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

Beyond Models: Reflections on Engineering AI-enabled Systems in a Project-Based Course

arXiv:2606.16842v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Teaching Software Engineering for AI-enabled systems entails addressing the integration of AI components within full-scale software architectures under realistic constraints. While machine learning courses emphasize model development, students often lack experience in architectural design, deployment, and monitoring of AI-enabled systems. Empirical evaluations of such system-oriented AI courses remain limited. This paper reflects on the design and implementation of a project-based master's-level course titled AI Algorithms: Theory and Engineering, at the University of Bremen, in which students developed a movie recommendation system while making architectural design decisions to address challenges related to scalability, deployment, and evolving requirements. We conducted a mixed-methods study combining analyses of student submissions and questionnaire responses to investigate integration challenges, learning outcomes, and opportunities for improvement. Our results indicate persistent difficulties in early architectural decisions, heterogeneous ML integration, evolving requirements, and data management, largely due to uneven ML and software engineering expertise. From the educator's perspective, the course fostered system-level reasoning and strengthened awareness of data-centric ML practices in AI-enabled systems.

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

VANDERER: Map-Free Exploration using Future-Aware and Visual-Curiosity-Guided Diffusion Policy

Mobile agents require efficient exploration strategies to map unseen environments and autonomously plan tasks. Traditional methods rely on generating occupancy maps and optimizing the sequence in which unexplored regions are visited. However, in sensor-constrained settings, such as those limited to monocular cameras, generating accurate occupancy maps is challenging. To address this, we propose VANDERER, an exploration framework that leverages a Visual Curiosity Module (VCM) to guide pre-trained diffusion policies using only monocular image data. This curiosity module predicts the outcomes of proposed actions via a navigation world model and evaluates them through a curiosity cost. The cost then guides the diffusion process toward generating actions that maximize exploration. Evaluated across diverse simulated environments, VANDERER consistently outperforms established baselines, exploring an average of 13.4% more area than NoMaD. Our results reveal a direct correlation between visual and geometric curiosity in outdoor environments, demonstrating that VANDERER can effectively leverage this relationship for efficient exploration using sensor-constrained agents.

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

ShowFlow: From Robust Single Concept to Condition-Free Multi-Concept Generation

Customizing image generation remains a core challenge in controllable image synthesis. For single-concept generation, maintaining both identity preservation and prompt alignment is challenging. In multi-concept scenarios, relying solely on a prompt without additional conditions like layout boxes or semantic masks, often leads to identity loss and concept omission. In this paper, we introduce ShowFlow, a comprehensive framework designed to tackle these challenges. We propose ShowFlow-S for single-concept image generation, and ShowFlow-M for handling multiple concepts. ShowFlow-S introduces a KronA-WED adapter, which integrates a Kronecker adapter with weight and embedding decomposition, and together with a novel Semantic-Aware Attention Regularization (SAR) training objective to enhance single-concept generation. Building on this foundation, ShowFlow-M directly reuses robust models learned by ShowFlow-S to support multi-concept generation without extra conditions, incorporating a Subject-Adaptive Matching Attention (SAMA) and a Layout Consistency guidance as the plug-and-play module. Extensive experiments and user studies validate ShowFlow's effectiveness, highlighting its potential in real-world applications like advertising and virtual dressing. Our source code will be publicly available at: https://htrvu.github.io/showflow.

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

Text-Driven Fusion for Infrared and Visible Images: Achieving Image Scene Adaptation on Hyperbolic Space

Infrared and visible image fusion aims to integrate complementary modalities, while existing Euclidean methods impose rigid distance metrics that distort multi-modal interactions and parent-to-child semantic hierarchies. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a text-driven fusion framework empowered by hyperbolic manifold learning. During training, BLIP-extracted text prompts serve as topological anchors within the hyperbolic space, guiding vision-attribute alignment through hyperbolic embeddings that naturally accommodate varying semantic granularities. By exploiting the exponential volume growth dictated by the Poincaré ball's negative curvature, this approach seamlessly embeds hierarchical trees to encode coarse-to-fine semantics without metric saturation, while the vast peripheral space prevents texture distortion during cross-modal fusion. At inference, the fusion process autonomously adapts to input content using the learned text-attribute priors, completely eliminating the need for textual input. Experimental results show our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on benchmark datasets, with code available at https://github.com/Shaoyun2023/TEDFusion.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Policy-driven Conformal Prediction for Trustworthy QoT Estimation

arXiv:2606.12501v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose Conformal QoT, a policy-driven framework that combines statistically guaranteed QoT estimation with operational decision policies, enabling reliable lightpath-feasibility predictions under domain shift and improving accuracy from 92\% to 99.6\% on open datasets.

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

Integrated Marketing Attribution: A Bayesian Framework for Privacy-Safe Granular Measurement Anchored in MMM

arXiv:2606.16878v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retail marketing measurement increasingly requires granular campaign-level insights without relying on user-level tracking. However, the two dominant approaches, Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) and Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA), often produce fragmented insights. MMM is privacy-safe and robust for channel-level planning but is too coarse for campaign optimization, while MTA provides granular attribution but has become less reliable under increasing privacy restrictions. We propose Integrated Marketing Attribution (IMA), a unified framework that combines MMM with channel specific Bayesian attribution models to derive campaign-level effects from aggregated data. By leveraging MMM-informed priors, IMA delivers granular, privacy-safe attribution while preserving consistency with MMM.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Suppressing Intrinsic Spin-Phonon Errors in Trapped-Ion Quantum Simulation

arXiv:2606.15518v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Trapped-ion quantum simulators realize programmable spin models through phonon-mediated interactions. For Hamiltonians with noncommuting terms, however, the same phonon bus generates intrinsic spin-phonon errors that strongly distort the target dynamics. Because these errors are governed by the full time history of the spin-dependent phonon motion, they survive standard loop-closing control and limit simulation accuracy. Using a sequence of frame transformations, we isolate the residual error dynamics and show that this intrinsic error can be strongly suppressed while preserving programmable Ising couplings. Full spin-boson simulations of multi-ion chains demonstrate orders-of-magnitude lower error than both constant-drive and conventional loop-closing protocols. These results remove a central precision barrier in trapped-ion analog quantum simulation and enable accurate programmable simulation of noncommuting many-body Hamiltonians and dynamical protocols.

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

Augmenting Dysarthric Speech Severity Assessment with MOS Supervision

arXiv:2606.18645v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dysarthria is a speech disorder marked by reduced intelligibility and communicative effectiveness. Automatic utterance-level assessment of dysarthric speech can support scalable speech monitoring and therapy-related analysis. Yet training such systems is bottlenecked by the scarcity of clinically annotated dysarthric speech. This work proposes to augment dysarthric speech assessment using data from speech synthesis evaluations, specifically human-annotated utterances with Mean Opinion Score (MOS) labels from the QualiSpeech corpus. Experiments show that fine-tuning on speech synthesis assessment data consistently improves performance on both intelligibility and naturalness prediction, while joint training yields gains primarily on naturalness. These results suggest that synthesis artifacts and dysarthric speech share perceptual commonalities, and speech synthesis evaluation corpora offer a practical augmentation source that reduces reliance on scarce clinical annotations.

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

NightFeats @ MMU-RAGent NeurIPS 2025: A Context-Optimized Multi-Agent RAG System for the Text-to-Text Track

We present NightFeats, a structured multi-agent retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system submitted to the MMU-RAGent competition at NeurIPS 2025, where it was awarded Best Dynamic Evaluation in the text-to-text track. Rather than targeting benchmark maximization, this work proposes a principled pipeline that decomposes knowledge synthesis into three coordinated phases: retrieval, curation, and composition, each governed by explicit intermediate representations and handoff contracts. Inspired by Agentic Context Engineering (ACE), the system introduces temporal-semantic reranking, bounded contradiction reconciliation, and citation-preserving composition as core architectural primitives. Competition results show that NightFeats surpasses proprietary baselines including Claude-SonnetV2 and Nova-Pro on LLM-as-a-Judge and Human Likert evaluations, confirming that architectural transparency and verifiable evidence grounding are better aligned with human preferences than systems optimizing narrowly for automatic similarity metrics.

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

SimSiam Naming Game: A Unified Approach for Emergent Communication and Representation Learning

Emergent Communication (EmCom) investigates how agents develop symbolic communication through interaction without predefined language. Recent frameworks, such as the Metropolis–Hastings Naming Game (MHNG), formulate EmCom as the learning of shared external representations negotiated through interaction under joint attention, without explicit success or reward feedback. However, MHNG relies on sampling-based updates that suffer from high rejection rates in high-dimensional perceptual spaces, making the learning process sample-inefficient for complex visual datasets. In this work, we propose the SimSiam Naming Game (SSNG), a feedback-free EmCom framework that replaces sampling-based updates with a symmetric, self-supervised representation alignment objective between autonomous agents. Building on a variational inference–based probabilistic interpretation of self-supervised learning, SSNG formulates symbol emergence as an alignment process between agents' latent representations mediated by message exchange. To enable end-to-end gradient-based optimization, discrete symbolic messages are learned via a Gumbel–Softmax relaxation, preserving the discrete nature of communication while maintaining differentiability. Experiments on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet-100 show that the emergent messages learned by SSNG achieve substantially higher linear-probe classification accuracy than those produced by referential games, reconstruction games, and MHNG. These results indicate that self-supervised representation alignment provides an effective mechanism for feedback-free EmCom in multi-agent systems.

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

Fractured Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Inference-time scaling techniques have significantly bolstered the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by harnessing additional computational effort at inference without retraining. Similarly, Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting and its extension, Long CoT, improve accuracy by generating rich intermediate reasoning trajectories, but these approaches incur substantial token costs that impede their deployment in latency-sensitive settings. In this work, we first show that truncated CoT, which stops reasoning before completion and directly generates the final answer, often matches the full CoT sampling while using dramatically fewer tokens. Building on this insight, we introduce Fractured Sampling, a unified inference-time strategy that interpolates between full CoT and solution-only sampling along three orthogonal axes: (1) the number of reasoning trajectories, (2) the number of final solutions per trajectory, and (3) the depth at which reasoning traces are truncated. Through extensive experiments on five diverse reasoning benchmarks and several model scales, we demonstrate that Fractured Sampling consistently achieves superior accuracy-cost trade-offs, yielding steep log-linear scaling gains in Pass@k versus token budget. Our analysis reveals how to allocate computation across these dimensions to maximize performance, paving the way for more efficient and scalable LLM reasoning. Code is available at https://github.com/BaohaoLiao/frac-cot.

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

CD-RCM: Generalizable Continuous-Depth Novel View Synthesis for Reflectance Confocal Microscopy

Reflectance confocal microscopy (RCM) provides noninvasive, cellular-resolution "optical biopsies" of human skin in vivo by acquiring en-face images at successive depths, forming a sparse z-stack. Due to optical limitations, these stacks are anisotropic 3D volumes with lateral resolution (0.5 $\mu$m) $\sim$6 times higher compared to axial resolution, which is defined by the optical sectioning (3 $\mu$m), limiting the interpretation of tissue. Our goal is to provide continuous-depth visualization by interpolating intermediate sections and making the 3D volume isotropic. Such a representation permits arbitrary-direction sectioning, including histopathology-like cross-sectional examination, without requiring per-patient optimization. To that end, we introduce the first RCM-specific novel-view synthesis (NVS) approach, CD-RCM, a feedforward model that predicts realistic, unseen depths from sparsely sampled RCM stacks. Classical neural rendering methods focus on reconstruction from surface-level multi-view observations. In contrast to surface-level camera views, RCM can acquire optically sectioned en-face images of tissue beyond the surface up to 200 $\mu$m. However, during visualization of the RCM stacks, observations of the shallower sections (towards the surface) obscure the deeper ones. This unique axial imaging geometry and layer-dependent anatomical organization motivated our development of a tailored architectural and training framework that explicitly accounts for RCM's depth-resolved, occlusive imaging physics. Experiments demonstrate that CD-RCM achieves high-fidelity novel-view synthesis with sub-second inference time.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

RepSelect: Robust LLM Unlearning via Representation Selectivity

Making large language models (LLMs) deeply forget specific knowledge and values without sacrificing general capabilities remains a central challenge in unlearning. However, current methods are easily reversed by fine-tuning or few-shot prompting, suggesting their forgetting is only shallow. We identify the root cause. Existing methods target representations shared with both the retain set and the subspace recovered by a fine-tuning attacker, making unlearning both disruptive to general capabilities and easy to reverse. We propose RepSelect (Representation Selectivity), isolates forget-set-specific representations by collapsing top principal components of weight gradients before each update, leaving general capabilities intact while limiting what fine-tuning can recover. We evaluate across two forget categories, biohazardous knowledge and abusive tendencies, and four model families spanning dense and Mixture-of-Experts architectures (Llama 3, Qwen 3.5, Gemma 4 E4B, DeepSeek V2 Lite). Compared to five popular baselines (GradDiff, NPO, SimNPO, RMU, UNDIAL), RepSelect achieves a 4-50x larger reduction in post-relearning answer accuracy than the strongest baseline, and is near-perfectly robust to few-shot prompting attacks. Targeting selective representations is thus an important step towards deep and robust LLM forgetting.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

AAPA: Adversarially Anchored Preference Alignment for Post-Training of Large Language Models

arXiv:2509.25148v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Post-training alignment of large language models often combines supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on expert demonstrations with reinforcement learning (RL) from preference or verifiable feedback. SFT provides a useful behavioral anchor but can overfit to static demonstrations, whereas RL encourages exploration but may drift from expert behavior or exploit imperfect rewards. We propose AAPA (Adversarially Anchored Preference Alignment), a plug-in framework that augments existing post-training objectives with a sentence-level adversarial anchoring signal. AAPA compares policy rollouts with offline, pre-collected expert responses using a fixed lightweight discriminator, and therefore requires neither online teacher inference nor discriminator co-training during policy optimization. The same anchoring term can be added to SFT, GRPO, and CHORD while preserving their original training pipelines. Experiments on instruction-following benchmarks show that AAPA consistently improves the corresponding base objectives across model scales. In particular, the staged AAPA configuration improves over a strong GRPO baseline by 5.77\% on \texttt{Qwen3-0.6B} and 3.75\% on \texttt{Qwen3-4B}. Further analyses on response length, log-probability distributions, and discriminator variants suggest that adversarial anchoring provides a stable semantic grounding signal for preference optimization. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/IsFaqq/AAPA}.

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

AI-Automation Tooling in Computer Engineering Education: Mixed-Methods TAM/UTAUT Evidence for a General Acceptance Attitude

作者:

arXiv:2606.12424v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As generative AI and low-code workflow platforms become routine in software practice, a key educational question is whether the next generation of computer engineers will accept these tools as useful, usable, and worthy of sustained engagement. This paper reports a mixed-methods, cross-sectional study of undergraduate computer engineering students' acceptance of AI automation tooling, instantiated through the open-source platform n8n across three identically scripted workshops in Thailand (n = 103). A 12-item, five-point Likert instrument mapped to six TAM/UTAUT constructs - Performance Expectancy (PE), Effort Expectancy (EE), Behavioral Intention (BI), Self-Efficacy (SE), Hedonic Motivation (HM), and Output Quality (OQ) - was complemented by inductive thematic analysis of open-ended feedback. Analyses combined ordinal reliability estimation, bootstrap confidence intervals, non-parametric tests, multiple-comparison-controlled correlations, polychoric dimensionality diagnostics, a common-method-bias check, and between-session comparisons. Acceptance was favorable across all six constructs with large effect sizes, with PE emerging as the strongest construct and HM as the weakest. Dimensionality diagnostics further revealed that canonical TAM/UTAUT sub-facets collapsed into a single general acceptance factor in this short-form post-workshop context, a finding with important methodological and theoretical implications. Qualitative themes converged with the quantitative profile regarding usefulness and enthusiasm but diverged on output quality, revealing a small yet articulate reliability-skeptical minority. The findings support the curricular adoption of AI automation tooling in undergraduate computing education and identify three theory-grounded instructional levers: instruction-sequencing scaffolds, self-efficacy supports, and trust-calibration interventions.

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

Audited Conformal Prediction for Classification under Unknown Distribution Shift

arXiv:2606.14909v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We consider the problem of uncertainty quantification for a pretrained classification model deployed under unknown distribution shift. We propose Audited Conformal Prediction (ACP), a method that leverages a small labeled dataset from the target population to train an auxiliary audit model identifying inputs where the legacy model is likely to fail. By integrating the audit model's outputs into the conformal prediction framework, ACP produces prediction sets that guarantee marginal coverage while achieving substantially higher conditional coverage in practice than existing approaches. We develop and analyze two complementary integration strategies – one targeting marginal coverage with improved conditional performance, the other providing explicit group-conditional coverage guarantees – and establish theoretical guarantees for both. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets validate the method and illustrate trade-offs between prediction set size and conditional coverage.

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

VHDLSuite: Unified Pipeline for LLM VHDL Generation with Data Synthesis and Evaluation

arXiv:2606.13735v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLM) have shown impressive capabilities in Register Transfer Level (RTL) code generation, particularly for Verilog. However, evaluating their performance with other Hardware Description Languages (HDL), especially VHDL, remains limited although its distinct language characteristics, such as stricter semantic rules, introduce evaluation considerations that differ from Verilog. This lack of coverage restricts fully understanding of how well current models generalize across hardware design languages with differing structures and semantics. To address this gap, we introduce VHDLSuite, a benchmark-centered infrastructure for scalable VHDL generation evaluation, integrating automated benchmark synthesis, executable validation, and multi-model diagnostic analysis. First, we propose a data pipeline that automatically converts Verilog designs and their accompanying testbenches into executable VHDL benchmark instances, followed by VUnit/GHDL-based validation to ensure each released task is compilable, runnable, and consistently checkable in the VHDL environment. Second, we introduce VHDLBench, a benchmark with over 200 VHDL problems with complete and validated testbenches across a wide range of complexity levels. Third, we extensively evaluate cutting-edge LLMs and uncover key challenges specific on LLM-aided VHDL generation. Our findings provide important insights and support future work in multi-language hardware design automation.Our data pipeline, benchmark, and evaluation framework will be open-sourced.

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

Learning New Tasks via Reusable Skills: Skill-Compositional Experts for Embodied Continual Learning

Embodied Continual Learning (ECL) aims to enable robots to continually acquire new manipulation tasks while retaining previously learned behaviors under closed-loop control. Compared with conventional continual learning, ECL suffers from more severe catastrophic forgetting. Feature drift accumulated under closed-loop control progressively propagates through sequential decision-making, leading to degradation of previously learned behaviors. A key challenge in ECL lies in structured skill reuse across continually evolving tasks, since existing methods primarily focus on skill learning without explicitly organizing them for coherent task execution. To address this issue, we propose SCE, a Skill-Compositional Experts framework for ECL. SCE builds a skill base via Compositional Skill Grounding (CSG), which decomposes task demonstrations into reusable skills. Based on this, Dual Execution-and-Transition Experts (DETE) enable new task learning through skill composition, where one branch ensures skill execution and the other supports transitions between skills for coherent behavior. Experiments on LIBERO benchmarks and real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate that SCE consistently improves retention and overall task performance. Further feature drift analyses and ablation studies verify the effectiveness of our method. Project website: https://eqcy.github.io/sce/.

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

EvoTrainer: Co-Evolving LLM Policies and Training Harnesses for Autonomous Agentic Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.03108v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Autonomous LLM training is often framed as recipe search, which leaves the training harness largely static. This limitation sharpens in agentic RL, where shifting bottlenecks and scalar rewards mask diverse failure modes. We introduce EvoTrainer, an autonomous training framework that co-evolves LLM policies and training-side harnesses through empirical feedback: it diagnoses rollout-level evidence, revises diagnostics, backtests interventions, and accumulates reusable skills. Evaluated on mathematical reasoning, competitive-programming code generation, and repository-level software engineering, EvoTrainer matches or exceeds the human-engineered RL references under the same data, codebase, and evaluation protocol, with the largest gain on long-horizon agentic SWE. Trajectory analyses show that retained strategies diverge across domains, evolving diagnostics prevent invalid high-scoring branches from being promoted, and reusable skills shape later search. Autonomous LLM RL should move beyond recipe search toward joint evolution of policies and the training harnesses that interpret them.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Engineering entanglement and transport in interacting quantum walks with tailored potentials

arXiv:2606.17825v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Controlling the interplay between particle propagation and quantum correlation generation is a central challenge in quantum transport. Here, we investigate two distinguishable continuous-time quantum walkers evolving on parallel one-dimensional lattices, interacting via distance-dependent potentials. While on-site interactions reproduce the typical bosonic behaviour, extending the interaction to a linear potential over multiple neighbors introduces controlled Bloch-like oscillations and shifts the bound-pair regime to stronger couplings. More generally, we explore a Coulomb-like interaction parameterized by strength, spatial scaling, and decay rate. This reveals a rich phase diagram including four distinct dynamical regimes: (i) a high-entropy, oscillatory regime akin to a linear potential; (ii) a strongly localized, bound-pair regime; (iii) a novel intermediate regime combining near-ballistic spreading with strong correlations; and (iv) a weakly interacting, free-propagation regime. Notably, regime (iii) achieves concurrent optimization of transport efficiency and entanglement, offering a sweet spot for correlated quantum dynamics. Our results provide a tool for designing interaction-engineered quantum walks with potential applications in quantum information processing and simulations.

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

MagPlus: Bridging Micro-to-Regular Facial Expressions through Learnable Magnification

Facial micro-expressions are subtle and short-lived facial movements that provide important cues about genuine human emotions. However, modeling and generating them remains difficult because annotated micro-expression data is limited and the underlying facial motions are extremely weak. Existing micro-expression generation methods therefore often suffer from limited quality, weak robustness, and poor generalization. We propose MagPlus, a transferable micro-expression processing pipeline that connects micro-expression analysis with standard facial animation models. Instead of training a dedicated generator from scratch, MagPlus learns to magnify subtle facial motions into the range of regular facial expressions, transforming micro-expressions into signals that are compatible with existing facial expression processing models. The magnified sequence is then used by a standard facial expression model for tasks such as transfer and synthesis. A complementary DeMagPlus module then restores the generated motion back to realistic micro-expression intensity levels while preserving the synthesized dynamics. We evaluate the framework using four facial animation models: FOMM, FSRT, MetaPortrait, and EmoPortraits. None of these models are trained on micro-expression data. Experiments show that MagPlus-DeMagPlus enables pretrained macro-expression models to generate more realistic micro-expression motion without retraining the backbones.

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

Federated Bilevel Performative Prediction

arXiv:2606.19734v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Federated bilevel optimization is widely used for nested learning problems across distributed clients, such as federated hyperparameter tuning and meta-learning under privacy and communication constraints. Most existing formulations assume fixed client data distributions, which can be violated by performativity, where deployed decisions reshape client behavior and data collection, inducing client-specific, decision-dependent distribution shift. We study federated bilevel performative prediction, where both upper-level (UL) and lower-level (LL) objectives are evaluated under client-dependent, decision-dependent distributions. We formalize the federated bilevel performatively stable (FBPS) point under a decoupled-risk perspective and provide sufficient conditions for its existence and uniqueness. We then develop two federated methods to compute the FBPS solution: FBi-RRM, which converges linearly under a contraction condition, and FBi-SGD, a communication-efficient stochastic method based on federated hypergradient estimation with convergence guarantees under diminishing step sizes when sensitivities are sufficiently small. Experiments on strategic regression and meta strategic classification validate the predicted stability thresholds and demonstrate improved meta-generalization over non-performative baselines, and CNN-based classification further demonstrates the practical effectiveness of the proposed methods in nonconvex neural network settings.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Beyond Self-Attention: Sub-Quadratic Vision Transformers for Fast Image Captioning

Image captioning is a challenging and significant task that aims to generate coherent and semantically meaningful textual descriptions for given images. To accomplish this task, it requires a deep understanding of visual content along with the ability to express that understanding in natural language. Despite remarkable progress with transformer-based architectures, existing approaches often suffer from limitations, such as a lack of rich local feature representations and the high computational cost of quadratic self-attention. The proposed model focuses on improving computational efficiency by restructuring the vision transformer architecture. In designing this approach, the standard self-attention mechanism in Vision Transformers is replaced with a probabilistic transformer approach based on a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), a soft-clustering technique. Instead of computing pairwise attention among all image patches, the model groups similar patches into a fixed number of clusters using an Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm. This clustering-based mechanism reduces the computational complexity from quadratic O(n^2) to linear O(nK), where K

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Spin correlations, low-energy scales, and anisotropy scaling in kagome frustrated magnets

arXiv:2606.12512v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neutron scattering is central to identifying quantum states of magnetic materials. In the search for quantum spin liquids, broad spectral features of inelastic spectra have been cited as evidence for spinon excitations, but can also arise from magnon excitations excitations in the presence of quenched disorder and strong magnon interactions. We develop a new approach to this problem, based on the adiabatic continuity in the $XXZ$ Heisenberg model on geometrically frustrating (GF) lattices as a function of the model's anisotropy. Using this approach, we identify universal features and energies of finite-temperature spin correlators. Focusing on the kagome lattice, we show that the low-energy spin spectral function contains robust, momentum-independent peaks with frequencies: $\omega_1 \approx 3.4 T^*$ and $\omega_2 \approx 6.3 T^*$, where the ``hidden energy scale'' $T^*$ is the characteristic scale of a low-temperature peak in the heat capacity, at which many GF magnets also display spin-glass freezing. We show that the spectral features at low energies $\omega\lesssim T^*$ arise from single-magnon scattering and identify the magnetizations of the respective excitations. We explore the evolution of the spectral features with temperature and discuss extensions to other GF lattices. Our results provide a sharp spectroscopic criterion for interpreting neutron scattering in kagome and other GF quantum magnets.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

MineExplorer: Evaluating Open-World Exploration of MLLM Agents in Minecraft

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong capabilities in perception, reasoning, and action generation. However, their ability to sustain exploration in dynamic open worlds remains unclear. Existing embodied and game-based benchmarks often compress interaction into short-horizon tasks or entangle success with domain-specific game mechanics. In this paper, we introduce MineExplorer benchmark for evaluating open-world exploration capabilities of MLLM agents in Minecraft. We first filter atomic tasks whose solutions rely heavily on Minecraft-specific knowledge to better reflect general open-world reasoning. Then we organize the benchmark around a ReAct-style capability formulation and compose atomic tasks into implicit multi-hop tasks. To further construct reliable instances, MineExplorer uses a multi-agent synthesis workflow that jointly designs task graphs, sandbox scenes, and rule-based milestone evaluators. Human evaluation shows that the multi-agent synthesis workflow produces significantly more reliable instances than a single-agent baseline. Experiments with advanced MLLM agents show that open-world exploration remains challenging, as strong models can handle many single-hop tasks but degrade sharply when hidden prerequisites must be coordinated over longer trajectories. Further analysis finds that task difficulty tracks agent completion, and larger models or thinking modes do not consistently translate into better performance. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Jometeorie/MineExplorer.