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01.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

When batch correction corrupts gene expression: uncovering distortions in correlation structures

Batch correction is essential for integrating datasets and enabling population-level insights into health and disease. Embedding-based approaches are among the most widely used solutions, but here we highlight a critical, overlooked limitation: these methods can distort feature-to-feature (e.g., gene gene) relationships, potentially undermining downstream analyses. We investigate this issue and introduce a novel metric to quantify it.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

EKF-Based Depth Camera and Deep Learning Fusion for UAV-Person Distance Estimation and Following in SAR Operations

arXiv:2602.20958v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-based Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) frameworks aid human search tasks by detecting and recognizing specific individuals, then tracking and following them while maintaining a safe distance. A key safety requirement for UAV following is the accurate estimation of the distance between camera and target object under real-world conditions, achieved by fusing multiple image modalities. As part of the system for automatic people detection and face recognition using deep learning, in this paper we present the fusion of depth camera measurements and monocular camera-to-body distance estimation for robust tracking and following. Deep learning based filtering of depth camera data and estimation of camera-to-body distance from a monocular camera are achieved with YOLO-pose, enabling real-time fusion of depth information using the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) algorithm. The proposed subsystem, designed for use in drones, estimates and measures the distance between the depth camera and the human body keypoints, to maintain the safe distance between the drone and the human target. Our system provides an accurate estimated distance, which has been validated against motion capture ground truth data. The system has been tested in real time indoors, where it reduces the average errors, RMSE and standard deviations of distance estimation up to 15,3% in three tested scenarios. Based on the test results, the EKF fusion-based approach increases the depth detection range by reducing the errors outside the optimal depth camera working range. It also shows improved robustness and precision in challenging conditions, such as reflections and poor visibility, making it suitable for SAR.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Prior-Informed Flow Matching for Graph Reconstruction

arXiv:2601.22107v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce Prior-Informed Flow Matching (PIFM), a conditional flow model for graph reconstruction. Reconstructing graphs from partial observations remains a key challenge; classical embedding methods often lack global consistency, while modern generative models struggle to incorporate structural priors. PIFM bridges this gap by integrating embedding-based priors with continuous-time flow matching. Grounded in a permutation equivariant version of the distortion-perception theory, our method first uses a prior, such as GraphSAGE or node2vec, to form an informed initial estimate of the adjacency matrix based on local information. It then applies rectified flow matching to refine this estimate, transporting it toward the true distribution of clean graphs and learning a global coupling. Experiments on different datasets demonstrate that PIFM consistently enhances classical embeddings, outperforming them and state-of-the-art generative baselines in reconstruction accuracy.

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

Agents-K1: Towards Agent-native Knowledge Orchestration

arXiv:2606.13669v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current LLM-based research agents have advanced through agent orchestration, yet largely overlook scientific knowledge orchestration. Existing works often reduce papers to abstracts, surface mentions, and flat \texttt{cites} edges, omitting key entities, claims, evidence, mechanisms, and method lineages essential for scientific reasoning. To this end, we introduce Agents-K1, an end-to-end knowledge orchestration pipeline that converts raw documents into agent-native scientific knowledge graphs. Agents-K1 integrates three components under a unifying theoretical foundation: a multimodal parser whose five-module schema captures entities, multimodal evidence, citations, and typed inter-entity relations across the full paper rather than abstracts alone; a 4B information-extraction backbone trained with GRPO under a rule-based reward; and a graphanything CLI, a tri-source agent interface that unifies web search, multimodal graph retrieval, and cross-document traversal. On top of this, we process 2.46 million scientific papers across six subjects to produce Scholar-KG, of which we release a one-million-paper subset, and the full Scholar-KG is accessible via the SCP link below. The same pipeline can be extended to general-domain corpora and to schema-conformant data synthesis. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Agents-K1 achieves superior performance in scientific information extraction, knowledge graph construction, and multi-hop scientific reasoning.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Rubric-Guided Self-Distillation: Post-Training Without Rubric Verifiers

arXiv:2606.12507v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Rubrics have emerged as an alternative to RLVR in open-ended domains where a single ground-truth final answer is not available. Existing rubric-based training methods rely on an LLM verifier that scores each rollout against rubrics. This introduces substantial training-time overhead, exposes optimization to verifier-specific biases, and reduces rubric feedback to a sparse end-of-trajectory signal. We propose Rubric-Guided Self-Distillation (RGSD), a verifier-free training method in which the base policy, conditioned on the rubric, serves as the teacher for the unconditioned student. RGSD distills the rubric-conditioned teacher distribution into the student token-by-token, replacing sparse trajectory-level rewards with dense per-token learning signals and removing the LLM judge from the training loop entirely. Across Qwen-2.5 (3B, 7B) and Qwen3-Thinking (4B, 8B) models on medical and science domains, RGSD achieves rubric satisfaction comparable to judge-based GRPO while using one on-policy rollout per prompt and no training-time verifier calls. Ablations show that raw rubrics provide a stronger teacher enrichment signal than self-generated reference responses, while a stronger GRPO judge can outperform RGSD in some settings, positioning RGSD as a complementary verifier-free alternative when verifier cost or reliability is the bottleneck.

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

Fractured Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Inference-time scaling techniques have significantly bolstered the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by harnessing additional computational effort at inference without retraining. Similarly, Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting and its extension, Long CoT, improve accuracy by generating rich intermediate reasoning trajectories, but these approaches incur substantial token costs that impede their deployment in latency-sensitive settings. In this work, we first show that truncated CoT, which stops reasoning before completion and directly generates the final answer, often matches the full CoT sampling while using dramatically fewer tokens. Building on this insight, we introduce Fractured Sampling, a unified inference-time strategy that interpolates between full CoT and solution-only sampling along three orthogonal axes: (1) the number of reasoning trajectories, (2) the number of final solutions per trajectory, and (3) the depth at which reasoning traces are truncated. Through extensive experiments on five diverse reasoning benchmarks and several model scales, we demonstrate that Fractured Sampling consistently achieves superior accuracy-cost trade-offs, yielding steep log-linear scaling gains in Pass@k versus token budget. Our analysis reveals how to allocate computation across these dimensions to maximize performance, paving the way for more efficient and scalable LLM reasoning. Code is available at https://github.com/BaohaoLiao/frac-cot.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Vacuum photon emission and mean electromagnetic field in pair-creating external backgrounds

arXiv:2606.12547v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We develop a perturbative description of vacuum radiative processes in quantum electrodynamics with a prescribed external electromagnetic background capable of producing electron-positron pairs. Since the initial vacuum is then unstable and the in- and out-vacua are inequivalent, radiative observables require a real-time formulation beyond the ordinary in-out approach of vacuum-stable QED. Using the Keldysh-Schwinger-Fradkin nonequilibrium technique, we derive the mean number density of emitted photons through the second nonvanishing order in the fine-structure constant. The leading term, of order $\alpha$, reproduces the known vertex and tadpole mechanisms, while the complete order-$\alpha^2$ correction contains interference, loop, and induced-current contributions. We also give an independent derivation based on the spectral decomposition of the identity operator in the in-Fock space, where the photon number density is represented as a sum of squared transition amplitudes and vacuum-disconnected terms are canceled by the optical theorem generalized to an unstable vacuum. In addition, we compute the mean electromagnetic field through order $e^3$, including the electromagnetic dressing of the induced vacuum current, and verify it using the corresponding Schwinger-Dyson equations. The final formulas are expressed in terms of exact solutions and propagators of the Dirac equation in the external background and apply to general spacetime-dependent field configurations.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Human-like autonomy emerges from self-play and a pinch of human data

arXiv:2606.19370v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Self-play reinforcement learning has recently emerged as a way to train driving policies without any human data. It uses cheap, large-scale simulations to substitute expensive, large-scale human driving demonstrations. A key limitation of this approach is that policies trained through pure self-play can learn effective but alien driving conventions incompatible with people. Previous works attempt to mitigate such behavioral misalignments through extensive reward engineering and domain randomization, which are brittle and labor-intensive. Instead of completely discarding human demonstrations, our method treats them as a regularization objective on top of a minimal safe goal-reaching reward. Like the spice in a good stew, we find that a little human data goes a long way: our method uses only 30 minutes of human demonstrations, 2500x fewer than comparable imitation learning approaches. Resulting policies coordinate with held-out human trajectories and complete training in 15 hours on a single consumer-grade GPU. Videos and full source code are available at https://spiced-self-play.com/.

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

Not All Skills Help: Measuring and Repairing Agent Knowledge

LLM agents can improve without weight updates by accumulating natural-language skills from experience, but current systems entrust every decision about which skills to keep and how to apply them to LLM judgment alone. We argue that this conflates two distinct roles: generating a skill from experience is a creative act that judgment handles well, while deciding whether that skill actually helps requires empirical evidence across many tasks. Measuring per-skill causal contributions via randomized masking, we find that skill libraries exhibit pervasive causal heterogeneity: individual skills routinely help on some task types while hurting on others, yet their opposing effects cancel in aggregate, making them invisible to global curation methods. We propose ASSAY, a framework that separates generation from curation: it computes a per-skill causal attribution on a small development set, restructures the library offline, and suppresses skills with negative predicted effect for each test task. Across seven base models spanning four providers and two benchmarks (AppWorld and tau-bench), ASSAY consistently improves over prior skill-curation approaches. On AppWorld's hardest split, DeepSeek-V3 achieves 69.3% task-goal completion (47.4% relative improvement), a new state of the art among all published methods including weight-tuned approaches. On tau-bench retail, GPT-4.1 improves by 8.7% relative, advancing past o4-mini, o1, and GPT-4.5 on the public leaderboard without any weight modification. Ablation traces the dominant gain to per-task masking, confirming that the bottleneck is matching skills to tasks at inference time, not removing bad skills globally. Code is available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/assay.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Modeling Sarcastic Speech: Semantic and Prosodic Cues in a Speech Synthesis Framework

Sarcasm is a pragmatic phenomenon in which speakers convey meanings that diverge from literal content, relying on an interaction between semantics and prosodic expression. However, how these cues jointly contribute to the recognition of sarcasm remains poorly understood. We propose a computational framework that models sarcasm as the integration of semantic interpretation and prosodic realization. Semantic cues are derived from an LLaMA 3 model fine-tuned to capture discourse-level markers of sarcastic intent, while prosodic cues are extracted through semantically aligned utterances drawn from a database of sarcastic speech, providing prosodic exemplars of sarcastic delivery. Using a speech synthesis testbed, perceptual evaluations show that semantic and prosodic cues enhance perceived sarcasm, with the combined system achieving the best downstream F1 while maintaining high subjective sarcasm ratings. These findings highlight the complementary roles of semantics and prosody in pragmatic interpretation and illustrate how modeling can shed light on the mechanisms underlying sarcastic communication.

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

Chronological Thinking in Full-Duplex Spoken Dialogue Language Models

Recent advances in spoken dialogue language models (SDLMs) reflect growing interest in shifting from turn-based to full-duplex systems, where the models continuously perceive user speech streams while generating responses. This simultaneous listening and speaking design enables real-time interaction and the agent can handle dynamic conversational behaviors like user barge-in. However, during the listening phase, existing systems keep the agent idle by repeatedly predicting the silence token, which departs from human behavior: we usually engage in lightweight thinking during conversation rather than remaining absent-minded. Inspired by this, we propose Chronological Thinking, an on-the-fly conversational thinking mechanism that aims to improve response quality in full-duplex SDLMs. Specifically, chronological thinking presents a paradigm shift from conventional LLM thinking approaches, such as Chain-of-Thought, purpose-built for streaming acoustic input. (1) Strictly causal: the agent reasons incrementally while listening, updating internal hypotheses only from past audio with no lookahead. (2) No additional latency: reasoning is amortized during the listening window; once the user stops speaking, the agent halts thinking and begins speaking without further delay. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of chronological thinking through both objective metrics and human evaluations show consistent improvements in response quality. Furthermore, chronological thinking robustly handles conversational dynamics and attains competitive performance on full-duplex interaction metrics.

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

Towards Pareto-Optimal Tool-Integrated Agents with Pareto Ranking Policy Optimization

Recent advances in tool-integrated language agents have significantly improved their ability to solve complex reasoning tasks. However, existing alignment methods predominantly focus on maximizing task accuracy, while overlooking auxiliary objectives such as tool-use efficiency, which are essential for practical deployment. To address this gap, we introduce ParetoPO, a two-stage multi-objective optimization framework for aligning tool-using large language models (LLMs) under competing objectives. In the first stage, ParetoPO leverages hypervolume-guided dynamic scalarization to adapt reward weights based on global Pareto frontier progress. In the second stage, it replaces scalarized learning signals with Pareto-ranking-based advantage computation, promoting nondominated trajectories through dominance-aware credit assignment. This design enables fine-grained, action-level optimization across multiple conflicting objectives. Experimental results on mathematic reasoning and multi-hop QA tasks show that ParetoPO consistently discovers policies with superior accuracy-efficiency trade-offs compared to static and heuristic baselines.

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

VLADriveBench: Evaluating CoT-Action Relationship in VLA for Autonomous Driving

Vision-language-action (VLA) models generate chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning alongside driving trajectories, but existing benchmarks evaluate only trajectory quality and do not assess whether the CoT is relevant, consistent, or causally connected to the driving action. We introduce VLADriveBench, a framework that combines observational metrics (mentioning, hallucination, contradiction, action alignment) with a CoT intervention protocol to provide complementary views of the CoT-action relationship. Applying VLADriveBench to three models across two architectures, we find that the two analyses can diverge sharply: ORION scores highest on observational alignment yet its CoT is epiphenomenal, while Alpamayo v1.5 scores lower yet its CoT is strongly causal, with visual salience gating the extent of CoT influence.

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

Applicability Condition Extraction for Therapeutic Drug-Disease Relations

arXiv:2606.14031v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Identifying conditions that a certain drug takes therapeutic effect on a target disease is crucial for clinical decision-making support. However, most existing biomedical information extraction methods have focused on identifying only relations between drugs and diseases, while largely overlooking the context-specific conditions where such relations can apply. To address this problem, we introduce the task of applicability condition extraction for therapeutic drug–disease relations from biomedical research literature. We create the first dataset that has manually annotated triples of drugs, diseases, and applicability conditions on biomedical paper abstracts with 1,119 drug-disease pairs. Using this dataset, we systematically evaluate the performance of a range of existing methods. In addition, we propose a new method that enhances LoRA to consider relations between drugs and diseases. Our method consistently outperforms strong baselines across different evaluation settings. The source code and dataset of this paper can be obtained from: https://github.com/guantingluo98/Drug-ACE

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

How Fine-Grained Should a RAG Benchmark Be? A Hierarchical Framework for Synthetic Question Generation

Evaluating retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems requires benchmarks that capture diverse question characteristics, yet practitioners lack empirical guidance on which dimensions to vary and at what granularity. We present HieraRAG, a hierarchical framework for studying granularity in RAG benchmark construction, defining optimal granularity as the level that maximizes discriminative power (the standard deviation of generation quality across categories) within a given RAG configuration. As a case study, we generate 5,872 synthetic question-answer (QA) pairs from FineWeb-10BT across 3 dimensions (Question Complexity, Answer Type, Linguistic Variation) at 3 granularity levels (2, 4, and 8 categories). With a BM25+Falcon-3-10B pipeline, optimal granularity varies by dimension: complexity benefits from fine-grained distinctions (discriminative power: 0.053) while answer type and linguistic variation peak at medium granularity. We introduce a Coherence Ratio metric to quantify whether fine-grained splits cleanly subdivide parent categories, revealing structural differences across dimensions (Question Complexity: 0.40 vs. Answer Type: 1.44). Human evaluation of 110 stratified QA pairs confirms synthetic quality. While these specific findings reflect a single configuration, HieraRAG provides a portable procedure and validation metric for practitioners to determine evaluation granularity within their own RAG settings.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

The use of Peres lattices in periodically driven systems

arXiv:2606.20009v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We demonstrate the strength of the method of Peres lattices in periodically driven quantum systems. The method, which has previously been used mostly in stationary systems, enables us to efficiently detect resonances in the driven system, to monitor the onset of chaos, and to recognize critical properties of the Floquet modes. It also allows quick comparisons of the spectra of Floquet modes for various driving Hamiltonians and transparent tests of the iterative approximation techniques based on effective stationary Hamiltonians.

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

Disentangling Dynamical Systems: Causal Representation Learning Meets Local Sparse Attention

arXiv:2603.14483v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Parametric system identification methods estimate the parameters of explicitly defined physical systems from data. Yet, they remain constrained by the need to provide an explicit function space, typically through a predefined library of candidate functions chosen via available domain knowledge. In contrast, deep learning can demonstrably model systems of broad complexity with high fidelity, but black-box function approximation typically fails to yield explicit descriptive or disentangled representations revealing the structure of a system. We develop a novel identifiability theorem, leveraging causal representation learning, to uncover disentangled representations of system parameters without structural assumptions. We derive a graphical criterion specifying when system parameters can be uniquely disentangled from raw trajectory data, up to permutation and diffeomorphism. Crucially, our analysis demonstrates that global causal structures provide a lower bound on the disentanglement guarantees achievable when considering local state-dependent causal structures. We instantiate system parameter identification as a variational inference problem, leveraging a sparsity-regularised transformer to uncover state-dependent causal structures. We empirically validate our approach across four synthetic domains, demonstrating its ability to recover highly disentangled representations that baselines fail to recover. Corroborating our theoretical analysis, our results confirm that enforcing local causal structure is often necessary for full identifiability.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Using wastewater surveillance to explore community-level dietary intake in sewered and non-sewered sanitation systems in Malawi, Africa

Wastewater can be used to measure biomarkers that reflect population-level dietary intake and diversity; however, how this approach may apply in a low-income country remains a knowledge gap. This study aims to evaluate whether select dietary-related metabolites can be detected in wastewater and environmental surveillance (WES) samples from both sewered and non-sewered sanitation systems in Malawi, Africa. Fourteen WES samples were collected and analyzed from two university campuses in Mzuzu and Thyolo, Malawi. Four targets were analyzed: N-methyl-2-pyridone-5-carboxamide (2PY; a biomarker of vitamin B3), 4-pyridoxic acid (4-PA; a biomarker of vitamin B6), as well as enterodiol and enterolactone (biomarkers of dietary fiber and polyphenol consumption). An 18-question survey, paired spatiotemporally with the WES measurements, assessed self-reported daily dietary intake, food insecurity, and nutrient deficiency symptoms among 500 respondents. Among the 14 WES samples, 2PY, 4-PA, and enterolactone were detected, while enterodiol was not detected above the method limit (

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Decision-Weighted Flow Matching for Contextual Stochastic Optimization

arXiv:2606.16790v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Conditional generative models are increasingly used as scenario generators for stochastic optimization, but standard training objectives emphasize uniform distributional fit rather than the downstream decisions induced by generated scenarios. This creates an objective mismatch: errors in statistically common regions may have little effect on decision regret, whereas errors in decision-sensitive regions can substantially change the optimal action. We propose Decision-Weighted Flow Matching (DW-FM), a regret-aligned training framework that preserves the simplicity of standard flow matching while reweighting its velocity-regression objective using decision-sensitive endpoint information. Theoretically, we connect downstream regret to pathwise velocity mismatch through a loss-induced decision discrepancy and an adjoint transport argument, yielding an ideal regret-aligned surrogate and practical endpoint-weighted objectives with regret guarantees. Empirically, we demonstrate the effectiveness of DW-FM on three CVaR-based contextual stochastic optimization benchmarks spanning synthetic portfolio, semi-real financial, and traffic-CVaR tasks, where DW-FM improves downstream regret over standard baselines.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

RepFusion: Leveraging Multimodal Priors for Denoising in Representation Space

Large language models (LLMs) are widely used in text-to-image (T2I) systems, but they are typically limited to text encoding, while denoising is handled by newly trained generative backbones. The emergence of representation autoencoders (RAEs) shifts the generation target toward semantically structured visual representations, creating a latent space that is more compatible with pretrained LLM priors. Inspired by multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), where an MLP projector is sufficient to align clean visual representations with a pretrained LLM, we repurpose the MLLM itself as a noisy representation encoder, extending this mechanism from clean to noisy inputs. We present RepFusion, which uses the resulting MLLM outputs as the conditioning signal for a diffusion transformer. In controlled comparisons at similar inference budgets, RepFusion outperforms baselines that devote comparable capacity to newly initialized denoisers. These results demonstrate that MLLMs provide strong priors for denoising visual representations and that, by conditioning on evolving noisy representations, test-time compute can be productively spent on repeated MLLM conditioning in modern T2I systems.

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

Beyond Third-Person Audits: Situated Interaction Auditing for User-Centered LLM Bias Research

Research on bias in large language models (LLMs) has predominantly focused on third-person audits, which study how models represent or evaluate demographic groups as external subjects. However, this paradigm overlooks a structural blind spot because the user is absent from the audit. In practice, LLMs are used in open-ended, personal interactions, during which the model implicitly represents the user and adjusts its responses accordingly. When identical requests yield different responses depending on who is asking, bias manifests not in how the model describes others but in how it treats its interlocutor. We propose Situated Interaction Auditing (SIA), a user-centered framework for studying how user profile signals – implicit sociodemographic markers, writing style, and stated identity – systematically shape LLM response quality, content, and tone. We demonstrate the framework through a case study that intersects gender and socioeconomic status signals across multiple task domains and outline a research agenda for SIA as a new mission for natural language processing.

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

A unified complexity bound for logconcave sampling

arXiv:2606.12694v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We give a simple, unified, and nearly tight bound for sampling arbitrary logconcave distributions from a warm start using the In-and-Out algorithm along with exponential lifting. The main new ingredient in the analysis is an improved bound on the Poincaré constant of a lifted distribution. As a consequence, the resulting convergence rate is nearly tight for both constrained settings (e.g., Gaussian restricted to a convex body) and well-conditioned settings (e.g., strongly logconcave and smooth densities).

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

FORGE: Foundational Optimization Representations from Graph Embeddings

arXiv:2508.20330v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Combinatorial optimization problems are ubiquitous in science and engineering. Still, learning-based approaches to accelerate combinatorial optimization often require solving a large number of difficult instances to collect training data, incurring significant computational cost. Existing learning-based methods require training dedicated models for each problem distribution, for each downstream task, severely limiting their scalability and generalization. We introduce Forge: Foundational Optimization Representations from Graph Embeddings, a framework that pre-trains a vector-quantized graph autoencoder on a large, diverse collection of mixed-integer programming (MIP) instances in an unsupervised manner, without relying on optimization solvers or optimal solutions. Vector quantization produces discrete code assignments that serve as a vocabulary for representing optimization instances. We evaluate Forge in both unsupervised and supervised settings. In the unsupervised setting, Forge embeddings effectively cluster unseen instances across problem domains and sizes. In the supervised setting, we fine-tune Forge embeddings and show that a single pre-trained model helps predicting both the integrality gap for cut-generation and variable hints for search guidance across multiple problem and size distributions. In both tasks, we improve the performance of a commercial optimization solver and outperform state-of-the-art learning-based methods. Finally, we open-source our training code, pre-trained Forge weights, and embeddings for multiple MIP distributions to foster further research in representation learning for optimization problems https://skadio.github.io/forge/

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

Multimodal Concept Bottleneck Models

arXiv:2606.19882v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) enhance the interpretability of deep learning networks by aligning the features extracted from images with natural concepts. However, existing CBMs are constrained in their ability to generalize beyond a fixed set of predefined classes and the risk of non-concept information leakage, where predictive signals outside the intended concepts are inadvertently exploited. In this paper, we propose Multimodal Concept Bottleneck Model (MM-CBM) to address these issues and extend CBMs into CLIP. MM-CBM utilizes dual Concept Bottleneck Layers (CBLs) to align both the image and text embeddings into interpretable features. This allows us to perform new vision tasks like zero-shot classification or image retrieval in an interpretable way. Compared to existing methods, MM-CBM achieves up to 51.26% accuracy improvement on average across four standard benchmarks. Our method maintains high accuracy, staying within ~5% of black-box performance while offering greater interpretability.

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

Poker Arena: Multi-Axis Profiling of Strategic Reasoning and Memory in LLMs

Strategic reasoning under uncertainty underpins consequential decisions in negotiation, finance, and policy, but prevailing game-play benchmarks collapse heterogeneous reasoning dimensions into a single scalar, leaving the capability structure of frontier LLMs unexamined. We introduce Poker Arena, a no-limit Texas Hold'em tournament platform that couples a three-layer memory architecture (within-hand, session, and cross-session) with a nine-axis cognitive profile decomposing strategic reasoning into interpretable dimensions such as bet-sizing calibration and positional awareness. We evaluate seven frontier models across 50 sessions of 1,000 hands and a controlled memory ablation; tournament chips and aggregate axis score order the field differently: Claude Opus 4.6 wins +$15,730 chips with 14 first-place finishes, yet ranks only fifth of seven on mean axis score, while persistent memory helps some models and hurts others. These findings show that multi-axis evaluation surfaces capability structure that scalar leaderboards systematically misrank, with cross-dimensional consistency outweighing peak performance on any single axis.