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

Fisher geometry reshapes the effect of incompatibility in multiparameter quantum estimation

arXiv:2606.11343v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multiparameter quantum estimation faces two fundamental obstacles: sloppiness, i.e., anisotropy of the quantum Fisher information matrix (QFIM) that renders some parameter directions insensitive, and incompatibility, the non-commutativity of optimal measurements for different parameters. The trade-off bound $C_T$ captures their joint impact on precision, but it has remained unclear how the distribution of incompatibility across parameter planes affects its overall cost. Here we separate the total amount of incompatibility from its location. We introduce a dimensionless quantity $G_n^{(F)}$ that measures the alignment between the incompatibility distribution and the eigenvalues of the QFIM, and show how the Frobenius scale of the incompatibility contribution factorizes. We obtain a bound and prove the incompatibility cost lies between this bound and a rank-dependent multiple thereof. We also prove that at fixed sloppiness, or equivalently fixed Fisher volume, concentrating incompatibility into a single parameter plane reduces the optimized trade-off cost because the Fisher geometry can then be reshaped to allocate more Fisher area to that plane. A qutrit $SU(2)$ encoding numerically confirms that states with larger incompatibility strength can nevertheless incur a smaller cost if the matching factor $G$ is sufficiently small. Our results establish that the distribution of incompatibility relative to the Fisher eigenbasis is a central diagnostic for multiparameter estimation, beyond the total incompatibility strength.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

RAVEN: A Regime-Aware Variable-context Expert Network for Financial Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.24062v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Financial time series forecasting presents structural challenges absent from standard benchmarks. Log-returns are non-stationary, exhibit exceptionally low signal-to-noise (SNR) ratios, and are governed by regime-dependent temporal dependencies. We identify a key limitation of state-of-the-art (SOTA) time series models in financial settings. A fixed context window is mismatched to the time-varying optimal look-back of non-stationary price processes. We propose the Regime-Aware Variable-context Expert Network (RAVEN), a Mixture-of-Experts framework designed to adaptively determine the temporal context for each input sample. Instead of relying on a fixed look-back horizon, RAVEN constructs a hierarchy of nested contiguous windows whose lengths are determined by the data itself. Specifically, RAVEN scores patches by learned importance in reverse chronological order and applies the Cumulative Importance Thresholding (CIT) mechanism to derive nested prefix windows, each routed to a scale-specialized expert. A Global Compressed Representation (GCR) branch runs in parallel over the full context, preserving global temporal coherence that local experts cannot guarantee. Because the nested routing induces structured overlap among expert inputs, we introduce a Correlation-Aware Weighting (CAW) to align variable-length expert outputs and penalize pairwise cosine similarity prior to aggregation. Experiments on cumulative log-return prediction (HS300, S&P500) and fund sales forecasting demonstrate that RAVEN achieves SOTA performances, improves Pearson correlation by 9.2% on HS300 and 20.2% on S&P500, and reduces MSE by 18.2% on fund sales forecasting, while achieving the best results in 14 of 16 metrics on four PEMS traffic benchmarks.

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

Action with Visual Primitives

arXiv:2605.22183v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for generalist robotic manipulation. A common design in current architectures maps language instructions and visual observations to actions in a single forward pass. While conceptually simple, this formulation entangles instruction comprehension, spatial scene understanding, and motor control within a single learning objective. As a result, the action expert must implicitly relearn cognitive and perceptual capabilities already present in the pretrained VLM, which can limit both learning efficiency and generalization. We introduce AVP (Action with Visual Primitives), an end-to-end architecture that implements this visual-primitive-centric interface: the VLM infers the next-stage target and emits visual-primitive tokens that condition a flow-matching action expert, with supervision derived from end-effector kinematics. Real-robot experiments on general pick-and-place tasks show that AVP improves the success rate by 37.04% over pi_0.5 and outperforms other recent methods, with consistent gains in data efficiency, spatial-compositional generalization, and object-level transfer.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Lower Complexity Bounds for Nonconvex-Strongly-Convex Bilevel Optimization with First-Order Oracles

作者:

arXiv:2511.19656v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Although upper bound guarantees for bilevel optimization have been widely studied, progress on lower bounds has been limited due to the complexity of the bilevel structure. In this work, we focus on the smooth nonconvex-strongly-convex setting and develop new hard instances that yield nontrivial lower bounds under deterministic and stochastic first-order oracle models. In the deterministic case, we prove that any first-order zero-respecting algorithm requires at least $\Omega(\kappa^{3/2}\epsilon^{-2})$ oracle calls to find an $\epsilon$-accurate stationary point, improving the optimal lower bounds known for single-level nonconvex optimization and for nonconvex-strongly-convex min-max problems. In the stochastic case, we show that at least $\Omega(\kappa^{5/2}\epsilon^{-4})$ stochastic oracle calls are necessary, again strengthening the best known bounds in related settings. Our results expose substantial gaps between current upper and lower bounds for bilevel optimization and suggest that even simplified regimes, such as those with quadratic lower-level objectives, warrant further investigation toward understanding the optimal complexity of bilevel optimization under standard first-order oracles.

05.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Non-asymptotic Tail Bounds for the Kostlan–Shub–Smale Field: Tensor PCA and Spherical $k$-Spin Complexity

arXiv:2606.17665v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper builds a hierarchy of explicit, non-asymptotic tail bounds for the supremum of the Kostlan–Shub–Smale (KSS) random field on the sphere, and applies it to two problems: Spiked Tensor PCA and the landscape of the spherical $k$-spin model. For Tensor PCA, we study the non-asymptotic statistical limits of estimating a rank-$R$ symmetric signal tensor of order~$k\ge 3$ and dimension~$d\ge 3$ from a single Gaussian observation at signal-to-noise ratio~$\lambda$, through the profile maximum likelihood estimator, the MLE restricted to normalized rank-$R$ tensors of coherence at least~$\kappa$. Our analysis uses a single reduction: a deterministic geometric inequality (the Tube Method) and a rank-reduction step bound the estimation error by the supremum of the canonical KSS field, which the Kac–Rice formula turns into a Gaussian integral against the expected absolute characteristic polynomial of a shifted Gaussian Orthogonal Ensemble, controlled in turn by the four explicit tail bounds of our hierarchy (three from a Mehta–Fyodorov representation, one from a Ben Arous–Dembo–Guionnet large deviation). The same reduction yields two results, each with explicit constants. For estimation, a finite-$(k,d)$ error bound recovers the asymptotically optimal rate~$\sqrt{d\log k}$ of Perry, Wein and Bandeira, with explicit dependence on the rank~$R$ and the coherence~$\kappa$. For the landscape, a two-sided non-asymptotic bracketing of the annealed complexity of the spherical $k$-spin Hamiltonian recovers the Auffinger–Ben Arous–\v{C}ern\'y complexity function in the high-dimensional limit.

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

Bypassing Prompt Guards in Production with Controlled-Release Prompting

arXiv:2510.01529v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Ball et al. recently established that prompt filtering for AI alignment faces a fundamental barrier: under standard cryptographic assumptions, no filter running significantly faster than the protected model can universally distinguish adversarial prompts from benign ones. We investigate whether this impossibility result translates to real-world vulnerabilities in deployed large language model (LLM) systems. We answer affirmatively by introducing controlled-release prompting, a practical instantiation of the theoretical framework that exploits the resource asymmetry between lightweight input filters and the main models they protect. Unlike the theoretical construction, our attack does not require model modification: it generates malicious prompts that are indecipherable by any bounded filter yet remain tractable to the target LLM. We find our attack to be successful on four major chat platforms (Google Gemini, DeepSeek Chat, xAI Grok, and Mistral Le Chat) where baseline methods fail. Additionally, we apply our attack to extract copyrighted data from Gemini. Finally, we provide a systematic evaluation of 14 open-weight prompt guard models, revealing that even reasoning-capable filters cannot reliably detect our attack without incurring prohibitive resource overhead.

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

DYNA : Dynamic Episodic Memory Networks for Augmenting Large Language Models with Temporal Knowledge Graphs in Continuous Learning

Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to incorporate new knowledge without forgetting or costly retraining. We propose DYNA, a lightweight framework that augments a frozen LLM with a temporal knowledge graph where events are nodes and temporal relations are directed, timestamped edges. The graph serves as an external, updatable memory. At query time, DYNA retrieves relevant nodes via random walks and centrality measures, then augments the LLM's response. Evaluated on three temporal recall tasks, DYNA reduces catastrophic forgetting by ~7% compared to fine-tuning and improves temporal ordering by ~5% over standard RAG. Higher graph clustering coefficients correlate with better retrieval, showing that graph structure matters. Contributions: (1) episodic memory as temporal KG, (2) retraining-free LLM augmentation, (3) graph properties as predictors of retrieval performance.

08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

Programmatic access to ICTV virus taxonomy through a public ontology API

The International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) is responsible for developing and maintaining a universal virus taxonomy. As the reference framework for organising the viral world, it is essential for virology and related fields. Despite its widespread use in research and public health, programmatic access to ICTV taxonomy has remained limited, posing challenges for integration, versioning, and interoperability across databases and bioinformatics resources requiring up-to-date virus taxonomy. To address this, we developed a public and sustainable solution leveraging ontology-based APIs. Successive ICTV Master Species List (MSL) releases were transformed into a structured ontology and deployed as a unified representation through the Ontology Lookup Service (OLS). The framework also provides ICTV-NCBI mappings and helper libraries for integration into downstream systems. This enables, for the first time, public programmatic retrieval of current and historical virological taxon names, taxonomic relationships, metadata, and persistent identifiers through stable endpoints. More broadly, this work illustrates a general strategy for transforming structured biological datasets into semantically enriched graph resources exposed through scalable public APIs. These developments enhance interoperability, reduce manual curation, and support FAIR-aligned taxonomic data management in virology and pandemic preparedness.

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

WHAR Arena: Benchmarking the State of the Art in Efficient Wearable Human Activity Recognition

arXiv:2606.13194v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep learning has become the dominant paradigm in Wearable Human Activity Recognition (WHAR), yet progress is obscured by a comparability crisis. Results are often reported using inconsistent datasets, custom data processing, and varying evaluation protocols, making state-of-the-art claims fragile. We address this with a large-scale, open-source benchmark that integrates 30 diverse datasets under standardized processing, unified model interfaces, and a shared cross-subject evaluation protocol. Evaluating 17 representative architectures across 4760 training runs, we jointly measure predictive performance alongside on-device latency, peak memory, and model size on an Android reference device. Our results reveal that the WHAR state of the art is distributed rather than dominated by a single architecture. While CNN-HAR achieves the highest mean macro-F1, top-performing models cluster tightly, indicating contemporary architectures have converged near a predictive performance ceiling. When accounting for deployment efficiency, compact neural models, such as TinierHAR, and classical Random Forests define the practically relevant Pareto frontier, whereas larger recurrent and hybrid models incur high hardware costs without corresponding performance gains. Consequently, while predictive performance has plateaued, substantial potential for future progress remains in optimizing deployment efficiency and improving adaptation to domain shifts. We release our full framework to support transparent reuse and extension.

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

ADORE: Iterative Query Expansion with Retrieval-Grounded Relevance Feedback

LLM-based query expansion improves retrieval by enriching the original query with additional context. Yet most methods remain generation-driven, producing plausible pseudo-documents or expansions without checking how the target corpus responds. This can introduce retrieval drift, amplify misleading vocabulary, or miss terms that distinguish relevant from non-relevant documents. We argue that effective expansion requires retrieval-grounded feedback, not just single-pass generation or unverified iteration. We introduce ADORE (ADapt, Observe, Relevance Evaluate), an iterative framework that turns retrieval outcomes into feedback for the next expansion. At each round, an LLM generates pseudo-passages, a retriever exposes the corpus response, and a relevance assessor evaluates retrieved documents against the original query. These judgments identify what to reinforce, what remains undercovered, and what to suppress. Across TREC Deep Learning, BEIR, and BRIGHT, ADORE consistently outperforms strong query expansion baselines with notable improvements across nearly all evaluation settings, improving average nDCG@10 by 24.5% over BM25 and 3.6% over the strongest prior query expansion method on BEIR, and by 122.9% over BM25 and 9.2% over the best query expansion baseline on BRIGHT. Our code and data are publicly available.

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

Hidden Degradation Costs in Energy-Cost-Only HEMS Optimisation: Study on Battery and PV Sensitivity

arXiv:2606.16051v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Residential battery energy storage systems (BESS) are increasingly deployed alongside photovoltaic (PV) generation to reduce household energy costs under volatile time-of-use (TOU) tariffs. Model predictive control (MPC) is a widely adopted optimisation strategy for home energy management systems (HEMS), typically formulated to minimise net energy cost, subject to physical and operational constraints. However, battery degradation is rarely embedded in the optimisation objective, meaning its cost is unquantified and aggressive; high-cycle-count strategies could incur significant losses once deployed to physical systems. This paper presents a receding-horizon mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) baseline for a UK residential HEMS, using demand data from the REFIT dataset. A 3 by 3 sensitivity study is conducted across three battery sizes and three PV array sizes, with post-hoc degradation cost estimated using the Naumann stress model and rainflow cycle counting. Results show that degradation remains constant for each battery size and can exceed energy cost savings by up to 1,060 %. These results demonstrate that energy-cost-only optimisation systematically underestimates the true system cost, motivating a degradation-aware control formulation.

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

Beyond a Single Explanation of the Adam–SGD Gap

arXiv:2606.14259v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prior work has identified several factors that can contribute to the performance gap between Adam and SGD, spanning data aspects, architecture design, and optimization properties. Yet these explanations are often studied in isolation, leaving their relative importance unclear. In this work, we revisit these hypotheses through a controlled empirical study across vision, language, genomics, and graph tasks, spanning modern and classical architectures, and carefully designed training setups. Our results suggest that no single factor consistently explains the Adam–SGD gap. For instance, the Adam advantage can (1) persist under a uniform vocabulary distribution yet nearly disappear under a heavy-tailed one; (2) reverse in favor of SGD in softmax-attention models; and (3) become larger under soft architectural modifications, e.g., when ReLU is replaced by a GeLU nonlinearity. This suggests that the gap arises from nontrivial data and architecture interactions, rather than from a single common factor. Yet, we observe a pattern across our settings: a crossover batch size at which the relative advantage shifts from SGD to Adam as the batch size scales. These empirical results are captured by our theoretical gap model, which predicts this batch-size-dependent crossover. Our perspective helps reconcile several existing hypotheses while offering practical insights across domains.

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

Benchmarking Vision-Language-Action Models on SO-101: Failure and Recovery Analysis

arXiv:2606.08881v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong generalization in robotic manipulation, yet existing evaluations are primarily conducted in simulation or on expensive robotic platforms, leaving their robustness on affordable real-world robots largely unexplored. We present a standardized real-world benchmark for evaluating representative VLA and imitation learning policies on the low-cost SO-101 robotic platform. The benchmark comprises four representative manipulation tasks together with unified evaluation protocols, enabling systematic comparison under embodiment uncertainty. Using real-world teleoperated demonstrations, we fine-tune and evaluate $\pi_{0.5}$, SmolVLA, Wall-X, and ACT directly on the physical platform. Beyond conventional task success rates, the benchmark incorporates a structured failure taxonomy, semantic- and execution-level failure decomposition, and recovery-aware evaluation metrics to characterize policy robustness. Experimental results show that stronger pretrained VLA policies generally outperform the imitation learning baseline, although performance remains highly task-dependent under low-cost robotic deployment conditions. Execution instability emerges as the dominant failure source, while recovery capability varies substantially across architectures. These results highlight the importance of failure and recovery analysis beyond binary task success and establish SO-101 as a practical benchmark for evaluating embodied AI systems under realistic low-cost robotic deployment conditions.

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

HiGR: Industrial-Scale Hierarchical Generative Slate Recommendation Framework in Tencent

arXiv:2512.24787v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Slate recommendation, which presents users with a ranked item list in a single display, is ubiquitous across mainstream online platforms. While recent generative recommendation methods have shown strong potential in modeling item sequences with semantic IDs, directly applying them to industrial-scale slate recommendation faces a fundamental disconnect: entangled SID spaces confound high-level list planning, fine-grained autoregressive decoding over long sequences limits semantic planning efficiency, and token-level objectives misalign with holistic slate quality. In this paper, we propose HiGR, an industrial-scale hierarchical generative framework for slate recommendation that bridges this disconnect through a co-designed pipeline. First, HiGR learns structured SIDs via a Prefix-Contrastive Residual Quantized VAE (PCRQ-VAE). By enforcing high-level prefixes to capture shared semantics, PCRQ-VAE creates a controllable discrete space that acts as a prerequisite for efficient planning. Leveraging this structured space, our Hierarchical Slate Decoder (HSD) shifts autoregressive modeling from entangled token-level decoding to coarse-grained preference embeddings. This design significantly reduces inference latency while allowing explicit global slate structure planning. Finally, this stable planning space enables an ORPO-based listwise alignment mechanism to optimize triple-objective implicit feedback-ranking fidelity, genuine user interest, and diversity. Extensive offline experiments show that HiGR outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by over 10% in offline recommendation quality while achieving a $5\times$ inference speedup. Online A/B tests on Tencent platforms further improve watch time by 1.22% and video plays by 1.73%. HiGR has been deployed on multiple Tencent platform surfaces, serving hundreds of millions of users and proving its industrial-scale applicability.

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

GSPan: A Continuous Gaussian Primitive Representation for Arbitrary-Scale Pansharpening

Pansharpening aims to generate high-resolution multispectral (HRMS) images by fusing low-resolution multispectral (LRMS) and panchromatic (PAN) observations. Most existing deep learning methods treat pansharpening as fixed-grid prediction, which limits scale adaptation. To address this, we propose GSPan, a framework that introduces 2D Gaussian Splatting (GS) into pansharpening. Instead of directly predicting pixels, GSPan represents band-wise residual details as continuous and learnable 2D Gaussian primitives. We design a Dual-Stream Hierarchical Interaction (DSHI) architecture with a Spatial-Spectral Interactive Attention (SSIA) module to estimate these primitives from complementary PAN and MS observations. The predicted primitives are rendered as a residual detail field and injected into the upsampled MS image. This continuous representation allows GSPan to render fused images on arbitrary target sampling grids without scale-specific retraining. It further enables a Scale-Decoupled Asymmetric Inference (SDAI) strategy, which estimates primitives at a reduced resolution and renders the fused image at the target resolution for efficient large-scene pansharpening. Experiments on QuickBird, GaoFen-2, WorldView-3, and WorldView-3-4K datasets show that GSPan delivers state-of-the-art fusion performance. Moreover, SDAI markedly accelerates inference, achieving a favorable trade-off between computational efficiency and fusion quality. Our results demonstrate the potential of continuous Gaussian residual representations as a flexible and scale-decoupled alternative to fixed-grid prediction.

16.
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.

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

Why SWAVE May Not Be All You Need:A Concept-Evolution Retrospective on Complex-Valued Recurrent Language Models

arXiv:2606.18324v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: SWave is a complex-valued recurrent language model (169.26M parameters, D=384, L=16, T=2048) trained on FineWeb-Edu using 2xH100 NVL. It was designed around three founding premises: that representing language as complex waves rather than real-valued numbers enables richer information encoding; that a Cayley-parameterised unitary transition provides a mathematical guarantee against state decay or explosion; and that a hidden state which rotates rather than shrinks preserves signal integrity over arbitrarily long contexts. The core of SWave evolved substantially across three development phases. The Resonance Head was found to structurally admit imaginary-channel collapse as a global loss minimum (a failure mode we term cos-domination collapse) and was superseded by an untied head with independent real and imaginary embedding tables from the Phase-Associative Memory (PAM) architecture. This resolved the degenerate minimum and enabled stable 200,000-step training (best-step PPL 22.0 at step 89,861). ComplexNorm and the Wave Propagation Scan proved load-bearing throughout all three phases and were retained to the final architecture. ProtectGatedScan was reframed as a structural prior rather than a learned behaviour. The four multi-scale retention concepts showed no measurable improvement under controlled evaluation and were found non-load-bearing. The ComplexGatedUnit was superseded by a real-valued squared-ReLU channel mixer with fewer parameters. The auxiliary training objectives showed no benefit once structural constraints were resolved. The investigation yields a formal characterisation of cos-domination collapse, a parallel scan with a log-space backward pass for numerical stability, six transferable engineering principles for complex-valued recurrent training, and a plan-to-code traceability methodology for catching structural divergences that conventional test suites miss.

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

An Introduction to Causal Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.24160v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Causal inference provides a set of principles and tools that allow one to combine data and knowledge about an environment to reason with questions of counterfactual nature, i.e., what would have happened had reality been different, even when no data of this unrealized reality is currently available. Reinforcement learning provides methods to learn a policy that optimizes a specific measure (e.g., reward, regret) when the agent is deployed in an environment and pursues an exploratory, trial-and-error approach. These two disciplines have evolved independently and with virtually no interaction between them. We note that they operate over different aspects of the same building block, counterfactual relations, which makes them umbilically connected. Based on these observations, novel learning opportunities arise when this connection is explicitly acknowledged and mathematized. To realize this potential, we note that any environment where the RL agent is deployed can be decomposed as a collection of autonomous mechanisms with different causal invariances, parsimoniously modeled as a structural causal model; any standard RL setting implicitly encodes such a model. This formalization allows us to put under a unifying treatment different modes of learning, including online, off-policy, and causal calculus learning, which appear unrelated in the literature. However, these modalities are not exhaustive: we introduce several natural and pervasive classes of learning settings that entail novel dimensions of analysis. Specifically, we introduce and discuss through causal lenses generalized policy learning, where to intervene, imitation learning, and counterfactual learning. These tasks lead to a broader view of counterfactual learning and suggest great potential for studying causal inference and reinforcement learning side by side, which we call causal reinforcement learning (CRL).

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

OpenMedQ: Broad Open Pretraining for Medical Vision-Language Models

We present OpenMedQ, a medical vision-language model pretrained on the broadest fully-open medical mix to date: 14 datasets totaling ~3.35M pretraining samples spanning pathology, radiology, microscopy, and text-only clinical QA. OpenMedQ reaches state-of-the-art BLEU-1 on PathVQA (75.9), beating Med-PaLM M variants up to 562B parameters (~80x larger), and matches the best reported VQA-MED BLEU-1 (64.5). Its vision encoder, transferred to 8 unseen medical classification benchmarks under an identical downstream recipe, obtains the highest average macro-F1 (0.757) among BiomedCLIP (0.745), PMC-CLIP (0.745), PubMedCLIP (0.746), and a from-scratch baseline (0.616). We release our code and an interactive demo is publicly available as a reproducible baseline for the community.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

GEAR-VLA: Learning Geometry-Aware Action Representations for Generalizable Robotic Manipulation

arXiv:2606.08530v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models achieve strong benchmark performance but still struggle in real-world deployment with unseen objects, background shifts, and different robot embodiments. We argue that this stems from the lack of a unified geometry-aware manipulation representation, leaving existing VLAs vulnerable to low-level trajectory supervision, misaligned 3D features, and embodiment differences. To address this, we propose GEAR-VLA, a VLA framework for learning unified geometry-aware action representations for generalizable robotic manipulation. GEAR-VLA adopts coarse-to-fine action learning, where multi-source embodied pretraining equips the VLM with embodied reasoning and discrete action understanding before latent action tokens connect action semantics to a gradient-decoupled DiT continuous action expert. It further performs semantic-aligned 3D integration by aligning a trainable 3D spatial backbone with the VLA representation while freezing the original VLM-aligned visual pathway. To share this representation across robots, GEAR-VLA uses embodiment canonicalization, where embodiment-aware states and embodiment-invariant actions confine robot differences to the low-level interface. Extensive simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate strong generalization: GEAR-VLA achieves state-of-the-art performance on LIBERO, zero-shot LIBERO-Plus, and RoboTwin 2.0, reaches 85.9% success on AgileX and 81.0% on the pretraining-unseen LDT-01 embodiment, and obtains 90.1% success on a 6,360-trial universal grasping benchmark with 212 unseen objects. Code and models will be released at https://github.com/babynabeauty/GEAR-VLA.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Real vs. Complex Spectral Bases for Neural Operators: The Role of Green's Function Alignment

arXiv:2606.24851v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fourier Neural Operators (FNO) learn solution operators of partial differential equations by parameterizing global convolutions in the complex Fourier domain. For real-valued PDE solutions, the complex FFT carries representational redundancy through conjugate symmetry. We introduce the Hartley Neural Operator (HNO), the exact real-valued mirror of FNO: it replaces the FFT with the purely real Discrete Hartley Transform and learns a single real multiplier per retained spectral mode, with no complex arithmetic. Because the real Hartley spectrum is not halved by conjugate symmetry, HNO retains twice as many frequency corners as FNO but one real weight where FNO carries a complex pair, so the two operators are iso-parametric at equal width and differ only in spectral basis. Our central thesis is that the best basis is a property of the operator. Self-adjoint elliptic operators (Poisson, biharmonic) have real, symmetric Green's functions that the real Hartley multiplier diagonalizes exactly, and HNO is favored there. Time-dependent operators carry phase, from oscillation in the wave equation to transport in advection, Burgers, and Navier-Stokes, which a real diagonal multiplier cannot represent, so FNO is favored there, and increasingly so with the operator's phase content, leaving the phaseless heat equation as the borderline case. Training both operators identically and benchmarking across PDE classes, initial-condition families, and boundary conditions, we find an elliptic-versus-time-dependent split that is monotone in operator phase content and matches the Green's-function theory we develop. Rather than a universal winner, our findings give a predictive rule: match the spectral basis to the symmetry of the solution operator.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

From Imitation to Alignment: Human-Preference Flow Policies for Long-Horizon Sidewalk Navigation

arXiv:2606.12603v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous long-horizon sidewalk navigation is essential for micro-mobility applications such as robotic food delivery and assistive electronic wheelchairs. Unlike autonomous driving on the road, long-horizon sidewalk navigation requires precise maneuvering through unpredictable sidewalk terrains and pedestrians, with a lightweight perception stack as minimal as a single monocular RGB camera. While imitation learning (IL) from demonstrations offers a practical solution, the resulting autopilot policy often suffers from compounding errors, a lack of social compliance on sidewalks, and deficiencies in counterfactual reasoning to handle complex situations. To address these challenges, we introduce FlowPilot, a mapless navigation policy that achieves robust and efficient long-horizon navigation performance using only a monocular RGB camera. We first propose to use anchored flow matching as an action representation for policy pre-training on large-scale robot fleet data and to capture the diverse, complex, multimodal distribution of sidewalk navigation behaviors. To bridge the gap between imitation and alignment, we further design a human-in-the-loop preference learning scheme to tune the policy on a small amount of human intervention data. It strengthens the model's counterfactual reasoning and social compliance on sidewalks. We evaluate FlowPilot through extensive simulation and real-world experiments in diverse sidewalk environments. FlowPilot achieves 42% success rate and 66% route completion in simulation, while FlowPilot-HP further improves real-world robustness and social compliance, reducing IR by 40.0% and NIR by 52.1% relative to the base model.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Gender Bias in LLM Hiring Decisions: Evidence from a Japanese Context and Evaluation of Mitigation Strategies

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in hiring workflows, yet most research on gender bias in LLM hiring decisions has focused on English-language, Western-format resumes. This study examines whether pro-female gender bias extends to a Japanese corporate context and evaluates two practical mitigation strategies. Using a counterfactual resume design with 60 Japanese rirekisho-format resumes, 12 name pairs selected on linguistically grounded gender-signal criteria, and five state-of-the-art LLMs (Claude Sonnet 4.6, GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Llama 3.3 70B), we conducted 43,200 API calls across baseline, prompt instruction, and privacy filter conditions. A crossed random-effects linear mixed model confirms a significant pro-female bias across all five models, replicating Western findings in a non-Western context. A prompt-level gender-neutrality instruction produces no meaningful reduction in bias. A name-reliance analysis formally identifies the candidate name as the primary gender channel: removing the name from the prompt reduces the female effect by nearly its full magnitude. An unexpected incompatibility between the privacy filter and GPT-4o's content safety filter, resulting in a 42% refusal rate, highlights a practical deployment challenge for name anonymization in LLM-assisted recruitment pipelines.

24.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Phase transitions for contact processes on sparse random graphs via metastability and local limits

arXiv:2505.22471v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose a new perspective on the asymptotic regimes of fast and slow extinction in the contact process on locally converging sequences of sparse finite graphs. We characterise the phase boundary by the existence of a metastable density, which makes the study of the phase transition particularly amenable to local-convergence techniques. We use this approach to derive general conditions for the coincidence of the critical threshold with the survival/extinction threshold in the local limit. We further argue that the correct time scale to separate fast extinction from slow extinction in sparse graphs is, in general, the exponential scale, by showing that fast extinction may occur on stretched exponential time scales in sparse scale-free spatial networks. Together with {the results of} Nam, Nguyen and Sly (Trans.\ Am.\ Math.\ Soc.\ 375, 2022), our methods can be applied to deduce that the fast/slow threshold in sparse configuration models coincides with the survival/extinction threshold on the limiting Galton-Watson tree.

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

CD-RCM: Generalizable Continuous-Depth Novel View Synthesis for Reflectance Confocal Microscopy

Reflectance confocal microscopy (RCM) provides noninvasive, cellular-resolution "optical biopsies" of human skin in vivo by acquiring en-face images at successive depths, forming a sparse z-stack. Due to optical limitations, these stacks are anisotropic 3D volumes with lateral resolution (0.5 $\mu$m) $\sim$6 times higher compared to axial resolution, which is defined by the optical sectioning (3 $\mu$m), limiting the interpretation of tissue. Our goal is to provide continuous-depth visualization by interpolating intermediate sections and making the 3D volume isotropic. Such a representation permits arbitrary-direction sectioning, including histopathology-like cross-sectional examination, without requiring per-patient optimization. To that end, we introduce the first RCM-specific novel-view synthesis (NVS) approach, CD-RCM, a feedforward model that predicts realistic, unseen depths from sparsely sampled RCM stacks. Classical neural rendering methods focus on reconstruction from surface-level multi-view observations. In contrast to surface-level camera views, RCM can acquire optically sectioned en-face images of tissue beyond the surface up to 200 $\mu$m. However, during visualization of the RCM stacks, observations of the shallower sections (towards the surface) obscure the deeper ones. This unique axial imaging geometry and layer-dependent anatomical organization motivated our development of a tailored architectural and training framework that explicitly accounts for RCM's depth-resolved, occlusive imaging physics. Experiments demonstrate that CD-RCM achieves high-fidelity novel-view synthesis with sub-second inference time.