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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

High-Risk Anti-Seizure Medication Use in Childbearing-Age People with Epilepsy in a Taenia solium Endemic Region

Background: People of childbearing potential with epilepsy in regions endemic for Taenia solium, where neurocysticercosis (NCC) is highly prevalent, represent a vulnerable population due to the elevated burden of epilepsy and resource limitations. Clinical practice in these settings remains poorly characterized. This study characterized anti-seizure medication (ASM) prescribing patterns by medication risk profiles among people of childbearing potential with epilepsy in Northern Peru, a region highly endemic for T. solium. Methods: Participants were drawn from a prospective, population-based epilepsy cohort in Tumbes, Peru (2006 to 2020). The analytic population included females with epilepsy aged 15 to 49 years. The primary outcome was pregnancy-associated ASM risk of congenital malformations and adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes. ASMs were classified as ''Established Low Risk'' (lamotrigine, levetiracetam), ''Possible Risk/Inadequate Data'' (carbamazepine, phenobarbital, phenytoin), and ''Established High Risk'' (valproic acid). Prescription patterns were examined in relation to demographic and clinical characteristics. Results: Among 1,975 individuals with epilepsy, 685 were people of childbearing potential. Approximately 34.9% met criteria for probable or definite NCC. Most ASM prescriptions were in the ''Possible Risk/Inadequate Data'' category (87.0%), and 12.8% received ''Established High Risk'' medications. In multivariable analysis, high-risk prescribing was associated with prior ASM use and polytherapy. Discussion: People of childbearing potential with epilepsy were predominantly treated with carbamazepine, phenytoin, phenobarbital, and valproate, reflecting local ASM availability. Despite evidence supporting lamotrigine and levetiracetam in pregnancy, prescribing patterns reflect local formulary constraints. These findings highlight a gap between guideline recommendations and real-world prescribing in resource-limited settings, underscoring the need for context-specific treatment strategies.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

CausalMoE: A Billion-Scale Multimodal Foundation Model for Granger Causal Discovery with Pattern-Routed Heterogeneous Experts

arXiv:2606.13024v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Granger Causal Discovery (GCD) is fundamental for analyzing temporal dependencies in complex systems. However, existing neural GCD methods predominantly rely on a "one-size-fits-all" paradigm, struggling to capture distribution shifts and dynamic regime changes inherent in real-world time series. This often leads to entangled representations and spurious causal graphs. In this paper, we propose CausalMoE, a billion-scale multimodal Granger causal foundation model that explicitly models patch-level heterogeneity. CausalMoE introduces a Pattern-Routed Mixture of Heterogeneous Experts, which dynamically identifies latent temporal patterns and routes patches to specialized domain experts, effectively decoupling regime-specific mechanisms from shared dynamics. To ensure interpretable graph recovery, we design a Causality-Aware Self-Attention mechanism operating across variables, yielding sparse Granger causal graphs via proximal optimization. Furthermore, CausalMoE is the first to integrate LLMs and VLMs to align numerical signals with textual and visual priors, regularizing causal estimation in complex scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CausalMoE establishes a new state-of-the-art on fully supervised benchmarks, while effectively generalizing to few-shot settings where traditional methods fail.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Sharing quantum indistinguishability with multiple parties

arXiv:2512.15199v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum indistinguishability of non-orthogonal quantum states is a valuable resource in quantum information applications such as cryptography and randomness generation. In this article, we present a sequential state-discrimination scheme that enables multiple parties to share quantum uncertainty, in terms of the max relative entropy, generated by a single party. Our scheme is based upon maximum-confidence measurements and takes advantages of weak measurements to allow a number of parties to perform state discrimination on a single quantum system. We review known sequential state discrimination and show how our scheme would work through a number of examples where ensembles may or may not contain symmetries. Our results will have a role to play in understanding the ultimate limits of sequential information extraction and guide the development of quantum resource sharing in sequential settings.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Notation Matters: A Benchmark Study of Token-Optimized Formats in Agentic AI Systems

Large language models in Agentic AI systems consume tool schemas and execution results and emit tool invocations as structured data. The default language for that exchange, JSON, was designed for application-to-application interchange rather than token efficiency, so its structural elements impose substantial token overhead. Recent work proposes token-optimized alternatives such as TOON (Token-Oriented Object Notation) and TRON (Token Reduced Object Notation) as more compact replacements, but these formats have been evaluated only on isolated comprehension or generation tasks. Whether their token reductions hold inside end-to-end agentic loops therefore remains an open question. We evaluate TOON and TRON on four agentic benchmarks (BFCL, MCPToolBenchPP, MCP-Universe, StableToolBench) and five open-weight LLMs, decoupling input compression from output compression to measure comprehension and generation independently. TRON reduces tokens by up to 27% with accuracy within 14pp of the JSON baseline. TOON achieves up to 18% reduction at a similar 9pp accuracy cost, but additionally cascades on multi-turn parsing failures and collapses parallel tool-call output for most models. The code is available at: https://github.com/lkutschka/notation-matters

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Priority-Aware Shapley Value

arXiv:2602.09326v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Shapley values are widely used for model-agnostic data valuation and feature attribution, yet they implicitly assume contributors are interchangeable. This can be problematic when contributors are dependent (e.g., reused/augmented data or causal feature orderings) or when contributions should be adjusted by factors such as trust or risk. We propose Priority-Aware Shapley Value (PASV), which incorporates both hard precedence constraints and soft, contributor-specific priority weights. PASV is applicable to general precedence structures, recovers precedence-only and weight-only Shapley variants as special cases, and is uniquely characterized by natural axioms. We develop an efficient adjacent-swap Metropolis-Hastings sampler for scalable Monte Carlo estimation and analyze limiting regimes induced by extreme priority weights. Experiments on data valuation (MNIST/CIFAR10) and feature attribution (Census Income) demonstrate more structure-faithful allocations and a practical sensitivity analysis via our proposed "priority sweeping".

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

Ultrastrongly coupled open systems and fine grained time

arXiv:2606.16634v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the dynamics of a d-level quantum system coupled to a bosonic reservoir when the coupling constant is large. It is known that in the limit of infinite coupling strength, the system undergoes an instantaneous nonselective measurement, resulting in the immediate decoherence in the measurement basis, followed by a unitary Zeno dynamics. Here we resolve this dynamical process by introducing a fine grained scaling regime of short times proportional to the inverse coupling. We provide a rigorous derivation of the open system dynamics in this regime of ultrastrong coupling and demonstrate how decoherence unfolds continuously in the new time scale. We show that Markovian dynamics which are not given by semigroups arise naturally, in contrast to what happens in the weak coupling theory.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

3D-DLP: Self-Supervised 3D Object-Centric Scene Representation Learning

arXiv:2606.19451v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce 3D-DLP, a self-supervised object-centric representation learning model that decomposes scene-level RGB-D or voxel observations into a set of 3D latent particles. Building on the Deep Latent Particles (DLP) framework, each particle encodes disentangled attributes, including 3D keypoint position, bounding box dimensions, and appearance features, and represents a distinct entity in the scene. The model learns interpretable per-particle segmentation maps through an end-to-end self-supervised reconstruction objective. We demonstrate on both simulated and real-world datasets that the learned latent space is interpretable and controllable: by manipulating particle positions and decoding, we can generate novel scene configurations. Furthermore, we show that leveraging these compact 3D latent particles for downstream robotic manipulation improves performance over baselines that either lack explicit 3D information or rely on memory-intensive dense 3D inputs without object-centric structure. Code and videos are available at https://eubooks3003.github.io/3d-dlp.

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

Reroute, Don't Remove: Recoverable Visual Token Routing for Vision-Language Models

Vision-language models (VLMs) project images into hundreds to thousands of visual tokens, making decoder inference expensive in both attention computation and KV-cache memory. Existing visual-token reduction methods largely follow a rank-and-remove paradigm: they score visual tokens, keep a compact subset, and permanently discard the rest. We show that this irreversible action is fragile because visual-token importance changes across decoder depth; tokens ranked low at one stage may become relevant in later layers, especially for grounding-sensitive queries. We propose Reroute, a training-free plug-in that replaces removal with recoverable routing. At each routing stage, selected vision tokens pass through decoder blocks, while deferred tokens bypass the stage and re-enter the candidate pool at the next routing decision. Reroute reuses existing attention-score ranking rules and stage-wise schedules, preserving the theoretical TFLOPs and KV-cache budget class of the pruning method it augments. Across FastV, PDrop, and Nüwa variants on LLaVA-1.5 and Qwen backbones, reroute improves grounding under aggressive token reduction while maintaining general VQA performance. These results suggest that VLM token reduction should not be viewed only as irreversible pruning, but also as recoverable routing. The code can be found here: https://github.com/elmma/mllm-reroute/

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

IUU+DB: Tracking Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated Fishing, Seafood Fraud, and Labor Abuse through LLM-driven Information Extraction

arXiv:2606.18181v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing (IUU) traditionally refers to fishing activities that violate applicable laws or occur in areas that lack applicable laws. We propose the term IUU+ to capture a broader suite of fisheries sector environmental and associated supply chain trade-related crimes and behaviors. Although IUU+ activity is widely recognized as a serious threat to marine ecosystems, markets, and livelihoods, a quantitative understanding of these incidents, e.g., their frequency, geography, species, actors, and patterns in the type of illicit activity, remains difficult to obtain. We propose IUU+DB, a large language model driven system for building a global incident database of IUU+ activity. The system ingests heterogeneous documents, classifies whether they describe relevant incidents, extracts key data elements such as actors, locations, species, vessels, violations, and enforcement outcomes, and supports deduplication and trend analysis. Case studies and validation results show that IUU+DB can help organize fragmented evidence, surface geographic and behavioral hotspots, support fisheries-domain specific research in academia and non-government organizations, assist source and species risk assessments for industry, and provide support for policy implementation and targeted enforcement efforts to government agencies.

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

FastMix: Fast Data Mixture Optimization via Gradient Descent

arXiv:2606.14971v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While large and diverse datasets have driven recent advances in large models, identifying the optimal data mixture for pre-training and post-training remains a significant open problem. We address this challenge with FASTMIX, a novel framework that automates data mixture discovery while training only a single proxy model. Instead of relying on predefined heuristics or resource-intensive simulations, FASTMIX jointly optimizes mixture coefficients and model parameters, substantially improving efficiency and scalability over prior approaches. At the core of FASTMIX is a reformulation of mixture selection as a bilevel optimization problem. Under this reformulation, we show that optimizing mixture ratios is mathematically equivalent to assigning per-source loss weights under uniform source sampling. This embeds the mixture coefficients directly into the differentiable iterative optimization objective, enabling efficient, gradient-based optimization of both mixture and model. To solve the optimization problem, FASTMIX implements an approximate iterative optimization procedure, alternating between (i) updating model parameters on data sampled according to current mixture ratios (inner loop) and (ii) updating mixture ratios based on validation feedback (outer loop). Across pre- and post-training, FASTMIX outperforms baselines while drastically reducing search cost. Code (https://github.com/hrtan/fastmix)

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Optical Creation of Synthetic Microgravity for Quantum Degenerate Gases

arXiv:2606.14985v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Microgravity environments provide unique opportunities for ultracold-atom experiments by enabling long interrogation times and reduced acceleration-induced dynamics. However, their realization has largely been restricted to specialized facilities such as drop towers, sounding rockets, and space-based laboratories. Here we realize synthetic microgravity for quantum degenerate gases using optically engineered force landscapes that compensate Earth's gravity to the milli-g level while maintaining continuous confinement of the atomic ensemble. These force landscapes are generated by dynamically painted optical dipole potentials and calibrated in situ through Bloch oscillations in a vertical optical lattice, enabling precise control of the residual acceleration. We use this capability to demonstrate matter-wave beam splitting with arm separations of several hundred microns. We further implement a Bloch-band atom interferometer in which interaction-induced dephasing is strongly suppressed through controlled three-dimensional expansion in the synthetic microgravity potential. This reduction of mean-field effects restores near-$\sqrt{N}$ scaling of interferometric sensitivity for large quantum degenerate ensembles. Our results establish a versatile platform for realizing synthetic microgravity with trapped quantum gases in terrestrial laboratories, bringing the advantages of microgravity experiments to continuously operating systems and opening new opportunities for quantum sensing, matter-wave interferometry, and precision measurements.

12.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-15

Long-term independent use of an intracortical brain–computer interface for speech and cursor control

Brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) can provide naturalistic communication and digital access to people with severe paralysis by decoding neural activity associated with attempted speech and movement. Recent work has demonstrated highly accurate intracortical BCIs for speech and cursor control, but two critical capabilities needed for practical viability were unmet: independent at-home operation without researcher assistance and reliable long-term performance supporting accurate speech and cursor decoding. Here we demonstrate the independent and near-daily use of a multimodal BCI with novel brain-to-text speech and computer cursor decoders by a man with paralysis and severe dysarthria due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Over nearly 2 years, the participant used the BCI for more than 3,800 h at home with no researchers present to maintain rich interpersonal communication with his family and friends, independently control his personal computer and sustain full-time employment—despite being paralyzed. He communicated 183,060 sentences—totaling 1,960,163 words—at an average rate of 56 words per minute. He labeled 92% of sentences as being decoded at least mostly correctly. In formal quantifications of performance where he was asked to say words presented on a screen, attempted speech was consistently decoded with more than 99% word accuracy (125,000 word vocabulary). The participant also used the speech BCI as keyboard input and the cursor BCI as mouse input to control his personal computer, enabling him to send text messages and emails and to browse the internet. These results demonstrate that intracortical BCIs have the potential to support independent use in the home, marking a critical step toward practical assistive technology for people with severe motor impairment. An automated intracortical brain–computer interface, used at home with no researcher intervention, provides long-term and accurate restoration of speech-based communication and cursor-based computer usage in a person with severe dysarthria due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

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

Beyond Rebalancing: Benchmarking Binary Classifiers Under Class Imbalance Without Rebalancing Techniques

arXiv:2509.07605v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Class imbalance poses a significant challenge to supervised classification, particularly in critical domains like medical diagnostics and anomaly detection where minority class instances are rare. While numerous studies have explored rebalancing techniques to address this issue, less attention has been given to evaluating the performance of binary classifiers under imbalance when no such techniques are applied. Therefore, the goal of this study is to assess the performance of binary classifiers "as-is", without performing any explicit rebalancing. Specifically, we systematically evaluate the robustness of a diverse set of binary classifiers across both real-world and synthetic datasets, under progressively reduced minority class sizes, using one-shot and few-shot scenarios as baselines. Our approach also explores varying data complexities through synthetic decision boundary generation to simulate real-world conditions. In addition to standard classifiers, we include experiments using undersampling, oversampling strategies, and one-class classification (OCC) methods to examine their behavior under severe imbalance. The results confirm that classification becomes more difficult as data complexity increases and the minority class size decreases. While traditional classifiers deteriorate under extreme imbalance, advanced models like TabPFN and boosting-based ensembles retain relatively higher performance and better generalization compared to traditional classifiers. Visual interpretability and evaluation metrics further validate these findings. Our work offers valuable guidance on model selection for imbalanced learning, providing insights into classifier robustness without dependence on explicit rebalancing techniques.

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

Sustainable Materials Discovery in the Era of Artificial Intelligence

arXiv:2601.21527v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed materials discovery, enabling rapid exploration of chemical space through generative models and surrogate screening. Yet current generative AI models for materials discovery, which now drive exploration of vast chemical and structural spaces, optimize candidates exclusively for structural stability and functional properties, with no integration of environmental assessment at any stage of the design loop. Prospective and ex-ante life cycle assessment methods exist and have been applied to emerging technologies, but they operate as standalone downstream analyses, not as active constraints within generative or active-learning pipelines. The result is that environmental feedback, even when produced, arrives after design decisions have been made rather than informing them. The disconnect between atomic-scale design and lifecycle assessment (LCA) reflects fundamental challenges: (i) data scarcity across heterogeneous sources, (ii) scale gaps from atoms to industrial systems, (iii) uncertainty in synthesis pathways, and (iv) the absence of frameworks that co-optimize performance with environmental impact. In this Perspective, we propose integrating upstream ML-assisted materials discovery with downstream LCA into the ML-LCA framework, comprising five components: information extraction for building materials-environment knowledge bases, harmonized databases linking properties to sustainability metrics, multi-scale models bridging atomic properties to lifecycle impacts, ensemble prediction of manufacturing pathways with uncertainty quantification, and uncertainty-aware optimization enabling simultaneous performance-sustainability navigation. Case studies spanning polymers, glass, photoresists, and cement demonstrate both necessity and feasibility while identifying material-specific integration challenges.

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

Technical Report for ICRA 2026 GOOSE 2D Fine-Grained Semantic Segmentation Challenge: Leveraging DINOv3 for Robust Outdoor Scene Understanding in Field Robotics

The GOOSE 2D Fine-Grained Semantic Segmentation Challenge at the ICRA 2026 Workshop on Field Robotics evaluates dense semantic segmentation of off-road imagery over a fine-grained taxonomy of 64 classes and 11 evaluated non-void coarse categories. We present the first-place solution to this challenge. Our solution comprises two complementary improvements: (a) a network-level design that combines a self-supervised DINOv3 ViT-L/16 backbone, a ViT-Adapter, and a Mask2Former mask-classification decoder, together with a coarse-category auxiliary loss on the global [CLS] token; and (b) an inference-time aggregation strategy based on multi-scale and horizontal-flip test-time augmentation and an ensemble of the top three checkpoints selected using Codabench scores. Our method achieves an official composite score of 76.57%, consisting of 69.32% fine-class mIoU and 83.81% category-level mIoU, and ranks first on the final phase leaderboard: www.codabench.org/competitions/14257/#/results-tab.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

The Simplified Stabilizer ZX-Calculus is Minimal

arXiv:2606.12383v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The stabilizer fragment of the ZX calculus is amongst the most important fragments of the theory. The closely related Clifford+T fragment is approximately universal (arXiv:1705.11151). Additionally, the stabilizer calculus can be described by a small collection of rewrites, most of which have been shown to be necessary (arXiv:1709.08903). However, two rules, describing the red/green compact-structure coincidence and the important bialgebra law, had not been shown to be necessary. We present a countermodel-style argument showing that both of these rules are individually necessary relative to the connectivity meta-rule of Backens–Perdrix–Wang (arXiv:1709.08903), and hence establish that the rule set presented in arXiv:1709.08903 has no redundant rewrite rule.

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

LEAP: Layer-skipping Efficiency via Adaptive Progression for Vision Transformer Distillation

Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) with Vision Transformer (ViT) backbones, such as DINOv2, have become essential for downstream tasks like object recognition and semantic segmentation. The immense computational requirements of backbones often necessitate distillation into smaller architectures for edge deployment. Feature-based knowledge distillation (KD) often suffers from the teacher-student gap; the student struggles to imitate teacher's complex feature map due to its limited capacity. To mitigate this bottleneck, we propose LEAP: Layer-skipping Efficiency via Adaptive Progression, a training curriculum for ViT feature-based knowledge distillation. By utilizing the teacher's intermediate feature maps as a sequence of progressively more difficult targets, our curriculum allows the student to build a foundational representation before tackling higher-level abstractions. Our results demonstrate that this paradigm significantly accelerates convergence through adaptive difficulty selection across various student model sizes and dataset scales. With our curriculum, the LEAP-distilled ViT-S achieves 90.1% accuracy on ImageNet-100, a +12.24% improvement compared with baseline. On ImageNet-1K, LEAP achieves +3.84% and +7.75% improvement for the instance retrieval task on the Oxford and Paris datasets, respectively. Furthermore, the curriculum enables 25.1% savings in training FLOPs and 21% savings in training time on ImageNet-100 by implementing early-stopping for teacher inference during the initial stages of training. Code is available at https://github.com/KevinZ0217/LEAP

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

When Do We Need LLMs? A Diagnostic for Language-Driven Bandits

arXiv:2604.05859v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study Contextual Multi-Armed Bandits (CMABs) for non-episodic decision-making problems where the context includes both textual and numerical information (e.g., recommendation systems, dynamic portfolio adjustments, offer selection; all frequent problems in finance). While Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to these settings, utilizing LLMs for reasoning at every decision step is computationally expensive, and uncertainty estimates are difficult to obtain. To address this, we introduce LLMP-UCB, a bandit algorithm that derives uncertainty estimates from LLMs via repeated inference. However, our experiments demonstrate that lightweight numerical bandits operating on text embeddings (dense or Matryoshka) match or exceed the accuracy of LLM-based solutions at a fraction of their cost. We further show that embedding dimensionality is a practical lever on the exploration-exploitation balance, enabling cost-performance tradeoffs without prompt complexity. Finally, to guide practitioners, we propose a geometric diagnostic based on the arms' embeddings to decide when to use LLM-driven reasoning versus a lightweight numerical bandit. Our results provide a principled deployment framework for cost-effective, uncertainty-aware decision systems with broad applicability across AI use cases.

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

Learning Fine-Grained Correspondence with Cross-Perspective Perception for Open-Vocabulary 6D Object Pose Estimation

Open-vocabulary 6D object pose estimation empowers robots to manipulate arbitrary unseen objects guided solely by natural language. However, a critical limitation of existing approaches is their reliance on unconstrained global matching strategies. In open-world scenarios, trying to match anchor features against the entire query image space introduces excessive ambiguity, as target features are easily confused with background distractors. To resolve this, we propose Fine-grained Correspondence Pose Estimation (FiCoP), a framework that transitions from noise-prone global matching to spatially-constrained patch-level correspondence. To systematically eliminate background interference, FiCoP first employs an object-centric disentanglement step to isolate the target from macro-level environmental noise. Building upon this localized region, our core methodological innovations are twofold. Firstly, a Cross-Perspective Global Perception (CPGP) module is proposed to fuse dual-view features, establishing structural consensus through explicit context reasoning and text-guided semantic injection. Secondly, we design a Patch Correlation Predictor (PCP) that leverages a patch-to-patch correlation matrix as a structural prior. This generates a precise block-wise association map, acting as a spatial filter to enforce fine-grained, noise-resilient matching. Experiments on the REAL275 and Toyota-Light datasets demonstrate that FiCoP improves Average Recall by 8.0% and 6.1%, respectively, compared to the state-of-the-art method, highlighting its capability to deliver robust and generalized perception for robotic agents operating in complex, unconstrained open-world environments. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/zjjqinyu/FiCoP.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Rethinking Global Average Pooling: Your Classifier Is Secretly a Multi-Instance Learner

Authors:

Modern image classifiers widely adopt global average pooling (GAP) followed by a linear classification head. This linearity ensures that the image-level logits equal the average of logits obtained by applying the classification head pointwise to the feature grid prior to GAP. Consequently, standard classifiers may inherently retain spatial class evidence that remains recoverable even when the image-level prediction is incorrect. This structure naturally suggests a multiple-instance learning (MIL) interpretation, where an image is viewed as a bag of spatial instances. Within this formulation, we demonstrate that standard classifiers trained with a single label per image can still learn the intended classification task in multi-object scenes. We further exploit this property to decompose image-level logits into a prediction grid, providing a post-hoc diagnostic to extract spatial class evidence that GAP otherwise obscures. Our systematic evaluation reveals that off-the-shelf models consistently recover the ground-truth class within foreground regions. The MIL interpretation further suggests that common classifier failures reflect known limitations of mean aggregation.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

A Resource for Enthymeme Detection in Controversial Political Discourse

Enthymemes, arguments with unstated premises or conclusions, are pervasive in persuasive discourse, yet their annotation remains notoriously subjective. We present a resource of 1,482 tweets from politically controversial discourse, annotated by five annotators for the presence of enthymemes and their argument structure, designed to study label variation. We first revisit the definition of enthymemes and propose annotation guidelines anchored in Walton's argumentation schemes, offering a structured and constrained approach that nonetheless preserves room for the interpretive nature of the task. This contrasts with past resources, which tend to eliminate disagreement, obscuring its sources and preventing investigation of its potential benefits for model performance. We further propose a complexity analysis of the task, identifying where annotation imposes high cognitive load and may give rise to inconsistent annotation. Our preliminary experiments show that models trained on annotator disagreement outperform models trained on hard majority-vote labels. We close by reflecting on how structural openness in enthymeme definitions and guidelines enables the study of variation in subjective inferential processes for future resources and downstream NLP applications concerned with human inference.

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

Quantization Robustness of Monotone Operator Equilibrium Networks

arXiv:2603.10562v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Monotone operator equilibrium networks are implicit-layer models whose output is the unique equilibrium of a monotone operator, guaranteeing existence, uniqueness, and convergence. When deployed on low-precision hardware, weights are quantized, potentially destroying these guarantees. We analyze weight quantization as a spectral perturbation of the underlying monotone inclusion. Convergence of the quantized solver is guaranteed whenever the spectral-norm weight perturbation is smaller than the monotonicity margin; the displacement between quantized and full-precision equilibria is bounded in terms of the perturbation size and margin; and a condition number characterizing the ratio of the operator norm to the margin links quantization precision to forward error. MNIST experiments confirm a phase transition at the predicted threshold: three- and four-bit post-training quantization diverge, while five-bit and above converge. The backward-pass guarantee enables quantization-aware training, which recovers provable convergence at four bits.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Risk beliefs, intensive digital information and demand for a new preventative health product in public clinics: Evidence from an experiment in Zimbabwe.

Demand for preventative health care is weak in low-income settings. In a field experiment in a low-income, high-risk setting, we evaluated whether demand for a new bio-medical preventative health product, offered free at public health clinics, responds to digital feedback-based intensive information on health risks and benefits of prevention along with a clinic referral enabling access to the product. In our sample of women aged 18-24 years, we find a large correction in risk beliefs sustained six months after the intervention. Against a background of very low baseline usage, within six months we find a 5.8 percentage point increase in take up of the prevention method, a level of uptake which is very large relative to the control group. Reassuringly, there is no meaningful difference in up-take amongst baseline high- risk and low-risk individuals.

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

GradPower: Powering Gradients for Faster Language Model Pre-Training

arXiv:2505.24275v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose GradPower, a lightweight gradient-transformation technique for accelerating language model pre-training. Given a gradient vector $g=(g_i)_i$, GradPower first applies the elementwise sign-power transformation: $\varphi_p(g)=(sign(g_i)|g_i|^p)_{i}$ for a fixed $p>0$, and then feeds the transformed gradient into a base optimizer. Notably, GradPower requires only a single-line code change and no modifications to the base optimizer's internal logic, including the hyperparameters. When applied to Adam (termed AdamPower), GradPower consistently achieves lower terminal loss across diverse architectures (LLaMA, Qwen2MoE), parameter scales (66M to 2B), datasets (C4, OpenWebText), and learning-rate schedules (cosine, warmup-stable-decay). The most pronounced gains are observed when training modern mixture-of-experts models with warmup-stable-decay schedules. GradPower also integrates seamlessly with other state-of-the-art optimizers, such as Muon, yielding further improvements. Finally, we provide theoretical analyses that reveal the underlying mechanism of GradPower and highlight the influence of gradient noise.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Semantic Router: On the Feasibility of Hijacking MLLMs via a Single Adversarial Perturbation

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly deployed in stateless systems, such as autonomous driving and robotics. This paper investigates a novel threat: Semantic-Aware Hijacking. We explore the feasibility of hijacking multiple stateless decisions simultaneously using a single universal perturbation. We introduce the Semantic-Aware Universal Perturbation (SAUP), which acts as a semantic router, "actively" perceiving input semantics and routing them to distinct, attacker-defined targets. To achieve this, we conduct theoretical and empirical analysis on the geometric properties in the latent space. Guided by these insights, we propose the Semantic-Oriented (SORT) optimization strategy and annotate a new dataset with fine-grained semantics to evaluate performance. Extensive experiments on three representative MLLMs demonstrate the fundamental feasibility of this attack, achieving a 66% attack success rate over five targets using a single frame against Qwen.