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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Characteristics and Outcomes of Gene-Elusive Dilated Cardiomyopathy

Background and Aims Genetic testing in dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) guides risk stratification and family screening. Likely pathogenic or pathogenic (LP/P) variants are identified in approximately one-third of patients, leaving many without a genetic diagnosis. Cohort studies suggest that "gene-elusive" patients have a lower risk of adverse events. This study aims to better characterise this group and identify factors associated with adverse outcomes. Methods Consecutive and unrelated DCM patients undergoing genetic testing and returning no LP/P variants were retrospectively recruited and compared to two control cohorts of DCM patients carrying LP/P variants in LMNA and TTN for a primary composite endpoint of end-stage heart failure (ESHF) or malignant ventricular arrhythmia (MVA). Results Among patients without prior MVA, the composite endpoint occurred in 36/423 (8.5%) gene-elusive, 14/39 (35.9%) LMNA and 11/100 (11%) TTN cardiomyopathy patients (log-rank p

02.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Robust semi-supervised scRNA-seq integration from virtual adversarial learning

Single-cell RNA sequencing integration methods that rely solely on transcriptomic data often struggle to preserve fine-grained distinctions between closely related cell subtypes. As a result, cell populations that are separable in the raw data may become over-mixed after integration, reducing biological resolution and interpretability. Incorporating marker gene information can potentially address these issues; however, the variability and complexity of available marker sets limit their effective application. To address this, we introduce scCRAFT+, a semi-supervised integration model that innovatively incorporates marker gene information through Virtual Adversarial Training (VAT). By jointly optimizing marker-derived supervision and transcriptome-wide representations, VAT enforces local prediction smoothness among transcriptionally similar cells, improving robustness to noisy marker annotations while enhancing both integration quality and cell type auto-annotation. This targeted approach significantly enhances annotation accuracy and robustness, particularly when faced with incomplete or incorrect marker gene sets. Benchmarking shows that scCRAFT+ achieves consistently stronger performance than current unsupervised and supervised integration approaches, resulting in improved integration quality and biologically meaningful sub-cell type auto-annotations.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Battery detection of XRay images using transfer learning

The need for detecting and sorting batteries is drastically increasing for many applications. This study proves the potential of transfer learning in predicting whether the image contains a battery or not, the location and identifying three types of batteries, namely: prismatic, pouch, and cylindrical Lithium-Ion Batteries (LIB). Particularly, it focuses on the transfer learning method in two applications: Training a large-scale dataset to detect electronic devices using a pre-trained YOLOv5m, then using these latter trained weights to detect and classify the batteries. The precision of battery detection achieves 94%, which outperforms the pretrained YOLOv5m weights with 5%, in 22 ms inference time.

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

Fault Lines: Navigating Ethics and Responsible AI Where National Policy Meets Local Practice in Public Sector Transformation

arXiv:2606.13039v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The UK government has adopted a pro-AI stance to help transform public service delivery in the face of severe financial pressures, but the path to translate this vision into responsible AI practice remains ill-defined. While UK policy is often set at the national level, local authorities are responsible for most public service delivery, and the rapid advance of AI-first narratives in the public sector is exposing fault lines in knowledge and practice at this national-local interface. This paper examines how responsible AI is interpreted and implemented at the interface between the UK's central government and local authorities, taking the high-stakes area of Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) as a case study. We present a thematic analysis of 17 semi-structured interviews with policymakers, practitioners, and third-sector professionals to identify barriers and enabling conditions for responsible AI where national policy meets local practice. We identify five interconnected challenges facing local authorities: shadow usage of AI and data privacy risks, market-government asymmetry in AI provision, insufficient workforce readiness, a lack of standardised definitions and measurements, and gaps in human accountability. For each, participants proposed actionable steps, from strengthening data protection frameworks and rebalancing the market-government relationship to enhancing workforce capacity. Our examination of SEND brings these challenges into sharper focus, showing how high-stakes decisions affecting vulnerable children and families intensify tensions around accountability, fairness, and human oversight, exposing the limits of a principle-based regulatory approach. We argue that responsible public sector AI requires both national policy adjustments and structural reforms to institutional capacity, values, and governance mechanisms at the local level.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Dual-Channel Grounded World Modeling (DCGWM): Structural Prevention of Objective Interference Collapse via Heterogeneous External Grounding with Inward-Only Gradient Flow

arXiv:2606.18688v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) are a leading approach to world model representation learning. We identify a failure mode in JEPA-based world models grounded against two qualitatively distinct external signals: physical dynamics (sparse, high-magnitude, constraint-satisfying gradient corrections) and social-behavioral dynamics (diffuse, distribution-matching corrections). We term this Objective Interference Collapse (OIC): we argue that joint learning in a shared latent space causes the dominant channel to systematically collapse the subordinate channel's representational subspace, in a manner not resolvable by loss weighting alone. We propose Dual-Channel Grounded World Modeling (DCGWM), designed to structurally prevent OIC through a partitioned latent space (physical subspace Z_p, behavioral subspace Z_b) with inward-only gradient flow. A Physical Grounding Channel updates only Z_p via VICReg-style alignment to physical measurements; a Social-Behavioral Grounding Channel updates only Z_b via alignment to trajectories from an emergent multi-agent simulation. An Inter-Channel Interface Module couples the subspaces at the task level without cross-subspace gradients. An Asymmetric Grounding Adherence Loss penalizes rollout drift with a hard hinge for physical violations and a soft KL for behavioral divergence. A Generative Rendering Layer is architecturally isolated from the latent world model. We present three theoretical results: the partition removes the gradient-interference pathway implicated in OIC; each grounded subspace inherits anti-collapse guarantees from its alignment objective; and generative isolation is necessary under a stated assumption on the generative objective's geometry. This manuscript establishes the problem formulation and architecture; experimental validation is ongoing and will be reported in a future revision.

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

Sharing quantum indistinguishability with multiple parties

arXiv:2512.15199v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum indistinguishability of non-orthogonal quantum states is a valuable resource in quantum information applications such as cryptography and randomness generation. In this article, we present a sequential state-discrimination scheme that enables multiple parties to share quantum uncertainty, in terms of the max relative entropy, generated by a single party. Our scheme is based upon maximum-confidence measurements and takes advantages of weak measurements to allow a number of parties to perform state discrimination on a single quantum system. We review known sequential state discrimination and show how our scheme would work through a number of examples where ensembles may or may not contain symmetries. Our results will have a role to play in understanding the ultimate limits of sequential information extraction and guide the development of quantum resource sharing in sequential settings.

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

ResidualPlanner+: a scalable matrix mechanism for marginals and beyond

arXiv:2305.08175v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Noisy marginals are a common form of confidentiality protecting data release and are useful for many downstream tasks such as contingency table analysis, construction of Bayesian networks, and even synthetic data generation. Privacy mechanisms that provide unbiased noisy answers to linear queries (such as marginals) are known as matrix mechanisms. We propose ResidualPlanner and ResidualPlanner+, two highly scalable matrix mechanisms. ResidualPlanner is both optimal and scalable for answering marginal queries with Gaussian noise, while ResidualPlanner+ provides support for more general workloads, such as combinations of marginals and range queries or prefix-sum queries. ResidualPlanner can optimize for many loss functions that can be written as a convex function of marginal variances (prior work was restricted to just one predefined objective function). ResidualPlanner can optimize the accuracy of marginals in large scale settings in seconds, even when the previous state of the art (HDMM) runs out of memory. It even runs on datasets with 100 attributes in a couple of minutes. Furthermore, ResidualPlanner can efficiently compute variance/covariance values for each marginal (prior methods quickly run out of memory, even for relatively small datasets). ResidualPlanner+ provides support for more complex workloads that combine marginal and range/prefix-sum queries (e.g., a marginal on race, a range query on age, and a combined race/age tabulation that answers age range queries for each race). It even supports custom user-defined workloads on different attributes. With this added flexibility, ResidualPlanner+ is not necessarily optimal, however it is still extremely scalable and outperforms the prior state-of-the-art (HDMM) on prefix-sum queries both in terms of accuracy and speed.

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

ChartFI: Benchmarking Faithfulness and Insightfulness of Chart Descriptions from Multimodal Large Language Models

Chart descriptions are essential for accessibility, cross-modal retrieval, and assisting readers in extracting insights from complex visualizations. As multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly adopted for automated chart description generation, a critical question arises: how faithfully and insightfully do these models actually describe charts? Current benchmarks fall short on two fronts: existing datasets consist of simple, homogeneous charts paired with shallow, fact-enumerating descriptions; and prevailing metrics fail to capture the multi-faceted nature of description quality. To address these gaps, we present the Chart Faithfulness and Insightfulness Benchmark (ChartFI-Bench). We first summarize four dimensions that characterize high-quality chart descriptions: factual accuracy, salient feature emphasis, domain-informed guidance, and chart-text complementarity. Guided by these dimensions, we construct a high-quality benchmark comprising 896 chart-description pairs, which feature visually complex charts and semantically rich descriptions. Furthermore, we design four aligned evaluation metrics – Faithfulness, Coverage, Informativeness, and Acuity – to systematically assess the quality of descriptions across these dimensions. Experiments conducted on mainstream MLLMs demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework and reveal common weaknesses among existing models.

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

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

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.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Topological Quantum Interferometry

arXiv:2606.19730v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Structured light provides high-dimensional Hilbert spaces holding tremendous potential for fundamental quantum optics and quantum technologies. However, existing characterization methods, like Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference, typically assume perfectly tuned conditions, overlooking the geometric physics governing spatial mode evolution. Here, we establish topological quantum interferometry driven by an interaction-based geometric phase, the exchange Berry phase (BPX). Our formalism generalizes $q$-plate state generation and characterization to arbitrary topological charges and (de)tuning conditions, demonstrating that BPX acts as a geometric marker governing spatial interference. We show BPX serves as a deterministic control parameter, decomposing two-photon spatial patterns into geometry-dictated fundamental modes. This mapping reveals topological invariants and phase singularities that function as a non-tomographic witness for state dimensionality estimation, circumventing full-state reconstruction. Being device-independent and highly scalable, this approach enables scalable high-dimensional characterization and topologically protected state selection, with direct applicability to quantum metrology and high-capacity quantum networks.

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

Co-PLNet: A Collaborative Point-Line Network for Prompt-Guided Wireframe Parsing

Wireframe parsing aims to recover line segments and their junctions to form a structured geometric representation useful for downstream tasks such as Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). Existing methods predict lines and junctions separately and reconcile them post-hoc, causing mismatches and reduced robustness. We present Co-PLNet, a point-line collaborative framework that exchanges spatial cues between the two tasks, where early detections are converted into spatial prompts via a Point-Line Prompt Encoder (PLP-Encoder), which encodes geometric attributes into compact and spatially aligned maps. A Cross-Guidance Line Decoder (CGL-Decoder) then refines predictions with sparse attention conditioned on complementary prompts, enforcing point-line consistency and efficiency. Experiments on Wireframe and YorkUrban show consistent improvements in accuracy and robustness, together with favorable real-time efficiency, demonstrating our effectiveness for structured geometry perception. Our code is available at https://github.com/GalacticHogrider/Co-PLNet.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Reasoning Text-to-Video Retrieval for Operating Room Clips via Action-Driven Digital Twins

Text-to-video retrieval in operating rooms (OR) is an enabling technology for OR safety, as it allows stakeholders to retrieve and inspect recordings of specific events. However, because the most safety-critical events may not follow the common structure, to unlock its full potential text-to-video retrieval must be able to handle implicit queries that require reasoning to identify the right video (e.g., the step right before clipping). However, existing methods rely on global embeddings that cannot reason over such queries. We propose OR3, a text-to-video retrieval method that converts clips into action-driven digital twins (ActDTs), grouping concurrent subject-action-object triplets under non-overlapping temporal intervals. Moreover, rather than cross-modal matching through paired encoders, OR3 performs imagination-based retrieval where an LLM generates hypothetical ActDTs from queries. This enables intra-modal matching via a single encoder trained with ActDT-tailored hard negatives. Finally, evidence-grounded refinement revises imagined ActDTs based on discrepancies with top candidates to capture procedure-specific patterns. We construct a benchmark from MM-OR with 276 implicit queries across four reasoning categories over 386 clips from robotic knee procedures. OR3 achieves 57.6 R@1 and 77.3 R@5, outperforming the strongest baseline. These results demonstrate that OR3 enables fine-grained discrimination between visually similar OR video clips through temporal action reasoning.

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

A Fixed-Point Neural Operator for Size- and Functional-Transferable Hamiltonian Prediction

arXiv:2606.14498v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Predicting the Kohn-Sham Hamiltonian with machine learning can accelerate density functional theory while retaining access to molecular orbitals, energy levels, and electronic-structure observables that energy-only surrogates cannot resolve. Yet element-wise agreement with the converged Hamiltonian, an implicit fixed point of the self-consistent field iteration, does not determine the occupied subspace that governs orbital energies and densities. Here we present HamEvo, a neural operator that learns the single-step self-consistent update and returns the converged Hamiltonian as its fixed point. HamEvo is pre-trained on intermediate self-consistent trajectories and calibrated at equilibrium with density-matrix supervision. Across benchmarks from MD17 to drug-like QMugs, HamEvo lowers Hamiltonian errors by 35-49% over direct-regression and deep-equilibrium baselines, and predicts QMugs HOMO and LUMO energies with mean absolute errors of 0.036 and 0.053 eV, near the 1 kcal/mol chemical-accuracy scale. Few-shot fine-tuning with only 20 reference conformations extends HamEvo to molecules of up to 122 atoms, well beyond the size range covered by pre-training. With thermal molecular-dynamics sampling, HamEvo captures temperature-dependent HOMO-LUMO gap renormalization beyond the harmonic approximation. Inference is up to 242 times faster than conventional DFT.

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

Super-Arrhenius relaxation of the triangular plaquette model in any dimension

arXiv:2606.16259v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Consider the following plaquette model from statistical physics: a lamp lies at every vertex of the triangular lattice and a switch lies at every even vertex of the (bipartite) dual hexagonal lattice. Each switch toggles the three lamps on its face. The energy of a configuration is the number of ON lamps. For the Glauber dynamics associated with the Gibbs measure defined by this Hamiltonian at any inverse temperature $\beta>0$, we show that, in any dimension $d\ge 2$, the infinite volume relaxation time satisfies \[e^{\beta^2/C}/C \le T_{\mathrm{rel}}\le Ce^{e^{C\beta}}\] for some $C>0$. Our result entails that the Gibbs measure is unique. The $e^{\beta^2}$ scaling was conjectured by Newman and Moore in 1999 and matches the behaviour of supercritical rooted kinetically constrained models such as the East model, thus recovering fragile glass phenomenology in the absence of kinetic constraints. More precisely, we show that, on a torus of side length $2^k$, when $\beta\to\infty$ and $k/\beta\to0$, we have $T_{\mathrm{rel}}=e^{2\beta k(1+o(1))}$. Quite surprisingly, however, we also prove that, on non-periodic finite domains of size $n\le e^{\beta/C}$ for large $C>0$, we have the much larger asymptotics $\ln T_{\mathrm{rel}}=\beta n^{\Theta(1)}$. The main ingredients of the proofs are new results in extremal and enumerative combinatorics and rely on renormalisation ideas for the dynamics and its groundstates also known as the Ledrappier subshift. We note consequences of our results to geometric group theory (more precisely to the complexity of the word problem for the Baumslag finitely presented group) and to ergodic theory.

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

Petrov-Galerkin Variational Physics-Informed Neural Network Framework for Two-Dimensional Singularly Perturbed Problems

arXiv:2606.16510v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This study proposes a Petrov-Galerkin based Variational Physics-Informed Neural Network (VPINN) for efficiently solving two-dimensional singularly perturbed problems (SPPs) with one and two small perturbation parameters. The approach employs neural networks to construct the trial solution space, while tensor-product hat functions are adopted as test functions to enforce the variational form. To accurately resolve of sharp boundary layers, the variational form is implemented using a Petrov-Galerkin formulation. Dirichlet boundary conditions are imposed directly, while the source terms are computed using automatic differentiation. Computational experiments on standard two-dimensional problems demonstrate that the proposed method achieves high accuracy in both the maximum and L_2 norms. These results confirm the efficiency and robustness of the Petrov-Galerkin VPINN approach in accurately capturing the multiscale features of two-dimensional SPPs.

16.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

A distant brown dwarf coplanar to a warm Jupiter and a hot super-Earth

In transiting planetary systems, in which planetary sizes are accurately determined from transit observations, the presence of transit-timing variations1 (TTVs), especially when combined with radial velocity (RV) data, provides powerful constraints on masses and orbital eccentricities. Together, these measurements offer crucial insights into system architecture, formation mechanisms and dynamical evolution. We present long-term RV and transit/TTV monitoring of the relatively young star (age approximately 1 Gyr) TOI-201, revealing an exceptional multi-planet system composed of a hot super-Earth (SE) size planet transiting every 5.8 days, a warm Jupiter (WJ) on a 53-day orbit and an eccentric (e = 0.62) low-mass brown dwarf (BD) on an approximately 8-year orbit, with an estimated mass MBD of about 16 Jupiter masses. The BD is the longest-period transiting substellar object ever characterized by means of RVs and the only one known to be coplanar with inner planets. The architecture of this system suggests that the SE was formed isolated and in the innermost region of the gaseous disk. On the other hand, the orbital configuration of the outer companions suggests a nearly in situ formation of both objects, with the WJ forming in a dense inner disk. Alternatively, the BD might have formed farther out and migrated inward, while increasing its eccentricity owing to interactions with the disk. Analysis of long-term radial velocity data and transit time variations, induced by a super-Earth, a warm Jupiter and a brown dwarf in a coplanar orbit around the relatively young star TOI201.

17.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-15

Long-term independent use of an intracortical brain–computer interface for speech and cursor control

Brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) can provide naturalistic communication and digital access to people with severe paralysis by decoding neural activity associated with attempted speech and movement. Recent work has demonstrated highly accurate intracortical BCIs for speech and cursor control, but two critical capabilities needed for practical viability were unmet: independent at-home operation without researcher assistance and reliable long-term performance supporting accurate speech and cursor decoding. Here we demonstrate the independent and near-daily use of a multimodal BCI with novel brain-to-text speech and computer cursor decoders by a man with paralysis and severe dysarthria due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Over nearly 2 years, the participant used the BCI for more than 3,800 h at home with no researchers present to maintain rich interpersonal communication with his family and friends, independently control his personal computer and sustain full-time employment—despite being paralyzed. He communicated 183,060 sentences—totaling 1,960,163 words—at an average rate of 56 words per minute. He labeled 92% of sentences as being decoded at least mostly correctly. In formal quantifications of performance where he was asked to say words presented on a screen, attempted speech was consistently decoded with more than 99% word accuracy (125,000 word vocabulary). The participant also used the speech BCI as keyboard input and the cursor BCI as mouse input to control his personal computer, enabling him to send text messages and emails and to browse the internet. These results demonstrate that intracortical BCIs have the potential to support independent use in the home, marking a critical step toward practical assistive technology for people with severe motor impairment. An automated intracortical brain–computer interface, used at home with no researcher intervention, provides long-term and accurate restoration of speech-based communication and cursor-based computer usage in a person with severe dysarthria due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Universality in Ionic Three-body Systems Near an Ion-atom Feshbach Resonance

arXiv:2511.00325v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We calculate bound and scattering properties of a system of two neutral atoms and an ion near an atom-ion Feshbach resonance. Our results indicate that long-range atom-ion interactions lead to significant deviations from universal behavior derived from contact or van der Waals potentials. We find that ionic systems display an overall suppression of inelastic transitions leading to recombination rates and lifetimes of Efimov state orders of magnitude smaller with respect to those for neutral atoms. We further characterize the dense spectra of triatomic molecular ions with extended lifetimes. Our results provide a deeper insight on the universality and structure of three-body ionic systems and establishing them as a promising platform for exploring novel few- and many-body phenomena with long-range interactions.

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

Direct Preference Optimization for Chatbot Fine-Tuning: An Empirical Study

We present an approach to fine-tuning large language models using Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), a reinforcement learning technique. Our experimental results demonstrate that DPO simplifies the training pipeline, improves computational efficiency, and achieves competitive performance. The evaluation using BLEU, ROUGE, and cosine similarity metrics indicates effective learning and convergence, though further investigation is needed to address observed training instability.

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

Simple Domain Generalization Methods are Strong Baselines for Open Domain Generalization

In real-world applications, a machine learning model is required to handle an open-set recognition (OSR), where unknown classes appear during the inference, in addition to a domain shift, where the data distribution differs between the training and inference phases. Domain generalization (DG) aims to handle the domain shift situation where the target domain of the inference phase is inaccessible during the model training. Open domain generalization (ODG) considers DG and OSR. Domain-augmented meta-learning (DAML) is a method targeting ODG; however, it has a complicated learning process. By contrast, although various DG methods have been proposed, they have not been evaluated in ODG situations. In this study, we comprehensively evaluate the existing DG methods in ODG and show that the two simple DG methods, CORrelation ALignment (CORAL) and maximum mean discrepancy (MMD), are competitive with DAML in several cases. In addition, we propose simple extensions of CORAL and MMD by introducing the techniques used in DAML, such as ensemble learning and Dirichlet mixup data augmentation. The experimental evaluation demonstrates that the extended CORAL and MMD can perform comparably to DAML with lower computational costs. This suggests that the simple DG methods and their simple extensions are strong baselines for ODG.

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

Signed Compression Progress on a Sealed Audit is Goodhart-Resistant

arXiv:2606.11417v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Compression progress is a long-standing proposal for intrinsic motivation: reward an agent when its world model becomes better at predicting or compressing experience. The folk claim is that this reward is "credible" because it is paid only for learning. We make this precise and prove it. If intrinsic reward is the signed decrease of a fixed sealed-audit loss, r_t = E(theta_{t-1}) - E(theta_t), then cumulative reward telescopes exactly to endpoint audit improvement, so no policy can push reward up indefinitely while true audit performance stagnates or degrades. For finite audit panels the same result holds with a sharp false-positive budget: cumulative empirical reward is at most true audit improvement plus 2 Delta_n(F, delta), the uniform audit deviation of the model class. This is horizon-free: adaptivity over time costs nothing once the sealed panel uniformly controls the class. The theorem also identifies the failure modes: the guarantee disappears if progress is clipped, scored on the agent's own stream, exposed to a high-capacity model on a reusable panel, or applied to a neural class that makes Delta_n vacuous. We give a Lean 4 mechanization of the structural core (telescoping, the finite-audit bound, finite Gibbs, and the entropy floor) and an experiment suite on ARC-TGI grid-transformation generators with adaptive holdout attacks. Experiments confirm the theory: finite-audit deviation scales as n^{-0.527}; signed progress resists clip-farming, stream leakage, and noisy-TV curiosity; naive reusable audits are exploitable by black-box scalar feedback, while standard release defenses keep the attack below the 2 Delta_n threshold. Signed compression progress on a sealed audit is an accounting signal of genuine improvement.

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

Rational Sparse Autoencoder

arXiv:2606.14990v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are standard tools for mechanistic interpretability, but current SAE families are constrained by fixed encoder nonlinearities such as ReLU, JumpReLU, and TopK. This hard-codes a particular sparsity mechanism into the model and can distort the reconstruction-versus-sparsity trade-off. We introduce the Rational Sparse Autoencoder (RSAE), which replaces the fixed encoder activation with a trainable rational function. Rational activations are flexible enough to uniformly approximate the activation primitives used by existing SAE families on compact domains (for TopK, the thresholded gate obtained after a separating top-k threshold is supplied), while also providing a richer function class for adapting to the observed pre-activation geometry. We realise this idea through a two-stage pipeline: an initialisation procedure that copies the pre-trained baseline SAE weights, plugs in rational coefficients obtained by the relaxed Remez exchange on synthetic data, and calibrates the scale parameters along with the rational coefficients; followed by a fine-tuning step under the standard sparsity-regularised reconstruction objective. Empirically, on residual-stream activations of three open-weight language models and across all three baseline activation families, the RSAE strictly improves on it after the fine-tuning step, both on reconstruction-side metrics and on downstream-behaviour metrics, without sacrificing feature-level interpretability under sparse probing. These gains are consistent across host language models, across baseline activation families, and across the full range of baseline sparsity we tested, while the upgrade itself adds only a handful of scalar parameters per autoencoder and runs in minutes on a single consumer GPU.

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

Visuals Lie, Consistency Speaks: Disentangling Spatial Attention from Reliability in Vision-Language Models

Multimodal Foundation Models are increasingly used as reasoning agents, making reliability, knowing when a model may hallucinate, critical. A common intuition, which we call the Attention-Confidence Assumption, holds that reliability follows from "structural" visual perception: tight attention on relevant regions should signal a trustworthy answer, while scattered attention signals confusion. We challenge this through the VLM Reliability Probe (VRP), a systematic cross-family study of reliability signals in contemporary Vision-Language Models (VLMs). We introduce structural-attention metrics, cluster counts (C_k) and spatial entropy (H_s), to quantify the visual encoder's gaze, and track its evolution (Delta H_s) across layers. This reveals a "Symbolic Detachment": models often "Early Lock" visual features only to diffuse attention later, severing early perception from final generation. Contrary to the grounding hypothesis, we find a "Cluster Failure": spatial attention has near-zero correlation (R approx 0.001) with accuracy. Instead, reliability is a phenomenon of generation dynamics and internal-state distributions. Self-Consistency, the agreement rate across sampled reasoning paths, is the dominant predictor of truth (R = 0.429). Scaling causal interventions exposes a sharp architectural divergence: LLaVA locks its prediction in a fragile late-stage bottleneck, whereas PaliGemma and Qwen2-VL distribute reliability globally, staying resilient even when ~50% or more of their most predictive layer is destroyed. For current VLMs, reliability signals are detached from visual grounding maps and are best inferred from generation-time dynamics and hidden-state probes.

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

ALCL: An Adaptive Log-Correntropy Loss for Robust Learning under Non-Gaussian Noise

arXiv:2606.16050v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robust deep learning under heavy-tailed and impulsive noise remains challenging because conventional losses such as mean squared error (MSE) exhibit unbounded sensitivity to outliers. Although correntropy-based objectives improve robustness, existing formulations rely on fixed kernel parameters that must be empirically tuned and remain static during training. To address these limitations, we propose an Adaptive Log-Correntropy Loss (ALCL), a heavy-tailed loss formulation that adaptively learns its robustness geometry during optimization. ALCL introduces a logarithmic residual model whose shape and scale parameters are learned jointly with network weights through differentiable reparameterization. This yields a principled maximum likelihood formulation whose influence function is formally bounded and redescending, allowing the loss geometry to adapt dynamically to evolving residual statistics while suppressing extreme outliers. Comparative experiments on four widely used benchmark datasets spanning grayscale and red-green-blue (RGB) image data under mixed heavy-tailed and impulsive noise demonstrate that ALCL consistently outperforms MSE and optimally tuned generalized correntropy losses in both reconstruction fidelity and downstream classification accuracy. While performance differences remain small under low-noise conditions, under high-noise regimes ALCL improves median accuracy by up to 4.75% on grayscale benchmarks and 4.51% on RGB datasets, with reduced variance across runs. These results demonstrate that adaptive robustness through joint learning of loss parameters provides a computationally efficient alternative to static correntropy-based losses for deep learning in non-Gaussian environments.

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

SurroundNEXO: Ego-Centric Metric Bridging for Spatially Consistent Geometry in Autonomous Driving

Modern autonomous driving depends on accurate metric 3D understanding for perception, reconstruction, and planning, which in turn requires reliable multi-camera depth prediction. However, the outward-facing nature of vehicle-mounted surround-view camera rigs inherently limits visual overlap across views, challenging the correspondence-based assumptions that underpin conventional multi-view geometry. To bridge this gap, we present SurroundNEXO, named after the Spanish word nexo for a geometric link, a low-overlap multi-camera metric depth framework that grounds cross-view reasoning in ego-centric geometry rather than dense visual correspondences. Instead of directly enforcing early global fusion, SurroundNEXO first assigns image tokens globally comparable ego-frame viewing directions through Ego-Ray Positional Encoding, then uses sparse LiDAR measurements as metric anchors to propagate absolute scale cues, and finally expands feature interaction progressively from view-local modeling to decomposed spatio-temporal reasoning and global integration. This design enables metric-scale depth prediction with improved spatial consistency across weakly overlapping cameras. Across low-overlap autonomous driving benchmarks, including NuScenes, Waymo and DDAD, SurroundNEXO reduces single-view error by 33.2%, improves cross-view consistency by 10.5%, and enhances metric reconstruction quality by 25.6% compared with SOTA methods. It further remains robust under extremely sparse depth prompts and exhibits strong zero-shot generalization to unseen camera layouts.