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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Spectrally engineered collinear type-0 SPDC source with enhanced spectral brightness for entanglement distribution

arXiv:2606.24036v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Entangled photon sources with high spectral brightness are important resources for photonic quantum information processing, particularly in quantum communication and quantum networking where usable photon flux of entangled photons is often constrained by channel loss and source inefficiency. Here, we demonstrate a spectrally engineered type-0 spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) source with enhanced spectral brightness for entanglement distribution. By pumping a 30-mm ppKTP crystal with an ultra-narrowband laser slightly detuned from degeneracy, photon-pair generation is concentrated into a narrow spectral bandwidth while retaining the strong nonlinear interaction of type-0 phase matching. The source produces a coincidence rate of 44.6 kHz corresponding to a detected spectral brightness of 0.507 MHz/mW/nm. We further integrate the source into a Sagnac interferometer to generate polarization-entangled photon pairs and demonstrate entanglement distribution through a 2.56 km free-space round-trip channel. Our results show that spectral engineering provides a practical route to compact, spectrally bright entangled-photon sources for quantum communication applications.

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

Polynomial-Time Mistake-Bounded Language Generation

arXiv:2606.16077v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this note, we introduce a polynomial-time version of the mistake-bounded language generation (MBLG) framework due to Kleinberg, Peale, and Reingold (2026). We observe that the family of parities of variables, and the family of conjunctions of literals, are polynomial-time MBLG. Our main result states that the family of monotone Boolean functions with polynomially-many maxterms is polynomial-time MBLG. This family includes all monotone Boolean functions, computable by polynomial-size decision trees. Our technique can be presented as a new combinatorial game about writing numbers on a board.

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

Intelligent Automation for Embodied Benchmark Construction: Pipelines, Embodiments, Simulators, and Trends

arXiv:2606.12207v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Embodied intelligence now spans navigation, household assistance, manipulation, autonomous driving, aerial agents, and multimodal large-model control. This expansion has made benchmark construction a central bottleneck for reliable evaluation. Unlike static datasets, embodied benchmarks combine task specifications, environments, robot data, demonstrations, annotations, metrics, evaluation scripts, and release policies into a single evaluation system. This survey reviews the literature through a five-stage construction pipeline: requirement and task construction, data acquisition, data cleaning and annotation, benchmark suite generation and metric definition, and evaluation execution with diagnostic feedback. For each stage, the survey analyzes the transition from manual curation to traditional automation, foundation-model assistance, and agentic closed-loop workflows. It also compares qualitative construction costs across human labor, data and asset acquisition, compute and simulation, validation and debugging, governance and maintenance, and rework risk. The main conclusion is that automation does not simply reduce benchmark cost. Instead, it often shifts cost toward validation, auditability, version control, and long-term governance. Progress in embodied evaluation will therefore depend not only on larger benchmark suites, but also on construction pipelines that are diagnosable, auditable, and responsibly refreshable.

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

Facial Affect Analysis for Service-Oriented Systems: Advances, Challenges, and Future Visions

Facial Affect Analysis (FAA) is evolving from a stand-alone recognition task into a reusable perception capability for Service-Oriented Software Ecosystems (SoSE). This paper preserves the FAA methodological core while reframing recent advances through systems-engineering requirements for composable and dependable services. We review representative progress in static and dynamic expression analysis, action-unit and micro-expression modeling, and modern CNN, Transformer, graph, and hybrid architectures, then interpret these advances by their operational fit in edge, cloud, and hybrid service pipelines. The synthesis emphasizes SoSE concerns that determine deployability: service contracts for uncertainty-aware outputs, latency and availability envelopes, lifecycle monitoring and recalibration, governance-aware integration, and interoperability across independently evolving components. Our analysis shows that benchmark gains alone are insufficient for SoSE readiness; robustness under shift, intervention stability, fairness, privacy posture, and runtime guarantees are equally critical. We conclude with a roadmap for treating FAA as an operational service component with explicit interfaces, measurable quality attributes, and accountable lifecycle management.

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

GRACE: Boosting Video MLLMs with Grounded Action-Centric Evidence for Viewer Sentiment Prediction

Viewer sentiment prediction in video advertisements aims to infer the latent affective response evoked in the audience. To bridge the gap between what is shown and what is felt, models must deduce hidden viewer emotions from explicit visual narratives, concrete character-object interactions, and visible textual cues. However, standard Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) typically rely on holistic frame representations, which leave these fine-grained, affect-relevant events implicit and complicate precise emotional reasoning. To address this, we propose a grounded action-centric evidence augmentation framework that enhances video MLLMs' clue extraction and comprehension by introducing explicit event structure and localized visual evidence. Our method extracts temporally ordered subject-verb-object (SVO) triplets and auxiliary visible textual cues from action-centric video descriptions, grounds subject and object entities as visual entity crops, and then enables the MLLM to perform clue-enhanced emotional reasoning based on these extracted structured clues. In this way, action triplets specify "what happens", while grounded visual entity crops anchor "who or what participates in each event" to concrete visual evidence. Experiments on the Pitts dataset show consistent improvements over Qwen2.5-VL and Qwen3-VL baselines. Ablation studies, cross-dataset evaluation on AdsQA, and transfer experiments on an emotion-focused TVQA subset further support the effectiveness and generalization of our approach.

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

High-Fidelity Two-Step Image Generation via Teacher-Aligned End-to-End Distillation

Few-step diffusion distillation has become increasingly mature for 4-8-step generation, yet pushing further to 2 steps remains challenging. In this work, we introduce Z-Image Turbo++, a high-quality 2-step image generation model distilled from the 8-step Z-Image Turbo teacher. Our method addresses the central bottlenecks of increased task difficulty and limited model capacity in 2-step generation through three simple but effective design choices tailored to this regime. First, we propose Distribution-Aligned Adversarial Learning, which uses teacher-generated images rather than external real images as real samples for GAN training, providing a more attainable and informative adversarial target. Second, we adopt Step-Decoupled Parameterization, assigning independent model parameters to the two denoising steps to better match their distinct capacity demands. Third, we perform End-to-End Training with Iterative Regularization, allowing the first step to receive gradients from final image quality while preserving a meaningful intermediate generation through an explicit step-1 loss. Together, these designs substantially narrow the quality gap between 2-step and 8-step generation in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations, highlighting the potential of carefully tailored distillation strategies for improving the quality-efficiency trade-off in few-step generation.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Data-driven sparse identification of governing PDEs via knockoff filters and multi-criteria trade-offs

arXiv:2605.26631v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose KO-PDE-IDENT, a data-driven framework for identifying parsimonious partial differential equations (PDEs) with false discovery rate (FDR) control. PDE discovery from noisy observations is often hindered by extreme multicollinearity among candidate terms, which causes typical sparse-regression methods to select spurious terms. To address this problem, KO-PDE-IDENT initially mines a support set of potential candidate terms via model-X knockoff filters with finite-sample FDR control, then refines and ranks the surviving PDE alternatives. The framework integrates three components. First, knockoff feature statistics are constructed by coupling $\ell_{0}$-constrained adaptive best-subset selection with SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP), yielding an effective and computationally efficient difference statistic. Second, a recursive feature elimination (RFE) procedure removes terms whose marginal contributions are dispensable and assesses statistical necessity through knockoff-perturbed hypothesis testing. Third, the final model selection is formulated as a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem, where the optimal governing equation is the alternative that best balances a wide range of criteria such as predictive accuracy, model complexity and coefficient uncertainty. We evaluate KO-PDE-IDENT on five canonical PDEs under severe noise corruption. Empirical results show that our framework can exactly recover the true PDE structure, eliminating false discoveries while retaining all true underlying terms, with low coefficient estimation error.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Free-Space CV-QKD with Single-Mode Fiber Reception: Effective Coupling Statistics and Protocol-Dependent Reference Noise

arXiv:2606.24431v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study free-space continuous-variable quantum key distribution (CV-QKD) with single-mode fiber (SMF) reception under atmospheric turbulence. The optical channel is modeled by split-step propagation through random phase screens, followed by finite-aperture collection and projection onto the guided receiving mode. We first examine the standard GG02 setting and ask which receiver-side observable is sufficient for effective key-rate prediction. We show that a mean-loss description is generally too optimistic, whereas a scalar effective law for the SMF coupling efficiency provides an accurate downstream Gaussian-channel description within the effective model considered here. We then extend the optical model to a pilot-assisted architecture in which the signal and pilot propagate through correlated but non-identical turbulent realizations generated by a frozen-flow construction. In this case, the signal coupling law alone is no longer sufficient: signal–pilot phase mismatch and loss of post-coupling coherence produce an additional protocol-dependent reference-noise penalty. The results distinguish two regimes: a scalar coupling description is largely adequate for GG02, while transmitted-reference architectures require an additional differential reference observable beyond the signal coupling statistics.

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

TA-RAG: Tone-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Peer-Support Health Communication

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) successfully grounds large language model (LLM) outputs in trusted documents, but factual grounding alone is insufficient for sensitive peer-support health communication. In domains such as HIV peer support, responses must also be accessible, stigma-free, empathetic, and tailored to the recipient. This paper presents TA-RAG, a lightweight, prompt-based tone-aware RAG framework that embeds explicit tone control into a RAG pipeline without requiring model fine-tuning. We operationalise tone across four core components: stigma-free rewriting, readability adjustment, recipient adaptation, and empathy rephrasing. We evaluate TA-RAG through component-level tests using questions derived from HIV Online Learning Australia (HOLA), UNAIDS terminology guidance, readability metrics, peer-support standards from National Association of People with HIV Australia (NAPWHA), and a public empathy dataset. Results show that the TA-RAG's components improve their targeted communication quality while preserving key content. These findings emphasise that prompt-based tone control is a potential direction for making RAG outputs suitable for sensitive peer-support health communication.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

ReSum: Synergizing LLM Reasoning and Summarization with Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.13316v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is a central technique for improving long-horizon reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing RLVR methods often encourage unnecessarily long reasoning rollouts, which can degrade reasoning coherence and exhaust the available context budget. Existing approaches to long-context organization often depend on external mechanisms to organize rollouts, rather than enabling the model to manage its own reasoning trajectory. To address this limitation, we propose ReSum, a novel RLVR framework that enables LLMs to compress and organize their reasoning trajectories through self-summarization. Our pilot studies show that self-summarization stabilizes generation by lowering token-level entropy, and that introducing a ``summarization'' phrase can substantially mitigate errors propagated from an incorrect rollout prefix. Motivated by these findings, ReSum adopts a summarization-aware adaptive rollout mechanism that contrastively evaluates whether self-summarization benefits the ongoing reasoning process. Specifically, when the model spontaneously triggers self-summarization, ReSum masks the summarization phrase to create a contrastive branch; for non-summarization positions, it instead randomly injects the phrase to create a matched branch. We further design a summarization-aware advantage to enable finer-grained comparison between contrastive rollout trajectories. Extensive experiments show that ReSum improves performance at an average of 4\% while reducing rollout length by 18.6\%.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

TrustErase: Auditable Instant Machine Unlearning with Passport-Embedded Representations

arXiv:2606.17122v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The demand for privacy-compliant AI has amplified the need for machine unlearning; yet, existing retraining or distillation-based methods remain unverifiable and computationally costly. We introduce TrustErase, a verifiable, data-free unlearning framework leveraging passport-embedded representations for instant, modular, and auditable forgetting. By treating passports as cryptographic keys within parameter-efficient adaptation layers, TrustErase enables the removal of specific classes or datasets through simple deactivation, without retraining, fine-tuning, or access to the original data. A singular value based decomposition conceals passports within model weights, ensuring that unlearning actions remain transparent and provably compliant. Evaluations on MNIST, CIFAR10 and CIFAR100 show that TrustErase matches or exceeds state-of-the-art benchmarks such as DELETE, L2UL, and Boundary Shrink, while operating in a strictly data-free regime. Ultimately, TrustErase establishes a new paradigm for trustworthy, accountable, and instantly forgettable AI systems.

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

RE4: Transformation-aware Imitation of Object Interactions Using Manipulation Modes

arXiv:2606.24403v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Object interaction tasks have been a focus of advances in imitation learning. End-to-end methods, dominated by diffusion and flow-based variants have shown leaps in performance while sacrificing interpretability. Object-centric and pose-informed variants have had a role in learning from demonstration in manipulation tasks. In this paper, we revisit a few modern imitation learning benchmarks for object interactions, with the aim of composing a framework that repurposes principled theories of manipulation, preserving both performance and interpretability. For image observations, lightweight training is proposed for model-free pose estimation of the target object, using self-supervision over the demonstration data available for imitation learning. This information is then used to inform a manipulation mode-aware retrieval of a demonstration, a mode-aware transformation, a replan step that connects to the retrieval point while preserving mode constraints, and finally rolling out the transformed demonstration. These compose four key steps of the proposed RE4 framework, evaluated over state-based and image-based benchmarks in Push-T and Robomimic. An adversarial benchmark that evaluates sparse data regions of image-based Push-T showcases the robustness, further bolstered by indications from low-data regime experiments. The current work shows promise in using simple interpretable building blocks to learn manipulation skills.

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

Traits Run Deeper: Trait-Specific Asymmetric Fusion for Personality Assessment

Personality assessment aims to infer stable personality traits from dynamic behaviors across language, voice, and facial cues. Since different personality dimensions are revealed through distinct behavioral perspectives, modeling trait-specific evidence is challenging. However, most existing approaches adopt a uniform multimodal fusion strategy across all dimensions, assuming identical modality contributions. This overlooks trait-specific modality preferences and introduces cross-modal interference. To address this issue, we propose a novel personality assessment framework called Traits Run Deeper, which consists of three components. Specifically, the Multimodal Foundation Representation (MFR) module constructs personality-oriented multimodal inputs and leverages psychology-informed semantic templates as anchors, enabling foundation models to capture trait-relevant information. Building upon MFR, the Trait-Specific Modality Fusion (TSMF) module acts as an asymmetric fusion mechanism, allowing each dimension to selectively exploit different modality pathways from modality-specific modeling to complementary fusion. Thus, TSMF captures heterogeneous modality preferences while reducing cross-modal contamination. Furthermore, the Distribution-Calibrated Personality Regression (DCPR) module mitigates label imbalance and central tendency bias through target distribution calibration, improving robustness and stability. Experimental results on the AVI Challenge 2026 validation set demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, reducing mean squared error (MSE) by approximately 25% compared with the baseline. Consistent improvements are observed on the official test set, where our method achieves the best performance and ranks first in the Personality Assessment Track. The source code will be made available at https://github.com/MSA-LMC/AVI2026.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

CANN-EUCLID: unsupervised constitutive artificial neural network model discovery from full-field data

arXiv:2606.14565v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Constitutive artificial neural networks (CANNs) provide interpretable material model discovery, but have so far been used in stress-supervised settings based on apparent stress-strain data from homogeneous tests. Because each test samples only a narrow loading path and provides homogenized rather than local stress information, robust discovery typically requires multiple loading modes to constrain the multidimensional response. This is challenging for soft biological tissues, where repeated testing, damage, and sample variability limit reliable information from a single specimen. Here, we combine CANNs with the stress-unsupervised full-field discovery framework EUCLID to identify sparse hyperelastic laws directly from displacement fields and reaction forces in one heterogeneity-inducing loading case. CANN-EUCLID minimizes equilibrium imbalance with sparsity-promoting regularization selecting compact active terms, without local stress measurements or a prescribed law. We evaluate the approach on isotropic and anisotropic benchmarks with prescribed ground-truth laws. When the ground truth is representable by the chosen CANN basis, our method recovers the correct terms with near-exact accuracy, including exponential terms with embedded parameters. When it is not contained in the basis, the method retains shared terms and approximates missing contributions using available basis functions. Generalization depends strongly on sampled deformation states: exponential strain-stiffening terms can be recovered accurately when sufficiently probed, but can produce large extrapolation errors when the stiffening regime lies outside the sampled domain. Forward FE validation simulations show that the discovered behavior accurately replicates the ground truth. These results establish stress-unsupervised CANN discovery as a promising framework for interpretable full-field constitutive model identification.

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

Towards Data-free and Training-free Compression for Speech Foundation Models Using Parameter Clustering

arXiv:2606.11836v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents a novel data-free and training-free compression approach for speech foundation models using channelwise clustering via k-means. More fine-grained, mixed sparsity pruning by layer-level varying number of parameter clusters is also explored. Experiments conducted on the LibriSpeech dataset suggest that when operating with pruning sparsity of 50% on HuBERT-large, consistent WER reductions of 27.73%/18.61% absolute (34.37%/21.91% relative) over the magnitude-based pruning were obtained on the test-clean and test-other subsets before fine-tuning and 0.19%/0.79% absolute (3.36%/4.62% relative) after fine-tuning with only 3 epochs. Similar WER reductions of 2.86%/5.02% absolute (59.21%/55.29% relative) were observed against magnitudebased pruning on Whisper-large-v3 at 10% sparsity, all with no significant WER increase relative to the uncompressed baseline.

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

Dynamic In-Group Persona Generation for Enhancing Human-AI Rapport

arXiv:2606.18256v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based chatbots are increasingly applied in interpersonal domains such as counseling and peer support, where establishing human-AI rapport is crucial yet remains challenging. In this work, we introduce a novel approach for conditioning LLMs with in-group personas, which (i) first identifies a user's primary concern and brief personal context (e.g., a computer science undergraduate worried about future career prospects), and (ii) generates a synthetic in-group persona that shares a similar primary concern while differing in background and narrative details, such as age or profession (e.g., a junior researcher at an AI startup). Furthermore, we conduct a human-subject study to systematically evaluate the effectiveness of in-group persona agents in enhancing human-AI rapport. We compare our approach against two baseline conditions: a conventional agent without persona conditioning and an agent exhibiting minimal self-disclosure (e.g., "I've felt that too"). Results from post-task questionnaires assessing rapport and user experience indicate that the in-group persona agent significantly improves perceived rapport and personal relevance compared to the baselines, and also yields more positive user experience-most notably higher engagement.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

What Is the Optimal Timing and Frequency of Workload-Matched Postprandial Physical Activity Breaks? A Randomized Controlled Crossover Study of Cardiometabolic and Cognitive Responses During Sedentary Behavior

Purpose Postprandial sedentary behavior is associated with negative health effects and constitutes a large part of daily life in modern society. This study investigated how the timing of physical activity after eating influences glucose levels, cerebral and muscle oxygenation, cognitive performance, and well-being during subsequent sitting. Methods In a four-armed randomized crossover trial, healthy adults consumed four standardized meals separated by 48-hour washout periods. Each meal was followed by 2 hours of sitting combined, in random order, with one of four interventions: (1) sitting only, (2) 15 minutes of moderate intensity cycling immediately after eating, (3) 15 minutes of cycling 20 minutes after eating, or (4) three workload-matched five-minute cycling bouts during sitting. Interstitial glucose (continuous glucose monitoring), cerebral and muscle oxygenation (Functional near infrared spectroscopy), cognitive performance (Stroop test), heart rate, blood pressure, and subjective ratings were assessed every 30 minutes. Data were analyzed using repeated-measures ANOVA. Results Twenty participants (mean age 27.1{+/-}10.3 years, 12 females) completed the study. Cycling immediately after eating reduced mean glucose levels during postprandial sitting, while both 15-minute cycling bouts increased cerebral oxygenation. All active conditions enhanced muscle oxygenation. Heart rate and arousal increased with delayed cycling and active breaks. No effects were observed for blood pressure, cognitive performance, focus, or well-being. Conclusion A short bout of physical activity immediately after eating reduces postprandial hyperglycemia and improves brain oxygenation during sitting, whereas delayed activity and brief breaks increase physiological activation without cognitive or perceptual benefits.

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

Remote sensing data imputation using deep learning for multispectral imagery

Remote sensing techniques have been increasingly utilised in aquatic applications in recent years. A common challenge in using optical satellite data is the presence of missing observations due to cloud cover. These data gaps can lead to missed detection of critical events, such as algal blooms, in lakes of high interest to water authorities. As a result, enhancing the completeness of optical satellite datasets is crucial for improving the monitoring and prediction of algal blooms. In this study, we compared a traditional data imputation method (i.e., linear interpolation) with deep learning models for reconstructing missing spectral bands across four lakes with historical records of algal blooms. The deep learning models adopted include CNN-based architectures (i.e., CNN, Inception Resnet, and Autoencoder) and CNN-LSTM-based architectures (i.e., CNN-LSTM, Resnet-LSTM, and Autoencoder-LSTM). Our results demonstrated that deep learning models substantially outperformed the baseline linear interpolation method in imputing spectral band values within artificially masked regions. Among these models, CNN delivered the best performance across most lakes. Furthermore, we evaluated the performance of algal bloom indices (i.e., Green/Red and NDCI) derived from the imputed imagery by comparing them with the observed data. Our results demonstrate that deep learning models are effective for imputing missing data in PlanetScope SuperDove imagery, enabling more reliable applications in water monitoring.

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

Theorem-Grounded Execution Ontologies for Interpretable Machine Reasoning

arXiv:2606.16010v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models have achieved impressive performance on reasoning tasks spanning mathematics, science, programming, and commonsense inference. Despite these advances, their reasoning processes remain largely latent, making them difficult to interpret, verify, replay, debug, and transfer across domains. Existing approaches such as chain-of-thought, tree-of-thoughts, graph-of-thoughts, and tool-augmented reasoning expose intermediate reasoning artifacts but typically lack explicit execution semantics, formal state representations, and verifiable reasoning structures. We introduce Theorem-Grounded Execution Ontologies (TGEO), a framework that models reasoning as an executable state-transition process rather than a sequence of generated tokens. Given an input problem, TGEO identifies relevant theorem families, binds the problem to a domain ontology, discovers semantic objects, instantiates states and operators, constructs predicates and contracts, and synthesizes an executable reasoning graph. The resulting graph provides an interpretable, replayable, and auditable representation of reasoning in which every state transition, operator application, and validation step is explicitly represented. TGEO integrates five architectural components: (1) theorem-grounded reasoning priors, (2) executable ontologies, (3) operator-mediated state transitions, (4) predicate and contract-based execution validation, and (5) architectural auditing and failure localization. We evaluate TGEO on theorem-intensive reasoning tasks derived from mathematical benchmark domains and a curated Golden Execution Suite. Our findings demonstrate the value of executable reasoning representations for interpretable, verifiable, and reproducible AI reasoning systems.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Nocturnal Respiratory Rate and Variability Predict Long-term Mortality in Stable Outpatients with Cardiovascular Disease

Background: Respiratory rate (RR) predicts short-term mortality in acute care settings, yet its prognostic significance in clinically stable outpatients remains poorly defined. Objectives: To determine whether the median and variability of nocturnal respiratory rate (NRR) are independently associated with long-term cardiovascular and all-cause mortality in outpatients with cardiovascular disease. Methods: We analyzed overnight chest belt waveforms from elective polysomnography in 5,679 older adults with cardiovascular disease enrolled in the Sleep Heart Health Study (SHHS). NRR was quantified at 30-second resolution, and per-subject median NRR and within-night variability (standard deviation) were derived. Kaplan-Meier survival analysis and Cox proportional hazards models were used to evaluate associations with cardiovascular and all-cause mortality over 3-year and 15-year follow-up periods, adjusting for demographic characteristics, cardiopulmonary comorbidities, and sleep apnea severity. Results: Higher median NRR and greater NRR variability were each associated with increased cardiovascular and all-cause mortality. Combining these metrics identified a high-risk group characterized by elevated median and high variability of NRR, with approximately five-fold higher 3-year all-cause mortality compared with a low-risk group; this association remained significant in Cox models (unadjusted HR: 2.61; 95% CI: 1.65, 4.14; p

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

AsyncOPD: How Stale Can On-Policy Distillation Be?

arXiv:2606.24143v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student on its own rollouts guided by teacher feedback and is becoming increasingly important for large language model (LLM) post-training. Like reinforcement learning (RL), however, OPD faces an on-policy systems bottleneck, as rollouts can dominate training time for reasoning workloads. Asynchronous training pipelines can alleviate this bottleneck by decoupling rollout generation from learner updates, but doing so introduces stale-policy data. While prior work has studied stale data in asynchronous RL, its effects in OPD remain underexplored. We present the first systematic study of staleness in asynchronous OPD, focusing on a practical setting where teacher feedback is implemented through local KL losses and full-vocabulary teacher logits are too expensive to store or transfer, necessitating finite teacher-score caches. We first show that KL direction changes the stale-data problem: teacher-weighted forward KL is more robust to stale rollouts, whereas student-weighted reverse KL is vulnerable. Second, for this vulnerable reverse-KL case, we study whether methods designed to stabilize asynchronous RL can mitigate OPD staleness. In our experiments, they do not improve over a simpler OPD-specific surrogate: recomputing the reverse-KL signal under the current student at learner time. Third, we analyze how finite teacher-score caches create a bias-variance tradeoff for sparse and sampled reverse-KL OPD estimators. This motivates multi-sample Monte Carlo (MC), which preserves MC correctability while reducing one-sample variance. Finally, we present and open-source AsyncOPD, a fully asynchronous OPD training pipeline built from these estimator choices. Experiments show that AsyncOPD improves training throughput by $1.6\times$ to $3.8\times$ over strict synchronous training while reaching comparable accuracy.

22.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-16

Daily briefing: How many elementary particles are there?

Authors:

Estimates range from 17 to 995.5. Plus, one man with paralysis is using a brain–computer interface at home and GLP-1 obesity drugs appear to boost testosterone and sperm quality. Estimates range from 17 to 995.5. Plus, one man with paralysis is using a brain–computer interface at home and GLP-1 obesity drugs appear to boost testosterone and sperm quality.

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

On the Limitations of Ray-Tracing for Learning-Based RF Tasks in Urban Environments

arXiv:2507.19653v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the realism of Sionna v1.0.2 ray-tracing for outdoor cellular links in central Rome. We use a real measurement set of 1,664 user-equipments (UEs) and six nominal base-station (BS) sites. Using these fixed positions we systematically vary the main simulation parameters, including path depth, diffuse/specular/refraction flags, carrier frequency, as well as antenna's properties like its altitude, radiation pattern, and orientation. Simulator fidelity is scored for each base station via Spearman correlation between measured and simulated powers, and by a fingerprint-based k-nearest-neighbor localization algorithm using RSSI-based fingerprints. Across all experiments, solver hyper-parameters are having immaterial effect on the chosen metrics. On the contrary, antenna locations and orientations prove decisive. By simple greedy optimization we improve the Spearman correlation by 5% to 130% for various base stations, while kNN-based localization error using only simulated data as reference points is decreased by one-third on real-world samples, while staying twice higher than the error with purely real data. Precise geometry and credible antenna models are therefore necessary but not sufficient; faithfully capturing the residual urban noise remains an open challenge for transferable, high-fidelity outdoor RF simulation.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Essential Subspace Merging for Multi-Task Learning

arXiv:2606.19164v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model merging aims to enable multi-task learning by integrating the capabilities of multiple models fine-tuned from the same pre-trained checkpoint into a single model. Its core challenge is inter-task interference among task-specific parameter updates. In this paper, we analyze the output shifts induced by task updates and observe that their energy is concentrated in a small number of principal directions. We call the subspace spanned by these directions the essential subspace. In contrast, most remaining directions carry little task-relevant energy, but their accumulation across multiple task updates can cause severe interference during merging. Motivated by this observation, we propose Essential Subspace Decomposition (ESD), which decomposes each task update according to the principal components of its activation shift. Based on ESD, we introduce Essential Subspace Merging (ESM), a training-free static merging method that orthogonalizes and fuses essential components into one compact multi-task model. We further extend ESM to ESM++, a training-free dynamic merging method that decomposes task-specific residuals into low-rank experts and selects the most relevant expert through prototype-based routing during forward inference. Extensive experiments across multiple task sets and model scales demonstrate that ESM and ESM++ effectively preserves task knowledge while reducing inter-task interference.

25.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

DLDN-Bench: A Benchmark Framework for Deep Learning de Novo Peptide Sequencing in Proteomics

De novo peptide sequencing is an essential approach for analyzing mass spectrometry data because it enables the identification of novel peptides without relying on protein sequence databases. Recent advances in deep learning have substantially improved the performance of de novo sequencing methods, but the rapid emergence of new models has led to heterogeneous evaluation practices and limited comparability. To address this, we introduce DLDN-Bench, a benchmark framework including a set of benchmark datasets derived from human muscle biopsy mass spectrometry data retrieved from PRIDE and annotated through consensus across multiple widely used database search engines. Using these datasets, we systematically benchmark recent deep learning-based de novo sequencing tools alongside traditional approaches. Performance is assessed using established metrics, including precision and coverage relative to a pseudo-ground truth defined by cross-engine agreement. To demonstrate the utility of DLDN-Bench, we benchmark four recent deep learning models and make all results publicly available. This benchmark framework provides a standardized basis for comparing state-of-the-art methods and offers an extensible resource for evaluating future tools in de novo peptide sequencing.