Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.23710

WiFi-Based People Counting Using Beam-Steerable Antennas: A Test-bed Study

Authors:

Riccardo Bersan↗Anay Ajit Deshpande↗Sanaz Kianoush↗Daniele Piazza↗Stefano Savazzi↗

arXiv:2606.23710v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Ubiquitous perception through RF signals is a pivotal opportunity for future technology: it enables personalized services such as smart living, remote healthcare, automated logistics or interaction through free-space gestures. The ubiquity of Wi-Fi and cellular networks presents a promising platform for the development of innovative sensing tools. Future standards will also introduce dedicated sensing features which, for example, will allow routers to work as frequency modulated continuous wave radios targeting radar applications. Most of the current chip designs support ad-hoc firmware for CSI extraction with MIMO arrangements of the transmitter (TX) and receiver (RX) antennas and OFDM subcarriers. The CSI describes the phase shift and amplitude attenuation of multiple propagation paths on each subcarrier. The latest IEEE 802.11be standard (Wi-Fi 7) offers a wider subcarrier bandwidth of 160MHz (up to 320MHz), providing at least 120 usable pilot subcarriers for CSI or CIR estimation. Additionally, Wi-Fi signals have been recently exploited to track daily human movements and behaviors, while Wi-Fi signal variations have been shown to differ between different people and can consequently be used for their re-identification.

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02.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.12374

Semantically-Aware Diver Activity Recognition Framework for Effective Underwater Multi-Human-Robot Collaboration

Authors:

Sadman Sakib Enan↗Junaed Sattar↗

Effective multi-human-robot collaboration is essential for expanding human-led operations in the challenging and high-risk underwater environment. For autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to become true teammates, they must be able to comprehend their surroundings and recognize a diver's activities to offer assistance and ensure safety. Towards this goal, we introduce DAR-Net, a novel transformer-based framework that analyzes complex underwater scenes to classify diver activities. Our contribution lies in a semantically guided learning formulation that couples transformer-based temporal reasoning with pixel-level scene supervision. This multi-loss training strategy explicitly aligns global activity recognition with local human-robot interaction semantics, which is particularly critical in low-visibility underwater conditions. To address the significant challenge of data scarcity in this domain, we present the first-ever Underwater Diver Activity (UDA) dataset, a foundational resource containing over 2,600 annotated images with pixel-level masks. Through rigorous experimental evaluations in a controlled environment, we demonstrate that DAR-Net achieves promising accuracy in recognizing six distinct diver activities, outperforming state-of-the-art models. While this dataset provides a crucial baseline, our work serves as a pioneering step, laying the groundwork for future research and facilitating the development of more intelligent, collaborative underwater robotic systems.

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03.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17459

Can LLMs Be CEOs? Benchmarking Strategic Resource Reallocation with Multi-Role Agent Simulation

Authors:

Yuyang Dai↗Xueqing Peng↗Lingfei Qian↗Zhuohan Xie↗

arXiv:2606.17459v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating the decision-making capabilities of large language models (LLMs) is a growing research priority, yet existing benchmarks focus on isolated cognitive tasks such as reasoning, knowledge retrieval, and economic rationality in stylized settings. These evaluations overlook the defining challenge of real executive decision-making: integrating conflicting recommendations from specialized stakeholders under information asymmetry, organizational constraints, and temporal dependencies. We introduce \textsc{CEO-Bench}, a multi-agent benchmark that evaluates LLMs on CEO-level strategic resource reallocation – the process of redirecting capital across business units in a multi-round, constraint-rich organizational environment. In \textsc{CEO-Bench}, LLM agents receive conflicting advice from four role-conditioned C-suite advisors (CFO, CTO, COO, CMO), each with private signals and distinct priorities, and must synthesize these into a concrete allocation plan evaluated along four dimensions: role integration, conditional boldness, history-sensitive judgment, and plan validity. Experiments across five frontier models on 13 scenarios reveal that all models achieve high structural validity but diverge sharply on strategic calibration – the hardest capability layer. We identify systematic failure modes including single-advisor capture, conservative default under ambiguity, and historical amnesia, and uncover a structural integration-boldness tradeoff: models that engage more deeply with conflicting perspectives tend to produce less decisive action. These findings delineate the current capability boundary of LLMs as organizational decision-makers and inform the design of future AI-assisted executive systems.

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04.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12538

Influence-solvability: a systematic theory of $(1+1)D$ solvability and its application to brickwork circuits

Authors:

Friedrich H\"ubner↗Sun Woo P. Kim↗

arXiv:2606.12538v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: `Solvable' circuits, such as dual unitaries and its generalisations, have arisen as paradigmatic examples of tractable chaotic non-equilibrium dynamics, both in classical and quantum systems. However, while increasingly more complicated sufficient conditions have been proposed, a systematic theory classifying and understanding general features of solvable circuits is missing. We develop such a theory by introducing influence-solvable circuits, a class of $(1+1)D$ circuits whose influence matrix, which represents the `bath' generated by its own evolution, is given by a uniform MPS with finite bond-dimension $\chi$. This property allows for efficient computation of subsystem dynamics and essentially contains all known examples of solvable circuits. We derive a set of necessary and sufficient local conditions by using a version of the fundamental theorem of MPS for open boundary conditions. Next we apply our theory to brickwork circuits with $\chi=1$ influence-solvability and perform a systematic classification of classical brickwork circuits with local dimension up to $d=3$ and quantum brickwork circuits with $d=2$. Our search reveals new solvable circuits that are not captured by known solvability conditions.

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05.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.12106

MSUE: Multi-Modal Soccer Understanding Expert

Authors:

Litao Li↗Yibo Yu↗Yufeng Hu↗Zhuo Yang↗Jiali Wen↗Yixin Chen↗Yixi Zhou↗

This paper presents our solution to the 2026 SoccerNet VQA Challenge. We first develop a cost-effective data synthesis pipeline driven by a Vision-Language Model (VLM), which systematically restructures raw domain data into diverse VQA samples, including concise answers and long-form responses. Second, we propose MSUE, a multi-expert question answering architecture that employs a Large Language Model (LLM) to dynamically dispatch questions to text, image, and video experts. These experts are instantiated as a strong text baseline Gemini3-Flash, a fine-tuned Qwen3-VL, and an external knowledge base, respectively, working collaboratively to enhance VQA performance. MSUE achieves an accuracy of 0.95 on the challenge benchmark, securing third place in the leaderboard.

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06.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2603.27812

LP-Based Algorithms for Scheduling in a Quantum Switch

Authors:

R. Srikant↗

arXiv:2603.27812v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We consider scheduling in a quantum switch with stochastic entanglement generation, finite quantum memories, and decoherence. The objective is to design a scheduling algorithm with polynomial-time computational complexity that stabilizes a nontrivial fraction of the capacity region. Scheduling in such a switch corresponds to finding a matching in a graph subject to additional constraints. We propose an LP-based policy, which finds a point in the matching polytope, which is further implemented using a randomized decomposition into matchings. The main challenge is that service over an edge is feasible only when entanglement is simultaneously available at both endpoint memories, so the effective service rates depend on the steady-state availability induced by the scheduling rule. To address this, we introduce a single-node reference Markov chain and derive lower bounds on achievable service rates in terms of the steady-state nonemptiness probabilities. We then use a Lyapunov drift argument to show that, whenever the request arrival rates lie within the resulting throughput region, the proposed algorithm stabilizes the request queues. We further analyze how the achievable throughput depends on entanglement generation rates, decoherence probabilities, and buffer sizes, and show that the throughput lower bound converges exponentially fast to its infinite-buffer limit as the memory size increases. Numerical results illustrate that the guaranteed throughput fraction is substantial for parameter regimes relevant to near-term quantum networking systems.

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07.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12651

Physics-Aware Auxiliary Losses Improve Out-of-Distribution Generalization of a GNN Synthesizability Filter

Authors:

Riya Bisht↗Dhruv Agarwal↗

arXiv:2606.12651v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine-learning drug-discovery pipelines increasingly rely on generative models that propose molecules far from the data used to train downstream synthesizability filters. Existing filters (SAScore, SCScore, RAscore, DeepSA) are purely statistical and degrade in exactly this out-of-distribution (OOD) regime. We ask whether cheap, closed-form physical priors, used as auxiliary supervision on a graph neural network (GNN), improve OOD generalization. We add two auxiliary losses to a GINE backbone: a topological complexity regression supervised by the Bertz index, and a strain-energy soft penalty supervised by MMFF94 force-field energy. On a 65,177-molecule corpus (HIV, Tox21, COCONUT) labeled by SAScore thresholds we reproduce a strong in-distribution baseline, then evaluate a 4-way ablation (baseline / +complexity / +strain / +both) on a single-source OOD split (train on drug-like HIV+Tox21, test on COCONUT natural products), repeated over 5 seeds with paired bootstrap confidence intervals. All three physics-aware variants give a small but statistically significant OOD improvement over the baseline (mean OOD AUC 0.9774): +complexity Delta = +0.0060 (95% CI [+0.0023, +0.0102]), +strain Delta = +0.0032 ([+0.0008, +0.0052]), +both Delta = +0.0066 ([+0.0038, +0.0093]); every interval excludes zero, and the combination is best. The variants are indistinguishable in-distribution, so the effect is visible only under OOD evaluation. We are explicit that the effects are modest, and we report a cautionary methodological finding: a single-seed version of this experiment produced a qualitatively different (non-monotone) story that did not survive multi-seed evaluation.

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08.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14081

Clay-CNN Hybrids: Leveraging Geo-Foundational Models as Auxiliary Context for Landslide Detection

Authors:

Huong Binh Vu↗

Rapid post-event landslide mapping is essential for disaster response but remains difficult to automate due to extreme class imbalance. This study evaluates whether Clay v1.5, a Geo-Foundational Model (GFM), can improve pixel-level landslide segmentation on the Landslide4Sense (L4S) benchmark, which contains 3,799 training chips with 14 Sentinel-2 and terrain bands and approximately 2% positive pixels. We compare three strategies: Clay as the primary encoder with multi-scale residual terrain fusion, a U-Net backbone augmented with Clay semantic context at the bottleneck, and a standard U-Net baseline. The hybrid U-Net + Clay model with two-stage Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) achieved the best test F1 of 64.5 +/- 1.8% over three seeds, surpassing the Clay-only backbone (55.2 +/- 3.6%) and the U-Net baseline (59.9%). Clay as a standalone encoder underperformed the U-Net due to the absence of multi-scale skip connections, but its pretrained representations consistently improved performance when injected as auxiliary context. These findings suggest that GFMs are most effective for landslide detection when they complement spatially detailed convolutional architectures rather than replace them.

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09.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2505.04486

Efficient Flow Matching using Latent Variables

Authors:

Anirban Samaddar↗Yixuan Sun↗Viktor Nilsson↗Sandeep Madireddy↗

Flow matching models have shown great potential in image generation tasks among probabilistic generative models. However, most flow matching models in the literature do not explicitly utilize the underlying clustering structure in the target data when learning the flow from a simple source distribution like the standard Gaussian. This leads to inefficient learning, especially for many high-dimensional real-world datasets, which often reside in a low-dimensional manifold. To this end, we present $\texttt{Latent-CFM}$, which provides efficient training strategies by conditioning on the features extracted from data using pretrained deep latent variable models. Through experiments on synthetic data from multi-modal distributions and widely used image benchmark datasets, we show that $\texttt{Latent-CFM}$ exhibits improved generation quality with significantly less training and computation than state-of-the-art flow matching models by adopting pretrained lightweight latent variable models. Beyond natural images, we consider generative modeling of spatial fields stemming from physical processes. Using a 2d Darcy flow dataset, we demonstrate that our approach generates more physically accurate samples than competing approaches. In addition, through latent space analysis, we demonstrate that our approach can be used for conditional image generation conditioned on latent features, which adds interpretability to the generation process.

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10.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2604.04611

Dynamic Free-Rider Detection in Federated Learning via Simulated Attack Patterns

Authors:

Motoki Nakamura↗

arXiv:2604.04611v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Federated learning (FL) enables multiple clients to collaboratively train a global model by aggregating local updates without sharing private data. However, FL often faces the challenge of free-riders, clients who submit fake model parameters without performing actual training to obtain the global model without contributing. Chen et al. proposed a free-rider detection method based on the weight evolving frequency (WEF) of model parameters. This detection approach is a leading candidate for practical free-rider detection methods, as it requires neither a proxy dataset nor pre-training. Nevertheless, it struggles to detect ``dynamic'' free-riders who behave honestly in early rounds and later switch to free-riding, particularly under global-model-mimicking attacks such as the delta weight attack and our newly proposed adaptive WEF-camouflage attack. In this paper, we propose a novel detection method S2-WEF that simulates the WEF patterns of potential global-model-based attacks on the server side using previously broadcasted global models, and identifies clients whose submitted WEF patterns resemble the simulated ones. To handle a variety of free-rider attack strategies, S2-WEF further combines this simulation-based similarity score with a deviation score computed from mutual comparisons among submitted WEFs, and separates benign and free-rider clients by two-dimensional clustering and per-score classification. This method enables dynamic detection of clients that transition into free-riders during training without proxy datasets or pre-training. We conduct extensive experiments across three datasets and five attack types, demonstrating that S2-WEF achieves higher robustness than existing approaches.

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11.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17897

Learn to Quantify Social Interaction with Constraints for Pedestrian Walking

Authors:

Xiaodan Shi↗

arXiv:2606.17897v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-term human path forecasting in crowds is critical for autonomous moving platforms (like autonomous driving cars and social robots) to avoid collision and make high-quality planning. Although the current research take into account social interactions for prediction, they don't reveal the exact kinds of social interactions happened among people and how the social interactions affect the decision-making process of pedestrians, which further limits its robustness. Social interactions in pedestrian walking are intuitively massive and hard to label and quantify. In this paper, we explore creatively to quantify and interpret how pedestrians interact with others by proposing Learn to Cluster. Our clustering social interactions is probabilistic latent variable generative, learning directly from sequential trajectory observations, scalable to arbitrary number of pedestrians. Learn to cluster is label-free and can be naturally integrated into the training process of the prediction model. The latent variables will then serve as 'labels' to categorize social interactions. Extensive experiments over several trajectory prediction benchmarks demonstrate that our method is able to learn the patterns of social interactions and effectively integrate the patterns to pedestrian trajectory prediction.

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12.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2602.04525

SLUM-i: Semi-supervised Learning for Urban Mapping of Informal Settlements and Data Quality Benchmarking

Authors:

Muhammad Taha Mukhtar↗Syed Musa Ali Kazmi↗Khola Naseem↗Muhammad Ali Chattha↗Andreas Dengel↗Sheraz Ahmed↗Muhammad Naseer Bajwa↗Muhammad Imran Malik↗

Rapid urban expansion has fueled the growth of informal settlements in major cities of low- and middle-income countries, with Lahore and Karachi in Pakistan and Mumbai in India serving as prominent examples. However, large-scale mapping of these settlements is severely constrained not only by the scarcity of annotations but by inherent data quality challenges, specifically high spectral ambiguity between formal and informal structures and significant annotation noise. We address this by introducing a benchmark dataset for Lahore, constructed from scratch, along with companion datasets for Karachi and Mumbai, which were derived from verified administrative boundaries, totaling approximately 900 $km^2$ of urban area. This collection is supplemented by four cities from prior literature across Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, with comprehensive data quality assessments provided for each city. We also propose a semi-supervised segmentation framework designed to mitigate the class imbalance and distribution mismatch inherent in standard semi-supervised learning pipelines. Our method integrates a Class-Aware Adaptive Thresholding mechanism that dynamically adjusts confidence thresholds to prevent minority class suppression, and a DINOv2-based unlabeled pool filter that removes out-of-distribution tiles prior to training to reduce covariate shift. Extensive experiments across seven cities spanning three continents, repeated over five random seeds, demonstrate gains of up to +5.9 pp mIoU over state-of-the-art semi-supervised baselines, with both components being architecture-agnostic and adding no inference overhead.

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13.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2512.24592

GH-ESD: Grounded Hypothesis-Driven Error Slice Discovery for Instance-Level Vision Tasks

Authors:

Wei Zhang↗Chaoqun Wang↗Zixuan Guan↗Sam Kao↗Pengfei Zhao↗Peng Wu↗Sifeng He↗

Systematic failures of vision models on semantically coherent subsets, known as error slices, reveal limitations in robustness and evaluation. Existing slice discovery approaches largely model slices as clusters in representation space or combinations of predefined attributes. While effective for image-level classification, such formulations are insufficient for instance-level tasks such as object detection and segmentation, where failures often arise from contextual relational and spatially grounded visual patterns. We propose GH-ESD (Grounded Hypothesis-Driven Error Slice Discovery), a generate and verify framework that reformulates slice discovery as grounded hypothesis generation and statistical verification. GH-ESD constructs relational failure hypotheses using LLM priors and grounded visual evidence, discovers hypothesis slices at the instance level via Vision Language Models, and verifies them through statistical trend analysis over instance-level errors. We also introduce GESD (Grounded Error Slice Dataset), a new benchmark for instance-level error slice discovery, providing expert-defined and spatially grounded slices derived from detection and segmentation failures. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GH-ESD consistently outperforms baselines, improving Precision@10 by 0.10 (0.73 vs. 0.63) on the GESD benchmark for detection tasks, while also supporting segmentation scenarios. GH-ESD identifies interpretable slices that facilitate actionable model improvements. The GESD dataset will be made publicly available upon acceptance.

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14.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16037

Adiabatically-induced Kawaguchi geometry and jerk in quantum-classical systems

Authors:

Athanasios Chatzistavrakidis↗Larisa Jonke↗Ryan Requist↗

arXiv:2606.16037v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Adiabatically eliminating the quantum degrees of freedom in a mixed quantum-classical system produces an effective force in the classical equation of motion. The elimination can be made to any order in the adiabatic parameter, generating a series of higher order forces. By applying a sequence of near-identity unitary transformations to the quantum state, we derive a hierarchy of increasingly accurate effective actions for the classical variables. The third order Euler-Lagrange equation is non-Newtonian as the force depends on the jerk, the third order time derivative of position. We find that the third order terms induce a special kind of Kawaguchi geometry on the space of classical variables. This geometry is characterized by an almost symplectic structure and a differential line element that depends on the acceleration in addition to the velocity. Our results can be used to efficiently capture higher order nonadiabatic effects in molecular dynamics simulations.

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15.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.13811

Aligning Quantum Operators with Large Language Models

Authors:

Rogerio Feris↗Yunchao Liu↗Pengyuan Li↗Hang Hua↗David Kremer↗

arXiv:2606.13811v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Can Large Language Models (LLMs) understand and reason about quantum operators? Despite their remarkable capabilities in mathematics and symbolic reasoning, LLMs remain inherently blind to quantum representations such as unitary matrices. In this work, we take a step toward bridging this gap by introducing an approach that maps unitary operators into the latent space of an LLM, enabling unified modeling over quantum and linguistic inputs. We instantiate this idea on Clifford+T circuit synthesis over a Pauli rotation gate set, where our model achieves results competitive with state-of-the-art methods and scales consistently with training data, with no signs of saturation. Our approach further enables language-conditioned synthesis, allowing gate constraints unseen during training to be specified directly in natural language. This work suggests a path toward quantum–aware foundation models that can natively interpret and reason about quantum operations, which could have broader implications reaching across quantum compilation and algorithm discovery.

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16.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20130

SAM3 Self-Distillation for Fine-Grained GOOSE 2D Semantic Segmentation

Authors:

Xuesong Wang↗

We describe our 4th-place entry to the ICRA 2026 GOOSE 2D Fine-Grained Semantic Segmentation Challenge, which reached a composite mean Intersection-over-Union (mIoU) of 69.73% on the official 1,815-image test set. Our model adapts the image encoder of a recent visual foundation model, Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM3), with a lightweight decoder. Beyond this, we contribute two techniques and one empirical finding: (i) a self-distillation scheme that re-uses SAM3 itself, prompted with ground-truth boxes, as a teacher on the classes where it outperforms our own model; (ii) an image-level multi-scale test-time augmentation scheme that restores multi-scale inference for a fixed-input-size model by rescaling the image rather than the model input; and (iii) the finding that an aggressive photometric distortion from a winning 2025 GOOSE 2D entry, transplanted onto our pipeline, is its single largest source of improvement.

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17.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2605.00074

CRC-Screen: Certified DNA-Synthesis Hazard Screening Under Taxonomic Shift

Authors:

Najmul Hasan↗

arXiv:2605.00074v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: DNA-synthesis providers screen incoming orders by searching the requested sequence against curated hazard lists. We show that this baseline collapses to a 100% false-flag rate when the hazardous sequence comes from a taxonomic family absent from the reference set: under Conformal Risk Control's certified miss-rate constraint, a low-discrimination signal forces the threshold below the entire test-benign mass. We compose three signals derived from a synthesis order's public annotation: $k$-mer Jaccard similarity to known toxins, the trimmed-mean score of a five-LLM judge panel, and cosine similarity to clustered embedding centroids. Fused under a monotone logistic aggregator and calibrated by Conformal Risk Control, the resulting screener certifies $\mathbb{E}[\mathrm{FNR}] \le \alpha + \mathrm{TV}$, where the additive term is the calibration-to-test distribution shift under family holdout (a certified ceiling of 24-49% across folds). Across ten leave-one-taxonomic-family-out folds at $\alpha=0.05$ on UniProt KW-0800 reviewed toxins, the calibrated screener achieves 0% empirical test miss rate on every fold and 0% test false-flag rate on nine of ten folds. The bound's finite-sample slack $1/(n_{\mathrm{cal}}+1)$ caps the certifiable miss rate at 1.77% on our 200-hazard subsample; reaching procurement-grade $\alpha=10^{-3}$ requires an $18\times$ larger calibration set, which the full reviewed UniProt KW-0800 corpus is large enough to deliver. The binding constraint on certifiable DNA-synthesis screening is calibration data, not algorithms. Code: https://github.com/najmulhasan-code/crc-screen

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18.

PLOS Medicine 2026-05-13 DOI: HASH:c338fc95d033da78a46f48516597d8df

On the evolution of the company we keep: Implications for infectious disease modeling

Authors:

Joël Mossong↗

by Joël Mossong Whom we meet shapes how infections spread. Where earlier focus of mathematical epidemiology was on incorporating age, more recent work has begun to reveal the importance of socioeconomic aspects for understanding and managing future epidemics. In this Perspective, Joël Mossong discusses the importance of understanding social contacts and how they have evolved for infectious disease modeling, and the need to factor in additional considerations such as ethic and socioeconomic backgrounds.

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19.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18681

Moving Beyond Diversity: Visual Token Pruning as Subspace Reconstruction for Efficient VLMs

Authors:

Jaeyeon Lee↗Shunjie Wen↗Dong-Wan Choi↗

Despite their remarkable performance, Vision Language Models (VLMs) incur substantial computational overhead due to the large number of visual tokens. While diversity maximization has become a dominant strategy for token reduction, existing methods rely on cosine-based normalized similarity that discards magnitude information, failing to faithfully approximate the original feature representation and leading to suboptimal performance, particularly on compositional multi-skill reasoning tasks. In this paper, we introduce SPARE, a subspace reconstruction method that reformulates token pruning as a column subset selection problem and explicitly minimizes reconstruction error. By iteratively selecting tokens with large projection residuals, SPARE performs reconstruction-driven pruning beyond angular diversity. Moreover, we reveal a counterintuitive anti-relevance phenomenon: tokens with lower image-text relevance score can better preserve contextual information. Based on this finding, we incorporate anti-relevance into SPARE as an additional selection criterion to promote context-aware token selection. Extensive experiments across multiple VLMs and benchmarks demonstrate that SPARE consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance, with strong gains on compositional tasks. When applied to LLaVA, SPARE removes up to 94% of visual tokens while retaining 95% of the baseline performance, all in a fully training-free manner.

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20.

PLOS Medicine 2026-06-23 DOI: HASH:69d897c60dd4043f444525a07759c603

Parental body mass index and offspring childhood body size and eating behaviour: A structural equation modelling analysis in the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study

Authors:

Tom A. Bond↗

by Tom A. Bond, Tom A. McAdams, Nicole M. Warrington, Laurie J. Hannigan, Espen Moen Eilertsen, Ziada Ayorech, Fartein A. Torvik, George Davey Smith, Deborah A. Lawlor, Eivind Ystrom, Alexandra Havdahl, David M. Evans Background The intergenerational transmission of obesity-related traits could propagate an accelerating cycle of obesity, if parental adiposity causally influences offspring adiposity. The extent to which intergenerational obesity associations are due to such causal effects, as opposed to genetic confounding (inheritance), is unclear. We aimed to establish whether associations between parental peri-pregnancy body mass index (BMI) and offspring birth weight (BW), BMI until 8 years of age, and 8-year-old eating behaviour are due to genetic confounding. Methods and findings Data were from the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study, a prospective population-based birth cohort born between 1999 and 2009 at 50 out of 52 hospital maternity units in Norway. We compared the strength of the associations of maternal pre-pregnancy BMI versus paternal BMI during pregnancy, with offspring outcomes including birth weight and BMI assessed between age 6 months and 8 years of age, and appetite-related eating behaviour traits assessed at age 8 years via the Child Eating Behaviour Questionnaire (CEBQ), adjusting for potential confounders including parity, parental/grandparental language group and parental age, smoking, education and income). We then used an extended children of twins structural equation model (SEM) to quantify the extent to which associations were due to genetic confounding. Up to 85,866 children (51.3% male) were included in linear regression models, whereas SEM models included up to 50,999 children. Maternal BMI was more strongly associated than paternal BMI with offspring BW, but the maternal-paternal difference decreased for offspring BMI after birth. Greater parental BMI was associated with obesity-related offspring eating behaviours. SEM results indicated that genetic confounding did not explain the association between parental BMI and offspring BW, but explained the majority of the association with offspring BMI from 6 months onwards. For 8-year BMI, genetic confounding explained 79% (95% CI [62, 95]; p = 1.9 × 10−12) of the covariance with maternal BMI and 94% (95% CI [72, 113]; p = 2.7 × 10−14) of the covariance with paternal BMI. Limitations of this study include selective recruitment and attrition, potential bias due to parental assortative mating, and that findings may not generalise beyond high-income country settings with high obesity prevalence. Conclusions We found strong evidence that parent–child BMI associations may primarily be due to genetic confounding. When considered alongside prior evidence, this finding may argue against a strong causal effect of maternal or paternal adiposity on childhood adiposity via intrauterine or periconceptional mechanisms.

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21.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15868

David vs. Goliath in Next Activity Prediction: Argmax vs. LSTM, Transformer, and LLM

Authors:

Hans Weytjens↗Ingo Weber↗

arXiv:2606.15868v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Next activity prediction (NAP) is a cornerstone of predictive process monitoring (PPM), enabling organizations to move from retrospective analysis to proactive process steering. The PPM field has progressed from classical machine learning through deep learning architectures such as LSTMs and Transformers to large language models (LLMs). Despite growing model complexity, no benchmark jointly compares LLMs, Transformers, LSTMs, and simple baselines in a direct sequence modeling setting for NAP. In this paper, we fill this gap with a systematic benchmark. We compare vocabulary-adapted LLMs, Transformers trained from scratch, LLM-distilled Transformers, and LSTMs against a simple counting-based argmax baseline across seven real-life event logs. Our results tell a David vs. Goliath story: pretraining confers no consistent improvement over training from scratch, model size shows little effect on performance, and on most datasets the argmax baseline matches or approaches the performance of billion-parameter LLMs.

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22.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24457

Lite Any Stereo V2: Faster and Stronger Efficient Zero-Shot Stereo Matching

Authors:

Junpeng Jing↗Ronglai Zuo↗Zhelun Shen↗Shangchen Zhou↗Rolandos Alexandros Potamias↗Stefanos Zafeiriou↗Krystian Mikolajczyk↗Jiankang Deng↗

Recent advances in stereo matching have achieved remarkable accuracy, but often rely on large models, heavy computation, or additional foundation-model priors, making them difficult to deploy on resource-constrained platforms. In contrast, efficient stereo models offer faster inference but are commonly considered less capable of strong zero-shot generalization. In this paper, we challenge this assumption by introducing Lite Any Stereo V2 (LAS2), an ultra-fast model series designed for efficient zero-shot stereo matching. LAS2 is developed from both architecture and training perspectives. Architecturally, we revisit efficient stereo design under practical deployment settings and propose a 2D-only cost aggregation framework, optimized for real inference latency rather than theoretical MACs alone. For training, we develop a three-stage strategy that combines synthetic supervision, self-distillation, and real-world knowledge distillation. To improve the reliability of real-world pseudo supervision, we further introduce pseudo-label filtering and an error-clamping operation, enabling smoother synthetic-to-real transfer. We instantiate LAS2 as a family of models, including feed-forward variants for different efficiency budgets and an iterative variant for higher accuracy. Extensive experiments show that LAS2 achieves state-of-the-art accuracy among efficient stereo methods while maintaining significantly lower latency. Specifically, LAS2-H achieves stronger overall zero-shot performance than the iterative method Fast-FoundationStereo, with 1.8x and 2.7x faster inference on H200 and Orin, respectively. The project page, demos, and code are available at https://tomtomtommi.github.io/LiteAnyStereoV2/.

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23.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2512.07925

Near–Real-Time Conflict-Related Fire Detection in Sudan Using Unsupervised Deep Learning

Authors:

Kuldip Singh Atwal↗Dieter Pfoser↗Daniel Rothbart↗

Ongoing armed conflict in Sudan highlights the need for rapid monitoring of conflict-related fire-affected areas. Recent advances in deep learning and high-frequency satellite imagery enable near–real-time assessment of active fires and burn scars in war zones. This study presents a near–real-time monitoring approach using a lightweight Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE)–based model integrated with 4-band Planet Labs imagery at 3 m spatial resolution. We demonstrate that these impacted regions can be detected within approximately 24 to 30 hours under favorable observational conditions using accessible, commercially available satellite data. To achieve this, we adapt a VAE–based model, originally designed for 10-band imagery, to operate effectively on high-resolution 4-band inputs. The model is trained in an unsupervised manner to learn compact latent representations of nominal land-surface conditions and identify burn signatures by quantifying changes between temporally paired latent embeddings. Performance is evaluated across five case studies in Sudan and compared against cosine distance, CVA, and IR-MAD using precision, recall, F1-score, and the area under the precision-recall curve (AUPRC) computed between temporally paired image tiles. Results show that the proposed approach consistently outperforms the other methods, achieving higher recall and F1-scores while maintaining viable precision in highly imbalanced fire-detection scenarios. Experiments with 8-band imagery and temporal image sequences yield only marginal performance gains over single 4-band inputs, underscoring the effectiveness of the proposed lightweight approach for scalable, near–real-time conflict monitoring.

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24.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.19262

Detecting Hidden ML Training With Zero-Overhead Telemetry

Authors:

Robi Rahman↗Sabiha Tajdari↗

arXiv:2606.19262v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hardware-enabled monitoring of GPU workloads underpins many proposals for AI compute governance, but if developers can defeat monitoring mechanisms, such schemes are unworkable. We evaluate the adversarial robustness of GPU workload classification using only zero-overhead, privacy-preserving NVML telemetry: content-agnostic signals that observe physical effects of computation without accessing model weights, training data, or hyperparameters. Across 5 rounds of monitor-evader iteration, we evaluate 20 evasion strategy families on 9 GPU models spanning 4 architecture generations. We develop a classifier that achieves 98.2% binary accuracy at identifying training workloads across the whole corpus, and 43-87% accuracy against the most challenging unexpected workloads even when they are adversarially disguised.

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25.

PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-05 DOI: HASH:06fd5a830f633ecf602ccb5755184374

Heuristic multi-site optimization for protein sequence design using Masked Protein Language Models

Authors:

Lijuan Wang↗

by Lijuan Wang, Yuze Wang, Chen Qiu, Liwei Xiao, Xianliang Liu, Junjie Chen Protein sequence design for tailored functional properties is a fundamental task in protein engineering, with critical applications in drug discovery and therapeutic development. Efficient navigation of the combinatorial vastness of protein sequence space to identify functional variants remains a formidable challenge. Conventional approaches, which predominantly rely on template-based local search or single-residue mutagenesis, are constrained by their susceptibility to local optima and their potential risk of destabilizing native structural stability. In this study, we introduce ProtHMSO, a heuristic multi-site optimization framework leveraging masked protein language models (ProtLMs) for context-aware sequence exploration. ProtHMSO mimics natural evolutionary mechanisms by employing ProtLM-derived substitution probabilities to guide heuristic searches for synergistic mutations, thereby constraining combinatorial search spaces through evolutionary and biophysical priors. ProtHMSO is further applied to replace the exploration strategies in genetic algorithms (GAs) and Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) for improving their convergence efficiency. Benchmark experiments demonstrate that protein sequences generated by ProtHMSO exhibit superior functional performance and closer alignment with natural sequence distribution, compared with state-of-the-art methods. These advancements highlight that ProtHMSO has strong potential and compatibility to accelerate functional protein discovery, offering a robust framework for efficient and context-aware exploration of protein sequence space.

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