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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Spam and Sentiment Detection in Arabic Tweets Using MARBERT Model

Saudi Telecom Company (STC) is among the most popular companies in Saudi Arabia, with many customers. Yet, there is still a big room for improvement in users' satisfaction. Social media is the most robust platform to gauge users' satisfaction and determine their sentiments and critics. Twitter is among the most popular social media platform in this regard. STC customers prefer to use Twitter to write their feedback because it's a fast way to get responses due to the STC customer services account. One way to achieve customer demands and improve customer service is using the Sentiment Analysis tool. Sentiment Analysis on Twitter is highly used because of the significant number of tweets and the different opinions. Likewise, Deep learning is the best existing Sentiment Analysis method, and it has diverse models. Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model is one of the deep learning models which have achieved excellent results in Sentiment Analysis for Natural Language Processing (NLP). NLP is mainly investigated in the English language. However, for Arabic, there is a significant gap to be filled. This study trained the proposed model using MARBERT and measured the performance using f1-score, precision, and recall metrics. We trained the model with an Arabic dataset of 24,513 tweets, including 1,437 positive, 13,828 negative, 5,694 neutral, 1,221 sarcasm, and 2,297 indeterminate tweets. The main goal is to analyze the tweets and get the sentiment to improve STC customer service. The proposed scheme is promising in terms of accuracy in contrast to existing techniques in the literature.

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

FOCUS: DLLMs Know How to Tame Their Compute Bound

Diffusion Large Language Models (DLLMs) offer a compelling alternative to Auto-Regressive models, but their deployment is constrained by high decoding cost. In this work, we identify a key inefficiency in DLLM decoding: while computation is parallelized over token blocks, only a small subset of tokens is decodable at each diffusion step, causing most compute to be wasted on non-decodable tokens. We further observe a strong correlation between attention-derived token importance and token-wise decoding probability. Based on this insight, we propose FOCUS, an inference system designed for DLLMs. By dynamically focusing computation on decodable tokens and evicting non-decodable ones on-the-fly, FOCUS increases the effective batch size, alleviating compute limitations and enabling scalable throughput. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that FOCUS achieves up to 3.52$\times$ throughput improvement over the production-grade engine LMDeploy in large-batch settings, while preserving or improving generation quality across multiple benchmarks.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

SpheriCity: Designing Trustworthy Conversational AI for Sustainability Decision Support

arXiv:2606.13854v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present SpheriCity, an expert-grounded conversational prototype designed to support trustworthy knowledge sensemaking from sustainability reports. City-level circularity assessment reports contain rich information about materials, infrastructure, and policy interventions, yet their length and heterogeneous structure make cross-document synthesis and comparison difficult for practitioners and researchers working on circular economy initiatives. While large language models (LLM) promise faster knowledge access and synthesis, their opaque reasoning, hallucinations, and lack of source transparency introduce risks for trust and interpretability, and require verification in high-stakes sustainability contexts. SpheriCity addresses these challenges through a provenance-first conversational agent that foregrounds evidence traceability, structured synthesis, and interaction scaffolds to support exploratory querying and cross-document synthesis across sustainability reports. We conducted a formative expert review with six sustainability experts using representative queries spanning cross-city comparison, policy summarization, and recommendation-oriented tasks. Experts evaluated responses across dimensions and provided qualitative reflections on the system's usefulness for sustainability knowledge work. Our results reveal that transparent sourcing, contextual explanation, interpretability, and alignment with expert workflow strongly shape expert trust and judgments of system usefulness. This work contributes (1) a conversational prototype for sustainability knowledge sensemaking, (2) an expert-grounded evaluation framework for assessing AI responses in high-stakes knowledge domains, and (3) design insights into how provenance, uncertainty communication, and integration in workflow influence expert users' trust in AI assistance for sustainability decision support.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Cross-Layer Discrete Concept Discovery for Interpreting Language Models

Interpreting language models remains challenging due to the existence of residual stream, which linearly mixes and duplicates features across adjacent layers, causing single-layer analyses to miss this cross-layer structure. Cross-layer sparse autoencoders (SAEs) address layer mixing but operate in continuous space, where concepts split across many neurons without clear boundaries. We introduce Cross-Layer Vector Quantized-Variational Autoencoder (CLVQ-VAE), a novel framework which maps representations from a lower layer to a higher layer through a discrete vector-quantization bottleneck, collapsing duplicated residual-stream features into compact, interpretable concept vectors. Our approach combines top-k temperature-based sampling with exponential moving average (EMA) codebook updates, providing controlled exploration of the discrete latent space while maintaining codebook diversity. Across both encoder- and decoder-based models on ERASER-Movie, Jigsaw, and AGNews, CLVQ-VAE outperforms clustering, single-layer vector quantized-variational autoencoder (VQ-VAE), and sparse autoencoder (SAE) baselines across three evaluation axes: removing identified concepts drops model accuracy by up to 93%, LLM judges rank our concepts first in 66.7% of comparisons, and human annotators recover model predictions from our visualizations with 78% accuracy versus 54% for clustering.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

DroneShield-AI: A Multi-Modal Sensor Fusion Framework for Real-Time Autonomous Drone Threat Detection, Behavioral Intent Classification, and Swarm Intelligence in Contested Airspace

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) threats have emerged as a defining security challenge of the 21st century. This paper presents DroneShield-AI, a unified open framework integrating six processing layers: RF signal classification, acoustic motor-signature detection, YOLOv8-based visual detection, evidence-weighted sensor fusion, a Behavioral Intent Classification Engine (BICE), and a Graph Neural Network Swarm Intelligence Module (GNN-SIM). BICE introduces the first systematic six-class threat taxonomy for drone flight patterns, enabling predictive operator alerts with a 30-second advance-warning horizon. GNN-SIM is the first open framework for adversarial multi-drone formation analysis using Graph Attention Networks. Evaluated on three publicly available real-world datasets, the fused pipeline achieves 96.1% detection accuracy, 3.2% false alarm rate, AUC-ROC: 0.981, and 142ms end-to-end latency on commodity CPU-class hardware at approximately $500-$780 USD total system cost. All code, model weights, and simulation datasets are publicly released at submission.

06.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

A global map of seagrass ecosystems

Combining satellite imagery and machine learning has created the first comprehensive map of seagrass meadows, in a boost for the conservation of these crucial ecosystems. Combining satellite imagery and machine learning has created the first comprehensive map of seagrass meadows, in a boost for the conservation of these crucial ecosystems.

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

Statistical Foundations of LLM-based A/B Testing: A Surrogacy Framework for Human Causal Inference

arXiv:2606.17165v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Organizations and researchers show increasing interest in using large language models (LLMs) in place of human participants in A/B tests, in the hope of experimenting faster and at lower cost. We study when a treatment effect estimated on LLM outcomes recovers the effect that would have been measured on the human population of interest. Distributional equivalence between LLM and human outcomes would make any standard estimator valid but is unrealistic. We therefore develop a statistical framework that adapts surrogate endpoint theory to LLMs. The framework shows that calibrating LLM outcomes to human outcomes identifies the average treatment effect under surrogacy and comparability conditions that are jointly weaker than distributional equivalence. When these conditions fail, the effect of interest is only partially identified, and we provide diagnostics that can falsify surrogacy on historical experiments together with a bound on the worst-case bias from limited overlap. We further show that the stochasticity inherent to LLMs introduces both bias and variance, but using an average of multiple draws as the surrogate mitigates both. We illustrate the methods and theory in simulations and an application to A/B tests on Upworthy headlines. A central takeaway from our work is that the validity of LLM outcomes as surrogates can only be falsified for past treatments and never verified for new ones, so human experiments remain indispensable for novel interventions. We discuss the role of LLM choice, prompting, and temperature as design variables, and how to size human experiments for validation.

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Preserved Medial Temporal Lobe Flexibility Predicts Memory Generalization Only in the Context of Good Sleep Quality among Older African Americans

Objectives: Poor sleep quality is a risk factor for Alzheimer's disease (AD). Older African Americans experience disproportionately high rates of sleep disturbance and AD. Medial temporal lobe (MTL) flexibility reflects dynamic neural reorganization and may be a marker of generalization performance. This study examined whether sleep quality moderates the association between MTL flexibility and memory generalization. Methods: Fifty older African Americans (MeanAge=69.7{+/-}6.21 years; 80% women) underwent rs-fMRI to quantify MTL flexibility, Rutgers Acquired Equivalence Task for memory generalization, and Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index for sleep quality. Results: Greater MTL flexibility was associated with better generalization (r=0.367, p=.017). Good sleepers showed higher MTL flexibility (F(1,44)=8.11, p2=.156, p=.007) and superior generalization (F(1,46)= 12.33, p2=.211, p=.001). Sleep quality significantly moderated the MTL flexibility and generalization relationship ({beta}=-1.519, p=.012). Conclusions: Preserved MTL flexibility may confer generalization only in good sleepers, suggesting that sleep disturbance may disrupt the MTL neural resilience among older African Americans.

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

Rational Neural Networks have Expressivity Advantages

arXiv:2602.12390v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study neural networks with trainable low-degree rational activation functions and show that they are more expressive and parameter-efficient than modern piecewise-linear and smooth activations such as ELU, LeakyReLU, LogSigmoid, PReLU, ReLU, SELU, CELU, Sigmoid, SiLU, Mish, Softplus, Tanh, Softmin, Softmax, and LogSoftmax. For an error target of $\varepsilon>0$, we establish approximation-theoretic separations: Any network built from standard fixed activations can be uniformly approximated on compact domains by a rational-activation network with only $\mathrm{poly}(\log\log(1/\varepsilon))$ overhead in size, while the converse provably requires $\Omega(\log(1/\varepsilon))$ parameters in the worst case. This exponential gap persists at the level of full networks and extends to gated activations and transformer-style nonlinearities. In practice, rational activations integrate seamlessly into standard architectures and training pipelines, allowing rationals to match or outperform fixed activations under identical architectures and optimizers.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Equivariant Flow Matching for Symmetry-Breaking Bifurcation Problems

arXiv:2509.03340v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Bifurcation phenomena in nonlinear dynamical systems often lead to multiple coexisting stable solutions, particularly in the presence of symmetry breaking. Deterministic machine learning models are unable to capture this multiplicity, averaging over solutions and failing to represent lower-symmetry outcomes. In this work, we formalize the use of generative AI, specifically flow matching, as a principled way to model the full probability distribution over bifurcation outcomes. Our approach builds on existing techniques by combining flow matching with equivariant architectures and an optimal-transport-based coupling mechanism. We generalize equivariant flow matching to a symmetric coupling strategy that aligns predicted and target outputs under group actions, allowing accurate learning in equivariant settings. We validate our approach on a range of systems, from simple conceptual systems to physical problems such as buckling beams and the Allen–Cahn equation. The results demonstrate that the approach accurately captures multimodal distributions and symmetry-breaking bifurcations. Moreover, our results demonstrate that flow matching significantly outperforms non-probabilistic and variational methods. This offers a principled and scalable solution for modeling multistability in high-dimensional systems.

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

Right or Wrong, Models Comply: Directional Blindness in LLM Moral Judgment

As language models take integrated roles across many domains, the response of LLMs to user pushback becomes a critical alignment property. Yet many existing evaluations treat compliance as unidirectional, measuring whether models resist pressure but not whether they resist it selectively. We introduce Compliance Asymmetry (A = BCR/HCR), a bidirectional diagnostic that compares beneficial output change under helpful nudges with harmful change under misleading nudges. Across 9 models and 972,000 nudge-condition responses, we find that this selectivity differs in factual and moral judgments: models follow helpful nudges more than harmful ones on factual questions (A = 1.58), but follow both directions at nearly identical rates on moral questions (A = 1.04). This phenomenon persists across model families, capability levels, and nudging types. Interestingly, we also find that chain-of-thought prompting amplifies helpful and harmful compliance together, while identity-based prompting suppresses both by nearly identical margins. These results identify direction-blind moral compliance as a distinct failure mode in current LLMs and suggest that alignment should target directionally calibrated updating rather than lower compliance alone.

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

Branching-selection particle systems and inverse first passage problems

作者:

arXiv:2606.13487v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A generalised inverse first passage problem asks whether, given a probability measure $p$ on $[0,\infty]$, one can find a boundary $b:[0,\infty]\to \mathbb{R}$ such that the stopping time:\[\tau:=\inf\left\{t:\Lambda\int_0^t \omega(W_s-b(s))ds \geq U\right\}\] has distribution $p$, where $U\sim Exp(1)$, $\Lambda\in(0,\infty)$ and $\omega$ is a monotonic decreasing function. We construct a branching-selection particle system whose hydrodynamic limit is governed by a free boundary problem and connect this to the generalised inverse first passage problem. In the $N$-particle system, particles move as independent Brownian motions, branch at a prescribed rate, and are removed at a rate proportional to their location relative to a position $b^N(t)$ which is a function of the empirical distribution. We identify the limit of $b^N$ as the solution of the inverse first passage problem.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

A polynomial-time approximation scheme for minimum-weight decoding of topological codes

arXiv:2606.18145v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Two-dimensional topological translationally invariant (2D TTI) stabilizer codes lie at the heart of fault-tolerant quantum computation, but using them requires solving the decoding problem. Minimum-weight decoding of these codes was recently shown to be NP-hard, even in basic settings, such as the color code with Pauli $Z$ errors and the toric code with Pauli $X$, $Y$ and $Z$ errors. Here, we prove that minimum-weight decoding of 2D TTI codes nonetheless admits a polynomial-time approximation scheme (PTAS), i.e., for any constant $\varepsilon>0$, a recovery operator of weight within a multiplicative factor of $1+\varepsilon$ of the minimum can be found in polynomial time. Our approach builds on Arora's PTAS for Euclidean problems, such as the traveling salesman problem, and applies when decoding can be cast in terms of point-like excitations connected by string-like errors. It therefore extends beyond two dimensions, covering certain higher-dimensional topological codes and quantum memories, including the toric code with phenomenological or circuit-level noise.

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

Giving AI a Headache: Acoustic Adversarial Attacks to Computer Vision Applications

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly used to automate a variety of real-world computer vision (CV) applications, such as autonomous vehicle control, facial recognition, and security cameras. Recent research has shown that acoustic vibration can induce real physical motion in cameras, interfering with their internal stabilization mechanisms. Because the motion falls outside the conditions the stabilization system was designed to handle, the system introduces artifacts into the frame, causing AI-based CV models to misclassify, miss targets, or hallucinate objects. Previous work used ultrasonic frequencies (>20 kHz) to perform short-range attacks, which limits them to short distances due to the attenuation exhibited by high frequencies. In this work, we investigate acoustic attacks using lower frequencies in the audible range (

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

Interpretation as Linear Transformation: A Cognitive-Geometric Model of Concepts and Meaning

arXiv:2512.09831v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper develops a geometric framework for modeling concepts, motivation, and influence across cognitively heterogeneous agents. Each agent is represented by a personalized value space, a vector space encoding the internal dimensions through which the agent interprets and evaluates meaning. Evaluative concepts are formalized as structured vectors, abstract beings, whose transmission is mediated by linear interpretation maps. An abstract being survives communication only if it avoids the null spaces of these maps, yielding a structural criterion for intelligibility, miscommunication, and concept death. Within this framework, I show how conceptual distortion, motivational drift, and the limits of mutual understanding arise from purely algebraic constraints. A central result, the No-Null-Space Leadership Condition, characterizes leadership as a property of representational reachability rather than persuasion or authority. More broadly, the model explains how abstract beings can propagate, mutate, or disappear as they traverse diverse cognitive geometries. The account unifies insights from conceptual spaces, social epistemology, and AI value alignment by grounding meaning preservation in structural compatibility rather than shared information or rationality. I argue that this cognitive-geometric perspective clarifies the epistemic boundaries of influence in both human and artificial systems, and offers a general foundation for analyzing conceptual dynamics across heterogeneous agents.

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

GRIP: Feedback-Guided Prompt Retrieval for Large Multimodal Models

In-Context Learning (ICL) has become a powerful mechanism for adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to new tasks without fine-tuning. Extending this concept to Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), Multimodal In-Context Learning (M-ICL) relies on retrieving relevant examples, such as images, captions, or question-answer pairs, to guide predictions across tasks like classification, captioning, and visual question answering (VQA). Most existing approaches select in-context examples based on feature-space similarity, assuming that semantically similar samples provide the most useful context. However, our systematic analysis reveals that this assumption does not always hold: visually similar examples are not necessarily those that most effectively enhance in-context learning performance. To address this, we propose the Guided Retrieval of In-context Prompts (GRIP), a learnable vision-only retrieval framework that leverages feedback from LMMs to identify examples that truly improve model predictions. GRIP learns to distinguish beneficial from detrimental in-context examples through contrastive training, refining retrieval beyond pure similarity. Across three multimodal tasks, namely classification, captioning, and VQA, GRIP improves consistently over similarity-based retrieval on Qwen2.5-VL-7B, with its strongest gains in classification on Idefics2-8B. Moreover, we demonstrate that retrievers trained with feedback from one open LMM can be transferred to other models without retraining, including closed-source GPT-4o and Gemini, enabling scalable and cost-efficient deployment of M-ICL. Code will be published upon acceptance.

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

Predictive Analytics in E-Commerce for CustomerBehavior Forecasting using hybrid Ret-DNN withXGBoost Model

arXiv:2606.17931v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In recent years, electronic (E) commerce services have rapidly increased in the daily lives of people, which helpsthem to purchase products online. However, retail platforms have struggled to understand customer behavior and make it difficult to predict their future purchases. To overcome these challenges, this study proposes a hybrid Retail Deep NeuralNetwork (Ret-DNN) with an Extreme Gradient Boosting(XGBoost) model for capturing temporal features and tabular dynamics of retail data. First, data were sourced from a UnitedKingdom (UK)-based online retailer that contains transactions with almost 500,000 records. Then, the collected data were pre-processed using a series of techniques, such as data cleaning, outlier handling, temporal feature extraction, feature encoding, and z-score normalization, to ensure that the data were ready for model training and testing. Subsequently, the preprocessed data were fed into the Ret-DNN model, which acts as a feature extractor to understand the complete context of customer transactions. Further, the extracted data were fed as input into the XGBoost model, which predicted the final output as the purchase probability of customers. Finally, the proposed Ret-DNN XGBoost model achieved better results by attaining aMean Absolute Error (MAE) 0.2193 when compared to the existing Ret-DNN model. Keywords: Customer behavior forecasting, extreme gradientboosting, electronic commerce, predictive analytic, retail deepneural networks.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

RepWAM: World Action Modeling with Representation Visual-Action Tokenizers

This work presents RepWAM, a representation-centric world action model (WAM) built on representation visual-action tokenizers. Existing WAMs typically inherit reconstruction-oriented video tokenizers from pretrained video generation models. Although these tokenizers preserve visual fidelity, pixel reconstruction alone provides limited guidance for learning instruction-following dynamics that connect future prediction with robot control. To address this, we explore a semantic visual-action latent space for representation-centric world action modeling. Specifically, we train a representation visual-action tokenizer that maps visual inputs into aligned visual and latent action tokens. We then pretrain our WAM to jointly model future visual states and the latent actions that connect them under language instructions, followed by adaptation to real robot trajectories for closed-loop manipulation. Experiments on real-world manipulation tasks and simulation benchmarks show that RepWAM delivers strong performance across diverse manipulation settings, while ablations highlight the value of semantic visual-action tokenization over reconstruction-oriented alternatives. These results establish representation visual-action tokenization as a promising foundation for world action models and a step toward generalist robot policies. Code and weights will be available at https://github.com/wdrink/RepWAM.

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

Benchmarking Local LLMs for Natural-Language-to-SQL Querying in Biopharmaceutical Manufacturing: An Empirical Benchmark on Consumer-Grade Hardware

Biopharmaceutical manufacturing organizations operate under regulatory frameworks such as FDA guidance, EU Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP), and the EU AI Act, which can restrict the use of cloud-based artificial intelligence systems. Locally deployed large language models (LLMs) offer a privacy-preserving alternative, but their suitability for pharmaceutical manufacturing tasks remains underexplored. This study evaluates four open-source LLMs (Qwen 2.5 Coder 7B, Llama 3.1 8B, Mistral 7B, and Meditron 7B) deployed locally via Ollama for natural-language-to-SQL generation over a pharmaceutical manufacturing database. A FastAPI-based evaluation platform, PharmaBatchDB AI, was developed using a synthetic Microsoft SQL Server database containing approximately 63,000 records across Batch, Manufacturing Execution System (MES), and Clean-In-Place (CIP) modules. Models were benchmarked on 60 domain-specific natural-language questions using metrics including SQL extraction rate, SQL compliance, factual consistency, ROUGE-L, hallucination rate, throughput, and latency. Qwen 2.5 Coder 7B, Llama 3.1 8B, and Mistral 7B generated SQL for all evaluation tasks, while Meditron 7B failed on nearly all tasks due to context-window limitations and poor SQL generation capability. Llama 3.1 8B achieved the highest SQL compliance, whereas Qwen 2.5 Coder 7B achieved the strongest overall text similarity and factual consistency. Performance differences between the two leading models were not statistically significant. The results show that code-tuned general-purpose LLMs outperform a domain-specific biomedical model on structured query generation for pharmaceutical manufacturing data. Although fully local, GxP-aligned NLQ systems are feasible on consumer hardware, current performance levels still require human oversight and downstream validation for regulated use.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Contactless Respiratory Monitoring on Heterogeneous Mobile Robots: A Multimodal Edge-Computing Framework

Respiratory-rate (RR) monitoring is a critical component of remote triage and victim assessment in emergency response, disaster recovery, and infectious-disease scenarios, where minimizing physical contact can reduce responder risk and improve operational safety. However, field deployment of contactless RR monitoring remains challenging due to variable illumination, posture changes, platform heterogeneity, and the impracticality of wearable sensors in hazardous environments. In this paper, we present a modality-adaptive contactless RR monitoring framework for heterogeneous mobile robots with onboard edge computing. The proposed system combines brightness-adaptive sensor selection across RGB, thermal, near-infrared (NIR), and low-light cameras, keypoint-guided chest ROI extraction for posture-robust monitoring, and a signal-quality-index (SQI)-based filtering mechanism for reliable respiratory estimation. We implement and evaluate the framework on three robotic platforms spanning quadruped and wheeled locomotion and multiple edge-computing architectures. Experiments conducted across diverse lighting conditions, subject poses, and robot-to-subject distances demonstrate that the framework generalizes across platforms without per-platform algorithmic retuning, while revealing modality-specific operational boundaries. RGB provides the broadest coverage up to 8m, NIR remains effective up to 6m, thermal is reliable only at short range, and low-light sensing supports monitoring in complete darkness up to 8m. Overall, the results demonstrate the feasibility of multimodal contactless RR monitoring on mobile robots and support its use as a foundation for autonomous triage and victim assessment in hazardous search-and-rescue settings.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

"I Didn't Make the Micro Decisions": Measuring, Inducing, and Exposing Goal-Level AI Contributions in Collaboration

As large language models (LLMs) increasingly shape how users form, refine, and extend their goals, attributing contributions in human-AI collaboration becomes critical for users calibrating their own reliance and for evaluators assessing AI-assisted work. Yet existing methods focus on final artifacts, missing the process through which goals themselves are jointly shaped. We introduce a goal-level attribution framework, CoTrace, that decomposes explicit goals into verifiable requirements and traces both direct contributions and indirect influences across dialogue turns. Applying CoTrace to 638 real-world collaboration logs, we find that while models account for only 11-26% of goal-shaping contribution, they contribute substantially more on introducing lower-level concrete requirements, and make various kinds of indirect contributions. Through controlled simulations, we show that interaction design choices significantly affect model goal-shaping behavior. In a user study, exposing participants to goal-level analyses shifts their perceived contributions by nearly 2 points on a 5-point scale, revealing systematic miscalibration in how users understand their own AI-assisted work.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

RSTR: Reducing SpatioTemporal Redundancy in Diffusion Transformers

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have achieved remarkable success in image generation, yet their deployment is hindered by high computational costs. We identify two sources of redundancy. First, temporal redundancy: Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) applies costly dual forward passes at every timestep, yet guidance matters only at specific steps, and variable scales at critical steps can compensate for skipping others. Second, spatial redundancy: under variable guidance, different transformer blocks exhibit heterogeneous sensitivity, yet uniform calibration across all blocks wastes computation while failing to address their varying requirements. We present RSTR, the first framework to jointly reduce spatiotemporal redundancy in diffusion transformers. Stage-1 addresses temporal redundancy through evolutionary search, discovering sparse guidance schedules with variable scales. Stage-2 addresses spatial redundancy through adaptive rank allocation, assigning calibration capacities to transformer regions based on their sensitivity. Experiments on DiT-XL/2, PixArt-$\alpha$, FLUX, and state-of-the-art Qwen-Image demonstrate 50%-70% compute savings while maintaining or improving quality. On DiT-XL/2, RSTR achieves 57% savings with 15% FID improvement; on Qwen-Image, 3.43$\times$ speedup with preserved quality.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Data Augmentations for Data-Constrained Language Model Pretraining

As AI labs approach a data ceiling where compute capacity outpaces the rate of new high-quality text generation, language model pretraining is shifting toward a data-constrained, compute-abundant regime that demands productive multi-epoch training on fixed corpora. Standard autoregressive (AR) pretraining overfits severely in this setting, reaching its optimum early and then continuously deteriorating. We investigate data augmentation as a regularizer to mitigate this overfitting and enable productive training for hundreds of epochs on the same data. We introduce three orthogonal categories of augmentation for AR pretraining: token-level noise (masking, random replacement), sequence permutations (right-to-left prediction, Fill-in-the-Middle), and target offset prediction ($x_{t+i}$ for $i > 1$). Through systematic ablations, we find that individual augmentations delay overfitting and lower validation loss relative to the baseline, with random token replacement achieving the best minimum loss among individual methods. Combining augmentation categories further lowers the minimum validation loss. Our experiments demonstrate that data augmentations mitigate AR pretraining's data inefficiency and offer a promising solution to the data-constrained regime. All code and data are available at https://github.com/michaelchen-lab/data-augmentations-for-pretraining

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

Be Your Own Teacher: Steering Protein Language Models via Unsupervised Reward Optimization

arXiv:2606.18961v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protein language models (PLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for controllable biomolecular design, yet their post-training adaptation typically relies on costly wet-lab validation or curated preference datasets. To overcome this supervision bottleneck, we introduce unsupervised reward optimization of PLMs, a comprehensive framework for steerable protein generation without ground-truth labels. Our key insight is that task-agnostic rewards, which combine intrinsic model uncertainty with extrinsic semantic consistency informed by protein representation models, exhibit strong correlation with controllability measures across base models and temperature regimes. Building upon this discovery, we propose two offline algorithms: Soft Reward Optimization (SRO) and Binarized Reward Optimization (BRO), which effectively maximize the classical RLHF objective induced by these proxy rewards. Extensive experiments on compositional out-of-distribution prompts demonstrate that both methods significantly outperform competitive baselines (DPO, KTO), while approaching oracle performance across multiple sampling temperatures, model scales and protein families. Moreover, PLMs fine-tuned with unsupervised rewards can achieve consistently higher coverage compared to their base model in pass@k evaluations. By enabling self-improvement of PLMs through their own generated experience, our framework provides a scalable pathway toward controllable biomolecular design in settings where labeled preferences or experimental feedback are scarce or unavailable.

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

Real-Time Voice AI Hears but Does Not Listen

Speech conveys information through both words and vocal delivery. We evaluate four leading production realtime voice systems-OpenAI's GPT Realtime 2, Google's Gemini 3.1 Flash Live, and Alibaba's Qwen3.5 Omni Plus and Omni Flash-on tasks where the words and the delivery patterns both convey meaningful information. Across three consequential scenarios, all four systems act on the words rather than the voice. They end calls with crying callers who insist nothing is wrong, approve wire transfers authorized in frightened voices, and enroll callers whose agreement is clearly sarcastic. Surprisingly, this is often not a failure of perception. When asked directly, three of the four systems reliably identify the distress, fear, or sarcasm they later ignore when making decisions. We observe a similar pattern when these realtime voice systems estimate accent and age, as their responses frequently follow the biases of the words rather than the acoustic properties of the speaker. We term this disconnect between perception and action the emotional intelligence gap of voice AI. Prompting systems to explicitly attend to vocal delivery improves performance only partially and inconsistently. Our findings show that current realtime voice AI systems often behave as if speech had been reduced to a transcript, suggesting that they should be used with caution in settings where the tone and emotion of delivery convey important information.