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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

3D-DLP: Self-Supervised 3D Object-Centric Scene Representation Learning

arXiv:2606.19451v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce 3D-DLP, a self-supervised object-centric representation learning model that decomposes scene-level RGB-D or voxel observations into a set of 3D latent particles. Building on the Deep Latent Particles (DLP) framework, each particle encodes disentangled attributes, including 3D keypoint position, bounding box dimensions, and appearance features, and represents a distinct entity in the scene. The model learns interpretable per-particle segmentation maps through an end-to-end self-supervised reconstruction objective. We demonstrate on both simulated and real-world datasets that the learned latent space is interpretable and controllable: by manipulating particle positions and decoding, we can generate novel scene configurations. Furthermore, we show that leveraging these compact 3D latent particles for downstream robotic manipulation improves performance over baselines that either lack explicit 3D information or rely on memory-intensive dense 3D inputs without object-centric structure. Code and videos are available at https://eubooks3003.github.io/3d-dlp.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Beyond MACs: Hardware Efficient Architecture Design for Vision Backbones

Vision backbone networks play a central role in modern computer vision. Enhancing their efficiency directly benefits a wide range of downstream applications. To measure efficiency, many publications rely on MACs (Multiply Accumulate operations) as a predictor of execution time. In this paper, we experimentally demonstrate the shortcomings of such a metric, especially in the context of edge devices. By contrasting the MAC count and execution time of common architectural design elements, we identify key factors for efficient execution and provide insights to optimize backbone design. Based on these insights, we present LowFormer, a novel vision backbone family. LowFormer features a streamlined macro and micro design that includes Lowtention, a lightweight alternative to Multi-Head Self-Attention. Lowtention not only proves more efficient, but also enables superior results on ImageNet. Additionally, we present an edge GPU version of LowFormer, that can further improve upon its baseline's speed on edge GPU and desktop GPU. We demonstrate LowFormer's wide applicability by evaluating it on smaller image classification datasets, as well as adapting it to several downstream tasks, such as object detection, semantic segmentation, image retrieval, and visual object tracking. LowFormer models consistently achieve remarkable speed-ups across various hardware platforms compared to recent state-of-the-art backbones. Code and models are available at https://github.com/altair199797/LowFormer/blob/main/Beyond_MACs.md.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Post Hoc Localization of Beam F3 Stimulation Targets: An MRI-Derived Geodesic Approach for Refined TMS E-Field Simulations

Background: Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) targeting the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) is an established treatment option in major depressive disorder. One of the most common approaches for targeting the dlPFC is the Beam F3 method, which determines the stimulation site (F3Beam) as a function of external cranial measurements. Precise knowledge of the individual stimulation site is essential for imaging-based analyses of TMS effects. However, due to the method's reliance on individual anatomy, retrospective identification of F3Beam targets across cohorts is challenging, limiting the analysis of existing datasets. We developed a scalable method to reconstruct subject-specific F3Beam target locations for e-field simulations based on structural imaging. Methods: High-resolution three-dimensional (3D) T1-weighted MRI was used to generate individual scalp meshes via the ''Simulation of Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation'' (SimNIBS) software. Subject-specific anatomical distances and coordinates of interest were measured geodesically using a Python-based script to reconstruct the individual F3Beam targets. Validation included a retrospective comparison between digital geodesic measurements and manual cranial measurements in 20 patients and a prospective comparison with MR-visible scalp markers in 2 healthy controls. To assess the impact of our targeting algorithm on e-field simulations, volumetric e-field maps based on three potential targets (F3Beam, F3MNI, F3Geo) were generated in SimNIBS and compared using voxel-wise statistics in SPM12. Results: Retrospective analysis revealed a systematic bias towards higher in vivo measurements compared to digital geodesic measurements, though deviations in the final distances determining F3Beam (xBeam and yBeam) were minimal ({Delta}xBeam: 0.11 {+/-} 0.08 cm; {Delta}yBeam: 0.14 {+/-} 0.21 cm). Prospective validation demonstrated that F3Beam coordinates better matched in vivo coil positions than group-template-derived targets (F3MNI). Group-level analysis showed method-dependent clustering of coil positions with corresponding voxel-wise e-field differences. Conclusions: Individualized geodesic measurements may enable accurate, scalable and retrospective identification of Beam F3 targets and coil orientations. This approach may yield more accurate e-field simulations than group-template based targeting and provides a practical method for retrospective analysis of existing TMS treatment cohorts. This could be leveraged to identify response predictors or imaging-based biomarkers of treatment response.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Internet of Everything in the 6G Era: Paradigms, Enablers, Potentials and Future Directions

arXiv:2604.25018v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The Internet of Everything (IoE) represents an evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT) by integrating people, data, processes, and things into a unified intelligent ecosystem. IoE aims to enhance automation, decision-making, and service efficiency across multiple application domains such as smart cities, healthcare, industry, and next-generation wireless networks. This paper provides a structured overview of the IoE concept, its core components, architectural foundations, enabling technologies, and major research challenges. Finally, open research directions toward 6G-enabled intelligent IoE systems are discussed, with emphasis on scalability, security, privacy, and energy efficiency.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Intermediate State Formation of Topologically Associated Chromatin Domains using Quantum Annealing

arXiv:2505.23289v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Topologically Associating Chromatin Domains are spatially distinct chromatin regions that regulate transcription by segregating active and inactive genomic elements. Empirical studies show that their formation correlates with local patterns of epigenetic markers, yet the precise mechanisms linking 1D epigenetic landscapes to 3D chromatin folding remain unclear. Recent models represent chromatin as a spin system, where nucleosomes are treated as discrete-state variables coupled by interaction strengths derived from genomic and epigenetic data. Classical samplers struggle with these models due to high frustration and dense couplings. Here, we present a quantum annealing (QA) approach to efficiently sample chromatin states, embedding an epigenetic Ising model into the topology of D-Wave quantum processors. Rather than reconstructing exact TAD size distributions or insulation scores, our method reproduces statistical features, such as mean marker incidences and intra-/inter-nucleosome correlations, while generating configurations that exhibit TAD-like structural motifs. These results demonstrate QA as an alternative to explore the chromatin architecture and provide a foundation in epigenetic modeling.

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

Vision-Encoder Behavioral Fingerprints of Image-to-Image Generative Models: A Training-Paradigm-Driven Taxonomy of Six Commercial APIs

Authors:

We study six production image-to-image AI systems (gpt-image-1, Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, Flux Kontext, SDXL img2img, SD3 img2img, and Qwen Image Edit) under a content-adaptive sub-JND adversarial perturbation pipeline, scoring all outputs by frozen DINOv2 ViT-B/14 token distances against clean references. Across a 3,588-call corpus spanning COCO photographs, CelebA-HQ portraits, and AI-generated inputs, the six systems partition into two image-invariant behavioral bands on a 2D (patch_mean, ssim_clean) plane: edit-trained models (Flux Kontext, Qwen Edit, Gemini) cluster in a tight band, while T2I-base models adapted at sampling time (SDXL, SD3, gpt-image-1) cluster in a drift band.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Numerically Optimizing Shortcuts to Adiabaticity: A Hybrid Control Strategy

arXiv:2604.01301v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Achieving fast, excitation-free quantum control is a vital challenge in modern quantum technologies. In many cases, shortcuts to adiabaticity enable fast adiabatic-like protocols, yet determining control parameters that satisfy practical constraints is often challenging in complex systems. Here, we combine an analytical shortcut to adiabaticity approach with several numerical optimization methods to boost the performance of the protocol. As a proof-of-principle for this hybrid approach, we study a particularly intricate control problem, the separation of two trapped ions. We show that this analytical-numerical approach, along with the physical insight gained through the variety of suboptimal solutions, leads to the exploration of new solutions in a complex landscape that yield improvements of up to 3 orders of magnitude. Moreover, this improvement comes with no additional cost from an experimental point of view.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Rule2Text: A Framework for Generating and Evaluating Natural Language Explanations of Knowledge Graph Rules

Knowledge graphs (KGs) can be enhanced through rule mining; however, the resulting logical rules are often difficult for humans to interpret due to their inherent complexity and the idiosyncratic labeling conventions of individual KGs. This work presents Rule2Text, a comprehensive framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to generate natural language explanations for mined logical rules, thereby improving KG accessibility and usability. We conduct extensive experiments using multiple datasets, including Freebase variants (FB-CVT-REV, FB+CVT-REV, and FB15k-237) as well as the ogbl-biokg dataset, with rules mined using AMIE 3.5.1. We systematically evaluate several LLMs across a comprehensive range of prompting strategies, including zero-shot, few-shot, variable type incorporation, and Chain-of-Thought reasoning. To systematically assess models' performance, we conduct a human evaluation of generated explanations on correctness and clarity. To address evaluation scalability, we develop and validate an LLM-as-a-judge framework that demonstrates strong agreement with human evaluators. Leveraging the best-performing model (Gemini 2.0 Flash), LLM judge, and human-in-the-loop feedback, we construct high-quality ground truth datasets, which we use to fine-tune the open-source Zephyr model. Our results demonstrate significant improvements in explanation quality after fine-tuning, with particularly strong gains in the domain-specific dataset. Additionally, we integrate a type inference module to support KGs lacking explicit type information. All code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/idirlab/KGRule2NL.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Would you still call this Dax? Novel Visual References in VLMs and Humans

Vision-language models (VLMs), like human learners, are frequently exposed to new visual concepts, but how they map novel visual references to language after exposure remains largely underexplored, particularly when those references contradict prior knowledge from pre-training. To study this, we present the Novel Visual References Dataset (NVRD): 19,176 images spanning 90 visual concepts across different levels of visual novelty, each with up to 20 increasingly perturbed versions of the original object to probe generalization. Unlike prior work on visual augmentations of familiar concepts, NVRD comprises entirely novel, open-ended stimuli constructed from scratch, mirroring how humans encounter genuinely new concepts. We evaluate 3 open- and 2 closed-source models alongside 2,400 human judgments for direct human-model comparison, and find that (i) models struggle to acquire novel concepts in-context when they contradict prior knowledge, and (ii) while models and humans show correlated sensitivity to visual perturbations, models significantly overgeneralize, extending learned labels to stimuli that humans reject. We contribute NVRD as a corpus and benchmark for research on visual concept learning in both humans and machines.

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

Learning optimal policies from event logs through reinforcement learning: a comparison of deep and MDP-based approaches

arXiv:2303.09209v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Prescriptive Process Monitoring is an emerging area within Process Mining that focuses on recommending actions to optimize business outcomes. Most existing works prescribe pre-defined interventions, i.e., sets of actions applied to ongoing process executions to achieve a specific objective or Key Performance Indicator (KPI). In contrast, only a few approaches have explored learning and evaluating optimal behavioral policies, i.e., general strategies that determine the best sequence of actions to maximize a desired KPI. In this paper, we address the problem of learning optimal behavioral policies by proposing an AI-based approach that learns an optimal policy directly from historical process executions using Reinforcement Learning (RL) to recommend the best actions for optimizing a KPI. To this end, we employ two RL techniques. The first is a classical model-based approach that extends previous work by the authors through the construction of a Markov Decision Process (MDP) capturing process behavior. The second is a model-free technique based on offline Deep RL. Unlike state-of-the-art work, we aim to minimize the use of domain knowledge and learn optimal policies directly from historical event data. This allows us to learn when to apply interventions and discover effective ones directly from data. Moreover, we target complex scenarios involving external actors, where the process owner controls only part of the activities. We adopt a data-driven Business Process Simulation (BPS) environment to evaluate the learned policies. Results show that both methods improve the targeted KPI with similar effectiveness, while the model-based approach outperforms offline Deep RL in computational efficiency.

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

How Fragile Are Training-Free AI-Generated Image Detectors? A Controlled Audit of Score Direction, Preprocessing, and Compression

Training-free detectors of AI-generated images promise generator-agnostic deployment without classifier training, yet their reported numbers are rarely compared under a single controlled protocol. We audit two representative training-free scores – an autoencoder-reconstruction score (AEROBLADE-style) and a noise-perturbation feature-similarity score (RIGID-style) – plus a naive feature-kNN control, on a common 1,500-image GenImage-derived benchmark spanning seven generators and JPEG compression at quality 70 and 50. The audit yields three cautionary findings. (i) Implementation details masquerade as method differences: replacing the LPIPS backbone (AlexNet -> VGG-16) changes overall AUROC by +0.085, and switching between resize-to-512 and native-resolution preprocessing flips per-generator conclusions by up to 0.38 AUROC. (ii) Score direction is not a property of the method but of its hyperparameters: the RIGID-style score is inverted (AUROC < 0.5) on SD1.5 and Wukong at noise level sigma=0.05, recovers to >0.5 for every generator at sigma=0.01, and collapses to 0.15 at sigma=0.3. (iii) Dataset format bias inflates robustness claims: without unified re-encoding, AUROC under JPEG-50 exceeds the clean condition for the AlexNet-backbone reconstruction score; after bias correction the residual anomaly localizes to a single generator (BigGAN). The audited scores have complementary per-generator failure sets, but naive z-score fusion does not beat the best single score, indicating that exploiting complementarity requires direction-aware combination.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Validity and Limitations of the Empatica E4 Wristband for Autonomic and Thermoregulatory Sleep Monitoring Against Concurrent Polysomnography: A Wearanize+ Dataset Study

The Empatica E4 wristband provides continuous multi-modal physiological monitoring including blood volume pulse (BVP), electrodermal activity (EDA) and skin temperature (TEMP) but its validity for sleep-stage-specific autonomic and thermoregulatory monitoring has not been systematically evaluated against concurrent polysomnography (PSG). Using the Wearanize+ dataset which provides synchronised PSG, Empatica E4, and Zmax EEG recordings from 100 home-recorded participants; a systematic validation of Empatica E4 physiological signals against PSG ground truth across five sleep stages was conducted. Of 100 participants, 92 had Empatica data; 69 met Zmax EEG signal quality criteria and formed the analysis sample. Heart rate (HR) from the pre-computed Empatica HR channel showed valid stage-specific patterns (Wake: 70.9 bpm, N3: 61.2 bpm) and moderate inter-device MeanNN correspondence with PSG ECG (Spearman r=0.35-0.42 across stages). Skin temperature showed the expected thermoregulatory pattern (Wake: 33.92C, N3: 35.48C) and is recommended for downstream analyses. Tonic EDA showed an inverted stage pattern attributable to wrist sweat accumulation during deep sleep, representing a known confound for wrist-worn EDA during sleep. Phasic EDA showed plausible patterns and may be used with caution. These findings establish a validated feature set for Empatica E4 sleep research and directly inform multimodal psychiatric biomarker studies using the Wearanize+ dataset.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Higher order PCA-like rotation-invariant features for detailed shape descriptors modulo rotation

Authors:

PCA can be used for rotation invariant features, describing a shape with its $p_{ab}=E[(x_i-E[x_a])(x_b-E[x_b])]$ covariance matrix approximating shape by ellipsoid, allowing for rotation invariants like its traces of powers. However, real shapes are usually much more complicated, hence there is proposed its extension to e.g. $p_{abc}=E[(x_a-E[x_a])(x_b-E[x_b])(x_c-E[x_c])]$ order-3 or higher tensors describing central moments, or polynomial times Gaussian allowing decodable shape descriptors of arbitrarily high accuracy, and their analogous rotation invariants. Its practical applications could be rotation-invariant features to include shape modulo rotation e.g. for molecular shape descriptors, or for up to rotation object recognition in 2D images/3D scans maybe also for 3D scene understanding, or shape similarity metric allowing inexpensive comparison of objects modulo rotation avoiding costly optimization over rotations.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

On the Limits of Stretching Quantum Pseudorandomness

arXiv:2606.24736v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pseudorandom states, introduced by Ji, Liu, and Song (CRYPTO '18), are quantum analogues of classical pseudorandom generators. A fundamental property of classical pseudorandom generators is that their output can be stretched to arbitrary polynomial length. Whether an analogous stretching property holds for quantum pseudorandom states remains unclear. In this work, we prove the first black-box separation between single-copy secure pseudorandom states ($\mathsf{1PRS}$) with different output lengths. Specifically, we construct a quantum oracle relative to which $\mathsf{1PRS}$ with output length $m(n)=1.1n$ exist, but $\mathsf{1PRS}$ with output length $m(n)=\Omega(n^{2+\epsilon})$ do not, for any $\epsilon>0$. Our proof leverages the Common Haar Random State (CHRS) model introduced by Chen, Coladangelo, and Sattath (EUROCRYPT '25), and introduces a technique to bound the effective number of resource CHRS states utilized by any $\mathsf{1PRS}$ generator in this model.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

From Content to Knowledge: Lightning Fast Long-Video Understanding with Neural Knowledge Representations

We propose a new paradigm for long video understanding by treating a long video as a Neural Knowledge Representation (NKR). NKR represents video contents neither as a stream of tokens nor pre-organized databases, but as an individual small portion of network weights attached to the VLM backbone. The NKR weights are optimized to encapsulate the video's semantic content via a novel Agentic Knowledge Distillation (AKD) process, where an agent automatically synthesizes dense descriptions and question-answer pairs to distill the video's knowledge into the NKR. While AKD serves as a comprehensive, one-time encoding phase, the resulting NKR transforms the video into a portable, reusable asset. At inference, the lightweight NKR is mounted onto a frozen Vision-Language Model (VLM), enabling direct, query-based understanding without reloading or re-encoding the original video. This approach decouples video length from inference cost, offering high amortized efficiency for multi-turn video understanding. Experiments on the LVBench benchmark show our method achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art approaches while reducing end-to-end latency by over two orders of magnitude, opening new possibilities for interactive long-video understanding.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Boosting Direct Preference Optimization with Penalization

Authors:

arXiv:2606.12505v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Offline preference optimization has become a practical substitute for reinforcement learning from human feedback, but pairwise objectives such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and its variants use only the chosen and rejected responses stored in a static dataset. This leaves a useful signal unused: the response that the reference model itself would generate for the same prompt. We propose Direct Preference Optimization with Penalization (DPOP), a simple extension of DPO that augments the base preference loss with a gated penalty on reference-greedy responses. DPOP activates this penalty only when the current policy still assigns a lower likelihood to the preferred response than to the rejected response. On AlpacaEval 2.0, DPOP improves length-controlled win rate over DPO, SimPO, and AlphaDPO on both Llama-3-8b-it and Gemma-2-9b-it, achieving relative gains of 5.3\% and 4.4\% over baselines on the two models, respectively. Ablations further show that a SimNPO-style length-normalized penalty is stronger than NPO and token-level unlikelihood in this setting.

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

MVG-KAN: Multi-View Geo-Wind Guided KAN for PM$_{2.5}$ Forecasting

arXiv:2606.24347v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate short-term PM$_{2.5}$ forecasting is important for public health protection, air-quality early warning, and urban environmental management. However, PM$_{2.5}$ variation is driven by multiple coupled factors, including stable periodic changes induced by human activities and meteorological regularity, station-specific short-term concentration evolution, and meteorology-driven pollutant dispersion among monitoring stations. Existing spatio-temporal forecasting methods may capture station relationships to some extent, but distance-only, correlation-based, or purely adaptive graphs are often insufficient to comprehensively represent these heterogeneous factors, especially wind-direction-dependent pollutant transport. To address this problem, we propose a Multi-View Geo-Wind Guided KAN model for PM$_{2.5}$ forecasting, named MVG-KAN, which models station-level PM$_{2.5}$ evolution from three complementary views: local periodic regularity, station-wise residual temporal dynamics, and meteorological-environment-guided spatial dispersion. Specifically, the periodic-residual forecasting backbone first separates stable daily and weekly patterns from non-periodic residual variations. A Geo-Wind Graph is constructed by combining geographic distance decay with wind-direction- and wind-speed-aware transport, providing a lightweight physically motivated directed spatial prior for residual propagation among stations. In addition, a temporal Kolmogorov-Arnold network (TKAN) residual head is then introduced to learn station-wise nonlinear autoregressive correction from de-periodized PM$_{2.5}$ residuals and historical multi-pollutant sequences, thereby enhancing the modeling of local residual inertia and pollutant co-variation.

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

Selecting Samples on Graphs: A Unified Dataset Pruning Framework for Lossless Training Acceleration

The rapid growth of modern training datasets has significantly increased computational cost, motivating dataset pruning~(DP) methods which retain only a subset of informative samples to reduce training cost. Existing pruning criteria typically rely on either intrinsic signals that assess samples independently or extrinsic signals that promote diversity via pairwise relations. While effective in their own specific regimes, each captures only one aspect of sample utility and lacks robustness across different pruning ratios or data distribution. In this work, we present a unified graph-based DP framework. By modeling the dataset as a weighted graph, where node weights encode intrinsic value and edge weights encode extrinsic value, DP can be cast as a Maximum Weight Clique Problem (MWCP). Although MWCP is NP-hard, its structure admits a principled greedy solution based on sample-wise marginal gains. Under a few mild conditions, we further prove that this unified objective enjoys a formal approximation guarantee, which applies to a broad family of importance metrics and provides practical design guidelines. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms existing DP methods while substantially reducing training cost, reducing training time by over 40\% without sacrificing accuracy on ImageNet-1k with ResNet-50.

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

RL-Index: Reinforcement Learning for Retrieval Index Reasoning

arXiv:2606.16316v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieving external knowledge is essential for solving real-world tasks, yet it remains challenging when the relationship between a query and its relevant knowledge involves implicit and complex reasoning beyond surface-level semantic or lexical matching (e.g., mathematical problems relying on the same theorem or coding requiring deep reasoning). Existing approaches primarily rely on query-side reasoning (e.g., query rewriting), which introduces significant online latency and underutilizes the opportunity to perform reasoning over the knowledge corpus itself (i.e., index-side reasoning). In this paper, we propose RL-Index, an agentic indexing framework that formulates retrieval index reasoning as a reinforcement learning problem. Instead of performing reasoning at query time, RL-Index shifts reasoning to the indexing stage by augmenting documents with LLM-generated rationales that explicitly encode the latent query-knowledge relationship. To optimize the quality of these rationales, we employ Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) and use retrieval similarity as a verifiable reward signal, enabling direct optimization of indexing decisions for retrieval effectiveness. Extensive experiments on the BRIGHT benchmark demonstrate that RL-Index consistently improves both retrieval and downstream question-answering performance, while significantly reducing online inference latency. Moreover, the learned rationale augmentation generalizes across diverse retrievers and generators, highlighting its robustness as a plug-and-play indexing strategy across different retrieval systems.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

TRACE: Trajectory-Routed Causal Memory for Delayed-Evidence Visuomotor Imitation

arXiv:2606.14551v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robots under autonomous operation may require decisions based on evidence that is no longer visible. We study delayed-evidence tasks, where an early cue disappears before a later decision point, so visually similar observations can require different actions. In these settings, the current observation is not a sufficient state for control. We introduce TRAjectory-routed Causal Evidence (TRACE), a memory framework for visuomotor imitation policies. TRACE stores task-relevant visual and robot-state evidence, such as object identity, target choice, or route-dependent state, in a fixed-size latent memory that remains bounded over long episodes. Instead of indexing memory by raw time or manually provided task labels, TRACE uses path signatures: compact, order-sensitive features of the executed robot-state trajectory. These signatures do not store the visual cue itself; rather, they provide trajectory-conditioned keys for writing and retrieving the evidence stored when the cue was visible. When the robot later reaches an ambiguous observation, the policy conditions on TRACE memory to recover the missing context and choose the correct branch. TRACE attaches through lightweight adapters to policies, without changing the policy backbone, action head, or imitation objective. Across real-world long-horizon manipulation tasks with visually ambiguous branch points, TRACE improves branch selection and task success over alternative baselines, including short-history and recurrent memory. Project page: https://jeong-zju.github.io/trace

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

Uncertainty Quality of VGGT: An Analysis on the DTU Benchmark Dataset

Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer (VGGT) has already attracted a great deal of attention in a short period of time, not least due to the Best Paper Award at CVPR-2025. Similar to DUSt3R and MASt3R, VGGT aims to bring about a paradigm shift by replacing established methods like bundle adjustment and feature matching with a simple, unified, feed-forward neural network that predicts camera poses, depth maps, and dense 3D structure directly from multiple images of a scene in a few seconds. A key aspect is its ability to process an arbitrary number of views consistently in a single forward pass without any post-processing or iterative optimization. For photogrammetry, this opens new possibilities for real-time, scalable, and accessible 3D reconstruction. In this context, not only high reconstruction accuracy but also high-quality uncertainty estimates are crucial, as they foster trust and enable robust quality assurance. This paper therefore investigates the quality of VGGT's uncertainty predictions. The analysis identifies an effective confidence threshold for filtering VGGT's raw output and demonstrates that enhancing uncertainty quality holds strong potential for improving the accuracy of its 3D reconstructions.

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

Rethinking the Role of Efficient Attention in Hybrid Architectures

Modern language models increasingly adopt hybrid architectures that combine full attention with efficient attention modules, such as sliding-window attention (SWA) and recurrent sequence mixers. However, how these efficient modules shape model capabilities remains poorly understood. To address this gap, we conduct a systematic analysis across hybrid architectures from three perspectives: scaling behavior, mechanism analysis, and architecture design. First, from a scaling perspective, we find that efficient-attention design primarily affects how fast long-context capability emerges, while different hybrids eventually converge to comparable long-context performance under sufficient training. Second, mechanistically, we show that long-range retrieval is mainly carried by full attention, whereas efficient attention shapes its optimization trajectory. This explains a counter-intuitive phenomenon we call Large-Window Laziness: larger SWA windows can delay the formation of retrieval heads in full-attention layers. Third, guided by this mechanism, we show that applying NoPE to only the full-attention layers of a small-window SWA hybrid substantially improves long-context performance with negligible impact on short-context performance.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

CASR: A Robust Cyclic Framework for Arbitrary Large-Scale Super-Resolution with Distribution Alignment and Self-Similarity Awareness

Arbitrary-Scale SR (ASISR) remains fundamentally limited by cross-scale distribution shift: once the inference scale leaves the training range, noise, blur, and artifacts accumulate sharply. We revisit this challenge from a cross-scale distribution transition perspective and propose CASR, a simple yet highly efficient cyclic SR framework that reformulates ultra-magnification as a sequence of in-distribution scale transitions. This design ensures stable inference at arbitrary scales while requiring only a single model. CASR tackles two major bottlenecks: distribution drift across iterations and patch-wise diffusion inconsistencies. The proposed SSAM module aligns structural distributions via superpixel aggregation, preventing error accumulation, while SARM module restores high-frequency textures by enforcing correlation-guided consistency and preserving self-similarity structure through correlation alignment. Despite using only a single model, our approach significantly reduces distribution drift, preserves long-range texture consistency, and achieves superior generalization even at extreme magnification.

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

On the Reliability of Cue Conflict and Beyond

Understanding how neural networks rely on visual cues offers a human-interpretable view of their internal decision processes. The cue-conflict benchmark has been influential in probing shape-texture preference and in motivating the insight that stronger, human-like shape bias is often associated with improved in-domain performance. However, we find that the current stylization-based instantiation can yield unstable and ambiguous bias estimates. Specifically, stylization may not reliably instantiate perceptually valid and separable cues nor control their relative informativeness, ratio-based bias can obscure absolute cue sensitivity, and restricting evaluation to preselected classes can distort model predictions by ignoring the full decision space. Together, these factors can confound preference with cue validity, cue balance, and recognizability artifacts. We introduce REFINED-BIAS, an integrated dataset and evaluation framework for reliable and interpretable shape-texture bias diagnosis. REFINED-BIAS constructs balanced, human- and model- recognizable cue pairs using explicit definitions of shape and texture, and measures cue-specific sensitivity over the full label space via a ranking-based metric, enabling fairer cross-model comparisons. Across diverse training regimes and architectures, REFINED-BIAS enables fairer cross-model comparison, more faithful diagnosis of shape and texture biases, and clearer empirical conclusions, resolving inconsistencies that prior cue-conflict evaluations could not reliably disambiguate.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Assessing Distribution Shift in Human Activity Recognition for Domain Generalization

arXiv:2606.24781v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While the field of Human Activity Recognition (HAR) continues to draw interest from researchers and advance in important ways, some key challenges remain. One of the most difficult aspects of building HAR models that show good performance in real-world settings is dealing with data diversity from device and sensor heterogeneity, and contextual changes that are intrinsic to real-world applications. While data diversity in HAR has been well-acknowledged in the literature, there remains a gap in understanding the effect of various types of distribution shifts on HAR models and the domain generalization problem that arises. Towards that end, this paper systematically evaluates 4 different types of distribution shifts, including variations in device type, sensor placement, sampling rate, and user behavior. Quantifying their effects, we illustrate that diversity shifts predominantly define all types of shifts, indicating the existence of unique features that are not shared across different domains. We then introduce a uniform HAR-based distribution shift benchmarks and conduct a comprehensive evaluation of up to 28 domain generalization methods. Our analysis exposes the limitations of current domain generalization algorithms in achieving model generalizability, marginally outperforming the empirical risk minimization baseline. This work represents the first systematic exploration of domain generalization and adaptation concerning specific distribution shifts in sensor-based HAR, offering an open-source benchmark platform and datasets to spur further research.