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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Bayesian Anytime Pareto Set Identification for Multi-Objective Multi-Armed Bandits

arXiv:2606.18785v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Identifying Pareto optimal solutions is critical to support multi-objective decision-making. We introduce the first anytime Multi-Objective Multi-Armed Bandit algorithm for the Pareto Set Identification problem, taking a Bayesian approach: Top-Two Pareto Front Thompson Sampling (TTPFTS). We benchmark TTPFTS against state-of-the-art fixed-budget Pareto Set Identification algorithms on synthetic environments. Next, we demonstrate its practical utility in a challenging multi-objective molecular discovery setting by efficiently exploring an ultra-large synthesis-on-demand molecular library. Furthermore, we introduce a novel uncertainty quantification metric that estimates our algorithm's confidence in the predicted Pareto set. We demonstrate that this metric effectively proxies true performance, yielding a robust methodology for monitoring learning progress in complex settings. Finally, we complement these empirical findings with a theoretical proof of the algorithm's asymptotic correctness.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

A Data-Centric Framework for Detecting and Correcting Corrupted Labels

arXiv:2606.11699v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The performance of machine learning and deep learning models largely depends on the quality of the training data. However, the quality of the real-world datasets is often compromised by noisy labels, which can substantially degrade model accuracy and reliability. To address this challenge, we propose Relabeler, an end-to-end data-centric framework for detecting and correcting corrupted labels. For corrupted label detection, Relabeler jointly leverages both local and global relationships among data instances to identify potentially noisy samples. After detecting suspicious instances, Relabeler further performs label correction by estimating the most probable clean label for each instance based on both its input features and observed noisy label. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets, noise types, and noise rates demonstrate that Relabeler consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving up to 58% improvement in label correction precision and 6% improvement in downstream task performance.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Adversarial Concept Search: Predicting Compositional Errors From Feature Geometry

arXiv:2606.13934v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humans cannot always intuit what scenarios are most challenging to LLMs. Hoping to capture challenging edge cases, developers either design problems to be difficult for humans or curate extensive benchmarks. What if we could instead anticipate which scenarios a model will fail on? In this paper, we use an LLM's representational geometry to predict which concept combinations it will fail on. We attribute this compositional failure to interference between salient features. In tasks that require systematic composition - toy programmatic settings, multihop reasoning, multilingual factual recall - we find that when a pair of concepts is encoded near-orthogonally, the model reliably composes them. When their linear encodings are close, producing interference, the model fails to compose them. Our method reliably anticipates failure modes across different compositional tasks, without evaluating specific inputs. These results lay the groundwork to use representational geometry to identify high-risk examples, construct targeted stress tests, and provide a scalable foundation for active learning in real-world deployment.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Parthenon Law: A Self-Evolving Legal-Agent Framework

arXiv:2606.04602v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As agents grow more capable, legal-domain LLM agents promise to turn document-heavy matters into reviewable work products – yet reliable deployment faces three obstacles: no large-scale evidence on how today's strongest model-and-harness combinations behave on end-to-end legal matters; no agent architecture adapted to the legal vertical, only general-purpose harnesses; and, in a setting that keeps shifting with new facts, authorities, and deadlines, no mechanism for systems to learn from their own outcomes. We address each. A large-scale empirical study on Harvey LAB – $12{,}510$ agent trajectories – shows that even frontier agents remain far from completing matters in a single pass: per-criterion accuracy climbs with stronger models while strict matter completion stalls. We then introduce \textsc{Parthenon}, a self-evolving legal-agent framework that factors Model, Harness, Agent roles, legal Knowledge, deterministic Tools, and procedural Skills into auditable surfaces for source traceability, date and number grounding, deliverable compliance, and issue closure. Finally, an anti-leakage learning loop converts scored failures into task-agnostic edits to skills, tools, and knowledge, letting the system improve with experience – as a firm refines its checklists and playbooks after each matter – without touching model weights. Across our large-scale empirical analysis, \textsc{Parthenon} substantially improves the performance of state-of-the-art models and harnesses on legal-matter tasks.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Provably Safe, Yet Scalable Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.14536v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that optimize rewards while satisfying constraints. Predominant approaches rely on soft-constrained policy optimization, which has achieved empirical success but does not provide formal safety guarantees for the learned policy. In contrast, methods with strict guarantees typically rely on explicit certificate functions, whose construction requires the direct synthesis and verification of control-invariant sets, a process that scales poorly with state dimension and often yields overly conservative behavior. In this paper, we present the Provably Safe, yet Scalable RL (PS2-RL) framework, a novel two-phase architecture for learning provably safe policies in a scalable manner, designed to overcome the key bottlenecks of prior methods. Rather than explicitly computing invariant sets, PS2-RL leverages a learned backup policy to forward-integrate the system dynamics, generating an implicit control-invariant set online. In the first phase, the backup policy is trained with our proposed safe-arrival value function, which characterizes the optimal backup policy for invariant-set construction. In the second phase, an RL policy is trained end-to-end through a differentiable projection layer that strictly enforces the safety guarantees induced by the learned backup policy. By maximizing the volume of the implicit control-invariant set in the first phase, the resulting PS2 policy from the second phase is performant and scalable, while maintaining provable safety. Crucially, PS2-RL imposes no restrictions on the underlying RL algorithm and can be plugged into any existing training pipeline. We establish theoretical guarantees for the proposed framework and evaluate it on robotic control tasks with state dimensions up to 10, a regime in which prior provably safe RL methods struggle or become impractical.

06.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22

Few-Shot Classification of C. elegans Developmental Stages via Explainable Hierarchical Hyperbolic Graph Embeddings

Automated, accurate, and fast developmental-stage classification of C. elegans from microscopy-based morphological images is essential for aging research, drug screening, and disease modeling. However, it remains challenging due to morphological similarities between stages and the limited annotated data. In this work, we propose HyperDev, a hyperbolic few-shot learning framework that addresses these limitations by directly encoding developmental hierarchies in the embedding space, unlike conventional Euclidean approaches that treat stages as independent classes. HyperDev uses Poincare ball geometry, combined with a biologically informed developmental prior, to naturally represent stage relationships. We introduce our selfcurated C. elegans dataset spanning seven developmental stages (Egg, L1-L4, Adult, Dauer) with extreme class imbalance (6-8 samples per minority class). HyperDev achieves competitive classification accuracy (76.9-88.3%) while providing intrinsic explainability across nine 7-way few-shot evaluation settings. The learned embeddings exhibited strong biological alignment (Pearson r = 0.669, p < 0.001), while significantly outperforming ProtoNet (r = 0.187), MatchingNet (r = 0.235), and RelationNet (r = 0.464). These results establish hyperbolic geometry as a principled approach to explainable few-shot learning in biological imaging, where understanding learned representations is as critical as predictive performance. Clinical Relevance–By enabling explainable, data-efficient developmental staging from scarce samples, HyperDev supports improved phenotype quantification for aging research, disease modeling, and drug screening. Index Terms–Hyperbolic learning, few-shot classification, developmental staging, Caenorhabditis elegans, interpretability, explainability.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Private Learning with Public Feature Conditioning

arXiv:2606.18773v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study differentially private (DP) regression in settings where each data sample includes public, non-sensitive features – common in applications such as recommendation and advertising systems. While such label-DP or semi-sensitive-feature settings have been primarily explored in the context of classification, effective approaches for regression remain underexplored. We introduce Cond-DP, a conditioned variant of DPSGD that leverages the structure of public feature matrices to improve optimization under privacy constraints. Motivated by the observation that these public features often exhibit rapidly decaying spectra, Cond-DP incorporates a data-driven conditioning matrix to reshape the optimization landscape and accelerate convergence. We provide convergence guarantees for convex, strongly convex, and non-convex settings, and recover standard DPSGD as a special case when the conditioning matrix is the identity. We show how to construct an effective conditioning matrix for Cond-DP directly from public features, enabling provably faster convergence than DPSGD in private linear regression without incurring additional privacy cost. Empirically, Cond-DP with this conditioning matrix consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across a wide range of datasets and model architectures under label DP, demonstrating strong and robust performance in practice.

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

ChildGuard: A Specialized Dataset for Combatting Child-Targeted Hate Speech

Mental health industry faces growing concerns regarding hate speech directed at children's on social media, as exposure to such content can contribute to adverse psychological outcomes during critical stages of development. Current hate speech datasets and detection systems provide limited support for child-focused applications because they are primarily designed for adults and lack dedicated representations of age-specific characteristics associated with hate speech directed at children's. To address this gap, we introduce ChildGuard, a large-scale English dataset for child-targeted hate speech containing 351,877 annotated instances collected from X (formerly Twitter), Reddit, and YouTube. The dataset covers three age groups such as younger children's (under 11), pre-teens (11-12), and teens (13-17). ChildGuard contains two subsets such as a contextual subset (157K) and a lexical subset (194K). Evaluation using recent transformer-based models and LLMs achieves a best Macro-F1 of 82.07%, decreasing to 79.41%, 79.24%, 76.04%, and 74.88% on younger children's, contextual, implicit hate, and cross-subset settings, respectively.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Information Leakage Detection through Approximate Bayes-optimal Prediction

arXiv:2401.14283v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In today's data-driven world, the proliferation of publicly available information raises security concerns due to the information leakage (IL) problem. IL involves unintentionally exposing sensitive information to unauthorized parties via observable system information. Conventional statistical approaches rely on estimating mutual information (MI) between observable and secret information for detecting ILs, face challenges of the curse of dimensionality, convergence, computational complexity, and MI misestimation. Though effective, emerging supervised machine learning based approaches to detect ILs are limited to binary system sensitive information and lack a comprehensive framework. To address these limitations, we establish a theoretical framework using statistical learning theory and information theory to quantify and detect IL accurately. Using automated machine learning, we demonstrate that MI can be accurately estimated by approximating the typically unknown Bayes predictor's log-loss and accuracy. Based on this, we show how MI can effectively be estimated to detect ILs. Our method performs superior to state-of-the-art baselines in an empirical study considering synthetic and real-world OpenSSL TLS server datasets.

10.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Measurement of reactor neutrino oscillation with the first JUNO data

Neutrino oscillations (see refs. 1,2 and references therein), a quantum effect manifesting at macroscopic scales, are governed by lepton flavour mixing angles and neutrino mass-squared differences3 that are fundamental parameters of particle physics, representing phenomena beyond the Standard Model. Precision measurements of these parameters are essential for testing the completeness of the three-flavour framework, determining the mass ordering of neutrinos and probing possible new physics. The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO)4 is a 20-ktonne liquid-scintillator detector located 52.5 km from multiple reactor cores, designed to resolve the interference pattern of reactor neutrinos with sub-percent precision5,6. Here we report, using the first 59.1 days of data collected since detector completion in August 2025, the first simultaneous high-precision determination of two neutrino oscillation parameters, $${\sin }^{2}{\theta }_{12}=0.3092\,\pm \,0.0087$$ and $$\Delta {m}_{21}^{2}=(7.50\,\pm \,0.12)\times 1{0}^{-5}\,{\mathrm{eV}}^{2}$$ for the normal mass ordering scenario, improving the precision by a factor of 1.6 relative to the combination of all previous measurements. These results advance the basic understanding of neutrinos, validate the design of the detector and indicate the readiness of JUNO for resolving the neutrino mass ordering with a larger dataset. The rapid achievement with a short exposure highlights the potential of JUNO to push the frontiers of precision neutrino physics and paves the way for its broad scientific programme. The first data of the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory deliver high-precision neutrino oscillation parameters, improving measurements and demonstrating readiness to determine neutrino mass ordering.

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

NoiseTilt: Noise-Tilted Reverse Kernels for Diffusion Reward Alignment

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

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

An interpretable unsupervised representation learning for high precision measurement in particle physics

arXiv:2511.22246v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Unsupervised learning has been widely applied to various tasks in particle physics. However, existing models lack precise control over their learned representations, limiting physical interpretability and hindering their use for accurate measurements. We propose the Histogram AutoEncoder (HistoAE), an unsupervised representation learning network featuring a custom histogram-based loss that enforces a physically structured latent space. Applied to silicon microstrip detectors, HistoAE learns an interpretable two-dimensional latent space corresponding to the particle's charge and impact position. After simple post-processing, it achieves a charge resolution of $0.25\,e$ and a position resolution of $3\,\mu\mathrm{m}$ on beam-test data, comparable to the conventional approach. These results demonstrate that unsupervised deep learning models can enable physically meaningful and quantitatively precise measurements. Moreover, the generative capacity of HistoAE enables straightforward extensions to fast detector simulations.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

MultiToP: Learning to Patch Visual Tokens to Mitigate Hallucinations in Video Large Multimodal Models

Video Large Multimodal Models have achieved remarkable progress in video understanding, yet they remain prone to hallucinations, where generated responses are not faithfully supported by the input video. In this paper, we propose MultiToP, a multimodal-context-aware visual token patching framework that mitigates hallucinations by refining unreliable visual tokens before language generation. MultiToP introduces a lightweight Visual Token Patcher to predict token-level replacement distributions and selectively substitute unreliable visual tokens with a dynamic global patch token. To train the patcher effectively, we further propose information-guided rank calibration, which uses answer-conditioned frame-level information cues derived from the backbone to guide token replacement. Combined with ground-truth answer supervision and sparsity regularization, MultiToP enables localized visual evidence refinement without modifying the original model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MultiToP effectively reduces hallucinations on Vript-HAL with negligible inference overhead, improving the F1 scores of Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct by 50.60% over the vanilla model. Meanwhile, MultiToP preserves general video understanding ability, yielding an 18.58% relative accuracy gain on ActivityNet-QA for Video-LLaVA-7B.

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

Generating Natural and Expressive Robot Gestures through Iterative Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback using LLMs

arXiv:2606.18747v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Expressive gestures are essential for natural and effective communication, complementing speech when verbal cues alone are insufficient (e.g., pointing). For social robots such as the humanoid Pepper, producing natural and expressive movements is critical for improving human-robot interaction (HRI) and long-term acceptance. However, generating gestures remains challenging due to reliance on expert-authored animations, resulting in rigid behaviors that are impractical for dynamic and diverse environments. Alternatively, machine learning approaches often struggle to capture perceived naturalness, becoming increasingly challenging with more degrees of freedom. Consequently, producing expressive robot gestures requires a system that can adapt to the environment while adhering to social norms and physical constraints. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) enable dynamic code generation, offering new opportunities for runtime gesture synthesis from natural language. In this paper, we integrate ChatGPT into the humanoid robot Pepper to generate co-speech gestures aligned with conversational output. While this baseline enables flexible gesture generation, the resulting motions are often perceived as stiff and unnatural. To address this limitation, we introduce an iterative reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) system that finetunes gesture generation based on user evaluations, leveraging an iterative user study to compare Pepper's generated gestures. Our results show that RLHF improved the LLM's co-speech generative capabilities, producing more expressive, relevant and fluid movements.

15.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-05

Heuristic multi-site optimization for protein sequence design using Masked Protein Language Models

Authors:

by Lijuan Wang, Yuze Wang, Chen Qiu, Liwei Xiao, Xianliang Liu, Junjie Chen Protein sequence design for tailored functional properties is a fundamental task in protein engineering, with critical applications in drug discovery and therapeutic development. Efficient navigation of the combinatorial vastness of protein sequence space to identify functional variants remains a formidable challenge. Conventional approaches, which predominantly rely on template-based local search or single-residue mutagenesis, are constrained by their susceptibility to local optima and their potential risk of destabilizing native structural stability. In this study, we introduce ProtHMSO, a heuristic multi-site optimization framework leveraging masked protein language models (ProtLMs) for context-aware sequence exploration. ProtHMSO mimics natural evolutionary mechanisms by employing ProtLM-derived substitution probabilities to guide heuristic searches for synergistic mutations, thereby constraining combinatorial search spaces through evolutionary and biophysical priors. ProtHMSO is further applied to replace the exploration strategies in genetic algorithms (GAs) and Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) for improving their convergence efficiency. Benchmark experiments demonstrate that protein sequences generated by ProtHMSO exhibit superior functional performance and closer alignment with natural sequence distribution, compared with state-of-the-art methods. These advancements highlight that ProtHMSO has strong potential and compatibility to accelerate functional protein discovery, offering a robust framework for efficient and context-aware exploration of protein sequence space.

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

Heterogeneous Knowledge Distillation via Geometry Decoupling and Momentum-Aware Gradient Regulation

Heterogeneous Knowledge Distillation (HKD) aims to transfer knowledge across varying architectures (e.g., from Transformer to CNN) but inherently suffers from severe training instability. We reveal that this instability stems from two highly coupled challenges: massive feature norm discrepancies that cause optimization drag, and severe gradient conflicts between the primary and distillation objectives arising from distinct inductive biases. To achieve stable distillation, we propose SPOFA, a framework built upon a novel Feature and Gradient Dual Stabilization mechanism. Specifically, at the feature level, we introduce a LayerNorm-based decoupling projector that explicitly decouples feature magnitude from direction, creating a bounded and stable space for semantic alignment. At the gradient level, we propose a momentum-driven Exponential Moving Average (MEMA) dynamic scaler. By establishing a robust historical baseline of the optimization trajectory, MEMA actively evaluates instantaneous gradient conflicts and adaptively penalizes harmful distillation signals, guaranteeing stable convergence. Importantly, SPOFA achieves this dual stabilization with an extremely lightweight parameter footprint. Extensive experiments on two mainstream benchmarks demonstrate that SPOFA achieves state-of-the-art accuracy, significantly outperforming computationally expensive methods while introducing only minimal computational overhead compared to standard baselines.

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

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

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.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Differential Privacy of Gaussian Process Posterior Sampling

arXiv:2606.17995v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the privacy of releasing posterior sample paths from a Gaussian process (GP) when the entire training set including covariates and responses is private. Unlike standard differential-privacy (DP) mechanisms that add external noise, posterior sampling is random by construction. We show that this intrinsic randomness yields DP guarantees by deriving explicit Rényi-DP bounds for GP posterior sample-path release. The bounds separate posterior-mean leakage from data-dependent posterior-covariance leakage showing that meaningful privacy depends sharply on effective ridge regularisation. We apply membership-inference attacks to show that empirical leakage follows the predicted dependence on regularisation, posterior variance and the number of released posterior sample-paths. Utility experiments on downstream posterior-sampling tasks identify noisy-observation regimes where privacy-compatible regularisation preserves useful decisions with modest utility loss. When stronger privacy is needed, the intrinsic guarantee can be sharpened by adding calibrated GP noise, providing an explicit additional privacy knob.

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

CoRe-MoE: Contrastive Reweighted Mixture of Experts for Multi-Terrain Humanoid Locomotion with Gait Adaptation

arXiv:2606.04718v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Humans primarily rely on walking and running to traverse complex terrains. Similarly, humanoid robots should be able to smoothly transition between walking and running while maintaining natural and stable locomotion. However, unifying gait transition and multi-terrain adaptation within a single policy remains challenging due to gradient interference between tasks and the distribution shift caused by terrain variations. Although Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures can mitigate multi-skill interference, direct joint training often fails to achieve clear expert specialization. To address these challenges, we propose CoRe-MoE, a two-stage reinforcement learning framework that decouples gait generation from terrain adaptation. In the first stage, a stable locomotion policy is learned to produce natural walking and running behaviors with smooth transitions. In the second stage, a terrain-aware MoE branch is introduced, and the gating network is trained with a contrastive objective to learn structured terrain representations and promote expert specialization. The final action is obtained through weighted fusion of the base gait policy and the terrain-aware branch, enabling the policy to preserve stable locomotion while adapting to complex terrains. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms baseline approaches in terms of success rate, locomotion stability, and multi-terrain adaptability. Furthermore, zero-shot deployment on a Unitree G1 humanoid robot validates the effectiveness of our framework, achieving robust walking and running across stairs, slopes, steps, obstacles, and unstructured outdoor terrains while maintaining accurate foothold control and dynamic stability.

20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Persistent Homology of the Planar Wiener Sausage: Brownian Scaling and a Logarithmic Expectation Law

arXiv:2606.11248v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study degree-one persistent homology of the planar Wiener-sausage filtration generated by standard Brownian motion without drift. In the drifted case, regeneration along the drift direction leads to linear-in-time laws for persistent-homological observables. In the recurrent zero-drift case, this renewal structure disappears. The organizing mechanism is instead Brownian self-similarity: the persistence diagram at time $T$ is equal in law to the image of the unit-time diagram under spatial dilation by $\sqrt T$. Consequently, large-time questions on fixed radius windows are transformed into small-radius questions for the unit-time Brownian trace. Let $B$ be standard planar Brownian motion, let $K_T=B\left(\left[0,T\right]\right)$, and let $K_T^{\left(r\right)}$ be the radius-$r$ Wiener sausage. Since $K_T^{\left(r\right)}$ is connected, its first Betti number $\beta_1^T\left(r\right)$ is the number of bounded complementary components of $K_T^{\left(r\right)}$. For a bounded nonnegative Borel function $\psi$ supported in a compact interval $\left[a,b\right]\subset\left(0,\infty\right)$, we consider the smoothed Betti-curve observable $\left[r_0,r_1\right] \mathrm{\Phi}_\psi \left(T\right) = \int_{r_0}^{r_1} \beta_1^T \left( r \right) \psi \left( r \right) dr$. We prove that there exist absolute constants 0

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

IVIE: A Neuro-symbolic Approach to Incremental and Validated Generation of Interactive Fiction Worlds

Computational creativity in Interactive Fiction faces a fundamental tension: Large Language Models (LLM) may produce creative narratives but struggle with world coherence, while symbolic systems ensure consistency but lack creative flexibility. We present IVIE (Incremental & Validated Interactive Experiences), a neuro-symbolic approach to generating complete and playable interactive fiction worlds from scratch. Building upon PAYADOR's neuro-symbolic framework, IVIE implements a four-stage incremental generation pipeline that delegates creative decisions–setting and character creation, puzzle design–to LLMs while grounding the world state through symbolic validation. The system generates worlds with interconnected locations, functional items, non-player characters, and coherent puzzles, all structured around a central goal-oriented architecture. Human evaluation shows the approach generates immersive, thematically coherent worlds with high player engagement. Results seem to indicate that the neuro-symbolic approach successfully balances flexibility with narrative coherence: symbolic validation grounds LLM generation without eliminating generative freedom. However, challenges remain: LLM inconsistencies occasionally bypass puzzle constraints, and objective validation gaps allow some structurally impossible goals. We identify key design considerations for future neurosymbolic interactive storytelling systems, particularly regarding LLM capabilities and their limitations.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Rethinking Psychometric Evaluation of LLMs: When and Why Self-Reports Predict Behavior

Anticipating LLM behavioral tendencies from low-cost psychometric probes is critical for safe deployment, but only if self-reports (SR) reliably predict behavior. Recent work documented substantial SR-behavior dissociation in LLMs, but relied on broad personality traits (Big 5) that predict specific behaviors weakly, even in humans. Furthermore, the isolation of conversational sessions combined with weak context matching left open whether LLMs truly lack coherence or whether the conditions needed to detect such coherence were not met. We contrast Big 5 with the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), which measures intention targeted to a specific behavior and predicts human behavior substantially better than broad traits. We run experiments across four behavioral tasks and 11 frontier LLMs, while also varying session context and identity induction. We find that SR-behavior coherence exists but is selective. 1) Within a shared conversation, the Theory of Planned Behavior reaches human-level coherence; Big 5 does not. 2) Across separate conversations, coherence survives only for behaviors anchored outside the immediate prompt, such as implicit bias shaped by training, and collapses when behavior is strongly primed by context, as with sycophancy. 3) Persona prompting makes self-reports more consistent across conversations, but does not bring behavior into alignment. These findings suggest that coarse personality frameworks, such as Big 5 may not be the best tools for testing deployment behavior. More task- and behavior-specific instruments are needed, and even these must be evaluated across tasks and contexts.

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

Bimanual Robot Manipulation via Multi-Agent In-Context Learning

arXiv:2604.20348v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful reasoning engines for embodied control. In particular, In-Context Learning (ICL) enables off-the-shelf, text-only LLMs to predict robot actions without any task-specific training while preserving their generalization capabilities. Applying ICL to bimanual manipulation remains challenging as the high-dimensional joint action space and tight inter-arm coordination constraints rapidly overwhelm standard context windows. To address this, we introduce BiCICLe (Bimanual Coordinated In-Context Learning), the first framework that enables standard LLMs to perform few-shot bimanual manipulation without fine-tuning. BiCICLe frames bimanual control as a multi-agent leader-follower problem, decoupling the action space into sequential, conditioned single-arm predictions. Evaluated on 13 tasks from the TWIN benchmark, BiCICLe achieves 70.5% average success rate, outperforming the best training-free baseline by 6.1 percentage points and surpassing most supervised methods. We also demonstrate superior real-world performance on 3 tasks without hardware-specific retraining.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

DiffCold: A Diffusion-based Generative Model for Cold-Start Item Recommendation

arXiv:2606.12245v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cold-start item recommendation remains a persistent challenge in real-world systems due to the absence of interaction histories. While prior models attempt to bridge this gap using item content features, they universally suffer from the seesaw dilemma: enhancing performance for cold items inevitably degrades performance for warm items, and vice versa. We identify that this dilemma stems from a fundamental distributional disparity: warm item embeddings occupy a complex ``behavioral manifold" shaped by rich interaction signals, whereas cold item embeddings are constrained to a ``semantic manifold" derived solely from auxiliary content. Existing methods often force a rigid mapping between these inconsistent spaces, causing the model to sacrifice the precision of warm representations to accommodate cold ones. To address this, we propose DiffCold, a diffusion-based generative model that unifies warm and cold representations. Unlike GANs or VAEs, DiffCold leverages conditional diffusion to reconstruct warm item embeddings from content, preserving the underlying manifold structure without degradation. We further tailor this paradigm with two specific designs: a Retrieval-enhanced Aggregator that initializes generation using semantically similar warm items to bypass inefficient noise, and a Simulation-based Representation Alignment module that enforces distribution consistency between generated and real embeddings via contrastive learning. Experiments on three benchmarks confirm that DiffCold resolves the seesaw dilemma, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art methods across all metrics.

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

ELVA: Exploring Ranking-Driven Universal Multimodal Retrieval

arXiv:2606.20280v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Leveraging Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) via contrastive learning has become a mainstream paradigm for improving the performance of Universal Multimodal Retrieval (UMR). However, previous works have ignored the grain blindness when adapting the contrastive paradigm into retrieval tasks. Grain blindness refers to the tendency of the model to overlook grain-level information contained in the query, which is crucial for effectively handling complex queries. This stems from contrastive learning treating samples as a binary classification (positive/negative), while ignoring the different information carried by each negative sample. To address this, we argue that negatives should be treated differently according to their similarity to the positive sample, enabling the model to learn distinct grain information from each negative. In this paper, we introduce a simple but effective framework, called ELVA, a novel rule-based RL framework that mitigates grain blindness through ranking-driven MLLMs. 1) Instead of relying on reward models, we extend Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) to retrieval tasks, allowing the model to explore new ranking behaviors without explicit ranking labels. 2) By utilizing rule-based rewards, our approach jointly optimizes the ranking of negative samples while enlarging the similarity gap between positive and negative. To more precisely measure grain blindness, we further introduce MRBench, a new benchmark specifically designed for multi-grain query scenarios. ELVA achieves state-of-the-art results across standard retrieval benchmarks, and its notable 13.1% improvement on MRBench further demonstrates its effectiveness in alleviating grain blindness.