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01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Building user-driven climate adaptation products

Climate adaptation products have traditionally been developed using a supply-driven model reliant on available climate information, leading to usability gaps1–4. To better meet user needs, the climate services field has recognized a need to shift towards a demand-driven model emphasizing co-production, that is, user-driven, scientifically informed products created through shared knowledge practices1–5. However, co-production can be challenging, especially for researchers unfamiliar with the approach or for digital and software-based products with complex user needs2,5–8. User-centred design, from the human–computer interaction field, offers a process that could complement co-production approaches to product development, yet its potential remains underexplored2. Here we show how user-centred design can be integrated into, and strengthen, co-production approaches for building user-driven climate adaptation products. Through a systematic review of the co-production and user-centred design literature, we identify key processes, mechanisms and best practices for both approaches. Our findings offer practical guidance for researchers and propose an integrated approach for developing climate adaptation products that are useful, usable and used. A systematic review and analysis shows how user-centred design can be integrated into, and strengthen, co-production approaches for building user-driven climate adaptation products.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

MASCOT-Android: A Curated Dataset and Automated Collection Pipeline for Android Malware Source Code Specimens

arXiv:2606.16072v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Compared with binaries and decompiled code, malware source code more directly reflects the attackers' original intent. However, the scarcity of source code and the high cost of manual review make such datasets difficult to build and maintain. We propose MASCOT-Android, a curated dataset of Android malware source code and an automated collection framework for scalable malware source code discovery on GitHub. A key finding of our work is that repository-level documentation alone provides a strong signal for malware source code collection. Our model extracts character-level TF-IDF features from 8,772 malware and 25,747 benign README documents and trains a LinearSVC classifier to distinguish malware repositories. This README-only model achieves an accuracy of 96.28\% and an FPR of 1.06\% in local evaluation. In addition, the model outputs confidence scores, allowing users to adjust the decision threshold to balance FPR and coverage, which is practical in real-world malware source code collection.

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

MORTAR: Multi-turn Metamorphic Testing for LLM-based Dialogue Systems

With the widespread application of LLM-based dialogue systems in daily life, quality assurance has become more important than ever. Recent research has successfully introduced methods to identify unexpected behaviour in single-turn testing scenarios. However, multi-turn interaction is the common real-world usage of dialogue systems, yet testing methods for such interactions remain underexplored. This is largely due to the oracle problem in multi-turn testing, which continues to pose a significant challenge for dialogue system developers and researchers. In this paper, we propose MORTAR, a metamorphic multi-turn dialogue testing approach, which mitigates the test oracle problem in testing LLM-based dialogue systems. MORTAR formalises the multi-turn testing for dialogue systems, and automates the generation of question-answer dialogue test cases with multiple dialogue-level perturbations and metamorphic relations (MRs). The automated MR matching mechanism allows MORTAR more flexibility and efficiency in metamorphic testing. The proposed approach is fully automated without reliance on LLM judges. In testing six popular LLM-based dialogue systems, MORTAR reaches significantly better effectiveness with over 150\% more bugs revealed per test case when compared to the single-turn metamorphic testing baseline. Regarding the quality of bugs, MORTAR reveals higher-quality bugs in terms of diversity, precision and uniqueness. MORTAR is expected to inspire more multi-turn testing approaches, and assist developers in evaluating the dialogue system performance more comprehensively with constrained test resources and budget.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Concatenated Matrix SVD: Compression Bounds, Incremental Approximation, and Error-Constrained Clustering

arXiv:2601.11626v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large collections of matrices arise throughout modern machine learning, signal processing, and scientific computing, where they are commonly compressed by concatenation followed by truncated singular value decomposition (SVD). This strategy enables parameter sharing and efficient reconstruction and has been widely adopted across domains ranging from multi-view learning and signal processing to neural network compression. However, it leaves a fundamental question unanswered: which matrices can be safely concatenated and compressed together under explicit reconstruction error constraints? Existing approaches rely on heuristic or architecture-specific grouping and provide no principled guarantees on the resulting SVD approximation error. In the present work, we introduce a theory-driven framework for compression-aware clustering of matrices under SVD compression constraints. Our analysis establishes new spectral bounds for horizontally concatenated matrices, deriving global upper bounds on the optimal rank-$r$ SVD reconstruction error from lower bounds on singular value growth. The first bound follows from Weyl-type monotonicity under blockwise extensions, while the second leverages singular values of incremental residuals to yield tighter, per-block guarantees. We further develop an efficient approximate estimator based on incremental truncated SVD that tracks dominant singular values without forming the full concatenated matrix. Therefore, we propose three clustering algorithms that merge matrices only when their predicted joint SVD compression error remains below a user-specified threshold. The algorithms span a trade-off between speed, provable accuracy, and scalability, enabling compression-aware clustering with explicit error control.

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

Spin disorder competing with positional symmetry breaking governs the metal-insulator behavior in oxide paramagnets

arXiv:2606.14624v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Numerous transition-metal oxides have low-temperature antiferromagnetic (AFM) states and high-temperature paramagnetic (PM) phases, where the AFM state is usually insulating while the PM phase can be either insulating or metallic. Without involving strong correlation, we use symmetry-broken density-functional theory (DFT) to obtain the PM phases of insulating NaFeO3 vs the recently discovered metallic NaOsO3. We develop the understanding of insulating and metallic behaviors in paramagnetic oxides by analyzing the interactions between magnetic and positional symmetry breaking: The insulating gap is governed by the competition between the spin disorder that induces a distribution of different magnitudes of local magnetic moments and the polymorphous distribution of off-center atomic displacements. NaFeO3, on the other hand, has large positional displacement with small spin-disorder-induced moments distribution, leading to insulating PM phase, whereas NaOsO3 has a pronounced spin-disorder-induced moments distribution that forces the PM phase to become metallic. Our work identifies this symmetry-breaking competition as a general framework to bridge seemingly disparate metal-insulator behaviors in transition-metal oxides paramagnets without invoking strong correlation.

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

Fabless Quantum Chip Design and Commercial Production

arXiv:2606.17956v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper proposes a fabless quantum-chip design and production architecture for superconducting quantum computing, centered on the SPICE-Q multiphysics simulation framework. The proposed ecosystem connects process-certified quantum PDKs, parameterized device cells, traceable model cards, SPICE-Q physical modeling languages, unified Q-EDA flows, foundry sign-off rules, cryogenic test feedback, and reusable quantum IP. In this model, design firms do not merely outsource fabrication; they prepare verified tape-outs under standardized process constraints and calibrated physical models. Its economic value lies in reducing repetitive device debugging, process exploration, and low-level layout effort, while its feasibility depends on PDK maturity, foundry yield, cryogenic test throughput, model-prediction accuracy, data-feedback mechanisms, and IP licensing boundaries. We argue that superconducting quantum chips can move from the current largely vertically integrated development model toward a fabless-foundry ecosystem only when hardware design is supported by standardized, verifiable, and reusable software and process interfaces. The required pillars are certified PDKs, PCell-based parameterized design, SPICE-Q cross-physics simulation, end-to-end Q-EDA automation, and a tradable quantum-IP market. By adapting lessons from the classical semiconductor industry to quantum hardware, this framework defines a path toward scalable, manufacturable, and commercially reusable superconducting quantum-chip design.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Formalizing and Mitigating Structural Distortion in LLM Attention for Zero-Shot Graph Reasoning

arXiv:2606.15633v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise for reasoning over Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs). However, applying LLMs to graphs requires linearizing their structure into sequences, introducing distortion rooted in the graph bandwidth problem. While this distortion has been shown to degrade performance, it is often attributed to prompt design or model scale, leaving the underlying mechanism unclear. In this work, we show how rotary positional embeddings turn graph linearization into bandwidth-dependent attention decay, suppressing attention between graph-adjacent nodes that are forced far apart in the serialized sequence. This shifts the focus of LLM-based graph reasoning from prompt engineering and scaling toward correcting attention misalignment. Motivated by this analysis, we propose Graph-aligned Language Attention (GaLA), a lightweight, inference-time modification for LLMs. GaLA biases attention toward graph-adjacent nodes while preserving the LLM's sequential inductive biases. Across TAG benchmarks, GaLA improves performance with negligible overhead, demonstrating that distortion is a correctable bottleneck in LLM-based graph reasoning.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Experimental Tabletop Petz recovery of a photonic qubit

arXiv:2606.12020v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The quantum information lost in open evolutions cannot be fully recovered, but partial recovery is possible. The Petz recovery map guarantees almost optimal recovery, notably if the chosen reference state is close to the real one. This map has been widely used in theoretical studies, but has been the object of only a handful of experimental realisations, typically under a single fixed noise model. In this work, we describe and implement the Petz recovery map for a versatile class of qubit channels with tunable decoherence and dissipation. The setup we realize is also the first experimental example of ``tabletop reversibility'': for a good range of choices of the reference state, the Petz recovery map can be implemented with the same devices as the forward dissipative evolution, whose effect it is partially undoing. Our results demonstrate that the Petz recovery map can be resource-efficiently realized without requiring complex ancillary resources, providing a feasible pathway for mitigating information loss in quantum systems.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

GOOSE-M2F: Adapting Mask2Former for High-Fidelity, Long-Tailed Fine-Grained Semantic Segmentation in Unstructured Outdoor Terrain

We present GOOSE-M2F, a task-specific adaptation of Mask2Former for the GOOSE 2D Fine-Grained Semantic Segmentation (FGSS) Challenge at ICRA~2026. The GOOSE benchmark spans 64 fine-grained classes across unstructured outdoor terrain with a severely long-tailed distribution, where rare classes occupy fewer than 50 pixels per image. We extend the Swin-Large Mask2Former baseline with three targeted contributions: (1)200 Object Queries to eliminate representational saturation; (2)a Feature Refinement Module (FRM) combining ASPP-lite and CBAM dual-attention; and (3)an Auxiliary Supervision Head that delivers direct per-pixel gradients for rare classes. A multi-stage training strategy pairs Distribution-Balanced loss, Rare-Class Copy-Paste augmentation, dynamic IoU-aware re-weighting, and EMA. At inference, a dense sliding-window engine with 2D Gaussian kernel blending and 4-scale TTA adds +10.57\%. GOOSE-M2F achieves 70.08\% Official Composite mIoU (63.55\% fine, 76.61\% coarse), placing 3rd on the GOOSE 2D FGSS leaderboard. Code and trained models are publicly available at: \href{https://github.com/Aditya-Lingam-9000/GOOSE-M2F}{Github GOOSE-M2F Code} and \href{https://huggingface.co/XYZ9843/GOOSE-M2F}{Hugging Face GOOSE-M2F}.

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

AI4SLT: Empirical Processes in Lean 4 for Formal Statistical Learning Theory

We present the first comprehensive Lean 4 formalization of statistical learning theory (SLT) grounded in empirical process theory. Our en-to-end formal infrastructure implement the missing contents in latest Lean library, including a complete development of Gaussian Lipschitz concentration, Dudley's entropy integral theorem for sub-Gaussian processes, and an application to least-squares (sparse) regression with a sharp rate. The project was carried out using a human-AI collaborative workflow, in which humans design proof strategies and AI agents execute tactical proof construction, leading to the human-verified Lean 4 toolbox for SLT. Beyond implementation, the formalization process exposes and resolves implicit assumptions and missing details in standard SLT textbooks, enforcing a granular, line-by-line understanding of the theory. This work establishes a reusable formal foundation and opens the door for future developments in machine learning theory. The code is provided in https://github.com/YuanheZ/lean-stat-learning-theory.

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

TabKD: Tabular Knowledge Distillation through Interaction Diversity of Learned Feature Bins

arXiv:2603.15481v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Data-free knowledge distillation enables model compression without original training data, critical for privacy-sensitive tabular domains. However, existing methods does not perform well on tabular data because they do not explicitly address feature interactions, the fundamental way tabular models encode predictive knowledge. We identify interaction diversity, systematic coverage of feature combinations, as an essential requirement for effective tabular distillation. To operationalize this insight, we propose TabKD, which learns adaptive feature bins aligned with teacher decision boundaries, then generates synthetic queries that maximize pairwise interaction coverage. Across 4 benchmark datasets and 4 teacher architectures, TabKD achieves highest student-teacher agreement in 14 out of 16 configurations, outperforming 5 state-of-the-art baselines. We further show that interaction coverage strongly correlates with distillation quality, validating our core hypothesis. Our work establishes interaction-focused exploration as a principled framework for tabular model extraction.

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

MCompassRAG: Topic Metadata as a Semantic Compass for Paragraph-Level Retrieval

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems depend critically on how documents are chunked and searched. Fine-grained chunks can improve retrieval precision but expand the search space, increasing latency and cost; larger chunks reduce the number of candidates but make dense similarity less reliable, as the representation for each chunk mixes multiple topics and introduces more semantic noise. This trade-off becomes especially limiting in deep research tasks, where retrieval must be both fast and precise across large, heterogeneous corpora. We introduce MCompassRAG, a metadata-guided retrieval framework that uses topic-level signals as a semantic compass for selecting relevant evidence. Instead of relying only on cosine similarity between queries and noisy chunk embeddings, MCompassRAG enriches chunk representations with topic metadata in the same embedding space and trains a lightweight retriever through LLM-teacher distillation. At inference time, MCompassRAG performs topic-aware retrieval without additional LLM calls, improving both efficiency and evidence quality. Across six complex retrieval benchmarks, MCompassRAG improves information efficiency (IE) by 8.24% on average with over 5 times lower latency than the strongest efficient RAG baselines. Code is available on https://github.com/AmirAbaskohi/MCompassRAG.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

LSTM based IoT Device Identification

arXiv:2304.13905v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While the use of the Internet of Things is becoming more and more popular, many security vulnerabilities are emerging with the large number of devices being introduced to the market. In this environment, IoT device identification methods provide a preventive security measure as an important factor in identifying these devices and detecting the vulnerabilities they suffer from. In this study, we present an end-to-end machine learning pipeline that identifies IoT devices in the Aalto university dataset (IoT devices captures) using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks. Raw network packet captures (PCAP) are processed into 25 engineered features, which are then arranged as sliding-window time-series sequences. We systematically evaluate sequence lengths from 2 to 20, reporting that performance improves approximately linearly up to length 6 and thereafter in a wave-like pattern, reaching its peak at length 18. On the final held-out test set with the optimal configuration, the model achieves an accuracy of 79.85% and a macro-averaged F1-score of 75.70% across 27 device classes.

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

Driving, Fast or Slow? Neuro-Symbolic Guidance for Motion Prediction in Multi-Modal Ground Mobility

arXiv:2606.15251v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate and interpretable motion prediction for heterogeneous traffic spaces, including pedestrians, bicycles, cars, and trucks, is essential for safe autonomous navigation. Nevertheless, state-of-the-art approaches remain predominantly black-box, lacking explicit encoding of the regulatory and behavioral constraints of real-world mobility. We propose Trajectory Compliance-Shaping (TraCS), a neuro-symbolic framework that augments existing black-box motion prediction backbones with interpretable and probabilistic first-order logic. To do so, TraCS employs an agentic code-generation pipeline to bridge the gap between natural-language descriptions of traffic regulations and probabilistic motion prediction. Furthermore, TraCS employs a reactive data-streaming inference engine that maintains and efficiently updates compliance landscapes as scenes evolve. To prevent TraCS from overconfidently steering the backbone's predictions in the wrong direction, we propose a neural confidence rating learned as a context-aware attenuation of the compliance signal. We demonstrate on the Argoverse 2 benchmark how TraCS consistently improves state-of-the-art prediction backbones, showing that probabilistic and symbolic compliance reasoning is a broadly applicable and computationally efficient complement to purely neural motion predictors.

15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Interplay of insurance and financial risks in a non Levy-Renewal environment

arXiv:2606.15596v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper we consider a multivariate risk model, with common counting process and common process of logarithmic returns for the investment portfolio. We assume that the claim-vectors, the counting process and the logarithmic returns of the investment portfolio satisfy a weak dependence structure. Further, we consider that the counting process represents an inhomogeneous renewal process, and the logarithmic returns represent a cadlag process with independent but not necessarily stationary increments. Under these conditions we provide an asymptotic expression for the infinite-time entrance probability of the discounted aggregate claims into some rare set xA, where A denotes a set from a general set family, crucial for the actuarial practice, when the common distribution of the claim vectors belong to a multivariate heavy-tailed distribution class. This result, is derived under a moment condition for the financial risks, and underlines the multivariate linear single big jump principle. When we restrict the distribution class of the claim-vectors to multivariate regular variation, we find more explicit asymptotic expressions, weakening the moment conditions on the financial risks. The asymptotic formulas, derived through double dependence solution, become more direct and practical in applications. With respect to the technical part, due to non Levy-Renewal framework, the classical Kesten-Goldie theorems are not applicable, nor their extensions. The way we make the discretization of the process of the discounted aggregate claims permits to derive uniform asymptotics with respect to the number of summands, that facilitate the approximation of the infinite sums of the main results.

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

Robust and Interpretable Adaptation of Equivariant Materials Foundation Models via Sparsity-promoting Fine-tuning

arXiv:2606.18691v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pre-trained materials foundation models, or machine learning interatomic potentials, leverage general physicochemical knowledge to effectively approximate potential energy surfaces. However, they often require domain-specific calibration due to physicochemical diversity as well as mismatches between practical computational settings and those used in constructing the pre-training data. To address this, we propose a sparsity-promoting fine-tuning method that selectively updates model parameters by exploiting the structural properties of E(3)-equivariant materials foundation models. On energy and force prediction tasks across molecular and crystalline benchmarks, our method matches or surpasses full fine-tuning and equivariant low-rank adaptation while updating only $\sim$3~\% of parameters, and in some cases as little as $\sim$0.5~\%. Beyond energy and force calibration, we further demonstrate task generalizability by applying our method to magnetic moment prediction and magnetism-aware total energy modeling. Finally, analysis of sparsity patterns reveals physically interpretable signatures, such as enhanced $d$-orbital contributions in transition metal systems. Overall, our results establish sparsity-promoting fine-tuning as a flexible and interpretable method for domain specialization of equivariant materials foundation models.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Language-Guided Abstraction for Visual Reasoning

The Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC) is viewed as a critical avenue to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), as it enables models to learn abstract transformation rules from few-shot examples and then generalize to new tasks. However, prevalent ARC methodology is either pure language or vision-only (i.e., VARC). The former depends heavily on LLMs, consuming billions of parameters. The latter often struggles to capture high-level semantics, leading to overfitting on pixel-level patterns. To bridge this gap, we propose L-VARC, a novel framework that enhances visual reasoning via a language-guided Learning Using Privileged Information (LUPI) branch. Specifically, we design a Semantic Compression Module by feeding a unified, task-agnostic prompt into DeepSeek-V3. In this way, the raw LARC (a crowd-sourced language description dataset) can be substantially refined and structured, fitting with the context length constraint of standard text encoders (e.g., CLIP). Moreover, we design a Cross-Attention Projector to align visual features with semantic embeddings, aiming to guide the training of the ARC model. Notably, the LUPI branch is taken in the training process and will be discarded during inference, thereby yielding a lightweight model with a mere 18 million parameters. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our L-VARC effectively leverages linguistic priors to boost visual reasoning and outperforms state-of-the-art. Ablation studies further confirm the contribution of the two new designs towards the L-VARC framework. The code is available at https://github.com/GZHU-DVL/L-VARC.

18.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-04

Cell differentiation can underpin the reproducibility of morphogenesis

by Dominic K. Devlin, Austen R. D. Ganley, Nobuto Takeuchi Morphogenesis of complex body shapes is reproducible despite the noise inherent in the underlying morphogenetic processes. However, how these morphogenetic processes work together to achieve this reproducibility remains unclear. Here, we ask how this reproducibility is achieved by evolving complex morphologies in a multi-scale, computational model. Each morphology consists of a population of cells on a two-dimensional grid using the Cellular Potts Model framework. Each cell contains a genome that encodes a gene regulatory network, morphogens for cell-cell signalling, and proteins that determine cell behaviours. By repeatedly simulating our model with different initial conditions under selection for shape complexity, we obtained a “zoo” of evolved morphologies. We find that these evolved, complex morphologies are reproducible in a sizeable fraction of simulations, despite no direct selection for reproducibility. We show that high reproducibility is caused by spatially segregating moving cells that “shape” morphologies from stationary cells that “maintain” morphologies during morphogenesis. Strikingly, most highly reproducible morphologies also evolved cell differentiation, where proliferative, moving progenitor cells irreversibly differentiate into non-dividing, stationary differentiated cells at tissue boundaries. These results suggest that cell differentiation observed in natural development plays a fundamental role in morphogenesis in addition to the production of specialised cell types. This previously unrecognised role of cell differentiation has major implications for our understanding of how morphologies are generated and regenerated.

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

LLMs+Graphs: Toward Graph-Native, Synergistic AI Systems

arXiv:2606.11560v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced rapidly, but their limitations in structured and multi-hop reasoning underscore the need for graph-native, synergistic artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Graph-structured data underpins critical applications across social, biological, financial, transportation, web, and knowledge domains, making it essential to understand how LLMs can leverage graph computation for grounded, context-rich inference. Three complementary synergies are emerging: LLMs augmented with graph computation for retrieval and reasoning; bidirectional integration between LLMs and knowledge graphs (KGs), where LLMs support KG construction and curation while KGs enforce semantic constraints and factual consistency; and AI agents strengthened by graph algorithms for planning, decision making, and multi-step reasoning. In parallel, LLMs introduce new capabilities for graph data management and graph machine learning (ML) through natural language interfaces and hybrid LLM-graph neural network (GNN) pipelines. This tutorial synthesizes the algorithms, systems, and design principles driving these converging directions, offering data science and data mining researchers a unified perspective on integrating LLMs, graph data management, graph mining, graph ML, and agentic computation into next-generation graph-native AI systems.

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

Examining the Cognitive Gap Between Authors and Peer Reviewers on Academic Paper Novelty

Novelty is a crucial metric for assessing the quality of academic papers. Scholars strive to highlight the novel aspects of their work, particularly in the title, abstract, and introduction. Peer review, serving as the gatekeeper of scientific rigor, rigorously evaluates the novelty of papers, yet a cognitive gap may exist between author self-promotion and reviewer evaluation. To investigate this, we analyzed 15,328 academic papers published in Nature Communications from 2016 to 2021, along with their peer-review comments. We found that both reviewers and authors emphasize result-oriented innovation, with reviewers adopting a more comprehensive evaluation perspective. Furthermore, by examining promotional intensity against inherent paper novelty, we found that its effect depends on the paper's actual innovation level. Highly innovative papers benefit from stronger promotional language, receiving more positive evaluations. We also found that promotional language significantly correlates with reviewer disagreement on novelty specifically for papers of moderate innovativeness, whereas it has negligible impact for papers with either very high or very low novelty. This reveals how promotional language operates most prominently in the gray area of academic evaluation.

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

Learning with Simulators: No Regret in a Computationally Bounded World

arXiv:2606.13576v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding the minimal assumptions necessary for generalization is the fundamental question in learning theory. Unfortunately, most results rely heavily on independence (or some proxy thereof) of the data-generating process, while results for strongly dependent data are far more limited. Towards addressing this gap, we introduce the framework of simulatable processes, where the learner has access to a simulator that approximates the distribution generating the data (which may be an arbitrarily complex and dependent process). Surprisingly, given access to such a simulator, we show that we can recover the same learning guarantees as in the classical setting with independent data, namely, error bounds that depend on the VC dimension. Further, we use this framework to study the power of conditional sampling and show strict statistical and computational advantages in this setting. As a highlight of our framework, we exhibit a single algorithm that simultaneously learns any given VC class under all processes samplable in bounded polynomial time, with regret controlled by the time-bounded Kolmogorov complexity of the process. This provides a significant conceptual broadening of the classical PAC model.

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

Data Augmentations for Data-Constrained Language Model Pretraining

As AI labs approach a data ceiling where compute capacity outpaces the rate of new high-quality text generation, language model pretraining is shifting toward a data-constrained, compute-abundant regime that demands productive multi-epoch training on fixed corpora. Standard autoregressive (AR) pretraining overfits severely in this setting, reaching its optimum early and then continuously deteriorating. We investigate data augmentation as a regularizer to mitigate this overfitting and enable productive training for hundreds of epochs on the same data. We introduce three orthogonal categories of augmentation for AR pretraining: token-level noise (masking, random replacement), sequence permutations (right-to-left prediction, Fill-in-the-Middle), and target offset prediction ($x_{t+i}$ for $i > 1$). Through systematic ablations, we find that individual augmentations delay overfitting and lower validation loss relative to the baseline, with random token replacement achieving the best minimum loss among individual methods. Combining augmentation categories further lowers the minimum validation loss. Our experiments demonstrate that data augmentations mitigate AR pretraining's data inefficiency and offer a promising solution to the data-constrained regime. All code and data are available at https://github.com/michaelchen-lab/data-augmentations-for-pretraining

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

GenTrack: A New Generation of Multi-Object Tracking

This paper introduces a novel multi-object tracking (MOT) method, dubbed GenTrack, whose main contributions include: first-a hybrid tracking approach employing both stochastic and deterministic manners to robustly handle unknown and time-varying numbers of targets, particularly in maintaining target identity (ID) consistency and managing nonlinear dynamics, second-leveraging particle swarm optimization (PSO) with some proposed fitness measures to guide stochastic particles toward their target distribution modes, enabling effective tracking even with weak and noisy object detectors, third-integration of social interactions among targets to enhance PSO-guided particles as well as improve continuous updates of both strong (matched) and weak (unmatched) tracks, thereby reducing ID switches and track loss, especially during occlusions, fourth-a GenTrack-based redefined visual MOT baseline incorporating a comprehensive state and observation model based on space consistency, appearance, detection confidence, track penalties, and social scores for systematic and efficient target updates, and five-the first ever publicly available source-code reference implementation with minimal dependencies, featuring three variants, including GenTrack Simple, Strengthen, and Super, facilitating flexible reimplementation. Experimental results have shown that GenTrack provides superior performance on standard benchmarks and real-world scenarios compared to state-of-the-art trackers, with integrated implementations of baselines for fair comparison. Potential directions for future work are also discussed. The source-code reference implementations of both the proposed method and compared-trackers are provided on GitHub: https://github.com/SDU-VelKoTek/GenTrack

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

A Hybrid GNN-FEM Framework for Phase-Field Fracture Simulation. Physics-Preserving Hybridization for Generalizable Surrogate Modeling

arXiv:2606.19378v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scientific machine learning (SciML) has emerged as a promising approach for accelerating simulations of complex physical systems, yet achieving physically consistent and generalizable predictions for nonlinear, history-dependent problems remains a central challenge. In this study, we propose a hybrid GNN–FEM framework for efficient and generalizable phase-field fracture modeling. While phase-field approaches provide a robust variational framework for simulating complex crack evolution, their high computational cost limits practical applications because they require solving coupled, nonlinear, and history-dependent systems within an incremental finite element procedure. To address this challenge, a graph neural network surrogate is integrated into the conventional staggered scheme, replacing the phase-field update at each load increment while retaining the FEM-based displacement solver to enforce mechanical equilibrium and boundary conditions. By preserving the incremental solution structure, the framework remains consistent with history-dependent fracture evolution without requiring the surrogate to approximate the full solution trajectory. This selective surrogate strategy emphasizes the identification of a physically meaningful and incrementally structured learning target, rather than relying on brute-force data generation to learn the full fracture process. The proposed framework achieves strong generalization across varying geometries, loading conditions, material properties, and discretizations through dimensionless feature design, a graph-based formulation on mesh-based domains, and a physics-informed loss derived from the governing phase-field equation. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the hybrid approach reduces computational cost while maintaining accuracy compared with conventional FEM, and exhibits robust predictive performance across diverse problem settings.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Vision Transformers for Face Recognition Need More Registers

Recent advances in Vision Transformers (ViTs) for face recognition (FR) have moved beyond the standard CLS-token paradigm. In this paradigm, a special classification token (CLS) is prepended to the patch embeddings and used as a representation of the input for downstream tasks. An alternative approach, Concatenated Patch Embeddings (CPE), instead leverages all patch tokens by concatenating them into a single vector, which is then projected into a compact face representation. CPE has been shown to improve recognition performance in comparison to CLS-based ones, but our qualitative analysis of attention maps showed the presence of artifacts that limit their interpretability. To address this issue, we incorporate register tokens, learnable tokens concatenated to the initial patch embeddings, and processed jointly through the ViT encoder blocks. This mechanism has been shown to produce more structured and interpretable attention maps compared to baseline ViT. We empirically demonstrate that these artifacts consistently appear across various ViT backbones, including small and large models, and that introducing register tokens effectively mitigates them. Adding four or eight registers significantly enhances interpretability, with eight registers providing the highest verification accuracies and smoothest attention structures. Our resulting model, ViT-8R, corresponds to a CPE-based ViT-B architecture augmented with eight register tokens achieves state-of-the-art performance among ViT-based FR models on large-scale IJB-B and IJB-C benchmarks. Also, ViT-8R produces substantially clearer attention maps compared with the baseline model, which offer deeper insight into the model's attention behavior (https://github.com/TaharChettaoui/ViT-FR-Registers)