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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

DreamX-World 1.0: A General-Purpose Interactive World Model

DreamX-World 1.0 is a general-purpose interactive text/image-to-video world model for controllable long-horizon generation. It supports camera navigation, revisits to previously observed regions, and promptable events across photorealistic, game-style, and stylized domains. Our data engine combines camera-accurate Unreal Engine rendering, action-rich gameplay recordings, and real-world videos with recovered camera geometry. For camera control, we introduce E-PRoPE, a lightweight variant of projective positional encoding that retains PRoPE's projective camera geometry while applying camera-aware attention to spatially reduced tokens. We convert a bidirectional video generator into a few-step autoregressive world model using causal forcing, DMD-style distillation, and long-rollout training. Training on self-generated long-horizon contexts exposes the model to its own generated history and reduces the style and color drift that accumulates across autoregressive chunks. Memory-Conditioned Scene Persistence retrieves earlier views through camera-geometry-based retrieval, while residual recycling makes the conditioning path less sensitive to imperfect memory latents. Event Instruction Tuning adds composable event control, and reinforcement learning alignment recovers camera control and visual quality after distillation. With mixed-precision DiT execution, residual reuse, 75\%-pruned VAE decoding, and asynchronous pipeline parallelism, DreamX-World 1.0 reaches up to 16\,FPS on eight RTX\,5090 GPUs. On our 5-second basic evaluation, DreamX-World 1.0 achieves a camera-control score of 73.75 and an overall score of 84.76, outperforming HY-WorldPlay 1.5 and LingBot-World in overall score, which achieve 80.79 and 80.45, respectively.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Lius: Translation Model Based Instructional Lingustic Using Continual Instruction Tuning In Kupang Malay

Large Language Models (LLMs) offer new potential for translation tasks but often experience performance degradation when handling low-resource languages. To address this limitation, we propose an approach for fine-tuning LLMs on a low-resource language, Kupang Malay. Our approach involves designing a set of instructions by leveraging explicit lexical and semantic features from a bilingual dictionary, and introducing Continual Instruction Tuning (CIT), a training paradigm that enables iterative instruction-based training. Experimental results demonstrate that our model, named Lius, yields notable improvements over standard instruction-tuned models by outperforming 4-6 points, and surpassing both Neural Machine Translation (NMT) and Multilingual LLM models by 10-13 points on several evaluation metrics. These findings highlight the potential of our approach to mitigate the reliance on large-scale parallel data in low-resource language translation.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

From Open Waters to Enclosed Cabins: ProteusVPR for Cross-Scene Visual Place Recognition in Maritime Perception and Cabin Inspection

Autonomous robotic inspection in maritime environments presents unique challenges for Visual Place Recognition (VPR) due to cross-scene perceptual shifts. Robots navigating ship-borne environments must transition between visually distinct domains: open decks with sparse textures and severe illumination changes, and enclosed cabins with repetitive structures and high visual ambiguity. Existing VPR methods, designed primarily for urban or indoor scenes, fail to generalize reliably across these starkly different scenarios. To address this, we propose ProteusVPR, a two-stage retrieval-refinement framework. The first stage employs any standard VPR model for initial image retrieval. The second stage introduces a geometric-visual estimation network that fuses the retrieved image with two temporally preceding frames, incorporating geometric descriptors, a local affine coordinate system, and camera azimuth encoding to achieve precise localization. To support this task, we introduce the XHZ dataset, an 8K-panoramic ship-borne dataset collected from an operational vessel, featuring multi-floor cabin structures, deck transition zones, and strict query-database separation for rigorous evaluation. Extensive experiments on the XHZ dataset demonstrate that ProteusVPR consistently improves the localization accuracy across multiple VPR backbones, reducing mean localization error by over 60\% on average and that ProteusVPR offers an effective and robust solution for precise visual localization in challenging, cross-scene maritime environments.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Constraining the outputs of ReLU neural networks

arXiv:2508.03867v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce a class of algebraic varieties naturally associated with ReLU neural networks, arising from the piecewise linear structure of their outputs across activation regions in input space, and the piecewise multilinear structure in parameter space. By analyzing the rank constraints on the network outputs within each activation region, we derive polynomial equations that characterize the functions representable by the network. We further investigate conditions under which these varieties attain their expected dimension, providing insight into the expressive and structural properties of ReLU networks.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Integration of lung tissue proteomics and genome-wide association data to identify lung cancer susceptibility proteins and potential drug targets

Background: Proteins directly impact disease development and act as drug targets. Therefore, we integrated genomic and lung tissue proteomics data to identify lung cancer susceptibility proteins, elucidating genetic mechanisms and candidate drug targets. Method: We profiled the proteome and genome in non-neoplastic lung tissue from 200 lung cancer patients. Using this data, we constructed genetic models to predict abundance across the proteome in lung tissue. We applied these models to genome-wide association study (GWAS) data from 55,174 lung cancer cases and 1,294,174 controls to evaluate their associations with the risk of lung cancer, overall and by major histological subtypes. Bayesian colocalization and Mendelian randomization (MR) analyses were used to prioritize putative causal proteins, which were cross-referenced with three main drug-protein databases to identify potential therapeutic targets. Results: We identified 29 proteins associated with lung cancer risk at a false discovery rate < 5%, including 25 for overall lung cancer, two (AQP3 and IL18) specifically for adenocarcinoma, and another two (HMGN2 and HLA-DMB) for squamous cell carcinoma. Of them, genes encoding 17 proteins reside at least 2Mb away from any known GWAS risk loci, including 14 for overall lung cancer (HYI, GPX1, GMPPB, DSP, HDDC2, MTCH2, SUOX, JMJD7, PDIA3, IL16, IQGAP1, SULT1A2, ARHGAP27, and TYMP) and three for subtypes (AQP3, IL18, and HMGN2). Among the 12 proteins located within the known risk loci, EPHX2, CLDN18, PSMD5, and CYP2S1 proteins showed an association independent of the proximal GWAS-identified lead variant. Colocalization and/or MR analysis suggested 11 potential causal proteins. Five of these candidate causal proteins (DSP, CLDN18, IQGAP1, IL18 and TYMP) are targeted by nine drugs already approved by the FDA or in phase III trials. Conclusion: Our study identified novel lung cancer susceptibility proteins and potential drug targets, offering valuable insights into lung cancer biology and future translational utilities.

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

LLM-as-Judge in Education: A Curriculum-Grounded Marking Pipeline

arXiv:2606.17507v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative AI and large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to question generation and automated assessment. However, deploying LLMs in preparation for high-stakes exams requires more than prompt engineering; it demands software pipelines that systematically ground model outputs in authorised curriculum artefacts and marking guidelines issued by education authorities. This paper presents a curriculum-grounded, configurable LLM-as-Judge pipeline for question-level marking, co-developed with an industrial partner, to support exam preparation for university admission. The pipeline identifies the relevant topics, subtopics, and cognitive demand of a question, and assembles verifiable and authorised context to support LLM judgement. Curriculum intent is operationalised through concrete syllabus artefacts, including prescribed verbs and outcomes, performance band descriptors, glossary definitions, and marking-guideline principles. A staged LLM workflow is employed to first generate question-specific rubrics, capturing structured expectations of performance, and then derive and evaluate marking criteria used to allocate marks to student responses. This design improves consistency, transparency, and alignment with official marking practices. Preliminary evaluation shows that the proposed LLM-as-Judge pipeline delivers marking outcomes comparable to human tutors, while yielding justifications that are more traceable to authorised curriculum artefacts and marking standards. The pipeline has also been integrated into an online study platform, where early deployment data provide initial insights into operational usage and manual overrides.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Data Intelligence Agents: Interpreting, Modeling, and Querying Enterprise Data via Autonomous Coding Agents

arXiv:2606.19319v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Production data integration is bottlenecked by repeated, lossy handoffs between data owners, engineers, and analysts who must collaboratively discover, structure, and query enterprise data. We present Data Intelligence Agents (DIA), a system of three agents (Data Interpreter, Schema Creator, and Query Generator) that compresses this workflow by treating autonomous coding agents (ACAs) as a first-class abstraction: rather than emitting text, the agents generate, execute, validate, and repair concrete artifacts, draw on a shared memory for experience reuse, and surface each for review by domain experts. DIA is deployed in production for enterprise customers. We study the Query Generator in depth and evaluate it in fully autonomous mode across seven SQL benchmarks spanning four task categories and four dialects. It matches or surpasses the best published results on all seven, demonstrating that an architecture grounded in execution, built on ACAs and a shared memory, generalizes across the data intelligence workload with adaptation confined to natural-language instructions.

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

Leadership as Coordination Control: Behavioral Signatures and the Recovery-Advantage Boundary in Multi-Agent LLM Teams

Authors:

Team science holds that leadership is contingent: it helps only under specific conditions, and capable, autonomous teams may need none at all. We ask the analogous question for multi-agent LLM teams: under what measurable conditions does process-level coordination control add value, and do those conditions match what team science predicts? We use behavioral signatures (majority lock-in, exploration, recovery from an incorrect round-0 consensus) and per-action ablations, clean because each controller is an explicit action set, not a monolithic prompt. We operationalize three classical leadership styles (transactional, transformational, situational) as controllers over a shared action vocabulary (explore, revise, accept, synthesize). A matched controller with the same actions but an arbitrary rule recovers no better than majority voting, so the theory-derived rule, not the vocabulary, does the work. Across four task regimes and three open-weight model families, no controller dominates by accuracy, as the contingency view predicts: transactional control matches a shared round-0 vote on all 12 (model, regime) combinations to within 1.3pp, and gains appear only on the one combination where the round-0 majority is unreliable (llama-4-scout social; situational +8pp over flat). A recovery-advantage account, tested with four boundary probes, says a controller beats plain interaction only where the round-0 majority is unreliable, the task is recoverable, and undirected interaction does not already repair it. These regions map onto contingency theory (leadership substitutes, path-goal redundancy, the situational readiness gap), so a largely null accuracy result is what the theory predicts, not a failure of the controllers. We read process-level coordination control as a contingency to be measured and theory-mapped, not a leaderboard to be topped.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Semantic DLM+: Improving Diffusion Language Models through Bias-variance Trade-off in Transition Kernel Design

arXiv:2606.15327v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have demonstrated strong scaling capacity as alternatives to autoregressive language models. However, their performance is highly sensitive to the choice of transition kernels, and poorly designed kernels can lead to issues like training instability, slow convergence, and biased sampling. In this paper, we study this sensitivity through a principled analysis of generalization error and identify three critical factors: asymptotic bias (difficulty in approximating the posterior distribution), exposure bias (error propagation during sampling), and optimization variance induced by kernel dispersion. We further compare different transition kernels: masking diffusion yields sparse and easier posterior-approximation targets, while uniform diffusion provides stronger sampling-side repair but induces harder approximation. Motivated by this trade-off, we revisit a previously overlooked variant, semantic DLM (SemDLM), where the transition kernel corrupts tokens to neighborhoods that are semantically similar. Our theory suggests that SemDLM can serve as a plausible middle ground by reducing the posterior approximation difficulty of uniform diffusion while retaining repair ability. However, we find that SemDLM suffers from a semantic basin problem, where sampling repeatedly stays within a semantic region and produces low-diversity text. To address this, we propose SemDLM+, which adds a global transition and a semantic-frequency penalty during sampling. Experiments on LM1B and OpenWebText show that SemDLM+ improves training dynamics and achieves competitive language modeling and generation quality with satisfactory diversity.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Bright-state source cancellation in dissipative shortcut Raman atom optics

arXiv:2606.24939v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spontaneous Raman scattering limits shortcut-assisted atom optics, but its microscopic origin is obscured once the lossy excited state is adiabatically eliminated. We organize the problem around a single quantity: in the instantaneous dark-bright basis the lower-manifold optical source is carried entirely by the bright-state amplitude, $S=\Omega b$, so that primary spontaneous scattering reduces to the compact functional. This recovers the known dissipative-STIRAP loss in transparent form and makes the action of a shortcut explicit: ideal counterdiabatic STIRSAP cancels the bright-state source, not the optical decay coefficient. We show this cancellation is exact in the full three-level model at the counterdiabatic point, for arbitrary one-photon detuning, Rabi frequency, and pulse duration. The residual source splits into orthogonal quadratures – shortcut mismatch (real) and two-photon Doppler detuning (imaginary) – which invites a velocity-selective protocol that nulls the Doppler quadrature for a chosen momentum class with a second, phase-shifted lower-state field. Our central result is that this source nulling is never superior to simply chirping the two-photon detuning: the two coincide only when the selected class $\delta_c$ is small compared with the bright-state gap, and the nulling degrades and then fails as $\delta_c\to|\mu|$ – precisely the regime of launched or warm clouds and high-order large-momentum-transfer (LMT) optics that motivates velocity selection. The controlling quantity is the magnitude of the residual Hamiltonian perturbation a scheme leaves behind, not the residual source it cancels. As a complement to existing multi-pulse decay budgets, we cast a single-pulse mode-error budget for LMT interferometry entirely in terms of the bright-state source, and delineate when shortcut-assisted Raman control reduces the total scattering cost.

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

Quantum steering in networks: Measurement-device-independent detection, continuous variables, and practical Gaussian schemes

arXiv:2606.25690v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We consider quantum steering certification in multipartite networks, with a focus on minimal trust scenarios: all-except-one parties are untrusted and treated device-independently. We show that it is always possible to lift steering certification to the measurement-device-independent regime, in which even the (last) trusted party can treat their local hardware as a black-box, except for a set of fiduciary quantum states used as the inputs to the experiment. This holds both for finite-dimensional systems as well as for bosonic continuous-variable systems, for which we provide a full characterization in the bipartite case. Additionally, we introduce measurement-device-independent network steering protocols based entirely on Gaussian operations – which cannot be used for fully device-independent protocols, and thus become instead a viable option for minimal trust certification as soon as a single trusted input is inserted in the network. Our results present a basis for steering-based applications (such as randomness generation) with minimal trust beyond full nonlocality and with feasible experimental requirements.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

XConv: Low-memory stochastic backpropagation for convolutional layers

arXiv:2106.06998v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Training convolutional neural networks at scale demands substantial memory, largely because intermediate activations must be stored for backpropagation. Existing remedies (checkpointing, invertible architectures, or gradient-approximation methods such as randomized automatic differentiation) either add significant computation, impose architectural constraints, or require non-trivial code changes. We propose XConv, a near-drop-in replacement for standard 2D and 3D convolutional layers that addresses all three: it preserves standard backpropagation, imposes no architectural constraints, and integrates into existing codebases with minimal changes. XConv exploits the algebraic structure of convolutional weight gradients, storing highly compressed projections of the activations rather than the full tensors and approximating the gradients via multi-channel randomized trace estimation. The number of probing vectors sets a memory-accuracy tradeoff and recovers the exact gradient in the limit. We establish convergence guarantees and error bounds for the estimator, showing that its gradient-error variance is comparable to that of stochastic gradient descent. Empirically, XConv matches exact-gradient methods across classification, generative modeling, super-resolution, inpainting, and segmentation, with gaps that narrow as the number of probing vectors grows, while reducing activation memory by a factor of two or more when convolutional activations dominate, and remaining computationally competitive with optimized convolution kernels at larger batch sizes. At half precision the gradient-approximation error falls to the rounding floor, so XConv adds essentially no error beyond that of low-precision arithmetic. The savings matter most where activation memory rather than compute is the binding constraint, such as high-resolution and volumetric training and on-device finetuning.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Keeping the Evidence Chain: Semantic Evidence Allocation for Training-Free Token Pruning in Video Temporal Grounding

Video Temporal Grounding (VTG) localizes the temporal boundaries of query-relevant moments in long, untrimmed videos, making video-language-model prohibitively expensive. While recent training-free token pruning has shown success in video question answering, naively applying these objectives to VTG causes drastic degradation, as VTG crucially depends on boundary-sensitive evidence and cross-frame reasoning chains. We therefore identify two VTG-specific pruning principles: evidence retention, which keeps query-critical patches especially around event boundaries, and connectivity strength, which preserves cross-frame connectivity for long-range evidence aggregation. Building on these insights, we propose SemVID, a training-free pruning framework that constructs a compact yet coherent token subset with complementary semantic roles. SemVID first allocates per-frame budgets by balancing query relevance and inter-frame variation to avoid over-pruned segments, and then selects three types of tokens: object tokens for diverse query-critical evidence, motion tokens to capture meaningful transitions and serve as cross-frame relays, and context tokens for scene continuity. Extensive experiments show that SemVID achieves a strong accuracy-efficiency trade-off, retaining up to 95.4% mIoU with only 12.5% visual tokens and delivering up to a 5.8x prefill speedup, consistently outperforming prior methods under the same budgets. Our code is available at https://github.com/JiaqiLi404/SemVID

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Deep Neural Networks with Ordinal Loss for Medical Applications

arXiv:2606.25769v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In many prediction problems in medical applications, target labels exhibit an inherent ordinal structure, where class ordering reflects clinically meaningful severity levels. The cost associated with misclassification is often non-uniform and asymmetric, as errors between distant ordinal categories may have substantially more severe consequences than errors between adjacent ones, and overestimating disease severity may have different clinical implications than underestimating it. Traditional loss functions such as multi-class cross-entropy treat all misclassifications equally and fail to incorporate this ordering information. Recent advances in ordinal regression aim to address this limitation by integrating rank-based structures into deep learning models. In this work, we introduce the Ordinal Cross-Entropy (OCE) framework, a general and architecture-independent approach for learning from ordinal data. The proposed method extends the standard cross-entropy formulation to account for misclassification severity through an ordinal cost matrix while preserving the probabilistic interpretation and optimization benefits of the conventional loss. We provide a theoretical analysis of the OCE gradient behavior and show that it yields smoother optimization dynamics and improved ordinal consistency. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that our method achieves lower prediction error costs and better calibration compared to existing state-of-the-art ordinal approaches, establishing OCE as a simple yet effective solution for ordinal regression in deep neural networks.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Software compensation of trigger-synchronous control-frame errors in qubits and qudits

arXiv:2606.00358v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum control experiments are often subject to coherent, time-dependent disturbances that vary over timescales comparable to the experiment duration. We show that when such disturbances are reproducible with respect to a trigger signal, their effect can be measured and compensated through software-defined updates to the control frequency and phase. We experimentally verify the performance of our protocol using a trapped $^{137}$Ba$^+$ ion experiencing magnetic-field-induced energy shifts synchronous with the laboratory AC mains power. Using this compensation technique, the calibrated AC line contribution to the instantaneous oscillator detuning is reduced by $21(9)\times$, and the fitted AC-induced phase amplitude is reduced below the measurement uncertainty. We use randomized benchmarking to validate the compensation performance in quantum gate sequences, recovering an average single-qubit gate fidelity of 99.93(1)\% with a magnetic-field-sensitive qubit. Finally, we extend the compensation framework to multi-level qudit control. Using the Bernstein-Vazirani algorithm as a benchmark, we increase the algorithm's success probability from 10(7)\% to 70(9)\% in a 16 level system when compensation is enabled. Our results demonstrate that trigger-synchronized coherent errors can be reframed as deterministic control-frame errors and corrected in software.

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

RedactionBench

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.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Variational Autoencoder Layer

Authors:

arXiv:2606.25900v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) belong to a family of autoencoders with probabilistic properties, making them well suited for generating data by producing a smooth and continuous latent space. Despite being introduced over a decade ago, the method continues to be widely adopted in both research and industry for diverse applications. While VAEs are typically used as standalone models, this paper introduces a novel approach to integrate them as a neural network layer. Furthermore, a new training strategy is proposed for models incorporating these layers, and their performance is thoroughly analyzed.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Longitudinal monitoring exposes correlated temporal protein variations in the female plasma proteome

The plasma proteome is a valuable resource for assessment of the physiological state of the donor. Containing hundreds of different proteins of variable concentrations, it displays substantial inter-donor differences in individual protein levels, making each plasma proteome highly donor-specific. Less is known about intra-donor variability in the plasma proteome over time, although such variations may even be more indicative of a changing physiological state. Here we assessed data obtained from the TIMES cohort, comprising 51 apparently healthy participants monitored monthly over 12 months, focusing especially on temporal variations in blood protein levels. Most strikingly, we observed that several women in this cohort revealed strongly correlated temporal variations in their plasma proteome, including most notably PZP, SHBG, FETUB, AGT, SERPINA6, SERPINA7, CP, APOL1 and KNG1, with levels sometimes fluctuating by more than 20-fold. In contrast, such variations were absent in men. Some of the fluctuating proteins have been known to be hormone-regulated (e.g., PZP, SHBG), but for others this was not yet fully clear. Through the tight co-variation observed for these proteins in the plasma proteome of women, we can conclude that all these proteins are similarly hormone regulated. The findings reported here not only corroborate previous studies showing estrogen-dependent regulation of several plasma proteins, but also extend this category to include also CP, APOL1, and KNG1. As these latter have been often proposed as candidate biomarkers, they should be validated in sex-balanced cohorts and interpreted with caution, especially in large-scale plasma proteomics studies wherein often only one or a few sampling time points are measured per donor.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Decentralized SGD with Controlled Disagreement Finds Flatter Minima

arXiv:2602.02899v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Decentralized training is often regarded as inferior to centralized training because the consensus errors between workers are thought to undermine convergence and generalization. This work challenges this view by introducing decentralized SGD with Adaptive Consensus (DSGD-AC), which uses a time-dependent scaling mechanism to maintain consensus errors throughout the training. We show that adaptive consensus changes the stationary variance of disagreement modes by balancing two effects: it preserves consensus-error magnitude through weaker graph damping while still allowing curvature-dependent damping to shape the disagreement directions. This balance can produce a stronger Hessian-weighted loss-envelope penalty around the deployed model, even when normalized Hessian alignment is weaker than in standard DSGD. Empirical results on image classification show that DSGD-AC reaches flatter solutions and higher test accuracy than standard DSGD and even centralized SGD. Together, these results support consensus errors as a useful implicit regularizer and open a new perspective on the design of decentralized learning algorithms.

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

Online Dynamic Batching with Formal Guarantees for LLM Training

arXiv:2606.19989v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern LLM training breaks a core assumption behind offline batch samplers: the true training cost of a sample is only observable after preprocessing, augmentation, templating, tokenization, and multimodal visual-token expansion. Unless one pays for a preprocessing- and augmentation-dependent length cache, batch construction is therefore blind to the quantity that determines padding, memory use, and GPU saturation. We introduce Online Dynamic Batching (ODB), a DataLoader-side drop-in system that moves batch formation to this point of accurate observability while preserving DDP step alignment. We formalize this synchronization requirement as the Distributed Group Alignment Problem and prove deadlock-free bounded termination with default join-mode identity coverage and opt-in non-join sample-quota closure. ODB requires no model, optimizer, or attention-kernel changes and is released as online-dynamic-batching with lightweight trainer adapters. Across public 2B/8B Qwen3-VL runs on UltraChat/LLaVA/ShareGPT4o, ODB improves literal emitted-sample throughput vs. fixed-batch Standard by 1.58-2.51x on single-node Full FT/LoRA and 1.71-3.78x on two-node Full FT, with Standard-comparable quality; production MM-Mix reaches 4.43x. Against GMT/BMT offline token-budget oracles, ODB is within 15% on UltraChat/LLaVA and faster on high-CV ShareGPT4o: 2.24-2.39x single-node Full FT/LoRA and 3.06-3.69x two-node Full FT. Together, ODB occupies the online/drop-in regime for high-heterogeneity LLM fine-tuning: large throughput gains at Standard-comparable quality, formal DGAP guarantees, and no length-cache precompute or kernel rewrites.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

ReFoCUS: Reinforcement-guided Frame Optimization for Contextual Understanding

Recent progress in Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs) has enabled effective vision-language reasoning, yet the ability to video understanding remains constrained by suboptimal frame selection strategies, albeit with the rapid development of video-specialized LMMs. Prior works attempted to solve this with static heuristics or external retrieval modules to feed frame-level information, but these approaches often fail to capture visual cues grounded to the given user queries conflating raw visual dynamics with true semantic relevance. In this paper, we introduce ReFoCUS (Reinforcement-guided Frame Optimization for Contextual UnderStanding), the first framework to integrate online policy-gradient reinforcement learning into frame-level optimization for video-LLMs. ReFoCUS aims to learn a frame selection policy, leveraging reward signals derived from reference models to capture their underlying scoring behavior over frame combinations that best support temporally grounded responses. To efficiently explore the large combinatorial frame space, we employ an autoregressive and query-conditional selection architecture that ensures contextual consistency while reducing complexity. Our policy learning removes the need for explicit frame-level supervision, as it implicitly discovers optimal and semantically consistent frame compositions. ReFoCUS consistently improves reasoning accuracy across multiple video QA benchmarks, demonstrating the advantage of aligning frame selection with model-internal utility.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Gaussian mode coupling of spectrally broadband photons from bulk spontaneous parametric down-conversion: A spatial-spectral mode analysis of fiber coupling

arXiv:2602.23238v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Photon sources based on spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) are central to experimental quantum optics and quantum technologies. Their performance is commonly quantified by three metrics: pair-collection probability, heralding efficiency, and spectral purity. In bulk-crystal SPDC, these metrics are known to be mutually constrained, yet the physical origin of the resulting trade-offs is often obscured. We show that these trade-offs originate from the frequency-dependent population of discrete spatial modes in the SPDC emission. By performing a Laguerre-Gauss mode decomposition at each frequency component, we show how spectral-spatial non-separability impacts collection probability, heralding efficiency, and purity. We apply this framework to two widely used quasi-phase-matching configurations: collinear degenerate type-0 and type-II SPDC in periodically poled bulk crystals, and quantify how different phase-matching functions shape the spectral-spatial mode structure. In particular, for type-II SPDC we compare standard periodically poled and aperiodically poled Gaussian phase matching. We experimentally validate some of our theoretical results using spatial- and spectral-projection measurements. This spectral-spatial mode analysis provides a quantitative and predictive framework for understanding and engineering bulk-crystal photon sources, enabling systematic multi-parameter optimization beyond qualitative design guidelines.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

ReA-OVCD: Reliability-Aware Open-Vocabulary Change Detection via Semantic and Spatial Refinement

Unlike traditional remote sensing change detection that relies on predefined categories, Open-Vocabulary Change Detection (OVCD) identifies land cover changes flexibly using arbitrary text prompts. However, existing methods suffer from an inherent trade-off when modeling changes: instance-level comparison overlooks fine-grained semantic variations (e.g., partial building extensions), while direct pixel comparison proves unreliable, yielding unstable responses and boundary artifacts due to semantic ambiguity and spatial inconsistency. To this end, we propose an efficient training-free Reliability-Aware Open-Vocabulary Change Detection (ReA-OVCD) framework. It first derives candidate change regions from pixel-wise semantic discrepancies to ensure flexible and detailed localization. To ensure reliability, it subsequently introduces a collaborative refinement strategy to explicitly model change validity from both semantic and spatial perspectives. Specifically, we develop a Semantic Change Reasoning (SCR) module that reassesses changes by jointly analyzing distributional divergence and response variation, enabling the suppression of incidental inconsistencies while preserving reliable semantic shifts. In addition, a Boundary-aware Change Refinement (BCR) module is designed to mitigate artifacts stemming from boundary misalignment and uncertainty through validating whether candidate regions are supported by reliable interior pixels. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets (LEVIR-CD, WHU-CD, DSIFN, and SECOND) demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving $\mathrm{F}_{1}^{C}$ improvements of 2.13\% to 9.75\% with higher computational efficiency. The code is publicly available at \https://github.com/Funny0101/ReA-OVCD

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

FlowObject: Flow Steering for Bridging Generative Priors and Reconstruction Fidelity

Recovering complete 3D representations of objects from few casual image captures remains a significant challenge. Recent 3D generative models, particularly those based on Flow-Matching (FM), can synthesize high-quality textured assets; however, they often suffer from ''synthetic bias'' where learned priors override observational evidence, alongside a lack of alignment with the observed instance. Conversely, optimization-based methods like 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) provide high fidelity on visible surfaces but fail to reason about unobserved geometry. In this paper, we present FlowObject, a framework that reformulates sparse-view 3D reconstruction as a training-free, guided inverse problem. Our approach applies a dual-space guidance strategy to steer the Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) trajectory of a flow-matching model, enabling the completion of unseen regions through learned generative priors while enforcing strict consistency with real-world observations. By integrating a 3DGS refinement stage, FlowObject further bridges the gap between ''synthetic-looking'' generative outputs and photorealistic reconstructions. Comprehensive benchmarks on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that current state-of-the-art methods often struggle to achieve geometric completeness and observational consistency simultaneously, especially under severe occlusions. In contrast, our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art generative models and optimization-based frameworks in both geometric completeness and view-dependent appearance fidelity.

25.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Variational Tail Bounds for Norms of Random Vectors and Matrices

arXiv:2503.17300v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose a variational tail bound for norms of random vectors and matrices under moment assumptions on their one-dimensional marginals. A simplified version of the bound that parametrizes the ``aggregating distribution'' using a certain pushforward of the Gaussian distribution is also provided. We apply the proposed method to reproduce some of the well-known bounds on norms of Gaussian random vectors, and also obtain dimension-free tail bounds for the Euclidean norm of random vectors with arbitrary moment profiles. Furthermore, we reproduce a dimension-free concentration inequality for sum of independent and identically distributed positive semidefinite matrices with sub-exponential marginals, and obtain a concentration inequality for the sample covariance matrix of sub-exponential random vectors. We also obtain a tail bound for the operator norm of a random matrix series whose random coefficients may have arbitrary moment profiles. Furthermore, we use coupling to formulate an abstraction of the proposed approach that applies more broadly. As a corollary, we derive a PAC-Bayesian-style bound in terms of a certain combination of the KL and R\'{e}nyi divergences between the prior and posterior distributions.