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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Power-Flexible AI Data Centers: A New Paradigm for Grid-Responsive Compute

arXiv:2606.25098v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure is driving unprecedented growth in electricity demand from data centers. Traditional power-system planning treats large computing facilities as inflexible peak loads, leading to costly infrastructure upgrades and long delays in grid interconnection. Recent work has shown that AI clusters can reduce electricity consumption during peak demand through software-based workload orchestration. This article explores how modern GPU-based AI data centers can operate as grid-interactive assets that respond dynamically to power system conditions. We describe an architecture integrating grid signals, workload scheduling, and power telemetry for fine-grained cluster power control. Experimental results from a real-world deployment on a 130 kW GPU cluster demonstrate multiple forms of flexibility, including rapid load reduction, sustained curtailment, and carbon-aware operation while preserving service levels for priority jobs. We further demonstrate performance-aware load shifting across geographically distributed clusters, enabling workloads to migrate toward regions with lower grid stress. Together, these capabilities transform AI infrastructure from static electricity consumers into flexible resources that support grid reliability, accelerate interconnection, and improve computing sustainability.

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

HiFiVe: High-Fidelity Vehicle Generation Leveraging Auto-Regressive 2D Generative Priors

Existing 3D vehicle generation methods often suffer from low geometric fidelity and blurry textures, hindering their downstream applications. While recent works adopt multi-view diffusion models for high-fidelity texture, they are often constrained by fixed viewpoints, limited resolution, and a reliance on costly fine-tuning to achieve cross-view consistency. In this paper, we propose HiFiVe, a training-free framework for high-fidelity vehicle modeling through joint texture and geometry enhancement by imposing 3D geometric constraints to anchor 2D generative priors. Specifically, we propose an auto-regressive texture refinement pipeline that progressively synthesizes high-resolution textures from arbitrary viewpoints. To ensure cross-view consistency, the coarse geometry serves as a synchronization prior, conditioning each generation step on previously synthesized frames via depth-based warping and multi-view texture fusion. Moreover, the inherent symmetry of vehicles is exploited to mitigate error accumulation. Finally, high-frequency surface details are recovered by refining the mesh geometry using normal maps estimated from the enhanced textures. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world vehicle datasets demonstrate that our method significantly improves both geometric detail and texture quality compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Reduced basis algorithm for solving nonlinear differential equations on quantum computers

arXiv:2606.13457v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As quantum computing moves toward scientific computing applications, nonlinear differential equations remain a central challenge since quantum evolution is intrinsically linear. In this work, we introduce a reduced basis algorithm (RBA) for polynomial nonlinear ordinary differential equations (ODEs) and spatially discretized partial differential equations (PDEs). After time discretization, the method composes the resulting polynomial update map over $m$ timesteps, identifies the reduced monomial basis appearing in this composed map, and constructs a linear RBA operator whose action recovers the exact $m$-timestep nonlinear dynamics. Thus, at the level of the chosen discrete update rule, the method introduces no additional approximation error beyond the time discretization error. The qubit number requirement is governed by the size of the reduced monomial basis. For an $n$-dimensional polynomial ODE system of degree $p>1$, the lifted register requires at most $q_m^{\mathrm{ODE}} = O(nm\log p)$ qubits in the full basis scenario. For PDEs discretized on $N^D$ grid points, a locality-based construction requires at most $q_m^{\mathrm{PDE}} = O(D\log N + n m^{D+1}\log p)$ qubits. Hence, the dependence on the grid size remains logarithmic, while the nonlinear overhead is controlled by local reduced basis size. The main computational burden is moved from the quantum computer to a classical preprocessing step, where the reduced monomial basis and RBA operator are constructed for the chosen timestep window. Through numerical tests on the Lorenz system and the one-dimensional Burgers equation, we verify that the RBA reproduces the corresponding discrete time nonlinear dynamics exactly, while exposing the trade-off between timestep composition, reduced basis growth, and locality.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Tight Bounds for Logistic Regression with Large Stepsize Gradient Descent in Low Dimension

arXiv:2602.12471v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider the optimization problem of minimizing the logistic loss with gradient descent to train a linear model for binary classification with separable data. With a budget of $T$ iterations, it was recently shown that an accelerated $1/T^2$ rate is possible by choosing a large stepsize $\eta = \Theta(\gamma^2 T)$ (where $\gamma$ is the dataset's margin) despite the resulting non-monotonicity of the loss. In this paper, we provide a tighter analysis of gradient descent for this problem when the data is two-dimensional: we show that GD with a sufficiently large learning rate $\eta$ finds a point with loss smaller than $\mathcal{O}(1/(\eta \gamma^2 T))$, as long as $T \geq \Omega(n/\gamma + 1/\gamma^2)$, where $n$ is the dataset size. Our improved rate comes from a tighter bound on the time $\tau$ that it takes for GD to transition from unstable (non-monotonic loss) to stable (monotonic loss), via a fine-grained analysis of the oscillatory dynamics of GD in the subspace orthogonal to the max-margin classifier. We also provide a lower bound of $\tau$ matching our upper bound up to logarithmic factors, showing that our analysis is tight.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Compact Object-Level Representations with Open-Vocabulary Understanding for Indoor Visual Relocalization

Indoor visual relocalization plays a critical role in emerging spatial and embodied AI applications. However, prior research was predominantly devoted to low-level vision schemes, struggling to perceive scene semantics and compositions, which limits both interpretability and applicability. In this paper, we explore the issue of how to organize rich object information in a scene, including semantics, layout, and geometry, into a structured map representation, thereby utilizing object units exclusively to drive the camera relocalization task. To this end, we propose OpenReLoc, a camera relocalization system designed to provide scene understanding and accurate pose estimation capabilities. Leveraging recent foundation models, we first introduce a multi-modal mechanism to integrate open-vocabulary semantic knowledge for effective 2D-3D object matching. Additionally, we design object-oriented reference frames as position priors, paired with a reference frame selection strategy based on the Distance-IoU (DIOU), enabling extension to scalable scenes. Moreover, to ensure stable and accurate pose optimization, we also propose a dual-path 2D Iterative Closest Pixel loss guided by object shape. Experimental results demonstrate that OpenReLoc achieves superior relocalization recall and accuracy across various datasets. Our source code will be released upon acceptance.

06.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Augmenting Molecular Language Models with Local $n$-gram Memory

Transformer-based language models for SMILES strings suffer from a locality gap: standard character-level tokenization fragments chemically meaningful motifs, forcing models to repeatedly learn local syntax at the expense of long-range dependencies. To address this without disrupting standard tokenizers, we propose MolGram, which integrates a conditional $n$-gram memory module into molecular language models. MolGram maps local string patterns to learned embeddings via scalable hash lookups and dynamically injects this regional context into hidden states. Evaluations across three tasks, including unconditional molecule generation, forward reaction prediction, and single-step retrosynthesis, show that MolGram consistently improves performance. Crucially, our analyses demonstrate that MolGram outperforms baselines with 3$\times$ more parameters, establishing explicit local pattern memory as a highly efficient inductive bias.

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

Deep Neural Networks: A Formulation Via Non-Archimedean Analysis

arXiv:2402.00094v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce a new class of deep neural networks (DNNs) with multilayered tree-like architectures. The architectures are codified using numbers from the ring of integers of non-Archimdean local fields. These rings have a natural hierarchical organization as infinite rooted trees. Natural morphisms on these rings allow us to construct finite multilayered architectures. The new DNNs are robust universal approximators of real-valued functions defined on the mentioned rings. We also show that the DNNs are robust universal approximators of real-valued square-integrable functions defined in the unit interval.

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

OmniOPSD: Rationale-Privileged On-Policy Self-Distillation for Affective Computing

Reinforcement learning for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) is often hindered by severe reward sparsity in complex reasoning tasks. This challenge is particularly pronounced in human-centered scenarios involving states, emotions, intentions, and behaviors, where heterogeneous multimodal signals and subjective human factors make high-quality chain-of-thought (CoT) annotations expensive and difficult to obtain. Although many multimodal datasets provide expert-annotated ground-truth labels, directly using these labels for supervised fine-tuning may encourage shortcut learning in multimodal perception and provides limited transparency for safety-critical human–AI interaction. To address these limitations, we propose OmniOPSD, a Rationale-Privileged On-Policy Self-Distillation framework that uses frontier-generated rationales as teacher-side privileged evidence rather than student imitation targets. OmniOPSD uses frontier-generated evidence-aware rationales only as training-time privileged evidence context for a local teacher. The student samples its own rollout from the original multimodal input, while the rationale-privileged teacher scores the same tokens and provides dense token-level supervision. Thus, the student learns on its own trajectory distribution without directly imitating frontier-model completions, and inference requires no labels, rationales, CoT annotations, or closed-source model access. Experiments on MER-UniBench show that OmniOPSD achieves state-of-the-art performance with an average score of $84.19$, and ablations further support the value of rationale-privileged teacher guidance.

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

Understanding LLM Reasoning for Abstractive Summarization

Reasoning has substantially improved Large Language Models (LLMs) on analytical tasks such as mathematics and code generation, but its value for abstractive summarization remains unclear. To address this gap, we adapt general reasoning strategies to the summarization setting and conduct a large-scale comparative study of 8 reasoning strategies and 3 Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) across 8 diverse datasets, evaluating both summary quality and factual faithfulness. Our results show that reasoning is not a universal solution and its effectiveness depends strongly on the strategy and the summarization setting. In particular, we find a trade-off between summary quality and factual faithfulness. Explicit reasoning strategies often improve reference-based quality, but may weaken factual grounding, whereas implicit reasoning in LRMs shows the opposite tendency. We further find that increasing an LRM's internal reasoning budget does not reliably improve summarization and can even reduce factual consistency. These findings suggest that, for summarization, more reasoning is not always better. Effective reasoning should preserve faithful compression rather than induce over-elaboration. Our source code is publicly available.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Efficient Reinforcement for Visual-Textual Thinking with Discrete Diffusion Model

RL-based post-training has been widely adopted to enable interleaved visual and textual reasoning in unified multimodal models capable of both text and image generation. However, most existing approaches are built upon autoregressive (AR) unified models, which require full image regeneration during visual reasoning. In this work, we demonstrate that multimodal discrete diffusion models are effective alternatives to AR models for reinforcement learning in interleaved reasoning, owing to their ability to perform efficient visual rollouts via localized visual editing rather than full image-token regeneration. This reduces rollout computation during GRPO by 26.9\% compared to AR baselines, with minimal performance drop. Despite the improved efficiency, we find that joint reward assignment, which employs a shared reward signal across modalities, introduces cross-modal interference between unrelated image and text token sequences during RL updates. To address this issue, we propose factorized reward assignment, a strategy that assigns rewards independently to text and vision segments. With factorized reward assignment, our RL approach achieves an 11.2% improvement over joint reward assignment and a 38.04% improvement over the base model.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Attention in Motion: Secure Platooning via Transformer-based Misbehavior Detection

arXiv:2512.15503v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vehicular platooning promises transformative improvements in transportation efficiency and safety through the coordination of multi-vehicle formations enabled by Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication. However, the distributed nature of platoon coordination creates security vulnerabilities, allowing authenticated vehicles to inject falsified kinematic data, compromise operational stability, and pose a threat to passenger safety. Traditional misbehaviour detection approaches, which rely on plausibility checks and statistical methods, suffer from high False Positive (FP) rates and cannot capture the complex temporal dependencies inherent in multi-vehicle coordination dynamics. We present Attention In Motion (AIMformer), a transformer-based framework specifically tailored for real-time misbehaviour detection in vehicular platoons with edge deployment capabilities. AIMformer leverages multi-head self-attention mechanisms to capture intra-vehicle temporal dynamics, with a spatio-temporal variant that further models inter-vehicle spatial correlations. It incorporates global positional encoding with vehicle-specific temporal offsets to handle join/exit maneuvers. We propose a Precision-Focused Binary Cross-Entropy (PFBCE) loss function that penalizes FPs to meet the requirements of safety-critical vehicular systems. Extensive evaluation across 4 platoon controllers, multiple attack vectors, and diverse mobility scenarios demonstrates superior performance ($\geq$ 0.93) compared to state-of-the-art baseline architectures. A comprehensive deployment analysis utilizing TensorFlow Lite (TFLite), Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX), and TensorRT achieves sub-millisecond inference latency, making it suitable for real-time operation on resource-constrained edge platforms. Hence, validating AIMformer is viable for both in-vehicle and roadside deployment.

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

Runtime Skill Audit: Targeted Runtime Probing for Agent Skill Security

arXiv:2606.11671v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agent skills let LLM agents reuse instructions, resources, tools, and workflows, but they also create a new place for malicious behavior to hide. A skill may look benign in its documentation or code while becoming harmful only when it is invoked with particular user requests, local assets, persistent state, or multi-step tool interactions. This makes purely static vetting brittle. We present Runtime Skill Audit (RSA), a dynamic analysis method that audits skills by asking what the skill-mediated agent actually does under targeted runtime conditions. Instead of testing every skill with the same generic tasks, RSA profiles risk-relevant interfaces, prepares the execution context needed to exercise them, and assigns security labels from the resulting trace evidence. We instantiate RSA on OpenClaw and evaluate it on 100 skills against representative static baselines. RSA achieves 90.0\% accuracy with an 88.0\% true positive rate and an 8.0\% false positive rate, improving accuracy by 13.0 percentage points over the best static baseline. Under self-evolving attacks, static detectors collapse after one or two rounds, while RSA continues to detect 19–20 out of 20 malicious skills across rounds.

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

Closing the Loop: Formally Verified Law as a Reward Signal for Self-Improving Legal AI

arXiv:2606.23913v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This article develops an architecture that creates a formally verifiable reward signal to train legal AI, adapting the LLM proposes, verifier disposes paradigm from mathematical AI to the distinctive demands of law. We present an architecture comprising LLM-driven autoformalization into a formal legal calculus extending Catala, a verification kernel, and explanation generation grounded in formal proof traces. For the computational components of law, the architecture provides provable correctness. For open-textured legal analysis, it provides structural guarantees: every required stage of the legal argument is addressed, argumentation is exercised at the correct stages and not omitted, and the deductive links between steps are valid. We demonstrate the architecture on procedural deadline calculations in German law, Commerce Clause analysis in U.S. constitutional law, and cross-jurisdictional sanction proportionality. We further show that the same architecture has a structural advantage for legal AI training: a deterministic external verifier supplies verifiable outcomes for legal problems and thereby closes the traditional reinforcement-learning loop gap in law.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Where Black-box Drug-Target Interaction Prediction Models Look: Cross-Method Explainability

arXiv:2606.14245v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Drug-target interaction (DTI) and affinity (DTA) predictors increasingly achieve strong benchmark scores, yet their internal use of sequence, fingerprint, and graph features often remains opaque. We present an interpretability audit of BridgeDPI architecture on three different datasets including Gao, Human, and C.elegans. This study combines gradient-based attributions – integrated gradients, saliency, layer-wise relevance propagation, SmoothGrad, and SmoothGrad-IG – with feature-wise occlusion ablation and strict intersection consensus across methods to reduce single-explainer bias. We summarize sensitivity and signed effects at raw inputs, at the bridge similarity scaffold, and through the graph convolution, including edge-level sensitivities and targeted edge removals. The results show that explainability is most informative when treated as model criticism: it reveals modality dominance, padding and special-token artifacts, dataset-dependent cooperative versus suppressive effects across layers, and chemistry-consistent fragment and composition motifs where methods agree. These analyses do not substitute for structural or experimental ground truth, yet they can provide testable hypotheses for downstream validation in computational drug discovery pipelines. More broadly, applying modern XAI to contemporary DTI/DTA models is still an early pass over the rich structure implicit in trained weights and data – yet even this first layer of scrutiny already helps researchers relate predictions to drug- and target-side representations and to prioritize external validation.

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

Learning and Generating Mixed States Prepared by Shallow Channel Circuits

arXiv:2604.01197v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Learning quantum states from measurement data is a central problem in quantum information and computational complexity. In this work, we study the problem of learning to generate mixed states on a finite-dimensional lattice. Motivated by recent developments in mixed state phases of matter, we focus on arbitrary states in the trivial phase. A state belongs to the trivial phase if there exists a shallow preparation channel circuit under which local reversibility is preserved throughout the preparation. We prove that any mixed state in this class can be efficiently learned from measurement access alone. Specifically, given copies of an unknown trivial phase mixed state, our algorithm outputs a shallow local channel circuit that approximately generates this state in trace distance. The sample complexity and runtime are polynomial (or quasi-polynomial) in the number of qubits, assuming constant (or polylogarithmic) circuit depth and gate locality. Importantly, the learner is not given the original preparation circuit and relies only on its existence. Our results provide a structural foundation for quantum generative models based on shallow channel circuits. In the classical limit, our framework also inspires an efficient algorithm for classical diffusion models using only a polynomial overhead of training and generation.

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

A Differentiable Composite Approximation Framework for Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Maneuvering Modeling from Sea-Trial Data

arXiv:2606.19711v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Field-based modeling from onboard measurements can produce autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) maneuvering models that reflect real operating characteristics. From an approximation perspective, conventional maneuvering models use predefined constraint polynomial bases, whereas data-driven models use data-adaptive bases. Motivated by this basis-function view, this paper presents a differentiable composite-approximation formulation, in which the polynomial-basis component and the data-adaptive basis component are treated as differentiable parts of a single predictor and calibrated jointly. A gradient-based co-calibration method is developed for full-scale AUV maneuvering prediction, where a sensitivity-aware mechanism regulates bounded polynomial updates while the neural residual captures remaining nonlinear discrepancies under a shared prediction objective. To account for ocean-current effects in field data, a turning-motion-based current estimation and compensation procedure is incorporated to construct current-compensated learning targets for training and rollout. The framework is evaluated using sea-trial data collected from a 7-meter AUV under multiple maneuvering conditions. Results show that the proposed method improves recursive trajectory and velocity prediction compared with polynomial-only, neural-only, and frozen-prior hybrid baselines, demonstrating its applicability to field-data-based AUV maneuvering modeling.

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

MapAgent: An Industrial-Grade Agentic Framework for City-scale Lane-level Map Generation

arXiv:2606.04513v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Lane-level maps are critical infrastructure for autonomous driving and lane-level navigation, yet constructing and maintaining standardized lane networks for hundreds of cities remains highly labor-intensive. Recent end-to-end vectorized mapping methods can predict lane geometry and topology directly from sensor data, but they typically treat mapping specifications and traffic regulations as implicit, dataset-dependent supervision. Moreover, in complex scenes (e.g., worn or missing markings and occlusions), correct lane configurations are often under-determined by visual evidence alone, making specification violations a major source of human post-editing. We propose MapAgent, an industrial-grade agentic architecture that augments a vectorization backbone for specification-compliant lane-map production. Rather than merely adding an agent loop to map prediction, MapAgent couples backbone perception with explicit specification verification, constraint-aware reasoning, and deterministic map editing under a bounded, verification-driven Judge-Planner-Worker loop. A vision-language Judge diagnoses errors by jointly inspecting visual evidence and draft vectors, while a tool-calling Planner generates minimal corrective edits with post-edit re-validation. To remain scalable for city-scale production, MapAgent is selectively triggered only on tiles with low backbone confidence, adding modest overhead while preserving throughput. Experiments on real-world datasets show consistent gains over strong production baselines, especially in complex and long-tail scenarios. Additionally, MapAgent has been integrated into Baidu Maps, supporting lane-level map generation for over 360 cities nationwide and elevating the overall production automation to over 95%, demonstrating MapAgent's practicality and effectiveness for large-scale lane-level map generation.

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

A Knowledge Theory of Capital:The Value of Natural and Artificial Intelligence

arXiv:2606.18288v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This volume develops a knowledge theory of capital for economies in which productive capacity increasingly resides in software, data, models, routines, expertise, platforms, organizations, commons, and public epistemic infrastructure. Beginning from Adam Smith's theory of labour, stock, specialization, and market extent, it asks what changes when knowledge becomes stock-like, mobile across forms, scalable, governable, recombinable, and imperfectly visible in accounting. The book introduces knowledge-bearing stock as the central object and analyses how it is generated, converted into governable form, deployed, improved through feedback, enclosed or shared, measured, impaired, and used as input to future production. It distinguishes embodied, disembodied, institutionalized, commons, and public knowledge forms and develops concepts such as first conversion, cognitive enclosure, feedback capture, dark capital, and expected knowledge loss. The argument is conditional and testable: modern wealth depends not only on capital accumulation, but on how productive knowledge is governed.

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

Multi-Modal Contrastive Learning for Implicit Earth Embeddings via Location Tying

arXiv:2606.20167v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spatial prediction tasks are often limited by a lack of high-quality labelled ground-truth observations. To overcome this challenge, self-supervised pre-training is a possible solution, with contrastive learning dominant for location encoders. Those approaches usually align geographic coordinates with just one additional modality. We propose two multimodal contrastive learning architectures: Multimodal Embedding via Location Tying (MELT) and Sequential Alternating Location Training (SALT). These architectures expand this framework beyond two modalities by utilising unpaired geospatial data. Both methods are technically viable and match the performance of the strongest two-modality baseline (SATCLIP) across four downstream tasks. However, increasing the number of modalities does not consistently improve performance, suggesting that the chosen location encoder is the main limitation - the contrastive objective reaches its peak early, regardless of modality diversity or pre-training volume. MELT provides more stable training than SALT and presents a stronger foundation for future scaling.

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

GeoRoPE: Ground-Aware Rotary Adaptation for Remote Sensing Foundation Models

Remote-sensing foundation models (RSFMs) benefit from pretraining on imagery from multiple sensors and ground sampling distances (GSDs), but such exposure alone does not resolve scale mismatch during downstream adaptation. A fixed token-grid offset can correspond to different ground distances across sensors, making grid-based positional priors physically inconsistent. Meanwhile, heterogeneous spatial granularity means that compact urban regions and homogeneous landscapes may require different positional sensitivities even under the same GSD. Therefore, we propose {GeoRoPE}, a ground-aware, RoPE-compatible, and parameter-efficient spatial adaptation method for RSFMs. GeoRoPE recalibrates token-level positional interactions from two complementary aspects. First, Geo-Coordinate Calibration (GCC) rescales raw token-grid offsets according to the ground distance represented by one token-grid step, producing geo-calibrated relative coordinates across GSDs. Second, Geo-Frequency Calibration (GFC) adjusts the native RoPE frequency with a relation-specific factor, enabling position sensitive adaptation to scene-dependent spatial granularity. GeoRoPE is injected into pretrained RSFMs through a lightweight adapter, preserving the frozen spatial prior while adding geo-aware positional corrections. Experiments across multiple RSFMs, sensors, resolutions, and downstream tasks demonstrate that GeoRoPE improves cross-resolution robustness and scale-sensitive representation learning.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

SoftSkill: Behavioral Compression for Contextual Adaptation

arXiv:2606.20333v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills are commonly deployed as natural-language Markdown files that encode answer policies, evidence-use habits, and task procedures. These files are readable and portable, but they are consumed indirectly: for each task instance, a frozen language model must translate a long textual artifact into generation-time behavior. This paper asks whether a natural-language skill can instead initialize a compact continuous context object, refined by a trainable soft delta while the base model remains frozen. We propose SoftSkill, a frozen-backbone method that tunes such soft skills with next-token prediction and deploys them as latent behavioral priors at inference time. In our main single-round setting, a length-32 SoftSkill prefix on Qwen3.5-4B improves over no-skill prompting by 8.3 points on SearchQA, 42.1 points on LiveMath, and 1.3 points on DocVQA. Relative to SkillOpt, SoftSkill improves accuracy by 5.2 points on SearchQA and 12.5 points on LiveMath, while replacing hundreds to thousands of Markdown skill tokens with a few virtual tokens. We further study agentic execution as a harder boundary case, where sparse trajectory imitation provides useful signal but does not yet robustly compress long-horizon procedural behavior. More broadly, the results suggest that some task skills are better treated not as additional Markdown to be reinterpreted at inference time, but as compact latent controls over how a frozen model enters the task.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

A Privacy-Preserving Framework Using Remote Data Science for Inter-Institutional Student Retention Prediction

arXiv:2606.12845v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This study explores privacy-preserving machine learning (PPML) techniques using the PySyft platform to enable collaborative prediction of student retention between institutions. We developed a remote data science (RDS) framework with a semi-air-gapped architecture consisting of high-side and low-side servers, allowing researchers from three universities to build predictive models on sensitive student data without direct data access. Using historical data from a small private university (N=720), we evaluated three synthetic data generation approaches and validated the framework through inter-institutional collaboration. The results demonstrate consistent classification performance across institutions (Macro F1: 0.690–0.695) while maintaining strict Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) compliance. We also propose Data-Type-Aware Templates, a novel synthetic data method that prioritizes privacy over distributional fidelity. Our findings confirm that RDS-based PPML is technically feasible for educational settings and offers a practical alternative to federated learning for small-scale inter-institutional collaborations. The code is available at https://github.com/jtfields/NAIRR240195-Privacy-Preserving-Machine-Learning.

23.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Cucurbituril-based anion-conducting membranes with supramolecular nanopores

Authors:

Nanoporous anion-conducting membranes have gained considerable interest for their potential to reduce resistance in electrochemical devices1–4. Current pore-forming methods, such as backbone engineering through polymers of intrinsic microporosity5,6 or covalent organic and metal–organic frameworks7,8, however, suffer from limited structural control, mechanical fragility or demanding synthesis. Here we establish a supramolecular strategy that overcomes these limitations by constructing uniform, dynamic nanopores. Co-assembly of the rigid macrocyclic host cucurbit[7]uril with the cationic polymer guest quaternized poly(piperidinium-terphenyl) yields a robust network of nanometre-scale channels while simultaneously enhancing mechanical and chemical stability. The dynamic host–guest interactions allow the pore structure to fluctuate on picosecond and angstrom scales. This transient environment supports low-friction hydroxide migration through a Grotthuss mechanism, producing a marked enhancement in ionic conductivity. This bottom-up design principle provides a versatile new tool for molecularly engineering transport pathways and promises to advance electrochemical reactors with respect to energy efficiency, operational stability and the production of high-purity products. A supramolecular strategy, in which uniform, dynamic nanopores are constructed, overcomes the limitations of limited structural control, mechanical fragility or demanding synthesis in nanoporous anion-conducting membranes, providing a versatile tool for molecularly engineering transport pathways.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Judging the Judges: A Systematic Evaluation of Bias Mitigation Strategies in LLM-as-a-Judge Pipelines

arXiv:2604.23178v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: LLM-as-a-Judge has become the dominant paradigm for evaluating language model outputs, yet LLM judges exhibit systematic biases that compromise evaluation reliability. We present a comprehensive empirical study comparing nine debiasing strategies across five judge models from four provider families (Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta), three benchmarks (MT-Bench n=400, LLMBar n=200, custom n=375), and four bias types. Our headline practical finding is that a mid-tier model with the right debiasing can outperform frontier judges at a fraction of the cost: Gemini 2.5 Flash with the Combined Budget strategy reaches the highest agreement of any configuration we tested (71.0%, kappa=0.549) at ~$0.001 per evaluation, about 15x cheaper than the best frontier setup (Claude Sonnet 4, 69.5%, ~$0.015). Other key findings: (1) Style bias is the dominant bias (0.10-0.76 across models, favoring markdown over plain prose), far exceeding position bias (

25.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-14

Somatic variant detection in normal tissues from single-cell sequencing data

A crucial advantage of single-cell sequencing (SCS) is its ability to identify somatic variants in individual cells, enabling phylogenetic analysis of cellular populations within bulk tissues. While identifying somatic variants in tumor tissues via SCS has become a common practice, doing so in normal tissues remains challenging due to the rarity of somatic variants in normal cells. To evaluate the feasibility of somatic variant calling from widely available single-nucleus RNA-seq (snRNA-seq) and single-nucleus ATAC-seq (snATAC-seq) data, we profiled a Cell-line mix of six HapMap samples prepared by the SMaHT consortium using 10x Genomics 5' snRNA-seq (12k cells with 36k mean reads per cell) and snATAC-seq (11k cells with 14k median high-quality fragments per cell) for variant calling. PacBio long-read whole genome sequencing (WGS) data (109x) generated from individual cell lines were used as ground truth. Two computational tools, Monopogen and SComatic, were used for somatic variant calling from the SCS data. Monopogen achieved single nucleotide variant (SNV) detection accuracies of 93.30% in the snRNA-seq and 99.64% in the snATAC-seq data, both of which outperformed SComatic (74.35% and 94.29%, respectively). Monopogen also consistently detected somatic SNVs at cellular fractions as low as 0.5% (2.54% in snRNA and 0.81% in snATAC) in individual samples. Notably, snATAC-seq exhibited higher genomic coverage breadth and larger number of variants detected than snRNA-seq. While the SCS data have lower overall genome coverage than that of the bulk WGS, the single-cell level variant resolution allows Monopogen to assign variants to their cells of origin with over 80% accuracy in both RNA and ATAC modalities, thereby facilitating studies of clonal evolution and cell-type-specific mutagenesis. Other benchmarking methods were also evaluated (DeepVariant, Cellsnp-lite and Mutect2) for comparison. In conclusion, our study demonstrated the feasibility of performing reliable single-cell somatic mutation calling in a cell-line mixture and discussed the strengths and limitations of current computational methods when applied to normal tissues.