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01.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-08

TRACEY: an updated resource for SNARE protein domain annotation with improved HMMs and expanded sequence coverage

Motivation: SNARE proteins catalyse membrane fusion across the eukaryotic endomembrane system, from synaptic vesicle exocytosis to intracellular trafficking, endosomal and vacuolar transport, and autophagy, and their accurate domain annotation depends on the quality of profile models and the sequence diversity behind them. The original SNARE domain classification predates the recent expansion of eukaryotic sequence data, leaving its HMM profiles and subgroup coverage unable to resolve divergent and lineage-specific paralogs. Results: We present an updated release of TRACEY built on a resynchronized, non-redundant collection of 18,915 curated SNARE proteins spanning 1,188 species, together with a consolidated set of 83 HMM profiles, including 43 models for newly defined subgroups, reconstructed through an iterative, mixture-model-driven procedure. In direct comparison with the legacy models, at least ~75% of sequences in every overlapping group scored better with the new HMMs, indicating systematic gains in domain detection. A redesigned web interface adds multiparameter querying, FASTA download, and direct scanning of user-submitted sequences against the curated profiles. Availability and implementation: TRACEY is freely available at https://tracey.unil.ch.

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

Irresponsible AI: big tech's influence on AI research and associated impacts

arXiv:2512.03077v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The accelerated development, deployment and adoption of artificial intelligence systems has been fuelled by the increasing presence of big tech in the AI field. This trend has been accompanied by growing ethical concerns and intensified societal and environmental impacts. This position paper argues that irresponsible AI development is strongly driven by big tech's influence and involvement in the field. First, we examine the growing and disproportionate influence of big tech in AI research and argue that its drive for scaling and general-purpose systems is fundamentally at odds with the responsible, ethical, and sustainable development of AI. Second, we review key current environmental and societal negative impacts of AI and trace their connections to big tech's influence. Third, we discuss the underlying economic forces driving big tech's actions. Finally, as a call to action, we invite AI researchers to counter big tech's influence in irresponsible AI development through strategies that build on the responsibility of implicated actors and collective action.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Towards Modality-imbalanced Federated Graph Learning: A Data Synthesis-based Approach

arXiv:2606.20382v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: MultiModal Federated Graph Learning (MM-FGL) offers a natural collaborative training paradigm, but its practical deployment is challenged by two granularities of modality imbalance. Client-level imbalance occurs when certain clients lack entire modalities, while node-level imbalance occurs when individual nodes exhibit missing visual or textual attributes. While several relevant studies exist, our investigation reveals that they predominantly target graph-agnostic or centralized scenarios, rendering them difficult to adapt directly. To address these challenges, we formalize modality-imbalanced MM-FGL as an implicit graph-aware latent semantic representation synthesis problem. This paradigm recovers missing modal semantics directly within the representation space, thereby maximizing alignment with the original data's semantic distribution and mitigating the high variance induced by missing modalities. To this end, we propose FedMGS (Federated Modality-aware Graph Synthesis), which integrates three core components. The availability-aware graph encoder prevents missing modalities from contaminating local structural propagation. The prototype-guided latent semantic synthesizer establishes cross-client semantic anchors for unavailable modalities. The reliability-calibrated semantic fusion mechanism regulates the impact of recovered latent representations prior to predictive readout. Extensive experiments on four tasks show that FedMGS consistently outperforms competitive baselines with gains up to 17.41% with best efficiency-performance tradeoff.

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

Trade-offs in Medical LLM Adaptation: An Empirical Study in French QA

The development of large language models (LLMs) has led to an increased focus on their adaptation to specialized domains and languages, yet the effectiveness of domain adaptation strategies remains unclear. We present a study of medical domain adaptation using French medical question-answering (QA) as a case study. We compare continual pretraining (CPT), supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and their combination across three model families, multiple sizes, and three initialization types, explicitly disentangling adaptation effects from base model choice. We evaluate both multiple-choice (MCQA) and open-ended QA (OEQA) under greedy and constrained decoding using automatic metrics and LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation. For MCQA, CPT+SFT most often achieves the best scores, but gains over SFT are small and frequently not statistically significant, making SFT a strong and cost-effective default. For OEQA, CPT consistently improves overlap-based metrics, while SFT often degrades generation quality; instruction tuning and CPT+SFT are preferred by LLM-based evaluation. Cross-lingual experiments further show effective transfer from French adaptation to English benchmarks. Overall, we provide practical guidelines for selecting adaptation strategies under computational constraints.

05.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15

Biological meaning in protein embedding space is resolution-dependent

Protein language model embeddings are increasingly used to organise biological sequences, yet how biological meaning is encoded within embedding neighbourhoods remains poorly understood. Using two independent hierarchical enzyme systems, carbohydrate-active enzymes and peptidases, we investigated how biological interpretation changes across embedding organisations aligned to different levels of biological hierarchy. Different embedding organisations give rise to distinct neighbourhood semantics. When aligned to membership-boundary resolution, embeddings robustly separated artefacts and unrelated proteins from members of the target category. However, embeddings aligned to functional-grouping resolution maintained compositional neighbourhood structure for multi-domain proteins spanning more than one functional or catalytic group. Finally, embeddings aligned to local-family resolution recovered compact family-like neighbourhoods, including families withheld from training, while weakening broader membership-boundary and functional-grouping relationships. Moreover, embeddings optimised toward the same level of biological organisation retain different biological relationships depending on optimisation trajectory employed. Together, our results show that proximity in protein embedding space has no fixed biological interpretation. Instead, biological meaning emerges across embedding resolutions through selective preservation of different forms of biological organisation.

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

Inverted Dirac oscillator

arXiv:2606.15303v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Dirac oscillator is obtained from the Dirac Hamiltonian $H^{\mathrm{D}} = \left( c\vec{\alpha}\cdot \vec{p} + mc^{2}\beta \right)$ by modifying the momentum through a non-Hermitian substitution $\overrightarrow{p} \rightarrow \overrightarrow{p} \pm i\omega \beta \overrightarrow{q}$. Despite the non-Hermitian nature of this momentum operator, the full Hamiltonian remains Hermitian due to the presence of the Dirac matrix $\vec{\alpha}$. However, if one instead introduces a Hermitian modification of the form $\vec{p} \rightarrow \vec{p} \pm \omega \beta \overrightarrow{q}$, the resulting Hamiltonian is no longer Hermitian. In this case, the system corresponds to an inverted Dirac oscillator $H^{\mathrm{r}}$, where the potential becomes unbounded from below, the energy spectrum becomes continuous, and the eigenfunctions fail to be square-integrable, leading to normalization difficulties. We show that the Hamiltonian $H^{\mathrm{r}}$ is a pseudo-$\mathcal{PT}$-symmetric operator, and we introduce an unbounded, non-unitary transformation that establishes a connection between $H^{\mathrm{r}}$ and $H^{\mathrm{D}}$. The purpose of this work is to analyze this relativistic quantum system – known as the Dirac inverted oscillator – which, despite its various applications, admits an exact analytical solution

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Leveraging Audio-LLMs to Filter Speech-to-Speech Training Data

Large-scale mined corpora provide abundant training data for end-to-end speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) but may contain noise, misalignment, and semantic errors. Filtering noisy data is crucial to maintain robust speech translation performance. We study how to train an audio-language model to make keep/drop decisions on paired speech directly from audio. To obtain reliable supervision without manual labels, we adopt a scalable two-stage Rank-to-Distill strategy. A lightweight ranker generates keep/drop pseudo-labels from noisy speech pairs, then trains an audio large language model to predict keep/drop directly from raw paired speech. The resulting model jointly captures acoustic fidelity and cross-lingual semantic consistency for the selection of speech-conditioned data. Experiments on CVSS-C and SpeechMatrix show consistent improvements over unfiltered training, yielding up to +1.4 ASR-BLEU for end-to-end S2ST.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

AI4Land: Scalable Deep Learning for Global High-Resolution Land Use Reconstruction

arXiv:2606.11793v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Uncertainty in the terrestrial carbon cycle remains a major constraint in climate projections, partly driven by the uncertainties affecting the land surface representation and variability in Earth system models. To address this limitation, we present a data-driven framework AI4Land, for generating high-resolution historical reconstructions and future projections of key land surface variables. The framework follows a two-phase approach using a U-Net architecture. In the first phase, which is the focus of this work, it reconstructs annual land use and land cover by integrating coarse-resolution scenario data with static geophysical features. In a planned second phase, the resulting high-resolution maps will be used to predict dynamic biophysical variables, particularly leaf area index, at finer temporal scales. Trained on Earth observation data, the models learn to reproduce spatially explicit and physically consistent land surface patterns, extending temporal coverage to periods lacking direct observations. AI4Land was developed and trained on MareNostrum5, demonstrating how GPU-accelerated HPC infrastructure enables global-scale climate AI pipelines. The final product is a suite of open-source emulators designed for real-time coupling with digital twin platforms, such as those developed under the Destination Earth initiative. By delivering realistic and evolving land surface conditions on demand, this work aims to reduce critical uncertainties and improve the predictive power of next-generation climate simulations.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Low-Energy Reduced RISC-V Instruction Subset Processor for Tsetlin Machine Inference at the Edge

arXiv:2606.19964v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tsetlin Machine (TM) is a logic-based machine learning approach that relies on simple bitwise operations and finite-state automata, which makes it attractive for edge AI deployments. Recent work has focused on co-processor and accelerator designs based on Tsetlin Machines (TMs). Although these designs achieve high performance, they typically depend on tightly coupled interfaces, microcode-style programming, and external host processors, limiting flexibility and ease of programming. In this work, we present a domain-specific RISC-V microprocessor architecture and design flow tailored for TM inference. Leveraging the modular structure of RISC-V, we design a reduced instruction subset processor that retains programmability while targeting improved performance and lower energy consumption for TM workloads. Instruction profiling is employed to guide instruction reduction, followed by datapath and control path simplifications tailored to TM inference. Both the baseline RV32IM core and the proposed reduced core are evaluated across multiple datasets and compared with Binarized Neural Networks (BNNs), which serve as a hardware-efficient baseline due to their reliance on bitwise operations during inference. Results show that TM achieves comparable or higher accuracy (e.g., up to 88.18% on CIFAR-2 compared to 60.0% for BNN) while reducing execution time by up to 98% across multiple datasets. Furthermore, the proposed design achieves an average $29.7\times$ reduction in energy consumption, demonstrating its effectiveness for programmable and efficient edge AI systems.

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

Efficient certification of intractable quantum states with few Pauli measurements

arXiv:2511.07300v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Efficient verification of quantum computational resources is crucial as experiments advance toward fault-tolerance. Universal quantum computation can be achieved by consuming resource states through simple Pauli measurements, yet a significant gap remains between states that are easy to certify and those required for universality. We focus on Clifford-enhanced Product States, a class of resource states obtained by applying Clifford circuits to a product of single-qubit, potentially magic, states. While essential for universal computation, the certification of such states has previously relied on query oracles that are \#P-hard to implement, leaving their efficient, oracle-free verification an open challenge. In this work, we demonstrate that such classically intractable resource states can be efficiently verified using only Pauli measurements. Our protocol achieves sample- and time-efficiency in both i.i.d.\ and adversarial settings. This work fills a gap in Pauli-based certification, providing a new practical pathway to verify resource states that drive universal Pauli-based quantum computation.

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

EvoTrainer: Co-Evolving LLM Policies and Training Harnesses for Autonomous Agentic Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.03108v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Autonomous LLM training is often framed as recipe search, which leaves the training harness largely static. This limitation sharpens in agentic RL, where shifting bottlenecks and scalar rewards mask diverse failure modes. We introduce EvoTrainer, an autonomous training framework that co-evolves LLM policies and training-side harnesses through empirical feedback: it diagnoses rollout-level evidence, revises diagnostics, backtests interventions, and accumulates reusable skills. Evaluated on mathematical reasoning, competitive-programming code generation, and repository-level software engineering, EvoTrainer matches or exceeds the human-engineered RL references under the same data, codebase, and evaluation protocol, with the largest gain on long-horizon agentic SWE. Trajectory analyses show that retained strategies diverge across domains, evolving diagnostics prevent invalid high-scoring branches from being promoted, and reusable skills shape later search. Autonomous LLM RL should move beyond recipe search toward joint evolution of policies and the training harnesses that interpret them.

12.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Finite-Sample Bounds for Expected Signature Estimation under Weak Dependence

arXiv:2605.20541v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The expected signature uniquely determines the law of a random rough path under a moment-growth condition, yet finite-sample bounds for estimating its truncations from a single long dependent trajectory remain unavailable. We study a strictly stationary stochastic process equipped with a geometric rough-path lift, observed in non-overlapping blocks of equally-spaced samples, and prove a non-asymptotic mean-squared error (MSE) bound for the block-averaging estimator of its truncated expected signature. Under moment and stationarity assumptions together with a direct covariance-decay condition on block signatures – strictly weaker than $\alpha$-mixing and applicable to long-range-dependent processes – the error separates into a discretization term and a fluctuation term, with rates determined respectively by path regularity and dependence strength. A levelwise rough-factorial variance analysis keeps finite-truncation constants explicit and yields an optimal allocation rule under a fixed observation budget. We verify the assumptions for independent-coordinate fractional Ornstein–Uhlenbeck processes in three regimes: short-range (Hurst $1/41/2$. Monte Carlo experiments show empirical slopes steeper than the guaranteed upper-bound rates.

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

A Multi-Modal Framework with Cross-Subject Pseudo-Labeling and Semantic Alignment for Micro-Gesture Recognition

Micro-gestures (MGs) are spontaneous and subtle body movements that frequently convey hidden human emotions. Recognizing MGs in untrimmed videos remains highly challenging due to their extremely low signal-to-noise ratio, severe long-tailed class distribution, and the inherent domain shift encountered in cross-subject evaluation scenarios. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive multi-modal framework for Track 1 of the 4th MiGA-IJCAI Challenge. To capture fine-grained representations, we design a saliency-guided multi-modal extraction pipeline integrating 68-keypoint skeleton joint coordinates, 3D heatmap volumes, and high-resolution RGB visual features. We introduce a gentle square-root smoothed weighting mechanism paired with an Orthogonal Semantic Embedding Loss to protect tail classes without compromising overall recognition capabilities. More importantly, to bridge the cross-subject generalization gap, we propose a Cross-Modal Pseudo-Labeling (CMPL) strategy for unsupervised domain adaptation, which significantly boosts single-modal robustness. A temperature-scaled soft-voting mechanism is finally utilized to alleviate overconfidence during late fusion. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves a competitive F1-score of 68.13\%, securing the 4th place.

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

Human-Enhanced Loop Modeling (HELM): Agent-Based Finite Element Modeling of Concrete Bridge Barriers

arXiv:2606.12025v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Finite element (FE) modeling of safety-critical infrastructure such as bridge barriers requires high-fidelity nonlinear dynamic analysis, yet the current FE modeling process remains labor-intensive and lacks automation. This paper presents the Human-Enhanced Loop Modeling (HELM) framework, a collaborative human-agent protocol that decomposes long-sequence finite element modeling into discrete, visually verifiable checkpoints across geometry generation, boundary condition definition, and material assignment. The framework is demonstrated through a 20-case matrix of reinforced concrete bridge barriers under MASH TL-4 and TL-5 lateral loading conditions, interfacing specialized agents with two widely used commercial FE softwares, i.e., ANSYS and LS-PrePost. Experimental results show that HELM improves the baseline autonomous modeling success rate from 20% to 75%, with agent-level pass rates for geometry and boundary condition tasks approximately doubling. Error analysis reveals that spatial reasoning and algebraic logic limitations constitute the primary failure modes, underscoring the value of structured human-in-the-loop intervention for modeling automation. The complete agent design code and prompts are open-sourced and can be accessed at: https://github.com/SimAgentDev/Ansys-LSPP-AgentKit.

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

Seeing Before Reasoning: Decoupling Perception and Reasoning for Shortcut-Resilient Multimodal On-Policy Self-Distillation

On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) trains a model on its own rollouts and uses a frozen copy to provide dense token-level targets conditioned on a reference target. This works well for LLM reasoning, but a direct extension to multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can create a shortcut: the privileged target may guide tokens mainly based on the text reference target rather than the image. We propose ViGOS, a visually grounded OPSD framework for MLLM post-training. The student first writes a visual description and then reasons toward the final answer. For valid rollouts, an image-only perception teacher supervises the description, while a privileged reasoning teacher supervises the reasoning and final answer on the same student prefix. A reference teacher is used only for invalid rollouts to recover the output format. Across general vision-language, expert reasoning, visual math, spatial grounding, and visual-language-prior benchmarks, ViGOS keeps the main benefits of OPSD and improves image-grounded behavior in shortcut-prone settings.

16.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-16

The data transparency crisis in research: Lessons from systematic reviews and meta-analyses

by Saul Martin-Rodriguez, Rodrigo Fernandez-Gonzalo, David Moher Summary points Systematic reviews and meta-analyses underpin clinical guidelines and health policy, yet their validity may be compromised by limited access to underlying datasets and associated analytical code. Reliance on incomplete or inconsistently reported summary statistics forces researchers to use imputation and unverifiable assumptions, which can distort effect estimates and mislead clinical decision-making. The consequences extend beyond methodology: flawed evidence synthesis can influence treatment recommendations, healthcare spending, and patient safety, as illustrated by historical cases such as hormone replacement therapy. Despite widespread data-sharing policies, compliance remains low, enforcement weak, and monitoring almost non-existent, with many datasets remaining unavailable or inaccessible. This Policy Forum argues for strengthening enforceable data-sharing mechanisms, including clearer enforcement and pragmatic verification approaches within editorial workflows.

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

Beyond the Sampled Token: Preserving Candidate Support in RLVR

arXiv:2510.14807v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We revisit exploration collapse in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), from the perspective of the candidate distribution for next-token prediction. We formally show that as probability concentrates on the top-$1$ candidate, the expected number of distinct responses collapses to one regardless of the sampling budget $K$. This theoretical implication is further verified by our empirical tracking of top-$N$ candidate probabilities during training, where the top-$1$ candidate progressively dominates while plausible alternatives are suppressed. These findings suggest a key desideratum for effective exploration: preserving non-negligible probability mass on the top-$N$ candidates. To this end, we propose Candidate-aware Support Preservation (CaSP), with two complementary designs. Specifically, CaSP redistributes positive gradients among top-$N$ candidates for correct responses, and applies a stronger penalty to the top-$1$ candidate for incorrect responses. Unlike many exploration-oriented methods that improve pass@$K$ at the cost of pass@1, CaSP improves pass@$K$ across the full $K$ spectrum. These gains generalize to 6 math, 2 logical-reasoning, and 2 coding benchmarks, and scales to 32B-parameter models and sampling budgets up to $K=1024$, positioning it as a principled, candidate-level approach for RLVR exploration.

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

TS-ICL: A Flexible Time-Indexed Foundation Model for Time Series via In-Context Learning

arXiv:2606.05878v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Foundation models mark a profound paradigm shift in time series modeling, with task-specific models being superseded by general-purpose zero-shot models. Yet, current approaches primarily focus on forecasting, while real-world time series are often irregularly and partially observed, requiring models that can jointly forecast, impute missing values, and handle degraded sampling conditions. To address these challenges, we introduce TS-ICL, a novel probabilistic In-Context Learning encoder–regressor Transformer that unifies forecasting and imputation. TS-ICL formulates time series tasks as timestamp-aligned regression and naturally incorporates covariates by training on synthetic dependency structures generated from a novel causal data prior. Empirically, TS-ICL achieves a new state-of-the-art in imputation, while remaining competitive with leading forecasting foundation models across both univariate and covariate-aware benchmarks. It shows particularly strong performance in forecasting with partially observed look-back windows.

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

Squeeze-Release: Iterative Pruning with Exact Structural Minimization

arXiv:2606.14346v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Unstructured pruning produces sparse weight tensors, but the standard implementation keeps tensor shapes unchanged so the deployed model is no smaller than before pruning. We present an exact structural rewrite, which we call minimization, that converts a masked network into a smaller dense network with the same forward function up to floating-point rounding. The Squeeze-Release cycle iterates pruning and minimization with an intermediate release step that re-enables the exact-zero positions inside the compacted tensors as small calibrated noise, turning otherwise wasted capacity back into trainable parameters. Successive cycles use that capacity to find structural redundancy a single pass cannot reach. We additionally introduce CompensatedLayerNorm, a function-preserving replacement for LayerNorm that extends minimization to channel reduction across LayerNorm-equipped residual streams. Squeeze-Release compresses the deployable network to 39x smaller than the unpruned model on a fully-connected model network and 14.8x smaller on modern CNN (ConvNeXt-Tiny), at comparable accuracy. In addition we prove that the rewrite can be extended to transformer architectures.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Fanconi Anemia as a Window into Premalignant Field Cancerization of the Oral Mucosa

Head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) evolves through stepwise clonal expansion within genetically altered mucosa fields, yet actionable biomarkers remain undefined. Leveraging Fanconi anemia (FA), a cancer predisposition syndrome with extreme HNSCC risk due to defective DNA interstrand crosslink repair, we profiled premalignant changes in the oral cavity using noninvasive brush biopsies. Consistent with our prior demonstration of genomic instability in FA-associated SCCs, we detected pathogenic TP53 variants in 26% and copy number alterations in 60.5% in clinically normal-appearing oral mucosa of individuals with FA. These subclinical clonal expansions define candidate biomarkers of early clonal evolution amenable to serial sampling for risk stratification and prevention studies. Since FA-associated SCCs share genomic features with sporadic HNSCC, these findings may extend to the broader population. We also identify somatic reversion of a pathogenic FANCB variant, providing evidence of genomic self-correction and suggesting a potential avenue for gene-based cancer prevention in FA.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

PCBSchemaGen: Reward-Guided LLM Code Synthesis for Printed Circuit Boards (PCB) Schematic Design with Structured Verification

arXiv:2602.00510v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Most LLM code-synthesis benchmarks rely on unit tests as the reward oracle, but PCB schematic design has none: correctness is defined by structured physical constraints over real IC packages and pin-level assignments, per-task golden references are unavailable, and SPICE simulation does not validate schematic-level correctness. We introduce PCBSchemaGen, a training-free inference-time framework that turns a frozen LLM into a verifiable, repairable PCB schematic generator. The framework induces a domain schema from IC datasheets to ground LLM decoding, pairs it with a deterministic 5-layer continuous-reward verifier with pin-level error localization, and refines candidates through a Thompson Sampling arm-acquiring bandit. We evaluate on 2 PCB benchmarks covering 227 real-IC tasks across 22 unified circuit domains, including a public-schematic-derived suite that serves as a fully held-out generalization test (verifier, KG library, and prompts frozen before any evaluation). Under our framework, an open-weight 31B model (Gemma-4-31B) passes 81.3% of PCBBench tasks on average, and the same framework transfers across both benchmarks with zero verifier code changes; a Circuitron-style inference-time prompting baseline on the same Gemma-4-31B backbone collapses on hard system-level designs. This suggests inference-time refinement under a deterministic structural verifier is a general recipe for reference-free LLM code synthesis in domains without unit-test oracles. Our benchmarks and deterministic verifier are publicly available at https://github.com/HZou9/PCBSchemaGen_v2.

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

Exact Posterior Score Estimation for Solving Linear Inverse Problems

Diffusion and flow-based models learn powerful data priors by training a denoiser to reverse Gaussian corruption. To use this prior to solve a linear inverse problem, one needs to sample from the posterior, but the score that the prior provides is the unconditional score, not the posterior score. Existing methods either steer a fixed pretrained denoiser with approximate measurement-matching corrections, or train a conditional restoration model that abandons the denoising structure of the prior. We derive the exact posterior score in closed form for linear Gaussian inverse problems under general Gaussian interpolants, and show that posterior sampling reduces to a denoising problem at an operator-dependent shifted pivot under an anisotropic noise covariance. We turn this identity into Exact Posterior Score (EPS), a denoising training objective that preserves the input/output structure of standard pretraining and can therefore be trained from scratch or fine-tuned from a pretrained denoiser. At inference, EPS uses the same sampler as the underlying backbone, with no likelihood gradients or projections. We evaluate EPS on five linear inverse problems across FFHQ and ImageNet, where it outperforms training-free and training-based baselines on fidelity, perceptual, and distributional metrics, while using roughly an order of magnitude fewer denoiser evaluations than gradient-based posterior samplers.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Demystifying Hidden-State Recurrence: Switchable Latent Reasoning with On-Policy Reinforcement Learning

Latent chain-of-thought compresses reasoning by replacing visible reasoning traces with continuous hidden-state recurrence, but existing formulations are difficult to optimize with standard on-policy reinforcement learning (RL) and hard to interpret causally. Our key insight is that a single pair of explicit boundary tokens can address both issues at once: discrete entry and exit anchors make the latent block compatible with standard on-policy RL, and the same anchors offer a natural foothold for mechanistic analysis. Motivated by this, we propose SWITCH, a switchable latent reasoning framework. The model emits to enter latent mode and to exit. Because the boundaries are ordinary discrete tokens, the GRPO policy ratio is well-defined at every decision point. The same anchors also expose the latent steps to direct probing and causal intervention. We train the model with a visible-to-latent curriculum and a Switch-GRPO objective that propagates gradients through recurrent latent computation. SWITCH consistently outperforms prior hidden-state-recurrence latent reasoning approaches at similar scale. Mechanistic analysis through the boundary tokens further reveals three findings: (i) is a sharply localised, learned switching policy rather than a stylistic artefact; (ii) the latent step it opens performs problem-specific, causally important computation rather than acting as an inert placeholder; and (iii) that computation is concentrated at a single hidden-state transition on entry. Together, these results show that hidden-state-recurrence latent reasoning is both RL-trainable and open to direct mechanistic analysis, including of how on-policy RL itself improves the model from the inside.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

ProcessThinker: Enhancing Multi-modal Large Language Models Reasoning via Rollout-based Process Reward

Visual question answering increasingly requires multi-step reasoning. Recent post-training with reinforcement learning under verifiable rewards (RLVR) and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) can improve multimodal reasoning, but most approaches rely on sparse outcome-only rewards. As a result, they struggle to tell whether an incorrect answer comes from a small mistake late in the reasoning or from an unhelpful trajectory from the start. A common solution is to train a process reward model (PRM) for step-level supervision, but this typically requires large-scale high-quality chain-of-thought annotations and additional training cost. We propose ProcessThinker, a practical post-training pipeline that provides step-level process rewards without training an explicit PRM. ProcessThinker first rewrites reasoning traces into a step-tagged format for cold-start supervised fine-tuning, then applies GRPO with a standard format reward and our rollout-based process reward. Concretely, for each intermediate step, we sample multiple continuations from that step and use the empirical success rate (final-answer verification) as the step reward. This gives dense credit assignment and encourages reasoning steps that more reliably support a correct conclusion, helping reduce inconsistent or self-contradictory progress across steps – a key issue in logical reasoning. Across four challenging video benchmarks (Video-MMMU, MMVU, VideoMathQA, and LongVideoBench), ProcessThinker consistently improves over the baseline model Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct