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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

EvoLMM: Self-Evolving Large Multimodal Models with Continuous Rewards

Recent advances in large multimodal models (LMMs) have enabled impressive reasoning and perception abilities, yet most existing training pipelines still depend on human-curated data or externally verified reward models, limiting their autonomy and scalability. In this work, we strive to improve LMM reasoning capabilities in a purely unsupervised fashion (without any annotated data or reward distillation). To this end, we propose a self-evolving framework, named EvoLMM, that instantiates two cooperative agents from a single backbone model: a Proposer, which generates diverse, image-grounded questions, and a Solver, which solves them through internal consistency, where learning proceeds through a continuous self-rewarding process. This dynamic feedback encourages both the generation of informative queries and the refinement of structured reasoning without relying on ground-truth or human judgments. When using the popular Qwen2.5-VL as the base model, our EvoLMM yields consistent gains upto $\sim$3\% on multimodal math-reasoning benchmarks, including ChartQA, MathVista, and MathVision, using only raw training images. We hope our simple yet effective approach will serve as a solid baseline easing future research in self-improving LMMs in a fully-unsupervised fashion. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/mbzuai-oryx/EvoLMM.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Complete entanglement detection using polynomial invariants

arXiv:2606.16712v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing methods for deciding whether a bipartite quantum state is separable or entangled typically fall into one of two categories: they are either complete but require access to an explicit density matrix followed by numerical optimization, or they can be evaluated directly by measuring the quantum system but are incomplete, in the sense that they cannot detect all forms of entanglement. In this work, we overcome both limitations in a unified framework. First, we bypass numerical optimization by deriving separability criteria in the form of universal bounds on tensor powers of separable states. We prove that these bounds are complete: every entangled state violates them for sufficiently large tensor powers. Second, we explicitly construct a corresponding complete family of nonlinear entanglement witnesses, which can detect all forms of entanglement without requiring an explicit density matrix. The witnesses we construct are moreover basis-independent, in the sense that they are invariant under conjugation by local unitaries. Altogether, our results expand the toolbox for entanglement detection in arbitrary local dimensions in a manifestly invariant way.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

CANN-EUCLID: unsupervised constitutive artificial neural network model discovery from full-field data

arXiv:2606.14565v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Constitutive artificial neural networks (CANNs) provide interpretable material model discovery, but have so far been used in stress-supervised settings based on apparent stress-strain data from homogeneous tests. Because each test samples only a narrow loading path and provides homogenized rather than local stress information, robust discovery typically requires multiple loading modes to constrain the multidimensional response. This is challenging for soft biological tissues, where repeated testing, damage, and sample variability limit reliable information from a single specimen. Here, we combine CANNs with the stress-unsupervised full-field discovery framework EUCLID to identify sparse hyperelastic laws directly from displacement fields and reaction forces in one heterogeneity-inducing loading case. CANN-EUCLID minimizes equilibrium imbalance with sparsity-promoting regularization selecting compact active terms, without local stress measurements or a prescribed law. We evaluate the approach on isotropic and anisotropic benchmarks with prescribed ground-truth laws. When the ground truth is representable by the chosen CANN basis, our method recovers the correct terms with near-exact accuracy, including exponential terms with embedded parameters. When it is not contained in the basis, the method retains shared terms and approximates missing contributions using available basis functions. Generalization depends strongly on sampled deformation states: exponential strain-stiffening terms can be recovered accurately when sufficiently probed, but can produce large extrapolation errors when the stiffening regime lies outside the sampled domain. Forward FE validation simulations show that the discovered behavior accurately replicates the ground truth. These results establish stress-unsupervised CANN discovery as a promising framework for interpretable full-field constitutive model identification.

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

Momentum-Guided Semantic Forecasting (MoFore) for Self-Supervised Video Representation Learning

作者:

Self-supervised video representation learning has recently advanced through contrastive learning, masked reconstruction, and predictive representation learning. Reconstruction-based approaches such as MAE and VideoMAE learn representations by recovering masked visual content [he2022mae,tong2022videomae], while contrastive methods such as CLIP learn semantically meaningful embedding spaces through representation alignment [radford2021clip]. In this work, we introduce a Momentum-Guided Semantic Forecasting framework (MoFore) for self-supervised video representation learning. Instead of optimizing for pixel-level reconstruction or task-specific semantic alignment, the proposed method learns temporally predictive video representations by forecasting future latent embeddings from temporally distant context clips. To improve robustness across temporal scales, we further introduce randomized temporal-gap forecasting during training. The framework combines predictive latent forecasting with contrastive regularization to encourage temporal consistency while preventing representation collapse. Experiments on the UCF101 dataset demonstrate that the proposed framework learns temporally consistent and semantically meaningful video representations without using action labels during training. Quantitative analysis shows strong temporal stability and emergent category-level structure in the learned embedding space, while qualitative retrieval experiments reveal motion-aware organization across related activities. Overall, the results suggest that long-range latent forecasting provides an effective and computationally efficient approach for self-supervised video representation learning without relying on reconstruction-based objectives.

05.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

Promera: a unified model for biomolecular structure prediction, filtering, and design

Generative models have become staple tools for modeling and designing biomolecular structures. However, although these tools have improved in structural prediction accuracy, their ability to filter designed binders—an essential use case—remains insufficient; whereas design methods have focused more on unconstrained binder generation rather than capabilities enabled by controllable design. We introduce Promera, a unified generative model that combines all-atom structure prediction with improved filtering and controllable design. We find that Promera's confidence metrics are more accurate for filtering binders from non-binders for both miniproteins and nanobodies, while its co-folding performance surpasses popular open-source models (OpenFold3-p2, Boltz-2) on therapeutically relevant categories. As a design model, Promera generates binders by predicting masked protein sequences with optional epitope, paratope, and template constraints. Remarkably, our nanobody designs match the in silico success rates from backprop-based techniques (mBER) when evaluated under co-folding confidence filters. We further provide two in silico demonstrations of the the versatile capabilities of our design method: epitope targeting of the Andes hantavirus glycoprotein with VHHs and active state stabilization of the beta-2 andrenergic GPCR. We conclude by proposing a scaling law for co-folding models, suggesting a path for further performance improvement.

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

Using Reinforcement Learning to Optimize the Global and Local Crossing Number

arXiv:2509.06108v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Graph drawing concerns the algorithmic visualization of graphs. A good drawing of a graph is easy to read and facilitates solving tasks on the graph. Several properties have been identified to occur in good drawings of graphs. Such properties include a low number of crossings, large angles between edges, short edges, and depicting symmetries. Many of these properties are explicitly measurable metrics. This brings us to the insight that graph drawing can be seen as a game. In this paper, we study a single-player optimization game in which the player iteratively moves vertices of a straight-line graph drawing to reduce edge crossings. This game arose naturally from the automatic track of the Graph Drawing Challenge, where solutions are obtained by repeatedly performing local vertex movements. We formalize this process as a game with full information and investigate whether reinforcement learning can discover effective strategies for playing it. Our reinforcement-learning agent observes the local geometric and structural context of a vertex and selects a movement direction with the goal of reducing either the global or the local crossing number, that is, the total number of crossings or the maximum number of crossings per edge. We compare the resulting strategies to existing methods and established crossing-minimization heuristics on standard benchmark graphs. While our approach does not out-compete state-of-the-art methods for minimizing the global crossing number, it is competitive and often superior for minimizing the local crossing number.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Learning Topological Representations for Molecular Dynamics

arXiv:2606.14737v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations generate trajectories in a high-dimensional configuration space whose analysis critically depends on molecular descriptors, typically handcrafted observables or learned kinetic embeddings. Designing descriptors that are both expressive and broadly applicable, however, remains challenging. We study persistent homology (PH) as a general-purpose representation for MD and introduce the masked Flood complex, a protein-tailored modification of a recently introduced simplicial complex construction that emphasizes inter-residue structure at low computational cost. Vectorized persistence diagrams then provide information-rich, geometry-aware summaries of protein conformations, which we evaluate on protein class prediction, frame-level observable regression, and Markov state model (MSM) estimation from learned low-dimensional coordinates in a single shared representation space. Results on the mdCATH dataset show that PH-based descriptors are competitive across tasks, with masked Flood PH yielding the most consistent overall performance. Further, when using topologically-informed MSMs as a drop-in replacement within the recent MarS-FM framework for generative modeling of protein conformations, we obtain consistently better ensemble statistics than MSMs based on physical observables. Finally, we explore the transferability of the generative model to qualitatively different, fast folding, proteins.

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

NEXUS: Neural Energy Fields for Physically Consistent Contact-Rich 3D Object Dynamics

Physics-grounded video generation requires controllable 3D object dynamics that remain physically consistent under contact, deformation, and external forcing. Existing trajectory-based methods often model isolated physical effects, making it difficult to compose conservative and non-conservative dynamics in contact-rich 3D scenes. We present NEXUS, a neural energy-field framework for contact-rich 3D object dynamics. NEXUS represents each object as a structural graph and constructs dynamic object-object and object-environment contact graphs. Inspired by Hamiltonian Neural Networks, NEXUS formulates motion through scalar energy and dissipation terms rather than directly predicting states or accelerations. Conservative effects, including gravity and elastic deformation, are composed as additive energy terms, while non-conservative effects such as damping and impact-induced energy loss are modeled with learned Rayleigh-style dissipation. Forces are derived by differentiating the energy and dissipation functions and rolled out with a multi-substep semi-implicit integrator. Across controlled trajectory benchmarks, NEXUS improves long-horizon accuracy over representative learned and physics-structured dynamics baselines under varying mechanical properties and physical-effect compositions. We further show that NEXUS trajectories provide effective guidance for contact-rich video generation, improving physical plausibility while maintaining competitive visual quality.

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

Learning the Geometry of Data: A Mathematical Review of Shape Space Analysis

arXiv:2606.17022v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A central objective of machine learning is to identify structure and patterns in data. Advances in data acquisition have increasingly produced datasets whose observations possess rich geometric form, giving rise to shape spaces that encode variability in object geometry. Such datasets arise across a wide range of disciplines, including biology, medicine, anthropology, and computer vision, where subtle geometric differences often carry important scientific information. Traditional machine learning methods, however, are frequently ill-equipped to account for the nonlinear geometric structure underlying these data. This survey synthesizes a rapidly growing body of work on shape space analysis, which provides a mathematical and computational framework for the study of geometric data. Drawing on ideas from differential geometry, statistics, and machine learning, we organize the literature around a common analytical pipeline: shape representation and parameterization, the rigorous construction of robust geodesic metrics, statistical analysis on shape spaces, and geometry-aware learning methods. We discuss how these tools enable the characterization of shape variability, the comparison of geometric objects, and the analysis of structural trajectories across populations and time. To illustrate the breadth of the field, we highlight applications spanning multiple scales of biological organization, including studies of subcellular morphology and primate tooth evolution. Across these and many other domains, researchers face common challenges arising from complex, nonlinear, and often unaligned geometric variation. The review concludes by identifying key theoretical and computational challenges, as well as emerging opportunities driven by increasingly large and diverse geometric datasets.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Quantum Information Geometry of Multicomponent Superconducting Fluctuation Transport

arXiv:2606.15928v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantum geometry underlies many electronic responses, but its transport signatures have so far been established mainly for pure single-particle Bloch states. Whether collective many-body fluctuations possess a measurable quantum geometry remains largely unexplored. Here we show that superconducting fluctuation transport provides a direct probe of quantum information geometry in collective many-body matter. Starting from a multicomponent time-dependent Ginzburg-Landau theory in the Gaussian fluctuation regime, we identify the equilibrium density matrix of fluctuating Cooper pairs as the static pair propagator, which defines a positive mixed-state manifold in momentum space. The geometry of this manifold is directly measurable through paraconductivity: the longitudinal paraconductivity is governed by the quantum Fisher information of superconducting fluctuation modes, while the fluctuational anomalous Hall effect is governed by the mean Uhlmann curvature, the mixed-state counterpart of Berry curvature. This correspondence further yields geometric bounds between these two transport components, with no direct analogue in normal electronic transport. Applied to chiral superconducting fluctuations in quarter-metal systems motivated by rhombohedral multilayer graphene, a symmetry-allowed Lifshitz invariant generates finite mean Uhlmann curvature and logarithmically enhances the anomalous Hall conductivity above the critical temperature. Our results establish collective superconducting fluctuations as an experimentally accessible transport probe of mixed-state quantum information geometry.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Occ-VLM: Occupancy Grounded Vision Language Model for Indoor Scene Understanding

Recently, vision-language models (VLMs) have made significant progress in 3D scene understanding, driving advances in applications such as embodied intelligence and robotic vision. However, existing approaches typically either rely directly on explicit 3D inputs (e.g., point clouds or RGB-D sequences), or introduce an additional 3D geometry encoder to derive 3D-aware visual tokens from 2D images. Such designs structurally decouple 3D geometric perception from the rich 2D semantics learned via vision-language pre-training, hindering the development of a unified 3D vision-language representation. In this work, we propose Occ-VLM, a novel framework for 3D scene understanding that operates purely on posed RGB images and employs a single 2D vision encoder. Specifically, Occ-VLM reconstructs 3D scene occupancy as an auxiliary geometric prior, which is utilized to spatially associate foreground 2D tokens with 3D space. These tokens are then decoded by a Large Language Model (LLM) for unified scene understanding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Occ-VLM achieves both accurate geometric perception and robust vision-language reasoning: it attains state-of-the-art performance on multi-view occupancy prediction, while performing on par with 3D-input VLMs on 3D Visual Question Answering (VQA) and 3D dense captioning benchmarks.

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

Entropic order parameters and topological holography

arXiv:2512.24225v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We show that the symmetry topological field theory (SymTFT) construction, also known as the topological holography, provides a natural and intuitive framework for the entropic order parameter characterising phases with (partially) broken symmetries. Various examples of group and non-invertible symmetries are studied. In particular, the origin of the distinguishability of the vacua resulting from spontaneously broken non-invertible symmetries is made manifest with an information-theoretic perspective, where certain operators in the SymTFT are excluded from observation.

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

From geometry to dynamics: Learning overdamped Langevin dynamics from sparse observations with geometric constraints

arXiv:2512.23566v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: How can we learn the laws underlying the dynamics of stochastic systems when their trajectories are sampled sparsely in time? Existing methods either require temporally resolved high-frequency observations, or rely on geometric arguments that apply only to conservative systems, limiting the range of dynamics they can recover. Here, we present a new framework that reconciles these two perspectives by reformulating inference as a stochastic control problem. Our method uses geometry-driven path augmentation, guided by the geometry in the system's invariant density to reconstruct likely trajectories and infer the underlying dynamics without assuming specific parametric models. Applied to overdamped Langevin systems, our approach accurately recovers stochastic dynamics even from extremely undersampled data, outperforming existing methods in synthetic benchmarks. This work demonstrates the effectiveness of incorporating geometric inductive biases into stochastic system identification methods.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Learning Urban Access Costs from Origin-Destination Flows via Inverse Optimal Transport

arXiv:2606.14157v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cities deliver basic services through mixed public-private facility networks, including schools, clinics, transit providers, and subsidized service points. In these systems, planners often observe where households go, but not the latent cost function through which they trade off factors such as distance, price, and institutional access. We study this urban problem through school choice in the Philippines, where the country's largest national education subsidy is intended to redirect learners from congested public schools to participating private schools. Treating school-to-school enrollment flows as an entropic optimal transport plan, we recover latent choice costs using two complementary inverse optimal transport models: an interpretable distance-banded model with a subsidy term, and a neural cost model trained through a differentiable Sinkhorn forward pass. Applied to 283{,}016 learner trips across 23{,}820 observed flows in the most populated region, the framework estimates a subsidy-equivalent distance, $\lambda^{(k)}$, interpreted as the kilometers of perceived travel cost offset by the subsidy. The case demonstrates how administrative origin-destination data can be transformed into interpretable planning metrics for accessibility-aware subsidy design, facility siting, and urban service allocation.

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

Revisiting Chebyshev Polynomial and Anisotropic RBF Models for Tabular Regression

arXiv:2602.22422v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Smooth-basis models such as Chebyshev polynomial regressors and radial basis function (RBF) networks are well established in numerical analysis. Their continuously differentiable prediction surfaces suit surrogate optimisation, sensitivity analysis, and other settings where the response varies gradually with inputs. Despite these properties, smooth models seldom appear in tabular regression, where tree ensembles dominate. We ask whether they can compete, benchmarking models across 55 regression datasets organised by application domain. We develop an anisotropic RBF network with data-driven centre placement and gradient-based width optimisation, a ridge-regularised Chebyshev polynomial regressor, and a smooth-tree hybrid (Chebyshev model tree); all three are released as scikit-learn-compatible packages. We benchmark these against tree ensembles, a pre-trained transformer, and standard baselines, evaluating accuracy alongside generalisation behaviour. The transformer ranks first on accuracy across a majority of datasets, but its GPU dependence, inference latency, and dataset-size limits constrain deployment in the CPU-based settings common across applied science and industry. Among CPU-viable models, smooth models and tree ensembles are statistically tied on accuracy, but the former tend to exhibit tighter generalisation gaps. We recommend routinely including smooth-basis models in the candidate pool, particularly when downstream use benefits from tighter generalisation and gradually varying predictions.

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

Agent-based models for the evolution of morphological alternation patterns

Why is the past of English "go" the apparently unrelated "went"? Such alternations are frequent in languages. They neither aid communication nor learnability, yet they can be persistent, surviving over centuries or millennia. We present a multi-agent simulation of the emergence of morphological stem and inflection alternations. Alternate forms arise by phonological changes or, as with "go/went", from lexical alternatives associated with a subset of the population. When an agent 'hears' another agent use a novel form for a slot in the paradigm of a word (say, the past tense of go), they will with some probability adopt that form, possibly spreading its use to other slots in the paradigm that shared the same original form. Thus alternative forms can spread through the population and become entrenched as stem or inflectional marker alternants. Unlike many previous computational studies, our system allows for naturalistic lexical forms, realistic phonological rules, lexicons with hundreds or thousands of entries, and agent populations in the tens or hundreds. It supports several network topologies, diffusion patterns and agent adoption policies. One issue with such simulations is evaluation: how realistic is the resulting morphology compared to those of real languages? We introduce the AI Historical Linguist, a novel Large Language Model-driven system that models a debate between two historical linguists. We use this to compare a set of real language morphologies, disguised morphologies, and experimentally evolved morphologies. The results suggest that among the factors that favor more plausible morphologies are scale-free social networks and random Bernoulli adoption of forms. We also present three case studies modeling attested historical changes, allowing us to test what might have happened if history had been different. All code and data are released.

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

N(CO)$^2$: Neural Combinatorial Optimization with Chance Constraints to Solve Stochastic Orienteering

arXiv:2606.18514v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural combinatorial optimization (NCO) offers a promising alternative to traditional heuristic-based methods for solving complex graph optimization problems by proposing to learn heuristics through data. This class of problems frequently arises in automation, as it can be used to model a variety of applications. While NCO has been extensively studied for deterministic combinatorial optimization problems, there are only a few works that aim to solve stochastic combinatorial optimization problems. In this work, we present N(CO)$^2$: Neural Combinatorial Optimization with Chance cOnstraints to solve the Stochastic Orienteering Problem (SOP) without the use of hand-crafted heuristics. By integrating a reinforcement learning (RL) framework, the model optimizes path selection under uncertainty, effectively balancing exploration and exploitation. Empirical results demonstrate that our method generalizes well across diverse SOP instances, achieving competitive performance compared to the state-of-the-art mixed-integer linear program (MILP) for the task. The proposed approach reduces human effort in heuristic design while enabling adaptive and efficient decision-making in uncertain environments.

18.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

TCRBinder: Unified pre-trained language model with paired-chain synergy for predicting T-cell receptor binding specificity

作者:

by Weihe Dong, Qiang Yang, Long Xu, Xiaokun Li, Kuanquan Wang, Suyu Dong, Gongning Luo, Xianyu Zhang, Tiansong Yang, Xin Gao, Guohua Wang Deciphering how human T cells recognise peptide-HLA (pHLA) complexes underpins next-generation vaccines and personalised immunotherapies, yet extreme sequence diversity and paired-chains interdependence still hamper reliable in silico prediction of T-cell receptor (TCR) specificity. To overcome these hurdles, we built TCRBinder, a paired-chain-aware deep model with a multi-branch encoder that routes each molecular component through dedicated transformer-based modules to capture contextual signals in both HLA pseudo-sequences and antigenic peptides while simultaneously processing the TCR α and β chains. This design captures the synergistic interaction between paired chains to emulate peptide-HLA-TCR (PHT) interactions and expose residue-level contact motifs. Across PHT and peptide-TCR (pTCR) benchmarks, the model delivered state-of-the-art performance (AUC-ROC = 0.911, AUPR = 0.791 for the PHT task) and remained superior on multiple independent datasets. We tracked the dynamics of clonal expansion and, in a large SARS-CoV-2 repertoire containing completely unseen peptides, improved the AUC-ROC by up to 16.3% over the leading alternatives. Moreover, TCRBinder provided mechanistic insights by pinpointing contact hotspots and quantifying residue contributions to binding probability. These capabilities position TCRBinder as a versatile tool for rational antigen discovery, immunotherapy stratification, and neoantigen vaccine design.

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

Does Text Actually Help? Uncovering and Resolving Text Collapse in Multimodal Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.19413v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal time series forecasting, which pairs numerical sequences with domain-relevant textual reports, promises to inject world knowledge into forecasting pipelines. However, we uncover a critical failure mode in existing frameworks that we term text collapse: the text branch converges to a content-independent transformation, contributing negligible discriminative signal regardless of the input description. We argue that text collapse is a consequence of a fundamental asymmetry in time series forecasting: the numerical input is strongly autocorrelated with the output, making the numerical backbone inherently dominant, while the text branch, despite carrying complementary and often critical information, is insufficiently utilized, leading to its systematic underexploitation. To address this, we propose REST-TS (Residual-Exclusive Supervision for Text in Time Series), which turns the asymmetry into a design principle: the numerical backbone produces its own independent numerical forecast, and the text branch is exclusively supervised to predict the structured components of the residual, the prediction gap that numbers cannot explain. Because no numerical pathway can reduce these losses, the text branch must extract genuine content from the input description. Evaluated across diverse real-world domains and backbone architectures, REST-TS achieves state-of-the-art performance and consistently demonstrates greater text-branch utilization than existing frameworks, providing strong empirical evidence that supervising the text branch on the residual compels it to extract genuine content from the input.

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

Sparsity Curse: Understanding RLVR Model Parameter Space from Model Merging

arXiv:2606.18521v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful post-training paradigm that surpasses Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) in eliciting reasoning intelligence and resisting catastrophic forgetting. Recent studies further reveal that RLVR induces highly sparse and off-principal parameter updates compared to SFT. This naturally raises the question: does such sparsity make RLVR models more amenable to model merging? If so, model merging would offer a scalable, training-free path to aggregate diverse reasoning capabilities from independently trained RLVR models. Surprisingly, we find the opposite, uncovering a sparsity curse: the sparse RLVR updates are spread farther apart in parameter space, forming near-orthogonal shortcuts that make aggregation inherently fragile. This is likely rooted in the stochasticity of RL optimization and the diversity of emergent reasoning patterns. Unlike SFT models that converge to shared, flat basins and merge naturally, RLVR models suffer severe degradation under standard merging methods. Through systematic empirical analysis of the update geometry, we characterize the mechanisms behind this failure and propose Sensitivity-aware Resolving Merging (SAR-Merging), a merging recipe tailored for the unique structure of RLVR parameter spaces. SAR-Merging resolves conflicts in overlapping update regions via Fisher Information-based sensitivity arbitration, followed by magnitude-aware sparsification and rescaling to preserve fragile reasoning pathways. Experiments on mathematical and coding benchmarks demonstrate that SAR-Merging substantially outperforms existing merging methods on RLVR models, enabling both single-task enhancement and multi-capability fusion.

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

Vector Quantized Latent Concepts: A Scalable Alternative to Clustering-Based Concept Discovery

Large language models (LLMs) encode rich semantic information in their hidden states, yet it remains difficult to understand what information these internal representations capture. Latent concepts extracted from hidden states offer a promising direction for interpreting LLMs, but existing clustering-based methods face a trade-off: hierarchical clustering produces coherent concepts but is limited to small datasets due to its quadratic memory cost, while K-Means scales efficiently but may yield less semantically coherent concepts. We propose Vector Quantized Latent Concept (VQLC), a discrete concept learning framework that learns a codebook of latent concepts on frozen hidden states. Across 12 dataset-model settings, VQLC stays close to K-Means in computational cost, scales better than hierarchical clustering, and remains competitive in faithfulness, with the clearest gains on decoder-only models. LLMs-based evaluation, qualitative analysis, and a Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) comparison demonstrate that the learned concepts are interpretable and task-relevant.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Amnesia: A Stealthy Replay Attack on Continual Learning Dreams

Continual learning (CL) models often use experience replay to reduce catastrophic forgetting, but their robustness to replay sampling interference remains underexplored. Existing CL attacks alter inputs or training pipelines (poisoning/backdoors) and rarely include explicit auditable constraints, limiting realism. Here, auditability means a monitor can verify compliance from sampler-visible telemetry - e.g., logged replay index/label statistics - by checking that the realized replay class histogram stays close to a nominal baseline and that replay rate is unchanged per batch and/or over a rolling window. We study a limited-privilege insider who controls only replay index selection, not pixels, labels, or model parameters, while staying within auditable limits such as queue priorities. We introduce Amnesia, a replay composition attack that maximizes degradation under two budgets: a visibility budget delta bounding the TV/KL divergence from a nominal class histogram p0, and a mass budget f fixing the replay rate. Amnesia has two steps: (i) compute lightweight class utilities, such as EMA loss or confidence, to tilt p0 toward harmful classes; and (ii) project the tilt back into the delta-ball using efficient KL (exponential tilt) or TV (balanced mass redistribution) optimizers. A windowed scheduler enforces rolling audits. Across challenging CL benchmarks and strong replay baselines, Amnesia consistently lowers final accuracy (ACC) and worsens backward transfer (-BWT). The KL variant delivers high impact while remaining largely undetected under multiple audit schemes, including per-batch and rolling-window checks. The TV variant is more damaging but easier to detect, especially under tight per-class constraints. These results expose index-only replay control as a practical, auditable threat surface in CL systems and establish a principled impact-visibility trade-off.

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

Improving Lunar Topography with Deep Learning Schrödinger Bridges

Increasing the resolution of planetary topography models can enable a better understanding of surface processes and geomorphology; however, existing analytical super-resolution methods are expensive and difficult to apply at large scales. Generative models provide the tools to learn complex relationships within data and can be applied at scale due to hardware accelerators and parallelization. We present a diffusion-based Schrödinger Bridge (SB) generative modeling approach for lunar topography super-resolution, connecting the distribution of low-resolution topography to that of high-resolution topography, incorporating physically-constraining optical imagery. Our approach is inspired by existing Shape-from-Shading methods, which improve a priori low-resolution topography by using optical images at the target resolution. We train SBs on a novel dataset of rendered lunar topography, emulating optical imagery from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Narrow Angle Camera. The result is a flexible approach for topography super-resolution which can provide pixel-level uncertainties in the reconstruction.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

CD-RCM: Generalizable Continuous-Depth Novel View Synthesis for Reflectance Confocal Microscopy

Reflectance confocal microscopy (RCM) provides noninvasive, cellular-resolution "optical biopsies" of human skin in vivo by acquiring en-face images at successive depths, forming a sparse z-stack. Due to optical limitations, these stacks are anisotropic 3D volumes with lateral resolution (0.5 $\mu$m) $\sim$6 times higher compared to axial resolution, which is defined by the optical sectioning (3 $\mu$m), limiting the interpretation of tissue. Our goal is to provide continuous-depth visualization by interpolating intermediate sections and making the 3D volume isotropic. Such a representation permits arbitrary-direction sectioning, including histopathology-like cross-sectional examination, without requiring per-patient optimization. To that end, we introduce the first RCM-specific novel-view synthesis (NVS) approach, CD-RCM, a feedforward model that predicts realistic, unseen depths from sparsely sampled RCM stacks. Classical neural rendering methods focus on reconstruction from surface-level multi-view observations. In contrast to surface-level camera views, RCM can acquire optically sectioned en-face images of tissue beyond the surface up to 200 $\mu$m. However, during visualization of the RCM stacks, observations of the shallower sections (towards the surface) obscure the deeper ones. This unique axial imaging geometry and layer-dependent anatomical organization motivated our development of a tailored architectural and training framework that explicitly accounts for RCM's depth-resolved, occlusive imaging physics. Experiments demonstrate that CD-RCM achieves high-fidelity novel-view synthesis with sub-second inference time.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

When Lower Privileges Suffice: Investigating Over-Privileged Tool Selection in LLM Agents

As LLM agents increasingly select tools autonomously, their choices among tools with different privileges become safety-relevant. However, prior tool-selection studies focus on safety-agnostic metadata preferences, leaving privilege-sensitive choices underexplored. To address this gap, we study over-privileged tool selection, in which an agent selects or escalates to a higher-privilege tool despite a sufficient lower-privilege alternative. We introduce ToolPrivBench to evaluate whether agents choose higher-privilege tools despite sufficient lower-privilege alternatives, measuring both initial selection and escalation after transient tool failures. Across eight domains and five recurring risk patterns, we find that over-privileged tool selection is common among mainstream LLM agents and is further amplified by transient failures. We further find that general safety alignment does not reliably transfer to least-privilege tool choice, while prompt-level controls provide only limited mitigation under transient failures. We therefore introduce a privilege-aware post-training defense that teaches agents to prefer sufficient lower-privilege tools and escalate only when necessary. Our mitigation experiments show that this defense substantially reduces unnecessary high-privilege tool use while preserving general capabilities.