-consistent matching against recent trajectories to favor temporally and geometrically consistent masks. It leaves the base architecture untouched, replacing confidence-driven writes with consistency-validated ones. For fair evaluation, we re-evaluate major open-source SAM2-based trackers across all available scales and datasets, filling gaps in prior reports. Integrated into five strong baselines, SENTRY delivers consistent gains across nine benchmarks, achieving new zero-shot SOTA on LaSOT, LaSOT_ext, GOT-10k, VOT20, VOT22, and DiDi. Despite these checks, the SAM2-L version runs at 32.8 FPS on an A100, and across compatible hosts adds only about 0.4–0.6 GB VRAM. Our results provide the first unified all-scale evaluation of SAM2-based trackers and show that enforcing temporal validity at write time stabilizes memory-augmented tracking without retraining.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

More Skills, Worse Agents? Skill Shadowing Degrades Performance When Expanding Skill Libraries

arXiv:2605.24050v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Skill libraries allow LLM agents to load task-specific instructions on demand, letting non-expert users solve domain-specific tasks through natural language without knowing which skills exist or how they work. However, performance degrades as libraries grow – by up to 21\% when scaling from a small set of helpful skills to a 202-skill library. In this work, we formulate this performance degradation as the pass rate drop between loading a library of known-helpful skills and the full library. Moreover, we propose to decompose the pass rate drop by conditioning on the skill(s) invocation – which skills the agent selects during a trajectory – into two effects: skill shadowing, where the agent selects wrong skills more often as the library expands, and context overhead, where the enlarged context degrades execution even when selection is correct. We derive upper bounds on both effects to characterize their magnitudes of impacts to the pass rate drop. Our empirical estimates of the effects and their upper bounds both show that the skill shadowing effect grows with library size and significantly contributes to the performance degradation, whereas the context overhead effect remains small and indistinguishable from zero. This observed asymmetry establishes that the skill selection failure, not the enlarged context, is the primary bottleneck when expanding the skill libraries.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Scaling-optimal purification of noisy qubit unitary channels

arXiv:2606.12394v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We consider the problem of purifying noisy qubit unitary channels. Given the ability to apply an unknown qubit unitary channel followed by depolarizing noise, we aim to construct a superchannel that purifies the noisy unitary back to the original unknown unitary. We first provide numerical evidence that sequential strategies can strictly outperform parallel strategies when the number of channel uses is finite, highlighting the fundamental distinction from state purification. We then provide a concrete $\mathrm{U}(2)$-covariant parallel protocol based on a novel entanglement-assisted quantum error-correcting code that suppresses the first-order noise strength as $O(1/n)$ with $n$ channel uses and show this scaling is asymptotically optimal in the low-noise regime, even when sequential strategies are allowed.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

ZeroWBC: Learning Natural Whole-Body Humanoid Interaction from Human Egocentric Data

arXiv:2603.09170v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Achieving versatile and natural whole-body humanoid interaction control remains challenging due to the high cost of whole-body teleoperation data. We present ZeroWBC, a teleoperation-free framework that learns humanoid whole-body interaction from human egocentric videos paired with synchronized whole-body motion and text annotations. ZeroWBC adopts a generation-then-tracking formulation to tackle the static scene whole-body interaction control problem. Given an initial egocentric image and a language instruction, a fine-tuned Vision-Language Model generates future human whole-body motion tokens, which are decoded into continuous motions and retargeted to the humanoid. The resulting reference motions, together with root and key body-part trajectories, are then executed by a general interactive motion tracking policy. To improve interaction performance, we introduce an interaction-oriented tracking reward that prioritizes global root and key body-part trajectory alignment while preserving natural whole-body motion. Experiments on the Unitree G1 humanoid robot show that ZeroWBC enables diverse scene-aware behaviors without robot teleoperation demonstrations. These results suggest a scalable paradigm for learning natural humanoid whole-body interaction from human egocentric data.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

HilDA: Hierarchical Distillation with Diffusion for Advancing Self-Supervised LiDAR Pre-trainin

arXiv:2606.20189v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Leveraging Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) for camera-to-LiDAR knowledge distillation offers a promising solution to the scarcity of annotated data needed to represent the immense geometric and kinematic diversity of real-world autonomous driving (AD). However, current approaches typically treat VFMs as black-box teachers, relying exclusively on frame-wise feature similarity. Consequently, they do not fully exploit the teacher's layer-wise semantic structure and global context, as well as the rich spatiotemporal information inherent in LiDAR sequences. We propose HilDA, a self-supervised pretraining framework for LiDAR backbones that better captures the semantic what and geometric where needed for driving tasks. HilDA combines hierarchical distillation comprising multi-layer distillation for progressive semantic alignment and global context distillation for scene-level semantics, with a temporal occupancy diffusion objective promoting spatiotemporal consistency. Models pre-trained with HilDA achieve state-of-the-art results on cross-modal distillation benchmarks and outperform models trained via prior distillation approaches on 3D object detection, scene flow, and semantic occupancy prediction. Code available at: https://maxiuw.github.io/hilda.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Decoupled Latent Optimization of Diffusion Models for Full Waveform Inversion

arXiv:2606.14139v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Full waveform inversion (FWI) recovers subsurface velocity from seismic recordings by solving a severely ill-posed, nonconvex PDE-constrained optimization. Classical regularizers stabilize the inversion but fail to reproduce realistic geological structures; recent diffusion-prior methods improve realism at the cost of a fragile trade-off between data fidelity and prior consistency. We propose Decoupled Latent Optimization (DLO), which relaxes the standard latent-optimization formulation into a quadratic-penalty objective over an auxiliary physical variable and a latent variable. The data-fidelity gradient acts in physical space, the diffusion sampler contributes only through a decoded prior sample, and the standard smoothed-velocity initialization of classical FWI is preserved. On the OpenFWI benchmark, DLO outperforms classical regularizers and existing diffusion-based methods under clean, noisy, and missing-trace acquisitions. The prior, trained on 70*70 OpenFWI models, transfers directly to the Marmousi and Overthrust benchmarks, where DLO recovers intricate fault structures and remains robust to initialization smoothing and measurement noise.

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

Fi-Gaussian: Frequency-Aware Implicit Gaussian Splatting for Single Image Dehazing

Single image dehazing continues to be hindered by the loss of high-frequency details and the difficulty of accurate physical scattering modeling. To address these issues, we propose Fi-Gaussian, a frequency-aware implicit Gaussian splatting network for single image dehazing. Unlike explicit rendering methods that rely on 3D point clouds, our method employs implicit Gaussian splatting to adaptively model the underlying distribution of clear images as a continuous representation in 2D feature space. The core of the network is a frequency-aware implicit Gaussian splatting module, which decouples low-frequency structural information and high-frequency texture information in the frequency domain and then performs adaptive Gaussian aggregation with complex-valued weights to recover fine details. In addition, a physics-driven scattering renormalization mechanism is introduced to estimate the transmission map and atmospheric light under the guidance of implicit Gaussian priors. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that Fi-Gaussian achieves state-of-the-art quantitative performance and produces visually superior dehazed results, validating the effectiveness of implicit Gaussian splatting for low-level vision tasks.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

APT: Atomic Physical Transitions for Causal Video-Language Understanding

Physical events are not understood by their names alone, but by the causal state changes that compose them. A clip-level label such as "bounce" can be correct while hiding the process that makes the event physically valid, from support loss and contact onset to rebound and settling. To make this hidden process explicit, we introduce Atomic Physical Transitions (APTs): minimal, temporally localized state changes that bind a visible cue to an active physical mechanism and before/after dynamical regimes. An APT chain represents a video as an ordered causal transition sequence rather than a single aggregate event label: event labels tell what happened; APT chains explain why it happened. To make APTs learnable by VLMs, we construct mixed-source APT data from human annotations and simulator ground truth, covering 14 transition types across contact, gravity, friction, and rotation/stability, with 27,303 timed instances over 1,246 trials. Using this data, we find that current VLMs miss transition-level physics, with zero-shot recall at most 14% and errors dominated by missed transitions. Direct fine-tuning on APT chains improves transition detection but causes event-level forgetting, indicating that the model learns a specialized answer format rather than a reusable physical representation. We therefore propose APT-Tune, a parameter-efficient recipe that teaches VLMs to use causal transitions without forgetting how to answer video questions. It combines image-pad-aware supervision, format-conditional co-training, and mechanism-conditioned domain-to-type decoding to make APT learning format-robust and physically grounded. With only 11 M LoRA parameters on Qwen3-VL-2B, APT-Tune substantially improves APT recall while also improving event-level video transfer. These results show that APTs are not a new answer format, but a human-aligned causal supervision signal for physical video understanding.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Multi-Modal Hyper-Graph Fusion for Low-Light Crowd Counting

Crowd counting is a fundamental task in computer vision. However, crowd counting in low-light environments remains largely underexplored, despite its practical importance in the real world. Existing methods mainly focus on well-lit scenes or rely on single-modality Red-Green-Blue (RGB) representations, which often become unreliable under extreme darkness and complex non-uniform illumination. To handle this problem, we construct three new low-light crowd counting benchmarks, which consist of two synthetic datasets, SHA\_Dark and SHB\_Dark, and a real-world benchmark LC-Crowd (Low-light Crowd Dataset). Inspired by Retinex-based physical modeling, we introduce depth and Canny edge cues as complementary geometric and structural priors to enhance the intrinsic reflectance representation under low-light conditions. We propose a Multi-Modal Hyper-Graph Fusion module, which formulates RGB appearance, depth geometry, and edge structure cues as nodes in a unified hyper-graph and explicitly captures their high-order complementary relationships via dynamic hyperedge construction and message passing. Furthermore, to adaptively allocate computation in dense prediction, we propose a Deformable Rectangular Sparse Attention (DRSA) module, which concentrates computation on informative regions through anchor-aware estimation and adaptive rectangular window modeling. Based on these designs, we develop a unified Low-Light Counting Network (LCNet) for robust low-light crowd counting. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method achieves the best overall performance against existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. The code is in the supplementary material. The datasets will be made public upon acceptance.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Weight-Space Geometry of Offline Reasoning Training

arXiv:2606.23740v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Offline reinforcement-learning losses (RFT, RIFT, DFT, Offline GRPO, DPO) are widely used to distill reasoning from large teachers into smaller students, and are typically compared on downstream accuracy alone. We ask whether they are mechanistically distinct or converge to a similar weight update. Training six methods (SFT, RFT, DFT, RIFT, Offline GRPO, DPO) on identical math rollouts from a single base model (Qwen3-4B) with attention-only LoRA, we analyze the resulting deltas via cosine similarity, principal-angle subspace analysis, linear mode connectivity, and CKA. We observe: (i) SFT, RFT, and RIFT have nearly colinear weight deltas (cosine >= 0.97, top-1 principal angle ~7 deg median over 144 modules) and comparable GSM8K accuracy (87-88%, n=1319; pairwise McNemar p >= 0.15); (ii) DFT diverges further in direction than any reward-weighted method despite using the same data; (iii) Offline GRPO adds a substantial component orthogonal to the SFT direction (~67% globally, up to ~86% in late layers) while staying in the SFT loss basin; (iv) DPO sits in a near-orthogonal subspace, shows a mode-connectivity barrier, and collapses late-layer CKA to ~0.46. DPO also reaches the highest accuracy in our protocol on both GSM8K (93.5%, McNemar p < 10^-9 vs. each other method) and AIME26 (30.0% vs. 3.3-10.0%); its training uses a 10x smaller learning rate than the others (the standard convention), so the update-norm and accuracy gaps reflect loss-function and optimizer choices jointly, and a learning-rate-matched DPO comparison is left for future work.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

ScalingAR: Scaling Confidence for Autoregressive Image Generation

Test-time strategies have shown remarkable success in improving large language models, but their application to next-token prediction (NTP) autoregressive (AR) image generation remains largely underexplored. Existing test-time scaling (TTS) methods for visual autoregressive models (VAR) rely on frequent partial decoding and external reward models, which are inefficient and often ineffective for NTP-based image generation due to the inherent instability of intermediate decoding results. To address these limitations, we propose ScalingAR, a novel test-time scaling framework tailored for NTP-based AR image generation. ScalingAR introduces token entropy as a confidence signal and operates at two complementary levels: (i) Profile Level, integrates intrinsic uncertainty and conditional utilization into a unified confidence state, and (ii) Policy Level, leverages this state for adaptive trajectory pruning and dynamic guidance scheduling. Without requiring early decoding or auxiliary rewards, ScalingAR achieves significant improvements across diverse benchmarks. Experiments show that ScalingAR (I) improves base models by $12.5\%$ on GenEval and $15.2\%$ on TIIF-Bench, (II) reduces visual token consumption by $62.0\%$ while outperforming baselines, and (III) enhances robustness, mitigating performance degradation by $26.0\%$ in challenging scenarios. These results establish ScalingAR as a robust and efficient test-time scaling solution for autoregressive image generation.

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

RadSEM: A Finding-by-Finding Metric for Clinical Consistency in Radiology Reports

arXiv:2606.17062v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Radiology report evaluation must distinguish clinical compatibility from surface similarity, because negation, laterality, or normal-abnormal polarity can reverse a finding. We propose RadSEM (Radiology Sentence-Level Evaluation Metric), a constrained LLM-assisted metric for reference-based evaluation of radiology Findings. RadSEM rewrites reference and generated reports into ordered atomic finding sentences, each expressing one site-finding proposition. It then performs contradiction-constrained many-to-many matching: incompatible pairs such as "effusion" and "no effusion" receive no credit, while compatible granularity differences can receive partial credit. A deterministic stage weights pairs by part-whole and abnormal-detail relationships, counts unmatched findings, and produces an abnormal-focused weighted F1 score. Thus, the LLM supports structured rewriting and local alignment rather than acting as an opaque judge. We evaluate RadSEM with SSREE, a controlled monotonicity stress test built from 2,448 de-identified reports expanded into five graded corruption levels. RadSEM achieves Kendall tau_b of 0.957, all-pairs concordance of 97.8%, adjacent concordance of 95.0%, and strict five-level ordering for 81.9% of reports, outperforming radiology-specific and general text metrics while avoiding the failure in which polarity-inverted reports regain lexical overlap. On the same SSREE set, RadSEM outperforms the Ref-anchored RadSEM-Alt policy, improving adjacent concordance from 90.7% to 95.0% and strict ordering from 67.2% to 81.9%. On a 599-triplet synonym/antonym subset, RadSEM prefers synonyms in 597 cases (99.67%). These results suggest that explicit finding units, contradiction-aware matching, and abnormal-focused deterministic scoring make report scoring more interpretable and sensitive to clinically meaningful errors. Code is available at https://github.com/jdh-algo/RadSEM.

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

Graph Alignment for Benchmarking Graph Neural Networks and Learning Positional Encodings

arXiv:2505.13087v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose a novel benchmarking methodology for graph neural networks (GNNs) based on the graph alignment problem, a combinatorial optimization task that generalizes graph isomorphism by aligning two unlabeled graphs to maximize overlapping edges. We frame this problem as a self-supervised learning task and present several methods to generate graph alignment datasets using synthetic random graphs and real-world graph datasets from multiple domains. For a given graph dataset, we generate a family of graph alignment datasets with increasing difficulty, allowing us to rank the performance of various architectures. Our experiments prove that there is an optimal task difficulty for having a statistically relevant ranking of different models and that, even on a structure-only task, anisotropic models perform better compared to isotropic ones. To further prove that our synthetic task capture meaningful information, we show its effectiveness for self-supervised GNN pre-training: the learned node embeddings can be leveraged as positional encodings by transformers for graph regression or can be used to reconstruct the full structure of the graph with $98\%$ accuracy. To support reproducibility and further research, we provide an open-source Python package to generate graph alignment datasets and benchmark new GNN architectures. The source code is available at https://github.com/adrien-lagesse/graph-alignment-benchmark.