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

Activation- and Influence-Aware Ranks (AIR): Function-Preserving SVD Compression for LLMs

arXiv:2606.19993v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present Activation- and Influence-Aware Ranks (AIR), an SVD-based LLM compression framework that guides each weight matrix's low-rank approximation with a backward-signal influence metric. Starting from the activation-aware optimum of SVD-LLM(W), AIR runs a single closed-form alternating least squares (ALS) sweep that integrates influence element-wise under a monotone-descent guarantee. AIR is layer-local and composes orthogonally with end-to-end methods: alone it exceeds ACIP, and AIR+LoRA outperforms it further. AIR improves perplexity over SVD-LLM(W) by >18% at

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

ENPIRE: Agentic Robot Policy Self-Improvement in the Real World

arXiv:2606.19980v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Achieving dexterous robotic manipulation in the real world heavily relies on human supervision and algorithm engineering, which becomes a central bottleneck in the pursuit of general physical intelligence. Although emerging coding agents can generate code to automate algorithm search, their successes remain largely confined in digital environments. We conjecture that the missing abstraction to automate robotics research is a repeatable feedback loop for real-world policy improvement: reset the scene, execute a policy, verify the outcome, and refine the next iteration. To bridge this gap, we introduce ENPIRE, a harness framework for coding agents that instantiates this physical feedback routine with four core modules: an Environment module (EN) for automatic reset and verification, a Policy Improvement module (PI) that launches policy refinement, a Rollout module (R) to evaluate policies with one or multiple physical robots operating in parallel, and an Evolution module (E) in which coding agents analyze logs, consult literature, improve training infrastructure and algorithm code to address failure modes. This closed-loop system transforms real-world manipulation learning into a controllable optimization procedure, minimizing human effort while allowing fair ablations across training recipe and agent variants. Powered by ENPIRE, frontier coding agents can autonomously train a policy to achieve a 99% success rate on challenging, dexterous manipulation tasks, such as organizing a pin box, fastening a zip tie, and tool use, a process that further accelerates when we dispatch an agent team on a robot fleet. Our results suggest a practical and scalable path toward deploying coding agents to autonomously advancing robotics in the physical world.

03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Unbiased Derivative Estimation for Stationary Mean of Parameterized Markov chains

arXiv:2606.11487v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose a new approach to unbiased estimation of the gradients of the stationary means associated with parametrized families of Markov chains. Our estimators are particularly efficient when the Markov chains have slow mixing rate. Our approach does not require a specific parametrization except for an oracle to evaluate the transition density and its gradient at a given data point without any additional knowledge about the density function itself. It makes our estimator suitable for parametrizations associated with neural networks. The estimator can potentially achieve large improvement in terms of efficiency. Numerical experiments confirm the good performance predicted by the theory.

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

MARD: Mirror-Augmented Reasoning Distillation for Mechanism-Level Drug-Drug Interaction Prediction

Mechanism-level drug-drug interaction (DDI) prediction requires identifying which enzyme or pharmacodynamic axis is implicated, in which direction, and with which evidence – not merely whether two drugs interact. We introduce a reproducible mechanism-level DDI labelling and evaluation protocol with a structured 7-family/147-subtype taxonomy, leakage-safe cold-split protocols, and auditable reasoning metrics for evaluating pharmacological prediction beyond flat interaction classification. We propose a pipeline that produces a 7B reasoning MARD (Mirror-Augmented Reasoning Distillation), combining three training innovations: a single-token KL divergence on direction tag that ties the model's prediction, per-loss PRM-weighted DPO with programmatic hard negatives, and a leakage-safe mechanism-aware retrieval channel. Process-reward step labels are automatically verifiable against DrugBank-structured fields, requiring no human or LLM judges. On the April-2026 DrugBank release, our MARD-7B is the only system in a 32-system comparison whose accuracy survives drug-pair novelty, beating the best baseline by +13.9 pp and GPT-4o by +6.7 pp at ~1% of frontier API cost. Further analysis reveals an anti-memorisation signature where accuracy improves on rarely seen drugs, suggesting that gain comes from structured pharmacological reasoning rather than drug-frequency memorisation. We release corpus, DDI-PRM, retrieval index, and training code.

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

Efficient Image-to-Image Schrödinger Bridge for CT Field of View Extension

Computed tomography (CT) is a cornerstone imaging modality for non-invasive, high-resolution visualization of internal anatomical structures. However, when the scanned object exceeds the scanner's field of view (FOV), projection data are truncated, resulting in incomplete reconstructions and pronounced artifacts near FOV boundaries. Conventional reconstruction algorithms struggle to recover accurate anatomy from such data, limiting clinical reliability. Deep learning approaches have been explored for FOV extension, with diffusion generative models representing the latest advances in image synthesis. Yet, conventional diffusion models are computationally demanding and slow at inference due to their iterative sampling process. To address these limitations, we propose an efficient CT FOV extension framework based on the image-to-image Schrödinger Bridge (I$^2$SB) diffusion model. Unlike traditional diffusion models that synthesize images from pure Gaussian noise, I$^2$SB learns a direct stochastic mapping between paired limited-FOV and extended-FOV images. This direct correspondence yields a more interpretable and traceable generative process, enhancing anatomical consistency and structural fidelity in reconstructions. I$^2$SB achieves superior quantitative performance, with root-mean-square error (RMSE) values of 49.8 HU on simulated noisy data and 152.0 HU on real data, outperforming state-of-the-art diffusion models such as conditional denoising diffusion probabilistic models (cDDPM) and patch-based diffusion methods. Moreover, its one-step inference enables reconstruction in just 0.19 s per 2D slice, representing over a 700-fold speedup compared to cDDPM (135 s) and surpassing DiffusionGAN (0.58 s), the second fastest. This combination of accuracy and efficiency indicates that I$^2$SB has potential for real-time or clinical deployment.

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

Reliability-Calibrated Edge-IoT Early Fault Warning for Rotating Machinery with a Physics-Guided Tiny-Mamba Transformer

arXiv:2601.21293v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) systems increasingly rely on distributed vibration sensing to support predictive maintenance of rotating machinery. In practical deployments, however, raw signal upload is costly and alarm decisions must be made locally under limited computation, changing operating conditions, and strict nuisance-alarm budgets. This paper presents a reliability-calibrated edge-IoT early-warning framework, in which a compact Physics-Guided Tiny-Mamba Transformer (PG-TMT) acts as the representation module and an extreme value theory (EVT) layer converts streaming anomaly scores into event-level alarm episodes. PG-TMT combines a depthwise-separable convolutional stem, a Tiny-Mamba state-space branch, and a lightweight local Transformer to capture transient, long-horizon, and multichannel degradation cues under batch-size-one inference. To improve auditability, temporal attention is projected to the frequency domain and softly aligned with analytical bearing fault-order bands. EVT calibration, dual-threshold hysteresis, and trimmed-tail fitting provide controllable false-alarm intensity even when healthy calibration data are imperfect. Experiments on CWRU, Paderborn, XJTU-SY, and an industrial pilot demonstrate that the proposed framework improves PR-AUC, reduces detection delay under a controlled nuisance-alarm budget, and remains robust to structured interference, metadata uncertainty, compound fault mixtures, and domain transfer. With a sub-1 MB footprint and Jetson p99 latency below 7 ms, the framework supports calibrated and interpretable early warnings for IIoT predictive maintenance.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

CIWI-CKT: Chaos-Informed Wave Interference Feature Fusion and Cross-City Knowledge Transfer for Traffic Flow Forecasting

arXiv:2606.15642v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate traffic flow prediction remains challenging in cross-city, data-scarce scenarios where limited historical data hinders model generalisation. The chaotic nature of traffic dynamics, complex spatio-temporal dependencies, and heterogeneous urban networks complicate few-shot learning across cities. Existing deep learning approaches either treat traffic as purely deterministic or lack mechanisms to model wave-like interference patterns essential for cross-regime traffic dynamics. To address these limitations, this paper proposes CIWI-CKT, a novel Chaos-Informed Wave Interference Feature Fusion framework with Cross-City Knowledge Transfer. Our framework introduces three core innovations: chaos-informed wave generation that extracts measurable chaos invariants and models traffic as adaptive wave components; meta-interference processing that captures wave interactions between support and query regimes while producing a predictability score for confidence estimation; and chaos-aware meta-learning that enables efficient cross-city knowledge transfer while preserving chaotic characteristics. We establish theoretical guarantees including chaos-to-wave stability, wave-induced dimension reduction, and meta-learning generalisation bounds. Extensive experiments on four real-world traffic datasets demonstrate that CIWI-CKT significantly outperforms state-of-the-art spatio-temporal graph learning, transfer learning, prompt-based, and few-shot methods, improving prediction accuracy while substantially reducing required training data.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Hybrid Iterative Neural Low-Regularity Integrator for Nonlinear Dispersive Equations

arXiv:2605.04853v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose HIN-LRI, a hybrid framework that augments a classical numerical solver with a neural operator trained to correct the solver's structured truncation error. A base low-regularity integrator provides a consistent first-order approximation to nonlinear dispersive PDEs, while a lightweight neural network, operating on a low-dimensional latent manifold, learns the residual defect that analytical methods cannot close. An explicit time-step scaling on the neural correction ensures that its Lipschitz contribution remains $\mathcal{O}(\tau)$, yielding a Gronwall stability factor bounded uniformly in the step size and independent of the spatial resolution. The network is trained end-to-end through a solver-in-the-loop objective that unrolls the full iteration and penalises trajectory error in a Bourgain-type norm, aligning learning with multi-step solver dynamics rather than isolated one-step targets. Under stated assumptions, the global error satisfies $C(\varepsilon_{net}+\delta)\,\tau^\gamma\ln(1/\tau)$, where $\varepsilon_{net}$ measures the network approximation quality and $\delta$ the training shortfall. Experiments on three dispersive benchmarks with rough data show that HIN-LRI improves accuracy over analytical integrators, splitting methods, and neural PDE surrogates, with stable spatial refinement, effective out-of-distribution transfer, and modest online overhead.

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

RankVR: Low-Rank Structure Perception and Value Recalibration for Robust Composed Image Retrieval

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) constitutes a pivotal paradigm requiring models to perform joint reasoning on reference images and modification texts. However, the prevalence of Noisy Triplet Correspondence (NTC) in large-scale datasets severely constrains model performance. Existing denoising methods either target binary mismatches or rely on scalar-based point-wise estimation, neglecting rich global structural correlations among sample populations and dynamic value variations during training, thereby yielding suboptimal results. This paper identifies two critical unresolved challenges: Global Structural Inconsistency of Semantic Correlations and Hard Sample Discrimination Uncertainty. To address these, we propose RankVR, a framework designed to construct a robust CIR model via global structure consistency and dynamic value perception. Specifically, we introduce the Global Structure Consistency Perception (GSCP) module, which utilizes the Effective Rank of the Correlation Matrix to decouple clean samples from structural noise. By measuring rank difference, GSCP identifies samples disrupting macroscopic semantic symmetry. Furthermore, we develop the Adaptive Semantic Value Calibration (ASVC) module to distinguish high-value hard clean samples. By integrating training potential and reliability, it dynamically quantifies the semantic value of each triplet, ensuring effective utilization of hard samples while suppressing noise characterized by logical conflicts. Extensive experiments on the FashionIQ and CIRR benchmark datasets demonstrate that RankVR significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, validating its superior robustness in noisy environments.

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

Discrete optimal transport is a strong audio adversarial attack

arXiv:2509.14959v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper, we investigate discrete optimal transport (DOT) as a black-box attack against modern automatic speaker verification (ASV) and anti-spoofing countermeasure (CM) systems. Our attack operates as a post-processing distribution-alignment step. Frame-level WavLM embeddings of generated speech (or another person speech) are aligned to an unpaired bona fide speech pool using entropic optimal transport and a top-k barycentric projection, followed by neural vocoding. Unlike gradient-based attacks, the proposed method requires no access to model parameters, gradients, or training data. Experiments on ASVspoof2019 and ASVspoof5 demonstrate that DOT attack substantially increases CM EER and substantially degrades ASV performance across multiple spoofing attacks. The attack transfers across datasets and remains effective after CM fine-tuning. Analysis using speaker similarity, Fréchet Audio Distance, and visualization of embedding distributions suggests that DOT succeeds by shifting source speech toward bona fide regions of the representation space rather than by maximizing speaker similarity. These results indicate that optimal-transport-based distribution alignment represents a previously underexplored attack vector for contemporary ASV and anti-spoofing systems.

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

MatchLM2Lite: A Scalable MLLM-to-Lite Framework for Reproduced Content Identification

Content moderation is critical for online video platforms to ensure content safety, protect creators, and sustain positive user experiences. Beyond filtering harmful content, platforms must guarantee content authenticity at scale so that users are exposed to diverse, original videos rather than low-value reproductions. We present MatchLM2Lite, a real-time, production-grade reproduced content identification (RCI) system that leverages the powerful understanding of a multimodal large language model (MLLM) distilled into a small and fast-inference model. Our system jointly models video, audio, and text signals, operating on pairs of videos to produce fine-grained reproduction scores. The system comprises two modules, MatchLM and MatchLite, and a two-stage training recipe. First, our high-capacity MLLM, MatchLM, serves as a teacher model to define the upper bound of RCI performance. Its capabilities are then distilled into a compact student model, MatchLite. This design allows MatchLite to deliver low-latency, high-throughput inference on video pairs while preserving much of MatchLM's accuracy, making it suitable for integration into real-time recommendation systems. MatchLM achieves an F1-score improvement of +8.57 compared to our previous production model. After knowledge distillation, MatchLite retains a +6.55 gain in F1-score while reducing computational cost by 35x. Deployed at scale, MatchLM2Lite enables efficient, pairwise multimodal RCI, stably serving online traffic at high queries per second (QPS) with an end-to-end latency below 30 seconds. This system has reduced the reproduced video view rate on our platform by 2.5% without degrading user engagement, demonstrating its effectiveness in a large-scale production environment.

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

LESS Is More: Mutual-Stability Sampling for Diffusion Language Models

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) offer a promising alternative to autoregressive decoding by iteratively refining masked sequences, enabling parallel token updates and bidirectional conditioning. Their practical efficiency, however, is limited by sampling procedures that execute a fixed number of reverse denoising steps selected before decoding, spending computation on already-stable positions and sometimes committing unstable ones too early. We present \textsc{LESS}, a training-free, model-agnostic adaptive sampler that treats token commitment as an online stopping problem. \textsc{LESS} implements mutual-stability sampling through a joint stability rule that makes a masked position eligible for unmasking only when its top-1 prediction has high confidence, its top-1 token persists across recent reverse steps, and its predictive distribution is stable under top-$K$ inter-step Jensen–Shannon divergence. We evaluate \textsc{LESS} on Dream-7B, LLaDA-8B, and LLaDA-1.5-8B, covering full-sequence diffusion and semi-autoregressive blockwise sampling regimes, across seven benchmarks spanning general knowledge, math, and code. \textsc{LESS} improves average accuracy over strong training-free adaptive samplers while using $72.1\%$ fewer reverse steps than fixed-budget decoding. Since each reverse step requires a Transformer forward pass, these step-count reductions translate into fewer forward evaluations, lower measured wall-clock latency, and lower estimated inference compute.

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

Cross-modal Identity Mapping: Minimizing Information Loss in Modality Conversion via Reinforcement Learning

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) often omit or misrepresent critical visual content in generated image captions. Minimizing such information loss will force LVLMs to focus on image details to generate precise descriptions. However, measuring information loss during modality conversion is inherently challenging due to the modal gap between visual content and text output. In this paper, we argue that the quality of an image caption is positively correlated with the similarity between images retrieved via text search using that caption. Based on this insight, we further propose Cross-modal Identity Mapping (CIM), a reinforcement learning framework that enhances image captioning without requiring additional annotations. Specifically, the method quantitatively evaluates the information loss from two perspectives: Gallery Representation Consistency and Query-gallery Image Relevance. Supervised under these metrics, LVLM minimizes information loss and aims to achieve identity mapping from images to captions. The experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our method in image captioning, even when compared with Supervised Fine-Tuning. Particularly, on the COCO-LN500 benchmark, CIM achieves a 20% improvement in relation reasoning on Qwen2.5-VL-7B.

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

Haiku to Opus in Just 10 bits: LLMs Unlock Large Compression Gains

arXiv:2604.02343v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the compression of LLM-generated text across lossless and lossy regimes, characterizing a compression-compute frontier where more compression is possible at the cost of more compute. For lossless compression, domain-adapted LoRA adapters can improve LLM-based arithmetic coding by 2x over compression with the base LLM alone. For lossy compression, prompting a model for a succinct rewrite then applying arithmetic coding can achieve compression ratios of approximately 0.03, a 2x improvement over compressing the original response. We further introduce Question-Asking compression (QA), an interactive lossy protocol inspired by the game 'Twenty Questions'. A small model iteratively refines its response by asking yes/no questions to a stronger model, transferring exactly one bit per answer. On 8 benchmarks spanning math, science, and code, 10 binary questions recover 23% to 72% of the capability gap between a small and large model on standard benchmarks and 7% to 38% on harder benchmarks, achieving compression ratios of 0.0006 to 0.004. This is over 100x smaller than prior LLM-based compression (Deletang et al., 2024), suggesting that interactive protocols can transfer knowledge far more efficiently than transmitting full responses.

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

Electric Field Distortions in Surface Ion Traps with Integrated Nanophotonics

arXiv:2503.20387v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The integration of photonic components into surface ion traps provides a scalable approach for trapped-ion quantum computing, sensing, and metrology, enabling compact systems with enhanced stability and precision. However, the introduction of optical apertures in the trap electrodes can distort the trapping electric field. This can lead to excess micromotion (EMM) and ion displacement which degrade the performance of quantum logic operations and optical clocks. In this work, we systematically investigate the electric field distortion in a surface ion trap with integrated waveguides and grating couplers using Finite Element Method (FEM) simulations. We analyze methods to reduce these distortions by exploiting symmetries and transparent conductive oxide materials.

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

Qwen-RobotNav Technical Report: A Scalable Navigation Model Designed for an Agentic Navigation System

Agentic navigation systems require a base navigation model whose observation strategy can be externally reconfigured at inference time, because instruction following, object search, target tracking, and autonomous driving share the same perception-planning backbone yet demand fundamentally different strategies for consuming the visual stream. We present Qwen-RobotNav, a scalable navigation model built on Qwen-RobotNav that addresses it through a parameterised interface with two complementary dimensions: multiple task modes that select the navigation behaviour, and controllable observation parameters (e.g., token budget, per-camera weights) that govern how visual history is encoded. With training-time randomization over all parameters, Qwen-RobotNav is robust to any inference-time configuration requiring zero architectural modification to the Qwen-RobotNav backbone. We train Qwen-RobotNav on 15.6M samples; co-training with vision-language data prevents the collapse into reactive action-sequence mappers observed in trajectory-only training. The parameterised interface also makes Qwen-RobotNav a natural building block for agentic systems: for long-horizon scenarios, an upper-level planner decomposes goals into sub-tasks and dynamically switches Qwen-RobotNav's task mode and context strategy mid-episode, composing complex behaviours from repeated calls to the same model. Extensive experiments show that Qwen-RobotNav sets new state-of-the-art results across major navigation benchmarks. The model exhibits favourable scaling from 2B to 8B parameters, with joint multi-task training developing a shared spatial-planning substrate that transfers across task families, and demonstrates strong zero-shot generalisation to real-world robots across diverse environments.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Afrispeech Semantics: Evaluating Audio Semantic Reasoning in Spoken Language Models Across Domains and Accents

Audio language models (ALMs) are increasingly used for speech-based understanding, yet their ability to perform semantic reasoning beyond transcription, Text-to-Audio Retrieval, Captioning, and Question-Answering accuracy remains insufficiently benchmarked. In particular, the effects of accent variation, domain shift, and semantic over-inference on audio reasoning are poorly understood. We evaluate audio language models across five semantic and paralinguistic reasoning tasks: entailment, consistency, plausibility, accent drift, and accent restraint. Collectively, these tasks assess a model's ability to reason over spoken audio as the primary evidence source, including whether a textual hypothesis can be inferred, contradicted, or left undetermined by the audio, whether statements align or conflict with spoken content, whether claims are plausible given the discourse, and whether model predictions remain stable or appropriately constrained across accent variation. These findings highlight critical limitations in current audio reasoning evaluations and hope to provide guidance for more robust and equitable ALM design and assessment

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Anatomy of Post-Training: Using Interpretability to Characterize Data and Shape the Learning Signal

arXiv:2606.12360v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language-model post-training is the main stage at which model behavior is shaped, yet it still largely involves optimization of scalar rewards that summarize diverse desiderata. This abstraction gives practitioners little visibility into what their data actually teaches models, allowing spurious correlations to be learned by a model and inducing undesirable behaviors such as over-stylization and sycophancy. To address this problem, we ask: can we inspect a preference dataset before optimization and decide, at the level of concepts, which behaviors a model should be allowed to learn? Motivated by this, we introduce a data-centric post-training pipeline that uses interpretability protocols to develop statistical hypotheses for the latent concepts separating preferred from dispreferred generations, making them explicit for fine-grained user feedback. Building on this view, we unify several interpretability-based training protocols as ways of shaping rewards via feature or data interventions. Empirically, we show that our pipeline diagnoses undesirable signals in existing preference data, mitigates off-target learning, and can also help amplify or shape desired properties such as safeguards and model personality. More broadly, our results suggest that interpretability can turn post-training from optimizing opaque proxy rewards into a process of auditing and sculpting the learning signal itself.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Decomposing Prediction Mechanisms for In-Context Recall

arXiv:2507.01414v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a new family of toy problems that combine features of linear-regression-style continuous in-context learning (ICL) with discrete associative recall. We pretrain transformer models on sample traces from this toy, specifically symbolically-labeled interleaved state observations from randomly drawn linear deterministic dynamical systems. We study if the transformer models can recall the state of a sequence previously seen in its context when prompted to do so with the corresponding in-context label. Taking a closer look at this task, it becomes clear that the model must perform two functions: (1) identify which system's state should be recalled and apply that system to its last seen state, and (2) continuing to apply the correct system to predict the subsequent states. Training dynamics reveal that the first capability emerges well into a model's training. Surprisingly, the second capability, of continuing the prediction of a resumed sequence, develops much earlier. Via out-of-distribution experiments, and a mechanistic analysis on model weights via edge pruning, we find that next-token prediction for this toy problem involves at least two separate mechanisms. One mechanism uses the discrete symbolic labels to do the associative recall required to predict the start of a resumption of a previously seen sequence. The second mechanism, which is largely agnostic to the discrete symbolic labels, performs a "Bayesian-style" prediction based on the previous token and the context. These two mechanisms have different learning dynamics. To confirm that this multi-mechanism (manifesting as separate phase transitions) phenomenon is not just an artifact of our toy setting, we used OLMo training checkpoints on an ICL translation task to see a similar phenomenon: a decisive gap in the emergence of first-task-token performance vs second-task-token performance.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

OSCS-SupCon: Orthogonal Sigmoid-based Common and Style Supervised Contrastive Learning for Robust Feature Disentanglement

Supervised Contrastive Learning (SupCon) has achieved strong performance by explicitly modeling pairwise relationships among samples. However, existing SupCon-based methods suffer from two key limitations: negative-sample dilution induced by the standard InfoNCE loss, and feature-space entanglement caused by the lack of explicit constraints separating category-relevant (common) and category-irrelevant (style) features. These limitations reduce feature discriminability and generalization ability. To address these issues, we propose OSCS-SupCon (Orthogonal Sigmoid-based Common and Style Supervised Contrastive Learning), a unified framework that combines a sigmoid-based pairwise contrastive objective with explicit orthogonality constraints. Specifically, we introduce a sigmoid-based contrastive loss with two learnable parameters, temperature and bias, which adaptively modulate pairwise decision boundaries and alleviate negative-sample dilution. Furthermore, we enforce orthogonality between common and style feature subspaces via a linear projection with ReLU nonlinearity, thereby reducing feature overlap and improving disentanglement of style-irrelevant representations. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that OSCS-SupCon consistently outperforms state-of-the-art supervised contrastive learning methods across multiple backbone architectures. In particular, on the fine-grained CUB200-2011 dataset with a ResNet-18 backbone, the proposed method achieves a 3.4% improvement in classification accuracy over CS-SupCon, highlighting its robustness and generalization capability. Ablation studies further confirm the effectiveness of each component.

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

CLoVE: Personalized Federated Learning through Clustering of Loss Vector Embeddings

arXiv:2506.22427v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose CLoVE (Clustering of Loss Vector Embeddings), a novel algorithm for Clustered Federated Learning (CFL). In CFL, clients are naturally grouped into clusters based on their data distribution. However, identifying these clusters is challenging, as client assignments are unknown. CLoVE utilizes client embeddings derived from model losses on client data, and leverages the insight that clients in the same cluster share similar loss values, while those in different clusters exhibit distinct loss patterns. Based on these embeddings, CLoVE is able to iteratively identify and separate clients from different clusters and optimize cluster-specific models through federated aggregation. Key advantages of CLoVE over existing CFL algorithms are (1) its simplicity, (2) its applicability to both supervised and unsupervised settings, and (3) the fact that it eliminates the need for near-optimal model initialization, which makes it more robust and better suited for real-world applications. We establish theoretical convergence bounds, showing that CLoVE can recover clusters accurately with high probability in a single round and converges exponentially fast to optimal models in a linear setting. Our comprehensive experiments comparing with a variety of both CFL and generic Personalized Federated Learning (PFL) algorithms on different types of datasets and an extensive array of non-IID settings demonstrate that CLoVE achieves highly accurate cluster recovery in just a few rounds of training, along with state-of-the-art model accuracy, across a variety of both supervised and unsupervised PFL tasks.

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

Illumination-Robust Camera-Based Heart-Rate Estimation for Physiological Sensing in Robots

Physiological awareness is important for service, social, and assistive robots that interact with humans in everyday environments. Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) enables non-contact heart-rate (HR) estimation from an RGB camera, making it a promising sensing modality for robot-mounted vision systems. However, illumination variation remains a major barrier to robust deployment. This paper presents an end-to-end spatial-temporal transformer framework for remote HR estimation on a new dataset with varied illumination. Our estimator integrates PRNet-based 3D face alignment, clip-level illumination augmentation, the Residual Temporal Standardization Module, and controlled hybrid temporal-frequency supervision. The training objective combines a Soft-Shifted Pearson waveform loss with a spectral Kullback-Leibler divergence loss, where a tuned weight ($\mathbf{\beta}$) controls the contribution of frequency-domain heart-rate guidance. Experiments on a static all-level mix protocol covering three illumination levels show that $\mathbf{\beta}=5$ provides the strongest result among the tested beta settings, achieving a best-run HR mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.79 bpm and an HR correlation of 0.982. Compared with the PhysFormer baseline evaluated on our dataset, our estimator reduces HR MAE by 93.6 %, while increasing HR correlation from 0.088 to 0.982, making it usable when illumination varies.

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

Diagnosing and Repairing Shape-Prior Shortcuts in Long-Range Single-Shot Fringe Projection Profilometry

arXiv:2606.17093v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning-based single-shot fringe projection profilometry (FPP) has been studied mostly at close range. The long-range regime (standoff beyond 1 m) remains largely unaddressed: inverse-square intensity falloff lowers fringe signal-to-noise ratio and degrades physical ground truth, the single-shot problem is ill-posed because fringe-order information is absent from one image, and these architectures have not been studied mechanistically. We present a diagnose-repair-verify study using mechanistic interpretability (MI) and conformal uncertainty quantification (UQ) as convergent diagnostics: they agree on one physical failure locus, driving and verifying an architectural repair. On a photorealistic synthetic benchmark (15,600 fringe images, 50 objects at 1.5-2.1 m), a best UNet baseline reaches 14.54 mm object mean absolute error (MAE). Three probes (linear probing, Grad-CAM, flat-plane out-of-distribution test) converge: the baseline solves the task via object-boundary shape priors rather than fringe-phase decoding. We repair this with PhiCalNet, which outputs wrapped phase rather than depth and applies a fixed differentiable calibration layer mapping phase to depth, removing the shape-prior solution from the hypothesis space architecturally rather than by a loss penalty. A physics-informed loss that enforces the same physics as a soft penalty on a depth-regressing network yields no measurable gain, isolating the architecture as the operative factor. PhiCalNet reduces object MAE 3.3x to 4.46 mm; the residual is carried by 0.103% of pixels at the +/-pi wrap discontinuity. Pixel-wise conformal UQ confirms the diagnosis: rejecting the top 5% of object pixels by snapshot disagreement cuts PhiCalNet RMSE by 64% (20.6->7.4 mm) versus 3.5% for the baseline. MI and UQ converge on the same failure locus.