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

On the Study of Biometric Spoofing Detection using Deep Learning

Biometric systems are increasingly deployed in security applications; however, they remain vulnerable to spoofing attacks, in which attackers exploit counterfeit biometric data to gain unauthorized access. This research evaluates the effectiveness of state-of-the-art machine learning models, MobileNetV2, DenseNet-121, Inception-v3, and Spoof Trace Disentanglement (STD) in detecting spoofing attacks within facial recognition systems. Using the CelebA-Spoof dataset, the study evaluates model effectiveness using metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 Score. Cross-dataset validation is carried out on the MSU-MFSD dataset to assess generalizability. The results show MobileNetV2 as the most efficient model, achieving 92% accuracy while balancing computational effectiveness, making it appropriate for real-life applications. Inception-v3 shows moderate robustness, while DenseNet-121 and STD struggle with generalization. The findings highlight the need for advances in domain adaptation and hybrid architectures to enhance biometric security systems.

03.
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.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

VISTA: Scale-Aware Visual Navigation via Action History Conditioning

arXiv:2606.17294v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision Navigation Foundation Models (VNMs) promise end-to-end learned navigation policies capable of zero-shot deployment across diverse embodiments and environments. To maintain generality, many vision-based navigation models predict normalized actions. However, this normalization introduces a critical deployment vulnerability: applying different scaling factors to the same normalized trajectory alters its physical geometry, which degrades navigation performance and increases collision risks. We address this vulnerability by conditioning the model on normalized action histories alongside image observations, providing explicit context on the relationship between the model's predictions and the robot's actual physical displacement. Furthermore, current VNMs often struggle in visually repetitive environments that lack distinct features. To resolve this issue, we integrate a DINOv3 encoder, whose richer representations enable our model to capture both spatial and geometric dimensions between observations. VISTA generalizes robustly to out-of-distribution environments, achieving 100% goal prediction accuracy in zero-shot, real-world deployment in Outdoor, Forest and Office settings, and an average of 95% checkpoints crossed, demonstrating consistent path following in unseen environments.

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

GPU-accelerated semidefinite programming for causal games

arXiv:2606.20519v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The process matrix formalism describes quantum correlations in scenarios without a fixed causal order between local laboratories. Operational signatures of such correlations can be investigated through causal games. A paradigmatic example is the Guess-Your-Neighbour's-Input game, in which two parties attempt to guess each other's inputs. Correlations compatible with any definite, or probabilistically mixed, causal order cannot achieve a winning probability exceeding $1/2$. The best process-matrix strategy currently known attains a value of approximately $0.6218$ using local dimension $d=5$, while the strongest known dimension-independent upper bound is $0.7592$. In this work, we investigate whether increasing the local dimension beyond $d = 5$ can narrow this gap. To this end, we employ a see-saw optimization scheme in which each step is formulated as a semidefinite program. For scalability, we develop a custom implementation of the SCS solver in which the dominant computational cost, the projection onto the positive-semidefinite cone, is offloaded to a GPU, yielding a six-fold speedup. Using this implementation, we explore local dimensions up to $d = 8$, and we do not find significant improvements over the value at $d=5$. Our results suggest that either qualitatively different strategies are required to approach the known upper bound, or that the bound itself is not tight.

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

Redact or Keep? A Fully Local AI Cascade for Educational Dialogue De-Identification

Educational dialogue is a valuable but sensitive resource for research: the same transcripts that capture authentic learning often capture personally identifiable information (PII) entangled with curricular content, where "Riemann" may refer to a real student or to a mathematical concept. Existing approaches force a tradeoff between governance and accuracy. Commercial Large Language Models (LLMs) can handle this ambiguity but require sending student data to third parties, while local named entity recognition (NER) systems preserve governance but over-redact curricular terms. We propose a fully local cascade framework that reframes de-identification from open-ended entity recognition to constrained privacy triage. A recall-first union proposer combines two lightweight encoders with deterministic rules to over-generate candidate spans; a context-aware reviewer then makes a binary Redact/Keep decision for each candidate using surrounding dialogue and speaker role. We evaluate three reviewer configurations against same-family LLM-only baselines and a commercial API on math tutoring transcripts from two large platforms. The strongest local configuration reaches 0.958 macro F1, compared with 0.767 for a same-family LLM-only baseline and 0.706 for the commercial API, while running entirely on a single laptop. On a targeted challenge set of curricular-personal name ambiguity, the same configuration degrades by only 0.03 F1 versus 0.19 to 0.25 for smaller reviewers. These results suggest that for educational de-identification, problem formulation matters more than model scale.

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

SIMMER: Benchmarking Latent Failures in LLM Executable Planning with a World Model

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as planners for autonomous agents in household environments. While existing benchmarks evaluate whether LLM-generated plans execute successfully, they overlook a critical type of failure: latent failures. Unlike immediate failures that trigger instant feedback at execution time and enable timely correction, latent failures do not immediately halt plan execution but silently compromise goal achievement. In severe cases, they cause irreversible harm. To address this gap, we introduce SIMMER, a benchmark for evaluating latent failures in LLM planning through a human-curated symbolic world model grounded in the kitchen domain. SIMMER defines a world model comprising 77 actions, 262 unique objects, and approximately 46,800 possible interactions that are semantically realistic, derived from real-world cooking scripts. It then leverages a state machine executor that validates plans against the world model and detects immediate precondition violations, latent hazards, and irreversible failures. Experiments across six LLMs show that even frontier models achieve at most 17% error-free plans. Moreover, up to 56% of plans contain latent failures, the majority of which lead to irreversible consequences. We further demonstrate that explicit state reasoning via counterfactual foresight simulation can reduce latent failures by up to 72% and irreversible cases by up to 75%, suggesting a promising direction for more robust LLM planners.

08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Riviera model with egoistical settlers

arXiv:2606.16791v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Riviera model mimics a densifying settlement along the coastline. In the lattice version, houses are built sequentially in empty sites with the constraint that every newly built house has at least one empty neighboring site. The distribution of clusters of adjacent houses does not obey a closed set of evolutionary equations, but the void-cluster-void distribution does. We compute the latter and extract the cluster distribution from it. In the jammed state, when all voids have length one and the evolution ceases, the cluster distribution has a neat form and exhibits a factorial decay with the length of the cluster. To investigate finite systems, we employ a static approach directly treating jammed states. If the coastline is a finite segment, we determine the statistics of the number of empty sites in the jammed state (the average, variance, and higher cumulants). We also study a continuum version in which houses are built along the line so that each newly built house is sufficiently separated from at least one neighboring house.

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

Cinematic Compositing Using Character-Environment-Harmonized Video Generation Models

Cinematic compositing aims to integrate green-screen characters into novel environments while maintaining physical and photometric realism. Previous methods often fail to capture the complex bidirectional interactions between characters and their surroundings, which we characterize as Character-to-Environment (C2E) physical interaction and Environment-to-Character (E2C) lighting harmonization. To address this, we propose an end-to-end video diffusion framework that jointly models C2E and E2C interactions, specifically handling the challenges of interactive props. Our approach introduces a tri-mask-guided architecture with RGB-D joint denoising to ensure physically consistent interactions among the character, props, and environment. We further develop an efficient prior-driven data curation pipeline to construct high-quality relighting pairs without expensive rendering. Finally, a reference-conditioned mechanism enables controllable environment synthesis and precise prop replacement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms existing methods in cinematic-quality dynamic video compositing.

10.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-12

Ten simple rules for executing an inherited research plan in computational biology

by Sahar Javaheri Tehrani, Toni Ingolf Gossmann Trainees in computational biology frequently inherit research plans whose aims, datasets, analytical strategies, and technical constraints were defined before their arrival. These plans often emerge from grants, collaborations, legacy codebases, shared high-performance computing environments, or partially completed analyses. While such plans provide a useful scaffold, they rarely specify all implementation details, prior assumptions, evaluation criteria, or dependencies needed for reliable execution. The transition from inheriting a partially articulated plan to producing reproducible results therefore creates an execution gap: a phase in which trainees must reconstruct what the project is, which elements are fixed, which remain negotiable, and which technical or organizational assumptions need to be tested before full-scale analysis begins. In this Ten Simple Rules article, we provide a practice-oriented framework for stabilizing inherited computational biology projects before workflows, benchmarks, and decision paths become entrenched. We do not claim that the individual practices described here are novel in isolation. Rather, our contribution is to organize familiar practices into a sequenced framework for a recurrent but under-articulated phase of computational research: inherited-plan execution. Computational biology makes this phase especially important because projects often combine heterogeneous datasets, fragile software environments, undocumented preprocessing choices, benchmarking assumptions, distributed collaborators, and asymmetrical access to contextual knowledge. By making this transition visible and operational, the rules aim to help trainees, supervisors, and collaborators reduce ambiguity, test feasibility, document decisions, and support reproducible and equitable project execution under real-world constraints.

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

All Smoke, No Alarm: Oracle Signals in Agent-Authored Test Code

arXiv:2606.18168v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Software practitioners increasingly use AI coding agents that generate test code alongside production code in open source pull requests (PRs). Recent studies report more than 932,000 agent-authored PRs across more than 116,000 repositories, yet whether their test files contain meaningful verification logic remains underexplored. Test files lacking explicit assertions execute code without verifying behavior, so quality gates based on test-file presence overestimate verification strength. The goal of this paper is to help practitioners assess the verification strength of agent-authored patches by characterizing oracle signals and their link to merge outcomes and review effort. We conduct an empirical study of 86,156 test-file patches from 33,596 agent-authored PRs across 2,807 GitHub repositories produced by five coding agents: OpenAI Codex, GitHub Copilot, Devin, Cursor, and Claude Code. A qualitative analysis of 384 stratified patches informs a syntactic taxonomy of eight oracle signal categories. Applied at scale, 80.2% of test patches contain weak or no explicit oracle signals. While raw merge rates are lower for strong-oracle PRs, a regression analysis adjusting for agent, PR size, repository popularity, task type, and language shows strong oracles significantly improve merge likelihood (OR = 1.28, p < 0.001). Our findings suggest that test file counts substantially overestimate verification strength and that practitioners can adopt oracle-aware quality checks to more accurately evaluate agent-authored contributions.

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

Recover Semantics First, Generate Better: Improved Latent Modeling for 3D MRI Reconstruction and Cross-Contrast Synthesis

Multi-contrast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) provides complementary information for clinical diagnosis. However, acquiring all MRI sequences is often time-consuming and costly. Recent generative models perform cross-contrast synthesis to address this issue by inferring absent contrasts from the available ones. Nevertheless, synthesizing 3D MRI presents significant challenges. Due to the massive volume sizes, operating directly in the pixel space is computationally prohibitive; therefore, a common approach is to first compress the 3D volumes into a latent space and subsequently train generative models in that space. We observe that existing compression architectures face several critical issues: they under-preserve long-range anatomical coherence, discard clinically meaningful semantics, and rely on optimization objectives that lead to over-smoothed reconstructions. Ultimately, these shortcomings compromise the performance of subsequent generative models. In this work, we propose a semantics-first latent modeling framework for 3D MRI reconstruction and cross-contrast synthesis. Specifically, we introduce a Latent Harmonization Encoder (LHE) to capture global anatomical dependencies, ensuring coherent volumetric representations. To mitigate semantic degradation during latent compression, we further design a Semantic Recovery Block (SRB) that injects high-level priors from a self-supervised semantic teacher, enhancing contrast-aware separability in the latent space. Additionally, we propose an Anatomy-aware Frequency Loss (AFL) to adaptively preserve diagnostically relevant high-frequency structures. Extensive experiments on two public multi-contrast MRI datasets demonstrate consistent improvements in reconstruction fidelity and cross-contrast synthesis quality. Our code is available at https://github.com/script-Yang/RSF.

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

TS-Fault: Benchmarking Time Series Forecasters Against Structural Faults

arXiv:2606.18539v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time series forecasting (TSF) underpins consequential decisions in energy, transportation, finance, and healthcare, yet TSF models are almost universally ranked by a single number (e.g., average error) on clean held-out data, under the implicit assumption that it predicts deployed reliability. However, real faults are not i.i.d noise but structured events with temporal shape, broken cross-variable dependencies, regime change coupled with missingness, and causal propagation across a sensing pipeline. Treating TSF robustness as a data-quality problem, we present TS-Fault, a benchmark that evaluates forecasting models under explicit, parameterized fault scenarios with controllable semantic difficulty. TS-Fault organizes recurring failures into four modes along two orthogonal axes (observation- vs mechanism-level; univariate vs multivariate) and injects each fault into the most prediction-critical window via a unified importance score. This design enables robustness to be tested against the structures models actually rely on, rather than reduced to generic noise sensitivity. We evaluate 21 models across 6 datasets, 4 modes, and 5 difficulty levels under a paired clean/corrupt protocol. The results reveal three findings that contradict common leaderboard intuition: (i) clean-data accuracy anti-correlates with robustness; (ii) clean rankings are preserved under observation-level faults but reshuffled under mechanism-level faults; and (iii) all catastrophic failures occur under mechanism-level faults, with foundation models achieving the highest clean-data accuracy yet exhibiting the greatest fragility. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Ray-zyy/TS-Fault.

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

OTCHA: Optimal Transport-driven Confidence-aware Latent Hub Alignment for Multi-View Medical Image Classification

Multi-view imaging, such as mammography and chest radiography, is a standard component of clinical practice. However, medical images are often unregistered and contain view-specific artifacts or irrelevant background cues that can obscure diagnostically relevant findings. Many existing methods directly fuse per-view representations, allowing such irrelevant content to contaminate the fused embedding and reducing robustness under varying view configurations. We propose OTCHA, a confidence-aware latent hub token alignment module based on optimal transport (OT) that refines patch tokens before fusion for multi-view classification. OTCHA introduces a set of learnable latent hub tokens shared across views. For each view, we compute an OT plan between patch tokens and hub tokens that jointly considers feature similarity and geometry, and augment the OT formulation with token-conditional dustbins to enable partial matching and discard irrelevant tokens. The resulting transport plan provides token-wise matching confidence, which gates hub-mediated message passing and weights a novel optimal-transport-based representation alignment loss to stabilize refinement. Experiments on three multi-view medical image datasets demonstrate consistent improvements over competing baselines across diverse anatomies and view configurations. Our code is available at https://github.com/labhai/OTCHA.

15.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-08

DipSkmer: Reference-free population genomics with diploid genome skims

Ecologists and conservation biologists rely on genetic diversity as a key essential biodiversity variable (EBV) used to track population health and dynamics, and utilize the population parameter {theta} (estimated by the average pairwise genomic distance) as a key metric of diversity. While whole-genome-sequencing (wgs) is increasingly affordable, it will be considerable time before the full diversity of life is represented by high-quality assembled genomes; even then, constant monitoring will still require repeated sampling of populations. In contrast, genome skimming (low-coverage, short-read wgs) is highly cost-effective but challenging to analyze because the coverage is too low for assembly and reliable error correction. Mature methods, such as Mash, exist for estimating pairwise genomic distances based on the Jaccard similarity of k-mer sets computed using sketching techniques. Some, such as Skmer, additionally model the impacts of low coverage. These methods have been successfully applied to assembly-free species identification and phylogenetics; however, their use in population genetics has been limited. This is because these methods implicitly treat genomes as haploid and heterozygosity confounds true estimates of genomic distance for diploid organisms. In this paper, we address this problem through a number of technical advances. First, we use coalescent theory to mathematically derive how the Jaccard index between two diploid samples changes with the scaled population size parameter ({theta}). Next, we derive an estimator that computes {theta} from the Jaccard index, in addition to several auxiliary variables, which we also estimate from the genome skims. The resulting method, DipSkmer, enables more accurate estimates of coverage, sequencing error, and pairwise nucleotide distance for diploid samples. Analyses of both simulated and empirical datasets show that for diploids and low distances (e.g.,

16.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-08

Effects of SGLT2 inhibition on incident heart failure in carriers of cardiomyopathy-associated genetic variants

Although the beneficial effects of sodium–glucose cotransporter 2 (SGLT2) inhibition in heart failure (HF) have been well established, it is unknown whether SGLT2 inhibition confers benefit in carriers of rare variants in cardiomyopathy-associated genes. Here we evaluated whole-exome sequencing data from the randomized DECLARE-TIMI 58 trial, in which adults with type 2 diabetes and increased cardiovascular risk were randomized to dapagliflozin or placebo treatment. Pathogenic or likely pathogenic variants (P/LP) in high-confidence cardiomyopathy genes were identified, and treatment effects on hospitalization for HF (HHF) were compared between carriers of such variants and noncarriers. Among 12,685 patients for whom sequence data were obtained, 121 carried a cardiomyopathy variant (76 dilated cardiomyopathy, 25 hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and 25 arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy). Over a median follow-up of 4.2 years, dapagliflozin lowered the risk of HHF more strongly in carriers (hazard ratio 0.18, 95% confidence interval 0.04–0.86) than in noncarriers (hazard ratio 0.70, 95% confidence interval 0.57–0.86; P interaction 0.03). Absolute risk reduction was 13.0% in carriers and 1.0% in noncarriers (P interaction 0.03). Most carriers (82%) had no prior HF, and in carriers without prior HF, treatment with dapagliflozin reduced the absolute risk of HHF by 12.8%, compared with a reduction of 0.6% in noncarriers (P interaction 0.01). The findings from this cohort of older and high-risk patients raise the possibility that SGLT2 inhibitor treatment should be started early to prevent HF in individuals who carry P/LP cardiomyopathy variants. These results need to be confirmed in a prospective, dedicated trial of preventive HF treatments in carriers of P/LP cardiomyopathy-associated variants. In a whole-exome sequencing analysis, the beneficial effects of the SGLT2 inhibitor dapagliflozin in reducing the risk of future heart failure hospitalization in individuals with type 2 diabetes were markedly greater in individuals who carried a cardiomyopathy-associated genetic variant compared with noncarriers, suggesting a personalized preventative therapy based on genetic information.

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

Task-Restricted Symmetries in Recurrent Weight Space

arXiv:2606.18457v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recurrent networks can contain substantial functional redundancy in weight space: changing a recurrent matrix may leave the input-output rollout nearly unchanged on a task distribution, while similar-scale changes can destroy the same behavior. We study this redundancy in one-layer tanh RNNs using ordered real Schur coordinates. The Schur form separates spectral blocks from directed nonnormal couplings, giving a diagnostic basis for structured ablations that keep the input and readout maps fixed. In a fixed-length copy task, selected nonnormal Schur couplings can be removed with little loss in some trained solutions, whereas other couplings are necessary for accurate autonomous replay. Across flip-flop, sine generation, and context-dependent integration, the loss-preserving ablation profile varies across tasks and trained solutions. These results identify candidate approximate functional invariances, not universal symmetries of recurrent weight space. Schur-coordinate ablations provide a practical diagnostic for which structured perturbations preserve a trained recurrent solution and which ones disrupt its computation.

18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Improved Amenability Bounds for Local Coordination Games

arXiv:2606.01963v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study local pure coordination games on finite social networks, continuing the framework of Hutchcroft, Rospuskova, and Tamuz. They showed that low inefficiency in local coordination forces the underlying graph to be amenable, with a square-root loss in the amenability parameter. We improve this loss in the binary unbiased setting. Using Shapley values of a mutual-information game associated with the players' local outputs, we prove that if the average disagreement is at most $\varepsilon$, then the graph is $(O(\varepsilon\log(1/\varepsilon)),r)$-amenable. This gives a sharper quantitative converse between local coordination and graph amenability.

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

A Geometric Profile of Semantic Information in Text: Frame-Conditional Uniqueness and a Trade-Off Triangle for Scalar Summaries

How much meaning does a text carry? Shannon's theory measures uncertainty over symbols and is intentionally indifferent to meaning, while pairwise metrics such as BERTScore compare two texts rather than characterizing one. We develop a geometric framework that measures semantic content from the structure of a text's sentence embeddings. The framework has three parts. First, within a fixed embedding and baseline, six natural axioms uniquely determine a scalar measure up to scale, a frame-conditional uniqueness theorem. The resulting scalar is empirically too coarse, motivating a richer representation. Second, we propose a three-coordinate semantic profile capturing novelty (displacement from generic discourse), breadth (diversity of distinct ideas), and integration (connectedness among them), together with a discrete minimal unit (the semantic quantum) whose resolution is fixed by a clustering threshold $\tau$. Third, we prove a no-go theorem: no scalar summary of the profile can simultaneously satisfy analytic stability under paraphrase and concatenation, ordinal robustness across text scales, and cross-representation comparability. We exhibit two practical scalars, $S_{\mathrm{minmax}}$ and $S_{\mathrm{rank}}$, each occupying a distinct corner of this trade-off triangle. Validation across 23 synthetic categories, 5 Project Gutenberg novels, and 3 embedding models confirms the trade-off. The recommended rank-normalized configuration passes 25 of 28 ordinal checks as point estimates (21 of 28 after Benjamini-Hochberg correction), outperforming seven baselines including unigram entropy and a BERTScore-based novelty signal. A separate variational result connects the breadth coordinate to the log-determinant of a determinantal point process (Spearman $\rho = 0.985$ over 507 Gutenberg chapters), giving an optimization-theoretic foundation for breadth.

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

Toward Instructions-as-Code: Understanding the Impact of Instruction Files on Agentic Pull Requests

arXiv:2606.13449v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI-agents (e.g., GitHub Copilot) collaborate as teammates in different software engineering tasks, including code generation proposed through pull requests (Agentic-PRs). For better agent efficiency, developers create instruction files that guide the AI-agents, including how to navigate the project, locate the right components, run tests, respect best practices, and more. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between the creation of these instructions and the performance of AI-agents in creating better pull requests, which have a higher chance of success (i.e., the merge rate), address more complex tasks (e.g., code churn), and require less effort to be merged (e.g., time to merge). To this end, we analyze 15,549 agentic PRs from 148 projects in the AIDev dataset. Using the three dimensions, we compare each project before and after the creation of the instruction files. We find that specifying instructions for AI-agents does not necessarily lead to better results. With the instruction files, 27.7\% of the projects increased their merge rate by at least 20\%, while 26.35\% decreased it. The same observation is seen with the amount of changes (e.g., code churn, number of modified files) and with the efforts to merge an agentic PR (e.g., merge time and number of comments). From a first exploration, we find that projects that managed to increase their merge rate have substantially longer instruction files, which are also well structured into a higher number of sections and sub-sections. Our results motivate the need for research to assist practitioners in framing the development of instruction files as a software engineering activity (aka, Instructions-as-Code).

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

GOOSE-M2F: Adapting Mask2Former for High-Fidelity, Long-Tailed Fine-Grained Semantic Segmentation in Unstructured Outdoor Terrain

We present GOOSE-M2F, a task-specific adaptation of Mask2Former for the GOOSE 2D Fine-Grained Semantic Segmentation (FGSS) Challenge at ICRA~2026. The GOOSE benchmark spans 64 fine-grained classes across unstructured outdoor terrain with a severely long-tailed distribution, where rare classes occupy fewer than 50 pixels per image. We extend the Swin-Large Mask2Former baseline with three targeted contributions: (1)200 Object Queries to eliminate representational saturation; (2)a Feature Refinement Module (FRM) combining ASPP-lite and CBAM dual-attention; and (3)an Auxiliary Supervision Head that delivers direct per-pixel gradients for rare classes. A multi-stage training strategy pairs Distribution-Balanced loss, Rare-Class Copy-Paste augmentation, dynamic IoU-aware re-weighting, and EMA. At inference, a dense sliding-window engine with 2D Gaussian kernel blending and 4-scale TTA adds +10.57\%. GOOSE-M2F achieves 70.08\% Official Composite mIoU (63.55\% fine, 76.61\% coarse), placing 3rd on the GOOSE 2D FGSS leaderboard. Code and trained models are publicly available at: \href{https://github.com/Aditya-Lingam-9000/GOOSE-M2F}{Github GOOSE-M2F Code} and \href{https://huggingface.co/XYZ9843/GOOSE-M2F}{Hugging Face GOOSE-M2F}.

22.
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.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

No classical particle limit for massless quanta

arXiv:2606.14632v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate whether relativistic massless classical particles may emerge as the classical limit of massless quanta. To address this question independently of any specific dynamics, environment, or pointer basis, we develop an axiomatic and purely kinematical framework for the coarse-graining approach. In this formulation, a candidate classical phase space is taken as the outcome space of a POVM subject only to minimal classicality and covariance under the relevant spacetime symmetry group. Applying this framework to the Poincaré group, we prove a no-go theorem for massless particles: the covariance requirement is incompatible with the operational conditions for classicality. The theorem leaves open field-like limits of massless quanta, for example the emergence of electromagnetic or gravitational fields, while ruling out classical massless particles, such as classical photons or gravitons.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Probing PbTe-Pb nanowire devices with radio-frequency reflectometry

arXiv:2606.04544v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We report the implementation of radio-frequency (rf) reflectometry on selective-area-grown PbTe-Pb nanowire devices on a CdTe substrate. These nanowires are predicted to host Majorana zero modes. We demonstrate the compatibility of the rf technique, including both resistive and capacitive sensing, with these nanowires. The effect of dielectric loss from the CdTe substrate is quantitatively characterized. Furthermore, the feasibility of rf reflectometry is verified under finite magnetic fields where zero-energy modes can emerge. Our results establish the fast control of PbTe quantum devices, paving the way for their applications in topological quantum computation.

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

Localizing Anchoring Pathways in Language Models

Irrelevant numbers in a prompt can shift language model judgments, producing anchoring effects in numerical reasoning. We study where this anchor-sensitive signal is carried inside language models using a controlled multiple-choice setup with shared answer options. We define a logit-difference metric comparing the correct answer option with the answer option corresponding to the anchor, and validate that it tracks behavioral anchoring. Using attribution-based circuit localization on 7B–8B Qwen and Llama base and instruction-tuned models, we find that edge-level methods recover this signal more faithfully than node-level methods. Low- and high-anchor circuits transfer strongly within a model, suggesting shared pathway structure across anchor direction. However, sparse transfer across base and instruction-tuned variants is less reliable, indicating that post-training changes which pathways matter most. Overall, our results provide a mechanistic account of how anchoring-related decision signals are carried inside language models.