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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Electromagnetic Wightman functions and vacuum densities for a brane intersecting the AdS boundary

arXiv:2604.17583v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We investigate the combined effects of a brane intersecting the AdS boundary and background gravitational field on the local characteristics of the electromagnetic vacuum. Two types of boundary conditions on the brane are considered, which are higher-dimensional generalizations of the perfect electric (PEC) and perfect magnetic (PMC) boundary conditions in Maxwell's electrodynamics. The brane-induced contributions to the Wightman functions of the vector potential and field tensor are explicitly extracted. Simple expressions in terms of elementary functions are provided. The behavior of the vacuum expectation values (VEVs) is mimicked by a scalar field with a negative effective mass squared determined by the radius of the AdS spacetime. The expectation values of the electric and magnetic fields squares and of the energy-momentum tensor are investigated as local characteristics of the vacuum state. The brane-induced contributions to these VEVs have opposite signs for the PEC and PMC conditions. For the PMC condition, this contribution is negative for the electric field squared and positive for the magnetic field squared. The VEV of the energy-momentum tensor has a nonzero off-diagonal component. The brane-induced vacuum energy density is positive for PMC condition, whereas the normal and parallel stresses change sign as functions of the distance from the brane. Unlike the problem involving a planar boundary in the Minkowski bulk, the vacuum energy-momentum tensor does not vanish in (3+1)-dimensional AdS spacetime.

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

MathVis-Fine: Aligning Visual Supervision with Necessity via Progressive Dependency-Guided Training for Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning

arXiv:2606.17888v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has extended from purely linguistic domains to multimodal scenarios; however, existing approaches often treat visual inputs as homogeneous or auxiliary signals, failing to capture the intricate and sample-specific dependencies between text and images in mathematical problem-solving. This gives rise to two core issues: first, the supervisory signals for visual content are generalized and coarse-grained, lacking adaptation to the actual necessity of visual information in each sample; second, training feedback becomes inaccurate when visual rewards are uniformly applied without distinguishing the complementary relationships among inputs. These limitations hinder models from achieving precise multimodal reasoning. In this work, we propose a framework for modeling fine-grained visual dependencies in mathematical reasoning. We first construct the MathVis-Fine dataset, augmenting fine-grained visual annotations with visual dependency ratings. Building upon this dataset, we introduce a two-stage progressive visual enhancement training paradigm that balances answer correctness rewards and visual grounding rewards according to the intrinsic visual dependency level of each sample, thereby mitigating reward bias and improving supervision accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the MathVis-Fine framework effectively enhances visual perception progressively based on visual dependency, offering a more precise training framework for multimodal mathematical reasoning. We will release the dataset upon acceptance.

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

Learn to Quantify Social Interaction with Constraints for Pedestrian Walking

Authors:

arXiv:2606.17897v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-term human path forecasting in crowds is critical for autonomous moving platforms (like autonomous driving cars and social robots) to avoid collision and make high-quality planning. Although the current research take into account social interactions for prediction, they don't reveal the exact kinds of social interactions happened among people and how the social interactions affect the decision-making process of pedestrians, which further limits its robustness. Social interactions in pedestrian walking are intuitively massive and hard to label and quantify. In this paper, we explore creatively to quantify and interpret how pedestrians interact with others by proposing Learn to Cluster. Our clustering social interactions is probabilistic latent variable generative, learning directly from sequential trajectory observations, scalable to arbitrary number of pedestrians. Learn to cluster is label-free and can be naturally integrated into the training process of the prediction model. The latent variables will then serve as 'labels' to categorize social interactions. Extensive experiments over several trajectory prediction benchmarks demonstrate that our method is able to learn the patterns of social interactions and effectively integrate the patterns to pedestrian trajectory prediction.

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

DailyReport: An Open-ended Benchmark for Evaluating Search Agents on Daily Search Tasks

arXiv:2606.12871v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Search Agents (SAs) typically leverage large language models (LLMs) to support complex information-seeking tasks by autonomously exploring web sources and synthesizing information into comprehensive responses. For SAs evaluation, prior benchmarks mainly focus on specialized tasks that are unlikely to arise in real-world user scenarios. Moreover, their reliance on coarse task-level rubrics often limits evaluation interpretability. To bridge this gap, we introduce DailyReport, an open-ended benchmark to evaluate SA capabilities on daily search tasks. It contains 150 open-ended tasks with 3,546 associated rubrics, capturing widely discussed and timely information demands of real-world users. Each task is decomposed into subtasks and evaluated with cascade rubrics across disentangled dimensions. Through cascade performance attribution and user-centric aggregation, we derive highly interpretable scores for each dimension, along with a user preference score. Our results on 17 agentic systems show that current systems still fall short of users' expectations. To facilitate future research, our dataset and code are made publicly available at https://github.com/AGI-Eval-Official/DailyReport.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

DiagFlowBench: Evaluating How Language Models Handle Off-Procedure Inputs in Grounded Diagnostic Dialogue

arXiv:2606.17904v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language models increasingly serve as advisory systems in maintenance operations. To prevent hallucination, recent systems ground these models in procedural documentation to constrain them to approved steps. In practice, however, operator queries frequently stray from this path, requiring models to recognise out-of-scope inputs mid-conversation, a dynamic that current benchmarks rarely prioritise. We introduce DiagFlowBench, a dataset of 50 industrial diagnostic flowcharts from a consumer manufacturer converted into 1,676 multi-turn conversations that contrast compliant with out-of-scope utterances. Evaluating a panel of ten commercial and open-weight models reveals high variability in abstention rates, with models commonly selecting a real but contextually inadequate step rather than fabricating facts. The inherent plausibility and authority of this mapped but wrong advice exposes a challenging vulnerability for grounding systems.

06.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Emergent decadal predictability in Antarctic contribution to sea-level rise

Despite large uncertainties associated with future mass loss from the Antarctic Ice Sheet, ice-sheet models show that the rate of sea-level rise from Antarctic ice loss in 2025 is strongly predictive of the rate for the next several decades, regardless of emission pathway or model complexity. This finding is robust across all models that were considered in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Sixth Assessment Report global mean sea-level projections, including the low-likelihood, high-impact scenarios of sea-level rise. Given this strong near-term decadal predictability, ice-sheet models that can accurately reproduce present-day ice-mass loss provide a reliable basis for near-term sea-level planning and adaptation through to mid-century. The predictability breaks down by the end of the twenty-first century as feedbacks, such as those related to marine ice-sheet retreat, begin to emerge, leading to accelerating ice loss. Drawing on these results, we identify key feedback mechanisms that can account for the transition between near-term decadal predictability and the longer-term, feedback-driven evolution, and suggest priorities for ice-sheet model development aimed at resolving long-term sea-level rise uncertainty. Although Antarctic ice loss projections diverge widely by 2100, this Perspective shows that present-day rates robustly predict mid-century sea level rise, providing a firm basis for near-term planning, while highlighting priorities for model development aimed at resolving longer-term sea level rise uncertainty.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

ICD-10 Code Ambiguity Obscures Treatment-Eligible Adults with Spinal Muscular Atrophy: A Single-Center Chart Review and Patient Outreach Study

Background. Three disease-modifying therapies (DMTs) for spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) have been approved since 2016, yet many adults remain untreated. Identifying them depends on ICD-10 codes that capture SMA but do not reliably distinguish it from other related conditions. We examined, in one U.S. health system, both patients' engagement with therapy and the accuracy of the codes used to find them. Methods. We conducted a retrospective chart review of adults in an academic health system identified by SMA-associated ICD-10 codes, with manual adjudication of diagnosis and DMT status. Confirmed SMA-positive, DMT-naive patients were invited to a structured telephone interview on treatment awareness and barriers. Results. Of 60 charts, 22 (36.7%; 95% CI 25.6-49.3%) were appropriately coded for SMA or a related disorder; only 16 (26.7%) had molecularly confirmed SMA. The other 38 (63.3%) were miscoded, spanning spinal and bulbar muscular atrophy, asymptomatic carriers, prenatal screening, and conditions unrelated to SMA. Ten of the 16 confirmed patients (62.5%) were DMT-naive; one was interviewed, one declined, and eight could not be reached. The non-response is itself a finding: the patients least visible to administrative data are the hardest to reach. Conclusions. ICD-10 ambiguity is a barrier to treatment access in adult SMA, as is loss to follow-up. We make two recommendations: continuous documentation-coding alignment that uses natural language processing to verify the genetic precondition, and type-specific SMA codes (subcodes for Types 0-4) anchored on molecular SMN1 confirmation. Together these would support cohort identification, outreach, and evidence generation without adding to clinician burden.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Techniques for Peak Memory Reduction for LoRA Fine-tuning of LLMs on Edge Devices

arXiv:2606.19528v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fine-tuning of Large Language Models (LLMs) using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) on an end-user's data offers personalized experiences while keeping data private, but faces severe memory constraints on consumer hardware. Peak memory during fine-tuning often exceeds device limits, especially for models with billions of parameters and long-context training data. This paper introduces a suite of complementary techniques to reduce memory footprint without sacrificing model quality: (1) base model quantization with on-the-fly dequantization, (2) memory-efficient checkpointing combining selective activation caching and disk offloading, (3) softmax approximation using semantically relevant token subsets, and (4) logits masking. Experiments on Llama-3.2 3B and Qwen-2.5 3B demonstrate up to $26\times$ and $28\times$ reduction in peak memory, enabling fine-tuning on resource-constrained devices.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Advances in 4D Representation: Geometry, Motion, and Interaction

We present a survey on 4D generation and reconstruction, a fast-evolving subfield of computer graphics whose developments have been propelled by recent advances in neural fields, geometric and motion deep learning, as well as 3D generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). While our survey is not the first of its kind, we build our coverage of the domain from a unique and distinctive perspective of 4D representations, to model 3D geometry evolving over time while exhibiting motion and interaction. Specifically, instead of offering an exhaustive enumeration of many works, we take a more selective approach by focusing on representative works to highlight both the desirable properties and ensuing challenges of each representation under different computation, application, and data scenarios. The main take-away message we aim to convey to the readers is on how to select and then customize the appropriate 4D representations for their tasks. Organizationally, we separate the 4D representations based on three key pillars: geometry, motion, and interaction. Our discourse will not only encompass the most popular representations of today, such as neural radiance fields (NeRFs) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), but also bring attention to relatively under-explored representations in the 4D context, such as structured models and long-range motions. Throughout our survey, we will reprise the role of large language models (LLMs) and video foundational models (VFMs) in a variety of 4D applications, while steering our discussion towards their current limitations and how they can be addressed. We also provide a dedicated coverage on what 4D datasets are currently available, as well as what is lacking, in driving the subfield forward. Project page:https://mingrui-zhao.github.io/4DRep-GMI/

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Controlled Comparison of Machine Learning Models for Fault Classification and Localization in Power System Protection

arXiv:2510.00831v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The increasing complexity of modern power systems, driven by the integration of inverter-based and distributed energy resources, challenges the reliability of conventional protection schemes and motivates the use of machine learning for protection tasks. However, published results are often difficult to compare because datasets, sensing assumptions, and decision horizons vary across studies. This paper presents a controlled comparison of machine learning models for fault classification (FC) and fault localization (FL) under identical sensing, timing, and validation conditions on a common electromagnetic transient dataset, using decision windows of 10-50 ms to reflect protection-relevant time scales. For FC, the best-performing nonlinear models achieve F1 scores above 0.98 already at 10 ms, while lower-capacity models degrade at shorter horizons but improve with longer windows, indicating that relevant fault-type information is already present in the earliest transient. For FL, the top-performing models reach a stable localization error of about 10 % of normalized line length across all evaluated horizons, while weaker models form a clearly separated second performance tier. Line-resolved analysis shows that localization accuracy varies across grid segments, indicating topology-dependent difficulty rather than insufficient temporal context alone. These findings provide a controlled reference for comparing machine learning models across two protection tasks with fundamentally different information requirements.

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

MedVeriSeg: Teaching LISA-Like Medical Segmentation Models to Verify Query Validity Without Extra Training

Despite recent progress in text-prompt-based medical image segmentation, existing LISA-like MLLM-based methods typically generate masks regardless of whether the target specified in the query is present, leading to hallucinated segmentation. In this work, we propose MedVeriSeg, a training-free query verification framework that enables LISA-like medical segmentation models to reject false segmentation queries. MedVeriSeg first quantifies the response quality between the [SEG] token and image features through a Similarity Response Quality Scoring Module. To further improve robustness, it employs a Lightweight Routed Multi-Agent Verification Module, which fuses quantitative score evidence with qualitative agent evidence to comprehensively verify the validity of the query. To support systematic evaluation, we construct MedVeriSeg-Bench, a benchmark designed for query verification in medical image segmentation. Experimental results demonstrate that MedVeriSeg effectively identifies false segmentation queries and reduces hallucinated segmentation, while maintaining a high acceptance rate for valid queries, thereby largely preserving the segmentation utility of LISA-like medical segmentation models.

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

Agent-based models for the evolution of morphological alternation patterns

Why is the past of English "go" the apparently unrelated "went"? Such alternations are frequent in languages. They neither aid communication nor learnability, yet they can be persistent, surviving over centuries or millennia. We present a multi-agent simulation of the emergence of morphological stem and inflection alternations. Alternate forms arise by phonological changes or, as with "go/went", from lexical alternatives associated with a subset of the population. When an agent 'hears' another agent use a novel form for a slot in the paradigm of a word (say, the past tense of go), they will with some probability adopt that form, possibly spreading its use to other slots in the paradigm that shared the same original form. Thus alternative forms can spread through the population and become entrenched as stem or inflectional marker alternants. Unlike many previous computational studies, our system allows for naturalistic lexical forms, realistic phonological rules, lexicons with hundreds or thousands of entries, and agent populations in the tens or hundreds. It supports several network topologies, diffusion patterns and agent adoption policies. One issue with such simulations is evaluation: how realistic is the resulting morphology compared to those of real languages? We introduce the AI Historical Linguist, a novel Large Language Model-driven system that models a debate between two historical linguists. We use this to compare a set of real language morphologies, disguised morphologies, and experimentally evolved morphologies. The results suggest that among the factors that favor more plausible morphologies are scale-free social networks and random Bernoulli adoption of forms. We also present three case studies modeling attested historical changes, allowing us to test what might have happened if history had been different. All code and data are released.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

S-GBT: Smooth Growth Bound Tensor for Certified Robustness Against Word Substitution Attacks in NLP

Despite recent progress in Natural Language Processing (NLP), models remain vulnerable to word substitution attacks. Most existing defenses focus on first order sensitivity and measure how much the output changes when the input is slightly perturbed. However, they ignore how this sensitivity evolves, which is described by curvature. When gradients vary sharply, models can still fail. This paper introduces the Smooth Growth Bound Tensor (S-GBT), a second order method that bounds the Hessian element-wise, for which we provide formal theoretical proofs on the resulting robustness bounds. A regularization term is added during training to minimize these bounds. This yields tighter certified robustness against word substitution attacks. The change in the output under word substitution is bounded by both a linear term and a quadratic term. S-GBT is derived for two architectures: Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). The method is integrated directly into the training objective. Its effectiveness is evaluated on multiple benchmark datasets. The results show that combining first and second order regularization improves certified robust accuracy by up to 23.4% compared to prior methods, while clean accuracy remains competitive. These findings indicate that controlling both the gradient and its variation is a promising direction for building more robust models.

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

nD-RoPE: A Generalized RoPE for n-Dimensional Position Embedding

arXiv:2606.12146v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) is widely adopted in Transformer models, yet its extension to high-dimensional domains lacks a unified theoretical formulation. Most existing approaches either apply rotations independently along each axis or empirically mix frequencies, which limits cross-dimensional interactions and yields direction-dependent representations. To address these limitations, we propose nD-RoPE, a decomposition-free generalization of RoPE to arbitrary dimensions. From a translation-invariant formulation in continuous Hilbert space, we derive a spectral condition for isotropy that requires treating positions and frequencies as coupled \(n\)-dimensional vectors. We instantiate this formulation with a multi-scale regular-simplex wave-vector design, which provides non-degenerate spatial coverage and a symmetric, directionally balanced second-order response. Experiments across images, videos, and point clouds demonstrate consistent performance gains and improved generalization in high-dimensional settings.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

PreAct: Computer-Using Agents that Get Faster on Repeated Tasks

Authors:

arXiv:2606.17929v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Computer-using agents drive real software through the screen – clicking and typing – but they solve every task from scratch: asked to repeat a task, an agent re-reads the screen, re-reasons every tap, and pays the full cost again. We present PreAct, which lets such an agent get faster on tasks it has done before. The first time it succeeds, PreAct compiles the run into a small state-machine program-states that check the screen, transitions that act-and on later runs replays it directly instead of invoking the agent 8.5-13x faster, with no per-step language-model calls. Replay is not blind: at each step PreAct checks that the screen matches what the program expects before acting, and hands control back to the agent the moment something is off. PreAct applies the same discipline when deciding what to keep: a freshly compiled program enters the store only if, re-run from a clean state, an independent evaluator confirms it solved the task-catching programs that replay to their last step yet leave the task undone. Across a mobile, a desktop, and a web benchmark, this store-time check separates repeated runs that improve from ones that degrade as faulty programs accumulate, worth 1.75-2.6 tasks per benchmark, the same direction on all three; a fallback that explores afresh when no program fits brings PreAct level with a strong record-and-replay baseline. We also report what did not matter: prompt wording, runtime guardrails, and whether a language model or a plain embedding retriever selects which program to reuse.

16.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

MedicalAgentsBench for Complex Medical Reasoning: Comparing Internalized Reasoning Models versus Externalized Agent-based Frameworks

Complex medical reasoning requires integrating heterogeneous clinical evidence across multiple inference steps. Large language models (LLMs) now approach this through two routes: internalized reasoning and externalized agent scaffolding (frameworks that decompose problems collaboratively amongst multiple LLMs). To determine whether these routes are exclusive or complementary, we introduce MedicalAgentsBench, a filtered benchmark of 862 complex clinical questions drawn from the union of eight medical datasets via difficulty-aware curation and contamination screening. Evaluating three internalized reasoning models (DeepSeek-R1, o1-mini, and o3-mini), seven base models, and nine externalized agent-based methods, we find that internalized and externalized approaches each independently improve performance, and that their benefits compound: the highest accuracy is achieved by layering agent workflows onto an internalized reasoning model (i.e., o3-mini + MDAgents with 35.1%). Pareto analysis shows this combination dominates the cost-performance frontier; moreover, lightweight optimization on inexpensive models offers an entry point for resource-constrained settings. Our benchmark is at https://github.com/gersteinlab/MedicalAgentsBench.

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

Speaking in Self-Assessing Tongues: On the Verbalized Confidence of LLMs in Machine Translation

The rapid rise in popularity of large language models (LLMs) for translation calls for a thorough study of the reliability of their confidence in their own outputs. Unlike many generation tasks, translation errors and confidence levels can be useful at different levels of granularity (tokens, words, or spans). Unsupervised approaches based on internal signals like predicted probabilities can be misleading because they reflect certainty among alternatives rather than correctness. In addition, they require access to such internal signals. Here, we devise five verbalized methods of extracting an LLM's per-token confidence without those shortcomings and compare their reliability with that of the model's internal signals of certainty. We evaluate reliability using two forms of alignment: fine-grained error detection and calibration. For both, internal and verbalized methods perform similarly, although results vary by model. Interestingly, we find little to no correlation between internal and verbalized methods.

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

Contextualizing Biological Language Models across Modalities via Logit-Space Contrastive Alignment

arXiv:2606.18703v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pretrained biological language models expose per-token probability distributions through masked-token prediction, providing the likelihood interface central to sequence design, variant scoring, and mechanistic interpretation. Yet these distributions are learned from broad unlabeled corpora and are not naturally conditioned on task-specific biological contexts such as interaction partners, cellular environments, or therapeutic interventions. Existing contextual matching methods often distort this interface through pooled embeddings, contrastive latent spaces, or task-specific prediction heads. We introduce LOGICA (Logit-space Contrastive Alignment), a framework for context-conditioned prediction that performs contrastive learning directly in output-logit space. Using gated cross-modal adapters compatible with each model's native token head, LOGICA preserves the pretrained likelihood interface and converts contextualized token log-likelihoods into matching scores. Alignment is defined through context-sensitive token probabilities rather than proximity in a shared embedding space, enabling learning from sparse paired data across models with distinct vocabularies, without a shared tokenizer or decoder. LOGICA is particularly effective for mutation-local variant ranking, where comparisons reduce to context-conditioned likelihoods of mutant tokens at perturbed sites. Across protein–ligand binding, TCR–peptide activity, and drug-conditioned resistance prediction, LOGICA improves over prior state-of-the-art methods, including matched latent-contrastive and conditional MLM baselines, while retaining a token-level interface for interpretation and generation. On held-out-gene single-mutation drug-resistance prediction, LOGICA improves AUC from near-random latent-space baselines of $\sim$0.55 to $\sim$0.65.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Tunneling Dynamics and Time Delay in Electron Transport through Time-Dependent Barriers with Finite-Bandwidth Reservoirs

arXiv:2507.20649v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study a model system consisting of a tunneling barrier driven by an external harmonic field and coupled to two leads with finite bandwidth. Avoiding Floquet expansions, we derive simple expressions for the time-dependent tunneling current in the adiabatic regime. Our approach relates the barrier modulation to a measurable time delay in the steady-state periodic current. It provides a physically consistent definition of the tunneling time inside the barrier by subtracting the time delay associated with the leads from the total time delay. We find that the tunneling time always vanishes for wide/high barriers. Remarkably, the time delay persists even when the barrier becomes static, i.e., in the limit where the modulation frequency vanishes. This indicates that the time delay obtained through the introduction of an external periodic perturbation actually reflects an intrinsic property of the tunneling dynamics, rather than an effect of the external drive or of a particular system. We apply our results to the analysis of tunneling times in optical experiments and find good agreement with the experimental data.

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

PARSE: Provenance-Aware Retrieval Sanitization for Professional Domain LLM Agents

Authors:

Prompt injection defenses evaluated on synthetic benchmarks do not generalize to real enterprise documents, which are longer, denser, and interleave legitimate authority language with factual content. We demonstrate this gap with a real-document benchmark of 122 tasks across five professional domains (financial, legal, medical, scientific, DevOps) using actual SEC filings, Federal Register rules, PubMed abstracts, arXiv papers, and GitHub postmortems. Paraphrasing, the strongest defense on synthetic benchmarks, shows no statistically significant attack success rate reduction on real documents (p=0.500) while degrading utility from 91.8% to 82.8%. We introduce PARSE (Provenance-Aware Retrieval Sanitization), a domain-aware, fact-preserving sanitization pipeline that classifies each sentence by injection likelihood, extracts structured facts before rewriting, and verifies fact preservation via a consistency-checking loop. A directiveness gate routes 59% of real enterprise documents to a lightweight path, concentrating computational cost on high-risk documents. PARSE achieves 15.6% attack success rate – a 38% reduction versus the 25.4% baseline – at 86.9% utility, the only condition that is both statistically significant (p=0.014, adequately powered) and maintains near-baseline utility. Practitioners should evaluate defenses on domain-matched real documents, not synthetic proxies.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Efficient On-Device Diffusion LLM Inference with Mobile NPU

arXiv:2606.13740v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) accelerate generation by denoising multiple tokens in parallel, making them attractive for latency-sensitive mobile inference. However, repeated denoising introduces substantial computation on smartphones. Mobile neural processing units (NPUs) offer high-throughput dense matrix computation, but efficiently exploiting them remains challenging: token commitment shrinks per-block effective workloads, token revision complicates KV cache reuse, and limited NPU-visible address space incurs costly remapping and data transfer overheads. In this paper, we propose llada.cpp, the first NPU-aware inference framework for accelerating dLLMs on smartphones. llada.cpp aligns block-wise dLLM inference with the execution characteristics of mobile NPUs through three techniques. (1) Multi-Block Speculative Decoding fills the shrinking workload in late-stage current-block decoding with speculative future-block tokens. (2) Dual-Path Progressive Revision keeps committed tokens revisable until stable and refreshes unstable tokens through a CPU-side path without stalling dense NPU execution. (3) Swap-Optimized Memory Runtime compacts NPU-visible address layouts and overlaps data staging with NPU computation to reduce remapping and transfer overheads. We implement llada.cpp as an end-to-end framework and evaluate it across diverse hardware platforms and dLLM workloads. llada.cpp reduces LLaDA-8B generation latency by 17x-42x over the CPU baseline with prefix KV cache reuse, while preserving generation quality.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Cost analysis of overseas versus domestic vaccination of US-bound refugees

Context: To ensure healthy resettlement and protect US health security, the Vaccination Program for US-bound Refugees (VPR) offers some recommended vaccines to refugees overseas before resettlement to the United States. The selected vaccines and number of doses vary by country of departure. VPR was found to be cost-saving in 2018 but had since expanded to more sites. Objective: Assess VPR's current costs and impact on post-arrival domestic vaccination needs and costs. Setting and Participants: A model-based analysis of the Federal government costs for VPR and post-arrival (US) vaccination of resettled refugees separated across five regions: Africa, Asia, the Middle East and North Africa/Republic of Turkiye and Middle East, Europe, and the Americas using fiscal year 2024 data. Design: We quantified and compared full vaccination costs for refugees under two scenarios: (1) 'No VPR' and (2) 'VPR'. Refugees would receive no vaccines overseas and be fully vaccinated after US arrival under 'No VPR'. Under 'VPR', refugees receive one or two doses of selected vaccines overseas before completing vaccination schedules after arrival. Main Outcomes: Costs were reported in 2023 US dollars for 'VPR' and 'No VPR' scenarios and further subdivided by grouping countries/sites depending on whether the International Organization for Migration (IOM) provides vaccination services for refugees (IOM sites) versus non-IOM providers (non-IOM sites). Results: 'VPR' resulted in average net cost savings of $147 per person or $14.7 million per 100,000-refugee cohort compared to providing all vaccines after US arrival ('No VPR'). 'VPR' was cost-saving across most regions, except for IOM sites in Europe, where a net cost of $44 per person was observed. Net cost savings per person were highest for IOM sites in Africa ($333). Conclusions: VPR remains a cost-saving strategy, while protecting US-bound refugees' health and US health security by preventing disease outbreaks during resettlement.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Geometry-Preserving Encoder/Decoder in Latent Generative Models

arXiv:2501.09876v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Generative modeling aims to generate new data samples that resemble a given dataset. When using diffusion models for this task, one of the main challenges is solving the problem in the input space, which tends to be very high-dimensional. To address this, recent approaches solve diffusion models in the latent space through an encoder that maps from the data space to a lower-dimensional latent space, improving training efficiency and achieving state-of-the-art results. The variational autoencoder (VAE) is the most commonly used encoder/decoder framework in this domain, known for its ability to learn latent representations and generate data samples. In this paper, we introduce a novel encoder/decoder framework with theoretical properties distinct from those of the VAE, specifically designed to preserve the geometric structure of the data distribution. We demonstrate the significant advantages of this geometry-preserving encoder in the training process of both the encoder and decoder. Additionally, we provide theoretical results proving convergence of the training process, including convergence guarantees for encoder training, and results showing faster convergence of decoder training when using the geometry-preserving encoder.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Beyond Rubrics: Exploration-Guided Evaluation Skills for Reward Modeling

Open-ended reward modeling requires judges that can follow subtle, domain-specific preferences when verifiable answers are unavailable. Existing rubric-based methods often address this by generating criteria online for each query, but the extra generation step can add inference overhead and produce rigid or misaligned guidance. We introduce Eval-Skill, an exploration-guided method that synthesizes reusable evaluation skills for reward modeling and reframes reward guidance as context evolution rather than parameter training or per-query rubric generation. Using only 100 cases per domain for skill evolution, Eval-Skill synthesizes reusable domain-level evaluation skills through two progressive stages, workflow generation followed by principle generation, with exploration and selection interleaved across both stages. Once generated, a skill is directly injected into the judge context. Across multiple RM benchmarks, Eval-Skill consistently improves diverse judge backbones; on RewardBench 2, it yields significant gains over vanilla judging for each main backbone (+13.44% for Qwen3-8B, and 18.51% for DeepSeek-V4-Flash). Further analyses of evolution-time scaling, generalizability, and transferability show that compact evaluation skills offer an efficient new paradigm for LLM-based evaluation. Code is available at https://github.com/xing-stellus-yue/Eval-Skill.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

CellNet – Localizing Cells using Sparse and Noisy Point Annotations

Counting living cells is an important step in many biological research workflows. Our collaborators at the Wellcome Sanger Institute study vital genes in humans via large scale saturation genome editing screening, which requires repeatedly counting cells a great number of times. Computer Vision based automation is crucial for high throughput and resource efficiency. In this work, we develop a regression-based deep learning computer vision algorithm to detect and count cells in phase-contrast microscopy images. To reduce annotation effort, which in practice often becomes a bottleneck, we focus on counting cells only using sparse point annotations, which are fast and easy to acquire. By comparison to state-of-the-art 0-shot methods, we show that regression-based counting is a promising alternative in low data regimes. Through developing methods to automatically count living cells in microscopy images, we contribute to valuable research on the human genome. The code is available at https://github.com/beijn/cellnet.