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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Simulation of Language Evolution under Regulated Social Media Platforms: A Synergistic Approach of Large Language Models and Genetic Algorithms

arXiv:2502.19193v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Social media platforms frequently impose restrictive policies to moderate user content, prompting the emergence of creative evasion language strategies. This paper presents a multi-agent framework based on Large Language Models (LLMs) to simulate the iterative evolution of language strategies under regulatory constraints. In this framework, participant agents, as social media users, continuously evolve their language expression, while supervisory agents emulate platform-level regulation by assessing policy violations. To achieve a more faithful simulation, we employ a dual design of language strategies (constraint and expression) to differentiate conflicting goals and utilize an LLM-driven GA (Genetic Algorithm) for the selection, mutation, and crossover of language strategies. The framework is evaluated using two distinct scenarios: an abstract password game and a realistic simulated illegal pet trade scenario. Experimental results demonstrate that as the number of dialogue rounds increases, both the number of uninterrupted dialogue turns and the accuracy of information transmission improve significantly. Furthermore, a user study with 40 participants validates the real-world relevance of the generated dialogues and strategies. Moreover, ablation studies validate the importance of the GA, emphasizing its contribution to long-term adaptability and improved overall results.

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

Pre-Deployment Robustness Stress Testing for CT Segmentation Systems Using Clinically Motivated Multi-Corruption Augmentation

Deep learning-based CT segmentation systems often achieve high accuracy on clean benchmark images, but their performance may degrade under heterogeneous clinical imaging conditions such as noise, resolution loss, contrast variation, intensity shift, and artifacts. This instability can limit reliable deployment in real-world medical imaging workflows. We propose Robustness via Augmented Multi-corruption Pipeline (RAMP), a robustness-oriented augmentation framework for CT segmentation. RAMP combines anatomically constrained spatial perturbations, CT intensity transformations, and stochastic multi-corruption composition to expose models to clinically plausible image degradation during training. Across two CT segmentation evaluation settings, RAMP achieved the strongest corrupted-image performance and the smallest clean-to-corrupted robustness gap. In the five-organ noisy evaluation benchmark, RAMP improved mean corrupted Dice from 0.610 to 0.753 and reduced the robustness gap from 0.264 to 0.064 compared with the nnU-Net baseline. In Abdomen1K, RAMP improved mean corrupted Dice from 0.633 to 0.789 and reduced the robustness gap from 0.290 to 0.070. Although RAMP did not achieve the highest clean-image Dice, it substantially mitigated worst-case segmentation collapse under severe image degradation. These results suggest that multi-corruption augmentation can serve as a practical pre-deployment strategy for improving the reliability of CT segmentation systems in heterogeneous clinical environments.

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

Focus When Necessary: Adaptive Routing and Collaborative Grounding for Training-Free Visual Grounding

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel in cross-modal reasoning, they often struggle to perceive fine-grained details in complex high-resolution images. Recent training-free methods address this through image scaling and localized cropping. However, applying these manipulations indiscriminately introduces computational redundancy for simple queries and can degrade accuracy by truncating essential global context or introducing irrelevant background noise. To this end, we propose LazyMCoT, a dynamic and training-free framework that adaptively allocates visual grounding efforts based on sample difficulty. The framework features an Adaptive Routing mechanism that evaluates predictive uncertainty using first-token statistics from a single forward pass. This efficiently bypasses confident cases while ensuring the recall of difficult samples via conformal calibration. For these challenging cases, a Collaborative Grounding module integrates the inherent cross-modal attention of the model with an external visual expert through a two-stage refinement process. This refinement process generates a precise localized display to recover small or occluded targets. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that LazyMCoT rivals training-based approaches by simultaneously improving reasoning accuracy and reducing average inference latency. Our code is availble at https://github.com/TencentBAC/LazyMCoT.

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

Multi-component Causal Tracing in Large Language Models

Causal tracing systematically intervenes on a large language model's (LLM's) internal representations to uncover and quantify the causal pathways linking specific inputs or computations to specific metrics of interest, quantifying the LLM's behavior. Building on previous single-component or single-layer studies, this paper presents a unified framework for causally tracing multiple components simultaneously. This framework systematically identifies the subsets of components (e.g., attention heads and multi-layer perceptron neurons) most critical to a desired target performance metric (e.g., accuracy and fairness). This is achieved by incorporating flexible interventions applied to a wide range of desired metrics. To address the combinatorial complexity of the multi-component problem, an efficient algorithm is designed that leverages soft interventions and a carefully designed metric transformation, converting the combinatorial search problem into a continuous one that can be solved efficiently under proper constraints, thereby generating proper binary decisions for selecting components. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method efficiently identifies subsets of the model's components that have a high impact on the target metric, outperforming existing baseline approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZiruiYan/multi-component-causal-tracing.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Towards Truly Multilingual ASR: Generalizing Code-Switching ASR to Unseen Language Pairs

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) has become a key technology for human–AI interaction. However, code-switching ASR (CS-ASR) remains particularly challenging due to the severe scarcity of multilingual CS speech resources across diverse language pairs. Existing approaches primarily improve CS-ASR performance through synthetic CS speech generation or pair-specific fine-tuning on limited bilingual datasets. Nevertheless, these approaches face an inherent scalability limitation, as support for CS must be developed separately for language pairs whose number grows combinatorially with the number of supported languages. In this work, we investigate whether CS capabilities learned from a limited set of seen language pairs can generalize to unseen language pairs through model merging and domain generalization methods. Our experiments show that merged bilingual CS-ASR models modestly generalize to unseen language pairs, suggesting limited transfer of bilingual CS capabilities across language pairs.

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

Self-Generated Error Training for Token Editing in Diffusion Language Models

作者:

Token-to-token (T2T) editing lets LLaDA2.1 revise committed tokens during block-diffusion decoding. The released recipe trains this editor on random vocabulary corruptions, but at inference the editor sees the model's own fluent, high-confidence draft errors instead. We study this training-inference mismatch and propose self-generated T2T, which performs a no-gradient draft pass, fills masked positions with predicted tokens, and supervises recovery in a second pass under these self-generated corruptions. We implement the update as a short LoRA continued-pretraining pass on LLaDA2.1-mini and evaluate on several benchmarks under the official Q-Mode T2T procedure with unchanged inference parameters. The method generally improves accuracy while reducing T2T edit intensity, mitigating failure modes such as final-digit transcription errors after otherwise correct reasoning and excessive self-correction before short factual answers.

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

SMEPilot: Characterizing and Optimizing LLM Inference with Scalable Matrix Extensions

arXiv:2606.16332v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern CPUs increasingly integrate matrix extensions, such as Arm Scalable Matrix Extension (SME), that provide high-throughput matrix execution within the CPU. For LLM inference, however, these units are not a universal replacement for conventional CPU cores: prefill, decode, attention, and KV-cache operations expose different arithmetic intensities, vector behavior, and layout requirements, while SME units and CPU cores still compete for shared memory bandwidth. This paper studies this mismatch through a roofline-based characterization of SME-enabled CPUs and uses the resulting model to guide operator-level execution choices. We present SMEPilot, an LLM inference engine that selects CPU-only, SME-only, or cooperative SME+CPU execution for each operator shape. SMEPilot partitions matrix work across SME and CPU cores at tile granularity, overlaps SME-suitable matrix stages with CPU-suitable vector stages in attention, and maintains layout state so packed tensor representations are reused rather than repeatedly rebuilt on critical paths. Across Llama-3.2-3B, Qwen3-4B, and Qwen3-30BA3B on phone, PC, and server platforms, SMEPilot improves end-to-end inference performance by up to 3.94$\times$.

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

Learning from almost nothing: How neural networks survive heavy input corruption

arXiv:2606.11319v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning from imperfect data is a central theme in machine learning, connecting practical questions of robustness to fundamental questions of learnability. Here we examine attribute noise: learning from corrupted inputs while keeping the labels intact, a setting that has received considerably less analytical attention than its label-noise counterpart. We consider two types of corruption models: additive noise and replacement noise. Through experiments with multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) on corrupted classification datasets, we find that neural networks remain robust, maintaining well-above-chance accuracy even when inputs are >90% corrupted – far beyond human recognition. To understand this robustness, we analyze infinite-width networks in the heavy-corruption regime using a mean-field-inspired approach and derive a leading-order decision rule for the classification outcome: the network implements a prototype rule, the nearest-class-mean, assigning each test point to the class whose training-set average it most closely resembles. This leading-order decision rule is universal across a broad range of MLP architectures, holding for any depth, as well as a wide class of activation functions and noise distributions. The same centroid mechanism closely matches finite-width network behavior in our experiments and provides an interpretable and analytically tractable account of why learning can succeed even when individual training examples carry almost no signal.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

CADBench: A Multimodal Benchmark for AI-Assisted CAD Program Generation

arXiv:2605.10873v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recovering editable CAD programs from images or 3D observations is central to AI-assisted design, but progress is difficult to measure because existing evaluations are fragmented across datasets, modalities, and metrics. We introduce CADBench, a unified benchmark for multimodal CAD program generation. CADBench contains 18,000 evaluation samples spanning six benchmark families derived from DeepCAD, Fusion 360, ABC, MCB, and Objaverse; five input modalities including clean meshes, noisy meshes, single-view renders, photorealistic renders, and multi-view renders; and six metrics covering geometric fidelity, executability, and program compactness. STEP-based families are stratified by B-rep face count and all families are diversity-sampled to support controlled analysis across complexity and object variation. We benchmark eleven CAD-specialized and general-purpose vision-language systems, generating more than 1.4 million CAD programs. Under idealized inputs, specialized mesh-to-CAD models substantially outperform code-generating VLMs, which remain far from reliable CAD program reconstruction. CADBench further reveals three recurring failure modes: reconstruction quality degrades with geometric complexity, CAD-specialized models can be brittle under modality shift, and model rankings change across metrics. Together, these results position CADBench as a diagnostic testbed for measuring progress in editable 3D reconstruction and multimodal CAD understanding. The benchmark is publicly available at https://github.com/anniedoris/CADBench.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

ProPlay: Procedural World Models for Self-Evolving LLM Agents

Self-evolving agents are expected to improve through interaction without external supervision, but this remains difficult in partially observable environments where agents must explore actively, learn from limited feedback, and decide when to trust prior experience. Existing LLM-agent methods often rely on memory or planning modules, yet they rarely close the loop between them to continually refine an internal understanding of environment dynamics. We introduce ProPlay, a procedural world model that supports procedure-level preplay, where agents can rehearse future procedural paths using the learned world knowledge. Rather than representing experience as isolated rules or low-level action constraints, ProPlay abstracts successful trajectories into procedures and organizes them in a procedure graph that captures causal transitions among task stages. Each transition is associated with a reliability record embedding to estimate its task-specific contribution from past outcomes. Before each episode, ProPlay simulates future procedural trajectories over known graph structures as structured soft guidance; after execution, it refines the graph using environment feedback. Experiments on public benchmarks show that ProPlay consistently improves environment understanding and self-evolution capability over strong baselines. Our code has been released in https://github.com/antman9914/proplay.

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

Brain-IT-VQA: From Brain Signals to Answers

Decoding visual content from fMRI signals recorded while a person views images, and specifically answering questions about the seen images, is a long-standing challenge. While significant progress has been made in recent years in visual question answering (VQA) from fMRI, performance remains limited. Moreover, although recent models can make increasingly accurate predictions, they have rarely been used as tools for understanding the structure of visual representations in the brain. We present Brain-IT-VQA, a framework for visual question answering from fMRI. Building on the Brain Interaction Transformer (Brain-IT), our method decodes language tokens from brain activity and integrates them with a language model to answer visual questions. Our model substantially outperforms previous fMRI-based captioning and VQA approaches. We further introduce NSD-VQA, a new dataset and benchmark for visual question answering from fMRI. Unlike existing image-fMRI VQA datasets, which typically provide only a few broad and weakly controlled questions per image, NSD-VQA provides on average 20 question-answer pairs per image across 20 controlled question categories that disentangle multiple levels of visual understanding. This enables more reliable and interpretable evaluation despite limited fMRI test data. Together, Brain-IT-VQA and NSD-VQA provide both a strong predictive framework and a tool for studying brain representations. Using this benchmark, we quantify which forms of visual and semantic information can be reliably decoded from fMRI responses to natural images. We further analyze the contributions of different brain regions across question types.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Biomedical Capacity, Governance, and Health Security: A Dominican Republic Research Analysis of Stakeholder Perspectives

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed critical vulnerabilities in globally concentrated biomedical supply chains and accelerated interest in nearshoring and hemispheric health-security strategies. The Dominican Republic, already the third-largest medical device exporter in Latin America, occupies a strategically significant but institutionally constrained position within this realignment. This study evaluates stakeholder perceptions of the principal opportunities and barriers affecting biomedical ecosystem development in the Dominican Republic, with particular attention to governance, workforce capacity, and value-chain upgrading pathways. Methods. A concurrent mixed-methods design was employed, integrating a cross-sectional electronic survey of 142 purposively sampled domain experts (administered September-December 2025) with a qualitative executive consultation with senior government and industry leaders. Survey analyses combined descriptive statistics, one-sample t-tests against the scale neutral midpoint, chi-square goodness-of-fit tests, Friedman non-parametric ranking, Spearman rank correlations, and exploratory linear and logistic multivariable regression. Qualitative responses were analyzed using a framework approach grounded in the Triple Helix model of innovation systems. Results. Perceived government support was significantly below neutral (mean = 2.67, SD = 1.12; p = 0.034). Workforce shortages (83.3%) and weak academia-industry collaboration (71.4%) were the most frequently endorsed barriers ({chi}2(5) = 18.7, p = 0.002). Regulatory modernization (88.1%) and workforce development (85.7%) ranked as the highest-priority policy levers (Friedman p = 0.005). Clinical trials and contract research organization services were the dominant sub-sector priority (76.2%, binomial p < 0.001). In multivariable analysis, perceived government support, talent availability, and confidence in IP protection jointly explained 46% of the variance in sector competitiveness (R2 = 0.46, p < 0.001). Strong majority support existed for a formal public-private biomedical coordination authority (73.8%, p < 0.001).Conclusion. Institutional credibility and advanced human capital–rather than geography or market access–are the perceived binding constraints on the Dominican Republics biomedical trajectory. Regulatory modernization, targeted workforce investment, and the establishment of a national biomedical coordination authority represent the highest-leverage interventions for positioning the country as a hemispheric hub for biomedical manufacturing, clinical research, and health security.

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

Phenotyping TPF via Self-Supervised Learning: A Label-Agnostic Framework with Expert Validation

The full potential of artificial intelligence in tibial plateau fracture characterisation remains unrealised, constrained by a fundamental dependency on labelled datasets whose consistency cannot be guaranteed: conventional classification schemes such as Schatzker and AO/OTA suffer from inter-observer variability, causing supervised models to learn human disagreement rather than stable fracture morphology. We design, implement, and validate a label-agnostic framework that eliminates this constraint by learning fracture representations directly from imaging data without observer-assigned labels. A RadImageNet-pretrained ResNet-50 encoder is fine-tuned on 154 cleaned knee radiographs using the SimCLR contrastive objective, preceded by a data cleaning protocol and followed by UMAP dimensionality reduction and k-means clustering to discover four imaging-derived phenotypes. Phenotype validity is assessed through a blinded expert review protocol administered to two independent clinicians. The four phenotypes demonstrate robust stability (bootstrap ARI = 0.319 +/- 0.041), strong internal cohesion (silhouette = 0.511), and coherence ratings of 3-5/5 from both reviewers under blinded conditions; one phenotype was unanimously identified as exhibiting comminution – a high-complexity feature isolated without any supervisory signal. Inter-partition comparison against Schatzker labels yields ARI = 0.013, confirming orthogonality to conventional classification boundaries. Notably, expert reviewers anchored to established classification vocabularies perceived imaging-derived groups as heterogeneous precisely where Schatzker alignment was lowest, suggesting that Schatzker-trained perception and label-agnostic embedding geometry measure orthogonal dimensions. These findings establish label-agnostic SSL phenotyping as a reproducible and clinically interpretable complement to conventional classification.

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

TokenRatio: Principled Token-Level Preference Optimization via Ratio Matching

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a widely used RL-free method for aligning language models from pairwise preferences, but it models preferences over full sequences even though generation is driven by per-token decisions. Existing token-level extensions typically decompose a sequence-level Bradley-Terry objective across timesteps, leaving per-prefix (state-wise) optimality implicit. We study how to recover token-level preference optimality using only standard sequence-level pairwise comparisons. We introduce Token-level Bregman Preference Optimization (TBPO), which posits a token-level Bradley-Terry preference model over next-token actions conditioned on the prefix, and derive a Bregman-divergence density-ratio matching objective that generalizes the logistic/DPO loss while preserving the optimal policy induced by the token-level model and maintaining DPO-like simplicity. We introduce two instantiations: TBPO-Q, which explicitly learns a lightweight state baseline, and TBPO-A, which removes the baseline through advantage normalization. Across instruction following, helpfulness/harmlessness, and summarization benchmarks, TBPO improves alignment quality and training stability and increases output diversity relative to strong sequence-level and token-level baselines.

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

TERMS-Bench: Diagnosing LLM Negotiation Agents Beyond Deal Rate

arXiv:2605.13909v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Negotiation is a central mechanism of economic exchange, shaping markets, procurement, labor agreements, and resource allocation. It is also a canonical testbed for agentic language models, requiring multi-turn interaction under hidden preferences, strategic communication, and binding constraints. These properties make negotiation hard to evaluate: unlike math or code, it has no intrinsic verifier. Existing LLM negotiation evaluations rely on LLM-vs.-LLM interaction or aggregate outcomes such as deal rate, leaving failures opaque. We introduce Terms-Bench, short for Testbed for Economic Reasoning in Multi-turn Strategy, a Bayesian-game framework that makes the environment itself the verifier by specifying the counterpart's latent type, policy, and payoff structure. We instantiate it in bilateral price negotiation, where the counterpart's private state and simulator policy are hidden from the agent but observable to the evaluator. This turns the counterpart from a black-box opponent into a diagnostic instrument, enabling agent-attributable failure analysis and oracle-reference optimality gaps. Evaluating 13 LLM agents spanning frontier systems from major providers, Terms-Bench turns negotiation evaluation from aggregate ranking into actionable diagnosis: where agents fail, why they fail, and what to strengthen. Empirically, frontier models saturate deal rate yet diverge in surplus extraction, cue use, belief calibration, and compliance, revealing agent-specific bargaining bottlenecks masked by prior benchmarks.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

JustDiag!: A Diagnostic Justification Engine for Accountable Root Cause Analysis

arXiv:2606.19407v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models can produce fluent root cause analyses, but fluent final answers alone are insufficient evidence for accountability in high-stakes operations. In real incident response, engineers need to know what evidence supported a diagnosis, which alternatives were considered, where contradictions remained, and whether the system resolved the case or preserved uncertainty. We address this gap with JustDiag, a diagnostic justification engine for RCA that maintains an explicit process state over evidence, findings, competing hypotheses, conflicts, and next checks. We evaluated the system on 66 real-world incidents using a two-layer protocol that separately scores final-answer quality and process quality. Relative to a matched control without diagnostic justification, JustDiag achieved stronger outcome and process scores, while accepting slightly lower terminal completion due to more calibrated non-closure. These results suggest that accountable RCA requires explicit diagnostic justification artifacts and process-aware evaluation, not only fluent final answers.

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

Fine-Tuning a 7B Advisor on Free-Tier GPUs: An Adapter-Handoff Recipe and a Synthetic-Data Reliability Caution

arXiv:2504.15610v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fine-tuning a 7B language model for specialized advising is attractive in resource-constrained settings, but multi-epoch runs routinely exceed the wall-clock limits of the free-tier GPUs (Kaggle, Colab) such users rely on. We report two things. First, a practical recipe: a three-epoch QLoRA fine-tune of Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3 (4-bit NF4, LoRA rank 16, via Unsloth) completed across two free-tier 16 GB GPUs (Tesla P100 then T4) by checkpointing only the small LoRA adapter (41.9M parameters) and resuming on the second machine. Adapter-only handoff is sufficient – optimizer and scheduler state need not be transferred – so the binding constraint is per-step VRAM and per-session wall-clock, not aggregate compute. Second, and more importantly, an honest evaluation that returns a cautionary result. On a blind held-out comparison against the un-fine-tuned base model, the fine-tuned model scored higher on similarity to the synthetic training distribution (BERTScore F1 +0.063, a fidelity not quality signal) but lower on advising quality: a blind LLM-as-judge preferred the base model on 46% of prompts versus 18%, and a source-verified factuality audit found four confident errors from the fine-tuned model on policy-sensitive topics against zero for the base. Auditing the training data with the same method, we find this is not a fine-tuning artifact: each audited error is already present in the Gemini-generated training answers, and a random-sample audit finds verifiable errors in a sizable fraction of responses (28-40%; single-judge, n=40). The data is therefore sufficient to account for the errors, which we attribute to the synthetic-data pipeline rather than the adapter-handoff method. We release the dataset, adapter, cross-GPU notebooks, and full evaluation harness so every result reproduces on a single 16 GB GPU.

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

The Weight Norm Sets the Grokking Timescale: A Causal Delay Law

arXiv:2606.13753v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Grokking is the delayed onset of generalization in neural networks, arising long after they fit the training data. Whether the weight norm causes this delay is disputed: some studies report a critical norm at the transition, others observe grokking with no fixed norm at all. We settle this by intervening on the norm during training rather than only observing it. Under free training with weight decay, networks grok when the weight norm reaches a value Wc that varies little across seeds and learning rates (CV 1 to 2 percent) and grows with the modular base as a power law. When we instead clamp the norm to a fixed multiple rho of Wc and hold it there, the network still groks, but the delay follows T_grok proportional to exp(alpha rho). One exponent, alpha near 7.5, fits this delay across four moduli (R^2 = 0.996). Over the swept ranges the held norm moves the delay by about 19x and the learning rate by only about 2x, and holding the norm above Wc slows grokking rather than preventing it. A final LayerNorm removes the dependence by decoupling weight scale from the network function; without it the exponential law returns. This pinned-norm delay is the exponential counterpart to the logarithmic delay predicted for a freely contracting norm.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Teaching Values to Machines: Simulating Human-Like Behavior in LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate a remarkable capacity to adopt different personas and roles; however, it remains unclear whether they can manifest behavior that adheres to a coherent, human-like value structure. In this work, we draw on established psychological value theory to induce human-like values in LLMs and assess their alignment with patterns observed in human studies. Using validated psychological questionnaires, we conduct large-scale experiments – over 5 million questions – to evaluate value structures and value-behavior relationships in leading LLMs and compare them to humans. Our findings reveal strong agreement between value-prompted LLMs and humans across both dimensions. Moreover, incorporating human value distributions enhances population-level simulations with value-induced LLMs. These findings highlight the potential of value-induced LLMs as effective, psychologically grounded tools for simulating human behavior.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Steering Where to Listen: Instruction-Based Activation Steering Redirects Temporal Attention in Large Audio-Language Models

arXiv:2606.11400v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) excel at audio understanding but expose little about where in an audio signal they attend. We introduce instruction-based vector steering, which constructs a steering vector by contrasting activations from differently instructed prompts while keeping the audio fixed. Through a systematic probe of LALM attention, we find that - unlike standard prompting or audio-based steering - this intervention significantly redistributes the temporal attention allocated to audio tokens, concentrating it on acoustically relevant regions. We then show that this attention shift is behaviorally meaningful: in a controlled three-event setting, reading out the temporal position of maximal steering-induced attention change recovers the location of a queried sound event without any training, attaining 60.87% and 68.72% overlap with ground-truth intervals on Qwen2-Audio and Audio Flamingo 3, far above direct prompting (31.84%, 46.75%) and random baselines (27.74%). Our results characterize a mechanistic property of instruction-based steering in LALMs and provide a training-free probe for the latent temporal structure these models encode.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Critique of World Model: A Generative Latent Prediction Architecture for World Modeling

World Model, the algorithmic simulator of the real-world environment which biological agents experience and act upon, has been an emerging topic in recent years due to the rising need to develop virtual agents with artificial (general) intelligence. There has been much discussion on what a world model really is, how to build it, how to use it, and how to evaluate it. In this essay, starting from the imagination in the famed Sci-Fi classic Dune, and drawing inspiration from the concept of ``hypothetical thinking'' in psychology literature, we argue the primary goal of a world model to be {\it simulating all actionable possibilities of the real world for purposeful reasoning and acting}. We examine the key design dimensions of world modeling: data, representation, architecture, learning objective, and usage, surveying existing approaches and analyzing their tradeoffs. Building on this examination, we propose a new Generative Latent Prediction (GLP) architecture for a general-purpose world model, based on stateful, hierarchical, multi-level, and mixed continuous/discrete representations, and a generative and self-supervised learning framework, with an outlook of a Physical, Agentic, and Nested (PAN) AGI system enabled by such a model.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Learning to Emulate Chaos: Adversarial Optimal Transport Regularization

arXiv:2604.21097v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Chaos arises in many complex dynamical systems, from weather to power grids, but is difficult to accurately model with data-driven methods such as machine learning emulators. While emulators are promising tools for accelerating simulations and solving inverse problems, they still struggle to learn chaotic dynamics, where sensitivity to initial conditions renders exact long-term forecasts infeasible, especially given noisy data. Recent work instead trains emulators to match the statistical properties of chaotic attractors, but these approaches often rely on handcrafted summary statistics or large, diverse multi-environment datasets. In this work, we propose a family of adversarial optimal transport objectives that can jointly learn high-quality summary statistics and a physically consistent emulator from a single noisy trajectory. We theoretically analyze and experimentally validate a Sinkhorn divergence formulation (2-Wasserstein) and a WGAN-style dual formulation (1-Wasserstein) of our approach. Numerical experiments across a variety of chaotic systems, including ones with high-dimensional spatiotemporal chaos, show that emulators trained using our proposed objectives have significantly improved long-term statistical fidelity.

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

Localizing Anchoring Pathways in Language Models

Irrelevant numbers in a prompt can shift language model judgments, producing anchoring effects in numerical reasoning. We study where this anchor-sensitive signal is carried inside language models using a controlled multiple-choice setup with shared answer options. We define a logit-difference metric comparing the correct answer option with the answer option corresponding to the anchor, and validate that it tracks behavioral anchoring. Using attribution-based circuit localization on 7B–8B Qwen and Llama base and instruction-tuned models, we find that edge-level methods recover this signal more faithfully than node-level methods. Low- and high-anchor circuits transfer strongly within a model, suggesting shared pathway structure across anchor direction. However, sparse transfer across base and instruction-tuned variants is less reliable, indicating that post-training changes which pathways matter most. Overall, our results provide a mechanistic account of how anchoring-related decision signals are carried inside language models.

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

Synthetic Homes: A Multimodal Generative AI Pipeline for Residential Building Data Generation under Data Scarcity

arXiv:2509.09794v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Computational models have emerged as powerful tools for multi-scale energy modeling research at the building and urban scale, supporting data-driven analysis across building and urban energy systems. However, these models require large amounts of building parameter data that is often inaccessible, expensive to collect, or subject to privacy constraints. We introduce a modular, multimodal generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) framework that integrates image, tabular, and simulation-based components and produces synthetic residential building datasets from publicly available county records and images, and present an end-to-end pipeline instantiating this framework. To reduce typical Large Language Model (LLM) challenges, we evaluate our model's components using occlusion-based visual focus analysis. Our analysis demonstrates that our selected vision-language model achieves greater visual focus than a GPT-based alternative for building image processing. We also assess realism of our results against a national reference dataset, finding that our synthetic data overlaps more than 95% for three of the four selected variables. This work reduces dependence on costly or restricted data sources, lowering barriers to building-scale energy research and Machine Learning (ML)-driven urban energy modeling, and therefore enabling scalable downstream tasks such as energy modeling, retrofit analysis, and urban-scale simulation under data scarcity.

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

FUSE: Quantifying Uncertainty in Vision-Language Models by Bayesian Fusing Epistemic and Aleatoric Uncertainty

Vision-language models (VLMs) are playing an increasingly important role across multiple domains. In many applications, such as robotics, it is crucial to quantify the uncertainty in the output of these models. } We develop FUSE, a probabilistic framework for capturing two complementary sources of uncertainty in vision-language modeling: (i) aleatoric embedding-level uncertainty derived from input data vision-language ambiguity, and (ii) epistemic model-level uncertainty estimated from the semantic response diversity of VLMs. Our approach formulates a Bayesian fusion mechanism that analytically combines these uncertainty sources to produce a scalar measure of uncertainty. This measure can be used to reliably predict the model's output correctness for downstream applications. We demonstrate that our method outperforms baselines and achieves SOTA uncertainty calibration.