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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Time-dependent averages of a critical long-range stochastic heat equation

Authors:
Sefika Kuzgun↗Ran Tao↗

arXiv:2411.09058v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the time-dependent spatial averages of a critical stochastic partial differential equation, namely the stochastic heat equation in dimension $d\geq 3$ with noise white in time and colored in space with covariance kernel $\|\cdot\|^{-2}$. The solution to this SPDE is a singular measure and was constructed by Mueller and Tribe in [MT04]. We show that the time-dependent spatial averages of this SPDE over a ball of radius $R$ at time $t$ have different limits under different space-time scales. In particular, when $t\ll R^2$, the central limit theorem holds; when $t=R^2$, the spatial average is a non-Gaussian random variable; when $t\gg R^2$, the spatial average becomes extinct.

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

AnchorEdit: Maintaining Temporal Consistency in Multi-turn Image Editing via Causal Memory

Authors:
Hang Xu↗Xiaoxiao Ma↗Guohui Zhang↗Yu Hu↗Siming Fu↗Jie Huang↗Lin Song↗Haoyang Huang↗Nan Duan↗Feng Zhao↗

Multi-turn image editing is essential for iterative design, yet current models often struggle with identity drift and error accumulation over successive steps. While existing research leverages video priors for consistency, their reliance on bidirectional attention is fundamentally misaligned with the causal, sequential nature of interactive editing. In this paper, we propose AnchorEdit, the first autoregressive (AR) diffusion-based framework designed specifically for high-resolution, long-term multi-turn editing. AnchorEdit bridges the gap between video priors and causal inference through a three-stage training curriculum: identity-preserving sing-turn pretraining, causal AR forcing fine-tuning with a novel self-rollout strategy to mitigate exposure bias, and consistency distillation for efficient 4-step generation. During inference, we introduce a memory mechanism to anchor the initial subject identity and ensure stable extrapolation across extended editing trajectories. To evaluate performance, we provide a new high-resolution multi-turn editing benchmark designed to stress-test long-horizon stability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AnchorEdit achieves state-of-the-art results, maintaining exceptional subject fidelity and instruction following even over 10+ interaction rounds.

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

EMORSION: Examining the Impact of Audio Parameters on Emotional Responses and Immersion in Film

Authors:
Nelly Garcia↗Ruby Crocker↗Bleiz M Del Sette↗Fabrizio Smeraldi↗Charalampos Saitis↗George Fazekas↗Joshua Reiss↗

arXiv:2606.18266v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: EMORSION is an exploratory proof-of-concept study examining how film audio design shapes audience emotion and immersion in acinema setting. Four film scenes were selected across the horror (2) and drama (2) genres, balanced between mainstream and independent productions. For each scene, multiple alternative audio mixes were created by systematically manipulating three core aspects of audio design, frequency (pitch), dynamics (loudness), and directionality (spatial placement). Three audience groups viewed the scenes, with each group exposed to one manipulated mix alongside a control mix for each scene. Audience responses were assessed through a triangulated multimodal framework combining self-reported emotion and immersion via a questionnaire, physiological measures including heart rate monitoring, and video-based motion tracking. The protocol successfully captured measurable, interpretable differences across audio conditions, indicating that even subtle changes in audio design can shape emotional perception and immersion. Unconventional mixes tended to produce greater variability in audience interpretation, while conventional immersive mixes were associated with stronger cross-audience agreement. These findings establish the feasibility of the EMORSION protocol and motivate larger-scale studies to characterise the role of specific audio parameters in shaping audience experience.

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

How Far Can Machine Translation Quality Take You? Extrinsic Discourse Evaluation in Goal-Oriented Setups

Authors:
Wafaa Mohammed↗Kata Naszadi↗Vlad Niculae↗

Existing machine translation (MT) metrics and discourse-focused evaluations primarily assess translation quality intrinsically, without measuring the downstream consequences of translation errors. In this work, we focus on extrinsic discourse evaluation of machine translation under two distinct regimes: static and interactive. Under the static regime, we propose an entity counting task as a probe of referential consistency in discourse. We show that high intrinsic MT quality does not reliably predict downstream discourse success and strong MT systems still produce referential inconsistencies. For the interactive regime, we study the goal-oriented multi-agent Welfare Diplomacy game as a probe of long-horizon communication and coordination. We find that interaction-specific translation failures impact downstream coordination. Our results highlight goal-oriented environments as a viable framework for discourse-sensitive extrinsic MT evaluation.

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

AFFORDANCE20Q: Evaluating Affordance Reasoning from Physical Properties

Authors:
Yifan Jiang↗Meige Yang↗Zitong Li↗Jay Pujara↗

arXiv:2606.14240v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Affordance reasoning, the inference of an object's action possibilities from its physical properties (e.g., shape and material), is fundamental to human physical understanding and increasingly critical for Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing affordance benchmarks largely expose explicit object identities in the evaluation setup, allowing models to rely on memorized object-affordance mappings rather than reasoning over physical properties. To address this gap, we introduce Affordance20Q, a novel affordance reasoning benchmark formulated as a 20-Questions game without exposing the object's identity. In each game, the model identifies a hidden object's affordance from a candidate set by asking yes/no questions about its physical properties. Affordance20Q comprises 1,009 games over 454 objects and 59 affordances, all manually filtered, refined, and annotated. We conduct comprehensive experiments with 15 state-of-the-art LLMs and find a substantial gap (~20 points) compared to human performance. A KL-based information-gain (IG) analysis further shows that models fail to ask discriminating questions as the game progresses. To close the gap, we develop KB-Anchored Rule Induction (KARI), a pipeline based on LLMs that generates affordance rules grounded in evidence from knowledge bases (KBs). KARI improves open-source LLMs by up to 15.2 points, while the limited coverage of KBs hinders further gains. We release all our code and data at https://github.com/1171-jpg/Affordance20Q.git

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

pFedUL: Layer-Aware Federated Unlearning for Personalized Federated Learning

Authors:
Zhuodong Liu↗Xiangyu Li↗Zhihao Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.16304v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Federated unlearning (FU) enables the removal of specific data contributions from federated learning (FL) models to comply with regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). However, most existing FU methods are designed for the FedAvg paradigm, where all clients share a single global model. In practice, personalized federated learning (pFL) methods such as FedPer, FedRep, Ditto, and FedBN have become widely adopted due to their superior handling of non-IID data. These methods decompose the model into shared global layers and client-specific personalized layers, fundamentally altering the semantics of unlearning, yet this setting has received little attention. We formalize FU under the pFL paradigm, identifying a tension between unlearning completeness on shared layers and personalization preservation for remaining clients. We then propose pFedUL, a layer-aware selective unlearning framework comprising three components: (1) gradient-based layer-wise contribution attribution that separately quantifies the target client's influence on shared and personalized parameters, (2) adaptive selective unlearning that applies differentiated forgetting strategies across layer types, and (3) a lightweight recalibration protocol enabling remaining clients to restore personalization with minimal overhead. We further introduce two new metrics, Personalization Preservation Score (PPS) and Cross-client Fairness Index (CFI), to evaluate pFL-specific unlearning quality. Experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and FEMNIST under varying non-IID settings indicate that pFedUL achieves unlearning effectiveness comparable to full retraining while maintaining an average of 97.3\% personalized accuracy for remaining clients. Compared with six state-of-the-art FU methods adapted to the pFL setting, pFedUL consistently achieves superior personalization preservation.

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

SkMTEB: Slovak Massive Text Embedding Benchmark and Model Adaptation

Authors:
Marek \v{S}uppa↗Andrej Ridzik↗Daniel Hl\'adek↗Nat\'alia K\v{n}a\v{z}ekov\'a↗Vikt\'oria Ondrejov\'a↗

We introduce SkMTEB, the first comprehensive MTEB-style text embedding benchmark for Slovak, a low-resource West Slavic language, comprising 31 datasets across 7 task types – nearly 4$\times$ the depth of existing multilingual benchmark coverage for Slovak. Our evaluation of 31 embedding models reveals that large instruction-tuned multilingual models achieve the strongest performance, while existing Slovak-specific models trained for NLU tasks transfer poorly to embedding tasks. To address the need for efficient, locally-deployable Slovak embeddings, we develop \texttt{e5-sk-small} (45M parameters) and \texttt{e5-sk-large} (365M) by applying vocabulary trimming and fine-tuning to Multilingual E5 models. Despite size reductions of up to 62\%, our open-source models achieve competitive performance with proprietary APIs while remaining locally deployable for semantic search and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). We release the benchmark, models, datasets, and code openly, hoping our approach offers a replicable path for other under-resourced languages.

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08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Diffusion Offline Reinforcement Learning for Fair and Energy-Efficient UAV-Assisted Wireless Networks

Authors:
Eslam Eldeeb↗Hirley Alves↗

arXiv:2606.16331v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The integration of generative artificial intelligence with wireless communication and signal processing systems has opened new avenues for intelligent, data-driven decision-making in future 6G networks. This work proposes a diffusion soft actor-critic (Diffusion-SAC) approach that leverages offline reinforcement learning (RL) enhanced by denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) to optimize trajectory and scheduling control in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks. While offline RL methods, such as conservative Q-learning (CQL), can learn from static datasets, they often struggle to generalize in low-data or dynamic conditions. To address this, we combine the robustness of CQL with the generative power of diffusion models, enabling expressive and signal-aware policy learning that generalizes beyond behavior policies. Applied to a UAV-assisted wireless network, the proposed framework minimizes transmission energy and improves fairness among devices. Simulations show that Diffusion-SAC outperforms standard offline RL baselines, achieving more stable convergence and higher rewards even with limited datasets. The method enhances data efficiency, reduces energy consumption, and increases throughput by more than 35 % compared to existing algorithms, demonstrating its potential for robust policy learning in next-generation wireless control systems.

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10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

An LLM-based Two-Stage Transformer Framework for Cross-Domain Bearing Fault Diagnosis with Limited Data

Authors:
Jinghan Wang↗Feng Cheng↗Wentao Wu↗Hang Li↗Gaoliang Peng↗Tianchen Liu↗

Bearing fault diagnosis faces critical challenges when dataset heterogeneity, operating condition variations, and limited labeled data occur simultaneously in industrial environments. Existing approaches address these issues in isolation and rely on implicit feature alignment, limiting effectiveness under concurrent challenges. This paper proposes a knowledge-guided two-stage transfer learning framework that employs a lightweight GPT-2-style Transformer with causal self-attention for hierarchical feature extraction from vibration signals, establishing explicit pathways where pre-trained encoder weights and fault prototype embeddings serve as knowledge carriers from multi-source pre-training to target adaptation. The framework addresses the dual-shift challenge through multi-source learning for generalizable representations, prototype-based knowledge modulation for target adaptation, and taxonomy-adaptive classification for seamless transfer across heterogeneous fault categories. Experimental validation on four real-world datasets demonstrates 92.61% average accuracy with only 10% labeled target data, outperforming state-of-the-art methods by 17.24 percentage points, establishing a practical pathway toward cost-effective predictive maintenance in Industry 4.0 applications.

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

Know Thy Reasoner: Not All Language Models Explore Alike

Authors:
Moulik Choraria↗Argyrios Gerogiannis↗Anirban Das↗Supriyo Chakraborty↗Sourya Basu↗Sambit Sahu↗Lav R. Varshney↗

arXiv:2604.10827v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Compute scaling for LLM reasoning trades off exploring solution approaches (breadth) against refining promising ones (depth), yet why a given trade-off works, and why it often fails to transfer across models, remains unclear. We argue that the optimal strategy depends on the model's diversity profile, the spread of probability mass across solution approaches, and that this must be characterized before any exploration strategy is adopted. We formalize this with a framework decomposing reasoning uncertainty, deriving when depth-based refinement outperforms parallel sampling, and validate it across three model families at both inference and training. Our central finding is that the diversity regime dictates the strategy: low-diversity aligned models benefit from depth-based refinement with lightweight intrinsic signals, whereas high-diversity base models are often harmed by it, and instead need breadth or stronger signals to compensate.

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

IHBench: Evaluating Post-Interruption Recovery in Voice Agents with Structured Workflows

Authors:
Ahmad Salimi↗Wentao Ma↗Yuzhi Tang↗Dongming Shen↗Mu Li↗Alex Smola↗

arXiv:2606.19595v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Voice agents deployed in structured workflows (customer service, healthcare scheduling, account management) must handle frequent user interruptions while maintaining progress through multi-step procedures. Existing benchmarks for speech-capable models focus on the timing of interruptions: barge-in detection, endpointing, and turn-taking dynamics. They leave unmeasured what happens after the interruption: does the agent resume the workflow at the correct step? Does it address the user's interjection? Does it avoid re-delivering content the user already heard? We introduce IHBench (Interruption Handling Benchmark), a benchmark that evaluates post-interruption recovery in voice agents executing state-machine-driven workflows across 10 enterprise domains. Six interruption types are injected at controlled points mid-utterance, with per-interruption evaluation rubrics generated alongside the data. Each interruption is scored on two axes: task fulfillment and recovery quality. We evaluate 27 audio-language model configurations from OpenAI, Google, and the open-weight community. Models vary widely, and recovery quality depends strongly on the interruption type. Across our experiments, closed-weight models are consistently more robust to interruptions than open-weight ones: they win far more often on task fulfillment, degrade roughly 3.3x more slowly as conversations grow longer, and show no audio-versus-text modality gap, whereas the open-weight models lose ground on all three. A human study validates the LLM judge against human annotators, and a cross-benchmark analysis against AudioMultiChallenge indicates that recovery quality is a largely distinct capability axis.

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13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

From "Aha Moments" to Controllable Thinking: Toward Meta-Cognitive Reasoning in Large Reasoning Models via Decoupled Reasoning and Control

Authors:
Rui Ha↗Rui Pu↗Chaozhuo Li↗Li Sun↗Sen Su↗

arXiv:2508.04460v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) can exhibit step-by-step reasoning, reflection, and backtracking, but these behaviors are often unregulated, leading to overthinking. As a result, LRMs continue generating redundant reasoning even after reaching high-confidence conclusions. This increases inference cost and latency, limiting practical deployment. The root cause is the absence of an intrinsic mechanism to monitor the reasoning state and decide when to continue, backtrack, or stop. We propose MERA, a meta-cognitive reasoning framework that decouples reasoning from control to enable independent optimization of control strategies. MERA constructs high-quality reasoning-control supervision data via a takeover-based pipeline, and transforms long-horizon traces into structured reasoning-control alternating sequences for training. The model is trained with supervised fine-tuning to internalize the structured separation, and further optimized with Control-Segment Policy Optimization (CSPO), which combines segment-wise GRPO with control masking to focus learning on control segments. Experiments across reasoning benchmarks show that MERA improves both efficiency and accuracy.

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14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Method comparisons for differentiation of Schizophrenia and Bipolar based on rs-fMRI Intrinsic and Functional Networks

Authors:
Janeva↗Breyton↗Markovska-Simoska↗Guilhaumou↗Petkoski↗Iraji↗Calhoun↗Gerazov↗

Psychosis as a symptom manifests in schizophenia and bipolar disorder, two highly heterogeneous psychiatric illnesses with overlapping clinical manifestations. Resting-state functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (rsfMRI), represents a promising tool for identifying objective biomarkers of functional brain alterations to aid differential diagnosis. In this work, we comparatively evaluate multiple rs-fMRI representations for differentiating schizophrenia and bipolar disorder using intrinsic connectivity network (ICN) temporal profiles and several functional network connectivity (FNC) approaches, including static, dynamic, and high-order connectivity analyses. The study was conducted on a cohort of 371 subjects with psychosis, while evaluation was performed using a separate held-out cohort of 315 subjects. We investigated convolutional neural network architectures applied to ICN temporal profiles, spectrograms, and scalograms, alongside classical machine learning models trained on connectivity-derived features. Across the evaluated approaches, ICN temporal profiles provided the most consistent discriminative performance, with a 1D convolutional neural network achieving the strongest overall results under the benchmark protocol. Among connectivity-based methods, static functional connectivity generally outperformed dynamic and high-order representations, suggesting that increased representational complexity did not necessarily translate into improved generalization. Although the obtained classification performance remained modest, the results highlight the challenges of robust psychosis differentiation using rs-fMRI while emphasizing the relative stability of low-order connectivity representations and temporal ICN features. These findings contribute to ongoing efforts toward reproducible and interpretable neuroimaging biomarkers for psychiatric disorders.

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

OCSVM-Guided Representation Learning for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection

Authors:
Nicolas Pinon↗Robin Trombetta↗Carole Lartizien↗

arXiv:2507.21164v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Unsupervised anomaly detection (UAD) aims to detect anomalies without labeled data, a necessity in many machine learning applications where anomalous samples are rare or not available. Most state-of-the-art methods fall into two categories: reconstruction-based approaches, which often reconstruct anomalies too well, and decoupled representation learning with density estimators, which can suffer from suboptimal feature spaces. While some recent methods attempt to couple feature learning and anomaly detection, they often rely on surrogate objectives, restrict kernel choices, or introduce approximations that limit their expressiveness and robustness. To address this challenge, we propose a novel method that couples representation learning with an analytically solvable One-Class SVM (OCSVM), through a custom loss formulation that directly aligns latent features with the OCSVM decision boundary. The model is evaluated on two tasks: a \deleted{new} benchmark based on MNIST-C, and a challenging brain MRI \deleted{subtle} lesion detection task. Unlike most methods that focus on large, hyperintense lesions at the image level, our approach succeeds to target small, non-hyperintense lesions, while we evaluate voxel-wise metrics, addressing a more clinically relevant scenario. Both experiments evaluate a form of robustness to domain shifts, including corruption types in MNIST-C and texture or population age variations in MRI. Results demonstrate performance and robustness of our proposed model, highlighting its potential for general UAD and real-world medical imaging applications. The source code is available at https://github.com/Nicolas-Pinon/uad_ocsvm_guided_repr_learning.

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

Sequential Hiring of Contingent Workers Through Learning-Based Optimization

Authors:
Chris Lee↗Xiuli Chao↗Izak Duenyas↗

arXiv:2606.18438v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper, we study a sequential workforce management problem in a contingent labor setting with uncertainty in both worker production and labor supply. A firm seeks to maximize cumulative profit by maintaining an active team of fixed size while learning worker productivity over time. We emphasize two critical operational frictions in this problem: replacing workers is costly, and workers may not be available immediately for hiring because of, for example, prior job commitments, scheduling constraints, or onboarding procedures. Thus, hiring decisions take effect only after a random delay. We formulate this problem as a stochastic multi-play bandit with costly switching and delayed actions, and develop a learning-based hiring policy, DR-UCB (DelayedReplacement-UCB), that makes replacement and hiring decisions sequentially through learning cycles. In each cycle, the policy uses real-time production data to determine when to initiate workforce changes and which workers to replace and hire. We show that the leading-order regret of the proposed policy matches its lower bound in its dependence on the time horizon. Our numerical experiments show that DR-UCB outperforms benchmark policies.

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17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Filtered ANN as a Phase Transition: When Selectivity-Estimation Error Causes Plan Regret

Authors:
Madhulatha Mandarapu↗Sandeep Kunkunuru↗

arXiv:2606.16341v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A filtered approximate-nearest-neighbor (ANN) query returns the k nearest vectors among those satisfying an attribute predicate P of selectivity s. The best execution strategy – pre-filter, post-filter, or in-filter – changes with s, so a system must estimate s and choose. We model this as an argmax over a landscape with phases (regions where each strategy wins) separated by boundaries, and show that selectivity-estimation error produces plan regret – recall lost versus the oracle strategy – only in the critical regions around those boundaries. The regret is a wedge of log-width equal to the multiplicative estimation error epsilon and height equal to the local cliff |V'(s*)| epsilon; the flip-margin 1/|V'(s*)| is the condition number of a sibling cardinality-estimation study reappearing as the local boundary theory. The two phase boundaries follow from independent mathematics: order statistics place the post-filter cliff at s ~ k/K, and site percolation places the in-filter cliff at s_c ~ 0.83/M for graph degree M (corpus-size independent). Criticality exists only under a constrained budget B < sqrt(k n). Under pre-registered decision rules we confirm, on synthetic sweeps and real SIFT1M, that regret concentrates ~290x at the boundary and that the regret curves obey a finite-size scaling collapse onto one universal wedge across two decades of corpus size. A real approximate index does not mis-locate the boundary, but a biased cost model opens a persistent miscalibration band that estimation-error robustness cannot fix. The contribution is a characterization, not a new index. Code and the full pre-registration are public.

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

A Differentiable Composite Approximation Framework for Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Maneuvering Modeling from Sea-Trial Data

Authors:
Aobo Wang↗Aifei Xia↗Zihao Wang↗Lizhu Hao↗

arXiv:2606.19711v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Field-based modeling from onboard measurements can produce autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) maneuvering models that reflect real operating characteristics. From an approximation perspective, conventional maneuvering models use predefined constraint polynomial bases, whereas data-driven models use data-adaptive bases. Motivated by this basis-function view, this paper presents a differentiable composite-approximation formulation, in which the polynomial-basis component and the data-adaptive basis component are treated as differentiable parts of a single predictor and calibrated jointly. A gradient-based co-calibration method is developed for full-scale AUV maneuvering prediction, where a sensitivity-aware mechanism regulates bounded polynomial updates while the neural residual captures remaining nonlinear discrepancies under a shared prediction objective. To account for ocean-current effects in field data, a turning-motion-based current estimation and compensation procedure is incorporated to construct current-compensated learning targets for training and rollout. The framework is evaluated using sea-trial data collected from a 7-meter AUV under multiple maneuvering conditions. Results show that the proposed method improves recursive trajectory and velocity prediction compared with polynomial-only, neural-only, and frozen-prior hybrid baselines, demonstrating its applicability to field-data-based AUV maneuvering modeling.

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19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Simple analytical flux-tuned iSWAP pulses for leakage suppression

Authors:
Dimitrios Georgiadis↗Boxi Li↗Asier Galicia↗Rami Barends↗F. A. C\'ardenas-L\'opez↗Felix Motzoi↗

arXiv:2606.13052v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fast, high-fidelity two-qubit gates are a key requirement for fault-tolerant quantum computation. Tunable coupler architectures provide a flexible approach for implementing entangling gates through flux control with large on-off ratios, but fast flux modulation can induce diabatic transitions and population leakage to non-computational states, limiting gate performance. Here we present an analytical flux control method enabling derivative removal by adiabatic gate ($\Phi$-DRAG) for suppressing leakage in flux tunable two-qubit gates. We show that $\Phi$-DRAG differs fundamentally from conventional microwave implementations and derive modified flux modulation protocols that suppress leakage below $10^{-4}$ for fast entangling gates. The method remains effective across a range of asymmetry between qubit anharmonicities and different circuit parameters, enabling high-fidelity two-qubit gates within the fifteen nanosecond range.

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

A Lightweight Multi-Agent Framework for Automated Concrete Barrier Design

Authors:
Wanting Wang↗Xiye Ma↗Yuyang He↗Minghui Cheng↗Ran Cao↗

arXiv:2606.12040v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The design of reinforced concrete highway barriers is a safety-critical process that requires strict compliance with regulatory provisions such as the AASHTO-LRFD bridge design guidelines. Current engineering practice relies heavily on manual, iterative, and heuristic calculations to satisfy complex nonlinear material and mechanics constraints. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate strong generative capabilities, their direct application to structural engineering remains limited by hallucination risks and insufficient physical grounding. To address these challenges, this study proposes a novel "generation-evaluation-optimization" closed-loop framework for automated concrete barrier design using the multi-agent orchestration capabilities of AutoGen. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed agentic framework achieves over 98% design accuracy, significantly outperforming standalone general-purpose LLMs. More importantly, the study reveals that design performance is not necessarily correlated with model scale, where an 8B-parameter lightweight model could outperform unconstrained 631B-parameter flagship models. This finding highlights the potential to substantially reduce computational costs while improving the accessibility of AI-assisted engineering tools for industry applications. The source code for the proposed multi-agent design framework is available at the project GitHub repository: https://github.com/MXY820/barrier-design. Keywords: Structural Engineering; Multi-Agent Systems; Large Language Models; Concrete Barrier Design; AutoGen; Design Automation.

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21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Examining Human-Like Behaviors in LLMs: A Multi-Dimensional Analysis of Model Behaviors, User Factors, and System Prompts

Authors:
Sunnie S. Y. Kim↗Margit Bowler↗Leon A Gatys↗

arXiv:2606.18258v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit a wide range of human-like behaviors, from expressing thoughts and emotions, to engaging in relationship-building with users, to refusing requests and maintaining boundaries. Despite their prevalence, researchers and practitioners lack methods and empirical insights to make informed decisions about when and what types of human-like behaviors LLMs should exhibit. To fill this gap, we present a multi-dimensional analysis of the prevalence, potential effects, and controllability of these behaviors using LLM-as-a-judge and human evaluation. Across 21,000 multi-turn conversations from four widely used models (gpt-4o, gpt-4.1-mini, claude-sonnet-4.6, gemini-2.5-flash), we find that human-like behaviors are pervasive but vary across models and user factors (conversation goals and user profiles). In terms of perceived appropriateness, human evaluators judged self-referential and relationship-building behaviors as less appropriate from LLMs than from humans, but boundary-maintaining behaviors more appropriate from LLMs than from humans. Finally, we show that system prompting can control these behaviors, though it requires careful evaluation to avoid unintended effects. We discuss the implications of our findings and provide recommendations for responsible LLM design and evaluation.

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

RCEM: Robust Conversational Search EMbedder in Distributional Shift

Authors:
Kilho Son↗Paul Hsu↗Cha Zhang↗Dinei Florencio↗

We propose RCEM, a Robust Conversational search EMbedder that is additionally equipped with LLM's query reformulation capability without losing base model's generalization. Unlike prior conversational dense retrieval approaches that learn direct conversation-to-passage matching, RCEM aligns conversations, prepended by special token, to LLM-rewritten queries, while preserving the original embedding space. The unchanged embedding space automatically maps the rewritten-query to the relevant passages. As a result, RCEM (1) reduces overfitting by simplifying the alignment task from long passages to shorter rewritten queries, (2) eliminates the need for conversation-to-passage relevance labels for training, and (3) maintains its original embedding space that allows conversational queries against indexes built by original embedder without rebuilding them. Extensive experiments show that RCEM consistently outperforms prior approaches, achieving up to 30% improvement under distributional shift.

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23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Encoder Winners Do Not Reliably Transfer Across VLA Backbone Scale: A Frozen-Backbone Grafting Diagnostic

Authors:
Qingping Zeng↗Fei She↗

Vision-language-action (VLA) policies typically inherit their vision encoder from upstream VLM releases, but it is unclear whether an encoder choice validated on a small VLA transfers to a larger backbone. We introduce a frozen-backbone grafting diagnostic: the vision tower of a released VLA is replaced by a candidate encoder under a fixed protocol (adaptive average pooling, LayerNorm, and a single trainable linear projector), with the language model and action expert frozen. Across four encoders, two LIBERO suites, two backbones (SmolVLA-450M and $\pi_{0.5}$-3.3B), and two-to-three seeds per cell (40 main grafting runs plus native, LoRA, pooling, and zero-/shuffled-image controls, all scored by offline action MSE), the small-backbone winner does not reliably select the large-backbone top tier: SigLIP is best on SmolVLA across both suites, while on $\pi_{0.5}$ DINOv2-small leads the spatial suite and the object suite is a seed-sensitive near-tie band; three of the four backbone-suite comparisons (and 11 of 12 seed-level cells) support backbone-dependent rankings. The grafting wrapper is itself non-neutral with opposite sign across backbones (+45-56% MSE on the SmolVLA native tower, -50-52% on $\pi_{0.5}$), so all conclusions are conditional on the fixed grafting protocol. We position frozen grafting as a cheap target-backbone diagnostic to run before committing to an encoder at scale, not as a closed-loop deployment claim.

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24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Phenotyping TPF via Self-Supervised Learning: A Label-Agnostic Framework with Expert Validation

Authors:
Miral Elnakib↗Muhammad Saad↗Ahmad Al-Kabbany↗

The full potential of artificial intelligence in tibial plateau fracture characterisation remains unrealised, constrained by a fundamental dependency on labelled datasets whose consistency cannot be guaranteed: conventional classification schemes such as Schatzker and AO/OTA suffer from inter-observer variability, causing supervised models to learn human disagreement rather than stable fracture morphology. We design, implement, and validate a label-agnostic framework that eliminates this constraint by learning fracture representations directly from imaging data without observer-assigned labels. A RadImageNet-pretrained ResNet-50 encoder is fine-tuned on 154 cleaned knee radiographs using the SimCLR contrastive objective, preceded by a data cleaning protocol and followed by UMAP dimensionality reduction and k-means clustering to discover four imaging-derived phenotypes. Phenotype validity is assessed through a blinded expert review protocol administered to two independent clinicians. The four phenotypes demonstrate robust stability (bootstrap ARI = 0.319 +/- 0.041), strong internal cohesion (silhouette = 0.511), and coherence ratings of 3-5/5 from both reviewers under blinded conditions; one phenotype was unanimously identified as exhibiting comminution – a high-complexity feature isolated without any supervisory signal. Inter-partition comparison against Schatzker labels yields ARI = 0.013, confirming orthogonality to conventional classification boundaries. Notably, expert reviewers anchored to established classification vocabularies perceived imaging-derived groups as heterogeneous precisely where Schatzker alignment was lowest, suggesting that Schatzker-trained perception and label-agnostic embedding geometry measure orthogonal dimensions. These findings establish label-agnostic SSL phenotyping as a reproducible and clinically interpretable complement to conventional classification.

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

Physics-Guided Spatiotemporal Learning for Coastal Wave Peak Period Estimation from Video

Authors:
Abubakar Hamisu Kamagata↗Dharm Singh Jat↗Attlee Munyaradzi Gamundani↗Abhishek Srivastava↗Paramasivam Saravanakumar↗

arXiv:2606.13302v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Wave parameters in the nearshore are crucial for coastal engineering, shoreline protection, marine hazard assessment, and coastal management for climate resilience. Traditional monitoring systems like buoys and radar platforms offer accurate monitoring but can have high installation and maintenance expenses and limited spatial coverage. Passive ocean monitoring using video has been achieved by leveraging deep learning, however, many methods are not physically interpretable, feasible, and validated for oceanography. In thiswork, a Physics-Guided Deep Spatiotemporal Learning Framework for direct estimation of nearshore wave peak periods from passive coastal video stream is proposed. The framework combines automated temporal-variance based region-of-interest detection, multi-stage Sim-to-Real transfer learning, and physics-informed regularization to enhance the predictive accuracy and physical consistency. A variety of spatiotemporal architectures were assessed, such as transformer-based and recurrent-convolutional ones, alongside synthetic pretraining,silver-label adaptation, and expert fine-tuning. The results show that transformer-based architectures outperformed in terms of the accuracy of the instantaneous prediction, while lightweight recurrent-convolutional architectures achieved higher temporal stability and operational oceanographic skill. Ablation studies also demonstrated the benefits of physics-guided regularization in terms of trend-following consistency, and physically implausible predictions. Explainability auditing also helped to focus attention in hydrodynamically active surf-zone regions and showed good agreement with the physically derived wave propagation behavior. In general, the proposed framework shows the promise of physics-guided video-based deep learning systems for long-term coastal wave monitoring that are cost-efficient and operationally feasible.

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