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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Advanced Machine Learning and Deep Learning Techniques for Enhanced Cattle Identification and Detection: A Comprehensive Review

arXiv:2606.15655v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The need for effective cattle identification technology is now more acutely felt than ever in maintaining biosecurity, food safety, and supply chain efficacy in livestock management. This paper presents a systematic review of recent research in cattle identification using machine learning and deep learning techniques. The present systematic review measures the effectiveness of traditional and modern cattle identification techniques using studies from major academic databases, where articles were subjected to full-text review. Among these techniques, classical Machine Learning Techniques such as K-Nearest Neighbors and Support Vector Machines have demonstrated good results in cattle identification; however, Deep Learning Techniques, such as Convolutional Neural Networks, Residual Networks, and You Only Look Once, are better in cognition, detection, and identification tasks. Feature extraction relies on common techniques like Local Binary Pattern (LBP), Speeded-Up Robust Features (SURF), and Scale-Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT), while key features commonly used in these studies include muzzle prints and coat patterns. The review highlights key hurdles involving cattle identification, such as the limited number of publicly accessible datasets, issues with data quality susceptible to environmental changes and animal mobility, and high demand for real-time processing ability. The paper aims to inform researchers, policymakers, and stakeholders about implementing scalable, humane, and effective cattle identification systems to achieve sustainable livestock management.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

A Resilient Solution for Sewer Overflow Monitoring across Cloud and Edge

arXiv:2605.10592v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Aging combined sewer systems in many historical cities are increasingly stressed by extreme rainfall events, which can trigger combined sewer overflows (CSO) with significant environmental and public health impacts. Forecasting the filling dynamics of overflow basins is critical for anticipating capacity exceedance and enabling timely preventive actions for CSO. We present a web-based demonstrator that integrates Deep Learning forecasting methods in both cloud and edge settings into an interactive monitoring dashboard for overflow monitoring, resilient to network outages. A video showcase is available online (https://cloud.bht-berlin.de/index.php/s/b9xt4T3SdiLBiFZ).

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

The Distribution Postulate in Algorithmic Bohmian Mechanics

arXiv:2606.16165v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In order to make the right empirical predictions Bohmian mechanics requires a special statistical boundary condition – the distribution postulate – but it is unclear how best to understand this condition. We show how one might use the theory of algorithmic randomness to formulate the distribution postulate as an objective constraining law. The framework requires us to say something about admissible quantum-mechanical states and measurements. In return, algorithmic Bohmian mechanics (aBM) guarantees the standard Born statistics for a collection of canonical quantum experiments in the limit, not just with high probability. The algorithmic distribution postulate provides a sharp typicality condition, clarifies the status of quantum probabilities in the deterministic theory, and provides a concrete example of how notions provided by the theory of algorithmic randomness can aid in specifying the content of a physical law.

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

Depth-Attention: Cross-Layer Value Mixing for Language Models

Self-attention selects information freely across the sequence, but across depth, Transformers merely add each layer's output to the residual stream, so later layers cannot selectively reuse earlier-layer representations. Recent cross-layer methods improve this flow but operate on hidden states outside attention, adding state beyond the key-value cache at inference–a cost that becomes increasingly salient as modern LLMs compress the cache with grouped-query and multi-head latent attention. We introduce Depth-Attention, which performs this selection inside the attention module itself: before a layer attends over the sequence, its query attends over the keys of earlier layers at the same token position and mixes their values into the value that self-attention then reads. Because Depth-Attention reuses the standard attention queries, keys, and value-cache slots, storing depth-mixed values in place of the original values, it adds no parameters and introduces no persistent inference state beyond the standard key-value cache–the same cache size as a vanilla decoder and less than hidden-state-based cross-layer methods. On Qwen3-style decoders at 1.5B and 3B parameters, Depth-Attention attains the lowest perplexity and the highest average downstream accuracy, improving over the vanilla Transformer by up to 2.3 accuracy points and surpassing strong cross-layer baselines in perplexity and average accuracy, while adding under 0.01% extra arithmetic FLOPs and no additional persistent inference state. The gains hold from 360M to 3B parameters and extend to looped Transformers.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

The Acceptability of Three Co-Created Peer Support Interventions for People Living with Leprosy Reactions in Indonesia: A Mixed-Methods Pilot Study

Background: Leprosy reactions (LR) are immune-mediated complications associated with disability, emotional distress, and social isolation. We identified a gap in affected-individual-informed interventions that aim to improve the management of LR in healthcare settings. To address this gap, we assessed the acceptability of three peer-support interventions co-created with people affected by LR in Indonesia. Methods: Using an interactive learning and action approach, we co-created peer counselling, telesupport groups, and participatory video interventions which were piloted in an urban hospital and 13 rural community clinics. A mixed-methods design was applied with interviews, focus group discussions, and pre-post assessments involving four participant groups. Data were analyzed thematically using an acceptability framework. Results: One hundred participants were enrolled, and 92 completed the pilot intervention between November 2022 and July 2023. Qualitative findings showed that all interventions were acceptable. Peer counselling provided emotional reassurance through shared experiences and was perceived as trustworthy and supportive. Perceived burdens differed by setting, with time constraints in urban facilities and geographical barriers in rural clinics. Knowledge improved significantly among participants of peer counselling and telesupport groups in rural settings. Telesupport groups facilitated connection, information exchange, and continuity of care. Digital access and literacy limited participation for some, particularly in rural areas. The participatory video was perceived as reassuring and informative. Improvements in knowledge, attitude, practices, and mental well-being domain scores were observed among urban participants, but responses in rural settings showed less change. Participants and co-implementers reported increased self-efficacy, participants confidence to perform required behaviors within peer support interventions, with effects shaped by intervention and setting. Conclusions: The three co-created peer-support interventions were acceptable for individuals with LR in diverse healthcare settings. These outcomes highlight the importance and effectiveness of selective, and context-sensitive implementation of one or more peer-support modalities.

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

Breaking the Ice: Analyzing Cold Start Latency in vLLM

arXiv:2606.07362v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As scalable inference services become popular, the cold start latency of an inference engine becomes important. Today, vLLM has evolved into the de facto inference engine of choice for many inference workloads. Although popular, due to its complexity and rapid evolution, there has not been a systematic study of its startup latency. With major architectural innovations such as the V1 API and the introduction of torch.compile, this paper presents the first detailed performance characterization of vLLM startup latency. We break down the startup process into six foundational steps and demonstrate that it is predominantly CPU bound. Each step exhibits consistent and interpretable scaling trends with respect to model-level and system-level parameters, enabling fine-grained attribution of latency sources. Building on these insights, we develop a lightweight analytical model that accurately predicts vLLM startup latency for a given hardware configuration, providing actionable guidance for resource planning in large-scale inference environments. All benchmarking datasets, analysis tools, and prediction scripts are open sourced at https://github.com/upb-cn/vllm-startup-profiler.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Efficient upsampling for tensor-network and quantum-state encoded functions

arXiv:2601.03885v2 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Both tensor trains (TTs) and quantum states provide compressed representations of grid-structured data with potentially exponential compression power. We present a unified framework for upsampling data encoded in vector amplitudes, with efficient realizations in both classical TT and quantum settings. Starting from an \(n\)-core TT or an \(n\)-qubit state on a coarse grid with \(2^n\) points, the construction produces an \((n+m)\)-core TT or \((n+m)\)-qubit state on a finer grid with \(2^{n+m}\) points. In the TT setting, it supports interpolation, quasi-interpolation, augmentation, and synthesis through efficient low-rank contractions, with the added \(m\) cores retaining constant rank. For function-value encodings, the resulting interpolation satisfies an \(\ell^2\)-error bound independent of the number of added grid points, achieves exponential compression at fixed accuracy, and has a logarithmic complexity in the number of grid points. In the quantum setting, the refined state is prepared by a \(\mathrm{poly}(n,m)\)-size circuit using \(\log(p+1)\) ancillas, where \(p\) controls the smoothness of the quasi-interpolant; the corresponding error scales quadratically with the initial grid spacing. We validate our framework for tensor networks in one-, two-, and three-dimensional examples, including functions, derivatives, airfoil masks, and synthetic random fields such as three-dimensional turbulence. In particular, fractal fields can be generated directly in TT format with logarithmic memory and runtime. These results open a practical route to multiscale solvers, generative models, and geometry-aware algorithms on tensor-network and quantum platforms, with potential applications in scientific simulation, imaging, and real-time graphics.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

BCL: Bayesian In-Context Learning Framework for Information Extraction

Existing information extraction (IE) tasks increasingly adopt in-context learning (ICL) with large language models. However, current approaches either show inconsistent performance across model scales or lack systematic optimization and generalizability. Building on this, we propose BCL (Bayesian In-Context Learning Framework for Information Extraction), the first optimization framework that uses particle filtering with Bayesian updates to systematically refine label representations across IE tasks. Through four steps initialization, observation, weight update, and resampling, BCL generalizes to both sequence labeling and relation classification paradigms. Extensive experiments demonstrate substantial and consistent improvements over existing approaches.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

QPU-scale randomized benchmarking via Bell-pair injection

arXiv:2606.20123v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mirror randomized benchmarking (MRB) is an established technique that provides a global error metric at the scale of a whole QPU. To expand upon this we introduce Mirror Quantum Awesomeness (MQA), a hybrid protocol that adds a structured entangling layer to MRB circuits. This enables per-edge correlation dynamics to be tracked via mutual information while preserving the MRB infidelity estimate. The resulting analysis of the injected entangled pairs locates a critical circuit depth, beyond which rudimentary error mitigation techniques can be expected to fail. A topological variant, Topological MQA, supplies a second critical depth via a decoder based on the surface-code decoding problem. Both are validated in simulation and demonstrated on the 156-qubit \texttt{ibm\_fez} and \texttt{ibm\_kingston} processors, where MQA closely agrees with MRB on the entanglement infidelity and the critical depth for \texttt{ibm\_fez} is found to be $\sim 50$.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

The Answer Lies Within: Self-Derived Rewards Enable Explainable Relation Extraction

Despite the remarkable reasoning capabilities of large language models, they still struggle with one-shot relation extraction without predefined relation labels. We identify two pitfalls: models are often misled by irrelevant tokens instead of relation-conveying semantics, and they often fail to align with the abstraction level human annotators expect. We introduce a novel framework that closes this gap with two components: (1) COGRE, a cognitively-inspired reasoning framework that structures RE into a series of processes mimicking human text-processing; and (2) HIT@DICT, a reinforcement learning intermediate reward strategy that encourages reasoning to align with relational labels by rewarding relation-relevant phrases in reasoning. The reward is derived on a credit dictionary automatically extracted from correct predictions. Our experiments show that our framework improves both accuracy and explanation quality by addressing these two pitfalls. For example, COGRE with Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct on One-shot NYT29 achieves 24.65% F1, surpassing prior reasoning-based designs. Optimizing this approach with RL using HIT@DICT further improves performance by +23.46% points. Finally, human evaluation shows that our best model generates relational phrases closely aligned with gold labels, increasing human explanation quality ratings by 54% (relative).

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

Trainable Photonic Measurement for Physics-Informed PDE Learning

arXiv:2606.18713v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Photonic quantum machine learning offers a route to trainable physical representations built from phase, interference and measurement. However, its role in scientific machine learning remains largely unexplored. Physics-informed neural fields provide a natural setting, because differential equations require trial spaces that preserve phase, frequency and derivative structure. Here we introduce a photonic quantum neural field in which coordinates become trainable optical phases, are mixed by multi-photon Fock-space interference and are decoded from photon-number measurements. The photonic circuit is optimized as the neural-field representation itself, not as a fixed feature map or hardware accelerator. Photonic measurement is therefore a trainable representation on which the physics-informed residual is minimized. Across seven elliptic, wave, nonlinear dispersive and inverse PDE benchmarks, we observe a phase-complexity transition: classical coordinate and Fourier-feature networks suffice in smooth regimes, whereas the photonic field is most accurate when residual derivatives amplify phase mismatch. In the hardest regimes it gives the lowest errors, with margins reaching an order of magnitude and about one quarter of the trainable parameters of classical baselines. Frozen and shuffled controls, together with noise stress tests, attribute this gain to learned interference and stable Fock-probability readout under compound perturbations. These results identify photonic quantum measurement as a representation-learning principle for scientific machine learning.

12.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-02

Proteomic signatures of early retinal neurodegeneration in type 2 diabetes mellitus

Authors:

by Huangdong Li, Ziyu Zhu, Shaopeng Yang, Weijing Cheng, Shaoying Tan, Zhuoyao Xin, Lei Zhang, Zhuoting Zhu, Shida Chen, Wenyong Huang, Wei Wang Background Retinal neurodegeneration is an early and independent feature of diabetic retinal disease and has been proposed as a window into the systemic neural consequences of diabetes, yet accessible molecular biomarkers and individualized prediction tools remain scarce. We aimed to identify circulating plasma protein signatures of diabetic retinal neurodegeneration (DRN) and to translate them into a clinically usable risk prediction system. Methods and findings In this multi-cohort prospective observational study, we integrated high-throughput plasma proteomics with longitudinal optical coherence tomography (OCT) in two independent populations. The discovery cohort comprised 1,492 participants had baseline plasma proteomics and OCT, and 1,218 were followed with repeated OCT over 6 years in Guangzhou Diabetic Eye Study (GDES). DRN was quantified by the annualized OCT-derived retinal nerve fiber layer thinning rate. In multivariable analyses adjusted for age, sex, smoking, systolic blood pressure, HbA1c, and diabetes duration, we identified 71 plasma proteins associated with development and progression of DRN. These proteins mapped onto pathways governing inflammatory immune recruitment, extracellular matrix remodeling, and microvascular homeostasis, providing a plausible biological basis for DRN. We developed a proteomics-based DRN model (Pro-DRN) using eight machine learning (ML) algorithms, including XGBoost and LightGBM. In the independent test set, Pro-DRN achieved a C-index of 0.860, rising to 0.908 when integrated with clinical variables. Compared with six conventional models, Pro-DRN improved discrimination (ΔC-index 0.137 to 0.159; all P 

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

InterleaveThinker: Reinforcing Agentic Interleaved Generation

Recent image generators have demonstrated impressive photorealism and instruction-following capabilities in single-image generation and editing. However, constrained by their architectures, they cannot achieve interleaved generation (text-image sequence), which has crucial applications in visual narratives, guidance, and embodied manipulation. Even the latest open-source Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) exhibit limited performance in this regard. In this paper, we introduce InterleaveThinker, the first multi-agent pipeline designed to endow any existing image generator with interleaved generation capabilities. Specifically, we employ a planner agent to organize the image-text input sequence, instructing the image generator on the required execution at each step. Subsequently, we introduce a critic agent to evaluate the generator's outputs, identify samples that deviate from the planned instructions, and refine the instructions for regeneration. To implement this pipeline, we construct the Interleave-Planner-SFT-80k and Interleave-Critic-SFT-112k to perform a format cold-start. Then we develop Interleave-Critic-RL-13k to reinforce the step-wise instruction correction capability within a generation trajectory using GRPO. Since a single interleaved generation trajectory may involve over 25 generator calls, optimizing the entire trajectory is computationally impractical. Therefore, we propose accuracy reward and step-wise reward, allowing single-step RL to effectively guide the entire generation trajectory. The results show that InterleaveThinker improves performance across various image generators. On interleaved generation benchmarks, it achieves performance comparable to Nano Banana and GPT-5. Surprisingly, it also significantly enhances the base model on reasoning-based benchmarks; for example, on 4-step FLUX.2-klein, we observe substantial gains on WISE and RISE.

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

An AI Security Agent for University ACMIS: Multi-Vector Threat Detection and Automated Response

arXiv:2606.08270v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: University Academic Management Information Systems (ACMIS) are high-value targets for a wide spectrum of security threats including brute-force login attacks, payment fraud, privilege escalation, insider data theft, and academic integrity violations. Traditional rule-based intrusion detection systems are inadequate because many malicious activities are structurally indistinguishable from normal operations. This paper presents an AI-based security agent for ACMIS that combines supervised anomaly detection, behavioural analytics, and a natural language processing chatbot for secure password recovery. The agent monitors five operational layers: authentication, authorisation, financial transactions, user behaviour, and system health, and responds through a four-tier risk escalation framework. A modular architecture allows the core engine to be extended to other institutional systems. Experiments on a simulated ACMIS event log dataset of 147,922 sessions demonstrate a threat detection macro-average F1 of 0.966, compared to 0.156 for a rule-based baseline and 0.836 for a sequence-only (LSTM) baseline, with end-to-end critical-tier automated response latency under 1 ms on a single-node prototype. The integrated recovery chatbot achieves 97.1 percent identity verification accuracy and an 87.3 percent mass-reset attack detection rate with zero false positives on legitimate high volume recovery periods.

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

MolmoMotion: Forecasting Point Trajectories in 3D with Language Instruction

Motion forecasting is central to visual intelligence: agents must anticipate how objects will move in order to plan actions, reason about physical interactions, and synthesize realistic futures. We argue that 3D points in world coordinates provide a general representation that is class-agnostic, view-stable, compact, and directly useful for downstream tasks. We formalize the task of goal-conditioned 3D point motion forecasting: given a short visual history, a set of 3D query points on an object of interest, and a language description of the intended goal, the model predicts the future 3D trajectory of each point. We introduce a full stack to study this task at scale: (1) MolmoMotion-1M is a large corpus of action-described, object-grounded 3D point trajectories annotated from 1.16M unconstrained videos; (2) PointMotionBench is a human-verified benchmark spanning 111 object categories and 61 motion types; and (3) MolmoMotion is a general motion forecasting model that supports both autoregressive coordinate prediction and flow-matching-based trajectory generation. MolmoMotion accurately predicts diverse motion patterns with different language instructions, and significantly outperforms existing motion prediction baselines on PointMotionBench. Finally, we show that the learned 3D motion prior transfers well to downstream applications: it improves training efficiency and generalization for robot manipulation, and its predicted trajectories provide effective motion guidance for generative models to synthesize videos with more realistic object motion.

16.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Revealing competitive interfacial reactions in high-energy Li–S batteries

Authors:

Charge transfer at solid–liquid interfaces plays a critical role in various energy-storage systems1, particularly under dynamically varying reactant concentrations. Deciphering these intricate reaction pathways remains a substantial challenge, notably in lithium–sulfur (Li–S) batteries, in which achieving high energy density requires efficient conversion of highly concentrated lithium polysulfides (LiPSs)2,3. However, the mechanisms governing lithium sulfide (Li2S) deposition and dissolution under lean electrolyte conditions remain poorly understood. Here, using in situ liquid-cell electron microscopy, we directly visualize concentration-driven phase segregation at the electrode–electrolyte interface. Within these high-concentration interfacial layers (HCILs), competitive surface and solution dictate the charge-transfer dynamics and ultimately govern Li2S deposition at different phase boundaries. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations reveal that the aggregation of LiPSs alters molecular geometry, electronic properties and orbital hybridization, collectively facilitating charge transfer through highly concentrated LiPSs clusters. Guided by these insights, we design optimized electrodes that balance interfacial reaction pathways, enabling fast charging (4 C, 26.8 mA cm−2) and achieving high energy densities exceeding 400 Wh kg−1. These findings provide mechanistic understanding of interfacial reactions under practical working conditions and offer a design strategy to advance Li–S batteries. Visualization of concentration-driven phase segregation within high-concentration interfacial layers in the context of high-energy lithium–sulfur batteries using liquid-cell electrochemical transmission electron microscopy reveals competitive interfacial reactions under lean electrolyte conditions at different phase boundaries.

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

Turning music identification into a neural forward pass

arXiv:2606.17301v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Search, a foundational operation in computer science, maps a query to a matching item in a collection. It is typically implemented as a System-2 like, rule-based pipeline in which a key is computed, an index is probed, and candidates are verified. By contrast, human recognition resembles a System-1 like, associative model of identity recovery, in which even partial cues can trigger a recall without explicitly enumerating, ranking, or even accessing discrete candidates. Here, we show that music sound identification, a difficult search problem, can be performed in a single neural feed-forward pass by a generative transformer. Trained on an audio dataset, the model predicts the corresponding track identifier from a short audio excerpt. This approach surpasses state-of-the-art acoustic fingerprinting, with the largest gains for short audio segments (1 second), demonstrating the method is not only viable but advantageous. Moreover, it reduces external storage to 0.33% of the baseline footprint and improves inference latency by 2.3x (p95). Furthermore, the model can reject queries for unseen tracks, supporting open-set operation while reducing misattribution risk. Using music track identification as an example, this work reframes search, bringing it closer in spirit to human associative recognition and away from algorithmic database lookup.

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

FronTalk: Benchmarking Front-End Development as Conversational Code Generation with Multi-Modal Feedback

We present FronTalk, a benchmark for front-end code generation that pioneers the study of a unique interaction dynamic: conversational code generation with multi-modal feedback. In front-end development, visual artifacts such as sketches, mockups and annotated creenshots are essential for conveying design intent, yet their role in multi-turn code generation remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we focus on the front-end development task and curate FronTalk, a collection of 100 multi-turn dialogues derived from real-world websites across diverse domains such as news, finance, and art. Each turn features both a textual instruction and an equivalent visual instruction, each representing the same user intent. To comprehensively evaluate model performance, we propose a novel agent-based evaluation framework leveraging a web agent to simulate users and explore the website, and thus measuring both functional correctness and user experience. Evaluation of 20 models reveals two key challenges that are under-explored systematically in the literature: (1) a significant forgetting issue where models overwrite previously implemented features, resulting in task failures, and (2) a persistent challenge in interpreting visual feedback, especially for open-source vision-language models (VLMs). We propose a strong baseline to tackle the forgetting issue with AceCoder, a method that critiques the implementation of every past instruction using an autonomous web agent. This approach significantly reduces forgetting to nearly zero and improves the performance by up to 9.3% (56.0% to 65.3%). Overall, we aim to provide a solid foundation for future research in front-end development and the general interaction dynamics of multi-turn, multi-modal code generation. Code and data are released at https://github.com/shirley-wu/frontalk

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

A Survey on 3D Skeleton Based Person Re-Identification: Taxonomy, Advances, Challenges, and Interdisciplinary Prospects

Person re-identification via 3D skeletons is an important emerging research area that attracts increasing attention within the pattern recognition community. With distinctive advantages across various application scenarios, numerous 3D skeleton based person re-identification (SRID) methods with diverse skeleton modeling and learning paradigms have been proposed in recent years. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review and analysis of recent SRID advances. First of all, we define the SRID task and provide an overview of its origin and major advancements. Secondly, we formulate a systematic taxonomy that organizes existing methods into three categories centered on hand-crafted, sequence-based, and graph-based modeling. Then, we elaborate on the representative models along these three types with an illustration of foundational mechanisms. Meanwhile, we provide an overview of mainstream supervised, self-supervised, and unsupervised SRID learning paradigms and corresponding common methods. A thorough evaluation of state-of-the-art SRID methods is further conducted over various types of benchmarks and protocols to compare their effectiveness, efficiency, and key properties. Finally, we present the key challenges and prospects to advance future research, and highlight interdisciplinary applications of SRID with a case study.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Mitigating Object Hallucinations in LVLMs via Attention Imbalance Rectification

Object hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) severely compromises their reliability in real-world applications, posing a critical barrier to their deployment in high-stakes scenarios such as autonomous driving and medical image analysis. Through systematic empirical investigation, we identify that the imbalanced attention allocation, both across modalities (i.e., vision and language) and within modalities (among individual tokens), exhibits a strong causal correlation with the occurrence of object hallucination. Leveraging this insight, we introduce a novel concept termed attention imbalance, which not only quantifies the degree of attention disparity but also visually delineates the underlying patterns (e.g., over-attentiveness to irrelevant language tokens or under-attentiveness to discriminative visual features) that drive object hallucination. To mitigate object hallucination, we further propose Attention Imbalance Rectification (AIR), a lightweight decoding-time intervention method that reallocates attention weights and adjusts attention distributions to rectify modality-wise and token-wise imbalances. Extensive evaluations on four mainstream LVLMs and three benchmarks (CHAIR, POPE, and MM-Vet) with seven baselines demonstrate that AIR consistently reduces object hallucination rates, achieving up to a 35.1% reduction compared to the baselines, while improving up to 15.9% of LVLMs' general capability across diverse vision-language tasks.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

AnchorKV: Safety-Aware KV Cache Compression via Soft Penalty with a Refusal Anchor

arXiv:2606.17872v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) outperform earlier architectures on generative inference and long-context tasks, but their large size introduces significant challenges in memory usage, energy cost, and on-device deployment. Since scaling pre-trained language models improves downstream capability [zhao2023survey], the key-value (KV) cache becomes a dominant inference bottleneck. Recent KV cache compression methods [jo2025fastkv,li2024snapkv,zhou2024dynamickv] reduce this cost by retaining only a subset of attention-relevant tokens. However, while these approaches preserve accuracy on benign workloads, their compression policies either fail to defend against jailbreak attacks [jiang2024robustkv] or degrade safety alignment under aggressive eviction. We propose AnchorKV, a drop-in modification to KV cache compression that biases token retention scores away from directions in key space associated with harmful prompts. AnchorKV constructs an offline safety anchor by adapting a difference-of-means representation engineering approach [arditi2024refusal,zou2023representation] to the layer-specific key projection space used in KV caching. Based on this anchor, a soft penalty token selection rule trades a small amount of utility for substantially improved safety alignment, while reducing to the original compressor when the penalty is zero.

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

Transformers Learn the Mestre-Nagao Heuristic

arXiv:2606.15036v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We train a two-layer transformer encoder to classify rational elliptic curves $E/\mathbb{Q}$ of conductor $\leq 10000$ as either rank 0 or rank 1 from the first 128 normalized Frobenius traces. We achieve >99% accuracy on both classes, and accuracy is essentially unchanged on test curves with no isogeny or quadratic-twist relative in the training set. We then apply techniques from mechanistic interpretability such as attention analysis, linear probing, activation patching, logit attribution, and neuron-level circuit analysis to reverse-engineer the algorithm the (centroid in function space) model learned. We find that a sparse circuit of 20 out of 512 layer-1 MLP neurons is sufficient for rank prediction under a linear probe with an AUROC of 0.992 at plateau, implementing a push-pull detector architecture of rank-0 and rank-1 detectors with a one-sided readout. However, we notice that the model has sub-optimal readout problems indicating a mismatch in rank-order between the readout pathway and the discriminative circuit. Critically, the learned input weights of the top discriminating neuron match the Mestre-Nagao sum heuristic weights $\log(p)/(p\cdot \log{B})$ with a Spearman coefficient $r = 0.997$ and Pearson coefficient $r = 0.952$: the model has learnt a result from analytic number theory from the Frobenius trace data alone. We additionally find that all 50 independently trained models concentrate CLS attention on prime positions at 2-50$\times$ the rate of composite positions. The CLS embedding encodes $\log{L(E,1)}$ with $R^2 = 0.962\pm 0.011$ across the 50 models (after controlling for the conductor). Activation patching analysis reveals that attention weights are dissociated from causal information flow. Additionally, the 50 solutions from training are near-identical in function space (with pairwise agreement $>$98.8%) despite large weight space barriers.

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

Canonical Variates in Wasserstein Metric Space

arXiv:2405.15768v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper, we address the classification of instances represented by distributions on a vector space rather than single points. We consider classification algorithms based on pairwise distances, specifically, the Wasserstein metric between distributions. Central to our investigation is dimension reduction within the Wasserstein metric space to enhance classification accuracy. We introduce a novel approach grounded in the principle of maximizing Fisher's ratio, defined as the quotient of between-class variation to within-class variation. The directions in which this ratio is maximized are termed discriminant coordinates or canonical variates axes. In practice, both between-class and within-class variations are defined as the average squared Wasserstein distances between pairs of distributions, with the pairs either belonging to the same class or to different classes. This ratio optimization is achieved through an iterative algorithm, which alternates between optimal transport and maximization steps within the vector space. Empirical studies are conducted to assess the algorithm's convergence; and experimental results demonstrate that the dimension reduction technique substantially enhances classification performance. Moreover, the new method outperforms well-established algorithms that operate on vector representations derived from distributional data. It also exhibits robustness to variations in how instances are summarized by distributions, such as the number of components in a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) representation.

24.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-23

Early Tracheal and Salivary miRNAs in Extremely Preterm Infants Predict BPD-related Pulmonary Hypertension

Pulmonary hypertension (BPD-PH) associated with bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD) in preterm infants associates with high morbidity and mortality within the first two years of life. In a previous unbiased study, we identified a panel miRNAs in tracheal aspirates (TA) that were differentially expressed in extremely low gestational age newborns (ELGANs) with BPD-PH compared to those with BPD but no PH. To explore the predictive potential of these miRNAs, we studied TA exosomes from 7 days old ELGANs and analysed a curated panel of 16 miRNAs through logistic regression and calculated the predictive AUROC to diagnose BPD-PH at 36 weeks PMA. AUROC of TA miRNAs was 0.76 with sensitivity and specificity of 53% and 93%, respectively. Adding sex and gestational age to the variables improved the AUROC to 0.78 with sensitivity and specificity of 61 and 87% respectively. Due to challenges of obtaining TA in non-invasively ventilated infants, we collected saliva samples from ELGANs at 7 days of age and compared the log expression of these 16 miRNAs in both biofluids and found significant correlation in their expression (pearson r=0.92, p

25.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12

PeptiDIA: A Machine Learning Framework for Enhanced Peptide Identification in Fast-Gradient Data-Independent Acquisition Proteomics

Data-independent acquisition (DIA) mass spectrometry has become increasingly prevalent in proteomics as advances in instrumentation, chromatography, and computational analysis have enabled robust proteome identification across complex biological samples. However, analytical depth achieved with fast chromatographic gradients remains lower than that obtained using long-gradients, reflecting a throughput-depth trade-off. Here, we present PeptiDIA, a machine learning framework that enhances peptide identification in fast-gradient DIA data by leveraging paired fast and long-gradient acquisitions from identical samples. PeptiDIA processes DIA-NN outputs generated at relaxed false discovery rate thresholds to obtain expanded candidate peptide pools and trains gradient-boosted decision tree models using long-gradient identifications as reference labels. The model integrates DIA-NN features with engineered peptide descriptors and applies isotonic regression to calibrate probabilities, enabling controlled peptide recovery relative to the long-gradient reference. Applied to human and murine datasets spanning six tissues acquired on an Orbitrap Exploris 480, PeptiDIA increased peptide identifications by 25-34% at 1% target reference-discordance rate (RDR) and increased the number of protein groups containing at least one rescued peptide by 15-17%. Overall, PeptiDIA improves the identification depth of fast-gradient DIA-NN workflows without altering acquisition strategies. The framework is available as a web application and command-line tool at https://github.com/Jordano700/PeptiDIA.