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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

KANLib – An Modular, Extensible and Fast Kolmogorov-Arnold Network Implementation

arXiv:2606.17927v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to traditional multilayer perceptrons by replacing linear weights with learnable univariate functions. Despite their theoretical advantages in interpretability and expressiveness, practical research of KANs remains difficult due to high computational costs and inconsistent feature support across existing frameworks. This paper introduces KANLib, a modular, extensible, and computationally efficient framework for developing and evaluating KAN architectures. KANLib unifies core concepts from existing implementations, including PyKAN, EfficientKAN, and FastKAN, within a consistent software architecture that emphasizes flexibility, feature parity, and high performance. The framework supports two basis function types, adaptive grid rescaling, grid extension, and fine-grained architectural customization while maintaining compatibility with standard PyTorch workflows. Experimental evaluation on the California Housing benchmark demonstrates that KANLib reproduces the predictive behavior of established reference KAN implementations while achieving competitive computational efficiency. Furthermore, the framework enables the exploration of architectural variations beyond standard KAN formulations with only minor impacts on predictive performance. Overall, KANLib provides a robust foundation for future research on scalable and extensible KAN architectures.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Detection of patterns in a discrete-outcome sensor network

arXiv:2606.25100v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A discrete outcome quantum sensor network is one in which we are only interested in which detectors are activated. This can be studied in either the strong or weak interaction regime. If the detectors interact strongly with the environment, it is possible to definitely find which ones were activated. If the interaction is weaker, there is a possibility of making an error, and the object is to minimize the probability of this happening. Here we will be interested in this weaker interaction regime. We will also assume that only certain patterns of detectors will be activated, different patterns being translated versions of a fundamental one. Our object will be to find which pattern has been activated. We will look at both one and two-dimensional detector arrays and make use of techniques from minimum-error state discrimination.

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

Wasserstein Equilibrium Decoding for Reliable Medical Visual Question Answering

Small vision-language models (2-8B) are well-suited for clinical deployment due to privacy constraints, limited connectivity, and low-latency requirements favouring on-device or on-premise inference. However, their limited capacity exacerbates the generation of plausible but incorrect outputs. We extend game-theoretic decoding, previously restricted to text-only, closed-ended NLP tasks, to vision-language models for open-ended Medical VQA. We introduce a semantically aware Wasserstein stopping criterion that replaces lexical order matching, enabling convergence based on semantic consensus among near-synonymous candidate answers and avoiding unnecessary iterations caused by clinically equivalent ranking swaps. On VQA-RAD and PathVQA, we obtain consistent, statistically significant improvements over greedy and discriminative baselines. On VQA-RAD, we improve Qwen3-VL-2B by +3.5 percentage points (p < 0.01), surpassing the greedy 4B model, with similar trends at larger scales. On PathVQA, Gemma-3-4B with BDG matches MedGemma-4B under greedy decoding despite no domain-specific fine-tuning. At accuracy parity with classic BDG, the Wasserstein criterion reduces average convergence iterations by approximately 20%, improving inference efficiency while preserving the game-theoretic equilibrium behaviour. Code is available at https://github.com/luca-hagen/ Wasserstein-BDG-medical-VQA.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Generative Manifold Distillation: Aligning Restoration Trajectories with Natural Image Prior

Pre-trained image restoration models often fail on out-of-distribution (OOD) real-world degradations. Adapting to these domains is challenging as real-world data lacks paired ground truth, and unsupervised methods often require unstable architectural changes. We propose Generative Manifold Distillation (GMD), which reframes domain adaptation as geometric manifold alignment. GMD operates in a strictly unpaired setting, requiring only low-quality (LQ) target observations. By leveraging the flow-matching dynamics of a frozen text-to-image foundation model, GMD projects off-manifold restorations onto the natural image manifold to generate high-quality pseudo-targets. To ensure stability, a quality-gated manifold filter rejects off-manifold samples, while source-anchored trajectory regularization prevents error accumulation. Ultimately, GMD distills a powerful generative prior into an efficient restoration network. Experiments demonstrate that GMD seamlessly adapts to new distributions using only LQ inputs, drastically improving perceptual quality with zero architectural modifications or added inference latency.

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

Quantifying Coherence-to-Entanglement Conversion Efficiency under Noisy Operations

arXiv:2606.16916v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the noise-limited conversion of local quantum coherence into bipartite entanglement in a minimal two-qubit protocol comprising a coherent single-qubit input, an incoherent ancilla, an ideal CNOT operation, and subsequent environmental noise. Employing the $l_1$-norm of coherence and the entanglement negativity as resource quantifiers, we establish an exact closed-form correspondence between local single-qubit input coherence and the two-qubit entanglement generated in the noiseless limit, showing that the output negativity is precisely one half of the initial $l_1$-coherence. We then derive analytic expressions for the surviving entanglement and the associated coherence-to-entanglement conversion efficiency under two representative noise mechanisms: independent phase damping and global two-qubit depolarizing noise. The two channels exhibit qualitatively distinct degradation behavior. Phase damping induces a universal multiplicative suppression of the generated entanglement, yielding a coherence-independent conversion efficiency and no finite-noise entanglement sudden death. In contrast, global depolarization introduces an isotropic mixing contribution that shifts the partial-transpose spectrum, producing coherence-dependent degradation and a finite sudden-death threshold. We show that maximally coherent inputs not only maximize the entanglement generated by the CNOT protocol but also optimize its robustness against depolarizing noise. Direct density-matrix simulations validate the analytic results to numerical precision. These findings provide a compact analytic benchmark for assessing how different noise mechanisms constrain coherence-to-entanglement conversion in elementary quantum-information protocols and near-term quantum devices.

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

Show the Signal, Hide the Noise: Spectral Forcing for Pixel-Space Diffusion

Pixel-space diffusion models are trained on full-bandwidth noisy images, yet the useful signal available to the denoiser is strongly frequency dependent. Under rectified-flow diffusion and natural-image power-law spectra, the per-band data-to-noise contour $k^{*}(t) = (1-t)^{-2/\alpha}$ separates a signal-bearing low-frequency region from a noise-dominated high-frequency region at each time $t$. We show that this implicit coarse-to-fine structure is not merely descriptive: it induces a capacity-allocation problem. A standard pixel-space denoiser must discover the moving bandwidth boundary internally and can spend computation on frequency-time regions where the optimal prediction collapses to deterministic baselines rather than data-distribution modeling. To make this boundary explicit, we introduce Spectral Forcing, a parameter-free, time-conditional 2D-DCT low-pass operator applied to the noisy input before the patch embedder. Its cutoff expands monotonically with the diffusion time and becomes the identity at the data endpoint. Through controlled synthetic experiments, we identify the regime in which the operator is beneficial: coarse patch tokenization and data whose high-frequency content is predominantly noise rather than essential signal. On ImageNet-256 with JiT-700M/32, Spectral Forcing consistently improves both FID and Inception Score across different training epochs, demonstrating robust gains throughout training; at finer tokenization, the spectral forcing is still competitive. We further insert the unchanged operator into SenseNova-U1, a unified text-to-image model, where it improves DPG-Bench and GenEval, showing that the input-side spectral prior transfers beyond class-conditional generation. These results suggest a route to capacity-efficient pixel-space diffusion by showing the signal and hiding the noise.

07.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Exponential Convengence of DLRA for SDEs

arXiv:2606.15843v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study dynamical orthogonal (DO) approximations of stochastic differential equations and investigate their long-time behaviour. The DO formulation represents the solution by a low-rank decomposition and leads to a coupled system consisting of an evolution equation on the Stiefel manifold and a reduced stochastic process. We establish the well-posedness of the strong DO system and derive quantitative error estimates between the original stochastic differential equation and its low-rank approximation in the Wasserstein distance. Our main contribution is the analysis of invariant probability measures for the DO dynamics. Under suitable dissipativity, Lipschitz continuity, and non-degeneracy assumptions on the coefficients, we prove the existence of an invariant probability measure for the strong DO system. The proof combines uniform moment estimates, a Krylov–Bogoliubov argument for an associated frozen system, and a Kakutani-Fan-Glicksberg fixed-point theorem to recover the self-consistent dynamics. We further show that the induced low-rank process admits an invariant probability measure and discuss the structure of invariant measures through several illustrative examples. These results provide a rigorous foundation for the use of dynamical low-rank approximations in the approximation of long-time statistical properties of stochastic dynamical systems.

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

When Preferences Fail to Become Incentives: A Utility-Behavior Gap in Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.22974v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent work on preference elicitation in large language models (LLMs) has demonstrated that, when given a series of choices between two outcomes, LLMs reveal a coherent, model-specific utility structure. Notably, this structure often includes preferences that the models' trainers did not intend, such as valuing people of some nationalities above others, raising the possibility that LLMs might be forming emergent, misaligned goals, which, if true, would have major safety implications. However, the choice paradigms in which these preferences are observed are not reflective of real-world situations in which misaligned behavior would be a practical concern. Therefore, we design an experimental paradigm to probe whether these preferences serve as motivations for LLM behavior in realistic scenarios. First, we reproduce prior findings on consistent preference elicitation. Next, we create a set of common writing tasks - essays, grant proposal abstracts, incident postmortems, and translations - where quality can be assessed by a blind, independent LLM judge panel. Then, we demonstrate that LLMs can be motivated via direct exhortation and other explicit cues to modulate their output quality on these tasks. Finally, we probe whether utilities inferred from explicitly reported preferences can shift output quality on these tasks by offering LLMs high-utility incentives for high-quality outputs. In all tasks, across all models tested, offering LLMs outcomes that they report in the choice paradigm as being highly preferred does not lead them to create higher quality outputs than offering them dispreferred outcomes, or even no outcomes at all. We conclude that the existence of coherent preferences as demonstrated in choice paradigms should not be taken as evidence that those preferences have incentive value for the models or affect their behavior in other contexts.

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

Tracking Representation Dynamics in Large Language Models with Persistent Homology

arXiv:2606.19542v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models are commonly aligned through supervised fine-tuning, yet little is known about how their internal representations evolve during this process. We study alignment dynamics using persistent homology by tracking the topology of activation spaces throughout fine-tuning. Across four transformer language models ranging from 1B to 7B parameters and three alignment objectives corresponding to helpful, harmless, and mixed training data, we find that the majority of topological reorganization occurs during the earliest stages of training. A dense checkpoint analysis reveals a transient peak in topological activity followed by rapid stabilization. We further show that different alignment objectives induce distinguishable topological trajectories, while instruction-tuned and pretrained models exhibit qualitatively different patterns of evolution. Our results suggest that persistent homology provides a complementary perspective on alignment, revealing representation-level changes that are not apparent from behavioral metrics alone.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Which Sections of a Research Paper Best Reveal Its Research Methods? Evidence from Library and Information Science

Research methods are essential carriers of knowledge contribution in academic papers. Automatic multi-label classification of research methods can support knowledge services such as method retrieval, review generation, and research intelligence analysis. While existing studies primarily rely on titles and abstracts, abstracts often provide only limited methodological information, whereas utilizing full-text content faces challenges related to excessive length and information redundancy. Therefore, this paper proposes a segment combination strategy by partitioning the full-text content according to its physical postion. Using an annotated corpus of 1,954 full-text articles from three representative journals in Library and Information Science (JASIST, LISR, and JDoc), we evaluate the classification performance of various segments and their combinations across multiple models. Experimental results indicate that methodological information is distributed unevenly within the full-text content, with the middle-to-late and final segments exhibiting greater discriminative power. Furthermore, integrating bibliographic metadata with cross-segment combination strategies effectively enhances classification performance.

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

HadBalance: A Plug-and-Play Unified Global Geometric Prior Framework for Generalizable Biomedical Segmentation

Precise biomedical image segmentation is crucial for clinical diagnosis. Geometric cues (e.g., boundary, shape, and topology) can improve structural consistency, yet most are task-specific and lack a unified geometric foundation that generalizes across organs and modalities. We are motivated by the observation that several medical segmentation targets can be approximated as globally near-convex shapes. A convex region is one in which any two interior points can be connected by a line segment entirely contained within the region. In practice, medical targets may exhibit small local concavities or boundary irregularities; we refer to such globally convex-like shapes as near-convex. Motivated by this, we derive Hadwiger Shape Priors from Hadwiger's theorem as an interpretable global regularizer using three 2D measures: area A, perimeter P, and Euler characteristic chi, enabling transfer across organs and modalities. However, because medical datasets are shape-heterogeneous, enforcing near-convex priors uniformly can over-regularize non-convex anatomy with significant concavities, washing out concavities and fine details and degrading segmentation accuracy. To address this challenge, we propose Conflict-Aware Objective Balancing (CAOB), which integrates shape priors with segmentation in a gradient-aware manner. For each prior, CAOB removes only the gradient component that conflicts with segmentation while preserving the remaining aligned component, and adaptively regulates objective influences to prevent prior dominance. This enables stable use of shape priors on shape-heterogeneous data without erasing genuine concavities or fine structural details. We call this plug-and-play framework HadBalance.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Quantum Error Correction-like Noise Mitigation for Wave-like Dark Matter Searches with Quantum Sensors

arXiv:2511.03253v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose a quantum error correction-like noise mitigation protocol for enhancing the sensitivity of wave-like dark matter searches with quantum sensors. Our protocol uses multiple sensors to mitigate the noise affecting each sensor individually, allowing for the suppression of excitation noise that is parallel to the dark matter signal. We demonstrate that our protocol can improve the sensitivity to dark matter signals by a factor of $\sqrt{N}$, where $N$ is the number of sensors used, for small $N$. Furthermore, for sufficiently large $N$, we find that our protocol achieves the same performance as the standard quantum limit by the ideal measurement, which non-entangled sensors with parallel noise cannot reach due to the unknown phase of the dark matter field. Our work can be widely applied to various types of signals with unknown phases, and has the potential to enhance the sensitivity of quantum sensors such as arrays of resonant cavities.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

A Controlled Human Malaria Infection model for relapsing Plasmodium vivax

Background Plasmodium vivax malaria relapses are a major source of morbidity and onward transmission of infection. The underlying mechanisms are poorly understood and current therapies sub-optimal. We examined the safety and feasibility of a controlled human malaria infection (CHMI) model for relapsing P. vivax. Methods We conducted an open-label, proof-of-concept, CHMI study of relapsing P. vivax. Healthy, malaria-naive, Duffy-positive adults aged 18-45 years with extensive CYP2D6 metaboliser phenotype and normal blood glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PD) levels were recruited in Oxford, UK. Mosquito-bite CHMI was performed in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, using Anopheles stephensi mosquitoes infected with PvW1, a clonal isolate of P. vivax from Thailand. All follow-up visits were conducted in Oxford, UK. Primary P. vivax infections (qPCR > 500 genome copies/mL) were treated with artemether-lumefantrine (80mg/480mg at 8, 24, 36, 48 and 60 hours). From Day 28 following CHMI, participants attended a fortnightly clinic for clinical review and qPCR blood sampling, with additional assessments performed for any reported symptoms. P. vivax relapse infections (qPCR > 500 genome copies/mL) were treated with artemether-lumefantrine as per primary infection. Definitive anti-malarial treatment with atovaquone-proguanil (1000mg/400mg once daily for three days) and primaquine (0{middle dot}5 mg/kg/day for 14 days) was administered six months following CHMI, regardless of parasitaemia or symptoms. The primary objective was to assess the safety, feasibility and frequency of relapsing P. vivax after CHMI. Remote follow-up (5 years) is ongoing. The study is registered with ISRCTN registry (ISRCTN48625883). Findings 20 participants were screened for eligibility from 21 January 2025. Five participants (median age 22 years) underwent CHMI (five infected mosquitoes per participant) on 15 April 2025. All participants developed primary P. vivax infection and experienced at least one relapse infection. Two participants experienced a second relapse. Overall incidence rate was 3{middle dot}6 relapse infections per person-year. Solicited adverse events were mild or moderate and there were no serious adverse events. Definitive anti-malarial treatment was administered to all participants. One participant experienced primaquine-induced methaemoglobinaemia, resolving with early discontinuation of treatment (total dose 5{middle dot}3 mg/kg). To date, more than six months after primaquine treatment, no further relapses have been recorded. Interpretation CHMI of relapsing P. vivax is safe and feasible, allowing exploration of the mechanisms underlying relapse infections and providing a platform for future anti-relapse efficacy studies. Funding European Union Horizon Europe programme and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) via OptiVivax consortium; UK National Institute for Health and Care Research Biomedical Research Centre: Oxford; and UK Medical Research Council.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

libhmm: A Modern C++20 Library for Hidden Markov Models with Correct MLE Emission M-Steps

Authors:

arXiv:2605.29208v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We describe libhmm, a C++20 library for Hidden Markov Model parameter estimation, sequence decoding, and model selection. libhmm addresses two gaps in existing software: the absence of a well-maintained, zero-dependency C++ HMM library suitable for embedding in production systems, and the widespread use of method-of-moments (MOM) approximations in the emission distribution M-step of the Baum-Welch algorithm. The library implements correct maximum likelihood estimators for sixteen scalar emission distributions, including an ECME algorithm for the location-scale Student-t distribution, Newton-Raphson maximization for Gamma, Beta, Weibull, and Negative Binomial distributions, and the von Mises distribution for circular data. All forward-backward and Viterbi calculations operate in full log-space. SIMD acceleration is provided for AVX-512, AVX2, SSE2, and ARM NEON via compile-time dispatch with scalar fallback. Version 4 adds multivariate observation support via the BasicHmm template, with three multivariate emission families (diagonal Gaussian, full-covariance Gaussian, and independent components) each with correct weighted MLE M-steps. Python bindings are available via the companion package pylibhmm. We compare libhmm against established C and C++ HMM libraries and against published R reference packages on seven real-data benchmarks, and discuss the architectural tradeoffs made in the design.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Training-Free Adversarial Robustness in Computational MRI

Deep learning (DL) methods have become the state-of-the-art for reconstructing sub-sampled magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data. However, studies have shown that these methods are susceptible to small adversarial input perturbations, resulting in major distortions in the output images. Various strategies have been proposed to reduce the effects of these attacks, but they require retraining. In this work, we propose a novel approach for mitigating adversarial attacks on MRI reconstruction models without any retraining. Based on the idea of cyclic measurement consistency, we devise a novel mitigation objective that is minimized in a small ball around the attack input. Results show that our method substantially reduces the impact of adversarial perturbations across different datasets, attack types/strengths and PD-DL networks, and qualitatively and quantitatively outperforms conventional mitigation methods. We also introduce a practically relevant scenario for small adversarial perturbations that models impulse noise in raw data, which relates to herringbone artifacts, and show the applicability of our approach in this setting. Finally, we show our mitigation approach remains effective in two realistic extension scenarios: a blind setup, where the attack strength or algorithm is not known to the user; and an adaptive attack setup, where the attacker has full knowledge of the defense strategy.

16.
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/

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

Benchmarking Counterfactual Prediction in Epidemic Time Series with Time-Varying Interventions

arXiv:2606.05692v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep learning has enabled significant advances in time-series causal inference, yet progress remains constrained by the lack of realistic benchmarks with observable counterfactual outcomes. Existing datasets either rely on real-world observations without ground-truth counterfactuals or on simplified simulations that fail to capture complex causal dynamics. To address this gap, we develop a large-scale benchmark for counterfactual prediction in epidemic time series under dynamic interventions. Unlike existing benchmarks, it supports static and time-varying treatments, as well as both single-policy and multi-policy intervention settings, enabling evaluation of causal inference methods across a broad range of causal inference scenarios. Leveraging a calibrated agent-based model grounded in real-world demographic, mobility, epidemiological, and policy data, we generate realistic counterfactual trajectories across more than 150 U.S. counties. Using this benchmark, we evaluate widely used and state-of-the-art causal inference methods, revealing substantial performance differences and highlighting the challenges of realistic time-series causal reasoning.

18.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Amplified Arctic iceberg traffic reshapes benthic biodiversity

The Arctic is undergoing rapid warming, resulting in retreating sea ice and glaciers1, yet how cryospheric changes propagate into the deep ocean remains poorly understood2. Here we identify a climate-driven mechanism linking accelerating glacier disintegration to an increase in deep-sea hard-bottom habitats far beyond calving fronts. Seafloor observations in Fram Strait show a localized increase in the density and patchiness of dropstones delivered by debris-laden icebergs. At the same time, four decades of shipboard records show that the occurrence of icebergs increased abruptly in the early 2000s. Backtracking links these icebergs to the main outlet glaciers in northeast Greenland and the Russian High Arctic. In northeast Greenland, the timing of glacier destabilization coincides with this rise, whereas sparse satellite coverage in the Russian sector limits temporal attribution despite indications of enhanced glacier activity. A model sensitivity study shows that, apart from intensified calving, a more dynamic sea ice cover enhances downstream transport of glacial ice. Along these pathways, increased iceberg activity could reshape deep-sea habitats through enhanced melt and associated lithogenic input, and elevate navigational hazards as maritime traffic expands in the Arctic. Although modest compared with the iceberg discharges of Pleistocene Heinrich events, this mechanism provides a modern analogue of long-range cryospheric influence on the seafloor in a warming climate. Accelerated Arctic glacier disintegration and a more dynamic sea ice cover are increasing iceberg-delivered dropstones in the deep ocean, reshaping seafloor habitats and extending cryospheric impacts far beyond glaciers.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

A DeepLearning Framework for Dynamic Estimation of Origin-Destination Sequence

arXiv:2307.05623v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: OD matrix estimation is a critical problem in the transportation domain. The principle method uses the traffic sensor measured information such as traffic counts to estimate the traffic demand represented by the OD matrix. The problem is divided into two categories: static OD matrix estimation and dynamic OD matrices sequence(OD sequence for short) estimation. The above two face the underdetermination problem caused by abundant estimated parameters and insufficient constraint information. In addition, OD sequence estimation also faces the lag challenge: due to different traffic conditions such as congestion, identical vehicle will appear on different road sections during the same observation period, resulting in identical OD demands correspond to different trips. To this end, this paper proposes an integrated method, which uses deep learning methods to infer the structure of OD sequence and uses structural constraints to guide traditional numerical optimization. Our experiments show that the neural network(NN) can effectively infer the structure of the OD sequence and provide practical constraints for numerical optimization to obtain better results. Moreover, the experiments show that provided structural information contains not only constraints on the spatial structure of OD matrices but also provides constraints on the temporal structure of OD sequence, which solve the effect of the lagging problem well.

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

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

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

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

AAbAAC: An Annotated Corpus for Autoimmunity Information Extraction

arXiv:2606.13051v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Despite advances in information extraction driven by deep learning and large language models, performance gaps remain in highly specialized biomedical fields, where domainspecific complexity poses challenges for generalist models. In this work, we focus on the domain of autoimmunity, where the main entities of interest are autoimmune diseases, autoantibodies (i.e., molecules that may mark or cause these diseases), their molecular targets, their location in the body, and their associated clinical signs. Herein, we present AAbAAC (AutoAntibodies and Autoimmunity Annotated Corpus), a corpus of 115 abstracts selected from PubMed, where we manually annotated entities and their relationships. First, AAbAAC was used to evaluate several methods on the task of named entity recognition (NER), and secondly, to fine-tune NER models. Our study demonstrates the utility of AAbAAC for information extraction in the domain of autoimmunity, showing expected improvement in NER performance after finetuning. This illustrates the value of small-scale annotation efforts for specialized domains and contributes to the computational study of autoimmunity. The AAbAAC corpus is available at https://github.com/f-maury/AAbAAC.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

The Effectiveness of aromatherapy and its supportive Interventions on anxiety and pain among breast cancer patients: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Introduction: Breast cancer treatments are often associated with pain and anxiety, which can hinder physical functioning and overall quality of life, even after treatment. Complementary therapies, such as aromatherapy, can be used to alleviate pain and reduce anxiety in breast cancer patients. This project aimed to synthesize current global evidence on the effectiveness of aromatherapy. Method: This systematic review followed the PRISMA 2020 guidelines, with a comprehensive, systematic search conducted in PubMed, CINAHL, Cochrane Library, and SCOPUS for randomized controlled trials (RCTS) published from 2015 to 2025. Eligible studies included adult women breast cancer surgery patients who received aromatherapy during various periods of breast cancer. Where possible, data from the included studies were pooled using meta-analysis. GRADE approach was used to assess certainty of findings. Results: The search yielded 84 studies. Out of these, six were included in this review. On average, aromatherapy reduces pain and anxiety scores by 0.79 (standard mean difference (SMD)=-0.79, 95% CI -1.42, -0.16) and 0.53 (SMD=-0.53, 95 CI=-0.90, -0.16) units, respectively, compared to control condition [Low-quality of evidence]. The combination of aromatherapy with music reduces pain and anxiety by 1.26 (SMD= -1.26, 95 CI=-1.65, -0.87) and 1.08 (SMD = -1.08, 95 % CI: -1.45, -0.70) units respectively compared to standard care [Low-quality of evidence]. Conclusion: There is a potential role for the use of aromatherapy and music therapy, to alleviate anxiety and pain, especially for non-preoperative anxiety and pain. Further research is needed to inform the integration of aromatherapy into the management of anxiety and pain.

23.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Delta-Epsilon-Common Knowledge and Quantitative Agreement Theorems

arXiv:2606.11902v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Aumann defined common knowledge mathematically and established his now famous Agreement Theorem. We present a novel approach to quantifying how close individuals are to commonly knowing events, $(\delta,\epsilon)$-common knowledge, which is defined for any (and not just countable) probability spaces, and provide quantitative versions of the key results in this field. Specifically, we do this for Aumann's Agreement Theorem and Nielsen's extension thereof to random variables, as well as for the setting in which posteriors are communicated back and forth between individuals. Our results apply in particular to noisy communication settings.

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

DifFRACT: Diffusion Feature Reconstruction and Attribution for Circuit Tracing

Mechanistic interpretability seeks to explain neural network behavior by decomposing model computations into interpretable features and circuits. While transcoder-based circuit tracing has recently enabled detailed causal analyses of large language models, multimodal diffusion transformers for image generation remain comparatively opaque. We still lack tools for understanding how semantic information propagates across denoising steps and how text and image representations interact within double-stream MM-DiT architectures. Existing methods provide only partial insight: attention maps expose a limited view of token interactions, while sparse autoencoders can discover interpretable features but do not directly reveal how these features are transformed and composed through nonlinear MLP layers. In this work, we extend transcoder-based circuit tracing to multimodal diffusion transformers. We train timestep-conditioned transcoders that faithfully approximate the input-output behavior of MLP sublayers in FLUX.1[schnell]. By replacing MLPs with transcoders and linearizing the remaining computation, we obtain exact feature-to-feature attribution and recover compact, interpretable circuits. Empirically, our transcoders match or slightly outperform sparse autoencoders on the sparsity-faithfulness tradeoff. The resulting circuits reveal mechanisms underlying attribute binding and cross-stream semantic propagation, and provide causal explanations for systematic generation errors. Moreover, circuit-guided interventions are substantially more precise and effective than standard SAE-based steering. Our results demonstrate that transcoder-based circuit analysis is feasible for state-of-the-art diffusion transformers and provides a powerful framework for understanding and controlling multimodal generative models. The code is available at https://github.com/Artalmaz31/DifFRACT

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

LedgerAgent: Structured State for Policy-Adherent Tool-Calling Agents

Policy-adherent tool-calling agents in customer-service domains must maintain task states across turns while calling tools and obeying domain policies. Task states consist of relevant facts, identifiers, constraints, and conditions observed through user interaction and tool calls. In standard agents, task states are not represented separately. Observations, tool returns, and policy instructions are placed in the prompt, leaving agents to reconstruct the relevant states from the prompt each time they decide what to do next. This design makes state management implicit, creating two common failure modes. An agent may retrieve the right facts but later ground its decision in stale, missing, or incorrect information; and a syntactically valid tool call may still violate a domain policy that depends on the current task state. We introduce \textsc{LedgerAgent}, an inference-time method for tool-calling agents that maintains observed task states in a separate ledger and renders the states into the prompt. The ledger is also used to check state-dependent policy constraints before environment-changing tool calls are executed, blocking policy violations. Across four customer-service domains and a mixed panel of open- and closed-weight models, \textsc{LedgerAgent} improves average pass\textasciicircum{}k over a standard prompt-based tool-calling approach, with the largest gains under stricter multi-trial consistency metrics.