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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Unbiased Derivative Estimation for Stationary Mean of Parameterized Markov chains

Authors:
Jeffrey Wang↗Chang-han Rhee↗

arXiv:2606.11487v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose a new approach to unbiased estimation of the gradients of the stationary means associated with parametrized families of Markov chains. Our estimators are particularly efficient when the Markov chains have slow mixing rate. Our approach does not require a specific parametrization except for an oracle to evaluate the transition density and its gradient at a given data point without any additional knowledge about the density function itself. It makes our estimator suitable for parametrizations associated with neural networks. The estimator can potentially achieve large improvement in terms of efficiency. Numerical experiments confirm the good performance predicted by the theory.

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

SeFi-Image: A Text-to-Image Foundation Model with Semantic-First Diffusion

Authors:
SeFi-Team↗

Training image generation foundation models consumes substantial resources. Previous methods have attempted to leverage semantic guidance to accelerate the training process, yet their experiments were only conducted on simple datasets such as ImageNet, at low resolutions, and with small-scale models. In this paper, we propose SeFi-Image, a text-to-image foundation model built upon semantic-first diffusion, a novel latent diffusion modeling paradigm. We instantiate SeFi-Image at three model scales, 1B, 2B, and 5B parameters, enabling systematic study of scaling behavior and flexible deployment under varying compute budgets. Notably, our largest 5B model was trained with merely 125K A800 GPU hours, corresponding to roughly 10-20% of the training compute used by Z-Image. However, it achieves results comparable to or even superior to Qwen-Image and Z-Image. Despite this modest training compute, SeFi-Image achieves strong performance on a wide range of benchmarks, including GenEval, DPG, LongTextBench, OneIG, and CVTG-2K. Moreover, we provide DMD2-distilled few-step turbo variants for each model scale to accommodate diverse hardware constraints and latency requirements. We publicly release our code, weights and hope this work offers the community useful insights into semantic-guided diffusion modeling for T2I generation, while also providing practical and readily deployable model options.

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03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

No Universal Purification in Quantum Mechanics

Authors:
Zhenhuan Liu↗Zhenyu Du↗Jens Eisert↗Zhenyu Cai↗Zi-Wen Liu↗

arXiv:2509.21111v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many central tasks in fundamental physics and quantum information processing are possible only insofar as mixed quantum states can be made purer. In this work, we prove that the linearity and positivity of quantum mechanics impose general restrictions on quantum purification, unveiling a new fundamental principle of quantum information processing. We first establish that no quantum operation can transform a finite number of copies of an unknown quantum state or channel into an exactly pure output that depends non-trivially on the input, thereby ruling out an important form of universal purification in both static and dynamical settings. Building on this, we show that, upon relaxing the requirement of exact purity, one can establish quantitative sample-complexity lower bounds for approximate purification that hold for arbitrary physically allowed strategies, whose scaling matches the performance of purification-related tasks across several different areas of quantum information processing. Moreover, this lower bound leads to a generalized standard quantum limit for learning arbitrary functions of a quantum state, greatly extending earlier results based on quantum Fisher information and revealing a deep connection between purification and quantum learning. Extending this principle to other important settings, we establish, for the first time, an exponential sample-complexity lower bound for approximate pure dilation state preparation and a no-go theorem for approximate bosonic Gaussian state purification with passive Gaussian operations, establishing much more stringent limitations under practical operational constraints.

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04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Chronological Thinking in Full-Duplex Spoken Dialogue Language Models

Authors:
Donghang Wu↗Haoyang Zhang↗Chen Chen↗Tianyu Zhang↗Fei Tian↗Xuerui Yang↗Gang Yu↗Hexin Liu↗Nana Hou↗Yuchen Hu↗Eng Siong Chng↗

Recent advances in spoken dialogue language models (SDLMs) reflect growing interest in shifting from turn-based to full-duplex systems, where the models continuously perceive user speech streams while generating responses. This simultaneous listening and speaking design enables real-time interaction and the agent can handle dynamic conversational behaviors like user barge-in. However, during the listening phase, existing systems keep the agent idle by repeatedly predicting the silence token, which departs from human behavior: we usually engage in lightweight thinking during conversation rather than remaining absent-minded. Inspired by this, we propose Chronological Thinking, an on-the-fly conversational thinking mechanism that aims to improve response quality in full-duplex SDLMs. Specifically, chronological thinking presents a paradigm shift from conventional LLM thinking approaches, such as Chain-of-Thought, purpose-built for streaming acoustic input. (1) Strictly causal: the agent reasons incrementally while listening, updating internal hypotheses only from past audio with no lookahead. (2) No additional latency: reasoning is amortized during the listening window; once the user stops speaking, the agent halts thinking and begins speaking without further delay. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of chronological thinking through both objective metrics and human evaluations show consistent improvements in response quality. Furthermore, chronological thinking robustly handles conversational dynamics and attains competitive performance on full-duplex interaction metrics.

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

Structuring Sparsity: Block-Sparse Featurizers Capture Visual Concept Manifolds

Authors:
Thomas Fel↗Matthew Kowal↗Mozes Jacobs↗Dron Hazra↗Usha Bhalla↗Lee Sharkey↗Lucius Bushnaq↗Satchel Grant↗Tal Haklay↗Thomas Icard↗Can Rager↗Michael Pearce↗…

What is the geometry of a visual percept? The most widely used protocols for decomposing neural network representations into interpretable parts treat concepts as isolated directions, yet recent work shows that concepts are often realized as geometric structures in low dimensional regions of activation space. We turn to the literature of Structured sparsity to close this gap, and show that block sparsity, which groups directions into blocks, is the prior matched to a generative model in which a representation is a sparse sum of low-dimensional manifolds: the modern, learned form of a classical idea in visual neuroscience, where a visual feature is carried by a coordinated group of neurons rather than a single tuned one. We implement three variants of block-sparse featurizers (BSFs) and, through a minimum-description-length analysis, show that all three describe activations more compactly than direction-based featurizers, with the recovered concepts typically two- to four-dimensional. We then use BSFs to (i) recontextualize prior work, showing that curve detectors in InceptionV1 actually read from a single continuous curve manifold, (ii) discover novel manifolds including shadows and lighting in DINOv3, and (iii) support interpretable control of image generation in diffusion models (SDXL) via manifold steering.

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

RedactionBench

Authors:
Sean Brynj\'olfsson↗Shashvat Jayakrishnan↗Esha Sali↗Diptanshu Purwar↗Madhav Aggarwal↗

Large Language Models are increasingly applied to sensitive domains that require redaction of personally identifiable information (PII). While redacting PII is a data cleaning prerequisite, existing benchmarks conflate extraction mechanics with privacy semantics. A public phone number is not equivalent to a phone number in a medical record. Whether information constitutes a violation depends heavily on who holds it, why, and in what context, fundamentally differentiating redaction from simple entity recognition. Grounded in contextual integrity, we introduce RedactionBench, a manually annotated benchmark comprising 200 diverse documents across 11 domains, mostly seeded from real-world sources. We also introduce R-Score, a novel character-level metric that treats semantically similar redactions equally and nullifies shallow formatting choices, such as varying masking styles for phone numbers. Evaluations across Named Entity Recognition models, entity extraction Small Language Models, and frontier models equipped with agentic tools demonstrate that contextual redaction remains an unsolved problem. A human evaluation with over 80 users on RedactionBench reveals a stark dichotomy in privacy perceptions. Annotators show consensus with target labels for mandatory redactions (89.4 percent) and safe text preservations (94.1 percent), but fail to agree on contextual redactions (47.7 percent). This variance demonstrates the subjective nature of contextual privacy and motivates R-Score, which decouples contextual ambiguity from strict precision. We compare 35 models across families and report their performance in redacting PII. Finally, we release RedactionBench to establish a baseline for future privacy-preserving systems, hoping to inspire efficient model design and standardized evaluations.

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07.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-01

A statistical framework for comparing epidemic forests

Authors:
Cyril Geismar↗

by Cyril Geismar, Peter J. White, Anne Cori, Thibaut Jombart Inferring who infected whom in an outbreak is essential for characterising transmission dynamics and guiding public health interventions. However, this task is challenging due to limited surveillance data and the complexity of immunological and social interactions. Instead of a single definitive transmission tree, epidemiologists often consider multiple plausible trees forming epidemic forests. Various inference methods and assumptions can yield different epidemic forests, yet no formal test exists to assess whether these differences are statistically significant. We propose such a framework using a chi-square test and permutational multivariate analysis of variance (PERMANOVA). We assessed each method’s ability to distinguish simulated epidemic forests generated under different offspring distributions. While both methods achieved perfect specificity for forests with 100+ trees, PERMANOVA consistently outperformed the chi-square test in sensitivity across all epidemic and forest sizes. Implemented in the R package mixtree, we provide the first statistical framework to robustly compare epidemic forests.

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

Structure Over Nonlinearity: Explicit Interaction Architectures for Dynamical Learning

Authors:
Augusto Sarti↗

arXiv:2606.19101v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Most learning architectures for dynamical systems rely on generic nonlinear function approximation, often requiring high model complexity to capture structured behaviors. In this work, we propose an alternative paradigm in which modeling capability arises primarily from structure rather than from expressive nonlinearities. We introduce a class of explicit structured dynamical units based on wave-inspired interaction structures with internal state. Inspired by wave-based computational principles, the proposed units adopt a strictly causal organization that eliminates algebraic loops, yielding fully explicit models that can be evaluated without implicit solvers. Stacking such units produces layered dynamical architectures with emergent hierarchical behavior. Through experiments on a nonlinear system identification task, we show that depth improves both representation quality and generalization, even under limited parameter optimization. In particular, the proposed architectures produce informative internal representations even under readout-only fitting, indicating that useful dynamical structure emerges from the organization of interactions prior to substantial parameter optimization. These results suggest that structure-first design provides a viable and effective alternative to conventional black-box approaches for learning dynamical systems, highlighting the role of interaction structure as a primary source of model expressivity.

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09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Do Thinking Tokens Help with Safety?

Authors:
Narutatsu Ri↗Abhishek Panigrahi↗Sanjeev Arora↗

Today's reasoning models use thinking tokens to attain stronger performance on benchmarks than their instruction-tuned counterparts. It is also generally believed that this more "deliberative" mode should improve alignment and safety, by providing the model a safe space to consider whether its planned answer to a request violates its safety principles. We present evidence that this intuition is not always correct. Across frontier open-weight reasoning models spanning GPT-OSS, Qwen, Olmo, and Phi families, we find that the eventual refusal/compliance outcome is already strongly predictable via a trained head on the first token's hidden representation ($0.84$-$0.95$ AUROC and $\sim88\%$ balanced accuracy for predicting refusal/compliance) before any visible thinking. The thinking process turns out to be more akin to prefix completion than to deliberative revision, with the final outcome rarely changing after the first $\sim20\%$ of thinking, despite giving the appearance of deliberation at the text level ($\sim74\%$ of text-level deliberations occur when the response distribution is already locked to one refusal/compliance side). We also find that existing inference-time and training-based safety interventions, despite being motivated by the goal of inducing deliberation, largely shift model behavior toward over-refusal while suppressing already-scarce deliberation signals. Our results suggest that safety behavior in current reasoning models is much less deliberative than commonly assumed, and highlight the need for methods that induce real safety deliberation.

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

System Report for CCL25-Eval Task 5: New Dataset and LoRA-Fine-Tuned Qwen2.5

Authors:
Haotao Xie↗

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have achieved promising progress in the fields of classical Chinese translation and the generation of classical poetry. However, domain-specific research on precise translation and affective-semantic understanding of classical poetry remains limited. The main challenge is that most studies treat the poetic appreciation task as a general-domain problem, neglecting the distinctive features of poetic appreciation, while high-quality and domain-specific datasets are extremely limited. To address this limitation, we decompose the task into three subtasks: term interpretation, semantic interpretation, and emotional inference. Based on multiple open-source datasets, we perform data cleansing and alignment to construct the Classical Chinese Poetry Instruction Pair Dataset (CCPoetry-49K), which comprises 49,404 high-quality instruction-response pairs explicitly optimized for this domain. We then propose a domain-specialized LLM, called PoetryQwen, by applying Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to fine-tune the Qwen2.5-14B model. Experimental results on the CCL25-Eval Task 5 benchmark demonstrate that PoetryQwen achieves a score of 0.757, representing a 9.7% improvement over the Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct baseline (0.690). These findings clearly indicate that PoetryQwen significantly enhances performance in precise translation and emotional understanding of classical poetry. We present new dataset and methodological considerations intended to support the domain-specific optimization of LLMs.

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11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Cross-Silo De-Anonymization Under Local Differential Privacy: Threat Model, Phase Transition, and Coordination Necessity

Authors:
Ziniu Liu↗Aiping Li↗

arXiv:2606.16763v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When a person's records appear in k independent data silos, each protected by (epsilon, delta)-differential privacy, standard composition yields a valid (k*epsilon, k*delta)-DP guarantee for the joint output. This worst-case bound, however, does not answer the concrete inference question: at what k can an adversary actually identify a target person? This paper develops the information-theoretic framework needed to answer that question. We introduce cross-silo person-level DP (XSP-DP), a Pufferfish-style privacy notion whose adjacency relation captures all records of a single person across all silos simultaneously, and verify that the standard basic composition bound carries over to this adjacency model. Within this framework we prove that de-anonymization undergoes a phase transition at k* = Theta(log n / epsilon^2) (population size n, per-silo RR parameter epsilon): a Fano lower bound shows any estimator fails for k > k*. An explicit XOR + randomized-response construction demonstrates information synergy: each silo's output is individually uninformative about the target, yet the joint mutual information is strictly positive. For non-coordinated binary randomized-response mechanisms, we prove that de-anonymization is inevitable once k exceeds the threshold, establishing that cross-silo coordination is necessary. These results provide a baseline threat model and Theta-level threshold for cross-silo inference attacks under local DP.

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

QG-MIL: A Gated Transformer Aggregator for Domain-Agnostic Multiple Instance Learning in Medical Imaging

Authors:
Luca Zedda↗Davide Antonio Mura↗Cecilia Di Ruberto↗Maurizio Atzori↗Muhammed Furkan Dasdelen↗Carsten Marr↗Andrea Loddo↗

Attention-based Multiple Instance Learning aggregators in medical imaging are prone to attention concentration, producing overconfident and unstable predictions. We introduce QG-MIL, a gated transformer aggregator that addresses this through four synergistic architectural components: RMSNorm-based pre-normalization, per-head QK normalization, fine-grained attention output gating, and SwiGLU-style feed-forward modules. Together, these design choices stabilize training and distribute attention more uniformly across instances without auxiliary losses, masking, or multi-stage regularization. We evaluate QG-MIL across six benchmarks spanning whole-slide pathology and cell-level hematology, covering two fundamentally different MIL scales. The best-performing QG-MIL variants outperform leading baselines on all six benchmarks, with an average improvement of +6.1 mean macro F1 points. Attention overlays and attention mass analysis confirm more distributed instance weighting. Ablation studies show that while individual components can match the full model on specific datasets, the QG-MIL design provides the most consistent cross-domain performance and tightest variance when compared to selected baselines. We release a configurable implementation to support reproducibility at: https://github.com/unica-visual-intelligence-lab/QG-MIL

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13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Ergodic Properties of Non-Linear Density-Dependent Perturbations of the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck Process

Authors:
Denis Belomestny↗Ekaterina Morozova↗

arXiv:2606.18877v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The present paper considers McKean-Vlasov SDEs with density-dependent spatially unbounded drift, which may be viewed as a non-linear density-dependent perturbation of the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process. We develop a comprehensive theoretical framework for this class of equations. First, we establish strong well-posedness and derive optimal Gaussian pointwise bounds for both the solution density and its gradient. Then we derive an explicit expression for the stationary density and show that it satisfies logarithmic Sobolev and Poincaré inequalities. Finally, we prove exponential convergence to equilibrium in the \(\chi^2\)-metric.

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14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Home-based binocular serious games in virtual reality to treat visual acuity and stereovision in residual amblyopia: AMBER study

Authors:
Aurilia↗Martin↗N.-L↗Simon-Martinez↗Antoniou↗M.-P↗Bouthour↗Bavelier↗Backus↗B. T↗Dornbos↗Blaha↗…

Objectives: Amblyopia is a pediatric visual disorder traditionally treated by patching the fellow eye, though many patients retain residual amblyopia post-treatment. Increasing evidence suggests that visual plasticity allows treat-ment beyond the classical therapeutic window. AMBER evaluated the efficacy of binocular serious games in virtual reality (VR) in residual amblyopia. Methods and Analysis: The monocentric, prospective, randomized, crossover trial (reported as case series) includ-ed 14 anisometropic, strabismic, or mixed residual amblyopia patients (6-35 years; 5 children, 9 adults). Participants underwent two 2-month intervention phases: optical correction (standard care) and standard care plus VR games (2.5 h/week), each with a 2-month follow-up. Best-corrected visual acuity (BCVA), stereoacuity, and reading speed were assessed (5 timepoints) using the Sloan and Landolt charts, the Titmus, TNO, Lang II, Asteroid, and Mnread tests. Compliance and adverse events (AE) were recorded. Results: VR training improved BCVA in 10 amblyopic eyes (Landolt and Sloan), with more pronounced effects in anisometropic patients. Six patients showed improved stereoacuity (Titmus; 4x mixed, 1x anisometropic, 1x stra-bismic amblyopia), persistent only in children (1x strabismic, 1x mixed amblyopia). Four improvements were ob-served with TNO (1x), Lang II (1x), Asteroid (0x), and MNread (1x). Despite positive trends, when comparing re-sults of individual patients, between both eyes, and with standard treatment, consistency of improvements cannot be conclusively demonstrated. One non-severe AE (dizziness) was reported. Conclusions: Following individual cases, VR training improved BCVA and stereoacuity, particularly in children and patients with high compliance. However, considering the cohort as a whole, consistency of effects has to be confirmed in larger groups. Thus, the methodologically sophisticated AMBER study revealed differences in VR treatment efficacy between amblyopia types, children/adults, endpoints and tests, offering precious data for the design of meaningful future studies. It shows that neurovisual plasticity gauged by VR-games offers safe, engaging treatment options for residual amblyopia.

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

Improving Scientific Document Retrieval with Academic Concept Index

Authors:
Jeyun Lee↗Junhyoung Lee↗Wonbin Kweon↗Bowen Jin↗Yu Zhang↗Susik Yoon↗Dongha Lee↗Hwanjo Yu↗Jiawei Han↗Seongku Kang↗

arXiv:2601.00567v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Adapting general-domain retrievers to scientific domains is challenging due to the scarcity of large-scale domain-specific relevance annotations and the substantial mismatch in vocabulary and information needs. Recent approaches address these issues through two independent directions that leverage large language models (LLMs): (1) generating synthetic queries for fine-tuning, and (2) generating auxiliary contexts to support relevance matching. However, both directions overlook the diverse academic concepts embedded within scientific documents, often producing redundant or conceptually narrow queries and contexts. To address this limitation, we introduce an academic concept index, which extracts key concepts from papers and organizes them guided by an academic taxonomy. This structured index serves as a foundation for improving both directions. First, we enhance the synthetic query generation with concept coverage-based generation (CCQGen), which adaptively conditions LLMs on uncovered concepts to generate complementary queries with broader concept coverage. Second, we strengthen the context augmentation with concept-focused auxiliary contexts (CCExpand), which leverages a set of document snippets that serve as concise responses to the concept-aware CCQGen queries. Extensive experiments show that incorporating the academic concept index into both query generation and context augmentation leads to higher-quality queries, better conceptual alignment, and improved retrieval performance.

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

LLMs Infer Cultural Context but Fail to Apply It When Responding

Authors:
Yisong Miao↗Jian Zhu↗Vered Shwartz↗

Recent work has shown that LLMs overrepresent dominant cultures, particularly Western ones, while marginalizing others. We investigate whether this affects models' ability to generate culturally adapted responses by evaluating their use of local measurement units based on the user's perceived cultural background. We introduce Cultural and Pragmatic Response Inference (CAPRI), a dataset of conversations with varying levels of cultural cues. Experiments with state-of-the-art LLMs show that models can infer cultural background and recall relevant conventions, but often fail to utilize the information to adapt their answers to the relevant cultural conventions, unless explicitly prompted to perform the tasks sequentially. We further evaluate adaptation to the interpretation of time and quantity expressions, two subjective language grounding dimensions that are affected by culture. We find that models increasingly adapt their answers as cultural cues accumulate, but their priors are not culture-neutral, sometimes aligning with the model's country of origin. Overall, CAPRI provides a resource for future research aimed at narrowing the gap between cultural knowledge and culturally adaptive language generation.

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

Direct Advantage Estimation for Scalable and Sample-efficient Deep Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Hsiao-Ru Pan↗Bernhard Sch\"olkopf↗

arXiv:2606.20411v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Direct Advantage Estimation (DAE) has been shown to improve the sample efficiency of deep reinforcement learning algorithms. However, its reliance on full environment observability limits its applicability in realistic settings, and its requirement to model transition probabilities incurs substantial computational overhead for high-dimensional observations. In the present work, we address both limitations. First, we extend the theoretical framework of DAE to partially observable domains with minimal modifications. Second, we reduce its computational complexity by introducing discrete latent dynamics models that efficiently approximate transition probabilities. We evaluate our approach on the Arcade Learning Environment and find that DAE scales effectively with function approximator capacity while retaining high sample efficiency.

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18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Memory-Efficient Meta-Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Safety-Critical Control in Adversarial Spacecraft Proximity Operations

Authors:
Alejandro Posadas-Nava↗Richard Linares↗Minduli Wijayatunga↗

arXiv:2606.17414v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous spacecraft rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO) require controllers that guarantee safety under thrust constraints while minimizing fuel expenditure. Input-constrained control barrier functions (ICCBFs) provide a control method for nonlinear systems with actuation constraints that construct a forward-invariant safe set. Previous work has shown that learning class-$\mathcal{K}$ functions defining the ICCBF recursion via meta reinforcement learning (meta-RL) yields a robust, non-greedy approach to safety-critical control in RPO. This paper extends that framework further by investigating the performance of three recurrent network architectures (Long Short Term Memory (LSTM), Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), Selective State Space Model (Mamba)) and two training algorithms (Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and Soft Actor Critic (SAC)) to identify the best setup for tuning ICCBF class-K functions via meta-RL. In addition to cooperative test cases, performance is evaluated in the presence of adversarial behavior where the target spacecraft behaves in a way that worsens the safety of the chaser spacecraft. Results indicate that state space models such as Mamba when used with PPO achieve superior task completion, safety, and fuel-savings compared to other architectures, across all cooperative and uncooperative scenarios tested.

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

SPEA2$^+$: Improved Density Estimation in SPEA2 with Provable Runtime Guarantees

Authors:
Duc-Cuong Dang↗Andre Opris↗Dirk Sudholt↗

arXiv:2606.12382v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Strength Pareto Evolutionary Algorithm 2 (SPEA2) is a popular and prominent evolutionary algorithm for solving multi-objective optimisation problems. Despite its popularity, theoretical analyses of SPEA2 have only appeared recently. Moreover, these analyses focus exclusively on how SPEA2 handles non-dominated solutions and disregard the algorithmic components responsible for handling dominated solutions. We conduct a first runtime analysis of SPEA2 for which these components are analysed. We prove that, unlike other prominent algorithms, including NSGA-II, NSGA-III and SMS-EMOA under the same setting of constant population size and duplicate elimination, SPEA2 is unable to cover the Pareto front of the OneTrapZeroTrap benchmark efficiently. Our results indicate that using k-th nearest-neighbour distance in the fitness assignment provides an insufficient signal to maintain diversity among dominated individuals. To address this issue, we propose an improved variant, SPEA2$^+$, that considers all pairwise distances. The new algorithm achieves the same performance guarantees as the other prominent algorithms on OneTrapZeroTrap, while matching the performance of the original SPEA2 on simpler problems. Experimental results complement our theoretical findings.

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

Learned JPEG Compression for DNN Vision

Authors:
Kaixiang Zheng↗Ahmed H. Salamah↗Siyu Chen↗En-Hui Yang↗

JPEG, a lossy image compression technique designed for human viewers, has maintained its dominance for decades. However, in the era of artificial intelligence (AI), a substantial portion of image data, often compressed by JPEG, is and will continue to be consumed by deep neural networks (DNNs) instead of humans, thus creating a need to optimize JPEG for DNN inference performance. To this end, we propose learned JPEG compression for DNN vision (J4D), a novel training framework for determining JPEG encoding parameters to minimize compression rate while maximizing DNN inference performance. The major challenge of solving this optimization problem lies in representing the JPEG codec and compression rate in closed form. By incorporating a differentiable soft quantizer based on a probabilistic quantization scheme, we not only obtain a differentiable proxy for the JPEG codec, but are also able to compute the entropy of the coded source analytically, which is a close estimate of the actual compression rate. Equipped with both the differentiable JPEG codec and the information-theoretic rate estimator, we are then able to solve the aforementioned optimization problem with backpropagation. After training, the learned encoding parameters will be subsequently used in actual JPEG encoding based on probabilistic quantization. Extensive experimental results across multiple datasets and DNN architectures demonstrate that J4D consistently and significantly outperforms the default JPEG and other competitive JPEG codecs optimized for DNNs. Notably, compared to the default JPEG, J4D achieves an increase in accuracy by as much as 11.60% at the same rate, or a reduction of compression rate up to 80.05% at the same accuracy. Additionally, with the help of J4D, we show the potential to design universal JPEG encoding parameters for various DNN architectures for the first time.

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21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Attention-Based Estimation of the Individual Treatment Benefit Probability under Dose Variation

Authors:
Lev V. Utkin↗Andrei V. Konstantinov↗Stanislav K. Kogan↗Natalya M. Verbova↗Maksim I. Goriunov↗

arXiv:2606.13821v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Estimating the probability that a treatment outperforms a control for an individual patient, called the Individual Probability of Treatment Benefit (IPTB), offers a clinically intuitive alternative to population-average metrics. However, existing methods for IPTB estimation are largely confined to binary treatment settings, despite the prevalence of dose-varying interventions in clinical practice. We propose a general framework for IPTB estimation with ordinal outcomes under discrete dose assignments, called Dose-AIPTB (Dose Attention-based IPTB). Our approach recasts the problem as binary classification over the unobserved sign of the individual treatment effect, constructing pseudo-labels from covariate-similar pairwise comparisons and aggregating them via attention mechanisms or Nadaraya-Watson kernel regression. This formulation naturally accommodates multiple discrete dose levels, extending beyond the binary treatment paradigm. Through numerical experiments on real-world and synthetic data under covariate shift, varying sample sizes, and heterogeneous outcomes, we demonstrate that attention-based aggregation consistently outperforms kernel alternatives. The framework provides a foundation for personalized dose selection grounded in individual-level benefit probabilities. Codes implementing the model are publicly available at https://github.com/NTAILab/AIPTBDose.

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22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

A Benchmark for Hallucination Detection in VLMs for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy

Authors:
Aminu Lawal↗Niyoj Oli↗Sachin Acharya↗Prashnna Gyawali↗Maria Carmen Romano↗Binod Bhattarai↗

arXiv:2606.24115v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) are prone to hallucination, which remains a major barrier to their safe deployment in clinical practice. To date, most hallucination detection methods have been evaluated on radiology benchmarks such as MIMIC-CXR and VQA-RAD, while gastrointestinal (GI) endoscopy remains largely underexplored. In this paper, we benchmark nine hallucination detection methods on the Gut-VLM dataset, a GI diagnostic Visual Question Answering (VQA) dataset with 4,392 test VQA pairs, across five VLMs (MedGemma-4B, MedGemma-27B, LLaVA-Med-7B, LLaVA-v1.6-7B, and Lingshu-32B). The methods span three categories: black-box methods (RadFlag, SelfCheckGPT-NLI), gray-box methods (AvgProb, AvgEnt, MaxProb, MaxEnt, Semantic Entropy, and VASE), and a white-box method (ReXTrust). Our results show that ReXTrust, a white-box method, achieves the highest AUC across all five models, outperforming the strongest alternative method on each VLM by a statistically significant margin (paired permutation test, p < 0.001 in all cases), reaching a peak AUC of 93.0 on MedGemma-4B. White-box hidden-state access provides a consistent advantage of 19.5 AUC points on average (range: 9.5–33.5), with ReXTrust maintaining strong performance even on LLaVA-v1.6-7B (AUC 79.9), where black-box methods and clustering-based gray-box methods collapse to near-chance performance. Among non-white-box methods, token-level gray-box statistics (MaxEnt, MaxProb) are the strongest alternatives, outperforming both clustering-based gray-box methods (Semantic Entropy, VASE) and black-box approaches on average. We further identify confident confabulation, a failure mode in which models hallucinate with high inter-sample consistency or high token-level probability, as a systemic failure for both consistency and uncertainty-based methods.

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23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

SAAS: Self-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Over-Search Mitigation in Agentic Search

Authors:
Yunbo Tang↗Chengyi Yang↗Shiyu Liu↗Zhishang Xiang↗Zerui Chen↗Qinggang Zhang↗Jinsong Su↗

Agentic search enables LLMs to solve complex multi-hop questions through iterative reasoning and external search. Despite the effectiveness, these systems often suffer from a critical limitation in practice: agents fail to recognize their own knowledge boundaries, blindly triggering searches when internal knowledge suffices and failing to terminate search even when adequate evidence has been collected. The lack of self-awareness leads to severe over-search, incurring substantial inference latency and prohibitive computational cost. To this end, we propose SAAS, a novel RL framework designed to cultivate dynamic self-awareness that precisely regulates search behavior without compromising accuracy. SAAS introduces three key components: (i) a search boundary modeling mechanism, which identifies the search boundary under the evolving policy by contrasting search-disabled and search-enabled rollouts; (ii) a boundary-aware reward module, which translates this boundary awareness into trajectory-level penalties, suppressing unnecessary and redundant searches; and (iii) a stage-wise optimization strategy, which leverages a sequential curriculum to prioritize reasoning over search regularization, thereby avoiding reward hacking. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SAAS substantially reduces over-search, while maintaining accuracy. Our code and implementation details are released at https://github.com/XMUDeepLIT/SAAS.

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24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

A Robust Strontium Tweezer Apparatus for Quantum Computing

Authors:
Marijn Venderbosch↗Rik van Herk↗Zhichao Guo↗Jes\'us del Pozo Mellado↗Max Festenstein↗Deon Janse van Rensburg↗Ivo Knottnerus↗Yu Chih Tseng↗Alexander Urech↗Robert Spreeuw↗Florian Schreck↗Rianne Lous↗…

arXiv:2601.16564v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Neutral atoms for quantum computing applications show promise in terms of scalability and connectivity. We demonstrate the realization of a versatile apparatus capable of stochastically loading a 5x5 array of optical tweezers with single $^{88}$Sr atoms featuring flexible magnetic field control and excellent optical access. A custom-designed oven, spin-flip Zeeman slower, and deflection stage produce a controlled flux of Sr directed to the science chamber. In the science chamber, featuring a vacuum pressure of $3 \times 10^{-11}$ mbar, the Sr is cooled using two laser cooling stages, resulting in $\sim 3 \times 10^5$ atoms at a temperature of 5(1) $\mu$K. The optical tweezers feature a $1/e^2$ waist of 0.81(2) $\mu$m, and loaded atoms can be imaged with a fidelity of $\sim 0.997$ and a survival probability of $0.99^{+0.01}_{-0.02}$. The atomic array presented here forms the core of a full-stack quantum computing processor targeted for quantum chemistry computational problems.

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25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Persistent Homology as a Theory of Emergent Structure

Authors:
Xin Li↗

arXiv:2507.03065v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Why do some macroscopic structures remain identifiable even though their microscopic constituents continually change? Vortices persist while fluid parcels turn over, neural memories persist while spikes and synapses fluctuate, and institutions persist while individuals enter and leave. We propose a scale-relative answer: an emergent property is a persistent nontrivial homology class $[z]\in H_p=\ker\partial_p/\im\partial_{p+1}$, a macro-feature that is closed but not exact across a filtration of descriptions. This identification turns emergence into a measurement problem. Persistent bars detect stable macro-features, and we introduce a contractive-similarity (CS) graph operator to supply scaffold spectral gaps that predict robustness. Hodge decomposition separates harmonic macro-scaffold from exact and co-exact micro-flow; and functorial condensation explains when one level's emergent class becomes a unit for the next. The resulting scaffold-flow framework expresses six familiar signatures of emergence (i.e., inevitability, coherence, irreducibility, complementarity, robustness, and hierarchy) within one mathematical language. It also yields falsifiable predictions across atmospheric, neural, and social systems: genuine emergent structures should persist across filtrations, remain spectrally stable, respond disproportionately to harmonic interventions, and require timescale separation for hierarchical autonomy.

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