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

CCKS: Consensus-based Communication and Knowledge Sharing

Authors:
Jinyuan Zu↗Xiaowei Lv↗Yongcai Wang↗Deying Li↗Yunjun Han↗Wenping Chen↗Fengyi Zhang↗Naiqi Wu↗

arXiv:2606.12281v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In Decentralized Training and Decentralized Execution (DTDE) for cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), action-advising-based knowledge sharing promotes interpretable and scalable cooperation among agents. However, current action advising approaches often adhere too much to the teacher's guidance without evaluating teacher-student compatibility, which causes excessive advising, suboptimal stability, and degraded performance. To overcome these challenges, this paper presents a Consensus-based Communication and Knowledge Sharing (CCKS) framework, which allows agents to adopt recommendations based on consensus-derived constraints and to follow the teacher's instructions more smartly. This mechanism enables agents to balance exploration and learning from experienced teachers, improving overall performance. The key is the consensus model construction, for which we propose to employ contrastive learning to construct consensus models based on local observations in the agents' training phase. In action selection, agents score and choose actions based on consensus and shared knowledge. Designed as a plug-and-play solution, CCKS integrates seamlessly with existing DTDE algorithms. Experiments conducted in the Google Research Football environment and the complex StarCraft II Multi-Agent Challenge demonstrate that the integration with CCKS significantly improves cooperation efficiency, learning speed, and overall performance compared with current DTDE baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/yuanxpy/CCKS.

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

TextHOI-3D: Text-to-3D Hand-Object Interaction via Discrete Multi-View Generation and Joint Mesh Optimization

Authors:
Zixiong Hao↗Zhencun Jiang↗

Text-conditioned 3D generation has progressed rapidly for images and isolated objects, but producing a hand-object mesh remains challenging: the output must preserve language semantics, cross-view consistency, object geometry, articulated hand shape, and physically plausible contact. We present TextHOI-3D, a staged framework that uses generated multi-view observations as an explicit interface between text-conditioned visual generation and geometry-aware hand-object recovery. TextHOI-3D learns a compact VQ token space for fixed-camera hand-object observations, predicts multi-view visual tokens from text with a CLIP-conditioned visual autoregressive model, and recovers a unified hand-object mesh through prior initialization, multi-view joint optimization, and anti-penetration refinement. The design separates semantic generation from geometric recovery while keeping both stages connected by a discrete multi-view representation. On HO3D-derived evaluations, the multi-view setting reduces object CD from 17.26 mm to 4.92 mm and penetration volume from 5.3721 cm^3 to 0.2193 cm^3 compared with a single-view counterpart, while improving hand errors and surface F-scores. These results support multi-view visual tokens as an effective intermediate representation for text-driven 3D hand-object mesh creation.

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03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

RepWAM: World Action Modeling with Representation Visual-Action Tokenizers

Authors:
Junke Wang↗Qihang Zhang↗Shuai Yang↗Yiming Luo↗Yujun Shen↗Zuxuan Wu↗Yu-Gang Jiang↗Yinghao Xu↗

This work presents RepWAM, a representation-centric world action model (WAM) built on representation visual-action tokenizers. Existing WAMs typically inherit reconstruction-oriented video tokenizers from pretrained video generation models. Although these tokenizers preserve visual fidelity, pixel reconstruction alone provides limited guidance for learning instruction-following dynamics that connect future prediction with robot control. To address this, we explore a semantic visual-action latent space for representation-centric world action modeling. Specifically, we train a representation visual-action tokenizer that maps visual inputs into aligned visual and latent action tokens. We then pretrain our WAM to jointly model future visual states and the latent actions that connect them under language instructions, followed by adaptation to real robot trajectories for closed-loop manipulation. Experiments on real-world manipulation tasks and simulation benchmarks show that RepWAM delivers strong performance across diverse manipulation settings, while ablations highlight the value of semantic visual-action tokenization over reconstruction-oriented alternatives. These results establish representation visual-action tokenization as a promising foundation for world action models and a step toward generalist robot policies. Code and weights will be available at https://github.com/wdrink/RepWAM.

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04.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Fast formation to reinforce lithium-rich cathodes

Authors:
Mengjian Fan↗

Formation in lithium-ion battery manufacturing typically involves low-rate charge–discharge cycles to establish stable electrode–electrolyte interfaces—a time-consuming process1–4. Here, our findings on lithium-rich layered oxide cathodes challenge the necessity of conventional formation, which can even shorten battery lifespan. Fast formation, on the other hand, reduces production cost and enhances capacity and stability. Multiscale synchrotron-based techniques show that residual lithium ions after the initial charge are critical for subsequent structural evolution and cycling performance. Deep lithium de-intercalation causes severe structural degradation and capacity loss due to the inherently fragile lithium-deficient matrix. By contrast, the residual lithium ions from fast formation enhance reversibility through a self-pinning effect, preventing pernicious lattice deformation and reinforcing the ion-storage framework. Adjusting the initial charge current density from 0.2 C to 2 C improves reversible capacity by 20% and extends cycle life by more than 36%. This approach can also be extended to other electrode systems, providing insights for more-efficient battery production. Fast formation in lithium-ion batteries outperforms conventional slow formation, lowering costs and improving battery capacity, stability and cycle life, offering broader application to electrode systems.

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

AsFT: Anchoring Safety During LLM Fine-Tuning Within Narrow Safety Basin

Authors:
Shuo Yang↗Qihui Zhang↗Yuyang Liu↗Xiaojun Jia↗Kunpeng Ning↗Jiayu Yao↗Jigang Wang↗Hailiang Dai↗Yibing Song↗Li Yuan↗

arXiv:2506.08473v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) improves performance but introduces critical safety vulnerabilities: even minimal harmful data can severely compromise safety measures. We observe that perturbations orthogonal to the alignment direction - defined by weight differences between aligned (safe) and unaligned models - rapidly compromise model safety. In contrast, updates along the alignment direction largely preserve it, revealing the parameter space as a "narrow safety basin". To address this, we propose AsFT (Anchoring Safety in Fine-Tuning) to maintain safety by explicitly constraining update directions during fine-tuning. By penalizing updates orthogonal to the alignment direction, AsFT effectively constrains the model within the "narrow safety basin," thus preserving its inherent safety. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets and models show that AsFT reduces harmful behaviors by up to 7.60%, improves task performance by 3.44%, and consistently outperforms existing methods across multiple tasks.

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

Pose6DAug: Physically Plausible Multi-view Object Swapping for Robot Data Augmentation

Authors:
Jonghoon Lee↗Seong Hyeon Park↗Byungwoo Jeon↗Minha Lee↗Jinwoo Shin↗

arXiv:2606.20118v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) policies have shown strong potential for general-purpose manipulation, yet they often fail on novel, out-of-distribution objects whose appearance or geometry deviates from the training distribution. The standard remedy is to collect multi-view teleoperation data for every failure case, but this scales poorly in both cost and time. We introduce Pose6DAug, a failure-driven data augmentation framework that turns a policy's own successful episodes into targeted demonstrations for its failure modes, without any new data collection. Our key insight is that each successful episode already encodes a physically valid action trajectory together with calibrated multi-view observations. By swapping only the manipulated object while preserving this trajectory, we obtain new and physically grounded demonstrations. However, naive 2D video editing breaks multi-view consistency and physical plausibility, particularly under heavy occlusion and egocentric viewpoints. Our method instead operates directly in 3D, anchoring the target object with an explicit mesh driven by a temporally coherent 6D pose trajectory, ensuring geometrically consistent renderings across all camera views. Fine-tuning a VLA on data augmented by our method improves success rates by 16.5% relative to the state-of-the-art baseline on novel objects, while preserving in-distribution performance. These results show that multi-view and physically consistent augmentation is a practical path to scalable VLA generalization.

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07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Adv-TGD: Adversarial Text-Guided Diffusion for Face Recognition Impersonation Attacks

Authors:
Omid Ahmadieh↗Nima Karimian↗

The widespread adoption of face recognition (FR) technologies raises serious privacy concerns, as facial data can be exploited without consent. To address this challenge, we propose Adv-TGD, a generative adversarial attack framework that synthesizes photorealistic faces capable of impersonating target identities and deceiving face recognition systems. Built upon Stable Diffusion, Adv-TGD performs per-sample LoRA fine-tuning conditioned on concise textual prompts to generate natural yet adversarially manipulated identities. Unlike conventional identity-attack approaches, our method optimizes lightweight cross-attention adapters for each source-target pair within a single-step denoising process. Latent blending is constrained by a face-local heatmap mask to ensure spatially precise identity manipulation while preserving non-sensitive regions. We introduce a composite objective that integrates masked epsilon-MSE reconstruction, thresholded identity divergence in FR embedding space, directional feature alignment, and source-similarity suppression to balance adversarial attack and visual realism. Optionally, LLaVA-generated attribute prompts enhance fine-grained semantic details without reintroducing identity cues. Under the black-box evaluation protocol, Adv-TGD attains an average attack success rate (ASR) of 85.90% across IR152, IRSE50, MobileFace, and FaceNet, surpassing the semantic SOTA baseline Adv-CPG by +6.25 points, diffusion-based makeup method DiffAIM by +3 points, and noise-based P3-Mask by +16 points. Despite its strong attack efficacy, Adv-TGD preserves high visual fidelity (PSNR = 27.15 dB, SSIM = 0.981). Furthermore, we demonstrate the flexibility of our framework by successfully extending it to in-the-wild datasets (LADN), general object classification (ImageNet), and transformer-based diffusion models (FLUX.1).

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

Guiding Federated Graph Recommendation with LLM-encoded knowledge

Authors:
Thi Minh Chau Nguyen↗Hien Trang Nguyen↗Duc Anh Nguyen↗Van Ho-Long↗Thanh Trung Huynh↗Zhao Ren↗

arXiv:2606.15277v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Graph-based recommender systems are highly effective at extracting collaborative signals from user–item interactions, and federated learning (FL) allows these models to be trained while preserving user privacy. However, aggregating graph representations across distributed, non-IID clients remains a challenge; structural embeddings learned locally often misalign, and naive averaging fails to capture meaningful cross-client relationships. Most existing federated graph methods rely exclusively on structural aggregation, neglecting the rich, global semantic context available in large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we propose a novel framework that uses LLM-encoded knowledge to guide federated graph recommendation. Specifically, clients learn structural representations from local graphs while simultaneously summarizing their typical interaction patterns into compact semantic vectors via a frozen LLM. The central server then uses these LLM-encoded semantic signals to discover related preference patterns across clients, guiding the selective aggregation of their structural representations. This enables semantically informed cross-client collaboration without exposing raw data. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks show that guiding structural alignment with LLM-encoded knowledge consistently improves recommendation accuracy over existing federated graph baselines.

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

Sample from What You See: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Diffusion Bridge with Observation-Embedded Stochastic Differential Equation

Authors:
Zhaoyang Liu↗Mokai Pan↗Zhongyi Wang↗Kaizhen Zhu↗Haotao Lu↗Haipeng Zhang↗Jingya Wang↗Ye Shi↗

arXiv:2512.07212v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Imitation learning with diffusion models has advanced robotic control by capturing the multi-modal action distributions. However, existing methods typically treat observations only as high-level conditions to the denoising network, rather than integrating them into the stochastic dynamics of the diffusion process itself. As a result, the sampling is forced to begin from random noise, weakening the coupling between perception and control and often yielding suboptimal performance. We propose BridgePolicy, a generative visuomotor policy that directly integrates observations into the stochastic dynamics via a diffusion-bridge formulation. By constructing an observation-informed trajectory, BridgePolicy enables sampling to start from a rich and informative prior rather than random noise, substantially improving precision and reliability in control. A key difficulty is that diffusion bridge normally connects distributions of matched dimensionality, while robotic observations are heterogeneous and not naturally aligned with actions. To overcome this, we introduce a semantic aligner to unify the visual and state inputs and align the observations with action representations, making diffusion bridge applicable to heterogeneous robot data. Extensive experiments across 52 simulation tasks on three benchmarks and 5 real-world tasks demonstrate that BridgePolicy consistently outperforms state-of-the-art generative policies. Our code is available at https://jianghcsr.github.io/BridgePolicy_page/.

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

GENEB: Why Genomic Models Are Hard to Compare

Authors:
Daria Ledneva↗Mikhail Nuridinov↗Denis Kuznetsov↗

Progress in genomic foundation models is difficult to assess due to fragmented benchmarks, incompatible evaluation protocols, and task-specific reporting. As a result, claims of superiority or generality across models are often not directly comparable. We introduce GENEB, a large-scale diagnostic benchmark that evaluates frozen representations from 40 genomic foundation models across 100 tasks spanning 13 functional categories under a unified probing-based protocol, including few-shot regimes. GENEB enables controlled comparison across model scale, architecture, tokenization, and pretraining data while explicitly exposing task-level trade-offs. Our analysis shows that aggregate leaderboards are unstable: model rankings vary sharply across task categories, scale provides only modest and inconsistent gains, and architectural and pretraining alignment frequently outweigh parameter count. These results highlight limitations of current evaluation practices and position GENEB as a reference framework for principled comparison and category-aware model selection in genomic machine learning.

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

From Sparse Features to Trustworthy Proxies: Certifying SAE-Based Interpretability

Authors:
Dibyanayan Bandyopadhyay↗Asif Ekbal↗

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are increasingly used to extract interpretable features from language models (LMs), yet a central question remains: when can an SAE-based explanation be treated as a faithful view of an underlying frozen LM We study this through a post-hoc generalization framework that certifies the LM via a sparse proxy, obtained by replacing a native hidden activation with its pretrained SAE reconstruction. Our framework derives an upper bound on the base model's expected risk using four measurable quantities: proxy risk, SAE reconstruction gap, concept-pool mismatch, and sparse complexity. We interpret this certificate as an operational criterion for explanatory faithfulness. In particular, a non-vacuous bound indicates that the extracted sparse features retain meaningful predictive information, while small reconstruction and mismatch errors indicate that the proxy remains behaviorally close to the original model. Empirically, we show that the bound becomes non-vacuous on GPT-2 Small, Gemma-2B, and Llama-3-8B at practical sample sizes. A detailed layerwise analysis of Llama-3-8B reveals a strong depth dependence, with later layers becoming much easier to certify, associated with both stronger local fidelity and weaker downstream error amplification. Finally, through feature-shuffling ablations, we show that the decomposition distinguishes genuine semantic alignment from mere statistical sparsity, providing a useful diagnostic for when SAE-based explanations become less reliable.

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13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Edit Knowledge, Not Just Facts via Multi-Step Reasoning over Background Stories

Authors:
Ya Gao↗Kalle Kujanp\"a\"a↗Pekka Marttinen↗Harri Valpola↗Alexander Ilin↗

arXiv:2602.02028v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Enabling artificial intelligence systems, particularly large language models, to update knowledge and flexibly apply it during reasoning remains a central challenge. Existing knowledge editing approaches emphasize atomic facts, improving factual recall but often failing to integrate updated information into a coherent framework usable across contexts. In this work, we argue that knowledge update is fundamentally a reasoning problem rather than a memorization problem. Consequently, a model should be trained in situations where the new information is instrumental to solving a task, combined with pre-existing knowledge, and exercised through multi-step reasoning. Based on this insight, we propose a training strategy based on three principles. First, new knowledge is introduced as a coherent background story that contextualizes novel facts and explains their relation to existing knowledge. Second, models are trained using self-generated multi-hop questions that require multi-step reasoning involving the new information. Third, training is done using knowledge distillation, forcing a student model to internalize the teacher's reasoning behavior without access to the novel information. Experiments show that models trained with this strategy effectively leverage newly acquired knowledge during reasoning and achieve remarkable performance on challenging questions that require combining multiple new facts.

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14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

AI-Automation Tooling in Computer Engineering Education: Mixed-Methods TAM/UTAUT Evidence for a General Acceptance Attitude

Authors:
Aung Pyae↗

arXiv:2606.12424v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As generative AI and low-code workflow platforms become routine in software practice, a key educational question is whether the next generation of computer engineers will accept these tools as useful, usable, and worthy of sustained engagement. This paper reports a mixed-methods, cross-sectional study of undergraduate computer engineering students' acceptance of AI automation tooling, instantiated through the open-source platform n8n across three identically scripted workshops in Thailand (n = 103). A 12-item, five-point Likert instrument mapped to six TAM/UTAUT constructs - Performance Expectancy (PE), Effort Expectancy (EE), Behavioral Intention (BI), Self-Efficacy (SE), Hedonic Motivation (HM), and Output Quality (OQ) - was complemented by inductive thematic analysis of open-ended feedback. Analyses combined ordinal reliability estimation, bootstrap confidence intervals, non-parametric tests, multiple-comparison-controlled correlations, polychoric dimensionality diagnostics, a common-method-bias check, and between-session comparisons. Acceptance was favorable across all six constructs with large effect sizes, with PE emerging as the strongest construct and HM as the weakest. Dimensionality diagnostics further revealed that canonical TAM/UTAUT sub-facets collapsed into a single general acceptance factor in this short-form post-workshop context, a finding with important methodological and theoretical implications. Qualitative themes converged with the quantitative profile regarding usefulness and enthusiasm but diverged on output quality, revealing a small yet articulate reliability-skeptical minority. The findings support the curricular adoption of AI automation tooling in undergraduate computing education and identify three theory-grounded instructional levers: instruction-sequencing scaffolds, self-efficacy supports, and trust-calibration interventions.

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15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

SkillChain: Closing the Loop on Skill Evolution for Image-Based E-Commerce AI Assistants

Authors:
Yimin Hu↗Mengtao Xu↗Hao Guo↗Yuheng Song↗Xiaoyong Zhu↗Bo Zheng↗

Image-based AI assistants are now deployed at production scale on e-commerce platforms, where a single uploaded image can trigger fundamentally different user intents: product search, style recommendation, visual encyclopedia, or utility tool calls, each demanding its own response format, tool invocation, and domain knowledge. Without per-intent behavioral constraints, LLM-based systems conflate these heterogeneous modes and fall short of domain quality standards, while the breadth and dynamism of the intent space render manual engineering infeasible. To address this, we present SkillChain, which closes the production feedback loop on Skill evolution, automating the lifecycle of Skills through three stages: Skill Creator for bootstrapping from task specs and trajectories, Route Optimizer for routing alignment, and Body Refiner for iterative Skill Body refinement via dual-path LLM-Judge evaluation. Deployed on a production-scale e-commerce image assistant, SkillChain substantially improves aggregate response quality, with the strongest gains on structural compliance and content quality; a one-week online A/B experiment further confirms significant gains in user engagement, content consumption, and long-term retention.

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

The Dynamics of Human and AI-Generated Language: How Semantics Fluctuates across Different Timescales

Authors:
Han-Jen Chang↗Yasir \c{C}atal↗Angelika Wolman↗Agust\'in Ib\'a\~nez↗David Smith↗I-Wen Su↗Kai-Yuan Cheng↗Georg Northoff↗

Spoken language, whether produced by humans or large language models (LLM), unfolds over time with varying semantic content. However, we still lack simple, interpretable time-series features that capture how generic versus specific content is distributed over time, and that can be used to compare human and AI-generated speech. We introduce a semantic-timescale analysis pipeline that turns word-level transcripts with timestamps into semantic time-series. For each spoken narrative, we compute (i) semantic specificity using WordNet-based word depth and (ii) contextual similarity using SBERT embeddings and quantify their temporal dependence using autocorrelation-window measures (ACW-0 and related metrics). We then compare original speech to multiple shuffled controls that selectively disrupt lexical identity, temporal order, and word duration. Across human-read autobiographical narratives, TTS readings, and LLM-generated texts rendered with TTS, we find that segments with longer ACW-0 in the semantic time-series tend to contain more generic vocabulary, whereas segments with shorter ACW-0 are enriched in more specific words. These associations are strongly attenuated or abolished when word order and timing are randomized, indicating that ACW-based measures capture non-trivial temporal organization of semantic content beyond static lexical distributions. Our results suggest that ACW-based semantic timescales are a useful family of features for analyzing and comparing the temporal structure of human and AI-generated speech.

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17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

LIBERO-Occ: Evaluating and Improving Vision-Language-Action Models under Scene-Induced Occlusion via Viewpoint Imagination

Authors:
Taishan Li↗Jiwen Zhang↗Siyuan Wang↗Xuanjing Huang↗Zhongyu Wei↗

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models achieve strong performance on standard manipulation benchmarks, but most evaluations assume that task-relevant objects are fully visible. This assumption often fails in realistic settings, where occlusion makes manipulation partially observable. In this paper, we study scene-induced occlusion as a fundamental challenge for VLA models and introduce LIBERO-Occ, an occlusion-oriented extension of LIBERO. Experiments show that state-of-the-art VLAs suffer substantial performance degradation under occlusion. To address this issue, we propose Viewpoint Imagination (VIM), which generates a complementary view from an occluded primary observation and conditions action prediction on both observed and imagined evidence. VIM improves robustness across task suites, occlusion types, and severity levels without requiring additional cameras at deployment time, suggesting that viewpoint imagination is an promising mechanism for perception completion in partially observable manipulation. Our benchmark and corresponding code are available at: \href{https://github.com/litsh/Libero-Occ}{https://github.com/litsh/Libero-Occ}.

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18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Tight Bounds for Quantum Phase Estimation and Related Problems

Authors:
Nikhil S. Mande↗Ronald de Wolf↗

arXiv:2305.04908v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Phase estimation, due to Kitaev [arXiv'95], is one of the most fundamental subroutines in quantum computing. In the basic scenario, one is given black-box access to a unitary $U$, and an eigenstate $\lvert \psi \rangle$ of $U$ with unknown eigenvalue $e^{i\theta}$, and the task is to estimate the eigenphase $\theta$ within $\pm\delta$, with high probability. The cost of an algorithm for us is the number of applications of $U$ and $U^{-1}$. We tightly characterize the cost of several variants of phase estimation where we are no longer given an eigenstate, but are required to estimate the maximum eigenphase of $U$, aided by advice in the form of states (or a unitary preparing those states) which are promised to have at least a certain overlap $\gamma$ with the top eigenspace. We give algorithms and nearly matching lower bounds for all ranges of parameters. We show that a small number of copies of the advice state (or of an advice-preparing unitary) are not significantly better than having no advice at all. We also show that having lots of advice (applications of the advice-preparing unitary) does not significantly reduce cost, and neither does knowledge of the eigenbasis of $U$. We immediately obtain a lower bound on the complexity of the Unitary recurrence time problem, resolving an open question of She and Yuen~[ITCS'23]. Lastly, we study how efficiently one can reduce the error probability in the basic phase-estimation scenario. We show that a phase-estimation algorithm with precision $\delta$ and error probability $\epsilon$ has cost $\Omega\left(\frac{1}{\delta}\log\frac{1}{\epsilon}\right)$, matching an easy upper bound. This contrasts with some other scenarios in quantum computing (e.g., search) where error-probability reduction costs only a factor $O(\sqrt{\log(1/\epsilon)})$. Our lower bound uses a variant of the polynomial method with trigonometric polynomials.

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

On the Variance of Temporal Difference Learning and its Reduction Using Control Variates

Authors:
Hsiao-Ru Pan↗Bernhard Sch\"olkopf↗

arXiv:2606.20357v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We analyze the variance of temporal difference (TD) learning using the phased setting with tabular representation, and show that one of the mechanisms behind its ability to reduce variance is by effectively aggregating over a larger number of independent trajectories. Based on this insight, we demonstrate that (1) the variance of TD is asymptotically bounded from above by Monte Carlo (MC) estimators, and (2) shorter horizon updates incurs less variance for a fixed number of samples. Beyond TD, we show that Direct Advantage Estimation (DAE), a method for estimating the advantage function, can be seen as a type of regression-adjusted control variate, which achieves a tighter bound on the variance compared to TD in the large-sample limit. Finally, we numerically illustrate the behaviors of these estimators with carefully designed environments.

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

IVIE: A Neuro-symbolic Approach to Incremental and Validated Generation of Interactive Fiction Worlds

Authors:
Micaela Vaucher↗Santiago Silveira↗Santiago G\'ongora↗Luis Chiruzzo↗

Computational creativity in Interactive Fiction faces a fundamental tension: Large Language Models (LLM) may produce creative narratives but struggle with world coherence, while symbolic systems ensure consistency but lack creative flexibility. We present IVIE (Incremental & Validated Interactive Experiences), a neuro-symbolic approach to generating complete and playable interactive fiction worlds from scratch. Building upon PAYADOR's neuro-symbolic framework, IVIE implements a four-stage incremental generation pipeline that delegates creative decisions–setting and character creation, puzzle design–to LLMs while grounding the world state through symbolic validation. The system generates worlds with interconnected locations, functional items, non-player characters, and coherent puzzles, all structured around a central goal-oriented architecture. Human evaluation shows the approach generates immersive, thematically coherent worlds with high player engagement. Results seem to indicate that the neuro-symbolic approach successfully balances flexibility with narrative coherence: symbolic validation grounds LLM generation without eliminating generative freedom. However, challenges remain: LLM inconsistencies occasionally bypass puzzle constraints, and objective validation gaps allow some structurally impossible goals. We identify key design considerations for future neurosymbolic interactive storytelling systems, particularly regarding LLM capabilities and their limitations.

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

MAGE-RAG: Multigranular Adaptive Graph Evidence for Agentic Multimodal RAG in Long-Document QA

Authors:
Yilong Zuo↗Xunkai Li↗Jing Yuan↗Qiangqiang Dai↗Hongchao Qin↗Ronghua Li↗

Long-document multimodal question answering requires a system to locate sparse evidence in long PDFs and integrate clues from text, tables, images, charts, and complex layouts. Existing RAG methods mostly rely on fixed Top-k retrieval over text chunks or pages. Text retrieval can compress the context but often loses visual and layout information; page-level visual retrieval preserves the original page, yet it also sends large irrelevant regions to the reader, leading to a static trade-off among evidence coverage, noise, and inference cost. This paper proposes MAGE-RAG, a multigranular adaptive graph evidence framework for long-document multimodal QA. MAGE-RAG uses page retrieval as the entry point for query-time evidence construction. Offline, it builds an evidence graph with page nodes and element nodes, encoding containment, reading order, layout adjacency, section hierarchy, and semantic-neighbor relations. At query time, an online evidence controller iteratively activates, opens, searches, and prunes evidence under explicit budgets. The resulting evidence subgraph is then rendered into structured multimodal reader input, allowing the LVLM to consume compact and relevant evidence within a limited context. On LongDocURL and MMLongBench-Doc, we establish a unified comparison and analysis protocol covering Direct MLLM, Text RAG, Page-level Visual RAG, and Graph/Agentic RAG. Experiments show that MAGE-RAG achieves 52.75 overall accuracy on LongDocURL, and 53.26 accuracy with 51.19 F1 on MMLongBench-Doc. Fine-grained breakdowns, budget-performance curves, ablations, and trace-based analysis further show that query-time evidence subgraph construction can balance dispersed evidence coverage with context-noise control. Our code is available at https://github.com/laonuo2004/MAGE-RAG.git.

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22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Spatially Grounded Concept Bottleneck Models via Part-Factorized Attention

Authors:
Dhanesh Ramachandram↗

Concept bottleneck models (CBMs) predict a layer of human-named attributes before predicting a class, which makes their decisions auditable. On fine-grained recognition tasks the concept heads are usually free to attend anywhere in the image, so a head named for one body region can be satisfied by evidence on another. This work studies a part-factorized CBM that removes that freedom by construction. The method has three components built on a frozen DINOv3 vision transformer. A learned foreground gate, trained on DINOv3 patch features, suppresses background patches inside the part attention. A set of part queries cross-attends to patch features and each of the 312 CUB attributes is routed, through a fixed concept-to-part map, to read only from the part token its name implies. A learnable two-dimensional Gaussian prior, injected additively in log space into the attention logits, breaks the permutation symmetry among part queries; its means are initialized from the dataset-average keypoint location of each part, which requires no per-image keypoint supervision at training or test time. On CUB-200-2011 the spatial-prior model matches a fully supervised baseline (88.85% versus 88.95% top-1) while raising pointing accuracy by 16 points (52.6% versus 36.4%). Replacing bounding-box supervision with a PCA foreground target and combining it with the Gaussian prior removes all per-image supervision and reaches 88.6% top-1 at about 70% pointing accuracy. A keypoint-fraction sweep shows that 0.5% of the training set (about 27 images) suffices to initialize the prior with no measurable loss. Removing part identity entirely is the harder case: without any spatial prior, pointing accuracy collapses to $2.9\%$.

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23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Invariants of Sequential Circuits and Generalized Non-Abelian Statistics

Authors:
Shintaro Sato↗Yoshimasa Hidaka↗Ryohei Kobayashi↗

arXiv:2606.11527v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Non-invertible symmetries in quantum many-body systems generally give rise to sequential unitary circuits that move symmetry defects. In this paper, we investigate invariants defined by sequences of such circuits, which move non-invertible defects and generate a Berry phase evaluated on quantum states with defects. We show that this Berry phase generally defines an invariant under local deformations, provided that the sequential circuits preserve the locality of those deformations. This invariant also rules out a short-range-entangled state that preserves the non-invertible symmetry, thereby signaling the 't Hooft anomaly of a non-invertible symmetry purely in terms of unitary operators acting on a state. We then apply this framework to loop excitations in three spatial dimensions and identify a new loop excitation in the (3+1)D $\mathbb{D}_4$ topological order, which we dub a non-Abelian fermionic loop. Using the invariant of sequential circuits, we characterize the statistics of non-Abelian fermionic loops. In addition, we find a new (3+1)D mixed topological order with a single non-Abelian fermionic loop, whose long-range entanglement is protected by an invariant of sequential circuits.

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24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Natural Language Processing Based Solution for Labeling Brain Metastasis Identified in Radiology Reports

Authors:
Liu↗Han↗Y. T↗Zuo↗Das↗Lin↗H.-M↗Colak↗Istasy↗Ladak↗A. M↗Bigenimana↗…

Abstract Purpose: Brain metastases (BM) far exceed primary CNS tumours and constitute the majority workload for neuro-oncology care providers. Currently, the cancer registries only capture synchronous BMs, which is only a small proportion of all BMs. We aim to develop and validate a natural language processing (NLP) algorithm that identifies brain metastases in radiology reports, enabling scalable surveillance of asynchronous BMs. Methods: Using population-based cancer registry data in Alberta, Canada, we identified a cancer cohort diagnosed between 2012–2019 with follow-up to 2022. All brain/head radiology reports at and post-cancer diagnosis were identified. Reports were sampled through a multi-phase approach and manually labeled for BM presence. We trained two Bio_ClinicalBERT models on the "Findings" and "Impressions" sections, respectively, and took the maximum predicted probability as the report-level prediction. Internal and external validation used reports from the Canadian provinces of Alberta, Ontario, and British Columbia. Results: The models were trained on 1,879 samples. For internal validation, 1,833 reports from 357 patients were tested. At a probability threshold of 0.4, the model achieved a sensitivity of 0.888 and precision of 0.499. The ensemble substantially outperformed single-section models, which achieved sensitivities of only 67.8% (Findings) and 74.2% (Impressions). On external validation, sensitivity was 0.918 in Ontario and 0.726 in British Columbia, demonstrating robustness across diverse data distributions. Conclusions: An NLP-based pipeline processing both Findings and Impressions sections has been developed and validated in three Canadian provinces. It meets cancer registry operational requirements and to be implemented into the surveillance workflow in Alberta and British Columbia, providing a foundation for population-level BM surveillance.

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25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Improving Generalization and Data Efficiency with Diffusion in Offline Multi-agent RL

Authors:
Zhuoran Li↗Ling Pan↗Jiatai Huang↗Longbo Huang↗

arXiv:2307.01472v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present a novel Diffusion Offline Multi-agent Model (DOM2) for offline Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL). Different from existing algorithms that rely mainly on conservatism in policy design, DOM2 enhances policy expressiveness and diversity based on diffusion model. Specifically, we incorporate a diffusion model into the policy network and propose a trajectory-based data-reweighting scheme in training. These key ingredients significantly improve algorithm robustness against environment changes and achieve significant improvements in performance, generalization and data-efficiency. Our extensive experimental results demonstrate that DOM2 outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in all multi-agent particle and multi-agent MuJoCo environments, and generalizes significantly better to shifted environments {(in $28$ out of $30$ settings evaluated)} thanks to its high expressiveness and diversity. Moreover, DOM2 is ultra data efficient and requires no more than $5\%$ data for achieving the same performance compared to existing algorithms (a $20\times$ improvement in data efficiency).

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