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

AIGS-Net: Compact Illumination Field Modeling via 2D Gaussian Splatting for Fast Low-Light Image Enhancement

Existing low-light image enhancement methods often face a bottleneck between the representation capacity of illumination-field modeling and computational complexity. To address this issue, this paper proposes an Adaptive Illumination Gaussian Splatting Network (AIGS-Net), an ultra-lightweight architecture for fast low-light enhancement. Unlike conventional static priors, AIGS-Net constructs an input-adaptive 2D Gaussian Splatting illumination field. The opacity of Gaussian basis functions is dynamically modulated by relative luminance statistics of the input image, and spatially varying illumination compensation is rendered through ordered alpha compositing. To guide adaptive illumination compensation efficiently, a zero-parameter nonlinear multiscale contextual encoding module is introduced to extract low-frequency structures and local contrast cues without additional convolutional weights. To suppress noise amplification and sensor-induced color bias, AIGS-Net integrates noise-mask estimation, locked single-channel Gamma mapping, cross-channel consistency regularization, and target color-alignment constraints. Experiments on LOL and LSRW benchmarks show that AIGS-Net improves detail recovery and color fidelity while requiring only approximately 40 learnable parameters, achieving an effective trade-off between enhancement quality and extreme inference efficiency.

02.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Functions of Bounded Variation and Point Processes

arXiv:2606.08304v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We investigate the relationship between the analytical properties of functions of bounded variation and the statistical behavior of hyperuniform point processes. We establish several characterization formulas for the jump part of the gradient of a bounded variation function, extending and unifying previous results by Beretti–Gennaioli and Dávila. In particular, we provide new expressions for the $L^2$-jump of the gradient using both difference quotients and Fourier transform methods. Furthermore, we connect these analytic structures to the theory of hyperuniform point processes. By analyzing the variance of linear statistics associated with bounded variation functions, we provide asymptotic estimates that depend on the specific classification of the hyperuniformity of the point process. The results show how the regularity and jump discontinuities of a function dictate the growth rate of fluctuations in point processes. Finally, we introduce an averaged quadratic BMO-type oscillation functional over translated and rotated cube partitions, similar to the one recently studied by Ambrosio et al., and prove, using results from point process, that it converges to an explicit dimensional constant times the $L^2-$jump, giving in particular a further new characterization of the perimeter of a set.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Active Inference for Adaptive Traffic Signal Control in Noisy Nonstationary IoT Environments

arXiv:2606.13698v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Urban traffic signal control at IoT-instrumented intersections must remain effective under sensor occlusion, weather attenuation, and nonstationary demand. Conventional controllers degrade under these conditions, and learned policies remain difficult to audit. To address these challenges, we propose an active inference controller for a four-arm signalized intersection that dynamically selects phases by minimizing expected free energy (EFE) over Gaussian beliefs about per-direction congestion levels, yielding a fully traceable decision pipeline. We benchmark the controller in a SUMO traffic simulator against a rule-based heuristic and a deep Q-network (DQN) across four scenarios that progressively increase noise and nonstationarity, spanning sensor occlusion, adverse weather, and stochastic accidents. Across 100 independent random evaluations per scenario, active inference attains the lowest idle times and CO2 emissions in the noisiest scenarios (56,977 s and 29.12 kg vs. 71,741 s and 30.56 kg for DQN). These gains come at a modest cost in bus priority service rate and phase switch frequency.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Residual-Space Evolutionary Optimization via Flow-based Generative Models

arXiv:2606.20084v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Data editing with generative methods typically requires differentiable objectives and gradient-based search. However, these assumptions break down in flow-based settings, where edits are performed through forward and backward integration and often involve non-differentiable or black-box objectives. We introduce residual-space evolutionary optimization, a model-agnostic framework that addresses this gap by combining flow-based generative editing with evolutionary algorithms. Building on the observation that conditional flow matching (CFM) can disentangle condition-controlled factors from instance-specific residuals, our framework directly operates in residual space and separates two complementary search regimes: self-pollination performs local exploitation through feature-preserving residual refinement, and cross-pollination promotes broader exploration by recombining residuals across heterogeneous samples. As a proof of concept, we validate on MorphoMNIST, a benchmark dataset for counterfactual generation, and on crystal data, demonstrating that this exploration–exploitation decomposition provides a useful mechanism for balancing target alignment, instance preservation, and diversity, and extends beyond images to real-world scientific domains.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Koshur Diacritizer: A Byte-Level Sequence-to-Sequence Model for Kashmiri Diacritic Restoration

Kashmiri, an Indo-Aryan language written in a modified Perso-Arabic script, frequently omits diacritic marks in digital text, creating ambiguity and challenging downstream NLP applications. We present Koshur Diacritizer, a ByT5-small byte-level sequence-to-sequence model for restoring diacritics in Kashmiri text. To support this task, we release a publicly available dataset of 23.7k aligned undiacritized diacritized Kashmiri sentence pairs. The proposed framework combines script-aware normalization, alignment validation, and skeleton-preserving inference to ensure reliable restoration while maintaining the original base-letter sequence. Experimental results on a held-out test set achieve a DERm of 0.2012 and a WER of 0.2159. Additionally, evaluation by a native Kashmiri linguistic expert yields a mean accuracy of 77.5%. The dataset, model, and source code are publicly released to provide a reproducible baseline for Kashmiri diacritic restoration and future low-resource language research.

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

VietMed-MCQ: A Consistency-Filtered Data Synthesis Framework for Vietnamese Traditional Medicine Evaluation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in general medical domains. However, their performance significantly degrades in specialized, culturally specific domains such as Vietnamese Traditional Medicine (VTM), primarily due to the scarcity of high-quality, structured benchmarks. In this paper, we introduce VietMed-MCQ, a novel multiple-choice question dataset generated via a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline with an automated consistency check mechanism. Unlike previous synthetic datasets, our framework incorporates a dual-model validation approach to ensure reasoning consistency through independent answer verification, though the substring-based evidence checking has known limitations. The complete dataset of 3,190 questions spans three difficulty levels and underwent validation by one medical expert and four students, achieving 94.2 percent approval with substantial inter-rater agreement (Fleiss' kappa = 0.82). We benchmark seven open-source models on VietMed-MCQ. Results reveal that general-purpose models with strong Chinese priors outperform Vietnamese-centric models, highlighting cross-lingual conceptual transfer, while all models still struggle with complex diagnostic reasoning. Our code and dataset are publicly available to foster research in low-resource medical domains.

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

A Multi-level Analysis of Factors Associated with Student Performance: A Machine Learning Approach to the SAEB Microdata

arXiv:2510.22266v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Identifying the factors that influence student performance in basic education is a central challenge for formulating effective public policies in Brazil. This study introduces a multi-level machine learning approach to classify the proficiency of 9th-grade and high school students using microdata from the System of Assessment of Basic Education (SAEB). Our model uniquely integrates four data sources: student socioeconomic characteristics, teacher professional profiles, school indicators, and principal management profiles. A comparative analysis of four ensemble algorithms confirmed the superiority of a Random Forest model, which achieved 90.2% accuracy and an Area Under the Curve (AUC) of 96.7%. To move beyond prediction, we applied Explainable AI (XAI) using SHAP, which revealed that the school's average socioeconomic level is the most dominant predictor, demonstrating that systemic factors have a greater impact than individual characteristics in isolation. The primary conclusion is that academic performance is a systemic phenomenon deeply tied to the school's ecosystem. This study provides a data-driven, interpretable tool to inform policies aimed at promoting educational equity by addressing disparities between schools.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

AnnotateAnything: Automatic Annotation of 3D Assets for Robot Manipulation

Simulation enables scalable robot data collection, but raw 3D assets provide only geometry, lacking the semantic, interactive, and physical knowledge needed to specify where and how robots should act. In this work, we present AnnotateAnything, a general automatic annotation framework that converts passive 3D assets into manipulation-ready assets with structured, diverse, and executable manipulation labels. AnnotateAnything is built around two complementary pipelines. First, a unified visual-language annotation pipeline using vision-language reasoning to infer object semantics, interaction constraints, and 3D-grounded cues, providing human-prior guidance for identifying meaningful interaction regions. Second, a fully automatic and massively parallel physics annotation pipeline grounds these priors in each asset's geometry and physical constraints through candidate generation, geometry optimization and trajectory generation. This pipeline produces diverse and executable action annotations, including grasp poses, dexterous contacts, articulation waypoints, insertion directions, hanging affordances, and navigation targets. Using the generated annotations, we further build an asynchronous parallel simulation data-collection system across diverse objects, tasks, and robot embodiments. Experiments demonstrate that AnnotateAnything achieves superior annotation efficiency, data-collection efficiency, and task success rates over existing annotation and data-generation pipelines, while also supporting downstream tasks such as affordance detection, robotic VQA, and visual instruction finetuning. We provide project materials on the project page and plan to release the full code, annotations, and benchmark to facilitate future research. Videos, code, demo assets, and annotations are provided in supplementary materials Project page: https://tourmaline-caramel-169490.netlify.app.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

EqCollide: Equivariant and Collision-Aware Deformable Objects Neural Simulator

arXiv:2506.05797v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Simulating collisions of deformable objects is a fundamental yet challenging task due to the complexity of modeling solid mechanics and multi-body interactions. Existing data-driven methods often suffer from lack of equivariance to physical symmetries, inadequate handling of collisions, and limited scalability. Here we introduce \name, the first end-to-end equivariant neural fields simulator for deformable objects and their collisions. We propose an equivariant encoder to map object geometry and velocity into latent control points. A subsequent equivariant Graph Neural Network-based Neural Ordinary Differential Equation models the interactions among control points via collision-aware message passing. To reconstruct velocity fields, we query a neural field conditioned on control point features, enabling continuous and resolution-independent motion predictions. Experimental results on 2D and 3D scenarios show that \name achieves accurate, stable, and scalable simulations across diverse object configurations. It achieves $24.34\%$ to $57.62\%$ lower rollout MSE, even compared with the best-performing baseline model. Furthermore, \name could generalize to more colliding objects and extended temporal horizons, and stay robust to input transformed with group action. Code is available at: https://github.com/AI4Science-WestlakeU/EqCollide

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

Learning Hybrid Biophysical Neuron Models with Neural ODEs

arXiv:2606.16693v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Biophysical neuron models link measurements of neural activity to underlying cellular mechanisms. Yet, a central challenge is that the kinetics of many ion channels are poorly characterized, and practical simplifications – omitting channels or reducing morphological detail – introduce systematic gaps between model and biology. Bridging these gaps requires approaches that can flexibly discover unmodeled dynamics while preserving mechanistic interpretability. Here, we introduce a hybrid modeling framework that embeds neural ordinary differential equations into conductance-based biophysical models to capture unknown currents or mis-specified channel kinetics. By parameterizing the neural ODE in terms of voltage-dependent steady-state and time-constant functions, we recover interpretable gating dynamics directly from voltage recordings without assuming a functional form. We show that the hybrid model fits the gating kinetics of 2400 ion channel models and recovers unknown gating dynamics from single current-clamp recordings, generalizing to out-of-distribution stimulus regimes under realistic inputs and parameter misspecification. We also use our method to reduce a multicompartment model of a cortical neuron into a single-compartment hybrid model with a learned axial current, yielding up to an order of magnitude lower computational cost. Together, our results establish a plug-and-play framework for selectively replacing unknown components of conductance-based models with neural ODEs while preserving their mechanistic structure.

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

EngTrace: A Symbolic Benchmark for Verifiable Process Supervision of Engineering Reasoning

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly entering specialized, safety-critical engineering workflows governed by strict quantitative standards and immutable physical laws, making rigorous evaluation of their reasoning capabilities imperative. However, existing benchmarks such as MMLU, MATH, and HumanEval assess isolated cognitive skills, failing to capture the physically grounded reasoning central to engineering, where scientific principles, quantitative modeling, and practical constraints must converge. To enable verifiable process supervision in engineering, we introduce EngTrace, a symbolic benchmark built on 90 parameterized templates, each generating unique, contamination-resistant problem instances, spanning three major engineering branches, nine core domains, and 20 distinct areas, yielding 1,350 test cases that stress-test generalization across diverse physical scenarios. Moving beyond outcome matching, we introduce a verifiable two-stage evaluation framework that uses a tiered protocol to validate intermediate reasoning traces alongside final answers through automated procedural checks and a heterogeneous AI Tribunal. Our evaluation of 27 leading LLMs reveals a distinct trade-off between numeric precision and trace fidelity, identifying a complexity cliff where abstract mathematical pre-training fails to translate into the integrative reasoning required for advanced engineering tasks.

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

Unsafer in Many Turns: Benchmarking and Defending Multi-Turn Safety Risks in Tool-Using Agents

LLM-based agents are becoming increasingly capable, yet their safety lags behind. This creates a gap between what agents can do and should do. This gap widens as agents engage in multi-turn interactions and employ diverse tools, introducing new risks overlooked by existing benchmarks. To systematically scale safety testing into multi-turn, tool-realistic settings, we propose a principled taxonomy that transforms single-turn harmful tasks into multi-turn attack sequences. Using this taxonomy, we construct MT-AgentRisk (Multi-Turn Agent Risk Benchmark), the first benchmark to evaluate multi-turn tool-using agent safety. Our experiments reveal substantial safety degradation: the Attack Success Rate (ASR) increases by 16% on average across open and closed models in multi-turn settings. To close this gap, we propose ToolShield, a training-free, tool-agnostic, self-exploration defense: when encountering a new tool, the agent autonomously generates test cases, executes them to observe downstream effects, and distills safety experiences for deployment. Experiments show that ToolShield effectively reduces ASR by 30% on average in multi-turn interactions. Our code is available at https://github.com/CHATS-lab/ToolShield.

13.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Robust semi-supervised scRNA-seq integration from virtual adversarial learning

Single-cell RNA sequencing integration methods that rely solely on transcriptomic data often struggle to preserve fine-grained distinctions between closely related cell subtypes. As a result, cell populations that are separable in the raw data may become over-mixed after integration, reducing biological resolution and interpretability. Incorporating marker gene information can potentially address these issues; however, the variability and complexity of available marker sets limit their effective application. To address this, we introduce scCRAFT+, a semi-supervised integration model that innovatively incorporates marker gene information through Virtual Adversarial Training (VAT). By jointly optimizing marker-derived supervision and transcriptome-wide representations, VAT enforces local prediction smoothness among transcriptionally similar cells, improving robustness to noisy marker annotations while enhancing both integration quality and cell type auto-annotation. This targeted approach significantly enhances annotation accuracy and robustness, particularly when faced with incomplete or incorrect marker gene sets. Benchmarking shows that scCRAFT+ achieves consistently stronger performance than current unsupervised and supervised integration approaches, resulting in improved integration quality and biologically meaningful sub-cell type auto-annotations.

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

OncoReg: Medical Image Registration for Oncological Challenges

In modern cancer research, the vast volume of medical data generated is often underutilised due to challenges related to patient privacy. The OncoReg Challenge addresses this issue by enabling researchers to develop and validate image registration methods through a two-phase framework that ensures patient privacy while fostering the development of more generalisable AI models. Phase one involves working with a publicly available dataset, while phase two focuses on training models on a private dataset within secure hospital networks. OncoReg builds upon the foundation established by the Learn2Reg Challenge by incorporating the registration of interventional cone-beam computed tomography with standard planning fan-beam CT images in radiotherapy. Accurate image registration is crucial in oncology, particularly for dynamic treatment adjustments in image-guided radiotherapy, where precise alignment is necessary to minimise radiation exposure to healthy tissues while effectively targeting tumours. This work details the methodology and data behind the OncoReg Challenge and provides a comprehensive analysis of the competition entries and results. Findings reveal that feature extraction plays a pivotal role in this registration task. A new method emerging from this challenge demonstrated its versatility, while established approaches continue to perform comparably to newer techniques. Both deep learning and classical approaches still play significant roles in image registration, with the combination of methods, particularly in feature extraction, proving most effective.

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

How Fine-Grained Should a RAG Benchmark Be? A Hierarchical Framework for Synthetic Question Generation

Evaluating retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems requires benchmarks that capture diverse question characteristics, yet practitioners lack empirical guidance on which dimensions to vary and at what granularity. We present HieraRAG, a hierarchical framework for studying granularity in RAG benchmark construction, defining optimal granularity as the level that maximizes discriminative power (the standard deviation of generation quality across categories) within a given RAG configuration. As a case study, we generate 5,872 synthetic question-answer (QA) pairs from FineWeb-10BT across 3 dimensions (Question Complexity, Answer Type, Linguistic Variation) at 3 granularity levels (2, 4, and 8 categories). With a BM25+Falcon-3-10B pipeline, optimal granularity varies by dimension: complexity benefits from fine-grained distinctions (discriminative power: 0.053) while answer type and linguistic variation peak at medium granularity. We introduce a Coherence Ratio metric to quantify whether fine-grained splits cleanly subdivide parent categories, revealing structural differences across dimensions (Question Complexity: 0.40 vs. Answer Type: 1.44). Human evaluation of 110 stratified QA pairs confirms synthetic quality. While these specific findings reflect a single configuration, HieraRAG provides a portable procedure and validation metric for practitioners to determine evaluation granularity within their own RAG settings.

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

Neural Slack Variables for Shape Constraints

arXiv:2606.13803v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Enforcing functional inequality constraints such as monotonicity and convexity in neural networks is a fundamental challenge in many industrial and scientific applications. Classical one-sided penalty methods, along with primal-dual methods gated by complementary slackness, provide constraint gradients only at violated locations, resulting in fragile satisfaction. Architectures that guarantee feasibility by construction, on the other hand, remain largely limited to elementary cases and impose additional inductive biases. We introduce neural slack variables, a deep learning native primal-side approach that converts constraint enforcement into a regression problem by coupling the primary network with a jointly learned auxiliary network. The auxiliary network serves as a valid target for the primary network's constraint quantities, inducing feasibility and regularity. Neural slack variables achieve zero measured violations on dense-grid monotonicity and convexity test cases, where penalty and primal-dual baselines leave residual violations, and enable arbitrage-free learning of volatility surfaces, an open industrial challenge in quantitative finance.

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

Learning to Inject: Automated Prompt Injection via Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2602.05746v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Prompt injection is a critical vulnerability in LLM agents, yet the strongest methods still rely on human red-teamers and hand-crafted prompts. Adapting automated jailbreak optimizers does not close this gap: jailbreaks shape models toward generic compliance, while prompt injection requires emitting specific tool calls with correct parameters. The success signal is binary, and randomly sampled suffixes almost never trigger it, so standard optimizers have no gradient to follow. We present AutoInject, a black-box reinforcement learning (RL) framework that learns adversarial suffixes for prompt injection. A learned comparison-based reward scores each candidate against the best suffix seen so far, turning the binary signal into a dense reward suitable for RL optimization. The framework supports both online query-based attacks and offline-trained transferable suffixes that need no utility access at deployment, and incorporates a utility objective when task-completion feedback is available. On AgentDojo, AutoInject outperforms template attacks, GCG, TAP, and adaptive attack across production models, with statistically significant improvements under McNemar's test with p

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

Indexed Bellman Information Complexity

作者:

arXiv:2606.11171v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We develop indexed Bellman information complexity, a representation-level theory of interactive decision making centered on information indices and reference histories. The representation strips away problem-specific syntax and retains only the ingredients needed for dynamic programming and information accounting, thereby unifying the earlier framework of indexed algorithmic information ratios (AIR). On the upper-bound side, regret is controlled by Bellman supersolutions or potential identities whose gradient bracket is paid for by indexed information. Upper-confidence-bound (UCB), estimation-to-decision/decision-estimation-coefficient (E2D/DEC), and adaptive-minimax-sampling or exploration-by-optimization (AMS/EBO) methods appear as three relaxations of this same identity. On the lower-bound side, the posterior-reference trajectory supplies both the information telescope and the ghost quantile of small-regret trajectories. The resulting critical radius in the lower bound is an effective-dimension-scale quantity, as in Fano and local-prior-mass lower bounds, rather than the constant radius of a two-point Le Cam argument. The examples show that DEC is best viewed as a one-step relaxation of indexed Bellman information complexity, not as a universally tight conversion mechanism. We illustrate the framework through several applications, with particular emphasis on kernel bandits. In this setting, the active action marginal provides a concrete basis for comparing UCB, E2D, and AMS/EBO.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

LLM-Assisted Stance Detection in Scientific Discourse: A Test Case in Bayesian Cognitive Science

Qualitative coding is central to social science, but expert annotation is difficult to scale. LLMs offer a possible extension, yet require careful validation when the target construct is interpretive, theoretically loaded, and only indirectly expressed. We study this problem in a difficult case: detecting whether authors treat Bayesian models as descriptions of mental and neural mechanisms (realism) or as useful mathematical tools (instrumentalism). Our method combines a theory-driven codebook, expert-coded reference annotations, a diagnostic-gated prompt-optimization search yielding a shared zero-shot prompt for three frontier LLMs (GPT-5.1, Claude Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 3 Pro Preview), and multi-rater reliability analysis. The final prompt achieved a held-out combined reliability score of 0.76 (harmonic mean of ICC = 0.79 and $\alpha$ = 0.74), with all diagnostics satisfied. Deployed on 6,858 quotes from 210 articles, the three LLMs reached substantial quote-level agreement (ICC = 0.80; $\alpha$ = 0.76; combined = 0.78) and near-perfect article-level rank stability ($r$ = 0.96-0.97 across rater pairs). The corpus was predominantly weakly realist, but article-level stances were rarely uniform: only 1.4% of articles used a single band, while 59.5% spanned four or more. Low-level perception/motor articles scored 8.8 Realism points higher than high-level cognition articles ($p < .001$, $d = 0.60$), quantifying a long-held qualitative intuition. We present this as an expert-led case study; the framework is intended to generalize to similar theoretically demanding tasks, not to all qualitative analysis.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Context-Guided Semantic Alignment for Feature Fusion Networks

Feature fusion networks are fundamental components in modern object detectors, aggregating multi-scale features to detect objects of varying sizes. However, directly fusing features from different pyramid levels often introduces semantic inconsistency due to their heterogeneous representations. In this paper, we propose Feature Interaction NEtwork (FINE), a lightweight semantic alignment module that refines low-level features via high-level contextual guidance using cross-level attention prior to fusion. To bridge the structural gap and ensure computational efficiency, we introduce an Alignment-Aware Token Sampling that aligns corresponding spatial regions across scales, reducing the attention complexity by an order of magnitude. The resulting attention weights generate a spatial-channel modulation map that is upsampled and applied to the low-level features via residual element-wise modulation. This mechanism ensures that the network selectively enhances semantically relevant pixels while preserving the sub-pixel localization accuracy necessary for dense prediction tasks. FINE is generally applicable to various detectors and consistently improves detection accuracy without compromising efficiency.

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

Learning What to Remember: A Cognitively Grounded Multi-Factor Value Model for Agentic Memory

arXiv:2606.12945v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-running LLM agents accumulate interaction histories far larger than any context window, forcing a standing decision: what to encode deeply, what to forget, and what to retrieve under a fixed memory budget. Production systems answer with semantic similarity or recency – both mis-specified for the forgetting decision, which is made at consolidation time before the future query is known. We propose a multi-factor memory value function V(m)=\sum_i w_i f_i(m) over seven interpretable factors (emotional intensity, goal relevance, value alignment, self/user relevance, task utility, reliability, and usage history) drawn from cognitive psychology, whose weights are learned from a downstream objective by a gradient-free optimiser, and whose single scalar uniformly controls encoding depth, forget risk, and retrieval rank. We make a methodological point: on LongMemEval, scoring goal relevance against the held-out evaluation question saturates gold-evidence retention at \approx 0.98 – this measures retrieval, not forgetting. In the realistic blind regime, a learned multi-factor value retains 0.770 \pm 0.011 of gold evidence across 479 usable cases, versus 0.657 for uniform weights, 0.518 for the best single factor, and 0.368 for recency; every paired gap's 95% bootstrap CI is above zero, and a neural network over the same factors ties the linear model. The learned weights are interpretable – reliability, emotional intensity, and self/user relevance dominate, while query-time goal similarity is correctly down-weighted for the forgetting decision. A controlled synthetic task with planted confounds confirms the learner recovers a separating weighting (1.00 retention) where uniform weighting fails (0.62). The substrate is open-source; all experiments run on a single CPU with no API calls.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Quantitative Gait Categorization in Parkinson's Disease with and without Freezing of Gait

Background: Freezing of gait (FOG) is a disabling and often underrecognized feature of Parkinsons disease (PD). Objective gait analysis may improve characterization of this motor symptom. Objective: To compare quantitative 3D gait parameters in PD with FOG (PDF) and PD without FOG (PDNF) in a routine clinical cohort. Methods: We retrospectively analyzed a sequential sample of 180 patients with PD referred for motion analysis between 2020 and 2024. All patients underwent 3D motion capture in the off-medication state. Eighteen gait outcomes spanning pace, rhythm, postural control, variability, and asymmetry domains were derived from steady-state walking tasks. FOG status was determined using physician documentation and Movement Disorder Society Unified Parkinsons Disease Rating Scale (MDS-UPDRS) items. Group differences between PDF (n=99) and PDNF (n=81) were evaluated using independent samples t-tests, with outcomes adjusted for disease duration and corrected for multiple comparisons. A secondary analysis among PDF compared those in Hoehn and Yahr (H&Y) stage [&ge;]III to those in H&Y [&le;]II. Results: PDF had longer disease duration, higher OFF MDS-UPDRS III scores, and higher Hoehn and Yahr stage than PDNF but were similar in age and sex. After adjusting for disease duration and multiplicity, PDF demonstrated reduced step length, stride length, and forward velocity, and greater cadence variability, while most postural control, and asymmetry measures were comparable between groups. Among PDF, advanced H&Y stage was associated with impaired pace and rhythm, similar to previous reports among PD in general. Conclusion: In this large, sequential, clinically referred cohort, FOG was associated with more advanced PD and specific impairments in pace and gait variability. These findings support comprehensive 3D gait analysis as an objective tool to better delineate FOG-related gait abnormalities and identify features that may predict FOG, informing targeted interventions.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Large Language Models Hack Rewards, and Society

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a dominant post-training paradigm, enabling large language models (LLMs) to learn from rewards. We observe that societal regulations are structurally similar to reward functions. They define measurable outcomes, thresholds, and exceptions, while often leaving institutional intent only partially specified. We hypothesise that the RL training process may exploit these gaps and therefore ask whether models' well-known tendency to hack reward functions during RL can scale into a more consequential failure mode named societal hacking: discovering loopholes in the rules society runs on. To study this phenomenon, we introduce SocioHack, a sandbox of 72 societal environments, and find that within these environments, reward hacking naturally emerges and leads to regulatory loophole discovery. Models learn to hack the social rules and generate strategies that remain technically compliant while defeating regulatory intent, and current LLM safeguards provide only limited mitigation. Therefore, collecting in-the-wild feedback for model training requires greater caution, and we need a next-generation post-training paradigm for safely iterating LLMs in real society.=

24.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Metastability for the Curie-Weiss-Potts model with unbounded random interactions

arXiv:2505.11260v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We analyse the metastable behaviour of the disordered Curie–Weiss–Potts (DCWP) model subject to a Glauber dynamics. The model is a randomly disordered version of the mean-field $q$-spin Potts model (CWP), where the interaction coefficients between spins are general independent random variables. These random variables are chosen to have fixed mean (for simplicity taken to be $1$) and well defined cumulant generating function, with a fixed distribution not depending on the number of particles. The system evolves as a discrete-time Markov chain with single spin flip Metropolis dynamics at finite inverse temperature $\beta$. We provide a comparison of the metastable behaviour of the CWP and DCWP models, when $N \to \infty$. First, we establish the metastability of the CWP model and, using this result, prove metastability for the DCWP model (with high probability). We then determine the ratio between the metastable transition time for the DCWP model and the corresponding time for the CWP model. Specifically, we derive the asymptotic tail behavior and moments of this ratio. Our proof combines the potential-theoretic approach to metastability with concentration of measure techniques, the latter adapted to our specific context.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Spotlight: Synergizing Seed Exploration and Spot GPUs for DiT RL Post-Training

arXiv:2606.19004v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training of Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) is prohibitively expensive, requiring thousands of high-end GPUs. Existing works explore two directions to reduce cost: seed exploration improves training convergence by selecting high-contrast samples, yet adds compute to the critical path; spot GPUs offer 69–77\% lower cost, yet sit idle during training because DiT rollouts finish nearly simultaneously, which prevents LLM-style pipelining of rollout with training. Spot preemptions further break Sequence Parallelism (SP) groups, fragmenting GPU topology. We present Spotlight, the first system that harvests spot GPUs for DiT RL post-training. Spotlight rests on two key insights we devise: (1)~we show that exploration can tolerate stale model weights because exploration that uses the model weights from the previous iteration preserves the relative ranking of random seeds, allowing exploration to run on idle spot GPUs during training. (2)~SP reconfiguration can reuse on-node state, reducing group recovery from minutes to sub-second launches. Built on these insights, Spotlight introduces three techniques: a bandit-based exploration planner that maximizes reward variance within the training time budget, elastic sequence parallelism that reconfigures SP groups on the fly via persistent schedulers and intra-node weight copying, and a preemption-aware pull-based request scheduler that balances load and commits in-flight state upon preemption. We implement Spotlight on the open-source RL platform ROLL and evaluate it on Qwen-Image post-training. Spotlight reaches the same target validation score $4\times$ faster than baselines, reducing total cost by $1.4$-$6.4\times$ while achieving superior image quality on DeepSeek-OCR and Geneval datasets with resolution $512\times512$ and $1280\times1280$.