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

BRDFusion: Physics Meets Generation for Urban Scene Inverse Rendering

Inverse rendering of urban scenes from captured videos enables numerous applications, including content creation and autonomous driving simulation. Physically-based rendering methods follow and control lighting physics, but suffer from reconstruction and rendering artifacts. While generative models produce realistic videos, they offer limited consistency and controllability. We present BRDFusion, a unified framework that combines two complementary models for inverse and forward rendering. Specifically, BRDFusion recovers explicit, consistent scene properties with physical modeling and alleviates optimization ambiguity with generative priors. During forward rendering, the physical model provides controllable rendering from the scene configuration, and the generative model denoises and fixes artifacts. Therefore, our method produces high-quality videos while allowing precise control, outperforming baselines in real and synthetic scenes. Moreover, BRDFusion supports novel-view relighting, night simulation, and dynamic object insertion/editing. Project page: https://shigon255.github.io/brdfusion-page/

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Clustering and Pruning in Causal Data Fusion

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.

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

CPS4: Class Prompt driven Semi-Supervised Spine Segmentation with Class-specific Consistency Constraint

Vision Language Model (VLM) has great potential to enhance the quality of pseudo labels in semi-supervised spine segmentation by leveraging textual class prompts to generate segmentation map, but no one has studied it yet. Although promising, it lacks explicit constraints to ensure consistency between spine class prompts and spine unit region, resulting in unsatisfactory performance in multi-class segmentation map generation. In this paper, we propose CPS4, the first text-guided semi-supervised spine segmentation network using class prompts to enhance the quality of spine pseudo labels. Specifically, CPS4 is implemented through two training stages. (i) Class-specific consistency constrained VLM pretraining stage: we propose token- and pixel-level attention loss to optimize the consistency between class prompts and spine units, forcing the textual class prompt to be closely coupled with the target spine unit in the semantic space. (ii) Class Prompt driven semi-supervised spine segmentation stage: using the pretrained vision-text encoder, we derive each class-specific binary segmentation map for the unlabeled spine image and integrate them into an unified multi-class segmentation map, improving the quality of the spine pseudo label generated by the semi-supervised spine segmentation network. Experimental results show that our CPS4 achieves superior spine segmentation performance with Dice of 80.44%, only using 5% labeled data on the public spine segmentation dataset, surpassing popular semi-supervised learning and VLM methods. Our code will be available.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Improving and Evaluating Hand-Object Interaction Detection

Understanding hands and the objects they interact with, both directly and through tools, is a key step for tasks ranging from action perception to 3D reconstruction and robotics. Our paper provides several contributions to the Hand-Object Interaction (HOI) understanding literature: (1) HOI-DETR, a new framework that introduces hand-object and object-object interactions to the Co-DETR architecture to produce a state-of-the-art method; (2) a comprehensive HOI evaluation suite of 4 diverse datasets, including a video benchmark derived from the HD-EPIC dataset and fresh annotations that improve the Hands23 benchmark and (3) a trained checkpoint that significantly improves the state of the art across Hands23, HOIST, FineBio, and HD-EPIC, including mAP gains of over 20 percentage points on Hands23 and FineBio. Our ablations confirm the contributions of each model component.

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

ScholaWrite: A Dataset of End-to-End Scholarly Writing Process

Writing is a cognitively demanding activity that requires constant decision-making, heavy reliance on working memory, and frequent shifts between tasks of different goals. To build writing assistants that truly align with writers' cognition, we must capture and decode the complete thought process behind how writers transform ideas into final texts. We present ScholaWrite, the first dataset of end-to-end scholarly writing, tracing the multi-month journey from initial drafts to final manuscripts. We contribute three key advances: (1) a Chrome extension that unobtrusively records keystrokes on Overleaf, enabling the collection of realistic, in-situ writing data; (2) a novel corpus of full scholarly manuscripts, enriched with fine-grained annotations of cognitive writing intentions. The dataset includes \LaTeX-based edits from five computer science preprints, capturing nearly 62K text changes over four months; and (3) analyses and insights into the micro-dynamics of scholarly writing, highlighting gaps between human writing processes and the current capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in providing meaningful assistance. ScholaWrite underscores the value of capturing end-to-end writing data to develop future writing assistants that support, not replace, the cognitive work of scientists.

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

Uncertainty Estimation for Molecular Diffusion Models

arXiv:2606.13451v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion models have seen wide adoption for 3D molecular generation, yet they offer no principled signal of when a generated molecule is likely to be of low quality. We propose a post-hoc method for estimating per-sample uncertainty in pretrained molecular diffusion models. Building on a Laplace approximation of the denoising network, we measure the variability of the noise prediction across the generation trajectory. Empirically, we show that the resulting uncertainty score is informative of sample quality, exhibiting a negative correlation with established sample-level quality metrics. We further study how the proposed uncertainty score can be used to filter generated samples, improving model performance via test-time scaling.

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

Deployment-Centered Evaluation: Predicting Query-Level Rejection Risk in a Clinical LLM System

arXiv:2606.12702v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into clinical systems, making it essential to evaluate the real-world utility of these systems. However, static benchmarks tend to measure correctness rather than user acceptance, aggregate performance across queries, and require densely annotated datasets – leading to major blind spots for evaluating clinical systems. In this work, we perform a deployment-centered evaluation of an LLM system embedded within electronic health records at an academic medical center, where user feedback is sparse but closely reflects the deployment conditions. Specifically, we train a pre-response classifier that estimates the risk that a future interaction will result in the user rejecting the LLM response, based on query content and deployment-specific context available before generation. We conduct a prospective analysis of our model over 4.5 months of user feedback, finding that our prediction model achieves an AUROC of 0.719. Further, we estimate the benefit of such predictions in two downstream use cases (guardrail triggering and abstention). Our key conceptual insight is that making use of deployment-specific context (i.e., the provider type, department name, language model used for response), as opposed to only query content, improves the ability to predict whether the user will reject the system output. Altogether, our empirical case study demonstrates the feasibility of predicting user rejection using deployment-specific context, opening the door to targeted guardrails.

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

Efficient Time Series Clustering from Multiscale Reservoir Dynamics with Granular-Ball Anchoring Graph Optimization

arXiv:2606.12077v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time-series clustering remains challenging due to the inherent trade-off between clustering effectiveness and computational efficiency. Similarity-based methods often suffer from quadratic complexity caused by pairwise distance computations, while deep learning-based approaches typically rely on costly iterative training and a large number of trainable parameters. In this paper, we propose MSRGC-Net, an efficient time-series clustering framework that integrates multiscale reservoir computing, granular-ball-based anchoring graph construction, and consensus learning. MSRGC-Net adopts a training-free reservoir computing paradigm to extract multiscale temporal representations from raw time series without backpropagation, significantly reducing computational overhead. To capture the intrinsic structure of the resulting representations, granular-ball computing is employed to adaptively model data distributions via density-consistent regions, yielding compact and robust anchor graph representations. Furthermore, a consensus-based anchoring graph optimization strategy is introduced to effectively align multiscale reservoir representations and integrate complementary information across temporal scales. Extensive experiments on widely used univariate and multivariate benchmark datasets demonstrate that MSRGC-Net consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in clustering performance while maintaining superior computational efficiency.

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

Closing the Approximation Gap in Simulation-free Latent SDEs

arXiv:2606.16138v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recovering dynamical systems from noisy observations is a recurring challenge across scientific domains, including neuroscience and physics. Latent stochastic differential equations (SDEs) address this by modeling the system as an unobserved state that evolves according to a learnable SDE and generates the observations. Variational inference (VI) provides a tractable objective for fitting latent SDEs. Traditional VI algorithms evaluate this objective by numerical simulation over a time discretization, trading fidelity for computational cost. A recent class of algorithms, simulation-free VI, sidesteps this tradeoff by parameterizing the posterior through its instantaneous marginals rather than its drift. In this work, we show that the efficiency of existing simulation-free VI algorithms comes at a price: their parameterizations restrict the approximate posterior to a subset of the SDEs available to simulation-based methods, degrading posterior inference and parameter learning. We propose Helmholtz-SDE, a simulation-free VI algorithm that closes this gap by optimizing over path laws compatible with a prescribed collection of marginals. Helmholtz-SDE recovers dynamics more faithfully than prior simulation-free methods, with the largest gains under high posterior uncertainty. It further matches the performance of simulation-based VI at a fraction of the runtime.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Observable Patterns Are Not Explanations: A Causal-Geometric Analysis of Latent Reasoning Models

Latent reasoning models (LRMs) replace explicit chain-of-thought with continuous thoughts. Recent work treats observable latent-state patterns, such as BFS-like frontiers and decodable arithmetic computation, as evidence for internal reasoning mechanisms. Evaluating two LRMs (Coconut and CODI) against controls lacking the proposed recurrence or curriculum, we find these patterns also appear in the controls and do not always causally affect behavior. Causal interventions reveal that latent-thought utilization is not binary but graded, scaling with a thought's causal effect on model behavior. Geometric analyses reveal this effect concentrates in low-rank directions whose step-to-step geometry grows more structured as their behavioral influence increases. Latent thoughts should therefore be treated as hidden computation, not hidden explanation: decodability, attention, or static structure alone cannot establish mechanism. LRM interpretability thus requires matched controls and causal tests.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

AI-Automation Tooling in Computer Engineering Education: Mixed-Methods TAM/UTAUT Evidence for a General Acceptance Attitude

作者:

arXiv:2606.12424v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As generative AI and low-code workflow platforms become routine in software practice, a key educational question is whether the next generation of computer engineers will accept these tools as useful, usable, and worthy of sustained engagement. This paper reports a mixed-methods, cross-sectional study of undergraduate computer engineering students' acceptance of AI automation tooling, instantiated through the open-source platform n8n across three identically scripted workshops in Thailand (n = 103). A 12-item, five-point Likert instrument mapped to six TAM/UTAUT constructs - Performance Expectancy (PE), Effort Expectancy (EE), Behavioral Intention (BI), Self-Efficacy (SE), Hedonic Motivation (HM), and Output Quality (OQ) - was complemented by inductive thematic analysis of open-ended feedback. Analyses combined ordinal reliability estimation, bootstrap confidence intervals, non-parametric tests, multiple-comparison-controlled correlations, polychoric dimensionality diagnostics, a common-method-bias check, and between-session comparisons. Acceptance was favorable across all six constructs with large effect sizes, with PE emerging as the strongest construct and HM as the weakest. Dimensionality diagnostics further revealed that canonical TAM/UTAUT sub-facets collapsed into a single general acceptance factor in this short-form post-workshop context, a finding with important methodological and theoretical implications. Qualitative themes converged with the quantitative profile regarding usefulness and enthusiasm but diverged on output quality, revealing a small yet articulate reliability-skeptical minority. The findings support the curricular adoption of AI automation tooling in undergraduate computing education and identify three theory-grounded instructional levers: instruction-sequencing scaffolds, self-efficacy supports, and trust-calibration interventions.

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

Optimizing Agentic Reasoning with Retrieval via Synthetic Semantic Information Gain Reward

arXiv:2602.00845v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agentic reasoning enables large reasoning models (LRMs) to dynamically acquire external knowledge, but yet optimizing the retrieval process remains challenging due to the lack of dense, principled reward signals. In this paper, we introduce InfoReasoner, a unified framework that incentivizes effective information seeking via a synthetic semantic information gain reward. Theoretically, we redefine information gain as uncertainty reduction over the model's belief states, establishing guarantees, including non-negativity, telescoping additivity, and channel monotonicity. Practically, to enable scalable optimization without manual retrieval annotations, we propose an output-aware intrinsic estimator that computes information gain directly from the model's output distributions using semantic clustering via bidirectional textual entailment. This intrinsic reward guides the policy to maximize epistemic progress, enabling efficient training via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Experiments across seven question-answering benchmarks demonstrate that InfoReasoner consistently outperforms strong retrieval-augmented baselines, achieving up to 5.4% average accuracy improvement. Our work provides a theoretically grounded and scalable path toward agentic reasoning with retrieval. The code is available at https://github.com/dl-m9/InfoReasoner

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Corticospinal tract risk modifies motor recovery after minimally invasive surgery for intracerebral hemorrhage: a secondary analysis of MISTIE-III

Objective: Outcome after surgical hematoma evacuation for intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) depends on hematoma location. As corticospinal tract (CST) integrity affects motor recovery after stroke, we hypothesized that CST integrity drives heterogeneity in surgical outcomes and investigated this in a secondary analysis of MISTIE-III participants. Methods: Risk of CST injury was categorized into four levels, based on the interaction between the CST, the hematoma, and perihematomal edema (PHE) on automatically segmented stability CT: no risk, PHE infiltration, hematoma infiltration, and complete interruption of the CST. Associations with outcome were tested using multivariable linear regression for motor National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) at day 180 and ordinal regression for modified Rankin Scale (mRS) at day 365, introducing an interaction term between CST risk and treatment group. Results: Day 180 motor NIHSS was significantly lower for 'no risk' ({beta}:-3.77, [95% confidence interval [CI]: -5.8 to -1.70], p=0.0003) and 'PHE infiltration' ({beta}:-2.3, [95%CI: -3.5 to -1.1]; p=0.0002) vs. 'complete interruption'. Surgery was associated with lower Day 180 motor NIHSS in participants with hematoma infiltration ({beta}:-2.07, [95%CI: -3.8 to -0.4], p=0.016). Compared to complete interruption, 'no risk' (adjusted odds ratio [aOR]:0.27, [95%CI: 0.10 to 0.74], p=0.01) and 'PHE infiltration' (aOR:0.41, [95%CI: 0.23 to 0.74]; p=0.003) were associated with lower odds of unfavorable day 365 mRS. Surgery was associated with lower mRS in participants with no risk (aOR:0.23, [95%CI: 0.05 to 0.97, p=0.045). Interpretation: Increasing CST risk is associated with worse motor recovery (day 180) and disability (day 365). CST risk modifies the effect of the MISTIE-III procedure on motor recovery and disability.

14.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

A 98-qubit trapped-ion quantum computer with all-to-all connectivity

Quantum computers require both high-fidelity operations and large qubit numbers to surpass classical capabilities1. Trapped-ion platforms have demonstrated the highest gate fidelities of any modality2–6 but scaling to larger qubit numbers while preserving performance has remained a central challenge. We report on Quantinuum Helios, a 98-qubit trapped-ion quantum processor based on the quantum charge-coupled device (QCCD) architecture7. Helios features 137Ba+ hyperfine qubits8,9, all-to-all connectivity enabled by a rotatable ion storage ring connecting two quantum operation regions by a junction10,11, speed improvements from parallelized operations12 and a new software stack with real-time compilation of dynamic programs13. Averaged over all operational zones in the system, we achieve average infidelities of 2.5(1) × 10−5 for single-qubit (1Q) gates, 7.9(2) × 10−4 for two-qubit (2Q) gates and 3.3(5) × 10−4 for state preparation and measurement (SPAM), none of which are fundamentally limited and probably able to be improved. These component infidelities are predictive of system-level performance in both random Clifford circuits and random circuit sampling (RCS), the latter demonstrating that Helios operates well beyond the reach of classical simulation and establishes a new frontier of fidelity and complexity for quantum computers14. A new quantum computer, Quantinuum Helios, which is a 98-qubit trapped-ion quantum processor built on the QCCD architecture, demonstrates performance well beyond classical capabilities and provides a path for scaling up quantum computing.

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

The Curse and Blessing of Mean Bias in FP4-Quantized LLM Training

arXiv:2603.10444v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: FP4 training promises substantial memory and compute savings for large language models, but remains fragile because blockwise quantization is dictated by extreme activation magnitudes, which inflate dynamic range and compress long-tail signals. We identify a counterintuitive source of this failure: dominant activation outliers are not merely arbitrary sparse events, but are largely induced by a coherent rank-one mean bias, whose direction aligns with the leading anisotropic spectral component. This mean component strengthens during training, is amplified and reshaped by attention and FFN operators, and increasingly dominates top activation magnitudes. Crucially, this discovery reveals that a seemingly complex outlier-suppression problem admits a truly simple solution: isolate the coherent mean before quantization. We therefore propose Averis, a mean-residual splitting quantization method that separates the mean component using only reductions and elementwise subtractions before FP4 quantization. Across Qwen3 0.6B Dense trained on 100B tokens and Qwen3 7B A1.5B MoE trained on 50B tokens, Averis enables robust W4A4G4 FP4 training, reducing BF16 loss gaps to 1.19%/0.81% versus 2.05%/1.10% for NVIDIA's recently released Hadamard-based outlier-smoothing method, while limiting downstream gaps to 0.89/0.71 points. With only 2.20% end-to-end overhead over vanilla NVFP4, about 30% of NVIDIA's Hadamard-based design, Averis provides a hardware-efficient path to stable low-bit LLM training. Complementary to Hadamard, Averis further reduces the Qwen3-0.6B loss and downstream gaps to 0.94% and 0.73 points when combined. Code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/averis-504D.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

AI4Land: Scalable Deep Learning for Global High-Resolution Land Use Reconstruction

arXiv:2606.11793v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Uncertainty in the terrestrial carbon cycle remains a major constraint in climate projections, partly driven by the uncertainties affecting the land surface representation and variability in Earth system models. To address this limitation, we present a data-driven framework AI4Land, for generating high-resolution historical reconstructions and future projections of key land surface variables. The framework follows a two-phase approach using a U-Net architecture. In the first phase, which is the focus of this work, it reconstructs annual land use and land cover by integrating coarse-resolution scenario data with static geophysical features. In a planned second phase, the resulting high-resolution maps will be used to predict dynamic biophysical variables, particularly leaf area index, at finer temporal scales. Trained on Earth observation data, the models learn to reproduce spatially explicit and physically consistent land surface patterns, extending temporal coverage to periods lacking direct observations. AI4Land was developed and trained on MareNostrum5, demonstrating how GPU-accelerated HPC infrastructure enables global-scale climate AI pipelines. The final product is a suite of open-source emulators designed for real-time coupling with digital twin platforms, such as those developed under the Destination Earth initiative. By delivering realistic and evolving land surface conditions on demand, this work aims to reduce critical uncertainties and improve the predictive power of next-generation climate simulations.

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

Teaching Values to Machines: Simulating Human-Like Behavior in LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate a remarkable capacity to adopt different personas and roles; however, it remains unclear whether they can manifest behavior that adheres to a coherent, human-like value structure. In this work, we draw on established psychological value theory to induce human-like values in LLMs and assess their alignment with patterns observed in human studies. Using validated psychological questionnaires, we conduct large-scale experiments – over 5 million questions – to evaluate value structures and value-behavior relationships in leading LLMs and compare them to humans. Our findings reveal strong agreement between value-prompted LLMs and humans across both dimensions. Moreover, incorporating human value distributions enhances population-level simulations with value-induced LLMs. These findings highlight the potential of value-induced LLMs as effective, psychologically grounded tools for simulating human behavior.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Deconvolution-based cell-type specific DNA methylation-wide and transcriptome-wide association studies identify risk CpG sites and genes associated with colorectal cancer risk

Bulk tissue-based DNA methylation-wide (MWAS) and transcriptome-wide association studies (TWAS) have identified CpG sites and genes associated with colorectal cancer (CRC) risk, but do not account for cellular heterogeneity. To address this, we developed a deconvolution-informed framework to infer cell-type specific DNA methylation and gene expression profiles from bulk normal colon tissues using reference single-cell epigenomic and transcriptomic datasets. We performed cell-type specific MWAS (ctMWAS) using deconvoluted DNA methylation data from 293 normal colon samples and conducted cell-type specific TWAS (ctTWAS) using deconvoluted gene expression data from 707 normal colon samples. Genetically predicted methylation and expression models were integrated with CRC GWAS summary statistics (78,473 cases and 107,143 controls) to identify risk-associated CpG sites and genes. Through ctMWAS, ctTWAS, and colocalization analyses, we identified 178 significant cell-type-specific CpG sites in 106 loci and 68 risk genes in 40 loci, including 26 previously unreported loci. Through additional integrative methylation-gene analysis, we prioritized 132 candidate risk genes, the majority of which were supported by multi-omics evidence and stage-specific dysregulation across the adenoma-carcinoma and serrated-carcinoma progression pathways. Pathway enrichment analyses implicated pathways involved in DNA double-strand break repair, TP53 regulation, TGF-{beta} signaling, and innate immune responses. Among prioritized genes, 14 were identified as putative druggable targets linked to 90 FDA-approved or clinical-stage drugs. Experimental validation supports an oncogenic role for SF3A3. These findings demonstrate that deconvolution-informed integrative analyses enable cell-type-resolved identification of epigenetic and transcriptional mechanisms underlying CRC susceptibility and provide insights into disease biology, prevention, and therapeutic target discovery.

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

Unreduced Persistence Diagrams for Topological Machine Learning

arXiv:2507.07156v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Supervised machine learning pipelines trained on features derived from persistent homology have been experimentally observed to ignore much of the information contained in a persistence diagram. Computing persistence diagrams is often the most computationally demanding step in such a pipeline, however. To explore this dynamic, we introduce several methods to generate topological feature vectors from unreduced boundary matrices and investigate their theoretical and computational properties. We compared the performance of pipelines trained on vectorizations of unreduced PDs to vectorizations of fully-reduced PDs across several data and task types. Our results indicate that models trained on PDs built from unreduced diagrams can perform on par and even outperform those trained on fully-reduced diagrams on some tasks. We also benchmarked the computational performance of an algorithm for computing unreduced diagrams, which was implemented as a heavily modified version of Ripser. These computations are parallelizable and required an order of magnitude less memory on average compared to computing full persistence diagrams. Our results suggest that machine learning pipelines which incorporate topology-based features may benefit in terms of computational cost and performance by utilizing information contained in unreduced boundary matrices.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Decoding the Genetic Architecture of Autistic Traits in the Aging Population

Autism research has mostly focused on diagnostic frameworks in childhood. However, autistic traits including social skills, communication, attention switching, attention to detail, and imagination may also vary in many undiagnosed individuals beyond childhood, and the genetic architecture of autistic traits in undiagnosed aging adults remains poorly understood. Here, we performed an exome-wide association study of autistic traits in adults aged >=40 from the UK Biobank (n = 161,269) and independently validated key findings in the SPARK cohort (n = 142,357). We identified exome-wide significance at 17q21.31, represented by a lead variant associated with social skills (rs199533, beta = 0.081, P = 2.04e-11). In addition, we identified an independent signal for communication (rs12632110, beta = 0.042, P = 3.07e-12) and two independent signals for attention switching (rs690733, beta = 0.046, P = 4.26e-12; rs2164272, beta = -0.047, P = 1.73e-12). Gene-based analyses further implicated loss-of-function variation in ZSCAN2 (beta = 1.00, P = 2.44e-6), which was associated with communication differences. Enrichment analyses revealed preferential expression of implicated genes in the cerebral cortex, while phenotypic and neuroimaging analyses linked those variants to cortical brain structure and regional volume. Taken together, these findings delineate the genetic architecture of autistic traits in the aging population and link genetic variation to downstream molecular and neuroanatomical mechanisms.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

StagePilot: Stage-Level Planning for Long-Horizon Dialogue Simulation in Cybergrooming

Cybergrooming is an evolving threat to youth, requiring proactive educational interventions. We address this by modeling dialogue progression as a structured planning problem over stage-wise interactions. We propose StagePilot, a dialogue framework that separates stage-level planning from response generation, in which the model selects the next stage under constrained transitions and generates responses conditioned on it, enabling coherent and realistic progression. Reinforcement learning is used to learn stage-level policies from offline data, optimizing for both emotional alignment and goal-consistent progression. Our empirical experiments show that StagePilot generates more structured, coherent dialogue trajectories and reduces conversational stagnation compared to baselines; notably, the IQL+AWAC variant reaches the final stage more often while maintaining over 70% positive or neutral responses, yielding a 43% relative improvement.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

FOSC-X: An Extended Framework for Optimal Local Cuts and Non-Horizontal Cluster Selection from Clustering Hierarchies

arXiv:2606.18972v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Extracting a flat clustering solution from a hierarchy is a common task in practical cluster analysis and can be formulated as an optimisation problem. Existing approaches focus on finding a single optimal solution. We introduce FOSC-X, a framework for extracting the top-M globally optimal flat clusterings from local, non-horizontal cuts of a hierarchical cluster tree, while optionally enforcing constraints on the number of clusters. This enables automatic identification of multiple high-quality alternative clusterings that capture different aspects of the hierarchical structure. Without constraints, the top-M problem can be solved in polynomial time using dynamic programming, exploiting the property that locally optimal partial candidates within subtrees can be combined to form globally optimal solutions while automatically determining the number of clusters. However, this can lead to solutions with numbers of clusters that are ultimately undesirable – e.g., too large to be meaningful or practically analysed within a particular application domain. Imposing cluster-count constraints breaks the optimality property underlying the unconstrained dynamic programming approach, since locally optimal partial candidates may no longer combine into feasible globally optimal solutions. FOSC-X addresses this challenge through a dynamic programming strategy that maintains compact sets of feasible candidates using lower and upper feasibility bounds while pruning infeasible or dominated combinations. The resulting method guarantees optimal rankings of the top-M solutions with linear-time complexity in the number of cluster nodes and dataset size, both with and without cluster-count constraints. Experiments show that FOSC-X efficiently reveals alternative clustering structures overlooked by single-solution extraction methods.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

SSNAPS: Audio-Visual Separation of Speech and Background Noise with Diffusion Inverse Sampling

arXiv:2602.01394v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper addresses the challenge of audio-visual single-microphone speech separation and enhancement in the presence of real-world environmental noise. Our approach is based on generative inverse sampling, where we model clean speech and ambient noise with dedicated diffusion priors and jointly leverage them to recover all underlying sources. To achieve this, reformulate a recent inverse sampler to match our setting. We evaluate on mixtures of 1, 2, and 3 speakers with noise and show that, despite being entirely unsupervised, our method consistently outperforms leading supervised baselines in WER across all conditions. We further extend our framework to handle off-screen speaker separation. Moreover, the high fidelity of the separated noise component makes it suitable for downstream detection of the acoustic scene. Code and pretrained models will become available upon acceptance. Demo page: https://ssnaps2026.github.io/ssnaps2026/

24.
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.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Operads for compositional reasoning in LLMs

Question decomposition, i.e. breaking a complex query into simpler sub-queries whose answers are composed to produce a final answer, is a widely used strategy for improving LLM reasoning, yet it currently lacks a rigorous mathematical foundation. In this paper, we propose operads, mathematical structures that model many-in, one-out operations and compositions thereof, as a natural framework for describing question decomposition. We define the questions operad $Q$, in which operations correspond to question templates and composition corresponds to substitution of sub-answers, and show how QA models can be interpreted as algebras over $Q$. Beyond reframing existing practice, this operadic perspective points toward new methods, in particular a notion of operadic consistency, which measures whether a QA model's answers agree across the partial collapses of a question decomposition tree. Empirical evaluation of operadic consistency is reported in our companion paper (Bottman, Liu, and Richardson, 2026), which finds it strongly correlated with accuracy across twelve LLMs and four multi-hop QA datasets and outperforming standard temperature-based self-consistency baselines. We argue that operads are the natural mathematical home for question decomposition, and that invariants such as operadic consistency open new directions for analyzing and improving the reliability of multi-step reasoning.