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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Space Is Intelligence: Neural Semigroup Superposition for Riemannian Metric Generation

作者:

arXiv:2606.18828v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traditional approaches place intelligence in the agent, whether as a learned policy or a search procedure. We instead place intelligence in the space itself: a scene induces a Riemannian metric on the configuration manifold, and action reduces to following the geodesics of that metric rather than invoking a separate planner or collision checker. A single Encoder-Router network realizes this idea through three complementary parameter groups – frame parameters that orient the generators, modulation parameters that govern their spatial propagation, and basic coefficients that determine their strength. These groups combine through a shared semigroup-superposition mechanism to produce a single Riemannian metric field, yielding a compact architecture whose geometry scales naturally with scene complexity. Trained on a single two-obstacle scene, the model demonstrates robust zero-shot generalization across unseen obstacle configurations, with orders-of-magnitude separation between collision-free and obstacle-penetrating path costs.

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

The N-Body Problem: Parallel Execution from Single-Person Egocentric Video

Humans can intuitively parallelise complex activities, but can a model predict this from observing a single person? Given one egocentric video, we introduce the N-Body Problem: predicting how N individuals, can hypothetically perform the same set of tasks. The goal is to maximise speed-up, but naive assignment of video segments to individuals often violates real-world constraints, leading to physically impossible scenarios like two people using the same object or occupying the same space. To quantify this, we formalise the N-Body Problem and propose a suite of metrics to evaluate both performance (speed-up, task coverage) and feasibility (spatial collisions, object conflicts and causal constraints). As a proof of concept, we introduce a structured prompting strategy that guides a Vision-Language Model (VLM) to reason about the 3D environment, object usage, and temporal dependencies, producing a viable parallel execution. On 100 videos from EPIC-Kitchens and HD-EPIC, for $N = 2$, our structured prompt improves action coverage by 45% over a baseline prompt for Gemini 2.5 Pro, while simultaneously slashing collision rates, object and causal conflicts by 51%, 52% and 55% respectively.

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

LiteOdyssey: A Lightweight Reasoning AI Agent for Interpretable Rare-Disease Diagnosis

arXiv:2606.16149v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most medical AI systems improve by scaling additional machinery: more fine-tuning data, more agents, and/or larger retrieval databases. In rare-disease diagnosis, however, such scaling can produce systems that are difficult to deploy, audit, and maintain. We asked whether state-of-the-art diagnostic performance could instead be achieved by extending the reasoning chain of a single AI agent: guiding it with a diagnostic policy, developed through human-AI collaboration and augmenting with freely available biomedical tools. We introduce LiteOdyssey, a lightweight rare-disease diagnostic framework that guides reasoning language model through a clinical genetics workflow. This framework was developed through Policy Iteration with Human Feedback (PIHF) and uses dynamic access to public biomedical tools. On two challenging benchmarks that provide only patient clinical features, LiteOdyssey achieved state-of-the-art performance, with an overall disease Recall@1 of 59.3% over the combined 1,243 cases of LIRICAL (n = 370) and the PhenoPacket Store (n = 873). Both benchmarks have a high proportion of ultra-rare disease (a prevalence below 1 in 1,000,000, with ultra-rare shares of approximately 45% and 52.8%, respectively). On the more difficult PhenoPacket subset, where causal diseases were not mapped to Orphanet in our rarity-mapping pipeline, LiteOdyssey achieved 60.7% Recall@1, compared with 10.7% for the same baseline model (GPT-5.4) without tools. This performance was achieved without fine-tuning, multi-agent ensembles, or a large case-retrieval database. Gains were also observed in the following: on cases never seen during development, on a private cohort of real-world rare disease patients, and on a smaller open-weights model. LiteOdyssey suggests a path toward rare-disease AI systems that are accurate, easier to deploy, and more transparent for physician review.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Mitigating Visual Hallucinations in Multimodal Systems through Retrieval-Augmented Reliability-Aware Inference

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in vision-language understanding and natural-language response generation. However, these systems can still produce overconfident predictions and hallucination-like outputs, particularly when the visual evidence is weak, ambiguous, or semantically inconsistent. Most existing approaches focus on improving multimodal representation alignment or retrieval-augmented generation, while providing limited mechanisms to quantify instance-level prediction reliability or identify incorrect visual outputs. This work proposes a retrieval-augmented reliability-aware inference framework for trustworthy multimodal visual understanding. The proposed framework constructs an external visual evidence database using pretrained visual embeddings and nearest-neighbor retrieval over normalized feature representations. Retrieved evidence is used to estimate prediction trustworthiness through multiple reliability indicators, including similarity strength, class-support agreement, evidence margin, entropy-based uncertainty, and an aggregate reliability score. Based on these signals, a decision gate determines whether the system should accept the prediction, answer with caution, or abstain/fallback when evidence is insufficient. A multimodal response-generation layer then produces a final user-facing response conditioned on the reliability decision. Experiments on ImageNet-100 demonstrate that the proposed reliability-aware framework improves accepted prediction accuracy from 85.84\% to 88.88\% at 89.04\% coverage. The hallucination-like accepted wrong-answer rate is reduced from 14.16\% to 11.12\%. These results show that integrating retrieval evidence, reliability estimation, and selective decision gating can improve calibration and reduce overconfident visual errors without retraining large multimodal models.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Reverse Flow Matching: A Unified Framework for Online Reinforcement Learning with Diffusion and Flow Policies

arXiv:2601.08136v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion and flow policies are gaining prominence in online reinforcement learning (RL) due to their expressive power, yet training them efficiently remains a critical challenge. A fundamental difficulty that distinguishes online RL from standard generative modeling is the lack of direct samples from the target Boltzmann distribution defined by the Q-function. To address this, two seemingly distinct families of methods have been proposed for diffusion policies: a noise-expectation family, which uses a weighted average of noise as the training target, and a gradient-expectation family, which employs a weighted average of Q-function gradients. However, it remains unclear how these objectives are formally related, or whether they can be synthesized into a more general formulation. In this paper, we propose a unified framework, reverse flow matching (RFM), which rigorously addresses the problem of training diffusion and flow models without direct target samples. By adopting a reverse inferential perspective, we formulate the training target as a posterior mean estimation problem given an intermediate noisy sample. Crucially, we introduce Langevin Stein operators to construct zero-mean control variates, deriving a general class of estimators that share the same expectation. We show that existing noise-expectation and gradient-expectation methods are simply two specific instances within this broader class. This unified view yields two key advancements: it extends the capability of targeting Boltzmann distributions from diffusion to flow policies, and it enables the principled combination of Q-value and Q-gradient information to form an effective estimator, thereby improving training efficiency and stability. We instantiate RFM to train a flow policy in online RL and demonstrate improved performance on continuous-control benchmarks compared to diffusion policy baselines.

06.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-18

Mechanisms underlying spontaneous and evoked calcium responses in oligodendrocyte precursor cells: A modeling investigation

作者:

by Martin Lardy, Leqi Wang, Claire Guerrier, Veronica T. Cheli, Pablo M. Paez, Anmar Khadra Calcium (Ca2+) signaling has emerged as a central regulator of activity-dependent myelination in oligodendrocytes. These Ca2+ signals encompass both the stimulus-independent spontaneous Ca2+ local transients (SCaLTs) generated intrinsically in a voltage-independent manner or facilitated by the membrane voltage, as well as evoked responses triggered by ATP and glutamate release. To investigate the regulatory mechanisms underlying this combined spiking activity, we developed a stochastic spatiotemporal flux-balance model of Ca2+ transients in oligodendrocyte precursor cells (OPCs). The model incorporates all the relevant fluxes in these cells and integrates membrane voltage dynamics with a Ca2+-induced Ca2+-release (CICR) mechanism using parameters fitted to Ca2+ fluorescence recordings. The model reproduced the intrinsic and voltage-facilitated SCaLTs in OPCs in the absence of purinergic and glutamatergic receptors, and captured the three distinct patterns of evoked Ca2+ responses induced by prolonged ATP and glutamate stimulations identified using machine classifier. The model highlighted the role of ATP and glutamate in generating these clusters, and showed that the fast dynamics of CICR is key to producing these evoked responses. Further analysis of the model also revealed that voltage-gated L- and T-type Ca2+ channels slightly increase the frequency of SCaLTs, while stimulation with ATP and glutamate, using randomly distributed pulses mimicking in vivo conditions, leads to an increase in both the amplitudes of Ca2+ spikes (i.e., the combination of SCaLTs and evoked responses) and the prevalence of wide spikes, especially upon glutamate stimulation. Bifurcation analysis of the deterministic version of the model, in the absence of diffusion, demonstrated that ATP and glutamate stimulation can shift the system into an oscillatory regime, thereby increasing the deterministic component of SCaLT dynamics. This study thus offers a comprehensive representation of OPC Ca2+ transients linking recorded in vitro behaviors to in vivo dynamics.

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

You Don't Need Strong Assumptions: Visual Representation Learning via Temporal Differences

Progress in AI has largely been driven by methods that assume less. As compute and data increase, approaches with weaker inductive biases generally outperform those with stronger assumptions. This is particularly characteristic of the field of Visual Representation Learning, where approaches have gone from being dominated by Supervised Learning, to Weakly Supervised Learning, to the now widespread success of Self-Supervised Learning without human labels. Yet, even modern Self-Supervised Learning approaches still depend on strong inductive biases such as augmentations, masking, or cropping. If this trend holds, even these remaining biases should become bottlenecks at scale – and our experiments confirm this: the optimal strength of inductive biases decreases as data grows. This motivates the search for approaches that rely on fewer assumptions. To this end, we introduce Temporal Difference in Vision (TDV), a new paradigm for self-supervised learning from video that avoids existing inductive biases, relying instead on a causal assumption that the past causes the future. TDV functions by jointly training an image encoder and a motion encoder so that the current frame's representation plus the encoded motion equals the next frame's representation. Despite not leveraging any strong inductive biases, TDV matches state-of-the-art recipes on dense spatial tasks, laying the foundation for representation learning without strong assumptions.

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

Coercivity and Local Convergence of Physical Learning in Linear Circuits

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

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Epidemiology of Cervical Precancerous Lesions: Prevalence and Predictors from Pap Smear Screening in Hawassa City Hospitals, Sidama Region, Ethiopia. Institutional-Based Cross-sectional Study

Background: Cervical cancer is the fourth most common cancer in women worldwide and remains a major public health challenge. In Ethiopia, it is the second leading cause of cancer deaths, with around 8,000 new cases and 6,000 deaths each year. Region?specific data on the prevalence and predictors of precancerous lesions remain scarce, yet such information is vital for guiding targeted reproductive health strategies. This study therefore examined the prevalence and predictors of cervical precancerous lesions among women aged 21-60 years undergoing Pap smear screening in public hospitals in Hawassa City, Sidama Region. Methods: An institution-based cross-sectional study was conducted among 241 women attending Pap smear screening at public hospitals in Hawassa City from March to August 2025. Sociodemographic and clinical data were collected via interviews and medical records. Lesions were classified based on the standardized international framework for reporting cervical cytology results from Pap smears per the Bethesda system. Multivariable logistic regression identified predictors p

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

The Data Manifold under the Microscope

arXiv:2606.15760v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A significant gap exists between theory and practice in deep learning. Generalization and approximation error bounds are often derived for simplified models or are too loose to be informative. Many rely on the manifold hypothesis and on geometric regularity such as intrinsic dimension, curvature, and reach. Progress requires insight into data-manifold geometry and suitable benchmarks, yet existing options are polarized: analytic manifolds with known geometry but limited applicability, or real-world datasets where geometry is only coarsely estimable. We introduce a benchmarking framework for studying data geometry. We repurpose and extend dSprites and COIL-20 with additional transformation dimensions and dense, axis-aligned sampling, and pair them with finite-difference estimators that recover curvature, reach, and volume at near-ground-truth accuracy in a regime where general-purpose estimators are unreliable or difficult to deploy. The framework is intended as a controlled testbed, useful as a calibration environment for geometric estimators and a sandbox for probing theoretical assumptions. To illustrate its use, we present two application studies, namely assessing the scaling behavior of the bounds of Genovese et al. and Fefferman et al., and tracking the layer-wise geometry of a $\beta$-VAE, highlighting the behavior of current bounds and the value of controlled benchmarks for guiding and validating future theory. A reference implementation is available at https://github.com/koulakis/manifold-microscope.

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

External Experience Serving in Production LLM Systems: A Deployment-Oriented Study of Quality-Cost Trade-offs

Production LLM systems accumulate reusable operational experience, but the practical deployment issue is not merely whether such experience can help. It is how different serving strategies trade off quality against online cost under realistic constraints. Injecting external experience can improve task quality, yet it also increases prompt burden, latency, and serving pressure. We study external experience serving as a deployment-oriented quality-cost trade-off problem. We evaluate this question in a real production moderation setting, with tool-use and GPQA as supporting contrast tasks that expose different output-cost regimes. We compare no-experience baselines, random experience controls, global prompt injection, and retrieval-based selective injection, and analyze both task quality and serving cost. The results show that, once experience becomes case-dependent, selective retrieval provides a stronger operating point than unconditional global injection. They further show that retrieval quality matters more than simply increasing Top-$K$, and that the same serving policy can exhibit substantially different cost-benefit profiles across short-output and decode-heavy regimes. These findings suggest that external experience is best treated as a selective, cost-aware serving decision rather than as a universal add-on. Overall, in the settings studied here, external experience pays off only when both the serving interface and the task-specific cost structure make its quality gains worth the online cost.

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

Impact of Connectivity on Laplacian Representations in Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2603.08558v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learning compact state representations in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) has proven crucial for addressing the curse of dimensionality in large-scale reinforcement learning (RL) problems. Existing principled approaches leverage structural priors on the MDP by constructing state representations as linear combinations of the state-graph Laplacian eigenvectors. When the transition graph is unknown or the state space is prohibitively large, the graph spectral features can be estimated directly via sample trajectories. In this work, we prove an upper bound on the approximation error of linear value function approximation under the learned spectral features. We show how this error scales with the algebraic connectivity of the state-graph, grounding the approximation quality in the topological structure of the MDP. We further bound the error introduced by the eigenvector estimation itself, leading to an end-to-end error decomposition across the representation learning pipeline. Additionally, our expression of the Laplacian operator for the RL setting, although equivalent to existing ones, prevents some common misunderstandings, of which we show some examples from the literature. Our results hold for general (non-uniform) policies without any assumptions on the symmetry of the induced transition kernel. We validate our theoretical findings with numerical simulations on gridworld environments.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Epipolar Geometry Improves Video Generation Models

Video generation models have advanced significantly through the latent diffusion transformers trained with rectified flow techniques. Yet these models still struggle with geometric inconsistencies, unstable motion, and visual artifacts that break the illusion of realistic 3D scenes. 3D-consistent video generation could significantly impact numerous downstream applications in generation and reconstruction tasks. We explore how epipolar geometry constraints improve modern video diffusion models. Despite using massive training data, these models fail to capture fundamental geometric principles. We align diffusion models using pairwise epipolar geometry constraints via preference-based optimization, directly addressing unstable trajectories and geometric artifacts through mathematically principled geometric enforcement. Our approach efficiently enforces geometric principles without requiring end-to-end differentiability. Evaluation demonstrates that classical geometric constraints provide more stable optimization signals than modern learned metrics. Training on static scenes with dynamic cameras ensures metric quality while the model generalizes to various dynamic scenes. By bridging data-driven learning with classical computer vision, we reduce epipolar error by 31% and improve human-rated consistency from 54% to 72% without compromising visual quality.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

How Fine-Grained Should a RAG Benchmark Be? A Hierarchical Framework for Synthetic Question Generation

Evaluating retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems requires benchmarks that capture diverse question characteristics, yet practitioners lack empirical guidance on which dimensions to vary and at what granularity. We present HieraRAG, a hierarchical framework for studying granularity in RAG benchmark construction, defining optimal granularity as the level that maximizes discriminative power (the standard deviation of generation quality across categories) within a given RAG configuration. As a case study, we generate 5,872 synthetic question-answer (QA) pairs from FineWeb-10BT across 3 dimensions (Question Complexity, Answer Type, Linguistic Variation) at 3 granularity levels (2, 4, and 8 categories). With a BM25+Falcon-3-10B pipeline, optimal granularity varies by dimension: complexity benefits from fine-grained distinctions (discriminative power: 0.053) while answer type and linguistic variation peak at medium granularity. We introduce a Coherence Ratio metric to quantify whether fine-grained splits cleanly subdivide parent categories, revealing structural differences across dimensions (Question Complexity: 0.40 vs. Answer Type: 1.44). Human evaluation of 110 stratified QA pairs confirms synthetic quality. While these specific findings reflect a single configuration, HieraRAG provides a portable procedure and validation metric for practitioners to determine evaluation granularity within their own RAG settings.

16.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-05

Heuristic multi-site optimization for protein sequence design using Masked Protein Language Models

作者:

by Lijuan Wang, Yuze Wang, Chen Qiu, Liwei Xiao, Xianliang Liu, Junjie Chen Protein sequence design for tailored functional properties is a fundamental task in protein engineering, with critical applications in drug discovery and therapeutic development. Efficient navigation of the combinatorial vastness of protein sequence space to identify functional variants remains a formidable challenge. Conventional approaches, which predominantly rely on template-based local search or single-residue mutagenesis, are constrained by their susceptibility to local optima and their potential risk of destabilizing native structural stability. In this study, we introduce ProtHMSO, a heuristic multi-site optimization framework leveraging masked protein language models (ProtLMs) for context-aware sequence exploration. ProtHMSO mimics natural evolutionary mechanisms by employing ProtLM-derived substitution probabilities to guide heuristic searches for synergistic mutations, thereby constraining combinatorial search spaces through evolutionary and biophysical priors. ProtHMSO is further applied to replace the exploration strategies in genetic algorithms (GAs) and Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) for improving their convergence efficiency. Benchmark experiments demonstrate that protein sequences generated by ProtHMSO exhibit superior functional performance and closer alignment with natural sequence distribution, compared with state-of-the-art methods. These advancements highlight that ProtHMSO has strong potential and compatibility to accelerate functional protein discovery, offering a robust framework for efficient and context-aware exploration of protein sequence space.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Edit Knowledge, Not Just Facts via Multi-Step Reasoning over Background Stories

arXiv:2602.02028v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Enabling artificial intelligence systems, particularly large language models, to update knowledge and flexibly apply it during reasoning remains a central challenge. Existing knowledge editing approaches emphasize atomic facts, improving factual recall but often failing to integrate updated information into a coherent framework usable across contexts. In this work, we argue that knowledge update is fundamentally a reasoning problem rather than a memorization problem. Consequently, a model should be trained in situations where the new information is instrumental to solving a task, combined with pre-existing knowledge, and exercised through multi-step reasoning. Based on this insight, we propose a training strategy based on three principles. First, new knowledge is introduced as a coherent background story that contextualizes novel facts and explains their relation to existing knowledge. Second, models are trained using self-generated multi-hop questions that require multi-step reasoning involving the new information. Third, training is done using knowledge distillation, forcing a student model to internalize the teacher's reasoning behavior without access to the novel information. Experiments show that models trained with this strategy effectively leverage newly acquired knowledge during reasoning and achieve remarkable performance on challenging questions that require combining multiple new facts.

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

Cascaded Sparse Autoencoders Learn Multi-Level Visual Concepts in Multimodal LLMs

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated strong performance on vision-language tasks, yet their internal visual representations remain difficult to interpret. Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) provide a scalable way to decompose dense model activations into sparse, interpretable features. However, existing SAE architectures primarily recover flat feature dictionaries and are less suited for explicit multi-level concept organization. In this paper, we introduce cascaded sparse autoencoders (CSAEs) for learning hierarchical visual concepts in MLLMs. Rather than nesting or stacking SAE sparse activation codes, CSAEs train a second-level SAE directly on the decoder weights of the first-level SAE, treating learned low-level feature directions as inputs for higher-level abstraction. This design enables CSAEs to learn "concepts of concepts" while avoiding drawbacks from the shared-prefix coupling of nesting, Matryoshka-style hierarchies and the bottlenecks of naively stacked SAEs. Experiments across Qwen3-VL, Gemma-3, and LLaVA on multiple visual datasets show that CSAEs improve interpretability in terms of hierarchical concept coherence over state-of-the-art SAE baselines. Results on concept steering further demonstrate that the learned concept groups support effective group-level interventions in MLLM outputs.

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

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

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

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

DCD: Domain-Oriented Design for Controlled Retrieval-Augmented Generation

arXiv:2604.07590v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is widely used to ground large language models in external knowledge sources. However, when applied to heterogeneous corpora and multi-step queries, Naive RAG pipelines often degrade in quality due to flat knowledge representations and the absence of explicit workflows. In this work, we introduce DCD (Domain-Collection-Document), a domain-oriented design to structure knowledge and control query processing in RAG systems without modifying the underlying language model. The proposed approach relies on a hierarchical decomposition of the information space and multi-stage routing based on structured model outputs, enabling progressive restriction of both retrieval and generation scopes. The architecture is complemented by smart chunking, hybrid retrieval, and integrated validation and generation guardrail mechanisms. We describe the DCD architecture and workflow and discuss evaluation results on synthetic evaluation dataset, highlighting their impact on robustness, factual accuracy, and answer relevance in applied RAG scenarios.

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

Occ-VLM: Occupancy Grounded Vision Language Model for Indoor Scene Understanding

Recently, vision-language models (VLMs) have made significant progress in 3D scene understanding, driving advances in applications such as embodied intelligence and robotic vision. However, existing approaches typically either rely directly on explicit 3D inputs (e.g., point clouds or RGB-D sequences), or introduce an additional 3D geometry encoder to derive 3D-aware visual tokens from 2D images. Such designs structurally decouple 3D geometric perception from the rich 2D semantics learned via vision-language pre-training, hindering the development of a unified 3D vision-language representation. In this work, we propose Occ-VLM, a novel framework for 3D scene understanding that operates purely on posed RGB images and employs a single 2D vision encoder. Specifically, Occ-VLM reconstructs 3D scene occupancy as an auxiliary geometric prior, which is utilized to spatially associate foreground 2D tokens with 3D space. These tokens are then decoded by a Large Language Model (LLM) for unified scene understanding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Occ-VLM achieves both accurate geometric perception and robust vision-language reasoning: it attains state-of-the-art performance on multi-view occupancy prediction, while performing on par with 3D-input VLMs on 3D Visual Question Answering (VQA) and 3D dense captioning benchmarks.

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

Beyond Scalar Rewards by Internalizing Reasoning into Score Distributions

Reward models are central to text-to-image post-training, but visual preference is subjective and better represented as a distribution over rubric scores than as a deterministic scalar. Existing scalar, score-token, and pairwise reward models over-compress uncertainty and fine-grained score differences, while reasoning-based generative rewards provide stronger judgments but are costly to deploy and difficult to use as direct optimization signals. We propose Z-Reward, a teacher-student reward modeling framework that decouples reasoning-heavy judgment from efficient reward deployment. The teacher is a large VLM that uses reasoning to infer rubric-aligned score distributions, and is trained with Group-wise Direct Score Optimization (GDSO), which combines policy-gradient rewards from distribution expectations with direct pointwise and pairwise supervision on score distributions and score gaps. The student is trained with Reasoning-Internalized Score Distillation (RISD), which transfers the teacher's reasoning-conditioned score distribution into a compact VLM without requiring explicit reasoning chains at inference time. On our internally annotated evaluation set, the 27B GDSO teacher reaches 89.6% human preference accuracy, outperforming SFT, RewardDance, and GRPO, while the 9B RISD student reaches 88.6%, outperforming the OPD baseline and closely matching the larger teacher. We further show that Z-Reward can serve as a differentiable reward signal for text-to-image optimization, yielding a 41.3% net human-preference improvement over the SFT baseline.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Superspace Concentration and Adversarial Robustness in Quantum Algorithms

arXiv:2606.11580v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study superspace concentration as a quantum resource, formalized through the focus measure F(\r{ho}) = {\lambda}_max(\r{ho}_super) - the largest eigenvalue of the reduced superspace state - which quantifies the capacity of a quantum system to concentrate informational weight into a preferred subspace of an extended degree-of-freedom space. We develop a complete resource-theoretic framework around this measure and validate its properties through GPU-accelerated numerical simulation. Analytic decoherence predictions are confirmed to machine precision (1.11 x 10^{-16}) for superspace dimensions dS in {2,4,8,16,32}. Focus monotonicity holds across 10,000 random states with zero violations under four focus-non-generating channels across six system configurations. Focused quantum states resist coherent unitary attacks with significantly greater resilience than standard fidelity predicts, with focus remaining above 0.9 at attack strength {\epsilon} = 0.302 versus {\epsilon} = 0.174 for fidelity. We further demonstrate that the focus measure and the U(dS)-asymmetry measure are operationally distinct: asymmetry remains near zero and provides no robustness signal under coherent and targeted attacks while focus tracks spectral concentration and remains robust until {\epsilon} > 0.3. The connection between Grover's algorithm and superspace concentration is made explicit via the identity F(|{\psi}_k>

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

Signals of Provenance: Practices & Challenges of Navigating Indicators in AI-Generated Media for Sighted and Blind Individuals

arXiv:2505.16057v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AI-Generated (AIG) content has become increasingly widespread by recent advances in generative models and the easy-to-use tools that have significantly lowered the technical barriers for producing highly realistic audio, images, and videos through simple natural language prompts. In response, platforms are adopting provable provenance with platforms recommending AIG to be self-disclosed and signaled to users. However, these indicators may be often missed, especially when they rely solely on visual cues and make them ineffective to users with different sensory abilities. To address the gap, we conducted semi-structured interviews (N=28) with 15 sighted and 13 BLV participants to examine their interaction with AIG content through self-disclosed AI indicators. Our findings reveal diverse mental models and practices, highlighting different strengths and weaknesses of content-based (e.g., title, description) and menu-aided (e.g., AI labels) indicators. While sighted participants leveraged visual and audio cues, BLV participants primarily relied on audio and existing assistive tools, limiting their ability to identify AIG. Across both groups, they frequently overlooked menu-aided indicators deployed by platforms and rather interacted with content-based indicators such as title and comments. We uncovered usability challenges stemming from inconsistent indicator placement, unclear metadata, and cognitive overload. These issues were especially critical for BLV individuals due to the insufficient accessibility of interface elements. We provide practical recommendations and design implications for future AIG indicators across several dimensions.

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

BRIDGE: Biological Evidence Refinement and Heterogeneous Dynamic Gating for Gene Regulatory Networks

arXiv:2606.14734v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Motivation: Gene regulatory network inference from single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data is important for uncovering cell-state-specific transcriptional programs. However, scRNA-seq measurements are sparse and noisy, and experimentally validated TF-target interactions remain limited, making reliable inference challenging. Although graph neural networks have advanced GRN prediction, existing methods often rely on biologically unconstrained graph augmentation, such as random edge perturbation, and insufficiently control information transfer between genes and cells. These limitations may distort regulatory structures and weaken robustness under noisy and weakly supervised settings. Results: To address these issues, we propose an innovative framework named Biological Evidence Refinement and Heterogeneous Dynamic Gating for Gene Regulatory Networks (BRIDGE). BRIDGE extracts gene and cell representations from the expression matrix and its matrix dual, and performs contrastive learning in the gene space and cell space between self and neighbors across the co-expression-refined regulatory view and the original graph. It then applies heterogeneous gated encoding to adaptively regulate information transfer between genes and cells, enabling robust transcription factor-to-target gene prediction. Experiments on benchmark datasets spanning three network types and seven cell types show that BRIDGE achieves state-of-the-art AUROC and AUPRC in most settings. In particular, on Specific networks, BRIDGE improves average AUPRC by 5% over the second-best baseline, GCLink. In cross-cell-type few-shot transfer, BRIDGE consistently outperforms GCLink and GENELink across all six target cell types. A case study on hESC further supports the biological relevance of the predictions, with 9 of the top 10 and 46 of the top 100 novel TF-target interactions validated by ChIPBase.