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

RC-GeoCP: Geometric Consensus for Radar-Camera Collaborative Perception

Collaborative perception (CP) enhances scene understanding through multi-agent information sharing. While LiDAR-centric systems offer precise geometry, high costs and performance degradation in adverse weather necessitate multi-modal alternatives. Despite dense visual semantics and robust spatial measurements, the synergy between cameras and 4D radar remains underexplored in collaborative settings. This work introduces RC-GeoCP, the first framework to explore the fusion of 4D radar and images in CP. To resolve misalignment caused by depth ambiguity and spatial dispersion across agents, RC-GeoCP establishes a radar-anchored geometric consensus. Specifically, Geometric Structure Rectification (GSR) aligns visual semantics with geometry derived from radar to generate spatially grounded, geometry-consistent representations. Uncertainty-Aware Communication (UAC) formulates selective transmission as a conditional entropy reduction process to prioritize informative features based on inter-agent disagreement. Finally, the Consensus-Driven Assembler (CDA) aggregates multi-agent information via shared geometric anchors to form a globally coherent representation. We establish the first unified radar-camera CP benchmark on V2X-Radar and V2X-R, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance with significantly reduced communication overhead. Code will be released soon.

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

TA-RAG: Tone-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Peer-Support Health Communication

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) successfully grounds large language model (LLM) outputs in trusted documents, but factual grounding alone is insufficient for sensitive peer-support health communication. In domains such as HIV peer support, responses must also be accessible, stigma-free, empathetic, and tailored to the recipient. This paper presents TA-RAG, a lightweight, prompt-based tone-aware RAG framework that embeds explicit tone control into a RAG pipeline without requiring model fine-tuning. We operationalise tone across four core components: stigma-free rewriting, readability adjustment, recipient adaptation, and empathy rephrasing. We evaluate TA-RAG through component-level tests using questions derived from HIV Online Learning Australia (HOLA), UNAIDS terminology guidance, readability metrics, peer-support standards from National Association of People with HIV Australia (NAPWHA), and a public empathy dataset. Results show that the TA-RAG's components improve their targeted communication quality while preserving key content. These findings emphasise that prompt-based tone control is a potential direction for making RAG outputs suitable for sensitive peer-support health communication.

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

GH-ESD: Grounded Hypothesis-Driven Error Slice Discovery for Instance-Level Vision Tasks

Systematic failures of vision models on semantically coherent subsets, known as error slices, reveal limitations in robustness and evaluation. Existing slice discovery approaches largely model slices as clusters in representation space or combinations of predefined attributes. While effective for image-level classification, such formulations are insufficient for instance-level tasks such as object detection and segmentation, where failures often arise from contextual relational and spatially grounded visual patterns. We propose GH-ESD (Grounded Hypothesis-Driven Error Slice Discovery), a generate and verify framework that reformulates slice discovery as grounded hypothesis generation and statistical verification. GH-ESD constructs relational failure hypotheses using LLM priors and grounded visual evidence, discovers hypothesis slices at the instance level via Vision Language Models, and verifies them through statistical trend analysis over instance-level errors. We also introduce GESD (Grounded Error Slice Dataset), a new benchmark for instance-level error slice discovery, providing expert-defined and spatially grounded slices derived from detection and segmentation failures. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GH-ESD consistently outperforms baselines, improving Precision@10 by 0.10 (0.73 vs. 0.63) on the GESD benchmark for detection tasks, while also supporting segmentation scenarios. GH-ESD identifies interpretable slices that facilitate actionable model improvements. The GESD dataset will be made publicly available upon acceptance.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Single-Stage Hierarchical Rectification for Weakly Supervised Histopathology Segmentation

Existing weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) methods in computational pathology rely on a multi-stage paradigm: class activation map (CAM) generation, offline pseudo-mask refinement, and fully supervised retraining. While established, this decoupled approach presents fundamental limitations. The multi-stage process not only incurs high computational training costs but also suffers from error propagation: local texture biases in shallow CNN layers generate false-positive artifacts that subsequent refinement steps often fail to correct. To address these persistent challenges through a simple yet highly effective approach, we propose the Single-Stage Hierarchical Rectification (SSHR) framework. Rather than passively refining CAMs post-hoc, our method proactively purifies intermediate feature representations during the forward pass. We introduce a Hierarchical Feature Rectification Module (HFRM) that utilizes deep global semantic context to filter out local anomalies in shallow layers. This mechanism generates high-fidelity activation maps directly within a single training loop. Experiments on the LUAD-HistoSeg and BCSS datasets demonstrate that SSHR outperforms state-of-the-art multi-stage methods. Furthermore, SSHR reduces training duration by 2 to 5 times. This efficiency minimizes computational overhead and accelerates clinical translation for large-scale histopathology workflows. The code is available at: https://github.com/trongduc-nguyen/SSHR

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Data Standards for Humanoid Robotics: The Missing Infrastructure for Physical AI

arXiv:2606.19769v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The scalability of humanoid robots will depend not only on models and hardware, but also on whether physical experience can accumulate across robots, tasks, organizations, and time. Drawing on the authors' work in developing ISO/WD 26264-1, Humanoid robot datasets – Part 1: General requirements, within ISO/TC 299/WG 16, this article argues that data standards are becoming foundational infrastructure for Physical AI. We develop three insights. First, humanoid robot data is embodied interaction data, not a collection of isolated digital samples; a useful dataset must preserve the relationship among robot body, action, task, scene, execution trace, and outcome. Second, its value depends on physical coherence: multimodal streams are reusable only when timing, coordinate frames, calibration, kinematics, units, and synchronization assumptions remain inspectable. Third, the main bottleneck is not only data scarcity, but non-cumulative data caused by high collection costs, data silos, and inconsistent evaluation. We argue that humanoid robot data standards address these bottlenecks by making embodied experience interpretable, shareable, traceable, and reusable. A general standard should provide horizontal infrastructure for lifecycle management, metadata, provenance, quality, versioning, and traceability, while capability-specific parts should define domain grammar for manipulation, locomotion, human-robot interaction, cognition, and future humanoid capabilities. As AI moves from screens into bodies, data standards must evolve from organizing digital information to structuring physical interaction.

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

Gaming-Resistant Insurance Contracts for Autonomous AI Agents: Strategy-Proof Toll Mechanism Design

arXiv:2606.16326v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Paper A defines a time-consistent actuarial runtime that prices each side-effect-bearing action against a contractually fixed safe default and gates execution against a reserve budget. It treats the operator as passive. This paper makes the operator strategic. We characterise a five-attack space for autonomous AI-agent insurance contracts and prove when the actuarial runtime is gaming-resistant. Two attack surfaces – post-toll safe-default selection and within-boundary action splitting – are closed by Paper A's minimal-authority and no-splitting clauses. The remaining three require new contract clauses. First, common-control aggregation prevents cross-boundary re-routing from reducing toll below the boundary potential applied to total exposure. Second, interface failures such as invalid JSON are contract-relevant events, not safety wins: treating them as zero-toll safe defaults can reward unreliable models, while escalation fees reverse the incentive. We validate this interface-compliance theorem on committed cross-model traces from the companion empirical paper. Third, a model-identity menu with a componentwise-minimum penalty schedule makes truthful reporting of the deployed model weakly dominant. We then compose these clauses with Paper A's runtime guarantees to obtain joint incentive compatibility over the five-attack space. Finally, a two-parameter premium family discharges operator individual rationality and weak budget balance at the truthful equilibrium. The result is an incentive-compatibility layer for actuarial control of autonomous-agent side effects.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

An Improved Generative Adversarial Network for Micro-Resistivity Imaging Logging Restoration

An improved GAN-based imaging logging image restoration method is presented in this paper for solving the problem of partially missing micro-resistivity imaging logging images. The method uses FCN as the generative network infrastructure and adds a depth-separable convolutional residual block to learn and retain more effective pixel and semantic information; an Inception module is added to increase the multi-scale perceptual field of the network and reduce the number of parameters in the network; and a multi-scale feature extraction module and a spatial attention residual block are added to combine the channel attention. The multi-scale module adds a multi-scale feature extraction module and a spatial attention residual block, which combine the channel attention mechanism and the residual block to achieve multi-scale feature extraction. The global discriminative network and the local discriminative network are designed to gradually improve the content and semantic structure coherence between the restored parts and the whole image by playing off each other and the generative network. According to the experimental results, the average structural similarity measure of the five sets of imaged logging images with different sizes of missing regions in the test set is 0.903, which is an improvement of about 0.3 compared with other similar methods. It is shown that the method in this study can be used for the restoration of micro-resistivity imaging log images with good improvement in semantic structural coherence and texture details, thus providing a new deep learning method to ensure the smooth advancement of the subsequent interpretation of micro-resistivity imaging log images.

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

Maximin Relative Improvement: Fair Learning as a Bargaining Problem

arXiv:2602.04155v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: When deploying a single predictor across multiple subpopulations, we propose a fundamentally different approach: interpreting group fairness as a bargaining problem among subpopulations. This game-theoretic perspective reveals that existing robust optimization methods such as minimizing worst-group loss or regret correspond to classical bargaining solutions and embody different fairness principles. We propose relative improvement, the ratio of actual risk reduction to potential reduction from a baseline predictor, which recovers the Kalai-Smorodinsky solution. Unlike absolute-scale methods that may not be comparable when groups have different potential predictability, relative improvement provides axiomatic justification including scale invariance and individual monotonicity. We establish finite-sample convergence guarantees under mild conditions.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Which Pairs to Compare for LLM Post-Training?

arXiv:2606.19607v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Preference-based post-training has become a central paradigm for aligning language models. A common data-collection strategy is to generate a small set of completions for each prompt and label the resulting comparison pairs. However, human preference labels are often much more expensive than generating additional completions, suggesting a different use of the same labeling budget: generate a larger pool of completions, but label only the most informative comparison pairs. This paper studies which pairs should be compared in preference-based post-training. We formulate comparison curation as a sampling-design problem and evaluate designs by the quality of the final policy under the preference-based post-training objective. We instantiate this framework for Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), analyzing how the choice of labeled pairs propagates through DPO training to downstream policy performance. Our main results provide matching upper and lower bounds on the post-training optimality gap of the DPO-trained policy. The bounds show that comparison selection affects downstream performance through a single design-dependent information matrix, which links label allocation to parameter estimation error and policy suboptimality. This yields an explicit optimization criterion for budgeted comparison curation and motivates practical sampling designs for selecting informative pairs from large generated completion pools. Experiments on synthetic settings and language-model post-training benchmarks show that the proposed designs consistently improve sample efficiency over common comparison-selection heuristics.

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

Bridging Single Distortion Artifacts and Mmultifactorial Clinical Quality: Few-shot Biparametric MRI Quality Assessment via Distortion-trained Prototypical Networks

Clinical prostate multi-parametric MRI relies heavily on high-quality diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI), yet reading DWI is frequently compromised by geometric distortion, often caused by rectal air. Assessing quality via the PI-QUAL scoring system is an emerging clinical standard, but it is subjective, time-consuming and suffers from a class imbalance where low-quality cases are diverse and relatively scarce. Using the PRIME clinical trial as an example, there are $6\%$ images with PI-QUAL scores lower than 4, $87\%$ of DWI issues are due to distortion. Many of the other clinical quality issues are under-represented. To address this common dual-scarcity of annotated clinical data, we propose a few-shot biparametric prototypical network for automated image quality assessment (IQA). Our framework utilizes a dual-branch 3D ResNet to fuse T2-weighted and DWI features, providing anatomical context to distinguish true morphology from distortion. To handle real-world heterogeneity, we introduce feature-wise linear modulation (FiLM) and a gradient reversal layer (GRL) to align feature distributions conditioned on varying b-values while suppressing acquisition-related biases. We demonstrate that a model meta-trained solely on comparatively objective, readily obtainable distortion labels can effectively adapt to predicting complex, multi-factorial clinical quality scores such as PI-QUAL using only five representative samples. Experimental results on two datasets show that our method significantly outperforms few-shot learning baselines for this challenging IQA task, offering a practically feasible and data-efficient solution for standardizing prostate MRI quality control in clinical workflows.

11.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Molecular basis of polyadenylated RNA fate determination in the nucleus

Authors:

Eukaryotic genomes generate a plethora of polyadenylated (pA+) RNAs1,2, which are packaged into ribonucleoprotein particles (RNPs). To ensure faithful gene expression, functional pA+ RNPs, including protein-coding RNPs, are exported to the cytoplasm, whereas transcripts within non-functional pA+ RNPs are degraded in the nucleus1–4. How cells distinguish these opposing fates remains unknown. The DExD-box ATPase UAP56 (also known as DDX39B) is a central component of functional pA+ RNPs, and promotes their docking to the nuclear pore complex-anchored TREX-25,6, which triggers transcript release from UAP56 to facilitate export7. Here we reveal that the poly(A) tail exosome targeting (PAXT) connection8 binds a TREX-2-like module, which releases pA+ RNAs from UAP56 for decay by the nuclear exosome. The core of this module consists of a LENG8–PCID2–SEM1 trimer, which we show is structurally and biochemically equivalent to the central GANP–PCID2–SEM1 trimer of TREX-2. Mutagenesis and transcriptomic data demonstrate that the nuclear fate of pA+ RNPs is governed by the contending actions of nucleoplasmic PAXT and nuclear pore complex-associated TREX-2, which interpret RNA-bound UAP56 as a signal for RNA decay or export, respectively. As RNA targets of PAXT are generally short and intron-poor, we propose an overall model for pA+ RNP fate determination whereby the distinct sub-nuclear localizations of PAXT and TREX-2 govern the degradation of short non-functional pA+ RNAs while allowing export of their longer and functional counterparts. Biochemical, structural and cell biological analyses reveal that UAP56 (DDX39B) assembles with a TREX-2–like module that redirects non-functional polyadenylated RNAs from export to degradation.

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

Distilling latent electrostatics from foundation machine learning interatomic potentials

arXiv:2606.15001v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Foundation machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) have enabled atomistic simulations across broad regions of chemical and materials space, but many remain computationally expensive and lack explicit electrostatics, limiting their use for systems governed by long-range interactions and electrical response. Previously, we introduced Latent Ewald Summation (LES), which learns latent atomic charges and long-range electrostatics from density functional theory (DFT) energy and force labels alone. Here, we use LES to extract electrostatics that are latent in foundation models: energies and forces predicted by a teacher model are used to train a lightweight LES-augmented student MLIP, with optional fine-tuning on additional DFT data. The resulting models reduce computational cost while providing access to Born effective charge tensors, and infrared spectra. We benchmark student models distilled from a broad set of foundation MLIPs, including UMA, MACE, Orb, eSEN, GemNet-OC, PET, and EquiformerV2-based models, against experimental infrared spectra for liquid water, concentrated hydrochloric acid, and the anatase TiO2(101)-water interface. Across these systems, electrostatic response can be extracted from most foundation MLIPs. The benchmark further shows that the underlying DFT level and dataset used to train the teacher model play a larger role than architecture in determining electrostatic and spectroscopic accuracy. For the TiO2-water interface, fine-tuning with a modest amount of higher-level DFT data improves structural and infrared predictions. LES-based distillation therefore provides a practical route for converting foundation MLIPs into efficient, electrically responsive models, while also testing the physical fidelity encoded in foundation models.

13.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Machine Learning-Guided Discovery of Bacterial-Selective Membrane-Active Compounds Reveals Mechanistic Bias in Antibiotic Training Datasets

The rise of antibiotic resistance necessitates the discovery of antibacterial compounds with novel mechanisms of action (MoAs). Recent machine learning approaches have shown promise in antibacterial compound discovery, but often identify derivatives of known antibiotic classes rather than mechanistically novel compounds. Previous approaches applied Tanimoto similarity filters at the end of screening pipelines, but this method has substantial drawbacks: Tanimoto similarity can be misleading in chemical space, and post-hoc filtering does not influence what activity models learn to prioritize. Here, we present a machine learning pipeline that addresses chemical novelty upfront by employing an XGBoost-based MoA classifier to explicitly prioritize compounds predicted to have mechanisms distinct from known antibiotic classes, combined with graph neural networks for antibacterial activity and toxicity prediction. Applied to the Zinc20 database, our approach successfully identified non-toxic antibacterial compounds structurally distinct from known antibiotics. Notably, the majority of these hits exhibited membrane-targeting activity with selectivity for bacterial cells over mammalian cells, suggesting potential for next-generation membrane-active antibiotics. However, we did not identify compounds with novel protein targets. Systematic analysis revealed that this limitation stems from mechanistic bias in training data rather than model architecture. Specifically, our activity model learned to preferentially score compounds similar to specific groups in the training data, thus overrepresenting certain MoA classes including membrane-active compounds. Even substantial model architecture and training data enhancements did not overcome this constraint. Our findings demonstrate that the primary bottleneck for discovering mechanistically novel antibiotics is the scarcity of diverse, mechanistically-annotated training data. This work provides both a methodological framework for mechanism-aware screening and critical insights into data requirements for genuinely novel antibiotic discovery.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Temporal2Seq: A Unified Framework for Temporal Video Understanding Tasks

With the development of video understanding, there is a proliferation of tasks for clip-level temporal video analysis, including temporal action detection (TAD), temporal action segmentation (TAS), and generic event boundary detection (GEBD). While task-specific video understanding models have exhibited outstanding performance in each task, there remains a dearth of a unified framework capable of simultaneously addressing multiple tasks, which is a promising direction for the next generation of AI. To this end, in this paper, we propose a single unified framework, coined as Temporal2Seq, to formulate the output of these temporal video understanding tasks as a sequence of discrete tokens. With this unified token representation, Temporal2Seq can train a generalist model within a single architecture on different video understanding tasks. In the absence of multi-task learning (MTL) benchmarks, we compile a comprehensive co-training dataset by borrowing the datasets from TAD, TAS, and GEBD tasks. We evaluate our Temporal2Seq generalist model on the corresponding test sets of three tasks, demonstrating that Temporal2Seq can produce reasonable results on various tasks and achieve advantages compared with single-task training on this framework. We also investigate the generalization performance of our generalist model on new datasets from different tasks, which yields superior performance to the specific model.

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

An Empirical Analysis of Optimization Dynamics and Sparsity Boundaries in Large-Scale Pedestrian Attribute Recognition

Pedestrian Attribute Recognition (PAR) is critical for video surveillance, enabling forensic search and re-identification systems. Extreme class imbalance remains a fundamental obstacle when merging PETA and PA-100K into a 109,000-image composite corpus, where minority attributes have positive sample fractions below 1%. This causes standard BCE optimization to suppress rare traits, a phenomenon we term the majority negative class cheating trap. We present a systematic ablation of Multi-Label Focal Loss hyperparameters (alpha and gamma) on a ResNet-18 backbone. A calibrated configuration (alpha=0.50, gamma=2.0) achieves a Macro F1-score of 62.32%, matching BCE baseline while preserving superior hard-example mining and convergence dynamics. Our approach uses pure loss-function engineering with zero computational overhead for edge deployment. We identify the Sparsity Wall, a hard boundary where positive sample fractions below 0.1% make global loss reweighting ineffective, requiring instance-level intervention.

16.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Diffuse Interface Energies with Microscopic Heterogeneities II: Rare Events

arXiv:2606.17968v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We analyze Allen-Cahn functionals with stationary ergodic coefficients in the regime where the length scale $\delta$ of the heterogeneities is much smaller (microscopic) than the interface width $\epsilon$ (mesoscopic). In a companion paper, we show that if the ratio $\epsilon^{-1} \delta$ vanishes fast enough as $\epsilon \to 0$, then the functionals converge to an effective surface energy where the energy density is determined by homogenization effects originating at microscopic scales. Here we prove that if the ratio $\epsilon^{-1} \delta $ vanishes too slowly, the limit of the functional may actually be smaller than this homogenized energy. We refer to this as the rare events regime. In the case of the random checkerboard in dimension one, we use large deviations techniques to give a complete description of the rare events regime, showing that the limiting energy depends in a nontrivial way on the limit of $\epsilon^{-1} \delta | \log \epsilon |$. We further construct, in any dimension, examples of random media in which rare events become relevant at algebraic scales $\delta \approx \epsilon^{1 + \alpha}$ for an arbitrary $\alpha > 0$, as well as almost periodic examples in which atypical configurations play the same role as rare events.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Efficacy and safety of semaglutide for obesity and hyperphagia in adults with Prader-Willi syndrome

Context: Prader-Willi syndrome is a genetic neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by hyperphagia and early-onset obesity from hypothalamic dysfunction with endocrinopathies and learning disability. Management is challenging with strict control of the food environment needed. While newer glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists, such as semaglutide, have efficacy in non-PWS obesity, there have been limited case reports in PWS. Objective/Design/Setting: Retrospective records review of 12 adults with PWS and overweight/obesity treated with semaglutide at a UK academic hospital centre specialist clinic. Patients: mean +/- SD age 28.3 +/- 10.1 years, 83% female, BMI 46.6 +/- 8.2kg/m2, 75% type 2 diabetes mellitus. Intervention: Median follow-up 17.2 months (range 8.7-36.1) with median semaglutide dose 2.4mg once weekly (1.0-2.4). Results: Although there was no significant weight loss on semaglutide, there was stabilisation of the weight gain prior to treatment over previous 12.4 months (7.6-23.0) (post -3.1 +/- 9.9% vs. pre +5.7 +/- 5.6%: d -0.72, P=0.037). There was a significant decrease in hyperphagia on semaglutide from hyperphagia questionnaire for clinical trials (n=11, -7.3 +/- 6.1 (max 36), d -1.19, P=0.003), having been stable before treatment. HbA1c improved in those with elevated baseline levels (n=6, -4.2 +/- 4.9%, d -0.74, P=0.13). Mild gastrointestinal side effects were seen in 25% but did not lead to discontinuation. Conclusions: In adults with PWS, semaglutide produced weight maintenance, reduced hyperphagia, and improved glycaemic control, with good tolerability. Larger placebo-controlled trials are needed to confirm these findings in adults and adolescents with PWS, especially in those without T2DM, where efficacy may be greater.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Mask, Sample, Revise: A Revisable CTMC Inference Stack for Guided Discrete Flow Matching Text-to-Speech

arXiv:2606.13989v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent alignment-free non-autoregressive (NAR) text-to-speech (TTS) models formulate synthesis as a conditional infilling task, bypassing explicit duration predictors and external aligners. When speech is represented with neural codec tokens, the infilling problem becomes discrete, making Discrete Flow Matching (DFM), a Continuous-Time Markov Chain (CTMC) framework for discrete generation, a natural fit. However, inference-time control for stable low-step conditional infilling remains underexplored. We propose Mask, Sample, Revise, an inference-time CTMC stack for alignment-free DFM-TTS. The stack combines predictor-free guidance to strengthen text conditioning, prompt-matched conditional coupling to align the probability path with the acoustic prompt, and SC-ReMask, a schedule-constrained remasking mechanism that introduces token-to-mask transitions so early de-masking decisions can be revised. These components require no post-hoc fine-tuning and operate in a single tau-leaping sampler. Controlled ablations show that this stack improves intelligibility and robustness in the low-NFE prompted setting, outperforming unguided and guidance-only samplers with substantially more steps.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Bounding Boxes as Goals: Language-Conditioned Grasping via Neuro-Symbolic Planning

For robotics to be effectively integrated into household or industrial environments, machines must adapt to natural-language prompts in real time. Although Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have enabled zero-shot generalization in robot task and motion planning (TAMP), current state-of-the-art approaches often remain computationally "heavyweight" or require extensive training on thousands of demonstrations. We present GRASP (Grounded Reasoning and Symbolic Planning), a framework designed as a step toward open-vocabulary tabletop manipulation. Our approach leverages a pretrained VLM to translate natural-language queries into neuro-symbolic goal states, grounded in the physical world via a bounding-box detection pipeline. Unlike methods that rely on fixed color lists or hard-coded coordinates, GRASP enables robots to interpret abstract spatial concepts such as "top shelf" and execute tasks without additional fine-tuning. We achieve 73.3% overall success across 90 real-robot trials at three difficulty levels, requiring no task-specific training.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

S4oP: Operator-level Pruning of Structured State Space Models for Resource-Constrained Devices

arXiv:2606.18096v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Structured State Space Models (SSMs), including the S4 and S4D architectures, have recently emerged as powerful alternatives to attention-based models for capturing long-range dependencies in sequential data. Despite their strong empirical performance, deploying these models in time- and resource-constrained settings remains challenging due to their computational and memory demands. In this paper, we propose a novel incremental, operator-level pruning approach for S4- and S4D-based models that significantly reduces inference cost while preserving predictive performance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to systematically investigate structured operator pruning for SSMs. Our method progressively prunes model operators by interleaving structured masking with fine-tuning, while jointly monitoring accuracy and inference latency. We implement this approach within a unified training and evaluation framework that enables systematic exploration of efficiency-accuracy trade-offs. Experiments across multiple benchmark datasets show that pruning up to 70% of the model operators preserves the performance of the original models in most cases, while substantially reducing inference latency. These results demonstrate that structured operator pruning is an effective and previously unexplored strategy for improving the efficiency of SSMs and facilitate their deployment in practical, resource-constrained scenarios.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Ultrafast nonadiabatic dynamics of tetraphenylsubstituted nitrogen-based heterocycles

arXiv:2604.16897v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Tetraphenylpyrazine (TPP) and 2,3,4,5-tetraphenyl-1H-pyrrole (TePP) are closely related heterocycles bearing four phenyl substituents, whose structural similarity makes them a useful pair for comparing how intramolecular flexibility influences excited-state relaxation and emission in the gas phase and in the solid state. TPP is a prototypical solid-state luminescence enhancement (SLE) emitter, exhibiting a markedly increased quantum yield upon molecular aggregation. In contrast, TePP displays similar quantum yields in solution and solid state, characteristic of dual-state emission (DSE). This behaviour indicates that intramolecular rotations are already significantly hindered in the isolated-molecule regime, consistent with our previous observations for TPP and other solid-state emitters (Hernández-Rodríguez et al., ChemPhysChem, 2024, 25, e202400563). To unravel the excited-state dynamics underlying this contrasting behaviour, we performed mixed quantum-classical trajectory simulations on a single molecule of TPP and TePP employing the surface-hopping method. Twelve singlet states were included at the TD-B3LYP-D3/def2-SVP level, which were previously benchmarked against coupled cluster methods. Simulated observables such as gas phase ultrafast electron diffraction (GUED) and time-resolved fluorescence (TR-FL) signals allow us to dissect the distinct deactivation pathways operating in both systems in the gas phase, while also providing mechanistic insight into how these pathways are expected to evolve in solution and solid-state environments.

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

Pareto LoRA: Mitigating Modality Imbalance in Unified Multimodal Models via Pareto-Optimal Gradient Integration

Unified multimodal models (UMMs) have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for integrating multimodal understanding and generation within a single autoregressive transformer. However, during multimodal instruction tuning, these models often exhibit pronounced modality imbalance: language gradients dominate optimization, thus leading to lower image generation quality, especially under parameter-efficient fine-tuning such as LoRA. In this work, we systematically analyze modality imbalance in LoRA-based fine-tuning of UMMs for interleaved text-image generation. We show that vision modality performance degrades substantially more than text modality performance when compared to unimodal counterparts, and that modality-specific gradients can differ by orders of magnitude across various tasks and layers. Motivated by this observation, we reformulate the multimodal instruction tuning as a bi-objective optimization problem and propose Pareto LoRA, a Pareto-optimal gradient integration strategy that balances the text and image objectives by modulating the gradient direction and strength. Experiments on the CoMM benchmark with Emu2 demonstrate that Pareto LoRA consistently improves multimodal generation balance, achieving up to 44.9% gains in perceptual image quality over vanilla LoRA while maintaining comparable text performance.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Adaptive Inference-Time Scaling via Early-Step Latent Verification for Image Editing

Instruction-based image editing has made notable progress with recent advances in generative models. However, the quality of the edited result is still influenced by the randomly sampled initial noise, particularly in complex editing scenarios. An unsuitable initial noise may lead to unsatisfactory editing results. Recent inference-time scaling methods address this issue by sampling multiple initial noises and selecting better candidates. Nevertheless, most of them follow a decode-then-verify scheme which introduces an efficiency-accuracy trade-off. When decoding is performed after limited inference steps, the decoded images often remain too noisy for reliable assessment, whereas sufficiently denoised images require much higher computational cost. To address this issue, we propose VeriLatent, a plug-and-play adaptive inference-time scaling framework with early-step latent verification for image editing. Specifically, we propose a novel verifier that scores each initial noise through a latent-space editing activation map at an early stage. It identifies promising candidates by assessing whether they can induce an effective edit in the correct region. This enables efficient early pruning without decoding latents into images. Building on this, we further develop an adaptive search strategy for inference-time scaling. It allocates inference budgets according to editing difficulty, thereby reducing the number of function evaluations (NFE). Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks and different base models demonstrate that VeriLatent consistently improves both editing performance and inference-time scaling efficiency.

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

Demystifying Variance in Circuit Discovery of LLMs

arXiv:2606.16920v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Circuit discovery is a key technique in mechanistic interpretability to pinpoint the model components that are crucial for performing a given task. Although the current state-of-the-art method (EAP-IG) performs well on the metric of (un)faithfulness, it suffers from substantial variability. This includes resampling variance, where the circuit changes when we probe with a new batch of data from the same distribution; rephrasing variance, where the discovered circuit shifts when the prompts are rephrased; and sample-wise variance, where a circuit with low population unfaithfulness exhibits large fluctuations in unfaithfulness across individual samples. This paper studies the roots of these variances. We demonstrate that CEAP, our new circuit discovery method that improves upon EAP-IG with a theoretical guarantee, can substantially lessen resampling variance. We further show that rephrasing variance arises because prompts with different templates tend to activate different circuits in the model. This leads us to argue that it may be challenging to find a comprehensive circuit that explains and controls the model's behavior on a task, which can be expressed in countless templates, suggesting that LLMs may be inherently hard to steer. We show that sparsity, which has been claimed to form more compact and interpretable task circuits, fails to solve this problem. Regarding sample-wise variance, we argue that it is largely benign: extremely poor unfaithfulness scores often stem from how unfaithfulness is defined, rather than from defects in the measured circuits. We show that the magnitude of unfaithfulness is affected by selective contribution scaling, a neural mechanism that accounts for the extremely poor scores sometimes observed.

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

Adjusted Cup-Product Neural Layer

arXiv:2606.13568v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many important observables in physics and geometry are cup products of cochains. The adjusted cup product neural layer has been introduced in this paper. It is a neural primitive that hard wires the cup product with an adjustment term from higher gauge theory. This creates a readout that is gauge invariant by design. Their main theoretical result shows that on a closed cycle the output relies entirely on the adjustment coefficient. Setting this coefficient to zero removes the output completely regardless of other parameters. Thus the adjustment is the only source of gauge invariant signal. They prove this observable is a nonzero quadratic form and is exactly invariant under one and two gauge transformations.