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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

On Local Population-Risk Certificates

Authors:
Mingzhi Song↗

arXiv:2606.19147v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper develops local certificates for population-risk increments around a current model. For a local candidate set \(\mathcal D\), the certificate is a two-sided confidence band for \(P({\ell_{\theta+v}-\ell_\theta})\) over \(v\in\mathcal D\). As an application, the upper endpoint of this band yields a risk-controlled update rule: an update is accepted only when its certified upper endpoint is nonpositive; otherwise the current model is retained.

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

Representing Time Series as Structured Programs for LLM Reasoning

Authors:
Jaeho Kim↗Changhun Oh↗Seokhyun Lee↗Irina Rish↗Changhee Lee↗

arXiv:2606.12481v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning and instruction-following capabilities, making them potentially powerful tools for time-series analysis. However, time series lie outside their native textual modality, raising a fundamental question: how should time series be represented so that LLMs can reason about them effectively? Existing work typically serializes raw numerical sequences or fine-tunes pre-trained LLMs on time-series data. These approaches place the burden of extracting temporal structure directly on the LLM, creating a modality mismatch that often degrades performance on long sequences and introduces substantial computational overhead. In this work, we introduce Time-Series-to-Structured-Program representation (T2SP), a deterministic, training-free method that represents a time series as a structured symbolic program. T2SP decomposes time series into trends, periods, and salient events, expressing them in a program-friendly format aligned with the textual and code-like modalities on which LLMs are natively trained. By shifting temporal-structure extraction from the model to the representation itself, T2SP enables off-the-shelf LLMs to leverage their existing reasoning capabilities for time-series understanding. We evaluate T2SP on three reasoning tasks – editing, captioning, and question answering – where it consistently improves performance, reduces reasoning time, and lowers failure rates compared with raw-string representations. Our results demonstrate that T2SP provides an effective interface between time series and LLMs.

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03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Benchmarking Quantum Computers via Protocols, Comparing IBM's Heron vs IBM's Eagle

Authors:
Nitay Mayo↗Tal Mor↗Yossi Weinstein↗

arXiv:2603.04377v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As quantum computing hardware rapidly advances, objectively evaluating the capabilities and error rates of new processors remains a critical challenge for the field. A clear and realistic understanding of current quantum performance is essential for guiding research priorities and driving meaningful progress. In this work, we apply and extend a protocol-based benchmarking methodology (Meirom, Mor, Weinstein Arxiv 2505.12441) that utilizes well-defined \underline{quantumness} thresholds. By evaluating performance at protocol level rather than the gate level, this approach provides a transparent and intuitive assessment of whether specific quantum processors, or isolated sub-chips within them, can demonstrate a practical quantum advantage. To illustrate the utility of this method, we compare two generations of IBM quantum computers: the older Eagle architecture and the newer Heron architecture. Our findings reveal the genuine operational strengths and limitations of these devices, demonstrating substantial performance improvements in the newer Heron generation. This work was made possible by IBM Quantum policies that enable independent and objective assessment of its quantum computers and sub-chips. We strongly encourage other companies to emulate the independent qubit availability and the fair pricing that allow researchers to perform such assessments.

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

PhoneHarness: Harnessing Phone-Use Agents through Mixed GUI, CLI, and Tool Actions

Authors:
Chenxin Li↗Zhengyao Fang↗Zhengyang Tang↗Pengyuan Lyu↗Xingran Zhou↗Xin Lai↗Fei Tang↗Liang Wu↗Yiduo Guo↗Weinong Wang↗Junyi Li↗Yi Zhang↗…

Phone agents are increasingly expected to complete real mobile workflows rather than merely predict the next screen action. However, much of the current mobile-agent literature still evaluates agents primarily as GUI controllers that observe a screen, emit taps and swipes, and are scored by target app state. Real phone-use tasks are broader: they require deciding when to use app GUIs, device-side commands, or structured tools, while leaving evidence that the intended side effect actually occurred. We introduce PhoneHarness, a mixed-action benchmark and execution harness for studying phone-use agents on verifiable mobile workflows. PhoneHarness runs a device-side agent loop over GUI, CLI, and host-side tool actions, combining deterministic action routing with bounded GUI delegation and auditable execution traces. Its benchmark, PhoneHarness Bench, evaluates whether agents complete tasks with observable side effects, not only whether they produce plausible final answers. On the annotated evaluation split, PhoneHarness reaches a 75.0% pass rate, outperforming the strongest non-PhoneHarness settings by 12.9 percentage points. PhoneHarness and PhoneHarness Bench therefore play distinct but mutually dependent roles: the harness makes mixed phone workflows executable, while the benchmark measures whether agents can use that harness reliably and safely. Our findings suggest that reliable phone automation depends on action-surface routing and verifiable execution, not only visual GUI control.

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05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

The Register Gap: A Meaning Intelligence Framework for Nigerian Public Discourse

Authors:
Celestine Achi↗

We introduce the Meaning Intelligence Framework (MIF), a nine-dimension annotation and evaluation schema for Nigerian public discourse that separates surface sentiment from true communicative intent. Existing benchmarks for Nigerian languages, including NaijaSenti and AfriSenti, treat sentiment classification as a three-way polarity task (positive, negative, neutral). We argue that the dominant failure mode of AI systems on Nigerian discourse is not translation failure but context failure: the same utterance carries opposite pragmatic force depending on speaker, audience, and situation. The MIF operationalises this insight across nine scored dimensions: register, surface sentiment, true intent, irony, coded subtext, risk tier, annotator confidence, speaker emotion, and recommended communications action. We construct a 30-item calibration dataset spanning Standard English, Nigerian English, Nigerian Pidgin, and code-mixed registers, and evaluate a frontier language model (Gemini 2.5 Flash) under zero-shot and schema-informed prompting conditions. The headline finding is the Register Gap: zero-shot register classification accuracy is 33.3%, rising to 73.3% (+40 points) when the model receives the MIF schema in-context. The composite Meaning Intelligence Score increases by 5.4 points (73.2 to 78.6) under schema-informed prompting, with the largest practical gains in register identification, coded-subtext detection (+10 points), and strategic action recommendation (+10.3 points). We release the framework specification, annotation guidelines, and the 30-item public calibration set to support reproducibility, while retaining a private holdout corpus for contamination-protected evaluation.

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06.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Metrics for Evaluating Biological AI Model Predictive Accuracy at the Data-Substrate Level

Authors:
Ewing↗M. A↗

Reports in the biological literature disagree on whether a given model can predict a biological outcome from a given data sample — one study finding a model capable, another, on the same kind of data, finding it is not. This is particularly a challenge in relation to LLMs–where the models are large and opaque, with weights and training data inaccessible.textbf{ }Such disagreements cannot be settled by directly inspecting the model. To address this challenge, we considertextbf{ }an alternative approach: assessing whether the data sample is adequate to support the prediction asserted. For a given dataset, its substrate — the underlying structure of the data — determines what any model can recover, independent of architecture or capacity. At the same time, predicting the present state of a biological process and predicting the direction of its future change are different tasks; the second is supportable among AI models only where the data encode direction as determinable from the state — a property we call encoding — and is unsupportable where the same observed state precedes change in opposite directions — a property we call non-identifiability, in the informational rather than the statistical sense. We introduce two generic metrics, Predictive Blindness Risk (PBR) and Prediction Indeterminacy Measure (PIM), that evaluate a data substrate for predictive accuracy directly — without access to model weights, architecture, or training data — and locate the regions of a data substrate where a predictive claim can be supported and where it cannot. Using human biological subjects, we employ the Yale Brain Metastases Longitudinal Data (1,430 human subjects; 11,892 MRI studies; four sequences) and show that direction of change was non-identifiable across regions encompassing the majority of transitions; a nonlinear AI model gained essentially nothing over majority-direction prediction there while recovering direction near-perfectly where the state encoded it; and model accuracy tracked data-substrate resolvability continuously (Spearman {rho} = -0.95 to -1.00). The metrics adjudicate, before any model is trusted and from the data alone, where claims of predictive accuracy — of state, or of the law of change — can be supported.

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

HairPort: In-context 3D-aware Hair Import and Transfer for Images

Authors:
Alireza Heidari↗Amirhossein Alimohammadi↗Wallace Michel Pinto Lira↗Adi Bar-Lev↗Ali Mahdavi-Amiri↗

Transferring hairstyles between images is an important but challenging task in computer graphics, computer vision, and visual effects. It enables users to explore new looks without physically altering their hair, with applications in virtual try-on systems, augmented reality, and entertainment. Most prior works operate best under small pose gaps, and they fall short under large viewpoint and scale differences, where missing hair content must be synthesized rather than transferred. We propose HairPort, a 3D-aware hairstyle transfer framework that attempts to solve these issues by explicitly separating hair removal from transfer and enforcing geometric consistency before synthesis. We introduce a Bald Converter, which produces realistic bald versions of faces through LoRA-based in-context adaptation of FLUX.1 Kontext. To train our Bald Converter, we introduce a new dataset, Baldy, containing 6,000 paired bald and original images across diverse identities and conditions. We also use a 3D-Aware Transfer Pipeline that reconstructs and re-renders the reference hairstyle from the target viewpoint before compositing it onto the source image. Being 3D aware, our method supports large pose and scale discrepancies between the source and target. Finally, a conditional flow-matching generator synthesizes the transferred result from the bald source and geometry-aligned reference guidance. Together, our method enables accurate, pose-consistent, and identity-preserving hairstyle transfer, outperforming existing methods both qualitatively and quantitatively.

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08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Towards Modality-imbalanced Federated Graph Learning: A Data Synthesis-based Approach

Authors:
Zhengyu Wu↗Hongchao Qin↗Xunkai Li↗Zekai Chen↗Rong-Hua Li↗Guoren Wang↗

arXiv:2606.20382v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: MultiModal Federated Graph Learning (MM-FGL) offers a natural collaborative training paradigm, but its practical deployment is challenged by two granularities of modality imbalance. Client-level imbalance occurs when certain clients lack entire modalities, while node-level imbalance occurs when individual nodes exhibit missing visual or textual attributes. While several relevant studies exist, our investigation reveals that they predominantly target graph-agnostic or centralized scenarios, rendering them difficult to adapt directly. To address these challenges, we formalize modality-imbalanced MM-FGL as an implicit graph-aware latent semantic representation synthesis problem. This paradigm recovers missing modal semantics directly within the representation space, thereby maximizing alignment with the original data's semantic distribution and mitigating the high variance induced by missing modalities. To this end, we propose FedMGS (Federated Modality-aware Graph Synthesis), which integrates three core components. The availability-aware graph encoder prevents missing modalities from contaminating local structural propagation. The prototype-guided latent semantic synthesizer establishes cross-client semantic anchors for unavailable modalities. The reliability-calibrated semantic fusion mechanism regulates the impact of recovered latent representations prior to predictive readout. Extensive experiments on four tasks show that FedMGS consistently outperforms competitive baselines with gains up to 17.41% with best efficiency-performance tradeoff.

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10.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Scaling Limits of Bivariate Nearly-Unstable Hawkes Processes and Applications to Rough Volatility

Authors:
Sohaib El Karmi↗

arXiv:2605.03703v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study a pair of nearly-unstable Hawkes processes coupled through a one-directional, or triangular, cross-excitation: the first component evolves autonomously and excites the second, but not conversely. Each component is self-exciting through a heavy-tailed memory kernel, and the two kernels are allowed to have different tail indices, so that the limiting components exhibit genuinely different degrees of roughness. As the system approaches criticality, we prove that the suitably rescaled intensity vector converges weakly to the unique solution of a coupled system of stochastic Volterra equations of rough-volatility type. The first limiting component is autonomous, while the second is driven both by its own noise and by an inherited noise transmitted from the first component through an effective cross-kernel. This cross-kernel is the convolution of the two limiting Mittag-Leffler kernels and therefore combines the two memory structures. As a consequence, we obtain a short-time cross-decorrelation law: although the two components are coupled, their functional correlation vanishes at small time scales at an explicit polynomial rate. This time-dependent correlation distinguishes the limit from independent rough processes and from classical bivariate rough models with constant Brownian correlation.

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

Task-Aware Structured Memory for Dynamic Multi-modal In-Context Learning

Authors:
Zhirui Chen↗Ziwei Chen↗Ling Shao↗

Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) depend on in-context learning (ICL) for rapid task adaptation, but their scalability is severely limited by finite context windows and the growing cost of key-value (KV) caches in long multi-modal sequences. Existing memory compression approaches typically rely on rigid token removal or sample-dependent importance estimation, which introduces bias, disrupts semantic structure, particularly for visual representations, and yields static memories that cannot adapt to new queries. We introduce TASM (Task-Aware Structured Memory), a training-free framework that addresses these limitations through task-aware, structure-preserving, and dynamically accessible memory construction. TASM employs task-vector guided compression to replace sample-specific signals with a task-level direction that captures shared relevance across demonstrations. To preserve the underlying manifold, it applies semantics-aware token merging via bipartite graph matching, aggregating tokens without destructive pruning. Finally, TASM structures memory into a hierarchy comprising a compact Core Memory and a Latent Bank, facilitating query-adaptive dynamic retrieval. Evaluations confirm TASM maintains high performance under heavy compression, effectively balancing efficiency with adaptability.

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12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Instrumental Activities of Daily Living in Older Adults with Epilepsy: A Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Multicenter Study

Authors:
Zawar↗Reyes↗Arrotta↗Hermann↗B. P↗Busch↗R. M↗Quigg↗Kapur↗Struck↗A. F↗Punia↗…

Objective: Instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs) represent a critical but understudied measure of day-to-day function in persons with epilepsy(PWE). In the multicenter Brain Aging and Cognition in Epilepsy (BrACE) study of PWE aged greater than or equal to 55 years, we examined the proportion, clinical correlates, epilepsy-related predictors, and longitudinal trajectory of IADL impairment. Methods: IADLs were assessed using the Functional Activities Questionnaire (FAQ; range=0 to 30; higher=more impaired); a FAQ greater than or equal to 2 defines MCI-level impairment, and a FAQ greater than or equal to 5 defines dementia-level functional impairment. Multivariable logistic regression identified predictors of baseline function. Global cognition (Montreal Cognitive Assessment [MoCA]), individual cognitive measures, and quality of life (QOL) were compared between the impaired and unimpaired groups. Linear regression evaluated predictors of longitudinal functional decline. Results: Of 57 participants (mean age=66.6 years; female=52.6%), 38.6% (n=22) had MCI-level functional impairment and 17.5% (n=10) had dementia-level functional impairment. In univariate analyses, worse FAQ scores were associated with lower education, higher area deprivation index, early-onset epilepsy (EOE less than 60 years), antiseizure medication polytherapy, and epilepsy localization. In multivariable analysis, temporal lobe epilepsy (OR=4.46, 95% CI=1.09, 21.83,p=0.047), EOE(OR=7.14, 95% CI=1.16, 59.97, p=0.046), and lower education(OR=0.70,95% CI=0.49, 0.93, p=0.025) remained independently associated with baseline MCI-level functional-impairment. Lower education (OR=0.55,95% CI=0.29, 0.84, p=0.021) was the only factor associated with dementia-level IADL-impairment. IADL-impaired participants demonstrated lower verbal memory scores (adjusted p=0.041) and MoCA scores (adjusted p

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13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

When Context Returns: Toward Robust Internalization in On-Policy Distillation

Authors:
Xun Wang↗Ruishuo Chen↗Zhuoran Li↗Yu Chen↗Longbo Huang↗

arXiv:2606.11627v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent work has shown that on-policy distillation can internalize privileged context, such as system prompts or task hints, into a student model so that the context is no longer needed at inference time. Although this approach successfully improves the student's no-context performance, we identify an interesting and previously unstudied phenomenon: in many settings, reintroducing the original privileged context to the distilled student actually degrades its performance, even on instances it already solves correctly without context. We term this context-induced degradation and argue that robust internalization demands not only matching the teacher's context-conditioned behavior, but also remaining stable when the context is reintroduced, a property we call context removability. Motivated by this observation, we propose a lightweight consistency regularizer that first anchors the student's no-context output via stop-gradient, then penalizes the context-conditioned output for deviating from it via forward KL divergence. This simple addition requires only one extra forward pass per training step, yet it effectively mitigates context-induced degradation and, in many cases, even improves no-context performance. Across 12 configurations spanning diverse domains and model families, our method improves context-conditioned accuracy in the majority of settings, reduces context-induced harm in 11 out of 12 settings, and effectively eliminates response-length inflation. A mechanistic case study further confirms that context removability is achieved at the representation level, with hidden states remaining nearly identical regardless of whether the context is present.

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14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Learn from Your Mistakes: Tree-like Self-Play for Secure Code LLMs

Authors:
Wenqi Chen↗Ziyan Zhang↗Bin Wang↗Lin Liu↗Hengheng Zhang↗Zhengsu Chen↗

arXiv:2606.03489v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in code generation, they remain prone to replicating subtle yet critical vulnerabilities endemic to their training data. Current alignment techniques, such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL), typically apply coarse-grained optimization at the sequence level. This approach often fails to address the localized nature of security flaws, where a single incorrect token choice can compromise an entire program. To bridge this gap, we introduce Tree-like Self-Play (TSP), a framework that reframes secure code generation as a fine-grained sequential decision process. Unlike standard methods that blindly maximize likelihood, TSP constructs a decision tree where the model explores branching trajectories–generating both secure "golden paths" and vulnerable variants. By treating code generation as a self-play game, the model learns to strictly discriminate against its own localized errors. This provides a dense, on-policy learning signal that forces self-correction precisely at the critical decision nodes where vulnerabilities typically emerge. Our experiments demonstrate that TSP fundamentally enhances model reliability. In Python security benchmarks, TSP boosts CodeLlama-7B's pass rate (SPR@1) to 75.8%, significantly outperforming SFT (57.0%) and unstructured self-play baselines. Crucially, TSP induces robust out-of-distribution generalization: the model not only reduces vulnerabilities in unseen categories (CWEs) by 24.5% but also successfully transfers security principles learned from C/C++ to diverse languages, including Python, Go, and JavaScript. This suggests that TSP does not merely memorize patches, but internalizes abstract, language-agnostic security logic.

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15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Semantic DLM+: Improving Diffusion Language Models through Bias-variance Trade-off in Transition Kernel Design

Authors:
Keyue Jiang↗Yuxiang Wang↗Yanan Zhao↗Xiang Yu↗Qifang Zhao↗Bohan Tang↗Baojian Zhou↗Yanghua Xiao↗Lin Qu↗Xiaoxiao Xu↗

arXiv:2606.15327v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have demonstrated strong scaling capacity as alternatives to autoregressive language models. However, their performance is highly sensitive to the choice of transition kernels, and poorly designed kernels can lead to issues like training instability, slow convergence, and biased sampling. In this paper, we study this sensitivity through a principled analysis of generalization error and identify three critical factors: asymptotic bias (difficulty in approximating the posterior distribution), exposure bias (error propagation during sampling), and optimization variance induced by kernel dispersion. We further compare different transition kernels: masking diffusion yields sparse and easier posterior-approximation targets, while uniform diffusion provides stronger sampling-side repair but induces harder approximation. Motivated by this trade-off, we revisit a previously overlooked variant, semantic DLM (SemDLM), where the transition kernel corrupts tokens to neighborhoods that are semantically similar. Our theory suggests that SemDLM can serve as a plausible middle ground by reducing the posterior approximation difficulty of uniform diffusion while retaining repair ability. However, we find that SemDLM suffers from a semantic basin problem, where sampling repeatedly stays within a semantic region and produces low-diversity text. To address this, we propose SemDLM+, which adds a global transition and a semantic-frequency penalty during sampling. Experiments on LM1B and OpenWebText show that SemDLM+ improves training dynamics and achieves competitive language modeling and generation quality with satisfactory diversity.

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16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Effects of Josephson Junction Non-idealities on Adiabatic Quantum Flux Parametron Circuits

Authors:
Daryoush Shiri↗Likai Yang↗Mohamed A. Hassan↗Philip Krantz↗Eric T. Holland↗

arXiv:2606.17338v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Adiabatic quantum flux parametron (AQFP) gate is a promising approach to scale up the cryogenic microwave electronics for superconducting qubit multiplexed control. However, the performance of these circuits depends on the quality of the Josephson junctions which are ideally superconductor-insulator-superconductor (SIS) type following the ideal sinusoidal relation between current and quantum phase. We demonstrate how the non-sinusoidal current-phase relation in Superconductor-Normal metal-Superconductor (SNS) and weak link (WL) junctions affects the speed, delay, and margin of the AQFP gates. The JJ models are defined in the Keysight ADS simulator using symbolically defined device (SDD) method.

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17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

An Introduction to the Foundations and Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics

Authors:
Theodore McKeever↗Ahsan Nazir↗

arXiv:2603.09818v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This article surveys a selection of key conceptual and interpretational developments in quantum mechanics, tracing the theory from its foundational postulates to contemporary discussions of measurement, nonlocality, and the emergence of classicality. Beginning with the structure of Hilbert space and the postulates governing state evolution and measurement, the epistemic stance of the Copenhagen interpretation and its modern reformulations are examined. The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen argument, Bell's theorem, and Hardy's paradox are then discussed as probes of locality and realism, alongside the deterministic but explicitly nonlocal de Broglie-Bohm theory. The measurement problem and the implications of contextuality are analyzed in relation to objective collapse models, which introduce new physical dynamics to account for definite outcomes. Finally, the role of decoherence in the suppression of interference and the emergence of classical behavior is explored, together with the interpretational frameworks of many-worlds and consistent histories. This material aims to provide a coherent introductory overview of how several of the most prominent interpretations address the central concern of what quantum mechanics tells us about the nature of physical reality.

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18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Probabilistic Contrastive Pretraining for Multi-task ADME Property Prediction

Authors:
Yifan Xue↗Srimukh Prasad Veccham↗Saee Paliwal↗Tyler Shimko↗Micha Livne↗

arXiv:2606.11508v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate prediction of absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion (ADME) properties is critical to drug discovery, but remains challenging because ADME endpoints are noisy, interdependent, and often data-limited. We propose a molecular graph-transformer pretraining framework that combines chemistry-specific self-supervision with contrastive mutual information machine learning (cMIM). Our method encodes molecular graphs into latent variables, reconstructs SMILES strings from the graph-derived latent codes, and augments the contrastive objective with domain-specific self-supervised chemistry tasks. Rather than treating these tasks as auxiliary regularizers with separately tuned loss weights, we formulate reconstruction, contrastive discrimination, and chemistry-specific supervision as unit-weighted log-probability factors in a single probabilistic latent-variable objective. For fine-tuning, we propose a multi-task GNN readout architecture with task-specific multilayer perceptron heads, preserving shared representation learning while mitigating negative transfer and improving the modeling of heterogeneous, nonlinear task relationships. Across Biogen, ExpansionRX, and ChEMBL-MT, the resulting Contrastive KERMT pretraining improves over the KERMT baseline by 7.6%, 9.9%, and 9.5% respectively (averaged over significantly-improved endpoints). Adding ADME-adjacent molecules to the pretraining corpus further improves transfer, and the contrastive component sharpens chemically meaningful latent neighborhoods.

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

Relational Structural Causal Models

Authors:
Adiba Ejaz↗Elias Bareinboim↗

arXiv:2606.14892v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: An artificial intelligence must have a model of its environment that is causal, supporting reasoning about interventions and counterfactuals, and also combinatorial, supporting generalization to unseen combinations of objects. In this work, we formally study when and how such a model can be learned. We develop relational structural causal models, extending structural causal models (Pearl 2009) to settings where objects and their relations vary. First, we show how answers to not only causal but also observational queries about unseen combinations of objects can not be identified without further assumptions. To enable such identification–including in the presence of unobserved confounding–we define relational causal graphs and derive symbolic identification criteria. Finally, we propose relational neural causal models, a provably correct approach that outperforms non-relational baselines on simulated traffic scenes with varying cars, signals, and pedestrians.

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20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Modality-Aware Feature Matching in Visual and Vision-Language Applications: A Comprehensive Survey

Authors:
Weide Liu↗Wei Zhou↗Jun Liu↗Ping Hu↗Jun Cheng↗Jungong Han↗Weisi Lin↗

Feature matching is a cornerstone task in computer vision, essential for applications such as image retrieval, stereo matching, 3D reconstruction, and SLAM. This survey comprehensively reviews modality-based feature matching, exploring traditional handcrafted methods and emphasizing contemporary deep learning approaches across various modalities, including RGB images, depth images, 3D point clouds, LiDAR scans, medical images, and vision-language interactions. Traditional methods, leveraging detectors like Harris corners and descriptors such as SIFT and ORB, demonstrate robustness under moderate intra-modality variations but struggle with significant modality gaps. Contemporary deep learning-based methods, exemplified by detector-free strategies like CNN-based SuperPoint and transformer-based LoFTR, substantially improve robustness and adaptability across modalities. We highlight modality-aware advancements, such as geometric and depth-specific descriptors for depth images, sparse and dense learning methods for 3D point clouds, attention-enhanced neural networks for LiDAR scans, and specialized solutions like the MIND descriptor for complex medical image matching. Cross-modal applications, particularly in medical image registration and vision-language tasks, underscore the evolution of feature matching to handle increasingly diverse data interactions.

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21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

EurekAgent: Agent Environment Engineering is All You Need For Autonomous Scientific Discovery

Authors:
Amy Xin↗Jiening Siow↗Junjie Wang↗Zijun Yao↗Fanjin Zhang↗Jian Song↗Lei Hou↗Juanzi Li↗

LLM-based agents have shown increasing potential in automating scientific discovery. Given an optimizable metric and an execution environment, they can propose, validate, and iterate scientific solutions, and have produced results that outperform human-designed approaches. As model capabilities continue to improve, we argue that the bottleneck for autonomous scientific discovery is shifting from prescribing agent workflows to designing agent environments: the resources, constraints, and interfaces that shape agent behavior. We frame this as environment engineering: building environments that amplify productive behaviors, such as open-ended exploration, systematic artifact management, and inter-agent collaboration, while suppressing harmful behaviors, such as reward hacking and high-friction human oversight. We present EurekAgent, an environment-engineered agent system for metric-driven autonomous scientific discovery. EurekAgent engineers the environment along four dimensions: permissions engineering for bounded agent execution and isolated evaluation; artifact engineering for filesystem and Git-based collaboration; budget engineering for budget-aware exploration; and human-in-the-loop engineering for easy human supervision and intervention. EurekAgent sets new state-of-the-art results on multiple mathematics, kernel engineering, and machine learning tasks, including new state-of-the-art 26-circle packing results discovered with less than $11 in total API cost. We open-source our code and results, and call for environment engineering as a core research direction for developing reliable autonomous research agents.

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

A Spatio-Temporal Expert Prefetching Framework for Efficient MoE-based LLM Inference

Authors:
Yingnan Zhao↗Razvan Bunescu↗Ahmed Louri↗Avinash Karanth↗Ke Wang↗

arXiv:2606.15453v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) based large language models (LLMs), such as Qwen and DeepSeek, have recently emerged as an effective approach to improving model capacity without proportionally increasing computational cost. By replacing the conventional feed-forward network in dense LLMs with a set of experts and activating only a subset of them for each input token, MoE models significantly increase the total number of parameters while keeping the per-token computation relatively manageable. However, this dynamic and irregular expert activation pattern also introduces substantial expert loading overhead during inference, since the required experts must be fetched on demand according to token-dependent routing results. As a result, expert loading latency becomes a major source of performance and energy inefficiency. To this end, we first perform a comprehensive analysis of expert selection behavior in various MoE-based LLMs and applications, including language understanding and code generation. Our analysis reveals that, within each application domain, expert requests exhibit strong correlation across both adjacent MoE layers and consecutive decoding tokens, making future expert activations predictable. Based on this insight, we propose ST-MoE, a spatio-temporal expert prefetching framework that proactively stages experts ahead of use to overlap expert loading with ongoing computation. ST-MoE combines a lightweight runtime prediction mechanism that preserves the original routing behavior with a reconfigurable hardware design that efficiently supports dynamic expert prefetching. The combined effect of the prediction mechanism with the supporting hardware significantly improves MoE inference performance and energy efficiency while preserving model inference accuracy.

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23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

DuoBench: A Reproducible Benchmark for Bimanual Manipulation in Simulation and the Real World

Authors:
Tobias J\"ulg↗Seongjin Bien↗Simon Hilber↗Yannik Blei↗Pierre Krack↗Maximilian Li↗Sven Parusel↗Rudolf Lioutikov↗Florian Walter↗Wolfram Burgard↗

arXiv:2606.11901v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Bimanual robot systems substantially expand manipulation capabilities, but coordinating two arms introduces additional control complexity and failure modes that are not well captured by existing benchmarks. We introduce DuoBench, an extensible benchmarking framework for bimanual manipulation policies on the FR3 Duo platform. DuoBench comprises eleven tasks spanning four coordination categories, implemented in simulation and partially reproduced in the real world through reproducible task recipes with 3D-printable assets. In addition, we propose a stage-based evaluation scheme that supports fine-grained semantic failure analysis beyond binary success and provide human-teleoperated datasets for all benchmark tasks. We benchmark several dual-arm imitation-learning and vision-language-action policies in simulation and on real hardware. Our results show that current policies remain challenged by bimanual manipulation, particularly in early interaction stages, parallel arm execution, and transfer between simulation and real-world settings. DuoBench provides a reproducible testbed for diagnosing these failure modes and studying future methods for dual-arm policy learning. Code, datasets, and videos are available at https://duobench.github.io/

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24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Learning User Simulators with Turing Rewards

Authors:
Yingshan Susan Wang↗Cedegao E. Zhang↗Linlu Qiu↗Zexue He↗Pengyuan Li↗Alex Pentland↗Roger P. Levy↗Yoon Kim↗

Learning to simulate human users in interactive settings could advance the training of agent assistants, evaluation of personalization systems, research in the social sciences, and more. Existing approaches generally do so by training a large language model (LLM) to match a single ground truth response, either by maximizing the log probability or by using a similarity reward. We instead propose {Turing-RL}: a Turing-Test-based reinforcement learning approach for training user simulator models. {Turing-RL} uses a discriminative Turing reward with an LLM judge to score how indistinguishable a generated response is from the real user's given the user's history, and the user simulator LLM learns to produce responses indistinguishable from what the user could have said with such rewards. Across two different domains–conversational chat and Reddit forum discussion–we find that {Turing-RL} consistently outperforms baseline methods on both LLM and human evaluation metrics. Our study suggests that optimizing for indistinguishability, rather than response matching, is effective for learning user simulators.

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25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Refusal Beyond a Single Direction: A Preliminary Comparison of Diff-in-Means and INLP

Authors:
Elisabetta Rocchetti↗Alfio Ferrara↗

arXiv:2606.13720v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Arditi et al. (2024) has shown that refusal in safety fine-tuned chat models is mediated by a single linear direction in the residual stream, recoverable by a difference-in-means (DiM) of harmful and harmless activations. We compare DiM-based interventions (activation addition and directional ablation) with two interventions derived from Iterative Nullspace Projection (INLP) – nullspace projection and counterfactual flipping – on five open-weight chat models, asking whether INLP can match DiM at steering refusal and whether its richer parameterisation yields more tweakable interventions. INLP counterfactual flipping is competitive with DiM directional ablation on refusal suppression, while nullspace projection is consistently weaker. Restricting INLP to the leading directions of the extracted subspace preserves most of the suppression effect at near-baseline perplexity, giving a tunable capability. Geometrically, the two INLP interventions land in qualitatively different regions of activation space: nullspace projection collapses transformed activations between the harmful and harmless clusters, while counterfactual flipping moves them into the opposite cluster, suggesting that the model encodes the absence of a concept differently from its opposite – an intriguing distinction that warrants further investigation in future work.

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