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

BayLing-Duplex: Native Full-Duplex Speech Dialogue with a Single Autoregressive LLM

Real-time, full-duplex speech interaction is a key feature of next-generation spoken chatbots, allowing the model to listen and speak at the same time and to handle natural phenomena such as overlap, hesitation, and barge-in. Existing speech language models (SpeechLMs) such as LLaMA-Omni and GLM-4-Voice are still turn-based and rely on an external Voice Activity Detection (VAD) module to mark the end of the user's turn, which fundamentally limits their interactive ability. In this paper, we introduce BayLing-Duplex, a native full-duplex SpeechLM where a single autoregressive LLM decides when to listen, when to speak, and when to stop, with no auxiliary turn-taking module. The design adds only a few special tokens to the standard vocabulary, so it transfers across LLMs and reuses existing training and serving stacks with no architectural adaptation. Starting from the public GLM-4-Voice checkpoint and using only 400K full-duplex samples for fine-tuning followed by a lightweight DPO stage, BayLing-Duplex reaches 92% turn-taking success and 100% interruption success on InstructS2S-Eval, while improving the speech-response score from 2.17 to 3.39 over Moshi. BayLing-Duplex also matches or surpasses its turn-based counterpart on Llama Questions, Web Questions, and Alpaca-Eval, showing that simultaneous listen-and-speak modeling does not sacrifice response quality.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Moving Beyond Diffusion: Hierarchy-to-Hierarchy Autoregression for fMRI-to-Image Reconstruction

Reconstructing visual stimuli from fMRI signals is a central challenge bridging machine learning and neuroscience. Recent diffusion-based methods typically map fMRI activity to a single neural embedding, using it as static guidance throughout the entire generation process. However, this fixed guidance collapses hierarchical neural information and is misaligned with the stage-dependent demands of image reconstruction. In response, we propose MindHier, a coarse-to-fine fMRI-to-image reconstruction framework built on scale-wise autoregressive modeling. MindHier introduces three components: a Hierarchical fMRI Encoder to extract multi-level neural embeddings, a Hierarchy-to-Hierarchy Alignment scheme to enforce layer-wise correspondence with CLIP features, and a Scale-Aware Coarse-to-Fine Neural Guidance strategy to inject these embeddings into autoregression at matching scales. These designs make MindHier an efficient and cognitively aligned alternative to diffusion-based methods by enabling a hierarchical reconstruction process that synthesizes global semantics before refining local details, akin to human visual perception. Extensive experiments on the NSD dataset show that MindHier achieves superior semantic fidelity, 4.67$\times$ faster inference, and more deterministic results than the diffusion-based baselines.

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

Cluster LOCO: Feature Importance For Interpreting Clusters

arXiv:2606.14592v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Clustering is widely used for exploratory analysis and scientific discovery, driving insights from market segmentation to biological data analysis, but its outputs can be difficult to interpret, audit, and reproduce as modern datasets become increasingly large and complex. Reliable use of clustering requires understanding which features drive the discovered structure, yet feature-level explanations for clustering remain scarce compared with methods in supervised learning. Furthermore, existing clustering feature importance scores are often tied to specific algorithms and data assumptions. To address these challenges, we propose Cluster LOCO (Leave-One-Covariate-Out), a family of model-agnostic feature importance scores for clustering. Cluster LOCO is built on feature occlusion and clustering generalizability, defined as whether cluster labels learned on one subset of the data can be accurately predicted on held-out samples. For any chosen clustering algorithm, Cluster LOCO quantifies a feature's importance by measuring how much its removal degrades generalizability. We first introduce Cluster LOCO-Split, which relies on data splitting, and then extend it to Cluster LOCO-MP, a minipatch ensemble-based version designed for large-scale data. Across synthetic simulations and an application to cell-type discovery in single-cell transcriptomics, we show that Cluster LOCO more reliably recovers informative features than existing clustering feature importance methods.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

AsFT: Anchoring Safety During LLM Fine-Tuning Within Narrow Safety Basin

arXiv:2506.08473v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) improves performance but introduces critical safety vulnerabilities: even minimal harmful data can severely compromise safety measures. We observe that perturbations orthogonal to the alignment direction - defined by weight differences between aligned (safe) and unaligned models - rapidly compromise model safety. In contrast, updates along the alignment direction largely preserve it, revealing the parameter space as a "narrow safety basin". To address this, we propose AsFT (Anchoring Safety in Fine-Tuning) to maintain safety by explicitly constraining update directions during fine-tuning. By penalizing updates orthogonal to the alignment direction, AsFT effectively constrains the model within the "narrow safety basin," thus preserving its inherent safety. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets and models show that AsFT reduces harmful behaviors by up to 7.60%, improves task performance by 3.44%, and consistently outperforms existing methods across multiple tasks.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

ClinHallu: A Benchmark for Diagnosing Stage-Wise Hallucinations in Medical MLLM Reasoning

Building trustworthy medical multimodal large language models (MLLMs) is critical for reliable clinical decision support. Existing medical hallucination benchmarks mainly focus on data collection, but often ignore where hallucinations originate within the reasoning process. We find that hallucination sources vary across samples: errors may arise from visual misrecognition, incorrect medical knowledge recall, or flawed reasoning integration. To enable source-level hallucination diagnosis, we introduce ClinHallu, a benchmark for stage-wise hallucination diagnosis in medical MLLM reasoning. ClinHallu contains 7,031 validated instances, where each instance is augmented with a structured reasoning trace decomposed into Visual Recognition, Knowledge Recall, and Reasoning Integration. We also use stage-replacement interventions to measure how correcting specific stages affects the final answer. Beyond evaluation, we show that trace-supervised fine-tuning reduces stage-wise hallucinations. ClinHallu provides a fine-grained hallucination testbed for diagnosing and mitigating reasoning failures in medical MLLMs. The benchmark is publicly available at https://github.com/alibaba-damo-academy/ClinHallu.

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

A Learning Method with Gap-Aware Generation for Heterogeneous DAG Scheduling

arXiv:2603.23249v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Efficient scheduling of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) is a core problem in large-scale data-intensive computing systems, where query plans, data-processing workloads, and computation graphs consist of dependent tasks competing for limited heterogeneous resource pools. In practice, achieving high-performance execution requires schedulers to adapt across environments with varying resource pools and task types, while generating schedules under tight runtime budgets. We propose WeCAN, an end-to-end reinforcement learning framework for heterogeneous DAG scheduling that addresses task-pool compatibility coefficients and generation-induced optimality gaps. It adopts a two-stage single-pass design: a single forward pass produces task-pool scores and global parameters, followed by a generation map that constructs schedules without repeated network calls. Its weighted cross-attention encoder models task-pool interactions gated by compatibility coefficients, and is size-agnostic to environment fluctuations. Moreover, widely used list-scheduling maps can incur generation-induced optimality gaps from restricted reachability. We introduce an order-space analysis that characterizes the reachable set of generation maps via feasible schedule orders, explains the mechanism behind generation-induced gaps, and yields sufficient conditions for gap elimination. Guided by these conditions, we design a skip-extended realization with an analytically parameterized decreasing skip rule, which enlarges the reachable order set while preserving single-pass efficiency. Experiments on real-world TPC-H query DAGs, resource-intensive workload datasets, and ML-compiler computation graphs demonstrate improved makespan over strong baselines, with inference time comparable to classical heuristics and faster than multi-round neural schedulers.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

ParseFixer: An Agentic Framework for Document Parsing via Selective Multimodal Correction

In this report, we present our third-place solution for the DataMFM Challenge Track 1: Document Parsing. This track requires models to recover structured Markdown documents from document page images while preserving textual content and document structure. To address the complementary requirements of accurate content recovery and faithful structure reconstruction, we propose ParseFixer, an agentic framework for backbone parsing and selective correction. ParseFixer consists of two key modules: Full-Page Backbone Parsing (FBP) and Agentic Selective Correction (ASC). FBP produces stable initial Markdown outputs with MinerU2.5 Pro, while ASC detects high-value parsing failures and repairs them through a verify-and-rollback correction process. By placing selective multimodal correction after open-source backbone parsing, ParseFixer improves the recovery of key document elements without rewriting reliable backbone predictions. On the test set, our final system achieves an overall score of 61.78 and ranks third in Track 1, demonstrating its effectiveness for accurate document parsing. Our code will be released at: https://github.com/iLearn-Lab/CVPRW26-ParseFixer.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Online Convex Optimization with Sublinear Noisy Probes

arXiv:2606.14640v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study Online Convex Optimization (OCO) over a convex set $K\subseteq \mathbb R^d$, where in each round $t$ the learner selects $x_t\in K$ and then observes a convex loss $f_t:K\to[0,1]$, with the goal of minimizing regret to the best fixed decision in hindsight. We introduce a unified probing model that generalizes two recent lines of work: sublinear best-expert queries in the experts setting, and pairwise (comparison-based) feedback available every round in OCO. In our framework, the learner has a budget of $k\le T$ pairwise probes; on a probed round it may query two points and learn which one has smaller loss. Our main result shows that even a sublinear and noisy probe budget can provably improve worst-case regret in the full feedback OCO regime. With $k$ $\delta$-noisy pairwise probes, we obtain: $ Reg_T \le O\left(\min\left\{\sqrt{dT\ln T},\; \frac{dT\ln T}{k|1-2\delta|}\right\}\right) $, which is tight (up to logarithmic factors in $T$) across $T$, $k$ and $\delta$. Specifically regarding the noise parameter $\delta \in [0,1]$, the regret guarantee smoothly degrades as the oracle response approaches a coin flip, i.e., $\delta$ is close to $\frac{1}{2}$. When applying the same techniques to a finite $K$ for the prediction with $d$ experts setting, the resulting rates are instead completely tight in all parameters, including $d$. Our analysis gives a streamlined treatment of pairwise probing in OCO by quantifying the benefit of probing via a variance reduction effect, combined with a second-order (variance-based) analysis of Continuous Exponential Weights.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Propagating Structural Guidance: Synthesizing Fluorescein Angiography from Fundus Images and Sparse OCT Scans

Fundus fluorescein angiography (FFA) is critical for assessing retinal vascular abnormalities, but its acquisition is invasive and not always feasible. In contrast, color fundus photography (CFP) is non-invasive and widely accessible, which has motivated studies on CFP-to-FFA synthesis. However, prior works rely solely on CFP surface texture, fundamentally limiting the ability to reconstruct functional vascular information and subtle pathological changes. To address this, we propose a novel framework that synthesizes FFA from CFP with structural guidance provided by optical coherence tomography (OCT). We construct a multi-modal retinal imaging dataset with paired CFP, FFA, and OCT from 3,676 patient eyes–the first tri-modally aligned dataset in retinal imaging. To bridge the spatial gap between OCT and fundus modalities, we propose a Spatially Aligned Cross-Modal Fusion (SACMF) module that projects depth-resolved OCT features onto the fundus plane and injects them into the CFP encoder via adaptive layer normalization. Beyond feature fusion, we further introduce Token-wise Cross-Modality Alignment (TCMA), a token-level contrastive learning strategy that explicitly aligns CFP and FFA representations at corresponding spatial positions. Our method achieves superior synthesis performance compared to state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, extensive experiments demonstrate that the FFA images synthesized by our approach bring greater improvements in downstream disease diagnosis performance than existing methods, highlighting the clinical potential of our approach as a non-invasive decision-support tool in routine workflows. The code is available at https://github.com/while-plus/OCT-guide-FFA-Syn.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

DragMesh-2: Physically Plausible Dexterous Hand-Object Interaction with Articulated Objects

Dexterous interaction with articulated objects is important for household, assistive, and humanoid manipulation, where multi-finger hands can provide compliant contact patterns beyond parallel-jaw grasping. However, articulated-object manipulation differs from static-object manipulation: the target part cannot be directly actuated, and its motion must emerge through sustained physical hand–handle contact. This makes the transition from object-centric articulated generation to hand-driven dexterous hand–object interaction non-trivial, since geometric trajectory replay or open-loop execution does not model the contact dynamics required to move the articulated part. Moreover, policies trained only for task completion under fixed dynamics can overfit nominal contact loads, especially without tactile or force feedback, and may degrade when the contact load changes. To address these challenges, we present DragMesh-2, a contact-driven framework for dexterous interaction with articulated objects that extends articulated interaction from object-centric generation to hand-driven dexterous hand–object interaction, where articulated motion must arise through physical contact. We further propose PICA, a physically informed contact-aware training mechanism that injects physical signals into policy learning without tactile or force feedback, improving robustness and task success under changing contact loads. Finally, we conduct systematic evaluation across multiple damping conditions and articulated-object categories to study robustness under contact-load variation, and provide a pure-geometry dexterous interaction resource to support future loco-manipulation and humanoid hand–object interaction research. Across seven GAPartNet objects, DragMesh-2 achieves stronger robustness under contact-load variation than the compared methods while maintaining high task success across damping conditions.

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

Oops, Wait: Discourse Tokens Matter in Reasoning Model

Recent studies suggest that even data-efficient training with ($\simeq$1K) reasoning trajectories can induce non-trivial reasoning capabilities in large language models through post-training. Such training corpora often contain iconic tokens such as "wait", "so", and "alternatively", which frequently appear in reasoning trajectories and may play a role in this process. This paper focuses on characterizing observable token-level patterns in post-training and a case study of how data-efficient supervised fine-tuning (SFT) differs from, and falls short of, large-scale post-training. To this end, we first identify tokens that correlate with correct answers along reasoning trajectories across models and training setups. We then focus on the distribution and (functional) roles of the "wait" token to primarily study the model trained in a data-efficient manner compared with the counterpart. Our study finds that discourse tokens are associated with correctness and a reasoning accuracy jump, even in data-efficient SFT. This suggests data-efficient SFT can partially reproduce discourse-token patterns to mimic meaningful reasoning behavior, but the patterns are less aligned with high-confidence answer transitions than those from large-scale post-training.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Toward Vibe Medicine: A Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Framework for Clinical Decision Support

arXiv:2606.15504v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In recent years, the advances of large language models and autonomous agents have revolutionized the healthcare field, facilitating diagnosis and improving treatment results. However, most existing AI systems rely on pre-trained knowledge and predefined pipelines, which struggle to learn dynamically from the interactive chat session history that contains patient outcomes and past failures. To address this limitation, we propose VIBEMed, a multi-agent framework with a built-in self-evolution mechanism and architecture-level safety sandbox for robust clinical decision support. The system integrates three specialized agents, including a Clinical Diagnostic Agent (CDA) for hypothesis generation, a Therapeutic Execution Agent (TEA) for treatment planning, and a Clinical Evolution Manager Agent (CEMA) that distills longitudinal clinical feedback into reusable knowledge, transforming multimodal patient information into personalized medical decisions. Through self-evolution mechanism, the framework enables iterative updates across memory, model behavior, and decision strategies, allowing the system to improve over time. Experimental results show that VIBEMed demonstrates superior performance through its evolving mechanism in complex clinical cases, particularly in tasks that require integrated decision-making and longitudinal planning. The framework also supports reliable end-to-end decisions in challenging scenarios such as oncology treatment planning, highlighting its feasibility in real-world clinical contexts. Overall, VIBEMed provides a practical path beyond static AI systems toward adaptive, experience-driven clinical decision support, demonstrating the value of combining multi-agent collaboration with continuous evolution for advancing precision medicine.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

COSMOS: Model-Agnostic Personalized Federated Learning with Clustered Server Models and Pseudo-Label-Only Communication

arXiv:2605.11165v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Federated learning (FL) in heterogeneous environments remains challenging because client models often differ in both architecture and data distribution. While recent approaches attempt to address this challenge through client clustering and knowledge distillation, simultaneously handling architectural and statistical heterogeneity remains difficult. We introduce COSMOS, a model-agnostic framework that enables server-side personalization using only pseudo-label communication. Clients train local models and predict on the public data; the server clusters clients by prediction similarity, trains a cluster-specific model for each group using its own compute, and distills the resulting models back to clients. We provide the first theoretical analysis showing that distillation from the learned cluster models can yield exponential personalization risk contraction, going beyond the convergence-to-stationarity guarantees typically provided in model-agnostic FL. Experiments across benchmarks demonstrate that COSMOS consistently outperforms all model-agnostic FL baselines while remaining competitive with state-of-the-art personalized FL methods. More broadly, our results highlight personalized server-side learning with pseudo-labels as a promising paradigm for scalable and model-agnostic federated learning in highly heterogeneous environments.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Two Wrongs, No Right: Auditing Social-Desirability Bias in LLM Annotators for Computational Social Science

Authors:

LLM annotators are increasingly used in computational social science (CSS), but it is unclear whether their alignment-shaped errors preserve the empirical conclusions a researcher would report. We audit three open-source 7B instruction-tuned models (Zephyr, Mistral-Instruct, Qwen2.5-Instruct) across six TweetEval tasks under four prompt conditions (72 cells) and find that social-desirability failures do not run in a single direction. Zephyr exhibits leniency bias, systematically under-applying harmful labels (offensive language: false benign rate 0.729, false alarm rate 0.031). Mistral and Qwen exhibit overcorrection, over-applying the same labels (Mistral hate-speech FAR = 0.604). All three models exhibit neutrality bias on abortion stance, underestimating opposition prevalence by 24 to 40 percentage points and inflating the neutral label. None of the four prompting interventions we test (neutral, safety framing, depersonalized, chain-of-thought) corrects these failures across models; safety framing can worsen stance distortion. Strikingly, Zephyr's hate-speech prevalence estimate matches the gold rate exactly while its class-conditional errors are large in both directions, an accidental cancellation that misleads aggregate validation. We translate these patterns into a three-part taxonomy with diagnostic FBR/FAR signatures and a lightweight gold-sample validation protocol. The headline for trustworthy CSS: a model that looks calibrated on aggregate metrics can still flip the substantive empirical conclusion a researcher would report.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Is Code Better Than Language for Algorithmic Reasoning

arXiv:2606.15589v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For tool-augmented language models, comparing natural-language reasoning with code-execution pipelines is difficult because the comparison changes both the intermediate representation and the execution mechanism. We separate these factors with an intermediate intervention: the model expresses its reasoning as executable code, and the language model simulates that code in context to produce an answer. On a 40-task verifiable algorithmic benchmark, deterministic code execution outperforms natural-language reasoning by +31.6pp. We observe that the intermediate intervention is not meaningfully different from natural-language reasoning (+0.15pp). These results suggest that, in our evaluated setting, changing the intermediate representation alone does not explain the tool-use advantage, providing evidence for the performance gains requiring reliable external execution. We formalize this intuition with a simple statistical decision-theoretic model that characterizes when execution dominates end-to-end risk in our disentangled trace-generation/execution regime. We validate our theory using a reconstruction intervention that leverages a proxy language model to infer natural-language reasoning traces from code representations, recovering performance comparable to the original natural-language reasoning pipeline. All experiments are at https://github.com/TerryTong-Git/ToolProj.

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

Probing Low Frame Rate Degradation in Neural Audio Codecs

arXiv:2606.16969v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low frame rates in neural audio codecs are attractive for autoregressive speech synthesis, where the generation cost scales linearly with the sequence length. Recent work has demonstrated that codecs can operate at 12.5 Hz and below, but the mechanisms underlying low frame rate degradation remain insufficiently understood. We investigate these mechanisms through a controlled frame rate ablation. We reproduce a quality cliff at 6.25 Hz reported in previous works and evaluate candidate explanations: phonemic collisions and codebook saturation, neither of which shows evidence of a fundamental barrier. The cliff is instead caused by suboptimal training configuration: fixed clip duration during training yields too few tokens at low frame rates, starving the decoder of inter-token context. Once corrected, WER degrades smoothly with phonemic load down to 3.1 Hz and 1.6 Hz, suggesting the inference-time efficiency gains of low frame rate codecs are more accessible than previously assumed.

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

Overcoming Rank Collapse in Feedback Alignment

arXiv:2606.11123v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Backpropagation (BP) is widely viewed as biologically implausible, in part because it requires feedback weights to be the transpose of forward weights for error propagation. Interestingly, when training a network with fixed random feedback weights to circumvent this issue, learning aligns the forward weights with the feedback weights, leading the backpropagated error signal to become an approximation of the standard gradient used by BP. This process, called Feedback Alignment (FA), occurs in MLPs and very shallow CNNs but does not scale well to deeper architectures. In this work, we first investigated differences between BP and FA models, trained on CIFAR10, specifically focusing on the effective rank of the signal. We found that the FA error has a considerably lower rank and hence is constrained to a lower-dimensional subspace compared to BP, limiting exploration of the parameter space. Motivated by this observation, we evaluated two mechanisms for increasing the effective dimensionality of FA: Muon, an optimiser that orthogonalises weight updates; and hidden activity normalisation, which promotes activation orthogonality. Across larger architectures and benchmarks, we find that these methods consistently improve over FA baselines, for example, on CIFAR100 with a Resnet-18, accuracy increases by 9 percentage points. Our results identify low-dimensional gradient dynamics as a key obstacle to scaling FA and suggest that inducing higher-dimensional update geometry is a promising route toward scaling alternatives to backpropagation.

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

The Road to Artificial SuperIntelligence: A Comprehensive Survey of Superalignment

arXiv:2412.16468v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has sparked discussion on Artificial Superintelligence (ASI), a hypothetical AI system that surpasses human intelligence. Although ASI remains hypothetical and far beyond current AI capabilities, discussing its potential and exploring its feasibility and potential risks is critical for the development of future AI systems. The idea of superalignment originates from scalable oversight, which studies how to supervise increasingly capable AI systems when direct human supervision becomes insufficient. In this paper, we focus on the superalignment problem: "The process of supervising, controlling, and governing artificial superintelligence." We first review scalable oversight paradigms-Sandwiching, Self-Enhancement, and Weak-to-Strong Generalization – then analyze the limitations of current paradigms through the lens of possibility and impossibility, discuss key challenges, and propose pathways for the safe and continual improvement of future AI systems.

19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

The Geometry of Admissible Short Selling in Discrete-Time Stochastic Portfolio Theory

arXiv:2606.11191v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While discrete-time Stochastic Portfolio Theory (SPT) provides a robust framework for market analysis, existing work on functional generation has predominantly focused on long-only portfolios defined on the entire unit simplex. This paper extends the geometric framework of functional generation to the broader class of bankruptcy-proof long-short portfolios defined on local market state spaces. We establish that, within this admissible setting, pseudo-arbitrage is fully characterized by the concavity of the generating function on the market state space, thereby relaxing the usual global domain requirement. A central contribution of this work is a geometric characterization of the short-selling mechanism. We prove that the presence of short selling is equivalent to the negativity of the maximal concave extension of the generating potential. This phenomenon is linked to the steepness of the logarithmic gradient as the market approaches a zero boundary nested inside the simplex. To systematically exploit this mechanism, we introduce the barycentric scaling transformation, a constructive methodology that maps classical long-only generating functions onto restricted domains to engineer admissible strategies with controlled short-selling exposure. Finally, through the analysis of specific shrunken portfolios, we identify a geometric phase transition: under suitable boundary conditions, admissible strategies exhibit a long-only core and a short-selling region in a qualitative sense (without asserting an exact partition of the state space). This provides a unified geometric perspective on relative arbitrage beyond the long-only constraint.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

APEX: A Network-Native Time-Series Foundation Model for Forecasting and Anomaly Detection for Wireless Edge Operations

arXiv:2606.11553v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generic time-series foundation models transfer poorly to wireless network telemetry whose signals are bursty, zero-inflated, and coupled across protocol layers. We present APEX, a network-native, decoder-only transformer for forecasting enterprise AP telemetry, and evaluate it on DHCP degradation as a representative network task. APEX is pre-trained on 10-channel multivariate telemetry from ~4,500 production wireless networks (~100K AP time series, 34 metrics per AP), and is available as APEX-Large (269M, cloud) and APEX-Edge (10.5M, edge). On a 192-step (4-day) DHCP degradation benchmark, APEX-Large reduces MAE by 18% over the strongest foundation-model baseline (Toto) and 38% over SARIMA, with anomaly-detection F1 = 0.93, while APEX-Edge enables sub-second, privacy-preserving inference on AP-class edge hardware. These results suggest network-native pre-training is a practical foundation for proactive wireless operations.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Order-Based Bayesian Network Modeling of Early Detection and Post-Diagnosis Control for Cardiovascular Disease Risk in Type 2 Diabetes

Patients diagnosed with type 2 diabetes (T2D) are at increased risk of developing cardiovascular disease (CVD), the leading cause of morbidity and mortality in this population. Early detection and glycemic control within the first year after diagnosis reduce CVD risk. However, gaps remain in how to operationalize early detection of T2D using Electronic Health Record (EHR) data and quantify its relationship with subsequent CVD risk using longitudinal observations. We developed a probabilistic graph model to analyze the interdependencies between early detection of T2D, post-diagnosis glycemic control, and CVD occurrence. Using a temporally structured Bayesian Network (BN) learned from EHR data of 9,450 primary care patients between 2017 and 2023, we quantified probabilistic dependencies between demographics, diagnostic delay surrogates, glycemic control, and post-diagnosis CVD occurrence. Percentile based thresholds defined risk groups, where individuals with predicted probabilities in the bottom decile ([≤] 10th percentile) were classified as low risk, and those in the top decile ([≥] 90th percentile) as high risk. Results demonstrated heterogeneity in predicted risks across glycemic and cardiovascular outcomes. Predicted probability of developing CVD within the first year after T2D diagnosis ranged from a mean of 5.2% in the low-risk group to 28.9% in the high-risk group, while predicted probabilities of mean Hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) [≥] 8% during the first year post-diagnosis ranged from 1.6% in low-risk to 55.1% in high-risk group. Patients with HbA1c at diagnosis [≥] 8% had higher predicted probabilities of first-year post-diagnosis mean HbA1c [≥] 8% (53.3% vs. 1.9%) and high HbA1c coefficient of variation (18.7% vs. 3.1%) compared with those with HbA1c [≤] 6.5%. Incorporating early clinical outcomes refined later risk predictions, with long-term CVD risk reaching 33.5% among high-risk individuals. The proposed model achieved predictive performance comparable to conventional machine learning approaches while providing interpretable relationships for risk stratification in primary care populations.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

A Closer Look at Failure Modes in Temporal Understanding of Large Audio-Language Models

arXiv:2606.17417v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) achieve strong performance on a variety of audio understanding tasks but continue to struggle with temporal reasoning, a fundamental capability central to human auditory perception. Understanding the causes of these failures remains challenging as existing benchmarks report performance gaps without probing underlying mechanisms. To address this, we introduce a benchmark with 1,657 questions across three foundational tasks designed specifically for mechanistic analysis. Examining model outputs across varying input settings (behavioral analysis) reveals that models often under-utilize audio when textual cues are available. We also provide the first causal mechanistic analysis of temporal reasoning failures in LALMs. Comparing attention upweighting against scaling, we find that redistributing attention across audio tokens is more effective than increasing audio attention. Targeting task-relevant tokens yields further gains. These findings suggest that modality imbalance alone cannot explain failures. Attention scaling at bottleneck layers improves accuracy from 55.9% to 59.1% without fine-tuning, demonstrating a promising direction for future work.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Sensor Configuration Matters: A Systematic Evaluation of Multimodal SLAM on Quadruped Robots

Autonomous navigation of quadrupedal robots in diverse environments fundamentally relies on resilient Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). While visual-inertial SLAM has matured across wheeled, handheld, and aerial platforms, a critical evaluation gap remains regarding how hardware-level sensor configurations affect performance under the aggressive dynamics of legged locomotion. Quadrupeds introduce distinct embodiment-induced sensory challenges, including foot-impact shocks, high-frequency mechanical vibrations, and rapid angular rotations, which degrade standard perception pipelines. To address this gap, we present a systematic evaluation of state-of-the-art visual, visual-inertial, and LiDAR-visual-inertial SLAM methods using the GrandTour dataset recorded on an ANYmal D quadruped. We isolate and quantify the impacts of camera modalities, shutter techniques, and inertial sensor tiers, analyzing their trade-offs across localization accuracy, algorithmic robustness, and computational resource utilization. Our empirical findings demonstrate that hardware selection has substantial influence on system resilience: stereo configurations consistently outperform monocular and RGB-D modalities, global shutter cameras significantly mitigate motion-induced tracking failures compared to rolling shutter cameras, and, crucially, standard inertial integration can degrade the performance of primarily vision-based frameworks under harsh legged locomotion. These insights additionally offer concrete design guidelines for tailoring custom sensor payloads to achieve dependable perception on agile legged systems.

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

pFedUL: Layer-Aware Federated Unlearning for Personalized Federated Learning

arXiv:2606.16304v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Federated unlearning (FU) enables the removal of specific data contributions from federated learning (FL) models to comply with regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). However, most existing FU methods are designed for the FedAvg paradigm, where all clients share a single global model. In practice, personalized federated learning (pFL) methods such as FedPer, FedRep, Ditto, and FedBN have become widely adopted due to their superior handling of non-IID data. These methods decompose the model into shared global layers and client-specific personalized layers, fundamentally altering the semantics of unlearning, yet this setting has received little attention. We formalize FU under the pFL paradigm, identifying a tension between unlearning completeness on shared layers and personalization preservation for remaining clients. We then propose pFedUL, a layer-aware selective unlearning framework comprising three components: (1) gradient-based layer-wise contribution attribution that separately quantifies the target client's influence on shared and personalized parameters, (2) adaptive selective unlearning that applies differentiated forgetting strategies across layer types, and (3) a lightweight recalibration protocol enabling remaining clients to restore personalization with minimal overhead. We further introduce two new metrics, Personalization Preservation Score (PPS) and Cross-client Fairness Index (CFI), to evaluate pFL-specific unlearning quality. Experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and FEMNIST under varying non-IID settings indicate that pFedUL achieves unlearning effectiveness comparable to full retraining while maintaining an average of 97.3\% personalized accuracy for remaining clients. Compared with six state-of-the-art FU methods adapted to the pFL setting, pFedUL consistently achieves superior personalization preservation.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Development of iADJUST: a theory-informed, patient co-designed digital psychological intervention for adjustment in chronic kidney disease

Background: Psychological distress is common in chronic kidney disease (CKD) and is associated with reduced quality of life, treatment non-adherence, and worse clinical outcomes. Distress in CKD is also linked to difficulties adjusting to the demands of illness management. Despite this, psychological support remains inconsistently integrated within kidney care pathways, and existing interventions often lack clear theoretical specification and explicit targeting of mechanisms underpinning adjustment to CKD. Objectives: To describe the systematic development of iADJUST, a theory-informed patient co-designed digital psychological intervention targeting key cognitive and behavioural mechanisms involved in adjustment to CKD. Methods: Intervention development was guided by the Medical Research Council framework for complex interventions. A structured, iterative process integrated empirical evidence, psychological theory, and patient and public involvement and engagement. The Common-Sense Model of Self-Regulation and cognitive behavioural theories informed the identification of modifiable maintaining mechanisms associated with adjustment to CKD. Intervention components were mapped onto these mechanisms and refined through co-design with people living with CKD. Results: iADJUST is a six-session self-guided digital psychological intervention delivered over 12 weeks and supplemented by therapist contact. The intervention targets illness-related uncertainty, fatigue-related activity dysregulation, catastrophic what-if thinking, self-critical evaluation, and behavioural withdrawal. It integrates psychoeducation, cognitive and behavioural strategies, maintenance planning, and elements from acceptance and commitment therapy and compassion-focused approaches. Content is delivered through video, audio, and guided tasks and activities. Conclusion: iADJUST provides a theory-informed, evidence-based psychological intervention for CKD explicitly mapping intervention components to maintaining cognitive and behavioural mechanisms implicated in adjustment. Feasibility evaluation is underway.