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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

The Road to Artificial SuperIntelligence: A Comprehensive Survey of Superalignment

arXiv:2412.16468v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has sparked discussion on Artificial Superintelligence (ASI), a hypothetical AI system that surpasses human intelligence. Although ASI remains hypothetical and far beyond current AI capabilities, discussing its potential and exploring its feasibility and potential risks is critical for the development of future AI systems. The idea of superalignment originates from scalable oversight, which studies how to supervise increasingly capable AI systems when direct human supervision becomes insufficient. In this paper, we focus on the superalignment problem: "The process of supervising, controlling, and governing artificial superintelligence." We first review scalable oversight paradigms-Sandwiching, Self-Enhancement, and Weak-to-Strong Generalization – then analyze the limitations of current paradigms through the lens of possibility and impossibility, discuss key challenges, and propose pathways for the safe and continual improvement of future AI systems.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

RepWAM: World Action Modeling with Representation Visual-Action Tokenizers

This work presents RepWAM, a representation-centric world action model (WAM) built on representation visual-action tokenizers. Existing WAMs typically inherit reconstruction-oriented video tokenizers from pretrained video generation models. Although these tokenizers preserve visual fidelity, pixel reconstruction alone provides limited guidance for learning instruction-following dynamics that connect future prediction with robot control. To address this, we explore a semantic visual-action latent space for representation-centric world action modeling. Specifically, we train a representation visual-action tokenizer that maps visual inputs into aligned visual and latent action tokens. We then pretrain our WAM to jointly model future visual states and the latent actions that connect them under language instructions, followed by adaptation to real robot trajectories for closed-loop manipulation. Experiments on real-world manipulation tasks and simulation benchmarks show that RepWAM delivers strong performance across diverse manipulation settings, while ablations highlight the value of semantic visual-action tokenization over reconstruction-oriented alternatives. These results establish representation visual-action tokenization as a promising foundation for world action models and a step toward generalist robot policies. Code and weights will be available at https://github.com/wdrink/RepWAM.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

SketchKeyAnime: Reference-anchored Sparse Key-Sketch Animation Synthesis

Traditional animation production relies heavily on manual drawing and iterative refinement, particularly for key-pose design, in-betweening, and character coloring. While existing animation and video generation methods have made notable progress, they typically depend on RGB boundary frames, dense frame-wise conditions, or complete sketch sequences, limiting their applicability under low-cost input conditions. We present SketchKeyAnime, a video diffusion framework for generating structurally controllable, appearance-consistent, and temporally coherent animations from sparse key-sketch inputs. Given a single reference RGB image and a few temporally indexed key sketches, SketchKeyAnime introduces a dual-branch conditioning mechanism to encode local geometric constraints alongside semantic-temporal context. It leverages Sketch Cross Attention to fuse reference image and sketch conditions with learnable gating, and incorporates an Adaptive Weighted Loss to strengthen supervision on key-sketch frames and line-art regions. Experimental results on the Aesthetic subset of Sakuga-42M show that our approach consistently outperforms representative animation interpolation and sketch-guided generation baselines. Compared to the best-performing baseline, SketchKeyAnime reduces EDMD by 31.9\% and FVD by 9.5\%, demonstrating superior sketch fidelity and temporal coherence, while achieving the best overall performance across most quantitative metrics. These results validate the proposed framework and highlight its potential for low-cost, highly controllable animation creation.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Beyond Uniform Tokens: Adaptive Compression for Time Series Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have enabled time series (TS) analysis by jointly modeling numerical observations and textual context through a shared token interface. However, TS tokens and prompt tokens exhibit fundamentally different information structures, making uniform token processing inefficient. In this paper, we study token efficiency in TS language modeling from an asymmetric-token perspective. We show that TS tokens have highly uneven spectral contributions, where many tokens share redundant frequency patterns while a small subset preserves critical temporal evidence. We also observe that prompt-token influence attenuates with model depth, suggesting that full prompt retention across all layers is unnecessary. Based on these findings, we develop an adaptive token budgeting framework that compresses TS tokens via frequency-domain structure and progressively reduces prompt tokens across layers. Experiments across forecasting, classification, imputation, and anomaly detection demonstrate up to 7.68$\times$ inference acceleration and performance gains in 78\% of evaluated settings, showing the effectiveness of asymmetric token compression for scalable TS foundation models.

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

Beyond Third-Person Audits: Situated Interaction Auditing for User-Centered LLM Bias Research

Research on bias in large language models (LLMs) has predominantly focused on third-person audits, which study how models represent or evaluate demographic groups as external subjects. However, this paradigm overlooks a structural blind spot because the user is absent from the audit. In practice, LLMs are used in open-ended, personal interactions, during which the model implicitly represents the user and adjusts its responses accordingly. When identical requests yield different responses depending on who is asking, bias manifests not in how the model describes others but in how it treats its interlocutor. We propose Situated Interaction Auditing (SIA), a user-centered framework for studying how user profile signals – implicit sociodemographic markers, writing style, and stated identity – systematically shape LLM response quality, content, and tone. We demonstrate the framework through a case study that intersects gender and socioeconomic status signals across multiple task domains and outline a research agenda for SIA as a new mission for natural language processing.

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

CARE: Competence-Aware Reward Shaping for Adaptive Reasoning Length in Video-MLLMs

In multimodal video reasoning, reinforcement learning-based methods typically rely on simplistic and inflexible reasoning-length control strategies that fail to adapt to the model's evolving competence. This mismatch may suppress necessary exploration at early stages, while encouraging redundant reasoning and inefficient decoding once the model becomes more competent. In this paper, we propose CARE, a competence-aware reward shaping framework for adaptive reasoning length optimization in multimodal reasoning. Specifically, CARE maintains a smoothed competence estimate via an exponential moving average of pass rates, and uses it to route training into progressive stages that shift the reward preference from exploration-oriented long-form reasoning to efficiency-oriented concise reasoning. To avoid conflating verbosity with intrinsic task complexity, CARE further normalizes reasoning effort with batch-level statistics, and introduces a posterior amplifier to strengthen reward signals for unexpectedly strong performance on historically difficult samples. The proposed mechanism is seamlessly integrated into the GRPO training pipeline and incurs no additional inference-time overhead. Extensive experiments on multiple video reasoning and general video understanding benchmarks demonstrate that CARE consistently improves reasoning accuracy, stabilizes reinforcement learning, and significantly enhances token efficiency. Moreover, CARE exhibits a characteristic inverted-U trajectory of reasoning length during training, and yields shorter yet more informative reasoning traces at convergence, indicating effective adaptive allocation of reasoning budget. We provide the source code for our proposed CARE framework and experiments at https://github.com/1Pansy/Video-CARE.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Learning Urban Access Costs from Origin-Destination Flows via Inverse Optimal Transport

arXiv:2606.14157v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cities deliver basic services through mixed public-private facility networks, including schools, clinics, transit providers, and subsidized service points. In these systems, planners often observe where households go, but not the latent cost function through which they trade off factors such as distance, price, and institutional access. We study this urban problem through school choice in the Philippines, where the country's largest national education subsidy is intended to redirect learners from congested public schools to participating private schools. Treating school-to-school enrollment flows as an entropic optimal transport plan, we recover latent choice costs using two complementary inverse optimal transport models: an interpretable distance-banded model with a subsidy term, and a neural cost model trained through a differentiable Sinkhorn forward pass. Applied to 283{,}016 learner trips across 23{,}820 observed flows in the most populated region, the framework estimates a subsidy-equivalent distance, $\lambda^{(k)}$, interpreted as the kilometers of perceived travel cost offset by the subsidy. The case demonstrates how administrative origin-destination data can be transformed into interpretable planning metrics for accessibility-aware subsidy design, facility siting, and urban service allocation.

08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Tumour evolution as ground truth for cancer whole-genome sequencing

Cancer genomes are shaped by evolutionary processes that couple mutagenesis, clonal selection, chromosomal instability, spatial growth and treatment response into structured genomic patterns, yet current benchmarking strategies largely ignore this evolutionary dependency. Here, we present SCOUT, a large-scale synthetic whole-genome sequencing resource of over 200 samples, designed for systematic benchmarking of tumour genomic analysis and evolutionary inference under controlled evolutionary ground truth. Unlike conventional task-specific simulations, SCOUT models tumour evolution as a latent generative process that simultaneously shapes mutations, copy-number alterations, variant allele frequencies, mutational signatures and clonal architectures. SCOUT recapitulates key features of solid and haematological malignancies, including driver mutations, chromosomal instability, intratumour heterogeneity, spatial sampling and treatment-associated evolutionary dynamics in tumour and matched-normal longitudinal and multi-region sequencing designs. Using SCOUT, we benchmarked widely used methods for somatic variant detection, copy-number analysis, mutational signature inference and tumour evolutionary reconstruction. Across analytical tasks, performance deteriorated in low-purity, highly subclonal and structurally complex tumours, while spatial sampling bias and hypermutation generated spurious evolutionary signals that confounded tumour interpretation across multiple inference layers. Evolutionary simulations further distinguished lineage-restricted genetic bottlenecks from multi-lineage resistance dynamics associated with tumour plasticity. Tumour purity consistently exerted a stronger effect on inference accuracy than sequencing depth. Together, our results establish evolutionary ground truth as a prerequisite for reproducible benchmarking and biologically interpretable analysis of cancer whole-genome sequencing data.

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

Harness In-Context Operator Learning with Chain of Operators

arXiv:2606.12318v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural operators approximate mappings between function spaces, but often generalize poorly to other operators and usually require fine-tuning or retraining. In-Context Operator Networks (ICON) addresses this issue by prompting the model with numerical context so that the model learns specific operators from prompts and adapt to different operators without fine-tuning. However, ICON may still fail to generalize to out-of-distribution (OOD) operator tasks. Inpired by the success of harness engineering of Large Language models (LLMs), we introduce Chain of Operators (CHOP), a framework that harness a frozen ICON to OOD operator tasks without updating its parameters. Specifically, CHOP constructs a chain of operators consisting of explicit elementary transformations and the frozen ICON. Experiments on a scalar conservation law and a mean-field control problem show that CHOP reduces relative inference error over direct ICON evaluation, while each operator in the chain remains interpretable and in closed form. A chain constructed on one PDE family further generalizes to a different family, indicating shared mechanisms across harness systems.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Effective discrete-modulated continuous variable QKD under general attacks

arXiv:2606.20346v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continuous variable quantum key distribution via discrete modulations ensures information-theoretic security using standard telecom technologies, providing affordable and scalable quantum communications with simplified classical postprocessing. However, existing security proofs against general attacks often rely on restrictive assumptions, such as a bounded dimension for coherent states, or require impractically large block sizes. In this work, we develop a finite-size security analysis that removes these limitations while incorporating realistic experimental features. Our approach combines the dimension reduction technique, a security proof based on the marginal-constrained entropy accumulation, and a trusted detector model accounting for the receiver imperfections. We report positive key rates in the finite-size regime for relevant block sizes of the order of $10^8$. These results contribute to narrowing the gap between theoretical security proofs and practical implementations of discrete-modulated continuous variable quantum key distribution protocols.

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

Understanding Scam Trends and Rail Paths from Reddit Self-Disclosure Narratives

Online scam behavior is inherently multi-stage, and the lifecycle includes temporally ordered rails and events rather than isolated signals. Existing works analyze characteristics of scam types and rails, but they do not track scam trends across years. Moreover, the work on the relations between rails is hampered due to the lack of open-source datasets with annotations and coverage of different scam types. To address these gaps, we build a dataset to analyze the yearly trend of scam characteristics and rail paths using Reddit self-disclosure narratives from 2023 to 2025. We collect 21,304 posts from scam-related subreddits with at least one rail among identity, communication, platform, and payment for trend analysis by heuristic annotation. Then, we label 1,800 posts containing explicit or recoverable scam chains by an LLM-assisted method for scam path analysis. The method is evaluated with human annotation. Lastly, we run a topic model on the comments of the posts to analyze the community support behavior. The results reveal that scam processes are predominantly multi-rail. Across years, different scam types and rail components dominate. Different scam types vary systematically in path complexity. Reddit support behaviors have become more detailed over time. This work supports synthetic scam chain data simulation and AI-related scam risk assessment, though findings may not generalise to other platforms.

12.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-21

ReSeT: a taxonomy-aware reference genome selection tool

Motivation: Reference genome composition determines which taxa a profiling pipeline can detect and distinguish, and becomes of critical importance for high-resolution profiling where taxonomic boundaries begin to blur. Existing selection tools optimize within-taxon representativeness but disregard discrimination across taxa, leaving open whether explicitly accounting for inter-taxon discrimination during selection improves profiling. Results: Here we present ReSeT, a facility-location-based reference genome selection tool that operates on arbitrary pairwise distance matrices, extended with a tunable inter-taxon discrimination term and per-genome selection cost, and solved by local search. We benchmark ReSeT against established selection methods on three viral datasets spanning varying degrees of taxonomic ambiguity. On the high-ambiguity SARS-CoV-2 datasets, appropriately tuned ReSeT selections matched or exceeded the strongest alternatives in terms of profiling accuracy, whereas on the low ambiguity IAV dataset VSEARCH remained dominant. Interestingly, we find that the novel inter-taxon discrimination term contributed weakly, indicating that ReSeT's facility-location formulation and selection cost drives ReSeT's performance. We further propose a novel taxonomic ambiguity index, computable from ReSeT's inputs, that summarizes the taxonomic ambiguity of reference genomes and aligns with where ReSeT improves over existing selection methods. Availability and implementation: ReSeT is implemented in Python ([≥]3.10) and is freely available under the MIT license. The source code is available on GitHub at https://github.com/JaspervB-tud/ReSeT and ReSeT can also be installed directly from the Python Package Index (PyPI) via pip install reset-bio.

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

Pano3D: Unified 3D Reconstruction and Panoptic Segmentation

Recent advances in 3D feedforward reconstruction neural networks have achieved remarkable success in dense reconstruction from images without any camera parameters. Yet, equipping these models with robust semantic understanding remains an open problem. Here we introduce an approach that performs 3D reconstruction and 3D panoptic segmentation in a unified framework. We build on existing 3D reconstruction models and augment them with a set-based mask decoder. The approach is jointly trained with a geometric and semantic loss, which are shown to be mutually beneficial. More precisely, the features are initialized from the geometric information and then finetuned to capture jointly geometry and semantics. We demonstrate the generality of our approach by successfully applying our framework both to online and all-to-all attention reconstruction backbones. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in 3D panoptic segmentation across ScanNet, ScanNet200, and ScanNet++ datasets. Ablation studies show that such joint training of a unified model equips 3D feedforward reconstruction neural networks with panoptic segmentation and yields mutually beneficial improvements.

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

Where Did It Go Wrong? Process-Level Evaluation of Web Agents with Semantic State Tracking

arXiv:2606.15673v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Web agents act through long interaction sequences, yet existing benchmarks evaluate only terminal success, discarding all process information and offering little guidance on improvement. In this work, we conduct a process-level analysis of web agents. We introduce WebStep, a benchmark of 1,800 task instances with controlled difficulty and automatic semantic state tracking. Each website exposes a deterministic semantic MDP alongside the GUI: the agent operates on the interface, while the environment records high-level states and transitions in the background, enabling fine-grained analysis without manual annotation. Based on the semantic trajectory, we first show that process metrics reveal differences invisible to outcome evaluation: three agents whose success rates cluster within 31-33% diverge in exploration reach versus execution accuracy. Then, decomposing by skill characterizes the nature of these differences, exposing opposite per-skill rankings hidden within the same website: e.g., on Housing, OpenAI CUA outperforms Qwen3.5 by 23.7% on commit actions yet underperforms it by 15.6% on filtering, pinpointing a concrete skill to improve even within a domain. Bifurcation analysis further localizes the decisive error that loses the task and shows that this error is agent-specific rather than shared. Finally, these differences widen as tasks grow harder: success rate is similar on easy tasks but separates sharply as exploration becomes more demanding. Our process-level analysis opens a new avenue in web agent evaluation, providing fine-grained and actionable insight into where and how each agent should be improved.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Instantaneous-Frequency EEG Microstate Dynamics Stratify Motor Subtypes in Parkinson's Disease

Parkinson's disease (PD) is clinically heterogeneous, yet objective electrophysiological markers of its postural-instability/gait-difficulty (PIGD) and tremor-dominant (TD) motor subtypes are lacking. We tested whether the temporal dynamics of instantaneous-frequency (IF) microstates in resting-state electroencephalography (EEG) distinguish these subtypes from each other and from healthy controls (HC). In a publicly available cohort (OpenNeuro ds007526) comprising 28 HC and 97 PD patients classified as PIGD (n=50) or TD (n=47), the spatial distribution of the IF was reduced by principal component analysis and modeled with a Gaussian hidden Markov model, yielding three recurrent microstates. Per-participant mean dwell time, occupancy, and state-transition probabilities were compared across the three groups and, within PD, correlated with clinical scores. We found that the dynamics of one microstate varied systematically across groups: its dwell time, occupancy, and self-transition probability increased monotonically from HC through TD to PIGD, while outgoing transitions decreased, so that the state became an increasingly persistent attractor. For dwell time, all three pairwise contrasts survived correction (HC versus PIGD, Hedges' g=1.06; HC versus TD, g=0.59; PIGD versus TD, g=0.40). None of the dynamic indices was associated with clinical severity, disease duration, or medication dose within PD. IF-microstate dynamics thus stratify the PD motor subtypes along a graded continuum without tracking continuous disease severity. The approach offers a candidate objective EEG marker for motor-subtype stratification, complementing spectral characterizations of PD.

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

VANDERER: Map-Free Exploration using Future-Aware and Visual-Curiosity-Guided Diffusion Policy

Mobile agents require efficient exploration strategies to map unseen environments and autonomously plan tasks. Traditional methods rely on generating occupancy maps and optimizing the sequence in which unexplored regions are visited. However, in sensor-constrained settings, such as those limited to monocular cameras, generating accurate occupancy maps is challenging. To address this, we propose VANDERER, an exploration framework that leverages a Visual Curiosity Module (VCM) to guide pre-trained diffusion policies using only monocular image data. This curiosity module predicts the outcomes of proposed actions via a navigation world model and evaluates them through a curiosity cost. The cost then guides the diffusion process toward generating actions that maximize exploration. Evaluated across diverse simulated environments, VANDERER consistently outperforms established baselines, exploring an average of 13.4% more area than NoMaD. Our results reveal a direct correlation between visual and geometric curiosity in outdoor environments, demonstrating that VANDERER can effectively leverage this relationship for efficient exploration using sensor-constrained agents.

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

Instruct-Particulate: Scaling Feed-Forward 3D Object Articulation with Kinematic Control

Reconstructing articulated 3D objects is important for animation, gaming, and robotic simulations. Recent neural networks can estimate the articulated structure of 3D objects, but their generalization remains limited by the scarcity of annotated data for this task. To address this gap, we introduce Instruct-Particulate, a model that takes a 3D mesh together with a target kinematic specification, including part descriptions, connectivity, joint types, and optional point prompts, and predicts the corresponding kinematic part segmentation and joint motion parameters. The kinematic specification disambiguates the task and allows the model to target annotations of different granularity, thereby making it possible to use more abundant heterogeneous training data. At test time, the kinematic specification can be obtained automatically from large-scale vision-language models, so the model can be applied to any input mesh. To train our model at scale, we construct a heterogeneous dataset of more than 150,000 articulated 3D objects, extending existing publicly available collections with data obtained by partially labelling other 3D models (monolithic or already decomposed into parts) with kinematic labels by means of vision-language models. Experiments show that our model generalizes better across categories and to AI-generated meshes, enabling articulated asset reconstruction from real-world images via image-to-3D models.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Quantum Computing Applications for Flight Trajectory Optimization

arXiv:2304.14445v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Major players in the global aerospace industry are shifting their focus toward achieving net carbon-neutral operations by 2050. A considerable portion of the overall carbon emission reduction is expected to come from new aircraft technologies, such as flight path optimization. In pursuing these sustainability objectives, we delve into the capacity of quantum computing to tackle computational challenges associated with flight path optimization, an essential operation within the aerospace engineering domain with important ecological and economic considerations. In recent years, the quantum computing field has made significant strides, paving the way for improved performance over classical algorithms. In order to effectively apply quantum algorithms in real-world scenarios, it is crucial to thoroughly examine and tackle the intrinsic overheads and constraints that exist in the present implementations of these algorithms. Our study delves into the application of quantum computers in flight path optimization problems and introduces a customizable modular framework designed to accommodate specific simulation requirements. We examine the running time of a hybrid quantum-classical algorithm across various quantum architectures and their simulations on CPUs and GPUs. A temporal comparison between the conventional classical algorithm and its quantum-improved counterpart indicates that achieving the theoretical speedup in practice may necessitate further innovation. We present our results from running the quantum algorithms on IBM hardware and discuss potential approaches to accelerate the incorporation of quantum algorithms within the problem domain.

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

CT-VDETR: Semi-supervised 3D Trauma Detection in Computed Tomography (CT) scans using Dense Vertex Relative Position Encoding

Accurate detection and localization of traumatic injuries in abdominal CT remain challenging because voxel-level annotations are limited and expensive to obtain. We present a label-efficient framework for 3D abdominal trauma detection that combines self-supervised pretraining with semi-supervised transformer-based detection. First, we use Masked Image Modeling (MIM) on 1098 CT volumes to pretrain a 3D U-Net encoder for anatomical representation learning. Next, we adapt V-DETR to dense volumetric CT through a feature adapter that converts the encoder feature grid into a compact token sequence for transformer decoding. The pretrained encoder is then integrated with V-DETR and 3D Vertex Relative Position Encoding (3D V-RPE) to improve the localization of irregularly shaped injuries. Finally, semi-supervised teacher-student consistency regularization leverages 2,000 additional unlabeled volumes during detector training. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first application of a 3D DETR-style detector to the RSNA abdominal trauma detection task. On this benchmark, the proposed method achieves 31.33% test mAP@0.50 using only 78 labeled training volumes, corresponding to a 1.53x improvement over supervised-only training. These results show that combining medical-domain pretraining with semi-supervised learning is an effective strategy for label-scarce 3D medical detection.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

When Do We Need LLMs? A Diagnostic for Language-Driven Bandits

arXiv:2604.05859v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study Contextual Multi-Armed Bandits (CMABs) for non-episodic decision-making problems where the context includes both textual and numerical information (e.g., recommendation systems, dynamic portfolio adjustments, offer selection; all frequent problems in finance). While Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to these settings, utilizing LLMs for reasoning at every decision step is computationally expensive, and uncertainty estimates are difficult to obtain. To address this, we introduce LLMP-UCB, a bandit algorithm that derives uncertainty estimates from LLMs via repeated inference. However, our experiments demonstrate that lightweight numerical bandits operating on text embeddings (dense or Matryoshka) match or exceed the accuracy of LLM-based solutions at a fraction of their cost. We further show that embedding dimensionality is a practical lever on the exploration-exploitation balance, enabling cost-performance tradeoffs without prompt complexity. Finally, to guide practitioners, we propose a geometric diagnostic based on the arms' embeddings to decide when to use LLM-driven reasoning versus a lightweight numerical bandit. Our results provide a principled deployment framework for cost-effective, uncertainty-aware decision systems with broad applicability across AI use cases.

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

Simulating Students' Java Programming Errors with Large Language Models

Understanding student errors in the programming is a cornerstone of programming education, yet obtaining a representative set of student errors for any newly designed task remains slow and costly, since authentic submissions only accumulate after extensive classroom deployment. This paper explores whether large language models (LLMs) can serve as scalable proxies for students by simulating realistic logical errors in code submissions. Using the CodeWorkout dataset of 74,000+ unique student Java submissions across 37 problems, we evaluate five LLMs under three mainstream prompting strategies: Input-Output (IO), Chain-of-Thought (CoT), and iterative Self-Refine. We assess performance along two key dimensions: diversity (the range of distinct error patterns) and alignment (alignment with authentic student mistakes), and examine how these vary by struggling level of programming tasks. Our quantitative findings reveal that while all models generate diverse errors, their alignment to human submissions diverges: Claude Sonnet 4 achieves the most balanced performance. In addition, we conducted a blinded expert annotation study (N = 401) comparing synthetic and authentic errors. This qualitative analysis confirms that the generated errors are functionally indistinguishable from authentic student errors. Moreover, higher-struggling-level problems elicit more diverse but less student-like errors. These results highlight trade-offs in using LLMs to simulate human learners and suggest design considerations for integrating synthetic errors into teachable agents, intelligent tutoring systems, and large-scale learning analytics.

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

DiffAttn: Diffusion-Based Drivers' Visual Attention Prediction with LLM-Enhanced Semantic Reasoning

Drivers' visual attention provides critical cues for anticipating latent hazards and directly shapes decision-making and control maneuvers, where its absence can compromise traffic safety. To emulate drivers' perception patterns and advance visual attention prediction for intelligent vehicles, we propose DiffAttn, a diffusion-based framework that formulates this task as a conditional diffusion-denoising process, enabling more accurate modeling of drivers' attention. To capture both local and global scene features, we adopt Swin Transformer as encoder and design a decoder that combines a Feature Fusion Pyramid for cross-layer interaction with dense, multi-scale conditional diffusion to jointly enhance denoising learning and model fine-grained local and global scene contexts. Additionally, a large language model (LLM) layer is incorporated to enhance top-down semantic reasoning and improve sensitivity to safety-critical cues. Extensive experiments on four public datasets demonstrate that DiffAttn achieves state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance, surpassing most video-based, top-down-feature-driven, and LLM-enhanced baselines. Our framework further supports interpretable driver-centric scene understanding and has the potential to improve in-cabin human-machine interaction, risk perception, and drivers' state measurement in intelligent vehicles.

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

From Reasoning Traces to Reusable Modules: Understanding Compositional Generalization in Language Model Reasoning

arXiv:2606.18089v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training pipelines that combine supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with reinforcement learning (RL) have emerged as the key recipe for transforming large language models (LLMs) into robust reasoners. We argue that this combined success is driven by compositional generalization, which we formalize through a hierarchical latent selection model. In this framework, reasoning traces are generated by a cascade of discrete latent selection variables corresponding to reusable atomic modules, including both skills (local operations) and routing mechanisms (how intermediate information is selected, reused, and composed). Within this model, we theoretically show that SFT and RL play asymmetric, complementary roles: SFT supplies the raw module materials in compositional traces, and RL decomposes those traces to identify the latent atomic modules and enable compositional generalization. We design controlled experiments to validate this theory. Our results demonstrate that RL can extract atomic modules from compound traces supplied by SFT and recombine them to solve new configurations. Moreover, we find that training on compound traces yields stronger generalization than training on isolated atomic modules. Finally, we investigate the relationship between SFT and RL data and identify an effective protocol in which SFT ensures coverage of all atomic modules through compositional traces, while RL focuses on novel compositions outside the SFT support to drive exploration.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Functional Cache Grafting: Robust and Rapid Code-Policy Synthesis for Embodied Agents

arXiv:2606.13097v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Code-writing large language models (CodeLLMs) generate executable code policies for embodied agents by translating natural language goals and environmental constraints into structured control programs. However, policy generation in open-domain embodied environments suffers from two fundamental limitations: (i) delayed decoding caused by repetitive prefill computation over long prompts, and (ii) limited robustness due to fully generative decoding, which often produces API mismatches, missing safety guards, and unstable control logic. To address these limitations, we present FCGraft, a Functional Cache Grafting framework. FCGraft maintains a library of function-level validated code skeletons and their associated prompt-level Transformer key-value (KV) caches, and synthesizes new policies by retrieving relevant functions and grafting their KV caches when a new task is provided. Given retrieved function caches, FCGraft performs cache grafting via stitching, which composes cached function segments into a composite policy, and patching, which locally adapts only the necessary code regions to satisfy task-specific parameters and constraints with minimal additional decoding. By eliminating redundant prefill computation, this approach reduces generation latency, while reusing validated control structures improves robustness over prompt-level caching methods RAGCache, achieving 18.31% higher task success rate and 2.3x faster policy synthesis.

25.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Construction of ergodic IDLA forests in $\mathbb{Z}^d$

arXiv:2506.10476v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We prove the existence of infinite-volume IDLA forests in $\mathbb{Z}^d$ , with $d \geq 2$, based on a multi-source IDLA protocol. Unlike IDLA aggregates, the laws of the IDLA forests studied here depend on the trajectories of particles, and then do not satisfy the famous Abelian property. Their existence is due to a stabilization result (Theorem 1.1, our main result) that we establish using percolation tools. Although the sources are infinitely many, we also prove that each of them play the same role in the building procedure, which results in an ergodicity property for the IDLA forests (Theorem 1.2).