Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12559

Feature-preserving Latent-EnKF for Data Assimilation of Flows with Shocks

Authors:

Hemanth Chandravamsi↗Hangchuan Hu↗Ponkrshnan Thiagarajan↗Tamer A. Zaki↗

arXiv:2606.12559v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) is widely adopted for sequential data assimilation, but fails for solutions with discontinuities, such as shocks in compressible flows. Uncertainty in shock location induces multimodal ensemble statistics that violate the Gaussian assumptions underlying the EnKF, producing large-scale spurious oscillations in the analysis state. We introduce a feature-preserving latent-EnKF that performs the ensemble update in a learned low-dimensional latent space, where shock and flow features admit a smooth manifold representation, thereby preserving sharp features during EnKF analysis. The updated latent state is mapped back to physical state through a shared decoder for all ensemble members. The algorithm eliminates the member-specific ordered training and positivity flooring used in prior approaches. Numerical experiments on a Sod shock tube and Mach 2 shock interaction with a 2D cylinder, using sparse and noisy observations, show accurate feature recovery of shocks and contact discontinuities without spurious oscillations.

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02.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24102

PORTER: Language-Grounded Event Representations for Portable Structured EHR Foundation Models

Authors:

Lin Lawrence Guo↗Adam Paul Yan↗Emily Vettese↗Lillian Sung↗

Most electronic health record (EHR) foundation models encode clinical events as discrete event tokens from a fixed vocabulary and therefore cannot directly represent events containing unseen concepts or new combinations of concepts and attributes such as numeric values. This limits transfer across institutions and even across deployment pipelines within the same institution. We introduce PORTER, a language-grounded structured EHR foundation model that decouples event representation from this fixed vocabulary. PORTER represents events through their descriptions using a frozen text encoder, integrates numeric values through a dedicated pathway, and learns clinical dynamics over patient timelines with an autoregressively pretrained temporal backbone. Across 74 clinical prediction tasks at a pediatric hospital, PORTER matched the mean AUROC of a fixed-vocabulary model with the same temporal backbone and pretraining objective. When the same patient timelines were rendered using event descriptions not seen during pretraining, PORTER transferred without retraining or vocabulary mapping, recovering 97.1% of the mean AUROC of a model trained directly on the target vocabulary. When transferred to MIMIC, PORTER outperformed the fixed-vocabulary model, which dropped 69% of events because their tokens were unseen. Mechanistic analyses showed cross-vocabulary transfer tracked preservation of patient-level representation geometry rather than the scale of the text encoder, and the numeric pathway improved sensitivity to magnitude without disrupting clinical concept identity. PORTER also achieved higher AUROC than a task-specific text serialization comparator, at 329-fold lower amortized compute. PORTER is a step toward vocabulary-independent EHR foundation models that reduce the need for vocabulary harmonization while preserving in-domain performance and enabling efficient cross-task reuse.

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03.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16580

Multi-Modal Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Network with Mixture of Experts for Soil Organic Carbon Prediction

Authors:

Daniele Mos↗Felipe Drummond↗Anton Bossenbroek↗Soufiane el Khinifri↗

Top-soil organic carbon (SOC) prediction is fundamental to agricultural sustainability, land use policy and fertilization planning. Existing approaches face two limitations: they pair hand-crafted covariates with classical ML or single-modal deep models that miss rich spectral and temporal information, and grid-based architectures ignore the irregular spatial structure of field measurements. We introduce SpTGNN, a multi-modal spatio-temporal graph neural network addressing both. SpTGNN represents soil measurements as nodes in a heterogeneous graph with three edge types (spatial proximity, spectral similarity, elevation), and applies relational graph attention to learn separate patterns per relation. A fine-tuned TerraMind encoder extracts node features from Sentinel-2, Sentinel-1 and DEM signals, combined with per-sample environmental covariates and learned positional and temporal embeddings. A sparse Mixture-of-Experts module fuses the four streams via top-$k$ routing. Uncertainty is captured by pairing heteroscedastic regression (aleatoric) with deep ensembles (epistemic), and a Moran's $I$ penalty regularizes spatial autocorrelation. We evaluate on a global SOC corpus split into three regional instances ($\sim$49k samples globally, Africa $\sim$26k, Europe $\sim$14k). Our 5-member deep ensemble reports $R^2=0.762$, RMSE $=3.51\pm0.48$ g/kg and MAPE $=22.9\%$ on the Africa test split, improving over a tabular XGBoost baseline; the best single checkpoint reaches validation $R^2=0.864$. Ablations confirm the heterogeneous graph, MoE fusion and fine-tuned backbone each contribute substantively, and the ensemble UQ stack achieves post-calibration ECE of $0.031$ (hybrid) and $0.026$ ($\beta$-NLL). To our knowledge, this is the first framework to unify foundation-model feature extraction, heterogeneous graph attention and decomposed uncertainty quantification for SOC estimation.

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04.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2505.19937

ALAS: An Automatic Latent Alignment Score for Audio Language Models

Authors:

Pooneh Mousavi↗Yingzhi Wang↗Mirco Ravanelli↗Cem Subakan↗

Large Language Models (LLMs) are extended into Speech-LLMs, and the quality of the audio–text alignment they learn affects most downstream Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) behavior. Yet despite a growth of fusion strategies, there is no standard way to measure how well a Speech-LLM internally binds audio frames to text tokens. We introduce ALAS (Automatic Latent Alignment Score), a model and task-agnostic metric that probes the LLM's per-layer hidden states, scoring the cross-modal cosine similarity between audio and text representations against a Whisper-derived reference. ALAS needs only a frozen forward pass and an off-the-shelf ASR reference, with no training or fitted classifier, and is calibrated to an interpretable uniform baseline comparable across tasks. Applying ALAS to four open-source Speech-LLMs (AF3, Qwen2-Audio, Qwen-Omni, SALMONN) across emotion recognition (IEMOCAP), open-ended SQA (LibriSQA), and multi-choice audio understanding (MMAU-speech), we find that the depth and strength of alignment reflect each model's audio-encoder design and the acoustic-versus-semantic demands of the task, and that ALAS tracks but does not duplicate task accuracy, exposing models that score well without genuinely grounding in the audio. We release ALAS as an open-source library so that practitioners can probe their own Speech-LLMs or try it on new tasks.

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05.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18272

Mitigating Anchoring Bias in LLM-Based Agents for Energy-Efficient 6G Autonomous Networks

Authors:

Hatim Chergui↗Claudia Carballo Gonz\'alez↗Farhad Rezazadeh↗Merouane Debbah↗

arXiv:2606.18272v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents an autonomous agentic resource negotiation framework designed to enable zero-touch network slicing in 6G architectures using Large Language Model (LLM) agents. While LLMs offer powerful reasoning capabilities, we demonstrate that such agents inherently suffer from anchoring bias, rigidly adhering to initial heuristic proposals and causing severe network over-provisioning. To systematically mitigate this cognitive bias, we propose a novel randomized anchoring strategy modeled via a Truncated 3-Parameter Weibull distribution. This mathematically bounded approach seamlessly integrates with burst-aware Digital Twins (DTs) employing Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) to rigorously guarantee strict Service Level Agreement (SLA) tail-latencies. To validate our methodology, we introduce and prove the Bimodal Constraint-Avoidance Utility Theorem, demonstrating that while feasible negotiations follow classical convex bounds, highly constrained scenarios undergo a phase transition governed by an inverse rational decay envelope. Empirical results generated using a locally hosted 1B-parameter model (\texttt{otel-llm-1b-it}) confirm these dual-regime bounds. Our cognitive de-biasing successfully dismantles rigid negotiation patterns, forcing agents into active exploration to safely ride SLA boundaries and boost system energy savings up to 25\%. Crucially, the lightweight 1B LLM achieves sub-second inference latencies (0.95s mean), ensuring our multi-agent framework is compatible with the operational timescales of the O-RAN non-Real-Time RAN Intelligent Controller (non-RT RIC)\footnote{Our source code is available for non-commercial use at https://github.com/HatimChergui.

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06.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.02283

Quantum optimal control of the Dicke manifold in dipolar Rydberg atom arrays

Authors:

Ivy Pannier-G\"unther↗Vikas Buchemmavari↗Pablo M. Poggi↗Ivan H. Deutsch↗

arXiv:2606.02283v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The ability to engineer and control quantum states of many-body systems is a central challenge in quantum information science. For a register of $N$ qubits, the full Hilbert space dimension grows exponentially as $2^N$, rendering generic state preparation and control infeasible without exploiting structure or symmetry. A particularly important and physically motivated restriction is to the fully symmetric subspace, spanned by the Dicke states, which are simultaneous eigenstates of collective spin $J=N/2$. Ensembles of Rydberg atoms interacting via electric dipoles in two-dimensional tweezer arrays form a promising platform for achieving such control. However, the finite range of dipole-dipole interactions poses a challenge to generating and controlling the Dicke manifold because the Hamiltonian incurs leakage from the computational subspace. To counteract this leakage, we perform quantum optimal control algorithms on a truncated Hilbert space according to our newly developed method of ``irrep distillation'' (IRD), which captures the process by which the symmetric subspace couples to leakage error-spaces, using only linear-scaling Hilbert dimension. We implement gradient ascent pulse engineering (GrAPE) on control schemes with little or no local addressing, to generate resourceful states like Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger, Dicke, and extremal quantum states. We benchmark each scheme of IRD-GrAPE for its quantum speed limit (QSL), as well as exactly testing pulse fidelities on small system sizes and predicting fidelities using higher-order IRD on larger systems.

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07.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15651

Self-Questioning Vision-Language Models: Reinforcement Learning for Compositional Visual Reasoning

Authors:

Saraswathy Amjith↗

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are AI systems that process both images and text, yet they often struggle with compositional visual reasoning questions that require chaining multiple steps together, such as identifying objects, counting them, and comparing the results. Existing approaches improve this reasoning by training models on human-written step-by-step explanations, but creating these annotations is expensive and difficult to scale. We propose a self-questioning framework that trains a VLM to break visual questions into smaller sub-questions and answer each one before producing a final response, using a reinforcement learning algorithm called Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). The model is never shown examples of how to decompose questions, it discovers this behavior on its own, guided by a reward signal that scores whether the output contains sub-questions and whether the final answer is correct. We apply this framework to a 3-billion-parameter model, training on both synthetic scenes of geometric shapes (CLEVR) and real-world photographs (A-OKVQA). On A-OKVQA, both self-questioning and standard reinforcement learning substantially improve accuracy over the untrained model (52.2% and 51.6% vs. 46.8%). We introduce the first self-questioning VLM by rewarding not only the final answer like standard RL but additionally for generating intermediate sub-questions, enabling it to discover compositional decomposition strategies. These results suggest that teaching AI systems to ask themselves intermediate questions is a promising strategy for complex visual reasoning, particularly when the difficulty of a question warrants explicit step-by-step decomposition.

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08.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2604.11197

MedP-CLIP: Medical CLIP with Region-Aware Prompt Integration

Authors:

Jiahui Peng↗He Yao↗Jingwen Li↗Yanzhou Su↗Sibo Ju↗Yujie Lu↗Jin Ye↗Hongchun Lu↗Xue Li↗Lincheng Jiang↗Min Zhu↗Junlong Cheng↗…

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has demonstrated outstanding performance in global image understanding and zero-shot transfer through large-scale text-image alignment. However, the core of medical image analysis often lies in the fine-grained understanding of specific anatomical structures or lesion regions. Therefore, precisely comprehending region-of-interest (RoI) information provided by medical professionals or perception models becomes crucial. To address this need, we propose MedP-CLIP, a region-aware medical vision-language model (VLM). MedP-CLIP innovatively integrates medical prior knowledge and designs a feature-level region prompt integration mechanism, enabling it to flexibly respond to various prompt forms (e.g., points, bounding boxes, masks) while maintaining global contextual awareness when focusing on local regions. We pre-train the model on a meticulously constructed large-scale dataset (containing over 6.4 million medical images and 97.3 million region-level annotations), equipping it with cross-disease and cross-modality fine-grained spatial semantic understanding capabilities. Experiments demonstrate that MedP-CLIP significantly outperforms baseline methods in various medical tasks, including zero-shot recognition, interactive segmentation, and empowering multimodal large language models. This model provides a scalable, plug-and-play visual backbone for medical AI, combining holistic image understanding with precise regional analysis.

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09.

PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-18 DOI: HASH:6e8442307a2a29c945e26cd772b8b374

Ten simple rules for turning your qualifying exam into an NIH-style fellowship proposal: A guide for graduate students

Authors:

Courtney Peña-Lima↗

by Courtney Peña-Lima, Cameron S. Bader, Brendan K. Ball, Troy C. Dildine, Mekhala V. Dissanayake, Iris van ‘t Erve, Albina Ibrayeva, Amy Nippert, M.K. Quinn, Chelse Spinner, Samuel Thompson, Antonio Tomasso, Crystal M. Botham Qualifying exams, often referred to as “quals” or candidacy exams, are an important milestone in doctoral programs. Although the style of quals varies greatly by program and institution, it is usually a proposal that requires students to develop research ideas as well as their scientific writing skills. Many quals are modeled after funding mechanisms that graduate students can apply to and on a topic that the student will pursue in their dissertation. This paper offers graduate students a step-by-step guide on how to turn their quals into a fellowship-style research proposal, using National Institutes of Health (NIH) mechanisms as a benchmark, as this is the norm within US research institutions. This paper will be most useful for students who have completed or are in the process of completing proposal-based qualifying exams, usually in the second year of a doctoral program.

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10.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25 DOI: arXiv:2606.26021

Privacy Vulnerabilities of Attention Layers in Tabular Foundation Models and Protection of High-Risk Queries

Authors:

T\^ania Carvalho↗Maxime Cordy↗

arXiv:2606.26021v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tabular foundation models are commonly assumed to present limited privacy concerns as they are often pre-trained on large collections of synthetic data. However, these models leverage in-context learning, where sensitive records may be provided directly at inference time as labelled context examples. In this paper, we demonstrate that predictions generated via the attention mechanism leak sufficient information to enable effective Membership Inference Attacks (MIAs). To highlight this vulnerability, we propose AMIA (Attention-based Membership Inference Attack), a shadow-model-free attack that exploits the concentration of transformer attention patterns. Our results show that attention mechanisms reveal strong membership signals, which exceed classical confidence-based attacks, achieving an average gain of 7.7\%, specially in low false-positive regimes. To mitigate this risk, we introduce an inference-time defence inspired by $k$-anonymity principles. This approach reduces the uniqueness of context-key representations without introducing random noise or retraining the model. By targeting only high-risk queries identified through AMIA scores, the defence substantially reduces membership leakage of this attack by an average of 50\% and 25\% against confidence-based attacks, while preserving predictive utility with only 3.9\% performance degradation. Beyond showing that context examples are vulnerable, we further demonstrate that fine-tuning introduces an additional source of privacy risk. In particular, samples whose prediction confidence increases after fine-tuning become more susceptible to MIAs, indicating that fine-tuning can amplify memorisation and expose sensitive training information through confidence shifts.

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11.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15124

Programmable Gauge-Field Textures with Ultracold Atoms in Momentum Space

Authors:

Hongru Wang↗Hang Li↗Yichen Pan↗Yuyan Luo↗Bryce Gadway↗Tao Chen↗Bo Yan↗

arXiv:2606.15124v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Synthetic gauge fields with ultracold atoms offer a route to quantum matter in which electromagnetic environments can be designed rather than merely imposed. While the Harper-Hofstadter model has been realized in several cold-atom systems, existing implementations are largely limited to spatially uniform magnetic fluxes. Here we experimentally realize a highly programmable two-dimensional momentum-state lattice of ultracold atoms with local control over the Peierls phase pattern, enabling direct implementation of Harper-Hofstadter Hamiltonians with tunable and spatially structured synthetic gauge fields. We observe a crossover from ballistic to strongly flux-modified bulk dynamics with suppressed transport. By introducing a synthetic electric field through site-dependent energy gradients, we further demonstrate Hall-type transverse drift arising from the interplay between electric and magnetic fields. In addition, we engineer a synthetic flux domain wall separating regions with opposite magnetic fluxes and observe anisotropic propagation guided along the interface. These results move cold-atom gauge-field engineering from uniform magnetic backgrounds toward designer gauge textures, providing an experimental setting for transport across programmable topological interfaces.

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12.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19895

A fast direct solver based neural network for solving PDEs

Authors:

Jashwanth Reddy Kadaru↗Vaishnavi Gujjula↗

arXiv:2606.19895v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The matrices arising from large scale $N$-body problems can be efficiently represented using hierarchical matrices, whose key idea is that the admissible off-diagonal sub-matrices can be well approximated by low-rank matrices across a hierarchy of matrix partitions. HODLR (Hierarchical Off-Diagonal Low-Rank) matrices are a subclass of hierarchical matrices in which all off-diagonal submatrices at every level of a recursive binary partition are low-rank. In this article, we present a neural network that learns the inverse operation of HODLR matrices based on the fast direct solver for HODLR matrices developed by Ambikasaran and Darve (2013). We further extend the architecture to learn nonlinear solution operators associated with PDEs by replacing some of the linear layers with deep sub-networks. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed architecture by performing a comprehensive set of experiments that include (i) solving a linear problem such as the Fredholm integral equation of the second kind, (ii) solving PDEs such as the nonlinear Schrödinger equation, Burgers' equation, and the steady-state Darcy's flow equation, (iii) generalization study across varying parameter values, (iv) comparing the inference time of the proposed network with the run time of a classical numerical solver, and (v) comparing the proposed network with some of the existing neural operator learning networks.

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13.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.08090

Fast LLM-Based Semantic Filtering: From a Unified Framework to an Adaptive Two-Phase Method

Authors:

Kyoungmin Kim↗Martin Catheland↗Anastasia Ailamaki↗

arXiv:2606.08090v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Evaluating a natural-language yes/no predicate over a document corpus under an accuracy target - the semantic filter - is a cornerstone of LLM-based data processing. Calling the LLM on every document (the oracle) is prohibitive, so cascades pair the oracle with a fast proxy. As deployed today, they leave four limitations on the table. (1) Each cascade family - model-free clustering, prebuilt small-LLM proxies, online-trained proxies - commits to a single representation and pipeline, and wins on only a narrow query regime. (2) The strongest online proxy invests in a custom training scheme on a bi-encoder over dense embeddings, missing the token-level evidence richer predicates require. (3) The proxy is trained against binary yes/no labels, wasting the LLM's per-document confidence at the boundary documents it most needs to learn. (4) Existing calibrations add a uniform safety margin, conflating genuine proxy uncertainty with small-sample noise and inflating cascade cost. We address these by (1) composing families adaptively - model-free clustering first, online proxy only when needed, with oracle calls shared across phases; (2) replacing the cosine bi-encoder with a hybrid of off-the-shelf token-aware models; (3) training the proxy with the oracle's per-document confidence as a soft label; and (4) a calibration that adds the safety margin only where the labeled sample is sparse. We are also the first to use the oracle's per-document confidence for three purposes: a query-level difficulty compass, a lower bound on the minimum oracle calls any proxy-based cascade can make, and the proxy's soft training label. At a 90% accuracy target on three 10K-document corpora, our methods are 1.6-2.0x faster than the best prior method per corpus and meet the target on 95% of queries; the BER-derived lower bound indicates a further ~4-20x of headroom for future work.

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14.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16273

Generative Modeling on Metric Graphs via Neural Optimal Transport

Authors:

Alessandro Micheli↗Yueqi Cao↗Anthea Monod↗Samir Bhatt↗

arXiv:2606.16273v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce, to our knowledge, the first deep generative modeling framework for probability distributions continuously supported on compact metric graphs. Given source and target measures on a metric graph, our method embeds the graph into a smooth ambient space, solves an entropic Kantorovich problem via a neural semidual parameterization, and projects generated samples back onto the original graph. We study two embedded geometries: an extrinsic Euclidean realization and the intrinsic tropical Abel–Jacobi embedding into the Jacobian torus. In both cases, the resulting generator is graph-supported by construction. We prove that, in the joint limit of increasing neural expressivity, the learned generator converges weakly to a valid transport coupling between the original graph measures. Empirically, across a range of geometrically distinct graphs, our method matches or improves upon heuristic transport baselines based on discrete graph OT, while scaling more favorably. Finally, we demonstrate scalability on real-world urban mobility data by training our model on one million Uber pickup locations in Manhattan, New York City.

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15.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2602.09533

Autoregressive Direct Preference Optimization

Authors:

Masanari Oi↗Mahiro Ukai↗Masahiro Kaneko↗Naoaki Okazaki↗Nakamasa Inoue↗

arXiv:2602.09533v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Direct preference optimization (DPO) has emerged as a promising approach for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, the widespread reliance on the response-level Bradley-Terry (BT) model may limit its full potential, as the reference and learnable models are assumed to be autoregressive only after deriving the objective function. Motivated by this limitation, we revisit the theoretical foundations of DPO and propose a novel formulation that explicitly introduces the autoregressive assumption prior to applying the BT model. By reformulating and extending DPO, we derive a novel variant, termed Autoregressive DPO (ADPO), that explicitly integrates autoregressive modeling into the preference optimization framework. Without violating the theoretical foundations, the derived loss takes an elegant form: it shifts the summation operation in the DPO objective outside the log-sigmoid function. Furthermore, through theoretical analysis of ADPO, we show that there exist two length measures to be considered when designing DPO-based algorithms: the token length $\mu$ and the feedback length $\mu'$. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to explicitly distinguish these two measures and analyze their implications for preference optimization in LLMs.

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16.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.10820

K-Forcing: Joint Next-K-Token Decoding via Push-Forward Language Modeling

Authors:

Zhiwei Tang↗Yuanyu He↗Yizheng Han↗Wangbo Zhao↗Jiasheng Tang↗Fan Wang↗Bohan Zhuang↗

Autoregressive (AR) language modeling is the dominant paradigm for text generation, yet its sequential token-by-token decoding makes inference memory-bound and inefficient. Existing acceleration approaches, such as speculative decoding and diffusion language models, can yield speedups under certain conditions but do not directly address high-load batch serving–the scenario most critical for industrial-scale deployment. We introduce K-Forcing, a push-forward language modeling paradigm for joint next-k-token decoding. K-Forcing distills an existing AR model into a conditional push-forward mapping–one that transforms independent uniform noise variables into a joint sample of multiple future tokens in a single forward pass. This design preserves fixed-length outputs, reuses the AR teacher backbone, and remains compatible with standard AR serving infrastructure. We train this mapping via progressive self-forcing distillation, which gradually expands the prediction window while enabling the student to closely match the sequence distribution of the AR teacher. We evaluate K-Forcing on LM1B and OpenWebText using a standard causal Transformer backbone. When aggressively configured to generate k = 4 tokens per forward pass, K-Forcing delivers approximately 2.4-3.5x speedup across different batch sizes, while incurring modest quality degradation relative to its AR teacher. As inference increasingly dominates the lifetime compute cost of modern LLMs, K-Forcing offers a promising route toward accelerating AR generation under real-world high-load deployment.

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17.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2605.03940

Reentrant value fields as delayed coupled reaction-diffusion systems on finite graphs

Authors:

Karsten Bohlen↗

arXiv:2605.03940v4 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We describe a dynamical system in which a symbolic field is coupled to a geometric field via a bipartite Hilbert-Schmidt kernel. The system is fully described by a retarded functional differential equation (RFDE) on the history space, subject to Lipschitz and small gain conditions. We show that the RFDE is well-posed under constant input and that it admits a compact global attractor. The principal subsystem $(H_L, X_R, P)$, which is comprised of the two primary fields as well as an executive field, is shown to be globally stable independent of delay, provided that the interfield coupling satisfies $C_{\mathcal{K}}^2

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18.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.14949

Initiation of Superradiance from Different Collective Spin States

Authors:

Adnan Alabbar↗Zhenghao Zhang↗Girish S. Agarwal↗

arXiv:2606.14949v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Superradiance is an extensive cooperative spontaneous emission phenomenon. Some atomic collective spin states exhibit it. However, distinct initial states differ in their decay dynamics. Dicke states with different numbers of excitations have their peak emission intensity shifted in time depending on the number of excitations. Emission intensity in atomic coherent states depends on their polarization. Some specific states undergo a squeezing controlled crossover, making the emission character dependent on the amount of squeezing in the state. We present detailed results on the superradiant dynamics of a representative selection of Dicke states. For large N, we are able to predict fairly accurately the pulse profile in each case using the mean field approximation, an approach based on the Fokker Planck Equation. We also present results on the intensity correlation function of the emission.

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19.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25 DOI: arXiv:2505.23866

Towards Understanding The Calibration Benefits of Sharpness-Aware Minimization

Authors:

Chengli Tan↗Yubo Zhou↗Haishan Ye↗Guang Dai↗Junmin Liu↗Zengjie Song↗Jiangshe Zhang↗Zixiang Zhao↗Yunda Hao↗Yong Xu↗

arXiv:2505.23866v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep neural networks have been increasingly used in safety-critical applications such as medical diagnosis and autonomous driving. However, many studies suggest that they are prone to being poorly calibrated and have a propensity for overconfidence, which may have disastrous consequences. In this paper, unlike standard training such as stochastic gradient descent, we show that the recently proposed sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) counteracts this tendency towards overconfidence. The theoretical analysis suggests that SAM allows us to learn models that are already well-calibrated by implicitly maximizing the entropy of the predictive distribution. Inspired by this finding, we further propose a variant of SAM, coined as CSAM, to ameliorate model calibration. Extensive experiments on various datasets, including ImageNet-1K, demonstrate the benefits of SAM in reducing calibration error. Meanwhile, CSAM performs even better than SAM and consistently achieves lower calibration error than other approaches

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20.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16985

Dynestyx: A Probabilistic Programming Library for Dynamical Systems

Authors:

Daniel Waxman↗Dmitry Batenkov↗John Feser↗Andy Zane↗Eli Bingham↗Youssef Marzouk↗Matthew E. Levine↗

arXiv:2606.16985v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: State-space models (SSMs) are the standard formalism for Bayesian treatment of dynamical systems, with natural applications in statistics, signal processing, and machine learning. Despite their importance in both theory and application, dynamical systems have proven difficult to incorporate in modern probabilistic programming languages (PPLs), making state-of-the-art methods less accessible to practitioners and introducing friction in following the "Bayesian workflow." We introduce dynestyx, a probabilistic programming library with first-class support for SSMs, including state-of-the-art methods in the estimation of both states and parameters. Through a single, unified interface, users may specify arbitrary priors for discrete-time or continuous-time dynamical systems, perform inference over mixed-effect data, and make state and parameter estimates with principled uncertainty quantification.

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21.

PLOS Medicine 2026-05-13 DOI: HASH:09e1b7c2032e6adf96b8b52c7c1c674e

Contribution of nosocomial transmission to <i>Klebsiella pneumoniae</i> neonatal sepsis in Africa and South Asia: An observational study of infection clusters inferred from pathogen genomics and temporal data

Authors:

Erkison Ewomazino Odih↗

by Erkison Ewomazino Odih, Jabir A. Abdulahi, Anne V. Amulele, Matthew Bates, Eva Heinz, Weiming Hu, Kajal Jain, Rindidzani Magobo, Courtney P. Olwagen, John M. Tembo, Tolbert Sonda, Jonathan Strysko, Caroline C. Tigoi, Kyle Bittinger, Jennifer Cornick, Ebenezer Foster-Nyarko, Wilson Gumbi, Steven M. Jones, Chileshe L. Musyani, Carolyn M. McGann, Ahmed M. Moustafa, Patrick Musicha, James C. L. Mwansa, Moreka L. Ndumba, Thomas D. Stanton, Donwilliams O. Omuoyo, Oliver Pearse, Laura T. Phillips, Paul J. Planet, Charlene M. C. Rodrigues, Fatou Secka, Kirsty Sands, Erin Theiller, Allan M. Zuza, Sulagna Basu, Grace J. Chan, Kenneth C. Iregbu, Jean-Baptiste Mazarati, Semaria Solomon Alemayehu, Timothy R. Walsh, Rabaab Zahra, Angela Dramowski, Sombo Fwoloshi, Appiah-Korang Labi, Lola Madrid, Noah Obeng-Nkrumah, David Ojok, Boaz D. Wadugu, Andrew C. Whitelaw, Anudita Bhargava, Atul Jindal, Ramesh K. Agarwal, Alexander M. Aiken, James A. Berkley, Susan E. Coffin, Nicholas A. Feasey, Nelesh P. Govender, Davidson H. Hamer, Shabir A. Madhi, Mari Jeeva Sankar, Kelly L. Wyres, Kathryn E. Holt Background Klebsiella pneumoniae is the leading cause of sepsis among neonates in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in Africa and Asia, contributing substantially to the overall burden of antimicrobial-resistant infections and mortality among neonates globally. Pathogen sequencing has been used to investigate case clusters and confirm nosocomial transmission in a small number of neonatal units. Here we utilise pathogen sequence data to estimate the fraction of K. pneumoniae neonatal sepsis attributable to nosocomial transmission in African and South Asian countries. Methods and findings We estimated the proportion of invasive K. pneumoniae disease involved in nosocomial transmission clusters in a given neonatal unit, using single-linkage clustering based on pairwise temporal and genetic distances estimated from bacterial whole-genome sequences aggregated from 10 contributing studies. Analysing 1,523 K. pneumoniae isolates from 27 units in 13 countries in Africa and South Asia between 2013 and 2023, we inferred 156 nosocomial transmission clusters, ranging from 2 to 188 neonates each (83 of the clusters comprised ≥3 cases). Overall, we estimated that 1,035 neonatal infections (68.0%) were part of nosocomial transmission clusters. Excluding the first infection in each cluster as a potential index case, we estimate at least 879 (57.7%) infections were acquired via nosocomial transmission. Sensitivity analyses showed that results were robust to the choice of genetic distance estimation methods and thresholds used to define clusters, and cluster estimates were stable over temporal distance thresholds ranging from 2 to 8 weeks. Isolates were mostly extended-spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL) producers (90.9%) and included 172 multi-locus sequence types (STs). Fourteen STs, including several globally recognised multidrug-resistant lineages, were associated with transmission clusters at multiple units, and these were collectively responsible for two-thirds of all infections. Carriage of carbapenemase genes (adjusted odds ratio, aOR = 2.08 [95% confidence interval, CI: 1.04, 4.14]; p = 0.04) and ESBL genes (aOR = 2.48 [95% CI: 1.26, 4.90]; p = 0.006) were significantly positively associated with transmission in a logistic regression model with site as a covariate. Limitations of this study include the lack of sufficient clinical data to allow high-resolution investigation of transmission dynamics and lack of facility-level data to investigate contributors to the observed differences in transmission burden across sites. Conclusions Nosocomial transmission contributes to a substantial proportion of K. pneumoniae sepsis in neonatal care units in Africa and South Asia. Reducing transmission within these settings through improved infection prevention and control and other measures could substantially reduce the neonatal sepsis burden. A high burden of transmission clusters is associated with the same drug-resistant lineages that are recognised as high-risk clones associated with hospital outbreaks in high-income countries, indicating global connectivity of the antimicrobial-resistant pathogen population.

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22.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2605.03065

OGPO: Sample Efficient Full-Finetuning of Generative Control Policies

Authors:

Sarvesh Patil↗Mitsuhiko Nakamoto↗Manan Agarwal↗Shashwat Saxena↗Jesse Zhang↗Giri Anantharaman↗Cleah Winston↗Chaoyi Pan↗Douglas Chen↗Nai-Chieh Huang↗Zeynep Temel↗Oliver Kroemer↗…

arXiv:2605.03065v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Generative control policies (GCPs), such as diffusion- and flow-based control policies, have emerged as effective parameterizations for robot learning. This work introduces Off-policy Generative Policy Optimization (OGPO), a sample-efficient algorithm for finetuning GCPs that maintains off-policy critic networks to maximize data reuse and propagate policy gradients through the full generative process of the policy via a modified PPO objective, using critics as the terminal reward. OGPO achieves state-of-the-art performance on manipulation tasks spanning multi-task settings, high-precision insertion, and dexterous control. To our knowledge, it is also the only method that can fine-tune poorly-initialized behavior cloning policies to near full task-success with no expert data in the online replay buffer, and does so with few task-specific hyperparameter tuning. Through extensive empirical investigations, we demonstrate that OGPO drastically outperforms methods alternatives on policy steering and learning residual corrections, and identify the key mechanisms behind its performance. We further introduce practical stabilization tricks, including success-buffer regularization, two-sided conservative advantages, and Q-variance reduction, to mitigate critic over-exploitation across state- and pixel-based settings. Beyond proposing OGPO, we conduct a systematic empirical study of GCP finetuning, identifying the stabilizing mechanisms and failure modes that govern successful off-policy full-policy improvement.

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23.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20160

Multi-objective design of photon blockade for bright single-photon sources

Authors:

Sunkyu Yu↗Xianji Piao↗Namkyoo Park↗

arXiv:2606.20160v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-quality single-photon sources, realized through saturable emitters, photon blockade, or heralded pair generation, are indispensable building blocks for photonic quantum platforms. Although these mechanisms suppress multiphoton emission through distinct principles typically captured by analytical models, their practical implementation is constrained by conflicting requirements for purity, brightness, and indistinguishability, which must be balanced within high-dimensional design landscapes. Here, we propose a computational framework for optimizing competing metrics of single-photon sources. Building on a Liouville-space adjoint formulation that efficiently evaluates multiple objectives in Markovian open quantum systems, we develop a Jacobian-based update, which ensures first-order monotonic reduction of multi-objective costs. By incorporating simulated annealing to escape gradient-vanishing plateaus, our framework achieves a design success rate of nearly 60 % for photon blockade with g2(0) smaller than 0.1 and theoretically bounded brightness across a broad parameter space, without any analytical guidance. This framework provides a general recipe for multi-objective design of open quantum systems.

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24.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15485

The Perils of Agency: How Developers Perceive, Prioritize, and Address Risks in Agentic AI Products

Authors:

Hao-Ping Lee↗Jessica He↗David Piorkowski↗Thomas Serban von Davier↗Jodi Forlizzi↗Sauvik Das↗

arXiv:2606.15485v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic AI systems act autonomously, use tools, adapt to context, and operate in complex real-world environments. However, these same characteristics can create or exacerbate product risks. We studied how industry developers (n=35) perceive, prioritize, and address the risks in their agentic AI products. We found that developers' perceptions of risk were closely tied to the qualities that made the product agentic, such as autonomy, tool use, and usage in a real-world context. Developers prioritized product and business risks before considering downstream societal risks like job displacement and end-user privacy. This prioritization also impacted developers' ability and motivation to mitigate agentic risks. Finally, developers lacked mature controls for containing agentic risks, often relying on constraining the same characteristics that make agents useful: e.g., autonomy and goal complexity. These findings reveal a capability vs. risk control tension in agentic AI development: developers need to address risks that emerge from agentic capabilities, yet they currently have limited support for doing so without constraining agentic functionality.

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25.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.14789

Plateau Gaps of Poisson Correctors Encode Metastable Reaction Rates

Authors:

Sang Yang↗Zhixin Peng↗

arXiv:2606.14789v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Metastable reaction rates are commonly inferred from transition-state fluxes, mean first-passage times, or fitted kinetic models. We show that they are directly encoded in the plateau gap of an occupation-time Poisson corrector. For a centered basin-occupation observable, the Poisson corrector develops metastable plateaus in the reactant and product basins, and their separation determines the forward and backward transition rates. This construction requires only the generator, stationary measure, and metastable partition, and therefore does not rely on a predefined transition-state surface. In overdamped and underdamped double-well dynamics, the plateau-gap rate recovers the Kramers, Grote-Hynes, and Pollak-Grabert-Hänggi hierarchy. The same corrector-martingale decomposition yields a reactive-noise density, revealing where stochastic forcing contributes to transitions in configuration or phase space. Thus, reaction rates and their fluctuation sources emerge from a single corrector field.

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