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01.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-22

Biological aging and generational shifts in early-onset cancer risk

Authors:
Ruiyi Tian↗

Incidence of early-onset cancer is rising globally in recent generations, which underscores the need to elucidate the influence of emerging generational risk factors. Systemic and organ-specific aging reflects the cumulative impact of exposures and may provide an integrative and complementary approach to understand early-onset cancer risk. Here among 154,169 young adults from the United Kingdom Biobank, systemic aging measured by PhenoAge increased across birth cohorts, with 23% s.d. increase for those born 1965–1974 versus 1950–1954, and was associated with early-onset solid cancer risk (hazard ratio (HR)per s.d. 1.08; 95% confidence interval (CI), 1.03–1.13), driven by lung, gastrointestinal and uterine cancers, independent of genetic risks of aging and cancer. Patterns were consistent using alternative systemic aging measures, including the Klemera–Doubal method-defined age gap and metabolomic-based age gap. These findings were validated partially among 10,262 participants in the United States All of Us Research Program. Proteomics-based organ-specific aging analyses linked immune aging with early-onset lung cancer (HRper s.d. 1.89; CI, 1.20–2.97) and adipose tissue aging to early-onset colorectal cancer (HR 1.60; CI, 1.11–2.32). Greater age gap, reflecting more advanced biological aging relative to chronological age, may serve as a driver associated with risk of early-onset solid cancers, highlighting the importance of uncovering underlying mechanisms to guide effective prevention strategies. Analyses of population cohorts found that young adults exhibited earlier systemic and organ-specific aging, which was associated with increased risk of early-onset cancer compared with older adults born decades earlier.

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02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Last But Not Least: Boundary Attention CalibratiON for Multimodal KV Cache Compression

Authors:
Tianhao Chen↗Yuheng Wu↗Kelu Yao↗Xiaogang Xu↗Xiaobin Hu↗Dongman Lee↗

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) achieve strong vision-language reasoning, but long visual contexts enlarge the KV cache and increase decoding latency. Existing compression methods rely on observation window attention for stable token-importance estimation, yet this aggregation can dilute sparse visual evidence and discard answer-critical tokens under aggressive compression. Therefore, we identify last-query attention as a complementary source for recovering such evidence, but its answer-irrelevant signals can mislead retention. We propose BACON, a plug-and-play method that calibrates observation window attention with last-query evidence and suppresses isolated noise via intra-layer coherence and inter-layer persistence. Across diverse benchmarks, models, budgets, and compression methods, BACON improves multimodal KV compression by 7.5% on average under the most aggressive budget, with gains up to 30.9%.

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

The Journal of Prompt-Engineered (Moral) Philosophy Or: Why AI-Assisted Ethics Research Requires Process Transparency

Authors:
Michele Loi↗

arXiv:2511.08639v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Existing AI disclosure mandates in scholarship require that AI assistance be reported but leave transparency philosophically unspecified: they fix the duty without explaining what the duty serves. We argue that ethical inquiry is essentially contested at two independent levels – about what it is, and about what it demands of the inquirer – defeating output-only evaluation and welfare-economic dismissal of the transparency question, and, by extension, reproducibility framings imported from the empirical sciences. The transparency duty is grounded instead in agent-integrity: the legibility, before a community of inquiry, of the identity-constituting commitments that the author's mode of philosophising expresses. Because the standards for evaluating such work are not communally settled, the achievable goal for transparency is not evaluation against agreed criteria but tracking – accumulating the evidentiary record that lets each tradition assess the work on its own terms and makes future normative judgments possible. We develop a documentation-adequacy framework that operationalises Meaningful Human Control through five transparency elements – declaration, navigation, documentation account, process documentation, and development records – demonstrated by the paper itself, whose full documentation record is archived at a persistent identifier. The framework is a first iteration subject to revision, not a settled standard.

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04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

The Standard Model, The Exceptional Jordan Algebra, and Triality

Authors:
Latham Boyle↗

arXiv:2006.16265v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Jordan, Wigner and von Neumann classified the possible algebras of quantum mechanical observables, and found they fell into 4 "ordinary" families, plus one remarkable outlier: the exceptional Jordan algebra. We point out an intriguing relationship between the complexification of this algebra and the standard model of particle physics, its minimal left-right-symmetric $SU(3)\times SU(2)_{L}\times SU(2)_{R}\times U(1)$ extension, and $Spin(10)$ unification. This suggests a geometric interpretation, where a single generation of standard model fermions is described by the tangent space $(\mathbb{C}\otimes\mathbb{O})^{2}$ of the complex octonionic projective plane, and the existence of three generations is related to $SO(8)$ triality.

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05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Using Cognitive Models to Improve Language Model Simulation of Human Persuasion Games

Authors:
Zirui Cheng↗Zeyu Shen↗Thomas L. Griffiths↗Peter Henderson↗

arXiv:2606.17657v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: People make decisions differently in strategic interactions. Some update beliefs like a Bayesian; others exhibit biases like motivated reasoning. Although creators of large language models use simulated humans for safety evaluations and training, they often fail to cover this breadth of human behavior. We argue that cognitive science and economics provide a convenient tool for doing so, making use of mathematical models of human decision-making. We propose an approach that we call Equation-to-Behavior Prompting for guiding large language models to match cognitive models, and evaluate this approach on persuasion games based on legal decision-making. We find that large models can approximate equation-based specifications – Bayesian updating, affine distortion, motivated updating, and Grether's $\alpha$-$\beta$ model – using prompting, but small models fail to do so. However, training small models with reinforcement learning to adhere to mathematical rules, Equation-to-Behavior RL, reduces belief error by 26.5% in out-of-distribution parameterizations. We show that these simulations can help create diverse training environments; training small models to consider different kinds of decision-makers improves average belief change by 2.5%–12% over Bayesian-only training, even when persuading GPT-5-mini. Our work could improve human simulations for training and evaluation in increasingly realistic settings, and could also enable novel research into more complicated mathematical models of human decision-making.

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

Timestep Rescheduling in Diffusion Inversion

Authors:
Shangquan Sun↗Ting Gong↗Zhirui Liu↗Jiamin Wu↗Runkai Zhao↗Mianxin Liu↗Wenqi Ren↗Xiaochun Cao↗

Diffusion inversion, which maps images back to the Gaussian latent space of a diffusion model, is a critical task for image reconstruction and editing. While DDIM enables fast deterministic inversion, it inherently introduces deviations that accumulate into noticeable inversion errors. Existing methods often address this by solving a fixed-point problem but largely overlook how the selection of the diffusion timestep in the noise scheduler influences inversion fidelity. In this work, we reveal that the deviation scale in diffusion inversion is strongly dependent on the timestep size, and exhibits a parabolic trend, with larger errors concentrated at both small and large timesteps. Based on this finding, we propose a simple yet effective nonuniform timestep scheduler that integrates a global rescaling with a local dynamic programming based rescheduling, enabling a strategic allocation of computational effort that minimizes the overall inversion error and preserves higher inversion accuracy. Our method serves as an off-the-shelf enhancement for existing inversion techniques and requires no extra parameters or computational overhead. Through extensive experiments, we verify that integrating our scheduler consistently boosts the performance of existing inversion methods, achieving superior results in image reconstruction and editing.

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07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Towards Geostrategic Critical Minerals and Materials Resilience: Secure Supply-Chain and Criticality Analyses for Quantum Technologies in Arctic and Space Environments

Authors:
Min-Ha Lee↗Alan J. Hurd↗Jolante Wieke Van Wijk↗Mauritz Kop↗

arXiv:2605.02926v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This manuscript maps secure-supply and criticality risks for quantum technologies deployed in extreme environments, linking upstream critical minerals and materials (CMMs) to downstream system performance, continuity of security, and mission assurance. It adopts a reproducible "Critical Level I" screening method to identify materials whose supply concentration, essentiality, and limited mitigatability can create bottlenecks for quantum deployment. The analysis is structured around two use cases: (i) niobium as a key input for superconducting quantum computing and related manufacturing and toolchain dependencies; and (ii) space-qualified superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs), alongside adjacent single-photon detector platforms such as SPADs, where radiation, thermal cycling, vibration, and electromagnetic interference can degrade device metrics and, in communications settings, threaten continuity of security. The manuscript further situates these dependencies within U.S.-China strategic competition over critical materials, refining capacity, export controls, and overseas mineral acquisitions, while also connecting them to standards-first governance, post-quantum cryptography migration, and the emerging security logic of quantum networking. It argues that static national critical-minerals lists are insufficient for mission-relevant quantum technology and proposes a dedicated Quantum Criticality and Critical Minerals (QCCM) dashboard as a living decision-support tool for tracking concentration, substitutability, qualification bottlenecks, stockpiling gaps, and geopolitical stress signals across quantum platforms. The paper concludes with implications for substitution, diversification, stockpiling, shielding, qualification-by-design, and standards-aligned governance to support secure, sustained, and mission-relevant quantum deployment.

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08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Selective Rotary Position Embedding

Authors:
Sajad Movahedi↗Timur Carstensen↗Arshia Afzal↗Frank Hutter↗Antonio Orvieto↗Volkan Cevher↗

Position information is essential for language modeling. In softmax transformers, Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE) encode positions through fixed-angle rotations, while in linear transformers, order is handled via input-dependent (selective) gating that decays past key-value associations. Selectivity has generally been shown to improve language-related tasks. Inspired by this, we introduce Selective RoPE, an input-dependent rotary embedding mechanism, that generalizes RoPE, and enables rotation in arbitrary angles for both linear and softmax transformers. We show that softmax attention already performs a hidden form of these rotations on query-key pairs, uncovering an implicit positional structure. We further show that in state-space models and gated linear transformers, the real part manages forgetting while the imaginary part encodes positions through rotations. We validate our method by equipping gated transformers with Selective RoPE, demonstrating that its input-dependent rotations improve performance in language modeling and on difficult sequence tasks like copying, state tracking, and retrieval.

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09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

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

Authors:
Kaleem Ullah↗Altaf Hussain↗Muhammad Munsif↗Sung Wook Baik↗

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.

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10.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Sharp connectivity bounds for the vacant set of random interlacements

Authors:
Subhajit Goswami↗Pierre-Fran\c{c}ois Rodriguez↗Yuriy Shulzhenko↗

arXiv:2504.02777v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider percolation of the vacant set of random interlacements at intensity $u$ in dimensions three and higher, and derive lower bounds on the truncated two-point function for all values of $u>0$. These bounds are sharp up to principal exponential order for all $u$ in dimension three and all $u \neq u_\ast$ in higher dimensions, where $u_*$ refers to the critical parameter of the model, and they match the upper bounds derived in the article arXiv:2503.14497. In dimension three, our results further imply that the truncated two-point function grows at large distances $x$ at a rate that depends on $x$ only through its Euclidean norm, which offers a glimpse of the expected (Euclidean) invariance of the scaling limit at criticality. The rate function is atypical, it incurs a logarithmic correction and comes with an explicit pre-factor that converges to $0$ as the parameter $u$ approaches the critical point $u_*$ from either side. A particular challenge stems from the combined effects of lack of monotonicity due to the truncation in the super-critical phase, and the precise (rotationally invariant) controls we seek, that measure the effects of a certain "harmonic humpback" function. Among others, their derivation relies on rather fine estimates for hitting probabilities of the random walk in arbitrary direction $e$, which witness this invariance at the discrete level, and preclude straightforward applications of projection arguments.

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11.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Bayesian modeling of longitudinal metatranscriptomes of broiler meat spoilage microbiomes shows shared predictive signature associated with spoilage at refrigerated temperatures

Authors:
Nushi↗Manninen↗Johansson↗Honkela↗Björkroth↗

Microbial spoilage of packaged meat is driven by complex microbial succession and related metabolic activity, yet conventional shelf-life assessment is mainly based on shelf-life studies relying on culturing and sensory analysis. In routine quality assurance, results are obtained retrospectively, and they are only indirectly linked to the metabolic activity related to sensory deterioration. Functional, time informative approaches that capture the active metabolic state of the spoilage microbiome and predict the rate of spoilage are lacking. We developed a censoring-aware Gaussian process (CAGP) framework to model longitudinal pathway expression profiles from broiler meat metatranscriptomes collected over consecutive storage days at 4 or 6{degrees}C. Samples were annotated using odor-based sensory scores defining fresh, early-spoilage, and late-spoilage phases. Because observed zeros in pathway-level data may reflect non-detection rather than true absence, the model treats low values as left-censored observations below a detection threshold while estimating smooth temporal trajectories with uncertainty. In leave-one-out prediction within the 4{degrees}C time series, predicted sampling days differed from the true days by an average of 0.43 days, and predicted spoilage phases agreed with the sensory classification. Trajectories learned at 4{degrees}C also transferred to an independent 6{degrees}C time series at the spoilage-phase level, suggesting that shared functional spoilage programs are preserved despite temperature-dependent changes in spoilage rate. Cross-entropy ranking further identified pathway modules carrying time- and phase-informative signals across temperatures. Overall, this framework provides a probabilistic approach for linking metatranscriptomic functional dynamics to sensory spoilage progression, supporting shelf-life assessment beyond retrospective microbial enumeration.

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12.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

The Amazon can be saved — with concerted action inside and outside Brazil

Authors: Unknown Author

As deforestation in the Amazon falls, fresh evidence shows that the rainforest can withstand global warming, but only if there is a worldwide effort to stop cutting it down. As deforestation in the Amazon falls, fresh evidence shows that the rainforest can withstand global warming, but only if there is a worldwide effort to stop cutting it down.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Prompt, Plan, Extract: Zero-Shot Agentic LLMs Workflows for Lung Pathology Extraction from Clinical Narratives

Authors:
Aman Pathak↗Cheng Peng↗Mengxian Lyu↗Ziyi Chen↗Reema Solan↗Sankalp Talankar↗Yasir Khan↗Hiren Mehta↗Aokun Chen↗Yi Guo↗Yonghui Wu↗

Information extraction from pathology reports is essential for cancer staging, tumor registry population. Yet key data remains embedded in narrative reports, making manual extraction labor-intensive and error-prone. Traditional supervised Natural Language Processing pipelines address this through fully supervised Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction, but require expensive manual annotation and suffer cascading failures when upstream entities are missed. In this study, we developed a zero-shot, agentic workflow, and evaluated five open-source generative Large Language Models (LLMs) to populate 13 College of American Pathologists synoptic fields from lung resection pathology reports. We compared them against a state-of-the-art supervised GatorTron NER-RE baseline using a novel, registry-aligned evaluation framework. The baseline achieved Micro-F1of 0.960, while the best zero-shot model (GPT-OSS-20B) achieved Micro-F1 of 0.893 (recall: 0.949), accurately extracting complex relations like Pathologic Stage without task-specific training. These results suggest that open-source, zero-shot agentic LLMs are a low-cost solution for extracting lung pathology information.

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14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Higher-order spectral perturbation expansions II: Kernel matrices and manifold learning

Authors:
Bernhard Stankewitz↗Martin Wahl↗

arXiv:2606.16373v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study spectral concentration bounds for kernel matrices as approximation of the corresponding kernel integral operator. Results are established under weak assumptions on the data setting and the reproducing kernel relying only on a Mercer condition and a local Weyl law. This allows us to deal with key features of kernel matrices, such as large multiplicities, large effective dimension, and heavy-tailed distributions. Our results apply to infinite dimensional principal component analysis, manifold learning, and Bayesian nonparametric statistics. We illustrate this via two prototypical examples: The heat kernel on the sphere and a wavelet prior from Bayesian nonparametrics.

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17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

A Security Analysis of Long-Horizon Agentic AI Systems: Threats, Evaluation, and Framework Development

Authors:
Ahmed Mohammed Almalki↗Mehedi Masud↗

arXiv:2606.14816v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents a structured analysis of security challenges in long-horizon agentic AI systems. The study reviews existing threats, evaluation approaches, attack propagation mechanisms, and security frameworks. A taxonomy of security threats and a framework for analyzing attack propagation are proposed to support future research in agentic AI security

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18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Audited Conformal Prediction for Classification under Unknown Distribution Shift

Authors:
Yanfei Zhou↗Rizal Fathony↗Nam H. Nguyen↗Matteo Sesia↗

arXiv:2606.14909v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We consider the problem of uncertainty quantification for a pretrained classification model deployed under unknown distribution shift. We propose Audited Conformal Prediction (ACP), a method that leverages a small labeled dataset from the target population to train an auxiliary audit model identifying inputs where the legacy model is likely to fail. By integrating the audit model's outputs into the conformal prediction framework, ACP produces prediction sets that guarantee marginal coverage while achieving substantially higher conditional coverage in practice than existing approaches. We develop and analyze two complementary integration strategies – one targeting marginal coverage with improved conditional performance, the other providing explicit group-conditional coverage guarantees – and establish theoretical guarantees for both. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets validate the method and illustrate trade-offs between prediction set size and conditional coverage.

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19.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Confined migration induces non-lethal DNA damage in developing neurons

Authors:
Zhejing Zhang↗

Migratory cells tend to have soft nuclei that deform and penetrate narrow spaces1,2. Extensive nuclear deformation during migration can cause nuclear-envelope rupture and DNA damage in cancer cells, which may contribute to malignant transformation during tumour progression3–6. However, the importance of DNA damage in physiological migration is less well understood. Here we demonstrate that the migration of neurons in developing cerebral and cerebellar cortices is accompanied by massive DNA double-stranded breaks (DSBs) due to mechanostress during passage through narrow interstitial spaces. In contrast to many other migratory cells, these DSBs occur without detectable nuclear envelope rupture. Confined migration increases topoisomerase-IIβ covalently bound DSBs, and these lesions are repaired through non-homologous end-joining during brain development without causing cell death. Genome sequencing revealed that DSBs tend to occur at transcriptionally inactive regions. The deletion of ligase IV at the onset of neuronal migration leads to persistent DSB accumulation in cerebellar neurons with moderate transcriptional changes in genes related to synaptic function, neuronal development and stress and immune responses. The mutant mouse develops mild motor deficits in later life, suggesting that the DNA damage generated during normal brain development poses a potential disease risk if left unrepaired. The migration of neurons in developing cerebral and cerebellar cortices is accompanied by massive DNA double-strand breaks due to mechanostress during passage through narrow interstitial spaces.

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20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Recursive Joint Simulation in Games

Authors:
Vojtech Kovarik↗Caspar Oesterheld↗Vincent Conitzer↗

arXiv:2402.08128v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Game-theoretic dynamics between AI agents could differ from traditional human-human interactions in various ways. One such difference is that it may be possible to accurately simulate an AI agent, for example because its source code is known. Such an agent would then be fundamentally uncertain whether it is in the real world or in a simulation. Our aim is to explore ways of leveraging this possibility to achieve more cooperative outcomes in strategic settings. In this paper, we study an interaction between AI agents where the agents run a recursive joint simulation. That is, the agents first jointly observe a simulation of the situation they face. This simulation in turn recursively includes additional simulations (with a small chance of failure, to avoid infinite recursion), and the results of all these nested simulations are observed before an action is chosen. We show that the resulting interaction is strategically equivalent to an infinitely repeated version of the original game, allowing a direct transfer of existing results such as the various folk theorems. As evidence that the equivalence is robust, we show that it holds even when we relax some of the assumptions and that it also holds ``from the inside'' – meaning, for an agent that finds itself inside the game and has self-locating uncertainty.

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21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

From Uncertain Judgments to Calibrated Rankings: Conformal Elo Estimation for LLM Evaluation

Authors:
Bora Kargi↗David Salinas↗

arXiv:2606.13221v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating new large language models typically requires costly human annotation campaigns at scale. LLM-as-a-judge offers a cheaper alternative, but judge scores carry systematic errors - such as position bias, self-preference, or intransitivity - that can strongly miscalibrate the resulting rankings. We quantify the resulting judge-human disagreement at two complementary levels. At the local level, we estimate per-battle uncertainty from the judge's own score differences by propagating calibrated win probabilities rather than hard labels into the Bradley-Terry procedure. This alone provides a drastic improvement to Elo estimation accuracy, bringing LLM-derived ratings within 17.9 Elo MAE of human-derived ones when averaged over 55 held-out models on LMArena. At the global level, we apply split conformal prediction to the residual gap between LLM-derived and human-derived Elo ratings across held-out models, producing prediction intervals with distribution-free marginal coverage guarantees that account for irreducible LLM-human disagreement. Together, these two layers yield a low-cost evaluation tool that provides developers with calibrated Elo estimates and honest uncertainty bounds, without access to large-scale human annotations.To facilitate reproducibility, we release our code at https://github.com/kargibora/SoftElo .

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

How Does the ReLU Activation Affect the Implicit Bias of Gradient Descent on High-dimensional Neural Network Regression?

Authors:
Kuo-Wei Lai↗Guanghui Wang↗Molei Tao↗Vidya Muthukumar↗

arXiv:2603.04895v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Overparameterized ML models, including neural networks, typically induce underdetermined training objectives with multiple global minima. The implicit bias refers to the limiting global minimum that is attained by a common optimization algorithm, such as gradient descent (GD). In this paper, we characterize the implicit bias of GD for training a shallow ReLU model with the squared loss on high-dimensional random features. Prior work (Vardi and Shamir, 2021) showed that the implicit bias does not exist in the worst-case, or corresponds exactly to the minimum-$\ell_2$-norm interpolating solution under exactly orthogonal data (Boursier et al., 2022). Our work interpolates between these two extremes and shows that, for sufficiently high-dimensional random data, the implicit bias approximates the minimum-$\ell_2$-norm solution with high probability with a gap on the order $\Theta(\sqrt{n/||\lambda||_1})$, where $n$ is the number of training examples and $\lambda$ denotes the spectrum of the data covariance matrix. Our results are obtained through a novel primal-dual analysis that carefully tracks the evolution of predictions, data-span coefficients, as well as their interactions, and show that the ReLU activation pattern quickly stabilizes with high probability over random data.

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23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Sentinel: Decoding Context Utilization via Attention Probing for Efficient LLM Context Compression

Authors:
Yong Zhang↗Heng Li↗Yanwen Huang↗Ning Cheng↗Yang Guo↗Yun Zhu↗Yanmeng Wang↗Shaojun Wang↗Jing Xiao↗

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) often suffers from long and noisy retrieved contexts. Existing context compression methods typically rely on heuristic relevance estimation or supervised compression models rather than on how LLMs utilize retrieved context during inference. We propose Sentinel, a lightweight sentence-level compression framework that decodes inference-time contextual utilization behaviors from head-wise attention patterns of frozen LLMs. To ground supervision in retrieval-dependent answering behavior, Sentinel trains a lightweight probe using QA examples where the model succeeds only when retrieved context is available. Sentinel performs compression using only a single non-autoregressive forward pass without dedicated compression training or autoregressive scoring. Empirically, we find that effective contextual utilization signals remain accessible even in compact proxy models. On LongBench, Sentinel with a 0.5B proxy model achieves up to 5$\times$ compression while attaining question-answering performance competitive with compression methods built on 7B-scale models. Despite being trained only on English QA data, Sentinel also generalizes effectively to Chinese and out-of-domain settings.

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

Complex Layout Classification in the Wild: A Low-Resource Approach with Layout-Preserving Augmentations

Authors:
Sharva Gogawale↗Iddo Hakim↗Gal Grudka↗Mohammad Suliman↗Omer Ventura↗Daria Vasyutinsky-Shapira↗Berat Kurar-Barakat↗Nachum Dershowitz↗

Many digitized corpora suffer from low resources because annotations may be scarce, page scans are noisy and of poor resolution, or layouts are structurally complex in ways that negatively affect the quality of automatic transcription. Developing robust classification models for low-resource languages is inhibited by the lack of large-scale annotated data and by the frequent semantic complexity of page layouts. To this end, we have curated a complex-layout dataset, manually classified into eight distinct layout types based on their separator regions. To overcome data scarcity, we propose a novel training strategy in the form of a CNN-based classifier that employs strong, domain-aware augmentations to improve generalization. We utilize narrow anisotropic Gaussian masking to suppress incidental textual details while preserving essential separations, compelling the model to learn global geometric arrangements. Additionally, we implement reflection-induced label transformations to enrich the training distribution while maintaining label consistency across asymmetric categories. The results demonstrate that layout-specific augmentations can substantially improve page-level layout classification under severe annotation scarcity.

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25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

InTrain: Intrinsic Trainability for Zero-Cost Neural Architecture Search

Authors:
Qinqin Zhou↗Fuhai Chen↗Jipeng Wu↗Zhiwei Chen↗Zhikai Hu↗Weiwei Cai↗

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.

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