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

Beyond Accuracy: Measuring Bias Acknowledgment in Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Responsible AI Evaluation

arXiv:2606.15127v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reasoning models are increasingly used in settings where the final answer is not the only object of review: educational tools may show students intermediate steps, decision-support systems may require human oversight, and audit workflows may inspect traces for misleading or biased input. In such settings, two responses can receive the same final-answer score while differing in whether the trace explicitly flags injected biasing content. Accuracy-only evaluation collapses these cases. We study this gap as a measurement blind spot for responsible evaluation and introduce a minimal trace-level diagnostic with two axes: susceptibility (whether the bias breaks a previously correct answer) and acknowledgment (whether the trace contains a rubric-defined surface reference to the injected content). Across thousands of biased GSM8K trials, GPT-4o and Claude Sonnet~4 have similar susceptibility rates ($1.3\%$ vs.\ $1.2\%$) but substantially different acknowledgment rates ($13.0\%$ vs.\ $75.0\%$) under the same rubric.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

IOAH3: Importance-Driven Adaptive Spatial Partitioning

arXiv:2606.18280v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present IOAH3 (Importance-Oriented Adaptive H3 partitioning), a computational method for constructing data-driven spatial partitions of geo-referenced observation domains. Standard approaches to spatial aggregation adopt fixed areal units, such as administrative boundaries or uniform hexagonal grids at a single resolution, without regard to the informational content of the underlying observations in each region. This leads to the well-known modifiable areal unit problem: statistical and inferential results depend on the arbitrary choice of partition, and spatially concentrated phenomena are averaged out in coarse cells that obscure fine-scale structure. IOAH3 addresses this by constructing an adaptive partition in three stages: multi-source feature extraction and importance scoring via principal component analysis over road density, POI density, building density, and terrain roughness signals, with population and flood-hazard data entering as auxiliary inputs to cell filtering and spatial smoothness; spatial cell selection via Markov Random Field graph-cut optimisation, which jointly maximises per-cell importance while enforcing spatial contiguity; and data-driven hierarchical refinement of high-importance regions to finer H3 resolution levels, with neighbour-propagated support to avoid isolated fine-resolution islands. The resulting partitions serve as input to spatial inference pipelines and provide a principled resolution of the partition-sensitivity problem prior to any modelling step.

03.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-08

TRACEY: an updated resource for SNARE protein domain annotation with improved HMMs and expanded sequence coverage

Motivation: SNARE proteins catalyse membrane fusion across the eukaryotic endomembrane system, from synaptic vesicle exocytosis to intracellular trafficking, endosomal and vacuolar transport, and autophagy, and their accurate domain annotation depends on the quality of profile models and the sequence diversity behind them. The original SNARE domain classification predates the recent expansion of eukaryotic sequence data, leaving its HMM profiles and subgroup coverage unable to resolve divergent and lineage-specific paralogs. Results: We present an updated release of TRACEY built on a resynchronized, non-redundant collection of 18,915 curated SNARE proteins spanning 1,188 species, together with a consolidated set of 83 HMM profiles, including 43 models for newly defined subgroups, reconstructed through an iterative, mixture-model-driven procedure. In direct comparison with the legacy models, at least ~75% of sequences in every overlapping group scored better with the new HMMs, indicating systematic gains in domain detection. A redesigned web interface adds multiparameter querying, FASTA download, and direct scanning of user-submitted sequences against the curated profiles. Availability and implementation: TRACEY is freely available at https://tracey.unil.ch.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Which Models Are Our Models Built On? Auditing Invisible Dependencies in Modern LLMs

Modern LLM training pipelines increasingly rely on other models to generate data, filter corpora, judge outputs, and guide development decisions. These dependencies are recursive: a model may depend on an upstream artifact whose own dependencies are documented only in separate releases and artifacts. As a result, the full dependency structure is fragmented across heterogeneous public artifacts, with complexity and recursive depth far outpacing humans' ability to trace. We introduce ModSleuth, an agentic system that recursively reconstructs LLM dependency graphs from public artifacts with source-grounded evidence. We find that the primary challenge is no longer information extraction, but defining what constitutes a dependency and reconciling artifact references across inconsistent documentation. We address these challenges through a formalization that distinguishes direct and indirect dependencies, represents heterogeneous pipeline roles through operation-centered relationships, and resolves artifact identities across names, versions, and repositories. Applying ModSleuth to four public-artifact-rich LLM releases, we recover 1,060 source-verified dependencies and construct large-scale dependency graphs of modern LLM development. These graphs reveal multi-hop license obligations, train-evaluation coupling, discrepancies between released and training-time artifacts, and documentation inconsistencies that would otherwise be difficult to uncover. We release ModSleuth and the resulting dependency graphs to support transparent analysis of the increasingly complex ecosystems underlying modern LLMs.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

PIGEON: VLM-Driven Object Navigation via Points of Interest Selection

Object navigation in unseen indoor environments requires agents to perform semantic search under partial observability. Vision-language models (VLMs) provide strong semantic-spatial priors for this task, but how to interface them with robot navigation remains challenging: dense VLM inference is expensive, while abstracting environments into symbolic memories often separates high-level reasoning from the raw visual evidence that supports it. We propose we propose PIGEON (Point of Interest Guided Exploration for Object Navigation), a VLM-driven framework that formulates object navigation as raw-observation-grounded sparse decision problem. PIGEON introduces Points of Interest (PoIs) as sparse visual decision units that couple geometrically executable waypoints with raw egocentric observations. Rather than using VLMs as dense controllers or restricting them to frontier ranking, PIGEON enables VLMs to select among task-critical PoIs, including exploration frontiers, suspected target objects, traversable stairs, and floor-level summaries, while low-level planners execute continuous motion between them. This PoI interface further makes high-level navigation decisions verifiable, allowing us to develop an RLVR pipeline that improves local VLMs without manual Chain-of-Thought annotations. Extensive experiments on Habitat ObjectNav benchmarks show that PIGEON achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance, scales consistently with foundation model capacity, and transfers to Active Embodied Question Answering with only prompt modifications. Real-world deployments on physical robots further demonstrate its robustness and efficiency.

06.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Multi-floor generalization of TASEP

arXiv:2603.13610v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider an interacting particle system, which generalizes the classical totally asymmetric simple exclusion process (TASEP), in that each site can contain up to a fixed finite number of particles, and the particle movement is governed by a back-pressure (BP) algorithm (also often called MaxWeight). There are $N$ sites (with $N$ finite or infinite), each may contain at most $c$ particles, $1 \le c < \infty$. New particles enter the system at the left-most site $1$ as a Poisson process of rate $\alpha\le 1$, unless site $1$ has $c$ particles. Particles (if any) are removed from the right-most site $N$ as a Poisson process of rate $\beta \le 1$. The left-to-right movement of particles between neighboring sites is governed by the BP rule: one particle moves from site $n$ to $n+1$ at epochs of a rate $1$ Poisson process, as long as the former site has strictly more particles than the latter. When $c=1$, this is the standard TASEP. Our main results address the asymptotics of the stationary distribution of a finite system, and especially the limit of the flux (current) as $N\to\infty$. In particular, we prove that interesting non-trivial phase transitions take place in a system with $c>1$. For example, if $c>1$ and $1/2 \le \beta \le 1$, the maximum limiting flux $1/4$ is achieved as long as $\alpha \ge \alpha_c^*$, where $\alpha_c^* < 1/2$ is some non-trivial threshold. (For the standard TASEP the threshold is $1/2$.) We also put forward a general conjecture about the stationary distribution asymptotics under an arbitrary parameter setting. We illustrate our formal results and the conjecture by simulations, and identify interesting directions for further research.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

HEPTv2: End-to-End Efficient Point Transformer for Charged Particle Reconstruction

arXiv:2606.20437v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Charged-particle tracking – reconstructing trajectories from sparse detector measurements – is a fundamental high-energy-physics inference problem and a canonical example of learning under extreme combinatorial ambiguity. At the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC), tracking must remain accurate and efficient despite unprecedented collision densities. Graph neural networks perform strongly, but incur substantial costs from graph construction and processing, while transformer-based approaches rely on auxiliary stages that prevent end-to-end optimization. To address this, we present HEPTv2, an end-to-end point-transformer architecture that reconstructs tracks from detector hits in one trainable pipeline. HEPTv2 combines a locality-aware point encoder with a track decoder that predicts complete trajectories without graph-building, clustering, or filtering. The encoder uses locality-sensitive hashing in detector coordinate space to preserve tracking-relevant geometry while enabling efficient local attention. The decoder resolves ambiguities through sectorized decoding and direct hit-to-track prediction under joint encoder-decoder supervision, allowing the full pipeline to be optimized end-to-end. On TrackML, HEPTv2 achieves 98.6% double-majority tracking efficiency at a 0.8% fake rate, while requiring only $\sim$15~ms inference time and 0.4~GB peak memory per event on a NVIDIA A100 GPU. Latency and memory scale approximately linearly for events with up to $5\times10^5$ hits. HEPTv2 establishes a new state of the art in the accuracy-latency trade-off, improving efficiency by 4.5% over the strongest prior transformer and by 1.1–2.2% over optimized graph-based pipelines, while reducing latency by factors of 7 and 38–52, respectively. These results show end-to-end transformers can deliver the accuracy and efficiency required for real-time particle reconstruction at the HL-LHC.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

DVANet: Degradation-aware Visual-prior Alignment Network for Image Restoration

All-in-One image restoration aims to develop a unified restoration framework for handling diverse degradation types. Existing end-to-end methods usually regard the restoration process as a black-box mapping, lacking an explicit optimization interpretation. Although deep unfolding provides an interpretable iterative modeling paradigm for image restoration, existing methods mostly rely on fixed degradation assumptions or predefined degradation information, making them difficult to adapt to unified restoration requirements under complex degradations and locally damaged content. This limitation restricts their performance in degradation suppression and structural detail recovery. To address these issues, this paper proposes DVANet, a deep unfolding network inspired by the half-quadratic splitting optimization algorithm, which formulates unified image restoration under complex degradations as a collaborative unfolding process between degradation-aware observation consistency and visual-prior-guided reconstruction. Specifically, in the degradation-aware observation consistency branch, a degradation representation module is employed to extract global degradation attributes and local degradation cues, and degradation-conditioned mapping is used to enhance the model's adaptability to different degradation types. In the visual-prior-guided reconstruction branch, DINOv3 is introduced to provide structural and semantic information as hierarchical visual priors, thereby complementing the missing structural information in damaged regions and improving detail recovery. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DVANet achieves superior or competitive performance on multi-scenario degradation and cross-domain image restoration tasks, showing favorable degradation adaptability and generalization ability.

09.
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.

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

Q-Fold: Query-Aware Focus-Context Spatio-Temporal Folding for Long Video Understanding

Long-video understanding remains challenging for multimodal large language models, because temporally extended videos often contain thousands of frames and are therefore expensive to process exhaustively. Existing methods usually construct compact visual inputs from long videos under a limited visual budget. However, most of them still follow a frame-centric paradigm and apply similar representations to retained content regardless of its importance. This makes it difficult to preserve both high-fidelity visual evidence and broad temporal coverage. To address this issue, we propose Q-Fold, a training-free input construction framework for long-video understanding. Instead of treating isolated frames as the basic modeling unit, Q-Fold operates on contiguous temporal segments and constructs a heterogeneous Focus–Context representation under query guidance. Query-relevant segments are preserved as high-fidelity Focus Frames, while less relevant segments are folded into chronology-preserving contextual layouts. In this way, Q-Fold preserves critical visual evidence and broad temporal coverage, while better maintaining local temporal continuity within short segments. Experiments on four long-video benchmarks with multiple Video-MLLMs show that Q-Fold consistently improves performance without increasing the input budget. Notably, it achieves gains of up to 9.1 percentage points on an ultra-long video benchmark. Code will be made publicly available.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

MolGraphBench: A Benchmark of GNN Architectures for Molecular Regression Tasks

arXiv:2602.20573v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Molecules are often represented as SMILES strings, which can be readily converted to hand-crafted descriptors or fingerprints (FP) for molecular property prediction. Research has demonstrated that SMILES can be converted to molecular graphs $G = (V, E)$, with atoms as nodes $(V)$ and bonds as edges $(E)$. These molecular graphs can subsequently be used to train graph neural networks (GNN) models. Despite the recent surge in application of GNN (existing and novel architectures) for molecular property prediction, a rigorous benchmark is still lacking. We propose MolGraphBench, a comprehensive benchmark of four commonly used GNN models for molecular property prediction. Benchmarking results demonstrate graph convolutional network (GCN) and graph isomorphism networks (GIN) as the optimal GNN architectures for molecular graph regression tasks, based on absolute performance, training efficiency, transfer learning and prediction quality. The study also indicates the non-complementary nature of molecular fingerprints in the fusion (GNN-FP) framework. Furthermore, our GNN models achieved performance superior or comparable performance to current state-of-the-art GNN baselines across three datasets (GCN with RMSE of $0.518$ on B3DB, GIN-FP with RMSE of $1.022$ on FreeSolv and GIN with MAE of $63.783$ on RT datasets). Findings from this study indicate that type of GNN-layer, should be treated as a tunable hyperparameter rather than a fixed design choice to achieve superior performance.

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

M*: A Modular, Extensible, Serving System for Multimodal Models

arXiv:2606.12688v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We are entering a new era of composite model architectures that integrate diverse components such as vision encoders, language backbones, diffusion and flow heads, audio codecs, action generators, and world-model predictors. Such architectures underpin a broad class of multimodal models, including unified multimodal models, omni models, speech-language models, vision-language-action policies, and world models. However, existing model serving frameworks were built on narrow assumptions about model structure, making them ill-suited to accommodate this new architectural diversity. Here we present M*, a universal serving system for efficient serving of composite AI models. M* represents models as dataflow graphs, processing requests spanning diverse modalities and tasks as traversals over these graphs. The core insight is a modular abstraction that supports arbitrary composition of model components, flexible placement onto a physical cluster, and model-agnostic optimizations within a distributed runtime. We call this abstraction the Walk Graph and show how it can concisely capture composite models from a broad range of families. We instantiate M* on representative models and find that it achieves, on average, 20% lower end-to-end latency than vLLM-Omni for text-to-image workloads on BAGEL, while delivering up to 2.9x lower real-time factor and 2.7x higher throughput for text-to-speech workloads on Qwen3-Omni. M* also outperforms the V-JEPA 2-AC rollout baseline for robotic planning by up to 12.5x. Thus, our work paves the road towards more efficient serving of complex models with minimal developer effort.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

AdaTKG: Adaptive Memory for Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning

arXiv:2605.07121v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Temporal knowledge graphs (TKGs) represent time-stamped relational facts and support a wide range of reasoning tasks over evolving events. However, existing methods produce entity representations that are static at the entity level, in that each representation is a function of learned parameters only and retains no trace of the interactions in which the entity has participated. In this paper, we depart from this static view and propose that each entity be modeled as an adaptive process whose representation is refined every time the entity participates in a fact. To this end, we propose AdaTKG, which maintains a per-entity memory that is updated with every observed interaction, with the memory accumulating online and predictions improving as more interactions arrive. Specifically, we instantiate the memory update as a learnable exponential moving average governed by a single shared scalar instead of using learnable parameters for each entity, enabling AdaTKG to handle entities unseen during training. Extensive experiments confirm consistent gains over TKG baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of adaptive memory. Code is available at: https://github.com/seunghan96/AdaTKG

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

ReFoCUS: Reinforcement-guided Frame Optimization for Contextual Understanding

Recent progress in Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs) has enabled effective vision-language reasoning, yet the ability to video understanding remains constrained by suboptimal frame selection strategies, albeit with the rapid development of video-specialized LMMs. Prior works attempted to solve this with static heuristics or external retrieval modules to feed frame-level information, but these approaches often fail to capture visual cues grounded to the given user queries conflating raw visual dynamics with true semantic relevance. In this paper, we introduce ReFoCUS (Reinforcement-guided Frame Optimization for Contextual UnderStanding), the first framework to integrate online policy-gradient reinforcement learning into frame-level optimization for video-LLMs. ReFoCUS aims to learn a frame selection policy, leveraging reward signals derived from reference models to capture their underlying scoring behavior over frame combinations that best support temporally grounded responses. To efficiently explore the large combinatorial frame space, we employ an autoregressive and query-conditional selection architecture that ensures contextual consistency while reducing complexity. Our policy learning removes the need for explicit frame-level supervision, as it implicitly discovers optimal and semantically consistent frame compositions. ReFoCUS consistently improves reasoning accuracy across multiple video QA benchmarks, demonstrating the advantage of aligning frame selection with model-internal utility.

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

When Rules Learn: A Self-Evolving Agent for Legal Case Retrieval

arXiv:2606.17220v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Legal case retrieval remains challenging due to the complexity of legal language and the need for precise lexical alignment between queries and relevant cases. Although dense retrieval models have achieved notable progress, empirical studies show that BM25 continues to serve as a strong baseline in this domain. It motivates us to propose a self-evolving framework for rule-driven query rewriting that enhances BM25 without any parameter training. The framework equips an LLM-based agent with an automatic evaluation environment, enabling it to iteratively create rewriting rules, plan validation experiments over rule combinations, and eliminate ineffective rules based on historical feedbacks. We evaluate our method on the Chinese legal case retrieval benchmark LeCaRD-v2. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms non-evolutionary baselines, including human-designed rules and greedy rule selection, particularly when powered by a highcapacity core LLM. We also conduct detailed analyses to investigate the mechanisms underlying self-evolution. Our findings reveal that LLM's capabilities to leverage previous experimental results and its intrinsic knowledge of rule elimination play critical roles in refining the rule set via self-evolution.

16.
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.

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

PoseGAM: Robust Unseen Object Pose Estimation via Geometry-Aware Multi-View Reasoning

6D object pose estimation, which predicts the transformation of an object relative to the camera, remains challenging for unseen objects. Existing approaches typically rely on explicitly constructing feature correspondences between the query image and either the object model or template images. In this work, we propose PoseGAM, a geometry-aware multi-view framework that directly predicts object pose from a query image and multiple template images, eliminating the need for explicit matching. Built upon recent multi-view-based foundation model architectures, the method integrates object geometry information through two complementary mechanisms: explicit point-based geometry and learned features from geometry representation networks. In addition, we construct a large-scale synthetic dataset containing more than 190k objects under diverse environmental conditions to enhance robustness and generalization. Extensive evaluations across multiple benchmarks demonstrate our state-of-the-art performance, yielding an average AR improvement of 5.1% over prior methods and achieving up to 17.6% gains on individual datasets, indicating strong generalization to unseen objects. Project page: https://windvchen.github.io/PoseGAM/ .

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

A Judge-Aware Ranking Framework for Evaluating Large Language Models without Ground Truth

arXiv:2601.21817v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Evaluating large language models (LLMs) on open-ended tasks without ground-truth labels is increasingly done via the LLM-as-a-judge paradigm. A critical but under-modeled issue is that judge LLMs differ substantially in reliability; treating all judges equally can yield biased leaderboards and misleading uncertainty estimates. More data can make evaluation more confidently wrong under misspecified aggregation. We propose a judge-aware ranking framework that extends the Bradley-Terry-Luce model by introducing judge-specific discrimination parameters, jointly estimating latent model quality and judge reliability from pairwise comparisons without reference labels. We establish identifiability up to natural normalizations and prove consistency and asymptotic normality of the maximum likelihood estimator, enabling confidence intervals for score differences and rank comparisons. Across multiple public benchmarks and a newly collected dataset, our method improves agreement with human preferences, achieves higher data efficiency than unweighted baselines, and produces calibrated uncertainty quantification for LLM rankings.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

JourneyFormer: Encoding Airbnb Guest Journey with Sequence Modeling

arXiv:2606.19108v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sequence modeling has become increasingly popular in recommendation and ranking algorithms, owing to its capacity to model users' historical behaviors and infer user intentions. Despite its theoretical simplicity, the practical deployment of a sequence model in production is non-trivial due to complexity of the sequence and sparse labels. For example, in Airbnb, guest sequences are often long, exploratory and complex, and we focus on booking labels, which are sparse. As such, we are often required to make various design decisions regarding data and modeling to strike a balance between effectiveness and scalability. This work delved into these production challenges and deployed JourneyFormer, a sequence modeling solution for search ranking at Airbnb. We detail crucial design considerations, covering aspects such as guest event selection, ID embeddings, model architecture, and label attribution. Additionally, we describe several tailored strategies to accelerate model training and inference. JourneyFormer has been successfully deployed within Airbnb's production, where its effectiveness and impact have been evidenced not only by improved offline ranking metrics but also by significant gains in key business metrics through online A/B testing across 2 production surfaces.

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

SpikeTAD: Spiking Neural Networks for End-to-End Temporal Action Detection

Video understanding is a crucial part of computer vision, with numerous application scenarios. With the increasing popularity of mobile devices, an increasing number of efforts are trying to deploy video understanding models on them. However, existing video understanding models are difficult to deploy due to their large size and prohibitive power consumption. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have shown bioplausibility and low power advantages over Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), especially on neuromorphic chips which are regarded as essential components of future mobile devices. However, excessively long conversion time-steps and severe performance degradation problems limit their application. To solve the problems above, we explore the application of SNNs on temporal action detection (TAD), which is an important task in video understanding, and propose the first SNN-based end-to-end TAD architecture coined as SpikeTAD. While maintaining extremely low power consumption, SpikeTAD achieves an average mAP of 67.2% in THUMOS14 and 37.42% in ActivityNet-1.3, demonstrating the feasibility of a low-power TAD model. Our code is available at https://github.com/MCG-NJU/SpikeTAD.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

On the Generalization Bounds of Symbolic Regression with Genetic Programming

arXiv:2604.17402v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Symbolic regression (SR) with genetic programming (GP) aims to discover interpretable mathematical expressions directly from data. Despite its strong empirical success, the theoretical understanding of why GP-based SR generalizes beyond the training data remains limited. In this work, we provide a learning-theoretic analysis of SR models represented as expression trees. We derive a generalization bound for GP-style SR under constraints on tree size, depth, and learnable constants. Our result decomposes the generalization gap into two interpretable components: a structure-selection term, reflecting the combinatorial complexity of choosing an expression-tree structure, and a constant-fitting term, capturing the complexity of optimizing numerical constants within a fixed structure. This decomposition provides a theoretical perspective on several widely used practices in GP, including parsimony pressure, depth limits, numerically stable operators, and interval arithmetic. In particular, our analysis shows how structural restrictions reduce hypothesis-class growth while stability mechanisms control the sensitivity of predictions to parameter perturbations. By linking these practical design choices to explicit complexity terms in the generalization bound, our work offers a principled explanation for commonly observed empirical behaviors in GP-based SR and contributes towards a more rigorous understanding of its generalization properties.

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

Transformer Geometry Observatory TGO-I: Spectral Geometry Observatory

Despite the widespread adoption of Vision Transformers (ViTs) and their success across numerous computer vision applications, the fundamental understanding of their dimensional and representational geometry remains relatively underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce Transformer Geometry Observatory (TGO), a systematic framework of experiments and analysis pipelines designed to investigate the representational geometry and dynamics of Vision Transformers. TGO-I, the first installment of the framework, focuses on the spectral geometry of ViT representations. Using a ViT-Small/16 model trained on ImageNet-100, we analyze Effective Rank, Stable Rank, Participation Ratio, Spectral Entropy, Spectral Flatness, Spectral Anisotropy, covariance structure, eigenspectra, and singular value spectra throughout training. Our results reveal a consistent increase in dimensional utilization, accompanied by decreasing anisotropy, increasing spectral entropy, increasing participation ratio, and progressively flatter eigenspectra. Contrary to the common intuition that training should concentrate information into a small number of dominant directions, we observe a progressive redistribution of variance across representational dimensions. This phenomenon is particularly pronounced in the final CLS token representation, which exhibits the highest effective dimensionality and lowest anisotropy within the network.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Branch-and-Browse: Efficient and Controllable Web Exploration with Tree-Structured Reasoning and Action Memory

Autonomous web agents powered by large language models (LLMs) show strong potential for performing goal-oriented tasks such as information retrieval, report generation, and online transactions. These agents mark a key step toward practical embodied reasoning in open web environments. However, existing approaches remain limited in reasoning depth and efficiency: vanilla linear methods fail at multi-step reasoning and lack effective backtracking, while other search strategies are coarse-grained and computationally costly. We introduce Branch-and-Browse, a fine-grained web agent framework that unifies structured reasoning-acting, contextual memory, and efficient execution. It (i) employs explicit subtask management with tree-structured exploration for controllable multi-branch reasoning, (ii) bootstraps exploration through efficient web state replay with background reasoning, and (iii) leverages a page action memory to share explored actions within and across sessions. On the WebArena benchmark, Branch-and-Browse achieves a task success rate of 35.8\% and reduces execution time by up to 40.4\% relative to state-of-the-art methods. These results demonstrate that Branch-and-Browse is a reliable and efficient framework for LLM-based web agents.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

From Tokens to Policy: Causal and Interpretable Heterogeneous Treatment Effects Identification

arXiv:2606.17010v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Heterogeneous Treatment Effect (HTE) identification is crucial to explain the impact of an intervention and optimize our policies accordingly. Existing approaches trade expressivity for interpretability, but, if some active heterogeneity drivers are unmeasured, methods at both ends of this spectrum allow for spurious HTE characterization with no causal reading. In this work, we focus on controlled experiments and argue that an oracle HTE causal characterization via the latent interactors is now within reach, thanks to (i) more extensive pre-treatment measurements, i.e., multi-modal and multi-view, and (ii) scalable representations with minimal human supervision. We then re-frame HTE identification as a Markov-blanket discovery problem on a sufficient and aligned pre-treatment representation, and introduce Neural EXposure Interaction Search (NEXIS), an iterative procedure with provable and empirically validated consistent selection. We deploy NEXIS on two anti-poverty programs in Africa, augmenting each with satellite imagery capturing previously unmeasured environmental effect modifiers, leading to novel, interpretable and prescriptive guidelines to optimize the programs' next iterations.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

A Risk Decomposition Framework for Pre-Hoc Fine-Tuning Prediction

arXiv:2606.17649v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The high cost of fine-tuning LLMs poses a significant economic barrier; pre-hoc performance prediction offers a critical solution to substantially reduce this expense. However, the theoretical limits of pre-hoc performance prediction remain unexplored. We formulate it as a stochastic estimation problem under information constraints, decomposing prediction risk into two components: an intrinsic limit (static data-model compatibility) and a reducible optimization variance. We prove that optimization variance admits a necessary lower bound on its decay rate, implying fundamental constraints on how quickly uncertainty dissipates, regardless of the predictor used. Based on these dynamics, we derive a budget-optimal probing principle and introduce a predictability phase diagram that organizes tasks into three distinct regimes: Static-Sufficient, Dynamic-Critical, and Noise-Dominant. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks validate these theoretical regimes and demonstrate the efficiency of our probing strategy.