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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

GSPan: A Continuous Gaussian Primitive Representation for Arbitrary-Scale Pansharpening

Pansharpening aims to generate high-resolution multispectral (HRMS) images by fusing low-resolution multispectral (LRMS) and panchromatic (PAN) observations. Most existing deep learning methods treat pansharpening as fixed-grid prediction, which limits scale adaptation. To address this, we propose GSPan, a framework that introduces 2D Gaussian Splatting (GS) into pansharpening. Instead of directly predicting pixels, GSPan represents band-wise residual details as continuous and learnable 2D Gaussian primitives. We design a Dual-Stream Hierarchical Interaction (DSHI) architecture with a Spatial-Spectral Interactive Attention (SSIA) module to estimate these primitives from complementary PAN and MS observations. The predicted primitives are rendered as a residual detail field and injected into the upsampled MS image. This continuous representation allows GSPan to render fused images on arbitrary target sampling grids without scale-specific retraining. It further enables a Scale-Decoupled Asymmetric Inference (SDAI) strategy, which estimates primitives at a reduced resolution and renders the fused image at the target resolution for efficient large-scene pansharpening. Experiments on QuickBird, GaoFen-2, WorldView-3, and WorldView-3-4K datasets show that GSPan delivers state-of-the-art fusion performance. Moreover, SDAI markedly accelerates inference, achieving a favorable trade-off between computational efficiency and fusion quality. Our results demonstrate the potential of continuous Gaussian residual representations as a flexible and scale-decoupled alternative to fixed-grid prediction.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Evaluating and Combating the Impact of Concept Drift on the Performance of Machine Learning-Based Phishing Detection Systems

arXiv:2606.11471v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The expansion of the digital domain has resulted in a substantial increase in digital communication, with email emerging as one of the most prominent channels. The proliferation of email communication is apparent in both professional and personal contexts, thereby creating numerous vulnerabilities for malicious actors to exploit. Spam emails, a form of unsolicited correspondence often bearing malicious intent towards recipients, have been an ongoing challenge for email users since the inception of email technology, and this problem has been exacerbated by the growth of the digital landscape. Email spam filters are integral components of email clients, engineered to identify potentially harmful messages and alert users to their malicious content. Phishing, frequently the initial phase of malware-based attacks, is evolving rapidly, with malware becoming increasingly sophisticated over time. A widely adopted approach for detecting malicious activity within malware and spam domains is the application of machine learning. Our aim is to assess the impact of the evolution within the spam email domain on these machine learning-based detection systems and to explore strategies for mitigating associated performance degradation.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

CAOA – Completion-Assisted Object-CAD Alignment

Accurately aligning CAD models to their corresponding objects in indoor RGB-D scans is a central challenge in 3D semantic reconstruction. The task requires estimating a 9-Degree-of-Freedom (DoF) pose-position, rotation, and scale along three axes-but is hindered by noisy and incomplete scans, as well as segmentation errors that cause geometric distortions. We present Completion-Assisted Object-CAD Alignment (CAOA), a method that integrates a semantically and contextually aware point cloud completion module with a symmetry-aware relative pose estimation algorithm, enabling precise alignment of CAD models to scanned objects. Existing completion methods are typically trained and evaluated on synthetic datasets, which often fail to generalize to real-world scans. To bridge this gap, we introduce a synthetic data generation strategy tailored to indoor scenes, significantly reducing the synthetic-to-real domain gap-validated through quantitative comparisons with widely used completion datasets. In addition, we release S2C-Completion, an expert-annotated dataset of over 8,500 object-CAD pairs from Scan2CAD, created for real-world indoor single-object completion and intended as a new benchmark for this task. For object-CAD alignment, we incorporate symmetry information via a symmetry-aware loss, improving robustness to symmetric ambiguities. On the Scan2CAD benchmark, CAOA achieves a 17% accuracy improvement over state-of-the-art methods.

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

Visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Silhouette-Guided Animal Art

Generative AI has advanced the ability to render photorealistic or artistic images, yet it remains limited in a key aspect of human creativity: interpreting ambiguous shapes. This phenomenon, rooted in pareidolia, allows humans to perceive meaningful forms in random patterns such as clouds, stones, or leaves. To computationally replicate this imaginative process, we introduce Visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Visual-RAG), a framework that generates animal art directly from natural silhouettes. Our method retrieves structurally similar animal shapes from a curated corpus of 28,586 high-quality silhouettes and uses them as reference exemplars to guide diffusion-based generation with ControlNet and IP-Adapter. Ablation studies confirm that shape Context with RANSAC provides the most accurate alignment, while removing shape standardization reduces the inlier ratio to just 13.4\%, underscoring the importance of structural fidelity in Visual-RAG. A user study with 12 participants evaluated the outputs in terms of aesthetics, silhouette fidelity, and overall impression. Results reveal that while Visual-RAG provides plausible interpretations, challenges remain in achieving high perceptual impact. This work lays the foundation for computational pareidolia, showing how machines can contribute to the early stages of imaginative discovery.

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

Thinking While Speaking: Inference-Time Knowledge Transfer for Responsive and Intelligent Conversational Voice Agents

Voice agents face a fundamental tension: the reasoning, retrieval, and tool use that make foundation models capable are iterative and slow, while conversational interaction demands responses on a millisecond timescale. Smaller, real-time models meet the latency bar but cannot match foundation models on complex tasks, leaving current voice agents to trade away either responsiveness or capability. We introduce conversational infill, where a small talker model both immediately generates contextually grounded responses to hide the latency of an external reasoner model and fluently integrates streamed reasoner knowledge into its responses during inference. We curate a 290,571-example synthetic dataset spanning six domains and demonstrate that this task is learnable across seven widely used small language models ranging from 135M to 1.7B parameters. Our system implementation, ConvFill, sustains millisecond-level time-to-first-response while closing the accuracy gap to within 6.3% of the corresponding frontier reasoner performance. In a live user study (n=18) with talker deployments running on an Apple M2 SoC, participants rank ConvFill on par with frontier models overall, prefer it for retrieval-heavy tasks, and rate it significantly more responsive. These results show that conversational infill unlocks a new point on the latency-capability Pareto frontier, offering a practical path toward voice agents that are both responsive and highly capable. Code, models, and datasets are available at https://github.com/vysri/conversational-infill.

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

V-JEPA 2.1: Unlocking Dense Features in Video Self-Supervised Learning

We present V-JEPA 2.1, a family of self-supervised models that learn dense, high-quality visual representations for both images and videos while retaining strong global scene understanding. The approach combines four key components. First, a dense predictive loss uses a masking-based objective in which both visible and masked tokens contribute to the training signal, encouraging explicit spatial and temporal grounding. Second, deep self-supervision applies the self-supervised objective hierarchically across multiple intermediate encoder layers to improve representation quality. Third, multi-modal tokenizers enable unified training across images and videos. Finally, the model benefits from effective scaling in both model capacity and training data. Together, these design choices produce representations that are spatially structured, semantically coherent, and temporally consistent. Empirically, V-JEPA 2.1 achieves state-of-the-art performance on several challenging benchmarks, including 7.71 mAP on Ego4D for short-term object-interaction anticipation and 40.8 Recall@5 on EPIC-KITCHENS for high-level action anticipation, as well as a 20-point improvement in real-robot grasping success rate over V-JEPA-2 AC. The model also demonstrates strong performance in robotic navigation (5.687 ATE on TartanDrive), depth estimation (0.307 RMSE on NYUv2 with a linear probe), and global recognition (77.7 on Something-Something-V2). These results show that V-JEPA 2.1 significantly advances the state of the art in dense visual understanding and world modeling.

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

The Integrator Advantage: Controlled Agentic AI for Small and Medium-Sized Companies

arXiv:2606.16649v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic AI marks a new phase of enterprise automation. Unlike traditional automation or conversational AI, agentic systems can interpret goals, plan multi step tasks, access tools, interact with enterprise systems, and execute workflows with varying degrees of autonomy. For small and medium sized companies, this creates potential to reduce administrative burden, accelerate routine processes, and improve the use of organizational knowledge. This paper argues that the near term value of Agentic AI does not lie in full autonomy or workforce reduction, but in controlled partial autonomy for simple and medium complexity business processes. It proposes an integration framework covering use case suitability, autonomy levels, technical integration, governance, security, employee enablement, and measurable impact. The paper concludes that Agentic AI can become a productivity lever when implemented as a human centered capability with responsibility and accountability retained by people.

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

Beyond Third-Person Audits: Situated Interaction Auditing for User-Centered LLM Bias Research

Research on bias in large language models (LLMs) has predominantly focused on third-person audits, which study how models represent or evaluate demographic groups as external subjects. However, this paradigm overlooks a structural blind spot because the user is absent from the audit. In practice, LLMs are used in open-ended, personal interactions, during which the model implicitly represents the user and adjusts its responses accordingly. When identical requests yield different responses depending on who is asking, bias manifests not in how the model describes others but in how it treats its interlocutor. We propose Situated Interaction Auditing (SIA), a user-centered framework for studying how user profile signals – implicit sociodemographic markers, writing style, and stated identity – systematically shape LLM response quality, content, and tone. We demonstrate the framework through a case study that intersects gender and socioeconomic status signals across multiple task domains and outline a research agenda for SIA as a new mission for natural language processing.

09.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Towards Conversational AI for Disease Management

While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in diagnostic dialogue1, their capabilities for effective management reasoning—including disease progression, therapeutic response, and safe medication prescription—remain under-explored. We advance the previously demonstrated diagnostic capabilities of the Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer (AMIE)1−3 through a new LLM-based agentic system optimized for multi-visit clinical management and dialogue. To ground its reasoning in authoritative clinical knowledge, AMIE leverages Gemini’s long-context capabilities4, combining in-context retrieval with structured reasoning to align its output with up-to-date clinical practice guidelines and drug formularies. In a randomized, blinded virtual Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) study, AMIE was compared to 21 primary care physicians (PCPs) across 100 multi-visit case scenarios designed to reflect UK NICE Guidance and BMJ Best Practice guidelines. AMIE was non-inferior to PCPs in management reasoning as assessed by specialists and scored better in both preciseness of treatments and investigations, and in its alignment with and grounding in clinical guidelines. To benchmark medication reasoning, we developed RxQA, a multiple-choice question benchmark derived from two national drug formularies (US, UK) and validated by board-certified pharmacists. Though AMIE and PCPs both benefited from the ability to access external drug information, AMIE outperformed PCPs on higher difficulty questions. While further research would be needed before real-world translation, AMIE’s strong performance across evaluations marks a significant step towards conversational AI as a tool in disease management.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Maternal and fetal HLA heterozygosity in preeclampsia: Insights from a large multi-ancestry pregnancy cohort

Preeclampsia (PE) is a leading cause of maternal and neonatal morbidity, with immune dysregulation at the maternal-fetal interface central to its pathogenesis. The highly polymorphic human leukocyte antigen (HLA) region mediates maternal immune tolerance of the semi-allogeneic fetus, yet the contribution of HLA diversity to PE risk remains poorly defined. Whether the HLA heterozygote advantage observed in other immune disorders is relevant to PE has not been systematically evaluated. Using data from the multi-ancestry TOPMed Boston-Colombia Collaborative for Adverse Pregnancy Outcomes (n = 12,790; 4,770 PE, 8,020 controls; 10,808 maternal, 1,982 fetal, including 1,848 pairs), we evaluated associations between heterozygosity across eight classical HLA loci and PE and four sub-phenotypes, adjusting for genetic ancestry. HLA heterozygosity was common across most loci (>80%). No individual maternal HLA locus was associated with overall PE; however, heterozygosity across class I loci showed a protective effect in preterm PE (OR=0.82, 95%CI:0.69-0.97), with a similar pattern for HLA-A heterozygosity (OR=0.78, 95%CI:0.64-0.96). In contrast, fetal heterozygosity at HLA-DQB1 was nominally associated with increased risk of PE (OR=1.36, 95%CI:1.03-1.79) and preterm PE (OR=1.73, 95%CI:1.13-2.73). No individual maternal or fetal HLA alleles were associated with PE. Maternal-fetal mismatch analysis demonstrated locus-specific associations with preterm PE, including increased risk with HLA-DQA1 mismatch and reduced risk with HLA-C mismatch. These findings highlight distinct maternal and fetal immunogenetic contributions to PE risk and underscore the importance of considering HLA diversity-rather than individual alleles alone-in studies of PE etiology.

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

Towards Spec Learning: Inference-Time Alignment from Preference Pairs

Steering a large language model (LLM) toward a desired behavior typically relies on an iterative process of hand-crafting a prompt based on a careful inspection of the model's responses. This is an involved, brittle, and error-prone process. Preference-based fine-tuning is a more rigorous but often prohibitively expensive solution. We propose spec learning, a framework that relies on a brief user instruction and a small set of preference judgments. These are compiled into specifications in the form of natural-language prompts for an LLM. Specifications condition LLMs at inference time, and no parameter updates to the underlying models are required. We show that the responses generated based on the compiled specifications often outperform direct preference optimization (DPO) on datasets from specialized domains whose preference signal is dense. Unlike opaque weight updates, the resulting specifications are human-readable and double as interpretable and transparent written embodiments of the preference signal that produced them.

12.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

On Skorokhod Problems for Reflected and Singular Stochastic Heat Equations

arXiv:2606.11951v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove a Skorokhod decomposition for the Markov processes $X^a$ and $X$ associated to the gradient Dirichlet forms with respect to the measures $\rho^a\mu^{\beta}$ and $\rho\mu^{\beta}$, respectively. Here, $\mu^{\beta}$ is the law of the standard Brownian bridge $\beta$, while $\rho^a$ and $\rho$ denote densities which are given by $\rho^a(z) := \mathbf{1}_{[0,\infty)}(\bar{z}_a)$ and $\rho(z) := \int_0^1 \mathbf{1}_{[0,\infty)}(\bar{z}_x) \, dx$, respectively, for all $z\in L^2(0,1)$ which have a (unique) continuous representative $\bar{z}$ which vanishes at zero and one. To this end, we derive infinite-dimensional integration by parts formulas (IbPFs) w.r.t. $\rho^a\mu^{\beta}$ and $\rho\mu^{\beta}$, which contain Hida distributions alongside the usual drift terms. We represent these Hida distributions by integration w.r.t. vector measures of bounded variation. The vector measures in question are constructed via an approximation argument, making use of a generalization of Prokhorov's theorem for vector measures. We further prove that, almost surely, the sample paths of $X^a$ and $X$ take values in the equivalence class of continuous functions vanishing at zero and one for all and $dt$-almost all times, respectively. The main motivation for studying $\rho^a\mu^{\beta}$ and $\rho\mu^{\beta}$ lies in the fact that the distributional terms in their IbPFs are simplifications of the distributional term in the IbPF w.r.t. the law of the reflected Brownian bridge on the unit interval $\mu^{|\beta|}$. Representing the latter by integration w.r.t. a vector measure of bounded variation is still an open problem.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Improving low-resource ASR using bilingual fine-tuning with language identification: a cross-linguistic evaluation

This study explores how bilingual fine-tuning affects automatic speech recognition (ASR) in low-resource languages. We evaluate this method across nine linguistically and geographically diverse language pairs, covering a range of language families and writing systems. To distinguish the two languages, during training, we pre-pend each input text with a language identification token. At inference, the model jointly predicts both the language and transcription from the speech input alone. As texts for which the language is incorrectly determined show low ASR performance, we also conduct a follow-up experiment in which the language identification token is provided both during training and inference. Our results show that bilingual fine-tuning can be beneficial when language identification accuracy is high, and that in cases where language identification performance is low, including the language identification token at inference helps to improve ASR performance.

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

Pigeonholing: Bad prompts hurt models to collapse and make mistakes

While in-context learning is generally shown to be effective in Large Language Models (LLMs), bad contexts can cause performance degradation and mode collapse, a phenomenon we call "pigeonholing." **Unintentionally bad** contexts can happen without malicious jailbreaking intents: For example, a user asks the model to justify an incorrect math theorem or fails to correct the model's buggy code. Specifically, we investigate ``pigeonholing" in two scenarios: (1) when the user suggests a solution, and (2) when the conversation context includes the assistant's previous (incorrect) responses. Our experiments across 10 verifiable and open-ended tasks with 10 different models show that pigeonholing manifests in several ways: (1) repeating the incorrect answers from context (leading to 38-40% performance drop), (2) converging on a narrow set of answers in coding and text generation without exploring alternatives, and (3) flipping stance on controversial topics to align with the user or the assistant's previous claims. We find that pigeonholing worsens almost monotonically with the number of conversation turns (performance drops by additional 14+% as repeated mistakes increase from 1 to 5), and pigeonholing-induced mode collapse can happen even when the provided example is correct. As a step toward mitigation, we propose RLVR with synthetic errors which improves models by 43-60% under bad contexts compared to vanilla RLVR baselines.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

A global log for medical AI

arXiv:2510.04033v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Modern computer systems rely on syslog, a universal protocol that records critical events across heterogeneous infrastructure. Medicine's rapidly growing AI stack has no equivalent. As medicine deploys AI tools at scale, there is no standard way to record how, when, by whom, and for whom these models are used. Without such records, it is difficult to measure real-world performance and outcomes, detect adverse events, or identify bias and dataset drift. Here we introduce MedLog, a protocol for event-level logging of medical AI. Each time an AI model interacts with a human, another algorithm, or an automated workflow, MedLog creates a record. Each record contains nine core fields: header, model, user, target, inputs, artifacts, outputs, outcomes, and feedback. We apply MedLog across four deployments in the US, Switzerland, and Vietnam: ICU deterioration prediction, tetanus progression monitoring from wearable signals, automated sepsis quality reporting, and patient attendance prediction. MedLog records capture model behavior, workflow interactions, and downstream outcomes, including AI performance degradation during severe weather events in patient attendance prediction and increased laboratory testing after ICU deterioration alerts. MedLog limits the data footprint through risk-based sampling, lifecycle-aware retention policies, and write-behind caching, enabling deployment in low-resource settings. It also supports detailed traces for complex, agentic, or multi-stage workflows, creating a foundation for continuous monitoring, auditing, and improvement of medical AI.

16.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-08

Distributed control circuits across a brain-and-cord connectome

Just as genomes revolutionized molecular genetics, connectomes (maps of neurons and synapses) are transforming neuroscience. To date, the only organisms with complete connectomes are worms1–3, sea squirts4, and comb jellies5 (103–104 synapses). By contrast, the fruit fly is more complex (108 synaptic connections), with a brain that supports learning and spatial memory6,7 and an intricate ventral nerve cord analogous to the vertebrate spinal cord8–12. Here we report the first densely-reconstructed adult fly connectome that unites the brain and ventral nerve cord, and we leverage this resource to investigate principles of neural control. We show that effector neurons (motor neurons, endocrine cells, and efferent neurons targeting the viscera) are primarily influenced by sensory neurons in the same body part, forming local feedback loops. These local loops are linked by long-range circuits involving ascending and descending neurons organized into behavior-centric modules. Single ascending and descending neurons are often positioned to influence the voluntary movements of multiple body parts, together with the endocrine cells or visceral organs that support those movements. Brain regions involved in learning and navigation supervise these circuits. These results reveal an architecture that is distributed, parallelized, and embodied, reminiscent of distributed control architectures in engineered systems13,14.

17.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-16

Daily briefing: How many elementary particles are there?

Authors:

Estimates range from 17 to 995.5. Plus, one man with paralysis is using a brain–computer interface at home and GLP-1 obesity drugs appear to boost testosterone and sperm quality. Estimates range from 17 to 995.5. Plus, one man with paralysis is using a brain–computer interface at home and GLP-1 obesity drugs appear to boost testosterone and sperm quality.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

RT-Counter: Real-Time Text-Guided Open-Vocabulary Object Counting

Text-guided open-vocabulary object counting (TOOC) aims to count objects belonging to the categories specified by natural language descriptions. Although vision-language pre-trained models have been successful applied to TOOC tasks, they still struggle with fine-grained spatial understanding and real-time inference requirements in counting scenarios. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a real-time TOOC framework, called the Real-Time Counter (RT-Counter), that achieves not only good counting accuracy but also high computational efficiency. RT-Counter designs a novel Visual Prototype Textualization (VPT) module that can project learned visual features into a text feature space and then generate features containing the abstract information that is hard to capture with visual prototypes and the detailed prototype information that is difficult to describe in text, enhancing the object-level visual-language model's counting capabilities. Additionally, RT-Counter incorporates our Weaving Transformer (Weaformer) layers, maintaining high descriptive power at a fraction of the computational cost. The Weaformer layer adopts a novel hybrid attention mechanism that can efficiently weave together local and global visual features. Extensive experiments on three public datasets show that RT-Counter successfully breaks the accuracy-speed trade-off in TOOC. While achieving a competitive MAE of 13.30 on FSC147, RT-Counter operates at 112.48 FPS, making it 7.4x faster and over 4$\times$ more parameter-efficient than the existing leading methods in TOOC. Our work aims at balancing high accuracy and real-time performance in TOOC. Code is available at: https://github.com/Jason-Mar1/RT-Counter.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Small Initialization Matters for Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.17945v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models provide a tractable system for asking how intelligence itself emerges, rather than only how LLMs can be engineered. Although progress is usually attributed to scale, data and architecture, we show that parameter initialization is a gene-like determinant of training and, in particular, of model capacity. Reducing the initialization scale consistently improves pretraining, with the largest gains on reasoning-demanding tasks. We identify two widely used empirical settings that restrain the advantage of small initialization, and show how relaxing them restores favorable scaling. We further uncover a critical initialization that balances the reasoning and training. Mechanistically, small initialization drives a distinct developmental trajectory: parameters first condense into low-complexity structures and later expand into richer representations, giving concrete form to the idea that compression is intelligence. Token-level analyses show that the gains concentrate on non-trivial, context-constrained predictions rather than all tokens uniformly. These results motivate a simple $\gamma$-initialization rule: expose initialization rage as an explicit knob and use small initialization by default, an almost cost-free intervention that improves pretraining and strengthens reasoning across model scales.

20.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Probing picometre-scale interlayer deformations via hyperbolic polaritons

Authors:

The resilience of van der Waals (vdW) materials to large strain fields makes them an ideal platform for tuning electronic, optical and magnetic properties1–4. Although in-plane strain is readily mapped, non-invasive and quantitative characterization of out-of-plane strain remains a formidable challenge, particularly for picometre-scale deformations buried at interfaces. Here we demonstrate a polaritonic optical method that uses the mid-infrared out-of-plane hyperbolic polaritons (oHPs) mode to detect interlayer deformations in prototypical vdW polar insulator–hexagonal boron nitride (hBN). This method uses the softening mechanism of out-of-plane transverse optical (oTO) phonons induced by interlayer strain, enabling highly sensitive detection of picometre-scale deformations. Although these oTO phonon modes are typically spectroscopically ‘dark’, their strain response is activated through the oHPs, achieving an atomic displacement sensitivity of about 10 pm (about 8 × 10−7 times the probing wavelength), enabling ultradeep-subwavelength mechanical interlayer deformation detection. This is experimentally validated in both planar hBN and at the buried interface of quantum dot–hBN nanotube heterostructures. This polariton-based picometrology bridges nanomechanics and photonics, providing a non-destructive lens to visualize hidden stress landscapes with atomic precision. A new polaritonic optical method that uses the mid-infrared out-of-plane hyperbolic polaritons mode is described and experimentally validated to allow the examination of picometre-scale interlayer deformations, providing a bridge between nanomechanics and photonics.

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

GeoWorld-VLM: Geometry from World Models for Vision-Language Models

Modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) achieve strong semantic recognition, yet remain brittle on elementary spatial relations such as left of, on, behind, and between. One cause of this failure arises before language reasoning begins: the visual pathway may compress or discard critical 3D structural cues during feature extraction, so the language model receives image representations that are already insufficient for reliable spatial judgment. We introduce GeoWorld-VLM, a VLM-side distillation framework that transfers geometric structure from frozen camera-conditioned video world models into VLMs. GeoWorld-VLM fine-tunes only the image encoder and multimodal projector, aligning post-projector image features with intermediate world-model representations while leaving the main backbone frozen. Given images, a prompt, and a sampled camera trajectory, the world-model teacher converts static visual input into a synthetic multi-view spatial signal. Training combines spatial answer supervision, teacher-student feature alignment, and a preservation anchor to the original VLM. Since the language model remains frozen, GeoWorld-VLM preserves the original model's linguistic capabilities while attributing spatial improvements to the enhanced visual pathway. To evaluate the effectiveness and generality of the proposed method, we apply GeoWorld-VLM to two distinct VLM architectures and observe consistent improvements across both backbones. GeoWorld-VLM improves performance by approximately 4 percent on both the What'sUp and VSR benchmarks, suggesting that world-model-guided visual alignment generalizes across model structures and spatial reasoning datasets.

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

Reasoning as Attractor Dynamics: Latent Memory Retrieval via Gibbs-Weighted Energy Minimization

arXiv:2606.24543v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are traditionally viewed as autoregressive generators. However, from the perspective of collective computation, they function as high-dimensional Dense Associative Memories that store complex reasoning patterns as latent attractors. In this work, we investigate the energy landscape of mathematical reasoning. We posit that correct reasoning chains correspond to deep, wide attractor basins ("flat minima") in the model's output distribution, whereas hallucinations manifest as sharp, unstable local minima. To exploit this geometry, we introduce a retrieval mechanism based on a Gibbs measure of the trajectory's spectral entropy. By sampling multiple reasoning paths and weighting them by their inverse energy ($P \propto e^{-\beta E}$), we approximate the equilibrium distribution of the associative memory, effectively ``relaxing'' the system into a robust solution. Empirically, this physics-inspired mechanism improves Microsoft Phi-3.5 performance on GSM8K by 5.38\% (84.7\% $\to$ 90.1\%), demonstrating that inference is better modeled as a dynamic settling process into an attractor basin rather than greedy next-token prediction.

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

Safety-Contract Graph Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Network Security Response

arXiv:2606.13832v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous network-security response systems promise to reduce Security Operations Centre (SOC) reaction latency, but reward-only multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) can improve security reward while remaining non-deployable. We present a safety-contract graph MARL framework and instantiate it as ACD$^3$-GAT (Adaptive Constrained Counterfactual Decisioning with a Graph Attention Network encoder), an architecture that separates simulator observations from reusable operational budgets, constrained optimization, graph state encoding, and counterfactual action screening. We evaluate the method in CAGE Challenge 4, where agents operate under budgets for Mean Time to Recover (MTTR), false-positive response, and firewall change-management disruption. Across the benchmark, every unconstrained method violates the SOC downtime budget in 100% of evaluated episodes, with mean downtime proxy costs of 311-430 against a budget of 50. This complements prior CAGE Challenge 4 findings by showing that reward-only learning lacks operational discipline. Constrained MAPPO-GAT (C-MAPPO-GAT) isolates Lagrangian operational-cost control and budget-aware screening, while ACD$^3$-GAT adds budget context, CVaR tail-risk estimation, opponent-belief state, and Graph Counterfactual Risk Propagation (G-CRP). The replicated comparison includes three 200-episode seeds for IPPO, MAPPO-GAT, C-MAPPO-GAT, and ACD$^3$-GAT. C-MAPPO-GAT reduces downtime violation from 100% to 0.3% and mean downtime cost from 355.4 to 15.5 relative to MAPPO-GAT. ACD$^3$-GAT reduces mean downtime cost to 48.2 with a 13.8% violation rate, placing it on the safety-contract frontier rather than at the most conservative compliance point. Topology-seed and coupled adaptive Red-process stress tests preserve this contrast and show lower worst adaptive degradation for safety-constrained policies than reward-only MAPPO-GAT.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

MAPS: A Novel Multi-Axial Projective Sphere for Geometrically Visualizing Higher d-Valued Quantum State-Space of Qudits

Authors:

arXiv:2606.15801v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visualizing the d-valued quantum state-space of quantum systems serves as a foundational pillar for the scientific research and practical applications in quantum computing and information science, where d >= 2. The 2-valued quantum states of a qubit are elegantly visualized on the three-dimensional Bloch sphere. In contrast, expanding this geometrical paradigm to visualize higher d-valued quantum states of a qudit (d >= 3), e.g., a qutrit (d=3), ququadit (d=4), and quintit (d=5), leads to severe structural and topological complexities. This paper introduces a new generalized three-dimensional framework to effectively visualize higher d-valued quantum states of a qudit, in the aspects of ease of illustration, structural simplicity, and natural representation for researchers and engineers. We called this new framework the "multi-axial projective sphere (MAPS)", which consists of n projectional intersecting spatial axes, where d-1

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

Federated continual learning: A comprehensive survey on lifelong and privacy-preserving learning over distributed and non-stationary data

arXiv:2606.11272v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative and privacy-preserving model training across distributed clients, but most existing FL systems implicitly assume data stationarity. In real-world settings-such as healthcare, industrial IoT (IIOT), cybersecurity, and smart cities-data streams are inherently non-stationary, leading classical FL methods to suffer from performance degradation, instability, and catastrophic forgetting. Continual Learning (CL) addresses learning under evolving data distributions but has been largely studied in centralized settings, overlooking key constraints of federated systems, including privacy, limited communication, and client heterogeneity. Federated Continual Learning (FCL) emerges at the intersection of FL and CL, aiming to support lifelong, adaptive, and privacy-aware learning over distributed and non-stationary data. This survey provides a comprehensive and systematic overview of FCL. We first present a formal definition of the FCL problem and clarify its distinctive characteristics. We then analyze the limitations of classical FL under non-stationary conditions, highlighting how CL principles support long-term adaptation. To organize the rapidly growing literature, we propose a multi-dimensional taxonomy of FCL approaches. Furthermore, we review representative application domains and data modalities, summarize commonly used evaluation metrics, and discuss experimental perspectives for assessing long-term performance and forgetting. Finally, we highlight key open challenges, including handling extreme heterogeneity under temporal drift, designing scalable and privacy-preserving memory mechanisms, and establishing standardized benchmarks. This survey aims to serve as a reference and a roadmap for advancing FCL toward robust and deployable real-world systems.