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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Scaling limits of the single-curve interface and outermost loops in the planar random field Ising model

arXiv:2606.13147v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove that the interface separating $+1$ and $-1$ spins in the near-critical planar random field Ising model (RFIM) with Dobrushin boundary conditions has a scaling limit, whose law is conformally covariant and almost surely absolutely continuous with respect to SLE$_3$. The limiting curve can be seen as a massive version of SLE$_3$ in the sense of Makarov and Smirnov, but in a random environment. We then show that the outermost spin loops of the near-critical planar RFIM with $+1$ boundary conditions have subsequential limits and that any of these limits is almost surely singular with respect to CLE$_3$. This dichotomy between absolute continuity of the single interface and singularity of the outermost loops reflects the fact that a single interface does not explore enough of the magnetization field of the near-critical RFIM to detect the singularity of this field with respect to the critical Ising magnetization field, whereas the outermost spin loops do.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

An Empirical Study on Learning Latent Representations for Emotional Speech Synthesis

For the last couple of years, the field of speech synthesis has improved dramatically thanks to deep learning. There are more and more deep learning-based TTS systems developed to make it possible to produce voices with high intelligibility and naturalness. Meanwhile, controlling the expressiveness is yet a big deal, generating speech in different styles or manners has received a lot of attention from community recently. This paper aims to give our solutions to deal with the task emotional speech synthesis (ESS) at VLSP 2022 which allows to generate humanlike natural-sounding voice from a given input text with desired emotional expression. By integrating speaker embedding, prosody bottleneck into FastSpeech 2, our systems can promisingly generate emotional speech of a single speaker (Sub-task 1), transfer speaking styles from another speaker to the target speaker with neutral non-expressive data while retaining the target speaker's identity (Sub-task 2).

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Context Compression Is Not One Thing: Readable Symbolic Re-expression vs. Coherent Summary at Matched Budget

We study context compression for multi-hop question answering with small language models. We propose Telegraph English, a readable symbolic format that rewrites retrieved passages into structured entity-relation statements, preserving reasoning evidence at lower token cost. In controlled experiments on MuSiQue, TwoWiki, and HotpotQA, Telegraph English outperforms three matched-budget compression baselines (character-level deletion, truncation, and random sub-sampling) on every dataset, with gains of 13 to 20 F1 percentage point. It also outperforms a coherent prose summary produced by the same encoder on the hardest dataset. A pre-registered depth-interaction hypothesis is null: the advantage does not grow with reasoning depth within datasets. We interpret these results as evidence that readable symbolic re-expression preserves entity content more densely than either natural language or coherent summarization at matched token budget.

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

Conformal Bayes under Label Shift: Post-Hoc Calibration vs. In-Training Adaptation

arXiv:2606.11865v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Conformal Bayes combines Bayesian posterior predictives with conformal calibration to produce prediction sets that are both statistically valid and geometrically efficient. We study conformal Bayes under label shift from a unified perspective, identifying two complementary approaches that restore nominal target-domain coverage through importance-weighted conformal calibration but operate through independent mechanisms. Post-hoc calibration tilts the posterior predictive toward the target domain and corrects the conformal threshold via an importance-weighted quantile, leaving the parameter posterior unchanged. In-training adaptation tilts the parameter posterior itself to the target domain, producing a corrected predictive whose highest predictive density region serves as the highest predictive density (HPD) based prediction set under the fitted target predictive; efficiency is model-dependent and does not imply finite-sample conditional optimality. Two controlled experiments show that in an unbiased training regime both strategies achieve valid coverage equally, while in a lead-optimization regime in-training adaptation acts as a debiasing operator, reducing interval width at unchanged coverage.

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

LedgerAgent: Structured State for Policy-Adherent Tool-Calling Agents

Policy-adherent tool-calling agents in customer-service domains must maintain task states across turns while calling tools and obeying domain policies. Task states consist of relevant facts, identifiers, constraints, and conditions observed through user interaction and tool calls. In standard agents, task states are not represented separately. Observations, tool returns, and policy instructions are placed in the prompt, leaving agents to reconstruct the relevant states from the prompt each time they decide what to do next. This design makes state management implicit, creating two common failure modes. An agent may retrieve the right facts but later ground its decision in stale, missing, or incorrect information; and a syntactically valid tool call may still violate a domain policy that depends on the current task state. We introduce \textsc{LedgerAgent}, an inference-time method for tool-calling agents that maintains observed task states in a separate ledger and renders the states into the prompt. The ledger is also used to check state-dependent policy constraints before environment-changing tool calls are executed, blocking policy violations. Across four customer-service domains and a mixed panel of open- and closed-weight models, \textsc{LedgerAgent} improves average pass\textasciicircum{}k over a standard prompt-based tool-calling approach, with the largest gains under stricter multi-trial consistency metrics.

06.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Balanced affine Motzkin paths: Pearson geometry and global endpoint asymptotics

arXiv:2601.17634v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study endpoint distributions of balanced affine weighted Motzkin paths. In the balanced case, the generating-function equation has Pearson-type characteristic geometry. We show that this geometry controls the terminal-height law globally: the characteristic escape time determines the limiting cumulant generating function, the large-deviation rate function, and the ray-scale asymptotics. Thus the usual Gaussian window is only the local quadratic approximation to a global Pearson-driven profile. For finite sizes, we prove a uniform Daniels saddlepoint approximation in the one-dominant-singularity regimes and identify the exceptional antipodal case requiring a lattice/interference correction.

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

Anomaly Detection via Mean Shift Density Enhancement

arXiv:2602.03293v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Unsupervised anomaly detection stands as an important problem in machine learning. Existing unsupervised anomaly detection algorithms rarely perform well across different anomaly types, often excelling only under specific structural assumptions. This lack of robustness also becomes particularly evident under noisy settings. We propose Mean Shift Density Enhancement (MSDE), a fully unsupervised framework that detects anomalies through their geometric response to density-driven manifold evolution. MSDE is designed as a general purpose anomaly detection framework, based on the principle that normal samples, being well supported by local density, remain stable under iterative density enhancement, whereas anomalous samples undergo large cumulative displacements as they are attracted toward nearby density modes. To operationalize this idea, MSDE employs a weighted mean-shift procedure with adaptive, sample-specific density weights derived from a manifold learning-based fuzzy neighborhood graph. We evaluate MSDE on an anomaly detection benchmark comprising 46 real-world tabular datasets, four realistic anomaly generation mechanisms, and six noise levels. Compared to 13 established unsupervised baselines, MSDE achieves consistently strong, balanced and robust performance for several standard classification metrics, at several noise levels and on average over several types of anomalies. These results demonstrate that displacement-based scoring provides a robust alternative to the existing state-of-the-art for unsupervised anomaly detection.

08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

The Erdős-Hajnal High-Girth Subgraph Conjecture Holds in the Polynomial Chromatic-Sparsity Regime

作者:

arXiv:2606.17901v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For a graph $G$ put $h_r(G)=\max{\chi(H):H\subseteq G,\operatorname{girth}(H)\ge r}.$ Erdős and Hajnal asked whether $h_r(G)\to\infty$ as $\chi(G)\to\infty$, for every fixed $r\ge4$. We prove this in every fixed polynomial edge-density regime: for all $r\ge4$, $k\ge2$, $P,C>0$, there is $M=M_{r,k}(P,C)$ such that $\chi(G)\ge M,\ e(G)\le C\chi(G)^P\Longrightarrow h_r(G)\ge k.$ Quantitatively, after replacing $P$ by $P\vee2$ and $C$ by $C\vee2$, $M_{r,k}(P,C)\le \exp!\left(O_{r,k}\bigl((P+2+\log(C\vee2))^2\bigr)\right),$ and consequently the same conclusion holds throughout the quasi-polynomial range $e(G)\le \exp\bigl(C_0(\log\chi(G))^a\bigr),\ 1 < a < 3/2,$ for all sufficiently large $\chi(G)$. In each fixed polynomial-density regime we also obtain $f_{P,C}(k,r)\le k^{O_{r,P,C}(1)}.$ The proof combines a chromatic-defect random extraction lemma, compact and near-quadratic sparse-core bases, and a peeling/thinning bootstrap increasing the admissible edge exponent by $1/(r-1)$. We also prove structural saturation results for possible counterexamples, including Moore-strength exact-cycle packings and quadratic saturation in projected colour-pair space. Finally, writing $h_r^{\mathrm f}(G)=\max{\chi_{\mathrm f}(H):H\subseteq G,\operatorname{girth}(H)\ge r},$ we develop a fractional random-extraction framework based on Mohar-Wu preservation. We prove sufficient cheap-cycle-killing criteria and verify them for several structured families, including clique-organised families, line graphs of incidence graphs of equal-order generalized quadrangles and generalized hexagons, and the Bohman-Keevash tracking-time triangle-free-process graph. We also isolate a density-free obstruction that any proof using this fractional surgery route must overcome.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Full-Self Diagnostics (FSD): Physics-Grounded Visual Biomarker Inference from Smartphone Video via Inverse Problems and Operator Learning

arXiv:2606.19372v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present Full-Self Diagnostics (FSD), a unified mathematical framework for recovering latent physiological states from unconstrained 9-second facial videos captured by consumer smartphones. The approach integrates five mutually reinforcing components: (1) a physics-based forward model derived from the radiative transfer equation and chromophore absorption that maps camera observables to biomarker concentrations; (2) an information-theoretic observability theory proving that multi-channel visual signals (spectral, pulse, respiratory, micro-expression, and oculomotor) contain strictly increasing mutual information with physiological state; (3) a stable, Tikhonov-regularized inverse problem with domain-uniform identifiability guarantees; (4) an operator-learning formulation that enables generalization across devices, resolutions, and populations; and (5) a supervised learning procedure, interpretable as stochastic variational inference, that continuously refines the model from paired biosensor ground truth with performance improving proportionally to one over the square root of the number of paired observations. Empirical validation on 38812 real-world paired scans across 59 subjects demonstrates practical performance. Self-collected data from the lead author (glucose range 35-550 mg/dL) yields MARD of 29.86 percent with 97.57 percent of predictions in Clarke Error Grid Zones A+B and only 0.27 percent in the dangerous Zone E. A well-managed diabetic participant achieves MARD of 17 percent in the narrower 70-180 mg/dL band. These results confirm that consumer-grade facial video encodes sufficient structured information for clinically relevant, non-invasive biomarker inference under fully unconstrained conditions, with performance scaling predictably as more paired data becomes available.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Stronger Entanglement Dies Faster: Quantum Mpemba Effect in Dissipative Qubits

arXiv:2605.23197v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In classical thermodynamics, the Mpemba effect refers to the counterintuitive observation that hot water can freeze faster than cold water, manifesting as an anomalous crossing of dynamical trajectories. While analogues of this phenomenon have been explored in open quantum systems and spin-chain entanglement asymmetry, its connection to the finite-time decoupling of quantum correlations remains elusive. In this work, we report a distinct Mpemba effect for quantum entanglement in a dissipative quantum system associated with entanglement sudden death (ESD). By analyzing two qubits interacting with local amplitude damping reservoirs, we demonstrate that a more strongly entangled initial state can experience a faster collapse into a separable state than a more weakly entangled state. This anomalous decay stems from the competition between initial coherence and excited-state population, where the latter acts as a catalyst for ESD. We provide exact analytical derivations for the trajectory crossover and ESD time, and map the phase diagram to precisely identify the parameter regime where the effect occurs. Our results offer a new strategy for controlling the lifetime of quantum resources in dissipative environments.

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

Select and Improve: Understanding the Mechanics of Post-Training for Reasoning

arXiv:2606.13125v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning has rapidly emerged as a key component in the training of reasoning and coding models, yet it remains poorly understood from a mechanistic perspective. We study how and through what underlying processes capabilities are acquired or enhanced via reinforcement learning post-training. Our analysis, based on controlled math reasoning experiments with Qwen-2.5-1.5B, reveals two core mechanisms: strategy selection and strategy improvement. Our results highlight the role of SFT data and reinforcement learning data in activating these mechanisms, in particular showing how supervising the model on diverse reasoning strategies can enable strategy selection and how increasing difficulty in reinforcement learning data can enable strategy improvement. Taken together, our results provide mechanistic insight into RL training and suggest practical interventions to continue scaling reasoning capabilities.

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

MLT-Dedup: Efficient Large-Scale Online Video Deduplication via Multi-Level Representations and Spatial-Temporal Matching

The explosive growth of user-generated video content on online platforms is accompanied by the emergence of numerous near-duplicate videos–videos that are identical or highly similar but differ by partial edits. These duplicates degrade user experience and increase storage and bandwidth costs, making large-scale video deduplication a critical task. Existing video deduplication frameworks face a fundamental challenge in retrieving sufficient high-quality candidates under a limited index budget, as well as trade-offs between efficiency and precision. To address these issues, we propose MLT-Dedup, an efficient large-scale online video deduplication framework with Multi-Level representations and spatial-Temporal matching. Our approach employs a Multi-Level Video Encoder (ML-VE) to extract both fine-grained frame-level and sparse clip-level embeddings: sparse embeddings support efficient candidate retrieval, while fine-grained embeddings are loaded for precise pairwise matching. During matching, we introduce DiF-SiM, a Differential Feature-enhanced Similarity Module capable of locating duplicated temporal segments and providing reliable similarity evidence to support policy-driven deduplication decisions. Extensive experiments on a real-world large-scale platform demonstrate that MLT-Dedup reduces online repetition rates by 91% at 90% precision. Furthermore, our sparse retrieval design achieves a 5x increase in indexing capacity, enabling broader candidate coverage in real-world deployment.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Membership Inference Attacks against Large Audio Language Models

arXiv:2603.28378v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present the first systematic Membership Inference Attack (MIA) evaluation of LALMs. Using Multi-modal Blind Baselines based on textual, spectral and prosodic features, we demonstrate that common audio datasets exhibit near-perfect train/test separability (AUC ~ 1.0) even without model inference, thus MIA may primarily detect distribution shift. We therefore introduce a blind-baseline protocol to control for this confound. Under this protocol, we identify that the distribution-matched datasets enable reliable MIA evaluation without distribution-shift artifacts. We benchmark multiple MIA methods and conduct modality disentanglement experiments on these datasets. The results reveal that LALM memorization is cross-modal, arising only from binding a speaker's vocal identity with its text. These findings establish a principled standard for auditing LALMs beyond spurious correlations. Our codebase is available at https://github.com/snooow1029/ALM_MIA.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

YeasierAgent: Agentic Social Sandbox as a Canvas for Intent-Driven Creation of Platform-Agnostic Symbiotic Agent-Native Applications

作者:

arXiv:2606.13722v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper introduces YeasierAgent, an application-building paradigm based on symbiotic agents, narrative worlds, and scene-aware interaction. It challenges the conventional device-coupled model of software by redefining applications as collaborative spaces among users, agents, and worlds. We present a system architecture that achieves two primary contributions: (1) enabling the rapid, cross-platform construction of agent-native applications by utilizing platform-agnostic interactive units (agents, scenes, dialogue) rather than fixed graphical layouts; and (2) unifying the emotional companionship and practical tool execution attributes of intelligent agents within a single experiential sandbox. By integrating automated generation, user-created worlds, and spatial multi-agent collaboration, YeasierAgent formalizes the category of Symbiotic Agent-Native Applications, demonstrating a shift from isolated, tool-specific chatbots toward cohesive, socially embedded computational environments.

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

Cluster Aggregated GAN (CAG): A Cluster-Based Hybrid Model for Appliance Pattern Generation

arXiv:2512.22287v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Synthetic appliance data are essential for developing non-intrusive load monitoring algorithms and enabling privacy preserving energy research, yet the scarcity of labeled datasets remains a significant barrier. Recent GAN-based methods have demonstrated the feasibility of synthesizing load patterns, but most existing approaches treat all devices uniformly within a single model, neglecting the behavioral differences between intermittent and continuous appliances and resulting in unstable training and limited output fidelity. To address these limitations, we propose the Cluster Aggregated GAN framework, a hybrid generative approach that routes each appliance to a specialized branch based on its behavioral characteristics. For intermittent appliances, a clustering module groups similar activation patterns and allocates dedicated generators for each cluster, ensuring that both common and rare operational modes receive adequate modeling capacity. Continuous appliances follow a separate branch that employs an LSTM-based generator to capture gradual temporal evolution while maintaining training stability through sequence compression. Extensive experiments on the UVIC smart plug dataset demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently outperforms baseline methods across metrics measuring realism, diversity, and training stability, and that integrating clustering as an active generative component substantially improves both interpretability and scalability. These findings establish the proposed framework as an effective approach for synthetic load generation in non-intrusive load monitoring research.

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

Rethinking the Role of Efficient Attention in Hybrid Architectures

Modern language models increasingly adopt hybrid architectures that combine full attention with efficient attention modules, such as sliding-window attention (SWA) and recurrent sequence mixers. However, how these efficient modules shape model capabilities remains poorly understood. To address this gap, we conduct a systematic analysis across hybrid architectures from three perspectives: scaling behavior, mechanism analysis, and architecture design. First, from a scaling perspective, we find that efficient-attention design primarily affects how fast long-context capability emerges, while different hybrids eventually converge to comparable long-context performance under sufficient training. Second, mechanistically, we show that long-range retrieval is mainly carried by full attention, whereas efficient attention shapes its optimization trajectory. This explains a counter-intuitive phenomenon we call Large-Window Laziness: larger SWA windows can delay the formation of retrieval heads in full-attention layers. Third, guided by this mechanism, we show that applying NoPE to only the full-attention layers of a small-window SWA hybrid substantially improves long-context performance with negligible impact on short-context performance.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Approximating optimal decoding of quantum LDPC codes with narrow frontiers

arXiv:2606.20513v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce the Frontier decoder, a pruned dynamic-programming decoder for sparse quantum decoding problems. Frontier processes error variables in a chosen order, merges prefixes with the same residual syndrome and logical label, and approximates logical-coset posterior masses by retaining only a narrow scored frontier. Without pruning, the recursion is exact ordered inference with exponential complexity. In the code-capacity setting, the decoder reaches thresholds close to optimal for the surface code and the color code. In the circuit-level noise model, it achieves state-of-the-art performance with a very small average retained list size: less than 100 for the gross code $[[144,12,12]]$ at a physical error rate of $0.001$. When the list size is constant, the decoder has linear complexity, suggesting the possibility of low-latency implementations.

18.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

AutoZyme: An Autonomous Agentic Framework to Optimize Bioinformatics Software

Performance bottlenecks in widely used genomics and bioinformatics software present a substantial and growing burden as biological datasets continue to increase in size and number. Relieving these bottlenecks relies largely on expert manual optimization and therefore remains difficult to scale. Here we present AutoZyme, an agentic framework for scientific software optimization. Given a target function, AutoZyme builds benchmarks, identifies bottlenecks, and iteratively tests code changes, retaining only those that improve runtime while preserving output. We evaluated AutoZyme on 45 functions, improving runtime without substantial memory increases in over 95% of cases considered. Across 38 functions from Seurat, Scanpy and related packages in genomics and bioinformatics, AutoZyme reduced runtime by a median of 8.52-fold, with the largest reductions exceeding 676-fold. The optimized functions are distributed through AutoZyme-Library as drop-in replacements for existing analysis pipelines. We also release AutoZyme as a reusable framework for optimizing additional user-specified packages and functions.

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

PAWS: Preference Learning with Advantage-Weighted Segments

arXiv:2606.11982v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) learns policies from human trajectory-level comparisons, avoiding explicit reward design and expert demonstrations. Existing methods typically train utility functions on trajectory or segment-level preferences while relying on per-step utility estimates during policy optimization. This training and inference mismatch induces a distribution shift that severely degrades temporal credit assignment and limits policy learning. We analyze this issue and propose PAWS, a segment-based preference learning method that performs policy updates directly using segment-level advantage functions. By aligning utility training with policy optimization, PAWS preserves trajectory-level preference information and avoids unreliable per-step learning signals. Experiments on simulated robotic manipulation and locomotion tasks demonstrate that PAWS consistently outperforms existing PbRL approaches, highlighting the importance of distribution-consistent preference learning.

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

A Systematic Evaluation of Black-Box Uncertainty Estimation Methods for Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.19868v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Although large language models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities across a wide range of tasks, their outputs often remain unreliable and may contain hallucinations, making uncertainty estimation (UE) essential for building trustworthy LLMs. In practice, many mainstream LLMs are only accessible through restricted APIs, where internal signals such as logits and hidden states are unavailable, making black-box UE especially important. However, existing work on black-box UE for LLMs remains fragmented in methodology and lacks a unified empirical comparison. To address this gap, we present a systematic review of black-box UE methods and organize them into five categories: verbalization-based, sampling-based, explanation-based, multi-agent, and hybrid methods. We further build a unified evaluation framework and benchmark 24 representative methods across 4 models and 4 dataset settings. Our results show that no single method consistently dominates across all settings. Nevertheless, methods that reason over and compare candidates in the answer space are generally effective, and hybrid methods that combine multiple uncertainty signals perform well under most conditions. By releasing the benchmark data and a unified evaluation framework, we aim to facilitate reproducible comparisons and support future research, while our empirical findings provide practical guidance for developing future black-box UE methods for LLMs.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

A Layered Security Framework Against Prompt Injection in RAG-Based Chatbots

Prompt injection is ranked as the most critical vulnerability in large language model (LLM) deployments by the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications, yet existing defenses operate at isolated pipeline stages and remain incomplete. Input filters cannot inspect retrieved documents, while output monitors cannot prevent malicious payloads from reaching the model. Consequently, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) chatbots remain vulnerable to indirect injection, where a poisoned knowledge-base document compromises every user whose query retrieves it. We present a three-layer framework that intercepts both direct and indirect prompt injection throughout the inference pipeline. Layer 1 screens user input using a rule-based pattern library and a fine-tuned semantic anomaly classifier. Layer 2 enforces a provenance-based instruction hierarchy during context assembly, preventing retrieved content from overriding operator policy. Layer 3 audits model output using a policy rule engine and semantic drift detector before delivery. A continuous audit loop aggregates structured logs and supports retraining to adapt the classifier to emerging attack patterns. The framework is model-agnostic and deploys as middleware without modifying the underlying LLM. Evaluation on 5,080 samples across GPT-4o, Llama 3, and Mistral 7B shows that the framework reduces Attack Success Rate (ASR) from 71.4\% to 11.3\%, outperforming the best single-layer baseline by 27.3 percentage points and a published guardrail system by 23.8 percentage points, while maintaining a 4.8\% false positive rate and a median latency overhead of 61.2 ms. Ablation studies confirm that all three layers provide complementary protection and that their combined effect exceeds the sum of individual contributions.

22.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

PhyloZoo: a unified framework for phylogenetic network analysis in Python

作者:

Reticulate evolutionary processes (events in which lineages merge, such as hybridization, recombination, and horizontal gene transfer) are widespread across nature but cannot be represented by phylogenetic trees alone. Phylogenetic networks have therefore become an important modelling tool, yet existing software is typically tied to specific inference paradigms and provides limited support for working with multiple network representations in a unified and programmable environment. PhyloZoo is an open-source Python framework that lowers the barrier to developing practical, easy-to-use software for phylogenetic network analysis. It provides data structures and algorithms covering the main representations used in the field, together with dedicated visualization tools and robust I/O for all major phylogenetic file formats. A particular emphasis lies on semi-directed phylogenetic networks, which explicitly represent root uncertainty and have so far received limited support in existing software. By offering a shared foundation for developing interoperable tools and a combinatorial layer that supports computational proofs and theoretical exploration, PhyloZoo enables reproducible workflows for applied, methodological, and theoretical studies of reticulate evolution. Availability and implementation: PhyloZoo is implemented in Python and installable from PyPI, with source code, documentation, and examples available at https://github.com/nholtgrefe/phylozoo.

23.
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

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

Budget-Aware Adaptive Adversarial Patches for Black-Box Object Detection

Adversarial patches pose a practical threat to modern object detectors. Prior work shows vulnerability, but three gaps limit actionable insight: (i) few score-based black-box attacks jointly optimize patch location, texture, and size under tight query budgets; (ii) success is rarely tied to the patch's visual footprint; and (iii) evaluations often conflate EOT robustness with plain-view suppression. We present \method{}, a query-efficient, budget-adaptive black-box attack that couples a lightweight Contextual Thompson-Sampling placer with NES-style pixel updates, growing the patch only when progress stalls. Reporting is anchored by a strict plain-image suppression test; EOT is audited but never used as a substitute for success, and optional appearance/printability weights expose strength–visibility trade-offs. Across YOLOv5, Faster R-CNN, and YOLOS, \method{} achieves strong suppression on CNN-based detectors and substantial suppression on the transformer-based detector, using compact patches and exposing clear query–footprint trade-offs relative to fixed-size and heuristic baselines. A print–capture pilot further shows transfer across unseen physical objects and viewpoints.

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

ROVE: Unlocking Human Interventions for Humanoid Manipulation via Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.17011v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Human interventions provide crucial corrective signals for post-training Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. However, enabling seamless humanoid interventions is a formidable systems challenge due to complex whole-body kinematics and dexterous-hand control. Consequently, the collected intervention trajectories are often suboptimal, and methods that rely on human interventions as expert supervision can absorb hesitant, inefficient, or even erroneous behaviors. To address both the system and algorithmic challenges, we propose ROVE, a reinforcement learning framework for humanoid VLA post-training with imperfect human interventions. First, ROVE introduces a human-in-the-loop pipeline capable of collecting deployment and intervention data for humanoid manipulation. Second, it utilizes Optimistic Value Estimation (OVE) to prioritize high-value behaviors from mixed-quality trajectories. To further robustify value estimation, we incorporate cross-embodiment human experience videos to provide rich supervision for long-tailed failure and recovery modes. The resulting critic yields informative advantage signals, steering the VLA actor to focus on high-value behaviors rather than indiscriminately imitating all actions. On challenging real-world contact-rich and fine-grained humanoid manipulation tasks, ROVE outperforms experience-learning baselines and consistently improves across multiple rollout-intervention iterations.