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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Plan-and-Verify Video Reward Reasoning with Spatio-Temporal Scene Graph Grounding

Reward models for text-to-video (T2V) generation guide post-training but often fail at fine-grained semantic alignment. We trace this to two structural weaknesses in existing reasoning-based reward models: they do not systematically verify every condition described in the prompt, and the visual evidence supporting each judgment remains implicit in their free-form reasoning. We propose SG-PVR, a video reward model that addresses these limitations through plan-and-verify reasoning grounded in spatio-temporal scene graphs. The verification plan decomposes the prompt into atomic claims, ensuring every requirement is checked. The spatio-temporal scene graph, encoding entities, attributes, and temporally-grounded relations, is extracted from the video and maintained as a persistent structured visual reference throughout reasoning. Each claim is verified against both the video and the scene graph, anchoring judgments in explicit visual evidence. SG-PVR achieves strong performance on semantic alignment, including fine-grained temporal semantics. As a test-time reranker, it further enhances compositional alignment in T2V generation.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Global Ease of Living Index: a machine learning framework for longitudinal analysis of major economies

arXiv:2502.06866v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The drastic changes in the global economy, geopolitical conditions, and disruptions such as the COVID-19 pandemic have impacted the cost of living and quality of life. It is essential to comprehend the long-term implications of the cost of living and quality of life in major economies. A transparent and comprehensive living index must include multiple dimensions of living conditions. In this study, we present an approach to quantifying the quality of life through the Global Ease of Living Index that combines various socio-economic and infrastructural factors into a single composite score. Our index utilises economic indicators that define living standards, which could help in targeted interventions to improve specific areas. We present a machine learning framework to address missing data for certain economic indicators in specific countries. We then curate and update the data and use a dimensionality reduction approach (Principal Component Analysis and Factor Analysis) to create the Ease of Living Index for major economies since 1970. Our work significantly adds to the literature by offering a practical tool for policymakers to identify areas needing improvement, such as healthcare systems, employment opportunities, and public safety. Our approach with open data and code can be easily reproduced and applied to various contexts, providing transparency and accessibility for ongoing research and policy development in quality-of-life assessment.

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

ANCHOR: Error-Controlled Adaptive Numerical Correction for Neural Operator Time Marching

arXiv:2512.19643v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Numerical simulation of time-dependent partial differential equations (PDEs) is central to scientific and engineering applications, but high-fidelity solvers are often prohibitively expensive for long-horizon or time-critical settings. Neural operator (NO) surrogates offer fast inference across parametric and functional inputs; however, most autoregressive NO frameworks remain vulnerable to compounding errors, and ensemble-averaged metrics provide limited guarantees for individual inference trajectories. In practice, error accumulation can become unacceptable beyond the training horizon, and existing methods lack mechanisms for online monitoring or correction. To address this gap, we propose ANCHOR (Adaptive Numerical Correction for High-fidelity Operator Rollouts), an online, instance-aware hybrid inference framework for stable long-horizon prediction of nonlinear, time-dependent PDEs. ANCHOR treats a pretrained NO as the primary inference engine and adaptively couples it with a classical numerical solver using a physics-informed, residual-based error estimator. Inspired by adaptive time-stepping in numerical analysis, ANCHOR monitors an exponential moving average (EMA) of the normalized PDE residual to detect accumulating error and trigger corrective solver interventions without requiring access to ground-truth solutions. We show that the EMA-based estimator correlates strongly with the true relative L2 error, enabling data-free, instance-aware error control during inference. Evaluations on six canonical PDEs: 1D and 2D Burgers', 2D Allen-Cahn, 2D Cahn-Hilliard, 2D Navier-Stokes, and 3D heat conduction, demonstrate that ANCHOR reliably bounds long-horizon error growth, stabilizes extrapolative rollouts, and significantly improves robustness over standalone neural operators, while remaining substantially more efficient than high-fidelity numerical solvers.

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

Hybrid Diffusion Transformer for Instruction-Guided Audio Editing via Rectified Flow

arXiv:2606.20101v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audio editing aims to modify specific content in an existing audio clip according to a natural language instruction while preserving the remaining acoustic content. Despite the remarkable progress of diffusion models, existing training-based editing methods mainly rely on the local inductive biases and cross-attention interaction in convolutional U-Net backbones, which often hinder long-range semantic alignment and precise understanding and localization of instructions. In contrast, diffusion transformers provide stronger global modeling and multimodal fusion, but existing editing architectures usually adopt a simple stack of MMDiT and DiT blocks. Applying joint attention over concatenated audio and text tokens in all blocks results in quadratic complexity with respect to token length. To balance editing performance and efficiency, we propose a hybrid two-stage diffusion transformer architecture for instruction-guided audio editing based on rectified flow matching. It performs joint attention over audio and text tokens to establish coarse semantic alignment at low-resolution stage, then switches to alternating joint-attention and cross-attention blocks to refine editing details at high-resolution stage. This coarse-to-fine strategy enables efficient and accurate instruction-guided audio editing. Experiments show that the proposed framework achieves notable performance gains on challenging editing tasks involving overlapping audio events and complex instructions, while substantially improving editing efficiency with a compact model.

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

No One-Size-Fits-All Neurons: Task-based Neurons for Artificial Neural Networks

arXiv:2405.02369v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In the past decade, many successful networks are on novel architectures, which almost exclusively use the same type of neurons. Recently, more and more deep learning studies have been inspired by the idea of NeuroAI and the neuronal diversity observed in human brains, leading to the proposal of novel artificial neuron designs. Designing well-performing neurons represents a new dimension relative to designing well-performing neural architectures. Biologically, the brain does not rely on a single type of neuron that universally functions in all aspects. Instead, in our brain, neurons are often task-based. In this study, we address the following question: since the human brain is a task-based neuron user, can the artificial network design go from the task-based architecture design to the task-based neuron design? Since methodologically there are no one-size-fits-all neurons, given the same structure, task-based neurons can enhance the feature representation ability relative to the existing universal neurons due to the intrinsic inductive bias for the task. Specifically, we propose a two-step framework for prototyping task-based neurons. As the initial step, we evaluate the proposed framework using polynomials as base functions. Empirically, systematic experimental results on synthetic data, classic benchmarks, and real-world applications show that the proposed task-based neuron design is not only feasible but also delivers competitive performance over other state-of-the-art models.

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

Fed-FBD: Federated Functional Block Diversification for Isolation, Privacy, and Surgical Unlearning

arXiv:2606.12679v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative model training without sharing raw patient data, but standard approaches such as FedAvg treat each client as a black box and provide no mechanism for isolating an adversarial contributor, auditing per-client influence, or honoring a departed participant's right to be forgotten. We present Fed-FBD (Federated Functional Block Diversification), a modular federated architecture that decomposes a ResNet backbone into six functional blocks (the stem, four residual groups, and the classification head) and maintains a warehouse of N color variants, each assembled from independently tracked and contributor-stamped blocks. Fed-FBD provides three capabilities absent in FedAvg: (i) architecturally guaranteed block-level isolation, so that an adversarial or mislabelled client cannot contaminate the clean colous; (ii) privacy-by-design, where membership inference advantage is already indistinguishable from chance before any privacy mechanism is applied; and (iii) surgical machine unlearning of a departed participant's contribution at sub-second cost and without retraining. Experiments on six MedMNIST-2D datasets, PathMNIST at 224x224, and CIFAR-10 show that Fed-FBD trades a modest 0.3%-3.1% IID accuracy gap on the adequately sized datasets for these guarantees, remains within 0.8%-4.0% of FedAvg at Dirichlet alpha=1.0 on three of four datasets, and confines all six adversarial attacks we study to the poisoned client's own blocks with at most +/-0.01 AUC drift on the clean colors.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

A 3D Isovist World Model – Revealing a City's Unseen Geometry and Its Emergent Cross-City Signature

arXiv:2606.03609v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Embodied agents that navigate cities rely on world models that predict how their surroundings will change as they move. But for navigation, what matters is not what the buildings look like; it is where the agent can go. Most world models nonetheless predict appearance, learning how a scene looks rather than the space an agent can move through. Those that do target geometry, such as bird's-eye-view occupancy grids, flatten the three-dimensional environment onto a ground plane, discarding the above-ground and multi-level structure that shapes real navigation. What is missing is a predictive target that captures the navigable geometry an agent actually traverses, without photometric entanglement and without collapsing the third dimension. Our key idea is to model the open volume between buildings, the negative space, encoded as a 3D isovist: a spherical visibility-depth map recording the distance to the nearest surface in every direction. We introduce an embodied world model that predicts the next isovist from a short history of past isovists and a movement action. The prediction is formulated as a depth residual so the decoder inherits sharp building edges, trained with self-rollout scheduled sampling to keep corrupted context on the geometry manifold, and equipped with a persistent latent bird's-eye-view spatial map for cross-path consistency. Our central finding is emergent and unexpected: a single city-blind model trained on Manhattan and Paris develops a cross-city spatial signature, with city identity linearly decodable from its temporal latents far above single-frame baselines, so the signature lives in the learned dynamics rather than in appearance. The representation is lightweight, interpretable, and reproducible, offering a geometric substrate for spatial reasoning in embodied AI, robotics, and urban analysis, released with an open dataset and pipeline.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

OccAny: Generalized Unconstrained Urban 3D Occupancy

Relying on in-domain annotations and precise sensor-rig priors, existing 3D occupancy prediction methods are limited in both scalability and out-of-domain generalization. While recent visual geometry foundation models exhibit strong generalization capabilities, they were mainly designed for general purposes and lack one or more key ingredients required for urban occupancy prediction, namely metric prediction, geometry completion in cluttered scenes and adaptation to urban scenarios. We address this gap and present OccAny, the first unconstrained urban 3D occupancy model capable of operating on out-of-domain uncalibrated scenes to predict and complete metric occupancy coupled with segmentation features. OccAny is versatile and can predict occupancy from sequential, monocular, or surround-view images. Our contributions are three-fold: (i) we propose the first generalized 3D occupancy framework with (ii) Segmentation Forcing that improves occupancy quality while enabling mask-level prediction, and (iii) a Novel View Rendering pipeline that infers novel-view geometry to enable test-time view augmentation for geometry completion. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OccAny outperforms all visual geometry baselines on 3D occupancy prediction task, while remaining competitive with in-domain self-supervised methods across three input settings on two established urban occupancy prediction datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/valeoai/OccAny .

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

Muon$^p$: Muon with Fractional Spectral Powers

arXiv:2606.13867v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Muon is an increasingly widely used optimizer that replaces a gradient $G=USV^\top$ with its polar factor $UV^\top$, thereby flattening the singular spectrum. However, full flattening discards singular-value information that may matter for adaptation. We introduce Muon$^p$, a Muon-style optimizer that instead uses fractional spectral-power updates $US^pV^\top$ for rational $p\in(0,1)$, interpolating between Muon and gradient descent. To make it practical, we prove that fractional spectral powers cannot be computed by any fixed univariate polynomial iteration, and furthermore derive low-degree odd bivariate recurrences that approximate $US^pV^\top$ using only matrix multiplications, preserving Muon's matrix-multiplication-only structure and compute complexity. We show that Muon$^p$ maximizes the linear improvement in loss under the Schatten $q$-norm for $q=1+\frac{1}{p}$. Empirically, Muon$^p$ is especially effective for finetuning: on billion-scale models, Muon$^p$ improves validation perplexity and downstream task performance. We further analyze when Muon$^p$ is less suitable, through the lens of spectral geometry. Our results reveal important insights on when preserving the singular spectrum can bring significant gains, and introduce a principled way to achieve them.

10.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

The Statistical Compass

arXiv:2606.11282v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This monograph develops probability and stochastic-process ideas as a translation language for statistics: from designed observations and data objects to targets, stability statements, inference, and use. The chapters move from motivating examples and randomization through probability measures, kernels, likelihoods, data objects, weak convergence, empirical fields, functional data, M- and Z-estimation, testing, local approximations, event-time processes, and prediction. Historical and biomedical examples are used to keep abstract objects tied to records, mechanisms, and decisions. The aim is to give readers a common grammar for classical probability, modern data structures, and statistical practice.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

CausalMotion: Structured Physical Reasoning as Keyframe and Trajectory Guidance for Training-Free Video Generation

Recent advances in diffusion-based video generation have significantly improved visual quality and short-term temporal coherence. However, existing methods still struggle to produce videos with physically consistent and causally plausible dynamics, especially in scenarios involving long-horizon interactions. This limitation arises from the fact that video diffusion models primarily learn physical consistency implicitly, while vision-language models can directly model physical laws. Based on this idea, in this work, we propose CausalMotion, a training-free framework that injects explicit physical reasoning into video generation through structured intermediate representations. Our key idea is to decouple reasoning from generation by leveraging a vision-language model to decompose a text prompt into a sequence of causally consistent keyframes and object-centric motion trajectories. These representations are then aligned and integrated as soft constraints to guide a pretrained video diffusion model during inference. This design enables explicit modeling of object dynamics and causal transitions without requiring additional training or supervision. Extensive experiments show that our method consistently improves physical plausibility and temporal coherence, particularly in dynamics-intensive scenarios, while maintaining high perceptual video quality.

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

AuAu: A Benchmark for Auditing Authoritarian Alignment in Large Language Models

The worldwide surge of authoritarianism, combined with the increasing central role in users' everyday lives, raises the question of to what extent specific models exhibit or promote authoritarian attitudes and characteristics. We introduce AuAu, a comprehensive benchmark that aims to assess the risk of LLMs generating responses with authoritarian tendencies. This benchmark combines three evaluation approaches: (i) psychometric questions from an extensive pool of 15 human validated instruments; (ii) contextual behavior vignettes probing intended actions in concrete situations; and (iii) responses to realistic user prompts. Unlike prior work, AuAu evaluates not only a general closeness towards authoritarianism but also the established sub-concepts Authoritarian Aggression, Authoritarian Submission, and Conventionalism. Evaluating 17 models from China, the EU, Russia, and the USA, we find that all tested models exhibit substantial authoritarian response rates under the psychometric evaluation, though rates drop significantly in increasingly more realistic downstream task. We further find that an authoritarian system prompt easily manipulates 15 out of 17 models to promote increased authoritarianism. Our results underscore the need for continued, systematic auditing of LLM-based AI systems to detect and ultimately mitigate undesired authoritarian tendencies in generated output. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/andreaseinwiller/AuAu

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

Single vs. Multiple Branches in DeepONet and S-DeepONet: Network Architecture Follows Coupling in Multiphysics Systems

arXiv:2507.03660v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: `Real-time prediction of complex physical systems requires surrogate models that learn from data while representing strong multiphysics coupling. Deep Operator Networks have shown success in single-physics problems, yet their effectiveness in capturing nonlinear interactions in coupled systems (such as thermo-mechanical or electro-thermal coupling) remains underexplored. Here we pose a practical question: should the architecture of a neural operator reflect the strength of physical coupling it aims to model? We compare single-branch and multi-branch designs, in both feedforward and sequential recurrent forms, across three representative systems: a reaction–diffusion problem with heterogeneous sources, a nonlinear thermo-electrical problem with temperature-dependent conductivity and Joule heating, and a viscoplastic thermo-mechanical model of steel solidification. Single-branch networks consistently outperform multi-branch variants in tightly coupled regimes by encouraging shared latent representations, whereas multi-branch designs remain favorable for decoupled or single-physics tasks. Once trained, these surrogates deliver full-field predictions up to $1.8 \times 10^4$ times faster than physics-based solvers.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Reliable Neural-Codec Text-to-Speech by ASR Self-Verification and Distillation: Near-Zero Catastrophic Failures Across Models and Codecs

arXiv:2606.18323v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Open autoregressive neural-codec text-to-speech (TTS) models sound excellent on typical inputs yet suffer stochastic catastrophic failures: on a meaningful fraction of utterances they emit silence, terminate early, or collapse into repetitive or hallucinated content. We show this failure mode is cheap to remove. Under a single format-robust metric (a catastrophic-failure rate via an ASR round-trip), best-of-N ASR self-verification drives failures to near-zero: no observed failures remain by N=2 on a standard corpus (LibriSpeech) and by N=4 on a hard prompt set. This is not an artifact of one model: the reduction replicates across four open codec-TTS systems and three neural codecs (XCodec2, SNAC, Mimi), reaching the near-zero floor by N=2 on three of the four. We then make the fix free at inference time by distilling the self-verified behaviour into the model, which recovers much of the robustness in single-shot decoding, closing ~52-58% of the failure mass on hard inputs at no test-time cost. The distillation gain concentrates where it is needed (hard inputs); on already-reliable prose there is no headroom and no detectable change. A controlled comparison adds a clean negative: offline direct preference optimization (DPO/IPO) does not beat plain supervised distillation, and an online iterative variant is promising but not statistically separable at our evaluation size. We report honestly the one model that resists (a larger Llasa where scale did not obviously help) and a rare-word capability ceiling that no self-distillation method overcomes

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Hierarchical mutual distillation for multi-view fusion: Learning from all possible view combinations

Multi-view learning often struggles to effectively leverage images captured from diverse angles and locations. Learning methods for unstructured multi-view images remain largely underexplored. We propose a novel Hierarchical Mutual Distillation for Multi-View Fusion (HMDMV) method, which can handle both structured and unstructured multi-view scenarios. It makes predictions utilizing all possible view combinations: single view, partial multi-view, and full multi-view. The method generates predictions for each view combination and then applies hierarchical mutual distillation to enhance inter-view consistency. An uncertainty-based weighting mechanism further refines the fusion process by adjusting the influence of each view combination according to its prediction confidence, reducing the impact of low-confidence views. Extensive experiments on large-scale structured and unstructured datasets demonstrate that HMDMV consistently achieves state-of-the-art classification accuracy. Another unique advantage of HMDMV is that it provides improved flexibility in inference, allowing for more or fewer view counts in inference than those used in training without additional processing. We also provide a light version with reduced training cost by designing an efficient strategy that randomly samples subsets of view combinations during each training iteration. These results highlight HMDMV's robustness in real-world settings where view availability is variable or incomplete. The code is available at https://github.com/labhai/HMDMV.

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

ReNikud: Audio-Supervised Hebrew Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion

Grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) conversion for Modern Hebrew is needed for applications like text-to-speech (TTS), but is challenging due to the language's abjad writing system, which leaves vowels largely unwritten, creating substantial ambiguity. Standard approaches first predict vowel diacritics (nikud) to produce International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcriptions, but this is limited: vocalization data is scarce and laborious to produce, it does not specify features such as lexical stress, and it reflects formal grammatical rules rather than everyday spoken pronunciation. Direct sequence-to-sequence IPA prediction, meanwhile, struggles on limited data and fails to exploit the character-level alignment characteristic of abjads. Our method, ReNikud, overcomes these limitations with two key insights: (1) Weak audio supervision via a phoneme-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) pseudo-labeling pipeline on thousands of hours of unlabeled Hebrew audio, yielding phonemic transcriptions that reflect natural spoken norms without manual annotation. (2) A pseudo-vocalization architecture that predicts IPA phonemes at each character position, enforcing character-level alignment as an inductive bias. Results on existing Hebrew G2P benchmarks and the new targeted MILIM benchmark for spoken Hebrew show that ReNikud surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods. We will release our code and trained models to support further work on Hebrew TTS and speech technologies.

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

VigilFormer: Deformable Attention for Video Anomaly Detection with Causal Risk Inference

Authors:

Video anomaly detection in surveillance settings must balance detection accuracy against real-time throughput, a tension that existing methods address either through stronger feature extractors or more efficient architectures, but rarely both. We present VigilFormer, a unified framework that combines deformable spatio-temporal attention with causal temporal modeling to detect anomalies in untrimmed surveillance video. The proposed Deformable Spatio-Temporal Encoder (DSTE) attends to a sparse set of informative locations across frames, avoiding the quadratic cost of dense attention while retaining the ability to capture irregular motion patterns. A Causal Anomaly Classifier (CAC) applies dilated causal convolutions over snippet-level features and optimizes a contrastive multiple-instance learning objective that separates anomalous and normal representations without frame-level labels. To meet deployment constraints, an Adaptive Confidence Scheduler (ACS) dynamically skips low-information frames at inference time, reducing redundant computation in static scenes. Evaluated on UCF-Crime, ShanghaiTech, and CUHK Avenue, VigilFormer achieves AUC scores of 87.83%, 97.21%, and 89.74% respectively, at 41.5 FPS on a single GPU, outperforming recent weakly-supervised methods in both accuracy and speed.

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

Virtual Sensing to Enable Real-Time Monitoring of Inaccessible Locations & Unmeasurable Parameters

arXiv:2412.00107v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Real-time monitoring of safety-critical interior states remains an open problem in energy systems where physical instrumentation is infeasible. Existing approaches rely on explicit governing equations, finite-dimensional state vectors, or per-instance retraining, which prevents mesh-independent, field-level inference at arbitrary interior coordinates under real-time constraints. We introduce operator-based virtual sensing for nuclear-grade thermal-fluid systems: we use the neural-operator framework to learn solution operators that map sparse boundary measurements to coupled internal fields in physically inaccessible regions, framing the problem class explicitly to distinguish it from classical state estimation and pointwise soft sensing. We instantiate this framework with MIMONet, a branch-trunk operator extended with three practical choices: multi-modal branch encoders for heterogeneous (scalar and function-valued) inputs; multiplicative branch fusion to preserve the bilinear PDE coupling structure; and shared-latent multi-field decoding with per-channel basis projections at the trunk's final layer. Evaluated across escalating complexity, from canonical lid-driven cavity flow to pressurized water reactor subchannels to fully coupled heat exchangers, MIMONet achieves below 5% relative errors and sub-millisecond inference on data-center accelerators (0.35 ms / 46 mJ per heat-exchanger inference on an NVIDIA H200, and sub-millisecond across the A40-H200-GH200 range), while remaining stable under 50% sensor noise. By staying accurate as geometric confinement and physics coupling intensify, MIMONet shows that operator-based virtual sensing can restore observability where physical instrumentation fails, establishing simulation-based feasibility within the evaluated operating envelopes as a step toward future experimental and cross-solver validation for safety-critical energy systems.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Provable quantum speedups for computing persistence in topological data analysis

arXiv:2410.21258v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Topological data analysis (TDA) aims to extract noise-robust features from a data set by examining the number and persistence of holes in its topology. We provide an efficient quantum algorithm for a computational problem closely related to a core task in TDA – determining whether a given hole persists across different length scales. Further, we prove the problem itself is $\mathsf{BQP}_1$-hard, implying that a classical solution is extremely unlikely; this stands in contrast to all previous quantum approaches to TDA, where the problems were also intractable for quantum computers, or where a rigorous proof of classical hardness still remains open. This result implies an {exponential} quantum speedup for this problem under standard complexity-theoretic assumptions. Our approach relies on encoding the persistence of a hole in a variant of the guided sparse Hamiltonian problem, where the guiding state is constructed from a harmonic representative of the hole.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

SAE Interventions are Unreliable: Post-Intervention Recovery of Suppressed Behavior

arXiv:2606.18322v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) decompose residual-stream activations into interpretable features. Recent latent-space defenses increasingly rely on these decompositions, assuming that identified "unsafe" SAE features serve as actionable handles for monitoring and intervention. In this paradigm, clamping a specific harmful feature is expected to reliably prevent model misbehavior. However, we show that this success may hide a recoverable failure mode: the clamp may block one visible route to a behavior without eliminating the behavior itself. We formulate this vulnerability as post-intervention recovery, a constrained residual-space optimization problem. Starting from the post-intervention residual state, we optimize residual perturbations to recover the pre-intervention behavior while preserving the post-intervention values of the targeted SAE features. Even under a strong threat model where the intervention remains active throughout optimization and generation, recovery remains possible. To rule out that recovery simply undoes the intervention, we use encoder-orthogonal updates for single-layer interventions and the corresponding feature-map Jacobian in the cross-layer setting. Across TPP, unlearning, IOI, and refusal steering experiments, this stress test reveals recoverable behavior despite successful feature-level intervention. Especially in the safety-critical refusal-steering setting, we achieve a 95.8% recovery rate on valid samples while keeping defended-feature relative drift to 0.131, substantially below suffix-based baselines. A recovery-path attribution analysis further localizes this recovery to the SAE reconstruction residual, the component left unexplained by the SAE. These results expose a gap between feature-level control and behavioral completeness: SAE features can support causal intervention, but controlling them does not guarantee control over the underlying behavior.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

SG2Loc: Sequential Visual Localization on 3D Scene Graphs

Visual localization in complex indoor environments remains a critical challenge for robotics and AR applications. Sequential localization, where pose estimates are refined over time, is important for autonomous agents. However, traditional methods often require storing extensive image databases or point clouds, leading to significant overhead. This paper introduces a novel, lightweight approach to sequential visual localization using 3D scene graphs. Our method represents the environment with a compact scene graph, where nodes represent objects (with coarse meshes) and edges encode spatial relationships. For each image in the localization phase, we extract per-patch semantic features, predicting object identities. Localization is performed within a particle filter framework. Each particle, representing a camera pose, projects the coarse object meshes from the scene graph into the image, assigning object identities to patches based on visibility. The similarity of the per-patch features, in the input image, and object features from the scene graph determines the weight of a particle. Subsequent images are incorporated sequentially, refining the pose estimate. By leveraging a compact scene graph and efficient semantic matching, our method significantly reduces storage while maintaining performance on real-world datasets. The code will be available at https://github.com/DmblnNicole/sg2loc.

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

CAPRA: Scaling Feedback on Software Architecture Deliverables with a Multi-Agent LLM System

arXiv:2606.18976v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated assessment in software engineering education has advanced significantly for code grading and essay scoring. However, reviewing software architecture deliverables, which requires analyzing structural completeness and requirements traceability, has not yet been fully automated. Applying Large Language Models (LLMs) to this task requires robust architectures to ensure technical feedback is accurate and reliable for students. This paper presents CAPRA (Configurable Architecture Proficiency Report Assessment), a multi-agent LLM system that analyzes software architecture deliverables to generate personalized, template-compliant LaTeX feedback. As a core design choice, CAPRA coordinates multiple specialized agents and employs a Python-based microservice for multi-modal document extraction, utilizing PyMuPDF and vision-enabled LLMs (specifically gpt-4o) to parse text and UML diagrams. To ensure educational reliability and mitigate hallucinations, CAPRA introduces a deterministic Evidence Anchoring step using fuzzy matching via normalized Levenshtein distance, along with a ConsistencyManager agent that cross-verifies, deduplicates, and merges findings. System performance is assessed using a structured eight-criterion binary evaluation taxonomy covering: (i) extraction completeness, (ii) feature validation, (iii) issue grounding and severity detection, (iv) recommendation specificity and traceability, and (v) template and tone compliance. A preliminary empirical evaluation on 10 student reports shows that CAPRA satisfied 88.8% of the evaluated criteria under a strict two-rater aggregation rule, achieved moderate inter-rater agreement with human evaluators (kappa = 0.582), and processed each report in slightly over 4 minutes. While these results support the viability of LLM-supported architectural feedback, human oversight remains essential for subjective assessment dimensions.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Electromagnetic Wightman functions and vacuum densities for a brane intersecting the AdS boundary

arXiv:2604.17583v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We investigate the combined effects of a brane intersecting the AdS boundary and background gravitational field on the local characteristics of the electromagnetic vacuum. Two types of boundary conditions on the brane are considered, which are higher-dimensional generalizations of the perfect electric (PEC) and perfect magnetic (PMC) boundary conditions in Maxwell's electrodynamics. The brane-induced contributions to the Wightman functions of the vector potential and field tensor are explicitly extracted. Simple expressions in terms of elementary functions are provided. The behavior of the vacuum expectation values (VEVs) is mimicked by a scalar field with a negative effective mass squared determined by the radius of the AdS spacetime. The expectation values of the electric and magnetic fields squares and of the energy-momentum tensor are investigated as local characteristics of the vacuum state. The brane-induced contributions to these VEVs have opposite signs for the PEC and PMC conditions. For the PMC condition, this contribution is negative for the electric field squared and positive for the magnetic field squared. The VEV of the energy-momentum tensor has a nonzero off-diagonal component. The brane-induced vacuum energy density is positive for PMC condition, whereas the normal and parallel stresses change sign as functions of the distance from the brane. Unlike the problem involving a planar boundary in the Minkowski bulk, the vacuum energy-momentum tensor does not vanish in (3+1)-dimensional AdS spacetime.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Time-Frequency Grid States for Reconstruction and Correction of Channel-Induced Distortion in Entangled Photons

arXiv:2606.12216v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Characterization of time-frequency (TF) quantum states requires reliable reconstruction of their TF distributions. However, imperfect transmission or measurement channels can distort reconstructed joint spectral intensities (JSIs), especially when the underlying perturbation mechanism is unknown. Here, we experimentally demonstrate a reconstruction and correction framework that uses a TF grid state as an intrinsic frequency-domain reference. By analyzing the displacement of the grid points, a Gaussian process regression model is employed to reconstruct a correction mapping for the nonlinear coordinate deformation without assuming a prior physical model of the distortion. The learned mapping reduces the residual coordinate deviation of the TF grid state by approximately a factor of 11 and, when applied to an independent frequency-entangled test state, improves the Gaussian-shape fidelity from 76.2\% to 90.0\%. These results establish TF grid states as practical metrological resources for diagnosing and correcting distortions in TF quantum systems, providing a pathway toward distortion-resilient quantum communication and high-dimensional quantum information processing.

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

Geometry-Aware Post-Hoc Uncertainty Quantification in Operator Learning

arXiv:2606.17513v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural operators provide fast surrogates for PDEs but their deterministic predictions limit their use in tasks requiring uncertainty quantification (UQ), especially under geometric variability. Existing approaches primarily model uncertainty in network parameters, largely overlooking the geometry-aware representations learned by the operator itself. We propose REEF-GP (Residual on Embedded Features Gaussian Process), a post-hoc UQ framework that fits a GP to the residuals of a frozen neural operator whose internal embeddings define the kernel feature space. Rather than learning a separate feature map, REEF-GP adapts the operator's intrinsic coordinate-feature representations to construct geometry-aware uncertainties. To ensure stability and scalability on unstructured domains, REEF-GP incorporates spectral-normalized projections, heteroscedastic geometry-aware noise, and efficient subset-based training that avoids restrictive low-rank approximations. Across five PDE benchmarks with varying geometries, REEF-GP preserves predictive accuracy while achieving calibrated uncertainty estimates competitive with deep ensembles but at a fraction of their cost. Our approach remains robust under geometric distribution shift, with uncertainty concentrating in physically meaningful regions (e.g., shock fronts). Our results demonstrate that accurate and scalable post-hoc UQ for neural operators can be achieved directly in their learned feature space, offering a practical alternative to parameter-centric approaches.