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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Moments in Rough Bergomi and Boundary Attainment in Rough Heston

arXiv:2606.07482v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We address two open questions in the rough volatility literature. First, we prove finite positive moments for the rough Bergomi price process, and for a wider class of Gaussian Volterra Bergomi models, in the whole subcritical range under negative correlation. More precisely, if \(\rho\in[-1,0)\), then \(\E[S_T^p]

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Efficient and Sound Probabilistic Verification for AI Agents

arXiv:2606.20510v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Securing AI agents that operate in complex digital environments has become a critical need, and runtime monitoring approaches that formulate and enforce policies expressed in a formal language like Datalog offer a promising solution. However, existing approaches are restricted to deterministic policies. In many practical applications of AI agents, there is a need to enforce security policies in the face of ambiguity, leading to probabilistic predicates or state transitions (for example, a declassifier or Personally Identifiable Information (PII) detector that has some failure probability on each invocation). Furthermore, in many such applications, one cannot easily make the independence assumptions necessary to invoke prior work on probabilistic inference in Datalog. We address this by introducing a sound and efficient framework for such verification based on distributionally robust optimization, computing sound upper bounds on the probability of policy violation regardless of possible correlations between predicates. On standard benchmarks for terminal and tool calling agents, we demonstrate that our approach outperforms prior art and improves the security-utility trade-off while ensuring rigorous bounds on the probability of policy violation.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

ReAge3D: Re-Aging 3D Faces with View Consistency

We present a novel framework for realistic and controllable 3D face re-aging which produces highly detailed, identity-preserving results. Existing 3D editing methods, while effective for coarse semantic changes, are not well suited for re-aging, as even small inconsistencies across re-aged 2D views can lead to over-smoothing of subtle but perceptually important age-related details. To address this challenge, we first introduce a 2D diffusion-based re-aging model, DiffReaging, trained on synthetically generated image pairs. We further propose a center-out editing propagation strategy that leverages this re-aging model to reconstruct multi-view-consistent re-aged images. Specifically, starting from a re-aged frontal pivot view, we reconstruct the remaining views through warping and our proposed Masked-DiffReaging process. By injecting existing content at every step of the diffusion process, Masked-DiffReaging ensures that the reconstructed regions remain coherent with existing pixels. The resulting consistent set of re-aged views supervises the optimization of the re-aged 3D representation. Our method outperforms existing 3D editing techniques both visually and quantitatively, enabling smooth, fine-grained control over age transformations in 3D face models.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Global Offshore Wind Infrastructure: Deployment and Operational Dynamics from Dense Sentinel-1 Time Series

The offshore wind energy sector is expanding rapidly, increasing the need for independent, high-temporal-resolution monitoring of infrastructure deployment and operation at global scale. While Earth Observation based offshore wind infrastructure mapping has matured for spatial localization, existing open datasets lack temporally dense and semantically fine-grained information on construction and operational dynamics. We introduce a global Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) time series data corpus that resolves deployment and operational phases of offshore wind infrastructure from 2016Q1 to 2025Q1. Building on an updated object detection workflow, we compile 15,606 time series at detected infrastructure locations, with overall 14,840,637 events as analysis-ready 1D SAR backscatter profiles, one profile per Sentinel-1 acquisition and location. To enable direct use and benchmarking, we release (i) the analysis ready 1D SAR profiles, (ii) event-level baseline semantic labels generated by a rule-based classifier, and (iii) an expert-annotated benchmark dataset of 553 time series with 328,657 event labels. The baseline classifier achieves a macro F1 score of 0.84 in event-wise evaluation and an area under the collapsed edit similarity-quality threshold curve (AUC) of 0.785, indicating temporal coherence. We demonstrate that the resulting corpus supports global-scale analyses of deployment dynamics, the identification of differences in regional deployment patterns, vessel interactions, and operational events, and provides a reference for developing and comparing time series classification methods for offshore wind infrastructure monitoring.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Generating function and Bloch representation for quantum Fisher tensor

arXiv:2603.04615v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The Uhlmann relative amplitude between two density matrices is shown to be a generating function, through which the quantum Fisher tensor that contains both the quantum Fisher information matrix and the mean Uhlmann curvature can be obtained via differentiation over system parameters. In the pure state limit, our generating function recovers that of the quantum geometric tensor proposed by Het\'{e}nyi and L\'{e}vay, and also clarifies the fidelity and phase between two quantum states as the generating functions of the quantum metric and Berry curvature, respectively. A generic expression for the quantum Fisher tensor in terms of the Bloch representation of density matrices is derived, which facilitates the calculation of the tensor, mean Uhlmann curvature, and geometric properties derived from the quantum Fisher information matrix. Canonical ensembles of spins are adopted to demonstrate our formalism, which reveals a constant Ricci scalar, a vacuum Einstein equation, and a cosmological constant on the 3D Euclidean manifold of the magnetic field.

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

IMPACTeen: Intentions, Manipulation, Persuasion, Annotations, and Consequences in Teen Communication Dataset

IMPACTeen is a dataset of textual social influence scenarios spanning interpersonal, media-based, and digital settings in an adolescent context. It contains 1,021 texts, 5,100 individual annotation records, and gold labels for social influence techniques, with each text annotated from five distinct perspectives: teenagers, parents, psychologists, communication experts, and teachers. The resource was constructed through constrained LLM generation, followed by a two-step human editing and validation phase aimed at ensuring youth-context realism. A multi-dimensional annotation covered influence presence, techniques, intentions, consequences, resistance, reactions, and annotation confidence. The dataset supports research on social influence detection, annotator disagreement, cross-lingual modeling, and the training and evaluation of language models. The dataset was created in Polish and is accompanied by a corresponding English version.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Learning Upper Lower Value Envelopes to Shape Online RL: A Principled Approach

arXiv:2510.19528v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We investigate the fundamental problem of leveraging offline data to accelerate online reinforcement learning - a direction with strong potential but limited theoretical grounding. Our study centers on how to learn and apply value envelopes within this context. To this end, we introduce a principled two-stage framework: the first stage uses offline data to derive upper and lower bounds on value functions, while the second incorporates these learned bounds into online algorithms. Our method extends prior work by decoupling the upper and lower bounds, enabling more flexible and tighter approximations. In contrast to approaches that rely on fixed shaping functions, our envelopes are data-driven and explicitly modeled as random variables, with a filtration argument ensuring independence across phases. The analysis establishes high-probability regret bounds determined by two interpretable quantities, thereby providing a formal bridge between offline pre-training and online fine-tuning. Empirical results on tabular MDPs demonstrate substantial regret reductions compared with both UCBVI and prior methods while remaining competitive with related approaches.

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

A Causal Model of Theory of Mind in Conflict for Artificial Intelligence

arXiv:2606.16944v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Theory of mind (ToM), the capacity to ascribe mental states to others and use those ascriptions for prediction and inference, is widely assumed to be essential for effective human-machine integration. Existing AI-ToM models address how to mentalize, but leave the question of when largely unaddressed. The central question is: under what situational and agent-level conditions is ToM engagement causally warranted in conflict? This paper presents a structural causal model formalized as a directed acyclic graph (DAG), treating ToM as a mechanism activated by situational and agent-level conditions rather than as an always-on capacity. The model specifies four exogenous variables capturing situational and agent-level conditions, five endogenous mediators, and a mechanistic ToM node producing engagement states through three distinct causal pathways: a tractability pathway, a reasoning-depth pathway, and an enabling-cause pathway. The primary outcome is epistemic accuracy, which decouples social reasoning from behavioral policy and generalizes across social phenomena beyond conflict. The framework gives AI systems a principled, resource-rational decision procedure for mentalizing, with implications for efficiency, trust, and the development of robust artificial social intelligence. Simulation validation, empirical human-machine teaming studies, and ethical considerations arising from conflict-optimized mentalizing are discussed.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Optimizing resource allocation for accuracy in noisy variational quantum algorithms

arXiv:2606.20153v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: For quantum algorithms to achieve their full potential, we need methodologies to optimize them, such as reaching a given output accuracy with minimal resource costs. Here, we develop such a methodology for a class of Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) algorithms. We leverage simulations of a Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) to propose a phenomenological model of such algorithms that captures the complex relationship between algorithmic accuracy, algorithmic resource costs, and the noise that exists in realistic quantum hardware. For this, we take the algorithmic resource cost to be the total number of quantum gate-operations in the algorithm; minimizing this cost typically makes the algorithm faster and more energy-efficient. We consider the subtle trade-off between quantum circuit size (small circuits are too imprecise, but large ones are too noisy), and the number of iterations of that quantum circuit for the full algorithm to sufficiently converge. Using a noise-metric-resource methodology, we identify the sweet spot (of circuit size versus iterations) that minimizes the algorithmic resource costs for a desired algorithm accuracy. It also gives the circuit size that maximizes algorithm accuracy for a fixed resource cost. Our methodology provides a practical guideline for near-term deployment of variational algorithms on realistic noisy hardware, including hardware that uses error mitigation.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Vaccine introductions in the WHO African Region, 2023-26: a country-level ecological analysis by Gavi eligibility and conflict-affected status

Background. The Immunization Agenda 2030 (IA2030) tracks new and underused vaccine introduction as an access metric, and its mid-term review calls for stronger country ownership, prioritisation, data use and tailored support in conflict-affected and resource-constrained settings; however, national launch status does not measure recurrent financing, implementation, safety or equity. We examined how recent vaccine-introduction activity was distributed across the WHO African Region. Methods. We conducted a descriptive country-level ecological analysis of all 47 Member States from January 2023 to June 2026. The country was the unit of analysis and contributed one cumulative, unweighted count of nationally endorsed vaccine-introduction and programme-change events. Counts were linked to Gavi eligibility, World Bank FY26 conflict-affected status, broader fragile and conflict-affected situation status in sensitivity analysis, and concurrent system-performance indicators, and modelled with Poisson regression using HC1 robust standard errors. Two Expanded Programme on Immunization (EPI) manager survey waves were summarised at country level. Reporting followed STROBE and RECORD. Results. Seventy-two events were recorded across 38 of 47 Member States: 48 new-antigen introductions, 20 dose or schedule expansions and four combination-vaccine introductions; malaria vaccines accounted for 21. Gavi-eligible conflict-affected countries averaged 2.50 events per country versus 1.27 in both comparison groups. Gavi-eligible conflict-affected status was associated with a higher count (incidence rate ratio [IRR] 1.97, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.38-2.81; p

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

Hierarchical Advantage Weighting for Online RL Fine-Tuning of VLAs from Sparse Episode Outcomes

arXiv:2606.17043v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When pretrained VLA policies are fine-tuned through online RL, each rollout episode produces only a single binary outcome (success or failure), yet the actor update requires per-transition supervision. Existing approaches commonly reduce this sparse outcome to a single scalar reward or advantage signal, which conflates distinct forms of transition-level feedback and provides limited guidance once basic task success becomes achievable. First, a single scalar signal conflates the two objectives of viability and efficiency; once basic success is achieved, the binary label provides no gradient to distinguish efficient completions from slow ones. Second, real-world rollouts mix autonomous and intervention segments; naively assigning episode outcomes across these boundaries introduces incorrect credit assignment. To address these issues, we propose Hierarchical Advantage-Weighted Behavior Cloning (HABC), which trains separate critic heads for these two objectives on different data subsets and combines their outputs with a state-adaptive balance. A state-adaptive gate $g_t$ merges their one-step advantages, prioritizing viability when success is uncertain and shifting to efficiency only when viability is high, and converts the result into per-transition weights on the actor loss. Intervention-aware credit assignment further restricts outcome labels to segments executed by the current policy, preventing supervision from leaking across intervention boundaries. In real-robot experiments on three contact-rich bimanual tasks, HABC raises success from supervised fine-tuning (SFT) baselines of 36%, 44%, and 12% to 92%, 88%, and 38%.

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

RedAct: Redacting Agent Capability Traces for Procedural Skill Protection

Users rely on execution traces to observe agent behavior, diagnose failures, and ensure accountability. These traces contain rich procedural detail, including tool invocations, intermediate decisions, and error-recovery logic. Yet this detail can expose private procedural skills, allowing downstream methods to recover key formulas, thresholds, and strategies without access to model weights or skill files. To quantify this risk and evaluate protection, we construct \textsc{CapTraceBench}, a benchmark of 75 specialized long-horizon tasks and 154 curated skills across seven domains. We also introduce \textsc{RedAct} https://github.com/XuShuwenn/RedAct, a protected trace release framework that localizes protected key information, rewrites traces while preserving verifier-critical evidence, and embeds behavioral watermarks for downstream provenance analysis. Across representative trace reuse methods, \textsc{RedAct} reduces normalized skill transfer (NST) from 44.7–67.1\% on raw traces to below the no-skill baseline, while preserving audit evidence. Its standalone behavioral watermarks reach 93.6–100.0\% true detection with a false alarm rate of at most 1.9\%. These results frame public agent traces as security interfaces and show that selective redaction can reduce procedural capability leakage without removing audit evidence.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Frozen elephant trunk repair in heritable thoracic aortic disease: Impact of genetic aortopathy on long-term outcomes - A multicenter analysis

Aims This multicenter study aims to compare outcomes of total aortic arch replacement (TAR) using the frozen elephant trunk (FET) technique in patients with and without heritable thoracic aortic disease (HTAD) and to assess whether HTAD influences postprocedural adverse aortic events (AAEs). Methods From 06/2007 to 05/2024, aortic databases from 13 European centers were screened for HTAD patients undergoing TAR with FET. All consecutive dissection and aneurysm non-HTAD patients from the four core centers served as comparator. The primary outcome was AAE, a composite of diameter progression, distal stent graft induced new entry (dSINE), malperfusion, rupture and pseudoaneurysm at 5 years after FET implantation. Results Of 2739 FET patients, 196 (7.2%) were diagnosed with HTAD. The control group consisted of 867 non-HTAD FET patients. Marfan syndrome was the most common condition (72%), followed by Loeys-Dietz syndrome (11%), vascular Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (5.6%) and Turner syndrome (2.0%). Seventeen (8.8%) patients were diagnosed with ns-HTAD. At 5 years 46 (24%) AAEs occurred in the HTAD group, 169 (20%) in the non-HTAD group (p=0.2). Diameter progression was the most common event (10% vs. 12%; p=0.6), followed by dSINE (5.8% vs. 4.5%; p=0.5), malperfusion (4.2% vs. 3.3%; p=0.5), rupture (2.1% vs. 0.7%; p=0.09) and pseudoaneurysm (0.5% vs. 0.2%; p=0.5). Conclusions The FET technique appears safe and effective for acute and chronic aortic disease in HTAD patients, with outcomes comparable to non-HTAD cases and no increase in graft-related complications, challenging traditional concerns about stent graft use in genetically mediated aortic disease.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

HeatKV: Head-tuned KV-cache Compression for Visual Autoregressive Modeling

Visual Autoregressive (VAR) models have recently demonstrated impressive image generation quality while maintaining low latency. However, they suffer from severe KV-cache memory constraints, often requiring gigabytes of memory per generated image. We introduce HeatKV, a novel compression method that adapts cache allocation in each head based on its attention to previously generated scales. Using a small offline calibration set, the attention heads are ranked according to their attention scores over prior scales. Based on this ranking, we construct a static pruning schedule tailored to a given memory budget. Applied to the Infinity-2B model, HeatKV achieves $2 \times$ higher compression ratio in memory allocation for KV cache compared to existing methods, while maintaining similar or better image fidelity, prompt alignment and human perception score. Our method achieves a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) for VAR model KV-cache compression, showcasing the effectiveness of fine-grained, head-specific cache allocation. Code and calibration script available at https://github.com/arm-research/heatkv.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Electronic Band Structure of Silicon Determined via a Variational Adiabatic Eigensolver: Theory and Experiment

arXiv:2606.16604v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This work addresses the critical challenge of excited-state preparation for semiconductor band structure calculations. We introduce a variational adiabatic eigensolver (VAE) protocol that combines adiabatic evolution with variational optimization to prepare high-fidelity eigenstates on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. Applying a momentum-space truncation, we accurately compute the electronic band structure of silicon – an idealized infinite periodic system – using only a modest number of qubits. Our approach employs multi-qubit parameterized circuits and a phase-based loss function, overcoming limitations of conventional methods. These limitations include the circuit-construction difficulty in traditional adiabatic approaches and the reduced accuracy of variational quantum eigensolvers for excited states. Through rigorous numerical simulation and experimental implementation on a superconducting quantum processor, we successfully prepare silicon's valence-band and conduction-band eigenstates. Single-shot readout yields state fidelities exceeding 96%, and the measured energy expectations agree with theoretical band energies within 0.5 eV. Further refinement via single-frequency oscillation fitting reduces the energy deviation to below 0.01 eV. This framework provides a robust and practical pathway for precisely determining electronic structures in quantum materials.

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

Litespark Inference For CPUs: Ultra-Fast SIMD Framework for Ternary (1.58-bit) Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have transformed artificial intelligence, but their computational requirements remain prohibitive for most users. Standard inference demands expensive datacenter GPUs or cloud API access, leaving over one billion personal computers underutilized for AI workloads. Ternary models offer a path forward: their weights are constrained to {-1, 0, +1}, theoretically eliminating the need for floating-point multiplication. However, existing frameworks fail to exploit this structure, treating ternary models as dense floating-point networks. We address this gap with custom SIMD kernels that replace matrix multiplication with simple addition and subtraction operations, targeting the integer dot product instructions available on modern CPUs. Our implementation, Litespark-Inference, is pip-installable and integrates directly with Hugging-Face, achieving 18.15x higher throughput, 7.15x faster time-to-first-token and 6.03x memory reduction compared to standard PyTorch inference on Apple Silicon, with comparable or higher throughput speedups up to 95.81x on Intel and AMD processors.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Follow the Latent Roadmap: Navigating Revocable Decoding for Diffusion LLMs with Anchor Tokens

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) offer a promising avenue for parallel generation but face a trade-off between decoding speed and quality. While revocable decoding strategies attempt to mitigate errors by verifying and remasking tokens, they typically operate within a mixed-quality context. This leads to two critical failures: Error Propagation, where new tokens absorb toxic information from erroneous context, and Local Error Reinforcement, where errors mutually reinforce each other to evade detection. To alleviate these challenges, we propose ASRD (Anchor Supervised Revocable Decoding), a training-free framework that operates within the embedding space. ASRD explicitly decouples the decoding context into trusted Anchor Tokens, which are identified via temporal consistency, and uncertain candidates. Leveraging a dynamic Anchor Tokens Cache, we introduce two complementary mechanisms: (1) Anchor-Guided Generation, which injects entropy-weighted anchor signals into masked positions to implicitly rectify attention toward the reliable global skeleton; and (2) Anchor-Perturbed Verification, which applies orthogonal perturbations to uncertain candidate tokens, destabilizing and remasking errors driven by fragile local consensus. Extensive experiments on math and coding benchmarks demonstrate that ASRD outperforms recent remasking baselines, achieving accuracy improvements of up to 6.4\% while accelerating inference throughput by up to 7.2$\times$.

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

MapAgent: An Industrial-Grade Agentic Framework for City-scale Lane-level Map Generation

arXiv:2606.04513v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Lane-level maps are critical infrastructure for autonomous driving and lane-level navigation, yet constructing and maintaining standardized lane networks for hundreds of cities remains highly labor-intensive. Recent end-to-end vectorized mapping methods can predict lane geometry and topology directly from sensor data, but they typically treat mapping specifications and traffic regulations as implicit, dataset-dependent supervision. Moreover, in complex scenes (e.g., worn or missing markings and occlusions), correct lane configurations are often under-determined by visual evidence alone, making specification violations a major source of human post-editing. We propose MapAgent, an industrial-grade agentic architecture that augments a vectorization backbone for specification-compliant lane-map production. Rather than merely adding an agent loop to map prediction, MapAgent couples backbone perception with explicit specification verification, constraint-aware reasoning, and deterministic map editing under a bounded, verification-driven Judge-Planner-Worker loop. A vision-language Judge diagnoses errors by jointly inspecting visual evidence and draft vectors, while a tool-calling Planner generates minimal corrective edits with post-edit re-validation. To remain scalable for city-scale production, MapAgent is selectively triggered only on tiles with low backbone confidence, adding modest overhead while preserving throughput. Experiments on real-world datasets show consistent gains over strong production baselines, especially in complex and long-tail scenarios. Additionally, MapAgent has been integrated into Baidu Maps, supporting lane-level map generation for over 360 cities nationwide and elevating the overall production automation to over 95%, demonstrating MapAgent's practicality and effectiveness for large-scale lane-level map generation.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

EmoFSM: A Finite State Machine for Emotional Support Conversation

Emotional support conversation (ESC) aims to alleviate people's emotional distress through effective conversations. Although large language models (LLMs) have made remarkable progress in ESC, most of these studies may not define the diagram from a state-model perspective, thereby providing a suboptimal solution for long-term satisfaction. To address such an issue, we leverage the Finite State Machine (FSM) on LLMs, and propose a framework called EmoFSM. Our framework allows a single LLM to bootstrap the planning during ESC, and self-reason the seeker's emotion, support strategy, and the final response upon each conversation turn. Substantial experiments in ESC datasets suggest that EmoFSM outperforms many baselines, including direct inference, self-fine, chain of thought, finetuning, and externally supported methods, even those with many more parameters.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Right Predictions, Misleading Explanations: On the Vulnerability of Vision-Language Model Explanations

Explanation mechanisms are increasingly used to support transparency and trust in vision-language models (VLMs), particularly in settings where model decisions require human oversight. However, the robustness of these explanations remains insufficiently understood. In this work, we investigate whether explanation heatmaps in VLMs, particularly CLIP-based models, faithfully reflect model reasoning under adversarial conditions. We show that explanation maps can be systematically manipulated while preserving the model's original prediction, revealing a disconnect between predictive behavior and explanation faithfulness. To study this vulnerability, we introduce X-Shift, a novel grey-box attack that perturbs patch-level visual representations to redirect explanation heatmaps toward semantically irrelevant regions without altering the predicted output. Unlike conventional adversarial attacks that aim to induce misclassification, X-Shift specifically targets the integrity of the explanation process itself. The attack operates without modifying model parameters and generalizes across multiple CLIP architectures and explanation methods. We evaluate the proposed approach on ImageNet-1k, MS-COCO, and Flickr30K, demonstrating consistent degradation in explanation alignment under imperceptible perturbations while maintaining prediction stability. Furthermore, standard prediction-oriented adversarial attacks fail to reproduce the same explanation-shifting behavior even under substantially larger perturbation budgets. Our findings highlight a fundamental limitation of current explanation mechanisms in VLMs and raise concerns about their use as reliable indicators of model trustworthiness in high-impact applications.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Bring My Cup! Personalizing Vision-Language-Action Models with Visual Attentive Prompting

arXiv:2512.20014v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models generalize well to generic instructions, they struggle with personalized commands such as "bring my cup," where the robot must act on one specific instance among visually similar objects. We study this setting of manipulating personal objects, in which a VLA must identify and control a user-specific object unseen during training using only a few reference images. To address this challenge, we propose Visual Attentive Prompting (VAP), a simple-yet-effective training-free perceptual adapter that equips frozen VLAs with top-down selective attention. VAP treats the reference images as a non-parametric visual memory, grounds the personal object in the scene through open-vocabulary detection and embedding-based matching, and then injects this grounding as a visual prompt by highlighting the object and rewriting the instruction. We construct two simulation benchmarks, Personalized-SIMPLER and Personalized-VLABench, and a real-world tabletop benchmark to evaluate personalized manipulation across multiple robots and tasks. Experiments show that VAP consistently outperforms generic policies and token-learning baselines in both success rate and correct-object manipulation, helping to bridge the gap between semantic understanding and instance-level control.

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

A New k-Space Model for Non-Cartesian Fourier Imaging

For the past several decades, it has been popular to reconstruct Fourier imaging data using model-based approaches that can easily incorporate physical constraints and advanced regularization/machine learning priors. The most common modeling approach is to represent the continuous image as a linear combination of shifted "voxel" basis functions. Although well-studied and widely-deployed, this voxel-based model is associated with longstanding limitations, including high computational costs, slow convergence, and a propensity for artifacts. In this work, we reexamine this model from a fresh perspective, identifying new issues that may have been previously overlooked (including undesirable approximation, wrap-around, and nullspace characteristics). Our insights motivate us to propose a new model that is more resilient to the limitations (old and new) of the previous approach. Specifically, the new model is based on a Fourier-domain basis expansion rather than the standard image-domain voxel-based approach. Illustrative results, which are presented in the context of non-Cartesian MRI reconstruction, demonstrate that the new model enables improved image quality (reduced artifacts) and/or reduced computational complexity (faster computations and improved convergence).

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

Algorithmic Constitutionalism

arXiv:2606.12437v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The increasing encroachment of artificial intelligence (AI) on social life raises significant risks for society, particularly within the infospheres created and controlled by companies such as Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon. This article examines these risks through an in-depth analysis of Facebook's content moderation regime, which is already partially governed by algorithms. We argue that the idea of ethical engineering, often proposed in the literature as a solution to the governance challenges posed by AI, is inadequate for several reasons. In response, we develop an alternative framework, which we term "algorithmic constitutionalism." Our approach rests on three pillars: (a) a layered architecture consisting of two levels of code: (i) an operative or object level and (ii) a meta level designed to protect the system's core principles from algorithmically initiated change; (b) algorithmic meta-reasoning, which enables the system to operate simultaneously at both levels so that it can monitor, verify, and potentially correct in real time operations at the object level that depart from principles protected at the meta-code level; and (c) correction through deliberation. The article elaborates the concept of algorithmic constitutionalism and demonstrates how it may be applied to Facebook's content moderation regime. As part of this analysis, we examine the tension between societal constitutionalism and algorithmic constitutionalism. Paradoxically, attempts to subject AI systems to external deliberative control may also enable AI agents to intervene in that process, potentially undermining its purpose. The article concludes by considering the implications of this argument for the European Digital Services Act, which entered into force in October 2022.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

The Clinical Characteristics and mortality outcomes of Atrial fibrillation complicating Heart failure with reduced ejection fraction: A prospective study from South Africa

Background: A growing burden of cardiovascular risk factors has raised cardiovascular disease-related mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), driving higher prevalence of heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF) and its complication with atrial fibrillation (AF). No prospective study has examined AF's clinical impact on HFrEF in SSA. Aim: To determine AF prevalence in HFrEF, describe HFrEF-AF clinical characteristics, and determine AF's impact on mortality. Methods: In this prospective observational study at a tertiary hospital in Johannesburg, 136 HFrEF patients were enrolled and categorised as HFrEF- SR (sinus rhythm) or HFrEF-AF. Baseline clinical characteristics and biochemistry were recorded. Comprehensive echocardiography including left atrial strain by 2D speckle-tracking was performed. Median follow-up was 30.6 months. Results: AF was present in 28 patients (21%). The mean age was 58.7 {+/-} 14.9 years (52.9% male) and differed between groups (p < 0.001). Hypertensive heart disease was the leading cause of HFrEF (36%). Compared with SR, HFrEF-AF patients had poorer health status (KCCQ 27 [16-43] vs 45 [32-60], p < 0.001) and lower left atrial strain (26.2 {+/-} 11.3%, p < 0.001). Guideline-directed medical therapy was suboptimal in the AF group: anticoagulation use was higher than SR (60% vs 9.5%, p < 0.001) but overall inadequate; HFrEF-AF patients received lower median doses of carvedilol (15.6 mg vs 25 mg, p = 0.002) and enalapril (10 mg vs 20 mg, p = 0.004), and fewer received spironolactone (50% vs 75.3%, p = 0.013). Survival was significantly lower in HFrEF-AF (0.41 [0.22-0.61]) versus SR (0.73 [0.61-0.82], p < 0.001). Independent predictors of mortality included prior stroke, lower TAPSE and KCCQ, and higher E/e' and heart rate. Conclusion: AF is common among HFrEF patients in this SSA cohort (though lower than in high-income countries) and associates with worse clinical status, suboptimal therapy, and higher mortality.