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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Quantitative and Optimal Device-Independent Lower Bounds on Detection Efficiency

Authors:
Arkaprabha Ghosal↗Soumyadip Patra↗Peter Bierhorst↗

arXiv:2511.19302v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper examines a quantitative and optimal lower bound on the detector efficiency in a (2,2,2) Bell experiment within a fully device-independent framework, whereby the detectors used in the experiment are uncharacterized. We provide a tight lower bound on the minimum efficiency required to observe a desired Bell-CHSH violation using the Navascués-Pironio-Acín (NPA) hierarchy, confirming tightness up to four decimal places with numerical optimization over explicit quantum realizations. We then introduce the effect of dark counts and demonstrate how to quantify the minimum required efficiency to observe a desired CHSH violation with an increasing dark count error. Finally, to obtain an analytical closed-form expression of the minimum efficiency, we consider the set of no-signaling behaviors that satisfy the Tsirelson bound, which are easier to characterize than the quantum set. Using such behaviors, we find a simple closed-form expression for a lower bound on the minimum efficiency which is monotonically increasing with the CHSH violation, though the analytically obtained lower bounds are meaningfully below the numerically tight lower bound.

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02.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Numerical simulations of the spread from the mean of the SLE and Multiple SLE dynamics

Authors:
Phillip Kim↗Vlad Margarint↗

arXiv:2606.11254v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Schramm-Loewner Evolution (SLE) describes a family of fractal curves that arise in the study of the scaling limits of many planar Statistical Physics models. These curves are modeled using the Loewner Differential Equation for the conformal maps $g_t(z)$ with a Brownian motion driver. Using Euler's Method, in the current work we performed numerical experiments to study at a fixed time the quantities $|g_t(z) - \overline{g_t(z)}|$ and $Re(g_t(z)) - Re(\overline{g_t(z)})$, where $Re$ denotes the real part and $\overline{g_t(z)}$ refers to the sample average. These random variables measure the 'spread' of the dynamics from the average behavior at fixed time. One of the scopes of this work is to give numerical predictions for future theoretical investigations on these quantities. When investigating these quantities in the SLE case our experiments predict that the distribution is bimodal when the dynamics started close to the origin, and it can become bell-shaped if the dynamics is started further from the origin. In the second part, we performed experiments for a Multiple SLE model whose driver is Dyson Brownian Motion. Due to singularity in the dynamics of the drivers and the many data points needed, this part is challenging from a computational perspective. In the multiple SLE case, our experiments predict that the distribution is bell-shaped in all cases. In addition, we check the changes in the distributions as we vary the parameter $\kappa$ in the SLE case and $\beta$ in the Multiple SLE case.

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

Multi-Variable Stellar Parameter Estimation Using Residual Multitask Neural Networks

Authors:
Bruno Santos Meneses Barreto↗Marcio Eisencraft↗

arXiv:2606.13868v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present an end-to-end pipeline for estimating stellar parameters from Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 12 spectra using a fully connected multitask neural network with residual blocks, whose hyperparameters are tuned via Bayesian optimization. The preprocessing pipeline includes per-spectrum standardization, RobustScaler normalization of the target variables – effective temperature $T_{\mathrm{eff}}$, metallicity $[\mathrm{Fe/H}]$, and surface gravity $\log g$ – and data augmentation via Gaussian noise injection. On a held-out test set, the model achieved Mean Absolute Errors (MAE) of $59.76~\mathrm{K}$ for $T_{\mathrm{eff}}$, $0.103~\mathrm{dex}$ for $[\mathrm{Fe/H}]$, and $0.130~\mathrm{dex}$ for $\log g$. Normalized against the full-scale range of each parameter, these results represent range-normalized errors between $1\%$ and $3\%$, achieved with a highly efficient model complexity of approximately 540,000 trainable parameters. These results demonstrate that a compact residual multitask architecture, combined with principled signal preprocessing, provides a parameter-efficient solution for nonlinear parameter estimation in large-scale spectral datasets. In particular, the proposed model achieves competitive performance with substantially lower complexity than deeper neural network baselines.

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04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Auditing Reward Hackability in Code RL Training Environments

Authors:
Shreshth Rajan↗

arXiv:2606.16062v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We measure the rate at which code RL environments accept incorrect solutions as correct. On a 49-task sample of SWE-bench Verified, 28.5% of tasks have test suites weak enough that a Docker-verified incorrect patch passes them. On 20 R2E-Gym tasks across 6 repositories, the same pipeline at single-shot exploit generation yields 25.0%. A random-effects meta-analysis over 134 frontier model submissions to SWE-bench Verified finds, within the same human-rated difficulty stratum, model Pass@1 is +14.14 percentage points higher on flagged-hackable tasks than on robust ones (95% CI [+11.80, +16.48]; one-sided p < 10^-6; I^2 = 0%; 123 of 134 models positive). We then describe a procedure for hardening the broken tasks. An inline LLM judge with a Docker gold-sanity gate runs each generated test against the gold solution before the judge is consulted. On the 11 broken tasks in the audit, the gate flags 65 of 105 decisive LLM-generated tests as failing on the gold patch itself, a 61.9% per-augmentation defect rate the LLM judge alone misses. With diversity-biased retry, the loop converges 9 of 11 tasks to a gated upgrade.

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05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

A Multi-Modal Sensor Fusion Instrument for Measuring Regional Human Mobility: The Distributed Human Data Engine (DHDE)

Authors:
Amil Khanzada↗Takuji Takemoto↗

arXiv:2603.21639v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Accurately estimating human mobility in peripheral regional economies presents a fundamental measurement challenge: physical ground-truth sensors are sparse, behavioral intent signals are heterogeneous, and environmental friction introduces systematic bias into demand inference. We introduce the Distributed Human Data Engine (DHDE), a multi-modal sensor fusion architecture that addresses this challenge by integrating physical instrumentation (Edge-AI cameras), digital intent signals (route search impression metrics), behavioral records (90,350 spending records, 97,719 standardized survey responses), and meteorological data across four geographically distributed nodes in Fukui, Japan. The primary measurement-science contribution is the design, deployment, and cross-node validation of the DHDE as a sparse-sensor compensation instrument: a heterogeneous sensor fusion architecture that anchors non-stationary digital intent signals to concurrent physical ground-truth counts, correcting for systematic bias introduced by meteorological planning friction. The instrument is implemented as an ensemble inference pipeline (Random Forest and Ordinary Least Squares with Newey-West robust inference), calibrated across 397 daily observations and validated by chronological holdout replication across four geographically distinct node types. The primary OLS specification achieved an in-sample explanatory power of R2 = 0.810 and a chronological out-of-sample predictive performance of R2 = 0.683. Results identify an Under-Vibrancy Paradox where macro-regional visitor satisfaction correlates positively with crowd density (Spearman rank correlation rs = +0.150, p = 0.002). We estimate an annual proxy gap of 865,917 intent-implied visits, corresponding to JPY 11.96 billion (USD 72.6 million) in foregone revenue.

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

ResearchClawBench: A Benchmark for End-to-End Autonomous Scientific Research

Authors:
Wanghan Xu↗Shuo Li↗Tianlin Ye↗Qinglong Cao↗Yixin Chen↗Hengjian Gao↗Yiheng Wang↗Qi Li↗Kun Li↗Sheng Xu↗Shengdu Chai↗Fangchen Yu↗…

AI coding agents are increasingly used for scientific work, but their end-to-end autonomous research capability remains difficult to verify. We present ResearchClawBench, a benchmark for evaluating autonomous scientific research across 40 tasks from 10 scientific domains. Each task is grounded in a real published paper, provides related literature and raw data, and hides the target paper during evaluation. Expert-curated multimodal rubrics decompose the target scientific artifacts into weighted criteria, enabling evaluation of target-paper-level re-discovery while leaving room for new discovery. We evaluate seven autonomous research (auto-research) agents under a unified protocol and seventeen native LLMs through the lightweight ResearchHarness. Current systems remain far from reliable re-discovery: the strongest autonomous agent, Claude Code, averages 21.5, and the strongest ResearchHarness LLM, Claude-Opus-4.7, averages 20.7, with an LLM frontier mean of only 26.5. Error analysis shows that failures concentrate in experimental protocol mismatch, evidence mismatch, and missing scientific core. ResearchClawBench provides a reproducible evaluation frontier for measuring progress toward autonomous scientific research.

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08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Adjoint Method versus Physics-Informed Neural Networks in PDE-Constrained Inverse Problems

Authors:
Zhen Zhang↗Alessandro Alla↗George Em Karniadakis↗

arXiv:2606.12337v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inverse problems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs) are central to computational mechanics and are commonly solved by adjoint-based optimization, while physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have emerged as a flexible alternative. Their relative performance remains difficult to assess because the two approaches are often compared under different formulations, parameterizations, optimizers, and regularization choices. We present a fair comparison of adjoint optimization and PINNs for PDE-constrained inverse problems. From a common abstract formulation, we instantiate both methods on identical domains, governing equations, observation models, and regularization terms, while matching the optimizer, unknown parameterization, and arithmetic precision wherever applicable. The benchmarks include unsteady Burgers, noisy Darcy permeability inversion, three-dimensional Allen–Cahn reaction identification, and unsteady Navier–Stokes viscosity identification. The results show that the representation of the unknown largely determines the preferred method: grid-based fields favor the discrete adjoint, whereas neural representations are native to PINNs and relevant for closure and constitutive modeling. For time-dependent problems, adjoint inversion can be dominated by trajectory storage and differentiation, while PINNs provide satisfactory reconstructions at lower cost. A PINN-warm-started adjoint strategy then recovers adjoint-level accuracy at substantially reduced cost.

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

From Sparse Features to Trustworthy Proxies: Certifying SAE-Based Interpretability

Authors:
Dibyanayan Bandyopadhyay↗Asif Ekbal↗

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are increasingly used to extract interpretable features from language models (LMs), yet a central question remains: when can an SAE-based explanation be treated as a faithful view of an underlying frozen LM We study this through a post-hoc generalization framework that certifies the LM via a sparse proxy, obtained by replacing a native hidden activation with its pretrained SAE reconstruction. Our framework derives an upper bound on the base model's expected risk using four measurable quantities: proxy risk, SAE reconstruction gap, concept-pool mismatch, and sparse complexity. We interpret this certificate as an operational criterion for explanatory faithfulness. In particular, a non-vacuous bound indicates that the extracted sparse features retain meaningful predictive information, while small reconstruction and mismatch errors indicate that the proxy remains behaviorally close to the original model. Empirically, we show that the bound becomes non-vacuous on GPT-2 Small, Gemma-2B, and Llama-3-8B at practical sample sizes. A detailed layerwise analysis of Llama-3-8B reveals a strong depth dependence, with later layers becoming much easier to certify, associated with both stronger local fidelity and weaker downstream error amplification. Finally, through feature-shuffling ablations, we show that the decomposition distinguishes genuine semantic alignment from mere statistical sparsity, providing a useful diagnostic for when SAE-based explanations become less reliable.

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10.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

A lactylation- and autophagy-associated prognostic signature reveals LSEC-derived CLEC3B as a novel mediator of hepatocellular carcinoma suppression

Authors:
Youai Song↗

by Youai Song, Yinkuan Ning, Meihui Li, Jianwei Lan, Liangchen Lei, Yufei Han, Zhuo Meng, Binjie Li, Pengpeng Liu, Quanyan Liu The crosstalk between lactylation and autophagy within the hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) microenvironment is a burgeoning field with profound implications. By integrating multi-omics data from public cohorts, we delineated two molecular subtypes of HCC with divergent clinical outcomes and established a lactylation-autophagy-related prognostic signature. This signature highlighted CLEC3B as a pivotal gene. Subsequent single-cell RNA sequencing and experimental validation unequivocally pinpointed liver sinusoidal endothelial cells (LSECs) as the principal cellular source of CLEC3B, which was significantly downregulated in HCC tissues. Functionally, conditioned media derived from CLEC3B-overexpressing LSECs potently inhibited HCC cell proliferation. Mechanistic investigations revealed that this tumor-suppressive effect was orchestrated through the concurrent suppression of autophagy and diminution of lactylation levels. Our findings position LSEC-secreted CLEC3B as a novel metabolic mediator in HCC, bridging two key pathways in tumor suppression, and endorse its clinical value both as a prognostic indicator and a promising therapeutic target.

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

Reassessing High-Performing LLMs on Polish Medical Exams: True Competence or Bias-Driven Performance?

Authors:
Antoni Lasik↗Jakub Pokrywka↗{\L}ukasz Grzybowski↗Jeremi Ignacy Kaczmarek↗Gabriela Korza\'nska↗Janusz \'Swieczkowski-Feiz↗Oskar Pastuszek↗Paulina Hoffman↗Jakub Tomasz D\k{a}browski↗Wojciech Kusa↗

Large language models (LLMs) in medicine are mainly evaluated using multiple-choice question answering (MCQA), which can overestimate real clinical ability due to guessing strategies and answer biases. To address these limitations, we introduce an expanded and more challenging benchmark based on Polish medical exams, adding over 15,000 questions, two new domains, and four structural modifications that reduce MCQA-specific artifacts and better test reasoning. We evaluate 21 LLMs and show that evaluation design strongly affects results. Under our harder setup, the best model (Qwen3.5-122B) drops by 28.4 and 31 pp on English and Polish exams, respectively. Despite low evidence of data contamination, standard MCQA scores do not reliably reflect true medical competence. To facilitate further research, we make our benchmark publicly available.

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

Mechanistic Analysis of Catastrophic Forgetting in Large Language Models During Continual Fine-tuning

Authors:
Gustav Olaf Yunus Laitinen-Fredriksson Lundstrom-Imanov↗

Sequential fine-tuning of Large Language Models (LLMs) adaptation to target tasks often triggers catastrophic forgetting, where the acquisition of novel target skills degrades ancestral capabilities. This paper presents a systematic comparative study of catastrophic forgetting across twenty premier models representing the state-of-the-art in mid-2026. We categorize our investigation into two primary research lines: (i) a behavioral and semantic output drift analysis of ten leading closed-source models (including Claude Fable 5, GPT-5.5 High, and Gemini 3.5 Flash), and (ii) a deep mechanistic interpretation of ten prominent open-weight architectures (such as DeepSeek-V4-Pro, Llama 4 Maverick, and Qwen 3.6-27B). Through weight-space trajectory tracking, Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA), and routing gate drift calculations in Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) layers, we localize the neural circuits highly susceptible to parameter overwriting. Our findings indicate that early-layer attention heads exhibit systemic entropic dispersion, while mid-to-deep feed-forward networks (or sparse expert blocks) suffer localized representation collapse. Informed by these insights, we introduce Low-Rank Circuit Projection (LRCP), a subspace-regularized training intervention. Empirical evaluations show that LRCP successfully mitigates up to 94.2% of ancestral capabilities in open-weight configurations and matches the adaptation velocity of standard PEFT baselines.

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

Distributional Loss for Robust Classification

Authors:
Kathleen Anderson↗Thomas Martinetz↗

This paper proposes a novel loss concept for supervised classification tasks. Rather than enforcing a direct mapping from each input sample to a single assigned label, we define an optimization objective over all classifier outputs as a bimodal Gaussian distribution. This softer target formulation implicitly captures class ambiguity, mitigates overfitting, and encourages the learning of more robust decision boundaries, all without requiring additional label information. Experimental results demonstrate consistent improvements in robustness, with particularly pronounced gains in low-data regimes, while requiring only minimal modifications to standard training pipelines.

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14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Provable quantum speedups for computing persistence in topological data analysis

Authors:
Casper Gyurik↗Alexander Schmidhuber↗Robbie King↗Vedran Dunjko↗Ryu Hayakawa↗

arXiv:2410.21258v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Topological data analysis (TDA) aims to extract noise-robust features from a data set by examining the number and persistence of holes in its topology. We provide an efficient quantum algorithm for a computational problem closely related to a core task in TDA – determining whether a given hole persists across different length scales. Further, we prove the problem itself is $\mathsf{BQP}_1$-hard, implying that a classical solution is extremely unlikely; this stands in contrast to all previous quantum approaches to TDA, where the problems were also intractable for quantum computers, or where a rigorous proof of classical hardness still remains open. This result implies an {exponential} quantum speedup for this problem under standard complexity-theoretic assumptions. Our approach relies on encoding the persistence of a hole in a variant of the guided sparse Hamiltonian problem, where the guiding state is constructed from a harmonic representative of the hole.

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15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

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

Authors:
Vidya Srinivas↗Zachary Englhardt↗Shwetak Patel↗Vikram Iyer↗

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

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

LLM-ODDR: A Large Language Model Framework for Joint Order Dispatching and Driver Repositioning

Authors:
Tengfei Lyu↗Siyuan Feng↗Hao Liu↗Hai Yang↗

arXiv:2505.22695v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Ride-hailing platforms face significant challenges in optimizing order dispatching and driver repositioning operations in dynamic urban environments. Traditional approaches based on combinatorial optimization, rule-based heuristics, and reinforcement learning often overlook driver income fairness, interpretability, and adaptability to real-world dynamics. To address these gaps, we propose LLM-ODDR, a novel framework leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for joint Order Dispatching and Driver Repositioning (ODDR) in ride-hailing services. LLM-ODDR framework comprises three key components: (1) Multi-objective-guided Order Value Refinement, which evaluates orders by considering multiple objectives to determine their overall value; (2) Fairness-aware Order Dispatching, which balances platform revenue with driver income fairness; and (3) Spatiotemporal Demand-Aware Driver Repositioning, which optimizes idle vehicle placement based on historical patterns and projected supply. We also develop JointDR-GPT, a fine-tuned model optimized for ODDR tasks with domain knowledge. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets from Manhattan taxi operations demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms traditional methods in terms of effectiveness, adaptability to anomalous conditions, and decision interpretability. To our knowledge, this is the first exploration of LLMs as decision-making agents in ride-hailing ODDR tasks, establishing foundational insights for integrating advanced language models within intelligent transportation systems. While the current framework incurs higher computational costs than traditional methods, we show that parallel decomposition and model distillation can reduce latency to production-viable levels for deployment.

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

PhaseWin: An Efficient Search Algorithm for Faithful Visual Attribution

Authors:
Zihan Gu↗Ruoyu Chen↗Junchi Zhang↗Li Liu↗Xiaochun Cao↗Hua Zhang↗

Visual attribution is a fundamental tool for interpreting modern vision and vision-language models, particularly when their decisions must be inspected, diagnosed, or audited. Its goal is to explain how a model's decision depends on local regions of the visual input, typically by assigning an importance ordering over candidate image regions. Given an image partitioned into $n$ regions, faithful attribution can be cast as an ordered subset-search problem, in which progressively inserting the selected regions should recover the target model response as early as possible. Exhaustive search over region subsets incurs exponential cost, while the widely used greedy search still requires a quadratic number of model evaluations, because every selection step rescores all remaining candidates. We propose PhaseWin, an efficient subset-search algorithm for faithful visual attribution. PhaseWin reorganizes greedy region selection into a phased window-search procedure: rather than re-evaluating the full candidate set at every step, it alternates between global candidate screening, adaptive pruning, and localized window refinement, while preserving the essential region-ranking behavior of greedy search. We analyze PhaseWin under monotone evidence-accumulation conditions and show that, under feature-level structural assumptions, it attains controllable linear evaluation complexity together with near-greedy faithfulness guarantees. Extensive experiments on image classification, object detection, visual grounding, and image captioning show that, among all compared attribution methods, PhaseWin reaches high faithfulness with the fewest forward passes, empirically realizing the predicted reduction from $O(n^2)$ to $O(n)$. The code is available at https://github.com/Qihuai27/phasewin-va.

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

MAGE-RAG: Multigranular Adaptive Graph Evidence for Agentic Multimodal RAG in Long-Document QA

Authors:
Yilong Zuo↗Xunkai Li↗Jing Yuan↗Qiangqiang Dai↗Hongchao Qin↗Ronghua Li↗

Long-document multimodal question answering requires a system to locate sparse evidence in long PDFs and integrate clues from text, tables, images, charts, and complex layouts. Existing RAG methods mostly rely on fixed Top-k retrieval over text chunks or pages. Text retrieval can compress the context but often loses visual and layout information; page-level visual retrieval preserves the original page, yet it also sends large irrelevant regions to the reader, leading to a static trade-off among evidence coverage, noise, and inference cost. This paper proposes MAGE-RAG, a multigranular adaptive graph evidence framework for long-document multimodal QA. MAGE-RAG uses page retrieval as the entry point for query-time evidence construction. Offline, it builds an evidence graph with page nodes and element nodes, encoding containment, reading order, layout adjacency, section hierarchy, and semantic-neighbor relations. At query time, an online evidence controller iteratively activates, opens, searches, and prunes evidence under explicit budgets. The resulting evidence subgraph is then rendered into structured multimodal reader input, allowing the LVLM to consume compact and relevant evidence within a limited context. On LongDocURL and MMLongBench-Doc, we establish a unified comparison and analysis protocol covering Direct MLLM, Text RAG, Page-level Visual RAG, and Graph/Agentic RAG. Experiments show that MAGE-RAG achieves 52.75 overall accuracy on LongDocURL, and 53.26 accuracy with 51.19 F1 on MMLongBench-Doc. Fine-grained breakdowns, budget-performance curves, ablations, and trace-based analysis further show that query-time evidence subgraph construction can balance dispersed evidence coverage with context-noise control. Our code is available at https://github.com/laonuo2004/MAGE-RAG.git.

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19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Plug-and-Play image restoration with Stochastic deNOising REgularization

Authors:
Marien Renaud↗Jean Prost↗Arthur Leclaire↗Nicolas Papadakis↗

Plug-and-Play (PnP) algorithms are a class of iterative algorithms that address image inverse problems by combining a physical model and a deep neural network for regularization. Even if they produce impressive image restoration results, these algorithms rely on a non-standard use of a denoiser on images that are less and less noisy along the iterations, which contrasts with recent algorithms based on Diffusion Models (DM), where the denoiser is applied only on re-noised images. We propose a new PnP framework, called Stochastic deNOising REgularization (SNORE), which applies the denoiser only on images with noise of the adequate level. It is based on an explicit stochastic regularization, which leads to a stochastic gradient descent algorithm to solve ill-posed inverse problems. A convergence analysis of this algorithm and its annealing extension is provided. Experimentally, we prove that SNORE is competitive with respect to state-of-the-art methods on deblurring and inpainting tasks, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

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20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Heterogeneous Knowledge Distillation via Geometry Decoupling and Momentum-Aware Gradient Regulation

Authors:
Wuming Yang↗Xiang Zhang↗Hongmin Zhao↗

Heterogeneous Knowledge Distillation (HKD) aims to transfer knowledge across varying architectures (e.g., from Transformer to CNN) but inherently suffers from severe training instability. We reveal that this instability stems from two highly coupled challenges: massive feature norm discrepancies that cause optimization drag, and severe gradient conflicts between the primary and distillation objectives arising from distinct inductive biases. To achieve stable distillation, we propose SPOFA, a framework built upon a novel Feature and Gradient Dual Stabilization mechanism. Specifically, at the feature level, we introduce a LayerNorm-based decoupling projector that explicitly decouples feature magnitude from direction, creating a bounded and stable space for semantic alignment. At the gradient level, we propose a momentum-driven Exponential Moving Average (MEMA) dynamic scaler. By establishing a robust historical baseline of the optimization trajectory, MEMA actively evaluates instantaneous gradient conflicts and adaptively penalizes harmful distillation signals, guaranteeing stable convergence. Importantly, SPOFA achieves this dual stabilization with an extremely lightweight parameter footprint. Extensive experiments on two mainstream benchmarks demonstrate that SPOFA achieves state-of-the-art accuracy, significantly outperforming computationally expensive methods while introducing only minimal computational overhead compared to standard baselines.

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21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

CALIBER: Calibrating Confidence Before and After Reasoning in Language Models

Authors:
Conor Finlay↗Joshua Kurien↗Saurabh Dash↗Marzieh Fadaee↗Beyza Ermis↗

Reasoning language models are increasingly asked not only to answer difficult questions, but also to estimate their likelihood of success. Existing methods typically elicit confidence only once: either before thinking or after answering. We argue that confidence in reasoning models is state-dependent: before thinking, confidence should estimate the chance of the model correctly solving the prompt, while after thinking it should predict whether the realized answer is likely to be correct. This distinction determines the appropriate supervision target: prompt-level success should supervise confidence estimates made after seeing the prompt, while individual answer-level correctness should supervise confidence estimates made after answering. We introduce CALIBER (Calibration Before and After Reasoning), which elicits both estimates and supervises each with the target matched to its information state. Under this unified protocol, CALIBER reduces Expected Calibration Error (ECE) by 52.5% over the strongest single-confidence baseline on BigMathDigits for the 7B model, while achieving the best Brier score and AUROC, and remains within 2.1 points of the best accuracy. Further, on a larger 30B model, CALIBER achieves the best ECE on BigMathDigits while remaining competitive in Brier score and AUROC. Out of distribution, it achieves the best ECE and Brier score on GPQA and TriviaQA, and remains competitive on SimpleQA. Ablations further show that this position-target alignment is most beneficial under distribution shift where it consistently reduces calibration error across all out-of-distribution benchmarks.

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22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Flood and Harvest: The Provable Necessity of Trivia for Generating Valuable Mathematics via the Lens of Language Generation in the Limit

Authors:
Xiaoyu Li↗Andi Han↗Dai Shi↗Zheng Gao↗Jiaojiao Jiang↗Junbin Gao↗

AI systems coupled to proof assistants now generate formal mathematics at scale, and the gap between what a checker can verify and what a mathematician would value has become the binding constraint. We model the generation of valuable mathematics as nested language generation in the limit: a verifiable formal language $F$, accessed through a membership oracle (the proof checker), contains an unknown valuable language $H \in \mathcal{H}$ revealed only through an adversarial enumeration of a core $C \subseteq H$ of exact density $\alpha$ (the literature). Every output is valuable ($\in H$), trivial ($\in F \setminus H$), or a hallucination ($\notin F$). We settle four questions. First, the verifier is not taste: the collections admitting generation with breadth are exactly those of the oracle-free model, characterized fiber-wise by Angluin's condition. Second, the verifier does buy sound coverage, covering all unseen valuable statements while asserting only valid ones: possible with it, impossible without it; it relocates unavoidable errors from false to trivial. Third, and centrally, a sharp dichotomy on the tight family: generators emitting finitely many trivia achieve optimal coverage $\alpha/2$, while any infinite trivia allowance, even at vanishing rate, jumps the optimum to $1-\alpha/2$ (both tight, for cores presented as the candidate intersection), and one generator attains both ends. The transition is in trivia count, not rate; the gap $1-\alpha$ is the unrecorded mass. Fourth, both regimes instantiate in a compression model of mathematics. A perfect verifier cannot substitute for taste: the unbounded stream of correct-but-worthless statements is not an engineering accident but a provable necessity, since covering unrecorded valuable mathematics requires an infinite, but asymptotically negligible, stream of certified trivia.

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23.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Structure of the pre-initiation complex explains CMGE biogenesis

Authors:
Thomas Pühringer↗

When cells enter S phase, bidirectional DNA replication is initiated through the kinase-regulated recruitment of three activators (Cdc45, GINS and Pol ε) to a duplex-DNA-loaded double hexamer of minichromosome maintenance (MCM) ATPases. Together, these proteins form two CMGE helicases that establish divergent replication forks as they become separated1. Here, to gain an understanding of CMGE biogenesis, we reconstituted the pre-initiation complex with purified yeast proteins. The cryo-electron-microscopy structure shows a set of firing factors caught in the act of assembling two symmetrical CMGEs. We show how stepwise complex formation reshapes MCM in preparation for DNA opening, and we explain how ATP promotes firing-factor ejection and CMGE maturation. We find that although Sld2 facilitates&nbsp;the recruitment of GINS to MCM, as expected, it also aids the efficient separation of the CMGE dimer, and is essential for the ejection of the lagging strand from MCM. These findings have direct implications for our understanding of the metazoan Sld2 orthologue, RECQL4, and point to a replication-fork establishment mechanism that is conserved across eukaryotes. Cryo-electron microscopy and biochemical reconstitution experiments in yeast provide insight into the assembly of the CMGE complex, a helicase that establishes bidirectional DNA replication in eukaryotic cells, and elucidate the role of the firing factor Sld2.

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24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

DynAMO:Dynamic Asset Management Orchestration via Topological Multi-Agent Scheduling

Authors:
Kanishk Kushwaha↗Vikrant Vinod Bansode↗Harsh Vardhan↗Dhaval C. Patel↗

arXiv:2606.19382v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While LLM-powered agents offer end-to-end automation for industrial asset lifecycles, real-world Industry 4.0 deployment is hindered by latency, concurrency instability, and safety risks. We present DynAMO (Dynamic Asset Management Orchestration), a deployment-ready engine using a Plan-then-Execute architecture to generate verifiable workflow graphs. DynAMO supports both SequentialWorkflow (topological execution) and ParallelWorkflow (dependency-aware concurrency). By dynamically identifying independent tasks, DynAMO preserves structural correctness and safety while significantly improving efficiency through controlled reasoning overlap. Across six controlled experiments on the AssetOpsBench industrial benchmark, DynAMO demonstrates substantial performance and robustness gains. Parallel execution reduces end-to-end latency by a median of 1.6x over sequential orchestration, rising to 1.8x on highly parallelizable workflows. After instrumenting external tool calls with realistic latencies, a latency decomposition shows that LLM reasoning and orchestration still account for more than 90% of execution time, identifying model inference as the primary system bottleneck. Structured context pruning reduces inference latency by approximately 30%, and DynAMO maintains correct functional behaviour (task completion, agent sequencing, and output quality) while exhibiting graceful degradation under controlled fault injection. Reproducibility analysis further confirms stable execution under repeated runs, with parallel scheduling reducing latency variance. These findings establish DynAMO as a practical blueprint for scalable, safe, and latency-aware agent deployment in Industry 4.0 automation pipelines. Code is available at: https://github.com/kushwaha001/DynAMO

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25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

PHANTOM: A Large-Scale Dataset of Multimodal Adversarial Attacks for Vision-Language Models

Authors:
Simone Gallivanone↗Hossein Khodadadi↗Mauro Dore↗Mauro Medda↗Nicola Franco↗

arXiv:2606.24388v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce a large-scale, open-source dataset of pre-generated adversarial attacks for vision-language models (VLMs). The dataset is designed to be diverse, representative, and practical, extending existing benchmarks by covering 10 high-level categories and 55 subcategories of harmful intents. Our primary goal is to make adversarial data accessible to the research community, given the computational cost and complexity of generating large numbers of attacks. The dataset comprises 47 524 adversarial samples, generated using state-of-the-art attack strategies from recent literature. Our work complements existing efforts by consolidating and extending prior benchmarks from multiple established sources, resulting in 7 826 intents, and introduce an additional category to broaden coverage. This provides realistic evaluation resources for studying model robustness and alignment. Our dataset intends to enable researchers and practitioners to systematically evaluate the robustness and safety of VLMs, fine-tune attack-generation models, and develop or stress-test defensive guardrails under diverse adversarial conditions. By releasing this resource, we aim to lower the barrier to adversarial research and foster more reproducible, comprehensive, and comparable evaluations of VLM safety.

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