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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Sparse Configuration Interaction for the Electronic Schrödinger Equation Revisited: Complete Basis Set Limit Complexity and Quantum-Encoding Impact

arXiv:2606.20385v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this article we revisit regularity results for eigenfunctions in the discrete spectrum of the electronic Schrödinger equation and study their consequences for approximation complexity. In particular, for the convergence to the complete basis set limit, it can be shown that the curse of dimensionality in the leading algebraic exponent can be mitigated. That is, for general sparse grid constructions, the main term of the convergence rate with respect to the number of degrees of freedom is independent of the number of electrons. These insights indicate potential benefits for classical numerical solvers of the electronic Schrödinger equation and also for quantum-computing approaches through new qubit-efficient wavefunction encodings.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Million-scale multimodal pollen microscopy with expert-guided foundation models

Automated pollen identification from microscopy remains a bottleneck in aerobiology, palaeoecology and biodiversity monitoring, because scalable systems must generalise across specimen preparation, scanner settings and geographic origins while retaining palynological interpretability. To address this gap, we present a million-scale multimodal pollen microscopy resource, Pollen AI Atlas, assembled from pure-species whole-slide bright-field images spanning four geographic origins, four scanner settings and 46 taxon labels across 31 botanical families. Seeded by one manually selected exemplar per source slide, token-level mining and filtering produced 1,511,390 released grain detections with 99.6\% proposal precision in expert-curated test regions. Each detection was paired with machine-generated grain-level morphological captions from five open-weight vision-language models, guided by expert-verified palynological anchors, yielding structured descriptions of aperture systems, wall ornamentation, shape and size. Among the evaluated models, Gemma4 provided the most controlled primary caption set, combining tight length control, no leakage and the strongest text-retrieval performance. Baseline benchmarks with frozen visual features reached 88.16\% top-1 accuracy, while cross-regional retrieval showed that caption-derived text embeddings remained robust when image similarity degraded (mAP@20 0.811 versus 0.262). Released data, annotations, captions, splits, code, and weights provide a benchmark for pollen recognition, cross-regional domain adaptation and domain-specific multimodal microscopy learning.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Thermodynamics of quantum processes: An operational framework for free energy and reversible athermality

arXiv:2510.12790v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We explore the thermodynamics of quantum processes (quantum channels) by axiomatically introducing the free energy for channels, defined via the quantum relative entropy with an absolutely thermal channel whose fixed output is in equilibrium with a thermal reservoir. This definition finds strong support through its operational interpretations in designated quantum information and thermodynamic tasks. We construct a resource theory of athermality for quantum processes, where free operations are Gibbs preserving superchannels and golden units are unitary channels with respect to absolutely thermal channel having fully degenerate output Hamiltonian. We exactly characterize the one-shot distillation and formation of quantum channels using hypothesis-testing and max-relative entropy with respect to the absolutely thermal channel. These rates converge asymptotically to the channel free energy (up to a multiplicative factor of half the inverse temperature), establishing its operational meaning and proving the asymptotic reversibility of the athermality. We show the direct relation between the resource theory of athermality and quantum information tasks such as private randomness and purity distillation, and thermodynamic tasks of erasure and work extraction. Our work connects the core thermodynamic concepts of free energy, energy, entropy, and maximal extractable work of quantum processes to their information processing capabilities.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Rolling Stock Planning Using the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm

arXiv:2606.11383v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Rolling stock planning is a complex optimization problem in railway management that involves assigning physical trains to scheduled trips while minimizing operational costs. In this work, we address a specific instance of this problem featuring 190 trips over two days, subject to constraints such as mandatory maintenance stops. We reformulate the problem as a Maximum-Weight Independent Set (MWIS) problem on a graph where nodes represent feasible train cycles. To handle the computational complexity of the large search space, we propose a hybrid divide-and-conquer algorithm. This approach iteratively selects subgraphs and solves the MWIS problem using various solvers, including exact classical methods and the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA). We evaluate the algorithm's performance by comparing these methods and analyzing the scaling with respect to subgraph size, with QAOA assessed through both classical simulation and execution on a quantum device (IQM Emerald). Our results indicate that increasing the subgraph size generally improves solution quality, demonstrating that the hybrid framework can effectively bridge the gap between polynomial-time approximate solvers and exponential-time exact methods.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

ConSolv: Solvent-Conditional Machine Learning Implicit Solvent Potential

arXiv:2606.24983v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Implicit solvent machine learning potentials (MLPs) offer a powerful route to bridging the gap between accuracy and efficiency in molecular simulations. However, existing models have largely focused on aqueous environments, overlooking the diverse and important roles of non-aqueous solvents in areas such as organic synthesis and battery technology. Here, we present ConSolv, a solvent-conditional MLP architecture that explicitly incorporates solvent effects on solute interactions through an attention-based solvent-embedding block. By combining experimental solvation free energy data with ab initio data, we train a single implicit solvent MLP that is transferable across 66 common organic solvents. ConSolv outperforms classical explicit solvent methods and selected ab initio implicit solvent approaches across multiple solvation free energy benchmarks, and demonstrates generalization to unseen solvents. Beyond solvation free energies, the model shows close agreement with experimental nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) data for $\gamma$-fluorohydrin molecules in chloroform. ConSolv's architecture is readily extensible to broader chemical spaces and alternative training strategies, while its attention-based design supports explainable artificial intelligence (AI) analysis that can help elucidate complex, solvent-dependent molecular interactions.

06.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-06

Pathways of emergency care for severely ill children in Nigerian and Ugandan hospitals: A process mapping study

Authors:

by Rami Subhi, Abiodun Sogbesan, Dan Muramuzi, Mikael Burhin, Ayobami A. Bakare, Adegoke G. Falade, Freddy E. Kitutu, Freddie Ssengooba, Carina King, Sumit Kane, Belinda Dawson-McClaren, Hamish R. Graham, the MOXY-Implementation Research Collaboration Background Child mortality remains high in countries with weak emergency care systems. Facility organisation for paediatric emergency care is heterogeneous and under-described. We examined how hospitals in Uganda and Nigeria are organised to deliver emergency care for neonates and children. Methods and findings We conducted a qualitative, multi-method study in 26 purposively selected secondary and tertiary facilities in Uganda and Nigeria from October 2023 to December 2024. Embedded researchers documented patient pathways, resources for care, and care processes for severely ill children (

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

A Multidomain Model for Dementia Classification using Harmonized LASI and LASI-DAD Data

ABSTRACT Dementia classification in heterogeneous populations is complicated by the influence of education, language, socioeconomic position and health status on cognitive test performance. Approaches that rely on fixed cognitive thresholds or isolated predictor sets may therefore perform inconsistently across diverse older adult populations. We developed and internally validated a multidomain classification model using harmonized data from the Longitudinal Ageing Study in India (LASI) and its diagnostic sub-study, LASI-DAD. Clinical dementia status was defined as a binary outcome derived from consensus-based Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR) assessments, averaged across 20 multiply imputed outcome datasets and finalised using a 0.5 threshold. The analytic sample comprised 3,186 participants after exclusion of those with mild cognitive impairment. Twenty-two predictors spanning cognitive performance, informant-reported decline, cardiometabolic biomarkers and sociodemographic characteristics were retained. Missing predictor values were addressed using k-nearest neighbours imputation. Model development used a stratified 70:30 train-test split, with nested cross-validation conducted within the training set only, and class imbalance corrected using the Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) applied exclusively within training folds. Five supervised learning approaches were evaluated: logistic regression, random forest, gradient boosting, XGBoost and support vector machines. The final logistic regression model achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC-AUC) of 0.932 and an average precision of 0.668 on the held-out set. At the optimal probability threshold of 0.70, sensitivity was 0.771, specificity was 0.905, positive predictive value was 0.325 and negative predictive value was 0.985. A cognition-only comparator, restricted to task-based cognitive measures and run through the same pipeline, yielded a ROC-AUC of 0.908 and average precision of 0.620, indicating incremental discriminatory value from the full multidomain feature set. Dementia prevalence increased progressively across model-derived risk strata, reaching approximately 50% in the highest category. Permutation importance and SHAP analyses identified informant-reported decline and orientation as the strongest contributors to classification, with cardiometabolic variables providing smaller but consistent incremental contributions. Dementia classification in a socially and clinically heterogeneous Indian cohort can be improved by integrating cognitive, informant, cardiometabolic and sociodemographic information within a single interpretable model. The strongest predictive signal was carried by cognitive and informant measures, with non-cognitive features adding structure around that core. The model requires external validation and calibration before broader application can be considered. Keywords - dementia; classification; multidomain modelling; machine learning; interpretability; older adults; India; LASI-DAD

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

Higher-Order Token Interactions via Quantum Attention

arXiv:2606.11673v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Standard dot-product self-attention computes, in a single layer, only pairwise (order-2) interactions between tokens; representing a generic order-$k$ interaction is known to require either super-quadratic resources in one layer or composition across depth. We introduce Quantum Higher-Order Attention (QHA), a shallow, hardware-realizable quantum attention head that, via data re-uploading and an all-to-all non-Clifford entangler, synthesizes order-$k$ token interactions inside the circuit and exposes them through a local single-qubit read-out. We prove (i) an expressivity separation: any single standard self-attention layer with embedding dimension $m$, $H$ heads and $p$-bit precision satisfying $mHp=o(N/\log\log N)$ cannot represent the order-$k$ correlation family that one QHA head represents with circuit depth $O(\log k)$ ($O(k)$ two-qubit gates); and (ii) a trainability guarantee for its local-design instantiation: with a local read-out and $O(\log n)$ depth the gradient variance is $\Omega(1/\mathrm{poly}(n))$ (no barren plateau), which we confirm empirically – while being explicit that the more expressive all-to-all instantiation we benchmark is trained empirically and shows exponentially decaying gradients. Empirically, at a $6.5\times$ smaller parameter budget, QHA generalizes hidden-subset parity of every order $k\le6$ from disjoint inputs, whereas the larger classical attention head collapses past order~2; consistent with theory, the size of the advantage tracks the target's Fourier degree - largest for parity and shrinking when low-order structure is present. As an application, QHA serves as a compact high-order interaction detector across three domains - genetic epistasis, learning-parity-with-noise, and graph triangle detection - reaching the noise ceiling at the smallest parameter budget where field-standard linear methods fail.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

RN-D: Discretized Categorical Actors for On-Policy Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2601.23075v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: On-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) remains a dominant paradigm for continuous control, yet standard implementations rely on Gaussian actors and relatively shallow MLP policies, often leading to brittle optimization when gradients are noisy, and policy updates must be conservative. In this paper, we revisit actor policy representation as a first-class design choice for on-policy RL. We study discretized categorical actors, which represent each action dimension as a distribution over discrete bins and induce a policy objective analogous to classification cross-entropy loss. Building on architectural advances from supervised learning, we further pair discretized categorical actors with regularized networks, yielding RN-D. Across diverse continuous-control benchmarks, we show that simply replacing the standard Gaussian actor with our proposed actor substantially improves performance, achieving state-of-the-art results within on-policy RL. We release our code at https://github.com/alwaysbyx/RND-RL.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

When Top-1 Fails: Calibrating LoRA Monitors for Masked Diffusion LMs

Discrete diffusion language model (DLM) fine-tuning inherits inexpensive diagnostics from denoising-time confidence monitors, but their PEFT-training meaning is untested. We test top-1 argmax concentration as a collapse warning. Across 816 LoRA/PEFT configurations from three DLM families, the warning fires for every configuration while logs record 0/816 actual collapses at the 200 step horizon, giving zero precision. The cause is pre-equilibrium saturation: top-1 concentration is already high before optimization and quickly becomes insensitive to final training stability. We then evaluate max LoRA gradient norm, a parameter-side signal that samples gradient routing rather than token concentration. On a pooled held-out LLaDA-family split, a train-optimized threshold identifies top-decile final-loss configurations with precision 0.68 and F1=0.79, above the all-positive top-1 baseline even at the lower split-bootstrap confidence bound. Autoregressive controls and cross-family threshold failures bound the result to short-horizon DLM-LoRA inspection rather than a universal collapse detector. Workflow: drop top-1 as a PEFT alarm, log max-gradient early in training, and calibrate thresholds per DLM family before routing runs for inspection.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Repeated Bilateral Trade: The Quest for Fairness

arXiv:2606.15369v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study repeated bilateral trade from a fairness perspective. At each round, a fresh seller-buyer pair arrives, and the platform posts a price before observing the traders' valuations. Trade occurs only if both agents accept the price. Rather than maximizing only the gain from trade, we consider platforms that seek balanced divisions of the generated surplus. We show that natural fairness desiderata lead to a one-parameter Rawls-to-Nash family of fair-gain objectives, obtained by aggregating the seller's and buyer's net gains through nonpositive Hölder means. Unlike the standard gain-from-trade objective and the Rawlsian fair-gain objective studied in prior work, our proposed objectives induce a new statistical structure in which expected rewards are recovered from threshold feedback through a two-dimensional singular-kernel integral identity. This leads to a nonstandard pure-exploration problem whose natural estimators are rectangular double sums with row-column dependence and singular weights. Assuming independent i.i.d. seller and buyer valuation sequences with arbitrary unknown marginals, we characterize the optimal learning rates for the whole Rawls-to-Nash family of fair-gain objectives, giving matching fixed-confidence sample-complexity and regret bounds up to polylogarithmic factors.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Deep learning for interactive and automated inner retinal layer segmentation in OCT images of patients with retinitis pigmentosa using limited training data

Purpose: New therapeutic strategies such as optogenetics have created a need for accurate tracking of inner retina degeneration in Retinitis pigmentosa (RP) patients. We introduce two tailored deep learning models to segment the RNFL (retinal nerve fibre layer), GCIPL (ganglion cell inner plexiform layer), INL (inner nuclear layer), CFT (central foveal thickness) and RPE (retinal pigment epithelium) in RP: The first is based on a Segment Anything Model (SAM), the second on nnU-Net. To our knowledge, SAM has not yet been applied to retinal layers in OCT data. Methods: SD-OCT images of a retrospective cohort of 37 RP patients were included. Data for four training cycles were prepared semi-automatically in MATLAB, then assessed and corrected by three expert graders. 1,700 segmented B-Scans from two open datasets were used for pretraining. For post-processing, semantic retinal boundary detection was developed. The final models, OCT-SAM and nnU-Net, were trained on 228 annotated RP scans. Detected layer thicknesses were validated against manual segmentation at 90 random points in 30 OCT B-Scans. Finally, OCT-SAM was tested on three RP cases with retrospective, longitudinal OCT data. Results: nnU-Net achieved a precision, recall and F-1 score of 0.96 while OCT-SAM performance resulted in slightly lower values of 0.93, 0.8 and 0.85, respectively. OCT-SAM measurements had low bias and good agreement with manual annotations, confirming reliability. Conclusions: OCT-SAM enabled fast data annotation and tool integration, whereas nnU-Net provided the best segmentation performance. OCT-SAM demonstrated longitudinal reproducibility and detected RP-characteristic pathologies and degenerative changes. Future work will extend OCT-SAM to 3D OCT segmentation.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Quantum Simulation of Spin-Dependent Electron Transfer in a Synthetic Chiral Lattice with a Trapped Ion

arXiv:2606.13930v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Electron transfer through chiral structures can exhibit spin asymmetry, known as the chiral-induced spin selectivity effect, whose microscopic origin remains an open question. While path-interference within the chiral moiety has been proposed as a key mechanism, its experimental validation requires precise and versatile tunability of system parameters. Here we implement a programmable quantum simulation of spin-dependent electron transfer in a donor–chiral-bridge–acceptor model using a trapped ion. The bridge is encoded in internal states of the ion with tunable nearest- and next-nearest-neighbor couplings, while donor and acceptor states are coupled via a spectator bosonic motional mode. We observe spin-dependent interference within the bridge, and further reveal spin-dependence in donor-to-acceptor transfer dynamics, controlled by amplitude and phase of the coupling parameter. Our results identify interference among spin-dependent pathways as a microscopic origin of spin-dependent transfer, and open a route toward quantum simulations of complex chiral lattices with multi-level and bosonic degrees of freedom.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

S1-Omni-Image: A Unified Model for Scientific Image Understanding, Generation, and Editing

We present S1-Omni-Image, an open-weight unified multimodal model for scientific image understanding, generation, and editing. Unlike general-purpose image generation models, scientific image tasks require not only high-fidelity synthesis, but also robust understanding of scientific semantics, structural relations, domain knowledge, and task intent. To this end, S1-Omni-Image builds on the scientific multimodal reasoning backbone S1-VL-32B and couples its understanding capability with an image generation module under a unified think-before-generate paradigm. Given a user instruction, the model first produces a task-oriented reasoning trace, a textual answer, and a task special token; their hidden states are then injected into the generation module to condition image generation or editing. S1-Omni-Image supports scientific image understanding, generation, and editing in a unified framework. For generation, it focuses on scientific illustrations and text rendering, including logical diagrams, relational comparisons, data charts, and realistic scientific visualizations. For editing, it casts segmentation and other domain-specific vision tasks as native image editing problems, enabling multi-turn illustration editing, medical and geographic image segmentation, medical image translation, and scientific image super-resolution. We construct SciGenEdit, a 314K-sample training dataset, and release the model weights, inference code, and SciGenEdit-10K. Experiments show that S1-Omni-Image substantially improves scientific image generation and editing while preserving the scientific image understanding capability inherited from S1-VL-32B. It outperforms open-source models on GenExam and TechImage-Bench, achieves state-of-the-art results on four editing benchmarks including MSD, cigRockSEM, SynthRAD2025, and IXI, and maintains stable performance on scientific image understanding evaluations.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Diabetes is associated with increased nocturnal respiratory rate

Background and Objective: Diabetes mellitus (DM) causes autonomic neuropathy, which may alter nocturnal respiratory rate (NRR). To test the association between DM and NRR, we analyzed elective polysomnograms of four large observational cohorts. Research Design and Methods: We performed cross-sectional analysis of over 25,000 individuals with polysomnograms (PSGs) from the Sleep Heart Health Study (SHHS), Hispanic Community Health Study/Study of Latinos (HCHS/SOL), Osteoporotic Fractures in Men Study (MrOS), and Wisconsin Sleep Cohort (WSC). Patient-level NRRs were derived from inductance plethysmography waveforms. DM status was determined by self-report, physician diagnosis, medication use, or laboratory values, depending on the cohort. We related DM and NRR (continuous and dichotomized) using logistic regression models and adjusted for potential confounders. Cohort-specific results were combined using random-effects meta-analysis. Results: Meta-analysis of unadjusted models showed a pooled odds ratio (OR) of 1.10 (95% CI:1.04-1.17) for each breath-per-minute (brpm) increase in NRR. This association remained significant after multivariable adjustment (OR:1.06, 95% CI:1.02-1.11). Dichotomized analyses similarly showed higher odds of DM across dichotomization thresholds ranging from 15 to 21 brpm. At a threshold of 18 brpm, the unadjusted pooled OR was 1.77 (95% CI:1.23-2.55, P=0.0022), and the adjusted OR was 1.49 (95% CI:1.10-2.02, P=0.0098). Conclusions: Clinically stable outpatients with elevated NRR have an increased prevalence of DM. Additional studies are needed to investigate whether the mechanism is autonomic neuropathy and whether monitoring NRR can detect early complications of DM.

16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

MLT-Dedup: Efficient Large-Scale Online Video Deduplication via Multi-Level Representations and Spatial-Temporal Matching

The explosive growth of user-generated video content on online platforms is accompanied by the emergence of numerous near-duplicate videos–videos that are identical or highly similar but differ by partial edits. These duplicates degrade user experience and increase storage and bandwidth costs, making large-scale video deduplication a critical task. Existing video deduplication frameworks face a fundamental challenge in retrieving sufficient high-quality candidates under a limited index budget, as well as trade-offs between efficiency and precision. To address these issues, we propose MLT-Dedup, an efficient large-scale online video deduplication framework with Multi-Level representations and spatial-Temporal matching. Our approach employs a Multi-Level Video Encoder (ML-VE) to extract both fine-grained frame-level and sparse clip-level embeddings: sparse embeddings support efficient candidate retrieval, while fine-grained embeddings are loaded for precise pairwise matching. During matching, we introduce DiF-SiM, a Differential Feature-enhanced Similarity Module capable of locating duplicated temporal segments and providing reliable similarity evidence to support policy-driven deduplication decisions. Extensive experiments on a real-world large-scale platform demonstrate that MLT-Dedup reduces online repetition rates by 91% at 90% precision. Furthermore, our sparse retrieval design achieves a 5x increase in indexing capacity, enabling broader candidate coverage in real-world deployment.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Coupled-Mode Equations with Arbitrary Mode Combinations for Kinetic-Inductance Superconducting Traveling-Wave Parametric Devices: Theory and Experimental Validation

arXiv:2606.17264v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The coupled-mode equations (CMEs) have proven very successful in describing parametric processes in nonlinear optics. More recently, the same formulation has been used to model microwave superconducting parametric amplifiers and frequency multipliers. However, when applied to the microwave regime, not all assumptions remain valid and losses play a more dramatic role. Here, we revisit the CMEs applied to traveling-wave superconducting amplifiers to include losses and provide a formulation that enables their systematic derivation for any combination of traveling waves. As examples, we discuss the impact of unwanted harmonics and intermodulation products on parametric amplification, as well as harmonic generation. We verify that, if not properly accounted for, device performance can deviate considerably from the ideal case. Furthermore, using a superconducting CPW-based artificial transmission line and combining an independent experimental determination of its nonlinear parameter $I'_*$ with simulations of its linear properties, we obtain a parameter-free validation of this formulation. The nonlinear parameter was determined to be $I'_* \approx 27$ mA which, surprisingly, scales with the theoretical depairing current and not with the much smaller critical current of the device. For the validation, we measured multiple-harmonic generation and found excellent agreement between theory and experiment. The fact that $I'_* \gg I_C$ has direct implications for device design.

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

Towards End-to-End Automation of AI Research

arXiv:2606.15497v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The automation of science is a long-standing ambition in the field of AI. While the community has made significant progress in automating individual components of the scientific process, a system that autonomously navigates the entire research lifecycle – from conception to publication – has remained out of reach. Here, we present the strongest demonstration to date toward automating the entire process end-to-end. We present The AI Scientist, which creates research ideas, writes code, runs experiments, plots and analyzes data, writes the entire scientific manuscript and performs its own peer review. Its ideas, execution, and presentation are of sufficient quality to produce a manuscript generated by an AI system that passes the first round of peer review at a major machine learning conference workshop. The workshop has an acceptance rate of 70 percent. Our system leverages modern foundation models within a complex agentic system. We evaluate The AI Scientist in two settings: a focused mode using human-provided code templates as an initial scaffold to conduct research on a specific topic, and a template-free, open-ended mode that leverages agentic search for wider scientific exploration. Both settings produce diverse ideas and automatically test, report on, and evaluate them. This achievement demonstrates AI's growing capacity for scientific contribution and signifies a potential paradigm shift in how research is conducted. As with any impactful new technology, there could be significant risks, including taxing overwhelmed review systems and adding noise to scientific literature. However, if developed responsibly, such autonomous systems could greatly accelerate scientific discovery.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

AIMER: Calibration-Free Task-Agnostic MoE Expert Pruning

arXiv:2603.18492v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models increase parameter capacity without proportional per-token computation, yet deployment still requires storing the full expert pool, making expert pruning important for reducing memory and serving overhead. Existing task-agnostic expert-pruning methods are typically calibration-dependent: they estimate expert importance from routing or activation statistics on a calibration set, making pruning decisions sensitive to calibration-data variation while introducing substantial preprocessing cost. We propose AIMER (Absolute mean over root mean square IMportance for Expert Ranking), a simple calibration-free criterion that identifies more distinct experts by capturing the concentration pattern of expert weights, making it well suited for task-agnostic expert pruning. Across 7B to 47B MoE language models with distinct architectures and 16 diverse benchmarks, AIMER consistently delivers stronger capability balance across diverse tasks than existing calibration-free methods. Surprisingly, AIMER also achieves better balance than strong calibration-based expert-pruning baselines calibrated on the widely used task-agnostic C4 corpus, while requiring only 0.22–2.06 seconds to score all experts.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

On Local Population-Risk Certificates

Authors:

arXiv:2606.19147v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper develops local certificates for population-risk increments around a current model. For a local candidate set \(\mathcal D\), the certificate is a two-sided confidence band for \(P({\ell_{\theta+v}-\ell_\theta})\) over \(v\in\mathcal D\). As an application, the upper endpoint of this band yields a risk-controlled update rule: an update is accepted only when its certified upper endpoint is nonpositive; otherwise the current model is retained.

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

Predicting Poets' Origins from Verse: A Computational Analysis of Regional Linguistic Fingerprints in the Complete Tang Poems

We ask whether the geographic origin of Tang-dynasty poets leaves a detectable linguistic trace in their work. Aggregating every poem attributed to each author in the Complete Tang Poems (Quan Tang Shi) and linking poets to their administrative circuit of origin via the China Biographical Database (CBDB), we build a poet-level corpus of 357 poets across the ten Tang circuits and frame origin prediction as multi-class classification. Using character $n$-gram TF-IDF together with interpretable domain features (imagery, season, and allusion), classical and neural models predict a poet's broad region (South vs.\ North) at $0.69$ accuracy, well above the $0.53$ majority baseline, and finer circuit-level origin above chance. Beyond classification, three findings emerge. (i) Linguistic distance between circuits grows with geographic distance (Mantel $r=0.40$, $p\approx0.09$ over nine circuits), evidence of a distance-decay effect in poetic language. (ii) The signal interacts with time: South/North separability is at chance in the High Tang and strongest in the Late Tang, consistent with court-driven homogenization at the empire's height followed by regional divergence. (iii) The model's confident errors are historically meaningful – in the Early Tang, every misclassification is a southern poet read as northern, reflecting the prestige of the northern court idiom. We further show that, when given the whole corpus through a hierarchical frozen-encoder representation, a classical-Chinese transformer (GuwenBERT) only matches – not beats – simple TF-IDF, and that combining them adds nothing, indicating that character $n$-grams already capture the regional signal. Our results position interpretable machine learning as a hypothesis generator for literary history.

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

C2FL: Clustered Continual Federated Learning under Spatial and Temporal Drift

arXiv:2606.18003v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Collective Adaptive Systems (CAS) increasingly rely on machine learning to let each node learn from locally sensed data, aligning its behavior with the surrounding environment. Scaling this intelligence, however, raises fundamental challenges: sensed data is often privacy-sensitive, preventing centralized collection; nodes are mobile, traversing regions where nearby nodes perceive similar phenomena while distant ones observe radically different conditions, creating natural spatial clusters; and these distributions evolve over time due to mobility, introducing temporal drift that makes local models progressively stale. These dynamics arise across domains - vehicular sensing, drone-based monitoring, smartphone crowdsensing - yet the interplay of privacy, spatial heterogeneity, and temporal drift severely undermines conventional learning strategies. Therefore, we propose C2FL, a fully distributed Federated Learning (FL) approach where nodes self-organize into learning groups through spatial clustering, reflecting the geographic structure of the environment. To counteract temporal drift, each node combines experience replay with a dwell-time-aware adaptive averaging step, progressively incorporating the regional consensus as it remains longer within the same area, while preserving previously acquired knowledge under evolving distributions. We evaluate our approach on synthetic experiments that systematically reproduce spatial and temporal shifts, showing that standard federated strategies degrade significantly under these conditions and that our method restores robust collective adaptation.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Agentic System as Compressor: Quantifying System Intelligence in Bits

arXiv:2606.25960v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models are turning from isolated predictors into agentic systems: they call tools, retrieve evidence, obey environment constraints, use verifiers, and complete tasks through search and multi-turn interaction. We adopts an analytical viewpoint based on "compression is intelligence": under a fixed task distribution, interface, and compute budget, a stronger agentic system lets a target object be reconstructed with fewer bits. We operationalize the measure with arithmetic coding, seed coding, and a fallback, and evaluate it in five settings: reversed text, chess moves, protein sequences, retrieval-augmented question answering, and semantic story compression; in all of them agentic components reduce codelength. These small, controlled experiments cover component types typical of real agentic systems, show that codelength can analyze how components, observers, and budgets change residual uncertainty, and offer guidance for evaluating real agent systems.

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

Feature extraction for plant growth estimation

Precision agriculture requires the estimation of plant growth stages in real-time. When the plant growth stage is known, the wastage of resources in cultivation, such as nutrients and water, is reduced as only the required resources need to be supplied. Plants at different growth stages, however, have similar morphological features, which can make autonomous growth stage estimation difficult. This paper presents two feature extraction methods for growth stage estimation: one that uses a bank of Gabor filters and morphological operations, and the other that uses pre-trained convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and transfer learning. We test these methods on a publicly available plant growth stage dataset (``bccr-segset``) for two species, canola and radish, grown and captured under indoor conditions. The two proposed feature extraction methods are compared, using support vector machines and boosted trees as classifiers. We find that both methods are suitable for real-time applications, and that CNN features outperform the hand-crafted features, both with regard to speed and accuracy. The best system (VGG-19 features, classified with a radial basis function support vector machine) obtained an accuracy of 98.4% for both species, processing an image in 0.08 seconds.

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

MSPL: Multi-Step Pseudo-Labeling for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection

Open-vocabulary object detection (OVD) aims to recognize and localize object categories beyond the training set. Recent approaches leverage vision-language models to generate pseudo-labels using image-text alignment, allowing detectors to generalize to unseen classes without explicit supervision. However, these methods depend heavily on single-step image-text matching, neglecting the intermediate reasoning steps crucial for interpreting semantically complex visual contexts, such as crowding or occlusion. In this paper, we introduce MSPL, a framework that incorporates multi-step visual reasoning into the pseudo-labeling process for OVD. It decomposes complex scene understanding into three interpretable steps-object localization, category recognition, and background grounding-where these intermediate reasoning states serve as rich supervision sources. Extensive experiments on standard OVD evaluation protocols demonstrate that MSPL achieves state-of-the-art performance with superior pseudo-labeling efficiency, outperforming the strong baseline by 9.4 AP50 for novel classes on OV-COCO and improving box and mask APr by 3.2 and 2.2, respectively, on OV-LVIS. Code and models are available at https://github.com/hchoi256/mspl.