Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15 DOI: HASH:255a9afdf745d5e8d5c4e3b01e35559b

CDH13 is associated with cellular viability after exposure to ionizing radiation using genome-wide screening

Authors:

Schmidt↗H.-L↗Ohlei↗Herwest↗Salewsky↗Bertram↗Demuth↗

Background: It is well known that genetic variants contribute to cellular sensitivity to chemotherapeutic agents and ionizing radiation (IR). The aim of this study was to identify single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and genes associated with the spectrum of normal cellular sensitivity of lymphoblastoid cell lines (LCLs) towards ionizing radiation and mitomycin C (MMC). Methods: In a first step, we determined the viability of LCLs established from male participants of the Berlin Aging Study II (BASE-II) aged >=62 years following treatments with increasing doses of IR (n=137 cell lines) or MMC (n=140 cell lines) using the alamarBlue assay. Results from intra-experimental triplicates and three independent experiments for each cell line and treatment were used to calculate the area under the curves (AUCs) representing the specific sensitivity to IR and MMC of each LCL. The data from these experiments were subsequently used as outcomes in genome-wide association studies (GWASs). In addition, we calculated polygenic risk scores (PGS) from UK Biobank GWAS results for four cancer-related phenotypes and assessed the extent to which the variance in the IR and MMC sensitivity is explained by these PGS. Results: The GWAS analyses revealed one variant, rs74728080, located in CDH13 on chromosome 16, to show genome-wide significant (p < 5 x 10-8, beta = 2.81) association with cellular viability after treatment with IR. In the GWAS on MMC sensitivity the most interesting signal was elicited by SNP rs113978558 in an intron of the PLD5 gene on chromosome 1 (p = 9.232 x 10-8; beta = 1.44). Several other SNPs with statistically suggestive (i.e., p < 1 x 10-5) evidence of association with IR or MMC sensitivity were identified. PGSs calculations from GWAS of four cancer-related traits in UKB explained ~5% and ~3% of phenotypic variance in IR- and MMC-induced cell viability, respectively. Conclusion: The genome-wide significant association of rs74728080 with IR sensitivity and the location of this variant in CDH13 is interesting and functionally highly plausible given its known involvement in oxidative-stress response and function as tumor suppressor. Taken together, our novel data suggest that CDH13 may be genuinely involved in regulating cellular IR sensitivity.

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02.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.13732

When Sample Selection Bias Precipitates Model Collapse

Authors:

Xinbao Qiao↗Xianglong Du↗Wei Liu↗Jingqi Zhang↗Peihua Mai↗Meng Zhang↗Yan Pang↗

arXiv:2606.13732v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The proliferation of recursive training on synthetic data can alleviate data scarcity but risks model collapse, where repeated training erodes distributional tails and homogenizes outputs. Data selection is widely viewed as a remedy, yet its reliability depends critically on the reference distribution used by the verifier. We show that in low-resource verification regimes, where each verifier observes only a small, fragmented, and biased slice of the target manifold, selection itself becomes biased. This situation naturally arises in low-resource data silos such as healthcare consortia or proprietary financial institutions, where raw data cannot be pooled and local references are inherently incomplete. As a result, selection preferentially retains samples aligned with the local manifold while pruning globally relevant tail modes, turning from a safeguard against collapse into a mechanism that precipitates it. We theoretically prove that such siloed selection accelerates collapse and induces power-law diversity decay. As an initial mitigation, we construct Wasserstein proxy references from multiple silos without sharing raw data. Empirical results confirm that local-reference selection fails on skewed distributions, whereas collaborative proxy references mitigate diversity degradation, suggesting that recursive synthetic-data pipelines require particular caution when real-data coverage is fragmented or scarce.

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03.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24256

Trimming the Long-Tail of Visual World Modeling Evaluation

Authors:

Bingxuan Li↗Yining Hong↗Cheng Qian↗Hyeonjeong Ha↗Jiateng Liu↗Zhenhailong Wang↗Yue Guo↗Yunzhu Li↗Heng Ji↗

Physical interactions follow a long-tailed distribution: a set of common and regular interactions dominates human experience and visual data, while a broad spectrum of rare and irregular interactions remains underrepresented. Although recent visual world models, including image and video generation models, achieve impressive realism on existing benchmarks, they primarily focus on simulating common physical interactions. This raises a central question: Do current visual world models internalize and generalize physical principles? In this work, we introduce Tailor-Bench, a benchmark that challenges world models to simulate irregular physical interactions. To enable systematic evaluation, we design three scenario modes that progressively challenge model reasoning: Regular scenarios reflect common tool-task pairs, Unconventional scenarios replace conventional tools with attribute-compatible substitutes to test affordance generalization, and Impossible scenarios introduce attribute-violating tools to probe constraint awareness. Additionally, we design two complementary settings under a unified evaluation protocol: predictive generation requires inferring outcomes without guidance, while descriptive generation specifies the target outcome for faithful realization. Our experimental results reveal a clear long-tail gap in physical world modeling: performance degrades from Regular to Unconventional and Impossible scenarios, indicating limited generalization beyond common interactions. Failure analysis further shows that models rely on superficial visual patterns: image models fail to realize correct state changes, while video models further suffer from temporal inconsistencies.

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04.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17241

Beyond Benchmarks: Continuous Edge Inference for Fine-Grained Roadside Perception

Authors:

Aditya Mishra↗Haroon Lone↗

Continuous AI inference on resource-constrained edge hardware introduces deployment effects that are largely invisible to conventional benchmark evaluation, including temporal instability in streaming video, thermal throttling under sustained load, and workload-dependent performance variability. We present Edge-TSR, a deployment-oriented continuous edge inference system for sustained roadside perception on the NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano. Edge-TSR integrates detection, tracking, fine-grained classification, and a lightweight track-aware temporal stabilization mechanism that improves streaming inference consistency with negligible computational overhead. Our central finding is that benchmark-centric evaluation systematically overstates deployed edge inference performance. Across three state-of-the-art baselines, we observe consistent 20-30% relative degradation when transitioning from static-image evaluation to real-world streaming deployment. Edge-TSR addresses this gap through temporal inference stabilization, recovering up to 10.16% classification accuracy over per-frame inference baselines while maintaining sustained real-time performance under continuous operation. We evaluate the complete system under diverse real-world deployment conditions, jointly characterizing inference quality, latency, throughput, and thermal behavior during long-duration operation. A 55-minute vehicular deployment over a 26 km route demonstrates sustained operation at 16.18 FPS within safe thermal limits on a single embedded device without cloud offload. Our findings show that deployment-aware evaluation and temporal inference stabilization are necessary components of continuously operating edge AI systems intended for real-world sensing deployments. We release a sample annotated streaming video evaluation dataset and full system implementation to support reproducible deployment-centric evaluation.

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05.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24324

Prague Dependency Treebank – Consolidated 2.0: Enriching a Complex Annotation Scheme

Authors:

Marie Mikulov\'a↗Ji\v{r}\'i M\'irovsk\'y↗Milan Straka↗Pavl\'ina Synkov\'a↗Jan \v{S}t\v{e}p\'anek↗Barbora \v{S}t\v{e}p\'ankov\'a↗Jan Haji\v{c}↗

The Prague Dependency Treebank framework is unique in its attempt to systematically include and link different layers of language, including a meaning representation with several types of inter-sentential phenomena, especially coreference and discourse relations. We present its second consolidated version (PDT-C 2.0), which concludes almost 30-years long project of sustained development of the resource to a uniformly and coherently annotated, genre-diversified, almost 4 million token language resource of Czech language, with accompanying fully compatible lexicons. In addition to continuous linguistic research, the richly linguistically annotated corpus is also widely used in international comparisons of the development of traditional and novel NLP tools as well as in conversions into other formalisms. The corpus and the trained parsers are available under the CC BY-NC-SA licence.

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06.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17791

The Slop Paradox: How Synthetic Standardization Erodes Clinical Uncertainty and Cross-Modal Alignment in AI-Rewritten Radiology Reports

Authors:

Samar Ansari↗

AI-assisted clinical documentation tools increasingly summarize, standardize, and reformat radiology reports using large language models (LLMs). We present a controlled measurement of the resulting information degradation. Using 450 chest X-ray reports from the Indiana University dataset, we generate synthetic versions via three realistic LLM rewriting tasks: EHR summarization, standardized rewriting, and teaching case preparation. We measure entity erosion (via medical NER), hedging collapse (loss of clinical uncertainty language), and cross-modal alignment degradation (via BiomedCLIP image-text similarity). Our central finding is a dissociation between information loss and cross-modal fidelity. EHR summarization is the most destructive at the content level, eroding 51.4% of clinical entities and 43.7% of hedging language, yet it preserves image-text alignment almost entirely (a 2.5% drop). The two tasks meant to produce cleaner training data, standardized rewriting and teaching case preparation, do the reverse: they preserve more entities (26.8% and 29.3% eroded) but cause 14.9-16.5% alignment drops, six to seven times those of EHR summarization. We term this the slop paradox: rewriting that makes clinical text look cleaner for multimodal training is precisely what pulls it away from the image. Contrary to our pre-specified hypothesis, rare pathologies were not preferentially degraded: across nine rare-versus-common comparisons, no difference survived multiple-comparison correction, and nominal differences ran in the opposite direction (common > rare), so contamination is invisible to condition-specific monitoring. The dominant determinant of degradation is the type of AI rewriting task, not the clinical content. These findings bear on multimodal medical AI dataset construction and the governance of AI-assisted clinical documentation.

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07.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15730

InstantForget: Update-Free Backdoor Unlearning with Inference-Time Feature Reset

Authors:

Zhenyu Yu↗

arXiv:2606.15730v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Backdoor unlearning aims to remove a malicious trigger behavior from a deployed model while preserving clean utility. We study the update-free inference-time setting, where model parameters remain frozen. First, we audit a common projection assumption under oracle paired clean and triggered features. Projection succeeds mainly on BadNets and leaves WaNet, Blended, and SIG at 0.683, 0.888, and 0.941 ASR on CIFAR-10 ResNet-18. This failure is not explained by spectral compactness, spatial locality, or subspace misalignment. It is predicted by a logit-triplet gap involving the target margin, target-logit drop, and non-target logit rise. We then introduce InstantForget, a clean-calibrated gated reset that flags anomalous features with a Mahalanobis score and moves only flagged features toward a neutral non-target representation. With one fixed operating point selected on held-out triggered validation, InstantForget reduces average ASR to 0.071 across four non-adaptive CIFAR-10 triggers without triggered samples or parameter updates at deployment. It also reaches 0.981 detection AUROC and transfers to six of eight tested backbones. Reported failures under WaNet, ModelNet10 point blend, two backbone geometries, and adaptive feature-compactness attacks define the method's scope.

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08.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2604.26740

Rendering-Aware Sparse Sampling for BRDF Acquisition

Authors:

W. Cao↗D. J\"onsson↗Z. Huang↗J. Unger↗

Accurate BRDF acquisition is essential for realistic rendering, but dense gonioreflectometer measurements are slow and expensive. We study how to select a small set of BRDF measurements that is most informative for reconstructing material appearance under a learned BRDF prior. Existing sparse-acquisition methods often optimize samples for BRDF-space reconstruction for all materials, while the perceptual importance of a adaptive measurement ultimately depends on its effect on each rendered appearance. We therefore formulate sparse adaptive acquisition as a rendering-aware optimization problem. Our method combines a set encoder for sparse coordinate–value observations, a pretrained hypernetwork-based/PCA-based BRDF reconstructor, and a differentiable renderer. During sampler training, the reconstructor remains fixed, and gradients from a rendered-image loss optimize the measurement locations. This separates acquisition design from prior fitting and encourages the sampler to choose directions that are informative under the learned material distribution. To make the comparison controlled, we evaluate the uniform baseline, meta-learning method, HyperBRDF method, and our learned sampler under matched sample numbers, train/test split, rendering scene, object mask, image mapping, and metrics. Our central claim: rendering-aware sampling improves extremely sparse BRDF acquisition when final rendered appearance is the target. BRDF-space and combined losses are reported only as ablations, together with joint refinement and image-only latent fitting for unseen materials.

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09.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.04547

Beyond Retrieval: Learning Compact User Representations for Scalable LLM Personalization

Authors:

Heng Cao↗Fan Zhang↗Jian Yao↗Yujie Zheng↗Changlin Zhao↗Lu Hao↗Yuxuan Wei↗Wangze Ni↗Huaiyu Fu↗Yuqian Sun↗Xuyan Mo↗

Personalizing large language models requires adapting model behavior to individual users while preserving robustness and deployment-scale efficiency. Existing approaches typically personalize LLMs either at the input level, by retrieving user histories or constructing profile prompts, or at the parameter level, by maintaining user-specific parameter-efficient modules. The former makes personalization sensitive to retrieval quality and prompt design, whereas the latter incurs storage and maintenance costs that grow with the user population. To address these limitations, we propose TAP-PER (Temporal Attentive Prefix for PERsonalization), a prefix-based framework that encodes user preferences as learnable representations, eliminating explicit prompt construction and replacing heavy per-user adapters with lightweight user-state prefix embeddings. Inspired by personalized recommendation systems, TAP-PER decomposes user modeling into user-state and query-conditioned components, and incorporates temporal signals to capture the evolving nature of user interests. Experiments on six LaMP tasks show that TAP-PER consistently outperforms prompt-based and model-based baselines across classification, rating, and generation settings. Moreover, TAP-PER uses 130x fewer per-user parameters than OPPU and roughly half the total parameter footprint of PER-PCS at the 1,000-user scale, demonstrating that scalable LLM personalization can be achieved without explicit prompt construction or heavy per-user adapters.

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10.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18778

Online Distributional Prediction via Latent Cluster Geometry Under Drift and Corruption

Authors:

Navyansh Mahla↗Prateek Chanda↗Ganesh Ramakrishnan↗

arXiv:2606.18778v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Online learning in non-stationary streams is often formulated as tracking a point estimate, but many applications require predicting the full data-generating distribution. We study online distributional prediction under drift and adversarial corruption. Our approach represents each candidate law through a latent cluster geometry: a variable-size configuration of centers that organizes probability mass and induces a predictive distribution. A Gibbs quasi-posterior over these configurations yields an online predictor by posterior averaging, and the resulting variable-dimensional posterior can be sampled with reversible-jump MCMC. The method therefore avoids specifying a parametric streaming law while retaining a structured latent space for uncertainty, regularization, and comparison. We evaluate performance by cumulative Wasserstein-1 regret against the time-varying true law. The analysis separates two effects: corruption perturbs the loss-based posterior update, whereas drift makes long-horizon posterior memory stale. We address the latter with a restarted variant that temporally localizes the same quasi-Bayesian update. The resulting high-probability bounds decompose into a PAC-Bayesian complexity term, a corruption-sensitive posterior perturbation term, and a dynamic optimal-transport term driven by \(A_T^{\mathrm{OT}}=\sum_{t=2}^T W_2^2(p_{t-1}^*,p_t^*)\). Under bounded support, stable latent geometry, predictive-map regularity, oracle realizability, localized restart windows, sublinear transport action, and sublinear corruption budget, the restarted predictor achieves sublinear cumulative Wasserstein regret. These guarantees require no parametric model for the stream, drift mechanism, or corruption process.

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11.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18315

Ghost Attractor Networks: Basin-Structured Dynamical Decoders for Closed-Loop Sequential Generation

Authors:

Tianyu Wang↗Ying Wang↗Zhihao Liu↗Xi Vincent Wang↗Lihui Wang↗

arXiv:2606.18315v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sequential output generation with large-scale Transformer and diffusion decoders pays a memory cost that grows with sequence length, plus iterative per-step computation. Replacing them with small feed-forward decoders restores efficiency but produces unstructured latent representations that limit closed-loop control: phase-conditioned action generation and cross-step latent carry-over both require a latent geometry with stable basins. This article proposes Ghost Attractor Networks, a theoretically derived dynamical decoder whose latent evolves under a learned potential with drift and produces a basin-attractor structure by construction. Three desiderata (multi-modality, decoder-level single-pass switching, and constant memory) motivate the potential-drift form, and mode transitions arise as saddle-node bifurcations with ghost-attractor escape. A hierarchical phase-space decomposition separates first-order basin convergence from second-order proprioceptive refinement. Empirically, a Ghost trained end-to-end with a behavioral-cloning and contrastive objective exhibits the predicted gradient-flow contraction in its potential, with the gradient norm decaying by 67 percent across five integration steps on 1430 held-out samples. Ghost is evaluated as a robotic action decoder. A 2.3-million-parameter Ghost matches the offline accuracy of a 1.07-billion-parameter Diffusion Transformer at 462 times fewer parameters and 32 times lower latency, and beats five alternative 2M-parameter decoders (MLP, Neural ODE, CVAE, Transformer, 1-step Diffusion) on offline mean squared error by 5.9 to 29 percent. On the LIBERO-10 closed-loop benchmark, phase conditioning on Ghost's basin-structured latent yields a 13.5 percentage-point success-rate gain over a feed-forward MLP baseline, and persistent-latent ensembling reaches a 95.7 percent final success rate.

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12.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.18242

EventDrive: Event Cameras for Vision-Language Driving Intelligence

Authors:

Dongyue Lu↗Rong Li↗Ao Liang↗Lingdong Kong↗Wei Yin↗Lai Xing Ng↗Benoit R. Cottereau↗Camille Simon Chane↗Wei Tsang Ooi↗

Event cameras sense the world through asynchronous brightness changes with microsecond latency and high dynamic range, offering motion fidelity far beyond frame-based sensors and capturing temporal structure that conventional exposures often miss. These properties make events a powerful complement to RGB in autonomous driving, especially under blur, glare, and rapid motion, where frame-based perception can become unreliable. However, existing event-aware vision-language models remain limited to generic perception and do not reveal how event sensing contributes to reasoning and decision-making across the full driving loop. We present EventDrive, a large-scale benchmark and model suite that unifies event streams, RGB frames, and language supervision across four core dimensions: Perception, Understanding, Prediction, and Planning, covering captions, structured QA, grounding, motion-state recognition, trajectory forecasting, and planning tasks. Building on this foundation, EventDrive-VLM introduces a multi-horizon event pyramid and a temporal-horizon mixture-of-experts module to adaptively encode and fuse asynchronous and frame-based information for downstream reasoning. Comprehensive evaluation across diverse tasks shows that event streams provide substantial gains in temporal precision, motion awareness, and robustness, bringing event sensing into the center of driving intelligence.

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13.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2104.08928

Group-Sparse Matrix Factorization for Transfer Learning of Word Embeddings

Authors:

Kan Xu↗Xuanyi Zhao↗Hamsa Bastani↗Osbert Bastani↗

Unstructured text provides decision-makers with a rich data source in many domains, ranging from product reviews in retail to nursing notes in healthcare. To leverage this information, words are typically translated into word embeddings – vectors that encode the semantic relationships between words – through unsupervised learning algorithms such as matrix factorization. However, learning word embeddings from new domains with limited training data can be challenging, because the meaning/usage may be different in the new domain, e.g., the word ``positive'' typically has positive sentiment, but often has negative sentiment in medical notes since it may imply that a patient tested positive for a disease. In practice, we expect that only a small number of domain-specific words may have new meanings. We propose an intuitive two-stage estimator that exploits this structure via a group-sparse penalty to efficiently transfer learn domain-specific word embeddings by combining large-scale text corpora (such as Wikipedia) with limited domain-specific text data. We bound the generalization error of our transfer learning estimator, proving that it can achieve high accuracy with substantially less domain-specific data when only a small number of embeddings are altered between domains. Furthermore, we prove that all local minima identified by our nonconvex objective function are statistically indistinguishable from the global minimum under standard regularization conditions, implying that our estimator can be computed efficiently. Our results provide the first bounds on group-sparse matrix factorization, which may be of independent interest. We empirically evaluate our approach compared to state-of-the-art fine-tuning heuristics from natural language processing.

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14.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18 DOI: HASH:0b597a9d09247f1fd31bd4d551f0f3da

Digital self-efficacy as a potential intermediary between vision impairment and daily internet use among older adults: A cross-sectional analysis of HINTS 2024

Authors:

Suzuki↗Hoffmann↗Leutwyler↗Wallhagen↗

Background: Older adults with vision impairment often experience barriers to using digital technology. The indirect associations between vision impairment and digital access and skills via digital self-efficacy and frustration among older adults remain largely unknown. Objective: This study aimed to 1) explore factors associated with digital access, skills, self-efficacy, and frustration among older adults with vision impairment; 2) examine associations between vision impairment and digital access, skills, self-efficacy, and frustration among older adults; and 3) examine whether digital self-efficacy and frustration may help explain associations between vision impairment and digital access and skills among older adults. Methods: This was a cross-sectional study using nationally representative data from the Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS) 2024. Respondents aged 60 and older were included. Vision impairment was assessed using a self-reported item. Outcomes included self-reported digital access, skills, self-efficacy, and frustration. Survey-weighted multivariable logistic regression and generalized structural equation modeling were conducted, adjusting for age, sex, race/ethnicity, education, and the number of comorbidities. Results: Among 3,149 older adults (mean [SD] age, 70.7 [10.0] years; 45.6% female), 7.1% (n=223) reported vision impairment. Among older adults with vision impairment, 65.6% (95% CI, 53.5% to 75.9%) used the internet daily, and 79.5% (95% CI, 66.8% to 88.2%) used a smartphone in the past 12 months. In multivariable logistic regression analyses among older adults with vision impairment, older age was associated with lower odds of daily internet use (OR, 0.84; 95% CI, 0.79 to 0.90), smartphone use (OR, 0.85; 95% CI, 0.75 to 0.97), wearable device use (OR, 0.88; 95% CI, 0.79 to 0.97), and using the internet to send a message to a healthcare provider (OR, 0.87; 95% CI, 0.80 to 0.93). Older adults who self-identified as racial and ethnic minority groups (e.g., Black/African American, Hispanic) had lower odds of daily internet use (OR, 0.15; 95% CI, 0.05 to 0.50) and using the internet to send a message to a healthcare provider (OR, 0.17; 95% CI, 0.04 to 0.73) compared with Non-Hispanic White older adults. Vision impairment was associated with lower odds of daily internet use (OR, 0.60; 95% CI, 0.37 to 0.99) and digital self-efficacy (OR, 0.53; 95% CI, 0.32 to 0.86). Digital self-efficacy was associated with higher odds of daily internet use (OR, 2.95; 95% CI, 2.04 to 4.26). Generalized structural equation modeling identified an indirect association between vision impairment and daily internet use via digital self-efficacy (coefficient, -0.68; 95% CI, -1.24 to -0.12). Conclusions: Findings suggest that reduced digital self-efficacy may help explain the observed association between vision impairment and daily internet use among older adults. Interventions targeting digital self-efficacy, including accessible interface designs, personalized coaching, and peer support, may help bridge the digital divide among older adults with vision impairment.

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15.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17851

A homotopy-type-theoretic generalization of neurosymbolic inference

Authors:

Fernando Zhapa-Camacho↗Robert Hoehndorf↗

arXiv:2606.17851v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A wide range of neurosymbolic (NeSy) systems compute one functional: a belief-weighted sum of a logical quantity over a space of $\sigma$-structures, of which weighted model counting, fuzzy logic, and probabilistic logic are special cases. This account is built on sets, and a set deliberately forgets two things that are important for NeSy: when two $\sigma$-structures are the same up to a symmetry of the theory, and how many distinct proofs witness a query. Replacing the underlying sets by types, in the sense of homotopy type theory, preserves this information, and turns this functional into a belief-weighted homotopy cardinality, a notion of size that counts each object in inverse proportion to its symmetries. We develop the framework from scratch for NeSy systems, prove a conservativity theorem that recovers the classical functional when symmetries are trivial, and show that the symmetry our framework exposes is exactly the one behind reasoning shortcuts. The payoff is concrete: the shortcut-aware concept posterior that recent methods reach by ensembling or expressive density estimation is the only symmetry-invariant point of the confusion-set simplex, computable in closed form by averaging a single model over the symmetry group. On MNIST reasoning-shortcut benchmarks this single-model wrapper is better calibrated than a diversity-trained ensemble, while leaving label accuracy and identifiable concepts untouched. Code is freely available at https://github.com/bio-ontology-research-group/hott-nesy.

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16.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2605.01482

Grounding Multi-Hop Reasoning in Structural Causal Models via Group Relative Policy Optimization

Authors:

Yunhan Bu↗Quan Zhang↗Huaping Zhang↗Guotong Geng↗Chunxiao Gao↗Askar Hamdulla↗Juan Wang↗Qiuchi Li↗Baohua Zhang↗Shuai Lei↗Yunbo Cao↗Zhunchen Luo↗…

arXiv:2605.01482v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-Hop Fact Verification requires complex reasoning across disparate evidence, posing significant challenges for Large Language Models , which may suffer from hallucinations and fractured logical chains. Existing methods, while improving transparency via Chain-of-Thought , often lack explicit modeling of the structural dependencies between evidence and claims. In this work, we introduce an SCM-inspired framework that grounds reasoning in explicit directed dependency graphs, treating verification as a constructive structural reasoning process rather than full causal inference with interventions or counterfactual semantics. We empirically identify an "inverted U-shaped" correlation between reasoning-chain length and accuracy, revealing that excessive structural complexity can degrade performance. To address this, we propose a rule-based reinforcement learning strategy using Group Relative Policy Optimization. This approach dynamically optimizes the trade-off between structural depth and conciseness. Extensive experiments on HoVer and EX-FEVER demonstrate that our SCM-GRPO framework outperforms strong baselines while producing more traceable reasoning structures for complex fact verification.

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17.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2410.21803

SimSiam Naming Game: A Unified Approach for Emergent Communication and Representation Learning

Authors:

Nguyen Le Hoang↗Tadahiro Taniguchi↗Tianwei Fang↗Akira Taniguchi↗Masatoshi Nagano↗

Emergent Communication (EmCom) investigates how agents develop symbolic communication through interaction without predefined language. Recent frameworks, such as the Metropolis–Hastings Naming Game (MHNG), formulate EmCom as the learning of shared external representations negotiated through interaction under joint attention, without explicit success or reward feedback. However, MHNG relies on sampling-based updates that suffer from high rejection rates in high-dimensional perceptual spaces, making the learning process sample-inefficient for complex visual datasets. In this work, we propose the SimSiam Naming Game (SSNG), a feedback-free EmCom framework that replaces sampling-based updates with a symmetric, self-supervised representation alignment objective between autonomous agents. Building on a variational inference–based probabilistic interpretation of self-supervised learning, SSNG formulates symbol emergence as an alignment process between agents' latent representations mediated by message exchange. To enable end-to-end gradient-based optimization, discrete symbolic messages are learned via a Gumbel–Softmax relaxation, preserving the discrete nature of communication while maintaining differentiability. Experiments on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet-100 show that the emergent messages learned by SSNG achieve substantially higher linear-probe classification accuracy than those produced by referential games, reconstruction games, and MHNG. These results indicate that self-supervised representation alignment provides an effective mechanism for feedback-free EmCom in multi-agent systems.

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18.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16326

Gaming-Resistant Insurance Contracts for Autonomous AI Agents: Strategy-Proof Toll Mechanism Design

Authors:

Hao-Hsuan Chen↗

arXiv:2606.16326v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Paper A defines a time-consistent actuarial runtime that prices each side-effect-bearing action against a contractually fixed safe default and gates execution against a reserve budget. It treats the operator as passive. This paper makes the operator strategic. We characterise a five-attack space for autonomous AI-agent insurance contracts and prove when the actuarial runtime is gaming-resistant. Two attack surfaces – post-toll safe-default selection and within-boundary action splitting – are closed by Paper A's minimal-authority and no-splitting clauses. The remaining three require new contract clauses. First, common-control aggregation prevents cross-boundary re-routing from reducing toll below the boundary potential applied to total exposure. Second, interface failures such as invalid JSON are contract-relevant events, not safety wins: treating them as zero-toll safe defaults can reward unreliable models, while escalation fees reverse the incentive. We validate this interface-compliance theorem on committed cross-model traces from the companion empirical paper. Third, a model-identity menu with a componentwise-minimum penalty schedule makes truthful reporting of the deployed model weakly dominant. We then compose these clauses with Paper A's runtime guarantees to obtain joint incentive compatibility over the five-attack space. Finally, a two-parameter premium family discharges operator individual rationality and weak budget balance at the truthful equilibrium. The result is an incentive-compatibility layer for actuarial control of autonomous-agent side effects.

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19.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.04935

What Type of Inference is Active Inference?

Authors:

Wouter W. L. Nuijten↗Mykola Lukashchuk↗Thijs van de Laar↗Bert de Vries↗

arXiv:2606.04935v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Active inference casts decision-making as inference, with the Expected Free Energy (EFE) unifying goal-directed and information-seeking behavior. Recent work showed that EFE minimization can be written as Variational Free Energy (VFE) minimization on a generative model augmented with epistemic priors. We prove that the VFE of the augmented model can be rewritten as the VFE of the predictive model plus explicit entropy-correction terms, making the EFE contribution transparent. We then show that proper EFE-based planning requires combining these epistemic corrections with a planning correction that turns marginal inference into policy optimization, yielding a full variational characterization of EFE-based planning. This clarifies which corrections are needed for cross-entropy planning and for full EFE-based planning. The same entropy-corrected formulation leads to a detailed message-passing scheme for EFE-based planning together with simpler ablations. Experiments on three grid-world environments show that full EFE-based planning outperforms ablations that omit either the planning correction or the epistemic corrections.

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20.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11213

Beyond Compaction: Structured Context Eviction for Long-Horizon Agents

Authors:

Andrew Semenov↗Svyatoslav Dorofeev↗

We present Context Window Lifecycle (CWL), a context-management scheme that gives long-horizon LLM agents an effectively unbounded working horizon. As a session accumulates history, CWL keeps the context within budget through graduated, semantically-aware eviction: the agent annotates its trajectory as typed, dependency-linked episodes as work proceeds, and a deterministic, LLM-free policy evicts content in priority order within that structure when a token budget is exceeded. CWL preserves user turns and the exploratory context the agent is actively reasoning over, while aggressively shedding action episodes whose effects are already persisted in the environment, keeping active context near a stable ceiling that also avoids the performance degradation associated with very large prompts. Compared to summarization-based compaction, CWL avoids four well-known limitations: unpredictable lossiness, destruction of causal structure, blocking model cost, and compression-induced hallucination. Compared to recency truncation, CWL is semantically aware: it drops the oldest-and-most-recoverable content according to the dependency graph rather than oldest-in-time regardless of relevance. We describe the annotation protocol, the episode graph, the eviction policy, and the token-accounting loop, and evaluate CWL on long-horizon agentic benchmarks: a single agent session completing 89 sequential tasks across 80 million tokens with no measurable degradation in task accuracy relative to per-task isolated sessions

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21.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.22424

FlowDec: Temporal Conditional Flow Decorruptor for Robust Continuous Vision-Language Navigation

Authors:

Yufei Zhang↗Changhao Chen↗

Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments (VLN-CE) requires agents to follow natural-language instructions in unseen scenes. While Large Models (LMs) have advanced VLN-CE, their performance remains severely degraded by real-world visual corruptions, a critical yet underexplored domain constraint. We introduce Temporal Conditional Flow Decorruptor (FlowDec), a novel image restoration framework tailored for LM-based VLN-CE. FlowDec integrates a hybrid temporal conditioning strategy to align the generative flow path with historical context and employs action-centroid guided filtering to dynamically assess and integrate outputs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FlowDec outperforms state-of-the-art decorruption methods in both navigation accuracy and generation latency. Our approach establishes a robust, efficient paradigm for resilient embodied navigation in unpredictable real-world conditions.

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22.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.09376

Precision Is Not Faithfulness: Coverage-Aware Evaluation of Grounded Generation with a Complete Oracle

Authors:

Juan S. Santillana↗

Reference-free faithfulness metrics verify each atomic claim a model makes against ground truth, and are increasingly used to evaluate grounded generation. We show they share a blind spot: they measure only precision – are the stated claims supported? – and therefore reward abstention, since a model can score near-perfect faithfulness by saying almost nothing. We make this measurable using Formula 1 telemetry, a domain where strategic ground truth is derived deterministically and, crucially, completely: for each decision we know the full set of facts that mattered. This completeness – absent in open-domain faithfulness benchmarks – lets us measure recall (coverage of the relevant facts) exactly, alongside precision. On a multilingual (EN/ES/PT) benchmark of 7,253 decision instances spanning 157 races, the most precise frontier model covers under half of the relevant facts and ranks last by F1, so requiring coverage reorders the systems; the same effect reappears in a second complete-oracle domain (NOAA weather forecasts). Fine-tuning small models (1B-7B) on the complete oracle closes the precision-recall gap entirely (F1 ~0.98), beating every zero-shot frontier system regardless of scale. We pair faithfulness with coverage into a single score, validate the metric (controlled perturbation; agreement across a model-free regex extractor and a cross-family LLM extractor, system-level Spearman 1.0), and give a verifier-guided generation method that improves precision and recall without references. We release the benchmark, structured annotations, metric, baselines, and an interactive demo.

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23.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11387

Small Experiments, Cheaper Decisions: A Case Study in Staged Promotion for Micro-Pretraining

Authors:

Felipe Chavarro Polania↗

Short pretraining runs can reduce experimental cost, but they can also over-promote configurations that only look strong at tiny budgets. We study an auditable staged-promotion protocol for a fixed micro-pretraining runner on two heterogeneous host blocks: Windows A100 and Linux L40S. Starting from twelve prior-screened configurations, we use staged budgets of 2 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 60 minutes, and 12 hours, with frozen promotion rules before expensive continuations. The early screens are intentionally treated as unstable: the 5- and 10-minute rankings are host-sensitive, and the eventual 12-hour top-ranked condition is not the mean-best condition at the replicated 10-minute gate. Because seed ranges differ across stages, these changes are operational promotion evidence, not within-seed curves. A replicated 60-minute gate keeps the Staged Factorial Screening bridge reference in the promoted set, where it ranks first in all four 60-minute host-seed cells. In the final 12-hour confirmation package, the bridge condition ranks first in all four host-seed cells across two seeds; the greedy comparator does not meet the frozen 0.010 val_bpb near-equivalence rule; and the cheaper d8/ar48 (depth-8, aspect-48) sentinel does not meet the frozen 0.020 mean-gap rule. The executed 12-hour branch spends 144 GPU-hours, and the full staged protocol records 169.2 training GPU-hours including screening stages. Continuing all four 60-minute candidates would spend 192 GPU-hours, while continuing all nine replicated 10-minute candidates would spend 432 GPU-hours. The latter numbers are accounting counterfactuals for unrun continuations, not evidence that skipped candidates could not have overtaken the reference. The result is a bounded cost-allocation finding, not a claim of global optimality, capacity-normalized superiority, or superiority over adaptive hyperparameter optimization methods.

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24.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.23938

Neuro-Symbolic Drive: Rule-Grounded Faithful Reasoning for Driving VLAs

Authors:

Xiangbo Gao↗Xiukun Huang↗Boyu Lu↗Junge Zhang↗Mengjie Mao↗Jiachen Li↗Wei Xiong↗Zhengzhong Tu↗

Driving VLA models incorporating Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning are attractive because they leverage pretrained VLM representations and expose intermediate decisions in natural language, yet current rationales often lack the step-by-step decision semantics needed to keep the rationale causally connected to the planned motion. We introduce Neuro-Symbolic Drive, a neuro-symbolic driving framework that supervises a driving VLA with rule-grounded reasoning traces extracted directly from classical rule-based planners. Our key observation is that rule-based planners are symbolic AI systems that already function as executable reasoning engines: they reason about active safety constraints, search over candidate maneuvers, and select a final trajectory. We instrument these planners in simulation to capture both the executed trajectory and the internal decision trace at each rule-evaluation step. Each trace is serialized into structured rule-grounded reasoning and paired with the trajectory to fine-tune Qwen3.5-4B as a driving VLA. Because these traces are derived directly from the planner states that determine the action, they ensure reasoning is structurally coupled to motion generation by construction, rather than by post-hoc alignment. On our simulator-generated benchmark, detailed rule-grounded reasoning reduces ADE@3s from 0.47 to 0.26 and miss rate from 8.30% to 6.40% under three-camera perception, and from 0.54 to 0.26 and 10.13% to 5.99% under eight-camera perception. Neuro-Symbolic Drive thus converts neuro-symbolic planning logic into structured supervision. Code base: https://github.com/XiangboGaoBarry/Neural-Symbolic-Drive.

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25.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20094

MakeupMirror: Improving Facial Attribute Preservation in Diffusion Models for Makeup Transfer

Authors:

Nefeli Andreou↗Angel Mart\'inez-Gonz\'alez↗Sabine Sternig↗Matthieu Guillaumin↗Epameinondas Antonakos↗Michael Opitz↗

arXiv:2606.20094v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Makeup transfer models enable fun augmented reality (AR) experiences as well as virtual try-on (VTO) for online makeup shopping. While recent state-of-the-art diffusion based solutions such as Stable-Makeup dramatically improve the accuracy and realism of makeup transfer, they still face limitations in identity and skin color preservation, making production-level VTO for makeup shopping unrealistic. In this work, we propose MakeupMirror, a diffusion-based approach to makeup transfer that makes significant progress towards preserving facial features and skin tone. We introduce several technical innovations over Stable-Makeup: (1) integration of facial geometry conditioning with ControlNets to maintain facial fidelity; (2) region-specific makeup transfer control to enable precise makeup application across facial regions such as skin, eyes and lips; (3) skin tone-based makeup transfer modulation that prevent skin tone alteration in cross-subject transfer scenarios; and (4) integration of a Levenberg-Marquardt Langevin sampler to speed up inference while maintaining generation quality. Our experiments on CPM-Real, Makeup Wild, and (herein newly collected, more diverse) MakeupSelfies datasets show that MakeupMirror improves relative facial recognition similarity by +60%, reduces relative skin tone difference by -50% over Stable-Makeup, with a latency of 0.7s, while achieving expert acceptance rate of 94% across core facial identity preservation criteria.

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