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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Structural Energy Guidance for View-Consistent Text-to-3D Generation

Text-to-3D generation based on diffusion models often suffers from the Janus problem, leading to inconsistent geometry across viewpoints. This work identifies viewpoint bias in 2D diffusion priors as the main cause and proposes Structural Energy-Guided Sampling (SEGS), a training-free and plug-and-play framework to improve multi-view consistency. SEGS constructs a structural energy in the PCA subspace of U-Net features and injects its gradient into the denoising process. It can be easily integrated into SDS/VSD pipelines without retraining. Experiments show that SEGS reduces the Janus Rate by about 10% on average and improves View-CS scores across multiple baselines, including DreamFusion, Magic3D, and LucidDreamer. This method effectively alleviates viewpoint artifacts while preserving appearance fidelity, providing a flexible solution for high-quality text-to-3D content generation.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Where Will They Go? Modelling Multimodal Pedestrian Manoeuvres from Ego-centric Videos

Pedestrian trajectory prediction from an ego-centric camera is challenging since it depends on complex interactions with vehicles and scene context, as well as the intention of the pedestrian. By modelling correlation and intent from the historical and future trajectories of the pedestrian, it will usually result in a multimodal (i.e. multiple modes) distribution. Existing stochastic predictors often sample multiple futures from a single unimodal distribution, which can yield sub-optimal 'mixed-mode' trajectories that lie between distinct motion patterns and become implausible in real scenes. In this paper, we propose MMPM, a mode-aware framework that separately models future trajectory distributions into semantically meaningful modes based on the pedestrian's crossing behavior. MMPM consists of two modules: behavior-aware Pedestrian Interaction Module (PIM) that jointly captures pedestrian-vehicle and pedestrian-environment interactions by introducing gaze, head and hand gesture, and a CVAE-based Mode-aware Trajectory Predictor (MTP) module to model the future trajectory distributions on two modes, crossing and non-crossing the road, separately. A query-based decoder further enforces mode consistency during decoding. Experiments on PIE and JAAD datasets show that our method surpasses state-of-the-art baselines. Our proposed MTP is model-agnostic, which can be integrated into existing frameworks such as BiTrap-NP and SGNet-ED to further improve future trajectory prediction performance. We additionally introduce a data-driven validation protocol that matches predictions to spatio-temporally consistent ground-truth trajectories, demonstrating improved frame-wise displacement errors over previous work.

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

PH-KAN: Port-Hamiltonian Kolmogorov-Arnold Network

arXiv:2606.14708v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Data-driven machine learning approaches have become increasingly attractive for nonlinear system identification, but standard models often fail to preserve the underlying physical structure and remain difficult to interpret, especially when no analytical model is available. In this context, port-Hamiltonian (pH) models provide a natural physics-informed representation. However, when these models are parameterized with standard multilayer perceptrons (MLPs), the learned constitutive components often remain poorly interpretable. In this paper, we propose a structure-preserving identification framework for nonlinear port-Hamiltonian systems based on Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs). The proposed PH-KAN model parameterizes the interconnection matrix, dissipation matrix, Hamiltonian, and input mapping using dedicated KAN blocks, while enforcing the port-Hamiltonian constraints by construction. This yields constitutive representations in which the nonlinear functions defining the identified pH components can be explicitly inspected, leading to a more interpretable model than with standard MLP-based parameterizations.

04.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Navigating a crowded developing brain leaves neurons with broken DNA

As neurons migrate to their final destinations in the forming brain, their DNA gets damaged. The brain has evolved a fix, but there can be lasting consequences if repair fails. As neurons migrate to their final destinations in the forming brain, their DNA gets damaged. The brain has evolved a fix, but there can be lasting consequences if repair fails.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

A Neuromorphic Trigger for Efficient Audio Event Detection

arXiv:2606.17775v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Efficient processing of continuous audio streams remains a key challenge for real-time and resource-constrained systems. This paper introduces a neuromorphic trigger for audio event detection, based on a spiking neural network (SNN) that selectively gates input to downstream models. The proposed trigger acts as a low-cost front-end, identifying salient audio segments and forwarding only these to a more computationally intensive model for tasks such as classification. The trigger is implemented as a lightweight fully connected SNN and evaluated on two representative tasks: Anomalous Sound Detection (ASD) and Sound Event Detection (SED). For ASD, the trigger achieves a one-second segment-based F1 score of 0.97 on a class-agnostic form of the URBAN-SED dataset, demonstrating high reliability in identifying relevant audio regions. For SED, the trigger is combined with the Dang classifier on the DCASE 2017 Challenge Task 2 dataset, showing a potential $42.6\times$ reduction in FLOPs while reducing the lower bound of the event-based error rate from 0.41 to 0.25. These results highlight the potential of neuromorphic triggers as real-time, energy-efficient front-end filters, enabling substantial reductions in computational cost.

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

CmdNeedle: Measuring the Incompleteness of Command Denylists for AI Agents

arXiv:2606.15549v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The adoption of AI agents is increasing rapidly. Terminal AI agents, i.e., AI agents that run in terminal environments, are a widely used type of AI agents. Terminal AI agents rely heavily on shell command execution to interact with the host systems. They adopt a three-list command-gating mechanism to mitigate security risks introduced by command execution, with denylists serving as the load-bearing component. However, modern operating systems often ship a large, ever-expanding set of shell commands with complex functionalities. Our observation is that even a built-in denylist of Claude Code, well-maintained by its developers, can overlook bypass commands that invalidate its effectiveness. Such negligence leads to fragile command denylists that cannot even block operations that practitioners expect them to block. This paper presents the first systematic characterization of command denylist fragility in terminal AI agents. The paper formalizes the command denylist fragility problem and proposes an LLM-driven pipeline, CmdNeedle, to detect such fragility. It prompts the LLM to propose possible bypasses and iteratively repairs them using feedback from a validator that executes them in a sandbox. In the evaluation, we applied CmdNeedle to 1,709 real-world command denylists (containing 13,332 denylist rules) collected from GitHub. The evaluation shows several key findings, including that 69.0–98.6% of the denylists are fragile, that this fragility occurs consistently across projects and agents, and the validity of several possible root causes for this fragility. Our pipeline and findings will hopefully facilitate future research and practice regarding the command denylists used by AI agents.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Pseudo-Feature Padding: A Lightweight Defense Against False Data Injection in Power Grids

arXiv:2606.20415v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep Neural Networks DNNs have achieved remarkable accuracy in various tasks including their application in CyberPhysical Systems CPS for detecting False Data Injection Attacks FDIA during critical operations However the unique infrastructure of CPS makes DNNs vulnerable to exploitation by attackers aiming to evade detection Additionally the distinct nature of CPS presents challenges for conventional defense mechanisms against FDIA This paper proposes an innovative defense framework that strengthens DNNs against such attacks by introducing an additional input layer that performs padding in the input samples using pseudofeature values derived from the inputs statistical distribution This padding increases the input dimensionality in a randomized and dataaware manner making adversarial attacks computationally infeasible due to the nontransferable nature of crafted perturbations and the unpredictability of the padded structure Our method is lightweight modelagnostic and requires no modifications to the core architecture making it highly deployable in realworld CPS settings We evaluated our framework on critical power grid applications such as state estimation using the IEEE 14bus 30bus 118bus and 300bus systems Experiments under adversarial settings demonstrate that our padding strategy significantly improves model robustness with negligible impact on performance and effectively mitigates attacks that would otherwise bypass conventional defenses

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Level of Physical Activity and ApoE Status - Effects on Alzheimer's Disease and on Mortality

Background: Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD) affect over 7.2 million Americans aged 65 and older, with the APOE-4 allele representing the strongest known genetic risk factor. Physical activity (PA) has been associated with reduced dementia risk, but its interaction with APOE genotype remains poorly characterized in large, genomically informed cohorts. Methods: We conducted a retrospective cohort analysis using linked genomic, survey, and longitudinal electronic health record data from the VA Million Veteran Program (MVP). Veterans aged

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Timestep Rescheduling in Diffusion Inversion

Diffusion inversion, which maps images back to the Gaussian latent space of a diffusion model, is a critical task for image reconstruction and editing. While DDIM enables fast deterministic inversion, it inherently introduces deviations that accumulate into noticeable inversion errors. Existing methods often address this by solving a fixed-point problem but largely overlook how the selection of the diffusion timestep in the noise scheduler influences inversion fidelity. In this work, we reveal that the deviation scale in diffusion inversion is strongly dependent on the timestep size, and exhibits a parabolic trend, with larger errors concentrated at both small and large timesteps. Based on this finding, we propose a simple yet effective nonuniform timestep scheduler that integrates a global rescaling with a local dynamic programming based rescheduling, enabling a strategic allocation of computational effort that minimizes the overall inversion error and preserves higher inversion accuracy. Our method serves as an off-the-shelf enhancement for existing inversion techniques and requires no extra parameters or computational overhead. Through extensive experiments, we verify that integrating our scheduler consistently boosts the performance of existing inversion methods, achieving superior results in image reconstruction and editing.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Computational references are not experiments: pre-registered validation of machine-learned sodium-cathode voltages

arXiv:2606.23725v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine-learning screens for battery materials are trained and judged almost entirely against computed reference voltages, and those references carry their own systematic errors. We report a case in which this matters quantitatively: our own screening stack (a graph-network voltage screen, a prior-art triage layer, and a local PBE+U bench) fails pre-registered validation against experiment-anchored literature values. Verdict thresholds, failure modes, and the primary metric were committed before analysis. On an operator-audited set of known Na-ion cathodes (n = 6 after one documented exclusion; verdict unchanged at n = 7), the raw held-out mean absolute error was 0.67 V, the pre-registered conservative metric, the upper 95% confidence bound of the cross-validated bias-corrected error, was 1.09 V, and the residual was strongly voltage-dependent (r = -0.94), so no additive calibration is valid. On the two compounds where prediction, database reference, and experiment could all be compared, the Materials Project PBE+U reference sat about 0.54 V below measurement: the reference, not the model, dominated the error. A prior-art screen found at least 70% of the targeted Na substitution space already published. We retire the screen, bound what "verified" means for our DFT ledger, and pre-register a calibration audit of it against four benchmark Li couples.

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

Remember, Don't Re-read: Stateful ReAct Agents for Token-Efficient Autonomous Experimentation

arXiv:2606.14945v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The autoresearch pattern enables autonomous experimentation by having a large language model (LLM) iteratively modify code to optimize a target metric. Its stateless design, however, reconstructs experimental context from scratch at every iteration, incurring $O(n)$ token cost per iteration and $O(n^{2})$ total. This work reformulates the pattern as a stateful ReAct agent using LangGraph, where typed persistent state carries experimental history across iterations via a tool-calling interface. Two benchmarks are evaluated: hyperparameter tuning (15 iterations, small per-iteration observations) and code performance optimization (40 iterations, large per-iteration observations containing full source code and benchmark results). On hyperparameter tuning, the stateful agent consumes 90\% fewer tokens (2{,}492 vs.\ 24{,}465). On code optimization, the stateful agent consumes 52\% fewer tokens (627K vs.\ 1{,}275K) while achieving comparable optimization quality on both tasks. The token reduction is structural: the stateless agent re-reads the full history at $O(n)$ cost per iteration, while the stateful agent operates within a fixed-size conversation window at $O(1)$ cost. This paper describes the architecture in sufficient detail for practitioners to implement a stateful autoresearch agent for their own workflows.

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

Theorem-Grounded Execution Ontologies for Interpretable Machine Reasoning

arXiv:2606.16010v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models have achieved impressive performance on reasoning tasks spanning mathematics, science, programming, and commonsense inference. Despite these advances, their reasoning processes remain largely latent, making them difficult to interpret, verify, replay, debug, and transfer across domains. Existing approaches such as chain-of-thought, tree-of-thoughts, graph-of-thoughts, and tool-augmented reasoning expose intermediate reasoning artifacts but typically lack explicit execution semantics, formal state representations, and verifiable reasoning structures. We introduce Theorem-Grounded Execution Ontologies (TGEO), a framework that models reasoning as an executable state-transition process rather than a sequence of generated tokens. Given an input problem, TGEO identifies relevant theorem families, binds the problem to a domain ontology, discovers semantic objects, instantiates states and operators, constructs predicates and contracts, and synthesizes an executable reasoning graph. The resulting graph provides an interpretable, replayable, and auditable representation of reasoning in which every state transition, operator application, and validation step is explicitly represented. TGEO integrates five architectural components: (1) theorem-grounded reasoning priors, (2) executable ontologies, (3) operator-mediated state transitions, (4) predicate and contract-based execution validation, and (5) architectural auditing and failure localization. We evaluate TGEO on theorem-intensive reasoning tasks derived from mathematical benchmark domains and a curated Golden Execution Suite. Our findings demonstrate the value of executable reasoning representations for interpretable, verifiable, and reproducible AI reasoning systems.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

FreoStream:Enhancing Stream Guardrails via Future-Aware Reasoning and Safety-Aligned Optimization

arXiv:2606.13737v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Stream guardrails enable token-level safety detection before full responses are generated. However, they often make overly conservative judgements and block those sensitive but safe tokens, which is known as over-refusal. Due to lack of full context, they also fail to detect implicitly harmful content from jailbreaking. To address these challenges, we propose FreoStream, a novel streaming guardrail framework. Specifically, FreoStream fine-tunes a LoRA module to perform Future-Aware Reasoning when the base guardrail detects unsafe tokens. The reasoning process follows a Future-Reason-Judge paradigm: predict the future, reason about the full context and give the final judgement. This design can effectively reduce over-refusal by incorporating the future information. Moreover, we introduce the Safety-Aligned Optimization module that extracts the safety-aligned component from the reasoning gradients to update the base guardrail model, thereby enhancing streaming safety detection. Extensive experiments on various safety benchmarks demonstrate that FreoStream achieves lower over-refusal rates and better jailbreak defense compared to existing streaming guardrails.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Unifying Quantum Smoothing Theories with Extended Retrodiction

arXiv:2510.08447v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Estimating the state of an open quantum system monitored over time requires incorporating information from past measurements (filtering) and, for improved accuracy, also from future measurements (smoothing). While classical smoothing is well understood within a Bayesian framework, its quantum generalization has been challenging, leading to distinct and seemingly incompatible approaches. In this work, we demonstrate that quantum state smoothing hinges on a uniquely quantum feature: the fundamental dependence of retrodiction on prior correlations. We introduce auxiliary systems into the prior belief to capture correlations formed during preparation and evolution and develop a comprehensive framework for quantum state smoothing based on extended Bayesian retrodiction. This framework identifies all previous approaches as different choices of the extended prior, and naturally extends it to other choices that have not been considered before. We also give an information-theoretic characterization of the choices of prior, in terms of the average entropy of the smoothed states. Our results establish quantum state smoothing as a fundamentally retrodictive process just like classical smoothing, with proper quantum features clearly identified.

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

Clusters are All You Need: Pre-Training the Tsetlin Machine with Semantic Clusters from Language Models for Interpretability

Pre-trained language models such as BERT achieve strong text classification performance but lack transparency, limiting their use in high-stakes settings. The Tsetlin Machine (TM) offers fully interpretable, clause-based reasoning but captures little semantic information, and prior attempts to bridge the two rely on static word embeddings that miss contextual meaning. We propose a semantic pre-training framework that transfers knowledge from a pre-trained language model into a TM without using embeddings. Text samples are grouped into semantically coherent clusters with K-means or Top2Vec, and the resulting cluster-sample pairs pre-train a non-negated TM with enhanced Type I feedback. The TM thereby learns interpretable semantic keywords that are fine-tuned on downstream tasks. Across five datasets, our method substantially outperforms vanilla and embedding-based TMs and reaches performance competitive with BERT while remaining interpretable.

16.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Progressive Alignment Objectives for Aligner-Encoder based ASR

Aligner-Encoders are recently proposed seq2seq end-to-end ASR models that replace decoder attention by predicting the uth token directly from the u-th encoder position, so the encoder must learn the alignment internally without cross-attention or a transducer lattice. In practice, this alignment often forms abruptly in the upper layers, making training sensitive and brittle on long utterances. We propose InterAligner, which adds an intermediate Aligner objective so alignment can form progressively across depth, together with an intermediate CTC loss (InterCTC) to stabilize optimization. On LibriSpeech with a 17-layer Conformer, a final-only Aligner reaches 5.0/7.8 WER (test-clean/other). InterCTC improves to 3.4/6.0, and InterAligner further reduces WER to 3.1/5.6 with the largest gains on long utterances.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Consistent Evaluation of Operators Involving the Position Operator in the Bloch Representation: Application to the Orbital Moment

arXiv:2606.11679v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The position operator plays a central role in condensed-matter observables such as velocity, orbital moment, and electric polarization. In solid-state physics, the evaluation of operators incorporating the position operator has not reached a consensus, as observed in the operator-level discrepancy between the local circulation of Wannier functions and the self-rotation of wave packets. Here, to achieve a consistent evaluation of such operators, we propose three rules for evaluating operators involving the position operator in the Bloch representation. The rules are devised to satisfy physical conditions: independence from the choice of unit cell, preservation of Hermitian conjugacy for the product of operators, and recovery of the correct intraband velocity. We further address the gauge dependence of the position operator and introduce a scheme termed gauge filtration, which systematically removes gauge-dependent contributions from the operators containing the position operator. This methodology ensures that the quantities obtained from the operator evaluation correspond to observable physical phenomena. By applying our framework, we reconcile the results concerning the self-rotation of the wave packet and the local circulation of the Wannier function. We expect our proposal to establish a consistent framework for evaluating operators involving the position operator.

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

SparseGS: Sparse View Synthesis using 3D Gaussian Splatting

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has recently enabled real-time rendering of unbounded 3D scenes for novel view synthesis. However, this technique requires dense training views to accurately reconstruct 3D geometry. A limited number of input views will significantly degrade reconstruction quality, resulting in artifacts such as "floaters" and "background collapse" at unseen viewpoints. In this work, we introduce SparseGS, an efficient training pipeline designed to address the limitations of 3DGS in scenarios with sparse training views. SparseGS incorporates depth priors, novel depth rendering techniques, and a pruning heuristic to mitigate floater artifacts, alongside an Unseen Viewpoint Regularization module to alleviate background collapses. Our extensive evaluations on the Mip-NeRF360, LLFF, and DTU datasets demonstrate that SparseGS achieves high-quality reconstruction in both unbounded and forward-facing scenarios, with as few as 12 and 3 input images, respectively, while maintaining fast training and real-time rendering capabilities.

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

Multi-Turn Reflective Masking Elicits Reasoning in Mask Diffusion Models

While reasoning on autoregressive (AR) models is often performed by chain-of-thought reasoning and reflection, their refinement of previous outputs still relies on fully sequential generation, even when only local edits are needed. In contrast, the masking mechanism in Mask Diffusion Models (MDMs) naturally supports explicit local edits on previous outputs, allowing selective refinement without discarding previous answers and generating another from scratch. While this property more closely aligns with how humans correct mistakes by iterative local refinement, existing MDMs do not support multi-turn masking and denoising. We propose Reflective Masking (RM), which elicits such an intrinsic reasoning capability in MDMs via lightweight post-training. RM provides a native test-time scaling, where an MDM iteratively revisits and revises its prior outputs based on evolving context. To exploit insights from previous turns like AR reasoning, we further introduce History Reference, a parameter-free mechanism that leverages intermediate denoising states during revision. Our approach requires no architectural changes and is easily applicable to existing MDMs. Across diverse tasks and modalities, including text generation, Sudoku, and image editing, Reflective Masking consistently outperforms standard masking-based baselines and demonstrates strong generality, positioning RM as a fundamental primitive for reasoning on MDMs.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Quantum conditional mutual information and channel capacity

作者:

arXiv:2606.25264v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Information measures acquire operational meaning through coding theorems. The quantum conditional mutual information (QCMI) is nonnegative due to strong subadditivity, yet a direct connection with channel coding has remained elusive. In this work, we propose a quantum communication task-conditional quantum communication-that fills this gap. We show that the optimal rate for establishing quantum correlation between two parties, assisted by a third system, is given by half the QCMI. This result naturally extends the classical key generation capacity of Csiszár and Ahlswede to the quantum domain. We place our model within the family tree of quantum protocols and compute the conditional capacity for several example channels. Our results provide new insights for code design in reliable quantum information processing.

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

GAE: Unleashing Physical Potential of VLM with Generalizable Action Expert

Vision-language models demonstrate strong reasoning and planning abilities, yet grounding these predictions into precise robot actions remains a central challenge. Existing Vision-Language-Action methods typically entangle reasoning and action generation, leading to limited generalization. We propose Generalizable Action Expert (GAE), a task-agnostic model that converts sparse geometric plans into dense robot actions. Our approach introduces a sparse geometric interface: the VLM predicts sparse 3D waypoints representing high-level intention, while GAE maps these waypoints together with real-time point cloud observations to continuous action trajectories. GAE is pretrained on a large-scale pointcloud-trajectory dataset comprising 150k trajectories from both simulation and real-world robots. To further improve efficiency and generalization, we introduce an Action Pre-training, Pointcloud Fine-tuning (APPF) scheme that decouples learning action dynamics from geometry grounding. After pretraining, GAE is frozen and reused across downstream tasks, requiring only lightweight fine-tuning of the VLM to produce the sparse interface. Experiments show that our method achieves strong performance and generalization across diverse visual domains, camera viewpoints, and natural language instructions.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

TerraBench: Can Agents Reason Over Heterogeneous Earth-System Data?

arXiv:2606.13148v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Climate and environmental decision-making increasingly requires reasoning across heterogeneous inputs, including gridded physical data, satellite imagery, geospatial context, and simulator outputs. Weather and climate foundation models can forecast well, but do not reason interactively in language, while large language models (LLMs) reason in language but cannot operate directly on high-dimensional Earth-system data. As a result, real scientific workflows in Earth-science remain underserved. We introduce TerraBench, a benchmark for grounded Earth-science reasoning, built on TerraAgent, a ReAct-style executable framework that interleaves reasoning, tool calls, and observations to couple LLM planning with scientific tools for environmental retrieval, geospatial processing, simulation, and artifact-backed computation. TerraBench unifies analysis of Earth observation imagery, gridded data, GIS reasoning and simulation in a single executable interface, whereas prior benchmarks isolate these capabilities into narrow individual tasks. It is also the first in this space to pair process-level tool-use metrics with tolerance-aware numeric scoring. The benchmark comprises 403 extensive agentic tasks across three tracks (Fundamentals, Simulator-Grounded, and Document-Grounded Verification) and eight application domains with 24,500 verified execution steps. These results indicate that reliable Earth-science agents must go beyond tool access to coordinate heterogeneous workflows, parameterize tools precisely, and preserve artifact provenance.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

DepthMaster: Unified Monocular Depth Estimation for Perspective and Panoramic Images

While monocular depth estimation has achieved significant progress, achieving generalized metric depth estimation for both narrow field-of-view (FoV) perspectives and $360^\circ$ panoramas remains an unsolved challenge. Existing methods are often tailored to specific camera types and struggle to produce accurate metric depth that generalizes across diverse settings. This limitation stems from two key challenges: the inherent geometric discrepancy between perspective and panoramic cameras, and the scarcity of panoramic training data with metric annotations. In this work, we introduce DepthMaster, a unified metric depth estimation framework. Rather than employing specialized networks to learn spherical distortions, we reformulate the problem by decomposing panoramic images into overlapping perspective patches. Crucially, distinct from prior projection-based methods that rely on ad-hoc architectural modifications to handle boundaries, we introduce a novel Correspondence Consistency Loss (CCL) and inject virtual projection cameras as geometric priors, allowing us to seamlessly stitch the patches while avoiding specialized operators and keeping the backbone largely compatible with standard Transformer designs. This strategy also resolves the geometric differences by unifying all inputs into a canonical perspective representation, and effectively circumvents data scarcity by directly unlocking powerful metric priors from vast perspective datasets. Trained on a mixed dataset that contains only one panorama dataset, DepthMaster achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on 13 diverse datasets, outperforming not only universal methods but also leading specialist models in both perspective and panoramic domains.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Multi-Agent Systems are Mixtures of Experts: Who Becomes an Influencer?

arXiv:2605.25929v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The effectiveness of multi-agent LLM deliberation depends not only on the agents' individual predictions, but also on how they communicate and collaborate. We study this mechanism through the lens of Friedkin-Johnsen (FJ) opinion dynamics, a tractable model for analyzing stubbornness, influence, and opinion change in multi-agent systems that captures empirically observed deliberation patterns. We show that the FJ parameters are input-dependent, turning multi-agent deliberation into a mixture of experts. This perspective implies that multi-agent systems can outperform single agents and static ensembles when routing reflects agent competence. Since competence is latent in practice, we analyze how influence is established through observable proxies: agents' self-assessed confidence, their perceived confidence, and initial alignment with other agents' views.

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

Universal Image Restoration via Internalized Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Image restoration seeks to recover high-quality images from degraded inputs but becomes highly ill-posed under complex, mixed degradations. While unified all-in-one models are common, their performance declines as degradation complexity increases. Recent works adopt Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning for multi-round restoration using specialized modules. However, this approach faces two key limitations: (i) increased computational cost due to multi-step processing, and (ii) weak modeling of interactions between degradations during stepwise inference. We introduce CoTIR, a universal image restoration framework that internalizes CoT reasoning within a single model. Concretely, we view image restoration as a specialized subtask of image editing, which implies that a large-scale pre-trained editing model provides a more favorable optimization starting point. Building on this, we fine-tune the model for restoration and further encode structured CoT-style reasoning into the learning objective via a differentiable formulation inspired by Lagrangian optimization, enabling holistic restoration without chaining specialized restorers. To facilitate training and evaluation, we further present CoTIR-Bench, a large-scale benchmark comprising 5.2 million samples with CoT-style reasoning traces. Extensive experiments on CoTIR-Bench and broad real composite degradation scenes show that CoTIR achieves stronger perceptual quality and more competitive fidelity than both all-in-one models and multi-round restoration methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/gy65896/CoTIR.