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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Mood-Aware Music Recommendation: Integrating User Affective Signals into Ranking Systems

Authors:
Terence Zeng↗Abhishek K. Umrawal↗

arXiv:2606.13858v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recommendation systems are essential in modern music streaming platforms due to the vast amount of available content. While collaborative filtering is widely used to suggest items based on the preferences of others with similar patterns, it performs poorly in domains where user-item interactions are sparse, such as music. Content-based filtering is an alternative approach that examines the qualities of the items themselves. Genre, instrumentation, and lyrics have been explored; however, relatively little attention has been given to emotion recognition. Since a user's emotional state strongly influences their music choice, incorporating mood signals offers a promising direction for personalization. In this work, we propose a mood-conditioned ranking framework that integrates user affective signals into the recommendation process via softmax-based sampling in the energy-valence space. We evaluate the approach via single-blind experiments in which participants compare recommendations from the proposed system against a baseline. The results indicate improved perceived recommendation quality, providing preliminary evidence for the effectiveness of incorporating mood-based inputs into music recommendations.

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02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Anti-causal domain generalization: Leveraging unlabeled data

Authors:
Sorawit Saengkyongam↗Juan L. Gamella↗Andrew C. Miller↗Jonas Peters↗Nicolai Meinshausen↗Christina Heinze-Deml↗

arXiv:2602.17187v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The problem of domain generalization concerns learning predictive models that are robust to distribution shifts when deployed in new, previously unseen environments. Existing methods typically require labeled data from multiple training environments, limiting their applicability when labeled data are scarce. In this work, we study domain generalization in an anti-causal setting, where the outcome causes the observed covariates. Under this structure, environment perturbations that affect the covariates do not propagate to the outcome, which motivates regularizing the model's sensitivity to these perturbations. Crucially, estimating these perturbation directions does not require labels, enabling us to leverage unlabeled data from multiple environments. We propose two methods that penalize the model's sensitivity to variations in the mean and covariance of the covariates across environments, respectively, and prove that these methods have worst-case optimality guarantees under certain classes of environments. Finally, we demonstrate the empirical performance of our approach on a controlled physical system and a physiological signal dataset.

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03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

From Detection to Recovery: Operational Analysis on LLM Pre-training with 504 GPUs

Authors:
Daemyung Kang↗Eunjin Hwang↗Hanjeong Lee↗HyeokJin Kim↗Hyunhoi Koo↗Jeongkyu Shin↗Jeongseok Kang↗Jihyun Kang↗Jinho Heo↗Joongi Kim↗Junbum Lee↗Jungseung Yang↗…

arXiv:2605.09370v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large-scale AI training is fundamentally a distributed systems problem, where hardware failures are routine operating conditions rather than rare exceptions, yet public operational evidence from production training clusters remains limited. This report presents an empirical analysis of a 63-node NVIDIA B200 production cluster (504 GPUs), using 55 days of Prometheus time-series data and 73 days of operational logs covering 224 multi-node training sessions. The environment is cross-organizational: five parties (SKT, Upstage, Lablup, NVIDIA Korea, VAST Data) share a unified monitoring pipeline. This enabled joint diagnosis of a 60-node-scale storage I/O bottleneck absent in 2-4-node tests, a production-scale phenomenon no single team could isolate alone. We perform three quantitative analyses yielding four findings. First, over 751 Prometheus metrics and 10 XID-identified GPU failures, no single metric is consistently dominant across failure types, motivating multi-signal detection. Second, 523 checkpoint events trace the save/load path from GPU VRAM to the NFS server: restart loading reaches 21.5% of maximum read bandwidth (700 GB/s) and save bursts 16.0% of maximum write bandwidth (250 GB/s), with NFS/RPC queueing and transport-layer backlog rising together. Third, across 224 sessions over 73 days, node exclusions concentrate so the top 3 of 63 nodes account for over 50%. Fourth, auto-retry chain analysis shows a 33.3% success rate over 12 chains (73 attempts), 2.7x the 12.5% manual rate, with a median retry interval of 11 minutes (IQR 10-11). All analyses are grounded in production infrastructure providing session-level workload management, GPU-centric scheduling, and unified observability.

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

NoContactNoWorries: Estimating Contact through Vision and Proprioception for In-Hand Dexterous Manipulation

Authors:
Soham Patil↗Avirup Das↗Sourabh Bhosale↗Spandan Roy↗

arXiv:2606.24450v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Perceiving physical contact is fundamental to dexterous manipulation. While robots often rely on dedicated hardware tactile sensors, humans exhibit a remarkable ability to infer contact by integrating visual information with an innate sense of their body's pose and movement. Inspired by this embodied perceptual skill, we investigate whether a robot can learn to infer contact from vision, an approach that also offers a scalable alternative to tactile hardware specifically for binary contact estimation, which faces practical challenges in cost, fragility, and integration. We present NoContactNoWorries, a transformer-based multimodal framework that fuses RGB-D vision with the robot's proprioception to infer binary contact states as a pseudo-tactile signal for hand-object interactions. We validate by training a single contact prediction model on multiple objects and show that the inferred contact signal supports downstream reinforcement learning agents for in-hand object reorientation, generalizing to novel objects. Experiments in both simulation and on a real-world robot validate our approach, highlighting the feasibility of inferring contact from vision and proprioception. Project Page: https://soham2560.github.io/no-contact-no-worries/

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

LiteOdyssey: A Lightweight Reasoning AI Agent for Interpretable Rare-Disease Diagnosis

Authors:
Minh-Ha Nguyen↗Erica Gray↗Chih-Ting Yang↗Rizwan Hamid↗Lingyao Li↗Siyuan Ma↗Thomas A. Cassini↗Cathy Shyr↗

arXiv:2606.16149v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most medical AI systems improve by scaling additional machinery: more fine-tuning data, more agents, and/or larger retrieval databases. In rare-disease diagnosis, however, such scaling can produce systems that are difficult to deploy, audit, and maintain. We asked whether state-of-the-art diagnostic performance could instead be achieved by extending the reasoning chain of a single AI agent: guiding it with a diagnostic policy, developed through human-AI collaboration and augmenting with freely available biomedical tools. We introduce LiteOdyssey, a lightweight rare-disease diagnostic framework that guides reasoning language model through a clinical genetics workflow. This framework was developed through Policy Iteration with Human Feedback (PIHF) and uses dynamic access to public biomedical tools. On two challenging benchmarks that provide only patient clinical features, LiteOdyssey achieved state-of-the-art performance, with an overall disease Recall@1 of 59.3% over the combined 1,243 cases of LIRICAL (n = 370) and the PhenoPacket Store (n = 873). Both benchmarks have a high proportion of ultra-rare disease (a prevalence below 1 in 1,000,000, with ultra-rare shares of approximately 45% and 52.8%, respectively). On the more difficult PhenoPacket subset, where causal diseases were not mapped to Orphanet in our rarity-mapping pipeline, LiteOdyssey achieved 60.7% Recall@1, compared with 10.7% for the same baseline model (GPT-5.4) without tools. This performance was achieved without fine-tuning, multi-agent ensembles, or a large case-retrieval database. Gains were also observed in the following: on cases never seen during development, on a private cohort of real-world rare disease patients, and on a smaller open-weights model. LiteOdyssey suggests a path toward rare-disease AI systems that are accurate, easier to deploy, and more transparent for physician review.

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

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

Authors:
Viet Hoang Pham↗Tran Trung Nguyen↗Bao Thu Ho↗Phuong Tuan Dat↗Thi Thu Trang Nguyen↗

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.

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

Compositional Behavioral Semantics for State Abstraction in Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Yivan Zhang↗Ziyan Luo↗Manuel Baltieri↗

arXiv:2606.25357v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: State abstraction plays a key role in scaling reinforcement learning to complex but structured systems. In studying such systems, a wide range of behavioral structures have been studied in reinforcement learning, including value functions, invariants, bisimulation relations, and behavioral metrics. However, a general principle for determining what structures are provably preserved under state abstraction is still lacking. In this paper, we present a unified framework for defining and analyzing behavioral structures in reinforcement learning. Our framework provides a compositional way to specify behavioral semantics based on local, one-step descriptions of system dynamics. Using this framework, we establish results showing how behavioral structures can be safely transferred between abstract and concrete systems. We further show how to construct quantitative metrics from logical behavioral semantics with soundness guarantees. Together, these results provide a principled foundation for reasoning about behaviors under state abstraction in reinforcement learning and offer reusable definition and proof principles for a broad class of behavioral structures in reinforcement learning.

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08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Forged Calamity: Benchmark for Cross-Domain Synthetic Disaster Detection in the Age of Diffusion

Authors:
Duc-Manh Phan↗Quoc-Duy Tran↗Duy-Khang Do↗Anh-Tuan Vo↗Hai-Dang Nguyen↗Trong Le Do↗Mai-Khiem Tran↗Vinh-Tiep Nguyen↗Tam V. Nguyen↗Isao Echizen↗Minh-Triet Tran↗Trung-Nghia Le↗…

The rapid advancement of text-to-image diffusion models has enabled the creation of highly photorealistic synthetic images that closely resemble real photographs, making it increasingly difficult to distinguish authentic content from AI-generated fabrications. This poses challenges for cybersecurity, digital forensics, and disaster response, where fake imagery of floods, fires, or earthquakes can spread misinformation or disrupt emergency operations. To address this, we introduce Forged Calamity, a benchmark dataset for synthetic disaster detection containing 30,000 images, including 6,000 real and 24,000 synthetic samples generated by four diffusion models. Comprehensive experiments across fine-tuned and zero-shot settings reveal consistent weaknesses in current forensic approaches. Fine-tuned detectors perform well in-distribution but lose up to 50\% accuracy on unseen generators or disaster types, showing overfitting to model-specific artifacts. Zero-shot generalized detectors also struggle to maintain stable accuracy, with only limited resilience in a few representation-robust models. These findings highlight persistent generalization gaps and the urgent need for domain- and model-agnostic detection methods to ensure visual authenticity in the diffusion era.

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09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Weave of Formal Thought

Authors:
Alexandre Bouayad↗

Large language models (LLMs) attain remarkable surface fluency on code, yet they neither formally guarantee the syntactic validity of their output nor leverage the hierarchical structure defining the target language. While existing constrained-decoding frameworks address the former, they operate under rigid assumptions that preclude critical lexical mechanisms – including context-sensitive lexing, maximal-munch tokenization, and keyword extraction – and only approximate vocabulary masking, sacrificing completeness. For the latter, code LLMs typically inject grammatical structure via predetermined policies rather than learning which structural information to expose. In this work, we introduce Weave of Formal Thought (WoFT), a paradigm uniting rigorous syntactic validation with learned structural representations. First, we present a formal engine and constrained decoder that is sound and complete with respect to the full Tree-sitter specification. By augmenting generalized LR (GLR) parsing with a speculative-lexing construction that maintains concurrent lexer-state hypotheses synchronized with a GLR graph-structured stack, our decoder admits every subword token extending to a valid program prefix and rejects all others. Second, we present a latent-variable fine-tuning method training the language model to interleave non-terminal grammar symbols directly into generation. Utilizing the reweighted wake-sleep (RWS) algorithm to optimize the importance-weighted evidence lower bound (IW-ELBO) of the surface text, the model learns to selectively retain formal derivations as an adaptive structural scratchpad. For Python, fine-tuning StarCoder2-3B with our RWS objective reduces per-token cross-entropy by 14.3% relative to a text-only SFT baseline, demonstrating that discretionary latent syntax recovers critical structural information that flat autoregressive training discards.

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10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Reliability-Aware Prototype Calibration for Frozen Pose-Flow Video Anomaly Detection

Authors:
Ning Dong↗Yingna Su↗Xin Dong↗Ziyun Jiao↗Xinnian Guo↗Zhuangzhuang Pan↗

Pose-flow video anomaly detectors are attractive for one-class surveillance because they provide likelihood-based rankings for tracked skeleton windows. However, a single likelihood score may hide multimodal normal behavior and be sensitive to pose-observation noise. We study a frozen-detector setting in which the pose-flow backbone, cached skeleton tracks, and evaluation pipeline are fixed. Reliability-Aware Prototype Calibration (RPC) is a post-hoc score calibration method for this setting. It adds a standardized nearest-prototype deviation in the frozen latent space to the standardized flow score, and uses keypoint confidence only to gate this added geometric evidence. Thus, RPC preserves the original density signal while correcting the ranking with empirical normal-mode structure under pose reliability. Across two frozen pose-flow backbones and four datasets, RPC improves frame-level AUROC in all eight backbone-dataset pairs, with gains ranging from 0.34 to 4.49 percentage points and averaging 2.03 points. Ablation and reliability analyses show that prototype deviation is the main corrective signal, while reliability gating is most useful when pose observations are less trustworthy. These results suggest that lightweight post-hoc calibration can strengthen cached pose-flow systems when retraining or reproducing the full pose pipeline is impractical.

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11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Q-Net: Queue Length Estimation via Kalman-based Neural Networks

Authors:
Ting Gao↗Elvin Isufi↗Winnie Daamen↗Erik-Sander Smits↗Serge Hoogendoorn↗

arXiv:2509.24725v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Estimating queue lengths at signalized intersections is a long-standing challenge in traffic management. Partial observability of vehicle flows complicates this task despite the availability of two privacy-preserving data sources: (i) aggregated vehicle counts from loop detectors near stop lines, and (ii) aggregated floating car data (aFCD) that provide segment-wise average speed measurements. However, how to integrate these sources with differing spatial and temporal resolutions for queue length estimation is rather unclear. Addressing this question, we present Q-Net: a queue estimation framework built upon a state-space formulation. This design addresses key challenges in queue modeling, such as violations of traffic conservation assumptions. Q-Net follows the Kalman predict-update structure and maintains physical interpretability in both the state evolution and measurement models. Q-Net uses an AI-augmented Kalman filter to learn time-varying gain dynamics from data. The framework supports real-time implementation and improves spatial transferability by grouping aFCD measurements into fixed-size local groups, making the number of learnable parameters independent of section length. Evaluations on urban main roads in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, show that Q-Net outperforms baseline methods, tracks queue formation and dissipation accurately, and mitigates aFCD-induced delays. By combining data efficiency, interpretability, real-time applicability, and spatial transferability, Q-Net makes accurate queue length estimation possible without costly sensing infrastructure like cameras or radar.

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

SUP-MCRL: Subject-aware Unified Pseudo-feature Coded Multimodal Contrastive Representation Learning for EEG Visual Decoding

Authors:
Shengyu Gong↗Weiming Zeng↗Yueyang Li↗Zijian Kang↗Hongjie Yan↗Wai Ting Siok↗Nizhuan Wang↗

Non-invasive brain-computer interfaces suffer severe fidelity degradation in neural visual decoding when generalizing to natural visual experiences. Conventional multimodal contrastive representation learning solely optimizes geometric distance alignment, neglecting semantic consistency and subject selectivity, causing spurious zero-shot alignment. We propose SUP-MCRL, a unified framework integrating three collaborative mechanisms: (1) Semantic-entity Aware Visual Encoder (SAVE), learning spatial attention to extract semantic content without pre-trained saliency models; (2 Unified EEG Enhancer (UEE), employing multi-scale atrous convolutions and inter-band attention for adaptive cross-subject robustness; and (3) Prototype-based Progressive Augmenter (PPA), maintaining an EMA-updated pseudo-feature pool to prevent representation collapse. Zero-shot experiments on THINGS-EEG achieve 66.0%/91.9% (Top-1/Top-5) intra-subject and 24.0%/52.9% LOSO accuracy, surpassing state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/NZWANG/SUP-MCRL.

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14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

CANN-EUCLID: unsupervised constitutive artificial neural network model discovery from full-field data

Authors:
Benjamin Alheit↗Siddhant Kumar↗Mathias Peirlinck↗

arXiv:2606.14565v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Constitutive artificial neural networks (CANNs) provide interpretable material model discovery, but have so far been used in stress-supervised settings based on apparent stress-strain data from homogeneous tests. Because each test samples only a narrow loading path and provides homogenized rather than local stress information, robust discovery typically requires multiple loading modes to constrain the multidimensional response. This is challenging for soft biological tissues, where repeated testing, damage, and sample variability limit reliable information from a single specimen. Here, we combine CANNs with the stress-unsupervised full-field discovery framework EUCLID to identify sparse hyperelastic laws directly from displacement fields and reaction forces in one heterogeneity-inducing loading case. CANN-EUCLID minimizes equilibrium imbalance with sparsity-promoting regularization selecting compact active terms, without local stress measurements or a prescribed law. We evaluate the approach on isotropic and anisotropic benchmarks with prescribed ground-truth laws. When the ground truth is representable by the chosen CANN basis, our method recovers the correct terms with near-exact accuracy, including exponential terms with embedded parameters. When it is not contained in the basis, the method retains shared terms and approximates missing contributions using available basis functions. Generalization depends strongly on sampled deformation states: exponential strain-stiffening terms can be recovered accurately when sufficiently probed, but can produce large extrapolation errors when the stiffening regime lies outside the sampled domain. Forward FE validation simulations show that the discovered behavior accurately replicates the ground truth. These results establish stress-unsupervised CANN discovery as a promising framework for interpretable full-field constitutive model identification.

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15.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-22

Differences in tuberculosis prevalence by sex in low- and middle-income countries over 1993–2025: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Authors:
Nicole A. Swartwood↗

by Nicole A. Swartwood, Nanki Singh, Seyed Alireza Mortazavi, Melike Hazal Can, Hening Cui, Do Kyung Ryuk, Peter MacPherson, Katherine C. Horton, Nicolas A. Menzies Background Global and national initiatives to combat tuberculosis (TB) have expanded over recent years. Despite this, the TB burden remains high in some population groups, with men recognized as having elevated TB risks. Summary measures of sex differences in TB prevalence were last estimated in 2016. Since then, many additional prevalence surveys have been conducted, including in the highest TB burden countries. We conducted a systematic review of sex-stratified TB prevalence survey data published over 1993–2025, to provide updated estimates of male-to-female (M:F) TB prevalence ratios and determine whether sex-related disparities in TB burden have closed over time. Methods and findings We identified surveys reporting community-representative, sex-stratified estimates of pulmonary TB prevalence in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), including surveys from an earlier review (covering January 1993–March 2016) and a new systematic review (covering 1st December 2015–13th October 2025). This review was prospectively registered with PROSPERO (CRD42024503853) and included searches of PubMed, Embase, Global Health, the Cochrane Library, Africa Index Medicus, LILACS, and SciELO. We extracted data on bacteriologically confirmed and smear-positive TB prevalence among adults (aged ≥ 15 years), stratified by sex. Risk of bias was evaluated using eight criteria specific to prevalence surveys. We fit multi-level Bayesian regression models with study- and country-level random effects to estimate the M:F ratio of TB prevalence (male prevalence divided by female prevalence), overall and for key subgroups. In meta-regression analyses, we estimated how prevalence ratios varied over time and according to known TB risk factors and TB case definitions.We identified 10,124 publications and extracted data from 100 eligible studies representing 102 unique prevalence surveys and 4,658,310 participants (45.6% male) in 33 LMICs. TB prevalence was higher in men than women in 90/102 of the included surveys, with a pooled M:F prevalence ratio of 2.02 (95% credible interval (CrI): 1.71, 2.34) for bacteriologically confirmed TB and 2.38 (95% CrI: 1.91, 2.90) for smear-positive TB. Time trend analyses showed a 2.0% (95% CrI: −0.2, 4.5%) average annual change in the M:F ratio of bacteriologically confirmed TB over the study period. The M:F prevalence ratio was estimated to be higher for countries with greater excess HIV prevalence among men, and countries with greater gender equity (as measured by the United Nation’s Gender Development Index). The estimated M:F prevalence ratio was also higher for surveys that did not restrict testing to individuals reporting TB symptoms. Study limitations include heterogeneity in survey methods and definitions, as well as limited data from the Americas, Eastern Mediterranean, and Europe WHO world regions and post-COVID-19 period. Conclusions Men in LMICs consistently experience TB at a higher prevalence than women. Time trend estimates are uncertain, but consistent with widening sex differences in TB prevalence over the last three decades, despite efforts to address the risk factors underlying this excess TB burden.

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16.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

GeroEngine: Generative single-cell aging trajectories reveal a bidirectionally traversable identity core and direction-specific inflammatory remodeling

Authors:
Bhak↗Jeon↗

Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) maps aging tissues at high resolution but is destructive, preventing longitudinal tracking; dropout and zero-inflation artifacts, amplified by shift-invariant linear simulations, confound age-associated variability. We developed GeroEngine, a technical-artifact-aware framework combining VAE-based trajectory simulation, LOPO cross-validation, linear baselines, reverse traversal, and reverse-directed network inference. In microglia and HSCs, the VAE reduced technical-artifact carryover while preserving trajectory heterogeneity and improving alignment to artifact-reduced reference manifolds. Consensus GeroTargets and GeroRegulators defined tissue-specific GeroNetworks organized into three pillars: lineage/replication identity collapse, a sex-dimorphic endocrine/stress core, and inflammatory remodeling. Forward and reverse simulations aligned to the common young[->]old aging axis revealed a sign-coherent, direction-specific program: identity/replication targets were bidirectionally recovered, whereas MHC/NF-{kappa}B inflammatory programs were preferentially forward-recovered. These results support identity collapse as a deep traversable core of aging and nominate upstream homeostatic restoration over downstream inflammatory suppression.

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

Vector Quantized Latent Concepts: A Scalable Alternative to Clustering-Based Concept Discovery

Authors:
Xuemin Yu↗Ankur Garg↗Samira Ebrahimi Kahou↗Hassan Sajjad↗

Large language models (LLMs) encode rich semantic information in their hidden states, yet it remains difficult to understand what information these internal representations capture. Latent concepts extracted from hidden states offer a promising direction for interpreting LLMs, but existing clustering-based methods face a trade-off: hierarchical clustering produces coherent concepts but is limited to small datasets due to its quadratic memory cost, while K-Means scales efficiently but may yield less semantically coherent concepts. We propose Vector Quantized Latent Concept (VQLC), a discrete concept learning framework that learns a codebook of latent concepts on frozen hidden states. Across 12 dataset-model settings, VQLC stays close to K-Means in computational cost, scales better than hierarchical clustering, and remains competitive in faithfulness, with the clearest gains on decoder-only models. LLMs-based evaluation, qualitative analysis, and a Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) comparison demonstrate that the learned concepts are interpretable and task-relevant.

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

Enhancing Decision-Making with Large Language Models through Multi-Agent Fictitious Play

Authors:
Leyang Shen↗Yang Zhang↗Xiaoyan Zhao↗Chun Kai Ling↗Tat-Seng Chua↗

Large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems (MAS) have demonstrated great potential in solving tasks with execution complexity, by distributing subtasks across cooperative agents. However, this divide-and-conquer paradigm falls short on decision-making tasks that are also prevalent in the real world. These tasks require simultaneous reasoning from the stances of all involved stakeholders whose decisions are mutually dependent and thus cannot be solved in isolation. We characterize this challenge as stance entanglement, a form of decision complexity distinct from execution complexity. To address it, we propose Multi-Agent Fictitious Play (MAFP), a novel MAS paradigm that represents stakeholder stances as agents and formulates decision-making as an equilibrium-seeking process. Built on the game-theoretic principle of fictitious play, MAFP iteratively updates each agent's decision by best responding to the empirical mixture of other agents' past decisions. This enables agents to expose and address one another's weaknesses, progressively improving decision quality and robustness. We evaluate MAFP on challenging decision-making tasks that test the capability of deciding strategies for competitive scenarios prior to acting. MAFP outperforms both single-round and multi-round baselines on two complementary metrics, tournament strength and robustness, demonstrating its effectiveness in addressing stance entanglement.

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19.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

A Unified Spatial AI Framework for Cross-Domain Tissue-State Analysis in Trauma, Oral, and Cardiovascular Pathology

Authors:
Pham↗T. D↗

Objective: To develop a cross-domain spatial AI framework for identifying conserved tissue-state organisation across trauma, oral disease, and cardiovascular tissue using spatial transcriptomic data. Methods: Four public spatial transcriptomic datasets spanning wound healing, periodontitis, oral squamous cell carcinoma, and cardiac tissue were integrated using recurrence modelling, graph-based spatial learning, fuzzy tissue-state analysis, and tensor decomposition. Cross-domain coupling, spatial fragmentation, recurrence structure, and permutation-based topological validation were evaluated. Results: Six conserved fuzzy tissue states were identified, dominated by extracellular matrix remodelling, fibroblast/stromal activation, endothelial signalling, and inflammatory pathways. Latent embedding analysis demonstrated strong overlap between trauma and oral domains, while cardiovascular tissue exhibited more compact spatial organisation. Oral inflammatory tissue showed the highest fragmentation, whereas cardiovascular tissue demonstrated greater recurrence coherence. Tensor decomposition identified conserved stromal-remodelling programmes across domains. Permutation testing confirmed significantly elevated graph modularity and reduced spatial entropy relative to null distributions. Conclusion: The proposed framework identified conserved spatial tissue-state architecture linking wound healing, oral pathology, and cardiovascular tissue despite differences in tissue origin, pathology, and acquisition technology. Significance: These findings demonstrate the potential of spatial AI for investigating conserved stromal and inflammatory microenvironmental organisation across clinically related disease systems and may support spatial biology research in trauma–oral–systemic health.

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20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Non-Hermitian Crystalline Braid Topology from Hermitian Projection: A Zero-Mode Resonance Mechanism

Authors:
Stefan {\DJ}or{\dj}evi\'c↗Vladimir Juri\v{c}i\'c↗

arXiv:2606.06626v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Non-Hermitian topological phases are typically engineered through gain and loss, nonreciprocity, or interaction with an environment. Here we show that they can instead emerge purely by projecting a fully Hermitian, topologically trivial parent lattice onto an embedded subsystem. The mechanism is general: when a zero mode of the eliminated degrees of freedom couples to the retained subsystem, the embedding self-energy develops a pole, the zero-frequency description becomes singular, and topology is carried by the finite-frequency projected Green's function. We realize the mechanism exactly in a trivial nearest-neighbor square lattice with an embedded one-dimensional zig-zag brane. In the periodic transverse geometry, the parity of the eliminated complement selects the outcome: even sectors reduce to a regular Schur complement and yield conventional SSH-type descendants, whereas odd sectors host a sublattice-imbalance zero mode and follow the resonant route. There, the complex bands braid through isolated finite-frequency exceptional points (EPs), while a parity symmetry inherited from the embedding, together with $\mathrm{TRS}^{\dagger}$, induces conjugated pseudo-Hermiticity and quantizes the complex Berry phase. The stable bulk invariant of the nondegenerate phases is this quantized complex Berry phase; adjacent sectors are separated by parity-paired exceptional points whose half-integer vorticities encode the local exchange of complex-energy strands.The absence of the non-Hermitian skin effect ensures that the invariant is defined directly on the ordinary Brillouin zone. A topolectrical implementation of the projected response predicts momentum-resolved transmission minima at the exceptional-point transition frequencies together with a characteristic low-frequency resonant admittance, providing an experimentally testable signature of the mechanism.

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21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

GroundSet: A Cadastral-Grounded Dataset for Spatial Understanding with Vector Data

Authors:
Roger Ferrod↗Ma\"el Lecene↗Krishna Sapkota↗George Leifman↗Vered Silverman↗Genady Beryozkin↗Sylvain Lobry↗

Precise spatial understanding in Earth Observation is essential for translating raw aerial imagery into actionable insights for critical applications like urban planning, environmental monitoring and disaster management. However, Multimodal Large Language Models exhibit critical deficiencies in fine-grained spatial understanding within Remote Sensing, primarily due to a reliance on limited or repurposed legacy datasets. To bridge this gap, we introduce a large-scale dataset grounded in verifiable cadastral vector data, comprising 3.8 million annotated objects across 510k high-resolution images with 135 granular semantic categories. We validate this resource through a comprehensive instruction-tuning benchmark spanning seven spatial reasoning tasks. Our evaluation establishes a robust baseline using a standard LLaVA architecture. We show that while current RS-specialized and commercial models (e.g., Gemini) struggle in zero-shot settings, high-fidelity supervision effectively bridges this gap, enabling standard architectures to master fine-grained spatial grounding without complex architectural modifications.

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22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Pragmatic Inference for Moral Reasoning Acquisition: Generalization via Metapragmatic Links

Authors:
Guangliang Liu↗Xi Chen↗Bocheng Chen↗Han Zi↗Xitong Zhang↗Kristen Johnson↗

While moral reasoning has emerged as a promising research direction for large language models (LLMs), achieving robust generalization remains a critical challenge. This challenge arises from the gap between what is said and what is morally implied. In this paper, we build on metapragmatic links and Moral Foundations Theory to close this gap. Specifically, we develop a pragmatic inference approach that enables LLMs, given a moral situation, to acquire the metapragmatic links between moral reasoning objectives and the social variables that influence them. We adapt this approach to three different moral reasoning tasks to demonstrate its adaptability and generalizability. Experimental results show that our approach significantly enhances LLMs' generalization in moral reasoning, paving the way for future research to leverage pragmatic inference across a wide range of moral reasoning tasks.

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

Verifiable Foundation Models for Robot Safety

Authors:
Davide Corsi↗Kyungmin Kim↗Roy Fox↗

arXiv:2606.23754v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deploying foundation models for robot control raises a central challenge: the expressive power that enables rich, multimodal perception also makes these models opaque and difficult to analyze formally, rendering them intractable for existing verification tools. In this paper, we present FEARL (Foundation-Enabled Assured Robot Learning), a framework that addresses this tension through a modular architectural decomposition. FEARL separates the policy into a large Controller (C) responsible for high-dimensional perception and task reasoning, and a small Safety module (S) that receives low-dimensional observations from dedicated safety sensors together with a bounded context embedding from C and produces the final action. Since many robot safety requirements, such as collision avoidance and workspace boundary constraints, can be expressed over these safety sensor observations, formal verification can be applied to S rather than to the full foundation-model backbone. This makes formal analysis tractable with existing tools while preserving the Controller's expressive power for task reasoning. To show that the decomposed policy remains capable of solving diverse tasks, we evaluate FEARL on three simulated robotic domains using multiple Controller backbones and training procedures, including pretrained off-the-shelf vision-language-action models. We further transfer the learned policy from one of our simulated tasks to a physical robot, suggesting that the low-dimensional safety interface supports practical sim-to-real transfer.

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

Localizing Anchoring Pathways in Language Models

Authors:
Hillary N. Owusu↗Sarah Wiegreffe↗Naomi H. Feldman↗

Irrelevant numbers in a prompt can shift language model judgments, producing anchoring effects in numerical reasoning. We study where this anchor-sensitive signal is carried inside language models using a controlled multiple-choice setup with shared answer options. We define a logit-difference metric comparing the correct answer option with the answer option corresponding to the anchor, and validate that it tracks behavioral anchoring. Using attribution-based circuit localization on 7B–8B Qwen and Llama base and instruction-tuned models, we find that edge-level methods recover this signal more faithfully than node-level methods. Low- and high-anchor circuits transfer strongly within a model, suggesting shared pathway structure across anchor direction. However, sparse transfer across base and instruction-tuned variants is less reliable, indicating that post-training changes which pathways matter most. Overall, our results provide a mechanistic account of how anchoring-related decision signals are carried inside language models.

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

From Sounds to Scenes: A Benchmark for Evaluating Context-Aware Auditory Scene Understanding in Large Audio Language Models

Authors:
Pengfei Zhang↗Hoang H Nguyen↗Kazi Shaharair Sharif↗Yutong Song↗Wenjun Huang↗Henry Peng Zou↗Pinxin Liu↗Honghui Xu↗Amir M. Rahmani↗

arXiv:2606.25391v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) have achieved remarkable progress in audio perceptual tasks across individual acoustic layers, including speech, sound, and music. However, existing benchmarks predominantly evaluate these layers in isolation, overlooking the complex contextual relationships that arise when multiple acoustic sources co-occur in real-world auditory scenes. Real-world auditory interpretation requires Context-Aware Auditory Scene Understanding (CASU): the ability to comprehend the holistic scene by integrating sound layers. To evaluate this capability, we introduce the CASU benchmark, which assesses whether Audio LLMs can interpret auditory scenes composed of speech, acoustic events (e.g., announcements), and background environments (e.g., traffic), and reason about the logical relationships between these layers. We propose a scalable pipeline for constructing time-accurate, semi-synthetic audio streams by composing real-world scene sounds with synthetic speech. Building on this data, we design four tasks that probe scene understanding: contextual question answering, entity extraction from the scene, speaker role inference, and counterfactual reasoning where scene is manipulated. Experiments across multiple LALMs demonstrate that effective auditory scene understanding requires integration over all auditory layers, rather than reliance on speech or sound alone, underscoring the necessity of CASU for advancing complex audio understanding in LALMs.

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