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

MOCHI: Motion Enhancement of Collaborative Human-object Interactions

Collaborative human-object interaction shows dynamic and complex movements that require mutual anticipation and continuous adjustment between participants and the shared object. Modeling such collaborative multi-human object interaction (MHOI) scenarios requires high-quality data acquisition as a foundational step; however, this is challenging due to the inherent complexity of MHOI where human-human and human-object interactions occur simultaneously. Such complexity leads to noisy MHOI captures characterized by several artifacts: contact misalignment between hands and objects, motion jitter and temporal inconsistencies in the captured sequences, and missing or incomplete finger-level articulation details. To address these challenges, we present MOCHI (MOtion Enhancement of Collaborative Human-object Interactions), a two-stage framework for enhancing noisy MHOI data. Our approach first generates physically plausible hand grasps through optimization from noisy body input, producing grasps that are both physically plausible and semantically consistent with the body pose, where these optimized grasps are extended into complete hand-object interaction sequences. Consequently, the full-body motion for all participants are refined through a diffusion-based noise optimization framework that uses single-person motion priors. During the optimization process, we introduce optimization objectives to encode human-object and human-human interaction information within these single-person priors. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our pipeline across diverse MHOI data, either acquired by existing capture methods or synthesized by generative models. We further show robustness of our system across varying numbers of participants and types of interactions, and demonstrate various applications including keyframe-based MHOI creation and data augmentation through varying object geometries.

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

HGCN(O): A Self-Tuning GCN HyperModel Toolkit for Outcome Prediction in Event-Sequence Data

arXiv:2507.22524v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose HGCN(O), a self-tuning toolkit using Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) models for event sequence prediction. Featuring four GCN architectures (O-GCN, T-GCN, TP-GCN, TE-GCN) across the GCNConv and GraphConv layers, our toolkit integrates multiple graph representations of event sequences with different choices of node- and graph-level attributes and in temporal dependencies via edge weights, optimising prediction accuracy and stability for balanced and unbalanced datasets. Extensive experiments show that GCNConv models excel on unbalanced data, while all models perform consistently on balanced data. Experiments also confirm the superior performance of HGCN(O) over traditional approaches. Applications include Predictive Business Process Monitoring (PBPM), which predicts future events or states of a business process based on event logs.

03.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

A global map of seagrass ecosystems

Combining satellite imagery and machine learning has created the first comprehensive map of seagrass meadows, in a boost for the conservation of these crucial ecosystems. Combining satellite imagery and machine learning has created the first comprehensive map of seagrass meadows, in a boost for the conservation of these crucial ecosystems.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

WorldLines: Benchmarking and Modeling Long-Horizon Stateful Embodied Agents

arXiv:2606.18847v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To assist humans over extended periods in real homes, embodied agents must remember user routines, world states, and past interactions. Existing long-term memory benchmarks mainly evaluate language-centric retrieval and question answering, while embodied benchmarks often focus on short-horizon task execution without testing long-term memory use in dynamic environments. We introduce WorldLines, a project-driven benchmark for long-horizon embodied household assistance. It constructs temporally extended household traces with dialogues, actions, execution feedback, object and device state changes, and converts them into evidence-linked samples for Memory QA and Embodied Task Planning. We further propose ObsMem, an observer-grounded memory framework that maintains visibility-aware memories and action-native state trails for state-aware decisions. Experiments reveal persistent challenges in partial observability, overwritten world states, and translating long-term memory into embodied plans, while ObsMem offers a stronger reference architecture for this setting.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Structured Representation Learning with Locally Linear Embeddings and Adaptive Feature Fusion

arXiv:2606.18469v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neuroscientific research has revealed that the brain encodes complex behaviors by leveraging structured, low-dimensional manifolds and dynamically fusing multiple sources of information through adaptive gating mechanisms. Inspired by these principles, we propose a novel reinforcement learning (RL) framework that encourages the disentanglement of dynamics-specific and reward-specific features, drawing direct parallels to how neural circuits separate and integrate information for efficient decision-making. Our approach leverages locally linear embeddings (LLEs) to capture the intrinsic, locally linear structure inherent in many environments, mirroring the local smoothness observed in neural population activity, while concurrently deriving reward-specific features through the standard RL objective. An attention mechanism, analogous to cortical gating, adaptively fuses these complementary representations on a per-state basis. Experimental results on benchmark tasks demonstrate that our method, grounded in neuroscientific principles, improves learning efficiency and overall performance compared to conventional RL approaches, highlighting the benefits of explicitly modeling local state structures and adaptive feature selection as observed in biological systems.

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

Controlled Chaos in 4D SCFTs

arXiv:2606.23785v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Chaotic dynamics play an important role in a number of physical systems. One of the qualitative hallmarks of this behavior is the appearance of a sufficiently "complex" spectrum of energy levels. This also makes it challenging to directly verify the onset of chaos in interacting quantum field theories. We present a class of 4D superconformal field theories (SCFTs) given by orbifolds of 4D $\mathcal{N} = 4$ Super Yang–Mills theory in which operator mixing in a controlled subsector is described by an effective spin chain in one spatial dimension with nearest neighbor interactions tuned by the marginal couplings of the SCFT. Tuning the marginal couplings results in a chaotic spectrum, while generically the spin chain exhibits Anderson localization. We diagnose the onset of chaos by analyzing the statistical distribution of eigenvalues of the dilatation operator, in particular properties such as eigenvalue level repulsion, spectral rigidity, and the spectral form factor. We also show that other diagnostics such as Krylov complexity sometimes do not faithfully capture this information. This structure defines a chaotic billiard in the target space of the stringy realization. We also comment on the large $N$ holographic dual description, where the controlled single spin chain approximation must be supplemented by multi-trace dynamics, i.e., the splitting and joining of multiple spin chains.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Holographic Memory for Zero-Shot Compositional Reasoning in Knowledge Graphs: A Mechanistic Study of Where and Why It Fails

Authors:

arXiv:2606.24948v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Knowledge graph embedding (KGE) models predict single-hop links well but have no mechanism for zero-shot compositional queries: multi-hop questions whose relation chains never appeared during training. Holographic Reduced Representations (HRR), which bind and unbind symbols via circular convolution, are a theoretically attractive candidate, since binding is approximately invertible and associative. We test whether this promise holds. We study two holographic memory variants, real-valued HRR and phase-only Fourier HRR (FHRR), each with a modern Hopfield cleanup, on FB15k-237 over five seeds. Four findings follow. First, both are competitive single-hop retrievers (filtered MRR 0.358 +/- 0.002 for HRR, 0.350 +/- 0.021 for FHRR). Second, neither composes zero-shot: accuracy stays at chance across all cleanup temperatures. Third, the main contribution, we localise the failure mechanistically. A hop-1 probe shows the memory recovers the correct intermediate entity with high fidelity (MRR 0.896 +/- 0.002 for HRR), yet composition still fails even with a verified-correct intermediate. A second probe shows why: posing the ground-truth second-hop fact as a standalone atomic query, bypassing composition entirely, already recovers it at only 0.26 to 0.48x average atomic accuracy, uniformly across relation fan-out. The bottleneck is not the bind-unbind algebra or the cleanup; it is that facts compositional chains pass through are intrinsically harder for the superposed memory to retrieve, a capacity and interference effect present already at a single hop. Fourth, we prove (Lemma 4.1) that FHRR's softmax cleanup is not phase-equivariant, compounding the primary failure on the minority of chains where hop-1 itself errs. Fixing zero-shot composition requires improving retrieval capacity under superposition, not just redesigning the cleanup.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Dynamic Link Prediction with Temporally Enhanced Signed Graph Neural Networks

arXiv:2605.26290v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Temporal signed networks (TSNs) model the time evolution of cooperative and adversarial relationships that arise in applications such as social media analysis, trust and reputation systems, and financial transaction networks. While graph neural networks (GNNs) perform well for static or unsigned link prediction, effective learning in temporal signed graphs remains challenging due to the interaction of signed relations, evolving structure, and balance-theoretic constraints. To address this gap, we propose a modular temporal enhancement framework for signed GNNs that integrates historical context into otherwise static architectures. The framework introduces a Historical Context Integration Module (HCIM) that combines learnable recency-aware temporal weighting, LSTM-based embedding trajectory modeling, and multi-head temporal attention to capture both short- and long-term signed interaction dynamics. Historical information is fused with current node representations using either global or node-adaptive weighting, allowing the architecture-agnostic framework to accommodate heterogeneous temporal behaviors. We instantiate the approach on the Self-Explainable Signed Graph Transformer (SE-SGformer), preserving interpretability while extending it with temporal awareness. Experiments on real-world and synthetic TSNs, including Bitcoin OTC, Bitcoin Alpha, Reddit, and small-world network models, demonstrate consistent and statistically significant improvements over the static baseline.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

LoMime: Query-Efficient Membership Inference using Model Extraction in Label-Only Settings

arXiv:2602.18934v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Membership inference attacks (MIAs) threaten the privacy of machine learning models by revealing whether a specific data point was used during training. Existing MIAs often rely on impractical assumptions, such as access to public datasets, shadow models, confidence scores, or knowledge of the training data distribution, making them vulnerable to defenses like confidence masking and adversarial regularization. Label-only MIAs, even under strict constraints, suffer from high query requirements per sample. We propose a cost-effective label-only MIA framework based on transferability and model extraction. By querying the target model $M$ using active sampling, perturbation-based selection, and synthetic data, we extract a functionally similar surrogate model $S$ on which membership inference is performed. This shifts the query overhead to a one-time extraction phase, eliminating repeated queries to $M$. Our method matches the performance of state-of-the-art label-only MIAs while significantly reducing query costs and operating under strict black-box constraints. On benchmark tabular datasets, we show that a query budget equivalent to testing the membership of approximately $1%$ of the training samples is sufficient to extract $S$ and achieve membership inference accuracy within $\pm 1%$ of that obtained when attacking $M$ directly. We also evaluate the effectiveness of standard defenses, including DP-SGD and regularization, proposed for label-only MIAs against our attack. Finally, we present preliminary results extending our framework to deep neural networks trained on image datasets, demonstrating promising transferability and membership inference performance under label-only access while highlighting directions for further optimization.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Feature-Aligned Speech Watermarking for Robustness to Reconstruction Distortions

arXiv:2606.11828v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audio watermarking aims to embed identifiable information into audio while remaining imperceptible. Existing methods adopt high-fidelity, low-energy designs to preserve perceptual quality, but the resulting watermarks lack robustness under suppression by speech reconstruction models. Improving robustness is challenging due to the inherent robustness-fidelity trade-off in existing designs, where increasing watermark energy improves robustness but reduces fidelity. To address this problem, we propose a feature-aligned watermarking method that aligns the watermark with the original speech feature distribution, allowing higher watermark energy to improve robustness while preserving imperceptibility. We use a pretrained speech codec to generate a pseudo-speech watermark and fuse it into the spectrogram of the input audio, with VAD loss and perceptual losses guiding embedding within voiced regions. Experiments show that our method maintains imperceptibility comparable to existing approaches while substantially improving robustness under both seen and unseen speech reconstruction models.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Epipolar Geometry Improves Video Generation Models

Video generation models have advanced significantly through the latent diffusion transformers trained with rectified flow techniques. Yet these models still struggle with geometric inconsistencies, unstable motion, and visual artifacts that break the illusion of realistic 3D scenes. 3D-consistent video generation could significantly impact numerous downstream applications in generation and reconstruction tasks. We explore how epipolar geometry constraints improve modern video diffusion models. Despite using massive training data, these models fail to capture fundamental geometric principles. We align diffusion models using pairwise epipolar geometry constraints via preference-based optimization, directly addressing unstable trajectories and geometric artifacts through mathematically principled geometric enforcement. Our approach efficiently enforces geometric principles without requiring end-to-end differentiability. Evaluation demonstrates that classical geometric constraints provide more stable optimization signals than modern learned metrics. Training on static scenes with dynamic cameras ensures metric quality while the model generalizes to various dynamic scenes. By bridging data-driven learning with classical computer vision, we reduce epipolar error by 31% and improve human-rated consistency from 54% to 72% without compromising visual quality.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Tabular Foundation Models for Clinical Survival Analysis via Survival-Aware Adaptation

arXiv:2606.12006v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Predicting time-to-event outcomes such as mortality is a fundamental task in clinical decision-making, commonly addressed through survival analysis. While classical statistical and deep learning approaches have been widely studied, they typically require task-specific training and sufficient labeled data. Recent advances in tabular foundation models offer a new paradigm by learning general-purpose representations for structured data. However, their applicability to censored time-to-event prediction in clinical settings remains underexplored, as typical applications are restricted to discrete classification rather than survival analysis tasks. In this work, we propose a lightweight adaptation approach for applying tabular foundation models to clinical survival analysis by directly training a survival-aware head on top of the pretrained representations. We study representative architectures, including TabPFN, TabDPT, and TabICL, and adapt them using a multi-task logistic regression (MTLR) head to model right-censored time-to-event outcomes. We evaluate this approach on a diverse set of public survival benchmarks and two large-scale ICU cohorts, MIMIC-IV and eICU. Our results show that this transfer learning approach achieves competitive or superior performance compared to strong baselines. On MIMIC-IV, TabDPT-FT-MTLR reaches a C-index of 0.856, corresponding to a relative improvement of +1.4% over the best non-FM baseline (DeepSurv, 0.844) and +6.7% over the best zero-shot model (0.802). On eICU, TabICL-FT-MTLR achieves 0.797, yielding gains of +1.7% (DeepSurv, 0.784) and +6.4% (0.749), respectively. These findings highlight the importance of combining pretrained tabular representations with survival-aware objectives and suggest that tabular foundation models provide a practical and effective alternative for clinical survival prediction.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Volterra Generative Models

arXiv:2606.18071v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Score-based diffusion models typically use Brownian perturbations, which provide tractable reverse-time dynamics but impose memoryless noising. We introduce Volterra generative models, a continuous-time score-based framework whose forward process injects path-dependent noise through fractional kernels. To handle the non-Markovian and non-semimartingale dynamics, we construct finite-dimensional Markovian lifts using Gaussian quadrature in both regimes and a hybrid finite-difference exponential approximation in the smooth regime. We prove squared error bounds, derive an augmented linear-Gaussian forward process, and show that the learning can remain data-dimensional by considering residual states and analytic auxiliary Gaussian scores. We also identify covariance and reverse-time degeneracies caused by shared Brownian factors and signed smooth-regime weights. The degeneracy motivates stabilized conditioning and, for stiff larger lifts, a Gaussian-bridge reconstruction sampler. Experiments on MNIST and CIFAR-10 show that persistent fractional perturbations with small Markovian lifts can improve score-based generation on MNIST and provide a promising extension to natural images, while the bridge sampler provides a stability mechanism for larger lifts.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

ST-DiffEye: Diffusion-based Continuous Gaze Generation via Joint Scanpath-Trajectory Modeling

We study the problem of human gaze modeling, which aims to generate the gaze patterns a viewer produces while observing a visual stimulus. Gaze is primarily captured through two modalities: continuous eye-tracking trajectories, which describe fine-grained motion dynamics, and discrete scanpaths, which describe high-level fixation structure. Because gaze varies substantially across viewers and trials, we treat this variability as a defining property rather than noise and model gaze as a stochastic generative process. Existing generative gaze models supervise on only one of these two representations in isolation. We hypothesize that trajectories and scanpaths describe gaze at complementary scales and are jointly informative during training, and test this hypothesis through ST-DiffEye, a joint trajectory-scanpath diffusion framework that couples both modalities by concatenating them as an additional raw input channel, requiring no architectural overhead beyond an input and output channel expansion. We further introduce a principled evaluation framework based on the Continuous Ranked Probability Score (CRPS), which generalizes any existing sequence similarity metric into a proper scoring rule that jointly assesses the accuracy and diversity of generated gaze. Experiments on task-driven visual search, covering both target-present and target-absent scenarios, and on free-viewing benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. These results, along with detailed ablations, confirm the benefit of joint modeling and the value of distribution-aware evaluation in capturing the intrinsic variability of human gaze. Project webpage: https://st-diffeye.github.io/

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Arbitrarily Loss-Tolerant Quantum Position Verification in a Single Execution

arXiv:2606.25037v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum position verification (QPV) seeks to certify the spatial location of an untrusted prover, but is challenged fundamentally by entanglement-based attacks and experimentally by photon loss. Both issues were addressed separately in different works and were simultaneously resolved for sequentially repeated protocols in Phys.\ Rev.\ Lett.\ 135,~260801 via a commitment-based modification that renders security independent of transmission losses. However, single-execution protocols are preferable in practice, and the original techniques do not extend to the parallel setting due to their reliance on sequential structure. We overcome this by utilizing different techniques based on no-signalling correlations, lifting the commitment modification to the parallel regime while preserving the security guarantees of the underlying QPV protocol. Applying this to a BB84-based QPV protocol suitable for near-term implementation and secure against bounded-entanglement adversaries, we prove that fixing a threshold~$k$ on the number of successfully committed qubits yields an adversarial acceptance probability that decays exponentially in~$k$. The resulting protocol maintains robustness to noise levels of up to~$3.7\%$ and remains secure under arbitrarily slow quantum communication, as does the original protocol. This yields the first fully loss-tolerant single-shot QPV protocol secure against entangled attackers, making QPV feasible over arbitrary distances. Finally, we refine the sequential analysis and obtain improved quantitative parameters for experimental implementations.

16.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

DeePEn - A Depth sensitive benchmark for Protein Engineering

Recent progress in modeling techniques and high-throughput screening has significantly enhanced the accessibility of protein engineering. Nevertheless, further progress gets hindered by the lack of robust benchmarks that capture the practical challenges for real-world protein engineering. Here, we introduced DeePEn, a Depth-sensitive benchmark for Protein Engineering that quantifies a models generalization capabilities when predicting protein fitness at increasing mutational distance from the wildtype or training data. We defined distance as the number of simultaneous point mutations, i.e., single amino acid variants (SAVs), moving from wild-type to mutant (edit distance in computer science jargon). Specifically selecting four deep mutational scanning (DMS) datasets with sufficient multi-mutation data points from ProteinGym, we assessed recent predictive models, including general and biophysics-informed protein Language Models (pLMs), and a non-transformer neural network. Our results highlight how the performance of all models deteriorates with increasing mutational distance and that no single metric sufficiently captures the diverse requirements of protein engineering. To overcome these shortcomings, DeePEn provides a readily available resource for multi-metric benchmarking that focuses on the prediction of distant variants.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Benign in Isolation, Harmful in Composition: Security Risks in Agent Skill Ecosystems

arXiv:2606.15242v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Skills are becoming the capability layer through which LLM agents turn plans into actions, but their use introduces security risks such as data leakage, unauthorized operations, and tool misuse. Existing vetting usually evaluates each skill in isolation, while real agent tasks often invoke multiple skills in a shared execution context. This creates Skill Composition Risk (SCR): a skill that appears benign alone can become harmful when its outputs, trust signals, authorization cues, or side effects influence later invocations along an activated path. We introduce SCR-Bench to evaluate this risk in controlled, sandboxed skill environments. Rather than relying only on textual intent or surface behavior, SCR-Bench records downstream state changes and path-level outcomes across composed skill executions. It contains three sub-benchmarks: SCR-CapFlow for capability-flow composition, SCR-TrustLift for trust-transfer composition, and SCR-AuthBlur for authorization-confusion composition. Across SCR-Bench, composed paths expose risks that are largely absent under isolated evaluation. In SCR-CapFlow, attack success rate reaches 33.6 percent under composition, compared with near-zero isolated baselines. In SCR-TrustLift, attack success rate exceeds 96.5 percent on four of five backends. In SCR-AuthBlur, the risky-approval rate increases by 71.8 percent relative to the L0 isolated baseline under the L1 context setting. These results show that agent skill security should be assessed at the level of activated paths rather than isolated artifacts. SCR and SCR-Bench provide a foundation for path-aware risk evaluation and defense in LLM agent skill ecosystems. Benchmark: https://github.com/saint-viperx/SCR_Bench.

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

Code-Switching Reveals Language Anchoring in Multilingual LLMs

Multilingual Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly expected to handle Code-Switched (CS) inputs, yet mixing languages frequently degrades performance relative to source- or target-language monolingual counterparts. To understand this degradation, we use grammar-forced CS as a controlled diagnostic setting for locating CS representations relative to their source and target counterparts. We introduce Anchor Bias, a geometric measure that quantifies language anchoring, whether a CS hidden state aligns closer to its source or target language counterpart. Across diverse MLLMs, Anchor Bias reveals a consistent grammar-frame effect: source-framed CS stays source-anchored, whereas target-framed CS shifts target-ward and shows larger Question Answering (QA) degradation. Motivated by this representational pattern, we propose CANVAS (Contextual Anchor-based Neural Vector Alignment Steering), an inference-time intervention that extracts a source-side canvas from the input and softly steers target-language hidden states toward the source anchor during prefill. CANVAS consistently recovers QA F1 across MLLMs and CS conditions, showing that internal anchoring signals provide an actionable target for mitigating CS inference failures.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

IntSeqBERT: Learning Arithmetic Structure in OEIS via Modulo-Spectrum Embeddings

arXiv:2603.05556v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Integer sequences in the OEIS span values from single-digit constants to astronomical factorials and exponentials, making prediction challenging for standard tokenised models that cannot handle out-of-vocabulary values or exploit periodic arithmetic structure. We present IntSeqBERT, a dual-stream Transformer encoder for masked integer-sequence modelling on OEIS. Each sequence element is encoded along two complementary axes: a continuous log-scale magnitude embedding and sin/cos modulo embeddings for 100 residues (moduli $2$–$101$), fused via FiLM. Three prediction heads (magnitude regression, sign classification, and modulo prediction for 100 moduli) are trained jointly on 274,705 OEIS sequences. At the Large scale (91.5M parameters), IntSeqBERT achieves 95.85% magnitude accuracy and 50.38% Mean Modulo Accuracy (MMA) on the test set, outperforming a standard tokenised Transformer baseline by $+8.9$ pt and $+4.5$ pt, respectively. An ablation removing the modulo stream confirms it accounts for $+15.2$ pt of the MMA gain and contributes an additional $+6.2$ pt to magnitude accuracy. A probabilistic Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT)-based Solver converts the model's predictions into concrete integers, yielding a 7.4-fold improvement in next-term prediction over the tokenised-Transformer baseline (Top-1: 19.09% vs. 2.59%). Modulo spectrum analysis reveals a strong negative correlation between Normalised Information Gain (NIG) and Euler's totient ratio $\varphi(m)/m$ ($r = -0.851$, $p < 10^{-28}$), providing empirical evidence that composite moduli capture OEIS arithmetic structure more efficiently via CRT aggregation.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Rethinking Cross-Layer Information Routing in Diffusion Transformers

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have become a de facto backbone of modern visual generation, and nearly every major axis of their design – tokenization, attention, conditioning, objectives, and latent autoencoders – has been extensively revisited. The residual stream that governs how information accumulates across layers, however, has been directly inherited from the original Transformer. In this paper, we present a systematic empirical analysis of cross-layer information flow in DiTs, jointly along depth and denoising timestep, and identify three concrete symptoms of traditional residual addition, namely monotonic forward magnitude inflation, sharp backward gradient decay, and pronounced block-wise redundancy. Motivated by this diagnosis, we propose Diffusion-Adaptive Routing (\textsc{DAR}), a drop-in residual replacement that performs learnable, timestep-adaptive, and non-incremental aggregation over the history of sublayer outputs. Moreover, the proposed \textsc{DAR} is compatible with many modern Transformer enhancement methods, such as REPA. On ImageNet $256\times256$, \textsc{DAR} improves SiT-XL/2 by $2.11$ FID ($7.56$ vs.\ $9.67$) and matches the baseline's converged quality with $8.75\times$ fewer training iterations. Stacked on top of REPA, it yields a $2\times$ training acceleration in the early stage, suggesting cross-layer information routing as an underexplored design axis in diffusion modeling, one that operates orthogonally to existing representation-alignment objectives. Beyond pretraining, \textsc{DAR} can also be applied during the fine-tuning stage of large-scale T2I models and preserves high-frequency details during Distribution Matching Distillation.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Polymer quantum mechanics on compact configuration spaces

arXiv:2606.06019v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: "Polymer quantum mechanics" is the name given to a quantization scheme inspired by loop quantum gravity in which the configuration space of the theory is chosen to have a discrete topology. Polymer quantization yields a representation of the canonical commutation relations that is genuinely distinct from the conventional "Schrödinger" representation. In this paper, we summarize the main features of polymer quantum mechanics and investigate in detail the polymer quantization of systems with configuration spaces that are classically compact. We show explicitly how using the standard construction of polymer states leads to a Hilbert space of states defined on a finite graph of points. By way of example, we find the exact energy eigenvalues and eigenfunctions for a particle on a ring and a particle in a box defined on such lattices, and discuss similarities and differences from standard Schrödinger quantum mechanics. We also explore the continuum limit of states in these systems, and demonstrate in detail how the exact eigenfunctions in the position representation approach their continuum counterparts.

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

Categorical Robustness Assessment for Machine Learning based Network Intrusion Detection Systems

arXiv:2606.12075v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) heavily utlize Machine Learning (ML) but ML models can be manipulated via adversarial attacks. These attacks add carefully crafted perturbations to network traffic data that leads to misclassifications. While prior work has demonstrated adversarial vulnerabilities in isolated settings, systematic cross-architecture as well as class and category of attack based comparisons under controlled attack conditions remain limited, leaving practitioners without clear guidance on which models to deploy in adversarial environments. This paper asks a simple question: what type of classifier architectures actually hold up when attackers try to manipulate the systems? We put three popular architectures through their paces: a 1D Convolutional Neural Network, a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network, and a Random Forest (RF) ensemble. Using the ACI-IoT-2023 dataset (over 1.2 million samples spanning 12 attack types), we subject each model with FGSM and PGD adversarial attacks, which apply gradient-based perturbations in normalized feature space consistent with established adversarial ML evaluation protocols, at perturbation budgets ranging from $\epsilon=0.01$ to $\epsilon=0.1$. Surprisingly, Random Forest achieved near-perfect baseline accuracy (99.98\%), yet collapsed catastrophically under attack, dropping 73 percentage points at the smallest perturbation we tested. CNN, on the other hand, retained 95.5\% accuracy at $\epsilon=0.01$ and degraded gracefully as perturbations increased. LSTM fell somewhere in between. These findings flip the conventional wisdom where high baseline accuracy means nothing if a model shatters at the first sign of adversarial pressure. For practitioners deploying intrusion detection in adversarial environments, we recommend CNN-based architectures and provide scenario-specific deployment guidance.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

When Life Gives You BC, Make Q-functions: Extracting Q-values from Behavior Cloning for On-Robot Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2605.05172v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Behavior Cloning (BC) has emerged as a highly effective paradigm for robot learning. However, BC lacks a self-guided mechanism for online improvement after demonstrations have been collected. Existing offline-to-online learning methods often cause policies to replace previously learned good actions due to a distribution mismatch between offline data and online learning. In this work, we propose Q2RL, Q-Estimation and Q-Gating from BC for Reinforcement Learning, an algorithm for efficient offline-to-online learning. Our method consists of two parts: (1) Q-Estimation extracts a Q-function from a BC policy using a few interaction steps with the environment, followed by online RL with (2) Q-Gating, which switches between BC and RL policy actions based on their respective Q-values to collect samples for RL policy training. Across manipulation tasks from D4RL and robomimic benchmarks, Q2RL outperforms SOTA offline-to-online learning baselines on success rate and time to convergence. Q2RL is efficient enough to be applied in an on-robot RL setting, learning robust policies for contact-rich and high precision manipulation tasks such as pipe assembly and kitting, in 1-2 hours of online interaction, achieving success rates of up to 100% and up to 3.75x improvement against the original BC policy. Code and video are available at https://pages.rai-inst.com/q2rl_website/

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

SHARD: Safe and Helpful Alignment via Self-Reframing Distillation

Large language models often struggle with sensitive prompts. They may refuse outright, provide generic safety boilerplate, or fail to address the user's legitimate informational needs that can be answered safely. We introduce SHARD, a self-reframing distillation method to improve safe-helpfulness. It first rewrites sensitive prompts to surface benign intent using philosophical guidelines, then reframes its original responses into safe, more helpful ones, and finally fine-tunes the model on its self-reframed responses. Across DNA and the English subset of LINGUASAFE, SHARD improves helpfulness for most model families while preserving safety. It also remains competitive with distillation from a larger teacher model, suggesting that models can internalize safe and helpful behavior elicited from their own. Warning: This paper contains content that may be offensive or harmful.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Towards Personalized Federated Learning for Dysarthric Speech Recognition

arXiv:2606.13253v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speech recognition is challenging for dysarthric speakers. While federated learning (FL)-based ASR can be an effective tool for protecting privacy, it suffers from heterogeneity issues caused by speaker variability. Forcing all speakers to share the same model components can be suboptimal under such heterogeneity, making personalization a promising direction; however, related research on dysarthric speech remains limited. To this end, this paper explores two aggregation strategies to achieve personalization, including the parameter-based averaging strategy and the embedding-based averaging strategy. Experiments on UASpeech and TORGO show that the proposed methods outperform the baseline regularized FedAvg by statistically significant WER reductions of up to 0.99% absolute (3.15% relative) on UASpeech and 0.56% absolute (4.73% relative) on TORGO, respectively.