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01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-09

Daily briefing: Trial to ‘de-age’ cells treats first person

Authors:

The gene-therapy trial aims to treat glaucoma by rejuvenating cells in the optic nerve. Plus, the mystery of how things freeze and encouragement to go out into the sunlight. The gene-therapy trial aims to treat glaucoma by rejuvenating cells in the optic nerve. Plus, the mystery of how things freeze and encouragement to go out into the sunlight.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Beyond Similarity: Temporal Operator Attention for Time Series Analysis

arXiv:2605.11287v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A persistent paradox in time-series forecasting is that structurally simple MLP and linear models often outperform high-capacity Transformers. We argue that this gap arises from a mismatch in the sequence-modeling primitive: while many time-series dynamics are governed by global temporal operators (e.g., filtering and harmonic structure), standard attention forms each output as a convex combination of inputs. This restricts its ability to represent signed and oscillatory transformations that are fundamental to temporal signal processing. We formalize this limitation as a simplex-constrained mixing bottleneck in softmax attention, which becomes especially restrictive for operator-driven time-series tasks. To address this, we propose $Temporal Operator Attention (TOA)$, a framework that augments attention with explicit, learnable sequence-space operators, enabling direct signed mixing across time while preserving input-dependent adaptivity. To make dense $N \times N$ operators practical, we introduce Stochastic Operator Regularization, a high-variance dropout mechanism that stabilizes training and prevents trivial memorization. Across forecasting, anomaly detection, and classification benchmarks, TOA consistently improves performance when integrated into standard backbones such as PatchTST and iTransformer, with particularly strong gains in reconstruction-heavy tasks. These results suggest that explicit operator learning is a key ingredient for effective time-series modeling.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

DriveJudge: Rethinking Autonomous Driving Evaluation with Vision-Language Models

Autonomous driving has shifted towards end-to-end policy learning, where reliable, interpretable policy evaluation is a fundamental challenge as driving quality is highly context-dependent. Commonly used rule-based driving metrics like EPDMS are interpretable but lack context-awareness, while recent VLMbased evaluations are context-aware but limited by ambiguous VLM outputs and weak physical grounding. To evaluate driving in a manner that is both interpretable and context-aware, we introduce DriveJudge. DriveJudge is a driving evaluation agent that combines rule-grounded evaluation with Vision-Language Model (VLM) reasoning and selectively invokes physically-grounded deterministic rule functions after interpreting the environmental context. To train and evaluate DriveJudge, we curate a large-scale dataset of 33,577 challenging driving samples with human annotations on whether the driving behavior is reasonable in the given scenario. With this dataset, we address the underexplored problem of driving metric evaluation, and introduce two human-aligned benchmark tasks: Driving Quality Classification and Trajectory Preference Selection. DriveJudge outperforms EPDMS for driving quality classification by 21.23 AUC, and the recent VLM-based DriveCritic for trajectory preference selection by 6.5%, setting a new standard for interpretable and precise driving evaluation.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

PPDM: Pixel Puzzling Diffusion Model for Speed and Memory Efficient Volumetric Medical Image Translation

Diffusion models have demonstrated superior fidelity for medical image-to-image translation, but their extension to high-resolution 3D volumes is severely constrained by prohibitive computational cost and GPU memory requirements. Existing memory-efficient strategies often compromise global volumetric consistency or fine anatomical detail. In this work, we propose the Pixel Puzzling Diffusion Model (PPDM), a simple and effective framework for memory- and speed-efficient 3D medical image translation. PPDM introduces a reversible pixel puzzle-unpuzzle operator that trades spatial resolution for channel dimensionality, substantially reducing activation memory while preserving global context. To further improve efficiency and stability, we adopt a direct bridge diffusion formulation that starts from the conditional input rather than pure noise, enabling the model to focus on task-relevant residuals. In addition, a puzzle-gradient loss is incorporated to enforce spatial coherence and suppress grid-like artifacts introduced by spatial rearrangement. We evaluate PPDM on multiple challenging 3D medical image translation tasks, including low-count PET denoising, joint PET denoising and attenuation correction, and cross-modal MRI translation. Across all tasks, PPDM consistently matches or outperforms full 3D diffusion models while reducing training GPU memory usage by up to an order of magnitude and significantly accelerating inference, and it outperforms existing memory-efficient diffusion approaches based on latent compression or frequency decomposition. These results demonstrate that PPDM provides a practical and scalable solution for high-fidelity 3D diffusion-based medical image translation under limited computational resources.

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

Privacy-Preserving Text Sanitization for Distributed Agents Collaboration via Disentangled Representations

When distributed agents exchange text across organizational boundaries, privacy leakage arises not only from explicit identifiers but also from distributional signatures such as formatting conventions, vocabulary choices, and syntactic patterns. We propose DiSan(Disentangled Sanitization), a privacy-preserving sanitization framework and a built-in component of Intern-Shannon for multi-agent collaboration. DiSan uses a two-stream encoder to factorize text into a source-invariant role subspace that preserves task semantics and a source-identifying style subspace that remains local. Federated proto-type alignment and adversarial regularization enable joint training without centralizing raw text. Experiments show that identifier-level masking is insufficient: masking 19.2% of tokens reduces TF-IDF stylometric attribution by only 18.6%. By contrast, DiSan reduces answer-level PII exposure by 20 times while maintaining 83% answer faithfulness on a distributed multi-agent RAG benchmark, and lowers Enron stylometric attribution by 73.2% under TF-IDF and 70.6% under a neural probe.

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

On the Limitations of Ray-Tracing for Learning-Based RF Tasks in Urban Environments

arXiv:2507.19653v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the realism of Sionna v1.0.2 ray-tracing for outdoor cellular links in central Rome. We use a real measurement set of 1,664 user-equipments (UEs) and six nominal base-station (BS) sites. Using these fixed positions we systematically vary the main simulation parameters, including path depth, diffuse/specular/refraction flags, carrier frequency, as well as antenna's properties like its altitude, radiation pattern, and orientation. Simulator fidelity is scored for each base station via Spearman correlation between measured and simulated powers, and by a fingerprint-based k-nearest-neighbor localization algorithm using RSSI-based fingerprints. Across all experiments, solver hyper-parameters are having immaterial effect on the chosen metrics. On the contrary, antenna locations and orientations prove decisive. By simple greedy optimization we improve the Spearman correlation by 5% to 130% for various base stations, while kNN-based localization error using only simulated data as reference points is decreased by one-third on real-world samples, while staying twice higher than the error with purely real data. Precise geometry and credible antenna models are therefore necessary but not sufficient; faithfully capturing the residual urban noise remains an open challenge for transferable, high-fidelity outdoor RF simulation.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Operational Tube-Sector Theory of Quantum State Distinguishability Under Generalized Symmetries

Authors:

arXiv:2606.19678v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A variational principle for quantum-state distinguishability is established in many-body systems with generalized symmetries, including noninvertible cases described by fusion categories. Standard fidelity and symmetry-resolved diagnostics emerge as coarse-grained limits of a more refined operational structure. When symmetry actions terminate at entanglement cuts, distinguishability is governed by boundary tube algebras within a symmetry-constrained measurement resource theory. The physically admissible instruments are characterized by complete positivity, entanglement-cut locality, boundary-module covariance, and sequential stability. The resulting optimal measurement structure is uniquely fixed by the center of the boundary tube algebra, $\mathcal{A}_{\mathrm{phys}} = Z\!\left(\mathrm{Tube}_{\mathcal{C}}(\mathcal{M}_A)\right)$, whose primitive idempotents define tube-sector probabilities that refine fidelity-based and symmetry-resolved descriptions. The associated tube positive-operator-valued measures (POVM) are extremal and yield optimal one-shot hypothesis-testing distinguishability under symmetry constraints. The construction is universal across fusion categories and independent of microscopic realization.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Sensitivity Shaping for Latent Modeling

arXiv:2606.14585v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative dynamics models enable planning in challenging robotic systems, but safe deployment requires reliably detecting policy-induced out-of-distribution (OOD) transitions. Existing methods typically treat the learned dynamics as fixed and attach post hoc support surrogates. We show that these surrogates can fail when the dynamics are locally insensitive to critical action choices: unsupported control actions may produce latent predictions that resemble demonstrated transitions, suppressing OOD signals despite large true predictive errors. To address this, we introduce support-conditioned control-sensitivity regularization, which promotes sensitive local response to control input changes in learned dynamics in high-support training regions. This preserves control-induced variation while limiting unstable extrapolation due to weak empirical support. Experiments in vision-based obstacle avoidance, manipulation, and real-robot navigation show improved OOD detection and safer closed-loop planning.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

SPOT-E: Test-Time Entropy Shaping with Visual Spotlights for Frozen VLMs

arXiv:2606.20244v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) often underperform on evidence intensive tasks because decisive visual evidence are small, localized, and easy to overlook, leading to failures in evidence readout even when high-level reasoning is intact. Prior inference-time visual interventions can improve grounding without retraining, but they are largely open-loop and lack a mechanism to verify whether highlighted evidence is actually used. We study answer-span prediction entropy as a model-internal feedback signal and show that naive entropy minimization is ambiguous, since low entropy may arise from evidence-grounded confidence or shortcut collapse. To resolve this ambiguity, we introduce low-entropy anchors and an entropy-shaping objective that reduces answer uncertainty while preserving baseline high-confidence tokens. We instantiate this principle in SPOT-E, a plug-and-play test-time method that produces question-conditioned spotlights, optimized per instance via light-weight tuning based on Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Across all benchmarks and different VLM families, SPOT-E yields consistent gains and improved robustness under visual corruptions. Code is publicly available at: \url{https://github.com/YinBo0927/SPOT-E}

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Intrinsic preservation of plasticity in continual quantum learning

arXiv:2511.17228v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Artificial intelligence in dynamic, real-world environments requires the capacity for continual learning. However, standard deep learning suffers from a fundamental issue: loss of plasticity, in which networks gradually lose their ability to learn from new data. Here we show that quantum learning models naturally overcome this limitation, preserving plasticity over long timescales. We demonstrate this advantage systematically across a broad spectrum of tasks from multiple learning paradigms, including supervised learning and reinforcement learning, and diverse data modalities, from classical high-dimensional images to quantum-native datasets. Although classical models exhibit performance degradation correlated with unbounded weight and gradient growth, quantum neural networks maintain consistent learning capabilities regardless of the data or task. We identify the origin of the advantage as the intrinsic physical constraints of quantum models. Unlike classical networks where unbounded weight growth leads to landscape ruggedness or saturation, the unitary constraints confine the optimization to a compact manifold. Our results suggest that the utility of quantum computing in machine learning extends beyond potential speedups, offering a robust pathway for building adaptive artificial intelligence and lifelong learners.

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

MemPO: Self-Memory Policy Optimization for Long-Horizon Agents

arXiv:2603.00680v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Long-horizon agents face the challenge of growing context size during interaction with environment, which degrades the performance and stability. Existing methods typically introduce the external memory module and look up the relevant information from the stored memory, which prevents the model itself from proactively managing its memory content and aligning with the agent's overarching task objectives. To address these limitations, we propose the self-memory policy optimization algorithm (MemPO), which enables the agent (policy model) to autonomously summarize and manage their memory during interaction with environment. By improving the credit assignment mechanism based on memory effectiveness, the policy model can selectively retain crucial information, significantly reducing token consumption while preserving task performance. Extensive experiments and analyses confirm that MemPO achieves absolute F1 score gains of 25.98 over the base model and 7.1 over the previous SOTA baseline, while reducing token usage by 67.58% and 73.12%. The code is released at https://github.com/TheNewBeeKing/MemPO.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Specific epigenetic age acceleration measures are associated with oral health outcomes in U.S. adults

Objectives: Oral health conditions impact a significant proportion of the global population. Chronological age is a known risk factor; however, characterization of epigenetic age remains limited and is expected to provide additional insight into biological mechanisms. Materials and Methods: The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) was used to analyze the effect of epigenetic age measures of DunedinPoAm, and epigenetic age acceleration (EAA) of Horvath, Hannum, Weidner, Lin, VidalBralo, PhenoAge, GrimAge, and GrimAge2, on various oral health outcomes from survey and examination results. Univariable and multivariable logistic regression were performed, adjusting for sex, race-ethnicity, education, poverty income ratio categories, and dental insurance coverage status. Results: DunedinPoAm was associated with the last dental appointment being for an existing issue (p=0.0093), poor general oral condition (p=0.0226), limiting food due to teeth problems (p=0.0031), and recommendation to see a dentist within the next two weeks (p=0.0171). EAAs for PhenoAge, GrimAge, and GrimAge2, were associated with a smaller number of oral health outcomes, whereas EAAs for Horvath, Hannum, Weidner, Lin, and Vidal-Bralo showed no associations. Conclusions: In a representative U.S. population, DunedinPoAm was most consistently positively associated with different adverse oral health outcomes compared with other epigenetic aging measures. Tracking specific epigenetic ages such as DunedinPoAm, EAA GrimAge, EAA GrimAge2, and PhenoAge, may aid in additional monitoring of oral health outcomes. Understanding specific aging-related CpGs associated with oral health may aid in elucidating underlying molecular mechanisms.

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

CAGE: Curvature-Aware Gradient Estimation For Accurate Quantization-Aware Training

arXiv:2510.18784v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Despite significant work on low-bit quantization-aware training (QAT), there is still an accuracy gap between such techniques and native training. To address this, we introduce CAGE (Curvature-Aware Gradient Estimation), a new QAT method that augments the straight-through estimator (STE) gradient with a curvature-aware correction designed to counteract the loss increase induced by quantization. CAGE is derived from a multi-objective view of QAT that balances loss minimization with the quantization constraints, yielding a principled correction term that depends on local curvature information. On the theoretical side, we introduce the notion of Pareto-optimal solutions for quantized optimization, and establish that CAGE yields strong convergence guarantees in the smooth non-convex setting. In terms of implementation, our approach is optimizer-agnostic, but we provide a highly-efficient implementation that leverages Adam statistics. CAGE significantly improves upon the prior state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy, for similar computational cost: for QAT fine-tuning, it halves the compression accuracy loss relative to the prior best method, while for QAT pre-training of Llama models, its accuracy for 3-bit weights-and-activations (W3A3) matches the accuracy achieved at 4-bits (W4A4) with the prior best method. The official implementation can be found over https://github.com/IST-DASLab/CAGE .

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Do LLMs Reliably Identify Correct Information Units in Aphasic Discourse?

Correct Information Units (CIUs) are central to discourse assessment in aphasia because they quantify communicative informativeness rather than linguistic form alone. However, CIU scoring is time intensive and requires trained raters. This study examined whether instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) can reliably perform token-level CIU classification from aphasic discourse transcripts. Sixteen picture-description transcripts elicited with the Cat Rescue stimulus were annotated for CIU status according to Nicholas and Brookshire (1993). The sample spanned four severity strata: control, mild, moderate, and severe aphasia. Four publicly available instruction-tuned LLMs were benchmarked under zero-shot and two few-shot prompting conditions across five stratified random seeds. Performance was evaluated against consensus human labels using accuracy, precision, recall, F1, and Cohen's kappa. Zero-shot prompting was insufficient across models. In contrast, few-shot prompting yielded substantial gains and produced competitive performance for three viable models. Mean few-shot F1 scores ranged from 0.776 to 0.817 across Llama-3.1-8B, Qwen2.5-7B, and Mistral-7B, with no significant differences between fixed global and per-chunk local example selection. Phi-3-mini was unstable and did not yield reliable performance. Viable models showed high recall but lower precision, suggesting systematic over-classification of tokens as CIUs. Performance also varied by discourse severity, with the weakest results in more severe aphasia. Few-shot LLM prompting can support automated CIU identification without gradient-based task training, but agreement with human annotation remains insufficient for fully autonomous use. These findings support LLM-based CIU scoring as a promising human-in-the-loop component of discourse assessment systems.

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

Intelligent Skin Cancer Detection Using a Multispectral Metasurface and a Hybrid

Skin cancer is among the most prevalent malignancies worldwiAdbe satnradcitts early detection is essential for improving patient survival and reducing treatment costs Conventional dermoscopic and visual imaging techniques are primarily limited to the visible spectrum and often fail to capture subtle spectral signatures associated with early stage malignancies This study proposes an innovative framework that integrates a multispectral metasurface for imaging with a hybrid deep learning architecture based on Convolutional Neural Networks and Vision Transformers The designed metasurface enables noninvasive acquisition of rich spectral information highly sensitive to tissue alterations while the hybrid CNN ViT model simultaneously extracts local and global features to robustly classify skin lesions Simulation-based evaluations demonstrate that the proposed method achieves approximately 98 accuracy 95 percentages sensitivity and 99 perentage specificity surpassing conventional RGB-based and single-architecture approaches Qualitative analyses using attention maps reveal that the model focuses on clinically relevant lesion regions improving interpretability Overall the results indicate that combining metasurface based multispectral imaging with hybrid deep learning can introduce a new generation of diagnostic tools in dermatology and pave the way for portable fast and highly accurate clinical systems

16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

When to Write and When to Suppress: Route-Specialized Dual Adapters for Memory-Assisted Knowledge Editing

Authors:

arXiv:2606.14668v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge editing systems must update selected facts while preserving nearby but irrelevant behavior. This paper studies this problem in a memory-assisted setting where an edit memory is retrieved at inference time and a parameter-efficient adapter corrects the model's object preference. We argue that the central design question is not only how to write an edit, but also when to suppress it. We introduce \method{}, a route-specialized dual-adapter editor. A relevance router first decides whether a prompt should receive an edit memory. Routed prompts use an edit adapter trained to prefer the new object over the original object; unrouted non-direct prompts use a separate locality adapter trained to preserve or restore the original-object preference. We evaluate \method{} on three 1,000-case protocols, \cf{}, \zsre{}, and \mquake{}, under the same memory protocol and two 7B/8B base models. On Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, \method{} obtains the best overall probability-preference accuracy on all three benchmarks: 0.8180 on \cf{}, 0.8946 on \zsre{}, and 0.9922 on \mquake{}. The same trend holds on Qwen3-8B. Router ablations show that the relevant memory boundary differs across datasets: a lexical neural router is safest on \cf{}, while BGE embedding routing is better on \zsre{} and \mquake{}. Component and module ablations show that the gain mainly comes from separating edit injection from off-route suppression rather than from simply increasing LoRA capacity.

17.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Extremal representations of functions of matrices and applications to multivariate prediction

arXiv:2606.19359v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Motivated by two seminal results of multivariate prediction theory by Helson and Lowdenslager and by Wiener and Masani we prove extremal representations of functions of matrices and derive their prediction-theoretic consequences. We also sketch a way to obtain matricial inequalities from our results. The main goal of the paper is the computation of the infimum of a set of values of the form $tr(A \Delta A^*)$, where $\Delta$ is a given non-negative Hermitian $n \times n$ matrix and the choices for $A$ exhauste a certain set of $n \times n$ matrices. In particular, we focus on norm-bounded unit spheres with certain types of properties of unitary invariance, what allows an application of the theory of majorization.

18.
Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-08

Single-cell spatial pharmacobiology for imaging antibody-based therapies in solid tumors

Authors: Unknown Author

We have developed single-cell spatial pharmacobiology (SSP), which combines in situ imaging of a systemically infused fluorescent therapeutic antibody with high-plex spatial proteomics. Applied to head and neck and pancreatic tumors from patients treated in phase 1 trials, SSP revealed marked spatial heterogeneity in antibody delivery and target engagement, which was shaped by conserved stromal barriers.

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

Agent trajectories as programs: fingerprinting and programming coding-agent behavior

arXiv:2606.16988v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Benchmark scores tell you what an agent got right; they do not tell you how it got there. In this work, we introduce methods for comparing agents procedurally in different contexts, where the model, tasks, and approaches vary. We compare ten agents and find that they are identifiable by their behavioral habits, which we define as fingerprints: a probe over these procedural signatures attributes an unseen trajectory to the correct agent at 85.7% accuracy, controlling for leakage across tasks. We develop procedural representations for agent problem-solving procedures with an emergent vocabulary induction technique that is meant to be maximally compressive to avoid surface-level variation while being expressive enough to unveil the quirks of the models' patterns. We apply our framework to the software engineering evaluation dataset SWE-Bench to study the structural distinctness of agent trajectories and find that behavior is most similar between models from similar release periods and those that are distilled from one another (e.g., a distilled student model and its teacher have a Jensen-Shannon divergence of 0.25, about half the distance between other model pairs). As more models saturate evaluations, we believe that it will be important to probe model behavior along more holistic dimensions than success rates alone. We introduce ProcGrep, a library for auditing and evaluating agents for how they approach tasks at a procedural level given their traces in a top-down fashion. We believe this work has a range of applications to help developers work with and program coding agents, such as task-aware model routing, agent monitoring, and finer-grained cost analysis.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

An epidemiological scenario for Mass Events During the World Cup

This brief work discusses potential superspreading events that may occur during the World Cup in Mexico. The study is particularly focused on the city of Guadalajara due to a large recent outbreak in January and February and insufficient vaccine coverage prior to 2026. Keywords: Superspreading; measles outbreak; branching process; individual reproduction number; World Cup

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Validity and Limitations of the Empatica E4 Wristband for Autonomic and Thermoregulatory Sleep Monitoring Against Concurrent Polysomnography: A Wearanize+ Dataset Study

The Empatica E4 wristband provides continuous multi-modal physiological monitoring including blood volume pulse (BVP), electrodermal activity (EDA) and skin temperature (TEMP) but its validity for sleep-stage-specific autonomic and thermoregulatory monitoring has not been systematically evaluated against concurrent polysomnography (PSG). Using the Wearanize+ dataset which provides synchronised PSG, Empatica E4, and Zmax EEG recordings from 100 home-recorded participants; a systematic validation of Empatica E4 physiological signals against PSG ground truth across five sleep stages was conducted. Of 100 participants, 92 had Empatica data; 69 met Zmax EEG signal quality criteria and formed the analysis sample. Heart rate (HR) from the pre-computed Empatica HR channel showed valid stage-specific patterns (Wake: 70.9 bpm, N3: 61.2 bpm) and moderate inter-device MeanNN correspondence with PSG ECG (Spearman r=0.35-0.42 across stages). Skin temperature showed the expected thermoregulatory pattern (Wake: 33.92C, N3: 35.48C) and is recommended for downstream analyses. Tonic EDA showed an inverted stage pattern attributable to wrist sweat accumulation during deep sleep, representing a known confound for wrist-worn EDA during sleep. Phasic EDA showed plausible patterns and may be used with caution. These findings establish a validated feature set for Empatica E4 sleep research and directly inform multimodal psychiatric biomarker studies using the Wearanize+ dataset.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Hybrid Diffusion Transformer for Instruction-Guided Audio Editing via Rectified Flow

arXiv:2606.20101v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audio editing aims to modify specific content in an existing audio clip according to a natural language instruction while preserving the remaining acoustic content. Despite the remarkable progress of diffusion models, existing training-based editing methods mainly rely on the local inductive biases and cross-attention interaction in convolutional U-Net backbones, which often hinder long-range semantic alignment and precise understanding and localization of instructions. In contrast, diffusion transformers provide stronger global modeling and multimodal fusion, but existing editing architectures usually adopt a simple stack of MMDiT and DiT blocks. Applying joint attention over concatenated audio and text tokens in all blocks results in quadratic complexity with respect to token length. To balance editing performance and efficiency, we propose a hybrid two-stage diffusion transformer architecture for instruction-guided audio editing based on rectified flow matching. It performs joint attention over audio and text tokens to establish coarse semantic alignment at low-resolution stage, then switches to alternating joint-attention and cross-attention blocks to refine editing details at high-resolution stage. This coarse-to-fine strategy enables efficient and accurate instruction-guided audio editing. Experiments show that the proposed framework achieves notable performance gains on challenging editing tasks involving overlapping audio events and complex instructions, while substantially improving editing efficiency with a compact model.

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

Magnifying What Matters: Attention-Guided Adaptive Rendering for Visual Text Comprehension

Visual Text Comprehension (VTC) renders text into images for a vision-language model (VLM) to read, sidestepping LLM context-window limits and powering applications from long-page OCR to multi-page memory QA. Yet existing VTC pipelines treat rendering and layout as a fixed, content-agnostic preprocessing step and offer little mechanistic understanding of how VLMs internally process visualized text. Through a focused empirical study on VTC QA tasks, we reveal that VLMs exhibit a localization-without-utilization regime: evidence-localizing attention emerges sharply in the middle-to-late layers and is largely decoupled from answer correctness, yet simply enlarging the localized spans on the rendered page recovers a large fraction of the failures. Building on these observations, we propose AGAR (Attention-Guided Adaptive Rendering), a training-free, model-agnostic method that leverages a VLM's own middle-to-late layer attention to identify the top-K important visual patches, maps them back to word spans, and re-renders the page with those spans enlarged before re-inferring the answer. Extensive experiments across nine VTC benchmarks (short-form, long-context, and multi-page memory QA) and four VLM backbones show that AGAR (i)consistently improves off-the-shelf VLMs as a plug-and-play enhancement, (ii)composes with VLM post-training to yield further gains, and (iii)remains robust under both visual- and text-side input degradation.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Mind the Gap: Diagnosing Constraint Discovery Failures in Text-in-Image Editing

Authors:

A key challenge in multimodal reasoning is determining which visual dependencies become relevant under a specific task, rather than merely recognizing visible content. We study this through edit-induced constraint discovery in text-in-image editing, a controlled diagnostic setting where a local text change can activate secondary consistency constraints: given a valid editing instruction and an image, can a model identify the secondary regions that must also change? Across 461 diagnostic cases, four MLLMs, and 19 constraint subtypes, models recover only 46% case-level macro recall under unguided prompting versus 94% when constraints are explicitly provided, suggesting that a substantial portion of the failure arises when models must decide which unstated dependencies to surface. Oracle-field decomposition shows that case-specific causal explanations are the most effective partial guidance (0.782 recall), above region names (0.610) or type labels (0.646), suggesting that edit-specific causal cues account for much of the oracle gain. A downstream experiment further shows that higher self-discovery recall does not necessarily improve task performance: unverified self-discovery introduces false positives that offset recall gains, motivating precision-aware constraint elicitation.