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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

SP-Mind: An Autonomous Reasoning Agent for Spatial Proteomics Analysis

arXiv:2606.24235v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spatial proteomics enables single-cell-resolution characterization of protein expression within tissue architecture, playing a critical role in understanding tumor microenvironments and guiding precision medicine. However, current analysis workflows remain fragmented, requiring expert manual orchestration of heterogeneous tools and limiting research scalability and reproducibility. We present SP-Mind, the first autonomous AI agent designed to unify the spatial proteomics analysis pipeline, from raw multiplexed tissue imaging to downstream phenotype discovery. Equipped with expert-curated biological analysis skills and specialized computational tools, SP-Mind converts natural-language queries into end-to-end analytical workflows without task-specific fine-tuning. To rigorously evaluate its capabilities, we introduce SP-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark spanning diverse tissue types, comprising 102 tasks across 18 distinct categories. Through extensive evaluation on SP-Bench and established downstream tasks, SP-Mind achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing open-source biomedical agent baselines.

02.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-10

A mean-field model of neural networks with PV and SOM interneurons reveals connectivity-based mechanisms of gamma oscillations

by Farzin Tahvili, Martin Vinck, Matteo Di Volo Classic theoretical models of cortical oscillations are based on the interactions between two populations of excitatory and inhibitory neurons. Nevertheless, experimental studies and network simulations suggest that interneuron subclasses such as parvalbumin (PV) and somatostatin (SOM) exert distinct control over oscillatory dynamics. Yet, we lack a theoretical understanding of the mechanisms underlying oscillations in E-PV-SOM circuits and of the differences with respect to the classical mechanisms for oscillations in simpler E–I networks. Here, we derive a biologically realistic mean-field model of a canonical three-population E-PV-SOM circuit. This model robustly generates oscillations whose features are consistent with experimental observations, including the relative timing of PV and SOM activity and the effects of optogenetic perturbations. By reducing the model to a linear analytical form, we demonstrate that gamma oscillations emerge directly from the cell-specific connectivity of the three-population circuit. This connectivity motif alone accounts for experimentally observed phase relationships, with PV activity consistently leading that of SOM neurons. Together, this mean field model identifies a distinct structural mechanism giving rise to oscillations in canonical E–PV–SOM circuits and provides theoretical primitives for constructing large-scale, cell-type-specific models of cortical dynamics.

03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Sparsity-adaptive concentration inequalities for random polynomials

arXiv:2606.24090v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove concentration inequalities for polynomials of independent, sparse $\alpha$-sub-exponential random variables. Specifically, we consider $X_i=\delta_i\xi_i$, where the Bernoulli selectors $\delta_i$ are independent with parameters $p_i$, and the variables $\xi_i$ are independent \(\alpha\)-sub-exponential random variables (not necessarily centered). For any polynomial $f:\mathbb R^n\to\mathbb R $ of degree at most $D$ and any $0

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

Sex-based Network-Specific Differences in Connectomes: A Krakencoder-Based Analysis

This study examines how deficiencies in one brain connectome modality propagate to the other, using the Krakencoder as a simulation framework. Structural and functional connectomes from 702 healthy participants in the Human Connectome Project were analyzed, with the impact of each of the Yeo-7 functional networks assessed separately. Seven scenarios were considered, each involving the removal of a single network while the remaining networks were preserved. The resulting perturbations in cross-modal predictions were quantified using three complementary metrics: KL divergence on eigenvalue spectra, Frobenius norm, and Wasserstein distance. In addition, the persistence of sex-specific information within the predicted connectomes was evaluated. Across all metrics and both prediction directions, the Default Mode Network produced the largest perturbations, whereas the Somatomotor network yielded the smallest. Sex differences in network-level perturbation signatures were subtle, with the best result being an accuracy of 66.09% from connectomes predicted under network-removal conditions. In contrast, connectomes predicted from intact inputs achieved substantially higher sex classification accuracy, reaching up to 84.76%. These findings confirm that full predicted connectomes retain considerably more sex-discriminative information than perturbation-derived signatures alone.

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

Decoherence as Defence and the Magnitude of Noise Regularisation: A Rigorous N -Qubit Theory of Stochastic Quantum Neural Networks for Adversarially Robust Network Intrusion Detection

Stochastic quantum neural networks (SQNNs) encode neuronal activations as qubits, synaptic topology as entanglement, and neural noise through a Lindblad master equation. A recent conference study applied a ring-entangled SQNN to collaborative intrusion detection and reached three conclusions: ring entanglement is essential for non-local anomaly detection; an adversarial-resilience bound holds but is conservative; and the depolarising channel fails to act as a dropout-style regulariser, behaving instead as output noise. It left open whether a per-gate stochastic deactivation (``true quantum dropout'') could regularise where the depolarising channel could not, and whether the loose robustness bound could be replaced by a predictive theory. This paper resolves both and extends the framework to real data and to neutral-atom hardware. We give an $N$-qubit formulation through the stochastic master equation and its vectorised Liouvillian, and prove a decoherence-contraction theorem: a depolarising channel of strength $\gamma$ over $L$ entangling layers contracts every weight-$w$ Pauli read-out by a factor $(1-4\gamma/3)^{wL}$ (for the weight-$1$ read-out used here, $(1-4\gamma/3)^{L}$); building on the general noise-as-defence result of Du et al., we make this quantitative and operational for intrusion detection. On the real NSL-KDD dataset under white-box FGSM and PGD attacks, a depolarising SQNN trained with the channel is, over seven seeds under strong $\ell_\infty$/$\ell_2$ attacks, significantly more robust than the noiseless circuit ($\ell_\infty$ PGD-$20$, $p=0.04$, large effect) and, critically, never suffers the catastrophic robustness collapse that the noiseless model and gradient-trained classical detectors (which fall from $95\%$ to $47\%$) do, cutting robustness variance roughly twofold; we show this robustness arises from a noise-reshaped training boundary rather than from attack-time gradient contraction. For generalisation, we derive an adaptive-penalty formula showing that per-gate dropout implements a curvature-weighted $L_2$ penalty $\tfrac{p(1-p)}{2}\sum\theta^2\partial^2_\theta L$ in weight space, maximised at $p=1/2$, whereas depolarising noise implements an output-space penalty. A $30$-seed study confirms the formula's quantitative prediction: both mechanisms reduce the train-test gap by a small but statistically significant margin ($\approx\!0.01$; $p

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

MIVE: A Minimalist Integer Vector Engine for Softmax LayerNorm and RMSNorm Acceleration

arXiv:2606.17781v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid growth of Large Language Models (LLMs) has intensified the need for specialized hardware accelerators that can satisfy stringent inference latency and power constraints. Although matrix multiplications dominate the overall computational workload, non-linear vector normalization operations, such as LayerNorm, RMSNorm and Softmax can become critical hardware bottlenecks. Existing accelerators typically implement these functions using dedicated hardware blocks, leading to duplicated resources and inefficient silicon utilization. To address this limitation, we propose a Minimalist Integer Vector Engine (MIVE), a programmable architecture capable of executing all three operations within a unified datapath. By exploiting common computational patterns across LayerNorm, RMSNorm and Softmax the proposed vector engine maximizes hardware sharing while reducing implementation overhead. Physical ASIC implementation results show that MIVE provides comprehensive multi-function support while achieving higher area and hardware efficiency than most state-of-the-art standalone accelerators.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Human-centred design approaches to health facility design: Evidence from perinatal care settings in Ethiopia and Bangladesh

While significant progress has been made in perinatal outcomes over recent decades in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), maternal and newborn quality improvement initiatives often fail to account for the spatial conditions in which they are implemented. Health systems are increasingly deploying evidence-based care models into built environments that are not optimally structured to meet the needs of its patient population. As the principal users, patients and health care workers can offer pragmatic insights about improving these structural designs. Our objective was to gather insights from patients, providers, and companions about how the physical design of their health facilities influenced their experience receiving or delivering perinatal care. We conducted a prospective observational study using a human-centred design (HCD) approach to analyse perceptions of the quality of perinatal care across two low resource settings: Ethiopia and Bangladesh. Using engagement and assessment tools, we conducted interviews, focus groups, facility walk-throughs, co-design workshops, and infrastructural assessments with patients, companions, providers, and Ministry of Health representatives. Descriptive statistics and thematic analysis were used to identify key learnings and develop recommendations. Across both countries, participants identified the need for facility layouts that better support privacy, mobility during labour, alternative birth positions, companion involvement, cultural and religious practices, sanitation, and provider visibility. Based on these insights, we developed six recommendations to better align health facility infrastructure with maternal and newborn care delivery needs. Our findings suggest that investments in health facility infrastructure may improve care experiences and help enable respectful, safe, and evidence-based maternal and newborn care. Alongside targeted spatial improvements, government authorities responsible for health facility planning should incorporate participatory design processes to ensure infrastructure reflects the needs of patients, companions, and providers and supports high-quality care delivery.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Non-Autoregressive Minimum Bayes' Risk Decoding for Fast Speech Recognition

Non-autoregressive (NAR) decoding generates output tokens in parallel, making speech recognition faster than autoregressive decoding, which generates them sequentially from left to right. However, the recognition performance is degraded because NAR decoding cannot resolve uncertainty by conditioning on previously generated tokens. To address this issue, we propose a novel NAR decoding framework based on minimum Bayes' risk (MBR) decoding, termed NAR-MBR decoding, that maximizes the expected utility calculated from samples drawn from the output probability of an NAR model rather than maximizing the output probability. Notably, by leveraging the nature of NAR models, multiple samples are obtained efficiently with a single forward computation. Our experiments across LibriSpeech, Switchboard, AMI, and web presentation corpus demonstrated that our NAR-MBR decoding outperformed previous NAR decoding and ran faster than AR decoding.

09.
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.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

How fast can you find a good hypothesis?

arXiv:2509.03734v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In the hypothesis selection problem, we are given sample and query access to finite set of candidate distributions (hypotheses), $\mathcal{H} = \{H_1, \ldots, H_n\}$, and samples from an unknown distribution $P$, both over a domain $\mathcal{X}$. The goal is to output a distribution $Q$ whose distance to $P$ is comparable to that of the nearest hypothesis in $\mathcal{H}$. Specifically, if the minimum distance is $\mathsf{OPT}$, we aim to output $Q$ such that, with probability at least $1-\delta$, its total variation distance to $P$ is at most $C \cdot \mathsf{OPT} + \varepsilon$. The optimal approximation for proper algorithms (where $Q \in \mathcal{H}$) is $C=3$ using $\Theta(\log(n/\delta)/\varepsilon^2)$ samples from $P$ and for improper algorithms (where $Q$ is not necessarily in $\mathcal{H}$) is $C=2$ using $\tilde{\Theta}(\log(n/\delta)/\varepsilon^2)$ samples from $P$. In the improper setting, the algorithm achieving $C=2$ [Bousquet, Braverman, Kol, Efremenko, Moran, FOCS 2021] runs in time which grows polynomially with $|\mathcal{X}|$ – it does not run in finite time for real-valued distributions. A promising path towards improved runtime is to consider improper algorithms which output a mixture $Q$ of the hypotheses as such a distribution can be represented in $n$ words of memory. We show (1) a lower bound that no algorithm which outputs a mixture can achieve approximation better than $C = 3-2/n$ unless the number of samples is polynomial in $|\mathcal{X}|$, as well as (2) an algorithm which runs in time $poly(n)$ and achieves the same approximation guarantee. In the proper setting, [Aliakbarpour, Bun, Smith, NeurIPS 2024] provided an algorithm with $C=3$ running in $\tilde{O}(n/(\delta^3\varepsilon^3))$ time. We improve this time complexity to $\tilde{O}(n/(\delta \varepsilon^2))$, significantly reducing the dependence on the confidence and error parameters.

11.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Balanced affine Motzkin paths: Pearson geometry and global endpoint asymptotics

arXiv:2601.17634v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study endpoint distributions of balanced affine weighted Motzkin paths. In the balanced case, the generating-function equation has Pearson-type characteristic geometry. We show that this geometry controls the terminal-height law globally: the characteristic escape time determines the limiting cumulant generating function, the large-deviation rate function, and the ray-scale asymptotics. Thus the usual Gaussian window is only the local quadratic approximation to a global Pearson-driven profile. For finite sizes, we prove a uniform Daniels saddlepoint approximation in the one-dominant-singularity regimes and identify the exceptional antipodal case requiring a lattice/interference correction.

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

A Comprehensive Ecosystem for Open-Domain Customized Video Generation

Recent progress in video generation has shown impressive visual synthesis capabilities. However, open-domain customized video generation remains limited by the lack of large-scale, annotated datasets capturing diverse identity-specific attributes. To address this, we introduce PexelsCustom-1M, the first publicly available million-scale dataset for identity-preserving video generation, containing one million curated triplets across 8,000+ categories. Leveraging this, we propose CustoMDiT, a parameter-efficient framework that adapts a pretrained multimodal Diffusion Transformer into a customized video generator with only 8% additional learnable parameters. Our method surpasses prior state-of-the-art. However, benchmarks such as DreamBooth cover only 100 classes, which is insufficient for real-world applications. To overcome this, we construct OpenCustom, a new benchmark with 1,000+ categories, created via cross-dataset knowledge fusion from ImageNet and MS-COCO. Extensive experiments confirm the advantages of both our dataset and model. We will open-source the entire ecosystem–including dataset, pipeline, benchmark, and implementations–to support further research.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

OmniSapiens: A Foundation Model for Social Behavior Processing via Heterogeneity-Aware Relative Policy Optimization

arXiv:2602.10635v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Socially intelligent AI systems must reason across diverse human behavioral tasks and generalize to new social contexts. However, behavioral data is inherently heterogeneous, comprising diverse modalities and prediction targets that produce uneven training signals across samples, creating imbalanced learning dynamics that challenge existing AI models. To address this, we develop Omnisapiens-7B 2.0, a foundation model for social behavior processing that explicitly addresses learning from heterogeneous behavioral data. This is enabled through Heterogeneity-Aware Relative Policy Optimization, a new RL method that rebalances learning signals across samples by approximating each sample's contribution to the policy update and using these estimates to drive geometrically centered, inertially smoothed advantage modulation for stable training. Omnisapiens-7B 2.0 achieves the best and most consistent performance across 10 behavioral tasks, while also attaining the best performance on all five held-out benchmarks, with gains of up to +12.02% and +9.37% respectively. Furthermore, it demonstrates more consistent and interpretable reasoning traces, supporting reliable real-world behavioral applications. Our model is available at https://github.com/MIT-MI/human_behavior_atlas.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

SpeechDx: A Multi-Task Benchmark for Clinical Speech AI

Speech offers a uniquely informative window into health by simultaneously engaging neurological, motor, respiratory, and vocal systems. Current clinical speech AI methods have largely progressed through isolated condition-specific studies, making results difficult to compare and generalization difficult to assess. We introduce SpeechDx, a large-scale benchmark for clinical speech AI spanning 12 datasets and 27 tasks across diverse health conditions. To enable evaluation across shared clinical mechanisms, SpeechDx structures tasks by the stage of speech production they disrupt: conceptualization, formulation, and articulation. The benchmark tests generalization by including tasks with limited labeled data and evaluating the same health condition across multiple datasets, distinguishing clinically meaningful patterns from dataset artefacts. We systematically evaluate 12 state-of-the-art audio encoders across all tasks and under zero-shot cross-condition transfer. Results show that large-scale speech models represent the strongest overall baselines, domain-specific models improve performance only on closely matched tasks, and no current representation generalizes reliably across the clinical speech landscape. SpeechDx establishes a shared evaluation framework for tracking progress toward general-purpose clinical speech representations

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Agentic Autodiscovery of Diastolic Dysfunction Phenotypes from Surface Electrocardiogram

Background: Left ventricular diastolic dysfunction (LVDD) is a major determinant of heart failure (HF), yet its assessment relies on multiparametric echocardiography, limiting scalability. We previously demonstrated that generative artificial intelligence (AI) can synthesize tissue Doppler imaging (TDI) waveforms from the 12-lead ECG. The growing complexity of candidate architecture creates a need for automated model-discovery frameworks. Objectives: To evaluate agentic AI-based auto-discovery for ECG-based LVDD assessment using either raw ECG or synthetic TDI waveforms. Methods: Two attention-based agentic AI architectures were developed using an automated large language model-driven refinement framework that optimized transfer-learning and multimodal architectures through autonomous proposal, validation, and selection of candidate model configurations. Development was performed in 1,011 paired ECG-echocardiography studies and externally validated in 983 patients using two reference frameworks: (i) data-driven phenogroups and (ii) the 2025 ASE Diastolic Function Guidelines. External validation was performed in CODE-15% (n=219,567) for HF-related mortality and EchoNext (n=35,718) for structural heart disease associations. Results: Despite the modest cohort size, the ECG-based agentic search achieved area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUCs) of 0.87 (95% CI: 0.85-0.89) and 0.83 (95% CI: 0.80-0.86) for phenogroup and guideline-based LVDD severity classification. Corresponding AUCs for the synthetic TDI-based model were 0.82 (95% CI: 0.80-0.85) and 0.80 (95% CI: 0.77-0.84), respectively. In large-scale external validation, both models stratified incident HF mortality with subdistribution hazard ratios ranging 5.5 to 9.5 (Gray's p

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

Different Layers, Different Manifolds: Module-Wise Weight-Space Geometry in Transformer Optimization

arXiv:2606.13276v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Weight-space geometry plays a central role in neural network optimization, yet manifold constraints are often applied uniformly across all weight matrices. In this work, we ask whether different transformer modules prefer different manifold geometries. We study Manifold Muon for GPT-2 pretraining and compare layer-wise assignments of Stiefel and DGram constraints across attention and MLP blocks. Our results show a clear asymmetry: constraining attention layers with Stiefel geometry while assigning DGram geometry to MLP layers gives the best performance among the tested configurations, whereas the inverted assignment and all-DGram configuration become unstable under the shared hyperparameter setting. We trace this failure to singular value growth in DGram-constrained attention weights, which can amplify attention logits and induce softmax saturation. These findings suggest that symmetry-aware and geometry-aware optimization for transformers should be module-specific rather than uniform.

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

RLCSD: Reinforcement Learning with Contrastive On-Policy Self-Distillation

On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) provides dense, token-level supervision for reasoning models by aligning a model's own distribution with the distribution it produces under privileged context, typically a verified solution. However, we show that the learning signal drawn from this distributional gap concentrates on style tokens rather than task-bearing ones, as the hinted model tends to produce more direct, shorter outputs. We term this pathology privilege-induced style drift, which destabilizes training or causes response length to shrink. To address this, we propose RLCSD (Reinforcement Learning with Contrastive on-policy Self-Distillation), which mitigates this drift by contrasting the teacher-student gap under a correct hint against that under a wrong hint, suppressing the style shift that conditioning on a hint tends to induce regardless of correctness, and yielding a signal that is more concentrated on task-bearing tokens. Experiments on Qwen3 (1.7B/4B/8B) and Olmo-3-7B-Think across mathematical and logical reasoning show that RLCSD consistently outperforms GRPO and prior OPSD methods. We further show that the contrastive principle is general: it plugs into existing OPSD methods to improve them, and its underlying insight extends to the broader cross-model on-policy distillation setting.

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

The Morse Transform for Discrete Shape Analysis

arXiv:2503.04507v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The geometry of an object plays a vital role in modulating its interactions with the physical world. It nevertheless remains difficult to describe geometric information numerically for the purposes of statistical inference or classification tasks. Here, we introduce a new topological transform which leverages directional piecewise-linear Morse theory to quantify the geometry of an embedded object by cataloguing critical points across multiple height-functions. The output of this Morse transform records both the heights and the local topological type (peak, trough or saddle) of the critical points that characterise the underlying shape, retaining finer information than the Euler characteristic transform whilst naturally prioritising a shape's outermost regions. Crucially, this output can be further compressed into a rich but compact feature vector. We benchmark the Morse feature vector as a descriptor for ligand-based virtual screening (LBVS), which intrinsically depends on the shape of molecules. Under a common gradient-boosted tree classification pipeline, Morse descriptors achieve the highest mean AUROC when compared to other topological transform descriptors and to standard shape-based LBVS descriptors.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Compressed minimum-purity time evolution for late-time quantum dynamics

arXiv:2606.11392v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Unitary time evolution of initially simple quantum many-body states rapidly generates entanglement and complex correlations, which limits direct numerical simulations. The late-time dynamics of physical observables, however, typically exhibits an effective simplicity in the form of hydrodynamics or kinetic theory. This leads to the question whether microscopic equations of motion can remain accurate and tractable up to long time scales by discarding irrelevant information in a controlled manner. Here, we introduce compressed minimum-purity time evolution (CoMPuTE) as an approach to keep track of a consistent set of reduced local density matrices, closing the hierarchical equations of motion using a minimum-purity principle. In benchmark applications we demonstrate (i) accurate description of energy diffusion in the one-dimensional mixed-field Ising model, (ii) the applicability to genuinely out-of-equilibrium Floquet dynamics starting from a pure state, and (iii) the limitations of the local reduced density matrix approximation when describing transport in the XXZ chain at $\Delta=1$ that is governed by increasingly non-local integrals of motion. The CoMPuTE method enhances computational efficiency in comparison to the closely related local-information time evolution algorithm, opening a possible route towards an extension to systems in higher spatial dimensions.

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

SA4Depth: Consistent Pose-Depth Scale Alignment for Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation

Self-supervised depth estimation from monocular sequences relies on the joint learning of a depth and a pose network. Despite abundant research done to improve the depth network, efforts on the pose remain limited. In this context, even when depth is estimated up to scale, we highlight the importance of the alignment between the scene scales estimated by the pose and depth nets. Then, we introduce SA4Depth, an approach to improve this alignment and boost the depth predictions while keeping the inference time unchanged. Our proposed method uses the depth estimated during training to reproject learnable visual features across consecutive frames and refine the pose estimates by reducing feature alignment residuals. With our method, the estimated scene scales by the separate depth and pose networks are aligned, and the prediction scale consistency is improved across different sequences. Our differentiable refinement integrates seamlessly into existing self-supervised pipelines and substantially improves their depth estimates. We demonstrate this with extensive experiments both outdoors and indoors on KITTI, Cityscapes, and NYUv2. Additionally, results on KITTI Odometry confirm the effectiveness of our pose refinement. Our code is available at https://github.com/Runningchauncey/SA4Depth .

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

Disagreement-Based Cross-Model Routing for Implicit Video Question Answering

We study multiple-choice video question answering on the ImplicitQA benchmark, where the correct answer is never explicitly shown but must be inferred from off-screen events, line-of-sight cues, causal structure, and cross-shot spatial layout. On this benchmark a single frontier video LLM already operates near its accuracy ceiling, and we observe that conventional self-consistency strategies – majority voting across repeated samples of the same model – can hurt rather than help, because the model's errors on hard questions are correlated. We propose disagreement-based cross-model routing, a pure inference-time procedure that requires no labels and no training. We triple-sample a native-video model (Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview) at temperature zero, exploit the genuine sample-to-sample variance of its video-processing pipeline to identify the roughly 20% subset of questions where the three samples disagree, and route only that subset to a second model from a different family (Claude Opus 4.8) that consumes uniformly sampled frames with adaptive thinking. On the 1001-question validation set with public ground truth – our main evaluation – the method improves AvgAcc by +1.43 over the best single sample of the primary model, with per-category gains concentrated on Motion & Trajectory (+5.49), Inferred Counting (+3.45), and Vertical Spatial Reasoning (+1.82) – the categories most dependent on cross-shot reference resolution. The same pipeline applied to the held-out 172-question CVPR 2026 ImplicitQA challenge test set achieves 82.03 AvgAcc / 79.71 MacroAvgAcc (+1.81 over the best single sample of the primary model), confirming the validation result on an independent split.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

No-Free-Fairness: Fundamental Limits and Trade-offs in Learning Systems

作者:

arXiv:2606.17810v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper, we establish a set of theoretical impossibility results, termed the No-Free-Fairness theorems, that identify three fundamental sources of disparity in learning systems. First, we show that when a task exhibits irreducible cost on a subgroup, any decision rule must trade off overall performance with disparity, yielding an inherent fairness–cost frontier. Second, we prove that even in ideal, noise-free settings where a perfectly fair and accurate solution exists, finite-sample learning alone induces nontrivial subgroup disparity, ruling out distribution-free fairness guarantees. More seriously, enforcing strict relative fairness creates a statistical bottleneck: achieving low cost may require exponentially many samples. Third, we show that limitations of the model class can independently induce disparity: if the model cannot represent accurate solutions for a subgroup, fairness remains unattainable regardless of data or training procedure. Overall, these results demonstrate that unfairness is not solely a consequence of biased data or suboptimal optimization, but arises from the intrinsic structure of decision problems, the constraints of finite data, and the expressivity of models. Our framework applies broadly beyond standard supervised learning, and suggests that achieving fairness requires explicit trade-offs and should be treated as a core design consideration.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Exploring the relationship between human-centric AI and firm idiosyncratic risks

arXiv:2606.24224v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Despite the extensive discussions of human-centric AI (HCAI) in Industry 5.0, its effects on firms' idiosyncratic risks (IR) remains underexplored. This is an imperative issue for firms navigate financial risks during the current technological revolution, as IR reflects investor reactions to corporate heterogeneous AI strategies and implementations by isolating firm-level stock volatility from systematic factors. Integrating situated AI theory with social-technical systems theory, we conceptualise HCAI as a situated AI strategy that reduces AI-related ethical risks and fosters AI-Human synergies in firms' business operations, ultimately reducing IR by aligning with stakeholders' diverse expectations. Moreover, socio-technical factors, namely digitalisation, operational efficiency, executive shareholding, and CEOs with IT background, may moderate the HCAI-IR relationship. Using a multi-source panel dataset of Chinese listed firms from 2015 to 2023, we find that HCAI is associated with lower firm IR. Furthermore, digitalisation and executive shareholding strengthen this risk-reducing effect, whereas operational efficiency and CEOs with IT background surprisingly attenuate it. Our findings offer theoretical contributions and practical insights for both ethical AI governance and firm financial risk management in the AI era.

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

Impatient Bandits: Optimizing for the Long-Term Without Delay

arXiv:2501.07761v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Increasingly, recommender systems are tasked with improving users' long-term satisfaction. In this context, we study a content exploration task, which we formalize as a bandit problem with delayed rewards. There is an apparent trade-off in choosing the learning signal: waiting for the full reward to become available might take several weeks, slowing the rate of learning, whereas using short-term proxy rewards reflects the actual long-term goal only imperfectly. First, we develop a predictive model of delayed rewards that incorporates all information obtained to date. Rewards as well as shorter-term surrogate outcomes are combined through a Bayesian filter to obtain a probabilistic belief. Second, we devise a bandit algorithm that quickly learns to identify content aligned with long-term success using this new predictive model. We prove a regret bound for our algorithm that depends on the Value of Progressive Feedback, an information-theoretic metric that captures the quality of short-term leading indicators that are observed prior to the long-term reward. We apply our approach to a podcast recommendation problem, where we seek to recommend shows that users engage with repeatedly over two months. We empirically validate that our approach significantly outperforms methods that optimize for short-term proxies or rely solely on delayed rewards, as demonstrated by an A/B test in a recommendation system that serves hundreds of millions of users.

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

Beyond the Commitment Boundary: Probing Epiphenomenal Chain-of-Thought in Large Reasoning Models

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning is the dominant paradigm for inference-time scaling in language models, yet the causal influence of individual steps on the final answer poorly understood. We estimate each step's causal importance via early exit and use this measure to study how answers form across the reasoning traces of several model families. Across diverse tasks, we find that reasoning typically crosses a commitment boundary – a sharp transition from transient intermediate guesses to a stable, high-confidence answer. This transition often happens in a single step, well before the model's reasoning block ends, and is followed by epiphenomenal CoT steps that leave the final answer probability unaltered. Using attention probes, we show that answer-formation stages can be linearly decoded from intermediate reasoning steps with high accuracy and generalize robustly to unseen reasoning tasks. We exploit this signal to early-exit reasoning blocks at the commitment boundary, reducing the length of CoTs up to 55\% on average with negligible impact on model performance.