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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Quantum-classical physics-informed Kolmogorov-Arnold networks for PDEs

arXiv:2606.20326v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We develop QCPIKAN, the first quantum-classical physics-informed Kolmogorov-Arnold network designed to solve partial differential equations (PDEs). Built upon Chebyshev-polynomial KAN layers and parameterized quantum circuits, this hybrid framework embeds physical constraints into the training loss to enforce physical consistency. Our theoretical investigations grounded in approximation theory prove that this design accelerates high-frequency error convergence to an exponential rate and effectively mitigates numerical dispersion. We validate the framework across three typical seepage scenarios in porous media, including single-phase flow, component transport and two-phase flow. Compared with existing quantum-classical physics-informed neural networks, QCPIKAN achieves superior performance in global prediction accuracy, local error control, dynamic evolution tracking and displacement front localization. This work provides a robust and efficient alternative for solving complex PDEs.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Using Seismic Statistical Features and VQ-VAE to Improve Spatiotemporal Seismicity Predictability

arXiv:2606.10069v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this paper we build upon a previous study in which we demonstrated, using XGBoost and earthquake catalogue data from Japan and Chile, that a set of 60 seismic statistical features (SSFs) had much greater predictive value than a set of 428 generic time series features from the tsfresh package. We here extend this previous work in two key ways, focusing on data from Japan as a large dataset is necessary in order to allow for the training of a deep learning (autoencoder) model. First, we move from whole-region prediction (considering, for each candidate event, the likelihood of an event M $\geq$ 5.0 anywhere in the region in the next 15 days) to localised predictions in which both the region of feature computation and the region of prediction are restricted to a circle of radius 24 km around the candidate event, and we show that performance remains excellent, similar to our previous whole-region study for the same area. Second, we here couple this proven set of SSFs, based on one-dimensional (catalogue) data, with a novel feature based on two-dimensional seismic maps, obtained by training a VQ-VAE model to reproduce such maps as output and identifying a measure of its error in doing so with a localised build-up of crustal stress. We show that while localised prediction based on SSFs can be effective alone, with test AUC values as high as those obtained in the case of Japan in our previous whole-region study, the inclusion of the new natively-spatial VQ-VAE-derived feature, top-ranked by SHAP analysis, can enhance performance and additionally appears to near-wholly replace the traditionally-computed $b$-value in terms of feature usage.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Self-Prompting Small Language Models for Privacy-Sensitive Clinical Information Extraction

Clinical named entity recognition from dental progress notes is challenging because documentation is highly unstructured, domain-specific, and often privacy-sensitive. We developed a locally deployable framework that enables small language models to self-generate, verify, refine, and evaluate entity-specific prompts for extracting multiple clinical entities from dental notes. Using 1,200 annotated notes, we evaluated candidate open-weight models with multi-prompt ensemble inference and further adapted selected models using QLoRA-based supervised fine-tuning and direct preference optimization. Model performance varied substantially, highlighting the need for task-specific evaluation rather than reliance on generic benchmarks. Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct achieved the strongest baseline performance. After DPO, Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct and Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct achieved micro/macro F1 scores of 0.864/0.837 and 0.806/0.797, respectively. These findings suggest that automated prompt optimization combined with lightweight preference-based post-training can support scalable clinical information extraction using locally deployed small language models.

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

When Context Returns: Toward Robust Internalization in On-Policy Distillation

arXiv:2606.11627v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent work has shown that on-policy distillation can internalize privileged context, such as system prompts or task hints, into a student model so that the context is no longer needed at inference time. Although this approach successfully improves the student's no-context performance, we identify an interesting and previously unstudied phenomenon: in many settings, reintroducing the original privileged context to the distilled student actually degrades its performance, even on instances it already solves correctly without context. We term this context-induced degradation and argue that robust internalization demands not only matching the teacher's context-conditioned behavior, but also remaining stable when the context is reintroduced, a property we call context removability. Motivated by this observation, we propose a lightweight consistency regularizer that first anchors the student's no-context output via stop-gradient, then penalizes the context-conditioned output for deviating from it via forward KL divergence. This simple addition requires only one extra forward pass per training step, yet it effectively mitigates context-induced degradation and, in many cases, even improves no-context performance. Across 12 configurations spanning diverse domains and model families, our method improves context-conditioned accuracy in the majority of settings, reduces context-induced harm in 11 out of 12 settings, and effectively eliminates response-length inflation. A mechanistic case study further confirms that context removability is achieved at the representation level, with hidden states remaining nearly identical regardless of whether the context is present.

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

HPSv3++: Scaling Reward Models Across the Full Spectrum of Diffusion Model Capabilities

Reward models guide text-to-image (T2I) systems toward outputs aligned with human preferences. However, typical reward models such as HPSv3 are trained on pre-annotated data from earlier T2I models, without accounting for quality discriminative shifts arising from evolving model capabilities and reinforcement learning (RL) iterations, limiting their broader applicability. In this work, we propose HPSv3++, a reward model framework that elevates the HPSv3 model for varying T2I model capabilities and their RL iteration changes across the full capability-iteration spectrum. Specifically, we first introduce HPDv3++, a 212K dual-dimension preference dataset annotated for text fidelity and aesthetic quality using a recent high-capability (Qwen-Image) model with human supervision. We then propose a two-stage training framework. Stage 1 employs data-aware orthogonal gradient projection to incorporate diverse aesthetic perception from HPDv3++ while preserving the original effective human preference knowledge in HPSv3. Stage 2 further leverages unlabeled data from T2I models spanning different capability levels and RL iterations, and introduces a joint capability-iterations conditioned signal for the reward model together with a standard deviation-driven unsupervised guidance mechanism, strengthening reward model across the capability-iteration spectrum. HPSv3++ achieves state-of-the-art preference prediction, outperforming HPSv3 9.8% on HPDv3, 5.5% on GenAI-Bench, while achieving 79.1%/88.1% on our proposed HPDv3++. When used for T2I RL training, it consistently improves GenEval scores across diverse T2I models, demonstrating its wide-range capabilities. The code is available at https://github.com/PlantPotatoOnMoon/HPSv3-PlusPlus.

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

Optimal Ansatz-free Hamiltonian Learning In Situ

arXiv:2606.19486v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Characterizing the features of a Hamiltonian that governs a quantum system serves as a fundamental subroutine of quantum device calibration, signal sensing, and error correction. Recent works proposed protocols have achieved the optimal Heisenberg-limited scaling learning ansatz-free Hamiltonians from their real-time evolutions without fully specifying interaction structures. However, these protocols rely on both deep circuits with interleaving probes and control, and extremely short time resolution, making them difficult to implement on near- and intermediate-term in situ quantum experiments. In this work, we propose a computationally efficient, control-free, and ancilla-free algorithm that uses only Pauli product state preparation and measurement, and learns an ansatz-free Hamiltonian $H$ with $||H||\leq\Lambda$ in total evolution time of $\Theta(\frac{\Lambda}{\epsilon^2}\log(\frac{\Lambda}{\epsilon}))$. The evolution time cost of our algorithm is optimal for any control-free protocols as we further prove a lower bound of $\Omega(\frac{\Lambda}{\epsilon^2}\log(\frac{\Lambda}{\epsilon}))$. Technically, our method introduces a randomized-sampling framework that combines band-limited kernel-based time sampling with a displacement sieve for Hamiltonian structure learning. The characteristic probe time resolution depends only on $\Lambda$ instead of $\varepsilon$, which makes our protocol especially appealing in the high-precision regime for sensing and calibration applications. We also show that the algorithm maintains the same asymptotic total evolution time in the presence of state-preparation-and-measurement (SPAM) noise when the Hamiltonian is local after calibration. Our results demonstrate the fundamental cost of experimentally friendly Hamiltonian learning and provide a practical route to rigorous in situ characterization of near-term quantum platforms.

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

From Noise to Intent: Anchoring Generative VLA Policies with Residual Bridges

arXiv:2604.21391v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Bridging high-level semantic understanding with low-level physical control remains a persistent challenge in embodied intelligence, stemming from the fundamental spatiotemporal scale mismatch between cognition and action. Existing generative VLA policies typically adopt a "Generation-from-Noise" paradigm, which disregards this disparity, leading to representation inefficiency and weak condition alignment during optimization. In this work, we propose ResVLA, an architecture that shifts the paradigm to "Refinement-from-Intent." Recognizing that robotic motion naturally decomposes into global intent and local dynamics, ResVLA utilizes spectral analysis to decouple control into a deterministic low-frequency anchor and a stochastic high-frequency residual. By anchoring the generative process on the predicted intent, our model focuses strictly on refining local dynamics via a residual diffusion bridge. Extensive simulation experiments show that ResVLA achieves competitive performance, strong robustness to language and robot embodiment perturbations, and faster convergence than standard generative baselines. ResVLA also demonstrates strong performance in real-world robot experiments.

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

Mutual Distillation of Dual-Foundation Models for Semi-Supervised PET/CT Segmentation

Organ segmentation from PET/CT is critical for quantitative analysis and radiotherapy planning in oncology. To ease the high annotation cost of PET/CT segmentation, semi-supervised learning (SSL) provides a practical and effective solution for developing deep models with limited labeled data. Recent developments in visual foundation models have demonstrated remarkable adaptability with improved efficiency. In this work, we propose a mutual distillation framework that seamlessly exploits both structural and functional foundation models, which act as modality-specific generalists for distilling knowledge from structural CT and metabolic PET imaging. By bridging the gap between the task-specific precision of student models and the segmentation priors of generalist foundation models, we propose MuDuo, a mutual distillation framework that synergistically leverages SAM-Med3D for CT and SegAnyPET for PET to distill their knowledge into a lightweight student network. Our approach eliminates the need for manual prompts while maximizing the utility of unlabeled data for automatic segmentation, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the AutoPET dataset with only 5 labeled cases. Our source code is available at https://github.com/Wu-beining/MuDuo.

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

StarOR: Synergizing Tree Search and Test-Time Reinforcement Learning for Optimization Modeling

arXiv:2606.15197v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Optimization modeling is inherently hierarchical, requiring a precise sequence of symbolic commitments. Traditional learning-based automated optimization modeling methods improve modeling policies through large-scale annotated or curated training data, but are costly to adapt to new problem distributions. Meanwhile, one-shot generation remains brittle in hierarchical modeling, where early symbolic errors can propagate into invalid formulations. Test-time scaling offers a promising alternative by enabling structural exploration with additional instance-level computation; however, existing search-based methods typically rely on a fixed policy, causing repeated rollouts to inherit similar modeling biases and providing limited credit assignment for intermediate decisions. To address these limitations, we propose StarOR, a synergistic search-and-adaptation framework that couples MCTS with Test-Time Reinforcement Learning for optimization modeling. StarOR decomposes the modeling process into four stages and updates a transient LoRA adapter via GRPO at each non-terminal node. By using MCTS-generated siblings as local comparison sets, StarOR transforms search-time exploration into instance-specific policy refinement. Moreover, an unsupervised multi-faceted reward system provides fine-grained feedback for intermediate formulation decisions without ground-truth labels. Experiments across five optimization benchmarks show that StarOR achieves state-of-the-art performance even with a 4B backbone, outperforming existing methods and the frontier LLMs.

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

Imbalanced Semi-Supervised Learning via Label Refinement and Threshold Adjustment

arXiv:2407.05370v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Semi-supervised learning (SSL) algorithms often struggle to perform well when trained on imbalanced data. In such scenarios, the generated pseudo-labels tend to exhibit a bias toward the majority class, and models relying on these pseudo-labels can further amplify this bias. Existing imbalanced SSL algorithms explore pseudo-labeling strategies based on either pseudo-label refinement (PLR) or threshold adjustment (THA), aiming to mitigate the bias through heuristic-driven designs. However, through a careful statistical analysis, we find that existing strategies are suboptimal: most PLR algorithms are either overly empirical or rely on the unrealistic assumption that models remain well-calibrated throughout training, while most THA algorithms depend on flawed metrics for pseudo-label selection. To address these shortcomings, we first derive the theoretically optimal form of pseudo-labels under class imbalance. This foundation leads to our key contribution: SEmi-supervised learning with pseudo-label optimization based on VALidation data (SEVAL), a unified framework that learns both PLR and THA parameters from a class-balanced subset of training data. By jointly optimizing these components, SEVAL adapts to specific task requirements while ensuring per-class pseudo-label reliability. Our experiments demonstrate that SEVAL outperforms state-of-the-art SSL methods, producing more accurate and effective pseudo-labels across various imbalanced SSL scenarios while remaining compatible with diverse SSL algorithms. The code is publicly available (https://github.com/ZerojumpLine/SEVAL).

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Learning from Your Own Mistakes: Constructing Learnable Micro-Reflective Trajectories for Self-Distillation

arXiv:2606.18844v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-distillation improves reasoning in large language models by using the model's own rollouts as training signal, typically through implicit logit-level alignment that minimizes KL divergence toward a privileged target distribution. However, because this supervision is generated via uncontrolled sampling, it provides no diagnostic insight into the model's specific errors or corrective guidance for its individual failure patterns. Consequently, the model learns to imitate a privileged distribution rather than receiving fine-grained corrections that pinpoint where and why its reasoning fails. In this paper, we propose Trajectory-Augmented Policy Optimization (TAPO), which advances self-distillation from implicit distributional alignment to explicit trajectory construction. During RL training, the model produces both correct and incorrect rollouts to the same query, and TAPO leverages this contrastive structure to construct micro-reflective corrections, new training trajectories that retain the model's erroneous reasoning up to the point of failure, then insert a natural-language diagnosis and corrected reasoning guided by a correct reference from the same sampling group. Since each trajectory is anchored in the learner's own prefix and solutions, the corrective signal preserves the model's on-policy distribution to a greater extent than the position-wise alignment imposed by KL-based methods. To integrate these trajectories, TAPO introduces difficulty-aware candidate selection at the model's capability boundary and decoupled advantage estimation to prevent gradient contamination. Experiments on AIME 2024, AIME 2025, and HMMT 2025 show that TAPO achieves consistent improvements over GRPO under the same number of training steps. Further analysis demonstrates that TAPO strengthens both first-pass reasoning and error-correction effectiveness.

12.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-15

WormSORT: A detection-based multiple object tracking model for individual silkworms in breeding environments

Authors:

by Hongkang Shi, Linbo Li, Shiping Zhu, Haibo He, Minghui Zhu, Jianfei Zhang Variety breeding has long been a cornerstone of high-quality agriculture, and recent advances in artificial intelligence have opened new avenues for accelerating biological breeding. In this study, we applied multiple object tracking (MOT) technology to silkworm breeding to achieve efficient, non-invasive, and dynamic individual monitoring. Unlike pedestrian or vehicle tracking, silkworms pose unique challenges for MOT due to their small size, dense distribution, and high inter-individual similarity, which complicate accurate tracking and behavioral analysis. To address these issues, we propose WormSORT, an enhanced tracking method based on a tracking-by-detection framework with an optimized data association strategy. A pre-trained detection model identifies silkworms in each frame, and deep feature vectors are extracted using a re-identification network. Identity association is first performed using Intersection over Union (IoU) matching, followed by deep feature similarity for unmatched cases, improving both tracking accuracy and reliability. To further enhance tracking stability, we introduce a candidate input padding mechanism, including IoU padding and feature padding, ensuring that high-confidence unmatched trajectories and detections remain involved in the matching process. To validate the proposed tracking strategy, we constructed two multiple silkworm tracking (MST) datasets: MST-50, containing approximately 50 individuals over 1000 frames, and MST-100, containing approximately 100 individuals over 1200 frames. Experimental results demonstrate that WormSORT outperforms existing methods, including DeepSORT, StrongSORT, OCSORT, ByteTrack, and BotSORT, achieving superior tracking performance. This study provides a valuable reference for silkworm tracking and behavioral analysis, contributing to the advancement of high-quality silkworm rearing and management.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Graph2Idea:Retrieval-Augmented Scientific Idea Generation with Graph-Structured Contexts

arXiv:2606.09105v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Generating novel, feasible, and high-quality research ideas is an important yet challenging task in scientific discovery. Recent Large Language Model (LLM)-based methods often ground idea generation with retrieved literature, but the retrieved evidence is usually provided as flat text, such as titles, abstracts, or summaries. Such flat contexts may contain redundant or weakly relevant information, while making cross-paper relations among problems, methods, mechanisms, and findings difficult to identify and trace. To address this challenge, we propose Graph2Idea, a knowledge graph-guided framework for retrieval-augmented scientific idea generation.Graph2Idea first retrieves papers according to the input topic, transforms them into structured knowledge triples, and dynamically constructs a target-centered knowledge graph to make literature relations explicit. It then extracts compact graph-derived contexts that retain target-relevant relational evidence while reducing noisy textual input. Based on these contexts, a two-stage generation process first identifies promising research directions and then guides the LLM to synthesize candidate ideas from graph-grounded evidence. Experiments on a scientific idea generation benchmark show that Graph2Idea outperforms representative baselines under the automatic evaluation protocol. Compared with the strongest baseline scores, it improves Novelty from 0.45 to 0.52, Quality from 0.24 to 0.29, and Feasibility from 0.22 to 0.28. These results suggest that graph-structured evidence helps LLMs generate research ideas through more explicit, compact, and traceable recombination of prior scientific knowledge.

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

Application of integrated gradients explainability to sociopsychological semantic markers

Classification of textual data in terms of sentiment, or more nuanced sociopsychological markers (e.g., agency), is now a popular approach commonly applied at the sentence level. In this paper, we exploit the integrated gradient (IG) method to capture the classification output at the word level, revealing which words actually contribute to the classification process. This approach improves explainability and provides in-depth insights into the text. We focus on sociopsychological markers beyond sentiment and investigate how to effectively train IG in agency, one of the very few markers for which a verified deep learning classifier, BERTAgent, is currently available. Performance and system parameters are carefully tested, alternatives to the IG approach are evaluated, and the usefulness of the result is verified in a relevant application scenario. The method is also applied in a scenario where only a small labeled dataset is available, with the aim of exploiting IG to identify the salient words that contribute to building the different classes that relate to relevant sociopsychological markers. To achieve this, an uncommon training procedure that encourages overfitting is employed to enhance the distinctiveness of each class. The results are analyzed through the lens of social psychology, offering valuable insights.

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

Approximate Next Policy Sampling: Replacing Conservative Target Policy Updates in Deep RL

arXiv:2605.05481v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We revisit a classic "chicken-and-egg" problem in reinforcement learning: to safely improve a policy, the value function must be accurate on the state-visitation distribution of the updated policy. That distribution over states is unknown and cannot be sampled for the purposes of training the value function. Conservative updates solve this problem, but at the cost of shrinking the policy update. This paper explores an alternative solution, Approximate Next Policy Sampling (ANPS), which addresses the problem by modifying the training distribution rather than constraining the policy update. ANPS is satisfied if the distribution of the training data approximates that of the next policy. To demonstrate the feasibility and efficacy of ANPS, we introduce Stable Value Approximate Policy Iteration (SV-API). SV-API modifies the standard approximate policy iteration loop to hold the target policy fixed while an iteratively updated behavioral policy gathers relevant experience. It only commits to a new policy once a convergence criterion has been met. If certain stability criteria are met, the update is guaranteed to be safe; otherwise, it remains no less safe than standard approximate policy iteration. Applying SV-API to PPO yields Stable Value PPO (SV-PPO), which matches or improves performance on high-dimensional discrete (Atari) and continuous control benchmarks while executing substantially larger target policy updates. These results demonstrate the viability of ANPS as a new solution to this classic challenge in RL.

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

Towards More General Control of Diffusion Models Using Jeffrey Guidance

A key strength of diffusion models lies in their flexibility, since their outputs can be controlled at sampling time through guidance. However, beyond simple cases such as conditional sampling, the target distribution is often left implicit, defined only through a sampling rule or a heuristic energy function. To address this, we propose Jeffrey guidance, a principled framework that extends diffusion-model control to applications beyond what standard guidance can express. It leverages Jeffrey's rule of conditioning to update marginal distributions towards a prescribed target, preserving the conditional structure and minimally perturbing the joint distribution. We first demonstrate Jeffrey guidance by targeting a prescribed embedding distribution. With Inception embeddings as the target, this leads to substantial reductions in FID on both CIFAR-10 and FFHQ. We further apply Jeffrey guidance to fairness on CelebA-HQ, updating an unconditional diffusion model to enforce independence between attributes.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

The Power of Test-Time Training for Approximate Sampling

arXiv:2606.11437v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Efficiently sampling from a complex probability distribution is a fundamental problem which has become increasingly pertinent in recent years with the rise of generative AI, as sophisticated sampling procedures from LLMs have been proposed to solve challenging reasoning problems. The efficacy of such sampling algorithms is limited, however, by the relationship between the LLM and the particular sampling task at hand, which has motivated the framework of test-time training (TTT). TTT works by updating a model's weights in response to partial generations and reward feedback received at inference time, thus adapting to the particular problem. In this work, we propose a formalization for TTT as the problem of producing a sample from a given probability measure $\mu^\star$ belonging to a known class ${F}$ of distributions, given an oracle $\hat \mu$ which yields approximate density estimates for $\mu^\star$. This is closely related to the problem of reducing sampling to approximate counting studied in seminal works of Jerrum, Valiant & Vazirani (1986) and Jerrum & Sinclair (1989): namely, when ${F}$ is the class of all distributions, it coincides exactly with the aforementioned counting-to-sampling reduction. In this paper, we first show a quadratic lower bound on the query complexity of sampling from $\mu^\star$ given query access to $\hat \mu$ (for sufficiently large classes ${F}$), thus showing that the random walk approach proposed by Jerrum & Sinclair (1989) and refined by Hayes & Sinclair (2010), is optimal. This answers an open question posed by Hayes & Sinclair. We then show that this lower bound can be circumvented if the size of ${F}$ is bounded appropriately. As we discuss, this latter result can be viewed as an abstraction of TTT, and thus represents a starting point for the development of a principled theoretical framework for TTT.

19.
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.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Quantum ring all-reduce: communication and privacy advantages for distributed learning

arXiv:2606.20344v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine learning models have scaled to unprecedented sizes, making training across distributed devices the de facto standard in the field. In this work, we explore how quantum communications can make distributed training both more communication-efficient and information-theoretically private, for both classical and quantum learning models. Ring all-reduce is the foundational communication primitive for large-scale distributed training. We present a quantum version that reduces per-link online communication by a provably optimal factor of two using pre-shared entanglement and superdense coding, without requiring the learning model or gradient computation to change. Beyond bandwidth, the primitive enables privacy guarantees that are information-theoretically impossible for any classical protocol, achieving composable {\epsilon}-secure aggregation, via verified entanglement, at a 2x overhead in GHZ copies. Our hybrid quantum-classical communication architecture yields simultaneous communication and security advantages for large scale distributed training, regardless of whether the learning itself is quantum or classical. Finally, we characterise quantum advantages in gradient conflict detection for server-to-client communication under bandwidth constraints, a setting that arises after ring all-reduce is completed, when full gradient broadcast to external clients is infeasible. Two variants of the problem admit different separations. For margin-based alignment testing (\textsc{GapIP}_{\tau}), the quantum advantage is quadratic in the margin parameter: \widetilde{O}({\tau}^{-1}\log P) qubits versus \widetilde{O}(\min(\{\tau}^{-2},P)) bits. For sign-consistency auditing against a private parameter matching (\textsc{TieAudit}_{\epsilon}), the advantage represents an exponential separation in communication complexity: \Omega(\sqrt{P}) bits whereas O({\epsilon}^{-2}\log P) qubits suffice.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Trade-offs in Medical LLM Adaptation: An Empirical Study in French QA

The development of large language models (LLMs) has led to an increased focus on their adaptation to specialized domains and languages, yet the effectiveness of domain adaptation strategies remains unclear. We present a study of medical domain adaptation using French medical question-answering (QA) as a case study. We compare continual pretraining (CPT), supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and their combination across three model families, multiple sizes, and three initialization types, explicitly disentangling adaptation effects from base model choice. We evaluate both multiple-choice (MCQA) and open-ended QA (OEQA) under greedy and constrained decoding using automatic metrics and LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation. For MCQA, CPT+SFT most often achieves the best scores, but gains over SFT are small and frequently not statistically significant, making SFT a strong and cost-effective default. For OEQA, CPT consistently improves overlap-based metrics, while SFT often degrades generation quality; instruction tuning and CPT+SFT are preferred by LLM-based evaluation. Cross-lingual experiments further show effective transfer from French adaptation to English benchmarks. Overall, we provide practical guidelines for selecting adaptation strategies under computational constraints.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Can Factual Opinions Be Edited (Manipulated) in Large Language Models?

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into various domains, making knowledge editing techniques crucial yet potentially hazardous. Current editing methods primarily target atomic facts, overlooking the significant risks associated with manipulating factual opinions, e.g., documented stances of public figures on societal issues. Such manipulation could reshape public images, influence elections, and alter societal views. To systematically assess this threat, we introduce the Factual Opinion Editing with Evidence (FOE) benchmark, which encompasses 261 public figures, 19 issue categories, and 2,178 complete opinion records. Our evaluations demonstrate that current editing techniques struggle significantly with factual opinions, often achieving only superficial changes while failing to preserve consistency between the edited opinion and the supporting evidence generated by the model. To address this limitation, we further propose a simple yet effective Self-Generated Evidence-Aligned method that achieves opinion-evidence alignment without relying on explicit instructions. Together, our benchmark and method provide a foundation for understanding the emerging security implications of factual opinion editing in LLMs.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

CrossMaps: Confidence-Aware Open-Vocabulary Semantic Mapping for Rover Navigation

arXiv:2606.16935v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rovers rely on perception to maintain spatial maps that encode both objects and sensor quality (e.g., range reliability, lighting artifacts, data density), guiding data fusion, embedding updates, and navigation under partial observability. To study these coupled perception-navigation processes, we present CrossMaps, a real-time confidence-aware open-vocabulary semantic mapping pipeline that constructs language-queryable maps from RGB-D data. Building on VLMaps-style approaches, CrossMaps integrates multi-scale CLIP embeddings with confidence-aware fusion and a dual-memory architecture consisting of Short-Term Memory (STM) and Long-Term Memory (LTM). The STM aggregates noisy visual observations using geometric, semantic, and temporal confidence cues, while confident and coherent cells are promoted to the LTM as persistent semantic landmarks. Designed for deployment with a Jetson Orin-powered UGV alongside SLAM, CrossMaps runs in real time and produces semantic heatmaps that can be queried with natural language to guide rover navigation.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

A2SG:Adaptive and Asymmetric Surrogate Gradients for Training Deep Spiking Neural Networks

Training deep spiking neural networks (SNNs) remains challenging due to sharp loss landscapes and temporal inconsistency caused by surrogate gradients. To address these challenges, we propose a unified framework: adaptive and asymmetric surrogate gradients A2SG. The adaptive gradients adjust an effective window for spatio-temporal adaptation, reducing spatial gradient variation and maintaining directional consistency of gradients over time. The asymmetric gradients reflect neuronal dynamics by assigning larger gradients to neurons with higher membrane potentials, and we prove that they yield lower variation than symmetric surrogates. Our analysis further establishes a direct connection between local gradient variation and the curvature of the loss landscape, providing a principled explanation for how A2SG promotes convergence to flatter minima and improves generalization. We conduct extensive experiments on diverse models, including CNN-based and Transformer-based SNNs, across various tasks such as image classification using both static and neuromorphic datasets, as well as segmentation. The results demonstrate that A2SG consistently improves accuracy and energy efficiency, establishing it as a general and reliable solution for training deep SNNs. Our code is available at https://github.com/KIST-NCL/A2SG.git.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Task-Aligned Stability Analysis of Vision-Language Models for Autonomous Driving Hazard Detection

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used for scene understanding in autonomous driving, but robustness analysis often relies on task-agnostic embedding stability alone. We study whether corruption-induced embedding drift predicts changes in a task-aligned hazard score derived from CLIP image-text similarities. Using controlled corruptions on BDD100K road scenes, we compare embedding drift against margin drift, defined as the change in hazard score under perturbation. The relationship is highly corruption-dependent: some families exhibit strong coupling between representation drift and decision drift, while others induce hazardous decision instability despite relatively modest embedding change. Furthermore, corruption families differ in failure direction: most suppress hazard detections via false negatives, while occlusion instead triggers false alarms, suggesting that benchmark design should account for asymmetric failure modes, not just overall instability rates. These results suggest that robustness benchmarks should include task-aligned stability measures in addition to embedding-level perturbation statistics.