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

FlowDec: Temporal Conditional Flow Decorruptor for Robust Continuous Vision-Language Navigation

Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments (VLN-CE) requires agents to follow natural-language instructions in unseen scenes. While Large Models (LMs) have advanced VLN-CE, their performance remains severely degraded by real-world visual corruptions, a critical yet underexplored domain constraint. We introduce Temporal Conditional Flow Decorruptor (FlowDec), a novel image restoration framework tailored for LM-based VLN-CE. FlowDec integrates a hybrid temporal conditioning strategy to align the generative flow path with historical context and employs action-centroid guided filtering to dynamically assess and integrate outputs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FlowDec outperforms state-of-the-art decorruption methods in both navigation accuracy and generation latency. Our approach establishes a robust, efficient paradigm for resilient embodied navigation in unpredictable real-world conditions.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Dimensionality Reduction of QAOA Parameter Space with Kernel PCA for Max-Cut

arXiv:2606.23718v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) is a leading variational algorithm for combinatorial optimization on near term quantum devices. As circuit depth increases, the number of optimization parameters grows, making the search landscape increasingly nonlinear and difficult to optimize. Previous studies have shown that optimal QAOA parameters often lie on a low dimensional manifold that can be approximated using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) at shallow circuit depths. However, the effectiveness of PCA decreases at higher depths because the underlying parameter manifold becomes increasingly nonlinear. In this work, we investigate Kernel Principal Component Analysis (KPCA) with a radial basis function kernel as a nonlinear dimensionality reduction technique for QAOA parameter optimization. The model is trained using 200 graphs from each of 3 graph families, namely Erdos-Renyi, Barabasi-Albert, and Watts-Strogatz, with graph sizes ranging from 7 to 10 nodes. Performance is evaluated on 30 test graphs containing 12 nodes at circuit depths 1, 2, 4, and 8. Experimental results demonstrate that KPCA consistently outperforms PCA at deeper circuit depths across all graph families. At depth 8, KPCA achieves approximation ratios above 0.86, while PCA declines to approximately 0.81 to 0.83. Both methods reduce the number of quantum circuit evaluations by more than 93 percent relative to unrestricted QAOA optimization. These findings suggest that nonlinear kernel methods more effectively capture the structure of the QAOA parameter manifold and provide a practical approach for scaling variational quantum optimization to deeper circuits.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Closing the Loop: PID Feedback Control for Interpretable Activation Steering in Symbolic Music Generation

arXiv:2606.18790v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transformer-based architectures have significantly advanced the generation of complex symbolic sequences, yet a significant gap remains in achieving fine-grained, interpretable control over discrete signal attributes. This paper investigates the mechanistic interpretability of the Multitrack Music Transformer (MMT) and proposes a framework for deterministic attribute modulation without retraining to bridge this gap via inference-time activation steering. Utilizing the Difference-in-Means (DiffMean) methodology, we isolate latent directions for signal attributes, specifically Pitch and Duration, within the residual stream. We validate the Linear Representation Hypothesis in this domain, achieving high correlation between steering magnitude and attribute shift. To address the inherent feature entanglement in multi-attribute steering, we introduce a Dual Steering framework utilizing Gram-Schmidt Orthogonalization. Experimental results demonstrate that this geometric decoupling reduces conceptual interference and signal degradation compared to naive vector addition, enabling independent deterministic control even against strong autoregressive conditioning.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

How Linear Is a Transformer Feed-Forward Block? Per-Block Linear Recoverability Is Learned, Not Architectural

Authors:

Transformer feed-forward networks (FFNs) are often treated as nonlinear stores of computation, yet how nonlinear a trained FFN block actually is has rarely been measured. We treat each FFN as a position-wise input-to-output map and split it into the exact least-squares linear approximation plus a residual. The held-out variance the closed-form linear map explains defines a block's linear recoverability (R^2_lin), an optimiser-free measure of its linearity. Across all twelve blocks of GPT-2, Pythia-160m, and llama-160m, R^2_lin is highly heterogeneous and non-monotone with depth, ranging from near-linear (>0.99) to strongly nonlinear (

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

Variable-Width Transformers

Scaling model size, specifically depth and width, has driven significant progress in transformer-based language models. However, most architectures maintain a constant width across all layers, allocating a fixed parameter and computation budget evenly despite different layers potentially playing distinct computational roles. In this work, we empirically investigate nonuniform capacity allocation across network depth by proposing a $\times$-shaped >

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Weaving Multi-Source Evidence for Biomedical Reasoning: The BioMedHop Benchmark and BioWeave Framework

Biomedical question answering (QA) increasingly requires reasoning over interacting entities, where supporting evidence is scattered across biomedical knowledge graphs, literature documents, and web-accessible resources. However, existing biomedical QA benchmarks mainly focus on exam-style knowledge, literature comprehension, or short-range multi-hop inference, leaving source-conditioned graph reasoning and evidence topology construction underexplored. To fill this gap, we introduce BioMedHop, a multi-source graph-grounded benchmark for evaluating biomedical reasoning over structured evidence topologies. BioMedHop contains 10,045 instances across KG, document, web, and hybrid evidence settings, covering shared-neighbor matching, intersection reasoning, path-based reasoning, and counting, with option-based, open-ended, and numeric count renderings. To support this benchmark, we further propose BioWeave, a source-aware reasoning framework that retrieves biomedical KG paths, gathers supporting clues from documents and web sources, assembles them into a unified evidence graph, and verifies answers through entity-level evidence support. Comprehensive experiments show that BioWeave achieves the best overall performance among compared methods on BioMedHop, outperforming the strong hybrid baseline ToG-2 by 10.5% in the overall average. Moreover, BioWeave consistently improves different LLM backbones and enables smaller models, such as Qwen3-4B, to achieve reasoning performance comparable to GPT-4-Turbo.

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

PragReST: Self-Reinforcing Counterfactual Reasoning for Pragmatic Language Understanding

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

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Lagrange: An Open-Vocabulary, Energy-Based Sparse Framework for Generalized End-to-End Driving

arXiv:2606.20274v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scaling end-to-end autonomous driving to complex, open-world environments requires perceptual models that generalize to anomalous scenarios and planners that produce kinematically valid trajectories. Existing paradigms face a distinct dichotomy between representational efficiency and generalization capacity. Dense models (e.g., occupancy networks), while geometrically robust, incur critical computational bottlenecks and struggle with high-level semantic reasoning. Conversely, sparse, query-based planners are efficient but reliant on closed-set definitions, rendering them vulnerable to out-of-distribution (OOD) events. Although recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models offer open-vocabulary reasoning, their autoregressive, discrete token generation fundamentally conflicts with the continuous, high-frequency control requirements of vehicle dynamics. To address this, we propose Lagrange, an open-vocabulary, computationally sparse driving framework based on Masked Latent Fields (MLF). Rather than relying on dense volumetric reconstructions or closed-set query mechanisms, Lagrange exploits Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to encode class-agnostic object proposals into continuous semantic visual tokens. We introduce an intent-driven masked cross-attention module that temporally filters irrelevant entities, decoding the attended tokens into an implicit continuous energy field defined over spatial coordinates. By framing decision-making as a Lagrangian action minimization problem spanning this energy field, we enforce strict compliance with vehicle kinematics while executing collision avoidance. Extensive offline evaluations on both standard (nuScenes) and long-tail (CODA) benchmarks demonstrate that Lagrange establishes a promising framework for robust, interpretable, and kinematically feasible open-world autonomy.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Phonikud: Overcoming Phonetic Underspecification for Hebrew Text-To-Speech

Text-to-speech (TTS) for Modern Hebrew is challenged by the language's orthographic complexity, with existing solutions ignoring underspecified phonetic features such as stress. We present a framework for more phonetically accurate Hebrew TTS with four contributions: (1) Phonikud, an open-source Hebrew grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) system that outputs fully-specified International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcriptions, designed by augmenting a base diacritizer. (2) The ILSpeech corpus of paired Hebrew audio, text, and expert IPA annotations. (3) A benchmark for the previously unmeasured task of Hebrew G2P conversion. (4) Hebrew audio-to-IPA models capturing previously disregarded phonetic details for automatic TTS evaluation. Our results show that Phonikud more accurately predicts Hebrew phonemes than prior methods, and that small, local TTS models with phonetic input from Phonikud approach large proprietary systems. We release our code, data, and models at https://phonikud.github.io.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Interaction-Enhanced Ergotropy in Phase-Driven Andreev Bound State Quantum Batteries

arXiv:2606.24456v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate a phase-driven quantum battery composed of two interacting Andreev bound state (ABS) units, providing a minimal superconducting platform for coherent energy storage. By analyzing the ergotropy dynamics under a superconducting phase ramp, we show that the interplay between avoided-crossing excitation and interaction-induced hybridization strongly modifies the charging process. In the high-transparency regime relevant for graphene SNS junctions, the interaction enhances the stored extractable work and generates pronounced oscillatory charging dynamics associated with coherent redistribution between coupled ABS sectors. The phase-resolved evolution further reveals optimal charging windows during the Josephson cycle, indicating the possibility of phase-programmable energy extraction through partial-cycle operation. Overall, our results identify interaction-assisted avoided-crossing dynamics as a microscopic mechanism for controllable energy storage in superconducting quantum batteries.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Practical Tests and Witnesses of Fermionic non-Gaussianity

arXiv:2605.26218v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fermionic Gaussian states describe free fermions and underlie the mean-field picture of matter, from metals to superconductors; they are also efficiently simulable on classical computers. Departures from Gaussianity – the correlations produced by interactions – are therefore what make a fermionic system hard to simulate classically and useful for quantum computation, analogous to the role of magic in stabilizer-based quantum computation. Yet detecting and quantifying such non-Gaussianity at scale has remained challenging. Here we introduce practical tests and witnesses of fermionic non-Gaussianity built on fermionic antiflatness, a measure derived from the two-point covariance matrix. We estimate it with two protocols – a two-copy Bell measurement and a single-copy scheme using commuting Majorana bilinears – that determine whether a state is Gaussian or far from it at lower measurement cost than existing approaches, using only operations native to fault-tolerant hardware. For mixed states, a purity-corrected witness certifies non-Gaussianity and remains robust under strong noise; running it on the IQM quantum processor, we find that noise can both reduce and enhance non-Gaussianity. Finally, we show that preparing pseudorandom fermionic states requires extensive non-Gaussianity. Together, these tools enable the study and certification of non-Gaussian fermionic resources on present-day quantum devices.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Visual Place Recognition in Forests with Depth-Aware Distillation

Visual place recognition in natural forest environments remains challenging due to repetitive vegetation, weak structural cues, and significant appearance variation across traversals. To address this limitation, this paper proposes a lightweight depth-aware distillation framework that injects geometric cues into a DINOv2-based place recognition model, while maintaining its pre-trained descriptor space. Evaluated on the recent WildCross benchmark, the proposed approach yields gains over an appearance-only counterpart, providing robustness to appearance variations. These results demonstrate the importance of depth as a strong complementary modality for place recognition in natural environments and identify depth-aware distillation as a promising direction for more robust forest perception.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

More with LESS – Local Scene Representations for Tactile Imaging

arXiv:2606.14344v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tactile imaging seeks to reconstruct the internal structure of soft objects through touch sensing, with applications in medical diagnosis and robotic manipulation. Recent self-supervised learning approaches have shown promising results, but rely on global, unstructured representations and robot-controlled sensing, limiting generalization and practical use. We propose Local Encoder for Spatial Sensing (LESS), an object-centric tactile representation that exploits the local nature of touch. The tactile scene is modeled as a grid of recurrent encoders with local receptive fields, whose states are fused to reconstruct 2D or 3D images of internal structure. This compositional design enables strong generalization: models trained on single-inclusion phantoms accurately image objects with multiple inclusions and varying sizes. The local structure further supports spatial uncertainty estimation. In addition, we enable hand-held tactile imaging via external pose tracking and human-like palpation data, and extend tactile imaging to full 3D reconstruction.

15.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Benchmarking attention-based methods for vision transformers' interpretability in retinal fundus imaging

Deep learning models based on Vision Transformers (ViTs) have shown strong performance in retinal fundus imaging, but their interpretability remains poorly understood. In particular, attention-based attribution methods are widely used to explain ViT predictions, despite limited evaluation of their faithfulness and biological relevance in medical imaging. Here, we systematically benchmark four attention-based interpretability methods for RETFound, a retinal ViT-based foundation model, that we previously fine-tuned to predict 17 retinal vascular phenotypes from UK Biobank fundus images1. We compare raw attention, attention rollout, gradient-weighted attention rollout, and Chefer's hybrid relevance-based method using both qualitative visualisation and quantitative evaluation frameworks. To assess attribution faithfulness, we perform perturbation-based deletion and insertion experiments, quantifying changes in model predictions as highly attended image regions are progressively removed or restored. To evaluate biological specificity, we run structure-aware analyses combining attribution maps with vessel segmentation and artery-vein labels through the Relative ratio of Attention Intensity (RAI) metric. Across models, attribution maps differed substantially depending on the selected interpretability method, highlighting the need for rigorous quantitative evaluation. Among the evaluated approaches, gradient-weighted attention rollout consistently achieved the strongest perturbation performance and produced attribution maps most closely aligned with the anatomical definition of the predicted retinal traits. Furthermore, vessel-type specific models systematically concentrate attention on the corresponding vascular structures despite being trained using only a single scalar value per image as supervision. These findings demonstrate that attention-based attribution methods capture biologically meaningful vascular representations, while also revealing method-dependent variability in attribution behaviour. This work provides a quantitative framework for evaluating interpretability methods in medical imaging with annotated segmentation and contributes toward more transparent and biologically grounded medical AI systems.

16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Continuous-time Optimal Stopping through Deep Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.17545v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Simulation based solvers for optimal stopping problems must discretize the stopping decision. Under classical dynamic programming, a coarse exercise grid with only a few stopping opportunities can materially undervalue the optimal expected reward, whereas on a very fine grid, approximation errors accumulate through the backward recursion. To remove this limitation, we develop a new reinforcement-learning inspired algorithm that enables us to learn the exercise rule at arbitrarily fine time resolution. Our CARLOS (Continuous-time Adaptive Reinforcement Learning for Optimal Stopping) algorithm utilizes an aggregate deep neural network (ADNN) to learn a joint space-time decision boundary. Starting from a coarse time grid, we progressively increase the frequency of stopping opportunities, while in parallel training the ADNN to refine its timing-value estimates. We moreover design an adaptive sampling strategy that gradually concentrates training effort near the stopping boundary. Benchmarked results show that CARLOS delivers higher prices than existing Bermudan solvers, approaching the American upper bound, and achieves high computational efficiency relative to non-RL comparators.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

VisCritic: Visual State Comparison as Process Reward for GUI Agents

Authors:

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.

18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Sharp One-Dimensional Sub-Gaussian Comparison in Convex Order

Authors:

arXiv:2604.26819v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We prove that any random variable $X$ whose moment generating function is point-wise upper bounded by that of $ G \sim \mathcal{N}(0,1) $ must be dominated by $ G/\mathbb{E}[|G|] $ in convex order, meaning $ \mathbb{E}[f(X)] \le \mathbb{E}[f(G/\mathbb{E}[|G|])] $ for all convex $f$. This is sharp as witnessed by $ X \sim \mathrm{Unif}(\{-1,1\}) $ and $ f(x) = |x| $.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

CACR:Reinforcing Temporal Answer Grounding in Instructional Video via Candidate-Aware Causal Reasoning

The task of temporal answer grounding in instructional video (TAGV), which aims to locate precise video segments that respond to natural language queries, is increasingly important for direct video answer retrieval. This task remains challenging due to the need to comprehend semantically complex questions and to address the significant length mismatch between untrimmed videos and short target moments. Existing methods often suffer from sensitivity to irrelevant content or insufficient visual reasoning capabilities. To tackle these limitations, we propose a Candidate-Aware Causal Reasoning (CACR) framework. Our approach first employs a Visual-Language Pre-training based Candidate Selection (VBCS) algorithm to efficiently generate K candidate segments, then applies a temporal logic reasoning module enhanced by a rejection reward mechanism and optimized via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) for robust inference. Extensive experiments on six benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of mean Intersection-over-Union (mIoU), providing a new perspective for reasoning-based retrieval in long videos.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Sparsity Curse: Understanding RLVR Model Parameter Space from Model Merging

arXiv:2606.18521v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful post-training paradigm that surpasses Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) in eliciting reasoning intelligence and resisting catastrophic forgetting. Recent studies further reveal that RLVR induces highly sparse and off-principal parameter updates compared to SFT. This naturally raises the question: does such sparsity make RLVR models more amenable to model merging? If so, model merging would offer a scalable, training-free path to aggregate diverse reasoning capabilities from independently trained RLVR models. Surprisingly, we find the opposite, uncovering a sparsity curse: the sparse RLVR updates are spread farther apart in parameter space, forming near-orthogonal shortcuts that make aggregation inherently fragile. This is likely rooted in the stochasticity of RL optimization and the diversity of emergent reasoning patterns. Unlike SFT models that converge to shared, flat basins and merge naturally, RLVR models suffer severe degradation under standard merging methods. Through systematic empirical analysis of the update geometry, we characterize the mechanisms behind this failure and propose Sensitivity-aware Resolving Merging (SAR-Merging), a merging recipe tailored for the unique structure of RLVR parameter spaces. SAR-Merging resolves conflicts in overlapping update regions via Fisher Information-based sensitivity arbitration, followed by magnitude-aware sparsification and rescaling to preserve fragile reasoning pathways. Experiments on mathematical and coding benchmarks demonstrate that SAR-Merging substantially outperforms existing merging methods on RLVR models, enabling both single-task enhancement and multi-capability fusion.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Unstable Features, Reproducible Subspaces: Understanding Seed Dependence in Sparse Autoencoders

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used to interpret neural network representations, but their utility depends on whether the learned features are reproducible across training runs. We study this question through feature stability: for each SAE feature, we estimate the probability that a similar feature reappears in an independently trained SAE. This yields a scalable per-feature signal that separates stable from unstable features. In a large-scale study across seeds, models, layers, dictionary sizes, and SAE variants, we find a pronounced functional asymmetry: stable features carry most of the reconstruction- and prediction-relevant signal, while unstable features have weak marginal impact and are dominated by low-frequency surface-form triggers in both activation statistics and automatic explanations. Geometrically, unstable features are individually non-reproducible but concentrate in reproducible lower-rank subspaces, suggesting that seed dependence often reflects basis ambiguity within a shared region of activation space rather than pure noise. A controlled synthetic model makes this mechanism explicit, showing that low-rank ground-truth features can be recovered at the subspace level while remaining non-identifiable as individual SAE latents across seeds. Finally, by pooling unique cross-seed features, we construct more stable SAEs while preserving explained variance in this setting. Together, these results show that unstable features are not merely failed or noisy latents: they have weak individual functional impact, but reflect reproducible low-dimensional structure that standard SAEs resolve differently across seeds.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Quantum statistical functions

Authors:

arXiv:2602.05821v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Statistical functions such as the moment-generating, characteristic, cumulant-generating, and second characteristic functions are standard tools in classical statistics and probability theory. They provide a systematic means to analyze the statistical properties of a system and find applications in diverse fields. While these functions are ubiquitous in classical theory, a quantum counterpart has remained underdeveloped because of the noncommutativity of operators. The absence of such a framework has obscured the connections between statistical quantities and the nonclassical features of quantum mechanics. Here, we construct a framework for quantum statistical functions that addresses these limitations and unifies the languages of quantum statistics. We show that the functions reproduce standard statistical quantities such as expectation values, variance, and covariance upon differentiation. By extending the framework to include pre- and post-selection, we define conditional functions that generate conditional statistical quantities, including the weak value and the weak variance. We further show that multivariable functions, defined with specific operator orderings, correspond to the Kirkwood–Dirac, Margenau–Hill, and Wigner distributions. By generalizing Bochner's theorem within the theory of compactly supported distributions, we obtain a criterion that separates classical statistics from quantum statistics, linking the failure of positive definiteness of the multivariable function to the emergence of quasiprobability. As an application, we import the classical method of moments and generalized method of moments into quantum estimation, introducing quantum estimators that exploit the proposed functions. Our framework reproduces quantum statistical quantities and incorporates the nonclassical features of quasiprobability, providing a basis for further study of quantum statistics.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

A Time-Reparameterized Cumulative Intensity Extrapolation Sampler for Discrete Flow Matching

arXiv:2606.24140v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Discrete flow matching (DFM) provides a principled framework for generative modeling on discrete state spaces via continuous-time Markov chain dynamics. In practice, sampling for DFM commonly employs discretizations such as $\tau$-leaping, yet efficient sampling methods under a limited number of function evaluations (NFE) remain less studied. To address this gap, we propose the Time-Reparameterized Cumulative Intensity Extrapolation (TR-CIE) sampler, which aims to improve sampling quality when function evaluations are restricted. TR-CIE consists of two components. First, a schedule-based time reparameterization rescales the time grid according to the noise schedule. Under standard factorized DFM rate parameterizations, this transformation of variables absorbs the schedule-dependent growth term and mitigates stiffness near the terminal sampling stage. Second, we introduce a cumulative-intensity extrapolation updating rule. By reusing cached model outputs from the previous step as a history term, this improves the approximation of stepwise cumulative intensities on the resulting non-uniform time grid. We provide a theoretical analysis that bounds the local approximation error of cumulative intensities and establishes convergence results. The resulting sampler requires one NFE per step and introduces no additional model evaluations compared to the standard $\tau$-leaping sampler. Extensive experiments on synthetic tasks, text generation, and text-to-image benchmarks demonstrate that our method improves sampling quality under limited NFE.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

FlexPooling with Simple Auxiliary Classifiers in Deep Networks

In computer vision, the basic pipeline of most convolutional neural networks consists of multiple feature extraction layers, where the input signal is downsampled to a lower resolution in each subsequent layer. This downsampling process is commonly referred to as pooling, which is an essential operation in CNNs. Pooling improves robustness against transformations, reduces the number of trainable parameters, increases the receptive field, and lowers computation time. Since pooling is a lossy process but remains important for extracting high-level information from low-level representations, it is important to preserve the most prominent information from previous activations to improve network discriminability. Standard pooling is usually performed using dense pooling methods, such as max pooling or average pooling, or through strided convolutional kernels. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective adaptive pooling method, called FlexPooling, which generalizes average pooling by learning a weighted average over activations jointly with the rest of the network. We further show that attaching Simple Auxiliary Classifiers (SAC) to the CNN improves performance and demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method compared with standard pooling methods. Experiments on multiple popular image classification datasets show that FlexPooling consistently outperforms baseline networks, achieving approximately 1 to 3 percent improvement in accuracy.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

A Scalable PyTorch Abstraction for Multi-GPU Gaussian Splatting

Gaussian splatting methods have become increasingly popular for neural reconstruction of the real world. However, they are often limited in scale and resolution due to compute and memory constraints. We present a multi-GPU Gaussian splatting approach that scales reconstruction to higher resolutions and larger scenes while abstracting away the code complexity typically associated with distributing a model. To accomplish this, we propose a PyTorch backend that distributes the Gaussian parameters and splatting operators across GPUs via CUDA unified memory and NVLink. Because distribution occurs at the operator level, the model code requires no explicit cross-device communication. More broadly, the backend exposes multiple GPUs as an aggregate PyTorch device and supports other PyTorch operators. We demonstrate city-scale reconstructions with street-level detail consisting of over 1 billion Gaussian splats, more than 25 times as many as the current state of the art.