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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

HPSv3++: Scaling Reward Models Across the Full Spectrum of Diffusion Model Capabilities

Reward models guide text-to-image (T2I) systems toward outputs aligned with human preferences. However, typical reward models such as HPSv3 are trained on pre-annotated data from earlier T2I models, without accounting for quality discriminative shifts arising from evolving model capabilities and reinforcement learning (RL) iterations, limiting their broader applicability. In this work, we propose HPSv3++, a reward model framework that elevates the HPSv3 model for varying T2I model capabilities and their RL iteration changes across the full capability-iteration spectrum. Specifically, we first introduce HPDv3++, a 212K dual-dimension preference dataset annotated for text fidelity and aesthetic quality using a recent high-capability (Qwen-Image) model with human supervision. We then propose a two-stage training framework. Stage 1 employs data-aware orthogonal gradient projection to incorporate diverse aesthetic perception from HPDv3++ while preserving the original effective human preference knowledge in HPSv3. Stage 2 further leverages unlabeled data from T2I models spanning different capability levels and RL iterations, and introduces a joint capability-iterations conditioned signal for the reward model together with a standard deviation-driven unsupervised guidance mechanism, strengthening reward model across the capability-iteration spectrum. HPSv3++ achieves state-of-the-art preference prediction, outperforming HPSv3 9.8% on HPDv3, 5.5% on GenAI-Bench, while achieving 79.1%/88.1% on our proposed HPDv3++. When used for T2I RL training, it consistently improves GenEval scores across diverse T2I models, demonstrating its wide-range capabilities. The code is available at https://github.com/PlantPotatoOnMoon/HPSv3-PlusPlus.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Weak continuous measurements require more work than strong ones

arXiv:2502.09732v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Understanding the energy cost of quantum measurement process and its connection to the measurement performance faces the challenge of modeling the objectification process. The latter, turns the measurement result into an objective fact, available to independent observers, and is responsible for the measurement irreversibility. To address this issue, we propose and analyze a dynamical model of quantum measurement, able to capture nonideal (weak and inefficient) measurements. In this model, the objectification is induced by a contact with a macroscopic reservoir at equilibrium which is responsible for the redundant broadcast of the measurement outcome (producing a Spectrum Broadcast Structure (SBS) state) while inducing decoherence in the pointer basis, in the line of the theory of quantum Darwinism. We analyze the performance of the obtained measurement process by introducing figures of merit to quantify the strength of the measurement and its efficiency. We also derive and a lower bound on the measurement work cost that we can relate to the measurement quality. We take as an illustration the readout of a qubit via its coupling to a harmonic oscillator. We investigate the long sequences of extremely short and weak measurements (a.k.a continuous measurements), to find under which conditions they converge to an ideal (projective) measurement and analyze their work cost. Surprisingly, we find that a sequence converging to projective measurement has a much larger work cost than an equivalent strong measurement obtained from a single intense interaction with the apparatus. We extend this result to a large class of models owing to scaling arguments. Our analysis offers new insights into the trade-offs between measurement strength, energy consumption, and information extraction in quantum measurement protocols.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

S-Agent: Spatial Tool-Use Elicits Reasoning for Spatial Intelligence

Real-world spatial intelligence requires reasoning over a continuous and evolving 3D world, yet existing VLMs and tool-augmented agents largely remain tied to static, stateless inference from isolated visual observations. We introduce \textsc{S-Agent}, a spatial tool-use agentic paradigm for understanding and reasoning over continuous multi-view images and videos. By formulating spatial reasoning as spatio-temporal evidence accumulation rather than isolated frame-level prediction, \textsc{S-Agent} reshapes spatial perception into scene-centric understanding beyond frame-centric recognition. Specifically, \textsc{S-Agent} casts the VLM as a semantic planner that decides what evidence is needed, while a hierarchy of spatial tools and experts grounds objects in 2D, lifts them into 3D geometric evidence, and aggregates this evidence into high-level spatial knowledge (e.g., counting, measurement, orientation, and relative position). Additionally, a temporal memory mechanism, including Scene Memory for maintaining the evolving scene state and Agent Memory for accumulating reasoning context, enables evidence integration across frames and reasoning steps. Comprehensive experiments on multi-view and video spatial reasoning benchmarks show that \textsc{S-Agent} consistently improves both open-source and closed-source VLMs in a training-free manner. Beyond inference-time augmentation, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on \textsc{S-Agent}-generated spatial trajectories \textsc{S-300K} yields \textsc{S-Agent-8B}, a compact spatial agent that significantly surpasses similar-scale baselines (e.g., Qwen3-VL-8B) and performs comparably to advanced closed-source models (e.g., GPT-5.4 and Gemini 3).

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

DSB: Dynamic Sliding Block Scheduling for Diffusion LLMs

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative for text generation, distinguished by their native support for parallel decoding. In practice, block inference is crucial for avoiding order misalignment in global bidirectional decoding and improving output quality. However, the widely-used fixed, predefined block (naive) schedule is agnostic to semantic difficulty, making it a suboptimal strategy for both quality and efficiency: it can force premature commitments to uncertain positions while delaying easy positions near block boundaries. In this work, we analyze the limitations of naive block scheduling and disclose the importance of dynamically adapting the schedule to semantic difficulty for reliable and efficient inference. Motivated by this, we propose Dynamic Sliding Block (DSB), a training-free block scheduling method that uses a sliding block with a dynamic size to overcome the rigidity of the naive block. To further improve efficiency, we introduce DSB Cache, a training-free KV-cache mechanism tailored to DSB. Extensive experiments across multiple models and benchmarks demonstrate that DSB, together with DSB Cache, consistently improves both generation quality and inference efficiency for dLLMs. Code is released at https://github.com/lizhuo-luo/DSB.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Allure of Craquelure: A Variational-Generative Approach to Crack Detection in Paintings

Recent advances in imaging technologies, deep learning and numerical performance have enabled non-invasive detailed analysis of artworks, supporting their documentation and conservation. In particular, automated detection of craquelure in digitized paintings is crucial for assessing degradation and guiding restoration, yet remains challenging due to the possibly complex scenery and the visual similarity between cracks and crack-like artistic features such as brush strokes or hair. We propose a hybrid approach that models crack detection as an inverse problem, decomposing an observed image into a crack-free painting and a crack component. A deep generative model is employed as powerful prior for the underlying artwork, while crack structures are captured using a Mumford–Shah-type variational functional together with a crack prior. Joint optimization yields a pixel-level map of crack localizations in the painting.

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

Quantifying Consistency in LLM Logical Reasoning via Structural Uncertainty

arXiv:2606.17312v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models can arrive at the same answer through reasoning paths that are unstable, contradictory, or difficult to rank consistently – a failure mode especially prevalent in multi-step deductive reasoning. Existing methods assess reliability primarily through output dispersion – measuring how much sampled answers differ – but this discards a complementary signal: whether the model can consistently rank competing reasoning candidates. We propose structural uncertainty, a consistency-aware framework derived from the stability of self-preference-induced rankings over sampled reasoning solutions. Given a query, we generate multiple candidate solutions and ask the model to judge pairwise preferences among its own outputs. We aggregate self-preferences into ranking distributions via Bradley-Terry modeling with PageRank, and decompose the signal into two entropy-based components: across-trial ranking instability and within-trial candidate ambiguity. Across five LLMs and eight benchmarks, structural signals provide information complementary to answer dispersion: on logical and mathematical reasoning tasks, the combination improves identification of unreliable instances, while on factual retrieval the structural signal collapses toward uniformity, diagnosing a regime boundary where reasoning-level consistency evaluation is uninformative. The two components relate differently to accuracy: within-trial ambiguity correlates positively with correctness – consistent with settings where multiple plausible solution paths remain competitive – while across-trial instability correlates negatively, signaling unreliable reasoning. Structural uncertainty is best understood not as a universal confidence estimator, but as a regime-sensitive evaluator of logical reasoning consistency.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

BigPower: Hierarchical Source-Level Module Power Estimation for CPUs with Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.13747v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate power estimation is important for understanding and optimizing CPU power behavior, yet practical workflows often rely on simulation-derived information or post-silicon analysis. In this work, we present BigPower, a hierarchical source-level surrogate model for fine-grained module-level power estimation during CPU design. BigPower leverages large language model-based representations together with architectural hierarchy, module connectivity, configuration parameters, and workload context to estimate module-level power consumption directly from source-level design information, without requiring additional simulation during inference. Experimental results in the open-source XiangShan processor family demonstrate practical fine-grained power estimation across diverse configurations and workloads, offering an efficient alternative to conventional simulation-based workflows.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Structural Energy Guidance for View-Consistent Text-to-3D Generation

Text-to-3D generation based on diffusion models often suffers from the Janus problem, leading to inconsistent geometry across viewpoints. This work identifies viewpoint bias in 2D diffusion priors as the main cause and proposes Structural Energy-Guided Sampling (SEGS), a training-free and plug-and-play framework to improve multi-view consistency. SEGS constructs a structural energy in the PCA subspace of U-Net features and injects its gradient into the denoising process. It can be easily integrated into SDS/VSD pipelines without retraining. Experiments show that SEGS reduces the Janus Rate by about 10% on average and improves View-CS scores across multiple baselines, including DreamFusion, Magic3D, and LucidDreamer. This method effectively alleviates viewpoint artifacts while preserving appearance fidelity, providing a flexible solution for high-quality text-to-3D content generation.

09.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-11

A zero-parameter first-principles gate framework for full-length TP53 missense variant interpretation

by Masamichi Iizumi Missense variant interpretation often achieves useful predictive performance but remains mechanistically opaque, particularly in proteins that combine structured domains with intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs). We developed Gate & Channel, a zero-parameter, first-principles framework for full-length TP53 missense variant analysis in which each prediction is generated by explicit IF-THEN gates derived from physicochemistry, geometry, structural constraints, and polymer physics rather than fitted weights. Variants are evaluated across independent channels representing distinct physical failure modes; a variant is predicted disruptive if any gate closes. A second hierarchical layer (“Geta”) encodes physically grounded post-closure exceptions, allowing sensitivity and specificity to be improved on disjoint variant populations. The v18 framework consists of 12 channels and 2 Getas spanning structured domains and IDRs, capturing DNA-contact disruption, Zn coordination, burial-dependent packing, secondary-structure compatibility, post-translational modification chemistry, short linear motif disruption (including a multi-partner coupled-folding face), proline-directed kinase recognition, and IDR-specific proline and glycine backbone constraints. Across 1,369 TP53 missense variants, the framework achieved 84.5% sensitivity and 89.1% positive predictive value, with 90.9% sensitivity preserved in the DNA-binding core and all 9/9 hotspot mutations captured. A post hoc audit of discordant IDR calls indicated that many apparent false positives had plausible molecular rationales, consistent with a distinction between molecular mechanism disruption and clinical penetrance. Applied to KRAS, TDP-43, and BRCA1, the same channels capture the dominant pathogenic mechanisms in each protein as a proof of principle, while residual missed variants name specific gates yet to be written. The framework is distributed as the open-source Python package pathogenicity-gates (v0.5.1, MIT). These results show that a substantial fraction of full-length TP53 missense variation can be resolved through explicit, auditable physical gates that carry meaning beyond TP53, with each remaining failure naming the next rule to be written.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

NeST: Neuron Selective Tuning for LLM Safety

arXiv:2602.16835v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safety alignment is essential for the responsible deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs). Yet, existing approaches often rely on heavyweight fine-tuning that is costly to update, audit, and maintain across model families. Full fine-tuning incurs substantial computational and storage overhead, while parameter-efficient methods, e.g., Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), trade efficiency for inconsistent safety gains and sensitivity to design choices. Safety intervention mechanisms reduce unsafe outputs without modifying model weights, but do not directly shape or preserve the internal representations that govern safety behavior. We present NeST, a Neuron-Selective Tuning framework for efficient post-hoc safety alignment. NeST identifies safety-relevant feed-forward neurons via activation probing on vanilla harmful and benign prompts, clusters neurons with similar activation profiles, and trains shared cluster-level updates while freezing the rest of the model. Importantly, NeST is trained only on vanilla malicious prompts, without using jailbreak-specific attack data, yet generalizes robustly to diverse jailbreaks. The learned updates are then folded into the original weights, incurring no inference-time overhead. Evaluated on 14 open-weight language and multimodal models, NeST outperforms lightweight baselines and approaches full fine-tuning robustness with significantly fewer trainable parameters. On text-only models, NeST reduces average jailbreak attack success rate from 44.5% to 1.1% while training only 0.4M parameters on average. Across multimodal settings, it reduces ASR from 55.3% to 1.1%, and for downstream fine-tuned variants, it restores safety by reducing ASR from 53.8% to 0.8%. These results show that robust, maintainable safety alignment can be achieved by concentrating adaptation on localized, functionally coherent safety structures.

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

Rendering-Aware Sparse Sampling for BRDF Acquisition

Accurate BRDF acquisition is essential for realistic rendering, but dense gonioreflectometer measurements are slow and expensive. We study how to select a small set of BRDF measurements that is most informative for reconstructing material appearance under a learned BRDF prior. Existing sparse-acquisition methods often optimize samples for BRDF-space reconstruction for all materials, while the perceptual importance of a adaptive measurement ultimately depends on its effect on each rendered appearance. We therefore formulate sparse adaptive acquisition as a rendering-aware optimization problem. Our method combines a set encoder for sparse coordinate–value observations, a pretrained hypernetwork-based/PCA-based BRDF reconstructor, and a differentiable renderer. During sampler training, the reconstructor remains fixed, and gradients from a rendered-image loss optimize the measurement locations. This separates acquisition design from prior fitting and encourages the sampler to choose directions that are informative under the learned material distribution. To make the comparison controlled, we evaluate the uniform baseline, meta-learning method, HyperBRDF method, and our learned sampler under matched sample numbers, train/test split, rendering scene, object mask, image mapping, and metrics. Our central claim: rendering-aware sampling improves extremely sparse BRDF acquisition when final rendered appearance is the target. BRDF-space and combined losses are reported only as ablations, together with joint refinement and image-only latent fitting for unseen materials.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Planning with the Views via Scene Self-Exploration

Can VLMs predict how each camera move changes the view, and plan many such moves ahead? We call this capability view planning, requiring (1)understanding how a single action transforms the view, and (2)composing many such transformations across multi-turn plans to identify a target view. We probe both abilities in our proposed ViewSuite, a 3D point-cloud environment on real ScanNet scenes. Across 13 frontier VLMs, a critical planning gap emerges: they possess basic view-action knowledge but fail to compose it across multi-turn plans, with the gap widening as viewpoint distance grows. To close this gap, we propose an iterative framework that alternates self-exploration with view graph distillation. The key insight is that all exploration trajectories, regardless of their outcome, collectively form a view graph that compactly captures how viewpoints connect across a scene. Distilling this graph into diverse supervised tasks reshapes the policy distribution and overcomes the sparse rewards that stall pure RL. This improves Qwen2.5-VL-7B from 2.5% to 47.8% on interactive view planning, surpassing GPT-5.4 Pro (18.5%) and Gemini 3.1 Pro (21.4%). Self-exploration emerges as a promising path toward VLMs that can actively reason and plan in 3D space. Code and Data are at https://viewsuite.github.io.

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

RQUL-UIE: Revitalizing Quality-Unstable Labels for Underwater Image Enhancement via In-Dataset Self-Supervision

Underwater Image Enhancement (UIE) is essential for mitigating degradations caused by water medium. Although learning-based methods have advanced significantly, most rely on paired datasets with unstable label quality, which bottlenecks model performance. This paper proposes a diffusion-based, in-dataset self-supervised learning strategy designed to exploit the quality distribution of training labels. Specifically, we evaluate label quality via semantic perception embeddings from a pre-trained diffusion model in a training-free manner. These quality scores are subsequently quantized into noise-level indices, guiding a multi-step denoising process for level-wise supervision. This mechanism prevents low-quality labels from degrading the model while maximizing their utility during training. Furthermore, a Fourier-based refinement network is incorporated to explicitly reconstruct high-frequency components. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms SOTA approaches in restoration quality. The code and pre-trained model will be available once accepted in link.

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

Cross-modal Consistency Guidance for Robust Emotion Control in Auto-Regressive TTS Models

While Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems enable emotional control via natural-language instructions, expressiveness, naturalness, and speech quality degrade when the target emotion conflicts with the textual semantics. We propose a Cross-modal Consistency Guided Classifier-Free Guidance (CCG-CFG) method with dynamic scales based on the degree of inconsistency between the text emotion and the explicit speech emotion, replacing the dropout condition with the text emotion. We also distill the CCG-CFG guidance signal using a hard-sample mining strategy, improving the TTS model's emotional alignment capability. Evaluations on five emotional corpora and two TTS benchmarks show that our approaches applied to CosyVoice2 achieve up to a 12% absolute improvement in emotion-recognition accuracy and a 10% relative improvement in subjective scores, outperforming baselines including HierSpeech++, Qwen3-TTS, and original CosyVoice2, while preserving intelligibility, naturalness, and high speech quality.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

PreUnlearn: Auditing Collateral Knowledge Damage Before Large Language Model Unlearning

Machine unlearning for large language models (LLMs) aims to remove specified knowledge while preserving the rest of the model's capabilities. However, the boundary between knowledge to forget and knowledge to retain is often unclear, since related and even distant information may be entangled in the model. In this paper, we study LLM unlearning from a data-centric perspective and measure how unlearning effects propagate from the forget set to same-domain and distant-domain knowledge. We find a consistent decay pattern: collateral damage is strongest near the forget set, weakens with semantic distance, but does not disappear at domain boundaries. We further ask whether such damage can be audited before unlearning is executed. We formulate forget-set auditing as a pre-unlearning prediction task and analyze which data features are most predictive of downstream damage. Our results show that interaction features between the forget set and evaluation set provide the strongest signals, suggesting that collateral damage is partly reflected in data geometry before model updates occur. These findings position forget-set auditing as an early warning tool for identifying risky unlearning runs and designing more reliable unlearning procedures.

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

Learned JPEG Compression for DNN Vision

JPEG, a lossy image compression technique designed for human viewers, has maintained its dominance for decades. However, in the era of artificial intelligence (AI), a substantial portion of image data, often compressed by JPEG, is and will continue to be consumed by deep neural networks (DNNs) instead of humans, thus creating a need to optimize JPEG for DNN inference performance. To this end, we propose learned JPEG compression for DNN vision (J4D), a novel training framework for determining JPEG encoding parameters to minimize compression rate while maximizing DNN inference performance. The major challenge of solving this optimization problem lies in representing the JPEG codec and compression rate in closed form. By incorporating a differentiable soft quantizer based on a probabilistic quantization scheme, we not only obtain a differentiable proxy for the JPEG codec, but are also able to compute the entropy of the coded source analytically, which is a close estimate of the actual compression rate. Equipped with both the differentiable JPEG codec and the information-theoretic rate estimator, we are then able to solve the aforementioned optimization problem with backpropagation. After training, the learned encoding parameters will be subsequently used in actual JPEG encoding based on probabilistic quantization. Extensive experimental results across multiple datasets and DNN architectures demonstrate that J4D consistently and significantly outperforms the default JPEG and other competitive JPEG codecs optimized for DNNs. Notably, compared to the default JPEG, J4D achieves an increase in accuracy by as much as 11.60% at the same rate, or a reduction of compression rate up to 80.05% at the same accuracy. Additionally, with the help of J4D, we show the potential to design universal JPEG encoding parameters for various DNN architectures for the first time.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

The Acceptability of Three Co-Created Peer Support Interventions for People Living with Leprosy Reactions in Indonesia: A Mixed-Methods Pilot Study

Background: Leprosy reactions (LR) are immune-mediated complications associated with disability, emotional distress, and social isolation. We identified a gap in affected-individual-informed interventions that aim to improve the management of LR in healthcare settings. To address this gap, we assessed the acceptability of three peer-support interventions co-created with people affected by LR in Indonesia. Methods: Using an interactive learning and action approach, we co-created peer counselling, telesupport groups, and participatory video interventions which were piloted in an urban hospital and 13 rural community clinics. A mixed-methods design was applied with interviews, focus group discussions, and pre-post assessments involving four participant groups. Data were analyzed thematically using an acceptability framework. Results: One hundred participants were enrolled, and 92 completed the pilot intervention between November 2022 and July 2023. Qualitative findings showed that all interventions were acceptable. Peer counselling provided emotional reassurance through shared experiences and was perceived as trustworthy and supportive. Perceived burdens differed by setting, with time constraints in urban facilities and geographical barriers in rural clinics. Knowledge improved significantly among participants of peer counselling and telesupport groups in rural settings. Telesupport groups facilitated connection, information exchange, and continuity of care. Digital access and literacy limited participation for some, particularly in rural areas. The participatory video was perceived as reassuring and informative. Improvements in knowledge, attitude, practices, and mental well-being domain scores were observed among urban participants, but responses in rural settings showed less change. Participants and co-implementers reported increased self-efficacy, participants confidence to perform required behaviors within peer support interventions, with effects shaped by intervention and setting. Conclusions: The three co-created peer-support interventions were acceptable for individuals with LR in diverse healthcare settings. These outcomes highlight the importance and effectiveness of selective, and context-sensitive implementation of one or more peer-support modalities.

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

Continuous Cross-Domain Traffic State Prediction via Memory-Augmented Graph Liquid Time-Constant Networks

arXiv:2606.15807v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traffic state prediction is a fundamental task in intelligent transportation systems. In practical applications, some regions suffer from limited traffic observations due to insufficient sensing infrastructure, making cross-domain knowledge transfer an important solution for data-scarce traffic prediction. However, existing cross-domain traffic prediction methods still face several limitations, including coarse-grained source-target adaptation, limited capability in handling unseen target-domain patterns, and insufficient modeling of continuous traffic dynamics under irregular or heterogeneous temporal conditions. To address these issues, this paper proposes a continuous cross-domain traffic prediction framework, termed Memory-Augmented Graph Liquid Time-Constant Network (MA-GLTC). Specifically, we first construct spatio-temporal units (STUs) to decompose traffic networks into transferable local units, enabling fine-grained knowledge alignment across domains. Then, a graph liquid time-constant network (GLTC) is developed to model graph-coupled traffic evolution in continuous time. Different from generic graph neural ODE-based models, GLTC introduces graph-coupled recurrent conductance into liquid time-constant dynamics, allowing node states to evolve with leakage, adaptive time constants, and neighborhood-aware feedback. Furthermore, a Memory-based Transfer Storage (MTS) mechanism is designed to preserve source-domain knowledge, retrieve matched traffic patterns, and update reliable target-domain patterns when unseen states emerge. Experiments on five public traffic datasets demonstrate that MA-GLTC consistently outperforms representative innerdomain and cross-domain baselines in both short-term and longterm prediction tasks. Compared with the second-best method, MA-GLTC reduces the average prediction errors by 3.02%, 0.33%, 8.92%, 10.09%, and 2.11%, respectively.

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

Nous: An Attempt to Extract and Inject the Cognition Behind Prediction-Market Behavior

Authors:

arXiv:2606.13038v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As LLM agents proliferate in prediction markets and collective decision-making, they risk a cognitive monoculture: agents built on shared foundation models produce correlated forecasts, and recent measurement finds frontier-model errors correlated at r ~ 0.77. We ask whether human cognitive diversity can be recovered from behavior and transferred to LLM agents. Nous extracts a structured eight-dimension behavioral profile from real Polymarket trading activity and injects it into agents through prompts. Our central finding is a dissociation between the two halves of that pipeline. Extraction works, partially: across 100 wallets, 8 of 14 parameters are temporally stable (split-half ICC >= 0.5, bootstrap CI lower bound > 0.3; contrarian score reaches ICC ~ 0.9); wallets are identifiable from their profiles well above chance (top-1 retrieval 17-22% vs. 1% chance); and two of four pre-specified dimensions rank-correlate with future realized profit out-of-sample, though the correlations do not survive behavioral-confound controls. Prompt-level injection does not measurably transmit it: on a semantic embedding metric, structured injection shows no significant advantage over a length-matched control on any model, and the diversity it induces neither reduces ensemble error correlation nor improves Brier score – a null that persists across exploratory checks on sampling temperature, profile diversity, and question difficulty. Measuring the prompts themselves locates the compression before the model: the structure-to-narrative translator emits near-uniform prompts whose spread does not track profile spread. We position Nous as measuring the cognitive-monoculture problem and the limits of a prompt-level remedy, motivating deeper, below-the-prompt injection (fine-tuning, activation steering). Code, frozen profiles, prompts, and model outputs: https://github.com/WillChienT/nous-paper

20.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

When batch correction corrupts gene expression: uncovering distortions in correlation structures

Batch correction is essential for integrating datasets and enabling population-level insights into health and disease. Embedding-based approaches are among the most widely used solutions, but here we highlight a critical, overlooked limitation: these methods can distort feature-to-feature (e.g., gene gene) relationships, potentially undermining downstream analyses. We investigate this issue and introduce a novel metric to quantify it.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

MUNI: Multimodal Unified Latent Diffusion for Coherent Any-to-Any Generation

arXiv:2606.16408v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce MUNI, an end-to-end multimodal latent diffusion framework for any-to-any generation that unifies subset-conditioned cross-modal generation and unconditional joint sampling through a shared stochastic latent. Existing multimodal generative models are largely LLM-based, which limits leveraging modality-specific generators and requires text-paired data for training. Recent diffusion- and flow-based any-to-any extensions take a different direction but still rely on text-aligned embeddings, fully-paired training, or matched-dimensionality deterministic mappings. MUNI rests on two complementary contributions, one architectural and one in the training objective. First, we extend latent diffusion to multimodal any-to-any generation end-to-end: instead of the standard two-stage recipe that precomputes a frozen latent space and then fits a prior over it, MUNI jointly trains modality-specific encoders, expressive decoders, and a single shared flow-based prior under one objective. Second, we identify that the standard aggregation rules of multimodal variational inference are insufficient once coupled with a learned prior and expressive decoders. A suitable shared latent must simultaneously satisfy coherence across generated modalities, predictive sufficiency of subset latents, and minimality of the latent content. We propose a routed training objective whose structural choices align the latent with these criteria and admit a minimal-sufficiency characterization in the realizable setting. Experiments on PolyMNIST-Quadrant-Labels and a large-scale image-text-audio benchmark show MUNI matching or exceeding the strongest baselines on conditional generation while opening its largest margins on unconditional coherence. Project page: https://muni-proj.github.io/.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Tensor network manifolds and Riemannian fundamental theorem for tensor networks

arXiv:2606.14613v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tensor networks provide a powerful framework for efficiently representing high-dimensional data and many-body quantum states. Endowing tensor networks with a Riemannian manifold structure provides a natural setting for numerical optimization and analysis. A central feature of tensor networks is their gauge freedom, whose characterisation (captured by so-called fundamental theorems) underlies both their intrinsic structure and the design of numerical algorithms. In this work, we study the interaction between the Riemannian manifold structure and the gauge freedom for several families of tensor networks. Using group actions and Riemannian submersions, we establish a Riemannian fundamental theorem for the tensor network families studied.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

High-Frequency Pricing at Scale for E-Commerce

arXiv:2606.13741v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper presents the design, development, and implementation of a specialized forecast-then-optimize algorithmic pricing tool for sales campaigns in fashion e-commerce. Sales events present unique challenges for pricing including volatile demand patterns, rapid pricing decisions, and the need to balance short-term revenue with long-term profitability. We describe our approach combining daily-resolution demand forecasting using gradient-boosted trees with a multi-objective optimization framework that maximizes both long-term profit and net merchandise value for more than 5 million articles. Our solution addresses key limitations of existing weekly-granularity systems by implementing a forecast-then-optimize architecture that reduces pricing decision time from hours to minutes. We validate our approach through 23 A/B tests across 12 markets during 2023-2024 sales campaigns at Zalando, one of Europe's leading online fashion retailers. Experimental results demonstrate that the new pricing system achieves approximately 6% higher profit while maintaining equivalent performance on sales and revenue compared to the previous manual-algorithmic hybrid approach. Based on these results, the algorithm was successfully deployed to production and now handles the majority of algorithmic pricing decisions for sales campaigns at the company.

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

LEAP: Layer-skipping Efficiency via Adaptive Progression for Vision Transformer Distillation

Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) with Vision Transformer (ViT) backbones, such as DINOv2, have become essential for downstream tasks like object recognition and semantic segmentation. The immense computational requirements of backbones often necessitate distillation into smaller architectures for edge deployment. Feature-based knowledge distillation (KD) often suffers from the teacher-student gap; the student struggles to imitate teacher's complex feature map due to its limited capacity. To mitigate this bottleneck, we propose LEAP: Layer-skipping Efficiency via Adaptive Progression, a training curriculum for ViT feature-based knowledge distillation. By utilizing the teacher's intermediate feature maps as a sequence of progressively more difficult targets, our curriculum allows the student to build a foundational representation before tackling higher-level abstractions. Our results demonstrate that this paradigm significantly accelerates convergence through adaptive difficulty selection across various student model sizes and dataset scales. With our curriculum, the LEAP-distilled ViT-S achieves 90.1% accuracy on ImageNet-100, a +12.24% improvement compared with baseline. On ImageNet-1K, LEAP achieves +3.84% and +7.75% improvement for the instance retrieval task on the Oxford and Paris datasets, respectively. Furthermore, the curriculum enables 25.1% savings in training FLOPs and 21% savings in training time on ImageNet-100 by implementing early-stopping for teacher inference during the initial stages of training. Code is available at https://github.com/KevinZ0217/LEAP

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Achieving double-logarithmic precision dependence in optimization-based quantum unstructured search

arXiv:2603.26039v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Grover's algorithm is a fundamental quantum algorithm that achieves a quadratic speedup for unstructured search problems of size $N$. Recent studies have reformulated this task as a maximization problem on the unitary manifold and solved it via linearly convergent Riemannian gradient ascent (RGA) methods, resulting in a complexity of $O(\sqrt{N/M}\log (1/\varepsilon))$, where $M$ denotes the number of target items and $\varepsilon$ denotes the success probability error. In this work, we adopt the Riemannian modified Newton (RMN) method to solve the quantum search problem, under the assumption that the ratio $ M/N$ is known. We show that, in this setting, the Riemannian Newton direction is collinear with the Riemannian gradient in the sense that the Riemannian gradient is always an eigenvector of the corresponding Riemannian Hessian. This structure removes the overhead of Hessian inversion and allows the proposed RMN method to retain the local quadratic convergence in terms of the error $\varepsilon$. More precisely, we rigorously prove an overall complexity of $O(\sqrt{N/M}+\log\log(1/\varepsilon))$. Furthermore, our approach remains Grover-compatible, namely, it relies exclusively on the standard Grover diffusion and oracle operators to ensure algorithmic implementability, and its parameter update process can be efficiently precomputed on classical computers.