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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

4DSloMo: 4D Reconstruction for High Speed Scene with Asynchronous Capture

Reconstructing fast-dynamic scenes from multi-view videos is crucial for high-speed motion analysis and realistic 4D reconstruction. However, the majority of 4D capture systems are limited to frame rates below 30 FPS (frames per second), and a direct 4D reconstruction of high-speed motion from low FPS input may lead to undesirable results. In this work, we propose a high-speed 4D capturing system only using low FPS cameras, through novel capturing and processing modules. On the capturing side, we propose an asynchronous capture scheme that increases the effective frame rate by staggering the start times of cameras. By grouping cameras and leveraging a base frame rate of 25 FPS, our method achieves an equivalent frame rate of 100-200 FPS without requiring specialized high-speed cameras. On processing side, we also propose a novel generative model to fix artifacts caused by 4D sparse-view reconstruction, as asynchrony reduces the number of viewpoints at each timestamp. Specifically, we propose to train a video-diffusion-based artifact-fix model for sparse 4D reconstruction, which refines missing details, maintains temporal consistency, and improves overall reconstruction quality. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly enhances high-speed 4D reconstruction compared to synchronous capture.

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

Self-Prompting Small Language Models for Privacy-Sensitive Clinical Information Extraction

Clinical named entity recognition from dental progress notes is challenging because documentation is highly unstructured, domain-specific, and often privacy-sensitive. We developed a locally deployable framework that enables small language models to self-generate, verify, refine, and evaluate entity-specific prompts for extracting multiple clinical entities from dental notes. Using 1,200 annotated notes, we evaluated candidate open-weight models with multi-prompt ensemble inference and further adapted selected models using QLoRA-based supervised fine-tuning and direct preference optimization. Model performance varied substantially, highlighting the need for task-specific evaluation rather than reliance on generic benchmarks. Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct achieved the strongest baseline performance. After DPO, Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct and Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct achieved micro/macro F1 scores of 0.864/0.837 and 0.806/0.797, respectively. These findings suggest that automated prompt optimization combined with lightweight preference-based post-training can support scalable clinical information extraction using locally deployed small language models.

03.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

HoloCell: A Generative Foundation Model for Holistic Cellular Modeling

Single-cell multi-omics technologies have recently advanced to enable the profiling of epigenomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic layers within individual cells, offering new opportunities to characterize cellular states as integrated biological systems. However, developing a unified framework that can seamlessly integrate diverse omics modalities and remain robust to heterogeneous modality missingness remains challenging. Here we present HoloCell, to our knowledge the first generative foundation model for joint representation learning and generative modeling across all three major single-cell omics modalities, i.e., epigenomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics. HoloCell contains over 860 million parameters and is pretrained on the Human-Multi-Omics-Corpus, which comprises approximately 468 million single-cell profiles across these three omics layers, corresponding to over 425 billion tokens. HoloCell introduces a simple yet biologically grounded hierarchical tokenization strategy that encodes cis-regulatory elements, genes, and proteins as structured tokens within a shared modeling framework. We evaluated HoloCell across single-omics representation learning, paired multi-omics integration, unpaired multi-omics alignment, and cross-modal generation via iterative diffusion and remasking, demonstrating its superior performance and flexibility across diverse omics tasks. From a representation perspective, HoloCell provides a unified digital mapping of cellular states across multiple omics layers, capturing cell heterogeneity as an integrated system. From a generation perspective, its iterative diffusion and remasking framework accounts for the inherently unordered nature of biological features, enabling in silico simulation of multi-omics information flow. Together, these capabilities position HoloCell as a versatile foundation model toward the emerging concept of a virtual cell, offering both systematic characterization and generative simulation of cellular systems within a unified framework.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

LLMpedia: A Transparent Framework to Materialize an LLM's Encyclopedic Knowledge at Scale

Benchmarks like MMLU suggest flagship language models approach factuality saturation above 90\%. LLMpedia shows this picture is incomplete. We materialize ${\sim}$1.3M encyclopedia articles entirely from parametric memory across three model families, then audit every claim against Wikipedia and curated web evidence. For \texttt{gpt-5-mini}, the verifiable true rate is 68.4\% on Wikipedia-covered subjects - more than 21\,pp below MMLU - and the gap is driven by unverifiability (30.5\%), not refutation (1.2\%). Beyond Wikipedia, frontier articles audited against curated web evidence reach 57.6\%; Wikipedia covers only 56.7\% of model-surfaced subjects, and three model families overlap in just 7.3\% of subject choices. In a retrieval-trap benchmark inspired by prior analysis of Grokipedia, LLMpedia is more factual at roughly half the textual similarity to Wikipedia. Every prompt, article, and verdict is released. Data, code, interface: https://llmpedia.net.

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

SAIGuard: Communication-State Simulation for Proactive Defense of LLM Multi-Agent Systems

arXiv:2606.12474v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) solve complex tasks through inter-agent collaboration, but their communication-driven nature also allows security risks to spread across agents and trigger system-wide failures. Existing MAS defenses mainly follow a reactive paradigm after execution by detecting and isolating harmful agents, which may cause irreversible damage and degrade collaborative utility. To address this, we propose a proactive defense framework for MAS security, namely a Simulation-aware Interception Guard (SAIGuard). SAIGuard performs communication-state simulation over the MAS interaction graph, estimates the impact of incoming messages on local agent states and the global MAS state, and detects risky messages via reconstruction deviations from benign communication patterns. Instead of isolating agents, SAIGuard sanitizes or regenerates suspicious messages before it propagation into system. Experiments across diverse topologies and attack scenarios show that SAIGuard reduces attack success rates while maintaining MAS utility, outperforming reactive defenses.

06.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

‘Hidden hero’ peptides guard crops against sudden cold

Authors: Unknown Author

A protein signal remains silent under normal conditions but is activated under cold stress to protect developing pollen. This ‘on-demand’ resilience mechanism could enable the development of ‘climate smart’ crops that maintain high yields in good years and food security under climate stress. A peptide signal ensures that, in cold conditions, developing pollen receives nutrients at the right time.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Litespark Inference For CPUs: Ultra-Fast SIMD Framework for Ternary (1.58-bit) Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have transformed artificial intelligence, but their computational requirements remain prohibitive for most users. Standard inference demands expensive datacenter GPUs or cloud API access, leaving over one billion personal computers underutilized for AI workloads. Ternary models offer a path forward: their weights are constrained to {-1, 0, +1}, theoretically eliminating the need for floating-point multiplication. However, existing frameworks fail to exploit this structure, treating ternary models as dense floating-point networks. We address this gap with custom SIMD kernels that replace matrix multiplication with simple addition and subtraction operations, targeting the integer dot product instructions available on modern CPUs. Our implementation, Litespark-Inference, is pip-installable and integrates directly with Hugging-Face, achieving 18.15x higher throughput, 7.15x faster time-to-first-token and 6.03x memory reduction compared to standard PyTorch inference on Apple Silicon, with comparable or higher throughput speedups up to 95.81x on Intel and AMD processors.

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

Weisfeiler Lehman Test on Combinatorial Complexes: Generalized Expressive Power of Topological Neural Networks

arXiv:2605.00725v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Topological neural networks have emerged as effective tools for modeling higher-order relational structures beyond pairwise graphs, including hypergraphs, simplicial complexes, and cell complexes. However, existing Weisfeiler-Leman type expressivity analyses are typically developed on different structural domains and rely on domain-specific neighborhood systems, making their expressive powers difficult to compare within a common formalism. In this paper, we introduce the Combinatorial Complex Weisfeiler-Leman (CCWL) framework, a unified expressive power refinement defined on combinatorial complexes. By exploiting the ability of combinatorial complexes to represent both set-type relations and part-whole hierarchies, CCWL performs topological color refinement through four structural neighborhoods: boundary, co-boundary, lower adjacency, and upper adjacency. We show that, under specified lifting maps, CCWL can simulate several domain-specific WL-type refinements, thereby providing a common theoretical baseline for analyzing topological message passing. We further study the neighborhood sufficiency problem and prove that, under explicit coverage conditions, a reduced refinement using only lower- and upper-adjacent bridge information preserves the distinguishing power of the full four-neighborhood CCWL refinement. Guided by this theoretical result, we instantiate the reduced refinement as the Combinatorial Complex Isomorphism Network (CCIN). Experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that CCIN achieves competitive performance against representative graph and topological neural network baselines. Ablation studies and resource-efficiency analyses further support the effectiveness of the proposed lower/upper-neighborhood design.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Point-Wise Geometry-Aware Transformer for Partial-to-Full Point Cloud Registration in Computer-Assisted Surgery

Partial-to-full registration remains challenging due to varying overlap ratios, fluctuating point densities, and the presence of noise. While transformers have shown strong potential for point cloud processing, prior methods typically confine them to global context aggregation, overlooking fine-grained local geometry crucial for accurate correspondence. We propose GAPR-Net, a learning-based point cloud registration framework with a coarse-to-fine architecture that combines convolution and transformer modules, in which local and global information is fused between the partial and full point clouds using a cross-attention mechanism. To achieve this, a transformation-invariant point-wise geometric feature representation is proposed, which can robustly capture relative geometric features for individual points with respect to their neighboring points. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, experiments are conducted on four geometrically distinct bones, including the tibia, femur, pelvis, and thoracic cartilage. The overall registration recall reaches 94.2\%, the method results in a low RMSE of 1.992 mm and $R^2$ values of 0.908 and 0.974 for rotation and translation, respectively. The results demonstrate that the proposed method effectively addresses the partial-to-full point cloud registration problem. The proposed method enables highly accurate 3D point cloud registration using partial observation, providing a critical foundation for precise surgical navigation and robotic interventions in computer-assisted surgery. The code will be accessed after the double-blind review process.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Quantum Batteries as Work Sources for Phase-Locked Parametric Amplification

Authors:

arXiv:2606.20306v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum batteries have been proposed as locally precharged work sources for superconducting quantum technologies, suggesting a route to reduce continuously supplied microwave drives. Here we ask whether the pump tone of a quantum-limited parametric amplifier can be replaced, or strongly duty-cycled, by a finite bosonic quantum battery. Quantizing the pump of a nondegenerate parametric amplifier exposes a resource distinction hidden in the classical description: stored pump energy can generate signal-idler photons, but pump phase coherence is required to generate a phase-locked amplifier field. In a closed trilinear model, coherent and phase-randomized coherent pumps with the same photon-number distribution produce comparable pair numbers, yet only the coherent pump produces anomalous two-mode coherence and an EPR-squeezed interference dip. Including leakage, we collect the emitted fields into cascaded temporal modes. At matched collector bandwidth, the coherent pump gives \(I_{\min}^{(f)}=0.553\), whereas the phase-randomized pump gives \(I_{\min}^{(f)}=1.94\) at nearly identical collected energy. Weak amplitude squeezing slightly improves the dip by reducing finite-pump number fluctuations while preserving the coherent displacement. Thus battery-powered parametric amplification requires phase-coherent stored energy, possibly assisted by number-noise reduction, rather than stored energy alone.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Real-World Effectiveness and Safety of Avacopan in ANCA-Associated Vasculitis: A Systematic Literature Review and Meta-analysis

Background: The efficacy and safety of avacopan in ANCA-associated vasculitis (AAV) has been established in randomized trials of of avacopan as a glucocorticoid (GC) sparing therapy. However, real world evidence (RWE) has an important role in confirming effectiveness and evaluating safety in more generalizable settings. This study aimed to synthesize RWE on the effectiveness and safety of avacopan in adults with AAV. Methods: A systematic literature review and meta analysis of non interventional real world studies was conducted in accordance with Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. Eligible studies included adults with AAV treated with avacopan in routine clinical practice. Pooled estimates of effectiveness and safety outcomes were calculated using random effects meta-analyses. Primary outcomes included remission at 6 and 12 months and sustained remission at 12 months. Secondary outcomes included relapse, GC use and dosing, hepatotoxicity, infections, and treatment discontinuation. Exploratory outcomes included changes in estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) and dialysis related endpoints. Results: A total of 71 studies were included and contributed to quantitative analyses. Pooled remission for patients on avacopan was 87% (95% CI: 75%-94%) at 6 months and 93% (95% CI: 86%-97%) at 12 months, and sustained remission was 86% (95% CI: 74%-93%) at 12 months. Relapse at 12 months was low (7%; 95% CI: 4%-11%). GC use was 36% at both 6 and 12 months. Improvements in eGFR were observed at 6 months (18 mL/min/1.73 m2) and 12 months (18 mL/min/1.73 m2), and dialysis liberation was 66% in a limited subset. Among avacopan patients, 11% experienced any hepatotoxicity, including 7% with serious (defined as directly reported or requiring hospitalization) hepatotoxicity, while 7% experienced serious (defined as directly reported or requiring hospitalization) infection. Conclusions: In real world clinical practice, avacopan is associated with high remission rates, low relapse rates, and a consistent GC sparing effect, with effectiveness comparable to standard of care regimens. Findings support its clinical use with appropriate safety monitoring; however, the observed heterogeneity in hepatotoxicity and the limited comparative effectiveness evidence highlight areas requiring further investigation.

12.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15

Maternal BMI and Placental Transcriptomic Changes: A Meta-Analysis of Gene Expression at the Maternal-Fetal Interface

Objective: Maternal body mass index (BMI) is often used as a measure of metabolic status and increased or decreased maternal BMI is associated with a heightened risk of cardiometabolic diseases across generations. The placenta mediates these maternal metabolic cues; however, its genome wide transcriptional adaptations in response to maternal BMI remain incompletely defined. Methods: To delineate placental genes, pathways, and interaction clusters whose transcript abundance varies with maternal prepregnancy BMI through a genome wide meta analysis of human placental RNA sequencing datasets. Placental RNA seq reads from four publicly available cohorts (n=146) were mapped to the GRCh38 reference genome and differentially expressed genes were identified. An independent microarray cohort (n=19) was reanalysed separately to facilitate cross platform comparison. Functional enrichment employed GO, KEGG, and STRING protein interaction resources. Results: Meta-analysis of 146 RNA seq samples identified eight genes with genome-wide significance in placentae from underweight pregnancies including inflammatory signaling gene MAP4K1 and metabolic enzyme PSPH, while overweight and obese categories revealed nominally significant differential expression. KEGG analysis demonstrated significant downregulation of oxidative phosphorylation with increasing maternal BMI, and protein-protein interaction networks revealed inflammatory mediators as central nodes in overweight and obese groups. Independent microarray validation corroborated key findings, including consistent downregulation of oxidative phosphorylation in obesity. Conclusion: Maternal BMI is associated with placental transcriptomic signatures involving inflammatory, metabolic, and hormonal pathways, with consistent downregulation of oxidative phosphorylation across platforms. This genome-wide meta-analysis provides a reproducible catalogue of BMI-responsive placental transcripts that may contribute to developmental programming of offspring health.

13.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-21

GENATATORs: ab initio Gene Annotation With DNA Language Models

Inference of gene structure and location from genome sequences - known as de novo gene annotation - is a fundamental task in biological research. However, sequence grammar encoding gene structure is complex and poorly understood, often requiring costly transcriptomic data for accurate gene annotation. In this work, we benchmark current solutions and develop new methods of gene annotation. We show that pretrained DNA language model (DNA LM) embeddings do not capture the features necessary for precise gene segmentation, and that task-specific fine-tuning remains essential. We comprehensively evaluate the impact of model architecture, training strategy, receptive field size, dataset composition, and data augmentations on gene segmentation performance. We revisit standard evaluation protocols, showing that commonly used per-token and per-sequence metrics fail to capture the challenges of real-world gene annotation. We introduce and theoretically justify new biologically grounded metrics, along with benchmarking datasets that better capture annotation quality. We show that fine-tuned DNA LMs outperform existing annotation tools, generalizing across species separated by hundreds of millions of years from those seen during training, and providing segmentation of previously intractable non-coding transcripts and untranslated regions of protein-coding genes. Our results thus provide a foundation for new biological applications centered on accurate gene annotation.

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

Semantic Grading of Written Answers in Low-Resource Language Bangla Using a Fine-Tuned Lightweight Language Model

Bangla is among the world's most widely spoken languages, yet it remains underserved in educational NLP research. In many remote and rural regions, access to qualified subject teachers is limited, and written answers are consequently graded largely by hand, restricting timely and consistent feedback. Automatic assessment is challenging because semantically correct responses can vary substantially in surface form. We present a bilingual (Bangla-English) evaluation system designed for low-resource educational settings that prioritizes semantic correctness over lexical overlap. Our approach fine-tunes a lightweight language model to grade each response using the question, reference answer, and student answer, producing a numeric score and concise, context-grounded feedback suitable for classroom deployment. We also construct a synthetic bilingual dataset to enable controlled training and evaluation. Across proprietary and open-source LLMs evaluated under a unified protocol, our QLoRA-tuned Qwen3-8B confirms consistent improvement by producing the most leakage-resistant feedback (RoRa = 0.819) in synthetic evaluation and the strongest agreement with human scores (rho = 0.936, MAE = 0.725) in a dedicated human study.

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

LEDGER: A Long-Context Benchmark of Corporate Annual Reports for Grounded Financial Retrieval and Extraction

Finance reporting is a natural proving ground for large language models, and the very-long-context capabilities of recent models across all sizes make rigorous evaluation in this domain an increasingly pressing need. Yet most public financial resources reduce the task to plain-text SEC 10-K filings paired with a handful of question-answer items. We release LEDGER (Long-context Evaluation of Documents for Grounded Extraction and Retrieval), a corpus of 4,999 digitized corporate annual reports - full documents with figures, tables, and narrative, not just regulatory filings. Each report is labeled with 31 consolidated financial KPIs to be extracted and linked to the market's reaction at the earnings date. From this data we derive three evaluation benchmarks spanning the difficulty spectrum: a pure page-level KPI retrieval task with TREC-style relevance judgments over 118,048 questions in natural language, a conversational "needle-in-a-haystack" single-value lookup, and a full KPI extraction task, both from long, numerically dense reports. We additionally provide human OCR-quality annotations with inter-annotator agreement and the complete extraction, validation, and scoring toolchain. We further demonstrate the dataset's research utility with a case study linking CEO-letter rhetoric to post-publication market impact.

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

Imperfect Visual Verification for Code Edition : A Case Study on TikZ

arXiv:2606.15693v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLMs have significantly advanced code generation, enabling the synthesis of functional programs. While recent systems achieve strong performance on many coding benchmarks, tasks involving programs such as TikZ that generate visual artifacts remain challenging, in particular on visual code customization. Unlike generation from scratch, customization requires localized, semantics-preserving edits: the model must locate relevant code, modify it according to the instruction, and preserve the remaining structure and rendering. Approaches based on post-hoc iterative refinement/correction where a verifier provides feedback to guide corrections, have shown promise. However, in the case of programs with a visual outcome such as in TikZ, where correctness is harder or likely impossible to formalize and evaluate automatically, deterministic verifiers do not exist. Hence, developers can only rely on imperfect verifiers. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study to answer:to what extent can iterative refinement remain effective when the verifier itself is unreliable?} We use TikZ as a focused case study that isolates the core difficulties of the problem (weak code structure, fine-grained visual semantics, and difficult feature localization) in a controlled and challenging setting. We define visual code customization as an iterative editing problem with an imperfect oracle, and introduce a framework for analyzing such iterative refinements. We conduct a large-scale study and evaluate multiple LLM-based and tool-augmented visual verifiers within iterative refinement pipelines, and perform extensive manual annotation of refinement trajectories to assess verifier behavior and feedback quality. Our findings show that even imperfect verifiers can determine with moderate accuracy whether visual instructions are applied to code, achieving F1-scores up to 0.815. Feedback improves iterative refinement, especially for weaker models, adding 11–20 perfect customizations for Qwen3-vl-30b-a3b-Instruct, while stronger models like Gemini-3 gain fewer improvements (+5) but benefit more from accurate verification that prevents premature acceptance. Feedback is effective only when it precisely identifies image issues, provides actionable guidance, addresses all relevant problems, and remains grounded in the original instruction.

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

From Agent Traces to Trust: A Survey of Evidence Tracing and Execution Provenance in LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.04990v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-based agents are evolving from passive text generators into autonomous systems capable of planning, tool use, retrieval, memory access, environmental interaction, and multi-agent collaboration. These capabilities expand agent autonomy, but also make agent behavior harder to verify, debug, and audit. Final-answer accuracy alone cannot explain how an output was produced, which evidence supported each claim, whether tool calls were justified, how memory influenced later decisions, or where failures originated. This survey examines evidence tracing and execution provenance as foundations for process-level accountability in trustworthy LLM agents. We define execution provenance as the typed graph of an agent execution and evidence tracing as its projection onto evidence-support relations. This perspective connects retrieval grounding, claim support, tool-use safety, memory lineage, observability, debugging, audit, and recovery within a unified framework. We introduce a taxonomy covering trace sources, evidence and execution units, provenance relations, tracing granularity and timing, representation forms, and trust functions. We then review key methodological directions, including provenance representation, evidence attribution, tool-use provenance, runtime guardrails, provenance-bearing memory, observability, and failure diagnosis. Finally, we discuss benchmarks, datasets, metrics, and open challenges for building provenance-aware, auditable, and recoverable agent systems.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Mitigating Simplicity Bias in OOD Detection through Object Co-occurrence Analysis

arXiv:2605.07821v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is crucial for ensuring the reliability of deep learning models. Existing methods mostly focus on regular entangled representations to discriminate in-distribution (ID) and OOD data, neglecting the rich contextual information within images. This issue is particularly challenging for detecting near-OOD, as models with simplicity bias struggle to learn discriminative features in disentangled representations. The human visual system can use the co-occurrence of objects in the natural environment to facilitate scene understanding. Inspired by this, we propose an Object-Centric OOD detection framework that learns to capture Object CO-occurrence (OCO) patterns within images. The proposed method introduces a new OOD detection paradigm that understands object co-occurrence within an image by predicting disentangled representations for the test sample, then adaptively divides patterns into three scenarios based on object co-occurrence patterns observed in ID training data, and finally performs OOD detection in a divide-and-conquer manner. By doing so, OCO can distinguish near-OOD by considering the semantic contextual relationships present in their images, avoiding the tendency to focus solely on simple, easily learnable regions. We evaluate OCO through experiments across challenging and full-spectrum OOD settings, demonstrating competitive results and confirming its ability to address both semantic and covariate shifts. Code is released at https://github.com/Michael-McQueen/OCO.

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

Using Reinforcement Learning to Optimize the Global and Local Crossing Number

arXiv:2509.06108v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Graph drawing concerns the algorithmic visualization of graphs. A good drawing of a graph is easy to read and facilitates solving tasks on the graph. Several properties have been identified to occur in good drawings of graphs. Such properties include a low number of crossings, large angles between edges, short edges, and depicting symmetries. Many of these properties are explicitly measurable metrics. This brings us to the insight that graph drawing can be seen as a game. In this paper, we study a single-player optimization game in which the player iteratively moves vertices of a straight-line graph drawing to reduce edge crossings. This game arose naturally from the automatic track of the Graph Drawing Challenge, where solutions are obtained by repeatedly performing local vertex movements. We formalize this process as a game with full information and investigate whether reinforcement learning can discover effective strategies for playing it. Our reinforcement-learning agent observes the local geometric and structural context of a vertex and selects a movement direction with the goal of reducing either the global or the local crossing number, that is, the total number of crossings or the maximum number of crossings per edge. We compare the resulting strategies to existing methods and established crossing-minimization heuristics on standard benchmark graphs. While our approach does not out-compete state-of-the-art methods for minimizing the global crossing number, it is competitive and often superior for minimizing the local crossing number.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Connections Between Pairs of Filters Improve the Accuracy of Convolutional Neural Networks

While researchers continue to find new and improved network structures for CNNs, most of the newly invented architectures still rely on the traditional pattern of stacking convolutional blocks and separating them with pointwise activation functions. However, there are drawbacks to a network purely building on pointwise nonlinearities. One alternative is to introduce a pairwise connection between two filters of a network. Typical connection functions use multiplications or the minimum operation to realize logical AND connections. In this paper, we go one step further by demonstrating that CNNs can benefit from more general connections, which include parameters that are learned. With such parameters, the network is able to implement different connections in different network layers and better adapt the connection function to the task at hand.

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

TokenRatio: Principled Token-Level Preference Optimization via Ratio Matching

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a widely used RL-free method for aligning language models from pairwise preferences, but it models preferences over full sequences even though generation is driven by per-token decisions. Existing token-level extensions typically decompose a sequence-level Bradley-Terry objective across timesteps, leaving per-prefix (state-wise) optimality implicit. We study how to recover token-level preference optimality using only standard sequence-level pairwise comparisons. We introduce Token-level Bregman Preference Optimization (TBPO), which posits a token-level Bradley-Terry preference model over next-token actions conditioned on the prefix, and derive a Bregman-divergence density-ratio matching objective that generalizes the logistic/DPO loss while preserving the optimal policy induced by the token-level model and maintaining DPO-like simplicity. We introduce two instantiations: TBPO-Q, which explicitly learns a lightweight state baseline, and TBPO-A, which removes the baseline through advantage normalization. Across instruction following, helpfulness/harmlessness, and summarization benchmarks, TBPO improves alignment quality and training stability and increases output diversity relative to strong sequence-level and token-level baselines.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Riemannian Metric Matching for Scalable Geometric Modeling of Distributions

arXiv:2606.14334v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-dimensional datasets often concentrate near low-dimensional structures, but estimating their geometry from samples typically relies on graphs and kernels that scale poorly with dataset size and dimension. We propose Riemannian metric matching: a denoising probabilistic framework for learning the Riemannian geometry of data using neural networks. Specifically, we learn the carré du champ operator, which, using diffusion geometry, gives us access to the Riemannian geometry toolkit for downstream machine learning and statistical tasks. Our key observation is that the carré du champ operator can be formulated as a conditional expectation over random perturbations of the data, which can be exploited for sample-wise training and constant cost, amortized inference without explicit kernel construction. Empirically, metric matching rivals or improves the accuracy of $k$-NN-based diffusion geometry estimators, while enabling amortized inference that is up to $400\times$ faster, and supports graph-free geometric analysis on high-dimensional images where nearest neighbors break down.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

AnonShield: Scalable On-Premise Pseudonymization for CSIRT Vulnerability Data

arXiv:2606.15650v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present AnonShield, a high-throughput, on-premise pseudonymization system that combines GPU-accelerated NER, streaming processing, caching, and schema-aware configuration. Evaluated on datasets up to 550 MB (70,951 records), AnonShield reduces processing time from over 92 hours to under 10 minutes (up to 738x speedup) while achieving up to 94.2% F1-score and 96.7% recall. Our results show that scalable pseudonymization of vulnerability data is feasible without sacrificing analytical utility, enabling compliant data sharing in operational CSIRT environments.

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

Phonikud: Overcoming Phonetic Underspecification for Hebrew Text-To-Speech

Text-to-speech (TTS) for Modern Hebrew is challenged by the language's orthographic complexity, with existing solutions ignoring underspecified phonetic features such as stress. We present a framework for more phonetically accurate Hebrew TTS with four contributions: (1) Phonikud, an open-source Hebrew grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) system that outputs fully-specified International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcriptions, designed by augmenting a base diacritizer. (2) The ILSpeech corpus of paired Hebrew audio, text, and expert IPA annotations. (3) A benchmark for the previously unmeasured task of Hebrew G2P conversion. (4) Hebrew audio-to-IPA models capturing previously disregarded phonetic details for automatic TTS evaluation. Our results show that Phonikud more accurately predicts Hebrew phonemes than prior methods, and that small, local TTS models with phonetic input from Phonikud approach large proprietary systems. We release our code, data, and models at https://phonikud.github.io.

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

Learning a Maximum Entropy Model for Visual Textures using Diffusion

Visual textures – spatially homogeneous image regions containing repeated elements (e.g. a field of grass, the bark of a tree) – are ubiquitous in visual scenes and provide important cues for recognizing and analyzing materials and objects. A number of existing texture models extract essential statistics from a single texture image, and can then generate high-quality samples that are visually similar to the original by matching these statistics. However, their statistics are either hand-designed or based on a network pretrained for another purpose (e.g., object recognition). Here, we develop the first principled method for unsupervised learning of a set of statistics that are used to constrain a maximum entropy probability model. We leverage methods developed for generative diffusion models to derive training and sampling procedures, and compare these to the traditional method of sampling via matching the statistics. Despite the compactness of our trained model (512 statistics), it generates texture images whose quality is as good as or better than the current state-of-the-art model (~177k statistics). A more direct comparison of the two models, obtained by synthesizing images that are indistinguishable for one model but maximally different for the other, reveals their relative strengths and weaknesses. Finally, we show that unlike previous statistical texture models, a straight trajectory in the representation space of our model generates homogeneous texture samples that interpolate smoothly between the features of the two end points.