Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

AcademicHub aggregates real-time literature from top journals and preprint platforms. Build your personal research radar and let large language models compile cross-disciplinary analysis briefings automatically.

01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

The Tatoxa System for Text Detoxification in Low-Resource Languages: The Case of Tatar

Text detoxification, the automated detection and mitigation of abusive and harmful content, is essential for ensuring the safety of online communities and protecting users. However, low resource languages such as Tatar have received little research attention. In this paper we present Tatoxa, a novel state-of-the-art system for text detoxification in the Tatar language. Comparative experiments show that the proposed approach outperforms existing open source and proprietary commercial LLMs on key quality metrics. We also introduce a new dataset for text detoxification in Tatar, designed for fine tuning and evaluation in low resource settings. Finally, cross lingual transfer experiments indicate that transfer from other languages, including the culturally close Russian, performs significantly worse than training on native Tatar data even when a large Russian corpus is available.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Anomalous weak values in a generalized Mach-Zehnder interferometer extracted directly from intensity measurements

arXiv:2606.24798v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Weak values provide a powerful framework for characterizing quantum systems. Their experimental extraction conventionally relies on weak conditioned von Neumann measurements, involving weak interactions and meter states that increase experimental complexity and often limit measurement efficiency. Here we introduce a method to fully characterize path weak-values in a generalized Mach-Zehnder interferometer employing neither meter states nor weak interactions. We experimentally demonstrate the technique in matter-wave interferometry. We identify anomalous weak values and, equivalently, negative quasiprobability distributions, which reflect the nonclassical behavior of the quantum system. The approach relies uniquely on intensity measurements at the output ports of the interferometer combined with controlled relative phase shifts between the paths. The absence of meter states enables considerable simplification of the setup and shorter measurement times, while preserving full access to weak values with comparable or increased accuracy. The scheme is directly applicable to a broad class of experiments involving two-level quantum systems.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Candidate overtone shear horizontal SAW resonators in thin-film lithium niobate for intermodal acousto-optic modulation

arXiv:2606.12853v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The merits of thin-film surface acoustic wave (SAW) devices are pivotal to develop the high-performance intermodal acousto-optic modulators. In this work, we have proposed shear-horizontal (SH) SAW resonators for anticipated intermodal acousto-optic modulation on the thin-film lithium niobate platform. Through optimization of the cut angle of LN films, the SAW wavelength, and the thickness of interdigital transducer (IDT) electrodes, the calculated acousto-optic overlap factors utilizing SH0 modes are improved by more than an order of magnitude compared with those of Rayleigh modes. Furthermore, we have fabricated and characterized three kinds of proof-of-principle SH0 mode devices without/with grating reflectors. The electromechanical coupling coefficients (keff^2) and quality factors (Q) in the overtone resonators with grating reflectors are systematically evaluated, featuring the highest Q of 843 with the compromised keff^2 of 0.96%-4.72%. The results reveal that the temperature coefficients of frequency (TCF) of Rayleigh modes vary across various overtones, whereas the SH0 modes exhibit TCFs in the range of 32.3-68.9 ppm/C. Our fabricated SH0-mode overtone resonators demonstrate the capability of operating at power levels up to 29 dBm without electrode damage, offering a promising paradigm for robust and high-efficiency intermodal acousto-optic modulators with potential applications in integrated optical signal processing, microwave photonics,and quantum information technologies.

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

MVOFormer: Flow-Semantic Transformer for Robust Monocular Visual Odometry

Monocular visual odometry (MVO) is foundational to autonomous navigation and robotic localization. However, existing learning-based MVO approaches often struggle with either a lack of interpretable, complementary features or overly complex multi-stage architectures. These limitations inherently restrict their robustness and cross-domain generalization. In this work, we propose MVOFormer, a novel transformer framework for robust monocular visual odometry. Our architecture features a Flow-Semantic Dual Branch Encoder that synergizes dense geometric motion cues with object-centric semantic priors, explicitly distinguishing static structures from dynamic distractors. These representations are then fused by an Iterative Multimodal Decoder, enabling coarse-to-fine pose refinement while dynamically suppressing attention on unreliable regions. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that, without any target-domain fine-tuning, MVOFormer achieves superior zero-shot generalization and robustness, significantly outperforming prior learning-based frame-to-frame methods across diverse benchmarks including TartanAir, KITTI, TUM-RGBD, and ETH3D-SLAM.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Data-Forcing Distillation: Restoring Diversity and Fidelity in Few-Step Video Generation

Recent progress has shown promise in distilling multi-step video diffusion models into efficient few-step students. Among them, Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) and its successor DMD2 achieved strong generation quality and fast convergence. However, due to the nature of the reverse Kullback–Leibler (KL) objective, these methods exhibit two persistent failure modes: a substantial drop in sample diversity, and visibly over-saturated outputs that deviate from real-video appearance. In this work, we propose Data-Forcing Distillation (DFD), a simple post-training framework that restores diversity and fidelity in DMD with only a single-line of code change. At its core is the teacher score discrepancy to guide the student toward the real-data distribution, pulling it to missing modes (mitigating mode collapse) and away from problematic modes absent in real data (avoiding over-saturation). We provide an in-depth theoretical analysis of our framework and validate our approach on text-to-video, image-to-video, and autoregressive video generation. With only 100–300 steps of finetuning, DFD effectively restores diversity and fidelity on both Wan2.1-1.3B and Cosmos-Predict2.5-2B model, resolving the over-saturation artifacts with significantly better video dynamics and appearance, and even outperforms the teacher model.

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

Mathematical perspective on genetic algorithms with optimization guided operators

arXiv:2606.12279v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent work in ML applies genetic algorithms at inference time to iteratively improve solutions to optimization problems. The basic mutation and recombination operators involved are qualitatively different from those studied classically. Mutations are no longer random; an ML algorithm mutates a solution with the goal of improving an objective. Similarly, recombination is not based on random collages of parent solutions. Instead, it is an ML optimization-based operator whose goal is to synthesize improved solutions from its inputs. Thus, these mutation and recombination operators are more likely to improve the objective, but their computational cost is much higher. We introduce a general model of genetic algorithms and formulating optimization in this model as a query-complexity problem, using the language of reinforcement learning. We then study specialized models. We show that some optimization problems require generation, mutation, and recombination to be solved. We then obtain qualitatively tight algorithms for a family of problems within this framework that captures the nontrivial role of diversity in the solution pool, a key feature of practical ML genetic algorithms.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Towards Robust Optimal Measurements Against Noise in Quantum Metrology

arXiv:2606.25638v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum parameter estimation utilizes quantum mechanical effects to attain higher measurement precision than classical schemes. In practical implementations, however, noise is inevitably present during the measurement process, causing a decrease in precision. Quantifying the impact of noise on different measurements is of considerable significance. Here, we experimentally investigate robust optimal measurements based on the theory of Fisher information measurement noise susceptibility (FI MENOS), which quantifies how susceptible a measurement is to noise. By constructing a polarizing Mach-Zehnder interferometer, we implement phase estimation under controlled noise. Our results indicate that different measurements exhibit distinct sensitivities to noise. To assess the influence of diverse noise types on precision, we further construct an experimental setup capable of introducing various forms of noise. The experimental results affirm that FI MENOS represents the worst-case scenario for estimation precision, enabling us to evaluate the noise immunity of optimal measurements. Our work provides a deeper insight into quantum metrology with noise, marking a notable advancement in quantifying the robustness of quantum estimation schemes against measurement noise effects.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Stringalign: Moving beyond summary statistics with a transparent Unicode-aware tool for evaluating automatic transcription models

Comparing text strings is crucial when evaluating and understanding the performance of various text processing tasks such as document recognition and audio transcription. With an increasingly complex landscape of AI-based handwritten text recognition (HTR), optical character recognition (OCR) and automatic speech recognition (ASR) models, there is a need for tools that facilitate evaluation in a flexible and reproducible way. This paper presents Stringalign, a Python library designed to simplify the evaluation process for automatic transcription projects and facilitate transparent evaluation. Stringalign's tools to examine and visualise both the rate of errors and the types of errors a model makes, give insights into possible improvements and help inform model selection for a particular task. Widely used string comparison metrics, such as the character and word error rates (CER and WER), although useful, can be ambiguous due to varying definitions of what constitutes a character and a word. Stringalign addresses this challenge by ensuring all preprocessing (i.e. normalisation and tokenisation) is transparent and easily replicable, and by providing tools to move beyond summary statistics and analyse common model errors. Moreover, Stringalign adheres to FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles for research software while staying lightweight and easy to adapt into researchers existing workflows. In this paper, we discuss challenges with character and word level string comparisons and show through examples that where existing tools can yield opaque and sometimes confusing results, Stringalign provides an easy-to-use and unambiguous alternative.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Utility-Constrained Policy Optimization

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.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Neuron-based Personality Trait Induction in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly proficient at simulating various personality traits, an important capability for supporting related applications (e.g., role-playing). To further improve this capacity, in this paper, we present a neuron-based approach for personality trait induction in LLMs, with three major technical contributions. First, we construct PersonalityBench, a large-scale dataset for identifying and evaluating personality traits in LLMs. This dataset is grounded in the Big Five personality traits from psychology and is designed to assess the generative capabilities of LLMs towards specific personality traits. Second, by leveraging PersonalityBench, we propose an efficient method for identifying personality-related neurons within LLMs by examining the opposite aspects of a given trait. Third, we develop a simple yet effective induction method that manipulates the values of these identified personality-related neurons. This method enables fine-grained control over the traits exhibited by LLMs without training and modifying model parameters. Extensive experiments validate the efficacy of our neuron identification and trait induction methods. Notably, our approach achieves comparable performance as fine-tuned models, offering a more efficient and flexible solution for personality trait induction in LLMs. We provide access to all the mentioned resources at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/NPTI.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Triangle Splatting SLAM

We present a dense RGB-D SLAM system using differentiable triangles as the 3D map representation. While 3D Gaussian Splatting has emerged as the leading method for novel-view synthesis, triangles remain the standard primitive for traditional rendering hardware, game engines, and downstream tasks requiring explicit geometry such as simulation, collision, and editing. Recent offline methods have demonstrated that an unstructured 'triangle soup' can be optimised into a photorealistic mesh via Delaunay triangulation across a set of posed images. Building upon this insight, we present the first dense SLAM system to employ Triangle Splatting to perform both tracking and mapping through online differentiable rendering of a triangle soup. The map can be converted into a connected mesh on-the-fly via restricted Delaunay triangulation, enabling new online capabilities such as mesh deformation and collision checking. On Replica and TUM-RGBD, our system outperforms baselines on 3D geometry, matches the camera-tracking accuracy, and enables online mesh-based scene editing.

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

COGNITION: From Evaluation to Defense against Multimodal LLM CAPTCHA Solvers

arXiv:2512.02318v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper studies how multimodal large language models (MLLMs) undermine the security guarantees of visual CAPTCHA. We identify the attack surface where an adversary can cheaply automate CAPTCHA solving using off-the-shelf models. We evaluate 7 representative MLLMs on 18 real-world CAPTCHA task types, measuring single-shot accuracy, success under limited retries, end-to-end latency, and per-solve cost. We further validate our findings through a supplemental external dataset and an adaptive-attacker setting with session memory, while also analyzing the impact of task-specific prompt engineering and few-shot demonstrations on solver effectiveness. We reveal that MLLMs can reliably solve recognition-oriented and low-interaction CAPTCHA tasks at human-like cost and latency, whereas tasks requiring fine-grained localization, multi-step spatial reasoning, or cross-frame consistency remain significantly harder for current models. By examining the reasoning traces of such MLLMs, we investigate the underlying mechanisms of why models succeed/fail on specific CAPTCHA puzzles and use these insights to derive defense-oriented guidelines for selecting and strengthening CAPTCHA tasks. To validate these principles, we present a proof-of-concept by hardening a vulnerable CAPTCHA type using our guidelines. We demonstrate that incorporating fine-grained localization and implicit counting reduces the success rate of state-of-the-art MLLMs from over 95\% to 0\%, confirming that structural changes can effectively mitigate the threat. We conclude by emphasizing the urgent need for CAPTCHA redesign as MLLM capabilities increasingly threaten existing defenses. Code Availability (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20406852).

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Render-FM: Feedforward Model for Real-time Photorealistic Volumetric Rendering

arXiv:2505.17338v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Photorealistic volumetric rendering of CT scans greatly benefits clinical workflows, yet neural approaches such as Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) require prohibitive per-scan optimization (hours for NeRF, about 30 minutes for 3DGS), making them impractical in clinical settings. We propose Render-FM, a feedforward model that eliminates this bottleneck by directly regressing 6D Gaussian Splatting (6DGS) parameters from a CT volume in a single 2.8-second forward pass, a 500x speedup over per-scan optimization. To bridge the domain gap between natural scene reconstruction and medical volumetric rendering, we introduce Anatomy-Guided Priming (AGP), which incorporates segmentation masks and transfer functions as structural and appearance priors, information that existing Gaussian splatting methods overlook. Built on an nnU-Net-inspired 3D U-Net trained on diverse CT scans, Render-FM predicts per-voxel 6DGS parameters and supports immediate real-time rendering. Unlike per-scan methods, it generalizes to unseen anatomies, novel transfer functions, and enables compositional organ visualization with zero additional preparation time. Optional 89-second fine-tuning further improves quality, surpassing per-scan optimized baselines. Project page: https://gaozhongpai.github.io/renderfm/.

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

Improved Baselines with Representation Autoencoders

Representation Autoencoders (RAE) replace traditional VAE with pretrained vision encoders. In this paper, we systematically investigate several design choices and find three insights which simplify and improve RAE. First, we study a generalized formulation where the representation is defined as sum of the last k encoder layers rather than solely the final layer. This simple change greatly improves reconstruction without encoder finetuning or specialized data (e.g., text, faces). Second, we study the prevalent assumption that RAE (using pretrained representation as encoder) replaces representation alignment (REPA), which distills the same representation to intermediate layers instead. Through large-scale empirical analysis, we uncover a surprising finding: RAE and REPA exhibit complementary working mechanisms, allowing the same representation to be used as both encoder and target for intermediate diffusion layers. Finally, the original RAE struggles with classifier-free guidance (CFG) and requires training a second, weaker diffusion model for AutoGuidance (AG). We show that REPA itself can be viewed as x-prediction in RAE latent space. By simply re-parameterizing the output of the DiT model, it can provide guidance for "free". Overall, RAEv2 leads to more than 10x faster convergence over the original RAE, achieving a state-of-the-art gFID of 1.06 in just 80 epochs on ImageNet-256. On FDr6, RAEv2 achieves a state-of-the-art 2.17 at just 80 epochs compared to the previous best 3.26 (800 epochs) without any post-training. This motivates EPFID@k (epochs to reach unguided gFID < k) as a measure of training efficiency. RAEv2 attains an EPFID@2 of 35 epochs, versus 177 for the original RAE. We also validate our approach across diverse settings for text-to-image generation and navigation world models, showing consistent improvements. The code is available at https://raev2.github.io.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Offline Channel-Independent QAOA Angles for RIS Power Aggregation: Unit-Circle Phase Dictionaries and Infinite-Size Spin-Glass Limits

arXiv:2606.24540v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) maximize received power by setting per-element phases. Discrete-phase optimization is NP-hard in the worst case, while the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) applied to RIS faces limited phase alphabets, either per-problem angle optimization or uncharacterized training cost exposed to barren plateaus, and no scalable performance benchmark. We introduce a $2^{M}$-phase $\theta$ dictionary for optimizing power $\|\mathbf{A} \, e^{j\theta}\|^{2}$ having $K \times N$ channel matrix $\mathbf{A}$ and QAOA angle offline optimization with instance and size-independent infinite-size limit of the mixed-$q$ Gaussian ensemble of Basso et al. Our design bounds the spin-Hamiltonian interaction order to at most quartic for any $M$, and the deployed order-2 reduction lies below the even-$q\!\ge\!4$ regime in which constant-level QAOA limitations are proved. We perform analytical, state-vector, matrix-product-state and Pauli-path-simulation numerical studies for $N=K \leq 100$ and QAOA depth $p=9$, verifying offline angle transfer to Rayleigh, Rician/line-of-sight, cascaded double-fading and spatially-correlated RIS channels at $N\!\in\!\{5,12\}$. We observe performance reaching a near-optimal multi-start single-flip local-search reference for $N\!\le\!16$ under order-2 modeling with $2^{5}{=}32$-phase dictionary while the order-4 model shows a performance ceiling below the classical reference. The approach suggests a route to near-optimal large-$N$ performance on future fault-tolerant (FTQ) quantum computers, which enable the higher-depth QAOA circuits.

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

Random Erasing vs. Model Inversion: A Promising Defense or a False Hope?

Model Inversion (MI) attacks pose a significant privacy threat by reconstructing private training data from machine learning models. While existing defenses primarily concentrate on model-centric approaches, the impact of data on MI robustness remains largely unexplored. In this work, we explore Random Erasing (RE), a technique traditionally used for improving model generalization under occlusion, and uncover its surprising effectiveness as a defense against MI attacks. Specifically, our novel feature space analysis shows that models trained with RE-images introduce a significant discrepancy between the features of MI-reconstructed images and those of the private data. At the same time, features of private images remain distinct from other classes and well-separated from different classification regions. These effects collectively degrade MI reconstruction quality and attack accuracy while maintaining reasonable natural accuracy. Furthermore, we explore two critical properties of RE including Partial Erasure and Random Location. Partial Erasure prevents the model from observing entire objects during training. We find this has a significant impact on MI, which aims to reconstruct the entire objects. Random Location of erasure plays a crucial role in achieving a strong privacy-utility trade-off. Our findings highlight RE as a simple yet effective defense mechanism that can be easily integrated with existing privacy-preserving techniques. Extensive experiments across 37 setups demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in the privacy-utility trade-off. The results consistently demonstrate the superiority of our defense over existing methods across different MI attacks, network architectures, and attack configurations. For the first time, we achieve a significant degradation in attack accuracy without a decrease in utility for some configurations.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

The Scaffold Effect: How Prompt Framing Drives Apparent Multimodal Gains in Clinical VLM Evaluation

arXiv:2603.28387v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Trustworthy clinical AI requires that performance gains reflect genuine evidence integration rather than surface-level artifacts. We evaluate 12 open-weight vision-language models (VLMs) on binary classification across two clinical neuroimaging cohorts, \textsc{FOR2107} (affective disorders) and \textsc{OASIS-3} (cognitive decline). Both datasets come with structural MRI data that carries no reliable individual-level diagnostic signal. Under these conditions, smaller VLMs exhibit gains of up to 58\% F1 upon introduction of neuroimaging context, with distilled models becoming competitive with counterparts an order of magnitude larger. A contrastive confidence analysis reveals that merely mentioning MRI availability in the task prompt accounts for 70-80\% of this shift, independent of whether imaging data is present, a domain-specific instance of modality collapse we term the scaffold effect. Expert evaluation reveals fabrication of neuroimaging-grounded justifications across all conditions, and preference alignment, while eliminating MRI-referencing behavior, collapses both conditions toward random baseline. Our findings demonstrate that surface evaluations are inadequate indicators of multimodal reasoning, with direct implications for the deployment of VLMs in clinical settings.

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

Graph-ESBMC-PLC: Formal Verification of Graphical PLCopen XML Ladder Diagram Programs Using SMT-Based Model Checking

PLCopen XML defines two encoding formats for IEC 61131-3 Ladder Diagram programs: a textual encoding using elements, and a graphical encoding that represents rung logic as a directed graph of localId/refLocalId connections. ESBMC-PLC supported the textual format but parsed graphical exports from CONTROLLINO, Beremiz, and OpenPLC Editor into an empty GOTO intermediate representation, causing vacuous verification success. This paper presents Graph-ESBMC-PLC, which closes this gap with a DFS-based graphical LD resolver. The resolver traverses the connection graph from leftPowerRail to each coil, extracts rung paths as Boolean contact conjunctions, and applies a three-tier I/O inference scheme. Ordering coils by rightPowerRail connectionPointIn sequence ensures SET coils process before RESET coils, matching IEC scan-cycle semantics. The graphical-to-IR conversion leaves the ESBMC backend unchanged. Validation on 3 graphical LD programs from CONTROLLINO/OpenPLC Editor shows all produce full GOTO IR with nondeterministic inputs and rung logic, versus the empty IR previously. All 3 verify SAFE at k=2 under 70ms. The 11 textual LD benchmarks are fully preserved, with no regression. Two Beremiz examples with no LD content or unsupported timer semantics are reported as discovered limitations. Artifact at Zenodo (DantasCordeiro2026graphical, doi:10.5281/zenodo.20699856).

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Efficient Multinomial Logistic Bandit via Frequent Directions

arXiv:2606.11968v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper studies efficient online algorithms for multinomial logistic bandits (MLogB), where the feedback distribution over $K+1$ outcomes follows a multinomial logistic model of $d$-dimensional action vectors. A representative UCB-type algorithm, OFUL-MLogB, achieves a regret bound of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(Kd\sqrt{T})$, but still requires $\mathcal{O}(K^3d^3)$ time and $\mathcal{O}(K^2d^2)$ space per round due to parameter estimation and optimistic reward construction, which is prohibitive in high-dimensional settings. To address this limitation, we propose EOFD-MLogB, which integrates frequent directions matrix sketching into OFUL-MLogB. By maintaining a low-rank SVD sketch of the accumulated Hessian, constrained online Newton updates in parameter estimation and $Kd \times K$ spectral-norm computations in the reward bonus are reduced to one-dimensional root-finding tasks and $K \times K$ eigenvalue computations, respectively. This yields dominant per-round time complexity $\mathcal{O}(Kd(m+K)^2)$ and space complexity $\mathcal{O}(Kd(m+K))$, where $m \ll d$ is the sketch size. We further prove a regret bound of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\Delta_T(Kd\ln\Delta_T+m)\sqrt{T})$, where the sketching error factor $\Delta_T$ is controlled by the $m$-truncated spectral tail of the Hessian. Thus, when the Hessian is approximately low-rank, the regret is close to that of OFUL-MLogB. Experiments validate the computational efficiency and competitive performance.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Reaching out-of-school girls with HPV vaccination: A qualitative evaluation in six low- and middle-income countries using the RE-AIM framework

Background Infection with human papillomavirus (HPV), the primary cause of cervical cancer, disproportionately affects women in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). While school-based vaccination of adolescent girls against HPV is highly effective, this strategy systematically excludes out-of-school (OOS) girls. Using the RE-AIM framework, we explored strategies to reach OOS girls with HPV vaccination across six African and Asian LMICs. Methods We conducted semi-structured key informant interviews with 32 vaccination program stakeholders from Cambodia, Cameroon, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, and Uganda between May and September 2024. Interviews explored countries implementation successes, challenges, and strategies to reach OOS girls with HPV vaccination and sustainability considerations. Data were analyzed using a hybrid team-based thematic analysis approach guided by the RE-AIM framework. Results Community outreach-based strategies, typically integrated into routine immunization outreach, were identified as the most effective approach to reach OOS girls with HPV vaccination. Targeted strategies, such as locating outreach clinics in community venues frequented by OOS girls (e.g., churches, markets) enhanced implementation. Perceived effectiveness of these strategies varied across participants, and formal assessment of effectiveness was constrained by the absence of disaggregated vaccination coverage data by school enrollment status. Some subpopulations of OOS girls (i.e., girls in nomadic or migrant communities, urban OOS girls) were not readily reached through standard outreach approaches, prompting implementation of adapted and tailored strategies for these subpopulations. Costs associated with conducting outreach in harder-to-reach areas were major barriers to reaching OOS girls, presenting challenges to the sustainability and cost-effectiveness of these approaches. Conclusions Routine community outreach platforms were widely perceived as most effective for reaching OOS girls. Strengthening disaggregated monitoring systems, adapting outreach for harder-to-reach subpopulations of OOS girls, and financing delivery models for tailored outreach strategies will be critical to improving equitable HPV vaccine coverage among OOS girls.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Diurnal variation in brain-derived tau and five other blood-based biomarkers for dementia and their association with cognitive performance

Blood-based biomarkers of dementia are a promising scalable tool for early diagnosis, tracking disease progression, and evaluating therapeutic efficacy. Utility of these biomarkers will not only be dependent on the reliability of their association with pathology but also contingent on their ability to track cognitive status. Previously, we demonstrated diurnal variation in several biomarkers (amyloid beta (A{beta}) 42 and 40, 42/40 ratio, glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP), neurofilament light (NfL), and phosphorylated-Tau 217 (p-Tau217)) which has implications for their reliability. Here, we extend these observations to a larger cohort, include brain-derived tau (BD-Tau), which is assumed to be produced exclusively in the brain, and report endocrine measures of circadian rhythmicity. We not only assessed whether these biomarkers vary with time of day, but also whether they associate with daytime function and whether these associations vary with cognitive domain and number of repeated assessments. Data collected in 20 PLWA (72.4{+/-}5.9 years, mean{+/-}SD) and 19 controls (68.9{+/-}9.8 years) were analysed. Participants completed 14 days of home monitoring and one laboratory assessment of sleep and daytime function: mood, daytime sleepiness, reaction time, immediate and delayed memory recall, everyday memory errors. During the 27-hour residential laboratory session, 3-hourly blood samples were collected and analysed for the six blood-based biomarkers of dementia as well as melatonin and cortisol. Rhythmicity of melatonin and cortisol did not differ between groups. P-Tau217 and GFAP (p

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Unifying Learning Dynamics and Generalization in Transformers Scaling Law

Authors:

The scaling law, a cornerstone of Large Language Model (LLM) development, predicts improvements in model performance with increasing computational resources. Yet, while empirically validated, its theoretical underpinnings remain poorly understood. This work formalizes the learning dynamics of transformer-based language models as an ordinary differential equation (ODE) system, then approximates this process to kernel behaviors. Departing from prior toy-model analyses, we rigorously analyze stochastic gradient descent (SGD) training for multi-layer transformers on sequence-to-sequence data with arbitrary data distribution, closely mirroring real-world conditions. Our analysis characterizes the convergence of generalization error to the irreducible risk as computational resources scale with data, especially during the optimization process. We establish matching upper and lower bounds on the excess risk, characterized by a distinct phase transition. In the initial optimization phase, the excess risk decays exponentially relative to the computational cost ${\sf C}$. However, once a specific resource allocation threshold is crossed, the system enters a statistical phase, where the generalization error follows a power-law decay of $\Theta(\mathsf{C}^{-1/7})$. These rates are certified by complementary lower bounds – statistical, via an information-theoretic two-point reduction, and optimization-side, via a first-order oracle argument – rendering the two-stage law tight up to constants, logarithmic factors, and a condition-number gap. Beyond this unified framework, our theory derives isolated scaling laws for model size, training time, and dataset size, elucidating how each variable independently governs the bounds of generalization.

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

The Vision Encoder as a Privacy Boundary: Visual-Token Side Channels in Encoder-Free Vision-Language Models

A vision encoder compresses image pixels into semantic embeddings, implicitly acting as a privacy boundary by preserving semantic content while attenuating pixel-local detail required for exact text recovery. Encoder-free vision-language models (VLMs) remove this boundary by routing image patches directly into the language-model token stream, thereby exposing an architectural privacy attack surface: intermediate visual tokens become a pre-output side channel. Under a token-access adversary, decoders invert visual-token streams from two encoder-free VLMs, Gemma4 and Fuyu, recovering recognizable image structure and readable held-out access codes, whereas matched encoder-based controls localize target regions but recover no exact strings. Within-model ablations show that the operative factor is spatial sampling fidelity of the visual-token grid, especially character-direction sampling density, rather than token or value count. The leakage is not limited to exported tokens: Gemma4 layer-0 key-value cache tensors are directly invertible, placing the side channel within KV caches commonly persisted by production serving stacks for decoding efficiency. The attack survives clutter, realistic document degradation, and zero-shot transfer to public document images, and it resists value-level defenses such as additive noise and quantization. Effective mitigation must therefore reduce spatial sampling, making removal of the vision encoder a first-class privacy decision in VLM deployment.

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

Sub-Token Routing for KV Cache Compression

Transformer inference often requires a large KV cache, especially for long-context language modeling and multimodal generation. Existing compression methods usually reduce cache cost by selecting, evicting, quantizing, or compressing cached tokens, or by reducing the visual-token sequence before language-model inference. We introduce sub-token routing, a KV-compression method that adds a finer control axis inside retained tokens. It splits each retained value vector into groups and keeps only selected groups, while leaving query and key states unchanged. The method is designed to work after token-level reduction. First, a token-reduction method determines which tokens are retained. Then, sub-token routing compresses the value states inside those retained tokens. Experiments under matched KV budgets show that adding sub-token routing improves token-level reduction performance in both LLM and VLM settings, including Quest on LLaMA-2-7B and Qwen2.5-7B, and FastV/VisionZip across LLaVA and Qwen-VL models. The gains are larger at smaller KV budgets, suggesting that value-group routing is especially useful when further token removal becomes costly. Overall, token-level reduction and sub-token routing provide complementary ways to reduce KV cost.

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

Neural Bayesian Anomaly Mitigation: A Robust Loss that Doubles as an Unsupervised Contamination Classifier

arXiv:2606.16524v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Engineered robust losses such as Huber, Student-$t$, and generalised cross-entropy make supervised models tolerant of contamination but cannot answer which observations are corrupted. We introduce Neural Bayesian Anomaly Mitigation (NBAM), a general-purpose drop-in loss derived from a Bayesian latent-switch mixture model: the marginal likelihood defines a robust supervised loss, and the associated posterior defines an unsupervised contamination classifier. Like Huber or Student-$t$, NBAM can replace the standard training loss in any supervised pipeline; unlike them, it additionally learns a structured contamination model and returns a calibrated per-sample contamination posterior. A learned input-dependent prior $\pi_\phi(x)$ captures the spatial locality of contamination, so that samples near known corruptions are more likely to be flagged, while an Occam penalty emerges automatically and regularises against over-flagging. On CIFAR-10 with asymmetric label contamination, NBAM recovers the structure of the corruption process without supervision: the contamination posterior separates clean from corrupted samples, and the learned anomaly head identifies the direction of every label-flip pair. Alongside these capabilities, NBAM outperforms the four robust-loss baselines considered here at contamination rates 0.2-0.6.