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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Quantum Global Variational Learning for Quantum Error Correction

arXiv:2606.08592v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Efficient quantum error correction is essential for the advancement of quantum computing. We propose a quantum neural network with a global structure that reduces the number of unitary matrices required in quantum circuits. This approach resulted in a 97% reduction in training time and up to a 25% improvement in the training completion rate, ultimately achieving a 100% success rate in training while surpassing the error correction performance reported in previous studies. In addition, we demonstrated the enhanced robustness of quantum error correction against internal network noise. Moreover, the fidelity of quantum error correction under internal network noise increased by up to 15% due to the reduced computational load.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

PHANTOM: A Large-Scale Dataset of Multimodal Adversarial Attacks for Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2606.24388v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce a large-scale, open-source dataset of pre-generated adversarial attacks for vision-language models (VLMs). The dataset is designed to be diverse, representative, and practical, extending existing benchmarks by covering 10 high-level categories and 55 subcategories of harmful intents. Our primary goal is to make adversarial data accessible to the research community, given the computational cost and complexity of generating large numbers of attacks. The dataset comprises 47 524 adversarial samples, generated using state-of-the-art attack strategies from recent literature. Our work complements existing efforts by consolidating and extending prior benchmarks from multiple established sources, resulting in 7 826 intents, and introduce an additional category to broaden coverage. This provides realistic evaluation resources for studying model robustness and alignment. Our dataset intends to enable researchers and practitioners to systematically evaluate the robustness and safety of VLMs, fine-tune attack-generation models, and develop or stress-test defensive guardrails under diverse adversarial conditions. By releasing this resource, we aim to lower the barrier to adversarial research and foster more reproducible, comprehensive, and comparable evaluations of VLM safety.

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

Beyond Third-Person Audits: Situated Interaction Auditing for User-Centered LLM Bias Research

Research on bias in large language models (LLMs) has predominantly focused on third-person audits, which study how models represent or evaluate demographic groups as external subjects. However, this paradigm overlooks a structural blind spot because the user is absent from the audit. In practice, LLMs are used in open-ended, personal interactions, during which the model implicitly represents the user and adjusts its responses accordingly. When identical requests yield different responses depending on who is asking, bias manifests not in how the model describes others but in how it treats its interlocutor. We propose Situated Interaction Auditing (SIA), a user-centered framework for studying how user profile signals – implicit sociodemographic markers, writing style, and stated identity – systematically shape LLM response quality, content, and tone. We demonstrate the framework through a case study that intersects gender and socioeconomic status signals across multiple task domains and outline a research agenda for SIA as a new mission for natural language processing.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Power Term Polynomial Algebra for Boolean Logic

arXiv:2603.13854v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce power term polynomial algebra, a representation language for Boolean formulae designed to bridge conjunctive normal form (CNF) and algebraic normal form (ANF). The language is motivated by the tiling mismatch between these representations: direct CNFANF conversion may cause exponential blowup unless formulas are decomposed into smaller fragments, typically through auxiliary variables and side constraints. In contrast, our framework addresses this mismatch within the representation itself, compactly encoding structured families of monomials while representing CNF clauses directly, thereby avoiding auxiliary variables and constraints at the abstraction level. We formalize the language through power terms and power term polynomials, define their semantics, and show that they admit algebraic operations corresponding to Boolean polynomial addition and multiplication. We prove several key properties of the language: disjunctive clauses admit compact canonical representations; power terms support local shortening and expansion rewrite rules; and products of atomic terms can be systematically rewritten within the language. Together, these results yield a symbolic calculus that enables direct manipulation of formulas without expanding them into ordinary ANF. The resulting framework provides a new intermediate representation and rewriting calculus that bridges clause-based and algebraic reasoning and suggests new directions for structure-aware CNFANF conversion and hybrid reasoning methods.

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

Decoupled Object-Centric Video Understanding for Generating Robotic Manipulation Commands

Translating video demonstrations into executable robot commands remains challenging because existing methods often fail to identify which objects are functionally involved in the demonstrated action. As a result, they may generate commands that are linguistically plausible but operationally ambiguous. We propose an object-centric video understanding framework that decouples action recognition from object identification to generate precise, grammar-free manipulation commands. Our approach integrates Temporal Shift Modules (TSM) for efficient spatio-temporal action classification with a novel Object Selection algorithm that identifies task-relevant objects through trajectory-based role classification, blur detection, and overlap minimization. The selected objects are then processed by Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for robust category recognition and zero-shot generalization. Evaluated on a modified Something-Something V2 dataset, our method achieves 86.79\% action classification accuracy and BLEU-4 scores of 0.337 on standard objects and 0.261 on novel objects. These results improve over the strongest task-specific baseline by 80.2\% and 143.9\%, respectively. Larger gains are observed in METEOR and CIDEr, reaching 157.9\% and 171.7\% on novel objects. Across all semantic metrics, our approach consistently outperforms task-specific methods and remains competitive with, or surpasses, large general-purpose VLMs while retaining a modular, object-centric design.

06.
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.

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

VieSpeaker: A Large-Scale Vietnamese Speaker Recognition Dataset Beyond Visual Dependency

Speaker recognition has advanced rapidly with large-scale training datasets, yet Vietnamese remains under-resourced, with existing corpora limited in scale and acoustic diversity. Most large-scale datasets rely on facial cues to link speech with speaker identities, restricting data collection to recordings where speakers appear on camera. We propose a face-independent dataset construction pipeline and introduce VieSpeaker, a large-scale Vietnamese speaker recognition dataset. Our approach leverages textual metadata and large language model reasoning to infer speaker identities from transcripts and contextual information. VieSpeaker contains approximately 902 hours of speech from 4,715 speakers. Experiments show that models trained on VieSpeaker achieve improved robustness and generalization compared to existing Vietnamese datasets. This work demonstrates the feasibility of face-independent dataset construction and provides a new direction for building large-scale speech resources.

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

SAG: SQL-Retrieval Augmented Generation with Query-Time Dynamic Hyperedges

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) offers an effective approach for large language models to access external knowledge. However, existing methods rely on dense similarity retrieval and face inherent limitations in handling structured constraints and multi-hop reasoning. Incorporating knowledge graphs partially alleviates these issues, but at the cost of semantic fragmentation, high maintenance overhead, and difficult incremental updates. This paper introduces SAG (SQLRetrieval Augmented Generation), a structured architecture for retrieval and agent systems. Instead of pre-building a global static graph, SAG converts each chunk into one semantically complete event and a set of indexing entities, then uses SQL join queries to dynamically link events that share entities into local hyperedges,constructing, at query time, a dynamically instantiated local index structure. This design avoids the need for global graph rebuilding and ongoing maintenance; the system naturally supports incremental writes, concurrent processing, and continuous scaling through its reliance on standard database infrastructure. Across HotpotQA, 2WikiMultiHop, and MuSiQue, three standard multi-hop benchmarks,SAG achieves the best results on 8 out of 9 Recall@K metrics, reaching 80.0% Recall@5 on MuSiQue, the benchmark with the highest multi-hop reasoning demands.SAG has also been deployed at a production scale of hundreds of millions of data items, with online retrieval latency kept within seconds. Project site and code are available at https://github.com/Zleap-AI/SAG-Benchmark.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Decoding the Genetic Architecture of Autistic Traits in the Aging Population

Autism research has mostly focused on diagnostic frameworks in childhood. However, autistic traits including social skills, communication, attention switching, attention to detail, and imagination may also vary in many undiagnosed individuals beyond childhood, and the genetic architecture of autistic traits in undiagnosed aging adults remains poorly understood. Here, we performed an exome-wide association study of autistic traits in adults aged >=40 from the UK Biobank (n = 161,269) and independently validated key findings in the SPARK cohort (n = 142,357). We identified exome-wide significance at 17q21.31, represented by a lead variant associated with social skills (rs199533, beta = 0.081, P = 2.04e-11). In addition, we identified an independent signal for communication (rs12632110, beta = 0.042, P = 3.07e-12) and two independent signals for attention switching (rs690733, beta = 0.046, P = 4.26e-12; rs2164272, beta = -0.047, P = 1.73e-12). Gene-based analyses further implicated loss-of-function variation in ZSCAN2 (beta = 1.00, P = 2.44e-6), which was associated with communication differences. Enrichment analyses revealed preferential expression of implicated genes in the cerebral cortex, while phenotypic and neuroimaging analyses linked those variants to cortical brain structure and regional volume. Taken together, these findings delineate the genetic architecture of autistic traits in the aging population and link genetic variation to downstream molecular and neuroanatomical mechanisms.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

OPD-Evolver: Cultivating Holistic Agent Evolver via On-Policy Distillation

Memory has become a standard substrate for self-evolving agents, yet retaining experience is not the same as learning how to evolve through it. Existing memory agents can store trajectories, retrieve reflections, or accumulate skills, but often lack the holistic competence to select useful experience, act on it, write reusable knowledge, and maintain a growing repository. We introduce OPD-Evolver, a slow-fast co-evolution framework that cultivates such an agent evolver through on-policy self-distillation. In the fast loop, OPD-Evolver interacts with a four-level memory hierarchy to read, use, write, and maintain experience for rapid test-time evolution. In the slow loop, outcome-calibrated memory attribution and privileged hindsight distill these four abilities into the deployable policy. Across multi-domain benchmarks, OPD-Evolver surpasses memory systems such as ReasoningBank by up to 11.5%, and training-based methods such as Skill0 by ~5.8%. Further analysis shows that OPD-Evolver internalizes high-value experience and memory management, enabling OPD-Evolver-9B to challenge giant counterparts such as Qwen3.5-397B-A17B and Step-3.5-Flash, pointing beyond memory-augmented agents toward genuinely qualified agent evolvers.

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

Learning User Simulators with Turing Rewards

Learning to simulate human users in interactive settings could advance the training of agent assistants, evaluation of personalization systems, research in the social sciences, and more. Existing approaches generally do so by training a large language model (LLM) to match a single ground truth response, either by maximizing the log probability or by using a similarity reward. We instead propose {Turing-RL}: a Turing-Test-based reinforcement learning approach for training user simulator models. {Turing-RL} uses a discriminative Turing reward with an LLM judge to score how indistinguishable a generated response is from the real user's given the user's history, and the user simulator LLM learns to produce responses indistinguishable from what the user could have said with such rewards. Across two different domains–conversational chat and Reddit forum discussion–we find that {Turing-RL} consistently outperforms baseline methods on both LLM and human evaluation metrics. Our study suggests that optimizing for indistinguishability, rather than response matching, is effective for learning user simulators.

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

Lighting-aware Unified Model for Instance Segmentation

Foundation models like the Segment Anything Model (SAM) demonstrate impressive zero-shot generalization but frequently degrade under diverse real-world illumination, particularly for instance segmentation. In this work, we address this limitation by developing Lighting Convolutional-Attention (\lca{)}, an adapter module that enhances segmentation robustness without fine-tuning the heavy backbone. \lca{} employs a dual-branch architecture to process RGB features alongside contrast maps, enabling physically motivated sensitivity to structural changes rather than illumination artifacts. We optimize \lca{} through a pairwise training strategy, introducing a targeted loss term that explicitly penalizes discrepancies between clean images and their corresponding illumination variants. To evaluate and support this architecture, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study across multiple existing benchmarks and present a novel Unity-based synthetic dataset specifically designed to accurately replicate complex real-world lighting conditions. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach successfully bridges the domain gap, delivering superior lighting-robust segmentation.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

LAST: Bridging Vision-Language and Action Manifolds via Gromov-Wasserstein Alignment

We take a Gromov-Wasserstein perspective on Vision-Language-Action (VLA) learning, where the goal is to make the relational geometry of action representations compatible with the semantic geometry of VL embeddings. However, this alignment is non-trivial due to the mathematical heterogeneity between the domains: the semantic space of vision-language is topologically linear and isotropic, whereas the physical manifold of robotic action is non-Euclidean and anisotropic. Their disjoint metric structures render direct regression ill-posed. To resolve this incompatibility, we introduce LAST (Lie-algebraic Action Space Tokenizer), which reconstructs the action space to establish local metric compatibility with the VL modality via a two-stage transformation: (1) Global Topological Linearization: linearizing the action manifold via Lie-algebraic mapping, converting trajectories into a fixed-length, physically additive representation. (2) Local Metric Discretization: hierarchically discretizing the representation into schemas and whitened residuals, yielding approximately isotropic local charts that are statistically aligned with the semantic metric. By resolving the structural mismatch at both global and local levels, LAST enables VLA models with superior convergence and generalizability.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Bi-Anchor Interpolation Solver for Accelerating Generative Modeling

arXiv:2601.21542v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Flow Matching (FM) models have emerged as a leading paradigm for high-fidelity synthesis. However, their reliance on iterative Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) solving creates a significant latency bottleneck. Existing solutions face a dichotomy: training-free solvers suffer from significant performance degradation at low Neural Function Evaluations (NFEs), while training-based one- or few-steps generation methods incur prohibitive training costs and lack plug-and-play versatility. To bridge this gap, we propose the Bi-Anchor Interpolation Solver (BA-solver). BA-solver retains the versatility of standard training-free solvers while achieving significant acceleration by introducing a lightweight SideNet (1-2% backbone size) alongside the frozen backbone. Specifically, our method is founded on two synergistic components: 1) Bidirectional Temporal Perception, where the SideNet learns to approximate both future and historical velocities without retraining the heavy backbone; and 2) Bi-Anchor Velocity Integration, which utilizes the SideNet with two anchor velocities to efficiently approximate intermediate velocities for batched high-order integration. By utilizing the backbone to establish high-precision ``anchors'' and the SideNet to densify the trajectory, BA-solver enables large interval sizes with minimized error. Empirical results on ImageNet-256^2 demonstrate that BA-solver achieves generation quality comparable to 100+ NFEs Euler solver in just 10 NFEs and maintains high fidelity in as few as 5 NFEs, incurring negligible training costs. Furthermore, BA-solver ensures seamless integration with existing generative pipelines, facilitating downstream tasks such as image editing.

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

Matching Tasks to Objectives: Fine-Tuning and Prompt-Tuning Strategies for Encoder-Decoder Pre-trained Language Models

Prompt-based learning has emerged as a dominant paradigm in natural language processing. This study explores the impact of diverse pre-training objectives on the performance of encoder-decoder pre-trained language models across generation and question answering tasks, with a focus on commonsense knowledge retrieval and completion. We highlight the benefits of incorporating multiple objectives during both pre-training and fine-tuning stages. We introduce the Match Task to Objective (MTO) framework and methods for determining the appropriate objective for a given task. This framework offers automated methods to prepare task-related data for adaptation through unsupervised training, based on the identified objective. In the fine-tuning stage, we design novel templates that align with the objectives of the pre-training and adaptation stages. When aligned with task requirements, these strategies can achieve a performance gain of over 120\% compared to conventional methods in few-shot settings. They significantly outperform related works in few-shot settings and exceed the baseline even in full-dataset scenarios. Furthermore, we extend this approach to include prompt-tuning methodologies, providing guidance for more effective soft prompt engineering and optimization. Our strategies significantly enhance prompt-tuning performance as well. These insights hold substantial value, precisely guiding the selection and optimization of models customized for specific tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/puraminy/MTO/

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

Circuit Synchronization Precedes Generalization: Causal Evidence from Fourier Structure in Grokking Transformers

arXiv:2606.12966v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Grokking – where a transformer on modular arithmetic suddenly transitions from near-chance to near-perfect validation accuracy – is attributed to a Fourier circuit, but its timing, causal structure, and controllability remain poorly understood. We introduce the Frequency Synchronization Degree (FSD), a normalised, permutation-tested metric for Fourier circuit synchronisation requiring no prior circuit knowledge. Across nine modular addition configurations (primes p in {53, 71, 97, 113, 131}, three seeds), FSD synchronises 500-3,000 steps before grokking (mean lead +1,722 steps; all nine positive, sign-test p~0.004), and precedes a restricted-logit loss baseline (Nanda et al.'s excluded loss) in all nine cases, making it the earliest available predictor. We provide direct causal evidence that the inter-phase gap is a regularisation phenomenon: forking training at the FSD-ceiling step and varying weight decay lambda produces strictly monotone earlier grokking, with Delta_t proportional to 1/lambda. This law replicates across three primes (p in {53,97,131}; R^2=1.00 and R^2=0.99 for two clean cases), captured as Delta_t ~ C/lambda, consistent with (1/lambda)*log(||W_mem||/tau). Architecture ablations show an attention-only model groks with a strong FSD precursor; an MLP-only model never groks; a single-layer model's FSD lags, confirming the precursor is a multi-block circuit property.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

3D-CBM: A Framework for Concept-Based Interpretability in Generative 3D Modeling

This research introduces a framework for incorporating Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) into 3D generative architectures to address the inherent 'semantic gap' in deep geometric learning. As deep models become central to 3D content creation, explainability shifts from a peripheral feature to a fundamental requirement for trust and accountability in safety-critical domains such as healthcare and manufacturing. CBMs provide an intrinsic interpretability solution by constraining latent representations to align with human-defined concepts, yet their application to unstructured 3D data remains largely unexplored. We design, implement, and validate a formal 3D-CBM architecture that maps raw geometric inputs, including point clouds and meshes, into a multi-tiered taxonomy of interpretable primitives and functional attributes. The framework further identifies strategic datasets, such as PartNet and ShapeNet, specialized for concept-based supervision. Experimental results from a 3D part-manipulation proof-of-concept experiment demonstrate the framework's efficacy, achieving a concept prediction accuracy of 88.8\% and a Chamfer Distance of 0.0115. Critically, the model enables precise test-time intervention, allowing for the interactive correction of structural errors. This work establishes a foundation for semantically-steerable 3D generation and invites further exploration into collaborative human-in-the-loop design systems.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Post-Selection Probability and Fidelity of Bidirectional Teleportation

arXiv:2606.17251v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding the scrambling of quantum information is central to many areas of quantum physics, including quantum thermalization, entanglement growth, and quantum information processing. Insights from these studies have, in turn, inspired the development of novel quantum protocols and algorithms. Recently, a bidirectional teleportation protocol was proposed to implement a digital SWAP operation between qubits by leveraging chaotic Hamiltonian evolution combined with measurement and post-selection. In this work, we provide a comprehensive study of two central quantities that characterize the protocol, the post-selection probability and the fidelity, taking into account possible errors in time-reversed dynamics. We show that these quantities can be expressed in terms of standard diagnostics in quantum dynamics, including the Loschmidt echo and its subsystem variant. The results unveil (1) the initial-state dependence of the fidelity and (2) the stability of the post-selection probability in integrable models. Our findings offer practical guidance for the implementation of the protocol on realistic quantum devices.

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

Provable quantum speedups for computing persistence in topological data analysis

arXiv:2410.21258v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Topological data analysis (TDA) aims to extract noise-robust features from a data set by examining the number and persistence of holes in its topology. We provide an efficient quantum algorithm for a computational problem closely related to a core task in TDA – determining whether a given hole persists across different length scales. Further, we prove the problem itself is $\mathsf{BQP}_1$-hard, implying that a classical solution is extremely unlikely; this stands in contrast to all previous quantum approaches to TDA, where the problems were also intractable for quantum computers, or where a rigorous proof of classical hardness still remains open. This result implies an {exponential} quantum speedup for this problem under standard complexity-theoretic assumptions. Our approach relies on encoding the persistence of a hole in a variant of the guided sparse Hamiltonian problem, where the guiding state is constructed from a harmonic representative of the hole.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Reversible Residual Normalization Alleviates Spatio-Temporal Distribution Shift

arXiv:2604.15838v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Distribution shift severely degrades the performance of deep forecasting models. While this issue is well-studied for individual time series, it remains a significant challenge in the spatio-temporal domain. Effective solutions like instance normalization and its variants can mitigate temporal shifts by standardizing statistics. However, distribution shift on a graph is far more complex, involving not only the drift of individual node series but also heterogeneity across the spatial network where different nodes exhibit distinct statistical properties. To tackle this problem, we propose Reversible Residual Normalization (RRN), a novel framework that performs spatially-aware invertible transformations to address distribution shift in both spatial and temporal dimensions. Our approach integrates graph convolutional operations within invertible residual blocks, enabling adaptive normalization that respects the underlying graph structure while maintaining reversibility. By combining Center Normalization with spectral-constrained graph neural networks, our method captures and normalizes complex Spatio-Temporal relationships in a data-driven manner. The bidirectional nature of our framework allows models to learn in a normalized latent space and recover original distributional properties through inverse transformation, offering a robust and model-agnostic solution for forecasting on dynamic spatio-temporal systems.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

An Extensive Benchmark for Single-round and Multi-round Instruction-based Image Editing

In recent years, there have been notable advancements in the area of instruction-based image editing (IIE), which focuses on the automatic alteration of input images using a model. Nevertheless, assessing the effectiveness of these editing models poses a considerable challenge due to the intricate nature of instructions and the wide variety of edits. To tackle this problem, one urgent task in this domain is the development of a robust evaluation framework that can precisely gauge the quality of editing outcomes and offer valuable benchmarks to guide future improvements. To address this challenge, we present a comprehensive evaluation benchmark named I2EBench2.0, designed for single-round and multi-round assessment of IIE models. I2EBench2.0 has four key features: 1) Evaluation Across Single and Multi-rounds: I2EBench2.0 simultaneously evaluates both single-round and multi-round instruction-based edits, assessing the precision and consistency of the edits. 2) Extensive Evaluation Criteria: I2EBench2.0 encompasses a broad range of criteria, evaluating both high-level and low-level aspects of each IIE model. Specifically, it incorporates 16 dimensions for single-round evaluations and 7 for multi-round evaluations. 3) Alignment with Human Judgment: To ensure our benchmark aligns with human evaluation, we conducted a comprehensive user study for each criterion. 4) Research-driven Insights: By analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of current IIE models across all 16 single-round and 7 multi-round dimensions, we provide critical insights aimed at directing future research in this area. We tested eight recently developed IIE models using I2EBench2.0 and derived academic insights through meticulous comparison and analysis. The related code, dataset, and images generated by all IIE models are available on GitHub: https://github.com/cocoshe/I2EBench.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Cardiac rhythm development: A wearable device index of risk for physical and mental illness in adolescence

Objective. The autonomic nervous system, which regulates cardiac rhythm, undergoes pronounced maturation across adolescence. How cardiac rhythm develops over this period, however, and whether individual differences in its development forecast mental and physical illness, remain open questions. We used three waves of Fitbit data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study to characterize the developmental trajectory of the cardiac rhythm and to test whether variation in that trajectory predicts onset of psychopathology and cardiometabolic disease. Methods. 8,301 adolescents contributed 242,811 valid Fitbit wear days across Waves 2 (Mage=12), 4 (Mage=14), and 6 (Mage=16). Cosinor mixed-effects models yielded three rhythm parameters per session: mesor (24-hour mean), amplitude (diurnal swing), and acrophase (peak timing). We first characterized age- and sex-specific trajectories, cross-wave stability, and factors shaping the rhythm. We then used parallel-process latent growth models to test whether within-person changes in rhythm tracked symptom trajectories, and hierarchical logistic models to test whether rhythm parameters predicted the first clinical onset of psychopathology and of obesity and hypertension. Results. The cardiac rhythm changed substantially across adolescence: mesor decreased, amplitude flattened, and acrophase shifted later. Within-person change in the rhythm tracked change in blood pressure, BMI, and trajectories of depression and ADHD symptoms. Higher mesor predicted incident onset of all five outcomes controlling for demographics, baseline symptoms, and behavior (ORs 1.36-1.54); amplitude, acrophase, and rhythm instability conferred additional risk. Conclusions. The 24-hour cardiac rhythm is a passively measurable substrate of adolescent autonomic development that indexes transdiagnostic risk for psychiatric and cardiometabolic illness.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

RTSGameBench: An RTS Benchmark for Strategic Reasoning by Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2606.18950v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often struggle with strategic reasoning, i.e., anticipating and influencing other agents' actions, under uncertainty in competitive and cooperative settings. Real-time strategy (RTS) games can be a natural testbed for diagnosing this limitation, as they demand coordination with allies, adaptation to opponents' strategy, and long-horizon planning under partial observability. However, existing RTS benchmarks offer limited evaluation scope, lack systematic competency diagnosis, and remain fixed in the pre-designed scenario coverage. To address these limitations, we present RTSGameBench, which is built on Beyond All Reason, a large-scale RTS game with an expanded battlefield that demands broader strategy diversity than the existing testbeds. The proposed benchmark provides evaluations through diverse gameplay across various matchup structures, diagnostic assessment via mini-games, each targeting an individual strategic competency, and extensible coverage via a self-evolving generation framework that converts free-form queries into new mini-games, improving over successive cycles. Additionally, for VLMs to operate in large-scale RTS games, we provide RTSGameAgent that manages units by an FSM with agentic memory. We empirically validate that multiple state-of-the-art VLMs do not perform well when matchups demand tighter coordination, multiagent coordination and when task scale increases.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Rescaling MLM-Head for Neural Sparse Retrieval

arXiv:2606.18811v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learned sparse retrieval (LSR) models such as SPLADE have traditionally used BERT-style masked language models as backbone encoders. A natural expectation is that replacing BERT with stronger pretrained encoders should improve retrieval effectiveness. However, we find that under standard SPLADE training recipes, backbones with large MLM-head L2 norms can suffer performance degradation and even training collapse under standard SPLADE training recipes. We identify this failure as a scale mismatch in the MLM head: SPLADE directly uses MLM-head outputs to construct sparse lexical representations, and query-document relevance is computed by an unnormalized dot product over these representations. As a result, an inflated MLM-head scale can amplify sparse activations, distort matching scores, and destabilize contrastive training under common training settings. To address this issue, we introduce a simple initialization-time correction that rescales the MLM-head projection by a constant factor before SPLADE training. This zero-cost adjustment improves training stability without modifying the model architecture or training objective. Across both in-domain and out-of-domain retrieval benchmarks, this simple correction substantially improves large-norm backbones such as ModernBERT and Ettin, turning unstable training runs into competitive sparse retrievers. In several settings, the corrected models further match or surpass the classic BERT-SPLADE baseline. These findings suggest that the bottleneck in adapting pretrained encoders to LSR is not encoder capacity alone, but the calibration of the MLM-head scale used to construct sparse lexical representations.

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

Diffusion Transformer World-Action Model for AV Scene Prediction

Action-conditioned world models let an autonomous vehicle predict future camera scenes from its own planned controls, enabling planning and simulation without real-world rollouts, but at compact, trainable scale the futures are ambiguous and the field's standard distortion metrics actively mislead: they reward a blurry regression mean over a realistic prediction. We confront this with a compact latent world model that, given the present front-camera latent and a sequence of ego-actions, predicts future scene latents a frozen decoder renders to $256 \times 256$ frames up to 8 seconds ahead, evaluated on 150 held-out nuScenes scenes. We first benchmark where to predict: across six frozen encoders spanning four representation families, V-JEPA2 with temporal context reduces steering RMSE by 40% over the best single-frame encoder. We then train a latent Diffusion Transformer (DiT) and, through a controlled diagnosis, identify the four ingredients it needs: spatial tokens, the $x_0$ objective, residual anchoring, and sampling matched to target uncertainty. In a Stable-Diffusion-VAE encode-predict-decode pipeline we expose the central tension: distortion metrics (cosine similarity, SSIM) favor the blurry mean, masking that the diffusion model is far closer to the real frame distribution. Inception-based FID and KID reveal a clean perception-distortion frontier: diffusion attains KID 0.078 versus 0.375 for regression ($4.8\times$ better), and a deployable train-derived calibration makes this practical without test-time ground truth. The model is genuinely action-controllable (steering drives scene displacement, Spearman $\rho = 0.81$, vs $-0.18$ for regression). We trace limited single-pass motion to a shared-present anchor and engineer a compact 1.7M-parameter "jump" model that recovers full ground-truth motion magnitude ($1.02\times$ GT), where single-pass models capture less than half.