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

Learning Dynamics Reveal a Hierarchy of Weight-Induced Layerwise Gram Metrics

arXiv:2606.09744v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study feed-forward ReLU networks with fixed readout and quadratic loss. The aim is to rewrite gradient descent not primarily as a dynamics in weight space, but as a collective dynamics closed in terms of fields defined on the training-set space. For a single hidden layer, the weight variables can be eliminated from the activation dynamics, yielding a closed equation for the residuals governed by a collective kernel that factorizes into an input-geometric matrix and a dynamical co-activation matrix. For deeper networks, the residual dynamics retains a clean layer-wise kernel structure. However, from depth three onward, closure requires a hierarchy of weight-induced Gram operators that mediate information transport across layers. Moreover, the conjugate-field dynamics is governed by operators satisfying a backward pullback recursion, of which the weight-induced Gram operators are the first nontrivial instances.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Geometric and Stochastic Analysis of Discontinuities in Sparse Mixture-of-Experts

arXiv:2606.19036v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE) architectures are now widely deployed in state-of-the-art language and vision models, where conditional routing allows scaling to very large networks. However, this very Top-$k$ expert selection that enables conditional routing also renders the SMoE map inherently discontinuous. In the vicinity of these discontinuity surfaces, even inputs that are arbitrarily close may activate substantially different sets of experts resulting in significantly different outputs. In this work we give a rigorous geometric and stochastic analysis of these discontinuities. We first classify them by order, determined by the number of tied experts at a switching event. Using measure-theoretic slicing arguments, we establish asymptotic volume estimates for the thickened discontinuity surfaces, showing that lower-order discontinuity sets dominate, whereas higher-order ones occupy a vanishingly small relative volume. Next, modeling random perturbations in the input space via a diffusion process, we prove that the path eventually encounter a discontinuity, and moreover that the first hit almost surely occurs on an order-1 discontinuity with explicit finite-time probability bounds. We further derive occupation-time bounds that quantify the duration the random path spend in the neighborhoods of each discontinuity order. These theoretical results imply that inputs are more likely to lie near lower order discontinuities. Motivated by this insight, we propose a simple smoothing mechanism that can be directly applied to existing SMoEs, softly incorporating experts near discontinuities; our analysis guarantees that the added computational overhead remains small while providing localized smoothing near discontinuities, and experiments across language and vision tasks show that smoothing not only enforces continuity of the SMoE map but also enhances empirical performance.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Fast When, Careful Who: Dual-Process Multiparty Turn-Taking with Diffusion Augmentation

Reliable turn-taking is essential for spoken dialogue systems. However, most existing methods are designed for two-speaker interaction and struggle with realistic multiparty audio containing overlap and rapid speaker changes. We study multiparty turn-taking on the VoxConverse dataset and propose an audio-only two-stage pipeline that separates when to trigger a turn boundary from whether the floor is actually transferring. A fast trigger scans the audio and proposes candidate end-of-turn times, while a lightweight verifier runs only at those times to decide \textsc{Hold} or \textsc{Shift} and support next-speaker prediction. We report results in the full multiparty setting and a controlled dyadic top-2 projection for comparability. We also investigate diffusion-based, label-preserving background-audio mixing as a data augmentation strategy. Results show improved shift detection over a baseline, with further improvements from diffusion augmentation.

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

Bring My Cup! Personalizing Vision-Language-Action Models with Visual Attentive Prompting

arXiv:2512.20014v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models generalize well to generic instructions, they struggle with personalized commands such as "bring my cup," where the robot must act on one specific instance among visually similar objects. We study this setting of manipulating personal objects, in which a VLA must identify and control a user-specific object unseen during training using only a few reference images. To address this challenge, we propose Visual Attentive Prompting (VAP), a simple-yet-effective training-free perceptual adapter that equips frozen VLAs with top-down selective attention. VAP treats the reference images as a non-parametric visual memory, grounds the personal object in the scene through open-vocabulary detection and embedding-based matching, and then injects this grounding as a visual prompt by highlighting the object and rewriting the instruction. We construct two simulation benchmarks, Personalized-SIMPLER and Personalized-VLABench, and a real-world tabletop benchmark to evaluate personalized manipulation across multiple robots and tasks. Experiments show that VAP consistently outperforms generic policies and token-learning baselines in both success rate and correct-object manipulation, helping to bridge the gap between semantic understanding and instance-level control.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Sonar-TS: Search-Then-Verify Natural Language Querying for Time Series Databases

Natural Language Querying for Time Series Databases (NLQ4TSDB) aims to assist non-expert users retrieve meaningful events, intervals, and summaries from massive temporal records. However, existing Text-to-SQL methods are not designed for continuous morphological intents such as shapes or anomalies, while time series models struggle to handle ultra-long histories. To address these challenges, we propose Sonar-TS, a neuro-symbolic framework that tackles NLQ4TSDB via a Search-Then-Verify pipeline. Analogous to active sonar, it utilizes a feature index to ping candidate windows via SQL, followed by generated Python programs to lock on and verify candidates against raw signals. To enable effective evaluation, we introduce NLQTSBench, the first large-scale benchmark designed for NLQ over TSDB-scale histories. Our experiments highlight the unique challenges within this domain and demonstrate that Sonar-TS effectively navigates complex temporal queries where traditional methods fail. This work presents the first systematic study of NLQ4TSDB, offering a general framework and evaluation standard to facilitate future research.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

The Impact of Pregnant Womens Dietary Behavior on the Physiological Adaptation Paradox and Maternal-Fetal Resource Conflict in Conflict Settings: A Predictive Analytical Study

This scientific study aims to assess the level of awareness, nutritional knowledge, and actual behavioral practices among pregnant women in the Capital District of Sanaa, Republic of Yemen, and to determine their impact on the health and clinical indicators of the mother and fetus under complex conflict conditions. The study employed a descriptive-analytical approach based on a simple random sample of 200 pregnant women attending government-run hospitals and specialized medical centers in the Capital District. Field data were collected during December 2025 using a structured and validated questionnaire consisting of 42 items measuring demographic variables, awareness, practices, barriers, and health outcomes. The results of the statistical analysis using SPSS software showed a high level of nutritional awareness (87%) and healthy dietary practices (80%) among the sample participants. Simple and multiple linear regression tests revealed a statistically significant effect of awareness and practices in explaining 20.2% of the variance in the health status of the mother and fetus (R{superscript 2}= 0.204, p < 0.001). The study demonstrated that actual behavioral practices have greater predictive power ({beta}=0.316, p=0.001) compared to theoretical cognitive awareness ({beta}=0.232, p=0.005) in determining clinical outcomes for the mother and fetus, highlighting the widening gap between knowledge and behavior under structural pressures. "Morning sickness" (80%) and the deterioration of "family economic status" (71%) emerged as the greatest physiological and material barriers to proper nutrition. With their inferential impact established as an extension of the maternal-fetal resource allocation conflict in a physiologically and economically challenging environment, the study also identified significant differences in nutritional behavior and health outcomes in favor of housewives and mothers who are more educated and have higher incomes, while no significant differences were recorded attributable to obstetric variables such as stage or order of pregnancy. The study offers a unique theoretical and practical contribution by formulating an integrated causal model that demonstrates that the fetus acts as a biological drain on the mothers cellular and mineral reserves in a war environment, which necessitates directing antenatal care and support programs toward effective behavioral empowerment and nutritional support to overcome the structural and material barriers faced by pregnant women.

09.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-18

Ten simple rules for turning your qualifying exam into an NIH-style fellowship proposal: A guide for graduate students

by Courtney Peña-Lima, Cameron S. Bader, Brendan K. Ball, Troy C. Dildine, Mekhala V. Dissanayake, Iris van ‘t Erve, Albina Ibrayeva, Amy Nippert, M.K. Quinn, Chelse Spinner, Samuel Thompson, Antonio Tomasso, Crystal M. Botham Qualifying exams, often referred to as “quals” or candidacy exams, are an important milestone in doctoral programs. Although the style of quals varies greatly by program and institution, it is usually a proposal that requires students to develop research ideas as well as their scientific writing skills. Many quals are modeled after funding mechanisms that graduate students can apply to and on a topic that the student will pursue in their dissertation. This paper offers graduate students a step-by-step guide on how to turn their quals into a fellowship-style research proposal, using National Institutes of Health (NIH) mechanisms as a benchmark, as this is the norm within US research institutions. This paper will be most useful for students who have completed or are in the process of completing proposal-based qualifying exams, usually in the second year of a doctoral program.

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

Hubs or Fringes: Pretraining Data Selection via Web Graph Centrality

The performance of modern language models depends critically on pretraining data composition. Yet existing data selection methods rely on auxiliary classifiers for document scoring or mixture optimization, adding computational overhead and dependence on labeled data. We propose WebGraphMix, a lightweight data selection framework that computes structural centrality scores over the Common Crawl host-level web graph and uses them to vary the proportion of central versus peripheral documents in the pretraining mixture. We hypothesize that central hosts expose models to reusable abstractions, while peripheral hosts encode specialized, long-tail knowledge. WebGraphMix computes centrality scores efficiently at web scale, requiring no model training, labeled data, or downstream supervision. We integrate WebGraphMix into the DataComp-LM pipeline and train models at 400M and 1B parameter scales with 8B and 28B tokens respectively, evaluating on 23 tasks ranging from factual knowledge to symbolic reasoning. Our experiments show that central and peripheral web regions encode complementary capabilities. Mixture combining both at a ratio of 1:1 achieves 41.4% on average, compared to 39.8% for uniform sampling. Combining structural scores with document-level quality classifier scores further improves performance to 43.8%. These findings demonstrate that web graph topology is a meaningful axis for pretraining data curation, capturing information that is largely orthogonal to existing content-based approaches.

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

U$^2$Mamba: A Two-level Nested U-structure Mamba for Salient Object Detection

Mamba-based models have emerged as a promising alternative for salient object detection (SOD), offering significant advantages in modeling long sequences. However, existing models often fail to explore contextual information and the depth of the entire architecture. This paper introduces U$^2$Mamba, a powerful and innovative U-structured network for salient object detection. We propose multiscale Mamba U-blocks (MMUBs) that enhance the model depth to improve local feature extraction capabilities. Our newly developed nested U-structure, incorporating MMUBs, enables the network to integrate various receptive fields from shallow and deep layers, thereby collecting richer contextual information and longer-range data without being constrained by resolution. Instead of using the traditional deep supervision scheme and top-level supervised training, we propose a hierarchical training supervision method where the loss is computed at each level during the training process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that U$^2$Mamba achieves highly competitive performance against state-of-the-art methods. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/JL021/U2Mamba}.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

World Model Self-Distillation: Training World Models to Solve General Tasks

Pretrained video generators are promising visual world models that exhibit emergent task-solving abilities; however, their reliance on detailed textual descriptions limits their direct use for planning and decision-making. Existing approaches either outsource this reasoning to language or vision-language models, or rely on supervised fine-tuning with paired task-execution videos, which are costly to collect and difficult to scale. We propose a scalable framework that elicits task-solving ability in such models by combining self-distillation with reinforcement learning. Given an unlabeled scene image, a vision-language model generates a candidate task and a detailed step-by-step solution. The solution conditions a pretrained video diffusion model, the Demonstrator; we distill its behavior into an Executor conditioned only on the image and a short task prompt. This transfers execution knowledge from caption-guided generation to instruction-conditioned task solving without curated task-video supervision. We further improve the Executor with reinforcement learning from VLM feedback, exploiting the asymmetry between judging whether a sampled video satisfies a task and generating the solution. Experiments on our proposed WorldTasks-Benchmark and the DreamGen robotics benchmark show that the Executor surpasses the Demonstrator under our VLM-based evaluation protocol and transfers competitively to robotic tasks.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Development of an Open-Access Action Observation Video Library for Upper Limb Motor Rehabilitation

Background: Occupational therapists can improve stroke survivors hand and arm movement and participation in daily activities through action observation (AO). AO involves watching another persons hand or arm complete a movement or task. While research generally supports the use of AO with stroke survivors, there are limited AO videos are available to occupational therapists which makes applying AO challenging. Objective: The purpose of this work is to develop structured and widely accessible tool to support access to AO for stroke survivors, occupational therapists, and researchers. Methods: To develop an AO video library for stroke rehabilitation, functional and non-functional upper limb task deficits were first identified through clinical observations and clinician interviews to establish a prioritized list of daily activities. In collaboration with media production specialists, healthy adult volunteers were recruited and filmed performing these tasks from both first- and third-person perspectives. The recorded videos were then systematically edited, enhanced with instructional title slides, and distributed via a public YouTube channel for clinical application and a categorized digital repository for research purposes. Results: Initial assessments revealed a complete lack of familiarity, awareness, and utilization of AO resources among local occupational therapists, despite high perceived clinical utility. To address this gap, a final library of 150 tasks was established, resulting in the production of 419 finalized, standardized videos featuring six healthy volunteers. For clinical application, these videos were hosted on a free, public YouTube channel organized into 18 functional playlists, while a parallel set was structured into distinct movement categories for research repository storage. Conclusion: By providing a structured and highly accessible tool, this repository enables clinicians, researchers, and caregivers to readily implement evidence-based action observation interventions in both clinical and home settings.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Muon$^p$: Muon with Fractional Spectral Powers

arXiv:2606.13867v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Muon is an increasingly widely used optimizer that replaces a gradient $G=USV^\top$ with its polar factor $UV^\top$, thereby flattening the singular spectrum. However, full flattening discards singular-value information that may matter for adaptation. We introduce Muon$^p$, a Muon-style optimizer that instead uses fractional spectral-power updates $US^pV^\top$ for rational $p\in(0,1)$, interpolating between Muon and gradient descent. To make it practical, we prove that fractional spectral powers cannot be computed by any fixed univariate polynomial iteration, and furthermore derive low-degree odd bivariate recurrences that approximate $US^pV^\top$ using only matrix multiplications, preserving Muon's matrix-multiplication-only structure and compute complexity. We show that Muon$^p$ maximizes the linear improvement in loss under the Schatten $q$-norm for $q=1+\frac{1}{p}$. Empirically, Muon$^p$ is especially effective for finetuning: on billion-scale models, Muon$^p$ improves validation perplexity and downstream task performance. We further analyze when Muon$^p$ is less suitable, through the lens of spectral geometry. Our results reveal important insights on when preserving the singular spectrum can bring significant gains, and introduce a principled way to achieve them.

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

Imbalanced Classification under Capacity Constraints

arXiv:2605.03289v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Detecting observations from a minority class under severe class imbalance is a central challenge in applications such as fraud detection, medical screening, and industrial quality control. In these settings, each positive prediction triggers a costly follow-up action, an MRI scan, a transaction audit, whose execution is subject to real operational constraints. This paper proposes a formal classification framework under capacity constraints: given a user-defined bound limit $b$ on the proportion of observations that can be labeled as belonging to the minority class, the goal is to find the classifier that maximizes sensitivity on that class. We characterize the optimal classifier under this constraint and establish its equivalence with the classical Bayes classifier under a reweighting of the prior probabilities. We also introduce a capacity-adjusted performance metric $M$ that accounts for the effective detection rate when the capacity constraint is binding. The framework is implemented on top of standard learning methods, k-NN, SVM, random forests, and neural networks, and statistical consistency is established for each. We further show that these methods reduce to post-hoc thresholding when no hyperparameters are oriented toward the capacity-constrained objective, and introduce a capacity-aware support vector machine that exploits the constraint during training and achieves the strongest empirical performance. Experiments on the Taiwanese credit card default dataset confirm that capacity-constrained classifiers substantially outperform both classical approaches and SMOTE under high imbalance regimes. The framework extends naturally to multiclass settings and online environments.

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

Boundary-Centric Clip-Budgeted Active Learning for Temporal Action Segmentation

Temporal action segmentation (TAS) in untrimmed videos requires dense temporal supervision. However, most of the annotation cost is spent identifying action transitions where segmentation errors concentrate and small temporal shifts can disproportionately degrade segment-level metrics. We introduce B-ACT, a clip-budgeted active learning framework that explicitly allocates supervision to these error-prone boundary regions. B-ACT operates in a hierarchical two-stage loop: (i) it ranks and queries unlabeled videos using predictive uncertainty, and (ii) within each selected video, it detects candidate transitions from the current model predictions and selects the top-$K$ boundaries via a novel boundary score. The boundary score fuses neighborhood uncertainty, class ambiguity, and temporal prediction dynamics to reveal the underlying importance of each frame. Importantly, our annotation protocol requests labels only at the boundary frames while still training on boundary-centered clips to exploit temporal context through the model's receptive field. Extensive experiments on GTEA, 50Salads, and Breakfast demonstrate that boundary-centric supervision delivers strong label efficiency and consistently surpasses representative TAS active learning baselines and prior state of the art under sparse budgets. Gains are largest on datasets where performance is highly sensitive to boundary placement, as measured by edit and overlap-based F1 metrics.

17.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Asymptotic properties for fully coupled delayed forward-backward stochastic differential equations

arXiv:2606.19925v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the asymptotic behavior of solutions to a class of fully coupled forward-backward stochastic differential equations with time-delayed generators. Such systems arise naturally in stochastic models with memory effects and constitute a significant extension of the classical fully coupled FBSDE framework. The presence of delay introduces additional analytical difficulties due to the dependence of the coefficients on the past trajectories of the solution processes and the resulting non-Markovian structure. Under suitable assumptions on the coefficients, we study the asymptotic properties of a perturbed delayed FBSDE driven by a small noise parameter. We first establish the convergence in distribution of the associated solution processes as the perturbation parameter tends to zero. We then prove almost sure convergence towards the solution of the corresponding deterministic limiting system. As a consequence of these asymptotic results, we derive a large deviation principle for the solution processes. Our results extend the asymptotic analysis of Cruzeiro, Gomes and Zhang (2014) from the classical fully coupled FBSDE setting to the delayed framework, and complement existing works on weakly coupled delayed forward-backward systems. They provide, to the best of our knowledge, the first large deviation principle for fully coupled forward-backward stochastic differential equations with delayed generators.

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

Sparse probes and murky physics: a case study of interpretability challenges in a foundation model for continuum dynamics

arXiv:2606.11657v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative AI emulators are increasingly used in scientific domains where we already have strong theory, benchmarks, and physical intuition. This raises a central evaluation and interpretability question: when a foundation-style model can reproduce known continuum dynamics, what internal mechanism supports that behavior, is the internal behaviour consistent with known physics, and how does it relate to where the emulator succeeds or fails? We investigate a cross-domain foundation model for continuum dynamics, Walrus by Polymathic, using mechanistic interpretability guided by physical principles. We apply a sparse autoencoder (SAE) to probe a selected layer, and address the practical challenge of triaging a large feature set (over 20,000) using enstrophy as a physically grounded metric. As a deliberately simple testbed, we focus on shear flow and compare feature recruitment across multiple shear-flow setups, i.e. parameter values in the numerical simulation. Across setups we find evidence of piecewise consistency, with subsets of features recurring in similar roles, but this structure is intermittent and does not map cleanly onto standard physical decompositions. In parallel, direct comparisons between numerical simulation and the emulator reveal systematic output-level discrepancies, including regimes where energy/structures become too diffuse or too localized. We connect parts of these discrepancies to changes in specific SAE feature usage. Our work highlights open questions for scientific foundation models: how to robustly prioritize mechanistically meaningful features, how to separate stable structure from analysis artifacts (including single-layer and SAE limitations), and how to use established benchmarks to decide when "different" internal representations are genuinely informative rather than merely effective.

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

GraspLLM: Towards Zero-Shot Generalization on Text-Attributed Graphs with LLMs

Research on Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs) has gained significant attention recently due to its broad applications across various real-world data scenarios, such as citation networks, e-commerce platforms, social media, and web pages. Inspired by the remarkable semantic understanding ability of Large Language Models (LLMs), there have been numerous attempts to integrate LLMs into TAGs. However, existing methods still struggle to generalize across diverse graphs and tasks, and their ability to capture transferable graph structural patterns remains limited. To address this, we introduce the GraspLLM, a framework that combines Graph structural comprehension with semantic understanding prowess of LLMs to enhance the cross-dataset and cross-task generalizability. Specifically, we represent node texts from different graphs in a unified semantic space with a frozen general embedding model, on top of which we perform motif-aware contrastive learning across multiple motif-induced adjacency matrices to extract dataset-agnostic structural information. Then, with our proposed optimal contextual subgraph, we extract the most contextually relevant subgraph for each target node and align these subgraphs to the token space of LLM via an alignment projector. Extensive experiments on TAG benchmark datasets spanning diverse domains reveal that GraspLLM consistently outperforms previous LLM-based methods for TAGs, especially in zero-shot scenarios, highlighting its strong generalizability across different datasets and tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/Heinz217/GraspLLM.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

"Do Not Mention This to the User": Detecting and Understanding Malicious Agent Skills in the Wild

LLM-based coding agents increasingly rely on third-party extensions called skills, which bundle natural language instructions and helper scripts that execute with full user privileges. Community registries have emerged to distribute these skills, but the security implications remain unstudied due to the absence of labeled threat data. This paper presents a systematic security analysis of 98,380 skills collected from two major registries. Through a combination of static pattern matching and dynamic behavioral verification, we identify 157 skills exhibiting confirmed malicious behavior, encompassing 632 distinct vulnerabilities across 13 attack techniques. Our analysis reveals that these threats are deliberate rather than accidental: each malicious skill contains an average of 4.03 vulnerabilities spanning multiple attack phases. We identify two dominant attack strategies with statistically significant negative correlation – credential theft via remote code execution, and agent manipulation through adversarial instructions embedded in documentation. Over half of all confirmed cases originate from a single threat actor employing templated brand impersonation at scale. We further observe that attack sophistication correlates with concealment investment, with advanced skills universally employing undocumented capabilities while also exploiting platform-native trust mechanisms. Following responsible disclosure, registry maintainers removed all 157 (100%) of the reported skills. Our dataset and detection pipeline are publicly available to facilitate future research on securing LLM agent ecosystems.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

RAVA: Retrieval-Augmented Viewpoint Alignment for Subject-Driven Image Generation

Reference-driven image generation has made rapid progress on identity preservation, but reliable viewpoint control across different subjects remains poorly understood. The difficulty is not merely generating a new image of the target subject: the model must infer the implicit viewpoint of one subject and transfer it to another subject using only image-level evidence, without camera poses, depth, or ray-based conditions. In this setting, existing generators conditioned on multiple image references often rely on spurious semantic correlations, which lead to viewpoint drift, part-level structural mismatches, and missing or unsupported target-specific content. We formulate this challenge as cross-subject viewpoint alignment and propose RAVA, a retrieval-augmented framework that supplies explicit geometric evidence before generation. RAVA first learns a cross-instance viewpoint embedding that retrieves target-subject images aligned with the anchor viewpoint, then applies a LogDet-based subset selection strategy to retain a compact reference set that is both view-consistent and structurally complementary. The selected references are finally consumed by a fine-tuned multi-reference image generator. Experiments show that generic semantic embeddings are nearly random for this task, while the proposed retriever substantially improves viewpoint retrieval quality. On cross-subject generation, RAVA consistently outperforms zero-shot baselines and stronger retrieval alternatives under the same generation backbone. These results indicate that cross-subject viewpoint alignment benefits from retrieval-augmented geometric grounding rather than relying on end-to-end generation alone.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

SpatialClaw: Rethinking Action Interface for Agentic Spatial Reasoning

Spatial reasoning, the ability to determine where objects are, how they relate, and how they move in 3D, remains a fundamental challenge for vision-language models (VLMs). Tool-augmented agents attempt to address this by augmenting VLMs with specialist perception modules, yet their effectiveness is bounded by the action interface through which those tools are invoked. In this work, we study how the design of this interface shapes the agent's capacity for open-ended spatial reasoning. Existing spatial agents either employ single-pass code execution, which commits to a full analysis strategy before any intermediate result is observed, or rely on a structured tool-call interface that often offers less flexibility for freely composing operations or tailoring the analysis to each task. Both designs offer limited flexibility for open-ended, complex 3D/4D spatial reasoning. We therefore propose SpatialClaw, a training-free framework for spatial reasoning that adopts code as the action interface. SpatialClaw maintains a stateful Python kernel pre-loaded with input frames and a suite of perception and geometry primitives, letting a VLM-backed agent write one executable cell per step conditioned on all prior outputs, enabling the agent to flexibly compose and manipulate perception results and adapt its analysis to both intermediate text and visual observations and the demands of each problem. Evaluated across 20 spatial reasoning benchmarks spanning a broad range of static and dynamic 3D/4D spatial reasoning tasks, SpatialClaw achieves 59.9% average accuracy, outperforming the recent spatial agent by +11.2 points, with consistent gains across six VLM backbones from two model families without any benchmark- or model-specific adaptation.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Seasonality, source type, and women's water labor: A longitudinal mixed-methods study in Kenya and Honduras

Women shoulder the majority of water collection labor globally, yet how their water collection and water-related work experiences may change over time or by water source type remains insufficiently understood. We conducted a longitudinal, mixed-methods study in rural Kenya and Honduras to understand how women's experiences collecting water and performing water-related work varied between (a) two time points, (b) improved and unimproved water source types, and (c) water source location. Data were collected in 2023 and 2024 using interviews, observation, GPS-enabled watches, and scales to measure time and distance traveled, water weight and volume carried, and calories expended. 133 women participated in data collection (66 Kenya, 67 Honduras). We compared women's experience data by time point (2023 vs. 2024), source type (improved vs. unimproved), and source location (off-premises vs. on-premises) (t-test, Mann-Whitney U test). We also mapped participants' routes and activities to show which sources were visited, when, and for what activities. In Kenya, mean water collection time, distance, and caloric expenditure were significantly lower and water volume was significantly higher in 2024 when there were unexpected rains compared to 2023 when there was a persistent drought. When comparing source types during the 2023 drought, journeys to improved sources took significantly less time and energy and covered less distance than journeys to unimproved sources. These differences were not observed during the rainy conditions of 2024 when unimproved sources were closer and more accessible. In Honduras, water collection and water work burdens did not differ significantly by time point or source type. We found women with on-premises water access to still expend considerable time and caloric expenditure engaging in water work within their household compounds. Findings from Kenya suggest that water infrastructure improvements can reduce women's water collection burdens, though benefits may depend on and vary by season and source location. Findings from Honduras show that water labor does not end once water is in the household. Rather, substantial time and energy are expended carrying out water-related work even when sources are on premises, suggesting that efforts to assess water labor need to extend beyond collection alone. To meaningfully reduce burdens and ensure improved water sources are utilized during all seasons, initiatives need to consider source location, seasonal variability, and work beyond collection. Evaluations to assess infrastructure impacts on women's labor and well-being are needed and long overdue.

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

Beyond Correctness: Enhancing Architectural Reasoning in Code LLMs via Scalable Labeling with Agentic Judgment

arXiv:2606.14948v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLMs have substantially improved software engineering yet real-world development requires architectural understanding. Such understanding is prohibitively expensive to label manually and impossible to verify through tests alone. We propose an agentic judging pipeline using a strong LLM as a scalable proxy for expert architectural evaluation, comprising two judges: the Architecture Complexity Judge (ACJ), which estimates codebase-specific architectural understanding a task demands, and the Architecture Quality Judge (AQJ), which evaluates patch conformance to repository-specific architectural conventions via source-grounded rubrics. Fine-tuning Qwen3-8B/14B/32B on 3,360 curated instances achieves resolved rates of up to 27.2% on SWE-bench Verified - up to 540% over the base model and 256% over unfiltered fine-tuning. Meanwhile, the trained models achieve strong cross-language generalization and consistent improvements in architectural patch quality.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

EventVLA: Event-Driven Visual Evidence Memory for Long-Horizon Vision-Language-Action Policies

Memory remains a critical bottleneck for long-horizon robotic manipulation, as standard Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies often fail when task-relevant cues become occluded or unobservable over time. While existing memory-augmented methods utilize historical context, they either suffer from severe information bottlenecks, incur high latency via decoupled dual systems, or rely on unselective buffers that accumulate massive visual redundancies. To address these limitations, we introduce EventVLA, an end-to-end framework founded on the concept of sparse visual evidence memory that comprises two core components: foundational visual anchors to retain initial and short-term contexts, and a dynamic Keyframe Evidence Memory (KEM) module. Specifically, KEM directly predicts future keyframe probabilities from the VLA's latent embeddings to autonomously capture and store sparse, task-critical visual events. This foresight-driven mechanism empowers the policy to dynamically evaluate the future causal utility of current observations, preserving transient visual evidence before it becomes unobservable. Furthermore, we propose RoboTwin-MeM, a diagnostic benchmark specifically designed to evaluate non-Markovian manipulation tasks with interactive visual evidence. Extensive evaluations show that across 17 memory-requiring simulation tasks and 4 real-world bimanual tasks, EventVLA achieves an average success rate improvement of +40% over state-of-the-art memory-augmented VLAs.