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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Experimental Tabletop Petz recovery of a photonic qubit

arXiv:2606.12020v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The quantum information lost in open evolutions cannot be fully recovered, but partial recovery is possible. The Petz recovery map guarantees almost optimal recovery, notably if the chosen reference state is close to the real one. This map has been widely used in theoretical studies, but has been the object of only a handful of experimental realisations, typically under a single fixed noise model. In this work, we describe and implement the Petz recovery map for a versatile class of qubit channels with tunable decoherence and dissipation. The setup we realize is also the first experimental example of ``tabletop reversibility'': for a good range of choices of the reference state, the Petz recovery map can be implemented with the same devices as the forward dissipative evolution, whose effect it is partially undoing. Our results demonstrate that the Petz recovery map can be resource-efficiently realized without requiring complex ancillary resources, providing a feasible pathway for mitigating information loss in quantum systems.

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

Offline Preference-Based Trajectory Evaluation

Authors:

arXiv:2606.17541v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Offline evaluation of agentic systems often collapses trajectories to terminal success, discarding information about partial progress and inducing widespread ties, creating substantial statistical inefficiency by reducing effective sample size and weakening the ability to distinguish systems. We propose preference-based trajectory evaluation, which compares trajectories directly through temporal preferences over progress and time-to-return profiles. We find that, across diverse agentic and interactive benchmarks, standard success-based metrics produce tied comparisons on roughly 75% of instances, whereas trajectory-aware preferences reduce ties to roughly 35%, improving discriminative power, ranking stability, and data efficiency. Our results suggest that benchmark saturation, often attributed to poor data collection or problem difficulty, may also be explained by the choice of evaluation measure.

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

Rethinking Global Average Pooling: Your Classifier Is Secretly a Multi-Instance Learner

Authors:

Modern image classifiers widely adopt global average pooling (GAP) followed by a linear classification head. This linearity ensures that the image-level logits equal the average of logits obtained by applying the classification head pointwise to the feature grid prior to GAP. Consequently, standard classifiers may inherently retain spatial class evidence that remains recoverable even when the image-level prediction is incorrect. This structure naturally suggests a multiple-instance learning (MIL) interpretation, where an image is viewed as a bag of spatial instances. Within this formulation, we demonstrate that standard classifiers trained with a single label per image can still learn the intended classification task in multi-object scenes. We further exploit this property to decompose image-level logits into a prediction grid, providing a post-hoc diagnostic to extract spatial class evidence that GAP otherwise obscures. Our systematic evaluation reveals that off-the-shelf models consistently recover the ground-truth class within foreground regions. The MIL interpretation further suggests that common classifier failures reflect known limitations of mean aggregation.

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

Hand-4DGS: Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting for 4D Hand Reconstruction from Egocentric Videos

Dynamic 3D hand reconstruction from egocentric videos is essential for next-generation computing platforms such as AR/VR and AI glasses. Despite its importance, most prior works focus either on multi-view 3D hand reconstruction or on 4D human body reconstruction. Egocentric 4D hand reconstruction remains challenging due to fast head motion, rapid hand dynamics, severe occlusions, and inherent ambiguity from single-view observations. To address these challenges, we introduce Hand-4DGS, the first feed-forward framework for reconstructing dynamic 4D hands directly from egocentric videos, enabling both fast (~60 FPS) inference and strong generalization. Our approach incorporates a mesh-guided representation for structural priors and temporal convolutions to model dynamic motion. We evaluate our framework on two challenging egocentric datasets, H2O and ARCTIC, and demonstrate significant improvements over baselines. Our method benefits from the generalization capability of feed-forward networks and effective 2D image supervision through Gaussian splatting, without requiring expensive 3D hand pose ground-truth annotations.

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

Polyp-D2ATL: Deep Domain-Adaptive Transfer Learning for Colorectal Polyp Classification under Label Distribution Shift

Early and highly accurate prediction of colorectal polyps, as an important sign of one of the most dangerous types of cancer, will result in saving more lives. Despite the advancements in colorectal polyp classification, many challenges remain in obtaining an automated polyp prediction system that is able to diagnose the difficult-to-predict polyps accompanied by different features in real scenarios, where the model can handle imbalanced data, label distribution shift, and cross-modality generalization successfully. In this study, we propose Polyp-D2ATL, a novel framework accompanied by a specific training strategy, which mitigates these limitations and effectively predicts the different classes of polyps belonging to the NICE classification. Our extensive experiments on the PICCOLO validation and test sets demonstrate that the proposed Polyp-D2ATL significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art models across various reliable metrics, achieving an accuracy of 82.38%, a Macro-F1 of 77.49%, and a specificity of 87.47% on the validation set, alongside consistent improvements on the held-out test set which demonstrates the generalization capacity and clinical applicability of the proposed approach.

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

Bridging Geographic Bias in Urban Streetscape Inference via Lifelong Learning with Visual-Semantic Pivoting

Authors:

Visual perception of urban streetscapes underpins evidence-based decisions in landscape planning, public health, and place-making. Yet models trained on a few well-photographed metropolises systematically misjudge underrepresented districts, propagating geographic bias into downstream policy. We address this gap with HVSP-LL, a lifelong learning framework that couples a stratified visual-semantic pivoting module with an equity-aware rehearsal mechanism. The pivoting module organises landscape concepts along a three-tier ontology (macro structure, meso composition, micro element) and aligns image features to learnable semantic anchors at each tier, providing transferable representations that resist distributional drift. The lifelong adaptation component sequentially absorbs new urban regions while constraining inter-region perception gaps through a worst-region sample-reweighting objective and a structurally-aware exemplar buffer. We evaluate HVSP-LL on a panoramic streetscape benchmark assembled from twelve cities across four continents and seven perceptual dimensions. The framework attains 0.834 Spearman correlation on the held-out city sequence, an absolute 6.1 point improvement over the strongest continual baseline, and shrinks the inter-city perception gap to 0.094 – a 38% reduction relative to the strongest continual baseline (0.151) and a 57% reduction relative to a representative regularisation baseline (0.218). Ablations confirm that each tier of the pivoting hierarchy contributes monotonically, and the equity-aware rehearsal converts mean backward transfer from -0.038 (without retention) to +0.013, eliminating catastrophic forgetting on the held-out sequence. Our results indicate that hierarchical anchoring is a practical pathway toward geographically equitable streetscape inference at city scale.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

The New Social Image: How AI Competency and AI Proactivity Influence Self- and Peer-Perceptions in the Workplace

arXiv:2606.00182v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Human-AI collaboration is considered the most promising way to incorporate AI in the workplace. What remains unexplored are the experiential consequences of this teaming. More specifically, in a team with AI, how humans perceive themselves (self-perception) and how they are perceived by their coworkers (peer perception) in terms of work ownership and job meaningfulness. In a 2x2x2 vignette study (n=50), participants rated perceptions of ownership, affect, job meaningfulness and satisfaction, and role dynamics across two levels (low/high) of AI proactivity and AI competency as within-subject factors, with point-of-view (self perception/peer perception) as between-subjects. Our results showed that AI with low competency or low proactivity generally improved feelings related to ownership, meaningfulness, satisfaction, and role dynamics, and also increased positive affect while reducing negative affect. However, these effects were often influenced by point-of-view. For instance, low AI proactivity resulted in higher job satisfaction from self-perception rather than peer perception. Based on our findings, we argue that designing AI for the future of work solely around performance metrics may not be adequate. Highly competent and proactive AI-driven systems can have undesirable impacts on perceptions of ownership, job identity, social image and team dynamics, and consequently, job meaningfulness.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Exact Entanglement Dynamics Beyond Nearest-Neighbor Dual-Unitary Floquet Systems

Authors:

arXiv:2606.11311v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Exact results using dual-unitarity largely rely on nearest-neighbor structures, while finite-range interactions typically lead to complications. Going beyond the usual nearest-neighbor setting, we introduce an analytically tractable family of finite-range kicked Ising models that admit exact closed-form entanglement dynamics. The construction is based on a staggered structure in which dual-unitarity is present on sublattices that are then coupled to each other. The central observation is that these inter-sublattice couplings do not obstruct the dual-unitarity of the resulting model. For the minimal interaction range of $r= 2$, we derive exact expressions for all the $n-$Rényi entanglement entropies at all times and show that the result is the sum of the two coupled sublattice contributions. Our framework extends naturally to larger finite interaction ranges and to systems with heterogeneous local Hilbert spaces, without additional assumptions. It thus provides a controlled setting for studying exact entanglement growth beyond strictly nearest-neighbor dual-unitary models.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

IAPO: Input Attribution-Aware Policy Optimization for Tool Use in Small Multimodal Agents

arXiv:2606.11652v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper investigates reinforcement learning (RL) methods for improving tool-calling capabilities in multimodal small language model (SLM) agents. While existing works have explored various reward designs to improve agentic tool-calling ability, these approaches face inherent limitations for SLM training, especially under multimodal scenarios. First, many existing methods evaluate tool use correctness through exact matching against certain ground-truth or predefined formats. However, this assumption is often unsuitable for multimodal tasks, where multiple tool use paths may be valid and annotated tool trajectories are typically unavailable. Second, such sparse and brittle binary rewards provide little guidance on how to improve the underlying decision process, making them particularly difficult for multimodal SLM to learn from. To address these issues, we propose Input Attribution-Aware Policy Optimization (IAPO), an RL algorithm for improving tool use in multimodal SLM by aligning the model's attribution across input components with that of a stronger teacher. Experiments on Qwen2.5-VL-3B show that the proposed method improves visual question answering accuracy by an average of 3% across six test sets compared with existing visual tool use work, by helping the model attend to the most relevant input evidence.

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

{\alpha}-Fair Insurance Pricing: A Fairness Continuum

arXiv:2606.14898v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fairness in insurance pricing remains a long-standing and deeply debated puzzle. On one hand, insurers, driven by profitability considerations, set premiums that differentiate across individual risks to achieve actuarial fairness. On the other hand, insurance serves a critical societal function by pooling risks across a population, motivating cross-subsidization among groups to promote solidarity fairness. The tension between these two competing notions of fairness makes insurance pricing inherently complex, particularly in modern settings where granular data allow for increasingly fine risk differentiation and regulators face growing pressure to protect vulnerable groups. To address this challenge, we propose an $\alpha$-Fair Individual Solvent Premium ($\alpha$-FISP) framework for insurance pricing that explicitly captures the trade-off between actuarial and solidarity fairness while guaranteeing solvency, a fundamental requirement in insurance operations. We formulate the pricing problem as a constrained optimization task, where actuarially fair premiums are adjusted subject to budget constraints on cross-subsidization within each risk class. This formulation naturally yields a family of solutions parameterized by $\alpha$, tracing a continuum between purely actuarial and purely solidarity-based pricing and enabling decision-makers to select an operating point along this fairness spectrum. We derive theoretical guarantees for the proposed framework. Numerical experiments show that $\alpha$-FISP is computationally tractable and aligns well with the U.S. regulatory regimes featuring heterogeneous state-level fairness requirements.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Do Time Series Foundation Model Benchmarks Hide Regime-Dependent Failures? Evidence from Traffic Speed Forecasting

arXiv:2606.18367v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Standard benchmarks evaluate time series foundation models (TSFMs) using aggregate metrics, but these can mask severe failures in critical operating regimes. We introduce regime-stratified evaluation and apply it to three TSFMs on two standard traffic speed benchmarks. Traffic exhibits abrupt regime switching between free-flow and congested states, producing bimodal speed distributions during transitions. When we stratify by traffic regime, both accuracy and prediction-interval coverage degrade sharply during transitions: transition-regime MAE reaches 11 mph (versus 3 mph overall), and empirical coverage of 90% prediction intervals drops as low as 55%. These failures are invisible in aggregate metrics because free-flow observations dominate the sample. A simple historical conditional baseline (sampling from per-sensor training distributions) achieves better transition coverage than any TSFM, but has far worse overall accuracy. We propose bimodal mixture augmentation (BMA), a post-hoc method that combines TSFM forecasts with historical distributional knowledge, approaching the historical baseline's transition coverage while preserving the TSFM's accuracy. Our results suggest that TSFM benchmarks should incorporate regime-aware evaluation to surface failures that aggregate metrics hide.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Prevalence and Correlates of Ideal Cardiovascular Health among Ugandan Adolescents: A Cross-Sectional Study

Introduction: Cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors often emerge during adolescence and track into adulthood, yet data on cardiovascular health (CVH) in sub-Saharan Africa remain limited. We assessed the prevalence and correlates of ideal CVH among Ugandan adolescents. Methods: We analysed baseline data of adolescents enrolled in a cluster-randomised controlled trial being conducted in urban (Kampala) and rural (Jinja) districts of Uganda. In this study, Ideal CVH was defined as meeting "ideal" status of 5-7 of the American Heart Association's Life's Simple 7 metrics. Random-effects logistic regression was used to identify factors associated with ideal CVH, accounting for village-level clustering. Results: We recruited 1316 participants with a mean age of 13.2 years, of whom 58.1% were female. Overall, the prevalence of ideal CVH was 66.8% (95% CI: 64.2% - 69.3%). The prevalence was higher in Jinja (74.4%, 95%CI: 70.9% - 77.7%) than Kampala (59.6%, 95%CI: 55.8%-63.2%) and the difference was evident (p

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Diffusion Policy Optimization without Drifting Apart

arXiv:2606.13795v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: RL post-training has become increasingly pivotal for improving diffusion policies, but existing diffusion policy-gradient methods are often unstable and cannot achieve reliable policy improvement. We identify the cause as the double-drift phenomenon: optimizing a variational surrogate can let the ELBO separate from the true log-likelihood, which then makes the resulting proxy policy gradient misaligned with the true policy gradient of expected return. We propose DiPOD, a diffusion policy optimization framework that maintains tight-bound behavior throughout training by interleaving self-distillation with policy-improving gradient updates. This leads to a simple and practical algorithm: augmenting each diffusion policy-gradient update with an on-policy ELBO regularizer. Across diffusion language model post-training and continuous-control diffusion policies, DiPOD substantially stabilizes training and reaches higher rewards than previous methods.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Bridging Mechanistic Interpretability and Prompt Engineering with Gradient Ascent for Interpretable Persona Control

arXiv:2601.02896v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Controlling emergent behavioral personas (e.g., sycophancy, hallucination) in Large Language Models (LLMs) is critical for AI safety, yet remains a persistent challenge. Existing solutions face a dilemma: manual prompt engineering is intuitive but unscalable and imprecise, while automatic optimization methods are effective but operate as "black boxes" with no interpretable connection to model internals. We propose a novel framework that adapts gradient ascent to LLMs, enabling targeted prompt discovery. In specific, we propose two methods, RESGA and SAEGA, that both optimize randomly initialized prompts to achieve better aligned representation with an identified persona direction. We introduce fluent gradient ascent to control the fluency of discovered persona steering prompts. We demonstrate RESGA and SAEGA's effectiveness across Llama 3.1, Qwen 2.5, and Gemma 3 for steering three different personas, sycophancy, hallucination, and myopic reward. Crucially, on sycophancy, our automatically discovered prompts achieve significant improvement (49.90% compared with 79.24%). By grounding prompt discovery in mechanistically meaningful features, our method offers a new paradigm for controllable and interpretable behavior modification. We release our scripts for RESGA and SAEGA in this github repo: https://github.com/HarshSaini10/RESGA_SAEGA.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

IsabeLLM: Automated Theorem Proving Applied to Formally Verifying Consensus

arXiv:2606.18098v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have led AI for Theorem Proving to become a promising means of formally verifying computer systems. Whilst formal verification is traditionally reserved for safety-critical systems due to the required amount of expertise and effort, AI can help to automate a large amount of this workload and make it far more accessible. Blockchain-based systems are becoming increasingly popular and are frequently targeted by malicious actors, often resulting in huge financial losses, highlighting the need to better verify these systems and mitigate vulnerabilities. Arguably the most important component of these systems is the consensus protocol, which allows nodes to agree on decisions in a potentially adversarial environment. In this paper, we improve upon IsabeLLM, the automated theorem proving tool in Isabelle. Namely, we implement a Retrieval-Augmented Generation framework, Error tracing and counterexample generation for improved context supplied to the Large Language Model. Compatibility with the latest version of Isabelle and Sledgehammer is also implemented for improved efficiency. We compare the performance of the two versions of IsabeLLM in their ability to complete the verification of Bitcoin's Proof of Work consensus.

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

Adiabatically-induced Kawaguchi geometry and jerk in quantum-classical systems

arXiv:2606.16037v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Adiabatically eliminating the quantum degrees of freedom in a mixed quantum-classical system produces an effective force in the classical equation of motion. The elimination can be made to any order in the adiabatic parameter, generating a series of higher order forces. By applying a sequence of near-identity unitary transformations to the quantum state, we derive a hierarchy of increasingly accurate effective actions for the classical variables. The third order Euler-Lagrange equation is non-Newtonian as the force depends on the jerk, the third order time derivative of position. We find that the third order terms induce a special kind of Kawaguchi geometry on the space of classical variables. This geometry is characterized by an almost symplectic structure and a differential line element that depends on the acceleration in addition to the velocity. Our results can be used to efficiently capture higher order nonadiabatic effects in molecular dynamics simulations.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

ScholarQuest: A Taxonomy-Guided Benchmark for Agentic Academic Paper Search in Open Literature Environments

arXiv:2606.20235v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Academic paper search is a core step in scientific research, and LLM-based search agents are emerging as a promising paradigm for iterative, intent-driven literature exploration. However, existing benchmarks are insufficient for systematically evaluating agentic academic search under realistic open literature environments. We propose ScholarQuest, a large-scale, taxonomy-guided benchmark for agentic academic paper search. ScholarQuest is constructed from over 1,000 computer science topics and four representative research intents, including method-oriented, setting-anchored, comparison-based, and scope-controlled queries. It further provides scalable answer construction and a shared retrieval backend ScholarBase for reproducible evaluation. Benchmarking results show that agentic methods outperform single-shot retrieval baselines, yet the best-performing agent only achieves 0.314 Recall@100 and 0.355 Recall@All, indicating substantial room for improvement. In addition, analyses of search efficiency, intent-level robustness, and failure cases further highlight the benchmark's ability to provide multi-dimensional evaluation signals for academic paper search agents.

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

Invariant Graph Representations for Continuous-Time Dynamic Graphs Under Distribution Shifts

arXiv:2405.19062v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continuous-Time Dynamic Graphs (CTDGs) enable fine-grained modeling of evolving relational systems. However, most existing CTDG representation learning methods are tailored to in-distribution settings and exhibit limited robustness under out-of-distribution (OOD) shifts. Although recent causal approaches learn invariant representations via interventions, they are primarily designed for static or discrete-time graphs and become computationally prohibitive for CTDGs due to the combinatorial explosion of structural and temporal variations. To address these challenges, we propose CIR, a framework grounded in a novel structural causal model termed the ICCM. To avoid exhaustive interventions, we leverage the Normalized Weighted Geometric Mean (NWGM) to efficiently approximate interventional predictions. We further instantiate ICCM within a practical deep learning architecture that jointly captures invariant structural and temporal patterns through dedicated subgraph extractors, and maintains an environment memory bank to model distributional shifts across evolving contexts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CIR consistently outperforms existing methods under diverse OOD scenarios.

19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Hermite trace polynomials and chaos decompositions for the Hermitian Brownian motion

arXiv:2207.13180v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: For a non-zero parameter $q$, we define Hermite trace polynomials, which are multivariate polynomials indexed by permutations. We prove several combinatorial properties for them, such as expansions and product formulas. The linear functional determined by these trace polynomials is a state for $q = \frac{1}{N}$ for $N$ a non-zero integer. For such $q$, Hermite trace polynomials of different degrees are orthogonal. The product formulas extend to the closure with respect to the state. The state can be identified with the expectation induced by the $N \times N$ Hermitian Brownian motion. Hermite trace polynomials are martingales for this Brownian motion, while the elements in the closure can be interpreted as stochastic integrals with respect to it. Using the grading on the algebra, we prove several chaos decompositions for such integrals, as well as analyze corresponding creation and annihilation operators. In the univariate, pure trace polynomial case, trace Hermite polynomials can be identified with the Hermite polynomials of matrix argument.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

GLARE: A Natural Language Interface for Querying Global Explanations

arXiv:2606.19735v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While global explanations are crucial for understanding vision models across datasets, classes, and decision contexts, their complex and monolithic nature often hinders practical exploration. Because users typically seek targeted answers to specific questions rather than static artifacts, we present an LLM-based interactive interface that provides natural language access to global explanations for black-box image classifiers. The system's core LLM acts as a mediator, translating natural language questions into structured SQL queries over local explanation data. This enables flexible aggregation without exposing users to low-level representations. For each query, the interface outputs statistics-augmented natural language responses, supporting local explanations, and intent-aligned visualizations. We evaluate the system on intent interpretation, query mapping accuracy, generalization to novel queries and datasets, and robustness to linguistic errors. Our results demonstrate that LLM-mediated querying substantially improves the accessibility and usability of global explanations for human-centered XAI.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Regional Service-System Conditions Associated with Facility-Linked Home-Based Specialist Care in Japan: A Claims-Based Ecological Study of Home Dialysis

Authors:

Background Complex chronic care is increasingly delivered in patients' homes while remaining linked to specialist facilities for training, monitoring, and backup care. Home dialysis provides a useful case because peritoneal dialysis (PD) and home hemodialysis (HHD) share a home-facility delivery structure but differ in technical and operational requirements. This study examined regional service-system conditions associated with the presence and scale of PD and HHD in Japan. Methods This ecological study used publicly available claims, administrative, census, and geospatial data harmonized to 334 Secondary Medical Areas. Regional indicators were organized into four domains: dialysis service delivery, implementation support for home-based care, hospital backup capacity, and living and sociodemographic context. Diffusion was examined using claims-based indicators of regional presence and post-presence scale, analyzed separately for PD and HHD with Firth penalized logistic regression and zero-truncated negative binomial regression, respectively. Results PD was observed in 271 regions and HHD in 109. Patterns of associated regional conditions differed by modality and stage. PD was associated mainly with existing dialysis-service organization, whereas HHD was associated with broader regional supports, including home-care delivery, living infrastructure, transition support, and hospital-system indicators. Conditions associated with presence differed from those associated with scale. Cross-modality associations suggested that shared regional factors may shape the distribution of both modalities. Conclusions Regional conditions for home dialysis diffusion in Japan differed by modality and stage. PD was linked mainly to existing dialysis-service organization, whereas HHD was linked to multi-domain regional support for technically demanding home treatment. Under standardized reimbursement, local service-system capacity may remain important for modality- and stage-specific diffusion of home dialysis.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

ZIVARI-TLBO: A Zero-Cost Inter-Group Evaluated-Elite Relay Mechanism for Teaching-Learning-Based Optimization

arXiv:2606.17087v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: ZIVARI-TLBO is a grouped Teaching-Learning-Based Optimization (TLBO) method that augments an existing population-state controller with a fixed inter-group evaluated-elite relay. At each scheduled event, every group offers its already evaluated elite to the next group in a fixed ring; the elite replaces the receiver's worst eligible learner only when its stored objective value is better. Because the exact relay copies an already evaluated solution and its stored fitness, it requires no additional objective-function calls. The frozen gts-v4-cm-fixed implementation is evaluated under equal 10,000-evaluation budgets on eight classical functions at dimensions 10, 30, 50, and 100, with 30 matched seeds, and on five constrained engineering problems. A direct ablation against the same grouped landscape-aware controller without relay records 728/11/221 wins/ties/losses and a rank-biserial effect size of 0.624 across dimensions. In an eight-method multidimensional comparison, WOA obtains the best average rank (2.914) and ZIVARI-TLBO ranks second (3.382); ZIVARI-TLBO significantly outperforms TLBO, MCTLBO, DE, PSO, and GWO, loses significantly to WOA, and is not significantly different from HHO after Holm adjustment. Feasibility-aware engineering results are mixed and sensitive to the current static-penalty formulation. The evidence supports a scoped relay contribution and budget-consistent information-sharing mechanism, but not universal state-of-the-art, global-convergence, engineering-dominance, or CEC superiority claims.

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

Boosting Direct Preference Optimization with Penalization

Authors:

arXiv:2606.12505v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Offline preference optimization has become a practical substitute for reinforcement learning from human feedback, but pairwise objectives such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and its variants use only the chosen and rejected responses stored in a static dataset. This leaves a useful signal unused: the response that the reference model itself would generate for the same prompt. We propose Direct Preference Optimization with Penalization (DPOP), a simple extension of DPO that augments the base preference loss with a gated penalty on reference-greedy responses. DPOP activates this penalty only when the current policy still assigns a lower likelihood to the preferred response than to the rejected response. On AlpacaEval 2.0, DPOP improves length-controlled win rate over DPO, SimPO, and AlphaDPO on both Llama-3-8b-it and Gemma-2-9b-it, achieving relative gains of 5.3\% and 4.4\% over baselines on the two models, respectively. Ablations further show that a SimNPO-style length-normalized penalty is stronger than NPO and token-level unlikelihood in this setting.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

GENA3D: Generative Amodal 3D Modeling by Bridging 2D Priors and 3D Coherence

Generating complete 3D objects under partial occlusions (i.e., amodal scenarios) is a practically important yet challenging problem, as large portions of object geometry are unobserved in real-world scenarios. Existing approaches either operate directly in 3D, which ensures geometric consistency but often lacks generative expressiveness, or rely on 2D amodal completion, which provides strong appearance priors but does not guarantee reliable 3D structure. This raises a key question: how can we achieve both generative plausibility and geometric coherence in amodal 3D modeling? To answer this question, we introduce GENA3D (GENarative Amodal 3D), a framework that integrates learned 2D generative priors with explicit 3D geometric reasoning within a conditional 3D generation paradigm. The 2D priors enable the model to plausibly infer diverse occluded content, while the 3D representation enforces multi-view consistency and spatial validity. Our design incorporates a novel View-Wise Cross-Attention for multi-view alignment and a Stereo-Conditioned Cross-Attention to anchor generative predictions in 3D relationships. By combining generative imagination with structural constraints, GENA3D generates complete and coherent 3D objects from limited observations without sacrificing geometric fidelity. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches in both synthetic and real-world amodal scenarios, highlighting the effectiveness of bridging 2D priors and 3D coherence in generating plausible and geometrically consistent 3D structures in complex environments.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Understanding Truncated Positional Encodings for Graph Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.13671v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Positional encodings (PEs) enhance the power of graph neural networks (GNNs), both theoretically and empirically. Two of the most popular families of PEs - spectral (e.g., Laplacian eigenspaces, effective resistance) and walk-based (polynomials of the adjacency matrix) - are theoretically equivalent in expressive power, with expressivity between the 1-WL and 3-WL tests. However, this equivalence assumes the GNN uses the "complete" version of these PEs, which requires $O(n^3)$ time and space complexity. Instead, practitioners commonly use truncated variants of these encodings, such as the first $k$ eigenspaces or powers of the adjacency matrix. However, the theoretical properties of these truncated PEs are unknown. In this work, we initiate the study of these truncated PEs. Theoretically, we show that, under truncation, several families of PEs are fundamentally different in expressive power. As a corollary, we show that truncated spectral PEs are no longer stronger than the 1-WL test. We also study a family of spectral PEs, the $k$-harmonic distances, to highlight the differences in expressive power of even closely related truncated PEs. Finally, we experimentally show that a mix of truncated PEs is preferable to any single family on real-world datasets.