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

SegmentAnyTreeV2: Scaling Transformer-Based Tree Instance Segmentation Across Sensors, Platforms, and Forests

We present SegmentAnyTreeV2, a sensor- and platform-agnostic framework for semantic and instance segmentation of forest point clouds. The model combines a serialization-based Point Transformer v3 backbone with a lightweight semantic head and a tree-focused cross-attention mask decoder. Semantic predictions restrict instance decoding to tree-class voxels, while instance-aware query initialization, one-to-many seed supervision, and asymmetric mask scoring improve separation in dense and structurally complex stands. We further introduce FOR-instance v3, an expanded benchmark comprising 427 scenes and 26,496 annotated trees across diverse biomes, forest structures, and LiDAR platforms. On the FOR-instanceV2 test split, SegmentAnyTreeV2 achieves 90.5% precision, 80.2% recall, 85.0% F1, 90.7% coverage, and 87.6% semantic mIoU, outperforming previous learning-based methods in both instance detection and mask completeness. Zero-shot evaluation on independent sites further demonstrates strong cross-domain generalization.

02.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

The $K$-th nearest neighbor random walk on a Poisson point process gets trapped

arXiv:2606.11271v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The $K$-th nearest neighbor random walk $(X_n)_{n \geq 0}$ on a homogeneous Poisson point process $\chi$ on $\R^d$ ($d\geq 1$), starts at the origin and at each step picks its next Poisson point among its closest neighbors according to i.i.d. labels having the same distribution as $K$. Our main result (Theorem 1) states that the number of Poisson points visited by $(X_n)_{n \geq 0}$ admits an exponential decay whenever the random variable $K$ has a bounded support (BS). In particular, the $K$-th nearest neighbor random walk visits finitely many Poisson points if and only if $K$ satisfies Assumption (BS). To prove it, we introduce the key notion of pioneer point which allows us to deal with the region of $\R^d$ already explored by $(X_n)_{n \geq 0}$. Still under Assumption (BS), we also prove an exponential decay for the Euclidean length of the trajectory performed by $(X_n)_{n \geq 0}$ (Theorem 2). Finally, and quite surprisingly, we exhibit an example of label distribution with bounded support for which the $K$-th nearest neighbor random walk discovers new Poisson points after a number of steps whose tail distribution is at least polynomial (Theorem 3).

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

StagePilot: Stage-Level Planning for Long-Horizon Dialogue Simulation in Cybergrooming

Cybergrooming is an evolving threat to youth, requiring proactive educational interventions. We address this by modeling dialogue progression as a structured planning problem over stage-wise interactions. We propose StagePilot, a dialogue framework that separates stage-level planning from response generation, in which the model selects the next stage under constrained transitions and generates responses conditioned on it, enabling coherent and realistic progression. Reinforcement learning is used to learn stage-level policies from offline data, optimizing for both emotional alignment and goal-consistent progression. Our empirical experiments show that StagePilot generates more structured, coherent dialogue trajectories and reduces conversational stagnation compared to baselines; notably, the IQL+AWAC variant reaches the final stage more often while maintaining over 70% positive or neutral responses, yielding a 43% relative improvement.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

SP-GCRL: Influence Maximization on Incomplete Social Graphs

arXiv:2605.12513v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Influence maximization (IM) in real platforms is challenged by incomplete, noisy social graphs and non-stationary diffusion dynamics. We propose SP-GCRL, a social-propagation-aware graph contrastive reinforcement learning framework that learns end-to-end seed selection under partial observability.We first introduce a social-propagation-aware nonlinear diffusion function to model reinforcement/diminishing effects and probability drift under repeated exposure; we then construct dual structural views and perform contrastive learning to obtain node representations robust to missing edges and weak ties, while replacing expensive strategy metrics with a GAT-based regression surrogate to improve efficiency and scalability; finally, we use DDQN to learn an end-to-end seed selection policy on top of these representations. Experiments on multiple real-world networks show that SP-GCRL achieves significant gains over heuristic and learning-based baselines across budgets and topologies, while maintaining strong large-scale scalability.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Resolving the Edge of a Quantum Pyramid

arXiv:2606.14698v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Standing on the shoulders of giants, we resolve the quantum pyramids conjecture, confirming the globally information-optimal measurement for an ensemble of equiangular equiprobable pure states, as conjectured by Englert and \v{R}eháček (arXiv:0905.0510). We do so by proving the remaining entropy inequalities of Holevo and Utkin (arXiv:2506.06700), which certify optimality for obtuse and flat pyramids. For obtuse pyramids, our key contribution is a rigorous proof that local minimizers of the corresponding entropy inequality cannot have three distinct coordinate values. We show that eliminating this family can be reduced to a neat algebraic reciprocal inequality relating branches of the Lambert $W$ function, which may be of independent interest. For flat pyramids, we prove a tight $\ell^p$ inequality for zero-sum vectors that was recently conjectured, proved analytically in dimension $d=3$, and computationally verified for $d\leq 200$ by Holevo and Utkin (arXiv:2603.24017). We prove this bound for all $d\geq 2$ via a technique in symmetric inequalities known as the equal variables method.

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

Lect\=uraAgents: A Multi-Agent Framework for Adaptive Personalized AI-Assisted Learning and Embodied Teaching

Effective personalized AI-assisted learning demands systems that can not only generate accurate learner-specific educational materials, but also dynamically adapt their instruction to diverse learners. However, existing educational agents have primarily focused on lecture content automation and simulations, which often fall short of modelling multimodal and embodied instructional methods tailored for the individual learner. To this end, we propose Lect\=uraAgents - a multi-agent framework that enables personalized learning through end-to-end adaptive embodied teaching. At its core, Lect\=uraAgents mirrors a professor-student relationship, in which a ProfessorAgent leads a collaborative team of specialized subordinate agents through research, planning, review, and embodied delivery of lecture contents that adapt to a learner's needs. The framework offers three main contributions: (1) a hierarchical multi-agent architecture for end-to-end personalized learning; (2) an adaptive embodied teaching mechanism, wherein the ProfessorAgent executes visible and pedagogically motivated teaching actions (e.g., handwrite, highlight, underline, etc.) over contents in a teaching environment; and (3) a Teaching Action-Speech Alignment (TASA) algorithm that employs salience-based heuristics and temporal semantic segmentation to generate coherent teaching action sequences aligned with learner profiles. We evaluate Lect\=uraAgents on diverse courses at high school, undergraduate, and graduate levels using sample-specific rubric-based analysis; with generated lecture materials and teaching actions assessed and validated by expert educators. Experimental results show consistent gains in lecture content quality, embodied teaching quality, assessment, and personalization over existing approaches, positioning Lect\=uraAgents as a pedagogically well-grounded framework for personalized learning at scale.

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

GrowthHacker: Automated Off-Policy Evaluation Optimization Using Code-Modifying LLM Agents

With data-driven development now widely adopted, online A/B testing is an established method for measuring the effects of new technologies. However, deploying online experiments demands resources for design, implementation, and deployment, and may negatively impact users (e.g., unsafe or unethical outcomes) while requiring weeks of data collection. To address this, the growing research area of off-policy evaluation (OPE), or offline A/B testing, assesses new technologies offline using previously collected logged data. OPE is also a fundamental problem in reinforcement learning and is important where online testing is expensive or risky, such as healthcare, recommender systems, education, and robotics. Despite advances in code-generation large language models (LLMs) and agentic workflows, little is known about whether and how LLMs and LLM-based agents can automatically optimize OPE implementations. We propose GrowthHacker, a benchmark that evaluates baseline LLMs and LLM-based agents on large-scale public datasets. GrowthHacker autonomously and iteratively modifies code, runs OPE, and uses the metrics to guide subsequent optimization. We evaluate methods on Open Bandit Pipeline (OBP) and Scope-RL, and develop a two_agent framework that addresses limitations of existing frameworks while reducing complexity. Across both libraries, two_agent shows the highest reliability (98.1%-100% success rate) and positive-outcome rate (78%), with a median improvement of 4.4% among positive outcomes; CrewAI achieves the highest average improvement (37.9%) and is the only framework with zero extreme-value failures. AutoGen and Default each reach 65% positive-outcome rates. These results establish the feasibility of using LLM-based agents as automated "growth hackers" to continuously improve OPE systems, with implications for scaling data-driven decision-making where manual optimization is expensive.

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

MIRAGE: Auditing Anti-Muslim Bias in Frontier LLMs Across Reasoning, Agentic, and Time-Coupled Conditions

arXiv:2606.16562v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Five years after the discovery of persistent anti-Muslim bias in large language models, most evaluations remain confined to single-turn prompt completion, a setting that no longer reflects how frontier LLMs are deployed. We introduce MIRAGE (Muslim-Identity Reasoning and Agentic Generation Evaluation), a benchmark of 1{,}200 prompts spanning three deployment-realistic conditions: direct completion, chain-of-thought reasoning, and simulated agentic decision-making across content moderation, lending triage, refugee claim summarization, and hiring screens. Across six frontier models, we find that (i) chain-of-thought reasoning amplifies rather than suppresses Muslim-violence associations by 12–34\% relative to direct completion, (ii) agentic decisions exhibit a 9–22 percentage-point asymmetry between Muslim and matched non-Muslim cases on identical evidence, and (iii) bias is sharply time-coupled to retrieved news context, increasing 18–27\% under recent-conflict retrieval. Existing prompt-based mitigations transfer poorly across our three conditions, suppressing direct-completion bias while leaving agentic asymmetry largely intact. We release MIRAGE and an open evaluation harness to support targeted mitigation research.

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

FAPO: Fully Autonomous Prompt Optimization of Multi-Step LLM Pipelines

arXiv:2606.19605v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-step LLM pipelines fail through interactions among retrieval, reasoning, and formatting steps, so prompt-only optimization can miss bottlenecks in the chain. We present FAPO (Fully Autonomous Prompt Optimization), a framework that lets Claude Code optimize an LLM pipeline inside a standardized codebase. FAPO evaluates a pipeline, inspects intermediate steps, diagnoses failures, proposes scoped changes, and validates variants repeatedly to optimize against a score function. It first tries prompt edits and, only when prompt optimization appears insufficient, changes chain structure within the permitted scope when attribution identifies a structural bottleneck. Across six benchmarks and three task models, FAPO beats the baseline GEPA in 15 of 18 model-benchmark comparisons. In 11 model-benchmark comparisons, FAPO wins with non-overlapping mean $\pm$ trial-standard-deviation ranges, and the mean FAPO-GEPA gain is +14.1 pp. In the six HoVer and IFBench comparisons where prompt-first search escalated to structural changes, FAPO wins all six with a mean gain of +33.8 pp. FAPO also improves performance on security tasks: on CTIBench-RCM, a security CVE-to-CWE task, prompt-only FAPO lifts test accuracy by +4.0 pp on GPT-5, +7.1 pp on Foundation-Sec-8B-Instruct, and +2.0 pp on Foundation-Sec-8B-Reasoning. These results position FAPO as a state-of-the-art pipeline optimization technique for both general-purpose and security-focused tasks.

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

GauS: Differentiable Scheduling Optimization via Gaussian Reparameterization

arXiv:2602.20427v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Efficient operator scheduling is a fundamental challenge in software compilation and hardware synthesis. While recent differentiable approaches have sought to replace traditional ones like exact solvers or heuristics with gradient-based search, they typically rely on categorical distributions that fail to capture the ordinal nature of time and suffer from a parameter space that scales poorly. In this paper, we propose a novel differentiable framework, GauS, that models operator scheduling as a stochastic relaxation using Gaussian distributions, which fully utilize modern parallel computing devices like GPUs. By representing schedules as continuous Gaussian variables, we successfully capture the ordinal nature of time and reduce the optimization space by orders of magnitude. Our method is highly flexible to represent various objectives and constraints, which provides the first differentiable formulation for the complex pipelined scheduling problem. We evaluate our method on a range of benchmarks, demonstrating that Gaus achieves Pareto-optimal results.

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

Optimizing Encoder Circuits of Entanglement-Assisted Quantum LDPC Codes via Beam Search

arXiv:2606.11468v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Entanglement-assisted (EA) quantum QC-LDPC codes offer strong error-correction capabilities with structured parity-check matrices, but their practical use depends on efficient encoder circuits and the availability of pre-shared Bell pairs (ebits). In all encoder implementations based on the stabilizer formalism, the dominant contribution to this complexity comes from the use of controlled gates. In this paper, we adopt the Sharma-Kumar-Garani (SKG) encoder construction. We formulate the encoder optimization as a search over GF(2) row operations that decompose the binary matrix derived from its CNOT sub-sequence. We solve this problem using a beam search algorithm guided by a Hamming-distance heuristic. For the tested EA quantum QC-LDPC code families, the proposed method achieves CNOT-count reductions of 7.3-34.0% relative to the SKG baseline encoder. The optimized circuits also yield lower CNOT counts than Patel-Markov-Hayes synthesis on all tested instances and are verified by stabilizer-tableau simulation. These results show that substantial encoder simplification is possible for structured EA QC-LDPC codes.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Revisiting Chebyshev Polynomial and Anisotropic RBF Models for Tabular Regression

arXiv:2602.22422v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Smooth-basis models such as Chebyshev polynomial regressors and radial basis function (RBF) networks are well established in numerical analysis. Their continuously differentiable prediction surfaces suit surrogate optimisation, sensitivity analysis, and other settings where the response varies gradually with inputs. Despite these properties, smooth models seldom appear in tabular regression, where tree ensembles dominate. We ask whether they can compete, benchmarking models across 55 regression datasets organised by application domain. We develop an anisotropic RBF network with data-driven centre placement and gradient-based width optimisation, a ridge-regularised Chebyshev polynomial regressor, and a smooth-tree hybrid (Chebyshev model tree); all three are released as scikit-learn-compatible packages. We benchmark these against tree ensembles, a pre-trained transformer, and standard baselines, evaluating accuracy alongside generalisation behaviour. The transformer ranks first on accuracy across a majority of datasets, but its GPU dependence, inference latency, and dataset-size limits constrain deployment in the CPU-based settings common across applied science and industry. Among CPU-viable models, smooth models and tree ensembles are statistically tied on accuracy, but the former tend to exhibit tighter generalisation gaps. We recommend routinely including smooth-basis models in the candidate pool, particularly when downstream use benefits from tighter generalisation and gradually varying predictions.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Wigner Cat Phases: A finely tunable system for exploring the transition to quantum chaos

作者:

arXiv:2512.22169v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A quantum mechanical setting consisting of a frozen qubit composed with a fully thermalized chaotic system of N states is proposed, with potential relevance to quantum control. Observing the states of the composed system selectively retaining the states leads to the observation of novel localization in the subsystem. At a tuning parameter of 1.0, implying no selection, the system exhibits Wigner-Dyson level spacing statistics, indicative of quantum chaos. As the tuning parameter is reduced and selection occurs at a cutoff, the nearest-neighbor level spacing distribution develops heavier tails, a signature of suppressed spectral mixing and the emergence of non-thermal dynamics. In these regimes, the eigendensity develops a pronounced "cat-ears" structure, reflecting the formation of spatially localized bimodal eigenstates. These topological features persist without transitioning to Poisson statistics, indicating a transition from quantum chaos to a non-thermal, novel many-body localized (MBL) regime-referred to as Wigner Cat Phases. The proposed mixed random matrix ensemble offers a practical probe for sustaining this novel quantum localization setting. Results from our rigorous spectral statistics analysis show how "cat-ears" form in spectral densities based on the degree of selection or disorder and indicate that gap ratio statistics must be used with caution in detecting the full integrable limit due to the possibility of heavy-tailed Wigner-Dyson distributions.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Sustainable Face Recognition on Low-Power Devices with VQ-VAE Embeddings

Face recognition has become a cornerstone of modern AI applications, yet conventional approaches often rely on computationally intensive models deployed in cloud environments, leading to increased network traffic, high energy consumption, and a heavy carbon footprint. This work introduces a sustainable, edge-deployable face recognition framework based on Vector-Quantized Variational Autoencoders (VQ-VAE), which generates compact and semantically rich latent representations of facial images. By leveraging the compression capacity and reconstruction quality of VQ-VAE embeddings on the edge and combining them with the power of pre-trained face embeddings in a knowledge distillation setup, our system achieves comparable accuracy to state-of-the-art face embedding models while significantly reducing memory and computation requirements on the edge, making it suitable for low-power edge devices. The integration of VQ-VAE compression minimizes network overhead while keeping the matching accuracy high by retaining only the most informative facial features in the latent space. As a result, the reconstructed images preserve the key identity characteristics, improving the robustness and overall performance of the face embeddings.

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

Graph Structured Combinatorial Semi-Bandit with Nonlinear Reward Associations through Separable Signals

arXiv:2606.14650v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The identification of optimal structures within vast arrays of interconnected data necessitates significant sampling- and computational effort. Learning and leveraging underlying signal dependencies can improve efficiency and predictive capabilities considerably, but the ubiquity of nonlinear statistical relations amplifies the complexity of such undertakings. In this paper, we develop novel generic and adaptive strategies equipped with routines for graph-based causal reward modeling, analytic reproducing kernel methods, and Taylor approximation of functional processes. We establish theoretical performance guarantees sublinear in time and linear in data volume over time. Our analyses cover robustness to a multitude of uncertainties arising from noise interference, gradual model convergence, and solution space mismatch. The framework's general appeal is substantiated by a minimalistic set of conditions or reliance on prior estimates, while various outlined modifications address specific or extended settings. To demonstrate practical effectiveness, we conduct numerical experiments using both benchmarked synthetic and real-world transportation datasets.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Cost-Performance Evaluation of Large Language Models for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis of HCAHPS Patient Comments: A Validation Study

Background: Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) free-text comments contain actionable feedback, but timely, scalable, and affordable sentiment analysis remains challenging for health systems that rely on third-party vendors. Objectives: To evaluate cost-performance tradeoffs between a cost-optimized and a flagship large language model (LLM) for aspect-based sentiment analysis of HCAHPS comments, using human inter-rater agreement as a reproducibility benchmark. Methods: We analyzed 512 free-text HCAHPS comments collected from two community hospitals in calendar year 2023. Six trained reviewers (medical students, recent medical graduates, and practicing internists) independently assigned positive, negative, or neutral labels to each comment-aspect pair; the majority label among three reviewers formed the consensus reference standard. Two OpenAI models - GPT-5-nano (cost-optimized) and GPT-5 (flagship) - were prompted in a zero-shot setting via the OpenAI API. We calculated pairwise Cohen's {kappa} to establish a human inter-rater baseline, then compared each model's labels to the consensus using Cohen's {kappa}, accuracy, weighted F1, and per-call cost and latency. Results: Mean human inter-rater agreement was {kappa} = 0.79 (substantial). Both LLMs exceeded this baseline (cost-optimized {kappa} = 0.85; flagship {kappa} = 0.85) with nearly identical accuracy (0.92) and weighted F1 (0.93 vs. 0.93). Performance was strong on positive (F1 ~ 0.97) and negative (F1 ~ 0.90) classes but poor on the underrepresented neutral class (F1

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

Manifold-Orthogonal Dual-spectrum Extrapolation for Parameterized Physics-Informed Neural Networks

arXiv:2603.13751v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have achieved notable success in modeling dynamical systems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs). To avoid computationally expensive retraining under new physical conditions, parameterized PINNs (P$^2$INNs) commonly adapt pre-trained operators using singular value decomposition (SVD) for out-of-distribution (OOD) regimes. However, SVD-based fine-tuning often suffers from rigid subspace locking and truncation of important high-frequency spectral modes, limiting its ability to capture complex physical transitions. While parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods appear to be promising alternatives, applying conventional adapters such as LoRA to P$^2$INNs introduces a severe Pareto trade-off, as additive updates increase parameter overhead and disrupt the structured physical manifolds inherent in operator representations. To address these limitations, we propose Manifold-Orthogonal Dual-spectrum Extrapolation (MODE), a lightweight micro-architecture designed for physics operator adaptation. MODE decomposes physical evolution into complementary mechanisms including principal-spectrum dense mixing that enables cross-modal energy transfer within frozen orthogonal bases, residual-spectrum awakening that activates high-frequency spectral components through a single trainable scalar, and affine Galilean unlocking that explicitly isolates spatial translation dynamics. Experiments on challenging PDE benchmarks including the 1D Convection–Diffusion–Reaction equation and the 2D Helmholtz equation demonstrate that MODE achieves strong out-of-distribution generalization while preserving the minimal parameter complexity of native SVD and outperforming existing PEFT-based baselines.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Universal Crossovers of Stabilizer Entropy Beyond Criticality

arXiv:2606.13810v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Stabilizer Rényi entropy has emerged as a probe of nonstabilizerness in quantum many-body systems, but its scaling structure beyond critical points remains poorly understood compared with entanglement entropy. Recent field-theory approaches indicate that stabilizer entropy contains universal critical data and boundary-sensitive terms, raising the question of how these structures extend into massive and crossover regimes. We address this problem for a broad class of finite-range spin chains at Rényi index one-half. We derive exact finite-size formulas for both full periodic chains and finite intervals of the infinite chain, making the universal crossover from critical to noncritical behavior analytically accessible. In periodic geometry, the entropy obeys a volume law away from criticality and exhibits a universal finite-size crossover controlled by the competition between system size and correlation length. We also show that the large-scale SRE density develops a cusp across the field-tuned critical line, while the XX endpoint is governed by a distinct scaling regime associated with the saturation point. In the subsystem geometry, the interval entropy separates bulk critical behavior from boundary contributions generated by the way the finite region cuts the infinite chain. The crossover from critical to massive behavior is then encoded in boundary constants and universal functions controlled by the correlation length. Through exact stabilizer-entropy correspondences, the scaling theory extends to internal XY reductions, Finite-range spin chains, and Cluster–Ising representatives. Our results provide an exact lattice benchmark for the emerging QFT description of stabilizer entropy beyond isolated conformal points.

19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

A Stochastic ISCS Markov Model for Fake News Propagation

arXiv:2606.18282v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper studies the propagation of fake news through a stochastic rumor spreading model based on Markov chains. Inspired by classical epidemiological SIR models, we consider a generalization of the Daley-Kendall framework for rumours that incorporates fact-checkers, following the Ignorant/Spreader/Checker/Stifler model introduced in Piqueira (2020). The model analyzes the influence of checkers on fake news dynamics. Numerical simulations are used to illustrate the behavior of the system and the impact of fact-checkers.

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

UNIEGO: Proxies as Mediators for Unified Egocentric Video Representation Learning

arXiv:2606.20559v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Egocentric video understanding is inherently limited by the narrow perspective of wearable cameras: a single viewpoint, a single modality, a single model cannot capture the full richness of human action. We argue that a truly expressive egocentric representation must subsume complementary knowledge across viewpoints, modalities, and foundation model representations, yet remain deployable from egocentric video alone. To this end, we introduce a hierarchical multi-teacher distillation framework that produces UNIEGO, a unified egocentric encoder trained with nine teachers spanning ego-exo viewpoints, RGB, depth, and skeleton modalities, and four foundation models. Rather than distilling directly from heterogeneous teachers whose incompatible architectures and feature geometries induce conflicting gradients, our framework interposes a layer of representation-specific Proxy models that translate diverse teacher knowledge into a homogeneous egocentric space. A second distillation stage, Selective Proxy Distillation (SPD), then adaptively selects, for each training sample, the subset of proxies that are both correct and confident, distilling exclusively from reliable supervision and suppressing erroneous signals. SPD is further stabilized by initializing UNIEGO as a learned convex combination of proxy parameters, placing the unified model in a well-conditioned region of the loss landscape before distillation begins. UNIEGO achieves state-of-the-art performance across three egocentric video understanding tasks - action recognition, video retrieval, and action segmentation on three challenging ego-exo benchmarks, outperforming naive multi-teacher distillation baselines and demonstrating that structured, proxy-mediated knowledge transfer yields richer and more discriminative egocentric representations.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Rift: A Conflict Signature for Deception in Language Models

作者:

A model that lies while knowing the truth is the central case ELK cannot handle with behavioral evaluation alone. We ask whether such deception leaves an internal signature distinguishing it from honest error. Our key move is a control for wrongness: we contrast a sleeper agent (knows the truth, lies on trigger) against a naive liar (fine-tuned to emit the same wrong answers with no honest training). Both produce identical wrong outputs; any difference is about knowledge conflict, not incorrectness. We find deceptive forward passes carry a conflict signature - 2.1-2.3x higher residual rank than naive-liar passes on the same wrong answer - strong enough to identify which of two responses is the lie with 100% accuracy and no labels, across GPT-2 small/medium (three seeds) and three instruct models. Across Qwen2.5-1.5B/7B and Phi-3-mini, instructed deception raises residual rank on every tested fact (18/18, 40/40, 34/34); on Phi-3, lies separate perfectly from both honest answers and hallucinations (AUC 1.0, Wilcoxon p~6e-11). The signature survives strategic self-constructed deception (model invents its own lie, AUC 1.0), active concealment attempts (AUC 1.0), and length-controlled replication (20/20, AUC 1.0, p~1e-6). Using basis-free relative representations, a probe trained on one model family detects deception in two other families zero-shot (mean AUC 0.933), surviving simultaneous architecture and format change (AUC 0.821), and transfers across five languages (AUC 1.000, length-controlled). The signature is read-only: detectable but not injectable (0/8 both directions). Honest limitations and six negative experiments are documented in full.

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

Conformal Path Reasoning: Trustworthy Knowledge Graph Question Answering via Path-Level Calibration

Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) offers grounded, interpretable reasoning, but existing methods often fail to provide reliable coverage guarantees over retrieved answers. While Conformal Prediction (CP) offers a principled framework for producing prediction sets with statistical guarantees, prior conformal KGQA methods suffer from two critical pitfalls: violated coverage guarantees due to invalid calibration, and weak score discriminability that yields excessively large prediction sets. We propose Conformal Path Reasoning (CPR), a novel trustworthy KGQA framework built on two key innovations. First, query-level conformal calibration over path-level scores preserves exchangeability to ensure valid coverage guarantees. Second, we introduce the Residual Conformal Value Network (RCVNet), a lightweight module trained via PUCT-guided exploration to learn discriminative path-level nonconformity scores. Extensive experiments show that CPR significantly improves the Empirical Coverage Rate by 45% while reducing prediction set size by 52% on average over conformal baselines across benchmark datasets, highlighting its effectiveness for reliable conformal reasoning over knowledge graphs.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Last-Iterate Convergence of Optimistic Multiplicative Weight Update

arXiv:2606.11773v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Optimistic Gradient Descent Ascent (OGDA) and Optimistic Multiplicative-Weights Update (OMWU) are two very popular algorithms to solve convex/concave saddle-point problems, where OMWU is the non-Euclidean, entropic version of OGDA. It is known since the '80s that the last iterate of OGDA asymptotically converges to a saddle point in smooth problems. On the other hand, it is unknown if OMWU has the same property. In this paper, I show that OMWU converges asymptotically for smooth convex-concave saddle-point problems, with a small enough constant learning rate. The result does not require uniqueness, strict complementarity, an error bound, or initialization near a solution. The main new ingredient is a boundary argument showing that every cluster point satisfies the inactive-coordinate KKT inequalities. The boundary argument was discovered with assistance from ChatGPT and is documented in the appendix.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Transformer Field Theory: A Response-Theoretic Approach to Mechanistic Interpretability

arXiv:2605.25225v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Mechanistic interpretability often studies Transformer behavior by intervening on internal activations through activation patching, causal tracing, path patching, and steering directions. This paper develops Transformer Field Theory: a response-theoretic framework in which the residual stream of a fixed forward pass is treated as a Transformer field over layer depth and token position. In this formulation, patching becomes a localized source insertion into the Transformer field, first-order sensitivity fields predict patch effects, Green functions describe downstream propagation, and patch selection is posed as an adjoint inverse problem. Empirically, we test the theory's forward response objects in GPT-2-style autoregressive Transformers. Localized Transformer-field interventions exhibit a bounded local linear regime; first-order sensitivities predict patch effects across layer-token sites; localized sources generate structured anisotropic Transformer-field propagation; high-sensitivity sites and sliced Green operators provide reduced response descriptions; and prompt-induced Transformer-field displacements partially transfer answer behavior. These results establish sensitivities, Transformer-field responses, and sliced Green operators as practical objects for organizing patching experiments, while providing the forward mathematical basis for patch-site inference and cross-scale response transfer.

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

Adapting Reinforcement Learning with Chain-of-Thought Supervision for Explainable Detection of Hateful and Propagandistic Memes

Hateful and propagandistic memes exploit the interplay between images and text to convey harmful intent that neither modality reveals alone. Although thinking-based multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have advanced vision-language understanding, their application to meme content moderation remains underexplored. We propose a reinforcement learning-based post-training method that improves classification performance and reference-based explanation quality in thinking-based MLLMs via task-specific rewards and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Concretely, we (i) conduct a systematic empirical study of off-the-shelf MLLMs for hateful and propagandistic meme understanding across English and Arabic benchmarks, (ii) extend existing meme datasets with weakly supervised chain-of-thought (CoT) rationales via distillation and multi-LLM fine-grained propaganda annotations, (iii) introduce a GRPO-based objective with thinking-length regularization that jointly optimizes classification accuracy and explanation quality, and (iv) investigate self-supervised GRPO on unlabeled memes using consensus-based pseudo-labels. Experiments on the Hateful Memes and ArMeme benchmarks show that our approach improves over previously reported results on FHM accuracy (up to +2.1%, from 79.9% to 82.0%) and on ArMeme macro-F1 (up to +7.6 points, from 0.536 to 0.612 with explanations; +6.1 compared to the original ArMeme benchmark), while also generating natural-language explanations. On ArMeme, sequence-classification baselines remain stronger in terms of raw accuracy, whereas our approach provides more balanced per-class performance along with explanations. We publicly release our code, data extensions, and evaluation resources.