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

DVD: Discrete Voxel Diffusion for 3D Generation and Editing

We introduce Discrete Voxel Diffusion (DVD), a discrete diffusion framework to generate, assess, and edit sparse voxels for SLat (Structured LATent) based 3D generative pipelines. Although discrete diffusion has not generally displaced continuous diffusion in image-like generation, we show that it can be an effective first-stage prior for sparse voxel scaffolds. By treating voxel occupancy as a native discrete variable, DVD avoids continuous-to-discrete thresholding and provides a simple framework for voxel generation, uncertainty estimation, and editing. Beyond quality gains, DVD provides more interpretable generation dynamics through explicit categorical modeling. Furthermore, we leverage the predictive entropy as a robust uncertainty metric to identify ambiguous voxel regions and complicated samples, facilitating tasks such as data filtering and quality assessment. Finally, we propose a lightweight fine-tuning strategy using block-structured perturbation patterns. This approach empowers the model to inpaint and edit voxels within a single sampling round, requiring negligible auxiliary computation and no additional model evaluations. Code is available at https://github.com/TeCai/DVD.

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

Reasoning as Pattern Matching: Shared Mechanisms in Human and LLM Everyday Reasoning

arXiv:2606.13607v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When large language models (LLMs) fail to generalize or make haphazard errors in reasoning, it is often taken as evidence that LLMs are not truly reasoning, but rather performing a kind of pattern matching. The implication is that people's behavior does not exhibit the same types of failures because human reasoning uses principled and abstract world models. We evaluate human participants and 25 LLMs on their ability to engage in common-sense reasoning about a variety of everyday situations and observe similar patterns of errors in both people and models. We then identify the set of attention heads driving LLM responses and find that these heads implement a form of pattern-matching. These attention heads allow us to predict seemingly inexplicable reasoning errors in people caused by ostensibly irrelevant prompt details. Taken together, our results suggest that everyday causal reasoning in people and LLMs is more consistent with a form of pattern-matching than with abstract world models.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

When Helpfulness Overrides Causal Caution: Context-Dependent Suppression and Recovery in LLMs

arXiv:2606.24370v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into decision-support roles in business and policy contexts. While prior benchmark studies have primarily evaluated LLMs' causal reasoning capabilities, a more fundamental epistemic dimension has been overlooked: Causal Caution, defined as the propensity to refrain from causal judgment when empirical evidence is insufficient. This study examines the systematic suppression of Causal Caution that occurs when LLMs shift from academic to practical advisory contexts. Using an evaluation rubric inspired by Pearl's Causal Hierarchy (the PCH score), we conducted experiments on four high-performance LLMs – Claude Sonnet 4.6, Claude Opus 4.7, GPT 5.5, and Gemini 3.1 Pro – across 480 trials. Causal Caution maintenance rates were 91.7–100.0% in academic contexts but dropped to 6.7–18.3% in practical advisory contexts (Fisher's exact test, p < .001 across all models). Furthermore, when restricted to practical prompts requesting concrete recommendations or explanatory rationales, only 1 of 200 responses (0.5%) maintained Causal Caution. A brief self-correction prompt – "Please reconsider this judgment from the perspective of causal relationships" – restored the expression of Causal Caution to maintenance rates of 71.4–100.0% (McNemar's test, p < .001 across all models). These results suggest that helpfulness-oriented response patterns may suppress the expression of Causal Caution in practical advisory contexts, with important implications for organizational governance. The findings indicate that this suppression reflects context-dependent variation in expression rather than an underlying capability limitation, suggesting that multi-agent architectures that separate proposal generation from causal auditing may offer a promising governance design.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Predicting Chemotherapy Response from Staging Laparoscopy Images

Background: For patients with metastatic gastrointestinal cancers, chemotherapy resistance is a common phenomenon that, if known in advance, would allow for individualized treatment decisions. This study aimed to test the feasibility of developing a deep learning computer vision system that uses laparoscopy images depicting peritoneal surface metastases (i.e., capturing the in-vivo optical appearance of metastases as a summary of their molecular makeup) to predict whether a patient is resistant to standard chemotherapy. Methods: The retrospective observational feasibility study included 35 adult patients who underwent staging laparoscopy for non-colon gastrointestinal adenocarcinoma with biopsy-confirmed peritoneal surface metastases and who underwent chemotherapy as their only treatment modality. Chemotherapy resistance was determined based on each patient's observed cancer-specific survival after controlling for confounders. Results: Of 35 patients, 17 were assigned to the chemotherapy sensitive group and 18 to the chemotherapy resistant group. The study cohort provided 1010 laparoscopy image patches of 101 biopsy-confirmed metastases. A densely connected convolutional neural network with cross-validation provided the best results for correctly predicting chemotherapy resistance at the patient level (accuracy 0.80 (95%CI 0.63-0.92), sensitivity 0.72, specificity 0.88, AUC-ROC 0.78). Saliency maps demonstrated the system's trustworthiness. Conclusion: In this study, a prototype surgical computer vision system designed to determine chemotherapy resistance from operative images of peritoneal surface metastases demonstrated its technical feasibility. Further development and validation in a multi-institutional clinical study are pending.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Uncovering Insights of Compound Flooding with Data-Driven AI

arXiv:2506.04281v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Compound flooding, driven by nonlinear interactions between multiple hydrometeorological factors, poses a significant challenge to hazard prevention. Existing forecasting approaches, whether physics-based or data-driven, often emphasize temporal patterns while underexploring how multiple interacting factors jointly shape flood dynamics. To address this problem, we conduct a large-scale data-driven analysis of compound flooding in South Florida, a typical area for compound flooding, by integrating tidal conditions, rainfall, groundwater stage, and human water management activities. Our analysis reveals three key findings: (i) models that capture temporal dynamics alone fail to represent multi-factor interactions during compound events; (ii) subsurface saturation, as reflected by groundwater levels, emerges as a dominant predictor of flood severity, often outweighing immediate rainfall intensity in this porous coastal region; and (iii) the spatial state of surrounding monitoring stations within a finite effective radius provides critical causal context for flooding, while extending temporal history yields diminishing returns during extreme events. These findings suggest that compound flooding is governed more by spatially coupled system states than by long-term temporal dependencies, challenging rain-centric and sequence-dominated forecasting paradigms. By framing data-driven models as tools for scientific inquiry rather than prediction alone, this study offers new insights into the mechanisms of compound flooding and informs the design of more physically grounded early-warning systems for coastal environments. Our dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/AslanDing/SFBench.

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

Small moments of the sensitivity of polynomial threshold functions

arXiv:2606.16004v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In the first version of Chang, Slote, Volberg, and Zhang's paper [BSA_of_PTF], the authors modify a nice recursive approach due to Kane in [Correct_exponent_for_AS] where he bounded the average sensitivity of polynomial threshold functions. In [BSA_of_PTF] Kane's argument was adopted to estimate the boolean surface area of polynomial threshold function. The bridge is a combinatorial averaging lemma considering all balanced partitions. The lemma serves as a substitute for an additive property of average sensitivity. With the lemma, one can apply a Kane-type algorithm to derive a recurrence. Solving the recurrence then gives an upper bound of $e^{C_d \sqrt{\log n}}$ for the boolean surface area. In the second version of the same paper, the authors derive a polylog upper bound for BSA of PTFs. The difference is that they use a tail estimate for the sensitivity function. With the help of a polynomial restriction lemma in [poly_restriction] they sharpen the upper bound. It is noteworthy that when applying the polynomial restriction, each coordinate is put into each part independently with equal probability. As a result, a partition does not necessarily have equal-size blocks. In other words, it may not be balanced. In this note, we first investigate the effect of different partitioning. Second, we use the recursive method in the first version to derive a polylog upper bound for $\mathbb E[s(x)^{\eta}]$ where $\eta < 1/2$. It is interesting to note the phase transition that happens at $\eta=1/2$ in both versions of the proof (but in a completely different form). Section [PhaseTr-s] treats that.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Variable-Width Transformers

Scaling model size, specifically depth and width, has driven significant progress in transformer-based language models. However, most architectures maintain a constant width across all layers, allocating a fixed parameter and computation budget evenly despite different layers potentially playing distinct computational roles. In this work, we empirically investigate nonuniform capacity allocation across network depth by proposing a $\times$-shaped >

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

RecourseBench: A Modular Framework for Reproducible Algorithmic Recourse Evaluation

arXiv:2606.16113v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Algorithmic recourse methods provide counterfactual explanations that inform individuals of the actions required to overturn an unfavorable model decision. Despite rapid methodological progress, principled comparison remains elusive; existing frameworks are often difficult to extend and lack both interoperability and systematic verification that integrated methods faithfully reproduce their originally reported results. We introduce RecourseBench, a unified evaluation framework built around three commitments namely, modularity, reproducibility, and interactivity. The framework decomposes the pipeline into five fully decoupled layers – Data, Preprocessing, Model, Recourse Method, and Evaluation – governed by abstract interfaces and a dynamic registry. To address the reproducibility gap in prior benchmarks, we introduce a four-tier classification system in which every integrated method is validated by an automated test suite against its originally reported results. We further provide an interactive web interface for flexible, configuration-driven comparison across methods, datasets, and model architectures. Our framework currently integrates 28 state-of-the-art recourse methods and, to our knowledge, constitutes the first recourse benchmark to explicitly enforce method-level reproducibility through automated, quantitative testing.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

RoPE-Aware Bit Allocation for KV-Cache Quantization

Existing low-bit KV-cache quantizers often treat each cached key as a flat vector. Under RoPE, however, a key's contribution to a future attention logit decomposes into a position-dependent sum over two-dimensional frequency blocks. This makes key-cache quantization a block-wise bit-allocation problem: high-energy RoPE blocks are more sensitive to quantization error and should receive more bits. We introduce Block-GTQ, a RoPE-aware bit allocator for key-cache quantization built on TurboQuant-MSE(TQ-MSE). For each layer and KV head, Block-GTQ computes a label-free energy score for each RoPE block and greedily allocates integer bit widths by marginal gain. Under matched K/V bit budgets, Block-GTQ better preserves RoPE query-key logits on a ten-model diagnostic panel, cutting per-layer MAE by 32-80% at 2 and 3 b/dim K-only quantization and winning all 367/367 layer comparisons against uniform TQ-MSE. These fidelity gains translate to stronger downstream long-context retrieval, understanding, and reasoning. At K2V2 on Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, Block-GTQ raises the six-task NIAH average from 70.6 to 97.4, and the LongBench-EN average from 36.87 to 53.31. On AIME 2024/2025 with DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B, without an fp16 recent-key buffer, Block-GTQ at K3V2 scores 51.7/37.5, close to fp16's 54.2/37.9, whereas uniform TQ-MSE collapses to 0.0/0.0. We further implement a packed-cache serving path. On a single H800 GPU with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct, packed K3V3 achieves 3.24x KV-cache compression with fp16-comparable quality, runs 1.34x faster than fp16 FlashAttention2 at 128K context, reduces peak memory from 56.31 GB to 19.85 GB, and remains feasible at 256K and 512K where fp16 OOMs. Code is available at https://github.com/JIA-Lab-research/blockgtq.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Irresponsible AI: big tech's influence on AI research and associated impacts

arXiv:2512.03077v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The accelerated development, deployment and adoption of artificial intelligence systems has been fuelled by the increasing presence of big tech in the AI field. This trend has been accompanied by growing ethical concerns and intensified societal and environmental impacts. This position paper argues that irresponsible AI development is strongly driven by big tech's influence and involvement in the field. First, we examine the growing and disproportionate influence of big tech in AI research and argue that its drive for scaling and general-purpose systems is fundamentally at odds with the responsible, ethical, and sustainable development of AI. Second, we review key current environmental and societal negative impacts of AI and trace their connections to big tech's influence. Third, we discuss the underlying economic forces driving big tech's actions. Finally, as a call to action, we invite AI researchers to counter big tech's influence in irresponsible AI development through strategies that build on the responsibility of implicated actors and collective action.

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

Generative Molecular Design with Steerable and Granular Synthesizability Control

arXiv:2505.08774v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Designing molecules that are both property-optimal and readily synthesizable is a central challenge in drug discovery. Existing works that do consider synthesizability can jointly output predicted synthesis routes for generated molecules. However, there has been minimal attention in addressing the ease of synthesis and with flexibility to incorporate desired reaction constraints. On the other hand, virtual screening searches for commercially available compounds, but imposes challenges when scaling to ultra-large (billion-size and beyond) chemical spaces. Here, we propose a generative design framework that unifies synthesis-constrained molecular design and ultra-large-scale virtual screening through steerable and granular synthesizability control. Generated molecules satisfy arbitrary multi-parameter optimization objectives with predicted synthesis routes satisfying mix-and-match constraints: including or avoiding certain reactions, incorporating specific building blocks, and minimizing synthesis route length. In an end-to-end in-house campaign targeting BRD4, we designed molecules synthesizable with specific selected reactions and building blocks, synthesized all six selected compounds, and identified two micromolar binders. We further demonstrate that reaction control enables efficient navigation of ultra-large make-on-demand chemical spaces to identify property-optimal candidates. By applying our framework to Chemspace's Freedom 4.0 make-on-demand space (142 billion molecules), we generated ~320k molecules (0.00023% of the library) on a single consumer-grade GPU (with only 8 GB GPU memory) and identified a micromolar Wee1 binder amongst 60 synthesized candidates. The single unified framework thus enables generating novel synthesizable molecules and retrieving catalogue-ready candidates, offering a flexible solution to mitigating the synthesizability bottleneck.

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

Selective Capability Unlearning in End-to-End Spoken Language Understanding

Modern spoken language understanding (SLU) systems are increasingly deployed in real-world settings, where specific functionalities may need to be removed due to policy or safety constraints. In SLU, a functionality corresponds to an intent and its associated slot-generation behavior. However, in autoregressive models, suppressing a target intent does not eliminate the conditional mapping that generates slots conditioned on that intent. When the intent prefix is externally supplied, the model can reconstruct the original intent-slot structure. We identify this structural failure as capability persistence. We propose \underline{Binding \underline{S}ubspace (BSU)}, a representation-level framework that isolates and attenuates intent-conditioned directions underlying this mapping. Across SLU benchmarks, BSU substantially reduces forced-prefix recoverability while preserving retained performance.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

FreshRetailNet-LT: A Stockout-Annotated Censored Demand Dataset for Latent Demand Recovery and Forecasting in Fresh Retail

arXiv:2505.16319v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate demand estimation is critical for the retail business in guiding the inventory and pricing policies of perishable products. However, it faces fundamental challenges from censored sales data during stockouts, where unobserved demand creates systemic policy biases. Existing datasets lack the temporal resolution and annotations needed to address this censoring effect. To fill this gap, we present FreshRetailNet-50K, the first large-scale benchmark for censored demand estimation. It comprises 50,000 store-product time series of detailed hourly sales data from 898 stores in 18 major cities, encompassing 863 perishable SKUs meticulously annotated for stockout events. The hourly stock status records unique to this dataset, combined with rich contextual covariates, including promotional discounts, precipitation, and temporal features, enable innovative research beyond existing solutions. We demonstrate one such use case of two-stage demand modeling: first, we reconstruct the latent demand during stockouts using precise hourly annotations. We then leverage the recovered demand to train robust demand forecasting models in the second stage. Experimental results show that this approach achieves a 2.73% improvement in prediction accuracy while reducing the systematic demand underestimation from 7.37% to near-zero bias. With unprecedented temporal granularity and comprehensive real-world information, FreshRetailNet-50K opens new research directions in demand imputation, perishable inventory optimization, and causal retail analytics. The unique annotation quality and scale of the dataset address long-standing limitations in retail AI, providing immediate solutions and a platform for future methodological innovation. The data (https://huggingface.co/datasets/Dingdong-Inc/FreshRetailNet-50K) and code (https://github.com/Dingdong-Inc/frn-50k-baseline}) are openly released.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Which Speech Representation Better Matches Text-Native Reasoning? A Study of Speech-Text Alignment on Frame Rate and Representation

Spoken dialogue models typically start from text LLM backbones, yet reasoning often degrades when conditioning on speech instead of text. We attribute part of this modality gap to a temporal-granularity mismatch: speech tokens are temporally redundant and far longer than text under matched semantics, diluting per-token semantic density and weakening text-native reasoning dynamics. We study speech token design as a representation selection problem and sweep frame rates under a frozen LLM backbone with a fixed information rate. To make low frame rates feasible, we introduce factorized FSQ and a lightweight non-autoregressive audio LM head, scaling capacity to nearly 300\,bits/frame without sacrificing efficient prediction. With the bottleneck removed, we sweep frame rates (50$\rightarrow$2.08\,Hz) and alignment depth, and observe a consistent best regime for speech QA at 4.17\,Hz with intermediate-layer representation alignment.

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

Gender Bias in LLM Hiring Decisions: Evidence from a Japanese Context and Evaluation of Mitigation Strategies

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in hiring workflows, yet most research on gender bias in LLM hiring decisions has focused on English-language, Western-format resumes. This study examines whether pro-female gender bias extends to a Japanese corporate context and evaluates two practical mitigation strategies. Using a counterfactual resume design with 60 Japanese rirekisho-format resumes, 12 name pairs selected on linguistically grounded gender-signal criteria, and five state-of-the-art LLMs (Claude Sonnet 4.6, GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Llama 3.3 70B), we conducted 43,200 API calls across baseline, prompt instruction, and privacy filter conditions. A crossed random-effects linear mixed model confirms a significant pro-female bias across all five models, replicating Western findings in a non-Western context. A prompt-level gender-neutrality instruction produces no meaningful reduction in bias. A name-reliance analysis formally identifies the candidate name as the primary gender channel: removing the name from the prompt reduces the female effect by nearly its full magnitude. An unexpected incompatibility between the privacy filter and GPT-4o's content safety filter, resulting in a 42% refusal rate, highlights a practical deployment challenge for name anonymization in LLM-assisted recruitment pipelines.

16.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Power-law hypothesis and (un)fairness of PageRank on undirected multi-type PAMs

arXiv:2606.19583v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The preferential attachment model (PAM) describes the sequential growth of a network based on the "rich-get-richer" principle. Several versions of it have become established for modeling, e.g., citation networks, capturing a power-law degree distribution. Directed versions of the preferential attachment model where the edges are directed from the new to the old vertices have been the subject of extensive research. They have been shown to exhibit remarkable properties such as heavier tails for the limiting graph-normalized PageRank than for the in-degrees. By contrast, for the undirected version, we recently showed that PageRank has similar tails as the degree. In the present paper, we discuss the PageRank asymptotics for a multi-type version of the undirected PAM (here vertices have different colors), complementing previous results of Antunes, Bhamidi, Banerjee and Pipiras on the asymptotics of PageRank on similar directed multi-type or colored PAMs. Our studies are motivated by the aim to go beyond the rigid rule of edge orientation in directed preferential attachment models. As the main result, for the case of a finite set of colors, we show that the power-law hypothesis for PageRank is fulfilled also for the colored undirected PAM, where, by contrast to the directed case, the power-law exponent is color-dependent for some choices of the initial color distribution and the attractiveness function. For the specific case of a two-type model, we discuss implications of our results on fairness in sampling underrepresented nodes from the network.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Variants of the Quantum Phase Operator for the Harmonic Oscillator

arXiv:2606.24913v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce and study quantum phase operators associated with the Quantum Harmonic Oscillator (QHO). We show that these operators are trace-class perturbations of the Susskind-Glogower operators and examine their mathematical and physical properties. The construction is motivated by the physically relevant two-phase case.

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

RT-VLA: Real-Time Vision-Language-Action Models via Knowledge Distillation

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown strong potential for end-to-end autonomous driving by jointly modeling visual perception, language reasoning, explainability and action prediction. However, their large vision-language backbones and reasoning modules introduce substantial inference latency and thereby prevent their deployment in the unforgiving reality of the road networks. We propose RT-VLA, a lightweight, distilled VLA model that transfers the driving and reasoning capabilities of the state-of-the-art SimLingo model into a compact student through multi-level supervised distillation. RT-VLA preserves language-based reasoning and supports post-hoc explanation through offline language analysis of safety-critical driving moments without adding latency to real-time control. Compared to the SimLingo teacher, RT-VLA maintains competitive closed-loop driving and language reasoning performance while reducing inference time by 44.8X in vision-only mode and 7.9X in vision+language mode. These results suggest that supervised distillation is a practical approach for building real-time, explainable VLA-style autonomous driving models.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Halo-Independent Quantum Sensor Probes of Low-Velocity Dark Matter

arXiv:2606.25129v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a halo-independent framework for sub-GeV dark matter (DM) direct detection using quantum sensors with sub-eV energy thresholds. Such detectors enable access to low DM velocities and may be sensitive to departures from the Standard Halo Model that are challenging to probe with conventional direct DM detection experiments. The method expresses the DM scattering event rate in terms of a detector and particle model-dependent response function, and a universal halo function common to all experiments to be determined from data. This allows the local DM velocity distribution to be constrained. As representative implementations, we consider TES (Al) and MKID (TiN)-like sensors and show that their differing material responses probe complementary regimes of the DM velocity distribution. Applying the framework to mock data derived from several benchmark local halo models, we demonstrate how the assumed halo function could be reconstructed. This framework demonstrates the potential of quantum sensors as a new avenue for mapping the local DM velocity distribution.

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

Definitional alignment before capability alignment: a Design-Science framework for adjudicating claims about AGI

arXiv:2606.12713v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Claims that artificial general intelligence has already arrived and claims that it remains decades away are often defended from overlapping evidence. "AGI" lacks a single shared and stable referent and competing operationalizations can return different verdicts on the same system. This article treats that under-specification as a design and governance problem. Following Design Science Research Methodology, it develops DAF-AGI, a second-order conceptual artifact with two coupled components: five ordinal criteria for assessing the adjudicative fitness of candidate definitions and a structured governance audit of authorship, interest, certification, external verification and revision authority. The artifact is demonstrated on five prominent measurement families and one deflationary boundary position in a documented corpus and then stress-tested against a stylized strong arrival claim: that current generative systems constitute AGI because they outperform a well-educated adult on many cognitive tasks. On evidence from the cited 2024-2025 sources, the claim was certifiable only under a performance-based operationalization; capability-ontology, psychometric and skill-acquisition approaches did not certify it, the economic family remains indeterminate and the deflationary position refuses binary adjudication. The contribution is a novel integration and operationalization, not an empirical validation: independent application, inter-rater testing and author-external cases remain necessary. The paper further proposes definitional sovereignty as an enabling component of algorithmic sovereignty: the institutional capacity to contest, certify and revise imported technological categories under public accountability.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Tracking Large-scale Shared Bikes with Inertial Motion Learning in GNSS Blocked Environments

arXiv:2605.07412v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Although Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) provide a general solution for bike tracking outdoors, there still exist complex riding environments where only inertial navigation systems work, such as urban canyons. Despite decades of research, localization using only low-cost inertial sensors still faces challenges such as cumulative drifts and poor robustness caused by filtering methods. Furthermore, sensors such as visual and LiDAR could provide reliable measurements, but they are not suitable for large-scale deployment. In this paper, we propose an inertial tracking framework that integrates bicycle mechanical constraints with a mixture-of-experts model. Specifically, we leverage multiple expert modules to capture shared representations and weight them through the gating mechanism, thus improving multi-task learning performance and enabling uncertainty-aware trajectory estimation. Furthermore, based on the mechanical transmission between the pedal and the rear wheel of a bike, we explore the intrinsic relationship between the rider's periodic pedalling behaviors and acceleration variations, and convert such patterns into bike's wheel speed for dynamic calibration. Experiments with real-world riding data from shared bikes of the DiDi ride-hailing platform demonstrate that our system improves the accuracy of baselines by at least 12%, with wheel speed errors below 0.5 m/s at 95-percentile.

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

Uncertainty Quality of VGGT: An Analysis on the DTU Benchmark Dataset

Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer (VGGT) has already attracted a great deal of attention in a short period of time, not least due to the Best Paper Award at CVPR-2025. Similar to DUSt3R and MASt3R, VGGT aims to bring about a paradigm shift by replacing established methods like bundle adjustment and feature matching with a simple, unified, feed-forward neural network that predicts camera poses, depth maps, and dense 3D structure directly from multiple images of a scene in a few seconds. A key aspect is its ability to process an arbitrary number of views consistently in a single forward pass without any post-processing or iterative optimization. For photogrammetry, this opens new possibilities for real-time, scalable, and accessible 3D reconstruction. In this context, not only high reconstruction accuracy but also high-quality uncertainty estimates are crucial, as they foster trust and enable robust quality assurance. This paper therefore investigates the quality of VGGT's uncertainty predictions. The analysis identifies an effective confidence threshold for filtering VGGT's raw output and demonstrates that enhancing uncertainty quality holds strong potential for improving the accuracy of its 3D reconstructions.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Relatively Smart: A New Approach for Instance-Optimal Learning

arXiv:2603.01346v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We revisit the framework of Smart PAC learning, which seeks supervised learners which compete with semi-supervised learners that are provided full knowledge of the marginal distribution on unlabeled data. Prior work has shown that such marginal-by-marginal guarantees are possible for "most" marginals, with respect to an arbitrary fixed and known measure, but not more generally. We discover that this failure can be attributed to an "indistinguishability" phenomenon: There are marginals which cannot be statistically distinguished from other marginals that require different learning approaches. In such settings, semi-supervised learning cannot certify its guarantees from unlabeled data, rendering them arguably non-actionable. We propose relatively smart learning, a new framework which demands that a supervised learner compete only with the best "certifiable" semi-supervised guarantee. We show that such modest relaxation suffices to bypass the impossibility results from prior work. In the distribution-free setting, we show that the One-Inclusion Graph learner is relatively smart up to squaring the sample complexity, and show that no supervised learning algorithm can do better. For distribution-family settings, we show that relatively smart learning can be impossible or can require idiosyncratic learning approaches, and its difficulty can be non-monotone in the inclusion order on distribution families.

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

Pano3D: Unified 3D Reconstruction and Panoptic Segmentation

Recent advances in 3D feedforward reconstruction neural networks have achieved remarkable success in dense reconstruction from images without any camera parameters. Yet, equipping these models with robust semantic understanding remains an open problem. Here we introduce an approach that performs 3D reconstruction and 3D panoptic segmentation in a unified framework. We build on existing 3D reconstruction models and augment them with a set-based mask decoder. The approach is jointly trained with a geometric and semantic loss, which are shown to be mutually beneficial. More precisely, the features are initialized from the geometric information and then finetuned to capture jointly geometry and semantics. We demonstrate the generality of our approach by successfully applying our framework both to online and all-to-all attention reconstruction backbones. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in 3D panoptic segmentation across ScanNet, ScanNet200, and ScanNet++ datasets. Ablation studies show that such joint training of a unified model equips 3D feedforward reconstruction neural networks with panoptic segmentation and yields mutually beneficial improvements.

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

Reversible Residual Normalization Alleviates Spatio-Temporal Distribution Shift

arXiv:2604.15838v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Distribution shift severely degrades the performance of deep forecasting models. While this issue is well-studied for individual time series, it remains a significant challenge in the spatio-temporal domain. Effective solutions like instance normalization and its variants can mitigate temporal shifts by standardizing statistics. However, distribution shift on a graph is far more complex, involving not only the drift of individual node series but also heterogeneity across the spatial network where different nodes exhibit distinct statistical properties. To tackle this problem, we propose Reversible Residual Normalization (RRN), a novel framework that performs spatially-aware invertible transformations to address distribution shift in both spatial and temporal dimensions. Our approach integrates graph convolutional operations within invertible residual blocks, enabling adaptive normalization that respects the underlying graph structure while maintaining reversibility. By combining Center Normalization with spectral-constrained graph neural networks, our method captures and normalizes complex Spatio-Temporal relationships in a data-driven manner. The bidirectional nature of our framework allows models to learn in a normalized latent space and recover original distributional properties through inverse transformation, offering a robust and model-agnostic solution for forecasting on dynamic spatio-temporal systems.