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

REACH: Interpretability-Driven Feature Identification and Architecture Compression for Multi-Channel Vehicular Channel Estimation

arXiv:2606.11857v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-channel mixed-SNR training improves out-of-distribution (OOD) generalisation of deep learning channel estimators for IEEE 802.11p vehicular communications, yet the internal mechanism responsible for this remains unexplained. This work presents REACH (Relevance-based Explanation and Architectural Compression for cHannel estimators), a gradient-based interpretability framework that operates at two levels. Input-level attribution identifies a subset of time-frequency features consistently relevant across all evaluated channel conditions, enabling input dimensionality reduction with minimal performance loss. Filter-level attribution reveals a near-universal internal representation, providing a representational account of the observed OOD generalisation. Guided by the resulting filter taxonomy, relevance-guided architecture compression substantially reduces both the number of parameters and the number of floating-point operations (FLOPs) with sub-1 dB normalised mean square error (NMSE) degradation, and OOD generalisation degrades more slowly than within-distribution accuracy under increasing compression.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

ChronoSurv: A Clinical Pathway-Guided Graph Framework for Multimodal Survival Analysis

arXiv:2606.19140v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate survival prediction is essential for personalized treatment planning in head and neck cancer, yet remains challenging due to the heterogeneous and high-dimensional nature of multimodal clinical data. While deep survival models have improved predictive performance over classical statistical approaches, existing methods typically rely on static fusion strategies or temporally agnostic modeling, limiting their ability to capture structured clinical workflows. In this work, we propose ChronoSurv, a heterogeneous hierarchical directed graph framework for multimodal survival analysis. ChronoSurv represents patient care as a progression-aware clinical trajectory using directed graphs aligned with key diagnostic steps. A hierarchical topology incorporates fine-grained, coarse, and global representations, further supporting flexible adaptation to missing modalities, while heterogeneous message passing models complex and asymmetric relationships across modalities and clinical steps. Experimental results on two public datasets demonstrate that ChronoSurv achieves state-of-the-art discriminative performance while maintaining statistically reliable calibration. Comprehensive ablation studies further confirm the contribution of each architectural component, highlighting the potential of trajectory-aware graph modeling for multimodal survival prediction.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Mask, Sample, Revise: A Revisable CTMC Inference Stack for Guided Discrete Flow Matching Text-to-Speech

arXiv:2606.13989v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent alignment-free non-autoregressive (NAR) text-to-speech (TTS) models formulate synthesis as a conditional infilling task, bypassing explicit duration predictors and external aligners. When speech is represented with neural codec tokens, the infilling problem becomes discrete, making Discrete Flow Matching (DFM), a Continuous-Time Markov Chain (CTMC) framework for discrete generation, a natural fit. However, inference-time control for stable low-step conditional infilling remains underexplored. We propose Mask, Sample, Revise, an inference-time CTMC stack for alignment-free DFM-TTS. The stack combines predictor-free guidance to strengthen text conditioning, prompt-matched conditional coupling to align the probability path with the acoustic prompt, and SC-ReMask, a schedule-constrained remasking mechanism that introduces token-to-mask transitions so early de-masking decisions can be revised. These components require no post-hoc fine-tuning and operate in a single tau-leaping sampler. Controlled ablations show that this stack improves intelligibility and robustness in the low-NFE prompted setting, outperforming unguided and guidance-only samplers with substantially more steps.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Reaffirming a Challenge to Bohmian Mechanics

arXiv:2509.06584v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In our recent work, we reported the first measurement of the speed of tunnelling particles using a coupled waveguide system. The measured speed is operationally defined through a comparison of two orthogonal motions in a coupled waveguide system, is compatible with the standard definition of dwell time and with the Büttiker-Landauer tunnelling time, and does not presuppose a trajectory picture. Here we respond to objections raised in comments, referee reports, preprints, and articles. We distinguish two questions that are often conflated: whether Bohmian mechanics reproduces the measured density, and whether the standard guiding equation assigns the correct state of motion to the particles. The first point follows under the usual quantum equilibrium assumptions. The second is a separate physical assumption, since the standard guiding equation does not follow from the Schrödinger equation alone. We argue that, in the evanescent regime, the state of motion assigned by the standard guiding equation is in disagreement with the measured speed. To make the distinction explicit, we also present a bidirectional Bohmian model that reproduces the same stationary density while assigning finite speeds compatible with the speed inferred in the evanescent regime.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Topological Codes Based on Space Groups

arXiv:2606.20548v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Topological codes form one of the most important classes of stabilizer codes. Most existing algebraic constructions and analyses of topological codes assume translation invariance. Here we show that topological codes can arise in more general settings by incorporating point group operations. The central construction is a class of Calderbank-Shor-Steane (CSS) codes called space-group codes, whose check operators are built from group-algebra templates over space groups that combine translations with point-group operations. We develop methods for analyzing topological properties of space-group codes using ring-modules and their invariant theory. At first glance, space-group codes might appear to complicate practical implementation; however, we find that they can exhibit greater locality than previous codes based purely on translations. Our framework thus extends the landscape of topological codes and opens up a broader design space for the co-design of topological codes with quantum computing platforms.

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

FlexMS: A Unified Public Benchmark for Molecule Tandem Mass Spectrum Prediction

arXiv:2602.22822v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) is central to small molecule identification, but current deep learning systems for spectrum prediction still remain difficult to evaluate and deploy in practice. While novel architectures constantly claim state-of-the-art performance, inconsistent metadata conditioning and entangled preprocessing pipelines hinder fair architectural comparisons. Besides, existing evaluations are often restricted to curated datasets, failing to capture the heterogeneity and cross-domain shifts of real-world metabolomics. Furthermore, current benchmarks lack difficulty-aware diagnostics and leave blind to how models behave under specific compute or data constraints. To address this, we present FlexMS, a modular public-data benchmark framework that standardizes MS/MS prediction across public resources while keeping molecular encoders, metadata conditioning, predictor heads, and downstream retrieval under one protocol. FlexMS establishes a fair evaluation playground which significantly lowers the barrier for integrating new predictive tools. Rather than solely optimizing for average scores, FlexMS augments aggregate accuracy with difficulty-aware diagnostics, providing actionable guidance on model selection across different compute constraints, data scales, and downstream retrieval objectives. Ultimately, FlexMS provides the community with a reproducible standard to identify which algorithmic conclusions are stable and which operating points are most viable in practice.

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

Evaluating Pluralism in LLMs through Latent Perspectives

The growing need to represent diverse perspectives has increased interest in pluralistic LLM generation. Although difficult to operationalize, identifying perspectives expressed in text would provide clear guidance on pluralistic alignment and more clearly articulate the pluralistic gap in LLM generation. While models have been shown to reduce the diversity of training data and generate homogeneously, this has been demonstrated primarily on multiple-choice questionnaires or using high-level characteristics of free-form text. In this paper, we introduce and implement a domain-agnostic multi-layered framework for unsupervised extraction of perspectives suitable for identifying the pluralistic gap in LLM-generated text. We evaluate our framework on book reviews, a highly opinionated dataset representing diverse perspectives, and compare various prompts and models. Our results show that while some models and prompting techniques come close to covering a broad spectrum of perspectives, rarer perspectives remain disproportionately underrepresented, resulting in distributions that diverge from human text.

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

Feature-Aligned Speech Watermarking for Robustness to Reconstruction Distortions

arXiv:2606.11828v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audio watermarking aims to embed identifiable information into audio while remaining imperceptible. Existing methods adopt high-fidelity, low-energy designs to preserve perceptual quality, but the resulting watermarks lack robustness under suppression by speech reconstruction models. Improving robustness is challenging due to the inherent robustness-fidelity trade-off in existing designs, where increasing watermark energy improves robustness but reduces fidelity. To address this problem, we propose a feature-aligned watermarking method that aligns the watermark with the original speech feature distribution, allowing higher watermark energy to improve robustness while preserving imperceptibility. We use a pretrained speech codec to generate a pseudo-speech watermark and fuse it into the spectrogram of the input audio, with VAD loss and perceptual losses guiding embedding within voiced regions. Experiments show that our method maintains imperceptibility comparable to existing approaches while substantially improving robustness under both seen and unseen speech reconstruction models.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Did You Forget What I Asked? Prospective Memory Failures in Large Language Models

作者:

Large language models often fail to satisfy formatting instructions when they must simultaneously perform demanding tasks. We study this behaviour through a prospective memory inspired lens from cognitive psychology, using a controlled paradigm that combines verifiable formatting constraints with benchmark tasks of increasing complexity. Across three model families and over 8,000 prompts, compliance drops by 2-21% under concurrent task load. Vulnerability is highly type-dependent: terminal constraints (requiring action at the response boundary) degrade most, with drops up to 50%, while avoidance constraints remain comparatively robust. A salience-enhanced format (explicit instruction framing plus a trailing reminder) recovers much of the lost compliance, restoring performance to 90-100% in many settings. Interference is bidirectional: formatting constraints can also reduce task accuracy, with one model's GSM8K accuracy dropping from 93% to 27%. In additional stacking experiments, joint compliance declines sharply as constraints accumulate. All results use deterministic programmatic checkers without an LLM-as-judge component on publicly available datasets.

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

Zero-Shot Cross-City Generalization in End-to-End Autonomous Driving: Self-Supervised versus Supervised Representations

End-to-end autonomous driving models are typically trained on multi-city datasets using supervised ImageNet-pretrained backbones, yet their ability to generalize to unseen cities remains largely unexamined. When training and evaluation data are geographically mixed, models may implicitly rely on city-specific cues, masking failure modes that would occur under real-world domain shifts when generalizing to new locations. In this work, we formulate zero-shot cross-city transfer as a controlled representation-level stress test for end-to-end autonomous driving and ask how visual pretraining affects transfer behavior under geographic domain shift. We conduct a comprehensive study by integrating self-supervised backbones I-JEPA, DINOv2, and MAE into planning frameworks. We evaluate performance under strict geographic splits on nuScenes in the open-loop setting and on NAVSIM in the closed-loop evaluation protocol. Our experiments reveal a substantial generalization gap when transferring models across cities with different road topologies, traffic conventions, and visual environments. In open-loop evaluation, a supervised backbone exhibits severe degradation when transferring between cities, yet some domain-specific self-supervised methods can substantially reduce both displacement and collision degradation. In closed-loop evaluation, self-supervised pretraining improves average out-of-distribution PDMS in several single-city training settings. Our results provide empirical evidence that representation learning influences the robustness of cross-city planning and motivate zero-shot geographic transfer as an important stress test for evaluating end-to-end autonomous driving systems.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

FineREX: Fine-Tuned NER-RE for Human Smuggling Knowledge Graphs

Court proceedings contain valuable evidence about human smuggling networks, but this information is often buried within unstructured, jargon-heavy legal documents. While large language models (LLMs) can support knowledge graph construction through automated information extraction, existing approaches rely on general-purpose models that are not tailored to the entity and relationship definitions required in this domain. We introduce FineREX, a streamlined knowledge graph construction pipeline built around a fine-tuned LLM for named entity recognition and relationship extraction (NER-RE). Using a manually annotated dataset of $512$ text chunks, FineREX achieves absolute improvements of 15.50% and 31.46% in entity and relationship F1-score, respectively, compared to a larger general-purpose baseline. These gains translate into higher-quality knowledge graphs, reducing legal noise by nearly half and lowering node duplication on long documents from 17.78% to 11.17%. By eliminating document rewriting and redundant extraction stages, FineREX also reduces end-to-end processing time by 50.0%. Our results demonstrate that domain-specific fine-tuning can substantially outperform larger general-purpose models while improving both the quality and efficiency of knowledge graph construction for illicit network analysis.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Knockoffs-based False Discovery Rate Control and Simplification for Deep Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.04404v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The deep neural network is a widely used framework in machine learning that has been widely applied in various fields. However, deep neural networks often involve a large number of parameters and inputs, many of which may be irrelevant to the goal or true output. These parameters and input variables not only increase computational complexity, but also contribute to additional computational cost. One solution to this problem is knockoff methods, which have proven successful in controlling false discovery rates in high-dimensional regression. Building on the knockoff methods and using the regularised neural network, this paper proposes three variable screening methods under the condition of controlling false discovery rates: one layer filter, multiple layers filter, and variable weight aggregation filter. In comparison with existing algorithms, we find that our algorithms show satisfactory performance.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

SSH-Net: A Deep Neural Network for Predicting Failure Time Distribution Functions under Competing Risks with Application to GPU Data

arXiv:2606.20451v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Competing risks are commonly observed in engineering fields and can bring challenges to time-to-event data modeling when the application scenarios are complicated. Recently, deep neural networks have received great attention for prediction with competing risks, due to their flexibility and high learning capability. However, the complexity of neural network structure brings extra difficulty in hyperparameter tuning based on different data inputs. Additionally, when an engineered system has complex physical structures with multiple hierarchical levels, treating all structural levels as a single group of inputs may fail to capture critical information. To address the issues, we propose a Structured Segmented Hazard Deep Neural Network (SSH-Net) for failure time prediction under cause-specific competing risks framework. Our approach associates neural network structure with data structures, and allows different covariate groups to impact the failure prediction through separate sub-networks. The neural network is constructed based on a cause-specific competing risks model. The SSH-Net outputs cause-specific hazard functions, and utilizes the penalized log-likelihood as the loss function. The prediction accuracy of SSH-Net is validated through simulation studies by evaluating the Brier score, the area under receiver operating characteristic curves (AUC), and the root mean square error (RMSE) of the predicted cause-specific cumulative incident function. We further demonstrate the model's ability to predict failure time distribution functions using the Titan GPU failure time data.

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

Filtered Conformal Ellipsoids for Graph-Native Time Series

arXiv:2606.17014v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Joint prediction sets for multivariate time series should control a single event while adapting to cross-coordinate dependence. We study filtered conformal ellipsoids: a frozen state-space filter emits a one-step predictive mean and covariance, and split-conformal calibration is applied to the resulting Mahalanobis scores. The filter is used to choose the ellipsoid shape; conformal calibration chooses the scalar radius, so the construction benefits from a learned predictive covariance without relying on Gaussian tail probabilities for coverage. The main difficulty is that filtered scores are dependent and learned recurrent filters need not contract in their raw hidden state; we therefore analyse contraction in an observable predictive-law quotient that identifies hidden states producing the same future sequence of emitted Gaussian laws. Under a stable Bayes Gaussian-projection filter, covariance bounds, and a finite-horizon observability Fisher condition, small excess Gaussian negative log-likelihood implies contraction of the learned emitted laws. Combined with a threshold-autocovariance envelope this yields a Chebyshev-type approximate coverage bound for filtered split-conformal prediction under dependence; a sharper Bernstein-type bound requires an additional geometric-mixing concentration assumption. Under Gaussian oracle realisability we also obtain a near-oracle log-volume comparison within the class of conditionally valid Gaussian ellipsoid rules. We instantiate the framework with a GCN-GRU filter with diagonal-plus-low-rank covariance. On moderate-size graph-native traffic benchmarks (METRLA-$20$ and PEMSBAY-$50$), the learned filter gives sharper at-target ellipsoids than static-covariance and non-filter baselines; at full-graph scale and on non-graph-native datasets, factor and copula baselines can be stronger.

16.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Visualizing the impact of quenched disorder on 2D electron Wigner solids

作者:

Electron Wigner solids (WSs)1–12 provide an ideal system for understanding the competing effects of electron–electron and electron–disorder interactions, a central unsolved problem in condensed matter physics. Progress in this topic has been limited by a lack of single-defect-resolved experimental measurements as well as accurate theoretical tools to enable realistic experiment/theory comparison. Here we overcome these limitations by combining atomically resolved scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM) with neural-quantum-state quantum Monte Carlo (NQS-QMC) simulation of disordered 2D electron WSs to discover new disorder-induced physical regimes of correlated electron behaviour. STM was used to image the electron density (ne)-dependent evolution of electron WSs in gate-tunable bilayer MoSe2 (BL-MoSe2) devices with varying long-range (nLR) and short-range (nSR) disorder densities. These images were compared with NQS-QMC simulations using realistic disorder maps extracted from experiment, thus allowing the roles of different disorder types to be disentangled. We identify two distinct physical regimes for disordered electron WSs that depend on nSR. For nSR ≲ ne, the WS behaviour is dominated by long-range disorder and features extensive mixed solid–liquid phases, a new type of local re-entrant melting/crystallization and prominent Friedel oscillations. By contrast, when nSR ≫ ne, these features are suppressed and a more robust amorphous WS phase emerges that persists to higher ne, highlighting the importance of short-range disorder in this regime. Our work establishes a powerful framework for studying disordered quantum solids through a combined experimental–theoretical approach. A technique combining atomically resolved scanning tunnelling microscopy with neural-quantum-state quantum Monte Carlo simulation of disordered 2D electron Wigner solids establishes a powerful framework to enable the clear identification of two distinct defect-induced disorder regimes.

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

Steady-State Noise Signatures of Lindbladian Exceptional Points

arXiv:2606.13377v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Exceptional points (EPs) are non-Hermitian degeneracies at which two or more eigenvalues and their corresponding eigenvectors coalesce. In open quantum systems, exceptional points can arise in the Lindbladian governing the dissipative dynamics. Their signatures have so far been mainly identified in finite-time observables, such as transient currents, while steady-state average currents generally provide no direct evidence of the underlying exceptional-point structure. In this work, we demonstrate that signatures of Lindbladian EPs can nevertheless be accessed in the steady-state regime through current noise. We derive general expressions for current correlation functions within a Lindblad master-equation framework and show, in particular, how exceptional points affect their behaviour as a function of the time delay. We illustrate these results with the paradigmatic example of two interacting qubits coupled to two reservoirs, where the steady-state noise clearly distinguishes overdamped, underdamped, and critical regimes. Our results establish current correlation functions as a steady-state probe of Lindbladian EPs in open quantum systems.

18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

How long does it take to train an Elephant Random Walk

作者:

arXiv:2509.15049v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study how conditioning on the first $k$ steps, which we think of as training, affects the long-term behavior of the Elephant Random Walk. When the elephant is conditioned to be at position $k$ at time $k$, the first return time to the origin scales as $k^{(4-4p)/(3-4p)}$ in the diffusive regime, and grows exponentially in the critical regime. We loosely interpret this as a measurement of the rate at which the elephant forgets its training.

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

AutoPass: Evidence-Guided LLM Agents for Compiler Performance Tuning

arXiv:2606.20373v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise for code compilation tasks, but applying them to runtime performance tuning is difficult due to complex microarchitectural effects and noisy runtime measurements. We present AutoPass, a multi-agent framework for compiler performance tuning that uses compiler and runtime evidence to guide LLM-generated optimization decisions. Rather than treating the compiler as a black box like prior auto-tuning schemes, AutoPass opens up the compiler to the LLM, enabling it to query compiler-internal optimization states and analyze the intermediate representation to orchestrate compiler options. The search process iteratively refines optimization configurations using measured runtime feedback to diagnose regressions and guide latency-improving edits. AutoPass operates in an inference-only, training-free setting and requires no offline training or task-specific fine-tuning, making it readily applicable to new benchmarks and platforms. We implement AutoPass on the LLVM compiler and evaluate it on server-grade x86-64 and embedded ARM64 systems. AutoPass outperforms expert-tuned heuristics and classical autotuning methods, achieving geometric-mean speedups of 1.043x and 1.117x over LLVM -O3 on x86-64 and ARM64, respectively.

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

Towards Anomaly Detection on Relational Data

arXiv:2606.18621v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Relational databases are widely used for managing structured data in real-world systems. Detecting anomalies from such relational data is crucial for identifying fraud, risks, and abnormal behaviors, yet remains under-explored. The key challenges lie in the intrinsic complexity of relational data: multi-table attributes are high-dimensional and heterogeneous, making sparse abnormal clues easy to overwhelm by normal or irrelevant information; and anomalies may further manifest as abnormal connection patterns across different foreign-key relations, which existing tabular and graph anomaly detection methods are ill-suited to capture. To address them, we propose RelAD, a reconstruction-based framework that captures anomalies from both attribute and relational edge reconstruction. RelAD contains two core modules: conditional sparse-gated attribute reconstruction, which suppresses redundant multi-table attributes and emphasizes abnormal semantic blocks, and dual-view multi-relational edge reconstruction, which detects relation-specific abnormal connections from both intrinsic and behavioral entity profiles. The resulting attribute and relational signals are integrated through a lightweight fusion module to produce the final anomaly score. We further construct 6 benchmark datasets with systematic anomalies, on which extensive experiments show that RelAD consistently outperforms other baselines while achieving competitive efficiency.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Boson Sampling as a Probe of Chaotic and Integrable Quantum Dynamics in a Photonic Chip

arXiv:2605.25398v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum chaos plays a key role in understanding complex quantum dynamics, while integrated photonics offers unique advantages for quantum applications, including high-speed operation, scalability, and programmable unitary transformations. However, integrated photonic approaches to probing quantum chaos remain largely unexplored, owing to the absence of a clear connection between programmable photonic dynamics and established chaos diagnostics. In this work, we establish Fock-state boson sampling as a practical probe of quantum chaos by exploiting the sensitivity of multiphoton interference to the random-matrix properties of underlying single-particle unitary dynamics. More importantly, we design and fabricate a programmable quantum photonic chip to experimentally implement this framework, achieving the first integrated-photonic demonstration of quantum-chaos probes based on boson sampling. Experimental results show that the three complementary probes proposed in this work, namely the distance to Porter–Thomas statistics, Shannon entropy, and Out-of-Time-Ordered-Correlator-equivalent observables, exhibit close agreement with theoretical predictions and consistently distinguish chaotic and integrable dynamics. Our work provides a scalable route for investigating complex quantum dynamics on programmable photonic platforms while leveraging the intrinsic advantages of boson sampling through multiphoton interference and complex output statistics.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

SAFformer:Improving Spiking Transformer via Active Predictive Filtering

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer notable advantages in biological plausibility and energy efficiency, making them promising candidates for building low-power Transformers. However, existing Spiking Transformers largely adhere to a passive reactive paradigm, which struggles to focus on task-relevant information and incurs substantial computational overhead when processing redundant visual data. To overcome this fundamental yet underexplored limitation, we propose SAFformer, a novel Spiking Transformer architecture based on an active predictive filtering paradigm. Inspired by the brain's predictive coding mechanism, SAFformer actively suppresses predictable signals and focuses on salient visual features. Extensive experiments show that SAFformer establishes new state-of-the-art performance on CIFAR-10/100 and CIFAR10-DVS. Remarkably, on ImageNet-1K, it achieves 80.44% Top-1 accuracy with only 26.58M parameters and an energy consumption of 5.88 mJ, demonstrating an exceptional balance between accuracy and efficiency.

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

Steerable Cultural Preference Optimization of Reward Models

It is essential for large language model (LLM) technology to serve many different cultural sub-communities in a manner that is acceptable to each community. However, research on LLM alignment has so far predominantly focused on predicting a unified response preference of annotators from certain regions. This paper aims to advance the development of alignment models with a more global outlook, that are able to accurately represent the preferences of subcommunities and do not exhibit excessive bias towards any of them. We focus on the development of reward models for this purpose and present a novel reward model training algorithm (SCPO) that can incorporate diverse cultural preferences in a balanced manner. Our method results in performance increases of the minority reward model of up to 7 points over the baseline model across two datasets, PRISM and GlobalOpinionQA, and across 7 countries. SCPO is up to 280% more training data-efficient than full-data finetuning of reward models. In addition, we perform analysis of bias by separately evaluating on the preference of subcommunities and show that excessive bias is mitigated via our weighting method. Our code is available at https://github.com/minsik-ai/Steerable-Cultural-Preference

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

A High-Resolution Landscape Dataset for Concept-Based XAI With Application to Species Distribution Models

arXiv:2604.13240v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Mapping the spatial distribution of species is essential for conservation policy and invasive species management. Species distribution models (SDMs) are the primary tools for this task, serving two purposes: achieving robust predictive performance while providing ecological insights into the driving factors of distribution. However, the increasing complexity of deep learning SDMs has made extracting these insights more challenging. To reconcile these objectives, we propose the first implementation of concept-based Explainable AI (XAI) for SDMs. We leverage the Robust TCAV (Testing with Concept Activation Vectors) methodology to quantify the influence of landscape concepts on model predictions. To enable this, we provide a new open-access landscape concept dataset derived from high-resolution multispectral and LiDAR drone imagery. It includes 653 patches across 15 distinct landscape concepts and 1,450 random reference patches, designed to suit a wide range of species. We demonstrate this approach through a case study of two aquatic insects, Plecoptera and Trichoptera, using two Convolutional Neural Networks and one Vision Transformer. Results show that concept-based XAI helps validate SDMs against expert knowledge while uncovering novel associations that generate new ecological hypotheses. Robust TCAV also provides landscape-level information, useful for policy-making and land management. Code and datasets are publicly available.