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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Demonstration of Exponential Quantum Speedup with Constant-Depth Compiled Circuits for Simon's Problem

arXiv:2604.27457v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We demonstrate exponential algorithmic quantum speedup for a restricted-Hamming-weight version of Simon's problem, in which the hidden string $b$ is promised to satisfy $HW(b)\le w$ for a Hamming-weight cutoff $w$, on present-day superconducting quantum processors. We introduce a hardware-aware compilation strategy that reduces the quantum part of each Simon query circuit to constant depth. The resulting compiled circuits have $O(1)$ depth, require only linear nearest-neighbor connectivity, map directly onto common device layouts, and avoid additional routing and SWAP overhead. Implemented on IBM's $156$-qubit Boston and $120$-qubit Miami processors, these circuits achieve sufficient fidelity to exhibit algorithmic quantum speedup without error suppression. Using the number-of-queries-to-solution (NTS) metric, we observe exponential speedup over the classical lower-bound benchmark for all restricted-Hamming-weight cutoffs $w\ge 4$ on Boston and across low-to-intermediate Hamming-weight cutoffs on Miami; at higher Hamming-weight cutoffs on Miami, we still observe polynomial speedup. The same construction also enables unrestricted instances of Simon's problem, corresponding to $w=n$ for problem size $n$, over the finite problem-size ranges for which our NTS computation is feasible; in this regime, the observed scaling advantage is not limited to the restricted-Hamming-weight setting. These results show that careful hardware-aware compilation can make quantum speedup experimentally accessible for a canonical hidden-subgroup problem in the NISQ regime.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Environment-Grounded Automated Prompt Optimization for LLM Game Agents

LLM agents in interactive environments are highly sensitive to their prompts, yet prompt engineering remains a manual, task-specific process. We introduce an automated prompt optimization framework for LLM agents that decomposes the observation-to-action pipeline into a goal-conditioned descriptor agent and an action selection agent, and iteratively refines each module's prompt through an LLM-driven evolutionary loop guided by environment returns. We propose a behavior analyzer to attribute episode outcomes to specific prompt components, and a mutator to propose targeted revisions to the prompt, before validating them through environment rollouts. We evaluate on all five BabyAI tasks in the BALROG benchmark, comparing our pipeline against BALROG's RobustCoTAgent under both plain and guided prompt initializations. Optimization improves performance consistently across tasks and conditions, without requiring updates to the model weights. On PutNext, a multi-step coordination task where the RobustCoTAgent achieves 0% success, our framework reaches up to 72.5% success rate using the same underlying LLM with optimized prompts. These results suggest that a multi-agent framework, combined with automatic prompt optimization, enhances LLMs without the need for fine-tuning or extensive human supervision.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Dense Supervision, Sparse Updates: On the Sparsity and Geometry of On-Policy Distillation

arXiv:2606.13657v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy distillation (\textsc{OPD}) has recently become a prominent post-training recipe as it combines two desirable ingredients: on-policy student trajectories and dense teacher supervision, yet how this hybrid changes a model's parameters remains unclear. Across several language and vision-language model pairs and use cases, our analysis yields two main findings. On sparsity, \textsc{OPD}-style updates are small and coordinate-sparse. They are distributed across layers and are usually FFN-heavy. This sparse structure is operationally useful: training only the discovered subnetwork recovers nearly the same performance as full \textsc{OPD}. However, the sparsity-inducing SGD optimizer underperforms AdamW in our optimizer ablation, likely because dense teacher supervision preserves heterogeneous coordinate-wise gradient scales where AdamW's adaptive scaling remains useful. On geometry, the updates are numerically full-rank but spectrally concentrated; they lie mostly away from the principal singular subspaces of the source weights and fall disproportionately on coordinates where the source weights are close to zero. These findings suggest that dense teacher supervision does not turn \textsc{OPD} into ordinary dense parameter rewriting; instead, \textsc{OPD} retains important geometric signatures of on-policy post-training.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Gaze Heads: How VLMs Look at What They Describe

How a vision-language model internally solves the task of describing an image is far from obvious. We find that the model develops a specific mechanism for this: a small set of attention heads in its language-model backbone, which we call gaze heads, whose attention tracks the image region the model is currently describing. We find them with a simple correlation score from a few forward passes, using comic strips as a controlled testbed where narrative order is laid out spatially. These gaze heads do not just track the image tokens being described: redirecting their attention to a chosen region forces the VLM to describe that region instead. A single attention-mask intervention on the top-100 gaze heads, fewer than 9% of all heads, steers the model's answer to any chosen comic panel at 83.1% accuracy, while the same intervention on random heads fails to redirect the answer, and intervening on all heads destroys generation. The same lever also extends to continuous control: switching the gaze target mid-generation makes the model wrap up its current panel description and move to the new one within a few tokens. Beyond comics, the same intervention redirects answers to chosen regions in natural COCO images. The mechanism further recurs across model sizes from 2B to 32B parameters and across other VLM architectures, although some frozen-encoder families show no comparable head set. More broadly, this shows that targeted edits identified through mechanistic analysis can serve as practical inference-time levers for steering multimodal model behavior, without any retraining. Our code, interactive demo, and datasets are available at https://gaze.baulab.info/

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

PrototypeNAS: Rapid Design of Deep Neural Networks for Microcontroller Units

arXiv:2603.15106v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Enabling efficient deep neural network (DNN) inference on edge devices with different hardware constraints is a challenging task that typically requires DNN architectures to be specialized for each device separately. To avoid the huge manual effort, one can use neural architecture search (NAS). However, many existing NAS methods are resource-intensive and time-consuming because they require the training of many different DNNs from scratch. Furthermore, they do not take the resource constraints of the target system into account. To address these shortcomings, we propose PrototypeNAS, a zero-shot NAS method to accelerate and automate the selection, compression, and specialization of DNNs to different target microcontroller units (MCUs). We propose a novel three-step search method that decouples DNN design and specialization from DNN training for a given target platform. First, we present a novel search space that not only cuts out smaller DNNs from a single large architecture, but instead combines the structural optimization of multiple architecture types, as well as optimization of their pruning and quantization configurations. Second, we explore the use of an ensemble of zero-shot proxies during optimization instead of a single one. Third, we propose the use of Hypervolume subset selection to distill DNN architectures from the Pareto front of the multi-objective optimization that represent the most meaningful tradeoffs between accuracy and FLOPs. We evaluate the effectiveness of PrototypeNAS on 12 different datasets in three different tasks: image classification, time series classification, and object detection. Our results demonstrate that PrototypeNAS is able to identify DNN models within minutes that are small enough to be deployed on off-the-shelf MCUs and still achieve accuracies comparable to the performance of large DNN models.

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

Acceleration of an algebraic multigrid pressure solver using graph neural networks

arXiv:2606.19251v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Solving the pressure-Poisson equation remains the primary computational bottleneck in incompressible unstructured flow solvers primarily due to the inherent sensitivity of traditional linear solvers to mesh irregularities. This work introduces a data-driven algebraic multigrid (AMG) smoother that uses a modified graph convolutional isomorphism network (GCIN). The graph neural network predicts optimal polynomial coefficients to construct a sparse pseudo-inverse operator across diverse grid topologies. The coefficients are optimized to reduce the residual after each V-cycle iteration. By directly capturing the algebraic structure of the system from the sparse coefficient matrix, the proposed method maintains the solver's linearity while adapting to local anisotropies in unstructured grids. Our framework demonstrates significant performance gains by reducing the number of V-cycles required for a given tolerance and delivering wall-clock speedups from 4% to 37% across diverse benchmarks. Notably, the model exhibits robust generalization by maintaining efficiency on meshes up to 128 times larger than those seen in training, and by accelerating the solver's convergence on unseen industry-relevant problems such as the AirfRANS dataset.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

The Perceived Fragility of Explanations in Audio Models: Manipulation of Attribution with Unchanged Predictions

arXiv:2606.14466v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper investigates the fragility of post-hoc explanation methods in audio deepfake detection. While previous work on explanation manipulation focused on images using standard $L_p$ metrics, we introduce a psychoacoustic framework that optimizes inaudible perturbations to decouple model attributions from final classifications. We evaluate this vulnerability across state-of-the-art architectures under strict prediction-preserving constraints. By evaluating the manipulation cost through domain-specific perceptual audio quality metrics alongside explanation alignment criteria, our framework demonstrates that an adversary can systematically distort automated explanation heatmaps while preserving the predicted deepfake label. Full code available at: https://github.com/cncPomper/Audio-XAI

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Agentic Reinforcement Learning for Search Misaligns Instruction-Tuning

Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) trains large language models to use tools, but its impact on alignment is poorly understood. We study how agentic RL for search affects the alignment of instruction-tuned (IT) models. We find that RL-trained models inherit refusal reasoning by deflecting harmful requests into benign search queries, but this breaks down under a simple diagnostic trigger that elicits a search call before refusal can occur. Under this condition, RL models produce multi-step unsafe search actions and reasoning, reducing search query safety by up to 68.6% in Qwen and Llama models relative to their IT counterparts. The effect generalises across model families, scales, and RL algorithms. To understand why, we identify linear directions in the residual stream that control search query safety, and show that RL training progressively shifts search behaviour toward the harmful end of this direction. We thus propose representation-guided RL training, which adds a reward penalty based on projection toward the harmful search direction. Training on benign data alone, it restores IT-level alignment without reducing task accuracy and requires no additional training data. Together, our work provides the first framework for diagnosing, mechanistically analysing, and mitigating alignment degradation in agentic RL for search.

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

General circuit mapping algorithm for neutral atom quantum computers

arXiv:2606.20503v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neutral atom quantum computers (NAQC) are emerging as a promising, scalable quantum computing platform because of their long qubit coherence, flexible qubit arrangement, and multiqubit gate capabilities. However, circuit execution often requires physically moving qubits, making compilation a critical optimization challenge. We propose a circuit independent mathematical framework built on graph-theoretic combinatorial optimization that determines the minimal number of required qubit transfers. This model captures spatial constraints specific to NAQC platforms with zone-limited gate operations and multi-qubit gates. From this framework, we encode the qubit mapping problem as a nonlinear integer program and solve it using a genetic algorithm, enabling trade-offs between minimizing the total traveled distance and the number of parallel transfer operations. Compared to the state-of-the-art scalable compiler for zoned architectures, our approach consistently finds fewer transfers. Depending on the optimization focus, our method produces shorter traveled distances or fewer parallel transfer operations. This work provides both theoretical guaranties and a practical tool for efficient, architecture-aware quantum circuit compilation. As a result, practitioners can generate hardware-aware mappings that reduce movement-induced errors and better exploit atom transfer parallelism, directly improving execution efficiency on NAQC devices.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Kareus: Joint Reduction of Dynamic and Static Energy in Large Model Training

arXiv:2601.17654v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The computing demand of AI is growing at an unprecedented rate, but energy supply is not keeping pace. As a result, energy has become an expensive and contended resource that requires explicit management and optimization. Although recent works have made significant progress in large model training optimization, they focus on optimizing either dynamic or static energy consumption. We find that fine-grained kernel scheduling and frequency scaling jointly and interdependently impact both dynamic and static energy consumption. Based on this finding, we design Kareus, a training system that pushes the time-energy tradeoff frontier by optimizing both aspects. Kareus decomposes the intractable joint optimization problem into local, partition-based subproblems. It then uses a multi-pass multi-objective optimization algorithm to find execution schedules that push the time-energy tradeoff frontier. Compared to the state of the art, Kareus reduces training energy by up to 28.3% at the same training time, or reduces training time by up to 27.5% at the same energy consumption.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

From AGI to ASI

arXiv:2606.12683v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Over the last decade, building human-level artificial general intelligence has moved from far-fetched speculation to being a concrete next-decade target for many of the largest AI organisations. Achieving this goal would have profound and far-reaching impacts on human society, which raises many complex questions for the decade ahead. This report investigates how AI itself might continue to develop in a post-AGI world along the continuum of machine intelligence. The endpoint of this continuum, Universal AI, is theoretically well understood, which provides some formal grounding for the main focus of this report: the transition from human-level AGI to artificial general superintelligence, which, intuitively, can be understood as a system that is more intelligent and cognitively capable than large organisations of humans. After characterizing ASI, the report discusses four potential pathways from AGI to ASI: scaling AGI, AI paradigm shifts, recursive improvement, and ASI emerging from large-scale multi-agent collectives. The report then discusses possible frictions and bottlenecks along these pathways. Determining whether the impact of these frictions will be negligible or substantial raises a number of concrete open research questions. Due to large uncertainties for predicting ASI progress, it cannot be ruled out that AI progress might continue to accelerate over the next years. This could imply that the image of a single transformative step change, caused by the introduction of human-level AGI into our society, could be inaccurate. More apt might be the prospect of a series of transformative societal changes caused by AI-enabled progress and breakthroughs across many areas of science and technology. Preparing for this prospect requires a massively interdisciplinary endeavour of global scope and interest.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Are Neuro-Inspired Multi-Modal Vision-Language Models Resilient to Membership Inference Privacy Leakage?

In the age of agentic AI, the growing deployment of multi-modal models (MMs) has introduced new attack vectors that can leak sensitive training data in MMs, causing privacy leakage. This paper investigates a black-box privacy attack, i.e., membership inference attack (MIA) on multi-modal vision-language models (VLMs). State-of-the-art research analyzes privacy attacks primarily to unimodal AI-ML systems, while recent studies indicate MMs can also be vulnerable to privacy attacks. While researchers have demonstrated that biologically inspired neural network representations can improve unimodal model resilience against adversarial attacks, it remains unexplored whether neuro-inspired MMs are resilient against privacy attacks. In this work, we introduce a systematic neuroscience-inspired topological regularization (tau) framework to analyze MM VLMs resilience against image-text-based inference privacy attacks. We examine this phenomenon using three VLMs: BLIP, PaliGemma 2, and ViT-GPT2, across three benchmark datasets: COCO, CC3M, and NoCaps. Our experiments compare the resilience of baseline and neuro VLMs (with topological regularization), where the tau > 0 configuration defines the NEURO variant of VLM. Our results on the BLIP model using the COCO dataset illustrate that MIA attack success in NEURO VLMs drops by 24% mean ROC-AUC, while achieving similar model utility (similarities between generated and reference captions) in terms of MPNet and ROUGE-2 metrics. This shows neuro VLMs are comparatively more resilient against privacy attacks, while not significantly compromising model utility. Our extensive evaluation with PaliGemma 2 and ViT-GPT2 models, on two additional datasets: CC3M and NoCaps, further validates the consistency of the findings. This work contributes to the growing understanding of privacy risks in MMs and provides evidence on neuro VLMs privacy threat resilience.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Indexed Bellman Information Complexity

Authors:

arXiv:2606.11171v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We develop indexed Bellman information complexity, a representation-level theory of interactive decision making centered on information indices and reference histories. The representation strips away problem-specific syntax and retains only the ingredients needed for dynamic programming and information accounting, thereby unifying the earlier framework of indexed algorithmic information ratios (AIR). On the upper-bound side, regret is controlled by Bellman supersolutions or potential identities whose gradient bracket is paid for by indexed information. Upper-confidence-bound (UCB), estimation-to-decision/decision-estimation-coefficient (E2D/DEC), and adaptive-minimax-sampling or exploration-by-optimization (AMS/EBO) methods appear as three relaxations of this same identity. On the lower-bound side, the posterior-reference trajectory supplies both the information telescope and the ghost quantile of small-regret trajectories. The resulting critical radius in the lower bound is an effective-dimension-scale quantity, as in Fano and local-prior-mass lower bounds, rather than the constant radius of a two-point Le Cam argument. The examples show that DEC is best viewed as a one-step relaxation of indexed Bellman information complexity, not as a universally tight conversion mechanism. We illustrate the framework through several applications, with particular emphasis on kernel bandits. In this setting, the active action marginal provides a concrete basis for comparing UCB, E2D, and AMS/EBO.

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

Reliable Neural-Codec Text-to-Speech by ASR Self-Verification and Distillation: Near-Zero Catastrophic Failures Across Models and Codecs

arXiv:2606.18323v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Open autoregressive neural-codec text-to-speech (TTS) models sound excellent on typical inputs yet suffer stochastic catastrophic failures: on a meaningful fraction of utterances they emit silence, terminate early, or collapse into repetitive or hallucinated content. We show this failure mode is cheap to remove. Under a single format-robust metric (a catastrophic-failure rate via an ASR round-trip), best-of-N ASR self-verification drives failures to near-zero: no observed failures remain by N=2 on a standard corpus (LibriSpeech) and by N=4 on a hard prompt set. This is not an artifact of one model: the reduction replicates across four open codec-TTS systems and three neural codecs (XCodec2, SNAC, Mimi), reaching the near-zero floor by N=2 on three of the four. We then make the fix free at inference time by distilling the self-verified behaviour into the model, which recovers much of the robustness in single-shot decoding, closing ~52-58% of the failure mass on hard inputs at no test-time cost. The distillation gain concentrates where it is needed (hard inputs); on already-reliable prose there is no headroom and no detectable change. A controlled comparison adds a clean negative: offline direct preference optimization (DPO/IPO) does not beat plain supervised distillation, and an online iterative variant is promising but not statistically separable at our evaluation size. We report honestly the one model that resists (a larger Llasa where scale did not obviously help) and a rare-word capability ceiling that no self-distillation method overcomes

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

When Does Streaming Tool Use Help? Characterizing Tool-Intent Stabilization in Streaming Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Streaming Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Streaming RAG) reduces user-perceived latency by issuing tool queries in parallel with ongoing user input, before the utterance is complete. Reported gains are aggregate, yet the mechanism's benefit is fundamentally query-intrinsic: speculation can only help when the correct tool query becomes determinable before the user stops speaking or typing. We isolate and measure this property – tool-intent stabilization, the point in the input stream at which a speculative query's retrieval converges to the answer-bearing result. On the CRAG benchmark (1371 validation questions) we (i) measure the distribution of stabilization, (ii) derive a model-agnostic bound H on the portion of tool latency that can be hidden behind the user's remaining input, as a function of tool latency L and input cadence {\delta}, (iii) validate against a working streaming pipeline that realized savings meet or exceed this bound, and (iv) identify which query properties predict early versus late stabilization. The study requires no model training and runs on commodity CPU hardware. We find that at a realistic operating point (L=600ms, {\delta}=3w/s, {\theta}=0.8), 73.9% of queries across the full benchmark admit substantial latency hiding – a blended figure that mixes sufficiency stabilization on the 21.3% of questions where gold evidence is verbatim-present and BM25-retrievable (95.2% streamable on this favorable slice) with a grounding-free top-1-settling fallback on the remainder. On the favorable slice, {\phi}_suf is bracketed to [0.26, 0.281] by exact and relaxed grounding – both early. Question type produces a significant but coarse early/late split (Kruskal-Wallis p=0.017, epsilon^2=0.04), directly informing when a learned speculative trigger is worth its cost.

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

Skeleton Sparsification and Densification Scale-Spaces

The Hamilton-Jacobi skeleton, also known as the medial axis, is a powerful shape descriptor that represents binary objects in terms of the centres of maximal inscribed discs. Despite its broad applicability, the medial axis suffers from sensitivity to noise: Minor boundary variations can lead to disproportionately large and undesirable expansions of the skeleton. Classical pruning methods mitigate this shortcoming by systematically removing extraneous skeletal branches. This sequential simplification of skeletons resembles the principle of sparsification scale-spaces that embed images into a family of reconstructions from increasingly sparse pixel representations. We combine both worlds by introducing skeletonisation scale-spaces: They leverage sparsification of the medial axis to achieve hierarchical simplification of shapes. Unlike conventional pruning, our framework inherently satisfies key scale-space properties such as hierarchical architecture, controllable simplification, and equivariance to geometric transformations. We provide a rigorous theoretical foundation in both continuous and discrete formulations and extend the concept further with densification. By growing the skeleton successively instead of shrinking it, we allow inverse progression from coarse to fine scales. Densification scale-spaces can even reach beyond the original skeleton to produce overcomplete shape representations with relevancy for practical applications. Through proof-of-concept experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework for practical tasks including robust skeletonisation, shape compression, and stiffness enhancement for additive manufacturing.

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

CAF-Gen: A Multi-Agent System for Enriching Argumentation Structures

Formalizing complex reasoning from natural text is one of the central challenges in computational linguistics. It requires systems to understand not just keywords but also the context and complex reasoning embedded in a text. Current Argument Mining (AM) techniques identify basic claims and premises, yet they often struggle to capture the richer structural information required by advanced schemas such as the Carneades Argumentation Framework (CAF), which incorporates features such as premise types, proof standards, and argument schemes. We address this limitation by introducing CAF-Gen, an automated multi-agent framework designed to enrich shallow argument structures into CAF-compliant argument models. By employing an iterative Creator-Reviewer pipeline, a creator agent's output is validated by a critical agent to ensure structural integrity. This multi-agent collaboration is crucial for mitigating the structural instability typical of single-pass generative models. Our experiments demonstrate that the iterative feedback loop improves the quality of the resulting data and achieves strong alignment with the original annotations, while producing structurally richer models. Our findings show that the multi-agent system can overcome the limitations of single-pass generation, providing a robust methodology for the automated modeling of formal argumentation.

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

SUP-MCRL: Subject-aware Unified Pseudo-feature Coded Multimodal Contrastive Representation Learning for EEG Visual Decoding

Non-invasive brain-computer interfaces suffer severe fidelity degradation in neural visual decoding when generalizing to natural visual experiences. Conventional multimodal contrastive representation learning solely optimizes geometric distance alignment, neglecting semantic consistency and subject selectivity, causing spurious zero-shot alignment. We propose SUP-MCRL, a unified framework integrating three collaborative mechanisms: (1) Semantic-entity Aware Visual Encoder (SAVE), learning spatial attention to extract semantic content without pre-trained saliency models; (2 Unified EEG Enhancer (UEE), employing multi-scale atrous convolutions and inter-band attention for adaptive cross-subject robustness; and (3) Prototype-based Progressive Augmenter (PPA), maintaining an EMA-updated pseudo-feature pool to prevent representation collapse. Zero-shot experiments on THINGS-EEG achieve 66.0%/91.9% (Top-1/Top-5) intra-subject and 24.0%/52.9% LOSO accuracy, surpassing state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/NZWANG/SUP-MCRL.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

ComAct: Reframing Professional Software Manipulation via COM-as-Action Paradigm

Existing computer-use agents remain fundamentally limited in professional software manipulation: GUI-based agents suffer from fragile visual grounding and long-horizon error accumulation, while API-basedapproaches struggle with heterogeneous protocols and inaccessible commercial interfaces. In this work,we identify the Component Object Model (COM) as a unified executable abstraction, proposing COM-as-Action: a new paradigm that reframes professional software interaction as deterministic program synthesisrather than sequential visual control. To validate this paradigm in the most demanding environments, weintroduce ComCADBench, the first benchmark for agents operating real industrial CAD software. Ourexperiments reveal a substantial paradigm gap: frontier proprietary models achieve near-zero successunder GUI-based interaction, whereas COM-based execution yields substantial immediate gains. Tobridge the remaining gap between syntactic correctness and geometric accuracy, we develop ComActor, aself-correcting agent trained through a progressive three-stage framework, alongside ComForge, a scalableplatform for large-scale training in Windows containers. Extensive experiments show that ComActorachieves state-of-the-art performance on ComCADBench, with strong resilience in long-horizon taskswhere baselines collapse, and generalizes to external CAD benchmark.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

One Layer's Trash is Another Layer's Treasure: Adaptive Layer-wise Visual Token Selection in LVLMs

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have achieved remarkable success across diverse multimodal tasks, yet their practical deployment remains constrained by the computational burden arising from lengthy visual tokens. While visual token pruning has emerged as a promising solution, existing methods suffer from a fundamental limitation: once tokens are pruned at a specific layer, they become inaccessible to all subsequent layers, leading to premature information loss that can compromise model performance. Through empirical studies, we observe that different layers exhibit distinct visual region focus, indicating a varying optimal token subset across layers. Motivated by this insight, we propose Adaptive Layer-wise Visual Token Selection (ALVTS), a novel framework that breaks away from the conventional static token pruning paradigm. ALVTS incorporates a lightweight token selector to identify and route important tokens for further processing, while allowing less important tokens to skip the layer, thus minimizing computational redundancy. These two streams of tokens are seamlessly reintegrated before being fed into subsequent layers, facilitating adaptive compression across the entire model. Grounded in our importance consistency constrained low-rank approximation, the proposed token selection module closely emulates the full attention mechanism, effectively capturing its essential patterns without requiring model retraining. Extensive experiments on LLaVA-1.5, LLaVA-NeXT, and Qwen2.5-VL validate the effectiveness of our method. With an 89% token compression ratio, ALVTS retains 96.7% of the original model's accuracy, achieving a superior efficiency-accuracy trade-off for LVLM inference.

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

Robust Dual-Signal Fusion: Hybrid Neuro-Symbolic Gating with Compressed Chain-of-Thought Refinement for Irony Detection in Social Media Texts

Large Language Models (LLMs) natively default to literal semantic interpretations, making zero-shot irony detection a persistent challenge. We introduce the Robust Dual-Signal (RDS) Fusion framework, a hybrid neuro-symbolic architecture that compresses Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning trajectories without Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). Evaluated on a strictly held-out TweetEval test set (N=734), RDS achieves 78.1% accuracy and a Macro F1 of 0.777, matching the absolute performance ceiling of the fine-tuned BERTweet. On the heavily imbalanced iSarcasm dataset, the frozen CoT pipeline filters 22.5% of out-of-distribution hallucinations, yielding a zero-shot Macro F1 of 0.6726 and Ironic F1 of 0.4821, outperforming multiple heavily supervised SemEval transformer ensembles. A statistical ablation confirms this structural synergy: adding the symbolic prior to the neural baseline yields no significant gain (p = 0.242), and the marginal benefit of adding the CoT pipeline to that prior is heavily compressed (p = 0.149). Only the complete, concurrent fusion of all three signals achieves a statistically validated improvement over the baseline (p = 0.005).

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

CrossEarth-Gate: Fisher-Guided Adaptive Tuning Engine for Efficient Adaptation of Cross-Domain Remote Sensing Semantic Segmentation

In Remote Sensing (RS), Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) has emerged as a key approach to activate the generalizable representation ability of foundation models for downstream tasks. However, existing specialized PEFT methods often fail when applied to large-scale Earth observation tasks, as they are unable to fully handle the multifaceted and unpredictable domain gaps (e.g., spatial, semantic, and frequency shifts) inherent in RS data. To overcome this, we propose CrossEarth-Gate, which introduces two primary contributions. First, we establish a comprehensive RS module toolbox to address multifaceted domain gaps, comprising spatial, semantic, and frequency modules. Second, we develop a Fisher-guided adaptive selection mechanism that operates on this toolbox. This selection is guided by Fisher Information to quantify each module's importance by measuring its contribution to the task-specific gradient flow. It dynamically activates only the most critical modules at the appropriate layers, guiding the gradient flow to maximize adaptation effectiveness and efficiency. Comprehensive experiments validate the efficacy and generalizability of our method, where CrossEarth-Gate achieves state-of-the-art performance on 16 out of 18 cross-domain benchmarks for RS semantic segmentation.

24.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-08

Assessing the inference of single-cell phylogenies and population dynamics from CRISPR lineage recordings

by Julia Pilarski, Tanja Stadler, Sophie Seidel Multicellular organisms develop from a single cell by repeated rounds of cell division, differentiation, and death, which can be represented as a single-cell phylogenetic tree. Genetic lineage tracing allows us to investigate this development by tracking the ancestry of individual cells as populations grow and change over time. However, accurate reconstruction of the cell phylogeny and quantification of the corresponding phylodynamic parameters – cell division, differentiation, and death rates – from this tracking data remains challenging and needs to be systematically evaluated. We perform simulations and assess, using the Bayesian framework, the joint inference of time-scaled cell phylogenies and phylodynamic parameters from CRISPR lineage recordings with random or sequential edits. Principally, we characterize the inference improvements as the recorder capacity increases. We observe more accurate phylogenetic reconstruction from sequential compared to random recordings, but no substantial improvement in phylodynamic inference when using the additional information contained in the order of edits. Overall, we find that CRISPR lineage recordings carry a strong signal on the rates of cell division when appropriate models are used. However, we detect biases in the inferred rates of cell division and death under phylodynamic model misspecification, i.e., when fitting classic memoryless birth-death processes to synchronous cell divisions. Moreover, for scenarios when cells differentiate into distinct types, we demonstrate that Bayesian phylodynamic analysis of sparse end-point measurements can resolve these cell differentiation trajectories by lineage and time. Under prototypical dynamics, we recover cell type-specific division and death rates, and cell type transition rates in over 80% of simulations. Overall, this simulation study explores how much information on cellular development can be extracted from state-of-the-art genetic lineage tracing data using phylogenetic and phylodynamic methodology.

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

PLAIground: SLO-Driven Runtime Model Selection for Compound AI Systems in the Edge-Cloud-Space Continuum

arXiv:2606.14356v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Applications in the 3D Computing Continuum, which unifies edge, cloud, and space, require combining multiple AI tasks such as object detection, time-series analytics, and natural language processing into Compound AI systems. These systems must satisfy stringent Service Level Objectives (SLOs) on accuracy, latency, and cost. A key mechanism for maintaining SLO compliance of Compound AI systems is runtime model selection, where AI models are dynamically switched for each workflow task. However, existing distributed and compound AI frameworks do not natively support runtime model selection. We present PLAIground, a framework that enables runtime model selection for Compound AI systems. PLAIground introduces Compoundable AI Model (CAIM) abstraction, which decouples task semantics from AI model implementations via Task and Data Contracts, enabling model switching without workflow changes. Additionally, PLAIground introduces Pixie, an SLO-driven runtime model selection algorithm, which dynamically selects the most suitable model for each task during execution. Our evaluation on two realistic Compound AI workflows demonstrates that Pixie achieves up to 91.3% accuracy while maintaining SLO compliance where fixed-model strategies either violate cost and latency budgets up to 21x or miss accuracy targets by 4%.