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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

From AGI to ASI

arXiv:2606.12683v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Over the last decade, building human-level artificial general intelligence has moved from far-fetched speculation to being a concrete next-decade target for many of the largest AI organisations. Achieving this goal would have profound and far-reaching impacts on human society, which raises many complex questions for the decade ahead. This report investigates how AI itself might continue to develop in a post-AGI world along the continuum of machine intelligence. The endpoint of this continuum, Universal AI, is theoretically well understood, which provides some formal grounding for the main focus of this report: the transition from human-level AGI to artificial general superintelligence, which, intuitively, can be understood as a system that is more intelligent and cognitively capable than large organisations of humans. After characterizing ASI, the report discusses four potential pathways from AGI to ASI: scaling AGI, AI paradigm shifts, recursive improvement, and ASI emerging from large-scale multi-agent collectives. The report then discusses possible frictions and bottlenecks along these pathways. Determining whether the impact of these frictions will be negligible or substantial raises a number of concrete open research questions. Due to large uncertainties for predicting ASI progress, it cannot be ruled out that AI progress might continue to accelerate over the next years. This could imply that the image of a single transformative step change, caused by the introduction of human-level AGI into our society, could be inaccurate. More apt might be the prospect of a series of transformative societal changes caused by AI-enabled progress and breakthroughs across many areas of science and technology. Preparing for this prospect requires a massively interdisciplinary endeavour of global scope and interest.

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

Rotation-Invariant Spherical Watermarking via Third-Order SO(3) Representation Coupling

Reliable watermarking of panoramic imagery is fundamentally challenged by arbitrary 3D rotations. As panoramas are defined on the sphere, they naturally transform under the action of $SO(3)$, rendering conventional planar representations and augmentation-based robustness strategies inadequate and devoid of theoretical guarantees. To address this, we formulate panoramas as spherical signals and leverage $SO(3)$ representation theory to derive provably rotation-invariant descriptors. While spherical harmonic coefficients transform equivariantly under rotations, the natural invariant constructions are typically limited to zeroth-order statistics which eliminate directional information and severely constrain embedding capacity. In this work, we introduce a principled third-order invariant construction by coupling higher-order $SO(3)$ irreducible representations via tensor products and projecting onto the trivial representation. This yields a spherical invariant bispectrum that preserves phase information while remaining strictly rotation-invariant. Leveraging this property, we embed watermarks into higher-order spherical harmonic coefficients and recover them from invariant bispectral scalars, enabling reliable extraction under arbitrary 3D rotations. We provide a theoretical proof of $SO(3)$ invariance for it and demonstrate experimentally its near-perfect robustness to continuous rotations while maintaining high visual fidelity.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Visual Generation in the New Era: An Evolution from Atomic Mapping to Agentic World Modeling

Recent visual generation models have made major progress in photorealism, typography, instruction following, and interactive editing, yet they still struggle with spatial reasoning, persistent state, long-horizon consistency, and causal understanding. We argue that the field should move beyond appearance synthesis toward intelligent visual generation: plausible visuals grounded in structure, dynamics, domain knowledge, and causal relations. To frame this shift, we introduce a five-level taxonomy: Atomic Generation, Conditional Generation, In-Context Generation, Agentic Generation, and World-Modeling Generation, progressing from passive renderers to interactive, agentic, world-aware generators. We analyze key technical drivers, including flow matching, unified understanding-and-generation models, improved visual representations, post-training, reward modeling, data curation, synthetic data distillation, and sampling acceleration. We further show that current evaluations often overestimate progress by emphasizing perceptual quality while missing structural, temporal, and causal failures. By combining benchmark review, in-the-wild stress tests, and expert-constrained case studies, this roadmap offers a capability-centered lens for understanding, evaluating, and advancing the next generation of intelligent visual generation systems.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Quality Over Clicks: Iterative Reinforcement Learning for Early-Stage E-Commerce Query Suggestion

Existing dialogue systems rely on query suggestion to enhance user engagement. Recent approaches mainly optimize generative models using click-through rate (CTR) models to align with user preferences. However, these methods are less effective in early-stage deployment scenarios, where click feedback is sparse and insufficient for training a reliable CTR model. To bridge this gap, we propose QualEQS, a quality-first iterative reinforcement learning framework for e-commerce query suggestion. We formalize actionable suggestion quality along three dimensions that directly affect downstream usability: answerability, factuality, and information gain. To continuously improve from online traffic without click supervision, we further propose group-level disagreement among candidate suggestions to identify ambiguous query contexts and mine hard training cases for iterative refinement. We also introduce EQS-Benchmark, a dataset of 16,949 real-world e-commerce queries for offline training and evaluation. Experiments show that our quality-based offline metrics correlate strongly with online performance, providing a practical evaluation recipe for sparse-feedback deployment. In both offline and online settings, QualEQS consistently outperforms strong baselines, yielding a 6.81% improvement in online ChatPV in a real-world enterprise-level conversational shopping assistant system.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Net-Ev$^2$: A Generative Simulator for Network Event Evolution

arXiv:2606.12494v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reducing real-world trial and error has long been a central goal of decision making, and generative simulators advance this goal by modeling the evolution of future states. An even more challenging yet meaningful task is simulating how disturbance events (e.g., accidents) propagate their impacts across real-world networks. The existing approaches fall short of modeling both structured attributes and unstructured semantics of events, and capturing topological structures in simulating network event evolution. Therefore, we are motivated to propose Net-Ev$^2$ ($\underline{Net}$work $\underline{Ev}$ent $\underline{Ev}$olution), a novel generative simulator that jointly leverages event cues while preserving network topology in simulations. Specifically, the framework consists of two stages, namely structure-guided masked pre-training and topology-aware diffusion process, which is achieved by U-Net-like graph downsampling and upsampling during denoising. At inference time, Net-Ev$^2$ can generate simulations using natural-language event input only, with greater flexibility for practical usage. Furthermore, we introduce Net-Ev$^2$-6.5M, a multimodal benchmark of aligned event and network traffic data across four large-scale road networks, as well as a new topology-aware metric, namely JL-MMD, to evaluate topological fidelity in generated network dynamics. Extensive experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance and strong generalization ability of Net-Ev$^2$. Code is made available at https://github.com/Guangyu4/Net-Ev-2.

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

RATS! Patches Talk Through Registers: Emergent Parts in Register Attention Transformers

When humans see a bird, they recognize far more than just "bird" – they see a head, wings, and talons, a structured assembly of reusable parts that can be identified across every bird they have ever seen. We ask whether a self-supervised visual model can discover the same compositional structure on its own. To this end, we propose RATS (Register Attention Transformers), which decomposes the classification token into N learnable register tokens that route patch information through an L->N->N->L bottleneck via a three-step compress-communicate-broadcast attention. The N registers are partitioned across the H attention heads, so that registers assigned to different heads do not interact with each other. Without auxiliary losses or part annotations, each register spontaneously specializes into a proto-semantic region whose emerging structure resembles object parts. RATS surpasses all baselines by +12 mIoU on average across five segmentation benchmarks, with consistent gains on ADE20K (+1.11 mIoU) and COCO (+0.2 AP^m). Its register dictionary further exhibits part-level consistency and semantic proximity across related categories. Our results suggest that RATS may provide a useful architectural prior for structured and interpretable visual representation learning.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Why Tree-Style Branching Matters for Thought Advantage Estimation in GRPO

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) trains Chain-of-Thought reasoning with verifiable rewards, but estimating thought-level advantages without value functions often suffers from high variance. Although tree-style branching is used in practice to reduce variance, it lacks a theoretical explanation of why it works and whether it is important or potentially necessary. We study thought-level advantage estimation in GRPO from a variance perspective under a minimal tree-style setting where multiple continuations are sampled for each thought. Using the multivariate delta method, we reveal a sampling-dimension asymmetry. Increasing sampled thoughts ($K$) leaves a strictly positive estimation-variance floor, whereas increasing continuations per thought ($M$) drives the leading-order estimation variance to zero at rate $1/M$. This implies that, within the fixed-temperature GRPO-style estimator without value models studied here, accurate thought-level advantage estimation cannot be achieved by scaling thought sampling alone, making continuation-level branching a principled and potentially necessary mechanism rather than a heuristic. Experiments further provide empirical evidence for its effectiveness and potential necessity, demonstrating improved optimization stability, training efficiency, and final performance not only in math but also across vision domains and under different model architectures and sizes.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Given, When, Then, Again: Mining Subscenario Refactoring Candidates in Behaviour-Driven Test Suites with ML Classifiers and LLM-Judge Baselines

Context. Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) test suites accumulate duplicated step subsequences. Three published refactoring patterns are available (within-file Background, within-repo reusable-scenario invocation, cross-organisational shared higher-level step), but no prior work automates which recurring subsequences are worth extracting or which mechanism applies. Objective. Rank recurring step subsequences ("slices") by refactoring suitability (extraction-worthy), pre-map each to one of the three patterns, and quantify prevalence across the public BDD ecosystem. Method. Every contiguous L-step window (L in [2, 18]) in a 339-repository / 276-upstream-owner Gherkin corpus is keyed by paraphrase-robust cluster identifiers and counted under three scopes. SBERT / UMAP / HDBSCAN clustering recovers paraphrase-equivalent slices. Three authors label a stratified 200-slice pool against a written rubric. An XGBoost extraction-worthy classifier trained under 5-fold cross-validation is compared with a tuned rule baseline and two open-weight Large Language Model (LLM) judges. Results. The miner produces 5,382,249 slices collapsing to 692,020 recurring patterns. Three-author Fleiss' kappa = 0.56 (extraction-worthy) and 0.79 (mechanism). The classifier reaches out-of-fold F1 = 0.891 (95% CI [0.852, 0.927]), outperforming both the rule baseline (F1 = 0.836, p = 0.017) and the better LLM judge (F1 = 0.728, p = 1.5e-4). 75.0%, 59.5%, and 11.7% of scenarios carry a within-file Background, within-repo reusable-scenario, and cross-organisational shared-step candidate, respectively; the figures are stable under a sweep of the classifier decision threshold. Conclusion. Paraphrase-robust subscenario discovery yields a corpus-wide census of BDD refactoring candidates; pipeline, classifier predictions, labelled pool, and rubric are released under Apache-2.0.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Deterministic Policy Gradient for Learning Equilibrium in Time-Inconsistent Control Problems

arXiv:2606.11798v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper, we develop a continuous-time model-free reinforcement learning algorithm to learn deterministic equilibrium policies in general time-inconsistent control problems. Utilizing the extended Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman system, we recast the original time-inconsistent problem into an equivalent two-stage problem. In the first stage, for given auxiliary functions, we employ the deterministic policy gradient approach to learn an optimal policy in an auxiliary time-consistent control problem. In the second stage, given the updated policy, we exploit the inner fixed point iterations and some martingale characterizations to learn the auxiliary functions. As a theoretical contribution, we provide some mild model assumptions and establish the convergence of inner fixed point iterations. By repeating this actor-critic style of iterations across two stages, our algorithm aims to learn the equilibrium under different sources of time-inconsistency in a unified manner. The superior effectiveness of the proposed algorithm are illustrated in two classical financial applications with time-inconsistency: mean-variance portfolio management and optimal tracking portfolio under non-exponential discounting.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Spin correlations, low-energy scales, and anisotropy scaling in kagome frustrated magnets

arXiv:2606.12512v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neutron scattering is central to identifying quantum states of magnetic materials. In the search for quantum spin liquids, broad spectral features of inelastic spectra have been cited as evidence for spinon excitations, but can also arise from magnon excitations excitations in the presence of quenched disorder and strong magnon interactions. We develop a new approach to this problem, based on the adiabatic continuity in the $XXZ$ Heisenberg model on geometrically frustrating (GF) lattices as a function of the model's anisotropy. Using this approach, we identify universal features and energies of finite-temperature spin correlators. Focusing on the kagome lattice, we show that the low-energy spin spectral function contains robust, momentum-independent peaks with frequencies: $\omega_1 \approx 3.4 T^*$ and $\omega_2 \approx 6.3 T^*$, where the ``hidden energy scale'' $T^*$ is the characteristic scale of a low-temperature peak in the heat capacity, at which many GF magnets also display spin-glass freezing. We show that the spectral features at low energies $\omega\lesssim T^*$ arise from single-magnon scattering and identify the magnetizations of the respective excitations. We explore the evolution of the spectral features with temperature and discuss extensions to other GF lattices. Our results provide a sharp spectroscopic criterion for interpreting neutron scattering in kagome and other GF quantum magnets.

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

FragFuse: Bypassing Access Control of Large Language Model Agents via Memory-Based Query Fragmentation and Fusion

arXiv:2606.15609v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on long-term memory to support complex task execution, user personalization, and domain adaptation. Meanwhile, emerging access-control mechanisms for LLM agents are being explored to block policy-violating requests and prevent misuse. We reveal a novel attack surface arising from agent memory operations: prohibited content that would trigger access control can be fragmented across interactions, stored in long-term memory in benign-appearing form, and later reconstructed through memory retrieval without appearing explicitly in the final user query. We propose FragFuse, the first attack that enables unprivileged users to bypass agent access control by exploiting this temporal channel introduced by long-term memory. FragFuse operates in three stages: (1) identifying rejection-responsive fragments via black-box adaptive querying with fragment masking; (2) injecting these fragments into memory using marker carrier queries; and (3) retrieving and fusing the stored fragments through a follow-up attack query. Although FragFuse can be instantiated manually for individual agents, we further develop a surrogate-based optimization scheme that tunes fusion instructions and marker designs, enabling automated attack generation without violating the attacker's threat-model assumptions. We evaluate FragFuse across four representative agent settings and task domains, covering three state-of-the-art agent access-control mechanisms. FragFuse achieves an average bypass success rate of 86.3% and an average end-to-end harmful task success rate of 41.1% across all settings, with only 4.4% average task-success degradation compared with configurations without access control. We also show that alternative defenses, including state-of-the-art prompt-injection detectors and perplexity detectors, do not effectively address this attack.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

ActiTect: A Generalizable Machine Learning Pipeline for REM Sleep Behavior Disorder Screening through Standardized Actigraphy

arXiv:2511.05221v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Isolated rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder (iRBD) is a major prodromal marker of $\alpha$-synucleinopathies, often preceding the clinical onset of Parkinson's disease, dementia with Lewy bodies, or multiple system atrophy. While wrist-worn actimeters hold significant potential for detecting RBD in large-scale screening efforts by capturing abnormal nocturnal movements, they become inoperable without a reliable and efficient analysis pipeline. This study presents ActiTect, a fully automated, open-source machine learning tool to identify RBD from actigraphy recordings. To ensure generalizability across heterogeneous acquisition settings, our pipeline includes robust preprocessing and automated sleep-wake detection to harmonize multi-device data and extract physiologically interpretable motion features characterizing activity patterns. Model development was conducted on a cohort of 78 individuals, yielding strong discrimination under nested cross-validation (AUROC = 0.95). Generalization was confirmed on a blinded local test set (n = 31, AUROC = 0.86) and on two independent external cohorts (n = 113, AUROC = 0.84; n = 57, AUROC = 0.94). To assess real-world robustness, leave-one-dataset-out cross-validation across the internal and external cohorts demonstrated consistent performance (AUROC range = 0.84-0.89). A complementary stability analysis showed that key predictive features remained reproducible across datasets, supporting the final pooled multi-center model as a robust pre-trained resource for broader deployment. By being open-source and easy to use, our tool promotes widespread adoption and facilitates independent validation and collaborative improvements, thereby advancing the field toward a unified and generalizable RBD detection model using wearable devices.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

HistoRAG: Embedding Historical Methodology in Retrieval-Augmented Generation Through Critical Technical Practice

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is the prevailing architecture for grounding language model outputs in external evidence, yet its dominant evaluation paradigms and default configurations remain oriented toward factual question-answering. For interpretive disciplines such as historical studies, RAG embeds assumptions that conflict with scholarly practice. We introduce HistoRAG, a framework that translates historiographical principles into concrete architectural interventions. Separated retrieval and generation decouples source discovery from interpretation, temporal windowing enforces balanced source representation across the research period as a methodological requirement of historical inquiry, and LLM-as-judge evaluation makes relevance judgments transparent and contestable. We evaluate these interventions using SPIEGELragged, applied to 102,189 articles from Der Spiegel (1950-1979). Each intervention addresses a measurable deficiency in standard RAG: era-specific vocabulary retrieves zero chunks from the 1950s when using 1970s terminology, evidence of the temporal skew that motivates windowing; vector similarity and LLM-assessed relevance correlate only weakly (Spearman rho = 0.275), motivating post-retrieval evaluation; and keyword-based and semantic retrieval surface largely disjoint source pools, motivating an architecture in which both operate as complementary retrieval layers under a shared LLM evaluation filter. We also introduce the concept of Zwischentexte (intermediate texts that function as interpretive proposals rather than findings) as a framework for responsible integration of LLM-generated text into scholarly practice. The architecture offers a model for how domain-specific epistemological commitments can be translated into RAG design decisions, and may transfer to other interpretive disciplines working with large corpora.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

SIMBA: ABidirectional Retrieval Forward Simulation Framework for Modeling FY-4A GIIRS Hyperspectral Infrared Radiances Toward NWP Applications

arXiv:2606.19943v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hyperspectral infrared observations are an important data source for numerical weather prediction (NWP) because they provide rich information on the vertical structure of atmospheric temperature and humidity. However, most existing deep learning methods mainly focus on one-way retrieval from radiances to atmospheric profiles, while the reverse radiance simulation process and the consistency between atmospheric state space and radiance observation space are insufficiently considered. In this study, we propose SIMBA, a unified bidirectional retrieval-forward simulation framework for FY-4A GIIRS hyperspectral infrared radiance modeling toward NWP applications. The framework jointly performs atmospheric profile retrieval and radiance reconstruction, introduces a cycle-consistency constraint to strengthen the coupling between the two processes, and employs a bidirectional Mamba state-space module to capture long-range dependencies along pressure levels. Using collocated FY-4A GIIRS observations and ERA5 reanalysis data, the proposed method is evaluated for temperature retrieval, specific humidity retrieval, long-wave radiance reconstruction, and medium-wave radiance reconstruction. Experimental results show that SIMBA outperforms several representative deep learning baselines across both retrieval and reconstruction tasks, while ablation experiments confirm the contribution of the bidirectional design and cycle-consistency mechanism. These results demonstrate that the proposed framework is effective for joint atmospheric profile retrieval and hyperspectral infrared radiance modeling, and suggest potential for future Jacobian-related analysis and NWP-oriented extensions.

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

Occ-VLM: Occupancy Grounded Vision Language Model for Indoor Scene Understanding

Recently, vision-language models (VLMs) have made significant progress in 3D scene understanding, driving advances in applications such as embodied intelligence and robotic vision. However, existing approaches typically either rely directly on explicit 3D inputs (e.g., point clouds or RGB-D sequences), or introduce an additional 3D geometry encoder to derive 3D-aware visual tokens from 2D images. Such designs structurally decouple 3D geometric perception from the rich 2D semantics learned via vision-language pre-training, hindering the development of a unified 3D vision-language representation. In this work, we propose Occ-VLM, a novel framework for 3D scene understanding that operates purely on posed RGB images and employs a single 2D vision encoder. Specifically, Occ-VLM reconstructs 3D scene occupancy as an auxiliary geometric prior, which is utilized to spatially associate foreground 2D tokens with 3D space. These tokens are then decoded by a Large Language Model (LLM) for unified scene understanding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Occ-VLM achieves both accurate geometric perception and robust vision-language reasoning: it attains state-of-the-art performance on multi-view occupancy prediction, while performing on par with 3D-input VLMs on 3D Visual Question Answering (VQA) and 3D dense captioning benchmarks.

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

Nonlinear cascaded quantum network with giant emitters

arXiv:2404.09829v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Chiral quantum optics is central to developing scalable quantum networks, yet existing approaches rely predominantly on linear single-photon regimes. It remains unclear how to generate directional multiphotons. Here we show that giant emitters coupled to nonlinear quantum optical baths enable tunable directional correlated photons, revealing a mechanism for multiphoton directional emission. We demonstrate that the propagation phases of correlated photons, together with the coupling phases of giant emitters, can generate destructive interference in one direction while enhancing emission in the opposite direction, making directionality fully tunable. Building on this mechanism, we introduce a nonlinear cascaded quantum network paradigm mediated by correlated flying qubits, providing a configurable building block enabling distinct many-body applications beyond linear unidirectional setups. These results reveal a rich landscape for engineering multiphoton propagation and correlations through interference in giant emitter-nonlinear bath architectures, offering pathways for quantum networks and strongly correlated light-matter platforms.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

AME: A Multi-Type Contributor Attribution Framework in Generative AI Markets

Generative AI enables value creation through multi-stage collaboration among heterogeneous contributors, including training data, base models, fine-tuning behaviors, and prompts. However, how to fairly allocate the data value remains largely unexplored. This paper formulates multi-stage generative AI value allocation as a new research problem and identifies three core challenges: heterogeneous data contribution valuation, data rights mapping, and trustworthy execution. We propose AME (Attribution-Mapping-Execution) framework, a unified framework that integrates data contribution valuation, data rights mapping, and trustworthy execution into a single workflow. Experimental results demonstrate that AME framework achieves data value allocation outcomes more consistent with human reference judgments while maintaining low-cost trustworthy execution. Our work provides an initial foundation for value assessment and revenue allocation in generative AI data markets.

18.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Bioinf-Farma: supervised integration of epitope prediction and recombinant protein developability for automated vaccine candidate prioritization

Vaccine antigen discovery requires prioritizing protein candidates according to both immunogenic potential and recombinant expression feasibility. These properties are typically evaluated using separate computational tools, requiring researchers to integrate heterogeneous outputs through ad hoc workflows. Here, we present BIOINF-farma, a modular platform integrating epitope prediction and developability assessment for rational antigen selection within a unified environment. Candidates can be submitted as amino acid sequences or three-dimensional structures. When experimental structures are unavailable, BIOINF-farma automatically searches for models in AlphaFold DB or performs structure prediction using Boltz-2, ensuring a standardized structural representation for downstream analyses. Antigenicity is quantified by combining structure-based conformational epitope signals (MLCE/REBELOT-BEPPE) and sequence-based linear epitope propensity scores (BepiPred 3.0) into a protein-level Antigenicity Score, with a classification threshold optimized on a manually curated validation dataset. Developability is evaluated through two supervised Random Forest meta-learners that integrate three solubility predictors (DeepSoluE, SoluProt, Protein-Sol) and three thermal stability predictors (TemStaPro, ProLaTherm, BertThermo), whose outputs are combined into an Expression Efficiency Score (EES). By integrating complementary predictive signals, the meta-learning framework achieves greater accuracy and robustness than individual predictors while maintaining performance across a broad range of sequence identities. The Antigenicity Score effectively discriminates antigenic from non-antigenic proteins with a large effect size, whereas EES successfully distinguishes soluble from insoluble outcomes on an independent panel of recombinant proteins expressed in Escherichia coli. BIOINF-farma jointly assesses antigenicity and expression feasibility within a single framework. Its modular architecture facilitates the incorporation of future predictive methods, while its web-based interface makes the full pipeline accessible to users without programming expertise, supporting rapid candidate triage in vaccine research and emerging pathogen responses.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

OccAny: Generalized Unconstrained Urban 3D Occupancy

Relying on in-domain annotations and precise sensor-rig priors, existing 3D occupancy prediction methods are limited in both scalability and out-of-domain generalization. While recent visual geometry foundation models exhibit strong generalization capabilities, they were mainly designed for general purposes and lack one or more key ingredients required for urban occupancy prediction, namely metric prediction, geometry completion in cluttered scenes and adaptation to urban scenarios. We address this gap and present OccAny, the first unconstrained urban 3D occupancy model capable of operating on out-of-domain uncalibrated scenes to predict and complete metric occupancy coupled with segmentation features. OccAny is versatile and can predict occupancy from sequential, monocular, or surround-view images. Our contributions are three-fold: (i) we propose the first generalized 3D occupancy framework with (ii) Segmentation Forcing that improves occupancy quality while enabling mask-level prediction, and (iii) a Novel View Rendering pipeline that infers novel-view geometry to enable test-time view augmentation for geometry completion. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OccAny outperforms all visual geometry baselines on 3D occupancy prediction task, while remaining competitive with in-domain self-supervised methods across three input settings on two established urban occupancy prediction datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/valeoai/OccAny .

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

CODEBLOCK: Learning to Supervise Code at the Right Granularity

arXiv:2606.18286v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Supervised fine-tuning of code LLMs typically applies uniform cross-entropy loss to all response tokens, implicitly assuming that every token provides equally useful learning signal. Recent token-level selection methods challenge this assumption in natural-language SFT by supervising only high-value tokens. However, directly transferring token-level masking to code can break syntactically and semantically coherent program units, because code depends on structural completeness and definition-use relations. We therefore propose CodeBlock, a structure-aware sparse supervision framework that selects structure-complete code evidence rather than isolated tokens. CodeBlock first selects high-quality instruction-response pairs, then partitions code responses into syntactically coherent coding items, estimates their utility by aggregating generalized cross-entropy over core logic tokens, and reranks them with data-flow reach and bridge signals to prioritize blocks that propagate or connect important program dependencies. During training, the full response remains available as context, while loss is applied only to selected code items and informative natural-language tokens. Experiments on six code-generation benchmarks show that CodeBlock achieves stronger average pass@1 than full-token SFT and competitive selection baselines, while using only 1.9% of supervised response tokens.

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

Constrained Semantic Decompression in LLMs through Persian Proverb-Conditioned Story Generation

Transforming a dense, abstract proverb into an engaging and morally faithful narrative requires deep cultural understanding and robust semantic grounding. We frame this problem as a constrained semantic decompression task and study proverb-conditioned story generation as a testbed for abstraction-to-realization in large language models (LLMs). Focusing on Persian, we introduce the Proverb Aligned Narrative Dataset (PAND), pairing proverbs with human-written stories and explicit meanings. By a hybrid evaluation framework that combines human-calibrated LLM-as-a-Judge with structural metrics, we analyze model behavior across multiple prompting regimes. Our findings reveal a persistent decompression gap: current LLMs often achieve strong surface-level fluency while failing to faithfully instantiate the underlying moral and causal structure encoded in proverbs. We further show that explicit reasoning and iterative refinement can partially mitigate these failures, suggesting that many decompression errors arise from difficulties in translating abstract meaning into narrative form rather than a complete lack of relevant knowledge. Our proposed task naturally extends to other forms of compressed cultural knowledge.

22.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

Nickel-Driven Dynamics of Urease in Sporosarcina pasteurii: Integrated Computational and Experimental Insights

Urease is a nickel-dependent enzyme that plays an important role in urea hydrolysis and in a process named as microbial-induced calcium carbonate precipitation (MICP), which is widely used in sustainable environmental biotechnology. Despite its ecological importance, urease powers Biogrout (biocementation), a promising green technology for soil stabilization and infrastructure repair. Yet, the relationship between nickel availability, enzyme activation, and bacterial fitness remains poorly understood. In this study, we reveal a striking dual effect of nickel on Sporosarcina pasteurii: while high Ni2+ concentrations strongly inhibit growth (IC50 {approx} 637.7 {micro}M), they simultaneously boost specific urease activity up to six-fold. This uncoupling between biomass and enzymatic efficiency highlights a previously overlooked adaptive strategy under metal stress. Using structural bioinformatics and molecular docking, we show that Ure1–the catalytic subunit–exhibits the strongest nickel affinity (-4.3 kcal{middle dot}mol-1), supported by highly conserved active-site residues, whereas accessory proteins UreE and UreG display moderate and weak binding, consistent with their roles in metal delivery and GTP-dependent maturation. In addition, microscopic observations confirmed that calcium carbonate precipitation was most pronounced at intermediate nickel concentrations (approximately 400-1000 {micro}M), whereas higher concentrations ([≥]1000-1300 {micro}M) led to reduced mineral formation due to loss viable cells. Taken together, these results indicates that nickel availability controls both urease activation and bacterial fitness, and that an optimal balance is required to maximize biomenerilization efficiency in environmental applications, particularly in biocementation technology.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Is My Vision-Language Data in Your AI? Membership Inference Test (MINT) Demo 2

We present the Membership Inference Test (MINT) Demo 2, a framework designed to improve transparency in machine learning training processes. MINT is a technique for experimentally determining whether specific data were used during machine learning model training. We establish the theoretical framework and propose multiple architectures for MINT depending on the amount of information known about the models that are being audited. Experimental results using a popular face recognition model, 4 state-of-the-art LLMs, and multiple, diverse, and large-scale public image and text databases achieve promising accuracy levels in the detection of training data of up to 90%. Building on these results, we introduce a comprehensive web platform1 that expands these capabilities to image and text modalities. The platform integrates a diverse technological stack, including MINT, aMINT, and gMINT, allowing users to audit a wide range of models. This demonstrator aims to promote AI transparency and provides a practical tool to foster compliance with emerging AI regulations.

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

Beyond representational alignment with brain-guided language models for robust reasoning

The correspondence between large language models (LLMs) and the neural mechanisms underlying human higher-order cognition remains insufficiently characterized. Given that language and reasoning in the human brain appear dissociable, an open question is whether LLMs align with neural signals from reasoning-related regions and whether such signals can improve them. Here, focusing on deductive reasoning, we show that LLM internal representations are not only partially aligned with task-fMRI activity but can also be directly enhanced by these signals. Using a neural-predictivity metric, we find that LLMs explain a substantial fraction of the explainable variance in reasoning-related regions at the aggregate level, whereas predictivity within specific reasoning types is lower, indicating both alignment and divergence. Building on this, we propose a brain-guided framework: we steer model representations along directions induced by the joint structure of model and brain representations, applying intervention at inference and fine-tuning during training. We demonstrate that task-evoked brain signals can directly enhance LLM reasoning, yielding gains orthogonal to language-only supervision across 10 LLMs (1.5B-72B), with transfer across reasoning types and up to 13\% absolute accuracy gain. Our results advance LLM-brain correspondences from correlation to guidance, establishing a brain-signal-driven pathway toward more robust and cognitively aligned AI.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

DeFAb: A Verifiable Benchmark for Defeasible Abduction in Foundation Models

arXiv:2606.18557v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A rule-based logic solver resolves every instance in our benchmark in under 50 microseconds with 100% accuracy; the best frontier language model reaches 65% at best and drops to 23.5% under rendering-robust evaluation (worst case over four surface renderings). We introduce DeFAb (Defeasible Abduction Benchmark), a dataset and generation pipeline that converts four decades of publicly funded knowledge bases into formally grounded instances for defeasible abduction: constructing hypotheses that explain anomalies by overriding defaults while preserving unrelated expectations. Because every hypothesis must pass polynomial-time checks for valid derivation, conservativity, and minimality, DeFAb makes logical rigor the instrument for measuring creativity and theoretical reasoning, scoring the disciplined construction of theory revisions rather than fluent but theory-destroying prose. The pipeline pairs taxonomic hierarchies (OpenCyc, YAGO, Wikidata) with behavioral property graphs (ConceptNet, UMLS) to produce 372,648+ instances across 33.75M materialized rules from 18 sources, in three levels with polynomial-time verifiable gold standards. Four frontier models do not reliably internalize defeasible reasoning: rendering-robust Level 2 accuracy is 7.8-23.5%; chain-of-thought variance (~36 pp) exceeds any inter-model gap; and a matched contamination control isolates a +19.4 pp Level 3 gap. We further release DeFAb-Hard (a 235-instance Level 3 difficulty variant; best model 53.3% vs 100% symbolic) and CONJURE (a kernel-verified transformative-creativity variant of 560 Lean 4/Mathlib instances whose gold answers are definitions the proof kernel did not previously contain, judge-free verifier; a pilot finds zero novel concepts). The same verifier doubles as an exact reward for preference optimization (DPO, RLVR/GRPO). Released under MIT at https://huggingface.co/datasets/PatrickAllenCooper/DeFAb.