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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

DYNA : Dynamic Episodic Memory Networks for Augmenting Large Language Models with Temporal Knowledge Graphs in Continuous Learning

Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to incorporate new knowledge without forgetting or costly retraining. We propose DYNA, a lightweight framework that augments a frozen LLM with a temporal knowledge graph where events are nodes and temporal relations are directed, timestamped edges. The graph serves as an external, updatable memory. At query time, DYNA retrieves relevant nodes via random walks and centrality measures, then augments the LLM's response. Evaluated on three temporal recall tasks, DYNA reduces catastrophic forgetting by ~7% compared to fine-tuning and improves temporal ordering by ~5% over standard RAG. Higher graph clustering coefficients correlate with better retrieval, showing that graph structure matters. Contributions: (1) episodic memory as temporal KG, (2) retraining-free LLM augmentation, (3) graph properties as predictors of retrieval performance.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Causal Emotion Recognition in Conversation: Context Saturation and Discourse-Marker Evidence

We address two persistent gaps in Emotion Recognition in Conversation: which modeling choices materially affect performance, and how recognition findings connect to interpretable discourse-level patterns. We study both through a systematic investigation on IEMOCAP with cross-dataset validation on MELD. For recognition, we run controlled ablations with 10 random seeds and paired significance tests with multiple-comparisons correction, yielding three findings. First, conversational context is the dominant factor, but performance saturates quickly: roughly 90% of the gain is captured within the most recent 10-30 preceding turns, depending on the label set. Second, hierarchical sentence representations help most in utterance-only settings and show a clear advantage on MELD, but their benefit disappears once turn-level context is available, suggesting that conversational history subsumes much of the intra-utterance structure. Third, integrating an external affective lexicon does not improve results, consistent with pretrained encoders already capturing most of the affective signal needed for ERC. Under a strictly causal setting, our simple models achieve strong performance (82.69% 4-way; 67.07% 6-way weighted F1), showing that competitive accuracy is achievable without future turns. For linguistic analysis, we examine 5,286 discourse-marker occurrences and find a reliable association between emotion and marker position (p < .0001). Sad utterances show reduced left-periphery marker usage (21.9%) relative to other emotions (28-32%), consistent with accounts linking left-periphery markers to active discourse management. This aligns with our recognition results, where Sad benefits most from conversational context (+22 percentage points), suggesting sadness may be more context-dependent than emotions with stronger local pragmatic cues.

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

Attention Alignment Between Humans and Vision-Language Models

Visual perception depends on top-down goals and bottom-up sensory mechanisms. Vision-language models implement both, allowing us to treat each component as a separable hypothesis about what drives where we look. We compared spatial attention maps from six vision-language models against human fixation heatmaps recorded on 200 images during two tasks (general description and social captioning). The six models spanned a 2$\times$2 factorial of CNN vs.\ ViT encoders crossed with LSTM vs.\ Transformer decoders, plus Molmo 7B-D and Qwen3.5 9B. We found that both decoder and encoder architecture shaped alignment, but decoder choice dominated. LSTM vs.\ Transformer decoders increased alignment by 40–50 percentage points (80–87\% vs.\ 40–59\% of the human noise ceiling). In contrast, CNN vs.\ ViT encoders contributed a secondary 5–20 point advantage depending on decoder family, with CNN-LSTM the most aligned model overall (85–87\%). Despite their alignment advantage, LSTM-decoder attention maps were spatially diffuse and minimally task-differentiated; ViT-Transformer, the weakest in alignment, showed the sharpest spatial concentration and strongest task differentiation. A hemispatial-neglect simulation confirmed that ablating attention impacted LSTM decoders more than Transformer decoders. In an exploratory extension using TRIBE-simulated synthetic neural responses, fixation alignment and neural relevance dissociate: CNN-Transformer attention maps better predicted synthetic brain activity despite lower fixation alignment, with attention maps best predicting early visual cortex. Together, top-down and bottom-up components trade off what they predict in behavioral and synthetic neural data.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Belief-Space Control for Personalized Cancer Treatment via Active Inference

arXiv:2606.10376v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Cancer treatment is at the core a sequential decision-making problem with partial observability, latent patient heterogeneity, and explicit constraints on the budget for medical measurements. Unlike standard Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches that control state trajectories, cancer treatments permanently modify patients' transition dynamics, changing how states evolve over time. We model cancer treatment as a belief-space planning problem using active inference, deriving an expected free-energy objective that unifies goal-directed control and information acquisition under measurement budgets without. We implement this framework using real clinical cancer data from the AACR Project GENIE Biopharma Collaborative dataset. Results on clinical data demonstrate a simultaneous patient categorization and high treatment efficacy, under real measurement and treatment constraints.

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

Token Reduction Should Go Beyond Efficiency in Generative Models – From Vision, Language to Multimodality

arXiv:2505.18227v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In Transformer architectures, tokens\textemdash discrete units derived from raw data\textemdash are formed by segmenting inputs into fixed-length chunks. Each token is then mapped to an embedding, enabling parallel attention computations while preserving the input's essential information. Due to the quadratic computational complexity of transformer self-attention mechanisms, token reduction has primarily been used as an efficiency strategy. This is especially true in single vision and language domains, where it helps balance computational costs, memory usage, and inference latency. Despite these advances, this paper argues that token reduction should transcend its traditional efficiency-oriented role in the era of large generative models. Instead, we position it as a fundamental principle in generative modeling, critically influencing both model architecture and broader applications. Specifically, we contend that across vision, language, and multimodal systems, token reduction can: (i) facilitate deeper multimodal integration and alignment, (ii) mitigate "overthinking" and hallucinations, (iii) maintain coherence over long inputs, and (iv) enhance training stability, etc. We reframe token reduction as more than an efficiency measure. By doing so, we outline promising future directions, including algorithm design, reinforcement learning-guided token reduction, token optimization for in-context learning, agentic framework design, and broader ML and scientific domains.

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

From Privacy to Workflow Integrity: Communication-Graph Metadata in Autonomous Agent Interoperability

arXiv:2606.07150v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Agent-interoperability protocols such as A2A and MCP standardize what agents say to one another but assume address-based transport. Whether over HTTP(S) or a content-protecting binding such as MLS-based SLIM, these transports protect message content yet leave the communication graph exposed: which agent contacts which, when, and how often. In agent systems this graph is more consequential than a privacy framing suggests. Endpoints are capability-labeled, workflows are structured and chained, and interactions are coupled to real actions, so an observer recovers more than past relationships: it can infer the pending workflow and, at machine speed, act on that inference before the workflow completes. The threat is therefore one of workflow integrity, not privacy alone. We formalize a threat model for the communication graph and locate what makes its metadata distinctively consequential: not stronger fingerprinting, which we measure to be comparable to other machine traffic, but exposure across independent trust domains, coupled to autonomous action. We define transport- and bootstrap-layer privacy properties, evaluate candidate transports, and give an A2A case study where a metadata-protecting binding surfaces the protocol's implicit identity assumptions. On a generative model anchored to a real capture and over a live A2A binding, a label-blind classifier recovers a task's class from passive metadata well above chance, and from only its opening; a defense-aware adversary does not overturn this, and only the full set of properties drives recovery toward chance. The leverage of acting on the leak is distinct from recoverability: under a fixed budget an adversary realizes most of a clairvoyant attacker's advantage from a workflow's opening, governed by precision over the top-ranked workflows rather than overall accuracy, so a defense suppresses it even while recovery stays above chance.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Which Models Perform Better in Inheritance Reasoning?

This paper presents the participation of team PSL in the QIAS 2026 Shared Task on Arabic Islamic inheritance reasoning. The task evaluates the ability of large language models to solve inheritance cases that require legal interpretation, multi-step reasoning, and precise numerical computation. We compare commercial and open-source models under a unified prompting strategy to assess their effectiveness in structured legal reasoning with minimal task-specific adaptation. \\ Our results show a clear gap in reliability between the two model families. Commercial models demonstrate stronger performance in identifying eligible heirs, applying exclusion rules, and maintaining consistency across reasoning steps. In contrast, open-source models exhibit greater instability, particularly in cases involving dependent legal decisions and fractional share adjustments. The best performance is achieved by Gemini 2.5 Flash, with an MRE of $0.989$.

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

EgoCS-400K: An Egocentric Gameplay Dataset for World Models

The shift from video generation to interactive world modeling places new demands on data: beyond captioned videos, world models require temporally aligned video-action-language trajectories grounded in the actions, camera motion, states, and events that drive future scene changes. However, such data is difficult to obtain at scale. Web video datasets offer broad visual coverage but lack executable actions and reliable states; robotic datasets provide action and state supervision but are costly and limited in scene diversity; and existing simulators often lack large-scale human-driven interaction trajectories. In this paper, we introduce EgoCS-400K, a large-scale replay-grounded egocentric Counter-Strike dataset for world models, built from public professional CS and CS2 match demos that preserve human gameplay trajectories and enable parsing, replaying, rendering, and temporal alignment. We extract player states, view directions, movements, keyboard/button inputs, view-angle changes, weapon usage, game events, and round-level context, and render clean first-person videos from the same trajectories. EgoCS-400K contains over 400,000 first-person videos and 10,000 hours of gameplay from more than 1,000 matches and 40,000 rounds, covering 13 maps and 10 player viewpoints per round. It supports a range of interactive visual modeling tasks, including action-conditioned future prediction, state- and event-aware scene rollout, replay-grounded captioning, and agent egocentric action understanding. By connecting visual observations with human actions, camera motion, game states, and events at scale, EgoCS-400K serves as a practical bridge between passive web videos, controllable game simulation, and costly real-world embodied data.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Evaluating Open-Source LLMs for Multi-Label ATT&CK Technique Classification on CTI Reports

arXiv:2606.18166v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Classifying Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) using MITRE Adversarial Tactics, Techniques, and Common Knowledge (ATT&CK) is essential for proactive defense, but historically required extensive human effort. Pre-Large Language Model (LLM) automation sped up this process, but could not resolve the complex language and multi-step attack patterns found in unstructured CTI reports. LLMs addressed previous limitations by using contextual reasoning to understand unstructured text. However, current evaluations rely on simplified, single-technique sentences that ignore the complexity of real-world CTI reports, which often leads to inflated performance results. Consequently, the baseline performance of open-source LLMs on complex unstructured CTI reports remains unevaluated. To address this gap, we constructed a ground-truth dataset of 2,076 human-annotated sentences (1,281 technique-positive, 795 negative) from 83 complex unstructured CTI reports. These sentences were mapped to 114 unique ATT&CK techniques using a six-phase annotation process, achieving \k{appa} = 0.68 inter-annotator agreement. Using this dataset, we evaluated seven open-source LLMs ranging from 8B to 236B parameters across prompt strategy and temperature configurations. The highest-performing LLM achieved a micro-averaged F1 score of 0.22, establishing the empirical baseline for multi-label ATT&CK classification on complex unstructured CTI. Parameter size showed a statistically significant positive correlation with F1 score. Prompt strategy and temperature produced no statistically significant gains across model configurations. These results indicate that current open-source LLMs are insufficient for production-grade ATT&CK classification. The dataset, benchmark, and findings provide a reproducible foundation for future CTI research.

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

Standardized Methods and Recommendations for Green Federated Learning

arXiv:2602.00343v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative model training over privacy-sensitive, distributed data, but its environmental impact is difficult to compare across studies due to inconsistent measurement boundaries and heterogeneous reporting. We present a practical carbon-accounting methodology for FL CO2e tracking using NVIDIA NVFlare and CodeCarbon for explicit, phase-aware tasks (initialization, per-round training, evaluation, and idle/coordination). To capture non-compute effects, we additionally estimate communication emissions from transmitted model-update sizes under a network-configurable energy model. We validate the proposed approach on two representative workloads: CIFAR-10 image classification and retinal optic disk segmentation. In CIFAR-10, controlled client-efficiency scenarios show that system-level slowdowns and coordination effects can contribute meaningfully to carbon footprint under an otherwise fixed FL protocol, increasing total CO2e by 8.34x (medium) and 21.73x (low) relative to the high-efficiency baseline. In retinal segmentation, swapping GPU tiers (H100 vs.\ V100) yields a consistent 1.7x runtime gap (290 vs. 503 minutes) while producing non-uniform changes in total energy and CO2e across sites, underscoring the need for per-site and per-round reporting. Overall, our results support a standardized carbon accounting method that acts as a prerequisite for reproducible 'green' FL evaluation. Our code is available at https://github.com/Pediatric-Accelerated-Intelligence-Lab/carbon_footprint.

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

AdsMind: A Physics-Grounded Multi-Agent System for Self-Correcting Discovery of Adsorption Configurations on Heterogeneous Catalyst Surfaces

arXiv:2606.19152v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Identifying the lowest-energy surface-adsorbate configuration is critical for modeling heterogeneous catalysis, yet exhaustive exploration with ab initio calculations is computationally prohibitive. Machine-learning force fields (MLFFs) accelerate structural relaxation but leave the search over the vast configurational space a major bottleneck, and open-loop large language model (LLM) agents lack a physics-grounded feedback mechanism to correct erroneous initial guesses. We propose AdsMind (Adsorption configuration discovery with Machine intelligence and relaxation feedback), a closed-loop multi-agent framework that enables autonomous error correction through MLFF relaxation feedback. Across four LLM backends, AdsMind achieves consistently high search reliability, with success rates of 100% and 98.8% on the benchmarks AA20 and OCD-GMAE62. Relative to its single-pass (1-Shot) ablation it reduces cross-backend energy dispersion, and it uses only 4.11 and 4.67 MLFF relaxations per case, respectively – an approximately 14-fold reduction over heuristic enumeration baselines. Density functional theory (DFT) validation using VASP/PBE on six representative AA20 systems shows that the reported open-loop Adsorb-Agent outputs exhibit qualitative adsorption-energy sign errors for molecular adsorbates, whereas AdsMind preserves the correct sign in all tested cases with closer quantitative agreement. AdsMind thus delivers reliability, self-reflection, and interpretability simultaneously, supporting more DFT-informed autonomous chemistry workflows.

14.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

SIRT7 regulates dosage compensation and safeguards the female X&#xa0;chromosome

Sirtuins are deacetylases implicated in stress responses and longevity in mammals1,2. Although their differential impact on disease for the two sexes has been noted3–7, the underlying reasons are unclear. Here, using Sirt7 as a model in mice, we examine the mechanisms leading to sex differences and find that Sirt7−/− female mice have decreased fitness throughout their lifespan. Notably, SIRT7 preferentially localizes to the sex chromosomes. In female&nbsp;individuals, SIRT7 loss affects X-chromosome inactivation, the first arm of dosage compensation that equalizes X-linked gene expression between males and females8–10. Xist is overexpressed and gene silencing becomes more efficient. However,&nbsp;SIRT7 loss has greatest impact on the active X (Xa) chromosome. The Xa chromosome becomes hyperacetylated at Lys36 of histone H3, structurally disorganized, prone to DNA damage and overexpressed. Increased Xa-chromosome expression leads to genome imbalance and augmented X-chromosome upregulation—the second arm of dosage compensation that balances X-chromosome versus autosomal gene expression. These data reveal an essential crosstalk between sirtuins and the sex chromosomes, with SIRT7 safeguarding X-chromosome integrity and dosage balance with autosomes. We propose that the sex bias in SIRT7 biology can be explained in part by unequal effects on the sex chromosomes. SIRT7 safeguards X-chromosome integrity and dosage balance with autosomes.

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

Claw-SWE-Bench: A Benchmark for Evaluating OpenClaw-style Agent Harnesses on Coding Tasks

General-purpose agents such as OpenClaw are increasingly used as autonomous tool users, but their coding ability is difficult to measure under SWE-bench: a generic agent does not by itself satisfy the clean Docker workspace, patch, and prediction contract required for scoring. We introduce Claw-SWE-Bench, a multilingual SWE-bench-style benchmark and adapter protocol that makes heterogeneous agent harnesses, or claws, comparable under fair settings including a fixed prompt, runtime budget, workspace contract, patch extraction procedure, and evaluator. The full benchmark contains 350 GitHub issue-resolution instances across 8 languages and 43 repositories, drawn from SWE-bench-Multilingual and SWE-bench-Verified-Mini after future-commit cleanup. We also release Claw-SWE-Bench Lite for faster validation, which is an 80-instance subset selected by a cost-aware, rank-aware procedure over 17 calibration columns. On the full benchmark, OpenClaw with a minimal direct-diff adapter scores only $19.1\%$ Pass@1, whereas the full adapter reaches $73.4\%$ with the same GLM 5.1 backbone, showing that adapter design is essential for enabling OpenClaw-style harnesses to perform coding tasks effectively. Across an OpenClaw $\times$ nine-model sweep and a five-claw $\times$ two-model sweep, model choice changes Pass@1 by $29.4$ pp and harness choice by $27.4$ pp under fixed models; systems with similar accuracy can differ substantially in total API cost. Claw-SWE-Bench therefore treats harness and cost accounting as first-class axes of SWE-style coding-agent evaluation, providing both a full benchmark and a low-cost reference set for reproducible comparison. The data is available at https://github.com/opensquilla/claw-swe-bench and https://huggingface.co/datasets/TokenRhythm/Claw-SWE-Bench.

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

DINO-Med3D: Bridging Dimension and Domain Gaps in Volumetric Segmentation via Progressive Adaptation

Although DINOv3 has demonstrated remarkable semantic discrimination in natural imagery, its direct application to volumetric medical segmentation is hindered by inherent dimension and domain disparities. To resolve these issues, we propose DINO-Med3D, a two-stage progressive framework that repurpose the pre-trained DINOv3 encoder for 3D medical tasks. In the first stage, we mitigate the dimension gap by introducing a multi-slice embedding module that incorporates pseudo-3D context, while simultaneously employing a segmentation proxy task to adapt representations learned from natural scenes to the medical domain. Subsequently, we further enhance volumetric understanding by adding lightweight 3D adapters into the frozen backbone to enforce global inter-slice continuity. Finally, to compensate for the spatial information loss inherent in the embedding process, we design a parallel detail recovery stream to explicitly preserve high-frequency boundary cues. Extensive experiments on five public datasets demonstrate that our approach successfully adapts DINOv3 to the medical domain and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.

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

Exploring Starts Are Not Enough: Counterexamples and a Fix for Monte Carlo Exploring Starts

arXiv:2606.15247v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The asymptotic behaviour of Monte Carlo Exploring Starts (MCES) is a long-standing open question in reinforcement learning, even in the tabular setting. We investigated the convergence properties of tabular MCES by constructing examples in which the algorithm converges to suboptimal solutions. This paper presents new counterexamples for both initial-visit and first-visit MCES and gives a convergence-restoring modification for the initial-visit case. We show that stable suboptimal solutions may exist for initial-visit MCES with sample-average updates even when greedy actions are updated more often than non-greedy actions on average. However, by scaling learning rates inversely to update frequencies on a state-by-state basis, convergence to optimality is guaranteed. Unlike previous uniformisation methods, this modification is applicable to large-scale problems that require approximating the estimated value function. We then extend the example to show that sample-average first-visit MCES may also converge to suboptimal solutions. This largely settles a fundamental open problem and shows that exploring starts alone do not guarantee convergence to optimality. More broadly, these results highlight that convergence depends critically on the relative size and frequency of updates applied to different actions, making the choice of learning rates and the balance between exploration and exploitation central to the analysis of MCES and the implementation of scalable Monte Carlo control methods.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

SymQNet: Amortized Acquisition for Low-Latency Adaptive Hamiltonian Learning

arXiv:2606.12808v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Adaptive Hamiltonian learning is central to calibrating and characterizing quantum devices. In an adaptive controller, choosing the next experiment is itself a computation. Bayesian design rules are recomputed after every posterior update, and that step can take seconds. Across hundreds of shots, those seconds become a significant wall-clock cost for adaptivity. We introduce SymQNet, an amortized reinforcement-learning approach for low-latency adaptive Hamiltonian learning. SymQNet learns a posterior-conditioned acquisition policy offline, then uses a fast policy forward pass online while retaining Bayesian posterior feedback. On transverse-field Ising benchmarks, SymQNet substantially reduces acquisition latency relative to bounded Fisher-information search and bounded two-step Bayesian active learning by disagreement (BALD). At five qubits, it reduces acquisition-only decision latency by $47.1\times$ and $72.6\times$ relative to these online baselines; at twelve qubits, full simulated steps take $1.02$ s for SymQNet versus $13.27$ s for bounded two-step BALD. Overall, we show that learned acquisition can make adaptive Hamiltonian learning practical for repeated low-latency workloads.

19.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22

Reference-guided immune recovery matching prioritizes traditional Chinese medicine ingredients

Therapeutic prioritization from single-cell transcriptomes requires a target that is closer to treatment response than disease-signature reversal. In immune diseases, post-treatment recovery may follow patient- and cell-type-specific trajectories rather than a simple return along the pretreatment disease axis. We developed ImmuneNavi, a healthy-reference-anchored recovery-matching workflow for ranking traditional Chinese medicine ingredients from paired PBMC data. The workflow maps heterogeneous PBMC cohorts to a common healthy immune coordinate system, constructs patient-cell-type disease and recovery states, and processes ITCM treated-control profiles into a fixed ingredient perturbation bank. Patient and ingredient states are represented in matched gene, pathway and transcription-factor views, allowing the model to combine local transcriptional direction with more stable program-level features. A matcher trained on one paired treatment cohort preserved recovery-aligned ingredient rankings in independent PBMC cohorts without redefining the feature space, candidate set or preprocessing procedure. This provides a reusable transcriptomic pipeline for moving from paired immune-state measurements to prioritized natural-product candidates for experimental follow-up.

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

A Mathematical Theory of Value: a synthesis on goal-directed agency under resource constraints

作者:

arXiv:2606.12502v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose that value – the quantity goal-directed agents create, destroy, and exchange – is a lawful structural quantity in the same category as information. Following Shannon's method, we make one ruthless abstraction: value is the rate at which an agent converts a resource into goal-progress, relative to a frame fixed by its goal. A scale-invariance axiom forces a logarithmic measure, $V=\sum_i k_i \ln e_i$; compounding of a reinvested resource forces the same form via the ergodicity argument of Peters (2019). The two routes are kin rather than independent; their agreement is a consistency check, not an over-determination. We derive a coding theorem of value: $\Delta G \le I(X;Y)$, achieved by Bayes-proportional allocation; realized value decomposes as $G=D(q\|r)-D(q\|p)$, identifying misalignment with measurable waste. For populations, value is frame-relative while price is frame-independent; a fleet that pools its resource and fuses its perception inherits the ceiling $G_{\mathrm{fleet}} \le I(X;Y_{1:m}) \le H(X)$ (a corollary; an earlier sum-form claim was wrong and is corrected in v5). A dynamical layer yields an is/ought asymmetry from which alignment emerges as a control-stability condition with a closed-form residual. We test the single-frame laws on live language models in a pre-registered scale-up: perception mutual information tracks realized capability rather than parameter count (Spearman $\rho = 0.977$ pooled over 30 model$\times$domain points), out-of-sample $\Delta G$ tracks $I(X;Y)$, and over-confidence is measurable dissipation; a further pre-registered test shows the bridge is shape-invariant across four task shapes ($n=42$, slope 0.953). None of the mechanisms is individually new – generalized Kelly, Armstrong & Mindermann (2018), classical control; the contribution is their unification and the governance mapping (incentive design over oversight) that follows.

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

VideoSketcher: Sequential Sketch Generation Using Video Model Priors

Sketching is inherently sequential: strokes are drawn progressively to explore and refine ideas. Yet most generative approaches treat sketches as static images, ignoring the temporal process underlying creative exploration. Modeling this sequential structure remains challenging: prior methods either rely on large-scale human-drawn datasets with limited diversity, or use large language models (LLMs) to produce drawing instructions, often at the cost of visual fidelity. We present VideoSketcher, a method for generating high-quality sketching processes by adapting pretrained text-to-video diffusion models to the sparse, continuous nature of sketch formation. Our key insight is that LLMs and video diffusion models offer complementary strengths: LLMs act as semantic planners that decompose concepts into step-by-step instructions, while video diffusion models serve as powerful "renderers" that translate them into temporally coherent sketch sequences. We introduce a two-stage fine-tuning strategy that decouples temporal structure from visual appearance: stroke ordering is learned from synthetic shape compositions, while style is distilled from as few as seven hand-drawn examples. Despite minimal supervision, our method can generate diverse, high-quality sequential sketches that faithfully follow specified drawing orders. Our framework naturally extends to brush style control and autoregressive generation, supporting artistic applications.

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

Uncertainty Quantification for Flow-Based Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2606.18043v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action models (VLAs) combine vision-language backbones with expressive generative action heads trained via flow matching on large-scale robotic datasets. Despite their strong empirical performance in robotic manipulation, VLAs lack mechanisms to quantify confidence in their predictions and to detect when their actions may be unreliable. This presents a critical limitation for real-world deployment in non-stationary environments, where models inevitably encounter scenarios outside their pretraining distribution and may fail without warning. To address this, we derive an efficient method for quantifying epistemic uncertainty in flow-matching models by leveraging velocity-field disagreement (VFD) across a small ensemble. We successfully use this uncertainty estimate for failure detection during deployment and active fine-tuning of flow-based VLAs. To this end, we propose SAVE, a framework for uncertainty-guided active multitask fine-tuning that reduces the number of costly expert demonstrations required to adapt VLAs to new tasks. Through extensive experiments on the LIBERO benchmark, we demonstrate that VFD yields better-calibrated uncertainty estimates predictive of downstream performance, that VFD achieves strong performance in detecting failures, and that uncertainty-guided data acquisition with SAVE requires at least 22% fewer samples than baselines. In summary, our work shows that quantifying epistemic uncertainty in flow-based VLAs improves both failure awareness and adaptation. Project website: tum-lsy.github.io/uq_vla/.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Rendering-Aware Sparse Sampling for BRDF Acquisition

Accurate BRDF acquisition is essential for realistic rendering, but dense gonioreflectometer measurements are slow and expensive. We study how to select a small set of BRDF measurements that is most informative for reconstructing material appearance under a learned BRDF prior. Existing sparse-acquisition methods often optimize samples for BRDF-space reconstruction for all materials, while the perceptual importance of a adaptive measurement ultimately depends on its effect on each rendered appearance. We therefore formulate sparse adaptive acquisition as a rendering-aware optimization problem. Our method combines a set encoder for sparse coordinate–value observations, a pretrained hypernetwork-based/PCA-based BRDF reconstructor, and a differentiable renderer. During sampler training, the reconstructor remains fixed, and gradients from a rendered-image loss optimize the measurement locations. This separates acquisition design from prior fitting and encourages the sampler to choose directions that are informative under the learned material distribution. To make the comparison controlled, we evaluate the uniform baseline, meta-learning method, HyperBRDF method, and our learned sampler under matched sample numbers, train/test split, rendering scene, object mask, image mapping, and metrics. Our central claim: rendering-aware sampling improves extremely sparse BRDF acquisition when final rendered appearance is the target. BRDF-space and combined losses are reported only as ablations, together with joint refinement and image-only latent fitting for unseen materials.

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

LATTEArena: An Evaluation Framework for LLM-powered Tabular Feature Engineering (Extended Version)

arXiv:2606.09004v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Feature engineering remains a cornerstone of tabular data analysis, and Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for its automation, giving rise to LLM-powered Automated Tabular Feature Engineering (LATTE). However, the field lacks standardized, cost-aware evaluation platforms, and the combinatorial explosion of design choices obscures true algorithmic progress. To bridge these gaps, we systematically deconstruct 15 representative LATTE methods into a unified 6-dimensional taxonomy. Based on this abstraction, we introduce LATTEArena, a standardized, modular, and extensible benchmarking framework that decouples monolithic pipelines into reusable execution blocks. By distilling the massive combinatorial space, we evaluate 24 core LATTE configurations across 7 research questions. Our head-to-head benchmarking goes beyond predictive accuracy to quantify token efficiency and execution robustness, yielding 17 empirical findings on cost-effectiveness trade-offs. Furthermore, we provide 3 concrete recommendations for optimal real-world deployment. By enabling controlled component-level comparisons, LATTEArena shifts the paradigm from ad-hoc prompt engineering to systematic context management. All code, datasets, and over 4,000 execution logs are publicly available to foster a dynamic, community-driven benchmark. Our framework, leaderboard, and all artifacts are hosted on the LATTEArena project website at https://goodenhak.github.io/LATTEArena.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Calibration Drift Under Reasoning: How Chain-of-Thought Budgets Induce Overconfidence in Large Language Models

The ability of large language models (LLMs) to express calibrated uncertainty is important for safe deployment. Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning is widely used to improve accuracy and reliability, but its effect on calibration is not fully understood. We show that this picture is incomplete: in some settings, increasing the reasoning budget beyond a task-specific threshold can cause models to become systematically overconfident, assigning high confidence to incorrect answers. We call this phenomenon Calibration Drift Under Reasoning (CDUR) and study it both theoretically and empirically. We define reasoning budget B and analyze conditions under which Expected Calibration Error ECE(B) follows a non-monotonic pattern: it first decreases as reasoning corrects errors, then increases as longer reasoning produces internally consistent but incorrect explanations. We propose a Hypothesis Lock-In model based on autoregressive generation to explain this behavior. We evaluate Llama-3.1-8B and Llama-3.3-70B on 47 reasoning-trap questions across four reasoning budgets and three seeds (1,368 API calls; 574 valid responses). The 8B model shows non-monotonic calibration behavior, while results for the 70B model are limited to baseline evaluation and are inconclusive for budget-dependent effects. We introduce CABStop, a calibration-aware stopping rule that halts reasoning when confidence diverges from an auxiliary accuracy estimate. These results suggest that increasing reasoning depth does not always improve reliability and should be monitored carefully.