Paper Plaza - AcademicHub

01.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.12089

Non-Hermitian Delocalization Realizes Random Dirac Criticality in One Dimension

Authors:

arXiv:2606.12089v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Non-Hermitian systems can evade Anderson localization and exhibit delocalized states even in one dimension. Here, we show that such non-Hermitian delocalized states under periodic boundary conditions (PBC) are intrinsically critical, realizing the universality class of one-dimensional random Dirac fermions. By linking spectral winding to topological Anderson transitions via Hermitization, we demonstrate that the delocalized PBC states exhibit a Dirac-type criticality with universal algebraic correlations. In contrast to Hermitian systems, where this criticality occurs only at fine-tuned transition points, it emerges generically in non-Hermitian systems as a consequence of spectral topology. These results identify a universal mechanism by which non-Hermiticity promotes criticality, providing a unified description of non-Hermitian delocalization in one dimension.

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02.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.23702

Heterogeneous 2D/1D Signal Representation Fusion for Underwater Acoustic Modulation Recognition Under Distribution Shift

Authors:

Ronglai Qian ↗Liang An ↗Xiaoyan Wang ↗Qing Fan ↗Ziwei Huang ↗Yang Ye ↗

arXiv:2606.23702v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modulation recognition systems rely on heterogeneous signal representations. 2D signal-image modalities such as time-frequency and cyclostationary maps capture structural patterns, while 1D statistical descriptors such as higher-order power spectra encode complementary cues. Under distribution shift, these modalities degrade unevenly, making robust fusion a central challenge for practical deployment. Progress is further limited by the lack of a unified evaluation protocol that systematically separates different shift types. This paper addresses both challenges through a joint benchmark-and-model study in underwater acoustic modulation recognition. UAMR-ShiftBench is the first benchmark to jointly cover in-distribution, low-SNR, unseen-environment, unseen-communication-parameter, and measured sea-trial evaluation under a single matched protocol, with two independent real-world subsets collected during two sea-trial campaigns conducted in March and November in the South China Sea. SCP-TriCA fuses STFT, cyclostationary, and P2/P4 (second- and fourth-order power spectra) modalities hierarchically: the two 2D modalities are first aligned through bidirectional cross-attention, and the 1D statistical modality is then incorporated through a sample-adaptive selective gate. On UAMR-ShiftBench, SCP-TriCA achieves 95.33% in-distribution accuracy and 74.59% simulated OOD average, outperforming the strongest baseline by 5.12 percentage points, and reaches 91.14% and 94.86% on the two sea-trial subsets, exceeding the best baseline by 15.71 and 23.00 percentage points respectively. Ablation results confirm that the gains stem from modality complementarity and the hierarchical fusion design. Code and models are available at https://github.com/ronglaiqian/UAMR-ShiftBench.

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03.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2603.01371

TIMI: Training-Free Image-to-3D Multi-Instance Generation with Spatial Fidelity

Authors:

Xiao Cai ↗Pengpeng Zeng ↗Ji Zhang ↗Heng Tao Shen ↗Jingkuan Song ↗Lianli Gao ↗

Precise spatial fidelity in Image-to-3D multi-instance generation is critical for downstream real-world applications. Recent work attempts to address this by fine-tuning pre-trained Image-to-3D (I23D) models on multi-instance datasets, which incurs substantial training overhead and struggles to guarantee spatial fidelity. In fact, we observe that pre-trained I23D models already possess meaningful spatial priors, which remain underutilized as evidenced by instance entanglement issues. Motivated by this, we propose TIMI, a novel Training-free framework for Image-to-3D Multi-Instance generation that achieves high spatial fidelity. Specifically, we first introduce an Instance-aware Separation Guidance (ISG) module, which facilitates instance disentanglement during the early denoising stage. Next, to stabilize the guidance introduced by ISG, we devise a Spatial-stabilized Geometry-adaptive Update (SGU) module that promotes the preservation of the geometric characteristics of instances while maintaining their relative relationships. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method yields better performance in terms of both global layout and distinct local instances compared to existing multi-instance methods, without requiring additional training and with faster inference speed.

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04.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16475

AI systems out-persuade expert humans

Authors:

Kobi Hackenburg ↗Caroline Wagner ↗Luke Hewitt ↗Ben M. Tappin ↗Ed Saunders ↗Hannah Rose Kirk ↗Helen Margetts ↗Christopher Summerfield ↗

arXiv:2606.16475v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many societal decisions are settled by contests of persuasion. Conversational AI is a powerful new entrant in these contests, but whether it can out-persuade skilled and highly incentivized humans has remained unclear. Here, in a series of four preregistered experiments (n = 18,978 conversations from 6,923 people), we pitted AI systems against a range of human persuaders, including laypeople, winners of a separately preregistered four-round online persuasion tournament, professional canvassers, and world championship debaters. We found that AI systems were reliably more persuasive than expert humans, even when expert humans chose their issues, researched in advance, underwent hours of live, structured practice, and were incentivized with {\pounds}1,000 cash bonuses. In a follow-up study, AI's advantage persisted after experts received a coaching tool that let them practice against the AI that beat them, review their performance history, and see what AI would have said at key moments. We found converging evidence that AI's advantage stemmed from rapidly deploying larger quantities of information: after coaching, expert humans could tie an AI constrained to respond at human speeds and with human-length messages. In a final study, we show that AI's advantage extends to consequential real-world behavior: AI was nearly 3x more effective than professional canvassers from a UK fundraising firm at raising real-money donations to Save the Children. Together, these results establish that frontier AI systems out-persuade expert humans in conversation, with significant implications for political communication.

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05.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11652

IAPO: Input Attribution-Aware Policy Optimization for Tool Use in Small Multimodal Agents

Authors:

Yifan Yang ↗Zhen Zhang ↗Jiayi Tian ↗Liyan Tan ↗Zheng Zhang ↗

arXiv:2606.11652v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper investigates reinforcement learning (RL) methods for improving tool-calling capabilities in multimodal small language model (SLM) agents. While existing works have explored various reward designs to improve agentic tool-calling ability, these approaches face inherent limitations for SLM training, especially under multimodal scenarios. First, many existing methods evaluate tool use correctness through exact matching against certain ground-truth or predefined formats. However, this assumption is often unsuitable for multimodal tasks, where multiple tool use paths may be valid and annotated tool trajectories are typically unavailable. Second, such sparse and brittle binary rewards provide little guidance on how to improve the underlying decision process, making them particularly difficult for multimodal SLM to learn from. To address these issues, we propose Input Attribution-Aware Policy Optimization (IAPO), an RL algorithm for improving tool use in multimodal SLM by aligning the model's attribution across input components with that of a stronger teacher. Experiments on Qwen2.5-VL-3B show that the proposed method improves visual question answering accuracy by an average of 3% across six test sets compared with existing visual tool use work, by helping the model attend to the most relevant input evidence.

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06.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.14997

AI Engram: In Search of Memory Traces in Artificial Intelligence

Authors:

Jea Kwon ↗Dong-Kyum Kim ↗Jiwon Kim ↗Yonghyun Kim ↗Woong Kook ↗Meeyoung Cha ↗

arXiv:2606.14997v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Memory formation is fundamental to intelligence, yet whether deep neural networks preserve identifiable memory traces analogous to biological memory units remains an open question. This work introduces a geometric framework to identify such "AI engrams" by formalizing the neuroscientific criteria of specificity, reactivation, sufficiency, and necessity into a constrained inverse problem. We derive a closed-form estimator that isolates individual memory traces from globally entangled parameters, and show that this biologically-derived solution corresponds to a natural gradient update on the parameter manifold. AI engrams enable surgical manipulation of learned knowledge: any subset of memories can be composed or erased through linear arithmetic, without iterative optimization. Experiments ranging from simple MLPs to LLMs demonstrate the causal validity and substantial scalability of AI engrams. Together, these results bridge theories of biological memory and artificial representation learning and offer geometric insight into how deep networks simultaneously support functional specificity within distributed storage.

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07.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16558

ROSA-RL: Uncertainty-Aware Roundabout Optimized Speed Advisory with Reinforcement Learning

Authors:

Anna-Lena Schlamp ↗Jeremias Gerner ↗Klaus Bogenberger ↗Werner Huber ↗Stefanie Schmidtner ↗

arXiv:2606.16558v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Roundabouts challenge automated driving in mixed traffic, as heterogeneous and non-deterministic human behavior, unknown driving intentions, and high interaction complexity create uncertainty about whether the conflict zone will be blocked or available at the moment of entry. We present ROSA-RL – uncertainty-aware Roundabout Optimized Speed Advisory with Reinforcement Learning. It enables safe and efficient roundabout entry for automated and human-driven vehicles in mixed traffic through probabilistic conflict forecasting. A Transformer-based model predicts conflict zone occupancy over a five-second horizon, capturing multi-agent interactions to anticipate upcoming conflicts and available gaps. The prediction outputs encode uncertainty in future motion and intent, and augment the state of a classical RL framework, enabling uncertainty-aware speed coordination. Evaluated in simulations grounded in real-world data, ROSA-RL can effectively handle uncertainty and outperform a comparable model-based baseline, closing the gap to an ideal setting assuming fully known occupancy while improving traffic efficiency and safety. The source code of this work is available under: github.com/urbanAIthi/ROSA-RL.

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08.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2603.01761

Position: Modular Memory is the Key to Continual Learning Agents

Authors:

arXiv:2603.01761v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Foundation models have transformed machine learning through large-scale pretraining and increased test-time compute. Despite surpassing human performance in several domains, these models remain fundamentally limited in continuous operation, experience accumulation, and personalization, capabilities that are central to adaptive intelligence. While continual learning research has long targeted these goals, its historical focus on in-weight learning (IWL), i.e., updating a single model's parameters to absorb new knowledge, has rendered catastrophic forgetting a persistent challenge. Our position is that combining the strengths of In-Weight Learning (IWL) and the newly emerged capabilities of In-Context Learning (ICL) through the design of modular memory is the missing piece for continual adaptation at scale. We outline a conceptual framework for modular memory-centric architectures that leverage ICL for rapid adaptation and knowledge accumulation, and IWL for stable updates to model capabilities, charting a practical roadmap toward continually learning agents.

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09.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11420

Context-Aware Multimodal Claim Verification in Spoken Dialogues

Authors:

Chaewan Chun ↗Delvin Ce Zhang ↗Dongwon Lee ↗

Every day, millions absorb claims from podcasts and streams that no fact-checker ever sees. Spoken misinformation is built through conversation, where credibility comes not from facts alone but from how claims are framed, reinforced, or left unchallenged across turns. Yet fact-checking has focused on isolated text, leaving dialogue audio under-studied. We introduce MAD2, a new Multi-turn Audio Dialogues benchmark for spoken claim verification, containing 1,000 two-speaker dialogues with 3,368 check-worthy claims and approximately 10 hours of audio, and propose calibrated multimodal fusion of a context-aware audio encoder and a dialogue-aware text model. Across settings, adding dialogue context improves verification, but the gains depend on scenario type. Using only preceding context often matches offline performance, supporting live-moderation settings, and audio contributes most when transcript-based models are destabilized by additional context. Overall, conversational structure matters more for verification than misinformation framing.

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10.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2605.09313

Attention Sinks in Diffusion Transformers: A Causal Analysis

Authors:

Fangzheng Wu ↗Brian Summa ↗

Attention sinks – tokens that receive disproportionate attention mass – are assumed to be functionally important in autoregressive language models, but their role in diffusion transformers remains unclear. We present a causal analysis in text-to-image diffusion, dynamically identifying dominant attention recipients per timestep and suppressing them via paired, training-free interventions on the score and value paths. Across 553 GenEval prompts on Stable Diffusion~3 (with SDXL corroboration), removing these sinks does not degrade text-image alignment (CLIP-T) or preference proxies (ImageReward, HPS-v2) at $k{=}1$; only under stronger interventions ($k\!\geq\!10$) does HPS-v2 exhibit a metric-dependent boundary, while CLIP-T remains robust throughout. The perceptual shifts induced by suppression are nonetheless sink-specific – $\sim\!6\times$ larger than equal-budget random masking – revealing an empirical dissociation between trajectory-level perturbation and semantic alignment in diffusion transformers. \footnote{Code available at https://github.com/wfz666/ICML26-attention-sink.}

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11.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18650

BLADE: Scalable Bi-level Adaptive Data Selection for LLM Training

Authors:

Jiaxing Wang ↗Deping Xiang ↗Jin Xu ↗Zirui Liu ↗Zicheng Zhang ↗Guoqiang Gong ↗Jun Fang ↗Chao Liu ↗Pengzhang Liu ↗Tongxuan Liu ↗Ke Zhang ↗Qixia Jiang ↗…

arXiv:2606.18650v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As Large Language Model (LLM) datasets scale to trillions of tokens, data selection has emerged as a critical frontier to filter out uninformative noise and construct adaptive learning trajectories. Beyond static heuristic filtering, advanced data selection methods for LLM training largely follow two paradigms, each with fundamental limitations. Influence-based methods provide principled bi-level objectives but require intractable inverse-Hessian computations, while excess-loss methods are computationally efficient but rely on a static reference model that becomes misaligned with the evolving proxy model during training. We propose BLADE (Bi-Level Adaptive Data sElection), a Hessian-free framework for data selection. BLADE reformulates the bi-level optimization problem underlying influence-based methods as a penalized single-level objective via Lagrange multipliers, avoiding inverse-Hessian computation while revealing a principled connection to excess-loss based data selection. The resulting objective recovers an excess-loss form but replaces the static reference model with a dynamic one that stays synchronized with training. Theoretically, we prove that this penalized formulation guarantees first-order convergence. For efficient online batch selection, we instantiate BLADE as a memoryless randomized block-coordinate Frank-Wolfe algorithm. Extensive experiments show that BLADE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art data selection baselines, providing a practical recipe for LLM training.

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12.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.13982

Adaptive Nucleus Truncation for Long-Form Reasoning

Authors:

Ousmane Amadou Dia ↗

arXiv:2606.13982v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sampling plays an important role in long-form language-model reasoning. Over thousands of decoding steps, small changes in the candidate token set can compound into different reasoning trajectories, stability profiles, and final answers. Existing truncation methods such as top-$p$, min-$p$, and fixed top-$n\sigma$ sampling improve over unrestricted sampling, but they rely on fixed thresholds that cannot adapt to changes in entropy, task difficulty, training stage, or generation budget. We introduce Adaptive Nucleus Truncation Sampling (ANTS), which extends top-$n\sigma$ sampling from a fixed decoding rule into an adaptive rollout-control mechanism for long-form generation. ANTS selects standardized neighborhoods around the maximum logit before temperature scaling, adapts the truncation width using an entropy-conditioned controller, and retains a no-truncation fallback arm to stabilize training when truncation becomes unsafe. On a 33B-total / 4B-active sparse Mixture-of-Experts reasoning model, ANTS improves average performance over percentage-based benchmarks by +1.9, +3.8, and +5.2 points at 8K, 16K, and 32K generation budgets, respectively. The strongest gains appear on instruction following and mathematical reasoning, with IFBench improving by more than 10 points at 32K and AIME 2025 improving by 7 points. Code generation reveals an important budget interaction. On Codeforces, ANTS trails the baseline at 8K, but reverses this gap and substantially improves ELO at 16K and 32K. These results suggest that sampler design should be treated not just as a decoding hyperparameter, but as part of how we stabilize and scale long-budget reasoning.

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13.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2601.00215

Disentangling Perception and Reasoning in Multimodal LLMs via Reward Design

Authors:

Omar Sharif ↗Eftekhar Hossain ↗Nikhil Singh ↗Patrick Ng ↗

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has driven major gains in LLM reasoning, and it is intuitive to assume this recipe will transfer well to multimodal models. However, multimodal models do two things: first, perceive what is in an image, then reason about what it implies. Because these stages are graded jointly, it is hard to tell how much room reasoning alone has to grow. We study this on algorithmic visual puzzles, where both components are necessary and show that perception, not reasoning, is the binding constraint. Replacing images with simple textual descriptions raises performance by over 20 points on average for Claude models. We then evaluate six reward designs aimed at inducing visual grounding during reasoning without chain-of-thought supervision. Training Qwen-2.5-VL-7B with GRPO, reward design induces long, structured reasoning with self-reflection and visual references, yielding a 5.56-point gain over the base model. These gains are, however, uneven; no single reward improves all categories, and rewards with verifiable accuracy signals trade out-of-domain transfer for in-domain accuracy. These results point to perception-aware reward design as a path forward, so that signals correct perception at its source rather than the reasoning that inherits its errors.

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14.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19710

FineREX: Fine-Tuned NER-RE for Human Smuggling Knowledge Graphs

Authors:

Elijah Feldman ↗Dipak Meher ↗Carlotta Domeniconi ↗

Court proceedings contain valuable evidence about human smuggling networks, but this information is often buried within unstructured, jargon-heavy legal documents. While large language models (LLMs) can support knowledge graph construction through automated information extraction, existing approaches rely on general-purpose models that are not tailored to the entity and relationship definitions required in this domain. We introduce FineREX, a streamlined knowledge graph construction pipeline built around a fine-tuned LLM for named entity recognition and relationship extraction (NER-RE). Using a manually annotated dataset of $512$ text chunks, FineREX achieves absolute improvements of 15.50% and 31.46% in entity and relationship F1-score, respectively, compared to a larger general-purpose baseline. These gains translate into higher-quality knowledge graphs, reducing legal noise by nearly half and lowering node duplication on long documents from 17.78% to 11.17%. By eliminating document rewriting and redundant extraction stages, FineREX also reduces end-to-end processing time by 50.0%. Our results demonstrate that domain-specific fine-tuning can substantially outperform larger general-purpose models while improving both the quality and efficiency of knowledge graph construction for illicit network analysis.

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15.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2507.17853

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

Authors:

Lifeng Chen ↗Jiner Wang ↗Zihao Pan ↗Beier Zhu ↗Xiaofeng Yang ↗Chi Zhang ↗

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.

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16.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11853

Task-Aware Structured Memory for Dynamic Multi-modal In-Context Learning

Authors:

Zhirui Chen ↗Ziwei Chen ↗Ling Shao ↗

Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) depend on in-context learning (ICL) for rapid task adaptation, but their scalability is severely limited by finite context windows and the growing cost of key-value (KV) caches in long multi-modal sequences. Existing memory compression approaches typically rely on rigid token removal or sample-dependent importance estimation, which introduces bias, disrupts semantic structure, particularly for visual representations, and yields static memories that cannot adapt to new queries. We introduce TASM (Task-Aware Structured Memory), a training-free framework that addresses these limitations through task-aware, structure-preserving, and dynamically accessible memory construction. TASM employs task-vector guided compression to replace sample-specific signals with a task-level direction that captures shared relevance across demonstrations. To preserve the underlying manifold, it applies semantics-aware token merging via bipartite graph matching, aggregating tokens without destructive pruning. Finally, TASM structures memory into a hierarchy comprising a compact Core Memory and a Latent Bank, facilitating query-adaptive dynamic retrieval. Evaluations confirm TASM maintains high performance under heavy compression, effectively balancing efficiency with adaptability.

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17.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2508.03736

Fusion of Pervasive RF Data with Spatial Images via Vision Transformers for Enhanced Mapping in Smart Cities

Authors:

Rafayel Mkrtchyan ↗Armen Manukyan ↗Hrant Khachatrian ↗Theofanis P. Raptis ↗

In this paper, we present a deep learning-based approach that integrates the DINOv2 architecture to improve building mapping by combining (possibly erroneous) maps from open-source platforms with pervasive radio frequency (RF) data collected from multiple wireless user equipments and base stations. Unlike prior methods, our approach leverages a vision transformer-based architecture to jointly process both RF and map modalities within a unified framework, effectively capturing spatial dependencies and structural priors for enhanced mapping accuracy. For the evaluation purposes, we employ a synthetic dataset co-produced by Huawei. To address the challenges associated with real-world data imperfections, we introduce controlled noise to its RF data so as to simulate real-world conditions. Additionally, we develop and train a model that leverages only aggregated path loss information to tackle the mapping problem. We measure the results according to three performance metrics: the Jaccard index (intersection over union, IoU), the Hausdorff distance, and the Chamfer distance. Our design achieves a macro IoU of 65.3%, significantly surpassing (i) the erroneous maps baseline, which yields 40.1%, (ii) an RF-only method from the literature, which yields 37.3%, and (iii) a non-AI fusion baseline that we designed which yields 42.2%. The comparative evaluation highlights the limitations of relying solely on RF data or on spatial data, as well as the effectiveness that AI can have on fusing data towards enhancing smart city mapping accuracy. We further validate our method on real-world data from the Oslo region, complementing the synthetic evaluation with a real deployment setting, where our best fusion model reaches 64.9% macro IoU. We additionally outline a strategy for deploying the model over larger areas by tiling the region with overlapping windows.

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18.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11997

Dark state spectroscopy in nonlinear waveguide quantum electrodynamics

Authors:

Shay Nadel ↗Amir Sivan ↗Aviv Karnieli ↗

arXiv:2606.11997v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum systems face a fundamental trade-off: they must remain decoupled from the environment to maintain long coherence times, yet they require interactions with the environment to be accessible for measurement. As a prime example, emitter arrays coupled to waveguides facilitate collective modes that, owing to interference, can suppress radiation into the waveguide. While complete destructive interference creates perfectly dark states with infinite lifetimes, their inherent decoupling makes them unmeasurable in standard waveguide quantum electrodynamics. Consequently, current approaches must rely on system non-idealities that permit measurement but limit the coherence times. In this work, we lift this limitation by proposing the use of weakly squeezed light generated in \{chi}(2) nonlinear waveguides for the spectroscopy of completely dark states. We show that the fluorescence spectrum probes transitions between the dressed dark states of the emitter array. This work paves the way towards the measurement and control of dark states, with applications for robust quantum memories, computation, and communication.

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19.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.23690

Beyond the Autoregressive Horizon: A Comprehensive Survey of Diffusion Models, World Modelling, and State Space Models for Code

Authors:

Kishan Maharaj ↗Ashita Saxena ↗Srikanth Tamilselvam ↗

arXiv:2606.23690v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autoregressive (AR) language models have driven significant progress in automated software engineering, enabling powerful code generation and assistance systems. However, the next-token prediction paradigm introduces structural limitations for code reasoning, including restricted global planning, challenges in maintaining long-range dependencies, and limited grounding in program execution semantics. Noting the heavy skewness of existing literature towards AR models, we discuss emerging paradigms that could potentially overcome the logic and scaling bottlenecks of next-token prediction by unlocking next-generation architectural capabilities for code intelligence. Specifically, we discuss the potential of Diffusion Models, which generate code via holistic denoising that captures long-range syntactic constraints often missed by AR models. We also discuss Code World Models (CWMs), which simulate execution states to support reasoning, and State Space Models (SSMs), which provide linear-time efficiency for massive contexts. By connecting these developments with findings from cognitive neuroscience, we outline directions for developing "System 2" code generation agents.

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20.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12476

Quickest Detection of Hallucination Onset: Delay Bounds and Learned CUSUM Statistics

Authors:

Igor Itkin ↗

Token-level hallucination detectors are evaluated as classifiers, by AUC over all tokens, yet a streaming monitor is judged by its reaction time: the number of tokens that pass between the onset of a hallucination and the alarm. We formulate hallucination onset detection as a quickest change detection problem. A first-order Markov model of the latent faithful/hallucinated state, validated on RAGTruth, places the task inside classical change-point theory and yields Lorden's lower bound on detection delay: about 1.3 tokens at a false-alarm rate of 0.01. We then show that a causal recurrent labeler acts as a CUSUM with a learned increment; at a matched false-alarm rate it detects in 11-13 tokens, against 31 for a linear per-token baseline, and a controlled decomposition attributes most of this advantage to a better per-token score rather than to temporal accumulation. An information-rate optimality theorem of Donsker-Varadhan type explains the remaining order-of-magnitude gap: the learned score realizes only 1/4.5 of the divergence the features carry, a deficit that recalibration cannot remove, with the remainder a finite-horizon effect. Classification metrics conceal this delay structure; sequential analysis makes it measurable

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21.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18950

RTSGameBench: An RTS Benchmark for Strategic Reasoning by Vision-Language Models

Authors:

San Kim ↗Daechul Ahn ↗Reokyoung Kim ↗Hyeonbeom Choi ↗Seungyeon Jwa ↗Jonghyun Choi ↗

arXiv:2606.18950v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often struggle with strategic reasoning, i.e., anticipating and influencing other agents' actions, under uncertainty in competitive and cooperative settings. Real-time strategy (RTS) games can be a natural testbed for diagnosing this limitation, as they demand coordination with allies, adaptation to opponents' strategy, and long-horizon planning under partial observability. However, existing RTS benchmarks offer limited evaluation scope, lack systematic competency diagnosis, and remain fixed in the pre-designed scenario coverage. To address these limitations, we present RTSGameBench, which is built on Beyond All Reason, a large-scale RTS game with an expanded battlefield that demands broader strategy diversity than the existing testbeds. The proposed benchmark provides evaluations through diverse gameplay across various matchup structures, diagnostic assessment via mini-games, each targeting an individual strategic competency, and extensible coverage via a self-evolving generation framework that converts free-form queries into new mini-games, improving over successive cycles. Additionally, for VLMs to operate in large-scale RTS games, we provide RTSGameAgent that manages units by an FSM with agentic memory. We empirically validate that multiple state-of-the-art VLMs do not perform well when matchups demand tighter coordination, multiagent coordination and when task scale increases.

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22.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2603.02159

Instrumental and Proximal Causal Inference with Gaussian Processes

Authors:

Yuqi Zhang ↗Krikamol Muandet ↗Dino Sejdinovic ↗Edwin Fong ↗Siu Lun Chau ↗

arXiv:2603.02159v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Instrumental variable (IV) and proximal causal learning (Proxy) methods are central frameworks for causal inference in the presence of unobserved confounding. Despite substantial methodological advances, existing approaches rarely provide reliable epistemic uncertainty (EU) quantification. We address this gap through a Deconditional Gaussian Process (DGP) framework for uncertainty-aware causal learning. Our formulation recovers popular kernel estimators as the posterior mean, ensuring predictive precision, while the posterior variance yields principled and well-calibrated EU. Moreover, the probabilistic structure enables systematic model selection via marginal log-likelihood optimization. Empirical results demonstrate strong predictive performance alongside informative EU quantification, evaluated via empirical coverage frequencies and decision-aware accuracy rejection curves. Together, our approach provides a unified, practical solution for causal inference under unobserved confounding with reliable uncertainty.

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23.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17065

PIVOT: Bridging Black-Scholes Implied-Volatility and Price Objectives via Differentiable Jäckel Operator

Authors:

Raeid Saqur ↗Yannick Limmer ↗Anastasis Kratsios ↗Blanka Horvath ↗Hans Buehler ↗

arXiv:2606.17065v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern option-learning systems operate in two coordinates: price space, where markets quote and no-arbitrage constraints are most naturally enforced, and implied volatility (IV) space, where volatility surfaces are smoothed, regularized, and evaluated. The bottleneck is interface, not approximation: Jäckel's seminal "Let's Be Rational" (LBR) solver already inverts the Black-Scholes price to machine precision efficiently. What is missing is a differentiable layer that preserves LBR in the forward pass and avoids backpropagating through its branch logic. Such a layer must also confront the unavoidable singularity of the inverse map in the low-vega regime, where the sensitivity 1/vega diverges as vega -> 0. We close this gap with PIVOT, the Price-Implied-Volatility Objective Translator. PIVOT keeps the LBR forward pass intact and supplies the backward pass by implicit differentiation through the smooth Black-Scholes/Black-76 price map, with an explicit gating contract: invalid domains return NaN, well-conditioned rows receive the exact 1/vega gradient, and low-vega rows are attenuated rather than silently regularized. On a single H100, a fused Triton kernel reaches 1.79e9 IV/s at machine precision (9.3e-14 max relative error vs. the reference C solver); end-to-end label generation sustains 48.9M/s on synthetic chains and 16.6M/s on SPX OptionMetrics. In a HyperIV-style one-day reproduction on SPX, PIVOT-augmented objectives Pareto-dominate the baselines, reducing held-out price MAE by up to 43.4% and the strongest three-seed gated objective improving price MAE by 38.8% and IV MAE by 21.3% jointly; cross-asset results on RUT, VIX, and NDX show directional price-MAE gains of 40.1%, 24.2%, and 16.7%, while an ungated IV-roundtrip control collapses to a degenerate near-zero surface, confirming the gate as a correctness contract rather than a tuning knob.

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24.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.14905

Deep Learning in Seismic Interpretation: Federated Advances in Salt Dome Segmentation

Authors:

Muhammad Zain Mehdi ↗Muhammad Zaid ↗Owais Aleem ↗

Salt-dome delineation is a critical, high-impact task in subsurface geological interpretation, driving decisions in hydrocarbon exploration, reservoir modeling, and drilling safety. While convolutional encoder-decoder architectures have delivered significant improvements in automated salt segmentation, their widespread application is severely limited by data sovereignty concerns, dataset bias, and the scarcity of labeled seismic volumes. This paper introduces FedSaltNet, a Federated Learning (FL) framework explicitly engineered for robust, generalizable, and privacy preserving salt-dome segmentation. We couple a lightweight Small U-Net backbone, chosen for its efficiency and regularization properties with a novel Foreground-Weighted (FG-WEIGHTED) aggregation strategy designed to tackle domain-specific class imbalance. Through an extensive comparative study emulating non-IID conditions across four diverse seismic datasets (TGS, SEAM, F3, GBS), we demonstrate two critical findings: The FG-WEIGHTED algorithm effectively mitigates data heterogeneity, yielding a 4.0% relative improvement in Intersection over Union (IoU) over the best conventional FL method. The simple U-Net architecture proved essential, outperforming the higher capacity ResNet-18 U-Net variant by 166% in average IoU, underscoring the necessity of architectural simplicity in data-constrained federated environments. FedSaltNet provides a validated, high-performance solution that establishes the viability of federated deep learning for collaborative, next-generation subsurface interpretation.

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25.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11583

Beyond the Golden Teacher: Enhancing Graph Learning through LLM-GNN Co-teaching

Authors:

Zhuoyi Peng ↗Hanlin Gu ↗Lixin Fan ↗Yi Yang ↗

arXiv:2606.11583v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Text-attributed graphs (TAGs) underlie real-world applications such as citation networks, social media, and e-commerce. Few-shot graph learning on TAGs is hard: with only a handful of labels per class and the rest of the graph unannotated, neither GNNs nor LLMs can learn well on their own. GNNs read topology and fail on cold nodes; LLMs read text and fail on text-ambiguous nodes. Existing LLM-GNN methods all follow the same recipe: designate one model as the golden teacher and use its outputs (e.g., features or pseudo-labels) to supervise the other. We argue this golden-teacher assumption breaks under sparse supervision: neither model is golden, and treating either as such transfers its blind spots into the student. We therefore ask: can we avoid designating either model as the golden teacher, and still perform effective graph learning? We answer with LLM-GNN Co-Teaching, a bidirectional co-teaching framework in which neither model is fixed as teacher. The GNN and LLM exchange their most confident pseudo-labels under an architecture-specific small-loss criterion, and both update every round. Supervision is then mined from the trajectory: whenever a node moves from cross-model contradiction at round t to cross-model agreement at round t+1, the LLM's two answers on the same input form a preference pair (old contradicting self < new peer-endorsed self) for DPO training. We call this Round-based Pseudo-Label Preference Optimization (RPL-PO). On six benchmarks, LLM-GNN Co-Teaching consistently outperforms GNN-as-Judge and all prior methods, with absolute 3-shot gains of 7.86% on Cora and 7.73% on ogbn-arxiv; improvements carry over to 5-shot and to zero-shot cross-dataset transfer. Error-structure analysis further shows that abandoning the golden-teacher assumption substantially improves the LLM's graph learning capability on challenging samples.

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