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

Quality Adaptive Angular Margin Learning for Respiratory Sound Classification

arXiv:2606.11915v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a quality-adaptive angular-margin learning framework that improves feature generalization by enforcing intra-class compactness and inter-class separability. Our framework, titled QLung, introduces a no-reference audio quality margin derived from spectral entropy and root-mean-square energy, which adaptively scales angular margins based on recording quality. To this end, we propose a log-scaled angular margin that stabilizes training under severe class imbalance. We also use an angular classifier that normalizes features and class weights, ensuring margin penalties are applied consistently on the unit hypersphere. Our approach improves in-distribution performance on the ICBHI dataset by 2.46\% over the cross-entropy baseline, and most significantly, achieves the strongest out-of-distribution performance on the SPRSound dataset compared to prior state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/RSC-Toolkit/QLung.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

FEMOT: Multi-Object Tracking using Frame and Event Cameras

Conventional RGB cameras have been widely used in multi-object tracking due to their ability to capture rich appearance and semantic information. However, their performance is often degraded under complex real-world challenges, such as motion blur, low illumination, and overexposure. Bio-inspired event cameras offer high temporal resolution and high dynamic range, providing complementary cues under extreme scenarios. Nevertheless, RGB-event multi-object tracking remains underexplored due to the lack of large-scale and well-annotated datasets. To address this issue, we propose FEMOT, a large-scale RGB-event multi-object tracking dataset that covers diverse real-world scenarios and 14 challenging attributes. With both RGB and event data as well as high-quality annotations, FEMOT provides a reliable platform for systematically evaluating RGB-event multi-object tracking methods. Based on FEMOT, we retrain and evaluate over ten strong trackers, thereby establishing a comprehensive benchmark for future research. Furthermore, we propose FEMOTR, a multimodal tracking framework that decouples RGB and event features and fuses them in the frequency domain, thereby effectively exploiting their complementary characteristics for robust object localization and identity association. Extensive experiments on FEMOT and DSEC-MOT datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The source code and benchmark dataset have been released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/FEMOT.

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

Concrete Subspace Learning based Interference Elimination for Multi-task Model Fusion

arXiv:2312.06173v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Merging models fine-tuned from a common, extensively pre-trained large model but specialized for different tasks has been demonstrated as a cheap and scalable strategy to construct a multi-task model that performs well across diverse tasks. Recent research, exemplified by task arithmetic, highlights that this multi-task model can be derived through arithmetic operations on task vectors. Nevertheless, current merging techniques frequently resolve potential conflicts among parameters from task-specific models by evaluating individual attributes, such as the parameters' magnitude or sign, overlooking their collective impact on the overall functionality of the model. In this work, we propose the CONtinuous relaxation of disCRETE (Concrete) subspace learning method to identify a common low-dimensional subspace and utilize its shared information to track the interference problem without sacrificing much performance. Specifically, we model the problem as a bi-level optimization problem and introduce a meta-learning framework to find the Concrete subspace mask through gradient-based techniques. At the upper level, we focus on learning a shared Concrete mask to identify the subspace, while at the inner level, model merging is performed to maximize the performance of the merged model. We conduct extensive experiments on both vision domain and language domain, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. The code is available at https://github.com/tanganke/subspace_fusion

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Finite-Element Matrix Product States for Continuum Models in One Dimension

arXiv:2606.14873v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a matrix product state framework for simulating one-dimensional quantum many-body systems in the continuum using non-orthogonal single-particle basis sets. By mapping the physical problem to an auxiliary computational space, we show that the resulting many-body overlap operator can be efficiently encoded as a matrix product operator for sufficiently localized orbitals, thereby generalizing a construction that first appeared in [arXiv:2405.10285]. This construction recasts the variational ground-state search into a generalized eigenvalue problem, which can be solved using a generalized density matrix renormalization group algorithm. As a primary application, we employ a first-order finite-element expansion to study the ground state properties of the Lieb-Liniger gas in the presence of inhomogeneities. This approach also provides a natural setting for exactly refining the lattice, thereby enabling multigrid optimization strategies for matrix product states.

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

AlignCoder: Aligning Retrieval with Target Intent for Repository-Level Code Completion

arXiv:2601.19697v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Repository-level code completion remains a challenging task for existing code large language models (code LLMs) due to their limited understanding of repository-specific context and domain knowledge. While retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approaches have shown promise by retrieving relevant code snippets as cross-file context, they suffer from two fundamental problems: misalignment between the query and the target code in the retrieval process, and the inability of existing retrieval methods to effectively utilize the inference information. To address these challenges, we propose AlignCoder, a repository-level code completion framework that introduces a query enhancement mechanism and a reinforcement learning based retriever training method. Our approach generates multiple candidate completions to construct an enhanced query that bridges the semantic gap between the initial query and the target code. Additionally, we employ reinforcement learning to train an AlignRetriever that learns to leverage inference information in the enhanced query for more accurate retrieval. We evaluate AlignCoder on two widely-used benchmarks (CrossCodeEval and RepoEval) across five backbone code LLMs, demonstrating an 18.1% improvement in EM score compared to baselines on the CrossCodeEval benchmark. The results show that our framework achieves superior performance and exhibits high generalizability across various code LLMs and programming languages.

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

MPC-Patch-Bench: Security-Aware LLM Code Patch for Multi-Party Computation

arXiv:2606.11416v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Repository-level benchmarks for evaluating Large Language Model (LLM) code repair on Secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC) software do not yet exist, and directly transplanting general-purpose benchmarks such as SWE-bench fails on three structural fronts: (i) MPC repositories are dominated by generic Python infrastructure rather than cryptographic logic; (ii) high-value MPC fixes lack the standardized tests rigid extraction pipelines require; and (iii) standard fail-to-pass evaluation is insufficient for code that must also be cryptographically safe. MPC is increasingly deployed for privacy-preserving machine learning, biomedical collaboration, and secure analytics. Existing MPC-specific code-synthesis efforts cover only operator-level or single-framework tasks; evaluating LLM agents on real repository-level MPC repair instead demands MPC-aware data curation and a verifier matched to the security and numerical-fidelity guarantees MPC programs must obey neither of which existing benchmarks provide. We introduce MPC-Patch-Bench, a repository-level benchmark organised around two frameworks. (1)The Data Curation Framework combines a domain-specific curation agent that filters raw pull requests through three cryptographic layers with a human-AI completion engine that synthesizes missing problem statements and Fail-to-Pass/Pass-to-Pass tests, yielding 205 fully verified instances. (2)The MPC Verifier provides dedicated security and numerical-fidelity checks via dynamic differential testing against plaintext oracles and MPC-specific static analysis rules that flag unsafe reveals, insecure arithmetic, and illegal public/private casts. The strongest evaluated LLM functionally resolves only 22.9% of MPC-Patch-Bench tasks; the MPC Verifier further reduces verified resolution to 17.1%, with up to 40% of functionally-passing patches rejected for cryptographic or numerical-fidelity violations.

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

Rotational Symmetry based Object Pose Estimation from Point Clouds in the Absence of Known 3D Models

Object pose estimation is crucial to many industrial applications, with one example being automated spray painting using a robot. However, confidentiality concerns often limit access to high-quality 3D models, posing a significant challenge for point-cloud-based pose estimation. In such scenarios, rotational symmetry, a readily accessible characteristic of many industrial objects, can provide valuable prior information to facilitate pose estimation.In this paper, we propose a method that leverages the rotational symmetry commonly found in industrial objects to address the challenge caused by the absence of 3D models. The object pose is jointly estimated with point cloud refinement through an iterative optimization process. This optimization relies on a rotational symmetry constraint loss. To construct this loss, each 3D point is rotated according to the currently estimated pose, and multiple correspondences are identified using nearest-neighbor search by exploiting the rotational symmetry property. These correspondences are then used to compute the rotational symmetry constraint loss, which iteratively refines both the pose and the point cloud.By explicitly incorporating rotational symmetry into the optimization process, the proposed method achieves robust pose estimation and generalizes well across diverse object types. The proposed method is evaluated on a dataset specifically created for point clouds without known 3D models, consisting of four categories of synthetic objects and one real wheel hub collected from a production line. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves performance comparable to methods that rely on known 3D models.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Granularity-Regulated Adaptive Computational Efficiency for Optimal Verification in Test-Time Scaling

Test-time scaling (TTS) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for improving the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs) by investing additional compute at inference time. A central component of TTS is the verifier, which selects or scores candidate solutions to guide the search process. While prior work has explored the benefit of verification, a fundamental question remains underexplored: what is the optimal granularity of verification under a given compute budget? Coarse-grained outcome reward models (ORMs) and fine-grained process reward models (PRMs) represent two extremes, yet neither alone achieves compute-optimality across all regimes. In this paper, we establish a unified theoretical framework, called GRACE (\underline{G}ranularity-\underline{R}egulated \underline{A}daptive \underline{C}omputational \underline{E}fficiency), that characterizes the optimal verification granularity as an explicit function of problem difficulty, verifier accuracy, and compute budget. We prove that there exists a phase transition: fine-grained verification dominates when either the compute budget is large or the problem is hard, whereas coarse-grained verification is preferred in the low-budget, easy-problem regime. Our theory unifies Best-of-$N$, beam search, and step-level MCTS within a single Pareto-optimality framework, and motivates an adaptive granularity strategy that provably achieves the compute-performance Pareto frontier. Empirical results on MATH-500, GSM8K, and AIME benchmarks corroborate all four theoretical claims, with our adaptive strategy outperforming fixed-granularity baselines by up to 3.1\% accuracy at matched compute.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Structuring Sparsity: Block-Sparse Featurizers Capture Visual Concept Manifolds

What is the geometry of a visual percept? The most widely used protocols for decomposing neural network representations into interpretable parts treat concepts as isolated directions, yet recent work shows that concepts are often realized as geometric structures in low dimensional regions of activation space. We turn to the literature of Structured sparsity to close this gap, and show that block sparsity, which groups directions into blocks, is the prior matched to a generative model in which a representation is a sparse sum of low-dimensional manifolds: the modern, learned form of a classical idea in visual neuroscience, where a visual feature is carried by a coordinated group of neurons rather than a single tuned one. We implement three variants of block-sparse featurizers (BSFs) and, through a minimum-description-length analysis, show that all three describe activations more compactly than direction-based featurizers, with the recovered concepts typically two- to four-dimensional. We then use BSFs to (i) recontextualize prior work, showing that curve detectors in InceptionV1 actually read from a single continuous curve manifold, (ii) discover novel manifolds including shadows and lighting in DINOv3, and (iii) support interpretable control of image generation in diffusion models (SDXL) via manifold steering.

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

Beyond the Linear Separability Ceiling: Aligning Representations in VLMs

A challenge in advancing Visual-Language Models (VLMs) is determining whether their failures on abstract reasoning tasks, such as Bongard problems, stem from flawed perception or faulty top-down reasoning. To disentangle these factors, we introduce a diagnostic framework centered on the Linear Separability Ceiling (LSC), the performance achievable by a linear classifier on a VLM's raw visual embeddings. Applying this framework to state-of-the-art VLMs, we uncover a pervasive ''alignment gap'', where most models fail to generatively outperform the linear separability of their representations. We find that the few models surpassing this ceiling do so via two mechanisms: by further refining visual representations into a more linearly separable format or by executing non-linear decision logic. We demonstrate that this bottleneck is not a fundamental limitation but a solvable visual alignment issue. Our method augments standard next-token prediction with a contrastive objective to restructure the visual manifold into a more one-dimensionally linear geometry, improving image-to-image comparison and enabling models to significantly surpass the LSC on abstract compositional reasoning tasks.

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

SpeechEQ: Benchmarking Emotional Intelligence Quotient in Socially Aware Voice Conversational Models

As multimodal conversational systems increasingly engage in spoken interaction, their ability to navigate paralinguistic social cues has become a critical bottleneck for natural human-AI communication. However, existing evaluations of machine emotional intelligence assess reasoning exclusively through isolated text or passive acoustic perception, overlooking the complex cross-modal reasoning required for active, multi-turn dialogue. We introduce \textsc{SpeechEQ}, a comprehensive framework designed to evaluate the sociolinguistic reasoning of Speech-Language Models (SLMs). The framework includes a validated dataset of 2,265 dialogues across 15 Emotional Quotient (EQ) subscales grounded in EQ-i 2.0 theory, along with a multi-turn evaluation protocol measured by our proposed Spoken EQ (SEQ) score inspired by human EQ assessments. Experiments show limitations in how both existing Speech Emotion Recognition and end-to-end Speech-Language Models understand and apply paralinguistic cues through speech. While end-to-end architectures outperform cascaded systems, \textsc{SpeechEQ} reveals that current multimodal models remain bottlenecked by a text-reliant ``modality shortcut,'' an alignment-induced ``safety trap,'' and ``contextual amnesia,'' highlighting the barriers to truly emotionally aware AI. Our benchmark can be accessed at https://huggingface.co/datasets/SpeechEQ/SpeechEQ and demo page at https://binomial14.github.io/speecheq-demo/

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

TNODEV: Toolbox for Neural ODE Verification

arXiv:2606.16567v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural ordinary differential equations (neural ODE) have started to appear in safety critical settings such as continuous-time controllers for cyber-physical systems and classifiers integrated into automated decision pipelines, raising the question of whether their behavior can be formally verified. Existing tools dedicated to neural ODE provide only a single reachability call without iterative input set refinement, limiting the precision of their verdicts to whatever one reachability call can deliver. We present TNODEV, the first sound formal verifier for neural ODE that integrates a falsification checker, a fast interval-based reachability backend based on continuous-time mixed monotonicity, a verification and refinement loop with three input-set splitting heuristics, and a parallel scheduler in a single end-to-end pipeline. TNODEV supports safe-set inclusion verification on pure neural ODE, neural ODE in closed loop with a neural network controller and general neural ODE (GNODE), with the safe set specified either as an interval or as the half-space intersection induced by a target classification label. We evaluate TNODEV on a range of benchmarks across safe-set inclusion and classification-robustness properties, including a direct reachability comparison against NNV~2.0 and CORA and a verification comparison against NNV2.0 on MNIST general neural ODE classifiers.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Tool-IQA: Augmenting Image Quality Assessment with Simple Tools

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have been increasingly adopted for Image Quality Assessment (IQA). However, current methods typically employ a static one-shot scoring paradigm, despite the fact that humans assess image quality through dynamic visual inspection, e.g., selectively adjusting views to verify details and subtle artifacts. Specifically, relying solely on a single-pass observation introduces two primary limitations: first, perceiving the image only at a global scale restricts the assessment of finer local details; second, the original intensity distribution of the image may overwhelm the visibility, leading to insufficient inspection of image quality. To address these issues, we propose Tool-IQA, shifting the assessment mechanism from passive scoring to a tool-augmented workflow. In particular, we equip VLMs with simple yet effective view tools: a Magnifier to inspect local details, and a Gamma Corrector to uncover visibility and hidden artifacts. The assessment follows a structured pipeline that consists of an initial observation with rubric notes, a tool-augmented in-depth inspection, and a final quantification for calibrated quality score. Furthermore, to ensure efficient and purposeful tool callings, we introduce a batch-aware training strategy to reward tool interactions that can yield positive contributions rather than simply encouraging usage. Experiments on a variety of IQA benchmarks demonstrate that, with effective tool calling and calibrated assessment, our proposed Tool-IQA significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art models, e.g., it achieves a PLCC of 0.854 on the challenging CLIVE dataset.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Distributional Loss for Robust Classification

This paper proposes a novel loss concept for supervised classification tasks. Rather than enforcing a direct mapping from each input sample to a single assigned label, we define an optimization objective over all classifier outputs as a bimodal Gaussian distribution. This softer target formulation implicitly captures class ambiguity, mitigates overfitting, and encourages the learning of more robust decision boundaries, all without requiring additional label information. Experimental results demonstrate consistent improvements in robustness, with particularly pronounced gains in low-data regimes, while requiring only minimal modifications to standard training pipelines.

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

Environment-Adaptive Covariate Selection: Learning When to Use Spurious Correlations for Out-of-Distribution Prediction

arXiv:2601.02322v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A common approach to out-of-distribution prediction restricts models to causal or invariant covariates to avoid spurious associations that may change across environments. Despite its theoretical appeal, this strategy can underperform empirical risk minimization when only a subset of the causal parents of the outcome is observed. In such settings, non-causal covariates can serve as proxies for unobserved causal parents and improve prediction when the proxy relationship is stable, but they can hurt when shifts disrupt that relationship. Thus, the optimal covariate set can depend on the specific shift encountered. Because different shifts leave signatures in the unlabeled covariate distribution, we propose an environment-adaptive covariate selection algorithm that maps environment-level summaries to environment-specific covariate sets. These summaries may be hand-crafted or learned from multi-environment data, and prior causal knowledge can be incorporated as constraints. Across simulations and applied datasets, the proposed method improves over static causal, invariant, and other non-adaptive rules under diverse shifts.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

AutoRelAnnotator: Calibrated Model Cascades for Cost-Efficient Relevance Evaluation in Sponsored Search

arXiv:2606.25871v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: How can we generate high-quality relevance annotations at scale without the cost and delays of human labeling? Relevance annotations are the backbone of search ranking systems which is needed for training data preparation, NDCG evaluation, and root cause analysis. However, human annotation is slow and off-the-shelf LLMs suffer from accuracy on domain-specific tasks. We propose a calibrated model cascade, a systematic approach for cost-efficient offline relevance annotation by routing queries through progressively larger fine-tuned classifiers. Our central insight is that accuracy and cost are orthogonal optimizations: domain-specific fine-tuning drives accuracy, cascading drives cost, and per-class isotonic calibration adds a small but reliable gain on top. Our contribution is threefold: (a) we decompose the gains and show that fine-tuning contributes 20 accuracy points while cascading is approximately accuracy-neutral but halves compute cost, (b) we introduce per-class isotonic calibration as one component of the cascade, contributing a small but statistically significant gain (+0.6 points over the strongest calibration baseline), and (c) we validate the system in production across six offline use cases, processing 150M+ annotations and enabling faster experimentation cycles. Our work is a building block for scalable, high-quality offline annotation pipelines in search and advertising systems.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Stalls and Spequlation: Pipelined Execution for Fault Tolerant Quantum Computation

arXiv:2606.19593v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fault-tolerant quantum computation requires the coordinated action of three distinct systems: classical control logic, quantum hardware, and classical error decoders. Current scheduling models treat logical operations as atomic, hiding the fact that these subsystems operate sequentially and spend significant time idle. We present a pipelined execution framework that decomposes each logical operation into its component stages i.e. Control, Execute, and Decode. Building on this, we discuss some speculation strategies that allow successor operations to begin processing before their predecessors have completed decoding. We evaluate our framework on several common benchmarks and show that pipelining with speculation reduces total pipeline steps by 20-40% compared to a no-speculation baseline. The most aggressive strategy consistently outperforms conservative alternatives, even though partial rollback is needed at times, because the per-rollback penalty is small relative to the parallelism gained. We further show that speculation facilitates load balancing by distributing work more evenly across the heterogeneous subsystems of a fault-tolerant quantum computer, converting idle time into useful computation while also saving on execution time.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

SPARC: Separating Perception And Reasoning Circuits for Test-time Scaling of VLMs

Despite recent successes, test-time scaling – i.e., dynamically expanding the token budget during inference as needed – remains brittle for vision-language models (VLMs). Unstructured visual reasoning chains entangle perception and reasoning, leading to long, disorganized contexts where small perceptual mistakes may cascade into completely wrong answers. Reasoning also requires expensive reinforcement learning with hand-crafted rewards. Here, we introduce SPARC (Separating Perception And Reasoning Circuits), a modular framework that explicitly decouples visual perception from reasoning. Inspired by sequential sensory-to-cognitive processing in the brain, SPARC implements a two-stage pipeline where the model first performs explicit visual search to localize question-relevant regions, then conditions its reasoning on those regions to produce the final answer. This separation enables independent test-time scaling with asymmetric compute allocation (e.g., prioritizing perceptual processing under distribution shift), and supports selective optimization (e.g., improving the perceptual stage alone when it is the bottleneck for end-to-end performance). It also accommodates compressed contexts by running global search at lower image resolutions and allocating high-resolution processing only to selected regions, thereby reducing visual token count and compute. SPARC outperforms monolithic baselines and strong visual-grounding approaches across challenging visual reasoning tasks, such as improving Qwen3VL 4B on the $V^*$ VQA benchmark by 6.7 points and surpassing "thinking with images" by 4.6 points in an OOD setting with a $200\times$ lower token budget.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

SkMTEB: Slovak Massive Text Embedding Benchmark and Model Adaptation

We introduce SkMTEB, the first comprehensive MTEB-style text embedding benchmark for Slovak, a low-resource West Slavic language, comprising 31 datasets across 7 task types – nearly 4$\times$ the depth of existing multilingual benchmark coverage for Slovak. Our evaluation of 31 embedding models reveals that large instruction-tuned multilingual models achieve the strongest performance, while existing Slovak-specific models trained for NLU tasks transfer poorly to embedding tasks. To address the need for efficient, locally-deployable Slovak embeddings, we develop \texttt{e5-sk-small} (45M parameters) and \texttt{e5-sk-large} (365M) by applying vocabulary trimming and fine-tuning to Multilingual E5 models. Despite size reductions of up to 62\%, our open-source models achieve competitive performance with proprietary APIs while remaining locally deployable for semantic search and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). We release the benchmark, models, datasets, and code openly, hoping our approach offers a replicable path for other under-resourced languages.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

High-Fidelity Two-Step Image Generation via Teacher-Aligned End-to-End Distillation

Few-step diffusion distillation has become increasingly mature for 4-8-step generation, yet pushing further to 2 steps remains challenging. In this work, we introduce Z-Image Turbo++, a high-quality 2-step image generation model distilled from the 8-step Z-Image Turbo teacher. Our method addresses the central bottlenecks of increased task difficulty and limited model capacity in 2-step generation through three simple but effective design choices tailored to this regime. First, we propose Distribution-Aligned Adversarial Learning, which uses teacher-generated images rather than external real images as real samples for GAN training, providing a more attainable and informative adversarial target. Second, we adopt Step-Decoupled Parameterization, assigning independent model parameters to the two denoising steps to better match their distinct capacity demands. Third, we perform End-to-End Training with Iterative Regularization, allowing the first step to receive gradients from final image quality while preserving a meaningful intermediate generation through an explicit step-1 loss. Together, these designs substantially narrow the quality gap between 2-step and 8-step generation in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations, highlighting the potential of carefully tailored distillation strategies for improving the quality-efficiency trade-off in few-step generation.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Anticipating the Optimism Gap: Predicting Distribution-Shift Degradation of RF-Impairment Detectors from In-Distribution Statistics

arXiv:2606.22054v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Detectors for GNSS radio-frequency impairments (jamming, spoofing, multipath) are usually reported with a single AUC measured on the distribution they were tuned on. That number falls once conditions move, and the size of the drop is rarely known in advance because labelled field data is scarce. We ask whether this optimism can be predicted before any out-of-distribution data is seen. On an open, parameter-grounded synthetic testbed with a tunable severity shift, we evaluate thirteen detectors (five physics baselines, full-feature logistic regression and multilayer perceptrons, and single-feature learned controls) across four impairment classes. The optimism gap, the difference between in-distribution and shifted AUC, grows monotonically as the shift deepens (mean Spearman correlation 0.50). It is driven by how many observables a detector uses rather than by whether it is learned, and it varies systematically by class. Centrally, a ridge model built only from in-distribution score statistics predicts the gap for a detector it has never seen (R^2 = 0.47) and for an impairment class it has never seen (R^2 = 0.46); both are significant against a 2000-fold permutation null (p < 0.001) and survive removing the feature that is, by construction, part of the target. The headline findings are synthetic. We then run the pre-registered protocol on three open field corpora: on Jammertest 2024 the cross-detector prediction holds (R^2 = 0.11, p = 0.009), and on SatGrid, whose spoofer power sweep gives a calibrated severity axis, in-distribution AUC overstates higher-severity AUC by up to 0.22 and to the point of sign inversion, with in-distribution AUC and realised gap perfectly rank-correlated (Spearman rho = 1.0). The mechanism survives contact with real data, at smaller magnitude than in simulation. We release the testbed, a software-receiver front end, the ingest adapters and the protocol.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Beyond Scalar Distances: Semantic Attribute Gradients from Frozen MLLMs for Visual Embeddings

Vision encoders for retrieval are typically trained with class-label supervision: each training pair reduces to a scalar that uniformly pushes the embedding apart or pulls it together, as if every visual attribute either differed or matched. A multimodal large language model (MLLM), shown the same pair, can articulate those attributes and use them to predict whether the images share a class. We propose SAGA, a framework that turns this language-grounded, attribute-aware perception into a training signal for the encoder itself. Specifically, we use Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to reward the MLLM for correct predictions on the vision encoder's tokens. Since correct predictions require those tokens to expose the specific attributes that differ or match between the pair, the gradient pushes the encoder to encode them, replacing the uniform pair-level scalar with attribute-resolved supervision. An auxiliary attention-distillation loss anchors the encoder's embedding to tokens the MLLM attended to, and a standard metric-learning loss shapes the embedding geometry for nearest-neighbour retrieval. The MLLM is frozen throughout and discarded at inference, matching the deployment cost of a metric-learning baseline. SAGA improves Recall@1 by 3 to 6 points over state-of-the-art baselines on CUB-200-2011, Cars-196, FGVC-Aircraft, and iNaturalist Aves on zero-shot image retrieval.

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

MUFFLe: Efficient Model Update Compression via Generalized Deduplication for Federated Learning

arXiv:2606.14354v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Federated learning is well suited to edge environments but is often limited by the uplink cost of transmitting model updates. This Work-in-Progress paper presents MUFFLe, a communication-efficient update compression scheme that integrates generalized deduplication (GD) into the FedAvg pipeline. MUFFLe deduplicates repeated patterns across the update vector, yielding a fixed-rate, variable-count compression scheme. Preliminary experiments on IID MNIST with 20 clients show that MUFFLe reaches the target accuracy of $92.93\%$ with 38~MB cumulative uplink communication, compared with 75~MB for 8-bit quantization, 86~MB for Top-$k$ sparsification, and 310~MB for uncompressed FedAvg. These results demonstrate the feasibility of applying GD to communication-efficient federated learning.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Beyond Accuracy: Measuring Logical Compliance of Predictive Models

arXiv:2606.20208v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine learning models are predominantly evaluated through predictive performance metrics such as ranking quality, prediction error, or classification accuracy. While these metrics effectively quantify how closely predictions match the ground truth, they do not assess whether model outputs respect predefined logical or domain-specific constraints. In high-stakes applications, including healthcare, finance, and autonomous systems, logical consistency can be as critical as predictive accuracy, yet no standard metric captures this dimension. We introduce the Rule Violation Score (RVS), a complementary evaluation metric that quantifies the extent to which a predictive model respects a given set of logical rules, independently of predictive accuracy. RVS treats hard rules (strict constraints) and soft rules (statistical regularities) differently, can be evaluated on any dataset and on any predictive model expressed over a relational vocabulary, and can be computed using SQL queries that are automatically generated for Horn rules. Beyond evaluating models, RVS can also evaluate the logical consistency of training datasets and help identify poorly defined rules. We evaluate RVS on three benchmarks covering knowledge graph link prediction and relational regression, including rule-based, embedding-based, and neuro-symbolic predictive models. Our results demonstrate that two models achieving comparable predictive accuracy can exhibit substantially different levels of logical compliance, revealing differences in model behavior that standard metrics fail to capture.

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

TopoCap: Learning Topology-Agnostic Motion Priors for Monocular Video-to-Animation

The explosion of generative 3D assets has created a massive demand for animation, yet current motion capture methods remain brittle, restricted to species-specific templates (e.g., SMPL) or requiring labor-intensive manual rigging. We introduce TopoCap, the first unified framework capable of extracting motion from monocular video and retargeting it onto characters with arbitrary, unseen skeletal topologies, i.e., from bipeds to hexapods and inanimate objects, without test-time optimization. Our key insight is that while skeletal structures are combinatorial and discrete, the underlying physics of motion occupy a continuous, low-dimensional manifold. We materialize this insight via a two-stage generative pipeline. First, we learn a Universal Motion Manifold using a Graph CVAE that compresses heterogeneous kinematic chains into a shared, fixed-length latent code. By explicitly conditioning the decoder on a structural embedding of the target rig, we disentangle motion dynamics from skeletal topology. Second, we treat video-to-animation as a conditional flow matching problem, predicting these topology-agnostic codes from visual features. To learn this generalized prior, we introduce Mobjaverse, a massive-scale dataset curated from Objaverse-XL. Comprising over 5,000 unique skeletal topologies and 2 million frames, it exceeds the structural diversity of existing datasets by two orders of magnitude. Extensive experiments demonstrate that \MethodMotion outperforms specialist models on human and quadruped benchmarks while enabling zero-shot retargeting for the long tail of 3D creatures. Dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/duckduckplz/Mobjaverse.