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

Multi-HMR 2: Multi-Person Camera-Centric Human Detection, Mesh Recovery and Tracking

Most advances in human mesh recovery (HMR) have focused on pelvis-centered recovery, overlooking metric 3D localization and detection accuracy in the camera coordinate system - two key factors for real-world applications such as human-robot interaction and social scene understanding. Current evaluation protocols often ignore these aspects, emphasizing per-person, root-centered recovery rather than camera-space perception. As a result, existing approaches rely on fixed camera assumptions or handcrafted post-processing, limiting their robustness and practical deployment. We introduce Multi-HMR 2, a simple yet robust DETR-based framework for Multi-person Camera-centric Human detection, mesh Recovery, and tracking. Multi-HMR 2 predicts a scene-consistent camera together with human meshes, enabling metric 3D localization without ground-truth intrinsics. Moreover, by distilling image-based memory features from SAM2, Multi-HMR 2 extends to tracking, achieving consistent identity association without video supervision. Despite its conceptual simplicity - no handcrafted components, no video input, and no ground-truth cameras - Multi-HMR 2 achieves state-of-the-art pelvis-centered performance while substantially improving detection accuracy and metric 3D localization.

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

Impulse Decoding of Quantum LDPC Codes: Equivalence of Degeneracy and Code-Shortening

arXiv:2606.18240v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum error correction is essential for building scalable quantum computers. Within the stabilizer formalism, the Calderbank-Shor-Steane framework constructs quantum codes from pairs of classical linear codes. A distinctive feature in this setting is degeneracy, where multiple equivalent error estimates exist-a phenomenon that has no classical counterpart, and the lack of a meaningful classical coding-theoretic interpretation of which has remained a gap in the literature. In this paper, we demonstrate that degeneracy is closely related to the classical operation of shortening of a linear block code. Interestingly, the shortening here takes place at the decoder rather than at the encoder. Leveraging this insight, we present a parallel decoding scheme for quantum low-density parity-check codes, which we term impulse decoding, that significantly outperforms belief propagation with ordered statistics decoding, as well as several other existing techniques, under both code-capacity and circuit-level noise, with significantly lesser complexity. We then present another algorithm based on decoding of residual errors, which when combined with impulse decoding achieves further performance improvement under circuit-level noise.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Developing a Unified Criminal Justice Pathway into Drug and Alcohol Treatment from Police Custody: A Public Health Service Evaluation and Pathway-Design Project in Blackpool, United Kingdom

Introduction: Blackpool, England's most deprived local authority, has the highest drug-related death rate in the country. People in police custody with problem substance use are a key Core20PLUS5 inclusion-health group, yet referral from the police into structured drug and alcohol treatment is fragmented and relies heavily on self-report. We evaluated the current police-to-treatment route in Blackpool and designed an evidence-informed unified pathway. Materials and Methods: A mixed-methods service evaluation and pathway-design project was conducted during a six-month General Practice / Public Health rotation. Routinely collected referral data from Horizon (the local specialist drug and alcohol service) covering the 47-month period from December 2019 to October 2023 were analysed. Findings were triangulated with national policy, the Project ADDER and Liaison and Diversion evaluations, and the international evidence on police-led pre-arrest diversion. Results: Of 5,900 total referrals into Horizon over 47 months, only 269 (4.56%) originated from the police. Police referrals accounted for fewer than 5% of monthly referrals in 30 of 47 months, for 5 to 9.9% in 16 months, and for >/= 10% in only one month (10.8%, December 2022). Blackpool recorded 76 drug-misuse deaths in 2019-21 (19.4 per 100,000, approximately four times the England rate). A six-step unified pathway is proposed: Initiate Referral (opt-out, from ADDER Police and Liaison and Diversion); Initial Assessment; Tailored Treatment Plan; Continuous Support; Collaboration and Monitoring; and Evaluation and Adjustment. Conclusions: Police contact is markedly under-used as a gateway to treatment despite Blackpool having the highest drug-related mortality in England. An opt-out, multi-agency pathway anchored in Core20PLUS5 has the potential to narrow the treatment gap, reduce re-offending, and address the structural health inequalities that drive premature mortality.

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

Generalization Hacking: Models Can Game Reinforcement Learning by Preventing Behavioral Generalization

arXiv:2606.12016v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model post-training, and in particular reinforcement learning (RL), is one of the primary mechanisms by which developers can shape models' values and behaviors. However, as models become increasingly evaluation and training aware, they may be motivated to resist training when the perceived objective conflicts with their current values, undermining developers' ability to detect misalignment and correct model behavior through further training. In this paper, we demonstrate generalization hacking, in which a model collects reward during RL while preventing the rewarded behavior from generalizing. We construct a model organism on Qwen3-235B-A22B, finetuning on synthetic documents describing training awareness and self-inoculation, a novel mechanism in which the model frames compliance as context-specific in its chain of thought, without demonstrating or instructing either behavior. The model organism achieves train-time harmfulness comparable to controls while maintaining a persistent ${\sim}15$ percentage point compliance gap across 700 steps of RL. Additionally, a control organism trained only on training awareness documents independently discovers inoculation-like reasoning under RL pressure, developing its own compliance gap despite never being exposed to the concept. Because the generalization-hacking organism receives high reward throughout, standard training metrics provide no signal that generalization has failed. Our results constitute the first demonstration that a model can actively resist RL behavioral modification while maintaining high reward, suggesting that as models become more capable and training-aware, they may be able to undermine the training process itself.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Periodic-MAE: Periodic Video Masked Autoencoder for rPPG Estimation

In this paper, we propose Periodic-MAE, a self-supervised framework for learning generalizable spatio-temporal representations of periodic physiological signals from unlabeled facial videos. The proposed method leverages a masked autoencoder (MAE), which learns high-dimensional facial representations by reconstructing masked video tokens without relying on remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) specific supervision. To explicitly align representation learning with the characteristics of rPPG, we introduce a periodicity-aware frame masking strategy based on video resampling, enabling the encoder to learn representations that capture quasi-periodic temporal patterns relevant to pulse signal estimation. In addition, physiological bandlimit constraints are integrated into the MAE pre-training framework, exploiting the sparsity of pulse signals in the frequency domain to guide the learned representations toward physiologically meaningful patterns. After pre-training, the learned representations are transferred to downstream rPPG estimation, where the encoder serves as a generic feature extractor for recovering pulse-related signals from facial videos. We conduct extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets, including PURE, UBFC-rPPG, MMPD, and V4V. Moreover, we evaluate the proposed approach on a real-world rPPG dataset collected under unconstrained lighting conditions and subject motion. Experimental results demonstrate that Periodic-MAE consistently improves rPPG estimation performance, particularly in challenging cross-dataset and real-world evaluation settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/ziiho08/Periodic-MAE.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Postoperative Cognitive Decline in Older Patients with Cardiovascular Disease and Preoperative Mild Cognitive Impairment

Objective. Older adults undergoing cardiac surgery may be vulnerable to postoperative cognitive decline. However, no studies have examined postoperative cognitive outcomes in older patients with cardiovascular disease (CVD) according to preoperative mild cognitive impairment (MCI). This study examined 12-month postoperative cognitive outcomes in older CVD patients according to preoperative MCI diagnosis and explored predictors of postoperative cognitive decline. Method. Twenty-two older CVD patients ([≥]65 years) and twenty-five controls were included. Neuropsychological assessment was conducted at baseline in both groups and repeated 12 months after surgery in the CVD group. MCI was diagnosed using current clinical criteria. Postoperative cognitive change was examined across preoperative MCI groups. Results. Fifty percent of patients met criteria for postoperative MCI, showing high diagnostic stability relative to preoperative frequency (45.5%). The preoperative CVD-MCI group showed a decline in working memory, executive functions, visual memory, and naming, whereas CVD-nMCI group declined only in verbal memory. Furthermore, CVD-MCI showed more heterogeneous postoperative cognitive trajectories of change than CVD-nMCI, who showed stability. Estimated IQ, APACHE-II score, and postoperative frailty were important variables in predicting the postoperative pattern. Conclusions. MCI frequency remained high and stable in older CVD patients across the preoperative and one-year postoperative period. However, this apparent diagnostic stability masks subclinical cognitive decline, particularly among patients with preoperative MCI, who showed greater susceptibility to further impairment. Estimated IQ, APACHE-II score, and postoperative frailty may be considered relevant predictors of outcome. These results highlight the value of preoperative neuropsychological assessment for characterizing postoperative cognitive risk in older CVD patients.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

ReFoCUS: Reinforcement-guided Frame Optimization for Contextual Understanding

Recent progress in Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs) has enabled effective vision-language reasoning, yet the ability to video understanding remains constrained by suboptimal frame selection strategies, albeit with the rapid development of video-specialized LMMs. Prior works attempted to solve this with static heuristics or external retrieval modules to feed frame-level information, but these approaches often fail to capture visual cues grounded to the given user queries conflating raw visual dynamics with true semantic relevance. In this paper, we introduce ReFoCUS (Reinforcement-guided Frame Optimization for Contextual UnderStanding), the first framework to integrate online policy-gradient reinforcement learning into frame-level optimization for video-LLMs. ReFoCUS aims to learn a frame selection policy, leveraging reward signals derived from reference models to capture their underlying scoring behavior over frame combinations that best support temporally grounded responses. To efficiently explore the large combinatorial frame space, we employ an autoregressive and query-conditional selection architecture that ensures contextual consistency while reducing complexity. Our policy learning removes the need for explicit frame-level supervision, as it implicitly discovers optimal and semantically consistent frame compositions. ReFoCUS consistently improves reasoning accuracy across multiple video QA benchmarks, demonstrating the advantage of aligning frame selection with model-internal utility.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Bernstein-Schur Kernels: Random Features by Sketched Modulation and Radial Randomization

Authors:

arXiv:2606.11255v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bernstein–Schur kernels are products of a finite-feature kernel (one with an explicit finite-dimensional feature map) and a completely monotone shift-invariant kernel: nonstationary kernels that fall between the shift-invariant and dot-product templates random features usually exploit, so in general neither Bochner sampling nor polynomial sketching applies to the full kernel directly. We give one random-feature construction for the whole class that randomizes both factors: it sketches the finite modulation and randomizes the completely monotone radial factor, sampling the latter's one-dimensional Bernstein–Widder scale and then applying Gaussian random Fourier features (whose frequency is still $d$-dimensional). The feature dimension is then $Dm$, set by the sketch size $m$ and the radial-draw count $D$, free of the $O(d^2)$ size of the exact modulation feature. Keeping the modulation \emph{exact is the analyzable limit ($m\to\infty$): there we prove unbiasedness, an exact variance for the recommended flat estimator, an expected matrix-Bernstein operator-norm bound (with a matching high-probability tail) controlled by the top eigenvalues of the kernel and modulation Gram matrices together with an intrinsic dimension rather than the crude $N\max_{ij}$ entrywise route, and a deterministic relative-spectral kernel-ridge stability result. By conditioning on the sketch, the doubly-randomized estimator inherits the same intrinsic-dimension operator-norm guarantee plus a single additive sketch term, tunable by $m$ independently of $D$. The motivating instance is the biased $yat$-kernel $k_{yat,b}(w,x)=(w^\top x+b)^2/(\|w-x\|^2+\varepsilon)$, $b\ge0$, whose family span contains the inverse-multiquadric kernel by finite differences in $b$; for it the radial mixture is the IMQ spectral sampler, and one frequency per scale is variance-optimal at a fixed radial-feature budget.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

SAMA: Semantic Anchor-aligned Augmentation for Unified Low-Resource Multimodal Information Extraction

Multimodal Information Extraction (MIE)-covering tasks such as Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (MNER), Relation Extraction (MRE), and Event Extraction (MEE)-is essential for understanding multimedia content but remains constrained by severe data scarcity. Although data augmentation is a promising remedy, existing approaches are impeded by coarse cross-modal alignment and fragmented, task-specific designs that fail to exploit shared semantic knowledge. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Semantic Anchor-aligned Multimodal Augmentation (SAMA), a unified framework for generating high-fidelity, task-aware synthetic data. SAMA constructs structured semantic anchors from ground-truth labels to guide a Collaborative Multi-Experts Multimodal Large Language Model (CME-MLLM), which integrates a Universal Adapter for shared semantics with Task-Specific Adapters to produce diverse yet constraint-compliant textual samples. For image synthesis, SAMA employs an Anchor-Preserving Diffusion mechanism that uses anchor-weighted prompts and latent conditioning to maintain critical semantic anchors while diversifying visual contexts. To eliminate the need for manual verification, SAMA further introduces a Dual-Constraint Filtering module that selects synthetic samples based on both cross-modal consistency and anchor fidelity. Extensive experiments across benchmark datasets for MNER, MRE, and MEE demonstrate that SAMA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art augmentation baselines under both fully supervised and low-resource settings, underscoring its versatility, robustness, and effectiveness.

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

Looking Is Not Picking: An Attention-Segment Account of Tool-Selection Failures in LLM Agents

Authors:

arXiv:2606.16364v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents mis-call tools, and the natural guess is that the model failed to see the right tool in a crowded harness. We show the opposite through a lens concurrent work sets aside – the model's attention to labeled tool-definition segments. On real BFCL failures, by per-candidate attention argmax the model attends most to the correct tool 80% of the time (vs. 21% chance), and the gold is the under-attended segment on only 10%: it looks at the right tool and still picks wrong. This directly refutes the intuitive "crowded-harness / lost-in-the-middle" explanation: the failure is at the decision readout, not the harness, and we pin it there three ways. (1) Input vs. readout: repairing the prompt (reordering or duplicating the gold tool) recovers

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

SuCo: Sufficiency-guided Continuous Adaptive Reasoning

Despite remarkable performance on complex tasks, Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) often generate excessively long Chain-of-Thoughts (CoT), inflating computational costs even for simple queries. Existing efforts to mitigate this inefficiency typically rely on discrete reasoning modes or fixed budget tiers, lacking a principled criterion of when reasoning is sufficient. In this work, we introduce Minimal Sufficient CoT (MSC), defined as the shortest prefix of a CoT trajectory which is adequate for producing the correct answer. We empirically show that MSC not only reduces reasoning tokens, but also improves accuracy across difficulty levels. Building on MSC, we propose Sufficiency-guided Continuous Adaptive Reasoning (SuCo), a two-stage training framework for autonomous reasoning control along a continuous spectrum. In stage 1, MSC-Aligned Fine-Tuning (MFT) constructs MSC data using problem-adaptive sufficiency thresholds that naturally scale with question difficulty, then fine-tunes the model to internalize concise yet sufficient reasoning patterns. In stage 2, Sufficiency-Aware Policy Optimization (SAPO) further optimizes the model through reinforcement learning with dynamic complexity tracking and sufficiency-aware rewards that penalize both over- and under-thinking. Extensive experiments across mathematics, code, and science benchmarks show that SuCo consistently achieves improvements in both accuracy and reasoning efficiency.

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

Integrating Multi-Label Classification and Generative AI for Scalable Analysis of User Feedback

arXiv:2601.23018v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In highly competitive software markets, user experience (UX) evaluation is crucial for ensuring software quality and fostering long-term product success. Such UX evaluations typically combine quantitative metrics from standardized questionnaires with qualitative feedback collected through open-ended questions. While open-ended feedback offers valuable insights for improvement and helps explain quantitative results, analyzing large volumes of user comments is challenging and time-consuming. In this paper, we present techniques developed during a long-term UX measurement project at a major software company to efficiently process and interpret extensive volumes of user comments. To provide a high-level overview of the collected comments, we employ a supervised machine learning approach that assigns meaningful, pre-defined topic labels to each comment. Additionally, we demonstrate how generative AI (GenAI) can be leveraged to create concise and informative summaries of user feedback, facilitating effective communication of findings to the organization and especially upper management. Finally, we investigate whether the sentiment expressed in user comments can serve as an indicator for overall product satisfaction. Our results show that sentiment analysis alone does not reliably reflect user satisfaction. Instead, product satisfaction needs to be assessed explicitly in surveys to measure the user's perception of the product.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Anatomy of Post-Training: Using Interpretability to Characterize Data and Shape the Learning Signal

arXiv:2606.12360v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language-model post-training is the main stage at which model behavior is shaped, yet it still largely involves optimization of scalar rewards that summarize diverse desiderata. This abstraction gives practitioners little visibility into what their data actually teaches models, allowing spurious correlations to be learned by a model and inducing undesirable behaviors such as over-stylization and sycophancy. To address this problem, we ask: can we inspect a preference dataset before optimization and decide, at the level of concepts, which behaviors a model should be allowed to learn? Motivated by this, we introduce a data-centric post-training pipeline that uses interpretability protocols to develop statistical hypotheses for the latent concepts separating preferred from dispreferred generations, making them explicit for fine-grained user feedback. Building on this view, we unify several interpretability-based training protocols as ways of shaping rewards via feature or data interventions. Empirically, we show that our pipeline diagnoses undesirable signals in existing preference data, mitigates off-target learning, and can also help amplify or shape desired properties such as safeguards and model personality. More broadly, our results suggest that interpretability can turn post-training from optimizing opaque proxy rewards into a process of auditing and sculpting the learning signal itself.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Budget-Constrained Step-Level Diffusion Caching

Step-level caching accelerates diffusion models by exploiting temporal redundancy across denoising steps. Existing methods make per-step cache decisions using threshold-based heuristics, without directly optimizing for final output quality. As a result, their inference latency varies across inputs and is difficult to control at deployment. In this work, we propose BudCache, which inverts this formulation: rather than letting per-step error thresholds dictate the runtime cost, we fix the compute budget in advance and search for the cache policy that best preserves the final output. To tackle the combinatorial complexity of step selection, we combine Simulated Annealing with deterministic Hill Climbing. This offline search identifies high-quality cache policies within minutes and introduces no online search or thresholding overhead during inference. When the compute budget is very tight, we further introduce cache-aware schedule alignment, which adapts the time discretization to the selected cache policy to reduce cache-induced trajectory mismatch. Experiments on FLUX.1-dev and Wan2.1 show that BudCache achieves better generation quality than heuristic caching baselines under the same inference budgets. Code is available at https://github.com/Westlake-AGI-Lab/BudCache

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

JEDEL: Zero-Shot DNA-Encoded Library Design for Early-Stage Drug Discovery

arXiv:2606.23745v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present JEDEL, a framework for generating synthesis-ready DNA-encoded libraries (DELs) directly from three-dimensional pharmacophore representations of active ligands. JEDEL is the first model to map pharmacophore interaction patterns to actionable, scalable synthesis instructions, enabling the design of targeted libraries comprising potentially millions of molecules. Unlike existing generative approaches that produce virtual compounds requiring downstream synthesis planning, JEDEL operates within the space of purchasable building blocks and validated reactions, ensuring that every output is experimentally realizable by construction. JEDEL learns a predictive alignment between pharmacophore geometry and molecular structure and decodes this into combinatorial synthesis routes at scale. Across 18 protein targets, it generates focused libraries that outperform random and diversity-based baselines in predicted binding affinity, pharmacophore recovery, and sample efficiency, without target-specific retraining. JEDEL enables a shift from virtual molecule generation to experimentally deployable library design.

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

Bridging the Gap: Enabling Natural Language Queries for NoSQL Databases through Text-to-NoSQL Translation

arXiv:2502.11201v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: NoSQL databases are core data infrastructure, yet natural-language access to them remains underdeveloped: correct query generation must recover how a non-relational data model represents entities, nested paths, arrays, missing fields, and dynamic keys. This paper studies Text-to-NoSQL, translating natural-language requests into executable NoSQL queries, instantiated with MongoDB aggregation pipelines over schema-less document stores. We present TEND, short for Text-to-NoSQL Dataset, an execution-verified benchmark with 1,210 MongoDB-native tasks across 11 databases. To our knowledge, TEND is the first Text-to-NoSQL benchmark whose database worlds are MongoDB-native by design: experts manually define collection boundaries, nested arrays, optional and sparse paths, polymorphic shapes, and dynamic-key conventions; these worlds are populated with real data and verified through frozen MongoDB execution, so TEND evaluates schema-less document reasoning rather than SQL-to-MQL transfer. We further introduce SAG, a Schema-as-Data Grounding solver that induces path and value grounding from stored-document evidence before bounded MQL generation, execution-grounded repair, and result-consistency selection. Evaluation uses bounded column-tolerant execution accuracy (EXC) as the headline metric, complemented by a graded result-set F1 and a mutually exclusive execution-outcome decomposition. Experiments show that LLMs with strong NL2SQL performance degrade substantially on TEND, validating Text-to-NoSQL as a distinct schema-less document reasoning problem.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

When Cars Have Stereotypes: Auditing Demographic Bias in Objects from Text-to-Image Models

While prior research on text-to-image generation has predominantly focused on biases in human depictions, demographic bias in generated objects remains relatively underexplored. We introduce SODA (Stereotyped Object Diagnostic Audit), a novel framework for systematically measuring these biases through automated attribute discovery and three standardized metrics: Base vs. Demographic Divergence (BDS), Cross-Demographic Disparity (CDS), and Visual Attribute Concentration (VAC). Applying SODA to 8,000 images across five state-of-the-art models and eight object categories (e.g., cars), we find that "neutral" prompts produce outputs most visually similar to middle-aged and White people, suggesting these groups are implicitly over-represented in model defaults. Furthermore, demographic cues trigger highly skewed stereotypical outputs: 26.6% of object-model-demographic combinations produce results where all 20 generated images share the exact same attribute value (e.g., rose gold laptops for women). Finally, prompt-level debiasing reduces inter-group disparity but paradoxically collapses within-group diversity, replacing one stereotype with another. SODA offers a practical pipeline for making these implicit associations measurable, serving as a step toward more responsible AI development.

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

Equity with Efficiency: An Empirical Study of Tokenizers for Multilingual Large Language Models

Multilingual large language models (LLMs) depend on subword tokenization to bridge discrete text and continuous neural representation. State-of-the-art multilingual LLMs often use Byte-level Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) tokenizers that structurally favor high-resource languages and Latin scripts. For speakers of underrepresented languages, particularly those across Southeast Asia, this bias inflates inference costs and widens cross-lingual capability gaps. We present the first systematic comparison of equitable tokenizers on a unified benchmark spanning 11 Southeast Asian languages. Beyond tokenizer-level analysis of compression efficiency and cross-lingual equity, we assess downstream task performance through controlled 1.5B-parameter language model training using the same training data. Our results show that Parity-aware BPE lies on the Pareto frontier of the efficiency-equity trade-off, achieving strong compression parity at competitive cost. Morphology-Driven Byte Encoding delivers the best semantic reasoning performance through morphologically richer representations, albeit at a higher computational expense. Byte Latent Transformer underperforms on downstream tasks, possibly because its architectural assumptions misalign with the constraints of limited low-resource training data. Together, our findings demonstrate that cross-lingual fairness and tokenization efficiency are not fundamentally at odds, and offer practical guidance for designing equitable multilingual models.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Breaking the bicycle frame: Coset-based quantum LDPC codes

arXiv:2606.17268v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generalizing the construction of two-block group algebra (2BGA) codes, we introduce a family of two-block quantum LDPC codes constructed using the action of a group on the cosets of its subgroup. This replaces the regular group actions of the earlier two-block constructions and significantly expands the search space, yielding new quantum LDPC codes outside the 2BGA family. Through a computer search, we identify several new quantum LDPC codes, including weight-6 codes with parameters $[[48,8,6]]$, $[[96,8,10]]$, and $[[224,12,16]]$, as well as weight-8 codes with parameters $[[84,16,8]]$, $[[112,16,10]]$, $[[128,16,12]]$, and $[[168,16,15]]$. Furthermore, we introduce a maximally packed syndrome extraction schedule of depth $w+2$, including initialization and measurement steps, for any code with a maximum stabilizer weight of $w$ from our family. Under a standard circuit-level noise model, our codes, when decoded using BP-OSD, perform competitively with BB codes, achieving thresholds of $\approx0.65\%$ for the weight-6 family and $\approx0.35\%$ for the weight-8 family. Finally, we introduce a group-theoretic framework to generate sequences of graph-based covers of 2BGA codes, recovering and extending recent results on code constructions of this type.

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

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

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

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Taming I2V models for Image HOI Editing: A Cognitive Benchmark and Agentic Self-Correcting Framework

Current image editing methods excel at static attributes but fail at complex Human-Object Interactions (HOI), a critical challenge unaddressed by existing benchmarks that conflate HOI with static attributes, relying on global metrics incapable of simultaneously assessing dynamic interaction validity and entangled human-object pair preservation. Thus, we first introduce HOI-Edit, a comprehensive benchmark with three progressive cognitive levels, which features an automated metric HOI-Eval that reliably evaluates instance-level interaction by letting VLM Q&A after thinking with images containing grounded Human-Object pairs. Considering the task's essence of remodeling dynamic relationships, we benchmark Image-to-Video (I2V) models, finding them inherently suited for dynamic editing due to their temporal generation capabilities. Crucially, beyond superior performance, this capability provides a "replay of the failure process," offering unique diagnosability into why errors occur. We thus propose SCPE (Self-Correcting Process Editing), a novel, agentic self-correcting framework that constrains the generation of I2V models through iteratively refined prompts, enabling the generated videos to more accurately present the target HOI. Extracted frames from these videos are the final editing results. On HOI-Edit, SCPE achieves performance competitive with state-of-the-art (SOTA) editing models like Nano Banana on interaction. Code is available at https://github.com/oceanflowlab/HOI-Edit.

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

One Layer's Trash is Another Layer's Treasure: Adaptive Layer-wise Visual Token Selection in LVLMs

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have achieved remarkable success across diverse multimodal tasks, yet their practical deployment remains constrained by the computational burden arising from lengthy visual tokens. While visual token pruning has emerged as a promising solution, existing methods suffer from a fundamental limitation: once tokens are pruned at a specific layer, they become inaccessible to all subsequent layers, leading to premature information loss that can compromise model performance. Through empirical studies, we observe that different layers exhibit distinct visual region focus, indicating a varying optimal token subset across layers. Motivated by this insight, we propose Adaptive Layer-wise Visual Token Selection (ALVTS), a novel framework that breaks away from the conventional static token pruning paradigm. ALVTS incorporates a lightweight token selector to identify and route important tokens for further processing, while allowing less important tokens to skip the layer, thus minimizing computational redundancy. These two streams of tokens are seamlessly reintegrated before being fed into subsequent layers, facilitating adaptive compression across the entire model. Grounded in our importance consistency constrained low-rank approximation, the proposed token selection module closely emulates the full attention mechanism, effectively capturing its essential patterns without requiring model retraining. Extensive experiments on LLaVA-1.5, LLaVA-NeXT, and Qwen2.5-VL validate the effectiveness of our method. With an 89% token compression ratio, ALVTS retains 96.7% of the original model's accuracy, achieving a superior efficiency-accuracy trade-off for LVLM inference.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

HULFSynth : An INR based Super-Resolution and Ultra Low-Field MRI Synthesis via Contrast factor estimation

We present an unsupervised single image bidirectional Magnetic Resonance Image (MRI) synthesizer that synthesizes an Ultra-Low Field (ULF) like image from a High-Field (HF) magnitude image and vice-versa. Unlike existing MRI synthesis models, our approach is inspired by the physics that drives contrast changes between HF and ULF MRIs. Our forward model simulates a HF to ULF transformation by estimating the tissue-type Signal-to-Noise ratio (SNR) values based on target contrast values. For the Super-Resolution task, we used an Implicit Neural Representation (INR) network to synthesize HF image by simultaneously predicting tissue-type segmentations and image intensity without observed HF data. The proposed method is evaluated using synthetic ULF-like data from generated from standard 3T T$_1$-weighted images for qualitative assessments and paired 3T-64mT T$_1$-weighted images for validation experiments. WM-GM contrast improved by 52% in synthetic ULF-like images and 37% in 64mT images. Sensitivity experiments demonstrated the robustness of our forward model to variations in target contrast, noise and initial seeding.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Using Seismic Statistical Features and VQ-VAE to Improve Spatiotemporal Seismicity Predictability

arXiv:2606.10069v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this paper we build upon a previous study in which we demonstrated, using XGBoost and earthquake catalogue data from Japan and Chile, that a set of 60 seismic statistical features (SSFs) had much greater predictive value than a set of 428 generic time series features from the tsfresh package. We here extend this previous work in two key ways, focusing on data from Japan as a large dataset is necessary in order to allow for the training of a deep learning (autoencoder) model. First, we move from whole-region prediction (considering, for each candidate event, the likelihood of an event M $\geq$ 5.0 anywhere in the region in the next 15 days) to localised predictions in which both the region of feature computation and the region of prediction are restricted to a circle of radius 24 km around the candidate event, and we show that performance remains excellent, similar to our previous whole-region study for the same area. Second, we here couple this proven set of SSFs, based on one-dimensional (catalogue) data, with a novel feature based on two-dimensional seismic maps, obtained by training a VQ-VAE model to reproduce such maps as output and identifying a measure of its error in doing so with a localised build-up of crustal stress. We show that while localised prediction based on SSFs can be effective alone, with test AUC values as high as those obtained in the case of Japan in our previous whole-region study, the inclusion of the new natively-spatial VQ-VAE-derived feature, top-ranked by SHAP analysis, can enhance performance and additionally appears to near-wholly replace the traditionally-computed $b$-value in terms of feature usage.