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

High-Fidelity 4D Hand-Object Capture via Multi-View Spatiotemporal Tracking and Physics-Aware Gaussians

The growing demand for high-fidelity 4D hand-object interaction (HOI) data in embodied AI and spatial computing is currently bottlenecked by the reliance on pre-scanned object templates and physical markers. While recent methods have demonstrated promising results in reconstructing 4D hand-object interaction from videos, they are highly sensitive to initial estimates of hand and object poses. Yet, estimating these poses from images is challenging, in particular under severe occlusion which is inherent in hand-object interaction scenarios. We propose a novel system for the robust and accurate reconstruction of hands and objects from synchronized and calibrated multi-view videos without requiring any templates or markers. Our system consists of two main components with key innovations: (1) a multi-view feed-forward transformer model that aggregates cross-view geometry and temporal cues to provide a reliable, metric-consistent initialization for both poses and dense object geometry, and (2) a hand-object physics-aware Gaussian-based optimization framework to refine the initial estimates, integrating tetrahedral constraints, collision refinement, and appearance decomposition to produce physically plausible and visually accurate reconstruction. Validated on public benchmarks and an extensive internal dataset, our pipeline achieves highly robust, artifact-free reconstruction, providing an efficient foundation for automated 4D asset generation. Our project page are available at https://zyshen021.github.io/HOSTPG/.

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

Internet of Everything in the 6G Era: Paradigms, Enablers, Potentials and Future Directions

arXiv:2604.25018v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The Internet of Everything (IoE) represents an evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT) by integrating people, data, processes, and things into a unified intelligent ecosystem. IoE aims to enhance automation, decision-making, and service efficiency across multiple application domains such as smart cities, healthcare, industry, and next-generation wireless networks. This paper provides a structured overview of the IoE concept, its core components, architectural foundations, enabling technologies, and major research challenges. Finally, open research directions toward 6G-enabled intelligent IoE systems are discussed, with emphasis on scalability, security, privacy, and energy efficiency.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

TopoCast: A Topological Fidelity Framework for Evaluating Transformer-Based Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.25439v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep learning-based models have achieved state-of-the-art performance in Time Series Forecasting (TSF), yet their evaluation remains dominated by pointwise error metrics such as Mean Squared Error (MSE), which quantify numerical accuracy but overlook structural properties of the forecast signal, including recurrent dynamics, oscillatory behavior, and phase alignment. As a result, forecasts exhibiting over-smoothing, phase shifts, or frequency distortions may achieve favorable error scores despite substantial structural degradation. To address this limitation, we propose TopoCast, a topology-driven framework for evaluating structural fidelity in TSF. TopoCast reconstructs phase-space representations of forecast and ground-truth sequences using Takens delay embedding and applies persistent homology to characterize their intrinsic dynamics. We derive four complementary topological fidelity measures from persistence diagrams and aggregate them into a Topological Fidelity Score (TFS). We further introduce dominant cycle overlap, a novel metric that maps persistent topological features to the temporal domain to assess whether dominant oscillatory patterns occur at the correct time points. Combined with TFS, this yields the Localized Topological Fidelity Score (LTFS), a phase-aware measure that captures temporal localization errors invisible to existing evaluation metrics. Experiments on five Transformer architectures across three real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate that models with similar forecasting errors can exhibit markedly different structural fidelity profiles, revealing failure modes overlooked by conventional evaluation and highlighting the value of topology-aware forecast assessment.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

EvTexture++: Event-Driven Texture Enhancement for Video Super-Resolution

Event-based vision has drawn increasing attention owing to its distinctive properties, including ultra-high temporal resolution and extreme dynamic range. Recent works have introduced it to video super-resolution (VSR) to enhance flow estimation and temporal alignment. In contrast, this paper shifts the focus of event signals from motion refinement to texture enhancement in VSR. We propose EvTexture++, the first event-driven framework dedicated to texture enhancement in VSR. It leverages high-frequency spatiotemporal details from events to improve texture recovery. EvTexture++ incorporates a customized texture enhancement branch, along with an iterative texture enhancement module that progressively exploits high-temporal-resolution event information for texture restoration. This enables gradual refinement of texture regions across iterations, yielding more accurate and detailed high-resolution outputs. Besides intra-frame texture recovery, large motions could degrade inter-frame temporal consistency, particularly in texture regions, leading to texture flickering. To mitigate this, we further exploit the continuous-time motion cues of events to enhance temporal consistency, introducing a temporal texture alignment module that estimates event-guided texture-aware flow for precise inter-frame texture alignment. Moreover, EvTexture++ is designed as a plug-and-play tool to flexibly boost the performance of existing VSR models. Experiments on five datasets demonstrate that EvTexture++ achieves state-of-the-art performance. When integrated into recent VSR models, it yields significant improvements, with gains of up to 1.55 dB in PSNR on the texture-rich Vid4 dataset. Code: https://github.com/DachunKai/EvTexture.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Stability of a Generalized Debiased Lasso with Applications to Resampling-Based Variable Selection

作者:

arXiv:2405.03063v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose a generalized debiased Lasso estimator based on a stability principle. When a single column of the design matrix is perturbed, the estimator admits a simple update formula that can be computed from the original solution. Under sub-Gaussian designs with well-conditioned covariance, this approximation is asymptotically accurate for all but a vanishing fraction of coordinates in the proportional growth regime. The proof relies on concentration and anti-concentration arguments to control error terms and sign changes. In contrast, establishing comparable distributional limits (e.g., Gaussianity) under similar assumptions remains open. As an application, we show that the approximation significantly reduces the computational cost of resampling-based variable selection procedures, including the conditional randomization test and a local knockoff filter.

06.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Fractional squeezing: spectra and dynamics from generalized squeezing Hamiltonian with fractional orders

作者:

arXiv:2601.15693v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We generalize the generalized-squeezing problem to include fractional values of the squeezing order $n$. This approach allows us to determine the locations of critical points at which qualitative changes in behaviour occur and accurately predict the behaviour at these critical points, which are challenging for conventional computational methods. Based on our numerical calculations, we identify with a high degree of confidence the point at which the spectrum turns from continuous to discrete and the point at which oscillations turn from having asymptotically infinite amplitudes to having finite amplitudes. Furthermore, we numerically investigate the behaviour in the large $n$ regime and provide an intuitive explanation for the numerical results.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Towards Deep Learning Surrogate for the Forward Problem in Electrocardiology: A Scalable Alternative to Physics-Based Models

arXiv:2512.13765v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The forward problem in electrocardiology, computing body surface potentials from cardiac electrical activity, is traditionally solved using physics-based models such as the bidomain or monodomain equations. While accurate, these approaches are computationally expensive, limiting their use in real-time and large-scale clinical applications. We propose a proof-of-concept deep learning (DL) framework as an efficient surrogate for forward solvers. The model adopts a time-dependent, attention-based sequence-to-sequence architecture to predict electrocardiogram (ECG) signals from cardiac voltage propagation maps. A hybrid loss combining Huber loss with a spectral entropy term was introduced to preserve both temporal and frequency-domain fidelity. Using 2D tissue simulations incorporating healthy, fibrotic, and gap junction-remodelled conditions, the model achieved high accuracy (mean $R^2 = 0.99 \pm 0.01$). Ablation studies confirmed the contributions of convolutional encoders, time-aware attention, and spectral entropy loss. These findings highlight DL as a scalable, cost-effective alternative to physics-based solvers, with potential for clinical and digital twin applications.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

FiCA: Feed-forward instant Gaussian Codec Avatars from a Single Portrait Image

We introduce FiCA, a Feed-forward, instant Gaussian Codec Avatar generation pipeline that creates lifelike avatars from a single portrait image. Generating a photorealistic and drivable avatar from just a single image is significantly challenging due to the limited visual information available to accurately infer the 3D appearance and geometry of human heads. To address this, we develop a novel system that combines human-centric vision foundation models with a diffusion model. This system is designed to fully exploit partial visual observations to generate lifelike human avatars. Our proposed diffusion model learns a generative mapping from these partial observations to complete and authentic 3D mesh reconstruction. Additionally, we introduce a feed-forward mesh refinement network that enhances the fidelity and identity preservation of the generated avatars, eliminating the need for person-specific test-time optimization. By leveraging a universal prior model that decodes a generated mesh into a set of 3D Gaussians, we generate a photorealistic 3D Gaussian avatar, capable of being driven with novel expressions in real-time. Our experiments demonstrate that the avatars generated by our feed-forward approach faithfully represent diverse identities and surpass the visual quality of avatars produced by recent competing methods.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

When does dissipation help neural surrogates learn open quantum dynamics?

arXiv:2606.23894v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dissipation is usually viewed as an obstacle to predicting quantum dynamics, yet it can also contract trajectories toward steady states and thereby suppress accumulated prediction errors, leaving it unclear whether dissipation ultimately helps or hinders the learnability of open quantum dynamics. We investigate this question using Neural Ordinary Differential Equation (NODE) surrogates for open Heisenberg XYZ spin chains. Closed-system learnability deteriorates rapidly with system size, culminating in a static-prediction collapse at four qubits; dissipation reverses this trend, creating a broad high-fidelity regime at intermediate system sizes, while at four qubits a fidelity-aware objective recovers learnable rollout structure that is absent under closed-system training. Comparison against static and steady-state baselines reveals that dissipation improves performance through two fundamentally different mechanisms: at weak-to-moderate dissipation the surrogate captures nontrivial transient dynamics and substantially outperforms trivial predictors, whereas at stronger damping high fidelity increasingly reflects trajectory simplification toward the steady state rather than improved learned dynamics. These results show that dissipation can enhance the learnability of open quantum dynamics, but that fidelity alone is insufficient to distinguish genuine dynamical learning from steady-state trivialization: dissipative contraction and trajectory simplification are distinct effects that peak in different regimes and should be disentangled when evaluating learned quantum-dynamical surrogates.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

VIA-SD: Verification via Intra-Model Routing for Speculative Decoding

Speculative decoding (SD) addresses the high inference costs of LLMs by having lightweight drafters generate candidates for large verifiers to validate in parallel. Existing draft-verify methods use binary decisions: accept or fully recompute. Yet we find that many rejected tokens can be verified correctly by a slim submodel derived from the full verifier via intra-model routing, instead of the full verifier. This motivates our slim-verifier to handle tokens requiring moderate verification resources, reducing expensive large-model calls. We propose Verification via Intra-Model Routing for Speculative Decoding (VIA-SD), a multi-tier framework using a routed slim-verifier. Draft tokens are processed hierarchically: direct acceptance for high-confidence cases, slim-verifier regeneration for medium-confidence cases, and full-model verification for uncertain cases. Across four representative tasks and multiple model families, VIA-SD reduces rejection rates by 0.10-0.22 and delivers 10-20% speedups over strong SD baselines, while achieving 2.5-3x acceleration over non-drafting decoding. Moreover, VIA-SD is compatible with existing SD frameworks without modifying their training procedures. Our results suggest multi-tier SD as a general paradigm for scalable and efficient LLM inference. Project page: https://zju-xyc.github.io/VIA-SD-Project-Page/

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

Principled RL for Flow Matching Emerges from the Chunk-level Policy Optimization

Recent Progress in post-training flow matching for text-to-image (T2I) generation with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has demonstrated strong potential. However, it is hindered by a critical limitation: inaccurate advantage attribution. In this work, we argue that aggregating consecutive steps into a coherent 'chunk' and shifting the policy optimization paradigm from GRPO's step level to the chunk level can effectively mitigate the negative impact of this issue. Building on this insight, we propose Group Chunking Policy Optimization (GCPO), the first chunk-level reinforcement learning approach for post-training flow matching. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GCPO achieves superior performance on both standard T2I benchmarks and preference alignment, with up to 43% relative gains over GRPO, highlighting the promise of chunk-level policy optimization. The code is available on https://github.com/xingzhejun/GCPO.

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

GridVQA-X: A Framework for Evaluating Multimodal Explainability Methods

With the increasing development of Vision-Language Models, it becomes imperative that their predictions are readily explainable to relevant stakeholders. However, the field of explainability has not kept pace with the multimodal surge. While recent Multimodal Explainable AI (MxAI) methods generate explanations to attribute the interaction between different modalities, current evaluation protocols lack the ground truth required to distinguish between true cross-modal reasoning (e.g., spatial composition) and shallow cross-modal shortcuts (e.g., Bag-of-Words attribute matching). It remains unknown whether MxAI methods faithfully capture synergistic interactions or merely hallucinate reasoning on models acting as simple feature detectors. In this paper, we introduce GridVQA-X, the first diagnostic framework specifically designed to evaluate cross-modal explainability. Unlike natural datasets, GridVQA-X leverages a closed-world synthesis logic to generate unique, mathematically guaranteed explanations. We utilize this controlled environment to train paired ground-truth models on identical architectures: $M_{pure}$, which learns robust spatial-relational reasoning and $M_{spur}$, which is structurally forced to rely on cross-modal shortcuts. This behavioral divergence creates a rigorous testbed: a faithful explainer must report distinct reasoning pathways for each model. Our findings reveal that widely used methods fail to distinguish between models relying on genuine spatial-relational reasoning and those exploiting cross-modal shortcuts, highlighting a critical gap in capturing true cross-modal synergy and misrepresenting how multimodal models actually make decisions.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Caring Without Feeling: Affective Dynamics as the Control Layer of Human-AI Agent Collaboration

arXiv:2606.18259v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI agents that plan, retain memory across sessions, invoke external tools and act with partial autonomy are transforming human–AI collaboration. Research on affective computing, simulated empathy in large language models, trust in automation and AI safety has illuminated important design principles, yet these literatures remain fragmented. No integrated account explains how affective cues operate within agentic collaboration – settings in which humans delegate, monitor and correct consequential tasks. This Review synthesises computational and interactional mechanisms of affective dynamics: the processes through which affective cues, emotion-like behaviour and perceived agent affect shape trust calibration, delegation decisions, error correction, dependence and governance. We trace how model-generated affective signals enter interaction loops that govern reliance, repair and oversight, and propose a framework that treats affect not as an internal property of AI but as a coordination layer through which humans and agents negotiate capability, uncertainty and responsibility. The framework provides a foundation for calibrated measurement, purposeful design and informed governance.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

DoubtProbe: Black-Box Jailbreak Defense via Structural Verification and Semantic Auditing

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in user-facing systems, black-box jailbreak defense has become an important practical problem. Existing defenses often rely on known-attack coverage, prompt-level semantic judgment, or local runtime control, yet these paths can become unstable under evolving prompt packaging, expression rewriting, and structure manipulation. We observe that many black-box jailbreaks do not remove the harmful goal, but reorganize the information needed to express and execute it, thereby evading safety alignment while remaining recoverable during generation. Motivated by this observation, we propose DoubtProbe, a dual-branch inference-time defense framework that combines structural verification with semantic auditing and formulates black-box jailbreak defense as consistency checking under controlled transformation. The structural branch extracts a structured representation from the original request, reconstructs the request under representation constraints, and detects information-preservation failures between the original and reconstructed requests; the semantic branch audits the original prompt directly. We evaluate DoubtProbe against representative black-box defenses on jailbreak and benign-request benchmarks, and further test backbone transfer from Qwen2.5-72B to Llama-3.1-70B. Results show that DoubtProbe achieves a stronger and more stable defense-utility trade-off: on Qwen2.5-72B, it reduces the JBB attack success rate from 0.293 to 0.100 and the CodeAttack attack success rate from 0.152 to 0.001, while maintaining false positive rates of 0.022 and 0.016 on AlpacaEval and OR-Bench; the same pattern remains stable on Llama-3.1-70B. These findings show that structural inconsistency signals provide a practical and generalizable basis for black-box jailbreak defense, especially when combined with semantic auditing.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

CineDance: Towards Next-Generation Multi-Shot Long-Form Cinematic Audio-Video Generation

The fidelity and structural diversity of training datasets fundamentally determine the capabilities of video generation models. While commercial systems showremarkableabilitytogeneratecinematicnarratives, the progress of open-source models remains limited by the scarcity of high-quality training data. To bridge this gap, we introduce CineDance-1M, a large-scale, open research Text-to-Audio-Video (T2AV) dataset designed specifically for multi-shot, long-form joint audio-video generation. Averaging 92.8 seconds and 24.2 continuous shots per video, it provides configurable, structured annotations for both audio and video modalities. This exceptional quality is achieved through a rigorous three-stage curation pipeline: i) diverse sourcing and comprehensive cleansing, ii) film-theory-inspired narrative parsing, and iii) hierarchical dual-modal captioning. For a comprehensive assessment, we propose CineBench, featuring a diverse prompt suite and a six-dimensional, human-aligned metric system tailored for complex narrative audio-video evaluation. Furthermore, we adapt LTX-2.3 into CineDance, which demonstrates exceptional single-modality quality alongside precise audio-video alignment and robust subject and environment consistency, effectively validating our curation strategy and the high quality of CineDance-1M. We anticipate that this work will serve as a solid foundation for accelerating future research in multi-shot, long-form joint audio-video generation. Our project page is available at https://aliothchen.github.io/projects/CineDance/.

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

Evaluating the Interpretability of Sparse Autoencoders with Concept Annotations

arXiv:2606.24716v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are increasingly used to extract interpretable concepts from vision and vision language models, yet existing evaluation methods largely rely on proxy metrics or qualitative inspection rather than measuring semantic correspondence. We present a human-grounded evaluation framework that quantifies alignment between SAE latents and human-annotated concepts, without requiring user studies, and validate this matching through targeted attribute perturbations. To enable this intervention-style evaluation in vision, we construct synCUB and synCOCO, synthetic benchmarks of paired images that differ in exactly one attribute. We introduce Fully-Binary Matching Pursuit (FBMP), a coalition-based matching procedure that supports many-to-one mappings between SAE latents and annotated concepts, and consistently outperforms one-to-one baselines. For functional validation, we propose a Targeted Attribute Perturbation Alignment Score (TAPAScore), which tests whether matched concepts respond selectively and in the expected direction under targeted image-level attribute perturbations. Under sanity checks, our matching and TAPAScore are the only evaluated metrics that reliably distinguish trained SAEs from untrained ones. Across SAEs trained on CLIP and DINOv2 embeddings, we find that increased overcompleteness can reduce perturbation alignment, indicating a reduction in interpretability. Our evaluation framework suggests that moderate dictionary sizes provide the best trade-off, yielding the most interpretable SAEs. Code and datasets are available at https://github.com/JonasKlotz/sae-concept-eval.

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

Augmenting Dysarthric Speech Severity Assessment with MOS Supervision

arXiv:2606.18645v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dysarthria is a speech disorder marked by reduced intelligibility and communicative effectiveness. Automatic utterance-level assessment of dysarthric speech can support scalable speech monitoring and therapy-related analysis. Yet training such systems is bottlenecked by the scarcity of clinically annotated dysarthric speech. This work proposes to augment dysarthric speech assessment using data from speech synthesis evaluations, specifically human-annotated utterances with Mean Opinion Score (MOS) labels from the QualiSpeech corpus. Experiments show that fine-tuning on speech synthesis assessment data consistently improves performance on both intelligibility and naturalness prediction, while joint training yields gains primarily on naturalness. These results suggest that synthesis artifacts and dysarthric speech share perceptual commonalities, and speech synthesis evaluation corpora offer a practical augmentation source that reduces reliance on scarce clinical annotations.

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

Sentence-Level Contextual Entrainment in Large Language Models

Contextual entrainment, which is a newly discovered phenomenon in large language models (LLMs), refers to the tendency of a model to assign higher probabilities to tokens that appear in its context. In this work, we extend this phenomenon from the token level to the sentence level by examining the per-token mean log-probability of a sentence instead of the probabilities of individual tokens. We investigate sentence-level contextual entrainment across 26 LLMs from seven families and two datasets, which cover both subjective and objective tasks. We find that sentence-level contextual entrainment exists. This means that the sentences in the prompt (even if they are counterfactual statements) can significantly increase their probability during model inference time. As the model size increases, contextual entrainment gradually decreases. We also find that contextual entrainment is controlled by 2% to 4% of the attention heads. Turning off these attention heads can effectively mitigate contextual entrainment without hurting the model's performance.

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

Low-power analogue neural networks with trainable nonlinear connections for continuous control

arXiv:2606.23742v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Physical neural networks promise low-power machine learning by computing directly with analogue device physics, but most architectures force nonlinear device responses to act as scalar weights. Inspired by Kolmogorov-Arnold networks, we place trainable nonlinear functions on the connections, making each physical connection a learnable computational element. Realising these functions as analogue band-pass filters on field-programmable analogue arrays, we find that the benefit is task-dependent and follows from the smoothness of the physical basis: the networks represent smooth, continuously valued targets, including robotic kinematics, continuous control, and photovoltaic maximum-power-point tracking, with far fewer nodes and connections than multilayer perceptrons, but offer no parameter-efficiency advantage on classification-like decision boundaries. Trained networks transfer to hardware across approximately 35,000 connections with quantified fidelity, and a dedicated CMOS implementation is projected to operate at approximately 30 microwatts. A memristive realisation reproduces the same behaviour in simulation, indicating that the advantage comes from placing trainable nonlinearity on connections, rather than from a particular device.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Dose-efficient Quantum Phase Estimation in Lossy Optical Interferometry

arXiv:2606.14254v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Optical interferometry is a cornerstone technique for precise phase measurements across various fields. In many applications, for example, biological imaging, it often necessitates stringent limits on light intensity to prevent adverse effects on light-sensitive samples, a condition known as dose-limited regimes. Maximizing the precision per dose is therefore crucial. In quantum metrology, quantum correlations enable high precision in phase estimation while adhering to dose constraints. Nevertheless, photon loss, including absorption by a sample, substantially diminishes the benefits of quantum enhancement in interferometry. In this work, we experimentally investigate a dose-efficient approach to quantum phase estimation using sequential strategies in the presence of loss. Performance of sequential strategies with and without control is evaluated through quantum Fisher information (QFI) per dose. Experimental results show that both sequential strategies exceed the classical limit and outperform the parallel strategy using unbalanced N00N states. Notably, the control-enhanced sequential strategy attains superior QFI per dose, approaching the quantum limit. These results highlight the promise of sequential strategy for imaging and sensing in resource-constrained scenarios, marking a significant step toward practical and efficient quantum metrology in lossy environments.

21.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15

Biological meaning in protein embedding space is resolution-dependent

Protein language model embeddings are increasingly used to organise biological sequences, yet how biological meaning is encoded within embedding neighbourhoods remains poorly understood. Using two independent hierarchical enzyme systems, carbohydrate-active enzymes and peptidases, we investigated how biological interpretation changes across embedding organisations aligned to different levels of biological hierarchy. Different embedding organisations give rise to distinct neighbourhood semantics. When aligned to membership-boundary resolution, embeddings robustly separated artefacts and unrelated proteins from members of the target category. However, embeddings aligned to functional-grouping resolution maintained compositional neighbourhood structure for multi-domain proteins spanning more than one functional or catalytic group. Finally, embeddings aligned to local-family resolution recovered compact family-like neighbourhoods, including families withheld from training, while weakening broader membership-boundary and functional-grouping relationships. Moreover, embeddings optimised toward the same level of biological organisation retain different biological relationships depending on optimisation trajectory employed. Together, our results show that proximity in protein embedding space has no fixed biological interpretation. Instead, biological meaning emerges across embedding resolutions through selective preservation of different forms of biological organisation.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Rethinking the Trust Region in LLM Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a cornerstone for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs), with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) serving as the de facto standard algorithm. Despite its ubiquity, we argue that the core ratio clipping mechanism in PPO is structurally ill-suited for the large vocabularies inherent to LLMs. PPO constrains policy updates based on the probability ratio of sampled tokens, which serves as a noisy single-sample Monte Carlo estimate of the true policy divergence. This creates a sub-optimal learning dynamic: updates to low-probability tokens are aggressively over-penalized, while potentially catastrophic shifts in high-probability tokens are under-constrained, leading to training inefficiency and instability. To address this, we propose Divergence Proximal Policy Optimization (DPPO), which substitutes heuristic clipping with a more principled constraint based on a direct estimate of policy divergence (e.g., Total Variation or KL). To avoid huge memory footprint, we introduce the efficient Binary and Top-K approximations to capture the essential divergence with negligible overhead. Extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate that DPPO achieves superior training stability and efficiency compared to existing methods, offering a more robust foundation for RL-based LLM fine-tuning. Our code is available at https://github.com/sail-sg/Stable-RL.

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

Spatial Priors via Space Filling Curves for Small and Limited Data Vision Transformers

Though Vision Transformers (ViTs) have become the dominant backbone in many computer vision tasks, due to permutation equivariance, their attention mechanism lacks explicit spatial inductive biases. This become particularly important in two settings: when model capacity is small or training data is limited. Inspired by the attention masking strategies in Linear Transformers and the scanning patterns of Vision SSMs, we introduce VIOLIN, a lightweight masked attention mechanism that encodes spatial structure within attention via Space Filling Curves (SFCs) with less than 0.0015% extra parameters and negligible computational overhead. VIOLIN scans the image using multiple SFCs to construct curve-specific decay masks, which are then combined and multiplied with the attention matrix. Across a wide range of evaluations, VIOLIN consistently improves performance. In limited data regimes such as fine-tuning on VTAB-1K, it boosts accuracy across all task groups and by up to 8.7% on the tasks where spatial information is essential. It can be combined with parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods such as LoRA to further increase the performance. Beyond fine-tuning, VIOLIN improves various small scale ViT architectures (e.g., DeiT, DINO) during pretraining on ImageNet-1K. Additionally, on pixel-level CIFAR-100 training, a task that is highly dependent on location information, VIOLIN increases accuracy by up to 7.2%. Overall, VIOLIN provides a computationally efficient yet effective way to inject spatial inductive bias into ViTs, especially benefiting small models and limited data settings.

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

Agentic Environment Engineering for Large Language Models: A Survey of Environment Modeling, Synthesis, Evaluation, and Application

Environments serve as interactive systems for large language model (LLM) based agents across diverse scenarios and play a crucial role in driving the continual evolution of model capabilities. Despite this importance, existing work lacks a systematic categorization and deep analysis. This paper systematically studies current researches on agentic environments from the perspective of the environment engineering lifecycle, covering their modeling, synthesis, evaluation and application. Specifically, the paper first introduces representative environments from the perspectives of eight attributes and eight domains, providing detailed analyses of their development paths and highlighting their core capabilities. Second, for automated environment synthesis, two paradigms are introduced, such as symbolic synthesis and neural synthesis. This paper also shows different environment evaluation methods in each paradigm. Thirdly, the corresponding environment applications from the perspective of agent-environment co-evolution are discussed. In specific, the paper characterizes the primary pathways for agent evolution in dynamic environments from four complementary perspectives: memory-centric experience evolution, orchestration-centric workflow evolution, trajectory-centric offline evolution, and exploration-centric online evolution. And three paradigms of environment evolution are identified, namely neural-driven, difficulty-driven, and scaling-driven approaches. At last, several promising future directions are discussed, including Environment-as-a-Service, Multi-agent Environments, and Neural-Symbolic Environments.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Random Grover Search

arXiv:2606.11759v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Grover's algorithm achieves a quadratic speedup for unstructured search given a global oracle for the target set. In many applications, however, the target set is specified as the intersection of multiple constraint sets. Constructing a global oracle for the intersection can be costly, whereas the individual constraint oracles are often much simpler to implement. We study a randomized Grover search algorithm that directly uses these constraint oracles. At each iteration, one of the corresponding Grover operators is selected at random. For the two-operator case with uniform sampling, we prove that the success probability approaches one after \[ \Theta \left(\frac\pi4\sqrt{\frac{N}{r}}\right) \] iterations, where $r$ is the size of the intersection. Thus, the algorithm achieves the same asymptotic query complexity as standard Grover search but without requiring a global oracle. We then generalize the analysis to arbitrary sampling distributions and an arbitrary number of Grover operators through an auxiliary operator that approximates the expected Grover evolution, while retaining the same asymptotic complexity. We further show that highly biased sampling distributions can still achieve near-unit success probability, enabling cheaper Grover operators to be used more frequently. Finally, we prove asymptotic optimality and support the theoretical results with numerical simulations.