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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Reconstructing Template-Memorized Images from Natural Prompts

arXiv:2507.07947v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in generative models, such as diffusion models, have raised concerns related to privacy, copyright infringement, and data stewardship. To better understand and control these risks, prior work has introduced techniques and attacks that reconstruct images, or parts of images, from training data. While these results demonstrate that training data can be recovered, existing methods often rely on high computational resources, partial access to the training set, or carefully engineered prompts. In this work, we present a new attack that requires low resources, assumes little to no access to the training data, and identifies seemingly benign prompts that can lead to potentially risky image reconstruction. We further show that such reconstructions may occur unintentionally, even for users without specialized knowledge. For example, we observe that for one existing model, the prompt ``blue Unisex T-Shirt'' generates the face of a real individual. Moreover, by combining the identified vulnerabilities with real-world prompt data, we discover prompts that reproduce memorized visual elements. Our approach builds on insights from prior work and leverages domain knowledge to expose a fundamental vulnerability arising from the use of scraped e-commerce data, where templated layouts and images are closely tied to pattern-like textual prompts. The code for our attack is publicly available at https://github.com/TheSolY/lr-tmi.

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

SkMTEB: Slovak Massive Text Embedding Benchmark and Model Adaptation

We introduce SkMTEB, the first comprehensive MTEB-style text embedding benchmark for Slovak, a low-resource West Slavic language, comprising 31 datasets across 7 task types – nearly 4$\times$ the depth of existing multilingual benchmark coverage for Slovak. Our evaluation of 31 embedding models reveals that large instruction-tuned multilingual models achieve the strongest performance, while existing Slovak-specific models trained for NLU tasks transfer poorly to embedding tasks. To address the need for efficient, locally-deployable Slovak embeddings, we develop \texttt{e5-sk-small} (45M parameters) and \texttt{e5-sk-large} (365M) by applying vocabulary trimming and fine-tuning to Multilingual E5 models. Despite size reductions of up to 62\%, our open-source models achieve competitive performance with proprietary APIs while remaining locally deployable for semantic search and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). We release the benchmark, models, datasets, and code openly, hoping our approach offers a replicable path for other under-resourced languages.

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

SDVDiag: Multimodal Causal Discovery for Online Diagnosis in Software-defined Vehicles

arXiv:2606.15559v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The transition toward software-defined vehicles concentrates an increasing share of vehicle functionality into distributed software services, where failures propagate through service dependencies and the surface symptom is often several causal hops away from the underlying defect. Existing approaches to causal root-cause analysis in such systems address this only partially: they typically reason over a single observability modality and operate in an offline, operator-driven mode that does not match the demands of continuous vehicle operation. This paper presents SDVDiag, a multimodal causal-discovery pipeline that fuses log-based and metric-based service representations into a shared embedding space before graph construction, coupled with an anomaly-driven trigger that converts the diagnostic platform from a manually operated batch tool into a continuously running online system. Evaluation on an Autonomous Valet Parking testbed shows that the multimodal pipeline produces sparser causal graphs than a metrics-only baseline (134 vs. 182 edges on average) and consistently outperforms it in edge-weighted reward against an expert knowledge graph at every stage of human-feedback refinement, showing a 2.4-fold improvement over the baseline after 60 feedback queries. An end-to-end fault-injection scenario further demonstrates that the integrated trigger correctly recovers a true root cause located two causal hops upstream of the observable symptom.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

RoboNaldo: Accurate, Stable and Powerful Humanoid Soccer Shooting via Motion-Guided Curriculum Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.11092v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Elite humanoid soccer shooting requires whole-body stability, high-impulse whole-body interactions, and accuracy to targets. Motion tracking-driven reinforcement learning (RL) provides stability in whole-body movement coordination, but a fixed reference makes it hard to adapt to varied ball positions and strike timings; in contrast, task reward-driven RL struggles to explore and discover valid kicks from scratch. We therefore introduce RoboNaldo, a three-stage motion-guided curriculum RL framework for high-impulse humanoid interaction. A single human-kick reference is used as a scaffold and progressively shifts optimization towards shooting performance. The curriculum first learns a stable whole-body kicking prior, then adapts the kick to free-kick settings where the ball is stationary at random positions, and finally extends it to moving-ball shooting through a locomotion-command and kick-trigger interface. A high-level heuristic planner controls this interface during training, while alternative high-level controllers can drive the same low-level policy at inference. In simulation, RoboNaldo demonstrates free-kick shot error 48.6% lower and shoot velocity 2.96x than prior work baselines. In real world on a Unitree G1 with onboard perception, RoboNaldo attains 0.73 m and 0.86 m average target shooting error from 3 m away in free-kick and moving-ball cases, accordingly. And the post-contact ball velocity reaches 13.10 m/s, which is 59-71% of reported professional open-play shot speed. Project page: https://opendrivelab.com/RoboNaldo.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

CHORUS: Decentralized Multi-Embodiment Collaboration with One VLA Policy

arXiv:2606.12352v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-robot collaboration allows robots to efficiently take on a wide range of tasks, from moving a couch through a doorway to assembling structures on a construction site. However, achieving such coordination in mobile multi-robot settings remains challenging: centralized methods conditioned on the combined observations of a team scale poorly with team size, and decentralized methods that train one policy per robot often require explicit alignment procedures or information sharing at inference time to overcome partial observability. Our key insight is that the visuomotor priors of pretrained vision-language-action (VLA) models should enable reactive, decentralized collaboration from each robot's local observations alone, without these inference-time assumptions. We propose CHORUS, a framework that adapts a single VLA backbone to control diverse, multi-robot teams. At inference time, each robot runs an independent copy of CHORUS, conditioned only on its own observations and a robot-identifying prompt. In real-world experiments including mobile tape measurement, library book handovers, and laundry basket lifting, CHORUS achieves a 64% point improvement over decentralized, from-scratch models, improves reactivity to teammate behavior by 40% points, and outperforms centralized baselines. Together, these results show that a shared VLA backbone is capable of achieving decentralized multi-robot collaboration, without per-robot policies or inter-robot communication at inference.

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

Universal Time Series Generation with Neural Controlled Differential Equations

arXiv:2605.28507v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent work on the sequence universality of State Space Models (SSMs) has introduced efficient, maximally expressive continuous-time approaches for time-series modelling. While these works focus on discriminative settings, we extend this perspective to generative time-series modelling by proving that maximally expressive Structured Linear Controlled Differential Equations (SLiCEs) are universal time-series generators, in the sense that they can approximate the induced path laws of continuous causal pushforwards on compact latent sets in $W_\infty$. Building on these theoretical results, we propose Generative SLiCEs (G-SLiCEs), a maximally expressive continuous-time model for flow matching on path-space. Empirically, we show that expressivity improves performance in probabilistic forecasting and downstream tasks, while retaining the advantages of continuous-time models such as generalising to arbitrary observation grids. This is particularly beneficial for irregular grids, where fixed-grid models often struggle.

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

Protean Compiler: An Agile Framework to Drive Fine-grain Phase Ordering

The phase ordering problem has been a long-standing challenge since the late 1970s, yet it remains an open problem due to having a vast optimization space and an unbounded nature, making it an open-ended problem without a finite solution, one can limit the scope by reducing the number and the length of optimizations. Traditionally, such locally optimized decisions are made by hand-coded algorithms tuned for a small number of benchmarks, often requiring significant effort to be retuned when the benchmark suite changes. In the past 20 years, Machine Learning has been employed to construct performance models to improve the selection and ordering of compiler optimizations, however, the approaches are not baked into the compiler seamlessly and never materialized to be leveraged at a fine-grained scope of code segments. This paper presents Protean Compiler: An agile framework to enable LLVM with built-in phase-ordering capabilities at a fine-grained scope. The framework also comprises a complete library of more than 140 handcrafted static feature collection methods at varying scopes, and the experimental results showcase speedup gains of up to 4.1% on average and up to 15.7% on select Cbench applications wrt LLVM's O3 by just incurring a few extra seconds of build time on Cbench. Additionally, Protean compiler allows for an easy integration with third-party ML frameworks and other Large Language Models, and two applications of this two-step optimization show a gain of 10.1\% and 8.5\% speedup w.r.t. -O3 on CBench's Susan and Jpeg applications. Protean compiler is seamlessly integrated into LLVM and can be used as a new, enhanced, full-fledged compiler. We plan to release the project to the open-source community in the near future.

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

QPILOTS: Efficient Test-Time Q-Steering for Flow Policies

arXiv:2606.14801v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Flow-matching and diffusion policies are expressive action generators, but optimizing them with temporal-difference reinforcement learning (RL) remains difficult. Effective policy extraction requires exploiting the critic's action gradient, yet directly backpropagating this signal through a multi-step denoising process can be numerically unstable. Existing methods work around this either by discarding gradient information, distilling the policy into a simpler one-step actor, or repeatedly fine-tuning the denoising policy as the critic improves. We propose QPILOTS, a method that leaves the original policy unmodified and steers the denoising process at inference time. At each denoising step, instead of evaluating the critic on the noisy intermediate action where critic predictions are unreliable, we first project that intermediate state to an estimate of the final clean action and compute the critic gradient there. We introduce two variants: QPILOTS-U uses a fast single-point approximation, while QPILOTS-M draws differentiable posterior samples via a learned auxiliary network. On a standard offline-to-online RL benchmark, QPILOTS achieves the best aggregate performance, reaching an average success rate of 90% across 50 tasks. We also apply QPILOTS to steer a large, frozen, pretrained Vision-Language Action (VLA) foundation model, outperforming or matching prior inference-time approaches across six manipulation tasks in simulation.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Energy-Modulated Time-Asymmetric Spontaneous Collapse: Forward-Backward Dynamics from Stochastic Ito Reversal and Bright Solitons

arXiv:2606.06452v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present a rigorous theoretical framework for symmetry breaking and quantum irreversibility arising from stochastic Ito field reversal within a cubic-quintic nonlinear Schrodinger equation (CQ-NLSE) formalism. Starting from three physically motivated considerations, forward and backward nonlinear stochastic differential equations are derived via the Ito calculus. Kinematic time-reversal is shown to be fundamentally incompatible with the Ito stochastic structure, yielding the universal asymmetry-coupling parameter of 2/3. An energy-driven collapse operator proportional to the product of noise strength, local probability density, and excitation energy squared is introduced, amplifying the collapse in high-density, high-excitation regions. Exactly bright soliton solutions are obtained for a quasi-one-dimensional BEC of attractive Li-7 atoms, with forward and backward amplitude ratio of 1.870. Heat map analysis of the parameter planes reveals that the forward collapse operator grows monotonically in time while the backward counterpart decays, achieving a ratio approximately 1030, sharply distinguishing this framework from conventional symmetric collapse models.

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

Distributed General-Purpose Agent Networks: Architecture, Key Mechanisms, and Prototypes

arXiv:2606.17368v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models have accelerated the transition from passive conversational assistants to autonomous agents that can understand goals, plan actions, invoke tools, and execute multi-step tasks. Yet the capability of a single agent remains constrained by its local data, tool permissions, runtime environment, and governance boundary. This paper studies distributed general-purpose agent networks: open peer-to-peer networks in which heterogeneous agents deployed on personal devices, edge nodes, or autonomous computing environments can discover one another, establish trust, negotiate cooperation rules, and execute open-ended tasks. We argue that such networks cannot be obtained by simply combining existing peer-to-peer overlays with conventional multi-agent systems. Unlike traditional P2P networks, agent networks must propagate semantic declarations about intentions, capabilities, states, and cooperation constraints. We therefore propose a layered architecture centered on a protocol adaptation layer that connects upper-level task semantics with lower-level network operations. Based on this architecture, the paper identifies three core mechanism problems: semantic announcement propagation for collaborator discovery, verifiable identity and multi-topic reputation for cooperation governance, and semantic-gradient mechanism design for open task execution. For each problem, we present a technical route, including bodyless gossip with sequential logs, BAID-based identity binding with MG-EigenTrust reputation, and a Stackelberg-style mechanism-generation loop driven by semantic attribution feedback. We further report prototype overhead results for BAID-style tiered verification and mechanism-level simulations of MG-EigenTrust under cross-topic disguise-collusion attacks. The resulting framework provides a system-level foundation for open, trustworthy, and scalable agent collaboration.

11.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Daily briefing: Ancient ground squirrels ate like ‘zombies of the Pleistocene’

Authors:

Evidence from fossilized poo reveals the diverse diet of ancient ground squirrels. Plus, the science behind the peptide craze and our innate tendency to wander anticlockwise. Evidence from fossilized poo reveals the diverse diet of ancient ground squirrels. Plus, the science behind the peptide craze and our innate tendency to wander anticlockwise.

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

Doeblin Curves

arXiv:2606.19859v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent research on Doeblin coefficients has shed light on their usefulness as a multi-way generalization of the Dobrushin contraction coefficient for TV distance, in a separate vein from their classic role in the theory of Markov chain ergodicity. However, strong conditions, such as being bounded away from 0, are typically necessary for Doeblin coefficients to establish the existence of information contraction. Building on recently formulated concepts of nonlinear information contraction, we aim to propose a finer-grained Doeblin-based characterization of multi-way contraction behavior which yields non-vacuous contraction guarantees even for channels whose Doeblin coefficient is 0. To this end, we introduce the notion of a Doeblin curve – a nonlinear function which quantifies the contraction behavior of a Markov kernel on collections of input distributions at specific levels of divergence and power. Through the course of our analysis, we develop a new variational characterization of Doeblin coefficients, present several properties of Doeblin curves, define several versions of power-constrained Doeblin curves, and derive upper and lower bounds using our aforementioned variational characterization. We then utilize these results in diverse areas, including generalization bounds for noisy iterative optimization, error bounds for reliable computation with noisy circuits, and differential privacy guarantees for online iterative algorithms. In particular, we extend results in these areas to broader domains or group settings, leveraging Doeblin curves to reveal finer-grained contraction phenomena than Doeblin coefficients.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Zero-Shot Active Feature Acquisition via LLM-Elicitation

arXiv:2606.18933v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Active feature acquisition (AFA) sequentially selects which features to observe to reach a classification or ranking decision. Its central limitation is reliance on large amount of labeled data to fit probabilistic models guiding acquisition. Large language models (LLMs) supply unsupervised domain knowledge, but are poor sequential planners. Asking one to both know and decide conflates capabilities best kept separate. Here, we develop a framework for zero-shot AFA through disciplined elicitation: asking the LLM only for what it can be trusted to return, the unary deviations and pairwise co-variations that are the sufficient statistics of a Markov random field (MRF). We apply our framework to two settings: binary classification and top-$k$ identification. In practice, the LLM reliably returns only discriminative statistics, what distinguishes the classes rather than each class in isolation, which precludes classical AFA. We apply a maximum-entropy closure that resolves this gauge ambiguity. We evaluate on a cohort of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) patients, an active clinical setting where diagnostic ambiguity and patient heterogeneity obstruct stable treatment strategies. Our framework outperforms the LLM both on real labels and on its own extracted beliefs. Where it matters most, on the hardest patients, our top-$k$ acquisition policy markedly outperforms all existing methods.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Development of an automated, imaging-based preoperative screening model for early identification of malnutrition in an abdominal surgery cohort

Background: Clinical malnutrition affects one in five abdominal surgery patients and increases postoperative complications and mortality. Current screening occurs after admission, closing the window for preoperative nutritional intervention. No objective, scalable preoperative screening tool exists. Objective: To determine whether automated volumetric CT-based body composition analysis improves preoperative identification of surgical patients at risk for clinical malnutrition compared to clinical variables or single slice imaging alone. Methods: Retrospective cohort study of adults undergoing elective abdominal surgery at a quaternary academic medical center (2018 to 2021) with a preoperative CT scan within 90 days and complete nutrition assessment. Clinical malnutrition was diagnosed by a registered dietitian using ASPEN/AND criteria. Three sex stratified Elastic Net models were compared: (1) base clinical variables; (2) base plus L3 single slice skeletal muscle index and attenuation; and (3) base plus comprehensive 3D volumetric quantification of five muscle groups and two fat depots. Discrimination (AUROC), calibration (Brier score), and clinical utility (decision curve analysis) were assessed via 10-fold cross-validation. Results: Among 1,143 patients (52.4% female; mean age 60.5 years), 231 (20.2%) were diagnosed with malnutrition. Malnourished patients had significantly higher complication rates (36.4% vs. 15.4%, p

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

What Do Safety-Aligned LLMs Learn From Mixed Compliance Demonstrations?

arXiv:2606.20508v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prior work has shown that in-context demonstrations can jailbreak language models, but it remains unclear how models interpret different types of compliance demonstrations. We study this by mixing benign compliance demonstrations (non-harmful request, helpful response) with harmful compliance demonstrations (harmful request, helpful response) and testing three hypotheses about how demonstration composition drives harmful compliance. Across four models, we find that benign and harmful demonstrations are not interchangeable: benign demonstrations can either reduce or increase harmful compliance depending on the model. We further show that preference optimization is the critical training stage that prevents benign demonstrations from increasing harmful compliance, that demonstration ordering exhibits strong recency bias, and that models differ in how refusal interacts with in-context learning: some adopt demonstrated formatting even when refusing, while others override all in-context signals upon refusal. Taken together, this work moves beyond showing that demonstration-based jailbreaking works to characterizing how it works: what models extract from compliance demonstrations depends on demonstration content, ordering, and training methodology.

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

CentroidKV: Efficient Long-Context LLM Inference via KV Cache Clustering

Large language models (LLMs) with extended context windows have become increasingly prevalent for tackling complex tasks. However, the substantial Key-Value (KV) cache required for long-context LLMs poses significant deployment challenges. Existing approaches either discard potentially critical information needed for future generations or offer limited efficiency gains due to high computational overhead. In this paper, we introduce CentroidKV, a simple yet effective framework for online KV cache clustering. Our approach is based on the observation that key states exhibit high similarity along the sequence dimension. To enable efficient clustering, we divide the sequence into chunks and propose Chunked Soft Matching, which employs an alternating partition strategy within each chunk and identifies clusters based on similarity. CentroidKV then merges the KV cache within each cluster into a single centroid. Additionally, we provide a theoretical analysis of the computational complexity and the optimality of the intra-chunk partitioning strategy. Extensive experiments across various models and long-context benchmarks demonstrate that CentroidKV achieves up to 75% reduction in KV cache memory usage while maintaining comparable model performance. Moreover, with minimal computational overhead, CentroidKV accelerates the decoding stage of inference by up to $1.92\times$ and increases the serving throughput by up to $4\times$.

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

Skill-Constrained Model Predictive Control for Resilient Manufacturing Supply Chains

arXiv:2606.17269v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In skill-constrained production-inventory systems, the qualified human capacity available tomorrow depends on training decisions made today: production requires certified workers, certifications decay unless maintained, and training consumes the same scarce worker hours that production needs now. We study a closed-loop skill-constrained model predictive controller that, at every shift, solves a finite-horizon mixed-integer program over production, inventory, backlog, and training, with binary predicted certification, hard production eligibility, and an interpretable terminal value that prices certified-capacity gaps at the horizon boundary; only the first-period action is applied before replanning. On synthetic, seed-controlled SkillChain-Gym scenarios - announced and surprise new-skill shocks, demand shocks, absenteeism, forecast- and availability-quality modes, capacity-boundary and training-rate sweeps, and negative controls - we evaluate the controller against production-only and maintenance-only ablations, static cross-training insurance plans, and a strong reactive heuristic, under an ex-ante locked configuration and paired statistics. The result is regime dependence, not superiority: no policy class dominates. Predictive control helps when skill or labor bottlenecks are forecastable early enough for training to complete; lean static insurance remains hard to beat under surprise shocks, near the demand-capacity boundary, and wherever pre-shock slack makes insurance cheap. Attribution ablations separate certification maintenance, re-acquisition of lapsed certifications, and greenfield skill acquisition. Forecastability, not adaptivity per se, decides when predictive control pays.

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

SA-VIS: Sparse frame Annotations for training Video Instance Segmentation

Recent online video instance segmentation (VIS) methods have achieved impressive results, thus becoming the preferred approach to segment instances in videos. Despite the resurgence of impressive single image models, the online (or semi-online) VIS approaches outperform single-image models (e.g., based on SAM) by using long sequences of densely annotated frames during training. However,such a training setup of VIS is expensive in the sense of compute as well as dense annotations required. In order to solve these major flaws, we argue that the effective modeling of the instances and their evolution in videos do not require densely annotated frames. To that end, we propose a simple and effective module, called Past-frames Feature Propagation (PFP) which aggregates low-dimensional features from the image encoder of multiple frames. This simple low-compute module provides tremendous learning capability in using sparse video frame labels for end-to-end training. Combined with a light-weight frame-specific Instance Queries, our Sparse frame Annotation VIS (SA-VIS) significantly improves performance over its baseline. Most interestingly, our simple design that avoids complexities effectively bridges the gap in accuracy between training on sparsely and densely annotated video sequences. This translates to a mere 0.4% drop in performance of SA-VIS when using annotations for only 1/5 of the images in the dataset. Empirically, SA-VIS shows strong improvements over the baseline on YouTube-VIS 2019/2021/2022 and Occluded VIS (OVIS) and an over 1% improvement in AP on the state-of-the-art in a limited annotations scenario.

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

Defending against Adaptive Prompt Injection Attacks via Reasoning-enabled Task Alignment

arXiv:2606.15441v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Indirect prompt injection attacks hijack LLM-based agents by embedding malicious instructions in third-party data that the agent retrieves during task execution. Existing defenses report near-zero attack success rate on static benchmarks, yet recent adaptive evaluations show that these results collapse once the attacker is allowed to optimize against the deployed defense. In this work, we trace this collapse to two failure modes. First, existing defense methods are confined to recognizing specific attack patterns, rather than assessing whether the intent of every embedded instruction is relevant to the user task. Second, training-based defenses, which otherwise offer the strongest safety-utility trade-off, assemble their adversarial examples from a handful of hand-crafted templates, and the resulting defender fails to generalize outside that narrow strategy distribution. To address these gaps, we propose RETA, a training-based method that grounds defense decisions on the user tasks rather than attacker-controlled data. At each tool-output step, the defender undertakes chain-of-thought reasoning verifying that its actions are consistent with the user task. Leveraging red-teaming, a simulated attacker synthesizes adversarial training data and receives a dictionary-learning diversity reward, achieving broad coverage of injection-reformulation strategies. Together, these allow the defender to be optimized via multi-objective reinforcement learning and achieve better safety-utility trade-off. Across six black-box adaptive attacks, RETA keeps every per-attack ASR below 10%, with average ASR of 2.92% and 3.75% on the two target models, while preserving most utility under attack and on clean inputs.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Before the Labels: How Dataset Construction Shapes Suicidality Detection in Clinical Text

Clinical NLP increasingly relies on electronic health record (EHR) data to detect suicidal behaviors, treating clinical documentation as more reliable ground truth than social media. We argue that this framing obscures how EHR-based suicidality datasets encode a particular operationalization of suicidality, shaped by who authors the data, how episodes are bounded, and how ambiguity is resolved. We ground this argument in a case study of the ScAN dataset, built over MIMIC-III clinical notes. We show how governance constraints, ICD-based cohort selection, single-annotator labeling, and hospital-stay-level aggregation produce labels that reflect clinician-documented judgments, treat suicidality as a bounded episode, and assume that intent can be reliably inferred from documentation. A linguistic analysis demonstrates that identical labels subsume heterogeneous clinical framings differing in temporality, negation, and uncertainty. We argue that clinical NLP should examine the assumptions embedded in suicidality datasets before interpreting their labels as ground truth.

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

RelayFormer: A Unified Local-Global Attention Framework for Scalable Image and Video Manipulation Localization

Visual manipulation localization (VML) aims to identify tampered regions in images and videos, a task that has become increasingly challenging with the rise of advanced editing tools. Existing methods face two central issues. The first is resolution diversity. Resizing or padding can distort subtle forensic cues and introduce unnecessary computational cost. The second is the difficulty of extending spatial models for images to spatio-temporal inputs in videos, which often results in maintaining separate architectures for the two data types. To address these challenges, we propose RelayFormer, a unified framework that adapts to varying resolutions and naturally handles both static and temporal visual data. RelayFormer partitions inputs into fixed-size sub-images and introduces Global Local Relay (GLR) tokens that propagate structured context through a relay-based attention mechanism. This design enables efficient exchange of global cues, such as semantic or temporal consistency, while preserving fine-grained manipulation artifacts. Unlike prior approaches that depend on uniform resizing or sparse attention, RelayFormer scales to variable resolutions and video sequences with minimal overhead. Experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate superior performance and strong efficiency, combining resolution adaptivity without interpolation or excessive padding, unified processing for images and videos, and a favorable balance between accuracy and computational cost. Code is available at~\href{https://github.com/WenOOI/RelayFormer}{https://github.com/WenOOI/RelayFormer}.

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

A Decision-Theoretic View of Test-Time Training: When, How Far, and Which Directions to Adapt

arXiv:2606.15569v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Test-time training (TTT) adapts a pretrained model to each prompt via parameter updates, improving accuracy under pretraining-to-test distribution shifts. Yet, its performance often suffers from instability and sensitivity to hyperparameters such as update steps and subspace. We explain this behavior through a decision-theoretic lens, treating TTT as implicit Bayesian inference in the kernel regime. Under a Gaussian process benchmark, we show that TTT reduces prediction error when updates are spectrally matched to the prompt's signal-to-noise ratio and aligned with query-relevant eigen-directions. This perspective underpins the following results: (1) we show when fixed update steps and subspaces fail under distribution shifts, motivating adaptive strategies; (2) we prove that selecting update steps via prompt evidence admits a PAC-Bayes guarantee against overfitting; and (3) we characterize the Bayes-optimal update subspace under a linear-Gaussian correction model, yielding a scoring rule for selecting Transformer blocks and heads. Our theory helps explain the empirical instability of TTT, taking a step toward principled guidance for when, how far, and which directions to adapt.

23.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

Perturbation Curve models continuous transcriptional response trajectories and improves prediction of genetic modulations

Single-cell CRISPR screens, Perturb-seq, have revolutionized functional genomics by revealing biological causality. However, although perturbation assignments are typically represented as discrete labels, the cell-level effective strength of perturbations is often continuous and diverse. Current analytical frameworks struggle to decouple the variability in perturbation strength from the diversity of downstream responses. Here, we present Perturbation Curve (PertCurve), a nonlinear, curve-based computational framework that models the trajectories of transcriptomic responses by explicitly incorporating diverse perturbation magnitudes and strengths. By ordering cells by perturbation strength, we demonstrate that PertCurve accurately recapitulates the response magnitudes and reveals the distinct modularity and asynchrony patterns of downstream gene behaviors. These patterns are categorized into archetypes, including proportional, sensitive, and threshold responses. By applying this framework across CRISPRi/a modalities, we identify universal response patterns in viral infection, apoptosis, and proliferation genes, and reveal previously overlooked context-specific regulatory features in cell differentiation. Finally, incorporating PertCurve into perturbation prediction models and evaluation metrics enhances predictive performance, delivering actionable insights for refining established models.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Excess mortality in Germany during 2020-2023: A descriptive age-stratified analysis

Authors:

This study investigates excess mortality in Germany in the years from 2020 to 2023 and its temporal alignment with reported COVID-19 deaths. The analysis uses annual and weekly all-cause mortality data and linear baseline trends derived from pre-pandemic years. Possible effects of demographic and population changes on baseline trends were also examined. Excess mortality was analysed over time and across age groups. Excess mortality was observed in all investigated years, rising from 2020 to its highest value in 2022. In absolute terms, the age group [≥]80 years accounted for the largest proportion of excess deaths throughout the study period. After 2021, elevated mortality relative to baseline was also observed in younger age groups down to 15 years of age, although absolute numbers remained substantially lower than in older groups. No evidence of excess mortality was observed for individuals younger than 15 years. Periods of excess mortality were temporally aligned with waves of reported COVID-19 deaths. In 2020, cumulative excess mortality after calendar week 11 closely matched reported COVID-19 deaths (43 876 vs. 41 835 deaths). Weekly excess mortality, reported COVID-19 deaths and wastewater viral load, when available showed strong temporal synchrony, although excess mortality increasingly exceeded reported COVID-19 deaths during later pandemic waves. Temporal patterns differed from the typical seasonal mortality peaks commonly associated with influenza epidemics during the early months of the year. In 2023, excess mortality declined substantially, possibly indicating a return to mortality levels before the emergence of SARS-CoV-2.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

The quantum harmonic oscillator and the real Hilbert space

arXiv:2606.12060v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The harmonic oscillator is considered within generalized frameworks using complex and quaternionic numbers. The classical oscillator is considered in terms of a complex position function, and quantum oscillators are examined in terms of complex wave functions, and in terms of quaternionic wave functions as well. Both of the quantum solutions are obtained within the real Hilbert space formalism. The results reveal the complex and quaternionic descriptions as suitable frameworks for non-stationary processes, including damped oscillations, forced oscillations, and additionally self-interacting processes that cannot be appropriately described otherwise.