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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Development and reliability and validity test of the Questionnaire on Knowledge, Attitude and Practice of ICU Nurses on Blood Oxygen Saturation Management in Mechanically Ventilated Patients

Authors:
Xie↗Bian↗Yu↗He↗

Objective: A questionnaire on the knowledge, attitude and practice of ICU nurses regarding the management of blood oxygen saturation in patients with mechanical ventilation was compiled, and its reliability and validity were tested. Method: Drawing upon the knowledge-attitude-practice theory, the initial questionnaire draft was developed through literature review and consultation with Delphi experts. Employing convenience sampling, 32 nurses from the General ICU of Wuxi Second People's Hospital were surveyed between 1 August 2025 and 27 September 2025, enabling item screening and assessment of reliability and validity.The full version of the developed questionnaire is provided as Supporting Information (S1 File). All items are published under a CC BY 4.0 license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Result: A questionnaire on the knowledge, attitude and practice of ICU nurses regarding the management of blood oxygen saturation in mechanically ventilated patients was finalised, comprising 26 items: 11 in the knowledge dimension, 6 in the attitude dimension and 9 in the behaviour dimension. The overall Cronbach's coefficient for the questionnaire was 0.88, with dimension-specific coefficients of 0.787, 0.722, and 0.781 respectively. The Spearman-Brown coefficient for the entire questionnaire was 0.967, while dimension-specific coefficients were 0.796, 0.666, and 0.728 respectively. The content validity index at the questionnaire level (S-CVI) was 0.886, and the item-level content validity index (I-CVI) ranged from 0.913 to 0.967. 0.728. The questionnaire's level content validity index (S-CVI) was 0.886, and the item level content validity index (I-CVI) ranged from 0.913 to 1.00. Conclusion: The questionnaire on knowledge, attitude and practice of blood oxygen saturation management in mechanically ventilated patients demonstrates good reliability and validity. It may serve as an assessment tool for intensive care unit nurses regarding their knowledge, attitude, and practices concerning blood oxygen saturation management in mechanically ventilated patients, thereby establishing a foundation for developing targeted intervention strategies in future practice.

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

Substrate Asymmetry in User-Side Memory: A Diagnostic Framework

Authors:
Youwang Deng↗

User-side memory in LLMs is typically scored as a single "personalization" capability: given a user's history, is the output more user-aware? We show this aggregate metric hides opposite-direction failures. Memory factorises into at least three orthogonal axes – behavioral consistency (style, voice), factual presence (recall facts in history), and factual absence (abstain when a fact is absent) – and no single substrate wins all three. Comparing per-user gamma-LoRA (a small LoRA adapter trained on each user's history; gamma denotes per-user, not per-task) against BGE-large dense top-K retrieval on a controlled 50-user synthetic corpus and a real-data probe (LaMP-3), we find gamma-LoRA decisively wins behavioral style while RAG decisively wins factual absence – and the same query-projection cells in attention layers 21-35 causally load-bear both effects in opposite directions (zeroing those LoRA weights raises absence-probe TPR by +33 pp and drops presence-probe TPR by 20 pp). On the more heavily RLHF-tuned Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct the asymmetry strengthens, not heals: parametric memory's behavioral advantage collapses while its absence-calibration deficit against retrieval widens – an alignment tax on parametric user-memory. On real-data LaMP-3, gamma-LoRA underperforms a majority baseline; a 9-condition mitigation sweep diagnoses this as instruction-following collapse, not substrate failure (a 9x2 cross-product shows the eval-time {1..5} logit mask drives main_acc to >=0.995 on every recipe), and the best training-time fix replicates bit-identically on Llama. Finally, substrate-selection routing is question-classification, not calibration: a 110M DistilBERT on the question text alone beats every logit-based router. We contribute the diagnostic framework, the diagnosed real-data negative, the alignment-tax replication, and the routing-as-classification finding.

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

Frontier: Towards Comprehensive and Accurate LLM Inference Simulation

Authors:
Yicheng Feng↗Xin Tan↗Yangtao Deng↗Yimin Jiang↗Yibo Zhu↗Hong Xu↗

arXiv:2605.21312v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern LLM serving is no longer homogeneous or monolithic. Production systems now combine disaggregated execution, complex parallelism, runtime optimizations, and stateful workloads such as reasoning, agents, and RL rollouts. Simulation is attractive for exploring this growing design space, yet existing simulators lack the architectural completeness and decision-grade fidelity it demands. Their monolithic-replica abstractions are ill-suited to disaggregated serving, while average-case analytical proxies can distort SLA predictions and even reverse optimization conclusions. We present Frontier, a discrete-event simulator for modern LLM inference serving. Frontier features a disaggregated abstraction. It captures the structure and dynamics of modern serving systems by modeling co-location, Prefill-Decode Disaggregation (PDD), and Attention-FFN Disaggregation (AFD) with role-specific cluster workers, incorporating key runtime optimizations (e.g., CUDA Graphs, speculative decoding) within the scheduler-batch-engine loop, and supporting stateful requests for emerging workloads. It further provides accurate and generalizable predictions of computation, communication, and memory costs across diverse serving scenarios with complex workload compositions. On 16-H800 GPU testbed, Frontier achieves an average throughput error below 4%. Compared with state-of-the-art simulators, it reduces end-to-end latency error from 44.9% to 6.4% under co-location and from 51.7% to 2.6% under disaggregation. It scales to over 1K GPUs on commodity CPUs and enables new use cases such as SLA-dependent Pareto frontier exploration, heterogeneous disaggregated allocation, agentic reasoning scheduling validation, and RL post-training reconfiguration. We release Frontier at https://github.com/NetX-lab/Frontier.

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05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Cross-Layer Discrete Concept Discovery for Interpreting Language Models

Authors:
Ankur Garg↗Xuemin Yu↗Hassan Sajjad↗Samira Ebrahimi Kahou↗

Interpreting language models remains challenging due to the existence of residual stream, which linearly mixes and duplicates features across adjacent layers, causing single-layer analyses to miss this cross-layer structure. Cross-layer sparse autoencoders (SAEs) address layer mixing but operate in continuous space, where concepts split across many neurons without clear boundaries. We introduce Cross-Layer Vector Quantized-Variational Autoencoder (CLVQ-VAE), a novel framework which maps representations from a lower layer to a higher layer through a discrete vector-quantization bottleneck, collapsing duplicated residual-stream features into compact, interpretable concept vectors. Our approach combines top-k temperature-based sampling with exponential moving average (EMA) codebook updates, providing controlled exploration of the discrete latent space while maintaining codebook diversity. Across both encoder- and decoder-based models on ERASER-Movie, Jigsaw, and AGNews, CLVQ-VAE outperforms clustering, single-layer vector quantized-variational autoencoder (VQ-VAE), and sparse autoencoder (SAE) baselines across three evaluation axes: removing identified concepts drops model accuracy by up to 93%, LLM judges rank our concepts first in 66.7% of comparisons, and human annotators recover model predictions from our visualizations with 78% accuracy versus 54% for clustering.

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

Clinically Aligned Geometry Constraints for Robust IVUS Vessel Boundary Segmentation

Authors:
Yunshu Chen↗Litao Yang↗Giuseppe Di Giovanni↗Jordan Tan↗Deval Mehta↗Andrew Lin↗Derek Chew↗Masasi Fujino↗Julie Butters↗Stephen Nicholls↗Zongyuan Ge↗Kyung Hoon Cho↗…

Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) lumen and external elastic membrane (EEM) segmentation is important for quantitative coronary plaque burden assessment. Errors in lumen or EEM delineation directly propagate to plaque area, plaque burden and geometric measurements. However, standard methods prioritising overlap scores often suffer from boundary drift and topology errors, leading to inaccurate clinical measurements. We present GeoCat, a geometry-consistent network that processes 5-frame IVUS clips using dual Cartesian-polar encoders with cross-domain attention and temporal fusion. A differentiable geometry consistency loss directly supervises clinically relevant descriptors including diameters, orientations, and cross-sectional areas. The model is trained on 12,242 annotated frames from 146 patients acquired with two commercial IVUS systems. We evaluate performance using both segmentation accuracy and plaque-relevant clinical metrics, including Dice/IoU, boundary measures(95HD (mm), ASSD), topology violation rate, and clinical geometry errors (dmax/dmin, angles, and areas). On our dataset, GeoCat achieves a Dice of 0.93, reduces 95HD to 0.14 mm, and lowers topology violations to 1.0%. Importantly, it significantly improves geometric fidelity, yielding diameter errors of 0.13-0.16 mm and angular errors of ~8 degrees, supporting reliable plaque burden quantification.

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

Multi-Token Residual Prediction

Authors:
Yufeng Xu↗Zishuo Bao↗Qian Wang↗Zeshen Zhang↗Haoqi Zhang↗Bowen Peng↗Ang Li↗Rahul Chalamala↗Yucheng Lu↗

arXiv:2605.18817v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) generate text by iteratively denoising masked token sequences, offering a tradeoff between parallelism and quality compared to autoregressive models. In current practice, the number of tokens decoded per step is controlled by a confidence threshold, and quality degrades monotonically as more tokens are denoised per step. We introduce Multi-token Residual Prediction (MRP), a lightweight module that enables dependency-aware multi-token denoising within a single backbone forward pass. MRP exploits a key property of the denoising process: the logit distributions at adjacent denoising steps are remarkably similar. Rather than running the backbone a second time to obtain the next-step logits, MRP predicts the residual between steps from the backbone's hidden states, effectively denoising more tokens per backbone forward at a fraction of the cost. We apply MRP across the two operating regimes of DLM decoding. In the high-quality-low-throughput static denoising regime, MRP serves as a drafter for speculative decoding: its proposals are verified against the backbone, yielding lossless acceleration of up to 1.4x in SGLang. In the low-quality-high-throughput dynamic denoising regime, MRP instead drives a remasking scheme that revokes over-eager reveals, recovering most of the accuracy lost to aggressive low-threshold decoding and improving accuracy by up to 22.6 points on code generation task HumanEval and 17.7 points on reasoning task GSM8K.

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08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Towards Effective Waste Segmentation for Automated Waste Recycling in Cluttered Background

Authors:
Mamoona Javaid↗Mubashir Noman↗Abdul Hannan↗Shah Nawaz↗Mustansar Fiaz↗Sajid Ghuffar↗

Rapid expansion of urban areas and population growth is causing an immense increase in waste production, which demands the need for efficient and automated waste management. In this scenario, automated waste recycling (AWR) using deep learning methods can assist humans in optimal waste management. Recent deep learning approaches for AWR provide promising waste segmentation performance, however, these methods rely on large backbone networks that are inefficient for AWR systems and suffer from performance deterioration in cluttered scenes. To this end, an optimal waste segmentation network is introduced which effectively utilizes the spatial domain to capture localized structural dependencies and the spectral domain to efficiently extract global contextual relationships. This cascaded design allows the network to progressively leverage both local and global representations across complementary domains to highlight the semantic information necessary for effective segmentation of various waste objects. Furthermore, auxiliary feature enhancement module (AFEM) is introduced to enhance the target objects' boundaries and blob amplification for better segmentation in cluttered scenarios. Extensive experimentation on ZeroWaste-aug, ZeroWaste-f and SpectralWaste datasets reveals the merits of the proposed method.

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09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Purity and bound energy in ancilla-assisted work extraction

Authors:
B. Vigneshwar↗Farhaan Khan↗R. Sankaranarayanan↗

arXiv:2606.19945v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate ancilla-assisted work extraction in quantum batteries from the perspective of bound energy and purity. We show that the bound energy of the reduced system provides a tight upper bound to the daemonic gain and that this bound is saturated for globally pure system–ancilla states. Motivated by this relation, we introduce a purity-based gain that qualitatively predicts the daemonic gain without requiring explicit optimization over measurements. We further introduce a protocol to analyze the role of dissipation and intrinsic interactions on daemonic gain. Under a collective environment, dissipation can dynamically generate and stabilize finite daemonic gain through environment-induced correlations. In interacting systems, level crossings and spectral restructuring strongly modify the attainable gain through their influence on the accessible bound energy. Our results demonstrate that daemonic gain is governed not only by correlations, but also by the spectral structure of the underlying Hamiltonian and information loss captured by bound energy and purity.

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10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

CASR: A Robust Cyclic Framework for Arbitrary Large-Scale Super-Resolution with Distribution Alignment and Self-Similarity Awareness

Authors:
Wenhao Guo↗Zhaoran Zhao↗Peng Lu↗Sheng Li↗Qian Qiao↗DeRui Li↗

Arbitrary-Scale SR (ASISR) remains fundamentally limited by cross-scale distribution shift: once the inference scale leaves the training range, noise, blur, and artifacts accumulate sharply. We revisit this challenge from a cross-scale distribution transition perspective and propose CASR, a simple yet highly efficient cyclic SR framework that reformulates ultra-magnification as a sequence of in-distribution scale transitions. This design ensures stable inference at arbitrary scales while requiring only a single model. CASR tackles two major bottlenecks: distribution drift across iterations and patch-wise diffusion inconsistencies. The proposed SSAM module aligns structural distributions via superpixel aggregation, preventing error accumulation, while SARM module restores high-frequency textures by enforcing correlation-guided consistency and preserving self-similarity structure through correlation alignment. Despite using only a single model, our approach significantly reduces distribution drift, preserves long-range texture consistency, and achieves superior generalization even at extreme magnification.

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11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

A multistate model of frailty progression after severe infections in adults >=65 years in England: a matched-cohort study

Authors:
Asare↗Mansfield↗K. E↗Gore-Langton↗G. R↗Barry↗Keogh↗Lo Re↗Rodriguez-Barradas↗M. C↗Justice↗A. c↗…

Background Evidence on frailty progression following severe infections is limited. We compared rates of transition to greater frailty or death between adults with and without severe infection in England. Methods We conducted a matched-cohort study among adults aged [≥]65 years (1,452,117: median age 76 years, 45% male) in Clinical Practice Research Datalink Aurum (2006-2019). Adults with severe infection (hospitalised primarily due to infection) were matched on calendar time to individuals without severe infection on age, sex, and primary care practice. The admission date was used as index date and same was assigned to matched unexposed adults. We measured frailty using Electronic Frailty Index, a proportion of 36 health deficits in validated categories (Fit 0-0.12, Mild >0.12-0.24, Moderate >0.24-0.36, Severe >0.36). In a time-varying Markov multistate model, we focused on forward transitions from baseline or intermediate frailty states to higher states or death. For each transition, we used Cox regression to estimate cause-specific transition hazard ratios (HR) with 95% confidence intervals (CIs), comparing adults with and without severe infection. We adjusted for baseline frailty score, age, sex, deprivation, harmful alcohol use, smoking, and primary care infection history 5 years before index date. We estimated state occupancy probabilities, and expected length of stay (ELOS) in each state at year five among adults with and without severe infection. We explored effect modification by infection type. Results Across all transitions, severe infection was associated with higher adjusted hazards of transitioning to worsening frailty or death, HR, 95% CI: (fit to: mild[1.56, 1.54-1.58], moderate[2.51, 1.79-3.51], death[4.57, 4.50-4.65]; mild to: moderate[1.52, 1.50-1.53], severe[1.90, 1.43-2.52], death[2.67, 2.64-2.70]; moderate to: severe[1.40, 1.38-1.42], death[1.87, 1.85-1.90]; severe to death[1.48, 1.46-1.50]). Transition hazard ratios were strongest for lower respiratory tract infections, followed by sepsis, urinary tract infections, meningitis/encephalitis, gastroenteritis, and skin and soft tissue infections. At five years, adults with severe infection had higher probabilities of transitioning to greater frailty or death across all transitions and lower ELOS in each frailty state than those without severe infection. Interpretation Severe infections may accelerate frailty deterioration in older age. Prevention through vaccination, early detection, and prompt management may help mitigate this decline.

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12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

No-Free-Fairness: Fundamental Limits and Trade-offs in Learning Systems

Authors:
Khoat Than↗

arXiv:2606.17810v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper, we establish a set of theoretical impossibility results, termed the No-Free-Fairness theorems, that identify three fundamental sources of disparity in learning systems. First, we show that when a task exhibits irreducible cost on a subgroup, any decision rule must trade off overall performance with disparity, yielding an inherent fairness–cost frontier. Second, we prove that even in ideal, noise-free settings where a perfectly fair and accurate solution exists, finite-sample learning alone induces nontrivial subgroup disparity, ruling out distribution-free fairness guarantees. More seriously, enforcing strict relative fairness creates a statistical bottleneck: achieving low cost may require exponentially many samples. Third, we show that limitations of the model class can independently induce disparity: if the model cannot represent accurate solutions for a subgroup, fairness remains unattainable regardless of data or training procedure. Overall, these results demonstrate that unfairness is not solely a consequence of biased data or suboptimal optimization, but arises from the intrinsic structure of decision problems, the constraints of finite data, and the expressivity of models. Our framework applies broadly beyond standard supervised learning, and suggests that achieving fairness requires explicit trade-offs and should be treated as a core design consideration.

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13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

KANLib – An Modular, Extensible and Fast Kolmogorov-Arnold Network Implementation

Authors:
Julian Hoever↗Gregor Schiele↗

arXiv:2606.17927v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to traditional multilayer perceptrons by replacing linear weights with learnable univariate functions. Despite their theoretical advantages in interpretability and expressiveness, practical research of KANs remains difficult due to high computational costs and inconsistent feature support across existing frameworks. This paper introduces KANLib, a modular, extensible, and computationally efficient framework for developing and evaluating KAN architectures. KANLib unifies core concepts from existing implementations, including PyKAN, EfficientKAN, and FastKAN, within a consistent software architecture that emphasizes flexibility, feature parity, and high performance. The framework supports two basis function types, adaptive grid rescaling, grid extension, and fine-grained architectural customization while maintaining compatibility with standard PyTorch workflows. Experimental evaluation on the California Housing benchmark demonstrates that KANLib reproduces the predictive behavior of established reference KAN implementations while achieving competitive computational efficiency. Furthermore, the framework enables the exploration of architectural variations beyond standard KAN formulations with only minor impacts on predictive performance. Overall, KANLib provides a robust foundation for future research on scalable and extensible KAN architectures.

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14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Weibull Weight-Scale Parameter Evolution under AdamW Training Dynamics

Authors:
Tiexin Ding↗

arXiv:2606.19367v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Building on a two-parameter Weibull framework for diagnosing transformer weight distributions, we study why the Weibull weight-scale parameter $\lambda$ grows, overshoots, and then relaxes during AdamW training. We derive a leading-order three-force decomposition of the squared weight norm from the AdamW update: an alignment force measuring the correlation between weights and the adaptive update direction, an injection force from adaptive step magnitude, and a decay force from decoupled weight decay. On self-trained Pythia-70M models with ground-truth optimizer moments, alignment dominates the rise phase, contributing 88-94% of the absolute force budget across four random seeds and remaining robust to super-weight removal. Near saturation, alignment and decay approach balance, explaining the transition from weight-scale growth to relaxation. These force dynamics directly govern the squared-norm component underlying $\lambda(t)$; the remaining RMS-to-Weibull reconstruction offset is measurable and decomposes into bridge and integration components, totaling approximately 5-6% in densely sampled regions. To extend the analysis to real models where optimizer moments are unavailable, we introduce a spline displacement method that recovers the alignment force from sparse checkpoints with approximately 92-94% accuracy, about twice the naive two-point baseline. We further observe that the peak value of $\lambda(t)$ varies with training-data coherence in our experiments, suggesting a data-dependent component of weight-scale growth that we leave to a controlled follow-up study. Code and data are available at https://github.com/tiexinding/NPM-Weibull-public.

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15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Fisher geometry reshapes the effect of incompatibility in multiparameter quantum estimation

Authors:
Jiayu He↗Matteo G. A. Paris↗

arXiv:2606.11343v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multiparameter quantum estimation faces two fundamental obstacles: sloppiness, i.e., anisotropy of the quantum Fisher information matrix (QFIM) that renders some parameter directions insensitive, and incompatibility, the non-commutativity of optimal measurements for different parameters. The trade-off bound $C_T$ captures their joint impact on precision, but it has remained unclear how the distribution of incompatibility across parameter planes affects its overall cost. Here we separate the total amount of incompatibility from its location. We introduce a dimensionless quantity $G_n^{(F)}$ that measures the alignment between the incompatibility distribution and the eigenvalues of the QFIM, and show how the Frobenius scale of the incompatibility contribution factorizes. We obtain a bound and prove the incompatibility cost lies between this bound and a rank-dependent multiple thereof. We also prove that at fixed sloppiness, or equivalently fixed Fisher volume, concentrating incompatibility into a single parameter plane reduces the optimized trade-off cost because the Fisher geometry can then be reshaped to allocate more Fisher area to that plane. A qutrit $SU(2)$ encoding numerically confirms that states with larger incompatibility strength can nevertheless incur a smaller cost if the matching factor $G$ is sufficiently small. Our results establish that the distribution of incompatibility relative to the Fisher eigenbasis is a central diagnostic for multiparameter estimation, beyond the total incompatibility strength.

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

Demystifying Variance in Circuit Discovery of LLMs

Authors:
Frank Zhengqing Wu↗Francesco Tonin↗Volkan Cevher↗

arXiv:2606.16920v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Circuit discovery is a key technique in mechanistic interpretability to pinpoint the model components that are crucial for performing a given task. Although the current state-of-the-art method (EAP-IG) performs well on the metric of (un)faithfulness, it suffers from substantial variability. This includes resampling variance, where the circuit changes when we probe with a new batch of data from the same distribution; rephrasing variance, where the discovered circuit shifts when the prompts are rephrased; and sample-wise variance, where a circuit with low population unfaithfulness exhibits large fluctuations in unfaithfulness across individual samples. This paper studies the roots of these variances. We demonstrate that CEAP, our new circuit discovery method that improves upon EAP-IG with a theoretical guarantee, can substantially lessen resampling variance. We further show that rephrasing variance arises because prompts with different templates tend to activate different circuits in the model. This leads us to argue that it may be challenging to find a comprehensive circuit that explains and controls the model's behavior on a task, which can be expressed in countless templates, suggesting that LLMs may be inherently hard to steer. We show that sparsity, which has been claimed to form more compact and interpretable task circuits, fails to solve this problem. Regarding sample-wise variance, we argue that it is largely benign: extremely poor unfaithfulness scores often stem from how unfaithfulness is defined, rather than from defects in the measured circuits. We show that the magnitude of unfaithfulness is affected by selective contribution scaling, a neural mechanism that accounts for the extremely poor scores sometimes observed.

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

Scaling Self-Play for End-to-End Driving

Authors:
Luke Rowe↗Roger Girgis↗Rodrigue de Schaetzen↗Daphne Cornelisse↗Alaap Grandhi↗Felix Heide↗Eugene Vinitsky↗Christopher Pal↗Liam Paull↗

End-to-end autonomous driving models are typically trained on offline human-demonstration datasets that provide limited state coverage and often no closed-loop feedback, making them prone to compounding errors when deployed in closed-loop and brittle to long-tail agent interactions. To overcome these limitations, we propose an alternative strategy for training end-to-end driving models: large-scale self-play directly from pixels in simulation. While prior self-play approaches have shown promising transfer to real-world driving, they typically assume vectorized Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) observations that are incompatible with end-to-end policies operating directly on sensor observations. To this end, we introduce Gigapixel, a high-throughput batched driving simulator with perspective rendering, enabling scalable self-play directly from pixel observations. Rather than targeting compute-costly photorealistic sensor simulation, Gigapixel renders a simplified bounding-box world that preserves essential scene structure while achieving throughput at 50k agent steps per second. Since direct pixel-space self-play RL is prohibitively sample-inefficient at end-to-end model scale, we propose self-play DAgger training: we train pixel-based policies in self-play via on-policy distillation from a privileged RL teacher. To bridge the sim-to-real gap, we subsequently transfer the self-play trained policies to real-world sensor data through lightweight perception adaptation. Policies trained in Gigapixel and adapted to real-world sensor data achieve competitive performance on the HUGSIM and NAVSIM-v2 benchmarks without human trajectory supervision. Moreover, scaling self-play training yields proportional gains in policy performance, establishing self-play as a practical and scalable strategy for training end-to-end models.

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

Whose hotel does the AI recommend? An algorithm audit of reputation signals in LLM-assisted hotel selection

Authors:
Mirza Samad Ahmed Baig↗Syeda Anshrah Gillani↗Asher Ali↗

Travelers increasingly ask large language model (LLM) assistants which hotel to book, making these systems gatekeepers of property visibility – yet what moves their recommendations is undocumented. We conduct a pre-specified algorithm audit using a randomized choice-based conjoint: across personas, prompt templates, and twelve open-weight and proprietary models, assistants choose among five hotels whose guest rating, review volume and recency, management response, chain affiliation, price, eco-certification, and list position are independently randomized. We estimate the average marginal component effect of each signal on the probability of recommendation. Guest rating and price dominate (a top rating raises selection by 31.6 percentage points; a high price lowers it by 30.0), reproducing human valence-and-price primacy but over-weighting eco-certification and ignoring management response. List position – a content-free artifact – shifts recommendations causally, worth about \$12 per night. Stated reasons track revealed weights imperfectly. The findings ground generative engine optimization and the accountability of AI infomediaries in causal evidence.

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

Momentum LMS Theory beyond Stationarity: Stability, Tracking, and Regret

Authors:
Yifei Jin↗Xin Zheng↗Lei Guo↗

arXiv:2602.11995v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In large-scale data processing scenarios, data often arrive in sequential streams generated by complex systems that exhibit drifting distributions and time-varying system parameters. This nonstationarity challenges theoretical analysis, as it violates classical assumptions of i.i.d. (independent and identically distributed) samples, necessitating algorithms capable of real-time updates without expensive retraining. An effective approach should process each sample in a single pass, while maintaining computational and memory complexities independent of the data stream length. Motivated by these challenges, this paper investigates the Momentum Least Mean Squares (MLMS) algorithm as an adaptive identification tool, leveraging its computational simplicity and online processing capabilities. Theoretically, we derive tracking performance and regret bounds for the MLMS in time-varying stochastic linear systems under various practical conditions. Unlike classical LMS, whose stability can be characterized by first-order random vector difference equations, MLMS introduces an additional dynamical state due to momentum, leading to second-order time-varying random vector difference equations whose stability analysis hinges on more complicated products of random matrices, which poses a substantially challenging problem to resolve. Experiments on synthetic and real-world data streams demonstrate that MLMS achieves rapid adaptation and robust tracking, in agreement with our theoretical results especially in nonstationary settings, highlighting its promise for modern streaming and online learning applications.

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

RankGraph-2: Lifecycle Co-Design for Billion-Node Graph Learning in Recommendation

Authors:
Renzhi Wu↗Zikun Cui↗Junjie Yang↗Tai Guo↗Hong Li↗Xian Chen↗Li Yu↗Ke Pan↗Sri Reddy↗Mahesh Srinivasan↗Nipun Mathur↗Haomin Yu↗…

arXiv:2606.18379v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Graph-based retrieval at billion-node scale requires jointly solving three tightly coupled problems – graph construction, representation learning, and real-time serving – yet existing work addresses each in isolation. We present RankGraph-2, a framework deployed at Meta that co-designs all three lifecycle stages for similarity-based retrieval (U2U2I and U2I2I), where each stage's requirements shape the others. Serving requires a co-learned cluster index to avoid expensive online KNN – this pushes index co-training into the training objective. Training benefits from the observation that similarity-based retrieval tolerates pre-computed neighborhoods, eliminating online graph infrastructure – this requires construction to produce self-contained data. Construction must also support hour-level refresh for item coverage. Acting on these cascading requirements, RankGraph-2 reduces hundreds of trillions of edges to hundreds of billions via subsampling with popularity bias correction, pre-computes multi-hop neighborhoods via personalized PageRank, and co-learns a residual-quantization cluster index that reduces serving computational cost by 83%. This lifecycle co-design enables a simple architecture to achieve 3.8 x higher recall than a GAT + Deep Graph Infomax model on a bipartite graph and 2.1 x higher than PyTorch-BigGraph on item retrieval. RankGraph-2 delivers up to +0.96% CTR and +2.75% CVR, and has powered 20+ retrieval launches across major surfaces.

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

MiniMax Sparse Attention

Authors:
Xunhao Lai↗Weiqi Xu↗Yufeng Yang↗Qiaorui Chen↗Yang Xu↗Lunbin Zeng↗Xiaolong Li↗Haohai Sun↗Haichao Zhu↗Vito Zhang↗Pengyu Zhao↗

arXiv:2606.13392v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Ultra-long-context capability is becoming indispensable for frontier LLMs: agentic workflows, repository-scale code reasoning, and persistent memory all require the model to jointly attend over hundreds of thousands to millions of tokens, yet the quadratic cost of softmax attention makes this untenable at deployment scale. We introduce MiniMax Sparse Attention (MSA), a blockwise sparse attention built upon Grouped Query Attention (GQA). A lightweight Index Branch scores key-value blocks and independently selects a Top-k subset for each GQA group, enabling group-specific sparse retrieval while maintaining efficient block-level execution; the Main Branch then performs exact block-sparse attention over only the selected blocks. Designed around a principle of simplicity and scalability, MSA is deliberately streamlined, making it straightforward to deploy efficiently across a broad range of GPUs. To translate sparsity into practical speedups, we co-design MSA with a GPU execution path that uses exp-free Top-k selection and KV-outer sparse attention to improve tensor-core utilization under block-granular access. On a 109B-parameter model with native multimodal training, MSA performs on par with GQA while reducing per-token attention compute by 28.4x at 1M context. Paired with our co-designed kernel, MSA achieves 14.2x prefill and 7.6x decoding wall-clock speedups on H800. Our inference kernel is available at: https://github.com/MiniMax-AI/MSA. A production-grade natively multimodal model powered by MSA has been publicly released at: https://huggingface.co/MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-M3.

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22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Exact Markovian Dissipation Requires Singular Energy Resources

Authors:
Hiroki Nakabayashi↗

arXiv:2606.19510v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Gorini–Kossakowski–Lindblad–Sudarshan (GKLS) equation describes irreversible quantum dynamical semigroups. We show that this description cannot be exact under physically regular energy conditions. We prove that the open-system survival probability under physically regular energy conditions has sublinear decay, whereas any dissipative GKLS semigroup has a linear short-time decay. Hence exact Markovian dissipation requires singular energy resources: an unbounded-below total Hamiltonian or infinite initial energy, and a divergent interaction-energy moment. Therefore, a dissipative time-independent GKLS equation should be regarded as an effective description rather than the exact reduced dynamics of a Hamiltonian dilation satisfying physically regular energy conditions.

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23.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Viability of engineered AAVs via protein language models

Authors:
Desrosiers↗Ocari↗Trinquier↗Zin↗E. A↗Van Meter↗Delmas↗Tekinsoy↗Planul↗Nemoto↗Dalkara↗Ferrari↗…

Capsid engineering has greatly improved the performance of recombinant AAV vectors used for gene therapy. One commonly used strategy is the insertion of a short, 7-mer, peptide into surface-exposed loops to modify receptor interactions and enhance cell entry. While effective in receptor retargeting and improved transduction, these insertions might destabilize the capsid protein, hinder assembly, and thus limit production. While previous attempts have used deep mutational scanning and AI to predict which insertions are viable, there is lack in understanding the structural consequences of these peptide insertions at the amino-acid level. Here we combined experiments, deep sequencing and large protein language models to gain insight on the impact of 7-mer insertions on the VR-VIII region. We first characterize the biochemical properties of viable insertions, thus identifying which residues are well tolerated, and which should instead be avoided. We then focus on the nearby context of those insertions, by studying the effect of the linkers, either for highly diverse libraries or for individual variants known for their efficiency. Next, we study the broader context, by extending our analysis to the whole capsid sequence, and identifying regions that can tolerate insertions without long-ranged structural deformations that could affect capsid functionality. We conclude with a cross-serotype comparison and a viability analysis of tens of previously engineered variants. Our work showcases how AI can uncover structure-function rules governing the success of engineered AAV capsids.

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

TokaMark: A Comprehensive Benchmark for MAST Tokamak Plasma Models

Authors:
C\'ecile Rousseau↗Samuel Jackson↗Rodrigo H. Ordonez-Hurtado↗Nicola C. Amorisco↗Tobia Boschi↗George K. Holt↗Andrea Loreti↗Eszter Sz\'ekely↗Alexander Whittle↗Adriano Agnello↗Stanislas Pamela↗Alessandra Pascale↗…

arXiv:2602.10132v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Development and operation of commercially viable fusion energy reactors such as tokamaks require accurate predictions of plasma dynamics from sparse, noisy, and incomplete sensors readings. The complexity of the underlying physics and the heterogeneity of experimental data pose formidable challenges for conventional numerical methods, and highlight the promise of modern data-native approaches. A major obstacle in realizing this potential is, however, the lack of curated, openly available datasets and standardized benchmarks. Existing fusion datasets are scarce, fragmented across institutions, facility-specific, and inconsistently annotated, which limits reproducibility and prevents a fair and scalable comparison of AI approaches. In this paper, we introduce TokaMark, a structured benchmark to evaluate AI models on real experimental data collected from the Mega Ampere Spherical Tokamak (MAST). TokaMark provides a comprehensive suite of tools designed to unify access to multi-modal fusion data and standardize evaluation protocols. The benchmark includes a curated list of 14 tasks spanning a range of physical mechanisms, exploiting a variety of diagnostics and covering multiple operational use cases. A baseline model is provided to facilitate transparent comparison and validation within a unified framework. By establishing a unified benchmark, TokaMark aims to accelerate progress in data-driven AI-based plasma modeling, contributing to the broader goal of achieving sustainable and stable fusion energy. The dataset, benchmark, documentation, and tooling are open-sourced under https://github.com/UKAEA-IBM-STFC-Fusion-FMs/tokamark_baseline.

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25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Improving Lunar Topography with Deep Learning Schrödinger Bridges

Authors:
Matthew Repasky↗Erwan Mazarico↗Michael K. Barker↗Stefano Bertone↗Terence J. Sabaka↗Yao Xie↗

Increasing the resolution of planetary topography models can enable a better understanding of surface processes and geomorphology; however, existing analytical super-resolution methods are expensive and difficult to apply at large scales. Generative models provide the tools to learn complex relationships within data and can be applied at scale due to hardware accelerators and parallelization. We present a diffusion-based Schrödinger Bridge (SB) generative modeling approach for lunar topography super-resolution, connecting the distribution of low-resolution topography to that of high-resolution topography, incorporating physically-constraining optical imagery. Our approach is inspired by existing Shape-from-Shading methods, which improve a priori low-resolution topography by using optical images at the target resolution. We train SBs on a novel dataset of rendered lunar topography, emulating optical imagery from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Narrow Angle Camera. The result is a flexible approach for topography super-resolution which can provide pixel-level uncertainties in the reconstruction.

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