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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Planning with Unified Multimodal Models

With the powerful reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs), many recent works have explored using them for decision-making. However, most of these approaches rely solely on language-based reasoning, which limits their ability to reason and make informed decisions. Recently, a promising new direction has emerged with unified multimodal models (UMMs), which support both multimodal inputs and outputs. We believe such models have greater potential for decision-making by enabling reasoning through generated visual content. To this end, we propose Uni-Plan, a planning framework built on UMMs. Within this framework, a single model simultaneously serves as the policy, dynamics model, and value function. In addition, to avoid hallucinations in dynamics predictions, we present a novel approach self-discriminated filtering, where the generative model serves as a self-discriminator to filter out invalid dynamics predictions. Experiments on embodied decision-making tasks show that Uni-Plan substantially improves success rates compared to VLM-based methods, while also showing strong data scalability, requiring no expert demonstrations and achieving better performance under the same training-data size. This work lays a foundation for future research in reasoning and decision-making with UMMs.

02.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-10

Interpreting higher-order dependence in multimorbidity using cohort data: A partial information decomposition approach

by Cillian Hourican, Geeske Peeters, René J. F. Melis, Almar Kok, Natasja M. van Schoor, Sandra Wezeman, Mike Lees, Marcel G. M. Olde Rikkert, Rick Quax In the context of multimorbidity, clinical features seldom act in isolation: symptoms, signs and behaviours form interdependent systems in which joint effects on function can be demonstrated only when features are considered together. We introduce an open, reusable workflow that detects and interprets these “together-only” interactions using bivariate Partial Information Decomposition (PID; two sources to one target), linking synergy-based dependence to the broader network of clinical variables rather than to a single target. The workflow estimates synergy with small-sample bias correction and summarises each pair in a Breadth–Uniformity–Synergy–Total (BUST) map: breadth of synergy across target variables (broad “generalist” vs narrow “specialist” patterns), cross-stratum uniformity across age, sex and multimorbidity (uniform vs subgroup-specific), synergy strength, and total shared information. Simple diagnostics contrast observed targets with additive expectations, revealing the specific joint configurations through which non-additive effects arise. Applied to data from the Longitudinal Ageing Study Amsterdam, we treated all health-related variables—covering symptoms, clinical signs, behaviours, lifestyle factors, and self-rated health indicators—as both sources and targets in the PID framework. This symmetric design permits synergy to be quantified for every pair of variables with respect to every other variable. The workflow identifies synergistic constellations that additive models miss. Multidomain cliques involving subjective health, pain, cognition and grip strength showed multiple non-additive configurations, whereas pairs such as alcohol use with grip strength exhibited focused, narrow but uniform synergy. Notably, the pairs with the strongest synergistic contributions were largely distinct from those with the highest total mutual information, indicating that synergy captures dependency structure overlooked by conventional association measures. Rather than a new measure, this work provides a bias-aware workflow that makes higher-order dependence visible and transferable. Our results support synergy-aware mapping as a practical complement to conventional multimorbidity analyses: it highlights specific combinations of routinely assessed features whose joint states may be especially informative across multiple health targets and therefore candidates for prioritised joint assessment and future multi-domain intervention studies.

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

CogCanvas: A Benchmark for Evaluating Multi-Subject Reference-Based Image Generation

Multi-subject reference-based image generation requires jointly preserving multiple human identities, binding per-person objects and fashion items, and respecting a specified background scene, a regime where current diffusion models remain brittle. Existing benchmarks evaluate only one axis at a time and none jointly captures multi-identity composition with human-object interaction, background grounding, and spatial plausibility. We introduce CogCanvas, a benchmark of 1,952 curated reference images spanning 100 celebrity identities, 115 distinctive objects and fashion items, and 29 real-world background scenes including landmarks, from which we construct 1,361 compositional prompts covering 2-5 person group sizes. The curation pipeline combines DINOv2-based deduplication, two-stage aesthetic filtering, and automated derivation of structured interaction and position graphs that serve as ground-truth supervision. CogCanvas supports three tasks, reference-based multi-human-object generation (primary), text-to-image compositional generation, and reference retrieval, under a unified six-axis evaluation protocol. We introduce two metrics tailored to the multi-reference setting: BG-Sim, which scores background fidelity on SAM 3-masked regions via DINOv3 feature similarity, and Attr-VQA, which uses a multimodal LLM to verify per-subject attribute binding and inter-person interactions against the structured graphs. Benchmarking five SOTA methods reveals that every model degrades substantially as group size grows from 2 to 5, with near-complete failure on object/fashion binding beyond three subjects.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

MedVeriSeg: Teaching LISA-Like Medical Segmentation Models to Verify Query Validity Without Extra Training

Despite recent progress in text-prompt-based medical image segmentation, existing LISA-like MLLM-based methods typically generate masks regardless of whether the target specified in the query is present, leading to hallucinated segmentation. In this work, we propose MedVeriSeg, a training-free query verification framework that enables LISA-like medical segmentation models to reject false segmentation queries. MedVeriSeg first quantifies the response quality between the [SEG] token and image features through a Similarity Response Quality Scoring Module. To further improve robustness, it employs a Lightweight Routed Multi-Agent Verification Module, which fuses quantitative score evidence with qualitative agent evidence to comprehensively verify the validity of the query. To support systematic evaluation, we construct MedVeriSeg-Bench, a benchmark designed for query verification in medical image segmentation. Experimental results demonstrate that MedVeriSeg effectively identifies false segmentation queries and reduces hallucinated segmentation, while maintaining a high acceptance rate for valid queries, thereby largely preserving the segmentation utility of LISA-like medical segmentation models.

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

Communication-Efficient Neural Tangent Kernels for Heterogeneous Decentralized Federated Learning

Authors:

arXiv:2512.12737v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Decentralized federated learning (DFL) enables collaborative model training without a central server, but converges slowly under statistical heterogeneity. Recent work has shown that neural tangent kernel (NTK) methods achieve faster convergence than gradient-based updates in DFL, while momentum has proven effective for accelerating gradient-based FL. However, applying momentum to NTK updates can destabilize training under heterogeneous data. We propose SPARK, which addresses this instability with a stage-wise annealed soft-label regularizer evaluated on neighborhood-aggregated data, so that momentum can accelerate NTK updates stably. Under high heterogeneity, SPARK converges about 3$\times$ faster than baselines and lowers the total communication to a target accuracy by up to about 70\%, and it attains higher accuracy across heterogeneity levels. We further study random projection as an optional Jacobian-compression strategy for bandwidth-constrained settings. We validate the approach across multiple datasets, network topologies, and heterogeneity levels.

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

Sovereign Execution Brokers: Enforcing Certificate-Bound Authority in Agentic Control Planes

arXiv:2606.20520v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous agents are increasingly connected to cloud, deployment, and data-control workflows, but production mutation authority should not reside inside non-deterministic reasoning processes. Existing access-control mechanisms authorize identities, while assurance layers certify proposed actions; neither alone provides a mandatory enforcement point for certified authority at the moment of mutation. This paper introduces the Sovereign Execution Broker (SEB), a runtime enforcement boundary for certificate-bound agentic infrastructure. SEB consumes certificates issued by the Sovereign Assurance Boundary (SAB), verifies that the requested mutation matches the certified execution contract, checks validity windows, policy epochs, revocation epochs, and live-state drift, mints scoped execution identity, invokes infrastructure APIs, and records signed decision and outcome records. By separating proposal, admission, and execution, SEB turns certified authority into a short-lived, revocable, auditable runtime capability, provided that production mutation APIs reject non-broker identities. We present the SEB execution model, certificate and replay-verification predicates, scoped identity semantics, bypass-prevention deployment patterns, failure behavior, and a concrete prototype implementation. We evaluate the prototype on AWS and Kubernetes clusters, measuring latency overheads, revocation propagation, drift detection, and security under fault injection.

07.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-08

Post-adjuvant chemotherapy in ctDNA-positive patients with resected colorectal cancer: a randomized phase 3 trial

Authors:

Tumor-informed circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) enables detection of molecular residual disease (MRD) after curative resection of colorectal cancer (CRC), but whether early intervention improves outcomes remains uncertain. ALTAIR was a randomized, double-blind, phase 3 trial embedded in the CIRCULATE-Japan platform evaluating a post-adjuvant ctDNA surveillance strategy with treatment initiation upon molecular recurrence. Patients with resected stage 0–IV CRC who became ctDNA positive after completion of standard-of-care therapy and had no radiological evidence of disease were randomly assigned (1:1) to receive trifluridine/tipiracil (FTD/TPI) or placebo for 6 months. The primary endpoint was investigator-assessed disease-free survival (DFS). Between July 2020 and June 2023, 243 patients were randomized to FTD/TPI (n = 122) or placebo (n = 121). Median DFS was 9.30 months with FTD/TPI and 5.55 months with placebo (hazard ratio = 0.79, 95% confidence interval: 0.60–1.05, P = 0.107), and the primary endpoint was not met. FTD/TPI increased grade 3 or higher hematologic adverse events (73.0% versus 3.3%) without new safety signals. These findings indicate that post-adjuvant intervention with FTD/TPI did not significantly improve DFS in ctDNA-positive patients without radiological disease. ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT04457297 . In the randomized, double-blind phase 3 ALTAIR trial, patients with resected colorectal cancer who became positive for circulating tumor DNA during post-adjuvant surveillance received trifluridine/tipiracil hydrochloride therapy, which did not significantly prolong disease-free survival compared with placebo.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Contour Field based Elliptical Shape Prior for the Segment Anything Model

The elliptical shape prior information plays a vital role in improving the accuracy of image segmentation for specific tasks in medical and natural images. Existing deep learning-based segmentation methods, including the Segment Anything Model (SAM), often struggle to produce segmentation results with elliptical shapes efficiently. This paper proposes a new approach to integrate the prior of elliptical shapes into the deep learning-based SAM image segmentation techniques using variational methods. The proposed method establishes a parameterized elliptical contour field, which constrains the segmentation results to align with predefined elliptical contours. Utilizing the dual algorithm, the model seamlessly integrates image features with elliptical priors and spatial regularization priors, thereby greatly enhancing segmentation accuracy. By decomposing SAM into four mathematical sub-problems, we integrate the variational ellipse prior to design a new SAM network structure, ensuring that the segmentation output of SAM consists of elliptical regions. Experimental results on some specific image datasets demonstrate an improvement over the original SAM.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Mood-Aware Music Recommendation: Integrating User Affective Signals into Ranking Systems

arXiv:2606.13858v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recommendation systems are essential in modern music streaming platforms due to the vast amount of available content. While collaborative filtering is widely used to suggest items based on the preferences of others with similar patterns, it performs poorly in domains where user-item interactions are sparse, such as music. Content-based filtering is an alternative approach that examines the qualities of the items themselves. Genre, instrumentation, and lyrics have been explored; however, relatively little attention has been given to emotion recognition. Since a user's emotional state strongly influences their music choice, incorporating mood signals offers a promising direction for personalization. In this work, we propose a mood-conditioned ranking framework that integrates user affective signals into the recommendation process via softmax-based sampling in the energy-valence space. We evaluate the approach via single-blind experiments in which participants compare recommendations from the proposed system against a baseline. The results indicate improved perceived recommendation quality, providing preliminary evidence for the effectiveness of incorporating mood-based inputs into music recommendations.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Systems via Textual Backpropagation

arXiv:2506.09046v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Leveraging multiple Large Language Models (LLMs) has proven effective for addressing complex, high-dimensional tasks, but current approaches often rely on static, manually engineered multi-agent configurations. To overcome these constraints, we present the Agentic Neural Network (ANN), a framework that conceptualizes multi-agent collaboration as a layered neural network architecture. In this design, each agent operates as a node, and each layer forms a cooperative team focused on a specific subtask. Our framework follows a two-phase optimization strategy: (1) Forward Phase - Drawing inspiration from neural network forward passes, tasks are dynamically decomposed into subtasks, and cooperative agent teams with suitable aggregation methods are constructed layer by layer. (2) Backward Phase - Mirroring backpropagation, we refine both global and local collaboration through iterative feedback, allowing agents to self-evolve their roles, prompts, and coordination. This neuro-symbolic approach enables our framework to create new or specialized agent teams post-training, delivering notable gains in accuracy and adaptability. Across seven benchmark datasets, our work surpasses leading multi-agent baselines under the same configurations, showing consistent performance improvements.

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

Inference-time Policy Steering via Vision and Touch

arXiv:2606.14981v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inference-time steering adapts pre-trained generative robot policies during deployment by verifying candidate actions before execution. While prior methods typically perform this verification only with visual observations, vision alone is often insufficient for contact-rich manipulation, where success depends on both global task progress and subtle local interactions such as contact force. We introduce ViTaL, a visuo-tactile inference-time steering framework that formulates multimodal guidance as a bi-level optimization problem. At the high level, visual sampling-and-verification performs long-horizon mode selection, deciding what behavior the robot should execute. At the low level, tactile-guided diffusion editing refines the selected action sequence over a shorter horizon to satisfy local contact requirements. To support outcome-based steering, ViTaL learns a visuo-tactile latent world model and employs semantically aligned visual and tactile verifiers, including a novel text-conditioned tactile reward that scores predicted tactile futures directly in latent space. Across three real-world contact-rich manipulation tasks, ViTaL improves overall success by 51% over the base policy, outperforms unimodal steering by at least 33%, and exceeds naive multimodal fusion by at least 20%. Website: https://yilin-wu98.github.io/vital_website.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

ActWorld: From Explorable to Interactive World Model via Action-Aware Memory

Interactive world models aim to simulate environment dynamics under real-time user actions. However, their action vocabulary is largely confined to navigation: most actions correspond to motion (e.g., walk, turn, look around), while interaction with objects in the scene (e.g., pick up plates, open doors, or trigger physical responses) is either absent, restricted to game domains, or relegated to prompt-to-full-video scenarios. The resulting worlds are visually explorable but not truly actionable. In this work, we present ActWorld, an interactive world model that extends prior navigation-centric generators to support mid-rollout object interaction within a chunk-autoregressive framework. We argue that the navigation-interaction gap stems from two bottlenecks. First, a data bottleneck: the lack of human-object interaction data with accurate, dense labels. Second, a memory bottleneck: recency-biased history compression in existing world models discards the event-transition frames that causally determine subsequent object states, leading to an action-forgetting pathology. On the data side, we construct a 100K interaction video dataset, each annotated with per-chunk captions via chain-of-thought reasoning. On the model side, we introduce a hierarchical action-aware memory design that routes history compression by interaction importance, complemented by a persistent memory bank that maintains event-update and object-identity tokens across long rollouts. Experiments show that ActWorld supports both flexible navigation and rich object interaction within a single model, substantially improving interaction fidelity over navigation-only baselines without sacrificing viewpoint control. Project page is available at https://interactwm.github.io/ActWorld.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

CaVe-VLM-CoT: An Interpretable Vision-Language Model Framework

arXiv:2606.18385v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) remain prone to hallucinations, producing fluent but visually unfaithful outputs. Existing chain-of-thought and retrieval-augmented methods only partially address this, as they neither enforce step-level citation grounding nor route verification failures back to retrieval for correction. We present CaVe-VLM-CoT, a modular reflection-based agentic-RAG framework that enforces evidence-grounded reasoning through a five-stage closed-loop pipeline: Extractor, Retriever, Solver, Citation Injector, and Verifier, in which detected ungrounded claims trigger structured feedback to the Extractor for targeted re-retrieval. Since no existing framework jointly measures retrieval quality, step-wise citation faithfulness, and cross-modal grounding, we propose a suite of 23 component-wise metrics across all stages, anchored by CaVeScore, a composite metric weighting accuracy, citation precision and recall, attribution, and evidence grounding. Without any architectural or prompt modifications, CaVe-VLM-CoT achieves 87.1\% accuracy and 56.6\% CaVeScore on ScienceQA , and 55.2\% accuracy and 35.7\% CaVeScore on MMMU (30 subjects).

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

An iterative Ising decoder for quantum error correction codes

arXiv:2606.12301v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Ising framework maps the decoding problem in quantum error correction onto ground-state optimization of a classical Hamiltonian, in which $X$-$Z$ error correlations enter as cross terms. Under phenomenological depolarizing noise, the exact joint formulation contains up to 8-body interactions for the toric code and 10-body for the $6.6.6$ color code. These high-order terms degrade solver convergence, inflate runtime, and raise the auxiliary spin overhead when embedding into native 2-body Ising hardware. In this work, we propose the iterative low-order decoding (ILOD) algorithm, which alternates between $X$- and $Z$-type sub-Hamiltonians, approximating cross-type correlations through Bayesian priors that reweight each type's couplings using the other type's inferred error configuration. This halves the maximum body count of interaction terms in the Hamiltonian, accelerating the solver, restoring convergence at larger code distances, and reducing the total spin count for 2-body embedding by a factor of $2.5$. For the toric code, ILOD attains a threshold of $4.73%$ versus $4.83%$ for the joint formulation, with the empirical runtime ratio scaling as $(0.81)^d$. For the $6.6.6$ color code, their thresholds agree within statistical uncertainty for small code distances, and ILOD remains convergent for larger distances where the joint formulation fails to converge despite a larger annealing budget.

15.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22

Multivariate Random Forests for Cross-Modal Multi-Omics Integration

Multi-omics studies are widely used across many areas of biomedical research. In many diseases, some signals are shared across data types, while others are strongest in a single omics layer. Current multi-omics clustering methods often either merge all data types into a single representation, which can blur biology that is strong in one layer, or rely on linear structure that may miss more complex relationships across data types. We introduce multiRF, a random-forest-based method that handles complex data types and separates shared and modality-specific structure for multi-omics data. multiRF learns sample similarities across omics layers from multivariate random forests, combines them across data types, and uses the resulting weights to estimate the part of each omics layer that is predictable from the others. The remaining residual is treated as modality-specific signal, allowing shared and modality-specific similarities to be clustered separately. In simulations, multiRF recovered shared clusters as well as or better than established integrative methods while more reliably separating modality-specific signal under nonlinear data structures. In TCGA head and neck squamous cell carcinoma, the shared component aligned with the main subtype structure across established reference classifications, while gene- and miRNA-specific components revealed additional immune and developmental biology. In the ADNI cohort with matched blood DNA methylation and structural MRI, the shared cross-modal aging signal was associated with future conversion to mild cognitive impairment or Alzheimer's disease, and a DNAm-specific residual signal showed exploratory additional information. These results show that multiRF can recover a common disease axis while retaining biologically meaningful signals specific to one data type. multiRF is available as an open-source R package at https://github.com/novawz/multiRF.

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

WISE: A Long-Horizon Agent in Minecraft with Why-Which Reasoning

arXiv:2606.12852v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Rapid advances have been made in developing general-purpose embodied agent in environments like Minecraft through the adoption of LLM-augmented hierarchical approaches. Despite their promise, low-level controllers often become performance bottlenecks due to repeated execution failures. We argue that a key limitation is not only the lack of episodic memory, but also the decoupling of what-where-when memory from which-why reasoning. To address this, we propose WISE (Which-Why Informed Semantic Explorer), a long-horizon agent framework with an enhanced low-level controller equipped with a Causal Event Graph that augments episodic memory with explicit causal structure linking observations to task relevance. Unlike prior work such as MrSteve, which relies on feature similarity for retrieval, WISE enables robust recall under viewpoint changes and supports opportunistic task reordering through causal reasoning. Building on this memory, we propose an Opportunistic Task Scheduler that dynamically re-prioritizes subtasks when causally relevant opportunities are detected. We further equip WISE with a multi-scale progressive exploration strategy to provide spatially comprehensive observations for downstream reasoning. Experiments show that WISE largely improves task success and efficiency on long-horizon sparse tasks, particularly in settings requiring adaptive decision-making.

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

A Pragmatic VLA Foundation Model

Offering great potential in robotic manipulation, a capable Vision-Language-Action (VLA) foundation model is expected to faithfully generalize across tasks and platforms while ensuring cost efficiency (e.g., data and GPU hours required for adaptation). To this end, we develop LingBot-VLA with around 20,000 hours of real-world data from 9 popular dual-arm robot configurations. Through a systematic assessment on 3 robotic platforms, each completing 100 tasks with 130 post-training episodes per task, our model achieves clear superiority over competitors, showcasing its strong performance and broad generalizability. We have also built an efficient codebase, which delivers a throughput of 261 samples per second with an 8-GPU training setup, representing a 1.5~2.8$\times$ (depending on the relied VLM base model) speedup over existing VLA-oriented codebases. The above features ensure that our model is well-suited for real-world deployment. To advance the field of robot learning, we provide open access to the code, base model, and benchmark data, with a focus on enabling more challenging tasks and promoting sound evaluation standards.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Structure-aware Knowledge-guided Heterogeneous Mamba for Zygomaticomaxillary Suture Assessment

The Zygomaticomaxillary Suture is a key circummaxillary structure that connects the zygomatic bone and the maxilla, which serves as a primary site of resistance during maxillary advancement, and its maturation status directly influences the timing and efficacy of orthopedic interventions. However, accurate staging of ZMS maturation remains challenging due to subtle high-frequency transitions in suture lines and the global semantic ambiguity between adjacent stages. To address this, we present the first public ZMS dataset, comprising 3,790 ZMS images covering the entire age range from 4 to 24 years. Based on this dataset, we propose SKMamba, a Structure-aware and Knowledge-guided Mamba-based multi-modal framework for automated ZMS maturation assessment. SKMamba adopts a decoupled dual-path architecture that mimics the hierarchical diagnostic process used by experienced orthodontists. We first introduce an Implicit Edge Extractor (IEE), which leverages structural pre-training to reduce trabecular noise and accentuate sutural boundaries. Complementarily, a Cross-Modal Semantic Alignment (CSA) module is designed to incorporate anatomical descriptions from a large language model (LLM). This module helps align local morphological cues with global semantic descriptions while ensuring that objective morphological evidence remains the primary basis for decisions. Extensive experiments on our ZMS dataset demonstrate that SKMamba achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing methods. Code is available at https://github.com/galaxygxq1116/SKMamba.

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

RECTOR: Masked Region-Channel-Temporal Modeling for Affective and Cognitive Representation Learning

arXiv:2606.15278v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Affective and cognitive disorders manifest as distributed, time-varying brain network dynamics across regions, channels, and time, challenging robust representation learning from EEG/sEEG for clinical diagnosis. We propose RECTOR (Masked Region-Channel-Temporal Modeling), an end-to-end self-supervised framework that unifies joint region-channel-temporal representation learning beyond fixed anatomical priors. At its core, RECTOR-SA is a hierarchical, block-sparse self-attention induced by Adaptive Functional Partitioning that evolves region structures from static anatomical definitions to adaptive functional regions. The self-supervision is driven by Masked Topology and Representation Learning, which jointly optimizes three complementary objectives: Masked Predictive Modeling, Topological Structure Modeling, and Cross-View Consistency. Across diverse benchmarks, RECTOR sets a new state-of-the-art in EEG emotion recognition and sEEG task-engagement classification. Crucially, its strong robustness to missing channels and cross-montage generalization underscores its potential for large-scale pre-training on heterogeneous EEG/sEEG, providing interpretable insights at both region and channel levels.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Disagreement-Based Cross-Model Routing for Implicit Video Question Answering

We study multiple-choice video question answering on the ImplicitQA benchmark, where the correct answer is never explicitly shown but must be inferred from off-screen events, line-of-sight cues, causal structure, and cross-shot spatial layout. On this benchmark a single frontier video LLM already operates near its accuracy ceiling, and we observe that conventional self-consistency strategies – majority voting across repeated samples of the same model – can hurt rather than help, because the model's errors on hard questions are correlated. We propose disagreement-based cross-model routing, a pure inference-time procedure that requires no labels and no training. We triple-sample a native-video model (Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview) at temperature zero, exploit the genuine sample-to-sample variance of its video-processing pipeline to identify the roughly 20% subset of questions where the three samples disagree, and route only that subset to a second model from a different family (Claude Opus 4.8) that consumes uniformly sampled frames with adaptive thinking. On the 1001-question validation set with public ground truth – our main evaluation – the method improves AvgAcc by +1.43 over the best single sample of the primary model, with per-category gains concentrated on Motion & Trajectory (+5.49), Inferred Counting (+3.45), and Vertical Spatial Reasoning (+1.82) – the categories most dependent on cross-shot reference resolution. The same pipeline applied to the held-out 172-question CVPR 2026 ImplicitQA challenge test set achieves 82.03 AvgAcc / 79.71 MacroAvgAcc (+1.81 over the best single sample of the primary model), confirming the validation result on an independent split.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Constraining the outputs of ReLU neural networks

arXiv:2508.03867v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce a class of algebraic varieties naturally associated with ReLU neural networks, arising from the piecewise linear structure of their outputs across activation regions in input space, and the piecewise multilinear structure in parameter space. By analyzing the rank constraints on the network outputs within each activation region, we derive polynomial equations that characterize the functions representable by the network. We further investigate conditions under which these varieties attain their expected dimension, providing insight into the expressive and structural properties of ReLU networks.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

StaminaBench: Stress-Testing Coding Agents over 100 Interaction Turns

arXiv:2606.19613v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce StaminaBench, a benchmark that measures the stamina of coding agents: how many consecutive interaction turns (change requests) they can handle before failing. Unlike the prevailing fraction-of-tasks-solved metric, this matches real vibe-coding where sessions run dozens or hundreds of turns. In StaminaBench, agents implement a REST API server and modify it across a tunable number of procedurally generated follow-up change requests - 100 in our experiments, resulting in codebases of up to 6,000 lines. Tests are generated fully programmatically without LLM involvement, ensuring reproducibility and reliability; change sequences are drawn from either a hardcoded or LLM-driven sampler, both constrained to a structured action space to ensure changes are valid. The agent and the server run in an isolated environment and communicate with the benchmark through HTTP, making testing fully black-box and language-agnostic. We evaluate six agent harnesses paired with seven open-source LLMs across 20 scenarios of 100 turns each and find that: (1) all the tested models fail within 5-6 turns, confirming that vibe-coding-style programming without thorough testing produces bugs; (2) passing test feedback back to the agent and allowing it to retry improves passed turn count by up to 12x; and (3) a good harness is required for strong performance: stronger models exhibit up to a 6x gap between their best and worst harness, while weaker models fail with any harness. We release the benchmark and the generated tasks to enable further research into multi-turn coding agent behavior. Benchmark code and data: github.com/amazon-science/StaminaBench.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Application of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Libraries: A Systematic Review

arXiv:2112.04573v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As the concept and implementation of cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning has become relevant, academics, researchers and information professionals involve research in this area. The objective of this systematic literature review is to provide a synthesis of empirical studies exploring application of artificial intelligence and machine learning in libraries. To achieve the objectives of the study, a systematic literature review was conducted based on the original guidelines proposed by Kitchenham et al. (2009). Data was collected from Web of Science, Scopus, LISA and LISTA databases. Following the rigorous/ established selection process, a total of thirty-two articles were finally selected, reviewed and analyzed to summarize on the application of AI and ML domain and techniques which are most often used in libraries. Findings show that the current state of the AI and ML research that is relevant with the LIS domain mainly focuses on theoretical works. However, some researchers also emphasized on implementation projects or case studies. This study will provide a panoramic view of AI and ML in libraries for researchers, practitioners and educators for furthering the more technology-oriented approaches, and anticipating future innovation pathways.

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

Position: Stop Anthropomorphizing Intermediate Tokens as Reasoning/Thinking Traces!

arXiv:2504.09762v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Intermediate token generation (ITG), where a model produces output before the solution, has become a standard method to improve the performance of language models on reasoning tasks. These intermediate tokens have been called \say{reasoning traces} or even \say{thinking traces} – implicitly anthropomorphizing the traces, and implying that these traces resemble steps a human might take when solving a challenging problem, and as such can provide an interpretable window into the operation of the model's thinking process to the end user. In this position paper, we present evidence that this anthropomorphization isn't a harmless metaphor, and instead is quite dangerous – it confuses the nature of these models and how to use them effectively, and leads to questionable research. We call on the community to avoid such anthropomorphization of intermediate tokens.

25.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Continuous stochastic flows driven by white noise and their duals

Authors:

arXiv:2606.12143v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study a class of continuous stochastic flows driven by a space-time white noise and characterize their dual flows by explicit stochastic differential equations. A key ingredient of the proof is the convergence of solutions under coefficient approximations. As an application, we derive the dual flows in two illustrative examples, the squared Bessel flow and the Jacobi flow. We also introduce a new model of polynomially self-repelling (PSR) flow and show that it enjoys a self-duality property.