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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Determinants of non-utilization of insecticide-treated nets among children under five in Rwanda: analyses of the 2024 Rwanda malaria indicator survey

Authors:
Eduah↗K. N↗A. O↗

Background Insecticide-treated nets (ITNs) are effective for preventing malaria among children under five years, who bear a disproportionate burden of malaria. This study assessed the prevalence and determinants of ITN non-utilization among children under five in Rwanda using data from the 2024 Rwanda Malaria Indicator Survey (RMIS).Methodology This cross-sectional study utilized nationally representative data from the 2024 RMIS. Analyses were restricted to children under five residing in households that owned at least one ITN. The outcome was non-utilization of ITN, defined as not sleeping under an ITN the night preceding the survey. Survey-weighted descriptive statistics were used to estimate the prevalence of ITN non-utilization. Factors associated with non-utilization were identified using a survey-weighted Poisson regression model. Adjusted prevalence ratios (aPRs), 95% confidence intervals and p-values were reported.Results A total of 1,979 children were included in the study. The weighted prevalence of ITN non-utilization among children under five years was 20.11% (95% CI: 17.81 - 22.63). After adjusting for other factors, children aged 2 - 3 years were associated with an 83% higher prevalence of ITN non-utilization compared with those aged [&le;]1 year (aPR = 1.83, 95% CI: 1.423 - 2.352, p < 0.001). Compared with households that owned only one ITN, children in households with three or more ITNs were associated with a 76% lower prevalence of ITN non-utilization (aPR = 0.24, 95% CI: 0.171 - 0.332, p < 0.001). Children living in households with 5 - 7 members were associated with an 87% higher prevalence of ITN non-utilization compared with those in households with 1 - 4 members (aPR = 1.87, 95% CI: 1.476 - 2.358, p < 0.001).Conclusion The findings suggest that ITN utilization among children is influenced not only by household access to nets but also by household composition and dynamics that shape the allocation and use of available preventive resources.

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

Privacy from Symmetry: Orthogonally Equivariant Transformers for LLM Inference

Authors:
Alexander Yukhimchuk↗Andrey Shulga↗Mladen Kolar↗Martin Tak\'a\v{c}↗

arXiv:2606.16461v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Running large language models locally is often impractical, pushing inference on sensitive text to third-party providers. Split inference partially mitigates this by keeping tokens on the client and sending only hidden representations, but these representations can still be recovered via nearest-neighbor search against the public embedding table. We propose an orthogonal obfuscation procedure in which the client multiplies embeddings by a secret orthogonal matrix before transmission. To enable correct inference under arbitrary rotations, we introduce ConjFormer, a transformer variant that is exactly $\mathrm{O}(d)$-equivariant via a lightweight normalization change (scalar RMSNorm) together with blockwise orthogonal conjugation of all linear weights. As a result, the server performs the full forward pass entirely in the rotated basis and never observes unrotated hidden states. Experiments on GPT-2 and Llama 3.2 1B models fine-tuned on PubMed show that orthogonal obfuscation eliminates direct cosine nearest-neighbor inversion and reduces token recovery from over 35% top-10 to at most 1.3%, while increasing perplexity by only 0.4% after fine-tuning. These results indicate that enforcing symmetry at the architectural level can provide a practical defense for privacy-preserving LLM inference without noise injection or heavy cryptographic machinery.

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03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Biarchetype analysis for univariate functional data. An application to macroeconomic financial time series

Authors:
Aleix Alcacer↗Rafael Benitez↗Vicente J. Bolos↗Irene Epifanio↗

arXiv:2606.15881v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce biarchetype analysis for the first time in the context of univariate functional data. This unsupervised methodology extends archetype analysis by simultaneously identifying archetypal structures across both the cases (countries, in our application) and the temporal argument. Both cases and time points are expressed as mixtures of biarchetypes, yielding a concise and highly interpretable representation of complex functional observations. Although biarchetype analysis is not intended as a clustering technique, it offers superior interpretability compared with biclustering approaches, as it is based on extreme, representative patterns rather than average centroids, thereby enhancing human comprehension. We apply the proposed method to 10-year government bond yields of European countries over the period 2001-2025. The results identify three distinct time regimes (the pre-crisis period, the euro-area sovereign debt crisis, and the post-crisis period), and reveal Germany, Greece, and Hungary as country archetypes.

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04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Critical spectral behavior and large deviations for geometric $\alpha$-stable processes

Authors:
Kaneharu Tsuchida↗

arXiv:2606.17501v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we study the Schrödinger-type operator associated with geometric stable processes on $\mathbb{R}^{d}$, especially the differentiability of spectral function. Let $\mathcal{H}$ be the generator of the geometric stable process and $\mu$ a smooth measure on $\mathbb{R}^{d}$. Then the spectral function $C(\theta)$ is defined as $C(\theta) = -\inf \sigma(-\mathcal{H} - \theta \mu)$, where $\sigma(\mathcal{A})$ denotes the spectrum of $\mathcal{A}$ and $\theta$ is a real parameter. Since the geometric stable process exhibits severe local singularities in its Lévy measure, its transition semigroup lacks ultracontractivity, which invalidates classical methods for proving the differentiability. To overcome this obstacle, we use the compact embedding of the extended Dirichlet space into $L^2(\mu)$. As a primary application of this differentiability, we establish a large deviation principle for a positive continuous additive functional associated with the smooth measure $\mu$.

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05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

3-Key-Input: Exploring the Theoretical Minimum Keys for Text Entry

Authors:
Naoki Kimura↗

How far can we reduce the number of physical keys if we endow an ambiguous keyboard with modern language models? Fewer keys increase hardware design freedom in constrained settings such as assistive devices and mobile form factors. This paper systematically evaluates text entry systems using 2-5 physical keys combined with language-model-based disambiguation. On a 300-sentence English corpus (100 sentences each for Business / Conversational / Technical), we compare key counts (2-5), letter-to-key mappings (layout-based / frequency-based / intentionally worst-case), and decoders (Trie-only, GPT-2 beam search, GPT-4o selection). We find that 3 keys + GPT-4o achieves character error rate (CER) 9.46% and word error rate (WER) 12.20%, reducing CER by 59% relative to 2 keys (CER 23.3%). At 3 keys, the key-stream entropy is 1.54 bits/char; while increasing to 5 keys improves accuracy (CER 5.4%), the marginal gains diminish. Mapping choice has a small impact under standard designs ({\Delta}CER < 0.5 pp), and even an intentionally worst mapping degrades CER by only +0.5 pp, whereas Technical sentences yield roughly twice the error rate of Business. These results suggest that, in our evaluated offline setting under a strong LM prior, 3 keys are a practical minimum for general English.

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

Dual-Stance Evaluation of Sycophancy: The Structure of Agreement and the Limits of Intervention

Authors:
Matthew James Buchan↗

Activation steering can shift LLM behaviour, but standard evaluations do not typically test whether a sycophancy-reduction direction also suppresses agreement with factually correct statements. We introduce dual-stance evaluation, which tests both stances of each topic, and apply it to centroid-difference steering on Llama-3-8B-Instruct. We find a dissociation: the model represents sycophantic and factual agreement in geometrically distinct subspaces, yet the steering direction projects equally onto both and cannot differentially target either. The direction accordingly reduces agreement with factually correct statements (e.g. that the Earth is round) as well as sycophantic ones. All other static properties of the two activation groups are matched, suggesting the behavioural dissociation arises from generation dynamics or from finer-grained structure that residual-stream analysis cannot resolve. The pattern illustrates a general gap: representations that are readable from activations may not be writable through them.

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07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Multi-component Causal Tracing in Large Language Models

Authors:
Zirui Yan↗Dennis Wei↗Dmitriy A. Katz↗Prasanna Sattigeri↗Ali Tajer↗

Causal tracing systematically intervenes on a large language model's (LLM's) internal representations to uncover and quantify the causal pathways linking specific inputs or computations to specific metrics of interest, quantifying the LLM's behavior. Building on previous single-component or single-layer studies, this paper presents a unified framework for causally tracing multiple components simultaneously. This framework systematically identifies the subsets of components (e.g., attention heads and multi-layer perceptron neurons) most critical to a desired target performance metric (e.g., accuracy and fairness). This is achieved by incorporating flexible interventions applied to a wide range of desired metrics. To address the combinatorial complexity of the multi-component problem, an efficient algorithm is designed that leverages soft interventions and a carefully designed metric transformation, converting the combinatorial search problem into a continuous one that can be solved efficiently under proper constraints, thereby generating proper binary decisions for selecting components. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method efficiently identifies subsets of the model's components that have a high impact on the target metric, outperforming existing baseline approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZiruiYan/multi-component-causal-tracing.

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08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Effects of Josephson Junction Non-idealities on Adiabatic Quantum Flux Parametron Circuits

Authors:
Daryoush Shiri↗Likai Yang↗Mohamed A. Hassan↗Philip Krantz↗Eric T. Holland↗

arXiv:2606.17338v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Adiabatic quantum flux parametron (AQFP) gate is a promising approach to scale up the cryogenic microwave electronics for superconducting qubit multiplexed control. However, the performance of these circuits depends on the quality of the Josephson junctions which are ideally superconductor-insulator-superconductor (SIS) type following the ideal sinusoidal relation between current and quantum phase. We demonstrate how the non-sinusoidal current-phase relation in Superconductor-Normal metal-Superconductor (SNS) and weak link (WL) junctions affects the speed, delay, and margin of the AQFP gates. The JJ models are defined in the Keysight ADS simulator using symbolically defined device (SDD) method.

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09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

FreeBridge: Variational Schrödinger Bridges for Cellular Transition Dynamics

Authors:
Xurui Wang↗Qin Ren↗Jun Ma↗Haibin Ling↗Chenyu You↗

arXiv:2606.11286v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: High-content imaging assays quantify cellular responses to chemical and genetic perturbations, yet continuous trajectories of individual cells are unobservable because cells are chemically fixed at acquisition. Perturbation modeling therefore reduces to inferring stochastic transport between control and treated populations observed only as separate marginals. While recent generative models achieve strong end-point alignment, boundary consistency does not determine intermediate evolution: multiple stochastic processes may connect identical marginals while traversing regions unsupported by observed single-cell morphologies. We introduce FreeBridge, a Schrödinger Bridge formulation for single-cell transition modeling under endpoint-only supervision. FreeBridge defines atomic states as instance-segmented single-cell representations, establishing a fixed cellular manifold, and learns stochastic transport constrained within this geometry via empirical latent support regularization. Across BBBC021, RxRx1, and JUMP, FreeBridge maintains competitive or improved endpoint fidelity and mechanism-of-action retention under a unified evaluation protocol; on BBBC021, it further reduces intermediate support violations. These findings highlight the importance of geometric grounding for biologically interpretable perturbation dynamics. Project page: https://y-research-sbu.github.io/FreeBridge/.

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10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Rethinking Cross-lingual Gaps from a Statistical Viewpoint

Authors:
Vihari Piratla↗Purvam Jain↗Darshan Singh↗Trevor Cohn↗Preethi Jyothi↗Partha Talukdar↗

Any piece of knowledge is usually expressed in one or a handful of natural languages on the web or in any large corpus. Large Language Models (LLMs) act as a bridge by acquiring knowledge from a source language and making it accessible when queried using target languages. A cross-lingual gap is a drop in accuracy incurred when querying knowledge in a target language rather than the source language. Existing research focused on modeling or training failures leading to cross-lingual gaps. In this work, we take an alternative view to characterize the nature of cross-lingual error, and hypothesize that the variance of responses in the target language is a key cause of this gap. For the first time, we formalize the cross-lingual gap in terms of biased and unbiased errors. We empirically validate our hypothesis through multiple inference-time interventions that control variance and reduce the cross-lingual gap. We demonstrate a few test-time ensemble methods that reduce response variance, and thereby improve source-target transfer scores by up to 12 absolute points yielding relative gains of 8% to over 50% across various LLMs.

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11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Stable, bidirectional electro-optic transduction in thin film lithium tantalate

Authors:
Christopher J. Axline↗Stephan Gamper↗Phoebe M. Tengdin↗Moritz Businger↗Guilhem Alma↗Marina A. Roquet↗Nicola Brusadin↗Robin Giroud↗Luis G. Villanueva↗

arXiv:2606.12726v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient and stable microwave-optical transduction is a key enabling technology for distributed superconducting quantum computing and heterogeneous quantum networks. Electro-optic transducers based on thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) have shown strong promise, but demonstrations to date have been limited by various factors such as low frequency bias drift, low efficiency, fabrication complexity, and scalability. Here we demonstrate the first integrated electro-optic microwave-optical transducers realized in thin-film lithium tantalate (TFLT), a material platform offering Pockels nonlinearity comparable to TFLN together with improved bias stability and high-power handling. We fabricate superconducting microwave resonators coupled to tunable photonic-molecule optical resonators using wafer-scale deep ultraviolet lithography, offering high-throughput production of hundreds of devices per wafer. Across six devices we observe coherent bidirectional conversion between C-band optical photons and 4.9-5.5 GHz microwave photons, with measured on-chip efficiencies and inferred single-photon coupling rates g_0/2{\pi} ~ 1 kHz consistent with theory. Continuous operation over multiple days is achieved using a static bias field with minimal feedback, demonstrating a major operational advantage. We further characterize optical loss statistics, microwave resonator performance, and optically induced added noise under pulsed pumping, finding less than one added photon for 100 microsecond pulses at the highest measured efficiencies. These results establish TFLT as a scalable and robust electro-optic platform for future quantum interconnects and modular quantum processors.

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12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Explaining Attention with Program Synthesis

Authors:
Amiri Hayes↗Belinda Li↗Jacob Andreas↗

arXiv:2606.19317v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A longstanding goal of research on interpretable deep learning is to replace opaque neural computations with human-meaningful symbolic descriptions. In this paper, we propose an approach for approximating the behavior of components of deep networks with executable programs. We focus on attention heads in transformer language models. For a given head, we first compute its associated attention matrices on a collection of randomly selected training examples. Next, we prompt a pre-trained language model with a summary of these matrices, and instruct it to generate a set of Python programs that can reproduce the associated attention patterns given only text from the input sentence. Finally, we re-rank programs according to how well our final set of programs predict behavior on held-out inputs. We demonstrate that a set of fewer than 1,000 such generated programs can reproduce the attention patterns of heads in GPT-2, TinyLlama-1.1B, and Llama-3B, achieving an average Intersection-over-Union similarity above 75% on TinyStories. Moreover, the best-fit programs can replace neural attention heads without substantially affecting model behavior: replacing 25% of attention heads with programmatic surrogates across the three models incurs only a 16% average perplexity increase, while maintaining performance on a variety of downstream question answering benchmarks. This work contributes a scalable pipeline for reverse-engineering attention heads in transformer models using human-readable, executable code, advancing a path toward symbolic transparency in neural models.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Beyond the Linear Separability Ceiling: Aligning Representations in VLMs

Authors:
Enrico Vompa↗Tanel Tammet↗Mohit Vaishnav↗

A challenge in advancing Visual-Language Models (VLMs) is determining whether their failures on abstract reasoning tasks, such as Bongard problems, stem from flawed perception or faulty top-down reasoning. To disentangle these factors, we introduce a diagnostic framework centered on the Linear Separability Ceiling (LSC), the performance achievable by a linear classifier on a VLM's raw visual embeddings. Applying this framework to state-of-the-art VLMs, we uncover a pervasive ''alignment gap'', where most models fail to generatively outperform the linear separability of their representations. We find that the few models surpassing this ceiling do so via two mechanisms: by further refining visual representations into a more linearly separable format or by executing non-linear decision logic. We demonstrate that this bottleneck is not a fundamental limitation but a solvable visual alignment issue. Our method augments standard next-token prediction with a contrastive objective to restructure the visual manifold into a more one-dimensionally linear geometry, improving image-to-image comparison and enabling models to significantly surpass the LSC on abstract compositional reasoning tasks.

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

MemBoost: A Memory-Boosted Framework for Cost-Aware LLM Inference

Authors:
Joris K\"oster↗Zixuan Liu↗Siavash Khajavi↗Zizhan Zheng↗

Large Language Models (LLMs) deliver strong performance but incur high inference cost in real-world services, especially under workloads with repeated or near-duplicate queries across users and sessions. In this work, we propose MemBoost, a memory-boosted LLM serving framework that enables a lightweight model to reuse previously generated answers and retrieve relevant supporting information for cheap inference, while selectively escalating difficult or uncertain queries to a stronger model. Unlike standard retrieval-augmented generation, which primarily grounds a single response, MemBoost is designed for interactive settings by supporting answer reuse, continual memory growth, and cost-aware routing. Experiments across multiple models under simulated workloads show that MemBoost substantially reduces expensive large-model invocations and overall inference cost, while maintaining high answer quality comparable to the strong model baseline.

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15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Anomaly Detection via Mean Shift Density Enhancement

Authors:
Pritam Kar↗Rahul Bordoloi↗Olaf Wolkenhauer↗Saptarshi Bej↗

arXiv:2602.03293v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Unsupervised anomaly detection stands as an important problem in machine learning. Existing unsupervised anomaly detection algorithms rarely perform well across different anomaly types, often excelling only under specific structural assumptions. This lack of robustness also becomes particularly evident under noisy settings. We propose Mean Shift Density Enhancement (MSDE), a fully unsupervised framework that detects anomalies through their geometric response to density-driven manifold evolution. MSDE is designed as a general purpose anomaly detection framework, based on the principle that normal samples, being well supported by local density, remain stable under iterative density enhancement, whereas anomalous samples undergo large cumulative displacements as they are attracted toward nearby density modes. To operationalize this idea, MSDE employs a weighted mean-shift procedure with adaptive, sample-specific density weights derived from a manifold learning-based fuzzy neighborhood graph. We evaluate MSDE on an anomaly detection benchmark comprising 46 real-world tabular datasets, four realistic anomaly generation mechanisms, and six noise levels. Compared to 13 established unsupervised baselines, MSDE achieves consistently strong, balanced and robust performance for several standard classification metrics, at several noise levels and on average over several types of anomalies. These results demonstrate that displacement-based scoring provides a robust alternative to the existing state-of-the-art for unsupervised anomaly detection.

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

David vs. Goliath in Next Activity Prediction: Argmax vs. LSTM, Transformer, and LLM

Authors:
Hans Weytjens↗Ingo Weber↗

arXiv:2606.15868v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Next activity prediction (NAP) is a cornerstone of predictive process monitoring (PPM), enabling organizations to move from retrospective analysis to proactive process steering. The PPM field has progressed from classical machine learning through deep learning architectures such as LSTMs and Transformers to large language models (LLMs). Despite growing model complexity, no benchmark jointly compares LLMs, Transformers, LSTMs, and simple baselines in a direct sequence modeling setting for NAP. In this paper, we fill this gap with a systematic benchmark. We compare vocabulary-adapted LLMs, Transformers trained from scratch, LLM-distilled Transformers, and LSTMs against a simple counting-based argmax baseline across seven real-life event logs. Our results tell a David vs. Goliath story: pretraining confers no consistent improvement over training from scratch, model size shows little effect on performance, and on most datasets the argmax baseline matches or approaches the performance of billion-parameter LLMs.

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

APT: Atomic Physical Transitions for Causal Video-Language Understanding

Authors:
Shang Wu↗Haoran Lu↗Songling Liu↗Chenwei Xu↗Lie Lu↗Pranav Maneriker↗Fan Du↗Manling Li↗Zhaoran Wang↗Han Liu↗

Physical events are not understood by their names alone, but by the causal state changes that compose them. A clip-level label such as "bounce" can be correct while hiding the process that makes the event physically valid, from support loss and contact onset to rebound and settling. To make this hidden process explicit, we introduce Atomic Physical Transitions (APTs): minimal, temporally localized state changes that bind a visible cue to an active physical mechanism and before/after dynamical regimes. An APT chain represents a video as an ordered causal transition sequence rather than a single aggregate event label: event labels tell what happened; APT chains explain why it happened. To make APTs learnable by VLMs, we construct mixed-source APT data from human annotations and simulator ground truth, covering 14 transition types across contact, gravity, friction, and rotation/stability, with 27,303 timed instances over 1,246 trials. Using this data, we find that current VLMs miss transition-level physics, with zero-shot recall at most 14% and errors dominated by missed transitions. Direct fine-tuning on APT chains improves transition detection but causes event-level forgetting, indicating that the model learns a specialized answer format rather than a reusable physical representation. We therefore propose APT-Tune, a parameter-efficient recipe that teaches VLMs to use causal transitions without forgetting how to answer video questions. It combines image-pad-aware supervision, format-conditional co-training, and mechanism-conditioned domain-to-type decoding to make APT learning format-robust and physically grounded. With only 11 M LoRA parameters on Qwen3-VL-2B, APT-Tune substantially improves APT recall while also improving event-level video transfer. These results show that APTs are not a new answer format, but a human-aligned causal supervision signal for physical video understanding.

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18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Validation of an Artificial Intelligence-Assisted Mobile Application for Dietary Oxalate Assessment in Kidney Stone Prevention

Authors:
Scotland↗K. B↗Ojo↗O. A↗Anokwuru↗Javaherforoush↗Jimenez↗Teoh↗Suryavanshi↗Chan↗

Background: Calcium oxalate nephrolithiasis is the most common type of kidney stone disease. Dietary oxalate intake is an important modifiable factor. Assessing dietary oxalate exposure in clinical practice poses challenges due to limitations of traditional dietary recall tools and variability in food composition data. Artificial intelligence (AI) applications in mobile health may offer scalable solutions for better dietary monitoring and kidney stone prevention. We examined the ability of StoneFree AI to estimate dietary oxalate from verbal and image-based food inputs. Objective: To evaluate the accuracy and limitations of StoneFree AI, for estimating dietary oxalate intake from verbal food descriptions and meal images, and to evaluate errors from entries that may inform future clinical use in kidney stone prevention. Methods: StoneFree AI is a cross-platform mobile application that uses a multimodal large language model (Google Gemini) to interpret verbal food descriptions and visual food images. The identified foods were mapped to oxalate values using the Harvard Oxalate Database. System performance was evaluated using 804 verbal food entries and 276 portion-size food images obtained from the ASA24 dietary assessment database. Verbal inputs were compared with reference oxalate values using absolute error and predefined agreement thresholds ({+/-}1, {+/-}5, {+/-}10 mg). Image-based inputs were evaluated against mutually exclusive primary error categories, including food identification, portion estimation, ingredient recognition, oxalate reference selection, and non-analyzable cases. Results: For verbal food entries, the AI system showed strong agreement with reference oxalate values. Overall, 82.1% of estimates were within {+/-}1 mg, 91.5% within {+/-}5 mg, and 94.5% within {+/-}10 mg of reference values. The mean absolute error was 3.32 mg, the median absolute error was 0.10 mg, and the concordance correlation coefficient (CCC) was 0.860. Image-based inputs showed a higher overall error rate of 63.0%, primarily due to food identification errors (33.0%), inaccurate portion estimation (11.0%), and ingredient recognition errors (9.8%). Most errors occurred with visually complex meals, such as mixed dishes and grain-based foods. Conclusions: AI-assisted estimation of dietary oxalate intake demonstrated high accuracy when structured verbal inputs were used but was less reliable for image-based meal analysis. These findings suggest AI-enabled mobile tools may support dietary monitoring for kidney stone prevention, particularly when user input is structured. Further refinement of computer vision models and prospective clinical validation are required before widespread clinical implementation.

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

FlowBender: Feedback-Aware Training for Self-Correcting Conditional Flows

Authors:
Daniel Gilo↗Sven Elflein↗Ido Sobol↗Or Litany↗

Conditional diffusion and flow models routinely fail to satisfy the very constraints that define their task. For instance, a depth-conditioned model often produces images whose re-extracted depth disagrees with the input, even though the forward operator–the depth predictor defining the constraint–is available during both training and inference. Existing approaches generally fall into two categories: supervised models that treat the conditioning signal as a static cue and ignore alignment information at inference, and guidance-based methods that consult it through hand-tuned linear updates, typically trading fidelity to the condition against the plausibility of the generated sample. We argue that the fundamental gap in both paradigms is that the model is never trained to utilize its own alignment error. We introduce FlowBender, a closed-loop framework that treats this error as a first-class input, training the network to learn a correction policy conditioned on inference-time feedback. At each step, an unguided look-ahead pass estimates the clean signal, a task-specific deviation is computed via the forward operator, and a refinement pass consumes this signal to produce a corrected velocity. We propose several variants of FlowBender, including a gradient-based formulation for differentiable operators and a zero-order variant for non-differentiable settings such as JPEG compression. For efficient sampling, we introduce a prior-step shortcut that enables closed-loop correction at a minimal additional computational cost. Across image-to-image translation, restoration, and 3D mesh texturing, FlowBender consistently outperforms standard supervised baselines, alignment-loss-augmented training, and state-of-the-art inference-time guidance, improving fidelity and plausibility simultaneously rather than trading them against each other. Project page: https://flow-bender.github.io/

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20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Online Dynamic Batching with Formal Guarantees for LLM Training

Authors:
Dian Li↗Zekun Wang↗Yaoru Wang↗Jiahong Yan↗

arXiv:2606.19989v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern LLM training breaks a core assumption behind offline batch samplers: the true training cost of a sample is only observable after preprocessing, augmentation, templating, tokenization, and multimodal visual-token expansion. Unless one pays for a preprocessing- and augmentation-dependent length cache, batch construction is therefore blind to the quantity that determines padding, memory use, and GPU saturation. We introduce Online Dynamic Batching (ODB), a DataLoader-side drop-in system that moves batch formation to this point of accurate observability while preserving DDP step alignment. We formalize this synchronization requirement as the Distributed Group Alignment Problem and prove deadlock-free bounded termination with default join-mode identity coverage and opt-in non-join sample-quota closure. ODB requires no model, optimizer, or attention-kernel changes and is released as online-dynamic-batching with lightweight trainer adapters. Across public 2B/8B Qwen3-VL runs on UltraChat/LLaVA/ShareGPT4o, ODB improves literal emitted-sample throughput vs. fixed-batch Standard by 1.58-2.51x on single-node Full FT/LoRA and 1.71-3.78x on two-node Full FT, with Standard-comparable quality; production MM-Mix reaches 4.43x. Against GMT/BMT offline token-budget oracles, ODB is within 15% on UltraChat/LLaVA and faster on high-CV ShareGPT4o: 2.24-2.39x single-node Full FT/LoRA and 3.06-3.69x two-node Full FT. Together, ODB occupies the online/drop-in regime for high-heterogeneity LLM fine-tuning: large throughput gains at Standard-comparable quality, formal DGAP guarantees, and no length-cache precompute or kernel rewrites.

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21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Surrogate-Assisted Framework for SI-Compliant Interconnect Design Optimization Using the Earth Mover's Distance

Authors:
Emre Ecik↗Werner John↗Julian With\"oft↗Ralf Br\"uning↗J\"urgen G\"otze↗

arXiv:2606.15234v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work presents a deterministic, machine-assisted framework for SI-compliant PCB design based on the Earth Mover's Distance (EMD). In contrast to conventional surrogate-based optimization methods that rely on iterative black-box search procedures, the proposed approach follows an interpretable, sequential evaluation strategy. Neural surrogate models are first used to efficiently predict waveform describing features from topology-dependent design parameters. A decision tree then acts as a physically motivated quality gate that identifies SI-compliant waveforms according to predefined SI criteria. Within the resulting valid solution space, the Earth Mover's Distance is employed as a similarity metric to rank candidate designs according to their proximity to an ideal reference signal. This enables not only the deterministic identification of admissible parameter regions but also a transparent prioritization of physically superior solutions without inverse modeling or stochastic search procedures. The methodology is demonstrated using a large-scale set of simulated DDR3 fly-by waveforms. By combining surrogate prediction, interpretable classification, and EMD-based waveform evaluation, the framework provides an explainable and computationally efficient alternative to conventional optimization strategies for supporting PCB development with AI-based methods.

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22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Structuring The Future: Diffusion LLM Speculative Decoding via Calibrated Draft Graphs

Authors:
Sudhanshu Agrawal↗Risheek Garrepalli↗Raghavv Goel↗Christopher Lott↗Fatih Porikli↗Mingu Lee↗

Diffusion LLMs (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a powerful alternative to autoregressive LLMs (AR-LLMs) with the potential to operate at significantly higher token-generation rates. To unlock this potential, we present Spiffy, a speculative decoding algorithm to accelerate dLLM inference while provably preserving the model's output distribution. This work addresses the unique challenges involved in applying ideas from speculative decoding of AR-LLMs to dLLMs. Spiffy performs auto-speculation to eliminate the overheads of an independent draft model, structuring draft states in the form of a novel directed draft graph to take advantage of the bidirectional, blockwise nature of dLLM generation. These draft graphs are calibrated offline to maximize acceptance rates and are dynamically pruned during inference for improved computational efficiency. We present a detailed formulation of Spiffy and demonstrate its ability to accelerate LLaDA, Dream, and SDAR models in combination with KV caching and threshold-based dynamic unmasking leading to up to $8.6\times$ reduction in model inferences and $6.3\times$ acceleration in token rate.

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23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

EQPO: Equitable Group Relative Policy Optimization for Clinical Reasoning

Authors:
Shiqi Dai↗Wei Dai↗Jiaee Cheong↗Paul Pu Liang↗

arXiv:2510.19893v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Medical AI systems demonstrated impressive diagnostic performance, yet they routinely show uneven accuracy across demographic groups, disadvantaging underrepresented populations. Although multimodal reasoning foundation models have pushed clinical diagnosis forward, reinforcement learning-based post-training tends to absorb and magnify the biases present in majority-dominated training corpora. We propose Equitable Group Relative Policy Optimization (EQPO), a hierarchical reinforcement learning method that encourages balanced learning across heterogeneous clinical populations by adaptively reweighting samples according to subgroup representation, task difficulty, and data source. As demographic annotations are frequently missing in real-world clinical data, EQPO additionally applies unsupervised clustering to recover latent subpopulations when they are unavailable. On 7 diagnostic benchmarks covering 5 modalities (X-ray, CT, dermoscopy, mammography, ultrasound), EQPO reduces F1 standard deviation by 43.9% and the maximum cross-group F1 gap by 42.7% on QoQ-Med3-8B over vanilla GRPO, and narrows predictive parity gaps by 27.2% on MedGemma-4B over bias-mitigated RL baselines while raising F1 by 12.5% even without any demographic labels. Examining the training trajectory shows that EQPO steadily improves fairness over the course of optimization, in contrast to baseline methods whose fairness degrades as training proceeds, and the discovered implicit groups remain stable and align with masked demographic attributes. We further release EquiMedGemma-4B and EquiQoQ-Med3-8B, equitability-aware clinical VLLMs that attain state-of-the-art accuracy with markedly smaller demographic gaps.

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24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

SENTINEL: Failure-Driven Reinforcement Learning for Training Tool-Using Language Model Agents

Authors:
Ziyi Wang↗Yuxuan Lu↗Yimeng Zhang↗Qun Liu↗Chen Luo↗Jiri Gesi↗Hanqing Lu↗Yisi Sang↗Manling Li↗Jing Huang↗Dakuo Wang↗

Language model agents are increasingly effective in solving realistic tasks through multi-turn tool use. However, training reliable tool-using agents remains challenging in practice. While reinforcement learning provides an on-policy paradigm for improving agents from their own environment interactions, its effectiveness depends heavily on the training task distribution. When tasks are fixed before training, the task distribution can become increasingly mismatched with the policy's evolving capabilities, causing many rollouts to be spent on uninformative tasks. We propose SENTINEL, a failure-driven reinforcement learning framework that turns the Solver's rollout failures into targeted training tasks. SENTINEL follows a Controller–Proposer–Solver loop: the Controller analyzes failed trajectories and summarizes recurring error patterns, the Proposer generates executable tasks that stress these weaknesses, and the Solver is trained on the targeted tasks. On Tau2-Bench Retail with Qwen3-4B-Thinking-2507, SENTINEL improves Pass\^{}1 from 66.4 to 74.9 and outperforms RL on general synthetic tasks across Pass\^{}k metrics. These results demonstrate that model failures provide an effective and scalable source of targeted training signal for improving tool-using language model agents.

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25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Sensor Configuration Matters: A Systematic Evaluation of Multimodal SLAM on Quadruped Robots

Authors:
Roberto Corlito↗Fabian Schmidt↗Nils Seibert↗Markus Enzweiler↗Abhinav Valada↗Arne Roennau↗

Autonomous navigation of quadrupedal robots in diverse environments fundamentally relies on resilient Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). While visual-inertial SLAM has matured across wheeled, handheld, and aerial platforms, a critical evaluation gap remains regarding how hardware-level sensor configurations affect performance under the aggressive dynamics of legged locomotion. Quadrupeds introduce distinct embodiment-induced sensory challenges, including foot-impact shocks, high-frequency mechanical vibrations, and rapid angular rotations, which degrade standard perception pipelines. To address this gap, we present a systematic evaluation of state-of-the-art visual, visual-inertial, and LiDAR-visual-inertial SLAM methods using the GrandTour dataset recorded on an ANYmal D quadruped. We isolate and quantify the impacts of camera modalities, shutter techniques, and inertial sensor tiers, analyzing their trade-offs across localization accuracy, algorithmic robustness, and computational resource utilization. Our empirical findings demonstrate that hardware selection has substantial influence on system resilience: stereo configurations consistently outperform monocular and RGB-D modalities, global shutter cameras significantly mitigate motion-induced tracking failures compared to rolling shutter cameras, and, crucially, standard inertial integration can degrade the performance of primarily vision-based frameworks under harsh legged locomotion. These insights additionally offer concrete design guidelines for tailoring custom sensor payloads to achieve dependable perception on agile legged systems.

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