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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

WAM4D: Fast 4D World Action Model via Spatial Register Tokens

World action models (WAMs) have recently shown promise in jointly modeling future observations and executable robot actions. However, most existing WAMs still operate in 2D video or latent spaces, where visually plausible rollouts miss the 3D spatial constraints and occluded contact geometry required for precise manipulation. While geometric foundation models offer strong priors for recovering dense 3D structure and motion from visual observations, forcing WAMs to predict the dense 4D representation introduces costly geometric decoding and slows down causal action generation. To address the trade-off, we present WAM4D, a fast 4D world action model that uses lightweight spatial register tokens as training-time future-depth readouts to transfer pretrained geometric priors into a causal video-action transformer, then removes the register branch for lightweight action inference. To prevent non-causal shortcuts, we further design causal mixture attention for the Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) WAM backbone, defining modality-specific visibility among video, action, and geometry tokens. Comprehensive experiments on RoboTwin 2.0 and challenging real-world manipulation tasks show that WAM4D improves spatial consistency and achieves competitive action prediction while maintaining efficient inference.

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

Where Did the Variability Go? From Vibe Coding to Product Lines by Regeneration

arXiv:2606.19042v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In vibe coding, an emerging AI-driven paradigm, an LLM generates an entire program from a natural language prompt, but what happens to the variability that traditional software engineering carefully builds into code? To answer this question, we conducted an exploratory analysis on 10 vibe coded C/C++ projects, which suggests that there is near-zero in-artifact variability, i.e., at compile and runtime. All variability decisions are resolved at a single new binding time, generation time, the moment the LLM produces the source code. Rather than treating this as a defect to fix, we propose Variability by Regeneration (VbR), to our knowledge the first product-line approach in which the LLM acts as the derivation engine, generating a purpose-built, free of dead code binary for each variant from a declarative specification, while a variant dispatcher transparently routes user requests to the matching binary. We formalise VbR, contrast it with classical SPL derivation, and demonstrate its full pipeline on a wc product family. For SPL engineering, variability in AI-generated software belongs in the specification, not in the code.

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

Stochastic Dimension Implicit Functional Projections for Global Integral Conservation in High-Dimensional PINNs

arXiv:2603.29237v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Enforcing prescribed global integral constraints in mesh-free neural PDE solvers is challenging in high-dimensional domains. Existing projection methods for spatial integrals are often tied to fixed grids or uniform quadrature, which can conflict with randomly sampled physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) and scale poorly with dimension. High-order differential operators also increase reverse-mode automatic differentiation memory costs. We propose Stochastic Dimension Implicit Functional Projection (SDIFP), a quadrature-level framework for enforcing prescribed first and second spatial moments. SDIFP replaces tensor-product nodal projection by a global affine correction of the neural-network output, with two scalar coefficients determined from a weighted quadrature rule. Under positive target variance and nonzero empirical raw variance, this correction is the nearest-point projection, in the weighted quadrature norm, onto the empirical two-moment constraint set. Thus, the prescribed moments are exact for the selected quadrature rule, while continuum errors are quadrature errors of the corrected field. For decomposable high-dimensional linear operators, SDIFP combines affine moment correction with stochastic operator-subset sampling. With independent residual and derivative sampling and conditionally unbiased coefficient-gradient estimation, the resulting estimator is unbiased for the specified quadrature-based residual objective; the shared-subset fast mode is biased in general. SDIFP avoids tensor-product quadrature for moment enforcement, separates forward quadrature evaluation from the reverse-mode graph, and retains pointwise inference efficiency once the affine coefficients are fixed or precomputed.

04.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-15

Long-term independent use of an intracortical brain–computer interface for speech and cursor control

Brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) can provide naturalistic communication and digital access to people with severe paralysis by decoding neural activity associated with attempted speech and movement. Recent work has demonstrated highly accurate intracortical BCIs for speech and cursor control, but two critical capabilities needed for practical viability were unmet: independent at-home operation without researcher assistance and reliable long-term performance supporting accurate speech and cursor decoding. Here we demonstrate the independent and near-daily use of a multimodal BCI with novel brain-to-text speech and computer cursor decoders by a man with paralysis and severe dysarthria due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Over nearly 2 years, the participant used the BCI for more than 3,800 h at home with no researchers present to maintain rich interpersonal communication with his family and friends, independently control his personal computer and sustain full-time employment—despite being paralyzed. He communicated 183,060 sentences—totaling 1,960,163 words—at an average rate of 56 words per minute. He labeled 92% of sentences as being decoded at least mostly correctly. In formal quantifications of performance where he was asked to say words presented on a screen, attempted speech was consistently decoded with more than 99% word accuracy (125,000 word vocabulary). The participant also used the speech BCI as keyboard input and the cursor BCI as mouse input to control his personal computer, enabling him to send text messages and emails and to browse the internet. These results demonstrate that intracortical BCIs have the potential to support independent use in the home, marking a critical step toward practical assistive technology for people with severe motor impairment. An automated intracortical brain–computer interface, used at home with no researcher intervention, provides long-term and accurate restoration of speech-based communication and cursor-based computer usage in a person with severe dysarthria due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

$\mu_0$: A Scalable 3D Interaction-Trace World Model

World models that capture how actions induce physical change enable scalable robot learning without reliance on embodiment-specific action labels. Pixel-space video models provide broad visual priors but expend model capacity on dense appearance reconstruction, while direct action models require embodiment-specific labels that hinder scalability. We present $\mu_0$, a scalable world model based on 3D traces. Rather than predicting dense pixels or directly modeling actions, $\mu_0$ forecasts smooth 3D trajectories for salient interaction points such as objects, tools, hands, and contact regions, yielding a compact, embodiment-agnostic motion interface. To enable training from diverse video sources, our TraceExtract system automatically extracts 3D supervision by selecting keypoints, constructing globally aligned traces, and associating motion segments with hierarchical language captions. This TraceExtract supervision pretrains $\mu_0$ by combining a pretrained vision-language backbone with a modular trace expert, which represents each query via B-spline control points and predicts future traces. Experiments show that $\mu_0$ outperforms baselines in both 2D and 3D trace prediction, including trace prediction models and tokenized VLM methods. Because $\mu_0$ is frozen and reusable, it can be paired with action experts for downstream robot embodiments. Despite action-free pretraining, the resulting trace-conditioned policies achieve performance competitive with VLA models pretrained with action supervision, such as $\pi_0$. These results establish 3D traces as a scalable and transferable representation for cross-embodiment manipulation.

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

Extending Covariant Fluctuation Theorems into Quantum Regime through Quasiprobability Approach

arXiv:2606.14519v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The covariant formulation of stochastic thermodynamics requires treating the stochastic work as a 4-vector, posing significant challenges for quantum systems due to the non-commutativity. We introduce a new quasiprobability distribution for the work 4-vector, which combines the Wigner and Margenau-Hill quasiprobabilities. This extends the covariant fluctuation theorems from classical to quantum regime. We illustrate our findings with a scalar field driven by classical particles with a generalized version of trace formula. Our work establishes a quasiprobability approach to studying relativistic quantum thermodynamics in a covariant way.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Federated Bilevel Performative Prediction

arXiv:2606.19734v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Federated bilevel optimization is widely used for nested learning problems across distributed clients, such as federated hyperparameter tuning and meta-learning under privacy and communication constraints. Most existing formulations assume fixed client data distributions, which can be violated by performativity, where deployed decisions reshape client behavior and data collection, inducing client-specific, decision-dependent distribution shift. We study federated bilevel performative prediction, where both upper-level (UL) and lower-level (LL) objectives are evaluated under client-dependent, decision-dependent distributions. We formalize the federated bilevel performatively stable (FBPS) point under a decoupled-risk perspective and provide sufficient conditions for its existence and uniqueness. We then develop two federated methods to compute the FBPS solution: FBi-RRM, which converges linearly under a contraction condition, and FBi-SGD, a communication-efficient stochastic method based on federated hypergradient estimation with convergence guarantees under diminishing step sizes when sensitivities are sufficiently small. Experiments on strategic regression and meta strategic classification validate the predicted stability thresholds and demonstrate improved meta-generalization over non-performative baselines, and CNN-based classification further demonstrates the practical effectiveness of the proposed methods in nonconvex neural network settings.

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

Enhancing Multilingual Reasoning via Steerable Model Merging

Model merging is an effective technique for composing the capabilities of a multilingual model and a reasoning model. It has achieved promising generalization in multilingual reasoning tasks by aligning feature spaces of different models. However, the merged single model often fails to address the conflicts between source models, leading to suboptimal performance. In other words, the one-size-fits-all merging strategy may not align with the characteristics of different inputs which may require prioritizing certain models over others. To this end, we propose a Steerable Model Merging (ST-Merge) framework to modulate the contribution of each source model. To realize this idea, we introduce a gated cross-attention mechanism to weight or filter the two attended source models in an adaptive manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ST-Merge consistently outperforms multiple strong baselines on four multilingual reasoning benchmarks across 21 different languages.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Vacuum photon emission and mean electromagnetic field in pair-creating external backgrounds

arXiv:2606.12547v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We develop a perturbative description of vacuum radiative processes in quantum electrodynamics with a prescribed external electromagnetic background capable of producing electron-positron pairs. Since the initial vacuum is then unstable and the in- and out-vacua are inequivalent, radiative observables require a real-time formulation beyond the ordinary in-out approach of vacuum-stable QED. Using the Keldysh-Schwinger-Fradkin nonequilibrium technique, we derive the mean number density of emitted photons through the second nonvanishing order in the fine-structure constant. The leading term, of order $\alpha$, reproduces the known vertex and tadpole mechanisms, while the complete order-$\alpha^2$ correction contains interference, loop, and induced-current contributions. We also give an independent derivation based on the spectral decomposition of the identity operator in the in-Fock space, where the photon number density is represented as a sum of squared transition amplitudes and vacuum-disconnected terms are canceled by the optical theorem generalized to an unstable vacuum. In addition, we compute the mean electromagnetic field through order $e^3$, including the electromagnetic dressing of the induced vacuum current, and verify it using the corresponding Schwinger-Dyson equations. The final formulas are expressed in terms of exact solutions and propagators of the Dirac equation in the external background and apply to general spacetime-dependent field configurations.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

OpenMedQ: Broad Open Pretraining for Medical Vision-Language Models

We present OpenMedQ, a medical vision-language model pretrained on the broadest fully-open medical mix to date: 14 datasets totaling ~3.35M pretraining samples spanning pathology, radiology, microscopy, and text-only clinical QA. OpenMedQ reaches state-of-the-art BLEU-1 on PathVQA (75.9), beating Med-PaLM M variants up to 562B parameters (~80x larger), and matches the best reported VQA-MED BLEU-1 (64.5). Its vision encoder, transferred to 8 unseen medical classification benchmarks under an identical downstream recipe, obtains the highest average macro-F1 (0.757) among BiomedCLIP (0.745), PMC-CLIP (0.745), PubMedCLIP (0.746), and a from-scratch baseline (0.616). We release our code and an interactive demo is publicly available as a reproducible baseline for the community.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

More Context, Larger Models, or Moral Knowledge? A Systematic Study of Schwartz Value Detection in Political Texts

Detecting Schwartz values in political text is difficult because implicit cues often depend on surrounding arguments and fine-grained distinctions between neighboring values. We study when context and explicit moral knowledge help sentence-level value detection. Using the ValuesML/Touché ValueEval format, we compare sentence, window, and full-document inputs; no-RAG and retrieval-augmented settings with a curated moral knowledge base; supervised DeBERTa-v3-base/large encoders; and zero-shot LLMs from 12B to 123B parameters. The results show that more context is not uniformly better: full-document context improves supervised DeBERTa encoders by 3.8-4.8 macro-F1 points over sentence-only input, but does not consistently help zero-shot LLMs. Retrieved moral knowledge is more consistently useful in matched comparisons, improving each tested model family and context condition under early fusion. However, scaling from DeBERTa-v3-base to large and from 12B to larger LLMs does not guarantee gains, and simple early fusion outperforms the tested late-fusion and cross-attention RAG variants for encoders. Per-value analyses show that context and retrieval help most for socially situated or conceptually confusable values. These findings suggest that value-sensitive NLP should evaluate context, knowledge, and model family jointly rather than treating longer inputs or larger models as universal improvements.

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

Blockwise Policy-Drift Gating for On-Policy Distillation

On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student policy using teacher signals computed on trajectories sampled by the student itself. Recent work shows that sampled-token OPD can be fragile on long-horizon reasoning tasks and that local teacher-support matching is a simple and effective repair. This paper introduces blockwise policy-drift gating, a lightweight student-only old-current drift controller for OPD under rollout reuse. The method computes log-probability shifts between the behavior student and the current student on the sampled token path, aggregates these shifts over fixed blocks or spans, and uses the resulting detached, mean-normalized gates to reweight OPD position losses. It does not change teacher targets, teacher top-K supports, or the rollout policy. In a six-variant Qwen3 math reasoning benchmark with a uniform 200-step training budget for all trained variants, we use pass@8 as the primary problem-level solve-rate metric. Fixed 64-token block gating improves sampled-token OPD mean pass@8 from 0.4978 to 0.5160 across AIME24, AIME25, MATH500, and AMC23. On Teacher-TopK/LSM, Block64 gives the best four-benchmark mean pass@8 among trained students. The results identify local old-current policy drift as a practical control signal for reused OPD rollouts and motivate block-level gating as a simple default for improving solve-rate robustness.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

OptEMA: Adaptive Exponential Moving Average for Stochastic Optimization with Zero-Noise Optimality

Authors:

arXiv:2603.09923v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Exponential moving averages (EMAs) are a central component of widely used adaptive optimizers such as Adam. However, existing analyses of Adam-style methods often yield suboptimal guarantees in the zero-noise regime, rely on open-loop parameter schedules, or require prior knowledge of smoothness constants. Motivated by these limitations, we introduce OptEMA and analyze two complementary variants: OptEMA-M, which applies an adaptive, decreasing EMA coefficient to the first moment with a fixed second-moment decay, and OptEMA-V, which swaps these roles. At the heart of these variants is a Corrected AdaGrad-Norm coefficient schedule. This formulation renders OptEMA algorithmically closed-loop and Lipschitz-free, meaning its effective stepsizes are trajectory-dependent and require no parameterization via the Lipschitz constant. Under lower-boundedness, unbiasedness, bounded variance, average smoothness, and a bounded stochastic-gradient condition used to control the adaptive normalizers, we prove that both variants achieve the unified noise-adaptive rate $\tilde{\mathcal{O}} \left(T^{-1/2}+\sigma^{1/2}T^{-1/4}\right)$ for the averaged gradient norm. In the zero-noise regime, these bounds automatically reduce to the nearly optimal deterministic rate $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(T^{-1/2})$ without manual hyperparameter retuning.

14.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-15

Activity-dependent adaptive deep brain stimulation improves gait in Parkinson’s disease

Authors:

Parkinson’s disease leads to a spectrum of locomotor deficits that vary in severity with the nature of daily activities and the fluctuating physiology of patients. Many of these deficits remain inadequately addressed by existing deep brain stimulation therapies that rely on activity-agnostic parameters optimized for cardinal motor symptoms. By contrast, therapies embedding activity-specific parameters have the potential to better address the entire range of symptoms. Here we expose physiological principles that enable real-time decoding of ongoing locomotor activities across motor fluctuations from the neural dynamics of the subthalamic nucleus. This decoding steered activity-dependent adaptations of deep brain stimulation therapies that improved locomotor deficits while preserving efficacy for cardinal motor symptoms across activities of daily living. Our activity-dependent framework provides a blueprint for next-generation neuromodulation therapies that continuously select parameters optimized to the behavioral context and fluctuating physiology of each patient. ClinicalTrials.gov registration NCT06791902 . Neural decoding algorithms that leverage physiological principles of locomotor encoding support activity-dependent deep brain stimulation therapies that improve locomotor deficits in people with Parkinson’s disease.

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

MCompassRAG: Topic Metadata as a Semantic Compass for Paragraph-Level Retrieval

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems depend critically on how documents are chunked and searched. Fine-grained chunks can improve retrieval precision but expand the search space, increasing latency and cost; larger chunks reduce the number of candidates but make dense similarity less reliable, as the representation for each chunk mixes multiple topics and introduces more semantic noise. This trade-off becomes especially limiting in deep research tasks, where retrieval must be both fast and precise across large, heterogeneous corpora. We introduce MCompassRAG, a metadata-guided retrieval framework that uses topic-level signals as a semantic compass for selecting relevant evidence. Instead of relying only on cosine similarity between queries and noisy chunk embeddings, MCompassRAG enriches chunk representations with topic metadata in the same embedding space and trains a lightweight retriever through LLM-teacher distillation. At inference time, MCompassRAG performs topic-aware retrieval without additional LLM calls, improving both efficiency and evidence quality. Across six complex retrieval benchmarks, MCompassRAG improves information efficiency (IE) by 8.24% on average with over 5 times lower latency than the strongest efficient RAG baselines. Code is available on https://github.com/AmirAbaskohi/MCompassRAG.

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

Enhanced Graph Neural Networks using K-Hop Gaussian Diffusion

arXiv:2606.18317v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most graph neural network (GNN) cores rely on graph convolutions, typically implemented as message passing between direct (single-hop) neighbors. In many real-world graphs, edges can be noisy or poorly defined, limiting information propagation to local neighborhoods. Existing diffusion kernels, such as Personalized PageRank (PPR) and Heat Kernel, alleviate this issue through global propagation, but still struggle with complex local structures and distant node noise. To address these limitations, we propose a K-Hop Gaussian (KHG) diffusion kernel as a preprocessing module for graph data. KHG introduces multi-hop diffusion with Gaussian weighting for remote nodes, balancing local and global information propagation before applying standard GNNs. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that KHG significantly outperforms traditional message-passing GNNs, as well as PPR and Heat Kernel diffusion, particularly in noisy or structurally complex graphs.

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

Computational Identifiability

arXiv:2606.19361v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Identification conditions describe the computability of a target query or parameter of interest as a function of the type and amount of information available. In causal identification, this information is often expressed in the form of a causal graph, and data are observed or collected for some subset of variables in the graph. Target queries may be for a single effect alone or for a class of effects in a given model. The derivation of an identification algorithm then defines mathematically the process by which the desired causal effect(s) can be uniquely determined, theoretically, in expectation. Identifiability in expectation, or 'theoretical identifiability,' generally assumes asymptotic properties, infinite data, or other mathematically idealized conditions. In this paper, we explore a fundamental distinction between this theoretical, idealized notion of identifiability and a proposed alternative that is computation-bound. The framework we propose - 'computational identifiability' - is to instead define a finite computational search procedure for an empirical estimator. If this process finds an estimator empirically, within a desired error tolerance, then identifiability is satisfied, conditional on the specified assumptions of the search (i.e., a prior distribution over the parameters) and conditional on the search procedure itself. Through several experiments, we demonstrate how this framework allows us to answer fine-grained, practical identification questions, such as identification with small finite samples, with ambiguous graphical criteria, with mixed observational-interventional data, and across counterfactual data and estimands. Code is available at https://github.com/lbynum/metadentify.

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

Aspect-Based Sentiment Evolution and its Correlation with Review Rounds in Multi-Round Peer Reviews: A Deep Learning Approach

Mining sentiment information from the textual content of peer review comments offers valuable insights into the scientific evaluation process. However, previous studies are often constrained by coarse-grained analysis and the lack of differentiation across review rounds. Notably, the dynamic shifts in reviewers' focus and sentiment tendencies throughout multiple review stages remain underexplored. To address this gap, the present study investigates the distribution and evolution of aspect-level sentiments and examines their correlation with the number of review rounds. We begin by segmenting the multi-round review comments of 11,063 accepted papers from Nature Communications and identifying fine-grained review aspect clusters. A manually annotated corpus of approximately 5,000 review sentences is then constructed. Using this dataset, we train a series of deep learning-based aspect sentiment classification models. Among them, the LCF-BERT-CDM model achieves the best performance, with a Macro-F1 score of 82.65%. Subsequent statistical analysis reveals a consistent trend: as the number of review rounds increases, the proportion of positive sentiments rises, while negative sentiments decline. Correlation analysis further indicates that aspect sentiment scores are negatively associated with the total number of review rounds. Key aspects exhibiting stronger correlations include "experiments", "research significance" and "result analysis".

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

A Resource for Enthymeme Detection in Controversial Political Discourse

Enthymemes, arguments with unstated premises or conclusions, are pervasive in persuasive discourse, yet their annotation remains notoriously subjective. We present a resource of 1,482 tweets from politically controversial discourse, annotated by five annotators for the presence of enthymemes and their argument structure, designed to study label variation. We first revisit the definition of enthymemes and propose annotation guidelines anchored in Walton's argumentation schemes, offering a structured and constrained approach that nonetheless preserves room for the interpretive nature of the task. This contrasts with past resources, which tend to eliminate disagreement, obscuring its sources and preventing investigation of its potential benefits for model performance. We further propose a complexity analysis of the task, identifying where annotation imposes high cognitive load and may give rise to inconsistent annotation. Our preliminary experiments show that models trained on annotator disagreement outperform models trained on hard majority-vote labels. We close by reflecting on how structural openness in enthymeme definitions and guidelines enables the study of variation in subjective inferential processes for future resources and downstream NLP applications concerned with human inference.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Exploring Dualistic Meta-Learning to Enhance Domain Generalization in Open Set Scenarios

arXiv:2606.23758v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Domain generalization learns from multiple source domains to generalize to unseen target domains. However, it often neglects the realistic case of label mismatch between source and target. Open set domain generalization is then proposed to recognize unseen classes in unseen domains. A simple approach trains one-vs-all classifiers to separate each class and detect outliers as unknown. Yet, the imbalance between few positive samples and many negative samples skews the decision boundary towards the positive ones, leading the model to over-reject out-of-distribution data, even from known classes in unseen domains. In this paper, we propose a novel meta-learning stategy called dualistic MEta-learning with joint DomaIn-Class matching (MEDIC), which considers implicit gradient matching towards inter-domain and inter-class task splits simultaneously to find optimal boundaries balanced for both domains and classes. Experimental results show that MEDIC not only outperforms prior methods in open set scenarios, but also maintains competitive close set generalization ability.

21.
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.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Decoupling local classicality from classical explainability: A noncontextual model for bilocal classical theory and a locally-classical but contextual theory

arXiv:2511.19266v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We construct an ontological model for the theory known as bilocal classical theory doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.102.052216. To our knowledge, this is only the second time that an ontological model has been constructed for an entire theory, rather than just for some particular scenarios within a theory. This result refutes a conjecture from doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.102.052216 which suggested that there might be no local-realist ontological model for bilocal classical theory. Moreover, it is the first time that an ontological model has been constructed for a theory that fails to be locally tomographic, showing that the assumption of local tomography underpinning the structure theorem in doi.org/10.22331/q-2024-03-14-1283 is a genuine limitation of the theorem. This demonstrates that in general there is no tension between failures of local tomography and classical explainability (i.e., generalised noncontextuality). In fact, bilocal classical theory is in many ways more simply understood via the underlying ontological model than it is within its original formulation (much as how odd-dimensional stabiliser subtheories can be more simply understood via Spekkens' toy theory). Furthermore, this result naturally leads to the question, does every locally-classical theory admit of an ontological model? By constructing a concrete counterexample, we show that this is not the case. Our findings demonstrate that there is no straightforward relationship between theories being locally-classical, and them being classically-explainable. This shows that the fundamental status of compositional properties (such as local tomography) is not a technical side-issue, but a central and unavoidable question for a coherent understanding even of classicality itself.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Boosting Direct Preference Optimization with Penalization

Authors:

arXiv:2606.12505v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Offline preference optimization has become a practical substitute for reinforcement learning from human feedback, but pairwise objectives such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and its variants use only the chosen and rejected responses stored in a static dataset. This leaves a useful signal unused: the response that the reference model itself would generate for the same prompt. We propose Direct Preference Optimization with Penalization (DPOP), a simple extension of DPO that augments the base preference loss with a gated penalty on reference-greedy responses. DPOP activates this penalty only when the current policy still assigns a lower likelihood to the preferred response than to the rejected response. On AlpacaEval 2.0, DPOP improves length-controlled win rate over DPO, SimPO, and AlphaDPO on both Llama-3-8b-it and Gemma-2-9b-it, achieving relative gains of 5.3\% and 4.4\% over baselines on the two models, respectively. Ablations further show that a SimNPO-style length-normalized penalty is stronger than NPO and token-level unlikelihood in this setting.

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

LEDGER: A Long-Context Benchmark of Corporate Annual Reports for Grounded Financial Retrieval and Extraction

Finance reporting is a natural proving ground for large language models, and the very-long-context capabilities of recent models across all sizes make rigorous evaluation in this domain an increasingly pressing need. Yet most public financial resources reduce the task to plain-text SEC 10-K filings paired with a handful of question-answer items. We release LEDGER (Long-context Evaluation of Documents for Grounded Extraction and Retrieval), a corpus of 4,999 digitized corporate annual reports - full documents with figures, tables, and narrative, not just regulatory filings. Each report is labeled with 31 consolidated financial KPIs to be extracted and linked to the market's reaction at the earnings date. From this data we derive three evaluation benchmarks spanning the difficulty spectrum: a pure page-level KPI retrieval task with TREC-style relevance judgments over 118,048 questions in natural language, a conversational "needle-in-a-haystack" single-value lookup, and a full KPI extraction task, both from long, numerically dense reports. We additionally provide human OCR-quality annotations with inter-annotator agreement and the complete extraction, validation, and scoring toolchain. We further demonstrate the dataset's research utility with a case study linking CEO-letter rhetoric to post-publication market impact.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Sex-Specific TMPRSS2 Response and Reduced Peripheral RNA Concentration Following AstraZeneca COVID-19 Vaccination in Nigeria.

Background: ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 remains a cornerstone COVID-19 vaccine in sub-Saharan Africa, yet population-specific molecular responses are understudied. We examined peripheral blood ACE2 and TMPRSS2 expression, total RNA concentration, and coagulation indices in Nigerians >=6 months post-vaccination. Methods: In a case-control study in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, 51 ChAdOx1-vaccinated adults and 51 age/sex-matched unvaccinated controls provided venous blood for RNA extraction, qRT-PCR, and coagulation assays. Multivariable linear models assessed effects of vaccination, sex, and age on molecular parameters. Results: Vaccinated participants had 37% lower total RNA concentration than controls (4.02 +/- 0.09 vs 6.38 +/- 0.14 ng/uL, p=6 months post-ChAdOx1, Nigerians show reduced peripheral blood RNA without sustained ACE2/TMPRSS2 upregulation. The sex-specific TMPRSS2 pattern suggests hormone and vaccine interactions previously unreported in African cohorts and highlights the need for sex-disaggregated molecular surveillance. Region-specific reference gene validation is recommended for Nigerian transcriptomic studies.