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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Low-Latency Real-Time Audio Game Commentary System via LLM-Based Parallel Text Generation

We present a low-latency real-time audio game commentary system that generates spoken commentary directly from live gameplay video. In this end-to-end setting, a key bottleneck is accumulated waiting time; conventional pipelines capture frames, generate text, and synthesize speech sequentially for each utterance, and do not request the next generation until speech playback has completed. This strict sequentiality causes long and unnatural silence between utterances. To address this latency bottleneck, our system runs text generation in parallel with speech playback and buffers multiple candidate utterances ahead of time, enabling immediate synthesis at playback boundaries. Experiments on fast-paced game videos show that our parallel design reduces the mean inter-utterance silence from 9.6 seconds to 0.3 seconds compared to sequential baselines. It also improves similarity to professional speaking–silence timing patterns by over 40 %, and a user study with 120 experienced game players confirms significantly improved perceived speaking rhythm. Our demo video is available at: https://youtu.be/pmrRUlvav8M.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Double-Helix Vision (DH-V2): A Geometry-Based Visual Sampler for Bandwidth-Constrained Perception

Authors:

We present Double-Helix Vision (DH), a geometry-based visual sampler that compresses 2D images into compact 1D signals using paired golden-ratio-inspired spiral trajectories. Rather than processing every pixel uniformly, DH employs two phase-shifted helices (Alpha and Beta, offset by 180 degrees) to sample the image with biologically-inspired foveation: high density at the center, sparse coverage at the periphery. At 4K resolution, DH achieves a 1,433x compression ratio (99.93% reduction) while preserving the geometric structure of the scene. The full perception pipeline – including spatial mapping, temporal collision detection, and intra-frame structural disparity estimation – runs in 0.52 ms at 1080p on CPU-only hardware, with no neural network dependencies. On CIFAR-10 at extreme sampling budgets (K=128 points per helix), DH achieves a +6.03% accuracy gain over uniform random sampling. A JSON-serializable Robotics API is provided, delivering sub-millisecond spatial perception reports in 2.7 KB packets. Code and benchmarks are available under the MIT License.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Zone of Proximal Policy Optimization: Teacher in Prompts, Not Gradients

Knowledge distillation transfers a teacher's competence to a small student but is brittle in the small-student regime: forcing the student to imitate logits from a much larger teacher concentrates it on the teacher's sharpest modes, hurting generalization on benchmark families beyond the training corpus. Reinforcement learning (RL) avoids logit imitation by training on the student's own rollouts. However, on questions where every rollout fails-yielding zero advantage and being silently discarded-injecting a stronger teacher's response into the policy gradient breaks the on-policy assumption and induces drift. We introduce Zone of Proximal Policy Optimization (ZPPO), inspired by Vygotsky's zone of proximal development, which keeps the teacher inside the prompt rather than the policy gradient. On hard questions, ZPPO constructs two reformulated prompts: a Binary Candidate-included Question (BCQ) pairs one correct teacher response with one incorrect student response as anonymized candidates the student must discriminate, and a Negative Candidate-included Question (NCQ) aggregates the student's wrong rollouts into a single prompt to surface their shared failure modes. A prompt replay buffer recirculates each hard question until it either graduates-the student's mean rollout accuracy on it reaches half- or is FIFO-evicted under finite capacity, amplifying BCQ and NCQ inside the student's current zone of proximal development. On the Qwen3.5 family at four student scales (0.8B-9B) with a 27B teacher, post-trained as vision-language models and evaluated on a 31-benchmark suite (16 VLM, 10 LLM, 5 Video), ZPPO outperforms off/on-policy distillation and GRPO, with the largest gains at the smallest scale.

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

Physics-Informed Discovery of Yield Functions in Plasticity via Convex Neural Representations

arXiv:2606.19375v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Identifying anisotropic yield functions remains challenging since yielding is not directly observed in full-field mechanical measurements, directional calibration can require many loading directions, and selecting an appropriate analytical form is nontrivial. This study proposes a physics-informed framework for discovering yield functions from full-field displacement data and reaction force data, without stress observations, plastic strain measurements, direct yield surface data, or a prescribed parametric yield function. The framework identifies the yield function as a mechanically constrained constitutive component inside elastoplastic stress integration, rather than through direct stress-space supervision. The yield function is represented by a convex neural network that enforces convexity and positive homogeneity of degree one while imposing the assumed tension-compression symmetry, and this neural yield function is trained with a differentiable stress update and a physics-informed force equilibrium loss across multiple loading cases. The proposed framework is validated using finite element (FE) benchmark studies with von Mises, Hill 1948, and Yld2000-2d yield functions, assessing yield contour agreement, displacement-noise sensitivity, identifiability through plastically active stress states, epistemic uncertainty, and polynomial-surrogate deployment. This study provides a mechanics-constrained pathway for discovering anisotropic yield functions from displacement and force data while keeping the identified component within the structure of elastoplastic stress integration.

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

VEPHand: View-Efficient Photometric Hand Performance Capture at Scale

Robust, high-fidelity 3D hand capture, while fundamental to digital human creation, remains challenging with practical multi-view systems that balance rich photometry with the geometric ambiguities of reconstruction arising from limited viewpoint density. This paper presents an end-to-end pipeline for dynamic hand performance capture and registration, specifically designed for view-efficient setups ($\sim$20 views). We address key challenges with two primary innovations. First, to overcome reconstruction difficulties like limited view overlap and background clutter, our mask-free neural method robustly extracts detailed hand geometry and appearance from unmasked images using scene parameterization and scenario-specific density regularization. Second, addressing registration challenges such as accurately capturing non-linear skin deformations and ensuring plausible results during severe self-contact, we propose a physics-inspired framework. It aligns reconstructions to a personalized hand model by optimizing intrinsic volumetric offsets within its canonical tetrahedral mesh, alongside pose parameters. This approach, supported by robust losses and optimization, captures fine surface deformations, ensures plausible results under severe articulation and self-contact, and demonstrates strong tolerance to input noise. We demonstrate the scalability and robustness of our automated pipeline on an extensive dataset of over 12,000 sequences, from which we also derive a large-scale, high-quality synthetic 2D/3D hand dataset for training downstream tasks. This showcases its effectiveness for single hands, intricate two-hand interactions, and natural hand-object manipulations. Our method achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction fidelity in view-efficient, unmasked scenarios and highly accurate registration. Our project page are available at https://zyshen021.github.io/VEPHand/.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Modelling the public-health impact of indoor air quality interventions on respiratory virus transmission

Respiratory virus transmission occurs in indoor settings where ventilation, occupancy, and dwell time determine exposure levels. Improving indoor air quality (IAQ) therefore could help reduce disease burden associated with respiratory viruses, yet its population-level impact remains poorly quantified. Here, we develop an individual-based transmission modelling framework that links within-location airborne dynamics to individual infection risk and population-level spread, whilst explicitly incorporating heterogeneity in ventilation and baseline indoor air quality across locations. We use this modelling approach to evaluate IAQ-improving interventions (air-quality interventions or AQIs), using hypothetical endemic and pandemic pathogen archetypes with properties similar to SARS-CoV-2 and influenza, and evaluate how effects on key epidemiological metrics (such as annualized incidence and epidemic final size) depend on AQI coverage, efficacy and allocation strategy. At 20% AQI intervention coverage and 80% efficacy, annualized incidence was reduced by approximately 7.2% for an endemic 'SARS-CoV-2-like' respiratory virus, and 17.0% for an endemic 'influenza-like' virus; at 60% coverage (80% efficacy) the reductions were 26.3% and 56.4%, respectively. Targeting AQI installation to the highest-risk locations outperformed random allocation: for SARS-CoV-2-like transmission, 20% coverage at 80% efficacy cut absolute incidence by 10.8% when targeted versus 7.2% when random; for influenza-like transmission, this comparison was 28.9% versus 17.0%. In epidemic scenarios, random installation at 40% coverage and 60% efficacy reduced final size by 23.7% (influenza-like) versus 6.3% (SARS-CoV-2-like). These results support treating clean indoor air as core public-health infrastructure and prioritising risk-based deployment of IAQ-improving interventions to maximise population-level benefit within budgetary and operational constraints.

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

DiskChunGS: Large-Scale 3D Gaussian SLAM Through Chunk-Based Memory Management

Recent advances in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have demonstrated impressive results for novel view synthesis with real-time rendering capabilities. However, integrating 3DGS with SLAM systems faces a fundamental scalability limitation: methods are constrained by GPU memory capacity, restricting reconstruction to small-scale environments. We present DiskChunGS, a scalable 3DGS SLAM system that overcomes this bottleneck through an out-of-core approach that partitions scenes into spatial chunks and maintains only active regions in GPU memory while storing inactive areas on disk. Our architecture integrates seamlessly with existing SLAM frameworks for pose estimation and loop closure, enabling globally consistent reconstruction at scale. We validate DiskChunGS on indoor scenes (Replica, TUM-RGBD), urban driving scenarios (KITTI), and resource-constrained Nvidia Jetson platforms. Our method uniquely completes all 11 KITTI sequences without memory failures while achieving superior visual quality, demonstrating that algorithmic innovation can overcome the memory constraints that have limited previous 3DGS SLAM methods.

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

ProGRank: Probe-Gradient Reranking to Defend Dense-Retriever RAG from Corpus Poisoning

arXiv:2603.22934v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) improves large language model applications by grounding generation in retrieved evidence, but also introduces corpus poisoning as a new attack surface. In this setting, an adversary injects or edits passages so that they enter the Top-$K$ results for target queries and influence downstream generation. Existing defences often rely on content filtering, auxiliary models, or generator-side reasoning, which complicates deployment. We propose ProGRank, a post hoc, training-free retriever-side defence for dense-retriever RAG. ProGRank stress-tests each query–passage pair under mild randomized perturbations, extracts probe gradients from a small fixed parameter subset, and derives two instability signals: representational consistency and dispersion risk. It then combines these signals with a score gate for reranking. ProGRank preserves the original passage content, requires no retraining, and supports a surrogate-based variant when the deployed retriever is unavailable. Experiments across datasets, retrievers, attacks, and retrieval-stage and end-to-end settings show that ProGRank improves robustness and maintains a favorable robustness–utility trade-off, including under adaptive evasive attacks.

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

FlowBank: Query-Adaptive Agentic Workflows Optimization through Precompute-and-Reuse

Large Language Model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems are increasingly powerful, but current agentic workflow optimization paradigms make an unsatisfying trade-off. Task-level methods spend substantial offline compute yet deploy only a single workflow, leaving complementary candidates unused, while query-level methods synthesize a new workflow per query at substantial inference cost. Our motivating analysis shows these paradigms are more complementary than competing: workflows discovered during offline search often solve different subsets of queries, and many queries handled by expensive query-level generation can already be solved by cheaper precomputed workflows. This suggests a different objective: rather than searching for one universally best workflow or regenerating one per instance, we should build a compact bank of reusable, complementary workflows and select among them adaptively at inference time. Doing so requires solving three coupled problems: generating complementary rather than redundant candidates, compressing them into a small deployable portfolio, and assigning each query to the right workflow under a performance-cost trade-off. To this end, we present FlowBank, a three-stage framework for portfolio-based agentic workflow optimization. Diversifying proposes DiverseFlow to steer search toward under-covered queries and produce a high-coverage candidate pool. Curating proposes CuraFlow to compress this pool into a compact portfolio with minimal redundancy. Matching casts deployment as edge-value prediction on a query-workflow bipartite graph and routes each incoming query to the portfolio member with the best predicted utility. Across five benchmarks, FlowBank achieves the highest average score among the evaluated methods while remaining cost-competitive, improving over the strongest automated and handcrafted baselines by 4.26% and 14.92% relative, respectively.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

DiffusionBlocks: Block-wise Neural Network Training via Diffusion Interpretation

arXiv:2506.14202v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: End-to-end backpropagation requires storing activations throughout all layers, creating memory bottlenecks that limit model scalability. Existing block-wise training methods offer means to alleviate this problem, but they rely on ad-hoc local objectives and remain largely unexplored beyond classification tasks. We propose $DiffusionBlocks$, a principled framework for transforming transformer-based networks into genuinely independent trainable blocks that maintain competitive performance with end-to-end training. Our key insight leverages the fact that residual connections naturally correspond to updates in a dynamical system. With minimal modifications to this system, we can convert the updates to those of a denoising process, where each block can be learned independently by leveraging the score matching objective. This independence enables training with gradients for only one block at a time, thereby reducing memory requirements in proportion to the number of blocks. Our experiments on a range of transformer architectures (vision, diffusion, autoregressive, recurrent-depth, and masked diffusion) demonstrate that DiffusionBlocks training matches the performance of end-to-end training while enabling scalable block-wise training on practical tasks beyond small-scale classification. DiffusionBlocks provides a theoretically grounded approach that successfully scales to modern generative tasks across diverse architectures. Code is available at https://github.com/SakanaAI/DiffusionBlocks .

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

Maturing Markov Decision Processes: Decision Making under Increasing Information and Shrinking Action Sets

arXiv:2606.18820v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sequential decision problems often exhibit an asymmetric evolution of information and decision flexibility: as a decision cycle unfolds, the agent receives richer information while feasible actions expire due to operational cutoffs, commitments, or resource constraints. Standard MDP formulations typically flatten this structure into stage-dependent state descriptions and action masks, thereby obscuring the nested information–action asymmetry that determines which decisions are urgent and which can be deferred. We introduce Maturing Markov Decision Processes (MMDPs), a formulation built around this information–action asymmetry. We characterize one of its key consequences through an expiring-action priority principle, which identifies the actions that must be resolved before the next stage. Motivated by this structure, we develop a structure-aware reinforcement learning framework with stage-aware policy design, expiring-action abstraction, and search-augmented learning with distillation. Experiments on a controlled multi-supplier replenishment problem, simplified cash-management environments of increasing complexity, and a production-scale simulator show that explicitly modeling this asymmetry improves learning efficiency and becomes increasingly valuable as decision problems scale.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Bayesian Magnetic Resonance Joint Image Reconstruction and Uncertainty Quantification using Sparsity Prior Models and Markov Chain Monte Carlo Sampling

We propose a novel framework for uncertainty quantification using compressed sensing magnetic resonance image reconstruction. The problem is formulated within a Bayesian framework as a linear inverse problem, with prior distributions assigned to the unknown model parameters. Specifically, the image to be reconstructed is assumed to be sparse in a given basis. We develop a general framework applicable to any basis and as examples, we test the sparsity of the image in its (1) spatial gradients using a total variation prior model, and in its (2) wavelet transform. A Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method, based on a split-and-augmented Gibbs sampler, is then employed to sample from the posterior distribution of the unknown parameters. The non-differentiable conditional distributions are efficiently sampled using a proximal MCMC method. The proposed algorithms are validated on both single-coil and multi-coil datasets using various k-space sub-sampling patterns and ratios. The results demonstrate the superior performance of each proposed approach in reconstructing images compared to its counterpart optimisation-based method. Moreover, our framework effectively quantifies uncertainty, showing a notable correlation between estimated uncertainty maps and error maps computed using ground truth and reconstructed images, compared with existing deep learning-based methods.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Continuous Audio Thinking for Large Audio Language Models

Large audio language models (LALMs) have shown impressive capabilities on diverse audio understanding tasks, ranging from speech transcription to music analysis. However, because LALMs are typically trained to produce text-aligned responses, their hidden states are progressively shaped for text generation rather than for preserving acoustic information. As a result, the diverse acoustic content that audio carries, such as phonetic detail, prosody, sound events, affect, and pitch, is lost along the way and difficult to leverage in the response. We introduce Continuous Audio Thinking (CoAT), a framework that equips audio language models with a continuous latent workspace for organizing acoustic information prior to response generation, grounded by distillation from audio experts. Within the thinking space, the model can utilize the rich acoustic information provided by expert distillation when generating its response. Furthermore, the proposed continuous thinking block can be processed in a single prefill, so CoAT does not require additional autoregressive decoding cost over the baseline. Across three LALMs, Qwen2-Audio, Qwen2.5-Omni-7B, and Audio Flamingo~3, performance gains on a broad benchmark suite spanning audio reasoning, audio understanding, music classification, speech emotion, and speech transcription demonstrate the effectiveness of CoAT. Further analysis confirms that the auxiliary supervision propagates from the thinking positions to the model's textual responses.

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

Predicting Cognitive Load from Speech and Interaction Dynamics in Dyadic Conversations

arXiv:2606.12971v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Estimating cognitive load from speech has largely been studied in controlled laboratory settings, with limited understanding of its reliability in natural collaborative conversations. We investigate whether speech and interaction dynamics predict perceived cognitive load during dyadic conversations. We analyze audio from 53 dyads performing nine collaborative tasks and extract static acoustic, dynamic, and interaction features to train a two-head Gated Recurrent Unit encoder to predict cognitive load scores. Results show conversational interaction provides useful signals for predicting cognitive load related to time pressure, mental work, effort, and task performance. Temporal demand is associated with turn-taking dynamics such as overlap and speaker switch, while mental demand is linked to imbalanced participation between speakers. These findings highlight the importance of task structure and conversational interaction for modeling cognitive load in natural collaborative settings.

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

SPARK: Spatial Policy-driven Adaptive Reinforcement learning for Knowledge distillation

Low-bit quantization enables deployment of image restoration (IR) networks on resource-constrained devices, but introduces rounding noise that disproportionately degrades high-frequency regions such as edges and fine textures. Existing knowledge distillation (KD) methods apply distillation signals uniformly across all spatial locations, overlooking the varying reconstruction difficulty across image regions. To address this, we propose SPARK (Spatial Policy-driven Adaptive Reinforcement Learning for Knowledge Distillation), a framework that adaptively allocates distillation effort using a lightweight reinforcement learning (RL) policy network. At each training step, a difficulty feature extractor computes four signals, namely Laplacian variance, pixel variance, student reconstruction error, and teacher-student knowledge gap, which are fed into a compact policy CNN that produces a stochastic spatial weight map to modulate the KD loss during quantization-aware training (QAT). SPARK is IR task-agnostic, adds no inference cost, and integrates into any existing QAT pipeline without architectural changes. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that SPARK consistently outperforms PTQ, QAT, and state-of-the-art (SOTA) KD approaches across multiple student architectures, achieving reconstruction quality closest to the full-precision teacher under significant computational constraints.

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

InfoPO: Information-Driven Policy Optimization for User-Centric Agents

arXiv:2603.00656v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Real-world user requests to LLM agents are often underspecified. Agents must interact to acquire missing information and make correct downstream decisions. However, current multi-turn GRPO-based methods often rely on trajectory-level reward computation, which leads to credit assignment problems and insufficient advantage signals within rollout groups. A feasible approach is to identify valuable interaction turns at a fine granularity to drive more targeted learning. To address this, we introduce InfoPO (Information-Driven Policy Optimization), which frames multi-turn interaction as a process of active uncertainty reduction and computes an information-gain reward that credits turns whose feedback measurably changes the agent's subsequent action distribution compared to a masked-feedback counterfactual. It then combines this signal with task outcomes via an adaptive variance-gated fusion to identify information importance while maintaining task-oriented goal direction. Across diverse tasks, including intent clarification, collaborative coding, and tool-augmented decision making, InfoPO consistently outperforms prompting and multi-turn RL baselines. It also demonstrates robustness under user simulator shifts and generalizes effectively to environment-interactive tasks. Overall, InfoPO provides a principled and scalable mechanism for optimizing complex agent-user collaboration. Code is available at https://github.com/kfq20/InfoPO.

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

Adv-TGD: Adversarial Text-Guided Diffusion for Face Recognition Impersonation Attacks

The widespread adoption of face recognition (FR) technologies raises serious privacy concerns, as facial data can be exploited without consent. To address this challenge, we propose Adv-TGD, a generative adversarial attack framework that synthesizes photorealistic faces capable of impersonating target identities and deceiving face recognition systems. Built upon Stable Diffusion, Adv-TGD performs per-sample LoRA fine-tuning conditioned on concise textual prompts to generate natural yet adversarially manipulated identities. Unlike conventional identity-attack approaches, our method optimizes lightweight cross-attention adapters for each source-target pair within a single-step denoising process. Latent blending is constrained by a face-local heatmap mask to ensure spatially precise identity manipulation while preserving non-sensitive regions. We introduce a composite objective that integrates masked epsilon-MSE reconstruction, thresholded identity divergence in FR embedding space, directional feature alignment, and source-similarity suppression to balance adversarial attack and visual realism. Optionally, LLaVA-generated attribute prompts enhance fine-grained semantic details without reintroducing identity cues. Under the black-box evaluation protocol, Adv-TGD attains an average attack success rate (ASR) of 85.90% across IR152, IRSE50, MobileFace, and FaceNet, surpassing the semantic SOTA baseline Adv-CPG by +6.25 points, diffusion-based makeup method DiffAIM by +3 points, and noise-based P3-Mask by +16 points. Despite its strong attack efficacy, Adv-TGD preserves high visual fidelity (PSNR = 27.15 dB, SSIM = 0.981). Furthermore, we demonstrate the flexibility of our framework by successfully extending it to in-the-wild datasets (LADN), general object classification (ImageNet), and transformer-based diffusion models (FLUX.1).

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

GRIP: Feedback-Guided Prompt Retrieval for Large Multimodal Models

In-Context Learning (ICL) has become a powerful mechanism for adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to new tasks without fine-tuning. Extending this concept to Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), Multimodal In-Context Learning (M-ICL) relies on retrieving relevant examples, such as images, captions, or question-answer pairs, to guide predictions across tasks like classification, captioning, and visual question answering (VQA). Most existing approaches select in-context examples based on feature-space similarity, assuming that semantically similar samples provide the most useful context. However, our systematic analysis reveals that this assumption does not always hold: visually similar examples are not necessarily those that most effectively enhance in-context learning performance. To address this, we propose the Guided Retrieval of In-context Prompts (GRIP), a learnable vision-only retrieval framework that leverages feedback from LMMs to identify examples that truly improve model predictions. GRIP learns to distinguish beneficial from detrimental in-context examples through contrastive training, refining retrieval beyond pure similarity. Across three multimodal tasks, namely classification, captioning, and VQA, GRIP improves consistently over similarity-based retrieval on Qwen2.5-VL-7B, with its strongest gains in classification on Idefics2-8B. Moreover, we demonstrate that retrievers trained with feedback from one open LMM can be transferred to other models without retraining, including closed-source GPT-4o and Gemini, enabling scalable and cost-efficient deployment of M-ICL. Code will be published upon acceptance.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Rethinking the Pointer Loss in Table Structure Recognition: Geometry-Aware Pointer Loss for Spatial Locality

Table Structure Recognition (TSR) using a pointer network achieves impressive results by predicting HTML sequences while aligning tags to detected text (or cell) regions. However, our analysis reveals that when pointer networks fail, 79.6% of errors occur between spatially adjacent cells (Manhattan distance

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Speeding up the annotation process in semantic segmentation industrial applications

arXiv:2606.19934v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current machine learning models commonly require large and well-annotated datasets. However, the annotation process often becomes a bottleneck, with increased complexity leading to higher chances of human errors. Within this context, our goal in this paper is to leverage unsupervised algorithms to improve data annotation efficiency for complex semantic segmentation problems in industrial materials science. Previous research has quantified labeling time and others explored unsupervised methods. However, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to quantify how much unsupervised algorithms accelerate the labeling process. We aim to validate the extent to which this laborious process can be accelerated, focusing on semantic segmentation tasks that involve annotating each pixel of high-resolution images, such as the microstructure characterization challenge in materials science. Specifically, we demonstrate that by using unsupervised computer vision algorithms, the time required for the labeling process can be reduced from 170 hours to 37 hours, achieving an approximate reduction of 78\%. The dataset we work with includes large images of dimensions 1280x959 and 960x703, which further increases the complexity of the annotation task. Despite these challenges, we create and share the largest public steel microstructure segmentation dataset to date, available under MIT License with permanent DOI, contributing a fully annotated, high-resolution dataset to the field. Additionally, this is the first work to compare the labeling time from scratch (a common approach in previous studies) to the labeling time when using these unsupervised algorithms as a pre-annotation step. Furthermore, we provide a Deep Learning model trained on this dataset, validated by field experts, and deployed in an industrial setting, serving as an initial benchmark for this public dataset.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Learning Interface Breakup: A Geometry-Conditioned Latent Surrogate for Spray Formation

arXiv:2606.16587v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Designing spray nozzles requires predicting how geometry shapes transient two-phase breakup, but high-fidelity volume-of-fluid (VOF) simulations with adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) are too expensive for iterative design exploration. Standard surrogate models are also challenged by this setting because both the liquid–gas interface and the underlying adaptive discretization evolve across time and geometries. We introduce a geometry-conditioned latent surrogate trained on 797 two-phase nozzle simulations that addresses this by encoding the AMR cell-density field, rather than the full multi-channel flow state, as a compact proxy for where the solver concentrates resolution. From this representation, the model reconstructs transient density evolution and nozzle geometry, and a lightweight second stage recovers the remaining flow variables. On held-out simulations, the method accurately captures key interface dynamics while reducing inference time to 0.045 seconds per trajectory, corresponding to a speed-up of more than $6\times10^4$ relative to Basilisk CFD. These results suggest that AMR refinement structure can serve as a compact and learnable representation for geometry-conditioned surrogate modeling of transient two-phase flows.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

T2S: A Rehearsal-Based Approach for Extraction-Resistant Model Watermarking

arXiv:2606.11698v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model watermarking safeguards AI model intellectual property by embedding distinctive knowledge that induces unique behavioral signatures. The primary technical challenge lies in ensuring watermark robustness against various post-processing attacks on the watermarked model. Model extraction attacks emerge as the most severe threat, where adversaries exploit prediction outputs to train surrogate models that illegally replicate the original model's functionality. In this work, we propose a rehearsal-based watermark embedding framework to enhance the robustness of model watermarks against model extraction attacks. By simulating the extraction process, our method leverages the loss of a simulated stolen model on a trigger set as a training signal to fine-tune the watermark knowledge within the target model. This fine-tuning step encourages the watermark to be embedded in a way that boosts transferability, thereby increasing its chances of persisting and remaining detectable in stolen models. Comprehensive experiments conducted under diverse settings demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves the robustness of model watermarks against both model extraction and subsequent watermark removal attacks.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Contactless Respiratory Monitoring on Heterogeneous Mobile Robots: A Multimodal Edge-Computing Framework

Respiratory-rate (RR) monitoring is a critical component of remote triage and victim assessment in emergency response, disaster recovery, and infectious-disease scenarios, where minimizing physical contact can reduce responder risk and improve operational safety. However, field deployment of contactless RR monitoring remains challenging due to variable illumination, posture changes, platform heterogeneity, and the impracticality of wearable sensors in hazardous environments. In this paper, we present a modality-adaptive contactless RR monitoring framework for heterogeneous mobile robots with onboard edge computing. The proposed system combines brightness-adaptive sensor selection across RGB, thermal, near-infrared (NIR), and low-light cameras, keypoint-guided chest ROI extraction for posture-robust monitoring, and a signal-quality-index (SQI)-based filtering mechanism for reliable respiratory estimation. We implement and evaluate the framework on three robotic platforms spanning quadruped and wheeled locomotion and multiple edge-computing architectures. Experiments conducted across diverse lighting conditions, subject poses, and robot-to-subject distances demonstrate that the framework generalizes across platforms without per-platform algorithmic retuning, while revealing modality-specific operational boundaries. RGB provides the broadest coverage up to 8m, NIR remains effective up to 6m, thermal is reliable only at short range, and low-light sensing supports monitoring in complete darkness up to 8m. Overall, the results demonstrate the feasibility of multimodal contactless RR monitoring on mobile robots and support its use as a foundation for autonomous triage and victim assessment in hazardous search-and-rescue settings.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

DRIFT: Refining Instruction Data via On-Policy Data Attribution

arXiv:2606.18307v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Optimizing the training data distribution for Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) dictates the capability of Large Language Models (LLMs). While existing data curation methods excel at accelerating training under constrained budgets, they are less suited to elevating the capability upper bound. The challenge here is no longer to identify a smaller subset that preserves performance, but to refine the data distribution toward instances most capable of improving the final model. To address this problem, we explore instance-level data attribution using Influence Functions (IF). We identify that standard IF formulations struggle in this setting due to two structural limitations: a proximity gap caused by off-policy validation targets, and a severe bias towards gradient norm. We propose DRIFT (Data Refinement via On-Policy Influence Functions for Supervised Fine-Tuning). Instead of relying on external reference data, DRIFT utilizes the model's on-policy rollouts as validation targets, which empirically minimizes the parameter proximity gap and better aligns with the local neighborhood assumption of IF. It further applies signed weighting based on trajectory correctness and debiases influence scores against the gradient hacking issue, allowing a small set of validation queries to act as reliable anchors for attributing the full dataset. Experiments on 7B-parameter instruction and reasoning models show that DRIFT consistently raises the performance ceiling on both, outperforming existing data curation baselines.