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

XPASS-Vis: A Dataset for Cross-Domain Personalized Image Aesthetic Assessment

Personalized image aesthetic assessment (PIAA) seeks to model, at the individual level, the subjective nature of aesthetic judgments toward artworks and photographs. Aesthetic preference is known to be both deeply personal and partially consistent across visual domains. Yet existing PIAA datasets and methods are largely confined to a single domain, or provide too few samples per annotator within each domain to enable personalization across domains. Consequently, the cross-domain generalization of personalized aesthetic preferences remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we introduce XPASS-Vis, the first dataset explicitly designed for cross-domain PIAA. XPASS-Vis comprises 6,526 stimuli from three visual domains – art, fashion, and landscape – rated by 129 annotators, yielding 87,836 user-stimulus interactions, each annotated with an overall aesthetic score and nine aesthetic-emotion ratings. Notably, each annotator rated more than 200 stimuli per domain, providing sufficient per-domain coverage to support personalization both within and across domains. Moreover, we establish baseline models for cross-domain PIAA under unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA), where a model trained on a labeled source domain is transferred to an unlabeled target domain. A systematic evaluation of representative UDA approaches shows that the best-performing method recovers approximately 60\% (Spearman's $\rho$ = .28) of the supervised upper bound under a fully unsupervised setting. This provides encouraging evidence that personalized aesthetic preferences are, to a meaningful extent, transferable across visual domains. At the same time, a substantial gap remains, highlighting the need for PIAA-specific adaptation strategies. XPASS-Vis and the accompanying baselines provide a foundation for future research on cross-domain PIAA. All datasets and code will be made publicly available upon acceptance.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Is Spurious Correlation Removal Always Learnable?

arXiv:2606.12930v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Invariant learning can fail even when the invariant structure is statistically identifiable. We show a conditional computational barrier: under a black-box samplable supervised sparse recovery primitive motivated by average-case sparse-recovery reductions, there exist samplable multi-environment instances with a one-dimensional predictive invariant subspace ($k=1$) that are learnable with polynomial samples by exhaustive search, while any polynomial-time constant-accuracy recovery algorithm would contradict the primitive. We further quantify environment diversity by a separation parameter $\gamma$, which controls identifiability and the curvature of invariance objectives. Under sufficient diversity and local Gaussian regularity, the minimax risk is $\mathbb{E}[\dist(\hat{V},V_{\mathrm{inv}})^2]=\Theta(k(d-k)/(n|\mathcal{E}|))$, and under label-induced shifts a phase transition occurs at $n^*\propto k(d-k)/(|\mathcal{E}|\gamma^2)$ with refined estimation error scaling proportional to $1/\gamma^2$. Synthetic and real datasets illustrate the predicted gaps and transitions and motivate simple diversity diagnostics.

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

Provenance-Enhanced Statements in Knowledge Graphs

arXiv:2606.15246v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Provenance-enhanced statements of the form "according to $X$, $\varphi$" are pervasive in contemporary knowledge graphs, especially in domains where graph content primarily represents claims, interpretations, and hypotheses (capta) rather than observer-independent facts (data). Current provenance models can record who asserted what, but they typically treat provenance as semantically neutral, leaving underspecified how attributed claims relate to factual commitment, to one another, and to reasoning. In this paper we introduce DEC, a framework that interprets provenance predicates as indicators of epistemic stance and groups provenance-homogeneous sets of statements into cognitive worlds. Drawing on cognitive modal logics (doxastic, epistemic, and conjectural), DEC characterizes locality, rationality, and controlled permeation between cognitive worlds and a distinguished factual core ("reality"), thereby enabling principled reasoning over attributed content without collapsing disagreements into inconsistencies. We formalize a DEC interpretation for RDF datasets that is conservative over RDF~1.2 semantics, clarify the role of intensionality and identity (including the Superman paradox), and illustrate the approach on common Semantic Web representations (named graphs, quoted triples/RDF-star, and reification). Finally, we describe our prototype DEC reasoner implemented as a Fuseki dataset module, supporting controlled factualisation and explicit detection of disagreements and delusions.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Compute Efficiency and Serial Runtime Tradeoffs for Stochastic Momentum Methods

arXiv:2606.19179v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Stochastic momentum methods such as heavy ball (HB), Nesterov momentum, and variants of Accelerated SGD (ASGD) [Kidambi et al., 2018] are widely used in modern training, but their stochastic benefits depend on two distinct quantities: serial runtime, the number of iterations needed to reach a target accuracy, and compute efficiency (CE), the inverse total gradient-query or FLOP cost. Larger batches reduce serial runtime without hurting CE only when the contraction gap grows linearly with batch size. We study stochastic HB and ASGD for consistent linear regression with Gaussian covariates and prove finite-dimensional, discrete-time lower bounds on their batch-size tradeoffs. Our first result shows that HB does not improve the CE frontier over SGD for arbitrary spectra; rather, it preserves SGD-level CE over a larger batch-size window, allowing larger batches to reduce serial runtime until HB reaches its deterministic accelerated scale. This window can be a factor $\sqrt{\kappa}$ larger than the SGD critical batch size. For ASGD, the picture is more spectrum-dependent: for rapidly decaying power-law spectra, ASGD improves small-batch CE over HB/SGD, but as batch size grows it trades this CE advantage for improved serial runtime. Synthetic linear-regression experiments verify these qualitative regimes, including near-overlap of ASGD and HB for slowly decaying spectra and the predicted CE–serial tradeoff for rapidly decaying spectra.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Quantum Simulation of Spin-Dependent Electron Transfer in a Synthetic Chiral Lattice with a Trapped Ion

arXiv:2606.13930v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Electron transfer through chiral structures can exhibit spin asymmetry, known as the chiral-induced spin selectivity effect, whose microscopic origin remains an open question. While path-interference within the chiral moiety has been proposed as a key mechanism, its experimental validation requires precise and versatile tunability of system parameters. Here we implement a programmable quantum simulation of spin-dependent electron transfer in a donor–chiral-bridge–acceptor model using a trapped ion. The bridge is encoded in internal states of the ion with tunable nearest- and next-nearest-neighbor couplings, while donor and acceptor states are coupled via a spectator bosonic motional mode. We observe spin-dependent interference within the bridge, and further reveal spin-dependence in donor-to-acceptor transfer dynamics, controlled by amplitude and phase of the coupling parameter. Our results identify interference among spin-dependent pathways as a microscopic origin of spin-dependent transfer, and open a route toward quantum simulations of complex chiral lattices with multi-level and bosonic degrees of freedom.

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

Agent trajectories as programs: fingerprinting and programming coding-agent behavior

arXiv:2606.16988v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Benchmark scores tell you what an agent got right; they do not tell you how it got there. In this work, we introduce methods for comparing agents procedurally in different contexts, where the model, tasks, and approaches vary. We compare ten agents and find that they are identifiable by their behavioral habits, which we define as fingerprints: a probe over these procedural signatures attributes an unseen trajectory to the correct agent at 85.7% accuracy, controlling for leakage across tasks. We develop procedural representations for agent problem-solving procedures with an emergent vocabulary induction technique that is meant to be maximally compressive to avoid surface-level variation while being expressive enough to unveil the quirks of the models' patterns. We apply our framework to the software engineering evaluation dataset SWE-Bench to study the structural distinctness of agent trajectories and find that behavior is most similar between models from similar release periods and those that are distilled from one another (e.g., a distilled student model and its teacher have a Jensen-Shannon divergence of 0.25, about half the distance between other model pairs). As more models saturate evaluations, we believe that it will be important to probe model behavior along more holistic dimensions than success rates alone. We introduce ProcGrep, a library for auditing and evaluating agents for how they approach tasks at a procedural level given their traces in a top-down fashion. We believe this work has a range of applications to help developers work with and program coding agents, such as task-aware model routing, agent monitoring, and finer-grained cost analysis.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Leveraging Audio-LLMs to Filter Speech-to-Speech Training Data

Large-scale mined corpora provide abundant training data for end-to-end speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) but may contain noise, misalignment, and semantic errors. Filtering noisy data is crucial to maintain robust speech translation performance. We study how to train an audio-language model to make keep/drop decisions on paired speech directly from audio. To obtain reliable supervision without manual labels, we adopt a scalable two-stage Rank-to-Distill strategy. A lightweight ranker generates keep/drop pseudo-labels from noisy speech pairs, then trains an audio large language model to predict keep/drop directly from raw paired speech. The resulting model jointly captures acoustic fidelity and cross-lingual semantic consistency for the selection of speech-conditioned data. Experiments on CVSS-C and SpeechMatrix show consistent improvements over unfiltered training, yielding up to +1.4 ASR-BLEU for end-to-end S2ST.

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

FLiP: Towards understanding and interpreting multimodal multilingual sentence embeddings

This paper presents factorized linear projection (FLiP) models for understanding pretrained sentence embedding spaces. We train FLiP models to recover the lexical content from multilingual (LaBSE), multimodal (SONAR) and API-based (Gemini) sentence embedding spaces in several high- and mid-resource languages. We show that FLiP can recall more than 75% of lexical content from the embeddings, significantly outperforming existing non-factorized baselines. Using this as a diagnostic tool, we uncover the modality and language biases across the selected sentence encoders and provide practitioners with intrinsic insights about the encoders without relying on conventional downstream evaluation tasks. Our implementation is public https://github.com/BUTSpeechFIT/FLiP.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Geometric mechanisms enabling spin- and enantio-sensitive observables in one photon ionization of chiral molecules

arXiv:2603.02735v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We examine spin-resolved photoionization of randomly oriented chiral molecules via circularly polarized light, and revisit earlier predictions of Cherepkov (J. Phys. B: Atom. Mol. Phys. 16, 1543, 1983). We will show that the dynamical origin of spin- and enantio-sensitive observables arise from two intrinsic mechanisms that are quantified by two pseudovectors stemming from the geometric properties of the photoionization dipoles in spin space and in real space, and an extrinsic mechanism which is a directional bias introduced by the well-defined direction of light polarization. These mechanisms arise solely from electric dipole interactions. Consequently, this means that the ten independent parameters that was earlier predicted by Cherepkov to fully describe spin-resolved photoionization of chiral molecules can be reduced as moments of these three pseudovectors. We also find that the molecular pseudoscalars describing the spin- and enantio-sensitive components of the yield can be described by the flux of these pseudovectors through the energy shell, which changes sign upon switching enantiomers. Our results provide compact expressions for these observables which provide an intuitive picture on what determines the strength of these spin- and enantio-sensitive observables. The approach can be readily generalized to photoexcitation, multiphoton processes, and arbitrary field polarizations. Regardless of the specific driving conditions, the resulting spin- and enantio-sensitive observables are still controlled by the same three pseudovectors, underscoring their universal role as the primary generators of chirality-induced spin asymmetries, emphasizing their fundamental geometric origin and the universality of the mechanism identified here.

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

Emergent retokenization symmetry in large language models: phenomenology and applications

Tokenization introduces representational redundancy: under a fixed token vocabulary, every byte string admits many valid token encodings, or segmentations, that decode to the same surface string. However, given a prompt, most language model tokenizers break this representational symmetry by returning a canonical segmentation. Training only on canonical segmentations should influence inference behavior, and there is little reason to expect models to respect segmentation symmetry on downstream tasks. We find that this symmetry partially emerges during training. Here, we probe this emergent symmetry through experiments testing token compositional understanding, representation diversity, and task focused benchmark performance. We primarily use retokenization – replacing a prompt's canonical tokenization with an alternative segmentation while preserving its bytes exactly. Relative to other prompt perturbations, retokenization is unusually clean because it isolates segmentation effects without changing syntax, semantics or surface form. We use retokenization to study sensitivity and robustness to semantically identical input representations across pretraining and post-training. Moreover, this partial retokenization symmetry suggests a distinct inference-time sampling axis. While temperature sampling generates diverse outputs from the model using its next-token probability distribution, retokenization generates diversity from the model's internal computations through semantically equivalent input representations. We find that while this retokenization sampling strategy can hurt performance on easy problems, it can also recover solutions that conventional sampling does not find. Overall, our work presents retokenization as a simple yet powerful probe of large language models, shedding light on compositional understanding and prompt sensitivity, and offering a novel sampling strategy.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Presurgical immune biomarkers associated with pain intensity and pain interference recovery after total knee arthroplasty: findings from the PRIME-KNEE study

Chronic postsurgical pain (CPSP) prevalence after total knee arthroplasty (TKA) is >20%. Circulating immune biomarkers are known factors of musculoskeletal pain but poorly understood as CPSP predictors. This prospective, longitudinal study of 203 patients s/p TKA tested presurgical plasma biomarkers associated with 6-month CPSP, using promising approaches from geriatrics biomarker research: expected recovery differential (ERD; resilience outcome) and penalized, machine-learning regularization modeling (elastic net and LASSO regression). Forty-nine presurgical candidate biomarkers were considered. CPSP was operationalized using ERDs built around PROMIS pain intensity and pain interference, which quantified the difference between observed and expected recovery after accounting for demographic, comorbidity, reserve, and perioperative factors. Plasma/ERDs from ~130 patients revealed 13 biomarkers with the highest selection stability criteria, and either positive or negative (+/-) associations with ERDs. Interleukin (IL) 5 (-) and Lipopolysaccharide-Binding Protein (LBP; +) were associated with both ERDs. Unique associations with pain intensity ERD included Cytomegalovirus-Specific IgG Negative (CMV IGg-; -), Macrophage Inflammatory Protein-1 Beta (MIP1b; -), IL12p70 (-, Cluster of Differentiation 30 (sCD30;-), Interferon alpha 2a (IFN2a;+), and Leukemia Inhibitory Factor (LIF;+). Unique associations with pain interference ERD included Lipopolysaccharide (LPS;-), Activin A (-), IL8 (-), Serum Amyloid A (SAA;-), and IL7 (+). Protein-protein interaction analyses and topology motifs suggest a centralized network with higher-than-expected connectivity, involving IL5, IL7, IL8, MIP1{beta}, and IFN2a, among others. This study proposes rigorous yet feasible approaches to expedite pain biomarker research, and introduces presurgical biomarkers t0 consider in future TKA-CPSP biosignature derivation.

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

A biological vision inspired framework for machine perception of abutting grating illusory contours

Higher levels of machine intelligence demand alignment with human perception and cognition. Deep neural networks (DNN) dominated machine intelligence have demonstrated exceptional performance across various real-world tasks. Nevertheless, recent evidence suggests that DNNs fail to perceive illusory contours like the abutting grating, a discrepancy that misaligns with human perception patterns. Departing from previous works, we propose a novel deep network called illusory contour perception network (ICPNet) inspired by the circuits of the visual cortex. In ICPNet, a multi-scale feature projection (MFP) module is designed to extract multi-scale representations. To boost the interaction between feedforward and feedback features, a feature interaction attention module (FIAM) is introduced. Moreover, drawing inspiration from the shape bias observed in human perception, an edge detection task conducted via the edge fusion module (EFM) injects shape constraints that guide the network to concentrate on the foreground. We assess our method on the existing AG-MNIST test set and the AG-Fashion-MNIST test sets constructed by this work. Comprehensive experimental results reveal that ICPNet is significantly more sensitive to abutting grating illusory contours than state-of-the-art models, with notable improvements in top-1 accuracy across various subsets. This work is expected to make a step towards human-level intelligence for DNN-based models.

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Voronoi Percolation: Topological Stability and Giant Cycles

arXiv:2601.00793v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the topological stability of Voronoi percolation in higher dimensions. We show that slightly increasing p allows a discretization that preserves increasing topological properties with high probability. This strengthens a theorem of Bollobás and Riordan and generalizes it to higher dimensions. As a consequence, we prove a sharp phase transition for the emergence of i-dimensional giant cycles in Voronoi percolation on the 2i-dimensional torus.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

How Does the ReLU Activation Affect the Implicit Bias of Gradient Descent on High-dimensional Neural Network Regression?

arXiv:2603.04895v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Overparameterized ML models, including neural networks, typically induce underdetermined training objectives with multiple global minima. The implicit bias refers to the limiting global minimum that is attained by a common optimization algorithm, such as gradient descent (GD). In this paper, we characterize the implicit bias of GD for training a shallow ReLU model with the squared loss on high-dimensional random features. Prior work (Vardi and Shamir, 2021) showed that the implicit bias does not exist in the worst-case, or corresponds exactly to the minimum-$\ell_2$-norm interpolating solution under exactly orthogonal data (Boursier et al., 2022). Our work interpolates between these two extremes and shows that, for sufficiently high-dimensional random data, the implicit bias approximates the minimum-$\ell_2$-norm solution with high probability with a gap on the order $\Theta(\sqrt{n/||\lambda||_1})$, where $n$ is the number of training examples and $\lambda$ denotes the spectrum of the data covariance matrix. Our results are obtained through a novel primal-dual analysis that carefully tracks the evolution of predictions, data-span coefficients, as well as their interactions, and show that the ReLU activation pattern quickly stabilizes with high probability over random data.

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

TivTok: Broadcasting Time-Invariant Tokens for Scalable Video Tokenization

Video tokenization is fundamental to scalable video generation, as the number of tokens directly determines the computational cost and the length of videos that can be modeled. Existing tokenizers mainly improve scalability by compressing videos into fewer tokens, but they often continue to represent persistent content, such as static backgrounds and consistent object appearances, repeatedly across frames and chunks. In this paper, we propose TivTok (Time-Invariant Tokenizer), a reuse-aware video tokenizer that makes persistent information reusable across time. TivTok represents a clip with Time-Invariant (TIV) tokens that encode information shared across frames and Time-Variant (TV) tokens that encode frame-specific residuals. To obtain this factorization, we introduce Scope-Induced Factorization (SIF), which assigns different attention scopes to the two token groups: TIV tokens attend to the full clip, whereas each TV token only accesses its corresponding frame together with the TIV tokens. In the decoder, Invariant Broadcasting (IB) reuses the same TIV tokens across frames and chunks for parallel reconstruction and long-video tokenization. Experiments show that TivTok achieves an rFVD of 12.65 on the standard $16{\times}256{\times}256$ benchmark and improves compression efficiency by 2.91$\times$ for 128-frame videos compared with the evaluated baselines, while using only 1.1\% of the tokens required by downsample-based tokenizers in our evaluation.

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

DOG-DPO:Dynamic Optimization in Geometry for Safety Alignment

arXiv:2606.07678v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safety alignment for large language models relies on preference data, but current pipelines often train on large, redundant datasets. Existing data selection methods typically score each preference pair independently, collapsing directional preference information into scalar quality or diversity scores. This sample-centric view is especially limiting in multi-dataset settings, where shared safety directions coexist with dataset-specific residual risks. We propose DOG-DPO, a training-free data selection framework that treats preference pairs as structured geometric signals. DOG-DPO first represents each preference pair as a direction in model representation space. It then decomposes multi-dataset preference geometry into a global anchor subspace and dataset-specific residual subspaces. Finally, it selects subsets by maximizing diversity-based coverage, encouraging broad, non-redundant coverage of alignment directions before DPO training. Across six safety benchmarks and two model backbones, DOG-DPO achieves a strong utility-robustness trade-off using only 11% of the preference pairs. It recovers most of the safety gains of full-data training while remaining entirely teacher-free, training-free, and substantially faster than representative selection baselines.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Asymptotic Compression of Interactive Quantum Communication using Type-Constrained de Finetti Reduction

arXiv:2606.24746v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: For many information processing tasks, de Finetti-style theorems can often simplify the analysis in worst-case input scenarios for which the task exhibits some permutation-invariance symmetry, as they can allow for a reduction from an analysis on worst-case inputs to that of i.i.d. inputs. If further information is available on the inputs, it might be advantageous to reflect this information in the de Finetti reduction. In our work, we focus on a form of such constraint, based on the type of the input. This allows us to obtain a conceptually simple proof of a new de Finetti reduction for classical probability distributions, derived from elementary properties from the method of types. We apply our constrained de Finetti reduction to the compression of quantum interactive communication protocols with classical inputs, and prove that the prior-free quantum information cost equals the worst-case input amortized quantum communication cost.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

SkillAudit: Ground-Truth-Free Skill Evolution via Paired Trajectory Auditing

arXiv:2606.14239v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills are structured procedural packages that guide frozen LLM agents in specialized workflows. Skills rarely remain sufficient after deployment: edge cases, API changes, and deployment constraints become visible only through use, making skill evolution a practical necessity. Existing methods depend on privileged feedback such as held-out validation scores, hidden test outcomes, or environment rewards – signals often unavailable when a practitioner has only a task description and workspace data. We introduce SkillAudit, a framework for evolving agent skills without ground-truth feedback. The key idea is paired trajectory auditing: at each iteration, the same task is executed with and without the candidate skill, isolating how the skill changes agent behavior without external labels. To turn behavioral differences into edit guidance, SkillAudit uses Process-Aligned Contrastive Evaluation (PACE), a cluster of evaluators that maps trajectory divergences to diagnostic signals linked to specific passages in the skill document. A structural verifier, compiled once from the task specification and then fixed, checks task constraints and rolls back harmful updates. SkillAudit routes edits through two pipelines: Refine removes noisy or irrelevant guidance from broadly useful skills, while Repair replaces passages that conflict with the task. Across 89 containerized tasks spanning 8 professional domains, SkillAudit achieves 73.9% average task reward, outperforming an agent without skills (40.9%) and the static expert skill (56.7%). These gains are obtained without accessing hidden tests, reference solutions, or external scoring functions during evolution.

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

YOLO-AMC: An Improved YOLO Architecture with Attention Mechanisms for Building Crack Detection

Crack detection plays an important role in infrastructure inspection and Structural Health Monitoring (SHM). However, cracks typically appear as thin, low-contrast structures and are easily affected by background noise, posing challenges for existing object detection models. This study proposes an improved YOLO-based architecture with integrated attention mechanisms, termed YOLO-AMC (YOLO with Attention Mechanisms for Crack Detection), to enhance automated crack detection performance. Based on YOLOv11, the original C2PSA module is removed, and multiple attention mechanisms, including Global Attention Mechanism (GAM), Residual Convolutional Block Attention Module (Res-CBAM), and Shuffle Attention (SA), are introduced into the multi-scale feature fusion layers of the Neck to strengthen cross-scale feature integration. Experimental results demonstrate that YOLO-AMC consistently outperforms baseline models YOLOv11n and YOLOv8n across multiple evaluation metrics. Among the evaluated attention modules, GAM achieves the best detection performance, obtaining mAP@0.5 = 0.9917 and mAP@0.5:0.95 = 0.9506 on the test dataset, which are higher than those of YOLOv11 (0.9833 / 0.9112) and YOLOv8 (0.9707 / 0.8921). Furthermore, while maintaining a computational complexity of 7.6 GFLOPs, the proposed model achieves 110.95 FPS on an NVIDIA RTX 4090 platform and approximately 5 FPS on a Raspberry Pi 5 edge device, demonstrating a favorable trade-off between accuracy and deployment efficiency. The implementation code for this study is available on GitHub at https://github.com/CY-Tsai24/YOLO-AMC.

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

Graph2Idea:Retrieval-Augmented Scientific Idea Generation with Graph-Structured Contexts

arXiv:2606.09105v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Generating novel, feasible, and high-quality research ideas is an important yet challenging task in scientific discovery. Recent Large Language Model (LLM)-based methods often ground idea generation with retrieved literature, but the retrieved evidence is usually provided as flat text, such as titles, abstracts, or summaries. Such flat contexts may contain redundant or weakly relevant information, while making cross-paper relations among problems, methods, mechanisms, and findings difficult to identify and trace. To address this challenge, we propose Graph2Idea, a knowledge graph-guided framework for retrieval-augmented scientific idea generation.Graph2Idea first retrieves papers according to the input topic, transforms them into structured knowledge triples, and dynamically constructs a target-centered knowledge graph to make literature relations explicit. It then extracts compact graph-derived contexts that retain target-relevant relational evidence while reducing noisy textual input. Based on these contexts, a two-stage generation process first identifies promising research directions and then guides the LLM to synthesize candidate ideas from graph-grounded evidence. Experiments on a scientific idea generation benchmark show that Graph2Idea outperforms representative baselines under the automatic evaluation protocol. Compared with the strongest baseline scores, it improves Novelty from 0.45 to 0.52, Quality from 0.24 to 0.29, and Feasibility from 0.22 to 0.28. These results suggest that graph-structured evidence helps LLMs generate research ideas through more explicit, compact, and traceable recombination of prior scientific knowledge.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

A Comparative Study of Bayesian Contextual Bandits for Real-Time Warehouse Sorter Optimization

arXiv:2606.23977v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient sorter diversion control of automated material handling systems (MHS) is critical for optimizing operational efficiency in large-scale warehouse environments. In this study, we use an inbound receiving sorter at a high-volume e-commerce warehouse as our primary use case, where the sorter diversion system relies on cost functions with static weight configurations that fail to adapt to highly dynamic system contexts, such as volume mode, congestion level, equipment physical status, and upstream/downstream dependencies. To address this real-time sorter diversion optimization challenge, we conducted a comparative study of three candidate hybrid machine learning frameworks: Linear Regression with Gradient Descent Optimization (LR+GDO), XGBoost with Bayesian Optimization (XGB+BO), and Bayesian Contextual Bandits (BCB). Model training and evaluation were enabled by leveraging a high-fidelity physics-aware emulator to overcome the cold-start problem and allow a safe transition from offline to online learning. We performed comprehensive evaluations including reward model predictive accuracy, contextual sensitivity, action distribution, and projected reward uplift. Our results demonstrate that while tree-based reward models offer slightly better predictive power, the BCB framework achieved overall higher performance with 2.03% reward uplift over the heuristic baseline. Furthermore, BCB exhibits several superior characteristics, such as its decisive time-optimal policy backed by Bang-Bang control theory, continuous online learning capability, strategic balance between exploration and exploitation, and significantly shorter inference latency. These results demonstrate the potential of the BCB framework for real-time control optimization in large-scale warehouse environments, motivating further investigation toward operational deployment.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

As You Wish: Mission Planning with Formal Verification using LLMs in Precision Agriculture

arXiv:2606.18519v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Though robotic systems are now being commercialized and deployed in various industries, many of these systems are highly specialized and often require an advanced skill set to operate and ensure they perform as instructed. To mitigate this problem, we recently introduced a mission planner leveraging LLMs to synthesize mission plans in precision agriculture based on mission descriptions provided in natural language. While the system demonstrates impressive performance, it also suffers from the inherent ambiguities of natural language. In this paper, we extend our system to address this issue by introducing multiple feedback loops in the planning architecture that leverage linear temporal logic (LTL) to ensure the mission planning system meets the specifications formulated by the user while still using natural language. To mitigate potential bias, this is achieved by using two different commercial LLMs in charge of the specification and verification subtasks. Through extensive experiments, we highlight the strengths and limitations of integrating mission verification into a fully autonomous pipeline, particularly regarding an LLM's ability to generate valuable LTL formulas, and show how our proposed implementation addresses and solves these challenges.

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

DeepForestVisionV2: Ecology-Driven Taxonomy Expansion for Camera-Trap Monitoring in African Tropical Forests

Camera-trap monitoring in African tropical forests increasingly extends beyond closed-canopy interiors to riverbanks, clearings, and park edges. Among available open tools for African forest camera-trap classification, DeepForestVision is the only one providing a matched offline workflow for both photographs and videos, and previous work showed that it outperformed other available baselines on a comparable benchmark. However, it was designed for closed-canopy, ground-level forest interiors and uses a 35-class prediction space that becomes too coarse when deployments encounter arboreal primates, birds, semi-aquatic taxa, or human-associated confounders such as livestock. We present DeepForestVisionV2, an ecology-driven expansion from 35 to 64 prediction classes (61 animal classes plus human, vehicle, and blank) designed to address three recurrent deployment gradients: vertical stratification, scene openness, and anthropogenic interfaces. DeepForestVisionV2 retains the same offline workflow and is trained on 1,535,010 photographs and 243,354 videos from multi-country African tropical-forest projects. Evaluation combines a cross-country cropped-photo validation set, used to assess robustness across sites and camera-trap settings, with three held-out Uganda video benchmarks spanning the targeted gradients. On the validation set, DeepForestVisionV2 reaches 0.86 accuracy, 0.82 macro-F1, and 0.81 balanced accuracy. On the deployment benchmarks, it preserves or improves baseline accuracy despite its harder classification task, while increasing the number of identified taxa from 22 to 29 in forest-interior videos and from 4 to 9 at riverbanks. In the park-edge use case, it raises accuracy from 0.62 to 0.86 and reduces false alarms from 11 to 0. These results show that DeepForestVisionV2 materially improves field utility while preserving robustness across sites, habitats, and camera-trap settings.

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

Critically Engaged Pragmatism: Scientific Norm and Social, Pragmatist Epistemology for AI Science Evaluation Tools

arXiv:2601.09753v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AI science evaluation tools aim to assess research credibility. As with traditional metrics such as impact factors, their edicts can be decontextualised and repurposed in problematic ways. To address this, I propose Critically-Engaged Pragmatism as a scientific norm enjoining scientific communities to scrutinise the purposes and purpose-specific reliability of AI science evaluation tools. To foster Critically Engaged Pragmatism, creators of AI science evaluation tools should transparently and fully report design, training, and benchmarking details to facilitate assessments of purpose-specific reliability, liability to different types of error, and bias. What count as best practices for the transparent reporting of AI science evaluation tools should be updated as new forms of error, bias, and gamesmanship are discovered. Under this framework, AI science evaluation tools are not objective arbiters of scientific credibility. Rather, they are the object of critical discursive practices that ultimately ground the credibility of scientific communities.

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

Exponentially many initializations to avoid barren plateaus

arXiv:2606.18515v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Barren plateaus are stated as an average-case phenomenon: pick an ansatz, initialize it naively, and concentration follows. This has led to the common view that a potential cure for barren plateaus is simply to initialize the parameters more carefully. Here we show that the situation is subtler. We introduce a first-moment framework that gives a simple operator-level diagnostic for when an initialization may escape the fully concentrated barren-plateau fixed point, and for comparing the biases induced by different initialization strategies. Our framework recovers several known initialization schemes such as identity and Gaussian initialization, but also shows that barren-plateau avoidance is highly non-unique. Indeed, many shifted, biased, and non-symmetric parameter distributions can avoid concentration, and these choices need not be equivalent. In fact, our results show that one can generate exponentially many families of inequivalent initialization strategies. Then, our numerics indicate that different first-moment-distinct initializations can lead to different attained minima, suggesting that avoiding barren plateaus via smart initializations can trade the exponential concentration problem for the challenge of selecting the right trainable pocket amongst many options.