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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Sub-Riemannian spectral distance

arXiv:2606.12804v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study eigenvalues and eigenfunctions of the ``div-grad type" sub-Laplacian with respect to Popp's volume on a compact equiregular sub-Riemannian manifold $M$. Since Popp's volume is canonically determined by the sub-Riemannian structure of $M$, the spetra of the sub-Laplacian carry geometric meanings. In this paper, we first embed $M$ into the Hilbert space of square-summable sequences using eigenfunctions and then define a spectral distance between two compact equiregular sub-Riemannian manifolds. Our result is a sub-Riemannian analogue of Berard-Besson-Gallot's classical work in the Riemannian case.

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

The Geometry of Phase Transitions in Generative Dynamics via Projection Caustics

arXiv:2606.13191v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continuous-state generative samplers, including diffusion and flow-matching models, evolve through continuous reverse-time dynamics, yet their samples often undergo abrupt qualitative changes: trajectories commit to modes, semantic alternatives collapse, and small perturbations in narrow time windows can produce large downstream effects. This paper develops a geometric account of such phase-transition-like behaviour. We view denoising as gradient descent on a free energy landscape and show that sharp transitions arise near projection caustics, where the nearest-point projection onto the data support ceases to be unique. Motivated by this perspective, we introduce the Critical Boundary Detector (CBD), as practical diagnostics for score-direction instability. Across toy models, standard diffusion models, and latent text-to-image diffusion models, CBD localises mode commitment, predicts intervention-sensitive windows, and supports targeted control in geometrically sensitive regions. Our results connect geometry of data and dynamics of diffusion generation.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Quantum Error Correction Codes for Truncated SU(2) Lattice Gauge Theories

Authors:

arXiv:2511.13721v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We construct two quantum error correction codes for pure SU(2) lattice gauge theory in the electric basis truncated at the electric flux $j_max=1/2$, which are applicable on quasi-1D plaquette chains, 2D honeycomb and 3D triamond and hyperhoneycomb lattices. The first code converts Gauss's law at each vertex into a stabilizer while the second only uses half of the vertices and is locally the carbon code. Both codes are able to correct single-qubit errors. The electric and magnetic terms in the SU(2) Hamiltonian are expressed in terms of logical gates in both codes. The logical-gate Hamiltonian in the first code exactly matches the spin Hamiltonian for gauge singlet states found in previous work.

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

PragReST: Self-Reinforcing Counterfactual Reasoning for Pragmatic Language Understanding

Natural language understanding often depends on meanings that are implied rather than explicitly stated, requiring pragmatic reasoning. Despite strong performance on math and logical reasoning, large language models (LLMs) still struggle with making pragmatic inferences, often choosing literal interpretations. To improve LLM pragmatic reasoning, we introduce PragReST, a self-supervised framework that constructs pragmatic QA data, generates counterfactual reasoning traces, and trains models to internalize them through supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, without human-labeled training data or distillation from a stronger teacher. Across four pragmatic benchmarks (PragMega, Ludwig, MetoQA, and AltPrag), PragReST improves over backbone models, task-specific pragmatic tuning baselines, and non-counterfactual variants of the same pipeline. On accuracy-based benchmarks, PragReST improves over the instruct backbone by 5.37 and 5.50% (absolute) for Qwen3-8B and Qwen3-14B, respectively. Our error analysis and ablations underscore the importance of counterfactual reasoning: PragReST primarily reduces errors caused by failures to contrast observed utterances with plausible alternatives, and removing counterfactual reasoning substantially reduces performance. Moreover, our training preserves out-of-domain performance on general-knowledge and mathematical reasoning benchmarks.

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

A Model-Free Universal AI

arXiv:2602.23242v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In general reinforcement learning, all established optimal agents, including AIXI, are model-based, explicitly maintaining and using environment models. This paper introduces Universal AI with Q-Induction (AIQI), the first model-free agent proven to be asymptotically $\varepsilon$-optimal in general RL. AIQI performs universal induction over distributional action-value functions, instead of policies or environments like previous works. Under a grain of truth condition, we prove that AIQI is strong asymptotically $\varepsilon$-optimal and asymptotically $\varepsilon$-Bayes-optimal. We also apply our novel proof techniques to show asymptotic $\varepsilon$-optimality of Self-AIXI without any ad-hoc assumptions. Our results significantly expand the diversity of known universal agents.

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

GRACE: Step-Level Benchmark for Faithful Reasoning over Context

Many reasoning tasks require models to reason over input context, from document-grounded question answering to rule-based deduction. Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting produces traces that appear transparent, yet individual steps can silently deviate from the source evidence, even when the final answer is correct. Existing methods detect hallucinations at the response level but fail to identify where in the chain a failure occurs or what type it is. We introduce GRACE, the first human-annotated step-level faithfulness benchmark with a data-driven error taxonomy for context-grounded textual reasoning. GRACE covers CoT traces from 10 models across 4 source datasets, with each step annotated for faithfulness, error category, and natural language explanation. A data-driven taxonomy, discovered bottom-up via unsupervised clustering, organizes failures into two tracks: GRACE-Inference (deductive errors) and GRACE-Grounding (factual grounding errors), with four categories each. The evaluation set is human-annotated and challenging by design. Our experiments reveal substantial headroom for current models. In addition, integrating step-level faithfulness signals into reinforcement learning pipelines improves both downstream accuracy and reasoning reliability.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Rumination as a cognitive vulnerability factor in perinatal bereavement: evidence from the CARING study

Purpose. Perinatal loss is associated with a high risk of persistent psychological distress, including prolonged grief, depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress symptoms. Cognitive processes such as rumination may play a crucial role in maintaining and amplifying distress following loss, yet their specific contribution in perinatal bereavement remains underexplored. Methods. The CARING (Cognitive Analysis and Rumination INvestigation in perinatal Grief) study employed a cross-sectional design involving 298 parents who experienced perinatal loss within the previous five years. Participants completed an anonymous online survey including measures of depressive rumination (Ruminative Response Scale, RRS), angry rumination (Anger Rumination Scale, ARS), perinatal grief (Perinatal Grief Scale, PGS), general psychopathology (SCL-90), and post-traumatic stress symptoms (NSESSS). Non-parametric analyses were conducted to examine associations between rumination patterns and psychological outcomes. Results. Higher levels of rumination were significantly associated with greater perinatal grief, depressive and anxiety symptoms, and post-traumatic stress. Depressive rumination showed consistently stronger associations with all outcomes compared to angry rumination. Participants presenting both depressive and angry rumination exhibited the highest levels of grief intensity, psychological distress, and PTSD symptoms, suggesting a graded relationship between rumination patterns and severity of distress. Rumination levels were not significantly associated with gestational age at loss or with having received psychological support. Conclusions. Rumination, particularly in its depressive form, appears to function as a transdiagnostic cognitive vulnerability factor in perinatal bereavement. These findings highlight rumination as a potential target for early screening and tailored psychological interventions aimed at reducing long-term distress following perinatal loss.

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Biomedical Capacity, Governance, and Health Security: A Dominican Republic Research Analysis of Stakeholder Perspectives

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed critical vulnerabilities in globally concentrated biomedical supply chains and accelerated interest in nearshoring and hemispheric health-security strategies. The Dominican Republic, already the third-largest medical device exporter in Latin America, occupies a strategically significant but institutionally constrained position within this realignment. This study evaluates stakeholder perceptions of the principal opportunities and barriers affecting biomedical ecosystem development in the Dominican Republic, with particular attention to governance, workforce capacity, and value-chain upgrading pathways. Methods. A concurrent mixed-methods design was employed, integrating a cross-sectional electronic survey of 142 purposively sampled domain experts (administered September-December 2025) with a qualitative executive consultation with senior government and industry leaders. Survey analyses combined descriptive statistics, one-sample t-tests against the scale neutral midpoint, chi-square goodness-of-fit tests, Friedman non-parametric ranking, Spearman rank correlations, and exploratory linear and logistic multivariable regression. Qualitative responses were analyzed using a framework approach grounded in the Triple Helix model of innovation systems. Results. Perceived government support was significantly below neutral (mean = 2.67, SD = 1.12; p = 0.034). Workforce shortages (83.3%) and weak academia-industry collaboration (71.4%) were the most frequently endorsed barriers ({chi}2(5) = 18.7, p = 0.002). Regulatory modernization (88.1%) and workforce development (85.7%) ranked as the highest-priority policy levers (Friedman p = 0.005). Clinical trials and contract research organization services were the dominant sub-sector priority (76.2%, binomial p < 0.001). In multivariable analysis, perceived government support, talent availability, and confidence in IP protection jointly explained 46% of the variance in sector competitiveness (R2 = 0.46, p < 0.001). Strong majority support existed for a formal public-private biomedical coordination authority (73.8%, p < 0.001).Conclusion. Institutional credibility and advanced human capital–rather than geography or market access–are the perceived binding constraints on the Dominican Republics biomedical trajectory. Regulatory modernization, targeted workforce investment, and the establishment of a national biomedical coordination authority represent the highest-leverage interventions for positioning the country as a hemispheric hub for biomedical manufacturing, clinical research, and health security.

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

Attention mechanisms and transfer learning for robust peach leaf damage classification under domain shift

Artificial intelligence provides a practical framework for crop damage assessment from imagery data, supporting early decision-making in agricultural management. In peach orchards, climate change increases abiotic stress and biotic pressures, including pests and diseases, which often produce visually similar foliar symptoms. This overlap makes manual diagnosis difficult, especially across multiple fields with varying environmental conditions, highlighting the need for automated models with strong generalization ability. We propose an image-based classification approach for peach leaf damage detection. A benchmark dataset was created through manual annotation of publicly available images, consisting of 1,366 peach leaves across six damage categories. Several deep learning architectures were evaluated. EfficientNet models achieved the best results, with EfficientNetB0 reaching 92.9 percent accuracy, EfficientNetB3 achieving 91.5 percent, and EfficientNetB5 showing the strongest performance on minority classes. DenseNet121 reached 92.6 percent accuracy. The integration of the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) improved performance in several backbones, particularly EfficientNetB5 and InceptionV3, while showing limited or negative impact in others. The CBAM-enhanced EfficientNetB5 achieved the best overall accuracy of 93.3 percent. To evaluate robustness under realistic conditions, a local dataset of 180 images across four classes was collected, and transfer learning strategies were applied to address domain shift. Three fine-tuning strategies were tested. EfficientNetB3 combined with CBAM achieved the best performance in the local domain, reaching a 93 percent macro F1-score after transfer. Overall, attention-based models showed improved robustness for minority classes and better generalization across different field conditions.

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

XMedFusion: A Knowledge-Guided Multimodal Perception and Reasoning Framework for Autonomous Medical Systems

Autonomous medical and robotic systems increasingly rely on intelligent perception and reasoning capabilities to interpret visual data and support clinical decision making. Radiology report generation represents a critical component of such automated diagnostic workflows, yet existing end-to-end multimodal models often suffer from weak visual grounding, resulting in unreliable interpretations and omission of subtle clinical findings. This paper presents XMedFusion, a modular AI framework designed as an intelligent perception and reasoning module for autonomous medical systems. The proposed framework decomposes visual information into coordinated functional components that emulate expert-driven analysis, including a visual perception agent that extracts image-grounded evidence, a knowledge graph construction agent that structures clinically relevant findings, and a retrieval-guided drafting process that ensures a consistent reporting structure. A synthesis agent iteratively integrates visual and structured evidence through reasoning-driven verification to produce reliable and interpretable diagnostic outputs. Experimental evaluation on a public chest radiograph dataset demonstrates significant improvements over baseline vision-language models, achieving gains from 0.0493 to 0.3359 in BLEU-1, 0.0863 to 0.2440 in ROUGE-L, and 0.0829 to 0.1708 in METEOR, along with substantial improvements in semantic evaluation metrics such as Consistency (2.38 to 7.80) and Accuracy (2.34 to 6.93). The results highlight the effectiveness of structured multi-agent perception and reasoning for enhancing robustness, transparency, and automation in intelligent medical imaging systems, enabling integration into autonomous healthcare and robotic diagnostic workflows.

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

SDFLoRA: Selective Decoupled Federated LoRA for Privacy-preserving Fine-tuning with Heterogeneous Clients

arXiv:2601.11219v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Federated learning (FL) for large language models (LLMs) has attracted increasing attention as a privacy-preserving approach for adapting models over distributed data, where parameter-efficient methods such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) are widely adopted to reduce communication and memory costs. However, practical deployments often exhibit rank and data heterogeneity: clients operate under different low-rank budgets and data distributions, making direct aggregation of LoRA updates biased and unstable. Existing approaches either enforce a unified rank or align heterogeneous updates into a single shared subspace, which tends to mix transferable and client-specific directions and consequently undermines personalization. Moreover, under differential privacy (DP), perturbing such structurally mixed updates injects noise into directions that should remain purely local, leading to unnecessary utility degradation. To address these issues, we propose Selective Decoupled Federated LoRA (SDFLoRA), a structure-aware LoRA framework that decouples each client update into a shared component for aggregation and a private component that preserves client-specific semantics. Only the shared component participates in subspace alignment, while the private component remains local and uncommunicated, making the training DP-compatible and stabilizing aggregation under rank heterogeneity. By injecting noise only into the aggregated shareable update, this approach avoids perturbations to local directions and improves the utility-privacy trade-off. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that SDFLoRA outperforms federated LoRA baselines and achieves a strong utility-privacy trade-off.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

An interpretable unsupervised representation learning for high precision measurement in particle physics

arXiv:2511.22246v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Unsupervised learning has been widely applied to various tasks in particle physics. However, existing models lack precise control over their learned representations, limiting physical interpretability and hindering their use for accurate measurements. We propose the Histogram AutoEncoder (HistoAE), an unsupervised representation learning network featuring a custom histogram-based loss that enforces a physically structured latent space. Applied to silicon microstrip detectors, HistoAE learns an interpretable two-dimensional latent space corresponding to the particle's charge and impact position. After simple post-processing, it achieves a charge resolution of $0.25\,e$ and a position resolution of $3\,\mu\mathrm{m}$ on beam-test data, comparable to the conventional approach. These results demonstrate that unsupervised deep learning models can enable physically meaningful and quantitatively precise measurements. Moreover, the generative capacity of HistoAE enables straightforward extensions to fast detector simulations.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Emergent Alignment

arXiv:2606.19527v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Can Large Language Models (LLMs) discern when their own outputs are misaligned with human ethics? And can they self-correct? We endow an LLM with a conscience step that reviews its own reasoning and outputs, and we extend the training loss with an alignment component using Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to steer the model away from non-ethical outputs. The result is an online technique to align models in a wide range of applications: training, fine-tuning, adversarial prompting, and zero-shot learning. It does not require a weaker or stronger judge, relying instead on a frozen copy of itself. In previous work, the Emergent Misalignment scenario showed a range of emergent unethical behaviors from fine-tuning the model to hack code. Instead, we empirically show how to achieve Emergent Alignment: a single high-level introspective question steers training toward an ethical model under the same code hacking scenario.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Contextualizing Biological Language Models across Modalities via Logit-Space Contrastive Alignment

arXiv:2606.18703v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pretrained biological language models expose per-token probability distributions through masked-token prediction, providing the likelihood interface central to sequence design, variant scoring, and mechanistic interpretation. Yet these distributions are learned from broad unlabeled corpora and are not naturally conditioned on task-specific biological contexts such as interaction partners, cellular environments, or therapeutic interventions. Existing contextual matching methods often distort this interface through pooled embeddings, contrastive latent spaces, or task-specific prediction heads. We introduce LOGICA (Logit-space Contrastive Alignment), a framework for context-conditioned prediction that performs contrastive learning directly in output-logit space. Using gated cross-modal adapters compatible with each model's native token head, LOGICA preserves the pretrained likelihood interface and converts contextualized token log-likelihoods into matching scores. Alignment is defined through context-sensitive token probabilities rather than proximity in a shared embedding space, enabling learning from sparse paired data across models with distinct vocabularies, without a shared tokenizer or decoder. LOGICA is particularly effective for mutation-local variant ranking, where comparisons reduce to context-conditioned likelihoods of mutant tokens at perturbed sites. Across protein–ligand binding, TCR–peptide activity, and drug-conditioned resistance prediction, LOGICA improves over prior state-of-the-art methods, including matched latent-contrastive and conditional MLM baselines, while retaining a token-level interface for interpretation and generation. On held-out-gene single-mutation drug-resistance prediction, LOGICA improves AUC from near-random latent-space baselines of $\sim$0.55 to $\sim$0.65.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Comparative Effectiveness and Safety of Prophylactic Vasopressors for Preventing Post-induction Hypotension in the Elderly: A Systematic Review and Network Meta-analysis

Background: Post-induction hypotension is a predictable haemodynamic hazard in older adults undergoing general anaesthesia. Prevention remains divided among volume optimisation, anaesthetic dose reduction, rescue treatment after hypotension occurs and proactive vasoactive support. Methods: We searched PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, CENTRAL, CNKI, Wanfang and VIP from inception to 30 March 2026. Eligible studies were randomised trials of prophylactic vasoactive drugs given before, during or immediately after induction in older adults. The primary outcome was post-induction hypotension. Secondary outcomes were post-induction mean arterial pressure (MAP), systolic arterial pressure (SBP), heart rate (HR) and reported haemodynamic adverse events. Random-effects network meta-analysis was used, and confidence in network estimates was assessed using CINeMA principles. Results: Thirty-one trials including 2,821 participants were included in the revised network. Compared with placebo/control, all active agents favoured lower post-induction hypotension. The most favourable point estimates were observed for phenylephrine (odds ratio [OR] 0.17, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.01 to 2.16) and metaraminol (OR 0.19, 95% CI 0.02 to 1.53), although both were imprecise. More precise reductions were observed for methoxamine (OR 0.23, 95% CI 0.13 to 0.43), norepinephrine (OR 0.25, 95% CI 0.13 to 0.47) and ephedrine (OR 0.34, 95% CI 0.19 to 0.63). Phenylephrine ranked highest for MAP support, norepinephrine ranked highest for SBP support, and ephedrine ranked highest for HR preservation. Global inconsistency was detected for SBP but not for hypotension incidence, MAP or HR, supporting cautious profile-based interpretation. Conclusions: Prophylactic vasopressor choice during induction should be guided by haemodynamic phenotype rather than ranking alone. In the revised network, active prophylaxis consistently favoured lower hypotension, but sparse nodes produced uncertainty. Norepinephrine retained a comparatively balanced profile when vasodilatory post-induction hypotension is anticipated, phenylephrine and related alpha-agonists provided stronger pressure support when HR and cardiac-output reserve are preserved, and ephedrine was most relevant when chronotropic support is desired. Keywords: general anaesthesia; induction; hypotension; norepinephrine; phenylephrine; ephedrine; network meta-analysis; older adults.

16.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Sharp Favard length of random Cantor sets

arXiv:2512.17753v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We show that for a large class of planar $1$-dimensional random fractals $S$, the Favard length $\operatorname{Fav}(S(r))$ of the neighborhood $S(r)$ is comparable to $\log^{-1}(1/r)$, matching a universal lower bound; up to now, this was only known in expectation for a few concrete models. In particular, we show that there exist $1$-Ahlfors regular sets with the fastest possible Favard length decay. For a wide class of planar one-dimensional "grid random fractals", including fractal percolation and its Ahlfors-regular variants, we further show that $\operatorname{Fav}(S(r))/\log(1/r)$ converges almost surely, and we identify the limit explicitly. Furthermore, we prove that for some $1$-dimensional Ahlfors-regular random fractals $S$, the Favard length of $S(r)$ decays instead like $\log\log(1/r)/\log(1/r)$, showing that the $1/\log(1/r)$ decay is not universal among random fractals, as might be expected from previous results.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

PoQ-Judge: A Multi-Architecture Evaluation Framework for Cost-Aware Proof-of-Quality in Decentralized LLM Inference

Decentralized LLM inference networks need lightweight, reference-free quality evaluation for Proof of Quality (PoQ). We present PoQ-Judge, a framework that trains dedicated judge models to score query-output pairs without ground-truth references. We study three architectures across the quality-cost tradeoff: a TextCNN judge, a MiniLM cross-encoder, and a DeBERTa judge. Using two-stage training on UltraFeedback plus GPT-labeled in-domain data, the best model reaches 0.747 Pearson correlation with the ground-truth proxy on a held-out test set, outperforming reference-based evaluators from prior work. As a reference-free component in composite scoring, it achieves 0.645 Pearson correlation, matching the best single reference-based evaluator while removing the need for reference answers. We also show that online calibration identifies semantic quality as the dominant dimension and that cascade evaluation reduces cost by 72.7 percent with only modest quality loss. Results are much stronger on QA than summarization, pointing to proxy quality as the main remaining limitation.

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

Learning the generating functional for variance reduction in lattice QCD

arXiv:2606.15986v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The generating functional in quantum field theory provides the natural framework for constructing correlation functions as derivatives with respect to source operators. We present a methodology that leverages machine-learned normalizing flows to reduce the variance of arbitrary $N$-point correlation functions of bosonic operators in lattice gauge field theory calculations by encoding a representation of the generating functional. We show that it is possible to systematically approach noiseless estimators of correlation functions in this framework. We demonstrate this methodology with applications to calculations of glueball correlation functions and Wilson loops in Quantum Chromodynamics and Yang-Mills theory. The results show up to three orders of magnitude variance reduction.

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

NeuronFabric: A Software Reference Architecture for On-Chip Transformer Training with Local Adam

arXiv:2606.16440v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Publicly documented accelerator architectures generally separate training computation from optimizer-state updates or rely on external memory and host orchestration. This paper presents NeuronFabric, a software reference architecture intended for future FPGA and ASIC implementations of transformer training with local Adam updates. A complete C# prototype implements forward pass, backpropagation, and Adam optimization without external machine-learning frameworks. The goal is to validate numerical correctness and memory requirements before hardware implementation. The evaluated model is a 334K-parameter autoregressive transformer (d=88, H=4, f=264, L=4, vocab=256) trained on the Shakespeare corpus. The BF16W configuration achieves evaluation loss 1.5426 after 80K samples, compared with 1.5224 for an FP32 GPU reference, while producing coherent character-level text. The paper introduces BF16W, which stores weights in BF16 while retaining Adam optimizer moments in FP32. This reduces memory requirements for on-chip training. A 334K-parameter FP32 model with Adam moments requires approximately 4.0 MB, matching the BRAM capacity of a Xilinx ZCU102 device. The BF16W variant requires approximately 3.34 MB, leaving memory available for activation storage. We describe the vocabulary-budget constraint observed during earlier experiments, quantify BF16W memory savings, and outline FPGA training as the next stage of development. No FPGA measurements are included in this paper. This publication serves as a public architectural disclosure and software reference implementation for future FPGA and ASIC exploration of the NeuronFabric architecture.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Towards Data-free and Training-free Compression for Speech Foundation Models Using Parameter Clustering

arXiv:2606.11836v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents a novel data-free and training-free compression approach for speech foundation models using channelwise clustering via k-means. More fine-grained, mixed sparsity pruning by layer-level varying number of parameter clusters is also explored. Experiments conducted on the LibriSpeech dataset suggest that when operating with pruning sparsity of 50% on HuBERT-large, consistent WER reductions of 27.73%/18.61% absolute (34.37%/21.91% relative) over the magnitude-based pruning were obtained on the test-clean and test-other subsets before fine-tuning and 0.19%/0.79% absolute (3.36%/4.62% relative) after fine-tuning with only 3 epochs. Similar WER reductions of 2.86%/5.02% absolute (59.21%/55.29% relative) were observed against magnitudebased pruning on Whisper-large-v3 at 10% sparsity, all with no significant WER increase relative to the uncompressed baseline.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

A finite-element-inspired bipartite graph learned simulator for manufacturability assessment in large-deformation sheet forming

arXiv:2605.22845v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Explicit dynamic finite element (FE) simulations are widely used for large deformation engineering analysis, but repeated simulations remain costly during design space exploration and optimisation. In explicit FE analysis, nodal kinematics and element level deformation measures evolve through coupled node element updates. This motivates graph learned simulators that approximate one step FE state transitions and roll them out autoregressively. However, many mesh based graph surrogates are node centred, which makes element level variables and native nodal elemental exchange less direct to represent. This work proposes CAttBiGNN, a cross attention based bipartite graph neural network for coupled nodal elemental learning. The graph represents FE mesh nodes and elements as distinct entities linked by directed node element edges, enabling nodal displacement increments and element level deformation states to be predicted on their native discretisation domains. An edge aware cross attention processor uses geometric edge embeddings to modulate directional node element message passing. For larger graphs, CAttBiUGNN combines the bipartite processor with graph downsampling and upsampling to improve long-range information propagation. The method is evaluated on dome shaped cold forming and corner shaped hot forming benchmarks. Comparisons with node centred baselines and bipartite and attention ablations show improved accuracy and balance in nodal displacement and elemental thinning prediction during autoregressive rollout. The results indicate that the proposed finite element inspired learned simulator can support manufacturability oriented field prediction and efficient design space exploration in large deformation sheet material forming.

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

Variable-Rate Deep Image Compression based on Low-Rank Adaptation by Progressive Learning

In the digital age, image compression is crucial for numerous applications, including web media, streaming services, high-resolution medical imaging, and connected vehicle networks, enabling efficient data storage and transmission. With the increasing demand for high-quality image communication, the need for advanced compression techniques becomes increasingly critical. Numerous Deep Image Compression (DIC) techniques have recently been introduced, showing impressive performance compared to traditional standards. However, variable-rate image compression remains an unresolved issue. Specific DIC methods deploy multiple networks to attain different compression rates, whereas others use a single model, which often results in higher computational complexity and reduced performance. This work proposes a progressive learning approach for variable-rate image compression based on the parameter-efficient fine-tuning method, the Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). We introduce an additional LoRA Rate-Adaptive Module (LoRAM) in DIC methods. Due to the re-parameterized merging of LoRA, our proposed method does not introduce additional computational complexity during inference. Compared to methods utilizing multiple models, comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive performance, saving 99\% in parameter storage, 90% in datasets, and 97% in training steps.

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

Faster Completion, Less Learning: Generative AI Reduced Study Time on Math Problems and the Knowledge They Build

arXiv:2605.21629v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: How much have students' ordinary learning processes shifted in response to generative AI, and how does that affect their durable learning outcomes? Self-report surveys show little change, while small-scale behavioral studies report widespread AI use without the scale or duration to measure learning consequences. We address both questions using a ten-year panel of $3.2$ million ALEKS learning interactions for investigating time-on-task, complemented by ALEKS PPL placement-assessment data for examining proctoring and learning outcomes, with a quasi-experimental design exploiting variation in tasks that are more susceptible to AI (text-based word problems) and less susceptible to AI (interactive graph-based problems). Learning time on AI-susceptible problems declines $2.8\%$ per quarter among college students after ChatGPT's release, cumulating to $26.9\%$ over eleven quarters; high-schoolers show $31.3\%$, middle-schoolers $9.0\%$, and Grade 5 students no detectable change. Among college students, the post-ChatGPT divergence vanishes entirely under proctoring, ruling out broad efficiency gains as the likely explanation. Logistic fixed-effects models on randomly assigned proctored retention items yield a $25\%$ cumulative decline in odds of correct response; the same estimator on non-proctored assessment produces a large opposite-signed increase – inconsistent with any platform, cohort, or curriculum explanation. These results are among the first large-scale behavioral and outcome evidence that generative AI has altered how students study and the knowledge they build – the population-level indicator of cognitive surrender, with direct implications for educational research, assessment governance, and AI policy.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Creative Integration: A Decidable Criterion of Creativity

"Integrative" solutions are widely praised but rarely defined: we lack an operational way to tell a genuine integration – one that makes the world cheaper to describe – from a tidy re-description. Building on the lineage that treats creativity and intelligence as compression, we give such a criterion for creative integration (CI): the resolution of a real conflict between A and B is CI if and only if, under a fixed description language, the description length strictly shrinks (C = L_pre/L_post > 1), with the reduction located in the conflict itself. We make the judgment decidable through four binary, conjunctive gates, and we fix its extension through a taxonomy of pseudo-integration that names and rejects the look-alikes. We back the criterion with a curated, multi-domain corpus and – crucially – validate it not by human inter-rater agreement but by four falsifiable tests it could fail: an independent computational check, discrimination against hard negatives, out-of-sample prediction, and description-language robustness; all pass with margin. The contribution is not "creativity is compression" but its decidability, discrimination, and corpus: on this account, what makes a move genuinely creative – rather than merely novel – is that it compresses a conflict, with novelty and value as downstream symptoms; whether all creativity is so constituted we state as an explicit conjecture. We claim only the sign of C-1; we judge, not generate. The result is a citable primitive for a broader program.

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

SinGeo: Unlock Single Model's Potential for Robust Cross-View Geo-Localization

Robust cross-view geo-localization (CVGL) remains challenging despite the surge in recent progress. Existing methods still rely on field-of-view (FoV)-specific training paradigms, where models are optimized under a fixed FoV but collapse when tested on unseen FoVs and unknown orientations. This limitation necessitates deploying multiple models to cover diverse variations. Although studies have explored dynamic FoV training by simply randomizing FoVs, they failed to achieve robustness across diverse conditions – implicitly assuming all FoVs are equally difficult. To address this gap, we present SinGeo, a simple yet powerful framework that enables a single model to realize robust cross-view geo-localization without additional modules or explicit transformations. SinGeo employs a dual discriminative learning architecture that enhances intra-view discriminability within both ground and satellite branches, and is the first to introduce a curriculum learning strategy to achieve robust CVGL. Extensive evaluations on four benchmark datasets reveal that SinGeo sets state-of-the-art (SOTA) results under diverse conditions, and notably outperforms methods specifically trained for extreme FoVs. Beyond superior performance, SinGeo also exhibits cross-architecture transferability. Furthermore, we propose a consistency evaluation method to quantitatively assess model stability under varying views, providing an explainable perspective for understanding and advancing robustness in future CVGL research. Codes will be available upon acceptance.