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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

How Linear Is a Transformer Feed-Forward Block? Per-Block Linear Recoverability Is Learned, Not Architectural

Authors:

Transformer feed-forward networks (FFNs) are often treated as nonlinear stores of computation, yet how nonlinear a trained FFN block actually is has rarely been measured. We treat each FFN as a position-wise input-to-output map and split it into the exact least-squares linear approximation plus a residual. The held-out variance the closed-form linear map explains defines a block's linear recoverability (R^2_lin), an optimiser-free measure of its linearity. Across all twelve blocks of GPT-2, Pythia-160m, and llama-160m, R^2_lin is highly heterogeneous and non-monotone with depth, ranging from near-linear (>0.99) to strongly nonlinear (

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

CausalMoE: A Billion-Scale Multimodal Foundation Model for Granger Causal Discovery with Pattern-Routed Heterogeneous Experts

arXiv:2606.13024v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Granger Causal Discovery (GCD) is fundamental for analyzing temporal dependencies in complex systems. However, existing neural GCD methods predominantly rely on a "one-size-fits-all" paradigm, struggling to capture distribution shifts and dynamic regime changes inherent in real-world time series. This often leads to entangled representations and spurious causal graphs. In this paper, we propose CausalMoE, a billion-scale multimodal Granger causal foundation model that explicitly models patch-level heterogeneity. CausalMoE introduces a Pattern-Routed Mixture of Heterogeneous Experts, which dynamically identifies latent temporal patterns and routes patches to specialized domain experts, effectively decoupling regime-specific mechanisms from shared dynamics. To ensure interpretable graph recovery, we design a Causality-Aware Self-Attention mechanism operating across variables, yielding sparse Granger causal graphs via proximal optimization. Furthermore, CausalMoE is the first to integrate LLMs and VLMs to align numerical signals with textual and visual priors, regularizing causal estimation in complex scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CausalMoE establishes a new state-of-the-art on fully supervised benchmarks, while effectively generalizing to few-shot settings where traditional methods fail.

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

Evidence of an Emergent "Self" in Continual Robot Learning

arXiv:2603.24350v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A key challenge to understanding self-awareness has been a principled way of quantifying whether an intelligent system has a concept of a "self", and if so how to differentiate the "self" from other cognitive structures. We propose that the "self" can be isolated by seeking the invariant portion of cognitive process that changes relatively little compared to more rapidly acquired cognitive skills - because our self is the most persistent aspect of our experiences. We used this principle to analyze the cognitive structure of robots under two conditions: One robot learns a constant task, while a second undergoes continual learning under variable tasks. We find that robots subjected to continual learning develop an invariant subnetwork that is significantly more stable (p < 0.001) compared to the control, and that this subnetwork is also functionally important: preserving it aids adaptation while damaging it impairs performance. We validate this pattern across three different robots spanning locomotion and manipulation.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

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

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

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

How Does the ReLU Activation Affect the Implicit Bias of Gradient Descent on High-dimensional Neural Network Regression?

arXiv:2603.04895v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Overparameterized ML models, including neural networks, typically induce underdetermined training objectives with multiple global minima. The implicit bias refers to the limiting global minimum that is attained by a common optimization algorithm, such as gradient descent (GD). In this paper, we characterize the implicit bias of GD for training a shallow ReLU model with the squared loss on high-dimensional random features. Prior work (Vardi and Shamir, 2021) showed that the implicit bias does not exist in the worst-case, or corresponds exactly to the minimum-$\ell_2$-norm interpolating solution under exactly orthogonal data (Boursier et al., 2022). Our work interpolates between these two extremes and shows that, for sufficiently high-dimensional random data, the implicit bias approximates the minimum-$\ell_2$-norm solution with high probability with a gap on the order $\Theta(\sqrt{n/||\lambda||_1})$, where $n$ is the number of training examples and $\lambda$ denotes the spectrum of the data covariance matrix. Our results are obtained through a novel primal-dual analysis that carefully tracks the evolution of predictions, data-span coefficients, as well as their interactions, and show that the ReLU activation pattern quickly stabilizes with high probability over random data.

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

Atlas H&E-TME: Scalable AI-Based Tissue Profiling at Expert Pathologist-Level Accuracy

Hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) staining is the cornerstone of histopathology, yet scalable, quantitative analysis of H&E whole-slide images (WSIs) remains a central challenge in computational pathology. We present Atlas H&E-TME, an AI-based system built on the Atlas family of pathology foundation models that predicts tissue quality, tissue region, and cell type labels across multiple cancer types, yielding over 4,500 quantitative readouts per slide at cell-level resolution. A key challenge to validating such systems is overcoming morphological ambiguity inherent to H&E-only ground truth and the limited scalability of more informed references drawing on modalities such as immunohistochemistry (IHC). We address this with a dual validation framework combining biologically grounded depth with technical and morphological breadth. For depth, we propose an IHC-informed multi-pathologist consensus protocol that substantially improves inter-rater agreement over conventional H&E-only annotation. This yields a molecularly grounded reference against which we compare Atlas H&E-TME and pathologists working from H&E alone. For breadth, we benchmark Atlas H&E-TME on over 200,000 high-confidence H&E-only pathologist annotations across 1,500+ cases spanning eight cancer types and their most common metastatic sites, with subtypes covering >90% of clinical cases per cancer type, drawn from 25+ sources and 8+ scanner models. Benchmarked against the IHC-informed consensus, Atlas H&E-TME matches or exceeds pathologist H&E-only performance and generalizes consistently and robustly across this broad morphological and technical scope. In doing so, Atlas H&E-TME turns the H&E slide – the most ubiquitous data in pathology – into a scalable, quantitative window into the tumor and its microenvironment, laying a foundation for the next generation of tissue-based biomarkers in translational and clinical research.

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

Learning aligned EEG representations with subject-specific encoders

arXiv:2606.16462v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cross-subject EEG decoding promises more training data, but it also exposes neural networks to strong inter-subject distribution shifts. We study whether task supervision and architecture alone can learn subject-aligned representations. We replace a shared EEG encoder with subject-specific encoders followed by a common classifier, and compare this hybrid model with standard EEGNet, AttentionBaseNet, and CTNet baselines with Euclidean Alignment (EA) on four motor-imagery datasets. EA improves shared encoders by recentering subject covariances, but the hybrid encoder largely internalises this role: validation-loss curves and latent-distance analyses change little when EA is removed. Subject-specific heads increase class distinctiveness and place each subject close to its own latent manifold, improving most subjects while leaving a method-sensitive subset. These results support subject-specific encoders as a learned alignment mechanism for EEG decoding and identify head selection for unseen subjects as the remaining bottleneck.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Scalable generation of heralded single photons via active feed-forward switching of a fiber delay line

arXiv:2606.16741v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quasi-deterministic single-photon generation is a key requirement for many photonic quantum technologies. Photon sources based on spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) are widely used for producing high-quality photons; however, the probabilistic nature of the process limits the generation of synchronized multi-photon states. Here, we demonstrate temporal synchronization of multiple photon-generation events using a free-space-fiber hybrid delay line with feed-forward control, enabling fast and efficient switching and scalable operation. Narrow-band, telecom-wavelength photons compatible for fiber transmission are heralded from a monolithic cavity SPDC source and synchronized across 20 time bins. This yields a sixfold enhancement in synchronized rates and enables multi-photon synchronization, with only a marginal increase of higher-order photon-number contributions.

09.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Consensus on Dynamic Stochastic Block Models: Fast Convergence and Phase Transitions

arXiv:2209.03999v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce two models of consensus following a majority rule on time-evolving stochastic block models (SBM), in which the network evolution is Markovian or non-Markovian. Under the majority rule, in each round, each agent simultaneously updates their opinion according to the majority of their neighbors. Our network has a community structure and randomly evolves with time. In contrast to the classic setting, the dynamics is not purely deterministic, and reflects the structure of SBM by resampling the connections at each step, making agents with the same opinion more likely to connect than those with different opinions. In the Markovian model, connections between agents are resampled at each step according to the SBM law and each agent updates their opinion via the majority rule. We prove a power-of-one type result, i.e., any initial bias leads to a non-trivial advantage of winning in the end, uniformly in the size of the network. In the non-Markovian model, a connection between two agents is resampled according to the SBM law only when at least one of them changes opinion and is otherwise kept the same. We identify the phase-transition threshold, up to the second-order leading term, between halting and fast convergence to consensus. We also give sufficient initial-lead conditions for consensus to occur within one, two, or three rounds.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Learning Geometric Representations from Videos for Spatial Intelligent Multimodal Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.05833v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at 2D semantic understanding but lack intrinsic 3D awareness, resulting in representations that fail to maintain geometric and spatial consistency across video frames. Given the scarcity of large-scale 3D data, we present GeoVR, a novel framework that learns geometric representations using purely 2D video sequences. This approach effectively restructures the semantic latent space within MLLMs to unlock spatial intelligence. Rather than employing superficial feature mixing, GeoVR reshapes the internal representations of the MLLM by distilling geometry knowledge from pre-trained 3D foundation models. This is accomplished through a multi-objective learning strategy driven by four complementary geometric targets: (1) estimating inter-frame camera poses to embed varying viewpoint dynamics, (2) regressing dense depth maps to anchor physical distances, (3) predicting a metric scale factor for real-world calibration, and (4) distilling multi-scale 3D features to align the intermediate feature space. Guided by these explicit physical and geometric constraints, the model's internal representations naturally develop strong 3D awareness. Extensive experiments on spatial reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that GeoVR achieves state-of-the-art performance, establishing a new paradigm for endowing foundation models with spatial intelligence.

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

Visualizing Uncertainty: Spatial Maps of Missing and Conflicting Evidence in Deep Learning

arXiv:2606.15767v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Understanding when and why deep neural networks are uncertain is crucial for deploying reliable machine learning systems in safety-critical domains. While existing uncertainty quantification methods provide scalar measures of model confidence, they offer limited insight into which spatial regions of an input contribute to different types of uncertainty. We propose a novel visualization framework, Uncertainty Activation Map (UAM), that combines Evidential Deep Learning (EDL) with Full-Gradient Class Activation Mapping (FullGrad) to generate interpretable spatial uncertainty activation maps. Our approach distinguishes between two fundamental types of uncertainty: vacuity, representing lack of evidence, and dissonance, capturing conflicting evidence between competing hypotheses. By leveraging the complete gradient decomposition property of FullGrad and the principled uncertainty quantification of Subjective Logic, our method produces theoretically grounded visualizations that highlight specific image regions responsible for model uncertainty. With this framework, vacuity and dissonance activation maps are generated by computing belief-weighted attributions, enabling identification of where models lack knowledge versus where they encounter ambiguous evidence. Extensive evaluations across multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework effectively addresses the critical gap between uncertainty quantification and explainability, providing intuitive visual feedback to assess model reliability in complex visual recognition tasks.

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

Intrinsic Gradient Suppression for Label-Noise Prompt Tuning in Vision-Language Models

Contrastive vision-language models like CLIP exhibit remarkable zero-shot generalization. However, prompt tuning remains highly sensitive to label noise, as mislabeled samples generate disproportionately large gradients that can overwhelm pre-trained priors. We argue that because CLIP already provides a near-optimal initialization, adaptation should be inherently conservative, particularly against the extreme gradient updates common in noisy settings. To this end, we propose Double-Softmax Prompt Tuning (DSPT), a hyperparameter-free method for intrinsic gradient suppression. By applying a sequential probabilistic normalization, DSPT induces a self-adaptive saturation zone that suppresses gradients from high-error noisy samples while maintaining informative updates. We also provide both theoretical analysis and empirical evidence about how this mechanism achieves adaptive suppression. This design transforms ``gradient vanishing'', traditionally a training bottleneck, into a principled noise-filtering shield for label-noise prompt tuning. Extensive experiments confirm that this simple, drop-in design achieves state-of-the-art robustness across various noisy benchmarks, outperforming methods with complex architectures and handcrafted hyperparameters.

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

CuMA: Aligning LLMs with Sparse Cultural Values via Demographic-Aware Mixture of Adapters

As Large Language Models (LLMs) serve a global audience, alignment must transition from enforcing universal consensus to respecting cultural pluralism. We demonstrate that dense models, when forced to fit conflicting value distributions, suffer from Mean Collapse, converging to a generic average that fails to represent diverse groups. We attribute this to Cultural Sparsity, where gradient interference prevents dense parameters from spanning distinct cultural modes. To resolve this, we propose \textsc{CuMA} (Cultural Mixture of Adapters), a framework that frames alignment as a conditional capacity separation problem. By incorporating demographic-aware routing, \textsc{CuMA} internalizes a Latent Cultural Topology to explicitly disentangle conflicting gradients into specialized expert subspaces. Extensive evaluations on WorldValuesBench, Community Alignment, and PRISM demonstrate that \textsc{CuMA} achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming both dense baselines and semantic-only MoEs. Crucially, our analysis confirms that \textsc{CuMA} effectively mitigates mean collapse, preserving cultural diversity. Our code is available at https://github.com/Throll/CuMA.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

STREAM: Multi-Tier LLM Inference Middleware with Dual-Channel HPC Token Streaming

arXiv:2606.13968v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Researchers and practitioners working with large language models face a fragmented landscape: local models are free and private but hardware limits the model size and context windows a researcher can use; institutional HPC centers offer powerful GPU resources at no marginal cost and keep data within institutional boundaries, but operate behind firewalls and are designed for batch jobs rather than interactive use; commercial cloud APIs provide frontier-model quality on demand but impose significant cost and data retention policies unsuitable for sensitive research data. No existing system unifies all three. STREAM (Smart Tiered Routing Engine for AI Models) addresses this gap with four contributions: (1) a three-tier routing architecture combining local, HPC, and cloud inference with a local LLM-based complexity judge; (2) a dual-channel HPC streaming architecture that separates the Globus Compute control plane (authentication and job dispatch) from a WebSocket relay data plane (token delivery), enabling sub-second TTFT (0.54 s median, 21.1x over batch mode's 11.40 s) through institutional firewalls without VPN or firewall rule changes, with end-to-end AES-256-GCM encryption ensuring the relay operator cannot read token payloads; (3) tier-aware context summarization that prevents long conversations from forcing simple queries onto expensive tiers; and (4) an HPC-as-API proxy mode that exposes HPC inference as an OpenAI-compatible endpoint callable from any standard client with no HPC expertise, a deployment pattern made practical only by the sub-second TTFT of contribution (2). Llama 3.2 3B achieves 85.1% free-tier retention on a 1,200-query benchmark spanning ten domains. Measured TTFT: 0.26 s local, 0.54 s HPC (relay), 1.68 s cloud.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

City landscape in sight: A crowdsourced framework for unlocking urban-scale window view perceptions from real estate imagery

City landscapes viewed through home windows influence quality of life, yet perceptions of actual window views at the urban scale remain understudied. This study presents an approach for large-scale mapping of perceptions using 12,334 window view images (WVIs) collected from actual residential properties listed on real estate platforms in Wuhan, China, representing a rarely explored form of urban view imagery that offers advantages over the rendered or simulated window views commonly examined in previous studies. Through a non-immersive virtual reality platform, we collected 27,477 pairwise comparisons across six perceptual dimensions (e.g.\ Vivid) from 304 participants based on 499 WVIs. A hybrid neural network model was trained to predict human perceptions of all crowdsourced WVIs and map their spatial distribution. Results reveal significant spatial autocorrelation with distinct hot and cold spots across the whole city. Floor level strongly influences human perceptions: while higher floors offer more preferred and extensive window views, lower-floor windows provide residents with quiet and vivid views. An inference model further shows that window view composition matters considerably: high ratios of sky, trees, and low-rise buildings enhance people's preferences and perceptions of vividness, whereas high ratios of high-rise buildings increase perceptions of monotony and oppression. Importantly, these effects are non-linear: the excessive presence of certain elements can alter their impact on human perception. This work advances urban-scale understanding of residents' visual experiences and provides evidence-based guidance for human-centric urban planning and real estate to optimise visual landscapes from windows.

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

SA-VIS: Sparse frame Annotations for training Video Instance Segmentation

Recent online video instance segmentation (VIS) methods have achieved impressive results, thus becoming the preferred approach to segment instances in videos. Despite the resurgence of impressive single image models, the online (or semi-online) VIS approaches outperform single-image models (e.g., based on SAM) by using long sequences of densely annotated frames during training. However,such a training setup of VIS is expensive in the sense of compute as well as dense annotations required. In order to solve these major flaws, we argue that the effective modeling of the instances and their evolution in videos do not require densely annotated frames. To that end, we propose a simple and effective module, called Past-frames Feature Propagation (PFP) which aggregates low-dimensional features from the image encoder of multiple frames. This simple low-compute module provides tremendous learning capability in using sparse video frame labels for end-to-end training. Combined with a light-weight frame-specific Instance Queries, our Sparse frame Annotation VIS (SA-VIS) significantly improves performance over its baseline. Most interestingly, our simple design that avoids complexities effectively bridges the gap in accuracy between training on sparsely and densely annotated video sequences. This translates to a mere 0.4% drop in performance of SA-VIS when using annotations for only 1/5 of the images in the dataset. Empirically, SA-VIS shows strong improvements over the baseline on YouTube-VIS 2019/2021/2022 and Occluded VIS (OVIS) and an over 1% improvement in AP on the state-of-the-art in a limited annotations scenario.

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

A Five-Plane Reference Architecture for Runtime Governance of Production AI Agents

Authors:

arXiv:2606.12320v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Enterprise security was built to govern data boundaries: the protected surface was data at rest and in transit, and the controls – access control, data-loss prevention, perimeter inspection – governed crossings of that boundary. Production AI agents dissolve this assumption. An agent reads context, calls tools, invokes connectors, and modifies systems of record on an enterprise's behalf, so risk moves inside the workflow, into sequences of individually-permitted actions that may transform a business process no one authorized. Existing policy engines do not extend to this regime: they evaluate request-time decisions against atomic principals, where agentic systems require stateful evaluation against composite principals whose authority attenuates through delegation chains. We present a reference architecture for the runtime governance of production agents, built from four composable primitives: a five-plane decomposition (a reasoning plane that adjudicates intent, and four enforcement planes – network, identity, endpoint, data – that realize the decision), stop-anywhere mediation, composite principals with capability attenuation, and audit as a structured evidence substrate. We define a taxonomy of six interruption primitives that generalize allow and deny, state and argue for four correctness invariants, and demonstrate the foreclosure of seven production-agent threats across five concrete workflows. A reference implementation of the policy-engine core supplies measured evidence: attenuation correctness and evidence reconstructability hold on every trial, adjudication runs in single-digit microseconds, and the audit substrate's tamper-evidence behaves exactly as designed. We are explicit about scope: the architecture governs delegated action, not model behavior, and a full-system evaluation against a live agent benchmark is the invited next step.

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

From Drift to Coherence: Stabilizing Beliefs in LLMs

arXiv:2606.17832v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are often hypothesized to perform implicit Bayesian inference, yet a key coherence condition, the martingale property of predictive beliefs, has been shown to fail in controlled synthetic in-context learning settings. We revisit this question in a more typical usage regime: generic multiple-choice question answering. Exploiting the discrete answer space, we compute exact predictive distributions and study belief dynamics induced by autoregressive answer resampling. We introduce prompted predictive resampling (PPR), where an LLM generates a sequence of answers to the same question. Empirically, PPR reveals early-stage belief drift, indicating martingale violations. However, after sufficient resampling steps, the belief process self-stabilizes and converges to a coherent predictive distribution. Based on this observation, we further propose (i) a seed-answer prompting strategy to accelerate stabilization, and (ii) a self-consistency loss that amortizes early-stage drift into the model via fine-tuning. Experiments on multiple-choice QA benchmarks show that our methods substantially reduce belief drift and improve predictive coherence without sacrificing accuracy.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

MRMU: A New Paradigm for Mendelian Randomization by Accounting for Measured Covariates and Unmeasured Confounders

Mendelian randomization (MR) is a powerful approach for causal inference, however, its reliability is frequently compromised by unadjusted covariates and unmeasured confounders, such as unmeasured pleiotropy and sample structure. To address these challenges, we introduce MRMU, a novel paradigm for the MR framework. Unlike traditional single-variable or multivariable MR methods, MRMU selects instrumental variables only from the exposure of interest and estimates one exposure effect at a time, while jointly accounting for measured covariates and unmeasured confounders. This design improves the reliability of MR analyses. In simulations and real data, MRMU achieved better type I error control, higher statistical power, and more accurate effect estimation than existing MR methods. Applying to coronary artery disease (CAD), MRMU identified robust cardiometabolic risk factors, including LDL-C, APOB, systolic blood pressure, body mass index, and smoking initiation, with consistent evidence across multiple CAD datasets. In contrast, traits such as HDL-C, height, and educational attainment, which were found to be significant by existing MR methods, were no longer supported by MRMU. MRMU further supported blood pressure-related traits, rather than lipid traits, as the more relevant pathway linking urate to CAD. Finally, by integrating large-scale plasma proteomics data, MRMU identified candidate CAD drug targets beyond established HMGCR- and PCSK9-related pathways, highlighting its utility for therapeutic target prioritization.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

TacCoRL: Integrating Tactile Feedback into VLA via Simulation

arXiv:2606.11743v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models provide strong visual, language, and action priors for robot manipulation, but visual observations alone often miss the local contact state required for contact-rich tasks. We present TacCoRL, a scalable framework that injects Tactile feedback into VLA policies and improves them through sim-real Co-training and simulation-based reinforcement learning (RL), without requiring large-scale tactile pretraining or extensive real-world contact exploration. The key idea is not only adding touch as an input, but learning how contact readings should modulate action responses in near-failure states that are rare in demonstrations and risky to collect on hardware. We use a real-aligned simulator as a closed-loop training environment for contact interaction. Mixed simulated and real trajectories first warm-start tactile-conditioned actions in the pretrained policy. Reinforcement learning with verifiable task rewards then optimizes the policy using simulated contact rollouts. It reinforces tactile-conditioned actions that lead to task completion, while a supervised objective on real trajectories keeps the refined policy anchored to deployment visual, tactile, and action distributions. The resulting policy transfers directly to the real robot without privileged simulation state or online real-world RL. Across four bimanual contact-rich tasks, the final visuo-tactile policy achieves an average success rate of 72.5%, compared to baseline of 50.0%. Result videos and more details are available at https://tac-corl.github.io/

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

FlowBank: Query-Adaptive Agentic Workflows Optimization through Precompute-and-Reuse

Large Language Model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems are increasingly powerful, but current agentic workflow optimization paradigms make an unsatisfying trade-off. Task-level methods spend substantial offline compute yet deploy only a single workflow, leaving complementary candidates unused, while query-level methods synthesize a new workflow per query at substantial inference cost. Our motivating analysis shows these paradigms are more complementary than competing: workflows discovered during offline search often solve different subsets of queries, and many queries handled by expensive query-level generation can already be solved by cheaper precomputed workflows. This suggests a different objective: rather than searching for one universally best workflow or regenerating one per instance, we should build a compact bank of reusable, complementary workflows and select among them adaptively at inference time. Doing so requires solving three coupled problems: generating complementary rather than redundant candidates, compressing them into a small deployable portfolio, and assigning each query to the right workflow under a performance-cost trade-off. To this end, we present FlowBank, a three-stage framework for portfolio-based agentic workflow optimization. Diversifying proposes DiverseFlow to steer search toward under-covered queries and produce a high-coverage candidate pool. Curating proposes CuraFlow to compress this pool into a compact portfolio with minimal redundancy. Matching casts deployment as edge-value prediction on a query-workflow bipartite graph and routes each incoming query to the portfolio member with the best predicted utility. Across five benchmarks, FlowBank achieves the highest average score among the evaluated methods while remaining cost-competitive, improving over the strongest automated and handcrafted baselines by 4.26% and 14.92% relative, respectively.

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

CoreMem: Riemannian Retrieval and Fisher-Guided Distillation for Long-Term Memory in Dialogue Agents

Personalized dialogue agents require continuous long-term memory to maintain coherent interactions across multiple sessions. However, deploying these capabilities on consumer-grade hardware (e.g., 8 GB VRAM edge devices) introduces severe memory and compute bottlenecks. Existing systems typically rely on isotropic cosine similarity for retrieval and heuristic rules for context compression. These approaches lack a unified theoretical foundation, frequently suffering from the hubness problem in high-dimensional retrieval and syntactic fragmentation during compression. To overcome these limitations, we propose CoreMem, a resource-efficient edge-cloud memory architecture fundamentally unified by information geometry. First, Riemannian retrieval replaces cosine matching with a locally adaptive Fisher-Rao metric, effectively penalizing hub memories via Mahalanobis distance with O(Ndr) Woodbury acceleration for real-time search. Second, Fisher-guided discrete token distillation (FDTD) introduces a hierarchical sentence-to-token compression mechanism. It derives sensitivity scores from Fisher information traces, providing a principled compression-KL tradeoff augmented with explicit structural syntax protection. Evaluated on the LOCOMO and LongMemEval-S benchmarks, CoreMem achieves strong accuracy improvements, yielding substantial gains in Open-domain (+4.51 pp) and Temporal (+4.17 pp) reasoning. Extensive profiling confirms that CoreMem operates seamlessly within a strict 8 GB VRAM budget, successfully bridging the gap between resource-constrained edge devices and the demand for theoretically grounded, lifelong memory agents.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Recursive Joint Simulation in Games

arXiv:2402.08128v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Game-theoretic dynamics between AI agents could differ from traditional human-human interactions in various ways. One such difference is that it may be possible to accurately simulate an AI agent, for example because its source code is known. Such an agent would then be fundamentally uncertain whether it is in the real world or in a simulation. Our aim is to explore ways of leveraging this possibility to achieve more cooperative outcomes in strategic settings. In this paper, we study an interaction between AI agents where the agents run a recursive joint simulation. That is, the agents first jointly observe a simulation of the situation they face. This simulation in turn recursively includes additional simulations (with a small chance of failure, to avoid infinite recursion), and the results of all these nested simulations are observed before an action is chosen. We show that the resulting interaction is strategically equivalent to an infinitely repeated version of the original game, allowing a direct transfer of existing results such as the various folk theorems. As evidence that the equivalence is robust, we show that it holds even when we relax some of the assumptions and that it also holds ``from the inside'' – meaning, for an agent that finds itself inside the game and has self-locating uncertainty.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Rigel: Reverse-Engineering the Metal 4.1 Tensor Compute Path on the Apple M4 Max GPU

Apple's Metal 4.1 exposes a tensor compute path: the Metal Performance Primitives (MPP) matmul2d operation over cooperative_tensor fragments, whose interface is documented but whose hardware behavior is deliberately hidden. The specification states which data-type rows are supported, never whether they are hardware-accelerated, where the operation physically executes, what its accumulator width is, or how it partitions matrix fragments across threads. We present Rigel, an empirical characterization of this path on a single Apple M4 Max (a pre-neural-accelerator generation). Using a checksum-gated, provenance-tracked microbenchmark harness, Rigel recovers eleven facts the v4.1 specification hides or contradicts. The headline finding: the Metal 4.1 fp8 (E4M3) matmul2d is emulated, not accelerated: it sustains 0.94x the throughput of fp16 despite reading half the operand bytes, so on M4 it is a memory-footprint feature, not a performance feature. We further show, via a three-signal triangulation (throughput ceiling, comparison against simdgroup_matrix, and per-rail power attribution), that matmul2d executes entirely on the GPU shader cores with no dedicated matrix datapath and no evidence of Apple Neural Engine routing; that it accumulates in >=fp32; and we reconstruct the opaque 8x8 cooperative_tensor fragment layout Apple documents nowhere. Acting on the characterization, a hand-fused GEMM + bias + GELU kernel beats the decomposed path by +6.5-12.9% in the cache-resident regime. All findings are reproducible from committed MIT-licensed code and per-cell CSVs.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Echo2ECG: Enhancing ECG Representations with Cardiac Morphology from Multi-View Echos

arXiv:2603.08505v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Electrocardiography (ECG) is a low-cost, widely used modality for diagnosing electrical abnormalities like atrial fibrillation by capturing the heart's electrical activity. However, it cannot directly measure cardiac morphological phenotypes, such as left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF), which typically require echocardiography (Echo). Predicting these phenotypes from ECG would enable early, accessible health screening. Existing self-supervised methods suffer from a representational mismatch by aligning ECGs to single-view Echos, which only capture local, spatially restricted anatomical snapshots. To address this, we propose Echo2ECG, a multimodal self-supervised learning framework that enriches ECG representations with the heart's morphological structure captured in multi-view Echos. We evaluate Echo2ECG as an ECG feature extractor on two clinically relevant tasks that fundamentally require morphological information: (1) classification of structural cardiac phenotypes across three datasets, and (2) retrieval of Echo studies with similar morphological characteristics using ECG queries. Our extracted ECG representations consistently outperform those of state-of-the-art unimodal and multimodal baselines across both tasks, despite being 18x smaller than the largest baseline. These results demonstrate that Echo2ECG is a robust, powerful ECG feature extractor. Our code is accessible at https://github.com/michelleespranita/Echo2ECG.