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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

IntSeqBERT: Learning Arithmetic Structure in OEIS via Modulo-Spectrum Embeddings

arXiv:2603.05556v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Integer sequences in the OEIS span values from single-digit constants to astronomical factorials and exponentials, making prediction challenging for standard tokenised models that cannot handle out-of-vocabulary values or exploit periodic arithmetic structure. We present IntSeqBERT, a dual-stream Transformer encoder for masked integer-sequence modelling on OEIS. Each sequence element is encoded along two complementary axes: a continuous log-scale magnitude embedding and sin/cos modulo embeddings for 100 residues (moduli $2$–$101$), fused via FiLM. Three prediction heads (magnitude regression, sign classification, and modulo prediction for 100 moduli) are trained jointly on 274,705 OEIS sequences. At the Large scale (91.5M parameters), IntSeqBERT achieves 95.85% magnitude accuracy and 50.38% Mean Modulo Accuracy (MMA) on the test set, outperforming a standard tokenised Transformer baseline by $+8.9$ pt and $+4.5$ pt, respectively. An ablation removing the modulo stream confirms it accounts for $+15.2$ pt of the MMA gain and contributes an additional $+6.2$ pt to magnitude accuracy. A probabilistic Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT)-based Solver converts the model's predictions into concrete integers, yielding a 7.4-fold improvement in next-term prediction over the tokenised-Transformer baseline (Top-1: 19.09% vs. 2.59%). Modulo spectrum analysis reveals a strong negative correlation between Normalised Information Gain (NIG) and Euler's totient ratio $\varphi(m)/m$ ($r = -0.851$, $p < 10^{-28}$), providing empirical evidence that composite moduli capture OEIS arithmetic structure more efficiently via CRT aggregation.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Giving AI a Headache: Acoustic Adversarial Attacks to Computer Vision Applications

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly used to automate a variety of real-world computer vision (CV) applications, such as autonomous vehicle control, facial recognition, and security cameras. Recent research has shown that acoustic vibration can induce real physical motion in cameras, interfering with their internal stabilization mechanisms. Because the motion falls outside the conditions the stabilization system was designed to handle, the system introduces artifacts into the frame, causing AI-based CV models to misclassify, miss targets, or hallucinate objects. Previous work used ultrasonic frequencies (>20 kHz) to perform short-range attacks, which limits them to short distances due to the attenuation exhibited by high frequencies. In this work, we investigate acoustic attacks using lower frequencies in the audible range (

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Unsafer in Many Turns: Benchmarking and Defending Multi-Turn Safety Risks in Tool-Using Agents

LLM-based agents are becoming increasingly capable, yet their safety lags behind. This creates a gap between what agents can do and should do. This gap widens as agents engage in multi-turn interactions and employ diverse tools, introducing new risks overlooked by existing benchmarks. To systematically scale safety testing into multi-turn, tool-realistic settings, we propose a principled taxonomy that transforms single-turn harmful tasks into multi-turn attack sequences. Using this taxonomy, we construct MT-AgentRisk (Multi-Turn Agent Risk Benchmark), the first benchmark to evaluate multi-turn tool-using agent safety. Our experiments reveal substantial safety degradation: the Attack Success Rate (ASR) increases by 16% on average across open and closed models in multi-turn settings. To close this gap, we propose ToolShield, a training-free, tool-agnostic, self-exploration defense: when encountering a new tool, the agent autonomously generates test cases, executes them to observe downstream effects, and distills safety experiences for deployment. Experiments show that ToolShield effectively reduces ASR by 30% on average in multi-turn interactions. Our code is available at https://github.com/CHATS-lab/ToolShield.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

G-Loss: Graph-Guided Fine-Tuning of Language Models

Traditional loss functions, including cross-entropy, contrastive, triplet, and su pervised contrastive losses, used for fine-tuning pre-trained language models such as BERT, operate only within local neighborhoods and fail to account for the global semantic structure. We present G-Loss, a graph-guided loss function that incorporates semi-supervised label propagation to use structural relationships within the embedding manifold. G-Loss builds a document-similarity graph that captures global semantic relationships, thereby guiding the model to learn more discriminative and robust embeddings. We evaluate G-Loss on five benchmark datasets covering key downstream classification tasks: MR (sentiment analysis), R8 and R52 (topic categorization), Ohsumed (medical document classification), and 20NG (news categorization). In the majority of experimental setups, G-Loss converges faster and produces semantically coherent embedding spaces, resulting in higher classification accuracy than models fine-tuned with traditional loss functions.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

On the Role of Computation in Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2602.05999v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: How does the amount of compute available to a reinforcement learning (RL) policy affect its learning? Can policies using a fixed amount of parameters, still benefit from additional compute? The standard RL framework does not provide a language to answer these questions formally. Empirically, deep RL policies are often parameterized as neural networks with static architectures, conflating the amount of compute and the number of parameters. In this paper, we formalize compute bounded policies and prove that policies which use more compute can solve problems and generalize to longer-horizon tasks that are outside the scope of policies with less compute. Building on prior work in algorithmic learning and model-free planning, we propose a minimal architecture that can use a variable amount of compute. Our experiments complement our theory. On a set 31 different tasks spanning online and offline RL, we show that $(1)$ this architecture achieves stronger performance simply by using more compute, and $(2)$ stronger generalization on longer-horizon test tasks compared to standard feedforward networks or deep residual network using up to 5 times more parameters.

06.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Questioning the Coverage-Length Metric in Conformal Prediction: When Shorter Intervals Are Not Better

arXiv:2601.21455v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Conformal prediction(CP) has become a cornerstone of distribution-free uncertainty quantification, conventionally evaluated by its coverage and interval length. This work critically examines the sufficiency of these standard metrics. We demonstrate that the interval length might be deceptively improved through a counter-intuitive approach termed Prejudicial Trick(PT), while the coverage remains valid. Specifically, for any given test sample, PT probabilistically returns an interval, which is either null or constructed using an adjusted confidence level, thereby preserving marginal coverage. While PT potentially yields a deceptively lower interval length, it introduces practical vulnerabilities: the same input can yield completely different prediction intervals across repeated runs of the algorithm. We formally derive the conditions under which PT achieves these misleading improvements and provide extensive empirical evidence across various regression and classification tasks. Furthermore, we introduce a new metric interval stability which helps detect whether a new CP method implicitly improves the length based on such PT-like techniques. Code is available at https://github.com/benben-cd/PT-Conformal-Prediction.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

AmchiBias: Measuring Stereotypical Bias in Goan Identity Groups with a Minimal Pair Dataset in English and Konkani

Socio-cultural stereotypical bias is an important consideration in the development and deployment of NLP systems. It is however often considered only at the national level, despite rich subnational socio-cultural structures. We present AmchiBias, the first benchmark for measuring socio-cultural stereotypical bias for the Indian state of Goa with its unique historically multicultural setting. It covers various Goan identity groups and comprises 313 minimal pairs across eight sociodemographic dimensions in both English and Devanagari Konkani. We then evaluate stereotypical bias in five multilingual encoder models on this benchmark. We find near-chance scores in Konkani, reflecting language incompetence for general multilingual models and a lack of Goan cultural competence for Indian language models. Queried in English, models with a stronger Indian language coverage show higher bias for pan-Indian groups than hyperlocal Goan groups. This suggests the English signal reflects pan-Indian pretraining associations rather than genuine Goan cultural knowledge. Our findings highlight a critical gap in low-resource multilingual NLP evaluation for hyperlocal community identities.

08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

A Unified Approach to Beta Moments, Combinatorial Identities, and Random Walks

arXiv:2605.05420v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The study of random walks has increasingly been popular across diverse disciplines such as statistics, mathematics, quantum physics, where they are used to model paths consisting of successive random steps in a mathematical space. A fundamental quantity of interest is the probability that a simple symmetric random walk returns to the origin after 2n steps. In this paper, we develop a unified probabilistic approach that connects the return probabilities in arbitrary dimensions with moment representations. Using this framework, we provide probabilistic proofs of several combinatorial identities involving beta and gamma functions, and derive new combinatorial identities in general dimensions.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Quantum simulation of the Liouville equation in classical mechanics with discontinuous potential via Schrödingerization

arXiv:2606.15066v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We develop quantum simulation algorithms for the Liouville equation of classical mechanics with discontinuous potential. Such discontinuities represent potential barriers at which classical particles undergo energy preserving transmission or reflection, and the resulting interface conditions must be incorporated into the numerical flux. We combine Hamiltonian-preserving schemes by Jin and Wen in Commun. Math. Sci. 3(3), 285-315 (2005) with the Schrödingerization method, which embeds the resulting nonunitary semi-discrete dynamics into a unitary Schrödinger type system in one additional auxiliary variable [arXiv:2212.14703, arXiv:2212.13969]. For one-, two-, and $n$-dimensional problems with grid aligned interfaces, we construct sparse matrix representations of the transmission and reflection fluxes using step and hat functions, derive the corresponding Hamiltonians of the Schrödingerized systems, and analyze their sparse-access query complexity. In the sparse-access oracle model, the resulting algorithms have a polynomial dependence on the inverse accuracy and avoid the exponential dependence on the phase-space dimension suffered by classical grid based Hamiltonian-preserving schemes, up to the cost of implementing the oracles and the postselection overhead. We also describe the postselected recovery of the physical solution state and the quantum readout of macroscopic observables such as density and averaged velocity through overlap estimation. Numerical experiments based on classical simulation of the Schrödingerized dynamics validate the proposed formulation and illustrate the correct transmission/reflection behavior at potential barriers.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

SeamEdit: A Black-Box VLM-Agnostic Pipeline for Large-Image Semantic Editing

Semantic region editing for large images must satisfy two requirements at the same time: high generative quality and natural integration with surrounding content. Some related methods rely on white-box models and leave the strong generation capability of closed-source models underexplored. Directly applying closed-source models to tiled editing, however, introduces several failure modes: semantic deformation, canvas-level alignment drift, and visible seam artifacts. This paper presents SeamEdit, a training-free and model-agnostic pipeline that treats any VLM with inpainting capability as a black-box oracle. SeamEdit mitigates these issues through a five-stage post-hoc pipeline: overlay-based tile decomposition, black-box VLM inpainting, geometric and color-consistency correction, seam-risk-based multi-candidate ranking, and dynamic-programming curved seam fusion. The pipeline reduces seam visibility and supports semantic modification of arbitrary tile regions.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

CogGuard: Cognitive and Operational Profiling for Proactive Warning in Edge Intelligent Services

arXiv:2606.15199v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Proactive warning is an important capability for edge intelligent services, where the system predicts whether a subject will successfully complete an incoming task under strict latency and privacy constraints. Such prediction depends on both long-term static attributes and short-term dynamic states derived from historical interaction logs. Recent Large Language Models (LLMs) offer strong long-context reasoning for constructing structured profiles from these logs, but existing solutions face two challenges for edge deployment: (1) profiling methods are typically domain-specific and lack a reusable abstraction across service scenarios, and (2) fine-tuning alignment models on heterogeneous edge clusters incurs high synchronization overhead due to the variance in input sequence lengths. To address these challenges, we propose CogGuard, a proactive-warning framework for edge intelligent services. CogGuard decouples offline LLM-based profile construction from online Small Language Model (SLM)-based score prediction through a shared static-dynamic profile-to-score pipeline, and instantiates it in two representative scenarios: educational performance warning and operational task outcome warning. For efficient profile construction, we design scenario-specific profiling methods with prefix-aligned KV-cache reuse to reduce repeated encoding overhead. For edge-side model alignment, we propose a length-aware distributed fine-tuning strategy with contrastive regularization to mitigate workload imbalance on heterogeneous clusters. Experiments on education and operation datasets show that CogGuard reduces profile construction time by up to 48% and distributed fine-tuning time by 19%, while achieving MAEs of 13.4 and 5.9, respectively, on 100-point-scale warning tasks. In the largest educational setting, CogGuard reduces prediction error by 15.4% compared with the strongest baseline.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Embedded Machine Learning for Microcontroller-Class Edge Devices: Data, Feature, Evaluation, and Deployment Pipelines

arXiv:2606.18122v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Embedded machine learning moves inference from cloud services to resource-constrained devices that must acquire data, preprocess signals, run a model, and act within tight limits on memory, energy, and latency. This paper presents a systems-oriented synthesis of an embedded machine-learning workflow for microcontroller-class platforms. The emphasis is placed on engineering decisions that are often hidden in generic machine-learning introductions: sampling and buffering, feature extraction as dimensionality reduction, validation under class imbalance, model/runtime co-design, and streaming deployment. Two representative signal families are used throughout the paper. The first is inertial motion recognition, where a two-second, three-axis accelerometer window is transformed from raw samples into root-mean-square and spectral features before classification. The second is keyword spotting, where audio is sampled, anti-aliased, transformed into mel-frequency cepstral coefficients, and processed by a compact one-dimensional convolutional network. The paper concludes with practical design rules for robust on-device inference, including data curation, quantization, thresholding, scheduling, and field monitoring.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

GitOfThoughts: Version-Controlled Reasoning and Agent Memory You Can Replay, Diff, and Merge

Large language model (LLM) reasoning is ephemeral: chains of thought vanish with the context window, pruned search branches leave no record, and memory buffers cannot be diffed, merged, or audited. Every other complex software process (code, infrastructure, data, experiments) is version-controlled; reasoning is not. We introduce GitOfThoughts, which stores an agent's reasoning tree as a git repository: every scored thought is a commit, scores are notes, outcomes are tags, and retrieval is "git log" over the agent's own history. This makes reasoning replayable, auditable, and mergeable across agents at near-zero engineering cost. We then ask the harder question: does memory, in any substrate, actually improve accuracy? Across five substrates (none, markdown, vector, graph, git), two benchmarks, two model scales, and pre-registered replications, the answer for novel problems is no. No memory format reliably helps, and a promising early result collapsed under its own pre-registered replication. Memory pays only above what we call the copyability threshold: when the retrieved case is a near-duplicate of the current problem (similarity >~ 0.8), accuracy jumps sharply; below it, nothing. The gain is answer retrieval, not method transfer: a 4.5x larger model doubles the near-duplicate payoff yet still cannot extract a transferable method from a worked example. The only general lever we find is test-time sampling. The case for git-as-substrate is therefore auditability, provenance, and mergeability at accuracy parity. We document a retracted result and a refuted hypothesis to model the evaluation standard we hold ourselves to.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Playful Agentic Robot Learning

arXiv:2606.19419v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current agentic robot systems can write executable Code-as-Policy programs, observe feedback, and revise behavior across multiple attempts, but they remain largely task-driven: reusable skills are acquired only after explicit instructions. We study Playful Agentic Robot Learning, where an embodied coding agent uses self-directed play as a continual skill-learning stage before downstream tasks arrive. We introduce RATs, Robotics Agent Teams designed for play-time skill acquisition. During play, RATs proposes novel yet learnable exploratory tasks, plans and executes robot-code policies, verifies intermediate progress, diagnoses failures, retries with dense, step-level feedback, and distills successful executions into a persistent code skill library. At test time, the agent reuses relevant skills from this frozen library to help solve new tasks. Experiments in LIBERO-PRO and MolmoSpaces show that play-learned skills improve held-out downstream tasks over no-play and random-play baselines, with 20.6 and 17.0 percentage-point gains over CaP-Agent0 on LIBERO-PRO and MolmoSpaces, respectively. Moreover, the learned skills can be plugged into other inference-time Code-as-Policy agents by simply retrieving them into the context, improving RoboSuite and real-world transfer by 8.9 and 8.8 points, respectively, without finetuning the underlying model.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

InTrain: Intrinsic Trainability for Zero-Cost Neural Architecture Search

Training-free neural architecture search promises efficient discovery of high-performance networks without costly training. However, existing zero-cost proxies rely on fragmented heuristics that fail to capture the fundamental question: what makes an architecture trainable? This paper introduces Intrinsic Trainability (InTrain), a unified theoretical proxy that formalizes trainability as an architectural invariant emerging from two synergistic components: geometric capacity and optimization resilience. We operationalize intrinsic trainability through analysis of neural information processing. Geometric capacity is quantified via the participation ratio of activation covariance eigenspectrum, capturing the effective dimensionality of representation manifolds. Optimization resilience is measured through cumulative gradient health, assessing the robustness of backpropagation across network depth. InTrain synthesizes these dimensions through a scale-invariant multiplicative coupling, which we hypothesize is essential for capturing their synergistic, non-additive relationship. Extensive experiments on standard NAS benchmarks and search spaces demonstrate that InTrain achieves ranking correlations on par with state-of-the-art ensemble-based proxies and outperforms other single-metric methods.

16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Composed Object Retrieval: Object-level Retrieval via Composed Expressions

Retrieving fine-grained visual content based on user intent remains a challenge in multimodal systems. Although current Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) methods combine reference images with retrieval texts, they are constrained to image-level matching and cannot localize specific objects. To this end, we propose Composed Object Retrieval (COR), a new object-level retrieval task that retrieves target object(s) from candidate objects in a target image and grounds the retrieved result with pixel-level masks. Given a reference object, its mask, a target image, and a retrieval text describing the desired modification, COR requires models to perform composed visual-textual reasoning rather than relying on explicit category names. This setting introduces several challenges, including fine-grained compositional matching, negative-object filtering under visually similar distractors, and flexible single- or multi-object retrieval. We construct COR125K, the first large-scale COR benchmark, containing 125,541 retrieval triplets across 408 categories with base/novel splits for evaluating category-level generalization. We also present CORE, a unified end-to-end model that integrates reference region encoding, adaptive vision-text interaction, and region-level contrastive learning to align composed representations with target objects while suppressing background and distractors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CORE significantly outperforms existing CIR-based pipelines and strong baselines in both base and novel categories, establishing a simple and effective foundation for fine-grained object-level multimodal retrieval. Code will be released publicly at https://github.com/wangtong627/COR.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Applications of quantum annealing to magnetic dipole hyperfine structure constants: First results beyond energies for atoms

arXiv:2606.20166v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We report the first results of the magnetic dipole hyperfine structure (HFS) constants of neutral $\mathrm{Li}$, Li-like $\mathrm{Be}$, neutral $\mathrm{Na}$, and Na-like $\mathrm{Mg}$ using a modified version of the Quantum Annealer Eigensolver (QAE) algorithm on D-Wave's quantum hardware. The results are benchmarked against relativistic configuration interaction with multiconfiguration Dirac Hartree-Fock (MCDHF) calculations using the General-purpose Relativistic Atomic Structure Package (GRASP), and simulated annealing. In our modified QAE, a zooming-and-sigma-annealing approach with a floating-point encoding scheme is adopted to estimate the ground-state eigenvalue and eigenvector of the relativistic Dirac-Coulomb Hamiltonian matrices ($H_{\mathrm{DC}}$) constructed from 11 or fewer configuration state functions (CSFs). For calculations with extended correlation orbital sets, we applied a CSF truncation scheme, retaining only CSFs (up to 12) that make significant contributions to the ground-state wavefunction. Our modified QAE precision is kept limited to three decimal places (up to 10 qubits). Hardware demonstrations on the D-Wave quantum processing unit (QPU) yielded results that were completely consistent with GRASP (at the chosen precision) in determining the magnetic dipole HFS constants, with accuracy varying across systems and $H_{\mathrm{DC}}$ matrix dimensions.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Closing the Social-Semantic Gap: SPSD for Edge-Based Prompt Compression in Cloud LLM Inference

arXiv:2606.19364v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The prefill stage of Large Language Model (LLM) inference is a growing contributor to cloud-scale energy cost. Many consumer-support and conversational prompts contain social scaffolding: politeness markers, apologetic preamble, repetition, and rapport-building language that is important for human communication but carries low marginal information for machine reasoning. We call this discrepancy the Social-Semantic Gap. We present SPSD (Sentiment Preserving Semantic Distillation), an edge-based pipeline that compresses user prompts using a 4-bit quantised Small Language Model before transmission to a cloud-deployed LLM. Evaluation on a 248-prompt corpus using Gemma-2-2B-Instruct (Q4_K_M) as the SLM and Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct as the cloud evaluation model yields a mean input token saving of 99.9 tokens per distilled call, with all 146 distilled calls yielding positive savings. Response quality, assessed by blind LLM-as-judge scoring across 121 pairs, is non-inferior to the raw path within a pre-specified 1-point margin on a 15-point rubric; the judge awarded 43 percent ties, 28 percent distilled wins, and 29 percent raw wins. Cosine similarity is mixed: mean 0.682, median 0.712, with 54.1 percent of pairs above the 0.70 reference threshold. Safety-critical domains are conservatively routed to passthrough via rule-based gates. Per-call net energy saving is estimated at 70-270 uWh under stated assumptions. SPSD shows that on-device prompt distillation can reduce cloud LLM input-token cost while preserving response quality within a practical non-inferiority margin.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Not Just How Much, But Where: Decomposing Epistemic Uncertainty into Per-Class Contributions

arXiv:2602.21160v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In safety-critical classification, the cost of failure is often asymmetric, yet Bayesian deep learning summarises epistemic uncertainty with a single scalar, mutual information (MI), that cannot distinguish whether a model's ignorance involves a benign or safety-critical class. We decompose MI into a per-class vector $C_k(x)=\sigma_k^{2}/(2\mu_k)$, with $\mu_k{=}\mathbb{E}[p_k]$ and $\sigma_k^2{=}\mathrm{Var}[p_k]$ across posterior samples. The decomposition follows from a second-order Taylor expansion of the entropy; the $1/\mu_k$ weighting corrects boundary suppression and makes $C_k$ comparable across rare and common classes. By construction $\sum_k C_k \approx \mathrm{MI}$, and a companion skewness diagnostic flags inputs where the approximation degrades. After characterising the axiomatic properties of $C_k$, we validate it on three tasks: (i) selective prediction for diabetic retinopathy, where critical-class $C_k$ reduces selective risk by 34.7\% over MI and 56.2\% over variance baselines; (ii) out-of-distribution detection on clinical and image benchmarks, where $\sum_k C_k$ achieves the highest AUROC and the per-class view exposes asymmetric shifts invisible to MI; and (iii) a controlled label-noise study in which $\sum_k C_k$ shows less sensitivity to injected aleatoric noise than MI under end-to-end Bayesian training, while both metrics degrade under transfer learning. Across all tasks, the quality of the posterior approximation shapes uncertainty at least as strongly as the choice of metric, suggesting that how uncertainty is propagated through the network matters as much as how it is measured.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Development of a symptom-based severity score anchored to health-related quality of life post-COVID-19 within the population-based EPILOC cohorts

Purpose Because simple symptom counts treat all symptoms as equally important and may not adequately capture the HRQoL impact of heterogeneous post-COVID-19 symptoms, we aimed to develop an HRQoL-anchored symptom severity score providing an interpretable measure of post-COVID-19 disease burden. Methods Baseline data from the population-based EPILOC and EPILOC Omicron surveys (adults aged 18-65 years) were used to develop a symptom-based severity score anchored to physical and mental HRQoL assessed with the SF-12. A two-stage modelling approach was applied to identify HRQoL-relevant symptoms and to derive symptom-specific weights for physical and mental component scores, incorporating 30 ordinal symptom severity variables. Symptom-specific weights were extracted to compute physical, mental, and composite severity scores. Score interpretation was examined using external reference measures, including EPILOC case status, self-reported health recovery, and functional consequences. Results A total of 19,004 participants (mean age 44.3 years, 59.6% female) were included. Sixteen symptoms contributed to the physical and eleven to the mental HRQoL score, with a limited subset accounting for most of the HRQoL loss. Severity scores were heavily right-skewed, with 50.6% of participants showing no measurable HRQoL impairment. Higher scores correlated with lower self-reported recovery, and increased probability of rehabilitation use and health-related changes in working time, supporting convergent and criterion-related validity. Conclusions This study introduces a transparent, HRQoL-anchored symptom severity score that measures graded post-COVID-19 burden beyond simple symptom counts. The score may be particularly suited for longitudinal assessment of recovery trajectories.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

TA-RAG: Tone-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Peer-Support Health Communication

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) successfully grounds large language model (LLM) outputs in trusted documents, but factual grounding alone is insufficient for sensitive peer-support health communication. In domains such as HIV peer support, responses must also be accessible, stigma-free, empathetic, and tailored to the recipient. This paper presents TA-RAG, a lightweight, prompt-based tone-aware RAG framework that embeds explicit tone control into a RAG pipeline without requiring model fine-tuning. We operationalise tone across four core components: stigma-free rewriting, readability adjustment, recipient adaptation, and empathy rephrasing. We evaluate TA-RAG through component-level tests using questions derived from HIV Online Learning Australia (HOLA), UNAIDS terminology guidance, readability metrics, peer-support standards from National Association of People with HIV Australia (NAPWHA), and a public empathy dataset. Results show that the TA-RAG's components improve their targeted communication quality while preserving key content. These findings emphasise that prompt-based tone control is a potential direction for making RAG outputs suitable for sensitive peer-support health communication.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

DREAM: Extending Vision-Language Models with Dual-Objective Encoding for Cross-Modal Retrieval

In today's media-driven world, the exponential growth of video content across domains such as surveillance, education, and entertainment has made retrieving semantically relevant videos via natural language queries increasingly critical. Early video retrieval systems relied on handcrafted features or shallow cross-modal mappings, limiting their ability to capture complex semantics and temporal dynamics. While large-scale vision-language models have improved cross-modal alignment, challenges remain in modeling fine-grained temporal dependencies and nuanced linguistic structures. In this paper, we introduce DREAM: Dual-path Representation Enhancement and Alignment Model, a novel multimodal framework that addresses these limitations through enhanced visual and textual encoding. DREAM incorporates a hybrid language modeling strategy that combines masked and permuted language modeling objectives to capture both local and global linguistic semantics. On the visual side, we design a hierarchical vision encoder with cascaded group attention, which integrates spatial and temporal information through multi-stage token interaction and coarse-to-fine attention refinement. We validate DREAM through comprehensive evaluations on the widely-used MSRVTT, MSVD and LSMDC benchmark datasets, where it achieves new state-of-the-art R1 scores of 49.4%, 49.7% and 27.3%, respectively. Qualitative analyses further show the model's ability to maintain coherent attention across frames and align complex queries with dynamic video content. These findings underscore the effectiveness of hierarchical attention and dual-objective textual modeling in enabling robust, context-aware video retrieval, and pave the way for future research in advancing cross-modal representation learning.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Flash-GRPO: Efficient Alignment for Video Diffusion via One-Step Policy Optimization

Group Relative Policy Optimization has emerged as essential for aligning video diffusion models with human preferences, but faces a critical computational bottleneck: training a 14B parametered model typically demands hundreds of GPU days per experiment. Existing efficiency methods reduce costs through sliding window subsampling training timesteps, but fundamentally compromise optimization, exhibiting severe instability and failing to reach full trajectory performance. We present Flash-GRPO, a single-step training framework that outperforms full trajectory training in alignment quality under low computational budgets while substantially improving training efficiency. Flash-GRPO addresses two critical challenges: iso-temporal grouping eliminates timestep-confounded variance by enforcing prompt-wise temporal consistency, decoupling policy performance from timestep difficulty; temporal gradient rectification neutralizes the time-dependent scaling factor that causes vastly inconsistent gradient magnitudes across timesteps. Experiments on 1.3B to 14B parameter models validate Flash-GRPO's effectiveness, demonstrating substantial training acceleration with consistent stability and state-of-the-art alignment quality.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Closing the Auto-Research Loop: An AI Co-Scientist for Production Search Ranking

arXiv:2603.22376v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present an AI Co-Scientist framework that closes the research loop for the production search-ranking system of a large online travel platform – pairing LLM agents with direct cloud-compute access so that idea generation, code implementation, GPU experimentation, and result analysis iterate end-to-end with a human scientist in the loop. The framework uses a hybrid agent architecture: single-LLM agents handle routine work, while multi-LLM consensus (GPT-5.2, Gemini Pro 3, Claude Opus 4.5) is invoked for higher-stakes decisions. On the production ranking task, a human-designed transformer baseline (V2) yielded $+0.118\%$ over a pre-transformer baseline (V1); the AI Co-Scientist's automated loop on top of V2 contributed an additional $+0.083\%$, for a combined $+0.201\%$ offline gain delivered in roughly one extra week of wall-clock time (single-run numbers; statistical limits discussed in the paper). The most useful AI proposals – unified long-sequence layouts, slot-type embeddings, and multi-phase learning-rate schedules – are standard practice in NLP and Vision but were absent from our production stack, suggesting that LLM agents can serve as cross-disciplinary connectors for ranking teams. We also report deployment context, negative results, and lessons learned.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Dose-efficient Quantum Phase Estimation in Lossy Optical Interferometry

arXiv:2606.14254v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Optical interferometry is a cornerstone technique for precise phase measurements across various fields. In many applications, for example, biological imaging, it often necessitates stringent limits on light intensity to prevent adverse effects on light-sensitive samples, a condition known as dose-limited regimes. Maximizing the precision per dose is therefore crucial. In quantum metrology, quantum correlations enable high precision in phase estimation while adhering to dose constraints. Nevertheless, photon loss, including absorption by a sample, substantially diminishes the benefits of quantum enhancement in interferometry. In this work, we experimentally investigate a dose-efficient approach to quantum phase estimation using sequential strategies in the presence of loss. Performance of sequential strategies with and without control is evaluated through quantum Fisher information (QFI) per dose. Experimental results show that both sequential strategies exceed the classical limit and outperform the parallel strategy using unbalanced N00N states. Notably, the control-enhanced sequential strategy attains superior QFI per dose, approaching the quantum limit. These results highlight the promise of sequential strategy for imaging and sensing in resource-constrained scenarios, marking a significant step toward practical and efficient quantum metrology in lossy environments.