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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Cinematic Compositing Using Character-Environment-Harmonized Video Generation Models

Cinematic compositing aims to integrate green-screen characters into novel environments while maintaining physical and photometric realism. Previous methods often fail to capture the complex bidirectional interactions between characters and their surroundings, which we characterize as Character-to-Environment (C2E) physical interaction and Environment-to-Character (E2C) lighting harmonization. To address this, we propose an end-to-end video diffusion framework that jointly models C2E and E2C interactions, specifically handling the challenges of interactive props. Our approach introduces a tri-mask-guided architecture with RGB-D joint denoising to ensure physically consistent interactions among the character, props, and environment. We further develop an efficient prior-driven data curation pipeline to construct high-quality relighting pairs without expensive rendering. Finally, a reference-conditioned mechanism enables controllable environment synthesis and precise prop replacement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms existing methods in cinematic-quality dynamic video compositing.

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

X-Tokenizer: A Multimodal Action Tokenizer for Vision-Language-Action Pretraining

Modern Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models must bridge pretrained vision-language reasoning and precise continuous robot control. Existing action tokenizers discretize actions primarily for reconstruction, producing codes that preserve motion geometry but provide only weak semantic supervision to the backbone. We therefore formulate action tokenization not as mere compression, but as semantic interface learning between multimodal reasoning and executable control. To this end, we introduce X-Tokenizer, a lightweight encoder-Semantic Residual Quantization (SRQ)-decoder architecture that provides a shared action interface across diverse robotic arm embodiments. Its key component, SRQ, imposes an asymmetric structure on residual vector quantization: the first level is trained with Masked Action Modeling (MAM) to form a discrete action language that captures coarse motion intent, while deeper levels remain reconstruction-oriented residuals that preserve fine-grained details. To further align action tokens with multimodal semantics, X-Tokenizer is pretrained with contrastive alignment to the representation space of a pretrained foundation model and with next-frame vision-language feature prediction. Pretrained on 2.4M trajectories (2.0B action frames), a single frozen X-Tokenizer plugs into a mixed discrete-continuous VLA as a representation-shaping supervision signal. X-Tokenizer achieves top real-world aggregate and strong RoboTwin 2.0 simulation results. Outperforming FAST in multimodal grounding (+13.5%) and long-horizon tasks (+8.25), it shows that action tokenizers serve as semantic interfaces for VLA pretraining beyond mere action compression.

03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Upper tails for irregular graphs beyond the mean-field regime

arXiv:2606.14564v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Let $G_{n,p}$ be the binomial random graph of density $p$ and let $X_H$ be the number of copies of a fixed graph $H$ in $G_{n,p}$. We prove asymptotically tight bounds on the logarithmic upper-tail probability of $X_H$ whenever $H$ is a connected, irregular graph with maximum degree $\Delta \ge 2$ and $p \ge n^{-1/\Delta - \varepsilon_H} (\log n)^{\omega(1)}$ for an explicit $\varepsilon_H >0$. These bounds are expressed in terms of a new variational problem that generalises the combinatorial optimisation problem arising from the naïve mean-field approximation. This new variational problem includes an entropy term that corresponds to the large number of embeddings of certain highly structured graphs in $K_n$. For a certain class of irregular graphs $H$ that we call stable, we show that this description of the upper-tail probability is valid in a range of densities that is optimal up to a poly($\log\log n$) factor. For a further subclass of stable graphs, which includes all irregular complete bipartite graphs, we show that this range of densities is optimal up to a multiplicative constant.

04.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

ECMME: an atlas of selection pressures on the mammalian extracellular matrix reveals contrasting evolutionary dynamics

The extracellular matrix (ECM) is a fundamental metazoan innovation that provides structural support and regulatory cues essential for multicellular life. While core matrisome components are subject to strong functional constraints, their evolutionary dynamics at the molecular level remain incompletely characterized. Here, we present a comprehensive per-residue analysis of selection pressures across 272 human core matrisome proteins using high-quality orthologous sequences from up to 228 placental mammal species. We developed an automated pipeline integrating ortholog identification, codon-aware alignments, and site-specific selection analyses with the MEME and FUBAR methods from the HyPhy suite. Results reveal pervasive strong purifying selection across the matrisome, consistent with its structural and functional indispensability. This is accompanied by episodic positive selection and rarer pervasive positive selection, with collagens exhibiting significantly elevated episodic positive selection compared to glycoproteins and proteoglycans. To facilitate community access, we developed ECMME (ECM Molecular Evolution) browser, an intuitive open-access web resource that visualizes selection metrics plotted directly onto protein topologies. ECMME allows researchers to seamlessly browse and investigate the data, providing a powerful framework for interpreting functional sites. It is available online and requires no local installation or set-up (https://izzilab-ecmme.share.connect.posit.cloud/).

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

AnchorKV: Safety-Aware KV Cache Compression via Soft Penalty with a Refusal Anchor

arXiv:2606.17872v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) outperform earlier architectures on generative inference and long-context tasks, but their large size introduces significant challenges in memory usage, energy cost, and on-device deployment. Since scaling pre-trained language models improves downstream capability [zhao2023survey], the key-value (KV) cache becomes a dominant inference bottleneck. Recent KV cache compression methods [jo2025fastkv,li2024snapkv,zhou2024dynamickv] reduce this cost by retaining only a subset of attention-relevant tokens. However, while these approaches preserve accuracy on benign workloads, their compression policies either fail to defend against jailbreak attacks [jiang2024robustkv] or degrade safety alignment under aggressive eviction. We propose AnchorKV, a drop-in modification to KV cache compression that biases token retention scores away from directions in key space associated with harmful prompts. AnchorKV constructs an offline safety anchor by adapting a difference-of-means representation engineering approach [arditi2024refusal,zou2023representation] to the layer-specific key projection space used in KV caching. Based on this anchor, a soft penalty token selection rule trades a small amount of utility for substantially improved safety alignment, while reducing to the original compressor when the penalty is zero.

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

Selective Agentic Recovery for UAV Autonomy with a Persistent Mission Runtime

arXiv:2606.14219v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic AI can support unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) autonomy by providing high-level recovery reasoning when local waypoint- or setpoint-based execution encounters blocked passages, repeated no-progress behavior, or mission-level ambiguity. On physical UAVs, however, remote reasoning is most useful when it is invoked selectively, since each call introduces latency, resource cost, backend uncertainty, and a need to validate the returned decision. This paper presents Persistent Mission Runtime (PMR), a UAV recovery framework that keeps the mission loop and safety-critical execution local while using an external agentic reasoner only as an on-demand recovery module. The reasoner selects from predefined recovery skills, and each returned decision is parsed, verified, safety-filtered, and mapped to local executor actions before it can affect flight. PMR introduces learned Cognitive Value of Invocation (learned-CVI), a compact admission gate that estimates when remote agentic reasoning is likely to improve near-term mission progress enough to justify its operational cost. Across a fixed 400-run Gazebo/PX4 benchmark with eight scenarios, learned-CVI raises hard/ambiguous-regime success from 5.0% under local-only autonomy to 95.0%, outperforms one-shot and periodic reasoning baselines by 20.0 and 32.5 percentage points, and reduces remote-agent calls by 16.7% and logged tokens by 29.2% relative to a manually tuned rule-based invocation baseline.

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

A large-scale pipeline for LLM-assisted corpus annotation: variation and change in the English consider construction

As natural language corpora expand at an unprecedented rate, manual annotation remains a significant methodological bottleneck in corpus linguistic work. We address this challenge by presenting a scalable pipeline for automating grammatical annotation in voluminous corpora using large language models (LLMs). Unlike previous supervised and iterative approaches, our method employs a four-phase workflow: prompt engineering, pre-hoc evaluation, automated batch processing, and post-hoc validation. We demonstrate the pipeline's accessibility and effectiveness through a diachronic case study of variation in the English evaluative consider construction (consider X as/to be/{\O} Y). We annotate 143,933 'consider' concordance lines from the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) via the OpenAI API in under 60 hours, achieving 98%+ accuracy on two sophisticated annotation procedures. A Bayesian multinomial GAM fitted to 44,527 true positives of the evaluative construction reveals previously undocumented genre-specific trajectories of change, enabling us to advance new hypotheses about the relationship between register formality and competing pressures of morphosyntactic reduction and enhancement. Our results suggest that LLMs can perform a range of data preparation tasks at scale with minimal human intervention, unlocking substantive research questions previously beyond practical reach, though implementation requires attention to costs, licensing, and other ethical considerations.

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Efficacy and safety of semaglutide for obesity and hyperphagia in adults with Prader-Willi syndrome

Context: Prader-Willi syndrome is a genetic neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by hyperphagia and early-onset obesity from hypothalamic dysfunction with endocrinopathies and learning disability. Management is challenging with strict control of the food environment needed. While newer glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists, such as semaglutide, have efficacy in non-PWS obesity, there have been limited case reports in PWS. Objective/Design/Setting: Retrospective records review of 12 adults with PWS and overweight/obesity treated with semaglutide at a UK academic hospital centre specialist clinic. Patients: mean +/- SD age 28.3 +/- 10.1 years, 83% female, BMI 46.6 +/- 8.2kg/m2, 75% type 2 diabetes mellitus. Intervention: Median follow-up 17.2 months (range 8.7-36.1) with median semaglutide dose 2.4mg once weekly (1.0-2.4). Results: Although there was no significant weight loss on semaglutide, there was stabilisation of the weight gain prior to treatment over previous 12.4 months (7.6-23.0) (post -3.1 +/- 9.9% vs. pre +5.7 +/- 5.6%: d -0.72, P=0.037). There was a significant decrease in hyperphagia on semaglutide from hyperphagia questionnaire for clinical trials (n=11, -7.3 +/- 6.1 (max 36), d -1.19, P=0.003), having been stable before treatment. HbA1c improved in those with elevated baseline levels (n=6, -4.2 +/- 4.9%, d -0.74, P=0.13). Mild gastrointestinal side effects were seen in 25% but did not lead to discontinuation. Conclusions: In adults with PWS, semaglutide produced weight maintenance, reduced hyperphagia, and improved glycaemic control, with good tolerability. Larger placebo-controlled trials are needed to confirm these findings in adults and adolescents with PWS, especially in those without T2DM, where efficacy may be greater.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

How Many Shots Are Enough for a Quantum Circuit?

arXiv:2606.16965v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum algorithms require repeated circuit executions, known as shots, to estimate output distributions accurately. Determining the minimal number of shots needed to meet a target accuracy is crucial to reduce costs and resource usage, especially on today's noisy and expensive quantum hardware. In this paper, we address the shot optimisation problem in a black-box setting, where no assumptions are made about the structure of the quantum circuit or the noise model of the backend. We introduce IncrementalExecution, a novel online framework that dynamically determines when to stop executing shots based on the principle of point of diminishing returns: the point at which additional shots no longer significantly alter the empirical distribution of a fixed circuit. The framework supports customisable policies for shot management, enabling flexible trade-offs between execution cost and result fidelity within static execution scenarios. We assess our proposal through an extensive experimental evaluation spanning 33,750 framework configurations across 180 unique static quantum circuit-backend combinations, for a total of 7.3M independent experiments. Unlike prior work that relies on problem-specific knowledge or algorithm-dependent assumptions (e.g., variational or adaptive workflows), our approach is applicable to a large set of static circuits and immediately deployable on current quantum cloud platforms.

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

AGDN: Learning to Solve Traveling Salesman Problem with Anisotropic Graph Diffusion Network

arXiv:2606.19185v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is a cornerstone of combinatorial optimization and arises in many practical scenarios. Although graph-based learning approaches have been explored for TSP, the question of how to exploit graph structure more effectively remains open. We present the Anisotropic Graph Diffusion Network (AGDN), a new Graph Neural Network framework designed to solve TSP. Our method tackles two central difficulties: (1) the lack of informative topological prior in fully connected TSP graphs, and (2) losing connected nodes in the optimal solution after the commonly used graph sparsification techniques. To overcome these issues, we construct a MixScore transition matrix that merges node similarity with pairwise distance, and we develop an anisotropic graph diffusion strategy that supports efficient information exchange across multiple hops. Comprehensive experiments spanning diverse instance sizes and node distributions show that AGDN consistently outperforms existing methods while keeping computation time competitive. Furthermore, AGDN generalizes well to problem sizes and distributions beyond those seen during training. The implementation is publicly available at: https://github.com/LabRAI/AGDN.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Interpolation between Convolution and Attention via K-Nearest Neighbors

Authors:

The shift from Convolutional Neural Networks to Transformers has reshaped computer vision, yet these two architectural families are typically viewed as fundamentally distinct. Convolutional Neural Networks are defined by spatially local convolution operations, while Transformers rely on global self-attention. We argue that convolution and self-attention, despite their apparent differences, can be unified within a single k-nearest neighbor aggregation framework. The critical insight is that both operations are special cases of neighbor selection and weighted aggregation. Convolution selects neighbors by spatial proximity while self-attention selects by feature similarity, revealing that they lie on a continuous spectrum rather than representing categorically different computations. We introduce Convolutional Nearest Neighbors (ConvNN), a unified framework that formalizes this connection. ConvNN exactly recovers standard and depthwise convolution by restricting neighbor selection to normalized spatial coordinates, and exactly recovers self-attention and its sparse variants, including KVT-attention, by replacing spatial proximity with scaled dot-product similarity. Beyond these special cases, ConvNN serves as a drop-in replacement for both convolution and attention layers, enabling systematic exploration of the intermediate spectrum between local and global aggregation through configurable similarity functions, neighbor selection strategies, positional encodings, and aggregation kernels.

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

Will AI Agents Free Us From Meaningless Work? A Human-Centered Analysis

arXiv:2606.12430v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Some claim that AI agents will free workers from the boring parts of their jobs, yet little is known about how workers themselves identify which tasks should be automated. Prior research focuses on occupations, overlooking that workers experience varying levels of meaning across tasks within the same role. We address this gap with a task-level analysis grounded in Graeber's theory of bullshit jobs. Using ratings from 202 workers on 171 workplace tasks, we (1) validate a five-item scale of perceived bullshitness, (2) show that perceived bullshitness strongly predicts desire for AI delegation, and (3) find that such tasks are also seen as requiring less human oversight. Together, these findings suggest that tasks perceived as bullshit are natural candidates for AI delegation, aligning worker preferences with perceived feasibility.

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

Representing Piecewise-Linear Functions by Functions with Minimal Arity

arXiv:2406.02421v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Any continuous piecewise-linear function $F\colon \mathbb{R}^{n}\to \mathbb{R}$ can be represented as a linear combination of $\max$ functions of at most $n+1$ affine-linear functions. In our previous paper [``Representing piecewise linear functions by functions with small arity'', AAECC, 2023], we showed that this upper bound of $n+1$ arguments is tight. In the present paper, we extend this result by establishing a correspondence between the function $F$ and the minimal number of arguments that are needed in any such decomposition. We show that the tessellation of the input space $\mathbb{R}^{n}$ induced by the function $F$ has a direct connection to the number of arguments in the $\max$ functions.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

MLUBench: A Benchmark for Lifelong Unlearning Evaluation in MLLMs

arXiv:2606.12809v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are trained on massive multimodal data, making data unlearning increasingly important as data owners may request the removal of specific content. In practice, these requests often arrive sequentially over time, giving rise to the challenging problem of MLLM Lifelong Unlearning. However, most existing benchmarks are limited in scale and scope, failing to capture the complexities of MLLM lifelong unlearning. To fill this gap, we introduce the MLUBench, a large-scale and comprehensive benchmark featuring 127 entities across 9 classes under lifelong unlearning requests. We perform extensive experiments using MLUBench and reveal that existing unlearning methods suffer from severe, cumulative degradation. More critically, we further identify the unique challenge of this problem: unlike in unimodal models, MLLM lifelong unlearning is constrained by the need to preserve multimodal alignment. Continually unlearning from one modality could degrade the entire model. To alleviate this challenge, we propose LUMoE, an effective method. Experiments demonstrate that LUMoE significantly mitigates the degradation problem faced by baselines. The source code and the MLUBench dataset are open-sourced in https://github.com/lihe-maxsize/Lifelong_Unlearning_main.

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

Test-Time Compute Scaling for ASR with Depth-Conditioned Looped Transformers

arXiv:2606.04678v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: End-to-end ASR systems typically use fixed-depth acoustic encoders at inference, making it difficult to trade additional test-time computation for improved recognition without training a larger model. A natural approach is to reuse a shared Transformer block recurrently, but we find that naive looping does not fully exploit additional recurrent compute. We introduce LARM, a depth-conditioned looped Transformer that turns recurrent encoder depth into a controllable test-time compute axis. LARM combines sparse CTC checkpoints, supervision-clock embeddings, FiLM depth conditioning, and delayed soft-posterior feedback. These components structure the loop into recognition checkpoints separated by latent refinement phases and allow shared weights to specialize across recurrent steps. On LibriSpeech, LARM improves WER as the number of inference loops increases and achieves performance competitive with deeper unshared-parameter baselines. Our results show that test-time compute scaling can extend beyond autoregressive language-model reasoning to continuous non-autoregressive speech recognition.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Diabetes and the Life-Course: Evidence from Panel Data and Electronic Health Records

Incidence of type 2 diabetes is increasing at ages when education, work, family, and financial transitions are taking place, yet we lack robust evidence of whether earlier treatment changes life-course outcomes and over which time span this takes place. This paper uses the medical cutoff for diabetes diagnosis (HbA1c of 6.5 percent) as a natural experiment to study the effects of diabetes treatment using electronic health records (EHR) and panel data. This paper has three main findings. First, using EHR data, we find that there is a sharp increase in the probability of both diagnosis of diabetes and prescription when the HbA1c equals 6.5 percent. Second, we find that treating diabetes reduces HbA1c levels, weight, BMI, and blood pressure and increases the amount of care received, proxied by the number of HbA1c tests. Both the diagnosis and a prescription are independently able to produce positive changes in metabolic health, although a prescription is more effective in this regard. Third, we conclude that treating diabetes does not have a significant effect on life-course outcomes for a cohort of young Americans aged 24-32, although it does result in a reduction in HbA1c levels that are seen even eight years after the intervention. Taken together, these findings suggest that receiving a diagnosis and prescription are both effective treatments for diabetes, but they do not translate to significant alterations in the lives of young adults in the medium-term.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Mixed-State Topological Order under Coherent Noise

arXiv:2411.03441v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Mixed-state phases of matter under local decoherence have recently garnered significant attention due to the ubiquitous presence of noise in current quantum processors. One of the key issues is understanding how topological quantum memory is affected by realistic coherent noise, such as random rotation noise and amplitude-damping noise. In this work, we investigate the intrinsic error threshold of the two-dimensional toric code (TC), a paradigmatic topological quantum memory, under these types of coherent noise by employing both analytical and numerical methods based on the doubled-Hilbert-space formalism. A connection between the mixed-state phase of the decohered TC and a non-Hermitian Ashkin-Teller-type statistical-mechanics model is established, and the mixed-state phase diagrams under the coherent noise are obtained. We find remarkable stability of mixed-state topological order under random rotation noise with axes near the $Y$-axis of qubits. We also identify intriguing extended critical regions at the phase boundaries, highlighting a connection with non-Hermitian physics. We argue that these phase boundaries provide upper bounds for the intrinsic error threshold, beyond which quantum error correction becomes impossible. We complement these findings by estimating the error thresholds for random rotation noise under standard quantum error correction, thereby providing lower bounds on the intrinsic error threshold.

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

Hierarchical Consistency Learning for Test-time Adaptation in Camouflage Perception

Camouflaged object detection (COD) aims to localize targets that exhibit minimal perceptual differences from backgrounds through physical attributes. Existing methods, constrained by the static train-then-freeze paradigm, suffer from domain rigidity and annotation dependency, limiting their adaptability to scene variations and unseen camouflage patterns. To overcome these, we propose the hierarchical consistency learning (HCL) framework, which integrates test-time adaptation for dynamic representation recalibration. Specifically, we design the hierarchical representation reconstruction (HRR) to alleviate feature entanglement by synergizing spatial reconstruction with dual-stream frequency-domain decomposition, enhancing robustness against appearance homogenization. The pixel and spectrum inference provide structural and contextual priors. We further introduce task affinity guidance (TAG) to propagate knowledge across branches via channel-wise affinity, aligning local discriminative cues and mitigating semantic drift. To ensure semantic invariance, we formulate the prototype consistency calibration (PCC), which aggregates region features into compact prototypes and establishes prototype-feature similarity. This imposes implicit and hierarchical constraints that bridge task and representation gaps. Extensive experiments across four camouflaged and four underwater object benchmarks, under three degradation settings, demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, highlighting its robustness and generalization under distribution shifts.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

KAN-MLP-Mixer: A comprehensive investigation of the usage of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) for improving IMU-based Human Activity Recognition

arXiv:2605.19031v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) have demonstrated an exceptional ability to learn complex functions on clean, low-dimensional data but struggle to maintain performance on noisy and imperfect real-world datasets. In contrast, conventional multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) are far more tolerant to noise and computationally efficient. Replacing all MLP components with KANs in HAR models often degrades accuracy and computation efficiency, highlighting an open challenge: how to combine KANs' precision with MLPs' noise robustness and efficiency. To address this, we systematically explore various placements of KAN modules within deep HAR networks and propose a hybrid architecture that strategically synergizes the strengths of both paradigms, which uses a KAN-based input embedding layer, retains MLP layers for intermediate feature mixing, and introduces a specialized LarctanKAN module for final activity classification. Across eight public HAR datasets, the hybrid KAN-MLP model achieves an average macro F1 score relative improvement of 5.33\% compared pure-MLP model, significantly outperforming standalone KAN and MLP baselines. Furthermore, integrating this hybrid strategy into other state-of-the-art HAR architectures consistently boosts their performance. Our findings demonstrate that a carefully orchestrated combination of KAN, MLP, or other conventional neural components yields more robust and accurate HAR models for real-world wearable sensing environments.

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

Inhibited radiative decay enhances single-photon emitters

arXiv:2511.23301v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum networks and modular quantum computers require efficient spin-photon interfaces, often realized using optical resonators that enhance radiative decay on a desired transition. However, this requires small mode volumes and high quality factors, which limits multiplexing capacity and demands precise frequency tuning. Here, we demonstrate an alternative approach that circumvents these bottlenecks for upscaling. Using a W1 silicon photonic crystal waveguide with a tailored photonic bandgap, we selectively inhibit unwanted decay pathways, thereby redirecting emission to the desired transition. This enables efficient photon collection over a large frequency range, allowing the resolution and individual addressing of tens of erbium dopants. Their lifetimes are preserved, or even increased, compared to bulk material. The extended mode volume of the devices enables the use of lower dopant concentrations, thereby improving emitter coherence. Our approach can be combined with Purcell enhancement and applied to other spin-qubit platforms, opening intriguing perspectives for photonic quantum technologies.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

PermDoRA – Understanding Adapter Interference in Language Models: Limits of Parameter-Space Geometry

arXiv:2606.11262v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Access control in large language models (LLMs) requires modular mechanisms to enable domain-specific behavior without retraining or cross-domain interference. A common hypothesis is that interference during adapter composition arises from overlap in linear parameter updates, suggesting that enforcing orthogonality or directional independence should improve multi-domain performance. We test this hypothesis using DoRA-RBAC, a hierarchical adapter composition framework based on weight-decomposed low-rank adaptation. We compare conventional Euclidean merging with a geometry-aware Riemannian-inspired merging strategy that approximates the Frechet mean via normalized directional averaging across multiple QA benchmarks (GPQA, PubMedQA, SimpleQA, WMDP) on LLaMA-3.1-8B and Mistral-7B. Our results show that while single-domain performance matches LoRA, geometry-aware merging provides no consistent advantage over standard averaging in multi-domain settings.Diagnostic analysis further reveals that angular alignment and orthogonality of adapter updates are weak predictors of composition performance. These findings suggest that adapter interference is not governed primarily by parameter-space geometry, but is instead consistent with interactions in shared nonlinear representations.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

A risk-of-contagion index using a Bayesian based model for the COVID-19 epidemic in Mexico

During the COVID-19 pandemic, limited testing capacity and reporting delays complicated epidemic surveillance and decision-making in Mexico. We calibrated textit{covidestim}, a Bayesian nowcasting model, to estimate the total SARS-CoV-2 infections from reported cases and deaths using Mexican surveillance data. Disease-progression distribution priors were calibrated using Mexico City records and validated through comparisons with national seroprevalence surveys, hospitalization data, and annual reported severe-case rates across all states. Using the reconstructed estimates of active infections, we implemented an event-based risk framework that quantifies the probability of encountering at least one infectious individual in gatherings of different sizes. This probability was subsequently translated into a four-level epidemiological traffic-light indicator and computed at both state and municipality levels. The resulting estimates revealed substantial spatial heterogeneity that is obscured by state-level aggregation, particularly in states with marked differences between urban and rural municipalities. To evaluate consistency with public-health indicators, we compared the proposed risk classification with the official Mexican epidemiological traffic-light system, considering interpretable gathering sizes relevant to public-health decision making. Weekly reports derived from this framework were delivered to policymakers in the State of Queretaro in Mexico, as an anticipation tool for school reopening and public-space management. This demonstrates that this Bayesian reconstruction of infections combined with event-based risk metrics can provide an interpretable and generalizable municipality-level complement to routine surveillance systems, particularly in regions with limited testing capacity and heterogeneous local transmission dynamics.

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

Single vs. Multiple Branches in DeepONet and S-DeepONet: Network Architecture Follows Coupling in Multiphysics Systems

arXiv:2507.03660v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: `Real-time prediction of complex physical systems requires surrogate models that learn from data while representing strong multiphysics coupling. Deep Operator Networks have shown success in single-physics problems, yet their effectiveness in capturing nonlinear interactions in coupled systems (such as thermo-mechanical or electro-thermal coupling) remains underexplored. Here we pose a practical question: should the architecture of a neural operator reflect the strength of physical coupling it aims to model? We compare single-branch and multi-branch designs, in both feedforward and sequential recurrent forms, across three representative systems: a reaction–diffusion problem with heterogeneous sources, a nonlinear thermo-electrical problem with temperature-dependent conductivity and Joule heating, and a viscoplastic thermo-mechanical model of steel solidification. Single-branch networks consistently outperform multi-branch variants in tightly coupled regimes by encouraging shared latent representations, whereas multi-branch designs remain favorable for decoupled or single-physics tasks. Once trained, these surrogates deliver full-field predictions up to $1.8 \times 10^4$ times faster than physics-based solvers.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Accelerating Speculative Diffusions via Block Verification

arXiv:2606.13426v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Speculative decoding speeds up LLM inference by using a draft model to generate tokens, with an acceptance-rejection scheme that ensures that the output matches the target distribution. Adapting this to continuous diffusions is difficult because speculative sampling requires drawing from a residual distribution. While straightforward in discrete spaces, efficiently sampling this residual in continuous space is non-trivial. Consequently, existing diffusion adaptations either use computationally inefficient sampling techniques or rely on an alternative scheme. In this work, we introduce a novel scheme that efficiently implements the original speculative sampling mechanism for diffusion models. Our approach offers a critical advantage over current methods: it enables us to adapt block verification from LLMs to diffusions – which provably improves the acceptance rate of drafts. Furthermore, we formalize and analyze the Free Drafter, a heuristic self-speculative drafter for diffusions that requires no training. By enabling block verification, our Free Drafter yields up to a 6.3% speedup over existing speculative methods with no additional training and negligible overhead beyond the existing parallel verification pass.