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01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-22

Isotopic evidence for a cold and distant origin of 3I/ATLAS

Interstellar objects provide the only directly observable samples of icy planetesimals formed around other stars, and can therefore provide insight into the diversity of physical and chemical conditions occurring during exoplanet formation1−3. Here we report isotopic measurements of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, which reveal an elemental composition unlike any Solar System body. The water in 3I/ATLAS is enriched in deuterium, at a level of D/H = (0.98 ± 0.06)%, which is more than an order of magnitude higher than in known comets, while its range of 12C/13C ratios (141–191 for CO2 and 123–172 for CO) exceeds typical values found in the Solar System, as well as nearby interstellar clouds and protoplanetary disks. Such extreme isotopic signatures indicate formation at temperatures  ≲ 30 K in a relatively metal-poor environment. When interpreted with respect to models for Galactic chemical evolution, the carbon isotopic composition implies that 3I/ATLAS may have accreted as long ago as 12 billion years, following a period of intense, early star formation. 3I/ATLAS thus represents a preserved fragment of an ancient planetary system.

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

Optimizing Health Coverage in Ethiopia: A Learning-augmented Approach and Persistent Proportionality Under an Online Budget

arXiv:2509.00135v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As part of nationwide efforts aligned with the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 3 on Universal Health Coverage, Ethiopia's Ministry of Health is strengthening health posts to expand access to essential healthcare services. However, only a fraction of this health system strengthening effort can be implemented each year due to limited budgets and other competing priorities, thus the need for an optimization framework to guide prioritization across the regions of Ethiopia. In this paper, we develop a tool, Health Access Resource Planner (HARP), based on a principled decision-support optimization framework for sequential facility planning that aims to maximize population coverage under budget uncertainty while satisfying region-specific proportionality targets at every time step. We then propose two algorithms: (i) a learning-augmented approach that improves upon expert recommendations at any single-step; and (ii) a greedy algorithm for multi-step planning, both with strong worst-case approximation estimation. In collaboration with the Ethiopian Public Health Institute and Ministry of Health, we demonstrated the empirical efficacy of our method on three regions across various planning scenarios.

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

MapSatisfyBench: Benchmarking Satisfaction-Aware Map Agents through Behavior-Grounded Implicit Decision Factors

arXiv:2606.17453v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model agents are increasingly integrated into map services. Since map services are embedded in everyday-life scenarios rather than professional task settings, users often express their needs informally, resulting in underspecified queries with many unspoken needs, namely, implicit decision factors that are critical for user satisfaction. Although clarification is an effective way to mitigate this issue, it increases user burden in daily interaction, and a capable agent should first proactively recover such factors from available information sources. However, evaluating this ability is challenging. The first challenge is to determine which implicit decision factors are suitable for evaluation. A factor is evaluable only if it affects user acceptance and can be recovered from information available to the agent before it responds. Second, user satisfaction cannot be reliably represented by a single reference answer, requiring a benchmark that converts satisfaction-relevant factors into objective and quantifiable evaluation targets. To address these challenges, we propose a restore-identify-filter framework that reconstructs complete user needs from behavior-chain evidence, identifies implicit decision factors, and retains only those supported by pre-query evidence. Building on this methodology, we construct MapSatisfyBench from large-scale, real-world anonymized user data and annotate ground truth from five dimensions and enables full-chain evaluation of satisfaction-aware map agents. Experiments show that current agents generally perform well on explicit task completion, but remain limited in satisfying implicit decision factors and proactively acquiring the evidence needed for satisfaction-aware decisions. These findings establish MapSatisfyBench as a benchmark for shifting map-agent evaluation from task completion toward satisfaction-aware spatial decision making.

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

OmniOPSD: Rationale-Privileged On-Policy Self-Distillation for Affective Computing

Reinforcement learning for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) is often hindered by severe reward sparsity in complex reasoning tasks. This challenge is particularly pronounced in human-centered scenarios involving states, emotions, intentions, and behaviors, where heterogeneous multimodal signals and subjective human factors make high-quality chain-of-thought (CoT) annotations expensive and difficult to obtain. Although many multimodal datasets provide expert-annotated ground-truth labels, directly using these labels for supervised fine-tuning may encourage shortcut learning in multimodal perception and provides limited transparency for safety-critical human–AI interaction. To address these limitations, we propose OmniOPSD, a Rationale-Privileged On-Policy Self-Distillation framework that uses frontier-generated rationales as teacher-side privileged evidence rather than student imitation targets. OmniOPSD uses frontier-generated evidence-aware rationales only as training-time privileged evidence context for a local teacher. The student samples its own rollout from the original multimodal input, while the rationale-privileged teacher scores the same tokens and provides dense token-level supervision. Thus, the student learns on its own trajectory distribution without directly imitating frontier-model completions, and inference requires no labels, rationales, CoT annotations, or closed-source model access. Experiments on MER-UniBench show that OmniOPSD achieves state-of-the-art performance with an average score of $84.19$, and ablations further support the value of rationale-privileged teacher guidance.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Mitigating Trotter Errors via Post-Processed Symmetry Restoration

arXiv:2606.20242v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum simulation is a powerful tool for exploring complex quantum many-body systems such as condensed matter physics and gauge theories. Trotterization, which approximates the ideal time evolution operator by decomposing it into a sequence of local gate operations, is one of the most widely used quantum simulation algorithms. However, such Trotterized implementations generally fail to preserve the symmetries of the target Hamiltonian during compilation. As a result, they can drive quantum states out of symmetrically allowed subspaces, leading to unphysical dynamics and symmetry-violating algorithmic errors. In this work, we propose a symmetry-based Trotter error mitigation protocol using classical post-processing. By applying symmetry transformations to the initial state or interleaving them between discrete Trotter layers, and then averaging an ensemble of the resulting measurement outcomes via classical post-processing, our method systematically projects out the symmetry-violating components of the Trotter error while leaving the ideal dynamics unchanged. Importantly, this framework naturally accommodates non-local spatial symmetries and anti-unitary operations such as time reversal, which are difficult or impossible to implement directly with hardware-native quantum gates. We benchmark our protocol on the one-dimensional XY model and the one-dimensional Schwinger model. In the XY model, enforcing reflection symmetry suppresses the leading-order Trotter error, whereas in the Schwinger model, interleaving gauge transformations between Trotter layers enables gauge-twirling effectively to reduce unphysical violations of local Gauss's law. These results demonstrate that symmetry-based post-processing provides a depth-preserving route to substantially improving the fidelity of Trotterized quantum simulations on near-term devices.

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

A Recipe for Long-Context Reasoning in Large Language Models via On-Policy Optimization and Distillation

Existing approaches to post-train models for long-context tasks face complementary limitations: (i) supervised fine-tuning (SFT) provides stable supervision but suffers from exposure bias; (ii) reinforcement learning methods such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) train on model-generated trajectories but struggle with long-horizon credit assignment and sparse rewards; and (iii) on-policy distillation (OPD) provides dense token-level guidance but does not directly optimize task rewards. We study these complementary strategies for long-context alignment and derive a recipe that combines GRPO with OPD-style teacher guidance: the student learns from its own rollouts using outcome-level rewards, while a stronger teacher provides dense token-level regularization in place of the standard reference policy. This is especially useful when process-level supervision is difficult to obtain. To support this study, we introduce LongBlocks, a synthetic multilingual dataset spanning multi-hop reasoning, contextual grounding, and long-form generation. Through controlled ablations, we isolate the roles of cold-start initialization, teacher anchoring, and data mixing, showing that our recipe yields a more stable and effective path to long-context reasoning than GRPO or OPD while preserving short-context capabilities.

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Effects of Resveratrol as an Adjunct to a Low-Calorie Diet in Postmenopausal Women with Obesity and Knee Osteoarthritis

Background. Obesity is a modifiable risk factor for osteoarthritis and may contribute to pain, functional impairment, inflammation, and cartilage degradation. Resveratrol has potential anti-inflammatory and chondroprotective effects, but its efficacy as an adjunct to dietary intervention remains unclear. Objective. This study evaluated whether resveratrol supplementation provides additional benefits when combined with a low-calorie diet in postmenopausal women with obesity and knee osteoarthritis. Methods. A total of 97 postmenopausal women with obesity and knee osteoarthritis were included in this randomized controlled clinical study. Participants received either a 10-day low-calorie diet alone or the same diet combined with 150 mg/day trans-resveratrol. Anthropometric parameters, body composition, biochemical markers, pain intensity, functional status, and urinary CTX-II were assessed at baseline and follow-up. Results. Both interventions were associated with reductions in body weight, BMI, waist and hip circumferences, fat mass, glucose, HOMA-IR, lipid parameters, hsCRP, VAS, WOMAC, LAI, and urinary CTX-II. Compared with diet alone, resveratrol supplementation did not provide additional benefits for anthropometric parameters, glucose metabolism, lipid profile, or WOMAC score. However, the resveratrol group showed a greater reduction in hsCRP and urinary CTX-II. The obesity class did not modify the treatment effect. Conclusion. A short-term low-calorie diet improved metabolic, inflammatory, and osteoarthritis-related parameters in postmenopausal women with obesity and knee osteoarthritis. The addition of resveratrol did not enhance weight loss or improve most metabolic outcomes but was associated with greater reductions in hsCRP and urinary CTX-II. These findings suggest a potential anti-inflammatory and cartilage-related effect of resveratrol, which requires confirmation in longer randomized trials.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Dynamic Rollout Editing for Reducing Overthinking in RL-Trained Reasoning Models

Long-form chain-of-thought reasoning can improve LLM performance on complex tasks, but models often continue generating unnecessary reasoning after a correct answer has emerged. We refer to this behavior as overthinking. We study this phenomenon from the perspective of GRPO-style reinforcement learning (RL) post-training, framing it as a training-time credit-assignment problem rather than merely a decoding-time stopping problem. In rollouts sampled at the onset of GRPO training, we observe that successful trajectories can exhibit a slightly higher degree of overthinking than unsuccessful trajectories for the same prompts. This early imbalance provides a starting point for an undesirable feedback loop: because GRPO assigns sequence-level credit, it cannot distinguish the solution-reaching prefix from the unnecessary continuation that lengthens a successful trajectory. Both receive positive update signal, allowing the initial imbalance to grow into more severe overthinking during training. To address this issue, we introduce Dynamic Rollout Editing (DRE), a training-time intervention for successful trajectories that continue thinking after answer emergence. DRE preserves the accepted verified prefix, edits the remaining thinking, and prefers the edited trajectory within the same RL group, weakening the preference signal for unnecessary thinking without penalizing the reasoning needed to reach the answer. Experiments across diverse tasks show the effectiveness of DRE.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Analytic Bijections for Smooth and Interpretable Normalizing Flows

arXiv:2601.10774v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A key challenge in normalizing flows is finding expressive invertible scalar bijections. Existing approaches face trade-offs: affine transformations are smooth and analytically invertible but lack expressivity; monotonic splines offer local control but are only piecewise smooth and act on bounded domains; residual flows achieve smoothness but need numerical inversion. We introduce three families of analytic bijections that are globally smooth ($C^\infty$), defined on all of $\mathbb{R}$, and analytically invertible in closed form, combining the favorable properties of prior approaches. Beyond serving as drop-in replacements in coupling flows, where they match or exceed spline performance, we develop radial flows: a novel architecture using direct parametrization that transforms the radial coordinate while preserving angular direction. Radial flows exhibit exceptional training stability, produce geometrically interpretable transformations, and on targets with radial structure can achieve comparable quality to coupling flows with $1000\times$ fewer parameters. We provide comprehensive evaluation on 1D and 2D benchmarks, and demonstrate applicability to higher-dimensional physics problems through experiments on $\phi^4$ lattice field theory, where our bijections outperform affine baselines and enable problem-specific designs that address mode collapse.

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

GRACE: Boosting Video MLLMs with Grounded Action-Centric Evidence for Viewer Sentiment Prediction

Viewer sentiment prediction in video advertisements aims to infer the latent affective response evoked in the audience. To bridge the gap between what is shown and what is felt, models must deduce hidden viewer emotions from explicit visual narratives, concrete character-object interactions, and visible textual cues. However, standard Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) typically rely on holistic frame representations, which leave these fine-grained, affect-relevant events implicit and complicate precise emotional reasoning. To address this, we propose a grounded action-centric evidence augmentation framework that enhances video MLLMs' clue extraction and comprehension by introducing explicit event structure and localized visual evidence. Our method extracts temporally ordered subject-verb-object (SVO) triplets and auxiliary visible textual cues from action-centric video descriptions, grounds subject and object entities as visual entity crops, and then enables the MLLM to perform clue-enhanced emotional reasoning based on these extracted structured clues. In this way, action triplets specify "what happens", while grounded visual entity crops anchor "who or what participates in each event" to concrete visual evidence. Experiments on the Pitts dataset show consistent improvements over Qwen2.5-VL and Qwen3-VL baselines. Ablation studies, cross-dataset evaluation on AdsQA, and transfer experiments on an emotion-focused TVQA subset further support the effectiveness and generalization of our approach.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Hand-4DGS: Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting for 4D Hand Reconstruction from Egocentric Videos

Dynamic 3D hand reconstruction from egocentric videos is essential for next-generation computing platforms such as AR/VR and AI glasses. Despite its importance, most prior works focus either on multi-view 3D hand reconstruction or on 4D human body reconstruction. Egocentric 4D hand reconstruction remains challenging due to fast head motion, rapid hand dynamics, severe occlusions, and inherent ambiguity from single-view observations. To address these challenges, we introduce Hand-4DGS, the first feed-forward framework for reconstructing dynamic 4D hands directly from egocentric videos, enabling both fast (~60 FPS) inference and strong generalization. Our approach incorporates a mesh-guided representation for structural priors and temporal convolutions to model dynamic motion. We evaluate our framework on two challenging egocentric datasets, H2O and ARCTIC, and demonstrate significant improvements over baselines. Our method benefits from the generalization capability of feed-forward networks and effective 2D image supervision through Gaussian splatting, without requiring expensive 3D hand pose ground-truth annotations.

13.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-14

TopoMIL: Topology Improves Multiple Instance Learning in Diagnostic Microscopic Images

Microscopic images of cells and tissues are central to disease diagnosis. In computational pathology, multiple instance learning (MIL) has emerged as a key paradigm for analyzing numerous images within a single patient sample. While the representative distribution of cells in a sample is important for diagnosis, existing MIL frameworks largely overlook it. We introduce TopoMIL, a framework that extracts the representative topological structure of the sample and integrates it into the MIL classifier. Three topological representations are assessed, each with distinct advantages and computational costs. We evaluate TopoMIL on four histopathology and cytomorphology datasets, each presenting unique challenges. Integrating the sample's topological information into MIL enhances classification across average, max, attention-based, and transformer pooling, yielding AUCROC gains of 3.3%, 4.2%, 5.9%, and 0.5%, respectively, with moderate computational cost. Our work underscores the potential of TopoMIL as a scalable extension to existing morphology-based models in computational pathology.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

CIAN: Multi-Stage Framework for Event-Enriched Image Captioning via Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Event-enriched image captioning describes not only visible content but also the broader context of events, including timing, location, and participants, capabilities missing in most pixel-bound models. We propose the Contextual Image-Article Narrator (CIAN), a multi-stage framework that enriches captions with external narratives. CIAN retrieves relevant articles using SigLIP, summarizes them to guide a Narrative Generation stage with a LoRA-fine-tuned Qwen model, and applies N-Gram-based Refinement for fluency and coherence. On the OpenEvents-V1 benchmark, CIAN achieves high retrieval performance (mAP 0.979) and improves caption quality, increasing CIDEr from 0.030 to 0.094. These results highlight the effectiveness of retrieval-augmented reasoning combined with linguistic refinement for generating context-aware, human-like captions.

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

Credibility-Weighted Pricing of Autonomous Vehicle Liability Under Operational Design Domain Shift

作者:

arXiv:2606.17451v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automated Driving System deployments create a foundational ratemaking challenge: sparse experience, shifting operational design domains, and non-stationary risk across software releases. We propose a hierarchical Bayesian credibility framework pooling across cities, software versions, and territories via a learned ODD-similarity kernel, nesting Buhlmann-Straub as a limiting case. Demonstrated on 648 verified-engaged Waymo crashes across four U.S. metros from the NHTSA Standing General Order database against 116 million matched miles, city-aggregate credibility weights are moderate (0.12-0.46), partial pooling decisively outperforms no pooling, and a power analysis shows the learned kernel's advantage becomes detectable at approximately twelve deployed cities.

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

VISUALSKILL: Multimodal Skills for Computer-Use Agents

Computer-use agents (CUAs) approach human-level performance on standardised benchmarks but still struggle on long-horizon tasks and unseen software. Existing skill libraries address this with reusable skills, but represent the skill artifact as text only, despite the visual nature of GUI interaction. We propose VISUALSKILL: a hierarchical multimodal skill, tailored to each target application and organised as a central index over per-topic files, which the agent consumes through a load_topic MCP tool that fetches the relevant topic's text and figures on demand. We construct each skill with a two-stage pipeline that combines authored documentation with live-application UI exploration. On two CUA benchmarks, CUA-World and OSExpert-Eval, a Claude Code CLI agent backed by Claude Opus 4.6 reaches an average score of 0.456 with VISUALSKILL, a +15.3 point absolute lift over the no-skill baseline (0.303). Against a matched text-only skill that is generated from the same source content and differs from VISUALSKILL only in modality, VISUALSKILL yields a further +8.3 point absolute gain over the matched text-only skill (0.373 vs. 0.456), providing direct evidence that retaining visual figures in the skill artifact, rather than verbalizing them away, helps the agent both identify UI elements and verify workflow state after each action. Our code is available at https://github.com/XMHZZ2018/VisualSkills.

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

The Perceived Fragility of Explanations in Audio Models: Manipulation of Attribution with Unchanged Predictions

arXiv:2606.14466v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper investigates the fragility of post-hoc explanation methods in audio deepfake detection. While previous work on explanation manipulation focused on images using standard $L_p$ metrics, we introduce a psychoacoustic framework that optimizes inaudible perturbations to decouple model attributions from final classifications. We evaluate this vulnerability across state-of-the-art architectures under strict prediction-preserving constraints. By evaluating the manipulation cost through domain-specific perceptual audio quality metrics alongside explanation alignment criteria, our framework demonstrates that an adversary can systematically distort automated explanation heatmaps while preserving the predicted deepfake label. Full code available at: https://github.com/cncPomper/Audio-XAI

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

Observation of alignment tensor effects in metastability-exchange collisions with highly polarized 3He ensembles

arXiv:2606.20330v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Highly polarized 3He ensembles prepared by metastability-exchange optical pumping (MEOP) have been widely used in precision measurements and fundamental physics. Metastability-exchange (ME) collisions, serving as the basis of MEOP, are traditionally described in terms of atomic orientation, while the significant contributions of metastable alignment tensor at high polarization remain unexplored. In this work, we develop a linearized model under mean-field approximation to investigate alignment tensor effects in highly polarized 3He , which originate from the metastable F = 3/2 manifold and are revealed through ME-induced relaxation and frequency shift. By means of free-induction-decay (FID) measurements, a pronounced dependence on nuclear polarization is experimentally observed in the response of the ground-state-metastable hybrid 3He ensembles to the external magnetic field. Furthermore, after obtaining the characteristics of tensor-induced phenomena, we demonstrate good agreement between the experiment and the theory. This work advances the understanding of nuclear spin dynamics in highly polarized 3He using MEOP. It further provides applications in systematic error correction of high-accuracy magnetometry, as well as in optimal protocol for the generation of nuclear spin-squeezed states.

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

ProPlay: Procedural World Models for Self-Evolving LLM Agents

Self-evolving agents are expected to improve through interaction without external supervision, but this remains difficult in partially observable environments where agents must explore actively, learn from limited feedback, and decide when to trust prior experience. Existing LLM-agent methods often rely on memory or planning modules, yet they rarely close the loop between them to continually refine an internal understanding of environment dynamics. We introduce ProPlay, a procedural world model that supports procedure-level preplay, where agents can rehearse future procedural paths using the learned world knowledge. Rather than representing experience as isolated rules or low-level action constraints, ProPlay abstracts successful trajectories into procedures and organizes them in a procedure graph that captures causal transitions among task stages. Each transition is associated with a reliability record embedding to estimate its task-specific contribution from past outcomes. Before each episode, ProPlay simulates future procedural trajectories over known graph structures as structured soft guidance; after execution, it refines the graph using environment feedback. Experiments on public benchmarks show that ProPlay consistently improves environment understanding and self-evolution capability over strong baselines. Our code has been released in https://github.com/antman9914/proplay.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Unsafer in Many Turns: Benchmarking and Defending Multi-Turn Safety Risks in Tool-Using Agents

LLM-based agents are becoming increasingly capable, yet their safety lags behind. This creates a gap between what agents can do and should do. This gap widens as agents engage in multi-turn interactions and employ diverse tools, introducing new risks overlooked by existing benchmarks. To systematically scale safety testing into multi-turn, tool-realistic settings, we propose a principled taxonomy that transforms single-turn harmful tasks into multi-turn attack sequences. Using this taxonomy, we construct MT-AgentRisk (Multi-Turn Agent Risk Benchmark), the first benchmark to evaluate multi-turn tool-using agent safety. Our experiments reveal substantial safety degradation: the Attack Success Rate (ASR) increases by 16% on average across open and closed models in multi-turn settings. To close this gap, we propose ToolShield, a training-free, tool-agnostic, self-exploration defense: when encountering a new tool, the agent autonomously generates test cases, executes them to observe downstream effects, and distills safety experiences for deployment. Experiments show that ToolShield effectively reduces ASR by 30% on average in multi-turn interactions. Our code is available at https://github.com/CHATS-lab/ToolShield.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Mem-World: Memory-Augmented Action-Conditioned World Models for Persistent Robot Manipulation

Action-conditioned world models have emerged as a promising paradigm for robot learning, offering a scalable alternative to costly real-world experimentation by generating action-consistent video rollouts. However, persistent world modeling remains challenging in manipulation: frequent end-effector occlusions and rapid wrist-camera motion make the current observation insufficient for predicting future views, causing models to forget or hallucinate scene details seen in earlier frames. Existing memory retrieval strategies often fail to identify informative history in dynamic manipulation scenarios. To address this limitation, we propose Mem-World, a memory-augmented multi-view action-conditioned world model. At its core, we present W-VMem, a 4D wrist-view-centered surfel-indexed memory that anchors historical observations to temporally evolving surface elements. By explicitly modeling when and where scene elements are observed, W-VMem enables geometry-aware retrieval of relevant history frames conditioned on future actions. During generation, relevant history frames are selected via surfel-based rendering and scoring, providing informative and non-redundant context for prediction. Extensive experiments show that Mem-World generates persistent rollouts in complex manipulation scenarios, enables more reliable policy evaluation than Ctrl-World, improving the Pearson correlation with real-world performance by 14.5\%, and supports effective policy improvement through synthetic data generation, increasing success rates from 58\% to 72\% on long-horizon tasks.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Self-Attention as Transport: Limits of Symmetric Spectral Diagnostics

When a language model processes a hallucinated response, its attention routing tends to fail in one of two shapes: over-concentrating on a narrow set of positions, or spreading so diffusely that relevance is diluted, and the shape of the failure carries diagnostic signal. We study these shapes as a diagnostic characterization, computed from attention matrices under forced scoring of benchmark-labeled responses rather than during live generation. A widely used family of spectral methods analyzes the symmetric component of the degree-normalized attention operator, which governs transport capacity; we prove that every transpose-invariant spectral diagnostic of this operator is structurally orientation-blind (it cannot distinguish an operator from its transpose, and therefore cannot detect information-flow direction), with a converse to the blindness theorem bounding any Lipschitz diagnostic's transpose sensitivity by the asymmetry coefficient $G$. Pairing this with a closed-form bipartite-Cheeger landscape for canonical causal architectures, we show that uniform causal attention satisfies an $n$-independent floor $\phi \ge 1/5$, while window attention pierces the floor as $O(w/n)$; failure modes are shape-different, not just value-different. This floor is an idealized-architecture benchmark, not an empirical attractor: the fraction of real attention heads that pierce it is itself an architectural signature. The resulting two-axis diagnostic ($\phi$ for capacity, $G$ for direction) yields a falsifiable polarity prediction: bottleneck- and diffuse-dominated benchmarks should exhibit opposite polarity. Under length-controlled evaluation, transport features retain interpretable signal (0.62-0.84 LC-AUROC) across the tested decoder-only, encoder-only, and encoder-decoder models, with polarity reversing as predicted between HaluEval and MedHallu.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

EPM-JEPA: Operator-Side Experience Modulation in JEPA-Family World Models

arXiv:2606.12979v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: JEPA-family world models use a static predictor whose weights do not adapt when test-time dynamics diverge from training. We compare two mechanisms for incorporating accumulated experience into a JEPA predictor under distribution shift: operand-side injection, where a compressed experience representation is added as a residual to the predictor's hidden state (EI-JEPA), and operator-side modulation, where the same representation generates low-rank weight deltas via LoRA applied to the predictor's weights (EPM-JEPA). On a pre-registered comparison (Moving MNIST, gravity shift), EPM-JEPA (D_shift^{n=50} = 0.7848 +/- 0.0078, three seeds) differs from EI-JEPA (0.8238) by delta = 4.74% - Outcome C: a null result - by our stated criterion, a valid outcome. As a secondary, non-pre-registered observation, EPM-JEPA improves 1.90% over a no-memory baseline (0.8000), consistently across seeds, while EI-JEPA underperforms the baseline, indicating the benefit is specific to weight-level modulation. Our primary contribution is a mechanism analysis: the D_shift^{n=50} trajectory reflects three independent dynamical processes - buffer cycling, EMA target drift, and an intrinsic LoRA settling transient of +0.021 - rather than convergence to equilibrium. These findings motivate PEM-JEPA, a physics-grounded successor addressing this dynamical-peak limitation.

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

Leveraging Audio-LLMs to Filter Speech-to-Speech Training Data

Large-scale mined corpora provide abundant training data for end-to-end speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) but may contain noise, misalignment, and semantic errors. Filtering noisy data is crucial to maintain robust speech translation performance. We study how to train an audio-language model to make keep/drop decisions on paired speech directly from audio. To obtain reliable supervision without manual labels, we adopt a scalable two-stage Rank-to-Distill strategy. A lightweight ranker generates keep/drop pseudo-labels from noisy speech pairs, then trains an audio large language model to predict keep/drop directly from raw paired speech. The resulting model jointly captures acoustic fidelity and cross-lingual semantic consistency for the selection of speech-conditioned data. Experiments on CVSS-C and SpeechMatrix show consistent improvements over unfiltered training, yielding up to +1.4 ASR-BLEU for end-to-end S2ST.

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

Humor Style Drives Laughter, Topic Shapes Acceptability: Evaluating Bilingual Personal and Political Robot-Delivered AI Jokes

arXiv:2606.13256v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Humor plays a central role in human social relationships, and recent advances in computational humor create new opportunities for integrating humor into human-robot interaction (HRI). While large language models (LLMs) can generate diverse forms of humor, it remains unclear how humor style, joke content, and language preference shape perceptions of robot-delivered humor in group settings. In this exploratory study, we employed a mixed factorial design in which participants evaluated AI-generated jokes delivered by a robot in a university classroom. We examined the effects of humor type (Affiliative, Self-Enhancing, Aggressive, Self-Defeating) and joke content (person-related vs. political) on perceived funniness and appropriateness, as well as preferred language. Results show that humor type significantly influences funniness, with Aggressive and Affiliative humor rated higher, while joke content primarily affects appropriateness, with person-related jokes preferred over political ones. Language preference was shaped by both joke content and participants' self-reported fluency and humor practices.