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

Bright Emission from Dark Sources in Hyperbolic Media

arXiv:2606.16071v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hyperbolic media enable ultra-strong light-matter interactions through their extreme field localization and small mode volumes, but low-loss realizations are fundamentally limited to the mid-infrared, owing to the long lifetimes of optical phonons in high-quality crystals. Here we show that bright emitters operating at visible or near-infrared frequencies can be used to generate radiation in this regime by inducing mid-infrared population dynamics, thereby creating a source in the hyperbolic frequency band without a corresponding dipole transition. We demonstrate that even a source with vanishing dipole and higher multipole moments - strictly non-radiating in any isotropic medium - becomes radiatively active in a hyperbolic environment. This enables visible and near-infrared control of light-matter interactions in polaritonic hyperbolic materials, establishing a new low-loss solid-state quantum optics platform.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Posterior Twins: Distributional Behavioral Simulation for Enterprise Decisions

Authors:

arXiv:2606.16415v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Enterprise behavioral simulation requires more than producing a plausible response. Many decisions depend on the shape of a population under a proposed action: which segments accept, defect, hesitate, or move into risk-sensitive states. This paper introduces Posterior Twins, a memory-grounded digital-twin approach that represents likely behavior as an updated distribution under a specific decision context. We evaluate a family of Twinning Labs behavioral-model operating points on a 226-example held-out behavioral-response benchmark and report both modal accuracy and Wasserstein-1 distance. The results show that modal accuracy and distributional fidelity identify different operating regimes. TL-Twin Alpha achieves the lowest observed Wasserstein-1 distance in the reported result set ($W_1 = 1.16$), while TL-Twin Delta and TL-Twin Gamma provide balanced operating points near the modal-accuracy frontier. The paper frames these results as a systems result: governed memory, behavioral model routing, scenario orchestration, distributional aggregation, and auditability are necessary for turning simulated behavior into reusable enterprise decision evidence.

03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

The Statistical Compass

arXiv:2606.11282v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This monograph develops probability and stochastic-process ideas as a translation language for statistics: from designed observations and data objects to targets, stability statements, inference, and use. The chapters move from motivating examples and randomization through probability measures, kernels, likelihoods, data objects, weak convergence, empirical fields, functional data, M- and Z-estimation, testing, local approximations, event-time processes, and prediction. Historical and biomedical examples are used to keep abstract objects tied to records, mechanisms, and decisions. The aim is to give readers a common grammar for classical probability, modern data structures, and statistical practice.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

PRISM: Perception Reasoning Interleaved for Sequential Decision Making

arXiv:2605.05407v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Scaling LLM-based embodied agents from text-only environments to complex multimodal settings remains a major challenge. Recent work identifies a perception-reasoning-decision gap in standalone Vision-Language Models (VLMs), which often overlook task-critical information. In this paper, we introduce PRISM, a framework that tightly couples perception (VLM) and decision (LLM) through a dynamic question-answer (DQA) pipeline. Instead of passively accepting the VLM's description, the LLM critiques it, probes the VLM with goal-oriented questions, and synthesizes a compact image description. This closed-loop interaction yields a sharp, task-driven understanding of the scene. We evaluate PRISM on the ALFWorld and Room-to-Room (R2R) benchmarks. We show that: (1) PRISM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art image-based models, (2) our Interactive goal-oriented perception pipeline yields systematic and substantial gains, and (3) PRISM is fully automatic, eliminating the need for handcrafted questions or answers.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

MedLatentDx: Latent Multi-Agent Communication for Cross-Hospital Rare-Disease Diagnosis

Rare diseases affect over $300$ million patients across more than $7{,}000$ conditions, yet no single hospital encounters enough cases of any one condition for reliable diagnosis. Cross-hospital collaboration could help by allowing a diagnosing institution to use distributed, case-specific diagnostic evidence, but privacy regulations restrict the transmission of identifiable clinical text across institutional boundaries. This setting raises two challenges: existing medical agent systems often rely on textual evidence exchange, while raw latent states such as hidden states and KV caches may still reveal prompt-derived clinical content. We introduce MedLatentDx, a latent multi-agent communication framework in which hospital agents keep private clinical records and retrieved cases local, and send compact latent KV blocks to a host agent for rare-disease diagnosis. MedLatentDx supports two deployment settings: same-backbone hospital agents use latent KV distillation, while hospitals with different LLM backbones use cross-family latent alignment. On CrossRare-Bench, a self-built large-scale rare-disease benchmark with hospital-level partitions, MedLatentDx improves cross-hospital diagnostic performance while reducing reconstructable clinical content relative to raw-latent communication baselines.

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

Toward all-optical unsupervised Hebbian learning in deep photonic neuromorphic networks

arXiv:2601.22300v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose a deep photonic neuromorphic network (PNN) architecture based on phase-change material (PCM) synapses and local optical feedback for online, unsupervised Hebbian learning. The proposed architecture combines optical vector-matrix multiplication, non-volatile PCM synaptic weighting, and local coincidence-driven synaptic adaptation within a multilayer photonic crossbar framework compatible with photonic integrated circuits. Unlike conventional PNNs that rely on externally computed gradients, repeated optical-electrical-optical conversions, or global backpropagation, the proposed framework employs local Hebbian learning governed directly by correlated pre- and post-synaptic optical activity. To investigate the feasibility of the proposed learning mechanism, we implemented the PNN design using fiber-optic components, programmable variable optical attenuators, and real-time software control that incorporates PCM thermal dynamics. Supervised and unsupervised learning behaviors were experimentally evaluated under both offline and online learning conditions using representative image-recognition tasks. The experimental results demonstrate adaptive synaptic evolution, successful optical inference, and autonomous pattern encoding through local Hebbian learning under realistic fiber-optic hardware conditions. These results establish a pathway toward future integrated photonic neuromorphic systems capable of scalable and energy-efficient online Hebbian learning.

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

Geometric and Stochastic Analysis of Discontinuities in Sparse Mixture-of-Experts

arXiv:2606.19036v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE) architectures are now widely deployed in state-of-the-art language and vision models, where conditional routing allows scaling to very large networks. However, this very Top-$k$ expert selection that enables conditional routing also renders the SMoE map inherently discontinuous. In the vicinity of these discontinuity surfaces, even inputs that are arbitrarily close may activate substantially different sets of experts resulting in significantly different outputs. In this work we give a rigorous geometric and stochastic analysis of these discontinuities. We first classify them by order, determined by the number of tied experts at a switching event. Using measure-theoretic slicing arguments, we establish asymptotic volume estimates for the thickened discontinuity surfaces, showing that lower-order discontinuity sets dominate, whereas higher-order ones occupy a vanishingly small relative volume. Next, modeling random perturbations in the input space via a diffusion process, we prove that the path eventually encounter a discontinuity, and moreover that the first hit almost surely occurs on an order-1 discontinuity with explicit finite-time probability bounds. We further derive occupation-time bounds that quantify the duration the random path spend in the neighborhoods of each discontinuity order. These theoretical results imply that inputs are more likely to lie near lower order discontinuities. Motivated by this insight, we propose a simple smoothing mechanism that can be directly applied to existing SMoEs, softly incorporating experts near discontinuities; our analysis guarantees that the added computational overhead remains small while providing localized smoothing near discontinuities, and experiments across language and vision tasks show that smoothing not only enforces continuity of the SMoE map but also enhances empirical performance.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Speeding up the annotation process in semantic segmentation industrial applications

arXiv:2606.19934v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current machine learning models commonly require large and well-annotated datasets. However, the annotation process often becomes a bottleneck, with increased complexity leading to higher chances of human errors. Within this context, our goal in this paper is to leverage unsupervised algorithms to improve data annotation efficiency for complex semantic segmentation problems in industrial materials science. Previous research has quantified labeling time and others explored unsupervised methods. However, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to quantify how much unsupervised algorithms accelerate the labeling process. We aim to validate the extent to which this laborious process can be accelerated, focusing on semantic segmentation tasks that involve annotating each pixel of high-resolution images, such as the microstructure characterization challenge in materials science. Specifically, we demonstrate that by using unsupervised computer vision algorithms, the time required for the labeling process can be reduced from 170 hours to 37 hours, achieving an approximate reduction of 78\%. The dataset we work with includes large images of dimensions 1280x959 and 960x703, which further increases the complexity of the annotation task. Despite these challenges, we create and share the largest public steel microstructure segmentation dataset to date, available under MIT License with permanent DOI, contributing a fully annotated, high-resolution dataset to the field. Additionally, this is the first work to compare the labeling time from scratch (a common approach in previous studies) to the labeling time when using these unsupervised algorithms as a pre-annotation step. Furthermore, we provide a Deep Learning model trained on this dataset, validated by field experts, and deployed in an industrial setting, serving as an initial benchmark for this public dataset.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Speaking in Self-Assessing Tongues: On the Verbalized Confidence of LLMs in Machine Translation

The rapid rise in popularity of large language models (LLMs) for translation calls for a thorough study of the reliability of their confidence in their own outputs. Unlike many generation tasks, translation errors and confidence levels can be useful at different levels of granularity (tokens, words, or spans). Unsupervised approaches based on internal signals like predicted probabilities can be misleading because they reflect certainty among alternatives rather than correctness. In addition, they require access to such internal signals. Here, we devise five verbalized methods of extracting an LLM's per-token confidence without those shortcomings and compare their reliability with that of the model's internal signals of certainty. We evaluate reliability using two forms of alignment: fine-grained error detection and calibration. For both, internal and verbalized methods perform similarly, although results vary by model. Interestingly, we find little to no correlation between internal and verbalized methods.

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

Attention, not scale, drives human-AI alignment in multimodal language prediction

Humans routinely draw on visual context to predict upcoming words. To what extent current vision-language models produce comparable behaviour is unclear. Here we placed five state-of-the-art pretrained systems side-by-side with 600 human participants in a web-based Visual-World Paradigm. On each of 100 six-second movie clips, models and participants received either text only or synchronised video and text and judged how likely a specified target word was to appear next; human eye movements were tracked throughout. Adding visual context increased model-human alignment in predictability ratings across all architectures (average Delta r = 0.18) with no impact of parameter size. When visual context was informative, transformer attention significantly increased alignment. Attention maps from two transformer models corresponded with human gaze, explaining up to 70% of the inter-participant variance when the scene contained informative cues. Notably, cross-modal attention reliably tracked anticipatory human fixations on semantic cues. These results suggest that current transformer-based vision-language models can approximate human behaviour exploiting visual context during language prediction - and that selective attention to informative cues, not sheer model scale, is the principal driver of this alignment.

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

Order Is Not Control

AI alignment, interpretability, steering, and neural perturbation studies identify order-inducing objects. We argue that order is not control. Control requires a receiver-gated response law: a denominator-indexed operator mapping material state, action/drive, bath, and receiver state to response displacement, sinks, effort, and basin projection. We identify it across biological, LLM, adapter, and stochastic-operator panels. The laws are local: an intervention can be admitted, saturated, sign-changing, leaky, or overdriven depending on medium, bath, receiver state, action port, and comparator. Control is assigned when finite effort moves a target or outcome-readout class under the same denominator while damage, null/evasive, invalid format, overdrive, and unnecessary effort stay bounded. Mouse ALM, C. elegans, and zebrafish panels provide physical response-operator evidence while excluding coordinate identity and controller conclusions. LLM panels show generated-output response laws: across four material conditions, response vectors are predictable at 72.8-73.7% component-sign accuracy, rising to 84.3-84.8% on nonzero components; held-out observers predict system-effect and target/oracle families at 93.6% and 91.7% accuracy. Constitution-conditioned adapters reshape susceptibility as prepared media, and stochastic-operator panels separate measured opportunity from deployable action policies. This gives a driven-dissipative response-system account at the mesoscopic control level: drives act through prepared media, baths, and receivers, producing admitted movement, impedance, sinks, or overdrive. The evidence supports local admitted control and measurable stochastic response operators, while leaving deployable pre-generation control, hidden/logit causal sufficiency, biological-to-LLM coordinate identity, and literal thermodynamic quantities outside scope.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Synthesizing Arbitrary Non-Hermitian Hamiltonian with Stochastic Floquet Engineering

arXiv:2606.15664v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The conventional Floquet engineering scheme synthesizes a given target Hamiltonian with a deterministic temporal periodic driving field. In this work, we introduce the stochastic Floquet engineering scheme that can synthesize an arbitrary non-Hermitian target Hamiltonian using a time-periodic driving field with noisy amplitude. Our method is rooted in the Hermitian dynamics taking noise as a valuable quantum resource with no need for loss or gain in prior. We apply our method to engineer a cavity Hamiltonian with dissipative coupling between Fock states, and to prepare a given quantum state from a generally arbitrary quantum state. The stochastic Floqut engineering also provides a way to generate non-unitary quantum gates, which take advantage in certain tasks compared to unitary quantum computing, without the need for ancillae or state-dependent updating.

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

YTClickbait21K: Human-Annotated Multimodal Dataset for YouTube Clickbait Detection Across Diverse Channels and Content Categories

Clickbait content on video-sharing platforms poses a significant challenge to information reliability, yet progress in automated detection has been constrained by the lack of large-scale, high-quality multimodal datasets. We present YTClickbait21K, a human-annotated YouTube clickbait dataset comprising 21,238 videos collected from 40 channels across 29 countries, covering diverse content categories such as news, entertainment, education, and gaming. Each sample includes structured metadata (title, description, engagement statistics) along with associated thumbnail images, enabling comprehensive multimodal analysis. To ensure annotation quality, every video was independently labeled by three annotators using a standardized decision framework that incorporates textual, visual, and cross-modal consistency cues, with final labels determined through majority voting. The dataset exhibits substantial inter-annotator agreement (k=0.65), confirming reliable labeling despite the inherent subjectivity of clickbait detection. By combining scale, annotation rigor, and multimodal richness, this dataset provides a robust benchmark for developing and evaluating machine learning models, facilitating research in cross-modal semantic understanding, and advancing automated content moderation systems.

14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Pricing Excess-of-Loss Reinsurance and CAT Bonds under Climate Uncertainty: A Cox Process Framework with Temperature-Dependent Stochastic Intensity

arXiv:2606.14830v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper develops a climate-aware pricing framework for excess-of-loss (XL) reinsurance contracts and catastrophe (CAT) bonds under non-stationary catastrophe risk. Catastrophe arrivals are modeled as a Cox process whose stochastic intensity depends exponentially on a temperature-related climate index. To represent climate dynamics, the index is modeled as a mean-reverting Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process around a time-dependent warming trend. Within this setting, aggregate losses follow a compound Cox structure with lognormal severities. Pricing is performed under a reduced-form risk-adjusted measure, which provides a tractable valuation approach for XL reinsurance layers and binary zero-coupon CAT bond payoffs in an incomplete market setting. Because catastrophe losses are not dynamically replicable, the framework emphasizes scenario-based valuation rather than model-independent no-arbitrage bounds. A Monte Carlo valuation scheme is implemented to quantify the economic implications of climate-dependent catastrophe intensity. The numerical results show that climate dependence materially changes the loss-generation mechanism and affects the valuation of catastrophe-linked contracts. In the baseline calibration, the climate-aware model increases the excess-of-loss reinsurance premium and lowers the CAT bond price relative to the stationary benchmark. Furthermore, our analysis of the 99.5\% Tail Value-at-Risk (TVaR) indicates that stationary benchmarks may underestimate economic capital requirements by approximately 13.7\% compared to the climate-aware framework, highlighting the potential regulatory relevance of the proposed model. This finding highlights that benchmark design is critical for interpreting climate-pricing effects.

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

StainFlow: Entity-Stain Tracking and Evidence Linking for Process Rewards in GUI Agents

arXiv:2606.07027v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become a promising approach for improving GUI Agents in long-horizon, stochastic digital environments, but trajectory-level success feedback is too sparse to provide reliable credit assignment for intermediate exploration steps. To mitigate this issue, recent studies introduce Process Reward Models (PRMs), which provide finer-grained training feedback through global milestone verification or local step-level evaluation. However, these methods still suffer from two level-specific limitations: global milestone decomposition is subjective and singular, making it difficult to accommodate the multiple valid execution paths in real GUI tasks, while fixed local judging windows may miss long-range key evidence or dilute the decision signal with irrelevant frames. Inspired by stain-tracing mechanisms in network flow analysis, we propose StainFlow, an entity-stain-flow process reward model for GUI Agents. To reduce the subjectivity of global partitioning, we introduce the Global Entity Stain Tracking module, which extracts visually verifiable task entities and tracks how their stain concentrations and states evolve along the trajectory, allowing task phases to be objectively separated by changes in the entity evidence flow. To improve the accuracy of local verification, we introduce the Local Stain Evidence Linking module. Centered on the triggering entities of each candidate key node, it retrieves relevant steps based on their stain concentrations and state changes, and dynamically constructs high-density evidence windows for verifying true key nodes. Extensive experiments on AndroidWorld and OGRBench show that StainFlow relatively improves online RL success by 3.2% and trajectory completion judgment accuracy by 1.8%.

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

Conditional Score-Based Modeling of Effective Langevin Dynamics

arXiv:2604.23952v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Stochastic reduced-order models are widely used to represent the effective dynamics of complex systems, but estimating their drift and diffusion coefficients from data remains challenging. Standard approaches often rely on short-time trajectory increments, state-space partitioning, or repeated simulation of candidate models, which become unreliable or computationally expensive for high-dimensional systems, coarse temporal sampling, or unevenly sampled data. We introduce a data-driven calibration method based on a novel relationship between the coefficients of a stochastic reduced model and the conditional score of the finite-time transition density, defined as the gradient of the logarithm of the transition density with respect to the initial state. The resulting identity expresses derivatives of lagged correlation functions as stationary expectations over observed lagged pairs involving this conditional score and the unknown model coefficients. This formulation allows the drift and diffusion structure to be constrained directly from finite-lag statistics, without differentiating trajectories, partitioning state space, or repeatedly integrating candidate reduced models during calibration, yielding a least-squares fitting problem over stationary lagged pairs. We validate the approach on three systems of increasing complexity: an analytically tractable Cox–Ingersoll–Ross diffusion, a two-dimensional nonequilibrium diffusion with affine multiplicative noise, and a periodic soft-spin stochastic Landau–Lifshitz chain. Across these tests, the inferred models preserve the invariant statistics while reproducing finite-lag dynamical correlations. The framework provides a scalable route for learning stochastic reduced-order models from data that reproduce prescribed statistical and dynamical properties.

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

MetaboNet-Bench: A Multi-modal Benchmark for Glucose Forecasting in Type 1 Diabetes

arXiv:2606.18640v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Glucose forecasting algorithms are an important aspect of glycemic control management in type 1 diabetes. So far, the research community has developed numerous algorithms and models for forecasting. However, it is well-recognized that the lack of standardized model performance evaluation benchmarks makes fair comparison difficult and hinders further innovation, and thus benchmark standardization is in urgent need. Furthermore, many published glucose forecasting algorithms are limited to CGM data alone, ignoring other multimodal signals such as insulin dosing and carbohydrate intake. Here, we introduce MetaboNet-Bench, a benchmark for multimodal glucose forecasting for patients with type 1 diabetes that provides an extensible open-source evaluation framework for comparison of glucose forecasting algorithms that leverage glucose, insulin, and carbohydrate data. We then demonstrate its utility by benchmarking several recently published glucose forecasting models and a custom multimodal time-series model, representing different model architectures. The results show that the benefit of adding data modalities is conditioned on the complexity of the model and that incorporating more clinical metrics helps identify meaningful gaps to fill for future research.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

SED:Lightweight Saliency prediction for Event-based data via Distillation

Event-based saliency prediction has gained attention recently, as combining event cameras with saliency estimation can act as an upstream stage that naturally improves the efficiency of downstream eventbased perception at the edge. However, current approaches are either neuromorphic, underperforming on event-based saliency benchmarks, or too heavy for resource-constrained edge applications due to their reliance on transformers or 3D convolutions. Drawing inspiration from efficient convolutional modules, SED and aiming to exploit the temporal information in event data, we propose a lightweight network, trained through knowledge distillation, built on a Depthwise Spatio-Temporal Block (DSTconv) – a factorization of the 3D depthwise separable convolution. Relative to its teacher, our model reduces the model size from 180 MB to 0.32 MB (562x) and the parameter count from 45M to 81k (554x), while matching or outperforming it on the N-DHF1K and N-UCF Sports datasets. Moreover, it generalizes strongly beyond its training distribution, transferring from synthetic to real event data where a model trained from scratch fails.

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

Text region detection in historical astronomical diagrams

Text detection is a crucial task in the analysis of historical documents. While datasets and benchmarks exist for text detection in manuscripts and maps, the study of text in mathematical diagrams has received little attention. To address this, we introduce a large-scale, diverse, open-access dataset of 948 historical astronomical diagrams containing 10,940 oriented polygonal text regions. Our dataset spans ten centuries (8th to 18th) and seven main linguistic traditions: Arabic and Persian (115), Chinese (332), Byzantine (233), Latin (185), Hebrew (48), and Sanskrit (35). It captures a wide range of diagram styles and textual content, from symbols to multi-line paragraphs. Each text instance is annotated with ordered polygons that precisely delineate text regions and encode the reading direction. In addition, we annotated the 2,293 regions in Latin diagrams with 20 class labels. We evaluated several strong baselines on our dataset, including TESTR, DeepSolo++, and Poly-DETR, a simple extension of DINO-DETR that we design to predict ordered polygon vertices. Poly-DETR achieves state-of-the-art performance on the MTHv2 and cBAD2019 benchmarks and provides a solid, simple baseline on our dataset. Code and dataset available online.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Geometric mechanisms enabling spin- and enantio-sensitive observables in one photon ionization of chiral molecules

arXiv:2603.02735v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We examine spin-resolved photoionization of randomly oriented chiral molecules via circularly polarized light, and revisit earlier predictions of Cherepkov (J. Phys. B: Atom. Mol. Phys. 16, 1543, 1983). We will show that the dynamical origin of spin- and enantio-sensitive observables arise from two intrinsic mechanisms that are quantified by two pseudovectors stemming from the geometric properties of the photoionization dipoles in spin space and in real space, and an extrinsic mechanism which is a directional bias introduced by the well-defined direction of light polarization. These mechanisms arise solely from electric dipole interactions. Consequently, this means that the ten independent parameters that was earlier predicted by Cherepkov to fully describe spin-resolved photoionization of chiral molecules can be reduced as moments of these three pseudovectors. We also find that the molecular pseudoscalars describing the spin- and enantio-sensitive components of the yield can be described by the flux of these pseudovectors through the energy shell, which changes sign upon switching enantiomers. Our results provide compact expressions for these observables which provide an intuitive picture on what determines the strength of these spin- and enantio-sensitive observables. The approach can be readily generalized to photoexcitation, multiphoton processes, and arbitrary field polarizations. Regardless of the specific driving conditions, the resulting spin- and enantio-sensitive observables are still controlled by the same three pseudovectors, underscoring their universal role as the primary generators of chirality-induced spin asymmetries, emphasizing their fundamental geometric origin and the universality of the mechanism identified here.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Speaker Verification with Speech-Aware LLMs: Evaluation and Augmentation

arXiv:2603.10827v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Speech-aware large language models (LLMs) can accept speech inputs, yet their training objectives largely emphasize linguistic content or specific fields such as emotions or the speaker's gender, leaving it unclear whether they encode speaker identity. First, we propose a model-agnostic scoring protocol that produces continuous verification scores for both API-only and open-weight models, using confidence scores or log-likelihood ratios from the Yes/No token probabilities. Using this protocol, we benchmark recent speech-aware LLMs and observe weak speaker discrimination (EERs above 20% on VoxCeleb1). Second, we introduce a lightweight augmentation that equips an LLM with ASV capability by injecting frozen ECAPA-TDNN speaker embeddings through a learned projection and training only LoRA adapters. On TinyLLaMA-1.1B, the resulting ECAPA-LLM achieves 1.03% EER on VoxCeleb1-E, approaching a dedicated speaker verification system while preserving a natural-language interface.

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

CaricHarmony: Contrastive Diffusion Paths for Identity-Preserving Caricature Synthesis

Sketch-based caricature synthesis suffers from a fundamental failure mode: when identity and shape conditions are combined in diffusion models, they create destructive interference that causes inevitable collapse toward either bland portraits or unrecognizable distortions. We identify the root cause as condition signal contamination – competing probability distributions in the denoising trajectory that make balanced generation impossible. We present CaricHarmony, the first training-free method that explicitly resolves this contamination through parallel uncontaminated diffusion paths. During inference, we maintain three paths: $\mathcal{P}^{\mathrm{i}}$ (pure identity), $\mathcal{P}^{\mathrm{s}}$ (pure shape), and $\mathcal{P}^{\mathrm{i+s}}$ (harmonized output). Novel energy functions operating on cross-attention features provide gradient guidance that steers $\mathcal{P}^{\mathrm{i+s}}$ toward optimal balance: $\mathcal{E}_{\mathrm{shape}}$ ensures sketch fidelity through layout and semantic alignment, while $\mathcal{E}_{\mathrm{id}}$ employs token-level correspondence matching robust to extreme distortions. Unlike DemoCaricature requiring 70 seconds per-identity fine-tuning or CaricatureBooth constrained to Bezier curves, CaricHarmony accepts any sketch format and generates in under 16 seconds. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance: 0.8615 shape CLIP score (vs. 0.8450) under comparable identity consistency score, with 7.81 overall user preference score (vs. 6.06). Our method fundamentally reconceptualizes the ID-shape conflict as conditioning signal contamination for diffusion models, enabling unprecedented creative control while preserving recognition.

23.
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

24.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Asymptotic analysis of the normal inverse Gaussian cumulative distribution

Authors:

arXiv:2509.05664v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Using a recently derived integral in terms of elementary functions, we derive new asymptotic expansions of the normal inverse Gaussian cumulative distribution function. One of the asymptotic representations is in terms of the normal Gaussian distribution or complementary error function.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Adaptive Multi-Resolution Procedural Knowledge Compression for Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) are widely used to tackle complex tasks with autonomous workflows. Recently, reusable natural language skills have emerged as a popular paradigm to inject procedural knowledge into LLM applications. Since popular skills are often invoked repeatedly, placing their full text in every context significantly increases prefill cost and latency. While text compression techniques have the potential to solve this problem, most existing methods are designed to compress factual knowledge in documents instead of procedural knowledge, making them insufficient for skill compression. In this paper, we argue that an effective skill compression method should: 1) preserve logical dependencies among workflows and tool protocols, 2) enable lightweight, offline compression for frequently updated community skills, and 3) be adaptable to varying complexities across skills. To address this, we present SKIM (SKIll coMpression), an adaptive multi-resolution soft token compression framework for procedural skills. Depending on the complexity of each skill, SKIM creates different numbers of soft tokens that not only improve the efficiency of LLM inference, but also preserve the effectiveness of skill usage. Experiments indicate that SKIM compresses skills to 30 to 60 percent of their original token length while preserving task performance better than existing compression methods.We have released our code at https://github.com/bebr2/SKIM .