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02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Photon: Federated LLM Pre-Training

Authors:
Lorenzo Sani↗Alex Iacob↗Zeyu Cao↗Royson Lee↗Bill Marino↗Yan Gao↗Dongqi Cai↗Zexi Li↗Wanru Zhao↗Xinchi Qiu↗Nicholas D. Lane↗

arXiv:2411.02908v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Scaling large language models (LLMs) demands extensive data and computing resources, which are traditionally constrained to data centers by the high-bandwidth requirements of distributed training. Low-bandwidth methods like federated learning (FL) could enable collaborative training of larger models across weakly-connected GPUs if they can effectively be used for pre-training. To achieve this, we introduce Photon, the first complete system for federated end-to-end LLM training, leveraging cross-silo FL for global-scale training with minimal communication overheads. Using Photon, we train the first federated family of decoder-only LLMs from scratch. We show that: (1) Photon can train model sizes up to 7B in a federated fashion while reaching an even better perplexity than centralized pre-training; (2) Photon model training time decreases with available compute, achieving a similar compute-time trade-off to centralized; and (3) Photon outperforms the wall-time of baseline distributed training methods by 35% via communicating 64x-512xless. Our proposal is robust to data heterogeneity and converges twice as fast as previous methods like DiLoCo. This surprising data efficiency stems from a unique approach combining small client batch sizes with extremely high learning rates, enabled by federated averaging's robustness to hyperparameters. Photon thus represents the first economical system for global internet-wide LLM pre-training.

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03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Detect, Unlearn, Restore: Defending Text Summarization Models Against Data Poisoning

Authors:
Poojitha Thota↗Shirin Nilizadeh↗

Training-time data poisoning during fine-tuning poses a significant threat to large language models (LLMs) deployed for abstractive text summarization, where small task-specific datasets exert disproportionate influence on model behavior. In this setting, adversaries manipulate fine-tuning data to induce persistent summarization failures, such as biased or harmful summaries, while preserving standard evaluation metrics. We present a unified post-hoc defense framework for detecting and remediating fine-tuning-stage poisoning in summarization models across the machine learning supply chain. Our experiments show that in white-box settings, poisoned document-summary pairs exhibit abnormally high training influence, enabling detection via influence-function analysis with semantic consistency checks. In black-box settings, poisoned models display two to three times greater sensitivity to semantics-preserving perturbations, enabling behavioral auditing without training data access. Beyond existing poisoning formulations, we introduce novel attacks targeting factual distortion and representational bias, showing that poisoning alters summarization behavior without triggering conventional alarms. Across nine architectures and six benchmark datasets under adaptive attacks, our defenses achieve 85-92% detection precision, while gradient-ascent unlearning restores up to 96% of original behavior with minimal utility loss (less than 0.6% ROUGE degradation). These results indicate that fine-tuning-time poisoning leaves persistent structural artifacts, enabling practical detection and post-deployment recovery without full retraining.

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04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

ResidualPlanner+: a scalable matrix mechanism for marginals and beyond

Authors:
Guanlin He↗Yingtai Xiao↗Levent Toksoz↗Zeyu Ding↗Danfeng Zhang↗Daniel Kifer↗

arXiv:2305.08175v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Noisy marginals are a common form of confidentiality protecting data release and are useful for many downstream tasks such as contingency table analysis, construction of Bayesian networks, and even synthetic data generation. Privacy mechanisms that provide unbiased noisy answers to linear queries (such as marginals) are known as matrix mechanisms. We propose ResidualPlanner and ResidualPlanner+, two highly scalable matrix mechanisms. ResidualPlanner is both optimal and scalable for answering marginal queries with Gaussian noise, while ResidualPlanner+ provides support for more general workloads, such as combinations of marginals and range queries or prefix-sum queries. ResidualPlanner can optimize for many loss functions that can be written as a convex function of marginal variances (prior work was restricted to just one predefined objective function). ResidualPlanner can optimize the accuracy of marginals in large scale settings in seconds, even when the previous state of the art (HDMM) runs out of memory. It even runs on datasets with 100 attributes in a couple of minutes. Furthermore, ResidualPlanner can efficiently compute variance/covariance values for each marginal (prior methods quickly run out of memory, even for relatively small datasets). ResidualPlanner+ provides support for more complex workloads that combine marginal and range/prefix-sum queries (e.g., a marginal on race, a range query on age, and a combined race/age tabulation that answers age range queries for each race). It even supports custom user-defined workloads on different attributes. With this added flexibility, ResidualPlanner+ is not necessarily optimal, however it is still extremely scalable and outperforms the prior state-of-the-art (HDMM) on prefix-sum queries both in terms of accuracy and speed.

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05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Beyond Visual Forensics: Auditing Multimodal Robustness for Synthetic Medical Image Detection

Authors:
Ching-Hao Chiu↗Hao-Wei Chung↗Gelei Xu↗Xueyang Li↗Pin-Yu Chen↗John Kheir↗Meysam Ghaffari↗Carlos Morato↗Ahmed Abbasi↗Yiyu Shi↗

With the rapid adoption of generative AI, synthetic medical images pose growing risks, including diagnostic deception and insurance fraud. Although prior work has explored vision-language model (VLM)-based synthetic image detection, these evaluations typically consider images in isolation. In clinical practice, however, images are interpreted alongside structured records and metadata, and VLMs are increasingly deployed under joint image-record inputs. We uncover a previously underexamined multimodal vulnerability: when given both modalities, VLMs may overweight record context in authenticity judgments, such that the same image receives different predictions solely due to changes in its accompanying text. This raises concerns about robustness in real-world deployment. To systematically characterize this effect, we reformulate synthetic medical image detection as an audit of multimodal robustness at the image-record interface and introduce a paired benchmark that holds the image fixed while swapping controlled metadata variants. Across multiple imaging modalities, we evaluate diverse open-weight and frontier API VLMs and quantify how metadata alone shifts authenticity predictions. Our benchmark provides a standardized tool for assessing and improving multimodal robustness beyond image-only settings. The code is available at https://github.com/chiuhaohao/Beyond-Visual-Forensics.

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

Multimodal Concept Bottleneck Models

Authors:
Tongqing Shi↗Ge Yan↗Tuomas Oikarinen↗Tsui-Wei Weng↗

arXiv:2606.19882v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) enhance the interpretability of deep learning networks by aligning the features extracted from images with natural concepts. However, existing CBMs are constrained in their ability to generalize beyond a fixed set of predefined classes and the risk of non-concept information leakage, where predictive signals outside the intended concepts are inadvertently exploited. In this paper, we propose Multimodal Concept Bottleneck Model (MM-CBM) to address these issues and extend CBMs into CLIP. MM-CBM utilizes dual Concept Bottleneck Layers (CBLs) to align both the image and text embeddings into interpretable features. This allows us to perform new vision tasks like zero-shot classification or image retrieval in an interpretable way. Compared to existing methods, MM-CBM achieves up to 51.26% accuracy improvement on average across four standard benchmarks. Our method maintains high accuracy, staying within ~5% of black-box performance while offering greater interpretability.

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

deFOREST: Fusing Optical and Radar satellite data for Enhanced Sensing of Tree-loss

Authors:
Julio Enrique Castrillon-Candas↗Hanfeng Gu↗Caleb Meredith↗Yulin Li↗Xiaojing Tang↗Pontus Olofsson↗Mark Kon↗

arXiv:2510.14092v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper we develop a deforestation detection pipeline that incorporates optical and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data. A crucial component of the pipeline is the construction of anomaly maps of the optical data, which is done using the residual space of a discrete Karhunen-Lo\'{e}ve (KL) expansion. Anomalies are quantified using a concentration bound on the distribution of the residual components for the nominal state of the forest. This bound does not require prior knowledge on the distribution of the data. This is in contrast to statistical parametric methods that assume knowledge of the data distribution, an impractical assumption that is especially infeasible for high dimensional data such as ours. Once the optical anomaly maps are computed they are combined with SAR data, and the state of the forest is classified by using a Hidden Markov Model (HMM). We test our approach with Sentinel-1 (SAR) and Sentinel-2 (Optical) data on a $92\,km \times 92\,km$ region in the Amazon forest. The results show that both the hybrid optical-radar and optical only methods achieve high accuracy that is superior to the recent state-of-the-art hybrid method. Moreover, the hybrid method is significantly more robust in the case of sparse optical data that are common in highly cloudy regions.

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08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Tamed Feynman-Kac diffusion processes: Killing-branching intertwine

Authors:
Piotr Garbaczewski↗Mariusz \.Zaba↗

arXiv:2605.07824v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Relaxation to equilibrium of a drifted Brownian motion is quantified by a transition probability density function, whose main (multiplicative) entry is an inferred Feynman-Kac kernel of the Schr\"{o}dinger semigroup operator. Although seemingly devoid of a natural probabilistic significance (except for its explicit path integral definition), the pertinent kernel relaxes to equilibrium as well. The implicit Feynman-Kac potential ${\cal{V}}(x)$, continuous, confining and bounded from below, may take negative values. If positive, ${\cal{V}}(x)$ can be interpreted as the killing rate of the decaying diffusion process. In case of relaxing F-K kernels the killing effects are tamed (often overcompensated). The taming inavoidably appears in conjunction with the existence of the negativity subdomains of ${\cal{V}}(x)$ in $R$. If locally ${\cal{V}}(x) < 0$, its sign inversion $- {\cal{V}}(x)$ can be interpreted as the branching (cloning, alternatively bifurcation) rate in the course of the other wise free random motion. The arising killed diffusion processes with branching, we interpret as the possible path-wise background of tamed (relaxing) Feynman-Kac diffusions. We present acomputer-assisted path-wise arguments, towards a consistency of the killing/branching taming scenario, for a number of nonlinear model systems in one space dimension. Special attention is paid to Feynman-Kac potential shapes in the double well form, where an analytic access to eigenvalues and eigenfunctions is scarce. Throughout the paper the dynamics refers to the positive real time. Since the Newton-type equations of motion for admissible classical trajectories have a Euclidean form (due to the sign inverted force term), we give a brief resume of a couple of their explicit solutions, without recourse to the Euclidean time intuitions, and the instanton lore of related quantum model systems.

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

Measurement-Free Toric-Code Memory in Array Globally Controlled Rydberg Array

Authors:
Han Wang↗Yusheng Zhao↗Xiuhao Deng↗Jinguo Liu↗

arXiv:2606.12030v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The central prerequisite of any fault-tolerant quantum architecture is a quantum memory: a block of encoded physical qubits whose logical state is actively preserved against noise across many rounds of error correction. In neutral-atom Rydberg arrays, realizing such a memory is obstructed not by the entangling gates themselves, which are already fast and high-fidelity, but by the auxiliary operations that a conventional error-correction cycle requires: mid-circuit fluorescence measurement, inter-zone atom transport, and locally focused single-qubit addressing. Each of these introduces latency, atom loss, or optical crosstalk that exceeds the cost of the underlying gates by orders of magnitude. These costs accumulate cycle after cycle, progressively degrading the very logical information the code is meant to protect. Here we propose a protocol that stabilizes a toric-code quantum memory without moving, measuring or local addressing atoms. The key is to use a three-species Rydberg atom array for the complete stabilizer cycle, including syndrome extraction, coherent correction, and ancilla reset, under global, species-selective laser pulses. Numerical simulation of a $4 \times 4$ rotated toric code shows a longer qubit lifetime when the physical error rate is below a pseudo-threshold $p^\star \approx 0.034$. The scheme offers a concrete, hardware-efficient route to topological quantum memory in neutral-atom platforms.

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

PhysMetrics.Weather: An Evaluation Framework for Physical Consistency in ML Weather Models

Authors:
Emma Kasteleyn↗Timo Maier↗Axel Lauer↗Veronika Eyring↗Pierre Gentine↗Ana Lucic↗

arXiv:2606.10642v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Machine learning weather prediction (MLWP) models have achieved impressive forecasting performance at a small fraction of the computational costs required for traditional physics-based methods. However, they are primarily (1) data-driven and (2) evaluated using pixel-wide error metrics (e.g., RMSE), so there are no guarantees that their forecasts are consistent with known physical laws. We introduce PhysMetrics$.$Weather, an evaluation framework that assesses the physical realism of MLWP models across three types of metrics: conservation, spectral, and dynamical. By quantifying physical realism, this tool guides the development of physics-informed architectures and helps evaluate whether MLWP models are reliable for operational use. Our framework is available on Github at https://github.com/Emmakast/PhysMetrics.Weather.

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

LoHoSearch: Benchmarking Long-Horizon Search Agents Beyond the Human Difficulty Ceiling

Authors:
Jiarui Zhao↗Rongzhi Zhang↗Lingchuan Liu↗Hao Yang↗Xunliang Cai↗Xi Su↗

Search agent benchmarks exemplified by BrowseComp have rapidly saturated over the past year, with the strongest models surpassing 90% accuracy. Since these benchmarks are predominantly human-authored, annotators lack a global perspective on entity statistics and cannot systematically maximize search space size and structural complexity. This creates a difficulty ceiling that is hard to break. To address this, we introduce LoHoSearch (Long-Horizon Search Agents), a challenging benchmark comprising 544 human-verified questions across 11 domains. LoHoSearch is constructed via an automated pipeline built upon a knowledge graph covering over 7 million Wikipedia entities, which selects relations with large search spaces and assembles them into structurally complex questions with KG-verified unique answers. Our evaluation demonstrates that even the strongest model achieves only 34.74% accuracy, and existing context management strategies (best +6.8%) yield far smaller gains than on prior benchmarks. LoHoSearch provides a more demanding standard for evaluating long-horizon reasoning and context management in search agents.

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12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Trust as a Hidden Driver of Epidemic Dynamics: A Missing Parameter in Compartmental Disease Transmission Models

Authors:
Zapf↗A. J↗Dewey↗Ognyanova↗Baum↗Hanage↗W. P↗Lipsitch↗Uslu↗A. A↗Druckman↗J. N↗…

Compartmental models of infectious disease transmission make assumptions about human behaviors. Specifically, they parameterize interactions across population groups, assumed to have distinct epidemiologically-relevant behavioral patterns, primarily through contact matrices stratified by demographic variables such as age, gender, or socioeconomic status. Although such demographic characteristics are readily measurable, they may inadequately capture the social and psychological forces that govern protective behaviors. Drawing on 20 waves of a national survey conducted throughout the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, we show that institutional trust - particularly trust in public health agencies, physicians, and hospitals - is a dominant predictor of protective behavior adoption. For mask wearing during periods of strongest pandemic activity, for example, institutional trust explains more behavioral variance across population groups than age, income, education, and partisan affiliation combined. In unadjusted analyses, the difference in protective behavior adoption between individuals with the highest and lowest trust in the CDC was four- to six-fold larger than the corresponding differences by age, income, or educational attainment, and exceeded the difference between Democratic and Republican respondents. This association was institutionally specific (e.g., the relationship attenuates for trust in banks), and behaviorally specific (e.g., trust in the CDC is associated with protective behaviors but not visiting a doctor). The latter suggests that trust modifies voluntary compliance with public health recommendations rather than access to or use of healthcare. We conclude that compartmental models of disease transmission would be substantially improved by incorporating institutional trust as a stratifying variable. We additionally offer a trust-integrated mathematical modeling framework and recommendations for the data infrastructure needed for its implementation.

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

Text region detection in historical astronomical diagrams

Authors:
Zeynep Sonat Baltac{\i}↗Rapha\"el Baena↗Fei Meng↗Somk\'eo Norindr↗Florence Somer↗Matthieu Husson↗Mathieu Aubry↗

Text detection is a crucial task in the analysis of historical documents. While datasets and benchmarks exist for text detection in manuscripts and maps, the study of text in mathematical diagrams has received little attention. To address this, we introduce a large-scale, diverse, open-access dataset of 948 historical astronomical diagrams containing 10,940 oriented polygonal text regions. Our dataset spans ten centuries (8th to 18th) and seven main linguistic traditions: Arabic and Persian (115), Chinese (332), Byzantine (233), Latin (185), Hebrew (48), and Sanskrit (35). It captures a wide range of diagram styles and textual content, from symbols to multi-line paragraphs. Each text instance is annotated with ordered polygons that precisely delineate text regions and encode the reading direction. In addition, we annotated the 2,293 regions in Latin diagrams with 20 class labels. We evaluated several strong baselines on our dataset, including TESTR, DeepSolo++, and Poly-DETR, a simple extension of DINO-DETR that we design to predict ordered polygon vertices. Poly-DETR achieves state-of-the-art performance on the MTHv2 and cBAD2019 benchmarks and provides a solid, simple baseline on our dataset. Code and dataset available online.

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14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Voronoi Percolation: Topological Stability and Giant Cycles

Authors:
Benjamin Schweinhart↗Morgan Shuman↗

arXiv:2601.00793v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the topological stability of Voronoi percolation in higher dimensions. We show that slightly increasing p allows a discretization that preserves increasing topological properties with high probability. This strengthens a theorem of Bollobás and Riordan and generalizes it to higher dimensions. As a consequence, we prove a sharp phase transition for the emergence of i-dimensional giant cycles in Voronoi percolation on the 2i-dimensional torus.

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

Bias-Controlled Primal-Dual Natural Actor-Critic: Optimal Rates for Constrained Multi-Objective Average-Reward RL

Authors:
Ankur Naskar↗Swetha Ganesh↗Vaneet Aggarwal↗

arXiv:2606.25012v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many reinforcement learning (RL) problems in the infinite-horizon average-reward setting require optimizing multiple conflicting objectives while satisfying multiple safety constraints. A common approach is concave scalarization, where the agent maximizes a utility $ f(J^\pi_{r_1}, \ldots, J^\pi_{r_M}) $ subject to a scalarized constraint $ g(J^\pi_{c_1}, \ldots, J^\pi_{c_N}) \ge 0 $, where $J^\pi_{r_m}$ and $J^\pi_{c_n}$ denote the average-reward and cost under policy $\pi$. However, the nonlinearity of $f$ and $g$ introduces bias in policy-gradient and actor-critic methods, since gradients must be evaluated using noisy estimates of $J^\pi,$ and $ \mathbb{E}[\partial f(J^\pi)] \neq \partial f(\mathbb{E}[J^\pi]),$ and this bias propagates through both primal and dual updates. We propose an MLMC-based primal-dual Natural Actor-Critic algorithm for average-reward MDPs that controls bias in scalarized objectives, constraint evaluation, and actor-critic estimation without requiring mixing-time knowledge. We show that the algorithm achieves optimal global convergence and constraint-violation rates of $ \tilde{O}(1/\sqrt{T}) $. To our knowledge, this is the first result establishing optimal convergence for concave scalarized multi-objective RL in the average-reward setting, both with and without constraints, and the first to do so without mixing-time information even in the absence of scalarization.

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

FlexMS: A Unified Public Benchmark for Molecule Tandem Mass Spectrum Prediction

Authors:
Yunhua Zhong↗Yixuan Tang↗Yifan Li↗Pan Liu↗Zhiwen Yang↗Jie Yang↗Jun Xia↗

arXiv:2602.22822v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) is central to small molecule identification, but current deep learning systems for spectrum prediction still remain difficult to evaluate and deploy in practice. While novel architectures constantly claim state-of-the-art performance, inconsistent metadata conditioning and entangled preprocessing pipelines hinder fair architectural comparisons. Besides, existing evaluations are often restricted to curated datasets, failing to capture the heterogeneity and cross-domain shifts of real-world metabolomics. Furthermore, current benchmarks lack difficulty-aware diagnostics and leave blind to how models behave under specific compute or data constraints. To address this, we present FlexMS, a modular public-data benchmark framework that standardizes MS/MS prediction across public resources while keeping molecular encoders, metadata conditioning, predictor heads, and downstream retrieval under one protocol. FlexMS establishes a fair evaluation playground which significantly lowers the barrier for integrating new predictive tools. Rather than solely optimizing for average scores, FlexMS augments aggregate accuracy with difficulty-aware diagnostics, providing actionable guidance on model selection across different compute constraints, data scales, and downstream retrieval objectives. Ultimately, FlexMS provides the community with a reproducible standard to identify which algorithmic conclusions are stable and which operating points are most viable in practice.

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17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

SCAR: Semantic Continuity-Aware Retrieval for Efficient Context Expansion in RAG

Authors:
Nathana\"el Langlois↗

Fixed-length chunking in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) often leads to boundary fragmentation, where critical evidence is split across segments, degrading retrieval recall. While static windowing and parent retrieval improve recall, they introduce significant token overhead. We propose SCAR (Semantic Continuity-Aware Retrieval), an adaptive retrieval policy that selectively expands neighboring chunks by weighing query-neighbor relevance against a structural continuity penalty. SCAR uses a relative expansion threshold tied to each retrieved chunk's own query-relevance, yielding an approximately scale-invariant decision rule that transfers across embedding models without recalibration. Across four diverse corpora (RFC, GDPR, a 10-K report, and a Merger agreement; N=320 queries; 160 boundary-fragmented), SCAR achieves 92.8% recall on boundary-fragmented queries with only 7.84 chunks, a 22.9% reduction compared to static windowing (10.16 chunks). Paired bootstrap tests (B=10,000) confirm the chunk reduction is highly significant (p

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

Temporally Consistent Graph Q-Networks for Intelligent Network Control

Authors:
Zacharias Veiksaar↗Maxime Bouton↗

arXiv:2606.13848v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mobile networks continue to grow in complexity and next generation networks are expected to support both increasing traffic loads and more diverse services. As network complexity rises, optimizing antenna parameters under dynamic or changing objectives becomes increasingly challenging. We propose a novel multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithm for high-level control and orchestration of mobile networks. The Temporally Consistent Graph Q-Network (TC-GQN) algorithm learns a self-predicting representation of the whole network that is task-independent and aggregates information from all base-stations. A graph neural network is trained using a global reward function to assign coordinated local actions based on the learned encoding of the global network state. We evaluate the algorithm in a simulated environment to orchestrate an energy-saving feature across multiple sectors and multiple carriers under different quality of service (QoS) constraints. The proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art graph-based baselines and a competitive rule-based controller by improving hardware sleep time while maintaining QoS. Moreover, the learned representation enables rapid adaptation to changing intents.

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

Rational Sparse Autoencoder

Authors:
Naiyu Yin↗Yue Yu↗

arXiv:2606.14990v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are standard tools for mechanistic interpretability, but current SAE families are constrained by fixed encoder nonlinearities such as ReLU, JumpReLU, and TopK. This hard-codes a particular sparsity mechanism into the model and can distort the reconstruction-versus-sparsity trade-off. We introduce the Rational Sparse Autoencoder (RSAE), which replaces the fixed encoder activation with a trainable rational function. Rational activations are flexible enough to uniformly approximate the activation primitives used by existing SAE families on compact domains (for TopK, the thresholded gate obtained after a separating top-k threshold is supplied), while also providing a richer function class for adapting to the observed pre-activation geometry. We realise this idea through a two-stage pipeline: an initialisation procedure that copies the pre-trained baseline SAE weights, plugs in rational coefficients obtained by the relaxed Remez exchange on synthetic data, and calibrates the scale parameters along with the rational coefficients; followed by a fine-tuning step under the standard sparsity-regularised reconstruction objective. Empirically, on residual-stream activations of three open-weight language models and across all three baseline activation families, the RSAE strictly improves on it after the fine-tuning step, both on reconstruction-side metrics and on downstream-behaviour metrics, without sacrificing feature-level interpretability under sparse probing. These gains are consistent across host language models, across baseline activation families, and across the full range of baseline sparsity we tested, while the upgrade itself adds only a handful of scalar parameters per autoencoder and runs in minutes on a single consumer GPU.

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

Self-Supervised Learning as Discrete Communication

Authors:
Kawtar Zaher↗Ilyass Moummad↗Olivier Buisson↗Alexis Joly↗

Most self-supervised learning (SSL) methods learn continuous visual representations by aligning different views of the same input, offering limited control over how information is structured across representation dimensions. In this work, we frame visual self-supervised learning as a discrete communication process between a teacher and a student network, where semantic information is transmitted through a fixed-capacity binary channel. Rather than aligning continuous features, the student predicts multi-label binary messages produced by the teacher. Discrete agreement is enforced through an element-wise binary cross-entropy objective, while a coding-rate regularization term encourages effective utilization of the constrained channel, promoting structured representations. We further show that periodically reinitializing the projection head strengthens this effect by encouraging embeddings that remain predictive across multiple discrete encodings. Extensive experiments demonstrate consistent improvements over continuous agreement baselines on image classification, retrieval, and dense visual prediction tasks, as well as under domain shift through self-supervised adaptation. Beyond backbone representations, we analyze the learned binary codes and show that they form a compact and informative discrete language, capturing semantic factors reusable across classes.

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21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Sociodemographic Disparities in Tafamidis Initiation and Clinical Outcomes in ATTR-CM Across the United States

Authors:
Cyrille-Superville↗Gaggin↗H. K↗Rosen↗Udall↗Hennum↗Zeldow↗Gao↗Nagelhout↗Keshishian↗Davis↗M. K↗…

BACKGROUND Transthyretin amyloid cardiomyopathy (ATTR-CM) is a progressive, life-threatening disease. Sociodemographic factors may influence time to treatment initiation and resulting clinical outcomes, yet these relationships are poorly characterized. OBJECTIVE Assess the effects of sex and race on tafamidis initiation and subsequent outcomes and their interaction with factors such as ATTR-CM type and social deprivation measures. METHODS A retrospective cohort analysis was conducted using the US Komodo Healthcare Map (01/2016-06/2024) among patients with amyloidosis, identified by ICD-10-CM diagnosis codes. Cumulative incidence of treatment initiation and survival probabilities for cardiovascular-related hospitalization (CVH) or death were estimated by Kaplan-Meier, stratified by sex and race. Cox proportional hazards models were fitted for both endpoints to estimate hazard ratios, adjusting for demographics and clinical characteristics. RESULTS Of 11,311 patients identified, White and Black patients (n=9,223) were included in subsequent analyses. Within 12 months of diagnosis, White women had the lowest cumulative incidence of tafamidis initiation (11.4%), followed by Black women (22.0%), Black men (26.7%), and White men (31.0%). Event-free survival at 12 months was lowest in Black women (42.9%), followed by Black men (46.8%), White women (48.6%), and White men (54.4%). Median (95% CI) time to CVH or death was shortest for Black women (8.0 months [6.8-10.0]) followed by Black men (9.9 months [8.8-12.0]), White women (11.0 months [9.6-13.0]), and White men (15.0 months [14.0-16.0]). CONCLUSIONS In this large, real-world cohort of US patients with ATTR-CM, sex and race contributed to disparities in tafamidis initiation and survival, underscoring compounded disparities in both access and outcomes.

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

Action with Visual Primitives

Authors:
Weilong Guo↗Yuchen Wang↗Renping Zhou↗Yunfeng Zhang↗Rui Fang↗Yuyang Pang↗Wenda Xu↗Gao Huang↗

arXiv:2605.22183v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for generalist robotic manipulation. A common design in current architectures maps language instructions and visual observations to actions in a single forward pass. While conceptually simple, this formulation entangles instruction comprehension, spatial scene understanding, and motor control within a single learning objective. As a result, the action expert must implicitly relearn cognitive and perceptual capabilities already present in the pretrained VLM, which can limit both learning efficiency and generalization. We introduce AVP (Action with Visual Primitives), an end-to-end architecture that implements this visual-primitive-centric interface: the VLM infers the next-stage target and emits visual-primitive tokens that condition a flow-matching action expert, with supervision derived from end-effector kinematics. Real-robot experiments on general pick-and-place tasks show that AVP improves the success rate by 37.04% over pi_0.5 and outperforms other recent methods, with consistent gains in data efficiency, spatial-compositional generalization, and object-level transfer.

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23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

INCREASED REMOVAL SIGNALS ON ERYTHROCYTES OF ANEMIC CANCER PATIENTS

Authors:
Matthaios↗Karatidis↗Balgkouranidou↗Bogatsa↗Kyriakou↗Anagnostopoulos↗Papadopoulos↗

BACKGROUND: Anemia is a negative factor in cancer, influencing the prognosis, quality of life and financial situation of cancer patients. Recent studies have shown that anemia in cancer is provoked by augmented erythrocyte removal. OBJECTIVE: In this study we sought to investigate the molecular bases for erythrocyte removal in cancer patients with anemia. In particular, we explored the levels of erythrocyte CD47, lactadherin, calreticulin and MCP1. METHODS: Thirty five anemic cancer patients (25 women, aged 66.4 +/-11.35 years old) and twelve healthy non-anemic controls (8 men, aged 61.1+/-9.98 years old) participated in our study. Red blood cells were isolated throug multiple centrifugations, and were lysed with the use of Triton-X 100. The levels of CD47, lactadherin, calreticulin and monocyte chemoattrractant protein 1 were determined by ELISA. RESULTS: Erythrocytes of anemic cancer patients display reduced CD47 (p

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24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Why SWAVE May Not Be All You Need:A Concept-Evolution Retrospective on Complex-Valued Recurrent Language Models

Authors:
Ramprasath Ganesaraja↗Swathika N↗Sahil Dilip Panse↗

arXiv:2606.18324v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: SWave is a complex-valued recurrent language model (169.26M parameters, D=384, L=16, T=2048) trained on FineWeb-Edu using 2xH100 NVL. It was designed around three founding premises: that representing language as complex waves rather than real-valued numbers enables richer information encoding; that a Cayley-parameterised unitary transition provides a mathematical guarantee against state decay or explosion; and that a hidden state which rotates rather than shrinks preserves signal integrity over arbitrarily long contexts. The core of SWave evolved substantially across three development phases. The Resonance Head was found to structurally admit imaginary-channel collapse as a global loss minimum (a failure mode we term cos-domination collapse) and was superseded by an untied head with independent real and imaginary embedding tables from the Phase-Associative Memory (PAM) architecture. This resolved the degenerate minimum and enabled stable 200,000-step training (best-step PPL 22.0 at step 89,861). ComplexNorm and the Wave Propagation Scan proved load-bearing throughout all three phases and were retained to the final architecture. ProtectGatedScan was reframed as a structural prior rather than a learned behaviour. The four multi-scale retention concepts showed no measurable improvement under controlled evaluation and were found non-load-bearing. The ComplexGatedUnit was superseded by a real-valued squared-ReLU channel mixer with fewer parameters. The auxiliary training objectives showed no benefit once structural constraints were resolved. The investigation yields a formal characterisation of cos-domination collapse, a parallel scan with a log-space backward pass for numerical stability, six transferable engineering principles for complex-valued recurrent training, and a plan-to-code traceability methodology for catching structural divergences that conventional test suites miss.

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25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Dehaze-GaussianImage: Zero-Shot Dehazing via Efficient 2D Gaussian Splatting Representation

Authors:
Yuhan Chen↗Wenxuan Yu↗Guofa Li↗Kunyang Huang↗Ying Fang↗Yicui Shi↗Wenbo Chu↗Keqiang Li↗

Existing single image dehazing methods are often constrained by computational redundancy in pixel-level optimization and the lack of physical interpretability in implicit neural networks. These limitations hinder the balance between representation efficiency and reconstruction fidelity. To address these issues, we propose Dehaze-GaussianImage, the first zero-shot framework that introduces 2D Gaussian Splatting (2DGS) into the image dehazing domain to break the traditional pixel-grid processing paradigm. Distinct from static convolutional neural networks (CNNs) or Transformers, our approach models hazy images as continuous and dynamically evolvable anisotropic Gaussian fields. Specifically, we propose a novel reconstruction-decoupling zero-shot learning strategy that embeds the atmospheric scattering model into the Gaussian parameter space. This strategy drives Gaussian primitives to adaptively split, clone, and prune during optimization, achieving geometric-level decoupling of the transmission medium and clear textures. Furthermore, explicit structure-preserving constraints are introduced to suppress artifacts commonly caused by traditional physical priors. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in a fully unsupervised manner with minimal parameters, highlighting the potential of explicit Gaussian representation for low-level vision tasks.

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