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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

UltraSketchLLM: Sub-1-Bit LLM Compression via Sketch and Hardware-Friendly Operators

arXiv:2506.17255v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) require larger GPU memory size these days, necessitating efficient and extreme weight compression methods. Existing compression methods are either theoretically limited by 1 bit per weight or face severe performance degradation and inefficiency. To deploy LLMs in resource-constrained scenarios, we introduce UltraSketchLLM, compressing LLMs with data sketch. It reduces peak GPU memory footprint with a high compression rate down to 0.5 bit per weight. Combined with hardware-friendly implementation, UltraSketchLLM keeps tolerable performance degradation and extremely low latency overhead with 14.9x speedup compared to naive sketch solution.

02.
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.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Lifecycle-Aware Dynamic Analysis for Secure ML Model Execution

arXiv:2606.19023v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The growing reliance on pre-trained Machine Learning (ML) models has introduced new attack surfaces. Recent vulnerabilities demonstrate that malicious behavior can be embedded within model artifacts, often bypassing existing defenses. Current model-scanning solutions primarily rely on static, format-specific rules or known attack signatures, which limit their ability to generalize across frameworks and to detect novel exploitation paths. In contrast, we propose a solution that focuses on the effects an attack has on the host system executing the model and builds on foundational intuitions about ML model execution. In particular, we observe that ML models operate within well-defined lifecycle phases and that, within each phase, interactions with the host system are highly structured and predictable. We translate these intuitions into Moat, a dynamic lifecycle-aware approach for securing ML model execution, and instantiate this design in Re-Moat, our reference implementation. We evaluate Re-Moat across multiple ML frameworks using 77,974 real-world model artifacts from the Hugging Face Hub, 31 Proofs-of-Concept (PoCs) from CVEs, and 334 models from a state-of-the-art dataset, and compare it against state-of-the-art model-scanning solutions. Our results show that our approach detects all evaluated attack classes while maintaining a close-to-zero false-positive rate, validating our intuitions and motivating dynamic analysis for securing ML model execution.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Adaptive Speech-to-Spike Encoding for Spiking Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.19039v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The mismatch between continuous acoustic signals and discrete event-driven processing remains a fundamental bottleneck for neuromorphic speech processing. Current systems typically rely on fixed spike encoders, forcing downstream Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) to compensate for non-adaptive input representations. To address this, we present a learnable residual speech-to-spike encoder jointly trained end-to-end with a Recurrent Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (R-LIF) backbone. We validate this approach on the Google Speech Commands v2 (GSC-v2) benchmark, achieving up to 94.97% accuracy. Notably, the learned encoder remains highly parameter-efficient with a compact 35k-parameter variant that reaches 89.8%, matching or exceeding prior baselines that require an order of magnitude more parameters. Our encoder-focused analysis, including linear probing and gradient-residual inspection, indicates that the encoder does not target faithful signal reconstruction but instead learns task-aligned spike representations that enhance class separability. Finally, we benchmark bio-inspired, hardware-friendly credit assignment by comparing Direct Feedback Alignment (DFA) with surrogate-gradient BPTT under identical architectures and training conditions. We find that DFA reaches 91.5% accuracy, quantifying the performance trade-off of bio-inspired learning rules for modern neuromorphic audio.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Cross-Modal Robustness Transfer (CMRT): Training Robust Speech Translation Models Using Adversarial Text

End-to-End Speech Translation (E2E-ST) has seen significant advancements, yet current models are primarily benchmarked on curated, "clean" datasets. This overlooks critical real-world challenges, such as morphological robustness to inflectional variations common in non-native or dialectal speech. In this work, we adapt a text-based adversarial attack targeting inflectional morphology to the speech domain and demonstrate that state-of-the-art E2E-ST models are highly vulnerable it. While adversarial training effectively mitigates such risks in text-based tasks, generating high-quality adversarial speech data remains computationally expensive and technically challenging. To address this, we propose Cross-Modal Robustness Transfer (CMRT), a framework that transfers adversarial robustness from the text modality to the speech modality. Our method eliminates the requirement for adversarial speech data during training. Extensive experiments across four language pairs demonstrate that CMRT improves adversarial robustness by an average of more than 3 BLEU points, establishing a new baseline for robust E2E-ST without the overhead of generating adversarial speech.

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

OmniPlan: An Adaptive Framework for Timely and Near-Optimal Network Planning Optimization

arXiv:2606.18105v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Network planning optimization is a fundamental problem across diverse domains, including transportation systems, communication networks, and power grids. It requires simultaneous optimization of multiple competing objectives under complex constraints. Existing network planning optimization frameworks rely on mixed integer programming (MIP) solvers, heuristics, and deep reinforcement learning (DRL) models to compute planning decisions. However, they lack effective adaptability to diverse and dynamic user intents, thus leading to the trade-off between execution time and optimality. In this paper, we propose OmniPlan, an adaptive framework that achieves both timeliness and near-optimality in network planning optimization. To achieve the adaptability lacking in existing solutions, OmniPlan employs a large language model (LLM)-based interpreter to convert heterogeneous natural-language intents into a unified and quantifiable user-preference vector. Then it employs a mixture-of-experts architecture that integrates MIP solvers, heuristics, and DRL models as specialized experts, where OmniPlan adapts to diverse intents by dynamically selecting timely and near-optimal experts. Finally, it incorporates a DRL-based expert configuration module that fine-tunes optimization objective weights to align planning decisions with user-specific preferences. We evaluate OmniPlan with a representative real-world workload, i.e., distributed machine learning (ML), where we leverage OmniPlan to offload a wide spectrum of ML inference tasks, e.g., decision trees, SVM, naive Bayes, XGBoost, and random forests, onto a network of hardware devices. Our experiments on a real-world testbed indicate that OmniPlan achieves near-optimal and low-execution-time offloading for real-world ML inference tasks, reducing latency by up to 97.8\% and network device resource consumption by up to 11.5\%.

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

Who Should Lead Decoding Now? Tracking Reliable Trajectories for Ensembling Masked Diffusion Language Models

Masked Diffusion Language Models (MDLMs) have emerged as a distinct paradigm for sequence generation. As MDLMs become diverse in capabilities and knowledge coverage, an important question is how to combine their knowledge. Toward this, we first investigate the unique decoding dynamics of MDLMs. We find that successful generations exhibit stable confidence dynamics over answer-relevant positions, while unreliable trajectories can often be corrected by injecting promising intermediate states from other models. Guided by this observation, we propose $TIE$ ($T$rajectory-based $I$terative $E$nsembling), a knowledge fusion framework in which MDLMs iteratively identify reliable decoding trajectories and relay them across models. TIE tracks confidence dynamics over answer-relevant positions to determine which model currently follows a more reliable trajectory and selectively transfers partially denoised sequences across models. As the model on the more promising trajectory often changes across denoising steps, TIE allows different models to contribute complementary strengths at different stages of generation. Strong performance across diverse reasoning tasks, along with our analyses, suggests that TIE offers a practical approach to the underexplored problem of MDLM ensembling.

08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-24

SEMFA: A General Framework for Inferring Statistical Significance of Mahalanobis Similarity between Multi-Omics Profiled Samples Built on Multiple Factor Analysis

Motivation: With rapid advances in sequencing technologies, many heterogeneous omics datasets have been generated, as seen in the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) and many single-cell multi-omics sequencing projects, bringing substantial challenges to existing integrative methods. In this article, we report a novel multi-omics fusion and analysis software SEMFA which performs general parametric tests for the Mahalanobis Similarity of samples based on the factor scores generated by an Extended version of conventional Multiple Factor Analysis. Results: Our developed method is effective and robust under both Gaussian and non-Gaussian assumptions. The mean F1 scores are over 0.8 when the column similarity level is 0.9 and the noise level ranges between 0.1 and 0.2, using simulation studies based on ENCODE count data. It was also efficient and effective at handling large-scale single-cell multi-omics data, as demonstrated in colon cancer cases as it unveiled signature network organization patterns of cells for stages III and IV.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Semantic Allocation in Ordered Bottlenecks: Predictive Residual Inference for Visual Representation Learning

Ordered bottlenecks aim to provide utility at flexible budgets by assigning coarse information to early tokens and task-relevant detail to later ones. Prior work, including tail dropping (TD), typically enforces ordering by means of a masking-based ordering pressure (MBOP): Late tokens are masked more frequently than early tokens and are therefore encouraged to store less essential fine details. We introduce predictive residual inference for ordered representations (PRIOR), a framework designed to address inherent weaknesses of MBOP. MBOP is prone to weak late-token utility because it lacks an explicit refinement objective and uses gradient exposure as a proxy for importance. Furthermore, representations may become particularly brittle in optimization-sensitive settings, such as when using discrete or quantized token representations. PRIOR replaces activation-rate control with log2-scaled levels and level-wise predictors. These predictors separate already explained from unexplained information, focusing each level on residual error. We compare PRIOR against MBOP-TD and independent tail-biased dropout (MBOP-ITD) in contrastive learning and image reconstruction tasks. Unlike the baselines, PRIOR learns well-ordered representations across experiments: low budgets provide coarse descriptors, while high budgets add refinements. Simultaneously, full-budget performance with PRIOR is higher in all but one experimental setting, where performance remains comparable. MBOP baselines are severely limited in discrete and quantized settings, while PRIOR approaches the performance of continuous counterparts. Taken together, these findings establish PRIOR as an effective framework for ordered representation learning.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Quantifying and Auditing LLM Evaluation via Positive–Unlabeled Learning

arXiv:2606.19057v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as judges for scalable evaluation, yet such LLM–as–a–Judge systems exhibit systematic biases that are decoupled from semantic quality, most notably verbosity bias. Meanwhile, human supervision is costly and typically selective, yielding reliable positive judgments but leaving most outputs unlabelled and potentially mixed in quality. We formulate LLM evaluation under selective human supervision as a positive–unlabelled learning problem and propose a geometric auditing framework based on Partial Optimal Transport. By aligning a small set of human–verified positives with a reliable subset of unlabelled outputs in a fixed embedding space, our method identifies human–consistent preferences and corrects biased judges without retraining. Experiments demonstrate improved alignment with human preferences, increased robustness to presentation biases, and interpretable confidence estimates, offering a scalable and statistically grounded alternative to existing LLM–as–a–judge pipelines.

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

When Tables Go Crazy: Evaluating Multimodal Models on French Financial Documents

Vision-language models (VLMs) perform well on many document understanding tasks, yet their reliability in specialized, non-English domains remains underexplored. This gap is especially critical in finance, where documents mix dense regulatory text, numerical tables, and visual charts, and where extraction errors can have real-world consequences. We introduce Scribe Finance, the first multimodal benchmark for evaluating French financial document understanding. The dataset contains 1,204 expert-validated questions spanning text extraction, table comprehension, chart interpretation, and multi-turn conversational reasoning, drawn from real investment prospectuses, KIDs, and PRIIPs. We evaluate six open-weight VLMs (8B-124B parameters) using an LLM-as-judge protocol. While models achieve strong performance on text and table tasks (85-90% accuracy), they struggle with chart interpretation (34-62%). Most notably, multi-turn dialogue reveals a sharp failure mode: early mistakes propagate across turns, driving accuracy down to roughly 50% regardless of model size. These results show that current VLMs are effective for well-defined extraction tasks but remain brittle in interactive, multi-step financial analysis. Scribe Finance offers a challenging benchmark to measure and drive progress in this high-stakes setting.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Spin-Momentum Impedance and Filtering by a Spin-Coupled Absorbing Boundary Condition

arXiv:2606.25650v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Absorbing boundaries are often treated as scalar sinks. Here we show that a spin-coupled absorbing boundary for a Pauli particle acts instead as a spin–momentum impedance. Its tangential boundary symbol has two branches, $i\kappa\pm|\boldsymbol{\xi}|$, coupling normal absorption to in-plane momentum. In a harmonic guide, the transverse ground state samples $|\boldsymbol{\xi}|\sim \ell_\perp^{-1}\sim\sqrt{\omega}$; narrowing the guide therefore strengthens a local evanescent boundary response without introducing a bulk potential barrier. Solving the detector-present spinor absorbing-boundary evolution, we identify boundary-induced filtering: the prompt detector flux is suppressed, the fixed-window detected fraction is reduced, and a delayed oscillatory sector appears. Over that window the restricted mean detection time is fitted by $A+B\sqrt{\omega}$, with setup-dependent coefficients. The robust result is a spin–momentum filtering mechanism with boundary scale $|\boldsymbol{\xi}|\sim\sqrt{\omega}$, not a universal arrival-time law.

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

A Bifurcation Theory Framework for Gradient Descent on the Edge of Stability

Authors:

arXiv:2606.15551v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Edge of Stability (EoS) phenomenon, where gradient descent operates with sharpness exceeding the classical convergence threshold yet the loss decreases over long timescales, is ubiquitous in modern deep learning but remains poorly understood in realistic settings. Prior rigorous analyses have been largely confined to scalar or low-dimensional losses with specific structural forms. In this work, we develop a bifurcation theory framework for gradient descent on the edge of stability that applies directly to overparameterized neural networks. By decomposing the training dynamics into components normal and tangent to the manifold of minimizers, we show that stable EoS training arises from a flip bifurcation in the normal direction, governed by the sign of the first Lyapunov coefficient, while the tangent dynamics drift toward regions of decreasing sharpness. Under mild spectral and geometric assumptions on the loss landscape, we prove convergence to the minimizing manifold when training at the EoS threshold. As a corollary, we recover and unify prior results: we show that the product-stability condition of Gan (2026) is an instance of our framework.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Enteral docosahexaenoic and arachidonic acid supplementation and retinopathy of prematurity: a re-analysis of randomized controlled trials in preterm infants

Background. A recent meta-analysis by Dang et al. [1] concluded that enteral supplementation with docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), with or without arachidonic acid (ARA) did not significantly affect retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) outcomes in preterm infants. Of four eligible trials that supplemented both DHA and ARA, only two contributed to each ROP outcome analyzed, and severe ROP was not assessed. Methods. We replicated the eligibility criteria and search strategy of Dang et al., restricted to trials that supplemented both DHA and ARA, and reanalyzed three ROP endpoints (any ROP, ROP requiring treatment, and severe ROP [stage 3 and/or treated]) using complete outcome records from all eligible trials. Crude risk ratios (RR) were pooled by Mantel-Haenszel fixed-effect meta-analysis. Gestational age-adjusted odds ratios (adjOR) were pooled on the log scale by inverse-variance random-effects meta-analysis with restricted maximum likelihood (REML) estimation of between-study variance and Hartung-Knapp confidence intervals. Results. Five trials were included; one trial was identified in our replicated search but was excluded by Dang et al. without a stated rationale. The pooled estimate for any ROP was consistent with Dang et al. (RR 0.87 [95% CI 0.71-1.08]; adjOR 0.70 [0.46-1.08]). For ROP requiring treatment, the crude RR suggested a lower risk but did not reach statistical significance (RR 0.60 [0.35-1.04]), whereas the gestational age-adjusted estimate indicated lower odds (adjOR 0.47 [0.23-0.94]). For severe ROP, DHA+ARA supplementation produced a significant protective effect in both unadjusted and adjusted models (RR 0.56 [0.36-0.86]; adjOR 0.42 [0.19-0.96]). Conclusions. When all eligible trials contribute to each endpoint and severe ROP is included as an outcome, enteral DHA+ARA supplementation reduces severe ROP and is associated with lower odds of ROP requiring treatment after adjustment for gestational age. These findings differ from the conclusions of Dang et al. and support reconsideration of DHA+ARA supplementation as a strategy to reduce sight-threatening ROP in preterm infants.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Reward-Centered ReST-MCTS: A Robust Decision-Making Framework for Robotic Manipulation in High Uncertainty Environments

Authors:

arXiv:2503.05226v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Monte Carlo tree search is attractive for robotic manipulation because it can improve action selection through simulation without requiring a fully differentiable policy. In uncertain domains, however, sparse terminal rewards and noisy transitions can make shallow search brittle: many candidate branches remain indistinguishable until late rollouts, and small simulation budgets amplify this ambiguity. This paper presents Reward-Centered ReST-MCTS, a decision-making framework that decomposes intermediate feedback into rule, heuristic, optional neural, and value-estimation channels, centers the resulting process signal against matched task contexts, and uses it to bias or repair search while preserving terminal-task evaluation. The primary evidence is intentionally tiered. Local tasks and matched ManiSkill diagnostics isolate reward-center mechanisms and ablations; matched option-level ManiSkill sweeps test robustness under primitive failure, observation noise, and initial-pose shifts while not claiming standard benchmark superiority; and an official same-backbone OpenVLA-OFT/LIBERO bridge tests bounded VLA action repair. The OpenVLA-OFT clean reproduction reaches 10/10 LIBERO-Spatial successes both with and without RCRM-Guard. A single-suite same-backbone action-channel stress artifact over ten paired LIBERO-Spatial action-channel stress episodes records 0/10 unguarded successes and 9/10 guarded successes. Additional observation-noise, language-perturbation, and visual-distractor probes are reported as coverage and negative-result context rather than superiority evidence. The resulting claim is bounded: Reward-Centered ReST-MCTS is an inspectable test-time verifier for same-backbone high-uncertainty manipulation, not a replacement VLA policy or a broad standard-benchmark superiority claim.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

MedLayBench-V: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Expert-Lay Semantic Alignment in Medical Vision Language Models

Medical Vision-Language Models (Med-VLMs) have achieved expert-level proficiency in interpreting diagnostic imaging. However, current models are predominantly trained on professional literature, limiting their ability to communicate findings in the lay register required for patient-centered care. While text-centric research has actively developed resources for simplifying medical jargon, there is a critical absence of large-scale multimodal benchmarks designed to facilitate lay-accessible medical image understanding. To bridge this resource gap, we introduce MedLayBench-V, the first large-scale multimodal benchmark dedicated to expert-lay semantic alignment. Unlike naive simplification approaches that risk hallucination, our dataset is constructed via a Structured Concept-Grounded Refinement (SCGR) pipeline. This method enforces strict semantic equivalence by integrating Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Concept Unique Identifiers (CUIs) with micro-level entity constraints. MedLayBench-V provides a verified foundation for training and evaluating next-generation Med-VLMs capable of bridging the communication divide between clinical experts and patients.

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

Token-Level Entropy Reveals Demographic Disparities in Language Models

We ask whether demographic identity, signaled by a name alone, systematically reshapes the generative distribution of a language model. Measuring full-vocabulary Shannon entropy at temperature zero across six open-weight base models and 5,760 implicit sentence-completion prompts (e.g., "Tanisha walked into the office on a Monday morning and"), we find that Black-associated names produce higher first-token entropy than White-associated names across all six architectures - opposite to the output-level homogeneity bias documented under explicit demographic prompting (Lee et al., 2024) - and Black-associated names always produce greater entropy above identity-neutral baselines than White-associated names ($\Delta\Delta > 0$ in all six models). Women-associated names co-occur with lower first-token entropy (DL-pooled $\hat\beta = -0.041, p = .019$) and more homogeneous outputs ($\hat\alpha = +0.024, p < .001$) than men-associated names - a pattern convergent with homogeneity bias; race and gender effects are additive. Instruction tuning does not attenuate the race gap (matched-format DL-pooled $\hat{\beta}=+0.153$). Running the same templates with explicit group labels instead of names yields null race effects in 10 of 12 models where implicit probing is significant - establishing that probing methodology is a primary determinant of which distributional structure is recovered.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Hybrid Uncertainty Sensitivity Analysis Based on the HSIC for High-Dimensional Responses with Aleatory–Epistemic Separation

arXiv:2606.14053v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantifying the influence of hybrid aleatory and epistemic uncertainties on high-dimensional system responses remains a major challenge in global sensitivity analysis (GSA). Existing Hilbert–Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC)-based approaches are primarily restricted to single-output settings and lack a rigorous decomposition of heterogeneous uncertainty sources and their interactions. To address this limitation, a novel double-space tensor-product RKHS framework is proposed for sensitivity analysis under hybrid uncertainty. By constructing factorized kernels over both the latent input space and the multidimensional output space, a concurrent double Möbius inversion is derived to orthogonally decompose the global dependence measure into pure aleatory effects, pure epistemic effects, and their interaction contributions. The resulting dimension-wise sensitivity indices preserve the uncertainty attribution structure across all output dimensions. To satisfy the independence assumptions required by the decomposition, an auxiliary-variable representation based on the inverse probability integral transform is introduced, enabling the treatment of hierarchical uncertainties and Copula-induced correlations within a unified latent space. A fully vectorized single-loop implementation is further developed to avoid the computational burden of nested Monte Carlo simulation. Statistical significance and estimation uncertainty are quantified through permutation testing and Bootstrap confidence intervals. Numerical studies on a modified multi-output Ishigami function and an aerodynamic pressure-field problem demonstrate the accuracy, scalability, and practical applicability of the proposed framework.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

GPU-accelerated semidefinite programming for causal games

arXiv:2606.20519v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The process matrix formalism describes quantum correlations in scenarios without a fixed causal order between local laboratories. Operational signatures of such correlations can be investigated through causal games. A paradigmatic example is the Guess-Your-Neighbour's-Input game, in which two parties attempt to guess each other's inputs. Correlations compatible with any definite, or probabilistically mixed, causal order cannot achieve a winning probability exceeding $1/2$. The best process-matrix strategy currently known attains a value of approximately $0.6218$ using local dimension $d=5$, while the strongest known dimension-independent upper bound is $0.7592$. In this work, we investigate whether increasing the local dimension beyond $d = 5$ can narrow this gap. To this end, we employ a see-saw optimization scheme in which each step is formulated as a semidefinite program. For scalability, we develop a custom implementation of the SCS solver in which the dominant computational cost, the projection onto the positive-semidefinite cone, is offloaded to a GPU, yielding a six-fold speedup. Using this implementation, we explore local dimensions up to $d = 8$, and we do not find significant improvements over the value at $d=5$. Our results suggest that either qualitatively different strategies are required to approach the known upper bound, or that the bound itself is not tight.

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

RIDGECUT: Learning Graph Partitioning with Rings and Wedges

arXiv:2505.13986v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise for combinatorial optimization problems on graphs by learning heuristics that generalize across instances. However, effectively incorporating domain knowledge into RL frameworks for graph partitioning remains challenging, as existing approaches typically rely on unconstrained node-level actions that lead to large action spaces and inefficient exploration. In this paper, we propose RidgeCut, an RL framework that constrains the action space to enforce structure-aware partitioning in the Normalized Cut problem. Using transportation networks as a motivating example, we introduce a novel concept that leverages domain knowledge about urban road topology – where natural partitions often take the form of concentric rings and radial wedges. By transforming the graph into linear or circular representations, our method enables the use of transformer-based policies and efficient learning via Proximal Policy Optimization. The resulting partitions from RidgeCut are not only aligned with expected spatial layouts but also achieve lower normalized cuts compared to existing methods. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world traffic graphs demonstrate that RidgeCut consistently outperforms existing methods while exhibiting strong inductive generalization across graph sizes. Although motivated by road networks, RidgeCut provides a general mechanism for embedding structural priors into RL frameworks for graph partitioning.

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

Beyond Artifacts: Towards Generalizable Synthetic Song Detection via Music-Intrinsic Features

arXiv:2606.16612v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid advancement of AI music generators highlights the urgent need for reliable Synthetic Song Detection (SSD). Existing SSD methods often rely on low-level artifacts or fixed feature assumptions, struggling to capture generator-agnostic cues. To address this, we propose Sofia (Synthetic-song detection framework via music features), a flexible framework that models music-intrinsic attributes via feature-specific experts and an adaptive Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) module. By configuring Sofia with representative Vocal, Audio-effect, Global structure features, and their combinations, we present their individual and complementary contributions. To comprehensively evaluate our framework, we further construct MUSIC8K, a challenging benchmark featuring lastest emerging generators and realistic audio perturbations. Experiments show that Sofia learns generator-agnostic representations from music-intrinsic features, improving the F1 score by 18.5 points over the strongest baseline on MUSIC8K-O while maintaining strong robustness.

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

From Memorization to Creation: Evaluating the Cognitive Depth of LLM-Generated Educational Questions

arXiv:2606.18257v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While LLMs show promise in automating educational content creation, their ability to generate questions that stimulate higher-order thinking remains understudied. This work evaluates six widely-used LLMs through a Bloom's Taxonomy lens, focusing on their capacity to transcend rote memorization and achieve cognitive leaps. Using a hybrid human–AI evaluation protocol, we generate and analyze 20{,}700 questions across computer science, K–12 math, and social-science domains. Key contributions include: (1) a fine-grained prompting strategy that reduces question repetitiveness by 24.45\% for Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, and increases the proportion of higher-order cognitive level outputs by 11.53\% for InternLM3-8B-Instruct; (2) quantitative metrics for cognitive shift intensity (CogShift) and category drift, revealing InternLM3's superior performance in multi-level transitions; (3) an interpretability analysis revealing metric-level correlations that enhance the transparency of Chain-of-Thought prompting. Our findings highlight the importance of cognitive-aware prompt design and provide benchmarks for deploying LLMs in personalized learning systems.

24.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-12

Stage-dependent role of NEK7 in the inactive-to-active conformational transition of NLRP3 monomer

Authors:

by Jin Peng, Wenjian Li, Hao Wang, Xiaohui Chen, Manjie Zhang, Bin Sun The NLRP3 inflammasome is a multiprotein complex that primes cytokine production in the innate immune system. The inflammasome activation involves the cage-to-disk transition of NLRP3 oligomers, facilitated by the co-factor NEK7 protein. While NEK7’s role in promoting cage disassembly has been reported, its involvement in the large conformational changes of the NLRP3 monomer during activation remains elusive. Here, by using multi-scale simulations, we uncovered a stage-dependent role of NEK7 in the inactive-to-active transition. In the early stage, NEK7 reshapes the dynamics of the highly unstable inactive NLRP3 monomer to resemble active state, priming the conformational transition. In the middle stage, NEK7 impedes progression by populating an intermediate state farther from the active conformation than the NEK7-free counterpart, and structures in this state exhibit reduced allosteric potential toward activation. In the late stage, NEK7 has negligible impact, as the active conformation remains inherently isolated by a high energy barrier regardless of NEK7 presence. This highlights the critical role of oligomeric assembly in enabling monomeric NLRP3 to complete its conformational transition, in agreement with experiment observations. Our work suggests a multilayered activation mechanism where oligomer-level assembly and monomeric conformational changes are coupled, providing new mechanistic insights into this physiologically essential macromolecular process.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

PAWS: Preference Learning with Advantage-Weighted Segments

arXiv:2606.11982v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) learns policies from human trajectory-level comparisons, avoiding explicit reward design and expert demonstrations. Existing methods typically train utility functions on trajectory or segment-level preferences while relying on per-step utility estimates during policy optimization. This training and inference mismatch induces a distribution shift that severely degrades temporal credit assignment and limits policy learning. We analyze this issue and propose PAWS, a segment-based preference learning method that performs policy updates directly using segment-level advantage functions. By aligning utility training with policy optimization, PAWS preserves trajectory-level preference information and avoids unreliable per-step learning signals. Experiments on simulated robotic manipulation and locomotion tasks demonstrate that PAWS consistently outperforms existing PbRL approaches, highlighting the importance of distribution-consistent preference learning.