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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

The Winner Takes It All

arXiv:2606.16885v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The winner-takes-all (WTA) process takes place on an arbitrary graph. There is an agent on each vertex of the graph, and active agents at neighboring vertices play games. In each game, a randomly chosen agent wins, while the loser is eliminated from subsequent games. The games are played at random times; each game finishes instantaneously, and the games cease when each active agent has only losers among its neighbors. On the one-dimensional lattice, the fraction of winners in the final state is $e^{-1}$, and we also determine the fractions $w_j$ of winners who won $j=0, 1, 2$ games. For the WTA process on a segment, we determine statistics of the total number of winners (the average, the variance, and all higher cumulants), the probabilities of reaching the final state with the minimum or maximum number of winners, and establish the behavior near the boundaries. For infinite regular trees with vertices of degree $d$, i.e., Bethe lattices with coordination number $d$, the fraction of winners is $(2/d)^{d/(d-2)}$.

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

EmbodiTTA: Resource-Efficient Test-Time Adaptation for Embodied Visual Systems

Continual Test-time adaptation (CTTA) continuously adapts the deployed model on every incoming batch of data. While achieving optimal accuracy, existing CTTA approaches present poor real-world applicability on resource-constrained edge devices, due to the substantial memory overhead and energy consumption. In this work, we first introduce a novel paradigm – on-demand TTA – which triggers adaptation only when a significant domain shift is detected. Then, we present OD-TTA, an on-demand TTA framework for accurate and efficient adaptation on edge devices. OD-TTA comprises three innovative techniques: 1) a lightweight domain shift detection mechanism to activate TTA only when it is needed, drastically reducing the overall computation overhead, 2) a source domain selection module that chooses an appropriate source model for adaptation, ensuring high and robust accuracy, 3) a decoupled Batch Normalization (BN) update scheme to enable memory-efficient adaptation with small batch sizes. Extensive experiments show that OD-TTA achieves comparable and even better performance while reducing the energy and computation overhead remarkably, making TTA a practical reality.

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

Priors Persist Through Suppression: A Stroop Paradigm for Lexical Override

作者:

Glossaries, technical specifications, and system prompts routinely ask language models to use familiar words in unfamiliar ways. When this works, the local rule does not install the new meaning on top of the old one; the pretrained prior keeps operating underneath, and its strength still shows through. We test this with a Stroop-style paradigm: a remapping rule (doctor means forest) pitted against the query word's lexical-prior distractor (hospital), with matched neutral controls. Across 11 open-weight models spanning four families and 1B-9B parameters, lexical-prior strength predicts interference even after item-level controls for answer prior, frequency, tokenization, and prompt wording. Activation patching on five aligned models locates a source-position triplet (definition subject, definition target, query word) that nearly fully recovers the conflict effect (aggregate $R \in [0.92, 1.06]$); a definition-target swap shows the triplet performs binding rather than identity matching. Dissociation experiments isolate target preservation as the binding-specific signature: distractor suppression occurs under matched, swap, and item-mismatched conditions alike, whereas target logit collapse occurs only when the definition-target position is corrupted. Behavior and mechanism converge on the same channel: the prior's strength both predicts which overrides fail and marks where the causal repair lands.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

PASQA: Pitch-Accent-Focused Speech Quality Assessment Model Trained on Synthetic Speech with Accent Errors

Existing mean opinion score (MOS) prediction models typically predict utterance-level naturalness MOS and can be insensitive to localized pitch-accent errors. We propose Pitch-Accent-focused Speech Quality Assessment (PASQA), which explicitly targets pitch-accent correctness. To train our model, we construct a controlled Japanese accent-error dataset by changing accent patterns using an accent-controllable text-to-speech system, and compute a pseudo accent-quality score from the accent-error rate. PASQA builds on self-supervised representations and employs mora-conditioned fusion, ranking loss, an auxiliary accent-error localization task, and speaker-invariant training. Experiments show that conventional models fail to preserve the ordering by accent-error severity, whereas PASQA achieves high ordering accuracy on both seen and unseen speakers. Further, PASQA shows stronger agreement with human accent-correctness judgments. The code is available at https://github.com/lycorp-jp/PASQA.

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

Learning from Own Solutions: Self-Conditioned Credit Assignment for Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards

arXiv:2606.18810v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has driven substantial progress in training LLMs for reasoning tasks, but representative methods such as GRPO assign uniform credit across all tokens, wasting gradient on routine tokens while under-crediting pivotal reasoning steps. Existing token-level credit assignment methods require resources beyond the model's own rollouts. GRPO variants rely on process reward models or ground-truth answers. Knowledge distillation assigns credit through per-token divergence but requires external teachers (On-Policy Distillation) or privileged information (On-Policy Self Distillation). However, these dependencies limit applicability in the pure RLVR setting. We observe that conditioning the model on its own verified trajectories induces a measurable per-token KL divergence between the original and conditioned distributions, and prove that distilling from a self-teacher constructed by verified trajectories leads to infeasible weighted-average solutions when multiple verified trajectories exist. We propose SC-GRPO (Self-Conditioned GRPO), which uses KL divergence mentioned before as a multiplicative weight on GRPO gradients. Across five benchmarks spanning math, code, and agentic tasks, SC-GRPO consistently outperforms 8.1% over GRPO and 5.9% over DAPO with stronger OOD performance. Moreover, SC-GRPO achieves higher performance than OPD.

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

Symmetry-Accelerated Classical Simulation of Clifford-Dominated Circuits

arXiv:2510.18977v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Classical simulation of quantum circuits plays a crucial role in validating quantum hardware and delineating the boundaries of quantum advantage. Among the most effective simulation techniques are those based on the stabilizer extent, which quantifies the overhead of representing non-Clifford operations as linear combinations of Clifford unitaries. However, finding optimal decompositions rapidly becomes intractable as it constitutes a superexponentially large optimization problem. In this work, we exploit symmetries in the computation of the stabilizer extent, proving that for real, diagonal, and real-diagonal unitaries, the optimization can be restricted to the corresponding subgroups of the Clifford group without loss of optimality. This ``strong symmetry reduction'' drastically reduces computational cost, enabling optimal decompositions of unitaries on up to seven qubits using a standard laptop – far beyond previous two-qubit limits. Additionally, we employ a ``weak symmetry reduction'' method that leverages additional invariances to shrink the search space further. Applying these results, we demonstrate exponential runtime improvements in classical simulations of quantum Fourier transform circuits and measurement-based quantum computations on the Union Jack lattice, as well as new insights into the nonstabilizer properties of multicontrolled phase gates and unitaries generating hypergraph states. Our findings establish symmetry exploitation as a powerful route to scale classical simulation techniques and deepen the resource-theoretic understanding of quantum advantage.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

MedicalAgentsBench for Complex Medical Reasoning: Comparing Internalized Reasoning Models versus Externalized Agent-based Frameworks

Complex medical reasoning requires integrating heterogeneous clinical evidence across multiple inference steps. Large language models (LLMs) now approach this through two routes: internalized reasoning and externalized agent scaffolding (frameworks that decompose problems collaboratively amongst multiple LLMs). To determine whether these routes are exclusive or complementary, we introduce MedicalAgentsBench, a filtered benchmark of 862 complex clinical questions drawn from the union of eight medical datasets via difficulty-aware curation and contamination screening. Evaluating three internalized reasoning models (DeepSeek-R1, o1-mini, and o3-mini), seven base models, and nine externalized agent-based methods, we find that internalized and externalized approaches each independently improve performance, and that their benefits compound: the highest accuracy is achieved by layering agent workflows onto an internalized reasoning model (i.e., o3-mini + MDAgents with 35.1%). Pareto analysis shows this combination dominates the cost-performance frontier; moreover, lightweight optimization on inexpensive models offers an entry point for resource-constrained settings. Our benchmark is at https://github.com/gersteinlab/MedicalAgentsBench.

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

Are Frontier LLMs Ready for Cybersecurity? Evidence for Vertical Foundation Models from Dual-Mode Vulnerability Benchmarks

arXiv:2605.23243v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We evaluate whether frontier LLMs are ready for cybersecurity through a dual-mode benchmark: white-box function-level vulnerability detection (VulnLLM-R, across C/Java/Python) and black-box web application security testing (five production-style applications with 118 ground-truth vulnerabilities across 20+ CWE families, which we will open-source). We test six frontier models (GPT-5.4, Codex~5.3, Claude Opus~4.6, Sonnet~4.6, Gemini~3.1~Pro and Gemini~3~Flash) and two domain-specialized models across four testing paradigms. Our findings are sobering: (1)~every frontier model produces 10-50% false positive rates in white-box detection, systematically over-predicting vulnerabilities; (2)~in black-box testing, frontier models achieve only 4-8% ground-truth coverage, improving to just 10-19% even with external security tools (Playwright MCP, Burp Suite MCP); (3)~structured penetration-testing methodology encoded in domain-specialized agents raises per-family detection above 50%, demonstrating that methodology, not scale, is the primary lever; and (4)~a domain-specialized defense model achieves the highest precision (0.904) and lowest false positive rate (9.7%) among all models, on a single GPU. We identify the absence of structured security testing traces end-to-end request/response sequences, failure-heavy data, and multi-step attack chains as the fundamental training data bottleneck, and propose self-play security testing as a data generation strategy. Our results make the case for vertical foundation models purpose-built for cybersecurity.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Learning a Maximum Entropy Model for Visual Textures using Diffusion

Visual textures – spatially homogeneous image regions containing repeated elements (e.g. a field of grass, the bark of a tree) – are ubiquitous in visual scenes and provide important cues for recognizing and analyzing materials and objects. A number of existing texture models extract essential statistics from a single texture image, and can then generate high-quality samples that are visually similar to the original by matching these statistics. However, their statistics are either hand-designed or based on a network pretrained for another purpose (e.g., object recognition). Here, we develop the first principled method for unsupervised learning of a set of statistics that are used to constrain a maximum entropy probability model. We leverage methods developed for generative diffusion models to derive training and sampling procedures, and compare these to the traditional method of sampling via matching the statistics. Despite the compactness of our trained model (512 statistics), it generates texture images whose quality is as good as or better than the current state-of-the-art model (~177k statistics). A more direct comparison of the two models, obtained by synthesizing images that are indistinguishable for one model but maximally different for the other, reveals their relative strengths and weaknesses. Finally, we show that unlike previous statistical texture models, a straight trajectory in the representation space of our model generates homogeneous texture samples that interpolate smoothly between the features of the two end points.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Quantum optical photoelectron interferometry

arXiv:2606.13447v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a general theoretical framework for multiphoton processes driven by quantum light fields, establishing a direct link between photon statistics and photoelectron observables. Our results show that the autocorrelation and cross-correlation functions, which quantify the underlying photon statistics, are directly mapped onto the resulting photoelectron spectra. Although our framework is broadly applicable, we demonstrate specifically in the example of reconstruction of attosecond beating by interference of two-photon transitions (RABBIT) the influence of the light statistical properties. In this approach, the amplitude, contrast and phase of the oscillations of the sideband signal as a function of pump-probe delay reveal the quantum nature of light. We analyze these observables across several quantum configurations, including correlated infrared and harmonic modes, as well as the uncorrelated case with non-classical harmonic statistics, thereby establishing a general framework for quantum-light RABBIT spectroscopy. We compare the analytical theory with numerical simulations for the case of classical harmonics and an infrared field in a squeezed coherent state, obtaining excellent agreement. Our results reveal how the interplay between classical and quantum correlations dictates the coherence of the photoemission process, providing a new window into the quantum-optical foundations of attosecond science.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

OdysSim: Building Foundation Models for Human Behavior Simulation

Large language models are increasingly deployed as human simulators for interactive evaluation and social simulation. Yet helpfulness-driven post-training pulls them toward a homogeneous, overly agreeable assistant register, creating a behavioral Sim2Real gap. We present OdysSim, the largest open systematic investigation of behavioral foundation models, i.e., models trained to simulate human behavior at scale. We propose SOUL, a taxonomy of five capability axes (CONV, SS, COG, ROLE, EVAL) that unifies 62 datasets and 23 benchmark tasks under one framework. Specifically, we curate the OdysSim corpus (21.4M interactions, 10B tokens, retrofitted with back-generated social contexts), construct the SOUL-Index benchmark, and develop an end-to-end training recipe combining midtraining, task-specific RL, and expert distillation. The resulting open 8B OSim model ranks first or tied-first on 8 of 23 tasks, outperforming any individual frontier model by this count, with the strongest gains on conversational and social tasks. Its outputs are also more human-like in length, formatting, and word choice, and it transfers zero-shot to out-of-distribution user simulation on $\tau$-bench, nearly matching real users on reaction alignment (93.2 vs. 93.5). We further show that LLM-as-judge RL induces reward-hacking patterns, and that our detectors can mitigate them during post-training. Together, our findings suggest that behavioral foundation models require rethinking the LLM training paradigm. We release all artifacts to support future research.

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

Learning Fair Pareto-Optimal Policies in Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.18111v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fairness is an important aspect of decision-making in multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL), where policies must ensure both optimality and equity across multiple, potentially conflicting objectives. While single-policy MORL methods can learn fair policies for fixed user preferences using welfare functions such as the generalized Gini welfare function (GGF), they fail to provide the diverse set of policies necessary for dynamic or unknown user preferences. To address this limitation, we formalize the fair optimization problem in multi-policy MORL, where the goal is to learn a set of Pareto-optimal policies that ensure fairness across all possible user preferences. Our key technical contributions are threefold: (1) We show that for concave, piecewise-linear welfare functions (e.g., GGF), fair policies remain in the convex coverage set (CCS), which is an approximated Pareto front for linear scalarization. (2) We demonstrate that non-stationary policies, augmented with accrued reward histories, and stochastic policies improve fairness by dynamically adapting to historical inequities. (3) We propose three novel algorithms, which include integrating GGF with multi-policy multi-objective Q-Learning (MOQL), state-augmented multi-policy MOQL for learning non-statoinary policies, and its novel extension for learning stochastic policies. We evaluate our algorithms across various domains and compare our methods against the state-of-the-art MORL baselines. The empirical results show that our methods learn a set of fair policies that accommodate different user preferences.

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

Entity Labels Are Not Entity Signals: A Framework for Observable Relevance in Document Re-Ranking

Entity-aware document retrieval uses query-associated entities as ranking signals, assuming that semantically relevant entities are also useful retrieval signals. We show this assumption is insufficient- and explain why. Unlike terms, which are ground-truth observations, entity links are hypotheses produced by an imperfect linker: an entity can be topically central yet provide no discriminative signal if the linker fires indiscriminately across relevant and non-relevant documents. We formalize this as a distinction between Conceptual Entity Relevance (CER)- whether an entity is topically related to a query- and Observable Entity Relevance (OER)- whether its observed presence in a collection discriminates relevant from non-relevant documents. Across four collections and annotation sources including human entity judgments, CER and OER exhibit near-chance agreement ($\kappa \approx 0$), while OER operationalizations agree substantially ($\kappa \approx 0.5$), confirming CER as the systematic outlier. CER-based supervision selects topically plausible but weakly discriminative entities, pruning fewer than 4% of non-relevant documents on some collections. Aligning supervision with OER improves non-relevant pruning by up to 10x and open-world MAP by 0.051 over BM25. Our findings motivate a shift from conceptual to observable notions of entity relevance in entity-aware retrieval.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Conformal Risk-Averse Decision Making with Action Conditional Guarantee

arXiv:2606.05551v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reliable decision making pipelines powered by machine learning models require uncertainty quantification (UQ) methods that come with explicit safety guarantees. Conformal prediction provides such UQ by wrapping ML predictions into prediction sets, and recent work by Kiyani et al. (2025b) established that these sets can be translated into optimal risk-averse decision policies – yet only inheriting marginal safety guarantees. We generalize and strengthen their results by (i) introducing action-conditional conformal prediction, which yields safety guarantees conditioned explicitly on each action taken by the decision maker, (ii) showing that action-conditional prediction sets serve as a proxy for the feasible decision space for risk-averse decision makers aiming to optimize action-conditional value-at-risk, and (iii) proposing a principled finite-sample algorithm based on pinball-loss minimization, connecting the framework of Gibbs et al. (2025) to action-conditional guarantees. Experiments on two real-world datasets confirm that our approach significantly improves action-conditional performance over conformal baselines.

15.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-09

Daily briefing: Trial to ‘de-age’ cells treats first person

作者:

The gene-therapy trial aims to treat glaucoma by rejuvenating cells in the optic nerve. Plus, the mystery of how things freeze and encouragement to go out into the sunlight. The gene-therapy trial aims to treat glaucoma by rejuvenating cells in the optic nerve. Plus, the mystery of how things freeze and encouragement to go out into the sunlight.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Expert in Ultrasound Skills: Feasibility of an IMU-video platform to describe technical profiles during focused cardiac ultrasound. Pilot study

Background: Focused cardiac ultrasound (FoCUS) is operator dependent and requires coordinated probe manipulation, image interpretation and iterative visual feedback. Existing assessment approaches often emphasize final image quality or expert rating. We developed Expert in Ultrasound Skills (EXUS) , a platform that synchronizes transducer-mounted inertial measurement unit (IMU) data with ultrasound video, and evaluated its technical feasibility during FoCUS acquisition. Methods: This observational pilot study included 6 operators performing two repetitions of a four-view FoCUS protocol, yielding 12 analytical sessions and 48 planned acquisitions. Feasibility was defined by acquisition completion, video availability, start/stop events, fused IMU-video windows, temporal coverage, complete human label entries and IMU integrity. A 100-image Likert rating task was used to summarize pairwise inter-rater agreement for still-frame image quality assessment. Results: All 48 planned acquisitions were completed with video, start/stop events, fused windows and complete human label entries. Temporal coverage was at least 90% in 47/48 acquisitions. IMU integrity endpoints exceeded the 80% threshold: 43/48 acquisitions had no extreme IMU-derived artifact, 43/48 had no active-segment IMU restart and 44/48 had no complete motion flatline. Mean pairwise exact agreement for the Likert task was 38.9%, with mean quadratic-weighted Cohen's kappa of 0.564. Post hoc profiles varied across duration, visual quality, mechanical load and motor efficiency. Conclusions: EXUS was technically feasible for synchronized IMU-video capture during FoCUS. The pilot supports multimodal acquisition data as a way to describe technical profiles and generate formative feedback hypotheses, but the post hoc indices are not validated competency measures. Keywords: focused cardiac ultrasound; point-of-care ultrasound; inertial measurement unit; medical education; deliberate practice

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

A Taxonomy of Mental Health and Technology Needs for Alzheimer's and Dementia Caregivers

arXiv:2606.19247v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Family members caring for individuals with Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (AD/ADRD) provide the foundation of long-term care worldwide. In 2023, more than 11 million U.S. family and friends contributed 18 billion hours of unpaid care, often at the cost of their own physical and mental health. These informal caregivers – also referred as the "invisible second patients" – experience elevated rates of mental health problems. Yet research commonly reduces their complex psychosocial experiences to a single construct of caregiver burden, obscuring which specific needs are unmet or effectively supported. At the same time, digital and AI-enabled technologies are rapidly expanding, from smartphone apps and videoconferencing to sensor platforms and AI chatbots. However, the absence of shared frameworks across medicine, psychology, and technology research limits cumulative progress. This study introduces a Caregiver Mental Health and Technology Taxonomy that systematically links AD/ADRD caregiver needs with corresponding classes of technology-based interventions. Drawing from an interdisciplinary literature review and two qualitative studies with caregivers, the taxonomy identifies mismatches between caregiver priorities and existing technological support, highlights under-served domains such as relational strain and compassion fatigue, and proposes design directions for adaptive, responsive systems. The framework offers a shared vocabulary to guide clinicians, researchers, and technology designers in developing more person-centered and clinically grounded innovation in dementia care.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Leishmaniasis on YouTube: a critical appraisal of the quality, reliability, and transparency of educational content

Background: Leishmaniasis is a neglected tropical disease of significant global public health importance, for which accurate information is essential to support prevention and early care-seeking, particularly in endemic, resource-limited settings. YouTube is a widely used source of health information, but the quality and reliability of leishmaniasis-related content have not been evaluated. We aimed to assess the quality, reliability, and transparency of English-language YouTube videos on leishmaniasis. Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional analysis of YouTube videos retrieved via the YouTube Data API on 15 June 2026 using the terms "leishmaniasis," "cutaneous leishmaniasis," and "visceral leishmaniasis." After applying eligibility criteria and screening the 150 most-viewed eligible videos, 48 videos were included. Two reviewers independently assessed each video using the modified DISCERN (mDISCERN) tool, the Global Quality Score (GQS), and the JAMA benchmark criteria, with disagreements resolved by consensus. Inter-rater agreement was assessed using the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC), and associations were examined using Spearman's rank correlation. Results: Of 402 videos retrieved, 48 met the inclusion criteria. The median GQS was 3.00 (IQR 2.00-4.00) and median mDISCERN was 3.00 (IQR 2.38-4.50), indicating moderate quality and reliability, while the median JAMA score was 2.00 (IQR 1.00-2.00), reflecting limited transparency; no video met all four JAMA criteria. The overwhelming majority of videos (47/48, 97.9%) were of professional or institutional origin. Inter-rater agreement was good to excellent (ICC 0.883 for GQS, 0.896 for mDISCERN, 1.000 for JAMA). The instruments were strongly inter-correlated (mDISCERN-GQS rho = 0.841, p < 0.001). Quality scores did not correlate positively with views, likes, or video duration; comments correlated weakly and negatively with mDISCERN (rho = -0.337, p = 0.031) and JAMA (rho = -0.381, p = 0.014). Conclusions: YouTube videos on leishmaniasis are of moderate quality and reliability but limited transparency, and are produced almost exclusively by professional sources. Video popularity, length, and age were not indicators of quality. There is a need for experts and institutions to produce clearly authored, well-sourced, and transparent educational content on this neglected tropical disease.

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

From Observation to Intervention: A Causal Audit of Expert Importance in Mixture-of-Experts Models

Interpretability methods routinely use population-level summary statistics over observed model behaviour to license claims about the effects of targeted interventions on specific computations; in Pearl's terms, they treat rung-1 associational evidence as if it supported rung-2 interventional conclusions, a move whose validity is rarely tested. We examine one concrete instance: the use of routing statistics in Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) pruning, where utilization rates, activation norms, and routing weight distributions are treated as predictors of which experts can be removed without functional cost. A token-level interventional audit across three high-redundancy MoE architectures (OLMoE-1B-7B-0924, Qwen1.5-MoE-A2.7B, DeepSeek-V2-Lite) finds no observational metric predicts causal expert importance in any model: across all 60 metric-layer combinations effect sizes stay below Cohen's $d = 0.23$, and no metric is reliably positive under our corrected, dual-test criterion. A per-token routing weight control, run with identical $n$, rules out insufficient power, recovering a signal whose CI excludes zero at OLMoE's final MoE layer ($d = +0.231$, 95\% CI $[+0.09, +0.37]$, $p = 0.0013$). Existing pruning methods succeed in this regime not by identifying dispensable experts but because early-layer redundancy renders most selection criteria interchangeable. Our results provide an explicit counterexample to the common inferential step from population-level observational summaries to token-level interventional claims about expert importance, and illustrate how interventional audits can calibrate the evidential standards for interpretability claims.

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

Market Design for AI: Beyond the Copyright Binary

arXiv:2606.12260v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: How can we design a market of human-generated content for use in training AI models that both enables technological progress and preserves individual incentives for high-quality content creation? Existing approaches take polar positions: a "free-for-all" model based on fair use and a "strong intellectual property rights" model. We show that both fail: Free-for-all does not compensate creators, and – by modeling as a static Stackelberg game – strong intellectual property rights also underpower creative incentives. We find this especially true for more innovative creators, a phenomenon we term the "originality penalty." Extending this insight to a dynamic model, we find another market failure undermining AI model performance, even for an initially good model: Such a model induces greater reliance by humans on AI-assisted creation, resulting in homogenized content feeding back into training, which degrades the model performance – a "curse of precision." We further propose a market design with a data intermediary internalizing cross-creator externalities and subsidizing innovative contributions, thereby restoring efficiency.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Decoupling Inference from State Updates in Low-Latency Feature Engines via Probabilistic Thinning

arXiv:2606.16981v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Streaming data systems increasingly underpin Machine Learning workflows that maintain large numbers of continuously updated aggregations. In production settings, each incoming event typically triggers read-modify-write operations to persistent storage, making high-frequency state updates a dominant source of latency, contention, and operational cost. In this work, we decouple inference from state persistence in streaming Machine Learning pipelines via probabilistic thinning: every event is scored, but durable state updates are selectively triggered by informative events. Unlike approaches that shed input or state, we show that persistence-path control is achievable without a high-frequency in-memory control plane or cross-worker coordination, relying exclusively on approximate statistics retrieved from disk-backed key-value stores. We model the resulting stochastic processes, derive bounds on filtering rates, and prove that common time-based aggregations remain unbiased under variance-aware formulations, preventing systemic error accumulation. We evaluate the approach in a controlled setting that isolates per-event costs, demonstrating substantial reductions in storage Input/Output and serialization overhead. Across experiments, up to 90% of events are excluded from the persistence path while preserving and in some cases improving downstream utility.

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

Triangle Splatting SLAM

We present a dense RGB-D SLAM system using differentiable triangles as the 3D map representation. While 3D Gaussian Splatting has emerged as the leading method for novel-view synthesis, triangles remain the standard primitive for traditional rendering hardware, game engines, and downstream tasks requiring explicit geometry such as simulation, collision, and editing. Recent offline methods have demonstrated that an unstructured 'triangle soup' can be optimised into a photorealistic mesh via Delaunay triangulation across a set of posed images. Building upon this insight, we present the first dense SLAM system to employ Triangle Splatting to perform both tracking and mapping through online differentiable rendering of a triangle soup. The map can be converted into a connected mesh on-the-fly via restricted Delaunay triangulation, enabling new online capabilities such as mesh deformation and collision checking. On Replica and TUM-RGBD, our system outperforms baselines on 3D geometry, matches the camera-tracking accuracy, and enables online mesh-based scene editing.

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

From Values to Tokens: An LLM-Driven Framework for Context-aware Time Series Forecasting via Symbolic Discretization

arXiv:2508.09191v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Time series forecasting plays a vital role in supporting decision-making across a wide range of critical applications, including energy, healthcare, and finance. Despite recent advances, forecasting accuracy remains limited due to the challenge of integrating historical numerical sequences with contextual features, which often comprise unstructured textual data. To address this challenge, we propose TokenCast, a large language model (LLM) driven framework that leverages language-based symbolic representations as a unified intermediary for context-aware time series forecasting. Specifically, TokenCast employs a discrete tokenizer to transform continuous numerical sequences into temporal tokens, enabling structural alignment with language-based inputs. To effectively bridge the semantic gap between modalities, both temporal and contextual tokens are embedded into a shared representation space via a pre-trained LLM, further optimized with generative objectives. Building upon this unified semantic space, the aligned LLM is subsequently fine-tuned in a supervised manner to predict future temporal tokens, which are then decoded back into the original numerical space. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework and highlight its potential as a generative framework for context-aware time series forecasting. The code is available at https://github.com/Xiaoyu-Tao/TokenCast.

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

Hidden Ghost Hand: Unveiling Backdoor Vulnerabilities in MLLM-Powered Mobile GUI Agents

Graphical user interface (GUI) agents powered by multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown greater promise for human-interaction. However, due to the high fine-tuning cost, users often rely on open-source GUI agents or APIs offered by AI providers, which introduces a critical but underexplored supply chain threat: backdoor attacks. In this work, we first unveil that MLLM-powered GUI agents naturally expose multiple interaction-level triggers, such as historical steps, environment states, and task progress. Based on this observation, we introduce AgentGhost, an effective and stealthy framework for red-teaming backdoor attacks. Specifically, we first construct composite triggers by combining goal and interaction levels, allowing GUI agents to unintentionally activate backdoors while ensuring task utility. Then, we formulate backdoor injection as a Min-Max optimization problem that uses supervised contrastive learning to maximize the feature difference across sample classes at the representation space, improving flexibility of the backdoor. Meanwhile, it adopts supervised fine-tuning to minimize the discrepancy between backdoor and clean behavior generation, enhancing effectiveness and utility. Extensive evaluations of various agent models in two established mobile benchmarks show that AgentGhost is effective and generic, with attack accuracy that reaches 99.7\% on three attack objectives, and shows stealthiness with only 1\% utility degradation. Furthermore, we tailor a defense method against AgentGhost that reduces the attack accuracy to 22.1\%. Our code is available at \texttt{anonymous}.