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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Hybrid Transformer-Mamba for Weakly Supervised Volumetric Medical Segmentation

Weakly supervised segmentation enables model training from plane-level labels. Existing methods often rely on 2D encoders, neglecting the volumetric nature of medical data. We propose TranSamba, a hybrid Transformer-Mamba architecture designed to capture 3D context via cross-plane modeling. TranSamba augments a Vision Transformer backbone with Cross-Plane Mamba blocks, leveraging linear-time modeling for efficient information exchange across neighboring planes. This exchange improves in-plane self-attention and subsequent attention maps for object localization. TranSamba maintains linear time complexity and constant space complexity with respect to the input volume depth. Extensive experiments on three datasets covering diverse modalities and pathologies show that TranSamba achieves state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating the generalizable efficacy of cross-plane modeling. Code is available at: https://github.com/YihengLyu/TranSamba.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Zone of Proximal Policy Optimization: Teacher in Prompts, Not Gradients

Knowledge distillation transfers a teacher's competence to a small student but is brittle in the small-student regime: forcing the student to imitate logits from a much larger teacher concentrates it on the teacher's sharpest modes, hurting generalization on benchmark families beyond the training corpus. Reinforcement learning (RL) avoids logit imitation by training on the student's own rollouts. However, on questions where every rollout fails-yielding zero advantage and being silently discarded-injecting a stronger teacher's response into the policy gradient breaks the on-policy assumption and induces drift. We introduce Zone of Proximal Policy Optimization (ZPPO), inspired by Vygotsky's zone of proximal development, which keeps the teacher inside the prompt rather than the policy gradient. On hard questions, ZPPO constructs two reformulated prompts: a Binary Candidate-included Question (BCQ) pairs one correct teacher response with one incorrect student response as anonymized candidates the student must discriminate, and a Negative Candidate-included Question (NCQ) aggregates the student's wrong rollouts into a single prompt to surface their shared failure modes. A prompt replay buffer recirculates each hard question until it either graduates-the student's mean rollout accuracy on it reaches half- or is FIFO-evicted under finite capacity, amplifying BCQ and NCQ inside the student's current zone of proximal development. On the Qwen3.5 family at four student scales (0.8B-9B) with a 27B teacher, post-trained as vision-language models and evaluated on a 31-benchmark suite (16 VLM, 10 LLM, 5 Video), ZPPO outperforms off/on-policy distillation and GRPO, with the largest gains at the smallest scale.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Which Spaces can be Embedded in $L_p$-type Reproducing Kernel Banach Space? A Characterization via Metric Entropy

arXiv:2410.11116v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper, we establish a novel connection between the metric entropy growth and the embeddability of function spaces into reproducing kernel Hilbert/Banach spaces. Metric entropy characterizes the information complexity of function spaces and has implications for their approximability and learnability. Classical results show that embedding a function space into a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) implies a bound on its metric entropy growth. Surprisingly, we prove a converse: a bound on the metric entropy growth of a function space allows its embedding to a $L_p-$type Reproducing Kernel Banach Space (RKBS). This shows that the ${L}_p-$type RKBS provides a broad modeling framework for learnable function classes with controlled metric entropies. Our results shed new light on the power and limitations of kernel methods for learning complex function spaces.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

ViCoStream: Streaming VideoLLMs Can Run Beyond 100 FPS with Stage-Wise Coordinated Inference

Streaming VideoLLMs must continuously process incoming video while maintaining low query latency, making both video-ingestion throughput and query-time responsiveness critical for real-time deployment. Existing methods largely focus on accelerating individual modules, such as visual encoding, token pruning, or KV-cache compression, but provide limited insight into whether the resulting system can sustain real-time streaming performance. We formulate streaming VideoLLM inference as a coordinated pipeline spanning visual preprocessing, visual encoding, token dropping, and LLM prefilling/decoding. Building on this formulation, we propose ViCoStream (Video Coordinated Streaming), a stage-wise coordinated streaming framework that combines chunk-wise execution, CUDA-stream overlap, visual token control, bounded visual attention, and query-side retrieval to bound per-chunk computation and memory costs. We further provide a systematic study of bottleneck migration, revealing how chunk size, token retention, attention locality, and retrieval scope shape the throughput-accuracy trade-off. Experiments with Qwen2.5-VL-3B/7B-Instruct across multiple streaming benchmarks show that ViCoStream achieves 134 FPS video throughput and less than 50 ms TTFT on a single A100 GPU while maintaining accuracy close to full-history baselines.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

3D Masked Autoencoders are Robust Learners of Volumetric and Multimodal Cellular Representations for Microscopy

Self-supervised learning in fluorescence microscopy often relies on 2D projections, despite the inherently three-dimensional nature of cells. We present a systematic comparison of 2D and 3D masked autoencoders (MAE-2D vs. MAE-3D) on volumetric microscopy data. Under matched architectures and training protocols, MAE-3D consistently outperforms 2D max-projection and slice-based variants on downstream single-cell tasks. We further align visual representations with a pretrained protein language model (ESM2) and show that cross-modal supervision yields larger gains for volumetric models. Channel cross-attention and frequency-domain regularization are critical for leveraging 3D spatial context. On a protein–protein interaction task, MAE-3D achieves a ROC–AUC of 0.865, outperforming prior methods by up to +0.025. For protein localization, our best 3D model attains state-of-the-art AUC$_{micro}$ (0.952) and F1$_{micro}$ (0.742), improving over previous approaches by +0.003 and +0.010 absolute, respectively. Overall, these results demonstrate the advantages of native 3D modeling and multimodal alignment for representation learning in single-cell microscopy.

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

Feature-Space Planes Searcher: A Universal Domain Adaptation Framework for Interpretability and Computational Efficiency

Domain shift, characterized by degraded model performance during transition from labeled source domains to unlabeled target domains, poses a persistent challenge for deploying deep learning systems. Current unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) methods predominantly rely on fine-tuning feature extractors - an approach limited by inefficiency, reduced interpretability, and poor scalability to modern architectures. Our analysis reveals that models pretrained on large-scale data exhibit domain-invariant geometric patterns in their feature space, characterized by intra-class clustering and inter-class separation, thereby preserving transferable discriminative structures. These findings indicate that domain shifts primarily manifest as boundary misalignment rather than feature degradation. Unlike fine-tuning entire pre-trained models - which risks introducing unpredictable feature distortions - we propose the Feature-space Planes Searcher (FPS): a novel domain adaptation framework that optimizes decision boundaries by leveraging these geometric patterns while keeping the feature encoder frozen. This streamlined approach enables interpretative analysis of adaptation while substantially reducing memory and computational costs through offline feature extraction, permitting full-dataset optimization in a single computation cycle. Evaluations on public benchmarks demonstrate that FPS achieves competitive or superior performance to state-of-the-art methods. FPS scales efficiently with multimodal large models and shows versatility across diverse domains including protein structure prediction, remote sensing classification, and earthquake detection. We anticipate FPS will provide a simple, effective, and generalizable paradigm for transfer learning, particularly in domain adaptation tasks. .

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

ArtiTwinSplat: Interactable Digital Twin Reconstruction via Gaussian Splatting from RGB-D videos

Deploying robots in unstructured real-world environments needs accurate, interactive models of the objects. Constructing these models at scale remains a critical bottleneck for robotic system integration. We present ArtiTwinSplat, a framework that automatically constructs articulated, photo-realistic digital twins of objects directly from RGB-D videos, requiring no CAD models, simulation assets, or manual annotations. Our method is built on 3D Gaussian Splatting that preserve geometric fidelity and photometric realism, coupled with an unsupervised articulation discovery pipeline that recovers part structure and joint kinematics from observed motion alone. With tracking and optimization stages our method provides stable, queryable digital twins that support real-time rendering, viewpoint control, and interactive manipulation. Unlike prior methods confined to simulation, ArtiTwinSplat operates directly on real-world observations and produces twins that are immediately usable by downstream robot planning and learning systems. This method offers a practical, scalable pathway toward digital twin construction, lowering the integration barrier for articulated object manipulation in embodied AI and human-robot collaboration contexts.

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

Context-Aware Prediction of Student Quiz Performance with Multimodal Textbook Features

作者:

arXiv:2606.24770v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Educational platforms often predict student performance from prior interactions, but the assessment content itself also varies in linguistic and visual complexity. This paper studies whether lightweight content features extracted from CourseKata chapter-review questions improve prediction of end-of-chapter quiz scores beyond a student's average prior exercise performance. The study combines 2023 CourseKata student response data with chapter-level text features from review-question wording and image features from textbook visuals. Across 4,742 student-chapter observations from 562 class-student IDs, adding content features improves student-grouped five-fold quiz prediction performance by 9.1% relative to a prior-performance baseline. In leave-chapter-out validation, text features reduce prediction error relative to the baseline, while image-containing models have higher error. This paper suggests that a context-aware model adds useful signal about the text and visual features of questions to better predict student quiz performance compared with using past student performance alone.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Frozen elephant trunk repair in heritable thoracic aortic disease: Impact of genetic aortopathy on long-term outcomes - A multicenter analysis

Aims This multicenter study aims to compare outcomes of total aortic arch replacement (TAR) using the frozen elephant trunk (FET) technique in patients with and without heritable thoracic aortic disease (HTAD) and to assess whether HTAD influences postprocedural adverse aortic events (AAEs). Methods From 06/2007 to 05/2024, aortic databases from 13 European centers were screened for HTAD patients undergoing TAR with FET. All consecutive dissection and aneurysm non-HTAD patients from the four core centers served as comparator. The primary outcome was AAE, a composite of diameter progression, distal stent graft induced new entry (dSINE), malperfusion, rupture and pseudoaneurysm at 5 years after FET implantation. Results Of 2739 FET patients, 196 (7.2%) were diagnosed with HTAD. The control group consisted of 867 non-HTAD FET patients. Marfan syndrome was the most common condition (72%), followed by Loeys-Dietz syndrome (11%), vascular Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (5.6%) and Turner syndrome (2.0%). Seventeen (8.8%) patients were diagnosed with ns-HTAD. At 5 years 46 (24%) AAEs occurred in the HTAD group, 169 (20%) in the non-HTAD group (p=0.2). Diameter progression was the most common event (10% vs. 12%; p=0.6), followed by dSINE (5.8% vs. 4.5%; p=0.5), malperfusion (4.2% vs. 3.3%; p=0.5), rupture (2.1% vs. 0.7%; p=0.09) and pseudoaneurysm (0.5% vs. 0.2%; p=0.5). Conclusions The FET technique appears safe and effective for acute and chronic aortic disease in HTAD patients, with outcomes comparable to non-HTAD cases and no increase in graft-related complications, challenging traditional concerns about stent graft use in genetically mediated aortic disease.

10.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

THEOBROMA: an aggregated open database of 1.13 million natural products with per-compound license auditing, three-tier classification, and stereochemistry-aware deduplication

Natural products remain one of the most productive sources of pharmacologically active compounds for drug discovery, yet the current open aggregator landscape attributes licenses at database rather than compound granularity, with consequences that have become tangible as the field grows. A recent relicensing event in one constituent source (the September 2024 transition of the Natural Products Atlas to CC BY-NC 4.0) demonstrates how database-level licensing propagates across an aggregate and motivates the per-compound audit framework presented here. The same peer cohort separately leaves classification provenance and stereoisomer-family relations coarser than either layer warrants. THEOBROMA, accessible at url{https://theobroma.l3s.uni-hannover.de}, integrates 1{,}133{,}004 natural products from 29 open sources under a per-compound license audit that resolves each compound's license tier across all attesting sources under a most-restrictive-wins rule, identifying 900{,}170 compounds (79.4%) under open-use licenses and exposing the per-source attestation chain and resolved tier through a dedicated audit endpoint and a query-time license filter. A three-tier classification stratifies 89.3% coverage into 35.1% curated, 43.9% high-confidence inferred, and 10.3% exploratory tiers, with 486{,}215 stereoisomer families preserved by full 27-character InChIKey deduplication and exposed via a dedicated texttt{/api/stereoisomers/} endpoint and a radial-family display. Per-compound license provenance is the primary differentiator. Classification stratification and stereoisomer-family exposure add finer-grained access to two related axes, supporting license-compatible virtual screening and isomer-specific bioactivity analysis at corpus scale. As an evolving open resource, THEOBROMA pairs continuous pipeline maintenance with interactive geographic, taxonomic, and chemical-space exploration.

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

Verifiable Environments Are LEGO Bricks: Recursive Composition for Reasoning Generalization

Reinforcement Learning (RL) with verifiable environments has emerged as a powerful approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). While prior research demonstrates that scaling environment quantity improves RL performance, existing manual or individual construction methods suffer from linear scaling limits, thereby hindering scalable reasoning generalization. This paper introduces RACES (Recursive Automated Composition for Environment Scaling), a framework that conceptualizes verifiable environments as composable building blocks that can be recursively assembled. The key insight is that when the codomain (output type) of one environment matches the domain (input type) of another, they can be automatically fused into a new verifiable environment, enabling recursive composition. RACES is implemented with 300 individual environments and defines a set of composition operators (\textsc{SEQUENTIAL}, \textsc{PARALLEL}, \textsc{SORT}, and \textsc{SELECT}) that induce diverse reasoning patterns. Extensive experiments show that RL training on these composite environments consistently enhances reasoning generalization. Specifically, RACES improves DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-14B by an average of 3.1 points (from 48.2 to 51.3) and boosts Qwen3-14B performance from 58.8 to 61.1 on six benchmarks, which are unseen during the construction of training environments. Moreover, RACES achieves performance comparable to training on 300 individual environments using only 50 base environments, demonstrating significant efficiency in environment utilization.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Calibrating Decision Robustness via Inverse Conformal Risk Control

arXiv:2510.07750v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Robust optimization safeguards decisions against uncertainty by optimizing against worst-case scenarios, yet their effectiveness hinges on a prespecified robustness level that is often chosen ad hoc, leading to either insufficient protection or overly conservative and costly solutions. Recent approaches using conformal prediction construct data-driven uncertainty sets with finite-sample coverage guarantees, but they still fix coverage targets a priori and offer little guidance for selecting robustness levels. We propose a new framework that provides distribution-free, finite-sample guarantees on both miscoverage and regret for any family of robust predict-then-optimize policies. Our method constructs valid estimators that trace out the miscoverage–regret Pareto frontier, enabling decision-makers to reliably evaluate and calibrate robustness levels according to their cost–risk preferences. The framework is simple to implement, broadly applicable across classical optimization formulations, and achieves sharper finite-sample performance. This paper offers a principled data-driven methodology for guiding robustness selection and empowers practitioners to balance robustness and conservativeness in high-stakes decision-making.

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

Entropy-Aware On-Policy Distillation of Language Models

On-policy distillation is a promising approach for transferring knowledge between language models, where a student learns from dense token-level signals along its own trajectories. This framework typically uses reverse KL divergence, encouraging the student to match the teacher's high-confidence predictions. However, we show that the mode-seeking property of reverse KL reduces generation diversity and yields unstable learning signals when the teacher distribution has high entropy. To address this, we introduce Entropy-Aware On-Policy Distillation. Our key idea is augmenting the standard reverse KL objective with forward KL when teacher entropy is high, capturing the full range of plausible outputs while retaining precise imitation elsewhere. It balances mode-seeking precision with mode-covering robustness without sacrificing on-policy training efficiency. Experiments show that our method maintains generation diversity (sustained token-level entropy) and improves student-teacher alignment (lower forward KL on high-entropy tokens). Across six math reasoning benchmarks, this yields Pass@8 accuracy gains of +1.37 for Qwen3-0.6B-Base, +2.39 for Qwen3-1.7B-Base, and +5.05 for Qwen3-4B-Base compared to baseline on-policy distillation methods. These results demonstrate that accounting for teacher uncertainty is essential for maintaining diversity and achieving effective knowledge transfer.

14.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

Genetic technologies to enhance crop nutritional value under climate change

At present, more than 700 million people live with caloric hunger, and more than two billion suffer from micronutrient deficiencies, known as ‘hidden hunger’. From an agricultural viewpoint, three major objectives need to be worked towards simultaneously to achieve zero hunger (the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 2): (1) enhanced yield; (2) higher vitamin and mineral density to sustain recommended daily intake (multi-biofortification); and (3) enhanced climate-change resilience. Although the Green Revolution increased global calorie production, it exacerbated hidden hunger by prioritizing high yield over nutritional quality. Stress from global climate change has been shown to reduce the densities of several micronutrients. CRISPR–Cas, which allows genome editing with extremely high precision, has emerged as a groundbreaking breeding technology that has already been adopted by many countries. Here we examine how CRISPR–Cas-based approaches could be used to achieve biofortification targets by enhancing micronutrient densities to the levels necessary to alleviate dietary vitamin and mineral deficiencies. Given the limited time frame available to achieve zero hunger, we argue that CRISPR–Cas technologies should be combined with metabolic engineering based on transformation and other technologies. We also consider untapped resources beyond metabolic pathways and current CRISPR–Cas methodologies to address one of the most important societal issues of the twenty-first century. This Review reflects on the joint power of genetic technologies, including untapped CRISPR–Cas techniques to combat hidden hunger and improve crop resilience, and argues in favour of their combined use to overcome these societal challenges.

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

Reliability of Probabilistic Emulation of Physical Systems

arXiv:2606.12997v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Two dominant approaches have emerged for generating probabilistic forecasts of physical systems: generative models, such as diffusion or flow matching; and ensembles of deterministic models with stochasticity injected, trained using the continuous ranked probability score (CRPS) loss. While both approaches have demonstrated strong predictive accuracy, the reliability of their uncertainties has not been systematically assessed. We address this gap by developing a framework to evaluate both approaches across diverse 2D spatiotemporal physical systems, under matched model size and computational budget. We assess the reliability of probabilistic emulation by inspecting the empirical coverage of predictive intervals, while also considering accuracy and computational efficiency metrics. CRPS-trained ensembles typically achieve more reliable uncertainties on both single-step prediction and autoregressive rollouts, demonstrating better coverage than the standard alternative of training generative models in a latent space. Moreover, the CRPS approach offers significantly faster inference. When generative models are trained in ambient rather than a compressed latent space, which is often infeasible for high-dimensional problems, they exhibit comparable coverage to CRPS-trained ensembles, though with substantially larger inference latency. In contrast, when CRPS-trained ensembles are trained in latent space they do not show a marked degradation in coverage with respect to ambient space. Both generative models and CRPS-trained ensembles demonstrate good predictive accuracy. To facilitate future research and application, we release AutoCast, a modular framework implementing both generative models and CRPS-trained ensembles, alongside AutoSim, a flexible dataset generation package for rapid prototyping.

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

Contrast-Informed Augmentation and Domain-Adversarial Training for Adult-to-Neonatal MR Reconstruction Generalization

Purpose: To investigate whether contrast-informed data augmentation and domain-adversarial training improve the adult-to-neonatal generalization of the E2E-VarNet. Methods: Three training regimes were investigated: (1) adult-only training with unaugmented adult data, (2) mixed training with paired unaugmented and neonatal-informed augmented adult data, and (3) mixed training with a domain-adversarial objective. Models were trained on retrospectively undersampled multi-coil adult T2-weighted brain MR data and evaluated on neonatal and adult test data at acceleration factors $R=4$ and $R=8$ using quantitative metrics and qualitative evaluation. Feature analyses assessed whether domain-adversarial training altered the latent representations of unaugmented adult, augmented adult, and neonatal test samples. Results: Mixed training (Mixed) and mixed domain-adversarial training (Mixed-DAT) outperformed unaugmented adult-only training (Unaug-Only) when evaluated on neonatal data. At R=4, Mixed-DAT achieved the best performance (SSIM = 0.924 +/- 0.027, PSNR = 33.98 +/- 1.15 dB). At R=8, Mixed-DAT performed best when measured using SSIM (0.848 +/- 0.031 vs. 0.766 +/- 0.037 for Unaug-Only and 0.814 +/- 0.035 for Mixed) and Mixed performed best when measured using PSNR (29.56 +/- 0.83 dB vs. 26.26 +/- 0.78 dB for Unaug-Only and 29.43 +/- 0.83 dB for Mixed-DAT). Qualitative assessment of t-SNE plots suggested that Mixed-DAT increased the overlap among the latent representations of the unaugmented adult, augmented adult, and neonatal test data. Conclusion: Contrast-informed augmentation and domain-adversarial training improved adult-to-neonatal generalization of deep learning-based MR reconstruction. These findings suggest that contrast-informed data augmentation combined with adversarial training may improve robustness to domain shift in undersampled neonatal MR reconstruction.

17.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-09

Multi-stable oscillations in cortical networks with two classes of inhibition

by Arnab Dey Sarkar, Bard Ermentrout In the classical view of cortical rhythms, interactions between excitatory pyramidal neurons (E) and inhibitory parvalbumin-expressing interneurons (I) are sufficient to generate gamma- and beta-band oscillations. However, it is now well established that multiple inhibitory interneuron subtypes exist and that they play important roles in the generation and modulation of these rhythms. In this paper, we develop a spiking network model consisting of populations of E, I, and an additional interneuron type, somatostatin-expressing neurons (S), which receive excitation from the E cells and inhibit both the E and I populations. The S cells are further modulated by a third inhibitory subtype, vasoactive intestinal peptide (VIP) neurons, which receive inputs from other cortical areas. We reduce the spiking network to a system of nine differential equations that describe the mean membrane potential, firing rate, and synaptic conductance for each population. Using this reduced model, we identify a wide range of parameters that exhibit multiple coexisting rhythms. Employing tools from nonlinear dynamics, we then explore the roles of the two classes of inhibition, as well as VIP modulation, in shaping the properties of these rhythms.

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

Online LLM Selection via Constrained Bandits with Time-Varying Demand

arXiv:2606.17489v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in edge-cloud inference systems to handle diverse user tasks with heterogeneous accuracy, latency, and cost profiles. Selecting the appropriate LLM for each incoming task is critical for ensuring service quality and efficient resource utilization. However, model heterogeneity, stochastic and unknown performance characteristics, and time-varying task demands make static selection strategies inadequate. Real-world deployments often impose hard resource budgets such as monetary expenditure limits, along with soft service-level requirements such as latency guarantees. These constraints introduce additional challenges for online decision-making. We formulate this problem as a constrained stochastic bandit learning task, where the learner sequentially selects models under both packing-type (hard) and covering-type (soft) constraints, while adapting to time-varying task demand. The learner operates without access to the underlying reward, cost, or latency distributions and must rely on partial feedback. We develop a novel online learning algorithm that leverages confidence-bound estimates and demand predictions to balance reward maximization with long-term constraint satisfaction. We provide theoretical guarantees showing sublinear regret and sublinear covering constraint violations compared to an offline benchmark with full information. Experimental results on synthetic workloads demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our approach in dynamic, resource-constrained environments.

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

Evolving Programmatic Skill Networks

arXiv:2601.03509v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study continual skill acquisition in open-ended embodied environments where an agent must construct, refine, and reuse an expanding library of executable skills. We introduce the Programmatic Skill Network (PSN), a framework in which skills are executable symbolic programs forming a compositional network that evolves through experience. PSN defines three core mechanisms instantiated via large language models: (1)~\opreflect for structured fault localization over skill compositions, (2)~progressive optimization with maturity-aware update gating that stabilizes reliable skills while maintaining plasticity for uncertain ones, and (3)~canonical structural refactoring under rollback validation that maintains network compactness. We further show that PSN's learning dynamics exhibit structural parallels to neural network training. Experiments on MineDojo and Crafter demonstrate robust skill reuse, rapid adaptation, and strong generalization across open-ended task distributions.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Unsupervised Learning of Efficient Exploration: Pre-training Adaptive Policies via Self-Imposed Goals

arXiv:2601.19810v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Unsupervised pre-training can equip reinforcement learning agents with prior knowledge and accelerate learning in downstream tasks. A promising direction, grounded in human development, investigates agents that learn by setting and pursuing their own goals. The core challenge lies in how to effectively generate, select, and learn from such goals. Our focus is on broad distributions of downstream tasks where solving every task zero-shot is infeasible. Such settings naturally arise when the target tasks lie outside of the pre-training distribution or when their identities are unknown to the agent. In this work, we (i) optimize for efficient multi-episode exploration and adaptation within a meta-learning framework, and (ii) guide the training curriculum with evolving estimates of the agent's post-adaptation performance. We present ULEE, an unsupervised meta-learning method that combines an in-context learner with an adversarial goal-generation strategy that maintains training at the frontier of the agent's capabilities. On XLand-MiniGrid benchmarks, ULEE pre-training yields improved exploration and adaptation abilities that generalize to novel objectives, environment dynamics, and map structures. The resulting policy attains improved zero-shot and few-shot performance, and provides a strong initialization for longer fine-tuning processes. It outperforms learning from scratch, DIAYN pre-training, and alternative curricula. Code is available at: https://github.com/Octavio-Pappalardo/ulee-jax

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Multi-Task Bayesian In-Context Learning

arXiv:2606.20538v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bayesian predictive inference provides a principled framework for uncertainty quantification, data efficiency, and robust generalization. However, exact inference is often intractable, and scalable approximations may remain computationally expensive or require restrictive modeling assumptions that degrade predictive performance. Prior-Data Fitted and in-context models have recently emerged as an amortized alternative by learning to map datasets directly to predictive distributions, but existing approaches are tightly coupled to the support of the training prior and lack explicit mechanisms for adapting to new priors at test time, resulting in limited robustness under distribution shift. We introduce a multi-task in-context learning framework for amortized hierarchical Bayesian predictive inference that explicitly represents prior information as a prefix of in-context datasets. A transformer trained on sequences of prior and target tasks learns to adapt its predictions across families of priors. On a suite of evaluations with increasing difficulty, including out-of-meta-distribution priors and priors with high-dimensional latent structures, our method matches oracle Bayesian predictors while being orders of magnitude faster. We further demonstrate its practical relevance on a real-world spatiotemporal temperature prediction benchmark. Code is available at https://github.com/martianmartina/multi-task-bayesian-icl/.

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

Vision Transformers for Face Recognition Need More Registers

Recent advances in Vision Transformers (ViTs) for face recognition (FR) have moved beyond the standard CLS-token paradigm. In this paradigm, a special classification token (CLS) is prepended to the patch embeddings and used as a representation of the input for downstream tasks. An alternative approach, Concatenated Patch Embeddings (CPE), instead leverages all patch tokens by concatenating them into a single vector, which is then projected into a compact face representation. CPE has been shown to improve recognition performance in comparison to CLS-based ones, but our qualitative analysis of attention maps showed the presence of artifacts that limit their interpretability. To address this issue, we incorporate register tokens, learnable tokens concatenated to the initial patch embeddings, and processed jointly through the ViT encoder blocks. This mechanism has been shown to produce more structured and interpretable attention maps compared to baseline ViT. We empirically demonstrate that these artifacts consistently appear across various ViT backbones, including small and large models, and that introducing register tokens effectively mitigates them. Adding four or eight registers significantly enhances interpretability, with eight registers providing the highest verification accuracies and smoothest attention structures. Our resulting model, ViT-8R, corresponds to a CPE-based ViT-B architecture augmented with eight register tokens achieves state-of-the-art performance among ViT-based FR models on large-scale IJB-B and IJB-C benchmarks. Also, ViT-8R produces substantially clearer attention maps compared with the baseline model, which offer deeper insight into the model's attention behavior (https://github.com/TaharChettaoui/ViT-FR-Registers)

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

From Paper Letters to an Integrated Digital Workflow: Improving Efficiency, Reliability, and Engagement in Health Guidance

Background: Post-checkup health guidance in Japan has traditionally relied on paper-based communication and manual administrative processes. These workflows are time-consuming, prone to transcription errors, and can delay timely engagement with health guidance recipients. Objective: To assess whether replacing a paper-based workflow with an integrated digital system using Microsoft Access, robotic process automation (RPA), and web-based responses could improve administrative efficiency, operational reliability, and engagement among health guidance recipients. Methods: This single-site quality improvement initiative redesigned the existing letter-based workflow. Access served as a central interface for managing recipients and generating guidance letters. RPA (EzRobot) automated repetitive clerical and billing-related tasks. A web form accessed via a QR code enabled recipients to respond digitally. Outcomes included manual administrative handling time per case, occurrence of transcription-related errors, health guidance completion rate, and guidance duration distribution. Results: Following implementation, staff active handling time per case decreased from approximately 10 minutes to less than 1 minute (approximately 30 seconds), while automated RPA execution typically required about 4-5 minutes per case without staff input. No transcription-related errors were detected during the post-implementation observation period. Health guidance completion rates improved from 28.3% to 39.2% (chi-square test, P=200 days decreased from 30.5% to 20.9% and cases with >=240 days decreased from 13.6% to 8.9% (R4 n=59, R5 n=158). Conclusion: An integrated Access-RPA-Web workflow was associated with improvements in administrative efficiency and operational reliability in post-checkup health guidance while retaining human verification and exception handling. This pragmatic, non-AI-dependent approach may offer a useful model for process-level improvement in preventive care settings.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Cluster-Aware Dual-Level Test Specification Generation for Large-Scale Automotive Software Requirements

arXiv:2606.17197v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generating test specifications that satisfy Automotive SPICE SWE.6 requirements becomes increasingly challenging and time-consuming as projects scale to thousands of requirements. Because this manual process often consumes weeks of engineering effort, automation becomes a critical necessity. However, standard Large Language Model (LLM) approaches struggle at scale: processing requirements individually discards vital inter-requirement dependencies, while feeding entire corpora at once exceeds context-window limits, leading to incomplete integration coverage and redundant test cases. This paper presents a novel "Cluster-then-Summarize" pipeline that addresses these limitations through three-stages. Requirements are embedded using sentence transformers and grouped using UMAP dimensionality reduction followed by HDBSCAN density-based clustering. This grouping utilizes an automatic minimum cluster size selection driven by a quality criterion combining normalized Silhouette and Calinski-Harabasz scores. A multi-level map-reduce summarization algorithm then distills each cluster into concise, domain-conformant descriptions while preserving quantitative thresholds and safety integrity levels. The pipeline exploits the derived cluster topology to generate test specifications at two levels: individual requirement verification and cluster-level integration tests that verify cross-requirement feature behavior. A nearby-cluster context mechanism provides bounded cross-feature awareness during each LLM call, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation grounds all outputs in ISO 26262 and ASPICE standards. Evaluation on automotive requirement datasets of varying scale demonstrates that the cluster-aware approach improves integration test coverage and maintains summarization fidelity compared to baseline methods while scaling efficiently to thousands of requirements.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

The Latent Color Subspace: Emergent Order in High-Dimensional Chaos

Text-to-image generation models have advanced rapidly, yet achieving fine-grained control over generated images remains difficult, largely due to limited understanding of how semantic information is encoded. We develop an interpretation of the color representation in the Variational Autoencoder latent space of FLUX.1 [Dev], revealing a structure reflecting Hue, Saturation, and Lightness. We verify our Latent Color Subspace (LCS) interpretation by demonstrating that it can both predict and explicitly control color, introducing a fully training-free method in FLUX based solely on closed-form latent-space manipulation. Code is available at https://github.com/ExplainableML/LCS.