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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Progress on the Kretschmann-Schlingemann-Werner Conjecture

arXiv:2308.15389v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Given any pair of quantum channels $\Phi_1,\Phi_2$ such that at least one of them has Kraus rank one, as well as any respective Stinespring isometries $V_1,V_2$, we prove that there exists a unitary $U$ on the environment such that $\|V_1-({\bf1}\otimes U)V_2\|_\infty\leq\sqrt{2\|\Phi_1-\Phi_2\|_\diamond}$. Moreover, we provide a simple example which shows that the factor $\sqrt2$ on the right-hand side is optimal, and we conjecture that this inequality holds for every pair of channels.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Standardized Methods and Recommendations for Green Federated Learning

arXiv:2602.00343v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative model training over privacy-sensitive, distributed data, but its environmental impact is difficult to compare across studies due to inconsistent measurement boundaries and heterogeneous reporting. We present a practical carbon-accounting methodology for FL CO2e tracking using NVIDIA NVFlare and CodeCarbon for explicit, phase-aware tasks (initialization, per-round training, evaluation, and idle/coordination). To capture non-compute effects, we additionally estimate communication emissions from transmitted model-update sizes under a network-configurable energy model. We validate the proposed approach on two representative workloads: CIFAR-10 image classification and retinal optic disk segmentation. In CIFAR-10, controlled client-efficiency scenarios show that system-level slowdowns and coordination effects can contribute meaningfully to carbon footprint under an otherwise fixed FL protocol, increasing total CO2e by 8.34x (medium) and 21.73x (low) relative to the high-efficiency baseline. In retinal segmentation, swapping GPU tiers (H100 vs.\ V100) yields a consistent 1.7x runtime gap (290 vs. 503 minutes) while producing non-uniform changes in total energy and CO2e across sites, underscoring the need for per-site and per-round reporting. Overall, our results support a standardized carbon accounting method that acts as a prerequisite for reproducible 'green' FL evaluation. Our code is available at https://github.com/Pediatric-Accelerated-Intelligence-Lab/carbon_footprint.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

The Internet of Agentic AI: Communication, Coordination, and Collective Intelligence at Scale

Authors:

arXiv:2606.12835v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid emergence of autonomous AI agents is transforming artificial intelligence from isolated model inference into distributed systems of reasoning, communication, and action. This paper develops the vision of the Internet of Agentic AI (IoAI): an open ecosystem in which heterogeneous agents discover one another, negotiate responsibilities, exchange context, invoke tools, and execute workflows across cloud, edge, device, organizational, and cyber-physical environments. We synthesize foundations from single-agent agentic AI, multi-agent systems, distributed computing, communication networks, game theory, and security engineering to characterize the architectures and mechanisms required for scalable agent ecosystems. The paper examines agent deployment models, workflow lifecycles, communication protocols, interoperability layers, resource-management challenges, and trust architectures, with case studies in adaptive manufacturing and distributed operational coordination. The resulting framework highlights the central research challenges of controlled emergence, semantic interoperability, secure identity, incentive-compatible coordination, resource-aware orchestration, and governance for large-scale networks of autonomous agents.

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

OneCanvas: 3D Scene Understanding via Panoramic Reprojection

Existing approaches to 3D scene understanding in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) either rely on complex, model-specific geometry encoders or large training budgets in pursuit of spatial reasoning. Instead, OneCanvas aggregates patch features from all views onto a single equirectangular panoramic canvas. Namely, each patch is unprojected to a 3D world coordinate using its depth and camera pose, then placed on the canvas at the continuous longitude and latitude of that point as seen from the canvas origin, with no rasterization or aggregation across overlapping views. A 3D position embedding of the patch's metric coordinates is added to its feature, restoring the depth lost when collapsing the world position to an angular canvas coordinate. Patches from all frames thus share one spatial coordinate system with no fusion or major architectural modifications of the backbone. The pretrained VLM consumes this representation as if it were an ordinary image. Because the canvas can be centered on any pose of interest, the same representation directly supports situated reasoning from a specific viewpoint, a common requirement in robotics and embodied AI. Thanks to this representation, we can also introduce a spatial pretraining curriculum: by procedurally placing patch features of objects, drawn from real images, at chosen 3D world positions on an otherwise empty canvas, we generate on-the-fly supervision spanning a broad range of spatial reasoning tasks, with answer distributions controlled to reduce spatial reasoning shortcuts. OneCanvas achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on SQA3D and VSI-Bench, and generalizes to out-of-distribution data on SPBench, using an order of magnitude less training compute than the strongest competing methods.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Characterizing the genetic basis of Cardio-Renal-Metabolic multimorbidity using multivariate genomic modelling

Cardio-renal-metabolic multimorbidity (CRMM) encompasses interrelated conditions affecting the heart, kidneys, and metabolic systems. Although the genetics of individual components are well studied, their shared architecture remains unclear. Here, we performed the largest multi-ancestry multivariate GWAS of CRMM across seven biobanks, including individuals of European (EUR; neff = 353,130), African (AFR; neff = 75,436), and East Asian (EAS; neff = 164,373) ancestry. We identified 287 lead loci in EUR, 30 in AFR, and 202 in EAS. Cross-ancestry analyses revealed ancestry-specific signals and 24 shared loci mapping to FTO and TCF7L2. Drug-repurposing highlighted candidates used for type 2 diabetes and hypertension. Mendelian randomization supported causal links with diverse diseases, while polygenic risk scores showed improved prediction across ancestries. Collectively, these findings advance understanding of CRMM genetics and inform precision medicine.

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

From Observation to Intervention: A Causal Audit of Expert Importance in Mixture-of-Experts Models

Interpretability methods routinely use population-level summary statistics over observed model behaviour to license claims about the effects of targeted interventions on specific computations; in Pearl's terms, they treat rung-1 associational evidence as if it supported rung-2 interventional conclusions, a move whose validity is rarely tested. We examine one concrete instance: the use of routing statistics in Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) pruning, where utilization rates, activation norms, and routing weight distributions are treated as predictors of which experts can be removed without functional cost. A token-level interventional audit across three high-redundancy MoE architectures (OLMoE-1B-7B-0924, Qwen1.5-MoE-A2.7B, DeepSeek-V2-Lite) finds no observational metric predicts causal expert importance in any model: across all 60 metric-layer combinations effect sizes stay below Cohen's $d = 0.23$, and no metric is reliably positive under our corrected, dual-test criterion. A per-token routing weight control, run with identical $n$, rules out insufficient power, recovering a signal whose CI excludes zero at OLMoE's final MoE layer ($d = +0.231$, 95\% CI $[+0.09, +0.37]$, $p = 0.0013$). Existing pruning methods succeed in this regime not by identifying dispensable experts but because early-layer redundancy renders most selection criteria interchangeable. Our results provide an explicit counterexample to the common inferential step from population-level observational summaries to token-level interventional claims about expert importance, and illustrate how interventional audits can calibrate the evidential standards for interpretability claims.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

SheafStain: Sheaf-Theoretic Schrödinger Bridge for Spatially and Biologically Coherent Virtual Staining

Current virtual staining approaches offer the potential for time- and cost-efficient biomarker quantification in cancer diagnostics and prognostics. However, patch-wise inference for gigapixel whole slide images (WSIs) fails to maintain spatial continuity, yielding artifacts that cause catastrophic mismatches with ground-truth images. Although pathology Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) offer rich representations, their self-attention causes varying global contexts to produce inconsistent embeddings for the same physical region. We formalize and validate this ``context contamination'' as a sheaf-theoretic problem where these embeddings form a presheaf that violates the gluing axiom. To address this, we propose SheafStain, a new approach that reinterprets VFM features as sheaf-like sections for spatially and biologically coherent virtual staining. Specifically, SheafStain integrates class and patch tokens into a Schrödinger Bridge framework as sheaf-like sections. While the class token anchors biological consistency, patch tokens form a per-position spatial map. A backbone co-pretrained on Hematoxylin \& Eosin (H\&E) and Immunohistochemistry (IHC) yields non-degenerate cross-stain stalks, so a single VFM feature space supervises both input conditioning and output stain alignment. Departing from prior work that evaluates on isolated $256 \times 256$ patches and either random-crops or resizes the $1024 \times 1024$ ground truth, we translate at $256 \times 256$ and evaluate on the stitched $1024 \times 1024$ outputs across HER2, ER, PR, and Ki-67. SheafStain demonstrates promising results against six prior methods while mitigating patch-boundary stitching artifacts. Code will soon be released.

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Cost-effectiveness of a virtual fracture clinic versus traditional in-person fracture clinic care for adults with acute simple fractures: a protocol for a health economic evaluation within the RECITAL trial

ABSTRACT Introduction Traditional in-person fracture clinics are often overcrowded and inconvenient for patients. Virtual fracture clinics aim to address some of these concerns by improving the efficiency of the orthopaedic service and reducing unnecessary interventions while maintaining safety and quality of care. The RECITAL trial is a non-inferiority randomised controlled trial comparing follow-up care provided at a virtual fracture clinic for people with acute simple fractures to follow-up care provided at an in-person fracture clinic. This study describes the protocol for an economic evaluation of RECITAL where the primary aim is to investigate the cost-effectiveness of a virtual fracture clinic compared with traditional in-person fracture clinic care from a health system perspective. Methods and analysis The RECITAL trial recruited 312 participants with acute simple fractures and randomised them to receive follow-up care provided at a virtual fracture clinic or follow-up care provided at an in-person fracture clinic. We will conduct a within-trial analysis from a health system perspective (primary analysis), as well as a health service, patient and societal perspective. The economic evaluation will estimate the difference in the cost of resource inputs on an intention to treat basis used by participants in the two arms of the trial, allowing comparisons to be made between the in-person and virtual fracture clinics. Data for intervention costs and healthcare utilisation will be collected from trial records, hospital electronic medical records and district performance units. The results of the economic evaluation will be expressed in terms of incremental cost per utility weight gained at 12 weeks and will be plotted on a cost-effectiveness plane. Bootstrapping by resampling will be used to estimate 95% confidence intervals around costs and outcomes, and to calculate the confidence intervals around the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio. A cost-effectiveness acceptability curve (CEAC) will be plotted, which will provide information about the probability that an intervention is cost-effective, given the level of a decision makers willingness to pay for each additional outcome. Ethics and Dissemination The trail was approved by the SLHD Ethics Review Committee (RPAH Zone) (X23-0200 and 2023/ETH01038). The findings will be disseminated through a peer-reviewed journal and conference presentations. Trial registration number The trial was prospectively registered on the Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry (ANZCTR; 12623000934640)

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

TimeVista: Exploring and Exploiting Vision-Language Models as Judges for Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.16173v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-quality time series forecasting is pivotal for real-world decision-making. However, traditional point-wise metrics often fail to reveal complex temporal patterns and align poorly with human intuitive preferences. While the ''LLM-as-a-Judge'' paradigm has revolutionized text evaluation by providing flexible, human-aligned judgment, its application to time series remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we leverage Vision-Language Models (VLMs) as judges for time series forecasting, harnessing their ability to comprehend time series plots grounded in textual information. Specifically, we propose a novel framework integrating micro- and macro-level judgments informed by contextual information to evaluate time series forecasting. To this end, we introduce TimeVista, a comprehensive VLM-as-a-Judge benchmark comprising 5563 time series samples paired with detailed evaluation rubrics. Extensive meta-evaluations demonstrate that VLMs are highly reliable judges, achieving significantly higher consistency with human preferences than conventional metrics. Building upon our benchmark, we comprehensively assess recent Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) under the VLM-as-a-Judge paradigm. Our results demonstrate that VLMs serve as robust and interpretable judges, providing a comprehensive, human-aligned standard for evaluating time series models.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

The Algorithm Is Not the Behavior: Learned Priors Override Look-Ahead in a Chess-Playing Neural Network

arXiv:2508.21380v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent mechanistic work has uncovered learned algorithms within neural networks, from modular arithmetic to search and planning in game-playing agents. But does algorithmic structure guarantee algorithmic behavior? We investigate this in Leela Chess Zero, the strongest neural chess engine, where prior work identified learned look-ahead. By extending the logit lens to its move-selecting policy network, we discover that correct puzzle solutions-including immediate checkmates-often appear in intermediate layers but are systematically overridden in the final output, a phenomenon we term "forgotten puzzles". Replicating prior analyses on these positions, we find that look-ahead operates normally-future moves of the correct continuation are represented, causally important, and linearly decodable-ruling out a failure of the algorithm itself. Instead, late layers increasingly shift toward prioritizing safe play over aggression. To test whether this shift drives the override, we steer the model against these preferences and recover 61.7% of forgotten puzzles, providing causal evidence that safety priors override algorithmically computed solutions. These findings demonstrate that algorithmic structure does not guarantee algorithmic behavior: a model can internally solve a problem and still output the wrong answer.

11.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-05

A multiscale, Bayesian inference approach to augment mechanistic models of cell signaling with machine-learning predictions of binding affinity

by Holly A. Huber, Stacey D. Finley Computational models in systems biology are often underdetermined—that is, there is little data relative to the complexity and size of the model. This lack of data is primarily due to limits in our ability to observe specific biological systems and restricts the utility of computational models. To reduce this uncertainty, recent methods have explored augmenting parameter inference of systems biology models with predictions from machine learning models. Such approaches expand the pool of data that is applicable for the inference problem. Here, we explore augmenting the parameter inference of intracellular signaling models. We choose to investigate signaling because experimental measurements of the variables of interest, protein dynamics, are still quite limited. To investigate, we propose a novel, multiscale, Bayesian inference approach that augments traditional signaling data with predictions of binding affinity. These predictions are generated using a machine learning pipeline with measurements of amino acid sequence, from the Universal Protein Resource, or protein structure, from the Protein Data Bank, as inputs. We find that we can successfully integrate these measurements into the inference problem using our novel framework. Excitingly, this integration significantly improves the parameter estimates of signaling models. We demonstrate that how much this improvement impacts predictions of signaling depends on the sensitivity of the prediction to perturbations in the parameter values. Overall, the framework we establish here improves the parameter inference of intracellular signaling models by successfully bridging data on protein sequence and structure with systems-level signaling.

12.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-21

ReSeT: a taxonomy-aware reference genome selection tool

Motivation: Reference genome composition determines which taxa a profiling pipeline can detect and distinguish, and becomes of critical importance for high-resolution profiling where taxonomic boundaries begin to blur. Existing selection tools optimize within-taxon representativeness but disregard discrimination across taxa, leaving open whether explicitly accounting for inter-taxon discrimination during selection improves profiling. Results: Here we present ReSeT, a facility-location-based reference genome selection tool that operates on arbitrary pairwise distance matrices, extended with a tunable inter-taxon discrimination term and per-genome selection cost, and solved by local search. We benchmark ReSeT against established selection methods on three viral datasets spanning varying degrees of taxonomic ambiguity. On the high-ambiguity SARS-CoV-2 datasets, appropriately tuned ReSeT selections matched or exceeded the strongest alternatives in terms of profiling accuracy, whereas on the low ambiguity IAV dataset VSEARCH remained dominant. Interestingly, we find that the novel inter-taxon discrimination term contributed weakly, indicating that ReSeT's facility-location formulation and selection cost drives ReSeT's performance. We further propose a novel taxonomic ambiguity index, computable from ReSeT's inputs, that summarizes the taxonomic ambiguity of reference genomes and aligns with where ReSeT improves over existing selection methods. Availability and implementation: ReSeT is implemented in Python ([≥]3.10) and is freely available under the MIT license. The source code is available on GitHub at https://github.com/JaspervB-tud/ReSeT and ReSeT can also be installed directly from the Python Package Index (PyPI) via pip install reset-bio.

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

Objects Before Words: Object-First Inductive Biases for Grounding Language in Child-View Video

Learning grounded word meaning from natural experience requires resolving two ambiguities in infant-view recordings: when the named referent appears and where it is in a cluttered frame. In SAYCam-style data, caregiver speech is sparse and weakly synchronized with egocentric video, so single-frame contrastive pairing yields noisy positives in which the intended object is absent or entangled with distractors. We propose BabyMind, an object-first bias for child-view contrastive learning under sparse, noisy supervision. BabyMind extracts candidate object embeddings using an offline mask-based region interface, links candidates across a short utterance-centered window into lightweight object files via tracking, and aligns utterances to bags of object files with a prototype-space multiple-instance contrastive objective. Track-coherence and global-object agreement regularizers stabilize learning and transfer object-file structure into the global frame embedding used at evaluation. On SAYCam-S, BabyMind improves Labeled-S 15 forced-choice accuracy by +2.6 points over CVCL and yields consistent gains on in-vocabulary out-of-distribution benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/sathiiii/BabyMind.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Multidimensional nutritional assessment in Crohns disease: cross-sectional comparison of active disease and remission

Malnutrition is common in Crohns disease (CD), and its assessment requires multiple tools. Comprehensive evaluation of nutritional status in a population with CD, predominantly characterized by metabolic phenotype, was inadequately reported. This study evaluated the nutritional status of CD patients using anthropometric, clinical, and biochemical measures and compared patients with active disease with those in remission. This cross-sectional study included 127 adults with CD: 63 with active disease and 64 in remission. Disease activity was classified using the Crohns Disease Activity Index, the Simple Endoscopic Score for Crohns Disease, and magnetic resonance enterography. Nutritional assessment included body mass index (BMI), mid-upper arm circumference, calf circumference, triceps skinfold thickness, mid-arm muscle circumference, Mini Nutritional Assessment-Short Form (MNA-SF), and biochemical markers including hemoglobin, serum iron, folate, vitamin B12, albumin, and zinc. Malnutrition was defined using the Global Leadership Initiative on Malnutrition criteria. Overall, 47.2% of participants were malnourished. Malnutrition was significantly more frequent in active disease than in remission (81.0% vs. 14.1%, P

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Belief-Space Control for Personalized Cancer Treatment via Active Inference

arXiv:2606.10376v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Cancer treatment is at the core a sequential decision-making problem with partial observability, latent patient heterogeneity, and explicit constraints on the budget for medical measurements. Unlike standard Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches that control state trajectories, cancer treatments permanently modify patients' transition dynamics, changing how states evolve over time. We model cancer treatment as a belief-space planning problem using active inference, deriving an expected free-energy objective that unifies goal-directed control and information acquisition under measurement budgets without. We implement this framework using real clinical cancer data from the AACR Project GENIE Biopharma Collaborative dataset. Results on clinical data demonstrate a simultaneous patient categorization and high treatment efficacy, under real measurement and treatment constraints.

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

A Benchmark and Framework for Evaluating Next Action Predictions in Spreadsheets

arXiv:2606.13802v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Predictive code completion greatly accelerates how quickly developers work. In spreadsheets, despite being much more common, such auto-completion features are virtually non-existent. To address this gap, we introduce a benchmark for systems that observe a sequence of user actions in a spreadsheet and predict future actions. Two challenges are (1) the absence of edit histories in public spreadsheet corpora and (2) the complex space of spreadsheet actions (spatial, temporal, composite). To address (1), we manually curate 52 sequences of 12K actions that recreate spreadsheets from public corpora, seeded by parametrized heuristics and LLM refinement. To address (2), we propose an online evaluation that expects a prediction after each user action, accepts or rejects that prediction, updates the future actions upon acceptance, and repeats this until the target spreadsheet is obtained. We use multiple baseline predictors (including zero-shot LLMs, fine-tuned SLMs, and classical models) and analyze different properties that our benchmark teaches us, including but not limited to: properties of saved actions and false positives, efficiency, effect of user profiles, effect of triggers, and effect of context.

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 (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Movement Primitives in Robotics: A Comprehensive Survey

arXiv:2601.02379v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Biological systems exhibit a continuous stream of movements, consisting of sequential segments, that allow them to perform complex tasks in a creative and versatile fashion. This observation has led researchers towards identifying elementary building blocks of motion known as movement primitives, which are well-suited for generating motor commands in autonomous systems, such as robots. In this survey, we provide an encyclopedic overview of movement primitive approaches and applications in chronological order. Concretely, we present movement primitive frameworks as a way of representing robotic control trajectories acquired through human demonstrations. Within the area of robotics, movement primitives can encode basic motions at the trajectory level, such as how a robot would grasp a cup or the sequence of motions necessary to toss a ball. Furthermore, movement primitives have been developed with the desirable analytical properties of a spring-damper system, probabilistic coupling of multiple demonstrations, using neural networks in high-dimensional systems, and more, to address difficult challenges in robotics. Although movement primitives have widespread application to a variety of fields, the goal of this survey is to inform practitioners on the use of these frameworks in the context of robotics. Specifically, we aim to (i) present a systematic review of major movement primitive frameworks and examine their strengths and weaknesses; (ii) highlight applications that have successfully made use of movement primitives; and (iii) examine open questions and discuss practical challenges when applying movement primitives in robotics.

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

FFinRED: An Expert-Guided Benchmark Generation and Evaluation Framework for Financial LLM Red-Teaming

arXiv:2606.19887v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing safety benchmarks target general adversarial scenarios but miss finance-specific risks. Financial LLMs face regulatory compliance violations, fraud facilitation, and systemic trust erosion that require targeted evaluation. We introduce FinRED, an expert-guided red-teaming framework for financial LLM safety evaluation developed with financial experts. FinRED uses a novel two-level taxonomy mapping global standards (e.g., FATF and EU DORA) to threats ranging from regulatory evasion to complex fraud, integrated with a scalable pipeline that converts real financial documents into context-rich red-teaming Behavioral Prompts (seeds) through an expert-defined schema. Rigorous expert validation confirms seed plausibility and realism for meaningful LLM safety evaluation. We also provide an expert-validated, finance-specific rubric that goes beyond disclaimer checks, aligns more closely with human experts than static one-size-fits-all rubrics, and reduces critical false negatives from 28 to 12. Aligned with internationally adopted risk-management and information-security standards (e.g., ISO/IEC 27001), FinRED is deployed in South Korea's Financial Security Institute (FSI) regulatory sandbox for generative AI security evaluation in real financial services. To mitigate dual-use risks, the dataset, generation pipeline, prompt template, and evaluation framework are gated for qualified researchers at https://github.com/selectstar-ai/FinRED-paper and https://huggingface.co/datasets/datumo/FinRED.

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

Learning to Hear Hesitation: Continual Learning for Disfluency-Aware ASR

Despite advances in large-scale Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), disfluent speech remains challenging, as state-of-the-art systems are often optimized to omit disfluencies, leading to information loss and hallucinations. Prior work has focused on verbatim transcription and the integration of disfluency markers, but adapting models on limited datasets can lead to catastrophic forgetting of general-domain knowledge. We address this gap by leveraging continual learning (CL) with explicit disfluency tokens. We first introduce these tokens into a pretrained ASR model to establish stable token mechanisms, and then continue training on additional datasets with varying disfluency distributions. Through a detailed analysis of model dynamics during training, we identify a trade-off between marker learning and ASR performance, and a consistent cross-attention head mechanism shared across CL methods.

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

Understanding Truncated Positional Encodings for Graph Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.13671v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Positional encodings (PEs) enhance the power of graph neural networks (GNNs), both theoretically and empirically. Two of the most popular families of PEs - spectral (e.g., Laplacian eigenspaces, effective resistance) and walk-based (polynomials of the adjacency matrix) - are theoretically equivalent in expressive power, with expressivity between the 1-WL and 3-WL tests. However, this equivalence assumes the GNN uses the "complete" version of these PEs, which requires $O(n^3)$ time and space complexity. Instead, practitioners commonly use truncated variants of these encodings, such as the first $k$ eigenspaces or powers of the adjacency matrix. However, the theoretical properties of these truncated PEs are unknown. In this work, we initiate the study of these truncated PEs. Theoretically, we show that, under truncation, several families of PEs are fundamentally different in expressive power. As a corollary, we show that truncated spectral PEs are no longer stronger than the 1-WL test. We also study a family of spectral PEs, the $k$-harmonic distances, to highlight the differences in expressive power of even closely related truncated PEs. Finally, we experimentally show that a mix of truncated PEs is preferable to any single family on real-world datasets.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Latent Space Reinforcement Learning for Inverse Material Estimation in Food Fracture Simulation

Realistic visual simulation of food manipulation requires accurate material parameters, yet these are difficult to measure directly and vary across the heterogeneous regions of a single food item. We address the inverse problem of estimating material parameters from a target description of fracture behavior in a non-differentiable continuum damage mechanics simulator. Using orange peeling as a test case, we train a neural surrogate on 2,000 forward simulations and compare Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES, a gradient-free evolutionary optimizer) with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO, a reinforcement learning algorithm) across the original 9-dimensional parameter space and two learned 4-dimensional latent representations. Since different oranges have different material properties, a practical inverse system must handle arbitrary targets without retraining. We train a goal-conditioned PPO policy that learns a general inverse mapping: given any target description of peeling behavior, the policy produces a material parameter estimate in a single forward pass (8 surrogate evaluations, approximately 10ms). Operating in a normalizing flow latent space with a shared surrogate evaluator, the goal-conditioned policy achieves 0.642 actual recovery when validated through the simulator, outperforming the original parameter space by 23%. A warm-start extension that initializes CMA-ES refinement from the policy's output further improves recovery to 0.828 with 540 evaluations. These findings provide a practical framework for inverse food physics and lay groundwork for vision-driven material identification from video observations of food manipulation.

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

A Conservation Law for Equilibrium Propagation and Coupled Learning

arXiv:2606.15444v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper we show that the physical learning methods known as coupled learning (CL) and equilibrium propagation (EP) conserve a mass-like quantity in the trainable parameters in the continuous-time, small-nudging limit. We prove that this conservation holds in a broad range of physically relevant settings. We then show that the conservation law constrains the training dynamics in a way that makes convergence reliable in important settings for linear circuits. We conclude by discussing some practical implications of this conservation law.

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

Retrieval-Augmented Foundation Models for Water Level Prediction in the Everglades

arXiv:2508.04888v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate water level forecasting in the Everglades is essential for flood mitigation, drought management, water resource planning, and biodiversity conservation. While recent time-series foundation models have shown strong performance on generic tasks (represented in their pre-training), their effectiveness in domain-specific applications remains insufficiently understood. In this work, we curate a domain-specific dataset for water-level forecasting in the Everglades and observe that the performance of current state-of-the-art models remains limited. To address this gap, we leverage a retrieval-augmented mechanism that retrieves analogous multivariate hydrological episodes from an external archive of historical observations to enrich the input context of those pre-trained models. We study two retrieval strategies, statistical similarity-based retrieval and mutual information-based retrieval, and analyze how incorporating retrieved historical contexts affects predictive performance. Extensive experiments show that retrieval augmentation consistently improves long-horizon water level forecasts and yields disproportionately larger gains during extreme events, which is particularly critical for environmental decision-making. Our study provides empirical evidence that analog-based retrieval can benefit pretrained time-series foundation models in environmental science, offering practical insights into their strengths, limitations, and failure modes when applied to hydrological forecasting in the Everglades. Although evaluated in the Everglades, the proposed framework is general and can be applied to other hydrological systems given time series data. The code and data have been made publicly available at https://github.com/rahuul2992000/WaterRAF.

25.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Denoising Distances in Metric Measure Spaces

arXiv:2606.18301v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent work studied the problem of finding clusters and denoising pairwise distances from noisy distances of points sampled on a manifold. We study the same problems in more general metric measure spaces under \lowerphiregularity{}. We give an algorithm that extracts large localized clusters around every sampled point and uses them to denoise distances to any fixed accuracy, with near-linear running time in the dense fixed-accuracy regime. We also show how to achieve much higher accuracy with a non-efficient algorithm. This suggests that unlike the Riemannian case, denoising to higher accuracy in more general metric spaces has a statistical-computational gap.