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02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

FlexMS: A Unified Public Benchmark for Molecule Tandem Mass Spectrum Prediction

arXiv:2602.22822v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) is central to small molecule identification, but current deep learning systems for spectrum prediction still remain difficult to evaluate and deploy in practice. While novel architectures constantly claim state-of-the-art performance, inconsistent metadata conditioning and entangled preprocessing pipelines hinder fair architectural comparisons. Besides, existing evaluations are often restricted to curated datasets, failing to capture the heterogeneity and cross-domain shifts of real-world metabolomics. Furthermore, current benchmarks lack difficulty-aware diagnostics and leave blind to how models behave under specific compute or data constraints. To address this, we present FlexMS, a modular public-data benchmark framework that standardizes MS/MS prediction across public resources while keeping molecular encoders, metadata conditioning, predictor heads, and downstream retrieval under one protocol. FlexMS establishes a fair evaluation playground which significantly lowers the barrier for integrating new predictive tools. Rather than solely optimizing for average scores, FlexMS augments aggregate accuracy with difficulty-aware diagnostics, providing actionable guidance on model selection across different compute constraints, data scales, and downstream retrieval objectives. Ultimately, FlexMS provides the community with a reproducible standard to identify which algorithmic conclusions are stable and which operating points are most viable in practice.

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

EPM-JEPA: Operator-Side Experience Modulation in JEPA-Family World Models

Authors:

arXiv:2606.12979v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: JEPA-family world models use a static predictor whose weights do not adapt when test-time dynamics diverge from training. We compare two mechanisms for incorporating accumulated experience into a JEPA predictor under distribution shift: operand-side injection, where a compressed experience representation is added as a residual to the predictor's hidden state (EI-JEPA), and operator-side modulation, where the same representation generates low-rank weight deltas via LoRA applied to the predictor's weights (EPM-JEPA). On a pre-registered comparison (Moving MNIST, gravity shift), EPM-JEPA (D_shift^{n=50} = 0.7848 +/- 0.0078, three seeds) differs from EI-JEPA (0.8238) by delta = 4.74% - Outcome C: a null result - by our stated criterion, a valid outcome. As a secondary, non-pre-registered observation, EPM-JEPA improves 1.90% over a no-memory baseline (0.8000), consistently across seeds, while EI-JEPA underperforms the baseline, indicating the benefit is specific to weight-level modulation. Our primary contribution is a mechanism analysis: the D_shift^{n=50} trajectory reflects three independent dynamical processes - buffer cycling, EMA target drift, and an intrinsic LoRA settling transient of +0.021 - rather than convergence to equilibrium. These findings motivate PEM-JEPA, a physics-grounded successor addressing this dynamical-peak limitation.

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

Unified MRI Brain Image Translation via Hierarchical Tumor Structure Comparison

Multi-modal MRI brain image translation via available modalities holds significant practical importance in modern medicine, providing robust support for early diagnosis, treatment planning, and outcome assessment of diseases. For this purpose, it is important to ensure the fidelity of the tumor regions after translation. However, existing brain image translation methods ignore the structure information of different tumor regions, which could assist translation models in enhancing the quality and clinical applicability of the translated images. In this work, we propose a novel translation model called HTSCGAN, which is a unified multi-modal brain image translation generative adversarial model integrating the structural information within tumor regions with the aim of improving the quality of brain image translation. Specifically, the generator employs three Patch Contrast Module (PCM) with different patch sizes to capture the hierarchical structural information of the tumor regions. In addition, a pretrained Patch Classifier (PC) and a pretrained Structure-Aware Encoder (SAE) are employed to derive the generated image containing the same tumor region structure as the ground truth image via patch classification loss and tumor perceptual loss, respectively. The experiments on BraTS2020 and BraTS2021 demonstrate strong performance of our model in both translation tasks and down stream segmentation tasks, highlighting its effectiveness in enhancing the quality and clinical relevance of the translated brain images. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/HTSCGAN.

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

Beyond the Smile: A Hybrid Convolutional VAE for Crypto Volatility Surfaces

arXiv:2606.16961v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a convolutional variational autoencoder for cryptocurrency implied-volatility surfaces, together with a deployable predictor that combines it with a quadratic smile re-fit through a deterministic per-tenor routing rule. Trained on 6,034 fully-filled hourly Binance Options surfaces of BTC and ETH spanning May-October 2023 and parameterised on a common $6 \times 7$ tenor-delta grid, the model attains a hidden-cell surface-completion RMSE in the 0.94-1.56 vol-point range across both markets and mask rates 10-50%. The hybrid predictor attains 0.83 vol points at 50% masking against 7.00 for the smile re-fit alone, an eightfold reduction obtained at no additional inference cost. Under structurally-correlated hole patterns that emulate the withdrawal of an entire tenor of strikes, the smile re-fit incurs 9.6-13.1 vol points of error while the learned model remains at 1.5-1.9, isolating a regime in which the generative model is the only viable predictor. Joint training on BTC and ETH improves the in-distribution model on both markets by 9-27% relative to the better-performing single-symbol counterpart, indicating a substantially shared vol-surface manifold across the two largest cryptocurrencies over the observation window. The hybrid is calendar- and butterfly-arbitrage-free at the listed strikes, a property that the parametric smile re-fit alone fails at high mask rates. The per-snapshot reconstruction error of the trained model flags the late-October ETF-anticipation rally and the August $17$, $2023$ flash crash as elevated-error periods without supervision. All training and evaluation infrastructure is released to support reproducible follow-on work.

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

PromptShift-CRC: Drift-Aware Conformal Risk Control for Foundation Models Under Prompt and Domain Shift

arXiv:2606.15964v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Foundation models are now used in settings where the prompts they receive can change quickly. Users change, topics change, policies change, and the model may suddenly face a kind of request that was rare in the calibration data. This makes fixed calibration risky. Conformal prediction and conformal risk control give model-agnostic ways to control error, but they work best when the calibration data still look like the future data. This paper develops PromptShift CRC, a drift-aware conformal risk control method for foundation-model outputs under prompt and domain shift. The method embeds prompts and responses, measures how far the current prompt stream has moved from the calibration pool, gives more weight to relevant or recent calibration examples, and updates the risk level online after observed violations. It reports three practical diagnostics: realized risk error, prompt drift, and effective calibration size. We give conditions under which the method controls risk up to terms for distribution mismatch and weighted quantile uncertainty. In a synthetic prompt-shift benchmark, static conformal risk control fails sharply after drift, while PromptShift-CRC gives the best coverage among the adaptive baselines considered. We then evaluate the same calibration layer on public benchmark derived streams for question answering, toxicity, summarization factuality, and long-context hallucination risk

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

BayLing-Duplex: Native Full-Duplex Speech Dialogue with a Single Autoregressive LLM

Real-time, full-duplex speech interaction is a key feature of next-generation spoken chatbots, allowing the model to listen and speak at the same time and to handle natural phenomena such as overlap, hesitation, and barge-in. Existing speech language models (SpeechLMs) such as LLaMA-Omni and GLM-4-Voice are still turn-based and rely on an external Voice Activity Detection (VAD) module to mark the end of the user's turn, which fundamentally limits their interactive ability. In this paper, we introduce BayLing-Duplex, a native full-duplex SpeechLM where a single autoregressive LLM decides when to listen, when to speak, and when to stop, with no auxiliary turn-taking module. The design adds only a few special tokens to the standard vocabulary, so it transfers across LLMs and reuses existing training and serving stacks with no architectural adaptation. Starting from the public GLM-4-Voice checkpoint and using only 400K full-duplex samples for fine-tuning followed by a lightweight DPO stage, BayLing-Duplex reaches 92% turn-taking success and 100% interruption success on InstructS2S-Eval, while improving the speech-response score from 2.17 to 3.39 over Moshi. BayLing-Duplex also matches or surpasses its turn-based counterpart on Llama Questions, Web Questions, and Alpaca-Eval, showing that simultaneous listen-and-speak modeling does not sacrifice response quality.

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

AL-GNN: Privacy-Preserving and Replay-Free Continual Graph Learning via Analytic Learning

arXiv:2512.18295v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continual graph learning (CGL) aims to enable graph neural networks to incrementally learn from a stream of graph structured data without forgetting previously acquired knowledge. Existing methods particularly those based on experience replay typically store and revisit past graph data to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. However, these approaches pose significant limitations, including privacy concerns, inefficiency. In this work, we propose AL GNN, a novel framework for continual graph learning that eliminates the need for backpropagation and replay buffers. Instead, AL GNN leverages principles from analytic learning theory to formulate learning as a recursive least squares optimization process. It maintains and updates model knowledge analytically through closed form classifier updates and a regularized feature autocorrelation matrix. This design enables efficient one pass training for each task, and inherently preserves data privacy by avoiding historical sample storage. Extensive experiments on multiple dynamic graph classification benchmarks demonstrate that AL GNN achieves competitive or superior performance compared to existing methods. For instance, it improves average performance by 10% on CoraFull and reduces forgetting by over 30% on Reddit, while also reducing training time by nearly 50% due to its backpropagation free design.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Handbook of Error-Correcting Codes

arXiv:2606.11484v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Barcode scans, clear phone calls, reliable data storage, satellite communication, and large-scale quantum computation are all made possible by error correction. We present a handbook version of The Error Correction Zoo, a curated reference of methods for protecting classical or quantum information from errors during storage and transmission. The handbook includes descriptions of these error-correcting codes and a classification according to the symbols they use. It also catalogues relations among codes and related objects such as sphere packings, lattices, designs, groups, and classical and quantum phases of matter. The collection is intended both as a rigorous reference and as a practical aid for tracing the web of code relationships and uncovering new connections.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

ITNet: A Learnable Integral Transform That Subsumes Convolution, Attention, and Recurrence

arXiv:2606.19538v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Convolutional networks, recurrent networks, and transformers each encode different inductive biases – locality, sequential memory, and content-dependent pairwise interaction – and have remained mathematically distinct since their inception. We show that this fragmentation reflects not a fundamental diversity in how signals should be processed, but rather incomplete views of a single underlying mathematical object: a learnable integral transform. We introduce the Integral Transform Network (ITNet), a unified architecture built around a learnable kernel that depends jointly on positions and features. This kernel is implemented as a small neural network, specifically an MLP, that models pairwise interactions, enabling the model to adapt its behavior from data. We show that convolution, self-attention (including multi-head), and autoregressive recurrence (including LSTM, GRU, S4, and Mamba) arise as special cases under appropriate parameterizations, and that ITNet is a universal approximator of continuous operators. To make this practical, we develop tiled kernel fusion, importance-weighted Monte Carlo integration, and learned low-rank factorization, enabling efficient and scalable computation. A single ITNet architecture with a shared operator and lightweight modality-specific encoders matches or exceeds specialized baselines on ImageNet-1K , GLUE, ModelNet40, VQA\,v2 and NLVR2. The results demonstrate that a single learned interaction mechanism can recover the behavior of all three architectural families from data.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Representing Piecewise-Linear Functions by Functions with Minimal Arity

arXiv:2406.02421v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Any continuous piecewise-linear function $F\colon \mathbb{R}^{n}\to \mathbb{R}$ can be represented as a linear combination of $\max$ functions of at most $n+1$ affine-linear functions. In our previous paper [``Representing piecewise linear functions by functions with small arity'', AAECC, 2023], we showed that this upper bound of $n+1$ arguments is tight. In the present paper, we extend this result by establishing a correspondence between the function $F$ and the minimal number of arguments that are needed in any such decomposition. We show that the tessellation of the input space $\mathbb{R}^{n}$ induced by the function $F$ has a direct connection to the number of arguments in the $\max$ functions.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Clinical Study Protocol of the 'Biomarkers of Severity of COVID-19 Patients' (BIOMARCOVID) Project

Introduction The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has challenged health care systems worldwide, in certain areas exceeding hospital capacities and human resources. This has underscored the importance of having better tools to predict the outcome of potentially severe respiratory infections such as SARS-CoV-2. Predicting COVID-19 severity may allow physicians to better manage ICU beds and increase the chances of patient survival through appropriate management. During the toughest months of the pandemic, most physicians tried to identify patients that might develop severe forms based primarily on clinical features on admission (e.g., BMI, age). In this context, significant research has focused on identifying comorbidities, clinical manifestations, and routine blood biomarkers to predict disease severity. However, despite the demonstrated value of untargeted metabolomics in assessing severity, limited data exist on its use for identifying novel metabolite biomarkers that could improve both the sensitivity and specificity of outcome prediction. Our goal is to identify metabolite biomarkers that could enhance the predictive accuracy of standard medical biology data and clinical parameters. Methods and analysis This is a retrospective, observational, monocentric cohort study conducted at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Grenoble Alpes (CHUGA). The maximum number of eligible patients admitted for PCR-confirmed COVID-19 between March and December 2020 will be included. Severity outcome is defined using the WHO 10-category ordinal scale (mild: categories 4-5; severe: >5). Blood samples were collected within 48 hours of admission and analyzed for 62 routine blood tests and untargeted multiplatform LC-MS/MS metabolomics across four national platforms. Statistical analysis will include logistic regression with variable selection for the primary aim, and multi-block chemometric integration of clinical, biological, and metabolomics data as a secondary aim. Ethics and dissemination A study steering committee has been formed to ensure the accuracy of the collected data by thoroughly reviewing it prior to the data lock. All aspects of the study comply with ethical standards, including approval by the CHUGA institutional review board and adherence to CNIL Reference Methodology MR004 for the protection of participants' rights, privacy, and confidentiality. This study is registered on the French Health Data Hub (number F20210218154851). Results will be disseminated through peer-reviewed publications, presentations at national and international scientific and clinical conferences, and reports shared with key healthcare system stakeholders.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

TW-LegalBench: Measuring Taiwanese Legal Understanding

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities across diverse tasks, yet their performance on jurisdiction-specific legal reasoning remains underexplored. We present TW-LegalBench that utilizes Taiwanese legal system's rich official corpus open to the public to fill the gap in evaluating LLMs on Taiwanese law, among common-law benchmarks that focus on English sources and civil-law benchmarks focusing on sources of Simplified Chinese. TW-LegalBench comprises three task types: (1) over 16,000 multiple-choice questions (MCQs) across five years of official examinations in 18 professional domains; (2) 117 open-ended essay questions (OEQs) from examinations for legal professionals with official scoring rubrics; and (3) more than 14,000 legal judgment prediction (LJP) instances covering hundreds of crime categories. We evaluate 13 LLMs using accuracy for MCQs, a decomposed LLM-as-Judge framework based on the scoring rubric points for OEQs, and metrics for sentencing accuracy and statute citation for LJP. Our results reveal that top-performing models exceed the passing threshold for qualified lawyers (passing rate: 11%) but fall short of that for judges and prosecutors (passing rate: 1~2%). For LJP, while models demonstrate reasonable verdict type accuracy and sentence prediction capability, they struggle to cite exact legal articles. These findings highlight that reliable legal text generation remains challenging for LLMs, even though their performance on qualification examinations approaches human level.

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

KAN-MLP-Mixer: A comprehensive investigation of the usage of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) for improving IMU-based Human Activity Recognition

arXiv:2605.19031v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) have demonstrated an exceptional ability to learn complex functions on clean, low-dimensional data but struggle to maintain performance on noisy and imperfect real-world datasets. In contrast, conventional multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) are far more tolerant to noise and computationally efficient. Replacing all MLP components with KANs in HAR models often degrades accuracy and computation efficiency, highlighting an open challenge: how to combine KANs' precision with MLPs' noise robustness and efficiency. To address this, we systematically explore various placements of KAN modules within deep HAR networks and propose a hybrid architecture that strategically synergizes the strengths of both paradigms, which uses a KAN-based input embedding layer, retains MLP layers for intermediate feature mixing, and introduces a specialized LarctanKAN module for final activity classification. Across eight public HAR datasets, the hybrid KAN-MLP model achieves an average macro F1 score relative improvement of 5.33\% compared pure-MLP model, significantly outperforming standalone KAN and MLP baselines. Furthermore, integrating this hybrid strategy into other state-of-the-art HAR architectures consistently boosts their performance. Our findings demonstrate that a carefully orchestrated combination of KAN, MLP, or other conventional neural components yields more robust and accurate HAR models for real-world wearable sensing environments.

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

FoundCause: Causal Discovery with Latent Confounders from Observational Data

arXiv:2606.17516v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Causal discovery from observational data remains challenging due to the need to recover directed structure and latent confounding without interventions. We propose FoundCause, an amortized causal discovery model trained entirely on synthetic data that maps datasets directly to causal graphs in a single forward pass. By learning from large collections of simulated structural causal models, FoundCause captures transferable statistical patterns that generalize beyond individual datasets. The architecture incorporates several key inductive biases for causal discovery. It uses a permutation-invariant transformer encoder with alternating attention over samples and variables to jointly model cross-variable dependence and per-variable distributions. Pairwise statistical features derived from classical asymmetry measures are injected through statistics-conditioned attention, guiding the model toward known causal signals. A factorized decoder separates edge existence from direction, while a triangular refinement module enables reasoning over higher-order causal motifs such as chains and colliders. In addition, a dedicated confounder module based on learnable latent tokens explicitly models hidden common causes, and the model explicitly handles missing data via its masked input representation. To our knowledge, FoundCause is the first amortized causal discovery approach to explicitly model latent confounding. FoundCause outperforms 11 classical non-amortized methods (e.g., PC, GES, NOTEARS-style optimization) and 4 amortized causal discovery methods on 15 real-world datasets, achieving +9.6% improvement in $F_1$, +1.2% in AUROC, and an 18.9% reduction in structural Hamming distance relative to the strongest non-amortized methods, while performing inference in a single forward pass.

16.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12

PHI-Reason: evidence-grounded species-level phage-host prediction from structured biological text profiles

Phage–host interaction (PHI) prediction is a fundamental problem in microbiology with applications in microbial ecology and microbiome engineering. Existing computational approaches typically convert phage and host information into numerical representations derived from sequence similarity, protein content, genome composition or reference databases, then score candidate hosts or train host-prediction models. Although effective, such representations often make it difficult to inspect which biological evidence supports a prediction. Here, we present PHI-Reason, a species-level PHI prediction framework that reformulates host prediction as constrained biological text reasoning. Instead of embedding phages and hosts directly as numerical vectors, PHI-Reason converts heterogeneous PHI-related evidence from phage genomes, host genomes, functional annotations, homology searches and biological metadata into modular natural-language profiles. A frozen large language model then performs species-level candidate-host ranking or pairwise PHI assessment by integrating the supplied evidence at inference time. Across species-level benchmarks, PHI-Reason achieved competitive host-prediction performance and recovered complementary correct assignments relative to established sequence- and reference-based methods. Its explicit profile design enabled systematic evidence perturbation and rationale-grounding analyses, showing that predictions depend on coherent multi-source biological evidence and that hallucination risk from unsupported or incomplete profiles can be made operationally measurable. These results position PHI-Reason as a constrained evidence-integration framework for species-level PHI prediction. Rather than replacing sequence-based predictors, it provides an interpretable layer that shows how far explicit biological evidence can support host inference, and where that evidence falls short.

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

How Low Can You Go? Active Learning for Sparse Model Discovery in the Ultra-Low-Data Limit

arXiv:2606.12182v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Identifying the governing equations of complex dynamical systems remains a fundamental challenge across science and engineering. While early approaches relied on empirical data and heuristics, modern data-driven methods offer greater flexibility and fewer assumptions. However, data acquisition in real-world settings is often expensive. This work addresses this challenge by introducing an active learning strategy for dynamics discovery in the ultra-low data limit. Rather than sampling randomly, our method iteratively prioritizes regions that are most informative for model identification. This approach builds on Sparse Identification of Nonlinear Dynamics (SINDy), and utilizes an ensemble extension, E-SINDy, to estimate epistemic uncertainty and guide the sampling for both ordinary and partial differential equations (ODEs/PDEs). For ODEs, an exhaustive analysis is conducted on the Lorenz system across varying data budgets and noise levels. For PDEs, two systems with contrasting dynamical characteristics are examined: the Burgers' equation, where a sharp shock front creates a distinction between informative and uninformative regions, and the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation, which presents a more spatially complex sampling landscape. Across all scenarios, the proposed method accurately identifies the governing dynamics with significantly fewer data samples than random sampling.

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

AI Sovereignty as National Learning Capacity: A Human-Centered Learning Mechanics Viewpoint on France, the United States, and China

Authors:

arXiv:2606.00729v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Artificial intelligence in France is often discussed through separate dimensions such as investment, compute, regulation, employment, sovereignty, and education. This viewpoint paper proposes a unified interpretation: France can be analyzed as a national AI learning system. Building on Human-Centered Learning Mechanics (HCLM), we use HCLM not as a validated econometric model, but as a conceptual and diagnostic lens for interpreting national AI development as a balance between information injection, absorptive capacity, and institutional dissipation. Information injection includes compute, data, talent, research, capital, industrial deployment, and policy experimentation. Institutional dissipation refers to avoidable frictions such as administrative overload, coordination failures, energy constraints, regulatory uncertainty, talent mobility pressures, and weak industrial absorption. Regulation is not treated as mere friction: adaptive governance, trusted data spaces, and safety-oriented standards may increase long-term learning capacity by improving legitimacy, interoperability, and social trust. The central claim is not that a country follows neural-network equations, but that AI sovereignty depends on how effectively it converts distributed information into absorbed, coordinated, and socially legitimate capability. The paper connects HCLM with neural scaling laws, endogenous growth theory, creative destruction, absorptive capacity, and coordination mechanisms. It offers a formal heuristic, policy indicators, illustrative scenarios, and implications for France. The numerical results are diagnostic scenarios, not econometric estimates or official rankings. The proposed viewpoint reframes AI policy as the governance of an open, strategic, non-equilibrium learning system that should be tested with historical and cross-country data.

19.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15

SMLMFlow: Improving Structural Resolution in Single Molecule Localization Microscopy with Flow Matching

While Single Molecule Localization Microscopy (SMLM) aims to generate precise coordinates of molecular targets in cells, the resulting point clouds are inherently blurred by additive noise sources across the experimental, imaging, and processing workflow. This blurring often limits SMLM's ability to accurately quantify complex assembled structures required to address biological issues, despite reported localization precision down to a couple of nanometers. Here, we present SMLMFlow, a machine learning framework for improving structural resolution in SMLM datasets that combines a graph neural network and a hierarchical transformer with flow matching. We show that SMLMFlow improves structural resolution and downstream quantification across different structures, including filaments and protein nano-clusters, and generalizes to new unseen photophysics models.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

EnvRL: Learn from Environment Dynamics in Agentic Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for training Large Language Models (LLMs) as agents. However, conventional RL methods for long-horizon agentic tasks often struggle with sparse outcome rewards. Intuitively, this overlooks the rich environment dynamics information contained in rollout interaction trajectories. We argue that the interaction experience inherently serves as an implicit supervision signal, reveals the underlying transition mechanisms of the environment, and enables the agent to construct a more accurate internal model of the environment.. Therefore, in this work, we investigate how to leverage this additional signal to improve policy learning. Specifically, we propose EnvRL, a framework that incorporates environment dynamics learning into agentic RL via two auxiliary objectives: state prediction and inverse dynamics. By jointly optimizing with the primary RL objective, we encourage the agent to internalize environment dynamics from its own interaction experience. Extensive experiments on two long-horizon agentic benchmarks demonstrate that EnvRL achieves significant improvements on success-rates over RL-only baselines, e.g., when trained with GRPO, lifting Qwen-2.5-1.5B-Instruct from 72.8% to 77.4% on ALFWorld, and from 56.8% to 67.0% on WebShop.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

CycliST: A Video Language Model Benchmark for Reasoning on Cyclical State Transitions

We present CycliST, a novel benchmark dataset designed to evaluate Video Language Models (VLM) on their ability for textual reasoning over cyclical state transitions. CycliST captures fundamental aspects of real-world processes by generating synthetic, richly structured video sequences featuring periodic patterns in object motion and visual attributes. CycliST employs a tiered evaluation system that progressively increases difficulty through variations in the number of cyclic objects, scene clutter, and lighting conditions, challenging state-of-the-art models on their spatio-temporal cognition. We conduct extensive experiments with current state-of-the-art VLMs, both open-source and proprietary, and reveal their limitations in generalizing to cyclical dynamics such as linear and orbital motion, as well as time-dependent changes in visual attributes like color and scale. Our results demonstrate that present-day VLMs struggle to reliably detect and exploit cyclic patterns, lack a notion of temporal understanding, and are unable to extract quantitative insights from scenes, such as the number of objects in motion, highlighting a significant technical gap that needs to be addressed. More specifically, we find no single model consistently leads in performance: neither size nor architecture correlates strongly with outcomes, and no model succeeds equally well across all tasks. By providing a targeted challenge and a comprehensive evaluation framework, CycliST paves the way for visual reasoning models that surpass the state-of-the-art in understanding periodic patterns.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

OPD-Evolver: Cultivating Holistic Agent Evolver via On-Policy Distillation

Memory has become a standard substrate for self-evolving agents, yet retaining experience is not the same as learning how to evolve through it. Existing memory agents can store trajectories, retrieve reflections, or accumulate skills, but often lack the holistic competence to select useful experience, act on it, write reusable knowledge, and maintain a growing repository. We introduce OPD-Evolver, a slow-fast co-evolution framework that cultivates such an agent evolver through on-policy self-distillation. In the fast loop, OPD-Evolver interacts with a four-level memory hierarchy to read, use, write, and maintain experience for rapid test-time evolution. In the slow loop, outcome-calibrated memory attribution and privileged hindsight distill these four abilities into the deployable policy. Across multi-domain benchmarks, OPD-Evolver surpasses memory systems such as ReasoningBank by up to 11.5%, and training-based methods such as Skill0 by ~5.8%. Further analysis shows that OPD-Evolver internalizes high-value experience and memory management, enabling OPD-Evolver-9B to challenge giant counterparts such as Qwen3.5-397B-A17B and Step-3.5-Flash, pointing beyond memory-augmented agents toward genuinely qualified agent evolvers.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Asymmetric quantum steering harvested near a Lorentz-violating BTZ black hole

arXiv:2606.12766v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We investigate the harvesting of quantum steering and its directional asymmetry between two Unruh-DeWitt detectors in a Lorentz-violating BTZ black hole spacetime. Since the detectors are located at different radial positions outside the black hole, they experience inequivalent local environments induced by gravitational redshift, causing Alice to undergo stronger effective thermal noise than Bob. Remarkably, we uncover a counterintuitive phenomenon in which the detector subjected to a higher effective temperature exhibits stronger steerability than the other one, revealing a nontrivial inversion of thermal intuition in curved spacetime. Furthermore, quantum steering survives only within a finite window of detector energy gaps and reaches its maximum within an optimal regime. We find that Lorentz violation suppresses steering most strongly near this optimal energy gap, indicating an enhanced sensitivity of maximal correlation extraction to symmetry breaking effects. Our results demonstrate that Lorentz violation acts as a geometric constraint on the quantum information capacity of spacetime, simultaneously restricting both the strength and the directionality of quantum correlations.

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

Federated Learning for Feature Generalization with Convex Constraints

arXiv:2606.14416v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Federated learning (FL) often struggles with generalization due to heterogeneous client data. Local models are prone to overfitting their local data distributions, and even transferable features can be distorted during aggregation. To address these challenges, we propose FedCONST, an approach that adaptively modulates update magnitudes based on the parameter strength of the global model. This prevents over-emphasizing well-learned parameters while reinforcing underdeveloped ones. Specifically, FedCONST employs linear convex constraints to ensure training stability and preserve locally learned generalization capabilities during aggregation. A Gradient Signal to Noise Ratio (GSNR) analysis further validates the effectiveness of FedCONST in enhancing feature transferability and robustness. As a result, FedCONST effectively aligns local and global objectives, mitigating overfitting and promoting stronger generalization across diverse FL environments, achieving state-of-the-art performance.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Spatial Priors via Space Filling Curves for Small and Limited Data Vision Transformers

Though Vision Transformers (ViTs) have become the dominant backbone in many computer vision tasks, due to permutation equivariance, their attention mechanism lacks explicit spatial inductive biases. This become particularly important in two settings: when model capacity is small or training data is limited. Inspired by the attention masking strategies in Linear Transformers and the scanning patterns of Vision SSMs, we introduce VIOLIN, a lightweight masked attention mechanism that encodes spatial structure within attention via Space Filling Curves (SFCs) with less than 0.0015% extra parameters and negligible computational overhead. VIOLIN scans the image using multiple SFCs to construct curve-specific decay masks, which are then combined and multiplied with the attention matrix. Across a wide range of evaluations, VIOLIN consistently improves performance. In limited data regimes such as fine-tuning on VTAB-1K, it boosts accuracy across all task groups and by up to 8.7% on the tasks where spatial information is essential. It can be combined with parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods such as LoRA to further increase the performance. Beyond fine-tuning, VIOLIN improves various small scale ViT architectures (e.g., DeiT, DINO) during pretraining on ImageNet-1K. Additionally, on pixel-level CIFAR-100 training, a task that is highly dependent on location information, VIOLIN increases accuracy by up to 7.2%. Overall, VIOLIN provides a computationally efficient yet effective way to inject spatial inductive bias into ViTs, especially benefiting small models and limited data settings.