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

CogGuard: Cognitive and Operational Profiling for Proactive Warning in Edge Intelligent Services

arXiv:2606.15199v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Proactive warning is an important capability for edge intelligent services, where the system predicts whether a subject will successfully complete an incoming task under strict latency and privacy constraints. Such prediction depends on both long-term static attributes and short-term dynamic states derived from historical interaction logs. Recent Large Language Models (LLMs) offer strong long-context reasoning for constructing structured profiles from these logs, but existing solutions face two challenges for edge deployment: (1) profiling methods are typically domain-specific and lack a reusable abstraction across service scenarios, and (2) fine-tuning alignment models on heterogeneous edge clusters incurs high synchronization overhead due to the variance in input sequence lengths. To address these challenges, we propose CogGuard, a proactive-warning framework for edge intelligent services. CogGuard decouples offline LLM-based profile construction from online Small Language Model (SLM)-based score prediction through a shared static-dynamic profile-to-score pipeline, and instantiates it in two representative scenarios: educational performance warning and operational task outcome warning. For efficient profile construction, we design scenario-specific profiling methods with prefix-aligned KV-cache reuse to reduce repeated encoding overhead. For edge-side model alignment, we propose a length-aware distributed fine-tuning strategy with contrastive regularization to mitigate workload imbalance on heterogeneous clusters. Experiments on education and operation datasets show that CogGuard reduces profile construction time by up to 48% and distributed fine-tuning time by 19%, while achieving MAEs of 13.4 and 5.9, respectively, on 100-point-scale warning tasks. In the largest educational setting, CogGuard reduces prediction error by 15.4% compared with the strongest baseline.

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

WaveDINO: Learning-Based Atmospheric Correction of Unwrapped InSAR Interferograms Validated by GNSS: Results at Laguna del Maule and Campi Flegrei Volcanoes

Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) enables effective monitoring of volcanic deformation; however, the observed signals are often corrupted by atmospheric phase delays, seasonal surface changes, and decorrelation effects. Existing atmospheric correction methods, such as numerical weather model-based methods, can reduce these effects but do not consistently remove atmospheric artefacts and may introduce residual biases. To address these limitations, we propose a novel learning-based method for denoising unwrapped InSAR interferograms, using a hybrid training strategy that combines physically motivated synthetic deformation with real atmospheric noise. Specifically, we introduce WaveDINO, a wavelet-based multi-scale denoising framework conditioned on frozen DINOv3 foundation-model features and terrain information. Training uses synthetic magma-source deformation superimposed on short-term interferograms to expose the network to realistic atmospheric statistics while retaining known ground truth. Performance is evaluated on both controlled synthetic data and long-term real interferograms from Laguna del Maule (Chile) and Campi Flegrei (Italy), with independent GNSS measurements used for validation. WaveDINO consistently outperforms competing models, improving agreement with GNSS measurements, and reducing mean GNSS misfit by approximately 3% and 19% at two sites, respectively, while surpassing weather-model-based corrections.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Learned Image Compression for Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-language-action (VLA) models increasingly rely on high-frequency multi-camera observations, making visual communication a major bottleneck for real-time robotic control in bandwidth-constrained or distributed deployment settings. Existing image and video codecs, however, are designed to preserve generic visual fidelity rather than the control performance of downstream VLA policies. In this work, we introduce SPARC (SPatially Adaptive Rate Control), a learned image compression framework tailored for VLA-driven robots. Our key observation is that the importance of visual information varies substantially across both camera views and spatial regions within an image. Based on this observation, SPARC employs a lightweight temporal mask selector that adaptively allocates bitrate over latent representations according to task relevance while leveraging temporal context. We further introduce a tilted rate loss that stabilizes training by reducing the tendency of entropy-based objectives to over-suppress rare yet task-critical visual patterns. Experiments on diverse robotic benchmarks, including RoboCasa365, VLABench, and LIBERO, show that SPARC consistently achieves stronger control performance than conventional image/video codecs and recent learned compression methods under the same bitrate budget. We additionally demonstrate real-world deployment benefits in remote-control settings, where our method substantially improves the bitrate-success tradeoff.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Polarization-Resolved Photon Statistics of Cavity Quantum Materials

arXiv:2606.11550v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: By forming hybrid light-matter states, optical cavities offer a route for engineering material properties, however, unambiguously probing the effects of light-matter coupling remains difficult. Here, we show that the polarization-resolved statistics of photons transmitted through a cavity, measurable via $g^{(2)}$, provide one such diagnostic. By relating $g^{(2)}$ to matter correlation functions such as the Raman structure factor, we link photon bunching and antibunching to material properties. By applying this method to the stripy-to-antiferromagnetic transition in the Kitaev-Heisenberg spin model, we find that polarization-dependent patterns of bunching and antibunching encode the magnetic point-group symmetries of each phase and characterize the behavior at the phase boundary. Finally, we predict measuring $g^{(2)}$ for output photon pairs polarized orthogonal to the input field will isolate higher-order light-matter scattering processes that probe higher-order material correlations.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Weak continuous measurements require more work than strong ones

arXiv:2502.09732v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Understanding the energy cost of quantum measurement process and its connection to the measurement performance faces the challenge of modeling the objectification process. The latter, turns the measurement result into an objective fact, available to independent observers, and is responsible for the measurement irreversibility. To address this issue, we propose and analyze a dynamical model of quantum measurement, able to capture nonideal (weak and inefficient) measurements. In this model, the objectification is induced by a contact with a macroscopic reservoir at equilibrium which is responsible for the redundant broadcast of the measurement outcome (producing a Spectrum Broadcast Structure (SBS) state) while inducing decoherence in the pointer basis, in the line of the theory of quantum Darwinism. We analyze the performance of the obtained measurement process by introducing figures of merit to quantify the strength of the measurement and its efficiency. We also derive and a lower bound on the measurement work cost that we can relate to the measurement quality. We take as an illustration the readout of a qubit via its coupling to a harmonic oscillator. We investigate the long sequences of extremely short and weak measurements (a.k.a continuous measurements), to find under which conditions they converge to an ideal (projective) measurement and analyze their work cost. Surprisingly, we find that a sequence converging to projective measurement has a much larger work cost than an equivalent strong measurement obtained from a single intense interaction with the apparatus. We extend this result to a large class of models owing to scaling arguments. Our analysis offers new insights into the trade-offs between measurement strength, energy consumption, and information extraction in quantum measurement protocols.

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

Budget-Aware Adaptive Adversarial Patches for Black-Box Object Detection

Adversarial patches pose a practical threat to modern object detectors. Prior work shows vulnerability, but three gaps limit actionable insight: (i) few score-based black-box attacks jointly optimize patch location, texture, and size under tight query budgets; (ii) success is rarely tied to the patch's visual footprint; and (iii) evaluations often conflate EOT robustness with plain-view suppression. We present \method{}, a query-efficient, budget-adaptive black-box attack that couples a lightweight Contextual Thompson-Sampling placer with NES-style pixel updates, growing the patch only when progress stalls. Reporting is anchored by a strict plain-image suppression test; EOT is audited but never used as a substitute for success, and optional appearance/printability weights expose strength–visibility trade-offs. Across YOLOv5, Faster R-CNN, and YOLOS, \method{} achieves strong suppression on CNN-based detectors and substantial suppression on the transformer-based detector, using compact patches and exposing clear query–footprint trade-offs relative to fixed-size and heuristic baselines. A print–capture pilot further shows transfer across unseen physical objects and viewpoints.

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

Retrievable Gradients: Continual Post-Training Without Cumulative Weight Drift

Continual post-training enables models to absorb emerging knowledge after deployment, but repeatedly updating shared parameters can accumulate weight drift, potentially causing catastrophic forgetting and degrading general capabilities. Retrieval-augmented generation avoids such parameter drift, yet often lacks the depth of parametric knowledge integration. In this paper, we propose ReGrad (Retrievable Gradients), a new paradigm that treats gradients as retrievable units of knowledge. ReGrad pre-computes document-specific gradients offline, stores them in an indexed Gradient Bank, and retrieves only query-relevant gradients at inference time for temporary weight adaptation. However, raw language-modeling gradients are optimized for token-level document reconstruction rather than for query-driven knowledge use. We therefore introduce a bi-level meta-learning objective that reshapes document-derived gradients into generalizable adaptation signals for downstream tasks. Experiments across general and domain-specific settings show that \textsc{ReGrad} outperforms CPT and RAG baselines, enabling scalable and reversible parametric knowledge injection without accumulating weight drift.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Age of LLM: A Strategic 1v1 Benchmark for Reasoning, Diplomacy and Reliability of Large Language Models under Fog of War

Authors:

We introduce Age of LLM, a turn-based 1v1 benchmark in which two LLMs face off on a 13x7 grid to destroy the enemy base. Three stressors are deliberate: fog of war, full diplomacy (messages, ceasefires, ultimatums; uranium kept secret), and a reliability dimension where every turn must follow a strict JSON schema and an illegal action is silently discarded. The engine is private and each match uses a fresh random map seed and opponent, mitigating the data contamination that affects public benchmarks. Models receive a (near) rule-only prompt with no build-order advice (two tactical seed phrases were present during data collection; see Section 2.7). We benchmark 15 reasoning models across 54 matches and 5,258 actions. Findings: (1) the nuclear rush dominates (78% on the rules-coherent v0.11+ sub-corpus; 85% corpus-wide) with a sole-launcher signature that is largely mechanical under secret-simultaneous launch rules, not a cognitive deterrence failure; (2) military conquest is rare but faster (12.3 vs 18.9 turns); (3) diplomacy is prolific yet almost never consummated; (4) ~58% of illegal actions are fog/state errors, making the illegal-action rate a measure of belief-tracking; (5) – the least established, and the only one we label exploratory – a weak link associates reliability with winning. The corpus is small, unbalanced and not side-swapped, so the ranking is a preliminary descriptive view, not a contribution. Beyond ranking, the turn-by-turn traces of actions and messages make the corpus a lens on how LLMs reason under adversarial uncertainty – their belief-tracking, spontaneous deception, and per-model cognitive "personas" – which we frame as a future research direction. We release the replay format, an isometric viewer and all replays; engine source on request.

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

Self-Evolving Vision-Language Models for Image Quality Assessment via Voting and Ranking

Improving vision-language models (VLMs) in the post-training stage typically relies on supervised fine-tuning or reinforcement learning, methods that necessitate costly, human-annotated data. While self-supervised techniques have proven effective for enhancing reasoning capabilities, their application to perceptual domains such as image quality assessment (IQA) remains largely unexplored. In this work, we introduce EvoQuality, a novel framework that enables a VLM to autonomously refine its quality perception capabilities without any ground-truth labels. EvoQuality adapts the principle of self-consistency to the ranking-based nature of IQA. It generates pseudo-labels by performing pairwise majority voting on the VLM's own outputs to establish a consensus on relative quality. These pseudo-rankings are then formulated into a fidelity reward that guides the model's iterative evolution through group relative policy optimization (GRPO). By iteratively leveraging its own predictions, EvoQuality progressively refines the VLM's perceptual capability. Extensive experiments show that EvoQuality boosts the base VLM's zero-shot performance by 31.8% on PLCC across diverse IQA benchmarks. Remarkably, despite being entirely self-supervised, EvoQuality achieves performance that is competitive with, or even surpasses, state-of-the-art supervised VLM-based IQA models, outperforming these models on 5 out of 7 IQA benchmarks. Furthermore, the framework demonstrates significant flexibility, allowing it to be stacked with pre-trained IQA models to bolster generalization on unseen datasets. Codes and checkpoints will be available at https://github.com/bytedance/EvoQuality.

10.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-14

Virtual phenotypic screening discovers novel scaffolds inhibiting the PI3K/mTOR pathway

Phenotypic drug discovery has yielded many first-in-class small-molecule drugs by discovering modulators of disease phenotypes in physiologically relevant cellular systems. However, high-content phenotypic assays lack the ultra-high-throughput scalability of target-based screens. Recent advances in virtual screening present an opportunity to address this bottleneck, but have been limited to simple phenotypes like viability, restricted to small repurposing libraries, or lack in-depth biological validation. Here, we present PhenoCompass, a multimodal co-embedding model that aligns compound structures and high-content phenotypic imaging to enable virtual phenotypic screening over billion-compound libraries. Following training on the Joint Undertaking in Morphology dataset with more than 100,000 Cell Painting compound profiles, retrospective validation with historical biochemical high-throughput screening data demonstrates that PhenoCompass ranks compounds according to their biochemical target engagement. Leveraging PhenoCompass, we performed a prospective screen of 3.8 billion Enamine REAL compounds for inhibitors of PI3K/mTOR pathway, a critical signaling cascade whose aberrant activation is a common tumor driver. This search identified 11 novel compounds with pathway-consistent Cell Painting readout and diverse scaffolds, a 54-fold enrichment over the training set. Orthogonal validation experiments using a FOXO3A reporter assay and direct kinase inhibition confirmed seven structurally novel inhibitors with distinct mechanisms of action. These results highlight the convergence of diverse molecular target profiles onto a shared morphological pathway signature and establish PhenoCompass as a robust framework for high-content phenotypic virtual screening.

11.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-05

Heuristic multi-site optimization for protein sequence design using Masked Protein Language Models

Authors:

by Lijuan Wang, Yuze Wang, Chen Qiu, Liwei Xiao, Xianliang Liu, Junjie Chen Protein sequence design for tailored functional properties is a fundamental task in protein engineering, with critical applications in drug discovery and therapeutic development. Efficient navigation of the combinatorial vastness of protein sequence space to identify functional variants remains a formidable challenge. Conventional approaches, which predominantly rely on template-based local search or single-residue mutagenesis, are constrained by their susceptibility to local optima and their potential risk of destabilizing native structural stability. In this study, we introduce ProtHMSO, a heuristic multi-site optimization framework leveraging masked protein language models (ProtLMs) for context-aware sequence exploration. ProtHMSO mimics natural evolutionary mechanisms by employing ProtLM-derived substitution probabilities to guide heuristic searches for synergistic mutations, thereby constraining combinatorial search spaces through evolutionary and biophysical priors. ProtHMSO is further applied to replace the exploration strategies in genetic algorithms (GAs) and Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) for improving their convergence efficiency. Benchmark experiments demonstrate that protein sequences generated by ProtHMSO exhibit superior functional performance and closer alignment with natural sequence distribution, compared with state-of-the-art methods. These advancements highlight that ProtHMSO has strong potential and compatibility to accelerate functional protein discovery, offering a robust framework for efficient and context-aware exploration of protein sequence space.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

RC-GeoCP: Geometric Consensus for Radar-Camera Collaborative Perception

Collaborative perception (CP) enhances scene understanding through multi-agent information sharing. While LiDAR-centric systems offer precise geometry, high costs and performance degradation in adverse weather necessitate multi-modal alternatives. Despite dense visual semantics and robust spatial measurements, the synergy between cameras and 4D radar remains underexplored in collaborative settings. This work introduces RC-GeoCP, the first framework to explore the fusion of 4D radar and images in CP. To resolve misalignment caused by depth ambiguity and spatial dispersion across agents, RC-GeoCP establishes a radar-anchored geometric consensus. Specifically, Geometric Structure Rectification (GSR) aligns visual semantics with geometry derived from radar to generate spatially grounded, geometry-consistent representations. Uncertainty-Aware Communication (UAC) formulates selective transmission as a conditional entropy reduction process to prioritize informative features based on inter-agent disagreement. Finally, the Consensus-Driven Assembler (CDA) aggregates multi-agent information via shared geometric anchors to form a globally coherent representation. We establish the first unified radar-camera CP benchmark on V2X-Radar and V2X-R, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance with significantly reduced communication overhead. Code will be released soon.

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

Mental-R1: Aligning LLM Reasoning for Mental Health Assessment

arXiv:2606.13176v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mental health problems such as anxiety, depression, and suicide remain urgent global challenges, where timely and accurate assessment is critical for effective intervention. Recently, large language models have been explored for mental health assessment. However, existing general-purpose post-training methods do not align with the cognitive processes of human assessment, which may lead to unreliable reasoning outcomes. To bridge this gap, we propose Cognitive Relative Policy Optimization (CRPO), a reinforcement learning framework tailored for the mental health domain. CRPO extends group relative policy optimization by integrating stage-dependent uncertainty modeling into the policy optimization process. Specifically, we introduce a stage-wise entropy regularization mechanism that encourages broad exploration in early reasoning phases and progressively enforces confident decision-making in later stages, mimicking the human cognitive shift from uncertainty to certainty. In addition, inspired by cognitive appraisal theory, we formalize cognitive reasoning stages, thereby guiding theory-grounded interpretable inference. Experiments on 8 mental health datasets show that CRPO achieves an average improvement of 10.4 percentage points in weighted F1-score over the best reinforcement learning baseline. Furthermore, the CRPO-trained model Mental-R1 demonstrates clear advantages compared with existing large language models on reasoning-intensive cases, suggesting that CRPO enhances reasoning capabilities for mental health assessment.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Attention Alignment Between Humans and Vision-Language Models

Visual perception depends on top-down goals and bottom-up sensory mechanisms. Vision-language models implement both, allowing us to treat each component as a separable hypothesis about what drives where we look. We compared spatial attention maps from six vision-language models against human fixation heatmaps recorded on 200 images during two tasks (general description and social captioning). The six models spanned a 2$\times$2 factorial of CNN vs.\ ViT encoders crossed with LSTM vs.\ Transformer decoders, plus Molmo 7B-D and Qwen3.5 9B. We found that both decoder and encoder architecture shaped alignment, but decoder choice dominated. LSTM vs.\ Transformer decoders increased alignment by 40–50 percentage points (80–87\% vs.\ 40–59\% of the human noise ceiling). In contrast, CNN vs.\ ViT encoders contributed a secondary 5–20 point advantage depending on decoder family, with CNN-LSTM the most aligned model overall (85–87\%). Despite their alignment advantage, LSTM-decoder attention maps were spatially diffuse and minimally task-differentiated; ViT-Transformer, the weakest in alignment, showed the sharpest spatial concentration and strongest task differentiation. A hemispatial-neglect simulation confirmed that ablating attention impacted LSTM decoders more than Transformer decoders. In an exploratory extension using TRIBE-simulated synthetic neural responses, fixation alignment and neural relevance dissociate: CNN-Transformer attention maps better predicted synthetic brain activity despite lower fixation alignment, with attention maps best predicting early visual cortex. Together, top-down and bottom-up components trade off what they predict in behavioral and synthetic neural data.

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

EqCollide: Equivariant and Collision-Aware Deformable Objects Neural Simulator

arXiv:2506.05797v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Simulating collisions of deformable objects is a fundamental yet challenging task due to the complexity of modeling solid mechanics and multi-body interactions. Existing data-driven methods often suffer from lack of equivariance to physical symmetries, inadequate handling of collisions, and limited scalability. Here we introduce \name, the first end-to-end equivariant neural fields simulator for deformable objects and their collisions. We propose an equivariant encoder to map object geometry and velocity into latent control points. A subsequent equivariant Graph Neural Network-based Neural Ordinary Differential Equation models the interactions among control points via collision-aware message passing. To reconstruct velocity fields, we query a neural field conditioned on control point features, enabling continuous and resolution-independent motion predictions. Experimental results on 2D and 3D scenarios show that \name achieves accurate, stable, and scalable simulations across diverse object configurations. It achieves $24.34\%$ to $57.62\%$ lower rollout MSE, even compared with the best-performing baseline model. Furthermore, \name could generalize to more colliding objects and extended temporal horizons, and stay robust to input transformed with group action. Code is available at: https://github.com/AI4Science-WestlakeU/EqCollide

16.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Uniform Sampling from High-dimensional Spectral Norm Balls

arXiv:2606.24134v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Motivated by an application in machine learning optimization, this paper focuses on the challenges of sampling a matrix uniformly from the unit spectral norm ball. It is proven that all singular values of sampled matrices converge to 1 almost surely as the matrix dimensions increase. This result provides the theoretical justification for a proposed simple sampling method applicable for large dimension sizes matching matrices found in modern large language models. Experimental results demonstrate both the convergence of the singular values, as well as the exact and proposed approximate sampling methods.

17.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Autoregressive Processes on Riemannian Manifolds

arXiv:2606.24771v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper introduces a Riemannian autoregressive (R-AR) model of order one, generalising classical discrete-time stochastic processes to manifold-valued data. The model is based on two parameters, a parameter $\mu$ representing the intrinsic central tendency as the Fréchet mean and an autoregressive parameter $\phi$ controlling the stationarity and ergodic properties. Due to the inherent dependence structure of the R-AR process, the estimation procedure for these parameters necessitates new asymptotic results for dependent processes on manifolds. Thus, we establish a strong law of large numbers for the sample Fréchet mean set of ergodic Markov chains in proper metric spaces. By proving this general consistency result, we move beyond the limitations of classical i.i.d. theory to provide the mathematical foundation required for the strong consistency of our proposed estimators. The framework is validated through numerical simulations in the hyperbolic plane and an application to aerosol size distributions on the Fisher-Rao manifold, demonstrating how the proposed model can characterise mean-reverting dynamics in nonlinear geometries.

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

Robust Detection of Planted Subgraphs in Semi-Random Models

arXiv:2508.02158v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Detection of planted subgraphs in Erdös-Rényi random graphs has been extensively studied, leading to a rich body of results characterizing both statistical and computational thresholds. However, most prior work assumes a purely random generative model, making the resulting algorithms potentially fragile in the face of real-world perturbations. In this work, we initiate the study of semi-random models for the planted subgraph detection problem, wherein an adversary is allowed to remove edges outside the planted subgraph before the graph is revealed to the statistician. Crucially, the statistician remains unaware of which edges have been removed, introducing fundamental challenges to the inference task. We establish fundamental statistical limits for detection under this semi-random model, revealing a sharp dichotomy. Specifically, for planted subgraphs with strongly sub-logarithmic maximum density detection becomes information-theoretically impossible in the presence of an adversary-despite being possible for some planted subgraphs in the classical random model. In stark contrast, for subgraphs with super-logarithmic density, the statistical limits remain essentially unchanged; we prove that the optimal (albeit computationally intractable) likelihood ratio test remains robust. Beyond these statistical boundaries, we design a new computationally efficient and robust detection algorithm, and provide rigorous statistical guarantees for its performance. Our results establish the first robust framework for planted subgraph detection and open new directions in the study of semi-random models, computational-statistical trade-offs, and robustness in graph inference problems.

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

LentiAvatar: Pseudo-Multiview Reconstruction and Subpixel Prism Rendering for Real-Time Stereoscopic Communication

Real-time stereoscopic video communication has long been a goal of immersive telepresence, yet practical systems still require specialized capture rigs or reduce remote users to a single portrait view. We present LentiAvatar, a Gaussian head-avatar system that connects monocular avatar capture with subpixel-encoded glasses-free lenticular display for real-time autostereoscopic communication. From a monocular portrait video, LentiAvatar reconstructs a controllable head avatar and optimizes it for the lateral viewing zones induced by the display. The method uses natural head turns as pseudo-multiview (PMV) supervision to constrain regions that are otherwise weakly observed in monocular training, including hair, ears, jaw contours, and neck boundaries. Reliable side frames are yaw-binned, aligned to virtual cameras, and supervised within a strict head-and-hair domain; contour-aware losses and staged regularization further suppress ghosting, alpha leakage, and depth instability while preserving lateral detail. At runtime, LentiAvatar renders 32 virtual views and encodes them into a 4K lenticular raster with calibrated subpixel-routing masks. The live-tracker prototype sustains 10.65 FPS, and a subject-specific distilled driver raises the same display pipeline to 38.49 FPS.

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

Utility-Diversity Aware Online Batch Selection for LLM Supervised Fine-tuning

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a commonly used technique to adapt large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks. In practice, SFT on a full dataset is computationally expensive and sometimes suffers from overfitting or bias amplification. This facilitates the rise of data curation in SFT, which prioritizes the most valuable data to optimze. This work studies the online batch selection family that dynamically scores and filters samples during the training process. However, existing popular methods often (i) rely merely on the utility of data to select a subset while neglecting other crucial factors like diversity, (ii) rely on external resources such as reference models or validation sets, and (iii) incur extra training time over full-dataset training. To address these limitations, this work develops UDS (Utility-Diversity Sampling), a framework for efficient online batch selection in SFT. UDS leverages the nuclear norm of the logits matrix to capture both data utility and intra-sample diversity, while estimating inter-sample diversity through efficient low-dimensional embedding comparisons with a lightweight memory buffer of historical samples. Such a design eliminates the need for external resources and unnecessary backpropagation, securing computational efficiency. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that UDS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art online batch selection methods under varying data budgets, and significantly reduces training time compared to full-dataset fine-tuning. Code is available at https://github.com/gfyddha/UDS.

21.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Boltzmann-Like Occupation of Nonequilibrium Steady States on Dense Networks

Authors:

arXiv:2606.14542v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A central problem in statistical physics is to extend the Boltzmann distribution to nonequilibrium steady states (NESS). We prove that NESS on large dense networks have Boltzmann-like occupation despite extensive entropy production. We further show that the active-matter heuristic of "low rattling" is asymptotically exact. Intuitively, these NESS spend a greater fraction of their time in states they leave more slowly. This explanation extends to the broader class of "equiaccessible" steady states, which play a role in our analysis akin to that of equilibrium in linear response.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Algebraic Dead Directions in LayerNorm Transformers: A Forward-Pass-Only Diagnostic at LLM Scale

arXiv:2606.19491v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pretrained transformers sit near singular minima of the loss, where the Fisher information metric degenerates along dead directions: directions in parameter space along which the directional Fisher vanishes. Locating such a direction normally needs a forward pass and an eigendecomposition of activations, or a sampling-based complexity estimate; none returns a direction computable from the network's parameters alone. We give one, for LayerNorm transformers. The inverse-scale direction $\gamma^{-1}/\|\gamma^{-1}\|$ of the LayerNorm affine is an exact algebraic kernel of the post-final-norm centred activation covariance, for any input distribution, and induces a corresponding dead direction in parameter space. It is read from the LN scale parameter alone, with no forward or backward pass and no eigensolve: the cheapest dead-direction read, specific to LayerNorm. We test it on $14$ pretrained transformers ($9$ LayerNorm, $5$ RMSNorm; $160$M-$35$B; language and vision objectives). At random initialisation the predicted direction matches the measured bottom singular direction (one forward pass, direct SVD) to four decimal places on $9/9$ LayerNorm models, and is correctly absent on $5/5$ RMSNorm models, which lack the mean-subtraction projector that creates it. On the trained checkpoint the covariance eigenvalue along this direction deepens by ${\sim}10^3\times$ and further dead directions open; the random-init-to-trained gap is a one-forward-pass, per-checkpoint readout of singular structure along the predicted coordinate. Two consequences follow in closed form: the residual stream's smallest singular value is preserved block-to-block on $13/14$ transformers measured on their own input distribution, the one exception (Gemma$4$-$31$B) a genuine dead direction the same read pinpoints; and the kernel direction's presence classifies a transformer's normalisation from the parameters alone.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Computing Evolutionarily Stable Strategies in Imperfect-Information Games

Authors:

arXiv:2512.10279v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present an algorithm for computing evolutionarily stable strategies (ESSs) in symmetric perfect-recall extensive-form games of imperfect information. Our main algorithm is for two-player games, and we describe how it can be extended to multiplayer games. The algorithm is sound and computes all ESSs in nondegenerate games and a subset of them in degenerate games which contain an infinite continuum of symmetric Nash equilibria. The algorithm is anytime and can be stopped early to find one or more ESSs. We experiment on an imperfect-information cancer signaling game as well as random games to demonstrate scalability.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

A soluble bi-specific fusion protein for the improved expansion of human CD8+ CAR-T cells

The success of Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) T cell therapy is heavily dependent on the quality of the final cellular product. Current expansion protocols often rely on reagents that require removal from cell culture media, posing logistical challenges in manufacturing, and can also lead to terminal differentiation. Here, we evaluate the use of a soluble, bead-free T cell activator, T cell expansion protein (T-CEP), as a streamlined alternative for generating potent CAR-T cells. Human T cells were activated with T-CEP or known T cell activators (Dynabeads and TransAct) and transduced with either CD19 or interleukin-13 (IL-13) mutein (tetravariant-13; TV-13)-based CAR lentiviral vectors. Our results demonstrate that T-CEP supports robust CAR-T cell expansion and achieves transduction efficiencies comparable to commercial reagents for both types of CAR-T cells. Notably, T-CEP significantly favored the expansion of CD8+ T cells, yielding an enhanced CD27+ phenotype and a lower CD4:CD8 ratio compared to TransAct. Cytotoxicity assays confirmed that T-CEP-expanded CAR-T cells possess cytolytic function equivalent to commercial reagents for both CARs, while exhibiting lower levels of inflammatory cytokine secretion. In summary, T-CEP represents a competitive alternative to existing expansion agents, as it does not require its removal during CAR-T manufacturing and generates a CD8+ dominant, less-differentiated phenotype without compromising efficacy.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

KeepLoRA++: Continual Learning with Layer-Scaled Residual Gradient Adaptation

Continual learning for pre-trained vision-language models requires balancing three competing objectives: retaining pre-trained knowledge, preserving knowledge from a sequence of learned tasks, and maintaining the plasticity to acquire new knowledge. This paper presents KeepLoRA++, balancing these objectives through a unified dual-dimensional knowledge retention mechanism. We analyze knowledge distribution of Transformer architecture from both inter-layer and intra-layer perspectives. The inter-layer perspective examines how retention is distributed across layers, while the intra-layer perspective focuses on the parameter space within each layer. Our analysis reveals a structural property: general transferable knowledge is mainly encoded in the shallow layers and the principal subspace of the parameters, while task-specific adaptations are localized in the deep layers and the residual subspace. Motivated by this insight, KeepLoRA++ introduces a layer-scaled residual gradient adaptation method. New tasks are learned by restricting LoRA parameter updates to the residual subspace, combined with a shallow-to-deep layer scaling, to prevent interference with previously acquired capabilities. Specifically, the gradient of a new task is projected onto a subspace orthogonal to both the principal subspace of the pre-trained model and the dominant directions of previous task features, while simultaneously assigning smaller update magnitudes to shallow layers and larger ones to deeper layers. Our theoretical analysis and empirical evaluations confirm that KeepLoRA++ successfully balances these three competing objectives, consistently outperforming representative baselines across image classification, visual question answering, and video understanding tasks.