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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

OmniVideo-100K: A Dataset for Audio-Visual Reasoning through Structured Scripts and Evidence Chains

Current automated pipelines for audio-visual Question Answering (QA) generally adopt a ``video-caption-QA'' paradigm. However, these methods typically segment videos into short clips and generate separate descriptions for audio and visual modalities. This decoupled processing severs inherent associations between sounds and their visual sources, while independent clip processing often causes inconsistent descriptions of the same entity across segments. Furthermore, coupling long-text comprehension and QA synthesis into a single step often restricts models to localized events, yielding questions lacking long-term temporal connections and deep cross-modal reasoning. To address these issues, we propose an automated data engine featuring two mechanisms: (1) Entity-Anchored Video Scripting transforms videos into structured scripts, comprising summaries, main entity lists, and segment-wise audio-visual descriptions. The entity list serves as a global prior to ensure cross-segment referential consistency and reconstruct audio-visual associations. (2) Clue-Guided QA Generation prompts models to first mine cross-segment, multimodal clues from the script, and subsequently generate QA pairs based on these high-value clues. Leveraging this pipeline, we construct the instruction-tuning dataset OmniVideo-100K and a human-verified test set, OmniVideo-Test. Fine-tuning VITA-1.5, Qwen2.5-Omni-7B and Qwen3-Omni-30B on OmniVideo-100K yields performance gains of up to 20.59% on OmniVideo-Test, demonstrating strong generalization (up to 12.64% improvements) across established benchmarks like Daily-Omni and JointAVBench.

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

Your Agent Has a Genome: Sequence-Level Behavioral Analysis and Runtime Governance of LLM-Powered Autonomous Agents

Authors:

arXiv:2606.15579v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose Base Sequence Analysis, a framework that encodes the runtime behavior of LLM-powered autonomous agents into compact symbolic sequences using a four-letter alphabet: X (Explore), E (Execute), P (Plan), and V (Verify). Drawing an analogy to genomic sequence analysis, we apply n-gram pattern mining, Markov transition matrices, and point-biserial correlation to 347 real-world execution traces collected from a production ReAct agent system over 8 days. Our analysis reveals that (1) the trigram P-X-P is the only statistically significant high-risk pattern, lowering success rate by 10.4%; (2) P-ratio is the strongest negative predictor of success (r=-0.256, pV transition probability is only 2.1%, indicating a systemic verification deficit. Based on these findings, we design Governor, a three-layer runtime intervention system comprising a rule engine, a statistical accumulator, and a chi-square-based threshold adaptor. In a natural before/after deployment evaluation (N=101 vs. N=246), Governor achieves a +6.2% absolute increase in task success rate while simultaneously reducing average token consumption by 44%. To validate cross-system generality, we apply the XEPV encoding to 2,000 public SWE-agent trajectories on SWE-bench, confirming that exploration spirals and the E->V verification deficit replicate in an independent system. We outline six research directions including base sequence language models, cross-agent behavioral fingerprinting, and reward shaping, and release an open-source toolkit for reproducibility.

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

The Dark Regulome: Disentangling Predictability from Regulation in Genomic Foundation Models

High-grade gliomas integrate into neural circuits through functional synapses with neurons, raising the question of which noncoding elements shape synaptogenic gene expression in tumor cells. The regulatory program written across the dark genome, what we call the $dark regulome$, is the natural substrate to probe, and sequence foundation models offer a zero-shot route through in-silico mutagenesis (ISM); yet likelihood-based scoring is tautologically coupled to local sequence predictability, leaving the regulatory interpretation underdetermined. Across three architecturally distinct foundation models (Caduceus-Ph, HyenaDNA, Enformer) and 30,448 dark genome elements at 92 glioma-relevant loci, we introduce a residualization-and-permutation diagnostic that separates predictability-driven from regulation-driven RIS variance. A sharp 10kb proximal-regulatory horizon survives every control we apply, but the LM-derived element-class hierarchy does not: a six-feature linear baseline matches Caduceus top-decile membership at AUC $= 0.985$. Cross-architecture decomposition cleanly separates a sequence-predictability layer (the two language models co-rank long well-predicted transposable elements) from a regulatory-output layer (Enformer alone retains residual cCRE-discriminative signal), with literally zero overlap between the two top-100 lists. Conservation, brain cis-eQTL, and STRING-PPI cross-checks then anchor what biology survives: top-100 elements across all three models are $3.3\times$ enriched per model for matching brain eQTLs ($p_\mathrm{emp} < 5\times 10^{-3}$), while a tempting transposable-element regulatory layer and a striking NRXN1+NLGN1 protein-pair convergence both fail proper permutation tests once those tests are constructed. We deliver the diagnostic as a general methodological tool for any ISM-based regulatory study.

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

MentalMARBERT: Domain-Adaptive Pre-training and Two-Stage Fine-Tuning for Arabic Mental Health Disorders Detection

Detecting mental health disorders from Arabic social media text remains challenging due to dialectal variation, informal language, limited high-quality annotated resources, and severe class imbalance. While English mental health natural language processing (NLP) has progressed substantially, Arabic multi-class disorder classification remains insufficiently studied. This study proposes a two-phase framework for Arabic mental health text classification. In phase 1, three Arabic pre-trained language models, AraBERT, CAMeLBERT, and MARBERT, undergo Domain-Adaptive and Task-Adaptive Pretraining (DAPT and TAPT) using a large-scale corpus of unlabeled Arabic mental health tweets. The adapted models are evaluated under a unified protocol to identify the most effective backbone model. In phase 2, the selected model is assessed across four configurations combining single-stage and hierarchical two-stage classification architectures with full fine-tuning and Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). To support this study, we constructed a novel annotated Arabic mental health dataset comprising 50,670 tweets across six categories, with strong inter annotator agreement (Krippendorff's Alpha = 0.733, average pairwise agreement = 0.797). Experimental results show that the domain-adapted MARBERT (MentalMARBERT) achieves statistically significant improvements over baseline models in both accuracy and macro-F1. The hierarchical two-stage architecture combined with full fine-tuning achieves the best overall performance, reaching a macro-F1 of 0.861 and an accuracy of 0.877. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of domain-specific adaptive pretraining and hierarchical classification for Arabic mental health disorder detection.

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

Multi-User Dueling Bandits: A Fair Approach using Nash Social Welfare

arXiv:2605.01961v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learning from human preference data is becoming a useful tool, from fine-tuning large language models to training reinforcement learning agents. However, in most scenarios, the model is trained on the average preference of all human evaluators, which, under large variations of preferences, can be unfair to minority groups. In this work, we consider fairness in dueling bandits, a standard framework for online learning from preference data. We assume that each user has a (potentially distinct) Condorcet winner, which is an arm preferred to every other arm. Using these user-specific Condorcet winners as reference points, we evaluate and score arms according to their performance relative to the corresponding winner. To promote fairness across heterogeneous users, we adopt the well-established Nash Social Welfare objective, which maximizes the product of user utilities, thereby inherently penalizing inequality and preventing the marginalization of any single user. Within this framework, we construct a hard instance to establish a regret lower bound of $\Omega(T^{2/3}\min(K,D)^\frac{1}{3})$ for a time horizon $T$, $K$ arms, and $D$ users, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first result quantifying the cost of fairness in dueling bandits with heterogeneous preferences. We then present the Fair-Explore-Then-Commit and Fair-$\epsilon$-Greedy algorithms with a Condorcet winner identification phase. We further derive their regret upper bounds that match the lower-bound dependence on $T$ up to logarithmic factors.

06.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Universal Crossovers of Stabilizer Entropy Beyond Criticality

arXiv:2606.13810v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Stabilizer Rényi entropy has emerged as a probe of nonstabilizerness in quantum many-body systems, but its scaling structure beyond critical points remains poorly understood compared with entanglement entropy. Recent field-theory approaches indicate that stabilizer entropy contains universal critical data and boundary-sensitive terms, raising the question of how these structures extend into massive and crossover regimes. We address this problem for a broad class of finite-range spin chains at Rényi index one-half. We derive exact finite-size formulas for both full periodic chains and finite intervals of the infinite chain, making the universal crossover from critical to noncritical behavior analytically accessible. In periodic geometry, the entropy obeys a volume law away from criticality and exhibits a universal finite-size crossover controlled by the competition between system size and correlation length. We also show that the large-scale SRE density develops a cusp across the field-tuned critical line, while the XX endpoint is governed by a distinct scaling regime associated with the saturation point. In the subsystem geometry, the interval entropy separates bulk critical behavior from boundary contributions generated by the way the finite region cuts the infinite chain. The crossover from critical to massive behavior is then encoded in boundary constants and universal functions controlled by the correlation length. Through exact stabilizer-entropy correspondences, the scaling theory extends to internal XY reductions, Finite-range spin chains, and Cluster–Ising representatives. Our results provide an exact lattice benchmark for the emerging QFT description of stabilizer entropy beyond isolated conformal points.

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

Improving Crash Frequency Prediction from Simulated Traffic Conflicts Using Machine Learning Based Microsimulation

arXiv:2606.12500v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traffic microsimulation combined with surrogate safety measures has increasingly been used as a proactive alternative to historical crash data for predicting crash frequency for current or planned road infrastructure designs. However, existing microsimulation-based safety studies have adopted simplified rule-based behaviour models, which reproduce traffic flow reasonably well but often fail to generate realistic conflict dynamics, limiting crash prediction accuracy. Recent advances in machine learning (ML)-based behaviour models offer a promising opportunity to potentially improve microsimulation realism and crash frequency predictions by learning human driving behaviour directly from large-scale trajectory datasets. To investigate this possibility, traffic microsimulation was conducted for five real-world signalised intersections in Leeds, UK, using both a standard rule-based model and a state-of-the-art ML model. Simulated vehicle trajectories were analysed using a two-dimensional Time-to-Collision metric to identify simulated conflicts, which were then modelled using Extreme Value Theory to predict crash frequency. Results show that conflicts from the ML model yielded crash predictions in line with the real-world crash data, whereas the rule-based model did not permit meaningful predictions, presumably due to a lack of model calibration to the specific simulated intersections. Directly using ML-generated simulated crashes to predict real-world crash frequency also yielded poor results, suggesting that while current ML models can realistically reproduce conflicts, they are not yet able to generate realistic crashes. Overall, the findings demonstrate that ML-based behaviour models are promising for improving crash prediction from simulated conflicts, without a need for location-specific model calibration, and suggest clear future directions for ML-based traffic microsimulation.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

LIBERO-Occ: Evaluating and Improving Vision-Language-Action Models under Scene-Induced Occlusion via Viewpoint Imagination

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models achieve strong performance on standard manipulation benchmarks, but most evaluations assume that task-relevant objects are fully visible. This assumption often fails in realistic settings, where occlusion makes manipulation partially observable. In this paper, we study scene-induced occlusion as a fundamental challenge for VLA models and introduce LIBERO-Occ, an occlusion-oriented extension of LIBERO. Experiments show that state-of-the-art VLAs suffer substantial performance degradation under occlusion. To address this issue, we propose Viewpoint Imagination (VIM), which generates a complementary view from an occluded primary observation and conditions action prediction on both observed and imagined evidence. VIM improves robustness across task suites, occlusion types, and severity levels without requiring additional cameras at deployment time, suggesting that viewpoint imagination is an promising mechanism for perception completion in partially observable manipulation. Our benchmark and corresponding code are available at: \href{https://github.com/litsh/Libero-Occ}{https://github.com/litsh/Libero-Occ}.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Contactless Respiratory Monitoring on Heterogeneous Mobile Robots: A Multimodal Edge-Computing Framework

Respiratory-rate (RR) monitoring is a critical component of remote triage and victim assessment in emergency response, disaster recovery, and infectious-disease scenarios, where minimizing physical contact can reduce responder risk and improve operational safety. However, field deployment of contactless RR monitoring remains challenging due to variable illumination, posture changes, platform heterogeneity, and the impracticality of wearable sensors in hazardous environments. In this paper, we present a modality-adaptive contactless RR monitoring framework for heterogeneous mobile robots with onboard edge computing. The proposed system combines brightness-adaptive sensor selection across RGB, thermal, near-infrared (NIR), and low-light cameras, keypoint-guided chest ROI extraction for posture-robust monitoring, and a signal-quality-index (SQI)-based filtering mechanism for reliable respiratory estimation. We implement and evaluate the framework on three robotic platforms spanning quadruped and wheeled locomotion and multiple edge-computing architectures. Experiments conducted across diverse lighting conditions, subject poses, and robot-to-subject distances demonstrate that the framework generalizes across platforms without per-platform algorithmic retuning, while revealing modality-specific operational boundaries. RGB provides the broadest coverage up to 8m, NIR remains effective up to 6m, thermal is reliable only at short range, and low-light sensing supports monitoring in complete darkness up to 8m. Overall, the results demonstrate the feasibility of multimodal contactless RR monitoring on mobile robots and support its use as a foundation for autonomous triage and victim assessment in hazardous search-and-rescue settings.

10.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

OMIO: A policy-driven Python library for reproducible microscopy image I/O

Modern fluorescence and multiphoton microscopy workflows operate within a heterogeneous ecosystem of file formats, partially overlapping metadata standards, and reader-specific conventions. In practice, this frequently leads to silent axis misinterpretations, loss or corruption of physical voxel size information, and laboratory-specific glue code that is fragile, poorly documented, and difficult to reproduce. OMIO, short for Open Microscopy Image I/O, addresses these issues by providing a lightweight, policy-driven image I/O layer for Python that enforces a canonical, OME-compatible data representation at the API boundary. The central contribution of OMIO is the explicit separation of low-level format access from semantic normalization. Existing reader libraries are used as interchangeable backends for extracting pixel data and available metadata, while OMIO enforces axis conventions, metadata interpretation, and fallback decisions in a centralized and auditable policy layer. This design allows heterogeneous microscopy inputs to be converted into a stable representation without propagating backend-specific assumptions into downstream analysis code. The core design principles of OMIO include canonical axis semantics (TZCYX), robust metadata normalization with explicit and auditable fallbacks, memory-aware operation via optional Zarr-based backends, and workflow-level semantics that extend beyond individual files to folder stacks and BIDS-like project structures. This architecture allows OMIO to orchestrate existing reader libraries into a coherent and reproducible I/O pipeline without replacing or duplicating their functionality. OMIO is implemented as an open-source and community-oriented system in which support for additional file formats and metadata conventions can be added incrementally through modular reader backends. By encouraging the contribution of example datasets, backend extensions, and feature requests, OMIO is designed to evolve alongside emerging acquisition systems while preserving strict semantic guarantees at the interface level. The resulting standardized OME-TIFF outputs are immediately suitable for downstream quantitative analysis and interactive inspection in scientific Python workflows, including workflows based on ImageJ and Napari.

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

Memory as a Wasting Asset: Pricing Flash Endurance for Embodied Agents, and the Limits of Doing So

arXiv:2606.18144v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A robot's flash endurance is a non-renewable stock: every persisted write spends one of a few thousand program/erase cycles and never refills, yet no fielded robot memory system prices which memories are worth an erase cycle. We treat embodied memory as depreciating capital and price that stock with a single endurance shadow price $\eta$, which makes cost-minimizing placement across a RAM / on-board NVM / cloud hierarchy a threshold in a wear-augmented per-byte index. The index is cost-optimal whatever the sign of the value-write association $\chi$; only when $\chi > 0$ does the optimum turn non-monotone, sending a robot's most valuable memories off its flash. The pivot is thus empirical, and we measure $\chi$ on real robot logs at a pre-specified gate: its sign is a property of the deployment regime – positive on recurrent long-horizon manipulation ($\hat{\chi} \approx +1.0 \times 10^{-3}$, replicated at full power), null on a shorter-horizon suite, and negative on non-recurrent teleoperation. Two boundaries scope the result. The endurance budget is dormant on premium 3,000-P/E TLC at datasheet prices and binding on the commodity QLC/eMMC ($\sim$1,000 P/E) that cheaper edge robots run. And where it binds, a learned wear-aware controller only ties price-based routing on task value, because realized value is tier-invariant across RAM, NVM, and cloud: the rent governs device lifetime and cost, not task performance. Whether wear-aware placement improves task value remains open – $\chi$ is measured against a value proxy, and the non-monotone optimum, while proven, is not yet observed in data.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Hybrid Classical-Quantum Variational Autoencoder for Neural Topic Modeling

Authors:

Neural topic models enable scalable semantic discovery, but their integration with quantum hardware remains largely unexplored. We present a proof-of-concept hybrid classical-quantum variational autoencoder (VAE) for topic modeling, embedding parameterized quantum circuits within the VAE inference network while retaining a classical topic-word decoder. To address the resource constraints of quantum hardware, we propose a modified Gaussian Softmax posterior that decouples latent space dimensionality from the number of topics to be extracted, enabling the model to operate with a low-resource 10-qubit quantum device. On the AgNews dataset, the hybrid VAE outperforms state-of-the-art neural topic models (NTMs), reaching a $C_v$ coherence score of 0.71 and an NPMI score of 0.20 while preserving high topic diversity. For comparison, we also construct a fully classical variant, which also outperforms state-of-the-art models on AgNews and exhibits clear class separation in the latent space. These results demonstrate that hybrid VAEs are computationally viable even on NISQ-era devices and represent a promising direction for quantum-enhanced topic modeling.

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

InstructTime++: Time Series Classification with Multimodal Language Modeling via Implicit Feature Enhancement

arXiv:2601.14968v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Most existing time series classification methods adopt a discriminative paradigm that maps input sequences directly to one-hot encoded class labels. While effective, this paradigm struggles to incorporate contextual features and fails to capture semantic relationships among classes. To address these limitations, we propose InstructTime, a novel framework that reformulates time series classification as a multimodal generative task. Specifically, continuous numerical sequences, contextual textual features, and task instructions are treated as multimodal inputs, while class labels are generated as textual outputs by tuned language models. To bridge the modality gap, InstructTime introduces a time series discretization module that converts continuous sequences into discrete temporal tokens, together with an alignment projection layer and a generative self-supervised pre-training strategy to enhance cross-modal representation alignment. Building upon this framework, we further propose InstructTime++, which extends InstructTime by incorporating implicit feature modeling to compensate for the limited inductive bias of language models. InstructTime++ leverages specialized toolkits to mine informative implicit patterns from raw time series and contextual inputs, including statistical feature extraction and vision-language-based image captioning, and translates them into textual descriptions for seamless integration. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of InstructTime++.

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

Stein's method for the matrix normal distribution

arXiv:2601.11422v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This work presents the first systematic development of Stein's method for matrix distributions. We establish the basic essential ingredients of Stein's method for matrix normal approximation: we derive an extended-generator-based Stein identity from a matrix Ornstein-Uhlenbeck diffusion with two-sided scales, provide an explicit semigroup representation for the solution of the Stein equation, and obtain regularity estimates for the solution. The new methodology is demonstrated in three examples: (i) smooth Wasserstein distance bounds to quantify the matrix central limit theorem (a didactic example), (ii) a Wasserstein distance bound for the matrix normal approximation of the centered matrix $T$ distribution, and (iii) a Stein's method-of-moments approach to estimating the row and column covariance factors of the matrix normal, yielding a flexible class of weighted flip-flop Stein estimators that generalize Dutilleul's classical flip-flop algorithm and naturally accommodate row/column importance weights, systematic missingness, and projection onto structured covariance families. The latter two examples are intrinsically matrix-valued and cannot be treated using naive vectorization.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Scaling Generative Foundation Models for Chest Radiography with Rectified Flow Transformers

arXiv:2606.19460v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce the first generative foundation model for chest radiograph synthesis trained from scratch at the billion-parameter scale. Existing radiographic AI models often suffer from poor generalisation across patient subpopulations, institutions, and acquisition settings, resulting in limited real-world clinical utility. Controlled, high-fidelity synthesis of chest radiographs is a promising path toward diversifying clinical datasets and evaluating the robustness of diagnostic models. Therefore, we present the largest specialist generative foundation model for chest radiographs to date, with over 1.3B parameters, trained for 1.6T tokens on a curated, heterogeneous dataset comprising 1.2M radiographs and clinical expert-guided metadata. Our model supports controllable radiograph generation and editing across multiple demographic subgroups, acquisition views, and a dozen pathologies. Moreover, we significantly advance the state of the art in radiograph synthesis fidelity, producing images that are indistinguishable from real radiographs to clinical experts.

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

LLMs Can Better Capture Human Judgments–With the Right Prompts

Are large language models (LLMs) bad at capturing human judgment? Two commonly stated limitations are that LLMs fail to capture full distributions of responses, and that their judgments are unstable across wording variations. We demonstrate simple prompting strategies that mitigate these limitations. Across two datasets–a U.S.-representative set of 144 moral scenarios and 38 moral beliefs from the International Social Survey Programme's Family and Changing Gender Roles module covering 32 countries–we show how simple elicitation techniques help improve AI-human alignment. First, prompting models to report standard deviations and response proportions recovers the full range of human responses better than common strategies. Second, ensuring scenarios are clear to human participants–as reflected in human confusion ratings–boosts model alignment, and LLMs can track human confusion ratings. At the same time, we find that LLMs' estimates of their own error are poorly calibrated, though they can predict human variability relatively well. These results suggest that asking better questions to LLMs can yield better answers.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Impact of Early Treatment on Symptom Improvement and Procedural Events among Men with BPH and Bothersome Lower Urinary Tract Symptoms: A Contemporary Analysis of the American Urological Association Quality (AQUA) Registry

PURPOSE: As the armamentarium of BPH therapies continues to expand, it remains imperative to maximize patient satisfaction and minimize decisional regret. We sought to determine the impact of time from BPH diagnosis to index treatment on symptom improvement and subsequent procedural events. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We queried the American Urological Association Quality Registry for men [&ge;] 40 years old with BPH, available IPSS data, and no receipt of prior BPH treatment. Index treatment included medication, surgery, or minimally invasive surgical therapy (MIST). Outcomes included IPSS over 3 years of follow-up, change in percentage of mild lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS) by 3 months, and time to procedural event. Patients were stratified by time from index diagnosis to treatment by 3 years. Outcomes were compared across time-to-treatment cohorts with appropriate statistical tests with p < 0.05 as significant. RESULTS: 43,919 patients met criteria with 19,642 pursuing treatments. Patients pursued treatment at comparably lower baseline IPSS compared to prior prospective series. Patients undergoing surgery and MIST had significantly higher baseline IPSS, while medical comorbidities were significantly more common among men initiating pharmacotherapy. Early surgery and MIST were associated with significant improvement in IPSS within 6-12 months and an increase in mild LUTS by 3 months. All forms of early treatment were associated with delayed time to procedural events, including catheterization and fulguration. CONCLUSIONS: Early procedural intervention for BPH is associated with early symptom improvement and delayed time to procedural events among real-world, contemporary practice.

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

Bayesian 3D Steerable CNNs: Enabling Equivariance and Uncertainty Quantification Simultaneously

arXiv:2606.15479v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Steerable convolutional neural networks (Steerable-CNNs) guarantee SE(3)-equivariance by parameterizing kernels as linear combinations of steerable basis functions, but their deterministic nature precludes uncertainty quantification - limiting their use in settings where confidence estimates are essential. We propose a Bayesian Steerable-CNN that places posterior distributions over the basis coefficients, yielding stochastic kernels while preserving equivariance exactly. The loss function of the model is obtained via variational inference and minimized by Bayes-by-Backpropagation. The framework admits a decomposition of predictive uncertainty into epistemic and aleatoric components. Empirically, the model attains competitive classification accuracy alongside an expected calibration error of 0.0263 and outperforms its deterministic counterpart by up to 6.17% under distributional shift induced by additive Gaussian noise. Furthermore, we leverage the model's uncertainty estimates to enhance its performance significantly, achieving a notable gain - approximately 4% higher accuracy across 84% of the test dataset. A statistically significant negative correlation between epistemic uncertainty and prediction error confirms that the learned posterior variance is semantically meaningful. The framework unifies Bayesian uncertainty quantification with the inductive bias of equivariant CNNs.

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

Physics-Constrained Neural Networks for Improved Short-Term Weather Forecasting: A Case Study over the South Pacific

arXiv:2606.17659v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This study introduces enhancements to physics-constrained neural networks (PCNNs) that improve the accuracy and stability of hybrid short-term weather forecasting models. Building on the WeatherGFT architecture, three innovations are proposed. First, an upgraded numerical solver, combining a fifth-order weighted essentially non-oscillatory scheme (WENO-5), a beta-plane approximation, and subgrid-scale viscosity, permits a fourfold increase in the integration time step to 1200 s while reducing the daily mean squared error by up to 26%. Second, a unified autoregressive hybrid block replaces the original chain of 24 specialised modules, eliminating overfitting to specific lead times. Third, the physical core is integrated with two state-of-the-art neural backbones, resulting in PI-PredFormer and PI-IAM4VP. Evaluation on the WeatherBench South Pacific subset from 2000 to 2004 shows that these hybrids reduce root mean squared error at 1-12 h lead times by 8-22% compared to purely neural counterparts, while better preserving physical consistency. These results demonstrate that incremental refinement of hybrid components offers a practical route toward more accurate and efficient short-range weather forecasting.

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

ECA: Efficient Continual Alignment for Open-Ended Image-to-Text Generation

Incremental Learning (IL) for Open-ended Image-to-Text Generation (OpenITG) enables models to continuously generate accurate, contextually relevant text for new images while preserving previously acquired knowledge. Unlike prior studies, this paper addresses a more practical scenario in which the predominant category of visual data shifts over time as environments evolve. In this context, we introduce a new notion of continual alignment, which incrementally adapts the alignment module within pre-trained VLMs to preserve high-quality cross-modal representations. Based on this idea, we propose Efficient Continual Alignment (ECA), a novel exemplar-free IL approach for OpenITG. The key challenge is enabling the model to acquire new, task-specific features while minimizing interference with the established alignment without accessing raw data from previous tasks. To address this, ECA employs three core mechanisms: a Mixture of Query (MoQ) module that adapts task-specific query tokens, a Fisher Dynamic Expansion (FeDEx) that dynamically expands model structure based on a Fisher Information Matrix (FIM)-based metric, and an embedding dictionary with Dictionary Replay (DR) to retain past knowledge. To evaluate ECA's performance, we construct four new IL OpenITG benchmarks that better reflect real-world scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that ECA significantly mitigates catastrophic forgetting and improves IL performance compared to baseline methods. Code and benchmarks are available at https://github.com/Snowball0823/ECA.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

QMaxCal: Path-Space Regularization for Open Quantum Control via Girsanov's Theorem

arXiv:2606.19947v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reliable quantum control in the presence of decoherence requires policies that combat the effect of environmental noise on the controlled dynamics. Open quantum systems under continuous monitoring generate classical measurement records whose drift depends on the noise experienced by the system; the records of two evolutions sharing the same decoherence channels differ only in this drift, so Girsanov's theorem yields a closed-form, differentiable estimator of the KL divergence between their trajectory distributions. We instantiate this estimator with two physically motivated reference measures, yielding two regularizers that both drive the system toward states where the effects of decoherence are minimal: the Wiener KL (KL_W), which is empirically more effective under certain conditions on the noise model, and the drift-variance regularizer (R_DV), which works for all noise models. Both are qualitatively distinct from existing penalties on control fluence or smoothness: they penalize the observable consequences of control on the decoherence channels rather than the control amplitude itself. The regularizers outperform unregularized gradient-based and reinforcement-learning baselines across a range of open quantum systems – including single- and multi-qubit benchmarks and a multi-qubit chain calibrated to a published snapshot of the IBM Kingston processor – along several axes of evaluation: final-state fidelity, robustness to mismatch in the assumed noise model (gains grow from +17 pp at training noise to +27 pp under 2.5x noise mismatch), and occupation of forbidden states. The regularizers reduce infidelity by up to 50%, with ~16% gains on the calibrated IBM Kingston chain.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Q-Net: Queue Length Estimation via Kalman-based Neural Networks

arXiv:2509.24725v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Estimating queue lengths at signalized intersections is a long-standing challenge in traffic management. Partial observability of vehicle flows complicates this task despite the availability of two privacy-preserving data sources: (i) aggregated vehicle counts from loop detectors near stop lines, and (ii) aggregated floating car data (aFCD) that provide segment-wise average speed measurements. However, how to integrate these sources with differing spatial and temporal resolutions for queue length estimation is rather unclear. Addressing this question, we present Q-Net: a queue estimation framework built upon a state-space formulation. This design addresses key challenges in queue modeling, such as violations of traffic conservation assumptions. Q-Net follows the Kalman predict-update structure and maintains physical interpretability in both the state evolution and measurement models. Q-Net uses an AI-augmented Kalman filter to learn time-varying gain dynamics from data. The framework supports real-time implementation and improves spatial transferability by grouping aFCD measurements into fixed-size local groups, making the number of learnable parameters independent of section length. Evaluations on urban main roads in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, show that Q-Net outperforms baseline methods, tracks queue formation and dissipation accurately, and mitigates aFCD-induced delays. By combining data efficiency, interpretability, real-time applicability, and spatial transferability, Q-Net makes accurate queue length estimation possible without costly sensing infrastructure like cameras or radar.

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

Will AI Agents Free Us From Meaningless Work? A Human-Centered Analysis

arXiv:2606.12430v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Some claim that AI agents will free workers from the boring parts of their jobs, yet little is known about how workers themselves identify which tasks should be automated. Prior research focuses on occupations, overlooking that workers experience varying levels of meaning across tasks within the same role. We address this gap with a task-level analysis grounded in Graeber's theory of bullshit jobs. Using ratings from 202 workers on 171 workplace tasks, we (1) validate a five-item scale of perceived bullshitness, (2) show that perceived bullshitness strongly predicts desire for AI delegation, and (3) find that such tasks are also seen as requiring less human oversight. Together, these findings suggest that tasks perceived as bullshit are natural candidates for AI delegation, aligning worker preferences with perceived feasibility.

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

Sovereign Execution Brokers: Enforcing Certificate-Bound Authority in Agentic Control Planes

arXiv:2606.20520v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous agents are increasingly connected to cloud, deployment, and data-control workflows, but production mutation authority should not reside inside non-deterministic reasoning processes. Existing access-control mechanisms authorize identities, while assurance layers certify proposed actions; neither alone provides a mandatory enforcement point for certified authority at the moment of mutation. This paper introduces the Sovereign Execution Broker (SEB), a runtime enforcement boundary for certificate-bound agentic infrastructure. SEB consumes certificates issued by the Sovereign Assurance Boundary (SAB), verifies that the requested mutation matches the certified execution contract, checks validity windows, policy epochs, revocation epochs, and live-state drift, mints scoped execution identity, invokes infrastructure APIs, and records signed decision and outcome records. By separating proposal, admission, and execution, SEB turns certified authority into a short-lived, revocable, auditable runtime capability, provided that production mutation APIs reject non-broker identities. We present the SEB execution model, certificate and replay-verification predicates, scoped identity semantics, bypass-prevention deployment patterns, failure behavior, and a concrete prototype implementation. We evaluate the prototype on AWS and Kubernetes clusters, measuring latency overheads, revocation propagation, drift detection, and security under fault injection.

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arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Out-of-Distribution (OOD) Detectors for Open-Set RF Fingerprinting

arXiv:2606.12718v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Radio-frequency (RF) fingerprinting systems must operate in open-world environments where signals from unknown transmitters and temporal drift introduce distribution shift at test time. Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection provides a natural framework for this problem, yet its application to RF fingerprinting (RFF) remains limited. A key barrier to their adoption is that most OOD detectors require auxiliary OOD data for parameter tuning, an assumption that is difficult to satisfy in RF environments where representative OOD data is impractical to collect. In this work, we introduce a promising set of OOD detection methods from the machine learning literature to open-set RFF domain. We present these methods within a unified mathematical framework based on information theory, which is a natural framework for communication systems. Our framework allows for the systematic analysis of methods and development of new methods. We further demonstrate the applicability of recent work on tuning OOD detectors without given OOD tuning data for open-set RFF. We evaluate on the POWDER RF fingerprinting dataset, showing that detectors tuned without any given OOD data achieve performance comparable to baselines with access to true OOD tuning data and greatly out-perform baseline approaches without access to true OOD tuning data, showcasing the practical viability for the RFF problem.