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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Non-negative Matrix Factorisation with Topological Regularisation

arXiv:2606.17531v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the learning of interpretable bases in non-negative matrix factorisation (NMF) by regularising the topology of the learned basis functions. Our approach is motivated by the observation that many data modalities can be viewed as non-negative functions on a structured domain, where the quality of a basis is intrinsically linked to its topology. However, naive methods for incorporating the topology of the support are often hindered by discreteness and threshold dependence, rendering them unsuitable for continuous optimisation. We address these challenges by employing persistent homology as a stable, threshold-free topological quantifier and by designing topological scores that integrate into the NMF objective as regularisers. The resulting framework encompasses spatially coherent image components, periodic time-series structures, and clique-like graph signals within a unified modelling language.

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

Manifold Bandits: Bayesian Curriculum Learning over the Latent Geometry of Large Language Models

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a central approach for improving reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs), where training efficiency depends critically on how problems are sampled during optimization. Existing adaptive curriculum learning methods typically prioritize prompts of intermediate difficulty, treating problem selection as a standard bandit problem with independent arms and overlooking the structured, heterogeneous nature of the task space. In this work, we frame problem sampling as a manifold-structured bandit problem with endogenous non-stationarity: problems are related through the model's latent representation space, and sampling decisions can steer how learning signals evolve across that space. To operationalize this perspective, we introduce Bayesian Manifold Curriculum (BMC), a structure-aware framework that organizes problems into a hierarchical task tree and applies Bayesian learning to guide sampling. Empirically, we find that different sampling strategies induce non-trivial tradeoffs between productivity (learning signal), diversity (coverage of the task manifold), and utility (evaluation relevance). These results show that prioritizing difficulty alone is insufficient for strong downstream performance, highlighting the importance of incorporating structure and type-awareness into problem sampling.

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

A2D2: Fine-Tuning Any-Length Discrete Diffusion for Adaptive Decoding

arXiv:2606.13565v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Discrete diffusion models offer a simple and stable likelihood-based framework for sequence generation, recently extended to any-length settings via token insertion. Principled reward-guided fine-tuning for any-length discrete diffusion, however, remains largely unexplored. We introduce Fine-Tuning Any-Length Discrete Diffusion for Adaptive Decoding (A2D2), a unified framework for reward-guided fine-tuning of any-length discrete diffusion models via joint optimization of the insertion and unmasking policies together with a quality-based inference schedule. We derive the Radon-Nikodym derivative for the joint insertion-unmasking path measures, enabling theoretically guaranteed convergence to the intractable reward-tilted sequence distribution without requiring target samples. Building on this, we establish unmasking and insertion quality as tractable approaches for minimizing decoding error and introduce the Adaptive Joint Decoding (AJD) loss, which provably yields the optimal path measure that generates the reward-tilted distribution. Empirically, A2D2 improves reward optimization while enhancing generation flexibility and accuracy over prior fixed-length fine-tuning and inference-time guidance methods.

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

Instruct-Particulate: Scaling Feed-Forward 3D Object Articulation with Kinematic Control

Reconstructing articulated 3D objects is important for animation, gaming, and robotic simulations. Recent neural networks can estimate the articulated structure of 3D objects, but their generalization remains limited by the scarcity of annotated data for this task. To address this gap, we introduce Instruct-Particulate, a model that takes a 3D mesh together with a target kinematic specification, including part descriptions, connectivity, joint types, and optional point prompts, and predicts the corresponding kinematic part segmentation and joint motion parameters. The kinematic specification disambiguates the task and allows the model to target annotations of different granularity, thereby making it possible to use more abundant heterogeneous training data. At test time, the kinematic specification can be obtained automatically from large-scale vision-language models, so the model can be applied to any input mesh. To train our model at scale, we construct a heterogeneous dataset of more than 150,000 articulated 3D objects, extending existing publicly available collections with data obtained by partially labelling other 3D models (monolithic or already decomposed into parts) with kinematic labels by means of vision-language models. Experiments show that our model generalizes better across categories and to AI-generated meshes, enabling articulated asset reconstruction from real-world images via image-to-3D models.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Which Pairs to Compare for LLM Post-Training?

arXiv:2606.19607v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Preference-based post-training has become a central paradigm for aligning language models. A common data-collection strategy is to generate a small set of completions for each prompt and label the resulting comparison pairs. However, human preference labels are often much more expensive than generating additional completions, suggesting a different use of the same labeling budget: generate a larger pool of completions, but label only the most informative comparison pairs. This paper studies which pairs should be compared in preference-based post-training. We formulate comparison curation as a sampling-design problem and evaluate designs by the quality of the final policy under the preference-based post-training objective. We instantiate this framework for Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), analyzing how the choice of labeled pairs propagates through DPO training to downstream policy performance. Our main results provide matching upper and lower bounds on the post-training optimality gap of the DPO-trained policy. The bounds show that comparison selection affects downstream performance through a single design-dependent information matrix, which links label allocation to parameter estimation error and policy suboptimality. This yields an explicit optimization criterion for budgeted comparison curation and motivates practical sampling designs for selecting informative pairs from large generated completion pools. Experiments on synthetic settings and language-model post-training benchmarks show that the proposed designs consistently improve sample efficiency over common comparison-selection heuristics.

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

Improved Stochastic Optimization of LogSumExp

arXiv:2509.24894v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The LogSumExp function, dual to the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, plays a central role in many important optimization problems, including entropy-regularized optimal transport (OT) and distributionally robust optimization (DRO). In practice, when the number of exponential terms inside the logarithm is large or infinite, optimization becomes challenging since computing the gradient requires differentiating every term. We propose a novel convexity- and smoothness-preserving approximation to LogSumExp that can be efficiently optimized using stochastic gradient methods. This approximation is rooted in a sound modification of the KL divergence in the dual, resulting in a new $f$-divergence called the Safe KL divergence. Our experiments and theoretical analysis of the LogSumExp-based stochastic optimization, arising in DRO and continuous OT, demonstrate the advantages of our approach over existing baselines.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Mix-QVLA: Task-Evidence-Aware Mixed-Precision Quantization of Vision-Language-Action Models

We propose Mix-QVLA, a task-evidence-aware mixed-precision PTQ framework for VLA models. Mix-QVLA anchors each quantized variant to the full-precision action-token reference decision and evaluates whether quantization preserves task-relevant evidence across key VLA functional boundaries. It computes normalized gradient-weighted task-evidence maps from boundary activations and compares full-precision and quantized maps using evidence-mass and attribution-distribution distortion, capturing changes in both the strength and allocation of decision-supporting evidence. A soft-bottleneck objective aggregates boundary-level degradation into layer-wise sensitivity scores. Mix-QVLA further models sensitivity throughout task execution, capturing phase-dependent shifts in layer importance rather than assuming a fixed sensitivity profile. The resulting evidence- and time-aware scores guide mixed-precision bit allocation under model-size and BitOps budgets. Extensive evaluations on OpenVLA-style policies show that Mix-QVLA improves the accuracy-efficiency trade-off of low-bit VLA deployment. On LIBERO, Mix-QVLA reduces OpenVLA-OFT memory from 15.4 GB to 4.1 GB, retains 96.3 average success compared with 97.1 for the BF16 model, and achieves a 1.52x inference speedup.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

When Roleplaying, Do Models Believe What They Say?

Language models can state that "the Earth orbits the Sun" and, when role-playing Aristotle, assert the opposite. Recent work argues that persona adoption is fundamental to how language models operate, with models constantly selecting the most appropriate persona for a given context. Does such role-playing merely change the model's outputs, or does it also affect what the model internally represents as truthful? We study this question with linear truth probes, applying them to LLMs role-playing historical personas whose likely beliefs differ from modern consensus. For each persona, we compare false claims the persona would likely have endorsed (*era-believed*) with topic-matched false claims they would not have endorsed (*era-false*). Across prompting, in-context learning, and supervised fine-tuning, persona induction suppresses era-believed statements less than equally false alternatives, yet they remain classified as false overall. Role-play therefore shifts what these models say more than what they internally represent as true. We contrast this with models trained on harmful advice that exhibit Emergent Misalignment (EM). Across three model families (Qwen 2.5 14B, Qwen 3 8B, and Llama 3.3 70B), their false claims move substantially toward the true region of probe space, are defended under challenge roughly half the time versus about a sixth for role-play, and are used in downstream reasoning. Role-play and Emergent Misalignment thus are points on a spectrum of belief internalization, where role-play changes what a model says with little representational change, while Emergent Misalignment shifts the internal representation of false claims without fully marking them as true.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Occupational Prompting Reveals Cultural Bias in Large Language Models

Social roles shape expectations, priorities, and judgments, yet it remains unclear how large language models (LLMs) associate occupational identities with broader cultural value patterns. Prior work used nationality-based cultural prompting to study how LLM responses to value-survey questions align with human cultural benchmarks. In this paper, we extend that framework by replacing cultural prompting with occupational prompting to examine how professional-role cues influence value-survey responses in open-weight LLMs. Using a survey-grounded evaluation pipeline based on questions from the Integrated Values Surveys, we project model responses into the two-dimensional Inglehart–Welzel cultural space. We prompt open-weight LLMs to answer questions under occupational identities such as accountant, teacher, engineer, and nurse, and then analyze how these occupation-conditioned responses are positioned on the cultural map. Our results show that when open-weight LLMs are prompted with occupations rather than national identities, their responses remain within a broadly Western-leaning region of the cultural map. However, different occupations introduce shifts within this region, producing distinct occupational skews. This indicates that occupational prompts are not treated as neutral role labels, but instead elicit structured value patterns. These findings extend survey-based evaluation of cultural bias beyond nationality-based prompting and provide a framework for studying how occupational personas shape value expression in LLMs.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Does the Data Processing Inequality Reflect Practice? On the Utility of Low-Level Tasks

The data processing inequality is an information-theoretic principle stating that the information content of a signal cannot be increased by processing the observations. In particular, it suggests that there is no benefit in enhancing the signal or encoding it before addressing a classification problem. This assertion can be proven to be true for the case of the optimal Bayes classifier. However, in practice, it is common to perform "low-level" tasks before "high-level" downstream tasks despite the overwhelming capabilities of modern deep neural networks. In this paper, we aim to understand when and why low-level processing can be beneficial for classification. We present a comprehensive theoretical study of a binary classification setup, where we consider a classifier that is tightly connected to the optimal Bayes classifier and converges to it as the number of training samples increases. We prove that for any finite number of training samples, there exists a pre-classification processing that improves the classification accuracy. We also explore the effect of class separation, training set size, and class balance on the relative gain from this procedure. We support our theory with an empirical investigation of the theoretical setup. Finally, we conduct an empirical study where we investigate the effect of denoising and encoding on the performance of practical deep classifiers on benchmark datasets. Specifically, we vary the size and class distribution of the training set, and the noise level, and demonstrate trends that are consistent with our theoretical results.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

TW-LegalBench: Measuring Taiwanese Legal Understanding

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities across diverse tasks, yet their performance on jurisdiction-specific legal reasoning remains underexplored. We present TW-LegalBench that utilizes Taiwanese legal system's rich official corpus open to the public to fill the gap in evaluating LLMs on Taiwanese law, among common-law benchmarks that focus on English sources and civil-law benchmarks focusing on sources of Simplified Chinese. TW-LegalBench comprises three task types: (1) over 16,000 multiple-choice questions (MCQs) across five years of official examinations in 18 professional domains; (2) 117 open-ended essay questions (OEQs) from examinations for legal professionals with official scoring rubrics; and (3) more than 14,000 legal judgment prediction (LJP) instances covering hundreds of crime categories. We evaluate 13 LLMs using accuracy for MCQs, a decomposed LLM-as-Judge framework based on the scoring rubric points for OEQs, and metrics for sentencing accuracy and statute citation for LJP. Our results reveal that top-performing models exceed the passing threshold for qualified lawyers (passing rate: 11%) but fall short of that for judges and prosecutors (passing rate: 1~2%). For LJP, while models demonstrate reasonable verdict type accuracy and sentence prediction capability, they struggle to cite exact legal articles. These findings highlight that reliable legal text generation remains challenging for LLMs, even though their performance on qualification examinations approaches human level.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Detect Before You Leap: Mirage Detection in Vision-Language Models

Vision-language models (VLMs) can produce confident visual answers even when the required visual evidence is missing, blank, or unrelated to the question. This failure mode, recently described as mirage (mirage2026), is especially concerning in medical and document VQA, where a plausible but visually ungrounded answer may be mistaken for image-based evidence. We study the complementary problem of pre-release mirage detection: given an image-question pair, determine whether the VLM should answer or abstain before generation. To that end, we propose a novel model-agnostic Text-Conditioned Layer-wise Internal Alignment (TC-LIA) method that probes patch-token representations across the layers of a CLIP ViT-H/14 vision encoder. The key idea is to project layer-wise image patch tokens into the final CLIP embedding space and measure their similarity with the question embedding, thereby tracking whether question-relevant visual evidence emerges across vision layers. TC-LIA summarizes this alignment trajectory using final image-text cosine similarity, late-layer top-k patch-text alignment, early-to-late gain, and layer-wise slope. These features are combined with pixel-statistic based blank/noise detection, zero-shot domain routing, and structured VLM self-assessment in an ensemble. Across five VQA domains with related, unrelated-real, and blank/noise inputs, and across twelve VLM backbones, Qwen2.5-VL-32B achieves the highest three-class detection accuracy of 94.7% with a 3.0% mirage rate, while Qwen2.5-VL-72B achieves 94.6% accuracy with a lower 2.8% mirage rate. Baseline mirage rates span 21.7-66.6%.

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

Geometry-Preserving Encoder/Decoder in Latent Generative Models

arXiv:2501.09876v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Generative modeling aims to generate new data samples that resemble a given dataset. When using diffusion models for this task, one of the main challenges is solving the problem in the input space, which tends to be very high-dimensional. To address this, recent approaches solve diffusion models in the latent space through an encoder that maps from the data space to a lower-dimensional latent space, improving training efficiency and achieving state-of-the-art results. The variational autoencoder (VAE) is the most commonly used encoder/decoder framework in this domain, known for its ability to learn latent representations and generate data samples. In this paper, we introduce a novel encoder/decoder framework with theoretical properties distinct from those of the VAE, specifically designed to preserve the geometric structure of the data distribution. We demonstrate the significant advantages of this geometry-preserving encoder in the training process of both the encoder and decoder. Additionally, we provide theoretical results proving convergence of the training process, including convergence guarantees for encoder training, and results showing faster convergence of decoder training when using the geometry-preserving encoder.

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

SMEPilot: Characterizing and Optimizing LLM Inference with Scalable Matrix Extensions

arXiv:2606.16332v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern CPUs increasingly integrate matrix extensions, such as Arm Scalable Matrix Extension (SME), that provide high-throughput matrix execution within the CPU. For LLM inference, however, these units are not a universal replacement for conventional CPU cores: prefill, decode, attention, and KV-cache operations expose different arithmetic intensities, vector behavior, and layout requirements, while SME units and CPU cores still compete for shared memory bandwidth. This paper studies this mismatch through a roofline-based characterization of SME-enabled CPUs and uses the resulting model to guide operator-level execution choices. We present SMEPilot, an LLM inference engine that selects CPU-only, SME-only, or cooperative SME+CPU execution for each operator shape. SMEPilot partitions matrix work across SME and CPU cores at tile granularity, overlaps SME-suitable matrix stages with CPU-suitable vector stages in attention, and maintains layout state so packed tensor representations are reused rather than repeatedly rebuilt on critical paths. Across Llama-3.2-3B, Qwen3-4B, and Qwen3-30BA3B on phone, PC, and server platforms, SMEPilot improves end-to-end inference performance by up to 3.94$\times$.

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

OR-Action: Multi-Role Video Understanding with Fine-Grained Actions

Fine-grained understanding of operating room (OR) activity could enable workflow-aware assistance, yet remains difficult due to clutter, occlusions, and limited sensing. The prevailing approach to model this environment is scene graphs as an interpretable representation of OR interactions. Converting their frame-wise relational predictions into temporally extended, fine-grained actions however, is challenging without explicit temporal modeling. To enable a principled temporal evaluation of current OR understanding methods, we introduce the first action-centric benchmark built on a publicly available ego-exocentric OR dataset by defining a fine-grained, multi-role action taxonomy and generating dense action segments via distillation from ground-truth scene graph state changes. Experiments on this benchmark show that current scene graph prediction methods struggle to model temporal structure, even when adding explicit modeling through Graph Neural Networks. We therefore introduce a vision-only temporal model that outperforms graph-based methods significantly when using all available egocentric video as input. Building on this model we also introduce a novel multi- to single-view feature alignment strategy that improves single-view performance on multi-role action recognition, mitigating the need for extensive egocentric video capture. Benchmark and code will be released upon acceptance.

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

A Convex Quasilinearization Method for Solving Nonlinear PDEs with Physics-Informed Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.18175v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a numerical method for the forward solution of nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs) in which Bellman-Kalaba quasilinearization reduces the nonlinear problem to a sequence of linear subproblems, each discretized by collocation onto a trial space that is linear in its parameters and solved by a single direct linear least-squares QR factorization. The trial space, which we term Linear-in-Learnables (LiL), comprises representations whose trainable parameters enter linearly, including random-feature extreme learning machines, spectral polynomial bases, and trigonometric expansions, each implemented as a physics-informed neural network. The method thus replaces the nonconvex gradient-based training that limits standard PINNs with a convex per-step solve. We establish local Newton-Kantorovich convergence of the outer iteration to a residual-limited neighborhood under an explicit smallness condition, with the limiting accuracy governed by the best-approximation residual of the trial space rather than by an optimization tolerance. The method, denoted LiL-Q, is assessed on seven benchmarks spanning scalar nonlinear PDEs (Bratu, viscous Burgers, Buckley-Leverett), coupled systems (plane-strain elasticity and the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations in two and three spatial dimensions), and steady-state Darcy flow with heterogeneous permeability. Across these problems, LiL-Q converges in single-digit outer iterations in most cases, even at the coarsest basis sizes and independent of the parameter count. When the exact solution lies in the span of the trial space, the method recovers it to machine precision in a single solve. On the Navier-Stokes benchmarks, it matches or exceeds published PINN solvers with up to two orders of magnitude fewer trainable parameters, without gradient-based optimization.

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

CAOA – Completion-Assisted Object-CAD Alignment

Accurately aligning CAD models to their corresponding objects in indoor RGB-D scans is a central challenge in 3D semantic reconstruction. The task requires estimating a 9-Degree-of-Freedom (DoF) pose-position, rotation, and scale along three axes-but is hindered by noisy and incomplete scans, as well as segmentation errors that cause geometric distortions. We present Completion-Assisted Object-CAD Alignment (CAOA), a method that integrates a semantically and contextually aware point cloud completion module with a symmetry-aware relative pose estimation algorithm, enabling precise alignment of CAD models to scanned objects. Existing completion methods are typically trained and evaluated on synthetic datasets, which often fail to generalize to real-world scans. To bridge this gap, we introduce a synthetic data generation strategy tailored to indoor scenes, significantly reducing the synthetic-to-real domain gap-validated through quantitative comparisons with widely used completion datasets. In addition, we release S2C-Completion, an expert-annotated dataset of over 8,500 object-CAD pairs from Scan2CAD, created for real-world indoor single-object completion and intended as a new benchmark for this task. For object-CAD alignment, we incorporate symmetry information via a symmetry-aware loss, improving robustness to symmetric ambiguities. On the Scan2CAD benchmark, CAOA achieves a 17% accuracy improvement over state-of-the-art methods.

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

A Tool for the Synthesis of Adaptive Probabilistic Processors Based on the Ising Model

arXiv:2606.19533v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work presents a tool for the synthesis and simulation of probabilistic architectures for solving combinatorial optimization problems by mapping them to the Ising model. The proposed approach automatically constructs the Ising Hamiltonian and determines the number of probabilistic elements (p-bits) based on problem characteristics such as size and topology. Furthermore, the tool introduces an adaptive strategy for selecting the most suitable update algorithm among Gibbs Sampling, Simulated Annealing (SA), Simulated Quantum Annealing (SQA), and cluster-based methods. Experimental results using benchmark problems demonstrate improved convergence behavior and flexibility compared to fixed approaches. The proposed framework enables systematic evaluation of probabilistic computing strategies and supports the development of future hardware implementations based on MTJs and p-bits.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Frequency-dependent cognitive effects of Deep Brain Stimulation in Parkinson's Disease: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Background: Subthalamic nucleus deep brain stimulation (STN-DBS) improves levodopa-induced motor complications and cardinal motor symptoms of Parkinson's disease (PD), but stimulation frequency may differentially shape outcomes. This is evident for axial and gait symptoms, which may respond differently to lower-frequency stimulation. Whether frequency-dependent effects extend to cognition remains unclear. Objective: To investigate the cognitive effects of DBS at distinct frequencies in PD. Methods: We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis (PROSPERO - CRD42024618253). PubMed, Web of Science, and EMBASE were searched for studies assessing cognitive outcomes under different stimulation frequencies. Eight cognitive domains were defined: verbal fluency, cognitive flexibility, executive control, working memory, attention, processing speed, episodic memory, and time processing. Multilevel random-effects meta-analyses were performed, with effect sizes expressed as Hedges' g. Results: Forty-three studies met the inclusion criteria, the majority (n = 31) involving STN-DBS. Twenty-one STN-DBS studies, including 355 patients, were included in the meta-analysis. Compared with HFS ([≥] 130 Hz), lower frequencies (4-80 Hz) were associated with better verbal fluency (g = 0.27) and cognitive flexibility (g = 0.38), with consistent effects across sensitivity and leave-one-out analyses. Accuracy-based executive control measures also favored lower-frequency stimulation. OFF-stimulation comparisons showed a concordant pattern. Evidence for other targets (PPN and NBM) was limited. Conclusions: Lower-frequency STN-DBS was associated with modest benefits in specific cognitive domains compared with HFS. These findings highlight the need for future research to determine how frequency interacts with stimulation location and symptom-specific networks to shape cognitive and cognitive-motor outcomes in PD.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

BenchX: Benchmarking AI Models for Cancer Detection and Localization with Demographic and Protocol Biases

Artificial intelligence (AI) has achieved remarkable success in medical imaging, but it is widely recognized that these models often perform inconsistently across real-world clinical settings. Such inconsistencies occur when patient demographics and imaging protocols vary, for example, in detecting small tumors, analyzing scans from different contrast phases, or evaluating patients of different ages or sexes. To quantify these inconsistencies, we develop a large-scale, open benchmark of 85,355 CT scans that systematically evaluates 12 tumor-detection AI models across tumor size, location, patient subgroup, and imaging protocol. We leverage large language models (LLMs) to extract and organize subgroup information from clinical data, which makes the analysis both scalable and reproducible. Our benchmark reveals that current state-of-the-art AI models, optimized for average accuracy, perform poorly in rare or underrepresented subgroups, such as young, female African Americans. However, collecting sufficient annotated data for these rare cases is often impractical. The benchmark provides a foundation for building more reliable and robust AI models for tumor detection and highlighting the need for rigorous, subgroup-level evaluation in medical imaging and computer vision. Datasets, code

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Can AI Reason Like an Urban Planner? Benchmarking Large Language Models Against Professional Judgment

Problem, Research Strategy, and Findings: The rise of large language models (LLMs) raises a key question for urban planning: which forms of professional planning knowledge can AI replicate, and which still require human judgment? Although AI tools are increasingly used in planning practice, there is still no systematic framework for testing whether they can reason with the contextual sensitivity, value awareness, and institutional literacy central to planning expertise. This paper introduces Urban Planning Bench (UPBench), a domain-specific evaluation framework that assesses LLM reasoning through a 4x5 matrix of four knowledge pillars and five cognitive levels adapted from Bloom's revised taxonomy. Evaluating 25 LLMs with automated scoring and expert review, we find a non-monotonic cognitive curve: models perform better on higher-order analytical tasks than on factual recall and integrative judgment. This suggests that planning knowledge often treated as lower-order is deeply shaped by institutional, jurisdictional, and temporal context, making it hard for LLMs to generalize. We summarize these limits as four epistemic diagnostics: regulatory hallucination, conceptual conflation, wickedness paralysis, and phronetic deficit. Takeaway for Practice: The findings support differential delegation in planning. LLMs can assist with cross-disciplinary synthesis, literature review, scenario generation, and preliminary policy analysis. However, they remain unreliable for jurisdiction-specific regulation, normative conflict resolution, and context-sensitive procedure. Agencies should require verification for AI-assisted regulatory analysis, while planning education should emphasize institutional literacy, normative judgment, and contextual sensitivity.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

StatefulDiscovery: Evidence-Calibrated Claim Formation in Open-Ended Scientific Discovery

arXiv:2606.11851v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open-ended scientific discovery asks agents to move beyond executing analyses for predefined questions. Across multiple rounds of exploration, a discovery agent must decide which phenomena warrant investigation while avoiding overinterpretation, where emerging claims exceed the evidential scope of the analyses supporting them. This creates an evidence-calibration problem: the exploration trajectory must be coupled with claim status so that evidence can guide both what to investigate next and what can be claimed. We introduce StatefulDiscovery, a discovery framework that externalizes investigation state and uses it to coordinate frontier selection, evidence acquisition, and claim adjudication. We evaluate StatefulDiscovery across 40 real-data discovery tasks. Compared with several baselines, StatefulDiscovery produces more claims overall judged to be both well-supported and high-value. Ablations indicate that structured hypotheses, local adjudication, and frontier control contribute to performance. Together, these results suggest that explicit discovery state can couple exploration with evidence-calibrated claim formation.

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

Benchmarking Large Vision-Language Models on Fine-Grained Image Tasks: From Evaluation to Diagnosis

Recent advancements in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable multimodal perception and reasoning capabilities. While numerous benchmarks have evaluated LVLMs from holistic or task-specific perspectives, their capabilities on fine-grained image tasks-fundamental to computer vision-remain insufficiently understood. To address this gap, we introduce FG-BMK, a comprehensive fine-grained evaluation benchmark containing 1.01 million questions and 0.28 million images, covering diverse scenarios from common object-centric domains to specialized domains. FG-BMK jointly evaluates dialogue-level fine-grained semantic recognition and feature-level visual discriminability through human-oriented and machine-oriented paradigms, enabling diagnostic analysis of whether LVLM failures arise from insufficient visual representations, weak visual-to-semantic grounding, or limited fine-grained knowledge. Through extensive experiments on a diverse set of representative LVLMs/VLMs, we find that current LVLMs remain inadequate fine-grained recognizers, with failures arising from intertwined bottlenecks in visual representations, semantic grounding, modality alignment, and category-level knowledge. We further analyze training design factors for improving fine-grained capabilities and examine how visual and linguistic perturbations affect LVLM predictions. These findings provide diagnostic insights into the limitations of current LVLMs and offer guidance for future data construction and model design in developing more reliable LVLMs for fine-grained visual tasks. Our code is open-source and available at https://fg-bmk.github.io/.

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

Discovering Lattice Reduction Strategies via Self-Play

arXiv:2606.15301v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Lenstra-Lenstra-Lovász (LLL) algorithm is a seminal contribution to computer science used for lattice basis reduction, yet its polynomial-time outputs produce bases that are far from optimal as the dimension grows. We show that deep reinforcement learning can discover strictly superior, generalizable reduction strategies by interacting with the primitive action space of LLL. We formulate lattice reduction as a single-player Markov Decision Process (MDP) and train a deep residual network using an AlphaZero-style self-play pipeline augmented with adaptive-horizon MCTS (Monte Carlo Tree Search), which couples multi-step network predictions with an entropy-gated expansion mechanism. The resulting policy, DeltaStar, is trained exclusively on small $8$-dimensional $q$-ary lattices and requires fewer primitive row operations than LLL. Crucially, it generalizes zero-shot to unseen moduli and higher dimensions up to $n=32$ without retraining.