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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Adaptive Weighted Averaging

arXiv:2606.12763v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the problem of selecting the largest among $n$ unknown values $x_1,\dots,x_n$ given only a single unbiased estimate $y_i$ for each $x_i$. We design strategies that are simultaneously admissible (not uniformly dominated by any other strategy) and also never worse than a given baseline such as uniform random selection. We provide an application to stochastic optimization, where we obtain online-to-batch conversion bounds with a desirable "no-compromise" guarantee: they are never worse than standard random iterate selection, and yet can be significantly better in benign settings.

03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

A Tail-Respecting Splitting Numerical Scheme for Lévy-Driven SDEs With Superlinear Drifts

arXiv:2504.07255v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present an explicit numerical approximation scheme, denoted by $\{X^n\}$, for the effective simulation of solutions $X$ to a multivariate stochastic differential equation (SDE) with a superlinearly growing $\kappa$-dissipative drift, where $\kappa>1$, driven by a multiplicative heavy-tailed Lévy process that has a finite $p$-th moment, with $p>0$. We show that the strong $L^{p_X}$-convergence $\sup_{t\in[0,T]}\mathbf E \|X^n_t-X_t\|^{p_X}=\mathcal O (h_n^{\gamma})$ holds for any $p_X\in (0,p+\kappa-1)$, which is exactly the range where the $p_X$-moment of the solution is known to be finite. Additionally, for any $p_X\in (0,p)$ we establish strong uniform convergence: $\mathbf E\sup_{t\in[0,T]} \|X^n_t-X_t\|^{p_X}=\mathcal{O} ( h_n^{\delta} )$. In both cases we determine the convergence rates $\gamma$ and $\delta$. In the special case of SDEs driven solely by a Brownian motion, our numerical scheme preserves super-exponential moments of the solution. The scheme $\{X^n\}$ is realized as a combination of a well-known Euler method with a Lie-Trotter type splitting technique.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

A physical adaptive material motor unit neural network: a hygromorph composite material machine

arXiv:2606.18275v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Advances in novel materials science enable structures to function as intelligent machines by embedding memory and learning capabilities directly into materials. Our work introduces a physical adaptive material motor unit neural network,leveraging a new generation of controllable actuators composed of wood- and carbon black-based composites, sensitive to temperature and relative humidity. These material actuators are assembled into a motor unit-like structure inspired by muscle contraction trigger, forming an intelligent machine capable of dynamic shading control that can be used, for example, in buildings. The machine is governed by a neural network trained on over 350 experimental data points collected under diverse environmental conditions. By establishing a new data-aware backpropagation training, we show that the machine predicts shading responses and learns to predict appropriate behaviour incrementally as the database expands. We also demonstrate the ability of the machine to optimise configurations to achieve similar shading outputs under two distinct conditions.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Active Reference Acquisition in Few-Shot Font Generation

Few-shot font generation aims to synthesize the remaining glyphs of a font given one or a few reference glyphs while preserving stylistic consistency, thereby supporting font designers in efficiently completing a typeface. Existing methods primarily focus on improving generation quality given a fixed reference set. However, when the current reference glyphs are insufficient to represent the target style, few-shot font generation may fail to produce satisfactory results. In practical scenarios, additional reference glyphs can often be obtained from the designer when necessary. Accordingly, we propose a new framework, Active Reference Acquisition in Few-Shot Font Generation, in which the model sequentially decides which character to acquire next as an additional reference. Furthermore, we propose a reference part-coverage-based acquisition function to efficiently query the designer. Motivated by the observation that font styles are well characterized by local structural parts, we represent each glyph using a histogram of local features and select query characters that maximize the expected part coverage of the reference set. By prioritizing characters that contain parts not yet covered by the current references, the proposed method progressively expands the diversity of visual parts in the reference set. As a result, generation quality is improved with fewer queries. Experiments on the Google Fonts dataset demonstrate that the proposed method achieves higher generation quality than random querying and reference-agnostic baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/matsuo-shinnosuke/ActiveRef-FontGen.

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

Can professional translators identify machine-generated text?

This study investigates whether professional translators without prior specialized training can reliably identify short stories generated in Italian by artificial intelligence (AI). Sixty-nine translators took part in an in-person experiment, where they assessed three anonymized short stories - two written by ChatGPT-4o and one by a human author. For each story, participants rated the likelihood of AI authorship and provided justifications for their choices. While average results were inconclusive, a statistically significant subset (16.2%) successfully distinguished the synthetic texts from the human text, suggesting that their judgements were informed by analytical skill rather than chance. However, a nearly equal number misclassified the texts in the opposite direction, often relying on subjective impressions rather than objective markers, possibly reflecting a reader preference for AI-generated texts. Low burstiness and narrative contradiction emerged as the most reliable indicators of synthetic authorship, with unexpected calques, semantic loans and syntactic transfer from English also reported. In contrast, features such as grammatical accuracy and emotional tone frequently led to misclassification. These findings raise questions about the role and scope of synthetic-text editing in professional contexts.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

FacProcessTwin: An LLM-Based System for Process Twin Development

arXiv:2606.17666v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Process twins provide real-time representations of entire production processes. By capturing how process steps interact, rather than monitoring a single machine in isolation as an asset-based digital twin does, they have the potential to drive efficiency gains across the whole process. However, developing a process twin is costly. It requires accurately modelling the entire production process: its process steps, the equipment and product-specific settings each step uses, and its process variations. The resulting model must then be bound to live operational data. We present FacProcessTwin, a system that leverages a large language model (LLM) to reduce this development time, building a process twin from a plant's process documentation and natural-language input from an operator. FacProcessTwin generates this complete process model and then automatically binds its process steps to live operational data. The generated model and its data bindings are rendered as an interactive process diagram through which manufacturing personnel can monitor and correct the system's autonomous decisions, such as resolving uncertainty at safety-critical binding steps. We evaluate FacProcessTwin through a real-world case study of an Australian food manufacturer, covering 16 production process flows that span chilled, frozen, and aseptic shelf-stable product categories and include process variations within the same product. The results show that FacProcessTwin generates these process models accurately (a mean F1 of 95.2% against ground truth) and builds each twin in roughly a sixth of the manual time. Its human-in-the-loop governance then keeps the safety-critical bindings correct: at ambiguous tags where a single-pass baseline silently mis-binds 75.0% of the time, FacProcessTwin defers to the operator and mis-binds none.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Near-Optimal Learning of Local Lindbladians

arXiv:2606.20535v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the problem of learning local Lindbladians from black-box access to the physical evolution, and the goal is to estimate all Hamiltonian and dissipative coefficients. We give an algorithm built directly from finite-time channel probes, which runs the unknown evolution for short times, estimates the corresponding Pauli transfer matrices from classical shadows, and converts these estimates into Lindbladian coefficients by stable local Fourier inversions. For fixed locality and bounded dissipative site degree, the uses of the dynamical evolution and total evolution time scale as $\widetilde{O}(\Lambda^2/\varepsilon^2)$ and $\widetilde{O}(\Lambda/\varepsilon^2)$ respectively, in the local dynamical strength bound $\Lambda$ and target accuracy $\varepsilon$, with only logarithmic dependence on the number of qubits. The algorithm is non-adaptive, uses no ancillas, and uses only random product states as inputs followed by random Pauli measurements. The method does not require knowing the support of the Lindbladian in advance. We complement the algorithm with matching lower bounds, showing that the learning algorithm is near-optimal both in physical dynamics accesses and in total evolution time. We construct a single-qubit dephasing Lindbladian family that already requires $\Omega(\Lambda^2/\varepsilon^2)$ channel uses and $\Omega(\Lambda/\varepsilon^2)$ total evolution time, even for adaptive algorithms with arbitrary ancillas and measurements. In particular, the lower bounds imply that the Heisenberg-limited scaling achievable for Hamiltonian learning is information-theoretically impossible once dissipative coefficients must be estimated.

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

Toward Calibrated Mixture-of-Experts Under Distribution Shift

arXiv:2606.20544v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Calibration aligns a model's predictive uncertainty with the frequencies of its empirical outcomes and is important for understanding and trusting reported probabilities. Recent work shows that enforcing calibration at the level of individual predictors can improve ensemble accuracy and calibration, with mixture-of-experts (MoE) models showing strong empirical improvements in particular; however, the conditions under which calibration helps MoE are not well understood. In this work, we study how MoE models behave under distribution shift, focusing on how routing mechanisms interact with expert-level calibration. We show that expert calibration is sufficient to ensure calibration of the overall model under a broad class of distribution shifts in hard-routed models, but is insufficient for calibrating soft-routed models. To address this, we propose an adversarial reweighting that penalizes calibration errors of the routed aggregate under distribution shift, and we demonstrate that it improves the accuracy-calibration tradeoff both on average and on difficult subsets of the data, across model classes, prediction tasks, and distribution shifts.

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

A finite-element-inspired bipartite graph learned simulator for manufacturability assessment in large-deformation sheet forming

arXiv:2605.22845v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Explicit dynamic finite element (FE) simulations are widely used for large deformation engineering analysis, but repeated simulations remain costly during design space exploration and optimisation. In explicit FE analysis, nodal kinematics and element level deformation measures evolve through coupled node element updates. This motivates graph learned simulators that approximate one step FE state transitions and roll them out autoregressively. However, many mesh based graph surrogates are node centred, which makes element level variables and native nodal elemental exchange less direct to represent. This work proposes CAttBiGNN, a cross attention based bipartite graph neural network for coupled nodal elemental learning. The graph represents FE mesh nodes and elements as distinct entities linked by directed node element edges, enabling nodal displacement increments and element level deformation states to be predicted on their native discretisation domains. An edge aware cross attention processor uses geometric edge embeddings to modulate directional node element message passing. For larger graphs, CAttBiUGNN combines the bipartite processor with graph downsampling and upsampling to improve long-range information propagation. The method is evaluated on dome shaped cold forming and corner shaped hot forming benchmarks. Comparisons with node centred baselines and bipartite and attention ablations show improved accuracy and balance in nodal displacement and elemental thinning prediction during autoregressive rollout. The results indicate that the proposed finite element inspired learned simulator can support manufacturability oriented field prediction and efficient design space exploration in large deformation sheet material forming.

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

Operator Learning for efficient Quantum Computation

arXiv:2606.20184v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: An efficient implementation of quantum algorithms is often hindered by the lack of efficient primitives for operators and state preparation. This limits both the ability of near-term quantum hardware to simulate complex problems and the potential of fault-tolerant algorithms to achieve practical quantum advantage. To address this, we propose a full-stack variational framework that transforms arbitrary operators to compact quantum circuits. The resulting variational circuits can be tailored to the connectivity and long-range interaction of the target hardware. The learning process employs backpropagation together with a cost function that efficiently optimizes unitary operators and non-unitary – dense or sparse – operators using only a single ancilla qubit for block encoding. Additionally, we introduce a regularization term that reduces the approximation error. The approach is validated for both quantum mechanical and engineering applications. In the former case, we learn propagators that arise in native quantum problems – such as quantum simulation and quantum chemistry – and achieve improved resource scaling in comparison to standard Suzuki-Trotter expansions. In the latter case, we demonstrate the approach's ability to implement the second-order central finite difference approximation of the Laplace operator – relevant for solving partial differential equations – while improving upon current error metrics. The final example deals with learning a dense, non-unitary operator that arises in the analysis of inviscid potential flow around an airfoil. This universality of the framework opens the door for solving general problems beyond prototypical engineering and quantum applications.

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

A polynomial-time approximation scheme for minimum-weight decoding of topological codes

arXiv:2606.18145v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Two-dimensional topological translationally invariant (2D TTI) stabilizer codes lie at the heart of fault-tolerant quantum computation, but using them requires solving the decoding problem. Minimum-weight decoding of these codes was recently shown to be NP-hard, even in basic settings, such as the color code with Pauli $Z$ errors and the toric code with Pauli $X$, $Y$ and $Z$ errors. Here, we prove that minimum-weight decoding of 2D TTI codes nonetheless admits a polynomial-time approximation scheme (PTAS), i.e., for any constant $\varepsilon>0$, a recovery operator of weight within a multiplicative factor of $1+\varepsilon$ of the minimum can be found in polynomial time. Our approach builds on Arora's PTAS for Euclidean problems, such as the traveling salesman problem, and applies when decoding can be cast in terms of point-like excitations connected by string-like errors. It therefore extends beyond two dimensions, covering certain higher-dimensional topological codes and quantum memories, including the toric code with phenomenological or circuit-level noise.

13.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-15

Blood signatures of cell type-specific aging forecast disease risk and resilience

Authors: Unknown Author

By measuring thousands of proteins in blood samples from over 60,000 people, we built molecular ‘clocks’ to estimate how fast cells age. Our analyses show that cell types age at different rates within the same person. Accelerated aging of specific cell types is associated with increased disease risk, whereas slower aging of others is linked to protection and improved survival.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Allure of Craquelure: A Variational-Generative Approach to Crack Detection in Paintings

Recent advances in imaging technologies, deep learning and numerical performance have enabled non-invasive detailed analysis of artworks, supporting their documentation and conservation. In particular, automated detection of craquelure in digitized paintings is crucial for assessing degradation and guiding restoration, yet remains challenging due to the possibly complex scenery and the visual similarity between cracks and crack-like artistic features such as brush strokes or hair. We propose a hybrid approach that models crack detection as an inverse problem, decomposing an observed image into a crack-free painting and a crack component. A deep generative model is employed as powerful prior for the underlying artwork, while crack structures are captured using a Mumford–Shah-type variational functional together with a crack prior. Joint optimization yields a pixel-level map of crack localizations in the painting.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

VERITAS: Verifier-Guided Proof Search for Zero-Shot Formal Theorem Proving

arXiv:2606.19399v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based formal provers often collapse rich verifier signals (syntax errors, type mismatches, partial goal progress) into a binary pass/fail bit. We present VERITAS, a zero-shot framework that routes every verifier signal back into proof search through a two-phase protocol: Best-of-N sampling first, then a critic-guided MCTS pass that ingests Phase 1 failures as explicit negative examples. The protocol preserves every theorem solved by its own Phase 1 sweep, so Phase 2's additional solves are attributable to feedback-driven exploration. VERITAS reaches 40.6% on miniF2F (vs. an independently run Best-of-5 at 36.9%, Portfolio 26.2%) and 7.3% on VERITAS-CombiBench, a 55-theorem combinatorics benchmark we release on which Best-of-5 (1.8%) falls below Portfolio (3.6%), exposing that unguided sampling hurts when correct lemma names must be recovered iteratively from verifier feedback. Artifacts are available on GitHub.

16.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Unbiased Derivative Estimation for Stationary Mean of Parameterized Markov chains

arXiv:2606.11487v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose a new approach to unbiased estimation of the gradients of the stationary means associated with parametrized families of Markov chains. Our estimators are particularly efficient when the Markov chains have slow mixing rate. Our approach does not require a specific parametrization except for an oracle to evaluate the transition density and its gradient at a given data point without any additional knowledge about the density function itself. It makes our estimator suitable for parametrizations associated with neural networks. The estimator can potentially achieve large improvement in terms of efficiency. Numerical experiments confirm the good performance predicted by the theory.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Characteristics and Outcomes of Gene-Elusive Dilated Cardiomyopathy

Background and Aims Genetic testing in dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) guides risk stratification and family screening. Likely pathogenic or pathogenic (LP/P) variants are identified in approximately one-third of patients, leaving many without a genetic diagnosis. Cohort studies suggest that "gene-elusive" patients have a lower risk of adverse events. This study aims to better characterise this group and identify factors associated with adverse outcomes. Methods Consecutive and unrelated DCM patients undergoing genetic testing and returning no LP/P variants were retrospectively recruited and compared to two control cohorts of DCM patients carrying LP/P variants in LMNA and TTN for a primary composite endpoint of end-stage heart failure (ESHF) or malignant ventricular arrhythmia (MVA). Results Among patients without prior MVA, the composite endpoint occurred in 36/423 (8.5%) gene-elusive, 14/39 (35.9%) LMNA and 11/100 (11%) TTN cardiomyopathy patients (log-rank p

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

On the empirical spectral distribution of matrix perpetuities

arXiv:2605.31054v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study matrix perpetuities, that is, solutions to affine fixed-point equations of the form \[ \mathbf{X} \stackrel{d}{=} \mathbf{A}\,\mathbf{X} \,\mathbf{A}^\top+\mathbf{B},\qquad (\mathbf{A},\mathbf{B})\mbox{ and }\mathbf{X} \mbox{ are independent}, \] with particular emphasis on the empirical spectral distribution of the solution. We first establish existence and uniqueness results by relating the problem to classical vector perpetuities, and then develop tools that preserve the matrix structure under orthogonal invariance. For positive semidefinite, orthogonally invariant models, we obtain power-law tail asymptotics for the expected empirical spectral distribution and show that the tail is governed by the largest eigenvalue. We also prove that, in the subcritical regime, the expected empirical spectral distribution of matrix perpetuities converges weakly, as the dimension tends to infinity, to the distribution of the corresponding free perpetuity. Our results are illustrated by matrix Beta prime perpetuities, for which explicit limiting spectral distributions are available.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Helical Dirac Current with Local Coupling to a Chiral Potential

arXiv:2606.17618v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We show that exact Dirac eigenstates in cylindrical confinement carry a definite helical conserved-current texture even in the zero orbital angular momentum channel l = 0. For the lowest confined mode, the Dirac current contains a nonvanishing azimuthal component together with longitudinal transport and exhibits opposite handedness in the two spin-resolved sectors. The structure also persists into the evanescent region. We further derive the channel-resolved matrix-element kernel generated by a static chiral scalar potential acting on the confined l = 0 Dirac modes. The resulting spin-selective coupling arises from the Dirac current texture and the scalar chiral potential, and yields a geometric selection rule in which diagonal channels vanish while off-diagonal conversion channels survive. The coupling strength is governed by an internal sampled-current overlap Jchi(k), defined as the integral from 0 to R of f(rho) times jphi_up(rho, k) times rho d rho. This quantity measures the spatial overlap between the chiral radial profile and the spin-up azimuthal Dirac-current density. The mechanism is fully local and texture-based, without external magnetic fields or spin-orbit coupling. Within standard Dirac theory, this work identifies the minimal static Dirac-geometric kernel underlying spin-selective response, establishing a baseline structure from which dynamical-medium, scattering, and transport formalisms can be systematically developed toward a complete description of spin-polarization phenomena such as CISS.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

AuAu: A Benchmark for Auditing Authoritarian Alignment in Large Language Models

The worldwide surge of authoritarianism, combined with the increasing central role in users' everyday lives, raises the question of to what extent specific models exhibit or promote authoritarian attitudes and characteristics. We introduce AuAu, a comprehensive benchmark that aims to assess the risk of LLMs generating responses with authoritarian tendencies. This benchmark combines three evaluation approaches: (i) psychometric questions from an extensive pool of 15 human validated instruments; (ii) contextual behavior vignettes probing intended actions in concrete situations; and (iii) responses to realistic user prompts. Unlike prior work, AuAu evaluates not only a general closeness towards authoritarianism but also the established sub-concepts Authoritarian Aggression, Authoritarian Submission, and Conventionalism. Evaluating 17 models from China, the EU, Russia, and the USA, we find that all tested models exhibit substantial authoritarian response rates under the psychometric evaluation, though rates drop significantly in increasingly more realistic downstream task. We further find that an authoritarian system prompt easily manipulates 15 out of 17 models to promote increased authoritarianism. Our results underscore the need for continued, systematic auditing of LLM-based AI systems to detect and ultimately mitigate undesired authoritarian tendencies in generated output. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/andreaseinwiller/AuAu

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Exploiting More Than Symmetry in Variational Quantum Machine Learning

arXiv:2606.20316v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The success of variational quantum learning models crucially depends on choosing parametrizations that reflect the structure of the problem at hand. Symmetries provide one of the clearest such structures: whenever transformations of the input leave the desired outcome unchanged, this invariance should be built into the model rather than discovered during training. However, imposing a symmetry does not by itself determine a useful ansatz. Even within the symmetry-preserving space, one must decide where the trainable degrees of freedom should be placed. In this work, we study this remaining design freedom in equivariant variational quantum circuits. Building on symmetry-based parameter sharing, we disentangle two architectural choices: how much symmetry should be enforced, and which symmetry-respecting interactions should be trainable. Using Tic-Tac-Toe as a fully enumerable and structurally transparent test case, we find that suitable subgroups preserve most of the generalization benefit. By contrast, the dominant gains arise from gates acting directly on decisive task motifs. Thus, symmetry defines the admissible design space, while effective ansatze require an additional task-informed choice of trainable interactions.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Majority-of-Three is Optimal

arXiv:2606.13614v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We give a short proof that the majority vote of three independent consistent classifiers is an optimal learner in the realizable PAC setting. This proves optimality for the simplest voting scheme, while simplifying both the algorithmic structure and the probabilistic analysis of previous voting learners, including the algorithm of S. Hanneke and the analysis of bagging by K. Green Larsen.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Variational Deep Unfolding with Mamba-Based Nonlocal Modeling for Underwater Image Enhancement

Underwater imaging plays a crucial role in ocean engineering, although captured data often suffer from poor visibility and color distortion. To address these challenges, we propose a model-based deep unfolding network for underwater image enhancement that integrates variational modeling into a learnable architecture. The framework is guided by a variational formulation based on a dehazing decomposition, incorporating a multiplicative residual component to absorb remaining artifacts and a nonlocal gradient-type constraint to preserve structural details and enhance edge sharpness. We provide a theoretical analysis establishing the existence of solution for the associated minimization problem. The proposed unfolding method incorporates Mamba layers to efficiently capture self-similarities in the scene. In addition, we introduce a proximal trajectory loss that enforces consistency between the unfolding stages and the iterations of an ideal restoration regularizer. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed unfolding approach achieves improved visual quality and competitive quantitative performance compared with recent state-of-the-art methods. The source code will be available at https://github.com/MIA-UIB/Variational-Unfolding-Mamba-Underwater-Enhancement .

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Low-Energy Reduced RISC-V Instruction Subset Processor for Tsetlin Machine Inference at the Edge

arXiv:2606.19964v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tsetlin Machine (TM) is a logic-based machine learning approach that relies on simple bitwise operations and finite-state automata, which makes it attractive for edge AI deployments. Recent work has focused on co-processor and accelerator designs based on Tsetlin Machines (TMs). Although these designs achieve high performance, they typically depend on tightly coupled interfaces, microcode-style programming, and external host processors, limiting flexibility and ease of programming. In this work, we present a domain-specific RISC-V microprocessor architecture and design flow tailored for TM inference. Leveraging the modular structure of RISC-V, we design a reduced instruction subset processor that retains programmability while targeting improved performance and lower energy consumption for TM workloads. Instruction profiling is employed to guide instruction reduction, followed by datapath and control path simplifications tailored to TM inference. Both the baseline RV32IM core and the proposed reduced core are evaluated across multiple datasets and compared with Binarized Neural Networks (BNNs), which serve as a hardware-efficient baseline due to their reliance on bitwise operations during inference. Results show that TM achieves comparable or higher accuracy (e.g., up to 88.18% on CIFAR-2 compared to 60.0% for BNN) while reducing execution time by up to 98% across multiple datasets. Furthermore, the proposed design achieves an average $29.7\times$ reduction in energy consumption, demonstrating its effectiveness for programmable and efficient edge AI systems.

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

Beyond Scalar Rewards by Internalizing Reasoning into Score Distributions

Reward models are central to text-to-image post-training, but visual preference is subjective and better represented as a distribution over rubric scores than as a deterministic scalar. Existing scalar, score-token, and pairwise reward models over-compress uncertainty and fine-grained score differences, while reasoning-based generative rewards provide stronger judgments but are costly to deploy and difficult to use as direct optimization signals. We propose Z-Reward, a teacher-student reward modeling framework that decouples reasoning-heavy judgment from efficient reward deployment. The teacher is a large VLM that uses reasoning to infer rubric-aligned score distributions, and is trained with Group-wise Direct Score Optimization (GDSO), which combines policy-gradient rewards from distribution expectations with direct pointwise and pairwise supervision on score distributions and score gaps. The student is trained with Reasoning-Internalized Score Distillation (RISD), which transfers the teacher's reasoning-conditioned score distribution into a compact VLM without requiring explicit reasoning chains at inference time. On our internally annotated evaluation set, the 27B GDSO teacher reaches 89.6% human preference accuracy, outperforming SFT, RewardDance, and GRPO, while the 9B RISD student reaches 88.6%, outperforming the OPD baseline and closely matching the larger teacher. We further show that Z-Reward can serve as a differentiable reward signal for text-to-image optimization, yielding a 41.3% net human-preference improvement over the SFT baseline.