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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Improving Generalization and Data Efficiency with Diffusion in Offline Multi-agent RL

arXiv:2307.01472v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present a novel Diffusion Offline Multi-agent Model (DOM2) for offline Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL). Different from existing algorithms that rely mainly on conservatism in policy design, DOM2 enhances policy expressiveness and diversity based on diffusion model. Specifically, we incorporate a diffusion model into the policy network and propose a trajectory-based data-reweighting scheme in training. These key ingredients significantly improve algorithm robustness against environment changes and achieve significant improvements in performance, generalization and data-efficiency. Our extensive experimental results demonstrate that DOM2 outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in all multi-agent particle and multi-agent MuJoCo environments, and generalizes significantly better to shifted environments {(in $28$ out of $30$ settings evaluated)} thanks to its high expressiveness and diversity. Moreover, DOM2 is ultra data efficient and requires no more than $5\%$ data for achieving the same performance compared to existing algorithms (a $20\times$ improvement in data efficiency).

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

A Text Recognition Dataset from Sahidic Coptic Ancient Manuscripts

In this work, we target Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) in low-resource scenarios, which arise from underrepresented languages, rare scripts, and degraded visual conditions typical of historical documents. We introduce SCAM (Sahidic Coptic Ancient Manuscripts), a new line-level dataset built from digitized ancient manuscripts written in the extinct Sahidic Coptic dialect. The dataset reflects a realistic and challenging setting, as it combines heterogeneous acquisition conditions across libraries with typical manuscript degradations such as ink fading, bleed-through, and material deterioration. In addition to visual complexity, SCAM poses significant linguistic challenges due to the scarcity of resources for Sahidic Coptic, its uncommon alphabet, and dialect-specific diacritics. To support research in low-resource HTR, we benchmark several state-of-the-art approaches based on different paradigms, highlighting their limitations and strengths in this setting. Our results underline the gap between current HTR performance on well-resourced modern scripts and historically grounded, low-resource scenarios, thus providing a reference point for future developments.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

A Unified Theory of Sinusoidal Activation Families for Implicit Neural Representations

Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) model continuous signals with compact neural networks and have become a standard tool in vision, graphics, and signal processing. A central challenge is accurately capturing fine detail without heavy hand-crafted encodings or brittle training heuristics. Across the literature, periodic activations have emerged as a compelling remedy: from SIREN, which uses a single sinusoid with a fixed global frequency, to more recent architectures employing multiple sinusoids and, in some cases, trainable frequencies and phases. We study this family of sinusoidal activations and develop a principled theoretical and practical framework for trainable sinusoidal activations in INRs. Concretely, we instantiate this framework with Sinusoidal Trainable Activation Functions (STAF), a Fourier-like activation whose amplitudes, frequencies, and phases are learned. Our analysis (i) establishes a Kronecker-equivalence construction that expresses trainable sinusoidal activations with standard sine networks and quantifies expressive growth, (ii) characterizes how the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) spectrum changes under trainable sinusoidal parameterization, and (iii) provides an initialization that yields standard normal post-activations without asymptotic central limit theorem (CLT) arguments. Empirically, on images, audio, shapes, inverse problems (super-resolution, denoising) and NeRF, STAF is competitive and often stronger on distortion-oriented reconstruction metrics such as PSNR/SSIM across the evaluated INR tasks, with favorable parameter efficiency under layer-wise sharing. While periodic activations can alleviate practical manifestations of spectral bias, our results indicate they do not eliminate it; instead, trainable sinusoids can improve the observed capacity-optimization trade-off in the evaluated settings.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

A biological vision inspired framework for machine perception of abutting grating illusory contours

Higher levels of machine intelligence demand alignment with human perception and cognition. Deep neural networks (DNN) dominated machine intelligence have demonstrated exceptional performance across various real-world tasks. Nevertheless, recent evidence suggests that DNNs fail to perceive illusory contours like the abutting grating, a discrepancy that misaligns with human perception patterns. Departing from previous works, we propose a novel deep network called illusory contour perception network (ICPNet) inspired by the circuits of the visual cortex. In ICPNet, a multi-scale feature projection (MFP) module is designed to extract multi-scale representations. To boost the interaction between feedforward and feedback features, a feature interaction attention module (FIAM) is introduced. Moreover, drawing inspiration from the shape bias observed in human perception, an edge detection task conducted via the edge fusion module (EFM) injects shape constraints that guide the network to concentrate on the foreground. We assess our method on the existing AG-MNIST test set and the AG-Fashion-MNIST test sets constructed by this work. Comprehensive experimental results reveal that ICPNet is significantly more sensitive to abutting grating illusory contours than state-of-the-art models, with notable improvements in top-1 accuracy across various subsets. This work is expected to make a step towards human-level intelligence for DNN-based models.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

QUIVER: Cost-Aware Adaptive Preference Querying in Surrogate-Assisted Evolutionary Multi-Objective Optimization

arXiv:2605.04267v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Interactive multi-objective optimization systems face a budget allocation dilemma: one can spend resources on expensive objective evaluations or on eliciting decision-maker preferences that identify the relevant region of the Pareto set. Moreover, preference elicitation itself spans modalities with different information content and cognitive burden, ranging from cheap, noisy pairwise preference statements (PS) to richer but costlier indifference adjustments (IA). We study cost-aware optimization under an unknown scalarization and introduce QUIVER (Query-Informed Value Estimation for Regret), a surrogate-assisted evolutionary multi-objective optimizer that adaptively chooses between objective evaluations and heterogeneous preference queries. At each step, QUIVER selects the next action by maximizing the expected decision-quality improvement per unit total cost. Across DTLZ and WFG benchmarks under synthetic decision-maker models, QUIVER achieves the lowest final utility regret on challenging WFG problems (utility regret of 2.14 on WFG4, 2.82 on WFG9: a 25% improvement over baselines), outperforming all single-modality baselines. We analyze how the optimal mix of PS and IA adapts to problem difficulty: on easy problems (DTLZ2), QUIVER selects 80\% PS queries; on hard problems (WFG9), it shifts to 35% IA queries. This adaptive modality selection demonstrates cost-aware preference learning in action.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Developing a Unified Criminal Justice Pathway into Drug and Alcohol Treatment from Police Custody: A Public Health Service Evaluation and Pathway-Design Project in Blackpool, United Kingdom

Introduction: Blackpool, England's most deprived local authority, has the highest drug-related death rate in the country. People in police custody with problem substance use are a key Core20PLUS5 inclusion-health group, yet referral from the police into structured drug and alcohol treatment is fragmented and relies heavily on self-report. We evaluated the current police-to-treatment route in Blackpool and designed an evidence-informed unified pathway. Materials and Methods: A mixed-methods service evaluation and pathway-design project was conducted during a six-month General Practice / Public Health rotation. Routinely collected referral data from Horizon (the local specialist drug and alcohol service) covering the 47-month period from December 2019 to October 2023 were analysed. Findings were triangulated with national policy, the Project ADDER and Liaison and Diversion evaluations, and the international evidence on police-led pre-arrest diversion. Results: Of 5,900 total referrals into Horizon over 47 months, only 269 (4.56%) originated from the police. Police referrals accounted for fewer than 5% of monthly referrals in 30 of 47 months, for 5 to 9.9% in 16 months, and for >/= 10% in only one month (10.8%, December 2022). Blackpool recorded 76 drug-misuse deaths in 2019-21 (19.4 per 100,000, approximately four times the England rate). A six-step unified pathway is proposed: Initiate Referral (opt-out, from ADDER Police and Liaison and Diversion); Initial Assessment; Tailored Treatment Plan; Continuous Support; Collaboration and Monitoring; and Evaluation and Adjustment. Conclusions: Police contact is markedly under-used as a gateway to treatment despite Blackpool having the highest drug-related mortality in England. An opt-out, multi-agency pathway anchored in Core20PLUS5 has the potential to narrow the treatment gap, reduce re-offending, and address the structural health inequalities that drive premature mortality.

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

Playful Agentic Robot Learning

arXiv:2606.19419v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current agentic robot systems can write executable Code-as-Policy programs, observe feedback, and revise behavior across multiple attempts, but they remain largely task-driven: reusable skills are acquired only after explicit instructions. We study Playful Agentic Robot Learning, where an embodied coding agent uses self-directed play as a continual skill-learning stage before downstream tasks arrive. We introduce RATs, Robotics Agent Teams designed for play-time skill acquisition. During play, RATs proposes novel yet learnable exploratory tasks, plans and executes robot-code policies, verifies intermediate progress, diagnoses failures, retries with dense, step-level feedback, and distills successful executions into a persistent code skill library. At test time, the agent reuses relevant skills from this frozen library to help solve new tasks. Experiments in LIBERO-PRO and MolmoSpaces show that play-learned skills improve held-out downstream tasks over no-play and random-play baselines, with 20.6 and 17.0 percentage-point gains over CaP-Agent0 on LIBERO-PRO and MolmoSpaces, respectively. Moreover, the learned skills can be plugged into other inference-time Code-as-Policy agents by simply retrieving them into the context, improving RoboSuite and real-world transfer by 8.9 and 8.8 points, respectively, without finetuning the underlying model.

08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12

PeptiDIA: A Machine Learning Framework for Enhanced Peptide Identification in Fast-Gradient Data-Independent Acquisition Proteomics

Data-independent acquisition (DIA) mass spectrometry has become increasingly prevalent in proteomics as advances in instrumentation, chromatography, and computational analysis have enabled robust proteome identification across complex biological samples. However, analytical depth achieved with fast chromatographic gradients remains lower than that obtained using long-gradients, reflecting a throughput-depth trade-off. Here, we present PeptiDIA, a machine learning framework that enhances peptide identification in fast-gradient DIA data by leveraging paired fast and long-gradient acquisitions from identical samples. PeptiDIA processes DIA-NN outputs generated at relaxed false discovery rate thresholds to obtain expanded candidate peptide pools and trains gradient-boosted decision tree models using long-gradient identifications as reference labels. The model integrates DIA-NN features with engineered peptide descriptors and applies isotonic regression to calibrate probabilities, enabling controlled peptide recovery relative to the long-gradient reference. Applied to human and murine datasets spanning six tissues acquired on an Orbitrap Exploris 480, PeptiDIA increased peptide identifications by 25-34% at 1% target reference-discordance rate (RDR) and increased the number of protein groups containing at least one rescued peptide by 15-17%. Overall, PeptiDIA improves the identification depth of fast-gradient DIA-NN workflows without altering acquisition strategies. The framework is available as a web application and command-line tool at https://github.com/Jordano700/PeptiDIA.

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

FronTalk: Benchmarking Front-End Development as Conversational Code Generation with Multi-Modal Feedback

We present FronTalk, a benchmark for front-end code generation that pioneers the study of a unique interaction dynamic: conversational code generation with multi-modal feedback. In front-end development, visual artifacts such as sketches, mockups and annotated creenshots are essential for conveying design intent, yet their role in multi-turn code generation remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we focus on the front-end development task and curate FronTalk, a collection of 100 multi-turn dialogues derived from real-world websites across diverse domains such as news, finance, and art. Each turn features both a textual instruction and an equivalent visual instruction, each representing the same user intent. To comprehensively evaluate model performance, we propose a novel agent-based evaluation framework leveraging a web agent to simulate users and explore the website, and thus measuring both functional correctness and user experience. Evaluation of 20 models reveals two key challenges that are under-explored systematically in the literature: (1) a significant forgetting issue where models overwrite previously implemented features, resulting in task failures, and (2) a persistent challenge in interpreting visual feedback, especially for open-source vision-language models (VLMs). We propose a strong baseline to tackle the forgetting issue with AceCoder, a method that critiques the implementation of every past instruction using an autonomous web agent. This approach significantly reduces forgetting to nearly zero and improves the performance by up to 9.3% (56.0% to 65.3%). Overall, we aim to provide a solid foundation for future research in front-end development and the general interaction dynamics of multi-turn, multi-modal code generation. Code and data are released at https://github.com/shirley-wu/frontalk

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

DIMOS: Disentangling Instance-level Moving Object Segmentation

Moving instance segmentation (MIS) attracts increasing attention due to its broad applications in traffic surveillance, autonomous driving, and animal tracking. Event cameras record asynchronous brightness changes, providing high temporal resolution and dynamic range, which makes them highly sensitive to motion information. By fusing event and image features, motion cues from events can complement spatial details from images, enhancing the performance of MIS. However, current multimodal MIS methods still struggle to segment small moving instances, as event cameras often yield sparse features under limited resolution. Moreover, event features entangle appearance attributes with motion cues, which further restricts effective cross-modal fusion. To address these challenges, we first propose a dual-disentangling feature extraction framework that separates and extracts appearance and motion information within both image and event modalities, thereby improving feature density. Subsequently, a multi-granularity cross-modal alignment is introduced to align distributionally and semantically consistent features across modalities, enabling more effective fusion with rich spatial and temporal details. The experiment results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in multimodal MIS, especially for small instances under challenging conditions such as fast motion and low-light settings.

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

ScaffoldAgent: Utility-Guided Dynamic Outline Optimization for Open-Ended Deep Research

arXiv:2606.20122v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open-ended deep research (OEDR) requires systems to acquire knowledge through multi-round retrieval and generate coherent long-form reports. The outline plays a central role as a structural scaffold that coordinates retrieval, evidence organization, and generation. However, existing methods either fix the outline before writing or refine it with local heuristics, leading to scaffold drift under continuous information accumulation and delayed feedback for evaluating outline modifications. We propose ScaffoldAgent, a utility-guided dynamic outline optimization framework for OEDR. ScaffoldAgent models outline evolution as a structured decision process with three operations: Expansion, Contraction, and Revision, enabling controlled updates to the report scaffold. It further introduces a utility-guided feedback mechanism that estimates the downstream value of each outline operation from retrieval gain, structural coherence, and trial-generation quality. The resulting utility signal guides node selection, operation scheduling, and termination during inference. Experiments on DeepResearch Bench and DeepResearch Gym show that ScaffoldAgent consistently improves long-form report generation and factual grounding over existing deep research agents.

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

TaFD: Threat-Aware Frequency Decoupling for Adversarial Robustness against Heterogeneous Attacks

Multi-threat robustness remains a fundamental challenge in deep learning. Although joint adversarial training (JAT) is widely adopted, it suffers from negative transfer under heterogeneous threats, particularly between $\ell_p$-bounded and semantic attacks. Through first-order gradient analysis, we formalize this as gradient incompatibility and theoretically establish the necessity of decoupled optimization. We further reveal that these conflicting threats exhibit separable spectral characteristics in the frequency domain. Motivated by this observation, we propose Threat-aware Frequency Decoupling (TaFD), a two-stage defense framework that reformulates JAT as a frequency-domain divide-and-conquer paradigm. TaFD first discovers latent threat domains via unsupervised clustering of attack spectral prototypes and trains a lightweight classifier for inference-time threat domain identification. Conditioned on the prediction, TaFD employs a Frequency-Conditional Convolution that learns threat-domain-specific spectral masks and routes each sample to the corresponding expert, enforcing structural parameter separation and alleviating optimization conflicts. We validate TaFD on three representative image-classification benchmarks (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Tiny-ImageNet) and on two representative architectures (the convolutional ResNet and the hybrid-transformer MobileViT). Extensive results demonstrate that TaFD achieves more balanced robustness against heterogeneous attacks than existing JAT and frequency-domain baselines, improving average robust accuracy by approximately 11\% over the strongest baseline while maintaining leading clean accuracy.

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

Improved Baselines with Representation Autoencoders

Representation Autoencoders (RAE) replace traditional VAE with pretrained vision encoders. In this paper, we systematically investigate several design choices and find three insights which simplify and improve RAE. First, we study a generalized formulation where the representation is defined as sum of the last k encoder layers rather than solely the final layer. This simple change greatly improves reconstruction without encoder finetuning or specialized data (e.g., text, faces). Second, we study the prevalent assumption that RAE (using pretrained representation as encoder) replaces representation alignment (REPA), which distills the same representation to intermediate layers instead. Through large-scale empirical analysis, we uncover a surprising finding: RAE and REPA exhibit complementary working mechanisms, allowing the same representation to be used as both encoder and target for intermediate diffusion layers. Finally, the original RAE struggles with classifier-free guidance (CFG) and requires training a second, weaker diffusion model for AutoGuidance (AG). We show that REPA itself can be viewed as x-prediction in RAE latent space. By simply re-parameterizing the output of the DiT model, it can provide guidance for "free". Overall, RAEv2 leads to more than 10x faster convergence over the original RAE, achieving a state-of-the-art gFID of 1.06 in just 80 epochs on ImageNet-256. On FDr6, RAEv2 achieves a state-of-the-art 2.17 at just 80 epochs compared to the previous best 3.26 (800 epochs) without any post-training. This motivates EPFID@k (epochs to reach unguided gFID < k) as a measure of training efficiency. RAEv2 attains an EPFID@2 of 35 epochs, versus 177 for the original RAE. We also validate our approach across diverse settings for text-to-image generation and navigation world models, showing consistent improvements. The code is available at https://raev2.github.io.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Topological Data Analysis for High-Dimensional Dynamic Process Monitoring

arXiv:2606.20443v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-time process monitoring requires methods that extract actionable information from high-dimensional time-series data. In this work, we present a new approach for process monitoring that combines tools of topological data analysis (TDA) and machine learning. In the proposed approach, we represent multivariate time-series data as manifolds and use topological descriptors to summarize the structure of such data; we then use a neural ordinary differential equation to learn the dynamic evolution of the topological structure of the system. Using real data from an industrial process, we show that this trajectory-based event detection approach is effective at detecting diverse types of events. We contrast this approach against reconstruction-based approaches such as principal component analysis and autoencoders and against a trajectory-based approach that uses Koopman autoencoders.

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

Improving and Evaluating Hand-Object Interaction Detection

Understanding hands and the objects they interact with, both directly and through tools, is a key step for tasks ranging from action perception to 3D reconstruction and robotics. Our paper provides several contributions to the Hand-Object Interaction (HOI) understanding literature: (1) HOI-DETR, a new framework that introduces hand-object and object-object interactions to the Co-DETR architecture to produce a state-of-the-art method; (2) a comprehensive HOI evaluation suite of 4 diverse datasets, including a video benchmark derived from the HD-EPIC dataset and fresh annotations that improve the Hands23 benchmark and (3) a trained checkpoint that significantly improves the state of the art across Hands23, HOIST, FineBio, and HD-EPIC, including mAP gains of over 20 percentage points on Hands23 and FineBio. Our ablations confirm the contributions of each model component.

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

RCEM: Robust Conversational Search EMbedder in Distributional Shift

We propose RCEM, a Robust Conversational search EMbedder that is additionally equipped with LLM's query reformulation capability without losing base model's generalization. Unlike prior conversational dense retrieval approaches that learn direct conversation-to-passage matching, RCEM aligns conversations, prepended by special token, to LLM-rewritten queries, while preserving the original embedding space. The unchanged embedding space automatically maps the rewritten-query to the relevant passages. As a result, RCEM (1) reduces overfitting by simplifying the alignment task from long passages to shorter rewritten queries, (2) eliminates the need for conversation-to-passage relevance labels for training, and (3) maintains its original embedding space that allows conversational queries against indexes built by original embedder without rebuilding them. Extensive experiments show that RCEM consistently outperforms prior approaches, achieving up to 30% improvement under distributional shift.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Visual-Redundancy-Controlled Parallel Decoding for Diffusion-Based Multimodal Large Language Models

arXiv:2605.25820v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion-based multimodal large language models (dMLLMs) decode by iteratively predicting tokens at multiple masked positions in parallel. This turns each decoding step into a position-selection problem: the model must choose not only which predictions are reliable in isolation, but also which positions should be committed together as context for later decoding steps. Existing confidence-based decoding ranks masked positions independently and commits the top-K positions, largely ignoring whether the committed tokens provide complementary visual grounding. We identify a step-level limitation of this strategy in multimodal settings: high-confidence tokens selected in the same step can rely on overlapping visual grounding, introducing visual redundancy among the committed tokens and leaving less complementary visual grounding available for later decoding. To quantify this effect, we introduce the Visual Redundancy Index (VRI), which measures visual grounding overlap among tokens committed in parallel. To control this redundancy during decoding, we propose Visual-Redundancy-Controlled Decoding (VRCD), a training-free inference-time decoding method that uses token-to-image attention to prioritize visually complementary positions. Across diverse multimodal benchmarks, VRCD reduces visual redundancy and remaining-position entropy with modest runtime overhead. In longer decoding experiments, it also achieves relative accuracy gains of up to 18.8% on M^3CoT and 6.9% on MMBench over confidence-based decoding. Code is available at https://github.com/infiniteYuanyl/VRCD.

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

LLM-WikiRace Benchmark: How Far Can LLMs Plan over Real-World Knowledge Graphs?

arXiv:2602.16902v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce LLM-Wikirace, a benchmark for evaluating planning, reasoning, and world knowledge in large language models (LLMs). In LLM-Wikirace, models must efficiently navigate Wikipedia hyperlinks step by step to reach a target page from a given source, requiring look-ahead planning and the ability to reason about how concepts are connected in the real world. We evaluate a broad set of open- and closed-source models, including Gemini-3, GPT-5, and Claude Opus 4.5, which achieve the strongest results on the easy level of the task and demonstrate superhuman performance. Despite this, performance drops sharply on hard difficulty: the best-performing model, Gemini-3, succeeds in only 23\% of hard games, highlighting substantial remaining challenges for frontier models. Our analysis shows that world knowledge is a necessary ingredient for success, but only up to a point, beyond this threshold, planning and long-horizon reasoning capabilities become the dominant factors. Trajectory-level analysis further reveals that even the strongest models struggle to replan after failure, frequently entering loops rather than recovering. LLM-Wikirace is a simple benchmark that reveals clear limitations in current reasoning systems, offering an open arena where planning-capable LLMs still have much to prove. Our code and leaderboard available at https:/llmwikirace.github.io.

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

MARS: Efficient, Adaptive Co-Scheduling for Heterogeneous Agentic Systems

arXiv:2604.26963v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as the execution core of autonomous agents rather than as standalone text generators. Agentic workloads induce a temporal shift from single-turn inference to multi-turn LLM-tool loops, and a spatial shift from chat-scale, GPU-only execution to repository-scale, GPU-CPU co-located execution. Consequently, coordinating heterogeneous resource demands of agentic execution has emerged as a critical system challenge. We design and implement MARS, an efficient and adaptive co-scheduling system that globally coordinates heterogeneous agentic workloads under coupled GPU-CPU resource pressure. By establishing holistic visibility across GPU inference and CPU tool execution via a unified information stream, an external control plane in MARS decouples admission from execution to prevent heterogeneous resource oversubscription. An internal agent-centric scheduler further minimizes the end-to-end critical path by prioritizing latency-sensitive continuations and adaptively retaining KV cache state only when warm resumption yields a latency benefit. Our evaluations show that MARS reduces end-to-end latency by up to 5.94x while maintaining nearly maximal system throughput. We further integrate MARS as the serving backend for the OpenHands coding agent framework, demonstrating its real-world effectiveness by accelerating end-to-end task completion time by up to 1.87x. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/Afterglow231/MARS_preview .

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

Multi-Granular Node Pruning for Causal Circuit Discovery

arXiv:2512.10903v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Circuit discovery aims to identify minimal subnetworks that are responsible for specific behaviors in large language models (LLMs). Existing approaches primarily rely on iterative edge pruning, which is computationally expensive and limited to coarse-grained units such as attention heads or MLP blocks, overlooking finer structures like individual neurons. We propose a node-level pruning framework for circuit discovery that addresses both scalability and granularity limitations. Our method introduces learnable masks across multiple levels of granularity, from entire blocks to individual neurons, within a unified optimization objective. Granularity-specific sparsity penalties guide the pruning process, allowing a comprehensive compression in a single fine-tuning run. Empirically, our approach identifies circuits that are smaller in nodes than those discovered by prior methods; moreover, we demonstrate that many neurons deemed important by coarse methods are actually irrelevant, while still maintaining task performance. Furthermore, our method has a significantly lower memory footprint, 5-10x, as it does not require keeping intermediate activations in the memory to work.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Corpus Augmentation for Sign Language Translation via LLM-Guided Video Stitching

Sign language translation (SLT) converts sign language video into spoken language text and holds significant promise for improving accessibility and enabling communication between signing and non-signing communities. While large weakly-aligned datasets have enabled pre-training at scale and gloss-free methods have reduced reliance on expert annotation, high-quality parallel sign video-text pairs for fine-tuning remain scarce, limiting generalisation on long-tail vocabulary and unseen constructions. We propose a corpus augmentation approach that requires no additional human annotation, external sign-language video corpora, or generative video models, relying only on the existing gloss-annotated training corpus and an LLM for sentence generation: per-gloss clips are extracted from training videos via CTC forced-alignment, novel gloss-sentence pairs are generated by a corpus-anchored LLM, and synthetic sequences are assembled through random sentence sampling and clip assignment. The resulting synthetic RGB video-text pairs are architecture-agnostic at the downstream training stage and can be consumed directly by RGB-based SLT models, or converted into pose or feature representations by pipelines that derive such inputs from video. Sincan et al. re-evaluated five recent gloss-free methods under strictly identical conditions; the largest verified gain over the GFSLT-VLP baseline was only 0.98 BLEU-4. Our augmentation, applied within the same framework, achieves +2.92 BLEU-4 without any change to architecture or training protocol. We further identify that synthetic data harms vision-language pretraining despite improving its objectives, and that optimising clip transitions for visual smoothness is counter-productive under L2-based criteria; we propose that abrupt boundaries may act as a form of implicit regularisation. Code is available at https://github.com/robizso/slt-datagen.

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

Stochastic trace estimation with tensor train random vectors

arXiv:2606.15679v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Stochastic trace estimation is a standard tool for approximating the trace of a large-scale matrix available only through matrix-vector products. However, in tensor-structured settings, unstructured Gaussian or Rademacher test vectors may be prohibitively expensive to store and compute with, while cheaper rank-one tensor-product vectors can require sample complexities that grow exponentially with the tensor order. This work studies Gaussian random tensor train vectors as a structured alternative for stochastic trace estimation. We show that, with a suitable choice of the tensor train rank, random tensor train vectors recover dimension-independent guarantees for the Girard–Hutchinson estimator. In particular, a median-of-means variant with tensor train rank $r \geq d-1$ achieves the same dependence on the accuracy $\varepsilon$ and failure probability $\delta$ as the classical estimator based on unstructured Gaussian vectors. We further prove an oblivious subspace injection result for sketches formed from independent Gaussian random tensor train vectors: tensor train rank $r\geq d-1$ and $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-2}(k+\log(1/\delta)))$ samples suffice for a $k$-dimensional target subspace. Finally, we investigate the use of such sketches within the Nystr\"{o}m++ framework. We show that the resulting estimator can achieve the desired $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-1})$ sample complexity under an additional spectral-tail condition. These results provide clarififcation on both the potential and the limitations of random tensor train vectors in stochastic trace estimation.

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

ttda704 at SemEval-2026 Task 6: Structured Chain-of-Thought Prompting for Political Evasion Detection

This paper describes our system for SemEval-2026 Task 6, which addresses the classification of political evasion strategies in English question-answer pairs extracted from U.S. presidential interviews. We systematically compare two distinct paradigms: (1) Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning of Qwen3 models (4B-32B) using QLoRA, enhanced with tiered upsampling and weighted cross-entropy loss to address severe class imbalance, and (2) structured Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting of reasoning-capable API models, namely DeepSeek-V3.2 and Grok-4-Fast. Our evaluation demonstrates that structured CoT prompting of reasoning-enabled models substantially outperforms our baseline parameter-efficient fine-tuning implementation in absolute Macro F1. Our best system, Grok-4-Fast with extended reasoning and few-shot hierarchical CoT prompting, achieves a Macro F1 of 0.5147 on Subtask 2 (9-class evasion) and 0.7979 on Subtask 1 (3-class clarity), ranking 8th out of 33 teams on Subtask 2 and 13th out of 41 teams on Subtask 1 on the official leaderboard. Furthermore, our ablation studies reveal key insights into effective prompt design for evasion detection: presenting labels within a hierarchical taxonomy helps structure model reasoning, while few-shot exemplars provide task calibration. However, the strongest prompt variants are not statistically distinguishable in Macro F1, and explicitly enabling extended reasoning modes yields substantial performance gains by facilitating the multi-step pragmatic analysis required to detect evasive intent.

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

Agent-based models for the evolution of morphological alternation patterns

Why is the past of English "go" the apparently unrelated "went"? Such alternations are frequent in languages. They neither aid communication nor learnability, yet they can be persistent, surviving over centuries or millennia. We present a multi-agent simulation of the emergence of morphological stem and inflection alternations. Alternate forms arise by phonological changes or, as with "go/went", from lexical alternatives associated with a subset of the population. When an agent 'hears' another agent use a novel form for a slot in the paradigm of a word (say, the past tense of go), they will with some probability adopt that form, possibly spreading its use to other slots in the paradigm that shared the same original form. Thus alternative forms can spread through the population and become entrenched as stem or inflectional marker alternants. Unlike many previous computational studies, our system allows for naturalistic lexical forms, realistic phonological rules, lexicons with hundreds or thousands of entries, and agent populations in the tens or hundreds. It supports several network topologies, diffusion patterns and agent adoption policies. One issue with such simulations is evaluation: how realistic is the resulting morphology compared to those of real languages? We introduce the AI Historical Linguist, a novel Large Language Model-driven system that models a debate between two historical linguists. We use this to compare a set of real language morphologies, disguised morphologies, and experimentally evolved morphologies. The results suggest that among the factors that favor more plausible morphologies are scale-free social networks and random Bernoulli adoption of forms. We also present three case studies modeling attested historical changes, allowing us to test what might have happened if history had been different. All code and data are released.

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

Towards Understanding What State Space Models Learn About Code

arXiv:2602.06774v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: State Space Models (SSMs) have emerged as an efficient alternative to the Transformer architecture. Prior work shows that, when trained under comparable conditions, SSMs can match or surpass Transformers on code understanding tasks. However, their internal mechanisms remain a black box. We present the first systematic analysis of what SSM-based code models learn along with the direct comparison between SSM and Transformer models in this domain. Our analysis shows that SSMs capture syntactic and semantic structure more effectively than Transformers during pretraining but forgets certain relations during fine-tuning on some tasks. To investigate this behavior, we introduce SSM-Interpret, a frequency-domain framework that exposes a spectral shift toward short-range dependencies during fine-tuning. Guided by these findings, we propose architectural modifications that significantly improve the performance of SSM-based code model by upto +6 MRR on NLCodeSearch. This demonstrates that our analysis not only explains model behavior but also leads directly to better designs.