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

UltraSketchLLM: Sub-1-Bit LLM Compression via Sketch and Hardware-Friendly Operators

arXiv:2506.17255v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) require larger GPU memory size these days, necessitating efficient and extreme weight compression methods. Existing compression methods are either theoretically limited by 1 bit per weight or face severe performance degradation and inefficiency. To deploy LLMs in resource-constrained scenarios, we introduce UltraSketchLLM, compressing LLMs with data sketch. It reduces peak GPU memory footprint with a high compression rate down to 0.5 bit per weight. Combined with hardware-friendly implementation, UltraSketchLLM keeps tolerable performance degradation and extremely low latency overhead with 14.9x speedup compared to naive sketch solution.

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

Prediction-Powered Risk Monitoring of Deployed Models for Detecting Harmful Distribution Shifts

arXiv:2602.02229v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the problem of monitoring model performance in dynamic environments where labeled data are limited. To this end, we propose prediction-powered risk monitoring (PPRM), a semi-supervised risk-monitoring approach based on prediction-powered inference (PPI). PPRM constructs anytime-valid lower bounds on the running risk by combining synthetic labels with a small set of true labels. Harmful shifts are detected via a threshold-based comparison with an upper bound on the nominal risk, satisfying assumption-free finite-sample guarantees on the type-I error. We demonstrate the effectiveness of PPRM through extensive experiments on image classification, large language model (LLM), and telecommunications monitoring tasks.

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

Fermi surface change and $d$-wave superconductivity in the square lattice Kondo-Heisenberg model

arXiv:2606.23799v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the two-dimensional Kondo-Heisenberg model on a square lattice, with the conduction electrons away from half-filling, using neural network quantum states. Mapping the ground-state phase diagram as a function of the Kondo and Heisenberg couplings, we identify (i) at weak Kondo coupling, antiferromagnetic Néel order with a Fermi surface whose enclosed area counts only the conduction electrons and is insensitive to the Néel order, and (ii) at strong coupling, a heavy Fermi liquid with a Fermi surface whose enclosed area counts both the conduction electrons and the spins. In the crossover between these regimes, we find $d_{x^2-y^2}$ superconductivity, evidenced by off-diagonal long-range order in the pair-pair correlations and a pairing-amplitude dome that coexists with the underlying magnetic phase. Our results establish Fermi volume change and unconventional superconductivity as intrinsic features of the two-dimensional Kondo-Heisenberg model.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

YOLO-AMC: An Improved YOLO Architecture with Attention Mechanisms for Building Crack Detection

Crack detection plays an important role in infrastructure inspection and Structural Health Monitoring (SHM). However, cracks typically appear as thin, low-contrast structures and are easily affected by background noise, posing challenges for existing object detection models. This study proposes an improved YOLO-based architecture with integrated attention mechanisms, termed YOLO-AMC (YOLO with Attention Mechanisms for Crack Detection), to enhance automated crack detection performance. Based on YOLOv11, the original C2PSA module is removed, and multiple attention mechanisms, including Global Attention Mechanism (GAM), Residual Convolutional Block Attention Module (Res-CBAM), and Shuffle Attention (SA), are introduced into the multi-scale feature fusion layers of the Neck to strengthen cross-scale feature integration. Experimental results demonstrate that YOLO-AMC consistently outperforms baseline models YOLOv11n and YOLOv8n across multiple evaluation metrics. Among the evaluated attention modules, GAM achieves the best detection performance, obtaining mAP@0.5 = 0.9917 and mAP@0.5:0.95 = 0.9506 on the test dataset, which are higher than those of YOLOv11 (0.9833 / 0.9112) and YOLOv8 (0.9707 / 0.8921). Furthermore, while maintaining a computational complexity of 7.6 GFLOPs, the proposed model achieves 110.95 FPS on an NVIDIA RTX 4090 platform and approximately 5 FPS on a Raspberry Pi 5 edge device, demonstrating a favorable trade-off between accuracy and deployment efficiency. The implementation code for this study is available on GitHub at https://github.com/CY-Tsai24/YOLO-AMC.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

An affordable hardware-aware neural architecture search for deploying convolutional neural networks on ultra-low-power computing platforms

arXiv:2606.16290v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hardware-aware neural architecture search (HW-NAS) allows the integration of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in microcontrollers devices by automatically designing neural architectures that can fit prearranged hardware constraints. However, state-of-the-art HW-NAS target high-performance microcontrollers, whose power consumption does not meet sensing nodes requirements. This work presents a HW-NAS generating tiny CNNs that can run on ultra-low-power microcontrollers, featuring a lightweight search procedure enabling its execution even on embedded devices. Empirical results on three well-known benchmarks for tiny computer vision proved that the proposed HW-NAS was able to generate tiny CNNs while preserving state-of-the-art classification accuracy.

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

VieSpeaker: A Large-Scale Vietnamese Speaker Recognition Dataset Beyond Visual Dependency

Speaker recognition has advanced rapidly with large-scale training datasets, yet Vietnamese remains under-resourced, with existing corpora limited in scale and acoustic diversity. Most large-scale datasets rely on facial cues to link speech with speaker identities, restricting data collection to recordings where speakers appear on camera. We propose a face-independent dataset construction pipeline and introduce VieSpeaker, a large-scale Vietnamese speaker recognition dataset. Our approach leverages textual metadata and large language model reasoning to infer speaker identities from transcripts and contextual information. VieSpeaker contains approximately 902 hours of speech from 4,715 speakers. Experiments show that models trained on VieSpeaker achieve improved robustness and generalization compared to existing Vietnamese datasets. This work demonstrates the feasibility of face-independent dataset construction and provides a new direction for building large-scale speech resources.

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

The Risk Shadow of Principal Component Analysis: When 99.9999% Variance Preservation Causes Catastrophic Decision Errors

arXiv:2606.14533v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Principal Component Analysis (PCA) preserves variance, not the information needed to detect rare catastrophic events. This paper proves the existence of a {\it Risk Shadow}: PCA can retain over 99.9999 percent of total variance while completely erasing all signal about rare, high-impact failures. When this happens, even the best possible classifier operating on the PCA representation reduces to a constant predictor. The root cause is a fundamental mismatch between variance maximization and tail risk awareness. To break the shadow, we introduce Expectile PCA (ExPCA) and Tail-Preserving PCA (TP-PCA), two methods that reweight the data covariance toward high-impact events. We prove theoretically that ExPCA strictly outperforms PCA in retaining rare-event information, and we validate our claims on synthetic data and a real-world credit card fraud detection benchmark. Our results call for a fundamental rethinking of variance-based dimensionality reduction in high-stakes decisions.

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

UXBench: Measuring the Actionability of LLM-Generated UX Critiques

arXiv:2606.16262v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as UX judges that inspect interfaces, diagnose usability problems, and propose repairs. Yet no controlled benchmark measures whether the resulting critiques are reliable and actionable across heterogeneous product surfaces. We introduce UXBench, a benchmark for evaluating LLMs as interaction-grounded UX judges. UXBench comprises local-first runnable web fixtures spanning ten product-surface families, paired with coverage-gated browser exploration that forces models to collect interaction evidence before reporting. Each judge model produces a structured UX report over seven rubric dimensions; report quality is measured by whether a fixed downstream repair agent can improve the interface based on the critique. We evaluate eight frontier models under both an automated repair-lift protocol and a blind human validation study. Results show that UX judging is neither saturated nor one dimensional: models differ meaningfully in report actionability, exhibit distinct rubric-level repair signatures, vary in fixture-level reliability, and trade leadership across surface categories

09.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-09

Don’t compete, collaborate: why collective funding applications are the future

Authors:

Scientists with disparate expertise writing grants together can identify knowledge gaps and drive progress — but systems must change to incentivize them. Scientists with disparate expertise writing grants together can identify knowledge gaps and drive progress — but systems must change to incentivize them.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Bayesian Tensor Decomposition with Diffusion Model Prior

arXiv:2606.03212v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Low-rank tensor decomposition (TD) is usually effective on clean, fully observed data, but it often degrades under severe missingness or noise. Low-rankness is itself a useful but limited structural prior, and additional handcrafted priors (e.g., sparsity or smoothness) still fall short of capturing the rich statistics of real-world data. To compensate for this weak inductive bias under heavy corruption, one would like to inject a learned, data-driven prior; however, the state-of-the-art diffusion models are not readily compatible with current TD and tractable posterior inference. To address these challenges, we introduce DiffBCP, a hybrid-prior Bayesian CP decomposition framework that couples a cumulative shrinkage process prior over the CP factors for automatic rank selection with an off-the-shelf pre-trained diffusion model as an implicit data prior on the reconstructed tensor. To make posterior inference tractable despite the coupling among the likelihood, low-rank constraint, and diffusion prior, we develop a split Gibbs sampler: CP factors admit conjugate updates, while the diffusion block is sampled via low-rank-guided denoising. A noise-adaptive coupling schedule further reduces sensitivity to hand-tuned annealing. Experiments on image inpainting and denoising, including high-resolution out-of-distribution images, show consistent gains over Bayesian, nonlinear, and plug-and-play TD baselines.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Latent-Conditioned Parameterized Quantum Circuits as Universal Approximators for Distributions over Quantum States

arXiv:2605.28690v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Many applications in quantum simulation, quantum chemistry, and quantum machine learning require not a single quantum state but an ensemble of states characterizing the heterogeneity of a target system. Preparing such ensembles state-by-state is prohibitive in both variational and fault-tolerant settings, thereby motivating a generative modeling approach. We introduce latent-conditioned parameterized quantum circuits (LPQCs), a hybrid quantum-classical framework in which classical neural networks map a latent variable sampled from a prior distribution to the parameters of a parameterized quantum circuit. We prove that LPQCs are universal approximators for probability measures over density operators in the 1-Wasserstein distance, extending classical universal approximation theorems to the quantum-distribution setting. We additionally introduce a multimodal latent prior and a mixture-of-experts circuit architecture, and show empirically that the latent-conditioned parameterization alleviates the barren plateau problem during optimization, a behavior for which we provide rigorous partial guarantees. Numerical experiments validate the framework on a synthetic multi-cluster ensemble of mixed quantum states and on a QM9-derived ensemble of 3-D molecular structures. In these tasks, LPQC outperforms recent quantum generative baselines and matches the generation quality of a classical neural-network baseline, while requiring an output dimension that grows only linearly with the number of qubits rather than exponentially. By leveraging classical expressivity in the latent space, LPQCs offer a tractable route to quantum generative modeling.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

MentalMARBERT: Domain-Adaptive Pre-training and Two-Stage Fine-Tuning for Arabic Mental Health Disorders Detection

Detecting mental health disorders from Arabic social media text remains challenging due to dialectal variation, informal language, limited high-quality annotated resources, and severe class imbalance. While English mental health natural language processing (NLP) has progressed substantially, Arabic multi-class disorder classification remains insufficiently studied. This study proposes a two-phase framework for Arabic mental health text classification. In phase 1, three Arabic pre-trained language models, AraBERT, CAMeLBERT, and MARBERT, undergo Domain-Adaptive and Task-Adaptive Pretraining (DAPT and TAPT) using a large-scale corpus of unlabeled Arabic mental health tweets. The adapted models are evaluated under a unified protocol to identify the most effective backbone model. In phase 2, the selected model is assessed across four configurations combining single-stage and hierarchical two-stage classification architectures with full fine-tuning and Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). To support this study, we constructed a novel annotated Arabic mental health dataset comprising 50,670 tweets across six categories, with strong inter annotator agreement (Krippendorff's Alpha = 0.733, average pairwise agreement = 0.797). Experimental results show that the domain-adapted MARBERT (MentalMARBERT) achieves statistically significant improvements over baseline models in both accuracy and macro-F1. The hierarchical two-stage architecture combined with full fine-tuning achieves the best overall performance, reaching a macro-F1 of 0.861 and an accuracy of 0.877. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of domain-specific adaptive pretraining and hierarchical classification for Arabic mental health disorder detection.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

RACL: Reasoning-Agent Control Layers for Continuous Metaheuristic Learning

arXiv:2606.20142v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper introduces RACL, a Reasoning-Agent Control Layer for metaheuristics. RACL places a reasoning agent above an existing optimizer. The agent does not replace the optimizer and does not modify business constraints. Instead, it controls the optimizer's internal search behavior by observing operational memory, reasoning over past behavior, formulating bounded hypotheses, testing interventions, evaluating outcomes, applying guardrails, consolidating useful policies and explaining its decisions. The experiment uses vehicle routing as a testbed, but the contribution is not a new routing solver, a particular ALNS configuration or a specific set of routing rules. The contribution is the RACL method: a way for a reasoning agent to discover, validate, consolidate and explain algorithmic control rules for a metaheuristic. In the current experimental setting, RACL improves or ties the Operational Memory Policy in 21 of 21 feasible cases and improves or ties a non-reasoning Stagnation-Triggered Policy in 18 of 21 feasible cases, with an average RACL vs STP cost delta of -0.641%. In the Sevilla-9/10 runtime sample, RACL improves average cost by -8.337% versus Fixed and -1.605% versus STP without showing material computational overhead. During the proof-of-concept, Codex was used as an in-the-loop reasoning agent observing executions, interpreting logs and proposing live bounded interventions. The policy proxy was later used only to make quantitative evaluation reproducible.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

External Validation and Calibration Assessment of Explainable Machine Learning Models for GVHD Prediction After Allogeneic HSCT

Background Graft versus host disease (GVHD) remains a major determinant of morbidity and mortality following allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (allo HSCT). Existing GVHD prediction models demonstrate modest discrimination and limited generalizability, and calibration drift across external populations is rarely characterized despite its essential role in the clinical interpretability of predicted probabilities. Objectives To develop and externally validate an explainable machine learning framework for predicting acute and chronic GVHD and associated overall survival in patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML), acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), and myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) undergoing allo HSCT, and to systematically characterize calibration across heterogeneous external validation cohorts to inform deployment requirements. Study Design The model was developed on three publicly available registry-derived datasets (N = 2,509) and externally validated across six independent cohorts (N = 14,788) comprising adult and pediatric allo HSCT recipients, including a regional Middle Eastern cohort (UAE and Jordan). A standardized preprocessing pipeline harmonized heterogeneous datasets. Gradient boosting models (CatBoost) were used for binary GVHD prediction; exploratory overall survival analysis used a Cox proportional hazards model with predicted acute GVHD risk as a covariate. Discrimination (AUROC with bootstrap 95% CI), calibration (logistic recalibration intercept and slope with analytical 95% CI), and feature importance (SHapley Additive exPlanations, SHAP) were assessed in training out-of-fold and all external cohorts. Results In internal validation, AUROC was 0.63 (95% CI 0.61-0.65) for acute GVHD and 0.72 (95% CI 0.70-0.74) for chronic GVHD. External validation demonstrated AUROC ranges of 0.51-0.57 (acute) and 0.54-0.64 (chronic), with consistent performance across disease subgroups despite substantial heterogeneity in transplant practices and feature availability. In exploratory survival analysis, the acute-GVHD-informed Cox model achieved a training-cohort C-index of 0.679 (95% CI 0.658-0.697); external C-indices ranged from 0.47-0.53. Calibration analysis identified systematic external risk overestimation (negative calibration intercept in 10 of 11 evaluable external cohort-target combinations) with heterogeneous slope drift requiring cohort-specific recalibration. Key predictors included recipient age, graft source, conditioning intensity, GVHD prophylaxis, and HLA match ratio. Conclusions An explainable, externally validated GVHD prediction framework was developed using heterogeneous registry-derived datasets, with systematic characterization of calibration drift across multiple external cohorts, an analysis rarely reported in prior GVHD prediction literature. Predictive performance was modest for acute GVHD and moderate for chronic GVHD, constrained by missing immunobiological variables and incomplete HLA characterization. Per-cohort recalibration is required before clinical deployment, with prospective validation and benchmarking against established GVHD risk scores identified as priority next steps.

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

Circuit Synchronization Precedes Generalization: Causal Evidence from Fourier Structure in Grokking Transformers

arXiv:2606.12966v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Grokking – where a transformer on modular arithmetic suddenly transitions from near-chance to near-perfect validation accuracy – is attributed to a Fourier circuit, but its timing, causal structure, and controllability remain poorly understood. We introduce the Frequency Synchronization Degree (FSD), a normalised, permutation-tested metric for Fourier circuit synchronisation requiring no prior circuit knowledge. Across nine modular addition configurations (primes p in {53, 71, 97, 113, 131}, three seeds), FSD synchronises 500-3,000 steps before grokking (mean lead +1,722 steps; all nine positive, sign-test p~0.004), and precedes a restricted-logit loss baseline (Nanda et al.'s excluded loss) in all nine cases, making it the earliest available predictor. We provide direct causal evidence that the inter-phase gap is a regularisation phenomenon: forking training at the FSD-ceiling step and varying weight decay lambda produces strictly monotone earlier grokking, with Delta_t proportional to 1/lambda. This law replicates across three primes (p in {53,97,131}; R^2=1.00 and R^2=0.99 for two clean cases), captured as Delta_t ~ C/lambda, consistent with (1/lambda)*log(||W_mem||/tau). Architecture ablations show an attention-only model groks with a strong FSD precursor; an MLP-only model never groks; a single-layer model's FSD lags, confirming the precursor is a multi-block circuit property.

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

AIRMap: AI-Generated Radio Maps for Wireless Digital Twins

arXiv:2511.05522v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Accurate, low-latency channel modeling is essential for real-time wireless network simulation and digital-twin applications. Traditional modeling methods like ray tracing are however computationally demanding and unsuited to model dynamic conditions. In this paper, we propose AIRMap, a deep-learning framework for ultra-fast radio-map estimation, along with an automated pipeline for creating the largest radio-map dataset to date. AIRMap uses a single-input U-Net autoencoder that processes only a 2D elevation map of terrain and building heights. Trained on 1.2M Boston-area samples and validated across four distinct urban and rural environments with varying terrain and building density, AIRMap predicts path gain with under 4 dB RMSE in 4 ms per inference on an NVIDIA L40S-over 100x faster than GPU-accelerated ray tracing based radio maps. A lightweight calibration using just 20% of field measurements reduces the median error to approximately 5%, significantly outperforming traditional simulators, which exceed 50% error. Integration into the Colosseum emulator and the Sionna SYS platform demonstrate near-zero error in spectral efficiency and block-error rate compared to measurement-based channels. These findings validate AIRMap's potential for scalable, accurate, and real-time radio map estimation in wireless digital twins.

17.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Daily briefing: Ancient ground squirrels ate like ‘zombies of the Pleistocene’

Authors:

Evidence from fossilized poo reveals the diverse diet of ancient ground squirrels. Plus, the science behind the peptide craze and our innate tendency to wander anticlockwise. Evidence from fossilized poo reveals the diverse diet of ancient ground squirrels. Plus, the science behind the peptide craze and our innate tendency to wander anticlockwise.

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

PEARL: Self-Evolving Assistant for Time Management with Reinforcement Learning

Overlapping calendar invitations force busy professionals to repeatedly decide which meetings to attend, reschedule, or decline. We refer to this preference-driven decision process as calendar conflict resolution. Automating this decision process is crucial yet challenging. Scheduling logistics can drain hours, and human delegation often fails at scale, which motivates us to ask: Can we trust large language models (LLMs) or language agents to manage time? To enable a systematic study of this question, we introduce CalConflictBench, a benchmark for long-horizon calendar conflict resolution. In CalConflictBench, conflicts are presented to agents round-by-round over a calendar year, requiring them to infer and adapt to user preferences progressively. Our experiments show that current LLM agents perform poorly with high error rates, e.g., Qwen-3-30B-Think has an average error rate of 35%. To address this gap, we propose PEARL, a reinforcement-learning framework that (i) augments the language agent with an external preference memory that stores and updates inferred strategies (e.g., attendee priorities, topic importance, time/location preferences), and (ii) optimizes the agent with round-wise rewards that directly supervise decision correctness, ranking quality, and memory usage across rounds. Experiments on CalConflictBench show that PEARL achieves an error reduction rate of 0.76 and a 55% improvement in average error rate compared to the strongest baseline.

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

Decision-Aware Memory Cards: Counterfactual-Inspired Context Selection and Compression for Tool-Using LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.08151v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Modern large language model (LLM) agents do not simply need longer contexts; they need decision-relevant evidence at the moment of action. We study decision-aware context selection: ranking retrieved files, tests, traces, rules, and memories by their expected effect on an agent's next action rather than by semantic similarity alone. We present the Counterfactual-Inspired Context Layer (CICL), which builds an instance context graph, estimates decision-oriented utility for candidate units, and compresses selected evidence into typed memory cards. The same schema can be instantiated with hosted LLM judges, local surrogates, or lightweight rankers, making the selection protocol auditable across model choices. On 50 SWE-bench Verified file-retrieval instances, Qwen3.6-Plus reranking of BM25 top-50 candidates improves hit@1 from 0.58 to 0.78 and MRR@10 from 0.634 to 0.790, with all 2,500 judgments parseable. Controlled diagnostics show that CICL identifies action-critical evidence: removing the top-utility semantic unit reduces F1 from 0.245 to 0.000. In selected-then-compressed mode, memory cards save 44.93 tokens per query while preserving selected evidence. CICL provides a practical layer for measuring, ranking, and compressing decision-critical context for tool-using agents. Code is available at https://github.com/stephen-guan-researcher/CICL.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Evaluating Open-Source LLMs for Multi-Label ATT&CK Technique Classification on CTI Reports

arXiv:2606.18166v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Classifying Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) using MITRE Adversarial Tactics, Techniques, and Common Knowledge (ATT&CK) is essential for proactive defense, but historically required extensive human effort. Pre-Large Language Model (LLM) automation sped up this process, but could not resolve the complex language and multi-step attack patterns found in unstructured CTI reports. LLMs addressed previous limitations by using contextual reasoning to understand unstructured text. However, current evaluations rely on simplified, single-technique sentences that ignore the complexity of real-world CTI reports, which often leads to inflated performance results. Consequently, the baseline performance of open-source LLMs on complex unstructured CTI reports remains unevaluated. To address this gap, we constructed a ground-truth dataset of 2,076 human-annotated sentences (1,281 technique-positive, 795 negative) from 83 complex unstructured CTI reports. These sentences were mapped to 114 unique ATT&CK techniques using a six-phase annotation process, achieving \k{appa} = 0.68 inter-annotator agreement. Using this dataset, we evaluated seven open-source LLMs ranging from 8B to 236B parameters across prompt strategy and temperature configurations. The highest-performing LLM achieved a micro-averaged F1 score of 0.22, establishing the empirical baseline for multi-label ATT&CK classification on complex unstructured CTI. Parameter size showed a statistically significant positive correlation with F1 score. Prompt strategy and temperature produced no statistically significant gains across model configurations. These results indicate that current open-source LLMs are insufficient for production-grade ATT&CK classification. The dataset, benchmark, and findings provide a reproducible foundation for future CTI research.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

AsFT: Anchoring Safety During LLM Fine-Tuning Within Narrow Safety Basin

arXiv:2506.08473v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) improves performance but introduces critical safety vulnerabilities: even minimal harmful data can severely compromise safety measures. We observe that perturbations orthogonal to the alignment direction - defined by weight differences between aligned (safe) and unaligned models - rapidly compromise model safety. In contrast, updates along the alignment direction largely preserve it, revealing the parameter space as a "narrow safety basin". To address this, we propose AsFT (Anchoring Safety in Fine-Tuning) to maintain safety by explicitly constraining update directions during fine-tuning. By penalizing updates orthogonal to the alignment direction, AsFT effectively constrains the model within the "narrow safety basin," thus preserving its inherent safety. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets and models show that AsFT reduces harmful behaviors by up to 7.60%, improves task performance by 3.44%, and consistently outperforms existing methods across multiple tasks.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Mitigating Object Hallucinations in LVLMs via Attention Imbalance Rectification

Object hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) severely compromises their reliability in real-world applications, posing a critical barrier to their deployment in high-stakes scenarios such as autonomous driving and medical image analysis. Through systematic empirical investigation, we identify that the imbalanced attention allocation, both across modalities (i.e., vision and language) and within modalities (among individual tokens), exhibits a strong causal correlation with the occurrence of object hallucination. Leveraging this insight, we introduce a novel concept termed attention imbalance, which not only quantifies the degree of attention disparity but also visually delineates the underlying patterns (e.g., over-attentiveness to irrelevant language tokens or under-attentiveness to discriminative visual features) that drive object hallucination. To mitigate object hallucination, we further propose Attention Imbalance Rectification (AIR), a lightweight decoding-time intervention method that reallocates attention weights and adjusts attention distributions to rectify modality-wise and token-wise imbalances. Extensive evaluations on four mainstream LVLMs and three benchmarks (CHAIR, POPE, and MM-Vet) with seven baselines demonstrate that AIR consistently reduces object hallucination rates, achieving up to a 35.1% reduction compared to the baselines, while improving up to 15.9% of LVLMs' general capability across diverse vision-language tasks.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Split-Head Quantum Generative Adversarial Network for Crystalline Material Discovery

arXiv:2606.17852v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The discovery of novel crystalline materials is a critical challenge in computational materials science, often limited by the spatial representation limitations and mode collapse typical of classical generative models. Traditionally, developing Quantum GANs for continuous 3D space is hindered by the limited capacity of near-term hardware. To overcome this, we adapt a physics-informed "split-head" architecture right from the quantum trunk to explicitly decouple macroscopic lattice bounds from microscopic atomic coordinates, significantly maximizing resource efficiency. This study disentangles the contributions of quantum circuits from these architectural priors by evaluating a Split-Head Quantum Generative Adversarial Network against an architecture-matched classical ablation model. Evaluated on the highly constrained Mg-Mn-O system, the results reveal a highly nuanced performance dichotomy between the advanced models. The architecture-matched classical ablation model demonstrated superior thermodynamic precision. Conversely, the integration of quantum circuits in the SH-QGAN drove unparalleled structural breadth and latent space exploration, more than doubling the ablation's geometric validity and successfully generating novel, metastable candidates converging on the Mg2MnO4 stoichiometry. These findings clarify that while architectural separation of cell and atom generation drives strict thermodynamic precision, quantum feature mapping independently provides the spatial diversity necessary to overcome mode collapse. Both mechanisms offer distinct, complementary enhancements for the generative discovery of advanced materials.

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

Vision-Language-Action Jump-Starting for Reinforcement Learning Robotic Agents

arXiv:2604.13733v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) enables high-frequency, closed-loop control for robotic manipulation, but scaling to long-horizon tasks with sparse or imperfect rewards remains difficult due to inefficient exploration and poor credit assignment. Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models leverage large-scale multimodal pretraining to provide generalist, task-level reasoning, but current limitations hinder their direct use in fast and precise manipulation. In this paper, we propose Vision-Language-Action Jump-Starting (VLAJS), a method that bridges sparse VLA guidance with on-policy RL to improve exploration and learning efficiency. VLAJS treats VLAs as transient sources of high-level action suggestions that bias early exploration and improve credit assignment, while preserving the high-frequency, state-based control of RL. Our approach augments Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) with a directional action-consistency regularization that softly aligns the RL agent's actions with VLA guidance during early training, without enforcing strict imitation, requiring demonstrations, or relying on continuous teacher queries. VLA guidance is applied sparsely and annealed over time, allowing the agent to adapt online and ultimately surpass the guiding policy. We evaluate VLAJS on six challenging manipulation tasks: lifting, pick-and-place, peg reorientation, peg insertion, poking, and pushing in simulation, and validate a subset on a real Franka Panda robot. VLAJS consistently outperforms PPO and distillation-style baselines in sample efficiency, reducing required environment interactions by over 50% in several tasks. Real-world experiments demonstrate zero-shot sim-to-real transfer and robust execution under clutter, object variation, and external perturbations.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Bounding Box Label Propagation for Re-Annotation of Document Layout Analysis Datasets

Datasets in practical document processing scenarios typically grow over time, and their class annotations undergo continuous refinement. This creates significant re-annotation efforts, which are time-consuming and costly. A promising remedy is to re-annotate only a small subset of available documents manually and apply semi-supervised learning techniques that leverage both labelled and unlabelled data. Although there are numerous approaches to tackle this problem for classification, there exists no adaptation for the problem of re-classifying object detection instances, e.g. for document layout analysis. To this end, we propose Bounding Box Label Propagation (BBLP), a pseudo-labelling framework for object detection. An object encoder integrates visual, textual, and positional embeddings from object detection samples to come up with a joint embedding that can be used for Label Propagation on partially annotated datasets in a plug-and-play fashion. Evaluation results indicate that the proposed approach produces high-quality class annotations of bounding boxes. In the D4LA layout analysis dataset, it achieves a mAP of 54.0%, corresponding to 81.6% of fully supervised performance, while using only 10% labelled data. Our work demonstrates the potential of Label Propagation for object detection and lays the groundwork for reducing manual annotation efforts in real-world document processing applications.