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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Development of an automated, imaging-based preoperative screening model for early identification of malnutrition in an abdominal surgery cohort

Background: Clinical malnutrition affects one in five abdominal surgery patients and increases postoperative complications and mortality. Current screening occurs after admission, closing the window for preoperative nutritional intervention. No objective, scalable preoperative screening tool exists. Objective: To determine whether automated volumetric CT-based body composition analysis improves preoperative identification of surgical patients at risk for clinical malnutrition compared to clinical variables or single slice imaging alone. Methods: Retrospective cohort study of adults undergoing elective abdominal surgery at a quaternary academic medical center (2018 to 2021) with a preoperative CT scan within 90 days and complete nutrition assessment. Clinical malnutrition was diagnosed by a registered dietitian using ASPEN/AND criteria. Three sex stratified Elastic Net models were compared: (1) base clinical variables; (2) base plus L3 single slice skeletal muscle index and attenuation; and (3) base plus comprehensive 3D volumetric quantification of five muscle groups and two fat depots. Discrimination (AUROC), calibration (Brier score), and clinical utility (decision curve analysis) were assessed via 10-fold cross-validation. Results: Among 1,143 patients (52.4% female; mean age 60.5 years), 231 (20.2%) were diagnosed with malnutrition. Malnourished patients had significantly higher complication rates (36.4% vs. 15.4%, p

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Scaling Self-Play for End-to-End Driving

End-to-end autonomous driving models are typically trained on offline human-demonstration datasets that provide limited state coverage and often no closed-loop feedback, making them prone to compounding errors when deployed in closed-loop and brittle to long-tail agent interactions. To overcome these limitations, we propose an alternative strategy for training end-to-end driving models: large-scale self-play directly from pixels in simulation. While prior self-play approaches have shown promising transfer to real-world driving, they typically assume vectorized Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) observations that are incompatible with end-to-end policies operating directly on sensor observations. To this end, we introduce Gigapixel, a high-throughput batched driving simulator with perspective rendering, enabling scalable self-play directly from pixel observations. Rather than targeting compute-costly photorealistic sensor simulation, Gigapixel renders a simplified bounding-box world that preserves essential scene structure while achieving throughput at 50k agent steps per second. Since direct pixel-space self-play RL is prohibitively sample-inefficient at end-to-end model scale, we propose self-play DAgger training: we train pixel-based policies in self-play via on-policy distillation from a privileged RL teacher. To bridge the sim-to-real gap, we subsequently transfer the self-play trained policies to real-world sensor data through lightweight perception adaptation. Policies trained in Gigapixel and adapted to real-world sensor data achieve competitive performance on the HUGSIM and NAVSIM-v2 benchmarks without human trajectory supervision. Moreover, scaling self-play training yields proportional gains in policy performance, establishing self-play as a practical and scalable strategy for training end-to-end models.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Reconstructing Template-Memorized Images from Natural Prompts

arXiv:2507.07947v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in generative models, such as diffusion models, have raised concerns related to privacy, copyright infringement, and data stewardship. To better understand and control these risks, prior work has introduced techniques and attacks that reconstruct images, or parts of images, from training data. While these results demonstrate that training data can be recovered, existing methods often rely on high computational resources, partial access to the training set, or carefully engineered prompts. In this work, we present a new attack that requires low resources, assumes little to no access to the training data, and identifies seemingly benign prompts that can lead to potentially risky image reconstruction. We further show that such reconstructions may occur unintentionally, even for users without specialized knowledge. For example, we observe that for one existing model, the prompt ``blue Unisex T-Shirt'' generates the face of a real individual. Moreover, by combining the identified vulnerabilities with real-world prompt data, we discover prompts that reproduce memorized visual elements. Our approach builds on insights from prior work and leverages domain knowledge to expose a fundamental vulnerability arising from the use of scraped e-commerce data, where templated layouts and images are closely tied to pattern-like textual prompts. The code for our attack is publicly available at https://github.com/TheSolY/lr-tmi.

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

InTrain: Intrinsic Trainability for Zero-Cost Neural Architecture Search

Training-free neural architecture search promises efficient discovery of high-performance networks without costly training. However, existing zero-cost proxies rely on fragmented heuristics that fail to capture the fundamental question: what makes an architecture trainable? This paper introduces Intrinsic Trainability (InTrain), a unified theoretical proxy that formalizes trainability as an architectural invariant emerging from two synergistic components: geometric capacity and optimization resilience. We operationalize intrinsic trainability through analysis of neural information processing. Geometric capacity is quantified via the participation ratio of activation covariance eigenspectrum, capturing the effective dimensionality of representation manifolds. Optimization resilience is measured through cumulative gradient health, assessing the robustness of backpropagation across network depth. InTrain synthesizes these dimensions through a scale-invariant multiplicative coupling, which we hypothesize is essential for capturing their synergistic, non-additive relationship. Extensive experiments on standard NAS benchmarks and search spaces demonstrate that InTrain achieves ranking correlations on par with state-of-the-art ensemble-based proxies and outperforms other single-metric methods.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

A large-scale pipeline for LLM-assisted corpus annotation: variation and change in the English consider construction

As natural language corpora expand at an unprecedented rate, manual annotation remains a significant methodological bottleneck in corpus linguistic work. We address this challenge by presenting a scalable pipeline for automating grammatical annotation in voluminous corpora using large language models (LLMs). Unlike previous supervised and iterative approaches, our method employs a four-phase workflow: prompt engineering, pre-hoc evaluation, automated batch processing, and post-hoc validation. We demonstrate the pipeline's accessibility and effectiveness through a diachronic case study of variation in the English evaluative consider construction (consider X as/to be/{\O} Y). We annotate 143,933 'consider' concordance lines from the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) via the OpenAI API in under 60 hours, achieving 98%+ accuracy on two sophisticated annotation procedures. A Bayesian multinomial GAM fitted to 44,527 true positives of the evaluative construction reveals previously undocumented genre-specific trajectories of change, enabling us to advance new hypotheses about the relationship between register formality and competing pressures of morphosyntactic reduction and enhancement. Our results suggest that LLMs can perform a range of data preparation tasks at scale with minimal human intervention, unlocking substantive research questions previously beyond practical reach, though implementation requires attention to costs, licensing, and other ethical considerations.

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

Algorithmic Prompt Generation for Diverse Human-like Teaming and Communication with Large Language Models

Understanding how humans collaborate and communicate in teams is essential for improving human-agent teaming and AI-assisted decision-making. However, relying solely on data from large-scale user studies is impractical due to logistical, ethical, and practical constraints, necessitating synthetic models of multiple diverse human behaviors. Recently, agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to emulate human-like behavior in social settings. But, obtaining a large set of diverse behaviors requires manual effort in the form of designing prompts. On the other hand, Quality Diversity (QD) optimization has been shown to be capable of generating diverse Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent behavior. In this work, we combine QD optimization with LLM-powered agents to iteratively search for prompts that generate diverse team behavior in a long-horizon, multi-step collaborative environment. We first show, through a human-subjects experiment, that humans exhibit diverse coordination and communication behavior in this domain. We then present a series of experiments showing that our approach captures behaviors that are difficult to observe without large-scale data collection, and a follow-up user study to show that these generated behaviors are human-like. Our findings highlight the combination of QD and LLM-powered agents as an effective tool for studying teaming and communication strategies in multi-agent collaboration.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Geometry-Preserving in 3D Gaussian Splatting for LiDAR-Camera Extrinsic Calibration

Accurate LiDAR-camera calibration is essential for robust multi-modal perception. Targetless approaches avoid manual setup but remain limited by the scarcity of discriminative cross-modal features. Recent methods address this by reconstructing the scene within a differentiable model, enabling extrinsic optimization through dense photometric supervision. Among these, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has been widely adopted as a geometric proxy that bridges LiDAR and camera within a single differentiable framework. However, since 3DGS was originally designed for novel view synthesis, existing methods tend to prioritize rendering quality, causing the proxy geometry to drift from the true LiDAR structure. We propose a framework that preserves the metric geometry of the Gaussian proxy by aggregating multi-view LiDAR observations for dense depth supervision and blocking photometric gradients from updating the Gaussian spatial parameters. We validate our method on public driving datasets, where it consistently outperforms existing targetless methods in calibration accuracy.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Spotlight: Synergizing Seed Exploration and Spot GPUs for DiT RL Post-Training

arXiv:2606.19004v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training of Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) is prohibitively expensive, requiring thousands of high-end GPUs. Existing works explore two directions to reduce cost: seed exploration improves training convergence by selecting high-contrast samples, yet adds compute to the critical path; spot GPUs offer 69–77\% lower cost, yet sit idle during training because DiT rollouts finish nearly simultaneously, which prevents LLM-style pipelining of rollout with training. Spot preemptions further break Sequence Parallelism (SP) groups, fragmenting GPU topology. We present Spotlight, the first system that harvests spot GPUs for DiT RL post-training. Spotlight rests on two key insights we devise: (1)~we show that exploration can tolerate stale model weights because exploration that uses the model weights from the previous iteration preserves the relative ranking of random seeds, allowing exploration to run on idle spot GPUs during training. (2)~SP reconfiguration can reuse on-node state, reducing group recovery from minutes to sub-second launches. Built on these insights, Spotlight introduces three techniques: a bandit-based exploration planner that maximizes reward variance within the training time budget, elastic sequence parallelism that reconfigures SP groups on the fly via persistent schedulers and intra-node weight copying, and a preemption-aware pull-based request scheduler that balances load and commits in-flight state upon preemption. We implement Spotlight on the open-source RL platform ROLL and evaluate it on Qwen-Image post-training. Spotlight reaches the same target validation score $4\times$ faster than baselines, reducing total cost by $1.4$-$6.4\times$ while achieving superior image quality on DeepSeek-OCR and Geneval datasets with resolution $512\times512$ and $1280\times1280$.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Exact Markovian Dissipation Requires Singular Energy Resources

arXiv:2606.19510v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Gorini–Kossakowski–Lindblad–Sudarshan (GKLS) equation describes irreversible quantum dynamical semigroups. We show that this description cannot be exact under physically regular energy conditions. We prove that the open-system survival probability under physically regular energy conditions has sublinear decay, whereas any dissipative GKLS semigroup has a linear short-time decay. Hence exact Markovian dissipation requires singular energy resources: an unbounded-below total Hamiltonian or infinite initial energy, and a divergent interaction-energy moment. Therefore, a dissipative time-independent GKLS equation should be regarded as an effective description rather than the exact reduced dynamics of a Hamiltonian dilation satisfying physically regular energy conditions.

10.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Diffuse Interface Energies with Microscopic Heterogeneities II: Rare Events

arXiv:2606.17968v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We analyze Allen-Cahn functionals with stationary ergodic coefficients in the regime where the length scale $\delta$ of the heterogeneities is much smaller (microscopic) than the interface width $\epsilon$ (mesoscopic). In a companion paper, we show that if the ratio $\epsilon^{-1} \delta$ vanishes fast enough as $\epsilon \to 0$, then the functionals converge to an effective surface energy where the energy density is determined by homogenization effects originating at microscopic scales. Here we prove that if the ratio $\epsilon^{-1} \delta $ vanishes too slowly, the limit of the functional may actually be smaller than this homogenized energy. We refer to this as the rare events regime. In the case of the random checkerboard in dimension one, we use large deviations techniques to give a complete description of the rare events regime, showing that the limiting energy depends in a nontrivial way on the limit of $\epsilon^{-1} \delta | \log \epsilon |$. We further construct, in any dimension, examples of random media in which rare events become relevant at algebraic scales $\delta \approx \epsilon^{1 + \alpha}$ for an arbitrary $\alpha > 0$, as well as almost periodic examples in which atypical configurations play the same role as rare events.

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

Ricci-Filtration: Boosting Retrieval-Augmented Generation Reranker to Query-Answer Tasks by Discrete Ricci Flow

arXiv:2606.15482v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Ricci flow is a curvature-guided diffusion process that deforms space by shrinking regions of high positive curvature and expanding those with negative curvature. Similarly, discrete Ricci flow on weighted graphs modifies edge weights by shrinking edges with positive Ricci curvature and stretching those with negative Ricci curvature, effectively increasing the separation between clusters. Inspired by these two cornerstone works, we propose a geometry-based RAG reranker enhancement procedure called Ricci-Filtration. By modeling the input query and initial retrieved chunks as a network, where the input query and chunks serve as nodes and embedding-based pairwise relations define an initial graph, Ricci-Filtration leverages discrete curvature and Ricci flow to evaluate the structural importance of each chunk with respect to the user query. The system first filters the initial chunks based on their geometric curvature relative to the query; then, a reranker processes the remaining chunks to enhance generative performance. We theoretically prove that normalized discrete Ricci flow can detect community structures by identifying distinct asymptotic behaviors in edge weights. This supports the removal of ``noisy'' document chunks characterized by large weights and negative Ricci curvature relative to the query node. Extensive experiments confirm that Ricci-Filtration outperforms several baseline reranking methods in accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 scores. Furthermore, ablation studies demonstrate that the Ricci-Filtration generally outperforms the baseline under various settings, highlighting the framework's robustness across different architectures.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

RECOM: A Validity Discrimination Tradeoff in Automatic Metrics for Open Ended Reddit Question Answering

Automatic metrics are the default for evaluating LLM-generated text, yet a metric is quietly asked to do two jobs: tell genuine content alignment from surface coincidence (validity), and tell a better system from a worse one (discriminative power). On open-ended, opinion-driven question answering, the two are in tension. We introduce RECOM (Reddit Evaluation for Correspondence of Models), a contamination-free evaluation dataset of 15,000 r/AskReddit questions (September 2025), each paired with its authentic community replies, which postdate every evaluated model's training cutoff. Scoring five open-source LLMs (7–10B) against every reply each metric paired with a random-derangement noise floor we find that no metric does both jobs well. Cosine similarity separates real from random answers (Cohen's $d \approx 2$) but cannot rank the five models ($|d| < 0.1$); BERTScore precision appears to rank the models (raw $|d|$ up to 0.63), but once response length is controlled this collapses to $|d| = 0.09$ and its validity is weak ($d \approx 0.8$, versus cosine's $\approx 2$). Because every metric scores the same outputs, this validity–discrimination tradeoff is a property of the metrics, not the models, and we argue it stems from representation design. Three independent LLM judges reproduce the validity gap and likewise separate the five models only weakly. We recommend reporting metrics on both axes, with an explicit random-baseline floor. RECOM is publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/recom-D4B0

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Under What Conditions Can a Machine Become Genuinely Creative?

作者:

arXiv:2606.13196v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent AI systems can generate texts, software architectures, hypotheses, designs, and scientific workflows that appear creative. This paper asks under what conditions a machine can become genuinely creative, and how human agency can be preserved within shared cognitive and creative environments. It develops a requirement framework derived from Designics, the science of meaning-bearing intentional change. The paper argues that genuine machine creativity should not be defined by output novelty, current performance, or transient architecture alone. Instead, creativity is understood as the structural transformation of incomplete situations through recursive intervention dynamics. On this view, it depends on ten requirements: environment representation, scoped perception, conflict identification, intervention capability, consequence observation, knowledge and environment update, rescoping, local-to-global unfolding, value-based scoping, and human-AI co-living. These are organized through the three laws of Designics: perception, conflict, and capability. The paper illustrates the computational tractability of these requirements through selected cyber-physical and cyber-biological studies, including recursive element extraction, autonomous mesh generation, and neurophysiological and workload analysis. It then treats open-ended systems, automated discovery frameworks, self-modifying agents, foundation models, and agentic workflows as pressure cases: they demonstrate powerful generative means but do not by themselves establish genuine machine creativity. Finally, the paper argues that proactive AI ethics is internal to genuine machine creativity rather than an after-the-fact filter. Value-based scoping and human-AI co-living must shape how creative machines perceive environments, identify conflicts, select interventions, observe consequences, update knowledge, and rescope future action.

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

MiniFool – Physics-Constraint-Aware Minimizer-Based Adversarial Attacks in Deep Neural Networks

arXiv:2511.01352v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this paper, we present a new algorithm, MiniFool, that implements physics-inspired adversarial attacks for testing neural network-based classification tasks in particle and astroparticle physics. While we initially developed the algorithm for the search for astrophysical tau neutrinos with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, we apply it to further data from other science domains, thus demonstrating its general applicability. Here, we apply the algorithm to the well-known MNIST data set and furthermore, to Open Data data from the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. The algorithm is based on minimizing a cost function that combines a $\chi^2$ based test-statistic with the deviation from the desired target score. The test statistic quantifies the probability of the perturbations applied to the data based on the experimental uncertainties. For our studied use cases, we find that the likelihood of a flipped classification differs for both the initially correctly and incorrectly classified events. When testing changes of the classifications as a function of an attack parameter that scales the experimental uncertainties, the robustness of the network decision can be quantified. Furthermore, this allows testing the robustness of the classification of unlabeled experimental data.

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

Self-Driving Datasets: From 20 Million Papers to Nuanced Biomedical Knowledge at Scale

arXiv:2605.07022v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Manually curated biomedical repositories – spanning bioactivity, genomics, and chemistry – are expensive to maintain, lag behind primary literature, and discard experimental context, obscuring nuances needed to assess data correctness and coverage. We show that PubMed itself can be autonomously and cost-effectively turned into structured datasets that are larger, more nuanced, and more accurate than the curated databases they replace. We present three coupled contributions: (1) an LLM-based entity-tagging pipeline, grounded in nine biomedical ontologies, that tags 4.5B entities across 19 categories in a 22.5M-paper, 2.5T-token PubMed corpus; (2) hybrid sparse-dense retrieval supporting entity-filtered semantic queries over the tagged corpus; and (3) Starling, a multi-agent deep research system that, given only a natural-language task description, designs precision- and recall-targeted retrieval filters, induces an extraction schema, and emits structured records with nuance-rich fields and supporting passages. Across six tasks – blood-brain barrier permeability, oral bioavailability, acute toxicity (LD50), gene-disease associations, protein subcellular localization, and chemical reactions – Starling produces ~6.3M records (91K-3M per task); several are, to our knowledge, the largest public datasets for their property. Frontier-model rejection of our extractions is 0.6-7.7% across tasks, far below error rates we measure on widely used curated counterparts (e.g., 16.5% on BBB_Martins, 7.3% on Bioavailability_Ma). Beyond scale and accuracy, the supporting passages carry nuance tabular databases discard – e.g., oral bioavailability may depend on fed vs. fasted state. Together, the corpus, retrieval, and agent establish a foundation for AI-driven therapeutic design. Code and datasets: https://github.com/starling-labs/starling.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Robust Spin Splitting and Strain-Controlled Optical Response in Monolayer CrC2N4 for Valleytronic and Optoelectronic Applications

arXiv:2606.17329v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Monolayer CrC2N4 recently emerged as a promising two-dimensional semiconductor, yet its spin-orbit-coupled (SOC) physics and strain-tunable optical response remained largely unexplored. Here, we investigated the electronic, valley, charge-transfer, and optical properties of pristine and biaxially strained monolayer CrC2N4 using first-principles calculations. The monolayer exhibited a direct band gap at the K/K' valleys. SOC produced valley contrasting out-of-plane spin polarization, yielding a moderate valence band spin splitting of 51.9 meV and a small conduction band spin splitting of 1.7 meV. Orbital-resolved analysis showed that the edge states were mainly governed by Cr-d and N-p hybridization, while Bader analysis indicated polar-covalent bonding through charge transfer toward N atoms. Biaxial strain in the range of -4% to +4% tuned the band gap from 1.987 to 1.421 eV and drove an indirect-to-direct gap transition near -1% strain. Tensile strain enhanced the Berry curvature and red-shifted the optical response toward the visible-near-infrared region. These results suggested monolayer CrC2N4 as a promising platform for strain-engineered valleytronic and optoelectronic device applications.

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

DreamReasoner-8B: Block-Size Curriculum Learning for Diffusion Reasoning Models

Block diffusion language models accelerate decoding through parallel block-wise denoising, yet whether they can be reliably scaled for long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning remains unresolved. To this end, we develop DreamReasoner-8B, an open-source block diffusion reasoning model, and conduct a systematic study of how training and inference block sizes affect long-CoT reasoning. Our analysis reveals a stark performance disparity: training with large block sizes yields remarkably poor reasoning, whereas small block sizes preserve effective reasoning. To bridge this granularity gap, we propose block-size curriculum learning, which gradually transitions training from fine-grained to coarse-grained block sizes, thereby overcoming this limitation and enabling strong reasoning performance that generalizes across diverse inference block sizes. On mathematical and code reasoning benchmarks, DreamReasoner-8B achieves results competitive with leading open autoregressive models such as Qwen3-8B. This work establishes a practical foundation for efficient, reasoning-capable diffusion language models. We release our model at https://github.com/DreamLM/DreamReasoner.

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

sebis at CRF Filling 2026: A Two-Stage Local LLM Pipeline for Medical CRF Filling

The extraction of structured clinical information from unstructured EHR notes is a persistent bottleneck in healthcare informatics. While large language models (LLMs) offer high performance, their deployment in clinical settings is hindered by privacy risks, inference costs, and the tendency to hallucinate beyond textual evidence. We address these challenges for the CL4Health 2026 Case Report Form (CRF) filling task by proposing a fully local, domain-adapted pipeline using the MedGemma-27B model. Our two-stage architecture, which separates binary presence classification from value extraction, enforces strict adherence to textual evidence and ensures deterministic outputs for negated, uncertain, or unknown states. By leveraging item-specific, few-shot in-context learning without external API calls or fine-tuning, our approach achieves a macro-F1 score of 0.55 on the official English test track. This result secures second place among all locally-hosted, open-source submissions. Our work demonstrates that privacy-preserving, on-premise LLM pipelines can achieve near-competitive performance with proprietary frontier models, providing a practical, data-sovereign framework for clinical NLP.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Heterogeneous LiDAR Early Fusion and Learned Re-Ranking Strategy for Robust Long-Term Place Recognition in Unstructured Environments

Robust localization in unstructured environments, such as agricultural fields, is a critical challenge for autonomous systems. LiDAR sensors provide detailed 3D information about the environment and are invariant to lighting conditions. For this reason, LiDAR-based place recognition methods have gained significant attention. In this paper, we propose MinkUNeXt-VINE++, a novel approach that combines early fusion of heterogeneous LiDAR data from two sensors (Livox Mid-360 and Velodyne VLP-16) and a learned re-ranking strategy in inference time. This fusion leverages the strengths of each sensor to provide a more comprehensive representation of the environment. Additionally, the re-ranking approach is particularly important in repetitive environments, such as vineyards, as finding true positives is a major challenge. We evaluated our approach using the TEMPO-VINE dataset, which provides heterogeneous LiDAR data in vineyard environments across different phenological stages. Our results demonstrate that MinkUNeXt-VINE++ significantly improves place recognition performance compared to single-sensor approaches and state-of-the-art methods. MinkUNeXt-VINE++ achieves a 20% improvement in the Recall@1 metric compared to single-sensor approaches, and +30% including re-ranking. The code of our method is publicly available for reproduction.

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

RLCSD: Reinforcement Learning with Contrastive On-Policy Self-Distillation

On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) provides dense, token-level supervision for reasoning models by aligning a model's own distribution with the distribution it produces under privileged context, typically a verified solution. However, we show that the learning signal drawn from this distributional gap concentrates on style tokens rather than task-bearing ones, as the hinted model tends to produce more direct, shorter outputs. We term this pathology privilege-induced style drift, which destabilizes training or causes response length to shrink. To address this, we propose RLCSD (Reinforcement Learning with Contrastive on-policy Self-Distillation), which mitigates this drift by contrasting the teacher-student gap under a correct hint against that under a wrong hint, suppressing the style shift that conditioning on a hint tends to induce regardless of correctness, and yielding a signal that is more concentrated on task-bearing tokens. Experiments on Qwen3 (1.7B/4B/8B) and Olmo-3-7B-Think across mathematical and logical reasoning show that RLCSD consistently outperforms GRPO and prior OPSD methods. We further show that the contrastive principle is general: it plugs into existing OPSD methods to improve them, and its underlying insight extends to the broader cross-model on-policy distillation setting.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Vision Transformers for Face Recognition Need More Registers

Recent advances in Vision Transformers (ViTs) for face recognition (FR) have moved beyond the standard CLS-token paradigm. In this paradigm, a special classification token (CLS) is prepended to the patch embeddings and used as a representation of the input for downstream tasks. An alternative approach, Concatenated Patch Embeddings (CPE), instead leverages all patch tokens by concatenating them into a single vector, which is then projected into a compact face representation. CPE has been shown to improve recognition performance in comparison to CLS-based ones, but our qualitative analysis of attention maps showed the presence of artifacts that limit their interpretability. To address this issue, we incorporate register tokens, learnable tokens concatenated to the initial patch embeddings, and processed jointly through the ViT encoder blocks. This mechanism has been shown to produce more structured and interpretable attention maps compared to baseline ViT. We empirically demonstrate that these artifacts consistently appear across various ViT backbones, including small and large models, and that introducing register tokens effectively mitigates them. Adding four or eight registers significantly enhances interpretability, with eight registers providing the highest verification accuracies and smoothest attention structures. Our resulting model, ViT-8R, corresponds to a CPE-based ViT-B architecture augmented with eight register tokens achieves state-of-the-art performance among ViT-based FR models on large-scale IJB-B and IJB-C benchmarks. Also, ViT-8R produces substantially clearer attention maps compared with the baseline model, which offer deeper insight into the model's attention behavior (https://github.com/TaharChettaoui/ViT-FR-Registers)

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Adaptable Method for Crystal Design across Diverse Constraints and Objectives with Pretrained Property Predictors

arXiv:2410.08562v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Advanced crystal design can accelerate materials discovery across applications from photovoltaics to spintronics. Practical design must satisfy multiple properties and physical constraints, yet existing machine-learning-based approaches to such design often depend on large datasets, retraining, or task-specific generators. Here, we show that direct predictor-guided gradient optimization enables data-efficient, constraint-rich crystal design by combining off-the-shelf predictors with site-wise element masks, template initialization, and task-specific losses. In perovskites, it outperformed generative and Bayesian baselines under three targets – band gap, formation energy, and tolerance factor – and two hard constraints. DFT assessment further showed band-gap targeting competitive with a leading generative model despite using predictors trained on roughly one-tenth of the data. By flexibly combining pretrained predictors with application-oriented masks and custom losses, the same framework supported half-metal design. Such modularity could help researchers and engineers translate diverse application requirements directly into optimized candidate crystals with minimal computational cost.

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

Human-like autonomy emerges from self-play and a pinch of human data

arXiv:2606.19370v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Self-play reinforcement learning has recently emerged as a way to train driving policies without any human data. It uses cheap, large-scale simulations to substitute expensive, large-scale human driving demonstrations. A key limitation of this approach is that policies trained through pure self-play can learn effective but alien driving conventions incompatible with people. Previous works attempt to mitigate such behavioral misalignments through extensive reward engineering and domain randomization, which are brittle and labor-intensive. Instead of completely discarding human demonstrations, our method treats them as a regularization objective on top of a minimal safe goal-reaching reward. Like the spice in a good stew, we find that a little human data goes a long way: our method uses only 30 minutes of human demonstrations, 2500x fewer than comparable imitation learning approaches. Resulting policies coordinate with held-out human trajectories and complete training in 15 hours on a single consumer-grade GPU. Videos and full source code are available at https://spiced-self-play.com/.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

From Small to Large: A Graph Convolutional Network Approach for Solving Assortment Optimization Problems

arXiv:2507.10834v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Assortment optimization seeks to select a subset of substitutable products, subject to constraints, to maximize expected revenue. The problem is NP-hard due to its combinatorial and nonlinear nature and arises frequently in industries such as e-commerce, where platforms must solve thousands of such problems each minute. We propose a graph convolutional network (GCN) framework to efficiently solve constrained assortment optimization problems. Our approach constructs a graph representation of the problem, trains a GCN to learn the mapping from problem parameters to optimal assortments, and develops three inference policies based on the GCN's output. Owing to the GCN's ability to generalize across instance sizes, patterns learned from small-scale samples can be transferred to large-scale problems. Theoretical results are established to show the expressive power of the proposed GCN, and explain the underlying mechanism of the size generalization ability. Numerical experiments show that a GCN trained on instances with 20 products achieves over 85% of the optimal revenue on problems with up to 2,000 products within seconds, outperforming existing heuristics in both accuracy and efficiency. We further extend the framework to settings with an unknown choice model using transaction data and demonstrate similar performance and scalability.