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

SCAN: A Decision-Making Framework for Effective Task Allocation with Generative AI

arXiv:2606.15601v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce SCAN – a human-centric decision-making framework to facilitate learners for effective task allocation with Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) based on Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development and Metacognition. In SCAN, we systematize and formalize AI-human interaction by introducing a task-identification approach with four "sub-zones": Substitute, Complement, Aid, and Non-negotiable. After describing the four sub-zones, we demonstrate how SCAN framework can be applied for knowledge workers in the workplace and students in education to metacognitively "scan" their use of Generative AI. We then discuss how such framework can be related to cognitive load theory, cognitive offloading, sycophancy, three decision-making modes in human-AI interactions (automation, augmentation, and collaboration), future of work such as upskilling and deskilling, and how it accounts for both human-human and human-AI learning. We propose that SCAN offers a great starting point before discussing whether GenAI complements or replaces our abilities when completing a task, with a general objective of sustaining lifelong learning, and a specific goal of reaching hybrid intelligence.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Bias Fitting to Mitigate Length Bias of Reward Model in RLHF

arXiv:2505.12843v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) relies on reward models to align large language models with human preferences. However, RLHF often suffers from reward hacking, wherein policy learning exploits flaws in the trained reward model to maximize reward scores without genuinely aligning with human preferences. A significant example of such reward hacking is length bias, where reward models usually favor longer responses irrespective of actual response quality. Previous works on tackling length bias have notable limitations, these approaches either mitigate bias without characterizing the bias form, or simply assume a linear length-reward relation. To accurately model the intricate nature of length bias and facilitate more effective bias mitigation, we propose FiMi-RM (Bias Fitting to Mitigate Length Bias of Reward Model), a framework that autonomously learns and corrects underlying bias patterns. Our approach consists of three stages: First, we warm up by training a standard reward model which inherently contains length bias. Next, we deploy a lightweight fitting model to capture the non-linear relation between length and reward. Finally, we incorporate this learned relation into the reward model, effectively decoupling length from reward while preserving preference modeling capabilities. Experimental results demonstrate that FiMi-RM achieves a more balanced length-reward distribution. Furthermore, when applied to alignment algorithms such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and Best-of-N (BoN), our debiased reward model improves length-controlled win rate and reduces verbosity without compromising its performance.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Preparing multi-qudit states in a definite-weight subspace

arXiv:2606.24659v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We formulate a deterministic algorithm for preparing arbitrary multi-qudit states in a definite-weight subspace. By ordering the corresponding computational basis states according to a Gray code for multiset permutations, the state-preparation task is reduced to performing a sequence of controlled 2-qudit Gray rotations. We use this algorithm to prepare exact eigenstates of the SU(3)-invariant Heisenberg Hamiltonian, whose Bethe ansatz is nested. In particular, we describe the preparation of the Bethe states, which are SU(3) highest-weight states, as well as their lower-weight descendants. We also consider the preparation of $SU(d)$ Dicke states and their q-deformations.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Confusion-Aware Transfer Teacher Curriculum Learning Framework: Disentangling Scoring and Pacing Effects

arXiv:2606.17706v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Curriculum learning couples two design choices, how samples are scored by difficulty and how harder samples are paced into training, making it difficult to attribute observed gains to either component. We disentangle these factors with two evaluation protocols: stage-wise test subsets that validate scoring functions independently of curriculum training, and a baseline that applies the same pacing schedule to randomly ordered data. Within the Transfer Teacher framework (TTF), we use these protocols to evaluate a confusion-aware difficulty score that considers both correct-class confidence and the probability distribution over incorrect classes. On CIFAR-10 with ResNet-18 and VGG-16, the proposed score produces model-interpretable difficulty rankings that align with human intuition. However, at full data, neither curriculum nor anti-curriculum ordering improves accuracy over standard training, indicating that improving the scoring function alone is insufficient to overcome the known failure modes of curriculum learning in TTF. In contrast, We find that confusion-aware curriculum ordering result in consistent data-efficiency benefits, outperforming random ordering by up to 8.7% points at the 20% data regime, suggesting the potential of TTF as a data-efficient training method.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Genomic wastewater surveillance of seasonal and zoonotic influenza A viruses in California during the 2024-2025 flu season

Wastewater genomic surveillance provides an opportunity to detect human and animal influenza A virus (IAV). We aimed to implement an IAV genomic surveillance framework agnostic to subtype, which enables recovery of IAV from multiple hosts and estimation of proportions across subtypes. We conducted IAV genomic surveillance in wastewater during the 2024-2025 flu season at multiple sites in California and compared these data with available human clinical IAV sequences and test positivity. We applied a custom whole-genome, multi-host IAV probe enrichment panel and adapted our custom expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm to deconvolute IAV mixtures in wastewater and infer subtype relative abundances. Absolute IAV concentrations were quantified using RT-PCR-based assays. H5N1 wastewater and clinical sequences were further characterized by constructing a whole-genome maximum-likelihood phylogenetic tree. Finally, we performed variant analysis to examine amino acid substitutions detected in wastewater. Our IAV probe enrichment method and EM algorithm successfully enriched all eight segments of three circulating IAV subtypes and accurately estimated subclade relative abundances for mixed IAV samples. Seasonal human H1N1pdm09 and H3N2 were detected throughout the study period from both wastewater and clinical sequencing data, with H1N1 subclades 6B.1A.5a.2a.1 and 6B.1A.5a.2a co-circulating, and H3N2 dominated by subclade 3C.2a1b.2a.2a.3a.1. Wastewater surveillance consistently detected H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b across three monitored wastewater sites, while clinical H5N1 detections, from anywhere in CA, were sporadic and rare. Whole-genome phylogenetic analysis revealed that wastewater H5N1 sequences clustered with reference sequences associated with dairy cow and avian infections, while all human clinical H5N1 sequences clustered exclusively with reference sequences associated with dairy cow infections. Amino acid substitutions were identified across viral segments, and no mutations associated with mammalian adaptation were observed from wastewater samples.

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

"**Important** You should give me full credits!": Exploring Prompt Injection Attacks on LLM-Based Automatic Grading Systems

arXiv:2606.03090v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has significantly accelerated recent research on LLM-based automatic grading (AG) systems. Benefiting from the strong instruction-following capabilities and broad prior knowledge of LLMs, educators can deploy AG systems across diverse tasks using only natural language rubrics while achieving satisfactory grading performance. Despite these advantages, new security concerns may also arise. In particular, prompt injection (PI) attacks have recently become a major threat to LLM-based applications. In the context of AG, attackers can potentially exploit PI vulnerabilities to manipulate grading systems into assigning artificially high scores regardless of the actual answer quality. Such behavior poses serious risks to the fairness, reliability, and integrity of educational assessment. In this work, we study PI attacks in AG systems, and systematically investigate the effectiveness of such attacks in educational scenarios. We further evaluate the effectiveness of existing defensive strategies against these attacks. Through comprehensive experiments under rubric-based grading settings, we demonstrate that current LLM-based AG systems remain highly vulnerable to PI attacks. We hope that our findings raise awareness of this emerging threat and motivate future research toward secure, robust, and trustworthy LLM-based educational systems.

07.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-11

Robust discovery of mutational signatures using power posteriors

Authors:

by Catherine Xue, Jeffrey W. Miller, Scott L. Carter, Jonathan H. Huggins Mutational processes, such as the molecular effects of carcinogenic agents or defective DNA repair mechanisms, produce different mutation types with characteristic frequency profiles, known as mutational signatures. Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) has been successfully used to discover many mutational signatures, yielding novel insights into cancer etiology and informing targeted therapies. However, the NMF model is only a rough approximation to reality, and even small departures from this assumed model can have large negative effects on the accuracy and reliability of the results. We propose BayesPowerNMF, a Bayesian NMF method that provides nonparametric robustness to model misspecification, principled automated selection of the number of latent processes, and uncertainty quantification of model parameters. In extensive simulation studies, we find that our proposed approach recovers more true signatures with greater accuracy than current leading methods. On whole-genome sequencing data for six cancer types from the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes Consortium, we find that our method is able to accurately recover more signatures than the current state-of-the-art.

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

Agentra: A Supervisable Multi-Agent Framework for Enterprise Intrusion Response

arXiv:2606.18325v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Enterprise intrusion response still depends on static playbooks and analyst-driven triage, creating delay between alert generation and containment. We present Agentra, a supervisable multi-agent Intrusion Response System (IRS) framework that converts alerts from IDS, EDR, and XDR platforms into structured incident response plans grounded in MITRE ATT&CK, MITRE D3FEND, and NIST CSF 2.0. Agentra decomposes response reasoning across role-scoped agents, validates proposed plans through a bounded Planner–Validator review loop, screens retrieved threat intelligence through a Moderator security gateway, gates actions through an Action Catalog and risk score, and records decisions in an append-only audit log. We evaluate Agentra against a static OASIS CACAO v2.0 cyber-playbook baseline on a 120-event corpus drawn from ThreatHunter-Playbook, Splunk BOTSv3, and DARPA OpTC. The strongest configuration improves FP-aware IRS F1 from 0.61 to 0.84 and restores the projected harmful-action rate to the static baseline level of 0.0% after Planner-only configurations introduce unsafe overreaction. These results indicate that multi-agent response planning can improve ontology-grounded IRS coverage while preserving analyst approval and auditability.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

A comparative and critical study of EEGNet for fNIRS-driven cognitive load classification

arXiv:2606.16160v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurately classifying cognitive load from functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) signals remains a significant challenge due to temporal variability, inter-subject differences, and sensitivity to preprocessing choices. This study provides a comprehensive evaluation of EEGNet for fNIRS-based cognitive load classification by systematically examining the effects of temporal segmentation strategies (overlapping vs. non-overlapping), window lengths (10s, 20s, 30s), feature extraction methods (Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Fast Independent Component Analysis (FastICA)), learning rate configurations (fixed and adaptive), and evaluation protocols (random split vs. subject-independent (SI)). Results from random-split experiments show that overlapping segmentation, combined with smaller fixed learning rates (0.01-0.001), yields the highest accuracies, due to temporal redundancy and dense sampling of hemodynamic transitions. However, SI evaluation reveals a substantial drop in accuracy, demonstrating limited generalization to unseen participants. Under SI evaluation, non-overlapping segmentation outperformed overlapping windows, with the best accuracy of 56.11% achieved using PCA features with a 20-second window and a 0.1 learning rate. These findings indicate that eliminating temporal redundancy helps the model learn more robust and generalizable representations of cognitive load across individuals. Although adaptive learning rate strategy improved training stability, it did not surpass the performance of optimally selected fixed learning rates. The study highlights the critical role of segmentation strategy and learning rate selection in improving model generalization and identifies methodological considerations essential for developing reliable, real-time, and SI cognitive load classification systems using fNIRS.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Direct/adaptive-mixture phase-gradient learning for neural-network quantum states with complex phase structure

arXiv:2606.13912v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural-network quantum states (NQS) are a leading variational tool for quantum many-body physics, yet their optimization is fragile whenever the ground state carries a non-trivial sign or complex phase structure, a situation generic to gauge fields, broken time-reversal symmetry, and fermionic statistics. We trace this fragility to the stochastic estimator of the phase gradient rather than to network expressiveness. The phase sector of the Monte Carlo energy gradient is a noisy score-function estimator; differentiating the local energy instead yields a direct estimator that is unbiased for the same phase force, has far lower variance, and requires only a separated amplitude–phase ansatz. Demonstrated on a 100-site flux ladder, a small network trained this way reaches $0.89\%$ median error, where tuned standard baselines plateau at $1.8\%$ and wider or deeper standard-gradient networks degrade from $8.4\%$ to $24.6\%$. The advantage carries over to chiral XXX chains: the direct estimator again converges to a markedly lower error than the standard one, across $\alpha$ and size; it grows with flux and vanishes in zero-flux controls. An adaptive-mixture of the two estimators is provably never worse in variance than the better endpoint at the optimal mixing coefficient, with seed-resolved diagnostics tracing much of the gain to eliminating failed runs. Estimator design thus emerges as a first-class lever for complex-valued neural quantum states.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Usability testing with a prototype user interface of an Artificial Intelligence driven air-Safety Tool (AISaT)

Involving end-users in the development of an AI tool is an important facilitator to its implementation. Usability testing was therefore conducted with a prototype user interface of an Artificial Intelligence driven air-Safety Tool (AISaT) to capture the perspectives and user experiences of AISaT from 10 staff members across two hospitals working within estates, infection prevention and control, and clinical areas, to inform the development of next iterations of AISaT. The perspectives shared could be grouped under improvements to the understand-ability; content; navigation; visibility; usability; workflow; ownership; and frequency of use of the tool. There were key areas that can and will be easily improved within AISaT, however there were areas that required a deeper level of critical reflection, such as incorporating data on more existing variables in a room (i.e., existing ventilation) and whether all patients should be assumed as infectious and breathing heavily. The research team must consider if the target audience of end users and recommended frequency of AISaT use will be pre-defined by the tool developers, or whether this level of detail should be left to each individual hospital to decide.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Why Tree-Style Branching Matters for Thought Advantage Estimation in GRPO

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) trains Chain-of-Thought reasoning with verifiable rewards, but estimating thought-level advantages without value functions often suffers from high variance. Although tree-style branching is used in practice to reduce variance, it lacks a theoretical explanation of why it works and whether it is important or potentially necessary. We study thought-level advantage estimation in GRPO from a variance perspective under a minimal tree-style setting where multiple continuations are sampled for each thought. Using the multivariate delta method, we reveal a sampling-dimension asymmetry. Increasing sampled thoughts ($K$) leaves a strictly positive estimation-variance floor, whereas increasing continuations per thought ($M$) drives the leading-order estimation variance to zero at rate $1/M$. This implies that, within the fixed-temperature GRPO-style estimator without value models studied here, accurate thought-level advantage estimation cannot be achieved by scaling thought sampling alone, making continuation-level branching a principled and potentially necessary mechanism rather than a heuristic. Experiments further provide empirical evidence for its effectiveness and potential necessity, demonstrating improved optimization stability, training efficiency, and final performance not only in math but also across vision domains and under different model architectures and sizes.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Transformation Behavior of Images in Latent Space

arXiv:2606.24430v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Training of neural networks for histopathology classification tasks typically relies on data encoding into latent space, which reduces complexity and improves performance. There are several encoder networks available, either pretrained on general image datasets such as ImageNET, or specifically on histopathological images. Training of encoder networks should be adapted to downstream tasks, allowing encoding of biologic/diagnostic content while rendering networks invariant to label-irrelevant transformations. This paper investigates the effect of classical image transformation on the latent space, using networks provided by Lunit Inc. and Bioptimus, both focusing on pathological images, and by Meta Research Team. We assess variance of embeddings resulting from standard data transformations by comparing original and transformed image embeddings and by contrasting them with random, unrelated embeddings, using image tiles from hematoxylin/eosin-stained sections available in a colorectal tissue dataset and the publicly accessible TCGA dataset. Our findings show that embeddings of original and transformed images are closer to each other than to random embeddings, indicating robustness to transformations. However, they are not fully invariant, revealing that the encoder networks do not completely neutralize transformation effects in latent space, explaining why transformation-mediated augmentation of datasets can improve performance. Significant differences were observed between general and histopathology-specific encoder networks.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

A Three-Layer Framework for AI in Scientific Discovery

Authors:

arXiv:2606.13566v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current discussions of AI in scientific discovery are often dominated by two visible capabilities: search over existing knowledge and execution through optimization, simulation, and automation. Both are important, but neither fully captures the central act of discovery: the formation and evolution of models. This paper proposes a three-layer view of AI in discovery. Layer 1 is search and retrieval by large language models. Layer 2, as the main innovation of this paper, is model formation through qualitative reasoning: the capacity to recognize when a current framework is structurally inadequate and to understand the problem within a broader representational space, not through trial and error, but through structural insight into what is missing and where it can be found. Layer 3 is execution, optimization, and refinement. The main claim is that Layer 2 is both the most important and the least developed. Search without model formation remains confined to inherited frameworks, while execution without conceptual revision only amplifies an existing formulation. We illustrate Layer 2 reasoning through three case studies: S. S. Chern's intrinsic proof of the Gauss-Bonnet theorem, the resolution of the Nesterov Accelerated Gradient convergence problem via Lyapunov functions, and the autonomous disproof of the Erdos unit distance conjecture by OpenAI in 2026. Each case exhibits the same structural signature: a framework that had become inadequate, a missing conceptual object, and a resolution found in an unexpected neighboring field.

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

Quantile Transfer for Reliable Operating Point Selection in Visual Place Recognition

Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is a key component for localisation in Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-denied environments, but its performance critically depends on selecting an image matching threshold (operating point) that balances precision and recall. Thresholds are typically hand-tuned offline for a specific environment and fixed during deployment, leading to degraded performance under environmental change. We propose a method that automatically selects the operating point of a VPR system to maximise recall at 100% precision. The method uses a small calibration traversal with known correspondences and transfers thresholds to deployment via quantile normalisation of similarity score distributions. This quantile transfer ensures that thresholds remain stable across calibration sizes and query subsets. Experiments with seven state-of-the-art VPR techniques across five benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed approach consistently outperforms existing baselines, enabling the underlying VPR technique to operate at 100% precision in approximately twice as many deployment scenarios (median improvement), while retrieving up to 29% more correct matches at that precision. The method eliminates manual tuning by adapting to new environments and generalising across operating conditions. Our code is available at https://github.com/DhyeyR-007/Quantile-Transfer-for-Reliable-VPR.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Does the method matter? Evaluating the effectiveness, efficiency and ease of hearing-aid gain self-adjustment

In conventional hearing-aid personalisation, clinicians cannot hear what their patients hear, and patients cannot often reliably detect or describe what they hear. Self-adjustment avoids this issue but requires user controls that adjust hearing-aid signal processing parameters to be effective, efficient and easy. In this study, we explored (a) the roles of interface complexity and stimulus type in the self-adjustment of hearing-aid gain, and (b) how well individuals can adjust one sound to match another to assess the same interfaces and stimuli. Adult hearing-aid users with mild to moderate symmetrical sensorineural hearing loss repeatedly adjusted the gain (a) to their preference from individual prescription (n = 41) and (b) to match their previous preferences from a random starting point (n = 32) using three interfaces representing different bass/mid/treble configurations and three stimuli (music, speech and speech-in-noise). The large interindividual variability in self-adjusted gains clustered into three patterns of deviation from initial prescription: increased relative bass, overall gain reduction, and close to initial prescription. There were no substantial effects of interface nor stimulus on self-adjustment reliability (median {sigma} = 2.8 dB), whereas absolute sound-matching error increased with increasing interface complexity and centre frequency. Neither individual matching accuracy nor questionnaire responses predicted either self-adjusted gains or reliability. Overall, these results show that many - but not all - hearing-aid users can adjust gains with reasonable reliability, and while it can be difficult to predict the behaviour from the individual, the individual applies a similar self-adjustment behaviour across different interfaces and stimuli.

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

Spatially Grounded Concept Bottleneck Models via Part-Factorized Attention

Concept bottleneck models (CBMs) predict a layer of human-named attributes before predicting a class, which makes their decisions auditable. On fine-grained recognition tasks the concept heads are usually free to attend anywhere in the image, so a head named for one body region can be satisfied by evidence on another. This work studies a part-factorized CBM that removes that freedom by construction. The method has three components built on a frozen DINOv3 vision transformer. A learned foreground gate, trained on DINOv3 patch features, suppresses background patches inside the part attention. A set of part queries cross-attends to patch features and each of the 312 CUB attributes is routed, through a fixed concept-to-part map, to read only from the part token its name implies. A learnable two-dimensional Gaussian prior, injected additively in log space into the attention logits, breaks the permutation symmetry among part queries; its means are initialized from the dataset-average keypoint location of each part, which requires no per-image keypoint supervision at training or test time. On CUB-200-2011 the spatial-prior model matches a fully supervised baseline (88.85% versus 88.95% top-1) while raising pointing accuracy by 16 points (52.6% versus 36.4%). Replacing bounding-box supervision with a PCA foreground target and combining it with the Gaussian prior removes all per-image supervision and reaches 88.6% top-1 at about 70% pointing accuracy. A keypoint-fraction sweep shows that 0.5% of the training set (about 27 images) suffices to initialize the prior with no measurable loss. Removing part identity entirely is the harder case: without any spatial prior, pointing accuracy collapses to $2.9\%$.

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

Sol Video Inference Engine: Agent-Native Full-Stack Acceleration Framework for Efficient Video Generation

arXiv:2606.23743v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern video diffusion models achieve higher generation quality through scaling, but this also increases inference cost. Although many acceleration methods have been proposed, a central challenge is that the most effective acceleration strategy is highly instance-specific: a recipe that works well for one combination of model, hardware, and inference configuration often does not transfer to another. Different models vary in architecture, numerical sensitivity, and attention concentration patterns. Inference settings differ in spatial and temporal resolution and video duration, while hardware platforms differ in memory hierarchy, supported numerical formats, and kernel throughput. These factors create a large tuning space, making manual performance engineering costly. We present Sol Video Inference Engine, an agentic, native, training-free acceleration framework for video diffusion models. It organizes five broadly applicable techniques, cache, sparse attention, token pruning, quantization, and kernel fusion, into an agentic acceleration stack for instance-specific optimization. For a concrete deployment target defined by a model, hardware platform, and serving configuration, parallel skill agents optimize the implementation of each technique, an agent integrator composes them into a global acceleration stack, and a human validator provides feedback on generation quality. We instantiate this workflow on three video models with different sizes and architectures: 64B Cosmos3-Super, 22B LTX-2.3, and 2B SANA-Video. With little human effort, the full stack achieves more than 2x end-to-end acceleration while maintaining near-lossless VBench quality, demonstrating the effectiveness of the agent framework for video diffusion acceleration.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Zone of Proximal Policy Optimization: Teacher in Prompts, Not Gradients

Knowledge distillation transfers a teacher's competence to a small student but is brittle in the small-student regime: forcing the student to imitate logits from a much larger teacher concentrates it on the teacher's sharpest modes, hurting generalization on benchmark families beyond the training corpus. Reinforcement learning (RL) avoids logit imitation by training on the student's own rollouts. However, on questions where every rollout fails-yielding zero advantage and being silently discarded-injecting a stronger teacher's response into the policy gradient breaks the on-policy assumption and induces drift. We introduce Zone of Proximal Policy Optimization (ZPPO), inspired by Vygotsky's zone of proximal development, which keeps the teacher inside the prompt rather than the policy gradient. On hard questions, ZPPO constructs two reformulated prompts: a Binary Candidate-included Question (BCQ) pairs one correct teacher response with one incorrect student response as anonymized candidates the student must discriminate, and a Negative Candidate-included Question (NCQ) aggregates the student's wrong rollouts into a single prompt to surface their shared failure modes. A prompt replay buffer recirculates each hard question until it either graduates-the student's mean rollout accuracy on it reaches half- or is FIFO-evicted under finite capacity, amplifying BCQ and NCQ inside the student's current zone of proximal development. On the Qwen3.5 family at four student scales (0.8B-9B) with a 27B teacher, post-trained as vision-language models and evaluated on a 31-benchmark suite (16 VLM, 10 LLM, 5 Video), ZPPO outperforms off/on-policy distillation and GRPO, with the largest gains at the smallest scale.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Matching Tasks to Objectives: Fine-Tuning and Prompt-Tuning Strategies for Encoder-Decoder Pre-trained Language Models

Prompt-based learning has emerged as a dominant paradigm in natural language processing. This study explores the impact of diverse pre-training objectives on the performance of encoder-decoder pre-trained language models across generation and question answering tasks, with a focus on commonsense knowledge retrieval and completion. We highlight the benefits of incorporating multiple objectives during both pre-training and fine-tuning stages. We introduce the Match Task to Objective (MTO) framework and methods for determining the appropriate objective for a given task. This framework offers automated methods to prepare task-related data for adaptation through unsupervised training, based on the identified objective. In the fine-tuning stage, we design novel templates that align with the objectives of the pre-training and adaptation stages. When aligned with task requirements, these strategies can achieve a performance gain of over 120\% compared to conventional methods in few-shot settings. They significantly outperform related works in few-shot settings and exceed the baseline even in full-dataset scenarios. Furthermore, we extend this approach to include prompt-tuning methodologies, providing guidance for more effective soft prompt engineering and optimization. Our strategies significantly enhance prompt-tuning performance as well. These insights hold substantial value, precisely guiding the selection and optimization of models customized for specific tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/puraminy/MTO/

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Spatiotemporal downscaling and nowcasting of urban land surface temperatures with deep neural networks

arXiv:2605.13566v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Land Surface Temperature (LST) is a key variable for various applications, such as urban climate and ecology studies. Yet, existing satellite-derived LST products provide either high spatial or high temporal resolution, resulting in a fundamental trade-off between the two. To address this trade-off, we combine observations from a geostationary and a polar orbiting satellite and provide LST fields at high spatial and high temporal resolution (1 km at 15-min intervals). We demonstrate their application for intraday forecasting of LSTs. To estimate LST fields at high spatiotemporal resolution, a U-Net model is trained to map LST fields from SEVIRI/MSG (3 km and 15 min resolution) to LST fields from Terra/Aqua MODIS (1 km, 4 overpasses per day) that are collocated in space and time. The presented model has been trained on LSTs across large European cities with a population exceeding 1 million inhabitants, and achieves an RMSE = $1.92${\deg}C and near-zero bias MBE = $0.01${\deg}C on the hold-out test set. As a second step, we present an LST nowcasting model based on ConvLSTM architecture, trained across downscaled LST fields with forecast lead times of 15 to 75 minutes. The nowcasting model outperforms a persistence and a Climatological Rolling Median benchmarks, with RMSEs of $0.57$ to $1.15${\deg}C for the considered lead times and biases ranging from $-0.1$ to $0.14${\deg}C. An additional validation conducted against independent MODIS overpasses confirms robust performance. Our LST forecast model at high spatiotemporal resolution is directly applicable to operational satellite-based LST monitoring.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Quantization Inflates Reasoning: Token Inflation as a Hidden Cost of Low-Bit Reasoning Models

arXiv:2606.25519v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantization is widely used to reduce the inference cost of large language models, but its effect on reasoning models is not fully captured by final-answer accuracy or per-token latency. We show that low-bit post-training quantization can introduce a hidden test-time compute cost: quantized reasoning models often generate longer chains of thought even when they still answer correctly. Across mathematical reasoning, code generation, scientific question answering, and agentic tool-use benchmarks, we find that INT4/INT3 quantization can preserve accuracy but increase reasoning-token usage, offsetting the expected per-token speedup. To measure this effect, we introduce the CoT Token Inflation Ratio, which compares reasoning length between quantized and full-precision models averaged across all evaluation benchmarks. We further show that token inflation is accompanied by behavioral changes in the reasoning trace, including more intermediate steps and greater semantic repetition. These changes translate into measurable end-to-end real-world serving penalties. Finally, we evaluate mitigation strategies and find that prompting and decoding-time sampling offer inconsistent accuracy-length trade-offs, while quantization-aware training shows more promise in reducing both accuracy degradation and token inflation. Our results suggest that reasoning-token usage should be reported alongside accuracy when evaluating quantized reasoning models.

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

EARS: Explanatory Abstention for Reliable Sub-Agent Modeling in Large-scale Multi-Agent Systems

In large-scale enterprise settings, centralized multi-agent systems (MAS) are increasingly adopted, in which a coordinator delegates user requests to lightweight, domain-specialized sub-agents. While this architecture improves modularity, scalability, and cost efficiency, its reliability depends not only on accurate routing but also on sub-agents' ability to calibrate their responses to capability constraints. In particular, sub-agents built on smaller fine-tuned models often struggle with such calibration, leading them to over-answer ambiguous, underspecified, misrouted, or unsupported requests and produce hallucinated outputs instead of actionable feedback. To address this challenge, we present EARS (Explanatory Abstention for Reliable Sub-Agent Modeling), a production-oriented framework that reframes sub-agent abstention as an inter-agent communication protocol: a sub-agent does not merely abstain, but exposes an actionable failure state to the coordinator. EARS curates human-agent interaction data using an ensemble of calibrated LLM-as-a-Judge models, producing structured abstention labels and rationales under a taxonomy of sub-agent failure modes. These data are used to fine-tune sub-agents to detect failure conditions and return rationales for coordinator-level clarification, rerouting, or fallback. We evaluate EARS in a large-scale production e-commerce assistant supporting enterprise business intelligence workflows. EARS improves the overall response pass rate from 68.5% to 78.9%, demonstrating that sub-agent-side explanatory abstention improves MAS reliability.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

ALAS: An Automatic Latent Alignment Score for Audio Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) are extended into Speech-LLMs, and the quality of the audio–text alignment they learn affects most downstream Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) behavior. Yet despite a growth of fusion strategies, there is no standard way to measure how well a Speech-LLM internally binds audio frames to text tokens. We introduce ALAS (Automatic Latent Alignment Score), a model and task-agnostic metric that probes the LLM's per-layer hidden states, scoring the cross-modal cosine similarity between audio and text representations against a Whisper-derived reference. ALAS needs only a frozen forward pass and an off-the-shelf ASR reference, with no training or fitted classifier, and is calibrated to an interpretable uniform baseline comparable across tasks. Applying ALAS to four open-source Speech-LLMs (AF3, Qwen2-Audio, Qwen-Omni, SALMONN) across emotion recognition (IEMOCAP), open-ended SQA (LibriSQA), and multi-choice audio understanding (MMAU-speech), we find that the depth and strength of alignment reflect each model's audio-encoder design and the acoustic-versus-semantic demands of the task, and that ALAS tracks but does not duplicate task accuracy, exposing models that score well without genuinely grounding in the audio. We release ALAS as an open-source library so that practitioners can probe their own Speech-LLMs or try it on new tasks.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Tensor-Network-Based Distributed Quantum Dynamics on Independent Quantum Computers

arXiv:2606.11579v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present an approach based on tensor networks for distributed quantum computing simulation of chemical wavepacket dynamics in a continuous variable representation. The central idea is that the tensor-network representation of the multidimensional time-evolution operator naturally induces an elevated Hilbert space where the dynamics decomposes into a set of independent lower-dimensional propagations. This transformation converts an entangled quantum evolution into a set of parallel computational tasks that can be executed asynchronously across heterogeneous quantum and classical computing architectures. The resulting formalism establishes a direct connection between tensor-network decompositions, uniformly controlled quantum circuits, and asynchronous distributed quantum computing. The approach is developed with a goal towards hybrid quantum/classical implementation, and is appropriate for a general heterogeneous mixture of quantum hardware systems. The experimental realization of the asynchronously distributed quantum processes that arise from the tensor-network decomposition are carried out on the Sandia National Laboratories' trapped-ion quantum computer, where the circuits are compiled using native partial-entangling $XX(\theta)$ gates, reducing the expected two-qubit gate infidelity by more than 30\% relative to conventional fully entangling decompositions. We demonstrate the methodology by quantum computing the vibrational spectra of a small protonated water cluster that shows critical quantum nuclear behavior. Such water cluster systems have been found to be challenging for experimental action spectroscopy and for theory, and here, for the first time, we provide results for vibrational spectroscopy that are in agreement with the respective classical results to within 4cm$^{-1}$, thus allowing for the potential for spectroscopic accuracy from quantum computations.