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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

ttda704 at SemEval-2026 Task 4: Modeling Narrative Structures via Pseudonymization and Multi-View Sentence Alignment

We present our approach to SemEval 2026 Task 4: Narrative Story Similarity and Narrative Representation Learning. Our solution uses contrastive learning with fine-tuned sentence transformers to capture narrative similarity across abstract themes, course of action, and outcomes. We develop two pipelines: (Track A) a single-view method that encodes full narratives with smart layer freezing to reduce overfitting, and (Track B) a multi-view method that models theme, plot, and outcome with view-specific projection heads and self-supervised alignment. Both pipelines build on sentence-transformers models and are trained with contrastive loss on synthetic data. The code is available at the following GitHub repository: https://github.com/dinhthienan33/SemEval2026-Task4-ttda704.

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

Multi-Modal Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Network with Mixture of Experts for Soil Organic Carbon Prediction

Top-soil organic carbon (SOC) prediction is fundamental to agricultural sustainability, land use policy and fertilization planning. Existing approaches face two limitations: they pair hand-crafted covariates with classical ML or single-modal deep models that miss rich spectral and temporal information, and grid-based architectures ignore the irregular spatial structure of field measurements. We introduce SpTGNN, a multi-modal spatio-temporal graph neural network addressing both. SpTGNN represents soil measurements as nodes in a heterogeneous graph with three edge types (spatial proximity, spectral similarity, elevation), and applies relational graph attention to learn separate patterns per relation. A fine-tuned TerraMind encoder extracts node features from Sentinel-2, Sentinel-1 and DEM signals, combined with per-sample environmental covariates and learned positional and temporal embeddings. A sparse Mixture-of-Experts module fuses the four streams via top-$k$ routing. Uncertainty is captured by pairing heteroscedastic regression (aleatoric) with deep ensembles (epistemic), and a Moran's $I$ penalty regularizes spatial autocorrelation. We evaluate on a global SOC corpus split into three regional instances ($\sim$49k samples globally, Africa $\sim$26k, Europe $\sim$14k). Our 5-member deep ensemble reports $R^2=0.762$, RMSE $=3.51\pm0.48$ g/kg and MAPE $=22.9\%$ on the Africa test split, improving over a tabular XGBoost baseline; the best single checkpoint reaches validation $R^2=0.864$. Ablations confirm the heterogeneous graph, MoE fusion and fine-tuned backbone each contribute substantively, and the ensemble UQ stack achieves post-calibration ECE of $0.031$ (hybrid) and $0.026$ ($\beta$-NLL). To our knowledge, this is the first framework to unify foundation-model feature extraction, heterogeneous graph attention and decomposed uncertainty quantification for SOC estimation.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Entanglement generation between field modes mediated by a fluctuating conducting wall

arXiv:2606.12338v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We consider a movable conducting plate of finite mass, between two fixed ones, whose mechanical degrees of freedom are treated quantum-mechanically and bound to its equilibrium position by a harmonic potential. The movable wall is thus subjected to quantum fluctuations of its position. This creates a system of two sub-cavities separated by the movable fluctuating plate, and two massless one-dimensional scalar fields, one in each sub-cavity. This system is described by an appropriate generalization of the Law Hamiltonian. The presence of the movable wall yields an effective plate-fields interaction, as well as an effective interaction between the field modes. We obtain, at the second order in perturbation theory, the ground state of the interacting system and the reduced density operator of the fields in each sub-cavity by tracing out the wall's degrees of freedom. We calculate the entanglement between two field modes, one in each cavity, by evaluating analytically the negativity; we then evaluate numerically also the total multimode negativity. Our results show that in both cases the fields in the two sub-cavities are entangled, in contrast to the case in which the wall is fixed in space. We discuss the amount of the field entanglement present as a function of relevant physical parameters of the system such as the mass and oscillation frequency of the movable wall, its distance from the fixed walls and the frequencies of the field modes considered.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

ST-DiffEye: Diffusion-based Continuous Gaze Generation via Joint Scanpath-Trajectory Modeling

We study the problem of human gaze modeling, which aims to generate the gaze patterns a viewer produces while observing a visual stimulus. Gaze is primarily captured through two modalities: continuous eye-tracking trajectories, which describe fine-grained motion dynamics, and discrete scanpaths, which describe high-level fixation structure. Because gaze varies substantially across viewers and trials, we treat this variability as a defining property rather than noise and model gaze as a stochastic generative process. Existing generative gaze models supervise on only one of these two representations in isolation. We hypothesize that trajectories and scanpaths describe gaze at complementary scales and are jointly informative during training, and test this hypothesis through ST-DiffEye, a joint trajectory-scanpath diffusion framework that couples both modalities by concatenating them as an additional raw input channel, requiring no architectural overhead beyond an input and output channel expansion. We further introduce a principled evaluation framework based on the Continuous Ranked Probability Score (CRPS), which generalizes any existing sequence similarity metric into a proper scoring rule that jointly assesses the accuracy and diversity of generated gaze. Experiments on task-driven visual search, covering both target-present and target-absent scenarios, and on free-viewing benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. These results, along with detailed ablations, confirm the benefit of joint modeling and the value of distribution-aware evaluation in capturing the intrinsic variability of human gaze. Project webpage: https://st-diffeye.github.io/

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Sentinel: Decoding Context Utilization via Attention Probing for Efficient LLM Context Compression

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) often suffers from long and noisy retrieved contexts. Existing context compression methods typically rely on heuristic relevance estimation or supervised compression models rather than on how LLMs utilize retrieved context during inference. We propose Sentinel, a lightweight sentence-level compression framework that decodes inference-time contextual utilization behaviors from head-wise attention patterns of frozen LLMs. To ground supervision in retrieval-dependent answering behavior, Sentinel trains a lightweight probe using QA examples where the model succeeds only when retrieved context is available. Sentinel performs compression using only a single non-autoregressive forward pass without dedicated compression training or autoregressive scoring. Empirically, we find that effective contextual utilization signals remain accessible even in compact proxy models. On LongBench, Sentinel with a 0.5B proxy model achieves up to 5$\times$ compression while attaining question-answering performance competitive with compression methods built on 7B-scale models. Despite being trained only on English QA data, Sentinel also generalizes effectively to Chinese and out-of-domain settings.

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

Towards a Unified Generative Model for Scarce Time Series with Domain Experts

arXiv:2606.15172v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Synthesizing realistic time series with generative models has wide-ranging applications in real-world scenarios. Despite recent progress, most existing methods are trained under the assumption of abundant training data, which substantially limits their effectiveness in data-scarce settings. In this paper, we propose TimeMoDE, a novel framework that integrates Diffusion Transformers with Mixture-of-Experts to exploit both domain adaptability and diffusion-stage awareness for time series generation under data scarcity. It is pre-trained on a large-scale collection of multi-domain datasets to extract domain-agnostic temporal representations and domain-specific information benefiting generalization during fine-tuning. We propose Domain Prompts to condition expert assignment for indistinguishable noised tokens, mitigating the limitations of capturing inter-dataset relationships. Moreover, we incorporate diffusion timestep signals to equip the experts with awareness of time series degradation variations, facilitating adaptive calibrate to stage-dependent denoising requirements. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TimeMoDE outperforms existing methods under diverse low-data settings. It establishes an innovative paradigm for advanced time series few-shot generation.

07.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

On creating convexity in high dimensions

arXiv:2502.10382v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Given a subset $A$ of $\mathbb{R}^n$, we define \begin{align*} \mathrm{conv}_k(A) := \left\{ \lambda_1 s_1 + \cdots + \lambda_k s_k : \lambda_i \in [0,1], \sum_{i=1}^k \lambda_i = 1 , s_i \in A \right\} \end{align*} to be the set of vectors in $\mathbb{R}^n$ that can be written as a $k$-fold convex combination of vectors in $A$. Let $\gamma_n$ denote the standard Gaussian measure on $\mathbb{R}^n$. We show that for every $\varepsilon > 0$, there exists a subset $A$ of $\mathbb{R}^n$ with Gaussian measure $\gamma_n(A) \geq 1- \varepsilon$ such that for all $k = O_\varepsilon(\sqrt{\log \log(n)})$, $\mathrm{conv}_k(A)$ contains no convex set $K$ of Gaussian measure $\gamma_n(K) \geq \varepsilon$. This result acts as a complement to the recent affirmative resolution of Talagrand's convexity conjecture by Hua, Song, and Tudose, which states that a universal dilation of the threefold Minkowski sum $A+A+A$ of a large set $A$ guarantees a large convex subset. Our approach utilises concentration properties of random copulas and the application of optimal transport techniques to the empirical coordinate measures of vectors in high dimensions.

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

HAMON: Passive Optical Sequence Mixing for Long-Horizon Forecasting

arXiv:2606.17028v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Simple linear and frequency-domain models remain surprisingly competitive in long-horizon time-series forecasting, and recent mechanistic evidence suggests that standard forecasting benchmarks may not require the dense superposed representations that make transformers powerful in other domains. This raises a substrate-level question: if the core forecasting operator is often low-complexity and approximately linear, does it need to be implemented as learned digital temporal mixing? We introduce HAMON, a passive diffractive optical forecasting core in which historical values are encoded onto an optical aperture, future positions are left dark, and cascaded trainable phase masks with free-space diffraction shape the forecast directly in the output field. At inference, prediction is performed by a single passive optical propagation pass with no trainable digital sequence-mixing layer. Across standard benchmarks, HAMON outperforms the strongest digital baselines considered on ETTm2 at all horizons and on ETTh2 at all but the longest horizon, improving MSE by up to 14\% and doing so consistently across horizons rather than at isolated points. It is competitive on Weather and trails the strongest baselines on the remaining ETT settings and on the high-channel-count Traffic and Electricity datasets. Phase encoding, intensity-compatible readout, and phase-scrambling ablations, together with a TorchOptics cross-simulator check, indicate that the forecasts arise from the data-bearing optical field rather than from a digital forecasting head. Because the passive core uses standard Fourier optics, HAMON defines a concrete target for optical hardware and for passive physical sequence mixing.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

IBAD: Interpretable Behavioral Anomaly Detection on Human Mobility Data

arXiv:2606.16023v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Human mobility appears highly diverse, yet much of a person's daily mobility can be explained by a small set of recurring behavioral templates, such as commuting, school-centered activities, caregiving, nightlife, or errand patterns. We present \texttt{IBAD} (\underline{I}nterpretable \underline{B}ehavioral \underline{A}nomaly \underline{D}etection), a framework that learns interpretable daily mobility templates and represents each individual as a distribution over mixtures of these templates. Rather than focusing on specific locations, IBAD characterizes activities that individuals perform across locations. This approach first discovers global behavioral templates using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), then employs a hierarchical self-supervised model to learn normal behavior of individuals from their soft behavioral templates. We also introduce a splicing benchmark that creates controlled behavioral mismatches between an individual's historical profile and injected mobility patterns. Experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets show that daily behavior can be effectively decomposed into a small number of interpretable templates. Crucially, we show that the learned behavioral archetypes transfer across distinct geographic and demographic contexts. Furthermore, IBAD maintains a robust competitive performance across all settings. For reproducibility purposes, the code is accessible at ~\href{https://github.com/USC-InfoLab/IBAD}{https://github.com/USC-InfoLab/IBAD}.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

CADET: Physics-Grounded Causal Auditing and Training-Free Deconfounding of End-to-End Driving Planners

作者:

arXiv:2606.14438v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: End-to-end (E2E) autonomous-driving planners trained by imitation are prone to statistical shortcuts: they associate scene elements that merely co-occur with expert actions (a roadside object, a building facade) with driving decisions, rather than the variables that causally determine them. Such causal confusion silently compromises reliability in long-tail scenarios, and it is difficult to detect, because prevailing open-loop metrics (L2 displacement and collision rate) are dominated by ego status and do not indicate whether a planner depends on spurious cues. Existing remedies based on causal-intervention training require retraining large models and cannot audit a planner that is already deployed. We present CADET, a training-free framework that audits, benchmarks, and repairs spurious reliance in pretrained E2E planners without any parameter update.

11.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-26

Requiring code sharing to strengthen transparency and trust in research

by Helen Lumbard, Lauren Cadwallader, Devin Soper, on behalf of the PLOS Medicine Staff Editors PLOS Medicine has always championed open science and data transparency. Now, recognizing that code is as essential a research artifact as the data it analyzes, we are strengthening our code sharing policy to further ensure reproducibility and trust in the scientific record. Recognizing that code is as essential a research artifact as the data it analyzes, this Editorial outlines how PLOS Medicine is strengthening its code sharing policy to further ensure reproducibility and trust in the scientific record.

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

TACOMORE: Exploring a replicable prompting protocol for LLM-assisted corpus analysis

As corpus linguistics continues to scale, researchers are facing a growing methodological bottleneck: while computational tools can easily count billions of words, the qualitative interpretation of these data remains a slow and labor-intensive human task. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising way to automate this process, yet their integration into the field is often hindered by concerns over black-box unpredictability and a lack of replicability. This study introduces TACOMORE, a structured prompting framework designed to transform ad-hoc AI interactions into a standardized linguistic protocol. Built upon four foundational principles (Task, Context, Model, and Replicability), the framework guides LLMs to move beyond generic probability prediction to anchoring their reasoning in the specific co-occurrence patterns of a target corpus. We applied this framework to three core corpus tasks, i.e., the analysis of keywords, collocates, and concordances, using an open corpus of COVID-19 research abstracts. After testing three LLMs, we found that while structured prompting improves accuracy and replicability, inherent limitations regarding hallucination persist. This research offers a critical lens into the role of LLMs in corpus linguistics, highlighting their potential as complementary tools while emphasizing the irreplaceable role of human validation.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Reinforcement Learning for LLM-based Event Forecasting

arXiv:2606.15917v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We use Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), a recently devised sample and memory efficient reinforcement learning method, to finetune pretrained LLMs in the range of 1.5B to 14B parameters equipped with the ability to get current information through the use of a Wikipedia revisions tool, or news summaries, to forecast real events beyond the knowledge cutoff of the LLM, as well as problems made to simulate different aspects of the dynamics of that training. We use the results of these experiments to comment on the scaling capability of LLMs for forecasting, as well as classify how judgmental forecasting fits into the verifiable/unverifiable domain taxonomy, considering the impact of the inherent aleatoric uncertainty when forecasting future events (e.g. the roll of a die). As a result of the GRPO training, we manage to bring a 1.5B parameter transformer (Qwen 2.5 1.5B) to forecasting performance superior to Claude Sonnet 3.5 over the same dataset as measured by cross entropy from the market agreed probabilities. We also discuss various dead ends on the path to this result.

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

Heteroskedastic Signals in Budgeted LLM Verification: Structural Heterogeneity Limits Optimization Gains

作者:

arXiv:2606.15841v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) systems increasingly use uncertainty signals to allocate limited computation across verification, test-time scaling, tool execution, and other selective-compute decisions. Such policies rely on a global signal comparability assumption: equal scores should carry comparable decision value across inputs. Using budgeted verification as a controlled diagnostic setting, we identify a failure mode of this assumption: uncertainty quality is heteroskedastic across cost strata, with some regions exhibiting near-random discriminability despite concentrating many errors. Under an explicit local model, we characterize the resulting distortion of global allocation and show that its upper bound scales with cross-stratum signal-quality dispersion. We separate weak signals, optimization instability, and structural heterogeneity through a controlled intervention hierarchy: Threshold, MP-Adapt, MP-Strat, and a deliberately simple cost-stratified thresholding intervention (CST). Across MBPP and MATH using Qwen3-8B, LLaMA3-8B, and GPT-4o-mini, global online adaptation yields inconsistent gains over static thresholding; MP-Strat partially recovers performance, while CST improves hit rate by up to 17 percentage points in strongly heterogeneous settings without gradient updates. These results identify structural heterogeneity, rather than optimizer weakness alone, as the primary bottleneck in the observed settings. More broadly, misaligned feedback structure cannot always be repaired by stronger optimization.

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

Vision-Language-Action Jump-Starting for Reinforcement Learning Robotic Agents

arXiv:2604.13733v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) enables high-frequency, closed-loop control for robotic manipulation, but scaling to long-horizon tasks with sparse or imperfect rewards remains difficult due to inefficient exploration and poor credit assignment. Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models leverage large-scale multimodal pretraining to provide generalist, task-level reasoning, but current limitations hinder their direct use in fast and precise manipulation. In this paper, we propose Vision-Language-Action Jump-Starting (VLAJS), a method that bridges sparse VLA guidance with on-policy RL to improve exploration and learning efficiency. VLAJS treats VLAs as transient sources of high-level action suggestions that bias early exploration and improve credit assignment, while preserving the high-frequency, state-based control of RL. Our approach augments Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) with a directional action-consistency regularization that softly aligns the RL agent's actions with VLA guidance during early training, without enforcing strict imitation, requiring demonstrations, or relying on continuous teacher queries. VLA guidance is applied sparsely and annealed over time, allowing the agent to adapt online and ultimately surpass the guiding policy. We evaluate VLAJS on six challenging manipulation tasks: lifting, pick-and-place, peg reorientation, peg insertion, poking, and pushing in simulation, and validate a subset on a real Franka Panda robot. VLAJS consistently outperforms PPO and distillation-style baselines in sample efficiency, reducing required environment interactions by over 50% in several tasks. Real-world experiments demonstrate zero-shot sim-to-real transfer and robust execution under clutter, object variation, and external perturbations.

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

Scalable Batch Bayesian Optimization Via Subspace Acquisition Functions

arXiv:2411.16206v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Extending Bayesian optimization to batch evaluation can enable the designer to make the most use of parallel computing technology. However, most of current batch approaches do not scale well with the batch size. That is, their optimization efficiencies often deteriorate as the batch size increases. To address this issue, we propose a simple and efficient approach to extend Bayesian optimization to large-scale batch evaluation in this work. Different from existing batch approaches, the idea of the new approach is to draw a batch of axis-aligned subspaces of the original problem and select one point from each subspace using existing acquisition functions. Numerical experiments show that our proposed approach speedups the convergence significantly when compared with the sequential Bayesian optimization algorithm, and performs very competitively when compared with ten batch Bayesian optimization algorithms. The implementation of our proposed approach is available at https://github.com/zhandawei/SubSpace_Acquisition_Functions.

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

IB-HFN: Information Bottleneck-Driven SAR-Optical Fusion Network for High-Fidelity Cloud Removal

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR)-assisted optical cloud removal aims to recover surface information obscured by clouds in optical remote sensing images by exploiting complementary SAR observations. Existing multimodal fusion methods typically rely on direct spatial concatenation and pixel-wise supervision, which can propagate SAR speckle noise into optical reconstruction and lead to over-smoothed results. To address these limitations, we propose an Information Bottleneck-driven High-Fidelity Network (IB-HFN) for SAR-assisted optical cloud removal. IB-HFN employs a dual-stream backbone to preserve modality-specific representations before deep semantic fusion, thereby mitigating premature cross-modal contamination. At the fusion stage, we introduce a Spatial Information Bottleneck Fusion module that compresses SAR features through a channel-wise variational information bottleneck to suppress unstructured speckle noise. In parallel, a local-global gating mechanism predicts clear-sky regions and routes reliable optical details through a Dirac-initialized skip connection, decoupling noise suppression from texture preservation. We further develop a joint optimization strategy that integrates feature-level bottleneck regularization with image-level constraints on reconstruction accuracy, structural consistency, spectral fidelity, and contrastive sharpness. A dynamic weighting schedule balances these objectives to stabilize training and reduce hazy artifacts. Experiments on the SEN12MS-CR dataset under challenging spatio-temporal splits demonstrate that IB-HFN achieves superior structural preservation and spectral fidelity over existing methods.

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

Fusion-E2Pulse: A Multimodal Event-RGB Fusion Network for Non-contact Pulse Wave Reconstruction

Non-contact pulse wave reconstruction hinges on the precise recovery of waveform morphology, including the dicrotic notch. Conventional Red-Green-Blue (RGB)-based methods, which extract physiological signals from recorded facial videos, are constrained by the integral imaging mechanism of standard cameras, where the exposure process induces a smoothing effect that attenuates subtle vascular pulsation details. Conversely, neuromorphic event cameras, while offering exceptional sensitivity to intensity fluctuations, are inherently susceptible to noise and artifacts induced by minor motion. To exploit the synergy between frame-based integration and event-based differential sensing, we propose a novel multimodal network named Fusion-E2Pulse. This framework utilizes filtered RGB signals as structural priors to suppress motion artifacts, while leveraging the high-sensitivity of event streams to recover fine-grained morphological details. Experimental results demonstrate that Fusion-E2Pulse achieves state-of-the-art performance, effectively balancing noise suppression and morphological fidelity, achieving a mean absolute error of 0.78 bpm for heart rate estimation, a waveform correlation of 0.89, and a systolic phase duration error of 16.74 ms, validating its efficacy in reconstructing fine-grained pathological features.

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

Learning to Hear Hesitation: Continual Learning for Disfluency-Aware ASR

Despite advances in large-scale Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), disfluent speech remains challenging, as state-of-the-art systems are often optimized to omit disfluencies, leading to information loss and hallucinations. Prior work has focused on verbatim transcription and the integration of disfluency markers, but adapting models on limited datasets can lead to catastrophic forgetting of general-domain knowledge. We address this gap by leveraging continual learning (CL) with explicit disfluency tokens. We first introduce these tokens into a pretrained ASR model to establish stable token mechanisms, and then continue training on additional datasets with varying disfluency distributions. Through a detailed analysis of model dynamics during training, we identify a trade-off between marker learning and ASR performance, and a consistent cross-attention head mechanism shared across CL methods.

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

3-Key-Input: Exploring the Theoretical Minimum Keys for Text Entry

作者:

How far can we reduce the number of physical keys if we endow an ambiguous keyboard with modern language models? Fewer keys increase hardware design freedom in constrained settings such as assistive devices and mobile form factors. This paper systematically evaluates text entry systems using 2-5 physical keys combined with language-model-based disambiguation. On a 300-sentence English corpus (100 sentences each for Business / Conversational / Technical), we compare key counts (2-5), letter-to-key mappings (layout-based / frequency-based / intentionally worst-case), and decoders (Trie-only, GPT-2 beam search, GPT-4o selection). We find that 3 keys + GPT-4o achieves character error rate (CER) 9.46% and word error rate (WER) 12.20%, reducing CER by 59% relative to 2 keys (CER 23.3%). At 3 keys, the key-stream entropy is 1.54 bits/char; while increasing to 5 keys improves accuracy (CER 5.4%), the marginal gains diminish. Mapping choice has a small impact under standard designs ({\Delta}CER < 0.5 pp), and even an intentionally worst mapping degrades CER by only +0.5 pp, whereas Technical sentences yield roughly twice the error rate of Business. These results suggest that, in our evaluated offline setting under a strong LM prior, 3 keys are a practical minimum for general English.

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

Branch-and-Browse: Efficient and Controllable Web Exploration with Tree-Structured Reasoning and Action Memory

Autonomous web agents powered by large language models (LLMs) show strong potential for performing goal-oriented tasks such as information retrieval, report generation, and online transactions. These agents mark a key step toward practical embodied reasoning in open web environments. However, existing approaches remain limited in reasoning depth and efficiency: vanilla linear methods fail at multi-step reasoning and lack effective backtracking, while other search strategies are coarse-grained and computationally costly. We introduce Branch-and-Browse, a fine-grained web agent framework that unifies structured reasoning-acting, contextual memory, and efficient execution. It (i) employs explicit subtask management with tree-structured exploration for controllable multi-branch reasoning, (ii) bootstraps exploration through efficient web state replay with background reasoning, and (iii) leverages a page action memory to share explored actions within and across sessions. On the WebArena benchmark, Branch-and-Browse achieves a task success rate of 35.8\% and reduces execution time by up to 40.4\% relative to state-of-the-art methods. These results demonstrate that Branch-and-Browse is a reliable and efficient framework for LLM-based web agents.

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

Are LLMs Bad at Moral Reasoning?

arXiv:2606.11635v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For highly capable AI systems to operate safely in dynamic, open-ended environments, they must be able to identify, understand, and respond to moral reasons for action, and constrain their behaviour accordingly. A growing body of research aims to evaluate this capacity – moral competence – in today's most capable AI systems, recently reaching broadly pessimistic conclusions. One of the most ambitious such papers collects gold-standard human-authored rubrics for evaluating moral reasoning in 1,000 cases, and benchmarks frontier AI models against those rubrics, with underwhelming results. In this paper, we argue that the MoReBench dataset can be redeployed to give a much more optimistic picture of LLMs' moral reasoning (an essential part of moral competence). We show that if, instead of scoring LLMs' responses to these cases against these rubrics, we instead give the LLMs the same task given to humans – to generate scoring rubrics for the moral analysis of particular cases – the rubrics they generate are both better calibrated to the human rubrics than their open-ended responses, and, where they differ, plausibly reflect nothing more than the vast dimensionality of most moral problems, as well as highlighting some human departures from the "rubric for creating rubrics". Taking these points into consideration, the MoReBench dataset suggests that LLMs are significantly more capable at moral reasoning than was previously believed.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

SAGE-OPD: Selective Agent-Guided Intervention for Multi-Turn On-Policy Distillation

On-policy distillation (OPD) improves student models by training them on trajectories induced by their own policy, making it a promising approach for mitigating exposure bias in agent training. However, most OPD studies focus on single-turn settings, while realistic LLM agents interact with environments over multiple turns. In this regime, early errors can alter future observations and compound across the trajectory, and standard dense token-level OPD becomes brittle, as it may over-penalize semantically valid alternatives, reinforce local degeneracies such as repeated actions, and propagate unreliable teacher supervision on off-distribution histories. We propose SAGE-OPD, a verifier-free selective intervention framework specifically designed for multi-turn OPD. Instead of applying teacher supervision uniformly across all turns, SAGE-OPD first observes environment feedback and uses teacher judgment to decide whether each student response should be skipped or intervened on. To further address compounding errors, SAGE-OPD weights token-level distillation by teacher confidence, reducing the influence of uncertain teacher distributions on corrupted or ambiguous histories. Finally, SAGE-OPD applies loss normalization to preserve the overall loss scale of standard OPD while retaining selective turn-level weighting. Experiments on agent tasks show that SAGE-OPD consistently improves over baselines, achieving up to a 13.3% relative improvement in ALFWorld unseen success rate over standard OPD. Ablation studies further demonstrate that turn-level intervention, teacher confidence weighting, and loss normalization provide complementary benefits. Our results suggest that effective multi-turn OPD should remain on-policy, but teacher supervision should be selectively allocated to turns where intervention is necessary and reliable.

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

CogCanvas: A Benchmark for Evaluating Multi-Subject Reference-Based Image Generation

Multi-subject reference-based image generation requires jointly preserving multiple human identities, binding per-person objects and fashion items, and respecting a specified background scene, a regime where current diffusion models remain brittle. Existing benchmarks evaluate only one axis at a time and none jointly captures multi-identity composition with human-object interaction, background grounding, and spatial plausibility. We introduce CogCanvas, a benchmark of 1,952 curated reference images spanning 100 celebrity identities, 115 distinctive objects and fashion items, and 29 real-world background scenes including landmarks, from which we construct 1,361 compositional prompts covering 2-5 person group sizes. The curation pipeline combines DINOv2-based deduplication, two-stage aesthetic filtering, and automated derivation of structured interaction and position graphs that serve as ground-truth supervision. CogCanvas supports three tasks, reference-based multi-human-object generation (primary), text-to-image compositional generation, and reference retrieval, under a unified six-axis evaluation protocol. We introduce two metrics tailored to the multi-reference setting: BG-Sim, which scores background fidelity on SAM 3-masked regions via DINOv3 feature similarity, and Attr-VQA, which uses a multimodal LLM to verify per-subject attribute binding and inter-person interactions against the structured graphs. Benchmarking five SOTA methods reveals that every model degrades substantially as group size grows from 2 to 5, with near-complete failure on object/fashion binding beyond three subjects.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Abstracting Cross-Domain Action Sequences into Interpretable Workflows

Sequential or time-stamped interaction logs provide objective records of digital application usage, yet their granularity and noise often obscure meaningful insights into people's work. Such insights are essential for improving digital products in ways grounded in real-world user interactions. Prior research has applied deep learning models to cluster user actions into high-level activities, but these approaches are highly sensitive to noise and struggle to generalize across applications. To address this limitation, we introduce WorkflowView, a framework that uses large language models (LLMs) to abstract low-level action sequences into high-level activities. We establish the effectiveness and generality of our approach across three distinct, challenging sequential tasks and diverse domains: (a) zero-shot task description reconstruction from browser logs (achieving high semantic similarity, $\mu_{sim} = 0.91$), (b) few-shot student dropout prediction using MOOC interaction logs (reaching weighted $F_1 = 0.90$ with only five few-shot examples), and (c) anonymized, privacy-preserving analysis of AI tool integration within document workflows in Microsoft Word. Our work demonstrates that LLM-based abstraction is a robust and efficient path forward for transforming low-level behavioral data into high-level, interpretable, and actionable insights. We also discuss practical considerations for deploying LLM-based inferences within logging infrastructures, including computational efficiency and user privacy.