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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

UKBAnalytica: an integrated R package for scalable phenotyping and reproducible epidemiological analysis within the UK Biobank Research Analysis Platform

作者:

UK Biobank provides longitudinal health-related data for approximately 500,000 participants, and its Research Analysis Platform (RAP) has shifted large-scale analyses toward secure cloud-based computation. However, many existing tools address only specific steps of the analytical workflow, leaving a need for an integrated framework that connects multi-source disease phenotyping, survival-ready cohort construction, and downstream analysis on the RAP. Here, we present UKBAnalytica, an extensible R package for scalable phenotyping and integrated analysis of UK Biobank data within the RAP environment. It currently includes 52 predefined baseline variables and a built-in library of 331 curated disease definitions. These definitions are based on multiple UK Biobank data sources, including ICD-10, ICD-9, self-reported conditions, death registry records, algorithmically defined outcomes, and OPCS-4 procedure codes. UKBAnalytica distinguishes prevalent and incident cases, constructs follow-up time, generates analysis-ready survival datasets, and summarizes participant flow. Beyond phenotype construction, UKBAnalytica provides integrated modules for epidemiological analysis, omics analysis, and machine-learning-based modeling and interpretation. By linking endpoint definition with downstream modeling under a consistent data structure, UKBAnalytica reduces repetitive scripting and improves analytical transparency. Furthermore, we demonstrate the package's practical utility through a case study on chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) proteomics. The findings align closely with previously reported conclusions, underscoring the robustness and reliability of our analytical framework. This phenotype-centered framework complements existing UK Biobank tools and facilitates reproducible RAP-based biomedical research. UKBAnalytica is freely available at https://github.com/Hinna0818/UKBAnalytica.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Demystifying Variance in Circuit Discovery of LLMs

arXiv:2606.16920v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Circuit discovery is a key technique in mechanistic interpretability to pinpoint the model components that are crucial for performing a given task. Although the current state-of-the-art method (EAP-IG) performs well on the metric of (un)faithfulness, it suffers from substantial variability. This includes resampling variance, where the circuit changes when we probe with a new batch of data from the same distribution; rephrasing variance, where the discovered circuit shifts when the prompts are rephrased; and sample-wise variance, where a circuit with low population unfaithfulness exhibits large fluctuations in unfaithfulness across individual samples. This paper studies the roots of these variances. We demonstrate that CEAP, our new circuit discovery method that improves upon EAP-IG with a theoretical guarantee, can substantially lessen resampling variance. We further show that rephrasing variance arises because prompts with different templates tend to activate different circuits in the model. This leads us to argue that it may be challenging to find a comprehensive circuit that explains and controls the model's behavior on a task, which can be expressed in countless templates, suggesting that LLMs may be inherently hard to steer. We show that sparsity, which has been claimed to form more compact and interpretable task circuits, fails to solve this problem. Regarding sample-wise variance, we argue that it is largely benign: extremely poor unfaithfulness scores often stem from how unfaithfulness is defined, rather than from defects in the measured circuits. We show that the magnitude of unfaithfulness is affected by selective contribution scaling, a neural mechanism that accounts for the extremely poor scores sometimes observed.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Objects Before Words: Object-First Inductive Biases for Grounding Language in Child-View Video

Learning grounded word meaning from natural experience requires resolving two ambiguities in infant-view recordings: when the named referent appears and where it is in a cluttered frame. In SAYCam-style data, caregiver speech is sparse and weakly synchronized with egocentric video, so single-frame contrastive pairing yields noisy positives in which the intended object is absent or entangled with distractors. We propose BabyMind, an object-first bias for child-view contrastive learning under sparse, noisy supervision. BabyMind extracts candidate object embeddings using an offline mask-based region interface, links candidates across a short utterance-centered window into lightweight object files via tracking, and aligns utterances to bags of object files with a prototype-space multiple-instance contrastive objective. Track-coherence and global-object agreement regularizers stabilize learning and transfer object-file structure into the global frame embedding used at evaluation. On SAYCam-S, BabyMind improves Labeled-S 15 forced-choice accuracy by +2.6 points over CVCL and yields consistent gains on in-vocabulary out-of-distribution benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/sathiiii/BabyMind.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Abstracting Cross-Domain Action Sequences into Interpretable Workflows

Sequential or time-stamped interaction logs provide objective records of digital application usage, yet their granularity and noise often obscure meaningful insights into people's work. Such insights are essential for improving digital products in ways grounded in real-world user interactions. Prior research has applied deep learning models to cluster user actions into high-level activities, but these approaches are highly sensitive to noise and struggle to generalize across applications. To address this limitation, we introduce WorkflowView, a framework that uses large language models (LLMs) to abstract low-level action sequences into high-level activities. We establish the effectiveness and generality of our approach across three distinct, challenging sequential tasks and diverse domains: (a) zero-shot task description reconstruction from browser logs (achieving high semantic similarity, $\mu_{sim} = 0.91$), (b) few-shot student dropout prediction using MOOC interaction logs (reaching weighted $F_1 = 0.90$ with only five few-shot examples), and (c) anonymized, privacy-preserving analysis of AI tool integration within document workflows in Microsoft Word. Our work demonstrates that LLM-based abstraction is a robust and efficient path forward for transforming low-level behavioral data into high-level, interpretable, and actionable insights. We also discuss practical considerations for deploying LLM-based inferences within logging infrastructures, including computational efficiency and user privacy.

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

Detecting Explanatory Insufficiency in Learned Representations: A Framework for Representational Vigilance

arXiv:2606.13172v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learned representations are central to modern machine learning and are commonly evaluated through predictive performance, robustness, uncertainty estimation, or generalization. However, a learned representation may remain operationally successful while progressively failing to organize persistent residual structures that are not fully captured by conventional evaluation metrics. This article introduces VER, the Vigilant Evaluator of Representations, a conceptual framework for monitoring representational adequacy in learned representations. VER does not propose a new learning algorithm, loss function, or model architecture. Instead, it formalizes a diagnostic process through which persistent residual structures may be identified, analyzed, and interpreted as potential indicators of explanatory insufficiency. The framework distinguishes representational inadequacy from ordinary prediction error, uncertainty, noise, and distribution shift. It introduces a monitoring sequence based on representation identification, explanatory-domain delimitation, residual-structure detection, explanatory-resistance evaluation, and vigilance signaling. VER is intended as a contribution to representation diagnostics in machine learning. Its objective is not to replace existing evaluation methods but to complement them by treating representational adequacy as an explicit object of inquiry. A path toward empirical evaluation through representational-vigilance benchmarks is also outlined.

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

Beyond the Training Distribution: Evaluating Predictions Under Distribution Shift and Selection Bias

arXiv:2606.14506v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Understanding how a prediction model will perform in a new environment before deployment is essential to preventing harm when algorithms inform decision-making. Two common sources of model performance degradation are (i) covariate shift, where the target covariate distribution differs from the source, and (ii) selective labels, where the observability of outcomes depends on historical decisions. We study pre-deployment model evaluation under the joint presence of covariate shift and labeling of outcomes selectively based on observed features. In particular, we present a double machine learning procedure for estimating the target risk of an arbitrary black-box prediction model under a general loss function. We show identification of this estimand under standard assumptions and derive a bias-corrected estimator based on the influence function of the target risk. Finally, we evaluate our estimator through experiments using the eICU electronic health records database, showing that it tracks the true target risk more accurately than methods that address either selective labels or covariate shift alone, as well as baselines that combine standard plug-in approaches.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Hey Chat, Can You Teach Me? Structuring Socratic Dialogue for Human Learning in the Wild

Large language models are now widely used for everyday learning, but the underlying interactions are typically unstructured chats rather than following a curriculum. Unlike formal online learning systems, these interactions carry no prior record of the student, so any estimate of what the student already knows must be inferred from the dialogue itself. We show that this gap is not closed by scaling models alone. Frontier and education-tuned LLMs perform poorly when asked to tutor a student over an extended session, because doing so requires three things at once. The tutor must sequence a curriculum, conduct Socratic dialogue, and infer the student's knowledge state from that dialogue. We propose separating these responsibilities. Given a student query, our system constructs a prerequisite knowledge graph in which subtopics are nodes and dependencies are edges, and frames tutoring as deciding which node to teach next and how many dialogue turns to spend on it before moving on. A lightweight PPO policy handles this sequencing decision, while an LLM conducts the Socratic exchange at the chosen node and returns a signal of student progress. Across held-out STEM and non-STEM topics, our PPO-paired tutor outperforms heuristic baselines, frontier general-purpose models, and a model specialised for Socratic dialogue: on both the rate at which students reach full curriculum mastery and the number of turns required. Explicit curriculum structure delivers gains that scaling the underlying model does not.

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

Federated Bilevel Performative Prediction

arXiv:2606.19734v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Federated bilevel optimization is widely used for nested learning problems across distributed clients, such as federated hyperparameter tuning and meta-learning under privacy and communication constraints. Most existing formulations assume fixed client data distributions, which can be violated by performativity, where deployed decisions reshape client behavior and data collection, inducing client-specific, decision-dependent distribution shift. We study federated bilevel performative prediction, where both upper-level (UL) and lower-level (LL) objectives are evaluated under client-dependent, decision-dependent distributions. We formalize the federated bilevel performatively stable (FBPS) point under a decoupled-risk perspective and provide sufficient conditions for its existence and uniqueness. We then develop two federated methods to compute the FBPS solution: FBi-RRM, which converges linearly under a contraction condition, and FBi-SGD, a communication-efficient stochastic method based on federated hypergradient estimation with convergence guarantees under diminishing step sizes when sensitivities are sufficiently small. Experiments on strategic regression and meta strategic classification validate the predicted stability thresholds and demonstrate improved meta-generalization over non-performative baselines, and CNN-based classification further demonstrates the practical effectiveness of the proposed methods in nonconvex neural network settings.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Indirect Computing Model with Indirect Formal Method

作者:

This paper,from the perspective of a collaborative intelligent computing system formed by combining human-computer interface and collaborative computing programs, discusses the principles of optimized cloud computing technology supported by the combination of an indirect computing model and an indirect formal method. On the basis of systematically reviewing the influence of previous theoretical achievements Turing's computability theory,Kleene's formal theory of small strings,von Neumann's digital computer architecture and Turing's hypothesis on AI judgment on the mainstream general-purpose digital computer paradigm,the author focuses on introducing an indirect computing model and an indirect formal theory compatible with both large and small strings. Using Chinese information data as an example,the design concept of a collaborative intelligent computing system prototype is presented. The significance is that this achievement facilitates optimization of cloud computing from data centers to knowledge centers.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Hybrid Open-Ended Tri-Evolution Makes Better Deep Researcher

arXiv:2606.13710v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep research and agent evolution serve as de-facto tasks for AI agents in real-world applications toward artificial general intelligence. The former enables autonomous retrieval and integration of information in open-ended environments to tackle open-ended research tasks, yet it is constrained by the static parametric deep research capabilities of agent systems. The latter allows agents to autonomously interact with the environment to gain experiences that evolve model capabilities. However, its effectiveness has been widely validated only on verifiable tasks with standard answers, leaving a gap with open-ended research tasks. To bridge these two critical tasks, we propose the Hybrid Open-Ended Tri-Evolution (HOTE) framework, which leverages hybrid-mode reinforcement learning to facilitate the collaborative evolution of a proposer, solver and judge based on web-scale knowledge, moving toward autonomous evolving agents in open-ended tasks and environments. Extensive experiments on three long-form deep research benchmarks demonstrate that the 8B model trained via HOTE surpasses the strongest static open 8-32B models as well as those trained by state-of-the-art deep research training methods with less time overhead, and further verify that the evolution of all three modules in HOTE is indispensable.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Recursive Learning Without Collapse: A Weighting-Based Stabilization Framework

arXiv:2502.18049v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent studies identified an intriguing phenomenon in recursive generative model training known as model collapse, where models trained on data generated by previous models exhibit severe performance degradation. Addressing this issue and developing more effective training strategies have become central challenges in generative model research. In this paper, we investigate this phenomenon within a novel framework, where generative models are iteratively trained on a combination of newly collected real data and synthetic data from the previous training step. To develop an optimal training strategy for integrating real and synthetic data, we evaluate the performance of a weighted training scheme in various scenarios, including Gaussian distribution estimation, generalized linear models, and nonparametric estimation. We theoretically characterize the impact of the mixing proportion and weighting scheme of synthetic data on the final model's performance. Our key finding is that, across different settings, the optimal weighting scheme under different proportions of synthetic data asymptotically follows a unified expression, revealing a fundamental trade-off between leveraging synthetic data and model performance. In some cases, the optimal weight assigned to real data corresponds to the reciprocal of the golden ratio. Finally, we validate our theoretical results on extensive simulated datasets and a real tabular dataset.

12.
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.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Multi-Agent Transactive Memory

The decentralized deployment of LLM agents with diverse capabilities across diverse tasks motivates infrastructure for knowledge sharing across heterogeneous agent populations. Just as search engines index human-generated artifacts to support human problem solving, retrieval systems can organize agent-generated artifacts for reuse across agent populations. We extend retrieval-augmented generation - which demonstrates the value of human-authored artifacts to individual agents - to retrieval of agent-generated artifacts supporting a population of agents. In particular, agent trajectories encode reusable procedural knowledge, yet these artifacts are typically discarded after a single use or retained only by the producing agent, forcing newly instantiated agents to repeatedly rediscover existing solutions. We propose Multi-Agent Transactive Memory (MATM), a framework for population-level storage and retrieval of agent-generated trajectories, where producer agents contribute trajectories to a shared repository and consumer agents retrieve them to improve task execution. We focus on interactive environments (ALFWorld and WebArena), where trajectories are long and encode especially rich procedural structure. Our experiments demonstrate that retrieving trajectories from MATM improves downstream task performance and reduces interaction steps without coordination or joint training. These results position MATM as a design pattern for population-level experience sharing in open agent ecosystems.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Evaluation of EEG Foundation Models for Event-Based Burst-Suppression Detection in ICU

arXiv:2606.20074v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Burst suppression (BS) is a clinically relevant electroencephalographic (EEG) pattern used to monitor sedation depth and brain activity in critically ill patients, particularly during induced coma in Intensive Care Units (ICUs). Automatic burst detection remains challenging because BS patterns vary substantially between patients and annotated datasets are scarce. Recently, EEG Foundation Models (FMs) have shown promise across several downstream EEG applications, but their usefulness for BS detection remains unexplored. We present the first study to evaluate EEG FMs for burst detection in reduced-montage ICU EEG without patient-specific calibration. We compare REVE-base, LUNA-large and LuMamba-Tiny with an adaptive thresholding baseline and a task-specific EEGNet baseline. Additionally, we complement conventional EEG window-based classification with event-based burst detection evaluation. This helps assessing clinically whether burst episodes are correctly detected, reducing the impact of expected annotation variability. The best model, REVE-base, achieved the highest event-based F1-score ($0.868 \pm 0.167$) and reduced burst-per-minute error by 52.1% and 36.2% compared to EEGNet and adaptive thresholding respectively, supporting FMs for scalable EEG monitoring in ICU. Ablation experiments showed that full fine-tuning was the most effective adaptation strategy with respect to frozen-backbone training, two-step fine-tuning, and LoRA-based adaptation, improving event-based F1-score over frozen-backbone training by up to $+0.102$ for LUNA-large. With reduced labeled datasets, pretrained REVE-base outperformed random initialization by $+0.723$ event-based F1 points at 25% of the cohort, demonstrating the benefit of pretraining FM representations when adapted to burst detection with limited labeled data.

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

HemExp: Clinically-Guided Latent Diffusion for Modeling Hematoma Expansion

Hematoma expansion (HE) after spontaneous intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) is a major determinant of acute triage and treatment decisions in neurosurgical care. However, most existing methods provide either a binary expansion risk or a single follow-up volume, limiting uncertainty-aware decisions. We introduce HemExp, a clinically-guided latent diffusion model that generates patient-specific follow-up non-contrast CT images, along with segmentations of intraparenchymal and intraventricular hemorrhage. Generation is conditioned on baseline imaging, clinical variables, and an explicit expansion indicator, enabling controllable simulation of realistic clinical scenarios. HemExp uses a hemorrhage-aware multi-head variational autoencoder and models progression as the difference between baseline and follow-up latent representations with a conditional diffusion model. The model is trained on paired scans from 450 patients across multiple centers and evaluated on 107 patients from a held-out institution. HemExp produces spatial HE probability maps by generating multiple synthetic follow-up images per patient to estimate distributions of plausible follow-up hematoma volumes. Perturbing clinical inputs such as symptom-onset-to-imaging time or anticoagulant status shifts the predicted follow-up volume distribution. HemExp extends binary predictors and demonstrates robust estimation of clinically relevant outcomes in the imaging space, such as hematoma volume, intraventricular involvement, and mass effects. Overall, our results support controllable latent diffusion as a promising direction for uncertainty-aware modeling of early ICH progression.

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

A Tool for the Synthesis of Adaptive Probabilistic Processors Based on the Ising Model

arXiv:2606.19533v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work presents a tool for the synthesis and simulation of probabilistic architectures for solving combinatorial optimization problems by mapping them to the Ising model. The proposed approach automatically constructs the Ising Hamiltonian and determines the number of probabilistic elements (p-bits) based on problem characteristics such as size and topology. Furthermore, the tool introduces an adaptive strategy for selecting the most suitable update algorithm among Gibbs Sampling, Simulated Annealing (SA), Simulated Quantum Annealing (SQA), and cluster-based methods. Experimental results using benchmark problems demonstrate improved convergence behavior and flexibility compared to fixed approaches. The proposed framework enables systematic evaluation of probabilistic computing strategies and supports the development of future hardware implementations based on MTJs and p-bits.

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

MEAL: A Benchmark for Continual Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2506.14990v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Benchmarks play a central role in reinforcement learning (RL) research, yet their computational constraints often shape what is studied. Despite the motivation of lifelong learning, most continual RL papers consider only 3-10 sequential tasks, as CPU-bound environments make longer sequences impractical. Meanwhile, continual learning in cooperative multi-agent settings remains largely unexplored. To address these gaps, we introduce MEAL (Multi-agent Environments for Adaptive Learning), the first benchmark for continual multi-agent RL. By leveraging JAX and GPU acceleration, MEAL enables training on sequences of 100 tasks in a few hours on a single GPU. We find that long task sequences reveal failure modes that do not appear at smaller scales.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

PlaceRep: Geospatial Place Representation Learning from Large-Scale Point-of-Interest Data

arXiv:2507.02921v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Learning effective representations of urban environments requires capturing spatial structure beyond fixed administrative boundaries. Existing geospatial representation learning approaches typically aggregate Points of Interest (POIs) into pre-defined administrative regions such as census units or ZIP code areas, assigning a single embedding to each region. However, POIs often form semantically meaningful groups that extend across, within, or beyond these boundaries, defining places that better reflect human activity and urban function. To address this limitation, we propose PlaceRep, a geospatial representation learning method that constructs place-level representations by clustering spatially and semantically related POIs. PlaceRep summarizes large-scale POI graphs from U.S. Foursquare data to produce general-purpose urban region embeddings while automatically identifying places across multiple spatial scales. By eliminating model pre-training, PlaceRep provides a scalable and efficient solution for multi-granular geospatial analysis. Experiments using the tasks of population density estimation and housing price prediction as downstream tasks show that PlaceRep outperforms most state-of-the-art graph-based geospatial representation learning methods and achieves up to a x100 speedup in generating region-level representations on large-scale POI graphs. The implementation of PlaceRep is available at https://github.com/mohammadhashemii/PlaceRep.

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

Gumbel-BEARD: Automatic Layer Selection for Self-Supervised Adaptation of Whisper in Low-Resource Domains

Speech foundation models often struggle in low-resource domains due to domain mismatch and data scarcity. We propose Gumbel-BEARD, a domain adaptation framework that automates Whisper encoder layer selection via an end-to-end trainable hard Gumbel-Softmax selector. It enables self-supervised adaptation with a BEST-RQ objective that dynamically adapts to target acoustic characteristics without manual tuning. Experiments on the MyST child speech corpus demonstrate efficiency and scalability: with 10 h of labeled data for fine-tuning, our method matches a fully supervised baseline trained on the complete 133 h labeled set. We establish new state-of-the-art word error rates (WERs) of 8.21% using Whisper-medium on MyST and 11.06% using Whisper-small on the OGI Spontaneous dataset. Evaluation on CORAAL further confirms robustness to adult dialectal domain shifts, with up to 6% relative WER reduction, highlighting the generalizability of our approach to diverse low-resource conditions.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Continuous Splatting meets Retinex: Continuous Gaussian Splatting and Implicit Reflectance Modeling for Low-Light Image Enhancement

Low-light image enhancement aims to recover clear images from low-illumination observations and is crucial for high-level downstream vision tasks. However, existing methods frequently encounter color distortion and structural artifacts when balancing global smooth illumination adjustment and local high-frequency detail recovery. To address these issues, we propose CGS-Retinex as the first low-light image enhancement framework based on explicit-implicit joint modeling. Our framework deeply integrates continuous Gaussian splatting with Retinex theory. Specifically, we represent the image grid as a continuous parameter field and propose a continuous Gaussian renderer to estimate the spatially continuous global illumination distribution. This approach fundamentally eliminates grid artifacts caused by discrete Gaussian sampling. Furthermore, we introduce an implicit neural representation to model reflectance independently. We leverage shallow high-frequency features to guide the network in accurately reconstructing degraded texture details. Within the Retinex framework, we incorporate physics-inspired brightness consistency constraints and illumination smoothness regularization to enable explicit illumination and implicit reflectance to maintain proper exposure and achieve high-fidelity recovery of high-frequency structures and colors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CGS-Retinex significantly suppresses dark-region noise and overexposure while achieving exceptional high-frequency structural fidelity and color restoration by precisely decoupling illumination and texture. This work establishes a novel continuous physical representation paradigm for low-light image enhancement.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Decoupled Latent Optimization of Diffusion Models for Full Waveform Inversion

arXiv:2606.14139v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Full waveform inversion (FWI) recovers subsurface velocity from seismic recordings by solving a severely ill-posed, nonconvex PDE-constrained optimization. Classical regularizers stabilize the inversion but fail to reproduce realistic geological structures; recent diffusion-prior methods improve realism at the cost of a fragile trade-off between data fidelity and prior consistency. We propose Decoupled Latent Optimization (DLO), which relaxes the standard latent-optimization formulation into a quadratic-penalty objective over an auxiliary physical variable and a latent variable. The data-fidelity gradient acts in physical space, the diffusion sampler contributes only through a decoded prior sample, and the standard smoothed-velocity initialization of classical FWI is preserved. On the OpenFWI benchmark, DLO outperforms classical regularizers and existing diffusion-based methods under clean, noisy, and missing-trace acquisitions. The prior, trained on 70*70 OpenFWI models, transfers directly to the Marmousi and Overthrust benchmarks, where DLO recovers intricate fault structures and remains robust to initialization smoothing and measurement noise.

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

See-and-Reach: Precise Vision-Language Navigation for UAVs within the Field of View

arXiv:2606.20045v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: UAV Vision-Language Navigation (UAV-VLN) is typically formulated as a holistic search-and-reach problem, where long-range target discovery and final target approach are optimized and evaluated jointly. This formulation makes it difficult to assess a critical capability of aerial embodied agents, namely whether a UAV can accurately ground a visible target and translate vision-language evidence into precise 3D motion once the target enters its field of view. To address this limitation, we introduce UAV-VLN-FOV, a target-visible navigation task that isolates the see-and-reach stage and enables a more diagnostic evaluation of terminal reaching ability. We further propose 3DG-VLN, a vision-language waypoint prediction framework guided by dynamic 3D direction cues to enhance fine-grained visual grounding and spatial direction alignment for precise target reaching. Specifically, 3DG-VLN adaptively processes high-resolution front-view and downward-view observations to preserve fine-grained visual and geometric details for target grounding. It also updates the target-relative direction online during closed-loop navigation, allowing the agent to maintain spatial alignment with the target and reduce accumulated direction drift. To support this task, we construct a dedicated high-resolution benchmark which contains 2,717 trajectories with target-oriented high-level instructions, high-resolution front-view and downward-view egocentric observations, and continuous 3D waypoint annotations. Experiments show that 3DG-VLN outperforms competitive UAV-VLN baselines, achieving a 13.82\% improvement in success rate. Real-world trials further demonstrate the potential of 3DG-VLN for practical see-and-reach navigation. The source code and benchmark are available at https://github.com/xuefanfu/3DG-VLN.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Does AI Reviewer See the Full Picture? Attacking and Defending Multimodal Peer Review

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) into scientific peer-review workflows introduces novel and significant risks for adversarial manipulation, especially given the multimodal nature of scientific papers where figures, not just text, convey core evidence. This creates a significant gap: current robustness studies on AI peer-review are overwhelmingly text-only. Moreover, the problem is distinct from standard jailbreaking, as a peer-review attack seeks to induce a domain-specific, targeted failure (e.g., "inflate this score") rather than a general safety policy violation, for which no practical defenses exist. To address this, we introduce PaperGuard, the first comprehensive benchmark designed to systematically evaluate and defend AI-generated peer-review against these domain-specific, cross-modal attacks. Our framework is built on three pillars: (1) a new multimodal peer-review dataset spanning multiple scientific domains; (2) a unified suite of attacks, including black-box prompt injections and white-box perturbations, specifically designed to target both text (GCG) and figures (PGD); and (3) a practical defense, motivated by the long-context challenge of academic papers, that uses chunk-based embedding search to efficiently localize and mitigate harmful instructions. Our extensive experiments, conducted across state-of-the-art models, confirm that AI reviewers are pervasively vulnerable. PaperGuard establishes the foundational benchmark, protocols, and actionable defense necessary to pioneer trustworthy, attack-resilient AI-assisted scholarly reviewing.

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

Sustainable Face Recognition on Low-Power Devices with VQ-VAE Embeddings

Face recognition has become a cornerstone of modern AI applications, yet conventional approaches often rely on computationally intensive models deployed in cloud environments, leading to increased network traffic, high energy consumption, and a heavy carbon footprint. This work introduces a sustainable, edge-deployable face recognition framework based on Vector-Quantized Variational Autoencoders (VQ-VAE), which generates compact and semantically rich latent representations of facial images. By leveraging the compression capacity and reconstruction quality of VQ-VAE embeddings on the edge and combining them with the power of pre-trained face embeddings in a knowledge distillation setup, our system achieves comparable accuracy to state-of-the-art face embedding models while significantly reducing memory and computation requirements on the edge, making it suitable for low-power edge devices. The integration of VQ-VAE compression minimizes network overhead while keeping the matching accuracy high by retaining only the most informative facial features in the latent space. As a result, the reconstructed images preserve the key identity characteristics, improving the robustness and overall performance of the face embeddings.

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

Augmenting Game AI with Deep Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.20210v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Immersion in video games depends not only on graphics, audio, and game mechanics, but also on the quality of in-game characters. Producing believable characters, or game AI, remains a significant challenge as behavioral complexity is hard to capture with hand-coded systems. Game AI is a source of immersion and engagement; however, the limitations stemming from the challenges of creating game AI often lead to frustration and the breaking of the illusion of realism within the game. The introduction of machine learning models opens the door to creating more believable, authentic, and relatable characters in games. The promise is that they either learn from interacting with the game, or from player data, to develop true human-like behavior. In this paper, we envision more applications of reinforcement learning for game AI in the future. For this to materialize, current research limitations are prohibitive to broad deployment across game genres. Therefore, we propose a framework for training reinforcement learning models with a set of requirements in mind that are suited towards game AI and game development. We present examples of games with reinforcement learning-augmented game AI and describe the practicalities of deploying player-facing machine learning agents in modern games. Furthermore, we identify bottlenecks and hard problems in these areas, which we believe offer promising research directions to accelerate the adoption of machine learning in game AI for the video game industry.