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

GOOSE-M2F: Adapting Mask2Former for High-Fidelity, Long-Tailed Fine-Grained Semantic Segmentation in Unstructured Outdoor Terrain

We present GOOSE-M2F, a task-specific adaptation of Mask2Former for the GOOSE 2D Fine-Grained Semantic Segmentation (FGSS) Challenge at ICRA~2026. The GOOSE benchmark spans 64 fine-grained classes across unstructured outdoor terrain with a severely long-tailed distribution, where rare classes occupy fewer than 50 pixels per image. We extend the Swin-Large Mask2Former baseline with three targeted contributions: (1)200 Object Queries to eliminate representational saturation; (2)a Feature Refinement Module (FRM) combining ASPP-lite and CBAM dual-attention; and (3)an Auxiliary Supervision Head that delivers direct per-pixel gradients for rare classes. A multi-stage training strategy pairs Distribution-Balanced loss, Rare-Class Copy-Paste augmentation, dynamic IoU-aware re-weighting, and EMA. At inference, a dense sliding-window engine with 2D Gaussian kernel blending and 4-scale TTA adds +10.57\%. GOOSE-M2F achieves 70.08\% Official Composite mIoU (63.55\% fine, 76.61\% coarse), placing 3rd on the GOOSE 2D FGSS leaderboard. Code and trained models are publicly available at: \href{https://github.com/Aditya-Lingam-9000/GOOSE-M2F}{Github GOOSE-M2F Code} and \href{https://huggingface.co/XYZ9843/GOOSE-M2F}{Hugging Face GOOSE-M2F}.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Deep Learning-Based Lunar Crater Terrain Relative Navigation

arXiv:2606.14776v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate position estimation is crucial for the successful implementation of future lunar landings using autonomous vehicles, especially in dangerous environments with sparse terrain features. In this paper, we propose a terrain relative navigation (TRN) algorithm combining our deep-learning crater detector, which was designed specifically for the NASA Crater Detection Challenge problem, and an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF). Our detector analyzes crater features from the monocular images acquired from orbit, and their matches with craters from a global database are identified via a Hungarian assignment approach followed by the consensus-based outliers removal method. The estimated measurements are then used to refine an EKF, where spacecraft pose estimation in the Lunar-Centered Lunar-Fixed (LCLF) frame of reference, augmented with altitude aiding information, constrains radial drift. The simulation results indicate that even if the spacecraft is off from its actual location up to 5 km, TRN could recover from this situation, achieving navigation error reduction to a few hundred meters. It should be noted that in order to maintain crater feature correspondences, it is important to match the image resolution and the scales within the scene to the detector training set distribution.

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

Pre-Warm: Input-Conditioned Weight Initialization for Convolutional Neural Networks

We introduce Pre-Warm, a simple yet effective zero-training-cost method for data-conditioned initialization of the first convolutional layer. Before the first forward pass, Pre-Warm extracts mean-centered local patches from a single training batch, clusters them with MiniBatchKMeans, applies inverse Manhattan spatial weighting, and uses the resulting centroids to initialize half of the first-layer filters (the remainder retain Kaiming initialization). We derive closed-form rules for all hyperparameters except a single insensitive scale parameter, though we derive a Kaiming parity bound on scale from patch dimensionality. For grayscale datasets we use Otsu's foreground density; for natural color images we use the mean L2 norm of mean-centered patches. Both rules accurately predict the optimal patch count observed in grid search. Across five standard benchmarks – MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, CIFAR-10, SVHN, and CIFAR-100 – and 8-seed paired experiments, Pre-Warm yields statistically significant accuracy improvements over standard Kaiming initialization (p < 0.05 on all datasets, p = 0.0007 on SVHN with 8/8 wins, p = 0.0033 on CIFAR-100 with 7/8 wins). The method adds negligible overhead, requires no architectural changes, and integrates into existing training pipelines with only a few lines of code. Pre-Warm demonstrates that even a lightweight, input-dependent signal can meaningfully improve optimization trajectories in modern convolutional networks.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Detecting Hate and Inflammatory Content in Bengali Memes: A New Multimodal Dataset and Co-Attention Framework

Internet memes have become a dominant form of expression on social media, including within the Bengali speaking community. While often humorous, memes can also be exploited to spread offensive, harmful, and inflammatory content targeting individuals and groups. Detecting this type of content is exceptionally challenging due to its satirical, subtle, and culturally specific nature. This problem is magnified for low-resource languages like Bengali, as existing research predominantly focuses on high-resource languages. To address this critical research gap, we introduce Bn-HIB (Bangla Hate Inflammatory Benign), a novel dataset containing 3,247 manually annotated Bengali memes categorized as Benign, Hate, or Inflammatory. Significantly, Bn- HIB is the first dataset to distinguish inflammatory content from direct hate speech in Bengali memes. Furthermore, we propose the MCFM (Multi-Modal Co-Attention Fusion Model), a simple yet effective architecture that mutually analyses both the visual and textual elements of a meme. MCFM employs a co-attention mechanism to identify and fuse the most critical features from each modality, leading to a more accurate classification. Our experiments show that MCFM significantly outperforms several state-of-the-art models on the Bn-HIB dataset, demonstrating its effectiveness in this nuanced task. To facilitate reproducibility and future research, the Bn-HIB dataset has been made publicly available through Mendeley Data. Warning: This work contains material that may be disturbing to some audience members. Viewer discretion is advised

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

An integrated ultrahigh vacuum cluster tool for diamond surface science and single nitrogen-vacancy center measurements

arXiv:2606.13961v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a custom-designed ultrahigh vacuum (UHV) cluster tool developed for studying shallow nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond, enabling in situ diamond surface preparation, characterization, and single NV center dynamics measurements within a single connected platform. The system combines a surface science chamber for controlled surface modification and analysis with a cryogenic confocal microscope chamber dedicated to NV spin and optical measurements. This integrated approach enables a direct correlation between diamond surface chemistry and the resulting NV spin and charge properties. The instrument provides a versatile platform for systematic studies of surface-induced decoherence mechanisms and charge dynamics for shallow NV centers, and establishes a pathway toward reproducible surface engineering for quantum sensing applications.

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

Quantum deformations of $\mathcal{U}(\mathfrak{sl}(2, \mathbb{R}))$. Part I: Fidelity and experimental benchmarking

arXiv:2606.19462v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This work explores the effects of both the standard quantum $q$-deformation and the non-standard $h$-deformation of the Hopf algebra $\mathcal{U}(\mathfrak{sl}(2, \mathbb{R}))$ on multi-qubit systems. By constructing the states of a Hilbert space of $N$ qubits through the Clebsch-Gordan coefficients associated with the deformed algebras, we show that these states naturally coincide with the eigenstates of the Hamiltonian of the $q$- and $h$-deformed Kittel-Shore models. We compare the resulting deformed states with those typically targeted in quantum information experiments, providing a bridge between algebraic constructions and experimentally relevant quantum resources. Fidelities with respect to the undeformed states are computed to establish how the quantum correlations are affected, both for few-qubit systems (including Dicke and non-Dicke states), and in the macroscopic limit ($N \to \infty$) through closed-form formulas derived for arbitrary Dicke states. The results reveal different behaviors between the two deformations. The $q$-deformation smoothly modifies the states and maintains a residual overlap with the original configurations, while the $h$-deformation rapidly makes the states orthogonal to their undeformed counterparts. Both models demand a standard $N^{-1}$ rescaling to preserve fidelity stability in the macroscopic limit.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Benchmarking LLM Agents on Meta-Analysis Articles from Nature Portfolio

Meta-analysis is a demanding form of evidence synthesis that combines literature retrieval, PI/ECO-guided study selection, and statistical aggregation. Its structured, verifiable workflow makes it an ideal substrate for evaluating systematic scientific reasoning, yet existing benchmarks lack ground truth across the full retrieval-screening-synthesis pipeline. We introduce MetaSyn, a dataset of 442 expert-curated meta-analyses from Nature Portfolio journals. Each entry pairs a research question with PI/ECO criteria, a retrieval corpus of 140k PubMed articles, verified positive studies, hard negatives that are topically similar but PI/ECO-ineligible, and complete search strategies and date bounds. Benchmarking twelve pipeline configurations (nine RAG variants and a protocol-driven agent) reveals a critical screening bottleneck: despite a retrieval ceiling of 90.9% recall at K=200, no system recovers more than 52.7% of ground-truth included literature. Current LLMs fail to reliably separate eligible studies from PI/ECO-failing distractors in pools of comparable topical relevance. Stage-attributed metrics capture where systems succeed and fail; a single end-to-end score does not.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Rigorous extension of semilocal collinear functionals to noncollinear DFT using $SU(2)$ rotations

arXiv:2605.31203v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In the presence of spin-orbit coupling and in geometrically frustrated materials, a noncollinear treatment the magnetization density is essential. However, in density functional theory most exchange–correlation functional approximations were originally developed for locally collinear magnetization. Many practical approaches to noncollinear DFT have emerged over the past decade. However, a first-principles connection between widely used semilocal collinear functionals and their noncollinear generalizations remains lacking. In this work, a locally exact relation between collinear and noncollinear exchange–correlation functionals is derived at the level of gradient expansions within a $u(2)$ matrix representation of the energy functional. Within this framework, collinear semilocal variables naturally acquire distinct dependencies on transverse and longitudinal magnetization gradient components. The widely used Scalmani–Frisch scheme emerges as a first-order approximation. The transformation of collinear functional derivatives to noncollinear space is implemented through numerically robust $SU(2)$ rotations. A consistent description of local magnetic torques is demonstrated for the prototypical spin-frustrated Cr$_3$ cluster. The approach further extends to fully nonlocal functionals and provides a direct route towards numerically stable relativistic response calculations. The influence on magnetic properties in presence of spin-orbit coupling is illustrated through calculations of hyperfine couplings in the high-spin ground states of uranium and the uranium ion.

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

Weighted Random Dot Product Graphs

arXiv:2505.03649v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modeling of intricate relational patterns has become a cornerstone of contemporary statistical research and related data science fields. Networks, represented as graphs, offer a natural framework for this analysis. This paper extends the Random Dot Product Graph (RDPG) model to accommodate weighted graphs, markedly broadening the model's scope to scenarios where edges exhibit heterogeneous weight distributions. We propose a nonparametric weighted (W)RDPG model that assigns a sequence of latent positions to each node. Inner products of these nodal vectors specify the moments of their incident edge weights' distribution via moment-generating functions. In this way, and unlike prior art, the WRDPG can discriminate between weight distributions that share the same mean but differ in other higher-order moments. We derive statistical guarantees for an estimator of the nodal's latent positions adapted from the workhorse adjacency spectral embedding, establishing its consistency and asymptotic normality. We also contribute a generative framework that enables sampling of graphs that adhere to a (prescribed or data-fitted) WRDPG, facilitating, e.g., the analysis and testing of observed graph metrics using judicious reference distributions. The paper is organized to formalize the model's definition, the estimation (or nodal embedding) process and its guarantees, as well as the methodologies for generating weighted graphs, all complemented by illustrative and reproducible examples showcasing the WRDPG's effectiveness in various network analytic applications.

10.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-13

On the evolution of the company we keep: Implications for infectious disease modeling

by Joël Mossong Whom we meet shapes how infections spread. Where earlier focus of mathematical epidemiology was on incorporating age, more recent work has begun to reveal the importance of socioeconomic aspects for understanding and managing future epidemics. In this Perspective, Joël Mossong discusses the importance of understanding social contacts and how they have evolved for infectious disease modeling, and the need to factor in additional considerations such as ethic and socioeconomic backgrounds.

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

Scale-Invariant Neural Network Optimization: Norm Geometry and Heavy-Tailed Noise

arXiv:2605.18528v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A growing lesson from neural network optimization is that optimizer design should respect how the model is parametrized. The layerwise input-output structure of neural networks motivates scale-invariant optimizers, such as Muon and Scion, whose updates also support hyperparameter transfer. At the same time, stochastic gradient noise in deep learning is often far from sub-Gaussian and may exhibit heavy tails. These observations have shaped recent algorithmic principles for training neural networks, yet their joint theoretical consequences are underexplored. In particular, it remains unclear what dimension dependence is unavoidable for gradient-based methods given the problem class is defined by input-output norm and under heavy-tailed noise, and whether higher-order smoothness can accelerate training. We study these questions through nonconvex smooth stochastic optimization over $\mathbb R^{m\times n}$ equipped with general norms and under $p^\mathrm{th}$-moment heavy-tailed noise, where the goal is to achieve an $\epsilon$-stationary point in the dual norm. Our first contribution is a dimension-dependent lower bound: when $\frac{\max\{m,n\}}{(\min\{m,n\})^2}$ is large enough, any gradient-based method requires $\Omega(\min\{m, n\}\epsilon^{-\frac{3p-2}{p-1}})$ oracles for the problem class defined by the spectral norm, which is a common input-output norm. We prove that a scale-invariant Scion method with the spectral norm can achieve the matching upper bound of $O(\min\{m, n\}\epsilon^{-\frac{3p-2}{p-1}})$. To exploit higher-order smoothness, we propose a transported Scion method and improve the bound to $O(\min\{m, n\}\epsilon^{-\frac{5p-3}{2p-2}})$ when the Hessian is Lipschitz. Finally, we incorporate heuristics into our transported method and evaluate it across multiple architectures and model sizes, demonstrating its flexibility and compatibility with neural network training.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Fast Nonparametric Conditional Independence Testing via Two-Stage Regression

arXiv:2606.18011v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Constraint-based causal discovery relies on repeated conditional independence tests, but fast nonparametric tests often sacrifice calibration, especially when variables depend on the conditioning set through nonlinear relationships. We introduce BLITZ (Broad-to-Local Independence Testing via residualiZation), a nonparametric conditional independence test designed to run well under a second while maintaining the accuracy needed for the thousands of queries performed by constraint-based causal discovery algorithms. BLITZ first removes broad smooth dependence on the conditioning set using low-order polynomial regression, then applies a small nonlinear feature map and residualizes those features with shallow tree regressions. The resulting statistic tests residual cross-covariance, with a moment-matched chi-square approximation to the null distribution. We show theoretically that the two-stage design reduces the effective complexity faced by the tree residualizers, allowing shallow trees to control residual conditional-mean bias while avoiding excessive overfitting. In simulations, BLITZ provides better null calibration than fast kernel, random-feature, and regression-based competitors while remaining among the fastest methods tested. In causal discovery experiments on synthetic graphs and flow-cytometry data, BLITZ yields more reliable endpoint orientations among retained adjacencies and competitive structural recovery. These results suggest that broad-to-local residualization is a practical route to calibrated, scalable nonparametric conditional independence testing for causal discovery.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Semantically-Aware Diver Activity Recognition Framework for Effective Underwater Multi-Human-Robot Collaboration

Effective multi-human-robot collaboration is essential for expanding human-led operations in the challenging and high-risk underwater environment. For autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to become true teammates, they must be able to comprehend their surroundings and recognize a diver's activities to offer assistance and ensure safety. Towards this goal, we introduce DAR-Net, a novel transformer-based framework that analyzes complex underwater scenes to classify diver activities. Our contribution lies in a semantically guided learning formulation that couples transformer-based temporal reasoning with pixel-level scene supervision. This multi-loss training strategy explicitly aligns global activity recognition with local human-robot interaction semantics, which is particularly critical in low-visibility underwater conditions. To address the significant challenge of data scarcity in this domain, we present the first-ever Underwater Diver Activity (UDA) dataset, a foundational resource containing over 2,600 annotated images with pixel-level masks. Through rigorous experimental evaluations in a controlled environment, we demonstrate that DAR-Net achieves promising accuracy in recognizing six distinct diver activities, outperforming state-of-the-art models. While this dataset provides a crucial baseline, our work serves as a pioneering step, laying the groundwork for future research and facilitating the development of more intelligent, collaborative underwater robotic systems.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Reinforcement Learning Improves Traversal of Parametric Knowledge in LLMs

Reinforcement learning (RL) is often credited with improving language model reasoning at the expense of knowledge. We challenge this narrative by showing that reasoning models consistently outperform their instruction-tuned versions on pure knowledge recall tasks. These gains do not reflect newly acquired information, but rather an improved procedural skill in navigating and searching existing knowledge hierarchies within the model parameters. Structured prompting, which explicitly guides models through hierarchical traversal – recovers most of the instruct-reasoning gap across five model families. A controlled RL experiment on unseen, non-extractable facts improves recall of held-out frequent but previously inaccessible facts, ruling out simple data exposure. On depth-stratified retrieval tasks, reasoning models exhibit superior traversal as retrieval depth grows. Layerwise activation analysis further shows that while factual representations maintain high cosine similarity between instruct and reasoning models, query representations diverge noticeably, indicating that reasoning primarily reshapes how models traverse knowledge rather than the knowledge representation itself. Finally, we find that distilled models often fail to match reasoning models on knowledge recall because they imitate self-correction without acquiring the exploratory behavior needed for hierarchical navigation. Together, these findings suggest that improving factual recall in LLMs depends not only on expanding what models know but also on teaching them to navigate it – motivating future post-training methods that optimize traversal.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Signature filtering: a lightweight enhancement for statistical watermark detection in large language models

arXiv:2606.18430v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Statistical watermarks help organizations attribute large language model (LLM) outputs, yet existing detectors often struggle when watermark signals are weak, texts are repetitive, or watermarks are edited. We propose signature filtering, a detection-time module that enhances watermark detection without modifying watermark embedding and text generation. It learns a small set of ``signature'' tokens whose presence makes watermark tests unreliable, and removes these tokens before detection. The signatures are obtained by solving a mixed-integer linear program on a small training set, with constraints that maximize the true positive rate. We additionally derive finite-sample and asymptotic bounds under several attacker models (color-blind, color-adaptive, and distributionally correlated). On four well-known watermark families (Kgw, Sweet, Unigram, Exp), four benchmark corpora (C4, MBPP, HumanEval, Code-Search-Net), and six LLMs (Opt-1.3b, Opt-6.7b, Llama2-13b, Llama3.1-8b, Qwen2.5-14b, Phi-3-medium-14b), 2- and 3-gram signatures raise detection rates in weak-signal and low-entropy settings from 8~31% without filtering to 78~99% with filtering, while keeping false positives controllable and often negligible. In stress tests where we scramble sentences and perturb 25~50% of tokens by dilution, deletions, and substitutions, 2-gram filters for Kgw-style watermarks preserve most of the clean-text detection gains, often matching or outperforming the advanced WinMax watermark detector. Signature filtering thus provides a simple, scalable, and model-agnostic add-on to strengthen watermark-based provenance checks for LLM text in information processing workflows.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Deconvolution-based cell-type specific DNA methylation-wide and transcriptome-wide association studies identify risk CpG sites and genes associated with colorectal cancer risk

Bulk tissue-based DNA methylation-wide (MWAS) and transcriptome-wide association studies (TWAS) have identified CpG sites and genes associated with colorectal cancer (CRC) risk, but do not account for cellular heterogeneity. To address this, we developed a deconvolution-informed framework to infer cell-type specific DNA methylation and gene expression profiles from bulk normal colon tissues using reference single-cell epigenomic and transcriptomic datasets. We performed cell-type specific MWAS (ctMWAS) using deconvoluted DNA methylation data from 293 normal colon samples and conducted cell-type specific TWAS (ctTWAS) using deconvoluted gene expression data from 707 normal colon samples. Genetically predicted methylation and expression models were integrated with CRC GWAS summary statistics (78,473 cases and 107,143 controls) to identify risk-associated CpG sites and genes. Through ctMWAS, ctTWAS, and colocalization analyses, we identified 178 significant cell-type-specific CpG sites in 106 loci and 68 risk genes in 40 loci, including 26 previously unreported loci. Through additional integrative methylation-gene analysis, we prioritized 132 candidate risk genes, the majority of which were supported by multi-omics evidence and stage-specific dysregulation across the adenoma-carcinoma and serrated-carcinoma progression pathways. Pathway enrichment analyses implicated pathways involved in DNA double-strand break repair, TP53 regulation, TGF-{beta} signaling, and innate immune responses. Among prioritized genes, 14 were identified as putative druggable targets linked to 90 FDA-approved or clinical-stage drugs. Experimental validation supports an oncogenic role for SF3A3. These findings demonstrate that deconvolution-informed integrative analyses enable cell-type-resolved identification of epigenetic and transcriptional mechanisms underlying CRC susceptibility and provide insights into disease biology, prevention, and therapeutic target discovery.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

DeepJEB++: Foundation Model-Driven Large-Scale 3D Engineering Dataset via 2D Latent Space Augmentation

arXiv:2606.12994v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Data-driven engineering design is constrained by the lack of large-scale 3D datasets that pair geometry with physics-based performance labels. In particular, existing 3D data augmentation techniques have limitations in preserving subtle and diverse geometric variations, and it remains difficult to automate the subsequent simulation-labeling process, where boundary conditions vary depending on the generated geometry. We present DeepJEB++, a foundation-model-driven data-augmentation framework that expands a small seed set of jet engine brackets into a large, simulation-labeled 3D dataset under constrained resources. Our key idea is to augment in the data-rich 2D latent space, then transfer to 3D. In Stage 1, we fine-tune a pretrained 2D latent diffusion model on multi-view renders and synthesize novel views by latent interpolation, retaining manufacturable designs through a vision-language-model (VLM) quality filter. In Stage 2, the validated images are lifted to 3D meshes by a domain-adapted generative foundation model. In Stage 3, an automated pipeline recognizes the load and bolt interfaces on each mesh and assigns finite-element labels – mass, stress, and displacement – without manual intervention. We assess augmentation quality along three intrinsic axes: manufacturability, label fidelity against the SimJEB ground truth, and distributional consistency. Starting from fewer than 400 seed designs, DeepJEB++ yields 15,360 simulation-labeled 3D brackets – a 40x expansion – using a single GPU per stage. The dataset will be made publicly available to support reproducible engineering-AI research.

18.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

Infectious Disease Forecasting via Physics-Informed Machine Learning

Infectious disease transmission evolves as a dynamic process shaped by biological mechanisms, population behavior, and intervention policies, yet public health responses are often driven by lagging indicators. Accurate short- and long-term disease forecasting is essential for the timely deployment of intervention strategies, healthcare capacity planning, and uncertainty-aware, risk-informed decision-making. To address this challenge, three broad classes of forecasting models have traditionally been used: statistical, machine learning, and mechanistic approaches. However, each of these modeling paradigms faces fundamental limitations. In particular, traditional statistical models often lack the flexibility needed to capture complex disease dynamics, machine learning approaches require large, high-quality data streams, and mechanistic models are notoriously difficult to calibrate. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel physics-informed machine learning (PIML) framework for forecasting infectious disease dynamics. Our approach simultaneously forecasts new case and hospitalization counts, along with other key epidemiological quantities such as the time-varying reproduction number. This is achieved through the design of a machine learning model and estimation strategy regularized by a system of differential equations that encode disease dynamics of the SIHR model, thereby bridging the gap between purely data-driven and mechanistic models. We demonstrate the proposed methodology through in-depth numerical studies and an application to COVID-19 data collected in the state of South Carolina.

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

U$^2$Mamba: A Two-level Nested U-structure Mamba for Salient Object Detection

Mamba-based models have emerged as a promising alternative for salient object detection (SOD), offering significant advantages in modeling long sequences. However, existing models often fail to explore contextual information and the depth of the entire architecture. This paper introduces U$^2$Mamba, a powerful and innovative U-structured network for salient object detection. We propose multiscale Mamba U-blocks (MMUBs) that enhance the model depth to improve local feature extraction capabilities. Our newly developed nested U-structure, incorporating MMUBs, enables the network to integrate various receptive fields from shallow and deep layers, thereby collecting richer contextual information and longer-range data without being constrained by resolution. Instead of using the traditional deep supervision scheme and top-level supervised training, we propose a hierarchical training supervision method where the loss is computed at each level during the training process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that U$^2$Mamba achieves highly competitive performance against state-of-the-art methods. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/JL021/U2Mamba}.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

A Turbo-Inference Strategy for Object Detection and Instance Segmentation

Object detection and instance segmentation tasks are closely related. Existing top-down instance segmentation methods usually follow a detect-then-segment paradigm, where an initial detector is used to recognize and localize objects with bounding boxes, followed by the segmentation of an instance mask within each bounding box. In such methods, the detection accuracy directly influences the subsequent segmentation performance. However, previous research has seldom explored the impact of the instance segmentation task on object detection. In this paper, we present a turbo-inference strategy for the top-down methods that leverages the complementary information between detection and segmentation tasks iteratively. Specifically we design two modules: turbo-detection head and turbo-segmentation head, which facilitate communication between the tasks. The two modules form a closed loop that interlaces the detection and segmentation results without retraining the model. Comprehensive experiments on the COCO, iFLYTEK, and Cityscapes datasets demonstrate that our method substantially enhances both detection and segmentation accuracies with a certain increase in computational cost. The proposed method represents a tradeoff between prediction accuracy and inference speed. Codes are available at https://github.com/zhaozhen2333/Turbo-Learning.git.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Structured Nonparametric Variational Inference for Dependent Latent Modeling

arXiv:2606.15458v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Variational inference (VI) is a core engine of modern AI, enabling scalable approximate Bayesian learning and uncertainty-aware training of large probabilistic and generative models. In this paper, we propose Structured Nonparametric Variational Inference (SN-VI), a novel framework for modeling complex dependencies among latent variables in posterior approximation, leveraging multivariate spline techniques. Unlike traditional methods that rely on the mean-field assumption, SN-VI preserves intricate latent variable dependencies, providing a flexible and accurate approximation of posteriors with arbitrary shapes. We establish rigorous theoretical guarantees, including the derivation of the lower bound for the variational objective and proof of asymptotic consistency in posterior estimation. To facilitate practical implementation, we develop an algorithm that automatically identifies dependent latent variables and their underlying dependence structure, without requiring manual specification. Simulation studies validate the effectiveness of SN-VI in approximating posterior distributions with bounded support and complex dependencies. The proposed method has been successfully applied to high-dimensional structured data, including computer vision datasets and spatial transcriptomics. In these applications, SN-VI demonstrates improved generative model performance and effectively uncovers coupled biological signals through the learned dependency structure.

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

Contrastive Regularization for Accent-Robust ASR

arXiv:2605.03297v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: ASR systems based on self-supervised acoustic pretraining and CTC fine-tuning achieve strong performance on native speech but remain sensitive to accent variability. We investigate supervised contrastive learning (SupCon) as a lightweight, accent-invariant auxiliary objective for CTC fine-tuning. An utterance-level contrastive loss regularizes encoder representations without architectural modification or explicit accent supervision. Experiments on the L2-ARCTIC benchmark show consistent WER reductions across multiple pretrained encoders, with up to 25 – 29\% relative reduction under unseen-accent evaluation. Analysis using within-transcript cosine dispersion indicates that SupCon promotes more compact and stable representation geometry under accent variability. Overall, SupCon provides an effective and model-agnostic regularization strategy for improving accent robustness.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

From Shield to Target: Denial-of-Service Attacks on LLM-Based Agent Guardrails

arXiv:2606.14517v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based guardrails have emerged as a highly effective defense against prompt injection and jailbreak attacks in autonomous agents. However, we reveal that the very reasoning and task-following capabilities enabling this protection introduce a novel vulnerability: attackers can inject crafted data to trap the guardrail in extended reasoning loops, effectuating a systematic denial-of-service (DoS) attack. To systematically expose this threat, we design a beam-search optimization framework that crafts natural-language payloads to maximize guardrail reasoning length, utilizing an LLM proposer guided by a strategy bank. Based on the observation of guardrail's schema-following nature, we also provide another attack framework driven by mechanism-aware structural mutations with less computational load. The attack efficacy is systematically evaluated in two parts. First, in standalone evaluations, the attack generalizes across diverse guardrail architectures, safety templates, and agent benchmarks. Payloads optimized on a single open-source surrogate successfully transfer to eight leading model backbones (e.g., Claude, GPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, and Qwen), achieving a 13–63$\times$ token amplification. Second, in end-to-end real-world agent deployments (web, desktop, code, and multi-agent systems), the attack reveals up to a 148$\times$ latency amplification. We show that a single poisoned document can saturate shared guardrail infrastructures, effectively starving co-located agents and paralyzing the entire system. By uncovering this availability flaw, our work underscores the urgent need to develop cost-bounded, reasoning-robust guardrails.

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

Average Rankings Mask Per-Subject Optimality: A Friedman-Nemenyi Benchmark of EEG Motor-Imagery BCI Decoders

arXiv:2606.24394v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Electroencephalography (EEG) is the dominant non-invasive modality for brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), yet reliable decoding of motor imagery is hampered by inter- and intra-individual variability. A recurring claim is that one decoding pipeline, most often a spatial or Riemannian method, is broadly preferable. We test the weakest version of that claim under the most favourable conditions. Using the Mother of All BCI Benchmarks (MOABB) framework, we evaluated 1,056 decoding configurations (feature extractor x scaler x classifier), >340,000 subject-level model fits, across three public left-versus-right motor-imagery datasets (PhysionetMI, 109 participants; Cho2017, 52; Zhou2016, 4) and two frequency bands (8-15 Hz, 8-30 Hz). Every model is fit and tested within a single session of a single participant, the easiest regime, giving every pipeline its best chance. We apply the statistics standard for multi-classifier comparison: Friedman omnibus tests, Nemenyi critical-difference analysis and Wilcoxon signed-rank tests with effect sizes. Covariance tangent-space projection (cov-tgsp) and Common Spatial Patterns (CSP) are the strongest families, but their ordering is dataset-dependent and, on the largest and most heterogeneous cohort (PhysionetMI), statistically indistinguishable (Nemenyi p = 0.27; Kendall's W = 0.11). At the individual level the single best pipeline is optimal for only 35% of PhysionetMI participants, and nonlinear descriptors are best for roughly one third; matching pipeline to participant adds about seven accuracy points over the best fixed choice. The ranking is not an artefact of dimensionality, and classifier and scaler choices are secondary to the feature representation. Even in the easiest regime, no single pipeline dominates: a lower bound on the personalization problem and a quantitative case for participant-aware model selection rather than a universal decoder.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

A Stabilized Path-Space Approach to Diffusion-Based Posterior Sampling

arXiv:2606.12710v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion models provide expressive data-driven priors for Bayesian inverse problems, but many diffusion posterior samplers rely on heuristic guidance approximations that can fail for nonlinear operators and multimodal posteriors. In this work, we develop a stabilized path-space framework for diffusion-based posterior sampling. Starting from a base diffusion process whose terminal marginal represents the prior, we define a likelihood-weighted target measure on trajectories and cast posterior sampling as learning a controlled stochastic process whose path measure matches this target. This formulation connects diffusion posterior sampling to stochastic optimal control while preserving the Bayesian structure needed for uncertainty quantification. We introduce a time reparameterization that makes the path-space control problem well posed by removing the bias induced by the unknown initial value function, without auxiliary training. We then learn the control via a trust-region path-space optimization method with log-variance objectives. The path-space perspective also unifies our learned control approach with existing guidance-based samplers, quantifies the sampling error induced by approximate controls, and yields importance sampling corrections for asymptotically exact posterior expectations. We evaluate the proposed framework on a suite of benchmark inverse problems with analytically characterized or high-quality reference posteriors, enabling principled assessment of sampling accuracy and uncertainty quantification. These experiments provide insight into the behavior of diffusion-based posterior samplers and demonstrate improved accuracy and robustness over leading approaches.