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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

SierpinskiCam: Camera-Controlled Video Retaking with Sierpinski Triangle Pattern Cues

Generating novel renderings of a scene along user-defined camera trajectories from a single monocular video, dubbed video retaking, is a compelling but difficult problem in content creation and visual effects. Existing geometry-guided approaches reconstruct a 4D representation from the source video and render it along the target trajectory to condition video diffusion models. However, this guidance degrades as the target camera departs from the source trajectory, leaving newly revealed regions sparse or entirely missing. We propose SierpinskiCam, which addresses this limitation by augmenting geometry-based guidance with Sierpinski dome texture cues that contains rich trackable features even under large viewpoint changes. We further introduce a reference video conditioning mechanism that appends source-video tokens to the target-token sequence and separates the two streams with negative RoPE indices, enabling appearance grounding without architectural modification or per-video adaptation. Extensive experiments show that SierpinskiCam achieves significant gains in camera controllability, geometric consistency, and video quality across diverse and challenging retaking scenarios. Project page: https://hyelinnam.github.io/SierpinskiCam/.

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

Dual-Stance Evaluation of Sycophancy: The Structure of Agreement and the Limits of Intervention

Activation steering can shift LLM behaviour, but standard evaluations do not typically test whether a sycophancy-reduction direction also suppresses agreement with factually correct statements. We introduce dual-stance evaluation, which tests both stances of each topic, and apply it to centroid-difference steering on Llama-3-8B-Instruct. We find a dissociation: the model represents sycophantic and factual agreement in geometrically distinct subspaces, yet the steering direction projects equally onto both and cannot differentially target either. The direction accordingly reduces agreement with factually correct statements (e.g. that the Earth is round) as well as sycophantic ones. All other static properties of the two activation groups are matched, suggesting the behavioural dissociation arises from generation dynamics or from finer-grained structure that residual-stream analysis cannot resolve. The pattern illustrates a general gap: representations that are readable from activations may not be writable through them.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

PAL-Bench: Evidence-Grounded Profile Reconstruction from Longitudinal Personal Albums

arXiv:2606.16175v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Longitudinal personal albums are weak-schema multimodal databases: noisy perceptual records whose key facts require joins across faces, text, timestamps, locations, and repeated events. Existing visual, video, document, and lifelog benchmarks test sub-problems, but not album-scale profile reconstruction with social identity binding and evidence citation. Benchmarking this task is difficult because the ground truth needed for evaluation–owner profiles, social graphs, face-name maps, and evidence provenance–is private state that real albums cannot safely release. We introduce PAL-Bench, a controlled benchmark for evidence-grounded reconstruction under a public-record contract. Its Evidence Compiler builds latent private worlds, programs target-level evidence paths, renders album pixels, re-measures them through perception pipelines, and exports audited public/private views. Agents receive only perception-derived public records; targets, identifier maps, and evidence paths remain hidden. PAL-Bench contains 50 synthetic users, 36,659 public photo records, and 2,799 targets over owner facts, identities, and relations. A privacy-preserving audit with 10 participants confirms that PAL-Bench evidence structures match real private albums, though equivalent releases remain privacy-prohibitive. Across seven systems and two compute-matched diagnostics, a seven-metric protocol reveals a gap between plausible profile summarization and faithful social reconstruction: systems recover some owner facts but struggle with recurring identities and evidence citation. PAL-TRACE, a reference framework that freezes identity bindings before owner-fact mining, performs best but leaves hard identity resolution far from solved. PAL-Bench provides a testbed for perceptual entity resolution, multimodal data integration, temporal evidence aggregation, and provenance-aware structured prediction.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Approximating Whittle-Matern Fields over Discretized Manifolds

arXiv:2606.13827v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Markovian Whittle-Matérn fields have been convergently approximated by discrete Gauss Markov Random Fields (GMRFs) with sparse precision matrices using a Finite Element approximation of the two-parameter family, \[ (\kappa^2 - \Delta)^{\alpha/2} u = \mathcal{W}, \;\; \kappa \in \mathbb{R}, \; \alpha \in \mathbb{N}. \] of SPDEs. Using recent developements in the analysis of Discrete Exterior Calculus (DEC), we present a different, yet closely related, convergent GMRF approximation to these Matérn fields over complete, boundaryless Riemannian manifolds discretized as well-centered simplicial complexes. This convergent method (i) is agnostic to $\alpha, \kappa$ and thus allows a universal approximation scheme for the precision and covariance matrices of the entire $(\alpha, \kappa)$-family of GMRFs, so they may be inferred rather than guessed. (ii) inherently models pointwise and piecewise-smoothed measurements of a random field and approximates both equally well (iii) is computationally independent of the interpolants used - it suffers no overhead if one convergent interpolant were replaced with another suitable interpolant over the same mesh. Furthermore, we show that, on discretizations that are well-connected in a precise sense, and volume-concentrated, the precision matrices are spectral functions of a graph-laplacian. We provide a low rank approximator to the family of such Matérn GMRFs and mention a use case: reducing the number of measurements needed to model the GMRF by compressed-sensing.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

LATTEArena: An Evaluation Framework for LLM-powered Tabular Feature Engineering (Extended Version)

arXiv:2606.09004v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Feature engineering remains a cornerstone of tabular data analysis, and Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for its automation, giving rise to LLM-powered Automated Tabular Feature Engineering (LATTE). However, the field lacks standardized, cost-aware evaluation platforms, and the combinatorial explosion of design choices obscures true algorithmic progress. To bridge these gaps, we systematically deconstruct 15 representative LATTE methods into a unified 6-dimensional taxonomy. Based on this abstraction, we introduce LATTEArena, a standardized, modular, and extensible benchmarking framework that decouples monolithic pipelines into reusable execution blocks. By distilling the massive combinatorial space, we evaluate 24 core LATTE configurations across 7 research questions. Our head-to-head benchmarking goes beyond predictive accuracy to quantify token efficiency and execution robustness, yielding 17 empirical findings on cost-effectiveness trade-offs. Furthermore, we provide 3 concrete recommendations for optimal real-world deployment. By enabling controlled component-level comparisons, LATTEArena shifts the paradigm from ad-hoc prompt engineering to systematic context management. All code, datasets, and over 4,000 execution logs are publicly available to foster a dynamic, community-driven benchmark. Our framework, leaderboard, and all artifacts are hosted on the LATTEArena project website at https://goodenhak.github.io/LATTEArena.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Utilising Artificial Intelligence to Identify Ventricular Tachycardia Ablation Targets in Sinus Rhythm

Background and Aims: Machine learning has shown potential in predicting ablation targets for ventricular tachycardia (VT) in an animal model. This study progresses to externally validating deep learning approaches for human data. Methods: The development and external validation dataset included 21 and 13 patients, respectively, with structural VT undergoing catheter ablation. In the development datasets, electrophysiological studies were conducted using the AdvisorTM HD grid (EnsiteTM X), while both CARTO and Ensite Precision were used in the validation dataset. In each patient, VT ablation targets were defined as mapping points within 8 mm of VT isthmuses. Three advanced machine learning models were trained using cardiac mapping data acquired in both omnipolar and unipolar configurations during sinus rhythm and ventricular pacing. Discrimination was evaluated using nested leave-one-out cross-validation at patient level. Results: Overall, graph convolutional networks (GCNs), which integrate intracardiac signal waveforms with three-dimensional electroanatomical geometries, achieved the highest performance, with optimal results obtained from unipolar electrograms acquired in sinus rhythm (median AUC 0.793, sensitivity 83.6%, specificity 69.0%). This may be partly explained by the inclusion of repolarization dynamics in unipolar electrograms and the higher point density of sinus rhythm maps. Comparable performance was observed in the external dataset. Conclusion: This study demonstrates that graph convolutional networks applied to sinus rhythm EGM waveforms collected during substrate mapping can localise critical components of VT re-entry circuits. This approach has potential to provide fast and accurate ablation guidance without the need to induce and map VT, improving safety and efficacy of VT catheter ablation.

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

Near-Optimal Stochastic Linear Bandits with Delay

arXiv:2606.16656v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study stochastic linear bandits with delayed feedback under several delay models and establish near-optimal regret guarantees. Our results identify when delayed linear bandits exhibit the same qualitative behavior as multi-armed bandits (MAB), and when the linear structure creates fundamentally new challenges. Specifically, (1) for loss-independent delays, where the delay does not depend on the realized loss (but potentially depends on the arm), we show that delays incur only an additive regret penalty. Under stochastic delays, this penalty scales with the expected delay, while under adversarial delays, it scales with the maximum number of outstanding observations. Notably, both delay penalties are dimension-free, improving upon the state-of-the-art results; (2) for loss-dependent delays, we show that linear bandits are substantially harder than MAB: unlike in MAB, we prove matching (up to log factors) upper and lower bounds in linear bandits, whose delay penalty depends on the square root of the dimension. (3) for the delay-as-payoff model, a special case of loss-dependent delay, we show that the optimal MAB guarantee, which depends only on the delay of the optimal arm, is also unattainable in linear bandits. Together, these results provide a sharp characterization of how delayed feedback interacts with linear generalization.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Otters++: A Time-to-first-spike Based Energy Efficient Optical Spiking Transformer

arXiv:2606.13016v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are promising for energy-efficient inference, and time-to-first-spike (TTFS) coding is especially attractive because each neuron fires at most once. In practice, however, this benefit is often reduced by the cost of computing a temporal decay term and multiplying it by the synaptic weight. We address this issue by turning a physical hardware "bug," the natural signal decay in optoelectronic devices, into the main computation of TTFS, named Otters++. Specifically, we use the measured decay of a custom In$_2$O$_3$ optoelectronic synapse to directly realize the TTFS temporal term, removing the need for explicit digital decay computation. To scale this idea to Transformer models, we establish a layer-wise functional equivalence between the Otters++ and a quantized neural network (QNN), and develop a hybrid training method that uses device-faithful SNN computation in the forward pass and QNN straight-through gradients through the equivalent QNN path in the backward pass, together with model distillation. This avoids differentiation through discrete first-spike events and reduces the over-sparsity problem in direct TTFS-SNN training. We further make training aware of measured device noise by sampling run-to-run variation, and refine the system-level energy model by accounting for device sharing and multi-hop communication. On GLUE dataset, Otters++ improves the average score to 84.17\% while maintaining a clear energy advantage over prior spiking Transformer baselines. These results show that physically grounded TTFS computing can be efficient, trainable, and robust under realistic hardware effects.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

ChronoSurv: A Clinical Pathway-Guided Graph Framework for Multimodal Survival Analysis

arXiv:2606.19140v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate survival prediction is essential for personalized treatment planning in head and neck cancer, yet remains challenging due to the heterogeneous and high-dimensional nature of multimodal clinical data. While deep survival models have improved predictive performance over classical statistical approaches, existing methods typically rely on static fusion strategies or temporally agnostic modeling, limiting their ability to capture structured clinical workflows. In this work, we propose ChronoSurv, a heterogeneous hierarchical directed graph framework for multimodal survival analysis. ChronoSurv represents patient care as a progression-aware clinical trajectory using directed graphs aligned with key diagnostic steps. A hierarchical topology incorporates fine-grained, coarse, and global representations, further supporting flexible adaptation to missing modalities, while heterogeneous message passing models complex and asymmetric relationships across modalities and clinical steps. Experimental results on two public datasets demonstrate that ChronoSurv achieves state-of-the-art discriminative performance while maintaining statistically reliable calibration. Comprehensive ablation studies further confirm the contribution of each architectural component, highlighting the potential of trajectory-aware graph modeling for multimodal survival prediction.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Domain Generalizable Adaptation of 3D Vision-Language Models via Regularized Fine-Tuning

Domain adaptation remains a central challenge in 3D vision, especially for multimodal foundation models that align 3D point clouds with visual and textual data. While these models demonstrate strong general capabilities, adapting them to downstream domains with limited data often leads to overfitting and catastrophic forgetting. To address this, we introduce ReFine3D, a regularized fine-tuning framework designed for domain-generalizable tuning of 3D large multimodal models (LMMs). ReFine3D combines selective layer tuning with two targeted regularization strategies: multi-view consistency across augmented point clouds and text diversity through synonym-based prompts generated by large language models. Additionally, we incorporate point-rendered vision supervision and a test-time augmentation mechanism with confidence-based aggregation to further enhance robustness. Extensive experiments across different 3D domain generalization benchmarks show that ReFine3D improves base-to-novel class generalization by 1.36%, cross-dataset transfer by 2.43%, robustness to corruption by 1.80%, and few-shot accuracy by up to 3.11%, outperforming prior state-of-the-art methods with minimal added computational overhead.

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

DVANet: Degradation-aware Visual-prior Alignment Network for Image Restoration

All-in-One image restoration aims to develop a unified restoration framework for handling diverse degradation types. Existing end-to-end methods usually regard the restoration process as a black-box mapping, lacking an explicit optimization interpretation. Although deep unfolding provides an interpretable iterative modeling paradigm for image restoration, existing methods mostly rely on fixed degradation assumptions or predefined degradation information, making them difficult to adapt to unified restoration requirements under complex degradations and locally damaged content. This limitation restricts their performance in degradation suppression and structural detail recovery. To address these issues, this paper proposes DVANet, a deep unfolding network inspired by the half-quadratic splitting optimization algorithm, which formulates unified image restoration under complex degradations as a collaborative unfolding process between degradation-aware observation consistency and visual-prior-guided reconstruction. Specifically, in the degradation-aware observation consistency branch, a degradation representation module is employed to extract global degradation attributes and local degradation cues, and degradation-conditioned mapping is used to enhance the model's adaptability to different degradation types. In the visual-prior-guided reconstruction branch, DINOv3 is introduced to provide structural and semantic information as hierarchical visual priors, thereby complementing the missing structural information in damaged regions and improving detail recovery. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DVANet achieves superior or competitive performance on multi-scenario degradation and cross-domain image restoration tasks, showing favorable degradation adaptability and generalization ability.

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

Texture-Shape Bias Balancing for Robust Synthetic-to-Real Semantic Segmentation in Automotive NIR Imagery

Semantic segmentation is a fundamental component of visual perception in modern automotive systems, enabling pixel-level scene understanding. Near-Infrared imaging (NIR) offers stable detection under difficult illumination conditions, but the development of domain-specific semantic segmentation models remains challenging due to the lack of high-quality annotated data from real-world scenarios. Synthetic datasets offer a scalable alternative, but models trained on synthetic images often suffer performance degradation when transferred to real domains. We present the first systematic study on synthetic to real domain adaptation for semantic segmentation in NIR images in the automotive domain. We propose a generative augmentation framework that transforms synthetic images into realistic NIR-style variants via our introduced target style adaptation (TSA). TSA fine-tunes a latent diffusion model via low-rank adaptation on a small curated set of real NIR images and applies it to synthetic training data using structure-preserving multi-signal conditioning. To reduce texture bias and improve segmentation robustness, we further apply a Voronoi-based style diversification strategy (VSD) that modifies the original textures while preserving scene geometry. Experiments with multiple model architectures on NIR data from vehicle interiors and street scenes show that balancing inductive bias during training leads to noticeably more robust semantic segmentation and effectively reduces the domain gap in our real-world scenarios by up to 63.6% on exterior and 28.4% on interior data. The code is available at GitHub.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Grammar of the Wave: Towards Explainable Multivariate Time Series Event Detection via Neuro-Symbolic VLM Agents

arXiv:2603.11479v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Time Series Event Detection (TSED) aims to localize semantically meaningful events in time series data, with critical applications in high-stakes domains. Unlike statistical anomalies, events are often defined by natural-language descriptions with internal temporal-logic structures across multiple physical channels. However, in real-world settings, dense event annotations are expensive to obtain, making purely supervised learning difficult. We introduce Language-guided TSED, a setting where a model is given textual event descriptions and must ground them to intervals in multivariate signals with little or no labeled data. To address this problem, we propose Event Logic Tree (ELT), a knowledge representation framework that converts linguistic descriptions into structured temporal logic over signal primitives. Building on ELT, we present SELA, a neuro-symbolic VLM agent framework that iteratively grounds primitives from signal visualizations and composes them under ELT constraints, producing both event intervals and faithful tree-structured explanations. We further release a real-world benchmark across energy and climate domains with expert knowledge and annotations. Experiments show that SELA improves over supervised fine-tuning and existing zero/few-shot time series reasoning baselines.

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

Model Stealing Through the Lens of Model Multiplicity

arXiv:2606.15493v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model stealing attacks, where adversaries create high-fidelity surrogate models, are a significant threat to the intellectual property of machine learning services. Conventional wisdom suggests these surrogates could provide adversaries with economic leverage comparable to the original service providers. This paper challenges this assumption by evaluating model stealing attacks beyond mere fidelity to the target model. Because query-based extraction provides only partial supervision of the target's input-output behavior, the surrogate is not uniquely identified: many near-optimal surrogates can achieve comparable fidelity while differing in deployment-relevant properties. Instead of performing a classic learning-based model stealing attack, we compute the Rashomon Set (i.e., the set of almost-equally-accurate models) of surrogate models, and evaluate its diversity using multiplicity metrics (ambiguity, discrepancy, and Rashomon Capacity) and group fairness metrics. Across tabular, medical imaging, and NLP tasks, our experiments on real-world datasets reveal that despite exhibiting similar fidelity to the target model, surrogate models can display significant variances in other critical performance metrics. These findings cast doubt on the presumed equivalence between high-fidelity surrogates and the target model in practical deployment scenarios.

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

Cross-Lingual Learning within Arabic Script for Low-Resource HTR

Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) with limited labeled data remains a challenging problem, particularly for Arabic-script languages. Although modern sequence-based recognizers perform well in high-resource settings, their accuracy degrades sharply as training data becomes scarce. Arabic-script languages share a common writing system with substantial character overlap, motivating cross-lingual learning as a strategy to mitigate data scarcity. We conduct a controlled line-level study of cross-lingual joint training for Arabic-script HTR under low-resource regimes (number of samples K = 100, 500, 1000 labeled lines) on Arabic (KHATT), Urdu (NUST-UHWR) and Persian (PHTD). CRNN and Vision Transformer-based HTR-VT models are trained on the union of multiple related Arabic-script datasets to mitigate the data scarcity and are evaluated on individual target languages. Both architectures benefit from cross-language training under low-resource conditions. CRNN remains more effective under extremely limited target-language data, whereas the benefits of cross-language training for HTR-VT become less consistent as larger amounts of target-language data become available. On Persian (PHTD), joint training achieves a Character Error Rate (CER) of 9.99 , surpassing previously reported results despite not using the full available training data. On an additional Urdu dataset (UNHD), joint training reduces CER from 17.20 to 14.45.

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

Critic Architecture Matters: Dual vs. Unified Critics for Humanoid Loco-Manipulation

arXiv:2606.11891v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-objective reinforcement learning for humanoid robots must coordinate locomotion and manipulation within a single policy. A natural design choice is whether to use a single (unified) critic that estimates the combined value of all objectives, or separate (dual) critics with disjoint reward signals. We present a controlled comparison on the Unitree G1 humanoid (23 active DoF) in NVIDIA Isaac Lab, training loco-manipulation policies through a sequential curriculum spanning 13 levels from stationary reaching to walking with variable-orientation targets. In standardized evaluation, dual-critic policies reach targets 3.5$\times$ faster (6.5 vs. 22.6 simulation steps), achieve 2$\times$ higher throughput (14.3 vs. 7.0 validated reaches per 1,000 steps), and attain higher validated reach rates (65.2% vs. 53.8%) compared to the unified-critic policy. Notably, additional anti-gaming reward mechanisms provide no further improvement beyond the architectural change alone (60.9% vs. 65.2%). These results have direct implications for the emerging paradigm of RL fine-tuning of imitation-learned policies: when refining a pre-trained manipulation policy with RL, a unified critic risks suppressing the learned behavior through competing locomotion gradients. These findings demonstrate that critic architecture is a primary - and often overlooked - design choice in multi-objective humanoid RL, with greater impact than reward engineering on reaching efficiency.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Sub-Token Routing for KV Cache Compression

Transformer inference often requires a large KV cache, especially for long-context language modeling and multimodal generation. Existing compression methods usually reduce cache cost by selecting, evicting, quantizing, or compressing cached tokens, or by reducing the visual-token sequence before language-model inference. We introduce sub-token routing, a KV-compression method that adds a finer control axis inside retained tokens. It splits each retained value vector into groups and keeps only selected groups, while leaving query and key states unchanged. The method is designed to work after token-level reduction. First, a token-reduction method determines which tokens are retained. Then, sub-token routing compresses the value states inside those retained tokens. Experiments under matched KV budgets show that adding sub-token routing improves token-level reduction performance in both LLM and VLM settings, including Quest on LLaMA-2-7B and Qwen2.5-7B, and FastV/VisionZip across LLaVA and Qwen-VL models. The gains are larger at smaller KV budgets, suggesting that value-group routing is especially useful when further token removal becomes costly. Overall, token-level reduction and sub-token routing provide complementary ways to reduce KV cost.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Multi-HMR 2: Multi-Person Camera-Centric Human Detection, Mesh Recovery and Tracking

Most advances in human mesh recovery (HMR) have focused on pelvis-centered recovery, overlooking metric 3D localization and detection accuracy in the camera coordinate system - two key factors for real-world applications such as human-robot interaction and social scene understanding. Current evaluation protocols often ignore these aspects, emphasizing per-person, root-centered recovery rather than camera-space perception. As a result, existing approaches rely on fixed camera assumptions or handcrafted post-processing, limiting their robustness and practical deployment. We introduce Multi-HMR 2, a simple yet robust DETR-based framework for Multi-person Camera-centric Human detection, mesh Recovery, and tracking. Multi-HMR 2 predicts a scene-consistent camera together with human meshes, enabling metric 3D localization without ground-truth intrinsics. Moreover, by distilling image-based memory features from SAM2, Multi-HMR 2 extends to tracking, achieving consistent identity association without video supervision. Despite its conceptual simplicity - no handcrafted components, no video input, and no ground-truth cameras - Multi-HMR 2 achieves state-of-the-art pelvis-centered performance while substantially improving detection accuracy and metric 3D localization.

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

Bioacoustic Geolocation: Species Sounds as Geographic Signals

arXiv:2505.18726v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Can we determine someone's geographic location solely from the sounds they hear? Are acoustic signals enough to localize within a country, state, or even city? In this work, we tackle the challenge of global-scale audio geolocation, with a particular focus on wildlife and natural sounds. We posit that bioacoustic signals contain informative geolocation cues because of well-defined geographic ranges of species. To test this hypothesis, we benchmark image geolocation and soundscape mapping methods, design oracles and species-centric baselines, and propose a hybrid approach that combines species range prediction with retrieval-based geolocation. We further ask whether geolocation improves with species-diverse recordings and spatiotemporal aggregation across neighboring samples. Finally, we extend our study to multimodal geolocation with case studies from movies that combine both audio and visual content. Our results highlight the potential of incorporating bioacoustic signals into geospatial tasks, motivating future work on species recognition and audio geolocation.

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

Fast Nonparametric Conditional Independence Testing via Two-Stage Regression

arXiv:2606.18011v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Constraint-based causal discovery relies on repeated conditional independence tests, but fast nonparametric tests often sacrifice calibration, especially when variables depend on the conditioning set through nonlinear relationships. We introduce BLITZ (Broad-to-Local Independence Testing via residualiZation), a nonparametric conditional independence test designed to run well under a second while maintaining the accuracy needed for the thousands of queries performed by constraint-based causal discovery algorithms. BLITZ first removes broad smooth dependence on the conditioning set using low-order polynomial regression, then applies a small nonlinear feature map and residualizes those features with shallow tree regressions. The resulting statistic tests residual cross-covariance, with a moment-matched chi-square approximation to the null distribution. We show theoretically that the two-stage design reduces the effective complexity faced by the tree residualizers, allowing shallow trees to control residual conditional-mean bias while avoiding excessive overfitting. In simulations, BLITZ provides better null calibration than fast kernel, random-feature, and regression-based competitors while remaining among the fastest methods tested. In causal discovery experiments on synthetic graphs and flow-cytometry data, BLITZ yields more reliable endpoint orientations among retained adjacencies and competitive structural recovery. These results suggest that broad-to-local residualization is a practical route to calibrated, scalable nonparametric conditional independence testing for causal discovery.

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

CentroidKV: Efficient Long-Context LLM Inference via KV Cache Clustering

Large language models (LLMs) with extended context windows have become increasingly prevalent for tackling complex tasks. However, the substantial Key-Value (KV) cache required for long-context LLMs poses significant deployment challenges. Existing approaches either discard potentially critical information needed for future generations or offer limited efficiency gains due to high computational overhead. In this paper, we introduce CentroidKV, a simple yet effective framework for online KV cache clustering. Our approach is based on the observation that key states exhibit high similarity along the sequence dimension. To enable efficient clustering, we divide the sequence into chunks and propose Chunked Soft Matching, which employs an alternating partition strategy within each chunk and identifies clusters based on similarity. CentroidKV then merges the KV cache within each cluster into a single centroid. Additionally, we provide a theoretical analysis of the computational complexity and the optimality of the intra-chunk partitioning strategy. Extensive experiments across various models and long-context benchmarks demonstrate that CentroidKV achieves up to 75% reduction in KV cache memory usage while maintaining comparable model performance. Moreover, with minimal computational overhead, CentroidKV accelerates the decoding stage of inference by up to $1.92\times$ and increases the serving throughput by up to $4\times$.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Beyond Similarity: Temporal Operator Attention for Time Series Analysis

arXiv:2605.11287v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A persistent paradox in time-series forecasting is that structurally simple MLP and linear models often outperform high-capacity Transformers. We argue that this gap arises from a mismatch in the sequence-modeling primitive: while many time-series dynamics are governed by global temporal operators (e.g., filtering and harmonic structure), standard attention forms each output as a convex combination of inputs. This restricts its ability to represent signed and oscillatory transformations that are fundamental to temporal signal processing. We formalize this limitation as a simplex-constrained mixing bottleneck in softmax attention, which becomes especially restrictive for operator-driven time-series tasks. To address this, we propose $Temporal Operator Attention (TOA)$, a framework that augments attention with explicit, learnable sequence-space operators, enabling direct signed mixing across time while preserving input-dependent adaptivity. To make dense $N \times N$ operators practical, we introduce Stochastic Operator Regularization, a high-variance dropout mechanism that stabilizes training and prevents trivial memorization. Across forecasting, anomaly detection, and classification benchmarks, TOA consistently improves performance when integrated into standard backbones such as PatchTST and iTransformer, with particularly strong gains in reconstruction-heavy tasks. These results suggest that explicit operator learning is a key ingredient for effective time-series modeling.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Morphology-resolved scrambling in a chaotic quantum billiard

arXiv:2606.16865v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chaotic quantum systems can retain spatial memory through scarred eigenstates, but whether these static structures control scrambling remains unclear. This work establishes a morphology-resolved connection between scarred eigenstates and eigenstate-resolved OTOCs in a peanut-shaped quantum billiard. Scalar localisation diagnostics, including differential entropy and continuum participation ratios, detect anomalous concentration but discard spatial architecture. A scale-normalised density overlap, in contrast, directly compares probability density profiles, revealing families of orthogonal eigenstates with nearly identical spatial morphology. Comparing the complete OTOC time traces of these orthogonal eigenstates reveals that morphological recurrence has dynamical content: moderate density overlap yields no universal prediction, whereas strongly recurring morphologies exhibit nearly identical OTOC growth and saturation. Thus, scarred structures act as spatial templates for operator growth, not merely static violations of ergodicity. This morphology-resolved framework turns eigenstate shape into a quantitative predictor of scrambling and provides a scale-controlled diagnostic of weak ergodicity breaking in quantum chaos.

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

SP-GCRL: Influence Maximization on Incomplete Social Graphs

arXiv:2605.12513v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Influence maximization (IM) in real platforms is challenged by incomplete, noisy social graphs and non-stationary diffusion dynamics. We propose SP-GCRL, a social-propagation-aware graph contrastive reinforcement learning framework that learns end-to-end seed selection under partial observability.We first introduce a social-propagation-aware nonlinear diffusion function to model reinforcement/diminishing effects and probability drift under repeated exposure; we then construct dual structural views and perform contrastive learning to obtain node representations robust to missing edges and weak ties, while replacing expensive strategy metrics with a GAT-based regression surrogate to improve efficiency and scalability; finally, we use DDQN to learn an end-to-end seed selection policy on top of these representations. Experiments on multiple real-world networks show that SP-GCRL achieves significant gains over heuristic and learning-based baselines across budgets and topologies, while maintaining strong large-scale scalability.

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

GameCraft-Bench: Can Agents Build Playable Games End-to-End in a Real Game Engine?

Game generation is an emerging application of coding agents, requiring models to transform natural-language specifications into playable interactive systems. Unlike traditional coding tasks, game generation takes place within a game engine, where scripts, scenes, assets, rendering, and runtime interactions must jointly produce coherent gameplay. We formalize end-to-end game generation as the problem of producing a complete game artifact that realizes a specification through observable player-game interaction in a target environment. We argue that evaluating this setting requires three desiderata: Engine Grounding, Artifact Completeness, and Interactive Verification. We propose an interaction-grounded evaluation framework that assesses executable gameplay through replayed demonstrations and rubric-guided multimodal judging. We instantiate this framework as GameCraft-Bench, a benchmark comprising 140 Godot tasks across 15 game families. Evaluations of frontier coding agents show that end-to-end game generation remains highly challenging: the strongest agent achieves only 41.46%, and most agents score below 40%. Further analysis reveals that while agents often implement recognizable mechanics, they struggle to deliver complete games with sufficient content, functional visual feedback, and coherent presentation. See https://tongxuluo.github.io/gamecraft-bench-website for demos, code, and data.