Paper Plaza - AcademicHub

01.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19558

Displacement Is Not Direction: Evaluating Fidelity Metrics for Quantized LLM Deployment

Authors:

Milo\v{s} Nikoli\'c ↗Ali Hadi Zadeh ↗Enrique Torres Sanchez ↗Andreas Moshovos ↗

Fidelity metrics, such as per-token KL divergence (KLD) against a high-precision reference, are often used in practice as low-cost proxies for benchmark quality. We test this practice on a 28-quant cohort of Qwen3.6-35B-A3B and a 41-quant cohort of Devstral-Small-2-24B, evaluated across a suite of downstream benchmarks. We find that KLD is strongly correlated with benchmark score over the full cohort ($\rho=-0.72$ on Qwen and $\rho=-0.86$ on Devstral, both with $p

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02.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15412

Few-Shot Biomedical Relation Extraction with Large Language Models: A Viable Alternative to Supervised Learning?

Authors:

Jakob Mraz ↗Toma\v{z} Curk ↗Bla\v{z} Zupan ↗

Biomedical relation extraction (BioRE) is a key step in transforming biomedical literature into structured knowledge. However, most existing approaches rely on supervised models trained on costly annotated datasets, limiting their scalability and adaptability across relation types and domains. We investigate few-shot BioRE using prompt-based learning with large language models (LLMs) and compare two task formulations: pairwise classification, which predicts relations for individual entity pairs, and joint generation, which extracts multiple relations in a single model call. Experiments on the BioREDirect dataset reveal a clear precision-recall trade-off. Pairwise classification achieves higher recall, whereas joint generation is more precise and computationally efficient. The best-performing model achieves a micro-F1 score of 0.44, substantially outperforming previous few-shot results (0.34) while remaining below the supervised baseline (0.56). Much of this gap is attributable to a single ambiguously defined relation type. When evaluated using macro-F1, which better captures performance across relation types in an imbalanced setting, prompt-based approaches outperform the supervised baseline (0.45 vs. 0.38), particularly on rare relation types. These findings highlight the potential of LLMs for BioRE in low-resource settings and underscore the importance of well-defined relation schemas.

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03.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.11123

Overcoming Rank Collapse in Feedback Alignment

Authors:

Gauthier Boeshertz ↗Razvan Pascanu ↗Claudia Clopath ↗

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

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04.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23 DOI: HASH:e544a2b6d4c2edc0d139fb6f10b4ab91

Sex-Specific TMPRSS2 Response and Reduced Peripheral RNA Concentration Following AstraZeneca COVID-19 Vaccination in Nigeria.

Authors:

Ekprikpo ↗E. S ↗Ken-Ezihuo ↗S. U ↗Echonwere-Uwikor ↗B. E ↗Jeremiah ↗Z. A ↗

Background: ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 remains a cornerstone COVID-19 vaccine in sub-Saharan Africa, yet population-specific molecular responses are understudied. We examined peripheral blood ACE2 and TMPRSS2 expression, total RNA concentration, and coagulation indices in Nigerians >=6 months post-vaccination. Methods: In a case-control study in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, 51 ChAdOx1-vaccinated adults and 51 age/sex-matched unvaccinated controls provided venous blood for RNA extraction, qRT-PCR, and coagulation assays. Multivariable linear models assessed effects of vaccination, sex, and age on molecular parameters. Results: Vaccinated participants had 37% lower total RNA concentration than controls (4.02 +/- 0.09 vs 6.38 +/- 0.14 ng/uL, p=6 months post-ChAdOx1, Nigerians show reduced peripheral blood RNA without sustained ACE2/TMPRSS2 upregulation. The sex-specific TMPRSS2 pattern suggests hormone and vaccine interactions previously unreported in African cohorts and highlights the need for sex-disaggregated molecular surveillance. Region-specific reference gene validation is recommended for Nigerian transcriptomic studies.

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05.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2603.00610

CMI-RewardBench: Evaluating Music Reward Models with Compositional Multimodal Instruction

Authors:

Yinghao Ma ↗Haiwen Xia ↗Hewei Gao ↗Weixiong Chen ↗Yuxin Ye ↗Yuchen Yang ↗Sungkyun Chang ↗Mingshuo Ding ↗Yizhi Li ↗Ruibin Yuan ↗Simon Dixon ↗Emmanouil Benetos ↗…

arXiv:2603.00610v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While music generation models have evolved to handle complex multimodal inputs mixing text, lyrics, and reference audio, evaluation mechanisms have lagged behind. In this paper, we bridge this critical gap by establishing a comprehensive ecosystem for music reward modeling under Compositional Multimodal Instruction (CMI), where the generated music may be conditioned on text descriptions, lyrics, and audio prompts. We first introduce CMI-Pref-Pseudo, a large-scale preference dataset comprising 110k pseudo-labeled samples, and CMI-Pref, a high-quality, human-annotated corpus tailored for fine-grained alignment tasks. To unify the evaluation landscape, we propose CMI-RewardBench, a unified benchmark that evaluates music reward models on heterogeneous samples across musicality, text-music alignment, and compositional instruction alignment. Leveraging these resources, we develop CMI reward models (CMI-RMs), a parameter-efficient reward model family capable of processing heterogeneous inputs. We evaluate their correlation with human judgment scores on musicality and alignment on CMI-Pref along with previous datasets. Further experiments demonstrate that CMI-RM not only correlates strongly with human judgments, but also enables effective inference-time scaling via top-k filtering. Code is available at GitHub (https://github.com/Haiwen-Xia/CMI-RewardBench). Model weights: CMI-RM (https://huggingface.co/HaiwenXia/CMI-RM). Datasets: CMI-Pref-Pseudo (https://huggingface.co/datasets/HaiwenXia/cmi-pref-pseudo) and CMI-Pref (https://huggingface.co/datasets/HaiwenXia/cmi-pref)

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06.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11 DOI: HASH:cc1a04973b1e6c3be041a67888394d2e

A Deep Hypergraph Learning Model for Predicting Antimicrobial Combination Effects Across Bacterial Targets

Authors:

Midjani ↗Rajabi ↗A. H ↗Keshtkar ↗F. Z ↗Malekpour ↗Jafarizadeh ↗Alizadehsani ↗Plawiak ↗

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) creates an urgent need for efficient strategies to identify effective antibacterial combinations. Combination therapy, including antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) paired with conventional antibiotics, is a promising approach, but exhaustive experimental screening across drug pairs and bacterial targets is impractical. This study introduces a hybrid GCN-based hypergraph neural network (HGNN) for predicting antimicrobial-agent combination outcomes against bacterial targets. Each antimicrobial-agent-antimicrobial-agent-bacterium triplet is represented as a ternary hyperedge, enabling the model to learn context-dependent interaction patterns. The framework integrates SMILES-derived molecular graph embeddings for antimicrobial agents, including conventional antibiotics and AMPs, with taxonomy-derived bacterial representations. The prediction task was formulated as a three-class classification problem: synergy, antagonism, and non-interaction. The non-interaction class included experimentally verified indifferent records and synthetic presumed non-interaction triplets generated by negative sampling. Model development used drug-pair-grouped splitting, five-fold grouped cross-validation within the training/validation partition, and final evaluation on a held-out test set. On the held-out three-class test set, the selected GCN-based HGNN achieved an accuracy of 0.83, weighted F1-score of 0.84, macro F1-score of 0.80, and ROC-AUC of 0.95. Per-class evaluation showed accuracies of 0.80 for synergy, 0.92 for antagonism, and 0.85 for non-interaction. Pair-type analysis showed strong performance across AMP-AMP, AMP-conventional antibiotic, and conventional antibiotic-conventional antibiotic combinations. These findings suggest that hypergraph-based representation learning can support computational prioritization of antimicrobial combinations for experimental follow-up. Further studies will be needed to improve model interpretability and to perform prospective validation of predicted synergistic combinations.

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07.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19407

JustDiag!: A Diagnostic Justification Engine for Accountable Root Cause Analysis

Authors:

Tingzhu Bi ↗Xinrui Jiang ↗Xun Zhang ↗Pengcheng Su ↗Congjie He ↗Jinglin Li ↗Ping Wang ↗Meng Ma ↗

arXiv:2606.19407v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models can produce fluent root cause analyses, but fluent final answers alone are insufficient evidence for accountability in high-stakes operations. In real incident response, engineers need to know what evidence supported a diagnosis, which alternatives were considered, where contradictions remained, and whether the system resolved the case or preserved uncertainty. We address this gap with JustDiag, a diagnostic justification engine for RCA that maintains an explicit process state over evidence, findings, competing hypotheses, conflicts, and next checks. We evaluated the system on 66 real-world incidents using a two-layer protocol that separately scores final-answer quality and process quality. Relative to a matched control without diagnostic justification, JustDiag achieved stronger outcome and process scores, while accepting slightly lower terminal completion due to more calibrated non-closure. These results suggest that accountable RCA requires explicit diagnostic justification artifacts and process-aware evaluation, not only fluent final answers.

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08.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.23760

Engineering Reliable Autonomous Systems: Challenges and Solutions

Authors:

arXiv:2606.23760v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Engineering reliable autonomous systems is an important and growing topic in computer science. As autonomous systems become more prevalent, easy-to-use techniques for building them reliably are increasingly important. This workshop report captures and expands on the discussions at the Lorentz Center Workshop "Engineering Reliable Autonomous Systems" (ERAS), held from 10 to 14 June 2024. The workshop was co-organised by the organisers of the Workshop on Formal Methods for Autonomous Systems (FMAS) and the Workshop on Agents and Robots for reliable Engineered Autonomy (AREA). It brought together members of the FMAS and AREA communities, industry practitioners, and representatives from sectors where autonomous systems pose distinctive engineering challenges. The workshop focused on three main research topics: techniques for verification and validation of autonomous systems; engineering real-world autonomous systems; and software architectures for safe autonomous systems. Its main outcome is a catalogue of challenges in these areas and, most importantly, a pathway to solutions. Some challenges can already be tackled by techniques that are well known in academia but have not yet become regularly used in practice. Other challenges remain unresolved and require further research. This roadmap is intended to support future research and industrial collaboration.

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09.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2602.02028

Edit Knowledge, Not Just Facts via Multi-Step Reasoning over Background Stories

Authors:

Ya Gao ↗Kalle Kujanp\"a\"a ↗Pekka Marttinen ↗Harri Valpola ↗Alexander Ilin ↗

arXiv:2602.02028v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Enabling artificial intelligence systems, particularly large language models, to update knowledge and flexibly apply it during reasoning remains a central challenge. Existing knowledge editing approaches emphasize atomic facts, improving factual recall but often failing to integrate updated information into a coherent framework usable across contexts. In this work, we argue that knowledge update is fundamentally a reasoning problem rather than a memorization problem. Consequently, a model should be trained in situations where the new information is instrumental to solving a task, combined with pre-existing knowledge, and exercised through multi-step reasoning. Based on this insight, we propose a training strategy based on three principles. First, new knowledge is introduced as a coherent background story that contextualizes novel facts and explains their relation to existing knowledge. Second, models are trained using self-generated multi-hop questions that require multi-step reasoning involving the new information. Third, training is done using knowledge distillation, forcing a student model to internalize the teacher's reasoning behavior without access to the novel information. Experiments show that models trained with this strategy effectively leverage newly acquired knowledge during reasoning and achieve remarkable performance on challenging questions that require combining multiple new facts.

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10.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24036

Spectrally engineered collinear type-0 SPDC source with enhanced spectral brightness for entanglement distribution

Authors:

Dong-Gil Im ↗Jungmo Lee ↗Kyungdeuk Park ↗Dongkyu Kim ↗Yonggi Jo ↗Yong Sup Ihn ↗

arXiv:2606.24036v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Entangled photon sources with high spectral brightness are important resources for photonic quantum information processing, particularly in quantum communication and quantum networking where usable photon flux of entangled photons is often constrained by channel loss and source inefficiency. Here, we demonstrate a spectrally engineered type-0 spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) source with enhanced spectral brightness for entanglement distribution. By pumping a 30-mm ppKTP crystal with an ultra-narrowband laser slightly detuned from degeneracy, photon-pair generation is concentrated into a narrow spectral bandwidth while retaining the strong nonlinear interaction of type-0 phase matching. The source produces a coincidence rate of 44.6 kHz corresponding to a detected spectral brightness of 0.507 MHz/mW/nm. We further integrate the source into a Sagnac interferometer to generate polarization-entangled photon pairs and demonstrate entanglement distribution through a 2.56 km free-space round-trip channel. Our results show that spectral engineering provides a practical route to compact, spectrally bright entangled-photon sources for quantum communication applications.

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11.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.12240

Multi-Rate Mixture of Experts for Accelerating Liquid Neural Network Training

Authors:

Shilong Zong ↗Almuatazbellah Boker ↗Hoda Eldardiry ↗

arXiv:2606.12240v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multivariate time-series data often exhibit complex temporal dependencies, irregular sampling, and heterogeneous dynamics across multiple time scales, making accurate sequence modeling particularly challenging. Traditional recurrent neural networks (RNNs), such as Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, operate in discrete time and may struggle to effectively capture continuous and irregular temporal behaviors. Liquid Neural Networks (LNNs) address some of these limitations through continuous-time dynamics, but standard LNN architectures typically rely on a single dynamical system, limiting their ability to model heterogeneous temporal patterns. To address these challenges, we propose a Multi-Rate Mixture-of-Experts (MR-MoE) framework built on top of Liquid Neural Networks. In the proposed architecture, multiple LNN-based experts operate at distinct time scales, enabling the model to explicitly separate fast-changing dynamics from slow-evolving temporal trends. A gating network further enables adaptive expert specialization based on input conditions. In addition, we incorporate both feature-level and temporal attention mechanisms to improve robustness, interpretability, and long-range dependency modeling. Feature-level attention suppresses noisy or irrelevant variables, while temporal attention selectively focuses on informative historical states. We evaluate the proposed framework on a complex multivariate time-series prediction task and compare it against strong baselines, including LSTM, monolithic LNN, and standard MoE models. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed MR-MoE framework consistently achieves improved AUROC and AUPRC performance while maintaining favorable computational efficiency. These results highlight the effectiveness of combining continuous-time dynamics, multi-scale expert decomposition, and adaptive attention mechanisms for time-series modeling.

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12.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24596

To Compare, or Not to Compare: On Methodological Practices in Evaluating Social Bias

Authors:

Federico Marcuzzi ↗Xuefei Ning ↗Roy Schwartz ↗Iryna Gurevych ↗

As Large Language Models are increasingly deployed in critical applications, robustly evaluating their social biases is paramount. However, the current literature suffers from widespread methodological fragmentation, which yields contradictory conclusions. This stems largely from ignoring the structural framing of benchmark-level evaluations. To resolve this, we introduce a unified and controllable framework that standardizes heterogeneous benchmarks to systematically contrast isolated demographic assessments with forced-choice comparative settings. Crucially, this allows us to disentangle the confounding effects of Chain-of-Thought reasoning, neutral fallback options, and other structural artifacts in social bias evaluations. Our evaluation across multiple model families reveals a massive, systematic paradigm gap: while isolated assessments limit prejudice activation, comparative settings act as aggressive catalysts for latent discrimination, a shift primarily driven by underspecified contexts. Alarmingly, CoT reasoning exacerbates social biases under comparative settings, and this systemic bias persists as a deterministic prejudice even when models are provided neutral fallback options or claim to answer randomly. Finally, we demonstrate that this comparative prejudice is a generalized phenomenon that scales positively with model size. Ultimately, we offer a crucial methodological guideline: while researchers must leverage comparative settings to robustly audit hidden biases, practitioners cannot safely rely on comparative deployments in ambiguous real-world tasks.

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13.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15590

Unlocking Diffusion Hierarchies: Adaptive Timestep Selection for Zero-Shot Segmentation

Authors:

Ramin Nakhli ↗Mahesh Ramachandran ↗Luca Ballan ↗

Zero-shot segmentation has recently shown notable improvement by leveraging the rich visual priors in large-scale text-to-image diffusion models, such as Stable Diffusion. However, current diffusion-based methods often face limitations due to the trade-off between spatial resolution and contextual information, as well as their reliance on a single static timestep for feature extraction. To overcome these challenges, our work introduces two key advancements. First, our Contextual Similarity Maps fuse high-resolution attention maps with rich U-Net encoder features, providing both fine-grained and robust per-pixel representations. Second, we identify an emergent hierarchical semantic progression within the denoising process of various diffusion models: representations transition from part-level abstractions at earlier timesteps to object-level abstractions at later stages. Leveraging this insight, we introduce a mechanism to adaptively select the optimal timestep for each pixel. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing zero-shot segmentation baselines, validating the efficacy of combining contextual features with dynamic, hierarchical timestep selection.

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14.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.13854

SpheriCity: Designing Trustworthy Conversational AI for Sustainability Decision Support

Authors:

Ahmed Qayyum ↗Madison Werner ↗Kathryn Youngblood ↗Jenna R. Jambeck ↗Tahiya Chowdhury ↗

arXiv:2606.13854v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present SpheriCity, an expert-grounded conversational prototype designed to support trustworthy knowledge sensemaking from sustainability reports. City-level circularity assessment reports contain rich information about materials, infrastructure, and policy interventions, yet their length and heterogeneous structure make cross-document synthesis and comparison difficult for practitioners and researchers working on circular economy initiatives. While large language models (LLM) promise faster knowledge access and synthesis, their opaque reasoning, hallucinations, and lack of source transparency introduce risks for trust and interpretability, and require verification in high-stakes sustainability contexts. SpheriCity addresses these challenges through a provenance-first conversational agent that foregrounds evidence traceability, structured synthesis, and interaction scaffolds to support exploratory querying and cross-document synthesis across sustainability reports. We conducted a formative expert review with six sustainability experts using representative queries spanning cross-city comparison, policy summarization, and recommendation-oriented tasks. Experts evaluated responses across dimensions and provided qualitative reflections on the system's usefulness for sustainability knowledge work. Our results reveal that transparent sourcing, contextual explanation, interpretability, and alignment with expert workflow strongly shape expert trust and judgments of system usefulness. This work contributes (1) a conversational prototype for sustainability knowledge sensemaking, (2) an expert-grounded evaluation framework for assessing AI responses in high-stakes knowledge domains, and (3) design insights into how provenance, uncertainty communication, and integration in workflow influence expert users' trust in AI assistance for sustainability decision support.

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15.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18 DOI: HASH:f5dd52ac6dd6f167bae6b329954ac000

Excess mortality in Germany during 2020-2023: A descriptive age-stratified analysis

Authors:

Sauter ↗

This study investigates excess mortality in Germany in the years from 2020 to 2023 and its temporal alignment with reported COVID-19 deaths. The analysis uses annual and weekly all-cause mortality data and linear baseline trends derived from pre-pandemic years. Possible effects of demographic and population changes on baseline trends were also examined. Excess mortality was analysed over time and across age groups. Excess mortality was observed in all investigated years, rising from 2020 to its highest value in 2022. In absolute terms, the age group [≥]80 years accounted for the largest proportion of excess deaths throughout the study period. After 2021, elevated mortality relative to baseline was also observed in younger age groups down to 15 years of age, although absolute numbers remained substantially lower than in older groups. No evidence of excess mortality was observed for individuals younger than 15 years. Periods of excess mortality were temporally aligned with waves of reported COVID-19 deaths. In 2020, cumulative excess mortality after calendar week 11 closely matched reported COVID-19 deaths (43 876 vs. 41 835 deaths). Weekly excess mortality, reported COVID-19 deaths and wastewater viral load, when available showed strong temporal synchrony, although excess mortality increasingly exceeded reported COVID-19 deaths during later pandemic waves. Temporal patterns differed from the typical seasonal mortality peaks commonly associated with influenza epidemics during the early months of the year. In 2023, excess mortality declined substantially, possibly indicating a return to mortality levels before the emergence of SARS-CoV-2.

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16.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20554

Structuring and Tokenizing Distributed User Interest Context for Generative Recommendation

Authors:

Ruizhong Qiu ↗Yinglong Xia ↗Dongqi Fu ↗Hanqing Zeng ↗Ren Chen ↗Xiangjun Fan ↗Hong Li ↗Hong Yan ↗Hanghang Tong ↗

arXiv:2606.20554v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative recommendation is an emerging paradigm that has shown promise in industrial recommendation systems, aiming to predict users' next interactions from their historical behaviors. At the core of generative recommendation lies item tokenization, which bridges item semantics and recommendation models. However, existing methods often struggle to effectively organize and inject complex user-behavioral and item-semantic contexts into recommendation models simultaneously. On the one hand, existing graph-based integration methods, such as graph serialization and graph neural networks, either suffer from scalability issues or exploit only local graph information. On the other hand, existing semantic tokenization methods typically rely on heuristics and lack explicit supervision signals, which may lead to inaccurate or suboptimal semantic representations. To address these limitations in user interest context modeling, we propose G2Rec, a scalable framework that unifies holistic graph-based user co-engagement modeling with semantic tokenization for industrial-scale generative recommendation. Overall, G2Rec enables recommendation models to capture holistic and semantically grounded user interest prototypes without requiring ground-truth user interests, thereby providing more comprehensive and accurate modeling of user behavior contexts in industrial sequential recommendation. Online deployment across product surfaces and extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate the superiority of G2Rec over existing methods.

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17.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2605.30208

Automating Low-Risk Code Review at Meta: RADAR, Risk Calibration, and Review Efficiency

Authors:

Chris Adams ↗Arjun Singh Banga ↗Parveen Bansal ↗Souvik Bhattacharya ↗Payal Bhuptani ↗Rujin Cao ↗Pedro Canahuati ↗Nate Cook ↗Brian Ellis ↗Prabhakar Goyal ↗Gurinder Grewal ↗Tianyu He ↗…

arXiv:2605.30208v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AI-assisted coding tools have altered software production. At Meta, significant lines of code per human-landed diff grew by 105.9% year over year and per-developer diff volume rose 51%, with agentic AI responsible for over 80% of that growth. Meanwhile, the share of diffs receiving timely review has declined, exposing a widening gap between code supply and reviewer bandwidth. We ask three questions that progress from feasibility through calibration to impact: (1) can risk-stratified automation operate at scale across diverse organizations, (2) how does tuning the risk threshold affect the trade-off between automation yield and safety, and (3) to what extent does automated review reduce end-to-end latency for AI-generated changes? We deployed RADAR (Risk Aware Diff Auto Review), a multi-stage funnel that classifies each diff by authorship and source type, applies eligibility gates, static heuristics, a machine-learned Diff Risk Score, LLM-based Automated Code Review, and deterministic validation before landing qualifying changes. We evaluate RADAR through telemetry covering 535K+ RADAR-reviewed diffs, observational before-after comparisons for policy changes, and difference-in-differences analysis of efficiency outcomes. RADAR has reviewed 535K+ diffs and landed 331K+. Relaxing the Diff Risk Score threshold from the 25th to the 50th percentile increased the approve rate to 60.31%. The revert rate for RADAR-reviewed diffs is 1/3 that of non-RADAR diffs, and the Production Incident rate is 1/50 that of non-RADAR diffs. RADAR reduces median time to close by over 330% and median diff review wall time by 35%. Risk-aware layered automation can materially reduce review bottlenecks created by AI-driven code growth without compromising production safety.

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18.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14130

Contract-Based Compositional Shielding for Safe Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Authors:

Omar Adalat ↗Edwin Hamel-De le Court ↗Francesco Belardinelli ↗

arXiv:2606.14130v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safe coordination problems surface in multi-agent reinforcement learning when global safety cannot be enforced by any agent unilaterally: the admissibility of one agent's action may depend on the dynamics of other agents. Decentralised shields can enforce safety at runtime, but purely factorised permissions often exclude optimal team behaviour that is safe only through coordination. We study deterministic safety guarantees for agents trained and deployed under decentralised execution, recovering team-optimal safe behaviour without centralised runtime control. Agents have a shared global specification $\phi$ in the safety fragment of Linear Temporal Logic ($\mathsf{LTL}_{\mathsf{safe}}$ ), and select among tuples of local $\mathsf{LTL}_{\mathsf{safe}}$ obligations whose conjunction implies the global specification $\phi$. Each agent may rely on the other agents' local obligations as assumptions because the whole contract tuple is certified simultaneously and allows projection into local action masks. At learning time, a non-stationary multi-armed bandit chooses among a library of local $\mathsf{LTL}_{\mathsf{safe}}$ obligations to select the tuple that optimises team reward, all without forgoing end-to-end safety. We evaluate the approach across 6 environments and 15 algorithmic variants.

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19.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.12368

DepthMaster: Unified Monocular Depth Estimation for Perspective and Panoramic Images

Authors:

Pengfei Wang ↗Shihao Wang ↗Liyi Chen ↗Zhiyuan Ma ↗Guowen Zhang ↗Lei Zhang ↗

While monocular depth estimation has achieved significant progress, achieving generalized metric depth estimation for both narrow field-of-view (FoV) perspectives and $360^\circ$ panoramas remains an unsolved challenge. Existing methods are often tailored to specific camera types and struggle to produce accurate metric depth that generalizes across diverse settings. This limitation stems from two key challenges: the inherent geometric discrepancy between perspective and panoramic cameras, and the scarcity of panoramic training data with metric annotations. In this work, we introduce DepthMaster, a unified metric depth estimation framework. Rather than employing specialized networks to learn spherical distortions, we reformulate the problem by decomposing panoramic images into overlapping perspective patches. Crucially, distinct from prior projection-based methods that rely on ad-hoc architectural modifications to handle boundaries, we introduce a novel Correspondence Consistency Loss (CCL) and inject virtual projection cameras as geometric priors, allowing us to seamlessly stitch the patches while avoiding specialized operators and keeping the backbone largely compatible with standard Transformer designs. This strategy also resolves the geometric differences by unifying all inputs into a canonical perspective representation, and effectively circumvents data scarcity by directly unlocking powerful metric priors from vast perspective datasets. Trained on a mixed dataset that contains only one panorama dataset, DepthMaster achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on 13 diverse datasets, outperforming not only universal methods but also leading specialist models in both perspective and panoramic domains.

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20.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2601.11219

SDFLoRA: Selective Decoupled Federated LoRA for Privacy-preserving Fine-tuning with Heterogeneous Clients

Authors:

Zhikang Shen ↗Jianrong Lu ↗Haiyuan Wan ↗Jianhai Chen ↗

arXiv:2601.11219v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Federated learning (FL) for large language models (LLMs) has attracted increasing attention as a privacy-preserving approach for adapting models over distributed data, where parameter-efficient methods such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) are widely adopted to reduce communication and memory costs. However, practical deployments often exhibit rank and data heterogeneity: clients operate under different low-rank budgets and data distributions, making direct aggregation of LoRA updates biased and unstable. Existing approaches either enforce a unified rank or align heterogeneous updates into a single shared subspace, which tends to mix transferable and client-specific directions and consequently undermines personalization. Moreover, under differential privacy (DP), perturbing such structurally mixed updates injects noise into directions that should remain purely local, leading to unnecessary utility degradation. To address these issues, we propose Selective Decoupled Federated LoRA (SDFLoRA), a structure-aware LoRA framework that decouples each client update into a shared component for aggregation and a private component that preserves client-specific semantics. Only the shared component participates in subspace alignment, while the private component remains local and uncommunicated, making the training DP-compatible and stabilizing aggregation under rank heterogeneity. By injecting noise only into the aggregated shareable update, this approach avoids perturbations to local directions and improves the utility-privacy trade-off. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that SDFLoRA outperforms federated LoRA baselines and achieves a strong utility-privacy trade-off.

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21.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20381

Rethinking Shrinkage Bias in LLM FP4 Pretraining: Geometric Origin, Systemic Impact, and UFP4 Recipe

Authors:

Qian Zhao ↗Kunlong Chen ↗Changxin Tian ↗Zhonghui Jiang ↗Haitao Zhang ↗Chaofan Yu ↗Peijie Jiang ↗Mingliang Gong ↗Jia Liu ↗Ziqi Liu ↗Zhiqiang Zhang ↗Jun Zhou ↗…

arXiv:2606.20381v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: FP4 training promises substantial reductions in memory and computation cost for LLM pretraining, yet current FP4 hardware paths and recipes, including NVIDIA Blackwell/Rubin-class systems and AMD MI350-series GPUs, remain centered on E2M1 data elements. In this study, we identify a fundamental limitation of that choice: non-uniform formats such as E2M1 inherently suffer from Shrinkage Bias, a systematic negative rounding error caused by the geometric asymmetry of their representable bins. We show that this bias accumulates multiplicatively across layers and is amplified by the Random Hadamard Transform (RHT), providing a unified explanation for the training instability observed in existing E2M1-based FP4 recipes. In contrast, uniform grids (E1M2/INT4) bypass this grid-geometry error and better convert the improved bucket utilization from RHT into higher quantization quality. Based on this finding, we propose UFP4, a uniform 4-bit training recipe that applies RHT to all three training GEMMs while restricting stochastic rounding to dY alone. On Dense 1.5B, MoE 7.9B, and MoE 124B long-run pretraining, UFP4 consistently achieves lower BF16-relative loss degradation than strong E2M1-based baselines, supported by scaling-law analysis and ablation studies. Our results suggest that future accelerators should support E1M2/INT4-style uniform 4-bit grids as first-class training primitives alongside E2M1.

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22.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19346

Disentangling Linguistic Relatedness from Task Alignment in Cross-Lingual Transfer

Authors:

Ahmed Haj Ahmed ↗Ruochen Zhang ↗Alvin Grissom II ↗

We study cross-lingual transfer by fine-tuning seven large language models (4B–671B parameters) on Arabic and evaluating zero-shot reading comprehension on Semitic languages and non-Semitic controls. Across dense and Mixture-of-Experts architectures, we find no evidence of Semitic-specific transfer: models with weak baselines improve dramatically across all languages, while strong-baseline models show only marginal gains regardless of language family. A chain-of-thought ablation reinforces this finding – the same models that benefit most from fine-tuning benefit equally from inference-time reasoning, suggesting both mechanisms address task-format alignment rather than cross-lingual knowledge transfer.

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23.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2604.10827

Know Thy Reasoner: Not All Language Models Explore Alike

Authors:

Moulik Choraria ↗Argyrios Gerogiannis ↗Anirban Das ↗Supriyo Chakraborty ↗Sourya Basu ↗Sambit Sahu ↗Lav R. Varshney ↗

arXiv:2604.10827v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Compute scaling for LLM reasoning trades off exploring solution approaches (breadth) against refining promising ones (depth), yet why a given trade-off works, and why it often fails to transfer across models, remains unclear. We argue that the optimal strategy depends on the model's diversity profile, the spread of probability mass across solution approaches, and that this must be characterized before any exploration strategy is adopted. We formalize this with a framework decomposing reasoning uncertainty, deriving when depth-based refinement outperforms parallel sampling, and validate it across three model families at both inference and training. Our central finding is that the diversity regime dictates the strategy: low-diversity aligned models benefit from depth-based refinement with lightweight intrinsic signals, whereas high-diversity base models are often harmed by it, and instead need breadth or stronger signals to compensate.

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24.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.05102

ZipSplat: Fewer Gaussians, Better Splats

Authors:

Alexander Veicht ↗Sunghwan Hong ↗D\'aniel Bar\'ath ↗Marc Pollefeys ↗

Feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting methods reconstruct a scene from posed or pose-free images in a single forward pass, yet current approaches predict one Gaussian per input pixel, tying the representation budget to camera resolution rather than scene complexity. A flat wall and a richly textured object thus produce equally many Gaussians despite very different geometric needs. We propose ZipSplat, a token-based feed-forward model that decouples Gaussian placement from the pixel grid. A multi-view backbone extracts dense visual tokens, and k-means clustering compresses them into a compact set of scene tokens. Cross- and self-attention refine these tokens, and a lightweight MLP decodes each into a group of Gaussians with unconstrained 3D positions. Because clustering is applied at inference, a single trained model spans the quality-efficiency curve without retraining. ZipSplat operates without ground-truth poses or intrinsics, yet sets a new state of the art on DL3DV and RealEstate10K with ${\sim}6{\times}$ fewer Gaussians than pixel-aligned methods, surpassing the best pose-free baseline by 2.1dB and 1.2dB PSNR, respectively. It further generalizes zero-shot to Mip-NeRF360 and ScanNet++, outperforming all comparable baselines. Our project page is at https://veichta.com/zipsplat.

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25.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2601.09304

Single-Round Clustered Federated Learning via Data Collaboration Analysis for Non-IID Data

Authors:

Sota Sugawara ↗Yuji Kawamata ↗Akihiro Toyoda ↗Tomoru Nakayama ↗Yukihiko Okada ↗

arXiv:2601.09304v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) enables distributed learning across multiple clients without sharing raw data. When statistical heterogeneity across clients is severe, Clustered Federated Learning (CFL) can im-prove performance by grouping similar clients and training cluster-wise models. However, most CFL approaches rely on multiple communication rounds for cluster estimation and model updates, which limits their practicality under tight constraints on communication rounds. We propose Data Collaboration-based Clustered Federated Learning (DC-CFL), a single-round framework that completes both client clustering and cluster-wise learning, using only the information shared in DC analysis. DC-CFL quantifies inter-client similarity via total variation distance between label distributions, estimates clusters using hierarchical clustering, and performs cluster-wise learning via DC analysis. Experiments on multiple open datasets under representative non-IID conditions show that DC-CFL achieves accuracy comparable to multi-round baselines while requiring only one communication round. These results indicate that DC-CFL is a practical alternative for collaborative AI model development when multiple communication rounds are impractical. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/souta-suga/DC-CFL.

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