Paper Plaza - AcademicHub

01.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24643

The Quantum Split-Step Fourier Algorithm for Nonlinear Optical Waveguides

Authors:

arXiv:2606.24643v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce the Quantum Split-Step Fourier (QSSF) algorithm for nonlinear optical waveguides, a numerical framework that combines split-step propagation of the nonlinear Schrödinger equation with a commutator-preserving Bogoliubov evolution of Gaussian quantum fluctuations. The method propagates the classical mean field together with the Bogoliubov matrices $U$ and $V$, from which reduced second moments, covariance matrices, symplectic eigenvalues, and entropic measures are constructed for arbitrary spectral windows. Applied to soliton-driven resonant radiation, QSSF shows that the selected radiation band acquires a steadily increasing von Neumann entropy and a corresponding loss of purity, quantifying its entanglement with the rest of the spectrum in the lossless Gaussian setting. The analysis also reveals a surprisingly pronounced low-dimensional structure: although the radiation occupies many Fourier bins, its reduced Gaussian state is dominated by only a few Williamson modes. QSSF therefore provides a practical information-theoretic diagnostic for quantum correlations in nonlinear frequency conversion, supercontinuum generation, and multimode squeezed-light formation in ultrafast waveguide platforms.

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02.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2511.07332

Grounding Computer Use Agents on Human Demonstrations

Authors:

arXiv:2511.07332v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Building reliable computer-use agents requires grounding: accurately connecting natural language instructions to the correct on-screen elements. While large datasets exist for web and mobile interactions, high-quality resources for desktop environments are limited. To address this gap, we introduce GroundCUA, a large-scale desktop grounding dataset built from expert human demonstrations. It covers 87 applications across 12 categories and includes 56K screenshots, with every on-screen element carefully annotated for a total of over 3.56M human-verified annotations. From these demonstrations, we generate diverse instructions that capture a wide range of real-world tasks, providing high-quality data for model training. Using GroundCUA, we develop the GroundNext family of models that map instructions to their target UI elements. At both 3B and 7B scales, GroundNext achieves state-of-the-art results across five benchmarks using supervised fine-tuning, while requiring less than one-tenth the training data of prior work. Reinforcement learning post-training further improves performance, and when evaluated in an agentic setting on the OSWorld benchmark using o3 as planner, GroundNext attains comparable or superior results to models trained with substantially more data,. These results demonstrate the critical role of high-quality, expert-driven datasets in advancing general-purpose computer-use agents.

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03.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24002

Picosecond Schrödinger cat states for ultrafast optical quantum processing

Authors:

arXiv:2606.24002v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Non-Gaussian states are essential resources for universal, fault-tolerant optical quantum computing, but their generation rate remains limited by low heralding probabilities and operation in nanosecond temporal modes. Here, we demonstrate multi-photon generalized photon subtraction in picosecond optical wave packets, establishing the state-generation capability required for high-rate operation by addressing the temporal-mode bottleneck that has constrained the achievable rate. Two interfering ultrashort squeezed vacua are heralded by photon-number-resolving detection with a high-speed transition-edge sensor and characterized by pulsed homodyne detection matched to 10-ps temporal modes at a 5-MHz pump repetition rate. We reconstruct Wigner functions without loss correction that exhibit up to four distinct negative regions for four-photon heralding, together with an effective cat-state amplitude of $\alpha_{\mathrm{eff}} = 1.69$. This amplitude approaches the range of practical relevance for fault-tolerant cat-code architectures and for adaptive breeding toward logical-qubit generation, while the picosecond temporal mode establishes a platform compatible with high-rate, scalable time-multiplexed photonic architectures.

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04.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20233

Cinematic Compositing Using Character-Environment-Harmonized Video Generation Models

Authors:

Tianyi Xiang ↗Mingming He ↗Li Ma ↗Jing Liao ↗

Cinematic compositing aims to integrate green-screen characters into novel environments while maintaining physical and photometric realism. Previous methods often fail to capture the complex bidirectional interactions between characters and their surroundings, which we characterize as Character-to-Environment (C2E) physical interaction and Environment-to-Character (E2C) lighting harmonization. To address this, we propose an end-to-end video diffusion framework that jointly models C2E and E2C interactions, specifically handling the challenges of interactive props. Our approach introduces a tri-mask-guided architecture with RGB-D joint denoising to ensure physically consistent interactions among the character, props, and environment. We further develop an efficient prior-driven data curation pipeline to construct high-quality relighting pairs without expensive rendering. Finally, a reference-conditioned mechanism enables controllable environment synthesis and precise prop replacement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms existing methods in cinematic-quality dynamic video compositing.

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05.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.13978

Classification of Astronomical Spectra Using PCA-Compressed Flux and Inverse-Variance Features

Authors:

Bruno Santos Meneses Barreto ↗Marcio Eisencraft ↗

arXiv:2606.13978v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper evaluates a signal-processing and supervised-learning pipeline for classifying SDSS DR17 astronomical spectra into stars, galaxies, and quasars. Each spectrum is represented by its measured flux and inverse-variance information, combining spectral shape with a wavelength-dependent reliability profile. After resampling onto a common logarithmic wavelength grid, the flux and inverse-variance vectors are standardized and separately compressed using principal component analysis. The resulting components are concatenated and used to train several classifiers. The best performance was obtained with the LightGBM gradient-boosting classifier, reaching $94.6\%$ accuracy and $92.1\%$ balanced accuracy on the test set.

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06.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13196

Under What Conditions Can a Machine Become Genuinely Creative?

Authors:

Yong Zeng ↗

arXiv:2606.13196v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent AI systems can generate texts, software architectures, hypotheses, designs, and scientific workflows that appear creative. This paper asks under what conditions a machine can become genuinely creative, and how human agency can be preserved within shared cognitive and creative environments. It develops a requirement framework derived from Designics, the science of meaning-bearing intentional change. The paper argues that genuine machine creativity should not be defined by output novelty, current performance, or transient architecture alone. Instead, creativity is understood as the structural transformation of incomplete situations through recursive intervention dynamics. On this view, it depends on ten requirements: environment representation, scoped perception, conflict identification, intervention capability, consequence observation, knowledge and environment update, rescoping, local-to-global unfolding, value-based scoping, and human-AI co-living. These are organized through the three laws of Designics: perception, conflict, and capability. The paper illustrates the computational tractability of these requirements through selected cyber-physical and cyber-biological studies, including recursive element extraction, autonomous mesh generation, and neurophysiological and workload analysis. It then treats open-ended systems, automated discovery frameworks, self-modifying agents, foundation models, and agentic workflows as pressure cases: they demonstrate powerful generative means but do not by themselves establish genuine machine creativity. Finally, the paper argues that proactive AI ethics is internal to genuine machine creativity rather than an after-the-fact filter. Value-based scoping and human-AI co-living must shape how creative machines perceive environments, identify conflicts, select interventions, observe consequences, update knowledge, and rescope future action.

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07.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.03085

Multi-component Causal Tracing in Large Language Models

Authors:

Zirui Yan ↗Dennis Wei ↗Dmitriy A. Katz ↗Prasanna Sattigeri ↗Ali Tajer ↗

Causal tracing systematically intervenes on a large language model's (LLM's) internal representations to uncover and quantify the causal pathways linking specific inputs or computations to specific metrics of interest, quantifying the LLM's behavior. Building on previous single-component or single-layer studies, this paper presents a unified framework for causally tracing multiple components simultaneously. This framework systematically identifies the subsets of components (e.g., attention heads and multi-layer perceptron neurons) most critical to a desired target performance metric (e.g., accuracy and fairness). This is achieved by incorporating flexible interventions applied to a wide range of desired metrics. To address the combinatorial complexity of the multi-component problem, an efficient algorithm is designed that leverages soft interventions and a carefully designed metric transformation, converting the combinatorial search problem into a continuous one that can be solved efficiently under proper constraints, thereby generating proper binary decisions for selecting components. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method efficiently identifies subsets of the model's components that have a high impact on the target metric, outperforming existing baseline approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZiruiYan/multi-component-causal-tracing.

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08.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2605.24903

SEED: Semi-supervised Continual MalwarE Detection for Tackling ConcEpt Drift on a BuDget

Authors:

Suresh Kumar Amalapuram ↗Bikraj Shresta ↗Siva Ram murthy Chebiyam ↗Bheemarjuna Reddy Tamma ↗Sumohana S Channappayya ↗

arXiv:2605.24903v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Machine learning based malware detectors become obsolete over time due to concept drift in benign and malware applications. Recent methods rely on fully labeled data and use hierarchical contrastive loss (HCL) with active learning to improve robustness against drift by exploiting semantic structure in malware representations. However, obtaining labeled data in the security domain is difficult. Under partially labeled settings, HCL suffers significant performance degradation in detecting unseen malware, especially on datasets such as BODMAS where strong semantic structure may not exist. In this paper, we propose SEED, a semantic-structure-agnostic method for malware detection under limited supervision. SEED combines a tailored binary cross-entropy objective with semi-supervised continual learning and active learning. For partially labeled seen tasks, unlabeled samples are projected into a representation space constructed from previously seen data using singular value decomposition, and paired with suitable labeled samples to encourage representation consistency. For unseen tasks with fully unlabeled data, uncertainty is quantified using cosine distance in representation space, and the most uncertain samples are selected for analyst labeling. We evaluate SEED on both Windows and Android malware datasets. Using only 20% labeled data on seen tasks, SEED achieves average AUT improvements of 40% on BODMAS and 14% on AndroZoo for unseen malware detection compared to HCL* (the semi-supervised adaptation of HCL), while remaining competitive on APIGraph. Finally, we introduce a delayed buffer update strategy to reduce label noise propagation during replay and improve learning stability.

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09.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15766

Rethinking Scaffolding in LLM Tutors: The Interactional Mismatch Between Benchmarks and Real-World Deployments

Authors:

Alexandra Neagu ↗Jeffrey T. H. Wong ↗Marcus Messer ↗Rhodri Nelson ↗Peter B. Johnson ↗

arXiv:2606.15766v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A central pedagogical value evaluated in AI tutor benchmarks is scaffolding: guiding students through graduated steps toward a solution. Alignment and evaluation methods for embedding scaffolding behaviour into chatbots, however, rest on an implicit assumption: that students will take up the scaffolding and engage in the conversation. To examine whether this assumption holds, we introduce an evaluation pipeline around two metrics - Chatbot Scaffolding and Student Uptake - and apply them across nine datasets of 9,490 chats, spanning AI tutor benchmarks and real-world deployments of educational chatbots. Our analysis reveals that while benchmarks assume a high-scaffolding, high-student-uptake environment, students in real-world settings exhibit lower levels of uptake overall - frequently bypassing the chatbot's pedagogical framing to drive the interaction toward their own learning goals at little interpersonal cost. We argue that bypassing scaffolding is not necessarily detrimental; rather, it frequently highlights a mismatch between a chatbot's pedagogical framing and the student's learning goals. To meaningfully evaluate the effectiveness of a chatbot's assistance, future benchmarks must move beyond the assumption that students will simply take up the scaffolding, and instead evaluate how these chatbots navigate diverse learning contexts and student-driven interaction patterns.

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10.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11432

Additive Noise, Shift Recovery, and Signed Signals in the Cumulative Distribution Transform

Authors:

Harbir Antil ↗Ratna Khatri ↗Aryan Saxena ↗

arXiv:2606.11432v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The cumulative distribution transform (CDT) is a quantile-based transport representation that exactly linearizes one-dimensional translations of positive densities. We study how this structure behaves under additive perturbations and how it can be exploited for shift recovery. Under a local nondegeneracy condition, we derive a first-order expansion showing that additive noise in physical space induces a nonlocal perturbation in CDT space through the primitive of the noise, weighted by the reciprocal density. This yields an explicit description of transform-domain sensitivity and shows, in particular, that perturbations are amplified in low-density regions. When the physical-space perturbation is modeled as a centered Gaussian random field, the induced first-order CDT perturbation is again Gaussian, with an explicit covariance kernel. We then use this structure to study recovery in CDT coordinates. In the known-template setting, the transport shift is obtained by projection onto the constant mode, giving an explicit estimator together with exactness in the noiseless case and a stability bound under perturbations. In the unknown-template setting, multiple observations permit joint recovery of the shifts and a common template up to the natural constant-mode gauge, leading to a simple de-shift–and–average procedure. We also consider a signed-signal analogue based on the signed cumulative distribution transform (SCDT), where shifts are estimated numerically by feature matching and unknown templates are recovered by alternating alignment and averaging. Numerical experiments validate the perturbation analysis and illustrate effective recovery for both density-valued and signed signals.

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11.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2512.13829

Conditional means, vector pricings, amenability and fixed points in cones

Authors:

Nicolas Monod ↗

arXiv:2512.13829v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We develop a generalization of conditional probability for arbitrary ordered vector spaces. A related problem is that of assigning a numerical value to one vector relative to another. We characterize the groups for which these generalized probabilities can be stationary, respectively invariant. Our results deviate from the setting of classical probability and lead to a new criterion for amenability and for fixed points in cones.

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12.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16661

SCAR: Semantic Continuity-Aware Retrieval for Efficient Context Expansion in RAG

Authors:

Nathana\"el Langlois ↗

Fixed-length chunking in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) often leads to boundary fragmentation, where critical evidence is split across segments, degrading retrieval recall. While static windowing and parent retrieval improve recall, they introduce significant token overhead. We propose SCAR (Semantic Continuity-Aware Retrieval), an adaptive retrieval policy that selectively expands neighboring chunks by weighing query-neighbor relevance against a structural continuity penalty. SCAR uses a relative expansion threshold tied to each retrieved chunk's own query-relevance, yielding an approximately scale-invariant decision rule that transfers across embedding models without recalibration. Across four diverse corpora (RFC, GDPR, a 10-K report, and a Merger agreement; N=320 queries; 160 boundary-fragmented), SCAR achieves 92.8% recall on boundary-fragmented queries with only 7.84 chunks, a 22.9% reduction compared to static windowing (10.16 chunks). Paired bootstrap tests (B=10,000) confirm the chunk reduction is highly significant (p

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13.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2512.19011

Do You Really Need a GPU to Guard Your LLM? CPU-Class Classifiers and Multi-Stage Pipelines for Safety Enforcement at Scale

Authors:

Vasudev Majhi ↗Dhruv Gupta ↗Advait Singh ↗Matthew Barker ↗Dhruv Kumar ↗

Safety classifiers that screen LLM inputs for jailbreak attempts have become standard deployment components, yet almost all production systems rely on GPU-based models: fine-tuned transformers and LLM-as-a-judge pipelines. These approaches impose significant per-query latency and infrastructure cost. Very little research has asked whether CPU-based classifiers, such as support vector machines and gradient-boosted trees trained on TF-IDF features, can match their accuracy across the conditions that production deployments encounter. We evaluate five CPU classifier families, Mamba-130M as an SSM-based GPU classifier, and transformer-based GPU models (DeBERTa-v3 and Gemma-2B with LoRA) across nine jailbreak sources and three regimes: in-distribution (D1), out-of-distribution (D2), and adversarially obfuscated (D3). On D1, the best CPU classifier matches the best transformer GPU model at roughly one-fifth the deployment cost. On D2, CPU classifiers fail via confident miscalibration, producing high-confidence false negatives that bypass escalation entirely. On D3, CPU classifiers outperform transformer GPU models by more than 26 percentage points in F1. Based on these complementary failure modes, we design GuardChain, a three-stage safety pipeline (Regex -> CPU -> GPU) that routes each prompt to the cheapest stage capable of a confident decision. The CPU stage alone resolves 80\% of in-distribution prompts at near-peak accuracy, and the GPU stage recovers the out-of-distribution failures. For practitioners deploying LLM safety at scale, this work provides evidence that GPU-class infrastructure is unnecessary for the majority of traffic.

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14.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12824

Acquisition state behaves as a structured, measurable variable governing lung-nodule AI: kernel-driven measurement instability and noise-driven detection fragility, invisible to DICOM metadata

Authors:

Daniel Soliman ↗

AI governance for medical imaging is formalizing: the 2026 ACR-SIIM Practice Parameter recommends local acceptance testing and ongoing drift monitoring, and the ACR Assess-AI registry monitors AI outputs using DICOM metadata for context. We argue that a necessary, currently unmonitored layer sits beneath output metrics: whether incoming studies remain within the acquisition envelope a model was validated on. Using a LUNA16-trained MONAI RetinaNet lung-nodule detector, we test whether acquisition state behaves as a structured, measurable variable. On real paired CT differing only in reconstruction kernel (NLST B30f vs B80f), kernel alone shifted AI-measured diameter and flipped a Fleischner size category in 5.2% (8 of 155) of nodules at fixed patient and acquisition, while detection confidence was unchanged (Wilcoxon p=0.22). Under controlled LIDC-IDRI perturbations the effects dissociated by axis: the noise axis degraded detection confidence (p=5.9e-32, concentrated in nodules under 6 mm) but not measurement, while the frequency/kernel axis corrupted measurement (p=8.6e-13) but not detection. A 4-feature pixel fingerprint recovered reconstruction identity (patient-level AUC about 0.95 on real CT, 0.995 on a QIBA phantom) where the ConvolutionKernel DICOM tag was uninformative (identical labels across reconstructions). The kernel axis transported across four manufacturers (leave-one-vendor-out AUC 0.94-0.98, matching the within-vendor ceiling). Acquisition state thus maps to distinct AI failure modes, frequency content to measurement reliability and noise to detection sensitivity, and is not recoverable from metadata. Acquisition-aware, input-side validation is the missing layer for the acceptance-testing and drift-monitoring requirements now entering imaging-AI accreditation.

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15.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2605.23176

DRIVESPATIAL: A Benchmark for Spatiotemporal Intelligence in VLMs for Autonomous Driving

Authors:

Spatiotemporal intelligence in autonomous driving (AD) requires an agent to integrate multi-view observations into a coherent scene representation, maintain object continuity across viewpoints and time, and reason about spatial relations, interactions, and future dynamics. However, existing AD vision-language benchmarks largely focus on single-view, static, ego-centric, or single-source question answering, leaving it unclear whether current Vision-Language Models (VLMs) can truly construct and reason over dynamic driving scenes. We introduce DriveSpatial, a benchmark of 15.6K human-verified QA pairs across 20 tasks from five large-scale AD datasets. DriveSpatial evaluates four abilities: Cognitive Scene Construction, Multi-view Relational Understanding, Temporal Reasoning, and Generalization. Unlike prior benchmarks, DriveSpatial is generated from a dynamic multi-relational scene graph that encodes object states, spatial relations, interactions, camera visibility, and temporal correspondences, enabling QA pairs that enforce genuine cross-view and spatiotemporal reasoning. Evaluating 15 representative VLMs reveals a substantial human-model gap: the strongest model trails humans by 28.4 points, with Cognitive Scene Construction emerging as the key bottleneck. Further diagnostics show that language-only prompting is insufficient, while explicit BEV grounding consistently improves performance. These results suggest that current VLMs lack the scene-construction ability needed for reliable spatiotemporal driving intelligence. DriveSpatial and its construction pipeline will be released to support future research.

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16.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16969

Probing Low Frame Rate Degradation in Neural Audio Codecs

Authors:

Alex Gichamba ↗Moise Busogi ↗

arXiv:2606.16969v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low frame rates in neural audio codecs are attractive for autoregressive speech synthesis, where the generation cost scales linearly with the sequence length. Recent work has demonstrated that codecs can operate at 12.5 Hz and below, but the mechanisms underlying low frame rate degradation remain insufficiently understood. We investigate these mechanisms through a controlled frame rate ablation. We reproduce a quality cliff at 6.25 Hz reported in previous works and evaluate candidate explanations: phonemic collisions and codebook saturation, neither of which shows evidence of a fundamental barrier. The cliff is instead caused by suboptimal training configuration: fixed clip duration during training yields too few tokens at low frame rates, starving the decoder of inter-token context. Once corrected, WER degrades smoothly with phonemic load down to 3.1 Hz and 1.6 Hz, suggesting the inference-time efficiency gains of low frame rate codecs are more accessible than previously assumed.

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17.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20167

Multi-Modal Contrastive Learning for Implicit Earth Embeddings via Location Tying

Authors:

Jonathan Hecht ↗Lukas Arzoumanidis ↗Ziyue Li ↗Youness Dehbi ↗

arXiv:2606.20167v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spatial prediction tasks are often limited by a lack of high-quality labelled ground-truth observations. To overcome this challenge, self-supervised pre-training is a possible solution, with contrastive learning dominant for location encoders. Those approaches usually align geographic coordinates with just one additional modality. We propose two multimodal contrastive learning architectures: Multimodal Embedding via Location Tying (MELT) and Sequential Alternating Location Training (SALT). These architectures expand this framework beyond two modalities by utilising unpaired geospatial data. Both methods are technically viable and match the performance of the strongest two-modality baseline (SATCLIP) across four downstream tasks. However, increasing the number of modalities does not consistently improve performance, suggesting that the chosen location encoder is the main limitation - the contrastive objective reaches its peak early, regardless of modality diversity or pre-training volume. MELT provides more stable training than SALT and presents a stronger foundation for future scaling.

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18.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19468

Characterizing Narrative Content in Web-scale LLM Pretraining Data

Authors:

Teagan Johnson ↗Elliott Ash ↗Andrew Piper ↗Maria Antoniak ↗

The narrative composition of web-scale LLM pretraining corpora remains largely unexplored even though narrative is a fundamental mode of human communication. We present the first fine-grained study of narrative features in Dolma, a 3-trillion-token open pretraining corpus. Drawing on narrative theory, we design a framework spanning three core narrative elements (agency, setting, and events) operationalized as 11 interpretable dimensions. After sampling and annotating a diverse set of 400 passages, we finetune and validate NarraBERT, a RoBERTa-based model for fine-grained narrative prediction. We apply NarraBERT to 3M passages, resulting in a new dataset, NarraDolma. We find (i) narrative structure is measurable at scale across extremely heterogeneous data, (ii) we uncover a continuous, multidimensional narrative structure underlying web text, and (iii) narrative qualities are unequally distributed across pretraining sources and topics in ways that current curation practices neither measure nor account for. Our framework, dataset, and analyses provide a foundation for understanding how narrative qualities are distributed in LLM pretraining data and for studying how data composition affects narrative reasoning tasks. We publicly release NarraDolma and NarraBERT.

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19.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20278

Proposal of quantum arrival-time measurement with a Bose-Einstein condensate

Authors:

Pascal Naidon ↗Lucas Happ ↗Denis Boiron ↗

arXiv:2606.20278v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This work shows how a Bose-Einstein condensate of ultracold atoms could be used to address a long-standing question in quantum theory: how much time does it take for a particle to reach a detector? To this end, we propose a realistic experimental setup, whose key idea is not to measure arrival times directly, but the arrival flux on the detector as a function of its position. This novel approach not only solves practical issues with having a detector close to the system, but also results in signals that allow to unambiguously distinguish different theoretical predictions. This proposal raises prospects for resolving the decades-old debate on this fundamental issue.

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20.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19776

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

Authors:

Jianing Li ↗Zhou Fang ↗Yijiang Liu ↗Li Du ↗

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.

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21.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12428

Mapping AI Programs in the U.S: A Status Report from Early 2026 and an Analysis of AI Majors and Minors

Authors:

Felix Muzny ↗Carolyn Jones ↗Carter Ithier ↗Hasnain Sikora ↗Hrutika Harshadbhai Patel ↗Carla E. Brodley ↗

arXiv:2606.12428v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a report on the status of undergraduate Artificial Intelligence (AI) programs in the United States in Spring 2026. In so doing, we 1) describe our scraping and mapping tools, which dynamically update to track the state of AI education in the U.S., and 2) create a historic record at a time of great upheaval. The tool we developed, available at https://cicmap.ai, detects, scrapes, and displays data from more than 350 undergraduate AI programs–majors, minors, concentrations, and certificates–at 4-year universities. Our tool searched over 560 institutions to locate these programs, a sample that represents 86\% of all undergraduate Computer Science (CS) graduates in the U.S. This tool allows prospective students, guidance counselors, administrators, and faculty to easily access AI program requirements and is designed to continually update as new programs emerge. To the best of our knowledge, this survey represents the most comprehensive snapshot of the state of AI programs in the U.S. to date. With this work we offer three important contributions: 1) a record of AI programs in the U.S. at a time of great upheaval; 2) a tool to explore AI programs and their requirements; and 3) an analysis of the courses required for 66 AI majors and 87 AI minors. Our analysis of majors and minors shows great variability in the size and the requirements of these degrees, but we note two takeaways. First, not all majors require a general AI course, but if they don't, they do require a Machine Learning (ML) course. Second, while more than a third of majors require an Ethics in AI course, just under a quarter of AI minors do.

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22.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14578

A Qualitative Review of GenAI-Based Methods for Data Generation and Augmentation in Industrial Computer Vision Applications

Authors:

Paul Koch ↗Paul Hofmann ↗Ferdinand Wa{\ss}elewsky ↗Adem Karakurt ↗Andre S\'ers ↗J\"org Kr\"uger ↗

AI-driven computer vision applications require a profound database to ensure predictable behaviors and performance. Such predictable behaviors are especially important for industrial applications in gaining trust from users. However, such a database is not readily available in industrial applications, and its acquisition is not trivial either. Active learning methods can be applied to ramp up data within a project deployment to iteratively increase the database, and thus the application predictability. Unfortunately, we observe that this often leads to a loss of user trust in the application, which is difficult to regain once lost. This leads to a "chicken-and-egg" dilemma in which neither the database nor the application is developed. In this work, we review state-of-the-art methods and approaches to further boost the database the initial active data ramp-up phase. Here, we focus on recent advancements in GenAI-based data generation and augmentation methods and review their adaptability on an industrial computer vision classification use case. Although we observe a potential for automatic data ramp-up, we also see a domain miss match in between the source (training environment) and target (industrial use-case) - regarding context defined in natural language and object characteristics.

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23.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2603.07920

RLPR: Radar-to-LiDAR Place Recognition via Two-Stage Asymmetric Cross-Modal Alignment for Autonomous Driving

Authors:

Zhangshuo Qi ↗Jingyi Xu ↗Luqi Cheng ↗Shichen Wen ↗Guangming Xiong ↗

All-weather autonomy is critical for autonomous driving, which necessitates reliable localization across diverse scenarios. While LiDAR place recognition is widely deployed for this task, its performance degrades in adverse weather. Conversely, radar-based methods, though weather-resilient, are hindered by the general unavailability of radar maps. To bridge this gap, radar-to-LiDAR place recognition, which localizes radar scans within existing LiDAR maps, has garnered increasing interest. However, extracting discriminative and generalizable features shared between modalities remains challenging, compounded by the scarcity of large-scale paired training data and the signal heterogeneity across radar types. In this work, we propose RLPR, a robust radar-to-LiDAR place recognition framework compatible with single-chip, scanning, and 4D radars. We first design a dual-stream network to extract structural features that abstract away from sensor-specific signal properties (e.g., Doppler or RCS). Subsequently, motivated by our task-specific asymmetry observation between radar and LiDAR, we introduce a two-stage asymmetric cross-modal alignment (TACMA) strategy, which leverages the pre-trained radar branch as a discriminative anchor to guide the alignment process. Experiments on four datasets demonstrate that RLPR achieves state-of-the-art recognition accuracy with strong zero-shot generalization capabilities.

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24.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20363

Automating SKILL.md Generation for Computer-Using Agents via Interaction Trajectory Mining

Authors:

Yuexing Hao ↗Xiaomin Li ↗

arXiv:2606.20363v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Explicit skill libraries make computer-using agents easier to inspect, but it remains unclear whether such libraries can be mined from interaction data in a way that improves downstream policies. We study this question through a three-stage pipeline that segments GUI trajectories, clusters segments into candidate skills, and trains a skill-aware policy from the resulting annotations. The mined clusters are readable on the source benchmark: five of eight clusters have at least 0.95 purity against InteraSkill Workflows labels. However, readability does not imply transfer. GRPO improves IW skill-step accuracy only from 18.5\% to 20.5\%, leaves BrowseComp+ essentially unchanged, and underperforms trivial frequency priors on key source-domain metrics. We therefore present the method as a diagnostic study: trajectory mining can expose inspectable skill structure, but the current boundary detector, orderless segment representation, and offline reward model are insufficient for reliable cross-domain policy improvement.

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25.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12685

Multiple Topological Haldane Phases for Symmetry-Protected Quantum Information Processing

Authors:

Jo\~ao Pedro Gama D'Elia ↗Irene D'Amico ↗Thereza Paiva ↗

arXiv:2606.12685v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Symmetry-protected topological phases have attracted significant interest at the fundamental level and as a potential platform for quantum information processing, owing to their protected edge states and resilience to perturbations. Applying these features for practical and efficient quantum computation is highly desirable, but remains an open challenge. Here, we demonstrate the partitioning into multiple independent Haldane phase subsystems of a single spin-1/2 ladder system and propose this as a scalable architecture for gate-based quantum computation, which takes advantage of the symmetry-protected topological order. We encode qubits in the two topological states of the $S^{z}=0$ sector of each subsystem. Finite-size effects, typically viewed as detrimental, instead provide a controllable energy splitting that enables single-qubit rotations using only local magnetic fields. An Ising-type interaction between neighboring subsystem edges generates entangling gates, enabling universal quantum computation driven by two control parameters that are easily accessible experimentally. Our results demonstrate how symmetry-protected topological phases can be directly harnessed for circuit-model quantum computation in realistic systems.

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