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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Marked random graphs with given degree sequence: large deviations on the local topology

arXiv:2401.00351v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate the behavior of the empirical neighborhood distribution of marked graphs in the framework of local weak convergence. Here we extend known results by considering uniform random graphs with given degree sequences and i.i.d. marks on half-edges and vertices. We establish a large deviation principle for such families of empirical measures. The proof builds on Bordenave and Caputo's seminal 2015 paper, and Delgosha and Anantharam's 2019 introduction of BC entropy, relying on combinatorial lemmas that allow one to construct suitable approximations of measures supported on marked trees. Possible applications of these results are in the study of interacting diffusions on top of random graphs.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Visuals Lie, Consistency Speaks: Disentangling Spatial Attention from Reliability in Vision-Language Models

Multimodal Foundation Models are increasingly used as reasoning agents, making reliability, knowing when a model may hallucinate, critical. A common intuition, which we call the Attention-Confidence Assumption, holds that reliability follows from "structural" visual perception: tight attention on relevant regions should signal a trustworthy answer, while scattered attention signals confusion. We challenge this through the VLM Reliability Probe (VRP), a systematic cross-family study of reliability signals in contemporary Vision-Language Models (VLMs). We introduce structural-attention metrics, cluster counts (C_k) and spatial entropy (H_s), to quantify the visual encoder's gaze, and track its evolution (Delta H_s) across layers. This reveals a "Symbolic Detachment": models often "Early Lock" visual features only to diffuse attention later, severing early perception from final generation. Contrary to the grounding hypothesis, we find a "Cluster Failure": spatial attention has near-zero correlation (R approx 0.001) with accuracy. Instead, reliability is a phenomenon of generation dynamics and internal-state distributions. Self-Consistency, the agreement rate across sampled reasoning paths, is the dominant predictor of truth (R = 0.429). Scaling causal interventions exposes a sharp architectural divergence: LLaVA locks its prediction in a fragile late-stage bottleneck, whereas PaliGemma and Qwen2-VL distribute reliability globally, staying resilient even when ~50% or more of their most predictive layer is destroyed. For current VLMs, reliability signals are detached from visual grounding maps and are best inferred from generation-time dynamics and hidden-state probes.

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

Contrastive Regularization for Accent-Robust ASR

arXiv:2605.03297v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: ASR systems based on self-supervised acoustic pretraining and CTC fine-tuning achieve strong performance on native speech but remain sensitive to accent variability. We investigate supervised contrastive learning (SupCon) as a lightweight, accent-invariant auxiliary objective for CTC fine-tuning. An utterance-level contrastive loss regularizes encoder representations without architectural modification or explicit accent supervision. Experiments on the L2-ARCTIC benchmark show consistent WER reductions across multiple pretrained encoders, with up to 25 – 29\% relative reduction under unseen-accent evaluation. Analysis using within-transcript cosine dispersion indicates that SupCon promotes more compact and stable representation geometry under accent variability. Overall, SupCon provides an effective and model-agnostic regularization strategy for improving accent robustness.

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

Offline Diffusion Policy for Multi-User Delay-Constrained Scheduling

arXiv:2501.12942v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Effective multi-user delay-constrained scheduling is crucial in various real-world applications, including embodied AI, instant messaging, live streaming, and data center management, where efficient resource allocation is required among users with diverse delay sensitivities. In these scenarios, schedulers must make real-time decisions to satisfy both delay and resource constraints without prior knowledge of system dynamics, which are often time-varying and challenging to estimate. {Current learning-based methods typically require online interactions with actual systems during the training stage. Therefore, these approaches are often difficult or impractical, as they can significantly degrade system performance and incur substantial service costs.} To address these challenges, we propose a novel offline reinforcement learning-based algorithm, named \underline{S}cheduling By \underline{O}ffline Learning with \underline{C}ritic Guidance and \underline{D}iffusion Model (SOCD), to learn efficient scheduling policies purely from pre-collected offline data. SOCD innovatively employs a diffusion policy, complemented by a sampling-free critic network for policy guidance. By integrating the Lagrangian multiplier optimization into the offline reinforcement learning, SOCD efficiently trains high-quality constraint-aware policies exclusively from available datasets, eliminating the need for online interactions with the system. Experimental results demonstrate that SOCD is resilient to various system dynamics, including partially observable and large-scale environments, and delivers superior performance compared to existing methods.

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

Incumbent Advantage: Brand Bias and Cognitive Manipulation Dynamics in LLM Recommendation Systems

Large language models (LLMs) are becoming a major way for consumers to find products, but we do not yet understand how brands compete in this new channel. We study brand dynamics in LLM recommendations using skincare products – a category where consumers cannot easily judge quality before buying and must rely on brand reputation – across three commercial LLMs (GPT-4o-mini, Claude Sonnet, Gemini 3 Flash), with a robustness check on search goods. In three experiments, we find: (1) a Conditional Monopoly where well-known brands get recommended 100% of the time (IAI = 10.0) when all products have the same specifications, but this dominance disappears with less than a +0.1-star rating advantage for a competitor; (2) authority-style marketing language, including fabricated clinical-evidence claims, breaks this monopoly at a Bias Surplus Value equal to +0.17 rating points, with each model responding differently; and (3) a social dilemma in multi-brand GEO competition: when all brands adopt the same optimization strategy, individual payoff falls from +0.802 to +0.007 in our payoff proxy, and non-participating brands receive zero recommendations in our tests. Our results suggest that generative engine optimization (GEO) should be studied not only as a security risk, but also as an emerging marketing practice that shapes market competition.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Genome-wide association and multi-omics functional screens reveal the genetic architecture of foveal development

Foveal hypoplasia causes visual impairment across congenital eye disorders, yet the genetic programmes governing foveal development remain poorly characterised and no tractable model exists for foveal disease. In the first genome-wide association study of foveal hypoplasia, we identified 42 sentinel variants mapping to 54 effector genes supported by >= 2 criteria from a variant-to-gene framework incorporating developmental multi-omics. Disruption of six effector genes using mutant lines and CRISPR knockouts in the zebrafish high acuity zone recapitulates structural, functional, and ultrastructural hallmarks of foveal hypoplasia, establishing the first vertebrate disease model. Integration with human foetal single-cell and spatial transcriptomics reveals two temporal waves of effector gene expression and identifies Muller glia as critical mediators of foveal patterning. Phenome-wide analyses reveal foveal variants are pleiotropic with refractive, lenticular, and metabolic traits, connecting foveal development to anterior segment and systemic disease biology. These findings should inform mechanistic studies of macular disease.

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

Pixel-TTS: Image based Text Rendering for Robust Text-to-Speech

Recent advances in pixel-based text modeling show that representing text as images enables models to exploit visual cues for language understanding. Grounding text in its visual form allows structurally similar characters with different Unicode encodings to produce similar embeddings, benefiting cross-lingual and zero-shot scenarios. Conventional text-based approaches treat each character independently, limiting generalization to unseen characters and requiring embedding expansion during cross-lingual adaptation. We propose Pixel-TTS, the first framework for visually grounded speech synthesis. It renders text as images and projects them through a 2D convolutional layer to generate embeddings. This design eliminates embedding matrix expansion during fine-tuning while improving robustness to unseen characters and orthographic variations. Extensive experiments show Pixel-TTS achieves competitive performance with strong baselines, faster convergence and robust zero-shot generalization.

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

Mitigating Disparate Impact of Differentially Private Learning through Bounded Adaptive Clipping

arXiv:2506.01396v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Differential privacy (DP) has become an essential framework for privacy-preserving machine learning. Existing DP learning methods, however, often have disparate impacts on model predictions, e.g., for minority groups. Gradient clipping, which is often used in DP learning, can suppress larger gradients from challenging samples. We show that this problem is amplified by adaptive clipping, which will often shrink the clipping bound to tiny values to match a well-fitting majority, while significantly reducing the accuracy for others. We propose bounded adaptive clipping, which introduces a tunable lower bound to prevent excessive gradient suppression. Our method improves worst-class accuracy by over 10 percentage points on Skewed and Fashion MNIST compared to unbounded adaptive clipping, 7 points compared to Automatic clipping, and 5 points compared to constant clipping. The code is available at https://github.com/TrustworthyMLHelsinki/adaptive-clipping-fairness.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

From Physics to Representation: Audio Learning with Synthetic Pre-training via Procedural Generation

arXiv:2606.14791v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Self-supervised learning advances audio representation for multimedia analysis. However, prevailing data-centric approaches rely on massive real-world corpora, increasing training costs, curation burdens, and privacy barriers. To address this, we present AudioPG, a procedural synthesis framework eliminating real audio recordings during pre-training. AudioPG trains a Transformer-based masked autoencoder on waveforms generated on-the-fly from basic acoustic primitives and composition rules. The encoder transfers effectively to real audio benchmarks, achieving 90.60% accuracy on ESC-50, 0.546 mAP on FSD50K, 88.17% on UrbanSound8K, and 97.03% on Speech Commands V2. Notably, pre-training completes in under 20 minutes on a single GPU. Latent space analysis reveals physical factors, including fundamental frequency and relative intensity, emerge in orthogonal subspaces, making representations linearly decodable. These results establish procedural synthesis as an efficient, interpretable pre-training signal when large-scale corpora are unavailable. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Freyliu0516/audioPG.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Improving Detection of Rare Nodes in Hierarchical Multi-Label Learning

arXiv:2602.08986v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In hierarchical multi-label classification, a persistent challenge is enabling model predictions to reach deeper levels of the hierarchy for more detailed or fine-grained classifications. This difficulty partly arises from the natural rarity of certain classes (or hierarchical nodes) and the hierarchical constraint that ensures child nodes are almost always less frequent than their parents. To address this, we propose a weighted loss objective for neural networks that combines node-wise imbalance weighting with focal weighting components, the latter leveraging modern quantification of ensemble uncertainties. By emphasizing rare nodes rather than rare observations (data points), and focusing on uncertain nodes for each model output distribution during training, we observe improvements in recall by up to a factor of five on benchmark datasets, along with statistically significant gains in $F_{1}$ score. We also show our approach aids convolutional networks on challenging tasks, as in situations with suboptimal encoders or limited data.

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

Persistent Homology of the Planar Wiener Sausage: Brownian Scaling and a Logarithmic Expectation Law

arXiv:2606.11248v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study degree-one persistent homology of the planar Wiener-sausage filtration generated by standard Brownian motion without drift. In the drifted case, regeneration along the drift direction leads to linear-in-time laws for persistent-homological observables. In the recurrent zero-drift case, this renewal structure disappears. The organizing mechanism is instead Brownian self-similarity: the persistence diagram at time $T$ is equal in law to the image of the unit-time diagram under spatial dilation by $\sqrt T$. Consequently, large-time questions on fixed radius windows are transformed into small-radius questions for the unit-time Brownian trace. Let $B$ be standard planar Brownian motion, let $K_T=B\left(\left[0,T\right]\right)$, and let $K_T^{\left(r\right)}$ be the radius-$r$ Wiener sausage. Since $K_T^{\left(r\right)}$ is connected, its first Betti number $\beta_1^T\left(r\right)$ is the number of bounded complementary components of $K_T^{\left(r\right)}$. For a bounded nonnegative Borel function $\psi$ supported in a compact interval $\left[a,b\right]\subset\left(0,\infty\right)$, we consider the smoothed Betti-curve observable $\left[r_0,r_1\right] \mathrm{\Phi}_\psi \left(T\right) = \int_{r_0}^{r_1} \beta_1^T \left( r \right) \psi \left( r \right) dr$. We prove that there exist absolute constants 0

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Tripartite entanglement of remote atomic qubits

arXiv:2606.17173v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Distributed entanglement across multi-node quantum networks is essential for a wide range of quantum technologies, including modular quantum computers, distributed sensing and metrology, and multi-party secure communication protocols. Such large-scale quantum networks will require photonic interconnects to generate and sustain entangled states across localized nodes. Previously, three-node distributed Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states have been generated between solid-state qubits and atomic ensembles, but not yet in the platform of individual atomic qubits, which can be replicated, detected, and individually controlled with high fidelity. Here we report the first fully-distributed GHZ state of qubits across a three-node quantum network of single atomic memories, using photonic interconnects. We achieve a bounded fidelity of $0.841(17) \leq \mathcal{F} \leq 0.881(17)$ at an entanglement generation rate of 0.095(5)/sec and measure a clear violation of Mermin's inequality while closing the detection loophole for the first time in a fully-distributed multipartite entangled state.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Out-of-Distribution (OOD) Detectors for Open-Set RF Fingerprinting

arXiv:2606.12718v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Radio-frequency (RF) fingerprinting systems must operate in open-world environments where signals from unknown transmitters and temporal drift introduce distribution shift at test time. Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection provides a natural framework for this problem, yet its application to RF fingerprinting (RFF) remains limited. A key barrier to their adoption is that most OOD detectors require auxiliary OOD data for parameter tuning, an assumption that is difficult to satisfy in RF environments where representative OOD data is impractical to collect. In this work, we introduce a promising set of OOD detection methods from the machine learning literature to open-set RFF domain. We present these methods within a unified mathematical framework based on information theory, which is a natural framework for communication systems. Our framework allows for the systematic analysis of methods and development of new methods. We further demonstrate the applicability of recent work on tuning OOD detectors without given OOD tuning data for open-set RFF. We evaluate on the POWDER RF fingerprinting dataset, showing that detectors tuned without any given OOD data achieve performance comparable to baselines with access to true OOD tuning data and greatly out-perform baseline approaches without access to true OOD tuning data, showcasing the practical viability for the RFF problem.

14.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-14

Virtual phenotypic screening discovers novel scaffolds inhibiting the PI3K/mTOR pathway

Phenotypic drug discovery has yielded many first-in-class small-molecule drugs by discovering modulators of disease phenotypes in physiologically relevant cellular systems. However, high-content phenotypic assays lack the ultra-high-throughput scalability of target-based screens. Recent advances in virtual screening present an opportunity to address this bottleneck, but have been limited to simple phenotypes like viability, restricted to small repurposing libraries, or lack in-depth biological validation. Here, we present PhenoCompass, a multimodal co-embedding model that aligns compound structures and high-content phenotypic imaging to enable virtual phenotypic screening over billion-compound libraries. Following training on the Joint Undertaking in Morphology dataset with more than 100,000 Cell Painting compound profiles, retrospective validation with historical biochemical high-throughput screening data demonstrates that PhenoCompass ranks compounds according to their biochemical target engagement. Leveraging PhenoCompass, we performed a prospective screen of 3.8 billion Enamine REAL compounds for inhibitors of PI3K/mTOR pathway, a critical signaling cascade whose aberrant activation is a common tumor driver. This search identified 11 novel compounds with pathway-consistent Cell Painting readout and diverse scaffolds, a 54-fold enrichment over the training set. Orthogonal validation experiments using a FOXO3A reporter assay and direct kinase inhibition confirmed seven structurally novel inhibitors with distinct mechanisms of action. These results highlight the convergence of diverse molecular target profiles onto a shared morphological pathway signature and establish PhenoCompass as a robust framework for high-content phenotypic virtual screening.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

No-Free-Fairness: Fundamental Limits and Trade-offs in Learning Systems

作者:

arXiv:2606.17810v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper, we establish a set of theoretical impossibility results, termed the No-Free-Fairness theorems, that identify three fundamental sources of disparity in learning systems. First, we show that when a task exhibits irreducible cost on a subgroup, any decision rule must trade off overall performance with disparity, yielding an inherent fairness–cost frontier. Second, we prove that even in ideal, noise-free settings where a perfectly fair and accurate solution exists, finite-sample learning alone induces nontrivial subgroup disparity, ruling out distribution-free fairness guarantees. More seriously, enforcing strict relative fairness creates a statistical bottleneck: achieving low cost may require exponentially many samples. Third, we show that limitations of the model class can independently induce disparity: if the model cannot represent accurate solutions for a subgroup, fairness remains unattainable regardless of data or training procedure. Overall, these results demonstrate that unfairness is not solely a consequence of biased data or suboptimal optimization, but arises from the intrinsic structure of decision problems, the constraints of finite data, and the expressivity of models. Our framework applies broadly beyond standard supervised learning, and suggests that achieving fairness requires explicit trade-offs and should be treated as a core design consideration.

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

Hybrid Classical-Quantum Variational Autoencoder for Neural Topic Modeling

作者:

Neural topic models enable scalable semantic discovery, but their integration with quantum hardware remains largely unexplored. We present a proof-of-concept hybrid classical-quantum variational autoencoder (VAE) for topic modeling, embedding parameterized quantum circuits within the VAE inference network while retaining a classical topic-word decoder. To address the resource constraints of quantum hardware, we propose a modified Gaussian Softmax posterior that decouples latent space dimensionality from the number of topics to be extracted, enabling the model to operate with a low-resource 10-qubit quantum device. On the AgNews dataset, the hybrid VAE outperforms state-of-the-art neural topic models (NTMs), reaching a $C_v$ coherence score of 0.71 and an NPMI score of 0.20 while preserving high topic diversity. For comparison, we also construct a fully classical variant, which also outperforms state-of-the-art models on AgNews and exhibits clear class separation in the latent space. These results demonstrate that hybrid VAEs are computationally viable even on NISQ-era devices and represent a promising direction for quantum-enhanced topic modeling.

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

When Does Trajectory-Level Supervision Permit Efficient Offline Reinforcement Learning?

arXiv:2606.18531v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning is typically analyzed under process-level reward supervision, yet many sequential decision datasets record only trajectory-level outcomes. We develop a statistical theory for offline policy optimization from such outcome-level supervision. We first study the canonical setting where the target remains the expected cumulative reward, but each offline trajectory provides only a scalar label whose conditional mean is the cumulative return. We propose OPAC, a pessimistic actor-critic algorithm that learns a latent reward model and optimizes a policy from trajectory-level labels. We prove a high-probability guarantee of order $\widetilde O(H^2\sqrt{C_{sa}(\pi^\star)/n})$ and a matching lower bound, characterizing the sharp statistical cost of replacing process-level rewards with one trajectory-level label. We then extend the principle to preference-based feedback, preserving the leading horizon and concentrability dependence up to preference-model constants. Finally, we study generalized outcome-based offline RL, where both the supervision and the objective are trajectory-level quantities induced by a nonlinear aggregation of latent per-step rewards. This problem is not learnable in general: for all-success objectives, any offline learner may require $\Omega(2^H)$ trajectories even with deterministic transitions and constant concentrability. We then identify a tractable regime through two structural coefficients, $\kappa_\mu(\sigma)$ and $\chi_\mu(\sigma)$, capturing information loss in outcome aggregation and generalized Bellman updates, under which generalized OPAC achieves polynomial sample complexity. Together, our results delineate when outcome-level supervision enables sample-efficient offline control and when missing process-level rewards create fundamental statistical barriers.

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

Examining Human-Like Behaviors in LLMs: A Multi-Dimensional Analysis of Model Behaviors, User Factors, and System Prompts

arXiv:2606.18258v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit a wide range of human-like behaviors, from expressing thoughts and emotions, to engaging in relationship-building with users, to refusing requests and maintaining boundaries. Despite their prevalence, researchers and practitioners lack methods and empirical insights to make informed decisions about when and what types of human-like behaviors LLMs should exhibit. To fill this gap, we present a multi-dimensional analysis of the prevalence, potential effects, and controllability of these behaviors using LLM-as-a-judge and human evaluation. Across 21,000 multi-turn conversations from four widely used models (gpt-4o, gpt-4.1-mini, claude-sonnet-4.6, gemini-2.5-flash), we find that human-like behaviors are pervasive but vary across models and user factors (conversation goals and user profiles). In terms of perceived appropriateness, human evaluators judged self-referential and relationship-building behaviors as less appropriate from LLMs than from humans, but boundary-maintaining behaviors more appropriate from LLMs than from humans. Finally, we show that system prompting can control these behaviors, though it requires careful evaluation to avoid unintended effects. We discuss the implications of our findings and provide recommendations for responsible LLM design and evaluation.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

The Market in the Model: Latent Diffusion as Neural Economy

Valuable critique of generative image models within visual culture and the humanities has emphasized the role of datasets in shaping the images they produce. Yet, close studies of the ideological positions embedded into the mechanism of the models have been neglected, leaving them imagined as "black boxes." In a bid to expand, rather than replace, dataset critique, this paper examines the mechanisms of the latent diffusion model in terms of the problems they were brought in to solve on behalf of computer vision engineers, and the decisions each component was tasked with automating. I interpret that ensemble through the histories of its parts and the theory of vision the system inscribes into every generated image. Drawing on Impett and Offert's notion of neural exchange value, I offer this analysis to argue that the model operates as a neural economy: a contained symbolic system that abstracts social communication into commensurable vectors as it transfers the social sphere into parcels for sale. Tracing the training and generation pipelines component by component reveals what each operation displaces, and how it further entrenches the logics of platform and attention economies over social communication. The paper warns that any critique fixated exclusively on copyright and commodity defenses risks reaffirming the very fetishism the model produces, and argues instead for centering social exchange.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Incentives Of EdTech: A Systematic Review Of EduNLP Research

While the Natural Language Processing community has dedicated significant resources in developing educational technologies (EdTech) that support this shift, it remains unclear whose interests are being best served among the stakeholders of education. In this paper, we present a systematic literature review of 204 papers published in venues of the Association for Computational Linguistics' Special Interest Group on Building Educational Applications in 2024 and 2025, and validate these against EdTech papers from the wider ACL Anthology. By examining stakeholder inclusion and the prioritisation of research tasks, our findings reveal a critical tension: a push and pull between private-sector incentives and the foundational needs of educational infrastructure. Our analysis reveals that teachers are systematically under-represented as beneficiaries of research (33.3%) despite being the most affected, that real-world deployment remains rare (9.8%), and that ethical engagement tends toward acknowledgement rather than action. Drawing on exemplary papers in our corpus, we offer concrete recommendations for more responsible EduNLP research practices.

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

Entropy-Gradient Inversion: Moving Toward Internal Mechanism of Large Reasoning Models

The advancement of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) has catalyzed a paradigm shift from reactive ``fast thinking'' text generation to systematic, step-by-step ``slow thinking'' reasoning, unlocking state-of-the-art performance in complex mathematical and logical tasks. However, the field faces the fundamental gap between token-level behavioral analysis and internal reasoning mechanisms, and the instability of reinforcement learning (RL) for reasoning optimization relying on costly external verifiers. We identify and formally define Entropy-Gradient Inversion, a robust negative correlation between token entropy and logit gradients that acts as a definitive geometric fingerprint for LRM reasoning capability. Building on this, we propose Correlation-Regularized Group Policy Optimization (CorR-PO), which embeds this inversion signature into RL reward regularization. Extensive experiments on various reasoning benchmarks across multiple model scales show CorR-PO consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, confirming that stronger inversion directly correlates with superior reasoning performance.

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

Attention-Based Prototype Calibration for Multi-Rater Few-Shot Medical Image Segmentation

Few-shot medical image segmentation methods typically assume a single ground-truth annotation, overlooking systematic variability across expert raters commonly observed in clinical datasets. We propose an attention-based prototype calibration framework for few-shot multi-rater segmentation that models rater-specific deviations from a consensus representation in prototype space. A lightweight yet principled attention operator directly refines rater prototypes without modifying the backbone feature extractor, making the approach fully compatible with existing prototype-based few-shot segmentation methods. This design preserves semantic consistency while enabling personalized segmentation outputs with minimal computational overhead. Experiments on multi-rater medical imaging datasets demonstrate consistent improvements over baseline prototype approaches, highlighting the effectiveness of structured prototype calibration for modeling annotation variability. Our code is available at https://github.com/truong2710-cyber/JAPC.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

MLT-Dedup: Efficient Large-Scale Online Video Deduplication via Multi-Level Representations and Spatial-Temporal Matching

The explosive growth of user-generated video content on online platforms is accompanied by the emergence of numerous near-duplicate videos–videos that are identical or highly similar but differ by partial edits. These duplicates degrade user experience and increase storage and bandwidth costs, making large-scale video deduplication a critical task. Existing video deduplication frameworks face a fundamental challenge in retrieving sufficient high-quality candidates under a limited index budget, as well as trade-offs between efficiency and precision. To address these issues, we propose MLT-Dedup, an efficient large-scale online video deduplication framework with Multi-Level representations and spatial-Temporal matching. Our approach employs a Multi-Level Video Encoder (ML-VE) to extract both fine-grained frame-level and sparse clip-level embeddings: sparse embeddings support efficient candidate retrieval, while fine-grained embeddings are loaded for precise pairwise matching. During matching, we introduce DiF-SiM, a Differential Feature-enhanced Similarity Module capable of locating duplicated temporal segments and providing reliable similarity evidence to support policy-driven deduplication decisions. Extensive experiments on a real-world large-scale platform demonstrate that MLT-Dedup reduces online repetition rates by 91% at 90% precision. Furthermore, our sparse retrieval design achieves a 5x increase in indexing capacity, enabling broader candidate coverage in real-world deployment.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Finetuning Vision-Language-Action Models Requires Fewer Layers Than You Think

arXiv:2606.20246v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models pre-trained on massive video-robot datasets have revolutionized robotic manipulation, yet their multi-billion parameter architectures impose prohibitive computational burdens during downstream fine-tuning and real-time inference. In this work, we reveal a highly non-trivial architectural characteristic of these continuous control foundation policies (e.g., pi_0, GR00T-N1.5): despite being trained on diverse physical trajectories, they exhibit severe layer-wise representational redundancy. To exploit this, we introduce a structural compression pipeline that is entirely training-free, bypassing the need of existing methods to load full-scale models to learn optimized token reductions or dynamic layer selectors. Instead, using only a single forward pass via Centered Kernel Alignment to identify redundant layer features, we remove twin layers to permanently compress the model depth by up to 50% across both the VLM backbone and the continuous control policy head. Downstream fine-tuning of this streamlined architecture yields a dual acceleration benefit: a 40-50% reduction in training time and up to 30% faster real-time inference, while matching or exceeding full-scale base model performance. We comprehensively validate our method across three simulation benchmarks (LIBERO, RoboCasa, SimplerEnv) and 10 diverse real-world manipulation tasks across 4 unique robotic embodiments. These results prove that advanced VLAs require significantly fewer layers than previously assumed, offering a highly compute-efficient paradigm for scalable robot learning.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

ORAgentBench: Can LLM Agents Solve Challenging Operations Research Tasks End to End?

arXiv:2606.19787v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents for multi-step tasks in executable environments, yet their ability to perform realistic operations research (OR) work remains unclear. Existing OR evaluations often decouple modeling from solving, rely on pre-formalized or text-only instances, and rarely test the full workflow from operational artifacts to validated decisions. In this work, we introduce ORAgentBench, an execution-grounded benchmark for evaluating autonomous agents on challenging end-to-end operations research tasks. It contains 107 human-reviewed tasks across diverse operational scenarios, each packaged in an isolated environment with a natural-language brief, multi-file data, configuration artifacts, and a required submission schema. Agents must write and run solution code, and their submissions are evaluated by hidden validators for schema validity, hard-constraint feasibility, and normalized objective quality. Experiments with fourteen frontier agent-model configurations show that current agents remain far from reliable OR practice. The best agent passes only 35.51% of all tasks and 20.59% of hard tasks, and many feasible submissions still fall below the required quality threshold. Failure analysis further shows that errors are dominated by strategic weaknesses, including missed operational rules, brittle formulations, weak feasible-solution construction, and insufficient solution improvement. OR-specific procedural skills increase hard-task feasibility, but do not reliably improve solution quality or pass rate. These results suggest that progress in OR agents requires moving beyond plausible optimization code toward dependable, high-quality operational decision-making.