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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

SCAN: A Decision-Making Framework for Effective Task Allocation with Generative AI

Authors:
Fendi Tsim↗Alina Gutoreva↗

arXiv:2606.15601v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce SCAN – a human-centric decision-making framework to facilitate learners for effective task allocation with Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) based on Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development and Metacognition. In SCAN, we systematize and formalize AI-human interaction by introducing a task-identification approach with four "sub-zones": Substitute, Complement, Aid, and Non-negotiable. After describing the four sub-zones, we demonstrate how SCAN framework can be applied for knowledge workers in the workplace and students in education to metacognitively "scan" their use of Generative AI. We then discuss how such framework can be related to cognitive load theory, cognitive offloading, sycophancy, three decision-making modes in human-AI interactions (automation, augmentation, and collaboration), future of work such as upskilling and deskilling, and how it accounts for both human-human and human-AI learning. We propose that SCAN offers a great starting point before discussing whether GenAI complements or replaces our abilities when completing a task, with a general objective of sustaining lifelong learning, and a specific goal of reaching hybrid intelligence.

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02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Reinforcing Dual-Path Reasoning in Spatial Vision Language Models

Authors:
Yatai Ji↗An-Chieh Cheng↗Yang Fu↗Yukang Chen↗Han Zhang↗Zhaojing Yang↗Wei Huang↗Ka Chun Cheung↗Song Han↗Vidya Nariyambut Murali↗Pavlo Molchanov↗Jan Kautz↗…

Spatial VLMs have made substantial progress in geometric perception, yet complex spatial reasoning requiring multi-step inference over depth, distance, and scene relations remains challenging. Moreover, different spatial queries call for fundamentally different strategies: some are best addressed through purely linguistic, step-by-step deduction, while others require explicit 3D grounding before quantitative inference. We present Dual-Path Spatial Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning for Spatial VLMs (SR-REAL), a unified framework that equips a spatial VLM with two complementary reasoning paths: Language-Only Reasoning (LOR), which performs step-by-step linguistic deduction, and Detect-Then-Reason (DTR), which detects 3D geometric cues (e.g., centers or bounding boxes) via region tokens before explicit geometric inference. SR-REAL begins with a cold-start supervised fine-tuning stage that constructs LOR and DTR chain-of-thought supervision and exposes a region-to-3D interface, followed by RL that optimizes the policy model with accuracy and format rewards; for DTR, a discrete center-based detection reward further refines geometric alignment. Across diverse spatial benchmarks, SR-REAL significantly outperforms spatial VLM baselines: (i) a single RL-trained model supports both reasoning paths, with DTR excelling in region-aware tasks through precise 3D localization and LOR enhancing general spatial reasoning; (ii) jointly training both paths fosters mutual reinforcement; (iii) high-quality, blended cold-start data is crucial for stable RL optimization; and (iv) the model generalizes across datasets and domains without per-task tuning, demonstrating positive transfer between LOR and DTR.

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03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

One Transit Is All You Need: Detecting Exoplanets Through Learned Stellar Behaviour with EXOVEIL

Authors:
Pratik Priyanshu↗

arXiv:2606.02778v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: I present EXOVEIL, a transit detection system that learns what a star's brightness should look like and flags when reality disagrees. Unlike existing systems that require phase-folded input, EXOVEIL operates on raw flux time series and can detect planets that transit only once.A Transformer world model, trained on 16,499 Kepler light curves with transit-masked self-supervised learning, predicts expected stellar flux. A matched-filter detector with variance weighting extracts transit signals from the prediction residuals. A learned classifier (XGBoost) separates planets from false positives, achieving AUC 0.938 on Kepler DR25. Applied to single-transit injection-recovery, EXOVEIL recovers 32% of transits at 1000 ppm depth a task where all classification-based systems score 0% by construction. A blind search of 3,737 Kepler stars yields 179 new transit-like signals not present in the DR25 TCE catalogue, including 46 monotransit candidates. Applied withoutretraining to 47 confirmed TESS planets in the PLATO LOPS2 field, EXOVEIL achieves 100% recovery, demonstrating zero-shot cross-mission transfer. At PLATO's 25-second cadence, detection reaches 100 ppm – approaching the Earth-analog regime. I provide the first application of conformal prediction to transit detection (95.9% empirical coverage) and release the system as pip install exoveil with pretrained weights and a candidate catalogue.

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04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

The Erdős-Hajnal High-Girth Subgraph Conjecture Holds in the Polynomial Chromatic-Sparsity Regime

Authors:
Eric Li↗

arXiv:2606.17901v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For a graph $G$ put $h_r(G)=\max{\chi(H):H\subseteq G,\operatorname{girth}(H)\ge r}.$ Erdős and Hajnal asked whether $h_r(G)\to\infty$ as $\chi(G)\to\infty$, for every fixed $r\ge4$. We prove this in every fixed polynomial edge-density regime: for all $r\ge4$, $k\ge2$, $P,C>0$, there is $M=M_{r,k}(P,C)$ such that $\chi(G)\ge M,\ e(G)\le C\chi(G)^P\Longrightarrow h_r(G)\ge k.$ Quantitatively, after replacing $P$ by $P\vee2$ and $C$ by $C\vee2$, $M_{r,k}(P,C)\le \exp!\left(O_{r,k}\bigl((P+2+\log(C\vee2))^2\bigr)\right),$ and consequently the same conclusion holds throughout the quasi-polynomial range $e(G)\le \exp\bigl(C_0(\log\chi(G))^a\bigr),\ 1 < a < 3/2,$ for all sufficiently large $\chi(G)$. In each fixed polynomial-density regime we also obtain $f_{P,C}(k,r)\le k^{O_{r,P,C}(1)}.$ The proof combines a chromatic-defect random extraction lemma, compact and near-quadratic sparse-core bases, and a peeling/thinning bootstrap increasing the admissible edge exponent by $1/(r-1)$. We also prove structural saturation results for possible counterexamples, including Moore-strength exact-cycle packings and quadratic saturation in projected colour-pair space. Finally, writing $h_r^{\mathrm f}(G)=\max{\chi_{\mathrm f}(H):H\subseteq G,\operatorname{girth}(H)\ge r},$ we develop a fractional random-extraction framework based on Mohar-Wu preservation. We prove sufficient cheap-cycle-killing criteria and verify them for several structured families, including clique-organised families, line graphs of incidence graphs of equal-order generalized quadrangles and generalized hexagons, and the Bohman-Keevash tracking-time triangle-free-process graph. We also isolate a density-free obstruction that any proof using this fractional surgery route must overcome.

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

Maestro Order: A Model-Agnostic Orchestration Harness

Authors:
Hidayet Aksu↗

arXiv:2606.23983v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A single forward pass of a capable model is a fast, fluent, and unreliable problem-solver: it is right often enough to be useful and wrong often enough to be dangerous; in language models, such confident errors are known as hallucinations. We present Maestro Order, a model-agnostic orchestration harness that turns unreliable solvers into reliable problem-solving systems by composing them according to four structural primitives (decompose, ensemble, verify, and recurse) and a budget-aware controller that decides where to spend compute. The harness treats any model as a black-box base solver behind a uniform interface, layers a verifier ensemble whose discrimination is measured online, and allocates verification and voting to the stages with the highest marginal reliability per unit cost. We give the architecture, the message and state schema, the controller algorithm, and the engineering that makes it deterministic, observable, and fault-tolerant. We then specify an evaluation methodology (reliability at fixed cost, coverage, calibration, and ablations) and report results from a faithful Monte Carlo simulation of the harness over a parameterized solver/verifier model. The simulation reproduces the predicted laws quantitatively: verification amplifies reliability geometrically (e.g. $0.55\to0.98$ with two gates, $\to0.999$ with four), voting helps only above chance and is limited by shared errors, and a budget-aware controller reaches a target reliability at a small fraction of the cost of voting alone by selecting the cheapest mechanism for each regime. We close with failure modes (verifier gaming, correlated errors, and decomposition error compounding) and concrete guidance: build robust checkers, diversify solvers, and let the controller put compute where the information is.

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

Do Prompt-Elicited Trajectories Reflect Training-Time Reward Hacking? A Systematic Study on Monitoring Trainig-Time Reward Hacking in Code Generation

Authors:
Lichen Li↗Hengguang Zhou↗Yijun Liang↗Tianyi Zhou↗Cho-Jui Hsieh↗

arXiv:2604.23488v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reward hacking in code generation, where models exploit evaluation loopholes to obtain high reward without correctly solving the intended task, poses a critical challenge for Reinforcement Learning (RL) and the deployment of reasoning models. Existing studies often rely on explicitly prompted hacking trajectories, but it remains unclear whether monitors trained on such data can detect reward hacks that arise without direct hacking instructions during RL training. In this work, we introduce Trace-and-Amplify, a framework for scalable curation of reward-hacking trajectories that arise during RL training without explicit hacking instructions. The framework uses unit-test tracers to identify hacking solutions when they occur and retains such trajectories for monitor training and evaluation. Through controlled comparisons between monitors trained on prompt-elicited hacking trajectories and training-time reward-hacking trajectories collected by Trace-and-Amplify, we find that (1) prompt-elicited-data-trained monitors often fail to generalize to trajectories curated by our framework, and (2) monitors trained on our Trace-and-Amplify trajectories demonstrate stronger generalizability to unseen hacking types. Our results indicate that prompted reward hacking data may not fully reflect training-time reward-hacking behaviors, and that relying solely on these data can lead to misleading conclusions. Codebase is available at https://github.com/LichenLillc/CoTMonitoring.git

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07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Inhibited radiative decay enhances single-photon emitters

Authors:
Florian Burger↗Stephan Rinner↗Andreas Gritsch↗Kilian Sandholzer↗Andreas Reiserer↗

arXiv:2511.23301v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum networks and modular quantum computers require efficient spin-photon interfaces, often realized using optical resonators that enhance radiative decay on a desired transition. However, this requires small mode volumes and high quality factors, which limits multiplexing capacity and demands precise frequency tuning. Here, we demonstrate an alternative approach that circumvents these bottlenecks for upscaling. Using a W1 silicon photonic crystal waveguide with a tailored photonic bandgap, we selectively inhibit unwanted decay pathways, thereby redirecting emission to the desired transition. This enables efficient photon collection over a large frequency range, allowing the resolution and individual addressing of tens of erbium dopants. Their lifetimes are preserved, or even increased, compared to bulk material. The extended mode volume of the devices enables the use of lower dopant concentrations, thereby improving emitter coherence. Our approach can be combined with Purcell enhancement and applied to other spin-qubit platforms, opening intriguing perspectives for photonic quantum technologies.

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08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

From Meta Idea to Advanced Mathematical Discovery – Human-AI Co-Discovery of Sign-Embedding Quantum Algorithms

Authors:
Yanqiao Wang↗Jin-Peng Liu↗Peng Li↗Yang Liu↗

arXiv:2606.24899v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI-assisted mathematics is often evaluated on solving predefined problems. In practice, however, many important advances begin earlier, when a vague research intuition is transformed into a concrete problem, a promising route, and a theorem family worth proving. This report studies that stage through a case study that led to sign-embedding quantum algorithms for matrix equations and matrix functions, foundational primitives in quantum linear algebra and operator-output quantum algorithms. The project began with a human-originated intuition that rational approximation is especially effective for jump-type functions such as the sign function, and might therefore serve as a design principle for quantum algorithms. Rather than merely assisting after the problem was fixed, AI-assisted exploration, including workflows later integrated into the agentic AI-mathematician system AIM, played a key role in expanding this intuition into a route map, comparing candidate formulations, and converging toward sign embedding as the central framework. AIM then helped connect a known matrix-sign identity to wider classes of matrix equations and matrix functions, and drafted proof and complexity calculations. The decisive scientific judgments remained human: selecting which human-AI-expanded routes were worth pursuing, rejecting a Cayley-trapezoidal approximation when its validity required a hidden condition, and refining the Sylvester implementation from a coarse quadratic-gap query route to the final factorized and scaled analysis. The report argues that human-AI co-discovery workflows, with systems such as AIM as important components, are most valuable not as standalone theorem provers, but as research partners for problem formation, connection discovery, derivation, and skeptical review inside a human-gated research loop.

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

READER: Robust Evidence-based Authorship Decoding via Extracted Representations

Authors:
Jiaxu Liu↗Sunnan Mu↗Dong Huang↗Liuyin Wang↗Jing Shao↗Jie Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.10794v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As agentic applications increasingly route user tasks through official and third-party LLM APIs, provenance becomes an operational question: which model generated a given black-box response? We study Dynamic Black-Box LLM Provenance: identifying the source LLM from generations elicited by query-varying, non-predefined prompts rather than a fixed input set or benchmark suite. This setting is difficult because prompt semantics dominate the text, while model-specific authorship traces are weak and inconsistent at the surface level. We introduce READER (Robust Evidence-based Authorship Decoding via Extracted Representations), a lightweight provenance framework that treats a frozen proxy LLM as a reader of hidden authorship evidence. READER maps black-box outputs into proxy activation space, temporally filters token states within each response, and performs Bayesian Evidence Accumulation by summing single-response log-posterior evidence across independently sampled prompts. This avoids fragile mean-pooling of prompt-specific representations while preserving the query-wise evidence needed for calibrated confidence. On Agent500, a 50-target dataset built from agent-style prompts, READER reaches $31.0$-$42.4\%$ top-1 accuracy from a single response and $70.0$-$84.0\%$ from 50 responses, substantially outperforming sentence-encoder fingerprints. Scaling across nine proxy readers further shows that stronger LLMs expose more linearly decodable authorship structure, suggesting that authorship perception is already present in frozen LLM representations and can be converted into reliable multi-query attribution.

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

A Critical Look at Targeted Instruction Selection: Disentangling What Matters (and What Doesn't)

Authors:
Nihal V. Nayak↗Paula Rodriguez-Diaz↗Neha Hulkund↗Sara Beery↗David Alvarez-Melis↗

arXiv:2602.14696v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Instruction fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) often involves selecting a subset of instruction training data from a large candidate pool, using a small query set from the target task. Despite growing interest, the literature on targeted instruction selection remains fragmented and opaque: methods vary widely in selection budgets, often omit zero-shot baselines, and frequently entangle the contributions of key components. As a result, practitioners lack actionable guidance on selecting instructions for their target tasks. In this work, we aim to bring clarity to this landscape by disentangling and systematically analyzing the two core ingredients: data representation and selection algorithms. Our framework enables controlled comparisons across models, tasks, and budgets. We find that only gradient-based data representations choose subsets whose similarity to the query consistently predicts performance across datasets, models, and candidate pools. While no single method dominates, gradient-based representations paired with greedy round-robin selection often perform best on average at low budgets, but these gains diminish at larger budgets. Finally, we unify several existing selection algorithms as forms of approximate distance minimization between the selected subset and the query set, and support this view with new generalization bounds. More broadly, our findings provide critical insights and a foundation for more principled data selection in LLM fine-tuning. The code is available at https://github.com/dcml-lab/targeted-instruction-selection.

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12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

NoiseTilt: Noise-Tilted Reverse Kernels for Diffusion Reward Alignment

Authors:
Jisung Hwang↗Yunhong Min↗Jaihoon Kim↗I-Chao Shen↗Minhyuk Sung↗

arXiv:2606.18066v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce the Noise-Tilted Reverse Kernel (NTRK), a reward-guided diffusion sampler that injects reward gradients through the noise term, leaving the pretrained reverse kernel unchanged and requiring only a single sample per step. Reward-guided sampling at inference time has greatly expanded the versatility of pretrained diffusion models. Yet existing methods face a trade-off. Gradient-based guidance shifts the reverse mean, steering generation but pushing intermediate states outside the region that the model was trained on and degrading quality. Search-based methods preserve quality but gain no gradient signal. No prior method achieves both. NTRK resolves this by keeping the reverse mean fixed and biasing the noise term toward high reward. We introduce a whitening operator, the central mechanism behind NTRK, that makes the reward gradient safe to inject as noise without losing its guiding signal. Across various reward alignment tasks, NTRK outperforms recent state-of-the-art baselines without losing sample quality. Remarkably, on aesthetic generation, NTRK surpasses the reward of the best baseline at 500 NFEs using only 25 NFEs, a 20$\times$ reduction in compute.

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13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Invariants of Sequential Circuits and Generalized Non-Abelian Statistics

Authors:
Shintaro Sato↗Yoshimasa Hidaka↗Ryohei Kobayashi↗

arXiv:2606.11527v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Non-invertible symmetries in quantum many-body systems generally give rise to sequential unitary circuits that move symmetry defects. In this paper, we investigate invariants defined by sequences of such circuits, which move non-invertible defects and generate a Berry phase evaluated on quantum states with defects. We show that this Berry phase generally defines an invariant under local deformations, provided that the sequential circuits preserve the locality of those deformations. This invariant also rules out a short-range-entangled state that preserves the non-invertible symmetry, thereby signaling the 't Hooft anomaly of a non-invertible symmetry purely in terms of unitary operators acting on a state. We then apply this framework to loop excitations in three spatial dimensions and identify a new loop excitation in the (3+1)D $\mathbb{D}_4$ topological order, which we dub a non-Abelian fermionic loop. Using the invariant of sequential circuits, we characterize the statistics of non-Abelian fermionic loops. In addition, we find a new (3+1)D mixed topological order with a single non-Abelian fermionic loop, whose long-range entanglement is protected by an invariant of sequential circuits.

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

Data-driven sparse identification of governing PDEs via knockoff filters and multi-criteria trade-offs

Authors:
Pongpisit Thanasutives↗Naichang Ke↗Yoshinobu Kawahara↗

arXiv:2605.26631v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose KO-PDE-IDENT, a data-driven framework for identifying parsimonious partial differential equations (PDEs) with false discovery rate (FDR) control. PDE discovery from noisy observations is often hindered by extreme multicollinearity among candidate terms, which causes typical sparse-regression methods to select spurious terms. To address this problem, KO-PDE-IDENT initially mines a support set of potential candidate terms via model-X knockoff filters with finite-sample FDR control, then refines and ranks the surviving PDE alternatives. The framework integrates three components. First, knockoff feature statistics are constructed by coupling $\ell_{0}$-constrained adaptive best-subset selection with SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP), yielding an effective and computationally efficient difference statistic. Second, a recursive feature elimination (RFE) procedure removes terms whose marginal contributions are dispensable and assesses statistical necessity through knockoff-perturbed hypothesis testing. Third, the final model selection is formulated as a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem, where the optimal governing equation is the alternative that best balances a wide range of criteria such as predictive accuracy, model complexity and coefficient uncertainty. We evaluate KO-PDE-IDENT on five canonical PDEs under severe noise corruption. Empirical results show that our framework can exactly recover the true PDE structure, eliminating false discoveries while retaining all true underlying terms, with low coefficient estimation error.

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

FinAcumen: Financial Multimodal Reasoning via Self-Evolving Experience Memory Harness

Authors:
Pianran Guo↗Pengcheng Zhou↗Yucheng Jian↗Shuhua Chen↗

arXiv:2606.17642v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Financial multimodal reasoning requires agents to coordinate numerical computation, retrieval, visual interpretation, and temporal grounding across heterogeneous evidence sources. Existing tool-augmented agents improve execution fidelity, yet remain largely stateless across episodes, repeatedly rediscovering reasoning strategies and failure patterns. In high-stakes financial settings, this leads to unreliable tool routing, noisy retrieval, and hallucination-prone reasoning. We present FinAcumen, a financial reasoning agent framework centered on selective experience memory for tool-augmented multimodal reasoning. FinAcumen accumulates financially grounded reasoning experience from prior trajectories, distilling successful strategies and failure-derived cautionary rules into a persistent memory bank. During inference, retrieved experiences condition reasoning only when semantic relevance exceeds a calibrated threshold, while irrelevant memory is explicitly suppressed through a fallback mechanism. A deterministic financial tool environment further grounds numerical computation, retrieval, visual decoding, and answer verification.Across four financial multimodal reasoning benchmarks, FinAcumen consistently improves a frozen 8B vision-language model over finance-specialized models and approaches leading proprietary general-purpose models. Further analysis shows that selective experience activation improves reasoning reliability under retrieval uncertainty. Our code is anonymously available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FinAcumen

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16.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Speculative Pipeline Decoding: Higher-Accruacy and Zero-Bubble Speculation via Pipeline Parallelism

Authors:
Yijiong Yu↗Huazheng Wang↗Shuai Yuan↗Ruilong Ren↗Ji Pei↗

Speculative Decoding (SD) accelerates low-concurrency LLM inference by employing a draft-then-verify paradigm. However, mainstream methods typically rely on multi-token prediction, which introduces escalating prediction difficulty and serial drafting latency. To address these, we propose Speculative Pipeline Decoding (SPD), a groundbreaking framework that unlocks the true potential of pipeline parallelism. By partitioning the target LLM into $n$ pipeline stages, SPD allows LLM to process $n$ tokens within single sequence in parallel to accelerate decoding. To continuous fill the pipeline in single sequence decoding, a speculation module aggregates intermediate features across different pipeline depths to predict the next token, executing strictly in parallel with the target model's pipeline step, to realize bounded difficulty, higher acceptance rates, and zero latency bubbles. Our experiments demonstrate that SPD achieves significantly higher theoretical and wall-clock speedup compared to mainstream baselines at moderate pipeline depth, though more aggressive settings require further improvement. Our code is available at https://github.com/yuyijiong/speculative_pipeline_decoding

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

Augmenting Game AI with Deep Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Alessandro Sestini↗Joakim Bergdahl↗Amir Baghi↗Jean-Philippe Barrette-LaPierre↗Florian Fuchs↗Linus Gissl\'en↗

arXiv:2606.20210v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Immersion in video games depends not only on graphics, audio, and game mechanics, but also on the quality of in-game characters. Producing believable characters, or game AI, remains a significant challenge as behavioral complexity is hard to capture with hand-coded systems. Game AI is a source of immersion and engagement; however, the limitations stemming from the challenges of creating game AI often lead to frustration and the breaking of the illusion of realism within the game. The introduction of machine learning models opens the door to creating more believable, authentic, and relatable characters in games. The promise is that they either learn from interacting with the game, or from player data, to develop true human-like behavior. In this paper, we envision more applications of reinforcement learning for game AI in the future. For this to materialize, current research limitations are prohibitive to broad deployment across game genres. Therefore, we propose a framework for training reinforcement learning models with a set of requirements in mind that are suited towards game AI and game development. We present examples of games with reinforcement learning-augmented game AI and describe the practicalities of deploying player-facing machine learning agents in modern games. Furthermore, we identify bottlenecks and hard problems in these areas, which we believe offer promising research directions to accelerate the adoption of machine learning in game AI for the video game industry.

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18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Invisible to humans, visible to machines: a preregistered audit of Unicode fidelity across four biomedical bibliographic APIs

Authors:
Przemys{\l}aw Czuma↗

Biomedical text mining, scientometrics, and the construction of training corpora for biomedical large language models (LLMs) all assume that the abstract text returned by a bibliographic API faithfully reproduces the published abstract. This pre-registered audit (OSF osf.io/269b5) tests that assumption for four widely used public APIs (PubMed E-utilities, Crossref, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar) against PubMed Central (PMC) JATS XML as a common ground truth. From a complete enumeration of the PMC Open Access subset for 2024 (about 700,000 records), a simple random sample of 4,000 English-language research articles was drawn; for each, we recorded whether Unicode characters from four pre-specified classes present in the JATS abstract (typographic punctuation, mathematical/scientific symbols, Greek letters, special whitespace) were preserved by each API. Two systematic, deterministic losses met the pre-registered criterion (upper 95% CI bound below 5%): the PubMed AbstractText field preserved typographic punctuation in only 0.6% of eligible abstracts (95% CI 0.3-1.0%), and OpenAlex preserved special whitespace in 0% (0.0-0.4%). A blinded mechanism audit attributed the first loss to character substitution and the second to inverted-index serialization. Mathematical symbols and Greek letters were preserved faithfully (over 95%) by all four APIs. Separately, Crossref returned no abstract for 24.6% of papers (coverage 75.4%, 95% CI 74.1-76.7%), concentrated in specific publishers (Elsevier and ACS: 0%). Character-level fidelity is therefore API-dependent and undocumented: the same publisher-deposited JATS text carries different surface signatures depending on the serving API, with direct consequences for tokenization-sensitive bibliometrics, corpus construction, and character-level indicators of LLM-assisted writing.

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19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Screen-Free Haptic Breathwork with HRV-Adaptive Control, Pilot Outcomes and System Design

Authors:
Adhia↗Raithatha↗Ferguson↗Pasquier↗

Vayu is a mobile breathwork system comprising an iOS companion app and Apple Watch application that delivers slow, resonant breathing using screen-free haptic cues, HRV-adaptive pacing, and reflective journaling grounded in Patanjali's five states of mind. The watchOS component provides tactile phase guidance and real-time biometric sensing (heart rate, HRV), while the iOS interface supports analytics and personalized recommendations. In a 4-6-week naturalistic pilot involving 199 adults (ages 22-65) across Canada, the United States, and India, participants engaged in daily 5-10-minute sessions guided by on-wrist haptics. Average adherence was 4.1 +/- 2.3 sessions per week, with 71% of active users maintaining at least 3 sessions per week. By week four, perceived stress (PSS-10) decreased by 2.5 points, resting heart rate declined by 7.4 bpm, and HRV increased by a median of 28.6% relative to baseline, accompanied by mood improvements. No adverse events were reported. HRV metrics are derived from Apple Watch PPG-based proxies and interpreted as relative trends. These findings suggest Vayu is effective and well-tolerated, demonstrating strong engagement and early efficacy signals.

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20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Vocabulary Dropout for Curriculum Diversity in LLM Co-Evolution

Authors:
Jacob Dineen↗Aswin RRV↗Zhikun Xu↗Ben Zhou↗

Co-evolutionary self-play, where one language model generates problems and another solves them, promises autonomous curriculum learning without human supervision. In practice, the proposer quickly converges to a narrow distribution of problems that satisfy the reward function. This diversity collapse renders the curriculum uninformative for the solver, stalling the co-evolutionary loop. We introduce vocabulary dropout, a random mask applied to the proposer's output logits during both policy training and curriculum generation, as a lightweight mechanism to sustain diversity. The mask is hard and non-stationary, preventing the proposer from locking into fixed token sequences. Training Qwen3-4B and Qwen3-8B on mathematical reasoning via R-Zero, we find that vocabulary dropout sustains proposer diversity across lexical, semantic, and functional metrics throughout training. It also yields solver improvements averaging +4.4 points at 8B, with the largest gains on competition-level benchmarks. Our findings suggest that explicit action-space constraints, analogous to the structural role that game rules play in classical self-play, can help sustain productive co-evolution in language. Vocabulary dropout is one simple instantiation of this principle.

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

Epistemic Uncertainty Is Not the Reducible Kind

Authors:
Robin Young↗

arXiv:2606.12646v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The standard taxonomy of predictive uncertainty defines epistemic uncertainty as the part removable by collecting more data, while the standard measure identifies it with a mutual-information term. We prove the definition and the measure are extensionally inconsistent. On an explicit construction, the measure assigns all uncertainty to the epistemic class, yet no quantity of training data reduces it. Reducibility is instead a property of the pair (uncertainty, acquisition class), and the dichotomy resolves into three parts: aleatoric, sample-reducible epistemic, and mechanism-reducible epistemic uncertainty. An exact identity for the value of an observation shows that in-distribution data never reduces mechanism-irreducible uncertainty and generically increases it. Ensemble disagreement, the deployed epistemic estimate, tracks the training procedure rather than the epistemic term. It collapses to zero beneath a positive truth under consistent training, and equals hyperparameter-scaled initialization noise under interpolation. A finite-sample falsification test and seed-swept experiments confirm the theory.

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

Multi-Modal Attention for Automated Disaster Damage Assessment Using Remote Sensing Imagery and Deep Learning

Authors:
Tewodros Syum Gebre↗Jagrati Talreja↗Leila Hashemi-Beni↗

Timely and accurate disaster damage assessment is crucial for effective emergency response, resource allocation, and recovery. Traditional methods, which often rely on manual inspections or sparse data, are typically slow and error-prone. This paper introduces a novel framework leveraging remote sensing imagery and deep learning to automate building damage classification. Using pre- and post-disaster satellite imagery, our model categorizes buildings into four damage levels: no damage, minor damage, major damage, and destroyed. The core innovation is a multi-modal attention mechanism that fuses bi-temporal features to explicitly detect and assess structural changes. We employ a lightweight ConvNeXT-Tiny backbone to ensure efficient processing without compromising performance. Key contributions include: (1) a cross-attention module for multi-modal data fusion, (2) an optimized preprocessing pipeline for large-scale datasets, and (3) robust data augmentation techniques. Experiments on a large-scale disaster dataset demonstrate an overall classification accuracy of 94.90%. The model effectively discriminates between damage categories and remains resilient to incomplete data. This system significantly improves assessment speed and accuracy, aiding emergency responders in prioritizing interventions. This work advances automated disaster damage detection by integrating multi-temporal imagery with deep learning, offering a scalable solution for real-time response.

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

T2MM: An LLM Supported Architecture For Inquiry-Based Modeling

Authors:
John Kos↗Rudra Singh↗Ashok Goel↗

Model Construction is a foundational practice in science learning that relies on visualization and interactivity. Large Language Models, increasingly augmented with multimodal capabilities, have been integrated in education contexts to support learning. However, these tools lack visual interactivity that is required by some learning contexts. We introduce Text to Multimodal Model (T2MM), a robust, dynamic LLM supported architecture that assists in model construction within the open inquiry ecology-based modeling software Virtual Experimental Research Assistant (VERA). T2MM accounts for the current context of the learner's model and creates interactive models, rather than static images, enabling the model to remain responsive to manual adjustment. To measure technical feasibility, we evaluate T2MM through a custom procedurally generated dataset of natural language learner modeling requests and target models within the VERA system. T2MM outperforms a baseline model generation architecture implemented through LLM-supported full code generation, common in the literature, across all measured success metrics. Our contribution not only outlines LLM integration into a inquiry-based learning modeling tool, but also describes a possible architecture through which more interactive multimodal LLM tools can be created.

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24.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Looking beyond stereotyped neuron structures reveals links between beading and morphological rearrangements in aging phenotypes.

Authors:
Gomez↗Nguyen↗Lagergren↗Flores↗San Miguel↗

Understanding how neuronal morphology changes during aging and acute stress is essential for elucidating mechanisms of neurodegeneration. The highly branched PVD neuron of Caenorhabditis elegans provides a powerful model for studying dendritic remodeling and degeneration-associated phenotypes such as dendritic beading. However, the complexity of this arbor presents substantial challenges for automated segmentation and quantitative analysis. In this study, we adapted a convolutional neural network (CNN)-guided region growing framework for automated dendrite tracing, coupled with two topology-based algorithms for categorizing dendritic segments by branching degree. The segmentation algorithm achieved high accuracy relative to manual tracing, with a median Dice coefficient of 0.82, while reducing analysis time by approximately tenfold. Automated dendrite categorization demonstrated strong agreement with manual annotations across branching orders, though position-based mapping performance declined with age due to progressive morphological distortion. Leveraging this platform, we investigated mechanistic differences in dendritic beading patterns observed during aging and cold shock. Consistent with prior work, aging was associated with decreased inter-bead spacing, whereas cold shock produced increased bead dispersion with stress severity. Structural analysis revealed that these trends were not driven by dendritic pruning or reduced arbor complexity. Instead, while a traditional anatomically unflexible paradigm falsely implicated lower-degree dendrites as highly vulnerable, our branching-informed framework revealed that age-dependent beading is fundamentally dictated by a segments history of successive branching events. Conversely, acute cold shock triggered systemic beading that expanded across all dendritic orders in a severity-dependent manner. Together, these findings demonstrate that chronic aging and acute stress engage distinct degenerative pathways (compartment-specific lineage vulnerability versus global architectural collapse) rather than gross morphological loss, as well as highlighting the need for paradigms that enable reliable analysis of changing morphologies.

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

MeshPad: Interactive Sketch-Conditioned Artist-Reminiscent Mesh Generation and Editing

Authors:
Haoxuan Li↗Ziya Erkoc↗Lei Li↗Daniele Sirigatti↗Vladislav Rosov↗Angela Dai↗Matthias Nie{\ss}ner↗

We introduce MeshPad, a generative approach that creates 3D meshes from sketch inputs. Building on recent advances in artist-reminiscent triangle mesh generation, our approach addresses the need for interactive mesh creation. To this end, we focus on enabling consistent edits by decomposing editing into 'deletion' of regions of a mesh, followed by 'addition' of new mesh geometry. Both operations are invoked by simple user edits of a sketch image, facilitating an iterative content creation process and enabling the construction of complex 3D meshes. Our approach is based on a triangle sequence-based mesh representation, exploiting a large Transformer model for mesh triangle addition and deletion. In order to perform edits interactively, we introduce a vertex-aligned speculative prediction strategy on top of our additive mesh generator. This speculator predicts multiple output tokens corresponding to a vertex, thus significantly reducing the computational cost of inference and accelerating the editing process, making it possible to execute each editing step in only a few seconds. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that MeshPad outperforms state-of-the-art sketch-conditioned mesh generation methods, achieving more than 22% mesh quality improvement in Chamfer distance, and being preferred by 90% of participants in perceptual evaluations.

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