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

Camera and LiDAR BEV Fusion for Cooperative 3D Object Detection on TUMTraf V2X

We describe a Camera and LiDAR fusion detector developed for the TUMTraf V2X cooperative 3D object detection track of the DriveX 2026 challenge. The detector fuses three roadside cameras with a fused infrastructure-plus-vehicle point cloud in a shared bird's-eye-view space and predicts boxes through a CenterPoint-style head with a generalized IoU regression loss and an IoU quality re-ranking head. Trained on the provided train and validation splits, the model reaches a 3D mAP of 0.85 on the public Codabench test split. While iterating on the system, we observed that 44 of the 50 test frames are also present in the released train (40) and validation (4) splits with their labels. We therefore conducted two additional studies to quantify how this overlap affects the final score: (1) a finetuning run that oversamples the 44 overlapping frames, reaching 0.89 mAP, and (2) a post-processing run that replaces predictions on those frames with the released ground truth, reaching 0.99 mAP (uploaded to our Codabench account for testing but not published on the leaderboard). All three configurations and their per-class results are reported.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

MARS: Margin-Adversarial Risk-controlled Stopping for Parallel LLM Test-time Scaling

arXiv:2606.12935v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Parallel test-time scaling samples many reasoning traces and majority-votes their answers, improving LLM accuracy but requiring traces to run to completion, incurring substantial computational overhead. We observe that probing partial traces at intermediate checkpoints can extract current answers without disrupting generation, revealing an evolving aggregate vote. Based on this observation, we introduce MARS, a margin-adversarial stopping rule that estimates which active traces are likely to change their answers and stops once the leader remains safe under a conservative bound on future vote movement. The rule separates two sources of uncertainty. It learns the trace-level switch probabilities that determine how much of the current margin is likely to be retained, while handling the harder question of where switching traces land through an adversarial bound calibrated from warmup traces. With true switch probabilities, MARS guarantees with high probability that the early-stopped answer matches the full-budget vote. In practice, a five-feature logistic model closely matches oracle switching behavior. Across three reasoning models and three competition-math benchmarks, MARS saves 25-47% of self-consistency tokens and 14-29% on top of DeepConf Online, a strong confidence-weighted baseline that already filters and truncates weak traces, while matching the accuracy of the corresponding full-budget baselines.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Deciphering Fingerprints of 3D Molecular Surfaces for Accurate Epitope Prediction

arXiv:2606.23830v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Molecular surfaces encode the geometric and physicochemical patterns that determine antibody-antigen recognition, central to epitope prediction. However, existing methods rely on sequences or backbone structures and struggle to capture discontinuous, surface-driven epitopes. This study presents SurfBind, a surface-centric learning framework for epitope prediction that operates directly on molecular surface representations. SurfBind integrates geometric and physicochemical cues through a Transformer-based architecture with patch-level surface modeling, binder-aware cross-attention, and a hierarchical coarse-to-fine prediction paradigm. Experiments on challenging epitope identification benchmarks, including SAbDab and DB5.5, demonstrate that SurfBind achieves state-of-the-art performance and strong generalization across unseen antibodies and conformational states, highlighting the value of interaction-aware surface modeling for understanding the crucial mechanisms of protein-protein interactions.

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

MeshPad: Interactive Sketch-Conditioned Artist-Reminiscent Mesh Generation and Editing

We introduce MeshPad, a generative approach that creates 3D meshes from sketch inputs. Building on recent advances in artist-reminiscent triangle mesh generation, our approach addresses the need for interactive mesh creation. To this end, we focus on enabling consistent edits by decomposing editing into 'deletion' of regions of a mesh, followed by 'addition' of new mesh geometry. Both operations are invoked by simple user edits of a sketch image, facilitating an iterative content creation process and enabling the construction of complex 3D meshes. Our approach is based on a triangle sequence-based mesh representation, exploiting a large Transformer model for mesh triangle addition and deletion. In order to perform edits interactively, we introduce a vertex-aligned speculative prediction strategy on top of our additive mesh generator. This speculator predicts multiple output tokens corresponding to a vertex, thus significantly reducing the computational cost of inference and accelerating the editing process, making it possible to execute each editing step in only a few seconds. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that MeshPad outperforms state-of-the-art sketch-conditioned mesh generation methods, achieving more than 22% mesh quality improvement in Chamfer distance, and being preferred by 90% of participants in perceptual evaluations.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Automatic ply-specific analyses of CFRP micrographs using shortest-path-based ply distinction

We present an automated approach to distinguish between ply instances in semantic segmentation masks of high-resolution carbon-fiber reinforced polymer micrographs. Interpreting the segmentation mask as a graph with pixels as vertices, enables us to use a shortest-path algorithm yielding the ply-separating paths. Thereby, we bridge the gap between semantic segmentation and ply instance segmentation using global information. We successfully apply our approach on high-resolution micrographs featuring a broad range of characteristics like artificially added gaps in single or multiple plies, different stacking sequences and ply traversing cracks. Assigning each fiber pixel to a ply based on the calculated paths, allows for a comprehensive, quantitative ply analysis with respect to its microstructural properties like the local fiber volume fraction as well as locally resolved ply and interleaf layer thickness. These insights help to reveal manufacturing-induced inhomogeneities, draw conclusions on manufacturing parameters and link mechanical properties to underlying microstructural imperfections.

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

PACT: Preserving Anchored Cores in Task-vectors for Model Merging

arXiv:2606.18627v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model merging has emerged as a training-free alternative to multi-task learning, aiming to combine multiple task-specific fine-tuned models into a single multi-task model. Most existing model merging approaches follow the Task Arithmetic paradigm, which decomposes fine-tuned weights into pre-trained parameters and task vectors, and performs merging exclusively in the task-vector space. The effectiveness of this paradigm implicitly relies on the assumption that task-specific knowledge is encoded solely within task vectors. We argue that this assumption generally does not hold due to the intrinsic task preferences of pre-trained models. Specifically, we identify Load-Bearing Wall (LBW) dimensions, namely some task-critical knowledge that remains embedded in the pre-trained weights rather than being fully transferred into task vectors. We characterize LBW dimensions from both scalar-weight and subspace perspectives, thereby covering the major paradigms of existing model merging methods. Our analysis reveals that, by ignoring LBW dimensions, task-vector-based approaches fail to fully resolve task conflicts and may inadvertently damage task-specific knowledge encoded in the pre-trained model, leading to degradation. To address this issue, we propose PACT, which preserves the anchored task-specific cores (i.e., LBW dimensions) within task vectors by aligning their orthogonal complements with the subspace of the pre-trained weights. These aligned subspace components are then removed from the task vectors before applying existing model merging algorithms. Furthermore, we develop an efficient variant based on randomized SVD to improve scalability. PACT can be seamlessly integrated with existing methods. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that PACT consistently enhances mainstream model merging approaches and establishes new state-of-the-art performance.

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

Red-Teaming Agent Execution Contexts: Open-World Security Evaluation on OpenClaw

arXiv:2605.11047v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Agentic language-model systems increasingly rely on mutable execution contexts, including files, memory, tools, skills, and auxiliary artifacts, creating security risks beyond explicit user prompts. This paper presents DeepTrap, an automated framework for discovering contextual vulnerabilities in OpenClaw. DeepTrap formulates adversarial context manipulation as a black-box trajectory-level optimization problem that balances risk realization, benign-task preservation, and stealth. It combines risk-conditioned evaluation, multi-objective trajectory scoring, reward-guided beam search, and reflection-based deep probing to identify high-value compromised contexts. We construct a 42-case benchmark spanning six vulnerability classes and seven operational scenarios, and evaluate nine target models using attack and utility grading scores. Results show that contextual compromise can induce substantial unsafe behavior while preserving user-facing task completion, demonstrating that final-response evaluation is insufficient. The findings highlight the need for execution-centric security evaluation of agentic AI systems. Our code is released at: https://github.com/ZJUICSR/DeepTrap

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

An Agentic Retrieval Framework for Autonomous Context-Aware Data Quality Assessment

arXiv:2606.13692v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Data quality assessment is a critical prerequisite for effective data analytics and data-driven decision-making, yet it remains a challenging task due to the inherently context-dependent nature of data quality. Existing approaches often rely on static rules or manual assessment strategies, limiting their adaptability to diverse usage scenarios and constraining automation at scale. Recent advances in artificial intelligence, particularly large language models, offer new opportunities for automating data quality assessment, but raise concerns related to reliability, grounding, and execution safety. In this paper, we propose a unified agentic-retrieval framework for autonomous context-aware data quality assessment. The framework interprets natural-language descriptions of intended data usage, derives context-aware assessment strategies, and generates executable validation logic through a multi-agent workflow. To ensure operational reliability, the framework introduces a feasibility validation stage that evaluates the realism and executability of generated assessment specifications before execution, enabling iterative refinement when necessary. Accepted validation logic is executed deterministically to guarantee reproducible and auditable results. We implement the proposed framework as an end-to-end prototype and evaluate it across multiple usage scenarios applied to the same dataset. The results demonstrate that assessment outcomes adapt meaningfully to different intended uses, while feasibility-gated execution reduces unrealistic or non-executable rule generation. The proposed approach provides a practical foundation for deploying autonomous yet controlled data quality assessment in modern data-driven environments.

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

MARIC: Multi-Agent Reasoning for Image Classification

Image classification has traditionally relied on parameter-intensive model training, requiring large-scale annotated datasets and extensive fine tuning to achieve competitive performance. While recent vision language models (VLMs) alleviate some of these constraints, they remain limited by their reliance on single pass representations, often failing to capture complementary aspects of visual content. In this paper, we introduce Multi Agent based Reasoning for Image Classification (MARIC), a multi agent framework that reformulates image classification as a collaborative reasoning process. MARIC first utilizes an Outliner Agent to analyze the global theme of the image and generate targeted prompts. Based on these prompts, three Aspect Agents extract fine grained descriptions along distinct visual dimensions. Finally, a Reasoning Agent synthesizes these complementary outputs through integrated reflection step, producing a unified representation for classification. By explicitly decomposing the task into multiple perspectives and encouraging reflective synthesis, MARIC mitigates the shortcomings of both parameter-heavy training and monolithic VLM reasoning. Experiments on 4 diverse image classification benchmark datasets demonstrate that MARIC significantly outperforms baselines, highlighting the effectiveness of multi-agent visual reasoning for robust and interpretable image classification.

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

SDS-LoRA: Overcoming Anisotropic Gradient Scaling in Low-Rank Adaptation

arXiv:2606.16454v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) enables efficient adaptation of large pre-trained models to downstream tasks by parameterizing weight updates with low-rank matrices. In this paper, we investigate the limitations of the LoRA parameterization from a geometric perspective. Specifically, we show that when a full fine-tuning gradient is backpropagated to the low-rank matrices, it undergoes anisotropic scaling driven by their singular values. We argue that this phenomenon is undesirable because it distorts the full fine-tuning gradient by skewing it toward dominant singular directions while suppressing others. Our analyses demonstrate that anisotropic gradient scaling reduces the effective rank of the low-rank matrices' gradients and results in suboptimal alignment between the full fine-tuning gradient and its low-rank approximation in LoRA, thereby exacerbating the gap to full fine-tuning. To address these limitations, we propose a new low-rank parameterization, SDS-LoRA, which structurally decouples singular values from the backward pass. Our method ensures that the full fine-tuning gradient backpropagates only through the orthonormal bases of the low-rank matrices' subspaces, independent of their scales. Convergence analysis demonstrates that while LoRA's convergence rate degrades with the condition number of the low-rank matrices, SDS-LoRA remains independent of it. Experimental results across natural language and vision benchmarks show that SDS-LoRA improves loss convergence and reduces the gap to full fine-tuning, significantly enhancing adaptation performance.

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

EndoCoT: Scaling Endogenous Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Diffusion Models

Recently, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have been widely integrated into diffusion frameworks primarily as text encoders to tackle complex tasks such as spatial reasoning. However, this paradigm suffers from two critical limitations: (i) MLLMs text encoder exhibits insufficient reasoning depth. Single-step encoding fails to activate the Chain-of-Thought process, which is essential for MLLMs to provide accurate guidance for complex tasks. (ii) The guidance remains invariant during the decoding process. Invariant guidance during decoding prevents DiT from progressively decomposing complex instructions into actionable denoising steps, even with correct MLLM encodings. To this end, we propose Endogenous Chain-of-Thought (EndoCoT), a novel framework that first activates MLLMs' reasoning potential by iteratively refining latent thought states through an iterative thought guidance module, and then bridges these states to the DiT's denoising process. Second, a terminal thought grounding module is applied to ensure the reasoning trajectory remains grounded in textual supervision by aligning the final state with ground-truth answers. With these two components, the MLLM text encoder delivers meticulously reasoned guidance, enabling the DiT to execute it progressively and ultimately solve complex tasks in a step-by-step manner. Extensive evaluations across diverse benchmarks (e.g., Maze, TSP, VSP, and Sudoku) achieve an average accuracy of 92.1%, outperforming the strongest baseline by 8.3 percentage points. The code and dataset are publicly available at https://internlm.github.io/EndoCoT/.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Graph Learning Should Move Beyond Restrictive Views of Spectral and Message-Passing GNNs

arXiv:2602.10031v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Graph neural networks (GNNs) are commonly divided into message-passing neural networks (MPNNs) and spectral GNNs, reflecting two largely separate research traditions in machine learning and signal processing. While MPNNs have a precise definition, there is no widely accepted criterion for what makes a mapping a spectral GNN. Most existing work restricts spectral GNNs to layered architectures based on linear spectral filters. Under this restriction, we show that spectral and spatial GNNs have largely equivalent expressive power. To promote progress in the field, we propose a precise definition of spectral GNNs based on eigenbasis symmetries, in contrast to the definition of MPNNs via neighborhood permutation symmetries. We further argue that the two perspectives offer complementary strengths. MPNNs provide a natural language for discrete structure and expressivity analysis through tools from logic and graph isomorphism, while the spectral perspective offers principled tools for understanding smoothing, bottlenecks, stability, and community structure. Overall, we argue that progress in graph learning will be accelerated by clarifying the similarities and differences between these perspectives and by moving toward a unified theoretical framework.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Training-Free Open-Vocabulary Visual Grounding for Remote Sensing Images and Videos

Remote sensing visual grounding (RSVG) aims to localize a referred target in a remote sensing image or video according to a natural language expression. Existing RSVG methods usually rely on task-specific manual annotations, which are costly to collect and inevitably limited in covering the diversity of real-world geospatial scenarios. As a result, they often struggle to generalize to open-vocabulary queries involving novel objects, fine-grained attributes, complex spatial relationships, and functional semantics. In this paper, we propose RSVG-ZeroOV, a training-free framework that leverages frozen generic foundation models for zero-shot open-vocabulary RSVG. RSVG-ZeroOV follows an Overview-Focus-Evolve paradigm, which exploits the distinct yet complementary attention patterns of vision-language models (VLMs) and diffusion models (DMs) to progressively generate precise grounding results. Specifically, (i) Overview utilizes a VLM to extract cross-attention maps that capture semantic correlations between the referring expression and visual regions; (ii) Focus leverages the fine-grained modeling priors of a DM to compensate for object structure and shape information often overlooked by VLM attention; and (iii) Evolve introduces a simple yet effective attention evolution module to suppress irrelevant activations, yielding purified object masks. To handle video inputs, we further present Video RSVG-ZeroOV, which extends image-level grounding to spatio-temporal grounding through a query-relevant key-frame selector and a temporal propagator, enabling efficient and temporally coherent video grounding without video annotations or fine-tuning. Extensive experiments on six image and video grounding benchmarks show that RSVG-ZeroOV consistently outperforms existing zero-shot baselines and achieves competitive or superior performance compared with weakly- and fully-supervised methods.

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

Did You Forget What I Asked? Prospective Memory Failures in Large Language Models

Authors:

Large language models often fail to satisfy formatting instructions when they must simultaneously perform demanding tasks. We study this behaviour through a prospective memory inspired lens from cognitive psychology, using a controlled paradigm that combines verifiable formatting constraints with benchmark tasks of increasing complexity. Across three model families and over 8,000 prompts, compliance drops by 2-21% under concurrent task load. Vulnerability is highly type-dependent: terminal constraints (requiring action at the response boundary) degrade most, with drops up to 50%, while avoidance constraints remain comparatively robust. A salience-enhanced format (explicit instruction framing plus a trailing reminder) recovers much of the lost compliance, restoring performance to 90-100% in many settings. Interference is bidirectional: formatting constraints can also reduce task accuracy, with one model's GSM8K accuracy dropping from 93% to 27%. In additional stacking experiments, joint compliance declines sharply as constraints accumulate. All results use deterministic programmatic checkers without an LLM-as-judge component on publicly available datasets.

16.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Reimagining machine vision with optical computing

Authors: Unknown Author

A general-purpose artificial-intelligence vision system for use in image-sensing devices has been developed by embedding fundamentals of core computer-vision operations into a light-manipulating planar material called an optical metasurface. A prototype enables accurate, real-time perception and processing across diverse tasks, suggesting that this could be a solution for rapid, low-energy, on-device vision intelligence. A specialized ‘metasurface’ can preprocess incoming scene information on image-generating devices.

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

PAWS: Preference Learning with Advantage-Weighted Segments

arXiv:2606.11982v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) learns policies from human trajectory-level comparisons, avoiding explicit reward design and expert demonstrations. Existing methods typically train utility functions on trajectory or segment-level preferences while relying on per-step utility estimates during policy optimization. This training and inference mismatch induces a distribution shift that severely degrades temporal credit assignment and limits policy learning. We analyze this issue and propose PAWS, a segment-based preference learning method that performs policy updates directly using segment-level advantage functions. By aligning utility training with policy optimization, PAWS preserves trajectory-level preference information and avoids unreliable per-step learning signals. Experiments on simulated robotic manipulation and locomotion tasks demonstrate that PAWS consistently outperforms existing PbRL approaches, highlighting the importance of distribution-consistent preference learning.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

From "Aha Moments" to Controllable Thinking: Toward Meta-Cognitive Reasoning in Large Reasoning Models via Decoupled Reasoning and Control

arXiv:2508.04460v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) can exhibit step-by-step reasoning, reflection, and backtracking, but these behaviors are often unregulated, leading to overthinking. As a result, LRMs continue generating redundant reasoning even after reaching high-confidence conclusions. This increases inference cost and latency, limiting practical deployment. The root cause is the absence of an intrinsic mechanism to monitor the reasoning state and decide when to continue, backtrack, or stop. We propose MERA, a meta-cognitive reasoning framework that decouples reasoning from control to enable independent optimization of control strategies. MERA constructs high-quality reasoning-control supervision data via a takeover-based pipeline, and transforms long-horizon traces into structured reasoning-control alternating sequences for training. The model is trained with supervised fine-tuning to internalize the structured separation, and further optimized with Control-Segment Policy Optimization (CSPO), which combines segment-wise GRPO with control masking to focus learning on control segments. Experiments across reasoning benchmarks show that MERA improves both efficiency and accuracy.

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

Improved Baselines with Representation Autoencoders

Representation Autoencoders (RAE) replace traditional VAE with pretrained vision encoders. In this paper, we systematically investigate several design choices and find three insights which simplify and improve RAE. First, we study a generalized formulation where the representation is defined as sum of the last k encoder layers rather than solely the final layer. This simple change greatly improves reconstruction without encoder finetuning or specialized data (e.g., text, faces). Second, we study the prevalent assumption that RAE (using pretrained representation as encoder) replaces representation alignment (REPA), which distills the same representation to intermediate layers instead. Through large-scale empirical analysis, we uncover a surprising finding: RAE and REPA exhibit complementary working mechanisms, allowing the same representation to be used as both encoder and target for intermediate diffusion layers. Finally, the original RAE struggles with classifier-free guidance (CFG) and requires training a second, weaker diffusion model for AutoGuidance (AG). We show that REPA itself can be viewed as x-prediction in RAE latent space. By simply re-parameterizing the output of the DiT model, it can provide guidance for "free". Overall, RAEv2 leads to more than 10x faster convergence over the original RAE, achieving a state-of-the-art gFID of 1.06 in just 80 epochs on ImageNet-256. On FDr6, RAEv2 achieves a state-of-the-art 2.17 at just 80 epochs compared to the previous best 3.26 (800 epochs) without any post-training. This motivates EPFID@k (epochs to reach unguided gFID < k) as a measure of training efficiency. RAEv2 attains an EPFID@2 of 35 epochs, versus 177 for the original RAE. We also validate our approach across diverse settings for text-to-image generation and navigation world models, showing consistent improvements. The code is available at https://raev2.github.io.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Quantum Dynamics from Lax Pair Theory: A Reconstruction from Spectrum Preservation

arXiv:2606.19664v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We reconstruct unitary quantum dynamics from a minimal axiomatic foundation built on Hilbert-space observables and isospectral evolution. The only dynamical assumption is that physical time evolution is a continuous one-parameter flow of Hermitian observables that preserves their spectra, i.e. the possible outcomes of measurement. We show that this assumption is already sufficient to force the Lax form of quantum dynamics. The Heisenberg equation, the time-dependent and time-independent Schrödinger equations, conservation laws, and good quantum numbers then follow as theorems rather than postulates. In this formulation, Lax pair theory supplies the missing dynamical bridge between the measurement structure of a Hilbert space and standard quantum evolution: the Hamiltonian is not assumed, but emerges as the generator required for an isospectral observable flow.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Multi-Variable Stellar Parameter Estimation Using Residual Multitask Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.13868v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present an end-to-end pipeline for estimating stellar parameters from Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 12 spectra using a fully connected multitask neural network with residual blocks, whose hyperparameters are tuned via Bayesian optimization. The preprocessing pipeline includes per-spectrum standardization, RobustScaler normalization of the target variables – effective temperature $T_{\mathrm{eff}}$, metallicity $[\mathrm{Fe/H}]$, and surface gravity $\log g$ – and data augmentation via Gaussian noise injection. On a held-out test set, the model achieved Mean Absolute Errors (MAE) of $59.76~\mathrm{K}$ for $T_{\mathrm{eff}}$, $0.103~\mathrm{dex}$ for $[\mathrm{Fe/H}]$, and $0.130~\mathrm{dex}$ for $\log g$. Normalized against the full-scale range of each parameter, these results represent range-normalized errors between $1\%$ and $3\%$, achieved with a highly efficient model complexity of approximately 540,000 trainable parameters. These results demonstrate that a compact residual multitask architecture, combined with principled signal preprocessing, provides a parameter-efficient solution for nonlinear parameter estimation in large-scale spectral datasets. In particular, the proposed model achieves competitive performance with substantially lower complexity than deeper neural network baselines.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

CANDLE: Character-level Arabic Noise Deduplication using Lightweight Encoder

Handling repeated characters in text can be tricky, since they can represent either the correct spelling of a word or informal character elongation often seen in social media posts. We present CANDLE, a lightweight system for character-level Arabic noise deduplication that addresses this challenge without relying on handcrafted rules, dictionaries, or morphological analyzers. At the heart of CANDLE is a novel application of Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) to this task, a formulation not previously explored for character deduplication, which frames normalization as a sequence alignment problem over a character-based encoder. Evaluated on three benchmarks spanning clean newspaper, manually curated ambiguous cases, and real-world social media text, the CTC model achieves a Sentence Error Rate (SER) as low as $5.37\%$ and consistently outperforms a classification-based baseline by a large margin. To reduce inference overhead, we distill the 6-layer CTC model into a 2-layer student, achieving a $3\times$ depth reduction with minimal performance degradation. Beyond deduplication accuracy, normalization yields a practical downstream benefit: a relative reduction in tokenizer fertility of up to $12.8\%$ across a diverse set of Arabic LLM tokenizers, directly lowering inference costs and improving context window utilization. We release all code and models publicly to support reproducibility and advance future research\footnote{https://github.com/abjadai/candle}.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Making Models Unmergeable via Scaling-Sensitive Loss Landscape

arXiv:2601.21898v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The rise of model hubs has made it easier to access reusable model components, making model merging a practical tool for combining capabilities. Yet, this modularity also creates a governance gap: downstream users can recompose released weights into unauthorized mixtures that bypass safety alignment or licensing terms. Because existing defenses are largely post-hoc and architecture-specific, they provide inconsistent protection across diverse architectures and release formats in practice. To close this gap, we propose Trap$^2$, an architecture-agnostic protection framework that encodes protection into updates during fine-tuning, regardless of whether they are released as adapters or full models. Instead of relying on architecture-dependent approaches, Trap$^2$ uses weight re-scaling as a simple proxy for the merging process. It keeps released weights effective in standalone use, but degrades them under re-scaling that often arises in merging, undermining unauthorized recomposition.

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

Cross-modal Consistency Guidance for Robust Emotion Control in Auto-Regressive TTS Models

While Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems enable emotional control via natural-language instructions, expressiveness, naturalness, and speech quality degrade when the target emotion conflicts with the textual semantics. We propose a Cross-modal Consistency Guided Classifier-Free Guidance (CCG-CFG) method with dynamic scales based on the degree of inconsistency between the text emotion and the explicit speech emotion, replacing the dropout condition with the text emotion. We also distill the CCG-CFG guidance signal using a hard-sample mining strategy, improving the TTS model's emotional alignment capability. Evaluations on five emotional corpora and two TTS benchmarks show that our approaches applied to CosyVoice2 achieve up to a 12% absolute improvement in emotion-recognition accuracy and a 10% relative improvement in subjective scores, outperforming baselines including HierSpeech++, Qwen3-TTS, and original CosyVoice2, while preserving intelligibility, naturalness, and high speech quality.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Disentangling Perception and Reasoning in Multimodal LLMs via Reward Design

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has driven major gains in LLM reasoning, and it is intuitive to assume this recipe will transfer well to multimodal models. However, multimodal models do two things: first, perceive what is in an image, then reason about what it implies. Because these stages are graded jointly, it is hard to tell how much room reasoning alone has to grow. We study this on algorithmic visual puzzles, where both components are necessary and show that perception, not reasoning, is the binding constraint. Replacing images with simple textual descriptions raises performance by over 20 points on average for Claude models. We then evaluate six reward designs aimed at inducing visual grounding during reasoning without chain-of-thought supervision. Training Qwen-2.5-VL-7B with GRPO, reward design induces long, structured reasoning with self-reflection and visual references, yielding a 5.56-point gain over the base model. These gains are, however, uneven; no single reward improves all categories, and rewards with verifiable accuracy signals trade out-of-domain transfer for in-domain accuracy. These results point to perception-aware reward design as a path forward, so that signals correct perception at its source rather than the reasoning that inherits its errors.