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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Critical spectral behavior and large deviations for geometric $\alpha$-stable processes

arXiv:2606.17501v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we study the Schrödinger-type operator associated with geometric stable processes on $\mathbb{R}^{d}$, especially the differentiability of spectral function. Let $\mathcal{H}$ be the generator of the geometric stable process and $\mu$ a smooth measure on $\mathbb{R}^{d}$. Then the spectral function $C(\theta)$ is defined as $C(\theta) = -\inf \sigma(-\mathcal{H} - \theta \mu)$, where $\sigma(\mathcal{A})$ denotes the spectrum of $\mathcal{A}$ and $\theta$ is a real parameter. Since the geometric stable process exhibits severe local singularities in its Lévy measure, its transition semigroup lacks ultracontractivity, which invalidates classical methods for proving the differentiability. To overcome this obstacle, we use the compact embedding of the extended Dirichlet space into $L^2(\mu)$. As a primary application of this differentiability, we establish a large deviation principle for a positive continuous additive functional associated with the smooth measure $\mu$.

02.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-14

Transposable elements as evolutionary substrates of proteindisorder in the human proteome

Intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs) are central contributors to protein function, evolution and human disease, yet the evolutionary routes that seed new disordered segments within pre-existing proteins are still poorly understood. Sequence insertions provide a powerful mechanism for disorder expansion, but the genomic donors of inserted IDR and its long-term conformational fate remain largely unknown. Transposable elements (TEs), abundant mobile genetic elements with distinctive compositional biases, represent compelling candidates for generating disorder within proteins. Here, we systematically mapped TE-derived segments across human proteins and isoforms, and we found that these insertions are strongly enriched in intrinsic disorder. The structural consequences of their insertion are shaped by TE class and family, reflecting the sequence biases of the elements from which they originate. Recent, Primate specific insertions preferentially generate disordered segments, whereas older insertions more frequently occupy ordered structural contexts, revealing an age-dependent transition in the conformational state of TE-derived sequences. TE-containing isoforms are expressed at lower levels than TE-free isoforms, particularly when insertions are young and disorder-rich, suggesting that intrinsic disorder may constrain the cellular tolerance of newly exonized sequences. These findings identify TEs as a major evolutionary mechanism linking genome mobility to the emergence of new disordered conformational ensembles in the human proteome.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Leishmaniasis on YouTube: a critical appraisal of the quality, reliability, and transparency of educational content

Background: Leishmaniasis is a neglected tropical disease of significant global public health importance, for which accurate information is essential to support prevention and early care-seeking, particularly in endemic, resource-limited settings. YouTube is a widely used source of health information, but the quality and reliability of leishmaniasis-related content have not been evaluated. We aimed to assess the quality, reliability, and transparency of English-language YouTube videos on leishmaniasis. Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional analysis of YouTube videos retrieved via the YouTube Data API on 15 June 2026 using the terms "leishmaniasis," "cutaneous leishmaniasis," and "visceral leishmaniasis." After applying eligibility criteria and screening the 150 most-viewed eligible videos, 48 videos were included. Two reviewers independently assessed each video using the modified DISCERN (mDISCERN) tool, the Global Quality Score (GQS), and the JAMA benchmark criteria, with disagreements resolved by consensus. Inter-rater agreement was assessed using the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC), and associations were examined using Spearman's rank correlation. Results: Of 402 videos retrieved, 48 met the inclusion criteria. The median GQS was 3.00 (IQR 2.00-4.00) and median mDISCERN was 3.00 (IQR 2.38-4.50), indicating moderate quality and reliability, while the median JAMA score was 2.00 (IQR 1.00-2.00), reflecting limited transparency; no video met all four JAMA criteria. The overwhelming majority of videos (47/48, 97.9%) were of professional or institutional origin. Inter-rater agreement was good to excellent (ICC 0.883 for GQS, 0.896 for mDISCERN, 1.000 for JAMA). The instruments were strongly inter-correlated (mDISCERN-GQS rho = 0.841, p < 0.001). Quality scores did not correlate positively with views, likes, or video duration; comments correlated weakly and negatively with mDISCERN (rho = -0.337, p = 0.031) and JAMA (rho = -0.381, p = 0.014). Conclusions: YouTube videos on leishmaniasis are of moderate quality and reliability but limited transparency, and are produced almost exclusively by professional sources. Video popularity, length, and age were not indicators of quality. There is a need for experts and institutions to produce clearly authored, well-sourced, and transparent educational content on this neglected tropical disease.

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

Catastrophic Forgetting is Low-Rank: A Function-Space Theory for Continual Adaptation

arXiv:2606.18024v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Catastrophic forgetting in continual adaptation is usually studied through parameter drift, replay, or distillation, but these views do not identify which output-space directions are vulnerable. We give a function-space account in the NTK regime: new-task training induces old-task prediction drift through the cross-task kernel, yielding a closed-form predictor for the forgetting vector before any new-task gradient step. In frozen-backbone linear-head PEFT-CL, where the model is linear in the trainable parameters, the predictor is exact up to numerical precision; for nonlinear adapters/full fine-tuning, it is a local NTK approximation. The same expression reveals that forgetting concentrates in a small number of old-task NTK eigenmodes and under frozen linear heads gives a Kronecker scaling rule for the vulnerable rank. These results clarify the relation to prior NTK-overlap theory, explain why parameter-space regularizers can miss output-space interference, and motivate a targeted spectral regularizer.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Diffusive Relaxation of Participation Entropy in U(1)-symmetric Dynamics

arXiv:2606.11561v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Participation entropy (PE) quantifies the spread of a many-body wavefunction across configuration space. While PE relaxes rapidly in generic chaotic systems, we show that $\mathrm{U}(1)$ conservation laws slow it down by imprinting with the slow hydrodynamic modes. Using a cluster expansion around equilibrium, we show that, after local density inhomogeneities decay, the leading PE deficit is dominated by squared connected density correlations. The long time relaxation is therefore controlled by diffusive correlation spreading, giving $\Delta S(t)\sim t^{-1/2}$ in the hydrodynamic regime and crossing over to $\sim \exp[-O(t/L^2)]$ when $t\geq L^2$. We confirm this entropy correlation relation using exact computation and infinite system tensor network simulations in various quantum $\mathrm{U}(1)$ conserving circuits. Our results establish PE as a sensitive probe of hydrodynamic memory and suggest that slow relaxation is a generic consequence of conservation laws.

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

Learning to Hear Hesitation: Continual Learning for Disfluency-Aware ASR

Despite advances in large-scale Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), disfluent speech remains challenging, as state-of-the-art systems are often optimized to omit disfluencies, leading to information loss and hallucinations. Prior work has focused on verbatim transcription and the integration of disfluency markers, but adapting models on limited datasets can lead to catastrophic forgetting of general-domain knowledge. We address this gap by leveraging continual learning (CL) with explicit disfluency tokens. We first introduce these tokens into a pretrained ASR model to establish stable token mechanisms, and then continue training on additional datasets with varying disfluency distributions. Through a detailed analysis of model dynamics during training, we identify a trade-off between marker learning and ASR performance, and a consistent cross-attention head mechanism shared across CL methods.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Translating the Untranslatable: An Operationalizable Ontology for Untranslatability

Untranslatability, cases where meaning cannot be directly preserved across languages, is well-studied in linguistics but underexplored in NLP. As machine translation (MT) systems improve on standard benchmarks, their limitations increasingly concentrate in such cases, where translation cannot be reduced to one-to-one equivalence. We introduce a structured ontology of untranslatability along with a taxonomy of compensation strategies, which are specific techniques to convey meaning under these untranslatable circumstances. We operationalize this framework into a multilingual dataset of untranslatable sentences paired with strategy-based translations, enabling controlled analysis of translation behavior. Initial human preference studies suggest that translation quality depends on the strategy used, with consistent preferences for outputs that include explanatory context, known as the Annotation compensation strategy. Our framework and dataset provide a foundation for studying and modeling strategy-informed machine translation.

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

TAPIOCA: Why Task- Aware Pruning Improves OOD model Capability

arXiv:2605.14738v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent work has promoted task-aware layer pruning as a way to improve model performance on particular tasks, as shown by TALE. In this paper, we investigate when such improvements occur and why. We show first that, across controlled polynomial regression tasks and large language models, such pruning yields no benefit on in-distribution (ID) data but consistently improves out-of-distribution (OOD) accuracy. We further show empirically that OOD inputs induce layerwise norm and pairwise-distance profiles that deviate from the corresponding ID profiles. This leads to a geometric explanation of task-aware pruning: each task induces a task-adapted geometry, characterized empirically by the representation profiles observed on ID inputs. OOD inputs can introduce a distorted version of the task-adapted geometry. Task-aware pruning identifies layers that create or amplify this distortion; by removing them, it shifts OOD representational norms and pairwise distances toward those observed on the adapted distribution. This realigns OOD inputs with the model's task-adapted geometry and improves performance. We provide causal evidence through controlled distribution shifts and residual-scaling interventions, and demonstrate consistent behavior across model scales.

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

The Third Challenge on Image Denoising at NTIRE 2026: Methods and Results

This paper reports on the NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Image Denoising, specifically focusing on the high-noise regime ($\sigma = 50$). The competition investigates advanced neural architectures designed to restore high-fidelity details from images corrupted by additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). Unlike constrained benchmarks, this track emphasizes peak quantitative performance, measured by Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), without limitations on parameter count or computational overhead. By synthesizing contributions from 20 finalist teams out of 116 registrants, this report benchmarks the latest technical innovations and provides a comprehensive snapshot of the current state-of-the-art in unconstrained image restoration.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

From Observation to Intervention: A Causal Audit of Expert Importance in Mixture-of-Experts Models

Interpretability methods routinely use population-level summary statistics over observed model behaviour to license claims about the effects of targeted interventions on specific computations; in Pearl's terms, they treat rung-1 associational evidence as if it supported rung-2 interventional conclusions, a move whose validity is rarely tested. We examine one concrete instance: the use of routing statistics in Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) pruning, where utilization rates, activation norms, and routing weight distributions are treated as predictors of which experts can be removed without functional cost. A token-level interventional audit across three high-redundancy MoE architectures (OLMoE-1B-7B-0924, Qwen1.5-MoE-A2.7B, DeepSeek-V2-Lite) finds no observational metric predicts causal expert importance in any model: across all 60 metric-layer combinations effect sizes stay below Cohen's $d = 0.23$, and no metric is reliably positive under our corrected, dual-test criterion. A per-token routing weight control, run with identical $n$, rules out insufficient power, recovering a signal whose CI excludes zero at OLMoE's final MoE layer ($d = +0.231$, 95\% CI $[+0.09, +0.37]$, $p = 0.0013$). Existing pruning methods succeed in this regime not by identifying dispensable experts but because early-layer redundancy renders most selection criteria interchangeable. Our results provide an explicit counterexample to the common inferential step from population-level observational summaries to token-level interventional claims about expert importance, and illustrate how interventional audits can calibrate the evidential standards for interpretability claims.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Integrating Multi-Label Classification and Generative AI for Scalable Analysis of User Feedback

arXiv:2601.23018v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In highly competitive software markets, user experience (UX) evaluation is crucial for ensuring software quality and fostering long-term product success. Such UX evaluations typically combine quantitative metrics from standardized questionnaires with qualitative feedback collected through open-ended questions. While open-ended feedback offers valuable insights for improvement and helps explain quantitative results, analyzing large volumes of user comments is challenging and time-consuming. In this paper, we present techniques developed during a long-term UX measurement project at a major software company to efficiently process and interpret extensive volumes of user comments. To provide a high-level overview of the collected comments, we employ a supervised machine learning approach that assigns meaningful, pre-defined topic labels to each comment. Additionally, we demonstrate how generative AI (GenAI) can be leveraged to create concise and informative summaries of user feedback, facilitating effective communication of findings to the organization and especially upper management. Finally, we investigate whether the sentiment expressed in user comments can serve as an indicator for overall product satisfaction. Our results show that sentiment analysis alone does not reliably reflect user satisfaction. Instead, product satisfaction needs to be assessed explicitly in surveys to measure the user's perception of the product.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Uncovering Latent Structures in Robust Pulse Sequences: A Model-Based Reinforcement Learning Approach for Adaptable Quantum Control

arXiv:2606.24507v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Real-time adaptive control of quantum systems requires rapid generation of robust, high-fidelity pulses across a continuous range of operating conditions. Standard optimization algorithms such as gradient-ascent pulse engineering (GRAPE) solve each instance independently, discarding information between runs and requiring costly reinitialization when parameters change. We present an approach to robust optimal quantum control based on model-based reinforcement learning, in which a single neural network – embedding the Hamiltonian directly into the training pipeline – generates robust gates across an entire family of gate configurations, without pre-computed training data. Demonstrated on a single-spin (two-level) system, the trained networks produce pulses for arbitrary rotation angles over a range of pulse durations, detunings, and field inhomogeneities in milliseconds, at fidelities comparable to multi-seed GRAPE. The framework is inherently adaptable: any parameter entering the Hamiltonian can serve as a network input, extending the approach to different systems and control settings. Beyond speed, the network reveals structure in the control landscape: it discovers the same structured phase profiles that appear in GRAPE solutions – made identifiable through fidelity-invariant symmetry transformations – but more consistently than independent optimization. This consistency enables smooth interpolation across the entire trained parameter space.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

From Awareness to Action: Understanding and Overcoming the Research-Practice Gap in Algorithmic Fairness for Public Health

arXiv:2606.11214v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Algorithmic fairness is essential for responsible ML-driven public health research, yet its practical implementation remains limited. To investigate this awareness-action gap, we conducted a sequential mixed-methods study comprising expert interviews, an online survey, and systematic mapping. The expert interviews informed the design of the survey, which in turn revealed fragmented definitions of fairness, limited training and guidance, reliance on external sources, and rare use of formal assessment, mitigation, or monitoring. These findings were subsequently mapped onto three established research-practice gap lenses: the Knowledge-Practice Gap, the Knowledge-to-Action Cycle, and the Knowing-Doing Gap, each offering complementary perspectives. Building on this synthesis, we introduce the Fairness-to-Action framework, which integrates methodological, organizational, and systemic dimensions to identify where translation of algorithmic fairness knowledge stalls. Our analysis shows that fairness remains weakly institutionalized, translation mechanisms are externally driven, and system-level priorities continue to emphasize accuracy over fairness. These insights suggest critical leverage points for advancing safe, fair, and ethical ML-driven public health research practice.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Dual-Channel Grounded World Modeling (DCGWM): Structural Prevention of Objective Interference Collapse via Heterogeneous External Grounding with Inward-Only Gradient Flow

Authors:

arXiv:2606.18688v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) are a leading approach to world model representation learning. We identify a failure mode in JEPA-based world models grounded against two qualitatively distinct external signals: physical dynamics (sparse, high-magnitude, constraint-satisfying gradient corrections) and social-behavioral dynamics (diffuse, distribution-matching corrections). We term this Objective Interference Collapse (OIC): we argue that joint learning in a shared latent space causes the dominant channel to systematically collapse the subordinate channel's representational subspace, in a manner not resolvable by loss weighting alone. We propose Dual-Channel Grounded World Modeling (DCGWM), designed to structurally prevent OIC through a partitioned latent space (physical subspace Z_p, behavioral subspace Z_b) with inward-only gradient flow. A Physical Grounding Channel updates only Z_p via VICReg-style alignment to physical measurements; a Social-Behavioral Grounding Channel updates only Z_b via alignment to trajectories from an emergent multi-agent simulation. An Inter-Channel Interface Module couples the subspaces at the task level without cross-subspace gradients. An Asymmetric Grounding Adherence Loss penalizes rollout drift with a hard hinge for physical violations and a soft KL for behavioral divergence. A Generative Rendering Layer is architecturally isolated from the latent world model. We present three theoretical results: the partition removes the gradient-interference pathway implicated in OIC; each grounded subspace inherits anti-collapse guarantees from its alignment objective; and generative isolation is necessary under a stated assumption on the generative objective's geometry. This manuscript establishes the problem formulation and architecture; experimental validation is ongoing and will be reported in a future revision.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

DeMaVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Foundation Model for Generalizable Deformable Manipulation

arXiv:2605.31286v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Real-world household robots require Vision-Language-Action (VLA) foundation models that can acquire reusable manipulation skills across diverse objects, task conditions, and household environments. Deformable-object folding is a representative challenge, requiring robots to handle clothing items from random initial states across varying categories, geometries, materials, and scenes. However, existing VLA systems commonly train separate policies for different object categories, while naively mixed multi-task training often suffers from task interference and degraded performance. To move beyond category-specific folding policies, we introduce DeMaVLA, a VLA foundation model for generalizable Deformable Manipulation. DeMaVLA adopts a VLM backbone with an action expert and formulates continuous action generation using flow matching. To improve efficiency, the action expert is constructed by pruning every other transformer layer while preserving layer-wise alignment with the VLM backbone, reducing training and inference cost. DeMaVLA is first pre-trained on approximately 5,000 hours of selected real-world dual-arm demonstrations to acquire general manipulation priors. It is then post-trained on mixed folding data that aggregates self-collected demonstrations and corrective trajectories from real-robot failures across multiple folding tasks through a human-in-the-loop Data Aggregation~(DAgger) pipeline. Experiments show that DeMaVLA achieves competitive performance on RoboTwin 2.0 and strong real-world results on our household folding benchmark. These results highlight the value of scalable real-world data, efficient action generation, and corrective learning for general-purpose VLA policies in deformable-object manipulation.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Cardiac Function Estimation from Phone Videos of Echocardiograms

Importance: Mobile phone-recorded echocardiogram videos are commonly used in point of care, telemedicine, and resource-limited workflows, but artificial intelligence models for left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) estimation have primarily been evaluated on native Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) videos. Objective: To evaluate whether previously described artificial intelligence models for LVEF estimation retain performance when applied to mobile phone-recorded echocardiographic videos. Design: Multicenter model validation study comparing model-estimated LVEF with clinician reported LVEF. Setting: Three medical centers: Kaiser Permanente Northern California, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center through MIMIC-IV-ECHO, and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Participants: Source studies with clinician reported LVEF and apical 4-chamber or apical 2-chamber views, yielding 6209 phone-recorded videos from 2648 studies and 2611 patients. Exposures: Mobile phone recording of native echocardiographic videos and fine-tuning of pretrained models using mobile phone-recorded videos from the Kaiser Permanente Northern California training cohort. Main Outcomes and Measures: Mean absolute error in ejection fraction percentage points, R^2 for continuous estimation, and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve for identifying ejection fraction greater than 50%. Results: The study included 6209 mobile phone recorded echocardiographic videos from 2648 studies and 2611 patients; the weighted mean age was 68.4 years, and 1031 patients were male (39.5%). Without phone-video fine-tuning, the primary model achieved a mean absolute error of 7.00 percentage points, coefficient of determination of 0.49, and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.91 on phone-recorded videos; corresponding native DICOM performance was 6.08 percentage points, 0.60, and 0.93, respectively. On the 2396-video fine-tuning evaluation cohort, fine-tuning improved primary model performance to a mean absolute error of 6.96 percentage points, coefficient of determination of 0.61, and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.93. Fine-tuning the public EchoNet-Dynamic model improved performance from 9.36 percentage points, 0.37, and 0.84 to 7.86 percentage points, 0.50, and 0.89, respectively. Progressive central zoom preprocessing degraded model performance. Conclusions and Relevance: These findings suggest that artificial intelligence assisted left ventricular ejection fraction estimation from mobile phone-recorded echocardiograms may be feasible when native image export is unavailable, although prospective evaluation is needed before clinical deployment.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Anything Goes? A Crosslinguistic Study of (Im)possible Language Learning in LMs

Do language models (LMs) offer insights into human language learning? A common argument against this idea is that because their architecture and training paradigm are so vastly different from humans, LMs can learn arbitrary inputs as easily as natural languages. We test this claim by training LMs to model impossible and typologically unattested languages. Unlike previous work, which has focused exclusively on English, we conduct experiments on 12 languages from 4 language families with two newly constructed parallel corpora. Our results show that while GPT-2 small can largely distinguish attested languages from their impossible counterparts, it does not achieve perfect separation between all the attested languages and all the impossible ones. We further test whether GPT-2 small distinguishes typologically attested from unattested languages with different NP orders by manipulating word order based on Greenberg's Universal 20. We find that the model's perplexity scores do not distinguish attested vs. unattested word orders, while its performance on the generalization test does. These findings suggest that LMs exhibit some human-like inductive biases, though these biases are weaker than those found in human learners.

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

EMFusion: Uncertainty-Aware Conditional Diffusion Model for Multivariate Narrow-band Exposure Forecasting

arXiv:2512.15067v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The rapid growth in wireless infrastructure has increased the need to accurately estimate and forecast electromagnetic field (EMF) levels to ensure ongoing compliance, assess potential health impacts, and support efficient network planning. While existing studies rely on univariate forecasting of wideband aggregate EMF data, multivariate narrow-band EMF forecasting is needed to capture the inter-operator and inter-frequency variations essential for proactive network planning. To this end, this paper introduces EMFusion, a conditional diffusion-based EMF forecasting framework that integrates diverse contextual factors, such as time of day, season, and holidays, while providing uncertainty-aware probabilistic forecasts. The proposed architecture features a residual U-Net backbone enhanced by a cross-attention mechanism that dynamically integrates external conditions to guide the generation process. Furthermore, EMFusion integrates an imputation-based sampling strategy that treats forecasting as a structural inpainting task, ensuring temporal coherence even with irregular measurements. Unlike standard point forecasters, EMFusion generates empirical probabilistic prediction intervals from the learned conditional distribution, providing uncertainty-aware probabilistic forecasting rather than simple point estimation. Numerical experiments conducted on the multivariate narrow-band EMF datasets demonstrate that EMFusion with the contextual information of working hours outperforms the baseline models with or without conditions. The proposed EMFusion outperforms the best baseline by 23.85% in continuous ranked probability score (CRPS) and 13.93% in normalized root mean square error.

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

Interpretable Factor Decomposition for Decision Intelligence in Large-Scale Financial Markets: Evidence from China's A-Share Market

arXiv:2606.12843v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present an interpretable machine learning pipeline to decompose Cross-Sectional Equity Return Predictability into auditable factor contribution. We apply an XGBoost model with TreeSHAP attribution and conduct stress testing on 3632 Chinese A-share stocks from 2009 until 2019. Using 60-month, rolling windows over 55 months of out-of-sample data, XGBoost obtains a mean AUC of 0.547 and +2.38%/month (Newey-West t = 5.94; Annualized Sharpe 2.23) long-short spread for the top vs bottom quintiles. This alpha is persistent after adjusting for the Carhart four-factor model (+2.31%/month; t = 7.48). SHAP Decomposition indicates that behavioral signals (turnover and momentum) account for 58.2% of predictive attribution compared to 10.7% for valuation ratios, on average, across 55 industry groups. Ablation analysis serves to cross-validate this ranking and provides evidence that SHAP and ablation diverge in a manner that highlights feature substitutability structure that is largely invisible to either method used in isolation.

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

Segmentation-based Detection for Efficient Multi-Task Spacecraft Perception

Vision-based perception is fundamental to Space Situational Awareness and autonomous on-orbit operations such as rendezvous, docking, servicing, and navigation. However, progress in this area is limited by the scarcity of annotated space imagery and by challenging visual-domain characteristics including severe illumination changes, low signal-to-noise ratio, and high contrast. We address Stream 1 of the SPARK 2026 Challenge, which requires a single model for spacecraft classification, detection, and fine-grained component segmentation across multiple target types. We propose a compact architecture that integrates a MobileNetV3 encoder with a U-Net-style decoder, combining computational efficiency with accurate dense prediction. Detection is derived analytically from the union of predicted component masks, avoiding a separate bounding-box regression head in the single-spacecraft setting. Our method achieved an overall leaderboard score of 0.9482, with task-specific scores of 1.0000 in classification, 0.9788 in detection, and 0.8917 in segmentation. The proposed approach ranked second overall in the SPARK 2026 Challenge, demonstrating that lightweight encoder-decoder architectures can deliver strong multi-task performance for practical onboard space vision systems.

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

How Controlling the Variance can Improve Training Stability of Sparsely Activated DNNs and CNNs

arXiv:2602.05779v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The Edge-of-Chaos (EoC) theory developed for the random initialization of deep networks allows more efficient training by both preserving information in the initial outputs of the network and minimising exploding or vanishing gradients through characterisation of the intermediate layers as Gaussian processes. This EoC theory provides formulae for the choice of the initialisation distribution variances of the weights and biases. For activations which are approximately linear around the origin, the EoC theory typically encourages the Gaussian process variance to converge towards zero with increasing depth. Here we consider the less studied setting of highly sparsity inducing activations where a large region of values near the origin are set to zero. In this setting we prove a new phenomenon whereby initialisations leading to larger fixed Gaussian processes are beneficial to training stability. This theory informs a new, yet simple, initialisation strategy that allows training DNNs and CNNs with as large as 90\% sparsity in the hidden layers.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Improving Visual Token Reduction via Rectifying Distortions for Efficient Multimodal LLM Inference

Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable success in vision-language tasks, yet the quadratic computational complexity arising from the vast number of visual tokens incurs significant memory and latency bottlenecks. While visual token reduction (VTR) strategies have been explored to mitigate this burden, existing methods overlook the positional and attentional consistency between the full and reduced sequences, resulting in a distorted representation. To this end, we propose RESTORE, a novel VTR framework that rectifies the positional and attentional distortions while maintaining efficiency. Specifically, we present a simple yet effective calibration method that restores lost visual attention by augmenting attention weights based on relative distances. We also introduce a distinctive anchor selection for token merging to mitigate information loss during feature averaging. Experimental results on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently improves the accuracy of various reduction methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance while maintaining computational efficiency. Project page is available at https://cvlab.yonsei.ac.kr/projects/RESTORE

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Annealed Entropic Allocation for Ranking and Selection

arXiv:2606.11347v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose Annealed Entropic Allocation, an annealed weighted soft-min framework for sequential budget allocation in ranking and selection. The central idea is to replace the non-smooth maximin large-deviation rate objective with a weighted log-sum-exp surrogate that aggregates challenger-specific pairwise scores through soft-min weights, mitigating hard switching when several challengers are nearly active. To improve finite-budget discrimination, we incorporate the saddlepoint approximation – a sub-exponential correction derived from refined pairwise tail asymptotics. Because these corrections are sub-exponential and the smoothing parameter is annealed to zero, the surrogate preserves the same first-order large-deviation target as the classical maximin formulation. We show that the surrogate converges uniformly to the hard minimum, that the soft-min weights concentrate on the active challengers, and that, under fixed weights, the induced target allocation map is continuous on the simplex interior. Numerical experiments on Gaussian and exponential instances demonstrate competitive performance, especially when multiple challengers are nearly tied.

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

MatchLM2Lite: A Scalable MLLM-to-Lite Framework for Reproduced Content Identification

Content moderation is critical for online video platforms to ensure content safety, protect creators, and sustain positive user experiences. Beyond filtering harmful content, platforms must guarantee content authenticity at scale so that users are exposed to diverse, original videos rather than low-value reproductions. We present MatchLM2Lite, a real-time, production-grade reproduced content identification (RCI) system that leverages the powerful understanding of a multimodal large language model (MLLM) distilled into a small and fast-inference model. Our system jointly models video, audio, and text signals, operating on pairs of videos to produce fine-grained reproduction scores. The system comprises two modules, MatchLM and MatchLite, and a two-stage training recipe. First, our high-capacity MLLM, MatchLM, serves as a teacher model to define the upper bound of RCI performance. Its capabilities are then distilled into a compact student model, MatchLite. This design allows MatchLite to deliver low-latency, high-throughput inference on video pairs while preserving much of MatchLM's accuracy, making it suitable for integration into real-time recommendation systems. MatchLM achieves an F1-score improvement of +8.57 compared to our previous production model. After knowledge distillation, MatchLite retains a +6.55 gain in F1-score while reducing computational cost by 35x. Deployed at scale, MatchLM2Lite enables efficient, pairwise multimodal RCI, stably serving online traffic at high queries per second (QPS) with an end-to-end latency below 30 seconds. This system has reduced the reproduced video view rate on our platform by 2.5% without degrading user engagement, demonstrating its effectiveness in a large-scale production environment.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Can Editing 1 Neuron Fix Repetition Loops in LLMs?

arXiv:2606.13705v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Yes. Can it cure doom loops? Probably not. The Gemma 4 instruction-tuned models share a reproducible failure: on long factual enumeration prompts, such as listing every episode of a TV series, the 88 IAU constellations, or the 151 original Pokemon, they collapse into repetition, either a tight verbatim loop or a list whose entries decay onto a single answer. These loops occur at rates as high as 95% and survive prompt rewording, inference-engine changes, and most sampling adjustments. In this paper we explore whether this behavior is localized enough to remove by weight edits. To localize the cause, we use per-layer ablation and per-neuron attribution, then confirm the strongest candidates with full-generation sweeps. The loops trace to a small set of MLP neurons (or, in the 26B-A4B Mixture-of-Experts model, a few routed experts) which we suppress with static weight edits. These "surgeries" can be as small as a single sign-inverted neuron (in the E2B model). The size of the effective edits grows with model scale, but in all cases, the loop patterns can be addressed at normal generation budgets while preserving general-purpose benchmark scores. However, the edits do not solve everything: we also study longer thinking budgets, where the two larger models most visibly enter doom looping, i.e. a non-convergent regime in which the model self-corrects in circles over a fact it cannot recall, exhausting the budget without committing to a final answer. We show this residual failure is reduced but not eliminated by the same edits, and argue it is fundamentally a knowledge-precision problem rather than a removable circuit; weight surgery can delete a loop, but it cannot supply a missing fact. Our results are both a feasibility demonstration, that is, evidence that a concrete generation pathology can be localized to a few parameters and edited out, and a delineation of where that approach stops.