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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Improved State Readout in NV Centers using Regression Models and Rabi Driving

arXiv:2606.23454v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Readout of state populations in nitrogen-vacancy centers from fluorescence measurements at room-temperature is routinely achieved via contrast-based calibration. The fidelities achieved by this conventional approach are limited by reducing the dynamical fluorescence behaviour of the NV center to a scalar value, and calculating the population of each possible state independently. To address these limitations, we use regression models trained on experimental data to map the fluorescence signals onto ideal simulated populations. Additionally, we enhance the informational content of the fluorescence signals by performing measurements during induced Rabi oscillations. Our results demonstrate that including these dynamical signals significantly reduces state readout errors across multiple tested models. Notably, linear ridge regression performs nearly on par with a non-linear kernel-based model, showing that simple models already capture the relevant mapping between the enhanced fluorescence signals and the underlying state populations. This data-driven approach provides a robust alternative that achieves higher fidelities than conventional calibration in our setting, paving the way for high-fidelity state readout in solid-state quantum registers.

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

End-to-End Machine Learning for Depressive State Classification via EEG and fNIRS

arXiv:2606.11555v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The escalating demand for mental healthcare, driven by rising societal stress, highlights the limitations of traditional psychiatric diagnostics. Conventional methods - relying primarily on clinical interviews and patient self-reports - are inherently vulnerable to subjective bias and the varying empirical judgment of practitioners. To address the need for quantitative evaluation, biological signal-based detection, including electroencephalography (EEG) and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), has emerged as a promising objective alternative. Such technology is particularly vital for identifying latent depressive states that may be unrecognized by the subjects themselves. Furthermore, in aging populations, the high comorbidity between depression and dementia necessitates early differentiation to prevent mutual symptom exacerbation and maintain Quality of Life (QoL). This pilot study of eleven healthy students establishes a framework for biological signal-based depression detection, serving as a foundational step toward automated, objective diagnostic tools for clinical use.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Gaussian superpositions for bosonic encodings

arXiv:2603.15258v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Non-Gaussian bosonic states are ubiquitous in interacting light–matter systems, many-body platforms, and relativistic quantum field settings, but their quantitative characterization is hindered by the infinite-dimensional Hilbert space and by the poor scalability of Fock-space truncation methods. We introduce an exact finite-manifold encoding for states supported on a finite span of Gaussian branches, enabling the use of standard finite-dimensional quantum-information tools directly on an effective density matrix whose entries are determined by Gaussian overlaps. As demonstrations, we obtain closed-form and numerically stable evaluations of entropies and relative-entropy non-Gaussianity, and derive an analytic expression for the bipartite entanglement negativity of arbitrary multimode two-branch Gaussian superpositions, including a minimal which-branch dephasing model. Our framework provides a practical bridge between experimentally accessible continuous-variable resources (e.g., cat-like and measurement-conditioned states) and discrete-variable information measures, with immediate applications to benchmarking non-Gaussian resources in several quantum technology platforms.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Probing, Fusion, and Trustworthiness: A Systematic Evaluation of Foundation Model Representations for Multimodal Cancer Analysis

arXiv:2606.17115v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Foundation models (FMs) have emerged as powerful representation extractors for medical data, yet their generalizability to datasets under distribution shift remains underexplored. This work systematically evaluates FM-based representations on a suite of computational pathology tasks across two real-world commercial cohorts, IH-BC and IH-NSCLC, drawn from the licensed in-house (IH) oncology dataset. The analysis focuses on two modalities, whole-slide images and transcriptomic profiles, drawn from the IH multimodal data. We first benchmark unimodal probing performance across five FMs on eight downstream classification tasks, and find that image and omics representations carry complementary predictive signals. Then we investigate whether multimodal fusion can yield additional gains over unimodal baselines by comparing three image-omics fusion strategies built on paired representations. The trustworthiness of selected unimodal and multimodal pipelines is further assessed through conformal prediction. Our results show that FM representations achieve competitive performance on out-of-distribution data and that multimodal fusion helps mainly when no single modality dominates the signal. Conformal prediction reveals that in the majority of cases where a point prediction fails, the true diagnosis remains recoverable within the prediction set, reinforcing the value of uncertainty-aware inference for clinical support.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Spectral analysis of equilibration: information leakage in isolated quantum systems

arXiv:2606.12545v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We develop a unified dynamical-spectral framework for equilibration in isolated quantum systems based on a subspace coarse-graining approach. Central to our formulation is the Leakage Fidelity Function (LFF), defined as the probability that a unitarily evolving state escapes the support of its initial subspace. This quantity provides a direct, operational measure of information flow and memory loss without invoking ensemble assumptions or perturbative arguments. We derive universal bounds on temporal fluctuations of the LFF, in terms of the spectral gap structure and the square of the effective dimension, evincing that large spectral delocalization suppresses fluctuations and guarantees equilibration on average. By introducing spectral power distributions and associated entropic measures, we establish a quantitative link between phase mixing, gap participation, and dynamical stability. We further investigate the equilibration timescale by connecting the LFF to quantum speed limits, thereby revealing the average time required for equilibration. Our results provide a state-dependent, geometrically transparent perspective on how spectral complexity and subspace information leakage jointly govern irreversibility in closed quantum many-body systems.

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

ExpRL: Exploratory RL for LLM Mid-Training

arXiv:2606.17024v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse reward reinforcement learning (RL) has become a standard tool for improving LLM reasoning, but its success depends critically on the coverage present in the base model. In practice, models are often primed for RL through mid-training on curated reasoning traces that teach useful primitive skills such as decomposition, verification, or self-correction. Although effective, this strategy requires manually specifying what the model should learn, and it remains unclear whether such primitive coverage is enough for much harder problems, which require combining these skills into broader solution strategies. We study a more automated approach: RL-based mid-training using large corpora of human-written question-answer data. Rather than treating reference solutions as targets to imitate, our method, ExpRL, uses them as reward scaffolds: references are hidden from the policy and used only to construct problem-specific grading rubrics for judging on-policy reasoning traces. The policy samples from the original problem prompt, while an LLM judge compares the sampled reasoning trace against the reference solution and assigns outcome-level or process-level dense rewards. This lets ExpRL reinforce partial progress, useful intermediate reductions, and productive reasoning behaviors that sparse final-answer rewards often fail to upweight. On challenging math reasoning tasks, ExpRL yields stronger RL priming than SFT, sparse-reward GRPO, and self-distillation, and provides a better initialization for subsequent sparse-reward RL. Additional mixed-domain experiments further suggest that ExpRL can extend beyond the original math-only setting.

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

Intermittent time series forecasting: local vs global models

arXiv:2601.14031v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Forecasting intermittent time series, which contain zeros, is a crucial challenge in supply chains as inventory policies require probabilistic forecasts to establish safety levels. Intermittent time series are commonly forecast using local models, trained individually on each time series. In the last years global models, trained on a large collection of time series, have become popular for time series forecasting. Global models are often based on neural networks or gradient boosted trees. We carry out the first study comparing state-of-the-art probabilistic local and global models on intermittent time series. For global models we consider three different distribution heads suitable for intermittent time series: negative binomial, hurdle-shifted negative binomial and Tweedie. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first use of the latter two with neural networks. We perform experiments on five datasets comprising overall more than 40'000 real-world time series. Among global models, TiDE, a simple neural network architecture, achieves the best accuracy; it also consistently outperforms local models and has lower computational requirements. Large global models are instead much more computationally demanding and less accurate. Among the distribution heads, the Tweedie provides the best estimates of the highest quantiles.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Exotic critical states as fractional Fermi seas in the one-dimensional Bose gas

arXiv:2602.17656v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Critical quantum field theories occupy a central position in modern theoretical physics for their inherent universality stemming from long-range correlations. As an example, the Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid (TLL) describes a wealth of one-dimensional quantum systems at low temperatures. Its behavior is deeply rooted in the emergence of an effective Fermi sea, leading to power-law correlations and Friedel oscillations. A promising direction to realize systems exhibiting novel universal behavior beyond TLL is through the generalization of the underlying Fermi sea. In this Letter, we show that fractional Fermi seas with reduced occupancy arise in an integrable Bose gas driven out of equilibrium by cyclic changes in interactions from repulsive to attractive. The correlation functions feature signatures of criticality incompatible with a conventional TLL, suggesting a novel critical phase. Our predictions, based on Generalized Hydrodynamics, are directly relevant to cold atoms.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Rarity-Gated Context Conditioning for Offline Imitation Learning-Based Maritime Anomaly Detection

arXiv:2606.13311v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Contextual anomaly detection aims to identify abnormal behavior conditional on context variables, but practical deployments often face highly imbalanced context distributions where rare regimes can be critical information. Under such frequency bias, context-conditioned models can produce unstable decisions and excessive false alarms in rare contexts. We propose Rarity-Gated Feature-wise Linear Modulation (RGFiLM), a rarity-aware conditioning module that combines feature-wise modulation (i.e., context-conditioned scaling and shifting of hidden features) with a gate controlled by a data-driven rarity score. The rarity score is estimated from the empirical distribution of context variables and regulates how strongly context modulates intermediate representations: the gate becomes more decisive under rare contexts while remaining conservative under frequent contexts. We evaluate RGFiLM on maritime trajectory anomaly detection using AIS motion sequences with ERA5 environmental context in an environment-sensitive detour scenario. When instantiated in a sequential anomaly scoring pipeline, RGFiLM achieves the best mean F1–False Positive Rate (FPR) trade-off among the compared context-agnostic and context-conditioned methods. These results suggest that explicitly accounting for context rarity is an effective approach for reducing false alarms in context-sensitive anomaly detection.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Constructing Evaluation Datasets for Procedural Reasoning: Balancing Naturalness, Grounding, and Multi-Hop Coverage

arXiv:2606.12767v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating procedural reasoning in AI-supported learning systems requires question-answer datasets that are both learner-like and grounded in the instructional knowledge the system is expected to use. We study how TMK-based question generation strategies affect dataset quality for procedural and multi-hop reasoning. We compare three strategies: strict generation from Task-Method-Knowledge (TMK) models, transcript-first generation with post-hoc TMK filtering, and TMK-aware generation that combines transcripts with structured guidance. To evaluate generated items, we introduce a grounding validation framework based on closed-set evidence units extracted from TMK models. The framework measures whether answers are supported by the underlying representation, whether questions are self-contained, and whether they target multi-hop procedural reasoning. Across 23 instructional topics and 690 generated question-answer pairs, strict TMK generation achieves the strongest overall quality, with 96.5% grounded questions and 92.6% usable questions. Transcript-first generation produces more learner-like questions but more context-dependent or weakly grounded items, while TMK-aware generation yields high raw multi-hop coverage but lower grounding. These results show that procedural richness and natural phrasing do not guarantee representational grounding, motivating explicit representation-aware validation for evaluation datasets in AI-supported learning.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

The Scaffold Effect: How Prompt Framing Drives Apparent Multimodal Gains in Clinical VLM Evaluation

arXiv:2603.28387v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Trustworthy clinical AI requires that performance gains reflect genuine evidence integration rather than surface-level artifacts. We evaluate 12 open-weight vision-language models (VLMs) on binary classification across two clinical neuroimaging cohorts, \textsc{FOR2107} (affective disorders) and \textsc{OASIS-3} (cognitive decline). Both datasets come with structural MRI data that carries no reliable individual-level diagnostic signal. Under these conditions, smaller VLMs exhibit gains of up to 58\% F1 upon introduction of neuroimaging context, with distilled models becoming competitive with counterparts an order of magnitude larger. A contrastive confidence analysis reveals that merely mentioning MRI availability in the task prompt accounts for 70-80\% of this shift, independent of whether imaging data is present, a domain-specific instance of modality collapse we term the scaffold effect. Expert evaluation reveals fabrication of neuroimaging-grounded justifications across all conditions, and preference alignment, while eliminating MRI-referencing behavior, collapses both conditions toward random baseline. Our findings demonstrate that surface evaluations are inadequate indicators of multimodal reasoning, with direct implications for the deployment of VLMs in clinical settings.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Zero-Shot Neural Priors for Generalizable Cross-Subject and Cross-Task EEG Decoding

arXiv:2606.23706v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The development of generalizable electroencephalography (EEG) decoding models is essential for robust brain-computer interfaces (BCI) and objective neural biomarkers in mental health. Conventional approaches have been hindered by poor cross-subject and cross-task generalization, owing to high inter-subject variability and non-stationary neural signals. We address this challenge with a zero-shot cross-subject decoding framework on the large-scale Healthy Brain Network dataset, benchmarking a convolutional neural network baseline, a hybrid LSTM, and a Transformer-based foundation model. To adapt the Transformer for regression while averting catastrophic forgetting, we propose a novel progressive unfreezing strategy. The baseline yielded an nRMSE of 0.9991, whereas our fine-tuned Transformer achieved 0.9799 on unseen subjects. This work advances scalable, calibration-free EEG decoding for computational psychiatry and behavioral prediction.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

FlowState: Sampling-Rate-Equivariant Time-Series Forecasting

arXiv:2508.05287v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Existing time series foundation models (TSFMs), often based on transformer variants, lack adaptability to different sampling rates, struggle with generalization across varying context and target lengths, and are computationally inefficient. We introduce FlowState, a novel TSFM architecture that achieves sampling-rate-equivariant forecasting through a unified design that pairs a state space model (SSM) encoder with a functional basis decoder (FBD). This design enables continuous-time modeling and dynamic time-scale adjustment, allowing FlowState to inherently generalize across all possible temporal resolutions, and dynamically adjust the forecasting horizons without retraining. We further propose an efficient pretraining strategy that improves robustness and accelerates training. Despite being one of the smallest TSFMs, FlowState achieves state-of-the-art results on the widely used GIFT-Eval benchmark, while demonstrating superior adaptability to unseen sampling rates. Our detailed analyses confirm the effectiveness of its components, and we demonstrate its unique ability to adapt to varying input sampling rates.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Probabilistic Salary Prediction with Graph Attention Networks and a Mixture Density Network

arXiv:2606.11663v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate salary prediction is critical for bridging the information gap between employers and job seekers in modern labor markets. Existing approaches predominantly yield a single point estimate and treat job attributes such as location, occupation, and industry as independent categorical features, ignoring both the inherent uncertainty and multi-modality of real-world compensation data and the rich hierarchical and semantic-similarity relationships that govern pay norms. In this paper we propose GAT-MDN, a unified framework that addresses both limitations simultaneously. For each of the three attribute domains we construct a domain-specific graph whose edges encode (i) hierarchical parent-child containment and (ii) weighted similarity links derived from a pre-trained Sentence-Transformer. Parallel Graph Attention Networks (GATs) with edge-feature-aware attention learn rich, context-sensitive node representations from these multi-relational graphs. A priority-based hierarchical selection module then assembles a composite feature vector that gracefully handles missing or coarse attributes, and a Mixture Density Network (MDN) head maps this vector to the parameters of a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), yielding a full conditional salary distribution. Extensive experiments on a real-world Dutch job-posting dataset of over 1 million records demonstrate that GAT-MDN significantly outperforms a non-graph MLP-MDN baseline in both Negative Log-Likelihood (NLL) and Mean Squared Error (MSE).

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

DEFINED: A Data-Efficient Computational Framework for Fine-Grained Creativity Assessment in Debate Scenarios

Human creativity has emerged as a critical competency in the era of large language models. Assessing creativity in complex, open-ended environments is a grand challenge in data mining, currently hindered by a reliance on standardized simple tasks and the scarcity of fine-grained expert data. As an ecologically valid assessment context, debate reflects multiple dimensions of creativity, encompassing both divergent thinking and convergent thinking. Moreover, debate is a data-rich domain, with a large volume of publicly accessible materials. Current mainstream automated scoring methods are poorly suited to complex settings such as debate, and therefore still rely on costly human evaluation. To this end, this paper proposes DEFINED, a data-efficient computational framework for fine-grained creativity assessment in debate scenarios. DEFINED operationalizes debate creativity through a hierarchical eight-dimensional metric system, implemented via a pre-trained autoregressive language model with a hierarchical scoring head that supports both fine-grained and coarse-grained evaluation. Statements and their associated expert scores were obtained from authentic debate competitions, and a constrained data augmentation strategy was employed to address the elite bias inherent in the original data. DEFINED adopts a mixed-granularity training strategy enabling robust learning from limited fine-grained supervision annotated by trained graduate experts. To rigorously validate ecological validity beyond synthetic benchmarks, we incorporate an empirical study with debate-naive participants, utilizing these authentic data to serve as a qualitative case study for mid-to-low proficiency populations. Across our evaluation protocol, our scoring model achieves accurate and stable scoring, outperforming prompt-based large language model evaluators and existing debate scoring methods.

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

FlexLAM: Resolving the Bottleneck Trade-off in Latent Action Learning

arXiv:2606.19408v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Latent actions provide a compact interface between action-free video and downstream decision-making, yet existing Latent Action Models (LAMs) force every transition through a fixed-capacity bottleneck. We identify a bottleneck trade-off: overly tight codes can discard transition cues needed for action alignment, while overly loose codes preserve additional transition variation that must be resolved when alignment labels are scarce or narrowly distributed. FlexLAM replaces this fixed capacity with variable-length latent actions trained by nested dropout, yielding prefix-valid codes that capture compact transition structure first and add detail only when needed, without new architectures or losses. A single FlexLAM matches or surpasses separately trained fixed-capacity LAMs at every evaluated token budget under standard scarce-label supervision and under a low-return single-task alignment stress test, indicating that FlexLAM is not merely adjustable at inference time but learns a better latent-action interface at the same token budgets. The same model supports inference-time token-budget adjustment without retraining, and FlexLAM improves Ego4D transition reconstruction. These results suggest that variable-length latent actions are an architecture-free, drop-in upgrade to the fixed-capacity bottleneck in latent action models, latent-action world models, and video-pretrained action interfaces.

17.
Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-22

Affordable centimeter-scale 3D microscopy with submicrometer resolution

Authors: Unknown Author

Submicrometer-resolution three-dimensional (3D) imaging of large samples has been constrained by the short working distance, high cost and inflexible design of immersion objectives. We developed hybrid solid–liquid optics (HySIL) — a refractive framework with index-matched components — for submicrometer-resolution 3D imaging of centimeter-scale samples in various immersion media using inexpensive air objectives.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Infinitesimal Causality

arXiv:2606.24621v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper introduces a categorical account of infinitesimal causality in Frobenius Markov categories equipped with tangent-bundle semantics. IDC captures the infinitesimal layer in which interventions act as tangent deformations of copy/discard structure. Two distinct Frobenius structures interact: (1) the categorical Frobenius algebra on classical variables encoding copying, comparing, and discarding; and (2) the geometric Frobenius integrability condition, namely involutive closure of the intervention distribution, distinct from the algebraic Frobenius structure. Categorical causal sufficiency is defined as the compatibility of these two notions. A key observation is that, for structural causal models, infinitesimal causality is most naturally formulated in the slice of deterministic mechanisms over exogenous variables, with visible stochastic kernels obtained only after pushforward. Interventions are tangent vectors that deform the Frobenius copy/discard operations; their Lie brackets measure whether this deformation preserves classical information-flow structure. Pearl's do-calculus is used as a guiding example of intervention identities: ignoring irrelevant interventions corresponds to counit invariance, action/observation exchange to coproduct compatibility with pushforward, and independence to involutive bracket closure of the visible intervention distribution.

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

Layer-wise Probing of wav2vec 2.0 and Whisper for Consonant Cluster Reduction in African American English

Self-supervised and supervised speech models are increasingly used to investigate which linguistic information their internal representations encode, and at what level of abstraction they encode it. One underexplored phenomenon is consonant cluster reduction (CCR) in African American English (AAE), a widespread phonological process and a source of automatic speech recognition (ASR) disparity. To examine how CCR is represented, we conduct speaker-independent layer-wise probing of wav2vec2-base and Whisper-small using two tasks: segmental reduction detection and segmental restoration of underlying cluster identity. Both models distinguish reduced and canonical forms with high accuracy. Crucially, reduced segments retain cues to their underlying stops, indicating that CCR is encoded as structured gradient phonological variation rather than simple segmental deletion. These results demonstrate structured phonological encoding of AAE CCR patterns in modern speech models.

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

Task Decomposition for Efficient Annotation

High-quality annotations of structured representations are expensive to collect over large corpora. Manual annotation of structure is laborious, and model-based annotation, although cheaper to generate, requires expensive validation and potentially significant supervision to ensure that the annotation quality is strong enough to be useful downstream. In traditional annotation workflows, annotation of each complete example is performed end-to-end by a single annotator. However, structured annotation is complex, and each aspect of the task represents a unique challenge with an associated inferential load for a given annotator. Modern annotation projects can incorporate heterogeneous groups of annotators, including both models and human annotators with varying domain and linguistic expertise. It remains unclear, however, how to redesign annotation tasks in this setting, where efforts are discriminately allocated across heterogeneous annotators with respect to distinct annotation challenges. We propose to decompose annotation tasks into sub-tasks in order to reduce the aggregate inferential load of annotation projects. Inspired by the notion of centers from centering theory, we introduce a formal model of inferential load based on the degrees of freedom in the space of valid annotations. Using this model, we show that identifying these centers (i.e. salient anchor entities realized by annotation sub-tasks) constrains the output space complexity, and decompositions which isolate and advance center identification reduce the aggregate inferential load. We provide guidelines for decomposing complex structured annotation tasks, supported by examples demonstrating improved cost-efficiency from our prior work. Finally, we present a procedure for allocating sub-tasks across annotators to maximize quality under a fixed budget.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

OpenMedQ: Broad Open Pretraining for Medical Vision-Language Models

We present OpenMedQ, a medical vision-language model pretrained on the broadest fully-open medical mix to date: 14 datasets totaling ~3.35M pretraining samples spanning pathology, radiology, microscopy, and text-only clinical QA. OpenMedQ reaches state-of-the-art BLEU-1 on PathVQA (75.9), beating Med-PaLM M variants up to 562B parameters (~80x larger), and matches the best reported VQA-MED BLEU-1 (64.5). Its vision encoder, transferred to 8 unseen medical classification benchmarks under an identical downstream recipe, obtains the highest average macro-F1 (0.757) among BiomedCLIP (0.745), PMC-CLIP (0.745), PubMedCLIP (0.746), and a from-scratch baseline (0.616). We release our code and an interactive demo is publicly available as a reproducible baseline for the community.

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

Reading between the Lines: Leveraging Large Language Models for Global Dementia and Depression Assessment from Clinical Interviews

Dementia and depression are the most prevalent neuropsychiatric disorders in geriatric populations, and their overlapping symptoms pose major challenges for differential diagnosis. In this study, we investigate open-weights Large Language Models (LLMs) for predicting dementia and depression severity from speech samples collected during standardized history taking interviews with 154 German-speaking subjects. We introduce an observer-based Global Depression Scale (GDS-D) aligned with the established Global Deterioration Scale (GDS), enabling parallel global staging of affective and cognitive symptoms. We compare three LLMs (Mistral 3.1, DeepHermes, Qwen3) in two settings: (1) zero-shot prediction and (2) LLM-based feature extraction for Support Vector Regression, using human and pause-enriched transcripts. Results show that LLMs effectively predict depression severity in zero-shot settings (best MAE of 0.60), while dementia assessment benefits substantially from structured feature extraction (best MAE of 0.78), reducing errors by up to 35% over zero-shot baselines. Pause-enriched transcripts achieve competitive performance with human transcriptions, demonstrating the viability of fully automatic screening pipelines for differential neuropsychiatric assessment.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

FOCUS: DLLMs Know How to Tame Their Compute Bound

Diffusion Large Language Models (DLLMs) offer a compelling alternative to Auto-Regressive models, but their deployment is constrained by high decoding cost. In this work, we identify a key inefficiency in DLLM decoding: while computation is parallelized over token blocks, only a small subset of tokens is decodable at each diffusion step, causing most compute to be wasted on non-decodable tokens. We further observe a strong correlation between attention-derived token importance and token-wise decoding probability. Based on this insight, we propose FOCUS, an inference system designed for DLLMs. By dynamically focusing computation on decodable tokens and evicting non-decodable ones on-the-fly, FOCUS increases the effective batch size, alleviating compute limitations and enabling scalable throughput. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that FOCUS achieves up to 3.52$\times$ throughput improvement over the production-grade engine LMDeploy in large-batch settings, while preserving or improving generation quality across multiple benchmarks.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Learning Upper Lower Value Envelopes to Shape Online RL: A Principled Approach

arXiv:2510.19528v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We investigate the fundamental problem of leveraging offline data to accelerate online reinforcement learning - a direction with strong potential but limited theoretical grounding. Our study centers on how to learn and apply value envelopes within this context. To this end, we introduce a principled two-stage framework: the first stage uses offline data to derive upper and lower bounds on value functions, while the second incorporates these learned bounds into online algorithms. Our method extends prior work by decoupling the upper and lower bounds, enabling more flexible and tighter approximations. In contrast to approaches that rely on fixed shaping functions, our envelopes are data-driven and explicitly modeled as random variables, with a filtration argument ensuring independence across phases. The analysis establishes high-probability regret bounds determined by two interpretable quantities, thereby providing a formal bridge between offline pre-training and online fine-tuning. Empirical results on tabular MDPs demonstrate substantial regret reductions compared with both UCBVI and prior methods while remaining competitive with related approaches.