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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Enhancing Quantum Machine Learning with Anyons

arXiv:2606.16090v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The power of quantum computing and quantum machine learning relies on harnessing uniquely quantum phenomena as computational resources. While superposition, coherence and entanglement have been central to this effort, the role of particle exchange statistics remains largely unexplored. Here, we introduce a quantum kernel framework that unifies bosonic, fermionic, and anyonic (fractional) exchange statistics within a single learning paradigm. We study this family of kernels from three perspectives. At the representation level, Haar-averaged effective-dimension analysis shows that fractional exchange phases access feature-space directions inaccessible to the purely symmetric or antisymmetric limits. At the level of kernel geometry, the corresponding Gram matrices show greater separation from the distinguishable-particle baseline and reduced label-dependent model complexity. Finally, on learning benchmarks, anyonic kernels consistently outperform their bosonic and fermionic counterparts, with stronger target alignment and more favorable class geometry. Together, these findings show that exchange statistics reshape the structure and geometry of quantum feature space, leading to enhanced learning performance. Our work identifies particle exchange statistics as an overlooked computational ingredient for quantum machine learning and provides the first systematic comparison of quantum learning models across exchange phases.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Learning to Distort: Weakly-Supervised Image Quality Transfer for Prostate DWI Correction

Single-shot echo-planar prostate diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) is frequently complicated by geometric distortions, which impact the ability to derive reliable diagnoses from such images. Developing automated correction methods is challenged by the absence of paired distorted and undistorted clinical scans. In this paper, we first propose a novel weakly-supervised image quality transfer (IQT) framework from undistorted to distorted images that utilizes image quality assessment (IQA) signals to supervise the transfer process. Unlike traditional methods that require expensive, voxel-wise paired data or resort to developing unpaired algorithms, our approach utilizes image-level quality labels (here, distorted vs. undistorted) to establish latent quality prototypes within a pre-trained feature space. Recognizing that simulating realistic distortions is more reliable than direct unpaired correction, we describe a weakly-supervised prototype flow matching algorithm to explicitly regularize generative trajectories towards distorted prototypes, producing realistic susceptibility artifacts that mimic clinical degradations. By synthesizing these realistic pairs, we enable a second IQT model to be trained in the forward direction for distortion correction. Experimental results demonstrate that our generated images successfully mimic the diagnostic interference of real-world artifacts, which leads to more capable distortion correction IQT models. In addition to qualitative comparisons, we also conduct exhaustive quantitative evaluations that compare our approach with existing unpaired approaches (e.g., CycleGAN, UNIT-DDPM, and OT-FM) - as either forward or reverse alternatives - by assessing clinical downstream task performance in PI-RADS and Gleason score classification, using both in-distribution and external data sets.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Direct Fisher Score Estimation for Likelihood Maximization

arXiv:2506.06542v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the problem of likelihood maximization when the likelihood function is intractable but model simulations are readily available. We propose a sequential, gradient-based optimization method that directly models the Fisher score based on a local score matching technique which uses simulations from a localized region around each parameter iterate. By employing a linear parameterization to the surrogate score model, our technique admits a closed-form, least-squares solution. This approach yields a fast, flexible, and efficient approximation to the Fisher score, effectively smoothing the likelihood objective and mitigating the challenges posed by complex likelihood landscapes. We provide theoretical guarantees for our score estimator, including bounds on the bias introduced by the smoothing. Empirical results on a range of synthetic and real-world problems demonstrate the superior performance of our method compared to existing benchmarks.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

CerViX-Net: A Multi-Branch Fusion of Vision Transformer and Convolutional Neural Networks for Cervical Cancer Detection using Cytology Images

Authors:

Cervical cancer represents a pressing global health challenge, emphasizing the critical need for accurate and timely diagnostic methods to facilitate effective treatment and improve survival rates. In response to this challenge, the study presents CerViX-Net, an innovative classification framework designed to advance cervical cancer detection through enhanced computational efficiency and diagnostic accuracy. The development of CerViX-Net is motivated by the limitations of traditional diagnostic models, particularly in handling the computational and memory demands of large-scale data, while ensuring precise feature extraction and classification. CerViX-Net employs a hybrid deep learning architecture that combines the capabilities of ResNet50, EfficientNet-B0, and a Modified Vision Transformer (ViT) module. The ResNet50 branch extracts hierarchical features through stacked convolutional and identity blocks. In another path, the modified ViT module transforms image patches via linear projection, augments them with positional and class embeddings, and processes them using Parallel Transformer Encoder layers to model contextual relationships. Concurrently, EfficientNet-B0 utilizes MBConv blocks to extract multi-scale representations. The feature outputs from all three branches are integrated and passed through a classification head consisting of dropout layers and dense layers to ensure robust and accurate predictions. The proposed framework is rigorously evaluated on the Mendeley LBC dataset, achieving exceptional performance metrics with an accuracy of 99.69%, precision of 99.28%, recall of 99.48%, and an F1-score of 99.52%. The robustness of CerViX-Net is further validated on the SIPaKMeD and Herlev Pap Smear datasets, where it demonstrates comparable excellence, underscoring its efficacy and adaptability across diverse cytology datasets. Statistical validation using Friedman's test further reinforces its superiority over competing methods.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Structuring Sparsity: Block-Sparse Featurizers Capture Visual Concept Manifolds

What is the geometry of a visual percept? The most widely used protocols for decomposing neural network representations into interpretable parts treat concepts as isolated directions, yet recent work shows that concepts are often realized as geometric structures in low dimensional regions of activation space. We turn to the literature of Structured sparsity to close this gap, and show that block sparsity, which groups directions into blocks, is the prior matched to a generative model in which a representation is a sparse sum of low-dimensional manifolds: the modern, learned form of a classical idea in visual neuroscience, where a visual feature is carried by a coordinated group of neurons rather than a single tuned one. We implement three variants of block-sparse featurizers (BSFs) and, through a minimum-description-length analysis, show that all three describe activations more compactly than direction-based featurizers, with the recovered concepts typically two- to four-dimensional. We then use BSFs to (i) recontextualize prior work, showing that curve detectors in InceptionV1 actually read from a single continuous curve manifold, (ii) discover novel manifolds including shadows and lighting in DINOv3, and (iii) support interpretable control of image generation in diffusion models (SDXL) via manifold steering.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Thinking While Speaking: Inference-Time Knowledge Transfer for Responsive and Intelligent Conversational Voice Agents

Voice agents face a fundamental tension: the reasoning, retrieval, and tool use that make foundation models capable are iterative and slow, while conversational interaction demands responses on a millisecond timescale. Smaller, real-time models meet the latency bar but cannot match foundation models on complex tasks, leaving current voice agents to trade away either responsiveness or capability. We introduce conversational infill, where a small talker model both immediately generates contextually grounded responses to hide the latency of an external reasoner model and fluently integrates streamed reasoner knowledge into its responses during inference. We curate a 290,571-example synthetic dataset spanning six domains and demonstrate that this task is learnable across seven widely used small language models ranging from 135M to 1.7B parameters. Our system implementation, ConvFill, sustains millisecond-level time-to-first-response while closing the accuracy gap to within 6.3% of the corresponding frontier reasoner performance. In a live user study (n=18) with talker deployments running on an Apple M2 SoC, participants rank ConvFill on par with frontier models overall, prefer it for retrieval-heavy tasks, and rate it significantly more responsive. These results show that conversational infill unlocks a new point on the latency-capability Pareto frontier, offering a practical path toward voice agents that are both responsive and highly capable. Code, models, and datasets are available at https://github.com/vysri/conversational-infill.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

One-Step Generalization Ratio Guided Optimization for Domain Generalization

arXiv:2606.16301v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Domain Generalization (DG) aims to train models that generalize to unseen target domains but often overfit to domain-specific features, known as undesired correlations. Gradient-based DG methods typically guide gradients in a dominant direction but often inadvertently reinforce spurious correlations. Recent work has employed dropout to regularize overconfident parameters, but has not explicitly adjusted gradient alignment or ensured balanced parameter updates. We propose GENIE (Generalization-ENhancing Iterative Equalizer), a novel optimizer that leverages the One-Step Generalization Ratio (OSGR) to quantify each parameter's contribution to loss reduction and assess gradient alignment. By dynamically equalizing OSGR via a preconditioning factor, GENIE prevents a small subset of parameters from dominating optimization, thereby promoting domain-invariant feature learning. Theoretically, GENIE balances convergence contribution and gradient alignment among parameters, achieving higher OSGR while retaining SGD's convergence rate. Empirically, it outperforms existing optimizers and enhances performance when integrated with various DG and single-DG methods.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Posterior Refinement: Fast Language Generation via Any-Order Flow Maps

Non-autoregressive generation offers a powerful paradigm for iterative refinement, allowing models to recursively critique, erase and regenerate arbitrary subsets of tokens. However, existing non-autoregressive models fail to realize this potential. Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) suffer from factorization error, causing sample quality to collapse when generating multiple tokens simultaneously. Flow Map Language Models (FMLMs) circumvent this bottleneck via joint sequence transport for excellent few-step generation, but sacrifice the inference-time flexibility of MDMs. We introduce FMLM+, a framework that bridges this gap by equipping FMLM with masking-style noise schedules. While generating the full sequence in a single step, FMLM+ simultaneously scores the global consistency of each token a posteriori. We leverage this to introduce Posterior Refinement, a novel inference-time refinement strategy that enables the model to adaptively self-correct its outputs, matching the performance of discrete baselines with 32x fewer NFEs. Across diverse benchmarks, we demonstrate that FMLM+ with Posterior Refinement improves the speed–quality tradeoff over both MDM and FMLM families, providing a scalable foundation for high-fidelity language modeling.

10.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-12

Placenta accreta spectrum in the 21st century: Challenging dogma and redefining disorder

Authors:

by Eric Jauniaux, Helena C. Bartels, Yalda Afshar Placenta accreta spectrum (PAS) is a serious pregnancy complication caused by abnormal placental attachment to the uterus. In this Perspective, Eric Jauniaux and colleagues discuss emerging evidence that challenges our long-held pathophysiological understanding of PAS, and argue that a critical reassessment of definition, diagnosis, and management is overdue. In this Perspective, Jonathan Evans and colleagues discuss why restricting access to joint replacement surgery based on BMI alone is not supported by evidence, and highlight how such rest rictions risk exacerbating stigma, inequity and avoidable harm to those who would benefit from surgery.

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

GeoStream: Toward Precise Camera Controlled Streaming Video Generation

Accurate interactive camera control is essential for video-based world models, but most existing approaches learn camera motion implicitly, leading to inaccurate control under out-of-distribution trajectories. Explicit geometric conditioning improves controllability, but existing methods are non-autoregressive and rely on a static 3D cache built from an initial frame, which becomes ineffective once the viewpoint moves beyond the original frustum. We propose GeoStream, a framework that enables precise metric-scale camera control in autoregressive streaming video generation. Our method maintains a self-refreshing 3D cache that is periodically updated online from the model's own outputs: we estimate depth from the most recently generated frame, unproject to 3D, and reproject into the target view to produce point reprojections as geometric conditioning for subsequent synthesis. By the same principle, the conditioning seen during training is also rendered from the student's own generated frames, yielding a fully on-policy distillation that naturally aligns the train and inference conditioning distributions. Unlike prior work that uses off-policy condition noising, our approach trains the model against the exact error distribution it encounters at inference, mitigating both standard autoregressive drift and the second-order geometric feedback loop that arises when the cache itself is derived from generated outputs. Quantitative and qualitative results show that our approach substantially improves camera controllability.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Image Quality Assessment of Identity Cards Using Measures from Open Face Image Quality

This paper addresses the challenge of assessing image quality in ID cards in remote verification systems by applying capture-related quality measures from the Open Face Image Quality (OFIQ) standard to ID card images. Our preprocessing pipeline includes corner detection, perspective normalization, and comprehensive foreground masking to ensure accurate and unbiased quality measure computation. We evaluate the effectiveness of these measures by analyzing their correlation with the performance of three presentation attack detection (PAD) algorithms across four diverse ID card datasets, where two datasets contain bona fide, i.e. pristine, images and two contain printed mock ID cards. Our results suggest that quality assessment based on some OFIQ measures can significantly improve PAD performance.

13.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-21

Expanding the GUSome: Structure-guided identification and characterization of gut microbial β-glucuronidases

The gut microbiome-encoded {beta}-glucuronidase (GUS) enzymes have a significant effect on human physiology through their deglucuronidation activity on endogenous and exogenous glucuronides. GUS activity also significantly influences the pharmacokinetics, efficacy and toxicity of various drugs including chemotherapeutic drugs. Given their crucial role in drug metabolism, GUS enzymes have emerged as promising targets for therapeutic intervention. Here, we have identified and characterized 79 unique GUS enzymes through a structure-guided approach. Structural modelling of these GUS enzymes revealed a conserved core and active-site residues with significant variations in the number and nature of the C-terminal domains. A new classification system based on the number and type of additional C-terminal domains is presented for the GUS proteins. Further, GUS enzymes have been categorized into different loop categories linked to their substrate preferences. The relationship between domain architecture and loop-type is explored by sequence similarity network analysis. We could successfully express, purify and validate GUS processing capability of a panel of identified GUS proteins. The nature of oligomer organization has been deciphered by SEC and DLS studies. Further, we have identified additional GUS enzymes capable of processing SN-38G, glucuronidated form of anticancer drug, irinotecan. These newly identified GUS enzymes will offer valuable insights into gut microbial GUS diversity and their role in understanding the population-specific drug-induced adverse effects on human health.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Understanding Sample Efficiency in Predictive Coding

arXiv:2605.11911v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Predictive Coding (PC) is an influential account of cortical learning. Much of recent work has focused on comparing PC to Backpropagation (BP) to find whether PC offers any advantages. Small scale experiments show that PC enables learning that is more sample efficient and effective in many contexts, though a thorough theoretical understanding of the phenomena remains elusive. To address this, we quantify the efficiency of learning in BP and PC through a metric called ``target alignment'', which measures how closely the change in the output of the network is aligned to the output prediction error. We then derive and empirically validate analytical expressions for target alignment in Deep Linear Networks. We show that learning in PC is more efficient than BP, which is especially pronounced in deep, narrow and pre-trained networks. We also derive exact conditions for guaranteed optimal target alignment in PC and validate our findings through experiments. We study full training trajectories of linear and non-linear models, and find the predicted benefits of PC persist in practice even when some assumptions are violated. Overall, this work provides a mechanistic understanding of the higher learning efficiency observed for PC over BP in previous works, and can guide how PC should be parametrised to learn most effectively.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

FATE: Pillar Encoding and Frequency-Aware Training for Event-Based Object Detection

Event cameras are bio-inspired sensors that asynchronously capture logarithmic intensity changes, offering inherent advantages in high-speed and high-dynamic-range scenarios. However, the sparse and asynchronous nature of event streams poses a fundamental challenge for modern deep learning architectures. To enable compatibility with standard models, most existing approaches partition the accumulation window into fixed temporal sub-bins. While effective for spatial processing, this internal discretization discards fine-grained temporal structure and constrains inference to the low temporal frequencies imposed by training supervision. To address this limitation, we propose FATE, a unified framework built upon a novel Pillar Encoding (PE). While operating over discrete macro-accumulation windows dictated by the target frequency, PE avoids internal temporal sub-binning. It organizes events into spatial pillars and approximates their intra-window evolution via projection onto a continuous-time orthogonal polynomial basis. This formulation yields an L2-optimal representation that retains rich temporal dynamics in a dense pseudo-image, mitigating information loss under sparse event conditions. To fully leverage this representation, we introduce Frequency-Aware Training (FAT), a soft mean-teacher curriculum that generates temporally dense pseudo-labels, effectively bridging the mismatch between low-frequency supervision and high-frequency inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FATE generalizes across architectural paradigms and consistently outperforms strong baselines. It enables robust object detection at high temporal resolutions up to 200 Hz, while incurring minimal overhead in parameter count and inference latency

16.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

APOSM: Pairwise preference learning improves generative small-molecule design

Small-molecule lead refinement is constrained by the cost of synthesizing and assaying candidates, making the surrogate models that prioritize compounds for experimental testing central to the design process. The reliability of such surrogates is limited by the noise and sparsity of screening measurements. We show that training the surrogate on pairwise comparisons between candidate molecules, rather than on absolute predicted scores, yields a substantially more reliable signal for active candidate selection in this regime. We develop APOSM, an active-learning algorithm that combines a fragment-based generator, a pairwise message-passing graph neural network surrogate, and probabilistic ranking inside a batched acquisition loop. On the Practical Molecular Optimization benchmark and a GPCR ligand rediscovery task, APOSM improves target attainment and sampling efficiency over unguided fragment-based optimization, the Graph-GA genetic algorithm, and a pointwise-regression ablation, with the largest gains on tasks where absolute scores are hardest to calibrate.

17.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Sub-Poisson distributions: Concentration inequalities, optimal variance proxies, and closure properties

arXiv:2508.12103v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a nonasymptotic framework for sub-Poisson distributions with moment generating function dominated by that of a Poisson distribution. At its core is a new notion of optimal sub-Poisson variance proxy, analogous to the variance parameter in the sub-Gaussian setting. This framework allows us to derive a Bennett-type concentration inequality without boundedness assumptions and to show that the sub-Poisson property is closed under key operations including independent sums and convex combinations, but not under all linear operations such as scalar multiplication. We derive bounds relating the sub-Poisson variance proxy to sub-Gaussian and sub-exponential Orlicz norms. Taken together, these results unify the treatment of Bernoulli and Poisson random variables and their signed versions in their natural tail regime.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Reliable quantification of renal function from frozen blood samples

BACKGROUND: Differences in renal function may affect Alzheimer disease (AD) blood biomarker levels independent of AD pathology. Although renal function was unaccounted for in foundational AD blood biomarker studies, there is potential to address this through quantification of estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) from frozen serum and plasma samples. However, the validity of eGFR evaluation from long-term frozen blood samples is unknown. METHODS: Adults aged 50-85 with at least 2 vascular risk factors were recruited from vascular surgery or cardiology clinics in Tucson, Arizona from 2022-2025. Individuals with creatinine assessments in point-of-care whole blood (POC-WB) and frozen serum and plasma samples using the iSTAT (Abbott) were included. eGFR was calculated using the 2021 CKD-EPI creatinine equation without race. Agreement between POC-WB and frozen blood samples was assessed using Cohen's kappa with linear weights. RESULTS: 134 participants (mean [SD] age: 72.6 [7.5] years, 39.6% female, 23.1% chronic kidney disease) had POC-WB eGFR available. Frozen serum and plasma samples had strong agreement with POC-WB for eGFR (Kw= 0.90-0.95, P

19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Atypical Decay Rates for Atypical Heights in Random Recursive Trees

arXiv:2604.20139v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We establish the large deviation probabilities for the height of random recursive trees, revealing polynomial upper-tail decay and stretched-exponential lower-tail decay. Remarkably, the lower tail features an atypical prefactor that grows to infinity more slowly than any $n$-fold iterated logarithm.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

CoRe: A Continuously Reward-Finetuned LLM Query Rewriter for Multi-Stage Context-Aware Relevance in Web-Scale Video Search

LLM-based query rewriters in production face a tension: the training reward must reflect how the rewrite is consumed by the production ranker, yet the training procedure must be cheap enough to support continuous redeployment as data drifts. We present CoRe (Context Relevance), such a system, redeployed weekly for over five months in a major short-video search engine. Our reward uses the deployed multimodal relevance model as its source and a multiplicative ratio form mirroring the production fusion algebra, closing the simulation-production gap that offline reward proxies leave open. A semi-online Mixed Preference Optimization loop makes this reward affordable at multi-million-instance weekly scale: a DPO-style pairwise objective restricts the gradient pass to a small top-k/bottom-k subset of sampled trajectories, and a phase structure reduces trainer/inference-server parameter syncs from per-step to per-phase. An automated promotion gate over reward-like and stability metrics detected and recovered from a real reward-hacking incident in production. Rewriter output is consumed as parallel relevance signals at recall, rawrank, and finerank without displacing the original signals, bounding rewriter-failure blast radius. Online A/B from two sequential production launches, first deploying the rewriter at finerank, then extending consumption to recall and rawrank, delivers statistically significant reductions in change-query rate on rewrite-impacted queries, with all headline relevance and engagement metrics moving in the expected direction.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Proactive Conversational Assistant for a Procedural Manual Task based on Audio and IMU

Real-time conversational assistants for procedural manual tasks often depend on video input, which can be computationally expensive and compromise user privacy. For the first time, we propose a real-time conversational assistant that provides comprehensive guidance for procedural manual tasks using only lightweight privacy-preserving modalities such as audio and IMU inputs from a user's wearable device to understand the context. Using a furniture assembly task and a cooking task, we show how this assistant proactively communicates step-by-step instructions to a user performing a procedural task, and answers user questions. We illustrate the data generation method and the system design to achieve such an assistant. On observing that an off-the-shelf language model is a talkative assistant but is not always able to answer questions correctly, we demonstrate how finetuning the model improves its ability to limit unnecessary dialogues with a 50% increase in the precision, while also improving its ability to answer questions correctly, measured by a 150% increase in the recall of answers. We further describe how such an assistant is implemented on an edge device with no dependence on the cloud.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Coulomb crystallization of xenon highly charged ions in a laser-cooled Ca+ matrix

arXiv:2512.12266v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We report on the sympathetic cooling and Coulomb crystallization of xenon highly charged ions (HCIs) with laser-cooled Ca$^+$ ions. The HCIs are produced in a compact electron beam ion trap, then charge selected, decelerated, and finally injected into a cryogenic linear Paul trap. There, they are captured into $^{40}$Ca$^+$ Coulomb crystals, and co-crystallized within them, causing dark voids in their fluorescence images. Fine control over the number of trapped ions and HCIs allows us to realize mixed-species crystals with arbitrary ordering patterns. By investigating Xe$^{q+}$–Ca$^+$ strings, we confirm the HCI charge states, measure their lifetime and characterize the mixed-species motional modes. Our system effectively combines the established quantum control toolbox for Ca$^+$ with the rich set of atomic properties of Xe highly charged ions, providing a resourceful platform for optical frequency metrology, searches for signatures of new physics, and quantum information science.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

ESMStereo: Enhanced ShuffleMixer Disparity Upsampling for Real-Time and Accurate Stereo Matching

Stereo matching has become an increasingly important component of modern autonomous systems. Developing deep learning-based stereo matching models that deliver high accuracy while operating in real-time continues to be a major challenge in computer vision. In the domain of cost-volume-based stereo matching, accurate disparity estimation depends heavily on large-scale cost volumes. However, such large volumes store substantial redundant information and also require computationally intensive aggregation units for processing and regression, making real-time performance unattainable. Conversely, small-scale cost volumes followed by lightweight aggregation units provide a promising route for real-time performance, but lack sufficient information to ensure highly accurate disparity estimation. To address this challenge, we propose the Enhanced Shuffle Mixer (ESM) to mitigate information loss associated with small-scale cost volumes. ESM restores critical details by integrating primary features into the disparity upsampling unit. It quickly extracts features from the initial disparity estimation and fuses them with image features. These features are mixed by shuffling and layer splitting then refined through a compact feature-guided hourglass network to recover more detailed scene geometry. The ESM focuses on local contextual connectivity with a large receptive field and low computational cost, leading to the reconstruction of a highly accurate disparity map at real-time. The compact version of ESMStereo achieves an inference speed of 116 FPS on high-end GPUs and 91 FPS on the AGX Orin.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

EmoFSM: A Finite State Machine for Emotional Support Conversation

Emotional support conversation (ESC) aims to alleviate people's emotional distress through effective conversations. Although large language models (LLMs) have made remarkable progress in ESC, most of these studies may not define the diagram from a state-model perspective, thereby providing a suboptimal solution for long-term satisfaction. To address such an issue, we leverage the Finite State Machine (FSM) on LLMs, and propose a framework called EmoFSM. Our framework allows a single LLM to bootstrap the planning during ESC, and self-reason the seeker's emotion, support strategy, and the final response upon each conversation turn. Substantial experiments in ESC datasets suggest that EmoFSM outperforms many baselines, including direct inference, self-fine, chain of thought, finetuning, and externally supported methods, even those with many more parameters.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

LaTtE-Flow: Layerwise Timestep-Expert Flow-based Transformer

Recent advances in multimodal foundation models unifying image understanding and generation have opened exciting avenues for tackling a wide range of vision-language tasks within a single framework. Despite progress, existing unified models typically require extensive pretraining and struggle to achieve the same level of performance compared to models dedicated to each task. Additionally, many of these models suffer from slow image generation speeds, limiting their practical deployment in real-time or resource-constrained settings. In this work, we propose Layerwise Timestep-Expert Flow-based Transformer (LaTtE-Flow), a novel and efficient architecture that unifies image understanding and generation within a single multimodal model. LaTtE-Flow builds upon powerful pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to inherit strong multimodal understanding capabilities, and extends them with a novel Layerwise Timestep Experts flow-based architecture for efficient image generation. LaTtE-Flow distributes the flow-matching process across specialized groups of Transformer layers, each responsible for a distinct subset of timesteps. This design significantly improves sampling efficiency by activating only a small subset of layers at each sampling timestep. To further enhance performance, we propose a Timestep-Conditioned Residual Attention mechanism for efficient information reuse across layers. Experiments demonstrate that LaTtE-Flow achieves strong performance on multimodal understanding tasks, while achieving competitive image generation quality with around 6x faster inference speed compared to recent unified multimodal models.