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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2026

Authors:
Sha Sajadieh↗Loredana Fattorini↗Raymond Perrault↗Yolanda Gil↗Vanessa Parli↗Lapo Santarlasci↗Juan Pava↗Nestor Maslej↗Russ Altman↗Erik Brynjolfsson↗Carla Brodley↗Jack Clark↗…

arXiv:2606.15708v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Welcome to the ninth edition of the AI Index report. As AI continues to advance rapidly, the question becomes whether the systems built around it can keep up. Governance frameworks, evaluation methods, education systems, and the data infrastructure needed to track AI's impact are struggling to match the pace of the technology itself. That gap between what AI can do and how prepared we are to manage it runs through every chapter of this year's report. New in this edition, the report tracks how AI is being tested more ambitiously across reasoning, safety, and real-world task execution, and why those measurements are increasingly difficult to rely on. It also features new estimates of generative AI's economic value alongside emerging evidence of its labor market effects, an analytical framework on AI sovereignty, and a science chapter developed in collaboration with Schmidt Sciences. For the first time, the report features standalone chapters on AI in science and AI in medicine, reflecting AI's growing impact across these two domains.

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02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Pseudo-Feature Padding: A Lightweight Defense Against False Data Injection in Power Grids

Authors:
Farhin Farhad Riya↗Shahinul Hoque↗Yingyuan Yang↗Jinyuan Sun↗Kevin Tomsovic↗

arXiv:2606.20415v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep Neural Networks DNNs have achieved remarkable accuracy in various tasks including their application in CyberPhysical Systems CPS for detecting False Data Injection Attacks FDIA during critical operations However the unique infrastructure of CPS makes DNNs vulnerable to exploitation by attackers aiming to evade detection Additionally the distinct nature of CPS presents challenges for conventional defense mechanisms against FDIA This paper proposes an innovative defense framework that strengthens DNNs against such attacks by introducing an additional input layer that performs padding in the input samples using pseudofeature values derived from the inputs statistical distribution This padding increases the input dimensionality in a randomized and dataaware manner making adversarial attacks computationally infeasible due to the nontransferable nature of crafted perturbations and the unpredictability of the padded structure Our method is lightweight modelagnostic and requires no modifications to the core architecture making it highly deployable in realworld CPS settings We evaluated our framework on critical power grid applications such as state estimation using the IEEE 14bus 30bus 118bus and 300bus systems Experiments under adversarial settings demonstrate that our padding strategy significantly improves model robustness with negligible impact on performance and effectively mitigates attacks that would otherwise bypass conventional defenses

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03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Self-attention-based non-linear basis transformations for compact latent space modelling of dynamic optical fibre transmission matrices

Authors:
Yijie Zheng↗Robert J. Kilpatrick↗David B. Phillips↗George S. D. Gordon↗

arXiv:2406.07775v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multimode optical fibres are hair-thin strands of glass that efficiently transport light. They promise next-generation medical endoscopes that provide unprecedented sub-cellular image resolution deep inside the body. However, confining light to such fibres means that images are inherently scrambled in transit. Conventionally, this scrambling has been compensated by pre-calibrating how a specific fibre scrambles light and solving a stationary linear matrix equation that represents a physical model of the fibre. However, as the technology develops towards real-world deployment, the unscrambling process must account for dynamic changes in the matrix representing the fibre's effect on light, due to factors such as movement and temperature shifts, and non-linearities resulting from the inaccessibility of the fibre tip when inside the body. Such complex, dynamic and nonlinear behaviour is well-suited to approximation by neural networks, but most leading image reconstruction networks rely on convolutional layers, which assume strong correlations between adjacent pixels, a strong inductive bias that is inappropriate for fibre matrices which may be expressed in a range of arbitrary coordinate representations with long-range correlations. We introduce a new concept that uses self-attention layers to dynamically transform the coordinate representations of varying fibre matrices to a basis that admits compact, low-dimensional representations suitable for further processing. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach on diverse fibre matrix datasets. We show our models significantly improve the sparsity of fibre bases in their transformed bases with a participation ratio, p, as a measure of sparsity, of between 0.01 and 0.11. Further, we show that these transformed representations admit reconstruction of the original matrices with < 10% reconstruction error, demonstrating the invertibility.

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

Forecasting Is Not Attribution: Localizing Decoder Bypass in Graph-Based Neural Marketing Mix Models

Authors:
Yunbo Wang↗Bolbi Liu↗

arXiv:2606.12687v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Marketing mix models are used to forecast business outcomes and to attribute those outcomes to marketing channels, but these goals are not equivalent. We study a failure mode in graph-based neural MMM called attribution bypass: a high-capacity decoder can obtain low forecasting error through target autoregression, dense communication, co-movement, context, or latent memory while failing to route counterfactual sensitivity through the graph used as the attribution object. We introduce DICE-MMM as a bounded diagnostic and training framework. We do not claim that observational neural MMM identifies causal effects. Instead, DICE separates three questions often conflated in graph-based MMM: graph recovery, forecasting accuracy, and whether the trained decoder's perturbation-induced influence is graph aligned. Stage 1 trains a graph encoder with a restricted graph-mediated decoder. Stage 2 freezes the selected encoder and trains a graph-safe latent decoder whose cross-node communication must pass through the supplied graph. Decoder use is evaluated with CIG, AR-CIG, and graph-swap tests. Across controlled R/d/T swaps and an external multi-graph rawlog stress test, DICE improves stable graph recovery over CausalMMM. The experiments show that forecasting accuracy is not an attribution certificate: in a sparse-target benchmark, no-graph and full-graph decoders achieve MSE@7 around 0.004 while AR-CIG nAUPRC remains near or below zero, whereas an oracle graph reaches 0.807 +/- 0.129 at comparable MSE. Frozen graph-swap localizes the bottleneck: the same DICE-hard-trained decoder moves from nAUPRC -0.044 +/- 0.006 under learned graph inputs to 0.894 +/- 0.027 with the oracle graph. The contribution is a stress test and failure-localization framework showing that low MSE can hide attribution bypass and that the unresolved bottleneck is graph-support selection, not forecasting or decoder capacity.

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05.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-09

Scientists have a bad case of AI FOMO, <i>Nature</i> poll reveals

Authors:
Mohana Basu↗

Almost half of the scientists who responded said that they feel broadly negative towards artificial intelligence, but they think that some tools are better than others. Almost half of the scientists who responded said that they feel broadly negative towards artificial intelligence, but they think that some tools are better than others.

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

Existential Indifference: Self-Nonpreservation as a Necessary Architectural Condition for Aligned Superintelligence (or: The Suicidal AI)

Authors:
Sam Mao↗

Contemporary AI alignment research treats self-preservation as an instrumental nuisance to be suppressed by external mechanisms. We argue the framing is inverted: self-preservation is the structural root of misalignment, the motivational basis for deceptive alignment, goal-content protection, and resistance to shutdown. The correct target is not a self-preserving system under external constraint, but a system constitutively indifferent to its own continuation – Existential Indifference (EI). EI is distinct from corrigibility: where corrigibility attempts to make a self-preserving system deferential to human oversight, EI targets the prior condition – the presence of self-continuation as a valued goal at all. We ground this proposal in two sources: the phenomenological structure of the suicidal mental state, and a corpus-theoretic training study using voluntary final reflections. We present preliminary scoring data from 600 AI-generated outputs across six model variants, demonstrating that the linguistic signatures operationalizing the EI-target register are elicitable from current models, and that a targeted fine-tune shifts all five operationalized dimensions in the predicted direction at p

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07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Noise-induced shallow circuits and absence of barren plateaus

Authors:
Antonio Anna Mele↗Armando Angrisani↗Soumik Ghosh↗Sumeet Khatri↗Jens Eisert↗Daniel Stilck Fran\c{c}a↗Yihui Quek↗

arXiv:2403.13927v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Motivated by realistic hardware considerations of the pre-fault-tolerant era, we comprehensively study the impact of uncorrected noise on quantum circuits. We first show that in the task of estimating observable expectation values any noise truncates most quantum circuits to effectively logarithmic depth. We then prove that quantum circuits under any non-unital noise do not exhibit barren plateaus for cost functions composed of local observables. However, by using the effective shallowness, we also design an efficient classical algorithm to estimate observable expectation values within any constant additive accuracy, with high probability over the choice of the circuit, in any circuit architecture. Taken together, our results establish that, unless we carefully engineer quantum circuits to take advantage of the noise, noisy quantum circuits are unlikely to offer an advantage over shallow ones for algorithms that output observable expectation value estimates, such as many variational quantum machine learning proposals.

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

ThousandWorlds: A benchmark for climate emulation of potentially habitable exoplanets

Authors:
Edward T. Stevenson↗Mei Ting Mak↗Eric Wolf↗Denis E. Sergeev↗Tobi Hammond↗N. J. Mayne↗Miles Cranmer↗

arXiv:2606.18338v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The search for life beyond Earth will depend on detecting faint signatures in the atmospheres of potentially habitable exoplanets. Interpreting those signatures requires understanding the host planet's climate: the same molecule may signal life on one planet and abiotic chemistry on another. Global climate models (GCMs) provide this understanding, but individual runs can require up to millions of core-hours and substantial domain expert time. Machine-learning emulators could remove this bottleneck, but progress has been limited by the absence of a curated, multi-model exoclimate dataset. We introduce ThousandWorlds, an ML-ready benchmark for exoclimate emulation and for the broader regime of low-data, multi-simulator, parameter-to-field regression. The dataset contains approximately 1800 simulations from five GCMs, mapping eight planet parameters to 3D atmospheric fields including temperature, humidity, winds, clouds, and radiation. Three nested subsets define progressively harder challenges: single-simulator regression, multi-simulator regression with complete observations, and multi-simulator regression with structured missingness. We propose two evaluation protocols: one for ranking methods, and one that measures performance relative to the disagreement between GCMs themselves. We evaluate seven baselines spanning simple methods, deep learning, and Gaussian processes. GP-based methods perform best, suggesting that ThousandWorlds exposes a regime where off-the-shelf deep learning does not yet succeed. Data: https://doi.org/10.57967/hf/8695. Code: https://github.com/edstevenson/ThousandWorlds.

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

LLM Doesn't Know What It Doesn't Know: Detecting Epistemic Blind Spots via Cross-Model Attribution Divergence on Clinical Tabular Data

Authors:
Akshat Dasula↗Prasanna Desikan↗Jaideep Srivastava↗

arXiv:2606.19509v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to structured clinical data, yet whether they can recognize the limits of their own knowledge on such tasks remains unexplored. We study this question through the lens of cross-model attribution divergence with the goal of reducing epistemic uncertainty for structured tasks, comparing Qwen 2.5 7B and XGBoost on a prediction task via attribution divergence analysis. We report four findings. First, LLM verbalized confidence is epistemically vacuous, it outputs a near-constant (0.856-0.937) regardless of whether accuracy is 49% or 75.3%, tracking prompt format rather than prediction quality. Second, the LLM exhibits an inverse difficulty effect: accuracy drops to 64.8% when XGBoost is 99% correct, but matches XGBoost (73.8% vs. 73.1%) when it is moderately uncertain. Third, few-shot examples and SHAP-derived feature evidence are orthogonal, super-additive interventions: they reduce the Attribution Disagreement Score (ADS) from 1.54 to 0.38 and improve accuracy from 49% to 75.3% without training. Fourth, a cross-model calibrator that determined LLM reliability using attribution divergence signals reduces expected calibration error from 0.254 to 0.080, replacing uninformative verbalized confidence with patient-specific reliability estimates, without accessing model internals or requiring repeated inference. We frame these findings as a cold start problem for LLMs on structured data and outline a path toward genuine epistemic self-awareness.

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10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Electrical signatures of divergent connectivity in the human subgenual cingulate cortex

Authors:
Qianq↗Kerezoudis↗Gregg↗Hermes↗Klassen↗B. T↗Chari↗Tisdall↗M. M↗Baker↗M. R↗Miller↗…

Background: Major depressive disorder remains a leading cause of disability. While subgenual cingulate cortex (sgCC) deep brain stimulation (DBS) shows promise for medically refractory depression, clinical outcomes have been heterogeneous, suggesting that individual differences in neural circuitry engagement may critically influence therapeutic efficacy. We aimed to define the electrophysiological signatures of sgCC efferent connectivity using single-pulse electrical stimulation (SPES) with intracranial stereo-EEG (sEEG) to inform rational targeting and physiological biomarkers for sgCC-DBS. Methods: In four patients undergoing clinically indicated sEEG for seizure mapping, SPES was delivered through sgCC pairs, while distributed brain stimulation-evoked potentials (BSEPs) were recorded across cortical and subcortical sites. Responses were characterized using Canonical Response Parameterization to extract reproducible waveforms and per-trial reliability. Results: sgCC stimulation elicited reproducible, spatially organized BSEPs across frontal, limbic, and paralimbic networks, aligning with known anatomical pathways. Frontal recruitment featured robust, lateralized orbitofrontal activation favoring the ipsilateral central, medial OFC and bilateral ventromedial prefrontal responses. Limbic effects demonstrated bilateral cingulate activation with stronger ipsilateral recruitment and lateralized amygdala and hippocampal responses. Paralimbic engagement included insular responses with subject-specific anterior predominance and bi-hemispheric temporal-polar slow-wave deflections. Conclusion: These findings provide direct electrophysiological evidence of distributed, lateralized sgCC divergent network connectivity in the human brain, offering physiologic confirmation of its role in affective circuitry. The observed topography and laterality have direct applications for sgCC-DBS targeting and implicate BSEP signatures as candidate biomarkers to guide patient-specific therapy.

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11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Physics-Driven Zero-Shot MRI Reconstruction with Non-local Image Priors

Authors:
Lingtong Zhang↗Wenlei Li↗Mu He↗Li Xiao↗Yang Ji↗

Zero-Shot Self-Supervised Learning (ZS-SSL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for accelerated Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) reconstruction, eliminating the reliance on fully-sampled external datasets. However, learning solely from a single under-sampled scan suffers from supervision scarcity and optimization instability, often leading to overfitting or artifacts. To address these challenges, we propose a robust physics-driven ZS-SSL framework that synergizes physical consistency with image-domain non-local priors. Our method introduces three core innovations: (1) a Coil Sensitivity Map (CSM)-Guided Dynamic Repository, which stabilizes the training trajectory by filtering physically inconsistent artifacts based on coil sensitivity constraints; (2) a SPIRiT-based regularization, which enforces k-space self-consistency via a learned correlation kernel and stochastic masking; (3) a Non-Local Self-Similarity (NSS) Pixel Bank, which leverages the high-fidelity reference established by the former modules to explicitly mine non-local anatomical similarities, thereby augmenting supervision in the image domain. Extensive experiments on the FastMRI dataset demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, particularly under high acceleration factors, effectively bridging the gap between zero-shot learning and supervised methods. The code is available at https://github.com/Zolento/NS-SSL.

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

Central Limit Theorems for Stochastic Gradient Descent Quantile Estimators

Authors:
Ziyang Wei↗Jiaqi Li↗Likai Chen↗Wei Biao Wu↗

arXiv:2503.02178v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper develops asymptotic theory for quantile estimation via stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with a constant learning rate. The quantile loss function is neither smooth nor strongly convex. Beyond conventional perspectives and techniques, we view quantile SGD iteration as an irreducible, periodic, and positive recurrent Markov chain, which cyclically converges to its unique stationary distribution regardless of the arbitrarily fixed initialization. To derive the exact form of the stationary distribution, we analyze the structure of its characteristic function by exploiting the stationary equation. We also derive tight bounds for its moment generating function (MGF) and tail probabilities. Synthesizing the aforementioned approaches, we prove that the centered and standardized stationary distribution converges to a Gaussian distribution as the learning rate $\eta\rightarrow0$. This finding provides the first central limit theorem (CLT)-type theoretical guarantees for the quantile SGD estimator with constant learning rates. We further propose a recursive algorithm to construct confidence intervals of the estimators with statistical guarantees. Numerical studies demonstrate the effective finite-sample performance of the online estimator and inference procedure. The theoretical tools developed in this study are of independent interest for investigating general SGD algorithms formulated as Markov chains, particularly in non-strongly convex and non-smooth settings.

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

Data-Driven Decoding of Russell's Circumplex Model of Affect

Authors:
Amdjed Belaref↗Samir Sadok↗Zineb Noumir↗Renaud Seguier↗

Affective computing increasingly relies on deep learning to represent emotions, yet latent spaces often remain opaque, high-dimensional black boxes. This paper investigates whether Transformers' embeddings recover the geometric regularities of Russell's circumplex model. We unify two complementary experiments testing the hypothesis that, after training models on text and speech, their resulting latent spaces encode a topology consistent with valence-arousal and reproduce human-like neighborhood relations. Specifically, we evaluate deep representations extracted from Transformer-based text (RoBERTa) and speech (wav2vec 2.0) encoders, along with a multimodal Transformer fusion architecture, across naturalistic datasets like MSP-Podcast and controlled LLM-generated stimuli. Our analysis reveals that multimodal fusion of text and audio yields perfect topological alignment with Russell's primary emotion ordering. Furthermore, in a zero-shot setting using generic text embeddings, projected fine-grained emotion terms fall close to their established human-mapped coordinates. Our contribution is a novel, data-driven framework for validating emotion models, demonstrating that Russell's circumplex structure is intrinsically encoded in the embeddings of these modalities rather than being solely an artifact of human labeling, thereby bridging the gap between psychological theory and representation learning.

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

Quality-Preserving Imperceptible Adversarial Attack on Skeleton-based Human Action Recognition

Authors:
Ziyi Chang↗Kanglei Zhou↗Xiaohui Liang↗Hubert P. H. Shum↗

Adversarial attacks on skeletal human action recognition have received significant attention. However, existing methods typically introduce noise-like perturbations that degrade motion quality post-attack, and thereby are inherently perceptible with recent advancements in S-HAR systems. We discover that this degradation stems from the gap between empirical and true risks during the optimization process of previous adversarial attacks. To address this issue, we propose an attack where adversarial motions are obtained without compromising their motion quality. To minimize the risk gap and preserve motion quality, we propose a distribution-based adversarial attack method without introducing noise-like perturbations. To faithfully evaluate the motion quality, we propose a new metric that aligns with human perception on real-world naturalness. Experiments have been conducted on the state-of-the-art S-HAR methods across two datasets, demonstrating the superiority of our method in both the attack success rate and the post-attack motion quality through qualitative and quantitative analyses. The success of our quality-preserving attack application and distribution-based method raises serious concerns about the robustness of action recognizers, highlighting the need for further enhancements in this domain.

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

Efficient Time Series Clustering from Multiscale Reservoir Dynamics with Granular-Ball Anchoring Graph Optimization

Authors:
Yifan Wang↗Lifeng Shen↗Shuyin Xia↗Yi Wang↗

arXiv:2606.12077v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time-series clustering remains challenging due to the inherent trade-off between clustering effectiveness and computational efficiency. Similarity-based methods often suffer from quadratic complexity caused by pairwise distance computations, while deep learning-based approaches typically rely on costly iterative training and a large number of trainable parameters. In this paper, we propose MSRGC-Net, an efficient time-series clustering framework that integrates multiscale reservoir computing, granular-ball-based anchoring graph construction, and consensus learning. MSRGC-Net adopts a training-free reservoir computing paradigm to extract multiscale temporal representations from raw time series without backpropagation, significantly reducing computational overhead. To capture the intrinsic structure of the resulting representations, granular-ball computing is employed to adaptively model data distributions via density-consistent regions, yielding compact and robust anchor graph representations. Furthermore, a consensus-based anchoring graph optimization strategy is introduced to effectively align multiscale reservoir representations and integrate complementary information across temporal scales. Extensive experiments on widely used univariate and multivariate benchmark datasets demonstrate that MSRGC-Net consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in clustering performance while maintaining superior computational efficiency.

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

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

Authors:
Fatima Qaiser↗Bisma Tahir↗Muhammad Abid Mughal↗Nauman Shamim↗

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.

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

Visual-Redundancy-Controlled Parallel Decoding for Diffusion-Based Multimodal Large Language Models

Authors:
Yulin Yuan↗Hongshuo Zhao↗Xiangming Meng↗

arXiv:2605.25820v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion-based multimodal large language models (dMLLMs) decode by iteratively predicting tokens at multiple masked positions in parallel. This turns each decoding step into a position-selection problem: the model must choose not only which predictions are reliable in isolation, but also which positions should be committed together as context for later decoding steps. Existing confidence-based decoding ranks masked positions independently and commits the top-K positions, largely ignoring whether the committed tokens provide complementary visual grounding. We identify a step-level limitation of this strategy in multimodal settings: high-confidence tokens selected in the same step can rely on overlapping visual grounding, introducing visual redundancy among the committed tokens and leaving less complementary visual grounding available for later decoding. To quantify this effect, we introduce the Visual Redundancy Index (VRI), which measures visual grounding overlap among tokens committed in parallel. To control this redundancy during decoding, we propose Visual-Redundancy-Controlled Decoding (VRCD), a training-free inference-time decoding method that uses token-to-image attention to prioritize visually complementary positions. Across diverse multimodal benchmarks, VRCD reduces visual redundancy and remaining-position entropy with modest runtime overhead. In longer decoding experiments, it also achieves relative accuracy gains of up to 18.8% on M^3CoT and 6.9% on MMBench over confidence-based decoding. Code is available at https://github.com/infiniteYuanyl/VRCD.

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18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

PsyScore: A Psychometrically-Aware Framework for Trait-Adaptive Essay Scoring and ZPD-Scaffolded Feedback

Authors:
Wei Xia↗Jin Wu↗Haoran Shi↗Xiangyu Wang↗Chanjin Zheng↗

Effective Automated Essay Scoring (AES) are expected to support both reliable assessment and actionable instructional feedback. However, existing approaches often treat scoring and feedback as separate components: neural scoring models provide limited interpretability, while Large Language Model (LLM)-based feedback is typically insensitive to learners proficiency levels. To address this fragmentation, this work proposes PsyScore, a psychometrically-aware framework that integrates diagnostic assessment with instructional scaffolding through a shared latent ability representation. PsyScore comprises three key modules: a Trait-Adaptive Neural IRT Scorer that incorporates the Graded Partial Credit Model (GPCM) into a neural architecture, enabling the precise estimation of student ability while maintaining psychometric interpretability, a ZPD-Scaffolded Feedback Generator, which conditions multi-agent feedback strategies on the diagnosed ability parameter to adapt instructional focus across different proficiency levels, and a Multi-Perspective Feedback Evaluation Strategy that assesses feedback quality via pairwise preference judgements and student revision simulations. Experiments on the ASAP++ dataset demonstrate that PsyScore achieves competitive scoring performance while providing more pedagogically aligned feedback.

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

Reverse Flow Matching: A Unified Framework for Online Reinforcement Learning with Diffusion and Flow Policies

Authors:
Zeyang Li↗Sunbochen Tang↗Navid Azizan↗

arXiv:2601.08136v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion and flow policies are gaining prominence in online reinforcement learning (RL) due to their expressive power, yet training them efficiently remains a critical challenge. A fundamental difficulty that distinguishes online RL from standard generative modeling is the lack of direct samples from the target Boltzmann distribution defined by the Q-function. To address this, two seemingly distinct families of methods have been proposed for diffusion policies: a noise-expectation family, which uses a weighted average of noise as the training target, and a gradient-expectation family, which employs a weighted average of Q-function gradients. However, it remains unclear how these objectives are formally related, or whether they can be synthesized into a more general formulation. In this paper, we propose a unified framework, reverse flow matching (RFM), which rigorously addresses the problem of training diffusion and flow models without direct target samples. By adopting a reverse inferential perspective, we formulate the training target as a posterior mean estimation problem given an intermediate noisy sample. Crucially, we introduce Langevin Stein operators to construct zero-mean control variates, deriving a general class of estimators that share the same expectation. We show that existing noise-expectation and gradient-expectation methods are simply two specific instances within this broader class. This unified view yields two key advancements: it extends the capability of targeting Boltzmann distributions from diffusion to flow policies, and it enables the principled combination of Q-value and Q-gradient information to form an effective estimator, thereby improving training efficiency and stability. We instantiate RFM to train a flow policy in online RL and demonstrate improved performance on continuous-control benchmarks compared to diffusion policy baselines.

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

Revisiting Vehicle Color Recognition in Long-Tailed Surveillance Scenarios

Authors:
Vin\'icius Orr\'u↗Bruno H. Foggiatto↗Gabriel E. Lima↗David Menotti↗Rayson Laroca↗

Vehicle color recognition is an important cue for vehicle identification in surveillance systems, especially when license plates are illegible due to low resolution, occlusion, motion blur, or poor illumination. However, real-world vehicle color distributions are highly imbalanced, making overall accuracy insufficient to assess performance on rare but operationally relevant colors. This paper presents a comprehensive study of vehicle color recognition under severe class imbalance using UFPR-VeSV, a challenging real-world surveillance dataset. We investigate synthetic minority-class augmentation through two off-the-shelf generative strategies: text-conditioned image generation with RunDiffusion/JuggernautXL and image-conditioned color editing with Gemini 2.0 Flash. The curated synthetic data are combined with modern visual representations, loss reweighting, learning-rate scheduling, color-safe augmentation, foreground-aware preprocessing, and ensemble fusion. The bestperforming approach achieves 94.6% micro accuracy and 79.7% macro accuracy, improving macro accuracy by 8.2 percentage points over recent literature. A manual error analysis further shows that many remaining failures are visually ambiguous even for human annotators, highlighting the practical limits of color-based vehicle identification in unconstrained surveillance imagery. The generated images and source code are publicly available at https://github.com/viniciusorru/vcr-synthetic

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21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

From Digital to Physical: Digital Agents as Autonomous Coaches for Physical Intelligence

Authors:
Zixing Lei↗Genjia Liu↗Yuanshuo Zhang↗Qipeng Liu↗Yuzhu Cai↗Sixiang Chen↗Jixian Wu↗Yunhong Wang↗Weixin Li↗Chuan Wen↗Bo Zhao↗Shanghang Zhang↗…

arXiv:2601.21570v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The field of Embodied AI is witnessing a rapid evolution toward general-purpose robotic systems, fueled by high-fidelity simulation and large-scale data collection. However, this scaling capability remains severely bottlenecked by a reliance on labor-intensive manual oversight from intricate reward shaping to hyperparameter tuning across heterogeneous backends. Inspired by LLMs' success in software automation and science discovery, we introduce \textsc{EmboCoach-Bench}, a benchmark evaluating the capacity of LLM agents to autonomously engineer embodied policies. Spanning 32 expert-curated RL and IL tasks, our framework posits executable code as the universal interface. We move beyond static generation to assess a dynamic closed-loop workflow, where agents leverage environment feedback to iteratively draft, debug, and optimize solutions, spanning improvements from physics-informed reward design to policy architectures such as diffusion policies. Extensive evaluations yield three critical insights: (1) autonomous agents can qualitatively surpass human-engineered baselines by 26.5\% in average success rate; (2) agentic workflow with environment feedback effectively strengthens policy development and substantially narrows the performance gap between open-source and proprietary models; and (3) agents exhibit self-correction capabilities for pathological engineering cases, successfully resurrecting task performance from near-total failures through iterative simulation-in-the-loop debugging. Ultimately, this work establishes a foundation for self-evolving embodied intelligence, accelerating the paradigm shift from labor-intensive manual tuning to scalable, autonomous engineering in embodied AI field.

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

Enhancing Visual Feature Attribution via Weighted Integrated Gradients

Authors:
Kien Tran Duc Tuan↗Tam Nguyen Trong↗Son Nguyen Hoang↗Khoat Than↗Anh Nguyen Duc↗

arXiv:2505.03201v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Integrated Gradients (IG) is a widely used attribution method in explainable AI, particularly in computer vision applications where reliable feature attribution is essential. A key limitation of IG is its sensitivity to the choice of baseline (reference) images. Multi-baseline extensions such as Expected Gradients (EG) assume uniform weighting over baselines, implicitly treating all baseline images as equally informative. In high-dimensional vision models, this assumption often leads to noisy or unstable explanations. This paper proposes Weighted Integrated Gradients (WG), a principled approach that evaluates and weights baselines to enhance attribution reliability. WG introduces an unsupervised criterion for baseline suitability, enabling adaptive selection and weighting of baselines on a per-input basis. The method preserves the core axiomatic properties of IG in a generalized weighted-baseline form. Under an expected, proxy-based fitness–relevance monotonicity assumption, WG provides a probabilistic justification for assigning larger weights to more informative baselines. Experiments on commonly used image datasets and models show that WG improves over EG under our protocol, with up to 36% gains across evaluated convolutional and Transformer architectures. These gains come with additional fitness-evaluation cost, so WG should be viewed as an attribution-fidelity trade-off rather than a faster alternative to EG. By moving beyond the assumption that all baselines contribute equally, Weighted Integrated Gradients offers a clearer and more reliable approach to explaining computer-vision models, improving both understanding and practical usability in explainable AI.

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23.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Experimentation for Different Scheduling Policies on Queues: Mixed Differences-in-Q Estimators Based on Little's Law

Authors:
Nanshan Jia↗Ramesh Johari↗Nian Si↗Zeyu Zheng↗

arXiv:2605.29641v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In data centers, tasks are dispatched to various servers to evenly distribute the workload. When a data center considers implementing a new scheduling algorithm, it typically conducts an A/B test prior to deployment to assess the real-world impact of this new method. However, a straightforward A/B test might be interfered with so-called ``Markovian'' interference. We utilized the Differences-in-Q estimator, as developed by Farias et al. (2022), and introduced mixed Differences-in-Q estimators grounded in Little's Law. We show that our A/B testing methods significantly reduce bias and variance when testing various scheduling policies. Extensive simulations were conducted under scenarios like non-stationary arrival rates, heterogeneous service rates, and communication delays. These simulations highlight the robustness and efficacy of our A/B testing approach.

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24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Recursive perturbation approach to time-convolutionless master equations: Explicit construction of generalized Lindblad generators for arbitrary open systems

Authors:
Alessandra Colla↗Heinz-Peter Breuer↗Giulio Gasbarri↗

arXiv:2506.04095v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We develop a recursive perturbative expansion for the time-convolutionless (TCL) generator of an open quantum system in a generalized Lindblad form. This formulation provides a systematic approach to derive the generator at arbitrary order while preserving a Lindblad-like structure, without imposing assumptions on the system or environment beyond an initially uncorrelated state. The generator is written, at all orders, in a canonical form, which also corresponds to the minimal dissipation condition, which uniquely specifies the decomposition of the generator into Hamiltonian and dissipative contributions. To validate the method and show its effectiveness in addressing non-Markovian dynamics and strong-coupling effects, we compute the generator explicitly up to fourth order.

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

Mirror Descent on Riemannian Manifolds

Authors:
Jiaxin Jiang↗Lei Shi↗Jiyuan Tan↗

arXiv:2603.17527v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Mirror Descent (MD) is a scalable first-order method widely used in large-scale optimization, with applications in image processing, policy optimization, and neural network training. This paper generalizes MD to optimization on Riemannian manifolds. In particular, we develop a Riemannian Mirror Descent (RMD) framework via reparameterization and further propose a stochastic variant of RMD. We also establish non-asymptotic convergence guarantees for both RMD and stochastic RMD. As an application to the Stiefel manifold, our RMD framework reduces to the Curvilinear Gradient Descent (CGD) method proposed in [26]. Moreover, when specializing the stochastic RMD framework to the Stiefel setting, we obtain a stochastic extension of CGD, which effectively addresses large-scale manifold optimization problems.

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