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02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Pixels to Proofs: Probabilistically-Safe Latent World Model Control via Parallel Conformal Robust MPC

Authors:
Devesh Nath↗Anutam Srinivasan↗Haoran Yin↗Ruitong Jiang↗Jeffrey Fang↗Glen Chou↗

We present SLS^2, a framework for safe feedback motion planning from pixels using robust model predictive control (MPC) in learned latent world models. Our approach trains an action-conditioned joint-embedding world model with compact Markovian latent states, enabling efficient gradient-based trajectory optimization through learned latent dynamics. To enforce safety for the true system despite imperfect latent predictions, we inform a GPU-accelerated system level synthesis (SLS) robust MPC scheme with conformal prediction to obtain calibrated latent error bounds and robust latent-space constraint sets. We further learn and conformalize a latent constraint checker, allowing the SLS planner to impose probabilistic safety constraints during closed-loop execution. We evaluate our method on vision-based control tasks, where it improves both goal-reaching performance and safety over latent world-model and safe-planning baselines.

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03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Pyramid Self-Contrastive Learning for Single-shot Test-time Ultrasound Image Denoising

Authors:
Jiajing Zhang↗Bingze Dai↗Xi Zhang↗Yue Xu↗Wei-Ning Lee↗

The inherent electronic and speckle noise complicates clinical interpretation of ultrasound images. Conventional denoising methods rely on explicit noise assumptions whose validity diminishes under composite noise conditions. Learning-based methods are usually pretrained in a limited image domain using a labeled dataset, which implies inevitable domain shift in complex in vivo environments. This study proposes a Pyramid Self-Contrastive Learning (PSCL) framework for test-time ultrasound image denoising without pretraining. Given multiple noisy samples from only one-shot imaging, PSCL disentangles anatomical similarity and noise randomness into separate pyramid latent spaces. The clean image is then decoded from the anatomy space while discarding the noise space. We first apply PSCL to synthetic aperture ultrasound (SAU), where an Aperture-to-Aperture loop serves as a self-supervised proxy task to ensure denoising fidelity. Simulation experiments, including noise levels from 0 to 30 dB and inclusion geometries from simple to complex, demonstrated improvements of 69.3% in SNR and 34.4% in CNR. The in vivo results showed 84.8% SNR and 25.7% CNR gains using only two aperture data of the heart in six echocardiographic views, liver, and kidney. PSCL delivers clear images across diverse imaging targets and configurations, paving the way for more reliable anatomical visualization without domain shift and pretraining costs.

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04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Multimodal Ordinal Modeling of Alzheimer's Disease Severity Using Structural MRI and Clinical Data

Authors:
Boris-Stephan Rauchmann↗Jonathan Laib↗Buse Ercik↗Robert Perneczky↗Sergio Altares-L\'opez↗

arXiv:2606.11794v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease (AD) require accurate and scalable tools for assessing disease severity, yet current clinical staging remains time-intensive and prone to variability. We propose an attention-enhanced multimodal machine learning framework with ordinal regression for automated and interpretable AD severity staging. The framework integrates T1-weighted MRI with demographic and genetic variables and compares unimodal and multimodal architectures using ordinal and non-ordinal prediction heads. Models were trained and validated using cohort-stratified splits derived from the ADNI, AIBL, and NIFD datasets. A strictly held-out test set was constructed using subjects excluded from all training, validation, preprocessing, and hyperparameter tuning procedures, with subject-level splitting employed throughout to prevent data leakage. Among unimodal approaches, the T1-weighted MRI model achieved slightly higher adjacent-stage accuracy (0.963) and agreement with clinical staging (QWK 0.444) than the tabular model (QWK 0.433). Integrating imaging, demographic, and genetic information improved overall performance. The multimodal non-ordinal baseline achieved the lowest prediction error (MAE 0.340), whereas the ordinal multimodal model achieved the highest adjacent-stage accuracy (0.970) and strongest agreement with clinical staging (QWK 0.549). These findings indicate that ordinal formulations better capture the ordered structure of the CDR scale and yield predictions more consistent with clinical staging. Explainability analyses using Grad CAM++ and SHAP demonstrated anatomically and clinically plausible model behavior, supporting transparent decision-making. Overall, attention-based multimodal learning with ordinal regression represents a robust, interpretable, and scalable approach for automated AD severity staging and AI-assisted clinical decision support.

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05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Accidental Symmetry in the Tavis-Cummings Model via the Schwinger Boson Representation

Authors:
Plato Deliyannis↗Iman Marvian↗

arXiv:2606.12813v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Jaynes-Cummings (JC) Hamiltonian is a paradigmatic model of light-matter interaction and, more generally, qubit-boson interactions, widely used across atomic, optical, and superconducting qubit platforms. In the multi-qubit setting, where n qubits are identically coupled to a single boson mode, this interaction is known as the Tavis-Cummings (TC) Hamiltonian. The structure of the TC model is usually understood in terms of two standard symmetries: permutation invariance of the qubits and a U(1) symmetry associated with conservation of the total excitation number. Here we identify an additional, independent "accidental" symmetry of the TC Hamiltonian and construct the corresponding conserved observable. We show that, for n>2 qubits, this symmetry imposes strong constraints on the realizable unitary transformations. These constraints persist in the presence of the global $J_z$ Hamiltonian, but are removed by adding $J_z^2$, even though $J_z^2$ preserves both permutation invariance and the U(1) symmetry. Finally, we explain the origin of this previously unnoticed symmetry using Schwinger's boson representation of angular momentum. These restrictions have important implications for controllability of the TC system and for its applications to quantum computing, which are investigated further in a companion paper.

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

Optimized Quantum States for Sensing in the Presence of Loss and Phase Noise

Authors:
Shruti Maliakal↗Zachary Mann↗Christopher Wipf↗Rana X Adhikari↗Su Direkci↗Yanbei Chen↗

arXiv:2606.19649v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Squeezed vacuum lets gravitational-wave detectors and other quantum sensors surpass the standard quantum limit, and is optimal in the loss-limited regime; phase noise breaks this optimality. Numerically optimizing the quantum Fisher information across the loss and phase-noise landscape, we identify non-Gaussian states that outperform any Gaussian state. These fall into three classes: Fock-like, cubic-phase-like, and states with discrete rotational symmetry. Limiting the average number of photons in the input state to $\bar{n}=5$, with $1-\eta = 5\%$ photon loss and 200 mrad phase noise, the non-Gaussian advantage reaches up to 2.2 dB. Furthermore, we observe that the non-Gaussian advantage can persist even when the measurement strategy is homodyne detection.

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07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

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

Authors:
Oleg Smirnov↗

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

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

Epipolar Geometry Improves Video Generation Models

Authors:
Orest Kupyn↗Th\'eo Uscidda↗Marta Tintore Gazulla↗Fabian Manhardt↗Federico Tombari↗Christian Rupprecht↗

Video generation models have advanced significantly through the latent diffusion transformers trained with rectified flow techniques. Yet these models still struggle with geometric inconsistencies, unstable motion, and visual artifacts that break the illusion of realistic 3D scenes. 3D-consistent video generation could significantly impact numerous downstream applications in generation and reconstruction tasks. We explore how epipolar geometry constraints improve modern video diffusion models. Despite using massive training data, these models fail to capture fundamental geometric principles. We align diffusion models using pairwise epipolar geometry constraints via preference-based optimization, directly addressing unstable trajectories and geometric artifacts through mathematically principled geometric enforcement. Our approach efficiently enforces geometric principles without requiring end-to-end differentiability. Evaluation demonstrates that classical geometric constraints provide more stable optimization signals than modern learned metrics. Training on static scenes with dynamic cameras ensures metric quality while the model generalizes to various dynamic scenes. By bridging data-driven learning with classical computer vision, we reduce epipolar error by 31% and improve human-rated consistency from 54% to 72% without compromising visual quality.

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

SpikeDecoder: Realizing the GPT Architecture with Spiking Neural Networks

Authors:
Claas Beger↗Florian Walter↗Alois Knoll↗

arXiv:2606.12287v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Transformer architecture is widely regarded as the most powerful tool for natural language processing, but due to a high number of complex operations, it inherently faces the issue of high energy consumption. To address this issue, we consider Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), which are an energy-efficient alternative to conventional Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) due to their naturally event-driven approach to processing information. However, this inherently makes them difficult to train. Often, many SNN-based models circumvent this issue by converting pre-trained ANNs. More recently, attempts have been made to design directly trainable SNN-based adaptations of the Transformer model structure. Although the results showed great promise, the application field was computer vision. Moreover, the proposed model incorporates only encoder blocks. In this paper, we propose SpikeDecoder, a fully SNN-based implementation of the Transformer decoder block, for applications in natural language processing. In a series of experiments, we analyze the impact of exchanging different blocks of the ANN model with spike-based alternatives to identify trade-offs and significant sources of performance loss. We further investigate the role of residual connections and the selection of SNN-compatible normalization techniques. Besides the work on the model architecture, we formulate and compare different embedding methods to project text data into spikes. Finally, we demonstrate that our proposed SNN-based decoder block reduces the theoretical energy consumption by 87% to 93% compared to the ANN baseline.

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10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

A polarity-aware multi-relational model for the signed interaction prediction in biological networks

Authors:
Ziye Zhou↗Meijie Wang↗Lun Yu↗

arXiv:2407.07357v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Predicting signed interactions in biological networks is crucial for understanding drug mechanisms and facilitating drug repurposing. While deep graph models have demonstrated success in modeling complex biological systems, existing approaches often fail to distinguish between positive and negative interactions, limiting their utility for precise pharmacological predictions. In this study, we propose a novel deep graph model, PAMR (polarity-aware multi-relational model), designed to predict both polar (e.g., activation, inhibition) and non-polar (e.g., binding, affect) chemical-gene interactions. Our model integrates graph convolutional networks with tensor decomposition to enhance feature representation and incorporates a conflict-aware sampling strategy to resolve polarity ambiguities. We introduce new evaluation metrics, polarity discrimination score (PDS) and CP@100, to assess the model's ability to differentiate interaction types. Experimental results demonstrate that PAMR outperforms baseline models, achieving superior classification accuracy and improved discrimination of polar edges. Specifically, PAMR-CL attains a Macro AUROC of 0.9072 and CP@100 of 0.974, surpassing RGCN, GraphSAGE, TransE, and BioNet baselines. A case study on nicotine further identifies two novel chemical-gene suppression links, S100A6 and SPP1, that are corroborated by independent experimental literature. Furthermore, we analyze the impact of subgraph components on predictive performance, revealing that additional network structures do not always enhance accuracy. These findings highlight the importance of polarity-aware modeling in drug discovery and network pharmacology, providing a scalable computational framework for polarity-aware chemical-gene interaction prediction and network pharmacology analysis.

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11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Raw-Curve Quantum Fingerprints: A Mahalanobis Authentication Framework with Drift Early Warning and Adversarial Detection

Authors:
Geyuyan Ma↗Xiangdong Meng↗Yangyang Fei↗Zhiqiang Fan↗Hanshi Zhao↗Chenhui Wang↗Haoran Yang↗Weilong Wang↗Zheng Shan↗

arXiv:2606.11644v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum cloud platforms are poised to deliver powerful computing capabilities, but users have no direct means to verify which physical device executes their workload. This lack of transparency enables hardware substitution attacks, where a malicious adversary could redirect a job to a substituted or inferior processor. We present a general authentication framework that addresses this problem by constructing multi-dimensional quantum fingerprints from raw measurement data. Without any curve fitting, we directly concatenate the raw statistics of complementary experiments into a high-dimensional feature vector that preserves subtle device-specific information. A Mahalanobis nearest-neighbor classifier achieves 100\% benign authentication accuracy on three superconducting processors over a three-week chronological split. The classifier naturally yields an authentication confidence $C_{\mathrm{claimed}}$ which reveals device-specific safety margins and motivates per-device alert thresholds. We assess the framework's robustness under two distinct scenarios. Under additive isotropic Gaussian noise, $C_{\mathrm{claimed}}$ decays predictably at a rate explained by inverse covariance traces, enabling an early warning mechanism. Against white-box adversarial perturbations, the same confidence threshold detects $L_2$ targeted attacks with near-perfect success and reveals device-dependent empirical thresholds for $L_\infty$ attacks, while untargeted and sparse attacks are ineffective. The proposed framework thus unifies fingerprint extraction, drift-resilient authentication, proactive health monitoring, and adversarial defense, offering a practical step toward trustworthy quantum cloud computing.

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

OTCHA: Optimal Transport-driven Confidence-aware Latent Hub Alignment for Multi-View Medical Image Classification

Authors:
Jiwoong Yang↗Haejun Chung↗Ikbeom Jang↗

Multi-view imaging, such as mammography and chest radiography, is a standard component of clinical practice. However, medical images are often unregistered and contain view-specific artifacts or irrelevant background cues that can obscure diagnostically relevant findings. Many existing methods directly fuse per-view representations, allowing such irrelevant content to contaminate the fused embedding and reducing robustness under varying view configurations. We propose OTCHA, a confidence-aware latent hub token alignment module based on optimal transport (OT) that refines patch tokens before fusion for multi-view classification. OTCHA introduces a set of learnable latent hub tokens shared across views. For each view, we compute an OT plan between patch tokens and hub tokens that jointly considers feature similarity and geometry, and augment the OT formulation with token-conditional dustbins to enable partial matching and discard irrelevant tokens. The resulting transport plan provides token-wise matching confidence, which gates hub-mediated message passing and weights a novel optimal-transport-based representation alignment loss to stabilize refinement. Experiments on three multi-view medical image datasets demonstrate consistent improvements over competing baselines across diverse anatomies and view configurations. Our code is available at https://github.com/labhai/OTCHA.

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13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Curvature-Guided Geometric Representation for Protein-Ligand Binding Affinity Prediction

Authors:
Shuai Li↗Chuan-Xian Ren↗Yuhao Li↗Ziqi Huang↗Yue Pan↗Mingzhe Tang↗Hong Yan↗

arXiv:2606.14159v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protein-ligand binding affinity (PLA) prediction is critical in drug discovery. Despite the notable advancements in machine learning-based approaches, existing methods struggle to jointly characterize local geometric organization and globally coordinated cross-molecular interactions, limiting their ability to model complex binding mechanisms. Here, we propose RicciBind, a geometric representation framework that integrates curvature-guided hierarchical structure learning with optimal transport (OT)-based cross-domain alignment to model molecular interactions. Specifically, RicciBind leverages Ricci curvature to capture local interaction tightness within molecular structures, enhancing structural awareness and organizing atomic interactions into curvature-aware hierarchical representations. An OT-based cluster matching mechanism then aligns protein and ligand clusters across heterogeneous domains under geometric constraints, enabling globally consistent correspondences and revealing higher-order interaction patterns beyond local neighborhoods. By coupling curvature-guided structure encoding with OT-driven cross-domain alignment, RicciBind effectively models complex interaction semantics and substantially improves both the accuracy and interpretability of binding affinity prediction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RicciBind achieved superior predictive performance and generalization across PLA benchmarks and virtual screening tasks. Ablation studies further confirmed the essential role of Ricci curvature in enhancing molecular interaction representations.

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14.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Predicting optimal growth temperatures of bacteria using learned structural information from a single protein

Authors:
Hoffert↗Myerscough↗Dragone↗N. B↗Gebert↗M. J↗Silberg↗J. J↗Fierer↗

Temperature is a fundamental determinant of bacterial physiology and ecology. Optimal growth temperature (OGT) is highly variable across species, contributing to differences in where and when species are most likely to thrive. Although the OGTs for most bacteria remain unknown, the increasing availability of genomes from uncultivated and cultivated taxa has made it advantageous to build genomic, cultivation-independent models to infer OGT. However, pre-existing genomic models often lack the generalizability and mechanistic grounding required for robust inferences of OGT. We propose a novel framework for predicting bacterial OGT which uses learned protein structural signatures of thermal adaptation. We hypothesize that biophysical tradeoffs which dictate enzymatic functions across variable temperatures provide a more robust empirical basis for OGT prediction than broad genomic features. Our OGT-predicting model, ROSEATE, is based on a single gene, adenylate kinase (ADK), that encodes for a ubiquitous enzyme essential for energy homeostasis. ROSEATE uses high-dimensional latent space encoding via MSA Transformer, a protein language model which embeds ADKs in a manner which preserves biophysical information about embedded proteins. We show that the accuracy of the ROSEATE model is on par with other genome-based models, has a high degree of phylogenetic generalizability, and the ESM embeddings effectively capture key temperature-adaptive enzyme characteristics derived from AlphaFold structures. Because ROSEATE is based on analyses of a single ubiquitous protein, it can be used with metagenomic data to infer the community-level variation in bacterial OGTs. We demonstrate this feature of ROSEATE by reconstructing ADK sequences from over 500 environmental and host-associated metagenomes, successfully distinguishing community-wide thermal preferences across diverse habitats, from polar oceans to mammalian guts. By transitioning from genomic proxies to informationally dense protein structural features, this work provides an efficient, interpretable tool for predicting bacterial OGTs across taxa and whole communities.

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15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

TacCoRL: Integrating Tactile Feedback into VLA via Simulation

Authors:
Siyu Ma↗Yuqi Liang↗Chang Yu↗Yunuo Chen↗Hao Su↗Yixin Zhu↗Yin Yang↗Chenfanfu Jiang↗

arXiv:2606.11743v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models provide strong visual, language, and action priors for robot manipulation, but visual observations alone often miss the local contact state required for contact-rich tasks. We present TacCoRL, a scalable framework that injects Tactile feedback into VLA policies and improves them through sim-real Co-training and simulation-based reinforcement learning (RL), without requiring large-scale tactile pretraining or extensive real-world contact exploration. The key idea is not only adding touch as an input, but learning how contact readings should modulate action responses in near-failure states that are rare in demonstrations and risky to collect on hardware. We use a real-aligned simulator as a closed-loop training environment for contact interaction. Mixed simulated and real trajectories first warm-start tactile-conditioned actions in the pretrained policy. Reinforcement learning with verifiable task rewards then optimizes the policy using simulated contact rollouts. It reinforces tactile-conditioned actions that lead to task completion, while a supervised objective on real trajectories keeps the refined policy anchored to deployment visual, tactile, and action distributions. The resulting policy transfers directly to the real robot without privileged simulation state or online real-world RL. Across four bimanual contact-rich tasks, the final visuo-tactile policy achieves an average success rate of 72.5%, compared to baseline of 50.0%. Result videos and more details are available at https://tac-corl.github.io/

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

Random Erasing vs. Model Inversion: A Promising Defense or a False Hope?

Authors:
Viet-Hung Tran↗Ngoc-Bao Nguyen↗Son T. Mai↗Hans Vandierendonck↗Ira Assent↗Alex Kot↗Ngai-Man Cheung↗

Model Inversion (MI) attacks pose a significant privacy threat by reconstructing private training data from machine learning models. While existing defenses primarily concentrate on model-centric approaches, the impact of data on MI robustness remains largely unexplored. In this work, we explore Random Erasing (RE), a technique traditionally used for improving model generalization under occlusion, and uncover its surprising effectiveness as a defense against MI attacks. Specifically, our novel feature space analysis shows that models trained with RE-images introduce a significant discrepancy between the features of MI-reconstructed images and those of the private data. At the same time, features of private images remain distinct from other classes and well-separated from different classification regions. These effects collectively degrade MI reconstruction quality and attack accuracy while maintaining reasonable natural accuracy. Furthermore, we explore two critical properties of RE including Partial Erasure and Random Location. Partial Erasure prevents the model from observing entire objects during training. We find this has a significant impact on MI, which aims to reconstruct the entire objects. Random Location of erasure plays a crucial role in achieving a strong privacy-utility trade-off. Our findings highlight RE as a simple yet effective defense mechanism that can be easily integrated with existing privacy-preserving techniques. Extensive experiments across 37 setups demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in the privacy-utility trade-off. The results consistently demonstrate the superiority of our defense over existing methods across different MI attacks, network architectures, and attack configurations. For the first time, we achieve a significant degradation in attack accuracy without a decrease in utility for some configurations.

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

Renewable Lasso without Batch-Number Constraints: A Gradient-Enhanced Approach

Authors:
Junzhuo Gao↗Ling Peng↗Xu Guo↗Heng Lian↗

arXiv:2606.11738v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study online estimation for high-dimensional generalized linear models with streaming data. First, for the non-distributed setting, we propose a gradient-enhanced surrogate loss that approximates the cumulative loss using only historical summaries, which modifies and improves upon the existing renewable estimation approach for the same model in the high-dimensional setting, and removes the batch-number constraint in previous studies. We then extend the method to distributed streaming data under the master-client architecture, where batches are partitioned across sites and only summaries (gradient vectors) are exchanged. Instead of directing applying the popular method of Jordan et al. (2019) to the surrogate quadratic loss, our adjusted approach does not require the clients to compute the full surrogate loss. We derive non-asymptotic error bounds under the high-dimensional scaling, without the stringent constraint on the number of batches in the previous studies. Simulation results under linear and logistic models, together with a real-data application, show improved accuracy over existing renewable estimators.

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18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

The Lov\'{a}sz Local Lemma: Foundations and Applications

Authors:
Igal Sason↗

arXiv:2603.07245v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The Lov\'{a}sz Local Lemma (LLL) is a central tool in probabilistic combinatorics, providing a sufficient condition under which a finite collection of undesirable events with limited dependencies can be simultaneously avoided with positive probability. This paper offers a self-contained expository treatment of the lemma and its strengthened versions, emphasizing mathematical foundations, conceptual clarity, and applications. We begin with a pedagogically motivated proof of the LLL based entirely on unconditional probability inequalities. Particular attention is given to the symmetric form of the lemma and several subsequent strengthenings. The paper also discusses a variety of classical applications of both the symmetric and asymmetric forms of the LLL in combinatorics and graph theory, including bounds for the edge-disjoint paths problem, satisfiability of Boolean formulas in conjunctive normal form, lower bounds on diagonal and off-diagonal Ramsey numbers, hypergraph coloring results, structural properties of directed graphs, and acyclic graph colorings. Additional observations and refinements are provided throughout. We also introduce the algorithmic framework of Moser and Tardos, highlighting its constructive counterpart to the LLL, together with an introduction to the entropy-compression principle. The lopsided LLL, a refinement of the LLL, is presented along with an application to the Latin transversal problem. We further discuss the cluster-expansion lemma and its relation to the LLL, and present an alternative treatment of the Latin transversal problem from the cluster-expansion perspective that yields an improved result. The paper concludes with a high-level overview of the iterated LLL, also known as the semi-random method.

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

PragReST: Self-Reinforcing Counterfactual Reasoning for Pragmatic Language Understanding

Authors:
Jihyung Park↗Minchao Huang↗Leqi Liu↗Elias Stengel-Eskin↗

Natural language understanding often depends on meanings that are implied rather than explicitly stated, requiring pragmatic reasoning. Despite strong performance on math and logical reasoning, large language models (LLMs) still struggle with making pragmatic inferences, often choosing literal interpretations. To improve LLM pragmatic reasoning, we introduce PragReST, a self-supervised framework that constructs pragmatic QA data, generates counterfactual reasoning traces, and trains models to internalize them through supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, without human-labeled training data or distillation from a stronger teacher. Across four pragmatic benchmarks (PragMega, Ludwig, MetoQA, and AltPrag), PragReST improves over backbone models, task-specific pragmatic tuning baselines, and non-counterfactual variants of the same pipeline. On accuracy-based benchmarks, PragReST improves over the instruct backbone by 5.37 and 5.50% (absolute) for Qwen3-8B and Qwen3-14B, respectively. Our error analysis and ablations underscore the importance of counterfactual reasoning: PragReST primarily reduces errors caused by failures to contrast observed utterances with plausible alternatives, and removing counterfactual reasoning substantially reduces performance. Moreover, our training preserves out-of-domain performance on general-knowledge and mathematical reasoning benchmarks.

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21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

A Cross-Model VLM-Judge Protocol for Single-Image 3D Mesh Quality (and Why Cheap Proxies Fall Short)

Authors:
Ali Asaria↗Tony Salomone↗Deep Gandhi↗

arXiv:2606.18451v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Single-image-to-3D generators are improving quickly, but there is no agreed, human-free way to tell whether one generated mesh is better than another. Practitioners commonly rely on cheap automatic proxies (render-space CLIP similarity and mesh geometry-validity statistics), yet how well these track perceived quality is unestablished. We make two contributions. First, we propose and validate a reproducible VLM-judge evaluation protocol: a fixed 24-view headless render rig, two independent vision-language judge families, and a mandatory position-bias correction that queries both presentation orders and keeps only order-consistent verdicts. The two judge families agree substantially with each other (Cohen's kappa = 0.66), well above the chance-agreement floor. Second, using this protocol as the reference, we show the cheap proxies do not substitute for it. Geometry validity is only a weak signal on average (because, as we show, it is bimodal) and stays below our pre-registered target, while render-CLIP is at chance. A learned Bradley-Terry head collapses onto a single manifoldness statistic (giving render-CLIP a negative weight) and matches geometry-only exactly, so learning the feature weights buys nothing. The proxy is also bimodal: it is significantly above chance on contrasts with visible geometric defects but at chance on ambiguous contrasts, consistent with geometry validity tracking the judge only when the defect is visually salient. We therefore recommend the VLM-judge protocol as a reliable, reproducible evaluator under the conditions tested (two feed-forward generators on Google Scanned Objects, with a face-drop degradation regime) and advise against geometry/CLIP proxies as optimization targets.

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22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

ROVE: Unlocking Human Interventions for Humanoid Manipulation via Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Wei Xiao↗Weiliang Tang↗Yuying Ge↗Hui Zhou↗Yao Mu↗Li Zhang↗Yixiao Ge↗

arXiv:2606.17011v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Human interventions provide crucial corrective signals for post-training Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. However, enabling seamless humanoid interventions is a formidable systems challenge due to complex whole-body kinematics and dexterous-hand control. Consequently, the collected intervention trajectories are often suboptimal, and methods that rely on human interventions as expert supervision can absorb hesitant, inefficient, or even erroneous behaviors. To address both the system and algorithmic challenges, we propose ROVE, a reinforcement learning framework for humanoid VLA post-training with imperfect human interventions. First, ROVE introduces a human-in-the-loop pipeline capable of collecting deployment and intervention data for humanoid manipulation. Second, it utilizes Optimistic Value Estimation (OVE) to prioritize high-value behaviors from mixed-quality trajectories. To further robustify value estimation, we incorporate cross-embodiment human experience videos to provide rich supervision for long-tailed failure and recovery modes. The resulting critic yields informative advantage signals, steering the VLA actor to focus on high-value behaviors rather than indiscriminately imitating all actions. On challenging real-world contact-rich and fine-grained humanoid manipulation tasks, ROVE outperforms experience-learning baselines and consistently improves across multiple rollout-intervention iterations.

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23.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Stable size-biasing and the positive scale-mixture order of generalized Gaussian laws

Authors:
Domingos S. P. Salazar↗

arXiv:2606.18458v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Let $X_r\sim N_r(0,1)$ be the centered unit-scale generalized Gaussian random variable with density proportional to $\exp(-|x|^r/2)$. We prove that, for $p,q>0$, there exists a strictly positive random variable $V$, independent of $X_q$, such that $X_p\stackrel{d}{=}VX_q$ if and only if $p\le q$. Moreover, the law of $V$ is unique. For $pq$, the required Mellin quotient, viewed as the candidate characteristic function of $\log V$, is unbounded by Stirling's formula, and hence cannot be a characteristic function. The factor laws form a multiplicative cocycle, $V_{p,r}\stackrel{d}{=}V_{p,q}V_{q,r}$, for $p\le q\le r$, where the factors on the right-hand side are independent copies. Thus the Mellin quotient isolated by Dytso, Bustin, Poor and Shamai is realized constructively throughout the $p

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24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

HawkesNest: A Multi-Axis Synthetic Benchmark for Spatiotemporal Pattern Complexity

Authors:
Yahya Aalaila↗Sumantrak Mukherjee↗Gerrit Gro{\ss}mann↗Sebastian Vollmer↗

arXiv:2606.16863v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluation of spatiotemporal point process (STPP) models relies heavily on opaque real-world datasets, where latent generative structure is unknown and model failures are difficult to attribute. We introduce HawkesNest, a generator-aligned benchmark for controlled spatiotemporal pattern complexity built on a multivariate Hawkes backbone. HawkesNest defines four complexity axes: space–time entanglement, background heterogeneity, cross-type interaction, and domain topology. Each axis is associated with a deterministic index computed from the latent data-generating mechanism. By varying these axes while holding global rate, stability, and simulation budget fixed, HawkesNest enables diagnostic stress tests of STPP models under known structural difficulty. We verify that the indices are monotone and nearly orthogonal under controlled sweeps. We illustrate its use by showing that Hawkes-family baselines degrade under joint heterogeneity–entanglement complexity, even though they are structurally aligned with the Hawkes data-generating backbone. We further show that HawkesNest exposes neural-model sensitivity: AutoSTPP remains vulnerable under isolated increases in space–time entanglement. Code. Available at https://github.com/YahyaAalaila/HawkesNest

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

AlignDrive: Aligned Lateral-Longitudinal Planning for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

Authors:
Yanhao Wu↗Haoyang Zhang↗Fei He↗Rui Wu↗Yanhu Shan↗Congpei Qiu↗Liang Gao↗Wei Ke↗Tong Zhang↗

Practical autonomous driving requires models that generalize by reasoning through spatial-temporal possibilities to exclude unsafe outcomes. While state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods use parallel planning architectures, they fail to explicitly couple speed decisions with agent behavior along the driving path, leading to suboptimal coordination. To address this, we propose a cascaded framework that transforms longitudinal planning from an independent prediction task into a path-conditioned reasoning process. On the model side, we introduce an anchor-based regression design that conditions longitudinal prediction on the lateral drive path, and reformulate longitudinal planning as 1D displacement prediction along the path. This reduces geometric uncertainty and sharpens the model's focus on interaction-driven dynamics. On the data side, we introduce a planning-oriented data augmentation strategy that simulates rare safety-critical events by programmatically inserting agents and relabeling longitudinal targets to enforce collision avoidance. Evaluated on the challenging Bench2Drive benchmark, our method achieves SOTA performance with a driving score of 89.07 and a success rate of 73.18%, demonstrating significantly improved coordination and safety. Further evaluation on Fail2Drive confirms strong generalization to rare edge cases where parallel formulations typically fail. Project page:https://yanhaowu.github.io/AlignDrive/.

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