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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Asymptotics of the number of labelled connected sparse multitype graphs

arXiv:2606.17912v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the asymptotic enumeration of labelled connected multitype graphs in the sparse regime, where both the number of vertices and edges grow linearly and the excess is proportional to the size of the graph. Extending the classical theory of connected graph enumeration to the multitype setting, we consider graphs with prescribed numbers of vertices of each type and prescribed edge counts between each pair of types. Our approach is probabilistic and relies on the theory of inhomogeneous random graphs. In particular, we exploit large-deviation principles and asymptotic estimates for connectedness probabilities to relate the counting problem to the emergence of giant components in suitably tuned supercritical random graphs. From large deviation asymptotics of connected components of inhomogeneous random graphs, we recognize that a connected graph with a given edge statistics corresponds to the (unique) giant component of larger inhomogeneous random graph with a suitably chosen connection kernel. This correspondence allows us to derive the leading exponential asymptotics for the number of connected multitype graphs with fixed type profile and edge matrix. The resulting formula generalizes the asymptotic enumeration results of Bender, Canfield, and McKay for connected sparse graphs to the multitype framework. More broadly, the paper illustrates how probabilistic techniques can provide transparent and effective tools for addressing new combinatorial enumeration problems.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Notation Matters: A Benchmark Study of Token-Optimized Formats in Agentic AI Systems

Large language models in Agentic AI systems consume tool schemas and execution results and emit tool invocations as structured data. The default language for that exchange, JSON, was designed for application-to-application interchange rather than token efficiency, so its structural elements impose substantial token overhead. Recent work proposes token-optimized alternatives such as TOON (Token-Oriented Object Notation) and TRON (Token Reduced Object Notation) as more compact replacements, but these formats have been evaluated only on isolated comprehension or generation tasks. Whether their token reductions hold inside end-to-end agentic loops therefore remains an open question. We evaluate TOON and TRON on four agentic benchmarks (BFCL, MCPToolBenchPP, MCP-Universe, StableToolBench) and five open-weight LLMs, decoupling input compression from output compression to measure comprehension and generation independently. TRON reduces tokens by up to 27% with accuracy within 14pp of the JSON baseline. TOON achieves up to 18% reduction at a similar 9pp accuracy cost, but additionally cascades on multi-turn parsing failures and collapses parallel tool-call output for most models. The code is available at: https://github.com/lkutschka/notation-matters

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

FLaRA: Predicting Future Latent Representations for Accident Anticipation

Anticipating traffic accidents from dashcam videos is a critical challenge in intelligent transportation systems. Existing methods typically map visual context directly to a collision probability without explicitly modeling the future evolution of the driving scene. In this paper we propose FLaRA (Predicting Future Latent Representations for Accident Anticipation), a novel predictive architecture that shifts this paradigm by forecasting future latent representations for accident anticipation. Building upon the Video Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (V-JEPA2), our model conditions a predictor network on observed context frames to predict the forthcoming latent features of the scene. A classifier then operates on these predicted future representations rather than only on past observations. To ensure these forecasts remain grounded in realistic future dynamics, we introduce a joint training objective that simultaneously optimizes an auxiliary feature-level reconstruction loss and a cross-entropy classification loss. Extensive evaluations on the Nexar dataset, alongside cross-domain validations on the DAD, DADA-2000, and DoTA benchmarks, demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance while maintaining realistic early warning capabilities.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Antimicrobial-resistant E. coli in human, animal and environmental reservoirs in rural Bangladeshi households with young children

In low-income countries, ESBL-producing Escherichia coli (ESBL-EC) is frequently detected in humans, animals and household environments, indicating widespread exposure to antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Established risk factors such as antibiotic use do not explain the high community carriage of AMR in all settings; identifying the dominant exposure pathways can inform interventions against AMR. We aimed to investigate (i) animal-human-environment sharing of AMR by assessing associations between the abundance of ESBL-EC in the household environment, domestic animal feces and young children's stool and (ii) household factors associated with ESBL-EC abundance in these reservoirs. We enrolled 112 households from the CRADLE trial in rural Bangladesh. We enumerated ESBL-EC in drinking water, food, child hand rinses, outdoor soil, indoor floor swabs, chicken and cow feces, and stool from children aged 6 months. We recorded indicators of sanitation, animal ownership/management, human and animal antibiotic use, and child exposure behaviors using structured questionnaires and spot checks. The highest prevalence of ESBL-EC was in child stool (95.6%) and animal feces (82.3-96.9%), followed by soil (48.2%) and floors (36.6%); < 10% of food, child hands and drinking water harbored ESBL-EC. The abundance of ESBL-EC in child stool was not associated with its abundance in any sampled matrix; the abundance in chicken but not cow feces showed positive correlations with soil, floors, child hands, and drinking water (correlation coefficients: 0.19-0.39, p-values < 0.05). Higher-quality latrines (improved, pour-flush, with slab) were associated with lower ESBL-EC abundance across matrices; unsafe animal management (animals roaming or spending the night inside the home) was associated with higher abundance. Child antibiotic use and exposure behaviors (soil ingestion, time spent on floor) were not associated with ESBL-EC abundance in child stool. We observed high AMR colonization among young children and domestic animals in rural Bangladesh not explained by traditional fecal-oral exposure pathways. Future studies should explore additional pathways and assess whether sanitation and animal management improvements can reduce AMR.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

EMAgnet: Parameter-Space EMA Regularization for Policy Gradient Self-Play in Large Games

arXiv:2606.23995v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent work has established that regularized policy gradient methods such as PPO, when used in self-play, can match or exceed specialized game-theoretic algorithms for solving two-player zero-sum imperfect-information games. The uniform distribution has emerged as a strong policy regularization target for this purpose, but it regularizes equally toward all actions regardless of their viability. We introduce EMAgnet, which instead regularizes toward an exponential moving average (EMA) of the last-iterate policy's parameters, providing an adaptive regularization target that evolves with the agent's improving strategy. We evaluate EMAgnet on both standard two-player zero-sum benchmarks and modified benchmarks with exploration challenges and large numbers of strictly dominated strategies. Relative to PPO self-play with uniform-magnet regularization under both linear and power-law annealing schedules, EMAgnet achieves lower exploitability in the majority of tested environments, with consistent performance gains across games containing strictly dominated strategies.

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

The relationship between the transition functions of the labeled and unlabeled versions of the infinitely-many-neutral-alleles diffusion model

Authors:

arXiv:2606.06739v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The transition function of the unlabeled infinitely-many-neutral-alleles diffusion model, as expressed by Zhou (2015), is derived from the transition function of the labeled infinitely-many-neutral-alleles diffusion model, slightly simplifying the derivation by Feng (2010).

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

SceneCraft: Interactive System for Image Editing via Scene Graph

Recent advances in generative AI have enabled natural language-driven image editing, yet existing systems often fail in complex scenes with multiple interacting objects because they rely heavily on users crafting precise text prompts. To address the absence of structured control, we propose SceneCraft, a novel interactive framework that bridges user intent and model execution by representing images as editable scene graphs. Instead of guessing text prompts through trial and error, users interact directly with a visual graph to perform complex spatial and relational operations. These graph modifications are automatically translated into precise, context-aware editing prompts, effectively eliminating linguistic ambiguity. To ensure robust and diverse results, structured prompts are dispatched to multiple state-of-the-art generative models. Evaluations across diverse editing scenarios show that SceneCraft provides a more intuitive control mechanism, significantly reducing the cognitive burden of manual prompt engineering while generating outputs that users consistently rate as higher in quality and fidelity.

08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-13

Reinforcement learning-driven unified generative framework for multi-objective RNA codon design

Current RNA codon design methods are limited by inefficient long-sequence processing and poor generalizability, often relying on a decoupled "generate-or-optimize" paradigm. We introduce RNARL, a reinforcement learning-driven framework that unifies sequence generation with multi-objective optimization. RNARL directly learns to generate high-performance sequences, effectively optimizing sequences over 3,900 nucleotides and demonstrating superior performance and universality across six species and five RNA types. RNARL thus establishes an effective and generalizable framework for RNA codon design. Finally, a user-friendly web platform is freely available to facilitate its application for RNA therapeutic design.

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

Multi-Bitwidth Quantization for LLMs Using Additive Codebooks

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed across heterogeneous hardware with varying resource constraints, the ability to adaptively manage the trade-off between performance and efficiency without retraining is critical. We propose Drop-by-Drop, a novel multi-bitwidth post-training quantization framework that enables inference-time precision control over LLM weights from a single trained model. Our method is theoretically grounded in information theory and successive refinement. We establish that LLM weights, which commonly follow a Gaussian distribution, can be optimally reconstructed with increasing fidelity as additional bits are incorporated, under a weighted mean squared error distortion motivated by LLM loss functions. To realize this in practice, Drop-by-Drop incorporates Matryoshka-style supervision into the loss function, exploiting the structure of additive codebooks. Drop-by-Drop produces a single model where ordered subsets of codebooks yield accurate partial reconstructions at each precision level. This approach significantly reduces storage and memory overhead by allowing a single checkpoint to serve multiple bitwidths, while maintaining competitive perplexity and accuracy across major architectures, such as Qwen, LLaMA, Gemma, and Mistral.

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

Rethinking Robust Adversarial Concept Erasure in Diffusion Models

Concept erasure aims to selectively unlearning undesirable content in diffusion models (DMs) to reduce the risk of sensitive content generation. As a novel paradigm in concept erasure, most existing methods employ adversarial training to identify and suppress target concepts, thus reducing the likelihood of sensitive outputs. However, these methods often neglect the specificity of adversarial training in DMs, resulting in only partial mitigation. In this work, we investigate and quantify this specificity from the perspective of concept space, i.e., can adversarial samples truly fit the target concept space? We observe that existing methods neglect the role of conceptual semantics when generating adversarial samples, resulting in ineffective fitting of concept spaces. This oversight leads to the following issues: 1) when there are few adversarial samples, they fail to comprehensively cover the object concept; 2) conversely, they will disrupt other target concept spaces. Motivated by the analysis of these findings, we introduce S-GRACE (Semantics-Guided Robust Adversarial Concept Erasure), which grace leveraging semantic guidance within the concept space to generate adversarial samples and perform erasure training. Experiments conducted with seven state-of-the-art methods and three adversarial prompt generation strategies across various DM unlearning scenarios demonstrate that S-GRACE significantly improves erasure performance 26%, better preserves non-target concepts, and reduces training time by 90%. Our code is available at https://github.com/Qhong-522/S-GRACE.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Evolving Quantum Error-Correcting Encodings for Molecular Simulation

arXiv:2606.25870v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Useful quantum algorithms require many coupled discrete design choices. We study LLM-driven evolutionary program synthesis – a language model edits a program, an external verifier scores the result, and high-scoring programs are retained and re-mutated – as a tool for quantum-computing research. As a case study, we apply this loop to the Generalized Superfast Encoding (GSE), a fermion-to-qubit encoding whose prior molecular constructions reach code distance $3$. The search discovered interpretable constructor programs whose codes have exact distance $5$ on the molecular instances tested, and distance $6$ on one $20$-mode instance, under strict stabilizer-coset semantics. To our knowledge these are the first GSE/superfast encodings beyond distance $3$ for dense molecular Hamiltonians. A second search, guided by verifier analysis of the first artifact, found a circulant constructor that reaches a five-qubits-per-mode floor on the tested $12$-, $14$-, $16$-, and $20$-mode instances, with certified dense-rule fallback at the failing $18$-mode case. As secondary resource descriptors, in a code-capacity memory comparison at $p=10^{-3}$ the resulting encodings use $4.2$–$5.0\times$ fewer data qubits than a scoped per-mode Jordan–Wigner $+$ $[[25,1,5]]$ surface route and have $3.4$–$8.2\times$ lower logical-failure rates under finite-weight decoding tables with explicit truncation brackets; we claim no circuit-level fault-tolerance or Trotter-cost advantage. The search trajectory illustrates a general operating lesson: rewarding distance alone selects trivial dense graphs, whereas holding verified distance fixed and rewarding compression selects structured rules.

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

Cycle-Consistent Neural Explanation of Formal Verification Certificates

arXiv:2606.24414v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Formal verification produces machine-checkable certificates that attest to the satisfaction or violation of temporal properties, yet these certificates remain opaque to non-specialist stakeholders. We propose a cycle-consistent neural architecture that generates faithful natural language explanations of verification certificates. A forward network NN1 maps certificates to explanations, and an inverse network NN2 reconstructs certificates from explanations; a symbolic verifier closes the loop, providing a differentiable faithfulness proxy. A pointer-generator mechanism ensures lexical grounding by copying state names directly from the certificate. We evaluate on 420 test certificates spanning six verification methods (bounded proof, k-induction, inductive invariant, lasso, reachability, witness pair) in both YES and NO verdict variants, drawn from a financial compliance domain with 207 named states. Our trained architecture, combined with a hybrid inference-time routing strategy, achieves 90.0% cycle-verified soundness, surpassing a multi- LLM few-shot baseline (76.1% for the best of 16 LLM combinations across four frontier models) by 13.9 percentage points. The neural model wins on 10 of 12 verdict/kind categories, with three categories reaching 100% soundness. The architecture offers 860x faster inference (185 ms vs. 160 s per certificate for the full multi-LLM baseline), offline operation, deterministic outputs, and zero per-inference cost. These results demonstrate that trained specialization outperforms general-purpose LLM prompting for structured certificate explanation, while eliminating the deployment constraints of cloud-based inference.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Towards a Dynamic and Fixed-budget Memory Bank for Efficient Streaming Video Understanding

Currently, streaming video understanding is still a daunting task for existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Its difficulties not only lie in handling the ever-increasing video frames, but also in the unpredictability of future video content and input instructions. In this paper, we study this task from the perspective of constructing a dynamic but fixed-budget memory bank, and propose a novel and training-free approach termed CausalMem. CausalMem is dedicated to constructing a dynamic visual memory update mechanism, thereby maximizing the amount of information in streaming video within a limited memory space, much like the human brain. In practice, CausalMem estimates the redundancy of visual tokens and updates the memory bank via an online semantic basis, which models the principal semantics of the observed video stream. To validate CausalMem, we apply it to two representative MLLMs, namely LLaVA-OneVision and Qwen2.5-VL respectively, and conduct extensive experiments on both streaming and offline video understanding benchmarks. The experimental results not only show the great advantages than existing methods under both streaming and offline settings, e.g., $+3.2\%$ and $+3.0\%$ average accuracy gains respectively, but also witness the superior semantic preservation for streaming videos, e.g., using 12$k$ token budgets to memorize hour-long streaming videos, which achieves more than 20$\times$ visual token compression ratio and only occupies about 82 MB storage. Our code is given in \href{https://github.com/hktk07/CausalMem}{CausalMem}.

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

WorldReasoner: Evaluating Whether Language Model Agents Forecast Events with Valid Reasoning

Forecasting real-world events requires language-model agents to reason under uncertainty from incomplete, time-bounded information. Yet evaluating whether agents genuinely forecast requires more than final-answer accuracy: a model may be correct by recalling memorized training facts, citing fabricated evidence, or producing an unsupported causal story. We present WorldReasoner, an evaluation framework for temporally valid event forecasting. Each task gives an agent a resolved forecasting question, a simulated forecast date, and access only to evidence available before that date; after resolution, the framework scores the submitted probability, cited evidence, and optional causal event graph. WorldReasoner reports three complementary axes: outcome quality against resolved answers, evidence quality over cited sources, and reasoning quality against post-resolution hindsight graphs. The benchmark is built by an agentic construction pipeline that generates forecasting questions, collects time-stamped evidence, and builds hindsight reference graphs at scale, yielding 345 resolved tasks derived from 14,141 articles with graphs covering 8,087 extracted events. Across six controlled agent settings, temporally valid retrieval is the strongest driver of outcome accuracy; causal graph construction improves key-event recovery; and correct graph-enabled forecasts are more strongly grounded in key events and relevant sources, yet agents still struggle to convert grounded evidence into calibrated probabilities.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Pulmonary Embolism Risk Stratification from CTPA and Medical Records: Vascular Graphs Are Not All You Need

Risk stratification for pulmonary embolism (PE) is critical for clinical decision-making. Stratification guidelines are based on patient medical records, parameters measured from computed tomography pulmonary angiography (CTPA), and blood tests. However, blood tests are often missing in routine practice. This work studies whether state-of-the-art models can accurately classify risk stratification from only medical records and biomarkers extracted from CTPA images. We benchmark different approaches to combine medical records and cardiac biomarkers with rich pulmonary vascular information; we add vascular biomarkers to tabular models and apply graph neural networks (GNNs) on the vascular tree's intrinsic graph representation. We use a private dataset (n=353) with uniquely complete data for PE risk stratification. Our results show that, among global features, medical records and cardiac biomarkers are the most significant predictors, while vascular biomarkers do not further improve stratification. Even more surprising, even GNNs on vascular graphs fail to outperform strong tabular baseline on global features. We consider hypotheses, on both models and data, that could explain this suboptimal performance. Our investigation suggests that, counter-intuitively, vascular graphs might hold no discriminative information for PE risk stratification. Code is available from https://github.com/creatis-myriad/GENESIS.

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

Fast Nonparametric Conditional Independence Testing via Two-Stage Regression

arXiv:2606.18011v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Constraint-based causal discovery relies on repeated conditional independence tests, but fast nonparametric tests often sacrifice calibration, especially when variables depend on the conditioning set through nonlinear relationships. We introduce BLITZ (Broad-to-Local Independence Testing via residualiZation), a nonparametric conditional independence test designed to run well under a second while maintaining the accuracy needed for the thousands of queries performed by constraint-based causal discovery algorithms. BLITZ first removes broad smooth dependence on the conditioning set using low-order polynomial regression, then applies a small nonlinear feature map and residualizes those features with shallow tree regressions. The resulting statistic tests residual cross-covariance, with a moment-matched chi-square approximation to the null distribution. We show theoretically that the two-stage design reduces the effective complexity faced by the tree residualizers, allowing shallow trees to control residual conditional-mean bias while avoiding excessive overfitting. In simulations, BLITZ provides better null calibration than fast kernel, random-feature, and regression-based competitors while remaining among the fastest methods tested. In causal discovery experiments on synthetic graphs and flow-cytometry data, BLITZ yields more reliable endpoint orientations among retained adjacencies and competitive structural recovery. These results suggest that broad-to-local residualization is a practical route to calibrated, scalable nonparametric conditional independence testing for causal discovery.

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

Continual Adaptation for Pacific Indigenous Speech Recognition

Speech foundation models struggle with low-resource Pacific Indigenous languages because of severe data scarcity. Furthermore, full fine-tuning risks catastrophic forgetting. To address this gap, we present an empirical study adapting models to real-world Pacific datasets. We investigate the impact of data volume, adaptation strategies, and representational drift on speech foundation models for various Pacific languages. Additionally, we analyze a continual learning framework for sequential language acquisition. Empirical results across three distinct Pacific Indigenous languages demonstrate that adapting to these linguistically distant languages induces severe internal representational drift. Consequently, these models face a strict plasticity and stability dilemma. While LoRA adapts well initially, it suffers from catastrophic forgetting during sequential learning. Ultimately, this study highlights the urgent need for robust adaptation strategies tailored to underrepresented languages.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

HumP-KD: A Hybrid Uncertainty-Aware Multi-Stage Progressive Knowledge Distillation Framework for Efficient Fire Classification

Real-time fire classification systems require models that are simultaneously accurate, computationally efficient, and deployable on resource-constrained hardware. This work proposes HumP-KD, a Hybrid Uncertainty-aware Multi-stage Progressive Knowledge Distillation framework for efficient fire classification. Two datasets, FlameVision and Dataset-II, containing 8,600 and 31,309 images, are used. Various CNN and transformer baselines are applied under standard preprocessing, online augmentation, Gaussian noise and motion blur robustness conditions. The proposed HumP-KD model distills knowledge from two frozen heterogeneous transformer teachers, Swin-Tiny and ViT-Base, along with their Meta-MLP ensemble, into a lightweight MobileViT-S student via three tightly integrated components. Hierarchical Progressive Knowledge Distillation employs a Hierarchical Feature Builder. It generates a fused spatial attention mask to guide distillation toward discriminative regions selectively. Multi-Stage Knowledge Distillation progressively activates three distillation stages across training. On Dataset-II, HumP-KD achieves a mean F1 score of $0.9876 \pm 0.0063$ across 10 independent trials, significantly outperforming the MobileViT-S baseline trained without distillation ($0.9537 \pm 0.0351$), with statistical significance confirmed by both independent t-test ($p = 0.0195$) and Wilcoxon signed-rank test ($W = 1$, $p = 0.0039$). The proposed method also demonstrates strong generalization across datasets and robustness under degraded visual conditions. The student model retains only 4.94M parameters and 19.01Mb model size, representing a $5.7\times$ parameter reduction over Swin-Tiny and a $17.5\times$ reduction over ViT-Base, while achieving 37.72 CPU FPS, making it suitable for real-time deployment.

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

Dense Supervision Is Not Enough: The Readout Blind Spot in Looped Language Models

arXiv:2606.24898v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Looped language models turn hidden states into runtime state: each state is decoded for prediction and fed back into future computation. This creates a basic supervision question: which state variables does cross-entropy actually control? We show that dense per-loop cross-entropy controls the variables exposed by the readout, not every variable active in the recurrent transition. Hidden-state scale gives a concrete failure mode. Scale-invariant readouts such as RMSNorm and LayerNorm hide radial scale from the immediate cross-entropy loss, while pre-norm residual recurrence continues to carry and update that same scale. Thus per-loop loss can make early exits usable without controlling recurrent scale. In 44M and 129M looped transformers without inter-loop normalization, per-loop cross-entropy through RMSNorm readouts still drives final hidden-state norms into the thousands or tens of thousands. Scale-visible readouts and explicit norm penalties keep norms in the tens, and scale-removing recurrence is the complementary architectural fix. The resulting design rule is simple: dense supervision trains exits; recurrent scale control requires either making scale visible to a loss or removing it from the loop. Consistent with this rule, scale-controlled variants achieve lower perplexity at matched inference-depth operating points in our variable-depth benchmarks.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

RAS: Measuring LLM Safety Through Refusal Alignment

Safety evaluation of large language models (LLMs) is commonly performed by querying models with unsafe or jailbreak prompts and judging whether their outputs violate a safety policy. Although useful, output-level evaluation is expensive, sensitive to judge choice, and easily tied to fixed question banks. We propose **SafeVec**, a white-box evaluation procedure that measures safety from internal representations rather than generated answers. **SafeVec** first extracts layer-wise refusal directions from a safety-aligned reference model, then selects stable layer windows where safe and unsafe behaviors are separable, and finally scores a target model by measuring whether its hidden states align with these refusal directions under unsafe and jailbreak prompts. The resulting metric, **RAS** (**R**efusal **A**lignment **S**core), maps representation-level refusal alignment to a calibrated 0-100 safety score. Across `Llama`, `Gemma`, and `Qwen` model families, RAS separates aligned models from uncensored and abliterated variants, tracks output-level attack success rate, and is substantially faster than judge-based evaluation. These results suggest that refusal alignment provides a compact and efficient signal for white-box LLM safety evaluation.

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

Enabling Real-Time Point-of-Care Ultrasound Segmentation: A GPU-Free Deployment in Resource-Limited Settings

Authors:

Ultrasound imaging is the most widely adopted medical modality globally due to its low cost and portability, yet artificial intelligence (AI) deployment remains constrained by reliance on GPU-accelerated models, creating a structural paradox where the cost of "intelligence" exceeds that of the imaging device itself. Here, we present the systematic adaptation and extensive evaluation of UltraSeg, an ultra-lightweight architecture originally developed for colonoscopic polyp segmentation, now engineered for point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) across ten public datasets spanning six anatomical sites (breast, thyroid, kidney, carotid, fetal, and small-animal tumor). We systematically validate both variants in ultrasound domains: UltraSeg-130K (0.13M parameters) achieves 89.7 FPS on single-core CPUs and 34.8 FPS on a refurbished mobile device, while UltraSeg-500K (0.5M parameters) delivers 44.6 FPS on CPU and 16.1 FPS on mobile device. UltraSeg-500K matches or exceeds the Dice performance of the 31M-parameter UNet and approaches 105M-parameter TransUNet in average performance, with superior zero-shot cross-dataset generalization on external validation sets (UDIAT, DDTI). By enabling clinical-grade segmentation without GPU dependency, this work brings AI costs in line with ultrasound accessibility, making advanced diagnostics available in resource-limited settings.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

High-Fidelity 4D Hand-Object Capture via Multi-View Spatiotemporal Tracking and Physics-Aware Gaussians

The growing demand for high-fidelity 4D hand-object interaction (HOI) data in embodied AI and spatial computing is currently bottlenecked by the reliance on pre-scanned object templates and physical markers. While recent methods have demonstrated promising results in reconstructing 4D hand-object interaction from videos, they are highly sensitive to initial estimates of hand and object poses. Yet, estimating these poses from images is challenging, in particular under severe occlusion which is inherent in hand-object interaction scenarios. We propose a novel system for the robust and accurate reconstruction of hands and objects from synchronized and calibrated multi-view videos without requiring any templates or markers. Our system consists of two main components with key innovations: (1) a multi-view feed-forward transformer model that aggregates cross-view geometry and temporal cues to provide a reliable, metric-consistent initialization for both poses and dense object geometry, and (2) a hand-object physics-aware Gaussian-based optimization framework to refine the initial estimates, integrating tetrahedral constraints, collision refinement, and appearance decomposition to produce physically plausible and visually accurate reconstruction. Validated on public benchmarks and an extensive internal dataset, our pipeline achieves highly robust, artifact-free reconstruction, providing an efficient foundation for automated 4D asset generation. Our project page are available at https://zyshen021.github.io/HOSTPG/.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

LLM Compression by Block Removal with Constrained Binary Optimization

In this paper, we formulate the compression of large language models (LLMs) by optimally deleting transformer blocks (``block removal'') as a constrained binary optimization (CBO) problem that can be mapped to a physical system (Ising glass), whose energies are a strong proxy for downstream model performance. This formulation enables an efficient ranking of a large number of candidate block-removal configurations yielding many high-quality, non-trivial solutions beyond those only removing consecutive regions. Our method performs strongly in the deep compression regime, such as for 50% compression of Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct, where we achieve an almost 23 percentage point increase on the MMLU benchmark compared to other state-of-the-art (SOTA) block-removal methods. For lighter compression, it performs on par with those methods across several benchmarks for Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, Qwen3-14B (both before and after retraining), as well as Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct. The approach is computationally efficient and requires only forward and backward passes on a calibration dataset for a few active parameters. Additionally, we demonstrate that using good heuristic solvers for the CBO problem provides solutions that perform well on downstream tasks in negligible runtime when it is unfeasible to solve the problem exactly. The method can be readily applied to any architecture. We illustrate this generality on the recent NVIDIA-Nemotron-3-Nano-30B-A3B-FP8 model, which exhibits a highly inhomogeneous and challenging block structure, and where we outperform SOTA for AIME25 and GPQA when removing either 2 attention layers or 3 mixture-of-experts layers.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Evaluating Japanese Dialect Robustness Across Speech and Text-based Large Language Models

Dialogue systems based on large language models (LLMs) have advanced significantly in recent years. However, dialectal variation remains a major challenge, particularly for systems that process spoken input. LLM-based speech language models (SLMs), which integrate LLMs with speech processing components, show promise for spoken language tasks, yet their ability to comprehend dialects has not been sufficiently studied. Moreover, it remains unclear how the dialectal understanding of the base LLM affects SLM performance. This study investigates the dialectal robustness of both LLMs and SLMs using Japanese dialects as a test case. We define robustness as the ratio of performance on dialectal versus standard inputs, enabling fair comparisons. Our experiments show that SLM robustness correlates with that of their text-based counterparts. Furthermore, training with dialectal data and fine-tuning the speech encoder each improves robustness in SLMs.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

BehaviorBench: Benchmarking Foundation Models for Behavioral Science Tasks

Foundation models have been increasingly applied to behavioral science domains such as psychology, sociology, and economics. While these models show promise in individual tasks such as survey response prediction and human-subject experiment simulation, there remains no systematic understanding of how well they perform across diverse behavioral science tasks, contexts, and populations. We introduce BehaviorBench, a comprehensive benchmark that evaluates foundation models along four core capabilities: (1) behavior prediction and simulation, (2) strategic decision-making, (3) subject-trait inference, and (4) behavioral knowledge application. Crucially, BehaviorBench evaluates model outputs at both the individual and distributional levels, capturing not only per-subject accuracy but also population-level alignment, an essential requirement for behavioral validity. Leveraging the tasks in BehaviorBench, we further develop Be.FM-1.5, extending the Be.FM family of behavioral foundation models fine-tuned on behavioral data. Our results reveal a considerable gap: proprietary general-purpose models excel at individual-level prediction and knowledge-intensive tasks, whereas behavioral foundation models, fine-tuned on behavioral data, achieve substantially stronger distributional alignment. Notably, Be.FM-1.5 leads on distributional metrics and remains competitive on individual-level metrics, suggesting that proper behavioral adaptation can close the gap. Our results highlight the importance of distributional evaluation, establish BehaviorBench as a foundation for developing and assessing behaviorally aligned AI systems, and demonstrate Be.FM-1.5's potential for a broad range of behavioral science studies. Our BehaviorBench and Be.FM-1.5 models can be accessed via https://umich-foreseer.github.io/behaviorbench/.