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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

RAMEN: Resolution-Adjustable Multimodal Encoder for Earth Observation

Earth observation (EO) data spans a wide range of spatial, spectral, and temporal resolutions, from high-resolution optical imagery to low resolution multispectral products or radar time series. While recent foundation models have improved multimodal integration for learning meaningful representations, they often expect fixed input resolutions or are based on sensor-specific encoders limiting generalization across heterogeneous EO modalities. To overcome these limitations we introduce RAMEN, a resolution-adjustable multimodal encoder that learns a shared visual representation across EO data in a fully sensor-agnostic manner. RAMEN treats the modality and spatial and temporal resolutions as key input data features, enabling coherent analysis across modalities within a unified latent space. Its main methodological contribution is to define spatial resolution as a controllable output parameter, giving users direct control over the desired level of detail at inference and allowing explicit trade-offs between spatial precision and computational cost. We train a single, unified transformer encoder reconstructing masked multimodal EO data drawn from diverse sources, ensuring generalization across sensors and resolutions. Once pretrained, RAMEN transfers effectively to both known and unseen sensor configurations and outperforms larger state-of-the-art models on the community-standard PANGAEA benchmark, containing various multi-sensor and multi-resolution downstream tasks. Our code and pretrained model are available at https://github.com/nicolashoudre/RAMEN.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Bypassing Prompt Guards in Production with Controlled-Release Prompting

arXiv:2510.01529v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Ball et al. recently established that prompt filtering for AI alignment faces a fundamental barrier: under standard cryptographic assumptions, no filter running significantly faster than the protected model can universally distinguish adversarial prompts from benign ones. We investigate whether this impossibility result translates to real-world vulnerabilities in deployed large language model (LLM) systems. We answer affirmatively by introducing controlled-release prompting, a practical instantiation of the theoretical framework that exploits the resource asymmetry between lightweight input filters and the main models they protect. Unlike the theoretical construction, our attack does not require model modification: it generates malicious prompts that are indecipherable by any bounded filter yet remain tractable to the target LLM. We find our attack to be successful on four major chat platforms (Google Gemini, DeepSeek Chat, xAI Grok, and Mistral Le Chat) where baseline methods fail. Additionally, we apply our attack to extract copyrighted data from Gemini. Finally, we provide a systematic evaluation of 14 open-weight prompt guard models, revealing that even reasoning-capable filters cannot reliably detect our attack without incurring prohibitive resource overhead.

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

HACMatch Semi-Supervised Rotation Regression with Hardness-Aware Curriculum Pseudo Labeling

Regressing 3D rotations of objects from 2D images is a crucial yet challenging task, with broad applications in autonomous driving, virtual reality, and robotic control. Existing rotation regression models often rely on large amounts of labeled data for training or require additional information beyond 2D images, such as point clouds or CAD models. Therefore, exploring semi-supervised rotation regression using only a limited number of labeled 2D images is highly valuable. While recent work FisherMatch introduces semi-supervised learning to rotation regression, it suffers from rigid entropy-based pseudo-label filtering that fails to effectively distinguish between reliable and unreliable unlabeled samples. To address this limitation, we propose a hardness-aware curriculum learning framework that dynamically selects pseudo-labeled samples based on their difficulty, progressing from easy to complex examples. We introduce both multi-stage and adaptive curriculum strategies to replace fixed-threshold filtering with more flexible, hardness-aware mechanisms. Additionally, we present a novel structured data augmentation strategy specifically tailored for rotation estimation, which assembles composite images from augmented patches to introduce feature diversity while preserving critical geometric integrity. Comprehensive experiments on PASCAL3D+ and ObjectNet3D demonstrate that our method outperforms existing supervised and semi-supervised baselines, particularly in low-data regimes, validating the effectiveness of our curriculum learning framework and structured augmentation approach.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

PLATE: Plasticity-Tunable Efficient Adapters for Geometry-Aware Continual Learning

arXiv:2602.03846v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We develop a continual learning method for pretrained models that requires no access to old-task data, addressing a practical barrier in foundation model adaptation where pretraining distributions are often unavailable. Our key observation is that pretrained networks exhibit substantial geometric redundancy, and that this redundancy can be exploited in two complementary ways. First, redundant neurons provide a proxy for dominant pretraining-era feature directions, enabling the construction of approximately protected update subspaces directly from pretrained weights. Second, redundancy offers a natural bias for where to place plasticity: by restricting updates to a subset of redundant neurons and constraining the remaining degrees of freedom, we obtain update families with reduced functional drift on the old-data distribution and improved worst-case retention guarantees. These insights lead to \textsc{PLATE} (Plasticity-Tunable Efficient Adapters), a continual learning method requiring no past-task data that provides explicit control over the plasticity-retention trade-off. PLATE parameterizes each layer with a structured low-rank update $\Delta W = B A Q^\top$, where $B$ and $Q$ are computed once from pretrained weights and kept frozen, and only $A$ is trained on the new task. The code is available at https://github.com/SalesforceAIResearch/PLATE.

05.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-12

The Hong Kong Genome Project is a flagship initiative for precision medicine in Chinese populations

作者: 未知作者

The Hong Kong Genome Project established a genome sequencing database that provides improved diagnoses for patients and more efficient, population-tailored carrier status screening. Actionable pharmacogenomic variants were identified in almost all participants, informing drug prescriptions. This work establishes a genomic resource and a transferable model for equitable precision medicine in underrepresented populations worldwide.

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

What sentiment analysis can't see: Measuring whether customers were helped, and what went wrong, across 70,000 support conversations

Most companies read their customer support data at scale using sentiment analysis, which measures how customers sound rather than whether they were satisfied with the result. We tested a richer alternative on 70,450 support conversations from a leading online fundraising platform: alongside tone, we used GPT-5.4 to estimate each customer's satisfaction and to flag whether they reported a concrete problem, then validated all three readings against the 1-to-5 ratings customers left on the conversations they rated. The satisfaction estimate tracked those ratings far better than sentiment did, correlating at 0.47 against 0.36 and flagging unhappy customers with far fewer false alarms. The structured read also sees what sentiment cannot: tone and satisfaction disagree in 44% of conversations, a single "Neutral" label hides everything from quietly satisfied customers to ones who quietly gave up, and the largest group of all is "tolerated friction," customers who are satisfied but still reporting a fixable problem, a standing issue that no sentiment-based dashboard can surface. The broader finding is that LLM-based annotation can capture far more than the tonality of a customer's language, offering strong potential for new business metrics grounded instead in the customer's state (whether they were satisfied) and the cause of their problem extracted directly from the raw textual data of interactions and feedback.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

ProCUA-SFT Technical Report

Training computer-use agents (CUAs) – models that interact with graphical desktops through screenshots and keyboard/mouse actions – requires large-scale, diverse trajectory data collected in full desktop environments. The largest public resource, AgentNet (22.5K human trajectories), leads to negative transfer when used for supervised fine-tuning (SFT): continuing training UI-TARS 7B on AgentNet causes OSWorld success rate to fall from 26.3% to 8-10%. We present ProCUA-SFT, a dataset of 3.1M step-level SFT samples distilled from 93K synthetic trajectories across 2,484 application combinations. The dataset is produced by a fully automated pipeline that (i) synthesizes grounded tasks on live desktops seeded with real-world content – 912 spreadsheets from SpreadsheetBench, approximately 10K permissively-licensed presentations from Zenodo10K, and multi-application OSWorld configs – and (ii) verifies each task's feasibility through binary precondition checking before rollout. A single VLM (Kimi-K2.5) serves as goal generator, precondition judge, and trajectory executor, eliminating planner-actor capability gaps. Each trajectory is expanded into step-prefix samples that exactly reproduce the context layout seen at inference time. Fine-tuning UI-TARS 7B on ProCUA-SFT for one epoch yields 45.0% on OSWorld – an 18.7 percentage-point improvement over the base model and over 35% above AgentNet-trained counterparts. A subset of ProCUA was incorporated into the training data for the Nemotron 3 Nano Omni model, contributing to its computer-use capabilities.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Quantum charge pumping in helical systems: A comparative study of short- and long-range hopping

arXiv:2606.12914v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Using the Keldysh non-equilibrium Green's function approach, we investigate charge pumping through a single-stranded helical structure described by a tight-binding model that includes either short-range hopping (SRH) or long-range hopping (LRH). While quantum pumping has been studied in various low-dimensional systems, the detailed behavior of the spectral current and the pumped dc current in helical geometries in the presence of higher-order electron hopping (beyond nearest neighbors) has not yet been systematically explored. Here, we focus on the interplay between helicity and extended hopping ranges, analyzing how they jointly control the energy-resolved and dc pumped currents under time-periodic end potentials. For LRH, the pumped dc current exhibits pronounced plateau-like regions as a function of chemical potential when energy levels are sparsely spaced – consistent with adiabatic transport – whereas SRH yields more parameter-sensitive currents without clear plateaus. The plateau stability is controlled by the drive frequency: at higher frequencies, Floquet side-band mixing destroys the plateaus, leading to oscillatory currents. The phase dependence remains nearly sinusoidal, and the current vanishes at zero phase lag, confirming the necessity of out-of-phase potentials. Crucially, in helical systems, the decay exponent $(\ell_c)$ acts as an effective structural parameter that can tune both the magnitude and sign of the pumped current, offering a geometric knob for controlling quantum pumping. Our findings not only fill a gap in the understanding of spectral and pumped currents in helical systems with extended hopping but also provide tools that can be applied to analyze similar phenomena in other chiral or quasi-one-dimensional systems.

09.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Light-induced quantum friction of carbon nanotubes in water

Friction slows down moving objects at both macroscopic and microscopic scales1. At the electronic level, quantum friction describes direct transfer of momentum between a liquid and the electrons of a solid2. Owing to its microscopic nature, this phenomenon remains experimentally challenging to capture3. Here we show that near-infrared fluorescent single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) exhibit light-induced quantum friction in water. It is measured by observing an excitation-power-dependent linear decrease of around 50% in the diffusion constants of functionalized SWCNTs in aqueous solution. This effect disappears when excitons are localized, as in the case of SWCNTs with quantum defects. We further show that the chemical manipulation of exciton concentration by molecules that increase or decrease SWCNT fluorescence also modulates the diffusion constant by up to a factor of 2. Optical pump terahertz (THz) probe spectroscopy shows an instantaneous response (around 30 cm−1) that we assign to direct exciton–water coupling in the range of water Debye modes. It is followed by an increasing (>100 ps) response in the range of intermolecular translational modes of the hydrogen bond network of water (>100 cm−1), resembling heating. Classical molecular dynamics simulations further support a mechanism in which the fluctuating dipole moments of excitons create frictional forces. These findings establish light-induced quantum friction between excitons in SWCNTs and water and show that electronic excitations can be used to control nanoscale motion and fluid properties. Near-infrared fluorescent carbon nanotubes exhibit light-induced quantum friction in water, in which exciton interactions slow nanoscale motion and enable optical control of diffusion and fluid dynamics.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

MedLatentDx: Latent Multi-Agent Communication for Cross-Hospital Rare-Disease Diagnosis

Rare diseases affect over $300$ million patients across more than $7{,}000$ conditions, yet no single hospital encounters enough cases of any one condition for reliable diagnosis. Cross-hospital collaboration could help by allowing a diagnosing institution to use distributed, case-specific diagnostic evidence, but privacy regulations restrict the transmission of identifiable clinical text across institutional boundaries. This setting raises two challenges: existing medical agent systems often rely on textual evidence exchange, while raw latent states such as hidden states and KV caches may still reveal prompt-derived clinical content. We introduce MedLatentDx, a latent multi-agent communication framework in which hospital agents keep private clinical records and retrieved cases local, and send compact latent KV blocks to a host agent for rare-disease diagnosis. MedLatentDx supports two deployment settings: same-backbone hospital agents use latent KV distillation, while hospitals with different LLM backbones use cross-family latent alignment. On CrossRare-Bench, a self-built large-scale rare-disease benchmark with hospital-level partitions, MedLatentDx improves cross-hospital diagnostic performance while reducing reconstructable clinical content relative to raw-latent communication baselines.

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

ChatPlanner: A Large Language Model Framework for Personalized Public Transit Routing

arXiv:2606.15315v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Personalized public transit routing in public transit systems remains challenging due to the difficulty of capturing and integrating diverse user preferences into routing algorithms. This paper presents ChatPlanner, a novel framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to enable preference aware public transit routing. Our approach employs fine-tuned LLMs with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to extract routing parameters and interpret nuanced user preferences from natural language queries, subsequently integrating these preferences into the objective function of a public transit routing algorithm. This study designs preference aware datasets incorporating eight personas and five contexts to establish scoring standards for both fine-tuning and RAG. This work conducted three experiments to validate the solutions' feasibility, extraction of routing information and preferences, and solution set quality and completeness. Results demonstrate that ChatPlanner generates feasible solutions reliably. Fine-tuning enforces the required output structure and learns general preference patterns, while RAG provides query-specific context to resolve imprecise or conversational expressions and calibrate continuous scores. The combination of both achieves the highest accuracy in routing information extraction and user preference interpretation. Results based on selected case studies show that by capturing user preferences, ChatPlanner identifies valuable solutions across different dimensions that existing route planners overlook, generating more valuable route alternatives. This research establishes a new paradigm for integrating natural language understanding into transportation optimization.

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

Analysing drivers and interdependencies in European electricity markets using XAI

arXiv:2606.19118v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Electricity markets are inherently complex systems characterised by strong nonlinearities, high-dimensional interactions, and increasing interdependence across regions. While deep neural networks (DNNs) have demonstrated strong predictive capabilities for electricity prices, their lack of interpretability limits their usefulness for understanding the underlying drivers of price formation. This paper addresses this gap by combining DNN models with explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) techniques to analyse the determinants of electricity prices across 39 European bidding zones. We employ SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) to quantify feature contributions and apply and extend SSHAP, an aggregation framework to improve interpretability in high-dimensional settings. The analysis identifies that renewable energy sources, particularly solar, play a disproportionately important role in price formation despite their lower share in total power generation. Gas prices remain a dominant and consistent driver across electricity markets, while interconnections significantly shape price dynamics, highlighting the strong interdependence of European electricity systems. In addition, a synthetic EU-wide electricity market is constructed to explore the counterfactual scenario of a fully integrated market with a single price.

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

Learn Temporal Consistency For Robust Satellite Video Detector

Satellite video object detection (SVOD) for oriented and fine-grained objects plays an important role in satellite applications. Most existing SVOD methods only focus on one or a few coarse-grained categories of moving objects and represent objects with horizontal bounding boxes. They have difficulty extracting complete, accurate, and consistent information about objects in whole satellite videos. In this paper, we propose a satellite video object detection framework based on Temporal Consistency Learning (TCL). TCL adeptly detects oriented and fine-grained objects by leveraging the rich temporal contexts within satellite videos. The framework integrates three key modules: temporal and fine-grained feature aggregation (TFA), structure encoding (SE), and temporal consistency constraint (TCC). TFA and TCC modules facilitate consistent representation learning across frames, while the SE module encodes both appearance and structural information for precise fine-grained recognition. Experimental results on the SAT-MTB benchmark dataset demonstrate TCL's superior performance, achieving a new state-of-the-art oriented and fine-grained detection accuracy of 47.7% mAP–a 4.8% improvement over the baseline. Furthermore, our TCL framework readily accommodates existing image-based detectors, leading to enhanced detection accuracies.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Trusting Right Predictions for Wrong Reasons: A LIME Based Analysis of Deep Learning Interpretability in Lung Cancer Diagnosis

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related mortality, with approximately 2.5 million new cases and 1.8 million deaths annually, making reliable diagnosis a clinical priority. Although deep learning models have achieved strong performance in lung cancer classification, evaluation has largely focused on predictive accuracy, leaving their decision-making processes insufficiently examined. This study compares three architecturally distinct models: a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), a pretrained ResNet50, and a Vision Transformer (ViT), trained on the IQ-OTH/NCCD lung cancer CT dataset. Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME) were applied to investigate model reasoning. In addition to standard performance metrics, a dual-correlation framework was introduced to measure both prediction agreement and explanation agreement across model pairs. All three models achieved strong classification performance, with ResNet50 attaining 98.61% accuracy, CNN 97.91%, and ViT 93.75%, while all achieved ROC-AUC scores of 0.99. Prediction correlations exceeded 0.99 across all model pairs, indicating highly consistent outputs. However, LIME explanation correlations remained below 0.26, revealing substantial differences in the image regions used to reach those predictions. Analysis of misclassified samples further identified a consistent spatial pattern: incorrect predictions were associated with attention outside the lung parenchyma, whereas correct predictions focused primarily within lung regions. These findings demonstrate that prediction agreement is a poor proxy for reasoning consistency, and that interpretability evaluation must be treated as an independent validation criterion alongside predictive performance in clinical AI systems.

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

PosterForest: Hierarchical Multi-Agent Collaboration for Scientific Poster Generation

arXiv:2508.21720v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Automating scientific poster generation requires hierarchical document understanding and coherent content-layout planning. Existing methods often rely on flat summarization or optimize content and layout separately. As a result, they often suffer from information loss, weak logical flow, and poor visual balance. We present PosterForest, a training-free framework for scientific poster generation. Our method introduces the Poster Tree, a structured intermediate representation that captures document hierarchy and visual-textual semantics across multiple levels. Building on this representation, content and layout agents perform hierarchical reasoning and recursive refinement, progressively optimizing the poster from global organization to local composition. This joint optimization improves semantic coherence, logical flow, and visual harmony. Experiments show that PosterForest outperforms prior methods in both automatic and human evaluations, without additional training or domain-specific supervision.

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

Exploring Multi-Modal Large Language Models and Two-Stage Fine-Tuning for Fashion Image Retrieval

Composed image retrieval retrieves a target image using a composed query of a reference image and a modified text description. In the fashion domain, this task requires understanding subtle attribute variations such as color, pattern, and texture. However, existing approaches face limitations due to scarce annotated data and simplistic negative sampling. We propose a novel framework that integrates a multi-modal large language model (LLaVA) to generate attribute-aware triplets and introduces a two-stage fine-tuning strategy to enhance contrastive learning. We leverage pretrained vision-language models, such as CLIP-ViT/B32, to generate and concatenate sentence-level prompts with the relative caption and to scale the number of negatives using static representations. Experimental results demonstrate enhanced compositional reasoning and improved fine-grained retrieval behavior, underscoring the feasibility and potential of the proposed framework for fashion retrieval.

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

Language Models as Interfaces, Not Oracles: A Hybrid LLM-ML System for Pediatric Appendicitis

Large language models (LLMs) can make clinical decision support more accessible by interpreting free-text documentation, but their direct use as diagnostic engines is limited by sensitivity to prompts, information order, and plausible but incorrect outputs. Structured machine-learning models offer more stable risk prediction, yet they require tabular inputs that are difficult to integrate with narrative clinical workflows. We present ClaMPAPP (Clinical Language-assisted Machine-learning Pipeline for Appendicitis), a hybrid system that uses an LLM as an interface rather than as the final decision-maker. ClaMPAPP extracts schema-constrained clinical features from note-like narratives, applies deterministic plausibility checks, and passes validated features to an XGBoost classifier trained on clinical, laboratory, and ultrasound variables. We evaluated ClaMPAPP on two independent pediatric appendicitis cohorts from German hospitals and compared it with end-to-end LLM baselines, including open-source and proprietary models. To preserve ground truth while testing free-text input, narratives were generated from structured electronic health records through template rendering and constrained LLM rewriting, with additional sentence-order permutation to assess positional robustness. ClaMPAPP achieved the strongest overall diagnostic performance in both internal and external validation while minimizing missed appendicitis cases, the key safety concern in acute triage. End-to-end LLMs showed unstable sensitivity-specificity trade-offs and greater degradation under narrative reordering. These results support an LLM-as-interface, ML-as-predictor design that separates natural-language usability from predictive inference and provides a more auditable pathway for clinical decision support.

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

Flow Map Denoisers: Traversing the Distortion-Perception Plane for Inverse Problems

arXiv:2606.19802v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Image restoration faces a fundamental tradeoff: methods that minimize error produce blurry reconstructions, while those that maximize perceptual quality yield sharp but less faithful images. Existing approaches either commit to a single operating point on this distortion perception (DP) frontier or require paired-data supervision, auxiliary models, or hyperparameter tuning of the sampler to access different points. We show that flow map models, a recent extension of flow matching for few-step sampling that learns an average field, implicitly define a one-parameter family of denoisers that continuously spans the DP frontier. The lookahead parameter t acts as a control knob between the MMSE and perceptual regimes. For Gaussian targets, we prove that varying t exactly recovers the optimal DP frontier; for natural images, we observe similar behavior empirically. Within a Plug-and-Play solver, the same mechanism extends to general inverse problems, where it controls a tradeoff between perceptual alignment and data consistency. Despite the lack of exact optimality guarantees in this setting, a single trained flow map spans the DP tradeoff, matching or exceeding specialized baselines at both extremes. Extensive experiments on CelebA ($128\times 128$) and AFHQ ($256\times 256$) across several linear and nonlinear inverse tasks validate our findings.

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

Authorship Attribution in Multilingual Machine-Generated Texts

As Large Language Models (LLMs) have reached human-like fluency and coherence, distinguishing machine-generated text (MGT) from human-written content becomes increasingly difficult. While early efforts in MGT detection have focused on binary classification, the growing landscape and diversity of LLMs require a more fine-grained yet challenging authorship attribution (AA), i.e., being able to identify the precise generator (LLM or human) behind a text. However, AA remains nowadays confined to a monolingual setting, with English being the most investigated one, overlooking the multilingual nature and usage of modern LLMs. In this work, we introduce the problem of Multilingual Authorship Attribution, which involves attributing texts to human or multiple LLM generators across diverse languages. Focusing on 18 languages – covering multiple families and writing scripts – and 8 generators (7 LLMs and the human-authored class), we investigate the multilingual suitability of monolingual AA methods in terms of their cross-lingual transferability, and the impact of generators on attribution performance. Our results reveal that while certain monolingual AA methods can be adapted to multilingual settings, significant limitations and challenges remain, particularly in transferring across diverse language families, underscoring the complexity of multilingual AA and the need for more robust approaches to better match real-world scenarios.

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

Prefill Awareness in Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.12747v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safety-relevant studies of language models, including alignment and jailbreaking evaluations and AI control protocols, often rely on prefilling model outputs. If AI models can recognize and act on the fact their prior assistant messages have been inserted or edited, the effectiveness and validity of these methods could be compromised. We investigate whether frontier language models can distinguish between tampered and untampered assistant-side context, a capability we call prefill awareness. To do so, we construct a binary preference benchmark across three prefill mechanisms, filtering for cases where models show consistent stances. We find that frontier models show substantial prefill awareness: Claude Opus 4.5 detects prefills opposing its preferences in 9-35% of cases with a 0% false positive rate when prompted; additionally, models often revert towards baseline behavior without explicitly reporting that the prefill was foreign. Controlled ablations later also show that detection and resistance rely on different cues, where stylistic mismatch mainly affects whether models flag a prefill as foreign, while preference mismatch mainly affects whether they revert toward their baseline answer. We also examine more realistic agentic settings such as misalignment-continuation evaluations and SWE-bench trajectories, where frontier models sometimes disavow prefilled assistant turns in ways that depend strongly on dataset, task success, and hidden formatting artifacts. Our results indicate that prefill awareness is already a substantial confound for some prefill-based methods. We recommend that model developers track this capability in frontier systems.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Utility-Constrained Policy Optimization

arXiv:2606.14029v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Constrained MDPs (CMDPs) are a widely adopted framework for incorporating safety into RL agents; however, the framework does not support risk-sensitive constraints. This can be problematic: For example, CMDPs allow for optimal solutions that, in order to satisfy the risk-neutral constraints, mix infrequent catastrophic behaviors and frequent, overly conservative ones. Moreover, prior empirical results suggest that enforcing stricter, risk-sensitive constraints can improve performance even under risk-neutral evaluation. The natural framework to incorporate risk-sensitive constraints is utility-constrained MDPs (UCMDPs), but no practical solutions for this problem existed. In this work, we introduce a simple yet powerful methodology for UCMDPs and constrained RL. Besides allowing for risk-sensitive constraints, our framework does not require us to fix constraint limits in advance of training the agent, provided that a sensible range is known. This increases policy flexibility and, in practice, allows for adjustments to these limits at no extra training cost. Besides benefiting from the generality of the framework, our agent shows strong performance in practice, consistently matching or outperforming existing baselines in several Safety Gymnasium benchmark tasks.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Provably Efficient Regularized Online RLHF with Generalized Bilinear Preferences

arXiv:2602.23116v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider the problem of regularized best-response max-regret minimization in online RLHF under general preferences and bandit feedback. While various regularizers are utilized to robustify alignment, known polylogarithmic regret guarantees remain heavily specific to KL. To investigate whether such fast rates extend beyond KL, we adopt the Generalized Bilinear Preference Model (GBPM) – capturing intransitive preferences over $d$-dimensional item-wise features via a rank-$2r$ skew-symmetric matrix – to isolate the impact of generic regularization. Crucially, under GBPM, we prove that the dual gap of any greedy policy is bounded by the squared estimation error, derived using only strong convexity and skew-symmetry. Under a feature coverage assumption, we establish a generic polylogarithmic regret of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\eta d^4 C_{\min}^{-1} (\log T)^2 \wedge d^2 C_{\min}^{-1/2} \sqrt{T})$ with Greedy Sampling, and a dimension-wise improved regret (for well-conditioned arm-sets) of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(C_{\min}^{-2} \sqrt{\eta r T} \wedge r^{1/3} C_{\min}^{-4/3} T^{2/3})$ with Explore-Then-Commit, where $\eta^{-1}$ is the regularization coefficient, $T$ is the time horizon, and $C_{\min}$ is an arm-set dependent quantity. This demonstrates that ``fast'' regrets are not KL-specific, but rather a fundamental consequence of generic strongly convex geometry.

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

Bridging Information Asymmetry: A Hierarchical Framework for Blind Face Restoration with Reduced Uncertainty

Blind face restoration remains a persistent challenge due to the inherent ill-posedness of reconstructing holistic structures from severely constrained observations. Current generative paradigms, while capable of synthesizing realistic facial details, remain limited by the under-constrained nature of blind restoration, where severely degraded inputs can be mapped to plausible yet identity-inconsistent outputs. To address this issue, we present Pref-Restore, a hierarchical framework for BFR with reduced restoration uncertainty. Our design is organized around three complementary principles: (1) Semantic Information Augmentation, where an auto-regressive semantic branch converts image and text cues into structured tokens that provide a stable high-level anchor; (2) Texture-level Fidelity Alignment, where the diffusion generator is trained under this anchor to recover identity-relevant details; and (3) Fidelity-constrained Preference Optimization, where a face-aware reward refines the diffusion trajectory while controlling the quality–fidelity trade-off. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks show that Pref-Restore achieves state-of-the-art performance, with stronger identity-sensitive fidelity and lower restoration uncertainty across repeated sampling. Systematic ablations further attribute these gains to the proposed hierarchical design, showing the necessity of staged training, the robustness and quality dependence of the text pathway, and the benefit of fidelity-constrained preference optimization.

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

Encoder Winners Do Not Reliably Transfer Across VLA Backbone Scale: A Frozen-Backbone Grafting Diagnostic

Vision-language-action (VLA) policies typically inherit their vision encoder from upstream VLM releases, but it is unclear whether an encoder choice validated on a small VLA transfers to a larger backbone. We introduce a frozen-backbone grafting diagnostic: the vision tower of a released VLA is replaced by a candidate encoder under a fixed protocol (adaptive average pooling, LayerNorm, and a single trainable linear projector), with the language model and action expert frozen. Across four encoders, two LIBERO suites, two backbones (SmolVLA-450M and $\pi_{0.5}$-3.3B), and two-to-three seeds per cell (40 main grafting runs plus native, LoRA, pooling, and zero-/shuffled-image controls, all scored by offline action MSE), the small-backbone winner does not reliably select the large-backbone top tier: SigLIP is best on SmolVLA across both suites, while on $\pi_{0.5}$ DINOv2-small leads the spatial suite and the object suite is a seed-sensitive near-tie band; three of the four backbone-suite comparisons (and 11 of 12 seed-level cells) support backbone-dependent rankings. The grafting wrapper is itself non-neutral with opposite sign across backbones (+45-56% MSE on the SmolVLA native tower, -50-52% on $\pi_{0.5}$), so all conclusions are conditional on the fixed grafting protocol. We position frozen grafting as a cheap target-backbone diagnostic to run before committing to an encoder at scale, not as a closed-loop deployment claim.