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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Power-law-graded Ising Interactions Stabilize Time Crystals Realizing Quantum Energy Storage and Sensing

arXiv:2508.14847v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study discrete time-crystalline (DTC) phases in one-dimensional spin-1/2 chains with power-law-graded Ising interactions under periodic Floquet driving. By generalizing Stark localization to power-law-graded Ising interaction profiles, we identify robust period-doubled dynamics across a wide range of interaction exponents, stabilized by the interplay between coherent driving and spatially varying coupling. Within the DTC phase, the energy stored in the system, interpreted as a quantum battery, increases superlinearly with system size, although no scaling advantage persists in normalized power. Beyond energy storage, we demonstrate that the DTC phase supports enhanced quantum sensing. The quantum Fisher information associated with estimating timing deviations in the drive scales superextensively with system size, surpassing the Heisenberg limit. The degree of quantum advantage can be tuned by varying the interaction exponent, though DTC behavior remains robust throughout. Our results position power-law-graded Ising interacting Floquet systems as robust platforms for storing quantum energy and achieving metrological enhancement.

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

Filtered ANN as a Phase Transition: When Selectivity-Estimation Error Causes Plan Regret

arXiv:2606.16341v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A filtered approximate-nearest-neighbor (ANN) query returns the k nearest vectors among those satisfying an attribute predicate P of selectivity s. The best execution strategy – pre-filter, post-filter, or in-filter – changes with s, so a system must estimate s and choose. We model this as an argmax over a landscape with phases (regions where each strategy wins) separated by boundaries, and show that selectivity-estimation error produces plan regret – recall lost versus the oracle strategy – only in the critical regions around those boundaries. The regret is a wedge of log-width equal to the multiplicative estimation error epsilon and height equal to the local cliff |V'(s*)| epsilon; the flip-margin 1/|V'(s*)| is the condition number of a sibling cardinality-estimation study reappearing as the local boundary theory. The two phase boundaries follow from independent mathematics: order statistics place the post-filter cliff at s ~ k/K, and site percolation places the in-filter cliff at s_c ~ 0.83/M for graph degree M (corpus-size independent). Criticality exists only under a constrained budget B < sqrt(k n). Under pre-registered decision rules we confirm, on synthetic sweeps and real SIFT1M, that regret concentrates ~290x at the boundary and that the regret curves obey a finite-size scaling collapse onto one universal wedge across two decades of corpus size. A real approximate index does not mis-locate the boundary, but a biased cost model opens a persistent miscalibration band that estimation-error robustness cannot fix. The contribution is a characterization, not a new index. Code and the full pre-registration are public.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Decoding Insect Song: A Multitask Semisupervised Orthoptera Bioacoustic Classifier

arXiv:2606.13236v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Passive acoustic monitoring holds great promise for ecological inference, yet existing automated tools are typically narrowly trained and non-transferable. We address these limitations with PULSE, a semi-supervised, multi-task framework for Orthoptera bioacoustics, combining weakly-supervised species classification, self-supervised learning on unlabelled field audio, and knowledge distillation from a general-purpose bioacoustic model. Our domain-adapted specialist model outperforms a state-of-the-art general model across all metrics (macro F1: 0.21 vs. 0.07; AUC: 0.74 vs. 0.45; AP: 0.32 vs. 0.19), with active learning further raising F1 to 0.34 and AUC to 0.84. Beyond classification, the learned embeddings encode ecologically meaningful structure, exposed through an interactive visualisation tool for ecological discovery.

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

SLU-2K: A Question-Based Benchmark for Semantic Evaluation of Sign Language Translation

Sign Language Translation (SLT) is typically evaluated with surface-form metrics such as BLEU and ROUGE, which reward lexical overlap but do not directly measure whether a translation preserves the meaning of the source sign sequence. This is in contrast with the final objective of integrating SLT in assistive technology. In this work, we shift the focus from Sign Language Translation (SLT) to Sign Language Understanding (SLU), with particular emphasis on semantic understanding. Specifically, we evaluate systems based on their ability to correctly recover, from the input video, key semantic aspects of the original sentence, such as actions taking place and facts about people and objects. To enable this evaluation systematically, we propose SLU-2K, a dataset of 2,350 closed-ended video question-answer pairs based on the popular PHOENIX-2014T and CSL-Daily datasets. To obtain SLU-2K, we propose and extensively evaluate an automated data generation pipeline which produces questions across 7 categories, namely actions, locations, numbers, objects, people, time, and weather conditions. We show the potential of SLU-2K by evaluating popular Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and two representative state-of-the-art systems, MMSTL and SpaMo. Our results show that MLLMs reach near-random performance, highlighting the need for a more systematic integration of SLU in current AI systems. Furthermore, state-of-the-art translation systems carefully fine-tuned on in-domain data still exhibit a substantial semantic gap, with results ranging from 56.7% to 75.2%. These findings suggest that current SLT evaluation protocols overestimate true understanding and that future progress should be measured not only by fluency and n-gram overlap, but also by semantic correctness. Code, prompts, and benchmark files are available at https://github.com/ZenoTsT/SLU-2K

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

The Distributed Detectability Band Against Marginal-Preserving Attacks

arXiv:2606.10456v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AI-control monitors score individual agent actions to detect misbehavior, but real harm can be distributed across many benign-looking steps, each individually below any per-step alarm. We construct a marginal-preserving, correlation-encoded distributed-sabotage attack using a Gaussian-copula AR(1) construction: the per-step monitor-score marginal is held exactly equal to benign, so mean, max, top-k tail, and threshold monitors (Monitor A) are defeated by construction, while harm is encoded in the temporal correlation structure. We sequence the paper around three reviewer-mandated gates. (1) Realizability gate: the stealthy attack achieves KS-distance to benign of 0.013 (effectively zero) at all tested harm levels up to 3.0, confirming that harm is fully decoupled from the per-step marginal and realizability is not harm-limited. (2) Monitor-A-vs-B reconciliation: we show formally that the attack, built against Monitor A's score marginal, remains marginal-preserving under a different-score Monitor B (the correlation/sequence family: CUSUM, SPRT, HMM-LR, runs test, autocorrelation, windowed logistic), and scope worst-case claims to score functions that admit a temporal signature. (3) Non-empty detectability band: Monitor A achieves AUC 0.52 (chance); Monitor B spans AUC 0.79-0.97 at the same 1% FPR target, and as harm is amortized over more steps Monitor A collapses to chance while Monitor B holds at AUC ~0.95. These results demonstrate a non-empty detectability band and characterize the sub-threshold sabotage frontier: distribution-shape monitors fail by construction; temporal-correlation monitors can detect but are not trivially optimal.

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

HGCN(O): A Self-Tuning GCN HyperModel Toolkit for Outcome Prediction in Event-Sequence Data

arXiv:2507.22524v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose HGCN(O), a self-tuning toolkit using Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) models for event sequence prediction. Featuring four GCN architectures (O-GCN, T-GCN, TP-GCN, TE-GCN) across the GCNConv and GraphConv layers, our toolkit integrates multiple graph representations of event sequences with different choices of node- and graph-level attributes and in temporal dependencies via edge weights, optimising prediction accuracy and stability for balanced and unbalanced datasets. Extensive experiments show that GCNConv models excel on unbalanced data, while all models perform consistently on balanced data. Experiments also confirm the superior performance of HGCN(O) over traditional approaches. Applications include Predictive Business Process Monitoring (PBPM), which predicts future events or states of a business process based on event logs.

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

TabKD: Tabular Knowledge Distillation through Interaction Diversity of Learned Feature Bins

arXiv:2603.15481v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Data-free knowledge distillation enables model compression without original training data, critical for privacy-sensitive tabular domains. However, existing methods does not perform well on tabular data because they do not explicitly address feature interactions, the fundamental way tabular models encode predictive knowledge. We identify interaction diversity, systematic coverage of feature combinations, as an essential requirement for effective tabular distillation. To operationalize this insight, we propose TabKD, which learns adaptive feature bins aligned with teacher decision boundaries, then generates synthetic queries that maximize pairwise interaction coverage. Across 4 benchmark datasets and 4 teacher architectures, TabKD achieves highest student-teacher agreement in 14 out of 16 configurations, outperforming 5 state-of-the-art baselines. We further show that interaction coverage strongly correlates with distillation quality, validating our core hypothesis. Our work establishes interaction-focused exploration as a principled framework for tabular model extraction.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Conformal Risk-Averse Decision Making with Action Conditional Guarantee

arXiv:2606.05551v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reliable decision making pipelines powered by machine learning models require uncertainty quantification (UQ) methods that come with explicit safety guarantees. Conformal prediction provides such UQ by wrapping ML predictions into prediction sets, and recent work by Kiyani et al. (2025b) established that these sets can be translated into optimal risk-averse decision policies – yet only inheriting marginal safety guarantees. We generalize and strengthen their results by (i) introducing action-conditional conformal prediction, which yields safety guarantees conditioned explicitly on each action taken by the decision maker, (ii) showing that action-conditional prediction sets serve as a proxy for the feasible decision space for risk-averse decision makers aiming to optimize action-conditional value-at-risk, and (iii) proposing a principled finite-sample algorithm based on pinball-loss minimization, connecting the framework of Gibbs et al. (2025) to action-conditional guarantees. Experiments on two real-world datasets confirm that our approach significantly improves action-conditional performance over conformal baselines.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Convex Approximation of Two-Layer ReLU Networks for Hidden State Differential Privacy

arXiv:2407.04884v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The hidden state threat model of differential privacy (DP) assumes that the adversary has access only to the final trained machine learning (ML) model, without seeing intermediate states during training. However, the current privacy analyses under this model are restricted to convex optimization problems, reducing their applicability to multi-layer neural networks, which are essential in modern deep learning applications. Notably, the most successful applications of the hidden state privacy analyses in classification tasks have only been for logistic regression models. We demonstrate that it is possible to privately train convex problems with privacy-utility trade-offs comparable to those of 2-layer ReLU networks trained with DP stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD). This is achieved through a stochastic approximation of a dual formulation of the ReLU minimization problem, resulting in a strongly convex problem. This enables the use of existing hidden state privacy analyses and provides accurate privacy bounds also for the noisy cyclic mini-batch gradient descent (NoisyCGD) method with fixed disjoint mini-batches. Empirical results on benchmark classification tasks demonstrate that NoisyCGD can achieve privacy-utility trade-offs on par with DP-SGD applied to 2-layer ReLU networks.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Quantum vortex in a fluid flow: negative effective mass and a novel mechanism for turbulence formation

arXiv:2606.15803v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We explore the movement of a thin, circular quantum vortex filament within an infinite cylindrical pipe. The fluid surrounding the vortex ring moves through the pipe at a non-zero velocity denoted by $v$. Our study examines the energy spectrum $E = E(p)$, where $p$ represents the total momentum of a vortex ring. We have demonstrated that the function $E(p)$ significantly depends on the velocity $v$. The discovered spectrum $E(p)$ reveals the existence of states with both negative and extremely large effective masses. We also explored the hypothesis regarding the existence of coupled vortex pairs possessing finite summary effective masses. Every pair consists of vortices that possess both positive and negative masses, with the magnitude of these masses being unrestricted. In our model, the criterion for the appearance of these states is based on comparing two numbers. The first is seen as a quantum counterpart to the Reynolds number, while the second represents its critical value for a flow with a single vortex. We also explore how this studied effect might contribute to the emergence of quantum turbulence. This study discusses a method for determining the critical Reynolds number in quantum turbulence, using the proposed model as a framework. Here, we use a new quantization technique for classical closed vortex filaments developed by the author earlier.

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

FacProcessTwin: An LLM-Based System for Process Twin Development

arXiv:2606.17666v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Process twins provide real-time representations of entire production processes. By capturing how process steps interact, rather than monitoring a single machine in isolation as an asset-based digital twin does, they have the potential to drive efficiency gains across the whole process. However, developing a process twin is costly. It requires accurately modelling the entire production process: its process steps, the equipment and product-specific settings each step uses, and its process variations. The resulting model must then be bound to live operational data. We present FacProcessTwin, a system that leverages a large language model (LLM) to reduce this development time, building a process twin from a plant's process documentation and natural-language input from an operator. FacProcessTwin generates this complete process model and then automatically binds its process steps to live operational data. The generated model and its data bindings are rendered as an interactive process diagram through which manufacturing personnel can monitor and correct the system's autonomous decisions, such as resolving uncertainty at safety-critical binding steps. We evaluate FacProcessTwin through a real-world case study of an Australian food manufacturer, covering 16 production process flows that span chilled, frozen, and aseptic shelf-stable product categories and include process variations within the same product. The results show that FacProcessTwin generates these process models accurately (a mean F1 of 95.2% against ground truth) and builds each twin in roughly a sixth of the manual time. Its human-in-the-loop governance then keeps the safety-critical bindings correct: at ambiguous tags where a single-pass baseline silently mis-binds 75.0% of the time, FacProcessTwin defers to the operator and mis-binds none.

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

NAMESAKES: Probing Identity Memorization in Text-to-Image Models

Text-to-image (T2I) models generate realistic likenesses of some individuals when prompted with their names, raising privacy concerns. However, distinguishing whether a generated face is memorized or fabricated currently requires ground-truth photos, access to training data, or white-box access to model internals, limiting applicability. We introduce a fully black-box behavioral probe that distinguishes between these regimes while requiring no reference photos or prior knowledge of training data. To benchmark this task, we present the NAMESAKES dataset of over one thousand names and faces of public figures spanning a wide range of fame levels, along with perturbed, less famous names. Experiments on state-of-the-art T2I models show that our probe substantially predicts identity memorization and separates memorized from unrecognized names, with further insights into differences across model families.

13.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-20

RNAStabFormer: Region-Aware Multi-Task Hybrid Learning for RNA Stability Prediction from Pulse-Chase Transcriptomics

作者:

RNA stability is a central layer of post-transcriptional gene regulation, yet large-scale stability labels derived from pulse-chase transcriptomics depend strongly on quantification region, time-window definition, and replicate quality control. We present RNAStabFormer, a controlled learning framework for predicting human RNA stability proxies from transcript sequence. Its core model, RAMHT, combines region-specific nucleotide Transformer encoders for CDS, and sequence, a CDS codon stream, engineered sequence-grammar features, gated fusion, and four task-specific regression heads. We construct four strict consensus labels from ENCODE BrU-seq/BruChase-seq data by crossing gene-sense and exon-sense quantification with late-chase 6 h/2 h and total-chase 6 h/0 h retention ratios, and evaluate all models on fixed repeated-random and chromosome-holdout splits. Across chromosome holdouts, XGBoost remains the strongest standalone model, with median Pearson correlations of 0.504, 0.544, 0.546, and 0.778 on the four labels. RAMHT is competitive with raw-sequence deep models but does not universally exceed engineered-feature baselines. A strict nested RAMHT–XGBoost blend nevertheless improves gene total-chase prediction by 0.017 mean Pearson and exon late-chase prediction by 0.004 mean Pearson over XGBoost. Region and mechanism analyses show that CDS, local k-mer composition, and codon-sensitive signals dominate predictive information. RNAStabFormer therefore provides both a multi-task neural model and a leakage-controlled evaluation protocol for RNA stability prediction from pulse-chase data.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Augmentation techniques for video surveillance in the visible and thermal spectral range

In intelligent video surveillance, cameras record image sequences during day and night. Commonly, this demands different sensors. To achieve a better performance it is not unusual to combine them. We focus on the case that a long-wave infrared camera records continuously and in addition to this, another camera records in the visible spectral range during daytime and an intelligent algorithm supervises the picked up imagery. More accurate, our task is multispectral CNN-based object detection. At first glance, images originating from the visible spectral range differ between thermal infrared ones in the presence of color and distinct texture information on the one hand and in not containing information about thermal radiation that emits from objects on the other hand. Although color can provide valuable information for classification tasks, effects such as varying illumination and specialties of different sensors still represent significant problems. Anyway, obtaining sufficient and practical thermal infrared datasets for training a deep neural network poses still a challenge. That is the reason why training with the help of data from the visible spectral range could be advantageous, particularly if the data, which has to be evaluated contains both visible and infrared data. However, there is no clear evidence of how strongly variations in thermal radiation, shape, or color information influence classification accuracy. To gain deeper insight into how Convolutional Neural Networks make decisions and what they learn from different sensor input data, we investigate the suitability and robustness of different augmentation techniques...

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

Predicting Immune Biomarkers with MultiModal Mixture-of-Expert Pathology Foundation Models Empowers Precision Oncology

Predicting immune biomarkers associated with the tumor immune microenvironment (TIME) is critical for advancing precision oncology, yet existing approaches are largely limited to single image modalities and suffer from insufficient resolution and incomplete utilization of complementary clinical and biological information. Here we introduce MixTIME, a multimodal foundation model that leverages a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture to integrate pathology foundation models trained across distinct modalities: image only (UNIv2), image text (CONCHv1.5), and image transcriptomic (STPath) representations for pixel-level and slide-level prediction of multiplex immunofluorescence (mIF) protein expression from hematoxylin and eosin (HE) whole-slide images. MixTIME employs a learnable router to dynamically weight expert contributions and is trained with a distribution- and tendency-aware loss function. Benchmarked on two datasets of different scales, MixTIME achieves state-of-the-art performance across 17 protein markers as measured by correlation metrics. The predicted mIF profiles substantially enhance downstream tasks, including spatial domain identification, survival prediction, and AI-assisted pathology report generation validated by expert pathologists from multiple institutes across the world. Furthermore, MixTIME enables longitudinal tracking of protein expression dynamics across clinical time points and reveals protein gene interaction patterns linked to drug resistance and immune suppression in tumor microenvironments. Collectively, MixTIME provides a scalable framework for multimodal biomarker discovery and clinical translation in computational pathology.

16.
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.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Automated jailbreak attack targeting multiple defense strategies

arXiv:2606.16751v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of tasks. However, their safety remains a critical concern due to their susceptibility to adversarial prompt-based attacks. In this paper, we present UNIATTACK, an adversarial testing framework designed from a defense-oriented perspective to systematically construct effective black-box attack prompts. Unlike prior approaches that rely on static templates or iterative model-specific tuning, UNIATTACK extracts minimal but high-impact attack features from diverse existing attacks, optimizes them via a specialized attacker LLM, and composes them into flexible templates through automated refinement process. This feature-centric construction enables one-shot attacks that generalize across multiple models and safety categories, providing a practical tool for assessing LLM robustness. Our evaluation results shows that compared to the baselines, UNIATTACK achieves an average attack success rate (ASR) improvement of 64.63\%-248.82\% on models deployed with multi-layered defense mechanisms and it only takes 0.03\%-4.96\% cost of the baselines. UNIATTACK artifact is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/UniAttack-Artifact-30F1.

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

Dissecting model behavior through agent trajectories

arXiv:2606.17454v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agent performance is not just a modeling problem, it is fundamentally a systems problem. The advanced capabilities of models are realized through agent harnesses. Therefore, a gap between model assumptions and harness behavior can easily prevent the model's full capabilities from translating into agent performance. We formalize this as the `intent-execution' gap: the mismatch between what the model intends and what the harness executes, and vice versa. We argue that minimizing this intent-execution gap is as important as other aspects of harness design such as tools and execution loops. To illustrate the impact of this harness-model alignment, we develop a simple and customizable harness called `Simple Strands Agent' (SSA). SSA aims to find the bulk of common patterns which generalize across different model families (such as Claude, Gemini, GPT, Grok, Qwen), as well as a small number of model-specific preferences. We make two contributions: (i) we $reproduce or improve on the pass@1$ performance reported by diverse model-provider families on popular agentic benchmarks (SWE-Pro, SWE-Verified and Terminal-Bench-2), and (ii) building on an $analysis of 138k trajectories generated by SSA$, we look beyond the $\texttt{pass@1}$ numbers which tend to be relatively even across frontier models. By representing agent trajectories in code state-spaces, we observe model-level differences in problem-solving behavior. Finer-grained metrics such as edit frequency, testing activity, and phase-transitions reveal how individual models allocate effort across different stages of autonomous problem solving.

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

Higher-Order Token Interactions via Quantum Attention

arXiv:2606.11673v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Standard dot-product self-attention computes, in a single layer, only pairwise (order-2) interactions between tokens; representing a generic order-$k$ interaction is known to require either super-quadratic resources in one layer or composition across depth. We introduce Quantum Higher-Order Attention (QHA), a shallow, hardware-realizable quantum attention head that, via data re-uploading and an all-to-all non-Clifford entangler, synthesizes order-$k$ token interactions inside the circuit and exposes them through a local single-qubit read-out. We prove (i) an expressivity separation: any single standard self-attention layer with embedding dimension $m$, $H$ heads and $p$-bit precision satisfying $mHp=o(N/\log\log N)$ cannot represent the order-$k$ correlation family that one QHA head represents with circuit depth $O(\log k)$ ($O(k)$ two-qubit gates); and (ii) a trainability guarantee for its local-design instantiation: with a local read-out and $O(\log n)$ depth the gradient variance is $\Omega(1/\mathrm{poly}(n))$ (no barren plateau), which we confirm empirically – while being explicit that the more expressive all-to-all instantiation we benchmark is trained empirically and shows exponentially decaying gradients. Empirically, at a $6.5\times$ smaller parameter budget, QHA generalizes hidden-subset parity of every order $k\le6$ from disjoint inputs, whereas the larger classical attention head collapses past order~2; consistent with theory, the size of the advantage tracks the target's Fourier degree - largest for parity and shrinking when low-order structure is present. As an application, QHA serves as a compact high-order interaction detector across three domains - genetic epistasis, learning-parity-with-noise, and graph triangle detection - reaching the noise ceiling at the smallest parameter budget where field-standard linear methods fail.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Learning Augmented Exact Exponential Algorithms

arXiv:2606.18807v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The field of learning-augmented algorithms has demonstrated that machine-learned predictions can bypass worst-case lower bounds across a wide range of problems. So far, however, the focus has been almost exclusively on polynomial-time algorithms, where predictions improve competitive ratios, approximation guarantees, or running times. In this paper, we raise the question of whether predictions can push the frontier of exact exponential-time algorithms for NP-hard problems. We answer this question affirmatively by proposing a general approach that augments an entire family of state-of-the-art exact algorithms for a variety of subset selection problems. We show that a noisy predictor that is only marginally better than random guessing suffices to provably reduce the search space, and that the resulting runtime speedup scales smoothly with the prediction quality. Importantly, our algorithms require only pairwise independence of predictions or, alternatively, do not require the knowledge of the predictor's accuracy - both strictly weaker and more realistic settings than typically assumed.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Mood-Aware Music Recommendation: Integrating User Affective Signals into Ranking Systems

arXiv:2606.13858v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recommendation systems are essential in modern music streaming platforms due to the vast amount of available content. While collaborative filtering is widely used to suggest items based on the preferences of others with similar patterns, it performs poorly in domains where user-item interactions are sparse, such as music. Content-based filtering is an alternative approach that examines the qualities of the items themselves. Genre, instrumentation, and lyrics have been explored; however, relatively little attention has been given to emotion recognition. Since a user's emotional state strongly influences their music choice, incorporating mood signals offers a promising direction for personalization. In this work, we propose a mood-conditioned ranking framework that integrates user affective signals into the recommendation process via softmax-based sampling in the energy-valence space. We evaluate the approach via single-blind experiments in which participants compare recommendations from the proposed system against a baseline. The results indicate improved perceived recommendation quality, providing preliminary evidence for the effectiveness of incorporating mood-based inputs into music recommendations.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Minimal Filling Architectures of Polynomial Neural Networks: Counterexamples, Frontier Search, and Defects

arXiv:2605.09609v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We provide counterexamples to the unimodal minimal filling architecture conjecture for polynomial neural networks (PNNs) with power activation functions. Fixing the input and output widths, the conjecture states that any minimal filling architecture has unimodal widths for the hidden layers. We found counterexamples via a frontier search, recursive dimension bounds on neurovarieties, and symbolic computation. Notably, several subarchitectures of our main example exhibit large defect, in contrast with the predominantly small-defect behavior observed in prior literature.

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

MemRefine: LLM-Guided Compression for Long-Term Agent Memory

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly expected to operate over long-term interactions, where information from past dialogues must be preserved and recalled to support future tasks. However, as interactions accumulate, the memory store grows without bound and fills with redundant entries that inflate storage cost and degrade retrieval by crowding out the most useful evidence. Furthermore, this is especially limiting on resource-constrained platforms with hard memory budgets, motivating us to formulate storage-budgeted memory management, the task of keeping an already constructed memory store within a fixed budget while preserving information useful for future interactions. To this end, we then propose MemRefine, an LLM-guided framework that, since surface similarity poorly reflects factual value, uses similarity only to propose candidate pairs and defers delete, merge, and preserve decisions to an LLM judge based on factual content, iterating until the budget is met. Across multiple memory frameworks and long-term conversation benchmarks, MemRefine consistently meets target budgets while preserving downstream performance and outperforming rule-based baselines under tight budgets.

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

ReFree: Towards Realistic Co-Speech Video Generation via Reward-Free RL and Multilevel Speech Guidance

Speech-driven talking character animation seeks to generate life-like portrait videos that convey natural conversation behavior, aligning facial motion with spoken audio. Although recent advances in video generation have substantially improved realism in video-based animation, achieving both accurate lip articulation and expressive behavior remains challenging. Existing approaches typically trade off precise phoneme-to-lip synchronization against dynamic facial expressions and head motion, yielding animations that are either accurate yet rigid, or expressive but poorly synchronized. We address this challenge by proposing ReFree-S2V, a flow-matching speech-to-portrait animation framework that builds upon a pretrained video generation model to achieve fine-grained speech articulation and high-level expressive cues in speech-driven portrait animation. This model introduces a multi-level speech representation capturing phonetic and prosodic information at both local and global granularities. These representations are selectively injected into transformer blocks via learnable level selectors, enabling both accurate lip synchronization and natural expressive motion. To achieve natural head movements, we further introduce a novel reward-free reinforcement learning scheme into flow-matching training to discourage perceptually implausible motion without relying on handcrafted synchronization metrics or reward models, or the high cost of human preference annotation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ReFree-S2V achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming existing methods in both quantitative lip-sync accuracy and qualitative human evaluations of naturalness and expressivity.

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

How far have we gone in Generative Image Restoration? A study on its capability, limitations and evaluation practices

Generative Image Restoration (GIR) has achieved impressive perceptual realism, but how far have its practical capabilities truly advanced compared with previous methods? To answer this, we present a large-scale study grounded in a new multi-dimensional evaluation pipeline that assesses models on detail, sharpness, semantic correctness, and overall quality. Our analysis covers diverse architectures, including diffusion-based, GAN-based, PSNR-oriented, and general-purpose generation models, revealing critical performance disparities. Furthermore, our analysis uncovers a key evolution in failure modes that signifies a paradigm shift for the perception-oriented low-level vision field. The central challenge is evolving from the previous problem of detail scarcity (under-generation) to the new frontier of detail quality and semantic control (preventing over-generation). We also leverage our benchmark to train a new IQA model that better aligns with human perceptual judgments. Ultimately, this work provides a systematic study of modern generative image restoration models, offering crucial insights that redefine our understanding of their true state and chart a course for future development.