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

Study of the triangular-lattice Hubbard model with constrained-path quantum Monte Carlo

arXiv:2603.14808v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We benchmark constrained-path Monte Carlo (CPMC) on the triangular-lattice Hubbard model for several fillings and $U$ values and show that symmetry-adapted trial wave functions substantially improve quantitative accuracy. Away from half-filling, simple free-electron-based trials that preserve the ground state symmetry yield energy deviations $\lesssim 1\%$ from exact diagonalization and density matrix renormalization group results. At half-filling, strong frustration in the intermediate to large $U$ regimes necessitates symmetry-projected trials to reach comparable accuracy, where both free-electron and symmetry-broken Hartree-Fock trials incur substantial constraint bias. Since the computational cost of CPMC with symmetry projection scales polynomially with system size, our results motivate its use as a practical route for studying competing ground states in strongly correlated, frustrated systems.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

AnnotateAnything: Automatic Annotation of 3D Assets for Robot Manipulation

Simulation enables scalable robot data collection, but raw 3D assets provide only geometry, lacking the semantic, interactive, and physical knowledge needed to specify where and how robots should act. In this work, we present AnnotateAnything, a general automatic annotation framework that converts passive 3D assets into manipulation-ready assets with structured, diverse, and executable manipulation labels. AnnotateAnything is built around two complementary pipelines. First, a unified visual-language annotation pipeline using vision-language reasoning to infer object semantics, interaction constraints, and 3D-grounded cues, providing human-prior guidance for identifying meaningful interaction regions. Second, a fully automatic and massively parallel physics annotation pipeline grounds these priors in each asset's geometry and physical constraints through candidate generation, geometry optimization and trajectory generation. This pipeline produces diverse and executable action annotations, including grasp poses, dexterous contacts, articulation waypoints, insertion directions, hanging affordances, and navigation targets. Using the generated annotations, we further build an asynchronous parallel simulation data-collection system across diverse objects, tasks, and robot embodiments. Experiments demonstrate that AnnotateAnything achieves superior annotation efficiency, data-collection efficiency, and task success rates over existing annotation and data-generation pipelines, while also supporting downstream tasks such as affordance detection, robotic VQA, and visual instruction finetuning. We provide project materials on the project page and plan to release the full code, annotations, and benchmark to facilitate future research. Videos, code, demo assets, and annotations are provided in supplementary materials Project page: https://tourmaline-caramel-169490.netlify.app.

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

Causal-Privacy Audit Workflow for Synthetic and Distilled Data in Dropout Support

arXiv:2606.15940v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Synthetic and distilled student data are increasingly used to enable privacy-conscious learning analytics, yet their suitability for decision-facing institutional support remains uncertain. In dropout support, generated data must preserve not only predictive utility or distributional resemblance, but also the financial-status evidence used to guide advising, payment-plan assistance, and scholarship-related decisions. Method: This study introduces CaP-Eval, a decision-facing causal-privacy audit workflow for evaluating generated student data under a fixed estimand, timing-aware adjustment design, estimator set, and empirical privacy-governance screen. The workflow compares original, distilled, adversarial synthetic, statistical synthetic, and DPGNet privacy-oriented generated data on predictive utility, treatment-effect fidelity, robustness to alternative estimators, and local training-record proximity. Results: DPGNet and distilled data preserved the original financial-status treatment-effect structure more reliably than the adversarial and Gaussian Copula baselines. DPGNet preserved full direction and rank agreement across epsilon levels; epsilon = 10 produced the smallest non-original IPW and DML deviations, while epsilon = 1 and epsilon = 5 amplified several financial-status contrasts. Distilled data remained highly faithful but retained the strongest local training-record proximity signal. TabularGNet preserved qualitative directions with moderate attenuation, and Gaussian Copula compressed effect magnitudes. Conclusions: Predictive utility, privacy orientation, empirical disclosure signals, and causal fidelity diverged; generated student data require joint audits of direction, magnitude, overlap, and release-governance risk before decision use.

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

Evolutionary Dynamics of Cooperation in Next-Generation LLM Agent Systems: A Cross-Provider Empirical Extension

arXiv:2605.29874v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Do next-generation LLM agents inherit the cooperative biases documented in their predecessors, or does scale and provider diversity reshape equilibrium behaviour in competitive multi-agent settings? Willis et al. established a benchmark for this question using evolutionary game theory and the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma (IPD), finding consistent cooperative biases in ChatGPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet. We extend this benchmark to four frontier models released in 2025-2026 - Claude Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and GPT-5.4 Mini - applying the identical protocol across three prompting styles (Default, Prose, Self-Refine) and four population compositions (balanced and biased, with and without noise). Cooperative bias persists across providers (H1): ten of twelve model-prompt combinations favour cooperative equilibria in balanced noiseless conditions. Cross-provider divergence is substantial (H3): Gemini 2.5 Flash reaches up to 77% aggressive equilibria under biased conditions, while GPT-5.4 Mini reaches 70% cooperative equilibria under Self-Refine. Support for aggressive capability parity is partial (H2): Self-Refine raises ICD in all models and Gemini 3.1 Pro Refine achieves the highest ICD in the dataset (0.925), but Default and Prose prompts show no systematic narrowing. Evidence on noise robustness is directionally positive but not robustly confirmed (H4): with n=500 Moran iterations per condition, average noise sensitivity is about 6 percentage points for Claude Sonnet 4.6 versus 13 pp for Claude 3.5 Sonnet, but this cross-study gap is not statistically significant once the predecessor's unreported sampling error is propagated. Provider identity, rather than model generation, is the strongest correlate of equilibrium outcomes; noise remains a universal challenge regardless of model size or vintage.

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

OmniTraffic: A Controllable Generation Pipeline and Benchmark for Spatio-Temporal Traffic Reasoning

Traffic scene understanding requires models to reason beyond object recognition, including lane topology, multi-view geometry, temporal evolution, and signal-phase semantics. However, existing traffic-oriented multimodal benchmarks largely emphasize passive visual recognition or isolated video understanding, offering limited support for evaluating structure-aware traffic reasoning under controlled conditions. We introduce OmniTraffic, a controllable generation pipeline and benchmark for spatio-temporal traffic reasoning. Built around 12 real-world intersections reconstructed into editable 3D traffic environments and complemented by surveillance footage from two countries, OmniTraffic supports both controlled and natural-condition evaluation. It defines a three-level task hierarchy spanning scene perception, multi-view and temporal reasoning, and decision support. Using structured traffic metadata, OmniTraffic generates synchronized multi-view VQA samples covering vehicle states, lane functions, view–BEV correspondence, temporal dynamics, and signal-phase analysis, resulting in 8M VQA samples and a 3K human-verified test set. Evaluation of eleven frontier MLLMs reveals a large human–model gap, with the most pronounced failures in topology-grounded and spatio-temporal reasoning tasks. Fine-tuning a lightweight MLLM on simulated OmniTraffic data further improves performance on real-world traffic scenes, demonstrating the value of simulation-generated supervision for traffic-specific multimodal reasoning. Beyond a fixed dataset, OmniTraffic provides an extensible pipeline with configurable intersections, camera views, traffic demands, signal phases, visual conditions, and rare events.

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

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

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

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Measurement-Free Toric-Code Memory in Array Globally Controlled Rydberg Array

arXiv:2606.12030v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The central prerequisite of any fault-tolerant quantum architecture is a quantum memory: a block of encoded physical qubits whose logical state is actively preserved against noise across many rounds of error correction. In neutral-atom Rydberg arrays, realizing such a memory is obstructed not by the entangling gates themselves, which are already fast and high-fidelity, but by the auxiliary operations that a conventional error-correction cycle requires: mid-circuit fluorescence measurement, inter-zone atom transport, and locally focused single-qubit addressing. Each of these introduces latency, atom loss, or optical crosstalk that exceeds the cost of the underlying gates by orders of magnitude. These costs accumulate cycle after cycle, progressively degrading the very logical information the code is meant to protect. Here we propose a protocol that stabilizes a toric-code quantum memory without moving, measuring or local addressing atoms. The key is to use a three-species Rydberg atom array for the complete stabilizer cycle, including syndrome extraction, coherent correction, and ancilla reset, under global, species-selective laser pulses. Numerical simulation of a $4 \times 4$ rotated toric code shows a longer qubit lifetime when the physical error rate is below a pseudo-threshold $p^\star \approx 0.034$. The scheme offers a concrete, hardware-efficient route to topological quantum memory in neutral-atom platforms.

08.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-08

Daily briefing: Human embryo genomes precisely altered

作者:

The use of ‘base editing’ to precisely tweak human embryos has divided researchers. Plus, the number of lives saved by less-polluting cars in China and how to tip the world towards a sustainable future. The use of ‘base editing’ to precisely tweak human embryos has divided researchers. Plus, the number of lives saved by less-polluting cars in China and how to tip the world towards a sustainable future.

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

FlowState: Sampling-Rate-Equivariant Time-Series Forecasting

arXiv:2508.05287v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Existing time series foundation models (TSFMs), often based on transformer variants, lack adaptability to different sampling rates, struggle with generalization across varying context and target lengths, and are computationally inefficient. We introduce FlowState, a novel TSFM architecture that achieves sampling-rate-equivariant forecasting through a unified design that pairs a state space model (SSM) encoder with a functional basis decoder (FBD). This design enables continuous-time modeling and dynamic time-scale adjustment, allowing FlowState to inherently generalize across all possible temporal resolutions, and dynamically adjust the forecasting horizons without retraining. We further propose an efficient pretraining strategy that improves robustness and accelerates training. Despite being one of the smallest TSFMs, FlowState achieves state-of-the-art results on the widely used GIFT-Eval benchmark, while demonstrating superior adaptability to unseen sampling rates. Our detailed analyses confirm the effectiveness of its components, and we demonstrate its unique ability to adapt to varying input sampling rates.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Physics-Informed Attention Mechanism and Generalization Capability of Deep Learning-Based Grain Growth Evolution Prediction

arXiv:2606.17235v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine Learning (ML) models for grain growth prediction are typically trained on idealized synthetic data, yet practical applications require generalization to conditions outside the training distribution. This study evaluated the Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) generalization capability of the trained model from our previous study across three test cases, including experimental microstructures, microstructures characterized by a bimodal grain size distribution, and abnormal grain growth. To further probe whether physics-informed architectural design could improve robustness under these different conditions, a boundary-masked attention mechanism was proposed specifically for grain growth, constraining attention to grain boundary pixels. Both the baseline and the proposed physics-informed attention model were evaluated without retraining or fine-tuning on the OOD data. Both models successfully generalized to all three test cases, yet the boundary-masked attention mechanism provided substantial improvements, with the most notable gains for microstructures characterized by a bimodal grain size distribution, where Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) improved from \num{0.6221} to \num{0.7609} and mean grain size ($\overline{R}$) error decreased from \operatorname{SI}{8.75}{\percent} to \operatorname{SI}{3.57}{\percent}. The attention heatmap analysis revealed that the boundary-masked attention model learned to concentrate attention on large grain boundaries in a manner consistent with curvature-driven grain growth physics, emerging from training without being explicitly encoded into the architecture. These results indicate that models trained on synthetic data can generalize to diverse OOD conditions without retraining, and that physics-informed attention may improve accuracy when the boundary morphology matches the training domain.

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

Explainable deep learning improves human mental models of self-driving cars

arXiv:2411.18714v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Self-driving cars increasingly rely on deep neural networks to achieve human-like driving. The opacity of such black-box planners makes it challenging to accurately anticipate when they will fail, with potentially catastrophic consequences. While research into interpreting these systems has surged, most of it is confined to simulations or toy setups due to the difficulty of real-world deployment, leaving the practical utility of such techniques unknown. Here, we introduce the Concept-Wrapper Network (CW-Net), a method for faithfully explaining the behavior of machine-learning-based planners that causally grounds their reasoning in human-interpretable concepts without sacrificing performance. We deploy CW-Net on a real self-driving car and show that the resulting explanations improve the human driver's mental model of the vehicle, allowing them to better predict its behavior, particularly in surprising situations. This demonstrates that explainable deep learning integrated into self-driving cars can be both understandable and useful in a realistic deployment setting. We anticipate our method could be applied to other safety-critical systems, such as autonomous drones and robotic surgeons, as well as to other architectures, such as end-to-end learning systems and vision-language-action models. Overall, our study establishes a deployment-validated pathway to interpretability for autonomous agents, which could help make them more transparent and safe.

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

Multidimensional Bayesian Active Machine Learning of Working Memory Task Performance

arXiv:2510.00375v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While adaptive experimental design has outgrown one-dimensional, staircase-based adaptations, most cognitive experiments still control a single factor and summarize performance with a scalar. We show a validation of a Bayesian, two-axis, active-classification approach, carried out in an immersive virtual testing environment for a 5-by-5 working-memory reconstruction task. Two variables are controlled: spatial load L (number of occupied tiles) and feature-binding load K (number of distinct colors) of items. Stimulus acquisition is guided by posterior uncertainty of a nonparametric Gaussian Process (GP) probabilistic classifier, which outputs a surface over (L, K) rather than a single threshold or max span value. In a young adult population, we compare GP-driven Adaptive Mode (AM) with a traditional adaptive staircase Classic Mode (CM), which varies L only at K = 3. Parity between the methods is achieved for this cohort, with an intraclass coefficient of 0.755 at K = 3. Additionally, AM reveals individual differences in interactions between spatial load and feature binding. AM estimates converge more quickly than other sampling strategies, demonstrating that only about 30 samples are required for accurate fitting of the full model.

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Additive Noise, Shift Recovery, and Signed Signals in the Cumulative Distribution Transform

arXiv:2606.11432v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The cumulative distribution transform (CDT) is a quantile-based transport representation that exactly linearizes one-dimensional translations of positive densities. We study how this structure behaves under additive perturbations and how it can be exploited for shift recovery. Under a local nondegeneracy condition, we derive a first-order expansion showing that additive noise in physical space induces a nonlocal perturbation in CDT space through the primitive of the noise, weighted by the reciprocal density. This yields an explicit description of transform-domain sensitivity and shows, in particular, that perturbations are amplified in low-density regions. When the physical-space perturbation is modeled as a centered Gaussian random field, the induced first-order CDT perturbation is again Gaussian, with an explicit covariance kernel. We then use this structure to study recovery in CDT coordinates. In the known-template setting, the transport shift is obtained by projection onto the constant mode, giving an explicit estimator together with exactness in the noiseless case and a stability bound under perturbations. In the unknown-template setting, multiple observations permit joint recovery of the shifts and a common template up to the natural constant-mode gauge, leading to a simple de-shift–and–average procedure. We also consider a signed-signal analogue based on the signed cumulative distribution transform (SCDT), where shifts are estimated numerically by feature matching and unknown templates are recovered by alternating alignment and averaging. Numerical experiments validate the perturbation analysis and illustrate effective recovery for both density-valued and signed signals.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Simulation of Non-Hermitian Hamiltonians with Bivariate Quantum Signal Processing

arXiv:2605.12450v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We achieve query-optimal quantum simulations of non-Hermitian Hamiltonians $H_{\mathrm{eff}} = H_R + iH_I$, where $H_R$ is Hermitian and $H_I \succeq 0$, using a bivariate extension of quantum signal processing (QSP) with non-commuting signal operators. The algorithm encodes the interaction-picture Dyson series as a polynomial on the bitorus, implemented through a structured multivariable QSP (M-QSP) circuit. A constant-ratio condition guarantees scalar angle-finding for M-QSP circuits with arbitrary non-commuting signal operators. A degree-preserving sum-of-squares spectral factorization permits scalar complementary polynomials in two variables. Angles are deterministically calculated in a classical precomputation step, running in $\mathcal{O}(d_R \cdot d_I)$ classical operations. Operator norms $\alpha_R\,,\beta_I$ contribute additively with query complexity $\mathcal{O}((\alpha_R + \beta_I)T + \log(1/\varepsilon)/\log\log(1/\varepsilon))$ matching an information-theoretic lower bound in the separate-oracle model, where $H_R$ and $H_I$ are accessed through independent block encodings. The postselection success probability is $e^{-2\beta_I T}\|e^{-iH_{\mathrm{eff}}T}|\psi_0\rangle\|^2\cdot (1 - \mathcal{O}(\varepsilon))$, decomposing into a state-dependent factor $\|e^{-iH_{\mathrm{eff}}T}|\psi_0\rangle\|^2$ from the intrinsic barrier and an $e^{-2\beta_I T}$ overhead from polynomial block-encoding.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Reward hacking in physical reinforcement learning revealed by turbulent drag reduction

arXiv:2606.06227v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A reinforcement-learning agent maximises its reward, which can diverge from the outcome its designer intended. In physical control the reward rarely closes that gap, and drag reduction in wall turbulence makes it concrete. A mass-conservation projection couples agents' outputs and erases the per-agent credit the policy gradient needs; a memoryless policy cannot resolve the slow near-wall cycle it acts on; and a pressure-gradient reward pays for nominal drag reduction by pumping power through the wall. Two degenerate controllers achieve large drag reductions while total dissipation rises, so the reported figure can mask a more wasteful flow. We trace each fault to its cause and fix it: a differentiable projection that restores credit, a recurrent policy with a widened sensing stencil, and a reward scored on the true wall power. The corrected controller acts on the flow within a closed energy budget, earning a conservative $17\%$ under honest accounting.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Usability testing with a prototype user interface of an Artificial Intelligence driven air-Safety Tool (AISaT)

Involving end-users in the development of an AI tool is an important facilitator to its implementation. Usability testing was therefore conducted with a prototype user interface of an Artificial Intelligence driven air-Safety Tool (AISaT) to capture the perspectives and user experiences of AISaT from 10 staff members across two hospitals working within estates, infection prevention and control, and clinical areas, to inform the development of next iterations of AISaT. The perspectives shared could be grouped under improvements to the understand-ability; content; navigation; visibility; usability; workflow; ownership; and frequency of use of the tool. There were key areas that can and will be easily improved within AISaT, however there were areas that required a deeper level of critical reflection, such as incorporating data on more existing variables in a room (i.e., existing ventilation) and whether all patients should be assumed as infectious and breathing heavily. The research team must consider if the target audience of end users and recommended frequency of AISaT use will be pre-defined by the tool developers, or whether this level of detail should be left to each individual hospital to decide.

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

GUMP-Net: An interpretable model-data-driven intelligent algorithm for multi-class pelvic segmentation

Pelvic segmentation is one of the most important and fundamental research problems in precise and intelligent diagnosis and treatment, as well as surgical planning and navigation for pelvic fractures. By combining an improved geodesic active contour model with deep neural networks, we propose GUMP-Net, an interpretable model-data-driven intelligent algorithm for multi-class pelvic segmentation, in which three network modules are designed to constitute the overall segmentation framework together: the object detection module for automatic level set initialization, the edge detector module for learning an anatomy-aware edge detector function and the iteration module for deep level set evolution. Leveraging the advantages of level set representation and deep learning, GUMP-Net shows more accurate, robust and consistent segmentation performance, especially in small training data situation, compared to the state-of-the-art methods. Extensive experiments on pelvic datasets demonstrate the rationality and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Further experiments extended to ankle dataset indicate broader applications to other anatomies. The proposed algorithm not only provides an efficient segmentation method for complex fracture reduction, but also gives an interpretable geometric perspective for understanding deep learning segmentation.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

SPIRIT-CONSORT-ELM: Element-Level Assessment of Randomized Controlled Trial Reporting Using Large Language Models

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) play a central role in assessing the benefits and harms of interventions. Incomplete reporting in RCT publications can compromise the verifiability and usefulness of RCTs. SPIRIT and CONSORT reporting guidelines aim to improve the completeness of RCT protocols and results publications, respectively. However, many RCTs are not reported completely. Checking manuscripts automatically could help authors improve the completeness of reports prior to publication. We previously annotated SPIRIT-CONSORT-TM, a corpus of 200 articles (comprising 100 protocol-results publication pairs) using 83 checklist items drawn from SPIRIT 2013 and CONSORT 2010. We also trained machine learning models to automatically assess reporting at the item level. Each checklist item can include multiple constituent elements (i.e., specific details required for that item), and an item might be considered fully reported when all of its elements are present. However, prior work does not explicitly capture or evaluate reporting at the element level. To address this gap, we extended SPIRIT-CONSORT-TM by incorporating element-level annotations and using them to assess reporting completeness (SPIRIT-CONSORT-ELM). We formulated element-level assessment as a machine reading comprehension task, operationalized through 119 questions, where each question targets a specific reporting element within a checklist item. Using the 200 articles included in SPIRIT-CONSORT-TM, two annotators independently answered 119 questions for 50 articles (25 protocol-results pairs) and resolved any discrepancies through discussion; the remaining 150 articles (75 protocol-results pairs) were assessed by a single annotator. We then developed an automated pipeline for element-level assessment using SPIRIT-CONSORT-ELM. The pipeline first applies a PubMedBERT-based model to identify sentences containing item-level reporting information, then it uses a generative large language model (LLM; GPT-5) with chain-of-thought reasoning to answer element-level questions based on the retrieved evidence. Agreement between the two annotators was high (Gwet's AC1: 0.782) and our pipeline achieved high accuracy in identifying element-level reporting evidence (F1: 0.822, Gwet's AC1: 0.796). Ablation studies indicate that chain-of-thought reasoning and the inclusion of illustrative in-context examples modestly improve LLM performance on the machine reading comprehension task. SPIRIT-CONSORT-ELM provides a benchmark for evaluating reporting guideline completeness at the element level, enabling assessment of RCT transparency beyond the simple presence or absence of checklist items and is publicly available at https://osf.io/kznx4/. The automated pipeline establishes a robust baseline for assessing RCT reporting and demonstrates potential as a practical aid for authors, reviewers, and editors to identify and address gaps in completeness and transparency of RCT reports.

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

From Tokens to Policy: Causal and Interpretable Heterogeneous Treatment Effects Identification

arXiv:2606.17010v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Heterogeneous Treatment Effect (HTE) identification is crucial to explain the impact of an intervention and optimize our policies accordingly. Existing approaches trade expressivity for interpretability, but, if some active heterogeneity drivers are unmeasured, methods at both ends of this spectrum allow for spurious HTE characterization with no causal reading. In this work, we focus on controlled experiments and argue that an oracle HTE causal characterization via the latent interactors is now within reach, thanks to (i) more extensive pre-treatment measurements, i.e., multi-modal and multi-view, and (ii) scalable representations with minimal human supervision. We then re-frame HTE identification as a Markov-blanket discovery problem on a sufficient and aligned pre-treatment representation, and introduce Neural EXposure Interaction Search (NEXIS), an iterative procedure with provable and empirically validated consistent selection. We deploy NEXIS on two anti-poverty programs in Africa, augmenting each with satellite imagery capturing previously unmeasured environmental effect modifiers, leading to novel, interpretable and prescriptive guidelines to optimize the programs' next iterations.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

SketchXplain: Intuitive Visual Explanations of Image Classifiers with Sketches

arXiv:2606.17646v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Saliency map visualizations explain image-based AI predictions by pointing to regions, but these are often unintuitive and semantically unclear, leaving an interpretability gap. We argue that AI explanations should be intuitive – coherent to user knowledge, yet simple and selective to accelerate interpretation. Inspired by artistic drawings, we propose SketchXplain to generate sketch-based visual explanations for intuitive image-based explainable AI (XAI). Combining techniques in saliency maps, concept-bottleneck models, and sketch optimization, SketchXplain integrates saliency to select coherent observation artifacts, concepts for knowledge coherence, cues to represent them, and abstraction for simplicity. Evaluating on face expression recognition, modeling and user studies showed that SketchXplain supported quicker interpretation with more aligned visualizations than saliency maps or simple drawings. Further evaluation on skin lesion diagnosis found that SketchXplain more coherently visualized disease symptoms, better supporting lay diagnosis. Thus, this work illustrates the value of sketches for intuitive, simple, coherent, and quick image-based XAI visualizations.

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

CRAX: Fast Safe Reinforcement Learning Benchmarking

arXiv:2606.20376v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safety is a core concern for deploying reinforcement learning (RL) agents in real-world domains such as robotics and autonomous driving. While benchmarks have been central to progress in RL, existing safety benchmarks with high-fidelity 3D physics remain computationally slow, limiting large-scale experimentation and rapid prototyping. To address this gap, we propose CRAX (Constrained RL Accelerated with JAX). Built on top of the MuJoCo XLA (MJX) physics engine with realistic 3D dynamics, CRAX leverages vectorized operations and hardware acceleration, yielding up to ~100x speedups over comparable CPU-based safety benchmarks. The benchmark features six environment suites and three agent-specific tasks, each spanning three difficulty levels. Evaluating six popular safe RL methods shows that no single approach dominates across all tasks, and reveals the trade-offs between performance and safety. We find that curriculum learning across difficulty levels and safety transfer can improve performance over direct training in harder settings.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

AudioDER: A Deduplication-Enhanced Reasoning Dataset for Post-Training Large Audio-Language Models

arXiv:2606.14591v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) have shown strong performance on a wide range of audio understanding tasks, yet they still struggle with complex audio reasoning. A practical way to improve such capabilities is post-training, whose effectiveness critically depends on the quality and diversity of training data. However, existing audio-language datasets often contain substantial redundancy, where many samples are highly similar in acoustic content and thus provide overlapping supervisory signals. Such redundancy not only increases annotation cost, but also limits corpus diversity and reduces the effectiveness of post-training. To address this issue, we propose a redundancy-aware data construction pipeline for building reasoning-oriented supervision for LALMs. Specifically, we first perform acoustic similarity-based deduplication across raw audio datasets to improve corpus diversity. We then integrate existing audio captions and question-answer pairs into a unified multiple-choice format. Based on these unified annotations, we leverage Qwen3-30B to generate chain-of-thought (CoT) rationales for reasoning-oriented supervision. Based on this pipeline, we construct AudioDER, a reasoning-oriented post-training dataset containing approximately 191k samples spanning sound, speech, and music. Each sample consists of an audio clip, a multiple-choice question, four answer candidates, an audio caption, and a CoT rationale. Extensive experiments show that post-training on AudioDER consistently improves the performance of Qwen2-Audio-7B-Instruct on multiple audio reasoning benchmarks, including MMAU-mini, MMSU, and MMAR. We hope AudioDER can serve as a valuable resource for advancing audio reasoning research and the development of more capable LALMs.

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

Beyond Scalars: Evaluating and Understanding LLM Reasoning via Geometric Progress and Stability

arXiv:2603.10384v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Evaluating LLM reliability via scalar probabilities often fails to capture the structural dynamics of reasoning. We introduce TRACED, a framework that assesses reasoning quality through theoretically grounded geometric kinematics. By decomposing reasoning traces into Progress (displacement) and Stability (curvature), we reveal a distinct topological divergence: correct reasoning manifests as high-progress, stable trajectories, whereas hallucinations are characterized by low-progress, unstable patterns (stalled displacement with high curvature fluctuations). Leveraging these signatures, our probabilistic framework achieves competitive performance and superior robustness across diverse benchmarks. Crucially, TRACED bridges geometry and cognition by mapping high curvature to ''Hesitation Loops'' and displacement to ''Certainty Accumulation'', offering a physical lens to decode the internal dynamics of machine thought.

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

Early Anomaly-Onset Detection based on Wigner–Ville Distribution Slice Spectra: A Transmission-Grid Test Case

arXiv:2606.15856v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Operational disturbance monitoring in power networks requires decisions to be made from waveform windows as they arrive, rather than from completed records after the event. This study evaluates full-vector Wigner–Ville Distribution Slice (WVDS) spectra for sequential anomaly-onset detection in high-voltage grid-voltage waveforms. The approach keeps the bilinear midpoint interaction structure of the Wigner–Ville distribution and represents each 128-sample voltage window by a 128-dimensional slice spectrum, avoiding manually selected fault-frequency markers. WVDS is used with a baseline-normalized deviation (BND) score and is compared against the BND of Fast Fourier Transform (FFT-BND), raw-window autoencoders, FFT autoencoders, and WVDS autoencoders under the same thresholding and three-window persistence rule. A synthetic autoencoder–clustering teacher is used to select RTE fault records that start from an initially normal region and then transition to anomalous behavior. On the filtered test set, FFT-BND achieves the highest sensitivity, whereas WVDS-BND provides the lowest false-alarm operating point, reducing record-level pre-onset false alarms to 0.69%. The autoencoder comparison follows the same selectivity pattern: WVDS reconstruction decreases false alarms relative to FFT reconstruction but misses more examples. The results indicate that preserved WVD cross-term information can form a selective representation for online grid-waveform anomaly monitoring when false alarms are costly.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

ActiveSAM: Image-Conditional Class Pruning for Fast and Accurate Open-Vocabulary Segmentation

Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM 3) provides a strong frozen backbone for concept-prompted segmentation, but applying it directly to open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS) is inefficient: full-resolution decoding is typically run over the entire dataset vocabulary, whereas each image contains only a small active subset of classes. We introduce ActiveSAM, a training-free, zero-shot inference framework that turns SAM 3 into an active-vocabulary segmenter. ActiveSAM first canonicalizes and expands class prompts, then estimates an image-conditioned active set from a low-resolution presence preview. Only the retained classes are decoded at full resolution, using bucketed prompt multiplexing with the frozen SAM 3 decoder. The preview stage uses only class-presence evidence and skips unnecessary segmentation-head computation, while the final stage applies margin-aware background calibration to suppress low-confidence pixels. ActiveSAM requires no target-dataset training, no weight updates, and no oracle class-presence labels. Across eight OVSS benchmarks, ActiveSAM improves the speed-accuracy tradeoff of training-free open-vocabulary semantic segmentation, outperforming the current state-of-the-art SegEarth-OV3 by approximately +1.4 mIoU on average while running up to 5.5x faster on large-vocabulary datasets. ActiveSAM also demonstrates the strongest robustness under image corruption that simulates real-world distribution shift, making it well-suited for deployment in noisy-input domains such as autonomous driving and embodied AI. Code is available at https://github.com/VILA-Lab/ActiveSAM.