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

Continuous Cross-Domain Traffic State Prediction via Memory-Augmented Graph Liquid Time-Constant Networks

arXiv:2606.15807v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traffic state prediction is a fundamental task in intelligent transportation systems. In practical applications, some regions suffer from limited traffic observations due to insufficient sensing infrastructure, making cross-domain knowledge transfer an important solution for data-scarce traffic prediction. However, existing cross-domain traffic prediction methods still face several limitations, including coarse-grained source-target adaptation, limited capability in handling unseen target-domain patterns, and insufficient modeling of continuous traffic dynamics under irregular or heterogeneous temporal conditions. To address these issues, this paper proposes a continuous cross-domain traffic prediction framework, termed Memory-Augmented Graph Liquid Time-Constant Network (MA-GLTC). Specifically, we first construct spatio-temporal units (STUs) to decompose traffic networks into transferable local units, enabling fine-grained knowledge alignment across domains. Then, a graph liquid time-constant network (GLTC) is developed to model graph-coupled traffic evolution in continuous time. Different from generic graph neural ODE-based models, GLTC introduces graph-coupled recurrent conductance into liquid time-constant dynamics, allowing node states to evolve with leakage, adaptive time constants, and neighborhood-aware feedback. Furthermore, a Memory-based Transfer Storage (MTS) mechanism is designed to preserve source-domain knowledge, retrieve matched traffic patterns, and update reliable target-domain patterns when unseen states emerge. Experiments on five public traffic datasets demonstrate that MA-GLTC consistently outperforms representative innerdomain and cross-domain baselines in both short-term and longterm prediction tasks. Compared with the second-best method, MA-GLTC reduces the average prediction errors by 3.02%, 0.33%, 8.92%, 10.09%, and 2.11%, respectively.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

OmniOPSD: Rationale-Privileged On-Policy Self-Distillation for Affective Computing

Reinforcement learning for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) is often hindered by severe reward sparsity in complex reasoning tasks. This challenge is particularly pronounced in human-centered scenarios involving states, emotions, intentions, and behaviors, where heterogeneous multimodal signals and subjective human factors make high-quality chain-of-thought (CoT) annotations expensive and difficult to obtain. Although many multimodal datasets provide expert-annotated ground-truth labels, directly using these labels for supervised fine-tuning may encourage shortcut learning in multimodal perception and provides limited transparency for safety-critical human–AI interaction. To address these limitations, we propose OmniOPSD, a Rationale-Privileged On-Policy Self-Distillation framework that uses frontier-generated rationales as teacher-side privileged evidence rather than student imitation targets. OmniOPSD uses frontier-generated evidence-aware rationales only as training-time privileged evidence context for a local teacher. The student samples its own rollout from the original multimodal input, while the rationale-privileged teacher scores the same tokens and provides dense token-level supervision. Thus, the student learns on its own trajectory distribution without directly imitating frontier-model completions, and inference requires no labels, rationales, CoT annotations, or closed-source model access. Experiments on MER-UniBench show that OmniOPSD achieves state-of-the-art performance with an average score of $84.19$, and ablations further support the value of rationale-privileged teacher guidance.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Accelerated Convex Optimization via Hamiltonian Dynamics with Deterministic Integration Time

arXiv:2606.17260v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We develop Hamiltonian dynamics-based algorithms for smooth convex optimization that achieve accelerated rates of convergence. By exploiting contraction of averaged Hamiltonian flow trajectories rather than requiring contraction at trajectory endpoints, we show that Hamiltonian dynamics-based optimization methods admit deterministic and accelerated convergence guarantees, extending prior work that is limited to quadratic objectives or holds only in expectation. We analyze an idealized continuous-time algorithm and derive practical discrete-time implementations with optimal first-order complexity, thereby establishing Hamiltonian dynamics as a useful algorithmic primitive for deterministic accelerated convex optimization.

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

AVIS: Adaptive Test-Time Scaling for Vision-Language Models

Modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) benefit from chain-of-thought prompting and test-time scaling, but these gains often come with prohibitive inference cost due to large visual contexts and long decoding chains. We view this cost through two coupled axes: Visual Context Scaling (VCS), which controls how much visual evidence is passed to the language model, and Visual Reasoning Scaling (VRS), which controls how much inference-time reasoning search is performed. Existing methods typically optimize one axis at a time, leaving the joint allocation of compute across these axes underexplored. We introduce Adaptive Visual Inference Scaling (AVIS), a lightweight policy that adapts both VCS and VRS per query. AVIS realizes VCS through Key Diversity Visual (KDV) pruning, a training-free $O(N)$ key-based rule for removing redundant visual tokens before prefilling, and realizes VRS through adaptive self-consistency, using a learned difficulty predictor to select the number of reasoning rollouts. AVIS is deployment-friendly and compatible with shared-prefill inference, where all rollouts reuse a single prefilling pass and KV cache. Across diverse image and video reasoning benchmarks, AVIS improves the accuracy–compute trade-off relative to VCS-only and VRS-only baselines, and remains effective on top of RL post-trained VLMs while keeping compute and latency low.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Targeted Proteomic Profiling of Nasal Fluid from the Brain-Nose Interface

The brain-nose interface is an anatomical junction where olfactory neurons from the olfactory bulb traverse the cribriform plate into the nasal mucosa, providing minimally invasive access to the central nervous system (CNS). We hypothesized that nasal fluid from this region could enable detection of neurology-relevant proteins using targeted multiplex assays. Using nosecollect, a targeted nasal sampling device, nasal fluid proximal to brain-nose interface was collected from cognitively impaired patients, alongside matched cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and plasma. After nasal sample-specific dilution optimization and intra-assay precision evaluation, all matrices were profiled with the Olink Target 96 Neurology and NUcleic acid Linked Immuno-Sandwich Assay CNS disease 120 (NULISAseq CNS Disease 120) panels. Nasal fluid showed technically repeatable detection (intra-assay coefficient of variation

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

Direct Preference Optimization for Chatbot Fine-Tuning: An Empirical Study

We present an approach to fine-tuning large language models using Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), a reinforcement learning technique. Our experimental results demonstrate that DPO simplifies the training pipeline, improves computational efficiency, and achieves competitive performance. The evaluation using BLEU, ROUGE, and cosine similarity metrics indicates effective learning and convergence, though further investigation is needed to address observed training instability.

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

SwiftCTS: Fast Cross-Design Prediction and Pareto Optimization of Clock Tree Metrics via Few-Shot Calibration

arXiv:2606.11348v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Clock Tree Synthesis (CTS) is a computationally expensive stage in the physical design flow, requiring iterative EDA tool invocations to navigate a vast configuration space for optimal power, wirelength, and timing skew. Existing machine learning approaches require computationally expensive retraining or fine-tuning cycles to adapt to unseen macro architectures and are architecturally mismatched to the millions of evaluations demanded by exhaustive combinatorial search. We present SwiftCTS, a physics-informed surrogate framework that addresses both limitations simultaneously. By coupling lightweight, physics-grounded statistical features with gradient-boosted ensembles, SwiftCTS trains in under five seconds on a CPU and delivers sub-millisecond inference without GPU support. To handle out-of-distribution (OOD) designs without retraining or fine-tuning, we introduce a K-shot multiplicative calibration mechanism that anchors predictions to just one or two physical reference runs, reducing power prediction error from 24.5\% to 3.3\% and wirelength error from 56.6\% to under 1\% on unseen macros. Integrating this engine with an evolutionary optimizer, SwiftCTS evaluates 100,000 CTS configurations in under ten seconds, yielding Pareto-optimal frontiers that are physically validated within the OpenROAD flow. Closed-loop validation confirms prediction errors below 0.5\% for power and wirelength, and timing skew predictions within five picoseconds on an OOD benchmark, consistently outperforming default tool heuristics across all target metrics. Code publicly available at: \href{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SwiftCTS-7E6E}{https://github.com/BarsatKhadka/SwiftCTS}

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

Conditional Score-Based Modeling of Effective Langevin Dynamics

arXiv:2604.23952v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Stochastic reduced-order models are widely used to represent the effective dynamics of complex systems, but estimating their drift and diffusion coefficients from data remains challenging. Standard approaches often rely on short-time trajectory increments, state-space partitioning, or repeated simulation of candidate models, which become unreliable or computationally expensive for high-dimensional systems, coarse temporal sampling, or unevenly sampled data. We introduce a data-driven calibration method based on a novel relationship between the coefficients of a stochastic reduced model and the conditional score of the finite-time transition density, defined as the gradient of the logarithm of the transition density with respect to the initial state. The resulting identity expresses derivatives of lagged correlation functions as stationary expectations over observed lagged pairs involving this conditional score and the unknown model coefficients. This formulation allows the drift and diffusion structure to be constrained directly from finite-lag statistics, without differentiating trajectories, partitioning state space, or repeatedly integrating candidate reduced models during calibration, yielding a least-squares fitting problem over stationary lagged pairs. We validate the approach on three systems of increasing complexity: an analytically tractable Cox–Ingersoll–Ross diffusion, a two-dimensional nonequilibrium diffusion with affine multiplicative noise, and a periodic soft-spin stochastic Landau–Lifshitz chain. Across these tests, the inferred models preserve the invariant statistics while reproducing finite-lag dynamical correlations. The framework provides a scalable route for learning stochastic reduced-order models from data that reproduce prescribed statistical and dynamical properties.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

iTryOn: Mastering Interactive Video Virtual Try-On with Spatial-Semantic Guidance

Video Virtual Try-On (VVT) aims to seamlessly replace a garment on a person in a video with a new one. While existing methods have made significant strides in maintaining temporal consistency, they are predominantly confined to non-interactive scenarios where models merely showcase garments. This limitation overlooks a crucial aspect of real-world apparel presentation: active human-garment interaction. To bridge this gap, we introduce and formalize a new challenging task: Interactive Video Virtual Try-On (Interactive VVT), where subjects in the video actively engage with their clothing. This task introduces unique challenges beyond simple texture preservation, including: (1) resolving the semantic ambiguity of interactions from standard pose information, and (2) learning complex garment deformations from video where interactive moments are sparse and brief. To address these challenges, we propose iTryOn, a novel framework built upon a large-scale video diffusion Transformer. iTryOn pioneers a multi-level interaction injection mechanism to guide the generation of complex dynamics. At the spatial level, we introduce a garment-agnostic 3D hand prior to provide fine-grained guidance for precise hand-garment contact, effectively resolving spatial ambiguity. At the semantic level, iTryOn leverages global captions for overall context and time-stamped action captions for localized interactions, synchronized via our novel Action-aware Rotational Position Embedding (A-RoPE). Extensive experiments demonstrate that iTryOn not only achieves state-of-the-art performance on traditional VVT benchmarks but also establishes a commanding lead in the new interactive setting, marking a significant step towards more dynamic and controllable virtual try-on experiences.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Localizing Credit at the Divergence: Path-Conditioned Self-Distillation for LLM Reasoning

arXiv:2606.15576v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards assigns a single scalar to each rollout, leaving token-level credit assignment underspecified in long reasoning traces. On-policy self-distillation addresses this by letting the same model act as a teacher conditioned on privileged information, producing a dense per-token signal. But the common choice of a ground-truth answer is only an endpoint cue: on terse-answer tasks, the teacher falls silent at the intermediate positions where path-level guidance matters most. We propose Hindsight Self-Distillation (HSD), which conditions the teacher on a successful peer rollout drawn from the current training group. Such a peer is an exact sample from the success-conditioned policy, requiring no additional sampled rollouts. By providing a full successful continuation rather than only the final answer, the resulting credit signal concentrates at the divergence position between a failed rollout and a successful peer. Across Qwen3-8B and Qwen3-32B on math and code benchmarks, HSD obtains the best result against GRPO variants and on-policy distillation baselines, with the largest gains on terse-answer tasks such as AIME.

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

UltraQuant: 4-bit KV Caching for Context-Heavy Agents

arXiv:2606.20474v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Context-heavy agents place unusual pressure on the key-value (KV) cache: long prefixes are reused across many short turns, while concurrency determines whether the serving system can keep GPUs utilized. We study 4-bit KV-cache compression for this setting, using TurboQuant-style rotation and codebook quantization as a quality anchor and vLLM FP8 KV caching as the deployment anchor. We report three contributions. First, we frame 4-bit KV caching around multi-round agent workloads where task quality, cache residency, and serving throughput must be measured jointly. Second, we describe the practical design choices needed to make the 4-bit path robust, including asymmetric K/V treatment, Walsh-Hadamard rotation, QJL removal, and block-scale variants. Third, we present serving optimizations on AMD GPUs, including optimized decode-attention kernels and UltraQuant, an FP4 approximation path that uses FP8 queries, FP4 KV tensors, UE8M0 group scales, and native scaled-MFMA support on CDNA4. On a long-context, multi-turn agentic workload, UltraQuant cuts P50 time-to-first-token by 3.47x in the cache-pressured late rounds (2.3x across all rounds) and raises output throughput by 1.63x over the FP8 KV baseline.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Efficacy of Ergothioneine Supplementation on Postpartum Fatigue, Sleep Quality, and Quality of Life: A Randomized, Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled Trial

Background: Postpartum asthenia, characterized by severe fatigue, sleep disturbances, and physiological stress, lacks effective targeted interventions. Ergothioneine (EGT) is a unique, naturally occurring antioxidant that actively accumulates in mitochondria, offering a compelling therapeutic rationale for systemic recovery. This study aimed to evaluate the efficacy of EGT in accelerating postpartum functional restoration and alleviating fatigue. Methods: This single-center, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial enrolled 40 postpartum women (SF-36 total score [≤] 70) who had ceased breastfeeding. Participants were randomized (1:1) to receive either 120 mg/day of EGT or a matched placebo for 30 days. Efficacy was assessed using the SF-36, Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI), Fatigue Scale-14 (FS-14), and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) asthenia scale. To rigorously evaluate the treatment effects, advanced statistical modeling, including Linear Mixed-Effects Models (LMM) and Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) adjusted for baseline covariates, was employed. Results: All 40 participants completed the trial. The EGT group demonstrated robust and accelerated functional recovery. Notably, significant improvements in sleep quality (p = 0.0361) and systemic fatigue (p = 0.0059) were observed as early as Day 15. Importantly, EGT yielded a statistically significant between-group superiority in alleviating mental fatigue compared to placebo at Day 15 (p = 0.0313). By Day 30, the EGT cohort exhibited substantial within-group improvements across all primary metrics, including SF-36 (+35.94%, p = 0.0006) and FS-14 (-27.78%, p = 0.0011). Furthermore, as an additional physiological benefit, EGT induced a selective and significant reduction in hepatic transaminases (ALT: -30.42%; AST: -17.44%) within normal limits, a trend not observed in the placebo group. EGT was exceptionally well-tolerated with no treatment-related adverse events. Conclusions: EGT supplementation (120 mg/day) safely accelerates postpartum functional recovery, offering rapid relief from mental fatigue and sleep disturbances within 15 days, while concurrently optimizing hepatic physiological status. These preliminary clinical signals warrant confirmation in larger, adequately powered cohorts. Trial Registration: ChiCTR2500114171; Prospectively registered on 2025-12-08.

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

Concatenated Matrix SVD: Compression Bounds, Incremental Approximation, and Error-Constrained Clustering

arXiv:2601.11626v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large collections of matrices arise throughout modern machine learning, signal processing, and scientific computing, where they are commonly compressed by concatenation followed by truncated singular value decomposition (SVD). This strategy enables parameter sharing and efficient reconstruction and has been widely adopted across domains ranging from multi-view learning and signal processing to neural network compression. However, it leaves a fundamental question unanswered: which matrices can be safely concatenated and compressed together under explicit reconstruction error constraints? Existing approaches rely on heuristic or architecture-specific grouping and provide no principled guarantees on the resulting SVD approximation error. In the present work, we introduce a theory-driven framework for compression-aware clustering of matrices under SVD compression constraints. Our analysis establishes new spectral bounds for horizontally concatenated matrices, deriving global upper bounds on the optimal rank-$r$ SVD reconstruction error from lower bounds on singular value growth. The first bound follows from Weyl-type monotonicity under blockwise extensions, while the second leverages singular values of incremental residuals to yield tighter, per-block guarantees. We further develop an efficient approximate estimator based on incremental truncated SVD that tracks dominant singular values without forming the full concatenated matrix. Therefore, we propose three clustering algorithms that merge matrices only when their predicted joint SVD compression error remains below a user-specified threshold. The algorithms span a trade-off between speed, provable accuracy, and scalability, enabling compression-aware clustering with explicit error control.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Protein Representation Learning with Secondary-Structure and Energy-Filtered Hydrogen-Bond Graphs

arXiv:2606.19374v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Graph-based representations are widely used in protein modeling, yet many existing approaches rely primarily on sequence adjacency or geometric proximity, which only partially reflect the principles governing protein folding. Proteins instead adopt complex three-dimensional conformations organized around secondary structure elements, such as $\alpha$-helices and $\beta$-sheets, which encode recurring local motifs and stabilizing hydrogen-bond interactions. In this work, we introduce a secondary-structure-aware graph neural network for protein representation learning. Residue-level node representations are augmented with secondary structure assignments, and graph edges are constructed from hydrogen-bond interactions filtered by their energetic strength. This design enables the model to capture both local structural context and long-range couplings that are central to protein stability and function. We evaluate the proposed approach on commonly used protein benchmarks and observe consistent improvements over existing graph-based methods. In addition, the resulting graph representations offer enhanced biological interpretability, as the learned connectivity aligns with established structural motifs. These findings suggest that incorporating secondary structure and energy-filtered hydrogen-bond topology provides an effective inductive bias for protein representation learning. The code is released at https://github.com/mohamedmohamed2021/SSProNet

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

Co-PLNet: A Collaborative Point-Line Network for Prompt-Guided Wireframe Parsing

Wireframe parsing aims to recover line segments and their junctions to form a structured geometric representation useful for downstream tasks such as Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). Existing methods predict lines and junctions separately and reconcile them post-hoc, causing mismatches and reduced robustness. We present Co-PLNet, a point-line collaborative framework that exchanges spatial cues between the two tasks, where early detections are converted into spatial prompts via a Point-Line Prompt Encoder (PLP-Encoder), which encodes geometric attributes into compact and spatially aligned maps. A Cross-Guidance Line Decoder (CGL-Decoder) then refines predictions with sparse attention conditioned on complementary prompts, enforcing point-line consistency and efficiency. Experiments on Wireframe and YorkUrban show consistent improvements in accuracy and robustness, together with favorable real-time efficiency, demonstrating our effectiveness for structured geometry perception. Our code is available at https://github.com/GalacticHogrider/Co-PLNet.

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

A Two-Phase Stability Study of LLM Judges and Bar Council Examiners on Thai Bar-Exam Free-Form Essays

Free-form legal essay evaluation in NLP treats expert inter-rater stability as a single ceiling number, and treats LLM-judge agreement with that ceiling as evidence of judge stability. We test both assumptions on the Thai bar examination through an identical-inputs protocol: three Bar Council-trained examiners (A, B, C) and a 26-LLM judge panel score the same 15 cross-graded answers from the same four inputs (question, official Bar Council grading regulation, gold answer, candidate answer). The headline finding is asymmetric. On 10 of 15 cells where the rubric prescribes both axes, all 29 raters converge in a tight band: panel agreement is universal. On the remaining 5 cells where the rubric does not prescribe how to grade a correct final answer that omits a decisive statutory citation, the human panel splits between two coherent readings (B/C majority at the upper rubric band, score 6-8; A minority at the lower band, score 1-2). The LLM judge population does not split symmetrically: 22 of 26 LLMs score in or near B/C's contested band, 3 sit in the regulation-silent middle gap, and only 1 (GPT-5.4 Nano) approaches A's band without consistently scoring within it. Zero LLMs in our 26-judge panel reproduce the minority human reading on the contested cells. The B/C-direction cluster spans every model size, vendor, and price tier we tested. An instrumented three-LLM anchor sub-panel (Claude 4.6 Opus, Gemini 3.1 Pro, GPT-5.4 Pro) carries determinism probes, input ablations, and bootstrap CIs, and reaches anchor panel $\alpha = 0.77$ on the 15 cells against human-panel $\alpha = 0.36$. The high LLM-panel $\alpha$ reflects systematic convergence on the majority reading rather than balanced reproduction of both readings; a benchmark that selects its LLM judge by maximising agreement with a human reference panel will inherit this asymmetry by construction.

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

A Dynamical Systems Perspective on the Analysis of Neural Networks

arXiv:2507.05164v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this chapter, we utilize dynamical systems to analyze several aspects of machine learning algorithms. As an expository contribution we demonstrate how to re-formulate a wide variety of challenges from deep neural networks, (stochastic) gradient descent, and related topics into dynamical statements. We also tackle three concrete challenges. First, we consider the process of information propagation through a neural network, i.e., we study the input-output map for different architectures. We explain the universal embedding property for augmented neural ODEs representing arbitrary functions of given regularity, the classification of multilayer perceptrons and neural ODEs in terms of suitable function classes, and the memory-dependence in neural delay equations. Second, we consider the training aspect of neural networks dynamically. We describe a dynamical systems perspective on gradient descent and study stability for overdetermined problems. We then extend this analysis to the overparameterized setting and describe the edge of stability phenomenon, also in the context of possible explanations for implicit bias. For stochastic gradient descent, we present stability results for the overparameterized setting via Lyapunov exponents of interpolation solutions. Third, we explain several results regarding mean-field limits of neural networks. We describe a result that extends existing techniques to heterogeneous neural networks involving graph limits via digraph measures. This shows how large classes of neural networks naturally fall within the framework of Kuramoto-type models on graphs and their large-graph limits. Finally, we point out that similar strategies to use dynamics to study explainable and reliable AI can also be applied to settings such as generative models or fundamental issues in gradient training methods, such as backpropagation or vanishing/exploding gradients.

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

A Survey on Long-Term Memory Security in LLM Agents: Attacks, Defenses, and Governance Across the Memory Lifecycle

The emergence of writable, cross-session persistent memory in LLM agents introduces a qualitatively different threat landscape from conventional input-centric security concerns, characterized by three properties: persistence, statefulness, and propagation. To systematically characterize this landscape, we propose a Memory Lifecycle Framework that organizes attacks, defenses, and their cross-phase dependencies along two axes: six lifecycle phases (Write, Store, Retrieve, Execute, Share & Propagate, Forget & Rollback) and four security objectives (Integrity, Confidentiality, Availability, Governance). This analysis in turn exposes the need for formal security guarantees at the system level, motivating Verifiable Memory Governance(VMG), a framework of five architectural primitives that specifies what verifiable mechanisms a long-term-memory system must provide to maintain auditable, recoverable control over its memory state. Our analysis indicates that robust Long-Term Memory (LTM) security cannot be retrofitted at retrieval or execution time alone, but must be anchored in storage-time provenance, versioning, and policy-aware retention from the outset.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

LOCUS: Local Visual Cue Search for Enhancing Fine-Grained Perception in Multimodal Large Language Models

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) remain unreliable on fine-grained visual perception, even when high-resolution inputs preserve the necessary local details. We identify this limitation as visual context rot: decisive evidence may exist in the full image, yet fail to be reliably selected and used amid redundant visual context. We propose LOCUS (LOcal visual CUe Search), a training framework that teaches MLLMs to internalize local evidence search through a verifiable proxy task. During training, LOCUS provides a local crop as a visual cue and optimizes the model to recover its spatial support in the full image using an IoU-based reward. The visual cue is used only during training, leaving the standard image-question inference interface unchanged. Experiments across fine-grained perception, hallucination, general understanding, and reasoning benchmarks show that LOCUS improves localization-sensitive visual understanding while preserving broad capabilities. Attention analyses further indicate stronger focus on task-relevant evidence regions, suggesting that training-time visual cue search provides an effective route to internalized fine-grained evidence selection.

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

Closing the Loop: PID Feedback Control for Interpretable Activation Steering in Symbolic Music Generation

arXiv:2606.18790v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transformer-based architectures have significantly advanced the generation of complex symbolic sequences, yet a significant gap remains in achieving fine-grained, interpretable control over discrete signal attributes. This paper investigates the mechanistic interpretability of the Multitrack Music Transformer (MMT) and proposes a framework for deterministic attribute modulation without retraining to bridge this gap via inference-time activation steering. Utilizing the Difference-in-Means (DiffMean) methodology, we isolate latent directions for signal attributes, specifically Pitch and Duration, within the residual stream. We validate the Linear Representation Hypothesis in this domain, achieving high correlation between steering magnitude and attribute shift. To address the inherent feature entanglement in multi-attribute steering, we introduce a Dual Steering framework utilizing Gram-Schmidt Orthogonalization. Experimental results demonstrate that this geometric decoupling reduces conceptual interference and signal degradation compared to naive vector addition, enabling independent deterministic control even against strong autoregressive conditioning.

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

Stimulus Motion Perception Studies Imply Specific Neural Computations in Human Visual Stabilization

Even during fixation the human eye is constantly in low amplitude motion, jittering over small angles in random directions at up to 100Hz. This motion results in all features of the image on the retina constantly traversing a number of cones, yet objects which are stable in the world are perceived to be stable, and any object which is moving in the world is perceived to be moving. A series of experiments carried out over a dozen years revealed the psychophysics of visual stabilization to be more nuanced than might be assumed, say, from the mechanics of stabilization of camera images, or what might be assumed to be the simplest solution from an evolutionary perspective. The psychophysics revealed by the experiments strongly implies a specific set of operations on retinal signals resulting in the observed stabilization behavior. The presentation is in two levels. First is a functional description of the action of the mechanism that is very likely responsible for the experimentally observed behavior. Second is a more speculative proposal of circuit-level neural elements that might implement the functional behavior.

24.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Exact Fourier dimensions of dyadic Mandelbrot cascades on curves of nonvanishing curvature under minimal integrability

arXiv:2606.11758v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove an exact Fourier-dimension formula for scalar dyadic Mandelbrot cascades pushed forward to fixed C^2 Jordan curves with nonvanishing curvature. Let W be in the minimal Kahane-Peyriere regime, let the scalar dyadic cascade live on T = R/Z, and let gamma map T to R^2 be a fixed C^2 Jordan curve with nonvanishing curvature, parametrized at constant speed. For the push-forward measure mu_gamma, we prove that, almost surely on non-extinction, its Fourier dimension is A_loc(W), the usual local exponent obtained by optimizing over q>1 from the moment expression involving E[W^q]. The upper bound follows from the scalar circle local-dimension theorem, bi-Lipschitz transfer to the fixed curve, and a deterministic curved-support obstruction for Fourier dimension. The lower bound follows from a fixed-curve finite-r annular theorem, which gives summable annular Fourier decay under a single finite moment witness. The main analytic input is a deterministic phase-geometry package for fixed nondegenerate C^2 curves: stationary tubes, derivative bands, and phase-bin coefficient estimates replacing the explicit trigonometric structure available on the unit circle.

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

MaxProof: Scaling Mathematical Proof with Generative-Verifier RL and Population-Level Test-Time Scaling

We present MaxProof, a population-level test-time scaling framework for competition-level mathematical proof in the MiniMax-M3 series. M3 first trains three proof-oriented capabilities – proof generation, proof verification, and critique-conditioned proof repair – using a defense-in-depth generative verifier engineered for low false-positive rate. These capabilities are merged into a single released M3 model. At test time, MaxProof treats the model as a generator, verifier, refiner, and ranker, searches over a population of candidate proofs, and returns one final proof through tournament selection. With MaxProof test-time scaling, the M3 model reaches 35/42 on IMO 2025 and 36/42 on USAMO 2026, exceeding the human gold-medal threshold on both.