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01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Human migration has surged since 2000 — these maps reveal where people are going

Authors:

Modelling with artificial-intelligence tools has filled gaps in migration data, revealing detailed global population movements from 1990 to 2023. Modelling with artificial-intelligence tools has filled gaps in migration data, revealing detailed global population movements from 1990 to 2023.

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

How fast can you find a good hypothesis?

arXiv:2509.03734v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In the hypothesis selection problem, we are given sample and query access to finite set of candidate distributions (hypotheses), $\mathcal{H} = \{H_1, \ldots, H_n\}$, and samples from an unknown distribution $P$, both over a domain $\mathcal{X}$. The goal is to output a distribution $Q$ whose distance to $P$ is comparable to that of the nearest hypothesis in $\mathcal{H}$. Specifically, if the minimum distance is $\mathsf{OPT}$, we aim to output $Q$ such that, with probability at least $1-\delta$, its total variation distance to $P$ is at most $C \cdot \mathsf{OPT} + \varepsilon$. The optimal approximation for proper algorithms (where $Q \in \mathcal{H}$) is $C=3$ using $\Theta(\log(n/\delta)/\varepsilon^2)$ samples from $P$ and for improper algorithms (where $Q$ is not necessarily in $\mathcal{H}$) is $C=2$ using $\tilde{\Theta}(\log(n/\delta)/\varepsilon^2)$ samples from $P$. In the improper setting, the algorithm achieving $C=2$ [Bousquet, Braverman, Kol, Efremenko, Moran, FOCS 2021] runs in time which grows polynomially with $|\mathcal{X}|$ – it does not run in finite time for real-valued distributions. A promising path towards improved runtime is to consider improper algorithms which output a mixture $Q$ of the hypotheses as such a distribution can be represented in $n$ words of memory. We show (1) a lower bound that no algorithm which outputs a mixture can achieve approximation better than $C = 3-2/n$ unless the number of samples is polynomial in $|\mathcal{X}|$, as well as (2) an algorithm which runs in time $poly(n)$ and achieves the same approximation guarantee. In the proper setting, [Aliakbarpour, Bun, Smith, NeurIPS 2024] provided an algorithm with $C=3$ running in $\tilde{O}(n/(\delta^3\varepsilon^3))$ time. We improve this time complexity to $\tilde{O}(n/(\delta \varepsilon^2))$, significantly reducing the dependence on the confidence and error parameters.

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

Persona-Pruner: Sculpting Lightweight Models for Role-Playing

Language Models (LMs) have shown remarkable potential as role-playing chatbots, delivering consistent, stylized interactions when given a specification of a character or user persona. However, applying these capabilities to real-world applications (e.g., ecosystems with numerous NPCs interacting simultaneously) exposes a critical inefficiency due to the excessive computational cost. In this paper, we question the necessity of dedicating a full, generalist model to a single persona, hypothesizing that a specific character identity relies on only a fraction of the model's total capacity. We observe that naively pruning LMs often severely degrades the role-playing performance for a specific persona; it does not distinguish between redundant knowledge and essential character traits. We propose Persona-Pruner, a framework that sculpts a lightweight role-playing model by isolating persona-specific sub-networks from a single description. Our experiments consistently show that Persona-Pruner preserves role-playing performance substantially more effectively than existing state-of-the-art LLM pruning techniques, reducing the performance drop from the dense model by up to 93.8% over the strongest baseline on RoleBench in LLM-as-a-judge score, while still maintaining general LLM capabilities. Code is available at https://github.com/jsu-kim/Persona-Pruner.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Mining Architectural Quality Under Agentic AI Adoption: A Causal Study of Java Repositories

arXiv:2606.13298v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI coding tools are now used by a majority of developers, and agentic use of these tools has popularized the practice colloquially called "vibe coding". Yet causal evidence on their effect on software architecture is scarce. Prior causal work has measured code-level outcomes (complexity, static analysis warnings); whether such degradation propagates to architecture-level outcomes remains unknown. We mine 151 open-source Java repositories, 74 with detectable agentic AI adoption (identified via configuration files and Co-Authored-By commit trailers) and 77 propensity-matched controls, across a 13-month per-repository window yielding 1,811 monthly Arcan snapshots. We estimate the causal effect of adoption on architectural smell density (ASD) with a staggered difference-in-differences design and the Borusyak imputation estimator, applying a causal design recently used for code-level metrics to the architecture level. Total smell counts are essentially unchanged (+1.1%, p = 0.82) while lines of code grow +12.8% (p = 0.003); the resulting 6.7% ASD decline (p = 0.004) is therefore a denominator effect rather than an architectural improvement. Per-type estimates and robustness checks (wild cluster bootstrap, Lee bounds, stale-observation sensitivity) corroborate the pattern; pre-trends are flat (Wald p = 0.90), consistent with parallel trends. Density-normalized outcomes can mislead when treatment affects system size: raw counts and explicit decomposition are required for causal mining studies of AI tool adoption. The complete replication package, including the curated 151-repository monthly panel, is publicly available.

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

Mitigating Scoring Errors and Compensating for Nonverbal Subtests in Speech-Based Dementia Assessment

Early detection of cognitive impairment relies on neuropsychological tests to minimize subjectivity by assessing multiple cognitive domains. Speech-based evaluation can support diagnostics and improve accessibility, but transcription errors and the omission of nonverbal subtests (e.g., motor skills) limit accuracy. Beyond conventional test scores, speech-derived features can provide additional insights into cognitive status. This study investigates the speech-based evaluation of the German "Syndrom-Kurz-Test," a standardized dementia screening test comprising verbal and motor subtests. We train models that integrate transcript-derived scores and Whisper embeddings per verbal subtest to reduce scoring errors. To compensate for missing motor subtests, we then leverage these fused representations to approximate expert overall ratings. Despite omitting subtests, our models strongly correlate with expert ratings and efficiently and accurately discriminate between cognitive status groups.

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

Beyond MACs: Hardware Efficient Architecture Design for Vision Backbones

Vision backbone networks play a central role in modern computer vision. Enhancing their efficiency directly benefits a wide range of downstream applications. To measure efficiency, many publications rely on MACs (Multiply Accumulate operations) as a predictor of execution time. In this paper, we experimentally demonstrate the shortcomings of such a metric, especially in the context of edge devices. By contrasting the MAC count and execution time of common architectural design elements, we identify key factors for efficient execution and provide insights to optimize backbone design. Based on these insights, we present LowFormer, a novel vision backbone family. LowFormer features a streamlined macro and micro design that includes Lowtention, a lightweight alternative to Multi-Head Self-Attention. Lowtention not only proves more efficient, but also enables superior results on ImageNet. Additionally, we present an edge GPU version of LowFormer, that can further improve upon its baseline's speed on edge GPU and desktop GPU. We demonstrate LowFormer's wide applicability by evaluating it on smaller image classification datasets, as well as adapting it to several downstream tasks, such as object detection, semantic segmentation, image retrieval, and visual object tracking. LowFormer models consistently achieve remarkable speed-ups across various hardware platforms compared to recent state-of-the-art backbones. Code and models are available at https://github.com/altair199797/LowFormer/blob/main/Beyond_MACs.md.

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

An Adaptive Data cleaning Framework for Noisy Label Detection

Deep neural networks (DNNs) excel in computer vision tasks given large annotated datasets. In real-world applications, however, labels are often corrupted by ambiguity, human error, or dynamic environments. Over-parameterized DNNs easily memorize these noisy labels during training, degrading model accuracy and generalization. Existing data-cleaning and sample-selection strategies often rely on manually specified thresholds, prior knowledge of the noise ratio, or a single metric (either learning dynamics or geometric structure), making them unstable in complex data regimes. This paper proposes a self-adaptive data-cleaning framework that integrates local, global, and learning dynamics cues for robust noisy-label detection. Samples are mapped into a unified low-dimensional feature space through a modular feature concatenation paradigm. We provide two instantiations: a 2D metric integrating class-adaptive KNN-based local disagreement with k-means-based global centroid distance, and a 3D multi-metric that additionally incorporates a z-normalized score. Unlike conventional 1D Gaussian Mixture Models applied to a single scalar metric, our framework performs multi-metric clustering on the feature space to adaptively partition samples into clean-dominant and noise-dominant components without requiring manual thresholds or noise priors. Experiments on CIFAR-10, MNIST, and ImageNet-100 with 5% to 40% symmetric label noise show high recall across settings, including near-perfect recall (>=98%) on ImageNet-100 at 40% noise. Subsequent training yields accuracy gains across evaluated settings, especially under severe corruption on ImageNet-100. These findings suggest that multi-metric integration provides a threshold-free, practical, and low-tuning strategy for noisy label detection.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

LADBench: A Benchmark for Logical Fault Detection in Images

Large Vision Language Models (VLMs) excel at visual question answering and semantic grounding, but their capacity for autonomous logical reasoning remains underexplored. Existing anomaly benchmarks emphasize visual errors or direct prompting rather than the physical and social common sense needed for open-world deployment. To address this, we introduce LAD-bench, a benchmark of more than 1,000 curated synthetic images with logical anomalies across four domains: Residential, Urban, Collaborative, and Nature. We further propose a Tiered Prompting Protocol based on progressive disclosure, which measures how much explicit assistance a model needs to localize and reason about a logical fault. Evaluating leading foundation models reveals substantial weaknesses: even the best achieves only 70.11% overall accuracy, showing that implicit logical fault detection remains unsolved. Crucially, models often fail to identify anomalies even after receiving explicit hints in deeper tiers. By surfacing these limitations in sequential multimodal reasoning, LAD-Bench offers a rigorous framework for advancing the safety, reliability, and cognitive alignment of autonomous visual systems. Dataset and Code: https://huggingface.co/datasets/SahasraK/LADBench

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

Continual Quadruped Robots Coordination via Semantic Skill Discovery

arXiv:2606.08102v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multi-quadruped coordination has attracted increasing attention due to its enhanced payload capacity, broader contact coverage, and improved adaptability to challenging tasks. Existing methods for multi-quadruped manipulation typically focus on predefined or closed task families, often relying on multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) to train task-specific coordination policies. However, such methods struggle in open-ended continual learning settings, where tasks arrive sequentially and robots are expected to acquire new coordination skills while reusing previously learned ones without catastrophic forgetting. To address this challenge, we propose Conquer, a semantic skill-library framework that formulates continual multi-quadruped coordination as a retrieve-adapt-update process. First, to accommodate varying team sizes across tasks, we design a team-structured Self-Allies-Goal (SAG) backbone that supports variable-cardinality robot teams by explicitly modeling each robot's own state, teammate context, and task goal. For each incoming task, Conquer constructs a task-level semantic descriptor from pre-execution information and retrieves a relevant skill from the library for adaptation. After successful execution, Conquer updates the skill library by extracting trajectory-level semantic descriptors and organizing them according to semantic distance, thereby enabling continual skill accumulation and cross-task knowledge transfer. Simulation experiments show that Conquer achieves a final average success rate of 95.6%, demonstrating strong forward transfer and negligible catastrophic forgetting. Real-world rollouts on Unitree Go2 teams further validate the deployment feasibility of Conquer for practical multi-quadruped coordination. Simulation and real-robot demonstration videos are available at: https://conquer-project.pages.dev/.

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

KAN-MLP-Mixer: A comprehensive investigation of the usage of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) for improving IMU-based Human Activity Recognition

arXiv:2605.19031v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) have demonstrated an exceptional ability to learn complex functions on clean, low-dimensional data but struggle to maintain performance on noisy and imperfect real-world datasets. In contrast, conventional multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) are far more tolerant to noise and computationally efficient. Replacing all MLP components with KANs in HAR models often degrades accuracy and computation efficiency, highlighting an open challenge: how to combine KANs' precision with MLPs' noise robustness and efficiency. To address this, we systematically explore various placements of KAN modules within deep HAR networks and propose a hybrid architecture that strategically synergizes the strengths of both paradigms, which uses a KAN-based input embedding layer, retains MLP layers for intermediate feature mixing, and introduces a specialized LarctanKAN module for final activity classification. Across eight public HAR datasets, the hybrid KAN-MLP model achieves an average macro F1 score relative improvement of 5.33\% compared pure-MLP model, significantly outperforming standalone KAN and MLP baselines. Furthermore, integrating this hybrid strategy into other state-of-the-art HAR architectures consistently boosts their performance. Our findings demonstrate that a carefully orchestrated combination of KAN, MLP, or other conventional neural components yields more robust and accurate HAR models for real-world wearable sensing environments.

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

Intrinsic Computational Functionalism and Simulated Consciousness

arXiv:2606.15348v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A common objection to artificial or simulated consciousness is that a simulated brain is no more conscious than simulated water is wet. We address this from the perspective of Intrinsic Computational Functionalism (ICF): if consciousness is computationally constituted, it depends not on externally imposed descriptions but on the computational structures a system physically realizes in virtue of its own causal-dynamical organization. In previous work we developed Canonical Functionalism as a mathematically precise special case of this anti-interpretivist program, identifying functional states by their complete future input-output roles under a fixed interface. Here we argue that this input-output construction, though important, is incomplete: as a behavioral boundary case of ICF, it makes lookup tables and unfolded systems that preserve the same boundary behavior canonically equivalent. A consciousness-relevant canonical representation must instead include internal mechanisms, interventions, and joint readouts belonging to the relevant intrinsic organization. We therefore define a mechanism-enriched canonical structure and use it to formulate Intrinsic Causal-Computational Realization (ICCR), a realization relation preserving physical implementation, intrinsic state individuation, transition structure, intervention profiles, and the relevant agent-body-world boundary. The central result is conditional: if conscious properties are invariants of intrinsic causal-computational organization, then any system satisfying ICCR realizes the same consciousness-relevant properties, whether biological, artificial, or simulated. We discuss objections including biological naturalism and integrated information theory. We conclude that to deny consciousness to a simulation, one must identify a consciousness-relevant intrinsic causal-computational structure that the simulation fails to realize.

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

LooseControlVideo: Directorial Video Control using Spatial Blocking

Precise 3D spatial orchestration in text-to-video generation remains a significant challenge, particularly for multi-object scenes where semantic layout and temporal dynamics are often entangled. While existing depth-conditioned models achieve good structural fidelity, they necessitate dense, frame-accurate guidance that is labor-intensive to author for dynamic events involving deformable objects. We present LooseControlVideo, a framework that enables intuitive and expressive control by using sparse, oriented 3D boxes as a "blocking" proxy. This allows users to author high-level layout and trajectory while leveraging a video generative model to generate realistic occlusions, dynamics and interactions. We achieve this by fine-tuning a Wan 2.2 backbone on a video dataset annotated with DNOCS, a novel encoding for 3D size, orientation and depth-ordered occlusions. Furthermore, our method allows for localized refinement, such as adjusting a jump trajectory or adding an interaction, with minimal disruption to the global scene context. Extensive evaluations on the nuScenes, HO-3D, and BEHAVE benchmarks demonstrate that LooseControlVideo significantly outperforms existing 2D-box and flow-based baselines. Our findings indicate a 1.2x to 3x improvement in Trajectory Error; 2x improvement in Rigid Motion Consistency; and a 1.5x to 2x increase in Occlusion Accuracy over current state-of-the-art layout-conditioned models, demonstrating that oriented 3D primitives provide good geometric prior for complex, multi-agent video authoring.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

What Limits Does Quantization Place on Dense Top-$k$ Retrieval? A Theoretical Study

arXiv:2606.11780v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We establish conditions for embedding a corpus of $N$ documents as $d$-dimensional vectors such that every $k$-subset $S \subseteq [N]$ is realizable as a result of top-$k$ retrieval by some query vector. Recent work shows that $d = O(k)$ suffices for such embeddings to exist in $\mathbb{R}^d$, independently of $N$. We theoretically prove that this corpus-independent bound is specific to infinite precision. With $B$ bits per coordinate, perfect top-$k$ retrieval requires $Bd = \Omega(k \ln N)$; thus, at any fixed precision, the dimension must grow at least logarithmically with $N$. Specializing to a $\ell_2$-normalized $B$-bit uniform scalar quantization model, we also identify a threshold on the precision $B^{*} = O(\ln \ln N)$ below which no dimension suffices, together with two further regimes that bound the feasible $(B, d)$ pairs. Our result implies that in practical vector databases and dense retrieval systems where quantization is standard, the embedding dimension and possibly the precision must grow with the corpus size.

14.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-18

Mechanisms underlying spontaneous and evoked calcium responses in oligodendrocyte precursor cells: A modeling investigation

Authors:

by Martin Lardy, Leqi Wang, Claire Guerrier, Veronica T. Cheli, Pablo M. Paez, Anmar Khadra Calcium (Ca2+) signaling has emerged as a central regulator of activity-dependent myelination in oligodendrocytes. These Ca2+ signals encompass both the stimulus-independent spontaneous Ca2+ local transients (SCaLTs) generated intrinsically in a voltage-independent manner or facilitated by the membrane voltage, as well as evoked responses triggered by ATP and glutamate release. To investigate the regulatory mechanisms underlying this combined spiking activity, we developed a stochastic spatiotemporal flux-balance model of Ca2+ transients in oligodendrocyte precursor cells (OPCs). The model incorporates all the relevant fluxes in these cells and integrates membrane voltage dynamics with a Ca2+-induced Ca2+-release (CICR) mechanism using parameters fitted to Ca2+ fluorescence recordings. The model reproduced the intrinsic and voltage-facilitated SCaLTs in OPCs in the absence of purinergic and glutamatergic receptors, and captured the three distinct patterns of evoked Ca2+ responses induced by prolonged ATP and glutamate stimulations identified using machine classifier. The model highlighted the role of ATP and glutamate in generating these clusters, and showed that the fast dynamics of CICR is key to producing these evoked responses. Further analysis of the model also revealed that voltage-gated L- and T-type Ca2+ channels slightly increase the frequency of SCaLTs, while stimulation with ATP and glutamate, using randomly distributed pulses mimicking in vivo conditions, leads to an increase in both the amplitudes of Ca2+ spikes (i.e., the combination of SCaLTs and evoked responses) and the prevalence of wide spikes, especially upon glutamate stimulation. Bifurcation analysis of the deterministic version of the model, in the absence of diffusion, demonstrated that ATP and glutamate stimulation can shift the system into an oscillatory regime, thereby increasing the deterministic component of SCaLT dynamics. This study thus offers a comprehensive representation of OPC Ca2+ transients linking recorded in vitro behaviors to in vivo dynamics.

15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

The FBSDE approach to sine-Gordon up to $6\pi$

arXiv:2401.13648v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We develop a stochastic analysis of the sine-Gordon Euclidean quantum field $(\cos (\beta \varphi))_2$ on the full space up to the second threshold, i.e. for $\beta^2 < 6 \pi$. The basis of our method is a forward-backward stochastic differential equation (FBSDE) for a decomposition $(X_t)_{t \geqslant 0}$ of the interacting Euclidean field $X_{\infty}$ along a scale parameter $t \geqslant 0$. This FBSDE describes the optimiser of the stochastic control representation of the Euclidean QFT introduced by Barashkov and one of the authors. We show that the FBSDE provides a description of the interacting field without cut-offs and that it can be used effectively to study the sine-Gordon measure to obtain results about large deviations, integrability, decay of correlations for local observables, singularity with respect to the free field, Osterwalder-Schrader axioms and other properties.

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

MLaGA: Multimodal Large Language and Graph Assistant

arXiv:2506.02568v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated substantial efficacy in advancing graph-structured data analysis. Prevailing LLM-based graph methods excel in adapting LLMs to text-rich graphs, wherein node attributes are text descriptions. However, their applications to multimodal graphs–where nodes are associated with diverse attribute types, such as texts and images–remain underexplored, despite their ubiquity in real-world scenarios. To bridge the gap, we introduce the Multimodal Large Language and Graph Assistant (MLaGA), an innovative model that adeptly extends LLM capabilities to facilitate reasoning over complex graph structures and multimodal attributes. We first design a structure-aware multimodal encoder to align textual and visual attributes within a unified space through a joint graph pre-training objective. Subsequently, we implement a multimodal instruction-tuning approach to seamlessly integrate multimodal features and graph structures into the LLM through lightweight projectors. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of MLaGA compared to leading baseline methods, achieving superior performance in diverse graph learning tasks under both supervised and transfer learning scenarios.

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

An AI Security Agent for University ACMIS: Multi-Vector Threat Detection and Automated Response

arXiv:2606.08270v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: University Academic Management Information Systems (ACMIS) are high-value targets for a wide spectrum of security threats including brute-force login attacks, payment fraud, privilege escalation, insider data theft, and academic integrity violations. Traditional rule-based intrusion detection systems are inadequate because many malicious activities are structurally indistinguishable from normal operations. This paper presents an AI-based security agent for ACMIS that combines supervised anomaly detection, behavioural analytics, and a natural language processing chatbot for secure password recovery. The agent monitors five operational layers: authentication, authorisation, financial transactions, user behaviour, and system health, and responds through a four-tier risk escalation framework. A modular architecture allows the core engine to be extended to other institutional systems. Experiments on a simulated ACMIS event log dataset of 147,922 sessions demonstrate a threat detection macro-average F1 of 0.966, compared to 0.156 for a rule-based baseline and 0.836 for a sequence-only (LSTM) baseline, with end-to-end critical-tier automated response latency under 1 ms on a single-node prototype. The integrated recovery chatbot achieves 97.1 percent identity verification accuracy and an 87.3 percent mass-reset attack detection rate with zero false positives on legitimate high volume recovery periods.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

On the Generalization Bounds of Symbolic Regression with Genetic Programming

arXiv:2604.17402v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Symbolic regression (SR) with genetic programming (GP) aims to discover interpretable mathematical expressions directly from data. Despite its strong empirical success, the theoretical understanding of why GP-based SR generalizes beyond the training data remains limited. In this work, we provide a learning-theoretic analysis of SR models represented as expression trees. We derive a generalization bound for GP-style SR under constraints on tree size, depth, and learnable constants. Our result decomposes the generalization gap into two interpretable components: a structure-selection term, reflecting the combinatorial complexity of choosing an expression-tree structure, and a constant-fitting term, capturing the complexity of optimizing numerical constants within a fixed structure. This decomposition provides a theoretical perspective on several widely used practices in GP, including parsimony pressure, depth limits, numerically stable operators, and interval arithmetic. In particular, our analysis shows how structural restrictions reduce hypothesis-class growth while stability mechanisms control the sensitivity of predictions to parameter perturbations. By linking these practical design choices to explicit complexity terms in the generalization bound, our work offers a principled explanation for commonly observed empirical behaviors in GP-based SR and contributes towards a more rigorous understanding of its generalization properties.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Multicluster measles outbreak with a substantial proportion of modified cases in Tokyo, Japan, January-May 2026

Tokyo experienced a measles outbreak (260 cases) in early 2026 despite elimination status. Adults aged 20-39 years were most affected, and 38% of cases were modified measles, increasing with prior vaccination. Although incidence rose until April, the effective reproduction number; R(t) fell below 1, consistent with outbreak control. Multiple clusters were identified, but many cases lacked epidemiological links, suggesting that modified measles is less likely to be considered in differential diagnosis. Intensive contact tracing and surveillance contributed to limiting transmission.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

LoopCoder-v2: Only Loop Once for Efficient Test-Time Computation Scaling

arXiv:2606.18023v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Looped Transformers scale latent computation by repeatedly applying shared blocks, but sequential looping increases latency and KV-cache memory with the loop count. Parallel loop Transformers (PLT) alleviate this cost through cross-loop position offsets (CLP) and shared-KV gated sliding-window attention, making loop count a practical design choice. We therefore study PLT loop-count selection through a gain–cost view: an extra loop may refine representations, but CLP also introduces a positional mismatch at each loop boundary. We instantiate this study by training LoopCoder-v2, a family of 7B PLT coders with different loop counts, from scratch on 18T tokens, followed by matched instruction tuning and evaluation. Empirically, the two-loop variant delivers broad gains over the non-looped baseline across code generation, code reasoning, agentic software engineering, and tool-use benchmarks, improving SWE-bench Verified from 43.0 to 64.4 points and Multi-SWE from 14.0 to 31.0 points. In contrast, variants with three or more loops regress, revealing a strongly non-monotonic loop-count effect. Our diagnostics show that loop 2 provides the main productive refinement, while later loops yield diminishing, oscillatory updates and reduced representational diversity. Because the CLP-induced mismatch remains roughly fixed as refinement gains shrink, the offset cost increasingly dominates. This gain–cost trade-off explains PLT's saturation at two loops and provides diagnostics for loop-count selection.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

IAPO: Input Attribution-Aware Policy Optimization for Tool Use in Small Multimodal Agents

arXiv:2606.11652v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper investigates reinforcement learning (RL) methods for improving tool-calling capabilities in multimodal small language model (SLM) agents. While existing works have explored various reward designs to improve agentic tool-calling ability, these approaches face inherent limitations for SLM training, especially under multimodal scenarios. First, many existing methods evaluate tool use correctness through exact matching against certain ground-truth or predefined formats. However, this assumption is often unsuitable for multimodal tasks, where multiple tool use paths may be valid and annotated tool trajectories are typically unavailable. Second, such sparse and brittle binary rewards provide little guidance on how to improve the underlying decision process, making them particularly difficult for multimodal SLM to learn from. To address these issues, we propose Input Attribution-Aware Policy Optimization (IAPO), an RL algorithm for improving tool use in multimodal SLM by aligning the model's attribution across input components with that of a stronger teacher. Experiments on Qwen2.5-VL-3B show that the proposed method improves visual question answering accuracy by an average of 3% across six test sets compared with existing visual tool use work, by helping the model attend to the most relevant input evidence.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Your Mouse and Eyes Secretly Leak Your Preference: LLM Alignment using Implicit Feedback from Users

To align a Large Language Model (LLM), most existing methods collect explicit human feedback and train a reward model to predict the human preference based on the response text. These existing methods have two key limitations. First, the users rarely provide explicit feedback for LLM responses, which makes the high-quality preference annotation expensive to collect. Second, the methods do not leverage implicit human feedback, which has proven vital to the economic moats of Internet giants. To quantify the value of implicit feedback, we build a new dataset called IFLLM, which collects 1336 multi-turn questions from the 59 Mechanical Turk workers, their mouse trajectories, and eye gazing points to the LLMs' responses from their webcams. IFLLM shows that the users have very diverse types of gazing behavior and mouse trajectories. Our reward model based on the implicit user feedback boosts the accuracy of the text-based reward model from 55% to 64% and nearly triples the relative response quality improvements after applying the DPO to eight LLMs, demonstrating the value of implicit feedback in the wild. Our data collection website, dataset, and codes can be found at https://github.com/themehulpatwari/llm-implicit-feedback/.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Lightweight Distillation of SAM 3 and DINOv3 for Edge-Deployable Individual-Level Livestock Monitoring and Longitudinal Visual Analytics

Foundation-model pipelines for individual-level livestock monitoring – combining open-vocabulary detection, promptable video segmentation, and self-supervised visual embeddings – have raised the accuracy ceiling of precision livestock farming (PLF), but their GPU memory budgets exceed the envelope of commodity edge accelerators. To close this gap, the 446M-parameter Perception Encoder (PE-ViT-L+) backbone of SAM 3 is distilled into a 40.66M-parameter multi-scale student through three mechanisms: a Feature Pyramid Network student encoder built on TinyViT-21M-512, a four-term direction-then-scale distillation loss, and backbone-substitution inference with sliding-window session pruning that bounds streaming GPU memory growth. The DINOv3 family includes a pre-distilled ViT-S/16 variant (21.6M parameters) released alongside a 6716M-parameter ViT-7B teacher; the ViT-S (21M) variant is adopted as the per-individual embedder. On the Edinburgh Pig dataset, the compressed pipeline reaches 92.29% MOTA and 96.15% IDF1 against the SAM 3 teacher (1.68- and 0.84-percentage-point losses), achieves a 7.77-fold reduction in system-level parameters and a 3.01-fold reduction in peak VRAM (19.52GB -> 6.49GB), and reaches 97.34% top-1 accuracy with 91.67% macro-F1 on nine-class pig behaviour classification. The pipeline fits inside an NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX 16GB envelope with 4.9GB of headroom, supporting a proposed – but not yet empirically validated – on-device embedding-pool re-identification mechanism whose per-individual footprint of approximately 94MB per animal per year produces a longitudinal visual record amenable to retrospective association with disease, lameness, reproductive, and growth outcome labels.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

AIGS-Net: Compact Illumination Field Modeling via 2D Gaussian Splatting for Fast Low-Light Image Enhancement

Existing low-light image enhancement methods often face a bottleneck between the representation capacity of illumination-field modeling and computational complexity. To address this issue, this paper proposes an Adaptive Illumination Gaussian Splatting Network (AIGS-Net), an ultra-lightweight architecture for fast low-light enhancement. Unlike conventional static priors, AIGS-Net constructs an input-adaptive 2D Gaussian Splatting illumination field. The opacity of Gaussian basis functions is dynamically modulated by relative luminance statistics of the input image, and spatially varying illumination compensation is rendered through ordered alpha compositing. To guide adaptive illumination compensation efficiently, a zero-parameter nonlinear multiscale contextual encoding module is introduced to extract low-frequency structures and local contrast cues without additional convolutional weights. To suppress noise amplification and sensor-induced color bias, AIGS-Net integrates noise-mask estimation, locked single-channel Gamma mapping, cross-channel consistency regularization, and target color-alignment constraints. Experiments on LOL and LSRW benchmarks show that AIGS-Net improves detail recovery and color fidelity while requiring only approximately 40 learnable parameters, achieving an effective trade-off between enhancement quality and extreme inference efficiency.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Half a Link can Be Enough to Predict a Whole Link: Understanding Generalization in Knowledge Graph Foundation Models

arXiv:2606.18001v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge graph (KG) foundation models (KGFMs) are zero-shot generalizers: trained once, they can predict links on unseen graphs without retraining. However, understanding when and how they can robustly generalize across KGs is still an open question. In this paper, we shed some light on their generalization mechanisms highlighting how their performance on unseen KGs is not uniform when it comes to partially seen links, which we call half-links. In fact, we show that to predict a test triple $(h,r,t)$ it might suffice in practice to have observed the half-link $(h,r)$ or $(r,t)$ in the inference graph. This yields a taxonomy of four scenarios when combinations of these half-links are observed or not. In a rigorous stratified analysis over these scenarios, we reveal that SoTA KGFMs use seen half links for predictions, while unseen half-links pose different challenges. As such, our finer-grained taxonomy can be a diagnostic protocol for robust KGFM generalization and highlights where novel KGFMs can improve.