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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Symmetric mass generation of interacting chiral fermions on a one-dimensional lattice without fermion doubling

arXiv:2606.24713v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Symmetric mass generation is the interaction-induced opening of a fermion gap without spontaneous symmetry breaking. The anomaly-free 3-4-5-0 model of Wang and Wen provides a minimal one-dimensional setting for this phenomenon, but a direct lattice realization faces two obstacles: fermion doubling for local chiral discretizations and perturbative irrelevance of the six-fermion gapping interaction. We address both obstacles. First, we formulate the model on a strictly one-dimensional tangent-fermion lattice, where a nonlocal hopping produces a single chiral branch without a mirror partner while retaining an efficient tensor-network representation. Second, we add a Hubbard-type density-density interaction (Luttinger parameter $K$) that reduces the scaling dimension of the 3-4-5-0 interaction from $5$ to $5K$, making it relevant for $K

02.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Optical metasurfaces for general vision processing on the edge

Authors:

Large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) models achieve notable performance in computer vision but require substantial computational resources, limiting their deployment on edge devices1,2. Optical neural networks (ONNs) promise reduced latency and energy consumption by making use of the inherent parallelism of light3. However, present ONNs struggle to scale and are confined to simple tasks, owing to the challenges of replicating exact algebraic operations of digital models using physical (analogue) systems. This work introduces a new paradigm that directly embeds core computer vision principles, including similarity-based recognition, attention-guided perception and detail–context fusion, into a large-scale optical metasurface. By unifying optical physics with these computer vision fundamentals, we develop a photonic–electronic engine that overcomes scalability and generality barriers, enabling high-accuracy, general-purpose computer vision at the edge. The resulting system combines a 41-million-parameter optical metasurface front end with a co-designed, ultraefficient 87,000-parameter digital back end, outperforming many digital models with tens of millions of parameters across object detection, segmentation, 3D reconstruction and video understanding. We build a deployable prototype and demonstrate real-time edge visual processing in natural scenes. This work represents a path towards practical optical computing for general vision tasks in complex natural environments, enabling a new paradigm for low-energy, low-latency, real-time on-device vision intelligence. By embedding core computer vision principles into a large-scale optical metasurface, an efficient vision processing system using far fewer parameters is demonstrated to outperform many digital models and enables deployment on edge devices.

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

Runtime Analysis of Cartesian Genetic Programming in Evolving Boolean Functions

arXiv:2606.15923v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cartesian Genetic Programming (CGP) is among the practical and popular forms of Genetic Programming as it uses a graph-based representation of programs. This paper presents a first runtime analysis of CGP in evolving Boolean functions using complete training sets. We prove an asymptotic bound $O(n D^5)$ for the expected number of fitness evaluations of CGP to construct a conjunction of $n$ inputs using at most $D \geq n-1$ binary gates, a minimal function set, and even with a strict survival selection. When the non-strict selection is used, the bound is improved to $O(n D^4)$. Our analysis reveals interesting characteristics of CGP induced search, which have been only observed empirically. In particular, enabling the acceptance of equally good solutions, including those with connected gates non-contributing to fitness, can lead to a speedup, and consequently a better asymptotic time bound. In contrast to conjunctions, we also prove a negative result which shows that CGP requires exponential time to evolve an exclusive disjunction. Experiments evolving conjunctions complement our theoretical findings. The use of incomplete training sets is found to further reduce the average number of fitness evaluations while maintaining a good level of generalisation.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

EnvRL: Learn from Environment Dynamics in Agentic Reinforcement Learning

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

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Progressive Pixel-Neighborhood Deformable Cross-Attention for Multispectral Object Detection

Effective cross-modal feature alignment and interaction are central challenges in multispectral object detection. Although global cross-attention provides strong long-range modeling ability, its quadratic complexity with respect to feature size limits deployment on resource-constrained platforms. We therefore propose Progressive Pixel-Neighborhood Deformable Cross-Attention for multispectral feature fusion, termed PNAFusion. The proposed framework is motivated by two observations: weak misalignment between visible and thermal images is usually concentrated around local neighborhoods, and semantic correspondence across modalities often follows non-linear spatial mappings that fixed receptive fields cannot model well. To address these issues, PNAFusion incorporates local spatial priors into its architectural design to concentrate feature interaction and alignment on the most relevant neighborhoods. Specifically, a Pixel-Neighborhood Cross-Attention (PNCA) module is introduced to avoid redundant global feature matching and suppress background noise. Meanwhile, an Adaptive Deformable Alignment (ADA) module captures non-linear spatial correspondences through learned pixel-wise offsets. These components are further integrated through an iterative feedback mechanism to progressively refine cross-modal feature alignment. Experiments on FLIR, M3FD, and DroneVehicle show that PNAFusion achieves 84.2, 90.5, and 85.5 mAP@0.5, respectively, under the YOLOv5 detector, and further reaches 86.8 mAP@0.5 on FLIR and 90.8 mAP@0.5 on M3FD when transferred to Co-DETR. Efficiency analysis indicates that PNAFusion reduces allocated GPU memory by 33.0\% compared with ICAFusion and reduces theoretical FLOPs from 194.8 G to 156.4 G, although the deformable sampling and iterative refinement introduce additional latency. Our code will be available at https://github.com/DanielQiuTian/PNAFusion.

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

ActiveScope: Actively Seeking and Correcting Perception for MLLMs

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive vision-language understanding, yet still struggle with fine-grained perception in high-resolution images. While existing training-free methods typically rely on attention-based localization or coarse-to-fine search, they are often misled by distractors and fail to locate multiple targets. Our investigation attributes these failures to Contextual Dominance, where salient distractors overwhelm target attention and cause inaccurate localization, and Semantic Bias, where global semantics cause the model to fixate on the most salient concept, resulting in incomplete localization in multi-object scenarios. Built on these insights, we propose ActiveScope, a training-free framework that enhances MLLMs by actively seeking and correcting perception. ActiveScope features two modules. The Semantic Anchor Localization (SAL) utilizes fine-grained semantic anchors to independently localize key targets, thereby mitigating semantic bias. The Interference-Suppressed Refinement (ISR) refines localization by suppressing attention on salient distractions to overcome contextual dominance. Extensive experiments on high-resolution image understanding benchmarks demonstrate that ActiveScope outperforms existing training-free methods (e.g., 96.34 percent accuracy on $V^{*}$ Bench), validating the superiority of the active search and self-correction paradigm. Our code is available at https://github.com/jasmine-ww/ActiveScope.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

A Poisson Process Life Expectancy framework for optimising patient lifetime during chemotherapy

Cancer therapy balances between two competing objectives - treatment efficacy against the tumour and the risk of treatment related severe adverse events, including patient death. Most existing optimal control theory (OCT) formulations rely on optimising heuristic cost functionals that lack direct clinical interpretability. In clinical practice treatment efficacy and patient tolerability are primarily assessed through survival metrics and adverse event rates. Here we introduce the Continuous Lifetime Payoff (CLP), a novel OCT objective functional that directly links treatment decisions to patient survival. It explicitly incorporates tumour dynamics, tumour eradication, and patient mortality from tumour progression, drug-related toxicity and age. We fit age-related mortality from life tables and infer parameters from simulated survival data. The CLP provides a clinically grounded framework for optimising chemotherapy regimens.

08.
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.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Readout-Induced Leakage in Superconducting Circuits with Nonlinear Couplings

arXiv:2606.16055v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In superconducting circuits, drive-induced unwanted transitions limit the readout power, thereby constraining readout speed and fidelity. When such transitions excite the qubit into leakage states, they produce correlated errors that are particularly harmful for quantum error correction. Native nonlinear qubit-readout resonator coupling is a promising alternative to conventional linear hybridization because it provides intrinsic Purcell protection and stricter selection rules for multiphoton processes. In realistic devices, however, we show that such a coupling alone neither eliminates nor necessarily suppresses drive-induced transitions. Instead, if not appropriately engineered, these couplings often worsen the situation by introducing additional parasitic processes. Moreover, the rates of these unwanted transitions remain sensitive to the choice of readout frequency, regardless of the coupling mechanism. We demonstrate that readout-induced leakage can thus vary by orders of magnitude even when readout frequencies differ by less than ~7%. Our results establish that the benefits of native nonlinear couplings are realized only through informed device design, including the spectral placement of relevant auxiliary modes and elimination of parasitic ones.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

AIRMap: AI-Generated Radio Maps for Wireless Digital Twins

arXiv:2511.05522v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Accurate, low-latency channel modeling is essential for real-time wireless network simulation and digital-twin applications. Traditional modeling methods like ray tracing are however computationally demanding and unsuited to model dynamic conditions. In this paper, we propose AIRMap, a deep-learning framework for ultra-fast radio-map estimation, along with an automated pipeline for creating the largest radio-map dataset to date. AIRMap uses a single-input U-Net autoencoder that processes only a 2D elevation map of terrain and building heights. Trained on 1.2M Boston-area samples and validated across four distinct urban and rural environments with varying terrain and building density, AIRMap predicts path gain with under 4 dB RMSE in 4 ms per inference on an NVIDIA L40S-over 100x faster than GPU-accelerated ray tracing based radio maps. A lightweight calibration using just 20% of field measurements reduces the median error to approximately 5%, significantly outperforming traditional simulators, which exceed 50% error. Integration into the Colosseum emulator and the Sionna SYS platform demonstrate near-zero error in spectral efficiency and block-error rate compared to measurement-based channels. These findings validate AIRMap's potential for scalable, accurate, and real-time radio map estimation in wireless digital twins.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

A Reproducible Log-Driven AutoML Framework for Interpretable Pipeline Optimization in Healthcare Risk Prediction

arXiv:2605.21528v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Accurate disease risk prediction is challenged by heterogeneous features, limited data, and class imbalance. This study presents yvsoucom-iterkit, a deterministic AutoML framework that models pipeline optimization as a configuration-level system with full reproducibility and traceable execution logs, enabling systematic analysis of component attribution, interactions, similarity, and cross-seed robustness. Experiments on the Pima Indians Diabetes and Stroke datasets across more than 18,000 pipeline configurations reveal a structured yet partially redundant search space, where performance is dominated by a small subset of interacting components. Ensemble models achieve stable performance, reaching a Weighted-F1 of 0.89 on Pima and 0.94 on Stroke. Macro-F1 reaches approximately 0.88 on Pima but drops to 0.6560 on Stroke due to severe imbalance. Cross-seed experiments show that ensembles reduce variance compared to single models. Friedman testing ($p < 0.05$) confirms significant ranking differences across configurations. Based on analysis of component attribution, interaction, and similarity, optimal configuration design reveals dataset-dependent behavior. For the Pima dataset, computational efficiency benefits from simplified search spaces where redundant components can be removed, with split ratio playing a key role. In contrast, the Stroke dataset requires enhanced imbalance-aware strategies, where RandomOverSampler improves Macro-F1 from 0.6560 to 0.6766. These findings demonstrate that effective AutoML optimization is achieved through optimal configuration design, where carefully constraining the search space to high-impact components can improve performance, stability, and interpretability while reducing unnecessary search complexity.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Paired plasma and EV-enriched plasma proteomics reveal nonredundant sepsis-associated host-response signatures in critical illness

Background: Plasma proteomics may identify host-response signatures in sepsis, but it is unclear whether extracellular vesicle (EV)-enriched plasma provides distinct or redundant information compared with plasma. We compared paired plasma and EV-enriched plasma proteomes in critically ill patients with sepsis and critically ill non-sepsis controls (CINS). Methods: In this prospective observational study, paired plasma and EV-enriched plasma samples were analyzed from 56 critically ill adults, including 40 patients with sepsis and 16 CINS patients. Protein abundance was quantified using liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry. Analyses compared proteomic depth, protein overlap, global concordance between compartments, and differential protein abundance between CINS and sepsis. Exploratory Gene Ontology enrichment was performed as a supplementary analysis. Results: EV-enriched plasma expanded proteomic detection, identifying 2,476 filtered proteins compared with 506 in plasma. Only 386 proteins were detected in both compartments, while 2,090 were unique to EV-enriched plasma and 120 were unique to plasma. Among shared proteins, plasma and EV-enriched plasma showed modest global concordance across critically ill patients (Spearman coeff = 0.322, p = 9.19 x 10^-11), with similar findings in sepsis alone. Differential abundance analysis identified 11 sepsis-associated proteins in plasma and 22 in EV-enriched plasma. Only SAA1, SAA2, and IGFBP6 were significant in both compartments. Exploratory pathway analysis supported acute-phase and inflammatory enrichment in plasma sepsis-associated proteins, while EV-enriched signals were directionally plausible but did not meet prespecified FDR thresholds. Conclusion: Plasma and EV-enriched plasma proteomics capture related but nonredundant sepsis-associated host-response information in critically ill patients.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

From Passive Generation to Investigation: A Proactive Scientific Peer Review Agent

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in automating scientific peer review. However, existing approaches often struggle to generate in-depth reviews supported by concrete evidence. We argue that a key limitation is the lack of flexibility to proactively investigate suspicious parts of a paper based on accumulated evidence, as human reviewers do. In this paper, we explore how to enable an LLM-based review agent to perform such proactive investigation. We find that this can be naturally formulated as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), and propose ProReviewer, a scientific peer review agent that proactively reviews a paper guided by a maintained, structured review log. The structured review log serves as a workspace for the agent to track evidence and intermediate findings collected during review. Experiments show that ProReviewer with an 8B backbone, trained by supervised fine-tuning and optimized by reinforcement learning, achieves the highest average score across five quality dimensions, outperforming prompt-based methods with much larger frontier LLMs by up to 39% and the strongest fine-tuned baseline by 16% relatively. It also attains the highest win rates against baselines in human evaluation.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Quantifying mandibular positioning error and simulated temporomandibular joint-space changes in patient-specific occlusal splints

Patient-specific occlusal positioning splints can be regarded as physical realisations of planned mandibular transformations. However, the achieved mandibular pose may differ from the planned one because of acquisition, registration, fabrication, and positioning errors. This study presents a transformation-based biomedical engineering framework for quantifying mandibular positioning accuracy and propagating the resulting error to a simulated temporomandibular joint configuration. Multimodal 3D data, including CBCT, facial motion acquisition, and dental scans, were integrated in a common coordinate system. Positioning splints corresponding to selected mandibular poses were designed and fabricated, and their realised positions were evaluated using repeated scans of plaster models. Discrepancies between planned and achieved positions were represented as rigid-body error transformations and analysed in SE(3), together with surface-distance metrics. The estimated transformations were propagated to CBCT-derived TMJ structures to quantify changes in condyle-fossa distance maps. The results demonstrate a systematic translational component and anisotropic variability of mandibular positioning error, with measurable propagation to simulated TMJ-space changes. The proposed framework provides an objective method for documenting planned and achieved mandibular configurations and for analysing positioning uncertainty in patient-specific splint workflows.

15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Sectional Curvature for Kantorovich-Wasserstein and Hellinger-Kantorovich Geometries

arXiv:2606.14318v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We derive an explicit formula for the sectional curvature of the space ${\cal M}(M)$ of finite measures on a Riemannian manifold M. The space ${\cal M}(M)$ is equipped with the Hellinger-Kantorovich metric $HK$. Even in the case M=R^n, the curvature is comprised of two parts: the `lifted part' is negative, and the `twisted part' is positive. It will be analyzed in detail for the multidimensional torus. Our general approach to sectional curvature in geodesic spaces also leads to new insights into the curvature of the space $P_2(M)$ of probability measures on M equipped with the Kantorovich-Wasserstein metric $W_2$.

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

DriveJudge: Rethinking Autonomous Driving Evaluation with Vision-Language Models

Autonomous driving has shifted towards end-to-end policy learning, where reliable, interpretable policy evaluation is a fundamental challenge as driving quality is highly context-dependent. Commonly used rule-based driving metrics like EPDMS are interpretable but lack context-awareness, while recent VLMbased evaluations are context-aware but limited by ambiguous VLM outputs and weak physical grounding. To evaluate driving in a manner that is both interpretable and context-aware, we introduce DriveJudge. DriveJudge is a driving evaluation agent that combines rule-grounded evaluation with Vision-Language Model (VLM) reasoning and selectively invokes physically-grounded deterministic rule functions after interpreting the environmental context. To train and evaluate DriveJudge, we curate a large-scale dataset of 33,577 challenging driving samples with human annotations on whether the driving behavior is reasonable in the given scenario. With this dataset, we address the underexplored problem of driving metric evaluation, and introduce two human-aligned benchmark tasks: Driving Quality Classification and Trajectory Preference Selection. DriveJudge outperforms EPDMS for driving quality classification by 21.23 AUC, and the recent VLM-based DriveCritic for trajectory preference selection by 6.5%, setting a new standard for interpretable and precise driving evaluation.

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

The Weight Norm Sets the Grokking Timescale: A Causal Delay Law

arXiv:2606.13753v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Grokking is the delayed onset of generalization in neural networks, arising long after they fit the training data. Whether the weight norm causes this delay is disputed: some studies report a critical norm at the transition, others observe grokking with no fixed norm at all. We settle this by intervening on the norm during training rather than only observing it. Under free training with weight decay, networks grok when the weight norm reaches a value Wc that varies little across seeds and learning rates (CV 1 to 2 percent) and grows with the modular base as a power law. When we instead clamp the norm to a fixed multiple rho of Wc and hold it there, the network still groks, but the delay follows T_grok proportional to exp(alpha rho). One exponent, alpha near 7.5, fits this delay across four moduli (R^2 = 0.996). Over the swept ranges the held norm moves the delay by about 19x and the learning rate by only about 2x, and holding the norm above Wc slows grokking rather than preventing it. A final LayerNorm removes the dependence by decoupling weight scale from the network function; without it the exponential law returns. This pinned-norm delay is the exponential counterpart to the logarithmic delay predicted for a freely contracting norm.

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

Thermodynamic assessment of machine learning models for solid-state synthesis prediction

arXiv:2602.04075v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Machine learning models have recently emerged to predict whether hypothetical solid-state materials can be synthesized. These models aim to circumvent direct first-principles modeling of solid-state phase transformations, instead learning from large databases of successfully synthesized materials. Here, we assess the alignment of several recently introduced synthesis prediction models with material and reaction thermodynamics, quantified by the energy with respect to the convex hull and a metric accounting for thermodynamic selectivity of enumerated synthesis reactions. A dataset of successful synthesis recipes was used to determine the likely bounds on both quantities beyond which materials can be deemed unlikely to be synthesized. With these bounds as context, thermodynamic quantities were computed using the CHGNet foundation potential for thousands of new hypothetical materials generated using the Chemeleon generative model. Four recently published machine learning models for synthesizability prediction were applied to this same dataset, and the resultant predictions were considered against computed thermodynamics. We find these models generally overpredict the likelihood of synthesis, but some model scores do trend with thermodynamic heuristics, assigning lower scores to materials that are less stable or do not have an available synthesis recipe that is calculated to be thermodynamically selective. In total, this work identifies existing gaps in machine learning models for materials synthesis and introduces a new approach to assess their quality in the absence of extensive negative examples (failed syntheses).

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Instance-Aware Knowledge Distillation for Semi-Supervised Learning of an On-Board Multi-Task Dense Prediction Model for Collision Avoidance System

Collision avoidance systems have evolved toward camera-based deep learning approaches for driving scene understanding. However, deployment in edge environments such as country clubs is constrained by limited computational resources and unreliable communication infrastructure. Moreover, constructing large-scale datasets for the target domain involves substantial annotation cost. To address these limitations, we propose an instance-aware knowledge distillation framework for semi-supervised learning. Specifically, we generate pseudo labels that mitigate teacher bias by leveraging domain priors from the teacher and instance-centric knowledge from foundation models. The trained lightweight student is deployed in the proposed collision avoidance system and performs multiple dense prediction tasks in real-time. The system detects frontal obstacles and encodes their spatial information into controller area network messages for automated guided vehicle operation. To achieve this, we construct a large-scale country club dataset and perform field validation of the proposed system. Experimental results demonstrate that the student outperforms the large teacher in instance segmentation while mitigating performance degradation in monocular depth estimation. Compared with the teacher, the student reduces FLOPs by 22.68$\times$ and parameters by 14.33$\times$, achieving 6.46 FPS on a low-cost edge device.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Temporal Backtracking Search for Test-time Generative Video Reasoning

While test-time scaling has revolutionized reasoning in large language models, generative video reasoning remains bottlenecked by a single-shot paradigm. We demonstrate that searching over denoising steps cannot rescue logically flawed rollouts because spatial trajectories commit early in the diffusion process. Root-level Best-of-N (BoN) sampling is similarly inefficient: reasoning errors cluster early in the temporal axis, and resampling blindly discards verified upstream progress. To unlock effective test-time scaling for video models, we introduce Temporal Backtracking Search (TBS), which shifts the search space to the temporal axis. TBS transforms video generation into an iterative generate-verify-restart loop via three core mechanisms: (1) variable-K conditioning to resume generation from arbitrary clean prefixes; (2) temporal process verification to localize failures and extract valid restart anchors; and (3) prefix-based search to reallocate compute toward extending correct trajectories rather than root resampling. Across algorithmic, navigation, and robotics domains, TBS Pareto-dominates matched-budget BoN. In a strict out-of-distribution setting where one-shot generation collapses (0.7% for BoN), TBS achieves 22.7%, with every solved episode stemming from a restarted branch. Ultimately, TBS reveals that the local reasoning competence of video models far exceeds what single-shot rollouts indicate, providing a scalable test-time framework to unlock it.

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

PiDA: Phonetically-Informed Data Augmentation for Robust Vietnamese Speech Translation

Cascaded speech translation (ST) systems suffer from error propagation when Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) outputs incorrect transcripts. We present the first systematic categorization of ASR errors for Vietnamese ST, classifying substitution errors by phonetic cause and quantifying their impact on downstream Neural Machine Translation (NMT) performance using Linear Mixed-Effects Modelling. We confirm that most ASR substitution errors arise from phonetic confusions rather than random noise, and that these phonetic errors significantly degrade ST quality. Motivated by this finding, we propose Phonetically-Informed Data Augmentation (PiDA), which generates ASR-like corruptions by substituting words with phonetically similar alternatives using phonetic word embeddings. Fine-tuning on a PiDA-augmented version of FLEURS Vietnamese-English improves translation of erroneous ASR outputs (up to +2.04 BLEU over standard fine-tuning) while also slightly improving clean-text performance.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Where Will They Go? Modelling Multimodal Pedestrian Manoeuvres from Ego-centric Videos

Pedestrian trajectory prediction from an ego-centric camera is challenging since it depends on complex interactions with vehicles and scene context, as well as the intention of the pedestrian. By modelling correlation and intent from the historical and future trajectories of the pedestrian, it will usually result in a multimodal (i.e. multiple modes) distribution. Existing stochastic predictors often sample multiple futures from a single unimodal distribution, which can yield sub-optimal 'mixed-mode' trajectories that lie between distinct motion patterns and become implausible in real scenes. In this paper, we propose MMPM, a mode-aware framework that separately models future trajectory distributions into semantically meaningful modes based on the pedestrian's crossing behavior. MMPM consists of two modules: behavior-aware Pedestrian Interaction Module (PIM) that jointly captures pedestrian-vehicle and pedestrian-environment interactions by introducing gaze, head and hand gesture, and a CVAE-based Mode-aware Trajectory Predictor (MTP) module to model the future trajectory distributions on two modes, crossing and non-crossing the road, separately. A query-based decoder further enforces mode consistency during decoding. Experiments on PIE and JAAD datasets show that our method surpasses state-of-the-art baselines. Our proposed MTP is model-agnostic, which can be integrated into existing frameworks such as BiTrap-NP and SGNet-ED to further improve future trajectory prediction performance. We additionally introduce a data-driven validation protocol that matches predictions to spatio-temporally consistent ground-truth trajectories, demonstrating improved frame-wise displacement errors over previous work.

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

Forced Deferral: Manipulating Routing Decisions in Multimodal LLM Cascades

arXiv:2606.15308v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong visual reasoning abilities, serving a large model for every query is computationally expensive. MLLM cascades mitigate this cost by first querying a weak but cheaper model and deferring to a strong model when the weak model's output is unconfident. However, since the weak model's confidence directly controls compute allocation, these systems expose a new attack surface: an adversary can manipulate confidence so that their queries are consistently deferred to the strong model. Motivated by this vulnerability, we introduce the Forced Deferral Attack (FDA), an adversarial image attack that lowers the weak model's confidence and causes cascades to route queries to the strong model. FDA learns a universal border trigger by optimizing a temperature-flattened objective. This objective pushes the weak model's token distribution on triggered inputs toward less concentrated targets constructed from its clean responses. Across datasets, model families, and deferral metrics, FDA consistently increases strong-model routing while outperforming image-perturbation and prompt-injection baselines. These results show that MLLM cascades are vulnerable to attacks that manipulate compute allocation, forcing unintended strong-model usage without directly targeting answer correctness.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Prompt Perturbation for Reliable LLM Evaluation over Comparison Graphs

Evaluating large language models (LLMs) is important for understanding their capabilities, comparing competing systems, and supporting the deployment of reliable models in practice. For open-ended tasks, pairwise evaluation has become a popular paradigm, in which two responses to the same prompt are compared and the resulting judgments are aggregated into an overall ranking. A central challenge of this paradigm is intransitivity: the induced comparison outcomes may fail to support any coherent global ranking. For example, one may observe cyclic preferences such as $A \succ B \succ C \succ A$, or inconsistencies involving ties such as $A \equiv B\equiv C\neq A$. Such contradictions make the resulting leaderboard unstable and challenging to interpret. In this paper, we propose a prompt perturbation framework for improving the consistency of pairwise LLM evaluation. Our approach generates perturbed variants of each prompt, uses the resulting comparison graphs to identify and filter out structurally inconsistent comparison patterns, and then applies standard ranking methods to the filtered comparisons. A key feature of the proposed framework is that graph-level structural consistency is incorporated explicitly into the evaluation pipeline before ranking aggregation. This provides a simple and principled way to reduce cyclic inconsistencies and improve the reliability of LLM rankings.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

RedAct: Redacting Agent Capability Traces for Procedural Skill Protection

Users rely on execution traces to observe agent behavior, diagnose failures, and ensure accountability. These traces contain rich procedural detail, including tool invocations, intermediate decisions, and error-recovery logic. Yet this detail can expose private procedural skills, allowing downstream methods to recover key formulas, thresholds, and strategies without access to model weights or skill files. To quantify this risk and evaluate protection, we construct \textsc{CapTraceBench}, a benchmark of 75 specialized long-horizon tasks and 154 curated skills across seven domains. We also introduce \textsc{RedAct} https://github.com/XuShuwenn/RedAct, a protected trace release framework that localizes protected key information, rewrites traces while preserving verifier-critical evidence, and embeds behavioral watermarks for downstream provenance analysis. Across representative trace reuse methods, \textsc{RedAct} reduces normalized skill transfer (NST) from 44.7–67.1\% on raw traces to below the no-skill baseline, while preserving audit evidence. Its standalone behavioral watermarks reach 93.6–100.0\% true detection with a false alarm rate of at most 1.9\%. These results frame public agent traces as security interfaces and show that selective redaction can reduce procedural capability leakage without removing audit evidence.