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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

ProfiLLM: Utility-Aligned Agentic User Profiling for Industrial Ride-Hailing Dispatch

arXiv:2606.18803v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bringing Large Language Models (LLMs) into industrial ride-hailing dispatch as semantic feature extractors over platform-scale behavioral logs is a compelling but under-explored data systems problem. Production matching pipelines remain dominated by structured numerical features, yet decisive behavioral signals (e.g., a driver's habitual aversion to certain regions) are inherently contextual and naturally expressible as LLM-generated user profiles. However, scaling such profiling to a live, millisecond-latency dispatcher faces three intertwined constraints rarely addressed together: on a platform with millions of daily orders, logs exceed any LLM's context window by orders of magnitude; most users are long-tail, with too few interactions for per-user profiling; and surface-fluent profiles do not necessarily improve downstream prediction utility. We present ProfiLLM, an agentic LLM data pipeline that operationalizes utility-aligned user profiling for production matching systems through two modules. (1) Tool-Augmented Global Knowledge Mining equips an LLM agent with 27 analytical tools to mine platform-scale data, producing reusable global knowledge, adaptive user clustering rules, and region-level supply-demand priors. (2) Utility-Aligned Profile Exploration generates multiple candidate profiles per cluster, evaluates them via a lightweight downstream utility proxy, iteratively refines the best candidates and constructs preference pairs for DPO fine-tuning. Deployed on DiDi's production dispatcher, ProfiLLM achieves up to +6.14% relative AUC improvement in outcome prediction, up to +4.35% GMV gain in dispatching simulation, and consistent improvements in a 14-day online A/B test including +0.47% GMV, +0.33% Completion Rate, and -0.82% Cancel-Before-Accept rate.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

EventDrive: Event Cameras for Vision-Language Driving Intelligence

Event cameras sense the world through asynchronous brightness changes with microsecond latency and high dynamic range, offering motion fidelity far beyond frame-based sensors and capturing temporal structure that conventional exposures often miss. These properties make events a powerful complement to RGB in autonomous driving, especially under blur, glare, and rapid motion, where frame-based perception can become unreliable. However, existing event-aware vision-language models remain limited to generic perception and do not reveal how event sensing contributes to reasoning and decision-making across the full driving loop. We present EventDrive, a large-scale benchmark and model suite that unifies event streams, RGB frames, and language supervision across four core dimensions: Perception, Understanding, Prediction, and Planning, covering captions, structured QA, grounding, motion-state recognition, trajectory forecasting, and planning tasks. Building on this foundation, EventDrive-VLM introduces a multi-horizon event pyramid and a temporal-horizon mixture-of-experts module to adaptively encode and fuse asynchronous and frame-based information for downstream reasoning. Comprehensive evaluation across diverse tasks shows that event streams provide substantial gains in temporal precision, motion awareness, and robustness, bringing event sensing into the center of driving intelligence.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Universal Crossovers of Stabilizer Entropy Beyond Criticality

arXiv:2606.13810v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Stabilizer Rényi entropy has emerged as a probe of nonstabilizerness in quantum many-body systems, but its scaling structure beyond critical points remains poorly understood compared with entanglement entropy. Recent field-theory approaches indicate that stabilizer entropy contains universal critical data and boundary-sensitive terms, raising the question of how these structures extend into massive and crossover regimes. We address this problem for a broad class of finite-range spin chains at Rényi index one-half. We derive exact finite-size formulas for both full periodic chains and finite intervals of the infinite chain, making the universal crossover from critical to noncritical behavior analytically accessible. In periodic geometry, the entropy obeys a volume law away from criticality and exhibits a universal finite-size crossover controlled by the competition between system size and correlation length. We also show that the large-scale SRE density develops a cusp across the field-tuned critical line, while the XX endpoint is governed by a distinct scaling regime associated with the saturation point. In the subsystem geometry, the interval entropy separates bulk critical behavior from boundary contributions generated by the way the finite region cuts the infinite chain. The crossover from critical to massive behavior is then encoded in boundary constants and universal functions controlled by the correlation length. Through exact stabilizer-entropy correspondences, the scaling theory extends to internal XY reductions, Finite-range spin chains, and Cluster–Ising representatives. Our results provide an exact lattice benchmark for the emerging QFT description of stabilizer entropy beyond isolated conformal points.

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

ADAPT: An Autonomous Forklift for Construction Site Operation

Efficient material logistics play a critical role in controlling costs and schedules in the construction industry. However, manual material handling remains prone to inefficiencies, delays, and safety risks. Autonomous forklifts offer a promising solution to streamline on-site logistics, reducing reliance on human operators and mitigating labor shortages. This paper presents the development and evaluation of ADAPT (Autonomous Dynamic All-terrain Pallet Transporter), a fully autonomous off-road forklift designed for construction environments. Unlike structured warehouse settings, construction sites pose significant challenges, including dynamic obstacles, unstructured terrain, and varying weather conditions. To address these challenges, our system integrates AI-driven perception techniques with traditional approaches for decision making, planning, and control, enabling reliable operation in complex environments. We validate the system through extensive real-world testing, comparing its continuous performance against an experienced human operator across various weather conditions. Our findings demonstrate that autonomous outdoor forklifts can operate near human-level performance, offering a viable path toward safer and more efficient construction logistics.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

A Knowledge Theory of Capital:The Value of Natural and Artificial Intelligence

arXiv:2606.18288v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This volume develops a knowledge theory of capital for economies in which productive capacity increasingly resides in software, data, models, routines, expertise, platforms, organizations, commons, and public epistemic infrastructure. Beginning from Adam Smith's theory of labour, stock, specialization, and market extent, it asks what changes when knowledge becomes stock-like, mobile across forms, scalable, governable, recombinable, and imperfectly visible in accounting. The book introduces knowledge-bearing stock as the central object and analyses how it is generated, converted into governable form, deployed, improved through feedback, enclosed or shared, measured, impaired, and used as input to future production. It distinguishes embodied, disembodied, institutionalized, commons, and public knowledge forms and develops concepts such as first conversion, cognitive enclosure, feedback capture, dark capital, and expected knowledge loss. The argument is conditional and testable: modern wealth depends not only on capital accumulation, but on how productive knowledge is governed.

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

HPSv3++: Scaling Reward Models Across the Full Spectrum of Diffusion Model Capabilities

Reward models guide text-to-image (T2I) systems toward outputs aligned with human preferences. However, typical reward models such as HPSv3 are trained on pre-annotated data from earlier T2I models, without accounting for quality discriminative shifts arising from evolving model capabilities and reinforcement learning (RL) iterations, limiting their broader applicability. In this work, we propose HPSv3++, a reward model framework that elevates the HPSv3 model for varying T2I model capabilities and their RL iteration changes across the full capability-iteration spectrum. Specifically, we first introduce HPDv3++, a 212K dual-dimension preference dataset annotated for text fidelity and aesthetic quality using a recent high-capability (Qwen-Image) model with human supervision. We then propose a two-stage training framework. Stage 1 employs data-aware orthogonal gradient projection to incorporate diverse aesthetic perception from HPDv3++ while preserving the original effective human preference knowledge in HPSv3. Stage 2 further leverages unlabeled data from T2I models spanning different capability levels and RL iterations, and introduces a joint capability-iterations conditioned signal for the reward model together with a standard deviation-driven unsupervised guidance mechanism, strengthening reward model across the capability-iteration spectrum. HPSv3++ achieves state-of-the-art preference prediction, outperforming HPSv3 9.8% on HPDv3, 5.5% on GenAI-Bench, while achieving 79.1%/88.1% on our proposed HPDv3++. When used for T2I RL training, it consistently improves GenEval scores across diverse T2I models, demonstrating its wide-range capabilities. The code is available at https://github.com/PlantPotatoOnMoon/HPSv3-PlusPlus.

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

SceneConductor: 3D Scene Generation from a Single Image with Multi-Agent Orchestration

Generating complete 3D scenes from a single image requires inferring globally consistent geometry, object relationships, and environmental context from inherently ambiguous visual evidence. Despite recent progress in joint layout-and-mesh generation, existing methods often rely on holistic or weakly decomposed pipelines that entangle many factors at once and demand extensive scene-level supervision, limiting their generalization to complex real-world environments. We propose a multi-agent orchestration framework that decomposes single-image 3D scene generation into three structured stages: scene initialization, environment construction, and multi-agent refinement. The initialization stage extracts image-derived object masks, builds object-level 3D representations, and predicts an initial spatial layout to form a coarse 3D scene. The environment-construction stage then leverages this initialization together with point-map geometry to build an environmental scaffold of supporting surfaces, room boundaries, materials, and illumination. Finally, in the refinement stage, a planner agent identifies structural and visual inconsistencies, applies simple corrections directly, and dispatches specialist agents for complex localized revisions that are reintegrated into the global scene. To provide reliable structural initialization while reducing reliance on scene-level annotations, we further introduce a geometry-aware layout predictor supervised by sparse geometric priors derived from point maps. Unlike fully supervised layout generators, the predictor can be trained from segmentation-level data and generalizes robustly to diverse real-world scenes. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that our method consistently outperforms prior approaches in geometric accuracy, spatial consistency, and perceptual realism.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Incentives and Evidence in Learned Service Orchestration

arXiv:2606.16555v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning for service orchestration has been the subject of sustained research for over a decade, yet it is not used in production at scale. The usual explanation is that learned controllers degrade under delayed and noisy telemetry, workload shifts, and uncontrolled tenants. We test whether existing evidence supports that explanation. We evaluate three highly influential RL-based orchestration systems spanning resource allocation, DAG scheduling, and autoscaling, using pre-registered predictions about comparative degradation under production-relevant perturbations and paired inference with family-wise error correction. Across the tests, most predicted performance reversals do not occur. Diagnostic analyses show that these outcomes often reflect comparator collapse, artefact limitations, or evaluation choices rather than evidence that learned controllers tolerate the perturbations. One apparent advantage under observation lag is roughly fortyfold compared to a Kubernetes HPA-equivalent controller. Another widely cited result cannot be reconstructed from its released artefact, and the strongest reproducible margin is far smaller than the published results. Conclusions also reverse under changes in perturbation magnitude and evaluation mode. Based on these results and broader patterns in the literature, we identify an institutional problem. Publication and review incentives favour benchmark gains against convenient comparators, even when those gains provide little evidence of deployment performance. We argue that the problem is not solely technical. Rather, it is institutional, so learned orchestration needs production-grade comparators, registered perturbation models, separate operational metrics, and publication criteria that reward reproducible operational evidence. Without these changes, the literature can grow without establishing whether learning improves orchestration.

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

Neural Phase Correlation

Correspondence is fundamentally relational: it seeks the unknown transformation between two observations of a common scene, not the content of either. Yet the dominant learning-based methods do not represent the transformation as a first-class object in the architecture. They encode each image independently and let a learned similarity function or a deep decoder discover the mapping implicitly. Phase correlation is the canonical exception, measuring the inter-image relationship directly in the Fourier domain, but the rigidity of its fixed basis confines it to global translation. We introduce a learned generalization of phase correlation that lifts this restriction by learning the basis on which the transformation decomposes. The same algebraic primitive extends to dense non-rigid deformations and to unitary dynamics. On the ACDC cardiac-MRI benchmark the framework matches or exceeds prior published baselines on both registration directions. On CAMUS echocardiography it matches state-of-the-art without auxiliary scoring or adaptive-smoothness mechanisms. Applied to time-evolved wavefunction pairs of the 1-D quantum harmonic oscillator, the same framework recovers the Hermite-function eigenstates and the quantized energy levels of the unknown Hamiltonian from observation pairs alone.

10.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-08

DDI_single: Single-Sequence-Based Protein Domain Assembly

作者:

Domains are the basic units of protein structure and function. Appropriate inter-domain organization is critical to enable cooperative execution of multiple related functions. It is thus a crucial step to determine the full-length structure of multi-domain proteins for the purpose of elucidating their functions and designing new drugs to regulate these functions. Existing structure prediction algorithms are generally better at solving the internal conformation of domains, rather than modeling the relative positions between domains. To address the challenge of accurately determining multi-domain protein conformations, we develop a single-sequence-based domain assembly algorithm called DDI_single. DDI_single directly extracts features from the amino acid sequence using the protein language model ESM-1b, and accurately predicts the interactions between residue pairs of structural domains through a novel gated cross-attention module, thus achieving the correct assembly of structural domains. With the knowledge of domain definition, DDI_single achieves more than 20% higher accuracy in the task of predicting the relative distances of residue pairs between domains than that of the single-sequence-based structure prediction algorithm trRosettaX_single. When assembling domains with known spatial conformations, DDI_single correctly assembles 74.4% of the samples in the test set (TM-score>0.5). When assembling domains with unknown spatial conformations, in cases where the internal spatial conformations of domains are correctly modeled, DDI_single correctly assembles 73.9% of the samples.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Position: Coding Benchmarks Are Misaligned with Agentic Software Engineering

Coding agents have become a major mode of software engineering, but the benchmarks we use to compare them were designed in a pre-agent era: they collapse model, harness, and environment into a single end-to-end score, typically computed against one reference solution, with no component-level signal for iteration. We argue that current coding benchmarks are misaligned with agentic software engineering. A coding agent in practice is not a model: it is a system harness – a composite of models, harnesses, contexts, environments, and feedback signals, any one of which can move the benchmark score by margins comparable to those between adjacent model generations. We discuss three symptoms: (i) benchmark scores conflate the model with the rest of the harness; (ii) grading against a single reference solution penalises equally valid alternatives; and (iii) the absence of signal at the level of individual harness components makes the end-to-end system score difficult to iterate on.

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

Cross-Modal Masked Compositional Concept Modeling for Enhancing Visio-Linguistic Compositionality

Contrastively trained vision-language models like CLIP, have made remarkable progress in learning joint image-text representations, but still face challenges in compositional understanding. They often exhibit a "bag-of-words" behavior–struggling to capture the object relations, attribute-object bindings, and word order dependencies. This limitation arises not only from the reliance on global, single-vector representations for optimization, but also from the insufficient exploitation and modeling of the rich compositional information inherently present in paired image text data. In this work, we propose MACCO (MAsked Compositional Concept MOdeling), a framework that masks compositional concepts in one modality and reconstructs them conditioned on the full contextual information from the other, enabling the model to capture and align cross-modal compositional structures more effectively. To facilitate this process, we introduce two auxiliary objectives that jointly align and regularize masked features both inter-modally and intra-modally. Extensive experiments on five compositional benchmarks, along with in-depth analyses, demonstrate that our approach not only significantly enhances compositionality in VLMs but also improves their ability to capture syntactic structure and linguistic information. Additionally, the improved compositionality also benefits text-to-image generation and multimodal large language model. Code is available at https://github.com/hiker-lw/MACCO.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

MolE-RAG: Molecular Structure-Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Chemistry

arXiv:2606.05693v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise for molecular property prediction, but their ability to reason over chemical structures remains limited, as molecular representations such as SMILES differ substantially from the natural language on which LLMs are primarily trained. To bridge this semantic and chemical knowledge gap, we propose MolE-RAG, a training-free, molecule-centric retrieval-augmented generation framework for LLM-based molecular property prediction. MolE-RAG augments each prediction with three complementary sources of inference-time context: retrieved chemistry literature, molecule-specific information including compound synonyms, identifiers, functional group annotations, and physicochemical descriptors, and structurally similar molecules retrieved from the training set. We evaluate MolE-RAG across nine molecular property prediction tasks using proprietary, chemistry-specialized, and open-source LLMs. Across general-purpose LLMs, MolE-RAG improves ROC-AUC by up to 28 percentage points on classification tasks and reduces regression RMSE by up to 67% relative to a SMILES-only baseline. We further find that the utility of each context source varies across models and tasks, with different models benefiting most from textual retrieval, molecular context, or structural retrieval. These results suggest that molecule-centric retrieval can improve LLM-based molecular property prediction without model fine-tuning while providing a flexible framework for integrating heterogeneous chemical knowledge at inference time.

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

AI Coding Agents Can Reproduce Social Science Findings

Recent anecdotal evidence suggests that AI coding agents can reproduce published findings when provided with original data and code; yet systematic evaluation across social sciences remains limited. Existing evaluation benchmarks are insufficient, either small or conflate agent performance with problems in the reproduction materials themselves, such as code that fails to execute correctly. Here we introduce SocSci-Repro-Bench, a benchmark of 221 tasks spanning four disciplines and 13 substantive domains, constructed from studies whose results are either fully reproducible with available materials or demonstrably non-reproducible due to missing data, allowing us to isolate agents' reproduction capacity. Evaluating two frontier coding agents, Claude Code and Codex, we find that both can reproduce a large share of social science findings, with Claude Code substantially outperforming Codex. These reproduction rates considerably exceed those previously reported for general-purpose LLM-based agents on comparable reproducibility benchmarks. Both agents also perform strongly on a reasoning task requiring identification of underlying research questions, and additional analyses suggest that results are not primarily driven by memorization. Providing the original paper PDF alongside replication materials modestly improves performance but introduces bias on tasks where reproduction is impossible. We also show that agents can be nudged toward confirmatory specification search through subtle prompt framing. Together, these findings suggest that at least some frontier coding agents can serve as reliable executors of computational workflows while underscoring the need for careful benchmarking and prompt design as AI systems assume larger roles in scientific production.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Nonlocal continuous-variable gates by amplified optical connections

arXiv:2603.12866v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Nonlocal quantum gates, coupling quantum systems located at a distance, are crucial for distributed quantum computing. To this aim, high-capacity optical noiseless connections between different processing units are essential for transmitting large amounts of information per mode. Simultaneously, optical quantum computing offers future high-speed multimode quantum processors. We propose a library of feasible protocols to implement a necessary nonlocal continuous-variable (CV) quantum nondemolition (QND) gate between two distant users sharing a quantum channel and exploiting classical communication. The users are endowed with a newly achieved high-fidelity and large-bandwith element - single-pass phase-sensitive optical parametric amplifier (OPA), that allows for both online squeezing and channel-loss compensation. The use of OPAs enhances quality of the resulting gate in terms of both excess noise and entangling capability. The proposed schemes are also applicable to CV cluster state fusion, providing a first step towards development of distributed CV measurement-based quantum computation.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Short-term relaxation after cervical rotatory manipulation is more closely associated with somatosensory input than cracking sound: a randomized controlled EEG study

Background Cervical rotatory manipulation is commonly used for neck-related symptoms and is often accompanied by a cracking sound. This sound is frequently regarded as a sign of successful manipulation, but whether it contributes substantially to the immediate relaxation response remains unclear. Objective This study examined whether short-term relaxation after cervical rotatory manipulation is more closely related to manipulation-associated sensory input than to the cracking sound cue alone. Methods In this single-session, three-arm, parallel randomized controlled study, 54 healthy volunteers were allocated to cervical rotatory manipulation, sham manipulation, or sham manipulation plus simulated cracking sound. Subjective outcomes were assessed before and after intervention, including positive affect, negative affect, comfort, and satisfaction. Eyes-closed resting-state electroencephalography was recorded before and after intervention. Prespecified neural outcomes included frontal alpha power, frontal alpha/beta ratio, occipital individual alpha frequency, and alpha-band fronto-parietal and fronto-temporal functional connectivity. Results Cervical rotatory manipulation produced greater improvements in positive affect, comfort, and satisfaction than sham manipulation or sham manipulation plus simulated cracking sound, whereas negative affect remained generally stable across groups. These subjective responses were accompanied by short-term electroencephalography changes, particularly in frontal alpha/beta and alpha-band fronto-parietal and fronto-temporal functional connectivity. Changes in frontal alpha/beta ratio were positively associated with changes in positive affect. In contrast, simulated cracking sound alone did not reproduce the full subjective or electroencephalography response observed after real manipulation. Conclusions The immediate relaxation response after cervical rotatory manipulation appears to be more closely related to manipulation-associated sensory input than to the cracking sound cue alone. These findings provide preliminary neurophysiological evidence for distinguishing real manipulation effects from sound-related contextual cues.

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

In-Domain Supervised Pathology Report Classification: A Reproducible Pipeline from Data Curation to Production-Matched Evaluation

We introduce an in-domain supervised pipeline designed to counter the out-of-distribution performance drop that hampers supervised biomedical NLP models, a problem observed when models trained on pathology reports are moved across cancer registries. Our contribution is a reproducible recipe for training a supervised classifier from routinely collected cancer registry data. It describes how to build the in-domain training set and a production-matched holdout, and to choose operating points that keep the false-negative rate (FNR) very low while keeping reviewer workload manageable. The pipeline standardizes data curation with facility-stratified sampling and separate handling of reports linked to registry cases, and includes a blinded manual audit to estimate positive-case prevalence and label noise. On a 418k-report holdout set, the Kentucky model achieved FNR 0.003 and false-positive rate (FPR) 0.097, improving over the Seattle-trained MOSSAIC OncoID baseline (FNR 0.010, FPR 0.183) and raising F1 from 0.860 to 0.922. In a blinded manual review of 600 reports, estimated positive prevalence declined from 0.500 to 0.398, indicating substantial label noise with errors concentrated in rare primary sites.

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

ExpRL: Exploratory RL for LLM Mid-Training

arXiv:2606.17024v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse reward reinforcement learning (RL) has become a standard tool for improving LLM reasoning, but its success depends critically on the coverage present in the base model. In practice, models are often primed for RL through mid-training on curated reasoning traces that teach useful primitive skills such as decomposition, verification, or self-correction. Although effective, this strategy requires manually specifying what the model should learn, and it remains unclear whether such primitive coverage is enough for much harder problems, which require combining these skills into broader solution strategies. We study a more automated approach: RL-based mid-training using large corpora of human-written question-answer data. Rather than treating reference solutions as targets to imitate, our method, ExpRL, uses them as reward scaffolds: references are hidden from the policy and used only to construct problem-specific grading rubrics for judging on-policy reasoning traces. The policy samples from the original problem prompt, while an LLM judge compares the sampled reasoning trace against the reference solution and assigns outcome-level or process-level dense rewards. This lets ExpRL reinforce partial progress, useful intermediate reductions, and productive reasoning behaviors that sparse final-answer rewards often fail to upweight. On challenging math reasoning tasks, ExpRL yields stronger RL priming than SFT, sparse-reward GRPO, and self-distillation, and provides a better initialization for subsequent sparse-reward RL. Additional mixed-domain experiments further suggest that ExpRL can extend beyond the original math-only setting.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

R2BC: Multi-Agent Imitation Learning from Single-Agent Demonstrations

arXiv:2510.18085v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Imitation Learning (IL) is a natural way for humans to teach robots, particularly when high-quality demonstrations are easy to obtain. While IL has been widely applied to single-robot settings, relatively few studies have addressed the extension of these methods to multi-agent systems, especially in settings where a single human must provide demonstrations to a team of collaborating robots. In this paper, we introduce and study Round-Robin Behavior Cloning (R2BC), a method that enables a single human operator to effectively train multi-robot systems through sequential, single-agent demonstrations. Our approach allows the human to teleoperate one agent at a time and incrementally teach multi-agent behavior to the entire system, without requiring demonstrations in the joint multi-agent action space. We show that R2BC methods match, and in some cases surpass, the performance of an oracle behavior cloning approach trained on privileged synchronized demonstrations across four multi-agent simulated tasks. Finally, we deploy R2BC on two physical robot tasks trained using real human demonstrations.

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

CLoVE: Personalized Federated Learning through Clustering of Loss Vector Embeddings

arXiv:2506.22427v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose CLoVE (Clustering of Loss Vector Embeddings), a novel algorithm for Clustered Federated Learning (CFL). In CFL, clients are naturally grouped into clusters based on their data distribution. However, identifying these clusters is challenging, as client assignments are unknown. CLoVE utilizes client embeddings derived from model losses on client data, and leverages the insight that clients in the same cluster share similar loss values, while those in different clusters exhibit distinct loss patterns. Based on these embeddings, CLoVE is able to iteratively identify and separate clients from different clusters and optimize cluster-specific models through federated aggregation. Key advantages of CLoVE over existing CFL algorithms are (1) its simplicity, (2) its applicability to both supervised and unsupervised settings, and (3) the fact that it eliminates the need for near-optimal model initialization, which makes it more robust and better suited for real-world applications. We establish theoretical convergence bounds, showing that CLoVE can recover clusters accurately with high probability in a single round and converges exponentially fast to optimal models in a linear setting. Our comprehensive experiments comparing with a variety of both CFL and generic Personalized Federated Learning (PFL) algorithms on different types of datasets and an extensive array of non-IID settings demonstrate that CLoVE achieves highly accurate cluster recovery in just a few rounds of training, along with state-of-the-art model accuracy, across a variety of both supervised and unsupervised PFL tasks.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Brain-IT-VQA: From Brain Signals to Answers

Decoding visual content from fMRI signals recorded while a person views images, and specifically answering questions about the seen images, is a long-standing challenge. While significant progress has been made in recent years in visual question answering (VQA) from fMRI, performance remains limited. Moreover, although recent models can make increasingly accurate predictions, they have rarely been used as tools for understanding the structure of visual representations in the brain. We present Brain-IT-VQA, a framework for visual question answering from fMRI. Building on the Brain Interaction Transformer (Brain-IT), our method decodes language tokens from brain activity and integrates them with a language model to answer visual questions. Our model substantially outperforms previous fMRI-based captioning and VQA approaches. We further introduce NSD-VQA, a new dataset and benchmark for visual question answering from fMRI. Unlike existing image-fMRI VQA datasets, which typically provide only a few broad and weakly controlled questions per image, NSD-VQA provides on average 20 question-answer pairs per image across 20 controlled question categories that disentangle multiple levels of visual understanding. This enables more reliable and interpretable evaluation despite limited fMRI test data. Together, Brain-IT-VQA and NSD-VQA provide both a strong predictive framework and a tool for studying brain representations. Using this benchmark, we quantify which forms of visual and semantic information can be reliably decoded from fMRI responses to natural images. We further analyze the contributions of different brain regions across question types.

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

Optimal Scheduling in a Question-Answering Forum of Knowledge Workers

arXiv:2606.19759v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As individuals turn to the Internet to find answers to questions they may have, several Question Answering (QA) forums have evolved, where users knowledgeable in certain topics can contribute their expertise to answering these requests for information. While these are currently volunteer based, we consider a future version employing knowledge workers who are experts in certain topics. In such a system, the request-answer processes forming the queuing system may utilize schedulers that assign requests in different topics to the experts in the forum, who may be able to answer them according to their expertise levels in different topics. With this model, we calculate the capacity of the system for handling the requests while keeping the system stable, and design schedulers that achieve capacity. We also investigate how collaboration between experts in answering requests can potentially increase capacity.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

What Does the Weight Norm Control in Grokking? Logit-Scale Mediation under Cross-Entropy

arXiv:2606.18465v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Grokking, the delayed jump from memorization to generalization, is usually tied to the weight norm: a smaller norm generalizes sooner. We ask what the norm actually controls. Holding the weight norm fixed by clamping and varying only an output temperature, we slide the grokking delay across its entire norm-induced range under cross-entropy; matching the effective logit scale back to baseline recovers about 85% of the delay at two moduli. Across a grid of norms and temperatures the delay collapses onto the logit scale alone (R2 = 0.97), with the norm adding 1-2% beyond it. The effect is loss-dependent: under mean-squared error the logit scale is pinned and the norm acts through a different route. A memorization control, a float64 softmax-collapse audit, and a no-LayerNorm transformer point to the same channel. Forking arms from one identical state, the delay follows the held norm value and not the clamp operation, which closes a rescaling-artifact concern. The proximal variable is the logit scale and the softmax saturation it drives; the weight norm is only an upstream handle. All numbers, tables, and figures reproduce from released code and data.

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

Kernel of Partition Paths: A Unified Representation for Tree Ensembles

arXiv:2606.18853v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A recent line of work has reframed individual decision trees as linear models on engineered features associated with their splits, opening routes for oracle inequalities and feature-importance reinterpretation, but leaving open the question of what unified geometric object a forest induces when one indexes its feature map by nodes rather than by splits. The present paper studies that object. KPP indexes the feature map by the nodes of the forest, weighted by a path metric that turns each coordinate into a component of a squared-Euclidean path-isometric embedding. KPP unifies four pillars under a single non-diagonal Gram that carries a metric: prediction, exact additive attribution, deterministic Lipschitz robust radius in the KPP metric, and uniform Rademacher risk bounds for regression and classification under fixed, honest, or cross-fit conditioning. All probabilistic guarantees are conditional on the representation and are stated under three explicit conditioning regimes; the robust-radius guarantee is deterministic in the KPP metric rather than in a norm on the raw input. Conjectured fast-rate refinements for both regression and classification are stated as open problems and are not claimed as theorems.

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

An AI Security Agent for University ACMIS: Multi-Vector Threat Detection and Automated Response

arXiv:2606.08270v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: University Academic Management Information Systems (ACMIS) are high-value targets for a wide spectrum of security threats including brute-force login attacks, payment fraud, privilege escalation, insider data theft, and academic integrity violations. Traditional rule-based intrusion detection systems are inadequate because many malicious activities are structurally indistinguishable from normal operations. This paper presents an AI-based security agent for ACMIS that combines supervised anomaly detection, behavioural analytics, and a natural language processing chatbot for secure password recovery. The agent monitors five operational layers: authentication, authorisation, financial transactions, user behaviour, and system health, and responds through a four-tier risk escalation framework. A modular architecture allows the core engine to be extended to other institutional systems. Experiments on a simulated ACMIS event log dataset of 147,922 sessions demonstrate a threat detection macro-average F1 of 0.966, compared to 0.156 for a rule-based baseline and 0.836 for a sequence-only (LSTM) baseline, with end-to-end critical-tier automated response latency under 1 ms on a single-node prototype. The integrated recovery chatbot achieves 97.1 percent identity verification accuracy and an 87.3 percent mass-reset attack detection rate with zero false positives on legitimate high volume recovery periods.