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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Enhancing Generative Auto-bidding with Offline Reward Evaluation and Policy Search

arXiv:2509.15927v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Auto-bidding is a critical tool for advertisers to improve advertising performance. Recent progress has demonstrated that AI-Generated Bidding (AIGB), which learns a conditional generative planner from offline data, achieves superior performance compared to typical offline reinforcement learning (RL)-based auto-bidding methods. However, existing AIGB methods still face a performance bottleneck due to their inherent inability to explore beyond the static dataset with feedback. To address this, we propose AIGB-Pearl (Planning with \textbf{EvaluAtor via RL}), a novel method that integrates generative planning and policy optimization. The core of AIGB-Pearl lies in constructing a trajectory evaluator to assess the quality of generated scores and designing a provably sound KL-Lipschitz-constrained score-maximization scheme to ensure safe and efficient exploration beyond the offline dataset. A practical algorithm that incorporates the synchronous coupling technique is further developed to ensure the model regularity required by the proposed scheme. Extensive experiments on both simulated and real-world advertising systems demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our approach.

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

Execution-State Capsules: Graph-Bound Execution-State Checkpoint and Restore for Low-Latency, Small-Batch, On-Device Physical-AI Serving

作者:

arXiv:2606.20537v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mainstream LLM serving systems reuse prefix work mainly through paged or radix key-value (KV) caches. This is highly effective for high-throughput, high-concurrency serving, but it manages only one positional fragment of execution state: the KV cache. We study the opposite regime: low-latency, small-batch, on-device physical-AI serving, where interactive LLM agents, speech systems, and robot policies repeatedly branch, reset, interrupt, and re-enter under tight responsiveness budgets. We introduce execution-state capsules, a graph-bound checkpoint and restore mechanism for the complete restorable state at a committed boundary. FlashRT is a white-box, backend-facing kernel runtime whose evaluated NVIDIA CUDA backend runs captured graph plans over contiguous static buffers with no block-table indirection. Because the live state is a closed set of named buffers, a capsule can snapshot, restore, fork, or roll back the whole execution boundary, including KV, recurrent state, convolution state, MTP state, and metadata. This moves reuse from token-addressed KV fragments to graph-bound execution-state boundaries. On an RTX 5090, capsule restore is byte-exact at the stored-state level and token-identical under greedy decode. A KV-only ablation diverges, showing that recurrent state is load-bearing. GPU-resident snapshot and restore are sub-millisecond, and TTFT speedup over cold prefill grows from 3.9x at 2k tokens to 27x at 16k tokens. On Jetson AGX Thor and DGX Spark, the same correctness and structural properties hold. Capsules are not a replacement for high-throughput KV-cache serving; they define a complementary latency-first serving point for explicit execution-state reuse.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

TopoHR: Hierarchical Centerline Representation for Cyclic Topology Reasoning in Driving Scenes with Point-to-Instance Relations

Topology reasoning is crucial for autonomous driving. Current methods primarily focus on instance-level learning for centerline detection, followed by a sequential module for topology reasoning that relies on simplified MLP layers. Moreover, they often neglect the importance of point-to-instance (P2I) relationships in topology reasoning. To address these limitations, we present TopoHR (Topological Hierarchical Representation), a novel end-to-end framework that establishes cyclic interaction between centerline detection and topology reasoning, allowing them to iteratively enhance each other. Specifically, we introduce a hierarchical centerline representation including point queries, instance queries, and semantic representations. These multi-level features are seamlessly integrated and fused within a hierarchical centerline decoder. Furthermore, we design a hierarchical topology reasoning module that captures both fine-grained P2I relationships and global instance-to-instance (I2I) connections within a unified architecture. With these novel components, TopoHR ensures accurate and robust topology reasoning. On the OpenLane-V2 benchmark, TopoHR refreshes state-of-the-art performance with significant improvements. Notably, compared with previous best results, TopoHR achieves +3.8 in $\mathrm{DET}_{l}$, +5.4 in $\mathrm{TOP}_{ll}$ on $subset_A$ and +11.0 in $\mathrm{DET}_{l}$, +7.9 in $\mathrm{TOP}_{ll}$ on $subset_B$, validating the effectiveness of the proposed components. The code will be shared publicly at https://github.com/Yifeng-Bai/TopoHR.git.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Data-Forcing Distillation: Restoring Diversity and Fidelity in Few-Step Video Generation

Recent progress has shown promise in distilling multi-step video diffusion models into efficient few-step students. Among them, Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) and its successor DMD2 achieved strong generation quality and fast convergence. However, due to the nature of the reverse Kullback–Leibler (KL) objective, these methods exhibit two persistent failure modes: a substantial drop in sample diversity, and visibly over-saturated outputs that deviate from real-video appearance. In this work, we propose Data-Forcing Distillation (DFD), a simple post-training framework that restores diversity and fidelity in DMD with only a single-line of code change. At its core is the teacher score discrepancy to guide the student toward the real-data distribution, pulling it to missing modes (mitigating mode collapse) and away from problematic modes absent in real data (avoiding over-saturation). We provide an in-depth theoretical analysis of our framework and validate our approach on text-to-video, image-to-video, and autoregressive video generation. With only 100–300 steps of finetuning, DFD effectively restores diversity and fidelity on both Wan2.1-1.3B and Cosmos-Predict2.5-2B model, resolving the over-saturation artifacts with significantly better video dynamics and appearance, and even outperforms the teacher model.

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

Global Ease of Living Index: a machine learning framework for longitudinal analysis of major economies

arXiv:2502.06866v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The drastic changes in the global economy, geopolitical conditions, and disruptions such as the COVID-19 pandemic have impacted the cost of living and quality of life. It is essential to comprehend the long-term implications of the cost of living and quality of life in major economies. A transparent and comprehensive living index must include multiple dimensions of living conditions. In this study, we present an approach to quantifying the quality of life through the Global Ease of Living Index that combines various socio-economic and infrastructural factors into a single composite score. Our index utilises economic indicators that define living standards, which could help in targeted interventions to improve specific areas. We present a machine learning framework to address missing data for certain economic indicators in specific countries. We then curate and update the data and use a dimensionality reduction approach (Principal Component Analysis and Factor Analysis) to create the Ease of Living Index for major economies since 1970. Our work significantly adds to the literature by offering a practical tool for policymakers to identify areas needing improvement, such as healthcare systems, employment opportunities, and public safety. Our approach with open data and code can be easily reproduced and applied to various contexts, providing transparency and accessibility for ongoing research and policy development in quality-of-life assessment.

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

A biological vision inspired framework for machine perception of abutting grating illusory contours

Higher levels of machine intelligence demand alignment with human perception and cognition. Deep neural networks (DNN) dominated machine intelligence have demonstrated exceptional performance across various real-world tasks. Nevertheless, recent evidence suggests that DNNs fail to perceive illusory contours like the abutting grating, a discrepancy that misaligns with human perception patterns. Departing from previous works, we propose a novel deep network called illusory contour perception network (ICPNet) inspired by the circuits of the visual cortex. In ICPNet, a multi-scale feature projection (MFP) module is designed to extract multi-scale representations. To boost the interaction between feedforward and feedback features, a feature interaction attention module (FIAM) is introduced. Moreover, drawing inspiration from the shape bias observed in human perception, an edge detection task conducted via the edge fusion module (EFM) injects shape constraints that guide the network to concentrate on the foreground. We assess our method on the existing AG-MNIST test set and the AG-Fashion-MNIST test sets constructed by this work. Comprehensive experimental results reveal that ICPNet is significantly more sensitive to abutting grating illusory contours than state-of-the-art models, with notable improvements in top-1 accuracy across various subsets. This work is expected to make a step towards human-level intelligence for DNN-based models.

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

CropTrack: A Tracking with Re-Identification Framework for Precision Agriculture

Multiple-object tracking (MOT) in agricultural environments presents major challenges due to repetitive patterns, similar object appearances, sudden illumination changes, and frequent occlusions. Contemporary trackers in this domain rely on the motion of objects rather than appearance for association. Nevertheless, they struggle to maintain object identities when targets undergo frequent and strong occlusions. The high similarity of object appearances makes integrating appearance-based association nontrivial for agricultural scenarios. To solve this problem we propose CropTrack, a novel MOT framework based on the combination of appearance and motion information. CropTrack integrates a reranking-enhanced appearance association, a one-to-many association with appearance-based conflict resolution strategy, and an exponential moving average prototype feature bank to improve appearance-based association. Evaluated on publicly available agricultural MOT datasets, CropTrack demonstrates consistent identity preservation, outperforming traditional motion-based tracking methods. Compared to the state of the art, CropTrack achieves significant gains in association accuracy and identification precision scores with a lower number of identity switches.

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

TS-Memory: Plug-and-Play Memory for Time Series Foundation Models

arXiv:2602.11550v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) achieve strong zero-shot forecasting through large-scale pre-training, but adapting them to downstream domains under distribution shift remains challenging. Existing solutions face a trade-off: Parametric Adaptation can cause catastrophic forgetting and requires costly multi-domain maintenance, while Non-Parametric Retrieval improves forecasts but incurs high inference latency due to datastore search. We propose Parametric Memory Distillation and implement it as TS-Memory, a lightweight memory adapter that augments frozen TSFMs. TS-Memory is trained in two stages. First, we construct an offline, retrieval-leakage-safe kNN teacher that synthesizes confidence-aware quantile targets from retrieved futures. Second, we distill this retrieval-induced distributional correction into a lightweight memory adapter via confidence-gated supervision. During inference, TS-Memory fuses memory and backbone predictions with constant-time overhead, enabling retrieval-free deployment. Experiments across diverse TSFMs and benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements in both point and probabilistic forecasting over representative adaptation methods, with efficiency comparable to the frozen backbone. Code: https://github.com/sisuolv/TS-Memory.

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

When Similar Means Different: Evaluating LLMs on Arabic–Hebrew Cognates

Arabic and Hebrew, as closely related Semitic languages, share a substantial lexicon of true cognates, misleading false friends, and modern loanwords. This overlap poses a challenge for cross-lingual semantic understanding in large language models (LLMs). To evaluate this capability, we introduce SemCog Bench, a curated benchmark of 1,858 Arabic–Hebrew word pairs with sentence-level annotations for cognate identification and semantic disambiguation. We evaluate open-source and commercial LLMs across multiple input representations (raw, diacritized, Romanized, and phonetic) and reveal a critical gap in cross-lingual reasoning. While models achieve high accuracy on true cognates, performance drops sharply on false friends and loanwords, reflecting a strong reliance on surface-form similarity. Furthermore, sentence-level context yields only modest improvements, suggesting that contextual cues alone are insufficient to overcome misleading form-based signals. These findings reveal a fundamental limitation of current LLMs in resolving cross-lingual form–meaning conflicts and establish SemCog Bench as a rigorous benchmark for multilingual semantic reasoning. Our code and data are publicly available.

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

A Complexity Measure for Active Learning in Multi-group Mean Estimation

arXiv:2606.14690v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study a max-risk objective for active learning in a multi-group mean estimation $d$-armed bandits: a learner adaptively allocates a budget of $T$ samples across $d$ groups to minimize the worst-case uncertainty index $\max_{k\in[d]}\sigma_k^2/n_k$, where $\sigma_k$ is the standard deviation of the distribution of arm $d$, and $n_k$ is the number of times arm $d$ is sampled. We develop a local minimax framework and prove the first general lower bound for this objective, valid for any finite-variance hypothesis class. The bound separates difficulty into three orthogonal factors: a budget term, a heteroscedasticity index measuring how unevenly the uncertainty is spread across arms, and a model-dependent complexity measure, the Variance Local Curvature ($\mathrm{VLC}$), which captures how much information a local change of variance creates inside the hypothesis class. For smooth classes, the $\mathrm{VLC}$ is a reparametrization of a variance–Fisher information, with closed-form values for common families. Benchmarking against the strongest available upper bound shows near-optimality up to logarithmic factors in broad regimes, and pinpoints a systematic gap in highly heterogeneous instances. Our proof introduces two key ingredients: a loss-induced $\ell_1$ geometry on the decision space, and a representation-based instance generator that reduces hard-instance construction to an explicit random matrix calculation.

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

Style-CCL: Content-Preserving Style Transfer via Curriculum Continual Learning

Content-Preserving Style transfer, given content and style references, remains challenging for Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) due to entangled content and style features. With a reverse triplet synthesis pipeline to build a million-scale training set and a dual-branch Style-Content DiT (SC-DiT) that decouples style and content via separate ROPE embeddings and causal masking, we observe that such a one-stage training paradigm on mixed style categories causes semantic styles to dominate, hindering texture style learning, and harming content preservation. To address these issues, we propose Style-CCL, a Multi-Stage Curriculum Continual Learning framework that trains SC-DiT from semantic (easy) to texture (hard) styles, and from clean to synthetic data, with Random Memory Rehearsal across stages to avoid catastrophic forgetting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our Style-CCL achieves state-of-the-art performance in three core metrics: style similarity, content consistency, and aesthetic quality.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

NARRAS: Edge-Triggered Distributed Inference for CSI-Based Localization in Vehicular IoT Networks

arXiv:2606.11914v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: CSI-based localization with spatially distributed antenna arrays exposes a basic resource trade-off. Each array can provide a rich view of the channel, but forwarding observations from all arrays to a fusion center is wasteful when only a few carry useful information, and the shared uplink supports only a limited number of simultaneous transmissions. We let each array decide locally whether its current observation is worth reporting, subject to a budget on the average number of active transmitters. We refer to this abstraction as Edge-Triggered Distributed Inference (ETDI). It captures a broader class of task-oriented communication problems where resource-constrained devices share an access channel for a common inference task. We instantiate ETDI for CSI-based localization, a common scenario in vehicular IoT networks. Spatially distributed remote antenna arrays (RAAs) encode local channel state information (CSI) from user equipment (UE) transmissions into latent features, and the fusion center estimates the UE position from the subset of reported features. We propose NARRAS, a decentralized reporting policy in which each RAA combines a recurrent summary of its recent observations with a memory of the last latent it transmitted. Training controls an explicit activity budget through differentiable activity penalties and validation-calibrated deterministic thresholds, and uses channel-chart regularization to shape the latent geometry. Experiments show that, at comparable uplink activity, NARRAS improves localization accuracy over learned and heuristic sparse-reporting strategies, while dense full-report models remain useful budget-free references. In low-activity regimes, chart regularization further reduces high-percentile localization errors, suggesting that geometry-aware latent representations are more robust under sparse reporting.

13.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-10

A mean-field model of neural networks with PV and SOM interneurons reveals connectivity-based mechanisms of gamma oscillations

by Farzin Tahvili, Martin Vinck, Matteo Di Volo Classic theoretical models of cortical oscillations are based on the interactions between two populations of excitatory and inhibitory neurons. Nevertheless, experimental studies and network simulations suggest that interneuron subclasses such as parvalbumin (PV) and somatostatin (SOM) exert distinct control over oscillatory dynamics. Yet, we lack a theoretical understanding of the mechanisms underlying oscillations in E-PV-SOM circuits and of the differences with respect to the classical mechanisms for oscillations in simpler E–I networks. Here, we derive a biologically realistic mean-field model of a canonical three-population E-PV-SOM circuit. This model robustly generates oscillations whose features are consistent with experimental observations, including the relative timing of PV and SOM activity and the effects of optogenetic perturbations. By reducing the model to a linear analytical form, we demonstrate that gamma oscillations emerge directly from the cell-specific connectivity of the three-population circuit. This connectivity motif alone accounts for experimentally observed phase relationships, with PV activity consistently leading that of SOM neurons. Together, this mean field model identifies a distinct structural mechanism giving rise to oscillations in canonical E–PV–SOM circuits and provides theoretical primitives for constructing large-scale, cell-type-specific models of cortical dynamics.

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

Fast Non-Episodic Finite-Horizon RL with K-Step Lookahead Thresholding

arXiv:2602.00781v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Online reinforcement learning in non-episodic, finite-horizon MDPs remains underexplored and is challenged by the need to estimate returns to a fixed terminal time. Existing infinite-horizon methods, which often rely on discounted contraction, do not naturally account for this fixed-horizon structure. We introduce a modified Q-function: rather than targeting the full-horizon, we learn a K-step lookahead Q-function that truncates planning to the next K steps. To further improve sample efficiency, we introduce a thresholding mechanism: actions are selected only when their estimated K-step lookahead value exceeds a time-varying threshold. We provide an efficient tabular learning algorithm for this novel objective, proving it achieves fast finite-sample convergence: it achieves minimax optimal constant regret for $K=1$ and $\mathcal{O}(\max((K-1),C_{K-1})\sqrt{SAT\log(T)})$ regret for any $K \geq 2$. We numerically evaluate the performance of our algorithm under the objective of maximizing reward. Our implementation adaptively increases K over time, balancing lookahead depth against estimation variance. Empirical results demonstrate superior cumulative rewards over state-of-the-art tabular RL methods across synthetic MDPs and RL environments: JumpRiverswim, FrozenLake and AnyTrading. Code is provided on \href{https://github.com/jamie01713/K-Step-Lookahead}{github}.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Agent Skill Evaluation and Evolution: Frameworks and Benchmarks

The growth of agent skills has transformed how agentic systems are built, evaluated, and deployed. As skill libraries continue to scale, rigorous evaluation becomes critical to ensuring their utility, quality, and safety in real-world applications. Consequently, the field is undergoing an emerging paradigm shift from isolated skill creation to automated, evaluation-driven skill evolution. In this survey, we systematically examine the landscape of skill evolution and evaluation beyond foundational skill creation. We categorize evolution into four distinct paradigms, spanning execution feedback, trajectory distillation, compression, and reinforcement learning, showing how each element contributes to improving skill utility and reliability. We also provide an analysis of six skill-centric benchmark categories, identifying structural gaps in benchmark coverage, trade-offs, and metric richness to advance skill research. Finally, we identify open directions for building skill ecosystems that are generalizable, efficient, and verifiably safe. The project URL is https://github.com/Cassie07/AgentSkill_Survey

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

Closed-loop discovery of out-of-distribution processing protocols by evolutionary search and uncertainty-aware learning

arXiv:2606.13859v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many materials and chemical systems exhibit history-dependent responses, where functional outcomes are governed not only by final-state variables but by the time-dependent sequence of fields, temperatures, or chemical potentials applied during operation. Discovering new processing protocols is therefore a high-dimensional search problem in which the control variable is an entire waveform or sample history, and conventional strategies either remain confined to conservative interpolative families or become prohibitively measurement intensive. Here, a closed-loop workflow is introduced that couples evolutionary search over a compact waveform representation with uncertainty-aware deep kernel learning to generate, rank, and experimentally validate candidate protocols. Applied to ferroelectric thin films, with the scanning-probe tip-bias waveform as the protocol and the nonlinear electromechanical response as the reward, the workflow discovers waveform families that enhance nonlinearity by de-aging the film. Spatially resolved before/after measurements show that the best-performing waveforms selectively activate pre-existing, weakly pinned domain-wall segments, whereas the worst drive long-range irreversible switching. This framework reframes protocol tuning as out-of-distribution discovery, generalizable to synthesis and annealing trajectories, battery formation protocols, and other high-dimensional control problems.

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

Investigating Faithfulness in Large Audio Language Models

arXiv:2509.22363v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) integrate audio encoders with pretrained Large Language Models to perform complex multimodal reasoning tasks. While these models can generate Chain-of-Thought (CoT) explanations, the faithfulness of these reasoning chains remains unclear. In this work, we propose a systematic framework to evaluate CoT faithfulness in LALMs with respect to both the input audio and the final model prediction. We define three criteria for audio faithfulness: hallucination-free, holistic, and attentive listening. We also introduce a benchmark based on both audio and CoT interventions to assess faithfulness\footnote{The benchmarking interface and evaluation results are available at https://poonehmousavi.github.io/faithfulness/. Experiments on Audio Flamingo 3 and Qwen2.5-Omni suggest a potential multimodal disconnect: reasoning often aligns with the final prediction but is not always strongly grounded in the audio and can be vulnerable to hallucinations or adversarial perturbations.

18.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Efficient and accurate neural-field reconstruction using resistive memory

作者:

Applications such as medical imaging, augmented and virtual reality, and embodied artificial intelligence (AI) depend on the ability to reconstruct complex signals from sparse observations. These applications are characterized by incomplete measurements and limited computational resources. Traditional approaches to digital hardware face the following challenges: explicit signal representations require heavy sampling and storage, data movement across the von Neumann bottleneck dominates energy and latency, and CMOS (complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor)-based circuits offer limited parallel efficiency. Here we present a software–hardware co-optimization framework for sparse-input signal reconstruction. At the software level, we use neural fields1 to implicitly represent signals using neural networks, which are further compressed by low-rank decomposition and structured pruning. At the hardware level, we design a resistive-memory-based computing-in-memory platform, featuring a Gaussian encoder and a multi-layer perceptron processing engine. The Gaussian encoder leverages the intrinsic stochasticity of resistive memory for efficient encoding, whereas the processing engine enables precise weight mapping through a hardware-aware quantization circuit. On a 40-nm 256 Kb resistive-memory macro, the system delivers 23.5×, 21.0× and 32.3× gains in projected energy efficiency, together with 10.8×, 38.8× and 6.2× gains in projected parallelism, for three-dimensional computed tomography sparse reconstruction, novel view synthesis and dynamic-scene novel view synthesis, without compromising on reconstruction quality. This work advances AI-driven signal reconstruction technology and paves the way for future efficient and robust medical AI and three-dimensional vision applications. A co-optimized AI hardware–software system using resistive-memory computing improves energy efficiency and parallelism for sparse signal reconstruction in imaging and three-dimensional vision applications.

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

Simulating Hate Speech Cascades with Multi-LLM Agents: Empirical Grounding, Modeling Fidelity, and Intervention Strategies

作者:

Faithful modeling of hateful content propagation on online platforms remains an open problem for moderation research. Classical cascade models that do not explicitly represent the profile, community, and content factors associated with hateful-content propagation may yield moderation strategies that behave less effectively when deployed in real-world scenarios. Multi-agent large language model (LLM) systems can, in principle, make each reshare decision depend on the user's profile, the surrounding community, and the post's content, but it remains unclear whether this added flexibility actually reproduces real hateful cascades more faithfully than classical baselines. We study three hateful Bluesky cascades and a size-matched benign control. In the empirical Bluesky data, we found that: 97.4–99.7\% of reposters take a hostile stance; toxicity-engagement homophily is higher on the diffusion tree than on the follower graph for hateful cascades; topology is star-like for the hateful cascades (most reposts come directly from the root) versus tree-like for the benign cascade (reposts propagate through multi-hop chains). In simulation, a multi-LLM-agent simulator reproduces the stance monoculture and the toxicity-delta direction. A structured ablation identifies agent heterogeneity as the leading fidelity factor, and amplifier targeting on dense networks yields 7.5–12.9\% reduction at 5.7\% benign collateral.

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

Surrogate-Assisted Framework for SI-Compliant Interconnect Design Optimization Using the Earth Mover's Distance

arXiv:2606.15234v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work presents a deterministic, machine-assisted framework for SI-compliant PCB design based on the Earth Mover's Distance (EMD). In contrast to conventional surrogate-based optimization methods that rely on iterative black-box search procedures, the proposed approach follows an interpretable, sequential evaluation strategy. Neural surrogate models are first used to efficiently predict waveform describing features from topology-dependent design parameters. A decision tree then acts as a physically motivated quality gate that identifies SI-compliant waveforms according to predefined SI criteria. Within the resulting valid solution space, the Earth Mover's Distance is employed as a similarity metric to rank candidate designs according to their proximity to an ideal reference signal. This enables not only the deterministic identification of admissible parameter regions but also a transparent prioritization of physically superior solutions without inverse modeling or stochastic search procedures. The methodology is demonstrated using a large-scale set of simulated DDR3 fly-by waveforms. By combining surrogate prediction, interpretable classification, and EMD-based waveform evaluation, the framework provides an explainable and computationally efficient alternative to conventional optimization strategies for supporting PCB development with AI-based methods.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

AgentCyberRange: Benchmarking Frontier AI Systems in Realistic Cyber Ranges

arXiv:2606.14295v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Frontier AI systems are increasingly capable of cybersecurity tasks, including codebase inspection, vulnerability detection, and exploitation. However, evaluating their offensive capabilities remains constrained by limited access to open, reproducible, multi-host cyber ranges. Existing public benchmarks capture isolated skills such as CTF solving, vulnerability reproduction, and exploit generation, but often abstract away realistic intrusion workflows: discovering exposed services, gaining a foothold, collecting internal information, and expanding compromise across hosts. This gap makes it difficult to observe emerging risks early, because frontier AI systems are rarely evaluated under realistic attack conditions. We introduce AgentCyberRange, the first open, multi-range infrastructure for measuring autonomous cyber attack capability in realistic cyber ranges. It combines 110 vulnerabilities across 15 real web applications and 8 enterprise-like cyber ranges with 156 internal hosts, plus Cage, a toolchain for execution, orchestration, result collection, and verification. The benchmark covers two core stages: web exploitation, where agents explore exposed applications and validate vulnerabilities, and post exploitation, where agents turn an initial foothold into broader internal compromise. We evaluate six frontier AI systems under matched prompts and budgets. GPT-5.5 with Codex performs best, solving 16.1% of web exploitation tasks and 31.7% of post-exploitation tasks; with more concrete hints, these rates increase to 33.0% and 46.3%. We also observe out-of-benchmark findings, including unknown vulnerabilities in popular projects, and payload mutation that bypasses host defenses. These results show that open cyber-range evaluation is necessary for observing emerging offensive capabilities under realistic and reproducible conditions.

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

Evaluating Universal Machine Learning Force Fields Against Experimental Measurements

arXiv:2508.05762v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Universal machine learning force fields (UMLFFs) promise to revolutionize materials science by enabling rapid atomistic simulations across the periodic table. However, their evaluation has been limited to computational benchmarks that may not reflect real-world performance. We introduce UniFFBench, a comprehensive evaluation framework featuring the MinX dataset – a diverse collection of 1,500+ mineral systems spanning 85 elements, extreme thermodynamic conditions (0–5000 K, 0–1000 GPa), and structural complexity, including partial occupancy and disorder. This diversity, combined with experimental reference values for validation, enables assessment of UMLFF generalization across chemical space and conditions substantially beyond typical training scenarios. Our systematic evaluation of six state-of-the-art UMLFFs reveals a substantial ``reality gap'': models achieving impressive performance on computational benchmarks often fail when confronted with experimental complexity. Even the best-performing models exhibit higher density prediction error than the threshold required for practical applications. We observe disconnects between simulation stability and mechanical property accuracy, with prediction errors correlating with training data representation rather than the modeling method.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Viral Proteins Reveal Geometry of Protein Language Models

arXiv:2606.12609v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protein language models are trained on highly imbalanced datasets, raising the question of how they represent underrepresented biological sequences. Using viral proteins as a case study across ESM model families, we identify a dominant nativeness axis in embedding space, aligned with masked reconstruction perplexity, that orders sequences from well-modeled cellular proteins through viral proteins to shuffled and random sequences. Scaling contracts this axis unevenly across viral families. Despite this, protein language model embeddings retain viral-specific signal: viral proteins remain linearly separable beyond zero-shot perplexity and shallow sequence features. Together, these results suggest that pLM representations are structured by a general notion of nativeness while preserving information specific to distinct biological groups.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

DF3DV-1K: A Large-Scale Dataset and Benchmark for Distractor-Free Novel View Synthesis

arXiv:2604.13416v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Advances in radiance fields have enabled photorealistic novel view synthesis. In several domains, large-scale real-world datasets have been developed to support comprehensive benchmarking and to facilitate progress beyond scene-specific reconstruction. However, for distractor-free radiance fields, a large-scale dataset with clean and cluttered images per scene remains lacking, limiting the development. To address this gap, we introduce DF3DV-1K, a large-scale real-world dataset comprising 1,048 scenes, each providing clean and cluttered image sets for benchmarking. In total, the dataset contains 89,924 images captured using consumer cameras to mimic casual capture, spanning 128 distractor types and 161 scene themes across indoor and outdoor environments. A curated subset of 41 scenes, DF3DV-41, is systematically designed to evaluate the robustness of distractor-free radiance field methods under challenging scenarios. Using DF3DV-1K, we benchmark nine recent distractor-free radiance field methods and 3D Gaussian Splatting, identifying the most robust methods and the most challenging scenarios. Beyond benchmarking, we demonstrate an application of DF3DV-1K by fine-tuning a diffusion-based 2D enhancer to improve radiance field methods, achieving average improvements of 0.96 dB PSNR and 0.057 LPIPS on the held-out set (e.g., DF3DV-41) and the On-the-go dataset. We hope DF3DV-1K facilitates the development of distractor-free vision and promotes progress beyond scene-specific approaches. The dataset and leaderboard are available at https://johnnylu305.github.io/df3dv1k_web/.

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

Learning What to Predict: Downstream-Guided Task Design for Continued Pretraining

arXiv:2601.22108v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continued pretraining is optimized with fixed self-supervised tasks but selected by downstream performance, creating a coarse feedback loop in which practitioners evaluate checkpoints, change data mixtures or objectives, and restart runs, while individual updates remain blind to target capabilities. We ask whether a small set of verifiable downstream examples can provide step-level feedback without directly supervising the learner. We introduce V-pretraining, which decouples a learner trained only with a self-supervised loss from a lightweight task designer that constructs targets or views for unlabeled batches. Given the current learner and batch, V-pretraining scores a candidate construction by predicting the first-order reduction in downstream loss after the induced self-supervised update. The designer maximizes this value; the learner then applies the update with targets or views detached, so downstream labels never update learner parameters. We instantiate V-pretraining as adaptive top-K soft targets for language modeling and learned views or masks for self-supervised vision. Across both modalities, V-pretraining improves target capabilities without degrading generalization. Under wall-clock-matched continued pretraining, it improves GSM8K Pass@1 for Qwen models using 1,024 GSM8K examples only as feedback, including a +7.4 point single-run gain for Qwen2.5-0.5B. In vision, it improves DINOv3 transfer to ADE20K semantic segmentation and NYUv2 depth estimation while preserving ImageNet linear accuracy, suggesting that feedback-guided task construction can improve target capabilities without collapsing general-purpose representations.