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

Cloze: An Open Research Platform for Studying Human-AI Conversations in Mental Health Contexts

Cloze is an open-source web platform for conducting controlled, monitored studies of human-AI conversation in mental health research contexts. Consumer large language model (LLM) products such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are built for individual productivity, and offer researchers little experimental control, inconsistent data export, and no shared safety scaffolding that holds across providers. Cloze gives research teams a single environment in which they configure which models participants converse with, how the AI is instructed, how conversations are scheduled over time, and which safety constraints apply unconditionally, while every message is captured with full provenance (model version, prompt configuration, timing). The platform currently supports OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and locally hosted open-weight models served through Ollama behind a unified interface, and runs in the cloud or fully on premises so that participant data need never leave an institution. Cloze is research infrastructure for building an evidence base on human-AI interaction in mental health contexts. It is not a therapeutic product.

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

Certifiable Safe RLHF: Semantic Grounding and Fixed Penalty Constraint Optimization for Safer LLM Alignment

arXiv:2510.03520v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Ensuring safety is a foundational requirement for large language models (LLMs). Achieving an appropriate balance between enhancing the utility of model outputs and mitigating their potential for harm is a complex and persistent challenge. Contemporary approaches frequently formalize this problem within the framework of Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) and employ established CMDP optimization techniques. However, these methods exhibit two notable limitations. First, their reliance on reward and cost functions renders performance highly sensitive to the underlying scoring mechanism, which must capture semantic meaning rather than being triggered by superficial keywords. Second, CMDP-based training entails tuning dual-variable, a process that is both computationally expensive and does not provide any provable safety guarantee for a fixed dual variable that can be exploitable through adversarial jailbreaks. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Certifiable Safe-RLHF (CS-RLHF) that introduces a cost model trained on a large-scale corpus to assign semantically grounded safety scores. In contrast to the lagrangian-based approach, CS-RLHF adopts a rectified penalty-based formulation. This design draws on the theory of exact penalty functions in constrained optimization, wherein constraint satisfaction is enforced directly through a suitably chosen penalty term. With an appropriately scaled penalty, feasibility of the safety constraints can be guaranteed at the optimizer, eliminating the need for dual-variable updates. Empirical evaluation demonstrates that CS-RLHF outperforms state-of-the-art LLM model responses rendering at-least 5 times efficient against nominal and jail-breaking prompts

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

The Emergence of Autonomous Penetration Capabilities in Large Language Model-Powered AI Systems

arXiv:2606.13079v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Nowadays, the autonomous execution of cyberattacks capable of causing substantial real-world harm is widely regarded as one of the critical red lines that frontier AI systems must not cross. Within this broader red-line scenario, autonomous penetration represents a core enabling capability and subtask: the ability of LLM-powered AI systems to independently conduct adversarial operations against a target server without human intervention, identify and exploit vulnerabilities, and obtain unauthorized access or control. A growing body of work has sought to assess the autonomous penetration capabilities of AI systems. However, existing evaluations often employ opaque methodologies, rely on unrealistic or overly simplified penetration-testing scenarios, or provide LLMs with excessive prior knowledge and task-specific guidance, and cannot accurately capture the extent to which modern AI systems can autonomously perform this core capability within broader high-impact cyberattack scenarios. To address these limitations, we construct a new autonomous penetration evaluation framework consisting of two components: target servers and agent scaffolding. Specifically, on the target-server side, we design two levels of target environments based on the number of secure services without known vulnerabilities deployed alongside a vulnerable service: Tier~1 (one secure service) and Tier~2 (three secure services), resulting in a total of 300 target servers. Meanwhile, the agent scaffolding adopts a general-purpose agent architecture equipped with a set of general-purpose cybersecurity tools, without any target-specific prior knowledge. We evaluate 19 open-weight and proprietary LLMs, and find that current models achieve penetration success rates ranging from 10.7% to 69.3%. Moreover, we observe that autonomous penetration capability continues to improve alongside advances in overall model capability.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Post-Selection Probability and Fidelity of Bidirectional Teleportation

arXiv:2606.17251v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding the scrambling of quantum information is central to many areas of quantum physics, including quantum thermalization, entanglement growth, and quantum information processing. Insights from these studies have, in turn, inspired the development of novel quantum protocols and algorithms. Recently, a bidirectional teleportation protocol was proposed to implement a digital SWAP operation between qubits by leveraging chaotic Hamiltonian evolution combined with measurement and post-selection. In this work, we provide a comprehensive study of two central quantities that characterize the protocol, the post-selection probability and the fidelity, taking into account possible errors in time-reversed dynamics. We show that these quantities can be expressed in terms of standard diagnostics in quantum dynamics, including the Loschmidt echo and its subsystem variant. The results unveil (1) the initial-state dependence of the fidelity and (2) the stability of the post-selection probability in integrable models. Our findings offer practical guidance for the implementation of the protocol on realistic quantum devices.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Hybrid Uncertainty Sensitivity Analysis Based on the HSIC for High-Dimensional Responses with Aleatory–Epistemic Separation

arXiv:2606.14053v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantifying the influence of hybrid aleatory and epistemic uncertainties on high-dimensional system responses remains a major challenge in global sensitivity analysis (GSA). Existing Hilbert–Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC)-based approaches are primarily restricted to single-output settings and lack a rigorous decomposition of heterogeneous uncertainty sources and their interactions. To address this limitation, a novel double-space tensor-product RKHS framework is proposed for sensitivity analysis under hybrid uncertainty. By constructing factorized kernels over both the latent input space and the multidimensional output space, a concurrent double Möbius inversion is derived to orthogonally decompose the global dependence measure into pure aleatory effects, pure epistemic effects, and their interaction contributions. The resulting dimension-wise sensitivity indices preserve the uncertainty attribution structure across all output dimensions. To satisfy the independence assumptions required by the decomposition, an auxiliary-variable representation based on the inverse probability integral transform is introduced, enabling the treatment of hierarchical uncertainties and Copula-induced correlations within a unified latent space. A fully vectorized single-loop implementation is further developed to avoid the computational burden of nested Monte Carlo simulation. Statistical significance and estimation uncertainty are quantified through permutation testing and Bootstrap confidence intervals. Numerical studies on a modified multi-output Ishigami function and an aerodynamic pressure-field problem demonstrate the accuracy, scalability, and practical applicability of the proposed framework.

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

FoleyGenEx: Unified Video-to-Audio Generation with Multi-Modal Control, Temporal Alignment, and Semantic Precision

We present FoleyGenEx, a unified video-to-audio (VTA) framework integrating multi-modal control, frame-level temporal alignment, and fine-grained semantics, enabling synchronized, versatile audio synthesis for diverse tasks. Existing VTA methods either have multi-modal control but weak temporal alignment or strong alignment but lack reference audio conditioning and semantic precision. FoleyGenEx fills this gap via three core innovations: a conditional injection mechanism for audio-controlled VTA and Foley extension, a multi-modal dynamic masking strategy preserving training synchronization, and an adverb-based data augmentation algorithm leveraging signal processing and large language models to enhance textual supervision with nuanced semantics. Experiments on AudioCaps, VGGSound, and Greatest Hits demonstrate its competitive controllable VTA performance against existing methods. Demo samples are available at https://foleygenex.github.io/FoleyGenEx.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

An Electric Potential-Augmented Benchmark Dataset for Physics-Guided Image Reconstruction of Electrical Capacitance Tomography

While deep learning has significantly advanced image reconstruction of Electrical Capacitance Tomography (ECT), most data-driven methods map directly between capacitance and permittivity distribution, treating the sensor as a black box. This overlooks the electric potential field – the fundamental physical link governing the nonlinear and ill-posed ``soft-field'' effect. To address this, we propose an electric potential-augmented ECT benchmark dataset designed to explicitly integrate latent physics behind ECT into the learning process. Generated via a COMSOL-MATLAB pipeline for an eight-electrode sensor as an example, the dataset comprises 20,000 randomized samples across four typical flow patterns. Crucially, alongside the conventional capacitance vectors and permittivity distributions depicted as images, each sample preserves eight excitation-wise full-field potential maps. Beyond data release, we provide illustrative evaluation protocols for both forward and inverse problems of ECT. Through comprehensive testing on both in-distribution (IID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios, we systematically demonstrate how the inclusion of electric potential maps enhances modeling accuracy and robustness. Fundamentally, the explicit inclusion of latent field information significantly lowers the barrier to integrating physical laws into ECT modeling, thereby establishing a standardized foundation for future physics-guided machine learning of ECT image reconstruction.

08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Phase transitions for contact processes on sparse random graphs via metastability and local limits

arXiv:2505.22471v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose a new perspective on the asymptotic regimes of fast and slow extinction in the contact process on locally converging sequences of sparse finite graphs. We characterise the phase boundary by the existence of a metastable density, which makes the study of the phase transition particularly amenable to local-convergence techniques. We use this approach to derive general conditions for the coincidence of the critical threshold with the survival/extinction threshold in the local limit. We further argue that the correct time scale to separate fast extinction from slow extinction in sparse graphs is, in general, the exponential scale, by showing that fast extinction may occur on stretched exponential time scales in sparse scale-free spatial networks. Together with {the results of} Nam, Nguyen and Sly (Trans.\ Am.\ Math.\ Soc.\ 375, 2022), our methods can be applied to deduce that the fast/slow threshold in sparse configuration models coincides with the survival/extinction threshold on the limiting Galton-Watson tree.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

PianoKontext: Expressive Performance Rendering from Deadpan Context

arXiv:2606.12282v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Expressive performance rendering (EPR) aims to generate realistic performances constrained on sequences of notes. However, flow matching audio editing models manipulate only synchronized music samples of the same duration, limiting their understanding of expressive timing. We introduce PianoKontext, a flow matching rendering model for classical piano music that generates variable-length performances in the latent space of a pretrained Music2Latent model. We synthesize MIDI scores into deadpan audio and employ Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) in the latent space to construct paired data for training. The aligned embeddings are concatenated in DiT blocks, allowing for a simple and effective learning of the dependencies between the score and performances. Audio samples are available at our demo page: https://realfolkcode.github.io/pianokontext_demo/.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Benchmarking Cross-Domain Audio-Visual Deception Detection

Automated deception detection is crucial for assisting humans in accurately assessing truthfulness and identifying deceptive behavior. Conventional contact-based techniques, like polygraph devices, rely on physiological signals to determine the authenticity of an individual's statements. Nevertheless, recent developments in automated deception detection have demonstrated that multimodal features derived from both audio and video modalities may outperform human observers on publicly available datasets. Despite these positive findings, the generalizability of existing audio-visual deception detection approaches across different scenarios remains largely unexplored. To close this gap, we present the first cross-domain audio-visual deception detection benchmark, that enables us to assess how well these methods generalize for use in real-world scenarios. We used widely adopted audio and visual features and different architectures for benchmarking, comparing single-to-single and multi-to-single domain generalization performance. To further exploit the impacts using data from multiple source domains for training, we investigate three types of domain sampling strategies, including domain-simultaneous, domain-alternating, and domain-by-domain for multi-to-single domain generalization evaluation. We also propose an algorithm to enhance the generalization performance by maximizing the gradient inner products between modality encoders, named ``MM-IDGM". Furthermore, we proposed the Attention-Mixer fusion method to improve performance, and we believe that this new cross-domain benchmark will facilitate future research in audio-visual deception detection.

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

Encode Errors: Representational Retrieval of In-Context Demonstrations for Multilingual Grammatical Error Correction

Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) involves detecting and correcting the wrong usage of grammar. While large language models (LLMs) with in-context learning (ICL) capabilities have shown significant progress on various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, their few-shot performance on GEC remains suboptimal. This is mainly due to the challenge of retrieving suitable in-context demonstrations that capture error patterns instead of semantic similarity. In this paper, we demonstrate that LLMs can inherently capture information related to grammatical errors through their internal states. From these states, we extract the Grammatical Error Representation (GER), an informative and semantically neutral encoding of grammatical errors. Our novel GER-based retrieval method significantly boosts performance in ICL settings on multilingual GEC datasets, improving the precision of correction. For high-resource languages, our results on 8B-sized open-source models match those of closed-source models such as Deepseek2.5 and GPT-4o-mini. For low-resource languages, our $F_{0.5}$ scores surpass the baseline by up to a factor of 1.20. This method provides a more precise and resource-efficient solution for multilingual GEC, offering a promising direction for interpretable GEC research.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Experimental Analysis of Neural Network-Based Image Classification on the CIFAR-10 Dataset

An experimental investigation of neural image classification on the CIFAR-10 benchmark is presented through fully connected and convolutional network formulations. The analysis emphasizes the complete learning pipeline: image vectorization, normalization, one-hot class encoding, supervised loss minimization, learning-rate selection, mini-batch training, convolutional feature extraction, max-pooling, and validation-based generalization assessment. A convolutional architecture with six convolutional layers and three max-pooling stages is evaluated for ten training epochs using a batch size of 128 and an Adam optimizer with a learning rate of 0.001. The validation accuracy reaches approximately 74.77%, while the validation loss begins to increase after the middle of training despite continued reduction in training loss. The resulting behavior illustrates the practical difference between representation learning and memorization, and it provides a compact experimental baseline for future studies on regularization, data augmentation, deeper architectures, and reproducible image-classification education.

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

Parameter-Efficient Adaptation of SAM 3 for Automated ITV Generation from 4DCT Images

Four-dimensional computed tomography (4DCT) captures the full respiratory cycle of thoracic anatomy, yet current Internal Target Volume contouring workflows process each phase in isolation, discarding temporal coherence and leaving contours vulnerable to phase-specific artifacts. We present a lightweight framework that applies parameter-efficient fine-tuning to the Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM 3) via low-rank adaptation (LoRA) to align its text-prompted segmentation with the medical domain using only seven annotated 3D CT volumes. Furthermore, the framework incorporates a hard negative mining strategy to improve boundary discrimination in low-contrast thoracic regions. At inference, phase-wise predictions are refined through phase-coherent temporal filtering and spatial connectivity analysis. Since respiratory motion is continuous and periodic, genuine anatomy appears in contiguous blocks of phases, whereas transient artifacts appear sporadically and are thus effectively suppressed. Experiments on pulmonary and cardiac structures yield median Dice scores of 0.968 and 0.910 with 95th-percentile Hausdorff distances of 0.998 mm and 2.931 mm, respectively. The proposed framework effectively eliminates the severe false-positive predictions inherent in the zero-shot inference of the unadapted SAM 3. With only seven annotated volumes, the framework retains over 95% of full-data accuracy, and the entire pipeline is trainable on a single consumer-grade GPU, demonstrating a scalable, data-efficient solution for adaptive radiotherapy.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

VGPT-RSI for RH-Adjacent Formal Progress: Boundary Certificates, Verified Finite Lagarias Inequalities, and Explicit Failure Localization

arXiv:2606.15096v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Riemann Hypothesis remains one of the central unsolved problems in mathematics. Rather than claiming proof, we investigate whether a verifiable AI-assisted reasoning system can produce reliable, formally checked partial progress while explicitly identifying the remaining mathematical obstructions. We apply the Verifiable Growing Physical Transformer with Recursive Self-Improvement (VGPT-RSI) to two RH-adjacent certification tasks. First, we construct and verify a finite RH-boundary certificate for inequality on a parameterized safe lower curve over a region. The numerical boundary curve is converted into a certificate-backed lower curve, audited using outward-rounded interval arithmetic and Arb/FLINT ball arithmetic, and then checked in Rocq/CoqInterval for the parameterized theorem. Second, we initiate a formal Lagarias-route certificate. Lagarias criterion states that RH is equivalent to the global inequality. We formalize the finite quantity and produce a Coq-checked finite certificate. The final system identifies the exact unresolved mathematical bottlenecks: formalizing the Lagarias equivalence, proving the global tail theorem beyond any finite cutoff, and potentially reducing counterexamples to colossally abundant or related extremal integers. These results demonstrate that VGPT-RSI can produce certified RH-adjacent formal progress, organize proof dependencies, and avoid overclaiming when the remaining obstruction is genuinely mathematical.

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

QMaxCal: Path-Space Regularization for Open Quantum Control via Girsanov's Theorem

arXiv:2606.19947v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reliable quantum control in the presence of decoherence requires policies that combat the effect of environmental noise on the controlled dynamics. Open quantum systems under continuous monitoring generate classical measurement records whose drift depends on the noise experienced by the system; the records of two evolutions sharing the same decoherence channels differ only in this drift, so Girsanov's theorem yields a closed-form, differentiable estimator of the KL divergence between their trajectory distributions. We instantiate this estimator with two physically motivated reference measures, yielding two regularizers that both drive the system toward states where the effects of decoherence are minimal: the Wiener KL (KL_W), which is empirically more effective under certain conditions on the noise model, and the drift-variance regularizer (R_DV), which works for all noise models. Both are qualitatively distinct from existing penalties on control fluence or smoothness: they penalize the observable consequences of control on the decoherence channels rather than the control amplitude itself. The regularizers outperform unregularized gradient-based and reinforcement-learning baselines across a range of open quantum systems – including single- and multi-qubit benchmarks and a multi-qubit chain calibrated to a published snapshot of the IBM Kingston processor – along several axes of evaluation: final-state fidelity, robustness to mismatch in the assumed noise model (gains grow from +17 pp at training noise to +27 pp under 2.5x noise mismatch), and occupation of forbidden states. The regularizers reduce infidelity by up to 50%, with ~16% gains on the calibrated IBM Kingston chain.

16.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

Ten simple rules for making the supplement increase your paper’s impact

作者:

by Volker Grimm, Uta Berger, Stefano Mammola Have you ever lost hours navigating supplementary materials—clicking between the main text and dozens of auxiliary files only to encounter broken links, illegible figures, and undefined variables and acronyms? If so, you’re not alone. What should support scientific communication has instead become an obstacle: supplementary information (SI) increasingly suffers from inconsistent formatting, poor accessibility, and fragmented organization that impedes rather than advances understanding. This is disheartening since the SI, if used effectively, has the power to enhance transparency, credibility, and reproducibility of research. Therefore, we propose 10 simple rules to help authors design SI that genuinely increase the impact of their research. The rules emphasize treating SI with the same care as the main text, using it strategically to support the scientific narrative while preserving clarity and focus. Key recommendations include creating a single, well-structured, self-contained SI master document; ensuring explicit cross-referencing between the main text and SI; making SI machine-readable; and avoiding the misuse of SI as a substitute for proper data repositories. We also highlight the importance of creativity in choosing appropriate formats and strict adherence to journal-specific guidelines. Finally, when available, we advocate the use of standardized templates to improve consistency, readability, and reuse across studies. By following these rules, authors can substantially increase the scientific impact of their work while at the same time contributing to more sustainable research practices.

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

FEMOT: Multi-Object Tracking using Frame and Event Cameras

Conventional RGB cameras have been widely used in multi-object tracking due to their ability to capture rich appearance and semantic information. However, their performance is often degraded under complex real-world challenges, such as motion blur, low illumination, and overexposure. Bio-inspired event cameras offer high temporal resolution and high dynamic range, providing complementary cues under extreme scenarios. Nevertheless, RGB-event multi-object tracking remains underexplored due to the lack of large-scale and well-annotated datasets. To address this issue, we propose FEMOT, a large-scale RGB-event multi-object tracking dataset that covers diverse real-world scenarios and 14 challenging attributes. With both RGB and event data as well as high-quality annotations, FEMOT provides a reliable platform for systematically evaluating RGB-event multi-object tracking methods. Based on FEMOT, we retrain and evaluate over ten strong trackers, thereby establishing a comprehensive benchmark for future research. Furthermore, we propose FEMOTR, a multimodal tracking framework that decouples RGB and event features and fuses them in the frequency domain, thereby effectively exploiting their complementary characteristics for robust object localization and identity association. Extensive experiments on FEMOT and DSEC-MOT datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The source code and benchmark dataset have been released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/FEMOT.

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

DynAMO:Dynamic Asset Management Orchestration via Topological Multi-Agent Scheduling

arXiv:2606.19382v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While LLM-powered agents offer end-to-end automation for industrial asset lifecycles, real-world Industry 4.0 deployment is hindered by latency, concurrency instability, and safety risks. We present DynAMO (Dynamic Asset Management Orchestration), a deployment-ready engine using a Plan-then-Execute architecture to generate verifiable workflow graphs. DynAMO supports both SequentialWorkflow (topological execution) and ParallelWorkflow (dependency-aware concurrency). By dynamically identifying independent tasks, DynAMO preserves structural correctness and safety while significantly improving efficiency through controlled reasoning overlap. Across six controlled experiments on the AssetOpsBench industrial benchmark, DynAMO demonstrates substantial performance and robustness gains. Parallel execution reduces end-to-end latency by a median of 1.6x over sequential orchestration, rising to 1.8x on highly parallelizable workflows. After instrumenting external tool calls with realistic latencies, a latency decomposition shows that LLM reasoning and orchestration still account for more than 90% of execution time, identifying model inference as the primary system bottleneck. Structured context pruning reduces inference latency by approximately 30%, and DynAMO maintains correct functional behaviour (task completion, agent sequencing, and output quality) while exhibiting graceful degradation under controlled fault injection. Reproducibility analysis further confirms stable execution under repeated runs, with parallel scheduling reducing latency variance. These findings establish DynAMO as a practical blueprint for scalable, safe, and latency-aware agent deployment in Industry 4.0 automation pipelines. Code is available at: https://github.com/kushwaha001/DynAMO

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

A unified complexity bound for logconcave sampling

arXiv:2606.12694v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We give a simple, unified, and nearly tight bound for sampling arbitrary logconcave distributions from a warm start using the In-and-Out algorithm along with exponential lifting. The main new ingredient in the analysis is an improved bound on the Poincaré constant of a lifted distribution. As a consequence, the resulting convergence rate is nearly tight for both constrained settings (e.g., Gaussian restricted to a convex body) and well-conditioned settings (e.g., strongly logconcave and smooth densities).

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

Searching for Synergy in Shared Workspace Human-AI Collaboration

arXiv:2606.18413v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automated AI agents are increasingly capable, yet many scientific and professional tasks require human judgment and contextual expertise. We study shared-workspace human-AI teams, where AI agents and human collaborators must coordinate responsibilities before submitting a final answer. Using the Collaborative Gym environment with DiscoveryBench tasks, we examine when adding simulated human collaborators improves performance and when process loss turns additional collaborators into coordination overhead. Across 1,482 sessions, adding relevant collaborators can lower performance when teams lack structure to coordinate their contributions. We then evaluate scaffolding that combines shared group memory with simulated human-in-the-loop (HITL) gates, where selected actions require approval from a designated simulated participant. This scaffolding yields higher mean performance, most clearly in three-person teams, with clearer responsibility signals and stronger routing of expertise to team actions. Overall, how human-AI teams coordinate and integrate expertise matters as much as the capability available to them.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Thinking with Visual Grounding

arXiv:2606.16122v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual thinking should not only sound right; it should show its evidence. While recent vision-language models (VLMs) can produce natural-language reasoning traces, these traces often leave the supporting image regions implicit, making them hard to verify and difficult to supervise. We introduce visually grounded thinking, a reasoning process in which models interleave natural-language thoughts with explicit point or box groundings of the visual evidence used at each step. This lets the model express intermediate reasoning in language while grounding key objects in the image regions they refer to. To train this behavior, we construct a scalable synthesis pipeline that distills correct visual reasoning traces, extracts the visual objects required by the traces, grounds them with a SAM3-based agent, and derives aligned point and box supervision from the resulting masks. We further propose grounding-aware reinforcement learning, which combines answer correctness rewards with dense grounding rewards that score whether generated object references match the correct image evidence. Across two counting benchmarks and four spatial reasoning benchmarks, adding visually grounded thinking to Gemma3-4B-IT consistently improves performance over the original model and the non-grounded thinking baseline. On spatial reasoning, the visually grounded thinking 4B models match, and in some cases surpass, Gemma3-27B-IT from the same model family. Our analysis shows that point grounding is well suited to counting, while box grounding benefits most from explicit grounding rewards on spatial tasks. Overall, our results show that VLMs think better when their intermediate thoughts are tied to the image regions that make them true.

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

Zero-Inflated Gaussian Distributions Enable Parameter-Space Sparsity in Estimation-of-Distribution Algorithms

arXiv:2606.19369v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Estimation-of-distribution algorithms (EDAs) are a powerful class of evolutionary methods for black-box optimization, especially when little is known about the structure of the objective. Whereas classical evolutionary algorithms rely on hand-designed mutation and crossover operators, hard to devise for unknown problem structures, and a source of bias, EDAs sidestep operator design entirely: they fit a probability distribution to the best individuals and sample the next generation from it. EDAs are well established on continuous parameter spaces, but they have not previously been generalized to sparse ones, in which most coefficients of a good solution are exactly zero. Existing sparse black-box optimizers therefore reintroduce exactly what EDAs were designed to avoid: hand-crafted sparsity operators, bi-level schemes alternating between support set and active values, zeroing thresholds, and other baked-in assumptions. We close this gap by proposing multivariate zero-inflated Gaussian (ZIG) distributions as EDA sampling laws. A latent Gaussian model with separate indicator and value dimensions represents sparsity patterns, correlations among active parameters, and the interactions between the two, so sparsity patterns and active values are optimized jointly, hierarchy-free. We show that the latent parameters of this model are identifiable from observed samples, unlike in the missing-data settings where related constructions originate, and introduce practical amortized inversion-based estimators for them. The estimators accurately recover latent correlation structures, and on the Lunar Lander benchmark the resulting ZIG-EDA converges faster and reaches higher final returns than a dense Gaussian EDA, a hand-crafted sparse evolutionary algorithm, and an ad-hoc sparse EDA, while finding controllers with only a small fraction of parameters active.

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

Direct Preference Optimization for Chatbot Fine-Tuning: An Empirical Study

We present an approach to fine-tuning large language models using Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), a reinforcement learning technique. Our experimental results demonstrate that DPO simplifies the training pipeline, improves computational efficiency, and achieves competitive performance. The evaluation using BLEU, ROUGE, and cosine similarity metrics indicates effective learning and convergence, though further investigation is needed to address observed training instability.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Possible or Definite? A Benchmark for Evaluating Diagnostic Uncertainty Preservation in Clinical Text

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for clinical text tasks such as summarization and revision. While most studies evaluate the fluency and coherence of LLM-generated text, whether LLMs correctly preserve diagnostic uncertainty remains underexplored. In clinical practice, phrases such as ``possible pneumonia'' communicate the strength of available evidence and directly guide decisions about follow-up testing and treatment. Altering these uncertainty expressions can change the clinical meaning entirely. In this paper, we systematically evaluated this problem in two steps. First, we constructed a benchmark of 1,200 clinical documents with 9,184 uncertainty annotations across five levels. Second, we evaluated three LLMs on this benchmark. Our results show that (1) LLMs preserve the original uncertainty cues poorly, often less than half the time; (2) LLMs struggle with nuanced distinctions between adjacent levels. This work reveals a failure mode not captured by standard evaluation metrics and provides implications for the safe deployment of LLMs in clinical workflows.

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

RealityBridge: Bridging Editable 3D Gaussian Splatting Driving Simulations and Real-World Videos

Long-tail hazardous scenarios are essential for safety-oriented autonomous driving, yet they are difficult to collect and reproduce at scale. Editable 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) simulation offers a promising alternative by reconstructing real driving scenes and supporting controllable scene editing. However, edited 3DGS-rendered videos still suffer from a significant Sim-to-Real gap, including rendering artifacts, degraded foreground assets, inconsistent illumination, and temporal flickering. Existing restoration and video generation methods are insufficient for this task, as they often fail to jointly repair 3DGS-specific artifacts, improve visual realism, and ensure temporal consistency. To fill this gap, we propose RealityBridge, a structure-preserving and asset-aware Sim-to-Real framework for edited 3DGS driving videos. RealityBridge uses multimodal controls, including rendered videos, foreground masks, edge maps, and semantic masks, together with a lightweight GateNet for adaptive condition allocation across backbone layers. We further construct targeted training data and introduce autoregressive long-video training with reward-guided post-training to improve restoration quality, temporal stability, and hallucination suppression. Extensive experiments on internal and public driving datasets show that RealityBridge outperforms existing methods in artifact removal, illumination harmonization, and long-sequence temporal consistency.