AI News Today

arXiv:2606.21982v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Few-step distillation for video diffusion models has attracted significant attention, driven by the urgent demand for efficient deployment in real-world scenarios. However, Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD), a leading paradigm, tends to degrade under limited NFE budgets, manifesting in video generation as layout instability, oversaturation, and broken motion dynamics. We trace this failure to a structural limitation: standard DMD is an intra

arXiv:2606.22002v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training medical image classifiers on entire datasets is wasteful when annotation budgets are limited: not all samples contribute equally, yet acquiring expert labels is expensive. Active learning reduces annotation cost through iterative querying, but assumes repeated access to an oracle and requires multiple rounds of model training. One-shot geometry-based methods such as facility location avoid retraining but operate on pairwise distances that

arXiv:2606.22042v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion-based video editing has made significant progress; however, achieving precise and temporally consistent object-level control, especially in multi-object scenarios, remains challenging due to attention leakage, identity drift, and unstable temporal dynamics. In this work, we propose IDAGEdit, a training-free framework for fine-grained multi-object video editing with strong temporal consistency. The framework adopts Layout-guided Attention

arXiv:2606.22076v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Single-reference unseen object 6D pose estimation reduces object onboarding by estimating poses of arbitrary novel objects from only one reference view. Recent correspondence-based pipelines have achieved robust performance with vision foundation model (VFM) features. However, they typically treat these features as intra-view descriptors, leaving dense visual-semantic cues, including appearance, structure, and context, insufficiently exchanged acro

arXiv:2606.22077v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Morphological traits provide important evidence for phylogenetic reconstruction and evolutionary relationship analysis. Recent image-based approaches have introduced deep learning, particularly convolutional models, to derive morphological features from specimen images, but these methods generally rely on single-modality visual representations and do not explicitly incorporate morphological semantics. This study proposes a morphology-aware multimod

arXiv:2606.22112v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The performance of advanced materials for extreme environments is underpinned by their microstructure, including the size and distribution of reinforcing phases. Chromium-based superalloys are a recently proposed alternative to conventional face-centred-cubic superalloys for high-temperature applications, such as Concentrated Solar Power, and their development requires efficient measurement of precipitate volume fraction and size distribution from

arXiv:2606.22124v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate recognition of anatomical structures is essential for safe and effective minimally invasive surgery (MIS), yet it remains underexplored in surgical computer vision due to limited annotated data and methods tailored primarily to natural scenes. In this work, we present a combined dataset and model framework to advance anatomy-aware perception in MIS. First, we introduce ATLAS-120k, a large-scale clip-level semantic segmentation dataset comp

arXiv:2606.22131v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: 4D dynamics (3D geometry evolving over time) is a fundamental representation of the physical world and plays a crucial role in world modeling (e.g., animation and games). Owing to the scarcity of large-scale, long-horizon 4D mesh data with arbitrary shapes, early text-to-4D methods rely on distillation or test-time optimization from video diffusion priors, making inference prohibitively slow. Recent feed-forward generators greatly reduce inference

arXiv:2606.22158v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Achieving human-like reasoning in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) remains a long-standing challenge. Recent approaches leverage Chain-of-Thought (CoT) rationales generated by human annotators or proprietary models to improve reasoning, which is costly and difficult to scale. Self-training offers a promising alternative by using models own outputs as supervision. However, existing methods often suffer from visual hallucinations -- where rationales des

arXiv:2606.20569v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We analyze identifiability in co-adaptive human-machine systems. We show that closed-loop encoder estimates do not uniquely identify user adaptation, but instead reflect properties of the joint system. We discuss implications for interpreting behavioral adaptation and propose conditions for identification.

arXiv:2606.20599v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tree of Thought (ToT) search has become a promising direction for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models, but deploying these methods in practice raises a question that has received little systematic attention: how do different search strategies behave under varying compute budgets, model sizes, and problem difficulties? In this work, we evaluate two representative ToT methods; DPTS, a Monte Carlo tree search based approach,

arXiv:2606.20600v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: What can the success of modern AI tell us about how humans learn? This paper argues that taking AI seriously as a model of human learning supports a modest but genuine associationism. The central finding is that supervised learning -- learning driven by evaluative feedback -- underlies a surprisingly wide range of contemporary AI systems, from large language models to game-playing agents, differing primarily in how much work is required to generate

arXiv:2606.20615v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agents now participate as first-class team members across the software development lifecycle, yet no specification language exists for expressing the human-agent responsibility boundaries, approval gates, and governance constraints this collaboration requires. Existing approaches encode process in agent prompts (subject to drift), target adjacent domains (workflow management, business processes), or address only fragments (access control, approv

arXiv:2606.20621v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-agent debate improves the reliability of large language models (LLMs) through iterative peer critiques. However, fixed topologies often introduce persistent positional biases, amplify unreliable agents, and cause high sensitivity to role assignments. We introduce \textit{Permutation-Equivariant Adaptive Routing Multi-Agent Debate (PEAR)}, an inference-time protocol that dynamically reconfigures communication roles and sparse topologies across

arXiv:2606.20622v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The goal of artificial intelligence is to create agents capable of general, adaptive behaviour in open-ended environments. Guided by the "Bitter Lesson", we argue that the most effective path toward this goal is to systematically remove human priors and allow intelligence to naturally emerge through interaction with a "Big World" that is orders of magnitude more complex than the agent itself. We propose the mobile Graphical User Interface (GUI) as

arXiv:2606.20624v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Significant progress has been made in aligning LLMs with target value functions. We argue that, even when an LLM has been well aligned in (post-)training, it may still fail to maximise the aligned value in reasoning. We mathematically formalise this gap as rational value risk: the utility discrepancy between a model's deployed reasoning strategy and its rational counterpart, which is defined to be the responses that maximise expected utility in the

arXiv:2606.20625v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents are promising for alpha mining via combining financial priors, symbolic reasoning, executable factor generation, and feedback-driven refinement. Yet, they face a combinatorial search space, noisy non-stationary feedback, redundant discoveries, and overfitting risks from naively reusing past successes. To address these challenges, we propose AlphaMemo, a self-evolving alpha mining agent with Structured Search-Process Memory. Rather than m

arXiv:2606.20627v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Planning with world models is bottlenecked by compounding prediction errors and the difficulty of defining optimizable goals. Visual targets provide precise local gradients but poor distant guidance, while language is flexible yet limited by noisy cross-modal alignment or dependence on large generative models unsuited for the high-sampling nature of model-based planning. To address these challenges, we introduce Latent Goal Prediction from Language

arXiv:2606.20628v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humans increasingly make decisions with AI assistance; for example, doctors may follow AI-recommended diagnostic tests and base their diagnoses on the results. A natural question is which tests should AI recommend to balance short-term decision quality and long-term human learning when different features (e.g., test results) are correlated. While prior work establishes that stationary policies that recommend the same tests repeatedly are optimal wh

arXiv:2606.20631v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills externalise reusable agent-facing behavioural knowledge and guidance as persistent artefacts that can be discovered, activated, and interpreted by LLM agents. Although a skill artefact is static at rest, its architectural responsibilities arise in use, when the artefact is selected for a run, bound to context and authority constraints, interpreted by a stochastic agent, and recorded as run evidence. We call this run-specific relation s

arXiv:2606.20634v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent-runtime systems emit traces, ledgers, provenance graphs, policy logs, delegation tokens, cache events, and tool-firewall records, but those containers do not necessarily answer governance questions about a specific decision. DEMM-Bench is a cross-regime benchmark for agent-runtime governance-evidence sufficiency, grounded in the Decision Evidence Maturity Model (DEMM): it measures whether records across eight evidence regimes are sufficient t

arXiv:2606.20636v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Computer-Use Agents (CUAs) are increasingly deployed in dynamic interactive environments, creating a growing need for continual skill learning during interaction. Recent approaches address this challenge by learning reusable skills from successful trajectories. However, these skill learning methods largely assume static and safe environments, overlooking risks from adversarial interactions (e.g., prompt injections) and environmental dynamics (e.g.,

arXiv:2606.20637v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Electoral redistricting in Ireland's Proportional Representation Single Transferable Vote (PR-STV) system faces the challenge of selecting an optimally representative set of electoral boundaries from an enormous set of possible configurations, and where ``representative'' is a delicate balance of constitutional objectives that are often in tension with one another. We present the first computational framework for Irish electoral redistricting that

arXiv:2606.20638v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models are increasingly deployed as long-lived agents that must adapt across users, tasks, domains, modalities, and feedback regimes without access to model weights. Existing black-box adaptation methods typically optimize a single prompt, maintain an undifferentiated memory, or rely on repeated rollout-heavy search. However, these designs struggle when streams of input are nonstationary, feedback is sparse, and failures from one tas

arXiv:2606.20640v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous vehicles offer the potential for safer and more efficient mobility, yet public trust remains limited due to the lack of transparency in their decision-making. This work addresses this issue by combining deep reinforcement learning (DRL) for adaptive driving control with large language model (LLM)-based explainability modules designed to communicate agent behavior to passengers. DRL agents were trained in simulation using a Dueling Double

arXiv:2606.20642v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Asymptotic statistical theory is a challenging domain for AI-assisted formalization: its central results mix convergence statements, asymptotic expansions, functional analysis, and regularity conditions that have a large gap from existing infrastructure in Lean 4 formalization. To address these challenges, we propose a hypothesis-disciplined Lean 4 formalization pipeline built from multiple agents: a manager that coordinates seven specialist roles

arXiv:2606.20643v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Electrical circuit diagram QA tasks require complex mathematical reasoning, which remains challenging for multimodal LLMs. We present SPARC, a multi-agent system that answers questions over circuit diagrams by grounding reasoning in executable physics-based simulations. SPARC uses LLM agents to synthesize, execute, and analyze simulation programs, improving accuracy and reliability by design. It achieves 83% accuracy, with up to a 58% absolute impr

arXiv:2606.20644v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-objective shortest-path (MOSP) algorithms traditionally rely on single-valued heuristics (SVHs), which associate each state with a single admissible cost vector. While SVHs provide safe lower bounds, they fail to capture the trade-off structure of the Pareto frontier and often yield weak search guidance. Multi-valued heuristics (MVHs) address this limitation by mapping states to sets of cost estimates, enabling a richer approximation of possi

arXiv:2606.20657v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training a frontier model is normally weeks of human work: proposing data and recipe changes, launching runs, reading evals, deciding what to keep. We report an autonomous system that runs this loop with no human in the loop, post-training a 30B Nemotron across four rounds over multiple weeks. The autonomously produced model reaches a held-out score of 0.86 against the top human submission's 0.87 on the public NVIDIA Nemotron-Reasoning Challen

arXiv:2606.20687v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-Camera Multi-Target (MCMT) tracking has emerged as a critical capability for applications ranging from autonomous driving to animal behavior monitoring. While recent advances have yielded sophisticated tracking algorithms, the availability of annotated multi-view data remains a significant bottleneck. Existing annotation tools predominantly support single-camera workflows or rely on LiDAR sensors, making cross-view labeling tedious and imprac

arXiv:2606.20689v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neonatal jaundice (hyperbilirubinemia) is one of the most common conditions affecting newborns worldwide, with India alone recording roughly 15 million cases per year. Early detection is critical, yet standard diagnosis requires blood tests that are often impractical in rural clinics where laboratory facilities are limited. This paper presents NeoJaundice-AI, a smartphone-based screening system that uses photographs of a baby's skin and sclera (eye

arXiv:2606.20693v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Background: Wildfires in Canada present increasing threats to ecosystems, communities, and infrastructure, demanding accurate forecasting tools to aid mitigation efforts. Existing models often lack scalability or fail to capture temporal dynamics effectively. Aims: This study aims to develop a deep learning framework tailored to Canadian wildfire spread prediction that captures spatio-temporal patterns in environmental data. Methods: We propose a U

arXiv:2606.20697v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AlphaEarth Foundations (AEF) unify global remote sensing foundation embeddings through multimodal self-supervised learning, but their pretraining focuses on physical land-surface signals, limiting plug-and-play use in socioeconomic tasks. We integrate seven heterogeneous data streams across 36 Chinese cities over eight years - AEF embeddings, population, nighttime lights, remote sensing indices, points of interest (POIs), urban morphology, and cros

arXiv:2606.20723v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chronic wound assessment remains a clinically challenging task that requires accurate interpretation of wound morphology, tissue composition, vascular characteristics, and infection risk. Recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have introduced the possibility of automated multimodal wound analysis through image understanding combined with clinical reasoning. This study evaluates the performance of several general-purpose and medically spec

arXiv:2606.20725v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate, up-to-date representations of road structures are critical for the safe operation of autonomous vehicles. Existing systems rely either on costly, maintenance-heavy high-definition (HD) maps which compromise safety when outdated, or purely sensor-based online mapping which struggles with long-range reliability and occlusion. Systems incorporating map prior information into online mapping seek to overcome drawbacks of both approaches by com

arXiv:2606.20728v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision foundation tools such as open-vocabulary detectors, segmentation models, and post-processing operators are powerful building blocks for computer vision, but their effectiveness depends heavily on how they are orchestrated: which tools are used, in what order, with what parameters, and under what visual conditions. Existing visual-programming agents typically generate a fixed solution pipeline, making them brittle under dense objects, occlusi

arXiv:2606.20736v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Static visual question answering (VQA) benchmarks age quickly: Once the items leak into training corpora, scores can reflect memorization rather than genuine visual ability, thus obscuring real progress. Rebuilding high-quality benchmarks such as V*Bench requires substantial human annotation, yet each static release can quickly become another leaked artifact. We propose ReKey, a live benchmark protocol that randomly regenerates the answer-bearing l

arXiv:2606.20752v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep neural network-based LiDAR 3D object detection serves as a critical perception component in safety-critical autonomous systems. However, recent studies have revealed its vulnerability to backdoor attacks. Existing attacks typically require white-box access or label modification and focus on geometric attacks such as object disappearance or bounding-box manipulation. In this paper, we present Mirage, a black-box and clean-label backdoor attack

arXiv:2606.20856v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-view surface reconstruction is a core problem in computer vision. One prominent line of work represents the surface implicitly as a signed distance field (SDF), optimizing it based on the photometric loss between rendered and observed pixel colors. These approaches typically employ SDF-based volume rendering to obtain a differentiable relaxation of discontinuous visibility along rays, thereby reducing reliance on silhouette supervision. In th

arXiv:2606.20886v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As urban areas expand, automatic monitoring of parking lots becomes essential for efficient and sustainable cities. This work proposes a self-supervised approach for parking spot occupancy recognition that requires no labeled samples from the target parking lot. Building upon a self-supervised transfer learning fine-tuning protocol, the proposed training strategy consists of two self-supervised stages: first on unlabeled generic data and then on un