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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Bayesian control for coding agents

Modern coding agents pair LLM generators with various tools, including cheap diagnostics and expensive verifiers. The tool-use decisions are typically governed by orchestrators that often use fixed rules and ignore uncertainty. We formulate orchestration as cost-sensitive sequential hypothesis testing: a Bayesian controller maintains a belief over candidate correctness and dynamically decides whether to gather more evidence, refine the candidate, verify it, or stop. Across six generators and nine coding benchmarks, Bayesian control proves to be most valuable when verification is costly and critics are informative but imperfect. Beyond control, the belief state yields an interpretable correctness score that outperforms token-probability and raw tool-success baselines for uncertainty quantification.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

On the Position Bias of On-Policy Distillation

arXiv:2606.22600v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: On-Policy Distillation (OPD) improves the learning efficiency of standard reinforcement learning through dense, token-level supervision from teachers. In the standard KL objective of OPD, token-level losses are uniformly averaged, implying equal weights for all tokens. However, we discover that not all tokens are created equal: as student rollouts grow longer, they deviate further from the teacher's distribution, leading to degraded supervision quality at later positions. As a result, OPD using only the first 30% of tokens can perform comparably to using all tokens, whereas OPD using only the last 30% of tokens barely learns anything. In this work, we provide a principled understanding of this issue through the lens of constrained optimization. Based on these insights, we derive Importance-Weighted On-Policy Distillation (IW-OPD), in which the weight assigned to each token depends on the accumulated discrepancy between the student's and teacher's distributions, naturally upweighting earlier tokens and downweighting later ones with larger deviations. We show that IW-OPD converges significantly faster than OPD, with better learning efficiency, and achieves better final performance than standard OPD in both same-size and cross-scale settings, improving performance up to 6.9 points on AIME-2025.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Attention is Just Another Name for Coupling?: A Fast-Slow ODE Perspective on Hierarchical Pretraining

Authors:

arXiv:2606.16730v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Causal self-attention is a coupling mechanism: each token's hidden state is updated by a learned mixture of preceding tokens at the same timescale. This paper asks whether a second, temporally slower coupling-a slow sub-system operating on a temporally-downsampled view of the sequence and fed back into the fast path through a zero-initialised gate-complements it. The question is framed in the language of singularly perturbed ordinary differential equations (ODEs), where the fast variable $x$ evolves at the token rate, the slow variable $y$ evolves at one update per $P$ tokens, and the timescale ratio $\varepsilon = 1/P$ is enforced structurally by causal block-mean pooling. The paper instantiates the fast-slow ODE formalism as a concrete neural network: a fast path of standard causal attention over $T$ tokens, a slow path of full attention over $T/P$ pooled tokens ($P^2 \times$ cheaper per layer), and a zero-initialised additive gate. In addition, under a linear-generator assumption on the fast dynamics, we prove that the equilibrium manifold $x = \phi(y)$ is exactly the master-equation (ME) stationary distribution $p_{\mathrm{st}}(y)$; in that regime a learned MLP $\phi_\theta(y)$ is a variational approximation of it (the trained block is not a generator, so this identity is the structured limit, not a claim about the network as trained). Empirically, at $500$k tokens the coupling is neutral – the gate stays closed and the coupled and frozen ablations are within run-to-run noise – at a wall-clock cost comparable to a dense baseline. The contribution is the precise, gap-marked mapping itself, not a performance gain.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

TurboMPC: Fast, Scalable, and Differentiable Model Predictive Control on the GPU

arXiv:2606.24039v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robotics increasingly relies on GPUs for parallel simulation, large-scale learning, and neural-network inference. For model predictive control (MPC) to scale with this paradigm, solvers must run efficiently on this hardware while remaining fast, differentiable, and compatible with expressive MPC formulations used in robotics. We present TurboMPC, a differentiable MPC solver that runs entirely on the GPU and supports state and control inequality constraints, implicit integrators, cross-time-coupled costs, and slack variables. TurboMPC combines sequential quadratic programming (SQP), an alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) inner solver, implicit differentiation, and a co-designed JAX-CUDA implementation for efficiency and ease of use. In simulation, we validate TurboMPC on constrained planning, humanoid imitation learning, and reinforcement learning with neural-network cost function tasks, achieving up to $15\times$ and $58\times$ speedups over state-of-the-art CPU and GPU differentiable solvers, respectively. We deploy TurboMPC on a full-scale car for minimum-time racing and find that batched, GPU-accelerated tuning of MPC parameters via Bayesian optimization yields significantly faster driving than a hand-tuned baseline. TurboMPC also scales to planning horizons of over $8000$ knot points while maintaining control of the vehicle. We open-source TurboMPC at: https://github.com/ToyotaResearchInstitute/turbompc

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Hölder++: Improving the Quality-Coherence Trade-off in Multimodal VAEs

arXiv:2606.13381v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing approaches for multimodal variational autoencoders (VAEs) face a trade-off between generative quality and coherence-i.e., they struggle to generate realistic and diverse samples that, at the same time, are semantically consistent across modalities. A recent work shows that using a simple approximation to Hölder pooling as an aggregation method improves coherence over the SOTA MMVAE+, despite assuming a single shared representation across all modalities. Yet, it slightly compromises sample diversity. Inspired by this insight, we propose Hölder++, a novel multimodal VAE that improves the generative quality-coherence trade-off through: (i) the first implementation of Hölder pooling without any approximation for multimodal VAEs; (ii) an extended architecture that models distinct shared and private (i.e., modality-specific) representations (Hölder+); and (iii) hierarchical inference that further enhances the disentanglement between the shared and private representations (Hölder++). Our experiments corroborate that Hölder++ consistently improves the generative quality-coherence trade-off, yields more structured latent spaces, and learns shared representations that are informative for downstream tasks.

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

Prompt2Effect: Training-Free Image-to-Video Model Specialization via LoRA Generation

Personalizing Image-to-Video (I2V) diffusion models with specific visual effects is increasingly demanded for high-end video generation. Current practice requires training a separate Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) module for each effect, incurring substantial data curation and iterative optimization costs that hinder interactive control. We present Prompt2Effect, a weight-driven hypernetwork that amortizes per-effect training by directly synthesizing effect-specific LoRA weights in a single forward pass. Unlike prior hypernetworks that regress adapter weights purely from semantics, Prompt2Effect is explicitly conditioned on the frozen base model weights, grounding weight prediction in the structural geometry of each layer. Furthermore, instead of predicting raw LoRA matrices, we introduce an SVD-canonicalized parameterization that resolves factorization ambiguity and stabilizes large-scale weight synthesis. Together, these design principles enable accurate and scalable LoRA prediction for high-dimensional I2V diffusion models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Prompt2Effect achieves on-par or superior video quality and effect alignment compared to conventional LoRA fine-tuning, while reducing the computational cost from 56 GPU training hours to 3.3 seconds of hypernetwork inference. When used as initialization for subsequent fine-tuning, our predicted weights further improve final performance and accelerate optimization by approximately 10x.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Spatially Coupled Phase-to-Depth Calibration for Fringe Projection Profilometry

In fringe projection profilometry (FPP), depth is commonly recovered by fitting a phase-to-depth relation independently at each camera pixel. Although such pixel-wise calibration achieves high local accuracy, neighboring pixels can acquire markedly different calibration functions even when they observe the same smooth surface, producing spatially inconsistent geometry and structured surface artifacts. We propose a spatially coupled phase-depth transformation in which all pixels share a single low-dimensional mapping-global phase scalars combined with affine spatial terms on the undistorted reference-camera grid-rather than independent per-pixel fits, optionally augmented by a bounded, spatially smooth correction field. We further introduce a native-grid pairing scheme that constructs phase-depth calibration pairs directly on the reference-camera grid: when depth supervision comes from a rectified active-stereo pipeline, planes are fitted in stereo 3D and sampled back onto the camera grid along native rays, so the phase maps are never rectified. On a dental target with high-resolution scanner ground truth, the proposed model attains point-to-surface RMSE comparable to an active-stereo reference (about 12{\mu}m aggregate) while substantially improving spatial coherence over pixel-wise polynomial and rational calibration, and reduces the runtime mapping to a few element-wise operations per pixel with negligible parameter storage.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Geometric Erasure by Contrastive Velocity Matching in Rectified Flows

arXiv:2606.00140v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While the rapid adoption of multimodal generative models offers immense potential, it has also increased the risks of harmful content synthesis, deepfakes, and copyright infringements. To address these challenges, concept erasure has emerged as a prospective safeguard. However, as the field gradually transitions from U-Net-based diffusion models to Rectified Flow Transformers, erasure research has struggled to keep pace. In this work, we introduce GEM, a simple but highly effective erasure framework for Rectified Flow models. As part of our contribution, we establish a principled bridge between trajectory-based unlearning grounded in Generative Flow Networks and classic teacher-guided erasure: we translate trajectory-based signals into a teacher-guided flow-matching setup that unifies the strengths of both paradigms. Concretely, a teacher provides complementary attraction and repulsion signals that we combine into a single geometric guidance objective, yielding targeted suppression of unwanted concepts while preserving benign generation.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

S1-Omni-Image: A Unified Model for Scientific Image Understanding, Generation, and Editing

We present S1-Omni-Image, an open-weight unified multimodal model for scientific image understanding, generation, and editing. Unlike general-purpose image generation models, scientific image tasks require not only high-fidelity synthesis, but also robust understanding of scientific semantics, structural relations, domain knowledge, and task intent. To this end, S1-Omni-Image builds on the scientific multimodal reasoning backbone S1-VL-32B and couples its understanding capability with an image generation module under a unified think-before-generate paradigm. Given a user instruction, the model first produces a task-oriented reasoning trace, a textual answer, and a task special token; their hidden states are then injected into the generation module to condition image generation or editing. S1-Omni-Image supports scientific image understanding, generation, and editing in a unified framework. For generation, it focuses on scientific illustrations and text rendering, including logical diagrams, relational comparisons, data charts, and realistic scientific visualizations. For editing, it casts segmentation and other domain-specific vision tasks as native image editing problems, enabling multi-turn illustration editing, medical and geographic image segmentation, medical image translation, and scientific image super-resolution. We construct SciGenEdit, a 314K-sample training dataset, and release the model weights, inference code, and SciGenEdit-10K. Experiments show that S1-Omni-Image substantially improves scientific image generation and editing while preserving the scientific image understanding capability inherited from S1-VL-32B. It outperforms open-source models on GenExam and TechImage-Bench, achieves state-of-the-art results on four editing benchmarks including MSD, cigRockSEM, SynthRAD2025, and IXI, and maintains stable performance on scientific image understanding evaluations.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

LLM-Evolved Domain-Independent Heuristics for Symbolic AI Planning

arXiv:2605.29649v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Heuristic search is the dominant paradigm in symbolic AI planning, and the strongest heuristics are the result of decades of work by planning researchers. Recent work has shown that large language models (LLMs) can design heuristics for individual planning domains, but no LLM-generated heuristic has so far worked on arbitrary planning tasks. In this paper, we use evolutionary search to produce the first LLM-generated domain-independent heuristics that exceed the hand-engineered state of the art. We let an LLM mutate parent heuristics written in C++, store candidates in a MAP-Elites archive keyed on informedness and speed and calculate fitness scores by blending coverage with solving time. To place the evolved programs in context, we additionally benchmark a broad set of hand-engineered heuristics on their informedness-speed tradeoff, which to our knowledge has not been done before. On unseen testing domains, our best evolved heuristic solves more tasks than even the strongest baseline, with our full heuristic suite spanning the Pareto frontier of said tradeoff. We also find that seeding evolution from the trivial blind heuristic outperforms seeding from the strong FF heuristic, even when the resulting program is itself an FF variant, and that LLM reasoning effort affects how often candidates compile much more than the quality of those that do. Because the evolved programs are plain C++, they slot into existing planners as drop-in replacements and inherit the soundness and completeness guarantees of the underlying search.

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

Privacy-preserving federated tensor decomposition of single-cell immune data: recovering multicellular programs across institutions

arXiv:2606.24938v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tensor decomposition of donor $\times$ cell-type $\times$ gene single-cell data recovers multicellular programs: coordinated axes of inter-individual transcriptional variation that span cell types and stratify disease. Yet immune single-cell atlases are increasingly multi-institution, multi-ancestry, and governed, so patient cells often cannot be pooled. We present a federated estimator: each site computes a local program subspace, and a coordinator merges these by stacked SVD under federated global-mean centering, provably equivalent (up to truncation) to the centralised decomposition. This centering makes the merge robust to site-label confounding (program AUC $0.957$ vs.\ $0.861$ for naive per-site centering). Only program subspaces leave a site, and aggregation is compatible with secure aggregation. On a 261-donor systemic lupus erythematosus atlas it recovers the canonical interferon program (ISG enrichment AUC $0.998$; case–control separation $0.958$; bootstrap $\DeltaAUC=-0.000$, 95\% CI $[-0.004,+0.012]$ vs.\ centralised), across institution-scale and multi-ancestry partitions, and across three real COVID-19 sites (subspace correlation $0.989$). It recovers the program when no site observes all cell types (correlation $1.000$, exact by construction), which fixed-feature federated PCA cannot. On an interstitial-lung-disease atlas the recovered program predicts disease better than the best single cell type (AUC $0.96$ vs.\ $0.91$; gap 95\% CI excludes zero) and the advantage survives federation; a liver cohort is consistent ($p=0.005$). Membership-inference shows secure aggregation cuts attack AUC from $0.91$ to $0.61$. The method enables cross-institution, cross-ancestry recovery of multicellular immune programs without sharing cells.

12.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-21

GENATATORs: ab initio Gene Annotation With DNA Language Models

Inference of gene structure and location from genome sequences - known as de novo gene annotation - is a fundamental task in biological research. However, sequence grammar encoding gene structure is complex and poorly understood, often requiring costly transcriptomic data for accurate gene annotation. In this work, we benchmark current solutions and develop new methods of gene annotation. We show that pretrained DNA language model (DNA LM) embeddings do not capture the features necessary for precise gene segmentation, and that task-specific fine-tuning remains essential. We comprehensively evaluate the impact of model architecture, training strategy, receptive field size, dataset composition, and data augmentations on gene segmentation performance. We revisit standard evaluation protocols, showing that commonly used per-token and per-sequence metrics fail to capture the challenges of real-world gene annotation. We introduce and theoretically justify new biologically grounded metrics, along with benchmarking datasets that better capture annotation quality. We show that fine-tuned DNA LMs outperform existing annotation tools, generalizing across species separated by hundreds of millions of years from those seen during training, and providing segmentation of previously intractable non-coding transcripts and untranslated regions of protein-coding genes. Our results thus provide a foundation for new biological applications centered on accurate gene annotation.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Token Complexity of Certifying Stochastic-Oracle Reliability

Authors:

arXiv:2606.24074v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Wang[Wang2026] introduced the Stochastic-Oracle Turing Machine (SOTM) framework and defined token complexity as the minimum expected cost of interacting with a stochastic oracle needed to attain a specified solution quality for a task. This paper develops an analogous notion for certifying the reliability of a stochastic oracle on a given domain. Certification token complexity is the minimum expected token cost required, with controlled error probability, to distinguish oracles that meet a target reliability level from those that fall below a lower reliability threshold. We construct an SPRT-based certification SOTM that queries the oracle, computes binary correctness scores, and stops when the accumulated log-likelihood evidence crosses a decision threshold. The SOTM halts almost surely, satisfies the desired two-sided error guarantee over the reliability regions to be certified, and yields an explicit upper bound on certification token complexity in terms of the reliability thresholds, the error bound, and the expected per-turn token cost. We then establish a matching information-theoretic lower bound: even with adaptive queries, every error-bounded certification SOTM must incur the same leading-order expected token cost as the SPRT-based construction as the prescribed error bound tends to zero. Together, these bounds characterize the leading-order certification token complexity in the small-error regime.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Pretrained self-supervised speech models can recognize unseen consonants

Modern pretrained self-supervised automatic speech recognition models are trained on large-scale audio data to encode speech into contextualized representations. However, their training data are heavily skewed toward high-resource languages with little data from low-resource languages, raising concerns about the potential underrepresentation of typologically uncommon speech sounds such as click consonants primarily found in Khoisan languages. This leads to our central research question: Can these models recognize click consonants as accurately as other speech sounds? To address this question, we fine-tune and compare pretrained self-supervised speech models (Wav2Vec2 and HuBERT) on data from two click-rich Khoisan languages (G|ui and West !Xoon). Our results reveal that the fine-tuned models consistently recognize clicks more accurately than non-clicks, suggesting that self-supervision enables generalization across human speech sounds including rare phonemes.

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

StereoFactory: A Unified Merging Framework for Robust Stereo Matching

Stereo matching has advanced through foundation models trained on large-scale datasets, yet this paradigm suffers from a scalability bottleneck: incorporating new data requires costly joint retraining. Model merging offers a scalable post-hoc alternative by integrating knowledge from specialized models after source checkpoints are available. However, existing merging methods typically retain all available models or rely on greedy inclusion, which can preserve harmful task-vector interference. We propose StereoFactory, a coarse-to-fine evolutionary framework for adaptive model merging. Stage~1 employs a genetic algorithm to search the combinatorial space of model subsets, determining which models should participate. Stage~2 addresses module-level knowledge specialization (different functional modules exhibit distinct preferences for knowledge sources) through CMA-ES optimization of architecture-adaptive routing over the selected task vectors, with optional module-level scaling. Experiments across two architectures and four benchmarks demonstrate that StereoFactory consistently achieves the best four-benchmark average under the same checkpoint pool, reducing the average error from 3.80 to 3.30 on NMRF and from 2.88 to 2.19 on FoundationStereo relative to the strongest controlled baseline. The post-hoc search requires only 2.7–3.7\% of the corresponding joint-retraining wall-clock time. Analysis reveals that knowledge contributions are inherently module-specific, and selected subsets can transfer across architectures with minimal degradation. Code will be publicly released upon acceptance at: https://github.com/XiandaGuo/StereoFactory.

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

Learning the generating functional for variance reduction in lattice QCD

arXiv:2606.15986v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The generating functional in quantum field theory provides the natural framework for constructing correlation functions as derivatives with respect to source operators. We present a methodology that leverages machine-learned normalizing flows to reduce the variance of arbitrary $N$-point correlation functions of bosonic operators in lattice gauge field theory calculations by encoding a representation of the generating functional. We show that it is possible to systematically approach noiseless estimators of correlation functions in this framework. We demonstrate this methodology with applications to calculations of glueball correlation functions and Wilson loops in Quantum Chromodynamics and Yang-Mills theory. The results show up to three orders of magnitude variance reduction.

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

The Representational Limit of Scalar Interactions: An Interventional Decomposition

arXiv:2606.19410v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Signed pairwise interaction scores fundamentally conflate uniqueness (U), redundancy (R), and synergy (S). We prove this on a minimal 3-way XOR structural causal model: faithful indices such as Shapley-Taylor return zero per pair, whereas projective indices such as Shapley Interaction spread the third-order effect into pair scalars that conflate the three mechanisms. We introduce Stochastic Hi-Fi, a post-hoc, retraining-free predictability decomposition that estimates per-feature U/R/S profiles by interventional masked inference. The estimator provides exact interventional semantics, finite-sample Monte Carlo bounds, strict variance reduction from coupled diamond sampling, and uniform finite-vocabulary convergence. Across tabular SCMs, Stochastic Hi-Fi recovers structure missed by scalar baselines (up to 411x larger interaction-magnitude recovery ratios). It also separates redundant and synergistic heads in the GPT-2 IOI circuit. On NIH ChestX-ray14, Stochastic Hi-Fi matches GradCAM on Pointing Game and improves substantially on Deletion AUC.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Optimizing Wigner Negativity in Scattering Processes Using Energetic Cost Functions

arXiv:2606.15101v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Wigner negativities (WNs) are key signatures of non-Gaussian bosonic states and essential resources for quantum technologies. We study their generation in the scattering of coherent pulses by a two-level atom coupled to a one-dimensional reservoir, a unitary and energy-preserving platform. Optimization in this multimode setting is hindered by the complexity of evaluating Wigner functions. We overcome this challenge by introducing energetic cost functions that identify output modes most likely to host large negativities. First using incoherent energy and then isolating a genuinely non-Gaussian contribution, we demonstrate a strong correlation between these quantities and WNs. This correlation extends beyond short, intense pulses to encompass pulses of finite energy, where photons are scattered while the two-level atom is driven. Focusing on the energy-efficiency of the process, we show that maximally efficient generation takes place for one input photon, on average, spectrally mode-matched with the atom.

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

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

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

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Association of Digoxin Use at Norwood Discharge with Fontan Completion: A Study from the Pediatric Heart Network Public Dataset

Background: Digoxin use after the Norwood procedure has been associated with improved interstage survival in hypoplastic left heart syndrome and related conditions. Whether this benefit translates into improved longer-term outcomes through staged palliation remains unknown. We aimed to determine the association of digoxin use at Norwood discharge with transplant-free survival and Fontan completion. Methods: We conducted a retrospective cohort study using the Pediatric Heart Network (PHN) Single Ventricle Reconstruction trial public dataset, including 549 infants enrolled at 15 North American centers between 2005 and 2008. Competing risk analysis was used to evaluate Fontan completion and Cox regression to assess death or transplantation within 6 years after the Norwood procedure. Mixed-effects models compared pre-Fontan hemodynamic and echocardiographic right ventricular indices between patients treated with and without digoxin after accounting for center clustering and adjustment for sex, shunt type, heart failure medications at Norwood discharge, and census block poverty level. Results: The 6-year cumulative incidence of Fontan completion was higher among patients discharged on digoxin than among those not receiving digoxin (82% vs 71%; p = 0.013). Competing-risk analysis accounting for death and transplant demonstrated a greater likelihood of Fontan completion among digoxin users (aHR 1.31; 95%CI 1.09-1.58; p = 0.005), without significant difference in the hazard of death or transplant (aHR 0.78; 95%CI 0.53-1.15; p = 0.208). No significant differences in pre-Fontan hemodynamic or echocardiographic indices were observed between groups. Initiation of digoxin post Stage II procedure was not associated with improved survival or likelihood to complete Fontan. Conclusion: Digoxin use at the time of Norwood discharge was associated with a 30% greater likelihood of Fontan completion by 6 years, without accompanying improvement in transplant-free survival. These findings extend prior observations of improved interstage outcomes associated with digoxin use and suggest that treatment may facilitate progression through staged palliation.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Do Large Language Models Have Emotions?

arXiv:2606.14742v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Do LLMs have emotions? A recent paper from Anthropic reports finding internal representations of emotion concepts in Claude Sonnet 4.5, concluding that the LLM has 'functional emotions.' We evaluate this claim against what is known about how emotions actually function in biological systems. We argue that emotions serve two core functions: the context-sensitive interpretation of situations, and the reorganization of processing across multiple systems in response to those interpretations. The Anthropic findings offer partial support for the first function, though the consistent, discrete emotional representations identified in Claude sit uneasily with affective neuroscience findings that human emotion is characterized by variable rather than uniform neural signatures. On the second function, the evidence is mixed: Claude's representations modulate output without producing the dynamic reorganization of attention, decision speed, and motivational state that defines emotion in biological systems. We close by proposing what it would take for an LLM to have emotions.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Exploratory Assessment of Pulsed-Wave Doppler Representations of Lung Sounds Using Deep Learning: An In-Vitro Phantom Study

The increasing availability of portable ultrasound systems motivates exploration of novel approaches to respiratory signal assessment. In this in-vitro study, we investigate whether pulsed-wave (PW) Doppler ultrasound can capture structured spectral patterns from replayed lung sound recordings. Digitized respiratory sounds were replayed through a tissue-mimicking ultrasound phantom, generating 1,478 PW Doppler spectral images from recordings associated with healthy subjects and several externally labeled disease categories. Exploratory classification experiments using a ResNet-18 architecture demonstrated that these Doppler representations contain learnable differences under controlled conditions. These findings motivate further investigation into PW Doppler as a potential representation of respiratory acoustics.

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

ViCoStream: Streaming VideoLLMs Can Run Beyond 100 FPS with Stage-Wise Coordinated Inference

Streaming VideoLLMs must continuously process incoming video while maintaining low query latency, making both video-ingestion throughput and query-time responsiveness critical for real-time deployment. Existing methods largely focus on accelerating individual modules, such as visual encoding, token pruning, or KV-cache compression, but provide limited insight into whether the resulting system can sustain real-time streaming performance. We formulate streaming VideoLLM inference as a coordinated pipeline spanning visual preprocessing, visual encoding, token dropping, and LLM prefilling/decoding. Building on this formulation, we propose ViCoStream (Video Coordinated Streaming), a stage-wise coordinated streaming framework that combines chunk-wise execution, CUDA-stream overlap, visual token control, bounded visual attention, and query-side retrieval to bound per-chunk computation and memory costs. We further provide a systematic study of bottleneck migration, revealing how chunk size, token retention, attention locality, and retrieval scope shape the throughput-accuracy trade-off. Experiments with Qwen2.5-VL-3B/7B-Instruct across multiple streaming benchmarks show that ViCoStream achieves 134 FPS video throughput and less than 50 ms TTFT on a single A100 GPU while maintaining accuracy close to full-history baselines.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

ParaScale: Scale-Calibrated Camera-Motion Transfer via a Gauge-Invariant Parallax Number

Authors:

arXiv:2606.19805v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transferring the camera motion of a reference video to a freshly generated one lets creators reuse cinematic moves. Yet reference and target often live at incompatible scales – a sweep across a galaxy versus a nudge across a desk – and naively reusing the recovered trajectory yields either imperceptible or violently exaggerated motion. We trace this to a geometric fact: translation-induced image motion scales as ||T||/Z, so a monocular trajectory is meaningful only up to a depth-scale gauge. We distill this into the Parallax Number Pi = ||Delta T|| / Zbar, a dimensionless, gauge-invariant descriptor of how strongly a camera move is felt, and prove that it – not the raw trajectory – is the quantity that scale-faithful transfer must preserve. ParaScale is a plug-and-play module that reads Pi off any reference video and re-realizes it against the target scene's own depth, per frame, leaving rotation untouched. Sitting between pose extraction and pose injection, it requires no retraining and drops into any pose-conditioned generator. We further introduce the Parallax Consistency Error (PCE), a scale-symmetric metric that – unlike the similarity-aligned TransErr – exposes scene-scale mismatch. Across scale regimes spanning four orders of magnitude and multiple backbones, ParaScale keeps the realized parallax on the identity line and cuts PCE by more than 3x over uncalibrated transfer with no loss of visual fidelity.

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

Right Predictions, Misleading Explanations: On the Vulnerability of Vision-Language Model Explanations

Explanation mechanisms are increasingly used to support transparency and trust in vision-language models (VLMs), particularly in settings where model decisions require human oversight. However, the robustness of these explanations remains insufficiently understood. In this work, we investigate whether explanation heatmaps in VLMs, particularly CLIP-based models, faithfully reflect model reasoning under adversarial conditions. We show that explanation maps can be systematically manipulated while preserving the model's original prediction, revealing a disconnect between predictive behavior and explanation faithfulness. To study this vulnerability, we introduce X-Shift, a novel grey-box attack that perturbs patch-level visual representations to redirect explanation heatmaps toward semantically irrelevant regions without altering the predicted output. Unlike conventional adversarial attacks that aim to induce misclassification, X-Shift specifically targets the integrity of the explanation process itself. The attack operates without modifying model parameters and generalizes across multiple CLIP architectures and explanation methods. We evaluate the proposed approach on ImageNet-1k, MS-COCO, and Flickr30K, demonstrating consistent degradation in explanation alignment under imperceptible perturbations while maintaining prediction stability. Furthermore, standard prediction-oriented adversarial attacks fail to reproduce the same explanation-shifting behavior even under substantially larger perturbation budgets. Our findings highlight a fundamental limitation of current explanation mechanisms in VLMs and raise concerns about their use as reliable indicators of model trustworthiness in high-impact applications.