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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Vorticity Induced by Non-frontal Collisions of Quantum Droplets

arXiv:2606.17498v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rotational dynamics induced by the non-frontal binary collisions of quantum droplets composed of ultracold alkali atoms are analyzed. A theoretical study is presented within the extended Gross-Pitaevskii equation framework, using experimentally feasible conditions. Numerical experiments elucidate a rich landscape of possible topological excitations in the system that are robust towards measurements. The collision of heteronuclear quantum droplets composed of $^{41}$K and $^{87}$Rb atoms in the incompressible regime, gives rise to dynamical instabilities that spontaneously generate topological defects: vortex rings, dislocation lines, and vortices in one species. Their presence depends on the Weber number and the impact parameter. An experimental proposal for vortex detection in both real and Fourier space using interaction ramps is described.

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

KAN-MLP-Mixer: A comprehensive investigation of the usage of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) for improving IMU-based Human Activity Recognition

arXiv:2605.19031v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) have demonstrated an exceptional ability to learn complex functions on clean, low-dimensional data but struggle to maintain performance on noisy and imperfect real-world datasets. In contrast, conventional multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) are far more tolerant to noise and computationally efficient. Replacing all MLP components with KANs in HAR models often degrades accuracy and computation efficiency, highlighting an open challenge: how to combine KANs' precision with MLPs' noise robustness and efficiency. To address this, we systematically explore various placements of KAN modules within deep HAR networks and propose a hybrid architecture that strategically synergizes the strengths of both paradigms, which uses a KAN-based input embedding layer, retains MLP layers for intermediate feature mixing, and introduces a specialized LarctanKAN module for final activity classification. Across eight public HAR datasets, the hybrid KAN-MLP model achieves an average macro F1 score relative improvement of 5.33\% compared pure-MLP model, significantly outperforming standalone KAN and MLP baselines. Furthermore, integrating this hybrid strategy into other state-of-the-art HAR architectures consistently boosts their performance. Our findings demonstrate that a carefully orchestrated combination of KAN, MLP, or other conventional neural components yields more robust and accurate HAR models for real-world wearable sensing environments.

03.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-22

Why heritage sites are at risk in a warming world — and how to save them

As rising seas and intensifying disasters threaten historic sites worldwide, new ways to understand, preserve and adapt these places are needed urgently. As rising seas and intensifying disasters threaten historic sites worldwide, new ways to understand, preserve and adapt these places are needed urgently.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

ERN-Net : Evolving Reason Node-Net for Document Binarization

This paper presents ERN-Net, an Evolving Reason Node-Net for efficient document image binarization. ERN-Net enhances degradation-sensitive regions, such as faint strokes, broken characters, and noisy backgrounds, through evolving reason nodes and multi-scale reasoning. We further compare ResNet-101, ConvNeXt-Tiny, and ConvNeXt-Base, and find that ConvNeXt-Tiny provides the best practical trade-off between accuracy and memory usage. In addition, DIBCO-based pretraining improves binarization performance without increasing model memory consumption, requiring only about 1.5 additional training hours. Experiments on DIBCO-style benchmarks show that ERN-Net is effective under low-data and low-memory settings.

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

Effects of sparsity and superposition on loss in simple autoencoders

arXiv:2606.18538v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: One of the major difficulties in the mechanistic interpretability of neural networks is the occurrence of polysemanticity, which suggests that each neuron is typically responsible for multiple different tasks, impeding a clean interpretation of their function. The seminal paper of Elhage et al. (2022) argues that this occurs due to superposition, a phenomenon where the neural network represents distinct features as non-orthogonal directions in a lower-dimensional space, a strategy that allows much greater compression of the data without sacrificing fidelity due to the feature sparsity of input vectors. Elhage et al. (2022) empirically validates these hypotheses in a rather natural and simple autoencoder with sparse inputs. The contribution of the present work is to analyze the mathematical basis for the occurrence and optimality of superposition, while rigorously corroborating some of their findings. In particular, we provide upper and lower bounds for the L2 reconstruction loss, tight in the very sparse regime, for power activation functions. A short list of interesting open problems are also included at the end.

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

Exposure Bias as Epistemic Underidentification in Recursive Forecasting

arXiv:2606.12990v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recursive multi-step forecasting is usually framed as distribution shift: models are trained on observed histories but deployed on their own predictions. We show this framing is incomplete by proving that, under partial observability or state truncation, recursive rollout is also an epistemic underidentification problem. Even with deterministic latent dynamics, one-step Bayes supervision identifies behavior only on observed contexts and need not identify the deployed recursive predictor once rollout queries self-generated induced states whose correct local targets are not determined by numeric state alone. We formalize this with induced states $Z$ and provenance variables $P$, and derive a decomposition of induced-state error into teacher-forcing/rollout mismatch, representation–class approximation, and provenance information gaps. Empirically, we show that rollout enters a distinct induced-state regime, that fixed induced states define a distinct local corrective task, and that closed-loop gains arise not only from local adaptation but also from changing the induced states visited during rollout. Using a simple binary provenance encoding, provenance-aware correction can further improve performance, though gains are conditional rather than uniform. These results recast exposure bias as reasoning under self-induced epistemic uncertainty.

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

Temporal Motif-aware Graph Test-time Adaptation for OOD Blockchain Anomaly Detection

arXiv:2605.29526v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Ever-evolving transaction patterns have significantly hindered anomaly detection on emerging cryptocurrency blockchains due to the vast number of addresses and diverse anomalous behaviors. Recently, advanced Graph Anomaly Detection (GAD) approaches applied to blockchains have faced two critical challenges: adversarial pattern evolution by malicious actors and the out-of-distribution (OOD) problem caused by varied transaction semantics on blockchains. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework termed TEmporal Motif-aware Graph Test-Time Adaptation (TEMG-TTA). First, we comprehensively capture the 3-node temporal motif distribution of each active address using an efficient computational mechanism, enabling downstream temporal motif-aware graph learning. Second, we design a simple yet effective test-time adaptation strategy to facilitate the sharing of common patterns between training and testing graphs. Extensive experiments on 5 real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed TEMG-TTA outperforms state-of-the-art GAD approaches by an average of 54.88\%. A further case study on interpretable motif patterns reveals that TEMG-TTA explicitly characterizes the complex transaction patterns of anomalous addresses, thereby verifying the effectiveness of our technical designs. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/LuoXishuang0712/TEMG-TTA/.

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

Towards Next-Generation Healthcare: A Survey of Medical Embodied AI for Perception, Decision-Making, and Action

Foundation models have demonstrated impressive performance in enhancing healthcare efficiency across a wide range of medical applications. Nevertheless, their limited ability to perceive, understand, and interact with the physical world significantly constrains their effectiveness in real-world clinical workflows, where safety-critical decision-making and physical execution are tightly coupled. Recently, embodied artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a promising physical-interactive paradigm for intelligent healthcare, enabling agents to operate in complex medical environments. As research in this area rapidly expands, understanding how intelligent agents function as integrated, end-to-end systems in clinical environments becomes increasingly critical. However, existing surveys on medical embodied AI largely emphasize individual aspects or functional components, lacking a unified system-level organization of the field. To support and consolidate recent advances, we systematically survey the core components of medical embodied AI, with a particular emphasis on the coordinated integration of perception, decision-making, and action. We further review representative medical applications and relevant datasets, and we analyze the major challenges encountered in real-world clinical practice. Finally, we discuss key directions for future research in this rapidly evolving field. The associated project can be found at https://github.com/VMVLab/Medical_Embodied_AI_Paper_List.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Instrument-based quantum resources: quantification, hierarchies and towards constructing resource theories

arXiv:2508.09134v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum resources are certain features of the quantum world that provide advantages in certain information-theoretic, thermodynamic, or other useful operational tasks that are outside the realm of what classical theories can achieve. Quantum resource theories provide us with an elegant framework for studying these resources quantitatively and rigorously. While numerous state-based quantum resource theories have already been investigated, and to some extent, measurement-based resource theories have also been explored, instrument-based resource theories remain largely unexplored, with only a few notable exceptions. As quantum instruments are devices that provide both the classical outcomes of induced measurements and the post-measurement quantum states, they are quite important, especially for scenarios where multiple parties sequentially act on a quantum system. In this work, we study several instrument-based resource theories, namely (1) the resource theory of information preservability, (2) the resource theory of (strong) entanglement preservability, (3) the resource theory of (strong) incompatibility preservability, (4) the resource theory of traditional incompatibility, and (5) the resource theory of parallel incompatibility. Furthermore, we outline the hierarchies of these instrument-based resources and provide measures to quantify them. We then also established a relationship between our resource measure and the advantage in an information-theoretic task. In short, we provide a detailed framework for a wide variety of instrument-based quantum resource theories.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Navigating Gigapixel Pathology Images with Large Multimodal Models

Recent advances in large multimodal models have allowed for the development of interactive chat models that can converse and reason about pathology whole-slide images (WSIs). However, existing slide-level chat systems are often highly specialized, typically compressing WSIs into fixed slide-level embeddings or relying on multi-component pipelines, which can lose multi-scale detail and limit generalizability beyond the target task. We present GIANT (Gigapixel Image Agent for Navigating Tissue), a simple, training-free approach that lets general-purpose multimodal models navigate WSIs on their own, iteratively selecting multi-magnification crops and aggregating evidence over time. To evaluate generalizability in WSI question answering and to promote reproducibility, we introduce MultiPathQA, a benchmark suite spanning five clinical challenges and 934 questions over 868 unique WSIs. This includes a new set of 128 pathologist-authored multiple-choice questions designed to mirror real diagnostic search and multi-scale reasoning. Using GPT-5, GIANT outperforms models specialized for pathology question answering, achieving state-of-the-art performance on four out of five benchmarks.

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

Coercivity and Local Convergence of Physical Learning in Linear Circuits

arXiv:2606.15443v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Physical learning methods train physical networks to perform computational tasks using only local update rules, exploiting the physics of the system to handle the global transfer of information. We provide the first local convergence analysis of three such methods – Equilibrium Propagation (EP), Coupled Learning (CL), and a new method we call Adjoint Coupled Learning (AL) – for linear circuits, in the limit of small-nudging for both discrete and continuous time. EP and AL perform gradient descent on a natural loss function, while CL follows modified dynamics with an additional cubic correction. Assuming the existence of a solution, we identify a coercivity condition, expressed as a rank condition on a matrix built from the network's incidence structure, under which the training loss decays exponentially and the parameters converge to the solution manifold. We show that coercivity can fail by exhibiting a kite circuit in which a symmetry causes the coercivity constant to degenerate on the solution manifold, but prove using Sard's theorem that such degeneracies are non-generic: coercivity holds at every point of the solution manifold for almost every choice of desired output.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

VigilFormer: Deformable Attention for Video Anomaly Detection with Causal Risk Inference

作者:

Video anomaly detection in surveillance settings must balance detection accuracy against real-time throughput, a tension that existing methods address either through stronger feature extractors or more efficient architectures, but rarely both. We present VigilFormer, a unified framework that combines deformable spatio-temporal attention with causal temporal modeling to detect anomalies in untrimmed surveillance video. The proposed Deformable Spatio-Temporal Encoder (DSTE) attends to a sparse set of informative locations across frames, avoiding the quadratic cost of dense attention while retaining the ability to capture irregular motion patterns. A Causal Anomaly Classifier (CAC) applies dilated causal convolutions over snippet-level features and optimizes a contrastive multiple-instance learning objective that separates anomalous and normal representations without frame-level labels. To meet deployment constraints, an Adaptive Confidence Scheduler (ACS) dynamically skips low-information frames at inference time, reducing redundant computation in static scenes. Evaluated on UCF-Crime, ShanghaiTech, and CUHK Avenue, VigilFormer achieves AUC scores of 87.83%, 97.21%, and 89.74% respectively, at 41.5 FPS on a single GPU, outperforming recent weakly-supervised methods in both accuracy and speed.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Exclusion Statistics as a Thermodynamic Resource in Quantum Heat Engines

arXiv:2606.19310v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The maximum power extractable from a quantum thermoelectric heat engine operating with free fermion carriers is bounded by the universal Whitney limit, $P_{fermion}^{\max} \simeq 0.0321\pi^2 k_B^2(T_L-T_R)^2/h$. We demonstrate that this bound is not fundamental to quantum heat engines but is instead an artifact of fermionic statistics. Within the nonlinear Landauer-B\"{u}ttiker framework, a bosonic working medium yields a strictly enhanced universal maximum power, $P_{boson}^{\max} = (\ln 2)^2\, k_B^2(T_L-T_R)^2/h$, exceeding the fermionic limit by a factor of $(\ln 2)^2/(0.0321\pi^2) \approx 1.52$. We propose magnon transport through a ferromagnetic spin chain as an experimentally viable bosonic realization. Incorporating Haldane fractional exclusion statistics with parameter $g$ provides a continuous interpolation between the bosonic ($g = 0$) and fermionic ($g = 1$) limits, revealing a monotonic enhancement of maximum power for $g < 1$ at reduced bias cost. These results establish quantum statistical exclusion as a previously unrecognized and independently tunable thermodynamic resource, opening performance regimes inaccessible to conventional carrier-engineering approaches.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Architectural Bias in Face Presentation Attack Detection: A Comparative Study of Vision Transformers and Convolutional Neural Networks

Face Presentation Attack Detection (PAD) systems constitute a critical security layer in biometric authentication; however, existing approaches exhibit systematic performance disparities across demographic groups, disproportionately affecting individuals with darker skin tones. This paper presents a comparative empirical investigation of whether Vision Transformer architectures reduce demographic bias in face PAD systems relative to convolutional baselines. Experiments are conducted on the CASIA-SURF Cross-Ethnicity Face Anti-Spoofing (CeFA) dataset. Three architectures are evaluated: a Multimodal ViT-Tiny trained from scratch, a ResNet18 CNN baseline, and a pretrained DeiT-S fine-tuned on CeFA across African, East Asian, and zero-shot Central Asian demographic groups. DeiT-S achieves the highest overall accuracy of 97.27% and the lowest EER of 0.86%, outperforming ResNet18 at 90.15% accuracy. In terms of fairness, DeiT-S reduces the inter-ethnic ACER gap between African and East Asian subjects to 0.13%, compared to 0.75% reported in an LBP-based work [6], representing an 83% reduction. Most notably, while ResNet18 records a BPCER of 10.44% on zero-shot Central Asian subjects, DeiT-S maintains 2.89% on the same unseen group, demonstrating a 3.6x generalization advantage. These results suggest that pretrained Vision Transformers achieve superior PAD accuracy, produce smaller demographic performance gaps, and generalize more equitably across unseen demographic groups, indicating that cross-demographic fairness in PAD may partly be influenced by architectural design.

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

Counterfactual Credit Policy Optimization for Multi-Agent Collaboration

arXiv:2603.21563v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Collaborative multi-agent large language models (LLMs) can solve complex reasoning tasks by decomposing roles, but reinforcement learning for such systems is limited by credit assignment: shared terminal rewards obscure individual contributions and can encourage free-riding. We introduce two optimizer-agnostic credit assignment methods for converting joint outcomes into agent-specific learning signals. Counterfactual Credit for Policy Optimization (CCPO) estimates an agent's marginal contribution by comparing the realized joint outcome with a counterfactual outcome where that agent is removed. Self-Evaluated Credit for Policy Optimization (SEPO) uses constrained self- and peer-evaluations as a verifier-anchored credit signal while keeping the external task outcome dominant. Both operate at the reward-construction layer rather than as policy optimizers, producing role-specific rewards or advantages for GRPO, GSPO, or REINFORCE++. We instantiate these credit signals in a sequential Think–Solve setting and evaluate them on mathematical reasoning benchmarks. Results show that explicit credit assignment often improves dual-agent reasoning, especially on MATH500 and several out-of-distribution settings, while gains vary across models and datasets. Our code is available at: https://github.com/bhai114/ccpo.

16.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Helping Figures Tell their Story! Paper-Grounded Video Generation Explaining Complex Scientific Figures

Scientific figures compress complex pipelines into a single canvas, yet understanding them requires paper-grounded, step-by-step narration aligned with visual highlights a capability missing from current video generation systems and benchmarks. To address this, we introduce paper-grounded figure-to-video generation: generating narrated, region-grounded walkthrough videos from a figure and its paper. We propose MINARD (Multimodal Interpretation of Narrated Architecture via Region Decomposition), a pipeline that generates paper-grounded narrations and sequentially grounds them to figure regions. We also release FigTalk, a benchmark with new sequential and component-level grounding metrics derived. On FigTalk, MINARD generates humanlike, paper-faithful narrations and outperforms narration-conditioned figure spatial grounding compared to existing approaches in both automatic and human evaluation

17.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-15

Nanocrystal-tailored recombination for all-perovskite tandem solar modules

作者:

The commercialization of all-perovskite tandem solar modules is hindered by the reliance on the conventional gold-based tunnel recombination junction (TRJ)1,2. Specifically, this TRJ introduces substantial near-infrared parasitic absorption3 and suffers from interfacial instability4, limiting both photocurrent generation and operational durability. Here, we develop a solution-processed interconnecting layer based on surface-engineered indium oxide (In2O3) nanocrystals featuring high optical transparency, wherein controlled nanocrystal morphology and tailored ligand chemistry enable smooth interfacial contact and favorable energy level alignment. Critically, we introduce a phosphonic acid additive into the lead–tin (Pb–Sn) perovskite precursor, which synergistically improves the electronic contact with the In2O3 recombination layer, thereby enhancing hole extraction. In addition, the additive regulates perovskite crystallization to mitigate residual strain during film formation, ensuring high-quality large-area deposits. This coordinated interfacial and crystallization engineering strategy simultaneously enhances carrier recombination efficiency at the interconnection layer, improves carrier extraction, and promotes large-area film uniformity in all-perovskite tandems. As a result, a 65-cm2 all-perovskite tandem solar module achieves a certified power conversion efficiency of 26.2%5, with an open-circuit voltage of 2.182 V, a fill factor of 77.4%, and a short-circuit current density of 15.6 mA cm-2 in terms of averaged subcell performance, measured by Japan Electrical Safety and Environment Technology Laboratories (JET). This marks a significant advance toward scalable perovskite tandem photovoltaics.

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

Hybrid NARX-LLM for Greenland Iceberg Discharge: Prompt-Driven Residual Correction

arXiv:2606.15288v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Greenland iceberg discharge exhibits complex nonlinear dynamics with limited observability, challenging traditional predictive models. We present a Hybrid NARX-LLM framework that combines a nonlinear autoregressive model with exogenous inputs (NARX) and a large language model (LLM) for residual correction. We further propose a Physics-Informed Prompt (PIP) method that transforms unstructured physical knowledge into structured prompts for zero-shot in-context reasoning. The primary objective is to explore the corrective potential of this framework for modeling Greenland iceberg discharge, rather than merely optimizing predictive accuracy. The NARX component captures intrinsic temporal dependencies, while the LLM, guided by PIP, encodes glacier dynamics and environmental drivers and perceives key trend patterns to correct systematic prediction errors. This integration allows the model to reason about unmodeled factors and produce interpretable residuals, enhancing overall predictive accuracy. Applied to Greenland iceberg discharge time series, our approach addresses extreme events that are difficult to predict due to rare variations and nonstationary trends, a limitation often overlooked by traditional methods. By fusing structured time-series modeling with knowledge-driven foundation AI, the framework offers a scalable and interpretable pathway to bridge data-limited climate forecasting with physics-informed LLM reasoning. The code is available.

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

Semantic Flip: Synthetic OOD Generation for Robust Refusal in Embodied Question Answering and Spatial Localization

Detecting unanswerable user queries remains essential for the reliable deployment of real-world embodied agents. However, modern vision-language models (VLMs) often generate overly confident answers even when the available visual memory cannot support the query. Such overconfidence poses various task-dependent risks. The agent may provide misleading information to the user in Embodied Question Answering and select an arbitrary coordinate and physically guide the user there in spatial reasoning for navigation. Despite these high stakes, only a few prior studies directly address when and how an embodied VLM should respond with "I do not know." This work proposes Semantic Flip, a simple yet effective framework that synthesizes auxiliary out-of-distribution (OOD) samples for embodied refusal without requiring external OOD annotations. The key idea is to independently transform the query and video memory to construct auxiliary OOD pairs that lack sufficient visual grounding. These synthesized pairs enable training a lightweight rejection module on top of a frozen pretrained VLM. The module attaches to any existing VLM-based pipeline without retraining the underlying model. Across two complementary benchmarks, Semantic Flip consistently outperforms strong prompting baselines. This work also introduces SpaceReject, a new refusal benchmark for spatial localization with deliberately unanswerable queries over long video memory, where Semantic Flip achieves an $F_1$ score of 0.9559. The source codes and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/ndb796/SemanticFlip.

21.
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.=

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

FineVLA: Fine-Grained Instruction Alignment for Steerable Vision-Language-Action Policies

arXiv:2605.27284v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are increasingly expected to not only complete robot tasks, but also follow human instructions about how those tasks should be executed. However, existing robot datasets usually pair trajectories with coarse goal-level language, leaving execution-critical details such as active arm, approach direction, and contact region unspecified. This limits steerable policy learning and robotic video understanding. We introduce FineVLA, an open framework for action-aligned fine-grained VLA supervision. The framework includes: (1) a data construction tool that unifies 972,247 trajectories across 85K tasks from 10 open-source robot datasets and builds FineVLA-Data, a human-verified dataset of 47,159 fine-grained trajectories; (2) a held-out benchmark with 500 videos, 11,631 atomic facts, and 1,030 VQA questions; (3) a robotics-specialized VLM annotator for scalable fine-grained annotation; and (4) a steerable VLA policy trained with controlled mixtures of fine-grained and raw goal-level instructions. Our experiments yield three findings. First, fine-grained supervision does not sacrifice goal-level success: FG-only improves over Raw-only by +1.4 to +8.1 success-rate points across settings. Second, fine-grained and raw instructions are complementary, following a consistent inverted-U trend peaking at FG:Raw = 1:2 to 1:1. The best mixed setting reaches 86.8%/82.5% in RoboTwin simulation and 62.7/100 in real-world dual-arm manipulation (vs. 49.9 Raw-only). Third, fine-grained supervision improves steerable control: the largest real-world gains appear on pose (+23), color (+18), and approach direction (+18)–factors where goal-level instructions provide no guidance. Overall, fine-grained language should augment goal-level instructions: specifying how to execute alongside what to achieve. Project page: https://finevla.xlang.ai/

23.
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.

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

Explainable deep learning improves human mental models of self-driving cars

arXiv:2411.18714v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Self-driving cars increasingly rely on deep neural networks to achieve human-like driving. The opacity of such black-box planners makes it challenging to accurately anticipate when they will fail, with potentially catastrophic consequences. While research into interpreting these systems has surged, most of it is confined to simulations or toy setups due to the difficulty of real-world deployment, leaving the practical utility of such techniques unknown. Here, we introduce the Concept-Wrapper Network (CW-Net), a method for faithfully explaining the behavior of machine-learning-based planners that causally grounds their reasoning in human-interpretable concepts without sacrificing performance. We deploy CW-Net on a real self-driving car and show that the resulting explanations improve the human driver's mental model of the vehicle, allowing them to better predict its behavior, particularly in surprising situations. This demonstrates that explainable deep learning integrated into self-driving cars can be both understandable and useful in a realistic deployment setting. We anticipate our method could be applied to other safety-critical systems, such as autonomous drones and robotic surgeons, as well as to other architectures, such as end-to-end learning systems and vision-language-action models. Overall, our study establishes a deployment-validated pathway to interpretability for autonomous agents, which could help make them more transparent and safe.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

LEAP: Layer-skipping Efficiency via Adaptive Progression for Vision Transformer Distillation

Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) with Vision Transformer (ViT) backbones, such as DINOv2, have become essential for downstream tasks like object recognition and semantic segmentation. The immense computational requirements of backbones often necessitate distillation into smaller architectures for edge deployment. Feature-based knowledge distillation (KD) often suffers from the teacher-student gap; the student struggles to imitate teacher's complex feature map due to its limited capacity. To mitigate this bottleneck, we propose LEAP: Layer-skipping Efficiency via Adaptive Progression, a training curriculum for ViT feature-based knowledge distillation. By utilizing the teacher's intermediate feature maps as a sequence of progressively more difficult targets, our curriculum allows the student to build a foundational representation before tackling higher-level abstractions. Our results demonstrate that this paradigm significantly accelerates convergence through adaptive difficulty selection across various student model sizes and dataset scales. With our curriculum, the LEAP-distilled ViT-S achieves 90.1% accuracy on ImageNet-100, a +12.24% improvement compared with baseline. On ImageNet-1K, LEAP achieves +3.84% and +7.75% improvement for the instance retrieval task on the Oxford and Paris datasets, respectively. Furthermore, the curriculum enables 25.1% savings in training FLOPs and 21% savings in training time on ImageNet-100 by implementing early-stopping for teacher inference during the initial stages of training. Code is available at https://github.com/KevinZ0217/LEAP