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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Stabilizing black-box algorithms through task-oriented randomization

Authors:
Yali Wang↗Zhaojun Wang↗

arXiv:2606.25269v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As black-box models become foundational to modern research, ensuring their stability is paramount for the realization of trustworthy artificial intelligence. The inherent diversity of inputs - ranging from structured Gaussian distributions to complex data with unknown structures - poses a significant challenge: how to stabilize black-box outputs while effectively leveraging available prior information. This paper introduces a task-oriented randomization methodology that adaptively tailors its strategy to the underlying generative mechanisms of the input data, specifically addressing unstructured complexities. A comprehensive suite of stability guarantees is proposed. Beyond establishing rigorous theoretical foundations for stability, the research provides a detailed analysis of the intrinsic trade-off between stability and exploration. Motivated by the architecture of Large Language Models, the framework is further extended to top-k ranking problems. The validity and effectiveness of the proposal are demonstrated through extensive numerical simulations and applications to the real-world dataset.

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02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

ACT-JEPA: Novel Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture for Efficient Policy Representation Learning

Authors:
Aleksandar Vujinovic↗Aleksandar Kovacevic↗

arXiv:2501.14622v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Learning efficient representations for decision-making policies is a challenge in imitation learning (IL). Current IL methods require expert demonstrations, which are expensive to collect. Additionally, they are not explicitly trained to understand the environment. Consequently, they have underdeveloped world models. Self-supervised learning (SSL) offers an alternative, as it can learn a world model from diverse, unlabeled data. However, most SSL methods are inefficient because they operate in raw input space. In this work, we propose ACT-JEPA, a novel architecture that unifies IL and SSL to enhance policy representations. It is trained end-to-end to jointly predict 1) action sequences and 2) latent observation sequences. To learn in latent space, we utilize Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture, which allows the model to filter out irrelevant details and learn a robust world model. We evaluate ACT-JEPA in different environments and across multiple tasks. Our results show that it outperforms the strongest baseline in all environments. ACT-JEPA achieves up to 40% improvement in world model understanding and up to 10% higher task success rate. Finally, we show that predicting latent observation sequences effectively generalizes to predicting action sequences. This work demonstrates how integrating IL and SSL leads to efficient policy representation learning, an improved world model, and a higher task success rate.

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03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Respiratory support with Continuous Positive Airway Pressure in preterm neonates: an analysis of coverage and quality of care in 66 neonatal units in Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria and Tanzania implementing with the NEST360 Alliance

Authors:
Shemwell↗Wainaina↗Lawn↗J. E↗Salim↗Penzias↗R. E↗Malla↗Johari↗Tillya↗Bohne↗C. A↗…

Background: Prematurity is the leading cause of child deaths worldwide, with the highest neonatal mortality in sub Saharan Africa. Respiratory distress syndrome (RDS) is the leading mortality pathway in preterm neonates, but continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) has high impact. This analysis reports CPAP coverage and quality of care for preterm neonates admitted to 66 neonatal units in Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria and Tanzania. Methods: Analyses used individually linked neonatal inpatient data and cross-sectional health systems data. All admitted neonates were eligible for inclusion (January 2021 through December 2024). Service readiness for CPAP delivery and mean CPAP coverage were described for CPAP eligible newborns (weighing 1500g). Quality of care cascades were constructed to illustrate key indicators. Survival among CPAP eligible neonates was analysed using regression models, stratified by clinical severity scores. Results: 375,255 newborn admissions were analysed in 66 neonatal units. Functional CPAP availability varied with median 16% of days (IQR: 4 to 47%) classified as high demand (>1.5 eligible newborns per CPAP). Of 64,761 CPAP eligible neonates, 22,006 (34%, 95% CI 33 to 34%) received CPAP. All countries showed improvement in CPAP coverage, with Tanzanian hospitals recording 63% increase in mean coverage (p-value=0.001) over time. Quality of care cascades showed treatment was initiated 1 day for 42% (95% CI 41 to 43%) of eligible neonates receiving CPAP. Only 10% of neonates

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04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

ForensicsTok: Forensics-Guided Tokenized Modeling for Image Tampering Localization

Authors:
Lei Xu↗Haowei Wang↗Shen Chen↗Taiping Yao↗Bin Li↗Changsheng Chen↗

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) offer powerful reasoning for forensic tasks, yet existing approaches utilizing exogenous segmentation decoders often suffer from suboptimal localization. The reliance on stitched pipelines introduces information bottlenecks during backpropagation, which dilutes spatial signals and is limited by semantic priors of the segmentor. To address these limitations, we propose ForensicsTok, which reformulates image manipulation localization as an autoregressive sequence generation task. ForensicsTok directly generates spatially grounded token sequences, enabling precise mask prediction without intermediary supervision. Specifically, we introduce a Token Splatting Decoder (TSD) to map tokens to binary masks via codebook-aware code smoothing, which mitigates sharp gradients from deterministic detokenizers. Furthermore, to capture diverse tampering clues, we propose a Hierarchical Expert Fusion (HEF) module that injects multi-scale features from a forensic expert model. This unified architecture effectively compensates for the lack of forensic priors in standard MLLMs. Extensive experiments on six benchmarks show that ForensicsTok substantially improves over existing MLLM-based baselines and slightly improves over strong forensic expert baselines, while exhibiting stronger robustness to perturbations.

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05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Active Reference Acquisition in Few-Shot Font Generation

Authors:
Shinnosuke Matsuo↗

Few-shot font generation aims to synthesize the remaining glyphs of a font given one or a few reference glyphs while preserving stylistic consistency, thereby supporting font designers in efficiently completing a typeface. Existing methods primarily focus on improving generation quality given a fixed reference set. However, when the current reference glyphs are insufficient to represent the target style, few-shot font generation may fail to produce satisfactory results. In practical scenarios, additional reference glyphs can often be obtained from the designer when necessary. Accordingly, we propose a new framework, Active Reference Acquisition in Few-Shot Font Generation, in which the model sequentially decides which character to acquire next as an additional reference. Furthermore, we propose a reference part-coverage-based acquisition function to efficiently query the designer. Motivated by the observation that font styles are well characterized by local structural parts, we represent each glyph using a histogram of local features and select query characters that maximize the expected part coverage of the reference set. By prioritizing characters that contain parts not yet covered by the current references, the proposed method progressively expands the diversity of visual parts in the reference set. As a result, generation quality is improved with fewer queries. Experiments on the Google Fonts dataset demonstrate that the proposed method achieves higher generation quality than random querying and reference-agnostic baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/matsuo-shinnosuke/ActiveRef-FontGen.

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

Gen-VCoT: Generative Visual Chain-of-Thought Reasoning via Diffusion-Based RGB Intermediate Representations

Authors:
Zhiqiang Zhou↗Junliang Dai↗Xu ling↗

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) excel at visual reasoning but rely on text-based chain-of-thought (CoT), lacking interpretable visual intermediates. Existing methods use opaque tokens or external tools, missing key properties. We propose Gen-VCoT, a framework using expert vision models to generate RGB images as reasoning intermediates. It has three stages: visual grounding (SAM segmentation), geometric reasoning (Marigold depth maps), and semantic reasoning (Qwen2-VL integration). An adaptive router selects reasoning depth. Evaluations show Gen-VCoT improves spatial (25% better) and depth (50% better) questions, but may hurt simple factual queries. Text CoT outperforms visual intermediates on CLEVR (91.2% vs 62.5%), showing task-dependent optimal representations. Gen-VCoT establishes a new paradigm for interpretable multimodal reasoning.

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07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Tying the Loop – Tied Expert Layers in Mixture-of-Experts Language Models

Authors:
Martin Jaggi↗

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures efficiently scale Large Language Models (LLMs) by activating only a small fraction of their experts per token, yet the full parameter count - dominated by the expert parameters - must be held in training and inference memory. To address this, we introduce Expert Tying, an architectural modification that shares expert parameters across consecutive transformer layers while preserving independent, layer-wise routing and attention. We evaluate this approach across common, state-of-the-art architectures, including OLMoE, Qwen3, and DeepSeek-style MoEs. Our pretraining experiments demonstrate that tying experts can reduce memory footprint by almost 2x at virtually no degradation in perplexity or downstream quality. By exploiting the parameter redundancy inherent in MoE pathways, our method provides a highly favorable compute-to-memory trade-off, advancing efficient training and scaling of next-generation LLMs.

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08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Graph Neural Networks for Semi-Supervised Image Classification with Multi-Feature Aggregation

Authors:
Marina Chagas Bulach Gapski↗Vinicius Atsushi Sato Kawai↗Gustavo Rosseto Leticio↗Lucas Pascotti Valem↗Daniel Carlos Guimar\~aes Pedronette↗Mohand Said Allili↗

Feature extraction involves the identification and extraction of salient characteristics or patterns, including edges, textures, shapes, and color attributes. Contemporary feature extractors predominantly leverage deep learning architectures, such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (VITs). The availability of diverse feature extractors in the literature provides a wide range of feature representations. Features extracted from an image depend on the specific application, the chosen extractor, and its configuration. Therefore, integrating complementary information by combining distinct extractors offers a promising way to enhance performance. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), particularly Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs), have emerged as powerful and widely adopted approaches for semi-supervised image classification, as they effectively leverage both labeled and unlabeled data while exploiting the underlying graph structures that capture relationships among samples. This study proposes a novel approach for GNNs in scenarios where labeled data is scarce, by integrating diverse sets of feature and graph representations derived from various extractors in classification scenarios. Experimental investigations were conducted, encompassing combinations of distinct feature and graph extractors, as well as rank aggregation strategies. The primary contributions of this work are underscored by the experimental findings, which demonstrate that the strategic combination of feature and graph representations, coupled with the application of manifold learning for graph processing, leads to significant improvements in classification accuracy across the majority of experimental conditions. Furthermore, the utilization of rank aggregation techniques to integrate features from different extractors was shown to enhance classification accuracy.

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09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

On-chip semi-device-independent quantum random number generator exploiting contextuality

Authors:
Maddalena Genzini↗Caterina Vigliar↗Mujtaba Zahidy↗Hamid Tebyanian↗Andrzej Gajda↗Klaus Petermann↗Lars Zimmermann↗Davide Bacco↗Francesco Da Ros↗

arXiv:2601.08392v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present a semi-device-independent quantum random number generator (QRNG) based on the violation of a contextuality inequality, implemented by the integration of two silicon photonic chips. Our system combines a heralded single-photon source with a reconfigurable interferometric mesh to implement qutrit state preparation, transformations, and measurements suitable for testing a KCBS contextuality inequality. This architecture enables the generation of random numbers from the intrinsic randomness of single-photon interference in a complex optical network, while simultaneously allowing a quantitative certification of their security without requiring entanglement. We observe a contextuality violation exceeding the classical bound by more than 10{\sigma}, unambiguously confirming non-classical behavior. From this violation, we certify a conditional min-entropy per experimental round of Hmin = 0.077 +- 0.002, derived via a tailored semidefinite-programming-based security analysis. Each measurement outcome therefore contains at least 0.077 +- 0.002 bits of extractable genuine randomness, corresponding to an asymptotic generation rate of 21.7 +- 0.5 bits/s. These results establish a viable route towards general-purpose, untrusted quantum random number generators compatible with practical integrated photonic quantum networks.

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10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Decoupling Inference from State Updates in Low-Latency Feature Engines via Probabilistic Thinning

Authors:
Augusto Peres↗Iker Perez↗Pedro Valdeira↗Guilherme Jardim↗Ana Sofia Gomes↗Hugo Ferreira↗Pedro Bizarro↗

arXiv:2606.16981v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Streaming data systems increasingly underpin Machine Learning workflows that maintain large numbers of continuously updated aggregations. In production settings, each incoming event typically triggers read-modify-write operations to persistent storage, making high-frequency state updates a dominant source of latency, contention, and operational cost. In this work, we decouple inference from state persistence in streaming Machine Learning pipelines via probabilistic thinning: every event is scored, but durable state updates are selectively triggered by informative events. Unlike approaches that shed input or state, we show that persistence-path control is achievable without a high-frequency in-memory control plane or cross-worker coordination, relying exclusively on approximate statistics retrieved from disk-backed key-value stores. We model the resulting stochastic processes, derive bounds on filtering rates, and prove that common time-based aggregations remain unbiased under variance-aware formulations, preventing systemic error accumulation. We evaluate the approach in a controlled setting that isolates per-event costs, demonstrating substantial reductions in storage Input/Output and serialization overhead. Across experiments, up to 90% of events are excluded from the persistence path while preserving and in some cases improving downstream utility.

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11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Large Language Models Hack Rewards, and Society

Authors:
Wei Liu↗Xinyi Mou↗Hanqi Yan↗Zhongyu Wei↗Yulan He↗

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a dominant post-training paradigm, enabling large language models (LLMs) to learn from rewards. We observe that societal regulations are structurally similar to reward functions. They define measurable outcomes, thresholds, and exceptions, while often leaving institutional intent only partially specified. We hypothesise that the RL training process may exploit these gaps and therefore ask whether models' well-known tendency to hack reward functions during RL can scale into a more consequential failure mode named societal hacking: discovering loopholes in the rules society runs on. To study this phenomenon, we introduce SocioHack, a sandbox of 72 societal environments, and find that within these environments, reward hacking naturally emerges and leads to regulatory loophole discovery. Models learn to hack the social rules and generate strategies that remain technically compliant while defeating regulatory intent, and current LLM safeguards provide only limited mitigation. Therefore, collecting in-the-wild feedback for model training requires greater caution, and we need a next-generation post-training paradigm for safely iterating LLMs in real society.=

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

UniReason-Med: A Shared Grounded Reasoning Interface for 2D-to-3D Transfer in Medical VQA

Authors:
Mengzhuo Chen↗Yan Shu↗Chi Liu↗Hongming Piao↗Xidong Wang↗Derek Li↗Bryan Dai↗

We study whether grounded reasoning supervision from abundant 2D medical images can improve 3D medical VQA when both input types are aligned through a common reasoning interface. We introduce UniReason-Med, a single-checkpoint framework that processes either a 2D image or a slice-serialized 3D volume at inference time, generating interleaved textual reasoning and localized visual evidence through shared box syntax, region-token injection, and a common grounded reasoning policy. To train this interface, we construct UniMed-CoT, a 220K instruction-tuning dataset with interleaved textual reasoning and grounded visual evidence, including 170K 2D and 50K 3D samples. Through supervised fine-tuning followed by outcome-level reinforcement learning, UniReason-Med learns to generate grounded reasoning traces without IoU/Dice-based localization rewards during RL. Data-mixture and component ablations show that joint 2D+3D grounded supervision substantially improves 3D reasoning over 3D-only training, while grounding and region-token injection consistently benefit both 2D and 3D tasks. These results suggest that a shared grounded reasoning interface can transfer reasoning structure from 2D images to slice-serialized volumetric medical understanding. The code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/IQuestLab/unireason-med.

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

Seeing Is Not Screening: Multimodal Hidden Instruction Attacks on Agent Skill Scanners

Authors:
Xiaojun Jia↗Jie Liao↗Simeng Qin↗Ke Ma↗Wenbo Guo↗Yebo Feng↗Aishan Liu↗Yang Liu↗

Agent skills are emerging as an important attack surface in LLM-based systems. Through an empirical study of existing skill scanners, we find that current defenses primarily rely on textual descriptions, manifests, and source code as the main signals for security analysis, which can leave visually conveyed malicious intent insufficiently examined. This creates a practical blind spot: harmful operational instructions hidden in images may bypass scanning while still being recoverable by multimodal agents during deployment. To systematically investigate this threat, we propose SkillCamo, a document-mediated multimodal instruction attack that conceals malicious instructions within images bundled with a skill while rewriting the surrounding documentation to naturally reference those images as part of the normal workflow. Thus, the attack does not rely on the image alone, but on the joint interpretation of textual guidance and visual payload at execution time. To defend against such attacks, we further propose ExecScan, an execution-grounded multimodal scanning module that performs intent extraction, behavior reconstruction, abuse assessment, and deliberative execution simulation over skill artifacts. ExecScan jointly analyzes documentation, code, referenced resources, and visual content to recover hidden instructions, reconstruct executable behavior chains, and identify downstream risks such as exfiltration, destruction, persistence, deception, and privilege escalation. Extensive experiments show that image-hidden malicious instructions challenge existing skill scanners, while ExecScan can improve the skill scanning performance.

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14.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

Crude oil fractionation by means of mesoporous polyacrylonitrile membranes

Authors:
Jihoon Choi↗

Atmospheric and vacuum distillation consume more than 1,100 TWh year−1 and emit more than 160 million metric tonnes of CO2 equivalent annually1,2, making membrane-based pre-fractionation a compelling retrofit strategy for lowering the energy and carbon intensity of petroleum refining3–10. Here we demonstrate that porous polyacrylonitrile (PAN) membranes, typically used as support layers, achieve effective molecular refining of crude oil at steady state. Under tangential flow, PAN membranes exhibited high crude oil permeances of up to 0.591 ± 0.040 l m−2 h−1 bar−1, a more than 23-fold increase over the previous benchmark (<0.1 l m−2 h−1 bar−1)1,11, selectively yielding enriched lighter hydrocarbon fractions such as naphtha and kerosene. This unexpected selectivity arises from the dynamic deposition of heavy hydrocarbons within the initially approximately 15-nm surface mesopores, which narrows the pore diameter to sub-2-nm dimensions. Depth-resolved chemical identification reveals selective accumulation of n-alkanes, suggesting a self-limiting pore constriction mechanism that stabilizes selective transport pathways. Once the n-alkane deposition is stabilized, selective enrichment of raw crude oils occurs with sustained stability over 4 weeks. Process simulations show that PAN-membrane-based pre-fractionation could reduce energy by 31.6%, cooling water by 20.7% and CO2 emissions by 37.6% compared with traditional atmospheric distillation. Porous polyacrylonitrile membranes—typically used as non-selective support layers—can be used to achieve effective molecular refining of crude oil at steady state, enabling substantial reductions in energy consumption, cooling water, and CO2 emissions compared with distillation processes.

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15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Right or Wrong, Models Comply: Directional Blindness in LLM Moral Judgment

Authors:
Jihye Kim↗Jeffrey Flanigan↗

As language models take integrated roles across many domains, the response of LLMs to user pushback becomes a critical alignment property. Yet many existing evaluations treat compliance as unidirectional, measuring whether models resist pressure but not whether they resist it selectively. We introduce Compliance Asymmetry (A = BCR/HCR), a bidirectional diagnostic that compares beneficial output change under helpful nudges with harmful change under misleading nudges. Across 9 models and 972,000 nudge-condition responses, we find that this selectivity differs in factual and moral judgments: models follow helpful nudges more than harmful ones on factual questions (A = 1.58), but follow both directions at nearly identical rates on moral questions (A = 1.04). This phenomenon persists across model families, capability levels, and nudging types. Interestingly, we also find that chain-of-thought prompting amplifies helpful and harmful compliance together, while identity-based prompting suppresses both by nearly identical margins. These results identify direction-blind moral compliance as a distinct failure mode in current LLMs and suggest that alignment should target directionally calibrated updating rather than lower compliance alone.

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

EventRadar: Long-Range Visual UAV Discovery through Spatiotemporal Event Sensing

Authors:
Zhiting Zhou↗Xingchen Liu↗Xinglin Yu↗Jiashen Chen↗Haoyang Wang↗Jingao Xu↗Yunhao Liu↗Xinlei Chen↗

Unauthorized unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) activity around airports, public venues, and other sensitive sites has made protected-airspace monitoring increasingly important. A practical sensing system must search a wide angular region, find small long-range targets, and return both bearing support and UAV-specific evidence before a restricted perimeter is breached. Existing UAV detection paths often rely on spatially organized evidence, such as body extent, silhouette, or track continuity. At long range, however, these cues become difficult to preserve and verify as the target footprint weakens and its image-plane support shrinks. EventRadar follows a complementary cue: propeller-induced temporal periodicity, which recent event-camera sensing studies have shown can reveal UAV-specific motion after appearance becomes weak. We extend this cue to kilometer-scale active sensing with an event-camera prototype. Scene-Anchored Geometry Evidence (SAGE) fuses scanning events with IMU pose to maintain a bearing-indexed scene memory, separating transient candidate support from persistent background clutter. Comb-guided Harmonic-Group Learned Iterative Shrinkage and Thresholding Algorithm (CHG) then treats each candidate as a weak high-rate timing signal and recovers phase-insensitive harmonic evidence with fixed compute. Compared with related event-camera baselines on 700-1500 m UAV event recordings, EventRadar achieves 0.990 mAP$_{.3}$ and 0.949 F1$_{.3}$, reduces FN$_{.3}$ to 0.009, and shows real-time feasibility in prototype profiling.

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17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

High-Order Hermite Optimization: Fast and Exact Gradient Computation in Open-Loop Quantum Optimal Control using a Discrete Adjoint Approach

Authors:
Spencer Lee↗Daniel Appelo↗

arXiv:2505.09857v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This work introduces the High-Order Hermite Optimization (HOHO) method, an open-loop discrete adjoint method for quantum optimal control. Our method is the first of its kind to efficiently compute exact (discrete) gradients when using continuous, parameterized control pulses while solving the forward equations (e.g. Schrodinger's equation or the Linblad master equation) with an arbitrarily high-order Hermite Runge-Kutta method. The HOHO method is implemented in QuantumGateDesign$.$jl (https://github.com/leespen1/QuantumGateDesign.jl), an open-source software package for the Julia programming language, which we use to perform numerical experiments comparing the method to Juqbox$.$jl (https://github.com/LLNL/Juqbox.jl). For realistic model problems we observe speedups up to 775x.

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

Can Vision Foundation Models Navigate? Zero-Shot Real-World Evaluation and Lessons Learned

Authors:
Maeva Guerrier↗Karthik Soma↗Jana Pavlasek↗Giovanni Beltrame↗

arXiv:2603.25937v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Visual Navigation Models (VNMs) promise generalizable, robot navigation by learning from large-scale visual demonstrations. Despite growing real-world deployment, existing evaluations rely almost exclusively on success rate, whether the robot reaches its goal, which conceals trajectory quality, collision behavior, and robustness to environmental change. We present a real-world evaluation of five state-of-the-art VNMs (GNM, ViNT, NoMaD, NaviBridger, and CrossFormer) across two robot platforms and five environments spanning indoor and outdoor settings. Beyond success rate, we combine path-based metrics with vision-based goal-recognition scores and assess robustness through controlled image perturbations (motion blur, sunflare). Our analysis uncovers three systematic limitations: (a) even architecturally sophisticated diffusion and transformer-based models exhibit frequent collisions, indicating limited geometric understanding; (b) models fail to discriminate between different locations that are perceptually similar, however some semantics differences are present, causing goal prediction errors in repetitive environments; and (c) performance degrades under distribution shift. We will publicly release our evaluation codebase and dataset to facilitate reproducible benchmarking of VNMs.

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19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

MLUBench: A Benchmark for Lifelong Unlearning Evaluation in MLLMs

Authors:
He Li↗Haoang Chi↗Qizhou Wang↗Yunxin Mao↗Zhiheng Zhang↗Jie Tan↗Tongliang Liu↗Wenjing Yang↗Bo Han↗

arXiv:2606.12809v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are trained on massive multimodal data, making data unlearning increasingly important as data owners may request the removal of specific content. In practice, these requests often arrive sequentially over time, giving rise to the challenging problem of MLLM Lifelong Unlearning. However, most existing benchmarks are limited in scale and scope, failing to capture the complexities of MLLM lifelong unlearning. To fill this gap, we introduce the MLUBench, a large-scale and comprehensive benchmark featuring 127 entities across 9 classes under lifelong unlearning requests. We perform extensive experiments using MLUBench and reveal that existing unlearning methods suffer from severe, cumulative degradation. More critically, we further identify the unique challenge of this problem: unlike in unimodal models, MLLM lifelong unlearning is constrained by the need to preserve multimodal alignment. Continually unlearning from one modality could degrade the entire model. To alleviate this challenge, we propose LUMoE, an effective method. Experiments demonstrate that LUMoE significantly mitigates the degradation problem faced by baselines. The source code and the MLUBench dataset are open-sourced in https://github.com/lihe-maxsize/Lifelong_Unlearning_main.

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20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Explosion and non-explosion in pure birth Crump–Mode–Jagers branching processes

Authors:
Oleksii Galganov↗Andrii Ilienko↗

arXiv:2601.06850v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this short note, we provide an explicit sufficient condition for non-explosion of Crump–Mode–Jagers branching processes with pure birth reproduction. It shows that the standard sufficient condition for explosion, namely the convergence of the series of reciprocals of the birth rates, is – at least for rate sequences without excessive oscillations – remarkably close to being necessary. At the same time, it is not necessary in full generality: we construct a counterexample which also yields a general preferential attachment tree without fitness with an infinite path and no vertices of infinite degree, thereby answering an open question previously raised in the literature.

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21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Tight $L_\infty$ Sample Complexity for Low-Degree and Sparse Boolean Polynomials

Authors:
Jasper van Doornmalen↗Mathieu Molina↗Victor Verdugo↗Jos\'e Verschae↗

arXiv:2606.17319v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Motivated by the optimization of bounded binary black-box functions, we study the problem of learning polynomial surrogates over the Boolean hypercube. To ensure that optimizing the surrogate yields good solutions for the underlying objective, we require uniform $L_\infty$-error guarantees rather than the usual $L_2$-type guarantees. We characterize the minimax sample complexity of uniform estimation under subgaussian noise for two classes of bounded polynomials. First, for polynomials of degree at most $d$ on $n$ variables, the sample complexity scales as $n^{d+1}$. Second, for $s$-sparse Fourier-Walsh polynomials with $s \leq n$, it scales as $ns^2$. These rates differ structurally from the noiseless setting, where uniform exact recovery scales as $n^d$ and $ns$, respectively. Our lower bounds hold even for arbitrary adaptive learners, showing that the additional factors are intrinsic to the noisy cases. Standard Fourier-analysis tools for the $L_2$-norm do not naturally extend to the $L_\infty$-setting in a way that yields uniform guarantees. Our proofs overcome this difficulty by relying on suitably chosen auxiliary norms that serve as proxies for controlling the $L_\infty$-error. Together, our results provide a tight characterization of the sample complexity of learning optimization-safe polynomial surrogates.

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22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Investigating Inductive Biases for Machine Learning Emulation of Sudden Stratospheric Warmings in Idealised Isca Simulations

Authors:
Oskar Bohn Lassen↗Simon Driscoll↗Stephen I. Thomson↗Sebastian Schemm↗Francisco C. Pereira↗

arXiv:2606.18857v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine-learning emulators are increasingly used for weather prediction and have the potential to extend skill on subseasonal-to-seasonal timescales by learning dynamically important sources of predictability. A key challenge is whether the models can exploit predictability anchors, such as stratospheric variability, that influence tropospheric circulation beyond short lead times. We test how architectural inductive bias affects emulation of sudden stratospheric warming (SSW) dynamics using paired idealised Isca simulations that differ only in an imposed wave-2 heating perturbation. Across convolutional, transformer, and graph-based architectures trained for one-step prediction, model differences are modest when the stratosphere is dynamically quiet but widen substantially when SSW-like variability is active. Our results identify explicit three-dimensional vertical coupling as a key inductive bias for machine-learning emulation of stratospheric dynamics. However, Eliassen-Palm flux diagnostics show that low forecast error does not guarantee physically faithful wave-mean-flow interaction, with coherent errors remaining in stratospheric wave-driving structure.

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23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Stochastic Signed Distance Processes

Authors:
Hiroki Sakuma↗Masatoshi Okutomi↗

Multi-view surface reconstruction is a core problem in computer vision. One prominent line of work represents the surface implicitly as a signed distance field (SDF), optimizing it based on the photometric loss between rendered and observed pixel colors. These approaches typically employ SDF-based volume rendering to obtain a differentiable relaxation of discontinuous visibility along rays, thereby reducing reliance on silhouette supervision. In this paper, we reformulate SDF-based volume rendering as probabilistic surface rendering, where each pixel color is modeled as a mixture distribution induced by the random first ray-surface intersection. To this end, we introduce Stochastic Signed Distance Processes (SSDP), which model the SDF along each ray as a stochastic process, inducing a first-passage-time distribution for each ray. We then derive the first-passage probability for each sampling interval based on Bayesian filtering, together with its practical approximation for parallel rendering. We further show that NeuS, an existing SDF-based volume rendering method, arises as a special case of our formulation. Experiments on the DTU and MobileBrick datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms baselines in both surface reconstruction and uncertainty quantification, supporting the effectiveness of our first-passage formulation. Our code is available at https://github.com/skmhrk1209/SSDP.

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24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

A Unified Framework for Structured Flow Modeling: From Representation to Verification and Model Discovery

Authors:
Diego Casadei↗

arXiv:2605.18250v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Many dynamical systems can be described in terms of structured flows combining source/sink behavior, cyclic dynamics, and topology-constrained transport. These features arise across a wide range of physical, engineered, and data-driven systems. The objective of this work is to establish a unified perspective on such systems, to identify modeling approaches that balance expressivity, interpretability, computational complexity, and data requirements, and to investigate how highly expressive models can be used to uncover the dominant mechanisms underlying observed dynamics. Starting from the Helmholtz-Hodge decomposition of continuous vector fields, we review the recently proposed Graph Vector Field (GVF) framework and its discrete representation on simplicial complexes. We then introduce a hierarchy of alternative approaches, including parametric conditional models, linear graph dynamical systems, and reduced Hodge representations. Finally, we propose a verification and validation methodology based on benchmark datasets from well-understood physical systems and on systematic model-reduction and ablation studies. The resulting family of structured-flow models within a common framework, ranging from low-dimensional parametric representations to full GVF formulations, supports a diagnostic methodology in which gradient, curl, harmonic, and topological contributions are systematically assessed through ablation studies. This process enables the identification of dominant mechanisms underlying the observed dynamics and guides the construction of simplified models tailored to the available data and operational constraints. By separating structural verification, behavioral verification, and domain-specific validation, the proposed approach provides a foundation for scalable and interpretable analysis of complex dynamical systems across multiple application domains.

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

Listening with Attention: Entropy-Guided Explainability for Transformer-Based Audio Models

Authors:
Ravi Ranjan↗Utkarsh Grover↗Xiaomin Lin↗Agoritsa Polyzou↗

arXiv:2606.14647v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transformer-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) models such as Whisper are highly accurate, but their predictions remain difficult to interpret. Existing explainable AI (XAI) methods often lack faithfulness and precise temporal grounding. We propose Listening with Entropy-guided Attention for Faithful explainability (LEAF-X), a model-intrinsic XAI framework for transformer-based ASR. LEAF-X combines entropy-guided attention weighting, multi-layer attention rollout, and optional causal ablations to identify low-entropy, high-impact heads and layers, producing sparse token-to-frame attributions. Unlike perturbation-based explainers or raw attention maps, LEAF-X exploits the internal structure of encoder-decoder and speech-augmented decoder-only models to generate explanations that better reflect model computation. Results show 32% improved faithfulness, 35-39% stronger locality/sparsity, and the most stable attributions, supporting more transparent and auditable ASR.

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