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02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

MGUP: A Momentum-Gradient Alignment Update Policy for Stochastic Optimization

Authors:
Da Chang↗Ganzhao Yuan↗

arXiv:2606.17526v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient optimization is essential for training large language models. Although intra-layer selective updates have been explored, a general mechanism that enables fine-grained control while ensuring convergence guarantees is still lacking. To bridge this gap, we propose MGUP, a novel mechanism for selective updates. MGUP augments standard momentum-based optimizers by applying larger step-sizes to a selected fixed proportion of parameters in each iteration, while applying smaller, non-zero step-sizes to the rest. As a nearly {plug-and-play} module, MGUP seamlessly integrates with optimizers such as AdamW, Lion, and Muon. This yields powerful variants such as MGUP-AdamW, MGUP-Lion, and MGUP-Muon. Under standard assumptions, we provide theoretical convergence guarantees for MGUP-AdamW (without weight decay) in stochastic optimization. Extensive experiments across diverse tasks, including MAE pretraining, LLM pretraining, and downstream fine-tuning, demonstrate that our MGUP-enhanced optimizers achieve superior or more stable performance compared to their original base optimizers. We offer a principled, versatile, and theoretically grounded strategy for efficient intra-layer selective updates, accelerating and stabilizing the training of large-scale models. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/MaeChd/MGUP.

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

IndicContextEval: A Benchmark for Evaluating Context Utilisation in Audio Large Language Models Across 8 Indic Languages

Authors:
Sakshi Joshi↗Dhruv Subhash Rathi↗Sanskar Singh↗Eldho Ittan George↗R J Hari↗Kaushal Bhogale↗Mitesh M. Khapra↗

AudioLLMs enable speech recognition conditioned on textual prompts such as domain descriptions or entity lists. However, it remains unclear whether these models genuinely utilise such context or rely on parametric knowledge learned during pretraining. Existing benchmarks cannot answer this question because they evaluate transcription under fixed prompting conditions and rarely include explicit contextual inputs. We introduce IndicContextEval, a 56-hour multilingual benchmark of natural speech from 555 speakers across 8 Indian languages and 23 professional domains. We design a 7-level prompting framework that progressively introduces contextual signals, including metadata, natural-language descriptions, entity lists in English and native script, and adversarial prompts with incorrect entities. Evaluating five models reveals substantial differences in context utilisation behaviour, highlighting the need for explicit evaluation of contextual grounding in AudioLLMs.

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04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Difference-Making without Making a Difference

Authors:
Sander Beckers↗

arXiv:2606.24832v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Over a series of seven papers, Andreas & Günther have introduced seven definitions of actual causation and have classified them as belonging to three different, competing, types of accounts: factual difference-making, counterfactual difference-making, and regularity-based. I show that their most recent - factual difference-making - definition instantiates all three types, thereby proving that these are distinctions without a difference. I further compare their novel account to the other six accounts on several crucial examples, revealing that this undermines all seven of their accounts.

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05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Resourcefulness of non-classical continuous-variable quantum gates

Authors:
Massimo Frigerio↗Antoine Debray↗Nicolas Treps↗Mattia Walschaers↗

arXiv:2410.09226v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In continuous-variable quantum computation, identifying key elements that enable a quantum computational advantage is a long-standing issue. Starting from the standard results on the necessity of Wigner negativity, we develop a comprehensive and versatile approach in which the techniques of $(s)$-ordered quasiprobabilities are exploited to provide rigorous statements on the simulability of photonic quantum circuits consisting of previously characterized gates and thereby identifying the contribution of each quantum gate to the potential achievement of quantum computational advantage. This is achieved by means of an analysis of the so-called transfer function, allowing us to highlight the resourcefulness of a gate set. As such this technique can be straightforwardly applied to current continuous-variables quantum circuits, while also constraining the tolerable amount of losses above which any potential quantum advantage can be ruled out. We use $(s)$-ordered quasiprobability distributions on phase-space to capture the non-classical features in the protocol, and focus our technique entirely on the ordering parameter $s$. This allows us to highlight the resourcefulness and robustness to loss of a universal set of unitary gates comprising three distinct Gaussian gates and any non-Gaussian unitary gate, providing important insight on the role of non-Gaussianity.

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

Neural Scaling Universality: If Exponents Are Fixed, Time to Understand Coefficients

Authors:
Yizhou Liu↗Jeff Gore↗

Neural scaling laws describe how pre-training loss decays as power laws with training time, model size, and compute. This position paper argues that the exponents of these power laws are fixed by generic mechanisms: a one-third time scaling due to the strong nonlinearity of Softmax, an inverse width scaling due to representational superposition, and an inverse depth scaling due to ensemble averaging of Transformer layers. These mechanisms are robust to a wide range of data structures and architectural details, placing current large language models in a universality class with fixed exponents. The coefficients, however, are expected to be sensitive to data and architecture details, and directly determine practical quantities such as the optimal model shape and the compute-optimal frontier. We therefore argue that understanding the coefficients is the key to near-term performance improvements, and that a closer examination of the current universality class may reveal pathways to better universality classes.

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

Multi-User Dueling Bandits: A Fair Approach using Nash Social Welfare

Authors:
Maheed H. Ahmed↗Mahsa Ghasemi↗

arXiv:2605.01961v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learning from human preference data is becoming a useful tool, from fine-tuning large language models to training reinforcement learning agents. However, in most scenarios, the model is trained on the average preference of all human evaluators, which, under large variations of preferences, can be unfair to minority groups. In this work, we consider fairness in dueling bandits, a standard framework for online learning from preference data. We assume that each user has a (potentially distinct) Condorcet winner, which is an arm preferred to every other arm. Using these user-specific Condorcet winners as reference points, we evaluate and score arms according to their performance relative to the corresponding winner. To promote fairness across heterogeneous users, we adopt the well-established Nash Social Welfare objective, which maximizes the product of user utilities, thereby inherently penalizing inequality and preventing the marginalization of any single user. Within this framework, we construct a hard instance to establish a regret lower bound of $\Omega(T^{2/3}\min(K,D)^\frac{1}{3})$ for a time horizon $T$, $K$ arms, and $D$ users, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first result quantifying the cost of fairness in dueling bandits with heterogeneous preferences. We then present the Fair-Explore-Then-Commit and Fair-$\epsilon$-Greedy algorithms with a Condorcet winner identification phase. We further derive their regret upper bounds that match the lower-bound dependence on $T$ up to logarithmic factors.

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08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Your Mouse and Eyes Secretly Leak Your Preference: LLM Alignment using Implicit Feedback from Users

Authors:
Haw-Shiuan Chang↗Jeffrey Gomez↗Mehul Patwari↗Aryan Sajith↗Hamed Zamani↗

To align a Large Language Model (LLM), most existing methods collect explicit human feedback and train a reward model to predict the human preference based on the response text. These existing methods have two key limitations. First, the users rarely provide explicit feedback for LLM responses, which makes the high-quality preference annotation expensive to collect. Second, the methods do not leverage implicit human feedback, which has proven vital to the economic moats of Internet giants. To quantify the value of implicit feedback, we build a new dataset called IFLLM, which collects 1336 multi-turn questions from the 59 Mechanical Turk workers, their mouse trajectories, and eye gazing points to the LLMs' responses from their webcams. IFLLM shows that the users have very diverse types of gazing behavior and mouse trajectories. Our reward model based on the implicit user feedback boosts the accuracy of the text-based reward model from 55% to 64% and nearly triples the relative response quality improvements after applying the DPO to eight LLMs, demonstrating the value of implicit feedback in the wild. Our data collection website, dataset, and codes can be found at https://github.com/themehulpatwari/llm-implicit-feedback/.

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09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

OmniRetarget: Interaction-Preserving Data Generation for Humanoid Whole-Body Loco-Manipulation and Scene Interaction

Authors:
Lujie Yang↗Xiaoyu Huang↗Zhen Wu↗Angjoo Kanazawa↗Pieter Abbeel↗Carmelo Sferrazza↗C. Karen Liu↗Rocky Duan↗Guanya Shi↗

arXiv:2509.26633v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A dominant paradigm for teaching humanoid robots complex skills is to retarget human motions as kinematic references to train reinforcement learning (RL) policies. However, existing retargeting pipelines often struggle with the significant embodiment gap between humans and robots, producing physically implausible artifacts like foot-skating and penetration. More importantly, common retargeting methods neglect the rich human-object and human-environment interactions essential for expressive locomotion and loco-manipulation. To address this, we introduce OmniRetarget, an interaction-preserving data generation engine based on an interaction mesh that explicitly models and preserves the crucial spatial and contact relationships between an agent, the terrain, and manipulated objects. By minimizing the Laplacian deformation between the human and robot meshes while enforcing kinematic constraints, OmniRetarget generates kinematically feasible trajectories. Moreover, preserving task-relevant interactions enables efficient data augmentation, from a single demonstration to different robot embodiments, terrains, and object configurations. We comprehensively evaluate OmniRetarget by retargeting motions from OMOMO, LAFAN1, and our in-house MoCap datasets, generating over 8-hour trajectories that achieve better kinematic constraint satisfaction and contact preservation than widely used baselines. Such high-quality data enables proprioceptive RL policies to successfully execute long-horizon (up to 30 seconds) parkour and loco-manipulation skills on a Unitree G1 humanoid, trained with only 5 reward terms and simple domain randomization shared by all tasks, without any learning curriculum.

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

OR-Action: Multi-Role Video Understanding with Fine-Grained Actions

Authors:
Felix Tristram↗Ege \"Ozsoy↗Christian Benz↗Marcel Walch↗Ghazal Ghazaei↗Nassir Navab↗

Fine-grained understanding of operating room (OR) activity could enable workflow-aware assistance, yet remains difficult due to clutter, occlusions, and limited sensing. The prevailing approach to model this environment is scene graphs as an interpretable representation of OR interactions. Converting their frame-wise relational predictions into temporally extended, fine-grained actions however, is challenging without explicit temporal modeling. To enable a principled temporal evaluation of current OR understanding methods, we introduce the first action-centric benchmark built on a publicly available ego-exocentric OR dataset by defining a fine-grained, multi-role action taxonomy and generating dense action segments via distillation from ground-truth scene graph state changes. Experiments on this benchmark show that current scene graph prediction methods struggle to model temporal structure, even when adding explicit modeling through Graph Neural Networks. We therefore introduce a vision-only temporal model that outperforms graph-based methods significantly when using all available egocentric video as input. Building on this model we also introduce a novel multi- to single-view feature alignment strategy that improves single-view performance on multi-role action recognition, mitigating the need for extensive egocentric video capture. Benchmark and code will be released upon acceptance.

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

Progressive Pixel-Neighborhood Deformable Cross-Attention for Multispectral Object Detection

Authors:
Tian Qiu↗Jifeng Shen↗Xin Zuo↗

Effective cross-modal feature alignment and interaction are central challenges in multispectral object detection. Although global cross-attention provides strong long-range modeling ability, its quadratic complexity with respect to feature size limits deployment on resource-constrained platforms. We therefore propose Progressive Pixel-Neighborhood Deformable Cross-Attention for multispectral feature fusion, termed PNAFusion. The proposed framework is motivated by two observations: weak misalignment between visible and thermal images is usually concentrated around local neighborhoods, and semantic correspondence across modalities often follows non-linear spatial mappings that fixed receptive fields cannot model well. To address these issues, PNAFusion incorporates local spatial priors into its architectural design to concentrate feature interaction and alignment on the most relevant neighborhoods. Specifically, a Pixel-Neighborhood Cross-Attention (PNCA) module is introduced to avoid redundant global feature matching and suppress background noise. Meanwhile, an Adaptive Deformable Alignment (ADA) module captures non-linear spatial correspondences through learned pixel-wise offsets. These components are further integrated through an iterative feedback mechanism to progressively refine cross-modal feature alignment. Experiments on FLIR, M3FD, and DroneVehicle show that PNAFusion achieves 84.2, 90.5, and 85.5 mAP@0.5, respectively, under the YOLOv5 detector, and further reaches 86.8 mAP@0.5 on FLIR and 90.8 mAP@0.5 on M3FD when transferred to Co-DETR. Efficiency analysis indicates that PNAFusion reduces allocated GPU memory by 33.0\% compared with ICAFusion and reduces theoretical FLOPs from 194.8 G to 156.4 G, although the deformable sampling and iterative refinement introduce additional latency. Our code will be available at https://github.com/DanielQiuTian/PNAFusion.

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

On the Benefits of Weight Normalization for Overparameterized Matrix Sensing

Authors:
Yudong Wei↗Liang Zhang↗Bingcong Li↗Niao He↗

arXiv:2510.01175v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While normalization techniques are widely used in deep learning, their theoretical understanding remains relatively limited. In this work, we establish the benefits of (generalized) weight normalization (WN) applied to the overparameterized matrix sensing problem. We prove that WN with Riemannian optimization achieves linear convergence, yielding an exponential speedup over standard methods that do not use WN. Our analysis further demonstrates that both iteration and sample complexity improve polynomially as the level of overparameterization increases. To the best of our knowledge, this work provides the first characterization of how WN leverages overparameterization for faster convergence in matrix sensing.

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

LLMs Infer Cultural Context but Fail to Apply It When Responding

Authors:
Yisong Miao↗Jian Zhu↗Vered Shwartz↗

Recent work has shown that LLMs overrepresent dominant cultures, particularly Western ones, while marginalizing others. We investigate whether this affects models' ability to generate culturally adapted responses by evaluating their use of local measurement units based on the user's perceived cultural background. We introduce Cultural and Pragmatic Response Inference (CAPRI), a dataset of conversations with varying levels of cultural cues. Experiments with state-of-the-art LLMs show that models can infer cultural background and recall relevant conventions, but often fail to utilize the information to adapt their answers to the relevant cultural conventions, unless explicitly prompted to perform the tasks sequentially. We further evaluate adaptation to the interpretation of time and quantity expressions, two subjective language grounding dimensions that are affected by culture. We find that models increasingly adapt their answers as cultural cues accumulate, but their priors are not culture-neutral, sometimes aligning with the model's country of origin. Overall, CAPRI provides a resource for future research aimed at narrowing the gap between cultural knowledge and culturally adaptive language generation.

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15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Thermodynamics of quantum processes: An operational framework for free energy and reversible athermality

Authors:
Himanshu Badhani↗Dhanuja G. S↗Siddhartha Das↗

arXiv:2510.12790v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We explore the thermodynamics of quantum processes (quantum channels) by axiomatically introducing the free energy for channels, defined via the quantum relative entropy with an absolutely thermal channel whose fixed output is in equilibrium with a thermal reservoir. This definition finds strong support through its operational interpretations in designated quantum information and thermodynamic tasks. We construct a resource theory of athermality for quantum processes, where free operations are Gibbs preserving superchannels and golden units are unitary channels with respect to absolutely thermal channel having fully degenerate output Hamiltonian. We exactly characterize the one-shot distillation and formation of quantum channels using hypothesis-testing and max-relative entropy with respect to the absolutely thermal channel. These rates converge asymptotically to the channel free energy (up to a multiplicative factor of half the inverse temperature), establishing its operational meaning and proving the asymptotic reversibility of the athermality. We show the direct relation between the resource theory of athermality and quantum information tasks such as private randomness and purity distillation, and thermodynamic tasks of erasure and work extraction. Our work connects the core thermodynamic concepts of free energy, energy, entropy, and maximal extractable work of quantum processes to their information processing capabilities.

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

Think-at-Hard: Selective Latent Iterations to Improve Reasoning Language Models

Authors:
Tianyu Fu↗Yichen You↗Zekai Chen↗Guohao Dai↗Huazhong Yang↗Yu Wang↗

Improving the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), especially under parameter constraints, is crucial for real-world applications. Looped transformers address this by performing multiple latent iterations to refine each token beyond a single forward pass. However, we identify a latent overthinking phenomenon: most token predictions are already correct after the first pass, but are sometimes revised into errors in later iterations. We ask whether selectively skipping latent iterations can improve accuracy, and reveal significant potential with an oracle iteration policy that boosts performance by up to 7.3%. Motivated by this, we propose Think-at-Hard (TaH), a looped transformer optimized for selective iteration. TaH employs a lightweight neural decider to trigger latent iteration, only at tokens likely to be incorrect after the standard forward pass. During latent iterations, depth-aware Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) modules shift the objective from general next-token prediction to focused hard-token refinement. A duo-causal attention mechanism extends attention from the token sequence dimension to an additional iteration depth dimension, enabling cross-iteration information flow with full sequential parallelism. Experiments on nine benchmarks show consistent gains across math, QA, and coding tasks. With identical parameter counts, TaH outperforms always-iterate baselines by 3.8-4.4% while skipping iterations on 93% of tokens, and exceeds single-iteration Qwen3 baselines by 3.0-3.8%. When allowing

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

Temporal Preference Optimization for Unsupervised Retrieval

Authors:
HyunJin Kim↗Jaejun Shim↗Young Jin Kim↗JinYeong Bak↗

arXiv:2606.17664v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Unsupervised dense retrievers offer scalability by learning semantic similarity from unlabeled documents via contrastive learning, but they struggle to capture the temporal relevance, retrieving semantically related but temporally misaligned documents-an important aspect when a document collection spans multiple time periods (e.g., retrieving documents from 2018-2025 for "Who is the president in 2019?" introduces temporal ambiguity). Existing methods rely on supervised training with explicit timestamps, which are not always feasible. We propose TPOUR (Temporal Preference Optimization for Unsupervised Retriever), which uses our novel training method Temporal Retrieval Preference Optimization (TRPO). TRPO reinterprets preference learning in the temporal dimension, guiding the retriever to favor temporally aligned documents. TPOUR further generalizes to unseen time periods via interpolation in a learned time embedding, enabling continuous temporal alignment. Experiments on temporal information retrieval (T-IR), TPOUR outperforms both unsupervised and supervised baselines. Compared to Qwen-Embedding-8B, despite being about 72.7x smaller, TPOUR Contriever improves average nDCG@5 by +4.04 (+12.15%) on explicit and +4.98 (+15.21%) on implicit queries. We provide our code at https://github.com/agwaBom/TPOUR.

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18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Frozen Foundation-Model Embeddings Discard Small-Lesion Signal in Chest Radiography: Implications for Pre-Deployment Evaluation

Authors:
Raajitha Muthyala↗Zhenan Yin↗Alekhya Jilla↗Frank Li↗Theo Dapamede↗Bardia Khosravi↗Mohammadreza Chavoshi↗Judy Gichoya↗Saptarshi Purkayastha↗

Frozen vision-transformer (ViT) foundation-model embeddings increasingly serve as the substrate for downstream chest-radiography (CXR) pipelines, yet where small-scale, low-contrast signal is retained or lost in the frozen forward pass has not been systematically quantified across architectures, pretraining domains, and objectives. We probed five frozen ViTs (RAD-DINO, DINOv2-B/14, DINOv3 ViT-7B, BiomedCLIP, MedSigLIP) and a frozen DINO-pretrained ResNet-50 architectural control across three large CXR cohorts (NIH-CXR14, MIMIC-CXR, Emory-CXR; aggregate pool n=492,724) and ChestX-Det10 (n=3,543; 1,462 small-lesion bounding boxes across Calcification, Nodule, Mass). Each model was evaluated with a small-scale-perturbation panel and a region-aware bounding-box-stratified probe on real lesions, comparing three pooling modes from the same forward pass: classification token (CLS), patch-mean (mean over all final-layer patch tokens), and bounding-box-restricted patch-local. On the perturbation panel, CLS embeddings sat at the chance floor (area under the ROC curve [AUC] 0.500-0.524); patch-mean was indistinguishable from CLS on iso-blur and reticular-fine cells but rose with CLS on larger directional-blur footprints, while disease AUC on globally decided tasks ranged 0.642-0.913. Patch-local probes recovered AUC ~1.0 from the same forward pass (per-model mean improvement +0.412 to +0.488); the ResNet-50 control reproduced the chance floor. On ChestX-Det10, image-level CLS classification showed within-class small-versus-large stratum gaps up to +0.243 AUC; bounding-box-level patch-local pooling on the same forward pass recovered AUC >= 0.899 on every (model x class) cell. Frozen ViT embeddings silently suppress small-scale signal at the global-aggregation step; the signal is recoverable from patch tokens conditional on a region of interest.

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19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Large Fluctuations in Open Quantum Systems

Authors:
V. Yu. Mylnikov↗S. O. Potashin↗A. Kamenev↗

arXiv:2606.11822v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study statistics of atypical measurement outcomes in the steady states of driven open quantum systems. In equilibrium, the probability distribution over the phase space, as encoded in, e.g., the Wigner function, is analytic in the phase-space coordinates. We show that this property is generically lost in driven dissipative systems: their {\it large-deviation function} develops lines and surfaces across which its derivatives are discontinuous. As an illustrative example, we consider a parametrically driven Kerr oscillator coupled linearly and/or nonlinearly to a dissipative bath. Rare fluctuations in the amplitude and phase of the induced oscillations are governed by semiclassical instanton trajectories of the corresponding Keldysh-Lindblad action. We demonstrate that a given fluctuation can be realized through multiple distinct instanton trajectories. The competition between these trajectories leads to abrupt switching of the dominant instanton and, consequently, to non-analytic features in the large-deviation function.

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20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Scale Buys Interpolation, Structure Buys a Horizon: Certified Predictability for Equivariant World Models

Authors:
Hongbo Wang↗

arXiv:2606.13092v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scale buys interpolation; structure buys a certified horizon. A world model's average error says nothing about whether a particular prediction can be trusted, or for how long. For equivariant latent world models we give a computable, multi-step certificate of the predictable horizon: $T$-step rollout error is provably constant over each symmetry orbit (Theorem A) and stratified channel-by-channel by the predictor's Lyapunov spectrum, $T_j(\epsilon)\sim\log(1/\epsilon)/\lambda_j$. The horizon is two-sided – a matching lower bound makes approximate equivariance provably horizon-limited – and the certificate is exclusive to structure: orbit-constant error characterizes equivariance, so no non-equivariant model has it at any scale. Empirically, on 40-D Lorenz-96 only a $\mathbb{Z}_N$-equivariant network recovers the full Lyapunov spectrum ($R^2{=}0.98$); dense and recurrent baselines fail. Because the spectrum is faithful, the certificate acts, a priori: under a fixed sensing budget a $c\times$-inflated certificate provably needs $c\times$ the budget, and the equivariant certificate meets a budget its inflated dense counterpart cannot – with zero calibration data. The same read-out, unchanged, audits public pretrained world models training-free: TD-MPC2 checkpoints land on the certificate's own scope taxonomy – calibrated where strongly expansive (ratio 0.94-1.02), optimistic where weakly expansive, correctly abstaining where contracting – a map a deployed monitor replicates cell-by-cell, out-of-sample. Across the official 1M-317M multitask ladder, calibration does not improve with parameters. On V-JEPA 2-AC (1B, real robot data) the measured cross-check correctly overrides an over-promising tangent spectrum – the cross-validated audit, not the raw number, is the deployable object. Scale buys interpolation, not a calibrated horizon.

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

Versioned Late Materialization for Ultra-Long Sequence Training in Recommendation Systems at Scale

Authors:
Liang Guo↗Ge Song↗Litao Deng↗Jianhui Sun↗Chufeng Hu↗Lu Zhang↗Zhen Ma↗Shouwei Chen↗Weiran Liu↗Sarang Masti Sreeshylan↗Xiaoxuan Meng↗Yanzun Huang↗…

arXiv:2604.24806v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern Deep Learning Recommendation Models (DLRMs) follow scaling laws with sequence length, driving the frontier toward ultra-long User Interaction History (UIH). However, the industry-standard "Fat Row" paradigm, which pre-materializes these sequences into every training example, creates a storage and I/O wall where data infrastructure usage exceeds GPU training capacity due to data redundancy that is amplified in multi-tenant environments where models with vastly different sequence length requirements share a union dataset. We present a versioned late materialization paradigm that eliminates this redundancy by storing UIH once in a normalized, immutable tier and reconstructing sequences just-in-time during training via lightweight versioned pointers. The system ensures Online-to-Offline (O2O) consistency through a bifurcated protocol that prevents future leakage across both streaming and batch training, while a read-optimized immutable storage layer provides multi-dimensional projection pushdown for heterogeneous model tenants. Disaggregated data preprocessing with pipelined I/O prefetching and data-affinity optimizations masks the latency of training-time sequence reconstruction, keeping training throughput compute-bound by GPUs. Deployed on production DLRMs, the system reduces training data infrastructure resource usage while enabling aggressive sequence length scaling that delivers significant model quality gains, serving as the foundational data infrastructure for modern recommendation model architectures, including HSTU and ULTRA-HSTU.

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22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Shortened blastocyst vitrification achieves live birth rates comparable to standard protocols: an analysis of 3168 cryotransfers

Authors:
Ebinger↗Misurac↗Lynch↗Desai↗De Rosa↗Vassena↗Atkinson↗

Study question Do shortened blastocyst vitrification and warming protocols provide comparable live birth rates (LBR) and obstetrical and perinatal outcomes to traditional vitrification and warming protocols? Summary answer Shortened vitrification and warming protocols provide comparable LBR, obstetric and perinatal outcomes to traditional protocols. Shortened vitrification coupled with traditional multi step warming benefitted women >35yrs. What is known already Embryo viability following cryopreservation is dependent on blastomere survival and functional integrity, both impacted by ice crystal formation and osmotic gradients. Recent innovations in cryopreservation challenge the need for stepwise dehydration and rehydration protocols. While one step ''fast'' blastocyst warming protocols seem to provide equivalent clinical outcomes to traditional ''slow'' protocols, fewer studies investigate whether blastocyst dehydration rates can be similarly increased. A thorough safety and effectiveness evaluation remains necessary for both treatment success and offspring health. Study design, size, duration Three clinics within a network participated in this retrospective consecutive cohort study, with cycle data collected for 3603 warmed blastocysts resulting in 3168 frozen blastocyst transfers in 2170 patients between 2023 and 2025. We modelled the relationship between ''fast'' versus ''slow'' protocols and outcomes with Generalized Additive Models, and linear and logistic regressions where appropriate. Two tailed chi square with Yates correction was used to examine pregnancy loss and obstetrical and perinatal outcomes; p0.05). Importantly, women 35yrs or older at vitrification (n=1715 transfers) profited from a F/S strategy, which provided a significant increase in live birth rates (OR:1.42 [1.02-1.98] p=0.038) compared to S/S. The same improved live birth following a F/S strategy were also seen in embryos of lower quality (OR:1.78 [1.12-2.83] p=0.015), suggesting of a protective effect of this cryopreservation strategy on the developmental competence of impaired germplasm. Limitations, reasons for caution Factors affecting the results may be unaccounted for by the study retrospective nature. Wider implication of the findings Overall, shortened, ''faster'' vitrification and warming protocols provide comparable reproductive outcomes to traditional ones. The combination of shorter exposure to cryoprotectant (CPA) during vitrification and stepwise osmotic gradient during warming provided significant clinical benefits specifically to patients >35 and lower quality embryos, pointing to the possibility of adapting vitrification protocols to specific patients populations and optimizing their clinical outcomes.

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23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Ultrafast nonadiabatic dynamics of tetraphenylsubstituted nitrogen-based heterocycles

Authors:
Javier Hern\'andez-Rodr\'iguez↗Alberto Mart\'in Santa Dar\'ia↗Susana G\'omez-Carrasco↗Sandra G\'omez↗

arXiv:2604.16897v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Tetraphenylpyrazine (TPP) and 2,3,4,5-tetraphenyl-1H-pyrrole (TePP) are closely related heterocycles bearing four phenyl substituents, whose structural similarity makes them a useful pair for comparing how intramolecular flexibility influences excited-state relaxation and emission in the gas phase and in the solid state. TPP is a prototypical solid-state luminescence enhancement (SLE) emitter, exhibiting a markedly increased quantum yield upon molecular aggregation. In contrast, TePP displays similar quantum yields in solution and solid state, characteristic of dual-state emission (DSE). This behaviour indicates that intramolecular rotations are already significantly hindered in the isolated-molecule regime, consistent with our previous observations for TPP and other solid-state emitters (Hernández-Rodríguez et al., ChemPhysChem, 2024, 25, e202400563). To unravel the excited-state dynamics underlying this contrasting behaviour, we performed mixed quantum-classical trajectory simulations on a single molecule of TPP and TePP employing the surface-hopping method. Twelve singlet states were included at the TD-B3LYP-D3/def2-SVP level, which were previously benchmarked against coupled cluster methods. Simulated observables such as gas phase ultrafast electron diffraction (GUED) and time-resolved fluorescence (TR-FL) signals allow us to dissect the distinct deactivation pathways operating in both systems in the gas phase, while also providing mechanistic insight into how these pathways are expected to evolve in solution and solid-state environments.

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24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Human-centred design approaches to health facility design: Evidence from perinatal care settings in Ethiopia and Bangladesh

Authors:
Luna-Muse↗Chowdhury↗Sharif↗Olaya↗S. P↗Figueroa↗J. M↗Shao↗Brose↗Jassat↗Barker↗

While significant progress has been made in perinatal outcomes over recent decades in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), maternal and newborn quality improvement initiatives often fail to account for the spatial conditions in which they are implemented. Health systems are increasingly deploying evidence-based care models into built environments that are not optimally structured to meet the needs of its patient population. As the principal users, patients and health care workers can offer pragmatic insights about improving these structural designs. Our objective was to gather insights from patients, providers, and companions about how the physical design of their health facilities influenced their experience receiving or delivering perinatal care. We conducted a prospective observational study using a human-centred design (HCD) approach to analyse perceptions of the quality of perinatal care across two low resource settings: Ethiopia and Bangladesh. Using engagement and assessment tools, we conducted interviews, focus groups, facility walk-throughs, co-design workshops, and infrastructural assessments with patients, companions, providers, and Ministry of Health representatives. Descriptive statistics and thematic analysis were used to identify key learnings and develop recommendations. Across both countries, participants identified the need for facility layouts that better support privacy, mobility during labour, alternative birth positions, companion involvement, cultural and religious practices, sanitation, and provider visibility. Based on these insights, we developed six recommendations to better align health facility infrastructure with maternal and newborn care delivery needs. Our findings suggest that investments in health facility infrastructure may improve care experiences and help enable respectful, safe, and evidence-based maternal and newborn care. Alongside targeted spatial improvements, government authorities responsible for health facility planning should incorporate participatory design processes to ensure infrastructure reflects the needs of patients, companions, and providers and supports high-quality care delivery.

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25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Unlocking Diffusion Hierarchies: Adaptive Timestep Selection for Zero-Shot Segmentation

Authors:
Ramin Nakhli↗Mahesh Ramachandran↗Luca Ballan↗

Zero-shot segmentation has recently shown notable improvement by leveraging the rich visual priors in large-scale text-to-image diffusion models, such as Stable Diffusion. However, current diffusion-based methods often face limitations due to the trade-off between spatial resolution and contextual information, as well as their reliance on a single static timestep for feature extraction. To overcome these challenges, our work introduces two key advancements. First, our Contextual Similarity Maps fuse high-resolution attention maps with rich U-Net encoder features, providing both fine-grained and robust per-pixel representations. Second, we identify an emergent hierarchical semantic progression within the denoising process of various diffusion models: representations transition from part-level abstractions at earlier timesteps to object-level abstractions at later stages. Leveraging this insight, we introduce a mechanism to adaptively select the optimal timestep for each pixel. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing zero-shot segmentation baselines, validating the efficacy of combining contextual features with dynamic, hierarchical timestep selection.

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