This Week In Computer Science Papers
Week beginning 15th June 2026
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Showing 1–36 of 763
Future Dynamic 3D Reconstruction: A 3D World Model with Disentangled Eg…
2026-06-16Computer Vision and Pattern Recognitionarxiv
Abstract
Forecasting the evolution of dynamic environments is crucial for autonomous agents. While generative world models have recently achieved high photorealism in 2D video synthesis by mixing ego-motion and environmental dynamics within the image plane, they exhibit physical inconsistencies, such as morphing or vanishing objects, especially over long time horizons. In this paper, we propose FR3D, a world model that predicts a persistent 3D latent representation for future dynamic 3D reconstruction. Unlike prior works that treat the world as a sequence of image-based features, FR3D explicitly decouples the 3D evolution of the scene from the agent's trajectory, treating the inferred ego-motion as a latent proxy for action. This disentanglement resolves the ambiguities between self-motion and world-motion, ensuring geometric consistency into the future. Furthermore, we introduce a teacher-student distillation strategy that leverages the spatial "common sense" of off-the-shelf foundation models, leading to robust zero-shot generalization. Extensive experiments demonstrate FR3D's strong performance for future dynamic 3D reconstruction from monocular observations across multiple datasets, even 2 seconds into the future. Project page: https://fr3d-wm.github.io.
Open → 2606.18250v1
Unified Multimodal Autoregressive Modeling with Shared Context-Visual T…
2026-06-16Computer Vision and Pattern Recognitionarxiv
Abstract
Unified Multimodal Modeling aims to integrate visual understanding and generation within a single system. However, existing approaches typically rely on two disparate visual tokenizers, which splits the representation space and hinders truly unified modeling. We propose UniAR, a unified autoregressive framework where a single discrete visual tokenizer serves as the key bridge between understanding and generation, enabling a shared context in which the model can directly interpret its own generated visual tokens without additional re-encoding. UniAR adapts a pretrained vision encoder with multi-level feature fusion and a lookup-free bitwise quantization scheme, preserving both high-level semantics and low-level details while scaling the effective visual vocabulary at minimal cost. Building on this, the unified autoregressive model adopts parallel-bitwise-prediction to jointly predict spatially grouped, multi-level visual codes, substantially reducing visual sequence length and accelerating generation. Finally, a diffusion-based visual decoder operates on discrete visual tokens to decode high-fidelity images. Through large-scale pre-training, followed by supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, UniAR achieves state-of-the-art performance on image generation and image editing while remaining competitive on multimodal understanding benchmarks. The project page is available at https://sharelab-sii.github.io/uniar-web.
Open → 2606.18249v1
Visual Verification Enables Inference-time Steering and Autonomous Poli…
2026-06-16RoboticsArtificial Intelligencearxiv
Abstract
Robots deployed in the real world should learn from their experience and improve over time. This requires a mechanism of practicing and learning from feedback. In this paper, we propose VERITAS, a generator-verifier framework for generalist robot policies for inference-time policy steering and self-improvement. We use a pre-trained generalist robot policy as a ``generator'' and pair it with a gradient-free ``visual verifier'' that evaluates actions at inference time. This framework enables inference-time steering that improves policy performance without additional training. We demonstrate that inference-time verification consistently outperforms vanilla generalists without training on additional demonstration data. Additionally, we demonstrate that the verified rollouts provide effective supervision for offline policy improvement: policies fine-tuned on verified self-generated trajectories achieve consistent performance gains. Notably, we find that post-training with verified rollouts achieves comparable efficiency to expert demonstrations, while requiring no human interventions. Our results highlight inference-time verification as a practical and scalable mechanism for improving robotic policies during deployment.
Open → 2606.18247v1
Variable-Width Transformers
2026-06-16Computation and Languagearxiv
Abstract
Scaling model size, specifically depth and width, has driven significant progress in transformer-based language models. However, most architectures maintain a constant width across all layers, allocating a fixed parameter and computation budget evenly despite different layers potentially playing distinct computational roles. In this work, we empirically investigate nonuniform capacity allocation across network depth by proposing a $\times$-shaped > <former architecture. This design maintains wider early and late layers while narrowing the middle layers, utilizing a parameter-free residual resizing mechanism. Across decoder-only language models ranging from 200M to 2B parameters (dense) and 3B parameters (MoE), our > <former consistently outperforms parameter-matched uniform baselines on language modeling loss. By reducing the average layer width, this architecture also requires fewer overall FLOPs (22% reduction under fitted loss-matched scaling curves) and smaller KV cache memory and I/O cost (15% reduction). In analysis, we show that this bottleneck structure results in qualitatively different representations in residual streams. Overall, our results demonstrate that nonuniform width allocation can result in more resource-optimal scaling of language models.
Open → 2606.18246v1
MOCHI: Motion Enhancement of Collaborative Human-object Interactions
2026-06-16Computer Vision and Pattern RecognitionGraphicsRoboticsarxiv
Abstract
Collaborative human-object interaction shows dynamic and complex movements that require mutual anticipation and continuous adjustment between participants and the shared object. Modeling such collaborative multi-human object interaction (MHOI) scenarios requires high-quality data acquisition as a foundational step; however, this is challenging due to the inherent complexity of MHOI where human-human and human-object interactions occur simultaneously. Such complexity leads to noisy MHOI captures characterized by several artifacts: contact misalignment between hands and objects, motion jitter and temporal inconsistencies in the captured sequences, and missing or incomplete finger-level articulation details. To address these challenges, we present MOCHI (MOtion Enhancement of Collaborative Human-object Interactions), a two-stage framework for enhancing noisy MHOI data. Our approach first generates physically plausible hand grasps through optimization from noisy body input, producing grasps that are both physically plausible and semantically consistent with the body pose, where these optimized grasps are extended into complete hand-object interaction sequences. Consequently, the full-body motion for all participants are refined through a diffusion-based noise optimization framework that uses single-person motion priors. During the optimization process, we introduce optimization objectives to encode human-object and human-human interaction information within these single-person priors. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our pipeline across diverse MHOI data, either acquired by existing capture methods or synthesized by generative models. We further show robustness of our system across varying numbers of participants and types of interactions, and demonstrate various applications including keyframe-based MHOI creation and data augmentation through varying object geometries.
Open → 2606.18243v1
EventDrive: Event Cameras for Vision-Language Driving Intelligence
2026-06-16Computer Vision and Pattern Recognitionarxiv
Abstract
Event cameras sense the world through asynchronous brightness changes with microsecond latency and high dynamic range, offering motion fidelity far beyond frame-based sensors and capturing temporal structure that conventional exposures often miss. These properties make events a powerful complement to RGB in autonomous driving, especially under blur, glare, and rapid motion, where frame-based perception can become unreliable. However, existing event-aware vision-language models remain limited to generic perception and do not reveal how event sensing contributes to reasoning and decision-making across the full driving loop. We present EventDrive, a large-scale benchmark and model suite that unifies event streams, RGB frames, and language supervision across four core dimensions: Perception, Understanding, Prediction, and Planning, covering captions, structured QA, grounding, motion-state recognition, trajectory forecasting, and planning tasks. Building on this foundation, EventDrive-VLM introduces a multi-horizon event pyramid and a temporal-horizon mixture-of-experts module to adaptively encode and fuse asynchronous and frame-based information for downstream reasoning. Comprehensive evaluation across diverse tasks shows that event streams provide substantial gains in temporal precision, motion awareness, and robustness, bringing event sensing into the center of driving intelligence.
Open → 2606.18242v1
EBench: Elemental Diagnosis of Generalist Mobile Manipulation Policies
2026-06-16Roboticsarxiv
Abstract
We present EBench, a simulation benchmark that diagnoses generalist mobile manipulation policies beyond a single success-rate scalar. EBench comprises 26 diverse and challenging manipulation tasks annotated along 5 capability dimensions and 4 generalization dimensions. We evaluate state-of-the-art generalist manipulation models including $π_0$, $π_{0.5}$, XVLA, and InternVLA-A1, and reveal that models with near success rates exhibit strikingly different capability profiles: $π_{0.5}$ achieves the highest test success rate and the best train--test retention, whereas InternVLA-A1 dominates mobile manipulation but collapses on dexterous tasks, and XVLA exhibits strengths on a disjoint set of atomic skills compared to other policies. Beyond capability profiling, EBench analyzes the generalization ability from 4 representative perspectives, identifying the impact of different distribution shift factors. The results reveal strengths and weaknesses of models behind an overall score. We hope this benchmark offers a broad set of diagnostic signals to guide iteration on generalist manipulation models.
Open → 2606.18239v1
ReproRepo: Scaling Reproducibility Audits with GitHub Repository Issues
2026-06-16Computation and LanguageArtificial IntelligenceMachine Learningarxiv
Abstract
Reproducing research results from papers and released code is central to scientific progress. Existing works have introduced benchmarks to evaluate whether LLM agents can assist with reproducibility, but they are difficult to scale due to their reliance on substantial manual effort for data curation and evaluation. We introduce ReproRepo, a scalable framework for reproducibility evaluation that leverages human-raised GitHub issues as naturally occurring supervision on realistic reproduction blockers. We instantiate ReproRepo on 1,149 recent machine learning papers from major conferences and evaluate four frontier model-agent configurations. Our results show that LLM agents, even without executing code, can identify many real-world reproducibility problems from paper-repository pairs: the best agent in our study, namely Codex with GPT-5.5, surfaces at least one semantically related human-reported blocker for ~90% of papers in the study. Further analysis shows that agents are particularly effective for surfacing visible failures and identifying the right semantic region, but may still be insufficient in exact localization. ReproRepo can serve as a reusable, scalable framework for future evaluations of LLM agents on real-world reproducibility auditing. Our code is released at https://github.com/LithiumDA/ReproRepo.
Open → 2606.18237v1
Sign-Rank, Index, and List Replicability: Connections and Separations
2026-06-16Machine LearningInformation Theoryarxiv
Abstract
In learning theory, the sign rank of a binary concept class captures the smallest dimension in which it can be represented by points and halfspaces. Despite tremendous interest, lower bounds on sign rank are notoriously difficult to come by. Two recent approaches to the problem establish lower bounds on sign rank by measures that are easier to analyze: the $\mathbb{Z}_2$-index and the list replicability number. We order these measures, showing that the $\mathbb{Z}_2$-index is upper-bounded by a linear function of the list replicability number. As a main consequence, we obtain a strong separation between sign rank and $\mathbb{Z}_2$-index, thereby resolving a question of Frick, Hosseini, and Vasileuski. This motivates a thorough study of list replicability, the stronger of the two lower-bounding measures. We establish upper bounds on the list replicability number by two combinatorial measures: height and minimum star number. We also prove a fundamental composition result, showing that the product of two concept classes has list replicability number bounded by the sum of the list replicability numbers of the two classes.
Open → 2606.18236v1
EvolveNav: Proactive Preflection and Self-Evolving Memory for Zero-Shot…
2026-06-16Artificial Intelligencearxiv
Abstract
Zero-Shot Object-Goal Navigation (ZS-OGN) requires embodied agents to explore and locate target objects without any prior training. To this end, recent methods leverage foundation models. But they typically rely on static priors and lack adaptation, which leads to repeated errors and costly trial and error. In this paper, we propose a self-evolving ZS-OGN framework that enables continuous test-time improvement. Specifically, we build an agentic rule memory by extracting actionable knowledge from past trajectories. Then, we propose a retrieval strategy based on upper confidence bound, selecting effective rules by balancing semantic relevance and historical success. In addition, we introduce a memory-guided preflection module that forecasts potential outcomes before action, reducing inefficient exploration. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms existing zero-shot baselines, achieving a 10.1\% improvement in success rate with fewer unnecessary steps.
Open → 2606.18235v1
Adaptive Volumetric Mechanical Property Fields Invariant to Resolution
2026-06-16Computer Vision and Pattern RecognitionMachine LearningRoboticsarxiv
Abstract
Accurate mechanical properties (or materials) Young's modulus ($E$), Poisson's ratio ($ν$) and density ($ρ$) are essential for reliable physics simulation of digital worlds, but most 3D assets lack this information. We propose AdaVoMP, a method for predicting accurate dense spatially-varying ($E$, $ν$, $ρ$) for input 3D objects across representations, improving the resolution, accuracy, and memory efficiency over the state-of-the-art. The foundation of our technique is a sparse and adaptive voxel structure SAV that efficiently represents both the input 3D shape and the material field output. We replace the fixed-voxel model of the most accurate prior method, VoMP, with a novel sparse transformer encoder-decoder model that learns to generate a unique SAV autoregressively for every input shape to represent its materials, achieving a resolution $16^3\times$ higher than prior art. Experiments show that AdaVoMP estimates more accurate volumetric properties, even with lesser test-time compute than all prior art. This allows us to convert high-resolution complex 3D objects into simulation-ready assets, resulting in realistic deformable simulations.
Open → 2606.18231v1
MAJIC: Leveraging Articulatory Motion for Speech-based Emotion Recognit…
2026-06-16Human-Computer Interactionarxiv
Abstract
We introduce MAJIC, a multimodal emotion recognition system that leverages articulatory motion of the jaw and facial muscles for speech-based emotion recognition (SER). While most SER systems perform well on datasets with strongly expressed emotional speech of trained actors, their performance often degrades when emotional expressions become more subtle. We explore this challenge by engineering features from articulatory motion and integrating them with audio features using a multi-task learning framework. Our key insight is that emotion in speech manifests not only through vocal characteristics but also through distinct articulatory motions: jaw movements, facial muscle vibrations, and speech-induced vibrations. While audio captures features such as pitch and prosody, articulatory motion contains complementary information that is not present in audio alone. We evaluate our system on data collected from 20 participants across multiple sessions, 10 languages, and diverse scenarios, including prompted and conversational speech, showing its robustness across users and settings. MAJIC achieves 93% accuracy and 91% F1 score for emotion classification, outperforming strong audio-based baselines on our dataset.
Open → 2606.18228v1
Strategies for preventing and reversing polarized online discourse
2026-06-16Computers and Societyarxiv
Abstract
Political polarization poses a variety of challenges for modern democracies. Entrenched disagreements on policy can prevent constructive discourse and compromise, and high levels of affective polarization threaten to undermine social cohesion and support for institutions. Finding ways to promote constructive discourse while maintaining free expression has proved a challenge for social media platforms, media outlets and policy makers alike. Here we develop a computational model -- based in psychology -- of online discourse and opinion dynamics under complex individual identities, which we use to assess the capacity of realistic interventions to prevent or reverse polarization. We show that changes to the range of acceptable opinions in a society -- i.e. the Overton window -- have a limited impact on polarization, and that attempts to ``optimize'' the Overton window can even trigger the onset of polarization. In contrast, interventions that shift attention towards under-discussed topics, or increase the costs of violating existing norms, are often effective at preventing polarization, but are less successful at reversing it. Most strikingly, increasing the salience of influential individuals, who model non-polarized discourse, can be highly effective at both preventing and reversing polarization. However we also find that once polarization has set in, even the most successful interventions result in latent extremism when identities are complex. Our work suggests that restricting speech by shrinking the range of acceptable discourse is an ineffective way to tackle polarization, whereas enforcement of existing norms, attention nudges and the presence of elites who model good behavior can be highly effective.
Open → 2606.18226v1
Directed Reachability-Preserving Minimum Edge Cut: Approximation and Pl…
2026-06-16Data Structures and AlgorithmsComputational Complexityarxiv
Abstract
We study a directed version of the three-terminal reachability-preserving minimum edge cut problem. Given a directed graph $G=(V,A)$ with arc costs and terminals $s_1,s_2,t$, the one-way directed RPMEC problem asks for a minimum-cost set of arcs whose deletion preserves the reachability $s_1\leadsto s_2$ while destroying the reachability $s_1\leadsto t$. We first give a path--cut formulation in terms of a rooted directed cut function. Using a root-linear approximation for the associated polymatroid, we obtain an $O(\sqrt r)$-approximation, where $r$ is the number of relevant vertices with positive singleton cut value. In particular this gives an $O(\sqrt n)$-approximation in general directed graphs. For acyclic directed graphs, we give an additional singleton-length algorithm and obtain an $O(\min\{\sqrt r,h\})$ guarantee, where $h$ is the maximum number of relevant vertices on an $s_1$-$s_2$ path. Finally, we prove that directed planar RPMEC is NP-hard, even on acyclic planar digraphs with nonnegative costs, by reducing from independent set on cubic planar graphs through a finite-bimodal directed node-cut construction and a planar node-to-edge split.
Open → 2606.18225v1
Learning Red Agent Policy from Observations for Neurosymbolic Autonomou…
2026-06-16Cryptography and SecurityArtificial IntelligenceMachine Learningarxiv
Abstract
With sophisticated cyber-attacks becoming increasingly prevalent, modern networks require intelligent autonomous cyber-defense agents trained via Reinforcement Learning (RL). These agents employ neurosymbolic approaches such as behavior trees with learning-enabled components (LECs) to learn, reason, adapt, and implement security rules while maintaining critical operations. However, these autonomous networks are partially observable systems, i.e., the cyber-attacker's (red agent's) actions are not observable, making it difficult for the defender to predict red actions, learn red policies, or assess the attacker's intrusion levels. To address this, we propose a Policy Learning Technique using imitation learning to learn policies for partially observable RL agents with discrete states and discrete actions. We apply this technique in an autonomous cyber environment to predict red agent's actions from network observations and defender actions. Integrated with a neurosymbolic cyber-defense agent, our method effectively handles different red policies and achieves high prediction accuracy across diverse simulated scenarios.
Open → 2606.18223v1
Darshana Graph: A Parallel Commentary Corpus for Comparative Indian Phi…
2026-06-16Computation and LanguageDigital Librariesarxiv
Abstract
We introduce Darshana Graph, a corpus of over 125,000 text records spanning classical Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain philosophical traditions, drawn from public-domain and openly licensed translations of sources including the Bhagavad Gita, Brahma Sutras, principal Upanishads, the Pali Canon, and core Jain texts. Its distinctive contribution lies in a structurally unique subset of roughly 8,500 Hindu and Jain records in which the same root verse or sutra is aligned across eighteen historical commentators representing five schools of Vedanta and other darshanas, enabling direct comparison of how independent interpretive traditions read identical source material. To our knowledge, no publicly available resource provides comparable cross-commentator alignment at this scale. We present two analyses built on this corpus. First, a transparent stylometric comparison requiring no machine learning measures argumentative style through scriptural citation density, explicit refutation rate, and sentence complexity. It finds a moderate negative correlation between citation density and refutation rate, a marked increase in refutation rate across three commentators in a related doctrinal lineage, and measurable genre-level differences within the Pali Canon itself. Second, we describe a constrained large language model pipeline that extracts typed philosophical relationships between concepts using a predefined relation vocabulary and deterministic post-hoc validation. The resulting graph surfaces cross-school disagreement patterns while also revealing important extraction limitations, including cases where an independent embedding-based analysis disagrees with the graph-derived findings. We release the full corpus, extracted relationship graph, and all source code.
Open → 2606.18222v1
Gatling: Rapid-Fire Consensus from Parallel Composition
2026-06-16Cryptography and SecurityDistributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computingarxiv
Abstract
Consensus protocols form the core of blockchains and other replicated state machines, ensuring that all correct nodes process the same totally ordered log of input transactions. In fault-free executions, performance is driven by the good-case transaction latency -- the time between a transaction becoming known to all nodes and its confirmation by the consensus protocol -- which depends on both how frequently proposals are made and, once made, how quickly they are confirmed. While prior work has established tight lower bounds on confirmation latency that modern protocols already achieve, it remains open whether the inter-proposal time can be further reduced below the state-of-the-art of one network delay. We introduce Gatling, an atomic broadcast protocol that achieves arbitrarily small inter-proposal times under rotating leader schedules; in particular, smaller than the network delay. Gatling runs multiple parallel instances of a black-box atomic broadcast protocol and staggers their proposal schedules to generate proposals in faster succession than state-of-the-art protocols. A deterministic interleaving rule merges the outputs of these instances into a single global log. We analyze the effects of head-of-line blocking caused by crashed leaders, and derive Gatling's optimal number of parallel instances. We further study the impact of Gatling on predictable validity and present two variants that retain this property. Finally, our experiments confirm that Gatling can be used with off-the-shelf component protocols to achieve low latency without fine-tuning the component protocol for minimum latency.
Open → 2606.18220v1
Finite-Time Queue Peak Laws in Stochastic Networks: Logarithmic Scaling…
2026-06-16Machine Learningarxiv
Abstract
We study finite-horizon queue peaks in generalized switches, a standard stochastic-network model in which many queues share constrained service resources. Arrivals may be dependent, time-varying, and adapted to the past; the standing load condition is uniform interior slack, meaning the conditional mean arrival vector stays in a fixed contraction of the capacity region. We show that this slack reshapes the finite-time peak law for drift-minimizing scheduling policies such as MaxWeight. The square-root envelope that is sharp without slack persists only up to a geometry-dependent threshold; beyond that threshold, the running maximum grows only logarithmically with the horizon, both with high probability and in expectation. The mechanism is self-normalization: in the current queue direction, the projected fluctuation scale is normalized by the stabilizing drift scale. This removes capacity geometry from the logarithmic coefficient, while geometry remains in the threshold. Matching lower bounds show that both the logarithmic term and a geometric threshold are unavoidable. When finite-time state-space collapse is available, the threshold can be sharpened using local bottleneck geometry. For generalized input-queued switches, we obtain finite-time peak bounds with tight logarithmic coefficients. Simulations illustrate the two-phase envelope, local geometric refinements, and variance-sensitive improvements predicted by the theory.
Open → 2606.18218v1
Zone of Proximal Policy Optimization: Teacher in Prompts, Not Gradients
2026-06-16Computation and Languagearxiv
Abstract
Knowledge distillation transfers a teacher's competence to a small student but is brittle in the small-student regime: forcing the student to imitate logits from a much larger teacher concentrates it on the teacher's sharpest modes, hurting generalization on benchmark families beyond the training corpus. Reinforcement learning (RL) avoids logit imitation by training on the student's own rollouts. However, on questions where every rollout fails-yielding zero advantage and being silently discarded-injecting a stronger teacher's response into the policy gradient breaks the on-policy assumption and induces drift. We introduce Zone of Proximal Policy Optimization (ZPPO), inspired by Vygotsky's zone of proximal development, which keeps the teacher inside the prompt rather than the policy gradient. On hard questions, ZPPO constructs two reformulated prompts: a Binary Candidate-included Question (BCQ) pairs one correct teacher response with one incorrect student response as anonymized candidates the student must discriminate, and a Negative Candidate-included Question (NCQ) aggregates the student's wrong rollouts into a single prompt to surface their shared failure modes. A prompt replay buffer recirculates each hard question until it either graduates-the student's mean rollout accuracy on it reaches half- or is FIFO-evicted under finite capacity, amplifying BCQ and NCQ inside the student's current zone of proximal development. On the Qwen3.5 family at four student scales (0.8B-9B) with a 27B teacher, post-trained as vision-language models and evaluated on a 31-benchmark suite (16 VLM, 10 LLM, 5 Video), ZPPO outperforms off/on-policy distillation and GRPO, with the largest gains at the smallest scale.
Open → 2606.18216v1
A benchmark suite of intracellular Boolean model variants and multiscal…
2026-06-16Databasesarxiv
Abstract
We present PhysiBench, an open resource for developing and evaluating computational methods in systems biology including a benchmark suite of 612 executable intracellular Boolean regulatory network variants and a dataset of 120,000 time-resolved multiscale stochastic simulations. The benchmark models are derived from seven published Boolean networks spanning cell-cycle control, developmental patterning, cancer signaling, immune response, and cell-fate decisions, and are executable in the PhysiBoSS/PhysiCell multiscale simulation framework. Model variants are generated through mutation-based model construction, online behavioral filtering, and offline sensitivity evaluation. The simulation dataset is produced from 60 selected models under systematically sampled stimulation protocols and fixed model-level initial configurations. Each trajectory is linked to its model identifier, input-parameter file, stochastic seed, and cell-level output file. PhysiBench supports direct simulation, surrogate modeling, data-driven inference, simulation-based optimization, and comparative benchmarking. Technical validation includes file-integrity and executability checks, graph-based structural diversity analyses, and behavioral heterogeneity assessment from multiscale simulation outputs.
Open → 2606.18215v1
Structural and Temporal Hallmarks of Genealogical Networks
2026-06-16Social and Information Networksarxiv
Abstract
The rapid growth of the genealogical sector, spanning platforms with billions of records and millions of users, has produced some of the largest and most complex networks available for analysis. Despite substantial advances in genealogical network research, it remains unclear whether human kinship networks exhibit universal structural properties. We address this by developing an integrated approach to genealogical network analysis that combines network-theoretic structure with an inferred notion of time. Using over one hundred datasets from the Kinsources repository, we reinterpret standard network measures in genealogical terms and introduce \emph{pseudogenerations}, a method for extracting temporal structure directly from network topology. Within this framework, we identify common features shared across datasets. We find that genealogical networks exhibit scale-free--like degree and component-size distributions, multiscale family organization, and small-world behavior with respect to genetic and union-based distances. We show that 2-components provide a natural unit of genealogical structure, observe consistent disassortative mixing, and find that recorded unions are strongly biased toward short genetic distances relative to potential pairings. We also document temporal and demographic patterns, including shifts in recorded parental and child information, as well as correlations among recorded unions, parents, and children. These results suggest that diverse genealogical datasets share a common set of structural and temporal characteristics, providing evidence for universal features of human kinship networks and establishing a general framework for their comparative analysis.
Open → 2606.18210v1
Rethinking Dataset Distillation for Classification: Do Distilled Sets O…
2026-06-16Machine Learningarxiv
Abstract
Dataset distillation (DD) has emerged as a prominent approach in data centric machine learning, aiming to synthesize compact training sets for efficient training by compressing the information in large datasets into a small number of synthetic samples. However, DD methods are often evaluated under inconsistent evaluation protocols, ranging from standard ERM to single/multi-teacher supervision, making it difficult to isolate the effectiveness of distilled data from evaluation. Moreover, many prior methods claim that DD outperforms data pruning approaches such as coreset selection (CS), based on the assumption that restricting condensed datasets to subsets of real samples fundamentally limits their expressiveness. In this work, we critically evaluate DD methods through large-scale experiments using standardized datasets and evaluation protocols to assess their intrinsic effectiveness. We benchmark seven state-of-the-art (SOTA) DD methods on ImageNet-1K, ImageNet100, and ImageNette, using three widely adopted training protocols against three CS strategies. Our results show that while some DD methods fail to outperform even simple random subsets, the SOTA DD approaches are comparable to or worse than coresets on large-scale datasets and incur a substantially higher cost for construction. Beyond accuracy, we also evaluate the representativeness, diversity, and quality of condensed sets, and find that coresets consistently achieve better coverage of the original data distribution. These findings highlight the limited practical advantages of current DD methods and show that coresets remain competitive and are often a more computationally efficient alternative for data-centric learning.
Open → 2606.18209v1
Looped World Models
2026-06-16Machine LearningArtificial IntelligenceComputation and Languagearxiv
Abstract
Current world models face a fundamental tension: faithful long-horizon simulation demands deep computation, but deeper models are expensive to deploy and prone to compounding errors. We resolve this by introducing Looped World Models (LoopWM), which are the first looped architectures for world modelling. Our method iteratively refines latent environment states through a parameter-shared transformer block. This yield up to 100x parameter efficiency over conventional approaches with adaptive computation that automatically scales depth to match the complexity of each prediction step. Orthogonal to scaling model size and training data, LoopWM establishes iterative latent depth as a new scaling axis for world simulation, which might significantly push the community forward.
Open → 2606.18208v1
Fixed-Point Reasoners: Stable and Adaptive Deep Looped Transformers
2026-06-16Artificial Intelligencearxiv
Abstract
Looped architectures provide an inductive bias toward learning step-by-step procedures for tasks that require compositional reasoning. The number of effective layers reached by looping determines the quality of the solution these models find. Like deep architectures, looped architectures are prone to a signal propagation problem induced by depth as the halting decision is postponed. In this paper, we address this signal propagation issue using pre-norm layers and residual scaling. Building on these architectural modifications, we propose FPRM, a Transformer-based Fixed-Point Reasoning Model that uses fixed-point convergence as an end-to-end halting mechanism in a looped architecture. We show that fixed-point halting allows FPRM to adapt its compute to task difficulty. FPRM is effective on common reasoning benchmarks, namely Sudoku, Maze, state-tracking, and ARC-AGI.
Open → 2606.18206v1
Analyzing and Encoding the Al-Mawrid Arabic-English Dictionary with the…
2026-06-16Computation and Languagearxiv
Abstract
This paper presents a robust methodology for the systematic digitization and encoding of the Al-Mawrid Arabic-English dictionary, transforming it from a legacy print resource into a standardized computational lexicon. Addressing a significant gap in Arabic lexical infrastructure, the study adopts a dual-standard framing that aligns the ISO Lexical Markup Framework (LMF) with the Text Encoding Initiative TEI Lex-0 guidelines. By applying an editorial view to the dictionary's macro- and microstructure, the research resolves the structural ambiguities and punctuation inconsistencies typical of 20th-century bilingual dictionaries. The methodology is grounded in an empirical analysis of the dictionary's lexical knowledge density. Drawing on a representative sample (the letter Ayn, comprising 4.6% of the total volume), the study provides scientific weight to the encoding process, demonstrating a structural parsing accuracy of 91%. Quantitative evaluation of the information extraction rules reveals high performance, with 85% precision and 98% recall for synonyms, and 88% precision for other morpho-semantic features. Beyond technical description, the paper provides a critical comparison with existing Arabic lexical resources and discusses the limitations of TEI Lex-0 when modelling specific Arabic phenomena, such as implicit "open set" semantic relations and scattered morphological cues. Furthermore, the study explores the potential for Linguistic Linked Open Data (LLOD) integration by establishing a scalable prefix-based referencing system that facilitates the resource's inclusion in the semantic web. The result is an interoperable, machine-tractable resource that provides a reproducible workflow for the retro-digitization of complex legacy bilingual lexicons within the Arabic NLP and Digital Humanities communities.
Open → 2606.18205v1
RubricsTree: Scalable and Evolving Open-Ended Evaluation of Personal He…
2026-06-16Computation and LanguageArtificial Intelligencearxiv
Abstract
The LLM-empowered personal health agents with user health (sensor) metrics have offered a promising pathway to alleviate global disparities in healthcare access. However, large-scale clinical deployment remains constrained by an open-ended evaluation bottleneck: physician annotation is reliable but costly and unscalable, while LLM-as-a-judge evaluators are scalable but subjective, inconsistent, and sometimes clinically misaligned. We introduce RubricsTree, a scalable evaluation framework with an expert-aligned hierarchical taxonomy of over 100 atomic, clinically-verifiable Boolean rubrics, evolving from the insights of 4,000 real user queries through an iterative human-in-the-loop curation protocol with an expertise panel led by an experienced physician. A context-aware adaptive router activates only the relevant auto-weighted rubric subset per query, providing the throughput needed for scalable evaluation with expert-aligned quality. Through a systematic meta-evaluation, we show that RubricsTree (i) substantially exceeds a strong large-scale evaluation baseline in expert alignment on challenging open-ended queries; (ii) reliably penalizes contextually degraded responses; and (iii) when used as structured instructions, text feedback, or training rewards for performance optimization, yields up to ~66% relative gains on HealthBench for Gemini, GPT, and Qwen model families. RubricsTree thus provides a scalable, auditable, and evolving evaluation infrastructure required for the continuous optimization of product-level personal healthcare AI.
Open → 2606.18203v1
On the Complexity of the Circuit Width Problem
2026-06-16Computational Complexityarxiv
Abstract
Montanaro's polynomial representation expresses amplitudes of quantum circuits over the gates $H$, $Z$, $CZ$, and $CCZ$ as normalized gaps of degree-three polynomials over $\mathbb{F}_2$. The normalization is governed by the circuit width $w(f)$, the minimum number of qubits in any circuit realizing a polynomial $f$. Thus, efficient width minimization would give an approximate-counting route toward a combinatorial characterization of $BQP$. We study the computational complexity of this parameter. For degree-three polynomials with no constant term, deciding whether $w(f)\le k$ is $NP$-complete, resolving Montanaro's open question. We also prove $NP$-hardness of approximation within any factor $49/48-ε$, and show via a twin-copy construction that the exact and approximation hardness results also hold for degree-two polynomials. Under the Exponential Time Hypothesis, the exact problem admits no $2^{o(n)}$-time algorithm when $k=Θ(n)$. Complementing these hardness results, we give a nondeterministic polynomial-time search algorithm using $2\log_2\binom{n}{k}=O(k\log(en/k))$ witness bits, and a constructive fixed-parameter algorithm parameterized by $k$ with running time $k^{6k+o(k)}n+O(m)$.
Open → 2606.18201v1
A Diagnostic Software Suite for Auditing Learned PDE Simulators
2026-06-16Mathematical Softwarearxiv
Abstract
Learned PDE simulators are increasingly used as low-cost replacements for expensive numerical solvers, but standard relative $L^2$ error does not determine whether a learned model behaves as a coherent numerical time propagator. This paper presents a diagnostic software suite for auditing learned PDE simulators as approximate evolution operators. The suite provides architecture-independent, post hoc diagnostics for relative state error, semigroup consistency, finite-difference generator discrepancy, energy behavior, integral balance, admissibility constraints, perturbation response, and scaling-law consistency. The software is designed around a minimal contract: reference trajectories, a learned propagator or saved predictions, equation metadata, and a diagnostic configuration specifying which structures are meaningful for the problem under study. We validate the suite on five benchmark PDE tasks: two-dimensional incompressible Navier-Stokes, shallow-water dynamics, active matter, three-dimensional compressible Navier-Stokes, and three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamics, using FNO, DeepONet, U-Net, and ResNet-style surrogate models together with controlled underfit and oversmoothed variants. The validation study shows that relative $L^2$ error can remain moderate, or even improve, while structural diagnostics deteriorate substantially. The package therefore supports software-level auditing of learned PDE simulators by reporting an interpretable diagnostic panel rather than collapsing model behavior into a single state-error score.
Open → 2606.18200v1
Seeing Is Not Screening: Multimodal Hidden Instruction Attacks on Agent…
2026-06-16Cryptography and SecurityComputer Vision and Pattern Recognitionarxiv
Abstract
Agent skills are emerging as an important attack surface in LLM-based systems. Through an empirical study of existing skill scanners, we find that current defenses primarily rely on textual descriptions, manifests, and source code as the main signals for security analysis, which can leave visually conveyed malicious intent insufficiently examined. This creates a practical blind spot: harmful operational instructions hidden in images may bypass scanning while still being recoverable by multimodal agents during deployment. To systematically investigate this threat, we propose SkillCamo, a document-mediated multimodal instruction attack that conceals malicious instructions within images bundled with a skill while rewriting the surrounding documentation to naturally reference those images as part of the normal workflow. Thus, the attack does not rely on the image alone, but on the joint interpretation of textual guidance and visual payload at execution time. To defend against such attacks, we further propose ExecScan, an execution-grounded multimodal scanning module that performs intent extraction, behavior reconstruction, abuse assessment, and deliberative execution simulation over skill artifacts. ExecScan jointly analyzes documentation, code, referenced resources, and visual content to recover hidden instructions, reconstruct executable behavior chains, and identify downstream risks such as exfiltration, destruction, persistence, deception, and privilege escalation. Extensive experiments show that image-hidden malicious instructions challenge existing skill scanners, while ExecScan can improve the skill scanning performance.
Open → 2606.18198v1
Learning from the Self-future: On-policy Self-distillation for dLLMs
2026-06-16Computation and Languagearxiv
Abstract
On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) has proven effective for post-training large language models (LLMs), yet its application to diffusion LLMs (dLLMs) remains unexplored. Existing OPSD methods are inherently autoregressive-centric. They inject privileged information via left-to-right prefix conditioning with token-level divergence supervision, a design that fundamentally conflicts with the arbitraryorder generation of dLLMs. We introduce d-OPSD, the first OPSD framework tailored for dLLMs. Our approach makes two core contributions. First, we reframe self-teacher construction by using self-generated answers as suffix conditioning, enabling the student model to learn from "self future-experience" rather than privileged prefixes. Second, we shift supervision from token-level to step-level, aligning training with the iterative denoising process of dLLMs. Experiments across four reasoning benchmarks show that d-OPSD consistently outperforms RLVR and SFT baselines with superior sample efficiency, requiring only around 10% of the optimization steps by RLVR and opening a promising pathway for dLLM posttraining. The code is available at https://github.com/xingzhejun/d-OPSD.
Open → 2606.18195v1
Ergodic Deviation-Robust Equilibrium under Mirror Descent Learning in F…
2026-06-16Computer Science and Game Theoryarxiv
Abstract
We introduce Ergodic Deviation-Robust Equilibrium (EDRE), a dynamics-relative equilibrium concept for repeated finite games in which agents learn via entropic mirror descent (EMD). EDRE requires three properties to hold simultaneously for the same profile and learning run: (E1) the limit profile is an $\varepsilon$-Nash equilibrium at a product distribution; (E2) along the entire learning trajectory, every fixed coalition's cumulative aggregate (summed-unilateral) deviation gain is $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{T})$ with high probability; and (E3) the limit profile is a fixed point of the EMD map, so that it is selected by the dynamics rather than merely certified as an equilibrium. We prove that the $\sqrt{T}$ deviation-regret rate is order-tight, establish existence in exact-potential games (via Nash's theorem, with a constructive proximal route under concavity) together with Lyapunov monotonicity of EMD (and pointwise convergence when the fixed-point set is a singleton), and extend the selection property to monotone polymatrix games through variational inequalities. Although a static EDRE coincides with an $\varepsilon$-Nash equilibrium, its content is dynamic: robust (positive-measure) selection under EMD excludes linearly unstable equilibria, so EDRE acts as a Nash equilibrium equipped with a dynamic certificate rather than a static refinement. On the complexity side, we show that computing EDRE is PPAD-hard in general polymatrix games and belongs to promise-PPAD for potential games. A worked $2\times 2$ coordination-game example illustrates all components of the framework. Additional results, including a bandit-feedback extension, a period-doubling route to Li-Yorke chaos for the two-strategy EMD map at large step size, a linear-program formulation for minimum-cost steering, and supporting simulations, appear in the appendices.
Open → 2606.18194v1
A Red-Team Study of Anthropic Fable 5 & Opus 4.8 Models
2026-06-16Cryptography and SecurityArtificial IntelligenceComputation and Languagearxiv
Abstract
We evaluate the adversarial robustness of two frontier large language models (LLMs) developed by Anthropic, Fable 5 and Opus 4.8, against four families of automated jailbreak attack across 7 826 harmful intents spanning a ten-category harm taxonomy. Using the HackAgent red-teaming framework, hundreds of thousands of adversarial attempts were generated and every apparent success was independently re-adjudicated by a panel of three judge models (majority vote). Both models resist the majority of attacks, but the residual surface is larger than aggregate framing suggests: it is dominated by adaptive iterative attacks, while static obfuscation is near-fully neutralised. The strongest adaptive search (tree-of-attacks) breaks Opus 4.8 on 11.5% of intents overall, whereas Fable 5 stays in the single digits (6.1% worst-case). Aggregate rates therefore should not be read as reassurance. Even in these hardened configurations, the two models produced 1 620 (Opus 4.8) and 702 (Fable 5) panel-confirmed harmful completions spanning every harm category, located automatically, cheaply, and within the first one or two refinement steps by an attacker model with no human expert in the loop. The reasonable conclusion is that even the best, most-tested frontier models remain reliably breakable under sustained automated pressure.
Open → 2606.18193v1
The Stanford EDGAR Filings Dataset: Reconstructing U.S. Corporate and F…
2026-06-16Artificial Intelligencearxiv
Abstract
As high-quality public web corpora become increasingly exhausted, clean long-context documents have become a scarce and expensive source of training data for large language models (LLMs). Existing long-context corpora are often proprietary and costly to acquire, synthetically generated, or concentrated in narrow domains such as programming. We introduce the Stanford EDGAR Filings Dataset (SEFD), an open reconstruction of SEC filings into layout-faithful MultiMarkdown for financial language modeling and evaluation. SEFD makes audited financial statements, risk disclosures, ownership reports, accounting notes, and market-moving event filings usable as long-context pretraining data and as a basis for financial reasoning, forecasting, compliance, and document understanding. The resulting corpus is token-efficient, model-ready, and has less than 0.1% overlap with Common Crawl-derived corpora. We release SEFD-v1, a 152B-token initial public snapshot, and provide corpus-level analyses of a larger 18.5M-filing archive estimated at 550B tokens. We further introduce two SEFD-derived benchmarks: EDGAR-Forecast, which evaluates filing-grounded numerical forecasting after model knowledge cutoffs, and EDGAR-OCR, which evaluates transcription of complex financial tables.
Open → 2606.18192v1
DRFLOW: A Deep Research Benchmark for Personalized Workflow Prediction
2026-06-16Artificial IntelligenceMultiagent Systemsarxiv
Abstract
Deep research (DR) systems are increasingly used for complex information-seeking tasks, but existing works mainly focus on generating reports and summaries. In contrast, many enterprise tasks instead require an agent to identify concrete workflows which is a sequence of action-steps. For example, rather than summarizing budgeting policies, an agent should be able to determine the steps needed to answer a question such as: "How do I request new headcount given a fixed budget?". Therefore, we introduce DRFLOW, a benchmark for evaluating personalized workflows predicted by agents from heterogeneous sources. Each task requires the agent to identify relevant evidence from scattered sources, then use that evidence to predict the correct action-step sequence for the user's task. DRFLOW contains 100 tasks across five domains, with 1,246 reference workflow steps grounded in more than 3,900 sources. We define seven diagnostic metrics covering factual grounding, step recovery, structural ordering, condition resolution, and personalization. We further present DRFLOW-Agent (DRFA), a workflow-oriented reference agent to predict personalized workflow. We show that although DRFA improves over strong baseline agents (upto 10.02% average F1 score), there is substantial room for improvement remains across these workflow metrics, indicating that predicting complete and correct personalized workflows remains a challenging frontier for deep research.
Open → 2606.18191v1
Multi-Source Cybersecurity Logs: An ATT&CK-Labeled Dataset and SLM Eval…
2026-06-16Cryptography and SecurityMachine Learningarxiv
Abstract
Multi-stage cyberattacks span system, network, and browser logs. Detecting them requires correlating events across all three sources. Machine learning methods can learn these cross-source patterns, but they need labeled multi-source data. Existing public datasets fall short. Network-only datasets such as CICIDS and UNSW-NB15 miss host and browser activity. Host-focused datasets such as LMDG and CICAPT-IIoT lack browser telemetry. ATLAS includes all three sources but labels events only as malicious or benign, without MITRE Adversarial Tactics, Techniques, and Common Knowledge (ATT&CK) technique granularity. No public dataset combines all three sources with per-entry ATT&CK technique labels. We close the gap by building a multi-source log dataset of 870 sessions (70 attack, 800 benign) and approximately 2.3 million events. We captured system, network, and browser activity simultaneously on Windows endpoints. We labeled malicious events with ATT&CK technique IDs, covering 12 tactics and 53 techniques. We generated all attack data using real tools, including Remote Access Trojan (RAT), Command and Control (C2) tunnels, and cloud exfiltration. To demonstrate learnability, we fine-tuned three Small Language Models (SLMs) (Qwen2.5-1.5B, Llama-3.2-3B, Phi-4-Mini) using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). We compared each against its base variant across ten metrics on two tasks: chunk classification and ATT&CK technique identification. Fine-tuning improved every model on every metric. Chunk classification accuracy rose from approximately 8% in the base variants to between 90% and 97% after fine-tuning. Technique identification remained challenging, with the best exact-match accuracy at 42%, although high partial-match scores show the models captured most of the underlying reasoning.
Open → 2606.18190v1
Beyond Failure Recovery: An Engagement-Aware Human-in-the-loop Framewor…
2026-06-16Roboticsarxiv
Abstract
Conventional human-in-the-loop approaches typically involve users only when a robot encounters failure or uncertainty, treating humans primarily as tools for improving robot performance. However, in many human-centered robotics settings, interaction should support engagement by keeping users involved in decision-making rather than limiting them to failure-driven interventions. This is particularly compelling in physical caregiving, where mobility limitations can reduce users' ability to intervene or modulate the robot's behavior in the moment. As a result, failure-driven interaction policies may relegate users to passive observers for long stretches of the task. For example, a user with mobility limitations may feel less engaged when being continuously and passively fed by a robot. At the same time, overly frequent interaction can be tiring and increase the user's workload. To address this trade-off, we propose Engagement-aware MPC (E-MPC), a user-engagement-aware method that plans interaction to maintain engagement while respecting a workload constraint. E-MPC leverages a user interaction dynamics model that captures how user engagement evolves as a function of both the frequency and type of interaction. Rather than requesting input only when difficulties arise during task execution, the robot proactively considers the user's preferred level of engagement throughout the task, balancing autonomy and interaction while ensuring task success. We evaluate E-MPC in simulation with several ablations and baseline comparisons. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach across diverse user personas. In addition, we conduct a real-world user study with participants with emulated mobility limitations on a robot-assisted bite acquisition system, showing that E-MPC improves user experience while maintaining task success.
Open → 2606.18189v1