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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Muse Spark Safety & Preparedness Report

arXiv:2606.12429v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Muse Spark is the latest large language model developed by Meta. In this report, we first present evaluations for catastrophic risk domains under Meta's Advanced AI Scaling Framework, along with the evidence that informed our launch decision. We then discuss additional considerations, such as Muse Spark's broader content safety and behavioral profile, that are relevant to overall safety but fall outside the catastrophic risk domains governed by the Framework. Our preparedness results covering Chemical and Biological, Cybersecurity, and Loss of Control risks assess Muse Spark's deployment within Meta AI as presenting acceptable levels of residual risks under our Advanced AI Scaling Framework. We conducted a broad set of evaluations targeting dual-use and high-risk capabilities across these catastrophic risk domains. Those evaluations identified elevated risks prior to mitigations, with Chemical and Biological capabilities assessed as likely reaching the "high risk" category under the Advanced AI Scaling Framework before safeguards were applied. We have implemented a multi-layered set of mitigations that address the identified risks, and Muse Spark demonstrates state-of-the-art refusal across a range of benchmarks related to hazardous workflows in chemistry and biology. We therefore release Muse Spark as the underlying model of Meta AI.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

NarrativeWorldBench: A Frontier-Saturated Benchmark and a Latent World Model for Long-Horizon Co-Creative Audio Drama

Long-form serialized audio drama, with arcs that run for 200 to 800 episodes, is a major creative medium and a setting where frontier large language models (LLMs) fail. We benchmark 21 models, spanning classical, fine-tuned, open-frontier, closed-frontier, and reasoning tiers, on a uniform set of structural narrative metrics. All closed-frontier systems saturate at a plot-beat F1 in the band [0.78, 0.81] and collapse by about -0.20 F1 at horizon h=200. We introduce NarrativeWorldBench, an open benchmark of nine narrative-structure metrics evaluated across horizons h in {10, 20, 50, 100, 200}, with cross-lingual evaluation across four Indic languages (Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi). We introduce N-VSSM, a Narrative Variational State-Space Model that maintains a structured 256-dimensional latent world state over more than 200 episodes via a Mamba-2 backbone with an event-conditioned posterior and an 8B decoder. N-VSSM holds plot-beat F1 >= 0.84 across all horizons at 4x lower compute than the closed-frontier band. A learned Cultural Transfer Function lifts cross-language fidelity by +0.20 to +0.23 Likert points. In a within-subjects writer study (n = 12 professional authors, 240 trials), N-VSSM is preferred over Claude Opus 4.5 on long-arc consistency 71% of the time and rated +1.3 Likert points higher on controllability.

03.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-14

Robust integration of weakly anchored spatial multi-omics

Spatial multi-omics holds great promise for dissecting complex biological processes, though inherent technical constraints continue to limit its widespread adoption. Currently, most studies therefore measure distinct omics features on separate tissue sections, necessitating spatial diagonal integration. An emerging practical solution is to leverage hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) images as an integration anchor, given their ubiquity, low cost, and compatibility across tissue preparations. However, this anchor is frequently compromised in real-world settings by variations in H&E staining style, absence of reliable histological landmarks, and mismatches in spatial resolutions across omics modalities. To address this, we introduce SpaWeaver, a computational framework that couples a pathology foundation model with a graph Transformer and a latent feature aligner module, providing a highly robust solution for weakly anchored spatial omics data diagonal integration. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SpaWeaver exhibits superior robustness against isolated or synergistic weak-anchoring factors. The spatial multi-omics profiles generated by SpaWeaver link molecular features originally separated on two sections, unlocking diverse downstream analyses once exclusive to co-assayed spatial multi-omics data, including niche-aware cell-cell communication inference and multi-omics resolved cell state. In this study, it unveils tumor-distance-dependent fibroblast-CD4+ T-cell signaling in human colon adenocarcinoma and identifies a hypoxic glycolytic tumor state with pyknotic nuclei in human ovarian cancer. Overall, our approach bridges readily accessible single-omics measurements across weakly anchored tissue sections, enabling unified spatial multi-omics characterization and system-level tissue analysis.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Strategic PAC Learnability via Geometric Definability

arXiv:2605.13426v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Strategic classification studies learning settings in which individuals can modify their features, at a cost, in order to influence the classifier's decision. A central question is how the sample complexity of the induced (strategic) hypothesis class depends on the complexities of the underlying hypothesis class and the cost structure governing feasible manipulations. Prior work has shown that in several natural settings, such as linear classifiers with norm costs, the induced complexity can be controlled. We begin by showing that such guarantees fail in general - even in simple cases: there exist hypothesis classes of VC dimension $1$ on the real line such that, even under the simplest interval neighborhoods, the induced class has infinite VC dimension. Thus, strategic behavior can turn an easy learning problem into a non-learnable one. To overcome this, we introduce structure via a geometric definability assumption: both the hypothesis class and the cost-induced neighborhood relation can be defined by first-order formulas over $\mathbb{R}_{\mathtt{exp}}$. Intuitively, this means that hypotheses and costs can be described using arithmetic operations, exponentiation, logarithms, and comparisons. This captures a broad range of natural classes and cost functions, including $\ell_p$ distances, Wasserstein distance, and information-theoretic divergences. Under this assumption, we prove that learnability is preserved, with sample complexity controlled by the complexity of the defining formulas.

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

Temporal Difference Learning for Diffusion Models

Diffusion models are typically trained with objectives that focus on local denoising targets at individual time steps (or adjacent pairs), which do not enforce consistency between predictions along the denoising trajectory. This lack of cross-time consistency can degrade performance, especially for few-step samplers. We introduce a temporal difference (TD) objective that penalizes inconsistency of the model's multi-step progress along the denoising path. By reformulating the diffusion process as a Markov reward process and casting denoising as a policy evaluation problem in reinforcement learning, we derive a unified TD approach that applies to both discrete- and continuous-time diffusion formulations. We further propose a principled sample-based reweighting method that stabilizes training. Empirically, we show that using our TD training can significantly improve sample quality measured by FID, with stronger advantages when the number of sampling steps is small, highlighting its practical utility under low-computation-budget scenarios. We provide ablation studies to justify our design choices, including pairwise loss reweighting, regularization weight, and one-step stride. Overall, our TD approach can be a general drop-in that enforces cross-time consistency and improves generation quality across different diffusion generative models.

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

Occ-VLM: Occupancy Grounded Vision Language Model for Indoor Scene Understanding

Recently, vision-language models (VLMs) have made significant progress in 3D scene understanding, driving advances in applications such as embodied intelligence and robotic vision. However, existing approaches typically either rely directly on explicit 3D inputs (e.g., point clouds or RGB-D sequences), or introduce an additional 3D geometry encoder to derive 3D-aware visual tokens from 2D images. Such designs structurally decouple 3D geometric perception from the rich 2D semantics learned via vision-language pre-training, hindering the development of a unified 3D vision-language representation. In this work, we propose Occ-VLM, a novel framework for 3D scene understanding that operates purely on posed RGB images and employs a single 2D vision encoder. Specifically, Occ-VLM reconstructs 3D scene occupancy as an auxiliary geometric prior, which is utilized to spatially associate foreground 2D tokens with 3D space. These tokens are then decoded by a Large Language Model (LLM) for unified scene understanding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Occ-VLM achieves both accurate geometric perception and robust vision-language reasoning: it attains state-of-the-art performance on multi-view occupancy prediction, while performing on par with 3D-input VLMs on 3D Visual Question Answering (VQA) and 3D dense captioning benchmarks.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

From Memorization to Parameter Interference: How Overtraining Experts Harms Model Merging

arXiv:2506.14126v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern deep learning is increasingly characterized by the use of open-weight foundation models that can be fine-tuned on specialized datasets. This has led to a proliferation of expert models and adapters, often shared via platforms like HuggingFace and AdapterHub. Model merging has recently emerged as an effective way to leverage these existing resources, enabling the composition of capabilities from different model checkpoints. A natural pipeline has thus formed to harness the benefits of transfer learning and amortize sunk training costs: models are pre-trained on general data, fine-tuned on specific tasks, and then multiple checkpoints are merged to obtain a more capable model. A prevailing assumption is that improvements at one stage of this pipeline propagate downstream, leading to gains at subsequent steps. In this work, we challenge that assumption by examining how expert fine-tuning affects model merging. We show that long fine-tuning of experts that optimizes for their individual performance leads to degraded merging performance across vision and language modalities, multiple model scales, and both fully fine-tuned and LoRA-adapted models. We trace this degradation to the memorization of a small set of difficult examples that dominate late fine-tuning steps. This causes negative parameter interference and encodes knowledge that is forgotten during merging. Finally, we demonstrate that task-dependent aggressive early stopping strategies can significantly improve model merging performance.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Quantum Dynamics from Lax Pair Theory: A Reconstruction from Spectrum Preservation

arXiv:2606.19664v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We reconstruct unitary quantum dynamics from a minimal axiomatic foundation built on Hilbert-space observables and isospectral evolution. The only dynamical assumption is that physical time evolution is a continuous one-parameter flow of Hermitian observables that preserves their spectra, i.e. the possible outcomes of measurement. We show that this assumption is already sufficient to force the Lax form of quantum dynamics. The Heisenberg equation, the time-dependent and time-independent Schrödinger equations, conservation laws, and good quantum numbers then follow as theorems rather than postulates. In this formulation, Lax pair theory supplies the missing dynamical bridge between the measurement structure of a Hilbert space and standard quantum evolution: the Hamiltonian is not assumed, but emerges as the generator required for an isospectral observable flow.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Blind Dexterous Grasping via Real2Sim2Real Tactile Policy Learning

arXiv:2606.11767v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Blind grasping with a dexterous hand is a crucial manipulation capability. Nevertheless, learning such tactile-only policies for real robots remains challenging due to the tactile sim-to-real gap and the limited expressiveness of sparse tactile signals. To bridge this gap, we propose a framework for tactile-only blind grasping that is deployable on a physical multi-fingered robotic hand. Our approach combines three key components. First, we introduce a Real2Sim tactile calibration pipeline that constructs a contact-calibrated digital-twin simulator capable of reproducing real tactile signals. Second, we improve the expressiveness of sparse tactile observations using a layout-aware tactile encoder, which incorporates sensor-geometry priors through self-supervised pretraining. Third, to improve generalization to unseen objects, we train object-specific reinforcement-learning experts in the calibrated simulator and aggregate their successful grasp trajectories into a tactile-conditioned Diffusion Policy. We evaluate our method on a physical LEAP Hand equipped with distributed tactile sensing across 10 seen and 10 unseen objects. The deployed policy achieves a 27\% real-world grasp success rate across all 20 objects, without real-world grasping demonstrations or visual input. Simulation ablations show that layout-aware tactile pretraining improves grasping performance, while sensing-level evaluations confirm that Real2Sim calibration increases the consistency of tactile contact events between simulation and hardware. Together, these results suggest that contact-event calibration, geometry-aware tactile representation learning, and diffusion-based policy aggregation provide an effective path toward tactile-only blind grasping on real dexterous robotic hands. Project page:Dex-Blind-Grasp.github.io.

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

Agent Skill Evaluation and Evolution: Frameworks and Benchmarks

The growth of agent skills has transformed how agentic systems are built, evaluated, and deployed. As skill libraries continue to scale, rigorous evaluation becomes critical to ensuring their utility, quality, and safety in real-world applications. Consequently, the field is undergoing an emerging paradigm shift from isolated skill creation to automated, evaluation-driven skill evolution. In this survey, we systematically examine the landscape of skill evolution and evaluation beyond foundational skill creation. We categorize evolution into four distinct paradigms, spanning execution feedback, trajectory distillation, compression, and reinforcement learning, showing how each element contributes to improving skill utility and reliability. We also provide an analysis of six skill-centric benchmark categories, identifying structural gaps in benchmark coverage, trade-offs, and metric richness to advance skill research. Finally, we identify open directions for building skill ecosystems that are generalizable, efficient, and verifiably safe. The project URL is https://github.com/Cassie07/AgentSkill_Survey

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Modelling the decadal expansion of West Nile virus in Italy: the role of climatic, anthropogenic, and macroecological drivers

Abstract BACKGROUND West Nile virus (WNV) is a growing health burden in Italy. Anticipating human infection risk is hampered by the pathogen's complex ecology, highlighting the need for comprehensive early-warning tools. AIM We aimed to model municipal-level WNV risk in Italy and characterize its decadal expansion in Italy, providing a comprehensive ecological understanding of viral emergence. METHODS We applied a machine learning framework to annual human WNV case data from 2014 to 2024. The model integrated a suite of environmental, socio-economic, and macroecological predictors to generate risk projections. We evaluated the model's performance through multiple validation settings. We also performed an anticipation test for the 2025 epidemic season, using 2024 environmental data to assess the model's predictive accuracy against observed 2025 human cases. RESULTS Our model achieved robust performance (True Skill Statistic > 0.4) and captured WNV progressive expansion from 184 predicted positive municipalities in 2014 to 2,012 in 2024 (an 11-fold increase in 11 years). Seasonal minimum temperature was the primary risk driver, followed by monitoring year and population density, indicating active spatial spread. Environmental suitability consistently preceded clinical detection. Municipalities with cases in 2023-2024 exhibited significantly higher predicted suitability during 2018-2022 than those without cases (average risk 0.58 vs 0.20). Our model successfully identified emerging risk hotspots along the Adriatic coast and southern Italy before the official human spillover of 2025. CONCLUSION Embedding macroecological drivers into WNV risk modelling provides an improved understanding of drivers of rapid WNV expansion. Our model enables proactive risk mapping, surveillance efforts, and targeted public health measures.

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

What Semantics Survive the Connector? Diagnosing VLM-to-DiT Alignment in Video Editing

Flow matching based video generative models have been increasingly relying on prepended Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to handle complex, instruction-based video editing. The prevailing assumption underlying this paradigm is that a connector module can seamlessly align the VLM's rich multi-modal reasoning with the original text embedding space of DiTs. However, we hypothesize that this alignment acts as a severe semantic bottleneck, degrading fine-grained structural variables. Verifying this is challenging, as end-to-end evaluations conflate alignment failures with generation errors, and natural datasets lack disentangled annotations. To rigorously investigate this, we propose a controlled data processing pipeline based on video composition that results in TRACE-Edit, a diagnostic dataset focusing on relation-based editing. Leveraging this dataset, we propose a comprehensive diagnostic protocol to analyze two important designs of meta-query and connector in the existing video editing models. Systematic evaluation of four representative model cases reveals that fine-grained structural semantics can be severely degraded during alignment. Our findings overturn the assumption of lossless semantic transfer, identifying the VLM-to-DiT alignment as a major bottleneck and providing a new diagnostic foundation for future multi-modal alignment architectures.

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

DifFRACT: Diffusion Feature Reconstruction and Attribution for Circuit Tracing

Mechanistic interpretability seeks to explain neural network behavior by decomposing model computations into interpretable features and circuits. While transcoder-based circuit tracing has recently enabled detailed causal analyses of large language models, multimodal diffusion transformers for image generation remain comparatively opaque. We still lack tools for understanding how semantic information propagates across denoising steps and how text and image representations interact within double-stream MM-DiT architectures. Existing methods provide only partial insight: attention maps expose a limited view of token interactions, while sparse autoencoders can discover interpretable features but do not directly reveal how these features are transformed and composed through nonlinear MLP layers. In this work, we extend transcoder-based circuit tracing to multimodal diffusion transformers. We train timestep-conditioned transcoders that faithfully approximate the input-output behavior of MLP sublayers in FLUX.1[schnell]. By replacing MLPs with transcoders and linearizing the remaining computation, we obtain exact feature-to-feature attribution and recover compact, interpretable circuits. Empirically, our transcoders match or slightly outperform sparse autoencoders on the sparsity-faithfulness tradeoff. The resulting circuits reveal mechanisms underlying attribute binding and cross-stream semantic propagation, and provide causal explanations for systematic generation errors. Moreover, circuit-guided interventions are substantially more precise and effective than standard SAE-based steering. Our results demonstrate that transcoder-based circuit analysis is feasible for state-of-the-art diffusion transformers and provides a powerful framework for understanding and controlling multimodal generative models. The code is available at https://github.com/Artalmaz31/DifFRACT

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

RepSelect: Robust LLM Unlearning via Representation Selectivity

Making large language models (LLMs) deeply forget specific knowledge and values without sacrificing general capabilities remains a central challenge in unlearning. However, current methods are easily reversed by fine-tuning or few-shot prompting, suggesting their forgetting is only shallow. We identify the root cause. Existing methods target representations shared with both the retain set and the subspace recovered by a fine-tuning attacker, making unlearning both disruptive to general capabilities and easy to reverse. We propose RepSelect (Representation Selectivity), isolates forget-set-specific representations by collapsing top principal components of weight gradients before each update, leaving general capabilities intact while limiting what fine-tuning can recover. We evaluate across two forget categories, biohazardous knowledge and abusive tendencies, and four model families spanning dense and Mixture-of-Experts architectures (Llama 3, Qwen 3.5, Gemma 4 E4B, DeepSeek V2 Lite). Compared to five popular baselines (GradDiff, NPO, SimNPO, RMU, UNDIAL), RepSelect achieves a 4-50x larger reduction in post-relearning answer accuracy than the strongest baseline, and is near-perfectly robust to few-shot prompting attacks. Targeting selective representations is thus an important step towards deep and robust LLM forgetting.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Latent Thought Flow: Efficient Latent Reasoning in Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.16222v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly rely on intermediate reasoning, yet explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) suffers from a linguistic space bottleneck: each thought must be decoded into tokens, causing high inference overhead. Latent reasoning moves deliberation into continuous space, but existing methods mostly learn deterministic or reward-maximizing paths, lacking a principled way to allocate probability across trajectories with different correctness and costs. We propose Latent Thought Flow (LTF), which models reasoning as variable-length continuous trajectories and trains a sampler to match a reward-induced posterior over answer quality and computation cost. We instantiate this with a continuous GFlowNet using stochastic latent transitions. To handle sparse answer supervision, we introduce an Entropy-Weighted Subtrajectory Balance objective for intermediate rewards and a reference-prior regularizer to anchor exploration. Experiments under finetuning and transfer learning settings show that LTF outperforms explicit CoT and latent reasoning baselines, improving accuracy by 9.5% while reducing reasoning length by 27.2% on average compared with strong latent reasoning baselines.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Revisiting Outage for Edge Inference Systems

arXiv:2504.03686v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: One of the key missions of sixth-generation (6G) mobile networks is to deploy large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) models at the network edge to provide remote-inference services for edge devices. The resultant platform, known as edge inference, will support a wide range of Internet-of-Things applications, such as autonomous driving, industrial automation, and augmented reality. Given the mission-critical and time-sensitive nature of these tasks, it is essential to design edge inference systems that are both reliable and capable of meeting stringent end-to-end (E2E) latency constraints. Existing studies, which primarily focus on communication reliability as characterized by channel outage probability, may fail to guarantee E2E performance, specifically in terms of E2E inference accuracy and latency. To address this limitation, we propose a theoretical framework that introduces and mathematically characterizes the inference outage (InfOut) probability, which quantifies the likelihood that the E2E inference accuracy falls below a target threshold. Under an E2E latency constraint, this framework establishes a fundamental tradeoff between communication overhead (i.e., uploading more sensor observations) and inference reliability as quantified by the InfOut probability. To find a tractable way to optimize this tradeoff, we derive accurate surrogate functions for InfOut probability by applying a Gaussian approximation to the distribution of the received discriminant gain. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed design over conventional communication-centric approaches in terms of E2E inference reliability.

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

QueryMarket: Cost-Aware Online Active Learning in Data Markets

arXiv:2606.17805v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Data acquisition is a major bottleneck for learning in real-time streams: analysts must decide on the fly which labels to purchase while respecting a rolling budget. However, existing online active learning rarely unifies pricing, information gain, and rolling budget constraints under concept drift. We introduce QueryMarket, a market-inspired framework that queries each incoming data point based on its estimated utility to the model and its price. Within this framework, we propose OVBAL (online variance-based active learning), which integrates data pricing with information-driven selection by estimating each sample's marginal utility via a D-optimality criterion with exponential forgetting and executing cost-aware purchases under rolling budget constraints. OVBAL yields a simple, fully online decision rule that adapts to nonstationary streams and heterogeneous label costs. Experiments on synthetic data and a real-world solar power generation forecasting task show that OVBAL is particularly effective under seller-centric pricing and yields a more favorable long-run error-cost trade-off in the real-world task under both pricing schemes.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

TNODEV: Toolbox for Neural ODE Verification

arXiv:2606.16567v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural ordinary differential equations (neural ODE) have started to appear in safety critical settings such as continuous-time controllers for cyber-physical systems and classifiers integrated into automated decision pipelines, raising the question of whether their behavior can be formally verified. Existing tools dedicated to neural ODE provide only a single reachability call without iterative input set refinement, limiting the precision of their verdicts to whatever one reachability call can deliver. We present TNODEV, the first sound formal verifier for neural ODE that integrates a falsification checker, a fast interval-based reachability backend based on continuous-time mixed monotonicity, a verification and refinement loop with three input-set splitting heuristics, and a parallel scheduler in a single end-to-end pipeline. TNODEV supports safe-set inclusion verification on pure neural ODE, neural ODE in closed loop with a neural network controller and general neural ODE (GNODE), with the safe set specified either as an interval or as the half-space intersection induced by a target classification label. We evaluate TNODEV on a range of benchmarks across safe-set inclusion and classification-robustness properties, including a direct reachability comparison against NNV~2.0 and CORA and a verification comparison against NNV2.0 on MNIST general neural ODE classifiers.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Do We Really Need Diffusion? A Fast U-Net for Paired Medical Image Translation

Magnetic resonance imaging-signal fat fraction (MRI-SFF) quantifies tissue fat and serves as an established biomarker for metabolic and musculoskeletal disorders. The acquisition requires, however, specialized MRI sequences, which are not available routinely. We investigate whether SFF can be estimated from widely available T2-weighted (T2w) MRI via image-to-image translation (I2I). We further compare a lightweight 4-level U-Net to a state-of-the-art Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM) using a dataset of 230 048 paired 2D images (183 517 train, 23 621 val, 22 910 test) from the German National Cohort (NAKO). Both models clearly outperform the identity baseline (Pearson correlation r = 0.769, mean absolute error MAE = 0.070 +/- 0.054), which confirms that the models learn a non-trivial cross-modal mapping. Interestingly, the lightweight U-Net outperforms the DDPM in both correlation (r = 0.975 vs. 0.962) and error (MAE = 0.014 +/- 0.015 vs. 0.019 +/- 0.019), while reducing inference time by a factor of 208 (25.2 ms vs. 5 227.2 ms per image using 50 Denoising Diffusion Implicit Model (DDIM) steps). The strong clinical performance at substantially reduced computational cost enables real-time clinical use.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

FlowObject: Flow Steering for Bridging Generative Priors and Reconstruction Fidelity

Recovering complete 3D representations of objects from few casual image captures remains a significant challenge. Recent 3D generative models, particularly those based on Flow-Matching (FM), can synthesize high-quality textured assets; however, they often suffer from ''synthetic bias'' where learned priors override observational evidence, alongside a lack of alignment with the observed instance. Conversely, optimization-based methods like 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) provide high fidelity on visible surfaces but fail to reason about unobserved geometry. In this paper, we present FlowObject, a framework that reformulates sparse-view 3D reconstruction as a training-free, guided inverse problem. Our approach applies a dual-space guidance strategy to steer the Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) trajectory of a flow-matching model, enabling the completion of unseen regions through learned generative priors while enforcing strict consistency with real-world observations. By integrating a 3DGS refinement stage, FlowObject further bridges the gap between ''synthetic-looking'' generative outputs and photorealistic reconstructions. Comprehensive benchmarks on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that current state-of-the-art methods often struggle to achieve geometric completeness and observational consistency simultaneously, especially under severe occlusions. In contrast, our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art generative models and optimization-based frameworks in both geometric completeness and view-dependent appearance fidelity.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Scratched Lenses, Shifted Depth: Passive Camera-Side Optical Attacks

Physical adversarial attacks on vision systems are typically studied through scene manipulation, such as adversarial patches or projections, where the adversary controls what the camera observes. Camera-side attacks using stickers or auxiliary optics have also been explored, but they treat attacks as image-space perturbations from designed patterns. This misses how physical imperfections interact with scene-dependent lighting and optics. We identify a threat: passive lens-side damage that is persistent yet trigger-conditioned, producing optical artifacts that bias geometric inference under particular visual conditions. We instantiate this threat through Scratch-induced Lens Adversarial Streak Hijacking SLASH, a physical-world attack caused by small scratches on a camera lens or protective cover. Scratches interact with bright light sources and specular reflections to create structured streak artifacts that distort depth cues. Since the perturbation is fixed in the optical path but triggered by the scene, it is both persistent and selective. We formulate the attack in optical space, model the scratch pattern as a trigger-conditioned optical channel, and optimize one fixed configuration across diverse viewing conditions. We evaluate SLASH on monocular depth estimation and monocular 3D object detection in digital and real-world settings. Under the fixed-scratch constraint, directional depth shifts reach up to 32% relative error for monocular depth estimation, with consistent effects on monocular 3D object detection. Physical experiments confirm transfer to real camera recordings, inducing depth shifts above the model's natural prediction baseline. These findings reveal an attack surface where benign-looking hardware imperfections act as latent, scene-triggered adversarial mechanisms, challenging assumptions about physical robustness and motivating defenses for secure vision systems.

22.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Establishing an $\Omega(\sqrt{d})$ complexity lower bound for PDMP samplers and how to break it: a sub-$\sqrt{d}$ algorithm for Gaussian-tailed targets

arXiv:2606.19909v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite the theoretical appeal of their non-reversibility, to date, no Piecewise Deterministic Markov Process (PDMP) samplers have been developed that scale better than $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{d})$ in computational complexity with respect to the target dimension $d$. We prove that this is a fundamental limitation by establishing an $\Omega(\sqrt{d})$ lower bound on the algorithmic complexity of PDMP samplers in a standard setup. By relaxing the assumption that the target density must remain invariant at all continuous times, we then demonstrate how to bypass this barrier. Specifically, we introduce a novel PDMP sampling scheme and show that it achieves an empirical complexity of $\mathcal{O}(d^\alpha)$, where $\alpha \in [0.2, 0.3]$ for Gaussian-tailed targets. In addition, this PDMP scheme is locally adaptive in both trajectory length and distance between velocity updates.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

ForceForget: Reinforcement Concept Removal for Enhancing Safety in Text-to-Image Models

With the advance of generative AI, the text-to-image (T2I) model has the ability to generate various contents. However, T2I models still can generate unsafe contents. To alleviate this issue, various concept erasing methods are proposed. However, existing methods tend to excessively erase unsafe concepts and suppress benign concepts contained in harmful prompts, which can negatively affect model utility. In this paper, we focus on eliminating unsafe content while maintaining model capability in safe semantic meaning interpretation by optimizing the concept erasing reward (CER) with reinforcement learning. To avoid overly content erasure, we introduce the Safe Adapter to project partial text embedding for efficient concept regulation in cross-attention layers. Extensive experiments conducted on different datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in alleviating unsafe content generation while preserving the high fidelity of benign images compared with existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) concept erasing methods. In terms of robustness, our method outperforms counterparts against red-teaming tools. Moreover, we showcase the proposed approach is more effective in emerging image-to-image (I2I) scenarios compared with others. Lastly, we extend our method to erase general concepts, such as artistic styles and objects. Disclaimer: This paper includes discussions of sexually explicit content that may be offensive to certain readers. All images used in this work are synthesized or from public datasets.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Inhomogeneous Light-Matter Coupling as a Resource for Noiseless Quantum Memories

arXiv:2605.26783v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Inhomogeneous ensembles of two-level systems are central to both fundamental light-matter physics and quantum-network applications. Understanding and optimizing ensemble-based quantum memories and entanglement protocols requires a unified framework that describes how to store quantum states of light as collective matter excitations and retrieve them on demand. Here we develop such a framework, the waveguide model, by mapping the dark collective modes of the ensemble onto an effective waveguide with well-defined input-output relations, valid in both the weak-excitation regime and near population inversion. This model reveals that inhomogeneous coupling – often regarded as a limitation – is instead the physical origin of noisy-echo suppression by adiabatic pulses, a key ingredient for realizing noiseless quantum memories. For entanglement generation, the same mechanism exposes a previously unexplored shortcoming of robust control pulses and leads to a new composite-pulse protocol that overcomes it. These results establish the waveguide model as a practical bridge between fundamental collective physics and quantum-network protocol design, recasting inhomogeneous coupling from an obstacle into a control knob for collective emission.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

K-Prism: A Knowledge-Guided and Prompt Integrated Universal Medical Image Segmentation Model

Medical image segmentation is fundamental to clinical decision-making, yet existing models remain fragmented. They are usually trained on single knowledge sources and specific to individual tasks, modalities, or organs. This fragmentation contrasts sharply with clinical practice, where experts seamlessly integrate diverse knowledge: anatomical priors from training, exemplar-based reasoning from reference cases, and iterative refinement through real-time interaction. We present $K-Prism$, a unified segmentation framework that mirrors this clinical flexibility by systematically integrating three knowledge paradigms: (i) $semantic priors$ learned from annotated datasets, (ii) $in-context knowledge$ from few-shot reference examples, and (iii) $interactive feedback$ from user inputs like clicks or scribbles. Our key insight is that these heterogeneous knowledge sources can be encoded into a dual-prompt representation: 1-D sparse prompts defining $what$ to segment and 2-D dense prompts indicating $where$ to attend, which are then dynamically routed through a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) decoder. This design enables flexible switching between paradigms and joint training across diverse tasks without architectural modifications. Comprehensive experiments on 18 public datasets spanning diverse modalities (CT, MRI, X-ray, pathology, ultrasound, etc.) demonstrate that K-Prism achieves state-of-the-art performance across semantic, in-context, and interactive segmentation settings.