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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Daily Healthy Eating Index (HEI-2020) scoring reveals diet quality patterns masked by aggregation

The Healthy Eating Index (HEI-2020) is conventionally computed by aggregating intake across days before scoring. Digital food logging enables an alternative: scoring each day and averaging daily scores. These methods are not equivalent. The HEI's density-based structure and component caps cause aggregation to inflate adequacy scores when intake is irregular. Using Food & You data, we show daily HEI correlates more strongly with microbiome diversity, and recommend co-reporting both metrics.

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

Massive Open-Vocabulary Keyword Spotting

Automatic speech recognition systems have been shown to under-perform when it comes to transcribing words rarely seen in the training data, namely specialized terminology. Open-vocabulary keyword spotting, combined with contextual biasing, has been shown to mitigate this issue. However, existing systems can only handle glossaries of a few hundred terms without becoming an infeasible bottleneck. We propose a system that stores features with a memory footprint up to 128 times smaller than a comparable baseline and allows users to process massive databases while remaining open-vocabulary. Without fine-tuning the speech recognition model, our system achieves a comparable entity recall as uncompressed solutions, even in languages not seen during training.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Wisdom of Committee: Diverse Distillation from Large Foundation Models and Domain Experts

arXiv:2402.14035v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Knowledge distillation from foundation models to compact domain models is challenging due to substantial gaps in capacity, architecture, and modality. For example, in our experiments, distilling from a 76M-parameter language model to a 2M-parameter recommender closes less than 40% of the performance gap between the undistilled student and the teacher. We show that introducing domain-specific experts – which share the student's architectural characteristics – alongside the foundation model as a diverse teacher committee significantly improves transfer. However, standard multi-teacher methods fail to exploit this diversity: naively combining heterogeneous teachers can degrade performance below single-teacher distillation. To address this, we propose DiverseDistill, an interactive distillation framework that employs a learnable Question-Answer mechanism to generate teacher-conditioned queries and align heterogeneous teacher outputs into the student's representation space. Unlike methods requiring gradient-based co-optimization or architectural modification of teachers, DiverseDistill operates with frozen teachers using only forward-pass inference through their intermediate layers: no parameter updates, no co-training, and no architectural surgery. A dynamic teacher importance mechanism further reduces training cost by filtering low-relevance teachers per sample (e.g., ~30% fewer forward passes with no quality loss for recommendation tasks), while the entire Distillation Module is discarded after training, adding zero inference overhead. Evaluations on recommendation (38x compression) and vision (3.6x compression) tasks demonstrate that DiverseDistill recovers 73-114% of the teacher-student performance gap, consistently outperforming all single- and multi-teacher baselines.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

CORA: Analyzing and bridging thinking-answer gap in Multimodal RLVR via Consistency-Oriented Reasoning Alignment

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has successfully elicited the reasoning capabilities of large language models, motivating its extension to multimodal scenarios. Existing methods primarily focus on improving the visual coverage of reasoning traces and mitigating visual hallucinations, but underestimate the semantic inconsistency between the reasoning process and the final answer. In this paper, we delve into thinking-answer inconsistency in RLVR for large vision-language models (LVLMs), showing thorough analyses of rollouts collected throughout Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) training process and post-RLVR evaluation outputs that this issue persists during training and remains present during inference. Motivated by the analysis, we propose Consistency-Oriented Reasoning Alignment (CORA), which introduces thinking-answer semantic consistency into RLVR through a lightweight plug-and-play consistency reward model, and further incorporates Hybrid Reward Advantage Splitting (HRAS) to stably coordinate task and consistency optimization. Extensive experiments across representative multimodal reasoning benchmarks and mainstream LVLMs show that CORA improves task performance while effectively mitigating thinking-answer inconsistency, leading to more faithful reasoning traces.

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

Proximal Policy Optimization for Amortized Discrete Sampling

arXiv:2606.15793v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper explores policy gradient algorithms for training stochastic policies to sample from structured discrete probability distributions under the Generative Flow Network (GFlowNet) framework. Building on extensive theoretical connections between GFlowNets and entropy-regularized reinforcement learning, we derive equivalents of standard policy gradient algorithms for training GFlowNets, as well as experimentally explore their various methodological aspects, including baseline training and advantage estimation. Most importantly, our work is the first to derive and successfully apply proximal policy optimization to GFlowNets, showing its improved convergence speed and data efficiency compared to standard GFlowNet training objectives on benchmarks ranging from synthetic energies to molecular graph generation.

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

Extracting Semantics: LLM-Guided Automatic Population of Robot Ontology from URDF

arXiv:2606.17073v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While commonsense knowledge may suffice for virtual agents, embodied robots interacting with humans require grounded and semantically rich representations of both their environment and their own physical embodiment. In cognitive robotics, ontologies are effective for integrating such heterogeneous knowledge to enable explainable reasoning, even during continuous knowledge updates. Yet, their manual construction remains a bottleneck. We present a preliminary approach for the automatic generation of robot semantic abstractions by transforming Unified Robot Description Format (URDF) models into populated ontologies. Although URDF files provide structural and kinematic descriptions, their identifiers often require commonsense interpretation to recover meaningful semantics, a task at which Large Language Models (LLMs) excel. Our pipeline leverages LLMs to infer semantic relationships by prompting them with concepts from an existing ontology, ensuring the final classification remains aligned with the formal model. To improve reliability, the pipeline combines majority voting across multiple LLM queries along with syntactic and schema-level validation to ensure that generated outputs conform to the expected representation format and ontology constraints. We evaluate the approach on multiple robot descriptions and discuss the generated abstractions. Initial results indicate that the proposed method can effectively bridge the gap between low-level robot descriptions and the structured, grounded knowledge representations required for human-robot interaction.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

3D Scene Graphs: Open Challenges and Future Directions

3D Scene Graphs (3DSGs) have emerged as a powerful representation for spatial AI by combining geometric grounding with semantic and relational abstractions of the environment. Their expressiveness has made them relevant to a broad range of problems in robotics and computer vision, including manipulation, navigation, task planning, scene understanding, and many others. However, the field remains fragmented: different communities adopt distinct formulations, construction pipelines, and evaluation protocols, making it difficult to compare methods, identify common assumptions, and assess remaining challenges for robust real-world deployment. This survey provides a unified and critical review of 3DSGs, with particular emphasis on open challenges and future directions. We first formalize 3DSGs under a common definition and analyze the principal modeling choices that characterize existing formulations, including node and edge attributes, hierarchical structure, dynamic scene representations, and affordance-aware extensions. We then review how 3DSGs are built from raw sensory observations, discussing the most common terminologies, conventions, and techniques. Finally, we examine downstream applications and evaluation strategies, from intrinsic graph quality to task-level performance. To support the community, we also provide a dedicated website that organizes and extends the surveyed content, accessible at https://3dscenegraphs.com/.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Bridging Single Distortion Artifacts and Mmultifactorial Clinical Quality: Few-shot Biparametric MRI Quality Assessment via Distortion-trained Prototypical Networks

Clinical prostate multi-parametric MRI relies heavily on high-quality diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI), yet reading DWI is frequently compromised by geometric distortion, often caused by rectal air. Assessing quality via the PI-QUAL scoring system is an emerging clinical standard, but it is subjective, time-consuming and suffers from a class imbalance where low-quality cases are diverse and relatively scarce. Using the PRIME clinical trial as an example, there are $6\%$ images with PI-QUAL scores lower than 4, $87\%$ of DWI issues are due to distortion. Many of the other clinical quality issues are under-represented. To address this common dual-scarcity of annotated clinical data, we propose a few-shot biparametric prototypical network for automated image quality assessment (IQA). Our framework utilizes a dual-branch 3D ResNet to fuse T2-weighted and DWI features, providing anatomical context to distinguish true morphology from distortion. To handle real-world heterogeneity, we introduce feature-wise linear modulation (FiLM) and a gradient reversal layer (GRL) to align feature distributions conditioned on varying b-values while suppressing acquisition-related biases. We demonstrate that a model meta-trained solely on comparatively objective, readily obtainable distortion labels can effectively adapt to predicting complex, multi-factorial clinical quality scores such as PI-QUAL using only five representative samples. Experimental results on two datasets show that our method significantly outperforms few-shot learning baselines for this challenging IQA task, offering a practically feasible and data-efficient solution for standardizing prostate MRI quality control in clinical workflows.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Web-based education on Metabolism and Obesity is associated with improved lifestyle and health behaviours among Brazilian school teachers

Background: Obesity is a major global public health challenge, and teachers play a critical role in school-based health promotion. This study examined the perceived impact of a web-based educational program on metabolism and obesity delivered to Brazilian school teachers. Methods: This analytical cross-sectional study included 217 teachers who responded to the evaluation questionnaire after attending the course between 2017 and 2022. Statistical analyses included logistic regression and chi-square tests. Findings: Course completion rate was 81.98%, substantially exceeding the 5-15% typical of global MOOCs. However, ethnic disparities were observed: White respondents were 4.95 times more likely to complete the course than Black respondents (p=0.00097) and Brown respondents were 3.05 times more likely (p=0.0268) than Black respondents. Among non-completers, lack of time (64.7%) was the primary barrier. Participation was concentrated in Sao Paulo (77%), with no respondents from three northern states. Perceived difficulty showed a non-significant trend (p=0.0893) where by Black respondents had the lowest predicted difficulty; the most challenging course material was Scientific Content/Reading papers (50%). Completion was strongly associated with applying learned activities in teaching (p

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Every Eval Ever: A Unifying Schema and Community Repository for AI Evaluation Results

AI evaluations are widely used for testing and understanding progress. However, the diverse evaluators bring with them inconsistencies that challenge analysis and comparison. First, results are saved in incompatible formats, scattered across leaderboards, papers, blog posts, evaluation harness logs, and custom repositories. Second, results are created by different evaluation frameworks, which produce divergent scores for nominally identical evaluations and record metadata inconsistently, hindering comparison, cross-community evaluation science, cost reduction, and reuse. We introduce Every Eval Ever, the first shared schema and community-crowdsourced repository for AI evaluation results. The schema standardizes how evaluations are represented in a unified, single JSON document. It is source-agnostic by design, ingesting results from evaluation harnesses and papers alike, and optionally stores per-instance outputs for fine-grained analysis. We contribute: (i) a community-governed metadata schema with a companion instance-level schema, the first standardization effort of its kind; (ii) automatic converters from popular formats, evaluation harnesses, and leaderboards to the unified schema; and (iii) a crowdsourced community database hosted on Hugging Face, currently spanning to date 22,235 models, 2,273 unique benchmarks, and 31 evaluation formats.

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

Prompt, Plan, Extract: Zero-Shot Agentic LLMs Workflows for Lung Pathology Extraction from Clinical Narratives

Information extraction from pathology reports is essential for cancer staging, tumor registry population. Yet key data remains embedded in narrative reports, making manual extraction labor-intensive and error-prone. Traditional supervised Natural Language Processing pipelines address this through fully supervised Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction, but require expensive manual annotation and suffer cascading failures when upstream entities are missed. In this study, we developed a zero-shot, agentic workflow, and evaluated five open-source generative Large Language Models (LLMs) to populate 13 College of American Pathologists synoptic fields from lung resection pathology reports. We compared them against a state-of-the-art supervised GatorTron NER-RE baseline using a novel, registry-aligned evaluation framework. The baseline achieved Micro-F1of 0.960, while the best zero-shot model (GPT-OSS-20B) achieved Micro-F1 of 0.893 (recall: 0.949), accurately extracting complex relations like Pathologic Stage without task-specific training. These results suggest that open-source, zero-shot agentic LLMs are a low-cost solution for extracting lung pathology information.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Sao Tome and Principe on the verge of eliminating lymphatic filariasis as a public health problem: evidence from IDA impact assessment surveys

Background Accelerated efforts to eliminate lymphatic filariasis (LF) as a public health problem have been supported by the introduction of the triple-drug regimen of ivermectin, diethylcarbamazine and albendazole (IDA) in endemic settings. In Sao Tome and Principe, nationwide mass drug administration (MDA) with diethylcarbamazine and albendazole was implemented in 2018, followed by IDA in 2019 and 2020. This study assesses progress towards elimination using post-MDA impact assessment surveys conducted after cessation of treatment. Methods Cross-sectional surveys were conducted among adults aged 20 years and older in 2022 and again between December 2024 and January 2025. Circulating filarial antigen (CFA) was detected using the filarial test strip (FTS). Individuals who tested positive were examined for microfilaremia using nocturnal calibrated thick blood smear microscopy. Additionally, programme data on MDA coverage and morbidity were obtained from national surveillance records. Results Three rounds of nationwide MDA achieved high epidemiological coverage (86.4% in 2018, 74.2% in 2019 and 80.0% in 2020). The impact assessment surveys conducted in 2022 evaluated 14 132 adults, with 21 individuals (0.15%) testing positive for CFA, while the follow-up survey conducted between December 2024 and January 2025 assessed 14 653 adults and detected seven positive cases (0.05%). No microfilariae were detected among the 28 antigen-positive individuals examined using nocturnal calibrated thick blood smears. National morbidity records documented 190 cases of lymphoedema and nine cases of hydrocoele. Conclusions Infection indicators remain well below WHO decision thresholds, suggesting that LF transmission is unlikely to be sustained. Sao Tome and Principe appears to be close to eliminating LF as a public health problem. However, strengthening morbidity management services will be essential to support the preparation of the national elimination dossier.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Improving End-to-End Speech Recognition for Dysarthric Speech through In-Domain Data Augmentation

arXiv:2606.19797v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dysarthric speech recognition is crucial for facilitating effective communication among individuals with dysarthria. However, accurately recognizing dysarthric speech poses significant challenges due to varying severity levels and limited data availability. In this paper, we explore data augmentation techniques for dysarthric automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems by fine-tuning the End-to-End pre-trained Wav2Vec2 model, with a specific focus on severity levels. To address the challenges of data scarcity and the need for extensive data in fine-tuning pre-trained ASR systems for dysarthric speech, we investigate four prominent data augmentation methods: Speaking-Rate Modification (SRM), Pitch Modification (PM), Formant Modification (FM), and vocal tract Length Perturbation (VTLP), tailored to different aspects of dysarthria. The study uses individually fine-tuned Wav2Vec2 models for each severity class as baseline systems. Additionally, we conducted severity-specific fine-tuning of the ASR model using augmented data. Results demonstrate distinct efficacy patterns for each augmentation technique across severity levels. The best WERs were achieved with SRM ($s$=0.8) for low (9.02\%) and medium (38.11\%) severities, and with PM ($\tau$=0.8) for high severity (55.15\%), reflecting relative improvements of 30.02\%, 16.64\%, and 15.47\%, respectively. These results confirm the effectiveness of the augmentation methods in improving dysarthric ASR performance.

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

Direct Advantage Estimation for Scalable and Sample-efficient Deep Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.20411v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Direct Advantage Estimation (DAE) has been shown to improve the sample efficiency of deep reinforcement learning algorithms. However, its reliance on full environment observability limits its applicability in realistic settings, and its requirement to model transition probabilities incurs substantial computational overhead for high-dimensional observations. In the present work, we address both limitations. First, we extend the theoretical framework of DAE to partially observable domains with minimal modifications. Second, we reduce its computational complexity by introducing discrete latent dynamics models that efficiently approximate transition probabilities. We evaluate our approach on the Arcade Learning Environment and find that DAE scales effectively with function approximator capacity while retaining high sample efficiency.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Privacy-Preserving Federated Autoencoder for ECG Anomaly Detection on Edge Devices

arXiv:2606.11556v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Continuous electrocardiography (ECG) monitoring could surface rhythm abnormalities before they escalate into cardiovascular events. However, a deployable system must satisfy three requirements simultaneously: legal-grade privacy (GDPR, HIPAA), real-time inference on constrained edge hardware, and detection quality under non-IID cross-hospital data. We design and evaluate an end-to-end federated system addressing all three for unsupervised 12-lead ECG anomaly detection on PTB-XL dataset, combining three autoencoder families (VanillaAE, ConvAE, VAE), Flower-based federated averaging (FedAvg) across ten simulated hospitals, client-side differentially private SGD (DP-SGD) with a Rényi-DP accountant, and 8-bit integer (INT8) post-training quantization with Raspberry Pi 4 benchmarking. Our main contributions are: an empirical characterization of how these mechanisms compose, practical DP-specific recommendations, and technical and security insights for a clinically sensitive setting. Federated learning matches or exceeds the centralized baseline across all architectures (ConvAE federated area under the ROC curve, AUROC, $0.782$), and an $\varepsilon$ sweep identifies $\varepsilon=4$ as the recommended clinical operating point. INT8 quantization roughly halves model size and cuts Pi 4 latency by up to $44%$ with $

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Advances in Scientific Machine Learning for Coupled Fluid Flow and Transport

arXiv:2606.19562v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This chapter reviews recent advances in Scientific Machine Learning (SciML) for modeling coupled fluid flow and transport phenomena governed by the incompressible Navier-Stokes and scalar transport equations. Such systems, found in applications like turbidity currents and thermal convection, feature strong nonlinear coupling and multiscale behavior that make high-fidelity simulations computationally expensive. To address this, the chapter surveys state-of-the-art SciML methods for building efficient surrogate models, including linear reduced-order techniques based on Singular Value Decomposition (such as Dynamic Mode Decomposition) and nonlinear neural network approaches like Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) and $\beta$-Variational Autoencoders ($\beta$-VAEs). It first covers the authors' work combining these models with High Performance Computing strategies, including Adaptive Mesh Refinement/Coarsening (AMR/C) and scientific floating-point data compression. It then presents two new contributions: surrogate modeling of turbidity currents via PINNs, and the extraction of disentangled nonlinear modes from thermal flows using $\beta$-VAEs. Governing equations and representative benchmarks, including lock-exchange flows and Rayleigh-Bénard convection, illustrate these methodologies. The chapter is intentionally long, covering both the mathematical and physical foundations of coupled fluid flow and the computational aspects of state-of-the-art modeling. Overall, it demonstrates how SciML enables fast, accurate approximations of complex coupled systems within the specific data regimes and modeling assumptions considered, while substantially reducing computational cost relative to full-order simulations. Broader capabilities such as real-time prediction and uncertainty quantification remain active research directions whose feasibility depends strongly on the problem at hand.

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

Darshana Graph: A Parallel Commentary Corpus for Comparative Indian Philosophy, with Stylometric and Exploratory Graph Analyses

Authors:

We introduce Darshana Graph, a corpus of over 125,000 text records spanning classical Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain philosophical traditions, drawn from public-domain and openly licensed translations of sources including the Bhagavad Gita, Brahma Sutras, principal Upanishads, the Pali Canon, and core Jain texts. Its distinctive contribution lies in a structurally unique subset of roughly 8,500 Hindu and Jain records in which the same root verse or sutra is aligned across eighteen historical commentators representing five schools of Vedanta and other darshanas, enabling direct comparison of how independent interpretive traditions read identical source material. To our knowledge, no publicly available resource provides comparable cross-commentator alignment at this scale. We present two analyses built on this corpus. First, a transparent stylometric comparison requiring no machine learning measures argumentative style through scriptural citation density, explicit refutation rate, and sentence complexity. It finds a moderate negative correlation between citation density and refutation rate, a marked increase in refutation rate across three commentators in a related doctrinal lineage, and measurable genre-level differences within the Pali Canon itself. Second, we describe a constrained large language model pipeline that extracts typed philosophical relationships between concepts using a predefined relation vocabulary and deterministic post-hoc validation. The resulting graph surfaces cross-school disagreement patterns while also revealing important extraction limitations, including cases where an independent embedding-based analysis disagrees with the graph-derived findings. We release the full corpus, extracted relationship graph, and all source code.

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

Efficient Online 3D Multi-Camera Multi-Object Tracking and Pose Estimation

This paper proposes a fast and online method for jointly performing 3D multi-object tracking and pose estimation using multiple monocular cameras. Our algorithm requires only 2D bounding box and pose detections, eliminating the need for costly 3D training data or computationally expensive deep learning models. Our solution is an efficient implementation of a Bayes-optimal multi-object tracking filter, enhancing computational efficiency while maintaining accuracy. We demonstrate that our algorithm is significantly faster than state-of-the-art methods without compromising accuracy, using only publicly available pre-trained 2D detection models. We also illustrate the robust performance of our algorithm in scenarios where multiple cameras are intermittently disconnected or reconnected during operation.

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

The New Social Image: How AI Competency and AI Proactivity Influence Self- and Peer-Perceptions in the Workplace

arXiv:2606.00182v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Human-AI collaboration is considered the most promising way to incorporate AI in the workplace. What remains unexplored are the experiential consequences of this teaming. More specifically, in a team with AI, how humans perceive themselves (self-perception) and how they are perceived by their coworkers (peer perception) in terms of work ownership and job meaningfulness. In a 2x2x2 vignette study (n=50), participants rated perceptions of ownership, affect, job meaningfulness and satisfaction, and role dynamics across two levels (low/high) of AI proactivity and AI competency as within-subject factors, with point-of-view (self perception/peer perception) as between-subjects. Our results showed that AI with low competency or low proactivity generally improved feelings related to ownership, meaningfulness, satisfaction, and role dynamics, and also increased positive affect while reducing negative affect. However, these effects were often influenced by point-of-view. For instance, low AI proactivity resulted in higher job satisfaction from self-perception rather than peer perception. Based on our findings, we argue that designing AI for the future of work solely around performance metrics may not be adequate. Highly competent and proactive AI-driven systems can have undesirable impacts on perceptions of ownership, job identity, social image and team dynamics, and consequently, job meaningfulness.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Continuous Language Diffusion as a Decoder-Interface Problem

Gaussian-corrupted sentence embeddings have no direct linguistic interpretation, yet continuous diffusion language models can generate fluent text from them. We study this puzzle through Embedded Language Flows (ELF) and identify a decoder-basin mechanism: our evidence suggests that denoising becomes reliable when trajectories reach regions where the native decoder can read stable tokens. We introduce a diagnostic protocol for denoisability, semantic recoverability, order sensitivity, decoder compatibility, and trajectory reliability. It exposes failures hidden by scalar metrics: low mean-squared error can discard linguistic content, low perplexity can reflect low-entropy collapse, and clean latent reconstruction can coexist with a narrow decoder basin. A decoder-margin bound explains why token recovery depends on margin and local decoder sensitivity, not latent error alone. Auditing public ELF checkpoints reveals an interface phase diagram: early predictions are weakly readable, mid-trajectory disagreement marks a competition region, and late predictions enter a high-margin decoder basin. Once inside, token realization is surprisingly simple on generated ELF states: frozen T5 (Text-to-Text Transfer Transformer) token-embedding lookup recovers $93$–$96\%$ of native decoder decisions, and a single linear readout reaches $97.9\%$ agreement at 32k samples, leaving an $\approx1.1$–$1.2$ perplexity gap in a structured residual tail. Under conservative held-out gates, a margin rule exits roughly $17$–$28\%$ earlier in denoising steps under an explicit diagnostic monitor. Boundary checks on LangFlow, BitstreamDiffusion, and the Continuous Latent Diffusion Language Model (Cola-DLM) show that the same interface questions remain meaningful when the state object and decoder change. Continuous and latent diffusion language models should therefore be evaluated as representation-decoder systems.

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

When Dynamics Models Read the Wrong Time Steps: Label-Free Event Credit Re-Anchoring for Robust Global Readouts

Authors:

arXiv:2606.17572v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learned dynamics models often answer global physical questions, such as fault severity or impact stiffness, by pooling a per-step feature sequence into one readout vector. This sequence-to-global interface creates an under-studied temporal credit problem: with only trajectory-level supervision, a model can predict accurately in training conditions while reading from abundant smooth correlates rather than the brief physical events that determine the target. We call this failure temporal credit dilution. It is not exposed by the training loss and is not removed by standard physics-informed residuals, because the error lies in where the global readout assigns functional credit. We introduce Credit-in-Event, an interface-level probe for measuring how much pooled credit lands on event steps, and prove in closed form that a pooled linear reader routes credit to a spurious background channel as the event fraction shrinks. We then propose CREST, a training-free and label-free readout that estimates a transient event core from learned features and re-anchors the pooled representation through event-versus-rest contrast. Across simulated gear and impact systems, recurrent and attention encoders, and public bearing vibration data, CREST reduces out-of-distribution error while restoring event credit. Ablations show that stable-step selection and receptive-field shrinking fail, confirming that the gain comes from event-core credit re-anchoring rather than a generic locality or stability prior.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Environment-Adaptive Covariate Selection: Learning When to Use Spurious Correlations for Out-of-Distribution Prediction

arXiv:2601.02322v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A common approach to out-of-distribution prediction restricts models to causal or invariant covariates to avoid spurious associations that may change across environments. Despite its theoretical appeal, this strategy can underperform empirical risk minimization when only a subset of the causal parents of the outcome is observed. In such settings, non-causal covariates can serve as proxies for unobserved causal parents and improve prediction when the proxy relationship is stable, but they can hurt when shifts disrupt that relationship. Thus, the optimal covariate set can depend on the specific shift encountered. Because different shifts leave signatures in the unlabeled covariate distribution, we propose an environment-adaptive covariate selection algorithm that maps environment-level summaries to environment-specific covariate sets. These summaries may be hand-crafted or learned from multi-environment data, and prior causal knowledge can be incorporated as constraints. Across simulations and applied datasets, the proposed method improves over static causal, invariant, and other non-adaptive rules under diverse shifts.

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

SCALE: Self-uncertainty Conditioned Adaptive Looking and Execution for Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2602.04208v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for general-purpose robotic control, with test-time scaling (TTS) gaining attention to enhance robustness beyond training. However, existing TTS methods for VLAs require additional training, verifiers, and multiple forward passes, making them impractical for deployment. Moreover, they intervene only at action decoding while keeping visual representations fixed-insufficient under perceptual ambiguity, where reconsidering how to perceive is as important as deciding what to do. To address these limitations, we propose SCALE, a simple inference strategy that jointly modulates visual perception and action based on 'self-uncertainty', inspired by uncertainty-driven exploration in Active Inference theory-requiring no additional training, no verifier, and only a single forward pass. SCALE broadens exploration in both perception and action under high uncertainty, while focusing on exploitation when confident-enabling adaptive execution across varying conditions. Experiments on simulated and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that SCALE improves state-of-the-art VLAs and outperforms existing TTS methods while maintaining single-pass efficiency.

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

Deep-Learning-Based Pixelated Microwave Filter Design and Characterization using Electro-Optical Electric-Field Measurements

arXiv:2606.18402v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traditional microwave filter design typically relies on iterative parameter tuning and predefined topologies, which limits design space and increases development time. This study uses a deep learning approach combining convolutional neural networks with genetic algorithms to automate pixelated microwave filter synthesis. To validate the approach experimentally, both S-parameter and spatial electric-field measurements were analyzed. The synthesized low-pass filter demonstrated excellent agreement between simulated and measured performance, achieving a 7 GHz passband with over 20 dB suppression beyond 9.5 GHz. Electro-optical measurements, for the first time, revealed electric field patterns that resemble coupled transmission-lines or stub structures, providing insight into the emergent characteristics of AI-generated designs.