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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Bi-qutrit entangled edge states of positive partial transposes with largest ranks

Authors:
Kyung Hoon Han↗Seung-Hyeok Kye↗

arXiv:2606.16265v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Whenever $E$ is an eight dimensional subspace of the bi-qutrit quantum system whose orthogonal complement is spanned by a vector of Schmidt rank three, we show that there exist PPT entangled edge states with the range space $E$ whose partial transposes are of rank six, which is the largest possible rank. In this way, we exhibit a huge family of bi-qutrit PPT entangled edge states of type $(8,6)$. They make faces of the convex set of all PPT states, and we find bi-qutrit PPT entangled edge states of other types on the boundaries of such faces.

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02.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-13

ProtAff: Protein Binding Affinity Prediction via LoRA-Finetuned ESM-2

Authors:
Chu↗L.-S↗Vogt↗Chungyoun↗Gray↗J. J↗

Predicting the binding affinity of protein–protein interactions remains a central challenge in computational biology. Structure prediction models such as AlphaFold3 (AF3) and Boltz-2 can produce high-quality docking poses, and their confidence scores indicate structure quality, but these same scores fail to rank binding affinity among confirmed binders. Here we present ProtAff, a sequence-only affinity prediction model built on ESM-2 (650M parameters) with low-rank adaptation (LoRA) fine-tuning and a cross-attention module. ProtAff is trained using a margin ranking loss on 362,567 affinity measurements spanning 20 heterogeneous data sources, and we removed all training samples whose target sequence exceeds 50% similarity to the test target EGFR. On the AdaptyvBio EGFR benchmark (N = 55), ProtAff achieves a Spearman correlation coefficient {rho} = 0.413, outperforming the best AF3 metric ({rho} = 0.054), the best Boltz-2 metric ({rho} = -0.046), and ML-based predictors MINT ({rho} = 0.242) and CrossAffinity ({rho} = 0.216). Applied to the AdaptyvBio Nipah virus binder design competition, a pipeline incorporating ProtAff for affinity ranking produced a design with KD = 0.132 nM (2 of 5 designs confirmed binding), a 2.8-fold improvement over the competition winner. On a cross-target discrimination benchmark of 91 VHH-antigen crystal structures, ProtAff underperforms structural methods for distinguishing cognate from non-cognate pairings, indicating that sequence-based affinity models are effective for within-target ranking but not for cross-target specificity.

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03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

MARD: Mirror-Augmented Reasoning Distillation for Mechanism-Level Drug-Drug Interaction Prediction

Authors:
Mohammadreza Riyazat↗Vian Lelo↗Rameen Jafri↗Yumna Khan↗Abeer Badawi↗

Mechanism-level drug-drug interaction (DDI) prediction requires identifying which enzyme or pharmacodynamic axis is implicated, in which direction, and with which evidence – not merely whether two drugs interact. We introduce a reproducible mechanism-level DDI labelling and evaluation protocol with a structured 7-family/147-subtype taxonomy, leakage-safe cold-split protocols, and auditable reasoning metrics for evaluating pharmacological prediction beyond flat interaction classification. We propose a pipeline that produces a 7B reasoning MARD (Mirror-Augmented Reasoning Distillation), combining three training innovations: a single-token KL divergence on direction tag that ties the model's prediction, per-loss PRM-weighted DPO with programmatic hard negatives, and a leakage-safe mechanism-aware retrieval channel. Process-reward step labels are automatically verifiable against DrugBank-structured fields, requiring no human or LLM judges. On the April-2026 DrugBank release, our MARD-7B is the only system in a 32-system comparison whose accuracy survives drug-pair novelty, beating the best baseline by +13.9 pp and GPT-4o by +6.7 pp at ~1% of frontier API cost. Further analysis reveals an anti-memorisation signature where accuracy improves on rarely seen drugs, suggesting that gain comes from structured pharmacological reasoning rather than drug-frequency memorisation. We release corpus, DDI-PRM, retrieval index, and training code.

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

MoCA-Agent: A Market-of-Claims Code Agent for Financial and Numerical Reasoning

Authors:
Abdelrahman Abdallah↗AbdelRahim A. Elmadany↗Sameh Al Natour↗Hasan Cavusoglu↗Adam Jatowt↗Muhammad Abdul-Mageed↗

arXiv:2606.11537v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Financial and tabular question answering requires more than fluent reasoning: answers must be grounded in the exact facts, formulas, units, signs, and scales that support them. A single misread cell or incorrect operation can silently produce a plausible but wrong result. We introduce \textsc{MOCA-Agent}, a market-of-claims code agent that replaces free-form multi-agent debate with claim-level verification. The system decomposes each question into typed atomic claims, asks specialist trader agents to buy or sell those claims, clears their orders into confidence-weighted accept/reject decisions, and synthesizes an executable Python program from market-supported evidence. A code-aware verifier then checks the program for execution, structural consistency, and common financial reasoning errors, with at most one market-aware repair round. Across ten public benchmarks spanning financial numerical reasoning, general tabular reasoning, ESG question answering, and multimodal chart reasoning, \textsc{MOCA-Agent} achieves strong performance using a fixed Qwen3.6-27B backbone, including $78.3\%$ on FinQA, $76.0\%$ on FinanceMath, $71.2\%$ on MultiHiertt, $86.9\%$ on ESGenius, and $85.6\%$ average on FinChart-Bench. These results show that aggregating evidence at the level of atomic claims, rather than whole answers, improves robustness in high-stakes numerical reasoning.\footnote{The code and data are available: https://github.com/UBC-NLP/MoCA-Agent.

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

Misinformation Propagation in Benign Multi-Agent Systems

Authors:
Jonas Becker↗Jan Philip Wahle↗Terry Ruas↗Bela Gipp↗

Multi-agent systems, in which multiple large language model agents solve problems through turn-based interaction, are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings such as medical diagnosis, legal analysis, and forensic decision-making. Their reliability can be at risk when single agents reason from incorrect or misleading context, e.g., from tool calls, since errors may propagate through agent interactions. This work studies this risk by injecting intent-based misinformation into benign single-agent and multi-agent systems across reasoning, knowledge, and alignment tasks. We find that misinformation can degrade single-agent performance and persists across multi-agent debate, with agents often retaining answers introduced by misinformed peers. Nevertheless, multi-agent debate reduces the resulting performance degradation compared to single-agent prompting, especially when most agents are not exposed to misinformation. Robustness depends on group composition and decision protocol. Consensus can be more stable than voting under peer pressure, while majorities can often steer misinformed agents back toward correct answers. Our results show that misinformation robustness in multi-agent systems depends on the underlying model and also on how agents exchange information and aggregate decisions.

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

Visual Generation in the New Era: An Evolution from Atomic Mapping to Agentic World Modeling

Authors:
Keming Wu↗Zuhao Yang↗Kaichen Zhang↗Shizun Wang↗Haowei Zhu↗Sicong Leng↗Zhongyu Yang↗Qijie Wang↗Sudong Wang↗Ziting Wang↗Zili Wang↗Hui Zhang↗…

Recent visual generation models have made major progress in photorealism, typography, instruction following, and interactive editing, yet they still struggle with spatial reasoning, persistent state, long-horizon consistency, and causal understanding. We argue that the field should move beyond appearance synthesis toward intelligent visual generation: plausible visuals grounded in structure, dynamics, domain knowledge, and causal relations. To frame this shift, we introduce a five-level taxonomy: Atomic Generation, Conditional Generation, In-Context Generation, Agentic Generation, and World-Modeling Generation, progressing from passive renderers to interactive, agentic, world-aware generators. We analyze key technical drivers, including flow matching, unified understanding-and-generation models, improved visual representations, post-training, reward modeling, data curation, synthetic data distillation, and sampling acceleration. We further show that current evaluations often overestimate progress by emphasizing perceptual quality while missing structural, temporal, and causal failures. By combining benchmark review, in-the-wild stress tests, and expert-constrained case studies, this roadmap offers a capability-centered lens for understanding, evaluating, and advancing the next generation of intelligent visual generation systems.

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07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Not Just How Much, But Where: Decomposing Epistemic Uncertainty into Per-Class Contributions

Authors:
Mame Diarra Toure↗David A. Stephens↗

arXiv:2602.21160v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In safety-critical classification, the cost of failure is often asymmetric, yet Bayesian deep learning summarises epistemic uncertainty with a single scalar, mutual information (MI), that cannot distinguish whether a model's ignorance involves a benign or safety-critical class. We decompose MI into a per-class vector $C_k(x)=\sigma_k^{2}/(2\mu_k)$, with $\mu_k{=}\mathbb{E}[p_k]$ and $\sigma_k^2{=}\mathrm{Var}[p_k]$ across posterior samples. The decomposition follows from a second-order Taylor expansion of the entropy; the $1/\mu_k$ weighting corrects boundary suppression and makes $C_k$ comparable across rare and common classes. By construction $\sum_k C_k \approx \mathrm{MI}$, and a companion skewness diagnostic flags inputs where the approximation degrades. After characterising the axiomatic properties of $C_k$, we validate it on three tasks: (i) selective prediction for diabetic retinopathy, where critical-class $C_k$ reduces selective risk by 34.7\% over MI and 56.2\% over variance baselines; (ii) out-of-distribution detection on clinical and image benchmarks, where $\sum_k C_k$ achieves the highest AUROC and the per-class view exposes asymmetric shifts invisible to MI; and (iii) a controlled label-noise study in which $\sum_k C_k$ shows less sensitivity to injected aleatoric noise than MI under end-to-end Bayesian training, while both metrics degrade under transfer learning. Across all tasks, the quality of the posterior approximation shapes uncertainty at least as strongly as the choice of metric, suggesting that how uncertainty is propagated through the network matters as much as how it is measured.

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

i1: A Simple and Fully Open Recipe for Strong Text-to-Image Models

Authors:
Boya Zeng↗Tianze Luo↗Shu Pu↗Jucheng Shen↗Taiming Lu↗Gabriel Sarch↗Zhuang Liu↗

Diffusion models have consistently driven progress in text-to-image generation. However, it is challenging to attribute recent progress to specific modeling and data choices: state-of-the-art open-weight models provide limited ablations, and do not disclose their training data and full training details. The research community needs fully open (weights, data, and code) models as a foundation for further research; yet existing fully open models still fall significantly short of leading models in performance. In this project, we conduct a systematic investigation of the modeling and data design choices in text-to-image diffusion training and inference with 300+ controlled experiments totaling 700K+ TPU v6e hours. Our experiments highlight several empirical findings (e.g., equal weighting is a strong default for mixing curated datasets) and simple design decisions (e.g., larger text encoder adapters improve performance with minimal added parameters) for training strong models. Guided by these insights, we train i1, a 3B-parameter text-to-image diffusion model using only publicly available datasets. i1 is competitive with leading models on five representative benchmarks (GenEval, DPG, PRISM, CVTG-2K, and LongText), and outperforms the best existing fully open model by 29.5 absolute percentage points on average. We provide the i1 checkpoints, training and inference code, and the data processing pipeline. Together, our findings and the i1 recipe establish a practical foundation for future open research in text-to-image diffusion models. Our code is available at https://github.com/zlab-princeton/i1.

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09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Fragile Knowledge, Robust Instruction-Following: The Width Pruning Dichotomy in Llama-3.2

Authors:
Pere Martra↗

Structured width pruning of GLU-MLP layers in Llama-3.2 models, guided by the Peak-to-Peak Magnitude (PPM) criterion, reveals a systematic dichotomy in how reducing the expansion ratio affects different model capabilities. While performance on tasks relying on parametric knowledge (e.g., MMLU, GSM8K) and perplexity metrics degrades predictably with decreasing expansion ratios, instruction-following capabilities improve at the 2.4x equilibrium ratio (IFEval: +4.8 points / +46% in Llama-3.2-1B and +3.7 points / +39% in Llama-3.2-3B), and multi-step reasoning remains robust (MUSR). This pattern, observed consistently across both evaluated model sizes, challenges the prevailing assumption in compression research that pruning induces uniform degradation. To investigate this, we evaluated seven expansion ratio configurations using comprehensive benchmark suites that assess factual knowledge, mathematical reasoning, language comprehension, instruction-following, and truthfulness. Our analysis identifies the expansion ratio as a critical architectural parameter that selectively reshapes the model's task performance profile, rather than merely serving as a compression metric.

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10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Prediction-Powered Risk Monitoring of Deployed Models for Detecting Harmful Distribution Shifts

Authors:
Guangyi Zhang↗Yunlong Cai↗Guanding Yu↗Osvaldo Simeone↗

arXiv:2602.02229v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the problem of monitoring model performance in dynamic environments where labeled data are limited. To this end, we propose prediction-powered risk monitoring (PPRM), a semi-supervised risk-monitoring approach based on prediction-powered inference (PPI). PPRM constructs anytime-valid lower bounds on the running risk by combining synthetic labels with a small set of true labels. Harmful shifts are detected via a threshold-based comparison with an upper bound on the nominal risk, satisfying assumption-free finite-sample guarantees on the type-I error. We demonstrate the effectiveness of PPRM through extensive experiments on image classification, large language model (LLM), and telecommunications monitoring tasks.

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11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

VistaRef: Boosting Visual Spatial Orientation Awareness for Pointing-to-Object Detection

Authors:
Ling Li↗Zhizhen Cai↗Xinkun Wu↗Ziyu Zhu↗Jiaqing Lyu↗Bowen Liu↗Zhidong Deng↗

Grounding deictic gestures in natural images is fundamental to AR and human-robot collaboration, providing a basis for seamless spatial interaction. While Transformer-based visual models have achieved significant progress in general object detection, their global attention mechanisms often neglect micro-geometric relationships, degrading orientation accuracy. In pointing tasks, this deficiency manifests as an inability to accurately capture the pointing ray implied by finger poses, which results in pointing drift and localization ambiguity when dealing with distant or densely packed objects. To address this, we propose VistaRef, a framework designed to explicitly enhance spatial orientation awareness. First, we develop the Local Hand Entity Modeling (LHEM) module, which incorporates hand-pose embeddings to strengthen the model's capability to capture subtle finger deviations. Second, drawing inspiration from multi-view geometry, we construct the Geometric Ray Modeling (GRM) module to transform implicit orientation information into explicit spatial geometric features, guiding feature aggregation and deep fusion via attention mechanisms. Furthermore, we introduce a novel Orientation-Consistent Alignment Loss (OCAL) to synergistically supervise hand presence and pointing consistency, ensuring that all architectural improvements collectively serve the core objective of spatial localization. Experimental results demonstrate that VistaRef significantly outperforms the baseline, achieving a 14-point absolute gain in grounding accuracy. Qualitative analysis further confirms that VistaRef effectively models the geometric correlation from hand to target, bridging the spatial perception gap inherent in traditional Transformers for complex scenarios. Code: https://github.com/lingli1724/VistaRef.

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

Gated QKAN-FWP: Scalable Quantum-inspired Sequence Learning

Authors:
Kuo-Chung Peng↗Samuel Yen-Chi Chen↗Jiun-Cheng Jiang↗Chen-Yu Liu↗En-Jui Kuo↗Yun-Yuan Wang↗Prayag Tiwari↗Andrea Ceschini↗Chi-Sheng Chen↗Yu-Chao Hsu↗Chun-Hua Lin↗Tai-Yue Li↗…

arXiv:2605.06734v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fast Weight Programmers (FWPs) encode temporal dependencies through dynamically updated parameters rather than recurrent hidden states. Quantum FWPs (QFWPs) extend this idea with variational quantum circuits (VQCs), but existing implementations rely on multi-qubit architectures that are difficult to scale on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices and expensive to simulate classically. We propose gated QKAN-FWP, a fast-weight framework that integrates FWP with Quantum-inspired Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (QKAN) using single-qubit data re-uploading circuits as learnable nonlinear activation, known as DatA Re-Uploading ActivatioN (DARUAN). We further introduce a scalar-gated fast-weight update rule that stabilizes parameter evolution, supported by a theoretical analysis of its adaptive memory kernel, geometric boundedness, and parallelizable gradient paths. We evaluate the framework across time-series benchmarks, MiniGrid reinforcement learning, and highlight real-world solar cycle forecasting as our main practical result. In the long-horizon setting with 528-month input window and 132-month forecast horizon, our 12.5k-parameter model achieves lower scaled Mean Square Error (MSE), peak amplitude error, and peak timing error than a suite of classical recurrent baselines with up to 13x more parameters, including Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks (25.9k-89.1k parameters), WaveNet-LSTM (167k), Vanilla recurrent neural network (11.5k), and a Modified Echo State Network (132k). To validate NISQ compatibility, we further deploy the trained fast programmer on IonQ and IBM Quantum processors, recovering forecasting accuracy within 0.1% relative MSE of the noiseless simulator at 1024 shots. These results position gated QKAN-FWP as a scalable, parameter-efficient, and NISQ-compatible approach to quantum-inspired sequence modeling.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

ComAct: Reframing Professional Software Manipulation via COM-as-Action Paradigm

Authors:
Jiaxin Ai↗Tao Hu↗Xuemeng Yang↗Shu Zou↗Hairong Zhang↗Daocheng Fu↗Yu Yang↗Hongbin Zhou↗Nianchen Deng↗Pinlong Cai↗Zhongyuan Wang↗Botian Shi↗…

Existing computer-use agents remain fundamentally limited in professional software manipulation: GUI-based agents suffer from fragile visual grounding and long-horizon error accumulation, while API-basedapproaches struggle with heterogeneous protocols and inaccessible commercial interfaces. In this work,we identify the Component Object Model (COM) as a unified executable abstraction, proposing COM-as-Action: a new paradigm that reframes professional software interaction as deterministic program synthesisrather than sequential visual control. To validate this paradigm in the most demanding environments, weintroduce ComCADBench, the first benchmark for agents operating real industrial CAD software. Ourexperiments reveal a substantial paradigm gap: frontier proprietary models achieve near-zero successunder GUI-based interaction, whereas COM-based execution yields substantial immediate gains. Tobridge the remaining gap between syntactic correctness and geometric accuracy, we develop ComActor, aself-correcting agent trained through a progressive three-stage framework, alongside ComForge, a scalableplatform for large-scale training in Windows containers. Extensive experiments show that ComActorachieves state-of-the-art performance on ComCADBench, with strong resilience in long-horizon taskswhere baselines collapse, and generalizes to external CAD benchmark.

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14.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

A mosaic of whole-body representations on the human precentral gyrus

Authors:
Darrel R. Deo↗

Understanding how the body is represented in the motor cortex is key to understanding how the brain controls movement. Although the motor cortex has been mapped in animal models at a fine scale1–10, characterization in humans remains primarily limited to low-resolution recording11–16 and stimulation techniques17–20. Here we created a comprehensive map of the human motor cortex at single-neuron resolution, spanning microelectrode array recordings from 20 arrays across 8 individuals with paralysis from spinal cord injury, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or brainstem stroke, all enrolled in brain–computer interface clinical trials. These arrays broadly sample the crown of the precentral gyrus (PCG; thought to be composed largely of the premotor cortex (Brodmann area 6)). We found that body parts were highly intermixed, such that the entire body was represented in all sampled locations of the PCG, although the relative strength of body parts was roughly consistent with the motor homunculus17,18. We also found two speech-preferential areas with a broadly tuned, orofacial-dominant area in between them. Throughout the PCG, movement representations of the four limbs were interlinked, with homologous movements of different limbs (for example, toe curl and hand close) having correlated representations. These data provide evidence consistent with an intermixed, interrelated and behaviour-centred organization of the motor cortex3,21. The resulting map also provides important targeting information for brain–computer interfaces that seek to restore motor function. A comprehensive map of the human motor cortex at single-neuron resolution is described.

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15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Sharp connectivity bounds for the vacant set of random interlacements

Authors:
Subhajit Goswami↗Pierre-Fran\c{c}ois Rodriguez↗Yuriy Shulzhenko↗

arXiv:2504.02777v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider percolation of the vacant set of random interlacements at intensity $u$ in dimensions three and higher, and derive lower bounds on the truncated two-point function for all values of $u>0$. These bounds are sharp up to principal exponential order for all $u$ in dimension three and all $u \neq u_\ast$ in higher dimensions, where $u_*$ refers to the critical parameter of the model, and they match the upper bounds derived in the article arXiv:2503.14497. In dimension three, our results further imply that the truncated two-point function grows at large distances $x$ at a rate that depends on $x$ only through its Euclidean norm, which offers a glimpse of the expected (Euclidean) invariance of the scaling limit at criticality. The rate function is atypical, it incurs a logarithmic correction and comes with an explicit pre-factor that converges to $0$ as the parameter $u$ approaches the critical point $u_*$ from either side. A particular challenge stems from the combined effects of lack of monotonicity due to the truncation in the super-critical phase, and the precise (rotationally invariant) controls we seek, that measure the effects of a certain "harmonic humpback" function. Among others, their derivation relies on rather fine estimates for hitting probabilities of the random walk in arbitrary direction $e$, which witness this invariance at the discrete level, and preclude straightforward applications of projection arguments.

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

Descriptive versus Regulatory Uncertainty in Bounded Predictive Systems

Authors:
Ahmed Gamal Eldin↗

arXiv:2605.18909v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Any system that models the world under finite representational capacity must compress; any compression entails a prior; and the prior is the system's bias. What has not been established is whether uncertainty participates in the dynamics governing future behavior, or merely describes the output distribution without consequence. We introduce a structural distinction between descriptive uncertainty, which does not recursively modulate the system's policy, and regulatory uncertainty, which directly enters the optimization landscape and drives persistent adaptive restructuring. We prove formally that current transformer architectures are confined to descriptive uncertainty at inference. We ground this in thermodynamics via Landauer's principle: for uncertainty to be regulatory, epistemic error must cost real energy; in a decoupled system, hallucinations and correct derivations dissipate identical energy. We test this empirically across three locally-deployed language models (3B, 8B, 70B parameters). Token-level Shannon entropy is statistically invariant across tasks spanning pattern retrieval, causal operator application, and out-of-distribution causal generalization in all three models (all pairwise p >= 0.568; within-model ranges 0.011-0.028 nats), while task accuracy varies substantially across the same conditions (0%-100%). Entropy and accuracy are orthogonal. The decoupling is scale-invariant: larger models achieve higher accuracy but identical entropy flatness. This structural incapacity is not resolvable by additional parameters or training data. Genuine epistemic grounding requires physical coupling between thermodynamic substrate state and information processing cost.

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17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Fair Cognitive Impairment Detection Through Unlearning

Authors:
William Nguyen↗Jiali Cheng↗Hadi Amiri↗

Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) is a medical condition characterized by a noticeable decline in memory, language, or thinking abilities. MCI detection from spontaneous speech is promising for scalable screening. However, learned models often exploit demographic cues correlated with labels, resulting in a large performance gap across subgroups. We present a multimodal framework that combines (i) cross-model fusion between modalities (speech, text, and image), and (ii) unlearning using gradient reversal that discourages the shared embedding from encoding task-irrelevant demographic attributes. Evaluated on the multilingual benchmarks TAUKADIAL and PREPARE, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art multilingual and multimodal baseline in MCI classification while substantially reducing the performance gap across patient subgroups (sex and language). We further analyze transfer across datasets, showing that demographic unlearning helps learn more robust representations for MCI detection.

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

Current World Models Lack a Persistent State Core

Authors:
Jinpeng Lu↗Dexu Zhu↗Haoyuan Shi↗Linghan Cai↗Guo Tang↗Yinda Chen↗Jie Cao↗Duyu Tang↗Yi Zhang↗Yong Dai↗Xiaozhu Ju↗

World models are increasingly regarded as a decisive step toward artificial general intelligence, yet modeling the physical world demands more than rendering convincing frames on demand: it requires an internal world state that keeps evolving over time, decoupled from observation, so that objects endure and events run to their conclusions whether or not a camera is watching, much as the moon holds to its orbit when no one is looking. This requirement is a blind spot of existing benchmarks, which reward surface properties such as fidelity, motion, and camera controllability while never asking whether a generated world keeps evolving once it is unobserved. We introduce WRBench, the first systematic diagnostic benchmark that treats camera motion as an intervention on observability and resolves evaluation into a human-calibrated chain that asks whether the camera executes the requested interaction, whether the scene stays continuous and identifiable while in view, and whether a returning target remains consistent with the event that was set in motion. Across 9{,}600 videos from 23 models spanning four control paradigms, one finding proves stubborn: current systems maintain the observed world as a tracking shot, resuming a returning target in the state at which it was abandoned rather than advancing the event while it went unseen. Because this failure recurs across control paradigms, model families, and increments of scale, robust world-state evolution does not follow from cleaner imagery, tighter control, richer geometric priors, or sheer parameter count We therefore argue that the stability of the physical state kernel and the consistency of worldlines under viewpoint intervention should become first-class objectives of world-model design, so that a world model captures how the world will unfold rather than how the next frame appears.

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

Clustering and Pruning in Causal Data Fusion

Authors:
Otto Tabell↗Santtu Tikka↗Juha Karvanen↗

arXiv:2505.15215v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Data fusion, the process of combining observational and experimental data, can enable the identification of causal effects that would otherwise remain non-identifiable. Although identification algorithms have been developed for specific scenarios, do-calculus remains the only general-purpose tool for causal data fusion, particularly when variables are present in some data sources but not others. However, approaches based on do-calculus may encounter computational challenges as the number of variables increases and the causal graph grows in complexity. Consequently, there exists a need to reduce the size of such models while preserving the essential features. For this purpose, we propose pruning (removing unnecessary variables) and clustering (combining variables) as preprocessing operations for causal data fusion. We generalize earlier results on a single data source and derive conditions for applying pruning and clustering in the case of multiple data sources. We give sufficient conditions for inferring the identifiability or non-identifiability of a causal effect in a larger graph based on a smaller graph and show how to obtain the corresponding identifying functional for identifiable causal effects. Examples from epidemiology and social science demonstrate the use of the results.

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

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

Authors:
Ali Asaria↗Tony Salomone↗Deep Gandhi↗

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

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

Improving Code-Switching ASR with Code-Mixing Guided Synthetic Speech

Authors:
Yue Heng Yeo↗Haoyang Li↗Yizhou Peng↗Shreyas Gopal↗Hexin Liu↗Leibny Paola Garcia-Perera↗Hardik B. Sailor↗Jeremy H. M. Wong↗Eng Siong Chng↗

arXiv:2606.19381v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Code-switch (CS) Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) remains challenging due to limited availability of high quality CS text-speech pairs for training. Although synthetic data augmentation via Text-to-speech (TTS) has been explored, existing CS TTS approaches primarily optimise reconstruction fidelity and do not explicitly enforce language-boundary consistency, thereby limiting their effectiveness for CS ASR augmentation. This paper proposes a code-mixing guided preference-learning framework that steers synthetic speech generation toward improved code-switching fidelity using the Code Mixing Index (CMI). Experiments on the SEAME Mandarin-English conversational corpus demonstrate that the proposed method enhances the utility of synthetic data for ASR fine-tuning. Specifically, when fine-tuning Whisper Large, the proposed approach reduces Mixed Error Rate (MER) from 12.1%/17.8% to 8.9%/14.2% on the DevMAN and DevSGE sets, respectively.

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

Revealing Artifacts via Noise Amplification: A Novel Perspective for AI-Generated Video Detection

Authors:
Renxi Cheng↗Jie Gui↗Hongsong Wang↗

With the rapid advancement of video generation models, distinguishing between AI-generated and authentic videos has emerged as a challenging endeavor. The majority of existing research endeavors concentrate on the development of detectors for identifying samples generated by generative adversarial networks. Nevertheless, the detection of AI-generated videos, particularly those produced by text-to-video models, still remains an uncharted territory. Although state-of-the-art text-to-video models can generate realistic visual content similar to real videos, they fall short of generating the details of the images and the changes in details within the videos. Inspired by this, we address AI-generated video detection from a novel perspective of bit-planes, which can effectively describe the details or noises in images or videos. To this end, we propose a simple yet effective approach called Noise Amplification. This approach first extracts noise signals based on bit-planes, then amplifies these noise signals, and finally feeds them into the discriminator networks for video fake classification. Noise amplification is comprehensively constructed by incorporating three aspects: pixel-level intensity enhancement, region-level spatial amplification, and frame-level temporal aggregation. To evaluate methods of AI-generated video detection in challenging scenarios, we also introduce a benchmark named HardGVD. Extensive experiments on both the large-scale dataset GenVidBench and HardGVD show that our simple approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

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23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Diffusion Policy Optimization without Drifting Apart

Authors:
Haozhe Jiang↗Haiwen Feng↗Pieter Abbeel↗Jiantao Jiao↗Angjoo Kanazawa↗Nika Haghtalab↗

arXiv:2606.13795v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: RL post-training has become increasingly pivotal for improving diffusion policies, but existing diffusion policy-gradient methods are often unstable and cannot achieve reliable policy improvement. We identify the cause as the double-drift phenomenon: optimizing a variational surrogate can let the ELBO separate from the true log-likelihood, which then makes the resulting proxy policy gradient misaligned with the true policy gradient of expected return. We propose DiPOD, a diffusion policy optimization framework that maintains tight-bound behavior throughout training by interleaving self-distillation with policy-improving gradient updates. This leads to a simple and practical algorithm: augmenting each diffusion policy-gradient update with an on-policy ELBO regularizer. Across diffusion language model post-training and continuous-control diffusion policies, DiPOD substantially stabilizes training and reaches higher rewards than previous methods.

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

When AI Meets Finance (StockAgent): Large Language Model-based Stock Trading in Simulated Real-world Environments

Authors:
Chong Zhang↗Xinyi Liu↗Zhongmou Zhang↗Mingyu Jin↗Lingyao Li↗Zhenting Wang↗Wenyue Hua↗Dong Shu↗Suiyuan Zhu↗Xiaobo Jin↗Sujian Li↗Mengnan Du↗…

arXiv:2407.18957v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Can AI Agents simulate real-world trading environments to investigate the impact of external factors on stock trading activities (e.g., macroeconomics, policy changes, company fundamentals, and global events)? These factors, which frequently influence trading behaviors, are critical elements in the quest for maximizing investors' profits. Our work attempts to solve this problem through large language model based agents. We have developed a multi-agent AI system called StockAgent, driven by LLMs, designed to simulate investors' trading behaviors in response to the real stock market. The StockAgent allows users to evaluate the impact of different external factors on investor trading and to analyze trading behavior and profitability effects. Additionally, StockAgent avoids the test set leakage issue present in existing trading simulation systems based on AI Agents. Specifically, it prevents the model from leveraging prior knowledge it may have acquired related to the test data. We evaluate different LLMs under the framework of StockAgent in a stock trading environment that closely resembles real-world conditions. The experimental results demonstrate the impact of key external factors on stock market trading, including trading behavior and stock price fluctuation rules. This research explores the study of agents' free trading gaps in the context of no prior knowledge related to market data. The patterns identified through StockAgent simulations provide valuable insights for LLM-based investment advice and stock recommendation. The code is available at https://github.com/MingyuJ666/Stockagent.

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25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

DREAM: Extending Vision-Language Models with Dual-Objective Encoding for Cross-Modal Retrieval

Authors:
Kaleem Ullah↗Altaf Hussain↗Muhammad Munsif↗Sung Wook Baik↗

In today's media-driven world, the exponential growth of video content across domains such as surveillance, education, and entertainment has made retrieving semantically relevant videos via natural language queries increasingly critical. Early video retrieval systems relied on handcrafted features or shallow cross-modal mappings, limiting their ability to capture complex semantics and temporal dynamics. While large-scale vision-language models have improved cross-modal alignment, challenges remain in modeling fine-grained temporal dependencies and nuanced linguistic structures. In this paper, we introduce DREAM: Dual-path Representation Enhancement and Alignment Model, a novel multimodal framework that addresses these limitations through enhanced visual and textual encoding. DREAM incorporates a hybrid language modeling strategy that combines masked and permuted language modeling objectives to capture both local and global linguistic semantics. On the visual side, we design a hierarchical vision encoder with cascaded group attention, which integrates spatial and temporal information through multi-stage token interaction and coarse-to-fine attention refinement. We validate DREAM through comprehensive evaluations on the widely-used MSRVTT, MSVD and LSMDC benchmark datasets, where it achieves new state-of-the-art R1 scores of 49.4%, 49.7% and 27.3%, respectively. Qualitative analyses further show the model's ability to maintain coherent attention across frames and align complex queries with dynamic video content. These findings underscore the effectiveness of hierarchical attention and dual-objective textual modeling in enabling robust, context-aware video retrieval, and pave the way for future research in advancing cross-modal representation learning.

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