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

Before You Think: System 0, AI-Mediated Cognition and Cognitive Colonization

arXiv:2606.13658v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper examines three recent frameworks for understanding the cognitive and epistemic consequences of artificial intelligence: Tri-System Theory, Thinkframes, and System 0. It argues that while the first two capture important dimensions of AI's influence on individual reasoning and collective epistemic practices, System 0 occupies a theoretically distinctive position that neither can fully replicate. The paper introduces the concept of cognitive colonization, according to which AI systems can embed external interests within the architecture of the self in ways that are difficult for users to perceive. Because such systems are already widely deployed, understanding these invisible forms of influence is an urgent philosophical and practical task.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

From Passive Generation to Investigation: A Proactive Scientific Peer Review Agent

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in automating scientific peer review. However, existing approaches often struggle to generate in-depth reviews supported by concrete evidence. We argue that a key limitation is the lack of flexibility to proactively investigate suspicious parts of a paper based on accumulated evidence, as human reviewers do. In this paper, we explore how to enable an LLM-based review agent to perform such proactive investigation. We find that this can be naturally formulated as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), and propose ProReviewer, a scientific peer review agent that proactively reviews a paper guided by a maintained, structured review log. The structured review log serves as a workspace for the agent to track evidence and intermediate findings collected during review. Experiments show that ProReviewer with an 8B backbone, trained by supervised fine-tuning and optimized by reinforcement learning, achieves the highest average score across five quality dimensions, outperforming prompt-based methods with much larger frontier LLMs by up to 39% and the strongest fine-tuned baseline by 16% relatively. It also attains the highest win rates against baselines in human evaluation.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Adaptive Nucleus Truncation for Long-Form Reasoning

arXiv:2606.13982v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sampling plays an important role in long-form language-model reasoning. Over thousands of decoding steps, small changes in the candidate token set can compound into different reasoning trajectories, stability profiles, and final answers. Existing truncation methods such as top-$p$, min-$p$, and fixed top-$n\sigma$ sampling improve over unrestricted sampling, but they rely on fixed thresholds that cannot adapt to changes in entropy, task difficulty, training stage, or generation budget. We introduce Adaptive Nucleus Truncation Sampling (ANTS), which extends top-\(n\sigma\) sampling from a fixed decoding rule into an adaptive rollout-control mechanism for long-form generation. ANTS selects standardized neighborhoods around the maximum logit before temperature scaling, adapts the truncation width using an entropy-conditioned controller, and retains a no-truncation fallback arm to stabilize training when truncation becomes unsafe. On a 33B-total / 4B-active sparse Mixture-of-Experts reasoning model, ANTS improves average performance over percentage-based benchmarks by +1.9, +3.8, and +5.2 points at 8K, 16K, and 32K generation budgets, respectively. The strongest gains appear on instruction following and mathematical reasoning, with IFBench improving by more than 10 points at 32K and AIME 2025 improving by 7 points. Code generation reveals an important budget interaction. On Codeforces, ANTS trails the baseline at 8K, but reverses this gap and substantially improves ELO at 16K and 32K. These results suggest that sampler design should be treated not just as a decoding hyperparameter, but as part of how we stabilize and scale long-budget reasoning.

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

HyperPotter: Spell the Charm of High-Order Interactions in Audio Deepfake Detection

arXiv:2602.05670v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Advances in AIGC technologies have enabled the synthesis of highly realistic audio deepfakes capable of deceiving human auditory perception. Although numerous audio deepfake detection (ADD) methods have been developed, most rely on local temporal/spectral features or pairwise relations, overlooking high-order interactions (HOIs). HOIs capture discriminative patterns that emerge from multiple feature components beyond their individual contributions. We propose HyperPotter, a hypergraph-based framework designed to capture high-order relations associated with synergistic patterns through clustering-based hyperedges with class-aware prototype initialization. Extensive experiments on 13 test sets show that HyperPotter improves over the baseline on 11 sets, yielding an average relative EER reduction of 12.68\% across all test sets and 22.15\% on the improved sets. These results demonstrate strong cross-scenario generalization, while also revealing robustness limits under severe codec or channel distortion.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Modality-Aware Out-of-Distribution Detection for Multi-Modal Action Recognition

The incorporation of additional modalities into action recognition models increases their performance across a wide range of settings. However, how this additional information can contribute to making the models more robust remains underexplored, particularly for the case of multi-modal out-of-distribution (OOD) detection. While methods exist that regularize the multi-modal training process with OOD detection in mind, they still apply off-the-shelf OOD detectors designed for the uni-modal case during inference, discarding important information. Based on an interesting relationship we find between the multi-modal and uni-modal predictions, we propose to use this signal to build a post-hoc detector explicitly designed for the multi-modal scenario. We combine this new source of information with a feature-space score, which detects off-manifold samples in the multi-modal space, and normalize them by the multi-modal logits. In doing so, the proposed hybrid detector is compatible with existing training-time approaches and consistently improves performance. Experiments on a wide range of established datasets from the MultiOOD benchmark show that, on average, our approach outperforms the state of the art. Our results show the importance of explicitly considering the different modalities at inference time for multi-modal OOD detection.

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

Certifiable Safe RLHF: Semantic Grounding and Fixed Penalty Constraint Optimization for Safer LLM Alignment

arXiv:2510.03520v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Ensuring safety is a foundational requirement for large language models (LLMs). Achieving an appropriate balance between enhancing the utility of model outputs and mitigating their potential for harm is a complex and persistent challenge. Contemporary approaches frequently formalize this problem within the framework of Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) and employ established CMDP optimization techniques. However, these methods exhibit two notable limitations. First, their reliance on reward and cost functions renders performance highly sensitive to the underlying scoring mechanism, which must capture semantic meaning rather than being triggered by superficial keywords. Second, CMDP-based training entails tuning dual-variable, a process that is both computationally expensive and does not provide any provable safety guarantee for a fixed dual variable that can be exploitable through adversarial jailbreaks. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Certifiable Safe-RLHF (CS-RLHF) that introduces a cost model trained on a large-scale corpus to assign semantically grounded safety scores. In contrast to the lagrangian-based approach, CS-RLHF adopts a rectified penalty-based formulation. This design draws on the theory of exact penalty functions in constrained optimization, wherein constraint satisfaction is enforced directly through a suitably chosen penalty term. With an appropriately scaled penalty, feasibility of the safety constraints can be guaranteed at the optimizer, eliminating the need for dual-variable updates. Empirical evaluation demonstrates that CS-RLHF outperforms state-of-the-art LLM model responses rendering at-least 5 times efficient against nominal and jail-breaking prompts

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

MDForge: Agentic Molecular Dynamics Pipeline Design under Sparse Simulator Feedback

Molecular dynamics (MD) is the canonical in-silico method for atomistic molecular science, simulating molecular behavior from first-principle physics. Designing an MD pipeline for a new system requires substantial expert knowledge: running it on even one molecule is expensive, ruling out trial-and-error. We automate this expert pipeline-design process with an LLM agent. Unlike existing MD agents that orchestrate a predefined tool set, we treat pipeline design as open-ended code generation in which the agent's behavior is reshaped online by verbal reward. Specifically, we build MDForge, an LLM agent whose in-context update rule densifies the sparse reward via a multi-agent debate among physics experts. On three SAMPL host-guest binding free-energy benchmarks, MDForge automatically designs MD pipelines competitive with human experts. Deployed on a library of unseen candidate guests, its CB[7] pipeline discovers a novel binder that wet-lab competition NMR confirms is a high-affinity, picomolar CB[7] binder. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/Zehong-Wang/MDForge.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Attention mechanisms and transfer learning for robust peach leaf damage classification under domain shift

Artificial intelligence provides a practical framework for crop damage assessment from imagery data, supporting early decision-making in agricultural management. In peach orchards, climate change increases abiotic stress and biotic pressures, including pests and diseases, which often produce visually similar foliar symptoms. This overlap makes manual diagnosis difficult, especially across multiple fields with varying environmental conditions, highlighting the need for automated models with strong generalization ability. We propose an image-based classification approach for peach leaf damage detection. A benchmark dataset was created through manual annotation of publicly available images, consisting of 1,366 peach leaves across six damage categories. Several deep learning architectures were evaluated. EfficientNet models achieved the best results, with EfficientNetB0 reaching 92.9 percent accuracy, EfficientNetB3 achieving 91.5 percent, and EfficientNetB5 showing the strongest performance on minority classes. DenseNet121 reached 92.6 percent accuracy. The integration of the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) improved performance in several backbones, particularly EfficientNetB5 and InceptionV3, while showing limited or negative impact in others. The CBAM-enhanced EfficientNetB5 achieved the best overall accuracy of 93.3 percent. To evaluate robustness under realistic conditions, a local dataset of 180 images across four classes was collected, and transfer learning strategies were applied to address domain shift. Three fine-tuning strategies were tested. EfficientNetB3 combined with CBAM achieved the best performance in the local domain, reaching a 93 percent macro F1-score after transfer. Overall, attention-based models showed improved robustness for minority classes and better generalization across different field conditions.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

RUB: Evaluating Residual Knowledge in Unlearned Models

Machine Unlearning (MUL) has emerged as a key mechanism for privacy protection and content regulation, yet current techniques often fail to guarantee the complete removal of sensitive information. While most existing works focus on verifying the execution of unlearning, they overlook the critical question of whether models remain robust against adversarial attempts to recover forgotten knowledge. In this work, we advocate for the principle of Robust Unlearning, which requires models to be both indistinguishable from retrained counterparts and resilient against diverse adversarial threats. To instantiate this principle, we propose a unified benchmark, RUB (Robust Unlearning Benchmark), that systematically evaluates the robustness of unlearning algorithms across classification, image-to-image reconstruction, and text-to-image synthesis. Within this framework, we introduce the Unlearning Mapping Attack (UMA) as a generalizable method to detect residual information, and demonstrate how existing attack strategies can be adapted into this framework as long as they conform to the generic UMA framework. Our experiments across discriminative and generative tasks reveal that state-of-the-art unlearning methods remain vulnerable under these evaluations, even when passing standard verification metrics. By positioning robustness as the central criterion and providing a benchmark for adversarial evaluation, we hope RUB paves the way toward more reliable and secure unlearning practices. The codebase and model checkpoints in RUB will be published.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Diabetes is associated with increased nocturnal respiratory rate

Background and Objective: Diabetes mellitus (DM) causes autonomic neuropathy, which may alter nocturnal respiratory rate (NRR). To test the association between DM and NRR, we analyzed elective polysomnograms of four large observational cohorts. Research Design and Methods: We performed cross-sectional analysis of over 25,000 individuals with polysomnograms (PSGs) from the Sleep Heart Health Study (SHHS), Hispanic Community Health Study/Study of Latinos (HCHS/SOL), Osteoporotic Fractures in Men Study (MrOS), and Wisconsin Sleep Cohort (WSC). Patient-level NRRs were derived from inductance plethysmography waveforms. DM status was determined by self-report, physician diagnosis, medication use, or laboratory values, depending on the cohort. We related DM and NRR (continuous and dichotomized) using logistic regression models and adjusted for potential confounders. Cohort-specific results were combined using random-effects meta-analysis. Results: Meta-analysis of unadjusted models showed a pooled odds ratio (OR) of 1.10 (95% CI:1.04-1.17) for each breath-per-minute (brpm) increase in NRR. This association remained significant after multivariable adjustment (OR:1.06, 95% CI:1.02-1.11). Dichotomized analyses similarly showed higher odds of DM across dichotomization thresholds ranging from 15 to 21 brpm. At a threshold of 18 brpm, the unadjusted pooled OR was 1.77 (95% CI:1.23-2.55, P=0.0022), and the adjusted OR was 1.49 (95% CI:1.10-2.02, P=0.0098). Conclusions: Clinically stable outpatients with elevated NRR have an increased prevalence of DM. Additional studies are needed to investigate whether the mechanism is autonomic neuropathy and whether monitoring NRR can detect early complications of DM.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Interaction geometry and ground-state properties of sparse quantum lattice models

arXiv:2606.20387v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate how interaction geometry shapes the low-energy phases of sparse tunable long-range quantum models. We focus on a class of graphs whose degree grows logarithmically with system size, and show how symmetry and frustration in graph connectivity can drive, suppress, and reshape ground-state phase transitions. The central examples are power-of-$p$ graphs, where even and odd values of $p$ exhibit qualitatively distinct behaviour: even-$p$ graphs inherit the rich phase structure of the power-of-two model, while odd-$p$ graphs are governed by geometric frustration. Fibonacci graphs provide a contrasting case, lacking the discrete self-similarity of the power-of-$p$ family but exhibiting a direct geometric mapping between the short- and long-range limits. Across our models, we find that phase structure and criticality are governed by the same effective-geometry principle, unifying our framework for experimentally motivated long-range quantum systems.

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

Carbon-Aware Governance Gates: An Architecture for Sustainable GenAI Development

arXiv:2602.19718v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The rapid adoption of Generative AI (GenAI) in the software development life cycle (SDLC) increases computational demand, which can raise the carbon footprint of development activities. At the same time, organizations are increasingly embedding governance mechanisms into GenAI-assisted development to support trust, transparency, and accountability. However, these governance mechanisms introduce additional computational workloads, including repeated inference, regeneration cycles, and expanded validation pipelines, increasing energy use and the carbon footprint of GenAI-assisted development. This paper proposes Carbon-Aware Governance Gates (CAGG), an architectural extension that embeds carbon budgets, energy provenance, and sustainability-aware validation orchestration into human-AI governance layers. CAGG comprises three components: (i) an Energy and Carbon Provenance Ledger, (ii) a Carbon Budget Manager, and (iii) a Green Validation Orchestrator, operationalized through governance policies and reusable design patterns.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Controlled Quantum Metrology with Anisotropic Heisenberg Spin Interactions under Intrinsic Decoherence

arXiv:2606.16918v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We theoretically investigate quantum parameter estimation in a two-qubit anisotropic Heisenberg spin system with Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya (DM) interaction in the presence of intrinsic decoherence described by the Milburn model. Using the Quantum Fisher Information (QFI), we study the estimation of both the uniform magnetic field and the DM interaction strength. Analytical expressions for the time-evolved density matrix are obtained and used to explore the effects of exchange anisotropy, intrinsic decoherence, and probe-state preparation on the achievable estimation precision. Our results show that suitable tuning of the anisotropic exchange coupling and the initial entangled state can considerably enhance the estimation performance, with different optimal parameter regimes emerging for magnetic-field and DM-interaction sensing. To better understand the role of quantum resources in metrology, we also examine the behaviour of concurrence, quantum coherence, and von Neumann entropy. Overall, our findings demonstrate that anisotropic Heisenberg spin systems with DM interaction provide a promising and flexible platform for high-precision quantum metrology even in the presence of intrinsic decoherence.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

How rare are Markovian quantum dynamics?

arXiv:2606.24511v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A profound understanding of decoherence and dissipation in quantum dynamics is crucial for the realistic modeling of the evolution of quantum systems. In open quantum dynamics one distinguishes between a memoryless, so-called Markovian evolution and dynamics incorporating memory effects, termed non-Markovian. In this work we study how prevalent memory effects are in the set of all such dynamics. We thus investigate how often a Markovian description is applicable. This question is approached by investigating randomly generated two-step qubit dynamics with respect to different concepts and witnesses of non-Markovianity. We observe that almost all dynamics are non-Markovian, and only a small (yet finite) fraction is Markovian. Furthermore, we study how this proportion changes when considering certain subclasses such as lower rank or mixed-unitary dynamics. Importantly, our results shed light on the relative ratios of – and interrelations between – the sets of dynamics that are non-Markovian with respect to different criteria. Finally, we investigate the fraction of dynamics in which the memory effects are necessarily of quantum nature and establish a connection between two recently developed concepts that characterize the quantumness of memory in non-Markovian dynamics.

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

Learning Survival Models with Right-Censored Reporting Delays

arXiv:2510.04421v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Survival analysis provides statistical methods to model the time until an event occurs. Reporting delays arise when event times are not observed at their occurrence but are only revealed upon reporting. This issue is particularly critical for timely risk evaluation when the observation window is short due to administrative censoring. In this study, we incorporate right-censored reporting delays by jointly modeling parametric hazards for the event and reporting processes. We then construct a consistent estimator for the model parameters and develop a Monte Carlo expectation-maximization algorithm to compute it. To address the challenges posed by administrative censoring, we leverage these findings and propose a transfer-learning procedure. Experimental results demonstrate that our method improves the accuracy of timely risk evaluation under administrative censoring.

16.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

Epiblast diversification and blood formation in a human pregastrula

Authors:

The incipient stage of gastrulation in human, when the primitive streak is about to emerge, represents a critical yet underexplored period. Here we present the high-resolution spatial transcriptomic landscape of a human embryo at Carnegie stage 6 (approximately 13–14 days post-conception), a stage at which primitive streak remains invisible and gastrulation-derived mesodermal/endodermal progenitors are not yet transcriptomically detected. We identified an anterior visceral endoderm-like hypoblast population, as well as a trifurcated developmental trajectory of the epiblast, progressing towards the amnion, primitive streak and node/prechordal plate/notochord (axial mesoderm) at subsequent developmental stages1–3. Furthermore, our findings challenge the existing paradigms by revealing that primitive haematopoiesis, involving three blood lineages, initiates in human yolk sac before gastrulation, earlier than previously recognized2,4–7, and that the first blood cells arise from the extra-embryonic mesoderm with a hypoblast rather than epiblast origin. Notably, we identified two spatial zones, each consisting of molecularly distinct yolk sac endoderm and extra-embryonic mesoderm populations, that respectively facilitated the generation of erythro-megakaryocytic lineages and myeloid precursors. These findings provide insights into the onset of gastrulation and the earliest blood formation in humans, with profound implications for advancing stem cell-derived human embryo models and in vitro blood regeneration. High-resolution spatial transcriptome analysis of a human embryo at Carnegie stage 6 reveals three distinct developmental trajectories from the epiblast towards amnion, primitive streak and axial mesoderm, and detects the initiation of haematopoiesis before gastrulation, originating from hypoblast rather than epiblast.

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

EvoMemBench: Benchmarking Agent Memory from a Self-Evolving Perspective

Recent benchmarks for Large Language Model (LLM) agents mainly evaluate reasoning, planning, and execution. However, memory is also essential for agents, as it enables them to store, update, and retrieve information over time. This ability remains under-evaluated, largely because existing benchmarks do not provide a systematic way to assess memory mechanisms. In this paper, we study agent memory from a self-evolving perspective and introduce EvoMemBench, a unified benchmark organized along two axes: memory scope (in-episode vs. cross-episode) and memory content (knowledge-oriented vs. execution-oriented). We compare 15 representative memory methods with strong long-context baselines under a standardized protocol. Results show that current memory systems are still far from a general solution: long-context baselines remain highly competitive, memory helps most when the current context is insufficient or tasks are difficult, and no single memory form works consistently across all settings. Retrieval-based methods remain strong for knowledge-intensive settings, whereas procedural and long-term memory methods are more effective for execution-oriented tasks when their stored experience matches the task structure. We hope EvoMemBench facilitates future research on more effective memory systems for LLM-based agents. Our code is available at https://github.com/DSAIL-Memory/EvoMemBench.

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

Clay-CNN Hybrids: Leveraging Geo-Foundational Models as Auxiliary Context for Landslide Detection

Authors:

Rapid post-event landslide mapping is essential for disaster response but remains difficult to automate due to extreme class imbalance. This study evaluates whether Clay v1.5, a Geo-Foundational Model (GFM), can improve pixel-level landslide segmentation on the Landslide4Sense (L4S) benchmark, which contains 3,799 training chips with 14 Sentinel-2 and terrain bands and approximately 2% positive pixels. We compare three strategies: Clay as the primary encoder with multi-scale residual terrain fusion, a U-Net backbone augmented with Clay semantic context at the bottleneck, and a standard U-Net baseline. The hybrid U-Net + Clay model with two-stage Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) achieved the best test F1 of 64.5 +/- 1.8% over three seeds, surpassing the Clay-only backbone (55.2 +/- 3.6%) and the U-Net baseline (59.9%). Clay as a standalone encoder underperformed the U-Net due to the absence of multi-scale skip connections, but its pretrained representations consistently improved performance when injected as auxiliary context. These findings suggest that GFMs are most effective for landslide detection when they complement spatially detailed convolutional architectures rather than replace them.

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

Denoising Score Matching with Random Features: Insights on Diffusion Models from Precise Learning Curves

arXiv:2502.00336v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We theoretically investigate the phenomena of generalization and memorization in diffusion models. Empirical studies suggest that these phenomena are influenced by model complexity and the size of the training dataset. In our experiments, we further observe that the number of noise samples per data sample ($m$) used during Denoising Score Matching (DSM) plays a significant and non-trivial role. We capture these behaviors and shed insights into their mechanisms by deriving asymptotically precise expressions for test and train errors of DSM under a simple theoretical setting. The score function is parameterized by random features neural networks, with the target distribution being $d$-dimensional Gaussian. We operate in a regime where the dimension $d$, number of data samples $n$, and number of features $p$ tend to infinity while keeping the ratios $\psi_n=\frac{n}{d}$ and $\psi_p=\frac{p}{d}$ fixed. By characterizing the test and train errors, we identify regimes of generalization and memorization as a function of $\psi_n,\psi_p$, and $m$. Our theoretical findings are consistent with the empirical observations.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Continual Self-Improvement with Lightweight Experiential Latent Memories

arXiv:2606.17803v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models achieve strong reasoning performance by scaling inference-time compute, yet remain fundamentally stateless, discarding the rich, self-produced reasoning traces generated during this process. We investigate whether models can instead learn online from this experience, converting transient computation (reasoning traces) into persistent reusable knowledge, and without external supervision or access to future data. We show that In-Context Learning (ICL) over raw reasoning traces fails to generalize, reflecting a fundamental limitation of token-level reuse: individual traces lack the abstraction needed for transfer, even after refinement (e.g. self-reflection). In contrast, drawing inspiration from recent works on unsupervised reinforcement learning, we find that lightweight per-instance training with self-generated test-time signals (majority voting) as rewards yields substantial gains, often surpassing full-dataset offline training, motivating a shift from raw traces to learned latent representations. Building on this insight, we propose an online method that distills inference-time compute spent on encountered problems into compact modular latent memories capturing the underlying reasoning structure. These memories are stored and retrieved for future inputs, enabling continual improvement while avoiding catastrophic forgetting through modular design. Importantly, our method is highly efficient, parametrized as extremely lightweight soft prompt memories (~0.001% of model parameters) and trained with only a few gradient steps, yet achieving performance competitive with full parametric updates and offline training. Across challenging mathematical reasoning benchmarks, our approach significantly outperforms zero-shot and raw data ICL baselines, while transferring effectively across datasets.

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

Mirage Probes: How Vision Models Fake Visual Understanding

Vision-language models (VLMs) can answer image-based questions confidently, and often correctly, even when no image is provided. This mirage behavior inflates benchmark scores without reflecting visual grounding. Prior work treats this as a single failure mode. We argue it is two. Using Mirage Probes, a contrastive probing framework that pairs paraphrased question variants with matched mirage and non-mirage labels on the same image, we show that mirage behavior is linearly decodable from internal activations across residual stream, MLP, post-attention, and attention-head sites in two open-source VLMs. We demonstrate that a Naive Bayes text baseline cannot recover this signal, ruling out surface lexical confounds. Cross-benchmark separability patterns, together with a novel Prior Harnessing Index (PHI) measuring how much a model can answer from text alone, expose two distinct regimes: textual biases, where the model answers from language priors without engaging visual representations, and spurious images, where it constructs false visual content in latent space and answers as if grounded. The distinction has direct mitigation consequences: text-distribution cleaning can address the first regime but cannot reach the second, since spurious-image mirages live in the model's visual representations rather than its text. Faithful visual grounding will require interventions at the representational level.

22.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Conditionally Poissonian random digraphs

arXiv:1705.03801v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We define a Poissonian model of directed random graphs which generalises the undirected Poissonian random graph process introduced by Norros and Reittu in Adv. Appl. Probab. 38 (2006), 59–75. Its loopless simple projection is a rank-one independent-arc inhomogeneous digraph of the type studied by Cao and Olvera-Cravioto, Random Struct. Alg. 56 (2020), 722–774. For the Poissonian multigraph itself, we discuss the relation to Norros-Reittu graphs, characterise limiting degree distributions, and record explicit exploration estimates. In particular, we give fixed-depth directed local weak limits, stopped branching-process couplings with weight-mass collision budgets, a comparison with the simple projection, and a rare-event concentration criterion. These estimates are intended as graph-side structural inputs for later dynamics on the graph.

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

Streaming Interventions: Can Video Large Language Models Correct Mistakes as They Occur?

arXiv:2606.09547v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Learning everyday skills, like cooking a dish, relies increasingly on instructional media such as online videos. This opens the door to the use of video (and multimodal) large language models (LLMs) as task guidance assistants. A crucial capability for the real-world success of a prospective task guidance assistant is it's ability to intervene proactively as soon as a mistake is apparent in order to guide the user. To evaluate this crucial capability, we introduce Ego-MC-Bench (Mistake Corrections), a benchmark for evaluating reactive, step-by-step task guidance in realistic cooking scenarios. Extensive experiments show that Ego-MC-Bench is highly challenging for state-of-the-art video LLMs. We argue that a key reason is the limited availability of training data for fine-tuning models on this task. Although there exists a wide range of cooking video datasets, existing datasets lack examples of mistakes along with appropriately timed interventions. To help address this data limitation, we also introduce Ego-CoMist, a counterfactual synthetic dataset created by transforming non -interactive cooking videos into supervised training examples showing proactive interventions. We show that fine-tuning on Ego-CoMist yields performance gains especially for smaller and more efficient video LLMs that are well suited for delivering assistance on edge devices.

24.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Consensus on Dynamic Stochastic Block Models: Fast Convergence and Phase Transitions

arXiv:2209.03999v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce two models of consensus following a majority rule on time-evolving stochastic block models (SBM), in which the network evolution is Markovian or non-Markovian. Under the majority rule, in each round, each agent simultaneously updates their opinion according to the majority of their neighbors. Our network has a community structure and randomly evolves with time. In contrast to the classic setting, the dynamics is not purely deterministic, and reflects the structure of SBM by resampling the connections at each step, making agents with the same opinion more likely to connect than those with different opinions. In the Markovian model, connections between agents are resampled at each step according to the SBM law and each agent updates their opinion via the majority rule. We prove a power-of-one type result, i.e., any initial bias leads to a non-trivial advantage of winning in the end, uniformly in the size of the network. In the non-Markovian model, a connection between two agents is resampled according to the SBM law only when at least one of them changes opinion and is otherwise kept the same. We identify the phase-transition threshold, up to the second-order leading term, between halting and fast convergence to consensus. We also give sufficient initial-lead conditions for consensus to occur within one, two, or three rounds.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

U$^2$Mamba: A Two-level Nested U-structure Mamba for Salient Object Detection

Mamba-based models have emerged as a promising alternative for salient object detection (SOD), offering significant advantages in modeling long sequences. However, existing models often fail to explore contextual information and the depth of the entire architecture. This paper introduces U$^2$Mamba, a powerful and innovative U-structured network for salient object detection. We propose multiscale Mamba U-blocks (MMUBs) that enhance the model depth to improve local feature extraction capabilities. Our newly developed nested U-structure, incorporating MMUBs, enables the network to integrate various receptive fields from shallow and deep layers, thereby collecting richer contextual information and longer-range data without being constrained by resolution. Instead of using the traditional deep supervision scheme and top-level supervised training, we propose a hierarchical training supervision method where the loss is computed at each level during the training process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that U$^2$Mamba achieves highly competitive performance against state-of-the-art methods. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/JL021/U2Mamba}.