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

VitalAgent: A Tool-Augmented Agent for Reactive and Proactive Physiological Monitoring over Wearable Health Data

arXiv:2605.29483v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Wearable devices enable continuous monitoring of physiological signals such as ECG and PPG, but existing mHealth systems are largely limited to task-specific prediction pipelines or reactive question answering over static summaries. They lack the ability to support temporal reasoning, persistent physiological context, and proactive monitoring over long-term signal streams. We propose VitalAgent, a tool-augmented agentic framework for ECG/PPG-based mHealth that supports both reactive question answering and proactive monitoring. VitalAgent is built on a longitudinal physiological memory and a tool-augmented reasoning interface that enables dynamic computation over raw signals. We further introduce VitalBench, a longitudinal physiological monitoring benchmark dataset comprising 1,862 QA pairs for reactive question answering and 90.2 hours of continuous ECG/PPG recordings for proactive monitoring, covering cardiac, physical activity, and stress-related tasks. Experiments demonstrate that VitalAgent achieves over 25% improvement over prompt-based and ReAct baselines in reactive evaluation and supports proactive alert monitoring over long-term physiological signals, highlighting the importance of dynamic tool use and long-term physiological monitoring.

02.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

pykarambola: Minkowski tensor morphometry of 3D structures

Three-dimensional biological morphologies encode functional and physiological state, yet the directional, orientational, and topological properties of these shapes are rarely captured by morphometric tools available for bioimage analysis. Minkowski tensors are mathematically rigorous tensor-valued measures that encode surface curvature and directionality for objects of arbitrary topology, with tensor eigensystems that directly quantify elongation axes and anisotropy. A C++ implementation, karambola, computes Minkowski tensors for triangulated surfaces but is inaccessible within Python-based bioimage workflows. Here we present pykarambola, a pip installable Python package that accepts NumPy arrays and standard mesh formats and returns Minkowski tensors, including derived anisotropy and orientation quantities. A high-level label-image API converts 3D integer arrays into per-object Minkowski tensors in a single call, making pykarambola directly compatible with the output of widely used segmentation tools. An optional Cython extension accelerates graph-traversal steps of mesh initialization for large-scale analyses. Benchmarked on 1,584 adrenal gland meshes, pykarambola reproduces all 121 C++ karambola output features to near-floating-point agreement and, in the pure-Python build, is 2.8x faster at 28^3 and 1.5x faster at 64^3 voxel resolution, with speedups primarily attributable to karambola's sequential per-object file I/O. pykarambola is freely available as an open-source software package.

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

C2-Faith: Benchmarking LLM Judges for Causal and Coverage Faithfulness in Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as judges of chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, yet it remains unclear whether they can reliably assess process faithfulness rather than merely answer plausibility. We introduce C2-Faith, a benchmark built from PRM800K that explicitly decomposes faithfulness into two complementary dimensions: causality (whether each step logically follows from prior context) and coverage (whether essential intermediate inferences are present). Using controlled perturbations, we construct examples with known causal error positions by replacing a single step with a logically inconsistent variant, and with controlled coverage deletions at varying rates, enabling direct measurement against reference labels. We evaluate three frontier LLM judges across three tasks: binary causal detection, causal step localization, and coverage scoring. Our results reveal that judge reliability is highly task-dependent, with no single model dominating across settings. While models often detect that an error exists, they struggle to accurately localize it, indicating a substantial gap between detection and attribution. Moreover, all judges systematically overestimate reasoning completeness, assigning high coverage scores even when substantial portions of intermediate reasoning are missing. These findings expose fundamental limitations of LLM judges in process-level evaluation and highlight the need for more reliable and calibrated methods when using LLMs to assess reasoning quality.

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

Seeing Before Reasoning: Decoupling Perception and Reasoning for Shortcut-Resilient Multimodal On-Policy Self-Distillation

On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) trains a model on its own rollouts and uses a frozen copy to provide dense token-level targets conditioned on a reference target. This works well for LLM reasoning, but a direct extension to multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can create a shortcut: the privileged target may guide tokens mainly based on the text reference target rather than the image. We propose ViGOS, a visually grounded OPSD framework for MLLM post-training. The student first writes a visual description and then reasons toward the final answer. For valid rollouts, an image-only perception teacher supervises the description, while a privileged reasoning teacher supervises the reasoning and final answer on the same student prefix. A reference teacher is used only for invalid rollouts to recover the output format. Across general vision-language, expert reasoning, visual math, spatial grounding, and visual-language-prior benchmarks, ViGOS keeps the main benefits of OPSD and improves image-grounded behavior in shortcut-prone settings.

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

The Query Channel: Information-Theoretic Limits of Masking-Based Explanations

arXiv:2604.16689v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Masking-based post-hoc explanation methods, such as KernelSHAP and LIME, estimate local feature importance by querying a black-box model under randomized perturbations. This paper formulates this procedure as communication over a query channel, where the latent explanation acts as a message and each masked evaluation is a channel use. Within this framework, the complexity of the explanation is captured by the entropy of the hypothesis class, while the query interface supplies information at a rate determined by an identification capacity per query. We derive a strong converse showing that, if the explanation rate exceeds this capacity, the probability of exact recovery necessarily converges to one in error for any sequence of explainers and decoders. We also prove an achievability result establishing that a sparse maximum-likelihood decoder attains reliable recovery when the rate lies below capacity. A Monte Carlo estimator of mutual information yields a non-asymptotic query benchmark that we use to compare optimal decoding with Lasso- and OLS-based procedures that mirror LIME and KernelSHAP. Experiments reveal a range of query budgets where information theory permits reliable explanations but standard convex surrogates still fail. Finally, we interpret super-pixel resolution and tokenization for neural language models as a source-coding choice that sets the entropy of the explanation and show how Gaussian noise and nonlinear curvature degrade the query channel, induce waterfall and error-floor behavior, and render high-resolution explanations unattainable.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Cellular Predictions on the Move: What about Data?

arXiv:2606.25709v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mobile cellular load forecasting is native to network resource optimization and delivery of services with reliability, latency and quality guarantees. The mainstream of machine learning research in the area is focused primarily on developing powerful learning structures for improved prediction accuracy. The data used for forecasting traditionally belong to the cellular domain and at most contain exogenous information about the surroundings of the base stations. We approach the prediction task from the perspective of data as a vital component of any data learning process. We hypothesize that substantial improvements could be achieved when the data inform on the processes that create the cellular load. Specifically, we propose to characterize the population dynamics – the potential number of cellular traffic sources and their mobility – in addition to employing historical time series of mobile data traffic. We validate our hypothesis for the rarely examined highway scenario. Comprehensive experiments show forecasting improvements on the order of $60\%$ due to the use of these data alone.

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

Human Universal Grasping

arXiv:2606.17054v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Humans can grasp objects effortlessly, whereas multi-fingered robots are far from this level of generality. We argue that the most natural source of robot grasping data is from humans, who pick up thousands of objects every day. We present HUG, a flow-matching model that generates diverse human grasps for any user-specified object in a single RGB-D image captured from a stereo camera. Using smart glasses, we first collect 1M-HUGs, an egocentric dataset of human grasps spanning 1M frames (27.8 hrs) and 6,707 object instances across 41 buildings. Next, to model the distribution of natural human grasps, our novel flow-matching model fuses RGB and depth observations to output a grasp parameterized by wrist translation, wrist rotation, and MANO hand pose. Predicted grasps can be retargeted to various robot hands, enabling zero-shot grasping in everyday scenes. To standardize evaluation, we build a new simulated benchmark, HUG-Bench, of 90 unseen objects from five geometric categories and various sizes, with metric-scale 3D meshes. We evaluate HUG in the real world on the 30-object test set of HUG-Bench across multiple stereo cameras, robot embodiments, and household environments. HUG outperforms the state-of-the-art grasping baselines by +23% and +34% on our challenging object set. Code, data, benchmark, checkpoints, and an interactive demo are released on our website: https://grasping.io/

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

Semantic Allocation in Ordered Bottlenecks: Predictive Residual Inference for Visual Representation Learning

Ordered bottlenecks aim to provide utility at flexible budgets by assigning coarse information to early tokens and task-relevant detail to later ones. Prior work, including tail dropping (TD), typically enforces ordering by means of a masking-based ordering pressure (MBOP): Late tokens are masked more frequently than early tokens and are therefore encouraged to store less essential fine details. We introduce predictive residual inference for ordered representations (PRIOR), a framework designed to address inherent weaknesses of MBOP. MBOP is prone to weak late-token utility because it lacks an explicit refinement objective and uses gradient exposure as a proxy for importance. Furthermore, representations may become particularly brittle in optimization-sensitive settings, such as when using discrete or quantized token representations. PRIOR replaces activation-rate control with log2-scaled levels and level-wise predictors. These predictors separate already explained from unexplained information, focusing each level on residual error. We compare PRIOR against MBOP-TD and independent tail-biased dropout (MBOP-ITD) in contrastive learning and image reconstruction tasks. Unlike the baselines, PRIOR learns well-ordered representations across experiments: low budgets provide coarse descriptors, while high budgets add refinements. Simultaneously, full-budget performance with PRIOR is higher in all but one experimental setting, where performance remains comparable. MBOP baselines are severely limited in discrete and quantized settings, while PRIOR approaches the performance of continuous counterparts. Taken together, these findings establish PRIOR as an effective framework for ordered representation learning.

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

A Minimal Model of Bounded Trade-Off Screening in Multi-Attribute Choice

arXiv:2606.13201v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Human decision-making often involves choosing between multi-attribute alternatives, yet classical models assume fully compensatory utility aggregation despite evidence that people reject options with poor performance on critical attributes. We propose a bounded trade-off reasoning framework in which decisions are governed by a screening process that evaluates the balance between gains and losses across attributes. The model introduces a trade-off tolerance parameter that controls acceptable imbalance and can vary across contexts. Through simulation, we show that this mechanism produces preference patterns that differ from standard utility-based models and captures context-dependent variation in trade-off behavior. These results establish bounded trade-off screening as a plausible computational mechanism for multi-attribute choice and generate testable predictions for future behavioral studies.

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

Federated Medical Image Segmentation under Real-World Label Noise: A Benchmark Suite for Noisy Label Learning Method Selection

While federated learning (FL) enables collaborative medical image segmentation without centralizing sensitive data, real-world deployment is frequently complicated by cross-site label imperfections such as contour disagreement, missing or additional structures, and confused labels. Federated noisy label learning (FNLL) aims to mitigate these effects, yet remains underused in practice as existing evidence is largely based on synthetic noise, simplified settings, and limited real-world noisy evaluation. We address this gap by introducing a benchmark suite that combines diverse real-world noisy datasets, deployment-relevant client-noise scenarios, and label-noise-targeted evaluation to support systematic FNLL assessment and informed method selection. The suite combines curated real-world noisy medical image segmentation datasets from diverse sources with a comprehensive federated segmentation framework including various client-noise scenarios and noise-targeted evaluation. The presented suite provides a realistic and discriminative basis for FNLL evaluation in medical image segmentation and establishes a reusable foundation for fair benchmarking, dataset-specific label-noise characterization, and future method development under realistic federated settings. Code is available at https://github.com/MIC-DKFZ/FedSegNoiseBench.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Accelerating physics-informed neural networks for full waveform inversion using a hybrid quantum-classical finite-basis architecture

arXiv:2606.01110v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Full waveform inversion (FWI) reconstructs heterogeneous material properties from receiver data but remains computationally demanding. Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) and their domain-decomposed variants (FBPINNs) offer a mesh-free alternative but face convergence challenges when representing complex velocity fields. We present a hybrid quantum-classical FBPINN for acoustic FWI, bringing together quantum computing and classical machine learning, in which the decomposed wavefield network and the global velocity network are implemented as classical-to-quantum pipelines terminating in parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs). The PQCs are realized as differentiable JAX statevector simulators, enabling end-to-end automatic differentiation through the classical PINN, the quantum circuit, and the physics-informed loss. On a geophysical anomaly benchmark, the quantum hybrid reaches a lower L1 velocity error than the primary classical FBPINN baseline in approximately 8x fewer training iterations, despite using approximately 33% fewer trainable parameters, and it outperforms all 15 classical hyperparameter variants tested. A second benchmark (checkerboard) demonstrates the generality of the inversion pipeline, confirming that the quantum hybrid architecture can recover structured spatial variations beyond the localized anomaly benchmark. Our framework is broadly applicable to wave-based inverse problems beyond geophysics, including medical ultrasound tomography and non-destructive evaluation.

13.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-21

Expanding the GUSome: Structure-guided identification and characterization of gut microbial β-glucuronidases

The gut microbiome-encoded {beta}-glucuronidase (GUS) enzymes have a significant effect on human physiology through their deglucuronidation activity on endogenous and exogenous glucuronides. GUS activity also significantly influences the pharmacokinetics, efficacy and toxicity of various drugs including chemotherapeutic drugs. Given their crucial role in drug metabolism, GUS enzymes have emerged as promising targets for therapeutic intervention. Here, we have identified and characterized 79 unique GUS enzymes through a structure-guided approach. Structural modelling of these GUS enzymes revealed a conserved core and active-site residues with significant variations in the number and nature of the C-terminal domains. A new classification system based on the number and type of additional C-terminal domains is presented for the GUS proteins. Further, GUS enzymes have been categorized into different loop categories linked to their substrate preferences. The relationship between domain architecture and loop-type is explored by sequence similarity network analysis. We could successfully express, purify and validate GUS processing capability of a panel of identified GUS proteins. The nature of oligomer organization has been deciphered by SEC and DLS studies. Further, we have identified additional GUS enzymes capable of processing SN-38G, glucuronidated form of anticancer drug, irinotecan. These newly identified GUS enzymes will offer valuable insights into gut microbial GUS diversity and their role in understanding the population-specific drug-induced adverse effects on human health.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Predicting Mergeability of Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning Updates

arXiv:2606.19549v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) makes it cheap to train many domain- and task-specific language model adapters, but whether two adapters can be merged is usually discovered only after both have been fully trained and evaluated. This late feedback is costly: adapters that are strong in isolation can interfere destructively once their updates are combined. We ask whether this outcome can be anticipated. We formalize adapter mergeability as the degree to which an adapter preserves its single-task utility after merging, and show that it can be forecast from signals measured in the first few percent of training – chiefly how the low-rank updates and their gradients align across tasks and how much they disturb shared representations. We package these signals into MergeProbe, a lightweight predictor that estimates pairwise and set-level retention and turns the estimate into a concrete decision: merge directly, reweight, prune, or route. On MERGE-PEFT, a five-domain benchmark spanning math, code, science, instruction following, and safety, MergeProbe attains the best average and worst-case retention among strong interference-aware merge baselines while adding far less deployment overhead than full task routing. This turns LoRA merging from a post-hoc engineering step into an anticipatory measurement problem.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Closest Accessible Symmetry reduction: a tool for Hamiltonian interpolation analysis

arXiv:2606.18161v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce a framework for analysing the spectrum of Hamiltonian interpolations without heavily relying on discretising the interpolation parameter. The method is based on the concept of accessible symmetries: a problem-class-dependent family of certifiable reflections that induce bipartitions of the Hilbert space. At each step, the interpolation Hamiltonian is projected onto the sectors of the accessible symmetry that is closest to being satisfied, yielding a hierarchy of weakly coupled pseudo-eigenspaces together with explicit residual couplings between them. We show that this representation captures qualitative signatures of quantum phase transitions, provides estimates of their location, and offers insights into their nature. The quality of the approximation is controlled by the compatibility between the accessible symmetry family and the problem instance. Although motivated in spirit by adiabatic quantum computation, our approach applies more broadly to the study of Hamiltonian phase diagrams, providing a new perspective on the spectral reorganisation of many-body quantum systems.

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

Thinking in Boxes: 3D Editing in Real Images Made Easy

Text and 2D-conditioning interfaces provide weak, ambiguous control over spatial transformations in image editing – particularly under large object motions and camera changes. Prior work has used 3D primitives such as boxes, but only as loose conditioning signals indicating approximate object location rather than specifying the transformation. We instead use 3D boxes as structured specifications: the user provides the input and output boxes of the edit, casting editing as a well-posed geometry problem. This ``thinking in boxes'' interface, where each box face is color-coded to convey 3D orientation, gives precise control over translation, rotation, scaling, and viewpoint changes in real images while preserving scene and object identity, and recovering previously unseen object regions. To ground transformations in scene appearance, we introduce a depth-aligned planar floor as a global reference frame, shaded with depth-aware cues. Conditioned on this structure, an image generator produces consistent results under large transformations. Trained in two stages – on synthetic multi-object scenes and a small set of real-world videos from Objectron – the system generalizes to complex, in-the-wild real images. Our method operates directly on real photographs and substantially outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods on large 3D edits.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

AtomMem: Building Simple and Effective Memory System for LLM Agents via Atomic Facts

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong reasoning and generation abilities, but their fixed context windows limit long-term information accumulation and reuse across multi-session interactions. Existing memory-augmented systems often construct memory in a coarse and unstable manner, relying on inefficient memory representations or unstable unconstrained updates. To address these challenges, we propose AtomMem, a long-term memory system designed for value-dense storage and stable memory evolution. AtomMem introduces a Fact Executor, which selectively extracts high value atomic facts from long form interactions to serve as highly efficient memory representations. Subsequently, AtomMem organizes these facts into hierarchical event structures and temporal profiles, capturing coherent episodic contexts and tracking dynamically evolving user attributes over time. During retrieval, the system activates an associative memory graph to connect fragmented memories. Experiments on the LoCoMo benchmark confirm that AtomMem achieves state-of-the-art performance across various reasoning tasks, offering a scalable and economically viable solution for deploying intelligent personalized agents.

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

YTClickbait21K: Human-Annotated Multimodal Dataset for YouTube Clickbait Detection Across Diverse Channels and Content Categories

Clickbait content on video-sharing platforms poses a significant challenge to information reliability, yet progress in automated detection has been constrained by the lack of large-scale, high-quality multimodal datasets. We present YTClickbait21K, a human-annotated YouTube clickbait dataset comprising 21,238 videos collected from 40 channels across 29 countries, covering diverse content categories such as news, entertainment, education, and gaming. Each sample includes structured metadata (title, description, engagement statistics) along with associated thumbnail images, enabling comprehensive multimodal analysis. To ensure annotation quality, every video was independently labeled by three annotators using a standardized decision framework that incorporates textual, visual, and cross-modal consistency cues, with final labels determined through majority voting. The dataset exhibits substantial inter-annotator agreement (k=0.65), confirming reliable labeling despite the inherent subjectivity of clickbait detection. By combining scale, annotation rigor, and multimodal richness, this dataset provides a robust benchmark for developing and evaluating machine learning models, facilitating research in cross-modal semantic understanding, and advancing automated content moderation systems.

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

Semantic-Anchored Evidential Fusion for Domain-Robust Whole-Slide Survival Analysis

arXiv:2606.19966v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Whole-slide images (WSIs) are widely used for computational cancer prognosis. However, most existing methods primarily focus on in-domain performance and fail to generalize across clinical centers. This limitation stems from their reliance on pixel-derived representations that are highly susceptible to domain-specific artifacts caused by staining protocols and scanner hardware. We hypothesize that high-level pathology semantics, such as tumor grade and micro-environmental architecture, provide a domain-invariant semantic representation that mirrors the robust diagnostic logic of human pathologists. Therefore, we propose a Semantic-Anchored Evidential Fusion Survival (SAEFS) framework, where SAEFS derives semantic anchors from WSIs via Visual Question Answering (VQA), employs a dual-stream WSI evidence extraction architecture, uses Dirichlet-based Subjective Logic to model uncertainty, and fuses semantic and visual evidence through a cautious conjunction rule to avoid overconfident fusion from correlated sources. Trained exclusively on one source domain and evaluated zero-shot across four unseen domains, SAEFS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models both in prediction accuracy and reliability, improving the average C-index by 10.2%. Quantitative analyses further show that VQA-derived semantic features exhibit significantly lower cross-center divergence than pixel-derived features, highlighting their robustness for cross-center clinical applications.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

FOUNDv2: Learning Unified User Quantized Tokenizers for User Representation

arXiv:2508.00956v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: User representation learning serves as a fundamental pillar for personalized services on large-scale web platforms. Despite its importance, conventional continuous embedding methods face significant challenges, including the lack of a unified paradigm for multi-source data integration, prohibitive storage overhead due to low information density, and the lack of multi-scale modeling granularity. To overcome these limitations, we introduce FOUNDv2, a comprehensive user representation scheme centered on the Unified User Quantized Tokenizer U2QT) framework. FOUNDv2 transforms heterogeneous user data into a standardized discrete token space through a robust two-stage architecture. Specifically, the framework first extracts compact feature representations and subsequently employs a multi-view RQ-VAE to discretize them into storage-efficient tokens using shared and source-specific codebooks. To empower these representations with predictive intelligence, we further design multi-scale alignment objectives to capture both fine-grained behavioral dependencies and macro-temporal periodicity. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate that FOUNDv2 consistently outperforms task-specific baselines while achieving substantial reductions in storage and computational costs. Finally, the large-scale deployment of FOUNDv2 on Alipay validates its practical scalability and efficiency across diverse industrial scenarios. The main code is available at: https://github.com/chuanhe1999/FOUNDv2.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Eigen-Spike Emergence and Quadratic Equivalents for Conjugate Kernels on Nonlinearly Separable Data

arXiv:2605.29669v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent work in random matrix theory (RMT) has developed the notion of deterministic equivalents: typically linear surrogate models that approximate the spectral behavior of large nonlinear random matrices, such as nonlinear feature maps in neural networks (NNs). Such equivalents make theoretical predictions tractable by reducing a complex model to a simpler one with properties that fall under the umbrella of classical RMT tools. However, this leaves open the question of whether this idealized linear equivalence remains meaningful for classification of high-dimensional nonlinearly separable data. Motivated by this, we consider the conjugate kernel (CK), which is the nonlinear feature map of a one-layer feedforward NN, under a canonical nonlinearly separable dataset for the XOR problem; and we use the study of informative outlier eigenvalues in the CK and whether their corresponding eigenvectors asymptotically align with XOR labels as a proxy for nonlinear learnability. We develop a robust quadratic equivalent of the CK matrix that enables a precise analysis of emergent informative spikes, as one modifies various knobs common in ML practice: sample complexity, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), nonlinear activation choice, and pretrained features. We identify regimes in which these knobs move the CK beyond the linear equivalent and produce BBP-type transitions to label-aligned outlier eigenspaces. Our analysis helps bring deterministic-equivalence tools from RMT to bear on problems of practical relevance in ML.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

SoftSkill: Behavioral Compression for Contextual Adaptation

arXiv:2606.20333v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills are commonly deployed as natural-language Markdown files that encode answer policies, evidence-use habits, and task procedures. These files are readable and portable, but they are consumed indirectly: for each task instance, a frozen language model must translate a long textual artifact into generation-time behavior. This paper asks whether a natural-language skill can instead initialize a compact continuous context object, refined by a trainable soft delta while the base model remains frozen. We propose SoftSkill, a frozen-backbone method that tunes such soft skills with next-token prediction and deploys them as latent behavioral priors at inference time. In our main single-round setting, a length-32 SoftSkill prefix on Qwen3.5-4B improves over no-skill prompting by 8.3 points on SearchQA, 42.1 points on LiveMath, and 1.3 points on DocVQA. Relative to SkillOpt, SoftSkill improves accuracy by 5.2 points on SearchQA and 12.5 points on LiveMath, while replacing hundreds to thousands of Markdown skill tokens with a few virtual tokens. We further study agentic execution as a harder boundary case, where sparse trajectory imitation provides useful signal but does not yet robustly compress long-horizon procedural behavior. More broadly, the results suggest that some task skills are better treated not as additional Markdown to be reinterpreted at inference time, but as compact latent controls over how a frozen model enters the task.

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

Aligning Implied Statements for Implicit Hate Speech Generalizability with Context-Bounded Semi-hard Negative Mining

Classifying implicit hate speech remains a challenge, as intent is often masked through insinuation and context rather than explicit slurs. Prior supervised contrastive approaches improve in-domain detection but can overfit surface cues and struggle to transfer across datasets. We propose ImpSH, a triplet-based framework that aligns posts with implied statements when available and uses context-bounded semi-hard negatives to focus learning on near confusions. We also examine AugSH, which forms positives via data augmentation. In controlled evaluations on IHC, SBIC, and DynaHate with BERT and HateBERT, ImpSH is a viable alternative to standard supervised contrastive baselines and often improves cross-domain performance under matched preprocessing and tuning budgets. Representation analysis using alignment and uniformity indicates tighter positive pairs with balanced global spread, and qualitative nearest-neighbor case studies illustrate typical false negatives under domain shift. These results demonstrate that aligning posts with their implied statements via context-bounded mining provides a more stable, bijective-like mapping to related insinuations, overcoming the volatility inherent in traditional clustering-based representation learning.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

NSVQ: Mitigating Codebook Collapse by Stabilizing Encoder Drift in Vector Quantization

Vector quantization is central to modern generative modeling pipelines, but large-codebook VQ models often suffer from codebook collapse. We identify encoder drift as a key driver of this failure: as the encoder moves the latent distribution, sparsely updated code vectors can lag behind, lose assignments, and increase quantization error, creating a feedback loop through the straight-through estimator. We propose NSVQ, a non-stationary-aware VQ training strategy that combines a dense non-stationary embedding loss, codebook replacement, and stage-wise encoder freezing. NSVQ first helps the codebook track encoder drift during early training, then freezes the encoder to consolidate the codebook under a fixed latent geometry, and finally reintroduces adversarial refinement. Experiments on ImageNet-1k show that NSVQ improves reconstruction quality while maintaining full codebook utilization. On ImageNet-1k at 128$\times$128 with 65,536 codes, NSVQ reduces rFID from 2.39 to 2.10 compared with SimVQ, while both methods maintain 100\% utilization. Additional latent diffusion experiments show that NSVQ also improves downstream ImageNet generation FID.

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

AVA-VLA: Improving Vision-Language-Action models with Active Visual Attention

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown remarkable progress in embodied tasks recently, but most methods process visual observations independently at each timestep. This history-agnostic design treats robot manipulation as a Markov Decision Process, even though real-world robotic control is inherently partially observable and requires reasoning over past interactions. To address this mismatch, we reformulate VLA policy learning from a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process perspective and propose AVA-VLA, a framework that conditions action generation on a recurrent state that serves as a neural approximation to the agent's belief over task history. Built on this recurrent state, we introduce Active Visual Attention (AVA), which dynamically reweights visual tokens in the current observation to focus on regions most relevant given both the instruction and execution history. Extensive experiments show that AVA-VLA achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard robotic benchmarks, including LIBERO and CALVIN, and transfers effectively to real-world dual-arm manipulation tasks. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of temporally grounded active visual processing for improving VLA performance in robotic sequential decision-making. The project page is available at https://liauto-dsr.github.io/AVA-VLA-Page.