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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Hierarchical GRU with Input-Conditioned Slot Queries for Ball Action Anticipation

We present a hierarchical model for ball action anticipation in football broadcast video. Given a 30-second observation window, the system predicts actions occurring in the subsequent 5-second window across 10 classes. A shared local Transformer encodes clip-level features within each 5-second sub-window; a GRU then aggregates temporal context across all sub-windows; finally, a Transformer decoder with K input-conditioned event slots decodes the anticipation target via three decoupled heads (objectness, class, temporal offset). We introduce frequency-reweighted Hungarian matching that systematically favours rare action classes, and Gaussian soft targets for temporal bin supervision. On the SoccerNet Ball Action Anticipation benchmark, our method achieves 17.91% mAP on the test server.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Fisher geometry reshapes the effect of incompatibility in multiparameter quantum estimation

arXiv:2606.11343v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multiparameter quantum estimation faces two fundamental obstacles: sloppiness, i.e., anisotropy of the quantum Fisher information matrix (QFIM) that renders some parameter directions insensitive, and incompatibility, the non-commutativity of optimal measurements for different parameters. The trade-off bound $C_T$ captures their joint impact on precision, but it has remained unclear how the distribution of incompatibility across parameter planes affects its overall cost. Here we separate the total amount of incompatibility from its location. We introduce a dimensionless quantity $G_n^{(F)}$ that measures the alignment between the incompatibility distribution and the eigenvalues of the QFIM, and show how the Frobenius scale of the incompatibility contribution factorizes. We obtain a bound and prove the incompatibility cost lies between this bound and a rank-dependent multiple thereof. We also prove that at fixed sloppiness, or equivalently fixed Fisher volume, concentrating incompatibility into a single parameter plane reduces the optimized trade-off cost because the Fisher geometry can then be reshaped to allocate more Fisher area to that plane. A qutrit $SU(2)$ encoding numerically confirms that states with larger incompatibility strength can nevertheless incur a smaller cost if the matching factor $G$ is sufficiently small. Our results establish that the distribution of incompatibility relative to the Fisher eigenbasis is a central diagnostic for multiparameter estimation, beyond the total incompatibility strength.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

EyeTheia: A Lightweight and Accessible Eye-Tracking Toolbox

We introduce EyeTheia, a lightweight and open deep learning pipeline for webcam-based gaze estimation, designed for browser-based experimental platforms and real-world cognitive and clinical research. EyeTheia enables real-time gaze tracking using only a standard laptop webcam, combining MediaPipe-based landmark extraction with a convolutional neural network inspired by iTracker and optional user-specific fine-tuning. We investigate two complementary strategies: adapting a model pretrained on mobile data and training the same architecture from scratch on a desktop-oriented dataset. Validation results on MPIIFaceGaze show comparable performance between both approaches prior to calibration, while lightweight user-specific fine-tuning consistently reduces gaze prediction error. We further evaluate EyeTheia in a realistic Dot-Probe task and compare it to the commercial webcam-based tracker SeeSo SDK. Results indicate strong agreement in left-right gaze allocation during stimulus presentation, despite higher temporal variability. Overall, EyeTheia provides a transparent and extensible solution for low-cost gaze tracking, suitable for scalable and reproducible experimental and clinical studies. The code, trained models, and experimental materials are publicly available.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Principled RL for Flow Matching Emerges from the Chunk-level Policy Optimization

Recent Progress in post-training flow matching for text-to-image (T2I) generation with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has demonstrated strong potential. However, it is hindered by a critical limitation: inaccurate advantage attribution. In this work, we argue that aggregating consecutive steps into a coherent 'chunk' and shifting the policy optimization paradigm from GRPO's step level to the chunk level can effectively mitigate the negative impact of this issue. Building on this insight, we propose Group Chunking Policy Optimization (GCPO), the first chunk-level reinforcement learning approach for post-training flow matching. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GCPO achieves superior performance on both standard T2I benchmarks and preference alignment, with up to 43% relative gains over GRPO, highlighting the promise of chunk-level policy optimization. The code is available on https://github.com/xingzhejun/GCPO.

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

Embedded Arena: Iterative Optimization via Hardware Feedback

arXiv:2606.16190v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Embedded devices from wildlife monitoring stations to clinical wearables require local AI inference due to latency, communication, or privacy constraints. Optimizing models for heterogeneous microcontrollers (MCUs) requires simultaneously satisfying hard physical constraints on memory, power, and temperature while preserving accuracy, a multidimensional optimization that is today performed manually by experts. We ask whether an LLM agent can autonomously navigate this complex, multi-turn pipeline guided by real hardware feedback, and introduce a hardware-in-the-loop agent arena in which the agent iteratively refines both model and firmware – compiling, flashing, and measuring on real hardware – to enable closed-loop optimization. Frontier models, including Claude Opus 4.7 and Gemini 3.1 Pro, fail entirely without hardware feedback (0% deployment success), whereas our hardware-in-the-loop formulation achieves the first successful deployment within three iterations and can surpass human expert results within seven. This agentic co-optimization achieves 250x compression for vision models with

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

Poster: EdgeCitadel – Hybrid NATS-MQTT Orchestration for Edge Multi-Agent Systems

arXiv:2606.14710v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Edge-resident AI agents increasingly span home servers, IoT hubs, laptops, and phones, yet their coordination stacks still assume cloud-style transports or a central relay. We present EdgeCitadel, an edge multi-agent orchestration platform built around a single NATS 2.10 server with the built-in MQTT adapter. The design combines MQTT connectivity for heterogeneous agents, JetStream-backed persistence and replay for backend services, direct peer delegation over a shared subject namespace, and a passive aggregator that visualizes and stores traffic without sitting on the delivery path. Our poster highlights the migration from MQTT relay prototypes (common in IoT communication) to the current hybrid architecture and demonstrates a working cross-device testbed spanning ARM64, x64, and Android clients.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

The impact of pre-stroke statin use on baseline corrected infarct volume and collateral perfusion

Stroke is a leading cause of disability and mortality worldwide, with ischaemic stroke the most prevalent type. Statins, used for cholesterol management, have demonstrated benefits in reducing stroke risk and improving outcomes in preclinical studies. However, the impact of pre-stroke statin use on stroke outcomes remain inconsistent. In this study, we aim to evaluate whether pre-stroke statin use is associated with greater volume of salvaged tissue and improved cerebral collateral perfusion. A retrospective analysis was conducted using data from 281 patients presenting with acute ischemic stroke to the John Hunter Hospital between May 2015 and May 2020. Patients were grouped based on pre-stroke statin use, and clinical variables, including infarct volume and collateral perfusion, were assessed. The primary outcome was salvage volume derived from baseline perfusion lesion volume minus infarct volume at follow-up. Collateral perfusion was measured by the hypoperfusion volume defined by delay time (DT)>6 seconds divided by the hypoperfusion volume defined by DT >2 seconds. Patients on statins at admission were significantly older and had more comorbidities. No significant association was found between pre-stroke statin use and salvage volume or collateral perfusion after adjusting for covariates. Larger initial infarct core was a significant predictor of salvage volume due to larger salvageable tissue volume at baseline. These findings indicate that pre-morbid statin use is not associated with larger salvage volume or improved cerebral collateral perfusion.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Quantum algorithm for dephasing of coupled systems: decoupling and IQP duality

arXiv:2601.06298v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Noise and decoherence are ubiquitous in the dynamics of quantum systems coupled to an external environment. In the regime where environmental correlations decay rapidly, the evolution of a subsytem is well described by a Lindblad quantum master equation. In this work, we introduce a quantum algorithm for simulating unital Lindbladian dynamics by sampling unitary quantum channels without extra ancillas. Using ancillary qubits we show that this algorithm allows approximating general Lindbladians as well. For interacting dephasing Lindbladians coupling two subsystems, we develop a decoupling scheme that reduces the circuit complexity of the simulation. This is achieved by sampling from a time-correlated probability distribution - determined by the evolution of one subsystem, which specifies the stochastic circuit implemented on the complementary subsystem. We demonstrate our approach by studying a model of bosons coupled to fermions via dephasing, which naturally arises from anharmonic effects in an electron-phonon system coupled to a bath. Our method enables tracing out the bosonic degrees of freedom, reducing part of the dynamics to sampling an IQP circuit. The sampled bitstrings then define a corresponding fermionic problem, which in the non-interacting case can be solved efficiently classically. We comment on the computational complexity of this class of dissipative problems, using the known fact that sampling from IQP circuits is believed to be difficult classically.

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

The Culture Funnel: You Can't Align What isn't in the Data

Current cultural alignment approaches focus on inference-time interventions, assuming models already contain sufficient cultural knowledge. We argue modern LLM pipelines suffer from a cultural data funnel. Using a multidimensional tagging framework across pretraining, fine-tuning, alignment, and reasoning datasets, we show explicit cultural signals decline sharply during post-training, while geographically concentrated, task-specialized data dominates. Multilinguality enhances geographic diversity of cultural knowledge but does not ensure balanced representation. Our tags improve downstream cultural benchmark performance, demonstrating that advances require shifting focus in training data pipelines. To facilitate future research, we release our culturally tagged dataset with 5.6M samples at https://huggingface.co/datasets/CohereLabs/CultureMarkers.

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

K-Forcing: Joint Next-K-Token Decoding via Push-Forward Language Modeling

Autoregressive (AR) language modeling is the dominant paradigm for text generation, yet its sequential token-by-token decoding makes inference memory-bound and inefficient. Existing acceleration approaches, such as speculative decoding and diffusion language models, can yield speedups under certain conditions but do not directly address high-load batch serving–the scenario most critical for industrial-scale deployment. We introduce K-Forcing, a push-forward language modeling paradigm for joint next-k-token decoding. K-Forcing distills an existing AR model into a conditional push-forward mapping–one that transforms independent uniform noise variables into a joint sample of multiple future tokens in a single forward pass. This design preserves fixed-length outputs, reuses the AR teacher backbone, and remains compatible with standard AR serving infrastructure. We train this mapping via progressive self-forcing distillation, which gradually expands the prediction window while enabling the student to closely match the sequence distribution of the AR teacher. We evaluate K-Forcing on LM1B and OpenWebText using a standard causal Transformer backbone. When aggressively configured to generate k = 4 tokens per forward pass, K-Forcing delivers approximately 2.4-3.5x speedup across different batch sizes, while incurring modest quality degradation relative to its AR teacher. As inference increasingly dominates the lifetime compute cost of modern LLMs, K-Forcing offers a promising route toward accelerating AR generation under real-world high-load deployment.

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

AgentCyberRange: Benchmarking Frontier AI Systems in Realistic Cyber Ranges

arXiv:2606.14295v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Frontier AI systems are increasingly capable of cybersecurity tasks, including codebase inspection, vulnerability detection, and exploitation. However, evaluating their offensive capabilities remains constrained by limited access to open, reproducible, multi-host cyber ranges. Existing public benchmarks capture isolated skills such as CTF solving, vulnerability reproduction, and exploit generation, but often abstract away realistic intrusion workflows: discovering exposed services, gaining a foothold, collecting internal information, and expanding compromise across hosts. This gap makes it difficult to observe emerging risks early, because frontier AI systems are rarely evaluated under realistic attack conditions. We introduce AgentCyberRange, the first open, multi-range infrastructure for measuring autonomous cyber attack capability in realistic cyber ranges. It combines 110 vulnerabilities across 15 real web applications and 8 enterprise-like cyber ranges with 156 internal hosts, plus Cage, a toolchain for execution, orchestration, result collection, and verification. The benchmark covers two core stages: web exploitation, where agents explore exposed applications and validate vulnerabilities, and post exploitation, where agents turn an initial foothold into broader internal compromise. We evaluate six frontier AI systems under matched prompts and budgets. GPT-5.5 with Codex performs best, solving 16.1% of web exploitation tasks and 31.7% of post-exploitation tasks; with more concrete hints, these rates increase to 33.0% and 46.3%. We also observe out-of-benchmark findings, including unknown vulnerabilities in popular projects, and payload mutation that bypasses host defenses. These results show that open cyber-range evaluation is necessary for observing emerging offensive capabilities under realistic and reproducible conditions.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Mem-World: Memory-Augmented Action-Conditioned World Models for Persistent Robot Manipulation

Action-conditioned world models have emerged as a promising paradigm for robot learning, offering a scalable alternative to costly real-world experimentation by generating action-consistent video rollouts. However, persistent world modeling remains challenging in manipulation: frequent end-effector occlusions and rapid wrist-camera motion make the current observation insufficient for predicting future views, causing models to forget or hallucinate scene details seen in earlier frames. Existing memory retrieval strategies often fail to identify informative history in dynamic manipulation scenarios. To address this limitation, we propose Mem-World, a memory-augmented multi-view action-conditioned world model. At its core, we present W-VMem, a 4D wrist-view-centered surfel-indexed memory that anchors historical observations to temporally evolving surface elements. By explicitly modeling when and where scene elements are observed, W-VMem enables geometry-aware retrieval of relevant history frames conditioned on future actions. During generation, relevant history frames are selected via surfel-based rendering and scoring, providing informative and non-redundant context for prediction. Extensive experiments show that Mem-World generates persistent rollouts in complex manipulation scenarios, enables more reliable policy evaluation than Ctrl-World, improving the Pearson correlation with real-world performance by 14.5\%, and supports effective policy improvement through synthetic data generation, increasing success rates from 58\% to 72\% on long-horizon tasks.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Exploiting Search in Symbolic Numeric Planning with Patterns

arXiv:2606.16329v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we present a procedure for numeric planning based on Symbolic Pattern Planning (SPP). Given a numeric planning problem $\Pi$, a pattern $\prec$ is a sequence of actions used to define a formula encoding the subsequences of $\prec$ executable from a starting state $S$. Cardellini, Giunchiglia, and Maratea (2024a) follow the Planning as Satisfiability approach by defining, at each step $n \ge 0$, a formula $\Pi^\prec_n$ in which $(i)$ the pattern $\prec$ is computed only for $n=0$ in the initial state $I$ of $\Pi$, and then exploited at each step $n$, $(ii)$ the starting state $S$ is set to $I$, and $(iii)$ the set $G$ of goals is required to hold in the last state that can be reached by one of the subsequences of $\prec$ concatenated $n$ times. The procedure begins with $n=0$, terminates as soon as $\Pi^\prec_n$ is satisfiable, and otherwise proceeds by incrementing $n$. In this paper, possibly at each step, $(i)$ we symbolically search for an intermediate state $P$ reachable from $I$, closer to a goal state, $(ii)$ dynamically recompute the pattern $\prec_h$ – to be used in the next step – in $P$, $(iii)$ refine the pattern $\prec_g$ used to reach $P$, and $(iv)$ start the new search from the state $S$ which can be either the initial state $I$ or the last computed intermediate state $P$, exploiting the computed patterns $\prec_g$ and $\prec_h$ to define the pattern $\prec$ to be used in the search. In particular, at each step, we define a formula $\Pi^{\prec}_{S,P}$ encoding the existence of a state $P'$ closer than $P$ to a goal state, with $P'$ reachable from the starting state $S$ when using the pattern $\prec$. We present different techniques for producing such formulas, each corresponding to a different strategy for exploring the search space. We prove their correctness and completeness, the latter under certain conditions.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Gradual Fine-Tuning for Flow Matching Models

arXiv:2601.22495v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fine-tuning flow matching models is a central challenge in settings with limited data, evolving distributions, or computational constraints. While recent work has produced significant advances, particularly in the area of reward-based fine-tuning, current methods fail to demonstrate both theoretical correctness as well as strong empirical results in terms of stability, efficiency, and diversity preservation. In this work, we propose Gradual Fine-Tuning (GFT), a simple yet principled annealing-based framework for fine-tuning flow generative models when only samples from the target distribution are available. For stochastic flows, GFT defines a temperature-controlled sequence of intermediate objectives that smoothly interpolate between the pretrained and target drifts, provably approaching the true target as the temperature approaches zero. We analytically demonstrate that sample generation after GFT can be made substantially more efficient with the use of arbitrary (e.g., optimal transport) couplings, as well as by utilizing few-step inference methods. Empirically, GFT significantly improves convergence stability, while maintaining or improving generation quality, training speed, and generation diversity compared to other fine-tuning methods. Our results position GFT as a simple yet theoretically grounded and practically effective alternative for scalable adaptation of flow matching models under distribution shift.

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

Temporal Motif-aware Graph Test-time Adaptation for OOD Blockchain Anomaly Detection

arXiv:2605.29526v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Ever-evolving transaction patterns have significantly hindered anomaly detection on emerging cryptocurrency blockchains due to the vast number of addresses and diverse anomalous behaviors. Recently, advanced Graph Anomaly Detection (GAD) approaches applied to blockchains have faced two critical challenges: adversarial pattern evolution by malicious actors and the out-of-distribution (OOD) problem caused by varied transaction semantics on blockchains. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework termed TEmporal Motif-aware Graph Test-Time Adaptation (TEMG-TTA). First, we comprehensively capture the 3-node temporal motif distribution of each active address using an efficient computational mechanism, enabling downstream temporal motif-aware graph learning. Second, we design a simple yet effective test-time adaptation strategy to facilitate the sharing of common patterns between training and testing graphs. Extensive experiments on 5 real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed TEMG-TTA outperforms state-of-the-art GAD approaches by an average of 54.88\%. A further case study on interpretable motif patterns reveals that TEMG-TTA explicitly characterizes the complex transaction patterns of anomalous addresses, thereby verifying the effectiveness of our technical designs. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/LuoXishuang0712/TEMG-TTA/.

16.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

THEOBROMA: an aggregated open database of 1.13 million natural products with per-compound license auditing, three-tier classification, and stereochemistry-aware deduplication

Natural products remain one of the most productive sources of pharmacologically active compounds for drug discovery, yet the current open aggregator landscape attributes licenses at database rather than compound granularity, with consequences that have become tangible as the field grows. A recent relicensing event in one constituent source (the September 2024 transition of the Natural Products Atlas to CC BY-NC 4.0) demonstrates how database-level licensing propagates across an aggregate and motivates the per-compound audit framework presented here. The same peer cohort separately leaves classification provenance and stereoisomer-family relations coarser than either layer warrants. THEOBROMA, accessible at url{https://theobroma.l3s.uni-hannover.de}, integrates 1{,}133{,}004 natural products from 29 open sources under a per-compound license audit that resolves each compound's license tier across all attesting sources under a most-restrictive-wins rule, identifying 900{,}170 compounds (79.4%) under open-use licenses and exposing the per-source attestation chain and resolved tier through a dedicated audit endpoint and a query-time license filter. A three-tier classification stratifies 89.3% coverage into 35.1% curated, 43.9% high-confidence inferred, and 10.3% exploratory tiers, with 486{,}215 stereoisomer families preserved by full 27-character InChIKey deduplication and exposed via a dedicated texttt{/api/stereoisomers/} endpoint and a radial-family display. Per-compound license provenance is the primary differentiator. Classification stratification and stereoisomer-family exposure add finer-grained access to two related axes, supporting license-compatible virtual screening and isomer-specific bioactivity analysis at corpus scale. As an evolving open resource, THEOBROMA pairs continuous pipeline maintenance with interactive geographic, taxonomic, and chemical-space exploration.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Paired plasma and EV-enriched plasma proteomics reveal nonredundant sepsis-associated host-response signatures in critical illness

Background: Plasma proteomics may identify host-response signatures in sepsis, but it is unclear whether extracellular vesicle (EV)-enriched plasma provides distinct or redundant information compared with plasma. We compared paired plasma and EV-enriched plasma proteomes in critically ill patients with sepsis and critically ill non-sepsis controls (CINS). Methods: In this prospective observational study, paired plasma and EV-enriched plasma samples were analyzed from 56 critically ill adults, including 40 patients with sepsis and 16 CINS patients. Protein abundance was quantified using liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry. Analyses compared proteomic depth, protein overlap, global concordance between compartments, and differential protein abundance between CINS and sepsis. Exploratory Gene Ontology enrichment was performed as a supplementary analysis. Results: EV-enriched plasma expanded proteomic detection, identifying 2,476 filtered proteins compared with 506 in plasma. Only 386 proteins were detected in both compartments, while 2,090 were unique to EV-enriched plasma and 120 were unique to plasma. Among shared proteins, plasma and EV-enriched plasma showed modest global concordance across critically ill patients (Spearman coeff = 0.322, p = 9.19 x 10^-11), with similar findings in sepsis alone. Differential abundance analysis identified 11 sepsis-associated proteins in plasma and 22 in EV-enriched plasma. Only SAA1, SAA2, and IGFBP6 were significant in both compartments. Exploratory pathway analysis supported acute-phase and inflammatory enrichment in plasma sepsis-associated proteins, while EV-enriched signals were directionally plausible but did not meet prespecified FDR thresholds. Conclusion: Plasma and EV-enriched plasma proteomics capture related but nonredundant sepsis-associated host-response information in critically ill patients.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Quantum codes and optimal pure quantum $(r,\delta)$-LRCs via the MP construction

arXiv:2606.14253v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we employ MP codes whose defining matrices are $\tau$-optimal defining ($\tau$-OD) matrices to construct new quantum codes and quantum $(r,\delta)$-LRCs. Specifically, we report the following results: We establish a unified $\tau$-monomial decomposition theorem for invertible self-adjoint matrices over finite fields of arbitrary characteristic, which generalizes the result in "Quantum codes using the $\tau$-OD MP construction" where the characteristic was required to be odd. Based on this theorem, we prove the existence of $\tau$-OD matrices over $\mathbb{F}_{q^2}$ for any characteristic and demonstrate that there exist several new infinite families of $\tau$-OD matrices over $\mathbb{F}_{q^2}$ of characteristic $2$. As an application of MP codes involving $\tau$-OD matrices, we construct several infinite families of quantum codes with flexible parameters. Within this framework, we present $222$ record-breaking quantum codes that surpass the best-known records maintained in Grassl's database. We propose two effective schemes for constructing optimal pure quantum $(r,\delta)$-LRCs via MP codes. Accordingly, we construct four new infinite families of optimal pure quantum $(r,\delta)$-LRCs with flexible parameters. Notably, we report an interesting phenomenon by exhibiting $30$ optimal pure quantum $(r,\delta)$-LRCs derived from our framework; that is, there exist quantum codes that are not only optimal pure quantum $(r,\delta)$-LRCs but also, according to Grassl's database, best-known, optimal, or record-breaking quantum codes. To the best of our knowledge, the new discovery that quantum codes are simultaneously optimal pure quantum $(r,\delta)$-LRCs and record-breaking quantum codes has not been previously reported in the literature.

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

A New k-Space Model for Non-Cartesian Fourier Imaging

For the past several decades, it has been popular to reconstruct Fourier imaging data using model-based approaches that can easily incorporate physical constraints and advanced regularization/machine learning priors. The most common modeling approach is to represent the continuous image as a linear combination of shifted "voxel" basis functions. Although well-studied and widely-deployed, this voxel-based model is associated with longstanding limitations, including high computational costs, slow convergence, and a propensity for artifacts. In this work, we reexamine this model from a fresh perspective, identifying new issues that may have been previously overlooked (including undesirable approximation, wrap-around, and nullspace characteristics). Our insights motivate us to propose a new model that is more resilient to the limitations (old and new) of the previous approach. Specifically, the new model is based on a Fourier-domain basis expansion rather than the standard image-domain voxel-based approach. Illustrative results, which are presented in the context of non-Cartesian MRI reconstruction, demonstrate that the new model enables improved image quality (reduced artifacts) and/or reduced computational complexity (faster computations and improved convergence).

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Efficient, Robust, and Anti-Collusion Fingerprinting of Image Diffusion Models

Model fingerprinting, embedding user-specific identifiers (fingerprints) into generated outputs, has recently emerged as a popular solution to protect the intellectual property rights (IPR) of generative text-to-image (T2I) models and prevent unauthorized redistribution. In this work, we reveal a previously unexplored systematic vulnerability in existing generative model fingerprinting methods: they lack robustness against collusion attacks, where multiple attackers combine their models to remove or obscure the fingerprints. To address this issue, we take the first step towards a robust fingerprinting method for T2I models with anti-collusion capabilities. The proposed method encodes strings of bits, namely fingerprints, into the coefficients of a personalized normalization module (PNM) incorporated into T2I models, so that fingerprints can be reliably recovered from any generated image. To defend against collusion attacks and prevent unauthorized model redistribution, we introduce an anti-collusion mechanism based on lossless function-invariant parameter transformations. This mechanism significantly degrades the image generation quality of colluded models, making them effectively unusable. Moreover, our method allows developers to efficiently create multiple copies of fingerprinted T2I models by reparameterizing the PNM without the need for retraining. We also introduce a worst-case optimization strategy to improve robustness against model-level attacks. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves high fidelity and robustness across multiple T2I image generation and editing tasks, with fingerprint extraction accuracy exceeding 99.5%. Compared with existing methods, our method demonstrates, for the first time, a notable proactive robustness to collusion attacks by significantly increasing the FID of colluded models.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

DF-ExpEnse: Diffusion Filtered Exploration for Sample Efficient Finetuning

arXiv:2606.19656v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A natural recipe for intelligent robotic decision-making is initializing from pretrained generative control policies, which have summarized offline experience, and adapting them to self-collected online experience. We present DF-ExpEnse, an exploration technique that improves the quality of online experience collection, thus increasing finetuning sample-efficiency. DF-ExpEnse leverages the multimodal modeling capabilities of the generative control policy to create an expressive and tractably evaluatable candidate set. It then utilizes an ensemble of critics to identify the action that best balances quality with high exploration interest. In fleet settings, DF-ExpEnse further enables cross-agent communication to facilitate collaborative exploration as a group. DF-ExpEnse can be seamlessly integrated with existing strategies that finetune pretrained generative control policies via reinforcement learning. We experimentally validate consistent sample-efficiency benefits through DF-ExpEnse across a variety of manipulation and locomotion tasks, compared to default finetuning and alternative action selection schemes. Project can be found at https://df-expense.github.io.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Discrete optimal transport is a strong audio adversarial attack

arXiv:2509.14959v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper, we investigate discrete optimal transport (DOT) as a black-box attack against modern automatic speaker verification (ASV) and anti-spoofing countermeasure (CM) systems. Our attack operates as a post-processing distribution-alignment step. Frame-level WavLM embeddings of generated speech (or another person speech) are aligned to an unpaired bona fide speech pool using entropic optimal transport and a top-k barycentric projection, followed by neural vocoding. Unlike gradient-based attacks, the proposed method requires no access to model parameters, gradients, or training data. Experiments on ASVspoof2019 and ASVspoof5 demonstrate that DOT attack substantially increases CM EER and substantially degrades ASV performance across multiple spoofing attacks. The attack transfers across datasets and remains effective after CM fine-tuning. Analysis using speaker similarity, Fréchet Audio Distance, and visualization of embedding distributions suggests that DOT succeeds by shifting source speech toward bona fide regions of the representation space rather than by maximizing speaker similarity. These results indicate that optimal-transport-based distribution alignment represents a previously underexplored attack vector for contemporary ASV and anti-spoofing systems.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Implementation of Licensed Plate Detection and Noise Removal in Image Processing

Authors:

Car license plate recognition system is an image processing technology used to identify vehicles by capturing their Car License Plates. The car license plate recognition technology is also known as automatic number-plate recognition, automatic vehicle identification, car license plate recognition or optical character recognition for cars. In Malaysia, as the number of vehicle is increasing rapidly nowadays, a pretty great number of vehicle on the road has brought about the considerable demands of car license plate recognition system. Car license plate recognition system can be implemented in electronic parking payment system, highway toll-fee system, traffic surveillance system and as police enforcement tools. Additionally, car license plate recognition system technology also has potential to be combined with various techniques in other different fields like biology, aerospace and so on to achieve the goal of solving some specialized problems.

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

Agentic AI for Bilevel Long-Term Optimization of Policy-Driven Physical Layer Systems

arXiv:2606.24416v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Network operators' changing policies, service requirements, and stringent real-time constraints render existing methods designed with fixed objectives and constraints ineffective. This paper presents Agentic long-term performance optimization (Agentic-LTPO), a nested bilevel optimization framework that can be applied to adaptive physical layer problem configuration. The key idea is to employ agentic AI to generate upper-level configurations in a bilevel optimization structure, where evolving operator policies, environment summaries, and historical experiences are translated into structured lower-level optimization problem configurations. The lower level solves the problems with updated configurations for real-time physical-layer decisions. Considering cell-free MIMO beamforming as a use case, we embody Agentic-LTPO by designing a new multi-agent decision process with retrieval-augmented experience-based verification in the upper level, together with a closed-form beamformer in the lower level. Experiments demonstrate that Agentic-LTPO exhibits strong adaptability to dynamic operator policies and effectively enhances the system's long-term performance by 57.2% compared to traditional methods.

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

BrainDINO: A Brain MRI Foundation Model for Generalizable Clinical Representation Learning

Brain MRI underpins a wide range of neuroscientific and clinical applications, yet most learning-based methods remain task-specific and require substantial labeled data. Here we show that a single self-supervised representation can generalize across heterogeneous brain MRI endpoints. We trained BrainDINO, a self-distilled foundation model, on approximately 6.6 million unlabeled axial slices from 20 datasets encompassing broad variation in population, disease, and acquisition setting. Using a frozen encoder with lightweight task heads, BrainDINO supported transfer across tumor segmentation, neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental conditions classification, brain age estimation, post-stroke temporal prediction, molecular status prediction, MRI sequence classification, and survival modeling. Across tasks and supervision regimes, BrainDINO consistently equaled or exceeded natural-image and MRI-specific self-supervised baselines, with particularly strong advantages under label scarcity. Representation analyses further showed anatomically organized and pathology-sensitive feature structure in the absence of task-specific supervision. Our findings indicate that large-scale slice-wise self-supervised learning can yield a unified brain MRI representation that supports diverse neuroimaging tasks without volumetric pretraining or full-network fine-tuning, establishing a scalable foundation for robust and data-efficient brain imaging analysis. Code is available at https://github.com/mclwu22/BrainDINO