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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

KFTD: Koopman-Fourier Time-Differentiable Network for Continuous Ocean Spatiotemporal Forecasting

arXiv:2606.17070v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate oceanic forecasting is critical for climate monitoring and disaster early warning. However, ocean spatiotemporal forecasting encounters the double challenges of modeling complex dynamical systems and ensuring computational efficiency. We present Koopman Fourier Time-Differentiable (KFTD) Network, a time continuous twostage paradigm that decouples interpolation from prediction to achieve efficient and scalable spatiotemporal modeling. We map complex nonlinear dynamics into the Koopman linear space and exploit Fourier analysis to enable continuous time interpolation at arbitrary sub-steps. A lightweight residual network consumes the high fidelity intermediate states to yield the final forecast. Unlike diffusion models, KFTD eliminates multi step noise sampling and directly evolves the system in continuous time, yielding a 4 computational speedup. We further introduce a DPP Loss that supports arbitrary PDE constraints in an endtoend manner, breaking the physical consistency bottleneck of pure data-driven approaches. Empirical results on four ocean datasets confirm that our continuous time framework reduces MSE by an average of 5.6% (up to 12.7% for SST) and improves efficiency over MCVD by 76.25%.

02.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22

HTS-Oracle X: AI-Guided Prospective Discovery of Small Molecule Immune Checkpoint Binders

Targeting immune checkpoint protein-protein interactions (PPIs) using small molecules remains limited by the shallow, featureless binding surfaces of co-stimulatory and co-inhibitory receptors and the characteristically low hit rates of conventional high-throughput screening against these interfaces. Here we report HTS-Oracle X, a multimodal deep learning platform that integrates bidirectional cross-attention fusion of ChemBERTa SMILES embeddings with extended RDKit descriptors, trains on continuous biophysical binding signals rather than binary labels, and employs Monte Carlo Dropout uncertainty quantification for uncertainty-adjusted compound selection. Trained on 45,760 Dianthus TRIC-screened compounds per target under scaffold-aware cross-validation, HTS-Oracle X was applied prospectively to a 100,160-compound Enamine library against CD28, TIM-3, and VISTA. From 150 model-selected compounds, 45 dose-response confirmed binders were identified (30.0% overall hit rate), yielding enrichment factors of 234-408x over experimentally established random prospective baselines and 16 sub-micromolar hits. The top hits, HX-CD28-1 (KD = 233 nM), HX-TIM3-1 (KD = 249 nM), and HX-VISTA-1 (KD = 345 nM), demonstrated on-target functional activity in immune cell and tumor co-culture assays. HTS-Oracle X represents a scalable AI-guided framework for small molecule discovery against non-enzymatic immune checkpoint targets.

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

Cross-Model Disagreement as a Label-Free Correctness Signal

arXiv:2603.25450v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Detecting when a language model is wrong without ground truth labels is a fundamental challenge for safe deployment. Existing approaches rely on a model's own uncertainty – such as token entropy or confidence scores – but these signals fail critically on the most dangerous failure mode: confident errors, where a model is wrong but certain. In this work we introduce cross-model disagreement as a correctness indicator – a simple, training-free signal that can be dropped into existing production systems, routing pipelines, and deployment monitoring infrastructure without modification. Given a model's generated answer, cross-model disagreement computes how surprised or uncertain a second verifier model is when reading that answer via a single forward pass. No generation from the verifying model is required, and no correctness labels are needed. We instantiate this principle as Cross-Model Perplexity (CMP), which measures the verifying model's surprise at the generating model's answer tokens, and Cross-Model Entropy (CME), which measures the verifying model's uncertainty at those positions. Both CMP and CME outperform within-model uncertainty baselines across benchmarks spanning reasoning, retrieval, and mathematical problem solving (MMLU, TriviaQA, and GSM8K). On MMLU, CMP achieves a mean AUROC of 0.75 against a within-model entropy baseline of 0.59. These results establish cross-model disagreement as a practical, training-free approach to label-free correctness estimation, with direct applications in deployment monitoring, model routing, selective prediction, data filtering, and scalable oversight of production language model systems.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Succeeding at Scale: Enterprise Retrieval Benchmark Construction and Index-Preserving Query Adaptation for Multi-Tenant Search

Large-scale multi-tenant retrieval systems generate extensive query logs but lack curated relevance labels for effective domain adaptation, resulting in substantial underutilized "dark data." This challenge is compounded by the high cost of model updates, as jointly fine-tuning query and document encoders requires full corpus re-indexing, which is impractical in multi-tenant settings with thousands of isolated indices. We introduce DevRev-Search, a passage retrieval benchmark for technical customer support built via a fully automated pipeline. Candidate generation uses fusion across diverse sparse and dense retrievers, followed by an LLM-as-a-Judge for consistency filtering and relevance labeling. We further study and systematically evaluate index-preserving query-only adaptation strategies that fine-tune only the query-encoder while keeping the document indices fixed. Experiments on DevRev-Search, SciFact, and FiQA-2018 show that parameter-efficient fine-tuning of the query encoder delivers a remarkable quality-efficiency trade-off, enabling scalable and practical enterprise multi-tenant retrieval.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Polygenic risk scores associate with asthma phenotypes and proteomic analyses implicate IL1R1 in two family-based studies

Despite its high prevalence and the discovery of hundreds of genetic associations, the genetic determinants and heterogeneous manifestations of asthma remain incompletely understood. Incorporating polygenic risk scores (PRS) into asthma research offers a powerful approach to quantify inherited susceptibility, refine risk profiles, and advance mechanistic understanding of disease development. For this study, we leveraged whole-genome sequencing (WGS) data from two family-based cohorts of childhood asthma - the Genetics of Asthma in Costa Rica Study (GACRS) and the Childhood Asthma Management Program (CAMP) - to examine the transmission profiles of externally derived asthma PRS and their associations with clinical phenotypes in children with asthma. To further elucidate molecular mechanisms, we integrated large-scale external genome-wide association study (GWAS) summary statistics and genetic prediction models of protein abundance in a two-step proteome-wide association study (PWAS) of asthma. Our findings provide robust evidence supporting the validity of externally derived asthma PRS (asthma PRS association p-value p={10}^{-24} [GACRS and CAMP trios combined] for the Global Biobank Meta-analysis Initiative [GBMI]) and reveal consistent associations with spirometry measures and atopy markers across both studies, as 13 of 21 traits (62%) were significantly associated with the GBMI-PRS in the meta-analysis after multiple-testing correction. Moreover, the results of the integrative proteomic analysis implicate IL-1 signaling in the etiology of asthma, reinforcing the candidacy of IL1R1 antagonists for drug repurposing.

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

MUSE: Agentic 3D Scene Authoring via Memory-Grounded Incremental Requirement Satisfaction

Text-driven 3D scene generation is a promising technique for digital content creation, embodied AI simulation, and interactive design, yet practical workflows often require refining, extending, or correcting existing scenes while preserving non-target content. Existing methods can produce realistic and structurally plausible scenes, but they generally lack editability with requirement-level state tracking, so part-level failures often lead to full-scene regeneration or manual intervention. To tackle this challenge, we formulate controllable 3D scene authoring as incremental requirement satisfaction, unifying construction and editing. In this paper, we present MUSE, a memory-grounded multi-agent framework in which an Architect compiles instructions into structured requirements, a Sculptor executes local scene operations, and an Inspector verifies each step while updating Working, Scene, and Skill Memory. To evaluate requirement-level controllability and preservation-aware editing, we introduce AuthorBench, offering 145 constrained construction cases and a 1,584-case preservation-aware editing pool paired with external structured checks. On full construction cases, MUSE improves All-Goal success from 37.9 to 80.7 and surface-constraint fulfillment from 35.0 to 92.6 over the strongest baseline. On a stratified 240-case editing test split, MUSE achieves 49.6 All-Goal success, 99.9 preservation rate, and only 0.6 unintended change rate. Beyond automated metrics, human evaluations on compared local-editing baselines support stronger alignment with user intent, and downstream navigation-proxy tests indicate stronger spatial stability. Combined with ablations validating our memory designs, these results establish MUSE as an effective framework for controllable 3D scene authoring.

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

Mana: Dexterous Manipulation of Articulated Tools

Articulated tool manipulation remains a major challenge in dexterous robotics due to the need to coordinate internal degrees of freedom and contact-rich interactions. While prior work has largely focused on rigid objects, articulated tool use remains underexplored because of its physical complexity and the difficulty of learning functional grasping and manipulation policies. We present Mana (Manipulation Animator), a general sim-to-real framework that reinterprets dexterous manipulation as an animation problem. Inspired by computer animation, Mana employs a coarse-to-fine pipeline that transforms procedurally-generated grasp keyframes into manipulation trajectories through motion planning and reinforcement learning. The data generation process is largely automatic, requiring only a few mouse clicks to specify functional affordances (

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Is ChatGPT Fair for Recommendation? Evaluating Fairness in Large Language Model Recommendation

The remarkable achievements of Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to the emergence of a novel recommendation paradigm – Recommendation via LLM (RecLLM). Nevertheless, it is important to note that LLMs may contain social prejudices, and therefore, the fairness of recommendations made by RecLLM requires further investigation. To avoid the potential risks of RecLLM, it is imperative to evaluate the fairness of RecLLM with respect to various sensitive attributes on the user side. Due to the differences between the RecLLM paradigm and the traditional recommendation paradigm, it is problematic to directly use the fairness benchmark of traditional recommendation. To address the dilemma, we propose a novel benchmark called Fairness of Recommendation via LLM (FaiRLLM). This benchmark comprises carefully crafted metrics and a dataset that accounts for eight sensitive attributes1 in two recommendation scenarios: music and movies. By utilizing our FaiRLLM benchmark, we conducted an evaluation of ChatGPT and discovered that it still exhibits unfairness to some sensitive attributes when generating recommendations. Our code and dataset can be found at https://github.com/jizhi-zhang/FaiRLLM.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

SuCo: Sufficiency-guided Continuous Adaptive Reasoning

Despite remarkable performance on complex tasks, Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) often generate excessively long Chain-of-Thoughts (CoT), inflating computational costs even for simple queries. Existing efforts to mitigate this inefficiency typically rely on discrete reasoning modes or fixed budget tiers, lacking a principled criterion of when reasoning is sufficient. In this work, we introduce Minimal Sufficient CoT (MSC), defined as the shortest prefix of a CoT trajectory which is adequate for producing the correct answer. We empirically show that MSC not only reduces reasoning tokens, but also improves accuracy across difficulty levels. Building on MSC, we propose Sufficiency-guided Continuous Adaptive Reasoning (SuCo), a two-stage training framework for autonomous reasoning control along a continuous spectrum. In stage 1, MSC-Aligned Fine-Tuning (MFT) constructs MSC data using problem-adaptive sufficiency thresholds that naturally scale with question difficulty, then fine-tunes the model to internalize concise yet sufficient reasoning patterns. In stage 2, Sufficiency-Aware Policy Optimization (SAPO) further optimizes the model through reinforcement learning with dynamic complexity tracking and sufficiency-aware rewards that penalize both over- and under-thinking. Extensive experiments across mathematics, code, and science benchmarks show that SuCo consistently achieves improvements in both accuracy and reasoning efficiency.

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

Emergent retokenization symmetry in large language models: phenomenology and applications

Tokenization introduces representational redundancy: under a fixed token vocabulary, every byte string admits many valid token encodings, or segmentations, that decode to the same surface string. However, given a prompt, most language model tokenizers break this representational symmetry by returning a canonical segmentation. Training only on canonical segmentations should influence inference behavior, and there is little reason to expect models to respect segmentation symmetry on downstream tasks. We find that this symmetry partially emerges during training. Here, we probe this emergent symmetry through experiments testing token compositional understanding, representation diversity, and task focused benchmark performance. We primarily use retokenization – replacing a prompt's canonical tokenization with an alternative segmentation while preserving its bytes exactly. Relative to other prompt perturbations, retokenization is unusually clean because it isolates segmentation effects without changing syntax, semantics or surface form. We use retokenization to study sensitivity and robustness to semantically identical input representations across pretraining and post-training. Moreover, this partial retokenization symmetry suggests a distinct inference-time sampling axis. While temperature sampling generates diverse outputs from the model using its next-token probability distribution, retokenization generates diversity from the model's internal computations through semantically equivalent input representations. We find that while this retokenization sampling strategy can hurt performance on easy problems, it can also recover solutions that conventional sampling does not find. Overall, our work presents retokenization as a simple yet powerful probe of large language models, shedding light on compositional understanding and prompt sensitivity, and offering a novel sampling strategy.

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

Energy-Modulated Time-Asymmetric Spontaneous Collapse: Forward-Backward Dynamics from Stochastic Ito Reversal and Bright Solitons

arXiv:2606.06452v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present a rigorous theoretical framework for symmetry breaking and quantum irreversibility arising from stochastic Ito field reversal within a cubic-quintic nonlinear Schrodinger equation (CQ-NLSE) formalism. Starting from three physically motivated considerations, forward and backward nonlinear stochastic differential equations are derived via the Ito calculus. Kinematic time-reversal is shown to be fundamentally incompatible with the Ito stochastic structure, yielding the universal asymmetry-coupling parameter of 2/3. An energy-driven collapse operator proportional to the product of noise strength, local probability density, and excitation energy squared is introduced, amplifying the collapse in high-density, high-excitation regions. Exactly bright soliton solutions are obtained for a quasi-one-dimensional BEC of attractive Li-7 atoms, with forward and backward amplitude ratio of 1.870. Heat map analysis of the parameter planes reveals that the forward collapse operator grows monotonically in time while the backward counterpart decays, achieving a ratio approximately 1030, sharply distinguishing this framework from conventional symmetric collapse models.

12.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Population-associated molecular variation in histologically normal breast tissue is context-dependent and associated with distinct transcriptional states

Population-associated molecular variation in breast tissue may contribute to differences in tissue biology and disease susceptibility, yet the extent to which such variation is shaped by underlying tissue states remains unclear. Here, we performed RNA-seq and lipidomic profiling of histologically normal breast tissue samples from African American (AA) and Caucasian White (CW) individuals, followed by conceptual integration of the resulting transcriptomic and lipidomic patterns. Unsupervised analysis revealed two distinct baseline transcriptional states (G1 and G2) that defined the primary axis of molecular variation across the cohort and corresponded to epithelial-enriched (G1) and vascular-enriched (G2) tissue contexts as determined by cell-type deconvolution. Global comparisons between AA and CW samples showed minimal transcriptomic differences, with only a single gene reaching significance after multiple testing correction. However, when stratified by baseline tissue state, 191 genes were differentially expressed within G1, with coordinated upregulation of extracellular matrix organization and proliferative/cytoskeletal processes in AA samples. These patterns were consistently supported across multiple enrichment approaches. No comparable population-associated differences were observed within G2. Lipidomic analyses showed partial but non-significant trends consistent with transcriptomic structure, suggesting that lipid variation provides complementary but limited support for baseline molecular differences, likely reflecting constraints of bulk tissue composition. Together, these findings suggest that population-associated molecular differences in normal breast tissue are context-dependent and emerge within specific baseline transcriptional states, where distinct biological programs can coexist and be differentially modulated. These findings highlight the importance of tissue heterogeneity in shaping molecular variation and its potential relevance to disease-associated tissue states.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Do Thinking Tokens Help with Safety?

Today's reasoning models use thinking tokens to attain stronger performance on benchmarks than their instruction-tuned counterparts. It is also generally believed that this more "deliberative" mode should improve alignment and safety, by providing the model a safe space to consider whether its planned answer to a request violates its safety principles. We present evidence that this intuition is not always correct. Across frontier open-weight reasoning models spanning GPT-OSS, Qwen, Olmo, and Phi families, we find that the eventual refusal/compliance outcome is already strongly predictable via a trained head on the first token's hidden representation ($0.84$-$0.95$ AUROC and $\sim88\%$ balanced accuracy for predicting refusal/compliance) before any visible thinking. The thinking process turns out to be more akin to prefix completion than to deliberative revision, with the final outcome rarely changing after the first $\sim20\%$ of thinking, despite giving the appearance of deliberation at the text level ($\sim74\%$ of text-level deliberations occur when the response distribution is already locked to one refusal/compliance side). We also find that existing inference-time and training-based safety interventions, despite being motivated by the goal of inducing deliberation, largely shift model behavior toward over-refusal while suppressing already-scarce deliberation signals. Our results suggest that safety behavior in current reasoning models is much less deliberative than commonly assumed, and highlight the need for methods that induce real safety deliberation.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Two-Electron Effects Extend High-Harmonic Generation into the keV Regime

arXiv:2606.24765v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Two-electron processes can generate high harmonics beyond the conventional single-active-electron cutoff. Motivated by recent experimental evidence of an extended secondary plateau in the helium high-harmonic spectrum [S. Wang et al, Optica, (2023); S. Wang et al, In Print in Nature Photon., (2026)], we present a two-electron generalisation of the strong-field approximation. We analyse the resulting expressions using the saddle-point method and determine the extended cutoff. We find good agreement with classical predictions of cutoff scalings of $4.7$ and $5.5$ times the ponderomotive energy, which significantly exceed the established single-electron scaling of 3.17. We calculate high-harmonic spectra generated via a two-electron process in helium atoms driven by an intense few-cycle infrared laser pulse. Our results demonstrate that the harmonic spectrum extends far beyond the water window, reaching photon energies up to $\approx 1.2\,\mathrm{keV}$ in the soft x-ray region. The large spectral bandwidth can support the generation of sub-attosecond soft x-ray pulses, which are of particular interest for probing ultrafast dynamics across matter, including applications in core-level spectroscopy and biological imaging.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Witnessing Spin-Orbital Entanglement using Resonant Inelastic X-Ray Scattering

arXiv:2512.06718v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Entanglement plays a central role in quantum technologies, yet its characterization and control in materials remain challenging. Recent developments in spectrum-based entanglement witnesses have enabled new strategies for quantifying many-body entanglement in macroscopic materials. Here, we develop a protocol for detecting spin-orbital entanglement using experiment-accessible resonant inelastic x-ray scattering (RIXS). Central to our approach is the construction of a Hermitian generator from experimentally measurable spectra, which allows us to compute the quantum Fisher information (QFI) available in spin–orbital systems. The resulting QFI provides upper bounds for $k$-producible states and thus serves as a robust witness of spin-orbital entanglement. To account for realistic experimental limitations, we further extend our framework to include relaxed QFI bounds applicable to measurements lacking full polarization resolution.

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

COGNITION: From Evaluation to Defense against Multimodal LLM CAPTCHA Solvers

arXiv:2512.02318v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper studies how multimodal large language models (MLLMs) undermine the security guarantees of visual CAPTCHA. We identify the attack surface where an adversary can cheaply automate CAPTCHA solving using off-the-shelf models. We evaluate 7 representative MLLMs on 18 real-world CAPTCHA task types, measuring single-shot accuracy, success under limited retries, end-to-end latency, and per-solve cost. We further validate our findings through a supplemental external dataset and an adaptive-attacker setting with session memory, while also analyzing the impact of task-specific prompt engineering and few-shot demonstrations on solver effectiveness. We reveal that MLLMs can reliably solve recognition-oriented and low-interaction CAPTCHA tasks at human-like cost and latency, whereas tasks requiring fine-grained localization, multi-step spatial reasoning, or cross-frame consistency remain significantly harder for current models. By examining the reasoning traces of such MLLMs, we investigate the underlying mechanisms of why models succeed/fail on specific CAPTCHA puzzles and use these insights to derive defense-oriented guidelines for selecting and strengthening CAPTCHA tasks. To validate these principles, we present a proof-of-concept by hardening a vulnerable CAPTCHA type using our guidelines. We demonstrate that incorporating fine-grained localization and implicit counting reduces the success rate of state-of-the-art MLLMs from over 95\% to 0\%, confirming that structural changes can effectively mitigate the threat. We conclude by emphasizing the urgent need for CAPTCHA redesign as MLLM capabilities increasingly threaten existing defenses. Code Availability (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20406852).

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

PianoKontext: Expressive Performance Rendering from Deadpan Context

arXiv:2606.12282v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Expressive performance rendering (EPR) aims to generate realistic performances constrained on sequences of notes. However, flow matching audio editing models manipulate only synchronized music samples of the same duration, limiting their understanding of expressive timing. We introduce PianoKontext, a flow matching rendering model for classical piano music that generates variable-length performances in the latent space of a pretrained Music2Latent model. We synthesize MIDI scores into deadpan audio and employ Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) in the latent space to construct paired data for training. The aligned embeddings are concatenated in DiT blocks, allowing for a simple and effective learning of the dependencies between the score and performances. Audio samples are available at our demo page: https://realfolkcode.github.io/pianokontext_demo/.

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

Optimal Transport for Machine Learners

arXiv:2505.06589v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern machine learning repeatedly manipulates probability measures: empirical datasets, generated samples, latent distributions, class-conditional laws, particle systems, weights of wide networks and attention patterns. Optimal transport is useful in this setting because it compares such objects by asking how mass should move. It therefore combines a statistically meaningful notion of discrepancy with a geometry of interpolation, dual certificates and variational dynamics. This makes OT a common language for losses, generative modeling, domain adaptation, robust learning, barycenters, gradient flows and mean-field descriptions of learning algorithms. This book presents the main OT techniques with these machine-learning uses in mind. It starts from finite assignment and the Monge map viewpoint, passes to Kantorovich couplings and dual potentials, and then explains the algorithmic ideas that make transport usable: linear programming, semi-discrete cells, Sinkhorn scaling and low-dimensional projections. The same objects are then reused as a geometry of measures, giving Wasserstein distances, barycenters, gradient flows, dynamic formulations and Gaussian/Bures formulas. The final chapters emphasize the variants most relevant to modern ML: divergences and adversarial losses, entropic and unbalanced relaxations, robust or spectral ground geometries, Gromov and quantum extensions, and transport-based views of generative models, mean-field networks and attention dynamics. The goal is to keep the mathematics explicit while exposing the computational and geometric intuitions needed to turn OT into a working toolbox for machine learners.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Beyond the Training Distribution: Evaluating Predictions Under Distribution Shift and Selection Bias

arXiv:2606.14506v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Understanding how a prediction model will perform in a new environment before deployment is essential to preventing harm when algorithms inform decision-making. Two common sources of model performance degradation are (i) covariate shift, where the target covariate distribution differs from the source, and (ii) selective labels, where the observability of outcomes depends on historical decisions. We study pre-deployment model evaluation under the joint presence of covariate shift and labeling of outcomes selectively based on observed features. In particular, we present a double machine learning procedure for estimating the target risk of an arbitrary black-box prediction model under a general loss function. We show identification of this estimand under standard assumptions and derive a bias-corrected estimator based on the influence function of the target risk. Finally, we evaluate our estimator through experiments using the eICU electronic health records database, showing that it tracks the true target risk more accurately than methods that address either selective labels or covariate shift alone, as well as baselines that combine standard plug-in approaches.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

From Sounds to Scenes: A Benchmark for Evaluating Context-Aware Auditory Scene Understanding in Large Audio Language Models

arXiv:2606.25391v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) have achieved remarkable progress in audio perceptual tasks across individual acoustic layers, including speech, sound, and music. However, existing benchmarks predominantly evaluate these layers in isolation, overlooking the complex contextual relationships that arise when multiple acoustic sources co-occur in real-world auditory scenes. Real-world auditory interpretation requires Context-Aware Auditory Scene Understanding (CASU): the ability to comprehend the holistic scene by integrating sound layers. To evaluate this capability, we introduce the CASU benchmark, which assesses whether Audio LLMs can interpret auditory scenes composed of speech, acoustic events (e.g., announcements), and background environments (e.g., traffic), and reason about the logical relationships between these layers. We propose a scalable pipeline for constructing time-accurate, semi-synthetic audio streams by composing real-world scene sounds with synthetic speech. Building on this data, we design four tasks that probe scene understanding: contextual question answering, entity extraction from the scene, speaker role inference, and counterfactual reasoning where scene is manipulated. Experiments across multiple LALMs demonstrate that effective auditory scene understanding requires integration over all auditory layers, rather than reliance on speech or sound alone, underscoring the necessity of CASU for advancing complex audio understanding in LALMs.

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

Energy-Conserved Neural Pipelines: Attenuating Error Propagation in Modular Neural Networks via Physical Conservation Constraints

arXiv:2606.11341v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modular neural network pipelines suffer from error compounding: noise at any module boundary propagates and potentially amplifies through subsequent modules. We introduce energy conservation as a hard physical constraint on inter-module information flow. Activation energy (the squared L2 norm of feature vectors) is enforced to be exactly preserved at every module boundary. Unlike soft energy penalties, conservation is an inviolable law: the network may redistribute energy across neurons but cannot create or destroy it. Four experiments on CIFAR-10 demonstrate: (1) conservation retains 77.4% of clean accuracy at noise sigma=0.2, versus 35.1% for baselines and 30.9% for energy-penalized models (p

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Erased, but Not Gone: Output Forgetting Is Not True Forgetting

arXiv:2606.25001v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine unlearning (MU) is commonly judged by output forgetting, such as low forget-set accuracy or reduced logit-level membership inference. But if output-level success can coexist with retraining-inconsistent residuals in representation space, what kind of forgetting are current evaluations actually certifying? We study this question through retraining-consistent representation forgetting, using the retrained model (i.e., trained from scratch without the forget data) as an operational reference for correct forgetting. Across multiple unlearning methods, datasets, and models, our theoretical analysis and empirical results show that standard output-level evaluation can systematically overestimate the success of unlearning. Under this stronger lens, current methods often appear forgotten at the output layer while exhibiting a structured mismatch relative to retraining. They partially align with retraining on forget samples, remain more inconsistent on retain samples, and leave residual discrepancy concentrated along retraining-related directions rather than diffuse in representation space. This structured mismatch is characterized by forget/retain asymmetry, directional mismatch, and concentrated residuals along retraining-related directions. These results suggest that current MU is often evaluated for apparent forgetting rather than retraining-consistent forgetting. More broadly, retraining reveals what output forgetting hides.

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

Temporal Self-Imitation Learning

arXiv:2606.19752v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-horizon robot manipulation policies trained with reward shaping can still exploit dense rewards through inefficient interaction, while rare efficient behaviors may be forgotten during training. We argue that temporal efficiency itself provides a powerful and underutilized source of self-supervision for reinforcement learning. We introduce Temporal Self-Imitation Learning (TSIL), a reinforcement learning framework that mines temporally efficient successful trajectories generated during learning and converts them into reusable supervision for future policy improvement. TSIL progressively refines learning using configuration-conditioned adaptive temporal targets derived from fast successful trajectories, while preserving and replaying efficient behaviors through efficiency-weighted self-imitation learning. Across 15 distinct long-horizon manipulation tasks, TSIL consistently improves learning efficiency, task-completion efficiency, revisitation of fast successful behaviors, and robustness to unstable training conditions. More broadly, our results suggest that the temporal structure of successful behavior itself provides a scalable self-supervisory signal for reinforcement learning beyond manually engineered reward shaping alone.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Quantum turbulence in the many-body regime

arXiv:2606.23822v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We discuss phenomenology associated with turbulent hydrodynamics in quantum fluids from a condensed-matter perspective. We begin with weakly-interacting superfluids, often modeled by a mean-field theory governed by the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. Considering the effect of quantum fluctuations beyond the mean-field approximation, we propose a study of many-body quantum effects in turbulent hydrodynamics, especially near zero temperature. We motivate examples of quantum many-body systems where such effects may be uncovered. These include bosons confined in a periodic potential in low spatial dimensions (one and two), and the associated quantum critical point of the superfluid-insulator transition, realized in present-day ultracold-atom and quantum computing platforms. We conclude by listing a set of (open) questions that may be answered using modern quantum many-body techniques. This article is part of the theme issue 'Frontiers of turbulence and statistical physics'.

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

Mood-Aware Music Recommendation: Integrating User Affective Signals into Ranking Systems

arXiv:2606.13858v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recommendation systems are essential in modern music streaming platforms due to the vast amount of available content. While collaborative filtering is widely used to suggest items based on the preferences of others with similar patterns, it performs poorly in domains where user-item interactions are sparse, such as music. Content-based filtering is an alternative approach that examines the qualities of the items themselves. Genre, instrumentation, and lyrics have been explored; however, relatively little attention has been given to emotion recognition. Since a user's emotional state strongly influences their music choice, incorporating mood signals offers a promising direction for personalization. In this work, we propose a mood-conditioned ranking framework that integrates user affective signals into the recommendation process via softmax-based sampling in the energy-valence space. We evaluate the approach via single-blind experiments in which participants compare recommendations from the proposed system against a baseline. The results indicate improved perceived recommendation quality, providing preliminary evidence for the effectiveness of incorporating mood-based inputs into music recommendations.