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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Person Identification from Contextual Motion

We consider the problem of identifying people based on their motion styles. We present a generative model describing the action instance creation process and derive a probabilistic identity inference scheme for two common person identification scenarios motivated by the surveillance and authentication applications. We introduce a novel, interactive, scenario for person identification from motion patterns. To this end, we formalize the identification process in the context of a sequential message exchange session between the subject and the system. The subject's behavior is modeled using a probabilistic generative model inspired by the Human Information Processing (HIP) paradigm. At each stage, the system presents a visual stimulus (a cue) to the subject and records their motion response. The cue is selected so as to maximize the mutual information of the expected response and the subject's identity. Once recorded, the response is used to update the a posteriori probability over possible subjects' identities. The process terminates once a sufficient classification confidence level is reached. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time person identification is addressed in such interactive setting. We report high recognition rates on five publicly available datasets and our own novel dataset consisting of 4,476 recordings of 22 test subjects responding to 15 cues.

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

SAERec: Constructing Fine-grained Interpretable Intents Priors via Sparse Autoencoders for Recommendation

arXiv:2606.18897v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Intent-based recommender systems have gained significant attention for improving accuracy and interpretability by modeling the underlying motivations behind user behaviors. Most existing models derive intents directly from user sequences via clustering or prototype learning. However, they are sensitive to sequence quality, require presetting the number of intents, and lack explicit semantic grounding. These issues lead to an incomplete and coarse intent set and limit the effectiveness of recommendation. In this paper, we propose the Sparse Autoencoder for intent-based recommendation (SAERec), a novel recommender that automatically constructs a fine-grained and interpretable intent space from a textual corpus to guide recommendation. Rather than treating texts as side signals, SAERec leverages them as high information density evidence for intent construction. Specifically, we first extract a comprehensive set of fine-grained interpretable intents from the latent space of large language models (LLMs) by using a sparse autoencoder (SAE) to disentangle and interpret text embeddings, which isolates intent-related semantics from textual noise. Then, for each user, we retrieve relevant intents from this set as priors to guide recommendation. It contains personal intents matching a user's current interests and public intents capturing general item patterns shared across users (e.g., quality, price). Finally, to integrate retrieved intents into sequence modeling, we propose a multi-branch attention mechanism that captures temporal dependencies and injects both personal and public intent signals, followed by an adaptive fusion layer to construct the final user representation for recommendation. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate the superiority of SAERec, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art baselines while providing human-understandable explanations.

03.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Probing picometre-scale interlayer deformations via hyperbolic polaritons

Authors:

The resilience of van der Waals (vdW) materials to large strain fields makes them an ideal platform for tuning electronic, optical and magnetic properties1–4. Although in-plane strain is readily mapped, non-invasive and quantitative characterization of out-of-plane strain remains a formidable challenge, particularly for picometre-scale deformations buried at interfaces. Here we demonstrate a polaritonic optical method that uses the mid-infrared out-of-plane hyperbolic polaritons (oHPs) mode to detect interlayer deformations in prototypical vdW polar insulator–hexagonal boron nitride (hBN). This method uses the softening mechanism of out-of-plane transverse optical (oTO) phonons induced by interlayer strain, enabling highly sensitive detection of picometre-scale deformations. Although these oTO phonon modes are typically spectroscopically ‘dark’, their strain response is activated through the oHPs, achieving an atomic displacement sensitivity of about 10 pm (about 8 × 10−7 times the probing wavelength), enabling ultradeep-subwavelength mechanical interlayer deformation detection. This is experimentally validated in both planar hBN and at the buried interface of quantum dot–hBN nanotube heterostructures. This polariton-based picometrology bridges nanomechanics and photonics, providing a non-destructive lens to visualize hidden stress landscapes with atomic precision. A new polaritonic optical method that uses the mid-infrared out-of-plane hyperbolic polaritons mode is described and experimentally validated to allow the examination of picometre-scale interlayer deformations, providing a bridge between nanomechanics and photonics.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

DREAM: Extending Vision-Language Models with Dual-Objective Encoding for Cross-Modal Retrieval

In today's media-driven world, the exponential growth of video content across domains such as surveillance, education, and entertainment has made retrieving semantically relevant videos via natural language queries increasingly critical. Early video retrieval systems relied on handcrafted features or shallow cross-modal mappings, limiting their ability to capture complex semantics and temporal dynamics. While large-scale vision-language models have improved cross-modal alignment, challenges remain in modeling fine-grained temporal dependencies and nuanced linguistic structures. In this paper, we introduce DREAM: Dual-path Representation Enhancement and Alignment Model, a novel multimodal framework that addresses these limitations through enhanced visual and textual encoding. DREAM incorporates a hybrid language modeling strategy that combines masked and permuted language modeling objectives to capture both local and global linguistic semantics. On the visual side, we design a hierarchical vision encoder with cascaded group attention, which integrates spatial and temporal information through multi-stage token interaction and coarse-to-fine attention refinement. We validate DREAM through comprehensive evaluations on the widely-used MSRVTT, MSVD and LSMDC benchmark datasets, where it achieves new state-of-the-art R1 scores of 49.4%, 49.7% and 27.3%, respectively. Qualitative analyses further show the model's ability to maintain coherent attention across frames and align complex queries with dynamic video content. These findings underscore the effectiveness of hierarchical attention and dual-objective textual modeling in enabling robust, context-aware video retrieval, and pave the way for future research in advancing cross-modal representation learning.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Concatenating Algebraic Codes over High-Rate Quantum LDPC Codes

arXiv:2605.21898v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Different quantum error correction schemes trade off overhead, error suppression, and hardware connectivity. Code concatenation can relax these tradeoffs by using an outer code whose non-local connectivity is supplied by logical operations of an inner code rather than directly by hardware. Prior works showed that this can reduce memory overhead for local low-rate inner codes such as the surface code. Here, we study concatenation over non-local, high-rate inner codes. Such inner codes experience correlated errors among the many logical qubits in a single codeblock. We handle this by treating each block as a single logical Galois qudit, enabling concatenation with algebraic outer codes with excellent parameters and, crucially, list decoders. In particular, we consider a memory system formed by concatenating quantum Reed-Solomon outer codes over the gross code. For fault-tolerant syndrome extraction, we develop a Galois qudit Shor scheme using "time-like" Reed-Solomon protection against measurement errors. Interestingly, a lightweight fault tolerance scheme, that would fail for qubits, works well for large-alphabet qudits, suggesting a very different theory of fault tolerance for such qudits. The whole protocol is optimised via improved bicycle instruction logical error rates, novel compilation strategies, and recent decoder post-selection rules. At uniform $10^{-3}$ physical noise, the concatenated gross code reaches the teraquop regime, which it previously could not access, with a lower space overhead than the $288$-qubit two-gross code, while offering several advantages from the engineering standpoint. Beyond our main case study, we believe the core ideas of Galois qudits, quantum Reed-Solomon outer codes, and list decoding, will prove generically powerful and highly transferable ideas across high-rate quantum architectures.

06.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Revealing trajectories of multi-modal voxel-level changes in neurodegenerative diseases using latent event mapping

Neurodegenerative diseases are driven by pathological mechanisms that can be indirectly measured in vivo using multi-modal neuroimaging. However, current computational methods that aim to reconstruct trajectories of voxel-level changes in the brain are either not computationally scalable or fully interpretable, limiting their ability to reveal associations between disease progression and underlying mechanisms. Here we introduce Latent Event Mapping (LEMING), a generative unsupervised modelling technique that learns a latent map of disease events along a common pseudo-timeline of events. We apply LEMING to amyloid PET and structural MRI data from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative to reveal the first voxel-level trajectories of events in Alzheimer's disease. Notably, we show how LEMING can provide new insights into progression-dependent disease mechanisms. We find that acetylcholine receptor density is significantly positively associated with both late-stage amyloid and atrophy events, suggesting that either these receptors are targeted later in disease progression, or that amyloid does not play an active role. This has strong implications for therapeutics that target acetylcholine receptors, particularly for early-stage intervention strategies.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

How reliable are LLMs when it comes to playing dice?

We investigate the probabilistic reasoning capabilities of large language models through a controlled benchmarking study on discrete probability problems. We constructed two datasets, respectively a set of standard exercises and a set of counterintuitive exercises, designed to trigger heuristic reasoning, and evaluated 8 state-of-the-art models, each tested with and without Chain-of-Thought prompting. Models achieve an average accuracy of 0.96 on standard problems but only 0.59 on counterintuitive ones. We further provide empirical evidence of token bias: performance drops by over 20% when canonical formulations are replaced by disguised variants. Embedding misleading suggestions in the prompt reduces performance by up to 34%, with no model proving immune. Taken together, the reported findings suggest that current LLMs are not yet genuine probabilistic reasoners, despite their success in advanced mathematical problems.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

BrainG3N: A Dual-Purpose Tokenizer for Controllable 3D Brain MRI Generation

arXiv:2606.19651v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Three-dimensional (3D) brain MRI is central to clinical neurology and neuro-oncology, where generative models could augment under-represented cohorts, simulate disease trajectories, and support privacy-preserving data sharing. Latent diffusion has been the go-to solution for modeling imaging data, but it places two competing demands on the tokenizer: encoder embeddings must retain the clinical information that downstream tasks act on, and the decoder must reconstruct anatomically faithful volumes. Existing reconstruction-driven tokenizers achieve the second at the expense of the first. To address this, we introduce a fully volumetric masked-autoencoder (MAE) based tokenizer for 3D brain MRI latent diffusion, decoupling encoder and decoder: a frozen 3D MAE encoder produces clinically informative embeddings, while a dedicated CNN decoder reconstructs voxels from a linear projection of those embeddings. We pretrain the encoder on 35,309 volumes from 18 public cohorts spanning four modalities, ten disease categories, and 200+ acquisition sites, and demonstrate its dual utility in two settings. First, on a 23-task linear-probing benchmark, the encoder outperforms or matches SOTA models (i.e., BrainIAC, BrainSegFounder, and MedicalNet) on 21 of 23 tasks. Second, a conditional diffusion transformer (DiT) trained on these clinically informative embeddings supports both conditional generation across six variables and patient-specific longitudinal forecasting. Together these results establish a single 3D brain-MRI embedding space capable of both downstream clinical tasks and controllable generation.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Think Fast: Estimating No-CoT Task-Completion Time Horizons of Frontier AI Models

arXiv:2606.07157v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many efforts to ensure frontier AI models are safe rely on monitoring their chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. If models become able to perform sufficiently complex reasoning internally, without explicit thinking tokens, this would undermine such oversight. We measure how well frontier models reason without CoT across a suite of over 30,000 questions spanning 43 benchmarks in domains including math, coding, puzzles, causality, theory-of-mind, and strategic reasoning. To compare models against humans, we estimate the $50\%$-task-completion time horizon (TH): the human time required for tasks a model completes with $50\%$ success rate. We complement this with a $50\%$ reasoning token horizon: the minimum number of o3-mini reasoning tokens needed for tasks a model solves with $50\%$ success rate. We find that the no-CoT $50\%$ TH of frontier models has been doubling roughly every year over the past six years, with GPT-5.5's TH reaching over 3 minutes and reasoning token horizon exceeding 1,500 tokens. Our median estimates predict that frontier no-CoT THs could exceed 7 minutes by 2028, and 25 minutes by 2030, though these projections carry substantial uncertainty. We recommend frontier developers track this explicitly.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Fast and Slow Variational Continual Learning

arXiv:2606.24007v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Continual learning remains a major challenge for modern deep networks, partly because commonly used optimizers lack inherent mechanisms for continual adaptation. One such natural mechanism is fast and slow adaptation to balance stability and plasticity. This mechanism has deep roots in neuroscience and biology, but there is no consensus on how to best incorporate it in commonly used optimizers. Here, we show that this can be easily done via the VCL framework, where past posteriors are used as priors in the future. Our key idea is to incorporate slow adaptation via merging of past posteriors to slow down the drift in the knowledge as learning progresses. The merged posterior is then used as the prior in the VCL update to implement the fast-weight updates. These steps can be seamlessly implemented in the IVON optimizer, whose form and costs are nearly identical to that of Adam. We call this new optimizer the Continual IVON (CoVON) optimizer and show that it not only consistently improves over existing VCL optimizers, but also performs better than other weight-regularization strategies across domain-incremental learning, continual pre-training, and fine-tuning of large language models.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Advancing DialNav through Automatic Embodied Dialog Augmentation

arXiv:2606.19948v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: For embodied agents capable of physical interaction, the capability to create and understand dialog is crucial to ensure both safety and effectiveness. While DialNav[han2025dialnav] provides a framework for holistic evaluation of the dialog–execution loop in photorealistic indoor navigation, its performance remains limited by a critical scarcity of training data (2K episodes). To address this, we propose an automatic generation pipeline, and construct the RAINbow dataset, a large-scale training dataset with 238K episodes for DialNav. Our pipeline converts existing VLN datasets into multi-turn dialog and creates cost-efficient and high-quality dataset. Then, we introduce two additional complementary advances to unlock the data's full potential: (1) Dual-Strategy Training, a navigation training scheme to align the navigation training with the dynamic dialog-navigation loop, and (2) a localization model that leverages VLN knowledge. By combining these complementary solutions, our model substantially outperforms the baseline in success rate on both Val Seen (58.24, +89\%) and Val Unseen (29.05, +100\%) splits, establishing a new state of the art.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Watching a Superconducting Coplanar Waveguide Heat Up with a Single Color Center

arXiv:2606.15398v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Single color centers in diamond offer a local probe of their cryogenic environment, providing a direct way to quantify heating in spin-control hardware. Here, we establish a single spectrally stable tin-vacancy (SnV) center as an on-chip thermometer for a diamond membrane and use it to characterize microwave- and radio-frequency-induced heating in a superconducting coplanar waveguide patterned on the same chip. We first calibrate the temperature dependence of the optical C-transition frequency and linewidth from $20\,\mathrm{K}$ down to the few-kelvin regime. At lower temperatures, where the optical response becomes weakly temperature dependent, we use the spin-lattice relaxation time $T_1$ as a complementary thermometer and tune its sensitivity with the transverse magnetic-field component. Applying this local thermometer to a niobium coplanar waveguide, we observe magnetic-field-dependent superconducting breakdown under GHz drive, accompanied by abrupt heating of the diamond. In contrast, at $20\,\mathrm{MHz}$ and $400\,\mathrm{mT}$, relevant for nuclear-spin control, we detect no measurable heating up to the breakdown threshold of $9.4\,\mathrm{dBm}$, corresponding to $B_\mathrm{ac}\sim1.2\,\mathrm{mT}$. These results define a safe operating window for superconducting microwave and RF control structures in diamond-based quantum nodes.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

A 3D Isovist World Model – Revealing a City's Unseen Geometry and Its Emergent Cross-City Signature

arXiv:2606.03609v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Embodied agents that navigate cities rely on world models that predict how their surroundings will change as they move. But for navigation, what matters is not what the buildings look like; it is where the agent can go. Most world models nonetheless predict appearance, learning how a scene looks rather than the space an agent can move through. Those that do target geometry, such as bird's-eye-view occupancy grids, flatten the three-dimensional environment onto a ground plane, discarding the above-ground and multi-level structure that shapes real navigation. What is missing is a predictive target that captures the navigable geometry an agent actually traverses, without photometric entanglement and without collapsing the third dimension. Our key idea is to model the open volume between buildings, the negative space, encoded as a 3D isovist: a spherical visibility-depth map recording the distance to the nearest surface in every direction. We introduce an embodied world model that predicts the next isovist from a short history of past isovists and a movement action. The prediction is formulated as a depth residual so the decoder inherits sharp building edges, trained with self-rollout scheduled sampling to keep corrupted context on the geometry manifold, and equipped with a persistent latent bird's-eye-view spatial map for cross-path consistency. Our central finding is emergent and unexpected: a single city-blind model trained on Manhattan and Paris develops a cross-city spatial signature, with city identity linearly decodable from its temporal latents far above single-frame baselines, so the signature lives in the learned dynamics rather than in appearance. The representation is lightweight, interpretable, and reproducible, offering a geometric substrate for spatial reasoning in embodied AI, robotics, and urban analysis, released with an open dataset and pipeline.

14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Pricing Excess-of-Loss Reinsurance and CAT Bonds under Climate Uncertainty: A Cox Process Framework with Temperature-Dependent Stochastic Intensity

arXiv:2606.14830v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper develops a climate-aware pricing framework for excess-of-loss (XL) reinsurance contracts and catastrophe (CAT) bonds under non-stationary catastrophe risk. Catastrophe arrivals are modeled as a Cox process whose stochastic intensity depends exponentially on a temperature-related climate index. To represent climate dynamics, the index is modeled as a mean-reverting Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process around a time-dependent warming trend. Within this setting, aggregate losses follow a compound Cox structure with lognormal severities. Pricing is performed under a reduced-form risk-adjusted measure, which provides a tractable valuation approach for XL reinsurance layers and binary zero-coupon CAT bond payoffs in an incomplete market setting. Because catastrophe losses are not dynamically replicable, the framework emphasizes scenario-based valuation rather than model-independent no-arbitrage bounds. A Monte Carlo valuation scheme is implemented to quantify the economic implications of climate-dependent catastrophe intensity. The numerical results show that climate dependence materially changes the loss-generation mechanism and affects the valuation of catastrophe-linked contracts. In the baseline calibration, the climate-aware model increases the excess-of-loss reinsurance premium and lowers the CAT bond price relative to the stationary benchmark. Furthermore, our analysis of the 99.5\% Tail Value-at-Risk (TVaR) indicates that stationary benchmarks may underestimate economic capital requirements by approximately 13.7\% compared to the climate-aware framework, highlighting the potential regulatory relevance of the proposed model. This finding highlights that benchmark design is critical for interpreting climate-pricing effects.

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

Guava: An Effective and Universal Harness for Embodied Manipulation

arXiv:2606.18363v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language models trained on large-scale vision-language data have demonstrated strong potential for embodied agents. Harnessing models through embodied tools use offers a promising alternative to end-to-end vision-language-action systems by combining high-level reasoning with external modules for perception, planning, and control. However, it remains unclear what makes an effective harness for embodied manipulation, and to what extent such a harness can unlock embodied capabilities in a wide range of reasoning models. In this work, we present Guava, a harness framework for embodied tool use developed through systematic exploration of the design space of agent workflows, action spaces, and observation spaces. Our study identifies three key ingredients for effective embodied agents: iterative perception-reasoning-action loops, semantic action abstractions, and multimodal observations. To understand whether these design principles are universal even to small models, we develop an end-to-end training pipeline that distills embodied manipulation capabilities into a 4B open-source model using fewer than 2K trajectories collected entirely in simulation. Experimental results in both simulation and real-world environments show performance comparable to frontier proprietary models while exhibiting strong generalization to unseen objects, novel instructions, and long-horizon tasks. Results suggest that a well-designed harness can serve as a scalable, model-agnostic interface for embodied manipulation, enabling strong emergent embodied capabilities in compact open-source models with minimal training data.

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

Whose hotel does the AI recommend? An algorithm audit of reputation signals in LLM-assisted hotel selection

Travelers increasingly ask large language model (LLM) assistants which hotel to book, making these systems gatekeepers of property visibility – yet what moves their recommendations is undocumented. We conduct a pre-specified algorithm audit using a randomized choice-based conjoint: across personas, prompt templates, and twelve open-weight and proprietary models, assistants choose among five hotels whose guest rating, review volume and recency, management response, chain affiliation, price, eco-certification, and list position are independently randomized. We estimate the average marginal component effect of each signal on the probability of recommendation. Guest rating and price dominate (a top rating raises selection by 31.6 percentage points; a high price lowers it by 30.0), reproducing human valence-and-price primacy but over-weighting eco-certification and ignoring management response. List position – a content-free artifact – shifts recommendations causally, worth about \$12 per night. Stated reasons track revealed weights imperfectly. The findings ground generative engine optimization and the accountability of AI infomediaries in causal evidence.

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

AME: A Multi-Type Contributor Attribution Framework in Generative AI Markets

Generative AI enables value creation through multi-stage collaboration among heterogeneous contributors, including training data, base models, fine-tuning behaviors, and prompts. However, how to fairly allocate the data value remains largely unexplored. This paper formulates multi-stage generative AI value allocation as a new research problem and identifies three core challenges: heterogeneous data contribution valuation, data rights mapping, and trustworthy execution. We propose AME (Attribution-Mapping-Execution) framework, a unified framework that integrates data contribution valuation, data rights mapping, and trustworthy execution into a single workflow. Experimental results demonstrate that AME framework achieves data value allocation outcomes more consistent with human reference judgments while maintaining low-cost trustworthy execution. Our work provides an initial foundation for value assessment and revenue allocation in generative AI data markets.

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

An Empirical Study on Learning Latent Representations for Emotional Speech Synthesis

For the last couple of years, the field of speech synthesis has improved dramatically thanks to deep learning. There are more and more deep learning-based TTS systems developed to make it possible to produce voices with high intelligibility and naturalness. Meanwhile, controlling the expressiveness is yet a big deal, generating speech in different styles or manners has received a lot of attention from community recently. This paper aims to give our solutions to deal with the task emotional speech synthesis (ESS) at VLSP 2022 which allows to generate humanlike natural-sounding voice from a given input text with desired emotional expression. By integrating speaker embedding, prosody bottleneck into FastSpeech 2, our systems can promisingly generate emotional speech of a single speaker (Sub-task 1), transfer speaking styles from another speaker to the target speaker with neutral non-expressive data while retaining the target speaker's identity (Sub-task 2).

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

UNIEGO: Proxies as Mediators for Unified Egocentric Video Representation Learning

arXiv:2606.20559v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Egocentric video understanding is inherently limited by the narrow perspective of wearable cameras: a single viewpoint, a single modality, a single model cannot capture the full richness of human action. We argue that a truly expressive egocentric representation must subsume complementary knowledge across viewpoints, modalities, and foundation model representations, yet remain deployable from egocentric video alone. To this end, we introduce a hierarchical multi-teacher distillation framework that produces UNIEGO, a unified egocentric encoder trained with nine teachers spanning ego-exo viewpoints, RGB, depth, and skeleton modalities, and four foundation models. Rather than distilling directly from heterogeneous teachers whose incompatible architectures and feature geometries induce conflicting gradients, our framework interposes a layer of representation-specific Proxy models that translate diverse teacher knowledge into a homogeneous egocentric space. A second distillation stage, Selective Proxy Distillation (SPD), then adaptively selects, for each training sample, the subset of proxies that are both correct and confident, distilling exclusively from reliable supervision and suppressing erroneous signals. SPD is further stabilized by initializing UNIEGO as a learned convex combination of proxy parameters, placing the unified model in a well-conditioned region of the loss landscape before distillation begins. UNIEGO achieves state-of-the-art performance across three egocentric video understanding tasks - action recognition, video retrieval, and action segmentation on three challenging ego-exo benchmarks, outperforming naive multi-teacher distillation baselines and demonstrating that structured, proxy-mediated knowledge transfer yields richer and more discriminative egocentric representations.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Task-Adaptive Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Weather Foundation Models

arXiv:2509.22020v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While recent advances in machine learning have equipped Weather Foundation Models (WFMs) with substantial generalization capabilities across diverse downstream tasks, the escalating computational requirements associated with their expanding scale increasingly hinder practical deployment. Current Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods, designed for vision or language tasks, fail to address the unique challenges of weather downstream tasks, such as variable heterogeneity, resolution diversity, and spatiotemporal coverage variations, leading to suboptimal performance when applied to WFMs. To bridge this gap, we introduce WeatherPEFT, a novel PEFT framework for WFMs incorporating two synergistic innovations. First, during the forward pass, Task-Adaptive Dynamic Prompting (TADP) dynamically injects the embedding weights within the encoder to the input tokens of the pre-trained backbone via internal and external pattern extraction, enabling context-aware feature recalibration for specific downstream tasks. Furthermore, during backpropagation, Stochastic Fisher-Guided Adaptive Selection (SFAS) not only leverages Fisher information to identify and update the most task-critical parameters, thereby preserving invariant pre-trained knowledge, but also introduces randomness to stabilize the selection. We demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of WeatherPEFT on three downstream tasks, where existing PEFT methods show significant gaps versus Full-Tuning, and WeatherPEFT achieves performance parity with Full-Tuning using fewer trainable parameters. The code of this work is available at https://github.com/ShileiCao/WeatherPEFT.

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

The Language You Ask In: Language-Conditioned Ideological Divergence in LLM Analysis of Contested Political Documents

Authors:

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as analytical tools across multilingual contexts, yet their outputs may carry systematic biases conditioned by the language of the prompt. This study presents an experimental comparison of LLM-generated political analyses of a Ukrainian civil society document, using semantically equivalent prompts in Russian and Ukrainian administered to two frontier models from different developers, ChatGPT 5.2 and Claude Opus 4.5. Despite identical source material and parallel query structures, both models diverged along the same axis: Russian-language outputs leaned toward delegitimizing framings, characterizing civil society actors as externally funded elites constraining a democratic mandate, while Ukrainian-language outputs treated the same actors as legitimate stakeholders in democratic contestation. The magnitude of this divergence, however, was model-dependent. ChatGPT's Russian output reproduced vocabulary characteristic of Russian state discourse; Claude Opus's stayed in a mainstream critical idiom and hedged its judgments in both languages. These findings demonstrate that prompt language alone can systematically shift the ideological orientation of an unchanged model analyzing identical content. The shift is a general property of multilingual LLMs whose severity, and whose alignment with propaganda narratives, varies across systems. The implications reach AI deployment in polarized information environments, cross-lingual research, and AI governance in multilingual societies.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

FBSDiff++: Improved Frequency Band Substitution of Diffusion Features for Efficient and Highly Controllable Text-Driven Image-to-Image Translation

With large-scale text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models achieving significant advancements in open-domain image creation, increasing attention has been focused on their natural extension to the realm of text-driven image-to-image (I2I) translation, where a source image acts as visual guidance to the generated image in addition to the textual guidance provided by the text prompt. We propose FBSDiff, a novel framework adapting off-the-shelf T2I diffusion model into the I2I paradigm from a fresh frequency-domain perspective. Through dynamic frequency band substitution of diffusion features, FBSDiff realizes versatile and highly controllable text-driven I2I in a plug-and-play manner (without need for model training, fine-tuning, or online optimization), allowing appearance-guided, layout-guided, and contour-guided I2I translation by progressively substituting low-frequency band, mid-frequency band, and high-frequency band of latent diffusion features, respectively. In addition, FBSDiff flexibly enables continuous control over I2I correlation intensity simply by tuning the bandwidth of the substituted frequency band. To further promote image translation efficiency, flexibility, and functionality, we propose FBSDiff++ which improves upon FBSDiff mainly in three aspects: (1) accelerate inference speed by a large margin (8.9$\times$ speedup in inference) with refined model architecture; (2) improve the Frequency Band Substitution module to allow for input source images of arbitrary resolution and aspect ratio; (3) extend model functionality to enable localized image manipulation and style-specific content creation with only subtle adjustments to the core method. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments verify superiority of FBSDiff++ in I2I translation visual quality, efficiency, versatility, and controllability compared to related advanced approaches.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Tri-Info: Generalizable, Interpretable Failure Prediction for VLA Models via Information Theory

arXiv:2606.19998v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are increasingly deployed across diverse tasks, yet they remain black boxes whose physical interactions can cause irreversible harm, making generalizable and interpretable failure detection essential. We observe that successful and failed rollouts carry systematically different information-theoretic signatures. Building on this, we formalize VLA control as a closed-loop information pipeline and derive the Triple Information-theoretic (Tri-Info) signals that capture whether actions remain diverse, temporally consistent, and coupled to state transitions. Across six VLA models and three benchmark environments, Tri-Info matches the strongest baselines in-domain. Moreover, Tri-Info transfers across architectures, environments, and the sim-to-real gap without retraining, reaching 83\% accuracy on real-world tasks where prior detectors collapse to chance. This establishes Tri-Info as a simple yet powerful method that not only detects failures with strong cross-domain generalization, but also delivers interpretable diagnostics of the underlying failure modes.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Preregistration for Experiments with AI Agents

arXiv:2606.11217v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The proliferation of large language models (LLMs) and autonomous AI agents has given rise to a rapidly growing methodological paradigm: "in silico" behavioral experiments. Originally conceived as a way to use AI agents as proxies for human participants in studies of cognition, decision-making, and social dynamics, this approach has taken on new significance – as AI agents increasingly negotiate, transact, and make consequential decisions on behalf of people and organizations, understanding their behavior has become a research priority in its own right. While these experiments with AI agents offer unprecedented advantages in terms of scalability, cost efficiency, and experimental control, they also inherit, and in some cases amplify, methodological vulnerabilities that have long plagued human subjects research. To address these issues, this paper argues that preregistration practices – central to improving the credibility of human subjects experiments – should now be extended to experiments with AI agents. We systematically catalog the researcher degrees of freedom that experiments with AI agents introduce – model selection, prompt wording, settings, and outcome-contingent redesign, for example – and show how the low cost of iteration and lack of reporting norms make these choices both easy to exploit and difficult to detect. We propose a preregistration template tailored to experiments with AI agents and call on conferences, journals, and funding agencies to make preregistration standard practice for this emerging research paradigm.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Grad Detect: Gradient-Based Hallucination Detection in LLMs

arXiv:2606.24790v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across diverse tasks, yet they remain prone to generating hallucinations. Detecting these hallucinations is critical for deploying LLMs reliably in high-stakes applications. We present Grad Detect, a gradient-based approach for predicting hallucinations by analyzing layer-wise gradient patterns from a single forward-backward pass during inference. Our method shows that the internal gradient structure of a model carries rich information about the correctness of its output. This information is not accessible through output-level signals alone. We evaluate Grad Detect on several Q&A benchmarks across both hallucination detection and model abstention prediction, where it consistently outperforms confidence-based and sampling-based baselines. Through comprehensive layer ablation studies across all eleven models from four architectural families, we find that the final five layers concentrate over 97% of the discriminative gradient signal, enabling efficient deployment with minimal performance loss. Grad Detect provides a unified framework for predicting multiple dimensions of LLM reliability, offering strong predictive performance alongside interpretable insights into where and how model failures originate.