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

Variational Deep Unfolding with Mamba-Based Nonlocal Modeling for Underwater Image Enhancement

Authors:
Daniel Torres↗Julia Navarro↗Catalina Sbert↗Joan Duran↗

Underwater imaging plays a crucial role in ocean engineering, although captured data often suffer from poor visibility and color distortion. To address these challenges, we propose a model-based deep unfolding network for underwater image enhancement that integrates variational modeling into a learnable architecture. The framework is guided by a variational formulation based on a dehazing decomposition, incorporating a multiplicative residual component to absorb remaining artifacts and a nonlocal gradient-type constraint to preserve structural details and enhance edge sharpness. We provide a theoretical analysis establishing the existence of solution for the associated minimization problem. The proposed unfolding method incorporates Mamba layers to efficiently capture self-similarities in the scene. In addition, we introduce a proximal trajectory loss that enforces consistency between the unfolding stages and the iterations of an ideal restoration regularizer. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed unfolding approach achieves improved visual quality and competitive quantitative performance compared with recent state-of-the-art methods. The source code will be available at https://github.com/MIA-UIB/Variational-Unfolding-Mamba-Underwater-Enhancement .

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

When RAG Hurts: Diagnosing and Mitigating Attention Distraction in Retrieval-Augmented LVLMs

Authors:
Beidi Zhao↗Wenlong Deng↗Xinting Liao↗Yushu Li↗Nazim Shaikh↗Yao Nie↗Xiaoxiao Li↗

While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is one of the dominant paradigms for enhancing Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) on knowledge-based VQA tasks, recent work attributes RAG failures to insufficient attention towards the retrieved context, proposing to reduce the attention allocated to image tokens. In this work, we identify a distinct failure mode that previous study overlooked: Attention Distraction (AD). When the retrieved context is sufficient (highly relevant or including the correct answer), the retrieved text suppresses the visual attention globally, and the attention on image tokens shifts away from question-relevant regions. This leads to failures on questions the model could originally answer correctly without the retrieved text. To mitigate this issue, we propose MAD-RAG, a training-free intervention that decouples visual grounding from context integration through a dual-question formulation, combined with attention mixing to preserve image-conditioned evidence. Extensive experiments on OK-VQA, E-VQA, and InfoSeek demonstrate that MAD-RAG consistently outperforms existing baselines across different model families, yielding absolute gains of up to 4.76%, 9.20%, and 6.18% over the vanilla RAG baseline. Notably, MAD-RAG rectifies up to 74.68% of failure cases with negligible computational overhead.

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04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Validating an Early Pregnancy HbA1c as the Screening Test for Gestational Diabetes Mellitus: Findings from PRISMA Pakistan Cohort

Authors:
Naz↗Yazdani↗Hoodbhoy↗Ghebremihael-Weldeselassie↗Mazhar↗Hotwani↗Jehan↗Nisar↗M. I↗Iqbal↗

Background: Early identification of gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) is critical to improving maternal and neonatal outcomes, particularly in resource-constrained settings where universal oral glucose tolerance testing (OGTT) is burdensome. We assessed whether early-pregnancy HbA1c alone or combined with common risk factors can predict GDM and reduce the burden of OGTT requirements in a peri-urban cohort in Karachi, Pakistan. Methods: We conducted a secondary analysis of the Pregnancy Risk Infant Surveillance and Measurement Alliance (PRISMA) Pakistan cohort. Women enrolled before 20 weeks' gestation with available early-pregnancy HbA1c and a 2-hour 75g OGTT at 24 to 28 weeks were included. We externally validated GDM prediction models originally developed in the STRiDE-India cohort. Model performance was evaluated using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves and area under the curve (AUC). We assessed four models: HbA1c alone (Model 1a); age, BMI, and family history of diabetes mellitus (FH DM) (Model 1b); HbA1c combined with age, BMI, and FH DM (Model 2); and an extended model, i.e., Model 2 combined with socioeconomic status, gestational age, parity, systolic and diastolic blood pressure (Model 3). A dual-threshold approach was applied to assess rule-in and rule-out performance. Results: Among 2,489 women, GDM incidence was 7.5% (n=186). Models with a broader set of predictors demonstrated higher AUC values, with Model 2 achieving an AUC of 0.61 (95% CI: 0.57, 0.66). Including additional factors (Model 3) did not further improve predictive ability (AUC: 0.62; 95% CI: 0.58, 0.66). In addition, at predefined thresholds, Model 2 achieved sensitivity of 73.7% (rule-out) and specificity of 83.5% (rule-in), with the potential to reduce OGTT requirements (58.5%). Conclusions: Early-pregnancy risk stratification using HbA1c combined with simple clinical predictors offers a pragmatic approach to streamline GDM screening among high-risk pregnant women. A dual-threshold strategy using Model 2 could reduce reliance on universal OGTT while prioritizing high-risk women for confirmatory testing.

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

Federated Foundation Language Model Post-Training Should Focus on Open-Source Models

Authors:
Nikita Agrawal↗Ruben Mayer↗

arXiv:2505.23593v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Post-training of foundation language models has emerged as a promising research domain in federated learning (FL) with the goal to enable privacy-preserving model improvements and adaptations to user's downstream tasks. Recent advances in this area adopt centralized post-training approaches that build upon black-box foundation language models where there is no access to model weights and architecture details. Although the use of black-box models has been successful in centralized post-training, their blind replication in FL raises several concerns. Our opinion is that using black-box models in FL contradicts the core principles of federation such as data privacy and autonomy. In this paper, we critically analyze the usage of black-box models in federated post-training, and provide a detailed account of various aspects of openness and their implications for FL.

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

JADE: Expert-Grounded Dynamic Evaluation for Open-Ended Professional Tasks

Authors:
Lanbo Lin↗Jiayao Liu↗Tianyuan Yang↗Li Cai↗Yuanwu Xu↗Lei Wei↗Sicong Xie↗Guannan Zhang↗

arXiv:2602.06486v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Evaluating agentic AI on open-ended professional tasks faces a fundamental dilemma between rigor and flexibility. Static rubrics provide rigorous, reproducible assessment but fail to accommodate diverse valid response strategies, while LLM-as-a-judge approaches adapt to individual responses yet suffer from instability and bias. Human experts address this dilemma by combining domain-grounded principles with dynamic, claim-level assessment. Inspired by this process, we propose JADE, a two-layer evaluation framework. Layer 1 encodes expert knowledge as a predefined set of evaluation skills, providing stable evaluation criteria. Layer 2 performs report-specific, claim-level evaluation to flexibly assess diverse reasoning strategies, with evidence-dependency gating to invalidate conclusions built on refuted claims. Experiments on BizBench show that JADE improves evaluation stability and reveals critical agent failure modes missed by holistic LLM-based evaluators. We further demonstrate strong alignment with expert-authored rubrics and effective transfer to HealthBench and DR.BENCH, covering medical and 10-domain professional evaluation settings. Code and data are available at https://github.com/smiling-world/JADE.

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07.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

novelBGC: An interactive dual-score framework for biosynthetic gene cluster novelty assessment and candidate prioritisation

Authors:
Shukla↗Merugu↗Sharma↗

Genome mining now yields tens of thousands of putative biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) per project, yet, separating genuinely novel candidates from rediscoveries of known compounds remains the rate-limiting step before experimental validation. Single-axis prioritisation tools, antiSMASH similarity, BiG-FAM GCF distance, and self-resistance-enzyme (SRE) filters such as ARTS, each surface a different facet of evidence, yet their isolated use systematically over-ranks rediscovery-prone BGCs and overlooks genuinely orphan clusters. We present novelBGC, a web-hosted framework that converts these disparate outputs into two deliberately non-inverse continuous metrics per BGC, a Novelty (N) and a Reference Similarity (RS) score which together define a 2D decision plane that resolves rediscoveries, divergent family members, contig-edge artefacts, and uncharted chemistry with interactive visualisations, with all component weights user-tuneable at submission. Retrospective validation across three independent experimental datasets demonstrates the utility of the framework for candidate prioritization. Within the first 186-BGC SRE-guided cloning study, every confirmed bioactive product fell within the low-to-mid N band whereas 55 high-N (N [≥] 0.50) BGCs were never selected. Moreover, in the other two studies, it correctly prioritised the fully orphan lariocidin BGC of Paenibacillus sp. M2 and the divergent within-family indanopyrrole-A idp BGC of Streptomyces sp. CNX-425. Together, these case studies demonstrate that the joint (N, RS) space facilitates prioritization decisions that are difficult to achieve using any single criterion alone. from identical input data. novelBGC requires no command-line expertise, no local tool installation, and no manual integration of intermediate output formats, addressing a well-documented accessibility barrier for wet-laboratory researchers engaging with genome-mining workflows. novelBGC is freely available at https://project.iith.ac.in/sharmaglab/novelbgc/.

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08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Reinforcement Learning for Accelerated Aerodynamic Shape Optimisation

Authors:
Florian Sobieczky↗Alfredo Lopez↗Erika Dudkin↗Christopher Lackner↗Matthias Hochsteger↗Bernhard Scheichl↗Helmut Sobieczky↗

arXiv:2507.17786v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a reinforcement learning (RL) based adaptive optimization algorithm for aerodynamic shape optimization focused on dimensionality reduction. The form in which RL is applied here is that of a surrogate-based, actor-critic policy evaluation MCMC approach allowing for temporal 'freezing' of some of the parameters to be optimized. The goals are to minimize computational effort, and to use the observed optimization results for interpretation of the discovered extrema in terms of their role in achieving the desired flow-field. By a sequence of local optimized parameter changes around intermediate CFD simulations acting as ground truth, it is possible to speed up the global optimization if (a) the local neighbourhoods of the parameters in which the changed parameters must reside are sufficiently large to compete with the grid-sized steps and its large number of simulations, and (b) the estimates of the rewards and costs on these neighbourhoods necessary for a good step-wise parameter adaption are sufficiently accurate. We give an example of a simple fluid-dynamical problem on which the method allows interpretation in the sense of a feature importance scoring.

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09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

FoMoE: Breaking the Full-Replica Barrier with a Federation of MoEs

Authors:
Lorenzo Sani↗Zeyu Cao↗Meghdad Kurmanji↗Alex Iacob↗Andrej Jovanovic↗Yan Gao↗Wanru Zhao↗Nicholas D. Lane↗

arXiv:2606.19025v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pre-training Large Language Models (LLMs) typically demands large-scale infrastructure with tightly coupled hardware accelerators. While increasing model and dataset scale remains the dominant driver of performance, Mixture-of-Experts (MoEs) architectures have recently achieved state-of-the-art results by decoupling parameter count from computational cost. This efficiency enables training massive models on constrained compute budgets, yet it typically requires the high-speed interconnects of a single datacenter. To overcome these physical limits, recent approaches such as DiLoCo and Photon use low-communication data-parallel methods to enable scaling across geographically distributed, weakly connected data centers. However, these methods suffer from a fundamental inefficiency: they require full model replicas at every site, which imposes prohibitive memory constraints and communication overheads. In this work, we introduce FoMoE, a system that breaks the full-replica paradigm by partitioning expert layers across workers. We demonstrate that FoMoE: (I) reduces communication costs by up to 1.42x over efficient baselines and 45.44x over DDP via partial expert replication in the studied regimes; (II) achieves empirical throughput speedups of up to 1.4x through a novel skip-token mechanism; and (III) shows stable routing in the trained proxy regimes and projects the communication/memory benefits to 100B-scale configurations through system modelling.

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10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

On The Effectiveness-Fluency Trade-Off In LLM Conditioning: A Systematic Study

Authors:
Iuri Macocco↗Pau Rodr\'iguez↗Arno Blaas↗Luca Zappella↗Marco Baroni↗Xavier Suau↗

Controlling the output of Large Language Models (LLMs) is a central challenge for their reliable deployment, yet a clear understanding of the involved trade-offs remains elusive. Current approaches to conditioning are often evaluated with a narrow focus on their effectiveness at injecting or removing a target concept, neglecting generation quality. We systematically investigate a range of conditioning methods in both injection and removal scenarios. We find that efficient steering methods frequently achieve conditioning at a steep cost to fluency. Furthermore, we identify a critical yet previously overlooked interaction with the training paradigm: activation steering methods are far less effective on instruction-tuned models than on their base counterparts. Simple prompting and full-fledged supervised fine-tuning, on the other hand, are viable options for concept injection, but are not as good at concept removal. Finally, cheaply computed textual metrics highly correlate to costly LLM-as-judge scores, and provide insights on the behavior of conditioning methods.

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11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

On the Geometry and Optimization of Polynomial Convolutional Networks

Authors:
Vahid Shahverdi↗Giovanni Luca Marchetti↗Kathl\'en Kohn↗

arXiv:2410.00722v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study convolutional neural networks with monomial activation functions. Specifically, we prove that their parameterization map is regular and is an isomorphism almost everywhere, up to rescaling the filters. By leveraging on tools from algebraic geometry, we explore the geometric properties of the image in function space of this map - typically referred to as neuromanifold. In particular, we compute the dimension and the degree of the neuromanifold, which measure the expressivity of the model, and describe its singularities. Moreover, for a generic large dataset, we derive an explicit formula that quantifies the number of critical points arising in the optimization of a regression loss.

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12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Narrative Theory-Driven LLM Methods for Automatic Story Generation and Understanding: A Survey

Authors:
David Y. Liu↗Aditya Joshi↗Paul Dawson↗

Applications of narrative theories using large language models (LLMs) deliver promising methods in automatic story generation and understanding tasks. Our survey examines how natural language processing (NLP) research uses LLM methods to engage with diverse concepts from narrative studies. We use established distinctions from narratology to categorise ongoing efforts and discover the following: \redtext{(a) narrative texts come from diverse sources beyond just literature, (b) theoretical synthesis and validation are potential outcomes, (c) generation tasks lag behind understanding in several ways: theoretical application, post-training methods, exploring non-fiction narratives and addressing narrative levels beyond fabula and discourse.} For future directions, instead of the pursuit of a single, generalised benchmark for `narrative quality', we believe that progress can benefit from efforts that focus on the following: defining and improving theory-based metrics for individual narrative attributes; continue conducting large-scale, theory-driven literary/social/cultural analysis; generating narratives in situated contexts; and continuing experiments where outputs can be used to validate or refine narrative theories. This work provides a contextual foundation for more systematic and theoretically informed narrative research in NLP by providing an overview to ongoing research efforts and the broader narrative studies landscape.

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13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Non-invasive Detection of Fasciculation Using Surface EMG with a Wavelet-Based Analytical Method (DEWCS)

Authors:
Mukaino↗Nagai↗Kobayakawa↗Ko↗Iwao↗Iida↗Irie↗Inamizu↗Nagata↗Tanaka↗Kurasawa↗Takeuchi↗…

Objective: Needle electromyography (nEMG) is essential for diagnosing neuromuscular disorders but is invasive and often painful. We employed single-channel bipolar surface EMG (sEMG) analyzed with a novel wavelet-based analytical approach, Detecting and Extracting Elemental Wave Components based on a Wavelet Coefficient Set (DEWCS) and investigated whether fasciculation-related activity could be identified. Methods: In this prospective study, 28 patients undergoing nEMG for suspected neuromuscular disorders and 13 healthy controls were included. Resting-state sEMG was recorded from selected muscles using single-channel bipolar active electrodes at a high sampling rate. DEWCS was used to extract indices reflecting fast- and slow-type motor unit (MU)-related activity. These standardized indices were evaluated against nEMG-detected fasciculation potentials using generalized estimating equation logistic regression to account for within-subject clustering. Diagnostic performance was assessed by receiver operating characteristic analysis. Results: A total of 67 muscles from 38 participants were analyzed. Indices of fast- and slow-type MU-related activity were significantly associated with fasciculation potentials (slow: OR 5.10, p = 0.0041; fast: OR 2.38, p = 0.0162). The combined model showed excellent discrimination (area under the curve = 0.97), outperforming either index alone. Muscle region had no significant effect. Conclusions: A single-channel bipolar sEMG setup combined with DEWCS detected fasciculation-related activity with promising accuracy. This method may serve as a non-invasive surrogate marker of lower motor neuron involvement. Further validation in larger cohorts is warranted. Significance: This non-invasive sEMG approach may help detect fasciculation-related activity and complement nEMG in neuromuscular diagnostics.

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14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Spatial Analysis and Multilevel Determinants of Hypertension in Zambia: Analysis of the 2017 WHO STEPS Survey

Authors:
Mutasha↗Simukoko↗Nkandu↗

Background: Hypertension is the leading modifiable cardiovascular risk factor globally, with the fastest-growing burden in low- and middle-income countries. This study aimed to estimate national hypertension prevalence, map provincial patterns, assess spatial clustering, and identify individual and community-level determinants among Zambian adults using the 2017 WHO STEPS survey. Methods: This cross-sectional study used data from the 2017 WHO STEPS survey, a nationally representative sample of 4,301 adults aged 18-69 years. Hypertension was defined as systolic BP [&ge;]140 mmHg, diastolic BP [&ge;]90 mmHg, or current antihypertensive use. Spatial autocorrelation was assessed via Moran's I and LISA. Four nested generalised linear mixed models with PSU-level random intercepts identified individual and community-level determinants. Results: Overall weighted hypertension prevalence was 24.0%. Lusaka recorded the highest prevalence (30.2%), followed by Southern (29.9%) and Muchinga (28.3%) provinces; Western Province had the lowest (12.4%). Spatial clustering was statistically significant but modest (Moran's I = 0.0247, p < 0.001). Between-cluster variation reduced from ICC = 5.9% to 1.8% in the full model, indicating geographic differences were largely explained by individual characteristics. Age was the strongest predictor; adults aged 60-69 had nearly sevenfold higher odds than those aged 18-29 (AOR 6.92, 95% CI: 4.95-9.66). Women had lower odds than men (AOR 0.64, 95% CI: 0.52-0.79). Obesity (AOR 2.34), overweight (AOR 1.65), high cholesterol (AOR 1.40), diabetes (AOR 1.35), and single marital status (AOR 1.34) were independently significant. Western Province showed consistently lower odds than Central Province (AOR 0.48). Conclusion: Hypertension affects one in four Zambian adults, driven primarily by age, sex, obesity, dyslipidaemia, and diabetes. Geographically prioritised interventions, including community health worker-led screening programmes in Lusaka and Southern Province, would maximise population-level impact. Population-level salt reduction and alcohol policies represent cost-effective complementary strategies. Longitudinal studies with finer spatial resolution are needed to clarify causal pathways underlying observed geographic clustering and inform SDG Target 3.4 progress.

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15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Notes2Skills: From Lab Notebooks to Certainty-Aware Scientific Agent Skills

Authors:
Shi Liu↗Jiayao Chen↗Chengwei Qin↗Yanqing Hu↗Jufan Zhang↗Linyi Yang↗

Scientific discovery workflows usually contain and rely heavily on lab notes, where researchers record observations, interpret uncertain results, and plan follow-up experiments. Such informative lab notes preserve evolving scientific reasoning and author uncertainty, rather than polished final results exhibited in publications, providing a valuable opportunity for AI to engage in scientific exploration at a more comprehensive and deeper level. However, most prior work on scientific text focuses on papers, protocols, or structured databases, leaving informal laboratory notes underexplored as inputs to AI agents for science. This gap matters because lab notes often intermingle validated observations, tentative judgments, and possible experimental next steps within the same passage. If these signals are conflated, an AI agent may mistake uncertain scientific judgments for confirmed conclusions or executable actions. To this end, we present Notes2Skills, a two-stage framework for turning lab notebooks into verifiable skills for scientific AI agents while preserving the author's certainty. Across seven conditions and three wet-lab sessions, Notes2Skills is the only configuration that neither mistakes uncertain notes for firm instructions nor discards firm ones. We show that certainty preservation is the missing piece between lab notebooks and reliable agent skills, opening a path toward safer AI co-scientist systems.

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

EventDrive: Event Cameras for Vision-Language Driving Intelligence

Authors:
Dongyue Lu↗Rong Li↗Ao Liang↗Lingdong Kong↗Wei Yin↗Lai Xing Ng↗Benoit R. Cottereau↗Camille Simon Chane↗Wei Tsang Ooi↗

Event cameras sense the world through asynchronous brightness changes with microsecond latency and high dynamic range, offering motion fidelity far beyond frame-based sensors and capturing temporal structure that conventional exposures often miss. These properties make events a powerful complement to RGB in autonomous driving, especially under blur, glare, and rapid motion, where frame-based perception can become unreliable. However, existing event-aware vision-language models remain limited to generic perception and do not reveal how event sensing contributes to reasoning and decision-making across the full driving loop. We present EventDrive, a large-scale benchmark and model suite that unifies event streams, RGB frames, and language supervision across four core dimensions: Perception, Understanding, Prediction, and Planning, covering captions, structured QA, grounding, motion-state recognition, trajectory forecasting, and planning tasks. Building on this foundation, EventDrive-VLM introduces a multi-horizon event pyramid and a temporal-horizon mixture-of-experts module to adaptively encode and fuse asynchronous and frame-based information for downstream reasoning. Comprehensive evaluation across diverse tasks shows that event streams provide substantial gains in temporal precision, motion awareness, and robustness, bringing event sensing into the center of driving intelligence.

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17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

3D Ising criticality with Platonic lattice superconducting qubits

Authors:
Liyang Sui↗Hong-Hao Song↗Sainan Huai↗Yufan Li↗Zhiwen Zong↗Kunliang Bu↗Xiaopei Yang↗Xingrui Liu↗Wenyan Jin↗Bowen Chen↗Xutao Zhang↗Jianlan Wu↗…

arXiv:2606.16854v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The three-dimensional (3D) Ising model is a foundational model in statistical physics and critical phenomena, yet its analytical intractability has long impeded the precise determination of universal critical exponents. While high-precision estimates have been obtained through classical numerical methods and conformal bootstrap techniques, a direct quantum simulation of the 3D Ising criticality remains challenging, requiring nontrivial connectivity, sufficient system size, and high spectral resolution. In this work, assisted by the state-operator correspondence of conformal field theory, we perform a digital quantum simulation of the 3D Ising critical exponents using a multiply-connected 9-qubit superconducting quantum processor with a Platonic lattice geometry. Employing an extended variational quantum eigensolver equipped with a phase-based loss function, we variationally prepare the low-energy eigenstates of the transverse-field Ising model on a cubic Platonic lattice encoded in an 8-qubit register. The four lowest eigenenergies are extracted via Fourier-transform analysis and high-precision numerical fitting, agreeing with the exact diagonalization values up to +/- 0.001. The resulting scaling dimension Delta_epsilon = 1.5850 and critical exponent nu = 0.7067 match well with theory.

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19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Discrete-Time Gaussian Process Mixtures for Robot Policy Learning

Authors:
Jan Ole von Hartz↗Adrian R\"ofer↗Joschka Boedecker↗Abhinav Valada↗

arXiv:2505.03296v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present Mixture of Discrete-time Gaussian Processes (MiDiGap), a novel approach for flexible policy representation and imitation learning in robot manipulation. MiDiGap enables learning from as few as five demonstrations using only camera observations and generalizes across a wide range of challenging tasks. It excels at long-horizon behaviors such as making coffee, highly constrained motions such as opening doors, dynamic actions such as scooping with a spatula, and multimodal tasks such as hanging a mug. MiDiGap learns these tasks on a CPU in less than a minute and scales linearly to large datasets. We also develop a rich suite of tools for inference-time steering using evidence such as collision signals and robot kinematic constraints. This steering enables novel generalization capabilities, including obstacle avoidance and cross-embodiment policy transfer. MiDiGap achieves state-of-the-art performance on diverse few-shot manipulation benchmarks. On constrained RLBench tasks, it improves policy success by 76 percentage points and reduces trajectory cost by 67%. On multimodal tasks, it improves policy success by 48 percentage points and increases sample efficiency by a factor of 20. In cross-embodiment transfer, it more than doubles policy success. We make the code publicly available at https://midigap.cs.uni-freiburg.de.

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

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

Authors:
Uljad Berdica↗Fernando Acero↗Anton Ipsen↗Parisa Zehtabi↗Michael Cashmore↗Manuela Veloso↗

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.

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21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

On-site interactions in quantum thermal machines: efficiency, rectification and entanglement beyond local and global master equations

Authors:
Salvatore Araceli↗Teddy H. M. Ong↗Baptiste Debecker↗Kai M\"uller↗Oliver Lunt↗Andrew J. Daley↗Fran\c{c}ois Damanet↗

arXiv:2606.14593v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Advances in experimental techniques have opened new routes for harnessing non-equilibrium dynamics in mesoscopic quantum systems. In this context, we study the impact of on-site interactions on the transport properties of a continuous quantum thermal machine composed of two coupled oscillators connected to two thermal reservoirs. In the weak system-reservoir coupling regime, where a long-standing debate concerns which reduced description should be preferred, we first show that the Redfield master equation (RME) provides an accurate and unifying framework that interpolates between two well-known limits: the local and global master equations. By relying on the Hierarchy of Pure States (HOPS), a numerically exact stochastic method, we then explore the full parameter space and show that interactions can be leveraged to tune the efficiency of the thermal machine at high temperatures (while leaving it essentially unchanged at low temperatures), induce non-reciprocal transport under asymmetric reservoir couplings, and generate steady-state entanglement within the junction. We derive expressions for system-bath correlators, such as heat and particle currents, consistently across different frameworks. Our work features on-site interactions to enhance the versatility of quantum thermodynamic junctions and clarifies the role of non-Markovianity and non-linearities in quantum transport.

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

Constitutional Value Potentials: reading and steering internal priority margins in language models

Authors:
Tong Che↗Rui Wu↗

arXiv:2606.15420v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A constitution tells a language model what to value, but little tells us whether it does. Adherence is judged from outputs, and output evidence is most fragile on value conflicts, where what matters is not which value a model mentions but which one it is willing to sacrifice. We provide evidence that this arbitration can be read from activations in a structured margin readout. We introduce Constitutional Value Potentials (CVP). For each value we learn a scalar potential from the hidden state: an internal pressure to preserve that value, supervised not by the prompt but by an independent judge's verdict on which value the model's own response actually preserved. The signed difference of two potentials is a priority margin. A constitutional clause becomes the claim that a margin stays positive, and a single monitor score flags when it does not. The monitor predicts conflict violations with AUROC up to 0.95, beats a strong hidden-state probe, and generalizes to held-out synthetic conflicts across three Qwen2.5 scales. The signal appears as the answer begins, from the prompt tail and first response token. Read this early, the same signal reveals whether an adversarial priority hack has actually pushed the model toward a violation, rather than only whether the prompt looks adversarial. The same directions also support intervention tests: under selected steering settings, moving along a value direction shifts judged trade-offs in the intended direction. Together, these results suggest that some constitution-relevant priorities are accessible as activation-space margins, rather than only as output behavior.

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23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Exploratory Assessment of Pulsed-Wave Doppler Representations of Lung Sounds Using Deep Learning: An In-Vitro Phantom Study

Authors:
Saad↗A. A↗Murthi↗S. B↗Boctor↗E. M↗Teeter↗W. A↗Seam↗

The increasing availability of portable ultrasound systems motivates exploration of novel approaches to respiratory signal assessment. In this in-vitro study, we investigate whether pulsed-wave (PW) Doppler ultrasound can capture structured spectral patterns from replayed lung sound recordings. Digitized respiratory sounds were replayed through a tissue-mimicking ultrasound phantom, generating 1,478 PW Doppler spectral images from recordings associated with healthy subjects and several externally labeled disease categories. Exploratory classification experiments using a ResNet-18 architecture demonstrated that these Doppler representations contain learnable differences under controlled conditions. These findings motivate further investigation into PW Doppler as a potential representation of respiratory acoustics.

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

Structured Nonparametric Variational Inference for Dependent Latent Modeling

Authors:
Yuda Shao↗Zhiling Gu↗Shan Yu↗

arXiv:2606.15458v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Variational inference (VI) is a core engine of modern AI, enabling scalable approximate Bayesian learning and uncertainty-aware training of large probabilistic and generative models. In this paper, we propose Structured Nonparametric Variational Inference (SN-VI), a novel framework for modeling complex dependencies among latent variables in posterior approximation, leveraging multivariate spline techniques. Unlike traditional methods that rely on the mean-field assumption, SN-VI preserves intricate latent variable dependencies, providing a flexible and accurate approximation of posteriors with arbitrary shapes. We establish rigorous theoretical guarantees, including the derivation of the lower bound for the variational objective and proof of asymptotic consistency in posterior estimation. To facilitate practical implementation, we develop an algorithm that automatically identifies dependent latent variables and their underlying dependence structure, without requiring manual specification. Simulation studies validate the effectiveness of SN-VI in approximating posterior distributions with bounded support and complex dependencies. The proposed method has been successfully applied to high-dimensional structured data, including computer vision datasets and spatial transcriptomics. In these applications, SN-VI demonstrates improved generative model performance and effectively uncovers coupled biological signals through the learned dependency structure.

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25.
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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