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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

DiFlow-TTS: Compact and Low-Latency Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech with Discrete Flow Matching

Zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) has made significant progress in replicating unseen voices, yet balancing generation quality and inference efficiency remains challenging. Autoregressive models suffer from high latency, while diffusion-based approaches are constrained by training-time configurations. Moreover, most flow-based methods operate in continuous space, which introduces optimization challenges because continuous token spaces are inherently more complex than discrete ones. To address these limitations, we propose DiFlow-TTS, a novel zero-shot TTS framework based on discrete flow matching. The model consists of a deterministic Phoneme-Content Mapper for linguistic modeling and a Factorized Discrete Flow Denoiser that simultaneously generates prosody and acoustic token streams. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach across multiple evaluation metrics.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Tunneling Dynamics and Time Delay in Electron Transport through Time-Dependent Barriers with Finite-Bandwidth Reservoirs

arXiv:2507.20649v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study a model system consisting of a tunneling barrier driven by an external harmonic field and coupled to two leads with finite bandwidth. Avoiding Floquet expansions, we derive simple expressions for the time-dependent tunneling current in the adiabatic regime. Our approach relates the barrier modulation to a measurable time delay in the steady-state periodic current. It provides a physically consistent definition of the tunneling time inside the barrier by subtracting the time delay associated with the leads from the total time delay. We find that the tunneling time always vanishes for wide/high barriers. Remarkably, the time delay persists even when the barrier becomes static, i.e., in the limit where the modulation frequency vanishes. This indicates that the time delay obtained through the introduction of an external periodic perturbation actually reflects an intrinsic property of the tunneling dynamics, rather than an effect of the external drive or of a particular system. We apply our results to the analysis of tunneling times in optical experiments and find good agreement with the experimental data.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Identifiable Markov Switching Models with Instantaneous Effects and Exponential Families

arXiv:2606.02231v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Temporal systems often exhibit non-stationary behaviour, such as seasonal climate variation or glucose fluctuations in patients with type-1 diabetes. One way to model non-stationarity is through discrete latent regimes, i.e., stationary segments of time. Such systems induce a Markov Switching Model (MSM), a class of Hidden Markov Models with autoregressive dependencies among latent regimes and observed variables. Identifying latent regimes is challenging in the presence of frequent regime switches and nonlinear and non-Gaussian dynamics, particularly when there are instantaneous effects between the variables, e.g., due to slow rates of measurements. In this work, we establish the identifiability of both latent regimes and regime-dependent causal structures under temporal regime dependencies, nonlinear lagged and instantaneous effects, and independent noise from the exponential family. Our identifiability theory subsumes non-temporal mixtures of causal models. Furthermore, we introduce FlowMSM, a regime detection framework that can be paired with any stationary causal discovery method to recover regime-dependent causal structures. Experiments on synthetic benchmarks and a financial economics dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach to detect latent regimes and discover causal structures from non-stationary time series.

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

A Qualitative Review of GenAI-Based Methods for Data Generation and Augmentation in Industrial Computer Vision Applications

AI-driven computer vision applications require a profound database to ensure predictable behaviors and performance. Such predictable behaviors are especially important for industrial applications in gaining trust from users. However, such a database is not readily available in industrial applications, and its acquisition is not trivial either. Active learning methods can be applied to ramp up data within a project deployment to iteratively increase the database, and thus the application predictability. Unfortunately, we observe that this often leads to a loss of user trust in the application, which is difficult to regain once lost. This leads to a "chicken-and-egg" dilemma in which neither the database nor the application is developed. In this work, we review state-of-the-art methods and approaches to further boost the database the initial active data ramp-up phase. Here, we focus on recent advancements in GenAI-based data generation and augmentation methods and review their adaptability on an industrial computer vision classification use case. Although we observe a potential for automatic data ramp-up, we also see a domain miss match in between the source (training environment) and target (industrial use-case) - regarding context defined in natural language and object characteristics.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Fragile Knowledge, Robust Instruction-Following: The Width Pruning Dichotomy in Llama-3.2

作者:

Structured width pruning of GLU-MLP layers in Llama-3.2 models, guided by the Peak-to-Peak Magnitude (PPM) criterion, reveals a systematic dichotomy in how reducing the expansion ratio affects different model capabilities. While performance on tasks relying on parametric knowledge (e.g., MMLU, GSM8K) and perplexity metrics degrades predictably with decreasing expansion ratios, instruction-following capabilities improve at the 2.4x equilibrium ratio (IFEval: +4.8 points / +46% in Llama-3.2-1B and +3.7 points / +39% in Llama-3.2-3B), and multi-step reasoning remains robust (MUSR). This pattern, observed consistently across both evaluated model sizes, challenges the prevailing assumption in compression research that pruning induces uniform degradation. To investigate this, we evaluated seven expansion ratio configurations using comprehensive benchmark suites that assess factual knowledge, mathematical reasoning, language comprehension, instruction-following, and truthfulness. Our analysis identifies the expansion ratio as a critical architectural parameter that selectively reshapes the model's task performance profile, rather than merely serving as a compression metric.

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

Emergent Alignment

arXiv:2606.19527v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Can Large Language Models (LLMs) discern when their own outputs are misaligned with human ethics? And can they self-correct? We endow an LLM with a conscience step that reviews its own reasoning and outputs, and we extend the training loss with an alignment component using Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to steer the model away from non-ethical outputs. The result is an online technique to align models in a wide range of applications: training, fine-tuning, adversarial prompting, and zero-shot learning. It does not require a weaker or stronger judge, relying instead on a frozen copy of itself. In previous work, the Emergent Misalignment scenario showed a range of emergent unethical behaviors from fine-tuning the model to hack code. Instead, we empirically show how to achieve Emergent Alignment: a single high-level introspective question steers training toward an ethical model under the same code hacking scenario.

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

Elastic ODYN: Differentiable Optimization for Infeasible Control and Learning in Robotics

arXiv:2606.16564v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robotic systems routinely encounter conflicting objectives, modeling errors, and degenerate contact conditions that render quadratic programs (QPs) infeasible. Yet most optimization solvers and differentiable QP layers assume feasibility, leading to numerical failures, unstable gradients, or solver breakdown when constraints cannot be simultaneously satisfied. We present Elastic ODYN, a primal–dual non-interior-point QP solver that handles infeasibility through smooth squared-$\ell_2$ elastic relaxations. The resulting formulation remains well posed under ill-conditioning and degeneracy, supports warm starting, and converges to closest-to-feasible solutions when no feasible point exists. A lightweight refinement stage recovers physically meaningful dual variables from the elastic solution. Building on this framework, we develop Elastic OdynLayer, a differentiable QP layer with stable gradients under infeasibility, and Elastic OdynSQP, an infeasibility-aware SQP method that resolves inconsistent subproblems and intrinsically infeasible optimal control tasks through selective constraint relaxation. We evaluate the framework on benchmark QPs, singular contact mechanics, differentiable parameter identification, and quadrupedal and humanoid trajectory optimization. Across all settings, Elastic ODYN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art elastic QP solvers in robustness, warm-start performance, and convergence reliability, enabling optimization, simulation, control, and learning beyond the feasibility assumptions of existing methods.

08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

PhenoBIC: operator-free single-cell spatial phenotyping in multiplex imaging data using deep learning of cell staining patterns

Multiplex imaging is a valuable tool for spatially examining tissue microenvironments at the single-cell level to uncover biological and clinical insights. However, most multiplex image analysis workflows currently require manual intervention for cell phenotyping, which slows progress, demands human effort, and yields operator-dependent outputs. Here, we developed PhenoBIC, a pre-trained deep learning model for image classification of the multiplexed biomarker signals in a cell (Biomarker Imprint of a Cell) to classify cell phenotypes. We show that PhenoBIC (F1-score ~0.88) outperforms manual gating (widely used) and other machine learning-based computational approaches for cell marker expression classification. We validated this across multiple biomarkers, tissue sampling strategies (whole biopsies and tissue microarrays), multiplex panels, imaging platforms, and tissue types. We have released our in-house training and validation datasets of ~1.4 million manually curated cell expression ground truth labels. We have also open-sourced PhenoBIC and enabled its community-wide deployment via the QuPath interface.

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

AutoMine Solution for AV2 2026 Scenario Mining Challenge

arXiv:2606.11874v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: With the development of autonomous driving systems, mining high-value, safety-critical, and planning-relevant scenarios from large-scale driving logs has become essential for data-driven evaluation. In this paper, we propose AutoMine, a robust self-refining scenario mining method based on LLMs and VLMs. AutoMine uses semantics-preserving prompt augmentation to reduce LLM prompt sensitivity, combines robust trajectory atomic functions with VLM-based functions to handle perception noise and open-world visual cues, and refines generated code through execution feedback from real logs. In the Argoverse 2 Scenario Mining Competition at CVPR 2026, AutoMine achieves a HOTA-Temporal score of 36.38 and a Timestamp BA score of 77.21.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Predicting Cognitive Load from Speech and Interaction Dynamics in Dyadic Conversations

arXiv:2606.12971v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Estimating cognitive load from speech has largely been studied in controlled laboratory settings, with limited understanding of its reliability in natural collaborative conversations. We investigate whether speech and interaction dynamics predict perceived cognitive load during dyadic conversations. We analyze audio from 53 dyads performing nine collaborative tasks and extract static acoustic, dynamic, and interaction features to train a two-head Gated Recurrent Unit encoder to predict cognitive load scores. Results show conversational interaction provides useful signals for predicting cognitive load related to time pressure, mental work, effort, and task performance. Temporal demand is associated with turn-taking dynamics such as overlap and speaker switch, while mental demand is linked to imbalanced participation between speakers. These findings highlight the importance of task structure and conversational interaction for modeling cognitive load in natural collaborative settings.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

GeoT2V-Bench: Benchmarking 3D Consistency in Text-to-Video Models via 3D Reconstruction

Camera-prompted text-to-video (T2V) models are increasingly used to synthesize virtual camera captures, such as orbiting objects or moving through static scenes. For these outputs, visual plausibility is insufficient: the generated frames should also provide coherent multi-view evidence for a single static 3D scene. We introduce GeoT2V-Bench, a reconstruction-based diagnostic benchmark for evaluating whether camera-prompted T2V clips can support explicit rigid 3D reconstruction. Our pipeline estimates per-frame camera intrinsics and poses with VGGT-style geometry estimation, fits DeformableGS, derives a static MedianGS proxy by temporal-median aggregation, and renders this proxy along the estimated camera path. Instead of producing a pass/fail label or a single scalar score, GeoT2V-Bench reports a continuous reconstruction profile covering apparent image motion, estimated trajectory behavior, MedianGS static rendering error, static-render flow agreement, and the gap between flexible and static fits. On a fair-format four-seed evaluation with 3,840 completed reconstructions from 12 open-weight model configurations and 80 GeCo-Eval static-scene prompts, we find that visible motion, static rendering error, flow agreement, and flexible-vs-static behavior often disagree. GeoT2V-Bench therefore captures complementary failure modes that emerge when generated videos are tested as global static-scene acquisitions.

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

Vision Transformers for Face Recognition Need More Registers

Recent advances in Vision Transformers (ViTs) for face recognition (FR) have moved beyond the standard CLS-token paradigm. In this paradigm, a special classification token (CLS) is prepended to the patch embeddings and used as a representation of the input for downstream tasks. An alternative approach, Concatenated Patch Embeddings (CPE), instead leverages all patch tokens by concatenating them into a single vector, which is then projected into a compact face representation. CPE has been shown to improve recognition performance in comparison to CLS-based ones, but our qualitative analysis of attention maps showed the presence of artifacts that limit their interpretability. To address this issue, we incorporate register tokens, learnable tokens concatenated to the initial patch embeddings, and processed jointly through the ViT encoder blocks. This mechanism has been shown to produce more structured and interpretable attention maps compared to baseline ViT. We empirically demonstrate that these artifacts consistently appear across various ViT backbones, including small and large models, and that introducing register tokens effectively mitigates them. Adding four or eight registers significantly enhances interpretability, with eight registers providing the highest verification accuracies and smoothest attention structures. Our resulting model, ViT-8R, corresponds to a CPE-based ViT-B architecture augmented with eight register tokens achieves state-of-the-art performance among ViT-based FR models on large-scale IJB-B and IJB-C benchmarks. Also, ViT-8R produces substantially clearer attention maps compared with the baseline model, which offer deeper insight into the model's attention behavior (https://github.com/TaharChettaoui/ViT-FR-Registers)

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

TextResNet: Decoupling and Routing Optimization Signals in Compound AI Systems via Deep Residual Tuning

arXiv:2602.08306v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Textual Gradient-style optimizers (TextGrad) enable gradient-like feedback propagation through compound AI systems. However, they do not work well for deep chains. The root cause of this limitation stems from the Semantic Entanglement problem in these extended workflows. In standard textual backpropagation, feedback signals mix local critiques with upstream contexts, leading to Attribution Ambiguity. To address this challenge, we propose TextResNet, a framework that reformulates the optimization process to achieve precise signal routing via four key innovations. Firstly, in the forward pass, it enforces Additive Semantic Deltas to preserve an Identity Highway for gradient flow. Secondly, in the backward pass, it introduces Semantic Gradient Decomposition via a Semantic Projector to disentangle feedback into causally independent subspaces. Thirdly, it implements Causal Routing, which routes projected signals to their specific components. Finally, it performs Density-Aware Optimization Scheduling to leverage the disentangled signals to dynamically allocate resources to key system bottlenecks. Our results show that TextResNet not only achieves superior performance compared to TextGrad, but also exhibits remarkable stability for agentic tasks in compound AI systems where baselines collapse. Code is available at https://github.com/JeanDiable/TextResNet.

14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

On two overlooked stick-breaking constructions of the normalized inverse Gaussian process

arXiv:2606.19306v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We shed light on two alternative stick-breaking constructions of the normalized inverse Gaussian (NIG) random discrete distribution which appear to have been overlooked so far in the Bayesian nonparametric setting. The first is derived from a result in Aldous and Pitman (1998) for the conditional Brownian excursion partition, mixing over the local time at zero up to time one. The second arises as a particular case of a result in James (2013) for priors obtained by a random spatial and temporal change of the normalized generalized Gamma subordinator. Both constructions are in terms of straightforward transformations of standard random variables and can be easily generalized to provide the stick-breaking construction of any element, respectively, in a) the family of mixed Poisson-Kingman models driven by the $1/2$ stable Lévy measure and b) the family of Poisson-Gamma processes driven by the Inverse Gaussian subordinator.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

MASK: Multi-Agent Semantic K-Scheduling for Risk-Sensitive 6G Robotics

arXiv:2606.11249v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Realizing the vision of 6G connected robotics requires reconciling high-performance collaborative control with the rigid spectral limitations of physical wireless channels. In realistic collaborative sensing scenarios, spectral resources are quantized into finite physical resource blocks or orthogonal subcarriers, rendering simultaneous transmission by all agents infeasible. To address this, we propose Multi-Agent Semantic K-Scheduling (MASK), a control architecture designed to sustain robust, risk-aware coordination under strict instantaneous bandwidth caps. We introduce Arbiter-Assisted Semantic Information Gating (A-SIG), a lightweight coordination mechanism that enforces hard access constraints by scheduling only the top-K agents based on locally computed semantic importance scores. By aggregating these prioritized observations into a compact latent state, a self-supervised global encoder enables a distributional policy to mitigate tail risks despite data sparsity. We evaluate MASK across diverse benchmarks, demonstrating that it matches the performance of communication-unconstrained baselines even when channel access is restricted to a small fraction of the swarm size. Furthermore, the framework exhibits inherent resilience to packet erasures, validating semantic scheduling as a critical enabler for resource-constrained 6G systems.

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

ScaleWoB: Guiding GUI Agents with Coding Agents via Large-Scale Environmental Synthesis

arXiv:2605.25160v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: GUI agents powered by large language models are advancing rapidly, creating urgent needs for evaluation and training based on realistic environments. However, directly doing so in real-world environments introduces some challenges that cannot be overlooked. Real-world environments are complex and uncontrollable, making it difficult to construct verifiable rewards and to save or reset states. Existing works prioritize reproducibility but are often limited to open-source apps or file-operation tasks for reliable reward building, leaving a persistent gap from real-world usage. Furthermore, relying on virtual machines or docker images demand high resource requirements and suffer from slow response speeds, which limit the efficiency. We present \sys, a framework that could produce high-fidelity synthesized interactive environments for GUI agents across platforms with verifiable rewards. These environments behave as backend-free webpages accessible via URL, requiring near-zero setup and low resource cost, making the approach suitable for both large-scale evaluation and downstream agent training. We support multiple GUI platforms including mobile, desktop, and automotive/in-vehicle interfaces based on the same pipeline, covering 100+ environments and 1000+ verifiable tasks. Among them, 120 challenging tasks across 63 simulated mobile applications are released as a fully synthesized mobile GUI agent benchmark. Experiment results on five state-of-the-art mobile GUI agents reveal substantial headroom – the average success rate is only 27.92\%, dropping to 17.82\% on long-horizon subset – while humans reach 92.08\%. A comparison against real-world sample tasks shows that assessments made in our synthetic environments generalize to real apps. The project website is at https://scalewob.github.io.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

OmniDirector: General Multi-Shot Camera Cloning without Cross-Paired Data

Cloning camera motion from reference videos is an important task in video generation, as videos provide intuitive and precise control. Existing methods either directly use parametric representations that fail to handle multi-shot generation or synthesize cross-paired data, which suffer from data scarcity, resulting in poor performance in complicated camera motion cloning. To address these issues, we introduce a general camera motion representation that encodes cameras as grid motion videos. This camera grid represents the camera parameters visually and supports the integration of diverse trajectories for multi-shot video generation. Building upon this, we propose OmniDirector, a unified framework trained on a million-scale camera grid-video pairs that coordinates characters, actions, and cameras to provide director-level control for multimodal diffusion transformers. Furthermore, we design a novel hierarchical prompt expansion agent that harmoniously integrates different control signals by systematically describing camera motion and visual content through understanding signal relationships. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance and outstanding controllability of our framework. Project page: https://ymlinfeng.github.io/OmniDirector.github.io/

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

Position: The Systemic Lack of Agency in Visual Reasoning

This paper argues that a systemic lack of Agency constrains the implicit reasoning capabilities of current Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Implicit reasoning refers to the ability to autonomously discover and utilize hidden visual evidence to bridge information gaps, rather than merely relying on explicitly specified targets. This capacity underlies human visual understanding and everyday reasoning. We argue that this limitation arises from a tendency to approach visual reasoning primarily as passive semantic retrieval, rather than as active, situated reasoning that depends on autonomous visual exploration. As a result, most existing benchmarks primarily assess Passive Capacity, leaving this aspect of reasoning largely unmeasured. To address this gap, we introduce the Visual Implicit Reasoning Diagnosing Benchmark (V-IRD), which targets this missing quadrant by requiring models to derive answers strictly through autonomous visual analysis. Our results show that, despite strong retrieval abilities, prominent VLMs struggle to utilize reference objects and to attend to visual evidence that requires self-directed inquiry. Simply put, strong semantic recognition does not equate to active visual exploration, revealing a critical gap in current VLMs. More information can be found at https://haoychen.github.io/Implicit-Reasoning/

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

Mind-Studio: Executable World Models with Lookahead Evaluation for Partially Observable Games

arXiv:2606.16070v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World-model synthesis aims to turn interaction experience into an internal model of environment dynamics. Existing symbolic approaches often fit observed transitions or mixtures of local rules, but they do not produce a complete executable program that can run independently of the real environment. We present Mind-Studio, a framework that synthesizes executable pygame-style world models from state-action-next-state trajectories using large language models. Mind-Studio combines entropy-selected traces with a lightweight game skill file containing object, action, and static scene information extracted from screenshots. We evaluate synthesis quality with a K-step lookahead fidelity protocol that compares generated world-model rollouts against Real-ALE rollouts from the same state. On Montezuma's Revenge, Mind-Studio improves chosen-action next-state prediction from 0.3% for PoE-World to 48.7% while verifying 5 of 8 subgoals; across Alien, Assault, and Skiing, it achieves stronger branch-level fidelity than prior learned lookahead sources.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

HarnessX: A Composable, Adaptive, and Evolvable Agent Harness Foundry

arXiv:2606.14249v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agent performance depends critically on the runtime harness, comprising the prompts, tools, memory, and control flow that mediate how a model observes, reasons, and acts. Yet today's harnesses remain largely hand-crafted and static: each new model or task still demands bespoke scaffolding, and the rich traces produced during execution are rarely distilled back into systematic improvement. We introduce HarnessX, a foundry for composable, adaptive, and evolvable agent harnesses. HarnessX assembles typed harness primitives via a substitution algebra, adapts them through AEGIS, a trace-driven multi-agent evolution engine grounded in an operational mirror between symbolic adaptation and reinforcement learning, and closes the harness-model loop by turning trajectories into both harness updates and model training signal. Across five benchmarks (ALFWorld, GAIA, WebShop, tau^3-Bench, and SWE-bench Verified), HarnessX yields an average gain of +14.5% (up to +44.0%), with gains largest where baselines are lowest. These results suggest that agent progress need not come from model scaling alone: composing and evolving runtime interfaces from execution feedback is an actionable and complementary lever. The complete codebase will be open-sourced in a future release.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

An Extensible and Lightweight Unified Architecture for Demosaicing Pixel-bin Image Sensors

Pixel-bin image sensors are becoming the default choice for smartphone cameras due to their resolution vs light-gathering trade-off. However, their larger inter-color separation compared to the Bayer color filter array (CFA) makes them challenging to demosaic. Furthermore, existing deep learning-based demosaicing methods are CFA-specific, requiring multiple individual models that take up precious onboard resources and demand larger development and maintenance efforts. In this work, we propose a modular unified architecture for demosaicing various pixel-bin sensors that provides higher image quality while being extensible and lightweight. Additionally, to enable plug-and-play operation, we introduce a learning-free CFA-identification module to detect the CFA type of raw data accurately.

22.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Second-order PACF asymptotics and discrimination between fractional Gaussian noise and $\operatorname{FARIMA}(0,d,0)$

作者:

arXiv:2605.31416v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fractional Gaussian noise and $\operatorname{FARIMA}(0,d,0)$ have the same long-memory pole $|\theta|^{-2d}$ and hence the same leading PACF law $\alpha(n)\sim d/n$. We show that this agreement breaks at the first non-universal order. For $0

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Online Reward-Punishment Learning from Fixed-Channel Perceptual Event Streams without Environment Rewards

作者:

arXiv:2606.18963v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study online reward-punishment learning when the environment provides no scalar reward or evaluative label. At each step the agent receives only a fixed-channel perceptual packet, and quantities such as pain, energy, contact, damage, or cognitive error are treated as perceptual dimensions whose valence must be inferred from transition consequences. OHIRL separates four roles: M_psi learns next-packet prediction, D_omega models residual dynamics, C_eta is a fixed internal post-transition trajectory evaluator, and B_xi learns to use the resulting value evidence for later policy updates and action scoring. C_eta uses a recovery-positive and persistence/growth-negative residual-regulation orientation; a coefficient-origin audit shows that equal-unit, raw-equal, and random monotone variants preserve more than 92% of the released top-action rankings, while sign inversion preserves 0%. The reward-free protocol exposes observation transitions while withholding environment rewards, delayed external evaluators, success labels, and action-goodness labels. A conditional error decomposition separates B_xi evidence-estimation error from residual policy-optimization error. In a 2x2-XOR packet task, medicine and chili acquire opposite value under visual XOR contexts, and the same pain or spice increase can be positive or negative depending on consequence structure; B_xi reaches 0.952 balanced reward-sign accuracy. In a full online-interleaved audit, M_psi reaches holdout R2=0.907, B_xi reaches 0.940 sign accuracy, and the policy reaches 0.979 optimal-action accuracy, while immediate packet scores, prediction-error rewards, shuffled targets, zero reward, and error-reduction controls collapse. Hidden-reward CartPole and Taxi controls, public-context no-leakage audits, and module-role ablations further test information boundaries and component necessity.

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

MorphStrata: Layer-Specific Perturbations for Generating Morphence Students in Time-Series Moving Target Defense

arXiv:2606.17435v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time-series forecasting models remain vulnerable to gradient-based adversarial attacks while existing defense mechanisms typically incur a trade-off in robustness for bounded response and compute cost. The problem is pronounced in Moving Target Defense where maintaining multiple randomized model instances substantially exacerbates the training overhead. In this work, we introduce MorphStrata, a student generation strategy with selective, layer-specific stochastic noise injection that extends the traditional Morphence defense. MorphStrata uses a Transformer backbone as the teacher and perturbs randomly selected architectural blocks to create structured heterogeneity across student models in response to varied data distributions and threat models. We evaluate against vanilla Transformer and Morphence backbones on a suite of benchmarks including the Jena Climate, Electricity Load Diagrams, and Appliances Energy Prediction using FGSM, BIM and PGD attacks across multiple attack strengths. Across datasets and attack regimes, the proposed ensemble maintains comparable adversarial RMSE. Specifically, for high entropy, periodic datasets as in the case of the AEP data, MorphStrata achieves the lowest RMSE across all attacks and perturbation budgets, improving over the static baseline by up to 24.11% and 97.97% under FGSM and BIM respectively at an epsilon value of 0.5 over 30 randomized trials. Targeting the layers to generate MorphStrata students accounts for less than 1% increase in train-times over the Morphence MTD baseline for most of the experiments, while accounting for double digit gains in adversarial RMSE reduction. We also observe a positive correlation between higher pairwise L2 distance (among generated students) and overall defense effectiveness. In summary, MorphStrata maintains adversarial robustness as an MTD defense at marginal cost deltas when compared to existing baselines.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Same Lesson, Different Story: Cross-Lingual Reconstruction of Cultural Narratives in Large Language Models

The evaluation of cultural grounding context becomes complex when multiple cultures convey the same moral lesson. This challenge is particularly relevant to large language models (LLMs), which produce narratives across a wide range of languages and cultural contexts. However, it remains uncertain whether these models preserve culturally grounded meaning when equivalent moral lessons are conveyed through distinct cultural forms. This study introduces a multilingual evaluation narrative framework that integrates a cross-linguistic collection of 414 proverbs spanning 15 languages and uses four LLMs to generate 13k narratives. By employing semantically equivalent proverbs as culturally grounded prompts, the analysis assesses whether models preserve meaning across languages, how cross-lingual conditioning influences narrative realization, and whether different model families converge on similar interpretations. Results indicate that cross-lingual prompting largely preserves proverb-level semantic meaning while systematically redistributing agency, social positioning, and narrative structure. Additionally, strong inter-model convergence is observed in both monolingual and cross-lingual settings, suggesting that multilingual LLMs rely on shared semantic abstractions despite architectural and linguistic differences. These findings shed light on the need for more comprehensive evaluations of cultural grounding. Relying exclusively on semantic similarity in multilingual narrative assessments may overestimate cultural preservation by neglecting culturally meaningful variations in narrative expression.