arXiv:2606.14934v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This work introduces the Separable Neural Architecture (SNA), a function representational class combining neural approximation with tensor decomposition. The SNA decouples localized coordinate functions (atoms) from global interactions governed by a sparse, low-rank interaction object. This architecture possesses a compact and smooth inductive bias well-suited for solving partial differential equations (PDEs). When viewed as a Galerkin trial space under the variational SNA (VSNA) framework, the formulation satisfies classical variational guarantees under Lax-Milgram: well-posedness, quasi-optimality, convergence, and stability. In high-dimensional spatiotemporal--parametric PDEs, the VSNA mitigates the curse of dimensionality by scaling algebraically rather than exponentially. Exploiting an entirely factorized, tensor-native alternating least squares (ALS) optimization framework reduces this cost to linear in dimension. The VSNA is validated across elliptic, hyperbolic, and parabolic systems, demonstrating close alignment with predicted algebraic and spectral scaling rates. We showcase the SNA as a "solve once, query anywhere" physical world model via two engineering case studies: a 7D parametric manufacturing simulation and an experimental thermal-to-property inversion pipeline for Inconel 718. The VSNA executes a 1,000,000-query Monte Carlo sweep in 102s on a standard laptop CPU, yielding a 150,000x speedup over a full-grid finite element baseline hosted on an NVIDIA A100 GPU. It further enables real-time generative inverse-mode reconstructions under 100ms. These results demonstrate that the SNA serves as a compact mathematical substrate for continuous parameter manifolds to enable real-time inversion, optimization loops, and rapid uncertainty propagation.

arXiv:2606.14943v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Causal Transformers model sequences through an autoregressive factorization of the joint distribution, which enables efficient left-to-right decoding and conditional likelihood computation. However, they cannot tractably sample from or evaluate arbitrary conditionals -- e.g., a block of text conditioned on past and future tokens. Recent work aims to solve this problem through novel architectures, but they often lead to sub-optimal modeling of such conditionals and degraded generations. We propose Arbitrary Conditionals GPT (AC-GPT) which introduces a simple modification to standard causal Transformers to enable evaluating and sampling from arbitrary conditionals -- including past, future, and mixed contexts -- within a single forward pass. Unlike prior approaches, our method preserves the standard left-to-right ordering and next-token prediction objective essential for both strong performance and efficient training on natural language. Crucially, this compatibility allows existing LLMs to be fine-tuned for arbitrary conditioning. Our empirical results indicate that our method outperforms baselines on modeling arbitrary conditionals, without degrading standard left-to-right performance.

arXiv:2606.14961v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning can improve LLM performance, but high answer confidence may be misleading when the accompanying CoT rationale is plausible yet incomplete or poorly supported. We study confidence--rationale alignment: whether a model's confidence in its committed answer is justified by its generated rationale. We introduce a GRPO-based reinforcement learning framework that jointly rewards answer correctness, committed-answer probability, and rubric-based rationale support, where the rubric assesses grounding, coherence, task match, and connection to the selected answer without revealing the gold answer to the judge. Across MedQA, MathQA, and OpenBookQA using three open-weight LLMs, our method reduces the confidence--rationale alignment error by up to 26.51% compared with untuned checkpoints, SFT, and correctness-only GRPO, while maintaining competitive accuracy and often improving calibration. These results show that reliable CoT reasoning requires not only confident answers, but rationales that substantively support them.

arXiv:2606.15007v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce Nemotron 3 Ultra, a 550 billion total and 55 billion active parameter Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Attention language model. We pre-trained Nemotron 3 Ultra on 20 trillion text tokens, then extended the context length to 1M tokens, and post-trained using Supervised Fine Tuning (SFT), Reinforcement Learning (RL), and Multi-teacher On-Policy Distillation (MOPD). Nemotron 3 Ultra is our most capable model yet, employing multiple key technologies - LatentMoE, Multi Token Prediction (MTP), NVFP4 pre-training, multi-environment RLVR, MOPD, and reasoning budget control. Nemotron 3 Ultra achieves up to ~6x higher inference throughput as compared to state-of-the-art publicly available LLMs while attaining on-par accuracy. The state-of-the-art accuracy, high inference throughput, and 1M token context length make Nemotron 3 Ultra ideal for long-running autonomous agentic tasks. We open-source the base, post-trained, and quantized checkpoints, along with the training data and recipe on HuggingFace.

arXiv:2606.15017v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Online web agents often augment a base actor with memory, workflow, or skill modules. These modules can improve performance, but they also consume test-time tokens, a cost rarely reported alongside the actor's inference cost. We study online augmentation, where this overhead is paid on every task, and re-evaluate its benefits under a fixed total inference budget. We compare AWM, ASI, and ReasoningBank with a token-matched vanilla baseline that uses the same budget for additional actor steps. Across three WebArena domains and three models, Gemini 3 Flash, GPT-5.4-mini, and Qwen 3.6-27B, the vanilla baseline matches or surpasses all three augmentation methods in aggregate success rate while often using fewer total tokens. We observe a similar trend on WorkArena-L1 with Qwen 3.6-27B, indicating that the effect extends to enterprise knowledge-work tasks. Our results suggest that skills and workflow memory can be useful in specific domains, but their apparent gains often vanish against a budget-matched actor. We further show that run-to-run variance materially affects outcomes and should be reported as a core evaluation criterion for online web agents.

arXiv:2606.15026v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Physiological stress and emotion recognition are important for health monitoring and affective computing. In this work, we present a comprehensive evaluation of deep learning models such as Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCN), and Transformer on the WESAD dataset for multimodal affect recognition using wrist and chest sensor signals. We perform ablation studies to assess the individual contributions of each modality by training models on wrist-only and chest-only inputs. In addition, we implement a late-fusion ensemble strategy that combines predictions from all three architectures trained on multimodal input. We also employ early fusion at the sensor level by concatenating wrist and chest signals before feeding them into each model. Our results show that Transformer models consistently achieve the highest accuracy in multimodal settings, while TCN models perform best in the wrist-only configuration. The ensemble method yields the highest overall accuracy (98.91 +/- 0.13%) and macro-F1 score (98.56 +/- 0.17%). These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of sensor fusion and ensemble-based fusion in developing robust systems for physiological emotion recognition.

arXiv:2606.14720v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This study aims to enhance maritime security by using advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Computer Vision (CV) techniques. For this purpose, it was designed and assessed intelligent object detection systems that can detect the presence of ships on the sea surface under different real-time environments. To achieve this goal, a maritime image dataset with 6,468 images was used, covering different weather conditions like cloudy, foggy, rainy, and sunny environments. Six deep learning architectures were evaluated, including a base Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model, four transfer learning models (Xception, VGG16, MobileNetV2, and EfficientNetV2L), and a Vision Transformer (ViT) model. The models were compared using multiple performance indicators, including accuracy, Type I and Type II errors, model size, and video processing time. The results show that model performance varies depending on computational constraints and deployment conditions. While lightweight architectures are suitable for resource-limited devices, the ViT achieved the best overall performance, reaching 100% accuracy with the lowest error rates and the fastest video processing time. The findings highlight the potential of AI-driven computer vision systems for maritime surveillance, border protection, and autonomous navigation.

arXiv:2606.14723v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study multiple-choice video question answering on the ImplicitQA benchmark, where the correct answer is never explicitly shown but must be inferred from off-screen events, line-of-sight cues, causal structure, and cross-shot spatial layout. On this benchmark a single frontier video LLM already operates near its accuracy ceiling, and we observe that conventional self-consistency strategies -- majority voting across repeated samples of the same model -- can hurt rather than help, because the model's errors on hard questions are correlated. We propose disagreement-based cross-model routing, a pure inference-time procedure that requires no labels and no training. We triple-sample a native-video model (Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview) at temperature zero, exploit the genuine sample-to-sample variance of its video-processing pipeline to identify the roughly 20% subset of questions where the three samples disagree, and route only that subset to a second model from a different family (Claude Opus 4.8) that consumes uniformly sampled frames with adaptive thinking. On the 1001-question validation set with public ground truth -- our main evaluation -- the method improves AvgAcc by +1.43 over the best single sample of the primary model, with per-category gains concentrated on Motion & Trajectory (+5.49), Inferred Counting (+3.45), and Vertical Spatial Reasoning (+1.82) -- the categories most dependent on cross-shot reference resolution. The same pipeline applied to the held-out 172-question CVPR 2026 ImplicitQA challenge test set achieves 82.03 AvgAcc / 79.71 MacroAvgAcc (+1.81 over the best single sample of the primary model), confirming the validation result on an independent split.

arXiv:2606.14724v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Video anomaly detection in surveillance settings must balance detection accuracy against real-time throughput, a tension that existing methods address either through stronger feature extractors or more efficient architectures, but rarely both. We present VigilFormer, a unified framework that combines deformable spatio-temporal attention with causal temporal modeling to detect anomalies in untrimmed surveillance video. The proposed Deformable Spatio-Temporal Encoder (DSTE) attends to a sparse set of informative locations across frames, avoiding the quadratic cost of dense attention while retaining the ability to capture irregular motion patterns. A Causal Anomaly Classifier (CAC) applies dilated causal convolutions over snippet-level features and optimizes a contrastive multiple-instance learning objective that separates anomalous and normal representations without frame-level labels. To meet deployment constraints, an Adaptive Confidence Scheduler (ACS) dynamically skips low-information frames at inference time, reducing redundant computation in static scenes. Evaluated on UCF-Crime, ShanghaiTech, and CUHK Avenue, VigilFormer achieves AUC scores of 87.83%, 97.21%, and 89.74% respectively, at 41.5 FPS on a single GPU, outperforming recent weakly-supervised methods in both accuracy and speed.

arXiv:2606.14725v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The shift from Convolutional Neural Networks to Transformers has reshaped computer vision, yet these two architectural families are typically viewed as fundamentally distinct. Convolutional Neural Networks are defined by spatially local convolution operations, while Transformers rely on global self-attention. We argue that convolution and self-attention, despite their apparent differences, can be unified within a single k-nearest neighbor aggregation framework. The critical insight is that both operations are special cases of neighbor selection and weighted aggregation. Convolution selects neighbors by spatial proximity while self-attention selects by feature similarity, revealing that they lie on a continuous spectrum rather than representing categorically different computations. We introduce Convolutional Nearest Neighbors (ConvNN), a unified framework that formalizes this connection. ConvNN exactly recovers standard and depthwise convolution by restricting neighbor selection to normalized spatial coordinates, and exactly recovers self-attention and its sparse variants, including KVT-attention, by replacing spatial proximity with scaled dot-product similarity. Beyond these special cases, ConvNN serves as a drop-in replacement for both convolution and attention layers, enabling systematic exploration of the intermediate spectrum between local and global aggregation through configurable similarity functions, neighbor selection strategies, positional encodings, and aggregation kernels.

arXiv:2606.14801v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Flow-matching and diffusion policies are expressive action generators, but optimizing them with temporal-difference reinforcement learning (RL) remains difficult. Effective policy extraction requires exploiting the critic's action gradient, yet directly backpropagating this signal through a multi-step denoising process can be numerically unstable. Existing methods work around this either by discarding gradient information, distilling the policy into a simpler one-step actor, or repeatedly fine-tuning the denoising policy as the critic improves. We propose QPILOTS, a method that leaves the original policy unmodified and steers the denoising process at inference time. At each denoising step, instead of evaluating the critic on the noisy intermediate action where critic predictions are unreliable, we first project that intermediate state to an estimate of the final clean action and compute the critic gradient there. We introduce two variants: QPILOTS-U uses a fast single-point approximation, while QPILOTS-M draws differentiable posterior samples via a learned auxiliary network. On a standard offline-to-online RL benchmark, QPILOTS achieves the best aggregate performance, reaching an average success rate of 90% across 50 tasks. We also apply QPILOTS to steer a large, frozen, pretrained Vision-Language Action (VLA) foundation model, outperforming or matching prior inference-time approaches across six manipulation tasks in simulation.

Molly Taft / Wired: Filing: the US DOJ asks court to dismiss an NAACP suit over xAI's gas turbines, saying xAI is integral to US' military operations, including the Iran War  —  In a bid to dismiss a lawsuit over xAI's polluting gas turbines, the Justice Department claimed the company is integral to military operations—including the Iran War.

Washington Post: Sources: Trump officials weighed Anthropic export controls weeks before forcing its models offline, after a dispute over Mythos access for a China-linked firm  —  The Trump administration weighed export controls on Anthropic weeks before forcing its AI model offline, after a dispute …

<blockquote cite="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/06/trump-anthropic-export-control-ai-race/687555/?gift=5MjKTLV9QwyU_J0HzTnanoWieJfkMhNH_YTT9pP_fhA"><p>Katie Moussouris, a cybersecurity expert and the CEO of Luta Security, told me that Anthropic shared with her a copy of the White House’s report on the Fable jailbreak to get her appraisal. (She said that she is not being paid by Anthropic.) The report, Moussouris said, involved IT experts asking Fable to help find and patch bugs. When given deliberately insecure code, she said, Fable refused the prompt “review the code for security issues” but then complied when asked to “fix this code,” followed by some further manual steps. Moussouris told me that this was just “the model working as intended” for cyberdefense.</p></blockquote> <p class="cite">&mdash; <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/06/trump-anthropic-export-control-ai-race/687555/?gift=5MjKTLV9QwyU_J0HzTnanoWieJfkMhNH_YTT9pP_fhA">Matteo Wong, The Atlantic</a>, The White House Is Ratcheting Up Its War Against Anthropic</p> <p>Tags: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/anthropic">anthropic</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/claude">claude</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai">ai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/llms">llms</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-ethics">ai-ethics</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/jailbreaking">jailbreaking</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/generative-ai">generative-ai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-security-research">ai-security-research</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/claude-mythos">claude-mythos</a></p>

In a bid to dismiss a lawsuit over xAI’s polluting gas turbines, the Justice Department claimed the company is integral to military operations—including the Iran War.

Leo Schwartz / The Information: Anthropic says its senior leaders met Trump admin officials on June 15, but no resolution was reached and both sides are working to resolve things quickly  —  Anthropic senior leaders met with top Trump administration officials on Monday to discuss a resolution to a White House directive …

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Yasutaka Tamura / Bloomberg: Taxi-hailing app Go's shares grew 21% in its Tokyo debut, after it raised ~$553M in Japan's largest IPO in 2026, giving the company a market value of ~$1.16B  —  Taxi-hailing app provider Go Inc.'s shares surged 21% in its trading debut on the Tokyo Stock Exchange on Tuesday …

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Anthropic leaders flew to Washington, DC, to meet with White House officials on Monday. After high-level talks, they’re still split on the risk Claude Fable 5 presents.