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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

GeoIMO: Geometry-Driven Independent Motion Classification for Event Cameras

Existing automotive event datasets rely on appearance-based annotations from frame pipelines, making them poorly suited for motion-aware event perception. We present a geometry-driven, annotation-free framework that classifies detected objects as static or independently moving by exploiting ego-motion structure directly from the event stream. A Focus of Expansion model with yaw compensation estimates global background motion, while objects are labeled as moving when local motion deviates from this prediction, as quantified by a scale-invariant residual. Temporal stabilization improves robustness across consecutive event windows. The method requires no learning, no manual motion labels, and works with any input bounding boxes. Experiments on MVSEC and the Prophesee 1 Megapixel Automotive Detection dataset demonstrate consistent performance across diverse driving scenarios, with yaw compensation improving results during turns and a simple translational local model offering a favorable accuracy-efficiency trade-off.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Investigating Faithfulness in Large Audio Language Models

arXiv:2509.22363v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) integrate audio encoders with pretrained Large Language Models to perform complex multimodal reasoning tasks. While these models can generate Chain-of-Thought (CoT) explanations, the faithfulness of these reasoning chains remains unclear. In this work, we propose a systematic framework to evaluate CoT faithfulness in LALMs with respect to both the input audio and the final model prediction. We define three criteria for audio faithfulness: hallucination-free, holistic, and attentive listening. We also introduce a benchmark based on both audio and CoT interventions to assess faithfulness\footnote{The benchmarking interface and evaluation results are available at https://poonehmousavi.github.io/faithfulness/. Experiments on Audio Flamingo 3 and Qwen2.5-Omni suggest a potential multimodal disconnect: reasoning often aligns with the final prediction but is not always strongly grounded in the audio and can be vulnerable to hallucinations or adversarial perturbations.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

SpaTeoGL: Spatiotemporal Graph Learning for Interpretable Seizure Onset Zone Analysis from Intracranial EEG

arXiv:2602.11801v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate localization of the seizure onset zone (SOZ) from intracranial EEG (iEEG) is essential for epilepsy surgery but is challenged by complex spatiotemporal seizure dynamics. We propose SpaTeoGL, a spatiotemporal graph learning framework for interpretable seizure network analysis. SpaTeoGL jointly learns window-level spatial graphs capturing interactions among iEEG electrodes and a temporal graph linking time windows based on similarity of their spatial structure. The method is formulated within a smooth graph signal processing framework and solved via an alternating block coordinate descent algorithm with convergence guarantees. Experiments on a multicenter iEEG dataset with successful surgical outcomes show that SpaTeoGL is competitive with a baseline based on horizontal visibility graphs and logistic regression, while improving non-SOZ identification and providing interpretable insights into seizure onset and propagation dynamics.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

SketchKeyAnime: Reference-anchored Sparse Key-Sketch Animation Synthesis

Traditional animation production relies heavily on manual drawing and iterative refinement, particularly for key-pose design, in-betweening, and character coloring. While existing animation and video generation methods have made notable progress, they typically depend on RGB boundary frames, dense frame-wise conditions, or complete sketch sequences, limiting their applicability under low-cost input conditions. We present SketchKeyAnime, a video diffusion framework for generating structurally controllable, appearance-consistent, and temporally coherent animations from sparse key-sketch inputs. Given a single reference RGB image and a few temporally indexed key sketches, SketchKeyAnime introduces a dual-branch conditioning mechanism to encode local geometric constraints alongside semantic-temporal context. It leverages Sketch Cross Attention to fuse reference image and sketch conditions with learnable gating, and incorporates an Adaptive Weighted Loss to strengthen supervision on key-sketch frames and line-art regions. Experimental results on the Aesthetic subset of Sakuga-42M show that our approach consistently outperforms representative animation interpolation and sketch-guided generation baselines. Compared to the best-performing baseline, SketchKeyAnime reduces EDMD by 31.9\% and FVD by 9.5\%, demonstrating superior sketch fidelity and temporal coherence, while achieving the best overall performance across most quantitative metrics. These results validate the proposed framework and highlight its potential for low-cost, highly controllable animation creation.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Connecting Quantum Tomography and Quantum Retrodiction

arXiv:2606.23777v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum tomography and quantum retrodiction are traditionally viewed as separate inference tasks: tomography reconstructs quantum states from measurement data, whereas retrodiction infers past quantum states from observed outcomes. We show that the two are manifestations of the same underlying principle. We prove that the Petz recovery map associated with a measurement channel is precisely the gradient update of the log-likelihood used in maximum-likelihood tomography. Consequently, repeated applications of the Petz map monotonically increase the likelihood. Extending beyond measurement channels, we derive a noncommutative generalization of the Petz map from the gradient of a generalized likelihood for arbitrary quantum channels. The resulting iterative procedure maximizes the likelihood and provides a general framework for quantum tomography, establishing a direct bridge between retrodiction, recovery maps, and statistical inference.

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

SFT Overtraining Predicts Rank Inversion via Entropy Collapse Under RLVR

The standard heuristic of selecting the SFT checkpoint with the highest pass@1 for GRPO can fail when SFT compresses the rollout distribution. For binary rewards, the expected within group advantage variance is $p(1{-}p)(g{-}1)/g$; when early GRPO drives $p$ below $p^*(g)$, most groups have identical rewards and provide no group relative signal. We study SFT depth ladders for Qwen2.5-Coder-3B and DeepSeek-Coder-6.7B. We test Qwen2.5-Coder-3B across five depths and three seeds, and DeepSeek-Coder-6.7B across four matched depths and three seeds. On Qwen, pre RL pass@1 rises with SFT depth, but peak GRPO pass@10 falls from $0.806$ to $0.481$ (3 seed mean, $n{=}20$); pre RL entropy is positively associated with the GRPO outcome ($\rho{=}{+}0.69$). On DeepSeek, pass@1 remains far above $p^*(8){=}0.083$, and GRPO outcomes compress rather than invert. A two stage diagnostic, combining pre RL entropy triage with an early GRPO entropy monitor, flags high risk checkpoints and can stop failing runs early. Simple KL to reference regularisation and label smoothing variants do not rescue the collapsed Qwen checkpoint in our setting, suggesting the failure is not a trivial GRPO hyperparameter artefact.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

MARD: Mirror-Augmented Reasoning Distillation for Mechanism-Level Drug-Drug Interaction Prediction

Mechanism-level drug-drug interaction (DDI) prediction requires identifying which enzyme or pharmacodynamic axis is implicated, in which direction, and with which evidence – not merely whether two drugs interact. We introduce a reproducible mechanism-level DDI labelling and evaluation protocol with a structured 7-family/147-subtype taxonomy, leakage-safe cold-split protocols, and auditable reasoning metrics for evaluating pharmacological prediction beyond flat interaction classification. We propose a pipeline that produces a 7B reasoning MARD (Mirror-Augmented Reasoning Distillation), combining three training innovations: a single-token KL divergence on direction tag that ties the model's prediction, per-loss PRM-weighted DPO with programmatic hard negatives, and a leakage-safe mechanism-aware retrieval channel. Process-reward step labels are automatically verifiable against DrugBank-structured fields, requiring no human or LLM judges. On the April-2026 DrugBank release, our MARD-7B is the only system in a 32-system comparison whose accuracy survives drug-pair novelty, beating the best baseline by +13.9 pp and GPT-4o by +6.7 pp at ~1% of frontier API cost. Further analysis reveals an anti-memorisation signature where accuracy improves on rarely seen drugs, suggesting that gain comes from structured pharmacological reasoning rather than drug-frequency memorisation. We release corpus, DDI-PRM, retrieval index, and training code.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Can Language Model Agents be Helpful Circuit Explainers in Mechanistic Interpretability?

arXiv:2606.24026v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mechanistic interpretability has made substantial progress in automatically localizing circuits, but explaining what localized components do remains labor-intensive and difficult to standardize. In this work, we study whether language model (LM) agents can assist with this explanation problem once a circuit has already been identified. We introduce AgenticInterpBench, a benchmark for circuit explanation built from 84 semi-synthetic transformer circuits with 163 component-level annotations. We propose HyVE (Hypothesize, Validate, Explain), an agentic explainer that analyzes each component through an iterative loop of observation, hypothesis generation, and causal validation, eventually producing a component-level explanation and a circuit-level task description. Across four LM backbones, HyVE recovers useful component- and task-level explanations, but no backbone is uniformly best. Our analysis shows that strong backbones usually form observation-grounded hypotheses, while failures more often arise later in the validation loop, through incomplete validation plans, code execution errors, or unresolved hypotheses. A case study on an arithmetic circuit in Llama-3-8B shows that the same formulation can extend beyond semi-synthetic benchmarks to naturally trained models. Overall, LM agents are promising circuit explainers, but reliable validation remains the key obstacle.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Twin-beam advantage in quantum LiDAR under correlated noise

arXiv:2606.17908v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum light promises improved precision in optical remote sensing, but its practical advantage depends critically on whether nonclassical resources remain useful under realistic noise and experimentally accessible detection. This question becomes especially relevant for LiDAR systems, where a quantum advantage has been demonstrated for target detection and joint range-velocity estimation, but mostly under idealized conditions or simple noise models, such as optical loss and thermal background. A key open point is whether entanglement provides an operational advantage when the dominant disturbance is not independent noise, but structured interference across sensing modes. Here, we address this question by studying the joint estimation of target range and velocity with bright two-mode Gaussian probes and homodyne detection, comparing coherent, separable squeezed, and twin-beam states at a fixed resource budget. Our results reveal a hierarchy of quantum resources set by the noise structure: separable squeezing provides a robust advantage over coherent illumination under loss and thermal background, whereas twin-beam probes become superior under correlated jamming when the receiver is adaptively optimized. These results establish correlated noise as the operational regime in which entanglement provides a robustness advantage beyond local squeezing, opening a receiver-aware route to quantum-enhanced LiDAR in realistic and potentially adversarial environments.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Learning to Hear Hesitation: Continual Learning for Disfluency-Aware ASR

Despite advances in large-scale Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), disfluent speech remains challenging, as state-of-the-art systems are often optimized to omit disfluencies, leading to information loss and hallucinations. Prior work has focused on verbatim transcription and the integration of disfluency markers, but adapting models on limited datasets can lead to catastrophic forgetting of general-domain knowledge. We address this gap by leveraging continual learning (CL) with explicit disfluency tokens. We first introduce these tokens into a pretrained ASR model to establish stable token mechanisms, and then continue training on additional datasets with varying disfluency distributions. Through a detailed analysis of model dynamics during training, we identify a trade-off between marker learning and ASR performance, and a consistent cross-attention head mechanism shared across CL methods.

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

WallZero: Mastering the Game of WallGo with Strategic Analysis

arXiv:2606.17847v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: WallGo is a recently introduced strategic board game popularized by the 2025 Netflix series The Devil's Plan. Although played on a small 7 x 7 board, its combination of stone movement and wall placement yields high game-tree complexity and intricate strategic interactions. Despite its growing popularity, WallGo remains underexplored. This paper presents WallZero, an AlphaZero-based agent for the two-player WallGo setting. We introduce tailored action and feature designs to improve playing performance significantly. In the evaluation, WallZero defeats two professional Go players who participated in this study, securing on average 1.98x more territory per game. Beyond its strength, we use WallZero to assess game fairness and identify key strategies for mastering WallGo. Interestingly, our results show that the opening used in the Netflix series yields a more balanced game. Our code is available at https://rlg.iis.sinica.edu.tw/papers/wallzero.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

A risk-of-contagion index using a Bayesian based model for the COVID-19 epidemic in Mexico

During the COVID-19 pandemic, limited testing capacity and reporting delays complicated epidemic surveillance and decision-making in Mexico. We calibrated textit{covidestim}, a Bayesian nowcasting model, to estimate the total SARS-CoV-2 infections from reported cases and deaths using Mexican surveillance data. Disease-progression distribution priors were calibrated using Mexico City records and validated through comparisons with national seroprevalence surveys, hospitalization data, and annual reported severe-case rates across all states. Using the reconstructed estimates of active infections, we implemented an event-based risk framework that quantifies the probability of encountering at least one infectious individual in gatherings of different sizes. This probability was subsequently translated into a four-level epidemiological traffic-light indicator and computed at both state and municipality levels. The resulting estimates revealed substantial spatial heterogeneity that is obscured by state-level aggregation, particularly in states with marked differences between urban and rural municipalities. To evaluate consistency with public-health indicators, we compared the proposed risk classification with the official Mexican epidemiological traffic-light system, considering interpretable gathering sizes relevant to public-health decision making. Weekly reports derived from this framework were delivered to policymakers in the State of Queretaro in Mexico, as an anticipation tool for school reopening and public-space management. This demonstrates that this Bayesian reconstruction of infections combined with event-based risk metrics can provide an interpretable and generalizable municipality-level complement to routine surveillance systems, particularly in regions with limited testing capacity and heterogeneous local transmission dynamics.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

TrustErase: Auditable Instant Machine Unlearning with Passport-Embedded Representations

arXiv:2606.17122v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The demand for privacy-compliant AI has amplified the need for machine unlearning; yet, existing retraining or distillation-based methods remain unverifiable and computationally costly. We introduce TrustErase, a verifiable, data-free unlearning framework leveraging passport-embedded representations for instant, modular, and auditable forgetting. By treating passports as cryptographic keys within parameter-efficient adaptation layers, TrustErase enables the removal of specific classes or datasets through simple deactivation, without retraining, fine-tuning, or access to the original data. A singular value based decomposition conceals passports within model weights, ensuring that unlearning actions remain transparent and provably compliant. Evaluations on MNIST, CIFAR10 and CIFAR100 show that TrustErase matches or exceeds state-of-the-art benchmarks such as DELETE, L2UL, and Boundary Shrink, while operating in a strictly data-free regime. Ultimately, TrustErase establishes a new paradigm for trustworthy, accountable, and instantly forgettable AI systems.

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

Task-Adaptive Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Weather Foundation Models

arXiv:2509.22020v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While recent advances in machine learning have equipped Weather Foundation Models (WFMs) with substantial generalization capabilities across diverse downstream tasks, the escalating computational requirements associated with their expanding scale increasingly hinder practical deployment. Current Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods, designed for vision or language tasks, fail to address the unique challenges of weather downstream tasks, such as variable heterogeneity, resolution diversity, and spatiotemporal coverage variations, leading to suboptimal performance when applied to WFMs. To bridge this gap, we introduce WeatherPEFT, a novel PEFT framework for WFMs incorporating two synergistic innovations. First, during the forward pass, Task-Adaptive Dynamic Prompting (TADP) dynamically injects the embedding weights within the encoder to the input tokens of the pre-trained backbone via internal and external pattern extraction, enabling context-aware feature recalibration for specific downstream tasks. Furthermore, during backpropagation, Stochastic Fisher-Guided Adaptive Selection (SFAS) not only leverages Fisher information to identify and update the most task-critical parameters, thereby preserving invariant pre-trained knowledge, but also introduces randomness to stabilize the selection. We demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of WeatherPEFT on three downstream tasks, where existing PEFT methods show significant gaps versus Full-Tuning, and WeatherPEFT achieves performance parity with Full-Tuning using fewer trainable parameters. The code of this work is available at https://github.com/ShileiCao/WeatherPEFT.

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

ReQAT: Achieving Full-Precision Reasoning Accuracy with 4-bit Floating-Point Quantization-Aware Training

arXiv:2606.15682v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) achieve strong problem-solving through long chain-of-thought, but their deployment is constrained by the high cost of full-precision inference and growing KV cache footprints. Microscaled FP4 formats enable efficient FP4 deployment; however, fully quantizing weights, activations, and KV caches (W4A4KV4) causes severe reasoning degradation that existing PTQ and QAT fail to recover. We identify that FP4 failures concentrate on low-entropy tokens–precise symbolic commitments such as digits and operators–where quantization noise inflates sampling errors that cascade through reasoning traces. Based on this insight, we propose ReQAT, a reasoning-centric FP4 training framework with three components: (i) Trace-Aligned QAT (TAQ), which revisits identical reasoning traces to focus updates on critical low-entropy decisions; (ii) Selective Entropy Minimization (SEM), which reinforces confidence at low-entropy positions; and (iii) Q-FIT, a quantization-friendly initialization that jointly calibrates RoPE-consistent KV cache transformations to stabilize QAT. Under the same training budget, ReQAT not only recovers but surpasses BF16 fine-tuning accuracy, while delivering up to 3.9x throughput speedup on NVIDIA DGX Spark and 3.1x on B200.

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

Bridging the Morphology Gap: Adapting VLA Models to Dexterous Manipulation via Intent-Conditioned Fine-Tuning

arXiv:2606.12109v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot generalization in robotic manipulation, yet the vast majority of pre-trained pipelines remain strictly confined to low-DoF parallel grippers. Adapting these rich semantic priors to high-DoF dexterous hands introduces a severe morphology gap, direct end-to-end joint fine-tuning inherently causes catastrophic forgetting of spatial reasoning and acute action manifold collapse due to data scarcity. In this paper, we present InDex, a novel, data-efficient adaptation framework rooted in cross-morphology semantic inheritance. Rather than discarding the pre-trained 1-DoF parallel grasp output, we repurpose it as a continuous, macroscopic virtual grasp intent proxy to sequentialize the control topology. We implement a two-stage decoupled learning architecture: the first stage parameter-efficiently aligns the VLA backbone to predict continuous arm trajectories and the scalar grasp intent; the second stage freezes this spatial backbone and leverages an intent-conditioned denoising diffusion head to decode fine-grained joint articulations for multi-fingered end-effectors. Extensive simulation benchmarks across a suite of multi-stage, contact-rich dexterous manipulation tasks demonstrate that InDex effectively masters intricate skills with minimal demonstration data, substantially outperforming monolithic baselines while preserving the robust spatial generalizability of the original VLA prior.

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

Stable Menus of Public Goods: AI-Enabled Progress

Authors:

arXiv:2606.16989v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Using an open problem from the EC 2025 paper "Stable Menus of Public Goods" as a testbed, we conduct experiments to understand the effectiveness of different AI-for-EconCS research workflows. Specifically, we study three questions: Does providing human intuition in the prompt help? Does automated multi-turn interaction help? And, does an LLM outperform a first-year PhD student? Regarding the first two questions, we provide evidence for the following workflow suggestions: (1) prompting with human intuition can encourage the LLM to have better "taste", (2) multi-turn workflows help when the pipeline encourages "ambitious" steps. Regarding the third question, using an unpublished manuscript written by the paper's senior authors prior to collaborating with the first-year PhD student, we compare the effectiveness of the LLM with that of the first-year PhD student, and find that the LLM is slightly less effective.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

When Does Streaming Tool Use Help? Characterizing Tool-Intent Stabilization in Streaming Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Streaming Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Streaming RAG) reduces user-perceived latency by issuing tool queries in parallel with ongoing user input, before the utterance is complete. Reported gains are aggregate, yet the mechanism's benefit is fundamentally query-intrinsic: speculation can only help when the correct tool query becomes determinable before the user stops speaking or typing. We isolate and measure this property – tool-intent stabilization, the point in the input stream at which a speculative query's retrieval converges to the answer-bearing result. On the CRAG benchmark (1371 validation questions) we (i) measure the distribution of stabilization, (ii) derive a model-agnostic bound H on the portion of tool latency that can be hidden behind the user's remaining input, as a function of tool latency L and input cadence {\delta}, (iii) validate against a working streaming pipeline that realized savings meet or exceed this bound, and (iv) identify which query properties predict early versus late stabilization. The study requires no model training and runs on commodity CPU hardware. We find that at a realistic operating point (L=600ms, {\delta}=3w/s, {\theta}=0.8), 73.9% of queries across the full benchmark admit substantial latency hiding – a blended figure that mixes sufficiency stabilization on the 21.3% of questions where gold evidence is verbatim-present and BM25-retrievable (95.2% streamable on this favorable slice) with a grounding-free top-1-settling fallback on the remainder. On the favorable slice, {\phi}_suf is bracketed to [0.26, 0.281] by exact and relaxed grounding – both early. Question type produces a significant but coarse early/late split (Kruskal-Wallis p=0.017, epsilon^2=0.04), directly informing when a learned speculative trigger is worth its cost.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Towards Understanding and Measuring COGNITIVE ATROPHY in LLM Behaviour

arXiv:2606.18129v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent incidents involving LLMs used for mental-health support reveal a critical evaluation gap: surface-level safety scores do not capture how models behave across realistic, emotionally sensitive interactions over time. Existing benchmarks measure knowledge, safety, or static response quality, but miss whether LLM interactions help users keep reflecting, coping, and making decisions themselves. We formalize this missing dimension as COGNITIVE ATROPHY, a process-level behavioural measure in AI-mediated mental-health support distinct from safety and helpfulness. To measure it, we introduce COGNITIVE ATROPHY BENCH, a clinically grounded benchmark built from 1,576 fully human-generated counseling conversations, 15,680 turns, and 42,230 responses from five LLMs. Three clinical and neuropsychology experts developed a 20-attribute schema spanning user context, response behaviour, and global risk flags; six trained clinical reviewers applied it with span-grounded evidence, producing 5,324 reviewer judgments. We further introduce the User-Input Risk Index (UIRI), the Cognitive Atrophy Risk Index (ARI), and trajectory summaries. Across five LLMs, models show a consistent moderate-to-high level of atrophy-aligned behaviour across single and multi-turn settings. While models generally respond to overt safety cues, they adapt less reliably when users seek solutions or decisions. The dominant recurring patterns are directive advice, problem-solving, recommendation responses, topic shifts, and forms of validation that may reinforce dependence rather than reflection. Our work makes COGNITIVE ATROPHY measurable and provides a foundation for auditing model behaviour in sensitive LLM conversations.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

The Latent Bridge: A Continuous Slow-Fast Channel for Real-Time Game Agents

arXiv:2606.24470v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A real-time agent for general computer use - with games as the most demanding case - must act within tens of milliseconds while still planning over seconds. These two regimes sit at opposite ends of the latency-quality tradeoff. A reasoning VLM (Qwen3-VL-8B-Thinking) deliberates effectively but requires ~1.5 s per response - far too slow for a 15 Hz control loop. In contrast, a reactive VLM (MiniCPM-o 4.5) acts in milliseconds but underperforms on planning-heavy tasks. We couple two frozen models of matched scale (9B reactive, 8B reasoning), leaving the communication channel as the sole trainable component. The standard coupling is a Text Bridge (T): the slow model writes a suffix the fast model reads. We introduce a learned continuous Latent Bridge (L) that projects the slow model's residuals into the fast model's input-embedding space in a LLaVA-style manner, avoiding any text round-trip; both are compared against Fast-Only (F). On 7 Atari games and a driving domain (MetaDrive), tuning the action decoder per channel on held-out seeds, the Latent Bridge matches or beats the Text Bridge in every domain: it significantly improves two games (MsPacman +57%, RoadRunner +28%) and is a safe drop-in elsewhere. Combining both channels interferes destructively (RoadRunner -96%), so only one should be used. The benefit is highly predictable: the bridge helps if and only if slow reasoning already beats fast reaction (T > F) - the Latent and Text gains over Fast-Only move together at r=0.93. MetaDrive is the controlled negative, where the Latent Bridge is demonstrably inert because the Text Bridge adds no value. We release replay recordings and reproducible pipelines.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Differential DNA Methylation and Delirium After Anesthesia and Surgery

Background: DNA methylation is an epigenetic modification that regulates gene expression in response to environmental exposures. We measured differential DNA methylation levels in blood before after general anesthesia and surgery in participants with and without postoperative delirium (POD) and postoperative neurocognitive disorder (PNCD). Methods: Blood sampling, delirium assessment and cognitive testing were prospectively performed at baseline before non-cardiac, non-neurologic surgery, and at 24 hours (24h) and 6 weeks (6wk) thereafter in 94 participants comprising 13 with POD and 81 without POD, and 40 with PNCD and 54 without PNCD 6wk after surgery who were matched for age and sex in the INTUIT and MADCO cohorts. DNA methylation was assessed using the Illumina Infinium MethylationEPIC Beadchip. Results: 132 differentially methylated positions (DMPs) annotated to 198 differentially methylated genes (DMGs) were identified in 94 participants 24h after surgery compared to baseline with a local false discovery rate (LFDR)

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

A Link between Shock-wave Theory and Symmetry-reduced Stochastic Gradient Descent for Artificial Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.18303v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We develop a mathematically explicit link between shock-wave theory and the symmetry-quotiented learning dynamics of stochastic gradient descent, drawing on differential geometry, Lie group theory, and fluid mechanics. Specifically, after quotienting parameter symmetries and applying local-entropy coarse-graining, the effective dynamics satisfy a viscous Hamilton–Jacobi equation on the quotient manifold. Moreover, under the assumption that the raw parameter dynamics can be summarized by a gradient field on the quotiented space, the gradient of the coarse-grained loss function obeys a Burgers-type equation, and shock formation can be established rigorously. We apply our theory to multilayer perceptrons, convolutional neural networks, Transformers, and mean-field networks, and show that they obey the Hamilton–Jacobi or Burgers-type equations. We conjecture that this framework also yields practical diagnostics for deep learning. In architectures such as Transformers, raw parameter norms are often distorted by symmetry redundancy and may therefore be misleading, whereas symmetry-corrected quotient observables provide a principled basis for monitoring, forecasting, and controlling training-phase transitions.

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

Stochastic Adaptive Gradient Descent Without Descent

arXiv:2509.14969v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a new adaptive step-size strategy for convex optimization with stochastic gradient that exploits the local geometry of the objective function only by means of a first-order stochastic oracle and without any hyper-parameter tuning. The method comes from a theoretically-grounded adaptation of the Adaptive Gradient Descent Without Descent method to the stochastic setting. We prove the convergence of stochastic gradient descent with our step-size under various assumptions, and we show that it empirically competes against tuned baselines.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Efficiently Representing Algorithms With Chain-of-Thought Transformers

The increasing popularity of reasoning models – language models that output a series of reasoning or thought tokens before producing an answer – is justified, in part, by theoretical results showing that chain-of-thought (CoT) transformers can simulate Turing machines, and thus perform arbitrary computation. However, the Turing machine, while suitable for complexity-theoretic analysis, is not convenient, intuitive, or efficient for discussing algorithms. Algorithms are typically designed and analyzed at a higher level of abstraction, captured by the Word RAM model with random-access memory and unit-cost operations on $\bigO(\log n)$-bit words. As a result, Word RAM algorithms can be substantially more efficient than their Turing machine counterparts, raising the question: Can CoT transformers efficiently simulate Word RAM algorithms? For instance, can they sort $n$ items in $\bigO(n \log n)$ steps or run Dijkstra's algorithm in $\bigO(E + V \log V)$ steps? We answer affirmatively, up to poly-logarithmic overhead. We first establish this for finite-precision transformers with poly-logarithmic width and rightmost unique hard attention, then strengthen the result to two more practical settings with finite width and log-precision: continuous CoT, where reasoning takes the form of vectors rather than tokens, and a hybrid architecture in which transformer layers sit atop a recurrent (linear RNN) layer. In all three cases, we find that CoT can efficiently simulate any Word RAM algorithm with only a poly-logarithmic overhead in $n$. This overhead reduces to log-square when the Word RAM has a ``flat'' instruction set, and only logarithmic for multiplication-free flat instructions – in stark contrast to known CoT simulations of Turing machines, which require quadratic overhead over Word RAM.