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

Randomized Kriging Believer for Parallel Bayesian Optimization with Regret Bounds

arXiv:2603.01470v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider the optimization problem of an expensive-to-evaluate black-box function, in which we can obtain noisy function values in parallel. For this problem, parallel Bayesian optimization (PBO) is a promising approach, which aims to optimize with fewer function evaluations by selecting a diverse input set for parallel evaluation. However, existing PBO methods suffer from poor practical performance or lack theoretical guarantees. In this study, we propose a PBO method, called randomized kriging believer (KB), based on a well-known KB heuristic and inheriting the advantages of the original KB: low computational complexity, a simple implementation, versatility across various BO methods, and applicability to asynchronous parallelization. Furthermore, we show that our randomized KB achieves Bayesian expected regret guarantees. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method through experiments, including those on real-data emulators.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

From Sorting Algorithms to Scalable Kernels: Bayesian Optimization in High-Dimensional Permutation Spaces

arXiv:2507.13263v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Bayesian Optimization (BO) is a powerful tool for black-box optimization, but its application to high-dimensional permutation spaces is severely limited by the challenge of defining scalable representations. The current state-of-the-art BO approach for permutation spaces relies on an exhaustive $\Omega(n^2)$ pairwise comparison, inducing a dense representation that is impractical for large-scale permutations. To break this barrier, we introduce a novel framework for generating efficient permutation representations via kernel functions derived from sorting algorithms. Within this framework, the Mallows kernel can be viewed as a special instance derived from enumeration sort. Further, we introduce the Merge Kernel , which leverages the divide-and-conquer structure of merge sort to produce a compact, $\Theta(n\log n)$ to achieve the lowest possible complexity with no information loss and effectively capture permutation structure. Our central thesis is that the Merge Kernel performs competitively with the Mallows kernel in low-dimensional settings, but significantly outperforms it in both optimization performance and computational efficiency as the dimension $n$ grows. Extensive evaluations on various permutation optimization benchmarks confirm our hypothesis, demonstrating that the Merge Kernel provides a scalable and more effective solution for Bayesian optimization in high-dimensional permutation spaces, thereby unlocking the potential for tackling previously intractable problems such as large-scale feature ordering and combinatorial neural architecture search.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

XPR: An Extensible Cross-Platform Point-Based Differentiable Renderer

Point-based differentiable rendering underpins modern 3D reconstruction, novel-view synthesis, and learning-based graphics pipelines, but developing new rendering methods often requires extensive low-level implementation, hardware-specific kernels, and manually written backward passes. This limits rapid prototyping, reproducibility, exploration, and deployment, especially across diverse hardware platforms. This paper presents XPR, an extensible cross-platform framework for point-based differentiable rendering. XPR introduces a high-level programming interface that separates method-specific logic from the shared rendering pipeline, allowing users to implement new methods in a few lines of code. Its pipeline decomposes rendering into modular, statically shaped parallel operations that can be lowered by a cross-platform compiler to GPUs, TPUs, CPUs, and other ML accelerators. We demonstrate implementations of 3DGS, 3DGUT, and LinPrim, with only a few 100s lines of Python code, each of which can be compiled to a range of hardware platforms with the XLA compiler. These results show that XPR enables fast experimentation and portable execution for emerging point-based differentiable rendering systems.

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

HybridCodeAuthorship: A Benchmark Dataset for Line-Level Code Authorship Detection

arXiv:2606.12620v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Thanks to the rapid adoption of AI code assistants powered by large language models (LLMs), industry codebases are, increasingly, a hybrid of AI- and human-authored code. For risk management and productivity analysis purposes, it is crucial to enable fine-grained location detection of AI-generated code. To develop algorithms for this task, quality benchmarks are needed to assess performance. However, existing benchmarks tend to comprise academic, LeetCode-style problems and presume a code snippet is either completely human-authored or completely AI-authored, which is not reflective of the diverse intents and styles of industry codebases utilizing AI code assistants. To fill these gaps, we introduce HybridCodeAuthorship, a novel benchmark of Python code files with interleaved human- and AI-authored lines of code to simulate authentic utilization of AI code assistants. In this paper, we first present our dataset construction pipeline, which leverages CodeSearchNet, a massive collection of links to open sourced repositories on GitHub. We then benchmark the performance of two state-of-the-art AI-generated code detection algorithms at both the line- and chunk-level. Experimental results demonstrate that HybridCodeAuthorship is a challenging benchmark with a top-scoring algorithm, AIGCode Detector, obtaining a highest F1 score of 0.48 and 0.56 on chunk-level and line-level code detection tasks, respectively.

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

Continual Learning with Support Boundary Experience Blending

Continual learning (CL) seeks to mitigate catastrophic forgetting when models are trained with sequential tasks. A common approach, experience replay (ER), stores past exemplars but only sparsely approximates the data distribution, yielding fragile and oversimplified decision boundaries. We address this limitation by introducing Support Boundary Data (SBD), generated via differential-privacy-inspired noise into latent features to create boundary-adjacent representations that implicitly regularize decision boundaries. Building on this idea, we propose Experience Blending (EB), a framework that jointly trains on exemplars and SBD through a dual-model aggregation strategy. EB has two components: (1) latent-space noise injection to generate support boundary data, and (2) end-to-end training that jointly leverages exemplars and SBD. Unlike standard experience replay, SBD enriches the feature space near decision boundaries, leading to more stable and robust continual learning. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Tiny ImageNet, and ImageNet1K demonstrate consistent accuracy improvements of 10%, 6%, 13%, 2%, respectively.

06.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Laws of Large Numbers for Non-Independent Random Variables on Hyperspaces with respect to the Hausdorff Metric

arXiv:2011.07199v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper investigates the limit behavior of the Minkowski sums for sequences of set-valued random variables. When the underlying space is finite dimensional, by using the support function, we establish the weak and strong laws of large numbers for non-independent random variables in the hyperspace with respect to the Hausdorff metric $d_H$.

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

Traditional machine learning vs. deep learning from dynamic graph representations of proteins' 3D folds in the task of protein structure classification

arXiv:2605.29228v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Protein structure classification (PSC) uses supervised learning to predict a protein's CATH/SCOP(e) class from the protein's sequence or 3D structural feature(s). We already modeled 3D structures as (static) protein structure networks (PSNs), demonstrating the competitiveness of PSN-based features to sequence or direct (i.e. non-network) 3D structural features in the PSC task. More recently, we demonstrated the power of features extracted from dynamic PSNs over features extracted from static PSNs (and thus by transitivity over sequence and direct 3D structural features) in the same task. That dynamic PSN approach used traditional machine learning (ML), combining manual (pre-engineered) features with an off-the-shelf classifier. Here, we evaluate whether automatic deep learning (DL) from the dynamic PSNs yields improvements. Our evaluation on 72 datasets spanning ~44,000 CATH- or SCOPe-labeled dynamic PSNs reveals that in terms of PSC accuracy, traditional ML and DL are (close to) tied for a large majority of the datasets, while DL is on average 10+ times slower. We are the first to evaluate traditional ML vs. DL in the dynamic PSN-based PSC task.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

DynamicPO: Dynamic Preference Optimization for Recommendation

arXiv:2605.00327v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In large language model (LLM)-based recommendation systems, direct preference optimization (DPO) effectively aligns recommendations with user preferences, requiring multi-negative objective functions to leverage abundant implicit-feedback negatives and sharpen preference boundaries. However, our empirical analyses reveal a counterintuitive phenomenon, preference optimization collapse, where increasing the number of negative samples can lead to performance degradation despite a continuously decreasing training loss. We further theoretically demonstrate that this collapse arises from gradient suppression, caused by the dominance of easily discriminable negatives over boundary-critical negatives that truly define user preference boundaries. As a result, boundary-relevant signals are under-optimized, weakening the model's decision boundary. Motivated by these observations, we propose DynamicPO (Dynamic Preference Optimization), a lightweight and plug-and-play framework comprising two adaptive mechanisms: Dynamic Boundary Negative Selection, which identifies and prioritizes informative negatives near the model's decision boundary, and Dual-Margin Dynamic beta Adjustment, which calibrates optimization strength per sample according to boundary ambiguity. Extensive experiments on three public datasets show that DynamicPO effectively prevents optimization collapse and improves recommendation accuracy on multi-negative preference optimization methods, with negligible computational overhead. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/xingyuHuxingyu/DynamicPO.

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

Multi-View In-Cabin Monitoring System for Public Transport Vehicles

We introduce a multi-view in-cabin monitoring dataset for public transportation with synchronized RGB and depth images from four inward-facing cameras and a rotating LiDAR covering the vehicle interior of a digitalized and partly automated German city bus. The dataset contains 9.136 synchronized samples with annotations and is accompanied by a calibration and pseudo-labeling pipeline that generates 3D human pose estimates and oriented 3D bounding boxes for occupants. We further provide a nuScenes-format conversion and benchmark representative multi-view 3D detection models (e.g., Lift-Splat-Shoot and BEVFusion), supporting comparative evaluation and small-scale training of multi-view in-cabin perception models. The dataset and tools are available at https://github.com/EvgenyGorelik/multiview_incabin_dataset.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Quantum walk-based optimisation for capacitated vehicle routing with homogeneous and heterogeneous fleets

arXiv:2606.12856v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) is an appealing candidate for quantum optimisation due to its combinatorial complexity and practical importance. However, the problem's constrained search space poses a challenge for such quantum algorithms. We introduce a quantum walk-based optimisation algorithm (QWOA) for the CVRP with homogeneous or heterogeneous vehicle fleets, addressing this challenge through a continuous-time quantum walk over a product space that coincides with combinatorial structures intrinsic to the CVRP solution space. Relative to the prior QWOA-based formulation, this approach reduces the per-layer gate complexity from $\mathcal{O}(n^{3}\log n)$ to $\mathcal{O}(n^{2}\log n)$ and supports a circuit parameterisation schedule generated by a fixed number of classical parameters. Exact state-vector simulation on instances with up to $n=8$ customers and $K=3$ vehicles demonstrates improved convergence to low-cost solutions using markedly fewer objective function evaluations, with the advantage broadening as problem size increases. These results identify structured product-space walks as a promising tool for optimisation over constrained combinatorial spaces.

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

Contagion Networks: Evaluator Bias Propagation in Multi-Agent LLM Systems

Authors:

arXiv:2606.20493v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When large language models serve as evaluators in multi-agent systems, their systematic evaluation biases propagate through the agent network. We introduce Contagion Networks, a formal framework for measuring how evaluator biases spread across interacting LLM agents. In a controlled 3-agent experiment using DeepSeek-chat with three distinct evaluator bias profiles (structured, balanced, evidence-based), we measure the Cross-Agent Contagion Matrix Gamma_3 and find that evaluator biases consistently propagate between agents (gamma in [0.157, 0.352]), even within the same underlying model. We identify three propagation regimes governed by the spectral radius rho(Gamma_N), and demonstrate that homogeneous-model agents produce contagion coefficients 3-5x weaker than cross-model coefficients observed in prior work (MM-EPC: gamma approx 0.85-1.3), placing them in the suppression regime. We show that increasing evaluator committee size from k=1 to k=3 reduces effective contagion by 72.4%, providing an actionable mitigation strategy. We release the open-source Contagion Network experimental framework.

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

MagpieTTS-LF: Inference-Time Long-Form Speech Generation Without Training on Long-Form data

arXiv:2606.18485v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems achieve remarkable quality on short utterances but long-form speech generation shows prosodic drift, speaker inconsistencies and sentence boundary artifacts. Existing approaches either compress sequences, increase context length or naively concatenate independently synthesized chunks. We present an inference-time approach called MagpieTTS-LF that enables MagpieTTS to produce coherent long-form speech without model retraining. Our method introduces three key innovations: (1) soft attention priors to guide monotonic alignment while preserving past and future context; (2) a stateful inference algorithm that maintains context across sentence chunks, ensuring prosodic continuity; (3) history-aware text encoding that uses past text for discourse-level prosodic planning. Experiments on long texts show significant improvements in long-range intelligibility, prosodic coherence, speaker consistency, and boundary naturalness compared to other baselines.

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

How Far Can Machine Translation Quality Take You? Extrinsic Discourse Evaluation in Goal-Oriented Setups

Existing machine translation (MT) metrics and discourse-focused evaluations primarily assess translation quality intrinsically, without measuring the downstream consequences of translation errors. In this work, we focus on extrinsic discourse evaluation of machine translation under two distinct regimes: static and interactive. Under the static regime, we propose an entity counting task as a probe of referential consistency in discourse. We show that high intrinsic MT quality does not reliably predict downstream discourse success and strong MT systems still produce referential inconsistencies. For the interactive regime, we study the goal-oriented multi-agent Welfare Diplomacy game as a probe of long-horizon communication and coordination. We find that interaction-specific translation failures impact downstream coordination. Our results highlight goal-oriented environments as a viable framework for discourse-sensitive extrinsic MT evaluation.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Learning Upper Lower Value Envelopes to Shape Online RL: A Principled Approach

arXiv:2510.19528v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We investigate the fundamental problem of leveraging offline data to accelerate online reinforcement learning - a direction with strong potential but limited theoretical grounding. Our study centers on how to learn and apply value envelopes within this context. To this end, we introduce a principled two-stage framework: the first stage uses offline data to derive upper and lower bounds on value functions, while the second incorporates these learned bounds into online algorithms. Our method extends prior work by decoupling the upper and lower bounds, enabling more flexible and tighter approximations. In contrast to approaches that rely on fixed shaping functions, our envelopes are data-driven and explicitly modeled as random variables, with a filtration argument ensuring independence across phases. The analysis establishes high-probability regret bounds determined by two interpretable quantities, thereby providing a formal bridge between offline pre-training and online fine-tuning. Empirical results on tabular MDPs demonstrate substantial regret reductions compared with both UCBVI and prior methods while remaining competitive with related approaches.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Distillation of supersinglet states

arXiv:2509.20962v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce an entanglement distillation (purification) protocol for supersinglet states composed of N qubits. The supersinglet state we target is a total spin zero state with zero spin variance, and has a fully entangled structure involving all qubits. In our distillation protocol, three copies of an initial spin zero state are measured in the local total spin basis such that a higher fidelity supersinglet state is generated upon postselection. The initial state can be prepared using conventional Bell state distillation methods distributed in a way to target the supersinglet symmetries. The protocol uses only local operations and classical communications, and is suitable for long-distance applications such as quantum clock synchronization and cryptography, and avoids a high dimensional Schur transform such that it can be used for tasks such as quantum metrology.

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

Flash-GRPO: Efficient Alignment for Video Diffusion via One-Step Policy Optimization

Group Relative Policy Optimization has emerged as essential for aligning video diffusion models with human preferences, but faces a critical computational bottleneck: training a 14B parametered model typically demands hundreds of GPU days per experiment. Existing efficiency methods reduce costs through sliding window subsampling training timesteps, but fundamentally compromise optimization, exhibiting severe instability and failing to reach full trajectory performance. We present Flash-GRPO, a single-step training framework that outperforms full trajectory training in alignment quality under low computational budgets while substantially improving training efficiency. Flash-GRPO addresses two critical challenges: iso-temporal grouping eliminates timestep-confounded variance by enforcing prompt-wise temporal consistency, decoupling policy performance from timestep difficulty; temporal gradient rectification neutralizes the time-dependent scaling factor that causes vastly inconsistent gradient magnitudes across timesteps. Experiments on 1.3B to 14B parameter models validate Flash-GRPO's effectiveness, demonstrating substantial training acceleration with consistent stability and state-of-the-art alignment quality.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Towards Provably Fair Machine Learning: Bayesian Approaches For Consistent and Transparent Predictions

arXiv:2606.12615v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: ML classifiers deployed in high-stakes domains produce predictions whose quality varies systematically across subgroups. For granular subgroups defined by intersections of multiple features, predictions are often inconsistent with the observed data: the model's outputs contradict the evidence available for that subgroup. This problem is exacerbated by regularisation, which improves aggregate performance by collapsing small subgroups into larger groups, disproportionately affecting demographic minorities. We define two requirements for consistent prediction: determinism (identical individuals receive identical predictions) and statistical consistency (we cannot reject, at significance level alpha, the hypothesis that the predictions for a subgroup were drawn from the Bayesian optimal target distribution inferred for that subgroup). From these requirements we derive the Fair Bayesian classifier, which enforces both across every group and subgroup simultaneously and abstains whenever no consistent deterministic prediction is possible. On three benchmark datasets (Adult, COMPAS, and Bank Marketing), standard classifiers produce statistically inconsistent predictions for a substantial proportion of subgroups. Our classifier achieves zero consistency error by construction while exceeding baseline accuracy and multicalibration on every dataset tested. Statistical consistency provides a principled foundation for prediction quality with direct implications for algorithmic fairness. Minority demographics are disproportionately concentrated in small subgroups, precisely where frequentist inference is least reliable; addressing this inference problem is therefore a necessary step toward fair ML. By enforcing Bayesian consistency at the finest resolution the data supports, the our classifier demonstrates that exhaustive subgroup fairness with principled abstention is achievable in practice.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Active Learning with Low-Rank Structure for Data Selection

arXiv:2606.16045v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In the data selection problem, the objective is to choose a small, representative subset of data that can be used to efficiently train a machine learning model. Sener and Savarese [ICLR 2018] showed that, given an embedding representation of the data and suitable geometric assumptions, heuristics based on $k$-center clustering can be used to perform data selection. This perspective was further explored by Axiotis et. al. [ICML 2024], who proposed a data selection approach based on $k$-means clustering and sensitivity sampling. However, these methods rely on the assumption that the dataset exhibits intrinsic geometric structure that can be effectively captured by clustering, whereas many modern datasets instead possess global algebraic structure that is better exploited by low-rank approximation or principal component analysis. In this paper, we introduce a new data selection framework based on low-rank approximation and residual-based sampling, formulated through the lens of row subset selection and loss-preserving coreset construction. Given an embedding representation of the data satisfying mild regularity conditions, which can be interpreted as algebraic or angular notions of Lipschitz continuity, we show that it is possible to select a weighted subset of $\tilde{O}\left(k + \frac{1}{\varepsilon^2}\right)$ data points whose average loss approximates the average loss over the full dataset within a $(1+\varepsilon)$ relative error, up to an additive $\varepsilon \Phi_k$ term, where $\Phi_k$ denotes the optimal rank-$k$ approximation cost of the embedding matrix. We complement these theoretical guarantees with empirical evaluations, demonstrating that on a range of real-world datasets, our data selection approach achieves improved performance over prior strategies based on uniform sampling or clustering-based sensitivity sampling.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Scale or Reason? A Compute-Equivalent Analysis of Reasoning Distillation

Distilling reasoning traces from strong teacher models has become the standard recipe for building capable small language models. Yet reasoning traces are 5-20$\times$ longer than standard instruction fine-tuning (IFT) outputs, meaning every practitioner who chooses reasoning distillation implicitly forgoes training a larger IFT model on the same compute budget. Whether this trade-off is worthwhile remains unaddressed. We study it with a controlled experiment: a single teacher generates paired IFT and reasoning outputs for identical prompts by toggling only its reasoning mode, isolating supervision format as the sole variable. Training students at five scales (0.5B to 14B) and evaluating on 18 benchmarks, we find that at matched FLOPs, IFT lies on or near the Pareto frontier across the majority of configurations. Reasoning reaches the Pareto frontier only on open-ended tasks at 7B and above. Even there, a sequential curriculum mixing just 25-50\% reasoning data with IFT captures most of the accuracy benefit at far lower compute cost.

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

StereoGeo: an end-to-end stereo camera calibration method

In this work, we propose StereoGeo, an end-to-end network-based approach for stereo camera calibration. Our method estimates the focal lengths and gravity directions of the left and right cameras, as well as the relative extrinsic transformation relating them. Existing methods often rely on calibration patterns in structured environments or address only a single camera configuration, being limited to either intrinsic or extrinsic estimation, and depending on a multi-view setups. StereoGeo extends the GeoCalib algorithm, integrating deep neural network feature extraction with a differentiable optimizer. Extensive experiments on real-world benchmarks demonstrate that StereoGeo achieves competitive performance for intrinsic calibration and provides accurate stereo extrinsic estimation, outperforming existing methods that are limited to monocular settings. The dataset used in this work is partially publicly available at https://github.com/meddourimane/StereoGeo-dataset.

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

Cordyceps: Covert Control Attacks on LLMs via Data Poisoning

arXiv:2605.26595v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are often fine-tuned on uncurated text datasets that adversaries can poison. Existing poisoning attacks primarily rely on fixed trigger phrases that defenses such as outlier detection, clean-data regularization, or online monitoring can neutralize. In this paper, we propose a data poisoning method that teaches an LLM an information hiding scheme reliably and stealthily through semantic associations between shared knowledge such as facts or concepts and attacker-chosen phrases. The induced hiding scheme can encode and decode arbitrary malicious instructions, thus revealing a new and subtle poisoning-induced vulnerability: covert control attacks. We precisely characterize covert control attacks and evaluate them across $5$ LLMs, $3$ backdoor defenses, and $4$ prompt injection defenses. With a small poisoned fraction, covert control attacks outperform heuristic-based prompt injection attacks in average attack success rate by about $40\%$ relative to clean fine-tuned models. They also circumvent defenses based on detection and fine-tuning, maintaining up to $93\%$ attack success rate after backdoor defenses and up to $98\%$ after prompt injection defenses.

22.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-24

trAIt: Species-by-Trait Data Retrieval using Large Language Models

Biological research often requires information about species' traits. Manual literature collation can be time-consuming and miss parts of the literature. To address this gap, we developed trAIt, a publicly available software for the retrieval of characteristics of species from scientific literature catalogued in the Europe PubMed Central (PubMed) database. trAIt provides a graphical user interface in which users specify species and characteristics of interest. Leveraging a large language model (LLM), trAIt retrieves relevant papers, combines their content through a consensus-based summarization model, and outputs a species-by-characteristic table. For a case study involving frog species, trAIt recovered 47.1% of trait-species combinations in 2.75 hours, while an expert curator independently recovered 62.4% over months. The consensus-based summarization substantially aids accuracy compared to single-source extraction. Across three case studies of vertebrate taxa, an expert confirmed the accuracy of 70.9% of trait-species entries recovered by trAIt. We observed considerable variation across taxa in trAIt's accuracy, which is possibly due to heterogeneity in open-access literature availability and inconsistencies in species and trait terminology. In sum, our analysis suggests that LLM-based tools can accelerate biological data synthesis but should be used to support domain experts' research, rather than replace their judgment.

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

CHILLGuard: Towards Fine-Grained Chinese LLM Safety Guardrail with Scalable Data Construction and Model-aware Preference Alignment

Malicious content generated from large language models (LLMs) could pose severe safety risks and ethical concerns. While existing LLM safety guardrails excel in English or multilingual settings, they lack adaptation to Chinese-specific regulatory policies, cultural context and linguistic nuances, failing to support fine-grained risk classification for diverse deployment needs. In this paper, we introduce a 5-macro, 31-micro category fine-grained risk taxonomy for Chinese scenarios, and build CHILLGuard: a dedicated Chinese LLM content safety guardrail. To address the critical scarcity of high-quality annotated Chinese safety data, we propose a scalable multi-stage data construction pipeline: we expand multi-source corpus via retrieval-augmented generation, generate implicit harmful samples through prompt engineering rewriting, and refine high-quality data via multi-model voting-based label calibration. Based on this, we build CHILLGuardTrain, a large-scale training set with 405,007 samples, and CHILLGuardTest, a rigorously curated annotated test set with 51,745 samples. We then train CHILLGuard on CHILLGuardTrain under a generator-classifier collaborative framework via Model-aware Direct Preference Optimization. Extensive experiments under multiple settings demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of CHILLGuard, e.g., a 15.92% improvement of F1 score over Qwen3Guard-8B-Strict on our benchmark. We will release our resources at https://github.com/cswbyu/CHILLGuard.

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

Beyond MACs: Hardware Efficient Architecture Design for Vision Backbones

Vision backbone networks play a central role in modern computer vision. Enhancing their efficiency directly benefits a wide range of downstream applications. To measure efficiency, many publications rely on MACs (Multiply Accumulate operations) as a predictor of execution time. In this paper, we experimentally demonstrate the shortcomings of such a metric, especially in the context of edge devices. By contrasting the MAC count and execution time of common architectural design elements, we identify key factors for efficient execution and provide insights to optimize backbone design. Based on these insights, we present LowFormer, a novel vision backbone family. LowFormer features a streamlined macro and micro design that includes Lowtention, a lightweight alternative to Multi-Head Self-Attention. Lowtention not only proves more efficient, but also enables superior results on ImageNet. Additionally, we present an edge GPU version of LowFormer, that can further improve upon its baseline's speed on edge GPU and desktop GPU. We demonstrate LowFormer's wide applicability by evaluating it on smaller image classification datasets, as well as adapting it to several downstream tasks, such as object detection, semantic segmentation, image retrieval, and visual object tracking. LowFormer models consistently achieve remarkable speed-ups across various hardware platforms compared to recent state-of-the-art backbones. Code and models are available at https://github.com/altair199797/LowFormer/blob/main/Beyond_MACs.md.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Exit-and-Join Dynamics for Decentralized Coalition Formation

Authors:

arXiv:2606.19683v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper studies coalition formation as a decentralized dynamical process driven by unilateral exit-and-join decisions. Agents evaluate local moves using the Aumann-Dreze value, so payoffs are computed within the agent's current coalition rather than through a globally negotiated coalition structure. The resulting model links cooperative payoff allocation with noncooperative best-response behavior: a terminal partition is precisely a coalition structure with no admissible, individually profitable exit-and-join deviation. We establish equilibrium characterizations, identify conditions under which the dynamics admit scalar Lyapunov or exact-potential representations, and analyze how switching and acceptance costs shape local stability. Numerical experiments test finite-time stabilization, cost sensitivity, and a special convex-game benchmark.