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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Truncated Wigner dynamics of biclique quantum spin glasses

Authors:
Dries Sels↗

arXiv:2606.20187v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantum spin glasses are often considered testbeds for studying quantum optimization algorithms and as such have been the subject of various quantum advantage claims. Here we investigate the near adiabatic dynamics of biclique quantum spin glasses within the (discrete) truncated Wigner approximation (TWA). Benchmarks on small systems show that TWA recovers sample-to-sample fluctuations of the Edwards-Anderson order parameter, over a wide range of annealing times, with increasing fidelity when the system size increases. We extract critical exponents from the Binder cumulant in line with theoretical expectations, reproducing recent quantum experiments. The computational cost of the method is minimal and it can easily be applied to tens of thousands of qubits.

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

Calibrated Sampling-Free Uncertainty Estimation in Bayesian Deep Learning

Authors:
Tobias Jan Wieczorek↗Leon de Andrade↗Thomas M\"ollenhoff↗Marcus Rohrbach↗

arXiv:2606.16214v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern deep learning models remain notoriously prone to overconfidence, limiting their reliability in high-stakes applications. Bayesian methods aim to counter this by learning a distribution over model parameters, and recent advances now make this feasible for large-scale architectures at costs comparable to AdamW. However, a challenge remains at test time: predictions must be averaged across many forward passes with weights sampled from the posterior, which is prohibitively expensive. Variance propagation offers an efficient alternative, computing layer-wise analytical approximations of uncertainty in a single forward pass. While such techniques are effective for MLPs, their extension to modern architectures remains challenging, due to increased depth and diversity of layer types. To fill this gap, we propose Calibrated Variance Propagation (CVP), which introduces a new propagation method for normalization layers, combines it with recent techniques for handling activation functions, and absorbs residual error through a light calibration step. CVP yields comparably accurate uncertainty estimates to MC sampling across transformers and CNNs, at a fraction of the cost. Against prior variance propagation work, CVP improves coverage at $0.5\%$ risk from $8.2\%$ to $14.6\%$ with BEiT-3 on Visual Reasoning (NLVR2) and from $2.6\%$ to $10.8\%$ with ViLT on VQAv2, with gains extending to convolutional architectures.

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03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

When AUC Misleads: Polarization-Aware Evaluation of Deepfake Detectors under Domain Shift

Authors:
Dat Nguyen↗Cosmin Radoi↗Romain Hermary↗Marcella Astrid↗Nesryne Mejri↗Enjie Ghorbel↗Djamila Aouada↗

Recent advances in generative AI, such as diffusion models and face-swapping tools, have enabled the creation of highly realistic deepfakes, leading to real-world harms including financial fraud and non-consensual explicit content. In response, deepfake detection has become an active research area, with recent methods increasingly focusing on improving generalization to unseen manipulations. This is typically evaluated using the Area Under the ROC Curve (AUC) measured separately across multiple datasets. However, such an evaluation fails to reflect real-world scenarios where detectors face a mixture of data sources and varying artifact types. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel metric, Cross-dataset AUC (Cross-AUC) that averages per-domain AUCs with a measure of prediction polarization for taking into account the robustness to domain shift. The polarization extent is quantified by the Wasserstein Distance between class score distributions. Cross-AUC not only assesses the generalization capabilities of deepfake detectors under domain shifts more realistically, but it is also interpretable as it better explains the reason behind a drop in performance. Experiments performed on seven benchmark datasets demonstrate its practical relevance.

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04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

GAS-Leak-LLM: Genetic Algorithm-Based Suffix Optimization for Black-Box LLM Jailbreaking

Authors:
Aman Anifer↗Vignesh Kumar Kembu↗Vishnu M↗Antonino Nocera↗Vinod P↗Amal Murali PK↗Akshay S Rajan↗

arXiv:2606.15788v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) constitute pivotal components within the AI-dominated information technology ecosystem. To mitigate risks associated with harmful or policy-violating outputs, commercial systems employ advanced alignment strategies and multi-layered content moderation mechanisms. Despite these safeguards, recent research has demonstrated that LLMs remain vulnerable to adversarial manipulation, particularly through jailbreaking and prompt injection techniques. In this work, we propose GAS-Leak-LLM a novel jailbreaking attack based on a genetic algorithm that systematically evolves adversarial suffix to bypass safety constraints. Operating in a strict black-box setting, our method requires no access to model parameters or internals, thereby reflecting realistic threat scenarios in deployed systems. Through the iterative application of selection, mutation, and crossover heuristics, the framework systematically explores the discrete prompt space to identify high-fitness adversarial suffixes. Empirical findings reveal critical shortcomings in existing safety enforcement mechanisms and confirm the effectiveness and practical viability of the proposed attack.

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

LearnOpt: Recovering the Latent Cognitive Structure of Standardized Examinations via Knowledge Graphs and Constrained Optimization

Authors:
Joy Bose↗Om Thomas↗

arXiv:2606.15349v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Standardized examinations are typically treated as uniform syllabus coverage problems. We argue they are better understood as adversarial systems with stable latent cognitive structures diverging systematically from official syllabi. We introduce LearnOpt, which recovers this structure from historical question papers and generates personalized, time-bounded study plans. Applied to nine years of NEET questions (2016-2024, n=1,496), LearnOpt builds an exam knowledge graph from LLM-tagged questions, extracts a five-category latent skill distribution, and formulates study planning as a knapsack-variant optimization over prerequisite-aware subgraphs with Bayesian Knowledge Tracing. Central finding: NEET's latent skill distribution is stable within a syllabus regime (consecutive-year KL divergence 0.004-0.032 for 2016-2021, non-significant under permutation testing) but shifts significantly with NCERT's 2023 syllabus rationalization: pooling 2016-2021 (n=1,072) vs 2023-2024 (n=392) gives KL=0.040 (p=0.0005), with Elimination/Negation questions rising from ~20-29% to ~31-35%. Latent structure, while not permanently stationary, is piecewise stable, with shifts detectable and attributable to curricular events. Within either regime, subject predicts skill profile more strongly than year. An optimization evaluation, using one real and two synthetic mastery profiles, shows the skill-weighted objective produces a modest but real reordering of recommended topics over a mastery-conditioned frequency baseline. Applying the pipeline to JEE Advanced reveals a profile dominated by Multi-concept Integration (80.9% vs. 33.3% for NEET), with a JEE-vs-NEET divergence (KL=0.505) exceeding NEET's largest cross-subject divergence: exam tier shapes latent cognitive structure more than subject, which shapes it more than time within a regime. Code, knowledge graph, and annotated dataset are released publicly.

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

Triangular Consistency as a Universal Constraint for Learning Optical Flow

Authors:
Yi Xiao↗Carlos Rodriguez Coronel↗Jing Zhan↗Haniyeh Ehsani Oskouie↗Alex Wong↗Dong Lao↗

arXiv:2606.19938v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose triangular consistency as a first-principled constraint for optical flow, which is agnostic to network architecture, supervision type, and dataset, and applies to both image-pair and multi-frame settings. This simple but powerful constraint is to compose two flows to induce a third flow and enforce consistency among the three. The composed flows may arise from (i) image pairs, yielding cycle consistency; (ii) multiple video frames, producing longer-range motion through temporal chaining; or (iii) image pairs combined with controlled synthetic transformations, which becomes data augmentation. This triangular consistency introduces negligible computational overhead and requires no additional annotations. Since it is derived directly from the geometry of optical flow, it does not rely on model-specific assumptions and serves as a ``universal'' plug-and-play component for optical flow training. Experiments show consistent improvement across supervised, unsupervised, and transfer learning settings.

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07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

TimeProVe: Propose, then Verify for Efficient Long Video Temporal Reasoning in Activities of Daily Living

Authors:
Arkaprava Sinha↗Dominick Reilly↗Siddharth Krishnan↗Hieu Le↗Srijan Das↗

Long Video Question Answering (LVQA) requires identifying sparse, query-relevant evidence within hours-long untrimmed videos. Existing approaches either process videos densely with large vision-language models (VLMs), incurring prohibitive computational cost, or rely on sparse caption-based reasoning, which often misses temporally localized and motion-centric evidence. We introduce TimeProVe, a cost-efficient hybrid framework for temporally grounded reasoning in long videos. TimeProVe first employs lightweight modules to generate action-grounded answer–evidence hypotheses and subsequently invokes an expensive VLM only for targeted verification. The core of our framework lies in the Action-based Candidate Evidence (ACE) module, which converts temporally localized actions into query-conditioned candidate answers and supporting evidence windows through lightweight LLM reasoning. We further introduce OpenTSUBench (OTB), an open-ended benchmark designed to evaluate temporally grounded reasoning in real-world Activities of Daily Living (ADL) scenarios. Experiments show that TimeProVe outperforms the strongest baseline on OTB by 7.3%, while reducing VLM calls by 75% and inference cost by 93%. Furthermore, without explicit temporal grounding training, TimeProVe achieves competitive performance on Charades-STA, and reaches state-of-the-art results when enhanced with grounding VLMs.

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

Zero-Shot Active Feature Acquisition via LLM-Elicitation

Authors:
Binyamin Perets↗Natalie Mendelson↗Shiran Vainberg↗Yehuda Chowers↗Shai Shen-Orr↗Shie Mannor↗

arXiv:2606.18933v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Active feature acquisition (AFA) sequentially selects which features to observe to reach a classification or ranking decision. Its central limitation is reliance on large amount of labeled data to fit probabilistic models guiding acquisition. Large language models (LLMs) supply unsupervised domain knowledge, but are poor sequential planners. Asking one to both know and decide conflates capabilities best kept separate. Here, we develop a framework for zero-shot AFA through disciplined elicitation: asking the LLM only for what it can be trusted to return, the unary deviations and pairwise co-variations that are the sufficient statistics of a Markov random field (MRF). We apply our framework to two settings: binary classification and top-$k$ identification. In practice, the LLM reliably returns only discriminative statistics, what distinguishes the classes rather than each class in isolation, which precludes classical AFA. We apply a maximum-entropy closure that resolves this gauge ambiguity. We evaluate on a cohort of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) patients, an active clinical setting where diagnostic ambiguity and patient heterogeneity obstruct stable treatment strategies. Our framework outperforms the LLM both on real labels and on its own extracted beliefs. Where it matters most, on the hardest patients, our top-$k$ acquisition policy markedly outperforms all existing methods.

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

Fluently Lying: Adversarial Robustness Can Be Substrate-Dependent

Authors:
Daye Kang↗Hyeongboo Baek↗

The primary tools used to monitor and defend object detectors under adversarial attack assume that when accuracy degrades, detection count drops in tandem. This coupling was assumed, not measured. We report a counterexample observed on a single model: under standard PGD, EMS-YOLO, a spiking neural network (SNN) object detector, retains more than 70% of its detections while mAP collapses from 0.528 to 0.042. We term this count-preserving accuracy collapse Quality Corruption (QC), to distinguish it from the suppression that dominates untargeted evaluation. Across four SNN architectures and two threat models (l-infinity and l-2), QC appears only in one of the four detectors tested (EMS-YOLO). On this model, all five standard defense components fail to detect or mitigate QC, suggesting the defense ecosystem may rely on a shared assumption calibrated on a single substrate. These results provide, to our knowledge, the first evidence that adversarial failure modes can be substrate-dependent.

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

A Scalable PyTorch Abstraction for Multi-GPU Gaussian Splatting

Authors:
Matthew Cong↗Francis Williams↗Jonathan Swartz↗Mark Harris↗Sanja Fidler↗Ken Museth↗

Gaussian splatting methods have become increasingly popular for neural reconstruction of the real world. However, they are often limited in scale and resolution due to compute and memory constraints. We present a multi-GPU Gaussian splatting approach that scales reconstruction to higher resolutions and larger scenes while abstracting away the code complexity typically associated with distributing a model. To accomplish this, we propose a PyTorch backend that distributes the Gaussian parameters and splatting operators across GPUs via CUDA unified memory and NVLink. Because distribution occurs at the operator level, the model code requires no explicit cross-device communication. More broadly, the backend exposes multiple GPUs as an aggregate PyTorch device and supports other PyTorch operators. We demonstrate city-scale reconstructions with street-level detail consisting of over 1 billion Gaussian splats, more than 25 times as many as the current state of the art.

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11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

A Statistical and Machine Learning Framework for Operational Threshold Detection and Deployable Dispatch Controller Development in Hydrogen Multi-Energy Systems

Authors:
Shadi Heenatigala↗Hasanika Samarasinghe↗

arXiv:2606.14601v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This study presents a statistical and machine learning framework for characterizing a hydrogen-based multi-energy system (H-MES) using one year of high-resolution operational data. Statistical analysis revealed a binary operation driven by renewable surplus, with solar irradiance explaining 45.7% of rank-based variance in hydrogen production, a large effect by conventional standards. Only high-irradiance periods triggered meaningful electrolyzer engagement, while electricity demand exerted a weaker inverse suppression effect ($\epsilon^2 = 0.126$). Multiple regression confirmed electrolyzer power as the dominant linear predictor, with a synergistic solar-wind interaction. Notably, Random Forest analysis ranked wind output first in predictive importance despite its weak bivariate correlation (r = 0.167), revealing non-linear dynamics invisible to parametric methods. A sequence model exploited strong 24-hour autocorrelation (r = 0.845) for operational forecasting, while a reinforcement learning agent optimized hydrogen revenue dispatch. The core contribution is demonstrating that statistical and machine learning approaches are complementary for H-MES modeling and control.

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

From Sparse Features to Trustworthy Proxies: Certifying SAE-Based Interpretability

Authors:
Dibyanayan Bandyopadhyay↗Asif Ekbal↗

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are increasingly used to extract interpretable features from language models (LMs), yet a central question remains: when can an SAE-based explanation be treated as a faithful view of an underlying frozen LM We study this through a post-hoc generalization framework that certifies the LM via a sparse proxy, obtained by replacing a native hidden activation with its pretrained SAE reconstruction. Our framework derives an upper bound on the base model's expected risk using four measurable quantities: proxy risk, SAE reconstruction gap, concept-pool mismatch, and sparse complexity. We interpret this certificate as an operational criterion for explanatory faithfulness. In particular, a non-vacuous bound indicates that the extracted sparse features retain meaningful predictive information, while small reconstruction and mismatch errors indicate that the proxy remains behaviorally close to the original model. Empirically, we show that the bound becomes non-vacuous on GPT-2 Small, Gemma-2B, and Llama-3-8B at practical sample sizes. A detailed layerwise analysis of Llama-3-8B reveals a strong depth dependence, with later layers becoming much easier to certify, associated with both stronger local fidelity and weaker downstream error amplification. Finally, through feature-shuffling ablations, we show that the decomposition distinguishes genuine semantic alignment from mere statistical sparsity, providing a useful diagnostic for when SAE-based explanations become less reliable.

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

Interpretation as Linear Transformation: A Cognitive-Geometric Model of Concepts and Meaning

Authors:
Chainarong Amornbunchornvej↗

arXiv:2512.09831v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper develops a geometric framework for modeling concepts, motivation, and influence across cognitively heterogeneous agents. Each agent is represented by a personalized value space, a vector space encoding the internal dimensions through which the agent interprets and evaluates meaning. Evaluative concepts are formalized as structured vectors, abstract beings, whose transmission is mediated by linear interpretation maps. An abstract being survives communication only if it avoids the null spaces of these maps, yielding a structural criterion for intelligibility, miscommunication, and concept death. Within this framework, I show how conceptual distortion, motivational drift, and the limits of mutual understanding arise from purely algebraic constraints. A central result, the No-Null-Space Leadership Condition, characterizes leadership as a property of representational reachability rather than persuasion or authority. More broadly, the model explains how abstract beings can propagate, mutate, or disappear as they traverse diverse cognitive geometries. The account unifies insights from conceptual spaces, social epistemology, and AI value alignment by grounding meaning preservation in structural compatibility rather than shared information or rationality. I argue that this cognitive-geometric perspective clarifies the epistemic boundaries of influence in both human and artificial systems, and offers a general foundation for analyzing conceptual dynamics across heterogeneous agents.

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14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

scGTN: Deep Siamese Graph Transformer Network for Single-cell RNA Sequencing Clustering

Authors:
Jinke Wu↗Yifan Wang↗Siyu Yi↗Caiyang Yu↗Ziyue Qiao↗Nan Yin↗Jiancheng Lv↗Wei Ju↗

arXiv:2606.18672v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) serves a pivotal role in characterizing gene expression at the cellular level, enabling the identification of cell types and advancing the understanding of cellular heterogeneity. Despite the significant progress in scRNA-seq data clustering, we argue that current methods always ignore the sparsity and noise, as well as the complex intercellular structural information inherent in scRNA-seq data. Toward this end, in this paper, we propose a novel single-cell RNA-seq clustering framework via deep Siamese Graph Transformer Network (termed scGTN), which explicitly integrates gene expression profile and intercellular structural dependencies for cell clustering. In particular, we formulate scRNA-seq data as a graph and construct two augmented graph views that serve as dual views to capture complementary intercellular information. Then, a Siamese graph transformer network is employed to explicitly incorporate shortest-path information and node-wise distances for capturing richer structural relationships between cells. Finally, we employ an optimal transport strategy to guide the cell clustering in a self-supervised manner. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark scRNA-seq datasets demonstrate that our scGTN consistently outperforms existing methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/W-RMSL/scGTN.

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

AGDN: Learning to Solve Traveling Salesman Problem with Anisotropic Graph Diffusion Network

Authors:
Bolin Shen↗Ziwei Huang↗Zhiguang Cao↗Yushun Dong↗

arXiv:2606.19185v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is a cornerstone of combinatorial optimization and arises in many practical scenarios. Although graph-based learning approaches have been explored for TSP, the question of how to exploit graph structure more effectively remains open. We present the Anisotropic Graph Diffusion Network (AGDN), a new Graph Neural Network framework designed to solve TSP. Our method tackles two central difficulties: (1) the lack of informative topological prior in fully connected TSP graphs, and (2) losing connected nodes in the optimal solution after the commonly used graph sparsification techniques. To overcome these issues, we construct a MixScore transition matrix that merges node similarity with pairwise distance, and we develop an anisotropic graph diffusion strategy that supports efficient information exchange across multiple hops. Comprehensive experiments spanning diverse instance sizes and node distributions show that AGDN consistently outperforms existing methods while keeping computation time competitive. Furthermore, AGDN generalizes well to problem sizes and distributions beyond those seen during training. The implementation is publicly available at: https://github.com/LabRAI/AGDN.

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

Matrix phase-space representations for gaussian boson sampling

Authors:
Peter D. Drummond↗Alexander S. Dellios↗Margaret D. Reid↗

arXiv:2503.12749v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce coherent matrix phase-space distributions. These use conservation laws and symmetries to improve the accuracy and speed of quantum phase-space representations. As an example, this is applied to validation of low-loss Gaussian boson sampling (GBS) quantum computational advantage experiments, where classical generation of the random photon-number counts is exponentially hard. Large improvements in sampling errors are demonstrated compared to previous methods. Matrix phase-space representations also provide a large numerical speed-up, due to their (at worst) quadratic scaling, compared to other methods for validating total count probabilities of large-scale, low-loss GBS networks.

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

LOKI: Memory-Free Null-Space Constrained Lifelong Knowledge Editing

Authors:
Masih Eskandar↗Miquel Sirera Perell\'o↗Stratis Ioannidis↗Jennifer Dy↗

arXiv:2606.19679v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Lifelong knowledge editing aims to efficiently and sequentially update language models over time, as new knowledge becomes available or when the model makes mistakes, while preserving acceptable performance on past knowledge. One unresolved challenge is that existing methods modify a fixed set of layers for all new knowledge samples, reducing flexibility and increasing catastrophic forgetting. Another is requiring access to previous knowledge and extensive pre-processing to obtain data statistics. To address these challenges, we introduce LOKI, a novel approach that uses dynamic layer selection based on the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion and projects gradient updates onto the null-space of the model weights, bypassing the requirement for previous knowledge access. We show that LOKI achieves superior performance to existing approaches across a wide variety of experiments, achieving up to a 14\% improvement in average accuracy.

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

QueryOcc: Query-based Self-Supervision for 3D Semantic Occupancy

Authors:
Adam Lilja↗Ji Lan↗Junsheng Fu↗Lars Hammarstrand↗

Learning 3D scene geometry and semantics from images is a core challenge in computer vision and a key capability for autonomous driving. Since large-scale 3D annotation is prohibitively expensive, recent work explores self-supervised learning directly from sensor data without manual labels. Existing approaches either rely on 2D rendering consistency, where 3D structure emerges only implicitly, or on discretized voxel grids from accumulated lidar point clouds, limiting spatial precision and scalability. We introduce QueryOcc, a query-based self-supervised framework that learns continuous 3D semantic occupancy directly through independent 4D spatio-temporal queries sampled across adjacent frames. The framework supports supervision from either pseudo-point clouds derived from vision foundation models or raw lidar data. To enable long-range supervision and reasoning under constant memory, we introduce a contractive scene representation that preserves near-field detail while smoothly compressing distant regions. QueryOcc surpasses previous camera-based methods by 26% in semantic RayIoU on the self-supervised Occ3D-nuScenes benchmark while running at 11.6 FPS, demonstrating that direct 4D query supervision enables strong self-supervised occupancy learning. https://research.zenseact.com/publications/queryocc/

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19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

DynaTok: Token-Based 4D Reconstruction from Partial Point Clouds

Authors:
Weirong Chen↗Keisuke Tateno↗Hidenobu Matsuki↗Michael Niemeyer↗Daniel Cremers↗Federico Tombari↗

We address 4D reconstruction from partial point cloud sequences, where depth-sensor observations are incomplete, unordered, and lack explicit temporal correspondences. This geometry-only setting is challenging due to missing observations and ambiguous dynamics. While recent progress has largely relied on image-based methods, existing point-based approaches typically focus on single objects, assume relatively complete inputs, or require explicit correspondences. To address these limitations, we propose DynaTok, a point-based framework for correspondence-free 4D reconstruction from partial point cloud sequences without images. DynaTok encodes frames into compact latent tokens, aggregates incomplete observations over time with a Transformer-based spatiotemporal encoder, and decouples geometry and motion through residual tokens in a unified model. A flow-matching decoder then reconstructs complete, temporally consistent 4D point-cloud sequences conditioned on the latent tokens. Experiments on object- and scene-level benchmarks demonstrate improved reconstruction quality and temporal coherence from partial point cloud observations. Project page: https://wrchen530.github.io/dynatok/.

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20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

On the Stability of Growth in Structural Plasticity

Authors:
Lute Lillo↗Nick Cheney↗

arXiv:2605.15435v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Standard deep-learning pipelines usually choose the network architecture before training and keep it fixed throughout optimization. In contrast, a model can also be adapted by editing its structure during training, for example by pruning existing hidden-neuron units or growing new ones. Although growth is appealing for adaptive and continual systems, we show that it is not simply the inverse of pruning. Pruning selects among units that have participated in training from the start, whereas growth inserts new units into an already specialized optimization trajectory. We isolate this insertion problem and show that newborn units are often forward-active but backward-starved: they participate in the forward computation, yet receive much weaker gradient signal than incumbent units. This disadvantage is minor in small MLP benchmarks, but becomes clear in harder image-classification settings with a convolutional trunk. In these settings, \textsc{Grow} can achieve high final accuracy during the structural-editing procedure, while \textsc{Prune} is stronger when performance is averaged over the training trajectory or when the final sparse network is retrained from scratch. Interventions targeting optimizer state, insertion, selection, and trainability show that improving the integration of newborn units can improve adaptive performance, but does not automatically produce better final subnetworks. In continual-learning benchmarks stressing plasticity loss, \textsc{Grow} becomes competitive mainly when new units have enough time to integrate. Together, these results suggest that \textsc{Grow} should be evaluated not only as an architecture-search operator, but as a time-sensitive optimization process whose success depends on insertion stability.

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

RoVE: Rotary Value Embeddings Attention for Relative Position-dependent Value Pathways

Authors:
Alejandro Garc\'ia-Castellanos↗Maurice Weiler↗Erik J Bekkers↗

arXiv:2606.11275v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE) make attention scores position-relative but leave the value pathway position-blind: the message sent by a value token is the same regardless of its distance from the query. We propose RoVE, a parameter-free modification that makes values position-sensitive by rotating them simultaneously with keys, and show that it turns RoPE attention into attentive convolution. This new perspective unifies several independent formulations of the same operation across computer vision, robotics, and modern LLM architectures. Trained 124M and 354M GPT-2 models show consistent empirical gains over RoPE on few-shot in-context learning, out-of-distribution perplexity, and long-context retrieval, with the clearest improvements on tasks that require long-range aggregation.

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23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Dango: A Strictly L1-Only Large Language Model for Studying Second Language Acquisition

Authors:
Shiho Matta↗Yin Jou Huang↗Fei Cheng↗Takashi Kodama↗Hirokazu Kiyomaru↗Yugo Murawaki↗

We introduce Dango, a 1.8B-parameter large language model designed for controlled studies of L1-to-L2 (Japanese-to-English) transfer in second language acquisition (SLA). While previous studies have explored SLA in language models, they have predominantly relied on smaller or non-decoder models, limiting their ability to generate open-ended text and reducing their suitability as practical L2 simulators. We identify a key challenge when scaling models to this size: L2 contamination within the "monolingual" pretraining corpus used for L1 acquisition. To address this, we propose a filtering method to reduce premature exposure to English while preserving realistic, minimal exposure. We then fine-tune the model on LLM-generated L2-learning lessons to simulate the L2 acquisition process. Our evaluations confirm that Dango develops human-like L2 production patterns, outperforming both unfiltered and standard multilingual baselines. We release the model, data, and code to facilitate reproducible computational SLA research and learner-facing applications.

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24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Know Thy Reasoner: Not All Language Models Explore Alike

Authors:
Moulik Choraria↗Argyrios Gerogiannis↗Anirban Das↗Supriyo Chakraborty↗Sourya Basu↗Sambit Sahu↗Lav R. Varshney↗

arXiv:2604.10827v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Compute scaling for LLM reasoning trades off exploring solution approaches (breadth) against refining promising ones (depth), yet why a given trade-off works, and why it often fails to transfer across models, remains unclear. We argue that the optimal strategy depends on the model's diversity profile, the spread of probability mass across solution approaches, and that this must be characterized before any exploration strategy is adopted. We formalize this with a framework decomposing reasoning uncertainty, deriving when depth-based refinement outperforms parallel sampling, and validate it across three model families at both inference and training. Our central finding is that the diversity regime dictates the strategy: low-diversity aligned models benefit from depth-based refinement with lightweight intrinsic signals, whereas high-diversity base models are often harmed by it, and instead need breadth or stronger signals to compensate.

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

Hey Chat, Can You Teach Me? Structuring Socratic Dialogue for Human Learning in the Wild

Authors:
Sidney Tio↗Arunesh Sinha↗Pradeep Varakantham↗

Large language models are now widely used for everyday learning, but the underlying interactions are typically unstructured chats rather than following a curriculum. Unlike formal online learning systems, these interactions carry no prior record of the student, so any estimate of what the student already knows must be inferred from the dialogue itself. We show that this gap is not closed by scaling models alone. Frontier and education-tuned LLMs perform poorly when asked to tutor a student over an extended session, because doing so requires three things at once. The tutor must sequence a curriculum, conduct Socratic dialogue, and infer the student's knowledge state from that dialogue. We propose separating these responsibilities. Given a student query, our system constructs a prerequisite knowledge graph in which subtopics are nodes and dependencies are edges, and frames tutoring as deciding which node to teach next and how many dialogue turns to spend on it before moving on. A lightweight PPO policy handles this sequencing decision, while an LLM conducts the Socratic exchange at the chosen node and returns a signal of student progress. Across held-out STEM and non-STEM topics, our PPO-paired tutor outperforms heuristic baselines, frontier general-purpose models, and a model specialised for Socratic dialogue: on both the rate at which students reach full curriculum mastery and the number of turns required. Explicit curriculum structure delivers gains that scaling the underlying model does not.

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