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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Spin mixing induced dynamics of spinor solitons in $F=1$ Bose Einstein condensates

arXiv:2606.14231v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We explore soliton interactions in a homogeneous spinor $F=1$ Bose Einstein Condensate (BEC) in the presence of a magnetic field, focusing on dark bright dark and bright dark bright configurations. We investigate how these interactions depend on the phase differences among bright solitons and their influence during the dynamics. Our findings align with prior non spinor results, i.e., repulsion among in phase bright solitons and attraction among out of phase pairs in self repulsive atomic BECs. The potential bright soliton attraction, added to the short range repulsion of dark dark soliton interactions, can lead to bound states. However, we find that these bound states break in the presence of spinor interactions due to the particle exchange dynamics between the hyperfine states of the components. Additonally, we develop an effective classical model to describe the soliton dynamics, using a Lagrangian approach. The accuracy of the model is tested by comparing it against numerical simulations. Our results suggest that the proposed model captures the essential features of soliton behavior in the presence of spin interactions, and provides congruent soliton trajectories and interspecies particle exchange dynamics in most of the cases.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

CentroidKV: Efficient Long-Context LLM Inference via KV Cache Clustering

Large language models (LLMs) with extended context windows have become increasingly prevalent for tackling complex tasks. However, the substantial Key-Value (KV) cache required for long-context LLMs poses significant deployment challenges. Existing approaches either discard potentially critical information needed for future generations or offer limited efficiency gains due to high computational overhead. In this paper, we introduce CentroidKV, a simple yet effective framework for online KV cache clustering. Our approach is based on the observation that key states exhibit high similarity along the sequence dimension. To enable efficient clustering, we divide the sequence into chunks and propose Chunked Soft Matching, which employs an alternating partition strategy within each chunk and identifies clusters based on similarity. CentroidKV then merges the KV cache within each cluster into a single centroid. Additionally, we provide a theoretical analysis of the computational complexity and the optimality of the intra-chunk partitioning strategy. Extensive experiments across various models and long-context benchmarks demonstrate that CentroidKV achieves up to 75% reduction in KV cache memory usage while maintaining comparable model performance. Moreover, with minimal computational overhead, CentroidKV accelerates the decoding stage of inference by up to $1.92\times$ and increases the serving throughput by up to $4\times$.

04.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Structural basis for chaperone-guided assembly of RNA-induced silencing complex

The RNA-induced silencing complex (RISC), comprising an Argonaute (AGO) protein and a small RNA, is the central effector in RNA silencing. Small RNAs are loaded onto AGO as bulky duplexes in an HSP70- and HSP90-dependent process1–3, but the molecular mechanism remains poorly understood. Here we identify the human AGO–HSP90–p23 complex, which captures AGO in an RNA-free state, termed the AGO maturation complex (AMC). The purified AMC enables RNA loading and AGO folding, faithfully recapitulating de novo RISC assembly. Using cryogenic electron microscopy, we determined the structure of AMC bound to a microRNA duplex. In contrast to its conformation in the RISC, AGO adopts a highly open conformation in the AMC: the N domain and the RNA-binding module (PAZ–MID–PIWI) are fully detached and anchored to opposite sides of the HSP90 dimer, connected solely by the unfolded L1 linker. This arrangement exposes a positively charged cleft that accommodates an RNA duplex. AGO folding is facilitated by a small RNA duplex containing a 5′-terminal phosphate—but not by single-stranded RNAs—revealing a role for the RNA duplex as a chaperone-like cofactor that directs AGO domain assembly. These findings elucidate the RISC assembly mechanism and establish the AMC as a molecular tool for probing optimal RNA features and chemical modifications for the rational design of small interfering RNA therapeutics. Our study also sheds light on how chaperones, together with ligands, can guide the folding of client proteins. Structures of the AGO maturation complex reveal how chaperones and an RNA duplex drive assembly of the RNA-induced silencing complex.

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

Structural Energy Guidance for View-Consistent Text-to-3D Generation

Text-to-3D generation based on diffusion models often suffers from the Janus problem, leading to inconsistent geometry across viewpoints. This work identifies viewpoint bias in 2D diffusion priors as the main cause and proposes Structural Energy-Guided Sampling (SEGS), a training-free and plug-and-play framework to improve multi-view consistency. SEGS constructs a structural energy in the PCA subspace of U-Net features and injects its gradient into the denoising process. It can be easily integrated into SDS/VSD pipelines without retraining. Experiments show that SEGS reduces the Janus Rate by about 10% on average and improves View-CS scores across multiple baselines, including DreamFusion, Magic3D, and LucidDreamer. This method effectively alleviates viewpoint artifacts while preserving appearance fidelity, providing a flexible solution for high-quality text-to-3D content generation.

06.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

cuBayes: GPU accelerated FreeBayes that achieves 1-minute whole-genome SNV calling while maintaining algorithmic semantics

Next-generation sequencing now produces whole-genome data in hours, but downstream variant calling remains a multi-hour to multi-day bottleneck that excludes genomic analysis from time-critical clinical settings. GPU acceleration offers a natural path forward – variant calling is inherently parallelizable across genomic positions – yet open-source infrastructure for porting existing algorithms to GPU hardware remains limited, leaving many widely-used tools without accelerated implementations. FreeBayes, a haplotype-based variant caller central to the 1000 Genomes Project and to multi-sample tumor evolution analyses, exemplifies this gap: it is natively single-threaded despite its algorithmic suitability for parallelization. We present cuBayes, a CUDA implementation of FreeBayes germline SNV calling that completes HG002 and HG004 2x250bp Illumina 60x whole-genome analysis in one minute (as opposed to hours if not days with manual region-based CPU parallelization) on a single NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada GPU, while producing variant calls with >99.9% concordance to the CPU reference. cuBayes is structured around an atom/molecule architecture in which reusable functional units (BAM decompression, position-wise pileup, batch coordination) are cleanly separated from algorithm-specific logic, providing a foundation intended to support acceleration of additional sequence analysis algorithms without redundant low-level engineering.

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

CzechDocs: A Multiway Parallel Dataset of Formatted Documents for Minority Languages in Czechia

We present CzechDocs, a multiway parallel dataset of formatted documents (HTML, DOCX, and PDF) covering Czech and minority languages used in Czechia-primarily Ukrainian and English, with smaller portions of Vietnamese, Russian and other languages. The dataset is designed to support the evaluation of machine translation systems that aim to preserve document formatting during translation. We provide a comparison of the most common approaches to format-preserving machine translation on a validation subset of the dataset. This validation split, together with the evaluation toolkit, is publicly released for further research. A held-out test split will be reserved for a future shared task focused on document-level translation with formatting preservation.

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

Definitional alignment before capability alignment: a Design-Science framework for adjudicating claims about AGI

arXiv:2606.12713v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Claims that artificial general intelligence has already arrived and claims that it remains decades away are often defended from overlapping evidence. "AGI" lacks a single shared and stable referent and competing operationalizations can return different verdicts on the same system. This article treats that under-specification as a design and governance problem. Following Design Science Research Methodology, it develops DAF-AGI, a second-order conceptual artifact with two coupled components: five ordinal criteria for assessing the adjudicative fitness of candidate definitions and a structured governance audit of authorship, interest, certification, external verification and revision authority. The artifact is demonstrated on five prominent measurement families and one deflationary boundary position in a documented corpus and then stress-tested against a stylized strong arrival claim: that current generative systems constitute AGI because they outperform a well-educated adult on many cognitive tasks. On evidence from the cited 2024-2025 sources, the claim was certifiable only under a performance-based operationalization; capability-ontology, psychometric and skill-acquisition approaches did not certify it, the economic family remains indeterminate and the deflationary position refuses binary adjudication. The contribution is a novel integration and operationalization, not an empirical validation: independent application, inter-rater testing and author-external cases remain necessary. The paper further proposes definitional sovereignty as an enabling component of algorithmic sovereignty: the institutional capacity to contest, certify and revise imported technological categories under public accountability.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

HarnessBridge: Learnable Bidirectional Controller for LLM Agent Harness

arXiv:2606.12882v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models are increasingly deployed as agents for long-horizon tasks, yet their performance is shaped not only by model capability and environment design, but also by the harness that mediates agent–environment interaction. Existing harnesses are largely manually engineered, making them difficult to scale as trajectories grow longer and interactions become more complex. In this work, we ask whether harness can be generated by a learnable plug-in module that can be trained in an end-to-end fashion. We introduce HarnessBridge, a lightweight learnable harness controller that parameterizes the agent–environment interface as a bidirectional projection. HarnessBridge learns two bidirectional projections: observation projection, which distills raw trajectories into compact, decision-relevant states, and action projection, which converts proposed actions into executable transitions or trajectory-grounded rejections. We train HarnessBridge on a harness supervision dataset via unified instruction tuning. On Terminal-Bench~2.0 and SWE-bench Verified, HarnessBridge matches or surpasses strong specialized harnesses while substantially reducing token usage and trajectory length, and generalizes from smaller generators to larger commercial models.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Ranking-optimized survival models can underperform fixed-horizon clinical prediction: a SUPPORT2 reanalysis of machine learning, attending-physician judgment, and the original SUPPORT model at 60- and 180-day mortality

Machine-learning survival models are increasingly proposed for intensive-care mortality prediction and are almost always selected and reported using the concordance index, a ranking metric averaged over follow-up. Yet most bedside decisions hinge on a probability at a specific time, such as 60- or 180-day mortality. We asked whether ranking-optimized models remain competitive at fixed clinical horizons against two reference points clinicians actually rely on: unaided attending-physician judgment and the original 1995 SUPPORT logistic model. Reanalyzing the SUPPORT2 cohort (9,105 critically ill adults from five United States centers, 1989-1994) under a stratified 70/15/15 split, we compared a gradient-boosted survival model, the physician's recorded prognosis, and the 1995 model at 60 and 180 days, alongside several alternative learners. The survival model achieved competitive ranking concordance (0.705) yet underperformed both comparators at fixed horizons: at 60 days its area under the ROC curve was 0.750, against 0.808 for physicians on the matched sample and 0.827 for the 1995 model, a gap that held across eight independent data splits and remained statistically reliable after multiplicity correction. The shortfall was not miscalibration, since post-hoc recalibration left discrimination unchanged, nor limited capacity, since neural networks, a deep ranking model, and two timepoint-aware discrete-time models also failed to close it; replacing the ranking objective with timepoint-matched binary training recovered roughly half the gap, pointing to an objective-horizon mismatch. Discrimination was equitable across sex, race, and age, but leave-one-disease-out validation exposed severe failure for disease groups absent from training, and the physician advantage was conditional on a physician electing to provide an estimate. We recommend reporting timepoint-specific discrimination alongside concordance, timepoint-matched training when fixed-horizon predictions drive care, leave-one-subgroup validation, and distribution-free prediction intervals to support selective deployment.

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

Evolutionary Two-Stage Hyperparameter Optimization Strategies for Physics-Informed Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.20442v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) solve Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) by embedding physical laws into neural network training. However, their performance suffers from unstable convergence, training plateaus, and strong sensitivity to architectural and optimization hyperparameters due to the highly non-convex and multi-term structure of the physics-informed loss. In this setting, the outer-loop hyperparameter search is a noisy and black-box optimization problem over heterogeneous parameters, where classical local or gradient-based strategies are easily trapped in suboptimal regions. Evolutionary algorithms, with their population-based exploration and ability to handle mixed, non-differentiable search spaces, provide a more robust mechanism for discovering promising configurations. We propose and investigate a two-stage approach based on evolutionary algorithms that combines exploration and exploitation parts of PINNs training to improve solution accuracy and robustness under fixed computational budgets. In the first stage, we perform low-fidelity training runs with truncated epochs to rapidly screen candidate configurations, treating hyperparameter selection as a black-box outer-loop problem. In the second stage, only the most promising candidates are fully trained with standard gradient-based optimizers to refine the solution. Evaluated on three popular problems, namely Advection, Klein-Gordon and Helmholtz equations, our method consistently outperforms standard training and achieves significantly lower mean error within constrained computational resources.

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

Public transit gains and spatially uneven travel demand changes after NYC congestion pricing

arXiv:2606.17530v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: New York City implemented the nation's first cordon-based congestion pricing program in January 2025, providing an opportunity to evaluate how system-wide urban mobility responds to large-scale pricing interventions. Because such policies generate spillovers across modes and locations, credible control groups are difficult to construct. We address this challenge using time series foundation models to generate probabilistic counterfactual demand forecasts with calibrated uncertainty. Applying this framework to bus, subway, and aggregate trip volume data, we find that post-policy bus and subway ridership increased significantly relative to expected no-policy demand, while overall travel demand decreased modestly. The effects are spatially heterogeneous: while reductions in overall travel demand are concentrated within the Congestion Relief Zone, transit gains extend beyond Manhattan's core. Socio-demographic analyses further reveal uneven adaptation across neighborhoods, highlighting spatial equity implications. Our framework provides a scalable approach for the uncertainty-aware evaluation of system-wide urban interventions when clean control groups are unavailable.

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

Multi-Bitwidth Quantization for LLMs Using Additive Codebooks

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed across heterogeneous hardware with varying resource constraints, the ability to adaptively manage the trade-off between performance and efficiency without retraining is critical. We propose Drop-by-Drop, a novel multi-bitwidth post-training quantization framework that enables inference-time precision control over LLM weights from a single trained model. Our method is theoretically grounded in information theory and successive refinement. We establish that LLM weights, which commonly follow a Gaussian distribution, can be optimally reconstructed with increasing fidelity as additional bits are incorporated, under a weighted mean squared error distortion motivated by LLM loss functions. To realize this in practice, Drop-by-Drop incorporates Matryoshka-style supervision into the loss function, exploiting the structure of additive codebooks. Drop-by-Drop produces a single model where ordered subsets of codebooks yield accurate partial reconstructions at each precision level. This approach significantly reduces storage and memory overhead by allowing a single checkpoint to serve multiple bitwidths, while maintaining competitive perplexity and accuracy across major architectures, such as Qwen, LLaMA, Gemma, and Mistral.

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

Reinforcement-aware Knowledge Distillation for LLM Reasoning

arXiv:2602.22495v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training has recently driven major gains in long chain-of-thought reasoning large language models (LLMs), but the high inference cost of such models motivates distillation into smaller students. Most existing knowledge distillation (KD) methods are designed for supervised fine-tuning (SFT), relying on fixed teacher traces or teacher-student Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence-based regularization. When combined with RL, these approaches often suffer from distribution mismatch and objective interference: teacher supervision may not align with the student's evolving rollout distribution, and the KL regularizer can compete with reward maximization and require careful loss balancing. To address these issues, we propose RL-aware distillation (RLAD), which performs selective imitation during RL – guiding the student toward the teacher only when it improves the current policy update. Our core component, Trust Region Ratio Distillation (TRRD), replaces the teacher-student KL regularizer with a PPO/GRPO-style likelihood-ratio objective anchored to a teacher–old-policy mixture, yielding advantage-aware, trust-region-bounded distillation on student rollouts and naturally balancing exploration, exploitation, and imitation. Across diverse logic reasoning and math benchmarks, RLAD consistently outperforms offline distillation, standard GRPO, and KL-based on-policy teacher-student knowledge distillation.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Multimodal LLM-Empowered Re-Ranking for Generalizable Person Re-Identification

Domain Generalizable (DG) person re-identification (Re-ID) has attracted growing research interest due to its potential for deployment in unseen real-world scenarios. Most existing approaches address DG Re-ID by focusing on training domain-generalizable encoders but ignore the possible refinements in inference stage. In contrast, this work explores an alternative direction which improves inference re-ranking to enhance DG Re-ID. Conventional re-ranking methods typically rely on neighborhood-based distances to refine the initial ranking list, inherently depending on features produced by the Re-ID encoder. However, they deteriorate on target domains since the encoder lacks sufficient generalizability to produce reliable feature distances on unseen scenarios. Inspired by the remarkable generalization capabilities of recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), we propose an MLLM-empowered distance metric to improve re-ranking in DG Re-ID. Specifically, we first adapt an MLLM to Re-ID data through supervised fine-tuning, which incorporates a domain-agnostic prompt and a query-candidate hard mining scheme. Then, the adapted MLLM is employed to compute a $\mu$-distance during inference, which is robust to domain gap and significantly enhances subsequent re-ranking performance. Our approach is model-agnostic and can be seamlessly integrated into previous re-ranking frameworks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach consistently yields substantial performance improvements across multiple DG Re-ID benchmarks. The code of this work will be released at https://github.com/RikoLi/MUSE soon.

16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Critical Percolation as a Synthetic Data Model for Interpretability

arXiv:2606.20347v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural networks learn features that reflect the hierarchical, multi-scale structure of natural data. Synthetic datasets used to evaluate interpretability methods typically lack this structure, limiting their value as realistic toy models. To close this gap, we introduce a family of synthetic datasets consisting of hierarchical functions defined on critical mean-field percolation clusters embedded in a high-dimensional data space. The percolation data consists of sparse, low-dimensional fractal clusters with a power-law size distribution. Latent variables modeling a taxonomic hierarchy generate each data point's target value. The data model is analytically tractable with known critical exponents that fix its properties without requiring hyperparameter tuning. We leverage a mapping between percolation clusters, random trees, and additive coalescence to propose an almost linear-time algorithm to jointly sample a random tree and its hierarchical latent decomposition, enabling data generation at arbitrary scale. Using probing experiments, we find that the model's ground-truth latent variables can be linearly decoded from neural network activations. Together, sparsity, self-similarity, power-law statistics, and analytical tractability make critical percolation a principled testbed for interpretability research.

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

Understanding the Rejection of Fixes Generated by Agentic Pull Requests – Insights from the AIDev Dataset

arXiv:2606.13468v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI coding agents are increasingly used to generate pull requests (PRs) that propose code fixes in software projects. From a first exploration of the AIDev dataset, we find that 46.41\% of the fixes proposed by the agents Copilot, Devin, Cursor, and Claude are rejected. This represents a significant amount of wasted resources that require human reviews, verifications, and running tests and validations for fixes that are merely discarded. Our goal in this paper is to understand the failure modes of AI-agents, an understanding that is crucial for better integrating AI-agents as efficient teammates. In this paper, we conduct a qualitative study on a representative sample of 306 non-merged pull requests created or co-authored by the agents mentioned earlier, followed by a quantitative analysis of the reasons for rejection. Our qualitative findings identify 14 reasons divided into four high-level categories for rejecting AI-agent fixes. We observe that developers can reject fixes due to fixes whose implementation is incorrect (e.g., incomplete, wrong approach), fixes that do not pass the continuous integration (CI) pipelines and fail tests, fixes for which the agent is unable to perform the implementation (e.g., no code generated, sessions lost), and fixes whose priority is low. Our results shed light on the importance of better guiding the model at these levels: (1) proposing hints about the approach to follow for fixing an issue, (2) outlining constraints or limitations regarding the approaches that should not be taken, and (3) instructing the agent on how to validate the implementation through CI pipelines and without introducing a breaking change. Our results suggest the need for good prioritization of tasks so that generated fixes do not lead to wasted human review efforts or wasted agent resources (e.g., tokens, compute, or allowed number of requests).

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Leverage Is Not Reach: A Control-Window Law for Single-Neuron Steering in Language Models

Authors:

Aligned language models gate behaviors such as refusal and language routing through sparse feed forward neurons, yet no theory predicts when a single neuron intervention controls a behavior coherently rather than collapsing the output. We develop a budget normalized control window framework for single neuron steering. A dose along one write direction reduces to one control coordinate: the alignment between the residual stream and the write, driven along a universal saturation curve in units of a coherence budget set by the residual norm divided by the write norm. Coherent control exists when a behavior trigger lies below the collapse ceiling. The same coordinate governs benign mode switches and refusal; the ceiling follows from weights and one generic forward pass, while triggers are measured at rollout. On fifteen held out neurons, the predicted ceiling has mean absolute error 0.14, about 0.07 in bulk layers, and the committed open or closed verdict holds on eleven against a ten of fifteen majority baseline. Closed cases expose three failure modes rather than violations: collapse before trigger, too little depth to propagate, or a normalization that caps how far one neuron can push. The law explains why local gradient attribution anti predicts control: true controllers write off the readout axis and carry a near zero first order gradient. A forward only contrastive screen made precise by the window recovers controllers that attribution misses. On refusal, the hardest case, intervention success is typed, not scalar: coherent bypass and strict actionable reach separate, so a neuron can flip refusal in fluent, on task text with no actionable content, and genuine actionable reach appears only for three of six audited Llama pivots and only at later rollout horizons. Single neuron steering is therefore a budgeted, typed audit of controllability rather than a fixed dose anecdote.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Spectrum Aware Illumination Estimation Using Multispectral Image

Multispectral (MS) imaging extends beyond conventional RGB imaging by capturing more spectral bands, thereby improving illuminant spectrum estimation (ISE). However, existing methods often fail to fully exploit spectral information, resulting in suboptimal performance under diverse lighting conditions and across different sensor domains. Hence, we propose a deep learning framework with a spatio-spectral feature extraction block, which incorporates spectral attention mechanisms to enhance spectral correlation and preserve illuminant-relevant spatial features. Through the inclusion of an illuminant prior (IP), our approach prioritizes specific channels that provide more meaningful information in an MS image. We also propose a spectral-domain transform across different MS sensor spaces. The results demonstrate that illuminant spectra learned in high-dimensional sensor spaces can be effectively transformed to various lower-dimensional camera sensor spaces without any additional training. To facilitate evaluation, we introduce a real-world MS dataset containing high-dimensional ground-truth illumination spectra captured under diverse lighting conditions. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our method achieves superior accuracy compared to existing models, thus providing a practical solution for real-world ISE. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/hyejin5/Spectrum-Aware-Illumination-Estimation-Using-Multispectral-Image.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Zero-shot generalization of transformer neural operators to larger domains

arXiv:2606.14597v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transformer-based neural operators have shown remarkable performance for approximating solution operators of partial differential equations on complex geometries. However, existing approaches implicitly assume a fixed domain size, which limits their ability to generalize at inference. In this work, we investigate domain extension, namely zero-shot inference on spatial domains that are significantly larger than those encountered during training. We argue that this setting fundamentally requires spatial locality and translation equivariance. We propose to implement this locality via a decomposable bias in the attention logits computation, enabling finely controllable locality while remaining fully decomposable into query-key inner products and directly compatible with optimized attention kernels. Combined with rotary positional embeddings, it enables expressive embeddings with controllable spatial support without altering the transformer architecture. We empirically show that our approach substantially improves zero-shot generalization to larger domains across two PDE benchmarks and a 3D industrial atmospheric flow application. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/cerea-daml/domain-extension.

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

Distributional Loss for Robust Classification

This paper proposes a novel loss concept for supervised classification tasks. Rather than enforcing a direct mapping from each input sample to a single assigned label, we define an optimization objective over all classifier outputs as a bimodal Gaussian distribution. This softer target formulation implicitly captures class ambiguity, mitigates overfitting, and encourages the learning of more robust decision boundaries, all without requiring additional label information. Experimental results demonstrate consistent improvements in robustness, with particularly pronounced gains in low-data regimes, while requiring only minimal modifications to standard training pipelines.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers for Nonlinear Matrix Decompositions

arXiv:2512.17473v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present an algorithm based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) for solving nonlinear matrix decompositions (NMD). Given an input matrix $X \in \mathbb{R}^{m \times n}$ and a factorization rank $r \ll \min(m, n)$, NMD seeks matrices $W \in \mathbb{R}^{m \times r}$ and $H \in \mathbb{R}^{r \times n}$ such that $X \approx f(WH)$, where $f$ is an element-wise nonlinear function. We evaluate our method on several representative nonlinear models: the rectified linear unit activation $f(x) = \max(0, x)$, suitable for nonnegative sparse data approximation, the component-wise square $f(x) = x^2$, applicable to probabilistic circuit representation, and the MinMax transform $f(x) = \min(b, \max(a, x))$, relevant for recommender systems. The proposed framework flexibly supports diverse loss functions, including least squares, $\ell_1$ norm, and the Kullback-Leibler divergence, and can be readily extended to other nonlinearities and metrics. We illustrate the applicability, efficiency, and adaptability of the approach on real-world datasets, highlighting its potential for a broad range of applications.

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

DSB: Dynamic Sliding Block Scheduling for Diffusion LLMs

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative for text generation, distinguished by their native support for parallel decoding. In practice, block inference is crucial for avoiding order misalignment in global bidirectional decoding and improving output quality. However, the widely-used fixed, predefined block (naive) schedule is agnostic to semantic difficulty, making it a suboptimal strategy for both quality and efficiency: it can force premature commitments to uncertain positions while delaying easy positions near block boundaries. In this work, we analyze the limitations of naive block scheduling and disclose the importance of dynamically adapting the schedule to semantic difficulty for reliable and efficient inference. Motivated by this, we propose Dynamic Sliding Block (DSB), a training-free block scheduling method that uses a sliding block with a dynamic size to overcome the rigidity of the naive block. To further improve efficiency, we introduce DSB Cache, a training-free KV-cache mechanism tailored to DSB. Extensive experiments across multiple models and benchmarks demonstrate that DSB, together with DSB Cache, consistently improves both generation quality and inference efficiency for dLLMs. Code is released at https://github.com/lizhuo-luo/DSB.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Clinician knowledge and self-efficacy in snakebite management: A cross-sectional assessment in Northern Uganda

Background: Snakebite envenomation (SBE) is a major public health crisis in rural Uganda, yet it remains a neglected tropical disease. Effective management is often compromised by systemic barriers and a lack of clinician training. This study assessed clinician self-efficacy and objective knowledge regarding SBE management in Northern Uganda. Methods: A descriptive, cross-sectional study was conducted between February and July 2025 among 379 healthcare workers in Gulu, Omoro, and Pader districts. A validated questionnaire was used to collect data on socio-demographics, self-reported efficacy (scale 1-10), and objective knowledge. Knowledge scores [&ge;]70% were categorized as adequate. Multivariable logistic regression identified independent predictors of adequate knowledge, and Spearmans correlation ({rho}) assessed the relationship between knowledge and self-efficacy. Results: The participants had a mean age of 35.6 years (SD {+/-}7.3), were predominantly female (56.5%, 214/379), and most (83.6%, 317/379) practiced at Health Centre III level facilities. While 53.8% (204/379) reported prior training, 48.3% (183/379) of these had not received an update in over 10 years. Adequate knowledge was demonstrated by 51.5% (195/379) of participants. In the multivariable analysis, practicing in Omoro (adjusted odds ratio [aOR]: 0.3, 95% CI: 0.1-0.6, p < 0.001) or Pader (aOR: 0.2, 95% CI: 0.1-0.4, p < 0.001) was associated with lower odds of adequate knowledge compared to Gulu district. Prior training significantly increased the odds of adequate knowledge (aOR: 2.3, 95% CI: 1.3-4.2, p = 0.006). A moderate positive correlation was observed between self-efficacy and objective knowledge (Spearmans {rho} = 0.33, p < 0.0001). Conclusion: Approximately half of the frontline healthcare workers in Northern Uganda lack adequate knowledge on SBE management, with significant geographic differences and outdated training. The gap between clinician self-efficacy and objective knowledge poses a risk to patient safety. Regular, mandatory refresher training and targeted educational outreach to remote districts are required to reduce SBE-related morbidity and mortality.