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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

One-Shot Novel View and Pose Human Image Synthesis via 3D Prior Guided Diffusion Model

This paper addresses the challenge of one-shot novel view and pose human image synthesis. The existing methods transfer the reference human image to a target pose using a set of 2D pose keypoints or synthesize human images based on generalizable human NeRF which uses human model priors to extract point-wise features. However, pose transfer based methods can not handle complex human pose using ambiguous 2D pose as the condition, while generalizable human NeRFs may be inaccurate to recover occluded/invisiable human parts without extracted reliable features. To solve these problems, we propose a novel approach for novel view and pose synthesis from a singe human image via conditional denoising diffusion model. Our diffusion model divides the novel view and pose synthesis problem into a sequence of conditional denoising steps. Specifically, to generate humans with complex and arbitrary poses, we introduce 3D human priors, i.e., 3D normal map and color prompt, as geometry and color conditions into the generation process. By transferring the reference human into the target human with a series of diffusion steps, our diffusion model enables high-quality synthesis including the occluded/invisible parts. Further, we propose a self-reconstruction based customized refinement to enhance fine details when tested on novel persons.Experimental results on different public datasets demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms previous methods and also shows better generalization ability across datasets. The code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/Yankeegsj/3DPGDM.

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

Constitutional Value Potentials: reading and steering internal priority margins in language models

arXiv:2606.15420v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A constitution tells a language model what to value, but little tells us whether it does. Adherence is judged from outputs, and output evidence is most fragile on value conflicts, where what matters is not which value a model mentions but which one it is willing to sacrifice. We provide evidence that this arbitration can be read from activations in a structured margin readout. We introduce Constitutional Value Potentials (CVP). For each value we learn a scalar potential from the hidden state: an internal pressure to preserve that value, supervised not by the prompt but by an independent judge's verdict on which value the model's own response actually preserved. The signed difference of two potentials is a priority margin. A constitutional clause becomes the claim that a margin stays positive, and a single monitor score flags when it does not. The monitor predicts conflict violations with AUROC up to 0.95, beats a strong hidden-state probe, and generalizes to held-out synthetic conflicts across three Qwen2.5 scales. The signal appears as the answer begins, from the prompt tail and first response token. Read this early, the same signal reveals whether an adversarial priority hack has actually pushed the model toward a violation, rather than only whether the prompt looks adversarial. The same directions also support intervention tests: under selected steering settings, moving along a value direction shifts judged trade-offs in the intended direction. Together, these results suggest that some constitution-relevant priorities are accessible as activation-space margins, rather than only as output behavior.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Socioeconomic inequalities in smoking prevalence and intensity in Germany: A repeated cross-sectional analysis from 1998 to 2024

Background: Smoking inequalities by socioeconomic status have widened consistently in Germany, but sex-specific trends after 2013 and inequalities in daily cigarette consumption among smokers (intensity) are unknown. We analyzed trends in absolute and relative socioeconomic inequalities in smoking prevalence and intensity among German adults across three decades. Methods: We used 14 waves (1998-2024) of population-representative cross-sectional data from the German Socio-Economic Panel to estimate sex-specific trends in smoking prevalence and intensity in adults aged 25-64. Inequalities were quantified across strata of education, occupation, and equivalized household income using the absolute and relative concentration index with 95% bootstrap confidence intervals. Results: Overall smoking prevalence declined from 35.05% (CI: [33.90%, 36.20%] in 1998 to 22.19% (CI: [21.15%, 23.24%]) in 2024, and mean intensity from 17.49 (CI: [17.09,17.90]) to 13.33 (CI: [12.88, 13.79]) cigarettes/day. Over this period sex-differences in both outcomes narrowed almost completely. Absolute and relative inequalities in smoking prevalence widened across all SES dimensions, particularly for education and occupation. By 2024, inequalities were larger among women than men driven by a stagnating or rising smoking prevalence among low-SES women at least until 2018 alongside continued declines in higher-SES women and for men. Inequalities in smoking intensity, particularly related to income, were generally smaller than those in prevalence. Conclusion: Socioeconomic smoking inequalities in Germany widened from 1998 to 2024 primarily driven by reductions among higher-SES groups and increases in low-SES women. However, recent reductions in low-SES women may indicate a new phase in the smoking epidemic. Health equity considerations should be integrated into a targeted German tobacco control strategy.

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

Adaptive Oscillatory-State Alignment for Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.06010v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Long-term time series forecasting benefits from inductive biases that expose recurring temporal structure. Existing periodic forecasting methods typically model recurrence through predefined periods, global spectral components, or fixed learnable templates. However, real-world temporal dynamics are rarely rigidly periodic: around a nominal cycle, oscillatory behavior often exhibits non-rigid periodicity (NRP), where cycle magnitude, cycle alignment, and local cycle duration vary over time. Under these conditions, fixed-template periodic modeling can become fundamentally mismatched to the underlying temporal states. We propose AOSNet, a Hilbert-guided forecasting framework that reformulates periodic forecasting from fixed template matching to adaptive oscillatory-state alignment. AOSNet extracts analytic-signal descriptors from both the observed sequence and a learnable global oscillatory prior, then adaptively aligns local states through a descriptor-conditioned gate that selectively preserves reliable observations while softly correcting mismatched regions. The learned prior serves not as a rigid repeated template but as a flexible oscillatory reference interpreted through local state dynamics. Experiments on eight public benchmarks and two cloud workload traces demonstrate leading or highly competitive accuracy with a compact model size and low inference latency, supporting repeated forecasting settings such as capacity planning and autoscaling. Controlled synthetic studies that isolate cycle-magnitude and cycle-alignment variation and combine them with cycle-duration changes show that the advantage of oscillatory-state alignment increases as NRP intensifies.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Detecting and Mitigating DDoS Attacks with AI: A Survey

arXiv:2503.17867v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Distributed Denial of Service attacks represent an active cybersecurity research problem. Recent research shifted from static rule-based defenses towards AI-based detection and mitigation. This comprehensive survey covers several key topics. Preeminently, state-of-the-art AI detection methods are discussed. An in-depth taxonomy based on manual expert hierarchies and an AI-generated dendrogram are provided, thus settling DDoS categorization ambiguities. An important discussion on available datasets follows, covering data format options and their role in training AI detection methods together with adversarial training and examples augmentation. Beyond detection, AI based mitigation techniques are surveyed as well. Finally, multiple open research directions are proposed.

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

Vision Transformers for Face Recognition Need More Registers

Recent advances in Vision Transformers (ViTs) for face recognition (FR) have moved beyond the standard CLS-token paradigm. In this paradigm, a special classification token (CLS) is prepended to the patch embeddings and used as a representation of the input for downstream tasks. An alternative approach, Concatenated Patch Embeddings (CPE), instead leverages all patch tokens by concatenating them into a single vector, which is then projected into a compact face representation. CPE has been shown to improve recognition performance in comparison to CLS-based ones, but our qualitative analysis of attention maps showed the presence of artifacts that limit their interpretability. To address this issue, we incorporate register tokens, learnable tokens concatenated to the initial patch embeddings, and processed jointly through the ViT encoder blocks. This mechanism has been shown to produce more structured and interpretable attention maps compared to baseline ViT. We empirically demonstrate that these artifacts consistently appear across various ViT backbones, including small and large models, and that introducing register tokens effectively mitigates them. Adding four or eight registers significantly enhances interpretability, with eight registers providing the highest verification accuracies and smoothest attention structures. Our resulting model, ViT-8R, corresponds to a CPE-based ViT-B architecture augmented with eight register tokens achieves state-of-the-art performance among ViT-based FR models on large-scale IJB-B and IJB-C benchmarks. Also, ViT-8R produces substantially clearer attention maps compared with the baseline model, which offer deeper insight into the model's attention behavior (https://github.com/TaharChettaoui/ViT-FR-Registers)

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Interactor: Agentic RL oriented Iterative Creation for Ad Description Generation in Sponsored Search

This paper focuses on automatically generating informative ad descriptions in sponsored search. Unlike ad titles which are usually optimized to attract user click feedbacks, ad descriptions have a longer text span and possess the potential of incorporating world knowledge to address user search intents while presenting the fine-grained selling points of the ads. We propose Interactor, a multi-turn iterative creation framework optimized with agentic RL for ad description generation. The generation model acts as a policy that interacts with a customized environment consisting of multiple generative reward models. Given initial generations by the policy, the customized GenRMs evaluate multi-dimensional qualities including knowledge capacity and landing page consistency, providing both binary signals and reasoning feedbacks. The policy then iteratively refines the descriptions based on such feedbacks to ensure continuous improvement. Experiments on industrial datasets show that the Interactor framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in generating knowledge-rich and faithful ad descriptions. Since May 2026, it has been deployed online in a leading search ads system, contributing to both ad revenue and user experience.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

The Morse Transform for Discrete Shape Analysis

arXiv:2503.04507v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The geometry of an object plays a vital role in modulating its interactions with the physical world. It nevertheless remains difficult to describe geometric information numerically for the purposes of statistical inference or classification tasks. Here, we introduce a new topological transform which leverages directional piecewise-linear Morse theory to quantify the geometry of an embedded object by cataloguing critical points across multiple height-functions. The output of this Morse transform records both the heights and the local topological type (peak, trough or saddle) of the critical points that characterise the underlying shape, retaining finer information than the Euler characteristic transform whilst naturally prioritising a shape's outermost regions. Crucially, this output can be further compressed into a rich but compact feature vector. We benchmark the Morse feature vector as a descriptor for ligand-based virtual screening (LBVS), which intrinsically depends on the shape of molecules. Under a common gradient-boosted tree classification pipeline, Morse descriptors achieve the highest mean AUROC when compared to other topological transform descriptors and to standard shape-based LBVS descriptors.

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

Improving Cross-Format Robustness in Language Models with Multi-Format Training

Large language models often remain sensitive to answer format: a question solved correctly in one form may fail in another semantically equivalent form. To study this gap, we define cross-format robustness as the extent to which a model answers the same underlying question consistently across formats. We then compare full-format training with FormatMix, which expands only a subset of training items into multiple equivalent formats using either random or targeted selection. Across GLM4 and Llama-3.1, multi-format supervision consistently improves both task performance and cross-format robustness, whereas Multiple-choice question (MCQ)-only supervision alone brings little benefit and can even reduce robustness. We further find that expanding only about 30% of the training set into multiple formats often recovers most of the gain from full-format training, and this effect appears across the model families and sizes we study. These results suggest that format diversity, rather than additional supervision alone, is the key driver of robustness. That lightweight multi-format augmentation is a practical way to make LLMs less sensitive to answer format without changing the base model.

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

Oops, Wait: Discourse Tokens Matter in Reasoning Model

Recent studies suggest that even data-efficient training with ($\simeq$1K) reasoning trajectories can induce non-trivial reasoning capabilities in large language models through post-training. Such training corpora often contain iconic tokens such as "wait", "so", and "alternatively", which frequently appear in reasoning trajectories and may play a role in this process. This paper focuses on characterizing observable token-level patterns in post-training and a case study of how data-efficient supervised fine-tuning (SFT) differs from, and falls short of, large-scale post-training. To this end, we first identify tokens that correlate with correct answers along reasoning trajectories across models and training setups. We then focus on the distribution and (functional) roles of the "wait" token to primarily study the model trained in a data-efficient manner compared with the counterpart. Our study finds that discourse tokens are associated with correctness and a reasoning accuracy jump, even in data-efficient SFT. This suggests data-efficient SFT can partially reproduce discourse-token patterns to mimic meaningful reasoning behavior, but the patterns are less aligned with high-confidence answer transitions than those from large-scale post-training.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Toward Self-Evolution-Ready Workflow Harnesses: A Reversible Migration Path and Convertibility Taxonomy for Expert LLM Pipelines

arXiv:2606.24598v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While expert-validated "LLM + script" workflows deliver significant value, they remain static: they encode hard-won domain knowledge yet fail to adapt execution based on feedback. Existing agent research predominantly targets greenfield agents and synthetic benchmarks, leaving the migration of active legacy workflows unresolved. To bridge this gap, we present a reversible, Strangler-Fig migration path that refactors legacy workflows into composable, typed, and auditable stages. Central to this framework is a three-tier convertibility taxonomy (A/B/C), implemented as a routing stage within the system harness, which diagnoses a workflow's readiness and routes it accordingly.

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

CAMEO: A Conditional and Quality-Aware Multi-Agent Image Editing Orchestrator

Conditional image editing aims to modify a source image according to textual prompts and optional reference guidance. Such editing is crucial in scenarios requiring strict structural control (i.e., anomaly insertion in driving scenes and complex human pose transformation). Despite recent advances in large-scale editing models (i.e., Seedream, Nano Banana, etc), most approaches rely on single-step generation. This paradigm often lacks explicit quality control, may introduce excessive deviation from the original image, and frequently produces structural artifacts or environment-inconsistent modifications, typically requiring manual prompt tuning to achieve acceptable results. We propose CAMEO, a structured multi-agent framework that reformulates conditional editing as a quality-aware, feedback-driven process rather than a one-shot generation task. CAMEO decomposes editing into coordinated stages of planning, structured prompting, hypothesis generation, and adaptive reference grounding, where external guidance is invoked only when task complexity requires it. To overcome the lack of intrinsic quality control in existing methods, evaluation is embedded directly within the editing loop. Intermediate results are iteratively refined through structured feedback, forming a closed-loop process that progressively corrects structural and contextual inconsistencies. We evaluate CAMEO on anomaly insertion and human pose switching tasks. Across multiple strong editing backbones and independent evaluation models, CAMEO consistently achieves 20\% more win rate on average compared to multiple state-of-the-art models, demonstrating improved robustness, controllability, and structural reliability in conditional image editing.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

AnchorKV: Safety-Aware KV Cache Compression via Soft Penalty with a Refusal Anchor

arXiv:2606.17872v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) outperform earlier architectures on generative inference and long-context tasks, but their large size introduces significant challenges in memory usage, energy cost, and on-device deployment. Since scaling pre-trained language models improves downstream capability [zhao2023survey], the key-value (KV) cache becomes a dominant inference bottleneck. Recent KV cache compression methods [jo2025fastkv,li2024snapkv,zhou2024dynamickv] reduce this cost by retaining only a subset of attention-relevant tokens. However, while these approaches preserve accuracy on benign workloads, their compression policies either fail to defend against jailbreak attacks [jiang2024robustkv] or degrade safety alignment under aggressive eviction. We propose AnchorKV, a drop-in modification to KV cache compression that biases token retention scores away from directions in key space associated with harmful prompts. AnchorKV constructs an offline safety anchor by adapting a difference-of-means representation engineering approach [arditi2024refusal,zou2023representation] to the layer-specific key projection space used in KV caching. Based on this anchor, a soft penalty token selection rule trades a small amount of utility for substantially improved safety alignment, while reducing to the original compressor when the penalty is zero.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

ASTER: Latent Pseudo-Anomaly Generation for Unsupervised Time-Series Anomaly Detection

Time-series anomaly detection (TSAD) is critical in domains such as industrial monitoring, healthcare, and cybersecurity, but it remains challenging due to rare and heterogeneous anomalies and the scarcity of labelled data. This scarcity makes unsupervised approaches predominant, yet existing methods often rely on reconstruction or forecasting, which struggle with complex data, or on embedding-based approaches that require domain-specific anomaly synthesis and fixed distance metrics. We propose ASTER, a framework that generates pseudo-anomalies directly in the latent space, avoiding handcrafted anomaly injections and the need for domain expertise. A latent-space decoder produces tailored pseudo-anomalies to train a Transformer-based anomaly classifier, while a pre-trained LLM enriches the temporal and contextual representations of this space. Experiments on three benchmark datasets show that ASTER achieves state-of-the-art performance and sets a new standard for LLM-based TSAD.

15.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-02

Data-driven model reveals increased stability of CAG-expanded <i>huntingtin</i> RNA due to MID1 binding

Authors:

by Yuhong Liu, Annika Reisbitzer, Domagoj Dorešić, Jan Hasenauer, Sybille Krauß, Tatjana Tchumatchenko RNA-binding proteins (RBP) are important regulators of RNA metabolism. In neurodegenerative disorders such as Huntington’s Disease (HD), disrupted RBP-RNA interactions contribute to neuronal dysfunction. One such RBP, Midline 1 (MID1), has been shown to aberrantly associate with mutant huntingtin (Htt) RNA, enhancing its translation, yet the mechanism driving this effect remains unknown. Here, we develop a computational model to understand the role of MID1. Based on previously published data, our model predicts that MID1 increases the stability of the Htt RNA. We experimentally validate this prediction, showing that overexpression of MID1 significantly prolongs the half-life of mutant Htt RNA. Furthermore, we evaluate model refinements, including clustering of MID1-bound RNA, which allow capturing all key observations in the data. Together, we provide a data-driven framework that underlines the importance of RBP-RNA interaction in post-transcriptional regulation. This framework also shows how individual molecular reactions jointly determine RNA stability and protein levels in HD.

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

A Hybrid GNN-FEM Framework for Phase-Field Fracture Simulation. Physics-Preserving Hybridization for Generalizable Surrogate Modeling

arXiv:2606.19378v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scientific machine learning (SciML) has emerged as a promising approach for accelerating simulations of complex physical systems, yet achieving physically consistent and generalizable predictions for nonlinear, history-dependent problems remains a central challenge. In this study, we propose a hybrid GNN–FEM framework for efficient and generalizable phase-field fracture modeling. While phase-field approaches provide a robust variational framework for simulating complex crack evolution, their high computational cost limits practical applications because they require solving coupled, nonlinear, and history-dependent systems within an incremental finite element procedure. To address this challenge, a graph neural network surrogate is integrated into the conventional staggered scheme, replacing the phase-field update at each load increment while retaining the FEM-based displacement solver to enforce mechanical equilibrium and boundary conditions. By preserving the incremental solution structure, the framework remains consistent with history-dependent fracture evolution without requiring the surrogate to approximate the full solution trajectory. This selective surrogate strategy emphasizes the identification of a physically meaningful and incrementally structured learning target, rather than relying on brute-force data generation to learn the full fracture process. The proposed framework achieves strong generalization across varying geometries, loading conditions, material properties, and discretizations through dimensionless feature design, a graph-based formulation on mesh-based domains, and a physics-informed loss derived from the governing phase-field equation. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the hybrid approach reduces computational cost while maintaining accuracy compared with conventional FEM, and exhibits robust predictive performance across diverse problem settings.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

From Correlation to Causation in Lane Change Prediction for Automated Driving: A Causal Explanation Framework

arXiv:2606.15756v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Lane-change prediction is a central task in intelligent vehicles, where early maneuver anticipation can support safer decision-making. However, many existing approaches mainly learn statistical associations between observed driving variables and future maneuvers, while overlooking the causal dependencies among the input variables themselves. This limits interpretability, especially when physically related variables such as longitudinal gap, relative longitudinal velocity, and Time-To-Collision (TTC) are treated as independent flat inputs. This article presents a causal-inference-based framework for lane-change prediction and explanation. The proposed approach combines linguistic feature construction, expert-constrained causal discovery, deep structural causal modeling with Deep End-to-end Causal Inference (DECI), intervention-based effect analysis, refutation testing, and recursive causal-chain explanation. The objective is not only to predict the future maneuver, but also to identify candidate variables that directly contribute to the prediction, the upstream factors influencing them, and the causal chains through which these effects propagate. The framework achieves average F1-scores above 95% during the first three seconds before the lane-marking crossing event. Beyond prediction accuracy, the framework uses intervention-based effect analysis to distinguish influential from weakly influential variables under the learned causal structure. It further distinguishes candidate direct contributors from mediated effects and generates contrastive causal-chain explanations that clarify why the predicted maneuver is favored and why the alternative maneuvers are less supported. The main contribution is therefore a mechanism-aware lane-change prediction pipeline that moves beyond correlation-based classification toward more interpretable causal reasoning for maneuver prediction.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Phase-space microscopes for quantum gases: Imaging conjugate variables and momentum-weighted densities

arXiv:2603.29568v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Quantum gas microscopes offer unprecedented insights into quantum many-body states of cold atomic gases. Here we introduce concrete protocols for extending quantum gas microscopes to measure in phase space, by mapping momentum onto auxiliary degrees of freedom and using positive operator-valued measures. We distinguish between two distinct operational modes. In the Husimi-Q phase space microscope, position and momentum are jointly measured; in this mode the fundamental quantum noise is distributed between position and momentum. Conversely, the averaged-mode phase space microscope extracts the spatial dependence of averages of the momentum density (and its moments); these averages can be retrieved with arbitrary spatial resolution. We illustrate the utility of these techniques in diverse physical settings.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

PMOF: A Dataset and Benchmark for Passenger Monitoring Using Overhead Fisheye Cameras

Autonomous staff-free public transport requires reliable in-vehicle passenger monitoring. However, perception inside moving vehicles is challenged by confined spaces, variable illumination, motion-induced background variation, occlusion, and limited viewpoints. To mitigate these spatial constraints, ceiling-mounted fisheye cameras provide full-scene coverage from a single viewpoint. Yet existing public overhead fisheye datasets are recorded in static environments and do not capture the domain shift introduced by vehicle motion. To fill this gap, we introduce PMOF, Passenger Monitoring using Overhead Fisheye cameras, the first public dataset of top-view fisheye imagery captured inside a moving vehicle, comprising over 19k manually annotated frames. PMOF provides rotated bounding boxes, tracking identifiers, and action labels, supporting object detection, tracking, and action recognition. We benchmark PMOF using YOLO26m-obb models fine-tuned under multiple dataset configurations that combine PMOF with existing overhead fisheye datasets. Cross-domain fine-tuning with custom rotation-aware augmentation achieves 94.8% AP50 on PMOF and 96.5% AP50 on an unseen overhead fisheye dataset from a different domain. Our results highlight the domain gap between static and moving environments and show that incorporating PMOF improves detection performance and advances generalization beyond passenger monitoring to broader fisheye-based person detection tasks. The dataset and code are available at https://swermuth.github.io/pmof/.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

TVIR: Building Deep Research Agents Towards Text-Visual Interleaved Report Generation

Deep Research Agents have shown strong capability in multi-step information retrieval, reasoning, and long-form report generation, but existing benchmarks and systems remain predominantly text-centric, with limited evaluation of whether visual elements are factually reliable and well aligned with the surrounding analysis. To address this gap, we introduce TVIR (Text-Visual Interleaved Report Generation), which includes TVIR-Bench, a benchmark of 100 expert-curated multimodal deep research tasks that require visual elements to serve specific analytical sub-goals, and TVIR-Agent, a hierarchical multi-agent framework that serves as a strong baseline for constructing outlines, retrieving images, generating charts with traceable sources, and composing reports through context-aware sequential writing. We further develop a dual-path evaluation framework that combines Textual Assessment and Visual Assessment. Experiments across nine deep research systems show that TVIR-Agent achieves strong overall performance, underscoring the importance of explicit multimodal design and evaluation for evidence-driven report generation.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

ThinkJEPA: Empowering Latent World Models with Large Vision-Language Reasoning Model

Recent progress in latent world models (e.g., V-JEPA2) has shown promising capability in forecasting future world states from video observations. Nevertheless, dense prediction from a short observation window limits temporal context and can bias predictors toward local, low-level extrapolation, making it difficult to capture long-horizon semantics and reducing downstream utility. Vision–language models (VLMs), in contrast, provide strong semantic grounding and general knowledge by reasoning over uniformly sampled frames, but they are not ideal as standalone dense predictors due to compute-driven sparse sampling, a language-output bottleneck that compresses fine-grained interaction states into text-oriented representations, and a data-regime mismatch when adapting to small action-conditioned datasets. We propose a VLM-guided JEPA-style latent world modeling framework that combines dense-frame dynamics modeling with long-horizon semantic guidance via a dual-temporal pathway: a dense JEPA branch for fine-grained motion and interaction cues, and a uniformly sampled VLM thinker branch with a larger temporal stride for knowledge-rich guidance. To transfer the VLM's progressive reasoning signals effectively, we introduce a hierarchical pyramid representation extraction module that aggregates multi-layer VLM representations into guidance features compatible with latent prediction. Experiments on hand-manipulation trajectory prediction show that our method outperforms both a strong VLM-only baseline and a JEPA-predictor baseline, and yields more robust long-horizon rollout behavior.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Tree-Structured Orthonormal Decomposition of the Aitchison Simplex

arXiv:2606.11646v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Compositional data – vectors encoding relative proportions – arise across scientific domains, including ecology, geochemistry, and genomics. The features in these data often come with known hierarchical structure (e.g., taxonomies, phylogenies, ontologies), yet existing methods either ignore this structure, discard the intrinsic Aitchison geometry, are designed for binary trees, or yield incomplete coordinate systems. We describe PolyILR, a canonical orthonormal decomposition of the Aitchison tangent space aligned with any tree topology. Our construction defines a weighted local geometry at each internal node capturing full branching structure, then lifts these to a global orthonormal basis where every coordinate corresponds to a specific tree location. On microbiome and single-cell benchmarks, PolyILR yields stable, interpretable features and enables inference at multiscale tree resolution. We also establish a novel theoretical connection to softmax classifiers, suggesting possible applications to probabilistic modeling.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Computational Identifiability

arXiv:2606.19361v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Identification conditions describe the computability of a target query or parameter of interest as a function of the type and amount of information available. In causal identification, this information is often expressed in the form of a causal graph, and data are observed or collected for some subset of variables in the graph. Target queries may be for a single effect alone or for a class of effects in a given model. The derivation of an identification algorithm then defines mathematically the process by which the desired causal effect(s) can be uniquely determined, theoretically, in expectation. Identifiability in expectation, or 'theoretical identifiability,' generally assumes asymptotic properties, infinite data, or other mathematically idealized conditions. In this paper, we explore a fundamental distinction between this theoretical, idealized notion of identifiability and a proposed alternative that is computation-bound. The framework we propose - 'computational identifiability' - is to instead define a finite computational search procedure for an empirical estimator. If this process finds an estimator empirically, within a desired error tolerance, then identifiability is satisfied, conditional on the specified assumptions of the search (i.e., a prior distribution over the parameters) and conditional on the search procedure itself. Through several experiments, we demonstrate how this framework allows us to answer fine-grained, practical identification questions, such as identification with small finite samples, with ambiguous graphical criteria, with mixed observational-interventional data, and across counterfactual data and estimands. Code is available at https://github.com/lbynum/metadentify.

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

ASALT: Adaptive State Alignment for Lateral Transfer in Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.24601v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) addresses the problem of training multiple agents that pursue collaborative, competitive, or mixed objectives. Prior work has investigated transfer learning between source and target domains in MARL; however, the majority of existing approaches impose the constraint that the dimensionalities of the observation space and the global state space must be identical across domains. In this paper, we introduce a method that explicitly accommodates mismatched state-space dimensionalities between source and target domains. The proposed approach, ASALT, incorporates both observation-level and state-level adapters that map the target-domain observations and global states into a shared embedding space, thereby enabling more effective transfer of knowledge across both actors and critics. These adapters can generate embeddings that support efficient strategy transfer across heterogeneous domains. Experimental results on multiple configurations in standard benchmark environments demonstrate that ASALT surpasses existing baselines in terms of sample efficiency and global return in cooperative settings, but its effectiveness depends on the degree of mismatch between source and target domains. Furthermore, our findings indicate that ASALT mitigates negative transfer, which frequently constitutes a major obstacle when transferring policies between domains with differing observation and action spaces.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Engagement Intensity as a Learner-Modeling Signal for Adaptive AI Ethics Instruction

arXiv:2606.18548v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Adaptive AI ethics instruction in graduate research training benefits from intake measures that reflect differences in prior LLM experience. Prior coursework or workshop attendance is an obvious candidate, but it is not clear whether it is associated with pre-instruction ratings on key AI perception items. We compare three candidate intake features, self-reported usage frequency, self-rated LLM familiarity, and prior AI education, across five baseline perception outcomes in 93 bioscience graduate and postdoctoral trainees enrolled in a required research ethics course. Usage frequency shows Holm-corrected associations with all five outcomes, self-rated familiarity with three, and prior AI education with none. A threshold-like pattern at the lower end of the scale is most visible for training interest and accuracy trust rather than appearing as a uniform gradient across all five outcomes. In a short intake survey, reported LLM use is more consistently associated with these perceptions than prior coursework or workshops, with self-rated familiarity serving as a secondary indicator. These results suggest that simple pre-instruction behavioral signals can inform lightweight intake profiling for adaptive AI ethics education.