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

Rethinking Text-to-Image as Semantic-Aware Data Augmentation for Indoor Scene Recognition

In the realm of computer vision, indoor image recognition presents challenges due to the intricate interplay of lighting conditions, occlusions, and diverse object arrangements within confined spaces. To address the lacks of training indoor images, we introduce a novel approach leveraging Stable Diffusion (SD) for the generation of synthetic images, which serve as a powerful data augmentation tool. The utilization of SD offers a principled framework for synthesizing diverse and realistic indoor scenes, thereby enriching the training data pool for robust indoor image recognition models. Experimental findings on the MIT Indoor Scene dataset reveal the potential of our proposed approach in enhancing the training of deep models when authentic data is limited. Furthermore, to prevent the misuse of SD synthetic images, we introduce a counter measure based on DIffusion Reconstruction Error (DIRE). The powerful DIRE presentation enables training robust classifiers only using lightweight deep models. Experiments show that our approach can perfectly recognize SD generated images with the accuracy of 100% using MobilenetV3.

02.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

<i>CHPO</i> coordinates chilling recovery and nitrogen use in rice

作者:

Global rice production faces mounting challenges from abnormal temperature fluctuations and nitrogen-fertilizer-driven environmental pollution1–7. Developing varieties that balance chilling resilience and nitrogen-use efficiency (NUE) offers a promising solution, but the molecular networks coordinating these traits remain poorly understood. Here we identify CHILLING PHOENIX (CHPO), a major gene underlying the quantitative trait locus shared by both chilling tolerance and resilience. It encodes a MYB transcription factor that acts as a key regulator coordinating post-chilling recovery with nitrogen use in rice. Natural variation in a GCG-repeat-encoded polyalanine tract alters CHPO DNA-binding preference and redirects regulatory outputs between the japonica-type (CHPOjap) and indica-type (CHPOind), causing opposing effects on chilling tolerance and resilience. This allelic variation is shaped by domestication selection, with the CHPOjap allele probably derived from Chinese wild rice. CHPOjap directly targets OsTCP19 and OsNRT2.4 to fine-tune NUE, thereby enhancing chilling tolerance and resilience. These findings provide a mechanistic framework for a chilling-induced high-nitrogen-utilization module that alleviates the damage caused by chilling stress, and a potential molecular design&nbsp;strategy for breeding rice varieties with both chilling resilience and high NUE at the&nbsp;recovery stage. A rice gene, CHPO, links chilling resilience with nitrogen-use efficiency, revealing a domestication-shaped regulatory mechanism that could guide breeding of climate-resilient, sustainable rice varieties.

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

MedLatentDx: Latent Multi-Agent Communication for Cross-Hospital Rare-Disease Diagnosis

Rare diseases affect over $300$ million patients across more than $7{,}000$ conditions, yet no single hospital encounters enough cases of any one condition for reliable diagnosis. Cross-hospital collaboration could help by allowing a diagnosing institution to use distributed, case-specific diagnostic evidence, but privacy regulations restrict the transmission of identifiable clinical text across institutional boundaries. This setting raises two challenges: existing medical agent systems often rely on textual evidence exchange, while raw latent states such as hidden states and KV caches may still reveal prompt-derived clinical content. We introduce MedLatentDx, a latent multi-agent communication framework in which hospital agents keep private clinical records and retrieved cases local, and send compact latent KV blocks to a host agent for rare-disease diagnosis. MedLatentDx supports two deployment settings: same-backbone hospital agents use latent KV distillation, while hospitals with different LLM backbones use cross-family latent alignment. On CrossRare-Bench, a self-built large-scale rare-disease benchmark with hospital-level partitions, MedLatentDx improves cross-hospital diagnostic performance while reducing reconstructable clinical content relative to raw-latent communication baselines.

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

Can Factual Opinions Be Edited (Manipulated) in Large Language Models?

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into various domains, making knowledge editing techniques crucial yet potentially hazardous. Current editing methods primarily target atomic facts, overlooking the significant risks associated with manipulating factual opinions, e.g., documented stances of public figures on societal issues. Such manipulation could reshape public images, influence elections, and alter societal views. To systematically assess this threat, we introduce the Factual Opinion Editing with Evidence (FOE) benchmark, which encompasses 261 public figures, 19 issue categories, and 2,178 complete opinion records. Our evaluations demonstrate that current editing techniques struggle significantly with factual opinions, often achieving only superficial changes while failing to preserve consistency between the edited opinion and the supporting evidence generated by the model. To address this limitation, we further propose a simple yet effective Self-Generated Evidence-Aligned method that achieves opinion-evidence alignment without relying on explicit instructions. Together, our benchmark and method provide a foundation for understanding the emerging security implications of factual opinion editing in LLMs.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

QMCtwin: Master-Equation Simulation of Syndrome Statistics Beyond Pauli Noise

arXiv:2606.19848v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As quantum error correction moves toward large-scale experimental implementations, decoder performance increasingly depends on how faithfully hardware noise is translated into syndrome statistics. Standard stabilizer workflows achieve scalability by replacing device dynamics with stochastic Pauli or detector-error models, but this compression can discard coherent phase information, nonunital drift, continuous-time effects of always-on couplings, and correlations generated by simultaneous Hamiltonian and dissipative evolution. Here we present QMCtwin, a sign-problem-suppressed quantum Monte Carlo framework for master-equation simulation of QEC circuits, and apply it to a full syndrome-extraction round of a distance-$7$ rotated surface code with $97$ physical qubits. The open-system model includes realistic superconducting-device noise mechanisms such as relaxation, pure dephasing, coherent gate miscalibration, residual $ZZ$ crosstalk, and drive-qubit detuning. By directly estimating syndrome observables from the QMC-generated stochastic density matrix estimator, we compare the master-equation dynamics with their Pauli-twirled Clifford simulation counterparts. QMCtwin predicts syndrome-extraction biases and correlations between syndromes and proxies of logical-string-parity that are absent or strongly suppressed in the stochastic Pauli description. We introduce information-theoretic diagnostics that further quantify how information concerning syndromes versus string-parity proxies differs between the realistic master-equation simulation and the corresponding Pauli-twirled model. These results show that QMC-based master-equation digital twins can expose noise features hidden by conventional Pauli/Clifford noise models and provide a practical path toward more accurate decoder-facing syndrome models.

06.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Locally Gentle State Certification for High Dimensional Quantum Systems

arXiv:2602.04550v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Standard approaches to quantum statistical inference rely on measurements that induce a collapse of the wave function, effectively consuming the quantum state to extract information. In this work, we investigate the fundamental limits of locally-gentle quantum state certification, where the learning algorithm is constrained to perturb the state by at most $\alpha$ in trace norm, thereby allowing for the reuse of samples. We analyze the hypothesis testing problem of distinguishing whether an unknown state $\rho$ is equal to a reference $\rho_0$ or $\epsilon$-far from it. We derive the minimax sample complexity for this problem, quantifying the information-theoretic price of non-destructive measurements. Specifically, by constructing explicit measurement operators, we show that the constraint of $\alpha$-gentleness imposes a sample size penalty of $\frac{d}{\alpha^2}$, yielding a total sample complexity of $n = \Theta(\frac{d^3}{\epsilon^2 \alpha^2})$. Our results clarify the trade-off between information extraction and state disturbance, and highlight deep connections between physical measurement constraints and privacy mechanisms in quantum learning. Crucially, we find that the sample size penalty incurred by enforcing $\alpha$-gentleness scales linearly with the Hilbert-space dimension $d$ rather than the number of parameters $d^2-1$ typical for high-dimensional private estimation.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Quickest Detection of Hallucination Onset: Delay Bounds and Learned CUSUM Statistics

作者:

Token-level hallucination detectors are evaluated as classifiers, by AUC over all tokens, yet a streaming monitor is judged by its reaction time: the number of tokens that pass between the onset of a hallucination and the alarm. We formulate hallucination onset detection as a quickest change detection problem. A first-order Markov model of the latent faithful/hallucinated state, validated on RAGTruth, places the task inside classical change-point theory and yields Lorden's lower bound on detection delay: about 1.3 tokens at a false-alarm rate of 0.01. We then show that a causal recurrent labeler acts as a CUSUM with a learned increment; at a matched false-alarm rate it detects in 11-13 tokens, against 31 for a linear per-token baseline, and a controlled decomposition attributes most of this advantage to a better per-token score rather than to temporal accumulation. An information-rate optimality theorem of Donsker-Varadhan type explains the remaining order-of-magnitude gap: the learned score realizes only 1/4.5 of the divergence the features carry, a deficit that recalibration cannot remove, with the remainder a finite-horizon effect. Classification metrics conceal this delay structure; sequential analysis makes it measurable

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Non-invasive Detection of Fasciculation Using Surface EMG with a Wavelet-Based Analytical Method (DEWCS)

Objective: Needle electromyography (nEMG) is essential for diagnosing neuromuscular disorders but is invasive and often painful. We employed single-channel bipolar surface EMG (sEMG) analyzed with a novel wavelet-based analytical approach, Detecting and Extracting Elemental Wave Components based on a Wavelet Coefficient Set (DEWCS) and investigated whether fasciculation-related activity could be identified. Methods: In this prospective study, 28 patients undergoing nEMG for suspected neuromuscular disorders and 13 healthy controls were included. Resting-state sEMG was recorded from selected muscles using single-channel bipolar active electrodes at a high sampling rate. DEWCS was used to extract indices reflecting fast- and slow-type motor unit (MU)-related activity. These standardized indices were evaluated against nEMG-detected fasciculation potentials using generalized estimating equation logistic regression to account for within-subject clustering. Diagnostic performance was assessed by receiver operating characteristic analysis. Results: A total of 67 muscles from 38 participants were analyzed. Indices of fast- and slow-type MU-related activity were significantly associated with fasciculation potentials (slow: OR 5.10, p = 0.0041; fast: OR 2.38, p = 0.0162). The combined model showed excellent discrimination (area under the curve = 0.97), outperforming either index alone. Muscle region had no significant effect. Conclusions: A single-channel bipolar sEMG setup combined with DEWCS detected fasciculation-related activity with promising accuracy. This method may serve as a non-invasive surrogate marker of lower motor neuron involvement. Further validation in larger cohorts is warranted. Significance: This non-invasive sEMG approach may help detect fasciculation-related activity and complement nEMG in neuromuscular diagnostics.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Incentives Of EdTech: A Systematic Review Of EduNLP Research

While the Natural Language Processing community has dedicated significant resources in developing educational technologies (EdTech) that support this shift, it remains unclear whose interests are being best served among the stakeholders of education. In this paper, we present a systematic literature review of 204 papers published in venues of the Association for Computational Linguistics' Special Interest Group on Building Educational Applications in 2024 and 2025, and validate these against EdTech papers from the wider ACL Anthology. By examining stakeholder inclusion and the prioritisation of research tasks, our findings reveal a critical tension: a push and pull between private-sector incentives and the foundational needs of educational infrastructure. Our analysis reveals that teachers are systematically under-represented as beneficiaries of research (33.3%) despite being the most affected, that real-world deployment remains rare (9.8%), and that ethical engagement tends toward acknowledgement rather than action. Drawing on exemplary papers in our corpus, we offer concrete recommendations for more responsible EduNLP research practices.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Target-Side Paraphrase Augmentation for Sign Language Translation with Large Language Models

Sign language translation (SLT) remains constrained by the limited availability of paired sign-video/text corpora and by the heavy-tailed vocabularies typical of real-world datasets. We study a target-side augmentation strategy in which a large language model (LLM) generates controlled paraphrase variants of the reference spoken-language sentence while the sign input remains unchanged. Concretely, we use GPT-4o to produce semantically faithful variants of the training targets and train a Signformer-style pose-based Transformer under a two-stage schedule: pre-training on the augmented corpus followed by fine-tuning on the original references. We evaluate this strategy on three datasets that span complementary challenges: PHOENIX14T (German Sign Language), a real-world corpus with moderate lexical diversity; the Greek Sign Language Dataset with highly controlled, repetitive recordings; and LSA-T (Argentinian Sign Language), a naturalistic corpus with a large vocabulary and severe long-tail sparsity. This range allows us to characterize precisely when and why target-side augmentation is beneficial. On PHOENIX14T, augmentation improves BLEU-4 from 9.56 to 10.33, demonstrating that paraphrastic exposure helps the decoder generalize beyond memorized reference phrasing. The near-saturated GSL baseline and the extremely sparse LSA-T setting reveal the limits of the approach: in both cases, single-reference lexical overlap metrics are insufficient to capture the full picture, motivating a complementary semantic evaluation. To our knowledge, this is the first study to examine LLM-generated target-side paraphrases as an augmentation mechanism for SLT, and the first to apply an LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation protocol to SLT. This complementary evaluation reveals gains in semantic fidelity that lexical overlap metrics understate.

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

Fractured Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Inference-time scaling techniques have significantly bolstered the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by harnessing additional computational effort at inference without retraining. Similarly, Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting and its extension, Long CoT, improve accuracy by generating rich intermediate reasoning trajectories, but these approaches incur substantial token costs that impede their deployment in latency-sensitive settings. In this work, we first show that truncated CoT, which stops reasoning before completion and directly generates the final answer, often matches the full CoT sampling while using dramatically fewer tokens. Building on this insight, we introduce Fractured Sampling, a unified inference-time strategy that interpolates between full CoT and solution-only sampling along three orthogonal axes: (1) the number of reasoning trajectories, (2) the number of final solutions per trajectory, and (3) the depth at which reasoning traces are truncated. Through extensive experiments on five diverse reasoning benchmarks and several model scales, we demonstrate that Fractured Sampling consistently achieves superior accuracy-cost trade-offs, yielding steep log-linear scaling gains in Pass@k versus token budget. Our analysis reveals how to allocate computation across these dimensions to maximize performance, paving the way for more efficient and scalable LLM reasoning. Code is available at https://github.com/BaohaoLiao/frac-cot.

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

The Missing Knowledge Layer in Cognitive Architectures for AI Agents

arXiv:2604.11364v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The two most influential cognitive architecture frameworks for AI agents, CoALA [21] and JEPA [12], both lack an explicit Knowledge layer with its own persistence semantics. This gap produces a category error: systems apply cognitive decay to factual claims, or treat facts and experiences with identical update mechanics. We survey persistence semantics across existing memory systems and identify eight convergence points, from Karpathy's LLM Knowledge Base [10] to the BEAM benchmark's near-zero contradiction-resolution scores [22], all pointing to related architectural gaps. We propose a four-layer decom position (Knowledge, Memory, Wisdom, Intelligence) where each layer has fundamentally different persistence semantics: indefinite supersession, Ebbinghaus decay, evidence-gated revision, and ephemeral inference respectively. Companion implementations in Python and Rust demonstrate the architectural separation is feasible. We borrow terminology from cognitive science as a useful analogy (the Knowledge/Memory distinction echoes Tulving's trichotomy), but our layers are engineering constructs justified by persistence-semantics requirements, not by neural architecture. We argue that these distinctions demand distinct persistence semantics in engineering implementations, and that no current framework or system provides this.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

The Pragmatic Persona: Discovering LLM Persona through Bridging Inference

Large Language Models (LLMs) reveal inherent and distinctive personas through dialogue. However, most existing persona discovery approaches rely on surface-level lexical or stylistic cues, treating dialogue as a flat sequence of tokens and failing to capture the deeper discourse-level structures that sustain persona consistency. To address this limitation, we propose a novel analytical framework that interprets LLM dialogue through bridging inference – implicit conceptual relations that connect utterances via shared world knowledge and discourse coherence. By modeling these relations as structured knowledge graphs, our approach captures latent semantic links that govern how LLMs organize meaning across turns, enabling persona discovery at the level of discourse coherence rather than surface realizations. Experimental results across multiple reasoning backbones and target LLMs, ranging from small-scale models to 80B-parameter systems, demonstrate that bridging-inference graphs yield significantly stronger semantic coherence and more stable persona identification than frequency or style-based baselines. These results show that persona traits are consistently encoded in the structural organization of discourse rather than isolated lexical patterns. This work presents a systematic framework for probing, extracting, and visualizing latent LLM personas through the lens of Cognitive Discourse Theory, bridging computational linguistics, cognitive semantics, and persona reasoning in large language models. Codes are available at https://github.com/JiSoo-Yang/Persona_Bridging.git

14.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-17

An Integrated Framework for Transcriptomic Characterization and Lorentzian Hyperbolic Visualization of a High-Risk Topological Branch in Alzheimer's Disease

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a highly heterogeneous brain disorder in which molecular alterations vary across brain regions, disease stages, and patient subgroups. This study introduces an integrated analytical framework for characterizing transcriptomic variation associated with a high-risk topological branch, which was identified based on Lorentz distance in postmortem Brodmann area 36 samples from the Mount Sinai Brain Bank cohort, where over 70% of samples were in Braak stages V-VI. The framework integrates weighted gene co-expression network analysis, repeated stability-based differential expression analysis, network-level gene filtering, Gene Ontology enrichment, and nested stratified cross-validation to evaluate whether topological branch-associated genes capture biologically meaningful signals and carry predictive information for high-Braak group status. The identified gene sets were functionally enriched for neuronal development, neuron projection organization, synaptic signaling, vesicle fusion, and regulated synaptic release, suggesting that the high-risk topological branch reflects biologically relevant transcriptomic programs linked to neurodegenerative progression. Nested cross-validation further showed that the selected genes achieved measurable internal predictive performance for distinguishing high-Braak samples. As a second methodological contribution, we introduced a Lorentzian hyperbolic variant of t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (Lorentz t-SNE) to explore latent non-Euclidean structure in transcriptomic data. This method embeds samples in hyperbolic space, providing an alternative to Euclidean embeddings for representing hierarchical or nonlinear structures. Compared with conventional Euclidean embeddings, the proposed Lorentz t-SNE revealed a more localized organization of high-Braak samples. Together, these results demonstrate the utility of the proposed analytical framework and Lorentz t-SNE for investigating heterogeneous, potentially non-Euclidean organization in AD transcriptomes.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Spectator-transition crosstalk in a spin-3/2 silicon vacancy qudit in silicon carbide revealed by broadband Ramsey interferometry

arXiv:2601.15559v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Color center spins in 4H-SiC offer a rare combination of wafer-scale materials maturity with long spin coherence and chip-level photonics, making them promising building blocks for scalable quantum technologies. In particular, the silicon vacancy hosts an S=3/2 ground state, a native qudit that enables compact encodings and subspace-selective control, but also introduces spectator transitions: short, detuned pulses can coherently drive non-addressed level pairs and create crosstalk. Here we use broadband Ramsey interferometry to reveal and quantify such spectator-transition crosstalk. Experimentally, the Ramsey Fourier spectra display multiple lines beyond the addressed single-quantum transition. Analytically, we map each line to a pairwise energy difference between qudit levels of the rotating-frame Hamiltonian and assign its weight via compact amplitudes set by the prepared state and the microwave pulse parameters, predicting a deterministic six-branch structure. Numerical time-domain propagation with the experimental sampling reproduces the detuning map, and the measured peak positions coincide with the analytic branch lines without frequency fitting. Together these results provide a practical, spectator-aware framework for multilevel control in the silicon vacancy qudit. The approach offers clear guidance to suppress crosstalk or, conversely, to exploit spectator lines, for example as additional constraints for in situ pulse calibration and for phase-sensitive quantum state and process estimation.

16.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-23

biomeStat: Using Agentic AI for Scalable Genomic Epidemiology Demonstrated Through End-to-End Analysis of 1,000 Asian Dengue Virus Genomes

Genomic epidemiology workflows typically require expert curation of multiple specialized tools, extensive manual parameter tuning, and access to heterogeneous compute infrastructure. While standard generative AI models often hallucinate in complex biological domains, we introduce biomeStat: an autonomous AI agent that functions as a strict deterministic orchestrator. By automatically writing code to execute established bioinformatics tools in sandboxed environments, biomeStat dynamically provisions compute resources (CPU and GPU) and guarantees reproducibility, making it immediately useful for scientists without requiring command-line expertise. To demonstrate the platform, we performed a fully autonomous genomic epidemiology and structural analysis of 1,000 Dengue virus (DENV) genomes sampled from 16 Asian countries between 2000 and 2025. The agent seamlessly orchestrated phylogenetic reconstruction (IQ-TREE, TreeTime), Bayesian phylodynamics (BEAST2 via NVIDIA H200 GPU), selection pressure analysis (HyPhy), and structural mapping (PyMOL). The analysis was completed in under 24 hours of wall-clock time, revealing endemic stability (R_e ~1.0) and identifying 1,869 candidate immune escape sites structurally colocalized with B-cell and T-cell epitopes. Furthermore, the agent validated 176 highly conserved drug target residues across the viral replication complex, confirming that resistance-associated positions for emerging antivirals JNJ-1802 and NITD-688 remain absolutely conserved across all four serotypes. By bridging the gap between natural language intent and deterministic computational execution, biomeStat reduces weeks of expert effort into a single-session analysis with full methodological transparency.

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

Reward as An Agent for Embodied World Models

arXiv:2606.19990v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While RL has become a promising tool for refining world models, existing methods largely rely on conservative rollouts near the training distribution, limiting exploration, behavioral diversity, and richer dynamic discovery. In this work, we challenge this conservative paradigm. We argue that the core limitation is not exploration itself, but the lack of reliable verification strategies to support broader exploration. Without reliable verification, expanded exploration becomes highly susceptible to reward hacking, where policies exploit imperfect rewards without achieving genuine improvement. To evaluate this motivation, we instantiate our method in embodied world models, where physical plausibility, and task completion provide a rigorous testbed for scalable RL under complex dynamics. On the verification side, we introduce Reward as an Agent, an agentic reward framework that actively evaluates generated behaviors to provide robust reward signals and mitigate reward hacking under distribution shifts. On the exploration side, we introduce Dynamic-Aware Rollout Diversification through DynDiff-GRPO, which explicitly expands action-space exploration to diversify trajectories, broaden state-action coverage, and encourage richer embodied behaviors beyond conservative rollout regimes. By unifying Reward as an Agent with DynDiff-GRPO, we enable RL on a more reliable reward foundation with substantially diversified sampling, effectively mitigating reward hacking while yielding significant accuracy gains across multiple open-source world models, thereby demonstrating that broader exploration can scale successfully when grounded in robust verification.

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

CuMA: Aligning LLMs with Sparse Cultural Values via Demographic-Aware Mixture of Adapters

As Large Language Models (LLMs) serve a global audience, alignment must transition from enforcing universal consensus to respecting cultural pluralism. We demonstrate that dense models, when forced to fit conflicting value distributions, suffer from Mean Collapse, converging to a generic average that fails to represent diverse groups. We attribute this to Cultural Sparsity, where gradient interference prevents dense parameters from spanning distinct cultural modes. To resolve this, we propose \textsc{CuMA} (Cultural Mixture of Adapters), a framework that frames alignment as a conditional capacity separation problem. By incorporating demographic-aware routing, \textsc{CuMA} internalizes a Latent Cultural Topology to explicitly disentangle conflicting gradients into specialized expert subspaces. Extensive evaluations on WorldValuesBench, Community Alignment, and PRISM demonstrate that \textsc{CuMA} achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming both dense baselines and semantic-only MoEs. Crucially, our analysis confirms that \textsc{CuMA} effectively mitigates mean collapse, preserving cultural diversity. Our code is available at https://github.com/Throll/CuMA.

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

Rel-Zero: Harnessing Patch-Pair Invariance for Robust Zero-Watermarking Against AI Editing

Recent advancements in diffusion-based image editing pose a significant threat to the authenticity of digital visual content. Traditional embedding-based watermarking methods often introduce perceptible perturbations to maintain robustness, inevitably compromising visual fidelity. Meanwhile, existing zero-watermarking approaches, typically relying on global image features, struggle to withstand sophisticated manipulations. In this work, we uncover a key observation: while individual image patches undergo substantial alterations during AI-based editing, the relational distance between patch pairs remains relatively invariant. Leveraging this property, we propose Relational Zero-Watermarking (Rel-Zero), a novel framework that requires no modification to the original image but derives a unique zero-watermark from these editing-invariant patch relations. By grounding the watermark in intrinsic structural consistency rather than absolute appearance, Rel-Zero provides a non-invasive yet resilient mechanism for content authentication. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Rel-Zero achieves substantially improved robustness across diverse editing models and manipulations compared to prior zero-watermarking approaches.

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

Fodor and Pylyshyn's Systematicity Challenge Still Stands

The recent successes of neural networks producing human-like language have caused significant stir in cognitive science, with many researchers arguing that classical puzzles about human cognition and challenges to artificial intelligence are being solved by neural networks. A notable case is the argument from systematicity due to Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn, argues that humans display systematic biconditional dependencies. For example, someone can understand the sentence "John saw Mary" just in case that they understand the sentence "Mary saw John." Symbolic systems explain this systematicity of language and thought, while neural networks offer no immediate explanation. Several recent articles argue that this challenge has now been met by neural networks. In particular, Brenden Lake and Marco Baroni argue that their meta-learning for compositionality protocol matches and perhaps explains human systematicity. We demonstrate that these conclusions are premature. Among other results, we found that their model struggles to learn rules that are even slightly out of distribution compared to their training data. Furthermore, the model behaves unsystematically even on many within-distribution problems. We conclude that Fodor and Pylyshyn's challenge to neural networks remains unmet.

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

Neural ensemble Kalman filter: Data assimilation for compressible flows with shocks

arXiv:2602.23461v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Data assimilation (DA) for compressible flows with shocks is challenging because many classical DA methods generate spurious oscillations and nonphysical features near uncertain shocks. We focus here on the ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF). We show that the poor performance of the EnKF may be attributed to the bimodal forecast distribution that can arise in the vicinity of an uncertain shock location; this violates the assumptions underpinning the EnKF, which assume a forecast which is close to Gaussian. To address this issue we introduce the new neural EnKF. The basic idea is to systematically embed neural function approximations within ensemble DA by mapping the forecast ensemble of shocked flows to the parameter space (weights and biases) of a deep neural network (NN) and to subsequently perform DA in that space. The nonlinear mapping encodes sharp and smooth flow features in an ensemble of NN parameters. Neural EnKF updates are therefore well-behaved only if the NN parameters vary smoothly within the neural representation of the forecast ensemble. We show that such a smooth variation of network parameters can be enforced via physics-informed transfer learning, and demonstrate that in so-doing the neural EnKF avoids the spurious oscillations and nonphysical features that plague the EnKF. The applicability of the neural EnKF is demonstrated through a series of systematic numerical experiments with the inviscid Burgers' equation, the Sod shock tube, and a two-dimensional blast wave.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Forecasting what Matters: Decision-Focused RL for Controlled EV Charging with Unknown Departure Times

arXiv:2606.19199v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The recent growth of EV adoption poses challenges for power systems, including increased peak demand and potential grid instability. Smart control of EV charging – e.g., based on reinforcement learning (RL) – can alleviate these issues by learning temporal and contextual patterns from historical data. Yet, in real-world scenarios, key features, such as departure time, often are unavailable. This, in turn, makes it harder for an RL agent to learn and execute an effective charging policy. To mitigate this uncertainty, a trained forecaster can approximate the unknown features from available data. However, since these forecasting models are typically trained for accuracy (rather than their impact on a downstream agent's decision quality), their errors may propagate and hinder the overall performance of a controller that is using the forecasts. To avoid this, we propose a decision-focused RL (DF-RL) framework in which the forecaster is trained end-to-end, i.e., with feedback from the charging policy actions taken by the RL agent. Such joint training of both the forecaster and controller ultimately results in higher-quality actions: our proposed DF-RL method yields superior charging decisions compared to other baselines, achieving up to a 14% improvement in total reward and a 55% reduction of unsupplied energy (i.e., charging that failed to happen because the EV already left), relative to the RL method without departure time forecasting.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

MobileFineTuner: A Mobile-Native Framework for On-Device LLM Fine-Tuning in Real-World Embedded AI Applications

arXiv:2512.08211v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are moving from cloud-centric services toward on-device embedded AI, where models interact with private, longitudinal signals sensed from users and their physical environments. Mobile phones are a natural platform for such applications because they are continuously carried by users, connected to wearable sensors, and deeply integrated with daily mobile applications. However, practical LLM fine-tuning on commodity phones remains difficult. Existing fine-tuning frameworks are largely Python-based and server-oriented, making them hard to deploy inside mobile applications. We present MobileFineTuner, a mobile-native open-source framework for end-to-end LLM fine-tuning on commodity mobile phones. MobileFineTuner is implemented in C++ and provides a reusable training stack. To make fine-tuning feasible under mobile resource constraints, MobileFineTuner integrates a resource-aware training runtime with memory-efficient attention, activation checkpointing, gradient accumulation, parameter sharding, and energy-aware scheduling. We evaluate MobileFineTuner on real mobile phones using GPT-2, Gemma 3, and Qwen2.5 models across multiple fine-tuning tasks. The results show that MobileFineTuner reproduces standard Full-FT and LoRA fine-tuning behavior, substantially reduces memory pressure and improves executability on memory-constrained phones. We further demonstrate MobileFineTuner through a private campus health-agent application, where a local LLM is fine-tuned on user-specific wearable-sensing records to provide more personalized responses while keeping raw records on the phone. These results establish MobileFineTuner as a practical toolkit for studying and building on-device LLM fine-tuning applications in embedded AI and sensing systems.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Can Machine Learning Forecast Rice Yields in Data-Constrained Settings? Satellite Climate Data, National Crop Statistics, and Lessons from Sierra Leone

arXiv:2606.13959v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sierra Leone's agriculture operates with almost no data-driven decision support, and no published machine learning study has examined the country's crop yields. We ask whether rice yield can be forecast from data Sierra Leone currently has. Using 25 years of FAOSTAT production data (2000-2024) for nine major crops, we train XGBoost, Gradient Boosting, and Random Forest under a strict anti-leakage protocol with expanding-window walk-forward evaluation across seven held-out years, benchmarked against naive persistence. No model trained on crop statistics alone outperforms persistence. Augmenting with free satellite climate data (CHIRPS rainfall, NASA POWER temperature) reverses this result: a climate-only XGBoost reduces forecast error by one third (RMSE 284 vs 428 kg/ha), a gain that holds for a linear model and is robust to excluding the anomalous 2018 season. Early-season (May-June) rainfall is the dominant predictor, implying seasonal yield risk is observable months before harvest. No model anticipated the 2018 collapse, whose origins were institutional rather than climatic. We translate the findings into policy recommendations for Sierra Leone's Feed Salone Strategy, with a fully open-source pipeline.

25.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

A thalamus–brainstem attractor network drives history-biased decisions

作者:

Natural environments often change gradually, making it adaptive to bias decisions on the basis of the recent past — a phenomenon known as serial dependence1–3. Large-scale recordings during behaviour have identified that serial dependence is a common motif for decision-making, with neural representations of past experiences found throughout the brain4–11. However, it remains unclear whether this bias arises from dedicated neural circuits with history-specific computations. Using whole-brain, cellular-resolution imaging in zebrafish performing memory-guided evasive manoeuvres12–14, we identified a hierarchical circuit that maintains past information and biases future choices. Discrete attractors in the dorsal thalamus encoded the position of the most recent obstacle, maintaining a categorical memory via persistent activity lasting 10–20 s. Optogenetic manipulation of the dorsal thalamus abolished or imposed serial bias. A downstream hindbrain integrator received input from the thalamus and combined it with current sensory cues to produce graded responses reflecting multi-trial history. Leveraging a comprehensive brain atlas in zebrafish15, we constructed a whole-brain computational model that recapitulated behaviour and also predicted a key role for heterogeneous inhibitory subtypes in enabling flexible state transitions. This attractor–integrator architecture reveals a hierarchical and modular computation that unifies robust memory retention with flexible sensory integration, providing a general principle for history-biased decisions. Whole-brain, cellular-resolution imaging reveals a hierarchical thalamus–brainstem attractor network that encodes recent history and shapes behavioural bias in zebrafish.