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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

DeepInflation: an AI agent for research and model discovery of inflation

arXiv:2601.14288v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present DeepInflation, an AI agent designed for research and model discovery in inflationary cosmology. Built upon a multi-agent architecture, DeepInflation integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) with a symbolic regression (SR) engine and a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) knowledge base. This framework enables the agent to automatically explore and verify the vast landscape of inflationary potentials while grounding its outputs in established theoretical literature. We demonstrate that DeepInflation can successfully discover simple and viable single-field slow-roll inflationary potentials consistent with the latest observations (with the ACT DR6 results taken as an example) or any given $n_s$ and $r$, and provide accurate theoretical context for obscure inflationary scenarios. DeepInflation serves as a prototype for a new generation of autonomous scientific discovery engines in cosmology, which enables researchers and non-experts alike to explore the inflationary landscape using natural language. This agent is available at https://github.com/pengzy-cosmo/DeepInflation.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

ANEForge: Python for direct computation on the Apple Neural Engine

arXiv:2606.17090v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: ANEForge is a Python package that programs the Apple Neural Engine (ANE), the fixed-function neural accelerator on every recent Apple device, directly and without CoreML. In production the engine is reachable only through CoreML, which treats it as a scheduling option: no configuration requires the ANE, and a model can silently run on the CPU or GPU instead. ANEForge compiles a lazy tensor graph, built from 58 fused operators and 19 native bridge operators, into a single ANE program. The program is dispatched through the same ANE daemon and kernel-driver stack as Apple's internal framework. Beyond inference, the package reaches the engine's native fused attention, streams int8, int4, and sparse weights, keeps decoder and optimizer state resident across steps, and runs the forward pass, backward pass, and optimizer update of training on the engine. A small fused program completes a call in about 90us, near the engine's 70us per-program dispatch floor, and a pretrained ResNet-18 forward runs end-to-end in 0.33ms. ResNet-18, a sentence encoder, and a Vision Transformer run end-to-end against framework references, and a Stable Diffusion U-Net validates its forward pass. ANEForge targets Apple Silicon under macOS 14 and later. Each release is verified against a recorded macOS and ANE-compiler version.

03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Scaling limit of additive functionals for reversible non-gradient exclusion process: critical cases

arXiv:2606.13442v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: For the reversible speed-change exclusion process $(\eta_t)_{t \geq 0}$ in $\mathbb{Z}^d$, we study the scaling limit of additive functionals ${\Gamma_t(f) = \int_0^t f(\eta_s)\, \mathrm{d} s}$. Concerning the local centered function $f$, the previous work [Commun. Math. Phys. 104, 1-19, 1986] by Kipnis and Varadhan and [Comm. Pure Appl. Math., 66: 649-677, 2013] by Gon{ç}alves and Jara respectively covered the cases $d \geq 3$ and $d=1$. The present paper completes the missing part $d=2$, and also develops the theory for functions with higher degree. The novelty is a quantitative homogenization of the resolvent, which allows to overcome the obstacle of correlation function in non-gradient models.

04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Optimal Sparsification of Gaussian Processes

arXiv:2606.19763v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove an optimal dimension-free sparsification theorem for suprema of centered Gaussian processes. Given a bounded set $T\subseteq\mathbb{R}^n$, we show that the supremum of the canonical Gaussian process on $T$ can be $L^2$-approximated by the supremum of a shifted subprocess indexed by only $\exp(O(1/\varepsilon^2))$ points, with error at most $\varepsilon$ times the Gaussian width of $T$. In particular, the size of the approximating process is independent of both the ambient dimension and the cardinality of the original index set. This improves a recent sparsification theorem of De, Nadimpalli, O'Donnell, and Servedio (2026) by an exponential factor, and we show that the dependence on $\varepsilon$ is tight up to constants in the exponent. As consequences, we obtain an exponentially improved junta theorem for norms over Gaussian space and sharpen results on learning, property testing, and polyhedral approximation of convex sets under the Gaussian measure. The proof is based on an interpolation argument that combines Sudakov's minoration with the Brascamp–Lieb inequality.

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

A physical adaptive material motor unit neural network: a hygromorph composite material machine

arXiv:2606.18275v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Advances in novel materials science enable structures to function as intelligent machines by embedding memory and learning capabilities directly into materials. Our work introduces a physical adaptive material motor unit neural network,leveraging a new generation of controllable actuators composed of wood- and carbon black-based composites, sensitive to temperature and relative humidity. These material actuators are assembled into a motor unit-like structure inspired by muscle contraction trigger, forming an intelligent machine capable of dynamic shading control that can be used, for example, in buildings. The machine is governed by a neural network trained on over 350 experimental data points collected under diverse environmental conditions. By establishing a new data-aware backpropagation training, we show that the machine predicts shading responses and learns to predict appropriate behaviour incrementally as the database expands. We also demonstrate the ability of the machine to optimise configurations to achieve similar shading outputs under two distinct conditions.

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

Adjoint Method versus Physics-Informed Neural Networks in PDE-Constrained Inverse Problems

arXiv:2606.12337v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inverse problems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs) are central to computational mechanics and are commonly solved by adjoint-based optimization, while physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have emerged as a flexible alternative. Their relative performance remains difficult to assess because the two approaches are often compared under different formulations, parameterizations, optimizers, and regularization choices. We present a fair comparison of adjoint optimization and PINNs for PDE-constrained inverse problems. From a common abstract formulation, we instantiate both methods on identical domains, governing equations, observation models, and regularization terms, while matching the optimizer, unknown parameterization, and arithmetic precision wherever applicable. The benchmarks include unsteady Burgers, noisy Darcy permeability inversion, three-dimensional Allen–Cahn reaction identification, and unsteady Navier–Stokes viscosity identification. The results show that the representation of the unknown largely determines the preferred method: grid-based fields favor the discrete adjoint, whereas neural representations are native to PINNs and relevant for closure and constitutive modeling. For time-dependent problems, adjoint inversion can be dominated by trajectory storage and differentiation, while PINNs provide satisfactory reconstructions at lower cost. A PINN-warm-started adjoint strategy then recovers adjoint-level accuracy at substantially reduced cost.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Primary care practitioners preconception health literacy and information-seeking: A cross-sectional survey.

Background Parental health before pregnancy influences maternal and child outcomes. Primary care professionals, including general practitioners [GPs], midwives, and naturopaths, can provide preconception care, yet many report limited knowledge and difficulty accessing relevant information. This study described Australian GPs, midwives, and naturopaths preconception health literacy, including knowledge and ability to access information. Methods Between July and September 2022, Australian GPs, midwives, and naturopaths completed a 32-item online cross-sectional survey. Participants were recruited through professional associations, and data were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics Results Participants (N=373) included naturopaths (40.7%), GPs (32.4%), and midwives (26.8%). Reported barriers to clinician health literacy including lack of preconception care resources (25.5%), and limited clinician knowledge (23.6%). The proportion identifying limited clinician knowledge differed significantly between professions (GP: 31.4%; midwives: 23.0%; naturopaths: 17.8%; p=0.030). The highest level of accurate knowledge regarding preconception exposures was for pre-pregnancy obesity (82.7%), while low birth weight was the most accurately identified preconception outcomes (83.7%). Incorrect responses were most common for maternal multivitamin use as an exposure (28.3%) and childhood leukaemia as an outcome (26.3%). Differences between professions were strongest for infant outcomes, with moderate associations observed for shoulder dystocia (V=.2355), precipitous labour (V=.2173), macrosomia (V=.2060), labour dystocia (V=.2018) and cryptorchidism (V=.2018). Discussion Preconception health literacy varies across primary care professions. Clinicians require greater access to targeted resources and education tailored to their differing scopes of practice and experience. Improving clinician preconception health literacy may strengthen consistent evidence-based care and support better maternal, child, and long-term family health outcomes.

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

Descriptive versus Regulatory Uncertainty in Bounded Predictive Systems

arXiv:2605.18909v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Any system that models the world under finite representational capacity must compress; any compression entails a prior; and the prior is the system's bias. What has not been established is whether uncertainty participates in the dynamics governing future behavior, or merely describes the output distribution without consequence. We introduce a structural distinction between descriptive uncertainty, which does not recursively modulate the system's policy, and regulatory uncertainty, which directly enters the optimization landscape and drives persistent adaptive restructuring. We prove formally that current transformer architectures are confined to descriptive uncertainty at inference. We ground this in thermodynamics via Landauer's principle: for uncertainty to be regulatory, epistemic error must cost real energy; in a decoupled system, hallucinations and correct derivations dissipate identical energy. We test this empirically across three locally-deployed language models (3B, 8B, 70B parameters). Token-level Shannon entropy is statistically invariant across tasks spanning pattern retrieval, causal operator application, and out-of-distribution causal generalization in all three models (all pairwise p >= 0.568; within-model ranges 0.011-0.028 nats), while task accuracy varies substantially across the same conditions (0%-100%). Entropy and accuracy are orthogonal. The decoupling is scale-invariant: larger models achieve higher accuracy but identical entropy flatness. This structural incapacity is not resolvable by additional parameters or training data. Genuine epistemic grounding requires physical coupling between thermodynamic substrate state and information processing cost.

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

PoQ-Judge: A Multi-Architecture Evaluation Framework for Cost-Aware Proof-of-Quality in Decentralized LLM Inference

Decentralized LLM inference networks need lightweight, reference-free quality evaluation for Proof of Quality (PoQ). We present PoQ-Judge, a framework that trains dedicated judge models to score query-output pairs without ground-truth references. We study three architectures across the quality-cost tradeoff: a TextCNN judge, a MiniLM cross-encoder, and a DeBERTa judge. Using two-stage training on UltraFeedback plus GPT-labeled in-domain data, the best model reaches 0.747 Pearson correlation with the ground-truth proxy on a held-out test set, outperforming reference-based evaluators from prior work. As a reference-free component in composite scoring, it achieves 0.645 Pearson correlation, matching the best single reference-based evaluator while removing the need for reference answers. We also show that online calibration identifies semantic quality as the dominant dimension and that cascade evaluation reduces cost by 72.7 percent with only modest quality loss. Results are much stronger on QA than summarization, pointing to proxy quality as the main remaining limitation.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Measurement Plasticity: Sensor-Level Adaptation for Vision-Language Models

We propose Multi-View Physical-prompt (MVP) for Test-Time Adaptation (TTA), a forward-only framework that moves TTA from tokens to photons by treating the camera exposure triangle (i.e., ISO, shutter speed, and aperture) as physical prompts. At inference, MVP acquires selected multiple physical views using a source-affinity score, evaluates digitally augmented variants of each retained view and filters the lowest-entropy predictions, and aggregates predictions with hard voting. This selection-then-vote design is simple, calibration-friendly, and requires no gradients or model modifications. On ImageNet-ES and ImageNet-ES-Diverse, MVP outperforms digital-only TTA on both Auto-Exposure and a combination with conventional sensor control. MVP remains effective under reduced parameter candidates that lower capture latency, demonstrating its practicality.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Beyond the Sampled Token: Preserving Candidate Support in RLVR

arXiv:2510.14807v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We revisit exploration collapse in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), from the perspective of the candidate distribution for next-token prediction. We formally show that as probability concentrates on the top-$1$ candidate, the expected number of distinct responses collapses to one regardless of the sampling budget $K$. This theoretical implication is further verified by our empirical tracking of top-$N$ candidate probabilities during training, where the top-$1$ candidate progressively dominates while plausible alternatives are suppressed. These findings suggest a key desideratum for effective exploration: preserving non-negligible probability mass on the top-$N$ candidates. To this end, we propose Candidate-aware Support Preservation (CaSP), with two complementary designs. Specifically, CaSP redistributes positive gradients among top-$N$ candidates for correct responses, and applies a stronger penalty to the top-$1$ candidate for incorrect responses. Unlike many exploration-oriented methods that improve pass@$K$ at the cost of pass@1, CaSP improves pass@$K$ across the full $K$ spectrum. These gains generalize to 6 math, 2 logical-reasoning, and 2 coding benchmarks, and scales to 32B-parameter models and sampling budgets up to $K=1024$, positioning it as a principled, candidate-level approach for RLVR exploration.

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

TouchThinker: Scaling Tactile Commonsense Reasoning to the Open World with Large-scale Data and Action-aware Representation

arXiv:2606.11637v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Touch is a key modality for embodied agents to understand the physical world. Although recent work has incorporated tactile signals into language systems for tactile commonsense reasoning, scaling such systems to realistic open-world settings remains challenging due to two key bottlenecks: (1) current tactile reasoning datasets remain limited in format and scale, providing insufficient supervision for reasoning from tactile observations to physical commonsense and hindering the learning of transferable tactile commonsense; (2) Tactile signals are inherently redundant and action-specific, yet existing methods often overlook these properties, resulting in inefficient representations with limited semantic expressiveness. To address these limitations, we propose TouchThinker, a tactile-language framework that scales tactile commonsense reasoning to the open world from both data and representation perspectives. First, we construct TouchThinker-1M, a million-scale, multi-source tactile reasoning dataset covering 415 objects, 8 scenarios, and 7 sensor types, providing a solid data foundation for open-world generalization. We further introduce TouchThinker-Bench, an open-world benchmark with more realistic and diverse tasks. Then, we propose action-aware modeling mechanism to improve tactile representation efficiency and enable efficient reasoning. Experimental results demonstrate that TouchThinker achieves competitive performance against state-of-the-art models across multiple datasets. Our code and dataset will be made available at: https://github.com/lvkailin0118/TouchThinker.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

A Comparative Study of Graph Neural Network Layer Selection for Interaction Modelling in Driving Trajectory Prediction

arXiv:2606.14956v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous driving systems rely on precise trajectory prediction to plan safe and efficient movement. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become a promising approach for modelling spatiotemporal interactions among road agents. However, designing GNN architectures for trajectory prediction remains non-standardized, with little guidance on which graph layers effectively capture spatial interactions and temporal dynamics. This paper offers a detailed comparative study of 19 graph layer types, focusing on their spatial and temporal processing capabilities to discover the most effective architectures for trajectory prediction. Within the explored hyperparameter setting, we highlight five standout layer combinations, with ARMA, Chebyshev, and topology-aware layers consistently performing better than others. Beyond performance metrics, our findings yield practical design principles: sum-based aggregation is more effective than mean-based methods, multi-head attention mechanisms enable richer interactions, and assigning different weights to different hop distances significantly improves prediction accuracy. These findings offer useful guidance for designing more interpretable and effective trajectory prediction models.

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

Planning with Unified Multimodal Models

With the powerful reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs), many recent works have explored using them for decision-making. However, most of these approaches rely solely on language-based reasoning, which limits their ability to reason and make informed decisions. Recently, a promising new direction has emerged with unified multimodal models (UMMs), which support both multimodal inputs and outputs. We believe such models have greater potential for decision-making by enabling reasoning through generated visual content. To this end, we propose Uni-Plan, a planning framework built on UMMs. Within this framework, a single model simultaneously serves as the policy, dynamics model, and value function. In addition, to avoid hallucinations in dynamics predictions, we present a novel approach self-discriminated filtering, where the generative model serves as a self-discriminator to filter out invalid dynamics predictions. Experiments on embodied decision-making tasks show that Uni-Plan substantially improves success rates compared to VLM-based methods, while also showing strong data scalability, requiring no expert demonstrations and achieving better performance under the same training-data size. This work lays a foundation for future research in reasoning and decision-making with UMMs.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

String dynamics of a (2+1)D U(1) quantum link model on a digital quantum computer

arXiv:2606.19601v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The (2+1)D U(1) pure gauge theory always exists in the confining phase, with strings of non-zero string tension giving a characteristic linear potential between static charges. This makes it a useful testing ground for quantum computing methods designed to study string dynamics of confining gauge theories. Here we implement a minimal U(1) quantum link model on a quantum computer with qubit degrees of freedom representing the dual height variables of the model. This facilitates an efficient realization of plaquette interactions and enables effective calculations of real-time dynamics that are inaccessible to traditional quantum Monte Carlo. A specifically tailored lattice geometry is chosen to match the heavy-hexagonal geometry of the IBM quantum hardware used here, minimizing non-adjacent qubit interactions. By performing quantum quenches from a simple initial string state, we probe the transverse quantum fluctuations of the string before it thermalizes. Our experimental results from digital quantum simulations, with up to 112 qubits, show good agreement with reference tensor-network calculations at short times and with thermal averages at long times. Near the phase transition, the quench dynamics exhibit large fluctuations of the initial string that extend across both spatial dimensions of the lattice. Nonetheless, our error-mitigated estimators from the quantum hardware also give accurate predictions in that regime, with noise-induced violations of local gauge symmetries comparable to finite-bond-dimension tensor-network results.

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

From Explicit Elements to Implicit Intent: A Predefined Library for Auditable Behavioral Inference

We present SemantiClean, a modular framework for extracting structured semantic signals from e-commerce session data and driving pluggable inference targets including purchase intent, customer segmentation, and product affinity through a shared element library. Unlike conventional end-to-end predictors that optimise solely for accuracy, SemantiClean prioritises auditability, structural governance, and sigma=0 reproducibility, explicitly trading marginal predictive gains for element-level transparency and defensible decision trails. Built upon the Online Shoppers Purchasing Intention (OSPI) dataset, the framework organises twenty-four behavioural elements into a four-layer architecture (Functional, Interaction, Systemic, Contextual) and enforces signal quality through three anti-inflation mechanisms: RedundancyGroup contribution caps, TieredPenaltyCalculator bias penalties, and AdaptiveConstraintMode cold-start protection.This report introduces the LLM-Integrated Semantic Inference Engine, a fully implemented two-phase LLM-driven inference architecture that leverages complete element metadata at inference time. All quantitative results reported herein are produced by this engine. Deterministic engine outputs remain fully reproducible (sigma=0); LLM-dependent results (E8, E10) are subject to controlled output variability under fixed provider/model/temperature settings. The gender inference target remains non-functional in the current implementation and is excluded from all quantitative results.

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

Model-Based and Data-Driven Hierarchical Control and Topology Co-Design for Robust Networked Systems

arXiv:2606.11596v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper, we consider a class of networked systems comprising an interconnected set of linear subsystems, disturbance inputs, and performance outputs. Using dissipativity theory, we first propose a model-based hierarchical control design strategy to ensure the closed-loop networked system is dissipative from its disturbance inputs to performance outputs. This involves designing local controllers for each subsystem to enforce local dissipativity guarantees, which are then exploited to co-design distributed global controllers and the interconnection topology to enforce global dissipativity guarantees while optimizing interconnection topology costs. The overall design process requires only solving a sequence of linear matrix inequality (LMI) problems, thereby retaining compositionality and decentralizability while avoiding non-convex, iterative design processes that are inefficient and centralized. This model-based hierarchical control design strategy assumes the knowledge of the subsystem dynamics, which may not hold in many real-world networked systems. Motivated by this, we also propose a data-driven hierarchical control design strategy that assumes only the availability of rich input-state-output trajectory data from the subsystems. The proposed data-driven design process assumes that the unknown disturbances affecting the subsystem dynamics are bounded by a quadratic matrix inequality (relaxing conventional bounds) and accounts for this by using the matrix S-lemma. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed model-based and data-driven hierarchical control designs is illustrated for a networked system representing a DC microgrid, with the aim of enforcing robust (dissipative) voltage regulation and current sharing.

19.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-14

Transposable elements as evolutionary substrates of proteindisorder in the human proteome

Intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs) are central contributors to protein function, evolution and human disease, yet the evolutionary routes that seed new disordered segments within pre-existing proteins are still poorly understood. Sequence insertions provide a powerful mechanism for disorder expansion, but the genomic donors of inserted IDR and its long-term conformational fate remain largely unknown. Transposable elements (TEs), abundant mobile genetic elements with distinctive compositional biases, represent compelling candidates for generating disorder within proteins. Here, we systematically mapped TE-derived segments across human proteins and isoforms, and we found that these insertions are strongly enriched in intrinsic disorder. The structural consequences of their insertion are shaped by TE class and family, reflecting the sequence biases of the elements from which they originate. Recent, Primate specific insertions preferentially generate disordered segments, whereas older insertions more frequently occupy ordered structural contexts, revealing an age-dependent transition in the conformational state of TE-derived sequences. TE-containing isoforms are expressed at lower levels than TE-free isoforms, particularly when insertions are young and disorder-rich, suggesting that intrinsic disorder may constrain the cellular tolerance of newly exonized sequences. These findings identify TEs as a major evolutionary mechanism linking genome mobility to the emergence of new disordered conformational ensembles in the human proteome.

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

Next-Latent Prediction Transformers Learn Compact World Models

arXiv:2511.05963v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Transformers replace recurrence with a memory that grows with sequence length and self-attention that enables ad-hoc lookups over past tokens. Consequently, they lack an inherent incentive to compress history into compact latent states with consistent transition rules. This often leads to learning solutions that generalize poorly. We introduce Next-Latent Prediction (NextLat), which extends standard next-token training with self-supervised predictions in the latent space. Specifically, NextLat trains a transformer to learn latent representations that are predictive of its next latent state given the next token. Theoretically, we show that these latents provably converge towards belief states, compressed information about the history necessary to predict the future. This simple auxiliary objective injects a recurrent inductive bias into transformers while leaving their architecture, parallel training efficiency, and inference unchanged. NextLat effectively encourages transformers to form compact internal world models with coherent belief states and transition dynamics – crucial properties not guaranteed by standard next-token prediction alone. Empirically, across benchmarks in world modeling, reasoning, planning, and language modeling, NextLat demonstrates significant gains over standard next-token prediction and other baselines in downstream accuracy, representation compression, and lookahead planning. Furthermore, NextLat enables variable-length self-speculative decoding, accelerating inference by up to 3.3x in language modeling. NextLat offers a simple yet effective paradigm for learning compact, predictive representations in transformers that generalize better. Our code is available at https://github.com/JaydenTeoh/NextLat.

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

Spectral Analysis of Molecular Features: When Richer Features Do Not Guarantee Better Generalization

arXiv:2510.14217v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The spectral properties of feature embeddings offer critical insights into model generalization and representation quality. While deep learning models are widely used for molecular property prediction, kernel methods remain competitive in low-data regimes, yet their spectral behavior is largely unexplored. We present the first comprehensive spectral analysis of kernel ridge regression across diverse representations-including molecular fingerprints (ECFP), pretrained transformers, graph neural networks, and 3D descriptors-evaluated on QM9 and 3 MoleculeNet benchmarks. Surprisingly, richer spectral features do not consistently yield better generalization performance, contradicting common representation heuristics used in self-supervised learning (SSL). Across 4 spectral metrics, only ECFP-based kernels show a strictly positive correlation with performance. Transformer and global 3D representations exhibit mixed behavior, whereas local 3D representations show consistently negative correlations. Truncation analysis further emphasizes this disparity: for local 3D representations on thermodynamic targets, fewer than 2\% of eigenvalues (and occasionally as few as 0.02\%) are needed to recover 95\% of performance, whereas ECFP and transformer kernels require significantly more. By demonstrating a strong dependence on both task and representation, our results challenge the heuristic that richer spectra inherently improve generalization, providing new guidance for evaluating representations in SSL and in label-limited scientific tasks.

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

VISA: VLM-Guided Instance Semantic Auditing for 3D Occupancy World Models

Semantic 3D occupancy provides a voxelized world state for autonomous driving and robot decision making, but object and rare-class errors can affect free-space interpretation, collision checking, and temporal state propagation. We show that a common VLM strategy, aligning 3D voxel or object features with crop-caption embeddings, improves text-space similarity without reliably improving closed-set occupancy mIoU. Motivated by this mismatch, we propose VISA, a training-time semantic auditing approach for existing occupancy world models. VISA queries an offline VLM on a representative crop of each physical object instance, obtains a structured audit with class hypotheses, plausible confusions, reliability, attributes, and evidence, and propagates it along the object track. The audit is grounded to matched 3D object voxels and distilled into semantic logits through reliability-weighted taxonomy, attribute-factor, and scene-level audit graph losses, while inference remains unchanged and requires no VLM. On nuScenes, averaged across three runs, VISA improves OccWorld from 19.06 to 20.05 mIoU and GaussianWorld from 21.36 to 21.91 mIoU; on GaussianWorld, object mIoU improves from 18.18 to 19.16 and rare-class mIoU from 15.60 to 16.79. These results suggest that VLMs are better suited to closed-set occupancy as reliability-aware semantic auditors than as generic caption-embedding targets.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Dual-Constrained Diffusion Image Compression for Operational Rate-Distortion-Perception Optimization

The rate-distortion-perception (RDP) trade-off extends classical rate–distortion theory by imposing a distributional constraint on reconstructions, providing a unified framework for neural image compression that jointly governs fidelity and perceptual realism. While prior work achieves near-optimal rate–perception trade-offs, practical frameworks explicitly realizing the full RDP surface remain scarce, primarily due to the difficulty of introducing common randomness at the decoder. We propose DCIC (Dual-Constrained Diffusion Image Compression), which integrates a learned codec with a diffusion-based decoder governed by joint distortion and idempotence constraints. The distortion constraint bounds reconstruction fidelity relative to the base codec output; the idempotence constraint – requiring that re-encoding the restored image recovers the base codec reconstruction – serves as a tractable surrogate for the distributional perception requirement. Together, they steer the reverse denoising process via iterative optimization with consistent noise injection, realizing common randomness without additional rate overhead. At fixed rate, dual attenuation factors $(K_D, K_P)$ jointly navigate the Pareto frontier of the distortion-perception plane, enabling continuously adjustable fidelity-realism trade-offs from a single bitstream. DCIC$_{RD}$ ($K_P{=}0$) and DCIC$_{RP}$ ($K_D{=}0$) arise as boundary curves, with DCIC$_{RDP}$ ($K_D = K_P=1$) realizing the optimal interior operating point. Experiments on CelebA-HQ, CLIC2020, and ImageNet-1K across CNN, Transformer, and hybrid architectures confirm that DCIC$_{RDP}$ achieves superior BD-PSNR over all perceptual codecs, while DCIC$_{RP}$ matches dedicated perception-oriented methods in BD-FID, validating the practical value of full RDP surface navigation.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

FlowBender: Feedback-Aware Training for Self-Correcting Conditional Flows

Conditional diffusion and flow models routinely fail to satisfy the very constraints that define their task. For instance, a depth-conditioned model often produces images whose re-extracted depth disagrees with the input, even though the forward operator–the depth predictor defining the constraint–is available during both training and inference. Existing approaches generally fall into two categories: supervised models that treat the conditioning signal as a static cue and ignore alignment information at inference, and guidance-based methods that consult it through hand-tuned linear updates, typically trading fidelity to the condition against the plausibility of the generated sample. We argue that the fundamental gap in both paradigms is that the model is never trained to utilize its own alignment error. We introduce FlowBender, a closed-loop framework that treats this error as a first-class input, training the network to learn a correction policy conditioned on inference-time feedback. At each step, an unguided look-ahead pass estimates the clean signal, a task-specific deviation is computed via the forward operator, and a refinement pass consumes this signal to produce a corrected velocity. We propose several variants of FlowBender, including a gradient-based formulation for differentiable operators and a zero-order variant for non-differentiable settings such as JPEG compression. For efficient sampling, we introduce a prior-step shortcut that enables closed-loop correction at a minimal additional computational cost. Across image-to-image translation, restoration, and 3D mesh texturing, FlowBender consistently outperforms standard supervised baselines, alignment-loss-augmented training, and state-of-the-art inference-time guidance, improving fidelity and plausibility simultaneously rather than trading them against each other. Project page: https://flow-bender.github.io/

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Floating-Point Networks with Automatic Differentiation Can Represent Almost All Floating-Point Functions and Their Gradients

arXiv:2605.01702v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Theoretical studies show that for any differentiable function on a compact domain, there exists a neural network that approximates both the function values and gradients. However, such a result cannot be used in practice since it assumes real parameters and exact internal operations. In contrast, real implementations only use a finite subset of reals and machine operations with round-off errors. In this work, we investigate whether a similar result holds for neural networks under floating-point arithmetic, when the gradient with respect to the input is computed by the automatic differentiation algorithm $D^\mathtt{AD}$. We first show that given a floating-point function $\phi$ (e.g., a loss function), arbitrary function values and gradients can be represented by a floating-point network $f$ and $D^\mathtt{AD}(\phi\circ f)$, respectively. We further extend this result: given $\phi_1,\dots,\phi_n$, $D^\mathtt{AD}(\phi_i\circ f)$ can simultaneously represent arbitrary gradients while $f$ represents the target values, under mild conditions. Our results hold for practical activation functions, e.g., $\mathrm{ReLU}$, $\mathrm{ELU}$, $\mathrm{GeLU}$, $\mathrm{Swish}$, $\mathrm{Sigmoid}$, and $\mathrm{tanh}$.