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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Minim: Privacy-Aware Minimal View for Agents via Trusted Local Sanitization

arXiv:2606.13949v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern LLM-powered autonomous agents increasingly rely on rich user interface (UI) state observations to achieve reliable action grounding in complex digital environments. However, many deployments transmit the full UI state to remote inference servers even when most elements are irrelevant to the current task, which can leak sensitive but unnecessary context such as authentication codes, private notifications, and background application states. We propose MINIM, a trusted local broker that performs privacy-aware minimization on the client side before any observation leaves the device. Grounded in Contextual Integrity (CI), MINIM learns a dual-score representation for each UI element by predicting an inherent sensitivity score (s) and a task-conditioned necessity score (n). These scores drive a ternary disclosure policy that keeps essential elements, abstracts sensitive attributes when needed, and removes task-irrelevant content. We optimize a CI-aware objective that penalizes necessity errors more strongly on high-risk content, enabling aggressive pruning while preserving task-critical information. Experiments on real-world UI observations derived from WebArena show that MINIM substantially reduces task-irrelevant sensitive leakage while preserving task-critical semantic context and the interactive affordances required for reliable agent actions.

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

CoIRL-AD: Collaborative-Competitive Imitation-Reinforcement Learning in Latent World Models for Autonomous Driving

End-to-end autonomous driving models trained with imitation learning (IL) often generalize poorly, particularly in long-tail scenarios where expert demonstrations are sparse. Reinforcement learning (RL) can provide complementary task-level supervision, but applying RL to real-world autonomous driving is challenging in offline settings without interactive simulators, where datasets are dominated by expert actions and provide limited behavioral diversity. We propose CoIRL-AD, a competitive dual-policy framework that integrates IL and RL under a unified offline training regime. CoIRL-AD decouples imitation and reward optimization into separate actors to alleviate objective conflicts, uses imagined future rollouts for long-horizon reward estimation, and introduces a competition mechanism that selectively transfers beneficial behaviors while keeping RL anchored to expert-like driving. Experiments on the nuScenes benchmark show that CoIRL-AD consistently improves robustness over strong IL-based baselines, with especially large gains in cross-city generalization and long-tail scenarios. Code is available at: https://github.com/SEU-zxj/CoIRL-AD.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

AIGS-Net: Compact Illumination Field Modeling via 2D Gaussian Splatting for Fast Low-Light Image Enhancement

Existing low-light image enhancement methods often face a bottleneck between the representation capacity of illumination-field modeling and computational complexity. To address this issue, this paper proposes an Adaptive Illumination Gaussian Splatting Network (AIGS-Net), an ultra-lightweight architecture for fast low-light enhancement. Unlike conventional static priors, AIGS-Net constructs an input-adaptive 2D Gaussian Splatting illumination field. The opacity of Gaussian basis functions is dynamically modulated by relative luminance statistics of the input image, and spatially varying illumination compensation is rendered through ordered alpha compositing. To guide adaptive illumination compensation efficiently, a zero-parameter nonlinear multiscale contextual encoding module is introduced to extract low-frequency structures and local contrast cues without additional convolutional weights. To suppress noise amplification and sensor-induced color bias, AIGS-Net integrates noise-mask estimation, locked single-channel Gamma mapping, cross-channel consistency regularization, and target color-alignment constraints. Experiments on LOL and LSRW benchmarks show that AIGS-Net improves detail recovery and color fidelity while requiring only approximately 40 learnable parameters, achieving an effective trade-off between enhancement quality and extreme inference efficiency.

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

Energy Use of AI Inference, Efficiency Pathways, and Test-Time Scaling

arXiv:2509.20241v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As AI inference scales to billions of queries, estimates of per-query energy use are increasingly important for capacity planning, efficiency interventions, and policy. Yet many public estimates assume non-production settings, leading to systematic overestimation. We introduce a bottom-up framework estimating inference energy from token throughput, node power, and overhead under large-scale deployment assumptions. For frontier-scale models (>200B parameters) on H100 nodes, we estimate a median energy of 0.31 Wh/query (IQR 0.16-0.60), indicating widely cited estimates are overstated by 4-20x. In test-time scaling scenarios 15x longer than typical queries, the median energy rises 13x to 3.91 Wh (IQR 2.15-7.05). Across models, serving systems, and hardware, we estimate 8-20x line-of-sight energy reductions. At datacenter scale, serving 1 billion queries/day requires 0.7 GWh; if 10% are long queries, demand rises to 1.7 GWh/day. With efficiency interventions, it falls to 0.8 GWh/day, mitigating the energy impact of test-time scaling.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Synergizing Physically Constrained MCMC and Chemical-Informed Gaussian Processes for Reaction Network Discovery

arXiv:2606.23757v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Extracting interpretable governing equations from sparse, noisy chemical time-series data remains difficult because discrete reaction topology and continuous kinetic parameters are tightly coupled. We present PC-MCMC-CIGP, a reproducible gray-box workflow that combines spike-and-slab topology sampling, hard conservation and thermodynamic screening, and a Chemical-Informed Gaussian Process (CIGP) residual model for parameter calibration and experimental design. The methodological contribution is not a new MCMC or GP family in isolation; rather, it is the integration of these components into a physically constrained workflow with explicit uncertainty-aware acquisition choices. On the H2 + Br2 benchmark, the constrained sampler distinguishes elementary radical pathways from deceptive phenomenological fits in our experiments. On styrene epoxidation, the CIGP optimization loop improves final yield by 12.5% over the reported GP-BO baseline. A new 10-seed acquisition study shows that EI, GWU, PC-EI, uncertainty sampling, discrepancy hunting, and random search have different trade-offs: PC-EI substantially reduces low-yield BO suggestions, while EI-style criteria give the strongest final-yield performance.

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

TerraBench: Can Agents Reason Over Heterogeneous Earth-System Data?

arXiv:2606.13148v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Climate and environmental decision-making increasingly requires reasoning across heterogeneous inputs, including gridded physical data, satellite imagery, geospatial context, and simulator outputs. Weather and climate foundation models can forecast well, but do not reason interactively in language, while large language models (LLMs) reason in language but cannot operate directly on high-dimensional Earth-system data. As a result, real scientific workflows in Earth-science remain underserved. We introduce TerraBench, a benchmark for grounded Earth-science reasoning, built on TerraAgent, a ReAct-style executable framework that interleaves reasoning, tool calls, and observations to couple LLM planning with scientific tools for environmental retrieval, geospatial processing, simulation, and artifact-backed computation. TerraBench unifies analysis of Earth observation imagery, gridded data, GIS reasoning and simulation in a single executable interface, whereas prior benchmarks isolate these capabilities into narrow individual tasks. It is also the first in this space to pair process-level tool-use metrics with tolerance-aware numeric scoring. The benchmark comprises 403 extensive agentic tasks across three tracks (Fundamentals, Simulator-Grounded, and Document-Grounded Verification) and eight application domains with 24,500 verified execution steps. These results indicate that reliable Earth-science agents must go beyond tool access to coordinate heterogeneous workflows, parameterize tools precisely, and preserve artifact provenance.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Cornell Interaction in the Two-body Pauli-Schrödinger-type Equation Framework: The Symplectic Quantum Mechanics Formalism

arXiv:2507.20045v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate the quantum behavior of a quark-antiquark bound system under the influence of a magnetic field within the symplectic formulation of quantum mechanics. Employing a perturbative approach, we obtain the ground and first excited states of the system described by the Cornell potential, which incorporates both confining and non-confining interactions. After performing a Levi-Civita mapping in phase space, we solve the time-independent symplectic Pauli-Schrödinger-type equation and determine the corresponding Wigner function. Special attention is given to the observation of the confinement of the quark-antiquark, that is revealed in the phase space structure. Due to the presence of spin in the Hamiltonian, the results reveal that the magnetic field enhances the non-classicality of the Wigner function, signaling stronger quantum interference and a departure from classical behavior. The experimental mass spectra is used to estimate the intensity of the external field, leading to a value that is in order of the transiet magnetic field measured in non-central heavy-ion collisions at RHIC and LHC.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Geometrical fairness in graph neural networks

arXiv:2606.17684v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Graph-based learning methods have become increasingly prominent due to their strong performance across diverse applications. Among these, recent frameworks grounded in diffusion processes provide a unifying perspective that extends traditional graph neural network formulations while addressing limitations of standard message-passing mechanisms. Despite these advances, concerns remain regarding the fairness of such models, as they may propagate or amplify biases present in the data. In this work, we introduce a fairness-aware adaptation of graph-based diffusion by modifying the underlying Laplacian operator. Our approach incorporates multiple complementary transformations, including subspace projections, spectral adjustments, and frequency-based filtering, to mitigate bias-related components. Leveraging the intrinsic smoothing properties of graph diffusion, we provide a principled analysis of the resulting behavior and establish theoretical insights into fairness properties. We evaluate the proposed framework on both synthetic and real-world datasets, demonstrating that it achieves competitive performance while improving fairness metrics with limited additional computational cost.

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

Vector Quantized Latent Concepts: A Scalable Alternative to Clustering-Based Concept Discovery

Large language models (LLMs) encode rich semantic information in their hidden states, yet it remains difficult to understand what information these internal representations capture. Latent concepts extracted from hidden states offer a promising direction for interpreting LLMs, but existing clustering-based methods face a trade-off: hierarchical clustering produces coherent concepts but is limited to small datasets due to its quadratic memory cost, while K-Means scales efficiently but may yield less semantically coherent concepts. We propose Vector Quantized Latent Concept (VQLC), a discrete concept learning framework that learns a codebook of latent concepts on frozen hidden states. Across 12 dataset-model settings, VQLC stays close to K-Means in computational cost, scales better than hierarchical clustering, and remains competitive in faithfulness, with the clearest gains on decoder-only models. LLMs-based evaluation, qualitative analysis, and a Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) comparison demonstrate that the learned concepts are interpretable and task-relevant.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

T Cell Receptor repertoire analysis reveals antigenic convergence and immunotherapeutic opportunities in Prostate Cancer

Background: The T-cell receptor {beta} (TCR{beta}) repertoire reflects antigen-driven adaptive immune responses and provides insight into tumor-immune interaction. In prostate cancer (PCa), the immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment limits effective T-cell activation, and the antigenic drivers shaping intratumoral TCR repertoires remains poorly defined. This study aimed to characterize matched tumor and peripheral TCR{beta} repertoires from treatment-naive PCa patients and to identify shared clonotypes and antigenic specificities associated with disease severity. Methods: Next-generation sequencing was used to profile TCR{beta} repertoires from matched tumor biopsies and peripheral blood mononuclear cells obtained from treatment-naive PCa patients. Repertoires clonality, diversity, and was assessed using established metrics. Antigenic convergence was evaluated using GLIPH2 to identify shared CDR3{beta} motifs and predicted tumor-associated antigen (TAA) recognition, followed by functional validation using IFN-{gamma} ELISpot and T-cell expansion assays. Results: Tumor-derived TCR{beta} repertoires displayed reduced richness and increased clonality compared with peripheral blood mononuclear cells, consistent with local antigen-driven expansion. High-grade tumors demonstrated greater interpatient clonotype sharing and motif-level convergence, indicative of recognition of common TAAs. GLIPH2 analysis associated expanded clonotypes with epitopes derived from prostate-specific G-protein coupled receptor (PSGR), prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA), and prostate-specific antigen (PSA). Functional validation confirmed that peptide pools containing PSGR- and PSMA-derived epitopes induced IFN-{gamma} production and antigen-specific T-cell proliferation in vitro. Conclusions: These findings reveal an oligoclonal, antigen-driven intratumoral TCR{beta} landscape and identify PSGR and PSMA as immunogenic, potentially actionable targets. Integration of TCR profiling with antigen discovery pipelines may support the development of TCR-based biomarkers and precision immunotherapeutic strategies in prostate cancer.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Vorticity Induced by Non-frontal Collisions of Quantum Droplets

arXiv:2606.17498v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rotational dynamics induced by the non-frontal binary collisions of quantum droplets composed of ultracold alkali atoms are analyzed. A theoretical study is presented within the extended Gross-Pitaevskii equation framework, using experimentally feasible conditions. Numerical experiments elucidate a rich landscape of possible topological excitations in the system that are robust towards measurements. The collision of heteronuclear quantum droplets composed of $^{41}$K and $^{87}$Rb atoms in the incompressible regime, gives rise to dynamical instabilities that spontaneously generate topological defects: vortex rings, dislocation lines, and vortices in one species. Their presence depends on the Weber number and the impact parameter. An experimental proposal for vortex detection in both real and Fourier space using interaction ramps is described.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

ICD-10 Code Ambiguity Obscures Treatment-Eligible Adults with Spinal Muscular Atrophy: A Single-Center Chart Review and Patient Outreach Study

Background. Three disease-modifying therapies (DMTs) for spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) have been approved since 2016, yet many adults remain untreated. Identifying them depends on ICD-10 codes that capture SMA but do not reliably distinguish it from other related conditions. We examined, in one U.S. health system, both patients' engagement with therapy and the accuracy of the codes used to find them. Methods. We conducted a retrospective chart review of adults in an academic health system identified by SMA-associated ICD-10 codes, with manual adjudication of diagnosis and DMT status. Confirmed SMA-positive, DMT-naive patients were invited to a structured telephone interview on treatment awareness and barriers. Results. Of 60 charts, 22 (36.7%; 95% CI 25.6-49.3%) were appropriately coded for SMA or a related disorder; only 16 (26.7%) had molecularly confirmed SMA. The other 38 (63.3%) were miscoded, spanning spinal and bulbar muscular atrophy, asymptomatic carriers, prenatal screening, and conditions unrelated to SMA. Ten of the 16 confirmed patients (62.5%) were DMT-naive; one was interviewed, one declined, and eight could not be reached. The non-response is itself a finding: the patients least visible to administrative data are the hardest to reach. Conclusions. ICD-10 ambiguity is a barrier to treatment access in adult SMA, as is loss to follow-up. We make two recommendations: continuous documentation-coding alignment that uses natural language processing to verify the genetic precondition, and type-specific SMA codes (subcodes for Types 0-4) anchored on molecular SMN1 confirmation. Together these would support cohort identification, outreach, and evidence generation without adding to clinician burden.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Multimodal LLM-Empowered Re-Ranking for Generalizable Person Re-Identification

Domain Generalizable (DG) person re-identification (Re-ID) has attracted growing research interest due to its potential for deployment in unseen real-world scenarios. Most existing approaches address DG Re-ID by focusing on training domain-generalizable encoders but ignore the possible refinements in inference stage. In contrast, this work explores an alternative direction which improves inference re-ranking to enhance DG Re-ID. Conventional re-ranking methods typically rely on neighborhood-based distances to refine the initial ranking list, inherently depending on features produced by the Re-ID encoder. However, they deteriorate on target domains since the encoder lacks sufficient generalizability to produce reliable feature distances on unseen scenarios. Inspired by the remarkable generalization capabilities of recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), we propose an MLLM-empowered distance metric to improve re-ranking in DG Re-ID. Specifically, we first adapt an MLLM to Re-ID data through supervised fine-tuning, which incorporates a domain-agnostic prompt and a query-candidate hard mining scheme. Then, the adapted MLLM is employed to compute a $\mu$-distance during inference, which is robust to domain gap and significantly enhances subsequent re-ranking performance. Our approach is model-agnostic and can be seamlessly integrated into previous re-ranking frameworks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach consistently yields substantial performance improvements across multiple DG Re-ID benchmarks. The code of this work will be released at https://github.com/RikoLi/MUSE soon.

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

SP-Mind: An Autonomous Reasoning Agent for Spatial Proteomics Analysis

arXiv:2606.24235v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spatial proteomics enables single-cell-resolution characterization of protein expression within tissue architecture, playing a critical role in understanding tumor microenvironments and guiding precision medicine. However, current analysis workflows remain fragmented, requiring expert manual orchestration of heterogeneous tools and limiting research scalability and reproducibility. We present SP-Mind, the first autonomous AI agent designed to unify the spatial proteomics analysis pipeline, from raw multiplexed tissue imaging to downstream phenotype discovery. Equipped with expert-curated biological analysis skills and specialized computational tools, SP-Mind converts natural-language queries into end-to-end analytical workflows without task-specific fine-tuning. To rigorously evaluate its capabilities, we introduce SP-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark spanning diverse tissue types, comprising 102 tasks across 18 distinct categories. Through extensive evaluation on SP-Bench and established downstream tasks, SP-Mind achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing open-source biomedical agent baselines.

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

From Brewing to Resolution: Tracing the Internal Lifecycle of Code Reasoning in LLMs

arXiv:2606.17648v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Standard accuracy metrics cannot explain why LLMs handle variable tracking but fail on semantically equivalent loops. We study an internal lifecycle of code reasoning in which models first brew the answer, making it linearly recoverable many layers before it becomes self-decodable, and then diverge into one of four resolution outcomes: Resolved, Overprocessed, Misresolved, or Unresolved. Understanding this lifecycle matters because similar task accuracies can mask fundamentally different failure modes that surface-level evaluation cannot detect. We introduce a dual diagnostic framework pairing layer-wise linear probing with Context-Stripped Decoding (CSD) and apply it to six code-reasoning task families across 16 models spanning Qwen, Llama, and DeepSeek architectures. All four outcomes carry substantial mass in every task family: overall Resolved is only 41.5%, with multiple tasks below 30%. Controlled sweeps over structure, depth, and operators expose task-specific failure bottlenecks: Function Call Resolved plunges from 61.1% to 2.5% as call depth increases from one to three. Across architectures and scales, the brewing scaffold remains stable, with normalized brewing duration 24-42% across all 16 models, while resolution success varies with capability. This indicates that the scaffold is a stable empirical regularity across the tested decoder-only Transformer families, whereas resolution success covaries with capability, scale, and training. Code: https://github.com/euyis1019/llm-brewing

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Steady-state entanglement of spin qubits mediated by nonreciprocal and chiral magnons

arXiv:2509.13094v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose a hybrid quantum system in which a magnet supporting non-reciprocal magnons, chiral magnons, or both mediates the dissipative and unidirectional coupling of spin qubits. By driving the qubits, the steady state of this qubit-qubit coupling scheme becomes the maximally entangled Bell state. We devise a protocol where the system converges to this entangled state and benchmark it including qubit decay and dephasing. The protocol is numerically tested on a hybrid system consisting of nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers coupled to magnon surface modes of an yttrium iron garnet (YIG) film. We show that the dephasing time of the NV centers forms the bottleneck for achieving the entanglement of NV centers separated by a distance within the magnon coherence length. Our findings identify the key technological requirements and demonstrate a viable route toward steady-state entanglement of solid-state spins over distances of several microns using magnonic quantum networks, expanding the toolbox of magnonics for quantum information purposes.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

World Models in Pieces: Structural Certification for General Agents

arXiv:2606.24842v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In the big-world regime, agents cannot be universally capable and their ability is inevitably specialized across a world model in pieces. Consequently, standard uniform guarantees fail to distinguish between the understanding of critical bottlenecks and irrelevant failures. We first formalize this limitation by proving that general agents are not universal, rendering standard worst-case analysis uninformative. To overcome this, we introduce structural certification, a transition-local framework that maps bounded goal-conditioned performance to entry-wise guarantees on the agent's internal world model. Our main contribution is constructive. We provide algorithms that filter specific transitions using deep compositional goals and prove that a general agent on these goals has a structural world model with a $\mathcal{O}(1/n) + \mathcal{O}(\delta)$ error bound. Conversely, this bound is tight in the small-$\delta$ regime, whose existence is explicitly guaranteed by our certification. These results enable the certifiable deployment of general agents by localizing the specific transitions where long-horizon planning is reliable.

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

PEFT-MedSAM: Efficient Fine-Tuning of Medical Foundation Models for Explainable Skin Lesion Segmentation

Automated segmentation of skin lesions using deep learning models for dermoscopic images can be very helpful in finding melanomas earlier than they would normally be detected. However, most deep learning methods available do not perform well. The aim of this paper is to present a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method called PEFT-MedSAM for adapting the Medical Segment Anything Model (MedSAM) to automatically segment dermoscopic skin lesions. The PEFT-MedSAM method uses only the lightweight mask decoder for training the model while keeping the pre-trained image encoder and prompt encoder frozen. The experiments performed on the ISIC 2018 benchmark dataset shows that PEFT-MedSAM obtains a dice coefficient of .9411 and an intersection over union value of .8918 when compared to both a fully trained U-Net baseline (.8715 dice coefficient) and zero-shot MedSAM inference (.8997 dice coefficient). The external validation of the model using PH2 dataset shows .9467 dice coefficient with +/- .0310 standard deviation. Supportive evidence for these claims include a p-value less than .0001 for Wilcoxon signed rank tests comparing the two datasets and bootstrap-estimated 95% confidence intervals of [.9364,.9447] that represent the estimated range of possible values for the average dice coefficient obtained by repeating the test. To increase clinical trustworthiness, we used Grad-CAM explainability along with a pointing game based evaluation methodology to evaluate the CNN baseline model on the validation set. The results showed that we had an accuracy rate of 98.27% on the validation set of 519 images and confirmed that the model classified regions containing skin lesions.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Pocket-SLAM: Rendering-Area-Aware Pruning for Memory-Efficient 3DGS-SLAM

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has garnered significant attention in Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) due to its advances in capturing fine-grained geometry features and synthesizing novel views. For SLAM in large-scale scenes, such as autonomous driving, 3DGS-SLAM faces a critical limitation: memory consumption increases continuously over time as Gaussian points accumulate, leading to poor memory efficiency and limiting its applicability. In this work, we propose a rendering-area-aware pruning strategy that selectively removes Gaussians based on their contribution to the effective rendering area, rather than solely relying on Gaussian-level heuristics such as opacity or gradient magnitude. This perspective directly targets the sources of memory redundancy, effectively reducing the peak memory footprint of 3DGS-SLAM during runtime. Evaluations on the EuRoC and KITTI datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing pruning approaches in large-scale outdoor scenes, achieving over 60% memory reduction and more than 2 times FPS improvement while preserving localization and mapping accuracy. These results highlight rendering-area-aware pruning as a promising direction for scaling 3DGS-SLAM to real-world autonomous driving scenarios. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/UMN-ZhaoLab/Pocket-SLAM.git.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

When Life Gives You BC, Make Q-functions: Extracting Q-values from Behavior Cloning for On-Robot Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2605.05172v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Behavior Cloning (BC) has emerged as a highly effective paradigm for robot learning. However, BC lacks a self-guided mechanism for online improvement after demonstrations have been collected. Existing offline-to-online learning methods often cause policies to replace previously learned good actions due to a distribution mismatch between offline data and online learning. In this work, we propose Q2RL, Q-Estimation and Q-Gating from BC for Reinforcement Learning, an algorithm for efficient offline-to-online learning. Our method consists of two parts: (1) Q-Estimation extracts a Q-function from a BC policy using a few interaction steps with the environment, followed by online RL with (2) Q-Gating, which switches between BC and RL policy actions based on their respective Q-values to collect samples for RL policy training. Across manipulation tasks from D4RL and robomimic benchmarks, Q2RL outperforms SOTA offline-to-online learning baselines on success rate and time to convergence. Q2RL is efficient enough to be applied in an on-robot RL setting, learning robust policies for contact-rich and high precision manipulation tasks such as pipe assembly and kitting, in 1-2 hours of online interaction, achieving success rates of up to 100% and up to 3.75x improvement against the original BC policy. Code and video are available at https://pages.rai-inst.com/q2rl_website/

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Spectrally Regularized Latent Flow Matching for Turbulence Generation

arXiv:2606.11691v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Latent diffusion and flow matching have emerged as leading approaches for synthetic turbulence generation, yet they systematically under-represent dissipation-range amplitudes. We introduce a latent flow matching framework with a spectrally regularized compression stage that directly targets this failure mode. On a 256^2 DNS dataset at Re_f \approx 2250, replacing an MSE-trained VAE with a zone-weighted log-spectral objective raises deep-dissipation retained spectral power from 25% to 94% in reconstruction and from 20% to 79% in unconditional generation. The improved latent representation also yields a substantially better sampling cost-fidelity tradeoff: the MSE-trained latent space imposes a fundamental quality ceiling near DD bias -0.70 that no integrator or step-count can overcome, while the spectrally regularized latent space reaches DD bias -0.117 at just 20 function evaluations. Mechanistically, encoder-decoder swap experiments show that the improvement is driven primarily by encoder-induced latent reorganization rather than decoder capacity, while a support-amplitude decomposition reveals that MSE-trained models behave as conservative suppression models, minimizing pointwise error by attenuating intermittent high-wavenumber structure. Both pipelines recover the second-order structure function and the correct sign of S_3, indicating the correct cascade direction without explicit supervision. A small residual gap in the magnitude of S_3 suggests that phase-coherent triadic organization remains a complementary axis to amplitude fidelity for future generative turbulence models.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Self-Evolving Visual Questioner

Vision-language models (VLMs) are typically trained as passive answerers, while their ability to actively ask diverse, non-trivial, visual-centric and grounded questions remains underexplored. Existing visual questioners' performance is bottlenecked by the availability of high-quality training data or the cost of curating them. We show that a VLM can continuously improve itself as a visual questioner without any external supervision. We propose a self-evolving framework that uses a VLM itself as both a proposer and a filter to produce harder, more informative, and visual-centric questions, while maintaining their exploration diversity to avoid training collapse. These questions are then used to train the VLM in both questioner and answerer modes. To evaluate the questioner, we introduce an agentic protocol that assesses questions along perception, reasoning, and diversity dimensions. Experiments across various backbone VLMs show that our method substantially enhances the quality and substantially expands the difficulty boundary of autonomous question generation. Under the same budget, our self-supervision is more effective than training on the static source data. Moreover, the self-evolving questioner remains a competitive or even better answerer.

23.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Variational Tail Bounds for Norms of Random Vectors and Matrices

arXiv:2503.17300v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose a variational tail bound for norms of random vectors and matrices under moment assumptions on their one-dimensional marginals. A simplified version of the bound that parametrizes the ``aggregating distribution'' using a certain pushforward of the Gaussian distribution is also provided. We apply the proposed method to reproduce some of the well-known bounds on norms of Gaussian random vectors, and also obtain dimension-free tail bounds for the Euclidean norm of random vectors with arbitrary moment profiles. Furthermore, we reproduce a dimension-free concentration inequality for sum of independent and identically distributed positive semidefinite matrices with sub-exponential marginals, and obtain a concentration inequality for the sample covariance matrix of sub-exponential random vectors. We also obtain a tail bound for the operator norm of a random matrix series whose random coefficients may have arbitrary moment profiles. Furthermore, we use coupling to formulate an abstraction of the proposed approach that applies more broadly. As a corollary, we derive a PAC-Bayesian-style bound in terms of a certain combination of the KL and R\'{e}nyi divergences between the prior and posterior distributions.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Reinforcing Dual-Path Reasoning in Spatial Vision Language Models

Spatial VLMs have made substantial progress in geometric perception, yet complex spatial reasoning requiring multi-step inference over depth, distance, and scene relations remains challenging. Moreover, different spatial queries call for fundamentally different strategies: some are best addressed through purely linguistic, step-by-step deduction, while others require explicit 3D grounding before quantitative inference. We present Dual-Path Spatial Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning for Spatial VLMs (SR-REAL), a unified framework that equips a spatial VLM with two complementary reasoning paths: Language-Only Reasoning (LOR), which performs step-by-step linguistic deduction, and Detect-Then-Reason (DTR), which detects 3D geometric cues (e.g., centers or bounding boxes) via region tokens before explicit geometric inference. SR-REAL begins with a cold-start supervised fine-tuning stage that constructs LOR and DTR chain-of-thought supervision and exposes a region-to-3D interface, followed by RL that optimizes the policy model with accuracy and format rewards; for DTR, a discrete center-based detection reward further refines geometric alignment. Across diverse spatial benchmarks, SR-REAL significantly outperforms spatial VLM baselines: (i) a single RL-trained model supports both reasoning paths, with DTR excelling in region-aware tasks through precise 3D localization and LOR enhancing general spatial reasoning; (ii) jointly training both paths fosters mutual reinforcement; (iii) high-quality, blended cold-start data is crucial for stable RL optimization; and (iv) the model generalizes across datasets and domains without per-task tuning, demonstrating positive transfer between LOR and DTR.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Characterization of Gaussian Universality Breakdown in High-Dimensional Empirical Risk Minimization

arXiv:2604.03146v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study high-dimensional convex empirical risk minimization (ERM) under general non-Gaussian data designs. By heuristically extending the Convex Gaussian Min-Max Theorem (CGMT) to non-Gaussian settings, we derive an asymptotic min-max characterization of key statistics, enabling approximation of the mean $\mu_{\hat{\theta}}$ and covariance $C_{\hat{\theta}}$ of the ERM estimator $\hat{\theta}$. Specifically, under a concentration assumption on the data matrix and standard regularity conditions on the loss and regularizer, we show that for a test covariate $x$ independent of the training data, the projection $\hat{\theta}^\top x$ approximately follows the convolution of the generally non-Gaussian distribution of $\mu_{\hat{\theta}}^\top x$ with an independent centered Gaussian variable of variance $\mathrm{tr}(C_{\hat{\theta}} \mathbb{E}[xx^\top])$. This result clarifies the scope and limits of Gaussian universality for ERMs. Additionally, we prove that any $\mathcal{C}^2$ regularizer is asymptotically equivalent to a quadratic form determined solely by its Hessian at zero and gradient at $\mu_{\hat{\theta}}$. Numerical simulations across diverse losses and models are provided to validate our theoretical predictions and qualitative insights.