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

Building Customer Support AI Agents at 100M-User Scale: An Evaluation-Driven Framework

The rapid rise in LLM capabilities has made AI agents increasingly viable across a broad range of tasks. Among the most promising applications is building production-ready customer-facing agents, a challenge that demands coordinated excellence in evaluation methodology, context engineering, training, and online measurement. Yet these critical pillars are typically developed in isolation, creating blind spots that only surface after deployment. In this paper, we present a unified framework that bridges offline development with online impact for customer support AI agents at Nubank, a company with 100M+ users. Our approach integrates several key components: (1) structured context engineering tailored to customer support agents, (2) systematic human-in-the-loop prompt iteration, (3) rigorous LLM judge evaluation with measured inter-rater agreement and GEPA optimization for consistency, and (4) ideation-to-production validation. A central insight is that evaluation-pipeline quality directly determines iteration velocity. We present results from five production deployments spanning distinct domains: card delivery, debt management, credit-limit support, card management, and product explanation. These deployments deliver consistent customer-satisfaction gains while substantially accelerating iteration. In our card-delivery deployment, large-scale A/B testing yields a 37 percentage-point improvement in AI transactional Net Promoter Score and a 29 percentage-point gain in self-service rate over prior agent variants, alongside a strong correlation between offline simulation metrics and online outcomes, demonstrating that eval-driven development reliably predicts production impact. On most use cases, AI satisfaction reaches within a few percentage points of expert human agents.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Dressed Floquet scars from protected zero modes in a Rydberg chain

arXiv:2606.15605v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this Letter, we present an approximate analytic construction of two zero quasienergy quantum many-body scars in a periodically driven model of Rydberg atoms on a ring, which persist over a range of driving amplitudes and frequencies for finite sizes. An index theorem protects an exponentially large number (in system size) of exact zero energy modes of the Floquet Hamiltonian in this setting. Unlike most of these zero modes which continuously change with drive parameters, these two quantum many-body scars retain the memory of particular states. They can be expressed as {\it dressed versions} of two contrasting states, the Rydberg vacuum and a unitarily rotated variant of a volume-law scar [Ivanov and Motrunich, Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 134}, 050403 (2025)], respectively. We provide an analytic understanding of their existence using a Floquet perturbation theory and show their resilience beyond the perturbative regime using exact diagonalization in finite systems. Our study provides insight into the structure of protected zero modes in interacting Floquet settings.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Wasserstein Policy Learning for Distributional Outcomes

arXiv:2606.19117v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Offline policy learning has received growing attention in causal inference. The primary objective is to learn a policy (individualized treatment rule) as a mapping from covariates to treatment that maximizes the empirical welfare defined as the mean of scalar-valued potential outcomes. In this paper, we study offline policy learning with distribution-valued outcomes, where each potential outcome is a probability measure on $\mathbb{R}$ and the reward is defined through a utility functional applied to the Wasserstein barycenter of induced outcome distributions. We establish statistical guarantees for the policy learning framework based on both Inverse Probability Weighting (IPW) and Doubly Robust (DR) estimators. By handling the challenging uniform deviation over the product of the combinatorial policy class and the infinite-dimensional quantile domain, we prove that the finite-sample regret has leading dependence $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{\mathrm{N-dim}(\Pi)/N})$. In the one-dimensional Wasserstein setting and under the stated regularity conditions, the leading regret rate is still governed by the policy-class complexity. Moreover, we provide a minimax lower bound establishing the sharpness of the leading dependence on $N$ and $\mathrm{N-dim}(\Pi)$.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Multiple Topological Haldane Phases for Symmetry-Protected Quantum Information Processing

arXiv:2606.12685v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Symmetry-protected topological phases have attracted significant interest at the fundamental level and as a potential platform for quantum information processing, owing to their protected edge states and resilience to perturbations. Applying these features for practical and efficient quantum computation is highly desirable, but remains an open challenge. Here, we demonstrate the partitioning into multiple independent Haldane phase subsystems of a single spin-1/2 ladder system and propose this as a scalable architecture for gate-based quantum computation, which takes advantage of the symmetry-protected topological order. We encode qubits in the two topological states of the $S^{z}=0$ sector of each subsystem. Finite-size effects, typically viewed as detrimental, instead provide a controllable energy splitting that enables single-qubit rotations using only local magnetic fields. An Ising-type interaction between neighboring subsystem edges generates entangling gates, enabling universal quantum computation driven by two control parameters that are easily accessible experimentally. Our results demonstrate how symmetry-protected topological phases can be directly harnessed for circuit-model quantum computation in realistic systems.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

TokenPilot: Cache-Efficient Context Management for LLM Agents

As LLM agents are deployed in long-horizon sessions, context accumulation drives up inference costs. Existing approaches utilize text pruning or dynamic memory eviction to minimize token footprints; however, their unconstrained sequence mutations alter layouts, introducing prefix mismatches and cache invalidation. This reveals a critical trade-off between text sparsity and prompt cache continuity. To address this, we present TokenPilot, a dual-granularity context management framework. Globally, Ingestion-Aware Compaction acts as a framework harness to stabilize prompt prefixes and eliminate open-world environmental noise at the ingestion gate. Locally, Lifecycle-Aware Eviction monitors the ongoing residual utility of context segments, enforcing a conservative batch-turn schedule to offload content segments only when task relevance expires. Experiments on PinchBench and Claw-Eval under both isolated and continuous modes demonstrate that TokenPilot reduces costs by 61% and 56% in isolated mode, and 61% and 87% in continuous mode, while maintaining competitive performance compared to prior systems. TokenPilot has been integrated into LightMem2 at https://github.com/zjunlp/LightMem2.

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

Quantum-Accelerated Self-Consistent Field: A Hybrid Algorithm

arXiv:2606.20176v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present the Grover adaptive search self-consistent field (GAS-SCF) algorithm. GAS-SCF leverages quantum arithmetic to construct an efficient oracle that marks target states (Fock states) which improve upon some initial classical energy estimate. Amplitude amplification then increases the probability of measuring these states. This approach offers a theoretical quadratic speed-up for the optimization problem encountered in SCF quantum chemistry and establishes a baseline against which structured optimization algorithms, such as QAOA and DQI may be compared. In this work, we classically simulate three examples as proofs of concept of the algorithm, the largest consisting of 26 qubits. We then extend our analysis to two larger systems, with O3 representing the largest case at 330 qubits. These examples are chosen to probe classically challenging SCF regimes. Achieving chemically relevant applications of GAS-SCF will require large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum hardware.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Adiabatic preparation of a fractional quantum Hall fluid by coherently pumping atoms from a Bose-Einstein condensate

arXiv:2606.15951v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose a protocol to adiabatically prepare a many-particle fractional quantum Hall fluid of bosonic ultracold atoms exploiting a time-dependent coherent coupling of a strongly interacting atomic state with a large dilute Bose-Einstein condensate. Starting from an empty cloud, atoms with well-defined angular momentum are coherently pumped into the fluid by Raman beams with a Laguerre-Gauss profile. Compared to number-conserving schemes which rely on finite-size-induced topological gaps, we identify an adiabatic path in the Fock space which avoids crossing topological phase transitions and thus maintains a sizable adiabatic gap open at all times. The efficiency of our preparation protocol is numerically assessed for typical experimental parameters up to particle numbers that largely exceed the experimental state-of-the-art. The crucial advantage of including an anharmonic confinement is finally highlighted.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

A Computational Audit of Demographic Association Encoding in ClinicalBERT Language Predictions

Transformer-based clinical language models are increasingly integrated into high-stakes clinical decision support pipelines, yet the computational mechanisms through which demographic associations encoded in medical documentation propagate into model probability distributions remain empirically underspecified. We present a systematic computational audit of representational bias in ClinicalBERT (Alsentzer et al., 2019), a BERT-based model pretrained on MIMIC-III discharge summaries, employing two complementary probing methodologies: Log Probability Bias Analysis (LPBA), which quantifies demographic descriptor-induced shifts in masked token probability distributions across behavioral and evaluative semantic categories, and Masked Language Model-based analysis (MLM), which probes internal representational structure for demographic agency attribution encoding across 98 real clinical sentence templates and eight intersectional race-gender combinations. Corpus frequency analysis operationalizes the distinction between statistical disparity and bias amplification by benchmarking model outputs against empirical term frequencies in the MIMIC-III training corpus. Of 32 statistically significant findings, 65.6% contradict observed corpus distributions, rising to 80% for Black patients and 87.5% for agency attribution under MLM probing, providing direct empirical evidence that representational bias in ClinicalBERT operates predominantly through model-internal amplification rather than training data inheritance. Keywords: natural language processing, clinical documentation, algorithmic auditing, representational bias, health equity 1

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Beyond Defensive Reporting: Machine Learning for Active Anti-Money Laundering Control in Insurance

arXiv:2606.16663v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Money laundering through insurance claims poses a threat to insurers both through fraudulent payouts and reputational and regulatory risk. Despite this, little research has examined how such laundering can be prevented. This paper examines whether machine learning can help insurers flag suspicious claims before payout, shifting the focus from passive reporting to active prevention. Using production data from a major Norwegian insurer, we train gradient-boosted decision tree models to detect claims later reported to authorities for suspected money laundering. Because fraud and laundering may share behavioural patterns, we also examine whether insurance fraud labels can serve as an auxiliary training signal. We compare different learning setups using the Budget-Weighted Capture Rate, a metric introduced in this paper to measure how many laundering cases are captured when only a small share of claims can be manually reviewed. The results show that incorporating fraud-related investigation labels substantially improves laundering detection. The best-performing model captures nearly two-thirds of laundering cases within the top-ranked 2 to 6 percent of claims selected for investigation. To our knowledge, this is the first empirical study of machine learning for money laundering detection in insurance claims.

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

TextHOI-3D: Text-to-3D Hand-Object Interaction via Discrete Multi-View Generation and Joint Mesh Optimization

Text-conditioned 3D generation has progressed rapidly for images and isolated objects, but producing a hand-object mesh remains challenging: the output must preserve language semantics, cross-view consistency, object geometry, articulated hand shape, and physically plausible contact. We present TextHOI-3D, a staged framework that uses generated multi-view observations as an explicit interface between text-conditioned visual generation and geometry-aware hand-object recovery. TextHOI-3D learns a compact VQ token space for fixed-camera hand-object observations, predicts multi-view visual tokens from text with a CLIP-conditioned visual autoregressive model, and recovers a unified hand-object mesh through prior initialization, multi-view joint optimization, and anti-penetration refinement. The design separates semantic generation from geometric recovery while keeping both stages connected by a discrete multi-view representation. On HO3D-derived evaluations, the multi-view setting reduces object CD from 17.26 mm to 4.92 mm and penetration volume from 5.3721 cm^3 to 0.2193 cm^3 compared with a single-view counterpart, while improving hand errors and surface F-scores. These results support multi-view visual tokens as an effective intermediate representation for text-driven 3D hand-object mesh creation.

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

Sparsified Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks for Interpretable Quantum State Tomography

arXiv:2606.11814v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine-learning approaches to quantum state tomography can achieve high reconstruction fidelity, but the physical structure used by the trained model often remains implicit. Here we ask whether a sparsified Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) can be used not only as a regressor, but also as an inspectable reconstruction rule whose internal organization can be checked against known Pauli structure. We study a controlled three-qubit GHZ-family benchmark in which all 63 non-identity Pauli expectation values are used to reconstruct three GHZ-subspace variables: the population imbalance $z$, the real off-diagonal component $c$, and the imaginary off-diagonal component $s$. Under finite-shot sampling and depolarizing noise, external ablation identifies the extended 12-channel GHZ-relevant Pauli set from the 63 measurements, with exact top-12 recovery across the tested shot counts and depolarizing-noise strengths. These support patterns remain stable across multi-seed random-initialization and noise-level analyses, and collapse under random-label controls. The dominant pruned input-hidden-output pathways organize Z-type population observables and X/Y off-diagonal observables in a pattern consistent with the analytic GHZ Pauli grouping, and sparse formula recovery recovers the canonical signed Pauli relations. The contribution of the KAN is therefore pathway-level structural interpretability within a neural reconstruction model, rather than superior sparse regression. Together with negative controls, these probes provide a consistency chain for auditing learned reconstruction rules against known physical structure.

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

Sequential Hiring of Contingent Workers Through Learning-Based Optimization

arXiv:2606.18438v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper, we study a sequential workforce management problem in a contingent labor setting with uncertainty in both worker production and labor supply. A firm seeks to maximize cumulative profit by maintaining an active team of fixed size while learning worker productivity over time. We emphasize two critical operational frictions in this problem: replacing workers is costly, and workers may not be available immediately for hiring because of, for example, prior job commitments, scheduling constraints, or onboarding procedures. Thus, hiring decisions take effect only after a random delay. We formulate this problem as a stochastic multi-play bandit with costly switching and delayed actions, and develop a learning-based hiring policy, DR-UCB (DelayedReplacement-UCB), that makes replacement and hiring decisions sequentially through learning cycles. In each cycle, the policy uses real-time production data to determine when to initiate workforce changes and which workers to replace and hire. We show that the leading-order regret of the proposed policy matches its lower bound in its dependence on the time horizon. Our numerical experiments show that DR-UCB outperforms benchmark policies.

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

AIPatient Arena: EHR-grounded evaluation of large language models in end-to-end clinical consultation workflows

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly considered for use in clinical consultation tasks, yet most medical evaluations remain static, single-turn, or narrowly outcome-based, limiting their ability to reflect the sequential, uncertain, and interactive nature of real-world care. Here, we propose AIPatient Arena, an EHRs-grounded evaluation framework for assessing the clinical utility of LLMs across eight dimensions of clinical competence. The framework integrates EHR data into patient-specific knowledge graphs, enabling multi-turn physician-patient interactions. We applied AIPatient Arena on a primary cohort of 437 patients and two out-of-distribution validation cohorts of 119 and 67 patients. We observe that LLMs performed well in medical interview questioning skills (QS; mean scores, 4.43-4.99/5), ethical and professional conduct (ET; 4.38-4.93/5), and clarity and transparency of clinical explanations (EX; 3.80-4.72/5). Performance was moderate in information integration (II; 3.19-4.21/5) and medication safety and justification (MS; 3.13-3.78/5), but persistent weaknesses were observed in handling of ambiguous patient responses (HR; 2.57-3.32/5), information coverage (IC; 2.08-3.02/5), and diagnostic accuracy and reasoning (Dx; 2.63-3.55/5). Process-based evaluation revealed recurrent interaction failures, including repetitive questioning, omission of past medical history, and inadequate handling of uncertainty. Richer conversational context improved diagnostic reasoning but yielded limited gains in treatment planning. These findings indicate that final-answer accuracy alone is insufficient for evaluating clinical readiness and highlight the importance of assessing how models gather, interpret, and communicate information throughout a consultation. AIPatient Arena provides an EHR-grounded framework for workflow-oriented pre-deployment evaluation of medical LLMs.

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

QuantKAN: A Unified Quantization Framework for Kolmogorov Arnold Networks

arXiv:2511.18689v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Kolmogorov–Arnold Networks (KANs) replace linear weights with spline-based functions, offering strong expressivity but posing challenges for low-precision deployment due to heterogeneous parameter distributions. We introduce QuantKAN, the first unified framework for quantization-aware training (QAT) and post-training quantization (PTQ) of KANs. The framework employs branch-aware quantizers for base and spline parameters and extends modern QAT and PTQ methods to spline-based layers across EfficientKAN, FastKAN, PyKAN, and KAGN. Experiments on MNIST, CIFAR-10/100, TinyImageNet, and ImageNet provide the first unified QAT/PTQ KAN benchmarks and show that DSQ is the most robust QAT method at aggressive low-bit settings, while GPTQ is the strongest PTQ method at moderate precision. Sensitivity analyses reveal architecture-specific failure modes: spline/basis parameters dominate in FastKAN, while base or scaling parameters dominate in EfficientKAN, GRAM, and PyKAN. Vivado HLS estimates on a Xilinx UltraScale+ device further suggest up to 3.32$\times$ throughput and 7.7$\times$ lower estimated dynamic energy per inference under W4A4, exposing a residual basis-evaluation tax that motivates basis-aware microarchitecture. QuantKAN is available at https://github.com/OSU-STARLAB/QuantKAN/.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Multi-Adapter PPO: A Cross-Attention Enhanced Wavelength Selection Framework for LIBS Quantitative Analysis

arXiv:2606.17476v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) quantitative analysis faces critical challenges in wavelength selection due to high-dimensional spectral data and the fundamental trade-off between prediction accuracy and feature efficiency. This paper presents a novel Multi-Adapter PPO framework that transforms wavelength selection into a reinforcement learning problem, leveraging cross-attention mechanisms and multiple specialized adapters to capture complex spectral relationships. Our approach outperforms traditional Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) by an average of 28.4\% in comprehensive score and 45.2\% in prediction accuracy across steel and coal datasets. The proposed method demonstrates superior performance in balancing prediction accuracy with feature efficiency, achieving state-of-the-art results in LIBS quantitative analysis while maintaining interpretability and computational efficiency. We released our code and dataset here: https://github.com/Hflying/MAPPO

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

Investigating Human-Model Discrepancies in Speech Quality Assessment via Acoustic and Prosodic Perturbations

Mean opinion score (MOS) prediction models are widely used as proxy metrics in text-to-speech (TTS) research, yet their ability to capture quality differences beyond acoustic fidelity remains unclear. We investigate this via controlled perturbations on speech: acoustic degradation, prosodic errors, and manipulation of speaker-specific characteristics such as pitch and speaking rate. We obtained MOS predictions for these speech samples from both human listeners and the model, and analyzed the differences in their perceptual characteristics. Results show that most models track acoustic degradation well, while all are insensitive to prosodic errors despite large subjective score drops. For speaker characteristics, models exhibit a double dissociation: strong mean fundamental frequency (F0) biases absent in human ratings, yet insensitivity to speaking rate and F0 variability that humans notice. These findings highlight limitations of scalar MOS prediction beyond acoustic fidelity.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

CogCanvas: A Benchmark for Evaluating Multi-Subject Reference-Based Image Generation

Multi-subject reference-based image generation requires jointly preserving multiple human identities, binding per-person objects and fashion items, and respecting a specified background scene, a regime where current diffusion models remain brittle. Existing benchmarks evaluate only one axis at a time and none jointly captures multi-identity composition with human-object interaction, background grounding, and spatial plausibility. We introduce CogCanvas, a benchmark of 1,952 curated reference images spanning 100 celebrity identities, 115 distinctive objects and fashion items, and 29 real-world background scenes including landmarks, from which we construct 1,361 compositional prompts covering 2-5 person group sizes. The curation pipeline combines DINOv2-based deduplication, two-stage aesthetic filtering, and automated derivation of structured interaction and position graphs that serve as ground-truth supervision. CogCanvas supports three tasks, reference-based multi-human-object generation (primary), text-to-image compositional generation, and reference retrieval, under a unified six-axis evaluation protocol. We introduce two metrics tailored to the multi-reference setting: BG-Sim, which scores background fidelity on SAM 3-masked regions via DINOv3 feature similarity, and Attr-VQA, which uses a multimodal LLM to verify per-subject attribute binding and inter-person interactions against the structured graphs. Benchmarking five SOTA methods reveals that every model degrades substantially as group size grows from 2 to 5, with near-complete failure on object/fashion binding beyond three subjects.

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

Mental Health AI Safety Claims Must Preserve Temporal Evidence

arXiv:2605.08827v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The safety of mental health AI is often judged at the wrong temporal scale. Current evaluations typically score isolated responses, endpoint outcomes, or aggregate dialogue quality, while clinically consequential failures may arise from the order and accumulation of interactions themselves, including delayed escalation, repeated reinforcement, dependency formation, failed repair, and gradual deterioration across turns. This paper argues that this mismatch is not merely a limitation of evaluation coverage but a source of invalid safety conclusions. We introduce Temporal Safety Non-Identifiability, a formal account of why safety properties that depend on sequence, timing, accumulation, or recovery cannot be certified by protocols that discard those features. From this formalization, we develop SCOPE (Safety Claims Over Preserved Evidence) as a general principle for aligning safety claims with the evidence an evaluation actually retains, and instantiate it as SCOPE-MH, a mental-health instantiation of this reporting standard. We operationalize SCOPE-MH through a proof-of-concept on the AnnoMI dataset of expert-annotated motivational interviewing conversations, which reveals mechanisms of failure that per-turn behavior scoring does not represent. We propose SCOPE-MH as a diagnostic complement to existing evaluation infrastructure and argue that evaluation preserving temporal evidence is necessary, not optional, for safety-critical mental health AI deployment.

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

Semantic Editing with Coupled Stochastic Differential Equations

Editing the content of an image with a pretrained text-to-image model remains challenging. Existing methods often distort fine details or introduce unintended artifacts. We propose using coupled stochastic differential equations (coupled SDEs) to guide the sampling process of any pre-trained generative model that can be sampled by solving an SDE, including diffusion and rectified flow models. By driving both the source image and the edited image with the same correlated noise, our approach steers new samples toward the desired semantics while preserving visual similarity to the source. The method works out-of-the-box, without retraining or auxiliary networks, and achieves high prompt fidelity along with near-pixel-level consistency. These results position coupled SDEs as a simple yet powerful tool for controlled generative AI. Project page: https://z-jianxin.github.io/syncSDE-release/. Code: https://github.com/Z-Jianxin/syncSDE-release.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Proposal of quantum arrival-time measurement with a Bose-Einstein condensate

arXiv:2606.20278v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This work shows how a Bose-Einstein condensate of ultracold atoms could be used to address a long-standing question in quantum theory: how much time does it take for a particle to reach a detector? To this end, we propose a realistic experimental setup, whose key idea is not to measure arrival times directly, but the arrival flux on the detector as a function of its position. This novel approach not only solves practical issues with having a detector close to the system, but also results in signals that allow to unambiguously distinguish different theoretical predictions. This proposal raises prospects for resolving the decades-old debate on this fundamental issue.

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

Z-Plane Neural Networks: Bounded Geometric Activation Replaces ReLU and LayerNorm

arXiv:2606.15669v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern deep neural networks rely on Euclidean scalar activations (e.g., ReLU) and global normalization techniques (e.g., LayerNorm) to prevent gradient instability in deep architectures. However, these mechanisms inherently cause dead neurons, discard critical directional information, and destroy the orthogonality of feature representations. Inspired by the frequency-modulation transmission of biological axons, we propose the Z-Plane Neural Network, which maps hidden states into 2D phasor bundles on a hypersphere. We introduce a novel geometric activation function, Radial Bounding($\mathbf{x} / \max(1, \|\mathbf{x}\|_2)$), which limits the energy magnitude while preserving the phase (direction). We demonstrate mathematically that this isotropic activation maintains 1-Lipschitz continuity and prevents gradient vanishing by preserving tangential gradients. Empirically, a 100-layer Z-Plane Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP)-entirely devoid of ReLU and LayerNorm-successfully converges on the MNIST dataset with 98.34% accuracy and absolute numerical stability, proving that bounded geometric activation alone is sufficient for stable deep learning.

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

On-Manifold Variational Learning with Heat-Kernel Priors

Learning unsupervised representations of medical imaging cohorts can reveal clinically meaningful prototypes without expert labels, which are often noisy and fail to capture true pathological heterogeneity. However, existing deep latent-variable models estimate Gaussian mixture priors via Euclidean averaging, producing prototypes that drift off the curved data manifold and degenerate as the number of sub-populations grows. We propose a manifold-anchored variational framework built on a geometry-aware Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm, whose M-step selects each sub-population prototype as the graph medoid with the highest diffusion centrality on a heat-kernel-weighted latent graph, ensuring that every prototype remains on-manifold. A Dirichlet energy regularizer enforces geometric smoothness of the latent space, and a per-sub-population uncertainty score enables label-free quality assessment. \rev{The manifold-anchored EM is a general-purpose geometric tool that extends standard EM and applies readily to other latent-variable models beyond this setting.} On cardiac scar and brain MRI benchmarks, our framework attains the highest accuracy among all compared methods, produces the sharpest prototypes reported to date, and remains stable at large sub-population counts where all baselines degenerate.

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

ZipSplat: Fewer Gaussians, Better Splats

Feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting methods reconstruct a scene from posed or pose-free images in a single forward pass, yet current approaches predict one Gaussian per input pixel, tying the representation budget to camera resolution rather than scene complexity. A flat wall and a richly textured object thus produce equally many Gaussians despite very different geometric needs. We propose ZipSplat, a token-based feed-forward model that decouples Gaussian placement from the pixel grid. A multi-view backbone extracts dense visual tokens, and k-means clustering compresses them into a compact set of scene tokens. Cross- and self-attention refine these tokens, and a lightweight MLP decodes each into a group of Gaussians with unconstrained 3D positions. Because clustering is applied at inference, a single trained model spans the quality-efficiency curve without retraining. ZipSplat operates without ground-truth poses or intrinsics, yet sets a new state of the art on DL3DV and RealEstate10K with ${\sim}6{\times}$ fewer Gaussians than pixel-aligned methods, surpassing the best pose-free baseline by 2.1dB and 1.2dB PSNR, respectively. It further generalizes zero-shot to Mip-NeRF360 and ScanNet++, outperforming all comparable baselines. Our project page is at https://veichta.com/zipsplat.

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

4DP-QA: Scalable QA for 4D Perception in Vision Language Models

Despite recent advances, Vision Language Models (VLMs) still struggle to grasp the dynamics of the world. We note that the ability to reason about a 4D scene, challenging in itself, is further complicated by two factors. First, VLMs observe motion indirectly via its projection onto 2D images. Second, existing datasets fail to disentangle object and camera motion. To address these challenges, we present a QA generation pipeline that focuses on motion-related scene understanding. We take particular care of the entanglement of camera and object motion by casting tracking in both the traditional way and in a novel, fixed reference system, dubbed True-Motion Tracking, which provides an intuitive description of motion. From this pipeline, we generate a large-scale training dataset of 400K samples, 4DP-QA (4D Perception QA), and a 2.2K-sample benchmark, 4DP-QA-Bench. Training existing models on our dataset yields performance improvements on an external benchmark, validating the effectiveness of our method.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

LLMs Contain Multitudes: How Deployment Context Reshapes Model-Level Preferences and Values

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly characterised in recent evaluation work as having stable, model-level preference and value systems. However, accompanying robustness checks are limited to incidental prompt perturbations such as syntax variation and option reordering. This leaves open whether the measured properties survive when the surrounding task context changes, as it does in most real deployments. We test this directly across two established pairwise paradigms: ranking country preferences and eliciting utility judgements. In both, we make the deployment context – the high-level task the model is performing while making concrete value-dependent choices – our controlled variable, varied across framings such as writing a Reddit post or a news article. Across five LLMs and over 1.2M pairwise decisions, deployment context produces variation far larger than prompt paraphrasing and temperature controls. In country preference rankings over 15 countries, context induces widespread, statistically significant rank shifts; the aggregate Global North favouritism reported in prior work is itself context-dependent, with each model's bias shifting systematically across contexts. In utility elicitation over 50 outcomes, broad cross-category ordering is preserved, but fine-grained rankings within domains vary substantially, and cardinal exchange rates between outcomes (e.g. how many lives in one region equal one in another) shift by a factor of 2.47 at the median. Reported model-level preferences and utilities are therefore better understood as context-conditioned measurements than fixed model-level properties: safety guarantees obtained under one framing provide limited assurance in another.