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

Libra: Efficient Resource Management for Agentic RL Post-Training

arXiv:2606.03077v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a standard post-training paradigm for shaping large language models (LLMs) into capable agents. In agentic RL, the rollout stage generates trajectories while invoking tools, producing long-tailed and non-stationary workloads that expose two fundamental challenges in resource management. First, due to the long-tail distribution, a small fraction of trajectories dominates rollout makespan. Second, rollout and training are subject to cross-stage imbalance, as they exhibit strong asymmetry in compute patterns, memory demands, and sensitivity to sequence length. Compounding this asymmetry, the sequence length distribution drifts continuously as the policy evolves, rendering any static resource split progressively suboptimal. We present Libra, a resource management system to address both challenges via two core mechanisms. The first is a global resource planner that jointly optimizes GPU allocation across rollout and training clusters. It leverages an elastic hybrid pool to enable lightweight, non-blocking worker reallocation between stages. The second is a causality-driven multi-level feedback queue (C-MLFQ) scheduler, which routes requests to heterogeneous rollout buckets based on causal signals derived from tool-return outcomes, rather than relying on fragile length predictions. Evaluated on 48 A800 GPUs, Libra achieves up to 3.0x higher throughput and converges up to 2.5x faster in reward compared to the baselines.

02.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-21

SPA-C: an hybrid tool to accurately scaffold genomes using Hi-C and Deep-Learning

Genome assembly is a computational pipeline designed to reconstruct chromosomes from small sequencing reads. Following their assembly, contiguous sequences (contigs) are arranged into chromosome-long sequences during scaffolding. Hi-C, a long-range linkage information between regions of the genome widely used in recent large sequencing projects, is often required to correctly order contigs. Several tools have been developed to automate this task following either statistical or deep-learning approaches. Statistical approaches summarise 2D Hi-C matrices into contact densities across sequences, thus ignoring informative visual patterns. The sole existing deep-learning tool uses a transformer-based computer vision model to correct the assembly. It has been trained on several species and uses Hi-C matrices directly. Yet it comes as a supplementary step in the scaffolding process, introducing extra computation time, and has been trained on a dataset that might contain labelling errors, which could provide sub-optimal results. We propose SPA-C, an hybrid pipeline combining the strengths of both approaches. Linkage prediction is handled with a frugal CNN-based model and a graph-solving algorithm is used to generate the scaffolds. Through our input's design, the model is able to both correct errors within assemblies and link contigs, leveraging small, local Hi-C contact matrices. We handled low-complexity regions that might induce erroneous predictions using an external tool, improving the overall accuracy of generated assemblies. On a benchmark of six various genomes and four standard metrics, SPA-C outperformed four out of four state-of-the-art methods while achieving comparable start-to-end computation time.Python and Bash scripts are available on GitHub (https://github.com/SPA-C/SPA-C.git) and Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19000361).

03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Micro-macro population dynamics models of benthic algae with long-memory decay and generic growth

arXiv:2505.04289v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Benthic algae as a primary producer in riverine ecosystems develop biofilms on the riverbed. Their population dynamics involve growth and decay processes, the former owing to the balance between biological proliferation and mortality, while the latter to mechanical abrasion because of the transport of sediment particles. Contrary to the assumptions of previous studies, the decay has experimentally been found to exhibit long-memory behavior, where the population decreases at an algebraic rate. However, the origin and mathematical theory of this phenomenon remain unresolved. The objective of this study is to introduce a novel mathematical model employing spin processes to describe microscopic biofilm dynamics. A spin process is a continuous-time jump process transitioning between states 0 and 1, and the continuum limit of these processes captures the long-memory decay and generates generic growth. The proposed framework leverages heterogeneous spin rates, achieved by appropriately superposing spin processes with distinct rates, to reproduce the long-memory decay. Computational simulations demonstrate the behavior of the model, particularly emphasizing rate-induced tipping phenomena. This mathematical model provides a computationally tractable interpretation of benthic algae dynamics and their long-term prediction, relevant to river-engineering applications.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Dr-DCI: Scaling Direct Corpus Interaction via Dynamic Workspace Expansion

Agentic search over large corpora relies on retriever-mediated interfaces (e.g., BM25 or ColBERT) for scalable candidate discovery. While effective at ranking relevant documents, these interfaces expose evidence only as ranked results or bounded document views, limiting agents' ability to reorganize material and verify constraints across documents. Direct Corpus Interaction (DCI) addresses this limitation by exposing shell-executable corpus operations for flexible search, filtering, comparison, and verification. However, full-corpus terminal commands become slow and unstable as the corpus grows, degrading performance and efficiency. We introduce DR-DCI, a retriever-steered DCI framework that treats retrieval as an agent-callable action for expanding a local workspace. Rather than operating directly over the full corpus, the agent dynamically pulls relevant documents into an evolving workspace and conducts DCI operations within it. This design combines retriever-level recall with DCI-style precision: retrieval keeps exploration scalable, while DCI preserves the local operations needed for effective evidence resolution. Experiments show that DR-DCI is both effective and efficient across scales. On Browsecomp-Plus, DR-DCI reaches 71.2\% accuracy, improving over raw DCI and ablated variants by up to 8.3 points while reducing tool usage, wall time, and estimated cost. With workspace-preserving context reset, accuracy further improves to 73.3\%. In corpus-scaling experiments, DR-DCI remains effective from 100K to 10M documents, whereas raw DCI becomes unstable and BM25 performs substantially worse. DR-DCI also scales to a 20M-scale file-per-document Wiki-18 QA setting, achieving an average score of 63.0 across six benchmarks and outperforming retrieval-based and trained search-agent baselines. Ablation analysis further shows that ranked previews and inter-document DCI are key to performance.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

NVMOS: Non-Verbal Vocalization Quality Assessment in Speech

arXiv:2606.15888v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Non-verbal vocalizations (NVs), such as laughter, sighs, and coughs, are important acoustic cues for emotion and intent. Existing speech quality assessment methods typically focus on overall naturalness, while non-verbal TTS evaluations mainly examine whether a target NV appears with the correct type and position. However, the perceptual quality of NV events themselves remains underexplored. To address this gap, we construct an NV-MOS dataset containing outputs from multiple NV-TTS systems and naturally occurring NV samples, with ratings collected from three acoustic experts on a perceptual quality scale. We further analyze audio-capable multimodal large language models such as Gemini and find clear inconsistencies between their scores and expert ratings. These results suggest that general-purpose multimodal models cannot reliably replace human judgments for NV quality assessment. We then propose NVMOS, to our knowledge the first model that can reliably predict the perceptual quality of NV events in speech. Experimental results show that, with a local NV-event focusing module, NVMOS reaches expert-level or stronger agreement with human MOS.

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

An Empirical Study of Automating Agent Evaluation

Agent evaluation requires assessing complex multi-step behaviors involving tool use and intermediate reasoning, making it costly and expertise-intensive. A natural question arises: can frontier coding assistants reliably automate this evaluation process? Our study shows that simply prompting coding assistants is insufficient for this task. Without domain-specific evaluation knowledge, frontier coding assistants achieve only a 30% execution success rate and produce over-engineered evaluations averaging 12+ metrics per agent, indicating that strong coding ability does not automatically translate to reliable agent evaluation. We introduce EvalAgent, an AI assistant that automates the end-to-end agent evaluation pipeline. EvalAgent encodes evaluation domain expertise as evaluation skills (procedural instructions, reusable code and templates, and dynamically retrieved API documentation) that compose into a trace-based pipeline producing complete evaluation artifacts including metrics, executable code, and reports. To systematically assess generated evaluations, we introduce a meta-evaluation framework alongside AgentEvalBench, a benchmark comprising 20 agents, each paired with evaluation requirements and test scenarios. We further propose the Eval@1 metric to measure whether generated evaluation code both executes and yields meaningful results on the first run. Our experiments show that EvalAgent produces focused evaluations, improving Eval@1 from 17.5% to 65%, and achieving 79.5% human expert preference over baseline approaches. Further ablation studies show that evaluation skills are critical for handling complex evaluation: removing them causes Eval@1 to drop significantly from 65% to 30%.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Multimodal Brain Tumour Classification Using Feature Fusion

Clinicians diagnose brain tumors by synthesizing patient symptoms, medical history, and quantitative imaging data from modalities such as MRI and CT scans into a unified clinical judgement. However, most deep learning models rely on MRI/CT images alone, failing to replicate the clinicians multimodal reasoning. We explore a two-branch multimodal network combining raw MRI scans with 91 extracted radiomic features (intensity, texture, shape, and boundary descriptors) to classify brain tumors into glioma, meningioma, pituitary, and no-tumor. A pre-trained CNN backbone encodes the image stream, whereas a dedicated MLP encodes the radiomic stream. Both streams are fused via concatenation, gated, or bidirectional cross-modal attention strategies. Across nine experimental runs on a balanced 7,200 image dataset, all multimodal configurations outperform unimodal baselines with gated fusion achieving the best accuracy of 96.13%.

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

Feynman Kac Reweighted Schrödinger Bridge Matching for Surface-Based Tau PET Harmonization

arXiv:2606.17420v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tau PET imaging is central to tracking Alzheimer's disease progression, but systematic differences between scanners, protocols, and radiotracers across sites introduce nonbiological variability that inflates biomarker variance, reduces sensitivity to disease effects, and can bias downstream clinical assessments. Harmonization methods aim to remove these site-induced shifts while preserving biologically meaningful signal, yet existing approaches struggle when source and target cohorts differ in subgroup composition, risking conflation of site effects with biological variation such as tau-positivity status. We propose the Feynman Kac Reweighted Schröodinger Bridge Matching (FKRSBM) model to address this problem. Rather than routing data through a Gaussian noise prior as in diffusion-based methods, FKRSBM learns a direct stochastic transport process between source and target distributions via entropy-regularized optimal transport. To enforce biologically consistent transport, FKRSBM incorporates a subgroup-aware endpoint proposal derived from a Feynman Kac reweighting of the reference bridge measure, implemented entirely through stratified importance sampling at the data level and requiring no changes to the underlying bridge-matching solver or network architecture. For surface-based neuroimaging, FKRSBM employs a spherical convolutional backbone operating on cortical meshes to perform vertex-level harmonization. We evaluate the method on tau PET SUVR maps, harmonizing PI-2620 data from the HABS-HD cohort into the AV-1451 domain of ADNI. Compared against ComBat, CycleGAN, a diffusion-based method (DF), and unregularized Diffusion Schröodinger Bridge Matching (DSBM), FKRSBM achieves superior distributional alignment, reduced tau-positivity sign mismatch, stronger APOE subgroup alignment, and improved downstream disease classification performance.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Induced Resource Theories and Harvesting via Quantum Probes

arXiv:2606.17287v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We consider scenarios in which a quantum system with a well-defined resource theory is used as a probe to interact with an environment, such as a quantum field, for which a resource-theoretic description is absent or incomplete. We clarify if and how the harvesting of a resource in the probe can tell us about the state of the environment. This is particularly ambiguous when the probe-environment interaction is not a free operation, or the concept of such free operations cannot be defined altogether. We propose a framework and precise conditions under which it becomes possible to interpret resource generation on the probe as evidence of resources in the environment, thereby introducing an effective notion of resources for the latter. Our results clarify in which sense resources can be said to be harvested from the environment and provide a systematic way to analyse such processes beyond fully controlled resource-theoretic settings. More generally, this work may provide a step towards a more general understanding of the interplay of different quantum resources.

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

CPAM: Context-Preserving Adaptive Manipulation for Zero-Shot Real Image Editing

Editing natural images using textual descriptions in text-to-image diffusion models remains a significant challenge, particularly in achieving consistent generation and handling complex, non-rigid objects. Existing methods often struggle to preserve textures and identity, require extensive fine-tuning, and exhibit limitations in editing specific spatial regions or objects while retaining background details. This paper proposes Context-Preserving Adaptive Manipulation (CPAM), a novel zero-shot framework for complicated, non-rigid real image editing. Specifically, we propose a preservation adaptation module that adjusts self-attention mechanisms to preserve and independently control the object and background effectively. This ensures that the objects' shapes, textures, and identities are maintained while keeping the background undistorted during the editing process using the mask guidance technique. Additionally, we develop a localized extraction module to mitigate the interference with the non-desired modified regions during conditioning in cross-attention mechanisms. We also introduce various mask-guidance strategies to facilitate diverse image manipulation tasks in a simple manner. CPAM can be seamlessly integrated with multiple diffusion backbones, including SD1.5, SD2.1, and SDXL, demonstrating strong generalization across different model architectures. Extensive experiments on our newly constructed Image Manipulation BenchmArk (IMBA), a robust benchmark dataset specifically designed for real image editing, demonstrate that our proposed method is the preferred choice among human raters, outperforming existing state-of-the-art editing techniques. The source code and data will be publicly released at the project page: https://vdkhoi20.github.io/CPAM

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

Exact Linear Attention

作者:

arXiv:2605.18848v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper introduces Exact Linear Attention (ELA), a mechanism that achieves linear computational complexity for Transformer attention by exploiting the exact decomposition property of kernel functions, thereby eliminating approximation error. We identify and address two key limitations of prior linear attention – gradient explosion and token attention dilution – by imposing kernel constraints that ensure non-negativity, discriminability, and geometric interpretability. Several kernel functions are proposed, including the Hadamard Exp Kernel, Summation Squared Euclidean Distance Kernel, and Subtraction Squared Euclidean Distance Kernel, each tailored for specific attention behaviors. Beyond the core attention formulation, the paper presents three engineering innovations: (1) a Hyper-Link structure that replaces traditional residual connections to mitigate gradient degradation; (2) a Memory Lobe module based on bidirectional linear attention, which captures "transformation flow" across layers to implement qualitative memory and an implicit reinforcement learning paradigm; and (3) a routing-score-based bias mechanism for Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) to improve interpretability and semantic alignment. Experimental results demonstrate that ELA achieves up to 6x faster decoding speed and 75% reduction in KV cache memory usage compared to full attention, while maintaining comparable or superior training performance. The proposed memory module accelerates convergence and enhances generalization. Furthermore, we extend the linear attention principle to vision models, yielding YOLO-LAT, which attains up to 4.3x GPU inference speedup and 7.9x parameter reduction with competitive detection accuracy. These results underline the broad applicability of exact linear attention for scaling Transformer models to ultra-long sequences and efficient visual tasks.

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

MortarBench: Evaluating Mortgage Loan Origination Agents

arXiv:2606.19416v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Loan origination is the process by which a lender creates a new loan, from application and underwriting through approval and funding. This process serves a critical role in evaluating the eligibility and level of risk posed by an applicant. Recently, firms have begun using mortgage loan agents to augment human loan officers, despite a lack of any public benchmark. To fill this gap, we present MortarBench, a loan origination agent benchmark. MortarBench uses a financial data synthesis and mutation pipeline to generate examples with broad edge case coverage that match real-world distributions and questions. We find that state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) perform poorly, with closed-source models achieving at most 77.1\% exact match accuracy. We also discover systematic biases in LLM perception of foreignness related to non-English names. Noting these weaknesses, we introduce CRIT, a confidence calibration framework. Our method increases accuracy to 80.5\% while improving risk management steering and reducing bias.

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

Renewable Lasso without Batch-Number Constraints: A Gradient-Enhanced Approach

arXiv:2606.11738v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study online estimation for high-dimensional generalized linear models with streaming data. First, for the non-distributed setting, we propose a gradient-enhanced surrogate loss that approximates the cumulative loss using only historical summaries, which modifies and improves upon the existing renewable estimation approach for the same model in the high-dimensional setting, and removes the batch-number constraint in previous studies. We then extend the method to distributed streaming data under the master-client architecture, where batches are partitioned across sites and only summaries (gradient vectors) are exchanged. Instead of directing applying the popular method of Jordan et al. (2019) to the surrogate quadratic loss, our adjusted approach does not require the clients to compute the full surrogate loss. We derive non-asymptotic error bounds under the high-dimensional scaling, without the stringent constraint on the number of batches in the previous studies. Simulation results under linear and logistic models, together with a real-data application, show improved accuracy over existing renewable estimators.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Multi-Modal Hyper-Graph Fusion for Low-Light Crowd Counting

Crowd counting is a fundamental task in computer vision. However, crowd counting in low-light environments remains largely underexplored, despite its practical importance in the real world. Existing methods mainly focus on well-lit scenes or rely on single-modality Red-Green-Blue (RGB) representations, which often become unreliable under extreme darkness and complex non-uniform illumination. To handle this problem, we construct three new low-light crowd counting benchmarks, which consist of two synthetic datasets, SHA\_Dark and SHB\_Dark, and a real-world benchmark LC-Crowd (Low-light Crowd Dataset). Inspired by Retinex-based physical modeling, we introduce depth and Canny edge cues as complementary geometric and structural priors to enhance the intrinsic reflectance representation under low-light conditions. We propose a Multi-Modal Hyper-Graph Fusion module, which formulates RGB appearance, depth geometry, and edge structure cues as nodes in a unified hyper-graph and explicitly captures their high-order complementary relationships via dynamic hyperedge construction and message passing. Furthermore, to adaptively allocate computation in dense prediction, we propose a Deformable Rectangular Sparse Attention (DRSA) module, which concentrates computation on informative regions through anchor-aware estimation and adaptive rectangular window modeling. Based on these designs, we develop a unified Low-Light Counting Network (LCNet) for robust low-light crowd counting. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method achieves the best overall performance against existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. The code is in the supplementary material. The datasets will be made public upon acceptance.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Foundation model-based tool for automated ulcerative colitis histology scoring demonstrates non-inferiority to pathologists across multiple scoring indices

In clinical trials for ulcerative colitis (UC), pathologists assess disease severity through standardized histological indices, including the Geboes Score, Robarts Histopathology Index (RHI), and Nancy Histologic Index (NHI). Despite strong associations with clinical outcomes, histologic scoring suffers from inter- and intra-reader variability, and consensus criteria for histologic remission remain uncertain. Through a consortium approach, we developed an artificial intelligence-based measurement (AIM) tool for scoring histology in UC mucosal biopsies (AIM-HI UC). This model, trained on a large dataset of UC biopsies (N=10,230), utilizes additive multiple instance learning models leveraging PLUTO, a pathology foundation model, that predict each of the Geboes subgrades, from which the Geboes grade-level score, RHI, and NHI can be calculated. Evaluation of this model on a standalone verification set including clinical trial specimens established algorithm non-inferiority and/or superiority relative to standard qualified pathologists through comparison of algorithm-consensus and pathologist-consensus agreement metrics (non-inferior if difference >-0.1, superior if difference >0, inclusive of confidence intervals). AIM-HI UC was determined to be non-inferior to pathologists (N=3) for the prediction of all seven Geboes subgrades, grade-level Geboes, RHI, NHI, histologic improvement (GS

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

On the Limitations of Ray-Tracing for Learning-Based RF Tasks in Urban Environments

arXiv:2507.19653v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the realism of Sionna v1.0.2 ray-tracing for outdoor cellular links in central Rome. We use a real measurement set of 1,664 user-equipments (UEs) and six nominal base-station (BS) sites. Using these fixed positions we systematically vary the main simulation parameters, including path depth, diffuse/specular/refraction flags, carrier frequency, as well as antenna's properties like its altitude, radiation pattern, and orientation. Simulator fidelity is scored for each base station via Spearman correlation between measured and simulated powers, and by a fingerprint-based k-nearest-neighbor localization algorithm using RSSI-based fingerprints. Across all experiments, solver hyper-parameters are having immaterial effect on the chosen metrics. On the contrary, antenna locations and orientations prove decisive. By simple greedy optimization we improve the Spearman correlation by 5% to 130% for various base stations, while kNN-based localization error using only simulated data as reference points is decreased by one-third on real-world samples, while staying twice higher than the error with purely real data. Precise geometry and credible antenna models are therefore necessary but not sufficient; faithfully capturing the residual urban noise remains an open challenge for transferable, high-fidelity outdoor RF simulation.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Utility-Constrained Policy Optimization

arXiv:2606.14029v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Constrained MDPs (CMDPs) are a widely adopted framework for incorporating safety into RL agents; however, the framework does not support risk-sensitive constraints. This can be problematic: For example, CMDPs allow for optimal solutions that, in order to satisfy the risk-neutral constraints, mix infrequent catastrophic behaviors and frequent, overly conservative ones. Moreover, prior empirical results suggest that enforcing stricter, risk-sensitive constraints can improve performance even under risk-neutral evaluation. The natural framework to incorporate risk-sensitive constraints is utility-constrained MDPs (UCMDPs), but no practical solutions for this problem existed. In this work, we introduce a simple yet powerful methodology for UCMDPs and constrained RL. Besides allowing for risk-sensitive constraints, our framework does not require us to fix constraint limits in advance of training the agent, provided that a sensible range is known. This increases policy flexibility and, in practice, allows for adjustments to these limits at no extra training cost. Besides benefiting from the generality of the framework, our agent shows strong performance in practice, consistently matching or outperforming existing baselines in several Safety Gymnasium benchmark tasks.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Agentic AI-based Framework for Mitigating Premature Diagnostic Handoff and Silent Hallucination in Healthcare Applications

arXiv:2606.18068v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and multi-agent systems have driven the rise of Agentic AI, showing promise for medical reasoning. However, open-ended conversational agents remain prone to two critical failure modes: premature diagnostic handoff and silent clinical hallucinations that may go undetected before reaching the patient. In this work, we propose a multi-agent framework that addresses both issues by replacing ``LLM-as-a-judge'' routing with deterministic orchestration constraints. The framework incorporates two safety mechanisms. First, a neuro-symbolic state-tracking gate enforces completeness of the OLDCARTS clinical protocol (Onset, Location, Duration, Character, Aggravating/Alleviating factors, Radiation, Timing, and Severity) by blocking diagnostic transitions until all required dimensions are collected. Second, an epistemic uncertainty quantification (UQ) gate computes semantic entropy (H) across K=5 independent diagnostic samples to identify and intercept divergent outputs before delivery. We evaluate the system using simulated patient agents powered by the llama-3.1-70b-instruct model on 150 test cases. The full architecture achieves 49.3% diagnostic precision, representing an absolute improvement of 11.3 percentage points over an unconstrained baseline. Additionally, we observe a statistically significant negative correlation (r = -0.181, p < 0.05) between OLDCARTS completeness (\sigma) and semantic entropy (H), suggesting that structured information gathering is associated with reduced diagnostic uncertainty.

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

PROBE: Probabilistic Occupancy BEV Encoding with Analytical Translation Robustness for 3D Place Recognition

We present PROBE (PRobabilistic Occupancy BEV Encoding), a learning-free LiDAR place recognition descriptor that models each BEV cell's occupancy as a Bernoulli random variable. Rather than relying on discrete point-cloud perturbations, PROBE analytically marginalizes over continuous Cartesian translations via the polar Jacobian, yielding a distance-adaptive angular uncertainty $\sigma_\theta = \sigma_t / r$ in $\mathcal{O}(R{\cdot}S)$ time. The primary parameter $\sigma_t$ represents the expected translational uncertainty in meters, a sensor-independent physical quantity that enhances cross-sensor generalization while reducing the need for extensive per-dataset tuning. Pairwise similarity combines a Bernoulli-KL Jaccard with exponential uncertainty gating and FFT-based height cosine similarity for rotation alignment. Evaluated on four datasets spanning four diverse LiDAR types, PROBE achieves the highest accuracy among handcrafted descriptors in multi-session evaluation and competitive single-session performance relative to both handcrafted and supervised baselines. The source code and supplementary materials are available at https://sites.google.com/view/probe-pr.

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

Reasoning Models Know What's Important, and Encode It in Their Activations

Language models often solve complex tasks by generating long reasoning chains, consisting of many steps with varying importance. While some steps are crucial for generating the final answer, others are removable. Determining which steps matter most, and why, remains an open question central to understanding how models process reasoning. We investigate if this question is best approached through model internals or through tokens of the reasoning chain itself. We find that model activations contain more information than tokens for identifying important reasoning steps. Crucially, by training probes on model activations to predict importance, we show that models encode an internal representation of step importance, even prior to the generation of subsequent steps. The internal representations of importance in different models yield high agreement on which steps are important. The representation is distributed across layers, and does not correlate with surface-level features, such as a step's relative position or its length. Our findings suggest that analyzing activations can reveal aspects of reasoning that surface-level approaches fundamentally miss, indicating that reasoning analyses should look into model internals.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

City landscape in sight: A crowdsourced framework for unlocking urban-scale window view perceptions from real estate imagery

City landscapes viewed through home windows influence quality of life, yet perceptions of actual window views at the urban scale remain understudied. This study presents an approach for large-scale mapping of perceptions using 12,334 window view images (WVIs) collected from actual residential properties listed on real estate platforms in Wuhan, China, representing a rarely explored form of urban view imagery that offers advantages over the rendered or simulated window views commonly examined in previous studies. Through a non-immersive virtual reality platform, we collected 27,477 pairwise comparisons across six perceptual dimensions (e.g.\ Vivid) from 304 participants based on 499 WVIs. A hybrid neural network model was trained to predict human perceptions of all crowdsourced WVIs and map their spatial distribution. Results reveal significant spatial autocorrelation with distinct hot and cold spots across the whole city. Floor level strongly influences human perceptions: while higher floors offer more preferred and extensive window views, lower-floor windows provide residents with quiet and vivid views. An inference model further shows that window view composition matters considerably: high ratios of sky, trees, and low-rise buildings enhance people's preferences and perceptions of vividness, whereas high ratios of high-rise buildings increase perceptions of monotony and oppression. Importantly, these effects are non-linear: the excessive presence of certain elements can alter their impact on human perception. This work advances urban-scale understanding of residents' visual experiences and provides evidence-based guidance for human-centric urban planning and real estate to optimise visual landscapes from windows.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Rare Coding Variants Reveal Distinct Genetic Architectures Across Multidimensional Sleep Phenotypes

Sleep and circadian traits have been widely studied using common variants, but the contribution of rare coding variation remains unclear. We analyzed rare coding variants in 397,065 whole-exome sequenced UK Biobank participants across 36 sleep phenotypes from self-report, diagnoses, sleep medication use and accelerometry, and meta-analyzed results with 171,536 whole-genome sequenced All of Us participants of diverse ancestries, with replication in the Mass General Brigham Biobank (N = 31,275). We identified 260 genes associated with sleep phenotypes, including novel associations with sleep medication use in 29 genes and 24 out of 29 have not previously been reported with any sleep phenotypes. We observed modest but significant rare variant heritability and strong genetic correlations between sleep medication use, insomnia and fatigue. Temporal gene expression trajectory analyses indicate that genes associated with self-reported sleep traits show constant high prenatal expression, whereas genes linked to sleep medication phenotypes exhibit peak expression in the late prenatal period. These findings highlight distinct biological mechanisms captured by different measurement sources of sleep phenotypes and reveal rare-variant-informed targets for therapeutic discovery.

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

NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Image Super-Resolution (x4): Methods and Results

This paper presents the NTIRE 2025 image super-resolution ($\times$4) challenge, one of the associated competitions of the 10th NTIRE Workshop at CVPR 2025. The challenge aims to recover high-resolution (HR) images from low-resolution (LR) counterparts generated through bicubic downsampling with a $\times$4 scaling factor. The objective is to develop effective network designs or solutions that achieve state-of-the-art SR performance. To reflect the dual objectives of image SR research, the challenge includes two sub-tracks: (1) a restoration track, emphasizes pixel-wise accuracy and ranks submissions based on PSNR; (2) a perceptual track, focuses on visual realism and ranks results by a perceptual score. A total of 286 participants registered for the competition, with 25 teams submitting valid entries. This report summarizes the challenge design, datasets, evaluation protocol, the main results, and methods of each team. The challenge serves as a benchmark to advance the state of the art and foster progress in image SR.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

The Distributed Detectability Band Against Marginal-Preserving Attacks

arXiv:2606.10456v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AI-control monitors score individual agent actions to detect misbehavior, but real harm can be distributed across many benign-looking steps, each individually below any per-step alarm. We construct a marginal-preserving, correlation-encoded distributed-sabotage attack using a Gaussian-copula AR(1) construction: the per-step monitor-score marginal is held exactly equal to benign, so mean, max, top-k tail, and threshold monitors (Monitor A) are defeated by construction, while harm is encoded in the temporal correlation structure. We sequence the paper around three reviewer-mandated gates. (1) Realizability gate: the stealthy attack achieves KS-distance to benign of 0.013 (effectively zero) at all tested harm levels up to 3.0, confirming that harm is fully decoupled from the per-step marginal and realizability is not harm-limited. (2) Monitor-A-vs-B reconciliation: we show formally that the attack, built against Monitor A's score marginal, remains marginal-preserving under a different-score Monitor B (the correlation/sequence family: CUSUM, SPRT, HMM-LR, runs test, autocorrelation, windowed logistic), and scope worst-case claims to score functions that admit a temporal signature. (3) Non-empty detectability band: Monitor A achieves AUC 0.52 (chance); Monitor B spans AUC 0.79-0.97 at the same 1% FPR target, and as harm is amortized over more steps Monitor A collapses to chance while Monitor B holds at AUC ~0.95. These results demonstrate a non-empty detectability band and characterize the sub-threshold sabotage frontier: distribution-shape monitors fail by construction; temporal-correlation monitors can detect but are not trivially optimal.