Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24 DOI: HASH:d82e1369cadcc190cf3f6f7e66030efc

Genetic overlap with schizophrenia and Parkinson's reveals psychomotor basis of physical activity

Authors:

van der Walt↗Shadrin↗Tesfaye↗van der Meer↗Andreassen↗Rokicki↗Campbell↗

Background Physical activity levels are altered across neuropsychiatric disorders. While these traits are heritable, the genetic overlap between normal variation in activity levels and neuropsychiatric disorders that involve motor dysfunction such as schizophrenia and Parkinson's disease (PD) remains unexplored. Objectives To investigate the genetic overlap between physical activity, schizophrenia, and PD. Methods Multi-Trait Analysis of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) was used to boost the GWAS power for objectively measured physical activity (n=89,683) by leveraging three GWAS of self-reported activity (n=124,842-377,234). Genetic overlap between the activity, schizophrenia and PD was characterized using linkage disequilibrium score regression, causal mixture modeling, and local genetic correlations. Pleiotropic variants were identified using the conjunctional false discovery rate, annotated to genes, and investigated for enrichment of biological processes, tissue types and association with GWAS-catalog traits. Results Genetic correlations of physical activity with schizophrenia and PD were negligible (rg=-0.02-0.02, p>0.05), but polygenic overlap was substantial, reflecting mixed effect directions. We identified 32 independent variants shared with schizophrenia and 11 with PD, including CRHR1, MAPT and KANSL1 within the 17q21.31 region. Schizophrenia-shared variants mapped to genes differentially expressed in subcortical regions, especially amygdala and basal ganglia. Gene-set analyses revealed enrichment for mental health and cognitive-behavioural traits (schizophrenia-shared genes) versus structural brain phenotypes and neurodegenerative disorders (PD-shared genes). Conclusions Despite negligible genetic correlations, physical activity shares substantial genetic architecture with schizophrenia and PD. Shared genes implicated brain regions and traits spanning motor and cognitive-affective function, consistent with the psychomotor nature of physical activity.

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02.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25 DOI: arXiv:2606.24964

Evidence for feature-specific error correction in LLMs

Authors:

Francisco Ferreira da Silva↗Stefan Heimersheim↗

arXiv:2606.24964v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding the features of large language models (LLMs) is a central goal of interpretability. LLMs are commonly assumed to use superposition to represent more features than they have dimensions. They may not only represent features in superposition but also perform computation in superposition. Theory predicts that computing in superposition requires error correction that privileges feature directions over generic ones, but this prediction has not been tested empirically. We propose an empirical test of error correction in LLMs based on activation perturbations. Perturbing residual-stream activations, we find that they are robust to small perturbations–forming activation plateaus consistent with error correction–but less robust along candidate feature directions ("pure" directions, constructed from contrastive prompt pairs) than along mixtures of two such directions, indicating that the pure directions are privileged. We quantify this privilegedness by modeling the perturbation effect as a function of the $L^p$-norm of its decomposition into feature components. For $p=2$ the response is a quadratic form with at most as many nonzero eigenvalues as the residual-stream dimension, which cannot privilege the many feature directions superposition requires. $p>2$ lifts this constraint and is consistent with feature-specific error correction. We find $p>2$ for contrastive, MELBO, and SAE-decoder directions, and $p\approx2$ for random and PCA directions (controls). These results replicate across Gemma-2-9B, Qwen3-1.7B, Llama-3.1-8B, Mistral-7B-v0.3, Aya-Expanse-8B, and Yi-1.5-9B. We further validate our method on a toy model of error correction with known ground-truth features, recovering $p>2$ for true feature directions, degrading toward $2$ as we rotate away from them.

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03.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24737

VSANet: View-aware Sparse Attention Network for Light Field Image Denoising

Authors:

Gargi Panda↗Soumitra Kundu↗Saumik Bhattacharya↗Aurobinda Routray↗

Light field (LF) image denoising is challenging due to the high-dimensional structure of LF data. While noise is independent across sub-aperture images, scene content exhibits strong cross-view correlations. We introduce VSANet, a view-aware sparse attention network for LF denoising. Specifically, we propose a view-aware sparse attention (VSA) block that represents the 4D LF feature map as a unified spatial-angular token space and performs cross-view aggregation via locality-sensitive hashing-based sparse attention. This enables global feature interactions with linear complexity, effectively exploiting LF correlations across views and spatial locations. In addition, we design a feature refinement (FR) block to emphasize informative features in spatial, angular, and epipolar subspaces. The VSA and FR blocks are integrated within a sequential attention refinement module, forming the core of VSANet. Experiments demonstrate VSANet outperforms stateof-the-art LF denoising methods.

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04.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.19199

Forecasting what Matters: Decision-Focused RL for Controlled EV Charging with Unknown Departure Times

Authors:

Giuseppe Gabriele↗Fabio Pavirani↗Seyed Soroush Karimi Madahi↗Chris Develder↗

arXiv:2606.19199v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The recent growth of EV adoption poses challenges for power systems, including increased peak demand and potential grid instability. Smart control of EV charging – e.g., based on reinforcement learning (RL) – can alleviate these issues by learning temporal and contextual patterns from historical data. Yet, in real-world scenarios, key features, such as departure time, often are unavailable. This, in turn, makes it harder for an RL agent to learn and execute an effective charging policy. To mitigate this uncertainty, a trained forecaster can approximate the unknown features from available data. However, since these forecasting models are typically trained for accuracy (rather than their impact on a downstream agent's decision quality), their errors may propagate and hinder the overall performance of a controller that is using the forecasts. To avoid this, we propose a decision-focused RL (DF-RL) framework in which the forecaster is trained end-to-end, i.e., with feedback from the charging policy actions taken by the RL agent. Such joint training of both the forecaster and controller ultimately results in higher-quality actions: our proposed DF-RL method yields superior charging decisions compared to other baselines, achieving up to a 14% improvement in total reward and a 55% reduction of unsupplied energy (i.e., charging that failed to happen because the EV already left), relative to the RL method without departure time forecasting.

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05.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17967

Learning task-specific subspaces via interventional post-training of speech foundation models

Authors:

Jack Cox↗Jon Barker↗

Speech foundation models, pre-trained on large corpora of unlabelled speech data, produce general-purpose representations which are useful across tasks. However, these representations encode information about salient speech variables in a distributed manner, while downstream speech tasks rely on only some of this variability. In this work, we propose a post-training refinement approach using interventional contrastive learning. By leveraging an interventional dataset and multi-part contrastive loss, we learn a transformation from the entangled representation space of speech foundation models into separate content and speaker subspaces. We evaluate the learnt representations on speaker verification and keyword spotting tasks, showing improved out-of-domain speaker verification performance and evidence that speaker and content information are separated across the learned subspaces.

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06.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2605.04954

On the Influence of the Feature Computation Budget on Per-Instance Algorithm Selection for Black-Box Optimization

Authors:

Koen van der Blom↗Diederick Vermetten↗

arXiv:2605.04954v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Per-instance algorithm selection (PIAS) takes advantage of complementarity between a set of algorithms by deciding which algorithm to run on a given instance. This decision is based on features of the instances, which, in the context of black-box optimization (BBO), require a part of the optimization budget to be computed. This raises two questions: (a) from which fraction of the budget spent on feature computation does PIAS become worth it for BBO, and (b) which fraction of the budget optimizes the tradeoff between feature accuracy and PIAS performance. To this end, we perform a broad study where PIAS with varying sampling budgets for feature computation is compared to the single best algorithm on a broad range of algorithm selection scenarios. These scenarios consist of two portfolio sizes, three problem sets, 4 dimensionalities, and 10 target budgets. We find that PIAS is viable for the majority of tested scenarios, even when as much as a quarter of the total budget is spent on feature computation. The tradeoff for the fraction of the budget spent on feature computation to maximize the benefit of PIAS is highly dependent on the specific AS scenario. Further, on average 20 percent of PIAS loss to the virtual best solver is explained by the budget spent on feature computation, highlighting the importance of properly accounting for the feature budget.

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07.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18702

UniTemp: Unlocking Video Generation in Any Temporal Order via Bidirectional Distillation

Authors:

Lin Zhang↗Sicheng Mo↗Zefan Cai↗Jinhong Lin↗Zihao Lin↗Jiuxiang Gu↗Krishna Kumar Singh↗Yuheng Li↗Yin Li↗

Autoregressive video diffusion models have emerged as a promising approach for long video generation, achieving strong performance in streaming settings. However, existing methods are restricted to forward temporal generation, whereas practical video creation often requires flexible generation order, e.g., conditioning on future context to extend backward, or on both past and future context for inbetween generation. We bridge this gap by training an autoregressive model that supports generation in arbitrary temporal directions. A key technical challenge arises from the Causal 3D VAE widely used in video diffusion models, which encodes latents strictly conditioned on past context. While suited for forward generation, this causal structure causes inter-block discontinuities when generation proceeds backward. To address this, we introduce blockwise anchor latents, a set of auxiliary latents that restore the missing past context at block boundaries during backward generation. Built on this design, we propose UniTemp, a bidirectional distillation framework that trains a single autoregressive student model for any-direction video generation. At inference time, UniTemp conditions on arbitrary past and/or future frames, improving controllability for both bidirectional and inbetween generation. Experiments show that UniTemp maintains competitive performance on short and long video generation compared to forward-only methods, while enabling diverse workflows such as bidirectional video extension, inbetween generation, looping video generation, scene transition, and visual story generation. Project website: https://lzhangbj.github.io/projects/unitemp/

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08.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11379

Automated Mediator for Human Negotiation: Pre-Mediation via a Structured LLM Pipeline

Authors:

Jamie Bergen↗Sarit Kraus↗

arXiv:2606.11379v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pre-mediation, the preparatory phase preceding direct human negotiation, plays a critical role in achieving mutually beneficial agreements, yet is often omitted due to cost, time, and limited access to trained mediators. We introduce an automated mediator for human negotiation, implemented as a structured pipeline of LLM modules, that supports pre-mediation in integrative negotiation settings. The pipeline decomposes preparation into specialized modules for dialogue, preference prediction, response-level critique, and structured summarization, separating inference, generation, and evaluation to address limitations of monolithic single-prompt approaches. We use the term "agent" for each module following common LLM-systems terminology, but the components are not autonomous and do not interact peer-to-peer; outputs are passed forward in a fixed sequence. We evaluate the system in two controlled human-subject experiments comparing AI-based pre-mediation with professional human mediators in a multi-issue negotiation scenario. On short-term self-reported measures, the automated mediator achieves preparation outcomes broadly comparable to human mediators, including trust in the mediator and confidence in reaching mutually beneficial agreements, while achieving substantially lower error on the preference-inference task under our scenario and prompts (36% lower RMSE). A second study shows that targeted prompt refinements reduce excessive affirmation patterns from 36.6% to 16.8%, matching human mediator baselines. Our findings suggest that structured LLM pipelines can provide scalable, low-effort pre-mediation support broadly comparable to human mediators on short-term self-reported preparation outcomes. The pipeline's single-party design mirrors how human mediators run pre-mediation today and enables parallel deployment across all parties to a dispute, supporting scalability.

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09.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2605.30456

DisjunctiveNet: Neural Symbolic Learning via Differentiable Convexified Optimization Layers

Authors:

Shraman Pal↗Can Li↗

arXiv:2605.30456v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many learning tasks in science and engineering are characterized by sparse datasets, which limits the effectiveness of purely data-driven approaches. At the same time, these problems are often accompanied by rich domain knowledge derived from physical laws, operational requirements, and expert heuristics. Such knowledge is frequently expressed as rules involving logical propositions and linear inequalities. Existing neuro-symbolic methods typically enforce these rules approximately through soft penalties, assume input-independent rules when designing specialized architectures, or rely on non-differentiable post-processing at inference time to achieve hard constraint satisfaction. While recent advances in differentiable optimization layers enable end-to-end feasibility enforcement within neural networks, extending these approaches to logical or mixed-integer rules remains challenging due to inherent nonconvexity. In this work, we propose a unified end-to-end framework for enforcing hard, input-dependent mixed integer linear constraints within neural networks. Our approach represents rules as disjunctive constraints and applies hierarchical convex relaxations to obtain convex hull formulations. These relaxations yield tractable linear constraints that can be embedded as differentiable optimization layers while enabling exact rule satisfaction. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework on real-world datasets, achieving perfect rule satisfaction and strong predictive performance.

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10.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2605.15980

Flash-GRPO: Efficient Alignment for Video Diffusion via One-Step Policy Optimization

Authors:

Xiaoxuan He↗Siming Fu↗Zeyue Xue↗Weijie Wang↗Ruizhe He↗Yuming Li↗Dacheng Yin↗Shuai Dong↗Haoyang Huang↗Hongfa Wang↗Nan Duan↗Bohan Zhuang↗…

Group Relative Policy Optimization has emerged as essential for aligning video diffusion models with human preferences, but faces a critical computational bottleneck: training a 14B parametered model typically demands hundreds of GPU days per experiment. Existing efficiency methods reduce costs through sliding window subsampling training timesteps, but fundamentally compromise optimization, exhibiting severe instability and failing to reach full trajectory performance. We present Flash-GRPO, a single-step training framework that outperforms full trajectory training in alignment quality under low computational budgets while substantially improving training efficiency. Flash-GRPO addresses two critical challenges: iso-temporal grouping eliminates timestep-confounded variance by enforcing prompt-wise temporal consistency, decoupling policy performance from timestep difficulty; temporal gradient rectification neutralizes the time-dependent scaling factor that causes vastly inconsistent gradient magnitudes across timesteps. Experiments on 1.3B to 14B parameter models validate Flash-GRPO's effectiveness, demonstrating substantial training acceleration with consistent stability and state-of-the-art alignment quality.

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11.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16795

WaveDINO: Learning-Based Atmospheric Correction of Unwrapped InSAR Interferograms Validated by GNSS: Results at Laguna del Maule and Campi Flegrei Volcanoes

Authors:

Robert Popescu↗Juliet Biggs↗Tianyuan Zhu↗Nantheera Anantrasirichai↗

Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) enables effective monitoring of volcanic deformation; however, the observed signals are often corrupted by atmospheric phase delays, seasonal surface changes, and decorrelation effects. Existing atmospheric correction methods, such as numerical weather model-based methods, can reduce these effects but do not consistently remove atmospheric artefacts and may introduce residual biases. To address these limitations, we propose a novel learning-based method for denoising unwrapped InSAR interferograms, using a hybrid training strategy that combines physically motivated synthetic deformation with real atmospheric noise. Specifically, we introduce WaveDINO, a wavelet-based multi-scale denoising framework conditioned on frozen DINOv3 foundation-model features and terrain information. Training uses synthetic magma-source deformation superimposed on short-term interferograms to expose the network to realistic atmospheric statistics while retaining known ground truth. Performance is evaluated on both controlled synthetic data and long-term real interferograms from Laguna del Maule (Chile) and Campi Flegrei (Italy), with independent GNSS measurements used for validation. WaveDINO consistently outperforms competing models, improving agreement with GNSS measurements, and reducing mean GNSS misfit by approximately 3% and 19% at two sites, respectively, while surpassing weather-model-based corrections.

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12.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2505.23851

ASyMOB: Algebraic Symbolic Mathematical Operations Benchmark

Authors:

Michael Shalyt↗Rotem Elimelech↗Ido Kaminer↗

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to symbolic mathematics, yet existing evaluations often conflate pattern memorization with genuine reasoning. To address this gap, we present ASyMOB, a high-resolution dataset of 35,368 validated symbolic math problems spanning integration, limits, differential equations, series, and hypergeometrics. Unlike prior benchmarks, ASyMOB systematically perturbs each seed problem using symbolic, numeric, and equivalence-preserving transformations, enabling a fine-grained assessment of generalization. Our evaluation reveals three key findings: (1) most models' performance collapses under minor perturbations, while top systems exhibit an apparent regime shift in robustness; (2) integrated code tools stabilize performance, particularly for weaker models; and (3) we identify examples where Computer Algebra Systems (CAS) fail while LLMs succeed, as well as problems solved only via a hybrid LLM-CAS approach, highlighting a promising integration frontier. ASyMOB serves as a principled diagnostic tool for measuring and accelerating progress toward building verifiable, trustworthy AI for scientific discovery.

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13.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25 DOI: arXiv:2603.01470

Randomized Kriging Believer for Parallel Bayesian Optimization with Regret Bounds

Authors:

Shuhei Sugiura↗Ichiro Takeuchi↗Shion Takeno↗

arXiv:2603.01470v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider the optimization problem of an expensive-to-evaluate black-box function, in which we can obtain noisy function values in parallel. For this problem, parallel Bayesian optimization (PBO) is a promising approach, which aims to optimize with fewer function evaluations by selecting a diverse input set for parallel evaluation. However, existing PBO methods suffer from poor practical performance or lack theoretical guarantees. In this study, we propose a PBO method, called randomized kriging believer (KB), based on a well-known KB heuristic and inheriting the advantages of the original KB: low computational complexity, a simple implementation, versatility across various BO methods, and applicability to asynchronous parallelization. Furthermore, we show that our randomized KB achieves Bayesian expected regret guarantees. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method through experiments, including those on real-data emulators.

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14.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2505.04218

Convergence rate of Euler–Maruyama scheme to the invariant probability measure under total variation distance for the SDEs

Authors:

Yuke Wang↗Yinna Ye↗

arXiv:2505.04218v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This article shows the geometric decay rate of Euler-Maruyama scheme for one-dimensional stochastic differential equation towards its invariant probability measure under total variation distance. Firstly, the existence and uniqueness of invariant probability measure and the uniform geometric ergodicity of the chain are studied through introduction of non-atomic Markov chains. Secondly, the equivalent conditions for uniform geometric ergodicity of the chain are discovered, by constructing a split Markov chain based on the original Euler-Maruyama scheme.

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15.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15474

Who Drifted: the System or the Judge? Anytime-Valid Attribution in LLM Evaluation Pipelines

Authors:

Yitao Li↗

arXiv:2606.15474v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continuous evaluation of LLM products relies on a strong LLM judge treated as ground truth: a cheap monitor scores every interaction and a team is paged when the score drifts down. But the judge is itself a model behind an API, and a silent version bump or scoring-prompt update changes how it scores – so every drift alarm is ambiguous between a worse product and a changed judge. We resolve the ambiguity with a fixed, human-labeled anchor set that the current judge re-scores at a steady interleave, a second betting e-process on the judge-versus-human gap, and a guard-window rule returning a verdict in {none, system, judge}. We prove anytime-validity, one-way identification (only the judge can move the anchors), an attribution race whose design law is that the anchors must out-run the main process they guard, and process orthogonality. On two real judge changes, a silent version bump is detected as judge drift in 60/60 runs with zero judge-to-system misattribution, and a contaminating strict-prompt change is correctly attributed on 110 of 120 runs at guard width 300 – while the industry-default rolling z-test false-alarms on 75% of drift-free streams. Every experiment replicates on a second domain (TL;DR summarization) with nothing re-tuned, and where the domains differ the differences are the ones the race predicts: the strict-prompt change shifts scores harder there, so the anchors fire faster and attribution becomes perfect (240/240). The monitor runs at approximately 0.64 of the cost of strong-judging every item, or 0.21 in a cheaper-but-deafer regime.

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16.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11817

Grammar-Constrained Decoding Can Jailbreak LLMs into Generating Malicious Code

Authors:

Yitong Zhang↗Shiteng Lu↗Jia Li↗

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for code generation, raising concerns that they may be misused to produce malicious code. Meanwhile, Grammar-Constrained Decoding (GCD) has been widely adopted to improve the reliability of LLM-generated code by enforcing syntactic validity. In this paper, we reveal a counterintuitive risk: this reliability-oriented technique can itself become an attack surface. We uncover a new jailbreak attack, termed CodeSpear, that exploits GCD to induce LLMs into generating malicious code. Our experiments show that simply applying a benign code grammar constraint can effectively jailbreak LLMs. To address this vulnerability, we propose CodeShield, a safety alignment approach that robustly preserves safe behavior even under attacker-controlled grammar constraints. CodeShield aligns the model in the code modality by teaching it to generate honeypot code under GCD. Such code is semantically harmless, so it does not implement the malicious request, and structurally diverse, so it is difficult to suppress through grammar tightening. At the same time, CodeShield still preserves natural-language refusals when natural language is available. Experiments on 10 popular LLMs across 4 benchmarks show that CodeSpear outperforms representative jailbreak baselines and increases the attack success rate by more than 30 percentage points on average. CodeShield also restores safety under CodeSpear while preserving benign utility. Our findings reveal a fundamental risk of GCD and call for greater attention to its potential security implications.

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17.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16371

CacheMuon: Using Temporal Preconditioning To Approximate Polar Factor

Authors:

Bishnu Dev↗Sushil Bohara↗Martin Tak\'a\v{c}↗Samuel Horv\'ath↗

arXiv:2606.16371v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Muon is an optimizer that computes updates using the polar factor of the momentum matrix and has shown strong empirical performance across a range of training settings. A key component of Muon is the Newton-Schulz iteration used to compute this polar factor. Although this avoids the cost of an exact singular value decomposition, it remains expensive in practice because it is applied at every optimization step. At the same time, the momentum matrix changes smoothly over training, suggesting strong temporal correlation in the corresponding polar factors. In this paper, we exploit this structure and propose CacheMuon, a temporal preconditioning method that reuses information from previous optimization steps to approximate the polar factor at the current step. This reduces redundant orthogonalization computation across iterations. We analyze CacheMuon as an inexact Muon update, with error controlled by fresh-solver error and cache staleness. Empirically, CacheMuon provides a controllable quality-efficiency frontier: conservative thresholds closely match fresh Muon on language-model and vision training while reducing orthogonalization FLOPs, whereas more aggressive thresholds yield larger arithmetic savings at the cost of modest validation-quality degradation.

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18.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24 DOI: HASH:eac702bb3f7da74f8444ddbe064d7a2a

Computational Decomposition of New Memory Failure in Alzheimer's Disease Through a Hippocampal Cortical Consolidation Bottleneck Model

Authors:

Zhang↗Pan↗Chen↗

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is clinically marked by difficulty retaining newly learned information, yet routine memory scores often conflate poor initial encoding with failure to stabilise information after encoding. This ambiguity limits the mechanistic interpretability of cognitive assessment during the transition from mild cognitive impairment to AD. Here we propose a Hippocampal Cortical Consolidation Bottleneck (HCCB) model to computationally separate these two components of new memory failure. The model represents newly presented information as a rapidly formed hippocampal trace and a slowly stabilised cortical trace, predicting a residual bottleneck when delayed recall falls below the level expected from immediate recall. We operationalised this prediction as Consolidation Bottleneck Index*(CBI*), a cognitively normal reference normalised residual index, and evaluated it using Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) cognitive and MRI data, with independent dynamical support from OpenNeuro EEG. Simulations showed recent memory vulnerability when hippocampal vulnerability exceeded cortical vulnerability. In ADNI, CBI* increased from cognitively normal participants to mild cognitive impairment nonconverters, reached Alzheimer like levels in mild cognitive impairment converters, and was associated with hippocampal atrophy. CBI* added minimal discrimination beyond established clinical and structural predictors, supporting its role as a mechanistic phenotype rather than a replacement prognostic model. OpenNeuro EEG further showed increased neurodynamic rigidity in AD. Our findings provide a computational framework for quantifying failed stabilisation of newly encoded information in AD progression.

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19.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13496

Budget-Constrained Step-Level Diffusion Caching

Authors:

Mingkun Lei↗Tong Zhao↗Liangyu Yuan↗Chi Zhang↗

Step-level caching accelerates diffusion models by exploiting temporal redundancy across denoising steps. Existing methods make per-step cache decisions using threshold-based heuristics, without directly optimizing for final output quality. As a result, their inference latency varies across inputs and is difficult to control at deployment. In this work, we propose BudCache, which inverts this formulation: rather than letting per-step error thresholds dictate the runtime cost, we fix the compute budget in advance and search for the cache policy that best preserves the final output. To tackle the combinatorial complexity of step selection, we combine Simulated Annealing with deterministic Hill Climbing. This offline search identifies high-quality cache policies within minutes and introduces no online search or thresholding overhead during inference. When the compute budget is very tight, we further introduce cache-aware schedule alignment, which adapts the time discretization to the selected cache policy to reduce cache-induced trajectory mismatch. Experiments on FLUX.1-dev and Wan2.1 show that BudCache achieves better generation quality than heuristic caching baselines under the same inference budgets. Code is available at https://github.com/Westlake-AGI-Lab/BudCache

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20.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.09313

Machine-Learning Emulation of Satellite Greenhouse Gas Retrievals: Stability over Time

Authors:

Nugzar Gognadze↗Motonobu Kanagawa↗Yu Someya↗Hisashi Yashiro↗

arXiv:2606.09313v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Retrieval algorithms are used to estimate atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHGs), such as carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4), by solving inverse problems from high-spectral-resolution satellite radiance measurements. However, these algorithms are computationally expensive, which makes real-time estimation at scale difficult. Machine-learning models have therefore been proposed as fast emulators of retrieval algorithms. Most existing studies, however, evaluate them only on test data from the same period as the training data. We study the stability over time of such emulators using data from the Greenhouse Gases Observing SATellite (GOSAT). We show that prediction accuracy generally deteriorates when the test period moves away from the training period. We also show that including time as an input feature substantially improves XCH4 prediction for Lasso and neural-network models. Among the methods considered, a simple Lasso model performs as well as or better than more complex methods such as neural networks, and yields more stable predictions over time. We further validate the results using the Total Carbon Column Observing Network (TCCON), a ground-based observation network. On the TCCON-matched dataset, the time-augmented Lasso achieves errors against TCCON that are comparable to the disagreement between GOSAT and TCCON for both XCO2 and XCH4.

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21.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18824

Where Will They Go? Modelling Multimodal Pedestrian Manoeuvres from Ego-centric Videos

Authors:

Yuxuan Xie↗Nicolas Pugeault↗Chongfeng Wei↗Hubert P. H. Shum↗Edmond S. L. Ho↗

Pedestrian trajectory prediction from an ego-centric camera is challenging since it depends on complex interactions with vehicles and scene context, as well as the intention of the pedestrian. By modelling correlation and intent from the historical and future trajectories of the pedestrian, it will usually result in a multimodal (i.e. multiple modes) distribution. Existing stochastic predictors often sample multiple futures from a single unimodal distribution, which can yield sub-optimal 'mixed-mode' trajectories that lie between distinct motion patterns and become implausible in real scenes. In this paper, we propose MMPM, a mode-aware framework that separately models future trajectory distributions into semantically meaningful modes based on the pedestrian's crossing behavior. MMPM consists of two modules: behavior-aware Pedestrian Interaction Module (PIM) that jointly captures pedestrian-vehicle and pedestrian-environment interactions by introducing gaze, head and hand gesture, and a CVAE-based Mode-aware Trajectory Predictor (MTP) module to model the future trajectory distributions on two modes, crossing and non-crossing the road, separately. A query-based decoder further enforces mode consistency during decoding. Experiments on PIE and JAAD datasets show that our method surpasses state-of-the-art baselines. Our proposed MTP is model-agnostic, which can be integrated into existing frameworks such as BiTrap-NP and SGNet-ED to further improve future trajectory prediction performance. We additionally introduce a data-driven validation protocol that matches predictions to spatio-temporally consistent ground-truth trajectories, demonstrating improved frame-wise displacement errors over previous work.

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22.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25 DOI: arXiv:2606.02197

Quantum-inspired Topographic Stereovision

Authors:

Fanglin Bao↗Youfei Xie↗Syed Masood↗

arXiv:2606.02197v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We revisit the conventional triangulation in distant stereovision, when shape rather than distance is the relevant observable. We show through the information-regret analysis that the optimal measurements for absolute distance and relative topography are unexpectedly different and incompatible, exposing an observable-measurement mismatch. To resolve this, we introduce stereo regularization to address stereo anisotropies that violate prevailing emitter-number conservation. Accordingly, we propose a topographic interferometer, which exploits cross-detector correlations to probe topography without measuring the distance profile. Our Fizeau-imaging interferometer turns parallax paths into Mach-Zehnder arms and employs a central path as the local oscillator for balanced homodyne detection, saturating the quantum Fisher information with improved topographic error scaling. This enables topographic stereovision of thermal sources beyond the Rayleigh limit, with feasible experimental demonstrations within existing techniques for remote sensing and astronomy.

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23.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2605.28882

GrowLoop: Self-Evolving Conversation Evaluation Seeded by Human

Authors:

Yihang Lin↗Yunze Gao↗Zeyang Lin↗Dongbo Li↗Kun Peng↗Yue Liu↗

With the rapid advancement of large language models, evaluating human-likeness in open-ended conversation has become increasingly important. However, human-likeness is a form of tacit knowledge that humans perceive intuitively, yet the underlying criteria resist explicit formulation. Human judgments vary widely, with strong agreement on some cases and legitimate disagreement on others. Meanwhile, the criteria behind human judgments remain implicit, leaving no clear basis for constructing cases. Further, what counts as human-likeness is not static, but evolving with model capability and human expectations. Despite progress in evaluation methods such as expert-authored benchmarks, Reward Models, and self-evolving benchmarks, none addresses all three challenges simultaneously. Therefore, we propose GrowLoop, a self-evolving conversation evaluation system that continuously adapts as models advance and scenarios shift. Starting from minimal human seed annotations, LLM agents iteratively extract and refine evaluation rubrics through Heuristic Learning. Human-AI agreement is required where annotators converge, while only plausibility is expected where they diverge. Moreover, the Rubric-Case co-evolution mechanism enables continuous evolution. When the evaluation target shifts, new human seeds expand the system's coverage accordingly. When applied to human-likeness evaluation in open-ended conversation, the AI judge guided by these rubrics not only substantially outperforms existing methods in alignment with human judgments, but also uncovers issues that annotators overlook. The resulting benchmark effectively discriminates models across capability tiers and reveals where they fall short, while generalizing to new scenarios and adapting as models advance. Our work shifts the benchmarking paradigm from manual updates or difficulty scaling to comprehensive, continuous self-evolution.

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24.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16281

Who Should Lead Decoding Now? Tracking Reliable Trajectories for Ensembling Masked Diffusion Language Models

Authors:

Heecheol Yun↗Joonhyung Park↗Joowon Kim↗Eunho Yang↗

Masked Diffusion Language Models (MDLMs) have emerged as a distinct paradigm for sequence generation. As MDLMs become diverse in capabilities and knowledge coverage, an important question is how to combine their knowledge. Toward this, we first investigate the unique decoding dynamics of MDLMs. We find that successful generations exhibit stable confidence dynamics over answer-relevant positions, while unreliable trajectories can often be corrected by injecting promising intermediate states from other models. Guided by this observation, we propose $TIE$ ($T$rajectory-based $I$terative $E$nsembling), a knowledge fusion framework in which MDLMs iteratively identify reliable decoding trajectories and relay them across models. TIE tracks confidence dynamics over answer-relevant positions to determine which model currently follows a more reliable trajectory and selectively transfers partially denoised sequences across models. As the model on the more promising trajectory often changes across denoising steps, TIE allows different models to contribute complementary strengths at different stages of generation. Strong performance across diverse reasoning tasks, along with our analyses, suggests that TIE offers a practical approach to the underexplored problem of MDLM ensembling.

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25.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2603.03998

Spectrally Corrected Polynomial Approximation for Quantum Singular Value Transformation

Authors:

Krishnan Suresh↗

arXiv:2603.03998v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum Singular Value Transformation (QSVT) provides a unified framework for applying polynomial functions to the singular values of a block-encoded matrix. QSVT prepares a state proportional to $\bA^{-1}\bb$ with circuit depth $O(d\cdot\mathrm{polylog}(N))$, where $d$ is the polynomial degree of the $1/x$ approximation and $N$ is the size of $\bA$. Current polynomial approximation methods are over the continuous interval $[a,1]$, giving $d = O(\sqrt{\kap}\log(1/\varepsilon))$, and make no use of any properties of $\bA$. We observe here that QSVT solution accuracy depends only on the polynomial accuracy at the eigenvalues of $\bA$. When all $N$ eigenvalues are known exactly, a pure spectral polynomial $p_{S}$ can interpolate $1/x$ at these eigenvalues and achieve unit fidelity at reduced degree. But its practical applicability is limited. To address this, we propose a spectral correction that exploits prior knowledge of $K$ eigenvalues of $\bA$. Given any base polynomial $p_0$, such as Remez, of degree $d_0$, a $K\times K$ linear system enforces exact interpolation of $1/x$ only at these $K$ eigenvalues without increasing $d_0$. The spectrally corrected polynomial $p_{SC}$ preserves the continuous error profile between eigenvalues and inherits the parity of $p_0$. QSVT experiments on the 1D Poisson equation demonstrate up to a $5\times$ reduction in circuit depth relative to the base polynomial, at unit fidelity and improved compliance error. The correction is agnostic to the choice of base polynomial and robust to eigenvalue perturbations up to $10\%$ relative error. Extension to the 2D Poisson equation suggests that correcting a small fraction of the spectrum may suffice to achieve fidelity above $0.999$.

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