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

Embodied-R1.5: Evolving Physical Intelligence via Embodied Foundation Models

arXiv:2606.11324v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce Embodied-R1.5, a unified Embodied Foundation Model (EFM) that integrates comprehensive embodied reasoning capabilities, spanning embodied cognition, task planning, correction, and pointing, within a single architecture toward general physical intelligence. Leveraging three automated data construction pipelines to significantly expand the data coverage of critical capabilities, we build a large-scale data system of over 15B tokens, and design a multi-task balanced RL recipe to alleviate heterogeneous task conflicts. We further introduce a Planner-Grounder-Corrector (PGC) closed-loop framework that enables a single model to autonomously execute and self-correct over long-horizon tasks. With only 8B parameters, Embodied-R1.5 achieves SOTA on 16 out of 24 embodied VLM benchmarks, surpassing leading models like Gemini-Robotics-ER-1.5 and GPT-5.4. Benefiting from the internalized embodied capabilities, Embodied-R1.5 can be fine-tuned into a VLA with only a small amount of data, outperforming leading VLA models like $\pi_{0.5}$ across 4 popular manipulation benchmark suites. We further conduct extensive zero-shot real-robot experiments, validating performance in instruction following, affordance grounding, articulated object manipulation, and long-horizon complex tasks, demonstrating strong generalization to the physical world. We open-source model weights, datasets, training code, and EmbodiedEvalKit, an evaluation framework tailored for embodied tasks, to facilitate future research in EFMs.

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

ToaSt: Token Channel Selection and Structured Pruning for Efficient ViT

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have achieved remarkable success across various vision tasks, yet their deployment is often hindered by prohibitive computational costs. While structured weight pruning and token compression have emerged as promising solutions, they suffer from prolonged retraining and inter-layer dependencies that complicate optimization, respectively. We propose ToaSt, a decoupled framework applying specialized strategies to distinct ViT components. We apply coupled head-wise structured pruning to Multi-Head Self-Attention modules, leveraging attention operation characteristics to enhance robustness. For Feed-Forward Networks (over 60% of FLOPs), we introduce Token Channel Selection (TCS), a training-free method that filters redundant noise channels at inference time. Extensive evaluations across nine diverse models, including DeiT, ViT-MAE, and Swin Transformer, demonstrate that ToaSt achieves superior trade-offs between accuracy and efficiency, consistently outperforming existing baselines. On ViT-MAE-Huge, ToaSt achieves 88.52% accuracy (+1.64%p) with 39.4% FLOPs reduction. ToaSt also transfers effectively to diverse downstream tasks (COCO detection, ADE20K segmentation, CIFAR-100 classification), achieving 52.2 versus 51.9 mAP on COCO. Code: github.com/SHANNonLab-HUFS/ToaSt

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Memory-Efficient Policy Libraries with Low-Rank Adaptation in Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.25700v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs), there has been success in minimizing both memory usage and computation with Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT), like Low Rank Adaptation (LoRA). In this article, we have explored whether this approach is transferable to the world of robotics and Reinforcement Learning (RL), allowing learning with reduced memory usage and improved computational performance. Specifically, we focused on a version of multi-task robotics, where a library of specialist policies are created. In such a library memory efficiency is especially important. We used a Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm and fine-tuned a baseline model to different tasks using LoRA. Our results demonstrate that, depending on the hyperparameters, LoRA can minimize memory usage by a factor of 20-160 compared to full fine-tuning of all layers. This implies a 90-95% storage saving when deploying a library of many (10-50) specialized policies, which can be the differentiating factor between being able to store the entire library in memory or having to use swap-memory in an applied robotics setting. At the same time, our results indicate that there is no significant difference in the success-rate between full fine-tuning and LoRA fine-tuning for the selected tasks.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Scalable quantum circuit knitting using a weak-coupling approximation

arXiv:2606.19035v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present a method for performing distributed quantum computing with controlled approximations. Exact distributed quantum computing requires exponential classical information to reconstruct the quantum process. However, we show how the classical cost is reduced to polynomial if the quantum procedure can be partitioned between a qubit that is weakly coupled the other qubits. We demonstrate our method for a layered circuit based on the circuits used for the quantum approximate optimization algorithm.

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

LLM-Based Visual Explanation Evaluation Framework for Assessing the Explainability of Facial Skin Disease Classification Models

Authors:

This study proposes a domain-specific LLM-based Visual Explanation Evaluation Framework for assessing Grad-CAM explanations in facial skin disease diagnosis models. While previous studies have primarily focused on improving classification performance through data augmentation techniques, relatively few studies have systematically examined whether model explanations are grounded in clinically relevant lesion regions. In this study, geometric augmentation, color-based augmentation, and mixed augmentation strategies were applied to facial skin disease classification models based on EfficientNet-B0, MobileNetV3, and ResNet18. Grad-CAM was employed to generate visual explanations representing the models' decision-making processes. Furthermore, an LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation framework was designed using GPT-5.5, Gemini 3.5 Flash, and Claude Sonnet 4.6 to assess Grad-CAM explanations from the perspectives of lesion localization and explanation trustworthiness. To improve evaluation consistency and clinical grounding, a progressive prompt engineering strategy was introduced, incorporating evaluation rubrics, clinical knowledge, penalty rules, and structured output formats.

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

Realistic noise synthesis reduces bias and improves tissue microstructure estimation with supervised machine learning

arXiv:2606.02044v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion MRI enables non-invasive probing of tissue microstructure, but accurate parameter estimation is challenged by noise-related effects. In supervised machine learning frameworks trained on simulated data, discrepancies between the noise characteristics of simulated and acquired signals introduce a form of covariate shift, whereby the input signal distribution differs between training and inference. We investigated the impact of this mismatch on microstructure parameter estimation and propose a realistic noise synthesis (RNS) framework to mitigate it. RNS incorporates both the Rician expectation and the effective post-processing noise variance into simulated training signals. The Rician expectation was modelled using a noise standard deviation estimated with MPPCA, while the effective standard deviation was derived from spherical harmonic residuals of preprocessed data. The method was evaluated using the cylinder-zeppelin and the SANDI models on simulated datasets across multiple SNR levels and on in vivo diffusion data with repeated acquisitions. Sensitivity to noise misestimation was also assessed. Ignoring magnitude-induced noise effects during training produced systematic, SNR-dependent parameter bias, particularly at low SNR. Incorporating the Rician expectation substantially reduced bias to the level of noise-aware nonlinear least-squares fitting. Modelling the effective standard deviation further improved precision. Performance was largely independent of regression architecture but sensitive to accurate noise estimation. These findings demonstrate that realistic noise modelling in simulated training data mitigates signal-domain covariate shift and is essential for unbiased supervised microstructure estimation, particularly in low-SNR regimes associated with high b-values or high spatial resolution.

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

TacCoRL: Integrating Tactile Feedback into VLA via Simulation

arXiv:2606.11743v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models provide strong visual, language, and action priors for robot manipulation, but visual observations alone often miss the local contact state required for contact-rich tasks. We present TacCoRL, a scalable framework that injects Tactile feedback into VLA policies and improves them through sim-real Co-training and simulation-based reinforcement learning (RL), without requiring large-scale tactile pretraining or extensive real-world contact exploration. The key idea is not only adding touch as an input, but learning how contact readings should modulate action responses in near-failure states that are rare in demonstrations and risky to collect on hardware. We use a real-aligned simulator as a closed-loop training environment for contact interaction. Mixed simulated and real trajectories first warm-start tactile-conditioned actions in the pretrained policy. Reinforcement learning with verifiable task rewards then optimizes the policy using simulated contact rollouts. It reinforces tactile-conditioned actions that lead to task completion, while a supervised objective on real trajectories keeps the refined policy anchored to deployment visual, tactile, and action distributions. The resulting policy transfers directly to the real robot without privileged simulation state or online real-world RL. Across four bimanual contact-rich tasks, the final visuo-tactile policy achieves an average success rate of 72.5%, compared to baseline of 50.0%. Result videos and more details are available at https://tac-corl.github.io/

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Quantum gates with parametrically driven multi-qubit couplers

arXiv:2606.14522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Superconducting quantum processors could significantly profit from enhanced connectivity together with precise control of interactions and gates between qubits. Here we investigate plaquettes of four qubits that are coupled via a central tunable coupling circuit, so that not only gates between qubits connected by an edge of the plaquette can be executed but also between qubits across the diagonal. By numerically and analytically analyzing parametrically driven processes, we explore $\sqrt{iSWAP}$-gates between any pair of qubits, also across the diagonal, as well as three-qubit interactions and gates. For experimentally available circuit parameters, we for example find $\sqrt{iSWAP}$-gates with a gate time of 50 ns and 99.9\% fidelity, which is decreased to 99.4\% if two such gates are executed in parallel on disjoint qubit pairs in the plaquette. For three-qubit gates we find fidelities of 95\% fidelity at a gate time of 200 ns.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Usability testing with a prototype user interface of an Artificial Intelligence driven air-Safety Tool (AISaT)

Involving end-users in the development of an AI tool is an important facilitator to its implementation. Usability testing was therefore conducted with a prototype user interface of an Artificial Intelligence driven air-Safety Tool (AISaT) to capture the perspectives and user experiences of AISaT from 10 staff members across two hospitals working within estates, infection prevention and control, and clinical areas, to inform the development of next iterations of AISaT. The perspectives shared could be grouped under improvements to the understand-ability; content; navigation; visibility; usability; workflow; ownership; and frequency of use of the tool. There were key areas that can and will be easily improved within AISaT, however there were areas that required a deeper level of critical reflection, such as incorporating data on more existing variables in a room (i.e., existing ventilation) and whether all patients should be assumed as infectious and breathing heavily. The research team must consider if the target audience of end users and recommended frequency of AISaT use will be pre-defined by the tool developers, or whether this level of detail should be left to each individual hospital to decide.

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

ENPIRE: Agentic Robot Policy Self-Improvement in the Real World

arXiv:2606.19980v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Achieving dexterous robotic manipulation in the real world heavily relies on human supervision and algorithm engineering, which becomes a central bottleneck in the pursuit of general physical intelligence. Although emerging coding agents can generate code to automate algorithm search, their successes remain largely confined in digital environments. We conjecture that the missing abstraction to automate robotics research is a repeatable feedback loop for real-world policy improvement: reset the scene, execute a policy, verify the outcome, and refine the next iteration. To bridge this gap, we introduce ENPIRE, a harness framework for coding agents that instantiates this physical feedback routine with four core modules: an Environment module (EN) for automatic reset and verification, a Policy Improvement module (PI) that launches policy refinement, a Rollout module (R) to evaluate policies with one or multiple physical robots operating in parallel, and an Evolution module (E) in which coding agents analyze logs, consult literature, improve training infrastructure and algorithm code to address failure modes. This closed-loop system transforms real-world manipulation learning into a controllable optimization procedure, minimizing human effort while allowing fair ablations across training recipe and agent variants. Powered by ENPIRE, frontier coding agents can autonomously train a policy to achieve a 99% success rate on challenging, dexterous manipulation tasks, such as organizing a pin box, fastening a zip tie, and tool use, a process that further accelerates when we dispatch an agent team on a robot fleet. Our results suggest a practical and scalable path toward deploying coding agents to autonomously advancing robotics in the physical world.

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

The Culture Funnel: You Can't Align What isn't in the Data

Current cultural alignment approaches focus on inference-time interventions, assuming models already contain sufficient cultural knowledge. We argue modern LLM pipelines suffer from a cultural data funnel. Using a multidimensional tagging framework across pretraining, fine-tuning, alignment, and reasoning datasets, we show explicit cultural signals decline sharply during post-training, while geographically concentrated, task-specialized data dominates. Multilinguality enhances geographic diversity of cultural knowledge but does not ensure balanced representation. Our tags improve downstream cultural benchmark performance, demonstrating that advances require shifting focus in training data pipelines. To facilitate future research, we release our culturally tagged dataset with 5.6M samples at https://huggingface.co/datasets/CohereLabs/CultureMarkers.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Association of circulating endothelial progenitor cell count and functional outcome in patients with acute ischemic stroke due to intracranial large vessel occlusion

Background: Circulating endothelial progenitor cells (cEPCs) contribute to vascular repair following an ischemic stroke. The aim of the study was to evaluate the association between cEPCs and functional outcomes in patients with acute ischemic stroke (AIS) due to large vessel occlusion (LVO) who received endovascular therapy (EVT). Methods: Prospective study of patients with LVO-AIS who received EVT. Blood samples were obtained within 24 +- 12 hours and on day 7+-1 from stroke onset. cEPCs were detected using flow cytometry (CD34+/VEGFR2+/CD133+). The primary endpoint was a favourable functional outcome (modified Rankin Scale 0-2) at three months of follow-up. Secondary endpoints include baseline to 24 hours/day 7 changes in the National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) score and collateral circulation (CC) status. Bivariate and multivariable logistic regression analyses were performed. Results: Included were 90 patients (73.2+-12.7 years, 41.1% women) in 42 of whom (46.7%) cEPCs were detected at 24 hours. On day 7, cEPCs were detected in 27 (43.6%) of 62 patients for which this information was available. Atrial fibrillation, prior anticoagulant treatment and stroke onset-to-door time

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Signed Compression Progress on a Sealed Audit is Goodhart-Resistant

arXiv:2606.11417v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Compression progress is a long-standing proposal for intrinsic motivation: reward an agent when its world model becomes better at predicting or compressing experience. The folk claim is that this reward is "credible" because it is paid only for learning. We make this precise and prove it. If intrinsic reward is the signed decrease of a fixed sealed-audit loss, r_t = E(theta_{t-1}) - E(theta_t), then cumulative reward telescopes exactly to endpoint audit improvement, so no policy can push reward up indefinitely while true audit performance stagnates or degrades. For finite audit panels the same result holds with a sharp false-positive budget: cumulative empirical reward is at most true audit improvement plus 2 Delta_n(F, delta), the uniform audit deviation of the model class. This is horizon-free: adaptivity over time costs nothing once the sealed panel uniformly controls the class. The theorem also identifies the failure modes: the guarantee disappears if progress is clipped, scored on the agent's own stream, exposed to a high-capacity model on a reusable panel, or applied to a neural class that makes Delta_n vacuous. We give a Lean 4 mechanization of the structural core (telescoping, the finite-audit bound, finite Gibbs, and the entropy floor) and an experiment suite on ARC-TGI grid-transformation generators with adaptive holdout attacks. Experiments confirm the theory: finite-audit deviation scales as n^{-0.527}; signed progress resists clip-farming, stream leakage, and noisy-TV curiosity; naive reusable audits are exploitable by black-box scalar feedback, while standard release defenses keep the attack below the 2 Delta_n threshold. Signed compression progress on a sealed audit is an accounting signal of genuine improvement.

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

Quantum Machine Learning for Industrial Applications

arXiv:2606.14822v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in Machine Learning have transformed numerous industrial sectors, yet classical paradigms face fundamental limitations: rapidly growing data volumes, rising computational costs, significant energy consumption, and the physical scaling limits of conventional hardware architectures. Quantum computing has emerged as a promising computational paradigm to address these challenges, giving rise to the field of Quantum Machine Learning (QML). In this thesis, the theoretical foundations of QML are investigated, with a focus on near-term and future practical applications. Three central challenges are addressed: the trainability of variational quantum circuits, their expressivity, and their resistance to efficient classical simulation. The trainability of Hamming-weight preserving variational quantum circuits is first studied, and theoretical guarantees are established that resolve an open conjecture on the absence of barren plateaus for this circuit family. Subspace-preserving QML algorithms are then introduced, including photonic circuits and quantum convolutional neural networks, and are designed to mimic classical ML subroutines while offering polynomial quantum advantage. Finally, variational quantum circuits are analyzed as quantum Fourier models, and a framework is derived to jointly characterize expressivity and trainability, from which conditions are obtained under which quantum models provably separate from their classical counterparts. These contributions are intended to advance the theoretical roadmap for harnessing near-term and future quantum technologies in real-world applications.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Accidental Symmetry in the Tavis-Cummings Model via the Schwinger Boson Representation

arXiv:2606.12813v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Jaynes-Cummings (JC) Hamiltonian is a paradigmatic model of light-matter interaction and, more generally, qubit-boson interactions, widely used across atomic, optical, and superconducting qubit platforms. In the multi-qubit setting, where n qubits are identically coupled to a single boson mode, this interaction is known as the Tavis-Cummings (TC) Hamiltonian. The structure of the TC model is usually understood in terms of two standard symmetries: permutation invariance of the qubits and a U(1) symmetry associated with conservation of the total excitation number. Here we identify an additional, independent "accidental" symmetry of the TC Hamiltonian and construct the corresponding conserved observable. We show that, for n>2 qubits, this symmetry imposes strong constraints on the realizable unitary transformations. These constraints persist in the presence of the global $J_z$ Hamiltonian, but are removed by adding $J_z^2$, even though $J_z^2$ preserves both permutation invariance and the U(1) symmetry. Finally, we explain the origin of this previously unnoticed symmetry using Schwinger's boson representation of angular momentum. These restrictions have important implications for controllability of the TC system and for its applications to quantum computing, which are investigated further in a companion paper.

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

GEAR-VLA: Learning Geometry-Aware Action Representations for Generalizable Robotic Manipulation

arXiv:2606.08530v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models achieve strong benchmark performance but still struggle in real-world deployment with unseen objects, background shifts, and different robot embodiments. We argue that this stems from the lack of a unified geometry-aware manipulation representation, leaving existing VLAs vulnerable to low-level trajectory supervision, misaligned 3D features, and embodiment differences. To address this, we propose GEAR-VLA, a VLA framework for learning unified geometry-aware action representations for generalizable robotic manipulation. GEAR-VLA adopts coarse-to-fine action learning, where multi-source embodied pretraining equips the VLM with embodied reasoning and discrete action understanding before latent action tokens connect action semantics to a gradient-decoupled DiT continuous action expert. It further performs semantic-aligned 3D integration by aligning a trainable 3D spatial backbone with the VLA representation while freezing the original VLM-aligned visual pathway. To share this representation across robots, GEAR-VLA uses embodiment canonicalization, where embodiment-aware states and embodiment-invariant actions confine robot differences to the low-level interface. Extensive simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate strong generalization: GEAR-VLA achieves state-of-the-art performance on LIBERO, zero-shot LIBERO-Plus, and RoboTwin 2.0, reaches 85.9% success on AgileX and 81.0% on the pretraining-unseen LDT-01 embodiment, and obtains 90.1% success on a 6,360-trial universal grasping benchmark with 212 unseen objects. Code and models will be released at https://github.com/babynabeauty/GEAR-VLA.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Dual Dimensionality for Local and Global Attention

Decoder-only Transformers compute attention over the KV cache of preceding tokens. Keys (and Values) are typically represented with the same dimensionality, regardless of its distance from the prediction target. In natural language, however, the next word is most strongly influenced by the immediately preceding tokens. We hypothesize that local and distant tokens impose asymmetric demands on representational capacity: local tokens are more critical for predicting immediate outputs and thus require richer representations, whereas distant tokens primarily serve as long-range memory, for which lower-dimensional representations may suffice. We formalize this idea as Distance-Adaptive Representation (DAR), implemented in a controlled setting that preserves full-dimensional representations within a local context window while assigning reduced-dimensional representations (e.g. 1/4 of the original dimensionality) to tokens beyond that window. Across multiple pretraining scales (70M to 410M parameters), as well as continued supervised fine-tuning on a 1B-scale model, this approach closely matches the performance of full-dimensional baselines. In contrast, uniformly reducing dimensionality across all token positions leads to worse performance. These results challenge the common assumption that key and value dimensionality should be uniform across token positions. Our findings suggest a new direction for designing attention architectures that adaptively allocate representational capacity across sequences, enabling further reductions in KV cache during inference.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Spin mixing induced dynamics of spinor solitons in $F=1$ Bose Einstein condensates

arXiv:2606.14231v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We explore soliton interactions in a homogeneous spinor $F=1$ Bose Einstein Condensate (BEC) in the presence of a magnetic field, focusing on dark bright dark and bright dark bright configurations. We investigate how these interactions depend on the phase differences among bright solitons and their influence during the dynamics. Our findings align with prior non spinor results, i.e., repulsion among in phase bright solitons and attraction among out of phase pairs in self repulsive atomic BECs. The potential bright soliton attraction, added to the short range repulsion of dark dark soliton interactions, can lead to bound states. However, we find that these bound states break in the presence of spinor interactions due to the particle exchange dynamics between the hyperfine states of the components. Additonally, we develop an effective classical model to describe the soliton dynamics, using a Lagrangian approach. The accuracy of the model is tested by comparing it against numerical simulations. Our results suggest that the proposed model captures the essential features of soliton behavior in the presence of spin interactions, and provides congruent soliton trajectories and interspecies particle exchange dynamics in most of the cases.

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

ScoutVLA: UAV-Centric Active Perception via a Dual-Expert VLA Model for Open-World Embodied Question Answering

Aerial Embodied Question Answering (EQA) requires Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to actively perceive the environment and answer natural language questions. Existing outdoor EQA systems usually stop once the target enters the UAV's field of view, leaving the fine-grained viewpoint adjustment needed for evidence-seeking questions largely unresolved. To address this issue, we introduce FG-EQA, a fine-grained active perception EQA benchmark with more than 40K simulated trajectories and 1K real-world trajectories. Drawing inspiration from the ``waggle dance'' of scout bees, which iteratively adjust their flight paths to verify target information, we propose ScoutVLA, an evidence-driven Vision-Language-Action model for outdoor EQA. To emulate this active exploration behavior, ScoutVLA features a decoupled dual-expert architecture: a vision-language expert infers the semantic intent to identify missing evidence, while an independent action expert employs high-DoF flow matching to generate continuous viewpoint-refinement trajectories. To balance the competing demands of continuous control and semantic reasoning, we devise a decoupled training strategy with a knowledge insulation mechanism that prevents the action gradients from erasing the model's multimodal reasoning ability. Extensive simulated experiments and a qualitative real-world field study both verify the superiority of ScoutVLA over the state-of-the-art baselines, demonstrating a 10.48$\boldsymbol{\times}$ higher average strict success rate and a 7.72$\boldsymbol{\times}$ higher average QA correctness.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Training-free Cross-domain Few-shot Segmentation via Robust Semantic Representation and Matching

Cross-domain Few-shot Segmentation (CD-FSS) aims to transfer knowledge learned from source domain to distinct target domains, segmenting unseen target classes with only a few annotated samples. Although existing methods have made significant progress, they still rely on training or fine-tuning processes, which incur high computational costs and risk overfitting. We observe that when powerful and general-purpose vision foundation models are incorporated into these methods, their performance shows only marginal improvement or even degrades due to overfitting. To address this, we eliminate trainable parameters and propose a training-free framework to avoid both training overhead and overfitting. Built upon the self-supervised vision encoder DINOv3, our framework addresses cross-domain challenges through three core modules. First, the Semantic-aware Feature Re-fusion (SAFR) module identifies and re-fuses features that emphasize semantic patterns, generating representations with enhanced semantic discriminability. Additionally, the Adaptive Support Enhancement (ASE) module narrows semantic gaps between support and query through robust query information aggregation. Finally, the Hybrid Prototype Matching (HPM) module integrates matching results from diverse prototypes to adapt to varying semantic complexity across domains. Extensive experiments on four target domain datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in CD-FSS without any training.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

On-Device Neural Architecture Search

arXiv:2606.24900v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper proposes a new approach to near-sensor computing, in which a lightweight Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is performed directly on the deployment device to find the best tiny neural architecture for analyzing the real-time data acquired through sensors. This new adaptation capability can be particularly useful in the case of human-machine interfaces for which the neural network analyzing the biometrical data can be re-designed each time the user changes, after a guided data collection procedure, fighting the typical data variations between individuals on a new level. To implement the proposed approach a new NAS has been designed and then validated on the Italian Sign Language dataset (ISL), a collection of surface electromyography (sEMG) signals of the signs of the Italian alphabet, using several embedded systems. Moreover, further validation on the Case Western Reserve University dataset (CWRU), a benchmark for intelligent fault diagnosis, is presented to suggest another possible application of the proposed approach. When run on a Raspberry Pi 4, the proposed NAS performs beyond the state of the art proposing a tiny neural architecture having 0.63 times less RAM occupancy and 5.96 percentage points of more accuracy in the case of the ISL dataset; and 0.44 times less RAM occupancy and 0.2 percentage points of more accuracy in the case of the CWRU dataset.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Variational Inference via Entropic Transport Descent

arXiv:2606.25265v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Particle-based variational inference (ParVI) methods approximate an intractable target distribution by evolving an ensemble of interacting samples. Existing approaches rely predominantly on kernel-based repulsion (e.g., SVGD), which suffers from variance collapse in high dimensions and mode collapse on multimodal targets – pathologies caused by the absence of global transport structure. We introduce entropic transport descent (ETD), a ParVI family that frames each particle update as an entropy-regularized optimal transport problem. Derived from the JKO proximal scheme by lifting to the space of couplings and relaxing via the KL chain rule, each ETD iteration reduces to a Sinkhorn computation. The resulting transport plan provides global coordination, guiding each particle to nearby high-density proposals and naturally preserving multimodal structure. ETD can operate entirely score-free, requiring only pointwise evaluations of the unnormalized target density. Experiments on variance-collapse diagnostics, Bayesian logistic regression, neural networks, and molecular Boltzmann distributions show that ETD matches or outperforms SVGD, AGF-SVGD, and SGLD, with the largest gains in high-dimensional and multimodal settings.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Accelerating Multimodal Large Language Models with Prior-Corrected Token Reduction

Visual token reduction has emerged as an effective strategy for accelerating Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Many existing methods prune tokens by ranking text-visual attention scores. However, we show that attention is often dominated by a model-induced prior: even without textual instruction, MLLMs tend to focus on certain task-agnostic regions. Consequently, the attention scores of instruction-conditioned tokens are suppressed, increasing the risk that these tokens are discarded during pruning. To address this issue, we propose Prior-Corrected Token Reduction (PriorTR), a training-free token reduction method that explicitly separates task-conditioned attention from the model-induced prior. PriorTR estimates the attention map of the prior, and contrasts it with the task-conditioned attention distribution to measure the additional usable information contributed by each visual token. Importantly, PriorTR computes both the model-induced prior and the task-conditioned posterior within a single forward pass by introducing a null token that serves as an instruction-agnostic probe in the attention block. This design avoids duplicated propagation. Extensive experiments across multiple multimodal benchmarks and MLLMs demonstrate that PriorTR consistently improves the trade-off between accuracy and efficiency over strong training-free baselines, particularly under aggressive token budgets.

24.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

Better data, better trees: GenBank-GISAID deduplication and source-specific artifact masking in viral genomics

GenBank and GISAID are the primary repositories for viral genomic data, but integrating records across them remains a challenge. The same sequence could be made available in both databases without any cross-reference linking the two entries. Consequently, there is no systematic way to identify this redundancy, which compromises the compilation of representative, non-redundant large-scale datasets. In parallel, the growth of viral genomic data has increased the risk of systematic technical artifacts introduced during sequencing or assembly. These artifacts can inflate substitution rate estimates and degrade temporal signal, biasing evolutionary rate estimates. To address both challenges, here we present a formal, reproducible workflow integrating two newly developed complementary tools: G2G matcher for cross-repository harmonization and Lab-Specific Bias FILTer (LSBFILT) for masking of laboratory-specific artifacts. Using the Eastern/Central/South African (ECSA) chikungunya virus lineage as a proof-of-concept, we demonstrate that our integrated workflow restores temporal signal and provides a robust, curated dataset for downstream phylodynamic analyses. Critically, restricting masking of homoplastic sites to specific sequences reduces the substitution rate estimate from an inflated 8.517 x 10e-4; to 5.078 x 10e-4; substitutions/site/year and increases the coefficient of determination (R2) of the root-to-tip regression analysis from 0.353 to 0.677. By enabling systematic cross-repository harmonization and source-specific artifact masking, we provide the molecular epidemiological community with scalable tools to reconcile fragmented genomic data and reduce technical biases, fostering more accurate and reproducible phylogenetic analysis. G2G matcher is available at https://github.com/andrezaleite/G2G-Matcher, and LSBFILT at https://github.com/khourious/LSBFILT.

25.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Convergence of a Critical Multitype Bellman–Harris Process with One Infinite-Mean Lifetime

arXiv:2606.11511v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study a critical multitype Bellman–Harris branching particle system in $\mathbb R^N$ with a finite type space $\mathbb K=\{1,\dots,K\}$. Particles of type $i$ move according to a symmetric $\alpha_i$-stable process and reproduce according to a critical offspring law whose mean matrix is irreducible and stochastic. The lifetime distribution of type $1$ is assumed to have infinite mean with regularly varying tail $$ 1-F_1(t)\sim c_1t^{-\gamma},\, 0 \frac{\gamma}{\beta}, $$ and a local increment condition on the heavy lifetime distribution, we prove convergence of the system to a Poisson random measure concentrated on the infinite-mean type.