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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Designing AI-Supported Focus Groups: A Role x Modality Playbook

Authors:
Zhiqing Wang↗Steven Dow↗

arXiv:2606.11835v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Collecting participants' lived experiences is central to design research. Focus groups are uniquely valuable because participants not only share individual accounts but also respond to one another, surfacing comparison, disagreement, and collective sensemaking. However, focus groups are resource-intensive and highly sensitive to facilitation: moderators must probe for specificity, balance participation, manage topic flow, and sustain psychological safety, and subtle facilitation choices can shape what becomes salient. Recent HCI work and commercial meeting tools show that generative AI can scaffold live conversation through prompting, turn regulation, thematic mapping, and real-time summarization. Yet UXR teams lack a clear map of what these capabilities mean in focus groups and what methodological risks they introduce. We synthesize AI supports for live conversation and translate them into a focus-group-specific playbook organized by AI role (tool, co-host, host) and modality (text, voice, embodied).We synthesize prior work on AI-supported live conversation and propose a focus-group-specific playbook of AI supports organized by role (tool, co-host, host) and modality (text, voice, embodied). We characterize interactional trade-offs and identify open questions for evaluating AI-supported focus groups as methodological configurations.

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02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

S1-DeepResearch: Beyond Search, Toward Real-World Long-Horizon Research Agents

Authors:
Yao Dong↗Xinglin Xiao↗Liwei Dong↗Xinlong Jin↗Zhengbo Li↗Heng Zhang↗Duyun Wang↗Nan Xu↗

Deep research agents aim to solve complex knowledge-intensive tasks through long-horizon planning, evidence gathering, reasoning, and report generation. While recent progress in search agents has demonstrated strong capabilities in information retrieval and answer verification, most existing training datasets remain search-centric, focusing primarily on closed-ended question answering and information localization. As a result, they mainly train information-seeking behavior while providing limited coverage of key deep research capabilities, including evidence integration, knowledge synthesis, planning, file understanding, and structured report generation. In this work, we propose a unified trajectory construction paradigm for deep research agents that combines closed-ended QA and open-ended exploration. The proposed framework consists of graph-grounded task formulation, agentic trajectory rollout, and multi-dimensional trajectory verification, enabling scalable synthesis of high-quality agentic trajectories spanning long-chain complex reasoning, deep research instruction following, report writing, file understanding and generation, and skills usage. Compared with existing search-oriented datasets, our synthesized trajectories place greater emphasis on knowledge synthesis, complex reasoning, and planning. S1-DeepResearch-32B achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source models of comparable scale across 20 benchmarks spanning five capability dimensions, including complex reasoning, instruction following, report generation, file understanding, and skills usage. On several challenging deep research benchmarks, it approaches the performance of leading proprietary frontier models. These results highlight the importance of jointly modeling information acquisition, knowledge synthesis, and planning-oriented agent behaviors for building effective deep research agents.

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

TrajGenAgent: A Hierarchical LLM Agent for Human Mobility Trajectory Generation

Authors:
Siyu Li↗Toan Tran↗Lingyi Zhao↗Khurram Shafique↗Li Xiong↗

arXiv:2606.12657v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Human mobility data is important for transportation, urban planning, and epidemic control, but large-scale trajectory collection is often costly and privacy-constrained, motivating realistic synthetic trajectory generation. Existing LLM-based generators typically rely on either prompt engineering, which preserves zero-shot reasoning but lacks fine-grained spatiotemporal grounding, or trajectory-level fine-tuning, which improves statistical precision but incurs substantial computational cost and may weaken general reasoning. We propose TrajGenAgent, a semantic-aware hierarchical LLM-agent framework for human mobility trajectory generation without model fine-tuning. TrajGenAgent uses a two-stage orchestrator-worker design: an LLM first synthesizes an individual- and weekday-conditioned activity chain from historical evidence via in-context learning, and a deterministic workflow then grounds each activity into a complete visit using personalized POI retrieval, distance-aware location selection, kinematics-aware travel-time propagation, and LLM-based duration estimation. To evaluate realism beyond aggregate spatiotemporal statistics, we introduce an anomaly-detection-based evaluation framework using two complementary detectors to assess behavioral and semantic plausibility. Experiments on benchmark and large-scale simulation datasets show that TrajGenAgent improves spatiotemporal fidelity, semantic coherence, and individual-specific behavioral realism over representative neural and LLM-based baselines, while avoiding parameter updates.

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05.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

GeroEngine: Generative single-cell aging trajectories reveal a bidirectionally traversable identity core and direction-specific inflammatory remodeling

Authors:
Bhak↗Jeon↗

Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) maps aging tissues at high resolution but is destructive, preventing longitudinal tracking; dropout and zero-inflation artifacts, amplified by shift-invariant linear simulations, confound age-associated variability. We developed GeroEngine, a technical-artifact-aware framework combining VAE-based trajectory simulation, LOPO cross-validation, linear baselines, reverse traversal, and reverse-directed network inference. In microglia and HSCs, the VAE reduced technical-artifact carryover while preserving trajectory heterogeneity and improving alignment to artifact-reduced reference manifolds. Consensus GeroTargets and GeroRegulators defined tissue-specific GeroNetworks organized into three pillars: lineage/replication identity collapse, a sex-dimorphic endocrine/stress core, and inflammatory remodeling. Forward and reverse simulations aligned to the common young[->]old aging axis revealed a sign-coherent, direction-specific program: identity/replication targets were bidirectionally recovered, whereas MHC/NF-{kappa}B inflammatory programs were preferentially forward-recovered. These results support identity collapse as a deep traversable core of aging and nominate upstream homeostatic restoration over downstream inflammatory suppression.

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

FATE: Pillar Encoding and Frequency-Aware Training for Event-Based Object Detection

Authors:
Md Tawheedul Islam Bhuian↗Kyoung-Don Kang↗

Event cameras are bio-inspired sensors that asynchronously capture logarithmic intensity changes, offering inherent advantages in high-speed and high-dynamic-range scenarios. However, the sparse and asynchronous nature of event streams poses a fundamental challenge for modern deep learning architectures. To enable compatibility with standard models, most existing approaches partition the accumulation window into fixed temporal sub-bins. While effective for spatial processing, this internal discretization discards fine-grained temporal structure and constrains inference to the low temporal frequencies imposed by training supervision. To address this limitation, we propose FATE, a unified framework built upon a novel Pillar Encoding (PE). While operating over discrete macro-accumulation windows dictated by the target frequency, PE avoids internal temporal sub-binning. It organizes events into spatial pillars and approximates their intra-window evolution via projection onto a continuous-time orthogonal polynomial basis. This formulation yields an L2-optimal representation that retains rich temporal dynamics in a dense pseudo-image, mitigating information loss under sparse event conditions. To fully leverage this representation, we introduce Frequency-Aware Training (FAT), a soft mean-teacher curriculum that generates temporally dense pseudo-labels, effectively bridging the mismatch between low-frequency supervision and high-frequency inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FATE generalizes across architectural paradigms and consistently outperforms strong baselines. It enables robust object detection at high temporal resolutions up to 200 Hz, while incurring minimal overhead in parameter count and inference latency

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07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

SciRisk-Bench: A Risk-Dimension-Aware Benchmark for AI4Science Safety

Authors:
Linghao Feng↗Yinqian Sun↗Dongqi Liang↗Sicheng Shen↗Chenfei Yan↗Yuxuan Peng↗Yilin Zhao↗Haibo Tong↗Kai Li↗FeiFei Zhao↗Yi Zeng↗

arXiv:2606.18936v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly embedded in AI for Science (AI4Science) workflows, from scientific question answering and literature analysis to laboratory planning and autonomous discovery. This progress creates an urgent need for safety benchmarks that evaluate not only scientific competence, but also whether models recognize and avoid risks in high-stakes scientific contexts. Existing AI4Science safety datasets cover several disciplines and task formats, leaving the underlying risk dimensions underspecified. We introduce SciRisk-Bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate AI4Science safety from two complementary perspectives: explicit risk dimensions and scientific disciplines. SciRisk-Bench covers 7 disciplines, 31 subdisciplines and 10 risk dimensions. In the experimental section, we evaluate both mainstream LLMs and science-oriented LLMs across risk dimensions, disciplines, and sub-disciplines, enabling fine-grained diagnosis of where scientific models remain unsafe.

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08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Beyond Native Success: Auditing Deployment-Interface Exposure of CLIP Backdoors

Authors:
Kunlan Xiang↗Haomiao Yang↗Wenbo Jiang↗

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training models are widely reused across downstream interfaces, including feature extraction, retrieval, reranking, and selection. Existing CLIP backdoor, however, usually validate attacks on a small attack-native task, leaving unclear whether the same poisoned checkpoint remains exposed, weakens, or becomes not applicable when reused through other interfaces. We introduce DIFE, a Deployment-Interface Footprint Evaluation framework that audits backdoored CLIP checkpoints across deployment interfaces. DIFE makes various evaluations comparable by specifying each interface's component readout, trigger channel, target event, reference condition, and metric. DIFE also introduces effective-footprint diagnosis to identify the reusable CLIP component or component combination that carries exposure and explains where risk transfers. Auditing reproduced CLIP backdoors with DIFE reveals a structured landscape: native success is not a checkpoint-level risk certificate, exposure follows component footprints, text-side poisoning does not yield textual-encoder control, and some coupled attacks remain mechanism-bound. This audit reveals a import gapin existing CLIP backdoors: a textual encoder that itself becomes a reusable carrier of adversarial behavior. We therefore introduce BadTextTower to fill this gap. BadTextTower produces strong text-conditioned retrieval, reranking, and selection exposure while leaving visual-only reuse nearly clean.

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09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Why Tree-Style Branching Matters for Thought Advantage Estimation in GRPO

Authors:
Hongcheng Wang↗Yinuo Huang↗Sukai Wang↗Guanghui Ren↗Hao Dong↗

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) trains Chain-of-Thought reasoning with verifiable rewards, but estimating thought-level advantages without value functions often suffers from high variance. Although tree-style branching is used in practice to reduce variance, it lacks a theoretical explanation of why it works and whether it is important or potentially necessary. We study thought-level advantage estimation in GRPO from a variance perspective under a minimal tree-style setting where multiple continuations are sampled for each thought. Using the multivariate delta method, we reveal a sampling-dimension asymmetry. Increasing sampled thoughts ($K$) leaves a strictly positive estimation-variance floor, whereas increasing continuations per thought ($M$) drives the leading-order estimation variance to zero at rate $1/M$. This implies that, within the fixed-temperature GRPO-style estimator without value models studied here, accurate thought-level advantage estimation cannot be achieved by scaling thought sampling alone, making continuation-level branching a principled and potentially necessary mechanism rather than a heuristic. Experiments further provide empirical evidence for its effectiveness and potential necessity, demonstrating improved optimization stability, training efficiency, and final performance not only in math but also across vision domains and under different model architectures and sizes.

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

Rethinking the Role of Efficient Attention in Hybrid Architectures

Authors:
Ziqing Qiao↗Yinuo Xu↗Chaojun Xiao↗Zhou Su↗Zihan Zhou↗Yingfa Chen↗Xiaoyue Xu↗Xu Han↗Zhiyuan Liu↗

Modern language models increasingly adopt hybrid architectures that combine full attention with efficient attention modules, such as sliding-window attention (SWA) and recurrent sequence mixers. However, how these efficient modules shape model capabilities remains poorly understood. To address this gap, we conduct a systematic analysis across hybrid architectures from three perspectives: scaling behavior, mechanism analysis, and architecture design. First, from a scaling perspective, we find that efficient-attention design primarily affects how fast long-context capability emerges, while different hybrids eventually converge to comparable long-context performance under sufficient training. Second, mechanistically, we show that long-range retrieval is mainly carried by full attention, whereas efficient attention shapes its optimization trajectory. This explains a counter-intuitive phenomenon we call Large-Window Laziness: larger SWA windows can delay the formation of retrieval heads in full-attention layers. Third, guided by this mechanism, we show that applying NoPE to only the full-attention layers of a small-window SWA hybrid substantially improves long-context performance with negligible impact on short-context performance.

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

Convergence Rate Analysis of the AdamW-style Shampoo: Unifying One-Sided and Two-Sided Preconditioning

Authors:
Huan Li↗Yiming Dong↗Zhouchen Lin↗

arXiv:2601.07326v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper studies AdamW-style Shampoo, an effective variant of the classical Shampoo that won the external tuning track of the AlgoPerf neural network training competition. Our analysis unifies one-sided and two-sided preconditioning. When the exponents of the two preconditioners sum to $1/2$, we establish the convergence rate $\frac{1}{K}\sum_{k=1}^KE\left[||\nabla f(X_k)||_*\right]\leq O(\frac{\sqrt{m+n}C}{K^{1/4}})$, where $K$ represents the number of iterations, $(m,n)$ denotes the dimensions of the matrix-valued parameters, and $C$ matches the constant appearing in the optimal convergence rate of SGD. Theoretically, the nuclear norm and Frobenius norm satisfy $||\nabla f(X)||_F\leq ||\nabla f(X)||_*\leq \sqrt{\min\{m,n\}}||\nabla f(X)||_F$, which suggests that our convergence rate is analogous to the optimal $\frac{1}{K}\sum_{k=1}^KE\left[||\nabla f(X_k)||_F\right]\leq O(\frac{C}{K^{1/4}})$ convergence rate of SGD in the ideal case where $||\nabla f(X)||_*= \Theta(\sqrt{\min\{m,n\}})||\nabla f(X)||_F$ and $m$ and $n$ are of comparable magnitude. Then, we extend our analysis to settings where the preconditioning exponents do not sum to 1/2, and establish convergence with an explicit but more involved rate.

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12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Flexible Catalysis

Authors:
M\'at\'e Weisz↗Sergii Strelchuk↗

arXiv:2510.01065v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In quantum information and computation, a central challenge is to determine which quantum states can be transformed into which others under restricted sets of free operations. While many transformations are impossible directly, catalytic processes can enable otherwise forbidden conversions: an auxiliary quantum state (the catalyst) facilitates the transformation while remaining unchanged. In this work, we introduce flexible catalysis, a generalization in which the catalyst is allowed to transform into a different auxiliary state, provided it remains a valid catalyst. We show that this framework subsumes both standard catalytic and multicopy transformations, and we analyse its advantages across several classes of free operations. In particular, we prove that when the free operations are local unitaries or permutation matrices, flexible catalysis enables state extractions that are unattainable with standard catalysis alone.

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

OptEMA: Adaptive Exponential Moving Average for Stochastic Optimization with Zero-Noise Optimality

Authors:
Ganzhao Yuan↗

arXiv:2603.09923v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Exponential moving averages (EMAs) are a central component of widely used adaptive optimizers such as Adam. However, existing analyses of Adam-style methods often yield suboptimal guarantees in the zero-noise regime, rely on open-loop parameter schedules, or require prior knowledge of smoothness constants. Motivated by these limitations, we introduce OptEMA and analyze two complementary variants: OptEMA-M, which applies an adaptive, decreasing EMA coefficient to the first moment with a fixed second-moment decay, and OptEMA-V, which swaps these roles. At the heart of these variants is a Corrected AdaGrad-Norm coefficient schedule. This formulation renders OptEMA algorithmically closed-loop and Lipschitz-free, meaning its effective stepsizes are trajectory-dependent and require no parameterization via the Lipschitz constant. Under lower-boundedness, unbiasedness, bounded variance, average smoothness, and a bounded stochastic-gradient condition used to control the adaptive normalizers, we prove that both variants achieve the unified noise-adaptive rate $\tilde{\mathcal{O}} \left(T^{-1/2}+\sigma^{1/2}T^{-1/4}\right)$ for the averaged gradient norm. In the zero-noise regime, these bounds automatically reduce to the nearly optimal deterministic rate $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(T^{-1/2})$ without manual hyperparameter retuning.

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

ChildGuard: A Specialized Dataset for Combatting Child-Targeted Hate Speech

Authors:
Gautam Siddharth Kashyap↗Mohammad Anas Azeez↗Rafiq Ali↗Zohaib Hasan Siddiqui↗Jiechao Gao↗Usman Naseem↗

Mental health industry faces growing concerns regarding hate speech directed at children's on social media, as exposure to such content can contribute to adverse psychological outcomes during critical stages of development. Current hate speech datasets and detection systems provide limited support for child-focused applications because they are primarily designed for adults and lack dedicated representations of age-specific characteristics associated with hate speech directed at children's. To address this gap, we introduce ChildGuard, a large-scale English dataset for child-targeted hate speech containing 351,877 annotated instances collected from X (formerly Twitter), Reddit, and YouTube. The dataset covers three age groups such as younger children's (under 11), pre-teens (11-12), and teens (13-17). ChildGuard contains two subsets such as a contextual subset (157K) and a lexical subset (194K). Evaluation using recent transformer-based models and LLMs achieves a best Macro-F1 of 82.07%, decreasing to 79.41%, 79.24%, 76.04%, and 74.88% on younger children's, contextual, implicit hate, and cross-subset settings, respectively.

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

Utility-Constrained Policy Optimization

Authors:
Mehrdad Moghimi↗Bernardo Avila Pires↗

arXiv:2606.14029v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Constrained MDPs (CMDPs) are a widely adopted framework for incorporating safety into RL agents; however, the framework does not support risk-sensitive constraints. This can be problematic: For example, CMDPs allow for optimal solutions that, in order to satisfy the risk-neutral constraints, mix infrequent catastrophic behaviors and frequent, overly conservative ones. Moreover, prior empirical results suggest that enforcing stricter, risk-sensitive constraints can improve performance even under risk-neutral evaluation. The natural framework to incorporate risk-sensitive constraints is utility-constrained MDPs (UCMDPs), but no practical solutions for this problem existed. In this work, we introduce a simple yet powerful methodology for UCMDPs and constrained RL. Besides allowing for risk-sensitive constraints, our framework does not require us to fix constraint limits in advance of training the agent, provided that a sensible range is known. This increases policy flexibility and, in practice, allows for adjustments to these limits at no extra training cost. Besides benefiting from the generality of the framework, our agent shows strong performance in practice, consistently matching or outperforming existing baselines in several Safety Gymnasium benchmark tasks.

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

HawkesNest: A Multi-Axis Synthetic Benchmark for Spatiotemporal Pattern Complexity

Authors:
Yahya Aalaila↗Sumantrak Mukherjee↗Gerrit Gro{\ss}mann↗Sebastian Vollmer↗

arXiv:2606.16863v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluation of spatiotemporal point process (STPP) models relies heavily on opaque real-world datasets, where latent generative structure is unknown and model failures are difficult to attribute. We introduce HawkesNest, a generator-aligned benchmark for controlled spatiotemporal pattern complexity built on a multivariate Hawkes backbone. HawkesNest defines four complexity axes: space–time entanglement, background heterogeneity, cross-type interaction, and domain topology. Each axis is associated with a deterministic index computed from the latent data-generating mechanism. By varying these axes while holding global rate, stability, and simulation budget fixed, HawkesNest enables diagnostic stress tests of STPP models under known structural difficulty. We verify that the indices are monotone and nearly orthogonal under controlled sweeps. We illustrate its use by showing that Hawkes-family baselines degrade under joint heterogeneity–entanglement complexity, even though they are structurally aligned with the Hawkes data-generating backbone. We further show that HawkesNest exposes neural-model sensitivity: AutoSTPP remains vulnerable under isolated increases in space–time entanglement. Code. Available at https://github.com/YahyaAalaila/HawkesNest

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18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Controlled Quantum Metrology with Anisotropic Heisenberg Spin Interactions under Intrinsic Decoherence

Authors:
S. K. Singh↗Jia-Xin Peng↗Y-J Zhu↗Mohammad Khalid↗

arXiv:2606.16918v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We theoretically investigate quantum parameter estimation in a two-qubit anisotropic Heisenberg spin system with Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya (DM) interaction in the presence of intrinsic decoherence described by the Milburn model. Using the Quantum Fisher Information (QFI), we study the estimation of both the uniform magnetic field and the DM interaction strength. Analytical expressions for the time-evolved density matrix are obtained and used to explore the effects of exchange anisotropy, intrinsic decoherence, and probe-state preparation on the achievable estimation precision. Our results show that suitable tuning of the anisotropic exchange coupling and the initial entangled state can considerably enhance the estimation performance, with different optimal parameter regimes emerging for magnetic-field and DM-interaction sensing. To better understand the role of quantum resources in metrology, we also examine the behaviour of concurrence, quantum coherence, and von Neumann entropy. Overall, our findings demonstrate that anisotropic Heisenberg spin systems with DM interaction provide a promising and flexible platform for high-precision quantum metrology even in the presence of intrinsic decoherence.

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20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

The censored stochastic six-vertex model and parabolic Kazhdan–Lusztig $R$-polynomials

Authors:
Hindy Drillick↗Levi Haunschmid-Sibitz↗

arXiv:2606.12670v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce a censored version of the stochastic six-vertex model. We show that for parameters $b_1 < b_2$, this model started from the initial condition ${1}_{x>0}$ is stochastically dominated at any time by the blocking measure. This is a partial analog of the censoring inequality for monotone spin systems. In particular, this result allows us to control the behavior of second-class particles. The proof uses parabolic Kazhdan–Lusztig $R$-polynomials, whose appearance is explained using a connection between the stochastic six-vertex model and the Iwahori–Hecke algebras of symmetric groups. Furthermore, we find an intertwining relation for this process using normalized parabolic Kazhdan–Lusztig $R$-polynomials as an intertwining kernel.

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

Towards Fast and Effective Long Video Understanding of Multimodal Large Language Models via Adaptive Quasi-Gaussian Sampling

Authors:
Kun Zhang↗Chenxin Fang↗Tao Chen↗Baiyang Song↗Yunhang Shen↗Yiyi Zhou↗Rongrong Ji↗

Long video understanding remains a daunting challenge for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) due to the excessive computation and memory footprint. Thus, keyframe selection is often adopted to mitigate this shortcoming, which however still suffers from low flexibility and high noise due to its hard sampling principle. In this paper, we define video frame selection as a problem of Quasi-Gaussian Sampling, and propose an adaptive and training-free approach termed AdaQ. Inspired by the $3$-$\sigma$ rule of Gaussian distribution, the objective of AdaQ is to achieve the optimal $3$-$\sigma$ interval for different examples, i.e., a smaller $3$-$\sigma$ interval for the local query and a larger one for the global query, thereby facilitating robust and adaptive frame sampling. To validate AdaQ, we apply it to four MLLMs with three embedding models. The extensive experimental results not only show its obvious performance gains over the default MLLMs and the SOTA keyframe selection methods, e.g., helping Qwen3-VL-8B outperform GPT4o by 15.8\% on average by using only 64 frames, but also confirm its superior robustness and high efficiency for long-video understanding, e.g., only 1 hyper-parameter needs to be set. Our code project is given at \href{https://github.com/Zkayovo-xmu/AdaQ}{https://github.com/Zkayovo-xmu/AdaQ}.

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22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Cost-Optimal Decision Diagrams for Stochastic Boolean Function Evaluation

Authors:
Xia Zong↗Tuomo Lehtonen↗Jussi Rintanen↗

arXiv:2606.24672v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In many decision-making scenarios, acquiring information incurs different costs. We consider the problem of constructing a deterministic evaluation strategy that minimizes the expected cost of evaluating a propositional formula under variable costs and a probability distribution over truth assignments. We present a branch-and-bound algorithm with variable-selection heuristics, pruning, and caching. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first practical exact algorithm for this level of generality. Experiments on random instances demonstrate scalability and quantify the efficiency-quality trade-off of a greedy beam-search variant. We additionally evaluate a structured heart-disease diagnosis instance. Finally, we prove that the problem is $\#P$-hard and contained in $\mathrm{PSPACE}$.

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23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Panel-level multilocus methylation quantification in native cell-free DNA by PCR-compatible sequential enzymatic processing

Authors:
Vaquer↗C. C↗Wetten↗P. A↗Garcia Samartino↗Rodriguez↗J. D↗Manzino↗N. R↗Perez Ravier↗Angeloni↗A. R↗…

DNA methylation is informative for liquid biopsy, but low template abundance, distributed methylation signals and workflow complexity limit implementation. Here we present Delta-HLD, a PCR-compatible methylation assay platform that quantifies methylation directly in native DNA through sequential hybridization, ligation and methylation-sensitive digestion. The assay co-reports methylation-dependent signals from multiple loci through a shared amplification architecture, generating a single panel-level PCR readout. We established the chemistry, optimized panel size and composition through model-guided experiments, and implemented the assay as a triplex qPCR workflow with per-sample internal process controls. Plasma proof-of-concept analyses showed discriminatory signal in CRC and proof-of-concept transferability to hepatocellular carcinoma. Additional platelet-retaining experiments identified a strategy to increase recovery of analyzable circulating templates while reducing genomic DNA recognition. Delta-HLD provides a compact PCR-compatible framework for low-input methylation analysis without base conversion.

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24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

RLRC: Reinforcement Learning-based Recovery for Compressed Vision-Language-Action Models

Authors:
Yuxuan Chen↗Yixin Han↗Yize Huang↗Xiao Li↗

arXiv:2506.17639v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action models (VLA) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities and strong potential in complex robotic manipulation. However, their large parameter sizes and high inference latency hinder real-world deployment, especially on resource-constrained platforms. To address this, we conduct a systematic empirical study of model compression for VLAs. Building on these insights, we present RLRC, a three-stage compression and recovery pipeline consisting of structured pruning, performance recovery via SFT and RL, and subsequent quantization. The RL stage incorporates a critic warm-up strategy and BC loss regularization to stabilize training and preserve policy behavior. RLRC achieves up to an 8 times memory reduction and 2.3 times inference speedup while maintaining the original task success rate. Extensive experiments across multiple VLA backbones show that RLRC consistently outperforms existing compression baselines, highlighting its effectiveness for on-device deployment. Project website: https://rlrc-vla.github.io

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

Cross-Layer Discrete Concept Discovery for Interpreting Language Models

Authors:
Ankur Garg↗Xuemin Yu↗Hassan Sajjad↗Samira Ebrahimi Kahou↗

Interpreting language models remains challenging due to the existence of residual stream, which linearly mixes and duplicates features across adjacent layers, causing single-layer analyses to miss this cross-layer structure. Cross-layer sparse autoencoders (SAEs) address layer mixing but operate in continuous space, where concepts split across many neurons without clear boundaries. We introduce Cross-Layer Vector Quantized-Variational Autoencoder (CLVQ-VAE), a novel framework which maps representations from a lower layer to a higher layer through a discrete vector-quantization bottleneck, collapsing duplicated residual-stream features into compact, interpretable concept vectors. Our approach combines top-k temperature-based sampling with exponential moving average (EMA) codebook updates, providing controlled exploration of the discrete latent space while maintaining codebook diversity. Across both encoder- and decoder-based models on ERASER-Movie, Jigsaw, and AGNews, CLVQ-VAE outperforms clustering, single-layer vector quantized-variational autoencoder (VQ-VAE), and sparse autoencoder (SAE) baselines across three evaluation axes: removing identified concepts drops model accuracy by up to 93%, LLM judges rank our concepts first in 66.7% of comparisons, and human annotators recover model predictions from our visualizations with 78% accuracy versus 54% for clustering.

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