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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Too long; didn't solve

arXiv:2604.07593v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Mathematical benchmarks consisting of a range of mathematics problems are widely used to evaluate the reasoning abilities of large language models, yet little is known about how their structural properties influence model behaviour. In this work, we investigate two structural length variables, prompt length and solution length, and analyse how they relate to model performance on a newly constructed adversarial dataset of expert-authored mathematics problems. We find that both prompt and solution lengths correlate positively with increased model failure across models. We also include a secondary, exploratory analysis of cross-model disagreement. Under a difficulty-adjusted normalised analysis, both variables retain weak negative associations with realised model separation, slightly stronger for prompt length. Overall, our main robust finding is that structural length is linked to empirical difficulty in this dataset.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

An Empirical Study of Automating Agent Evaluation

Agent evaluation requires assessing complex multi-step behaviors involving tool use and intermediate reasoning, making it costly and expertise-intensive. A natural question arises: can frontier coding assistants reliably automate this evaluation process? Our study shows that simply prompting coding assistants is insufficient for this task. Without domain-specific evaluation knowledge, frontier coding assistants achieve only a 30% execution success rate and produce over-engineered evaluations averaging 12+ metrics per agent, indicating that strong coding ability does not automatically translate to reliable agent evaluation. We introduce EvalAgent, an AI assistant that automates the end-to-end agent evaluation pipeline. EvalAgent encodes evaluation domain expertise as evaluation skills (procedural instructions, reusable code and templates, and dynamically retrieved API documentation) that compose into a trace-based pipeline producing complete evaluation artifacts including metrics, executable code, and reports. To systematically assess generated evaluations, we introduce a meta-evaluation framework alongside AgentEvalBench, a benchmark comprising 20 agents, each paired with evaluation requirements and test scenarios. We further propose the Eval@1 metric to measure whether generated evaluation code both executes and yields meaningful results on the first run. Our experiments show that EvalAgent produces focused evaluations, improving Eval@1 from 17.5% to 65%, and achieving 79.5% human expert preference over baseline approaches. Further ablation studies show that evaluation skills are critical for handling complex evaluation: removing them causes Eval@1 to drop significantly from 65% to 30%.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Stop When Further Reasoning Won't Help: Attention-State Adaptive Generation in Reasoning Models

By incorporating test-time compute scaling, large reasoning models (LRMs) can solve complex problems through explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning processes. However, they often suffer from overthinking, resulting in redundant token outputs and degraded accuracy. Current methods to mitigate this issue remain limited: training-based approaches require substantial computational resources, while training-free methods rely on well-crafted prompts or unreliable confidence signals. In this work, we investigate early stopping from the perspective of attention distributions and propose a simple method, ASAG, which infers the model's reasoning state and adaptively adjusts the generation strategy. The proposed framework is training-free and plug-and-play, enabling seamless integration into existing LRMs. Extensive experiments on nine benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements across mainstream LRMs with varying parameter scales, including the DeepSeek-R1-Distill and Qwen3 series. Specifically, ASAG improves average accuracy by 3.2% while reducing the number of generated tokens by nearly 40% across all reasoning tasks on Qwen3-8B.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Toward 360-Degree Indoor Panorama Editing via Tuning-Free Diffusion Model with Refocusing Cross-Attention

Zero-shot text-guided diffusion has significantly advanced image editing; however, its practical usability remains constrained by three persistent challenges: prompt brittleness that requires meticulous prompt engineering, spillover edits that unintentionally affect non-target regions, and failures on small or cluttered objects caused by limited fine-grained supervision in training data. We propose FocusDiff (Target-Aware Refocusing for Tuning-Free Diffusion Editing), a tuning-free framework for precise and region-specific image manipulation based on refocusing cross-attention. Given a target region obtained through automated segmentation or manual selection, FocusDiff applies selective blurring to non-edit areas to guide attention toward the masked region while accurately transferring the object's identity, structure, and appearance to the edited output. Integrated context-preserving modules further ensure background fidelity and global coherence, enabling accurate edits from simple text prompts in a single pass. We also extend FocusDiff to 360-degree indoor panorama editing and demonstrate its effectiveness within virtual reality environments. Extensive experiments on our localized editing benchmark LIMB, comprising 30 multi-object images and 100 annotated examples including challenging small-object cases, show that FocusDiff outperforms existing zero-shot editors in text-image alignment and background preservation, achieving superior precision, photorealism, and usability. The project page is available at https://vdkhoi20.github.io/FocusDiff.

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

Phantoms and Disclosures: a Causal Framework for Auditing Synthetic Data

arXiv:2606.16952v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid adoption of generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) has spurred interest in synthetic data as a privacy-preserving alternative to sensitive real-world datasets. However, generating high-utility synthetic data often carries the risk of memorizing and regurgitating private information from the training corpus. In this work, we present a customizable empirical auditing framework designed to detect and explain such data disclosures. Our framework introduces a mechanism to distinguish between "true disclosures"-where the system directly reproduces a user's information-and "phantom disclosures''-where the system incidentally generates a user's data. By partitioning input data into training and holdout sets and applying rigorous statistical hypothesis testing, we determine if observed disclosures are consistent with strict privacy baselines, such as zero-learning or specific Differential Privacy (DP) bounds. Crucially, this approach requires no model access, no canary insertion, and no reference model training -only the synthetic output and a held-out control set. We demonstrate that this framework effectively functions as a membership inference attack, providing empirical lower bounds on privacy leakage that are tighter than prior data-based auditing methods. Our approach is model-agnostic, applies to any synthetic data generation mechanism, and requires orders of magnitude fewer computational resources than shadow-model or canary-based alternatives.

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

Testing Catability and Coherent Superposition of $2\mathcal{D}$ Graphene Quantum system

arXiv:2605.10967v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We develop a theoretical framework for describing superposed coherent states in graphene quantum systems using the concept of catability as a phase-sensitive metric functional measure. In this case, the formalism quantifies interference stability and coherence structure via phase-dependent contributions of quantum superposition states. Catability is defined as a functional measure sensitive to relative phase variations within coherent state combinations, serving as a diagnostic tool for quantum interference effects in graphene-based systems. Also, the formulation is extended using Lie algebra techniques, where the underlying symmetry structure of graphene quantum states is represented through operator algebras governing state transformations in quantum space. In this context, to describe nonlocal propagation and phase-resolved dynamics, a Green function approach is incorporated, enabling systematic treatment of quantum correlations in a spatially extended structures framework. A unified framework is constructed by combining Lie algebraic symmetry analysis with Green function propagation theory, yielding a consistent description of phase-sensitive catability in complex graphene quantum configurations within the framework approach. Results provide a structured route for testing coherence, interference stability, and quantum state control in low-dimensional quantum materials systems.

07.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-20

Seed variation impacts clustering stability in Single-Cell RNA-Seq and can be mitigated by StAbility-BasEd-Reassignment (SABER)

Single-cell RNA-seq clustering is commonly treated as reproducible once a random seed is fixed, yet the choice of seed itself may alter cell assignments and downstream interpretation. We systematically quantified seed-induced clustering variability by running Louvain and Leiden clustering across 100 seeds in Seurat and Scanpy on 28 single-cell RNA-seq datasets from the Human Cell Atlas and IMMUcan. Using Element-Centric Consistency, we found that seed choice affected a substantial fraction of cells, with Scanpy showing more unstable assignments than Seurat on average, 40.46% versus 26.78% unstable cells, respectively. This increased stability came at a marked computational cost: Seurat required approximately 19-fold higher median memory than Scanpy. Seed-dependent clustering variability also propagated to cell-type annotation, particularly among transcriptionally related populations including macrophage/monocyte, endothelial/epithelial and T/NK cell states. To mitigate this instability, we developed StAbility-BasEd Reassignment (SABER), a Scanpy-based framework that identifies seed-sensitive cells across repeated clusterings and reassigns them to stable cluster cores using cosine similarity. SABER improved clustering quality while preserving annotation concordance and reduced median memory usage 3.5-fold compared with Seurat-Louvain. Our results identify seed choice as an underappreciated source of variability in single-cell analysis and provide a scalable strategy to improve clustering robustness.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

EKF-Based Depth Camera and Deep Learning Fusion for UAV-Person Distance Estimation and Following in SAR Operations

arXiv:2602.20958v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-based Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) frameworks aid human search tasks by detecting and recognizing specific individuals, then tracking and following them while maintaining a safe distance. A key safety requirement for UAV following is the accurate estimation of the distance between camera and target object under real-world conditions, achieved by fusing multiple image modalities. As part of the system for automatic people detection and face recognition using deep learning, in this paper we present the fusion of depth camera measurements and monocular camera-to-body distance estimation for robust tracking and following. Deep learning based filtering of depth camera data and estimation of camera-to-body distance from a monocular camera are achieved with YOLO-pose, enabling real-time fusion of depth information using the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) algorithm. The proposed subsystem, designed for use in drones, estimates and measures the distance between the depth camera and the human body keypoints, to maintain the safe distance between the drone and the human target. Our system provides an accurate estimated distance, which has been validated against motion capture ground truth data. The system has been tested in real time indoors, where it reduces the average errors, RMSE and standard deviations of distance estimation up to 15,3% in three tested scenarios. Based on the test results, the EKF fusion-based approach increases the depth detection range by reducing the errors outside the optimal depth camera working range. It also shows improved robustness and precision in challenging conditions, such as reflections and poor visibility, making it suitable for SAR.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

ScholarSum: Student-Teacher Abstractive Summarization via Knowledge Graph Reasoning and Reflective Refinement

Abstractive summarization plays a crucial role in enabling efficient understanding of scientific literature, yet it inherently demands both linguistic fluency and factual faithfulness. Existing approaches often fail to reconcile these two requirements. Extractive methods rely on rigid sentence splicing that disrupts macro-level logical coherence, while large language model (LLM)-based generative approaches, despite mastering linguistic fluency, exhibit limited factual consistency. In this work, we propose ScholarSum, a hierarchical reflective graph-based framework that emulates a student-teacher writing process for fluent and faithful scientific summarization. ScholarSum first organizes the document into a hierarchical knowledge graph by segmenting it into semantically coherent units, whose multi-layered community structure captures global logic and macro-level themes. Guided by this global structure, the student generates an initial draft, which is subsequently refined through fine-grained evidence retrieval. To ensure factual consistency, a teacher-like reviewer then iteratively examines the draft, identifies unsupported content, and prompts targeted re-retrieval and rewriting until the summary meets rigorous quality standards. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ScholarSum significantly outperforms previous baselines in terms of both completeness and faithfulness. Our code is available at https://github.com/Xiaoyu-Tao/ScholarSum.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Pixels to Proofs: Probabilistically-Safe Latent World Model Control via Parallel Conformal Robust MPC

We present SLS^2, a framework for safe feedback motion planning from pixels using robust model predictive control (MPC) in learned latent world models. Our approach trains an action-conditioned joint-embedding world model with compact Markovian latent states, enabling efficient gradient-based trajectory optimization through learned latent dynamics. To enforce safety for the true system despite imperfect latent predictions, we inform a GPU-accelerated system level synthesis (SLS) robust MPC scheme with conformal prediction to obtain calibrated latent error bounds and robust latent-space constraint sets. We further learn and conformalize a latent constraint checker, allowing the SLS planner to impose probabilistic safety constraints during closed-loop execution. We evaluate our method on vision-based control tasks, where it improves both goal-reaching performance and safety over latent world-model and safe-planning baselines.

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

PRISMR: Overcoming Parse Collapse in Multimodal Listwise Ranking via Parameterized Representation Internalization

arXiv:2606.12942v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative listwise ranking with Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) aims to capture global list context in a single forward pass, but its effectiveness degrades in long-context multimodal scenarios. We identify a recurring failure mode, parse collapse, where the autoregressive decoder produces fluent yet incomplete rankings by silently omitting candidates and terminating early. This failure stems from limited context utilization rather than simple formatting mistakes, making prompt engineering and constrained decoding insufficient. We propose PRISMR (Parameterized Representation Internalization for Semantic Multimodal Ranking), a framework that replaces transient in-context list processing with parametric structural conditioning. PRISMR uses a lightweight hypernetwork to encode multimodal candidates in parallel and generate item-specific LoRA weights, which are synthesized into an instance-specific adapter for a LMM. This paradigm enables more robust internalization of list structure while preserving the base model. We further introduce a large-scale multimodal review-ranking benchmark for evaluation. Experiments demonstrate that PRISMR substantially reduces parse collapse, improves listwise ranking performance, and transfers effectively across domains and instruction-tuned backbones.

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

Evaluating and Preserving Lexical Stress in English-to-Chinese Speech-to-Speech Translation

Speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) systems have achieved impressive progress in semantic accuracy and speech naturalness. However, the cross-lingual transfer of lexical stress, a vital cue for emphasis and speaker intent, remains heavily underexplored, compounded by a lack of reliable automatic evaluation metrics for tonal languages like Chinese. We investigate English-to-Chinese S2ST stress transfer by constructing a stress-annotated Chinese dataset and an XLS-R-based Mandarin stress detector. Integrating this with the English EmphAssess system, we propose a novel objective metric for cross-lingual stress evaluation. Furthermore, we fine-tune CosyVoice3 to build a stress-aware S2ST system. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed S2ST architecture significantly outperforms existing systems in stress translation capability while maintaining competitive translation quality. Furthermore, our evaluation metric exhibits a strong correlation with human subjective judgments.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Closed-Loop Triplet Synergistic Generation for Long-Form Video

Multi-shot long-form video generation remains challenging due to identity drift and compounding inconsistencies across shots. While storyboard-driven pipelines improve controllability, they are often executed in a feed-forward manner, with limited mechanisms to incorporate generated visual evidence back into subsequent conditioning. We propose CoTriSyGen, an agentic framework that formulates multi-shot long video generation as a closed-loop visual-text-memory synergy process, where planned intent, persistent memory, and generated visuals are jointly leveraged for iterative correction and long-range coherence. A vision-language-model-based analyzer reasons over this triplet and produces updates to both prompts and memory along two pathways: (i) intra-shot refinement, which triggers targeted regeneration when semantic or compositional violations are detected and refines image-to-video prompt for coherent motions; and (ii) inter-shot refinement, which rewrites subsequent-shot prompts to propagate newly manifested entities or attributes and improve prompt quality (e.g., compositional grounding and cinematic fluency) based on generated evidence. The loop is grounded in an entity-centric memory modeled as a mutable visual state that evolves as the story progresses, which is continuously updated by both the generator and the analyzer by adding new and evolved entities to reflect appearance changes, accumulated multi-view evidence, and multi-entity compositions. Experiments on our curated StoryBench benchmark demonstrate substantial improvements in cross-shot consistency, prompt adherence, and cinematic continuity over representative methods.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Cardiac positronium lifetime in human PET: a reproducible right-left ventricular contrast that is not explained by blood oxygenation

Background. Ortho-positronium (o-Ps) lifetime, now measurable in vivo on long-axial-field-of-view (LAFOV) PET/CT, has been proposed as a biomarker of tissue oxygenation and hypoxia. Because o-Ps lifetime is dominated by tissue free-volume structure while the oxygen- specific contribution is small, whether an in-vivo lifetime contrast reflects oxygenation rather than anatomy is an open, identifiability-limited question. Aim. To test the oxygenation hypothesis directly using the heart's natural arterial/venous oxygenation contrast, with a built-in anatomical control. Methods. We re-analysed a public [82Rb]Cl human cardiac LAFOV PET/CT dataset (5.30 x 10^8 evaluated three-photon events). Per-compartment o-Ps lifetimes were extracted with a background-plus-two-component exponentially-modified-Gaussian (EMG) model. The list-mode to image mapping and right/left ventricle (RV/LV) identity were established lifetime-free (the mapping reproduces the provider's reconstructed image at block-correlation 0.998 and wins a joint multi-organ alignment panel). We applied a confound battery: registration stress test, blood-core vs wall, lung-air and wall-myocardium partial-volume, tissue density; and a structure/position-matched control (pulmonary artery, deoxygenated, vs aorta, oxygenated). An isotope-matched 82Rb uniform-quartz reference bounded the instrument's positional behaviour. All results were produced by two independent analysis pipelines. Results. RV o-Ps lifetime exceeded LV by delta tau = +0.304 ns (RV 1.700 +/- 0.172, LV 1.396 +/- 0.130 ns; about 1.4 sigma), in the oxygen-expected direction; the contrast was stable across +/-16 mm registration perturbation (sign preserved in 100% of 342 shifts) and resided in the blood core, not the wall. However, the matched-vessel control was null: pulmonary artery minus aorta = -0.011 +/- 0.344 ns. Lung-air and wall-myocardium partial-volume were disfavoured, and the effect fell within the isotope-matched 82Rb instrumental positional envelope (about 0.1-0.35 ns over 40 mm in uniform material). Conclusion. On this single subject, the cardiac o-Ps lifetime contrast does not provide a clean readout of blood oxygenation: an oxygenation effect of the observed (about 0.3 ns) magnitude is ruled out by the matched control, while a small physiological effect cannot be excluded. We provide a reusable confound-control battery for evaluating future in-vivo o-Ps oxygenation claims. Multi-subject replication with anatomy decoupled from oxygenation is required.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

ARB4WM: An Adversarial Robustness Benchmark for World Models in Continuous Control

arXiv:2606.16605v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World models are widely used in robotic and agentic engineering control systems due to their ability to learn latent dynamics for planning and decision-making. As these systems are increasingly deployed in safety-critical settings, understanding their robustness under adversarial conditions has become essential. However, existing evaluations lack a unified benchmark for testing adversarial threats across the policy, value, and latent-dynamics levels of world-model agents. To fill this gap, we present ARB4WM, a unified evaluation framework for pre-deployment robustness and risk assessment of world-model agents under visual perturbations. ARB4WM defines five white-box loss objectives across these three levels and studies their effects when combined with single-step or multi-step perturbation strategies and temporal attack modes, including full-frame, half-sequence, and sparse-frame exposure. Specifically, we evaluate four Dreamer-style agents across 20 tasks from MetaWorld and the DeepMind Control Suite under different loss objectives, perturbation strategies, and temporal attack modes. Results show that attacks targeting value estimation, latent representations, and RSSM dynamics can be as damaging as direct policy disruption, and that early or frequent perturbations are especially harmful, while input-level defenses provide limited recovery under adaptive attacks. These findings suggest that safety, risk, and reliability assessment for world models should cover multiple component-oriented attack objectives and temporal exposure protocols rather than relying solely on action-space robustness. Source code is available at https://github.com/zaoanguai/ARB4WM.

16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Physics-IQ Verified

Video generative models ( VGMs) have become a new frontier that can be used not just for video generation but for a multitude of downstream tasks, including world modeling. To advance these tasks, a good video model must understand the physical reality of the world. Evaluating this understanding is an emerging field and has led to the Physics-IQ benchmark, which quantifies this explicitly by comparing model-generated videos to real-world videos of physical experiments. In this work, we present a systematic audit of the Physics-IQ benchmark, expose shortcomings and propose three solutions that sharpen how we can measure physical understanding of VGMs. Specifically, we improve prompt and ground-truth quality to reduce the influence of confounding factors and further introduce a sample-level scoring system that weights each sample and metric equally. Our resulting benchmark, Physics-IQ Verified, refines 57.6\% of all samples and improves over 34.8\% of prompts. In a comparison study using six image-to-video generative models, we observe moderate but meaningful ranking changes (Kendall's $\tau = 0.46$). We hope Physics-IQ Verified advances the community by providing a more reliable signal toward physically accurate VGMs. The code for the benchmark can be accessed at https://github.com/google-deepmind/physics-iq-benchmark

17.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22

CellTosg2Sequence: A Unified Text-Omics-Signaling-Graph Large Language Model for Single-Cell Analysis

bioRxivLaTeXUnicodeabstract — In single-cell (sc)-based scientific discovery, text-formatted biomedical prior knowledge and signaling graphs are essential for annotating and interpreting numeric sc-omics data and for generating novel testable hypotheses. A major limitation of existing single-cell large language models (scLLMs) is that they rely on numeric expression data with gene names as the only textual signal, while comprehensive biomedical priors – cellular localization, gene function, disease associations, and signaling interaction patterns – remain absent from the model input. We introduce CellTosg2Sequence, a textual-prior- and signaling-graph-augmented cell-omics-sentence language model. A lightweight heterogeneous graph encoder maps a curated 62,507-node biomedical knowledge graph (KG) into compact virtual tokens that are prepended to each cell sentence, allowing the language model to condition on biological structure with minimal sequence-length overhead. We train CellTosg2Sequence with a three-stage objective: Stage I anchors the KG channel under autoregressive language-model pretraining, leveraging Qwen2.5-32B's own language reasoning for rapid KG alignment; Stage II aligns labels via supervised fine-tuning with KG-anchored InfoNCE; Stage III applies Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with an ontology-hierarchy reward, enabling free-generation cell-type prediction that generalizes beyond the closed training vocabulary. Across multiple benchmarks and ablation experiments, CellTosg2Sequence outperforms strong baselines. All results are achieved with lightweight LoRA training and a single unified checkpoint.

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

AsFT: Anchoring Safety During LLM Fine-Tuning Within Narrow Safety Basin

arXiv:2506.08473v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) improves performance but introduces critical safety vulnerabilities: even minimal harmful data can severely compromise safety measures. We observe that perturbations orthogonal to the alignment direction - defined by weight differences between aligned (safe) and unaligned models - rapidly compromise model safety. In contrast, updates along the alignment direction largely preserve it, revealing the parameter space as a "narrow safety basin". To address this, we propose AsFT (Anchoring Safety in Fine-Tuning) to maintain safety by explicitly constraining update directions during fine-tuning. By penalizing updates orthogonal to the alignment direction, AsFT effectively constrains the model within the "narrow safety basin," thus preserving its inherent safety. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets and models show that AsFT reduces harmful behaviors by up to 7.60%, improves task performance by 3.44%, and consistently outperforms existing methods across multiple tasks.

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

Gaussian Spatial Priors for Anatomy-Aware Object Detection in Surgical Videos

Detecting anatomical structures in surgical video is essential for intraoperative safety frameworks such as the Critical View of Myopectineal Orifice (CVMPO) in inguinal hernia repair. While prominent structures like the Cooper's Ligament and Triangle of Doom are reliably detected by standard methods, smaller structures such as the epigastric vessels remain challenging due to their visual ambiguity and intermittent visibility. We observe that the spatial relationship between structures is anatomically constrained, and propose a Gaussian Spatial Prior (GSP) module that encodes this relationship as a compact, parametric bias injected into the self-attention of a DAB-DETR decoder. The prior is computed offline from training annotations as a small set of frozen Gaussian parameters and recomputed at each decoder layer using the iteratively refined reference points. On a dataset of inguinal hernia repair videos with 5-fold cross-validation, GSP improves dependent class detection by $+33.5\%$ ($AP_{50}$) over DAB-DETR and $+53.9\%$ over YOLOv26, while also improving anchor detection by $+6.0\%$. These gains are statistically significant across all folds ($p=0.012$, paired $t-$test).

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

Federated Causal Inference from Multi-Site Observational Data via Propensity Score Aggregation

arXiv:2505.17961v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Causal inference typically assumes centralized access to individual-level data. Yet, in practice, data are often decentralized across multiple sites, making centralization infeasible due to privacy, logistical, or legal constraints. We address this problem by estimating the Average Treatment Effect (ATE) from decentralized observational data via a Federated Learning (FL) approach, allowing inference through the exchange of aggregate statistics rather than individual-level data. We propose a novel method to estimate propensity scores via a federated weighted average of local scores using Membership Weights (MW), defined as probabilities of site membership conditional on covariates. MW can be flexibly estimated with parametric or non-parametric classification models using standard FL algorithms. The resulting propensity scores are used to construct Federated Inverse Propensity Weighting (Fed-IPW) and Augmented IPW (Fed-AIPW) estimators. In contrast to meta-analysis methods, which fail when any site violates positivity, our approach exploits heterogeneity in treatment assignment across sites to improve overlap. We show that Fed-IPW and Fed-AIPW perform well under site-level heterogeneity in sample sizes, treatment mechanisms, and covariate distributions. Theoretical analysis and experiments on simulated and real-world data demonstrate clear advantages over meta-analysis and related approaches.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Learning a Maximum Entropy Model for Visual Textures using Diffusion

Visual textures – spatially homogeneous image regions containing repeated elements (e.g. a field of grass, the bark of a tree) – are ubiquitous in visual scenes and provide important cues for recognizing and analyzing materials and objects. A number of existing texture models extract essential statistics from a single texture image, and can then generate high-quality samples that are visually similar to the original by matching these statistics. However, their statistics are either hand-designed or based on a network pretrained for another purpose (e.g., object recognition). Here, we develop the first principled method for unsupervised learning of a set of statistics that are used to constrain a maximum entropy probability model. We leverage methods developed for generative diffusion models to derive training and sampling procedures, and compare these to the traditional method of sampling via matching the statistics. Despite the compactness of our trained model (512 statistics), it generates texture images whose quality is as good as or better than the current state-of-the-art model (~177k statistics). A more direct comparison of the two models, obtained by synthesizing images that are indistinguishable for one model but maximally different for the other, reveals their relative strengths and weaknesses. Finally, we show that unlike previous statistical texture models, a straight trajectory in the representation space of our model generates homogeneous texture samples that interpolate smoothly between the features of the two end points.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

GeoWorld-VLM: Geometry from World Models for Vision-Language Models

Modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) achieve strong semantic recognition, yet remain brittle on elementary spatial relations such as left of, on, behind, and between. One cause of this failure arises before language reasoning begins: the visual pathway may compress or discard critical 3D structural cues during feature extraction, so the language model receives image representations that are already insufficient for reliable spatial judgment. We introduce GeoWorld-VLM, a VLM-side distillation framework that transfers geometric structure from frozen camera-conditioned video world models into VLMs. GeoWorld-VLM fine-tunes only the image encoder and multimodal projector, aligning post-projector image features with intermediate world-model representations while leaving the main backbone frozen. Given images, a prompt, and a sampled camera trajectory, the world-model teacher converts static visual input into a synthetic multi-view spatial signal. Training combines spatial answer supervision, teacher-student feature alignment, and a preservation anchor to the original VLM. Since the language model remains frozen, GeoWorld-VLM preserves the original model's linguistic capabilities while attributing spatial improvements to the enhanced visual pathway. To evaluate the effectiveness and generality of the proposed method, we apply GeoWorld-VLM to two distinct VLM architectures and observe consistent improvements across both backbones. GeoWorld-VLM improves performance by approximately 4 percent on both the What'sUp and VSR benchmarks, suggesting that world-model-guided visual alignment generalizes across model structures and spatial reasoning datasets.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Deep-Unfolded Coordination

arXiv:2606.19920v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Distributed optimization is a highly scalable and structurally transparent technique to solve multi-agent robotics problems; however, such methods often suffer from the need for highly-specialized, problem-specific hyperparameter tunings. In this work, we propose Deep Coordinator, a deep-unfolding framework that learns to dynamically adjust the hyperparameters of ADMM-DDP, a popular distributed solver for robotics tasks, at solve-time in response to optimizer performance. Our architecture consists of unrolling a fixed number of ADMM-DDP iterations into a neural network with learnable functions between layers mapping the optimizer state to the next hyperparameters. To the best of our knowledge, Deep Coordinator is the first deep-unfolding framework to adapt the penalty parameters of a non-convex optimizer at solve-time; we show that the mainstream supervised approach can yield degenerate solutions when training such models, and propose an unsupervised learning scheme. On simulations with fleets of cars and quadrotors, Deep Coordinator produces trajectories of comparable quality 6.18-9.44x faster than conventional solvers. Furthermore, Deep Coordinator retains its performance benefits when deployed to systems up to 8x larger than trained on.

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

FusionRS: A Large-Scale RGB-Infrared Remote Sensing Dataset for Dual-Modal Vision-Language Foundation Models

Remote sensing vision-language models have advanced Earth observation understanding, but most existing work remains centered on RGB imagery, leaving the complementary information in infrared data underexplored. Infrared images provide distinctive cues, including thermal intensity structures, object boundaries, and illumination-invariant scene features, which can enrich visual-language learning beyond conventional RGB observations. However, a large-scale RGB-infrared-text dataset for remote sensing vision-language modeling is still absent. To address this gap, we introduce FusionRS, the first large-scale RGB-infrared-text dataset designed for dual-modal vision-language learning in remote sensing. FusionRS is constructed by translating diverse public RGB remote sensing images into infrared-style counterparts, forming aligned RGB-IR image pairs. Each pair is associated with conventional scene captions and IR-aware captions that explicitly describe infrared-specific visual properties while preserving semantic content. Based on FusionRS, we train dual-modal vision-language foundation models for RGB-IR joint understanding. We first train CLIP-style models for RGB-IR-text alignment, and then fine-tune generative VLMs for dual-modal RGB-IR captioning. Experiments show that FusionRS improves RGB-IR alignment, infrared-to-text retrieval, and dual-modal captioning over RGB-only and non-IR-aware training settings. Ablation studies further verify that IR-aware captions are crucial for strengthening infrared-language alignment, highlighting the importance of modality-specific textual supervision for more scalable RGB-infrared remote sensing vision-language representation learning.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Convergence Rate Analysis of the AdamW-style Shampoo: Unifying One-Sided and Two-Sided Preconditioning

arXiv:2601.07326v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper studies AdamW-style Shampoo, an effective variant of the classical Shampoo that won the external tuning track of the AlgoPerf neural network training competition. Our analysis unifies one-sided and two-sided preconditioning. When the exponents of the two preconditioners sum to $1/2$, we establish the convergence rate $\frac{1}{K}\sum_{k=1}^KE\left[||\nabla f(X_k)||_*\right]\leq O(\frac{\sqrt{m+n}C}{K^{1/4}})$, where $K$ represents the number of iterations, $(m,n)$ denotes the dimensions of the matrix-valued parameters, and $C$ matches the constant appearing in the optimal convergence rate of SGD. Theoretically, the nuclear norm and Frobenius norm satisfy $||\nabla f(X)||_F\leq ||\nabla f(X)||_*\leq \sqrt{\min\{m,n\}}||\nabla f(X)||_F$, which suggests that our convergence rate is analogous to the optimal $\frac{1}{K}\sum_{k=1}^KE\left[||\nabla f(X_k)||_F\right]\leq O(\frac{C}{K^{1/4}})$ convergence rate of SGD in the ideal case where $||\nabla f(X)||_*= \Theta(\sqrt{\min\{m,n\}})||\nabla f(X)||_F$ and $m$ and $n$ are of comparable magnitude. Then, we extend our analysis to settings where the preconditioning exponents do not sum to 1/2, and establish convergence with an explicit but more involved rate.