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

Implicit Neural Representations of Individual Behavior

arXiv:2606.12200v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study policy representation learning from unlabeled multi-policy behavioral data. Each episode is generated by a fixed policy, but policy labels are unavailable. This setting appears in robotics play, demonstrations, games, racing, and other datasets where heterogeneous behaviors are mixed without annotations. We introduce Behavioral INR, a self-supervised generative model that adapts implicit neural representations (INRs) from vision to behavior. Instead of mapping coordinates to RGB values, Behavioral INR represents a policy as a state-action function mapping states to subsequent actions. An episode-level latent modulates this function through FiLM layers, yielding a generative prior over policies and allowing policy identity to be inferred without supervision. Because INRs treat each datapoint as samples from an underlying function, the same model naturally accommodates variable episode lengths and different sampling granularities, as in vision INRs with different image resolutions. We also define policy-level out-of-distribution (OOD) shifts along state-distribution and action-distribution axes, which arise when policies overlap in states or actions but are not captured by standard behavioral OOD settings based only on new agents or environments. We evaluate on synthetic Gaussian random field data, MuJoCo demonstrations with controlled OOD splits, and real-world chess, Formula 1 racing, robotics, and Seek-Avoid datasets. Behavioral INR most consistently improves policy identifiability in the hardest continuous state-action settings, especially when longer episodes, more policies, and OOD splits reduce the usefulness of marginal shortcuts; amortized history encoders remain competitive when policy identity can be recovered from symbolic repetition or low-dimensional action statistics. We release code and checkpoints.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

CrossAccent-TTS: Cross-Lingual Accent-Intensity Controllable Text-to-Speech via Disentangled Speaker and Accent Representations

arXiv:2606.25403v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accent conversion and controllability remain fundamental challenges in cross-lingual text-to-speech (TTS), particularly for low-resource and phonetically diverse Indic languages. While recent large language model (LLM)-based TTS systems exhibit strong cross-lingual generalization, they provide limited explicit control over accent characteristics and intensity. In this paper, we propose CrossAccentTTS, a framework that enables both accent control and conversion while preserving speaker identity. Specifically, we introduce an Accent Intensity Controller (AIC) that injects weighted language embeddings into the accent subspace, allowing smooth interpolation between accents and fine-grained modulation of accent strength at inference time. Experiments on the Indic Multilingual and L2-arctic datasets shows that CrossAccent-TTS achieves precise control of accent intensity, outperforming strong baselines in accent similarity and controllability by maintaining speaker similarity and naturalness.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Gaussian mode coupling of spectrally broadband photons from bulk spontaneous parametric down-conversion: A spatial-spectral mode analysis of fiber coupling

arXiv:2602.23238v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Photon sources based on spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) are central to experimental quantum optics and quantum technologies. Their performance is commonly quantified by three metrics: pair-collection probability, heralding efficiency, and spectral purity. In bulk-crystal SPDC, these metrics are known to be mutually constrained, yet the physical origin of the resulting trade-offs is often obscured. We show that these trade-offs originate from the frequency-dependent population of discrete spatial modes in the SPDC emission. By performing a Laguerre-Gauss mode decomposition at each frequency component, we show how spectral-spatial non-separability impacts collection probability, heralding efficiency, and purity. We apply this framework to two widely used quasi-phase-matching configurations: collinear degenerate type-0 and type-II SPDC in periodically poled bulk crystals, and quantify how different phase-matching functions shape the spectral-spatial mode structure. In particular, for type-II SPDC we compare standard periodically poled and aperiodically poled Gaussian phase matching. We experimentally validate some of our theoretical results using spatial- and spectral-projection measurements. This spectral-spatial mode analysis provides a quantitative and predictive framework for understanding and engineering bulk-crystal photon sources, enabling systematic multi-parameter optimization beyond qualitative design guidelines.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

The Theory of Mind Utility: Formal Specification of a Mentalizing Mechanism

arXiv:2606.12721v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Inferring others' beliefs requires more than reading surface signals; it requires tracking who told them what, in what order, and how credibly. The Theory of Mind Utility (ToM-U) formalizes this epistemic state inference problem at the computational level of analysis, specifying what mentalizing computes and why without commitment to algorithmic or neural implementation. ToM-U achieves this by constructing Local Epistemic World Models (LEWMs) – directed typed graphs that represent agents, state nodes, and the epistemic relationships among them – and evaluating discrete candidate LEWMs against observed behavior until one achieves sufficient confidence. Five formal definitions specify the LEWM structure, agent node properties including ordered information access history, a bounded proliferation mechanism for recursive mentalizing, three inference procedures, and a residue function that captures the structured trace left by failed mentalizing attempts. ToM-U differs from Bayesian Theory of Mind and adjacent formal accounts, which presuppose rather than derive belief states, and from simulation theory and theory-theory, which lack a formal apparatus for epistemic state inference. The architecture generates directional, falsifiable predictions about mentalizing failure that follow from structural properties of the model rather than auxiliary assumptions, and positions ToM-U as a domain-agnostic mechanism upstream of goal inference and other downstream social cognitive processes.

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

PolyKV: Heterogeneous Retention and Allocation for KV Cache Compression

arXiv:2606.15157v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: KV cache compression is essential for reducing the memory cost of long-context large language model inference. Existing approaches, however, typically apply a single compression policy and a uniform cache budget across all transformer layers. This uniform design ignores the fact that different layers can play different roles during prefill and decoding, and may therefore require different eviction strategies and cache capacities. We present PolyKV, a layer-wise KV cache optimization framework that considers design space with method selection and budget allocation. PolyKV routes each layer to a suitable KV compression policy based on layer-level signals, while assigning non-uniform budgets under a fixed total budget. This formulation enables heterogeneous compositions of existing KV cache methods. Experiments on LLaMA-3.1-8B and Qwen3-8B show that, under the same 512-token average KV budget, PolyKV recovers 54.5% and 25.7% of the LongBench performance gap between the strongest single-policy baseline and FullKV, respectively. Across 128-1024 budget sweep, PolyKV consistently improves over the strongest baseline by 1.7%-6.4%, corresponding to 40.0%-54.5% recovery of the FullKV gap.

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

GeoRanker: Distance-Aware Ranking for Worldwide Image Geolocalization

Worldwide image geolocalization-the task of predicting GPS coordinates from images taken anywhere on Earth-poses a fundamental challenge due to the vast diversity in visual content across regions. While recent approaches adopt a two-stage pipeline of retrieving candidates and selecting the best match, they typically rely on simplistic similarity heuristics and point-wise supervision, failing to model spatial relationships among candidates. In this paper, we propose GeoRanker, a distance-aware ranking framework that leverages large vision-language models to jointly encode query-candidate interactions and predict geographic proximity. In addition, we introduce a multi-order distance loss that ranks both absolute and relative distances, enabling the model to reason over structured spatial relationships. To support this, we curate GeoRanking, the first dataset explicitly designed for geographic ranking tasks with multimodal candidate information. GeoRanker achieves state-of-the-art results on two well-established benchmarks (IM2GPS3K and YFCC4K), significantly outperforming current best methods.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Occ-VLM: Occupancy Grounded Vision Language Model for Indoor Scene Understanding

Recently, vision-language models (VLMs) have made significant progress in 3D scene understanding, driving advances in applications such as embodied intelligence and robotic vision. However, existing approaches typically either rely directly on explicit 3D inputs (e.g., point clouds or RGB-D sequences), or introduce an additional 3D geometry encoder to derive 3D-aware visual tokens from 2D images. Such designs structurally decouple 3D geometric perception from the rich 2D semantics learned via vision-language pre-training, hindering the development of a unified 3D vision-language representation. In this work, we propose Occ-VLM, a novel framework for 3D scene understanding that operates purely on posed RGB images and employs a single 2D vision encoder. Specifically, Occ-VLM reconstructs 3D scene occupancy as an auxiliary geometric prior, which is utilized to spatially associate foreground 2D tokens with 3D space. These tokens are then decoded by a Large Language Model (LLM) for unified scene understanding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Occ-VLM achieves both accurate geometric perception and robust vision-language reasoning: it attains state-of-the-art performance on multi-view occupancy prediction, while performing on par with 3D-input VLMs on 3D Visual Question Answering (VQA) and 3D dense captioning benchmarks.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

SAGE: Retain-Aware Post-Hoc Sanitization of Final Unlearning Vector

arXiv:2606.18309v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) unlearning aims to remove undesirable knowledge or behaviors while preserving retained capabilities. Current unlearning methods all involve a trade-off between unlearning and retention. We have found that the retention activation bias can also be used to quantify the damage an unlearning method inflicts on retention, without considering the specific implementation of the unlearning process. This allows us to restore retention performance for any unlearning method using a post-hoc approach. Therefore, we propose a complementary post-hoc setting to sanitize the final update vector without rerunning the original unlearning pipeline. In this setting, we design SAGE, Spectral Activation-GEometry Sanitization, a source-agnostic correction for final unlearning updates. SAGE collects real module inputs from a small retain proxy, extracts their dominant activation geometry, and solves a source-anchored optimization objective in closed form, which suppresses update components aligned with high-energy retained directions while preserving the source method's forgetting carrier. Across multiple unlearning methods, model scales, and benchmarks, SAGE consistently relieves the retain-forget trade-off, identifying post-hoc sanitization of final vectors as a practical and underexplored axis for machine unlearning.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Surrogate models for Rock-Fluid Interaction: A Grid-Size-Invariant Approach

arXiv:2602.22188v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modelling rock-fluid interaction requires solving a set of partial differential equations (PDEs) to predict the flow behaviour and the reactions of the fluid with the rock on the interfaces. Conventional high-fidelity numerical models require a high resolution to obtain reliable results, resulting in huge computational expense. This restricts the applicability of these models for multi-query problems, such as uncertainty quantification and optimisation, which require running numerous scenarios. As a cheaper alternative to high-fidelity models, this work develops eight surrogate models for predicting the fluid flow in porous media. Four of these are reduced-order models (ROM) based on one neural network for compression and another for prediction. The other four are single neural networks with the property of grid-size invariance; a term which we use to refer to image-to-image models that are capable of inferring on computational domains that are larger than those used during training. In addition to the novel grid-size-invariant framework for surrogate models, we compare the predictive performance of UNet and UNet++ architectures, and demonstrate that UNet++ outperforms UNet for surrogate models. Furthermore, we show that the grid-size-invariant approach is a reliable way to reduce memory consumption during training, resulting in good correlation between predicted and ground-truth values and outperforming the ROMs analysed. The application analysed is particularly challenging because fluid-induced rock dissolution results in a non-static solid field and, consequently, it cannot be used to help in adjustments of the future prediction.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Learning Credal Ensembles via Distributionally Robust Optimization

arXiv:2602.08470v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Credal predictors are models that are aware of epistemic uncertainty and produce a convex set of probabilistic predictions. They offer a principled way to quantify predictive epistemic uncertainty (EU) and have been shown to improve model robustness in various settings. However, most state-of-the-art methods mainly define EU as disagreement caused by random training initializations, which mostly reflects sensitivity to optimization randomness rather than uncertainty from deeper sources. To address this, we define EU as disagreement among models trained with varying relaxations of the i.i.d. assumption between training and test data. Based on this idea, we propose CreDRO, which learns an ensemble of plausible models through distributionally robust optimization. As a result, CreDRO captures EU not only from training randomness but also from meaningful disagreement due to potential distribution shifts between training and test data. Empirical results show that CreDRO consistently outperforms existing credal methods on tasks such as out-of-distribution detection across multiple benchmarks and selective classification in medical applications.

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

FOCUS on Contamination: Hydrology-Informed Noise-Aware Learning for Geospatial PFAS Mapping

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are persistent environmental contaminants with significant public health impacts, yet large-scale monitoring remains severely limited due to the high cost and logistical challenges of field sampling. The lack of samples leads to difficulty simulating their spread with physical models and limited scientific understanding of PFAS transport in surface waters. Yet, rich geospatial and satellite-derived data describing land cover, hydrology, and industrial activity are widely available. We introduce FOCUS, a geospatial deep learning framework for PFAS contamination mapping that integrates sparse PFAS observations with large-scale environmental context, including priors derived from hydrological connectivity, land cover, source proximity, and sampling distance. These priors are integrated into a principled, noise-aware loss, yielding a robust training objective under sparse labels. Across extensive ablations, robustness analyses, and real-world validation, FOCUS consistently outperforms baselines including sparse segmentation, Kriging, and pollutant transport simulations, while preserving spatial coherence and scalability over large regions. Our results demonstrate how AI can support environmental science by providing screening-level risk maps that prioritize follow-up sampling and help connect potential sources to surface-water contamination patterns in the absence of complete physical models.

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

PCA-Enhanced Adaptive NVAR Framework for High-Resolution Sea Surface Temperature Forecasting in the East Sea

arXiv:2606.12141v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate forecasting of sea surface temperature (SST) in regional seas such as the East Sea is crucial for monitoring marine ecosystems, assessing climate risks, managing fisheries, and conducting naval operations. Traditional numerical ocean models provide reliable predictions but are computationally expensive and often unsuitable for real-time forecasting. Many deep learning methods also struggle with high-dimensional spatiotemporal ocean data and experience error accumulation over longer forecasting periods. This study builds on our previously proposed Adaptive Next-Generation Reservoir Computing (Adaptive NVAR) framework, initially introduced and tested on synthetic dynamical systems, and extends it to ocean forecasting. We present a reduced-order forecasting framework that combines Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) with Adaptive NVAR to predict SST dynamics in the East Sea. SST fields are compressed into a low-dimensional representation using SVD, which extracts dominant modes of ocean variability. Adaptive NVAR models the temporal evolution of these latent states, and the predicted states are reconstructed into SST forecasts. We evaluate the framework using regional ocean datasets and compare it with the standard NG-RC/NVAR. Results show that Adaptive NVAR consistently achieves lower forecasting errors across multiple prediction horizons. In addition, SVD reduces computational complexity, resulting in a fast and scalable framework suitable for real-time ocean forecasting.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Reinforcement Learning for LLM-based Event Forecasting

arXiv:2606.15917v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We use Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), a recently devised sample and memory efficient reinforcement learning method, to finetune pretrained LLMs in the range of 1.5B to 14B parameters equipped with the ability to get current information through the use of a Wikipedia revisions tool, or news summaries, to forecast real events beyond the knowledge cutoff of the LLM, as well as problems made to simulate different aspects of the dynamics of that training. We use the results of these experiments to comment on the scaling capability of LLMs for forecasting, as well as classify how judgmental forecasting fits into the verifiable/unverifiable domain taxonomy, considering the impact of the inherent aleatoric uncertainty when forecasting future events (e.g. the roll of a die). As a result of the GRPO training, we manage to bring a 1.5B parameter transformer (Qwen 2.5 1.5B) to forecasting performance superior to Claude Sonnet 3.5 over the same dataset as measured by cross entropy from the market agreed probabilities. We also discuss various dead ends on the path to this result.

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

ViPER: Vision-based Packing-Aware Encoder for Robust Malware Detection

Visualization-based malware detection maps raw binary bytes to grayscale images and applies learned visual classifiers, providing an evasion-resistant and disassembly-free alternative to conventional analysis pipelines. However, executable packing remains a critical failure mode: packed binaries produce high-entropy images that obscure the structural patterns these models rely on. Because packing is also prevalent in benign software (e.g., for compression or copy protection), packing state alone is not a reliable indicator of maliciousness, and existing approaches do not address this challenge within a unified supervised framework. We present ViPER, a Vision-based Packing-Aware Encoder for Robust malware detection. ViPER builds on a LoRA-adapted ViT-B/14 backbone with a dual-head architecture that jointly learns malware classification and packing detection. A packing-aware gating mechanism conditions malware predictions on the inferred packing state, enabling distinct decision boundaries for packed and unpacked inputs. To address packing label skew during training, we employ frequency-weighted losses with stratified sampling over joint class-packing strata. Evaluated on 200,000 Windows PE byteplot images, ViPER achieves a balanced accuracy of 0.8521, ROC-AUC of 0.9260, and AUPR of 0.9279, outperforming representative state-of-the-art baselines across all primary metrics, while attaining a packing detection AUC of 0.9949.

15.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-15

Environmental “knees” and “wiggles” as strong stabilizers of species’ range limits set by interspecific competition

by Farshad Shirani, Benjamin G. Freeman Whether interspecific competition is a major contributing factor to setting species’ range limits has been debated for a long time. Theoretical studies have proposed that the interactions between interspecific competition and disruptive gene flow along an environmental gradient can halt range expansion of ecologically similar species where they meet. However, the stability of such range limits has not been well addressed. We use a deterministic mathematical model of adaptive range evolution over a continuous habitat to show that the range limits set by interspecific competition are unlikely to be evolutionarily stable if the environmental optima for fitness-related traits vary (almost) linearly in space. That is, in a linear environment without a dispersal barrier or a third (or more) species, the range borders formed between two competing species constantly move towards the weaker species. We demonstrate that environmental nonlinearities such as “knees” and “wiggles”—wherein an isolated sharp change or a step-like change occurs in the steepness of a trait optimum—can strongly stabilize competitively formed range limits. The stabilization mechanism relies on the contrast that such nonlinearities create in the level of disruptive gene flow to the peripheral population of each species, and succeeds when an additional process, such as Allee effects, prevents the establishment of an infinitesimal population in the presence of an abundant competitor. We show that the stability of the range limits at these nonlinearities is robust against moderate environmental disturbances. Whether strong disturbances such as rapid high-amplitude climate changes can destabilize such range limits depends on how the competitive dominance of the species changes across the nonlinearity. Therefore, our findings underscore the importance of assessing species’ competitive ability when predicting responses to climate change, and identify geographic regions where established range limits are likely to persist as well as regions where shifting limits may eventually stabilize.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

A controlled human infection model for symptomatic pertussis in North America using the pertactin-producing clinical isolate D420

Background Despite widespread vaccination, pertussis remains a poorly controlled disease globally and results in substantial annual morbidity and mortality, particularly in young children. Controlled human infection models (CHIMs) using the causative agent Bordetella pertussis are promising systems to enable the study of pertussis disease pathogenesis and immunology and to rapidly assess vaccines and therapeutics. While a pertussis CHIM that produces asymptomatic infection has been established in Europe, the development of a CHIM that leads to symptomatic illness would be advantageous for evaluating vaccine efficacy against both infection and disease. Methods Healthy participants 18-40 years of age were inoculated intranasally with one of eight doses (ranging from 104 to 108 colony forming units (CFU)) of the pertactin-producing B. pertussis isolate D420 at the challenge facility within the Canadian Center for Vaccinology (Nova Scotia, Canada). The study occurred in two stages. In stage one, the B. pertussis dose was escalated in cohort groups of five to six participants until reaching an endpoint where 70-90% of participants exhibited mild (non-severe, Grade 1 or 2) symptomatic infection, defined as the Human Infectious Dose 70-90 (HID70-90). In stage two, additional challenges were conducted for doses below, at, and above the identified HID70-90 to characterize the emerging pertussis model. For all challenge doses, participants were closely monitored during an inpatient stay of up to 24 days and post-discharge for laboratory-confirmed infection, pertussis symptoms, safety, and IgG antibody responses to four B. pertussis antigens including pertussis toxin, filamentous hemagglutinin, fimbriae, and pertactin. All participants received a five-day course of azithromycin, where timing of initiation depended on B. pertussis testing and symptoms. The study was conducted between July 4, 2022 and March 19, 2025. Findings Seventy-five participants were inoculated with one of the eight B. pertussis D420 challenge doses and completed the inpatient stay. From the stage-one dose escalation, we found that 107 CFU of B. pertussis D420 was the lowest dose that achieved the HID70-90, where 9 of 12 participants (75.0%) exhibited mild symptomatic infection. Following stage-two challenges, 16 of 22 total participants at 107 CFU (72.7%) developed mild symptomatic infection, thus verifying the HID70-90. The symptomatic infection rate below the HID70-90 at 5x106 CFU of D420 was 20.0% and above the HID70-90 at 5x107 and 108 CFU were 58.3% and 55.6%, respectively. Symptoms with elevated frequency for symptomatic infection (relative to background symptoms in non-infected) included nasal congestion, runny nose, fatigue, malaise, and cough. At the HID70-90, 50% of symptomatic infections included cough. Serological analyses of the four highest (stage-two) challenge doses (5x106, 107, 5x107, 108 CFU) revealed that antibody titres increased over time post-challenge. Seroconversion for at least one of the four studied antibodies was nearly twice as common for symptomatic (70.0%) than asymptomatic (35.7%) infection and was absent (0%) for non-infected. All infections were cleared following azithromycin treatment (100%) and there were no study-related serious adverse events. Interpretation A safe and reproducible symptomatic pertussis CHIM was achieved, providing a model for research on pertussis disease pathogenesis and immunology and for assessing vaccines and therapeutics. (Clinicaltrials.gov, NCT05136599).

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Effective Faraday interaction between light and Helium-3 nuclear spins in a multi-pass cell

arXiv:2606.20328v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Helium-3 nuclear spins form an exceptionally stable quantum system with extremely long coherence time, offering exciting opportunities for quantum technologies. In particular, nuclear spin-squeezed states promise enhanced precision for sensing tasks and tests of new physics. A central challenge for all these applications is the realization of a controllable light-nuclear spin interface. Here we experimentally demonstrate such an interface by exploiting metastability-exchange collisions in a low-pressure helium-3 gas cell at room temperature. A radio-frequency discharge produces a small population of metastable atoms that both enables efficient optical pumping and mediates an effective Faraday interaction between the collective nuclear spin and an optical probe. We quantitatively characterize the strength of this interaction as a function of the nuclear polarization, applied magnetic field, and probe-beam parameters. Moreover, we show that using a multi-pass cell enhances this interaction by effectively increasing the optical depth. Extrapolating to a tenfold increase of the probe power used in the present experiment, we project a measurement-induced squeezing rate of 0.52 s$^{-1}$. Our results provide a practical pathway for optical access to helium-3 nuclear spins and open prospects for generating long-lived, macroscopic nuclear spin-squeezed states for quantum metrology.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Reaching out-of-school girls with HPV vaccination: A qualitative evaluation in six low- and middle-income countries using the RE-AIM framework

Background Infection with human papillomavirus (HPV), the primary cause of cervical cancer, disproportionately affects women in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). While school-based vaccination of adolescent girls against HPV is highly effective, this strategy systematically excludes out-of-school (OOS) girls. Using the RE-AIM framework, we explored strategies to reach OOS girls with HPV vaccination across six African and Asian LMICs. Methods We conducted semi-structured key informant interviews with 32 vaccination program stakeholders from Cambodia, Cameroon, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, and Uganda between May and September 2024. Interviews explored countries implementation successes, challenges, and strategies to reach OOS girls with HPV vaccination and sustainability considerations. Data were analyzed using a hybrid team-based thematic analysis approach guided by the RE-AIM framework. Results Community outreach-based strategies, typically integrated into routine immunization outreach, were identified as the most effective approach to reach OOS girls with HPV vaccination. Targeted strategies, such as locating outreach clinics in community venues frequented by OOS girls (e.g., churches, markets) enhanced implementation. Perceived effectiveness of these strategies varied across participants, and formal assessment of effectiveness was constrained by the absence of disaggregated vaccination coverage data by school enrollment status. Some subpopulations of OOS girls (i.e., girls in nomadic or migrant communities, urban OOS girls) were not readily reached through standard outreach approaches, prompting implementation of adapted and tailored strategies for these subpopulations. Costs associated with conducting outreach in harder-to-reach areas were major barriers to reaching OOS girls, presenting challenges to the sustainability and cost-effectiveness of these approaches. Conclusions Routine community outreach platforms were widely perceived as most effective for reaching OOS girls. Strengthening disaggregated monitoring systems, adapting outreach for harder-to-reach subpopulations of OOS girls, and financing delivery models for tailored outreach strategies will be critical to improving equitable HPV vaccine coverage among OOS girls.

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

GetNetUPAM: Ecologically Informed Nested Cross-Validation and Noise-Robust Attention for Marine Bioacoustic Monitoring

Deploying reliable bioacoustic monitoring systems requires models that generalize under high-noise, low-SNR conditions and evaluation protocols that expose deployment-relevant failure modes, gaps largely unaddressed in current UPAM practice. Intrinsic noise, variable propagation, and mixed biological and anthropogenic sources induce distribution shifts that conventional models and single-split evaluations obscure, inflating performance and masking instability. We introduce GetNetUPAM, a hierarchical nested cross-validation framework that uses the nested stage to quantify model stability rather than tune for inflated hold-out scores. By partitioning data into site-year blocks, GetNetUPAM preserves ecological heterogeneity and forces each outer fold to represent a distinct environmental regime, preventing overfitting to localized noise or sensor artifacts. Inner stratified folds measure generalization across the full UPAM signal distribution, enforcing strict separation between model development and the outer held-out deployment condition. Using GetNetUPAM, we evaluate the Adaptive Resolution Pooling and Attention Network (ARPA-N), a CNN architecture for irregular spectrogram dimensions. ARPA-N integrates CBAM spatial attention as a learned noise suppressor, producing attention maps that localize true call structure and avoid the global, non-biological cues exploited by standard CNNs on long-window data. Under GetNetUPAM, ARPA-N generalizes robustly across diverse environmental regimes. In the zero-training support Balleny Islands region, it reduces false positives per hour by over an order of magnitude (approximately 10x) at fixed 90 percent recall, yielding consistently improved metrics across folds. These advances provide a reproducible benchmark and move UPAM toward scalable, deployment-reliable ecological monitoring.

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

Brain-IT-VQA: From Brain Signals to Answers

Decoding visual content from fMRI signals recorded while a person views images, and specifically answering questions about the seen images, is a long-standing challenge. While significant progress has been made in recent years in visual question answering (VQA) from fMRI, performance remains limited. Moreover, although recent models can make increasingly accurate predictions, they have rarely been used as tools for understanding the structure of visual representations in the brain. We present Brain-IT-VQA, a framework for visual question answering from fMRI. Building on the Brain Interaction Transformer (Brain-IT), our method decodes language tokens from brain activity and integrates them with a language model to answer visual questions. Our model substantially outperforms previous fMRI-based captioning and VQA approaches. We further introduce NSD-VQA, a new dataset and benchmark for visual question answering from fMRI. Unlike existing image-fMRI VQA datasets, which typically provide only a few broad and weakly controlled questions per image, NSD-VQA provides on average 20 question-answer pairs per image across 20 controlled question categories that disentangle multiple levels of visual understanding. This enables more reliable and interpretable evaluation despite limited fMRI test data. Together, Brain-IT-VQA and NSD-VQA provide both a strong predictive framework and a tool for studying brain representations. Using this benchmark, we quantify which forms of visual and semantic information can be reliably decoded from fMRI responses to natural images. We further analyze the contributions of different brain regions across question types.

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

MAD: Manifold Attracted Diffusion

arXiv:2509.24710v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Score-based diffusion models are a highly effective method for generating samples from a distribution of images. We consider scenarios where the training data comes from a noisy version of the target distribution, and present an efficiently implementable modification of the inference procedure to generate noiseless samples. Our approach is motivated by the manifold hypothesis, according to which meaningful data is concentrated around some low-dimensional manifold of a high-dimensional ambient space. The central idea is that noise manifests as low magnitude variation in off-manifold directions in contrast to the relevant variation of the desired distribution which is mostly confined to on-manifold directions. We introduce the notion of an extended score and show that, in a simplified setting, it can be used to reduce small variations to zero, while leaving large variations mostly unchanged. We describe how its approximation can be computed efficiently from an approximation to the standard score and demonstrate its efficacy on toy problems, synthetic data, and real data.

22.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

On two overlooked stick-breaking constructions of the normalized inverse Gaussian process

arXiv:2606.19306v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We shed light on two alternative stick-breaking constructions of the normalized inverse Gaussian (NIG) random discrete distribution which appear to have been overlooked so far in the Bayesian nonparametric setting. The first is derived from a result in Aldous and Pitman (1998) for the conditional Brownian excursion partition, mixing over the local time at zero up to time one. The second arises as a particular case of a result in James (2013) for priors obtained by a random spatial and temporal change of the normalized generalized Gamma subordinator. Both constructions are in terms of straightforward transformations of standard random variables and can be easily generalized to provide the stick-breaking construction of any element, respectively, in a) the family of mixed Poisson-Kingman models driven by the $1/2$ stable Lévy measure and b) the family of Poisson-Gamma processes driven by the Inverse Gaussian subordinator.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Pose6DAug: Physically Plausible Multi-view Object Swapping for Robot Data Augmentation

arXiv:2606.20118v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) policies have shown strong potential for general-purpose manipulation, yet they often fail on novel, out-of-distribution objects whose appearance or geometry deviates from the training distribution. The standard remedy is to collect multi-view teleoperation data for every failure case, but this scales poorly in both cost and time. We introduce Pose6DAug, a failure-driven data augmentation framework that turns a policy's own successful episodes into targeted demonstrations for its failure modes, without any new data collection. Our key insight is that each successful episode already encodes a physically valid action trajectory together with calibrated multi-view observations. By swapping only the manipulated object while preserving this trajectory, we obtain new and physically grounded demonstrations. However, naive 2D video editing breaks multi-view consistency and physical plausibility, particularly under heavy occlusion and egocentric viewpoints. Our method instead operates directly in 3D, anchoring the target object with an explicit mesh driven by a temporally coherent 6D pose trajectory, ensuring geometrically consistent renderings across all camera views. Fine-tuning a VLA on data augmented by our method improves success rates by 16.5% relative to the state-of-the-art baseline on novel objects, while preserving in-distribution performance. These results show that multi-view and physically consistent augmentation is a practical path to scalable VLA generalization.

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

Scalar-Stepsize Nonuniform Monte Carlo Optimistic Policy Iteration: A Certified Counterexample

arXiv:2606.15978v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tsitsiklis proved convergence of Monte Carlo optimistic policy iteration under a uniform update structure and identified nonuniform update frequencies as a delicate obstruction. We give a certified negative answer for the natural scalar-stepsize, unnormalized asynchronous state-value recursion with fixed nonuniform state-selection probabilities. In a three-state, two-action discounted MDP, the nonuniform update frequencies induce a diagonally scaled greedy-policy mean field with a certified nonconstant attracting hybrid periodic orbit. With a bounded unbiased geometric-horizon estimator and Robbins–Monro stepsizes, the original stochastic recursion remains trapped near the cycle with positive probability and therefore fails to converge. The example pinpoints a geometric obstruction: uniform sampling gives radial residual contraction, whereas scalar nonuniform sampling anisotropically distorts the residual dynamics and can generate switched attracting cycles.

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arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

A Unified Approach to Beta Moments, Combinatorial Identities, and Random Walks

arXiv:2605.05420v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The study of random walks has increasingly been popular across diverse disciplines such as statistics, mathematics, quantum physics, where they are used to model paths consisting of successive random steps in a mathematical space. A fundamental quantity of interest is the probability that a simple symmetric random walk returns to the origin after 2n steps. In this paper, we develop a unified probabilistic approach that connects the return probabilities in arbitrary dimensions with moment representations. Using this framework, we provide probabilistic proofs of several combinatorial identities involving beta and gamma functions, and derive new combinatorial identities in general dimensions.