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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Semantic Editing with Coupled Stochastic Differential Equations

Editing the content of an image with a pretrained text-to-image model remains challenging. Existing methods often distort fine details or introduce unintended artifacts. We propose using coupled stochastic differential equations (coupled SDEs) to guide the sampling process of any pre-trained generative model that can be sampled by solving an SDE, including diffusion and rectified flow models. By driving both the source image and the edited image with the same correlated noise, our approach steers new samples toward the desired semantics while preserving visual similarity to the source. The method works out-of-the-box, without retraining or auxiliary networks, and achieves high prompt fidelity along with near-pixel-level consistency. These results position coupled SDEs as a simple yet powerful tool for controlled generative AI. Project page: https://z-jianxin.github.io/syncSDE-release/. Code: https://github.com/Z-Jianxin/syncSDE-release.

02.
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.

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

Securing the Future of IoMT in the Post-Quantum Era: An Edge-Native Federated Learning Approach

arXiv:2606.14515v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) devices operate under strict resource constraints while handling highly sensitive health data, making security and privacy critical concerns. Federated learning (FL) further complicates this landscape, as model updates exchanged during training may unintentionally expose private medical information. Emerging quantum computing capabilities threaten the long-term viability of conventional lightweight cryptographic mechanisms, motivating the integration of Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) into IoMT systems. This article discusses key enabling technologies for quantum-resilient IoMT, including post-quantum key establishment, lightweight encryption, and edge-native orchestration. We propose a scalable Kubernetes-based framework that integrates PQC into FL-enabled IoMT environments and validate it on a Raspberry Pi testbed. Results demonstrate that distributed cryptographic processing significantly reduces latency compared to sequential designs while maintaining feasible resource overhead. The primary contribution of this work lies in the design and validation of a secure orchestration and communication framework for FL-enabled IoMT systems. We conclude by outlining future directions toward energy-aware architectures, intelligent security optimization, and resilient next-generation Intelligent Internet of Medical Things (IIoMT) ecosystems.

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

Measuring Semantic Progress in Multi-turn Dialogue via Information Gain

Evaluating multi-turn dialogue is challenging because quality emerges across turns rather than within individual responses. We focus on a key dimension of information-seeking dialogue: semantic progress, defined as the accumulation of new, question-relevant, and non-redundant information over the course of a conversation. We formalize semantic progress as question-conditioned uncertainty reduction and introduce an information-theoretic metric that approximates it in embedding space. Our main estimator uses a tractable Gaussian formulation with closed-form updates, while a complementary maximum-entropy argument shows why log-determinant structure arises more broadly when only second-order embedding information is retained. This formulation yields desirable theoretical properties, including monotonicity, additive decomposition of total information gain across turns, and diminishing returns for redundant evidence. Unlike LLM-as-a-judge approaches, our metric requires no autoregressive inference at evaluation time and is fully reproducible for a fixed embedding model. Experiments on MT-Bench, Chatbot Arena, and UltraFeedback show that the proposed metric achieves competitive agreement with human judgments despite targeting only semantic progress, with improved alignment on MT-Bench and UltraFeedback compared to several LLM-based judges. Notably, the method remains effective with lightweight embedding models under CPU-only execution, indicating that semantic progress can be captured without reliance on large model capacity.

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

Effective Dimension Governs Generalization in Quantum Kernel Vision Models

arXiv:2606.20183v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent quantum vision models-quantum vision transformers and quantum convolutional networks-report two striking but unexplained empirical phenomena: (i) ansatze with more, or more uniformly distributed, entanglement generalize better, and (ii) injecting quantum noise can improve test accuracy rather than degrade it. These observations are currently treated as curiosities, discovered by grid search and explained, if at all, by hand. We show that both are manifestations of a single, measurable quantity: the effective dimension $d_eff$ of the (noise-shaped) quantum feature kernel. Working primarily with quantum-kernel vision models-a quantum feature map read out by a kernel classifier-we give a spectral account in which entanglement structure and quantum noise are two knobs that move $d_eff$; in an overfitting regime, contracting $d_eff$ acts as ridge-like regularization. We analyze the mechanism: an exact decomposition of the depolarized kernel $K_p=(1-p)^2K+\tfrac{p(2-p)}{D}\mathbf{1}\mathbf{1}^\top$ with $d_eff(K_p)\to1$, a contraction result (and its boundary) for amplitude damping, a kernel-machine capacity bound, and a capacity/alignment risk decomposition; the monotone contraction operative in our entangled experiments is verified empirically, not proven in general. Along the one-parameter depolarizing family the collapse is instead exact by construction; we use it only to confirm the kernel decomposition to machine precision and at up to $12$ qubits, not as evidence for $d_eff$. Amplitude damping contracts $d_eff$ and lifts test accuracy by up to $+13\%$ along an inverted-U sweet spot; the effect's sign flips between the over- and under-fitting regimes; noise injection matches an explicit spectral-filtering frontier. Our results organize two reported anecdotes into a single measurable principle for designing quantum-vision models.

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

Beyond Similarity: Temporal Operator Attention for Time Series Analysis

arXiv:2605.11287v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A persistent paradox in time-series forecasting is that structurally simple MLP and linear models often outperform high-capacity Transformers. We argue that this gap arises from a mismatch in the sequence-modeling primitive: while many time-series dynamics are governed by global temporal operators (e.g., filtering and harmonic structure), standard attention forms each output as a convex combination of inputs. This restricts its ability to represent signed and oscillatory transformations that are fundamental to temporal signal processing. We formalize this limitation as a simplex-constrained mixing bottleneck in softmax attention, which becomes especially restrictive for operator-driven time-series tasks. To address this, we propose $Temporal Operator Attention (TOA)$, a framework that augments attention with explicit, learnable sequence-space operators, enabling direct signed mixing across time while preserving input-dependent adaptivity. To make dense $N \times N$ operators practical, we introduce Stochastic Operator Regularization, a high-variance dropout mechanism that stabilizes training and prevents trivial memorization. Across forecasting, anomaly detection, and classification benchmarks, TOA consistently improves performance when integrated into standard backbones such as PatchTST and iTransformer, with particularly strong gains in reconstruction-heavy tasks. These results suggest that explicit operator learning is a key ingredient for effective time-series modeling.

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

MedSynth: Realistic, Synthetic Medical Dialogue-Note Pairs

Physicians spend significant time documenting clinical encounters, a burden that contributes to professional burnout. To address this, robust automation tools for medical documentation are crucial. We introduce MedSynth – a novel dataset of synthetic medical dialogues and notes designed to advance the Dialogue-to-Note (Dial-2-Note) and Note-to-Dialogue (Note-2-Dial) tasks. Informed by an extensive analysis of disease distributions, this dataset includes over 10,000 dialogue-note pairs covering over 2000 ICD-10 codes. We demonstrate that our dataset markedly enhances the performance of models in generating medical notes from dialogues, and dialogues from medical notes. The dataset provides a valuable resource in a field where open-access, privacy-compliant, and diverse training data are scarce. Code is available at https://github.com/ahmadrezarm/MedSynth/tree/main and the dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Ahmad0067/MedSynth.

08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Symmetric Cooperative Motion in Higher Dimensions

arXiv:2606.13459v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove a distributional convergence result for a multidimensional version of symmetric cooperative motion which was introduced and studied in one dimension in [HRW, SCM1]. Our approach relies on framing the associated recursive distributional equation as a discretization of the porous medium equation. A major challenge is to analyze the behaviour of finite difference schemes which approximate weak solutions of the porous medium equation with unbounded initial data. In overcoming this difficulty, we perform a detailed analysis of the probability mass function of symmetric cooperative motion, in which we introduce several new comparison arguments for the discrete process. Consequently, along the way, we establish a novel multidimensional convergence result for a finite difference scheme approximating the ZKB/Barenblatt solution of the porous medium equation, which is of independent interest.

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

GetNetUPAM: Ecologically Informed Nested Cross-Validation and Noise-Robust Attention for Marine Bioacoustic Monitoring

Deploying reliable bioacoustic monitoring systems requires models that generalize under high-noise, low-SNR conditions and evaluation protocols that expose deployment-relevant failure modes, gaps largely unaddressed in current UPAM practice. Intrinsic noise, variable propagation, and mixed biological and anthropogenic sources induce distribution shifts that conventional models and single-split evaluations obscure, inflating performance and masking instability. We introduce GetNetUPAM, a hierarchical nested cross-validation framework that uses the nested stage to quantify model stability rather than tune for inflated hold-out scores. By partitioning data into site-year blocks, GetNetUPAM preserves ecological heterogeneity and forces each outer fold to represent a distinct environmental regime, preventing overfitting to localized noise or sensor artifacts. Inner stratified folds measure generalization across the full UPAM signal distribution, enforcing strict separation between model development and the outer held-out deployment condition. Using GetNetUPAM, we evaluate the Adaptive Resolution Pooling and Attention Network (ARPA-N), a CNN architecture for irregular spectrogram dimensions. ARPA-N integrates CBAM spatial attention as a learned noise suppressor, producing attention maps that localize true call structure and avoid the global, non-biological cues exploited by standard CNNs on long-window data. Under GetNetUPAM, ARPA-N generalizes robustly across diverse environmental regimes. In the zero-training support Balleny Islands region, it reduces false positives per hour by over an order of magnitude (approximately 10x) at fixed 90 percent recall, yielding consistently improved metrics across folds. These advances provide a reproducible benchmark and move UPAM toward scalable, deployment-reliable ecological monitoring.

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

BrainDINO: A Brain MRI Foundation Model for Generalizable Clinical Representation Learning

Brain MRI underpins a wide range of neuroscientific and clinical applications, yet most learning-based methods remain task-specific and require substantial labeled data. Here we show that a single self-supervised representation can generalize across heterogeneous brain MRI endpoints. We trained BrainDINO, a self-distilled foundation model, on approximately 6.6 million unlabeled axial slices from 20 datasets encompassing broad variation in population, disease, and acquisition setting. Using a frozen encoder with lightweight task heads, BrainDINO supported transfer across tumor segmentation, neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental conditions classification, brain age estimation, post-stroke temporal prediction, molecular status prediction, MRI sequence classification, and survival modeling. Across tasks and supervision regimes, BrainDINO consistently equaled or exceeded natural-image and MRI-specific self-supervised baselines, with particularly strong advantages under label scarcity. Representation analyses further showed anatomically organized and pathology-sensitive feature structure in the absence of task-specific supervision. Our findings indicate that large-scale slice-wise self-supervised learning can yield a unified brain MRI representation that supports diverse neuroimaging tasks without volumetric pretraining or full-network fine-tuning, establishing a scalable foundation for robust and data-efficient brain imaging analysis. Code is available at https://github.com/mclwu22/BrainDINO

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

UltraQuant: 4-bit KV Caching for Context-Heavy Agents

arXiv:2606.20474v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Context-heavy agents place unusual pressure on the key-value (KV) cache: long prefixes are reused across many short turns, while concurrency determines whether the serving system can keep GPUs utilized. We study 4-bit KV-cache compression for this setting, using TurboQuant-style rotation and codebook quantization as a quality anchor and vLLM FP8 KV caching as the deployment anchor. We report three contributions. First, we frame 4-bit KV caching around multi-round agent workloads where task quality, cache residency, and serving throughput must be measured jointly. Second, we describe the practical design choices needed to make the 4-bit path robust, including asymmetric K/V treatment, Walsh-Hadamard rotation, QJL removal, and block-scale variants. Third, we present serving optimizations on AMD GPUs, including optimized decode-attention kernels and UltraQuant, an FP4 approximation path that uses FP8 queries, FP4 KV tensors, UE8M0 group scales, and native scaled-MFMA support on CDNA4. On a long-context, multi-turn agentic workload, UltraQuant cuts P50 time-to-first-token by 3.47x in the cache-pressured late rounds (2.3x across all rounds) and raises output throughput by 1.63x over the FP8 KV baseline.

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

Human-AI Coevolution Dynamics: A Formal Theory of Social Intelligence Emergence Through Long-Term Interaction

Current conversational AI systems have made significant progress in language generation, personalization, and long-context interaction. However, most existing methods model social behavior through isolated components such as emotion modeling, memory retrieval, or persona conditioning, lacking a unified framework to explain the emergence of stable social relationships and social intelligence in long-term human-AI interaction.To address this, we propose the Human-AI Coevolution Dynamics Framework (HACD-H), a formal model of human-AI interaction as a self-organizing social cognitive system. HACD-H integrates emotional adaptation, relational organization, social memory, and personality consistency into a unified dynamical framework and introduces principles including multi-timescale social cognition, relational attractors, trust basins, developmental phase transitions, and social cognitive energy dynamics.We construct a conversational dataset with approximately 14,700 interaction turns and develop a theory-driven empirical evaluation framework. Results reveal a hierarchy of temporal persistence in social cognition, stable relational attractors, phase-transition-like developmental patterns, and a structured social cognitive energy landscape. Social intelligence shows a significant negative correlation with social cognitive energy (r = -0.391, p < 0.001), and interaction trajectories exhibit progressive energy reduction over time.These findings suggest that social intelligence emerges from long-term social cognitive coevolution rather than isolated conversational capabilities. HACD-H provides a unified theoretical foundation for modeling adaptive human-AI social interaction and developing socially intelligent AI systems.

13.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-12

An innovative technology boosts image quality for protein structures

After years of effort, two research teams have developed ‘laser phase plate’ systems that could help cryo-electron-microscopy users to generate high-quality structures for a broad range of proteins. After years of effort, two research teams have developed ‘laser phase plate’ systems that could help cryo-electron-microscopy users to generate high-quality structures for a broad range of proteins.

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

ClawEnvKit: Automatic Environment Generation for Claw-Like Agents

Constructing environments for training and evaluating claw-like agents remains a manual, human-intensive process that does not scale. We argue that what is needed is not just a dataset, but an automated pipeline capable of generating diverse, verified environments on demand. To this end, we introduce ClawEnvKit, an autonomous generation pipeline that instantiates this formalism from natural language descriptions. The pipeline comprises three modules: (1) a parser that extracts structured generation parameters from natural language input; (2) a generator that produces the task specification, tool interface, and scoring configuration; and (3) a validator that enforces feasibility, diversity, structural validity, and internal consistency across the generated environments. Using ClawEnvKit, we construct Auto-ClawEval, the first large-scale benchmark for claw-like agents, comprising 1,040 environments across 24 categories. Empirically, Auto-ClawEval matches or exceeds human-curated environments on coherence and clarity at 13,800x lower cost. Evaluated across 4 model families and 8 agent harness frameworks, we find that harness engineering boosts performance by up to 15.7 percentage points over a bare ReAct baseline, completion remains the primary axis of variation with no model saturating the benchmark, and automated generation enables evaluation at a scale previously infeasible. Beyond static benchmarking, ClawEnvKit enables live evaluation: users describe a desired capability in natural language and obtain a verified environment on demand, turning evaluation into a continuous, user-driven process. The same mechanism serves as an on-demand training environment generator, producing task distributions that adapt to an agent's current weaknesses rather than being bounded by existing user logs.

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

When Does Deep RL Beat Calibrated Baselines? A Benchmark Study on Adaptive Resource Control

arXiv:2605.26418v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A properly calibrated rule-based autoscaler can beat every one of six mainstream deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms on cost across every workload we test - so when, if ever, does DRL actually help? We study this in RLScale-Bench, a reproducible benchmark and evaluation protocol for DRL on adaptive resource control, where an agent allocates compute to a dynamic workload under cost and service-level constraints. We evaluate PPO, DQN, A2C, SAC, TD3, and DDPG under matched architectures, training budgets, and reward functions against a calibrated rule-based baseline across six workload patterns and five seeds (240 runs), instantiate the benchmark on Kubernetes Horizontal Pod Autoscaling, and probe distribution-shift generalization. Three findings challenge common assumptions: (i) the calibrated controller achieves the lowest cost on all six workloads, though it trails the best RL agents on bursty and flash traffic; (ii) discrete-action algorithms outperform continuous-action ones by one to two orders of magnitude in constraint violations due to action-space mismatch; and (iii) no single algorithm dominates across workloads, with rankings shifting by up to four positions. The bottleneck in RL-based resource control is not algorithm selection but baseline calibration, reward engineering, and realistic evaluation protocols.

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

The More the Merrier: Combining Properties for ABox Abduction under Repair Semantics for ELbot

arXiv:2606.19197v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Abduction is a central approach to explain missing entailments from a knowledge base by providing a hypothesis, that would, if added to the knowledge base, make the missing entailment become true. Abduction under repair semantics has recently been investigated in detail, where several desirable properties and optimality criteria were considered, such as signature-restrictions and minimality in size and of introduced conflicts. Naturally, hypotheses that satisfy more than one of these properties or combine a property with an optimality criterion would be even more desirable for applications. So far, such hypotheses have not been investigated in the literature. In the present paper, we consider the ABox abduction problem for hypotheses satisfying more than one property or additional optimality criteria, for EL_bot under brave and AR semantics. Our main observation is that often requiring additional properties for hypotheses does not lead to an increase of complexity.

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

Physics in 2-Steps: Locking Motion Priors Before Visual Refinement Erases Them

Image-to-Video diffusion models leverage input images to generate visually stunning content, yet frequently produce motion that violates physical laws. We reveal a surprising finding: a 2-step generation often exhibits better physical consistency than a 50-step output from the same model. Through spectral analysis, we trace this to phase erosion during denoising; the phase degrades significantly (dropping by $\approx 18\%$ from step 2 to step 50), whereas the magnitude remains relatively stable. Building on this insight, we propose PhaseLock, a training-free framework that preserves the valid motion priors from few-step inference throughout the denoising trajectory. Rather than relying on full-step inference for physical consistency, PhaseLock extracts a motion prior from just 2 steps and enforces it onto high-fidelity generation via Latent Delta Guidance. Our approach effectively mitigates phase degradation, improving physical consistency by an average of 6.2 points across diverse models while largely maintaining visual fidelity, with negligible overhead ($1.06\times$ time, $1.02\times$ memory) and reduced reliance on expensive external guidance methods ($\sim5\times$ time). Project Page: https://dnwjddl.github.io/phaselock

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

LLM-as-Judge in Education: A Curriculum-Grounded Marking Pipeline

arXiv:2606.17507v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative AI and large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to question generation and automated assessment. However, deploying LLMs in preparation for high-stakes exams requires more than prompt engineering; it demands software pipelines that systematically ground model outputs in authorised curriculum artefacts and marking guidelines issued by education authorities. This paper presents a curriculum-grounded, configurable LLM-as-Judge pipeline for question-level marking, co-developed with an industrial partner, to support exam preparation for university admission. The pipeline identifies the relevant topics, subtopics, and cognitive demand of a question, and assembles verifiable and authorised context to support LLM judgement. Curriculum intent is operationalised through concrete syllabus artefacts, including prescribed verbs and outcomes, performance band descriptors, glossary definitions, and marking-guideline principles. A staged LLM workflow is employed to first generate question-specific rubrics, capturing structured expectations of performance, and then derive and evaluate marking criteria used to allocate marks to student responses. This design improves consistency, transparency, and alignment with official marking practices. Preliminary evaluation shows that the proposed LLM-as-Judge pipeline delivers marking outcomes comparable to human tutors, while yielding justifications that are more traceable to authorised curriculum artefacts and marking standards. The pipeline has also been integrated into an online study platform, where early deployment data provide initial insights into operational usage and manual overrides.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

MARS: Margin-Adversarial Risk-controlled Stopping for Parallel LLM Test-time Scaling

arXiv:2606.12935v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Parallel test-time scaling samples many reasoning traces and majority-votes their answers, improving LLM accuracy but requiring traces to run to completion, incurring substantial computational overhead. We observe that probing partial traces at intermediate checkpoints can extract current answers without disrupting generation, revealing an evolving aggregate vote. Based on this observation, we introduce MARS, a margin-adversarial stopping rule that estimates which active traces are likely to change their answers and stops once the leader remains safe under a conservative bound on future vote movement. The rule separates two sources of uncertainty. It learns the trace-level switch probabilities that determine how much of the current margin is likely to be retained, while handling the harder question of where switching traces land through an adversarial bound calibrated from warmup traces. With true switch probabilities, MARS guarantees with high probability that the early-stopped answer matches the full-budget vote. In practice, a five-feature logistic model closely matches oracle switching behavior. Across three reasoning models and three competition-math benchmarks, MARS saves 25-47% of self-consistency tokens and 14-29% on top of DeepConf Online, a strong confidence-weighted baseline that already filters and truncates weak traces, while matching the accuracy of the corresponding full-budget baselines.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

The Unreliable Judges: Assessing Reproducibility and Self-Preference Bias of LLMs as Free-Text Evaluators

Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming clinical practice and research, but their adoption requires rigorous evaluation. While human assessment is ideal, its cost has driven the widespread use of LLMs as evaluators. We introduce an open-source reciprocal framework comparing 71 human experts against six LLMs. AI evaluators show a strong self-preference bias, yet neither group reliably identified whether a response was human- or AI-generated. AI scores correlated with surface features such as length and lexical diversity, whereas human scores did not. By probing the evaluator's hidden states and applying targeted steering, we show that verbosity is a major causal driver of the bias. Moreover, shuffling question-response pairings shows that long responses keep high scores even when they no longer answer the question, whereas short ones do not, demonstrating that AI judges reward verbosity largely independently of content alignment. Finally, API-based and batch inference inflate stochasticity, underscoring the need for controlled deployment.

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

Evoflux: Inference-Time Evolution of Executable Tool Workflows for Compact Agents

arXiv:2606.12674v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Compact language models (LMs) reduce cost, latency, and deployment risk for tool agents. Yet MCP-style tool use requires more than isolated function calling: an agent must discover tools from live catalogs, satisfy schemas, preserve dependencies across intermediate outputs, and ground final responses in executed evidence. Small planners often generate plausible workflow graphs that fail under tool resolution, parameter validation, dependency tracking, or execution. We argue that this failure mode is poorly handled by small-corpus distillation. A few hundred teacher traces can teach workflow format, but rarely cover the recovery behavior needed to repair failed plans over changing tool catalogs. We introduce Evoflux, an inference-time evolutionary search method that treats compact tool use as the repair of executable tool workflows. It evolves typed workflow graphs through structured edits, execution feedback, adaptive intensity, meta-guided redesign, and diversity pruning. On held-out MCP-Bench tasks spanning live MCP servers and 250 tools, Evoflux raises execution feasibility from roughly 3% to 17-24% across small planners. In contrast, SFT and SFT+DPO on the same search-mined data match, underperform, or collapse below zero-shot performance; ReAct reaches higher peaks, but with higher variance and token cost. These results show that execution-grounded search is more reliable under scarce teacher-trace budgets.

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

Spectral Query-Key Product Weight Steering for Training-Free VLM Hallucination Mitigation

Vision-language models (VLMs) often generate fluent but visually unsupported descriptions, especially by mentioning objects absent from the image. We propose QK Product Steering, a data-free, training-free, and zero-inference-cost weight edit for reducing object hallucination. The method directly edits the per-head query-key product, the operator that produces pre-softmax attention logits, by suppressing a small number of dominant singular modes in selected middle layers. The edited product is then mapped back to the query weights through a closed-form query-only update while keeping shared key weights fixed, making the edit compatible with grouped-query attention. We further decompose the QK product into symmetric and antisymmetric components to distinguish mutual content-similarity patterns from directional attention patterns. Across three GQA-based VLMs, QK Product Steering achieves an average relative CHAIR$_s$ reduction of $4.0\%$, while matched random-mode controls show negligible change. Interpretability ablations show that the hallucination signal is specific to dominant QK modes and is primarily localized to the symmetric mutual-attention channel. Overall, QK Product Steering offers a simple alternative to decoding-time mitigation, requiring no additional data, fine-tuning, or inference-time overhead while largely preserving general multimodal capability.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Beyond Correctness: Enhancing Architectural Reasoning in Code LLMs via Scalable Labeling with Agentic Judgment

arXiv:2606.14948v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLMs have substantially improved software engineering yet real-world development requires architectural understanding. Such understanding is prohibitively expensive to label manually and impossible to verify through tests alone. We propose an agentic judging pipeline using a strong LLM as a scalable proxy for expert architectural evaluation, comprising two judges: the Architecture Complexity Judge (ACJ), which estimates codebase-specific architectural understanding a task demands, and the Architecture Quality Judge (AQJ), which evaluates patch conformance to repository-specific architectural conventions via source-grounded rubrics. Fine-tuning Qwen3-8B/14B/32B on 3,360 curated instances achieves resolved rates of up to 27.2% on SWE-bench Verified - up to 540% over the base model and 256% over unfiltered fine-tuning. Meanwhile, the trained models achieve strong cross-language generalization and consistent improvements in architectural patch quality.

24.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Navigating a crowded developing brain leaves neurons with broken DNA

As neurons migrate to their final destinations in the forming brain, their DNA gets damaged. The brain has evolved a fix, but there can be lasting consequences if repair fails. As neurons migrate to their final destinations in the forming brain, their DNA gets damaged. The brain has evolved a fix, but there can be lasting consequences if repair fails.

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

ST-DiffEye: Diffusion-based Continuous Gaze Generation via Joint Scanpath-Trajectory Modeling

We study the problem of human gaze modeling, which aims to generate the gaze patterns a viewer produces while observing a visual stimulus. Gaze is primarily captured through two modalities: continuous eye-tracking trajectories, which describe fine-grained motion dynamics, and discrete scanpaths, which describe high-level fixation structure. Because gaze varies substantially across viewers and trials, we treat this variability as a defining property rather than noise and model gaze as a stochastic generative process. Existing generative gaze models supervise on only one of these two representations in isolation. We hypothesize that trajectories and scanpaths describe gaze at complementary scales and are jointly informative during training, and test this hypothesis through ST-DiffEye, a joint trajectory-scanpath diffusion framework that couples both modalities by concatenating them as an additional raw input channel, requiring no architectural overhead beyond an input and output channel expansion. We further introduce a principled evaluation framework based on the Continuous Ranked Probability Score (CRPS), which generalizes any existing sequence similarity metric into a proper scoring rule that jointly assesses the accuracy and diversity of generated gaze. Experiments on task-driven visual search, covering both target-present and target-absent scenarios, and on free-viewing benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. These results, along with detailed ablations, confirm the benefit of joint modeling and the value of distribution-aware evaluation in capturing the intrinsic variability of human gaze. Project webpage: https://st-diffeye.github.io/