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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Compact graphs and quantum automorphisms

arXiv:2606.13928v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Compact graphs are graphs for which the fractional automorphism polytope has no genuinely fractional vertices. This paper proposes a quantum analogue of this idea by evaluating the fundamental magic unitary of the quantum automorphism group on states, which we show to produce a closed convex set of doubly stochastic matrices sitting between the classical automorphism polytope and the full fractional automorphism polytope. Our main result is that the natural quantum analogue of compactness is classical, that is, a quantum compact graph is classically compact. We also relate this set to the quantum orbital algebra and obtain a hierarchy of classical and quantum compactness pseudo notions. The framework recovers familiar consequences of compactness through commutants and suggests quantum analogues of generous transitivity and distance-transitivity. We also isolate examples and open problems indicating where quantum symmetries may strictly refine the classical compactness theory.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Sharp Transitions for Subsystem Complexity

arXiv:2510.18832v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The circuit complexity of time-evolved pure quantum states grows linearly in time for an exponentially long time. This behavior has been proven in certain models, is conjectured to hold for generic quantum many-body systems, and is believed to be dual to the long-time growth of black hole interiors in AdS/CFT. Achieving a similar understanding for mixed states remains an important problem. In this work, we study the circuit complexity of time-evolved subsystems of pure quantum states. We find that for greater-than-half subsystem sizes, the complexity grows linearly in time for an exponentially long time, similarly to that of the full state. However, for less-than-half subsystem sizes, the complexity rises and then falls, returning to low complexity as the subsystem equilibrates. Notably, the transition between these two regimes occurs sharply at half system size. We use holographic duality to map out this picture of subsystem complexity dynamics and rigorously prove the existence of the sharp transition in random quantum circuits. Furthermore, we use holography to predict features of complexity growth at finite temperature that lie beyond the reach of techniques based on random quantum circuits. In particular, at finite temperature, we argue for an additional sharp transition at a critical less-than-half subsystem size. Below this critical value, the subsystem complexity saturates nearly instantaneously rather than exhibiting a rise and fall. This novel phenomenon, as well as an analogous transition above half system size, provides a target for future studies based on rigorous methods.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Heteroskedastic Signals in Budgeted LLM Verification: Structural Heterogeneity Limits Optimization Gains

作者:

arXiv:2606.15841v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) systems increasingly use uncertainty signals to allocate limited computation across verification, test-time scaling, tool execution, and other selective-compute decisions. Such policies rely on a global signal comparability assumption: equal scores should carry comparable decision value across inputs. Using budgeted verification as a controlled diagnostic setting, we identify a failure mode of this assumption: uncertainty quality is heteroskedastic across cost strata, with some regions exhibiting near-random discriminability despite concentrating many errors. Under an explicit local model, we characterize the resulting distortion of global allocation and show that its upper bound scales with cross-stratum signal-quality dispersion. We separate weak signals, optimization instability, and structural heterogeneity through a controlled intervention hierarchy: Threshold, MP-Adapt, MP-Strat, and a deliberately simple cost-stratified thresholding intervention (CST). Across MBPP and MATH using Qwen3-8B, LLaMA3-8B, and GPT-4o-mini, global online adaptation yields inconsistent gains over static thresholding; MP-Strat partially recovers performance, while CST improves hit rate by up to 17 percentage points in strongly heterogeneous settings without gradient updates. These results identify structural heterogeneity, rather than optimizer weakness alone, as the primary bottleneck in the observed settings. More broadly, misaligned feedback structure cannot always be repaired by stronger optimization.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

ExPLAIND: Unifying Model, Data, and Training Attribution to Study Model Behavior

arXiv:2505.20076v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Post-hoc interpretability methods typically attribute a model's behavior to its components, data, or training trajectory in isolation, and are often tied to a particular level of granularity along the local-to-global spectrum. This leads to explanations that lack a unified view and may miss key interactions. We present ExPLAIND, a theoretically grounded, unified framework that integrates model components, data, and training trajectory while supporting explanations across granularities. We generalize recent work on gradient path kernels, reformulating models trained by AdamW as kernel machines. From the resulting kernel feature maps, we derive novel parameter-wise and step-wise influence scores. We empirically validate the resulting decomposition of model behavior in several settings and apply ExPLAIND to two case studies. Our findings on a Transformer exhibiting Grokking support previously proposed learning phases, while refining the final phase as one in which outer layers align around a representation pipeline learned after memorization. For EuroLLM pretraining, ExPLAIND reveals a two-phase dynamic, with the first characterized by outer-layer MLP learning and the second by increased relative influence of intermediate attention layers. These results establish ExPLAIND as a unified framework for interpreting model behavior and training dynamics.

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

Reinforcement Learning with Action-Triggered Observations

arXiv:2510.02149v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce Action-Triggered Sporadically Traceable Markov Decision Processes (ATST-MDPs), a reinforcement learning framework for partial observability in which full state observations occur stochastically at each step, with probability determined by the chosen action. We derive Bellman equations tailored to this setting and establish the existence of an optimal policy. Exploiting the fact that sporadic observations reveal the full state, we provide an equivalent formulation in which agents commit to action-sequences between consecutive observations. Under the linear MDP assumption, we show that the value function over such action-sequences admits a linear representation in a finite-dimensional feature map, enabling standard regression-based methods. As an application, we derive ATST-LSVI-UCB, an optimistic algorithm achieving regret $\widetilde{O}(\sqrt{Kd^3(1-\gamma)^{-3}})$ for episodic learning with geometrically distributed horizons, where $K$ is the number of episodes, $d$ the feature dimension, and $\gamma$ the discount factor (episode continuation probability), matching the known rate for linear MDPs with full observability.

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

Sign-Language Datasets at Scale: A Comprehensive Survey on Resources, Benchmarks, and Annotation Standards

Sign languages are expressive visual languages used by Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) communities. Despite substantial progress in sign-language recognition, translation, and production, advances remain constrained by fragmented datasets, inconsistent annotations, and limited linguistic coverage. Existing benchmarks often fail to reflect real-world communication needs, and systematic analyses of these limitations remain limited. In this survey, we present a comprehensive index of sign-language datasets, covering 120 resources across 35 sign languages. We analyze key challenges such as modality imbalance, annotation granularity, and signer bias, and outline considerations for future dataset design. We also introduce a 24-field Sign-Language Datasheet and release a public GitHub repository (https://github.com/Ginqwerty/Open-Sign-Language) to support standardized documentation and reproducible evaluation. Overall, our work provides a unified and practical foundation for developing inclusive, robust, and scalable sign-language technologies in real-world applications.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Beyond IGO-Flow: Toward Convergence Analysis of IGO in Continuous Spaces

arXiv:2606.17523v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Information-Geometric Optimization (IGO) provides a unified framework for black-box optimization by interpreting the adaptation of a search distribution as a natural gradient update. Despite its conceptual importance, the convergence theory of IGO remains limited: most existing results concern continuous-time idealizations such as the IGO flow, rather than discrete-time updates with non-infinitesimal learning rates. In this paper, we study discrete-time IGO in continuous spaces, formulated as natural gradient updates in the expectation-parameter coordinates of an exponential family. In particular, we analyze IGO over the multivariate Gaussian family on strongly convex quadratic objective functions. Our analysis covers a setting that simultaneously incorporates full covariance adaptation, a fixed positive learning rate, and quantile-based weights. In this setting, we prove that the covariance matrix converges to the zero matrix. We further show that the mean vector converges to the global optimum, provided that the condition number of the appropriately scaled covariance matrix is bounded at sufficiently frequent iterations. These results advance the convergence theory of IGO and help bridge the gap between the mathematical theory of IGO and practical covariance-adaptive search methods such as CMA-ES.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

WISE: A Long-Horizon Agent in Minecraft with Why-Which Reasoning

arXiv:2606.12852v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Rapid advances have been made in developing general-purpose embodied agent in environments like Minecraft through the adoption of LLM-augmented hierarchical approaches. Despite their promise, low-level controllers often become performance bottlenecks due to repeated execution failures. We argue that a key limitation is not only the lack of episodic memory, but also the decoupling of what-where-when memory from which-why reasoning. To address this, we propose WISE (Which-Why Informed Semantic Explorer), a long-horizon agent framework with an enhanced low-level controller equipped with a Causal Event Graph that augments episodic memory with explicit causal structure linking observations to task relevance. Unlike prior work such as MrSteve, which relies on feature similarity for retrieval, WISE enables robust recall under viewpoint changes and supports opportunistic task reordering through causal reasoning. Building on this memory, we propose an Opportunistic Task Scheduler that dynamically re-prioritizes subtasks when causally relevant opportunities are detected. We further equip WISE with a multi-scale progressive exploration strategy to provide spatially comprehensive observations for downstream reasoning. Experiments show that WISE largely improves task success and efficiency on long-horizon sparse tasks, particularly in settings requiring adaptive decision-making.

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

Adjoint Method versus Physics-Informed Neural Networks in PDE-Constrained Inverse Problems

arXiv:2606.12337v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inverse problems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs) are central to computational mechanics and are commonly solved by adjoint-based optimization, while physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have emerged as a flexible alternative. Their relative performance remains difficult to assess because the two approaches are often compared under different formulations, parameterizations, optimizers, and regularization choices. We present a fair comparison of adjoint optimization and PINNs for PDE-constrained inverse problems. From a common abstract formulation, we instantiate both methods on identical domains, governing equations, observation models, and regularization terms, while matching the optimizer, unknown parameterization, and arithmetic precision wherever applicable. The benchmarks include unsteady Burgers, noisy Darcy permeability inversion, three-dimensional Allen–Cahn reaction identification, and unsteady Navier–Stokes viscosity identification. The results show that the representation of the unknown largely determines the preferred method: grid-based fields favor the discrete adjoint, whereas neural representations are native to PINNs and relevant for closure and constitutive modeling. For time-dependent problems, adjoint inversion can be dominated by trajectory storage and differentiation, while PINNs provide satisfactory reconstructions at lower cost. A PINN-warm-started adjoint strategy then recovers adjoint-level accuracy at substantially reduced cost.

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

Viral Proteins Reveal Geometry of Protein Language Models

arXiv:2606.12609v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protein language models are trained on highly imbalanced datasets, raising the question of how they represent underrepresented biological sequences. Using viral proteins as a case study across ESM model families, we identify a dominant nativeness axis in embedding space, aligned with masked reconstruction perplexity, that orders sequences from well-modeled cellular proteins through viral proteins to shuffled and random sequences. Scaling contracts this axis unevenly across viral families. Despite this, protein language model embeddings retain viral-specific signal: viral proteins remain linearly separable beyond zero-shot perplexity and shallow sequence features. Together, these results suggest that pLM representations are structured by a general notion of nativeness while preserving information specific to distinct biological groups.

11.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15

Multiple Fault Analysis and Drug Therapy on Signaling Pathways Using Dynamic Bayesian Network-based Model

Cell growth is an intricate biological phenomenon that is closely regulated by the interplay between various growth factors and transcription factors. Signaling pathways are the main mediators in this event, which provide the driving force for mitosis or sometimes meiosis. However, when malfunctions occur within the biological network, they can cause uncontrolled cell division, regardless of external stimuli. By employing Dynamic Bayesian Networks (DBNs), these malfunctions can be explicitly simulated, offering insights into their effects on cellular behavior and growth regulation. To a significant extent, the resultant outcomes can be mitigated through the use of reduced drug combinations. This study delves into the intricacies of signaling pathway behavior under the influence of concurrent malfunctions. Initially, we replicate the effects of these dysfunctions within DBNs. Subsequently, drug therapy is applied to alleviate their impact. Our methodology introduces a parameter known as efficiency_score, enabling the identification of optimized drug combinations without prior knowledge of specific dysfunctions. Particularly relevant in the context of realistic cancer conditions, these tailored drug inhibition points demonstrate enhanced efficacy compared to conventional treatments. Leveraging GPU acceleration throughout the modeling process accelerates the analysis of multiple faults within the biological networks, rendering our approach notably faster and more efficient.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Stalls and Spequlation: Pipelined Execution for Fault Tolerant Quantum Computation

arXiv:2606.19593v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fault-tolerant quantum computation requires the coordinated action of three distinct systems: classical control logic, quantum hardware, and classical error decoders. Current scheduling models treat logical operations as atomic, hiding the fact that these subsystems operate sequentially and spend significant time idle. We present a pipelined execution framework that decomposes each logical operation into its component stages i.e. Control, Execute, and Decode. Building on this, we discuss some speculation strategies that allow successor operations to begin processing before their predecessors have completed decoding. We evaluate our framework on several common benchmarks and show that pipelining with speculation reduces total pipeline steps by 20-40% compared to a no-speculation baseline. The most aggressive strategy consistently outperforms conservative alternatives, even though partial rollback is needed at times, because the per-rollback penalty is small relative to the parallelism gained. We further show that speculation facilitates load balancing by distributing work more evenly across the heterogeneous subsystems of a fault-tolerant quantum computer, converting idle time into useful computation while also saving on execution time.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

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

作者:

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

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

RAMEN: Resolution-Adjustable Multimodal Encoder for Earth Observation

Earth observation (EO) data spans a wide range of spatial, spectral, and temporal resolutions, from high-resolution optical imagery to low resolution multispectral products or radar time series. While recent foundation models have improved multimodal integration for learning meaningful representations, they often expect fixed input resolutions or are based on sensor-specific encoders limiting generalization across heterogeneous EO modalities. To overcome these limitations we introduce RAMEN, a resolution-adjustable multimodal encoder that learns a shared visual representation across EO data in a fully sensor-agnostic manner. RAMEN treats the modality and spatial and temporal resolutions as key input data features, enabling coherent analysis across modalities within a unified latent space. Its main methodological contribution is to define spatial resolution as a controllable output parameter, giving users direct control over the desired level of detail at inference and allowing explicit trade-offs between spatial precision and computational cost. We train a single, unified transformer encoder reconstructing masked multimodal EO data drawn from diverse sources, ensuring generalization across sensors and resolutions. Once pretrained, RAMEN transfers effectively to both known and unseen sensor configurations and outperforms larger state-of-the-art models on the community-standard PANGAEA benchmark, containing various multi-sensor and multi-resolution downstream tasks. Our code and pretrained model are available at https://github.com/nicolashoudre/RAMEN.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

S-SPPO: Semantic-Calibrated Self-Play Preference Optimization

arXiv:2606.01561v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences is often formulated via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). However, the standard Bradley-Terry instantiation of DPO is limited in modeling common departures from transitivity in human preferences. To address this, recent work has introduced Self-Play Preference Optimization (SPPO), which iteratively refines the policy by training on self-generated win-lose pairs. Our investigation, however, reveals a critical instability in SPPO: the optimization is prone to policy degeneration when the preference oracle assigns overly confident wins to semantically indistinguishable responses. To mitigate this, we propose S-SPPO, a dual-space semantic calibration framework comprising: i) Supervision Calibration via semantic gating, which anneals win rate targets toward the maximum-entropy baseline as semantic overlap increases; and ii) Representation Calibration via latent repulsion to enforce geometric diversity to prevent manifold collapse and maintain latent diversity between chosen and rejected samples. Theoretically, we show that the calibration preserves the constant-sum game structure, facilitating convergence to a Nash Equilibrium. Empirically, S-SPPO avoids the performance degradation seen in prior methods, achieving 52.19% win rate and 47.46% length-controlled win rate on AlpacaEval 2.0 with Llama-3-8B, without using additional human-annotated preferences during training. The code will be available at https://github.com/xiwenc1/s-sppo.

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

Object Tokens as a Bridge Between Segmentation and Visual Question Answering in Robotic Surgery

Visual Question Answering (VQA) in robotic surgery, referred to as surgical VQA, requires high-level understanding of complex surgical scenes and the integration of visual perception with language reasoning, with the potential to support surgical training and intraoperative decision-making. Recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown promising performance through parameter-efficient fine-tuning; however, most existing approaches rely on coarse visual grounding, typically limited to bounding boxes, which fails to capture the fine-grained spatial structure of surgical objects. In this work, we propose a unified framework that jointly performs pixel-level segmentation and visual question answering within a single framework. Our approach integrates a VLM with a Segment Anything Model (SAM)-based decoder and represents scene elements as object tokens generated by the VLM. These object tokens guide answer prediction and are further projected to the SAM-based decoder to produce segmentation masks. By optimizing the object token embeddings through both segmentation and question answering objectives, the model learns spatially grounded representations that enhance visual reasoning while providing explicit pixel-level grounding. We evaluate the proposed method on the private RAMIE (Robot-Assisted Minimally Invasive Esophagectomy) dataset and the public EndoVis18 dataset, where it consistently outperforms baseline methods for surgical VQA. These results demonstrate that incorporating context-aware object tokens into vision-language models improves fine-grained surgical scene understanding.

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

When Does Mixing Help? Analyzing Query Embedding Interpolation in Multilingual Dense Retrieval

While mixed-language querying is ubiquitous in multilingual communities, the sensitivity of dense retrievers to such queries remains poorly understood. We present a ratio-controlled study on mMARCO that systematically evaluates retrieval performance by varying the mixing proportion of parallel query translations via embedding-level mixing – constructing mixed queries as an interpolation of monolingual embeddings. Experiments with BGE-M3 demonstrate that an optimal mixing ratio outperforms the best monolingual endpoint in 88/105 cases. We uncover a distinct asymmetry driven by English dominance: mixing is uniformly beneficial when retrieving from non-English document indices, whereas indices containing English are best served by pure English queries. Furthermore, English acts as the strongest mixing partner for every non-English document language. Finally, when controlling for English dominance, mixing gains correlate negatively with typological distance. We conclude that language-mix sensitivity is structured and predictable, and we validate the robustness of these patterns across model families and scales.

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

AIChilles: Automatically Uncovering Hidden Weaknesses in AI-Evolved Systems

arXiv:2606.15834v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The computer systems community has recently seen growing interest in AI-driven system evolution, where AI agents iteratively rewrite systems. Frameworks such as AdaEvolve and Engram report 12-60% score improvements over human-designed algorithms. While these results are promising, there are practical concerns if these AI-evolved programs can perform worse on unseen workloads and exhibit scalability regressions. Given the speed and scale of AI-generated code, we need automated mechanisms to uncover such identify hidden weaknesses in AI-evolved systems programs. To this end, we develop AIChilles that takes as input a baseline program $P$ and an AI-evolved program $P'$, AIChilles searches for valid workloads where $P'$ regresses relative to $P$ in correctness, runtime, memory usage, or output quality. To tackle the diversity in system applications, weakness types and potential bugs, AIChilles combines deterministic workload-parameter extraction, agent-based constraint inference, differential oracles, and code-frequency coverage to discover diverse failures. Across five system applications and 30 AI-evolved programs, AIChilles finds 49 distinct hidden weaknesses. We also show that explicitly including AIChilles in the AI-driven development lifecycle can mitigate several of these weaknesses.

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

JSCGC: Joint Source-Channel-Generation Coding for Wireless Generative Communications

Conventional communication systems, including both separation-based coding and learning-based joint source-channel coding (JSCC), are typically designed under Shannon's rate-distortion theory. However, relying on generic distortion metrics fails to capture complex human visual perception, often resulting in blurred or unrealistic reconstructions. In this paper, we propose Joint Source-Channel-Generation Coding (JSCGC), a generative communication paradigm that replaces the conventional decoder with a generative model at the receiver. The received signal is treated as a condition that controls the sampling process into the learned conditional distribution, reformulating communication from deterministic reconstruction for distortion minimization to controlled generation for mutual information maximization under perceptual constraints. Based on this formulation, we develop a unified joint training and efficient stochastic sampling framework, and provide theoretical analysis of its effectiveness in both learning and inference stages. Extensive experiments on latent-space image transmission demonstrate that the JSCGC consistently improves feature-based, semantic-level, and distributional quality across diverse channel conditions, while exhibiting a distinct error behavior characterized by semantic inconsistency rather than distortion.

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

Data-driven Control with Real-time Uncertainty Compensation for Multi-Fuel Engines

arXiv:2606.16171v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-fuel compression ignition (CI) engines offer superior power density and fuel flexibility. However, achieving consistent and optimal combustion phasing across a wide range of operating conditions remains a major challenge, particularly in the presence of modeling uncertainties. This paper presents a novel, data-driven real-time uncertainty compensation framework for combustion control in multi-fuel CI engines. The proposed approach introduces a pseudo-engine speed that enables dynamic adaptation of control inputs in response to uncertainty affecting the engine. To model the underlying combustion process, a Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) model is first trained on available input-output data, capturing the nonlinear and fuel-dependent behavior across varying operating conditions. Control inputs are then synthesized through model inversion of the learned GPR surrogate and augmented with an uncertainty compensator designed to mitigate deviations caused by dynamic variations in operating conditions and model inaccuracies. This integrated control strategy allows for real-time input corrections within a finite number of combustion cycles. Theoretical analysis establishes finite-time convergence guarantees for the proposed controller. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method steers the combustion phasing to the desired value in real-time, providing a scalable and adaptive control solution for multi-fuel CI engine operation.

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

CacheWeaver: Cache-Aware Evidence Ordering for Efficient Grounded RAG Inference

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) improves factual grounding, but it also lengthens prompts and raises prefill cost. Prefix caching in serving engines such as vLLM reduces this cost only when requests share the same token prefix. In grounded generation, however, adjacent queries may retrieve overlapping evidence in different orders, so set overlap does not become reusable prefix overlap. We present CacheWeaver, a lightweight prompt-layer method for cache-aware evidence ordering. The method keeps a prefix tree over recently served evidence sequences and uses a greedy walk to place the most reusable prefix first, while leaving the serving engine and retrieved evidence set unchanged. Across three vLLM configurations, the method lowers median time-to-first-token (TTFT) by about 20-33 percent relative to retrieval-order prefix caching, without hurting answer quality in our QA tests. The greedy policy reaches 97.5 percent of the median TTFT gain from oracle ordering, indicating that most reusable prefix locality can be recovered by a simple scheduling layer between retrieval and inference.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Strategic Feature Selection

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

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

Self-CTRL: Self-Consistency Training with Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.18327v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language models (LMs) that faithfully describe their own behavior can more easily be audited, understood, and trusted by users. This paper describes Self-Consistency Training with Reinforcement Learning (Self-CTRL), a method that optimizes for consistency between a LM's self-explanations and behavior on related inputs by updating explanations to better predict behavior or updating behavior to better match explanations. We apply our method in two domains. First, we study a formal probabilistic reasoning task in which LMs must learn to imitate a family of biased samplers and evaluated on their ability to report the associated biases. We find that consistency training improves the correlation between self-reported and behaviorally-measured latent biases from $R^2=0.24$ to $R^2=0.64$ on a set of held-out distributions, matching the generalization of direct ground-truth supervision. Second, we study a constitutional AI domain in which LMs must describe when they will refuse or comply with user requests. Here, Self-CTRL produces rules that faithfully describe the model's behavior on held-out requests, improving the refusal predictions of a third-party auditor model from $36\%$ to $92\%$. In the other direction, behavior updates improve alignment, reducing HarmBench failure rate from $15.0\%$ to $0.5\%$ without substantially increasing refusal on harmless prompts. By aligning explanations and behavior, our work provides a general recipe for training AI models to be safer, more transparent, and more controllable.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

SVHighlights: Towards Extremely Long Sport Video Highlight Detection

While highlight detection for long-form videos is of great practical importance, most existing methods remain limited to short-form content, largely due to the absence of a suitable benchmark. To bridge this gap, we introduce SVHighlights, to the best of our knowledge, the first benchmark for highlight detection in extremely long sports videos, each exceeding one hour in duration, across multiple sports categories. SVHighlights is constructed from pairs of full-length sports videos and their corresponding official highlight videos using a dataset generation pipeline, enabling scalable label generation without conventional per-clip saliency annotation. The benchmark comprises 320 videos with an average duration of 2.00 hours and a total of 640.18 hours, substantially exceeding previous datasets. Existing methods also face fundamental challenges on long videos: models trained on short clips fail to generalize to hour-long content, and their clip-level scoring lacks the broader context needed to identify highlights. To address this and provide a strong baseline, we present TF-SELECTOR, a training-free segment-based approach that divides each video into context-aware segments by merging adjacent shots sharing the same semantic content, and predicts segment-level saliency scores using a large language model with multimodal inputs including visual captions, transcripts, and audio volume. Experiments demonstrate that TF-SELECTOR achieves superior performance across most metrics compared to Video Temporal Grounding (VTG)-tuned baselines, with improvements of +2.50 in HIT@1, +4.04 in HIT@K, and +2.95 in IoU. These results establish SVHighlights as a challenging testbed for long-form highlight detection and demonstrate that a simple segment-based strategy can effectively scale to hour-long videos.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

How do Self-Supervised Remote Sensing Vision Models Transfer to Downstream Tasks?

Self-supervised geospatial foundation models (GeoFMs) learn transferable representations from remote sensing data, but their downstream behavior is difficult to characterize. We study six representative GeoFMs spanning joint-embedding, reconstruction, and multimodal pretraining families, and evaluate transfer across classification, regression, and segmentation benchmarks under different label availability and downstream pipelines. We find that model rankings change across tasks and adaptation settings. Layerwise probing shows that, in most cases, task-relevant information is more accessible in intermediate transformer blocks compared to final-layer embeddings, and that GeoFMs exhibit distinct depthwise profiles. In segmentation case studies on PASTIS and Sen1Floods11, downstream adaptation settings such as decoder design and fine-tuning can be as impactful as the choice of GeoFM, and standard dense-prediction heads may be poorly aligned with how GeoFMs organize information over depth. Finally, CKA analysis on case studies shows that fine-tuning does not rewrite GeoFMs uniformly across depth, and the strongest changes are localized to the first linear layer of the MLP in ViT blocks. These results help explain why GeoFM rankings shift across benchmarks and motivate more representation-aware evaluation and adaptation strategies.