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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

An Algebraic Matrix Spencer Theorem

Authors:
Emrullah Akbas↗Suvrit Sra↗

arXiv:2606.16005v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We develop an algebraic approach to matrix discrepancy based on the representation theory of finite-dimensional C$^*$-algebras. As an application, we resolve a substantial structured special case of the Matrix Spencer conjecture. In particular, we show that for every family of contractions $A_1,\ldots,A_n$ that are contained in a finite-dimensional $C^*$-algebra $\mathcal A$ with $dim_{\mathbb C} (\mathcal A) \lesssim n$, there exists signs $x\in\{\pm1\}^n$ such that $\|\sum_{i=1}^n x_i A_i\| \le O(\sqrt n)$. As a noteworthy special case, our main result also resolves the Group Spencer conjecture of (Bandeira'24). We furthermore prove that Matrix Spencer continues to hold for low-rank perturbations of matrix families coming from an $C^*$-algebra of small dimension.

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02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

TimeLAVA: Learning-Agnostic Data Valuation for Time Series

Authors:
Wenqin Liu↗Weizhi Quan↗Aoqi Zuo↗Erdun Gao↗Vu Nguyen↗Dino Sejdinovic↗Howard Bondell↗Mingming Gong↗

arXiv:2606.18729v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Data valuation quantifies the intrinsic quality of individual samples to enable principled data curation, quality control, and robust learning. For time series in critical domains such as healthcare, finance, and industrial monitoring, effective valuation methods are essential yet fundamentally lacking. Existing approaches are either model-dependent, limiting their generalizability, or designed for i.i.d. data and thus fail to capture temporal dependencies, multi-scale patterns, and non-stationary dynamics inherent to sequential data. We introduce TimeLAVA, a learning-agnostic framework that values temporal segments by their marginal contribution to minimizing distributional discrepancy between evaluated and reference data. At its core is a novel Selective Wavelet-based Wasserstein discrepancy combining multi-scale wavelet transforms for temporal localization with unbalanced optimal transport for robustness to distributional shifts. Segment values are efficiently computed via sensitivity analysis without requiring model training and aggregated into point-wise scores. We provide theoretical guarantees linking valuation to model-agnostic generalization and prove bounded sensitivity to outlier contamination. Extensive experiments across anomaly detection, data pruning, and label noise detection demonstrate that TimeLAVA produces significantly more informative value scores than existing methods on diverse real-world datasets.

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

SPARK: Spatial Policy-driven Adaptive Reinforcement learning for Knowledge distillation

Authors:
Mohamed Jismy Aashik Rasool↗Shabir Ahmad↗Gisong Oh↗Teag Kuen Whangbo↗

Low-bit quantization enables deployment of image restoration (IR) networks on resource-constrained devices, but introduces rounding noise that disproportionately degrades high-frequency regions such as edges and fine textures. Existing knowledge distillation (KD) methods apply distillation signals uniformly across all spatial locations, overlooking the varying reconstruction difficulty across image regions. To address this, we propose SPARK (Spatial Policy-driven Adaptive Reinforcement Learning for Knowledge Distillation), a framework that adaptively allocates distillation effort using a lightweight reinforcement learning (RL) policy network. At each training step, a difficulty feature extractor computes four signals, namely Laplacian variance, pixel variance, student reconstruction error, and teacher-student knowledge gap, which are fed into a compact policy CNN that produces a stochastic spatial weight map to modulate the KD loss during quantization-aware training (QAT). SPARK is IR task-agnostic, adds no inference cost, and integrates into any existing QAT pipeline without architectural changes. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that SPARK consistently outperforms PTQ, QAT, and state-of-the-art (SOTA) KD approaches across multiple student architectures, achieving reconstruction quality closest to the full-precision teacher under significant computational constraints.

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04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Compositional Skill Routing for LLM Agents: Decompose, Retrieve, and Compose

Authors:
Xueping Gao↗

LLM agents increasingly rely on external skills – reusable tool specifications – but real-world tasks often require composing multiple skills, not just selecting one. We formalize this as the Compositional Skill Routing problem: given a complex user query and a large skill library, decompose the query into atomic sub-tasks, retrieve the appropriate skill for each sub-task, and compose an executable plan. We present SkillWeaver, a decompose-retrieve-compose framework combining an LLM task decomposer, a bi-encoder skill retriever with FAISS indexing, and a dependency-aware DAG planner. To support evaluation, we introduce CompSkillBench, a benchmark of 300 compositional queries over 2,209 real MCP server skills spanning 24 functional categories, sourced from the public MCP ecosystem. Our experiments reveal that task decomposition quality is the primary bottleneck: standard LLM decomposition reaches only 34.2% category recall at the step level. To address this, we propose Iterative Skill-Aware Decomposition (SAD), a retrieval-augmented feedback loop that iteratively aligns decomposition with available skills. SAD improves decomposition accuracy from 51.0% to 67.7% (+32.7%, Wilcoxon p < 10^-6) in a single iteration; DA-conditioned analysis confirms that correct granularity is the prerequisite for effective retrieval (CatR@1 rises from 34% to 41% when DA=1). SkillWeaver reduces context window consumption by over 99%, and transfer experiments confirm generalization (+35.6% relative DA gain even when target categories are absent from the retrieval pool).

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05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Sparse probes and murky physics: a case study of interpretability challenges in a foundation model for continuum dynamics

Authors:
Katherine Rosenfeld↗Maike Sonnewald↗

arXiv:2606.11657v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative AI emulators are increasingly used in scientific domains where we already have strong theory, benchmarks, and physical intuition. This raises a central evaluation and interpretability question: when a foundation-style model can reproduce known continuum dynamics, what internal mechanism supports that behavior, is the internal behaviour consistent with known physics, and how does it relate to where the emulator succeeds or fails? We investigate a cross-domain foundation model for continuum dynamics, Walrus by Polymathic, using mechanistic interpretability guided by physical principles. We apply a sparse autoencoder (SAE) to probe a selected layer, and address the practical challenge of triaging a large feature set (over 20,000) using enstrophy as a physically grounded metric. As a deliberately simple testbed, we focus on shear flow and compare feature recruitment across multiple shear-flow setups, i.e. parameter values in the numerical simulation. Across setups we find evidence of piecewise consistency, with subsets of features recurring in similar roles, but this structure is intermittent and does not map cleanly onto standard physical decompositions. In parallel, direct comparisons between numerical simulation and the emulator reveal systematic output-level discrepancies, including regimes where energy/structures become too diffuse or too localized. We connect parts of these discrepancies to changes in specific SAE feature usage. Our work highlights open questions for scientific foundation models: how to robustly prioritize mechanistically meaningful features, how to separate stable structure from analysis artifacts (including single-layer and SAE limitations), and how to use established benchmarks to decide when "different" internal representations are genuinely informative rather than merely effective.

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

The Hidden Environmental Cost of Poor Coding Practices in TensorFlow and Keras Applications: A Study on Resource Leaks and Carbon Emissions

Authors:
Bashar Abdallah↗Gustavo Santos↗Rola Al Bataineh↗Alain Abran↗Mohammad Hamdaqa↗

arXiv:2606.19799v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Efficiency and sustainability are critical considerations in the development and deployment of machine learning (ML) applications. Among the factors influencing sustainability, resource leaks in ML code can introduce hidden inefficiencies that elevate energy consumption and CO2 emissions. Despite this, empirical evidence quantifying their environmental impact remains limited. This emerging results paper presents an initial empirical investigation of two common resource-leak smells, namely Improper Model Reuse (IMR) and Unreleased Tensor References (UTR), and their impact on energy consumption and CO2 emissions in TensorFlow and Keras workloads. Controlled experiments were conducted for each smell by executing identical training tasks while comparing against a smell-free baseline. Our preliminary results show that both smells consistently increase estimated electricity usage and carbon emissions. IMR and UTR increased electricity consumption by approximately 32% and 46%, respectively, with proportional increases in CO2 emissions. Paired statistical tests indicate that these differences are systematic and statistically significant, providing initial empirical evidence that resource-leak smells may degrade ML energy efficiency and environmental sustainability. These findings suggest that resource-leak smells pose measurable risks to both software quality and sustainability, emphasizing the importance of integrating resource-lifecycle management and energy-efficiency considerations into ML development.

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07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Diffusive Dynamics of Nonstabilizerness

Authors:
Zhenyu Xiao↗Shinsei Ryu↗

arXiv:2606.13606v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Symmetries shape the quantum-information dynamics of many-body systems, but their effect on nonstabilizerness, the resource complementary to entanglement, is less understood. We compute the stabilizer Rényi entropy, a measure of nonstabilizerness, in $\mathrm{U}(1)$-symmetric one-dimensional random circuits. The disorder-averaged dynamics is captured by a four-replica tensor network, which we evaluate by $S_4$-adapted infinite time-evolving block decimation (iTEBD) directly in the thermodynamic limit. Together with a hydrodynamic argument, our results identify a diffusive universality class for the late-time approach of nonstabilizerness to its random-state value, with the stabilizer Rényi entropy gap closing as $1/t$. The same scaling is verified in an energy-conserving nonintegrable Ising chain. More broadly, our framework provides a hydrodynamic perspective on nonstabilizerness generation and offers insight into the design of approximate Haar-random states in Hamiltonian dynamics.

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

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

Authors:
Yuhan Pu↗Hao Zheng↗Ziqian Mo↗Zirui Pang↗Hill Zhang↗Tianyi Fan↗Shuhong Wu↗Jiaheng Wei↗

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

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

Signed Compression Progress on a Sealed Audit is Goodhart-Resistant

Authors:
Ayush Mittal↗Dhruv Gupta↗

arXiv:2606.11417v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Compression progress is a long-standing proposal for intrinsic motivation: reward an agent when its world model becomes better at predicting or compressing experience. The folk claim is that this reward is "credible" because it is paid only for learning. We make this precise and prove it. If intrinsic reward is the signed decrease of a fixed sealed-audit loss, r_t = E(theta_{t-1}) - E(theta_t), then cumulative reward telescopes exactly to endpoint audit improvement, so no policy can push reward up indefinitely while true audit performance stagnates or degrades. For finite audit panels the same result holds with a sharp false-positive budget: cumulative empirical reward is at most true audit improvement plus 2 Delta_n(F, delta), the uniform audit deviation of the model class. This is horizon-free: adaptivity over time costs nothing once the sealed panel uniformly controls the class. The theorem also identifies the failure modes: the guarantee disappears if progress is clipped, scored on the agent's own stream, exposed to a high-capacity model on a reusable panel, or applied to a neural class that makes Delta_n vacuous. We give a Lean 4 mechanization of the structural core (telescoping, the finite-audit bound, finite Gibbs, and the entropy floor) and an experiment suite on ARC-TGI grid-transformation generators with adaptive holdout attacks. Experiments confirm the theory: finite-audit deviation scales as n^{-0.527}; signed progress resists clip-farming, stream leakage, and noisy-TV curiosity; naive reusable audits are exploitable by black-box scalar feedback, while standard release defenses keep the attack below the 2 Delta_n threshold. Signed compression progress on a sealed audit is an accounting signal of genuine improvement.

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

Bridging Passive and Active: Enhancing Conversation Starter Recommendation via Active Expression Modeling

Authors:
Yiqing Wu↗Haoming Li↗Guanyu Jiang↗Jiahao Liang↗Yongchun Zhu↗Jingwu Chen↗Feng Zhang↗

Large Language Model (LLM)-driven conversational search is shifting information retrieval from reactive keyword matching to proactive, open-ended dialogues. In this context, Conversation Starters are widely deployed to provide personalized query recommendations that help users initiate dialogues. Conventionally, recommending these starters relies on a closed "exposure-click" loop. Yet, this feedback loop mechanism traps the system in an echo chamber where, compounded by data sparsity, it fails to capture the dynamic nature of conversational search intents shaped by the open world. As a result, the system skews towards popular but generic suggestions. In this work, we uncover an untapped paradigm shift to shatter this harmful feedback loop: harnessing user "free will" through active user expressions. Unlike traditional recommendations, conversational search empowers users to bypass menus entirely through manually typed queries. The open-world intents in active queries hold the key to breaking this loop. However, incorporating them is non-trivial: (1) there exists an inherent distribution shift between active queries and formulated starters. (2) Furthermore, the "non-ID-able" nature of open text renders traditional item-based popularity statistics ineffective for large-scale industrial streaming training. To this end, we propose Passive-Active Bridge (PA-Bridge), a novel framework that employs an adversarial distribution aligner to bridge the distributional gap between passively recommended starters and active expressions. Moreover, we introduce a semantic discretizer to enable the deployment of popularity debiasing algorithms. Online A/B tests on our platform, demonstrate that PA-Bridge significantly boosts the Feature Penetration Rate by 0.54% and User Active Days by 0.04%.

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11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Graph Learning Should Move Beyond Restrictive Views of Spectral and Message-Passing GNNs

Authors:
Antonis Vasileiou↗Juan Cervino↗Pascal Frossard↗Charilaos I. Kanatsoulis↗Christopher Morris↗Michael T. Schaub↗Pierre Vandergheynst↗Zhiyang Wang↗Guy Wolf↗Ron Levie↗

arXiv:2602.10031v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Graph neural networks (GNNs) are commonly divided into message-passing neural networks (MPNNs) and spectral GNNs, reflecting two largely separate research traditions in machine learning and signal processing. While MPNNs have a precise definition, there is no widely accepted criterion for what makes a mapping a spectral GNN. Most existing work restricts spectral GNNs to layered architectures based on linear spectral filters. Under this restriction, we show that spectral and spatial GNNs have largely equivalent expressive power. To promote progress in the field, we propose a precise definition of spectral GNNs based on eigenbasis symmetries, in contrast to the definition of MPNNs via neighborhood permutation symmetries. We further argue that the two perspectives offer complementary strengths. MPNNs provide a natural language for discrete structure and expressivity analysis through tools from logic and graph isomorphism, while the spectral perspective offers principled tools for understanding smoothing, bottlenecks, stability, and community structure. Overall, we argue that progress in graph learning will be accelerated by clarifying the similarities and differences between these perspectives and by moving toward a unified theoretical framework.

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12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Grad Detect: Gradient-Based Hallucination Detection in LLMs

Authors:
Anand Kamat↗Daniel Blake↗Brent M. Werness↗

arXiv:2606.24790v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across diverse tasks, yet they remain prone to generating hallucinations. Detecting these hallucinations is critical for deploying LLMs reliably in high-stakes applications. We present Grad Detect, a gradient-based approach for predicting hallucinations by analyzing layer-wise gradient patterns from a single forward-backward pass during inference. Our method shows that the internal gradient structure of a model carries rich information about the correctness of its output. This information is not accessible through output-level signals alone. We evaluate Grad Detect on several Q&A benchmarks across both hallucination detection and model abstention prediction, where it consistently outperforms confidence-based and sampling-based baselines. Through comprehensive layer ablation studies across all eleven models from four architectural families, we find that the final five layers concentrate over 97% of the discriminative gradient signal, enabling efficient deployment with minimal performance loss. Grad Detect provides a unified framework for predicting multiple dimensions of LLM reliability, offering strong predictive performance alongside interpretable insights into where and how model failures originate.

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14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Understanding Key Features of Time Series Foundation Models from Epidemic Forecasting

Authors:
Alireza Jafari↗Judy Fox↗Geoffrey C. Fox↗Madhav Marathe↗Aniruddha Adiga↗

arXiv:2606.19560v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Seasonal influenza infects millions of people and causes substantial morbidity and mortality in the United States each year, making accurate short-term forecasting a core public-health need. Reliable forecasts of epidemic time series can inform vaccination timing, hospital staffing, and resource allocation, yet the comparative behavior of modern forecasting architectures on infectious-disease surveillance data remains insufficiently characterized. We address this gap through a systematic evaluation of regional influenza forecasting using influenza-like illness surveillance and influenza-associated hospitalization time series under both temporal and spatial generalization settings for 1-4-week-ahead prediction. We compare classical neural network architectures, numerical transformer-based models, pretrained time series foundation models, and LLM-based forecasting approaches. Across tasks, we demonstrate that a mixture-of-experts model that fuses multiple pretrained forecasters achieves the strongest overall performance, indicating that heterogeneous pretrained representations provide complementary predictive information. Our results further show that numerical transformer-based models produce reliable forecasts, while pretraining provides the largest gains at longer horizons, particularly when the pretraining domain is mechanistically aligned with influenza dynamics. In contrast, LLM-based time series methods underperform relative to numerical forecasters in this setting. Finally, we examine hospitalization information as both an auxiliary covariate and a pretraining source. Hospitalization signals provide complementary improvements in selected settings and clarify when additional surveillance streams enhance the robustness of multi-horizon forecasting. These findings provide actionable guidance on model selection, pretraining strategy, and auxiliary-signal use for influenza preparedness.

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15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Extrema of microscopically slowed-down Gaussian fields

Authors:
Zuodi Xie↗

arXiv:2606.19207v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce a family of Gaussian fields whose covariance structure exhibits an inhomogeneous, microscopic slowdown and it interpolates between a $\log$ profile (for a certain interpolation parameter $\alpha=0$) and a $\log\log$ profile (when the interpolation parameter is $\alpha=1/2$). We consider both one dimensional such objects (which we call {\it Branching Brownian Motions in a cooling environment}) as well as higher dimensional, spatial fields. We identify the correct centering of the maximum at time $T$ and prove tightness of the recentered maximum. While the exponent in the first-order growth varies linearly with $\alpha$, giving a leading order of $T^{1-\alpha}$, the second-order correction exhibits a phase transition at $\alpha=1/3$.

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

Optimizing Wigner Negativity in Scattering Processes Using Energetic Cost Functions

Authors:
Kian Hwee Lim↗Kiarn T. Laverick↗Sahil Sardar Jafar↗Samyak P. Prasad↗Maria Maffei↗Alexia Auff\`eves↗

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.

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17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Skill-Guided Continuation Distillation for GUI Agents

Authors:
Zhimin Fan↗Hongwei Yu↗Yeqing Shen↗Haolong Yan↗Guozhen Peng↗Tianhao Peng↗Yudong Zhang↗Xiaowen Zhang↗Kaijun Tan↗Zheng Ge↗Xiangyu Zhang↗Daxin Jiang↗…

arXiv:2606.18890v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Improving GUI agents typically relies on behavior cloning on expert trajectories. However, as the current policy deviates from the expert policy, it inevitably encounters policy-induced off-trajectory states during closed-loop execution, i.e., states that fall outside the expert trajectories. Since expert trajectories provide no demonstrations for these unseen states, such states receive no effective supervision, leaving the policy unable to select the correct action. To close this supervision gap, we propose Skill-Guided Continuation Distillation (SGCD), an iterative self-improvement framework. SGCD first runs the plain policy without skill guidance for a few steps to reach realistic off-trajectory states. From these states, a skill-guided policy then completes the task and produces successful continuations, which are mixed with expert trajectories to supply supervision over policy-induced off-trajectory states. The skills are extracted from both successful and failed rollouts, consisting of Continuation Plans, Critical Targets, Failure Traps, and Success Criteria. On OSWorld-Verified, SGCD improves the success rate of three base models from the low-30\% range to over 50\%, demonstrating its effectiveness and generality.

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

Trimodal Glioma Representation Alignment via Volumetric Contrastive Learning

Authors:
Denise Marini↗Eleonora Grassucci↗Danilo Comminiello↗

Glioma grading and survival prediction require the integration of heterogeneous information collected at different spatial and biological scales. Histopathology describes tissue morphology, mRNA expression captures molecular activity, and magnetic resonance imaging provides a non-invasive view of tumor extent and radiological heterogeneity. Existing glioma prognosis models often combine only two of these sources, while their alignment objectives remain mostly pairwise. This paper introduces GLORIA, a novel trimodal framework for GLioma Omics - Radiology - hIstopathology Alignment. GLORIA processes whole-slide image regions, gene-expression profiles, and 3D MRI volumes through modality-specific encoders, projects them into a shared latent space, and aligns them with a Gramian contrastive loss that measures the volume spanned by the three modality embeddings. The aligned representations are fused through a cross-modal gating module and optimized jointly for three-class glioma grading and overall survival prediction. We evaluate GLORIA on a matched TCGA-GBM/LGG and BraTS21 cohort, comprising 132 patients with all three modalities. On the shared trimodal test set, GLORIA improves over the bimodal WSI-mRNA baseline in all the metrics considered.

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19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Quality-Preserving Imperceptible Adversarial Attack on Skeleton-based Human Action Recognition

Authors:
Ziyi Chang↗Kanglei Zhou↗Xiaohui Liang↗Hubert P. H. Shum↗

Adversarial attacks on skeletal human action recognition have received significant attention. However, existing methods typically introduce noise-like perturbations that degrade motion quality post-attack, and thereby are inherently perceptible with recent advancements in S-HAR systems. We discover that this degradation stems from the gap between empirical and true risks during the optimization process of previous adversarial attacks. To address this issue, we propose an attack where adversarial motions are obtained without compromising their motion quality. To minimize the risk gap and preserve motion quality, we propose a distribution-based adversarial attack method without introducing noise-like perturbations. To faithfully evaluate the motion quality, we propose a new metric that aligns with human perception on real-world naturalness. Experiments have been conducted on the state-of-the-art S-HAR methods across two datasets, demonstrating the superiority of our method in both the attack success rate and the post-attack motion quality through qualitative and quantitative analyses. The success of our quality-preserving attack application and distribution-based method raises serious concerns about the robustness of action recognizers, highlighting the need for further enhancements in this domain.

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20.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-14

Prediction of parsimonious and temporally sensitive sets of cell fate engineering transcription factors with IMCell

Authors:
Su↗E. Y↗Ly↗Cahan↗

Transcription factor (TF) cocktails used in cell identity reprogramming protocols have largely been developed from experimental approaches. A handful of computational approaches have been reported, though have not been widely adopted by the scientific community. To standardize their use and assess their performance, we built CompForce, a platform that integrates these tools. Using CompForce, we found that existing computational methods offer modest improvements over differential expression on both synthetic and literature-curated data, and that their lackluster and inconsistent performance could be attributed to a reliance on local centrality metrics. To improve upon these methods, we developed IMCell, a prediction method that is inspired by the influence maximization problem. Unlike existing tools, IMCell returns optimized TF sets rather than ranked TF lists. We demonstrate that IMCell vastly out-performs existing tools, and further extend it to dynamic, stepwise contexts. The tools presented here are available in the R packages CompForce and IMCell.

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21.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Diffusion approximations for interacting stochastic systems with reflection and control

Authors:
Thoa Thieu↗Roderick Melnik↗

arXiv:2601.05895v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study diffusion approximations for a class of interacting stochastic systems with reflection and control. Motivated by interacting stochastic dynamics subject to feedback mechanisms and boundary constraints, we consider diffusion-scaled stochastic processes incorporating stochastic fluctuations, state-dependent interactions, and reflection. Under suitable assumptions, we establish convergence in distribution of the scaled processes to systems of interacting reflected stochastic differential equations of Ornstein-Uhlenbeck type. The limiting dynamics capture key features of constrained multi-agent systems, including mean-reverting behavior, interaction effects, and confinement within bounded domains through Skorokhod reflection. The analysis combines diffusion-scaling arguments, stability estimates, and continuity properties of the Skorokhod map to connect discrete stochastic systems with their reflected diffusion limits. To illustrate the framework, we present numerical examples motivated by crowd dynamics and neural population dynamics. The simulations demonstrate qualitative agreement between the finite stochastic systems and the corresponding reflected diffusion models and illustrate how diffusion approximations can provide tractable descriptions of interacting stochastic systems with constraints.

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22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

MuVAP: Multimodal Multiparty Voice Activity Projection for Turn-taking Prediction in the Wild

Authors:
Haotian Qi↗Gabriel Skantze↗

arXiv:2606.16731v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current multiparty turn-taking models often rely on complex microphone arrays or multi-camera setups, limiting their applicability in human-robot interaction scenarios. We introduce MuVAP, a causal multimodal framework that extends Voice Activity Projection by grounding acoustic predictions in face tracks, enabling speaker-aware turn-taking predictions from a monaural audio stream and a single camera view. To address the combinatorial complexity of modeling multiple speakers, we propose Role-Relative Projection, which maps any N-speaker interaction onto a fixed current versus next floor-holder state. Because existing audiovisual datasets contain disruptive editing cuts that break causal tracking, we introduce the Audio-Visual Conversation Corpus, a 31-hour dataset of unedited, single-camera multiparty conversations. Evaluations demonstrate that MuVAP outperforms strong baselines on Shift-Hold and next-speaker prediction tasks across two- and three-speaker settings.

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24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Trusted Uncertainty in Large Language Models: A Unified Framework for Confidence Calibration and Risk-Controlled Refusal

Authors:
Markus Oehri↗Giulia Conti↗Kaviraj Pather↗Alexandre Rossi↗Laia Serra↗Adrian Parody↗Rogvi Johannesen↗Aviaja Petersen↗Arben Krasniqi↗

Deployed language models must decide not only what to answer but also when not to answer. We present UniCR, a unified framework that turns heterogeneous uncertainty evidence including sequence likelihoods, self-consistency dispersion, retrieval compatibility, and tool or verifier feedback into a calibrated probability of correctness and then enforces a user-specified error budget via principled refusal. UniCR learns a lightweight calibration head with temperature scaling and proper scoring, supports API-only models through black-box features, and offers distribution-free guarantees using conformal risk control. For long-form generation, we align confidence with semantic fidelity by supervising on atomic factuality scores derived from retrieved evidence, reducing confident hallucinations while preserving coverage. Experiments on short-form QA, code generation with execution tests, and retrieval-augmented long-form QA show consistent improvements in calibration metrics, lower area under the risk-coverage curve, and higher coverage at fixed risk compared to entropy or logit thresholds, post-hoc calibrators, and end-to-end selective baselines. Analyses reveal that evidence contradiction, semantic dispersion, and tool inconsistency are the dominant drivers of abstention, yielding informative user-facing refusal messages. The result is a portable recipe of evidence fusion to calibrated probability to risk-controlled decision that improves trustworthiness without fine-tuning the base model and remains valid under distribution shift.

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25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Detecting Explanatory Insufficiency in Learned Representations: A Framework for Representational Vigilance

Authors:
Jacques Raynal↗Pierre Slangen↗Elsa Raynal↗Jacques Margerit↗

arXiv:2606.13172v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learned representations are central to modern machine learning and are commonly evaluated through predictive performance, robustness, uncertainty estimation, or generalization. However, a learned representation may remain operationally successful while progressively failing to organize persistent residual structures that are not fully captured by conventional evaluation metrics. This article introduces VER, the Vigilant Evaluator of Representations, a conceptual framework for monitoring representational adequacy in learned representations. VER does not propose a new learning algorithm, loss function, or model architecture. Instead, it formalizes a diagnostic process through which persistent residual structures may be identified, analyzed, and interpreted as potential indicators of explanatory insufficiency. The framework distinguishes representational inadequacy from ordinary prediction error, uncertainty, noise, and distribution shift. It introduces a monitoring sequence based on representation identification, explanatory-domain delimitation, residual-structure detection, explanatory-resistance evaluation, and vigilance signaling. VER is intended as a contribution to representation diagnostics in machine learning. Its objective is not to replace existing evaluation methods but to complement them by treating representational adequacy as an explicit object of inquiry. A path toward empirical evaluation through representational-vigilance benchmarks is also outlined.

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