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Science Journals

Peer-reviewade publikationer — 56950 artiklar

Influence of Aspect ratio in the Convection in Rotating Annulus In the Presence of Localized Heating
arXiv:2606.04151v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Two-dimensional (2D) axisymmetric simulations are conducted to investigate convection in a rotating cylindrical annulus with localized heating at the outer bottom edge and uniform cooling at the inner cylindrical wall. The resulting radial and vertical temperature gradients generate buoyancy-driven motion and produce a stratification pattern relevant to atmospheric circulation. The effects of aspect ratio (\(\Gamma\)), Rayleigh number (\(Ra = 2.4 \times 10^{7}\)--\(1.2 \times 10^{9}\)), and Taylor number (\(Ta = 1.6 \times 10^{7}\)--\(1.2 \times 10^{9}\)), including the non-rotating limit (\(Ta=0\)), are examined. Convection is largely confined to thin boundary layers, while the fluid interior remains diffusion dominated. Without rotation, the temperature field exhibits nearly horizontal isotherms. Rotation establishes quasi-hydrostatic and geostrophic balances that redistribute heat and promote deeper penetration of isotherms into the interior. Heat transfer, quantified by the Nusselt number (\(Nu\)), depends strongly on \(Ra\), \(Ta\), and \(\Gamma\). For moderate and high \(Ra\), \(Nu\) follows the scaling \(Nu \sim Ra^{1/4}\) and is only weakly influenced by rotation. At low \(Ra\) and high \(Ta\), rotational suppression of buoyancy reduces \(Nu\) significantly. Increasing \(\Gamma\) enhances heat transfer, although the growth rate diminishes for \(\Gamma > 1\). The relative thermal and Ekman boundary-layer thicknesses govern the sensitivity of heat transfer to rotation.
Incremental Sheaf Cohomology on Cellular Complexes: O(1)-in-n Lazy Edit Processing under Bounded Local Geometry
arXiv:2606.04227v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present an algorithmic framework for incremental maintenance of first sheaf cohomology $H^1(X; \mathcal{F})$ on dynamically evolving 1-dimensional cellular complexes equipped with finite-dimensional cellular sheaves. The classical computation of $H^1$ via factorization of the coboundary matrix requires $O(n^3)$ time; when the complex evolves with a stream of $m$ edits, full recomputation after each edit costs $O(mn^3)$. Under a bounded local geometry assumption -- bounded cell size $v_{\max}$, bounded stalk dimension $d$, and bounded nerve degree $D$ -- each edit (vertex insertion, edge insertion, restriction map update) affects only a bounded set of local coboundary blocks. The algorithm therefore processes lazy streaming edits in $O(1)$ time with respect to the total complex size $n$ (with cost polynomial in the local geometry parameters $v_{\max}$, $d$, and $D$, which are treated as constants independent of $n$), deferring local eigensolves and Mayer-Vietoris global assembly to synchronization points (Flush). At synchronization, the maintained state agrees with the corresponding batch assembly of the partitioned sheaf model; we observe zero measured drift in all batch-verified runs (through $V = 10^6$). We also give an amortized $O(|E|)$ streaming construction for the cellular decomposition and discuss an adversarial algebraic-RAM barrier arguing that unpartitioned non-trivial sheaves ($d \geq 2$, non-identity restriction maps) do not admit the same locality. Experiments on Barabasi-Albert graphs with up to $5 \times 10^6$ vertices and $1.7 \times 10^7$ streaming edits show 35 $\mu$s median lazy per-edit update latency (excluding flush); query time (global assembly at synchronization) is $O(n)$ per flush in the implemented full-traversal path. Exact synchronization costs are reported separately.
Atom Interferometry with Transverse Optical Modes
arXiv:2606.04430v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We experimentally demonstrate atom interferometry using the transverse phase profile of an optical mode. As proof-of-principle, we use the helical phase windings of Hypergeometric Gaussian beams for Ramsey interferometry with ensembles of ballistically-expanding cold Rb87 atoms, and we show that the interferometer can measure rotations induced by a motor with a sensitivity that scales linearly with orbital angular momentum and interferometer time. We characterize the thermal decoherence of the interferometer, deriving and experimentally confirming a closed-form expression for the spatially-varying interferometer visibility arising near the singularity of the helical phase winding, motivating the use of condensed atoms in ring-shaped traps.
MIRAGE: Mobile Agents with Implicit Reasoning and Generative World Models
arXiv:2606.04627v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Mobile agents are increasingly expected to operate everyday applications from screenshots and language goals, where reliable control requires reasoning over screen affordances, multi-step navigation, and future state changes. However, many agents externalize this computation as long textual chains of thought, which slows interaction, increases supervision cost, and complicates deployment. We introduce MIRAGE, a framework that learns continuous latent reasoning representations from visible textual reasoning traces. MIRAGE transfers explicit reasoning into compact hidden states, enabling the agent to reason internally without decoding long rationales. It also incorporates a generative world-model objective: latent reasoning vectors are aligned with future screenshots, encouraging the agent to anticipate upcoming interface states before acting. This turns hidden computation into both a compressed thought representation and a forward-looking model of environment dynamics. At inference time, MIRAGE reasons in continuous latent space, reducing token generation while improving execution efficiency. On AndroidWorld, MIRAGE matches explicit chain-of-thought supervised fine-tuning in the 4B ablation with a 3-5x lower decoded-token budget and improves a comparable instruction-tuned baseline by 10.2 points; on AndroidControl, it improves action grounding while generating over 75% fewer tokens.
The Right Measure for Physics-Constrained Generation: A Co-Area Correction for Posterior-Consistent PDE Inverse Problems
arXiv:2606.04804v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Generative models -- diffusion and flow matching -- are increasingly used to solve partial differential equation (PDE) inverse problems, enforcing the governing physics as a \emph{hard constraint} (via projection or guidance) and reporting the resulting samples as a Bayesian posterior with calibrated uncertainty. We show that this widely adopted recipe samples the wrong distribution. Conditioning a generative prior on a hard PDE constraint is conditioning on a measure-zero manifold -- an operation that is intrinsically ambiguous (the Borel--Kolmogorov paradox) and whose physically correct resolution, the small-residual-noise limit, carries a co-area (Fixman) Jacobian factor $[det(JJ^{\top})]^{-1/2}$ that projection- and guidance-based methods silently omit. We make the bias precise, show that it grows with the heterogeneity of the constraint sensitivity, and validate it on controlled problems against an \emph{i.i.d.} ground-truth arbiter. The omitted factor is not a second-order detail: removing it inflates the posterior error to $20\times$ the sampling-noise floor; minimal-displacement projection (as in PCFM) is biased at $9\times$ the floor; and a naive scalar reweighting does not fix it. We introduce \textbf{CoCoS}, a measure-aware constrained sampler that targets the correct co-area posterior, and show that it matches the gold-standard posterior to within sampling noise. Our results imply that ``satisfying the physics'' is not the same as ``sampling the posterior,'' and give a principled correction for uncertainty-aware scientific inference.
The Usefulness Gap in Proof-of-Useful-Work: An Empirical Study of Pearl's cuPOW Protocol
arXiv:2606.04819v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Pearl, a Layer-1 blockchain with high-profile AI industry endorsements, markets its Proof-of-Useful-Work (PoUW) protocol as simultaneously securing the network and performing AI inference. We present the first systematic empirical measurement of a deployed PoUW system, finding that Pearl's 24 EH/s network -- representing approximately 320,000 GPU-equivalents consuming an estimated 112 MW -- produces zero useful AI computation. Budget GPU rental prices rose 38% and utilization surged from 57% to 94% following the mining software's public release, displacing legitimate research workloads. Our measurements span five dimensions: (1) network composition analysis of 8,012 workers shows all have inference-capable hardware, yet the dominant mining software contains no inference code; (2) the verification protocol accepts random matrices by design, confirmed by 44 pool-accepted shares from our open-source miner across NVIDIA, AMD, CPU, and Apple Silicon hardware; (3) statistical distribution checks are trivially defeated by adversarial Gaussian sampling; (4) mining economics are marginal at current PRL prices ($0.76), with ROI ranging from -1% to +67% depending on GPU tier -- near breakeven for most hardware; and (5) the mining computation is commodity integer arithmetic portable to any hardware platform, offering no vendor lock-in. These findings quantify the verifiability-usefulness tension identified theoretically by Leinweber et al., providing concrete measurements of its magnitude and economic consequences in a deployed system.
Toward Multi-Domain and Long-Tailed Quantization via Feature Alignment and Scaling
arXiv:2606.04920v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantizing deep neural networks is essential for efficient inference on resource-constrained devices. However, most existing methods are designed for single-domain and class-balanced data, leaving practical settings with domain shifts or severe class imbalance underexplored. We address these challenges with Efficient Multi-Domain Alignment Quantization (EmaQ), which aligns domain distributions through a CDF-based projection and uses sensitivity-aware weight aggregation to stabilize multi-domain quantization. We further extend EmaQ to EmaQ-LT for long-tailed quantization by introducing class-conditioned variance scaling and confidence-based logit adjustment to mitigate majority-class overconfidence. Theoretical analyses establish convergence guarantees and motivate the proposed sensitivity and scaling mechanisms. Experiments on standard, multi-domain (Office-31, Digits), and long-tailed (SynDigits-LT, CIFAR-10-LT, CIFAR-100-LT) benchmarks show that EmaQ and EmaQ-LT achieve strong low-bit performance under domain shift and class imbalance.
A Game-Theoretic Decision Framework for Optimal Selection of Coordination Detection Methods in Multi-UAV Fleet Operations
arXiv:2606.02383v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Detecting coordination among unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) fleets operating in shared airspace and identifying the route-lead aircraft whose navigation decisions govern fleet behavior presents a fundamental speed--accuracy trade-off: fast methods enable real-time traffic management but sacrifice detection fidelity, while accurate methods may exceed the time budget for actionable airspace deconfliction. This paper presents a game-theoretic decision framework that resolves this trade-off by formulating method selection as a two-player zero-sum game between a Monitor (selecting computational methods and parameters) and Nature (selecting the unknown traffic scenario). We construct an end-to-end pipeline from trajectory surveillance data through eight candidate detection algorithms, a Monte Carlo sensitivity analysis characterizing their stochastic performance, and finally a multi-objective optimization layer that identifies Pareto-optimal method portfolios. The minimax solution provides a robust mixed strategy with a probability distribution over methods that guarantees worst-case performance regardless of scenario uncertainty. Experimental evaluation across 200 randomized configurations spanning 5--50 aircraft demonstrates that the framework recommends distinct method portfolios depending on operational priority: Koopman Phase dominates balanced (70.6%) and speed-priority (79.7%) profiles, while CRQA emerges as primary (47.4%) when route-lead identification is prioritized. The framework achieves a guaranteed game value of 0.29--0.53 (normalized utility) across all tested preference profiles, providing the first principled, scenario-adaptive methodology for computational method selection in UTM fleet monitoring operations.
A Pre-Registered Causal Partition of Self-Consistency Elicitation and Reward Design in RLVR
arXiv:2606.05932v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) improves reasoning even when the reward signal is spurious -- assigning credit to the group-plurality answer rather than a ground-truth verifier. Practitioners commonly interpret naive = acc(TRUE) - acc(RANDOM) as the reward-design effect. We prove this estimand is systematically biased: it conflates self-consistency elicitation (sharpening the policy toward its modal answer via majority pseudo-reward) with genuine reward-design signal. Using a controlled tabular-GRPO simulator we derive an exact telescoping decomposition total = null + elicit + rd and measure each term across five prior-strength levels. The reward-design fraction of the naive estimator ranges from 0.139 at weak prior (ps=0.20) to 0.05 at strong prior (ps=0.80), with the elicitation term flipping sign at the self-consistency crossover. A pre-registered 2x2x2 factorial confirms non-additivity (interaction ratio 0.385; AxC effect -0.089). A points-vs-bounds pilot gate shows strong-prior regimes are point-identified while near-crossover regimes are only bounded. Re-audits of two named published results yield ELICITATION DOMINATED (elicitation share 0.98) and REWARD DESIGN DOMINATED (rd share 1.18) verdicts respectively, demonstrating the diagnostic value of the partition. We pre-commit to submit regardless of flip outcome; a non-flip is a finding of equal standing. We release a reusable one-command harness for any alignment paper to run the same audit.
Towards Healthy Evolution: Exploring the Role and Mechanisms of Human-Agent Interaction in Self-Evolving Systems
arXiv:2606.06114v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Self-evolving agents improve through continual self-play and self-generated learning signals, but autonomous evolution can also cause capability degradation and safety drift. Although human feedback has proven effective for static and post-trained agents, its role in self-evolving systems remains underexplored. We introduce Agent Norm Correction through Human-like Oversight and Review (ANCHOR), an LLM-based framework that simulates human supervision and delivers feedback at various phases of self-evolution. With ANCHOR, we evaluate two representative open-source self-evolving agent systems across coding, mathematical reasoning, and safety. Our results show that even limited supervision substantially mitigates safety degradation while preserving stable performance on core evolutionary objectives. Further analysis shows that supervision over the output verification phase is the most effective for intervention, whereas increasing supervision frequency yields diminishing returns. These findings provide empirical evidence and practical guidance for designing more stable, controllable, and human-aligned self-evolving agent systems.
Humans' ALMANAC: A Human Collaboration Dataset of Action-Level Mental Model Annotations for Agent Collaboration
arXiv:2606.06388v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent advances in LLM agents have enabled complex cognitive capabilities, such as multi-step reasoning, planning, and tool use, that increasingly position these agents as human collaborators. Effective collaboration, however, requires collaborators to continuously maintain and align mental models of their own reasoning,partners' intentions, and shared goals during the collaborative process. Today's agents rarely develop such capabilities since they are primarily optimized for task completion, and the community lacks authentic human collaboration data with action-level mental model annotations that could guide agents toward process-level collaborative competence. To bridge this gap, we present ALMANAC, a dataset of Action-Level Mental model ANnotations for Agent Collaboration built from the Map Task, a classic dyadic routing task from social science. ALMANAC contains 2,987 collaboration actions, each paired with theory-informed mental model annotations that record the participants' self-reasoning, perceived partner intent, and perceived team goal. We benchmark six LLMs on predicting humans' next-turn behavior and mental models. Our results demonstrate ALMANAC's utility in evaluating models' ability to simulate human collaborative behaviors and infer their underlying mental models.
CollabSim: A CSCW-Grounded Methodology for Investigating Collaborative Competence of LLM Agents through Controlled Multi-Agent Experiments
arXiv:2606.06399v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-agent systems (MAS) built on large language models have shown growing promise, with their effectiveness resting on agents' ability to coordinate through text-based channels much as human teams do. Yet recent study suggests that MAS often falter not because agents lack individual task-solving ability, but because they lack collaborative competence: the capacity to establish common ground, maintain shared task understanding, balance individual and collective incentives, and repair misalignment as interaction unfolds. Decades of research in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work have characterized these requirements for human teams coordinating under constrained communication, yet existing MAS evaluations focus mainly on task outcomes or single-agent proficiency in reasoning, planning, and tool use. To enable a systematic analysis of agents' collaborative competence in MAS, we introduce CollabSim, a configurable simulation framework that combines a theory-grounded definition of collaborative capabilities, controlled manipulation of interaction conditions, and action-level probing of agents' internal states. Experiments across four LLMs show that CollabSim can capture condition effects, separate model performance patterns, and reveal task-dependent effects of agent design.
Revisiting Articulated Parts Perception in Robot Manipulation
arXiv:2606.08103v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We are surrounded by various objects with movable, articulated parts, e.g., box, handle, door. An accurate and generalizable perception of articulated parts is essential to enhance robotic manipulation capabilities. Building on this need, recent efforts in articulated parts perception have followed two main directions: One line of work uses pose-based representation, which requires high manual cost; in parallel, affordance-based methods extract future object motion from point tracking without additional manual efforts, but suffer from low-quality data. In this paper, we propose a new representation of articulated parts, Geometric Primary Structure (GPS), an abstraction of the part geometry structure to balance scalability and quality. For efficient and scalable data collection, GPS is integrated with a portable Virtual Reality (VR) device and requires only one minute to annotate one object sequence. This direct human annotation provides higher quality than the estimated affordance. With this efficient VR-GPS system, we collect 41K frames for 234 objects across six part classes, and train a generalizable GPS model with a single RGB-D object image as input. For object manipulation, we deploy a heuristic policy based on GPS prediction. Without any in-domain fine-tuning, our method achieves an 73% success rate, covering 270 initial states for 9 objects. Our code, data and reusable tool are available at https://enlighten0707.github.io/gps.
Reinforcement learning in linear embedding space unlocks generalizable control across soft robot configurations
arXiv:2606.08104v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Soft-bodied organisms such as octopuses and elephant trunks exhibit remarkable morphological adaptability, dynamically reconfiguring body shape and stiffness, and flexibly adjusting their control strategies to enable versatile behaviors. Inspired by these biological systems, various soft robots have emerged in recent decades, featuring diverse materials, stiffnesses, and morphologies tailored to specific tasks. Despite substantial advances in the materials and structural designs of soft robots, developing a generalizable control framework capable of rapid adaptation across diverse configurations remains a long-standing challenge. Existing controllers are limited to fixed configurations, demanding laborious configuration-specific remodelling and policy redesign for new configurations. Here, we introduce a generalizable control system that enables rapid adaptation across diverse soft robot configurations via reinforcement learning in a shared linear Koopman embedding space. By encoding robot dynamics into this embedding space, our method decouples control policies from specific morphologies, allowing real-time, model-free policy adaptation across diverse configurations without retraining from scratch. We validate our system across 33 distinct robot configurations. Our system achieves a 75 times reduction in transfer samples across configurations, while sustaining robust performance under high-speed motion, heavy payloads, and multiactuator faults, and achieving real-world skills previously unattainable in soft robotics. This work establishes a unified and adaptable control paradigm for diverse soft robot configurations, bridging mechanical reconfigurability with control flexibility, and may offer broader insights for generalizable control in complex physical systems.
From Shortcuts to Reasoning: Robust Post-Training of Theory of Mind with Reinforcement Learning
arXiv:2606.09092v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Theory of Mind (ToM) is a must-acquire skill for modern foundation model systems to operate effectively and safely in the real world. Recent works have explored honing ToM via post-training; however, we show that such progress is confounded by a pervasive "shortcut" issue: tasks can reach up to 99% accuracy by simply exploiting spurious causal correlations, leading to a false sense of ToM. Motivated by this, we first develop a framework to systematically examine ToM datasets for shortcuts and provide guidance for future development. We find that questions reducible to pure state tracking, such as "belief," are especially shortcut-prone compared to mind questions, such as "intention," where reasoning beyond tracking is required. Using four shortcut-free datasets across three ToM contexts, we then comprehensively study whether Reinforcement Fine-Tuning with verifiable rewards and explicit reasoning chains, called Thinking-RFT, elevates ToM beyond Supervised Fine-Tuning, or SFT. Our key findings are as follows. First, Thinking-RFT effectively improves ToM in all scenarios, with a 6% improvement over SFT, particularly in complex higher-order reasoning, with a 10% improvement over SFT, and multimodal cases, with a 7% improvement over SFT. It also generalizes notably better to unseen domains and higher-order queries while being more robust to counterfactuals. Second, ToM benefits specifically from the joint effect of reasoning and RL: Thinking-RFT outperforms Non-Thinking-RFT by 7% on average. Third, RFT works by learning to ground its reasoning on anchor cues, such as keywords and state changes, that correspond to causal factors. We believe our study is useful for developing effective and robust ToM post-training datasets and advancing critical ToM capabilities.
AlphaOPT: Formulating Optimization Programs with Self-Improving LLM Experience Library
arXiv:2510.18428v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Optimization modeling underlies critical decision-making across industries, yet remains difficult to automate: natural-language problem descriptions must be translated into precise mathematical formulations and executable solver code. Existing LLM-based approaches typically rely on brittle prompting or costly retraining, both of which offer limited generalization. Recent work suggests that large models can improve via experience reuse, but how to systematically acquire, refine, and reuse such experience in structurally constrained settings remains unclear. We present \textbf{AlphaOPT}, a self-improving experience library that enables LLMs to learn optimization modeling knowledge from limited supervision, including answer-only feedback without gold-standard programs, annotated reasoning traces, or parameter updates. AlphaOPT operates in a continual two-phase cycle: a \emph{Library Learning} phase that extracts solver-verified, structured insights from failed attempts, and a \emph{Library Evolution} phase that refines the applicability of stored insights based on aggregate evidence across tasks. This design allows the model to accumulate reusable modeling principles, improve transfer across problem instances, and maintain bounded library growth over time. Evaluated on multiple optimization benchmarks, AlphaOPT steadily improves as more training data become available (65\% $\rightarrow$ 72\% from 100 to 300 training items) and outperforms the strongest baseline by 9.1\% and 8.2\% on two out-of-distribution datasets. These results demonstrate that structured experience learning, grounded in solver feedback, provides a practical alternative to retraining for complex reasoning tasks requiring precise formulation and execution. All code and data are available at: https://github.com/Minw913/AlphaOPT.
Latent Spherical Flow Policy for Reinforcement Learning with Combinatorial Actions
arXiv:2601.22211v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) with combinatorial action spaces remains challenging because feasible action sets are exponentially large and governed by complex feasibility constraints, making direct policy parameterization impractical. Existing approaches embed task-specific value functions into constrained optimization programs or learn deterministic structured policies, sacrificing generality and policy expressiveness. We propose a solver-induced \emph{latent spherical flow policy} that brings the expressiveness of modern generative policies to combinatorial RL while guaranteeing feasibility by design. Our method, LSFlow, learns a \emph{stochastic} policy in a compact continuous latent space via spherical flow matching, and delegates feasibility to a combinatorial optimization solver that maps each latent sample to a valid structured action. To improve efficiency, we train the value network directly in the latent space, avoiding repeated solver calls during policy optimization. To address the piecewise-constant and discontinuous value landscape induced by solver-based action selection, we introduce a smoothed Bellman operator that yields stable, well-defined learning targets. Empirically, our approach outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by an average of 20.6\% across a range of challenging combinatorial RL tasks.
Block-A-Mole: The Sustainability Frontier of Moving-Target Censorship Resistance
arXiv:2606.08886v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Internet censorship affects over four billion people, and deployed circumvention systems share a common weakness: their endpoints are fixed and discoverable, so a patient censor can enumerate and block them. Moving-target circumvention systems instead rotate endpoints across commercial cloud address space faster than censors can react, but the field lacks a theory of when rotation works, leaving rotation intervals and pool sizes to intuition. We give the first formal account of moving-target censorship resistance by modeling the censor-defender interaction as a continuous-time timing game over a combinatorial address-domain space, generalizing FlipIt to a collateral-bounded adversary. We prove a sustainability frontier separating configurations a censor can defeat from those it cannot, and show that under the Great Firewall's 2024 shift to blocking QUIC and TLS by domain, raw rotation speed is not the binding constraint. Instead, availability is governed by the domain burn rate, $\beta=\lambda_{\mathrm{disc}}/\lambda_{\mathrm{intro}}$, the ratio between how quickly the censor blocks defender domains and how quickly the defender introduces fresh ones. We derive a closed-form availability law, prove that address rotation alone cannot sustain high availability when $\beta>1$ regardless of endpoint rotation speed, and characterize the frontier $\beta^\star$. We validate the analysis with an open, model-level censor-defender simulator requiring no privileged access or cloud deployment. The simulator reproduces the predicted phase transition at $\beta^\star$ under adversary profiles representative of the GFW, Russia's TSPU, and Iran, and shows robustness to state-dependent discovery and bursty, provider-correlated burns. The result replaces the heuristic of ``rotate faster'' with a precise operating condition: keeping the domain economy ahead of the censor.
Trustworthy Visual Predicates for Robust Manipulation Understanding under Degradation
arXiv:2606.08121v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Manipulation understanding requires reliable relational evidence, such as contact, support, containment, motion coupling, grasp, release, and active-hand involvement. Although these visual predicates are widely used in event-chain, graph-based, and neuro-symbolic models, their reliability under visual degradation is rarely analyzed directly. This paper introduces a predicate-level reliability framework for robust manipulation understanding under blur, occlusion, illumination change, low resolution, frame dropping, and detection noise. The framework defines a structured predicate vocabulary, confidence-aware predicate estimation, and reliability metrics for predicate preservation, degradation sensitivity, temporal consistency, confidence-weighted stability, and downstream impact. Experiments on controlled manipulation videos and public egocentric or bimanual datasets, including VISOR/EPIC-KITCHENS, H2O, and ARCTIC, show that predicate failures are structured rather than uniform. Static spatial predicates remain comparatively robust, whereas contact-sensitive, dynamic, and derived predicates such as grasp and release are more fragile. Under severe degradation, detection noise, occlusion, and frame dropping cause the strongest reliability losses. Downstream analysis shows that degraded predicates reduce manipulation-understanding accuracy from 0.89 to 0.58, while removing confidence weighting under moderate degradation reduces accuracy from 0.74 to 0.64. These results show that predicate reliability provides a diagnostic layer between visual perception and structured manipulation reasoning.
Intrinsic Selection and Particle Resampling for Inference-Time Scaling Beyond Domain Verifiability
arXiv:2606.08850v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Inference-Time Scaling (ITS) has largely succeeded in verifiable domains like math and coding, where cheap verification enables scalable output selection. However, extending ITS to tasks prone to systematic failure - driven by faulty initial assumptions or unmet multidimensional constraints - typically relies on costly external solvers or brittle, model-based verifiers. Our key insight is that the intrinsic statistics of parallel sample sets, specifically length-adjusted tail entropy, provide a robust discriminative signal for solution quality without access to ground truth. Crucially, these statistics serve as a difficulty gate for adaptive compute allocation, dynamically routing problems across scaling regimes. First, Intrinsic Selection (iS) ranks candidates post-hoc, matching consensus-based algorithms across three domains and improving engineering design selection by 20% over pass@1 baselines. Second, Intrinsic Particle Filtering (iPF) generalizes this to step-level resampling, guiding generation toward high-confidence reasoning trajectories to improve pass@1 by 6.1 points on average on hard math problems. Finally, Particle Distillation (dPF) injects privileged guidance via early logit blending and KL-guided resampling, steering generation past systematic reasoning errors to satisfy expert rubrics, yielding up to 26.5% gains on complex clinical responses. Our pipeline applies seamlessly across broad-purpose, domain-specialized, and multimodal architectures, successfully extending ITS to open-ended domains without requiring trained reward models or exact ground-truth verification.
A Vision-language Framework for Comparative Reasoning in Radiology
arXiv:2606.06407v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Medical imaging artificial intelligence has achieved strong performance in isolated image interpretation, but remains poorly aligned with radiological practice, where diagnosis and follow-up rely on comparison across prior studies and analogous reference cases. Here we formulate radiological comparison as an entity-aware cross-image reasoning problem and introduce a framework that supports both reference-case retrieval and temporal comparative interpretation. We construct MedReCo-DB, a large-scale comparative imaging resource derived from routine image-report pairs, comprising more than 690,000 images from over 160,000 patients across eight institutions, four countries and seven imaging modalities. Reports are decomposed into anatomical structures, abnormal findings and pathological conditions to provide supervision for entity-conditioned retrieval and comparative visual question answering. Using this resource, we develop MedReCo, an entity-aware visual encoder for controllable retrieval of clinically analogous cases, and MedReCo-VLM, a vision--language extension for generative interpretation of interval change. Across internal, external and cross-center evaluations, MedReCo achieved the highest Recall@1 in all 12 internal retrieval settings and improved external retrieval by a mean of 6.0 percentage points. In clinically confusable differential groups, it consistently outperformed the strongest baselines. MedReCo-VLM achieved the best performance across all comparative generation evaluations and improved longitudinal follow-up accuracy by 14.5-46.5 percentage points on chest radiographs and 13.0-27.9 percentage points on CT. These findings suggest that entity-aware comparative reasoning can be learned from routine clinical data at scale and may provide a more clinically aligned foundation for medical imaging AI.
Front-to-Attractors: Modifying the Front-to-Front Heuristic in Bidirectional Search
arXiv:2606.07047v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Heuristics play a central role in the performance of bidirectional search algorithms, which commonly rely on two main classes. Front-to-end (F2E) heuristics estimate the distance from a state s to the target of the search (the goal for forward search or the start for backward search). In contrast, front-to-front (F2F) heuristics estimate the distance from s to the opposite search frontier using a pairwise function h(s, s'), where s' ranges over frontier states. Although F2F heuristics are typically more informative and therefore reduce the number of node expansions, their reliance on extensive pairwise evaluations incurs substantial computational overhead. To address this limitation, we introduce a new heuristic class, front-to-attractors (F2A), that preserves much of the informativeness of F2F while dramatically reducing its computational cost. Rather than evaluating distances to all states on the opposite frontier, F2A estimates the distance from s to a small, dynamically maintained set of attractors in the opposite search direction. These attractors serve as a surrogate for the full frontier, enabling rich heuristic guidance at a fraction of the computational expense while maintaining the optimality guarantees offered by F2F. We evaluate F2A across multiple domains and show that it reduces the number of pairwise evaluations by up to 11.2x compared to F2F, while achieving 4.8x fewer node expansions than F2E on average.
Cheap Reward Hacking Detection
arXiv:2606.08893v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A small transformer encoder is trained to map Terminal-Wrench trajectories onto a unit sphere where embedding distance approximates the $L_1$ distance between reward and metadata signals. A linear probe on top of that embedding detects reward hacking on the cleaned test split with AUC $0.9467$ and TPR@5%FPR $0.8296$, matching the TW sanitized LLM-as-judge AUC ($0.9510$ on the cleaned split) and exceeding its TPR@5%FPR ($0.7130$ vs $0.8296$) on the same information condition, at roughly four orders of magnitude lower per-trajectory cost. The encoder is not a pure behavior reader: stripping natural-language reasoning from its input at probe time drops AUC to $0.6213$.
Breaking the Tokenizer Barrier: On-Policy Distillation across Model Families
arXiv:2606.09456v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-Policy Distillation (OPD) has become a core technique in the post-training of Large Language Models (LLMs) for transferring knowledge from domain experts to student models. However, existing OPD distillation methods require teacher and student models to share the same tokenizer, restricting the applicability of OPD within the model series. Current mainstream practice typically employs Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on teacher-generated responses for cross-tokenizer distillation, which fails to capture the rich knowledge embedded in the teacher's probability distribution. In this work, we enable the standard on-policy distillation method to operate across model families, ensuring that high-fidelity token-level signals can propagate across different tokenizers with a precise token-mapping algorithm. Extensive experiments show that cross-tokenizer OPD is significantly more compute-efficient than baselines on various benchmarks. Our results unlock a broader range of teacher-student pairs for OPD, opening up new avenues for adapting and enhancing interactions between LLMs.
Physics-Embedded Neural Networks for sEMG-based Continuous Motion Estimation
arXiv:2506.22459v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurately decoding human motion intentions from surface electromyography (sEMG) is essential for myoelectric control and has wide applications in rehabilitation robotics and assistive technologies. However, existing sEMG-based motion estimation methods often rely on subject-specific musculoskeletal (MSK) models that are difficult to calibrate, or purely data-driven models that lack physiological consistency. This paper introduces a novel Physics-Embedded Neural Network (PENN) that combines interpretable MSK forward-dynamics with data-driven residual learning, thereby preserving physiological consistency while achieving accurate motion estimation. The PENN employs a recursive temporal structure to propagate historical estimates and a lightweight convolutional neural network for residual correction, leading to robust and temporally coherent estimations. A two-phase training strategy is designed for PENN. Experimental evaluations on six healthy subjects show that PENN outperforms state-of-the-art baseline methods in both root mean square error (RMSE) and $R^2$ metrics.