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

VDE Bench: Evaluating The Capability of Image Editing Models to Modify Visual Documents

In recent years, image editing models have made significant progress, enabling users to manipulate visual content in a flexible and interactive manner through natural language instructions. However, an important yet underexplored research direction remains dense visual document image editing, which involves modifying textual content within images while faithfully preserving the original text style and background context. Existing methods primarily focus on English scenarios and images with relatively sparse text, and thus cannot adequately address dense, structurally complex documents or non-Latin scripts such as Chinese. To bridge this gap, we propose VDE Bench (Visual Doc Edit Bench), a rigorously human annotated and evaluated benchmark specifically designed to assess the performance of image editing models on bilingual Chinese-English and complex visual document editing tasks. The benchmark comprises a high quality dataset of 942 instruction based image editing samples, whose seed images encompass dense Chinese and English text documents including academic papers, posters, presentation slides, examination materials, and newspapers. Furthermore, we introduce a novel evaluation framework that systematically quantifies editing performance at the OCR parsing level, thereby enabling fine grained assessment of text modification accuracy. Based on this benchmark, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of representative image editing models. Human verification demonstrates a high degree of consistency between human judgments and automated evaluation metrics. VDE Bench constitutes the first systematic benchmark for evaluating the performance of image editing models on bilingual dense text visual documents.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Mana: Dexterous Manipulation of Articulated Tools

Articulated tool manipulation remains a major challenge in dexterous robotics due to the need to coordinate internal degrees of freedom and contact-rich interactions. While prior work has largely focused on rigid objects, articulated tool use remains underexplored because of its physical complexity and the difficulty of learning functional grasping and manipulation policies. We present Mana (Manipulation Animator), a general sim-to-real framework that reinterprets dexterous manipulation as an animation problem. Inspired by computer animation, Mana employs a coarse-to-fine pipeline that transforms procedurally-generated grasp keyframes into manipulation trajectories through motion planning and reinforcement learning. The data generation process is largely automatic, requiring only a few mouse clicks to specify functional affordances (

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Hierarchical Consistency Learning for Test-time Adaptation in Camouflage Perception

Camouflaged object detection (COD) aims to localize targets that exhibit minimal perceptual differences from backgrounds through physical attributes. Existing methods, constrained by the static train-then-freeze paradigm, suffer from domain rigidity and annotation dependency, limiting their adaptability to scene variations and unseen camouflage patterns. To overcome these, we propose the hierarchical consistency learning (HCL) framework, which integrates test-time adaptation for dynamic representation recalibration. Specifically, we design the hierarchical representation reconstruction (HRR) to alleviate feature entanglement by synergizing spatial reconstruction with dual-stream frequency-domain decomposition, enhancing robustness against appearance homogenization. The pixel and spectrum inference provide structural and contextual priors. We further introduce task affinity guidance (TAG) to propagate knowledge across branches via channel-wise affinity, aligning local discriminative cues and mitigating semantic drift. To ensure semantic invariance, we formulate the prototype consistency calibration (PCC), which aggregates region features into compact prototypes and establishes prototype-feature similarity. This imposes implicit and hierarchical constraints that bridge task and representation gaps. Extensive experiments across four camouflaged and four underwater object benchmarks, under three degradation settings, demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, highlighting its robustness and generalization under distribution shifts.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Extracting Governing Equations from Latent Dynamics via Multi-View Contrastive Learning

arXiv:2606.13260v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Identifying latent dynamical systems from noisy, high-dimensional measurements is a central problem at the intersection of representation learning, system identification, and scientific discovery. We present DYSCO, a multi-view temporal contrastive learning algorithm that jointly recovers latent trajectories and the governing dynamics from such observations, by leveraging multiple independent noisy views of the same underlying process to disentangle signal from noise. By parameterizing the dynamics in a structured functional basis, our framework further enables symbolic recovery of the governing equations within an affine gauge. We offer theoretical guarantees for strong identification up to an affine indeterminacy, extending prior identifiability results to the realistic setting of noisy nonlinear observations. Empirically, we demonstrate accurate recovery of both latent trajectories and flow fields across a diverse set of dynamical regimes (e.g., chaotic, oscillatory, and metastable) under both Gaussian and Poisson observation noise, the latter being particularly relevant for neural recordings.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Position: Generative Engine Optimization Creates Underexamined Risks, Governance Must Target Concentration, Disclosure, and Academic Blind Spots

arXiv:2606.12439v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) answer engines are increasingly used for information seeking, shifting visibility from ranked lists to synthesized answers. This enables Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), which targets LLM answer engines' evidence pool and generation. We analyze the search engine optimization (SEO) to GEO transition to identify two risks: (i) concentrated influence from low contestability and system sensitivity, and (ii) undisclosed commercial influence embedded in evidence and reasoning. We then formalize a general GEO pipeline to locate where optimization acts and compare academic and industry practices, revealing a third risk: (iii) academic-industry blind spots driven by visibility and evaluation asymmetries between offline setups and deployed systems. This position argues the need for answer-level governance and measurement: stronger contestability, high-precision disclosure, black-box auditing of material influence, and deployment-aligned metrics for exposure persistence.

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

Structured Noise Adaptation for Sequential Bayesian Filtering with Embedded Latent Transfer Operators

arXiv:2606.14195v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Kalman filters based on the Embedded Latent Transfer Operators (ELTO) emerge as novel statistical tools for sequential state estimation. However, a critical limitation stems from their use of simplified noise models, which fail to dynamically adapt to non-stationary processes. To address this limitation, we introduce an ELTO-based Bayesian filtering approach with a new structured parameterization for the filter's noise model. This parameterization enables structured noise adaptation, which couples the data-driven learning of an optimal time-invariant noise model with dynamic parameter adaptation that responds to changes in dynamics within non-stationary processes. Empirical results show that our structured noise adaptation improves the filter's dynamic state estimation performance in noisy, time-varying environments.

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

Improved Knowledge Distillation for Land-Use Image Classification

In the present article, an improved Knowledge Distillation (KD) framework has been proposed for efficient compression of deep convolutional neural networks for land-use image classification task. Motivated by the need to achieve competitive classification accuracy while reducing computational complexity, a teacher-student learning paradigm is adopted in which a VGG16 network transfers knowledge to a lightweight MobileNetV2 model. The proposed framework integrates hard supervision from ground truth labels with a soft supervision strategy that combines Kullback-Leibler divergence and Cosine Similarity losses. Experiments conducted on three land-use datasets show that the proposed KD-based method yields improved performance, and achieves an accuracy of 99.04%, outperforming both baseline student training and single-loss distillation approaches, while retaining substantial model compression.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Deja Vu at Scale: Paraphrase-Robust Detection of Duplicate Gherkin Steps in Behaviour-Driven Software Testing with Sentence-Transformer Embeddings and a 1.1M-Step Open Benchmark

Context. Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) suites in Gherkin accumulate step-text duplication with documented maintenance cost. Prior detectors either require runnable tests or are single-organisation, leaving a gap: a static, paraphrase-robust, step-level detector and a public benchmark to calibrate it. Objective. We release (i) the largest cross-organisational BDD step corpus to date, (ii) a labelled pair-level calibration benchmark, and (iii) a four-strategy detector with a consolidation-savings model linking clusters to ISO/IEC 25010 maintainability sub-characteristics. Method. The corpus contains 347 public GitHub repositories, 23,667 .feature files, and 1,113,616 Gherkin steps, SPDX-tagged. The detector layers exact hashing, normalised Levenshtein, sentence-transformer cosine, and a Levenshtein-banded hybrid. Calibration uses 1,020 manually labelled step pairs under a released rubric (60-pair overlap, Fleiss kappa = 0.84). We report precision, recall, and F1 with bootstrap 95% CIs under the primary rubric and a score-free relabelling, and benchmark against SourcererCC-style and NiCad-style lexical baselines. Results. Step-weighted exact-duplicate rate is 80.2%; median-repository rate is 58.6% (Spearman rho = 0.51). The top hybrid cluster has 20,737 occurrences across 2,245 files. Near-exact reaches F1 = 0.822 on score-free labels; semantic F1 = 0.906 under the primary rubric reflects a disclosed stratification artefact. Lexical baselines reach F1 = 0.761 and 0.799. The savings model estimates 893,357 corpus-wide eliminable step occurrences; on the median repository 62.5% of step lines are eliminable.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

VLGA: Vision-Language-Geometry-Action Models for Autonomous Driving

Vision-language-action (VLA) models can describe scenes and reason about them in language, yet still struggle to ground their actions in the dense 3D world around them. Existing approaches either inject features from a frozen 3D foundation model without an objective that ensures the policy uses them, or constrain geometry with sparse box and map losses that provide no dense spatial signal. We introduce VLGA, the first vision-language-action model supervised to reconstruct the dense 3D world it drives through. VLGA introduces geometry as a fourth modality alongside vision, language, and action through a dedicated expert supervised by a per-pixel pointmap regression loss against LiDAR. Extensive experiments conducted on challenging nuScenes and Bench2Drive datasets for open-loop and closed-loop evaluations, respectively, show the superiority of VLGA over counterpart VLA methods. In particular, on open-loop nuScenes, VLGA sets a new state of the art among VLA methods without ego status, with the lowest L2 (0.50\,m average) and 3-second collision rate (0.18\%). On closed-loop Bench2Drive, VLGA attains the state-of-the-art driving score of 79.08, +0.71 over the strongest prior VLA, at comparable efficiency and comfort.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

DeepForestVisionV2: Ecology-Driven Taxonomy Expansion for Camera-Trap Monitoring in African Tropical Forests

Camera-trap monitoring in African tropical forests increasingly extends beyond closed-canopy interiors to riverbanks, clearings, and park edges. Among available open tools for African forest camera-trap classification, DeepForestVision is the only one providing a matched offline workflow for both photographs and videos, and previous work showed that it outperformed other available baselines on a comparable benchmark. However, it was designed for closed-canopy, ground-level forest interiors and uses a 35-class prediction space that becomes too coarse when deployments encounter arboreal primates, birds, semi-aquatic taxa, or human-associated confounders such as livestock. We present DeepForestVisionV2, an ecology-driven expansion from 35 to 64 prediction classes (61 animal classes plus human, vehicle, and blank) designed to address three recurrent deployment gradients: vertical stratification, scene openness, and anthropogenic interfaces. DeepForestVisionV2 retains the same offline workflow and is trained on 1,535,010 photographs and 243,354 videos from multi-country African tropical-forest projects. Evaluation combines a cross-country cropped-photo validation set, used to assess robustness across sites and camera-trap settings, with three held-out Uganda video benchmarks spanning the targeted gradients. On the validation set, DeepForestVisionV2 reaches 0.86 accuracy, 0.82 macro-F1, and 0.81 balanced accuracy. On the deployment benchmarks, it preserves or improves baseline accuracy despite its harder classification task, while increasing the number of identified taxa from 22 to 29 in forest-interior videos and from 4 to 9 at riverbanks. In the park-edge use case, it raises accuracy from 0.62 to 0.86 and reduces false alarms from 11 to 0. These results show that DeepForestVisionV2 materially improves field utility while preserving robustness across sites, habitats, and camera-trap settings.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

TextMesh4D: Zero-shot Text-to-4D Mesh Generation

Large-scale, high-quality dynamic 3D (4D) assets are essential for learning physically grounded representations, but remain costly to capture and annotate at scale. This limits the viability of supervised 4D learning and motivates zero-shot text-to-4D generation leveraging pretrained diffusion priors. To model complex dynamics, prior methods typically adopt implicit 3D representations (e.g., NeRFs or 3DGS) for their deformation capacity. However, their implicit nature provides limited control over surface topology, which hinders high-fidelity geometry and makes temporally coherent surface reconstruction challenging. To address these limitations, we explore zero-shot text-to-4D mesh generation. However, a structural mismatch arises when combining diffusion-based guidance with topology-constrained meshes: the guidance is noisy and spatially inconsistent, while meshes impose severe topological constraints, making direct vertex-level deformation unstable. In this paper, we introduce TextMesh4D, the first zero-shot framework for text-to-4D that directly generates dynamic meshes by addressing the above challenge at two complementary levels. Geometrically, we shift deformation modeling from vertices to faces via a Jacobian Deformation Field (JDF), enabling topology-aware surface reconstruction through an integrability-enforcing integration formulation. Semantically, we propose a Local-Global Semantic Regularizer (LGSR) that preserves identity over time by jointly constraining local deformation plausibility and global shape consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art temporal consistency, structural fidelity, and visual quality, while remaining efficient on a single 24GB GPU.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Food4All: An Agentic Framework and Benchmark for Food Resource Navigation with Adaptive User Understanding

Food assistance referral requires conversational agents to translate underspecified, often noisy help-seeking dialogues into locally valid resource recommendations. We present Food4All, an agentic food-resource referral framework and benchmark grounded in 686 structured Indiana food resources. Food4All couples a food-specific search tool with 300 multi-turn evaluation tasks spanning single food needs, composite cases with access or document constraints, and five non-ideal user interaction traits: unreasonable demands, rambling responses, impatience, incomplete answers, and inconsistent information. We evaluate six Large Language Models (LLMs) on requirement grounding, resource retrieval, final referral correctness, and interaction efficiency. Although the strongest model achieves 96.33% referral accuracy, our diagnostics reveal persistent failures in grounding schedule, eligibility, intake, and document constraints, as well as failures to preserve valid retrieved resources in the final recommendation. Trait-level analysis further shows that different non-ideal behaviors stress different parts of the referral pipeline. Food4All provides a controlled testbed for studying tool-calling agents in constraint-sensitive food assistance referral under realistic user interaction challenges.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

REGRID-QAOA: A Resource-Efficient Graph-Reduced Hybrid QAOA Framework for Physics-Constrained Power System Islanding

arXiv:2606.15083v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum computing has rapidly emerged as a powerful paradigm for tackling computationally demanding problems. In particular, quantum optimization shows strong promise for hard combinatorial problems in power systems, where increasing distributed energy penetration heightens the need for intentional islanding to maintain grid reliability and resilience. However, power system islanding is an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem that becomes computationally prohibitive for classical solvers as network size grows, motivating the use of quantum computing as a promising alternative pipeline. This study develops a resource-efficient hybrid QAOA islanding framework that brings physics-constrained power-system partitioning into the quantum optimization workflow. The framework combines coherency-informed graph reduction, physics-aware constraint modeling, and structured post-processing to efficiently convert shallow-circuit QAOA samples into high-quality feasible islanding decisions without deep circuits or large shot budgets. The proposed framework is validated on the standard IEEE benchmark systems (9-, 14-, 24-, 30-, 39-, and 57-bus), demonstrating that the hybrid workflow achieves Gurobi-optimal solution quality with a clear quantum resource advantage over vanilla QAOA, while the resulting islanding solutions satisfy all physical feasibility requirements after network separation. This study establishes QAOA-based islanding as a viable quantum approach for critical infrastructure, with structured post-processing as the key enabler of quantum resource efficiency.

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

Overcoming the Impedance Mismatch: A Theoretical Roadmap for Fusing Foundation Models and Knowledge Graphs

arXiv:2606.15656v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern artificial intelligence remains fundamentally divided between the continuous, probabilistic spaces of Foundation Models and the discrete, deterministic structures of Knowledge Graphs. While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) attempts to connect them by serializing graph data into text, we argue this lexical bridging is merely a superficial patch. In this paper, we formalize the underlying structural and geometric friction as the Impedance Mismatch. By categorizing current neuro-symbolic integration strategies into a three-tiered hierarchy, we demonstrate that neither surface-level prompt injection nor continuous representation alignment can preserve the strict logical motifs required for reliable multi-hop reasoning. We define the specific mathematical limits, such as the Lexical Bottleneck and Topological Collapse, that show current architectures will eventually hallucinate or conflate semantic nodes. To achieve true semantic fusion, we propose a rigorous theoretical roadmap. We advocate for natively internalizing discrete symbolic structures through Structured Residual Streams, utilizing Vector Symbolic Architectures for latent sub-graph injection, and performing model updates via Orthogonal Subspace Editing. This actionable framework paves the way for models that seamlessly fuse the precision of symbolic logic with the expressivity of parametric memory.

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

Q-Learning with Fine-Grained Gap-Dependent Regret

arXiv:2510.06647v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study fine-grained gap-dependent regret bounds for model-free reinforcement learning in episodic tabular Markov Decision Processes. Existing model-free algorithms achieve minimax worst-case regret, but their gap-dependent bounds remain coarse and fail to fully capture the structure of suboptimality gaps. We address this limitation by establishing fine-grained gap-dependent regret bounds for both UCB-based and non-UCB-based algorithms. In the UCB-based setting, we develop a novel analytical framework that explicitly separates the analysis of optimal and suboptimal state-action pairs, yielding the first fine-grained regret upper bound for UCB-Hoeffding (Jin et al., 2018). To highlight the generality of this framework, we introduce ULCB-Hoeffding, a new UCB-based algorithm inspired by AMB (Xu et al.,2021) but with a simplified structure, which enjoys fine-grained regret guarantees and empirically outperforms AMB. In the non-UCB-based setting, we revisit the only known algorithm AMB, and identify two key issues in its algorithm design and analysis: improper truncation in the $Q$-updates and violation of the martingale difference condition in its concentration argument. We propose a refined version of AMB that addresses these issues, establishing the first rigorous fine-grained gap-dependent regret for a non-UCB-based method, with experiments demonstrating improved performance over AMB.

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

Graphical Causal Reasoning for Root Cause Analysis in Cloud Networks

arXiv:2606.13532v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cloud-computing relies on large-scale networks which are inherently complex systems. In this paper, we present a novel approach to root cause analysis (RCA) of cloud network incidents, leveraging graph-based causal discovery techniques. Our method addresses the limitations of rule-based automation by introducing a spatiotemporal grouping strategy and an automation ontology to reduce the dimensionality of the problem. We construct a causal graph from binary time series data using bivariate Granger causality and conditional independence tests. For inference, we introduce a probabilistic method that assigns edge-specific conditional probabilities as a function of time lag, allowing for interpretable, time-aware root cause scoring via causal graph traversal. We evaluated the system using a labeled dataset of 35 production incidents from a major cloud provider. The model successfully recalled the correct root cause in 85.7% of incidents and produced an exact match in 74.3%. In production, the deployed system has been used in over 800 real-world incidents, with positive qualitative feedback from network engineers. These results highlight the practicality of a data-driven, causal approach to RCA in dynamic and large-scale operational environments.

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

VisDom: Sparse Novel View Synthesis with Visible Domain Constraint

Sparse novel view synthesis (NVS) remains challenging due to the ambiguity of recovering 3D geometry from few input views. While NeRF- and Gaussian Splatting (GS)-based methods perform well with dense supervision, they often overfit in sparse settings, producing floating artifacts and inconsistent geometry. Silhouette consistency is commonly used as a regularizer, but it remains insufficient, as silhouette-consistent regions can extend beyond the true object geometry. We introduce VisDom, a learning-free geometric constraint that augments classical carving-based visual hull reconstruction by enforcing a minimum multi-view visibility requirement. Specifically, we define a visible domain as the subset of 3D space observed by at least $K$ views and use it as an additional filtering criterion on top of standard silhouette-based reconstruction. This provides a stronger spatial prior in sparse-view settings. We integrate VisDom into both implicit (NeRF) and explicit (GS) pipelines by restricting volumetric sampling and guiding Gaussian placement during optimization. Experiments on three challenging datasets show consistent improvements in sparse-view NVS, enabling high-quality object-centric reconstruction from as few as four input images. Our method is domain-agnostic, requires only silhouettes, and introduces no learned parameters, making it a simple complement to existing approaches. Applying VisDom on top of GaussianObject further improves performance on Omni3D and MipNeRF360, while matching or surpassing it at 22 $\times$ lower training cost.

18.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-16

Mathematicians are developing rules for AI use — other fields should follow

作者: 未知作者

The mathematics community is right to call for transparency, integrity and fairness to be protected when AI tools are used. Researchers in other disciplines could learn from this approach. The mathematics community is right to call for transparency, integrity and fairness to be protected when AI tools are used. Researchers in other disciplines could learn from this approach.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Attribution-Guided and Coverage-Maximized Pruning for Structural MoE Compression

arXiv:2606.18304v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models scale compute efficiently, yet remain expensive to deploy due to their substantial memory footprint and inference overhead. Prior compression methods mainly operate at the expert level, either removing entire experts or ranking experts by coarse-grained importance scores. However, such expert-wise decisions are often too coarse to capture fine-grained redundancy, leading to misallocated pruning budgets and limited compression. To address this problem, we observe that information within MoE experts is highly concentrated in a small subset of channels, leaving substantial redundancy even in experts deemed important. Based on this observation, we propose a structural pruning framework tailored for MoE models. Our method reformulates prune-ratio allocation as a channel-score coverage maximization problem and solves it efficiently using an attribution-based approximation. Experiments on DeepSeek and Qwen MoE models show that our method preserves model accuracy under 50% or 25% structured pruning when combined with 4-bit quantization. On Qwen3-30B-A3B, our approach reduces memory footprint by 5.27$\times$ and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across diverse benchmarks.

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

DiffAttn: Diffusion-Based Drivers' Visual Attention Prediction with LLM-Enhanced Semantic Reasoning

Drivers' visual attention provides critical cues for anticipating latent hazards and directly shapes decision-making and control maneuvers, where its absence can compromise traffic safety. To emulate drivers' perception patterns and advance visual attention prediction for intelligent vehicles, we propose DiffAttn, a diffusion-based framework that formulates this task as a conditional diffusion-denoising process, enabling more accurate modeling of drivers' attention. To capture both local and global scene features, we adopt Swin Transformer as encoder and design a decoder that combines a Feature Fusion Pyramid for cross-layer interaction with dense, multi-scale conditional diffusion to jointly enhance denoising learning and model fine-grained local and global scene contexts. Additionally, a large language model (LLM) layer is incorporated to enhance top-down semantic reasoning and improve sensitivity to safety-critical cues. Extensive experiments on four public datasets demonstrate that DiffAttn achieves state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance, surpassing most video-based, top-down-feature-driven, and LLM-enhanced baselines. Our framework further supports interpretable driver-centric scene understanding and has the potential to improve in-cabin human-machine interaction, risk perception, and drivers' state measurement in intelligent vehicles.

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

A Mechanistic Understanding of Pronoun Fidelity in LLMs

Faithful and robust pronoun use is important for fair and coherent generations, yet large language models largely fail when multiple referents use different pronouns. To study the interplay of reasoning, repetition, and bias in this task, prior work relies exclusively on behavioural approaches, which may not reflect a model's internal workings. Therefore, we provide a mechanistic, model-internal perspective on pronoun fidelity, testing whether three mechanisms – group entity binding (G), recency bias (R), and stereotypical bias (S) – are causally implemented across several SOTA language models. Using Boundless Distributed Alignment Search, we find all three coexist as causal subspaces distributed across network depth. No single mechanism fully explains model behaviour, but a combination of the three consistently accounts for 91-99.5%. An attention head analysis further reveals two competing copying routes; group binding and stereotype share a localized concept-level route that retrieves a bound occupation-pronoun unit, while recency uses a distributed token-level route that repeats surface forms. In sum, pronoun fidelity arises from competition between simultaneously active causal subspaces.

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

SheafStain: Sheaf-Theoretic Schrödinger Bridge for Spatially and Biologically Coherent Virtual Staining

Current virtual staining approaches offer the potential for time- and cost-efficient biomarker quantification in cancer diagnostics and prognostics. However, patch-wise inference for gigapixel whole slide images (WSIs) fails to maintain spatial continuity, yielding artifacts that cause catastrophic mismatches with ground-truth images. Although pathology Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) offer rich representations, their self-attention causes varying global contexts to produce inconsistent embeddings for the same physical region. We formalize and validate this ``context contamination'' as a sheaf-theoretic problem where these embeddings form a presheaf that violates the gluing axiom. To address this, we propose SheafStain, a new approach that reinterprets VFM features as sheaf-like sections for spatially and biologically coherent virtual staining. Specifically, SheafStain integrates class and patch tokens into a Schrödinger Bridge framework as sheaf-like sections. While the class token anchors biological consistency, patch tokens form a per-position spatial map. A backbone co-pretrained on Hematoxylin \& Eosin (H\&E) and Immunohistochemistry (IHC) yields non-degenerate cross-stain stalks, so a single VFM feature space supervises both input conditioning and output stain alignment. Departing from prior work that evaluates on isolated $256 \times 256$ patches and either random-crops or resizes the $1024 \times 1024$ ground truth, we translate at $256 \times 256$ and evaluate on the stitched $1024 \times 1024$ outputs across HER2, ER, PR, and Ki-67. SheafStain demonstrates promising results against six prior methods while mitigating patch-boundary stitching artifacts. Code will soon be released.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Learning Policy from a Single Trajectory in Average-Reward Markov Decision Process

arXiv:2606.16729v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While there is an extensive body of work characterizing the sample complexity of discounted cumulative-reward MDPs, finite sample analyses for average-reward MDPs have been limited, and most existing works rely on restrictive assumptions such as ergodicity or access to a generative model. In this work, we establish the first finite sample complexity guarantees from a single trajectory for weakly communicating average-reward MDPs. To this end, we study the dynamics of a single trajectory in weakly communicating MDPs and based on this analysis, we develop novel model-free methods. Notably, our value-based and policy-based methods provide finite sample complexity guarantees of $\widetilde{O}(1/\varepsilon^2)$ and $\widetilde{O}(1/\varepsilon^4)$ from a single trajectory in weakly communicating MDPs, respectively. Furthermore, we introduce the first model-free method that requires no prior knowledge of problem-dependent quantities for communicating MDPs.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

The Safety-Aware Denoiser for Text Diffusion Models

arXiv:2605.08116v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent work on text diffusion models offers a promising alternative to autoregressive generation, but controlling their safety remains underexplored. Existing safety approaches are geared toward autoregressive models and typically rely on post-hoc filtering or inference-time interventions. These are inadequate for effectively addressing safety risks in text diffusion models. We propose the Safety-Aware Denoiser (SAD), a safety-guidance framework in text diffusion models. The SAD modifies the iterative denoising process such that the text sample at the final denoising step is steered toward provably safe regions of the text space. This inference-time method can integrate safety constraints into the denoiser, avoiding computationally expensive retraining of the underlying diffusion model and enabling flexible, lightweight safety guidance. We evaluate the safety of the generated text using the SAD, with respect to hazard taxonomy, memorization, and jailbreak. Experimental results show that SAD substantially reduces unsafe generations while preserving generation quality, diversity, and fluency, outperforming existing methods. These results demonstrate that our safety guidance during denoising provides an effective and scalable mechanism for enforcing safety in text diffusion models.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Prefill Awareness in Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.12747v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safety-relevant studies of language models, including alignment and jailbreaking evaluations and AI control protocols, often rely on prefilling model outputs. If AI models can recognize and act on the fact their prior assistant messages have been inserted or edited, the effectiveness and validity of these methods could be compromised. We investigate whether frontier language models can distinguish between tampered and untampered assistant-side context, a capability we call prefill awareness. To do so, we construct a binary preference benchmark across three prefill mechanisms, filtering for cases where models show consistent stances. We find that frontier models show substantial prefill awareness: Claude Opus 4.5 detects prefills opposing its preferences in 9-35% of cases with a 0% false positive rate when prompted; additionally, models often revert towards baseline behavior without explicitly reporting that the prefill was foreign. Controlled ablations later also show that detection and resistance rely on different cues, where stylistic mismatch mainly affects whether models flag a prefill as foreign, while preference mismatch mainly affects whether they revert toward their baseline answer. We also examine more realistic agentic settings such as misalignment-continuation evaluations and SWE-bench trajectories, where frontier models sometimes disavow prefilled assistant turns in ways that depend strongly on dataset, task success, and hidden formatting artifacts. Our results indicate that prefill awareness is already a substantial confound for some prefill-based methods. We recommend that model developers track this capability in frontier systems.