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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

ROSA-TFormer: A Radar-Optical Sensor-Aware Temporal Transformer for Pinus sylvestris Plantation Classification in Northern Shaanxi Using GEE-Derived Sentinel-1/2 Time Series

Accurate identification of Pinus sylvestris var. mongolica plantations is important for monitoring afforestation quality and ecological restoration in northern Shaanxi. This paper proposes ROSA-TFormer, a radar-optical sensor-aware temporal Transformer for P. sylvestris classification using Sentinel-1/2 time-series data generated on Google Earth Engine. The model integrates separate SAR and optical embedding branches, a sensor-aware gate, and temporal attention pooling to capture multi-source seasonal features. Experiments on monthly and half-month point-level datasets show that ROSA-TFormer achieves strong classification performance, with 99.67% overall accuracy, 99.56% macro F1, and 98.91% P. sylvestris F1 on the HalfMonth-dataBig dataset. Spatial block validation and ablation results further indicate the effectiveness of radar-optical temporal fusion and sensor-aware modeling. The results demonstrate the potential of ROSA-TFormer for point-level P. sylvestris plantation classification, while broader wall-to-wall validation remains necessary.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

SDQM: Synthetic Data Quality Metric for Object Detection Dataset Evaluation

The performance of machine learning models depends heavily on training data. The scarcity of large-scale, well-annotated datasets poses significant challenges in creating robust models. To address this, synthetic data generated through simulations and generative models has emerged as a promising solution, enhancing dataset diversity and improving the performance, reliability, and resilience of models. However, evaluating the quality of this generated data requires an effective metric. We introduce the Synthetic Dataset Quality Metric (SDQM) to assess data quality for object detection tasks without requiring model training to converge. This metric enables more efficient generation and selection of synthetic datasets, addressing a key challenge in resource-constrained object detection tasks. In our experiments, SDQM demonstrated a strong correlation with the mean average precision (mAP) scores of YOLO11, a leading object detection model, whereas previous metrics only exhibited moderate or weak correlations. In addition, it provides actionable insights into improving dataset quality, minimizing the need for costly iterative training. This scalable and efficient metric sets a new standard for evaluating synthetic data. The code for SDQM is available at https://github.com/ayushzenith/SDQM

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

ROMPAR: Morphological Completion and Demographic Unlearning for Romanian-Accented Speech Recognition

Automated transcription of parliamentary proceedings faces significant hurdles due to demographic bias, dialectal variation, and technical artifacts such as utterance truncation during segmentation. This paper introduces the ROManian PARliamentary Speech Corpus (ROMPAR) dataset, a 17.80-hour corpus of Romanian and Moldavian parliamentary speech, featuring double-annotated ground truth and explicit labels for reconstructed word fragments. To build a robust ASR system, we propose a multi-task adversarial training framework that enforces demographic invariance across age, gender, and dialect. We address the inherent instability of adversarial objectives in generative architectures by introducing an exponential decay mechanism for the adversarial coefficients. Furthermore, we implement an LLM-guided decoding strategy with position-dependent weighting to facilitate morphological completion of truncated terminal words. Our results demonstrate that the proposed framework significantly reduces WER and achieves an F1-score of 96.6% in morphological reconstruction.

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

Pretraining A Large Language Model using Distributed GPUs: A Memory-Efficient Decentralized Paradigm

Pretraining large language models (LLMs) typically requires centralized clusters with thousands of high-memory GPUs (e.g., H100/A100). Recent decentralized training methods reduce communication overhead by employing federated optimization; however, they still need to train the entire model on each node, remaining constrained by GPU memory limitations. In this work, we propose SParse Expert Synchronization (SPES), a memory-efficient decentralized framework for pretraining mixture-of-experts (MoE) LLMs. SPES trains only a subset of experts per node, substantially lowering the memory footprint. Each node updates its local experts and periodically synchronizes with other nodes, eliminating full-parameter transmission while ensuring efficient knowledge sharing. To mitigate limited per-expert data utilization under sparse expert updates, we introduce an expert-merging warm-up strategy, where experts exchange knowledge early in training, to rapidly establish foundational capabilities. With SPES, we train a 2B-parameter MoE LLM using 16 standalone 48GB GPUs over internet connections, which achieves competitive performance with centrally trained LLMs under similar computational budgets. We further demonstrate scalability by training a 7B model from scratch and a 9B model upcycled from a dense checkpoint, both of which match prior centralized baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/zjr2000/SPES.

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

Improving Generalization and Data Efficiency with Diffusion in Offline Multi-agent RL

arXiv:2307.01472v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present a novel Diffusion Offline Multi-agent Model (DOM2) for offline Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL). Different from existing algorithms that rely mainly on conservatism in policy design, DOM2 enhances policy expressiveness and diversity based on diffusion model. Specifically, we incorporate a diffusion model into the policy network and propose a trajectory-based data-reweighting scheme in training. These key ingredients significantly improve algorithm robustness against environment changes and achieve significant improvements in performance, generalization and data-efficiency. Our extensive experimental results demonstrate that DOM2 outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in all multi-agent particle and multi-agent MuJoCo environments, and generalizes significantly better to shifted environments {(in $28$ out of $30$ settings evaluated)} thanks to its high expressiveness and diversity. Moreover, DOM2 is ultra data efficient and requires no more than $5\%$ data for achieving the same performance compared to existing algorithms (a $20\times$ improvement in data efficiency).

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

FFinRED: An Expert-Guided Benchmark Generation and Evaluation Framework for Financial LLM Red-Teaming

arXiv:2606.19887v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing safety benchmarks target general adversarial scenarios but miss finance-specific risks. Financial LLMs face regulatory compliance violations, fraud facilitation, and systemic trust erosion that require targeted evaluation. We introduce FinRED, an expert-guided red-teaming framework for financial LLM safety evaluation developed with financial experts. FinRED uses a novel two-level taxonomy mapping global standards (e.g., FATF and EU DORA) to threats ranging from regulatory evasion to complex fraud, integrated with a scalable pipeline that converts real financial documents into context-rich red-teaming Behavioral Prompts (seeds) through an expert-defined schema. Rigorous expert validation confirms seed plausibility and realism for meaningful LLM safety evaluation. We also provide an expert-validated, finance-specific rubric that goes beyond disclaimer checks, aligns more closely with human experts than static one-size-fits-all rubrics, and reduces critical false negatives from 28 to 12. Aligned with internationally adopted risk-management and information-security standards (e.g., ISO/IEC 27001), FinRED is deployed in South Korea's Financial Security Institute (FSI) regulatory sandbox for generative AI security evaluation in real financial services. To mitigate dual-use risks, the dataset, generation pipeline, prompt template, and evaluation framework are gated for qualified researchers at https://github.com/selectstar-ai/FinRED-paper and https://huggingface.co/datasets/datumo/FinRED.

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

Spatially Selective Self-Training for Unsupervised Building Change Detection

Unsupervised building change detection aims to learn building-change masks from unlabeled bi-temporal remote sensing images. Existing label-free methods often follow a discrepancy-to-mask paradigm, directly using temporal differences, frozen foundation-model responses, prompt-based outputs, or post-processing results as final change maps. Although these strategies provide annotation-free cues, they do not learn a task-specific building-change detector and remain vulnerable to the gap between generic temporal discrepancies and building-defined structural changes. In practice, such discrepancies are often noisy and task-irrelevant, as appearance shifts, registration errors, and non-building modifications can produce strong but misleading responses. To address this problem, we propose SST-CD, a spatially selective self-training framework that reformulates fully label-free building change detection as end-to-end detector learning under noisy pseudo supervision. SST-CD uses temporal discrepancies as candidate pseudo labels and trains the detector only on spatially reliable pixels, whose reliability is estimated by a local consistency criterion that filters inconsistent regions from supervision. To further stabilize noisy self-training, a lightweight feature adapter recalibrates bi-temporal features, while a prototype-based decoder produces compact change and no-change representations. Experiments on LEVIR-CD, WHU-CD, and DSIFN-CD show that SST-CD achieves F1 scores of 83.08%, 91.69%, and 86.60%, respectively, outperforming existing unsupervised and label-free baselines.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Cross-Dataset Bloom Question Classification: Supervised Models and Prompted LLMs

Automatic Bloom's taxonomy classification of assessment questions can substantially reduce instructor workload, but labeling is subjective and teacher-dependent. Prior machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) approaches reported strong within-dataset results, yet were rarely evaluated in cross-dataset settings, leaving real-world generalizability unclear; meanwhile, LLM effectiveness for Bloom question classification has not been systematically studied. We evaluated the cross-dataset generalization of existing ML/DL methods and assessed LLMs with multiple prompting strategies on five datasets; the best prompting strategy combined in-context examples with course-specific action verbs. Supervised ML/DL models degraded substantially on unseen datasets, whereas LLMs were more stable, suggesting a robust alternative across diverse educational contexts. Based on the best prompting strategy, we also presented a lightweight UI that supports instructors in automatically classifying large question banks; a usability study indicated low workload and high usability.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

A Validated LBM Dataset and Pipeline for Surrogate Modeling of Turbulent 3D Obstructed Channel Flows

arXiv:2606.16765v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating neural operators for 3D turbulent flow requires validated datasets with physical benchmarks. We present a reproducible pipeline generating training data for 3D channel flows around generated geometries at Re=1,000-10,000. Our lattice Boltzmann solver with cumulant collision operators is rigorously verified against experimental measurements (Strouhal number, drag coefficients, turbulent fluctuations) with comprehensive grid convergence studies at resolution 1024x512x512. Building upon an established framework, this validated pipeline enables standardized surrogate model comparison. We outline planned systematic evaluation of Fourier Neural Operator and U-Net variants on forecasting, super-resolution, and error correction tasks, using physics-informed metrics to assess turbulent energy cascade representation. Future work will compare computational efficiency between numerical solvers and neural surrogates, exploring practical application. We seek community feedback on our validation approach, planned benchmark methodology, and evaluation priorities for neural operators in turbulent flows.

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

Cordyceps: Covert Control Attacks on LLMs via Data Poisoning

arXiv:2605.26595v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are often fine-tuned on uncurated text datasets that adversaries can poison. Existing poisoning attacks primarily rely on fixed trigger phrases that defenses such as outlier detection, clean-data regularization, or online monitoring can neutralize. In this paper, we propose a data poisoning method that teaches an LLM an information hiding scheme reliably and stealthily through semantic associations between shared knowledge such as facts or concepts and attacker-chosen phrases. The induced hiding scheme can encode and decode arbitrary malicious instructions, thus revealing a new and subtle poisoning-induced vulnerability: covert control attacks. We precisely characterize covert control attacks and evaluate them across $5$ LLMs, $3$ backdoor defenses, and $4$ prompt injection defenses. With a small poisoned fraction, covert control attacks outperform heuristic-based prompt injection attacks in average attack success rate by about $40\%$ relative to clean fine-tuned models. They also circumvent defenses based on detection and fine-tuning, maintaining up to $93\%$ attack success rate after backdoor defenses and up to $98\%$ after prompt injection defenses.

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

Characterizing Software Aging in GPU-Based LLM Serving Systems

arXiv:2606.11916v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper proposes an empirical methodology to study software aging in GPU-based LLM serving systems. Traditional aging studies focus on CPU-centric software with relatively regular workloads; LLM serving is different, spanning a Python host and a CUDA device, handling requests whose cost varies by orders of magnitude, and relying on rapidly evolving software stacks. We run a 216-hour campaign across six co-located deployments under identical stress conditions, monitor host, device, and client metrics in parallel, and apply a statistical pipeline that accounts for autocorrelation and multiple testing. Our results reveal statistically significant memory aging in all deployments, with leak rates strongly dependent on the serving runtime and deployment configuration. Beyond these findings, we provide a reproducible framework that opens a research direction at the intersection of the software aging and rejuvenation and LLM serving communities.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Detecting basis-dependent hardware errors through spatio-temporal quantum steering

arXiv:2606.16451v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spatio-temporal quantum steering provides a framework for benchmarking the nonclassicality of general quantum state transfer processes. A central diagnostic is the no-signaling-in-time (NSIT) condition, whose violation can indicate basis-dependent hardware errors. However, finite measurement statistics may also yield apparent violations, thereby obscuring the detection of basis-dependent hardware errors. To address this, we construct a statistical hypothesis test under the null hypothesis that NSIT violations arise solely from statistical fluctuations. Combining the statistical properties of NSIT violation under the null hypothesis with Chebyshev's inequality, we obtain a distribution-free upper bound on the $p$-value without parametric assumptions. We apply this method to two examples. For a single-qubit state-transfer experiment on a superconducting processor, we observe several instances that the NSIT violation is observed and the null hypothesis is simultaneously rejected by a small $p$-value, providing statistical evidence of basis-dependent hardware errors. For a seven-qubit Hayden-Preskill teleportation protocol on IonQ devices, the null hypothesis is also rejected even when the average fidelity exceeds the classical threshold, while the associated nonclassicality measure vanishes. Our results highlight the necessity of statistical hypothesis testing for detecting basis-dependent errors in near-term quantum devices.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

RankVR: Low-Rank Structure Perception and Value Recalibration for Robust Composed Image Retrieval

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) constitutes a pivotal paradigm requiring models to perform joint reasoning on reference images and modification texts. However, the prevalence of Noisy Triplet Correspondence (NTC) in large-scale datasets severely constrains model performance. Existing denoising methods either target binary mismatches or rely on scalar-based point-wise estimation, neglecting rich global structural correlations among sample populations and dynamic value variations during training, thereby yielding suboptimal results. This paper identifies two critical unresolved challenges: Global Structural Inconsistency of Semantic Correlations and Hard Sample Discrimination Uncertainty. To address these, we propose RankVR, a framework designed to construct a robust CIR model via global structure consistency and dynamic value perception. Specifically, we introduce the Global Structure Consistency Perception (GSCP) module, which utilizes the Effective Rank of the Correlation Matrix to decouple clean samples from structural noise. By measuring rank difference, GSCP identifies samples disrupting macroscopic semantic symmetry. Furthermore, we develop the Adaptive Semantic Value Calibration (ASVC) module to distinguish high-value hard clean samples. By integrating training potential and reliability, it dynamically quantifies the semantic value of each triplet, ensuring effective utilization of hard samples while suppressing noise characterized by logical conflicts. Extensive experiments on the FashionIQ and CIRR benchmark datasets demonstrate that RankVR significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, validating its superior robustness in noisy environments.

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

AIGS-Net: Compact Illumination Field Modeling via 2D Gaussian Splatting for Fast Low-Light Image Enhancement

Existing low-light image enhancement methods often face a bottleneck between the representation capacity of illumination-field modeling and computational complexity. To address this issue, this paper proposes an Adaptive Illumination Gaussian Splatting Network (AIGS-Net), an ultra-lightweight architecture for fast low-light enhancement. Unlike conventional static priors, AIGS-Net constructs an input-adaptive 2D Gaussian Splatting illumination field. The opacity of Gaussian basis functions is dynamically modulated by relative luminance statistics of the input image, and spatially varying illumination compensation is rendered through ordered alpha compositing. To guide adaptive illumination compensation efficiently, a zero-parameter nonlinear multiscale contextual encoding module is introduced to extract low-frequency structures and local contrast cues without additional convolutional weights. To suppress noise amplification and sensor-induced color bias, AIGS-Net integrates noise-mask estimation, locked single-channel Gamma mapping, cross-channel consistency regularization, and target color-alignment constraints. Experiments on LOL and LSRW benchmarks show that AIGS-Net improves detail recovery and color fidelity while requiring only approximately 40 learnable parameters, achieving an effective trade-off between enhancement quality and extreme inference efficiency.

16.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

The Wrong Kind of Right: Quantifying and Localizing Misfired Alignment in LLMs

Warning: This paper studies stereotypes and biases, and contains potentially disturbing examples, used for illustration purposes only. Our findings should not be interpreted as an argument against alignment. Instead, this paper highlights the need for principled approaches to more advanced alignment. Alignment aims to ensure that large language models (LLMs) behave safely and reliably, including by avoiding unsafe inferences. However, we show that such safety-oriented behaviors can misfire: models may reject warranted conclusions even when they are explicitly supported by context. We call this failure mode misfired alignment, where alignment-induced changes cause LLMs to override explicit evidence. To quantify this phenomenon, specifically on stereotype-related alignment, we introduce VETO, a benchmark consisting of 2,032 BBQ-derived contrastive pairs, and define a new metric, Misfired Alignment Rate (MAR), which measures on a 0 to 100 scale how often a model fails on a stereotype-related question but succeeds on its contrastive counterpart. We benchmark 25 LLMs on VETO, and show that all LLMs, including the most recent ones, exhibit non-trivial (4.7 to 18.9%) MARs while all human participants achieve 0.0% MAR. Controlled priming experiments further show that alignment-induced cues can substantially amplify MAR across LLMs, indicating that these failures are not merely artifacts of individual examples but can be induced by safety-related framing. Mechanistic analyses on open-weight LLMs reveal late-layer suppression of evidence-supported answers, and comparisons between instruct and base LLMs suggest that this suppression emerges after instruction training. These findings show that current alignment methods can overgeneralize surface-level safety cues, to the point of overriding objective evidence, motivating more work on alignment objectives that better preserve contextual grounding.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Performance of five risk stratification tools for paediatric pneumonia against WHO scores using data from the PediCAP trial in sub-Saharan Africa

Background Risk stratification tools for childhood pneumonia have been proposed to improve identification of children at highest risk of death, particularly in low-resource settings. However, their added value over the WHO Integrated Management of Childhood Illness (IMCI) criteria and danger signs remains uncertain. Methods We conducted a secondary analysis of a multi-country randomised controlled trial of children without HIV hospitalised with pneumonia in Mozambique, South Africa, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. We evaluated the performance of five published risk scores alongside WHO IMCI severity classification and danger signs. Discrimination for (1) in-hospital mortality, (2) 28-day mortality, and (3) 28-day readmission or death was assessed using area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC). Comparative performance and clinical utility were examined. Results Of the 1010 participants, 18 (1.8%) died in hospital, 22 (2.2%) died in hospital or in the 7 days post-discharge, and 63 (6.2%) died or were readmitted by day 28. Univariate case-fatality rates were highest for variables associated with malnutrition, convulsions, and hypoxaemia. All risk scores demonstrated moderate discrimination for in-hospital and in-hospital+7-day mortality (AUC range approximately 0.75-0.84), with no meaningful differences between models, and performed similarly to the WHO danger signs and IMCI severity classification. In contrast, all approaches performed poorly in predicting 28-day readmission or death (AUC approximately 0.54-0.58). No risk score consistently outperformed simple clinical criteria. Conclusions In this multi-country dataset, we found no evidence that published paediatric pneumonia risk scores meaningfully outperform WHO IMCI-based clinical assessment for predicting mortality. The relatively small number of mortality events limits precision, and modest differences cannot be excluded. These findings suggest that, in low-resource settings, strengthening implementation of existing WHO clinical criteria may be more effective than adopting more complex prediction tools.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

FEnc$^2$: Unifying Data Packing for Efficient Private Inference via Convolution and Architecture-Aware Fragment Encoding

arXiv:2606.16359v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) enables privacy-preserving machine learning but incurs extreme computational and memory overhead. These costs come not only from expensive low-level primitives, including Number Theoretic Transform (NTT), rotation, and key-switching, but also from inefficient ciphertext packing at the application level. Existing packing strategies typically preserve either neighboring data elements or feature grouping, but not both, leading to wasted ciphertext slots, excessive rotations, and inflated ciphertext counts. We propose FEnc2, a unified and principled fragment-based encoding framework for CKKS-based private convolutional neural network inference. FEnc2 optimizes slot utilization, rotation complexity, and ciphertext density through two components: 1)Conv-aware Encoding, which analytically selects an optimal fragment size to decouple spatial dependencies and jointly minimize inner-outer rotations across layers, and 2)Arch-aware Ct Compression, which restores ciphertext density after feature- or channel-reduction layers. Together, these transformations reshape encrypted workload structure and reduce homomorphic operations by one to two orders of magnitude. With full memory capacity utilized, i.e., at maximum batch size, FEnc2 achieves end-to-end latency speedups over the state-of-the-art Orion of up to 228.83x on GPU and 226.06x on CPU for LeNet on MNIST, and up to 4.55x on GPU and 9.43x on CPU for MobileNet on ImageNet. FEnc2 is hardware-agnostic yet architecturally transformative: by optimizing encrypted tensor layout before execution, it reduces ciphertext count and workload pressure on hardware, complementing primitive-level optimizations such as NTT and keyswitch accelerators. These results show that application-level data layout is a first-order architectural design dimension for encrypted inference and an important enabler for next-generation FHE systems.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Geometric Domain Adaptation via Optimal Transport for Linear Regression in R^2

arXiv:2606.14023v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Optimal Transport has become recently a powerful method for domain adaptation by aligning source and target distributions. We study a supervised domain adaptation problem where source and target domains are related by a rotation or a translation or a homothety in $\mathbb{R}^2$. We prove that the optimal transport map recovers the underlying map when using a $p-$norm cost with $p \geq 2$. Based on this insight, we develop a method combining $K-$means and optimal transport to estimate the underlying map, enabling adaptation of linear regression models when target data is scarce. Simulations demonstrate improved performance over baseline methods. Rather than relying on highly expressive deep learning architectures, we focus on classical machine learning models to emphasize interpretability and theoretical insight. This perspective allows us to explicitly characterize the role of optimal transport in recovering geometric transformations such as rotations, translations, and homotheties. Our contributions include a theoretical result linking optimal transport and rotations, translations and homothecies in $\mathbb{R}^2$, and a practical method for adaptation in linear regression offering both conceptual clarity and applied value in domain adaptation tasks in this space.

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

MCR-VQGAN: A Scalable and Cost-Effective Tau PET Synthesis Approach for Alzheimer's Disease Imaging

Tau positron emission tomography (PET) is a critical diagnostic modality for Alzheimer's disease (AD), but its widespread clinical adoption is hindered by radiation exposure, limited availability, high clinical workload, and substantial financial costs. To address these limitations, we propose the Multi-scale CBAM Residual Vector Quantized Generative Adversarial Network (MCR-VQGAN) to synthesize high-fidelity tau PET images from structural T1-weighted MRI. MCR-VQGAN advances the standard VQGAN architecture through three enhancements: multi-scale convolutions, ResNet blocks, and Convolutional Block Attention Modules (CBAM), which collectively improve the capture of local and global features. Using 222 paired T1-weighted MRI and tau PET scans from the ADNI database, we trained and compared MCR-VQGAN against cGAN, WGAN-GP, CycleGAN, and baseline VQGAN. MCR-VQGAN achieved superior image synthesis performance across all metrics (MSE = 0.0056 +/- 0.0061, PSNR = 30.65 +/- 4.47 dB, SSIM = 0.9263 +/- 0.0469). A CNN-based AD classifier trained on real tau PET achieved comparable accuracy on real (63.64%) and synthetic (65.91%) images, indicating that diagnostically relevant features are preserved. Regional SUVR-equivalent analysis across Braak-defined ROIs further indicated strong agreement between real and synthetic tau PET (Pearson r = 0.78-0.88; ICC = 0.71-0.84), with the strongest agreement in Braak V/VI (ICC = 0.838). Together, these results suggest that MCR-VQGAN offers a promising and scalable surrogate for conventional tau PET imaging, potentially improving the accessibility of tau biomarkers for AD research and clinical workflows.

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

A General Framework for Decision Trees via Bregman Divergences

arXiv:2606.13984v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Decision trees are one of the fundamental tools in statistical learning due to their interpretability, flexibility, and their ability to adapt to nonlinear structures. Among them, the Classification and Regression Trees, introduced by Breiman, Friedman, Olshen, and Stone in 1984, became one of the most influential algorithms and remains one of the most widely used methods for classification and regression problems. On the other hand, Bregman divergences, introduced by Lev Bregman in 1967 in the context of convex optimization, provide a broad family of loss functions that naturally generalize the squared Euclidean distance. This family includes, among others, the Kullback-Leibler divergence, the Poisson divergence, and the Itakura-Saito divergence, as well as several losses associated with distributions belonging to the exponential family. Moreover, Bregman divergences possess a rich geometric structure and deep connections with convex analysis and information geometry. In this work, we propose a generalization of the CART paradigm based on Bregman divergences, thereby obtaining a broader family of decision trees adapted to different statistical models and underlying geometries. Although algorithms such as CART or classical implementations such as rpart incorporate different impurity criteria, these are usually introduced in an ad hoc manner for each specific model. In contrast, the Bregman divergence approach provides a unified framework that allows these criteria to be derived and interpreted from common convex and geometric principles. Beyond the algorithmic construction, we also investigate theoretical properties of these trees. In particular, we study how properties of the generating convex function – such as strong convexity or smoothness – influence impurity gains between parent and child nodes, as well as stability and consistency properties of the estimator.

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

Reinforcement Learning-Guided Retrieval with Soft Fusion for Robust Multimodal Imitation Learning under Missing Modalities

arXiv:2606.15514v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robotic systems perceive the world through multiple input modalities – including visual camera streams and natural language instructions – and must select appropriate actions based on these signals. However, assuming the permanent availability of all input devices is unrealistic, as sensors may fail, become occluded, or drop out entirely during deployment. Robust handling of such missing-modality scenarios is therefore essential for real-world robot operation. This paper introduces RL4IL, a reinforcement learning guided method for imitation learning that selects the most suitable action for a given observation by identifying the most relevant expert demonstrations from a training library. A reinforcement learning policy, trained via Proximal Policy Optimisation over Breadth-First Search candidate sets, ranks candidate demonstrations and a soft cross-attention fusion head aggregates their action signals to produce the final prediction. When a modality is missing at inference time, a dedicated per-modality RL retrieval policy identifies donor demonstrations from the training library, and a soft imputation head reconstructs the missing embedding via cross-attention over the top-ranked donors – without requiring any retraining of the system. Experiments on three LIBERO benchmark suites demonstrate that RL4IL substantially outperforms state-of-the-art imitation learning methods under sensor dropout conditions, while requiring no policy network training. The code can be found at https://github.com/h-ismkhan/Reinforcement-Learning-via-kNN-for-Robotic-Learning-with-Missing-Camera

23.
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.

24.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

VFUSE: Virulent Feature Understanding with Sparse autoEncoders

Generative models have shown remarkable progress in a variety of domains such as protein design, but such power enables the opaque generation of hazardous proteins. In this work, we introduce VFUSE (Virulent Feature Understanding with Sparse autoEncoders), a mechanistic interpretability approach that trains SAEs on diffusion-transformer activations to audit protein models for hazard-aware features. We apply VFUSE to RoseTTAFold3 and RFDiffusion3, popular open-weight models for protein folding and synthesis. We find that for certain blocks, linear probes detect hazardous designs significantly better when fit in the SAE latent space over the original model's representations: improving interpretability without sacrificing model performance. Furthermore, we identify monosemantic features from the SAE that fire only on hazardous designs at up to AUROC 0.84 (q < 10-13).

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

LUCID: Learned Undersampling-Adaptive Consistency-Guided Inference with Deterministic Flow Matching for Sparse-View CT Reconstruction

Sparse-view CT reduces radiation dose and scanning time by acquiring fewer projection views, but angular undersampling makes reconstruction severely ill-posed, causing streak artifacts, structural blurring, and loss of fine details. Existing supervised methods are often tied to specific sampling settings, whereas generative methods may introduce anatomically inconsistent hallucination-like structures under severe undersampling. We propose Lucid, a sparsity-adaptive, consistency-guided reconstruction framework based on a Flow Matching generative prior for sparse-view CT. Lucid is trained only on high-quality CT images to learn a continuous transport between a Gaussian distribution and the high-quality CT image distribution, independent of view sampling. During inference, the sampling sparsity level is explicitly incorporated to adapt the generative trajectory of a single pretrained model. Specifically, Lucid constructs a degradation-matched initial state by sparsity-weighted fusion of the sparse-view FBP image and Gaussian noise, performs sparsity-modulated Flow Matching updates, and applies projection-domain data-consistency correction after each prior update. Experiments under multiple sparse-view settings show that Lucid achieves stable reconstruction performance across different sampling densities, improves image quality and structural fidelity, and reduces the risk of hallucination-like structures in generative sparse-view CT reconstruction.