Paper Plaza - AcademicHub

01.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2601.08961

On multidimensional infinite dihedral group extensions of Gibbs Markov maps

Authors:

arXiv:2601.08961v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We obtain a local central limit theorem for cocycles associated with a class of non abelian and non compact group extensions of Gibbs Markov maps. This class consists of multidimensional infinite dihedral groups. Unlike in the set up of the random walks on groups, we cannot use the convolution of measures on the group and instead we resort to an approach based on irreducible representations. Depending on the dimension of the group, we obtain either mixing, and thus ergodicity, or dissipativity. Also, we obtain the asymptotics of the first return time of the group extension to the origin.

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02.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17281

Are you speaking my languages? On spoken language adherence in multimodal LLMs

Authors:

Hyungwon Kim ↗Kandarp Joshi ↗Lillian Zhou ↗Pavel Golik ↗Petar Aleksic ↗

While Large Language Model (LLM) based Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) enables seamless multilingual use, models often misidentify the output language, compromising transcription fidelity and downstream application quality. To preserve flexibility and code-switching capabilities, we propose a soft prompting approach that hints at potential spoken languages without strictly constraining the output. We formally define this challenge as a lack of language adherence, introduce a novel metric to quantify violations, and evaluate three mitigation strategies: (1) zero-shot prompting for robust guidance under uncertainty, (2) supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to improve prompt adherence, and (3) Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to enforce adherence during decoding. We present a comparative analysis of these methods across multiple languages, evaluating effectiveness in reducing the language violation while maintaining overall ASR performance. Finally, we discuss trade-offs to guide strategy selection under various compute constraints.

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03.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19624

MassSpecGym in the Wild: Uncovering and Correcting Evaluation Pitfalls in AI-Driven Molecule Discovery

Authors:

arXiv:2606.19624v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable benchmarking is critical for developing machine learning models for tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) based molecule discovery. Subtle issues in experimental design and model evaluation procedures can degrade the trustworthiness of such benchmarks and lead to erroneous conclusions. We conduct a thorough review of model evaluation issues in the recent MS/MS machine learning literature, using the standard MassSpecGym benchmark suite as a case study to illustrate the impact of these issues. We find evaluation issues in at least 17 of 26 papers reporting MassSpecGym benchmark results in the first year of its adoption. We isolate three classes of failures: (i) data leakage, (ii) shortcut learning, and (iii) implementation bugs and metric divergence. Through extensive experimentation and code replication, we quantify the impact of these issues and show how they corrupt the evaluation standards MassSpecGym was designed to enforce. We distill our findings into recommendations generalizable to MS/MS challenges, benchmarks, and custom evaluation setups. We also release MassSpecGym v1.5, an implementation of our recommendations in the MassSpecGym benchmarking suite which addresses the failure modes identified in this audit. MassSpecGym v1.5 is publicly available at https://github.com/pluskal-lab/MassSpecGym.

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04.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25 DOI: arXiv:2606.25169

Laplace–Fisher Gate Identities for Optimal Matrix-Gated Blended Score Estimation

Authors:

Alois Duston ↗Tan Bui Tanh ↗

arXiv:2606.25169v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sampling from an unnormalized target by reversing an Ornstein–Uhlenbeck diffusion requires the score of each noise-perturbed marginal. Tweedie's identity and a target-score identity give unbiased finite-reference estimators for this score. Scalar blends can reduce variance, but are too rigid for singular or strongly anisotropic targets. We cast blended score estimation as conditional risk minimization over matrix-valued blending coefficients, or gates, and derive the variance-optimal gate [ \Gstar(y,t)=\alphat^2\bigl(\alphat^2 I_d+\gammat,\E[H_0(X_0)\mid Y_t=y]\bigr)^{-1},\qquad H_0=-\nabla^2\log p_0 . ] Here (\alphat=e^{-t}) and (\gammat=1-e^{-2t}). We call this formula the Laplace–Fisher Gate Identity (\operatorname{LFGI}{}). Since the Tweedie–TSI disagreement has conditional mean zero, the gate changes estimator variance without changing its expected value. We give the Gaussian special case and prove finite-reference consistency and stability bounds for estimating the gate from weighted reference samples. We apply the finite-reference LFGI estimator to normalized density evaluation for Bayesian inverse problems. When MCMC pilot samples and derivative information are available, LFGI uses these byproducts to construct a normalized posterior-density surrogate. The surrogate enables posterior-energy evaluation, model-evidence estimation, and density-based diagnostics beyond those available from samples alone. On a PDE-constrained inverse-problem benchmark, LFGI improves posterior-density calibration and sampling diagnostics relative to the other tested score-estimator classes, and known-evidence experiments check absolute calibration in Gaussian and non-Gaussian settings.

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05.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25 DOI: arXiv:2602.02877

A Geometry-Aware Efficient Algorithm for Compositional Entropic Risk Minimization

Authors:

Xiyuan Wei ↗Linli Zhou ↗Bokun Wang ↗Chih-Jen Lin ↗Tianbao Yang ↗

arXiv:2602.02877v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper studies optimization for a family of problems termed $compositional entropic risk minimization$, in which each data's loss is formulated as a Log-Expectation-Exponential (Log-E-Exp) function. The Log-E-Exp formulation serves as an abstraction of the Log-Sum-Exponential (LogSumExp) function when the explicit summation inside the logarithm is taken over a gigantic number of items and is therefore expensive to evaluate. While entropic risk objectives of this form arise in many machine learning problems, existing optimization algorithms suffer from several fundamental limitations including non-convergence, numerical instability, and slow convergence rates. To address these limitations, we propose a geometry-aware stochastic algorithm, termed $SCENT$, for the dual formulation of entropic risk minimization cast as a min–min optimization problem. The key to our design is a $stochastic proximal mirror descent (SPMD)$ update for the dual variable, equipped with a Bregman divergence induced by a negative exponential function that faithfully captures the geometry of the objective. Our main contributions are threefold: (i) we establish an $O(1/\sqrt{T})$ convergence rate of the proposed SCENT algorithm for convex problems; (ii) we theoretically characterize the advantages of SPMD over standard SGD update for optimizing the dual variable; and (iii) we demonstrate the empirical effectiveness of SCENT on extreme classification, partial AUC maximization, contrastive learning and distributionally robust optimization, where it consistently outperforms existing baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/Optimization-AI/SCENT.

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06.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2511.07397

Thinking While Speaking: Inference-Time Knowledge Transfer for Responsive and Intelligent Conversational Voice Agents

Authors:

Vidya Srinivas ↗Zachary Englhardt ↗Shwetak Patel ↗Vikram Iyer ↗

Voice agents face a fundamental tension: the reasoning, retrieval, and tool use that make foundation models capable are iterative and slow, while conversational interaction demands responses on a millisecond timescale. Smaller, real-time models meet the latency bar but cannot match foundation models on complex tasks, leaving current voice agents to trade away either responsiveness or capability. We introduce conversational infill, where a small talker model both immediately generates contextually grounded responses to hide the latency of an external reasoner model and fluently integrates streamed reasoner knowledge into its responses during inference. We curate a 290,571-example synthetic dataset spanning six domains and demonstrate that this task is learnable across seven widely used small language models ranging from 135M to 1.7B parameters. Our system implementation, ConvFill, sustains millisecond-level time-to-first-response while closing the accuracy gap to within 6.3% of the corresponding frontier reasoner performance. In a live user study (n=18) with talker deployments running on an Apple M2 SoC, participants rank ConvFill on par with frontier models overall, prefer it for retrieval-heavy tasks, and rate it significantly more responsive. These results show that conversational infill unlocks a new point on the latency-capability Pareto frontier, offering a practical path toward voice agents that are both responsive and highly capable. Code, models, and datasets are available at https://github.com/vysri/conversational-infill.

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07.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2510.16311

Toward General Digraph Contrastive Learning: A Dual Spatial Perspective

Authors:

Zhengyu Wu ↗Daohan Su ↗Yang Zhang ↗Xunkai Li ↗Rong-Hua Li ↗Guoren Wang ↗

arXiv:2510.16311v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) has emerged as a powerful tool for extracting consistent representations from graphs, independent of labeled information. However, existing methods predominantly focus on undirected graphs, disregarding the pivotal directional information that is fundamental and indispensable in real-world networks (e.g., social networks and recommendations).In this paper, we introduce S2-DiGCL, a novel framework that emphasizes spatial insights from complex and real domain perspectives for directed graph (digraph) contrastive learning. From the complex-domain perspective, S2-DiGCL introduces personalized perturbations into the magnetic Laplacian to adaptively modulate edge phases and directional semantics. From the real-domain perspective, it employs a path-based subgraph augmentation strategy to capture fine-grained local asymmetries and topological dependencies. By jointly leveraging these two complementary spatial views, S2-DiGCL constructs high-quality positive and negative samples, leading to more general and robust digraph contrastive learning. Extensive experiments on 7 real-world digraph datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach, achieving SOTA performance with 4.41% improvement in node classification and 4.34% in link prediction under both supervised and unsupervised settings.

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08.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15899

SkillVetBench: LLM-as-Judge for Multi-Dimensional Security Risk Evaluation in Open-Source LLM Agent Skills

Authors:

Ismail Hossain ↗Sai Puppala ↗Md Jahangir Alam ↗Tanzim Ahad ↗Sajedul Talukder ↗

arXiv:2606.15899v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Open-source LLM agent ecosystems are growing rapidly, yet the security of community-contributed skills - modular tool definitions that extend agent capabilities - remains largely unvetted. The gap we fill: existing scanners operate at the code layer and are structurally blind to instruction-layer and multi-agent risk - natural-language directives that hijack an agent, exfiltrate data through encoded side channels, or chain harm across pipelines - so what is needed is a semantic, multi-dimensional vetting system rather than another signature matcher. We present SKILLVETBENCH, a live public leaderboard on Hugging Face that uses an LLM-as-Judge to vet agent skills. What is new: SARS (Skill Agentic Risk Score), a five-dimensional agentic-risk metric with a principled weighted formula for instruction-following systems. What is integrated: full CVSS v4.0 vector decomposition and a ClawHub dual-view that places our LLM-generated review beside the official marketplace verdict. What is demonstrated: drawing on our companion benchmark paper [ 1], the LLM-as-Judge stage achieves zero false negatives across 78 confirmed-malicious skills and zero false positives across 22 benign controls, while the best static baseline (SKILLSIEVE) still misses 15%; for instruction-layer categories such as Prompt Injection and Memory Poisoning, conventional tools miss between 89% and 100% of threats (e.g., CODEBERT detects none of nine memory-poisoning skills). Detection rates vary from 35% to 95% across four LLM evaluators, motivating ensemble scoring in production deployments.

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09.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2601.14288

DeepInflation: an AI agent for research and model discovery of inflation

Authors:

Ze-Yu Peng ↗Hao-Shi Yuan ↗Qi Lai ↗Jun-Qian Jiang ↗Gen Ye ↗Jun Zhang ↗Yun-Song Piao ↗

arXiv:2601.14288v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present DeepInflation, an AI agent designed for research and model discovery in inflationary cosmology. Built upon a multi-agent architecture, DeepInflation integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) with a symbolic regression (SR) engine and a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) knowledge base. This framework enables the agent to automatically explore and verify the vast landscape of inflationary potentials while grounding its outputs in established theoretical literature. We demonstrate that DeepInflation can successfully discover simple and viable single-field slow-roll inflationary potentials consistent with the latest observations (with the ACT DR6 results taken as an example) or any given $n_s$ and $r$, and provide accurate theoretical context for obscure inflationary scenarios. DeepInflation serves as a prototype for a new generation of autonomous scientific discovery engines in cosmology, which enables researchers and non-experts alike to explore the inflationary landscape using natural language. This agent is available at https://github.com/pengzy-cosmo/DeepInflation.

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10.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12789

How Fine-Grained Should a RAG Benchmark Be? A Hierarchical Framework for Synthetic Question Generation

Authors:

Chase M. Fensore ↗Kaustubh Dhole ↗Jason Fan ↗Eugene Agichtein ↗Joyce C. Ho ↗

Evaluating retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems requires benchmarks that capture diverse question characteristics, yet practitioners lack empirical guidance on which dimensions to vary and at what granularity. We present HieraRAG, a hierarchical framework for studying granularity in RAG benchmark construction, defining optimal granularity as the level that maximizes discriminative power (the standard deviation of generation quality across categories) within a given RAG configuration. As a case study, we generate 5,872 synthetic question-answer (QA) pairs from FineWeb-10BT across 3 dimensions (Question Complexity, Answer Type, Linguistic Variation) at 3 granularity levels (2, 4, and 8 categories). With a BM25+Falcon-3-10B pipeline, optimal granularity varies by dimension: complexity benefits from fine-grained distinctions (discriminative power: 0.053) while answer type and linguistic variation peak at medium granularity. We introduce a Coherence Ratio metric to quantify whether fine-grained splits cleanly subdivide parent categories, revealing structural differences across dimensions (Question Complexity: 0.40 vs. Answer Type: 1.44). Human evaluation of 110 stratified QA pairs confirms synthetic quality. While these specific findings reflect a single configuration, HieraRAG provides a portable procedure and validation metric for practitioners to determine evaluation granularity within their own RAG settings.

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11.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2506.08473

AsFT: Anchoring Safety During LLM Fine-Tuning Within Narrow Safety Basin

Authors:

Shuo Yang ↗Qihui Zhang ↗Yuyang Liu ↗Xiaojun Jia ↗Kunpeng Ning ↗Jiayu Yao ↗Jigang Wang ↗Hailiang Dai ↗Yibing Song ↗Li Yuan ↗

arXiv:2506.08473v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) improves performance but introduces critical safety vulnerabilities: even minimal harmful data can severely compromise safety measures. We observe that perturbations orthogonal to the alignment direction - defined by weight differences between aligned (safe) and unaligned models - rapidly compromise model safety. In contrast, updates along the alignment direction largely preserve it, revealing the parameter space as a "narrow safety basin". To address this, we propose AsFT (Anchoring Safety in Fine-Tuning) to maintain safety by explicitly constraining update directions during fine-tuning. By penalizing updates orthogonal to the alignment direction, AsFT effectively constrains the model within the "narrow safety basin," thus preserving its inherent safety. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets and models show that AsFT reduces harmful behaviors by up to 7.60%, improves task performance by 3.44%, and consistently outperforms existing methods across multiple tasks.

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12.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19495

LooseControlVideo: Directorial Video Control using Spatial Blocking

Authors:

Shariq Farooq Bhat ↗Niloy J. Mitra ↗Kalyan Sunkavalli ↗

Precise 3D spatial orchestration in text-to-video generation remains a significant challenge, particularly for multi-object scenes where semantic layout and temporal dynamics are often entangled. While existing depth-conditioned models achieve good structural fidelity, they necessitate dense, frame-accurate guidance that is labor-intensive to author for dynamic events involving deformable objects. We present LooseControlVideo, a framework that enables intuitive and expressive control by using sparse, oriented 3D boxes as a "blocking" proxy. This allows users to author high-level layout and trajectory while leveraging a video generative model to generate realistic occlusions, dynamics and interactions. We achieve this by fine-tuning a Wan 2.2 backbone on a video dataset annotated with DNOCS, a novel encoding for 3D size, orientation and depth-ordered occlusions. Furthermore, our method allows for localized refinement, such as adjusting a jump trajectory or adding an interaction, with minimal disruption to the global scene context. Extensive evaluations on the nuScenes, HO-3D, and BEHAVE benchmarks demonstrate that LooseControlVideo significantly outperforms existing 2D-box and flow-based baselines. Our findings indicate a 1.2x to 3x improvement in Trajectory Error; 2x improvement in Rigid Motion Consistency; and a 1.5x to 2x increase in Occlusion Accuracy over current state-of-the-art layout-conditioned models, demonstrating that oriented 3D primitives provide good geometric prior for complex, multi-agent video authoring.

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13.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2601.03326

Higher order PCA-like rotation-invariant features for detailed shape descriptors modulo rotation

Authors:

Jarek Duda ↗

PCA can be used for rotation invariant features, describing a shape with its $p_{ab}=E[(x_i-E[x_a])(x_b-E[x_b])]$ covariance matrix approximating shape by ellipsoid, allowing for rotation invariants like its traces of powers. However, real shapes are usually much more complicated, hence there is proposed its extension to e.g. $p_{abc}=E[(x_a-E[x_a])(x_b-E[x_b])(x_c-E[x_c])]$ order-3 or higher tensors describing central moments, or polynomial times Gaussian allowing decodable shape descriptors of arbitrarily high accuracy, and their analogous rotation invariants. Its practical applications could be rotation-invariant features to include shape modulo rotation e.g. for molecular shape descriptors, or for up to rotation object recognition in 2D images/3D scans maybe also for 3D scene understanding, or shape similarity metric allowing inexpensive comparison of objects modulo rotation avoiding costly optimization over rotations.

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14.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14284

Hierarchical ODE: Learning Continuous-Time Physical Prototypes for Early Link Failure Detection

Authors:

Jiaen Lv ↗Leran Qi ↗Shaowei Wang ↗

arXiv:2606.14284v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Time series prototype learning is fundamentally challenged by observational ambiguity. Discrete architectures fail to resolve this, as they lack the capacity to decouple stochastic noise from continuous dynamics. Furthermore, rigid closed-set assumptions fail to capture unseen diversity. To address these limitations, we propose a hierarchical ordinary differential equation clustering network, which utilizes neural ordinary differential equation to model latent state evolution as a continuous integral curve. This formulation enforces temporal continuity to effectively disentangle smooth feature trends from stochastic noise, while our adaptive hierarchical mechanism autonomously determines the appropriate number of prototypes without rigid prior constraints. Validated on the early link failure detection task with irregularly sampled time series, the proposed method effectively extracts underlying physical prototypes, thereby enabling robust failure detection. Our code is available at https://github.com/NJ-LNN/Hierarchical-ODE.

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15.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17077

Comprehensive pKa Data Augmentation from Limited Real Data through an Engineered Models-Quantum Framework

Authors:

Wang Rui ↗Liu Dinghao ↗

arXiv:2606.17077v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Proton dissociation constants (pKa) are critical for functional molecule discovery and molecular modeling. Building on iBonD, the largest experimental pKa database established, we and other researchers have developed several methods including machine-learning-based empirical prediction and high-accuracy energy calculations. Despite this foundation, the rapid augmentation of high-quality pKa data remains fundamentally constrained. As part of this work, we performed large-scale regression-based pKa prediction on unlabeled molecular datasets using a collection of extensively optimized machine-learning models. The results indicate that, since the feature distributions of unlabeled molecular datasets, the pKa data distribution approximates normality, with extreme scarcity of tail-region samples. Although such augmentation is highly valuable for improving overall data availability and predictive modeling, it remains insufficient for efficiently discovering molecules with broad-spectrum pKa properties. To address this, we explore the targeted generation of molecules with sparse pKa properties from the vast chemical space. Given that traditional continuous latent space VAE-RNN methods for molecular generation suffer from insufficient stability and fail to demonstrate clear advantages in complementing sparse data, we design and implement a quantum-assisted sparse-pKa molecular generation. Feasibility is validated on a simulated quantum annealer, and superior extreme-value sampling is further achieved on physical coherent Ising machines (CIMs). (to be continued)

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16.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.19079

ARIADNE: Agnostic Routing for Inference-time Adapter DyNamic sElection

Authors:

Enrico Cassano ↗Micha{\l} Brzozowski ↗Zuzanna Dubanowska ↗Paolo Mandica ↗Neo Christopher Chung ↗

arXiv:2606.19079v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The increasing deployment of parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has led to model ecosystems in which a single backbone is paired with many task-specialized adapters. In this setting, inference-time queries often arrive without task labels, requiring the system to automatically select the most appropriate adapter from a growing and heterogeneous adapter pool. Existing routing methods either depend on access to adapter internals, such as weight decompositions or gradient-based statistics, or require additional router training, which limits scalability and portability as new adapters are added. We introduce ARIADNE, a training-free, adapter-agnostic routing framework for dynamic adapter selection at inference time. ARIADNE represents each adapter through a set of centroids computed from embeddings of its training set, capturing the data distribution associated with that adapter. Given an unlabeled input, it selects an adapter by measuring proximity to these centroids in latent space. Because routing is performed entirely in the input embedding space, ARIADNE is compatible with arbitrary PEFT methods and requires no modification to the adapters or training procedures. Primarily evaluated with Llama 3.2 1B Instruct on 23 diverse NLP tasks, ARIADNE recovers 97.44% of the upper bound performance. Scaling to 44 tasks, it achieves 89.7% average selection accuracy, without additional training or access to adapter internals.

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17.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2510.18289

Food4All: An Agentic Framework and Benchmark for Food Resource Navigation with Adaptive User Understanding

Authors:

Yiyang Li ↗Weixiang Sun ↗Tianyi Ma ↗Kaiwen Shi ↗Zheyuan Zhang ↗Yanfang Ye ↗

Food assistance referral requires conversational agents to translate underspecified, often noisy help-seeking dialogues into locally valid resource recommendations. We present Food4All, an agentic food-resource referral framework and benchmark grounded in 686 structured Indiana food resources. Food4All couples a food-specific search tool with 300 multi-turn evaluation tasks spanning single food needs, composite cases with access or document constraints, and five non-ideal user interaction traits: unreasonable demands, rambling responses, impatience, incomplete answers, and inconsistent information. We evaluate six Large Language Models (LLMs) on requirement grounding, resource retrieval, final referral correctness, and interaction efficiency. Although the strongest model achieves 96.33% referral accuracy, our diagnostics reveal persistent failures in grounding schedule, eligibility, intake, and document constraints, as well as failures to preserve valid retrieved resources in the final recommendation. Trait-level analysis further shows that different non-ideal behaviors stress different parts of the referral pipeline. Food4All provides a controlled testbed for studying tool-calling agents in constraint-sensitive food assistance referral under realistic user interaction challenges.

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18.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17832

From Drift to Coherence: Stabilizing Beliefs in LLMs

Authors:

SongEun Kim ↗Seungyoo Lee ↗Edwin Fong ↗Hyungi Lee ↗Juho Lee ↗

arXiv:2606.17832v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are often hypothesized to perform implicit Bayesian inference, yet a key coherence condition, the martingale property of predictive beliefs, has been shown to fail in controlled synthetic in-context learning settings. We revisit this question in a more typical usage regime: generic multiple-choice question answering. Exploiting the discrete answer space, we compute exact predictive distributions and study belief dynamics induced by autoregressive answer resampling. We introduce prompted predictive resampling (PPR), where an LLM generates a sequence of answers to the same question. Empirically, PPR reveals early-stage belief drift, indicating martingale violations. However, after sufficient resampling steps, the belief process self-stabilizes and converges to a coherent predictive distribution. Based on this observation, we further propose (i) a seed-answer prompting strategy to accelerate stabilization, and (ii) a self-consistency loss that amortizes early-stage drift into the model via fine-tuning. Experiments on multiple-choice QA benchmarks show that our methods substantially reduce belief drift and improve predictive coherence without sacrificing accuracy.

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19.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16694

Adaptive inference and function vectors in deep transformers

Authors:

Ravin Raj ↗Gautam Reddy ↗

arXiv:2606.16694v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transformers are widely used as a general-purpose substrate for learning complex correlations between a large collection of coupled variables, but their internal mechanisms have remained mysterious. We introduce a theory of a deep transformer as a mean-field interacting system that implements distributed inference, subject to constraints on communication, locality and depth. We show that such a system can exploit internal state representations ('function vectors') to infer a latent context variable at increasingly finer scales over its layers. In an in-context regression task, the theory predicts a non-trivial relationship between non-Gaussian, hierarchical structure in the latent context variable, and transformer depth. Predictions are tested using constrained linear attention transformers and demonstrate adaptive inference in deep architectures. Feedforward blocks and depth enable transformers to implement a much richer class of in-context learning algorithms than previously described.

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20.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24414

Cycle-Consistent Neural Explanation of Formal Verification Certificates

Authors:

Andoni Rodriguez ↗Alberto Pozanco ↗Daniel Borrajo ↗

arXiv:2606.24414v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Formal verification produces machine-checkable certificates that attest to the satisfaction or violation of temporal properties, yet these certificates remain opaque to non-specialist stakeholders. We propose a cycle-consistent neural architecture that generates faithful natural language explanations of verification certificates. A forward network NN1 maps certificates to explanations, and an inverse network NN2 reconstructs certificates from explanations; a symbolic verifier closes the loop, providing a differentiable faithfulness proxy. A pointer-generator mechanism ensures lexical grounding by copying state names directly from the certificate. We evaluate on 420 test certificates spanning six verification methods (bounded proof, k-induction, inductive invariant, lasso, reachability, witness pair) in both YES and NO verdict variants, drawn from a financial compliance domain with 207 named states. Our trained architecture, combined with a hybrid inference-time routing strategy, achieves 90.0% cycle-verified soundness, surpassing a multi- LLM few-shot baseline (76.1% for the best of 16 LLM combinations across four frontier models) by 13.9 percentage points. The neural model wins on 10 of 12 verdict/kind categories, with three categories reaching 100% soundness. The architecture offers 860x faster inference (185 ms vs. 160 s per certificate for the full multi-LLM baseline), offline operation, deterministic outputs, and zero per-inference cost. These results demonstrate that trained specialization outperforms general-purpose LLM prompting for structured certificate explanation, while eliminating the deployment constraints of cloud-based inference.

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21.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11880

SG2Loc: Sequential Visual Localization on 3D Scene Graphs

Authors:

Nicole Damblon ↗Olga Vysotska ↗Federico Tombari ↗Marc Pollefeys ↗Daniel Barath ↗

Visual localization in complex indoor environments remains a critical challenge for robotics and AR applications. Sequential localization, where pose estimates are refined over time, is important for autonomous agents. However, traditional methods often require storing extensive image databases or point clouds, leading to significant overhead. This paper introduces a novel, lightweight approach to sequential visual localization using 3D scene graphs. Our method represents the environment with a compact scene graph, where nodes represent objects (with coarse meshes) and edges encode spatial relationships. For each image in the localization phase, we extract per-patch semantic features, predicting object identities. Localization is performed within a particle filter framework. Each particle, representing a camera pose, projects the coarse object meshes from the scene graph into the image, assigning object identities to patches based on visibility. The similarity of the per-patch features, in the input image, and object features from the scene graph determines the weight of a particle. Subsequent images are incorporated sequentially, refining the pose estimate. By leveraging a compact scene graph and efficient semantic matching, our method significantly reduces storage while maintaining performance on real-world datasets. The code will be available at https://github.com/DmblnNicole/sg2loc.

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22.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18687

Spatially Stratified Distillation for Heterogeneous Radar Place Recognition

Authors:

Sagun Singh Shrestha ↗Samuel Harding ↗Abdelwahed Khamis ↗Saimunur Rahman ↗Peyman Moghadam ↗

Scalable, all-weather place recognition increasingly relies on heterogeneous radar place recognition to bridge diverse hardware platforms. A notable application is matching queries from cost-effective 4D automotive radars against high-fidelity reference maps built by dense spinning radars. This process is fundamentally limited by the extreme sparsity (and narrow field-of-view) of the 4D sensor, which captures only a fraction of the structural density present in the spinning radar database. Prior efforts address this issue by unifying different radar signals. That is, projecting both signals into a common representational space. Yet, they suffer performance degradation in multi-session environments. In this paper, we propose spatially-stratified distillation (SSD); a strategy that replaces standard uniform distillation with an asymmetric spatial alignment derived directly from physical radar returns. In regions where both radars exhibit overlapping returns, SSD enforces strong feature alignment. Crucially, in sparse regions where the 4D student lacks returns but the teacher contains valid structure within the shared field of view, SSD applies heavily discounted distillation weights. Extensive evaluations of the recent HeRCULES dataset demonstrate that SSD significantly outperforms prior place recognition methods, achieving state-of-the-art results on its challenging dynamic sequences.

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23.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25 DOI: arXiv:2606.25001

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

Authors:

Teresa Pui Yee Yong ↗Win Kent Ong ↗Chee Seng Chan ↗

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.

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24.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2601.19612

Safe Exploration via Policy Priors

Authors:

Manuel Wendl ↗Yarden As ↗Manish Prajapat ↗Anton Pollak ↗Stelian Coros ↗Andreas Krause ↗

arXiv:2601.19612v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safe exploration is a key requirement for reinforcement learning (RL) agents to learn and adapt online, beyond controlled (e.g. simulated) environments. In this work, we tackle this challenge by utilizing suboptimal yet conservative policies (e.g., obtained from offline data or simulators) as priors. Our approach, SOOPER, uses probabilistic dynamics models to optimistically explore, yet pessimistically fall back to the conservative policy prior if needed. We prove that SOOPER guarantees safety throughout learning, and establish convergence to an optimal policy by bounding its cumulative regret. Extensive experiments on key safe RL benchmarks and real-world hardware demonstrate that SOOPER is scalable, outperforms the state-of-the-art and validate our theoretical guarantees in practice.

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25.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11209

ProcessThinker: Enhancing Multi-modal Large Language Models Reasoning via Rollout-based Process Reward

Authors:

Jingpei Wu ↗Xiao Han ↗Weixiang Shen ↗Boer Zhang ↗Zifeng Ding ↗Volker Tresp ↗

Visual question answering increasingly requires multi-step reasoning. Recent post-training with reinforcement learning under verifiable rewards (RLVR) and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) can improve multimodal reasoning, but most approaches rely on sparse outcome-only rewards. As a result, they struggle to tell whether an incorrect answer comes from a small mistake late in the reasoning or from an unhelpful trajectory from the start. A common solution is to train a process reward model (PRM) for step-level supervision, but this typically requires large-scale high-quality chain-of-thought annotations and additional training cost. We propose ProcessThinker, a practical post-training pipeline that provides step-level process rewards without training an explicit PRM. ProcessThinker first rewrites reasoning traces into a step-tagged format for cold-start supervised fine-tuning, then applies GRPO with a standard format reward and our rollout-based process reward. Concretely, for each intermediate step, we sample multiple continuations from that step and use the empirical success rate (final-answer verification) as the step reward. This gives dense credit assignment and encourages reasoning steps that more reliably support a correct conclusion, helping reduce inconsistent or self-contradictory progress across steps – a key issue in logical reasoning. Across four challenging video benchmarks (Video-MMMU, MMVU, VideoMathQA, and LongVideoBench), ProcessThinker consistently improves over the baseline model Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct

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