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02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

FitVTON: Fit-aware Virtual Try-On via Body-Garment Size Control

While diffusion-based virtual try-on has achieved impressive visual realism, most methods treat the task as 2D inpainting, prioritizing texture preservation over physical plausibility. Consequently, they often produce plausible-looking images that fail to reflect authentic garment fit across diverse body shapes. We present FitVTON, a Fit-aware virtual try-on model on different bodies in the wild. FitVTON encodes garment-body size through structured text prompts, and learn from simulated try-on triplets from parameterized garment model. To improve the fitting effects over garment silhouettes, we introduce two auxiliary head to predict the masks for both the garment and the exposed body. We further introduce a texture rectification stage to improve realistic appearance from simulated data. To evaluate the fitting fidelity, we curate a real-world dataset, FittingEffect3K, combining VLM-based scoring protocol. Both subjective and quantitive experiments show that FitVTON demonstrate authentic fitting fidelity, with significant sizing accuracy and shape preservation over state-of-the-art methods while maintaining competitive image quality. Project Page: https://zenoning.github.io/FitVTON/.

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

Eigen-Spike Emergence and Quadratic Equivalents for Conjugate Kernels on Nonlinearly Separable Data

arXiv:2605.29669v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent work in random matrix theory (RMT) has developed the notion of deterministic equivalents: typically linear surrogate models that approximate the spectral behavior of large nonlinear random matrices, such as nonlinear feature maps in neural networks (NNs). Such equivalents make theoretical predictions tractable by reducing a complex model to a simpler one with properties that fall under the umbrella of classical RMT tools. However, this leaves open the question of whether this idealized linear equivalence remains meaningful for classification of high-dimensional nonlinearly separable data. Motivated by this, we consider the conjugate kernel (CK), which is the nonlinear feature map of a one-layer feedforward NN, under a canonical nonlinearly separable dataset for the XOR problem; and we use the study of informative outlier eigenvalues in the CK and whether their corresponding eigenvectors asymptotically align with XOR labels as a proxy for nonlinear learnability. We develop a robust quadratic equivalent of the CK matrix that enables a precise analysis of emergent informative spikes, as one modifies various knobs common in ML practice: sample complexity, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), nonlinear activation choice, and pretrained features. We identify regimes in which these knobs move the CK beyond the linear equivalent and produce BBP-type transitions to label-aligned outlier eigenspaces. Our analysis helps bring deterministic-equivalence tools from RMT to bear on problems of practical relevance in ML.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Contrastive Action-Image Pre-training for Visuomotor Control

Existing vision encoders for robotics face a fundamental bottleneck: robotic datasets lack the scale necessary for large-scale pre-training. Prior work circumvents this data scarcity by turning to internet-scale image and language data or egocentric human video. While these models show promise, neither paradigm learns from paired vision and action data, which downstream visuomotor control policies require. However, robot trajectories, the most direct source of this paired signal, are not available at pre-training scale, motivating us to extract action signals from abundant human video instead. To this end, we introduce CAIP (Contrastive Action-Image Pre-training), a vision encoder that treats human hand poses from large-scale egocentric video as a proxy for end-effector actions. By extracting 3D hand keypoints, a representation that aligns naturally with downstream robot action spaces, CAIP learns a unified action-image representation through a contrastive objective. Leveraging 32,041 hours of egocentric human video and only 88 hours of robotic manipulation data, CAIP outperforms state-of-the-art vision encoders including DINOv2, SigLIP, MVP, and R3M. Evaluated on a challenging real-world dexterous manipulation setup using Dexmate Vega and Sharpa Wave hands, CAIP yields performance gains of more than 30% on tasks involving folding, pouring, and fine-grained manipulation. Our results show that our method of contrastive action-centric pre-training yields a scalable path to achieving robust visual representations better suited for physical interaction.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

RUB: Evaluating Residual Knowledge in Unlearned Models

Machine Unlearning (MUL) has emerged as a key mechanism for privacy protection and content regulation, yet current techniques often fail to guarantee the complete removal of sensitive information. While most existing works focus on verifying the execution of unlearning, they overlook the critical question of whether models remain robust against adversarial attempts to recover forgotten knowledge. In this work, we advocate for the principle of Robust Unlearning, which requires models to be both indistinguishable from retrained counterparts and resilient against diverse adversarial threats. To instantiate this principle, we propose a unified benchmark, RUB (Robust Unlearning Benchmark), that systematically evaluates the robustness of unlearning algorithms across classification, image-to-image reconstruction, and text-to-image synthesis. Within this framework, we introduce the Unlearning Mapping Attack (UMA) as a generalizable method to detect residual information, and demonstrate how existing attack strategies can be adapted into this framework as long as they conform to the generic UMA framework. Our experiments across discriminative and generative tasks reveal that state-of-the-art unlearning methods remain vulnerable under these evaluations, even when passing standard verification metrics. By positioning robustness as the central criterion and providing a benchmark for adversarial evaluation, we hope RUB paves the way toward more reliable and secure unlearning practices. The codebase and model checkpoints in RUB will be published.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Hantavirus Disease in Uruguay: Trends and Mortality Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Introduction: Hantavirus disease is an emerging and potentially severe zoonosis of global distribution. In Uruguay, it is transmitted by rodents inhabiting peridomestic, suburban, and rural areas. Global incidence is estimated at 150,000 to 200,000 cases per year, with up to 300 annual cases in the Americas. Since 1997, Uruguay's Ministry of Public Health (MPH) has monitored Hantavirus cardiopulmonary syndrome (HCPS), the most common clinical presentation in the region. By 2019, a total of 271 cases had been identified in the country, with an estimated mortality rate of nearly 50%. Objectives: To describe the clinical, epidemiological, and occupational characteristics of patients with Hantavirus disease in Uruguay during the pre-pandemic (2018-2019) and pandemic (2020-2021) periods. Methods: A descriptive, cross-sectional, observational study was conducted, including all serologically confirmed cases of Hantavirus infection reported to the MPH between 2018 and 2021. Clinical and demographic data were extracted from the mandatory reporting form for zoonotic diseases. Incidence and case fatality rates were calculated, and factors associated with fatal outcomes were analyzed. Results: A total of 58 confirmed cases were identified between 2018 and 2021. Most patients were male (62%), with a mean age of 36.5 years (SD 16). A decline in incidence was observed during 2020-2021, with no significant change in case fatality. Direct rodent exposure was the most frequently associated risk factor. Montevideo and Canelones were the most affected departments. Renal and pulmonary involvement were significantly associated with mortality. Conclusion: Hantavirus remains a relevant public health concern in Uruguay. Although a decrease in incidence was observed during the COVID-19 pandemic years, case fatality rates remained high. The findings underscore the need for sustained surveillance and early recognition, particularly in urbanizing regions.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

The Target ALS Global Natural History Study: Cross-platform proteomics to accelerate biofluid biomarker and drug target discovery in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a fatal, rapidly progressive neurodegenerative disease of motor neurons for which therapeutics are limited. Improved biomarkers are imperative to improve patient care and therapeutic development. Here, we employed 35-plex isobaric tandem mass tag labeling based on isobutyl-proline reporter group (TMTpro) to perform unbiased proteomic analysis of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and plasma from control (n= 28, n= 31) and sporadic ALS (sALS) (n= 39, n= 41), from the Target ALS Global Natural History Study (TALS GNHS). We identified 2,875 proteins in CSF and 1,118 proteins in plasma and identified known and novel differentially expressed proteins (DEPs) between controls and sALS, some of which were orthogonally validated using immunoassay. Comparison of TMTpro-MS and Olink proximity extension assay proteomics revealed common and non-overlapping differentially expressed proteins illustrating strengths unique to each platform. This initial cross-sectional proteomic study of biofluids from the TALS GNHS, with unrestricted availability of study results to the research community, highlights the potential of this resource as a potent platform for ALS biomarker discovery.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

On the Energy Distribution of the Galactic Center Excess' Sources

arXiv:2507.17804v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The Galactic Center Excess (GCE) may yet herald the discovery of annihilating dark matter. Weighing against that conclusion are analyses showing evidence for dim point sources within the spatial structure of the emission. Due to technical limitations these analyses are purely spatial with all spectral information that could disentangle the excess from astrophysical backgrounds discarded. Here, we demonstrate that a neural network simulation-based inference approach can jointly analyze the spatial and spectra data. The addition is profound: energy information drives the putative point sources to be significantly dimmer, indicating either the GCE is truly diffuse in nature or made of an exceptionally large number of sources. Quantitatively, for our best fit background model, the excess is essentially consistent with Poisson emission as predicted by dark matter. If due to point sources, our median prediction is $\mathcal{O}(10^5)$ sources, or more than 35,000 at 90\% confidence, both orders of magnitude larger than the hundreds preferred by earlier point-source analyses of the GCE, although variations allowed by background systematics could reduce the required number of sources by roughly an order of magnitude.

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

Can AI Agents Synthesize Scientific Conclusions?

Scientific AI agents increasingly retrieve evidence, reason across sources, and synthesize conclusions used in consequential decisions. Yet, their ability to do so in high-stakes domains such as health remains unclear. We introduce SciConBench, a large-scale live benchmark of 9.11K questions and expert-written conclusions from systematic reviews to evaluate open-domain scientific conclusion synthesis. The benchmark draws on an expert-validated automated evaluation pipeline that decomposes conclusions into atomic facts and measures correctness and comprehensiveness via factual precision and recall. To mitigate data leakage, we further introduce SciConHarness, a clean-room evaluation harness that equips agents with controlled web interaction to ensure valid measurement. Evaluating 8 frontier models and deep research agents, we find that factual quality remains low: under clean-room settings, the best agent achieves only a factual F1 of 0.337. Our clean-room setting consistently reduces performance relative to unconstrained evaluation, suggesting that leakage inflates estimates of models' true synthesis capabilities. Finally, we audit consumer-facing agents (e.g., Google AI Overview, OpenEvidence) and find they frequently generate incomplete and sometimes contradictory conclusions, even when the ground-truth answer is available. Overall, our results show that reliable synthesis of scientific conclusions remains an open challenge, and that clean-room evaluation is essential for assessing open-domain AI agents.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

How to sketch a learning algorithm

作者:

arXiv:2604.07328v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: How does the choice of training data influence an AI model? This broad question is of central importance to interpretability, privacy, and basic science. At its technical core is the data deletion problem: after a reasonable amount of precomputation, quickly predict how the model would behave in a given situation if a given subset of training data had been excluded from the learning algorithm. We present a data deletion scheme capable of predicting model outputs with vanishing error $\varepsilon$ and failure probability $\delta$ in the deep learning setting. Our precomputation and prediction algorithms are only $\tilde{O}(\log(1/\delta)/\varepsilon^2)$ factors slower than regular training and inference, respectively. The storage requirements are those of $\tilde{O}(\log(1/\delta)/\varepsilon^2)$ models. Our proof is based on an assumption that we call stability. In contrast to the assumptions made by prior work, stability appears to be fully compatible with learning powerful AI models. In support of this, we show that stability is satisfied in a minimal set of experiments with microgpt. Our code is available at https://github.com/SamSpo1/microgpt-sketch. At a technical level, our work is based on a new method for locally sketching an arithmetic circuit by computing higher-order derivatives in random complex directions. Forward-mode automatic differentiation allows cheap computation of these derivatives.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Knowledge Reutilization in Meta-Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.18132v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Meta-reinforcement learning enables fast adaptation by extracting shared structure from related tasks, but existing end-to-end methods often couple task inference with embodiment-specific control. This coupling can obscure non-parametric task semantics, reduce sample efficiency, and limit cross-agent reuse. We propose a meta-knowledge reutilization framework that learns task-level knowledge on a dynamics-simplified agent and transfers it to heterogeneous agents. The framework uses a Bayesian non-parametric prior to organize latent task modes and a high-level policy to generate task-level magnitude guidance. To bridge reusable task knowledge with different embodiments, we introduce a semantic-magnitude interface and a lightweight temporal adaptor, which convert frozen meta-knowledge into temporally aligned subgoals for embodiment-specific low-level controllers. Experiments on multiple locomotion agents show that our framework reduces final-step tracking error by 94.75% – 99.79% compared with recent state-of-the-art baselines and achieves comparable deployment performance with about 23.8% of their interaction data.

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

Normative Robustness as a Frontier for Non-Verifiable Reasoning in LLMs

arXiv:2606.12731v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As LLMs increasingly serve in advisory and deliberative roles, users rely on them for non-verifiable reasoning in domains lacking objective ground truths. However, traditional evaluations of LLM reasoning focus almost exclusively on fact-based domains, such as mathematics and science, leaving uncertainty over whether and to what degree models can handle ambiguous, subjective, or value-laden problems over time. To address this concern, we propose moral reasoning as a paradigmatic subdomain of non-verifiable reasoning. We define moral robustness as a model's capacity to exhibit sound moral reasoning across time and contexts, and we introduce a scalable, adversarial, multi-turn evaluation framework to empirically measure this capability. We simulate 48,000 user-agent moral deliberations across four frontier LLMs, varying premise relevance, premise order, conversation duration, and the user's stated moral view. We find that models successfully ignore morally-irrelevant distractors, but shift their reasoning by up to 6.5%, on average, towards the user's stated preferred moral view, and varying their reasoning depending on factors such as order (altering moral judgments by order in 13-22% of the cases) and duration (altering moral judgments between single-turn and multi-turn in 10-24% of the cases). Our analysis indicates that models tailor not just their final verdicts but their underlying justifications to align with a user's moral viewpoint - a failure mode we characterize as moral deliberative sycophancy.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Agentic Artificial Intelligence for Hospital Readmission Review: A Single-Center Blinded Evaluation and Exploratory Qualitative Analysis

Background: Manual review of 30-day hospital readmissions can identify actionable quality and safety problems, but it is labor-intensive. We developed and evaluated an agentic AI workflow for evidence-grounded readmission review. Materials and methods: We studied adult patients with unplanned 30-day readmission after discharge from a medicine hospitalist service at a single academic health system. An AI agent using a large language model queried a database containing notes, encounters, procedures, laboratory results, and other clinical data, and completed the same structured readmission-review rubric used by physicians. In the primary comparative evaluation, 20 randomly selected readmissions from 2025 were each reviewed by two physicians and the AI system. Blinded physician evaluators rated review quality. After rubric refinement, the AI workflow was applied to 100 recent readmissions in an exploratory expanded-cohort analysis of recurring improvement opportunities. Results: In the primary comparative evaluation, the AI classified 9/20 readmissions (45%) as preventable, compared with 19/40 physician reviews (47.5%). Blinded overall quality ratings were similar for AI and physician reviews (4.35 vs. 4.20 on a 1-5 scale; mean difference 0.15, 95% CI -0.20 to 0.48; p=0.49), as were factuality/support and usefulness/actionability ratings. No AI hallucinations were identified during factuality review. Agreement on preventability and primary readmission category was low for both AI-human and human-human comparisons. The AI system cost $0.23 per chart; physician reviewers took a median of 15 minutes, corresponding to an estimated $42.43 per chart. In the exploratory expanded-cohort analysis, AI-assisted review identified recurring vulnerabilities in post-discharge follow-up plans, incomplete inpatient workups, medication-safety transitions, and indwelling-device transitions. Conclusions: Agentic AI produced readmission reviews with similar blinded quality ratings to physician reviews in this small single-center primary comparative evaluation and supported identification of recurring quality-improvement themes in the exploratory expanded-cohort analysis. Preventability judgments remained variable among both AI and physicians, underscoring the need for human oversight and prospective evaluation before operational use.

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

BLISS: A Lightweight Bilevel Influence Scoring Method for Data Selection in Language Model Pretraining

arXiv:2510.06048v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Effective data selection is essential for pretraining large language models (LLMs), enhancing efficiency and improving generalization to downstream tasks. However, existing approaches often require leveraging external pretrained models, making it difficult to disentangle the effects of data selection from those of the external pretrained models. In addition, they often overlook the long-term impact of selected data if the model is trained to convergence, primarily due to the prohibitive cost of full-scale LLM pretraining. In this paper, we introduce BLISS (BileveL Influence Scoring method for data Selection): a lightweight data selection method that operates entirely from scratch, without relying on any external pretrained oracle models, while explicitly accounting for the long-term impact of selected data. BLISS leverages a small proxy model as a surrogate for the LLM and employs a score model to estimate the long-term influence of training samples if the proxy model is trained to convergence. We formulate data selection as a bilevel optimization problem, where the upper-level objective optimizes the score model to assign importance weights to training samples, ensuring that minimizing the lower-level objective (i.e., training the proxy model over the weighted training loss until convergence) leads to best validation performance. Once optimized, the trained score model predicts influence scores for the dataset, enabling efficient selection of high-quality samples for LLM pretraining. We validate BLISS by pretraining 410M/1B/2.8B Pythia and LLaMA-0.5B models on selected subsets of the C4 dataset. Notably, under the 1B model setting, BLISS achieves $1.7\times$ speedup in reaching the same performance as the state-of-the-art method, demonstrating superior performance across multiple downstream tasks.

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

The Algebra of Units: From Buckingham's Pi-grec Theorem to Latent-Variable Learning

arXiv:2606.16737v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Engineers often measure many quantities-speed, pressure, temperature, length-expressed in different physical units. The Buckingham Pi-grec theorem states that these variables can always be combined into a smaller set of dimensionless numbers whose values fully determine the system's behaviour. Identifying the appropriate dimensionless groups has traditionally required expert knowledge and physical insight. This paper shows that they can instead be discovered automatically from data, without prior knowledge of the governing physics. The key observation is that, after logarithmic transformation, measurements collected under different scalings of the same system lie on a low-dimensional manifold whose geometry is determined by the underlying dimensionless groups. Singular value decomposition (SVD) identifies this manifold directly from data. A subsequent search over integer-exponent combinations recovers candidate dimensionless quantities, while a repeating-variable filter retains only those constructed from the machine's characteristic scales. This procedure recovers familiar engineering groups, including the flow coefficient, head coefficient, and Mach number, while excluding equivalent but less interpretable alternatives. The method is demonstrated on a synthetic compressor dataset containing 16,000 measurements. Starting from raw dimensional variables and no physics input, it recovers the correct dimensionless groups to numerical precision and reproduces the compressor performance map with an error below 0.01%. More broadly, the work reveals a close connection between classical dimensional analysis and modern data-driven learning. Both rely on the same underlying algebraic structure, suggesting new approaches for building physical models that are simultaneously interpretable, scalable, and data-efficient.

16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

BSViT: A Burst Spiking Vision Transformer for Expressive and Efficient Visual Representation Learning

Spiking Vision Transformers (S-ViTs) offer a promising framework for energy-efficient visual learning. However, existing designs remain limited by two fundamental issues: the restricted information capacity of binary spike coding and the dense token interactions introduced by global self-attention. To address these challenges, this work proposes BSViT, a burst spiking-driven Vision Transformer featuring a Dual-Channel Burst Spiking Self-Attention (DBSSA) mechanism. DBSSA encodes queries with binary spikes and keys with burst spikes to enhance representational capacity. The value pathway adopts dual excitatory and inhibitory binary channels, enabling signed modulation and richer spike interactions. Importantly, the entire attention operation preserves addition-only computation, ensuring compatibility with energy-efficient neuromorphic hardware. To further reduce spike activity and incorporate spatial priors, a patch adjacency masking strategy is introduced to restrict attention to local neighborhoods, resulting in structure-aware sparsity and reduced computational overhead. In addition, burst spike coding is systematically integrated across the network to increase spike-level representational capacity beyond conventional binary spiking. Extensive experiments on both static and event-based vision benchmarks demonstrate that BSViT consistently outperforms existing spiking Transformers in accuracy while maintaining competitive energy efficiency.

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

FeedEval: Pedagogically Aligned Evaluation of LLM-Generated Essay Feedback

Going beyond the prediction of numerical scores, recent research in automated essay scoring has increasingly emphasized the generation of high-quality feedback that provides justification and actionable guidance. To mitigate the high cost of expert annotation, prior work has commonly relied on LLM-generated feedback to train essay assessment models. However, such feedback is often incorporated without explicit quality validation, resulting in the propagation of noise in downstream applications. To address this limitation, we propose FeedEval, an LLM-based framework for evaluating LLM-generated essay feedback along three pedagogically grounded dimensions: specificity, helpfulness, and validity. FeedEval employs dimension-specialized LLM evaluators trained on datasets curated in this study to assess multiple feedback candidates and select high-quality feedback for downstream use. Experiments on the ASAP++ benchmark show that FeedEval closely aligns with human expert judgments and that essay scoring models trained with FeedEval-filtered high-quality feedback achieve superior scoring performance. Furthermore, revision experiments using small LLMs show that the high-quality feedback identified by FeedEval leads to more effective essay revisions. We release our code and curated datasets at: https://github.com/BBeeChu/FeedEval.git.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Generalization Hacking: Models Can Game Reinforcement Learning by Preventing Behavioral Generalization

arXiv:2606.12016v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model post-training, and in particular reinforcement learning (RL), is one of the primary mechanisms by which developers can shape models' values and behaviors. However, as models become increasingly evaluation and training aware, they may be motivated to resist training when the perceived objective conflicts with their current values, undermining developers' ability to detect misalignment and correct model behavior through further training. In this paper, we demonstrate generalization hacking, in which a model collects reward during RL while preventing the rewarded behavior from generalizing. We construct a model organism on Qwen3-235B-A22B, finetuning on synthetic documents describing training awareness and self-inoculation, a novel mechanism in which the model frames compliance as context-specific in its chain of thought, without demonstrating or instructing either behavior. The model organism achieves train-time harmfulness comparable to controls while maintaining a persistent ${\sim}15$ percentage point compliance gap across 700 steps of RL. Additionally, a control organism trained only on training awareness documents independently discovers inoculation-like reasoning under RL pressure, developing its own compliance gap despite never being exposed to the concept. Because the generalization-hacking organism receives high reward throughout, standard training metrics provide no signal that generalization has failed. Our results constitute the first demonstration that a model can actively resist RL behavioral modification while maintaining high reward, suggesting that as models become more capable and training-aware, they may be able to undermine the training process itself.

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

Convex training of Lipschitz-regularized shallow neural networks

arXiv:2606.19652v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work, we introduce a training procedure for shallow neural networks that promotes robustness against adversarial attacks. We solve a non-convex Lipschitz-regularized training program by introducing a convex restriction that can be efficiently solved to global optimality. Our approach can be employed as a post-processing step by taking a pre-trained network as an initial solution to then solving the convex program whose optimal network is guaranteed to be no worse than the initial one. We illustrate the improvements of our training procedure with experiments using real world datasets for regression tasks under an adversarial setting. We show numerically that solving our proposed convex program yields networks with lower objective values on the Lipschitz-regularized program compared to existing methods. Additionally, we show that on certain datasets, networks obtained using our convex training program are both more accurate and robust with respect to adversarial attacks.

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

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

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

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

RGB-S: Image-Aligned Tactile Saliency for Robust Dexterous Manipulation

Effective visuo-tactile integration is critical for robotic dexterous manipulation, especially when visual observations are unreliable or occluded. However, robustly aligning sparse, heterogeneous tactile measurements with dense visual representations remains a fundamental challenge. Most existing approaches require policies to learn cross-modal correspondences implicitly from limited demonstrations, without leveraging geometric priors. As a result, they are often data-inefficient and generalize poorly when visual observations are degraded. To address this limitation, we propose a framework that explicitly grounds physical contacts in the image domain. Using robot forward kinematics and camera calibration, we project tactile sensor locations directly onto the RGB image plane. We then render force-modulated Gaussian saliency maps to model spatial uncertainty arising from kinematic and calibration errors. By integrating these 2D spatial anchors through a zero-initialized conditioning architecture, our method injects physical contact priors into standard visual backbones while preserving pre-trained visual representations. We evaluate our method on six dexterous manipulation tasks in both simulation and the real world under severe visual occlusions. Real-world experiments show that explicit RGB-S grounding in the image domain improves real-world occluded manipulation success rates by $26.7$ percentage points over the strongest implicit visuo-tactile baseline, suggesting its improved spatial reasoning and robustness to occlusion. Project page: touch-as-saliency.github.io

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Translating the Untranslatable: An Operationalizable Ontology for Untranslatability

Untranslatability, cases where meaning cannot be directly preserved across languages, is well-studied in linguistics but underexplored in NLP. As machine translation (MT) systems improve on standard benchmarks, their limitations increasingly concentrate in such cases, where translation cannot be reduced to one-to-one equivalence. We introduce a structured ontology of untranslatability along with a taxonomy of compensation strategies, which are specific techniques to convey meaning under these untranslatable circumstances. We operationalize this framework into a multilingual dataset of untranslatable sentences paired with strategy-based translations, enabling controlled analysis of translation behavior. Initial human preference studies suggest that translation quality depends on the strategy used, with consistent preferences for outputs that include explanatory context, known as the Annotation compensation strategy. Our framework and dataset provide a foundation for studying and modeling strategy-informed machine translation.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Advances in Scientific Machine Learning for Coupled Fluid Flow and Transport

arXiv:2606.19562v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This chapter reviews recent advances in Scientific Machine Learning (SciML) for modeling coupled fluid flow and transport phenomena governed by the incompressible Navier-Stokes and scalar transport equations. Such systems, found in applications like turbidity currents and thermal convection, feature strong nonlinear coupling and multiscale behavior that make high-fidelity simulations computationally expensive. To address this, the chapter surveys state-of-the-art SciML methods for building efficient surrogate models, including linear reduced-order techniques based on Singular Value Decomposition (such as Dynamic Mode Decomposition) and nonlinear neural network approaches like Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) and $\beta$-Variational Autoencoders ($\beta$-VAEs). It first covers the authors' work combining these models with High Performance Computing strategies, including Adaptive Mesh Refinement/Coarsening (AMR/C) and scientific floating-point data compression. It then presents two new contributions: surrogate modeling of turbidity currents via PINNs, and the extraction of disentangled nonlinear modes from thermal flows using $\beta$-VAEs. Governing equations and representative benchmarks, including lock-exchange flows and Rayleigh-Bénard convection, illustrate these methodologies. The chapter is intentionally long, covering both the mathematical and physical foundations of coupled fluid flow and the computational aspects of state-of-the-art modeling. Overall, it demonstrates how SciML enables fast, accurate approximations of complex coupled systems within the specific data regimes and modeling assumptions considered, while substantially reducing computational cost relative to full-order simulations. Broader capabilities such as real-time prediction and uncertainty quantification remain active research directions whose feasibility depends strongly on the problem at hand.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Efficient Flow Matching using Latent Variables

Flow matching models have shown great potential in image generation tasks among probabilistic generative models. However, most flow matching models in the literature do not explicitly utilize the underlying clustering structure in the target data when learning the flow from a simple source distribution like the standard Gaussian. This leads to inefficient learning, especially for many high-dimensional real-world datasets, which often reside in a low-dimensional manifold. To this end, we present $\texttt{Latent-CFM}$, which provides efficient training strategies by conditioning on the features extracted from data using pretrained deep latent variable models. Through experiments on synthetic data from multi-modal distributions and widely used image benchmark datasets, we show that $\texttt{Latent-CFM}$ exhibits improved generation quality with significantly less training and computation than state-of-the-art flow matching models by adopting pretrained lightweight latent variable models. Beyond natural images, we consider generative modeling of spatial fields stemming from physical processes. Using a 2d Darcy flow dataset, we demonstrate that our approach generates more physically accurate samples than competing approaches. In addition, through latent space analysis, we demonstrate that our approach can be used for conditional image generation conditioned on latent features, which adds interpretability to the generation process.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Systematic Construction of Time-Dependent Hamiltonians for Microwave-Driven Josephson Circuits

arXiv:2512.20743v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Time-dependent electromagnetic drives are fundamental for controlling complex quantum systems, including superconducting Josephson circuits. In these devices, accurate time-dependent Hamiltonian models are imperative for predicting their dynamics and designing high-fidelity quantum operations. Existing numerical methods, such as black-box quantization (BBQ) and energy-participation ratio (EPR), excel at modeling the static Hamiltonians of Josephson circuits. However, these techniques do not fully capture the behavior of driven circuits stimulated by external microwave drives, nor do they include a generalized approach to account for the inevitable noise and dissipation that enter through microwave ports. Here, we introduce numerical techniques that leverage classical microwave simulations, efficiently executable in finite-element solvers, to obtain the time-dependent Hamiltonian of microwave-driven superconducting circuits with arbitrary geometries under charge, flux, or mixed electromagnetic modulation. Importantly, our techniques do not rely on a lumped-element description of the superconducting circuit, in contrast to previous approaches to tackling this problem. We demonstrate the versatility of our approach by characterizing the driven properties of realistic circuit devices in complex electromagnetic environments, including coherent dynamics due to charge and flux modulation, as well as drive-induced relaxation and dephasing. Our techniques offer a powerful toolbox for optimizing circuit designs and advancing practical applications in superconducting quantum computing.