Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

探索全球前沿学术脉络

AcademicHub 汇聚顶级期刊与预印本平台的实时文献。定制您的专属科研雷达,利用大语言模型自动生成交叉领域文献分析简报。

01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Findings of the MAGMaR 2026 Shared Task

This overview paper presents the results of the shared task for the second workshop on Multimodal Augmented Generation via Multimodal Retrieval (MAGMaR). In this shared task participants submitted systems focused on either (i) video retrieval or (ii) grounded generation of articles given retrieved videos. Teams could submit to either task. For the retrieval task, we had 2 participating teams that submitted a total of 17 systems – all of which beat a baseline derived from the winner of last year's shared task. On the generation side, we had 4 teams submit 16 systems. All teams had at least one generated report that was labeled the best by a human annotator.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

LEAP: Layer-skipping Efficiency via Adaptive Progression for Vision Transformer Distillation

Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) with Vision Transformer (ViT) backbones, such as DINOv2, have become essential for downstream tasks like object recognition and semantic segmentation. The immense computational requirements of backbones often necessitate distillation into smaller architectures for edge deployment. Feature-based knowledge distillation (KD) often suffers from the teacher-student gap; the student struggles to imitate teacher's complex feature map due to its limited capacity. To mitigate this bottleneck, we propose LEAP: Layer-skipping Efficiency via Adaptive Progression, a training curriculum for ViT feature-based knowledge distillation. By utilizing the teacher's intermediate feature maps as a sequence of progressively more difficult targets, our curriculum allows the student to build a foundational representation before tackling higher-level abstractions. Our results demonstrate that this paradigm significantly accelerates convergence through adaptive difficulty selection across various student model sizes and dataset scales. With our curriculum, the LEAP-distilled ViT-S achieves 90.1% accuracy on ImageNet-100, a +12.24% improvement compared with baseline. On ImageNet-1K, LEAP achieves +3.84% and +7.75% improvement for the instance retrieval task on the Oxford and Paris datasets, respectively. Furthermore, the curriculum enables 25.1% savings in training FLOPs and 21% savings in training time on ImageNet-100 by implementing early-stopping for teacher inference during the initial stages of training. Code is available at https://github.com/KevinZ0217/LEAP

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

HarnessBridge: Learnable Bidirectional Controller for LLM Agent Harness

arXiv:2606.12882v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models are increasingly deployed as agents for long-horizon tasks, yet their performance is shaped not only by model capability and environment design, but also by the harness that mediates agent–environment interaction. Existing harnesses are largely manually engineered, making them difficult to scale as trajectories grow longer and interactions become more complex. In this work, we ask whether harness can be generated by a learnable plug-in module that can be trained in an end-to-end fashion. We introduce HarnessBridge, a lightweight learnable harness controller that parameterizes the agent–environment interface as a bidirectional projection. HarnessBridge learns two bidirectional projections: observation projection, which distills raw trajectories into compact, decision-relevant states, and action projection, which converts proposed actions into executable transitions or trajectory-grounded rejections. We train HarnessBridge on a harness supervision dataset via unified instruction tuning. On Terminal-Bench~2.0 and SWE-bench Verified, HarnessBridge matches or surpasses strong specialized harnesses while substantially reducing token usage and trajectory length, and generalizes from smaller generators to larger commercial models.

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

Principled RL for Flow Matching Emerges from the Chunk-level Policy Optimization

Recent Progress in post-training flow matching for text-to-image (T2I) generation with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has demonstrated strong potential. However, it is hindered by a critical limitation: inaccurate advantage attribution. In this work, we argue that aggregating consecutive steps into a coherent 'chunk' and shifting the policy optimization paradigm from GRPO's step level to the chunk level can effectively mitigate the negative impact of this issue. Building on this insight, we propose Group Chunking Policy Optimization (GCPO), the first chunk-level reinforcement learning approach for post-training flow matching. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GCPO achieves superior performance on both standard T2I benchmarks and preference alignment, with up to 43% relative gains over GRPO, highlighting the promise of chunk-level policy optimization. The code is available on https://github.com/xingzhejun/GCPO.

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

Application of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Libraries: A Systematic Review

arXiv:2112.04573v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As the concept and implementation of cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning has become relevant, academics, researchers and information professionals involve research in this area. The objective of this systematic literature review is to provide a synthesis of empirical studies exploring application of artificial intelligence and machine learning in libraries. To achieve the objectives of the study, a systematic literature review was conducted based on the original guidelines proposed by Kitchenham et al. (2009). Data was collected from Web of Science, Scopus, LISA and LISTA databases. Following the rigorous/ established selection process, a total of thirty-two articles were finally selected, reviewed and analyzed to summarize on the application of AI and ML domain and techniques which are most often used in libraries. Findings show that the current state of the AI and ML research that is relevant with the LIS domain mainly focuses on theoretical works. However, some researchers also emphasized on implementation projects or case studies. This study will provide a panoramic view of AI and ML in libraries for researchers, practitioners and educators for furthering the more technology-oriented approaches, and anticipating future innovation pathways.

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

Geometric and Stochastic Analysis of Discontinuities in Sparse Mixture-of-Experts

arXiv:2606.19036v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE) architectures are now widely deployed in state-of-the-art language and vision models, where conditional routing allows scaling to very large networks. However, this very Top-$k$ expert selection that enables conditional routing also renders the SMoE map inherently discontinuous. In the vicinity of these discontinuity surfaces, even inputs that are arbitrarily close may activate substantially different sets of experts resulting in significantly different outputs. In this work we give a rigorous geometric and stochastic analysis of these discontinuities. We first classify them by order, determined by the number of tied experts at a switching event. Using measure-theoretic slicing arguments, we establish asymptotic volume estimates for the thickened discontinuity surfaces, showing that lower-order discontinuity sets dominate, whereas higher-order ones occupy a vanishingly small relative volume. Next, modeling random perturbations in the input space via a diffusion process, we prove that the path eventually encounter a discontinuity, and moreover that the first hit almost surely occurs on an order-1 discontinuity with explicit finite-time probability bounds. We further derive occupation-time bounds that quantify the duration the random path spend in the neighborhoods of each discontinuity order. These theoretical results imply that inputs are more likely to lie near lower order discontinuities. Motivated by this insight, we propose a simple smoothing mechanism that can be directly applied to existing SMoEs, softly incorporating experts near discontinuities; our analysis guarantees that the added computational overhead remains small while providing localized smoothing near discontinuities, and experiments across language and vision tasks show that smoothing not only enforces continuity of the SMoE map but also enhances empirical performance.

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

Polynomial-Time Mistake-Bounded Language Generation

arXiv:2606.16077v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this note, we introduce a polynomial-time version of the mistake-bounded language generation (MBLG) framework due to Kleinberg, Peale, and Reingold (2026). We observe that the family of parities of variables, and the family of conjunctions of literals, are polynomial-time MBLG. Our main result states that the family of monotone Boolean functions with polynomially-many maxterms is polynomial-time MBLG. This family includes all monotone Boolean functions, computable by polynomial-size decision trees. Our technique can be presented as a new combinatorial game about writing numbers on a board.

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

Blended Chart Surfaces: A Seamless Explicit Representation for Smooth Surface Fitting

A surface representation suitable for geometry processing should be compact and explicit, provide global smoothness guarantees, support a wide range of surface topologies, and offer reliable access to differential quantities such as normals and surface energies, while remaining compatible with modern differentiable optimization. Existing neural representations typically sacrifice one or more of these properties: implicit fields typically require iso-surfacing for downstream use, while explicit neural maps are constrained by canonical-domain parametrizations or exhibit seam artifacts between local charts. We introduce Blended Chart Surfaces, a compact, network-free, explicit representation that is smooth by construction and anchored to user-provided topology. Given a coarse proxy mesh encoding the intended surface topology and approximate geometry, Blended Chart Surfaces jointly optimize for a polynomial map at each proxy vertex using an off-the-shelf optimizer to fit to an implicit target shape, avoiding the need for an input parametrization. Neighboring maps are fused using a smooth 'one-ring coordinate' blending scheme, decoupling topology and coarse geometry (carried by the proxy) from geometric details (carried by the local patches). The surface is globally smooth, fully differentiable, and enables stable evaluation of derivatives, making differential quantities and surface energies directly accessible. Additionally, our construction is equivariant to rigid motions and scaling of the proxy mesh. We evaluate Blended Chart Surfaces on various topologies and geometric complexity, and compare against explicit alternatives including interpolating-function baselines and mesh-displacement MLPs. Across these, Blended Chart Surfaces achieve a favorable trade-off among compactness, simplicity, access to differential quantities, and expressivity while remaining smooth across patch boundaries.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

findsylls: A Language-Agnostic Toolkit for Syllable-Level Speech Tokenization and Embedding

Syllable-level units offer compact and linguistically meaningful representations for spoken language modeling and unsupervised word discovery, but research on syllabification remains fragmented across disparate implementations, datasets, and evaluation protocols. We introduce findsylls, a modular, language-agnostic toolkit that unifies classical syllable detectors and end-to-end syllabifiers under a common interface for syllable segmentation, embedding extraction, and multi-granular evaluation. The toolkit implements and standardizes widely used methods (e.g., Sylber, VG-HuBERT) and allows their components to be recombined, enabling controlled comparisons of representations, algorithms, and token rates. We demonstrate findsylls on English and Spanish corpora and on new hand-annotated data from Kono, an underdocumented Central Mande language, illustrating how a single framework can support reproducible syllable-level experiments across both high-resource and under-resourced settings.

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

Fusion of Pervasive RF Data with Spatial Images via Vision Transformers for Enhanced Mapping in Smart Cities

In this paper, we present a deep learning-based approach that integrates the DINOv2 architecture to improve building mapping by combining (possibly erroneous) maps from open-source platforms with pervasive radio frequency (RF) data collected from multiple wireless user equipments and base stations. Unlike prior methods, our approach leverages a vision transformer-based architecture to jointly process both RF and map modalities within a unified framework, effectively capturing spatial dependencies and structural priors for enhanced mapping accuracy. For the evaluation purposes, we employ a synthetic dataset co-produced by Huawei. To address the challenges associated with real-world data imperfections, we introduce controlled noise to its RF data so as to simulate real-world conditions. Additionally, we develop and train a model that leverages only aggregated path loss information to tackle the mapping problem. We measure the results according to three performance metrics: the Jaccard index (intersection over union, IoU), the Hausdorff distance, and the Chamfer distance. Our design achieves a macro IoU of 65.3%, significantly surpassing (i) the erroneous maps baseline, which yields 40.1%, (ii) an RF-only method from the literature, which yields 37.3%, and (iii) a non-AI fusion baseline that we designed which yields 42.2%. The comparative evaluation highlights the limitations of relying solely on RF data or on spatial data, as well as the effectiveness that AI can have on fusing data towards enhancing smart city mapping accuracy. We further validate our method on real-world data from the Oslo region, complementing the synthetic evaluation with a real deployment setting, where our best fusion model reaches 64.9% macro IoU. We additionally outline a strategy for deploying the model over larger areas by tiling the region with overlapping windows.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

MGUP: A Momentum-Gradient Alignment Update Policy for Stochastic Optimization

arXiv:2606.17526v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient optimization is essential for training large language models. Although intra-layer selective updates have been explored, a general mechanism that enables fine-grained control while ensuring convergence guarantees is still lacking. To bridge this gap, we propose MGUP, a novel mechanism for selective updates. MGUP augments standard momentum-based optimizers by applying larger step-sizes to a selected fixed proportion of parameters in each iteration, while applying smaller, non-zero step-sizes to the rest. As a nearly {plug-and-play} module, MGUP seamlessly integrates with optimizers such as AdamW, Lion, and Muon. This yields powerful variants such as MGUP-AdamW, MGUP-Lion, and MGUP-Muon. Under standard assumptions, we provide theoretical convergence guarantees for MGUP-AdamW (without weight decay) in stochastic optimization. Extensive experiments across diverse tasks, including MAE pretraining, LLM pretraining, and downstream fine-tuning, demonstrate that our MGUP-enhanced optimizers achieve superior or more stable performance compared to their original base optimizers. We offer a principled, versatile, and theoretically grounded strategy for efficient intra-layer selective updates, accelerating and stabilizing the training of large-scale models. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/MaeChd/MGUP.

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

Meta Flow Maps enable scalable reward alignment

arXiv:2601.14430v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Controlling generative models is computationally expensive. This is because optimal alignment with a reward function–whether via inference-time steering or fine-tuning–requires estimating the value function. This task demands access to the conditional posterior $p_{1|t}(x_1|x_t)$, the distribution of clean data $x_1$ consistent with an intermediate state $x_t$, a requirement that typically compels methods to resort to costly trajectory simulations. To address this bottleneck, we introduce Meta Flow Maps (MFMs), a framework extending consistency models and flow maps into the stochastic regime. MFMs are trained to perform stochastic one-step posterior sampling, generating arbitrarily many i.i.d. draws of clean data $x_1$ from any intermediate state. Crucially, these samples provide a differentiable reparametrization that unlocks efficient value function estimation. We leverage this capability to solve bottlenecks in both paradigms: enabling inference-time steering without inner rollouts, and facilitating unbiased, off-policy fine-tuning to general rewards. Empirically, our single-particle steered-MFM sampler outperforms a Best-of-1000 baseline on ImageNet across multiple rewards at a fraction of the compute.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Human-centred design approaches to health facility design: Evidence from perinatal care settings in Ethiopia and Bangladesh

While significant progress has been made in perinatal outcomes over recent decades in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), maternal and newborn quality improvement initiatives often fail to account for the spatial conditions in which they are implemented. Health systems are increasingly deploying evidence-based care models into built environments that are not optimally structured to meet the needs of its patient population. As the principal users, patients and health care workers can offer pragmatic insights about improving these structural designs. Our objective was to gather insights from patients, providers, and companions about how the physical design of their health facilities influenced their experience receiving or delivering perinatal care. We conducted a prospective observational study using a human-centred design (HCD) approach to analyse perceptions of the quality of perinatal care across two low resource settings: Ethiopia and Bangladesh. Using engagement and assessment tools, we conducted interviews, focus groups, facility walk-throughs, co-design workshops, and infrastructural assessments with patients, companions, providers, and Ministry of Health representatives. Descriptive statistics and thematic analysis were used to identify key learnings and develop recommendations. Across both countries, participants identified the need for facility layouts that better support privacy, mobility during labour, alternative birth positions, companion involvement, cultural and religious practices, sanitation, and provider visibility. Based on these insights, we developed six recommendations to better align health facility infrastructure with maternal and newborn care delivery needs. Our findings suggest that investments in health facility infrastructure may improve care experiences and help enable respectful, safe, and evidence-based maternal and newborn care. Alongside targeted spatial improvements, government authorities responsible for health facility planning should incorporate participatory design processes to ensure infrastructure reflects the needs of patients, companions, and providers and supports high-quality care delivery.

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

Interpretation as Linear Transformation: A Cognitive-Geometric Model of Concepts and Meaning

arXiv:2512.09831v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper develops a geometric framework for modeling concepts, motivation, and influence across cognitively heterogeneous agents. Each agent is represented by a personalized value space, a vector space encoding the internal dimensions through which the agent interprets and evaluates meaning. Evaluative concepts are formalized as structured vectors, abstract beings, whose transmission is mediated by linear interpretation maps. An abstract being survives communication only if it avoids the null spaces of these maps, yielding a structural criterion for intelligibility, miscommunication, and concept death. Within this framework, I show how conceptual distortion, motivational drift, and the limits of mutual understanding arise from purely algebraic constraints. A central result, the No-Null-Space Leadership Condition, characterizes leadership as a property of representational reachability rather than persuasion or authority. More broadly, the model explains how abstract beings can propagate, mutate, or disappear as they traverse diverse cognitive geometries. The account unifies insights from conceptual spaces, social epistemology, and AI value alignment by grounding meaning preservation in structural compatibility rather than shared information or rationality. I argue that this cognitive-geometric perspective clarifies the epistemic boundaries of influence in both human and artificial systems, and offers a general foundation for analyzing conceptual dynamics across heterogeneous agents.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Matrix Product States for Modulated Symmetries: SPT, LSM, and Beyond

arXiv:2603.19189v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Matrix product states (MPS) provide a powerful framework for characterizing one-dimensional symmetry-protected topological (SPT) phases of matter and for formulating Lieb-Schultz-Mattis (LSM)-type constraints. Here we generalize the MPS formalism to translationally invariant systems with general modulated symmetries. We show that the standard symmetry "push-through" condition for conventional global symmetry must be revised to account for symmetry modulation, and we derive the appropriate generalized condition. Using this generalized push-through structure, we classify one-dimensional SPT phases with modulated symmetries and formulate LSM-type constraints within the same MPS-based framework.

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

Quantum deformations of $\mathcal{U}(\mathfrak{sl}(2, \mathbb{R}))$. Part I: Fidelity and experimental benchmarking

arXiv:2606.19462v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This work explores the effects of both the standard quantum $q$-deformation and the non-standard $h$-deformation of the Hopf algebra $\mathcal{U}(\mathfrak{sl}(2, \mathbb{R}))$ on multi-qubit systems. By constructing the states of a Hilbert space of $N$ qubits through the Clebsch-Gordan coefficients associated with the deformed algebras, we show that these states naturally coincide with the eigenstates of the Hamiltonian of the $q$- and $h$-deformed Kittel-Shore models. We compare the resulting deformed states with those typically targeted in quantum information experiments, providing a bridge between algebraic constructions and experimentally relevant quantum resources. Fidelities with respect to the undeformed states are computed to establish how the quantum correlations are affected, both for few-qubit systems (including Dicke and non-Dicke states), and in the macroscopic limit ($N \to \infty$) through closed-form formulas derived for arbitrary Dicke states. The results reveal different behaviors between the two deformations. The $q$-deformation smoothly modifies the states and maintains a residual overlap with the original configurations, while the $h$-deformation rapidly makes the states orthogonal to their undeformed counterparts. Both models demand a standard $N^{-1}$ rescaling to preserve fidelity stability in the macroscopic limit.

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

Proximal Policy Optimization for Amortized Discrete Sampling

arXiv:2606.15793v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper explores policy gradient algorithms for training stochastic policies to sample from structured discrete probability distributions under the Generative Flow Network (GFlowNet) framework. Building on extensive theoretical connections between GFlowNets and entropy-regularized reinforcement learning, we derive equivalents of standard policy gradient algorithms for training GFlowNets, as well as experimentally explore their various methodological aspects, including baseline training and advantage estimation. Most importantly, our work is the first to derive and successfully apply proximal policy optimization to GFlowNets, showing its improved convergence speed and data efficiency compared to standard GFlowNet training objectives on benchmarks ranging from synthetic energies to molecular graph generation.

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

Jones-matrix analysis of phase accumulation in a linear-optical multi-pass interferometer

arXiv:2606.14422v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum information science has traditionally relied on nonclassical resources, such as entangled photon pairs and squeezed states, to achieve measurement performance beyond classical limits. Here, we revisit the multi-pass photonic scheme reported in Nature 450, 393 (2007) to clarify the physical origin of the observed superresolution and the associated claim of supersensitivity. Using a rigorous Jones-matrix formalism, we show that the round-trip evolution of the HQMQ linear optics unit is equivalent to the product of two reflections in polarization space, resulting in an effective rotation operator. This equivalence reveals that the accumulated phase arises from coherent polarization-state rotation on the Poincare'e sphere. The resulting phase accumulation is interpreted geometrically as a progressive realignment of the polarization state during successive forward and backward propagations. To validate the theoretical model, a classical-wave implementation is experimentally conducted, analyzed, and compared with the corresponding Jones-matrix solution. Finally, the scaling behavior of the Fisher information is analyzed to examine the origin of the claimed supersensitivity. The results are further compared with a recently developed coherence de Broglie wavelength framework, which achieves identical superresolution through repeated coherent interactions in a cascaded interferometeric architecture.

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

PointDiffusion: Diffusion-Based Scene Completion in the Point Cloud Domain

Reconstructing dense 3D scenes from sparse LiDAR point clouds is a fundamental challenge in autonomous driving, where latent diffusion models offer a promising solution. However, existing approaches rely on object-level autoencoders that collapse into unstable global representations at outdoor scale and suffer from ground truth data corrupted by odometry drift that systematically degrades supervision quality. Furthermore, multi-step diffusion inference incurs prohibitive latency for real-time deployment. We propose a novel multi-token Gaussian VAE with cross-attention pooling for stable scene-scale LiDAR compression, combined with an anchor-based ICP ground truth refinement pipeline that eliminates drift-induced noise from training supervision. Together, these components enable a scaffold-free single-step diffusion completion model that achieves an approximately 16x reduction in squared Chamfer distance on SemanticKITTI seq. 08 (0.396 m^2 to 0.024 m^2), surpasses LiDiff and ScoreLiDAR by 17-19% and 10-11%, respectively, and operates at 25-143x lower inference latency. Our results demonstrate that data quality dominates model design in this regime and that multi-token latent spaces provide a stable first stage for latent diffusion-based scene completion.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Bridging Geographic Bias in Urban Streetscape Inference via Lifelong Learning with Visual-Semantic Pivoting

作者:

Visual perception of urban streetscapes underpins evidence-based decisions in landscape planning, public health, and place-making. Yet models trained on a few well-photographed metropolises systematically misjudge underrepresented districts, propagating geographic bias into downstream policy. We address this gap with HVSP-LL, a lifelong learning framework that couples a stratified visual-semantic pivoting module with an equity-aware rehearsal mechanism. The pivoting module organises landscape concepts along a three-tier ontology (macro structure, meso composition, micro element) and aligns image features to learnable semantic anchors at each tier, providing transferable representations that resist distributional drift. The lifelong adaptation component sequentially absorbs new urban regions while constraining inter-region perception gaps through a worst-region sample-reweighting objective and a structurally-aware exemplar buffer. We evaluate HVSP-LL on a panoramic streetscape benchmark assembled from twelve cities across four continents and seven perceptual dimensions. The framework attains 0.834 Spearman correlation on the held-out city sequence, an absolute 6.1 point improvement over the strongest continual baseline, and shrinks the inter-city perception gap to 0.094 – a 38% reduction relative to the strongest continual baseline (0.151) and a 57% reduction relative to a representative regularisation baseline (0.218). Ablations confirm that each tier of the pivoting hierarchy contributes monotonically, and the equity-aware rehearsal converts mean backward transfer from -0.038 (without retention) to +0.013, eliminating catastrophic forgetting on the held-out sequence. Our results indicate that hierarchical anchoring is a practical pathway toward geographically equitable streetscape inference at city scale.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Task-Instructed Causal Routing of Vision Foundation Models for Multi-Task Learning

Vision foundation models (VFMs) have demonstrated strong robustness and transferability across a wide range of visual tasks. However, each model typically encodes strong inductive biases shaped by its pre-training objective and data domain, resulting in fragmented yet complementary visual knowledge. As a result, a single model often struggles to capture the diverse visual representations required across multiple dense prediction tasks. To address this limitation, we propose TIGER (Task-Instruction-Guided Expert Routing), a framework that coordinates multiple heterogeneous VFMs for multi-task dense prediction. Instead of naively aggregating expert features, TIGER leverages natural-language task instructions to guide a routing network that assigns token-level expert weights conditioned on task semantics, enabling adaptive integration of complementary expert features. TIGER further introduces a counterfactual loss that aligns routing decisions with each expert's causal contribution by measuring prediction changes when experts are excluded, encouraging more reliable and interpretable routing. We evaluate TIGER on two multi-task dense prediction benchmarks, NYUD-v2 and Pascal Context, where it consistently outperforms recent multi-task learning baselines while keeping all VFMs frozen. These results demonstrate that combining instruction-guided expert routing with counterfactual causal alignment enables effective coordination of heterogeneous vision foundation models.

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

Hidden in Plain Sight: Benchmarking Agent Safety Against Decomposition Attacks with DECOMPBENCH

arXiv:2606.13994v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based Agents are becoming increasingly capable and widely deployed, creating growing incentives for adversarial misuse in the real-world. A key emerging threat is Decomposition Attacks [glukhov2024breach, jones2024adversaries] in which a harmful task is broken into simpler, benign subtasks that evade safety mechanisms when executed separately but cumulatively fulfill the malicious intent. Although recent benchmarks assess agent safety in multi-turn and multi-tool-use settings, they do not explicitly capture this form of decompositional misuse and may not represent realistic adversarial execution flows. To this end, we introduce DeCompBench, a benchmark designed specifically to evaluate agentic safety under decomposition attacks. DeCompBench is created with a decomposition-by-design principle using a graphical framework and enables harmful task decomposition into individually benign and executable subtasks with realistic workflows. Our experiments using a custom decomposer show that state-of-the-art agents exhibit high refusal rates on monolithic harmful tasks, but significantly lower refusal rates on their decomposed variants, while often inadvertently fulfilling the adversarial objectives. These findings underscore the need for safety evaluations against decomposition attacks and corresponding defenses. Our dataset is publicly available and can be found at https://huggingface.co/datasets/decompositionbench/DeCompBench.

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

CrossEarth-Gate: Fisher-Guided Adaptive Tuning Engine for Efficient Adaptation of Cross-Domain Remote Sensing Semantic Segmentation

In Remote Sensing (RS), Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) has emerged as a key approach to activate the generalizable representation ability of foundation models for downstream tasks. However, existing specialized PEFT methods often fail when applied to large-scale Earth observation tasks, as they are unable to fully handle the multifaceted and unpredictable domain gaps (e.g., spatial, semantic, and frequency shifts) inherent in RS data. To overcome this, we propose CrossEarth-Gate, which introduces two primary contributions. First, we establish a comprehensive RS module toolbox to address multifaceted domain gaps, comprising spatial, semantic, and frequency modules. Second, we develop a Fisher-guided adaptive selection mechanism that operates on this toolbox. This selection is guided by Fisher Information to quantify each module's importance by measuring its contribution to the task-specific gradient flow. It dynamically activates only the most critical modules at the appropriate layers, guiding the gradient flow to maximize adaptation effectiveness and efficiency. Comprehensive experiments validate the efficacy and generalizability of our method, where CrossEarth-Gate achieves state-of-the-art performance on 16 out of 18 cross-domain benchmarks for RS semantic segmentation.

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

Neuro-Relational Programs: Unifying Queries and Neural Computation over Structured Data

arXiv:2606.11946v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The conventional approach to deep learning over relational databases applies neural models, such as Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), to a graph representation of the database. Recent approaches instead operate on databases directly, associating tuples with embeddings and extending query mechanisms to jointly process embeddings and relational content. Inspired by these developments, we introduce Neuro-Relational Programs (NRPs), a declarative query language for relational databases whose facts carry numeric vector embeddings. NRPs extend Datalog-style rules with operations that combine, aggregate, and transform embeddings, thereby interleaving relational reasoning and learnable neural components within a single formalism. This yields a general approach to neural computation over relational data: an NRP can be read both as a query plan with trainable components and as a neural architecture with relational structure built in. Natural syntactic fragments of NRPs recover existing architectures and query formalisms. Zero-ary NRPs correspond to non-adaptive query algorithms; monadic NRPs generalize GNN-style message passing and precisely capture Deep Homomorphism Networks, a connection that we extend to frontier-guarded NRPs over databases with row-ids. We characterize the expressive power of unrestricted NRPs with ReLU-FFN transformations by FOCQ, an extension of first-order logic with counting interpreted over real-weighted structures, yielding a precise connection with uniform TC$^0$ over ordered databases. Together, these results establish NRPs as a broad declarative framework for querying and neural computation over relational data.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Strategic Feature Selection

arXiv:2606.18867v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When algorithmic predictors inform resource allocation in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, these predictors must account for strategic manipulation of input features. The typical solution is to redesign the predictor itself to explicitly account for strategic interactions. In practice, however, decision makers are often constrained to adjusting coarser levers within existing prediction pipelines. For example, healthcare organizations often select which features to exclude based on perceived manipulability, while using standard regularization procedures to shrink the coefficients of retained features. In this work, we initiate a formal study of strategic classification through feature selection and its interaction with ridge regularization. Our main finding is that excluding individual features based on their manipulability alone is generally suboptimal. We provide a fine-grained characterization of the performance of a feature subset under optimal regularization, yielding new insights for policy design. Motivated by this characterization, we develop a practical algorithm for jointly choosing the feature set and the level of ridge regularization. Through a real-world case study on a healthcare payments benchmark, we illustrate how our algorithm can guide the design of coarse policy levers in practice. Our results provide a principled, practical framework for mitigating the effects of strategic behavior in algorithmic decision-making systems.