Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

Nature (Science) 2026-06-18 DOI: HASH:6fffd8927de756d5968d05c8e4e3ddbb

Cell transplant across the tree of life hints at how animals emerged

Authors:

Ewen Callaway↗

Embryonic ‘organizer cells’ can tell embryos of various phyla what kind of body to build. Embryonic ‘organizer cells’ can tell embryos of various phyla what kind of body to build.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

02.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18316

A Survey on Data-Driven Models for Soil Moisture Regression and Classification

Authors:

Ilektra Tsimpidi↗George Georgoulas↗Vidya Sumathy↗George Nikolakopoulos↗

arXiv:2606.18316v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Soil Moisture (SM) modelling constitutes a complex spatiotemporal learning problem characterised by nonlinear environmental interactions, heterogeneous data sources, and limited ground observations. Physics-based approaches, such as water balance models, rely on explicit hydrological equations and high-quality inputs, but their computational cost and scalability limitations restrict large-scale deployment. Data-driven artificial intelligence (AI) methods have emerged as flexible alternatives, enabling the extraction of empirical relationships between soil moisture and environmental variables with reduced modelling assumptions. This work presents a structured survey of AI-based models for soil moisture estimation and classification. Existing approaches are organized into five categories: (a) statistical time-series models, (b) geostatistical methods (c) classical machine learning (ML) models, (d) Deep Learning (DL) models and (e) Probabilistic/Bayesian methods. These models leverage historical soil moisture records, meteorological variables, vegetation indices, topography, soil characteristics, and geolocation data to perform regression or classification tasks.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

03.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17588

Understanding LLMs in Title-Abstract Screening: From Disagreements to Recommendations

Authors:

Mika M\"antyl\"a↗Patricia Matsubara↗Katia Romero Felizardo↗Miikka Kuutila↗Marco Gerosa↗Savio de Sousa Sampaio↗Tayana Conte↗Igor Steinmacher↗

arXiv:2606.17588v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Several studies have examined the use of large language models (LLMs) for title-abstract screening in systematic reviews (SRs), reporting mixed accuracy. However, questions of reliability remain largely unaddressed. In this study, we go beyond quantitative LLM-human agreement metrics and qualitatively investigate how and why LLMs fail. We also propose actionable recommendations. We analyzed disagreements between LLMs and researchers across six software engineering SRs and over 1,000 primary study papers. For each SR, papers were screened independently by human experts and LLMs in zero-shot mode, resulting in Kappa values ranging from 0.52 to 0.77. Qualitative analysis suggests that human-LLM disagreement results from recurring, identifiable causes, such as boundary ambiguity in key terms, keyword overemphasization, and incorrect topic inference. Based on these findings, we propose recommendations such as validating semantic understanding before deployment, running multiple LLMs, and focusing validation efforts on borderline cases. Future studies are needed to validate the impact of our recommendations, and community efforts are needed to develop normative guidelines on LLM usage in SRs.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

04.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25 DOI: arXiv:2606.22027

RARM: Confidence-Gated Progress Reward Modeling for RL in Manipulation

Authors:

Pengzhi Yang↗Xinyu Wang↗Pengyu Jing↗Kehan Wen↗Yiduo Qu↗Zhenhao Huang↗Minghao Fu↗Xin Liu↗Yaheng Shen↗Fan Shi↗

arXiv:2606.22027v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning for robot manipulation is often bottlenecked by reward design, especially in long-horizon tasks: sparse success rewards provide weak supervision, while hand-crafted dense rewards are tedious to design and generalize poorly across tasks. Progress-based reward models offer a promising alternative by estimating how far an observation has advanced toward task completion, but existing approaches often require task-specific demonstrations or progress labels, and can assign high rewards to visually plausible but physically incorrect states. We introduce the Reference-Anchored Reward Model (RARM), a lightweight visual comparator that converts a single successful demonstration into a dense, progress-aware reward. RARM is trained once on general-purpose videos with a contrastive temporal objective, requiring no robot-specific data, task-specific reward labels, or per-task reward engineering. At deployment, RARM matches rollout clips to reference clips and rewards only confident forward progress, suppressing uncertain matches that may otherwise produce false-positive rewards. Across 9 simulated manipulation tasks from LIBERO and MetaWorld and 4 real-world tasks, RARM achieves the best overall success rates in subsequent RL training, with particularly large gains on long-horizon tasks such as cloth folding, where unreliable progress estimates are especially harmful.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

05.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25 DOI: arXiv:2606.25757

OPERA: Aligning Open-Ended Reasoning via Objective Perplexity-based Reinforcement Learning

Authors:

Wenxuan Jiang↗Zining Fan↗Zijian Zhang↗Xuecheng Wu↗Hongming Tan↗Haoyang Dai↗Xiaoyu Li↗Xuezhi Cao↗Ninghao Liu↗

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has enabled LLMs to excel in objective reasoning tasks such as mathematics and code generation. However, applying RL to open-ended tasks, such as creative writing, remains challenging because LLM-as-a-judge reward models often exhibit stylistic biases and positional inconsistencies, leading to unstable supervision. To address this, we propose OPERA (Objective Perplexity-based Reflective Alignment), which replaces unreliable external judges with intrinsic rewards derived from perplexity dynamics. Specifically, we derive an intrinsic reward signal from perplexity dynamics, quantifying uncertainty reduction at critical reflective states. During the cold-start phase, we introduce a data synthesis method that leverages carefully designed guiding words to generate diverse reasoning traces, along with perplexity-prioritized rollouts that utilize internal log-probabilities to identify logically consistent reasoning branches. This pipeline yields a large-scale dataset comprising 20,000 high-quality reasoning trajectories. Empirical evaluations consistently demonstrate the scalability and efficacy of our approach in alignment for open-ended tasks. Implementing OPERA on Qwen3-8B establishes a new state-of-the-art among open-source models, achieving parity with or surpassing proprietary models like Gemini2.5 and MiniMax-M2.5 in some open-ended tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/pangpang-xuan/OPERA.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

06.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.12289

The Standard Interpretable Model: A general theory of interpretable machine learning to deductively design interpretable methods using Lagrangian mechanics

Authors:

Pietro Barbiero↗Giovanni De Felice↗Mateo Espinosa Zarlenga↗Francesco Giannini↗Filippo Bonchi↗Mateja Jamnik↗Giuseppe Marra↗Ruggero Noris↗

arXiv:2606.12289v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As Artificial Intelligence models grow in complexity, interpretability has become an indispensable tool for understanding, debugging, and controlling their computations. However, interpretability lacks general theories to deductively design interpretable methods. This gap between theories and methods results in a fragmented literature and inconsistent evaluation protocols. To fill this gap, we introduce the Standard Interpretable Model (SIM), a general theory grounded in Lagrangian mechanics that enables the deductive design of interpretable methods. Specifically, the SIM summarises, in a set of premises, what interpretability is for a target user. From these premises, the SIM systematically derives interpretability symmetries and corresponding constraints, which shape the landscape of a Lagrangian whose minima correspond to optimal interpretable models. To reach the minima, one can either update the parameter values of an opaque model to make it more interpretable or compile constraints into an interpretable architecture. We empirically show that the SIM identifies and solves limitations of existing methods (including traditional, concept-based, and mechanistic interpretability), highlights underexplored research directions, and informs the design of core programming interfaces. Beyond being a research method, the deductive nature of the SIM offers pedagogical grounding for interpretability curricula and may shift the scientific community's perspective of a discipline that has long been fragmented.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

07.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.07015

Towards Unified Song Generation and Singing Voice Conversion with Accompaniment Co-Generation

Authors:

Ziyu Zhang↗Chunyu Qiang↗Xiaopeng Wang↗Yuxin Guo↗Kang Yin↗Wenjie Tian↗Jingbin Hu↗Tianlun Zuo↗Zhao Guo↗Teng Ma↗Yuzhe Liang↗Chen Zhang↗…

arXiv:2606.07015v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While song generation and singing voice conversion (SVC) have evolved significantly, they have long been developed isolated: the former lacks zero-shot speaker cloning, while the latter overlooks vocal-accompaniment synergy. To bridge this gap, we propose UniSinger, the first end-to-end framework unifying speaker cloning song generation and accompaniment co-generation SVC. Building on the multimodal diffusion transformer, we construct a unified speaker embedding space transferring speaker representation from SVC to song generation, endowing fine-grained cross-task timbre control. To mitigate multi-task optimization conflicts, we design a curriculum learning strategy using task-specific modality masking to guide the model to gradually master the generative mechanisms among semantic content, vocal timbre, and accompaniment. Experiments show state-of-the-art performance on both tasks and realizes complementary benefits, offering new possibilities for intelligent music production.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

08.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12789

How Fine-Grained Should a RAG Benchmark Be? A Hierarchical Framework for Synthetic Question Generation

Authors:

Chase M. Fensore↗Kaustubh Dhole↗Jason Fan↗Eugene Agichtein↗Joyce C. Ho↗

Evaluating retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems requires benchmarks that capture diverse question characteristics, yet practitioners lack empirical guidance on which dimensions to vary and at what granularity. We present HieraRAG, a hierarchical framework for studying granularity in RAG benchmark construction, defining optimal granularity as the level that maximizes discriminative power (the standard deviation of generation quality across categories) within a given RAG configuration. As a case study, we generate 5,872 synthetic question-answer (QA) pairs from FineWeb-10BT across 3 dimensions (Question Complexity, Answer Type, Linguistic Variation) at 3 granularity levels (2, 4, and 8 categories). With a BM25+Falcon-3-10B pipeline, optimal granularity varies by dimension: complexity benefits from fine-grained distinctions (discriminative power: 0.053) while answer type and linguistic variation peak at medium granularity. We introduce a Coherence Ratio metric to quantify whether fine-grained splits cleanly subdivide parent categories, revealing structural differences across dimensions (Question Complexity: 0.40 vs. Answer Type: 1.44). Human evaluation of 110 stratified QA pairs confirms synthetic quality. While these specific findings reflect a single configuration, HieraRAG provides a portable procedure and validation metric for practitioners to determine evaluation granularity within their own RAG settings.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

09.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-14 DOI: HASH:7cc85698839a5a4d3aed7f2d82d82db0

Systematic AI-Driven Drug Repurposing via Clinical Trial Data Mining: A Framework and Six Cross-Therapeutic Case Studies.

Authors:

Gote↗

Drug repurposing, the application of approved or shelved compounds to new therapeutic indications, offers a cost- and time-efficient alternative to de novo drug discovery. However, the systematic identification of repurposing candidates from the rapidly expanding body of clinical trial data remains a significant challenge. Here we present a publicly accessible AI-powered tool that mines the ClinicalTrials.gov registry to identify approved drugs with under-explored therapeutic potential in high-value disease areas. The tool integrates natural language processing, mechanism-of-action pathway analysis, and trial density scoring to surface candidates where biological plausibility is high and clinical trial coverage is sparse. We demonstrate the tool's utility across six cross-therapeutic case studies spanning oncology, cardiology, neurology, rare diseases, immunology, and infectious disease. Key findings include: the identification of Zonisamide as an under-explored combination candidate for obesity alongside GLP-1 receptor agonists; mechanistic validation of SGLT2 inhibitors in heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF); and a novel cross-domain mapping of anti-TNF biologics to early-stage neurodegeneration via shared neuroinflammatory pathways. The tool is freely accessible and designed to lower the barrier for academic and industry researchers to systematically pursue repurposing opportunities.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

10.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2605.20541

Finite-Sample Bounds for Expected Signature Estimation under Weak Dependence

Authors:

Bryson Schenck↗

arXiv:2605.20541v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The expected signature uniquely determines the law of a random rough path under a moment-growth condition, yet finite-sample bounds for estimating its truncations from a single long dependent trajectory remain unavailable. We study a strictly stationary stochastic process equipped with a geometric rough-path lift, observed in non-overlapping blocks of equally-spaced samples, and prove a non-asymptotic mean-squared error (MSE) bound for the block-averaging estimator of its truncated expected signature. Under moment and stationarity assumptions together with a direct covariance-decay condition on block signatures – strictly weaker than $\alpha$-mixing and applicable to long-range-dependent processes – the error separates into a discretization term and a fluctuation term, with rates determined respectively by path regularity and dependence strength. A levelwise rough-factorial variance analysis keeps finite-truncation constants explicit and yields an optimal allocation rule under a fixed observation budget. We verify the assumptions for independent-coordinate fractional Ornstein–Uhlenbeck processes in three regimes: short-range (Hurst $1/41/2$. Monte Carlo experiments show empirical slopes steeper than the guaranteed upper-bound rates.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

11.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24064

Beyond Trajectory Imitation: Strategy-Guided Policy Optimization for LLM Reasoning

Authors:

Tianyuan Shi↗Canbin Huang↗Bei Li↗Xin Chen↗Xiaojun Quan↗Jingang Wang↗Qifan Wang↗

arXiv:2606.24064v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Distilling reasoning capabilities from strong to weak language models typically involves imitating specific solution trajectories, effectively transferring what to answer rather than how to reason. This trajectory-level imitation encourages memorization of instance-specific steps rather than acquisition of transferable problem-solving skills, limiting generalization to novel problems. We propose Strategy-Guided Policy Optimization (SGPO), which replaces instance-level trajectory imitation with reusable strategy distillation. SGPO extracts structured strategy descriptions from strong-model responses and, for each problem, constructs both autonomous and strategy-guided trajectories to enable direct comparison of the model's behavior with and without strategic guidance. The framework then addresses two key questions. For how to distill, a token-level forward-KL objective selectively transfers the distributional shift induced by strategy conditioning into the unguided policy, with proximal constraints ensuring stability. For when to distill, adaptive instance-level weighting strengthens guidance when autonomous exploration falls short and reduces it as the model's own competence grows. Experiments on four mathematical benchmarks across two model families show that SGPO consistently outperforms SFT, on-policy RL, and hybrid-policy baselines, improving the average score by 2.2 points over the strongest baseline on Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct. Analysis reveals that the forward-KL objective provides an inherently selective distillation signal that outperforms direct trajectory imitation, and that strategy distillation exhibits complementary scaling with base model capability.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

12.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11806

External Experience Serving in Production LLM Systems: A Deployment-Oriented Study of Quality-Cost Trade-offs

Authors:

Lin Sun↗Heming Zhang↗Xiangzheng Zhang↗

Production LLM systems accumulate reusable operational experience, but the practical deployment issue is not merely whether such experience can help. It is how different serving strategies trade off quality against online cost under realistic constraints. Injecting external experience can improve task quality, yet it also increases prompt burden, latency, and serving pressure. We study external experience serving as a deployment-oriented quality-cost trade-off problem. We evaluate this question in a real production moderation setting, with tool-use and GPQA as supporting contrast tasks that expose different output-cost regimes. We compare no-experience baselines, random experience controls, global prompt injection, and retrieval-based selective injection, and analyze both task quality and serving cost. The results show that, once experience becomes case-dependent, selective retrieval provides a stronger operating point than unconditional global injection. They further show that retrieval quality matters more than simply increasing Top-$K$, and that the same serving policy can exhibit substantially different cost-benefit profiles across short-output and decode-heavy regimes. These findings suggest that external experience is best treated as a selective, cost-aware serving decision rather than as a universal add-on. Overall, in the settings studied here, external experience pays off only when both the serving interface and the task-specific cost structure make its quality gains worth the online cost.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

13.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20238

Random Projections for Multi-Copy Quantum Algorithms

Authors:

Xiaoyu Liu↗Jordi Tura↗Johannes Kn\"orzer↗

arXiv:2606.20238v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Estimating nonlinear properties of quantum states is a central task in quantum information science. Multivariate traces, $\mathrm{tr}(\rho_1 \cdots \rho_K)$, and nonlinear observables such as $\mathrm{tr}(\rho^K)$, for integer $K$, can be accessed through collective measurements on multiple state copies, but standard protocols based on swap tests require coherent operations on the full Hilbert space and become experimentally unfeasible for large systems. In this work, we introduce a framework for multi-copy measurements based on random projections onto lower-dimensional subspaces prior to the collective measurement, which is then performed only on the reduced Hilbert space. This procedure yields a tunable tradeoff between coherent quantum resources and statistical sampling overhead, allowing the amount of coherent processing to be matched to the capabilities of the underlying hardware. We derive explicit formulas relating the Haar-averaged projected moments to multivariate traces of the original states and analyze the sampling overhead induced by the projection procedure. Specifically, after compressing an $n$-qubit state to a reduced $q$-qubit subspace, estimating $\mathrm{tr}(\rho^K)$ requires approximately $O(2^{(n-q)(K-1)})$ copies of $\rho$, with each qubit projected out increasing the sampling cost by a factor of $2^{K-1}$. Our results establish how coherent multi-copy operations can be traded for additional state copies, enabling multi-copy quantum protocols to be optimized for the available hardware resources.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

14.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14515

Securing the Future of IoMT in the Post-Quantum Era: An Edge-Native Federated Learning Approach

Authors:

Taym Alshoghri↗Deemah H. Tashman↗Mohammad Reza Gerami↗Soumaya Cherkaoui↗

arXiv:2606.14515v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) devices operate under strict resource constraints while handling highly sensitive health data, making security and privacy critical concerns. Federated learning (FL) further complicates this landscape, as model updates exchanged during training may unintentionally expose private medical information. Emerging quantum computing capabilities threaten the long-term viability of conventional lightweight cryptographic mechanisms, motivating the integration of Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) into IoMT systems. This article discusses key enabling technologies for quantum-resilient IoMT, including post-quantum key establishment, lightweight encryption, and edge-native orchestration. We propose a scalable Kubernetes-based framework that integrates PQC into FL-enabled IoMT environments and validate it on a Raspberry Pi testbed. Results demonstrate that distributed cryptographic processing significantly reduces latency compared to sequential designs while maintaining feasible resource overhead. The primary contribution of this work lies in the design and validation of a secure orchestration and communication framework for FL-enabled IoMT systems. We conclude by outlining future directions toward energy-aware architectures, intelligent security optimization, and resilient next-generation Intelligent Internet of Medical Things (IIoMT) ecosystems.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

15.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2503.00069

Societal Alignment Frameworks Can Improve LLM Alignment

Authors:

Karolina Sta\'nczak↗Nicholas Meade↗Mehar Bhatia↗Hattie Zhou↗Konstantin B\"ottinger↗Jeremy Barnes↗Jason Stanley↗Jessica Montgomery↗Richard Zemel↗Nicolas Papernot↗Nicolas Chapados↗Denis Therien↗…

Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has focused on producing responses that meet human expectations and align with shared values - a process coined alignment. However, aligning LLMs remains challenging due to the inherent disconnect between the complexity of human values and the narrow nature of the technological approaches designed to address them. Current alignment methods often lead to misspecified objectives, reflecting the broader issue of incomplete contracts, the impracticality of specifying a contract between a model developer, and the model that accounts for every scenario in LLM alignment. In this paper, we argue that improving LLM alignment requires incorporating insights from societal alignment frameworks, including social, economic, and contractual alignment, and discuss potential solutions drawn from these domains. Given the role of uncertainty within societal alignment frameworks, we then investigate how it manifests in LLM alignment. We end our discussion by offering an alternative view on LLM alignment, framing the underspecified nature of its objectives as an opportunity rather than perfect their specification. Beyond technical improvements in LLM alignment, we discuss the need for participatory alignment interface designs.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

16.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25 DOI: arXiv:2606.25177

EveLoad: Cognitive Workload Recognition from Event-Based Eye Movements

Authors:

Guorui Lu↗Shaohua Guan↗Zhen Xu↗Qinyu Chen↗

arXiv:2606.25177v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cognitive workload monitoring is important for adaptive rehabilitation and assistive interfaces, where task difficulty, pacing, and feedback should be adjusted according to the user's cognitive state to avoid overload and under-challenge. Emerging extended reality and robot-assisted rehabilitation environments provide controllable training tasks, but they require unobtrusive sensing methods that can capture rapid ocular dynamics during interaction. Existing eye-movement-based cognitive workload recognition methods mainly rely on frame-based eye trackers, which often suffer from limited temporal resolution and degraded robustness under rapid eye movements. In contrast, event cameras provide microsecond-level temporal resolution, high dynamic range and low latency, making them suitable for capturing fine-grained ocular dynamics. Many previous studies rely on free-viewing or similar paradigms, where gaze locations can vary across tasks. As a result, models may learn associations between gaze-location distributions and cognitive workload, rather than workload-related eye movement characteristics themselves. In this work, we introduce EveLoad, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first event-based eye-movement dataset with graded cognitive workload annotations, collected from 20 healthy participants under spatially constrained and task-driven conditions using a controlled N-back-guided fixation paradigm. Based on this dataset, we establish a benchmark for cognitive workload recognition with six workload levels and propose a learning framework that encodes spatiotemporal event representations. Experimental results show that our approach achieves an average subject-specific accuracy of 96.36% and 96.13% under mixed random split evaluation. These results suggest that event-based eye movements may provide a useful sensing pathway for future workload-aware rehabilitation.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

17.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.13884

Capability Minimization as a Safety Primitive: Risk-Aware Causal Gating for Least-Privilege LLM Agents

Authors:

Laxmipriya Ganesh Iyer↗Rahul Suresh Babu↗

arXiv:2606.13884v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern decision systems increasingly rely on learned components whose outputs may be confident yet wrong, exposing downstream actions to costly errors. We introduce Risk-Aware Causal Gating (RACG), a framework that decides whether to act on, defer, or abstain from a model's prediction by combining causal effect estimation with calibrated risk control. RACG models the causal pathway from candidate actions to outcomes and gates each decision according to an estimated counterfactual risk rather than raw predictive confidence. To make gating reliable, we derive distribution-free bounds on the probability of acting under high-risk conditions and show how these bounds translate into operating thresholds that satisfy user-specified safety constraints. We further propose an adaptive gating policy that adjusts to distribution shift by monitoring discrepancies between predicted and realized outcomes, tightening the gate when causal assumptions appear violated. Across simulated interventions and real-world decision benchmarks, RACG reduces high-cost errors substantially while preserving most of the utility of an ungated policy, and it outperforms confidence-based and selective-prediction baselines at matched abstention rates. Our results indicate that explicitly separating causal risk from predictive uncertainty yields decision systems that are both safer and more transparent, offering a principled mechanism for trustworthy automation in high-stakes settings.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

18.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2503.11479

Towards practical PDMP sampling: Metropolis adjustments, locally adaptive step-sizes, and NUTS-based time lengths

Authors:

Augustin Chevallier↗Sam Power↗Matthew Sutton↗

arXiv:2503.11479v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Piecewise-Deterministic Markov Processes (PDMPs) hold significant promise for sampling from complex probability distributions. However, their practical implementation is hindered by the need to compute model-specific bounds. Conversely, while Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) offers a generally efficient approach to sampling, its inability to adaptively tune step sizes impedes its performance when sampling complex distributions like funnels. To address these limitations, we introduce three innovative concepts: (a) a Metropolis-adjusted approximation for PDMP simulation that eliminates the need for explicit bounds without compromising the invariant measure, (b) an adaptive step size mechanism compatible with the Metropolis correction, and (c) a No U-Turn Sampler (NUTS)-inspired scheme for dynamically selecting path lengths in PDMPs. These three ideas can be seamlessly integrated into a single, `doubly-adaptive' PDMP sampler with favourable robustness and efficiency properties.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

19.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2511.05017

Towards Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models by Refining Textual Embeddings

Authors:

Aakriti Agrawal↗Gouthaman KV↗Rohith Aralikatti↗Gauri Jagatap↗Jiaxin Yuan↗Sarvesh Baskar↗Vijay Kamarshi↗Andrea Fanelli↗Furong Huang↗

Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) remain a persistent challenge, often stemming from inadequate integration of visual information during multimodal reasoning. A key cause is the model's over-reliance on textual priors and underutilization of visual cues, leading to outputs that are linguistically fluent but visually inaccurate. For example, given an image of an empty kitchen countertop, an LVLM might hallucinate a "bowl of fruit" or "cup of coffee", relying on language associations rather than visual evidence. Most LVLMs incorporate visual features by appending them to the input stream of a pre-trained LLM and training on large-scale vision-language datasets. Our systematic analysis reveals that this strategy often leads to over-dependence on textual information due to the inherent bias of LLMs towards language-dominant representations. This imbalance skews attention towards the text over visual content, weakening the model's ability to ground outputs in visual inputs. To address this, we propose a simple yet effective visual feature incorporation method that encourages the model to learn visually-informed textual embeddings distinct from those of the base LLM and promotes a more balanced attention distribution. Experimental results across multiple hallucination benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly reduces hallucinations and fosters more balanced multimodal reasoning. Notably, our approach achieves substantial gains, including +9.33% on MMVP-MLLM, +2.99% on POPE-AOKVQA, up to +3.4% on Merlin, and +3% on the hard-data split of HallusionBench.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

20.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15 DOI: HASH:dfaacf92e7c80e9ee1c4b62852689ed8

Repurposing cardiovascular disease risk models to predict incident and co-occurring cardiovascular, cardiometabolic and neurocognitive outcomes.

Authors:

Quill↗Chaturvedi↗van Vugt↗Hingorani↗A. D↗Schmidt↗A. F↗

Background: Cardiovascular disease (CVD), cardiometabolic and neurocognitive conditions share risk factors and frequently co-occur. We evaluated whether four established CVD risk prediction models (QRISK3, PCE, SCORE2, SCORE2-OP) can be repurposed to predict 10-year risk of these conditions and their co-occurrence with CVD. Methods: The models were recalibrated using 20% of the UK Biobank (UKB) and evaluated in the remaining 80%. We performed external validation using data from Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) Aurum, assessing model discrimination (c-statistics) and calibration (intercept and slope). We used permuted feature importance to determine the influence of each individual predictor in the models. Results: Depending on the model, the c-statistics for incident CVD ranged from 0.71 to 0.74 in the UKB test set (16,137 events). Discrimination was equal to or higher than CVD when evaluated against non-traditional CVD outcomes: 0.74 to 0.77 for heart failure (3,471 events), 0.72 to 0.73 for atrial fibrillation (9,213 events), 0.73 to 0.75 for peripheral arterial disease (1,927 events) and 0.80 to 0.82 for abdominal aortic aneurysm (595 events). For the multimorbidity endpoints, model discrimination ranged from 0.74 for the composite of CVD and T2DM (SCORE2-OP) to 0.83 for the composite of CVD and dementia or Parkinson's disease (QRISK3). When considering the onset of any cardiovascular, cardiometabolic, or neurocognitive outcome discrimination ranged from 0.71 to 0.72. The repurposed models slightly underestimated the predicted risk in the CPRD compared to the UKB: average difference in calibration intercept was at most -0.64. After age and sex, smoking status and systolic blood pressure contributed most to model predictions. Conclusions: Repurposed CVD models can be used to identify 10-year risk of many CVD-related conditions and their multimorbidity. These may be used to support risk-based approaches to prevention and screening. The repurposed models have been made available at: https://repurposed-cvd-risk-models.shinyapps.io/cvd_cmd_dementia_app/ Keywords: Risk prediction; cardiovascular disease; cardiometabolic disease; dementia; disease prevention.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

21.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24525

VisCritic: Visual State Comparison as Process Reward for GUI Agents

Authors:

Jiachen Qian↗

GUI agents powered by vision-language models show strong potential for automating digital tasks, yet frequently fail in long-horizon scenarios due to the absence of step-level verification. Existing process reward models verify actions through textual reasoning alone, missing the visual nature of GUI state changes. We introduce VisCritic, a visual process reward framework that verifies agent actions by directly comparing pre-action and post-action screenshots in visual feature space. VisCritic employs a Siamese vision transformer to extract change-aware representations, coupled with an Action-Aware Critic Head that jointly evaluates action success, task progress, and error type. A critic-training data construction pipeline generates weakly supervised samples from existing trajectories without additional human labels for critic training. Experiments and offline analyses across five benchmarks demonstrate that VisCritic serves as a plug-and-play enhancement for diverse GUI agents, generally improving benchmark metrics while providing visual diagnostic cues.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

22.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17338

Effects of Josephson Junction Non-idealities on Adiabatic Quantum Flux Parametron Circuits

Authors:

Daryoush Shiri↗Likai Yang↗Mohamed A. Hassan↗Philip Krantz↗Eric T. Holland↗

arXiv:2606.17338v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Adiabatic quantum flux parametron (AQFP) gate is a promising approach to scale up the cryogenic microwave electronics for superconducting qubit multiplexed control. However, the performance of these circuits depends on the quality of the Josephson junctions which are ideally superconductor-insulator-superconductor (SIS) type following the ideal sinusoidal relation between current and quantum phase. We demonstrate how the non-sinusoidal current-phase relation in Superconductor-Normal metal-Superconductor (SNS) and weak link (WL) junctions affects the speed, delay, and margin of the AQFP gates. The JJ models are defined in the Keysight ADS simulator using symbolically defined device (SDD) method.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

23.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20474

UltraQuant: 4-bit KV Caching for Context-Heavy Agents

Authors:

Inesh Chakrabarti↗David Limpus↗Aditi Ghai Rana↗Bowen Bao↗Spandan Tiwari↗Thiago Crepaldi↗Ashish Sirasao↗

arXiv:2606.20474v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Context-heavy agents place unusual pressure on the key-value (KV) cache: long prefixes are reused across many short turns, while concurrency determines whether the serving system can keep GPUs utilized. We study 4-bit KV-cache compression for this setting, using TurboQuant-style rotation and codebook quantization as a quality anchor and vLLM FP8 KV caching as the deployment anchor. We report three contributions. First, we frame 4-bit KV caching around multi-round agent workloads where task quality, cache residency, and serving throughput must be measured jointly. Second, we describe the practical design choices needed to make the 4-bit path robust, including asymmetric K/V treatment, Walsh-Hadamard rotation, QJL removal, and block-scale variants. Third, we present serving optimizations on AMD GPUs, including optimized decode-attention kernels and UltraQuant, an FP4 approximation path that uses FP8 queries, FP4 KV tensors, UE8M0 group scales, and native scaled-MFMA support on CDNA4. On a long-context, multi-turn agentic workload, UltraQuant cuts P50 time-to-first-token by 3.47x in the cache-pressured late rounds (2.3x across all rounds) and raises output throughput by 1.63x over the FP8 KV baseline.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

24.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25 DOI: arXiv:2507.01695

PERTINENCE: Input-based Opportunistic Neural Network Dynamic Execution

Authors:

Omkar Shende↗Gayathri Ananthanarayanan↗Marcello Traiola↗

arXiv:2507.01695v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Deep neural networks (DNNs) are widely used for their ability to model complex patterns across domains such as computer vision, speech recognition, and robotics. However, larger models, while often more accurate, are computationally expensive and energy-intensive. Since such a cost is typically needed only for challenging inputs, dynamically selecting lighter models for simpler inputs can improve efficiency with minimal impact on accuracy. We introduce PERTINENCE, a runtime method that selects, from a set of pre-trained models, the lightest model likely to process each input correctly. An ML-based dispatcher performs this selection, and a genetic algorithm explores dispatcher training strategies to identify Pareto-optimal trade-offs between accuracy and computational cost. We evaluate PERTINENCE on CNNs trained on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, ViTs trained on TinyImageNet, and a YOLO-based road occupancy estimation application using real-time intersection camera feeds. Results show that PERTINENCE matches or improves the accuracy of state-of-the-art pre-trained models while reducing operations by up to 36%, with equivalent or lower end-to-end inference time through tunable invocation intervals.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

25.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25 DOI: arXiv:2603.13826

The Effective Number of Nonzeros: Theory and Regularization for Sparse Recovery

Authors:

Haoyu He↗Hao Wang↗Jiashan Wang↗Qiankun Shi↗

arXiv:2603.13826v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Classical sparse recovery treats all nonzero entries equally, though numerical noise often creates long tails of negligible coefficients. This paper develops an entropy-based notion of effective sparsity to measure the coefficients carrying significant mass. The central quantity, the effective number of nonzeros (ENZ), is obtained by exponentiating the Shannon entropy of the normalized magnitude distribution. We show that ENZ decomposes exactly into the support cardinality multiplied by a distributional efficiency factor, thereby making precise its relation to the $\ell_0$ count and explaining how it discounts uninformative coefficients. Furthermore, the Shannon ENZ is embedded into a parallel Rényi family that recovers several scale-invariant sparsity measures, including the $\ell_1/\ell_2$ ratio, as special cases. We then prove a stability result under a restricted isometry condition, establishing an explicit bound that depends on the tail energy, measurement perturbation, and restricted isometry constant. For computation, a separable unnormalized entropy surrogate is introduced to avoid global coupling. Numerical experiments on sparse signal recovery and gradient-domain image denoising demonstrate that the resulting regularizer is robust, computationally efficient, and competitive with standard sparsity penalties.

Read & Discuss → View Source →