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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Spatial Analysis and Multilevel Determinants of Hypertension in Zambia: Analysis of the 2017 WHO STEPS Survey

Authors:
Mutasha↗Simukoko↗Nkandu↗

Background: Hypertension is the leading modifiable cardiovascular risk factor globally, with the fastest-growing burden in low- and middle-income countries. This study aimed to estimate national hypertension prevalence, map provincial patterns, assess spatial clustering, and identify individual and community-level determinants among Zambian adults using the 2017 WHO STEPS survey. Methods: This cross-sectional study used data from the 2017 WHO STEPS survey, a nationally representative sample of 4,301 adults aged 18-69 years. Hypertension was defined as systolic BP [&ge;]140 mmHg, diastolic BP [&ge;]90 mmHg, or current antihypertensive use. Spatial autocorrelation was assessed via Moran's I and LISA. Four nested generalised linear mixed models with PSU-level random intercepts identified individual and community-level determinants. Results: Overall weighted hypertension prevalence was 24.0%. Lusaka recorded the highest prevalence (30.2%), followed by Southern (29.9%) and Muchinga (28.3%) provinces; Western Province had the lowest (12.4%). Spatial clustering was statistically significant but modest (Moran's I = 0.0247, p < 0.001). Between-cluster variation reduced from ICC = 5.9% to 1.8% in the full model, indicating geographic differences were largely explained by individual characteristics. Age was the strongest predictor; adults aged 60-69 had nearly sevenfold higher odds than those aged 18-29 (AOR 6.92, 95% CI: 4.95-9.66). Women had lower odds than men (AOR 0.64, 95% CI: 0.52-0.79). Obesity (AOR 2.34), overweight (AOR 1.65), high cholesterol (AOR 1.40), diabetes (AOR 1.35), and single marital status (AOR 1.34) were independently significant. Western Province showed consistently lower odds than Central Province (AOR 0.48). Conclusion: Hypertension affects one in four Zambian adults, driven primarily by age, sex, obesity, dyslipidaemia, and diabetes. Geographically prioritised interventions, including community health worker-led screening programmes in Lusaka and Southern Province, would maximise population-level impact. Population-level salt reduction and alcohol policies represent cost-effective complementary strategies. Longitudinal studies with finer spatial resolution are needed to clarify causal pathways underlying observed geographic clustering and inform SDG Target 3.4 progress.

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

AME: A Multi-Type Contributor Attribution Framework in Generative AI Markets

Authors:
Yang Shi↗Songwen Pei↗Yang Gao↗Bingxue Zhang↗

Generative AI enables value creation through multi-stage collaboration among heterogeneous contributors, including training data, base models, fine-tuning behaviors, and prompts. However, how to fairly allocate the data value remains largely unexplored. This paper formulates multi-stage generative AI value allocation as a new research problem and identifies three core challenges: heterogeneous data contribution valuation, data rights mapping, and trustworthy execution. We propose AME (Attribution-Mapping-Execution) framework, a unified framework that integrates data contribution valuation, data rights mapping, and trustworthy execution into a single workflow. Experimental results demonstrate that AME framework achieves data value allocation outcomes more consistent with human reference judgments while maintaining low-cost trustworthy execution. Our work provides an initial foundation for value assessment and revenue allocation in generative AI data markets.

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03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Between Patterns and Predictions: Interpretable Latent EEG Representations for Clinical Insights

Authors:
Krumm↗L. M↗Terziev↗Kranz↗Westover↗Meisel↗

Electroencephalography (EEG) captures rich brain dynamics, yet in clinical practice this complexity is often reduced to simplified summaries or categorical labels, limiting its interpretability for decision-making. We tested the hypothesis that a pretrained latent embedding framework, the Universal Map of EEG (UM-EEG), can preserve clinically meaningful structure across heterogeneous datasets and provide a generalizable representation of brain states. We applied UM-EEG, without retraining, to three independent cohorts spanning distinct clinical contexts: long-term EEG recordings from cardiac arrest patients (n = 576), subarachnoid hemorrhage (n = 100), and routine clinical EEG recordings containing physiological and pathological patterns (n = 141). EEG segments were projected into a shared 128-dimensional space anchored by expert-derived reference states, including wakefulness, sleep stages, ictal-interictal continuum activity, and burst suppression. Across datasets, favorable outcome or physiological recordings were consistently located closer to healthy reference states, whereas poor outcome and pathological recordings shifted toward pathological regions of the embedding space. Trajectory-derived geometric and temporal features discriminated outcome in cardiac arrest (ROC-AUC 0.83) and subarachnoid hemorrhage (ROC-AUC 0.76), and distinguished physiological from pathological routine EEGs (ROC-AUC 0.93). In routine EEG, similarity relationships derived from embedding trajectories correlated with those derived from structured clinical reports, indicating that the latent space recapitulates clinically relevant organization. These findings show that a fixed, semantically structured EEG embedding generalizes across etiologies and recording settings, enabling prognostic stratification and contextual interpretation while preserving the relational structure of brain states.

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

Top-Theta Attention: Sparsifying Transformers by Compensated Thresholding

Authors:
Konstantin Berestizshevsky↗Renzo Andri↗Lukas Cavigelli↗

We present Top-Theta (Top-$\theta$) Attention, a training-free method for sparsifying transformer attention during inference. Our key insight is that static, per-head thresholds can be calibrated to retain the desired constant number of significant elements per attention row. This approach enables content-based sparsity without retraining, and it remains robust across data domains. We further introduce compensation techniques to preserve accuracy under aggressive sparsification, establishing attention thresholding as a practical and principled alternative to top-k attention. We provide extensive evaluation on natural language processing tasks, showing that Top-$\theta$ achieves 3-10x reduction in V-cache usage and up to 10x fewer attention elements during inference while degrading no more than 1% in accuracy.

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

Utility-Diversity Aware Online Batch Selection for LLM Supervised Fine-tuning

Authors:
Heming Zou↗Yixiu Mao↗Yun Qu↗Qi Wang↗Xiangyang Ji↗

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a commonly used technique to adapt large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks. In practice, SFT on a full dataset is computationally expensive and sometimes suffers from overfitting or bias amplification. This facilitates the rise of data curation in SFT, which prioritizes the most valuable data to optimze. This work studies the online batch selection family that dynamically scores and filters samples during the training process. However, existing popular methods often (i) rely merely on the utility of data to select a subset while neglecting other crucial factors like diversity, (ii) rely on external resources such as reference models or validation sets, and (iii) incur extra training time over full-dataset training. To address these limitations, this work develops UDS (Utility-Diversity Sampling), a framework for efficient online batch selection in SFT. UDS leverages the nuclear norm of the logits matrix to capture both data utility and intra-sample diversity, while estimating inter-sample diversity through efficient low-dimensional embedding comparisons with a lightweight memory buffer of historical samples. Such a design eliminates the need for external resources and unnecessary backpropagation, securing computational efficiency. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that UDS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art online batch selection methods under varying data budgets, and significantly reduces training time compared to full-dataset fine-tuning. Code is available at https://github.com/gfyddha/UDS.

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

Proactive Conversational Assistant for a Procedural Manual Task based on Audio and IMU

Authors:
Rehana Mahfuz↗Yinyi Guo↗Erik Visser↗Phanidhar Chinchili↗

Real-time conversational assistants for procedural manual tasks often depend on video input, which can be computationally expensive and compromise user privacy. For the first time, we propose a real-time conversational assistant that provides comprehensive guidance for procedural manual tasks using only lightweight privacy-preserving modalities such as audio and IMU inputs from a user's wearable device to understand the context. Using a furniture assembly task and a cooking task, we show how this assistant proactively communicates step-by-step instructions to a user performing a procedural task, and answers user questions. We illustrate the data generation method and the system design to achieve such an assistant. On observing that an off-the-shelf language model is a talkative assistant but is not always able to answer questions correctly, we demonstrate how finetuning the model improves its ability to limit unnecessary dialogues with a 50% increase in the precision, while also improving its ability to answer questions correctly, measured by a 150% increase in the recall of answers. We further describe how such an assistant is implemented on an edge device with no dependence on the cloud.

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

Data-driven Lake Water Quality Forecasting for Time Series with Missing Data using Machine Learning

Authors:
Rishit Chatterjee↗Tahiya Chowdhury↗

arXiv:2601.15503v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Volunteer-led lake monitoring yields irregular, seasonal time series with many gaps arising from ice cover, weather-related access constraints, and occasional human errors, complicating forecasting and early warning of harmful algal blooms. We study Secchi Disk Depth (SDD) forecasting on a 30-lake, data-rich subset drawn from three decades of in-situ records collected across Maine lakes. Missingness is handled via Multiple Imputation by Chained Equations (MICE), and we evaluate performance with a normalized Mean Absolute Error (nMAE) metric for cross-lake comparability. Among six candidates, ridge regression provides the best mean test performance. Using ridge regression, we then quantify the minimal sample size, showing that under a backward, recent-history protocol, the model reaches within 5% of full-history accuracy with approximately 176 training samples per lake on average. We also identify a minimal feature set, where a compact four-feature subset matches the thirteen-feature baseline within the same 5% tolerance. Bringing these results together, we introduce a joint feasibility function that identifies the minimal training history and fewest predictors sufficient to achieve the target of staying within 5% of the complete-history, full-feature baseline. In our study, meeting the 5% accuracy target required about 64 recent samples and just one predictor per lake, highlighting the practicality of targeted monitoring. Hence, our joint feasibility strategy unifies recent-history length and feature choice under a fixed accuracy target, yielding a simple, efficient rule for setting sampling effort and measurement priorities for lake researchers.

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08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Optimal Impulse Control for Cyber Risk Management

Authors:
Caroline Hillairet↗Thibaut Mastrolia↗Wissal Sabbagh↗

arXiv:2410.17706v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We explore an optimal impulse control problem wherein an electronic device owner strategically calibrates protection levels against cyber attacks. Utilizing epidemiological compartment models, we qualitatively characterize the dynamics of cyber attacks within the network. We determine the optimal protective measures against effective hacking by formulating and solving a stochastic control problem with optimal switching. We demonstrate that the value function for the cluster owner constitutes a viscosity solution to a system of coupled variational inequalities associated with a fully coupled reflected backward stochastic differential equation (BSDE). Furthermore, we devise a comprehensive algorithm alongside a verification procedure to ascertain the optimal timing for network protection across various cyber attack scenarios. Our findings are illustrated through numerical approximations employing deep Galerkin methods for partial differential equations (PDEs). We visualize the optimal protection strategies in the context of two distinct attack scenarios: (1) a constant cyber attack, (2) an exogenous cyber attack strategy modeled with a Poisson process.

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09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

How AI Agents Reshape Knowledge Work: Autonomy, Efficiency, and Scope

Authors:
Jeremy Yang↗Kate Zyskowski↗Noah Yonack↗Jerry Ma↗

arXiv:2606.07489v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Frontier AI systems are bridging the gap between intelligence and utility by shifting from conversational assistants to autonomous agents that execute tasks end to end. Using production data from Perplexity's Search and Computer products, we study this transition by examining how AI agents accelerate and reshape knowledge work. Three key empirical findings emerge. First, using sessions with near-identical initial query pairs as natural experiments for the same underlying task attempted with both products, Computer performs 26 minutes of autonomous work per user session, versus 33 seconds for Search. Computer automates task decomposition and execution that Search users might otherwise manually orchestrate and implement. As a result, Computer shifts follow-up query distribution toward higher-order work such as verification and extension. Autonomy also increases execution quality, with per-query dissatisfaction rates 55% lower on Computer than on Search. Second, due to its autonomy advantage, Computer reduces completion time from 269 to 36 minutes on matched tasks, lowering estimated time and cost by 87% and 94%, respectively, compared to humans equipped with Search alone. Third, Computer changes the scope of work that users attempt: Computer queries more often cross occupational boundaries, require higher-order cognition, draw on broader expertise, take the form of composite tasks that bundle interdependent subtasks into a single query, and unlock work activities that are essentially absent from Search usage among the same users. Together, the evidence indicates that AI agents accelerate workflows, enhance output quality, reduce costs, and expand the breadth and depth of automated work.

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10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

The Acceptability of Three Co-Created Peer Support Interventions for People Living with Leprosy Reactions in Indonesia: A Mixed-Methods Pilot Study

Authors:
Putri↗A. I↗Walker↗S. L↗Agusni↗R. I↗Alinda↗M. D↗Kusumaputra↗B. H↗Listiawan↗M. J↗…

Background: Leprosy reactions (LR) are immune-mediated complications associated with disability, emotional distress, and social isolation. We identified a gap in affected-individual-informed interventions that aim to improve the management of LR in healthcare settings. To address this gap, we assessed the acceptability of three peer-support interventions co-created with people affected by LR in Indonesia. Methods: Using an interactive learning and action approach, we co-created peer counselling, telesupport groups, and participatory video interventions which were piloted in an urban hospital and 13 rural community clinics. A mixed-methods design was applied with interviews, focus group discussions, and pre-post assessments involving four participant groups. Data were analyzed thematically using an acceptability framework. Results: One hundred participants were enrolled, and 92 completed the pilot intervention between November 2022 and July 2023. Qualitative findings showed that all interventions were acceptable. Peer counselling provided emotional reassurance through shared experiences and was perceived as trustworthy and supportive. Perceived burdens differed by setting, with time constraints in urban facilities and geographical barriers in rural clinics. Knowledge improved significantly among participants of peer counselling and telesupport groups in rural settings. Telesupport groups facilitated connection, information exchange, and continuity of care. Digital access and literacy limited participation for some, particularly in rural areas. The participatory video was perceived as reassuring and informative. Improvements in knowledge, attitude, practices, and mental well-being domain scores were observed among urban participants, but responses in rural settings showed less change. Participants and co-implementers reported increased self-efficacy, participants confidence to perform required behaviors within peer support interventions, with effects shaped by intervention and setting. Conclusions: The three co-created peer-support interventions were acceptable for individuals with LR in diverse healthcare settings. These outcomes highlight the importance and effectiveness of selective, and context-sensitive implementation of one or more peer-support modalities.

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11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Beyond Problem Solving: UOJ-Bench for Evaluating Code Generation, Hacking, and Repair in Competitive Programming

Authors:
Tingqiang Xu↗Hangrui Zhou↗Tianle Cai↗Alex Gu↗Kaifeng Lyu↗

arXiv:2606.12864v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite strong performance in competitive programming, the role of Large Language Models (LLMs) in supporting human learning in the same setting remains largely unexplored. In this work, we introduce UOJ-Bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate not only the problem-solving ability of LLMs, but also their ability to identify errors in human-written code – a crucial educational activity traditionally supported by running test cases over online judge systems. UOJ-Bench consists of three distinct tasks: code generation, code hacking, and code repair, all constructed from real-world code submissions on the Universal Online Judge (UOJ) and evaluated through UOJ's native judging infrastructure. Our results show that under one-shot evaluation, even the strongest models fail to identify errors in more than 50% of a set of submissions that have been found to be incorrect by UOJ users. While test-time scaling improves success rates to above 90%, the substantial computational costs incurred from model inference limit its practicality for large-scale deployment. Despite these limitations, we find that the best-performing models under test-time scaling can uncover errors in over 5% of full-score submissions across roughly 30 problems, suggesting that frontier LLMs can already provide complementary signals beyond standard judging systems.

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12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Output Type Before Quality: A Standards-Derived XAI Admissibility Rubric for Autonomous-Driving Safety

Authors:
Abhinaw Priyadershi↗Mandar Pitale↗Jelena Frtunikj↗Maria Spence↗

arXiv:2606.05461v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Safety standards for ML-based autonomous driving specify the kind of evidence an assurance case must contain (directed cause-and-effect chains, quantified interventional effects, named root-cause variables), yet the XAI literature is organised by output type and technique family (saliency maps, feature attribution, counterfactuals, causal graphs, language traces). SHAP, the most-recommended ADS XAI method, returns a ranked feature list that no implementation effort can convert into a directed chain (Fig.1). We name this mismatch the evidence-type gap. From AMLAS, ISO 26262, ISO21448, ISO/PAS 8800 we derive 19 testable evidentiary criteria across 7 lifecycle stages with representative clause-cited derivations and score six XAI method classes structurally. Causal XAI emerges as structurally required to satisfy the derived criteria at three stages: hazard identification (+62% rubric gap), incident investigation (+50%), and data management (+50%); the verdict set is stable across thresholds T in (0%, 50%]$ and survives a worst-case single-cell flip down to T = 25%. At the remaining four stages, correlational or language-based methods are comparable or sufficient. The rubric identifies structural admissibility (necessary but not sufficient for compliance): an admissible method's specific output content may still be wrong, and validating that fidelity (the edges a fitted SCM produces, the cause a trace names) is the open assurance challenge. A single-VLA proof of concept on 1,996 real-world driving clips (79,840 rows, ten splits) is consistent with each method's observed output type matching its rubric prediction. XAI method selection for ADS safety assurance should be driven by lifecycle-stage evidence demand, not by method popularity.

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

DySink: Dynamic Frame Sinks for Autoregressive Long Video Generation

Authors:
Bo Ye↗Xinyu Cui↗Jian Zhao↗Tong Wei↗Min-Ling Zhang↗

Autoregressive long video generation often adopts bounded-memory streaming for efficiency, typically combining local windows for short-term continuity with static early-frame sinks as long-range anchors. However, this fixed allocation keeps early frames cached even when the current visual state has substantially diverged from them, while discarding potentially more relevant intermediate history. As a result, the retained long-range context may become less adaptive and bias generation toward outdated cues; in severe cases, RoPE-induced phase re-alignment can homogenize inter-head attention and cause sink collapse, where content regresses toward sink frames. We propose DySink, a retrieval-based framework that maintains a compact memory bank and selects visually relevant historical frames as dynamic frame sinks. DySink couples adaptive retrieval with a sink anomaly gate, which detects excessive inter-head consensus over retrieved context and suppresses collapse-prone context. Experiments on minute-long videos show that DySink consistently improves dynamic degree over strong baselines while also achieving higher temporal quality. The code and model weights will be released at https://github.com/yebo0216best/DySink.

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

LLM-WikiRace Benchmark: How Far Can LLMs Plan over Real-World Knowledge Graphs?

Authors:
Juliusz Ziomek↗William Bankes↗Lorenz Wolf↗Shyam Sundhar Ramesh↗Xiaohang Tang↗Ilija Bogunovic↗

arXiv:2602.16902v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce LLM-Wikirace, a benchmark for evaluating planning, reasoning, and world knowledge in large language models (LLMs). In LLM-Wikirace, models must efficiently navigate Wikipedia hyperlinks step by step to reach a target page from a given source, requiring look-ahead planning and the ability to reason about how concepts are connected in the real world. We evaluate a broad set of open- and closed-source models, including Gemini-3, GPT-5, and Claude Opus 4.5, which achieve the strongest results on the easy level of the task and demonstrate superhuman performance. Despite this, performance drops sharply on hard difficulty: the best-performing model, Gemini-3, succeeds in only 23\% of hard games, highlighting substantial remaining challenges for frontier models. Our analysis shows that world knowledge is a necessary ingredient for success, but only up to a point, beyond this threshold, planning and long-horizon reasoning capabilities become the dominant factors. Trajectory-level analysis further reveals that even the strongest models struggle to replan after failure, frequently entering loops rather than recovering. LLM-Wikirace is a simple benchmark that reveals clear limitations in current reasoning systems, offering an open arena where planning-capable LLMs still have much to prove. Our code and leaderboard available at https:/llmwikirace.github.io.

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

Open Materials Generation with Inference-Time Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Philipp Hoellmer↗Stefano Martiniani↗

arXiv:2602.00424v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Continuous-time generative models for crystalline materials enable inverse materials design by learning to predict stable crystal structures, but incorporating explicit target properties into the generative process remains challenging. Policy-gradient reinforcement learning (RL) provides a principled mechanism for aligning generative models with downstream objectives but typically requires access to the score, which has prevented its application to flow-based models that learn only velocity fields. We introduce Open Materials Generation with Inference-time Reinforcement Learning (OMatG-IRL), a policy-gradient RL framework that operates directly on the learned velocity fields and eliminates the need for the explicit computation of the score. OMatG-IRL leverages stochastic perturbations of the underlying generation dynamics preserving the baseline performance of the pretrained generative model while enabling exploration and policy-gradient estimation at inference time. Using OMatG-IRL, we present the first application of RL to crystal structure prediction (CSP). Our method enables effective reinforcement of an energy-based objective while preserving diversity through composition conditioning, and it achieves performance competitive with score-based RL approaches. Finally, we show that OMatG-IRL can learn time-dependent velocity-annealing schedules, enabling accurate CSP with order-of-magnitude improvements in sampling efficiency and, correspondingly, reduction in generation time. The OMatG-IRL code is included in a new release of the Open Materials Generation (OMatG) framework available at https://github.com/FERMat-ML/OMatG.

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16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Correcting Sensor-Induced Distribution Drift with Wasserstein Adversarial Learning

Authors:
Saraa Ali↗Vladimir Bocharnikov↗Fedor Ratnikov↗Mikhail Hushchyn↗Artem Ryzhikov↗Denis Derkach↗

arXiv:2606.18561v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The quality of recorded data depends on the stability of the sensor system that acquires it. Sensor motion and aging can degrade the performance and stability of downstream data-driven methods. We present a Wasserstein-GAN-inspired approach for unsupervised inference of physically interpretable transformation parameters that map a changed detector response distribution back to a nominal reference distribution. In contrast to standard generative modeling, the generator is used as a learnable calibration transformation whose trainable weights represent the sought parameters, while the critic provides a distributional distance signal via the Wasserstein objective. We validate the approach on a tracking-detector toy model with controlled layer shifts and demonstrate its application on high-granularity Geant4-simulated calorimeter data with cell-wise aging effects. The method recovers aging coefficients for individual cells with correlation to ground truth and improves agreement between calibrated and reference energy-sum distributions, while exhibiting the expected degradation at increasing channel-to-channel noise levels. These results indicate that adversarial distribution matching can serve as a data-driven component of calibration strategies in settings where direct labels for degradation parameters are unavailable.

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

S$^2$COPE: Self-Supervised Concept Discovery via Preference Learning

Authors:
Shilong Xiang↗Zirui Zhang↗Chengzhi Mao↗

Current representation learning paradigms force a fundamental compromise: self-supervised methods scale to massive datasets but yield opaque features, whereas interpretable models remain bottlenecked by the need for dense human annotation. We introduce Self-Supervised Concept discOvery via Preference lEarning (\model), a label-free framework that resolves this dilemma. Instead of treating Vision-Large-Language Models (VLLMs) as static feature extractors, \model leverages them as active participants in a self-supervised preference optimization loop. By autonomously hypothesizing, validating, and reinforcing candidate visual attributes directly from raw imagery, our framework discovers novel, structured concepts without a single label. Extensive experiments across natural, medical, and physics domains demonstrate that \model successfully extracts domain-specific concepts where standard VLLMs often fail to generate. By amortizing concept discovery directly into the VLLM backbone through our self-supervised preference objective – rather than relying on static generation and disjoint filtering – we achieve up to a 24-point absolute improvement in downstream top-1 classification accuracy on unseen data. Our work suggest that interpretability can emerge through a model's autonomous interaction with incidental visual structures, without any human supervision.

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18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Random Erasing vs. Model Inversion: A Promising Defense or a False Hope?

Authors:
Viet-Hung Tran↗Ngoc-Bao Nguyen↗Son T. Mai↗Hans Vandierendonck↗Ira Assent↗Alex Kot↗Ngai-Man Cheung↗

Model Inversion (MI) attacks pose a significant privacy threat by reconstructing private training data from machine learning models. While existing defenses primarily concentrate on model-centric approaches, the impact of data on MI robustness remains largely unexplored. In this work, we explore Random Erasing (RE), a technique traditionally used for improving model generalization under occlusion, and uncover its surprising effectiveness as a defense against MI attacks. Specifically, our novel feature space analysis shows that models trained with RE-images introduce a significant discrepancy between the features of MI-reconstructed images and those of the private data. At the same time, features of private images remain distinct from other classes and well-separated from different classification regions. These effects collectively degrade MI reconstruction quality and attack accuracy while maintaining reasonable natural accuracy. Furthermore, we explore two critical properties of RE including Partial Erasure and Random Location. Partial Erasure prevents the model from observing entire objects during training. We find this has a significant impact on MI, which aims to reconstruct the entire objects. Random Location of erasure plays a crucial role in achieving a strong privacy-utility trade-off. Our findings highlight RE as a simple yet effective defense mechanism that can be easily integrated with existing privacy-preserving techniques. Extensive experiments across 37 setups demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in the privacy-utility trade-off. The results consistently demonstrate the superiority of our defense over existing methods across different MI attacks, network architectures, and attack configurations. For the first time, we achieve a significant degradation in attack accuracy without a decrease in utility for some configurations.

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

Multi-Head Attention-Based Feature Extractor Integration with Soft Actor-Critic for Porosity Prediction and Process Parameter Optimization in Additive Manufacturing

Authors:
Kianoush Aqabakee↗Leonardo Stella↗

arXiv:2606.20087v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Additive manufacturing process optimization requires precise parameter control to minimize defects such as porosity. Traditional reinforcement learning (RL) approaches using discrete action spaces suffer from slow convergence and susceptibility to local optima, limiting their effectiveness for high-precision manufacturing tasks. This study addresses these limitations by employing a continuous action space combined with a novel architecture that integrates a multi-head attention mechanism with the Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) algorithm. The attention-based feature extractor enhances the agent's ability to capture subtle variations in low-dimensional input features, enabling more effective exploration-exploitation balance for navigating value spaces with local minima. We validate our approach on porosity prediction and process parameter optimization in laser powder bed fusion, demonstrating faster convergence and higher final reward values compared to standard RL methods including DQN, PPO, TD3, and vanilla SAC. The proposed methodology achieves a convergence value of 322.79 within 14 episodes, outperforming existing approaches while maintaining stability throughout training.

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

deFOREST: Fusing Optical and Radar satellite data for Enhanced Sensing of Tree-loss

Authors:
Julio Enrique Castrillon-Candas↗Hanfeng Gu↗Caleb Meredith↗Yulin Li↗Xiaojing Tang↗Pontus Olofsson↗Mark Kon↗

arXiv:2510.14092v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper we develop a deforestation detection pipeline that incorporates optical and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data. A crucial component of the pipeline is the construction of anomaly maps of the optical data, which is done using the residual space of a discrete Karhunen-Lo\'{e}ve (KL) expansion. Anomalies are quantified using a concentration bound on the distribution of the residual components for the nominal state of the forest. This bound does not require prior knowledge on the distribution of the data. This is in contrast to statistical parametric methods that assume knowledge of the data distribution, an impractical assumption that is especially infeasible for high dimensional data such as ours. Once the optical anomaly maps are computed they are combined with SAR data, and the state of the forest is classified by using a Hidden Markov Model (HMM). We test our approach with Sentinel-1 (SAR) and Sentinel-2 (Optical) data on a $92\,km \times 92\,km$ region in the Amazon forest. The results show that both the hybrid optical-radar and optical only methods achieve high accuracy that is superior to the recent state-of-the-art hybrid method. Moreover, the hybrid method is significantly more robust in the case of sparse optical data that are common in highly cloudy regions.

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21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Diffusion-based Cumulative Adversarial Purification for Vision Language Models

Authors:
Jia Fu↗Yongtao Wu↗Yihang Chen↗Kunyu Peng↗Xiao Zhang↗Volkan Cevher↗Sepideh Pashami↗Anders Holst↗

Vision Language Models (VLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in multimodal understanding, yet their susceptibility to adversarial perturbations poses a significant threat to their reliability in real-world applications. Despite often being imperceptible to humans, these perturbations can drastically alter model outputs, leading to erroneous interpretations and decisions. This paper introduces DiffCAP, a novel diffusion-based purification strategy that can effectively neutralize adversarial corruptions in VLMs. We theoretically establish a provable recovery region in the forward diffusion process and meanwhile quantify the convergence rate of semantic variation with respect to VLMs. These findings manifest that adversarial effects monotonically fade as diffusion unfolds. Guided by this principle, DiffCAP leverages noise injection with a similarity threshold of VLM embeddings as an adaptive criterion, before reverse diffusion restores a clean and reliable representation for VLM inference. Through extensive experiments across six datasets with three VLMs under varying attack strengths in three task scenarios, we show that DiffCAP outperforms existing defense techniques by a substantial margin. Notably, DiffCAP significantly reduces both hyperparameter tuning complexity and the required diffusion time, thereby accelerating the denoising process. Equipped with theorems and empirical support, DiffCAP provides a robust and practical solution for securely deploying VLMs in adversarial environments. The source code is available at https://github.com/JasonFu1998/DiffCAP.

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22.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Sharp Favard length of random Cantor sets

Authors:
Alan Chang↗Pablo Shmerkin↗Ville Suomala↗

arXiv:2512.17753v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We show that for a large class of planar $1$-dimensional random fractals $S$, the Favard length $\operatorname{Fav}(S(r))$ of the neighborhood $S(r)$ is comparable to $\log^{-1}(1/r)$, matching a universal lower bound; up to now, this was only known in expectation for a few concrete models. In particular, we show that there exist $1$-Ahlfors regular sets with the fastest possible Favard length decay. For a wide class of planar one-dimensional "grid random fractals", including fractal percolation and its Ahlfors-regular variants, we further show that $\operatorname{Fav}(S(r))/\log(1/r)$ converges almost surely, and we identify the limit explicitly. Furthermore, we prove that for some $1$-dimensional Ahlfors-regular random fractals $S$, the Favard length of $S(r)$ decays instead like $\log\log(1/r)/\log(1/r)$, showing that the $1/\log(1/r)$ decay is not universal among random fractals, as might be expected from previous results.

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

Hardware- and Vision-in-the-Loop Validation of Deep Monocular Pose Estimation for Autonomous Maritime UAV Flight

Authors:
Maneesha Wickramasuriya↗Beomyeol Yu↗Jaden Shin↗Mason Huslig↗Taeyoung Lee↗Murray Snyder↗

arXiv:2606.19176v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous UAV operations on ships require reliable vision-based relative pose estimation, yet at-sea validation is costly, weather-dependent, and risky. This paper presents a hardware-validated vision-in-the-loop framework that enables fully autonomous indoor flight while emulating photorealistic maritime environments. Rendered maritime views are processed onboard by a deep transformer-based monocular pose estimator. Delayed vision measurements are fused with high-rate IMU data using a delayed Kalman filter to provide consistent state estimates for geometric control. The system captures critical embedded effects, including perception latency, asynchronous updates, and computational constraints, that are absent in pure simulation. Autonomous takeoff, trajectory tracking, and landing experiments demonstrate stable closed-loop flight. The results establish a safe and hardware-realistic intermediate stage for developing maritime UAV autonomy prior to shipboard deployment.

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

Robust Neural Tucker Factorization with Bias Correction and Adaptive Initialization

Authors:
Yuchao Su↗Yixin Ran↗

arXiv:2606.16388v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-dimensional incomplete (HDI) tensors are widely used in traffic and climate applications, but sparse observations make accurate completion difficult. The intrinsic non-linear dynamics and non-stationary variations across distinct multi-modal fields severely hinder the efficacy of conventional linear reconstruction frameworks. Neural Tucker factorization provides an effective framework for modeling high-order interactions among tensor modes. By parameterizing underlying structural characteristics into continuous latent spaces, neural representations circumvent the rigid low-rank constraints of classical algebra. However, its performance can still be affected by implementation-level choices, especially parameter initialization and the bias configuration of the final output mapping. Suboptimal initializations frequently lead to variance explosion across the cubically expanded interaction spaces, driving the subsequent non-linear activation boundaries into severe gradient saturation zones, while the omission of a dedicated translation parameter forces interaction weights to implicitly absorb global statistical deviations. This paper proposes a simple yet effective neural Tucker factorization model with Kaiming initialization and bias correction (KaBiN) for HDI tensor completion. The proposed model utilizes Kaiming uniform initialization for the embedding and Tucker linear parameters, and adopts a simple bias correction in output mapping. By elegantly decoupling global mean shifts from local structural representations, the framework provides a highly stable and well-conditioned optimization landscape. Experiments on three real-world HDI tensor datasets show that KaBiN achieves better performance than the original NeuTucF, while introducing minimal computational overhead.

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

Sumi: Open Uniform Diffusion Language Model from Scratch

Authors:
Mengyu Ye↗Keito Kudo↗Wataru Ikeda↗Ryosuke Matsuda↗Keisuke Sakaguchi↗Jun Suzuki↗

Diffusion models have become a promising alternative to autoregressive models. Among these, uniform diffusion language models (UDLMs) permit any token to be updated at any step, in principle enabling more flexible generation. However, no UDLM has yet been pretrained from scratch at both large parameter scale and large token budget. Both autoregressive modeling and masked diffusion modeling already have capable models at scale that the community can study and build on; uniform diffusion has none. A scratch-pretrained UDLM at scale would provide a clean reference point for studying scaling behavior, generation dynamics, controllability, and trade-offs against established autoregressive and masked diffusion models. To this end, we introduce Sumi ("ink" in Japanese), a fully open 7B uniform diffusion language model pretrained from scratch on 1.5T tokens. Sumi performs competitively with autoregressive models trained at comparable token budgets on knowledge, reasoning, and coding benchmarks, while under-performing on commonsense benchmarks, where our education-heavy data mixture is a likely contributor. We release our model weights, checkpoints, and full training recipe, including a complete specification of the data mixture over publicly available corpora. We hope this release enables the community to study native uniform diffusion at scale and catalyzes work on its as-yet poorly understood aspects.

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