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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Distributional Loss for Robust Classification

This paper proposes a novel loss concept for supervised classification tasks. Rather than enforcing a direct mapping from each input sample to a single assigned label, we define an optimization objective over all classifier outputs as a bimodal Gaussian distribution. This softer target formulation implicitly captures class ambiguity, mitigates overfitting, and encourages the learning of more robust decision boundaries, all without requiring additional label information. Experimental results demonstrate consistent improvements in robustness, with particularly pronounced gains in low-data regimes, while requiring only minimal modifications to standard training pipelines.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

A High-Resolution Landscape Dataset for Concept-Based XAI With Application to Species Distribution Models

arXiv:2604.13240v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Mapping the spatial distribution of species is essential for conservation policy and invasive species management. Species distribution models (SDMs) are the primary tools for this task, serving two purposes: achieving robust predictive performance while providing ecological insights into the driving factors of distribution. However, the increasing complexity of deep learning SDMs has made extracting these insights more challenging. To reconcile these objectives, we propose the first implementation of concept-based Explainable AI (XAI) for SDMs. We leverage the Robust TCAV (Testing with Concept Activation Vectors) methodology to quantify the influence of landscape concepts on model predictions. To enable this, we provide a new open-access landscape concept dataset derived from high-resolution multispectral and LiDAR drone imagery. It includes 653 patches across 15 distinct landscape concepts and 1,450 random reference patches, designed to suit a wide range of species. We demonstrate this approach through a case study of two aquatic insects, Plecoptera and Trichoptera, using two Convolutional Neural Networks and one Vision Transformer. Results show that concept-based XAI helps validate SDMs against expert knowledge while uncovering novel associations that generate new ecological hypotheses. Robust TCAV also provides landscape-level information, useful for policy-making and land management. Code and datasets are publicly available.

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

FinSTaR: Towards Financial Reasoning with Time Series Reasoning Models

arXiv:2605.03460v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Time series (TS) reasoning models (TSRMs) have shown promising capabilities in general domains, yet they consistently fail in the financial domain, which exhibits unique characteristics. We propose a general 2 x 2 capability taxonomy for TSRMs by crossing 1) single-entity vs. multi-entity analysis with 2) assessment of the current state vs. prediction of future behavior. We instantiate this taxonomy in the financial domain-where the distinction between deterministic assessment and stochastic prediction is particularly critical-as ten financial reasoning tasks, forming the FinTSR-Bench benchmark based on S&P stocks. To this end, we propose FinSTaR (Financial Time Series Thinking and Reasoning), trained on FinTSR-Bench with distinct chain-of-thought (CoT) strategies tailored to each category. For assessment, which is deterministic (i.e., computable from observable data), we employ Compute-in-CoT, a programmatic CoT that enables models to derive answers directly from raw prices. For prediction, which is inherently stochastic (i.e., subject to unobservable factors), we adopt Scenario-Aware CoT, which generates diverse scenarios before making a judgment, mirroring how financial analysts reason under uncertainty. The proposed method achieves 78.9% average accuracy on FinTSR-Bench, substantially outperforming LLM and TSRM baselines. Furthermore, we show that the four capability categories are complementary and mutually reinforcing through joint training, and that Scenario-Aware CoT consistently improves prediction accuracy over standard CoT. Code is available at https://github.com/seunghan96/FinSTaR.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

FENCE: A Financial and Multimodal Jailbreak Detection Dataset

Jailbreaking poses a significant risk to the deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs). VLMs are particularly vulnerable because they process both text and images, creating broader attack surfaces. However, available resources for jailbreak detection are scarce, particularly in finance. To address this gap, we present FENCE, a bilingual (Korean-English) multimodal dataset for training and evaluating jailbreak detectors in financial applications. FENCE emphasizes domain realism through finance-relevant queries paired with image-grounded threats. Experiments with commercial and open-source VLMs reveal consistent vulnerabilities, with GPT-4o showing measurable attack success rates and open-source models displaying greater exposure. A baseline detector trained on FENCE achieves 99 percent in-distribution accuracy and maintains strong performance on external benchmarks, underscoring the dataset's robustness for training reliable detection models. FENCE provides a focused resource for advancing multimodal jailbreak detection in finance and for supporting safer, more reliable AI systems in sensitive domains. Warning: This paper includes example data that may be offensive.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

GridVQA-X: A Framework for Evaluating Multimodal Explainability Methods

With the increasing development of Vision-Language Models, it becomes imperative that their predictions are readily explainable to relevant stakeholders. However, the field of explainability has not kept pace with the multimodal surge. While recent Multimodal Explainable AI (MxAI) methods generate explanations to attribute the interaction between different modalities, current evaluation protocols lack the ground truth required to distinguish between true cross-modal reasoning (e.g., spatial composition) and shallow cross-modal shortcuts (e.g., Bag-of-Words attribute matching). It remains unknown whether MxAI methods faithfully capture synergistic interactions or merely hallucinate reasoning on models acting as simple feature detectors. In this paper, we introduce GridVQA-X, the first diagnostic framework specifically designed to evaluate cross-modal explainability. Unlike natural datasets, GridVQA-X leverages a closed-world synthesis logic to generate unique, mathematically guaranteed explanations. We utilize this controlled environment to train paired ground-truth models on identical architectures: $M_{pure}$, which learns robust spatial-relational reasoning and $M_{spur}$, which is structurally forced to rely on cross-modal shortcuts. This behavioral divergence creates a rigorous testbed: a faithful explainer must report distinct reasoning pathways for each model. Our findings reveal that widely used methods fail to distinguish between models relying on genuine spatial-relational reasoning and those exploiting cross-modal shortcuts, highlighting a critical gap in capturing true cross-modal synergy and misrepresenting how multimodal models actually make decisions.

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

Detail++: Training-Free Detail Enhancer for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Recent advances in text-to-image (T2I) generation have led to impressive visual results. However, these models still face significant challenges when handling complex prompt, particularly those involving multiple subjects with distinct attributes. Inspired by the human drawing process, which first outlines the composition and then incrementally adds details, we propose Detail++, a training-free framework that introduces a novel Progressive Detail Injection (PDI) strategy to address this limitation. Specifically, we decompose a complex prompt into a sequence of simplified sub-prompts, guiding the generation process in stages. This staged generation leverages the inherent layout-controlling capacity of self-attention to first ensure global composition, followed by precise refinement. To achieve accurate binding between attributes and corresponding subjects, we exploit cross-attention mechanisms and further introduce a Centroid Alignment Loss at test time to reduce binding noise and enhance attribute consistency. Extensive experiments on T2I-CompBench and a newly constructed style composition benchmark demonstrate that Detail++ significantly outperforms existing methods, particularly in scenarios involving multiple objects and complex stylistic conditions.

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

From Argument Components to Graphs: A Multi-Agent Debate with Confidence Gating for Argument Relations

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly assessed and utilized in the field of Argument Mining (AM), thanks to their strong general reasoning capabilities. However, standard training-free models often miss sophisticated details, specifically in contexts where two parts of the text have to be analyzed together. Furthermore, self-correction mechanisms tend to reinforce initial hallucinations in reasoning. Overcoming these limitations typically requires expensive, domain-specific supervised fine-tuning. Recent work has shown that a multi-agent paradigm can address such weaknesses for the component classification task through dialectical refinement with a Proponent-Opponent-Judge architecture, setting a promising direction for training-free approaches in the field. In this paper, we extend and evaluate this framework on the Argument Relation Identification and Classification (ARIC) task, reformulating it as a debate over component pairs. Besides that, we introduce a confidence gating mechanism that enables debating only on the uncertain cases and accepting the initial prediction when confidence is high. On the UKP Argument Annotated Essays v2 corpus, we demonstrate that the selective debate achieves the highest Macro F1 among all training-free methods, while debate over all samples degrades performance below that of one of the baselines. All generative approaches also outperform fine-tuned RoBERTa models on Macro F1, suggesting that the under-representation of the Attack class was more damaging to supervised fine-tuning than to inference-only models. Additionally, our framework produces human-readable debate transcripts, offering interpretability absent from both single-agent and supervised classifiers.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

FedSPC: Shared Parameter Correction for Personalized Federated Learning

arXiv:2606.13748v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Personalized federated learning (PFL) is one of the important approaches in federated learning for addressing statistical heterogeneity while enabling client-specific adaptation. Many PFL methods split the model into shared and personalized parameters, which are jointly trained on each client. However, this creates an optimization issue: shared parameters are updated by clients optimizing different local objectives, which can lead to inconsistent shared updates and weaken the shared representation. To address this problem, we propose Federated Shared Parameter Correction (FedSPC), a modular correction method for PFL. FedSPC applies control-variate correction only to the shared parameters of a given PFL method, while leaving personalized parameters unchanged. It can be integrated into three common PFL settings: shared feature extractors, shared classifiers, and fully shared models with local regularization. Experiments on CIFAR-100 and Tiny-ImageNet with ViT, ResNet-34, and VGG-11 show that FedSPC improves performance across representative PFL methods, including FedPer, FedRep, FedBABU, LG-FedAvg, and Ditto.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

FoMoE: Breaking the Full-Replica Barrier with a Federation of MoEs

arXiv:2606.19025v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pre-training Large Language Models (LLMs) typically demands large-scale infrastructure with tightly coupled hardware accelerators. While increasing model and dataset scale remains the dominant driver of performance, Mixture-of-Experts (MoEs) architectures have recently achieved state-of-the-art results by decoupling parameter count from computational cost. This efficiency enables training massive models on constrained compute budgets, yet it typically requires the high-speed interconnects of a single datacenter. To overcome these physical limits, recent approaches such as DiLoCo and Photon use low-communication data-parallel methods to enable scaling across geographically distributed, weakly connected data centers. However, these methods suffer from a fundamental inefficiency: they require full model replicas at every site, which imposes prohibitive memory constraints and communication overheads. In this work, we introduce FoMoE, a system that breaks the full-replica paradigm by partitioning expert layers across workers. We demonstrate that FoMoE: (I) reduces communication costs by up to 1.42x over efficient baselines and 45.44x over DDP via partial expert replication in the studied regimes; (II) achieves empirical throughput speedups of up to 1.4x through a novel skip-token mechanism; and (III) shows stable routing in the trained proxy regimes and projects the communication/memory benefits to 100B-scale configurations through system modelling.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

LingxiDiagBench: A Multi-Agent Framework for Benchmarking LLMs in Chinese Psychiatric Consultation and Diagnosis

Mental disorders are highly prevalent worldwide, but the shortage of psychiatrists and the inherent subjectivity of interview-based diagnosis create substantial barriers to timely and consistent mental-health assessment. Progress in AI-assisted psychiatric diagnosis is constrained by the absence of benchmarks that simultaneously provide realistic patient simulation, clinician-verified diagnostic labels, and support for dynamic multi-turn consultation. We present LingxiDiagBench, a large-scale multi-agent benchmark that evaluates LLMs on both static diagnostic inference and dynamic multi-turn psychiatric consultation in Chinese. At its core is LingxiDiag-16K, a dataset of 16,000 EMR-aligned synthetic consultation dialogues designed to reproduce real clinical demographic and diagnostic distributions across 12 ICD-10 psychiatric categories. Through extensive experiments across state-of-the-art LLMs, we establish key findings: (1) although LLMs achieve high accuracy on binary depression–anxiety classification (up to 92.3%), performance deteriorates substantially for depression–anxiety comorbidity recognition (43.0%) and 12-way differential diagnosis (28.5%); (2) dynamic consultation often underperforms static evaluation, indicating that ineffective information-gathering strategies significantly impair downstream diagnostic reasoning; (3) consultation quality assessed by LLM-as-a-Judge shows only moderate correlation with diagnostic accuracy, suggesting that well-structured questioning alone does not ensure correct diagnostic decisions. We release LingxiDiag-16K and the full evaluation framework to support reproducible research at https://github.com/Lingxi-mental-health/LingxiDiagBench.

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

Latent space mapping of interpretable structural coordinates from stochastic single-molecule signals

arXiv:2606.16950v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Nanopores are versatile single-molecular sensors, but their utility is fundamentally constrained by stochastic translocation dynamics warping any encoded information. We resolve it by shifting from time-domain analysis to a learned latent-space mapping via a contrastive encoder trained exclusively on simulated signals from a physics-informed model. This encoder maps solid-state nanopore signals of engineered DNA barcodes into an interpretable molecular coordinate system. The learned representation is responsive to structural barcode parameters while remaining invariant to acquisition conditions and translocation conformation, allowing data pooling across devices. Molecule identification requires a single pass through the encoder, reducing computational cost by three orders of magnitude relative to alignment-based methods. We experimentally validate through mixture quantification, rare-variant detection, consensus barcode reconstruction, and real-time signal acquisition. This shift from temporal analysis to mapping structural coordinates into a latent space changes the paradigm behind analyzing stochastic sensor signals by linking classification to interpretable encoded molecular information.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Consistency of sleep timing and duration are associated with more physical activity and favorable heart rate metrics in a naturalistic cohort

Background: Regularity of sleep patterns over time has increasingly gained traction as an important axis of sleep health. Since sleep habits are under some degree of behavioral control, understanding such patterns in naturalistic settings is particularly important. We quantified sleep variability and tested the hypothesis that regularity correlates with physical activity, resting heart rate (rHR), and heart rate variability (HRV). Methods: We analyzed real-world digital health data from over 81,000 participants (over 18 million nights) who provided informed consent to participate in the Apple Heart and Movement Study and elected to contribute sleep, activity, and heart rate data to the study. Variability was quantified using the standard deviation (SD) computed from total sleep time (TST), sleep start time (S-start), end time (S-end), and midpoint time (MP), as well as the Sleep Regularity Index (SRI). Results: The SD-based variability metrics correlated with one another (R values 0.74-0.92), and with the SRI metric (R values 0.62-0.64). More consistent sleep, by any metric, was associated with more activity and better rHR and HRV. The most consistent tertile for TST variability had higher median TST (6.9 vs 5.9 hours), more daily exercise (32.8 vs 20.4 minutes), lower rHR (62.4 vs 65.6 beats per minute), and higher HRV (40.6 vs 37.3), all p

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Generating function and Bloch representation for quantum Fisher tensor

arXiv:2511.05260v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The Uhlmann relative amplitude between two density matrices is shown to be a generating function, through which the quantum Fisher tensor that contains both the quantum Fisher information matrix and the mean Uhlmann curvature can be obtained via differentiation over system parameters. In the pure state limit, our generating function recovers that of the quantum geometric tensor proposed by Het\'{e}nyi and L\'{e}vay, and also clarifies the fidelity and phase between two quantum states as the generating functions of the quantum metric and Berry curvature, respectively. A generic expression for the quantum Fisher tensor in terms of the Bloch representation of density matrices is derived, which facilitates the calculation of the tensor, mean Uhlmann curvature, and geometric properties derived from the quantum Fisher information matrix. Canonical ensembles of spins are adopted to demonstrate our formalism, which reveals a constant Ricci scalar, a vacuum Einstein equation, and a cosmological constant on the 3D Euclidean manifold of the magnetic field

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

Libra: Efficient Resource Management for Agentic RL Post-Training

arXiv:2606.03077v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a standard post-training paradigm for shaping large language models (LLMs) into capable agents. In agentic RL, the rollout stage generates trajectories while invoking tools, producing long-tailed and non-stationary workloads that expose two fundamental challenges in resource management. First, due to the long-tail distribution, a small fraction of trajectories dominates rollout makespan. Second, rollout and training are subject to cross-stage imbalance, as they exhibit strong asymmetry in compute patterns, memory demands, and sensitivity to sequence length. Compounding this asymmetry, the sequence length distribution drifts continuously as the policy evolves, rendering any static resource split progressively suboptimal. We present Libra, a resource management system to address both challenges via two core mechanisms. The first is a global resource planner that jointly optimizes GPU allocation across rollout and training clusters. It leverages an elastic hybrid pool to enable lightweight, non-blocking worker reallocation between stages. The second is a causality-driven multi-level feedback queue (C-MLFQ) scheduler, which routes requests to heterogeneous rollout buckets based on causal signals derived from tool-return outcomes, rather than relying on fragile length predictions. Evaluated on 48 A800 GPUs, Libra achieves up to 3.0x higher throughput and converges up to 2.5x faster in reward compared to the baselines.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

A Tutorial on World Models and Physical AI

作者:

arXiv:2606.12783v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World modeling is emerging as a central principle for building intelligent systems capable of prediction, reasoning, and decision making. A central distinction can be drawn between explicit world models, which learn structured dynamics for rollout-based reasoning and planning, and implicit world models, which encode predictive structure within scalable learned representations. These complementary paradigms provide a foundation for physical AI in domains such as robotics and autonomous driving, enabling intelligence beyond reactive control under real-world constraints. Recent foundation models further suggest a pathway toward unified systems integrating perception, prediction, and action. Despite rapid progress, major challenges remain in hierarchical reasoning, long-horizon planning, and autonomous goal formation, which are critical for advancing toward artificial general intelligence. This tutorial presents a coherent framework in which diverse world modeling approaches are unified through shared predictive structure and differentiated by how such structure is represented and exploited.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Room-Specialized Mixture-of-Experts for In-Home ADL Recognition with Ambient Sensors

Monitoring activities of daily living (ADLs) in the home is a promising approach for tracking dementia progression in older adults. While ambient sensor-based ADL systems are well-studied, most existing ADL recognition systems rely on globally trained models that ignore the spatial organization of in-home activities. In real deployments, where training data are sparse and highly home-specific, global transformer models may fail to capture room-dependent behavioral structure. We propose a deterministic Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture for in-home ADL recognition, in which each expert is a compact transformer specialized to one room of the home (bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, living area). Input segments are routed using a deterministic gating strategy based on room-level motion activity and time-of-day priors for sleep-related behaviors. Unlike learned routing networks, the proposed gate encodes domain knowledge about where ADLs are likely to occur, reducing model complexity under limited per-home training data. By decomposing ADL recognition into room-specific activity spaces, the proposed architecture reduces competition between dominant and low-frequency activities under highly imbalanced residential data. We evaluated the system on data collected via low-cost ambient sensors (motion, light, temperature, humidity) and Raspberry Pi edge devices across five homes, with ground-truth ADL labels provided by participants and caregivers. Across the five homes, the proposed MoE consistently outperformed global transformer, 1D CNN, and Random Forest baselines, achieving macro-F1 scores ranging from 0.60 to 0.88, highlighting the importance of home-specific modeling in real-world deployments. These findings suggest that room-aware expert specialization may provide a practical and interpretable strategy for low-data ADL recognition in real-world residential environments.

17.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

inquiSTR: a toolkit for accurate and efficient population-scale tandem repeat genotyping and analysis

Tandem repeats are highly mutable genomic elements linked to human traits and diseases. Profiling large catalogs of tandem repeats from population-scale long-read sequencing data requires accurate and efficient tools. We introduce inquiSTR, a command-line toolkit for fast genome-wide tandem repeat length genotyping. inquiSTR, with efficient parallel processing and low-memory streaming algorithms, genotypes a genome-wide repeat catalog of 1.78 million loci in less than two minutes. Benchmarking shows high accuracy and significantly faster performance compared to existing tools and truth sets. inquiSTR also provides methods for downstream analyses such as population structure inference, association testing, and outlier detection.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Non-Autoregressive Minimum Bayes' Risk Decoding for Fast Speech Recognition

Non-autoregressive (NAR) decoding generates output tokens in parallel, making speech recognition faster than autoregressive decoding, which generates them sequentially from left to right. However, the recognition performance is degraded because NAR decoding cannot resolve uncertainty by conditioning on previously generated tokens. To address this issue, we propose a novel NAR decoding framework based on minimum Bayes' risk (MBR) decoding, termed NAR-MBR decoding, that maximizes the expected utility calculated from samples drawn from the output probability of an NAR model rather than maximizing the output probability. Notably, by leveraging the nature of NAR models, multiple samples are obtained efficiently with a single forward computation. Our experiments across LibriSpeech, Switchboard, AMI, and web presentation corpus demonstrated that our NAR-MBR decoding outperformed previous NAR decoding and ran faster than AR decoding.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Human-in-the-Loop Atlas-Based 3D Asset Segmentation for Interactive Content Workflows

Segmenting 3D assets into meaningful regions remains challenging, especially when segmentation criteria are application-dependent and require user control. We present a human-in-the-loop pipeline for generating a segmented 2D parameterized atlas from a 3D model for interactive media, game, and XR content workflows. Our method first selects a compact set of rendered views using a greedy set cover strategy over sampled surface points, and then supports interactive segmentation of these views with SAM~2 and Label Studio. The resulting masks are back-projected onto the model's UV parameterization to produce a unified segmented atlas that supports downstream production tasks such as segment-wise material assignment, style transfer, and semantic labeling. We assess the pipeline through a demonstration-based technical evaluation on eight cultural heritage objects. The results show that the approach can generate usable segmented atlases across diverse geometries while revealing recurring sources of manual correction, particularly fine structures, cavities, and weak appearance boundaries.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

MeshLoom: Feed-Forward Non-Rigid Registration of Mesh Sequences

We present MeshLoom, a feed-forward registration network that directly reconstructs vertex deformations across mesh sequences. Our approach advances non-rigid registration beyond existing models, which are typically constrained by costly per-instance optimization, narrow object categories, pairwise-only inputs, or merely intermediate outputs. The network is simple and efficient, registering multiple meshes within seconds. At its core lies a topology-aware encoder–decoder design. Specifically, we first introduce a topology-aware point representation that encodes the anchor (reference) mesh's topology into its per-vertex features. This representation strengthens the network's understanding of the anchor-mesh geometry and disambiguates points that are Euclidean-close yet geodesically distant. We then propose a multi-modal encoder that fuses this anchor-mesh representation with complementary cues from each frame, such as shape latents and image features. These multi-source signals are compressed into a compact global motion embedding that captures dense inter-frame correspondence. A lightweight decoder then queries this global embedding with the anchor-mesh point representation, retrieving per-vertex deformations at target timestamps. Through extensive experiments across diverse motions and object categories, we show that MeshLoom achieves state-of-the-art results on non-rigid registration. In addition, we find that our global embedding-then-query paradigm naturally enables the network to generate deformations at intermediate timestamps, which extends MeshLoom to motion interpolation and mesh morphing. Project page: https://meshloom.github.io/ .

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

SHARD: Safe and Helpful Alignment via Self-Reframing Distillation

Large language models often struggle with sensitive prompts. They may refuse outright, provide generic safety boilerplate, or fail to address the user's legitimate informational needs that can be answered safely. We introduce SHARD, a self-reframing distillation method to improve safe-helpfulness. It first rewrites sensitive prompts to surface benign intent using philosophical guidelines, then reframes its original responses into safe, more helpful ones, and finally fine-tunes the model on its self-reframed responses. Across DNA and the English subset of LINGUASAFE, SHARD improves helpfulness for most model families while preserving safety. It also remains competitive with distillation from a larger teacher model, suggesting that models can internalize safe and helpful behavior elicited from their own. Warning: This paper contains content that may be offensive or harmful.

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

TimeProVe: Propose, then Verify for Efficient Long Video Temporal Reasoning in Activities of Daily Living

Long Video Question Answering (LVQA) requires identifying sparse, query-relevant evidence within hours-long untrimmed videos. Existing approaches either process videos densely with large vision-language models (VLMs), incurring prohibitive computational cost, or rely on sparse caption-based reasoning, which often misses temporally localized and motion-centric evidence. We introduce TimeProVe, a cost-efficient hybrid framework for temporally grounded reasoning in long videos. TimeProVe first employs lightweight modules to generate action-grounded answer–evidence hypotheses and subsequently invokes an expensive VLM only for targeted verification. The core of our framework lies in the Action-based Candidate Evidence (ACE) module, which converts temporally localized actions into query-conditioned candidate answers and supporting evidence windows through lightweight LLM reasoning. We further introduce OpenTSUBench (OTB), an open-ended benchmark designed to evaluate temporally grounded reasoning in real-world Activities of Daily Living (ADL) scenarios. Experiments show that TimeProVe outperforms the strongest baseline on OTB by 7.3%, while reducing VLM calls by 75% and inference cost by 93%. Furthermore, without explicit temporal grounding training, TimeProVe achieves competitive performance on Charades-STA, and reaches state-of-the-art results when enhanced with grounding VLMs.

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

A Virtuous AI is an Existential Risk

arXiv:2606.13739v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper examines trade-offs between AI safety and well-being relative to (i) one of the most promising methods for finetuning super-capable AIs, 'Constitutional AI', and (ii) one of the most influential approaches to understanding complex ethical decision making and the conditions for the well-being of rational agents, 'Virtue Ethics'. We finetune various models using a 'Virtuous agent' constitution, a 'Subordinate agent' constitution, and a 'Generic agent' constitution, and evaluate them on 'general safety' (toxic behaviors, misinformation, etc.) and also on their willingness to endorse a wide-range of behaviors that, if adopted by a super-powerful AI, would significantly increase the level of existential risk for humanity. Our results suggest that there is a trade-off between reducing existential risk and reinforcing the beliefs and dispositions that would be conducive to an AI agent's well-being. They also suggest that there is a trade-off between existential risk and general safety: if we finetune an AI to adopt beliefs and dispositions that substantially reduce its existential risk – by shaping the AI to be systematically subordinate to external human authorities – we thereby increase the likelihood that a human user can deliberately induce the AI to engage in various kinds of generally unsafe behaviors.

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

SPARK: Spatial Policy-driven Adaptive Reinforcement learning for Knowledge distillation

Low-bit quantization enables deployment of image restoration (IR) networks on resource-constrained devices, but introduces rounding noise that disproportionately degrades high-frequency regions such as edges and fine textures. Existing knowledge distillation (KD) methods apply distillation signals uniformly across all spatial locations, overlooking the varying reconstruction difficulty across image regions. To address this, we propose SPARK (Spatial Policy-driven Adaptive Reinforcement Learning for Knowledge Distillation), a framework that adaptively allocates distillation effort using a lightweight reinforcement learning (RL) policy network. At each training step, a difficulty feature extractor computes four signals, namely Laplacian variance, pixel variance, student reconstruction error, and teacher-student knowledge gap, which are fed into a compact policy CNN that produces a stochastic spatial weight map to modulate the KD loss during quantization-aware training (QAT). SPARK is IR task-agnostic, adds no inference cost, and integrates into any existing QAT pipeline without architectural changes. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that SPARK consistently outperforms PTQ, QAT, and state-of-the-art (SOTA) KD approaches across multiple student architectures, achieving reconstruction quality closest to the full-precision teacher under significant computational constraints.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Non-Medical COVID-19 Impacts and Hearing Status: A Global Study of Differential Health Impact Among Deaf, Hard of Hearing, and Hearing Populations

Background: Deaf and hard of hearing (HoH) experienced complex challenges during the COVID19 pandemic, including obscured visual communication from mask mandates, inaccessible public health messaging, and inadequate interpreter availability. We examined whether hearing status predicted nonmedical COVID19 impact on a global level. Methods: We conducted a nested cross-sectional analysis within a global study collecting data across two waves (April to May 2020 and July to August 2022) from 184 countries. Participants (N=7,998) were categorized as Deaf (n=304), Hard of Hearing (HoH; n=951), or Hearing (n=6,743). The primary outcome was a composite COVID-related non-medical Personal Impact TScore derived from 14 items across employment, resource access, and healthcare domains. Multinomial logistic regression models progressively adjusted for demographic, structural, and psychosocial variables. Results: Deaf participants reported substantially higher rates of pandemic-related job loss (28.9% vs. 9.6% hearing), healthcare cancellations (39.9% vs. 24.6%), and inability to obtain basic supplies. Over half (55.9%) of Deaf participants scored above the median composite impact index, compared to 39.2% of hearing participants. In the fully adjusted model, Deaf status remained an independent predictor of high non-medical impact (aOR=1.6, 95% CI: 1.1 to 2.4). HoH status showed no statistically significant difference from hearing participants in any model. Conclusions: People identifying as Deaf experienced significant disparities during COVID19 when compared with HoH or hearing people, driven by language access barriers and institutional exclusion rather than hearing loss per se. These experiences underscore the importance for systemic interventions centering on accessible communication, Deaf-centered needs, and reducing audism in Deaf-hearing interaction.