AI News Today

arXiv:2604.00626v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As Large Language Models continue to grow in both capability and cost, transferring frontier capabilities into smaller, deployable students has become an important engineering problem, and knowledge distillation remains a common technique for this transfer. The prevailing recipe in industrial pipelines, static imitation of teacher-generated text, carries a structural weakness that grows more severe as tasks become longer and more reasonin

arXiv:2604.18105v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Integrating large language models (LLMs) into automatic speech recognition (ASR) has become a mainstream paradigm in recent years. Although existing LLM-based ASR models demonstrate impressive performance on public benchmarks, their training remains predominantly data-driven, leaving key practical challenges insufficiently addressed -- particularly limited downward scalability in resource-constrained deployments and hallucinations under a

arXiv:2605.13438v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Existing agent memory remains predominantly reactive and retrieval-based, lacking the capacity to autonomously organize experience into persistent cognitive structure. Toward genuinely autonomous agents, we introduce CogniFold, a brain-inspired "always-on" agent memory designed for the next generation of proactive assistants. CogniFold continuously folds fragmented event streams into self-emerging cognitive structures, bootstrapping progr

arXiv:2606.19635v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Recommendation Models (LRMs) have demonstrated promising capabilities in industry-scale recommendation tasks. However, holistically integrating traditional signals into these transformer-based architectures effectively and efficiently remains a major challenge. Conventional approaches that "textualize" these signals directly or create discrete item representations often lead to excessively long prompts, substantial memory footprints, and hi

arXiv:2606.19752v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-horizon robot manipulation policies trained with reward shaping can still exploit dense rewards through inefficient interaction, while rare efficient behaviors may be forgotten during training. We argue that temporal efficiency itself provides a powerful and underutilized source of self-supervision for reinforcement learning. We introduce Temporal Self-Imitation Learning (TSIL), a reinforcement learning framework that mines temporally effici

arXiv:2606.19636v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Math and science reasoning benchmarks rely on pass@k, the fraction of sampled chains that reach gold, as the canonical per-example difficulty signal. The same signal drives RL with verifiable rewards, math data curation, synthetic curricula, and verifier training. We show this proxy has a persistent blind spot on its hardest stratum: on the eight free-form math cells we test (GSM8K and MATH across four open-weight models), 10.3-22.9% of the examp

arXiv:2606.19714v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as judges for open-ended generation, as large-scale human evaluation is often expensive and difficult to scale, yet their preferences remain imperfect proxies for human judgment. Existing auditing pipelines often assume that a reliable subset of examples or clean supervision signals are available beforehand, for example from human annotation, heuristic filtering, or the outputs of strong judges.

arXiv:2606.19721v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In challenging real-world reinforcement learning applications, communication delays or sensor failures often cause frame dropping, in which the agent cannot receive the dropped states and associated rewards. To address the performance degradation caused by frame dropping, the Decision Transformer under Random Frame Dropping (DeFog) was developed by incorporating additional mechanisms into the decision transformer to tackle frame dropping. Althoug

arXiv:2606.19725v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Validating changes in low-level C firmware is expensive because unit tests (UTs) are fragile under strict build constraints, where missing headers, unresolved symbols, and dependency mismatches frequently prevent compilation and linking. This study introduces an automated UT authoring workflow for the Open-Source Silicon Initialization Library (openSIL) firmware codebase maintained by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) that reduces manual effort throug

arXiv:2606.19729v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Planning under uncertainty is an essential capability for autonomous robots. The Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) provides a powerful framework for such a capability. Although POMDP-based planning has advanced significantly, its application to real-world problems is often limited by the difficulty of obtaining faithful POMDP models. We present Vectorized Online planning wIth Learned diffusion model for POMDP Agents (VOiLA), a

arXiv:2606.19755v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speculative inference accelerates large language model (LLM) decoding but provides no inherent safety guarantees. Existing safety defenses are largely incompatible with speculative inference: they either introduce additional computation or disrupt the draft-verify mechanism, negating acceleration benefits. This reveals a fundamental incompatibility between current safety methods and speculative decoding. We propose SafeSpec, a safety-aware specul

arXiv:2606.19769v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The scalability of humanoid robots will depend not only on models and hardware, but also on whether physical experience can accumulate across robots, tasks, organizations, and time. Drawing on the authors' work in developing ISO/WD 26264-1, Humanoid robot datasets -- Part 1: General requirements, within ISO/TC 299/WG 16, this article argues that data standards are becoming foundational infrastructure for Physical AI. We develop three insights. Fi

arXiv:2606.19781v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural scaling laws describe how model performance improves as a power law in compute, model size, and dataset size. While well-established for large language models, these relationships are emerging for large models in particle physics. As with language, empirical studies show that the performance scales as a power law. However, unlike natural language or image domains, fundamental physics has high-fidelity simulators that produce synthetic data

arXiv:2606.19791v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The challenge associated with recognizing dysarthric speech primarily arises from pronounced acoustic variability attributed to impaired articulatory precision. Past research has demonstrated improved recognition through the use of hybrid DNN/HMM sequence discriminative training. This paper presents a comprehensive investigation of various combinations of acoustic features tailored to different Acoustic Models, offering suitable feature selection

arXiv:2606.19793v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The challenge associated with recognizing dysarthric speech primarily arises from pronounced acoustic variability attributed to impaired articulatory precision. Past research has demonstrated improved recognition through the use of hybrid DNN/HMM sequence discriminative training. This paper presents a comprehensive investigation of various combinations of acoustic features tailored to different Acoustic Models, offering suitable feature selection

arXiv:2606.19795v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Electronic design automation (EDA) is inherently multi-stage and handoff-heavy. Design artifacts, flow scripts, and engineering decisions cross tool, session, and organizational boundaries before final implementation, signoff, or release. Each transfer carries explicit and implicit requirements that may not be fully captured by stage-local checks. LLM-based agents now invoke EDA tools directly, embed retrieved knowledge in executable scripts, and

arXiv:2606.19797v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dysarthric speech recognition is crucial for facilitating effective communication among individuals with dysarthria. However, accurately recognizing dysarthric speech poses significant challenges due to varying severity levels and limited data availability. In this paper, we explore data augmentation techniques for dysarthric automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems by fine-tuning the End-to-End pre-trained Wav2Vec2 model, with a specific focus

arXiv:2606.19803v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vector databases are increasingly used in security sensitive contexts with Retrieval Augmented Generation and organizational AI pipelines; however, their security capabilities remain limited. Specifically, Fine-grained Access Control (FGAC) which is required to ensure that data access adheres to user-specific policies is not fully supported in modern vector databases. Unlike relational databases, vector databases combine structured and unstructur

arXiv:2606.19818v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) aligns large language models by training reward models on preference data and optimizing policies to maximize predicted rewards. However, this pipeline faces two fundamental challenges: (1) reward models cannot signal when their predictions are unreliable, since they usually act as deterministic point estimators; and (2) modern group-based policy optimization can amplify unreliable reward signals,

arXiv:2606.19827v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Medical tabular data are ubiquitous in clinical research, but deep learning for tables remains underexplored because reliable labels often require costly expert adjudication, even though structured clinical variables are routinely available in tabular form. Self-supervised learning can leverage these unlabeled tables, and recent binning-based pretexts offer a promising inductive bias, but existing objectives fix a single global quantile discretiz

arXiv:2606.19850v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep neural networks (DNNs) exhibit attractive performance in various fields but often suffer from low interpretability. The neural additive model (NAM) and its variant called the neural basis model (NBM) use neural networks (NNs) as nonlinear shape functions in generalized additive models (GAMs). Both models are highly interpretable and exhibit good performance and flexibility for NN training. NAM and NBM can provide and visualize the contributi

arXiv:2606.19887v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing safety benchmarks target general adversarial scenarios but miss finance-specific risks. Financial LLMs face regulatory compliance violations, fraud facilitation, and systemic trust erosion that require targeted evaluation. We introduce FinRED, an expert-guided red-teaming framework for financial LLM safety evaluation developed with financial experts. FinRED uses a novel two-level taxonomy mapping global standards (e.g., FATF and EU DORA)

arXiv:2606.19888v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modeling long-sequence medical time series data, such as electrocardiograms (ECG), poses significant challenges due to high sampling rates, multichannel signal complexity, inherent noise, and limited labeled data. While recent self-supervised learning (SSL) methods, based on various encoder architectures such as convolutional neural networks, have been proposed to learn representations from unlabeled data, they often fall short in capturing long-

arXiv:2606.19934v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current machine learning models commonly require large and well-annotated datasets. However, the annotation process often becomes a bottleneck, with increased complexity leading to higher chances of human errors. Within this context, our goal in this paper is to leverage unsupervised algorithms to improve data annotation efficiency for complex semantic segmentation problems in industrial materials science. Previous research has quantified labeling

arXiv:2606.19950v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show great potential in medical tasks, but their elicited confidence often misaligns with actual accuracy, potentially leading to misdiagnosis or overlooking correct advice. This study presents the first comprehensive analysis of the relationship between accuracy and confidence in medical MLLMs. It proposes a novel method that combines Multi-Strategy Fusion-Based Interrogation (MS-FBI) with auxiliary expert

arXiv:2606.19965v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly expected to act on visual information, yet the same scene may require different actions under different task contexts. How reliably can a model turn the same visual evidence into the action required by the current context? To answer this question, we introduce \textsc{ROSE} (\textbf{R}eference-conditioned \textbf{O}ddity and \textbf{S}ymbolic \textbf{E}xecution), a controlled benchmark that

arXiv:2606.20045v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: UAV Vision-Language Navigation (UAV-VLN) is typically formulated as a holistic search-and-reach problem, where long-range target discovery and final target approach are optimized and evaluated jointly. This formulation makes it difficult to assess a critical capability of aerial embodied agents, namely whether a UAV can accurately ground a visible target and translate vision-language evidence into precise 3D motion once the target enters its field

arXiv:2606.20076v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) have become dominant in visual synthesis, but their quality-compute trade-off is largely constrained by the tokenizer's fixed compression ratio. Variable-length tokenizers (VLTs) promise adaptive compression by varying token counts, allowing diffusion models to flexibly balance quality and compute. However, conventional VLTs modulate length by truncating ordered token sequences, which makes token semantics depend on t

arXiv:2606.20077v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual tokens enter Large Language Models (LLMs) as raw, foreign signals. How they are transformed into meaningful representations and interact with the language space depends entirely on the integration architecture. Whether by treating visual tokens as in-context prompts within the input sequence or injecting them directly into the LLM's intermediate layers. A controlled comparison and understanding of how these architectural choices affect visua

arXiv:2606.20094v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Makeup transfer models enable fun augmented reality (AR) experiences as well as virtual try-on (VTO) for online makeup shopping. While recent state-of-the-art diffusion based solutions such as Stable-Makeup dramatically improve the accuracy and realism of makeup transfer, they still face limitations in identity and skin color preservation, making production-level VTO for makeup shopping unrealistic. In this work, we propose MakeupMirror, a diffusio

arXiv:2606.20177v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success in various Remote Sensing (RS) tasks. However, their ability to comprehend negation remains underexplored, limiting deployment in real-world applications where models must explicitly identify what is false or absent, e.g., emergency responders need to locate non-flooded routes for evacuation. To comprehensively study this limitation, we introduce RS-Neg, the first benchma

arXiv:2606.20189v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Leveraging Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) for camera-to-LiDAR knowledge distillation offers a promising solution to the scarcity of annotated data needed to represent the immense geometric and kinematic diversity of real-world autonomous driving (AD). However, current approaches typically treat VFMs as black-box teachers, relying exclusively on frame-wise feature similarity. Consequently, they do not fully exploit the teacher's layer-wise semantic

arXiv:2606.20244v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) often underperform on evidence intensive tasks because decisive visual evidence are small, localized, and easy to overlook, leading to failures in evidence readout even when high-level reasoning is intact. Prior inference-time visual interventions can improve grounding without retraining, but they are largely open-loop and lack a mechanism to verify whether highlighted evidence is actually used. We study answer-span pr

arXiv:2606.20523v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal foundation models have advanced rapidly thanks to large optical benchmarks, but comparable resources for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) remain limited. Existing SAR--optical datasets largely rely on low-resolution, intensity-only Ground Range Detected~(GRD) products and do not preserve complex-valued SAR measurements or native acquisition geometry, which restricts physically grounded multimodal learning. In particular, large-scale public

arXiv:2504.11171v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present TerraMind, the first any-to-any generative, multimodal foundation model for Earth observation (EO). Unlike other multimodal models, TerraMind is pretrained on dual-scale representations combining both token-level and pixel-level data across modalities. On a token level, TerraMind encodes high-level contextual information to learn cross-modal relationships, while on a pixel level, TerraMind leverages fine-grained representations to ca

arXiv:2601.21542v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Flow Matching (FM) models have emerged as a leading paradigm for high-fidelity synthesis. However, their reliance on iterative Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) solving creates a significant latency bottleneck. Existing solutions face a dichotomy: training-free solvers suffer from significant performance degradation at low Neural Function Evaluations (NFEs), while training-based one- or few-steps generation methods incur prohibitive training

arXiv:2602.23172v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Capturing 4D spatiotemporal scene structure is crucial for the safe and reliable operation of robots in dynamic environments. However, existing approaches typically address only part of the problem: they either provide coarse geometric tracking via bounding boxes or detailed 3D occupancy estimates that lack explicit temporal association and instance-level reasoning. In this work, we present Latent Gaussian Splatting (LaGS) for 4D Panoptic Occup

arXiv:2603.01250v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Breast cancer is the most frequently diagnosed malignancy among women worldwide and a leading cause of cancer-related mortality. Dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging plays a central role in tumor characterization and treatment monitoring, particularly in patients receiving neoadjuvant chemotherapy. However, existing artificial intelligence models for breast magnetic resonance imaging are typically developed and evaluated using h

arXiv:2603.09420v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Motion forecasting enables autonomous vehicles to anticipate scene evolution by predicting the future trajectories of dynamic agents. However, existing approaches typically assume a closed-world setting with a fixed object taxonomy and access to high-quality perception, limiting their applicability in the real world where perception is imperfect, and new object classes may emerge over time. In this work, we introduce class-incremental motion fo

arXiv:2604.19196v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Face Anti-Spoofing (FAS) remains challenging due to the requirement for robust domain generalization across unseen environments. While recent trends leverage Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for semantic supervision, these multimodal approaches often demand prohibitive computational resources and exhibit high inference latency. Furthermore, their efficacy is inherently limited by the quality of the underlying visual features. This paper revisits t