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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Differential Determinants of Past Behavior and Future Intention Regarding Voluntary Blood Donation: A Cross-Sectional Study of Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices in Qingdao, China

Background A persistent gap between motivation and action threatens voluntary blood supply. This study examined the publics knowledge, attitudes, and practices (KAP) regarding blood donation, with a particular focus on identifying the different determinants of past blood donation behavior and future willingness to donate. Methods Convenience sampling was used to conduct a cross-sectional survey among 1,058 eligible people in Qingdao, China, between July and November 2025. Data were collected via a self-designed KAP questionnaire. To find independent characteristics linked to previous behavior and future intention, respectively, multivariable binary logistic regression was used. Results Overall, 37.0% of participants (n=391) had a lifetime donation history, while 39.2% (n=415) intended to donate in the next 12 months. Past behavior was positively associated with older age (36-45 years: OR=6.84; 95% CI: 3.21-14.58), higher education (OR=2.06; 95% CI: 1.33-3.17), and interpersonal interaction channels (OR=1.45; 95% CI: 1.01-2.09) but hindered by safety concerns (OR=0.23; 95% CI: 0.16-0.34). Conversely, future intention was positively correlated with male sex (OR=1.69; 95% CI: 1.24-2.29), prior donation history (OR=2.69; 95% CI: 1.87-3.86), having family members or friends in need of blood (OR=2.75; 95% CI: 1.96-3.85), and traditional media exposure (OR=3.33; 95% CI: 2.18-5.10). Higher education was adversely correlated with future intention (OR=0.55; 95% CI: 0.38-0.79). Conclusion There is a substantial disparity between donation motivation and action. The determinants of past behavior and future intention are asymmetric, suggesting that stage-specific interventions are required, using social mobilization for initiating first-time donations, while employing family reciprocity and authoritative communication to sustain long-term engagement.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Analyzing the Narration Gap in LLM-Solver Loops

arXiv:2606.19588v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Formal tools such as SAT and SMT solvers are increasingly embedded in language model reasoning pipelines when a safety or security critical question can be formulated in logic. Unlike chain of thought whose steps are sampled from the model distribution without formal guarantee, a solver produces a sound and independently verifiable answer. However, the soundness guarantee can be lost in the interaction between the solver and the model. The hybrid pipeline has three components: formalizing the question, deciding it, and narrating the result. Prior work has studied the formalization and decision, but not narration, which is the step that turns a formal tool's output into the user answer. To fill the narration gap, we first model the LLM-solver loop as a verified decision procedure. We further evaluate five open-sourced models under prompt injection, and we find certificate gating makes the solver verdict sound, while an adversary can invert a verified conclusion across phrasings and channels. We study the mitigation through hardened prompt that reduces injection significantly but cannot eliminate it and still suffers under adaptive attack. Combining the formal analysis and empirical studies, we show in the LLM-solver loop, robustness does not reach to the answer that the user finally reads.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Benign in Isolation, Harmful in Composition: Security Risks in Agent Skill Ecosystems

arXiv:2606.15242v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Skills are becoming the capability layer through which LLM agents turn plans into actions, but their use introduces security risks such as data leakage, unauthorized operations, and tool misuse. Existing vetting usually evaluates each skill in isolation, while real agent tasks often invoke multiple skills in a shared execution context. This creates Skill Composition Risk (SCR): a skill that appears benign alone can become harmful when its outputs, trust signals, authorization cues, or side effects influence later invocations along an activated path. We introduce SCR-Bench to evaluate this risk in controlled, sandboxed skill environments. Rather than relying only on textual intent or surface behavior, SCR-Bench records downstream state changes and path-level outcomes across composed skill executions. It contains three sub-benchmarks: SCR-CapFlow for capability-flow composition, SCR-TrustLift for trust-transfer composition, and SCR-AuthBlur for authorization-confusion composition. Across SCR-Bench, composed paths expose risks that are largely absent under isolated evaluation. In SCR-CapFlow, attack success rate reaches 33.6 percent under composition, compared with near-zero isolated baselines. In SCR-TrustLift, attack success rate exceeds 96.5 percent on four of five backends. In SCR-AuthBlur, the risky-approval rate increases by 71.8 percent relative to the L0 isolated baseline under the L1 context setting. These results show that agent skill security should be assessed at the level of activated paths rather than isolated artifacts. SCR and SCR-Bench provide a foundation for path-aware risk evaluation and defense in LLM agent skill ecosystems. Benchmark: https://github.com/saint-viperx/SCR_Bench.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

FlowRL: A Taxonomy and Modular Framework for Reinforcement Learning with Diffusion Policies

arXiv:2603.27450v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Thanks to their remarkable flexibility, diffusion models and flow models have emerged as promising candidates for policy representation. However, efficient reinforcement learning (RL) upon these policies remains a challenge due to the lack of explicit log-probabilities for vanilla policy gradient estimators. While numerous attempts have been proposed to address this, the field lacks a unified perspective to reconcile these seemingly disparate methods, thus hampering ongoing development. In this paper, we bridge this gap by introducing a comprehensive taxonomy for RL algorithms with diffusion/flow policies. To support reproducibility and agile prototyping, we introduce a modular, JAX-based open-source codebase that leverages JIT-compilation for high-throughput training. Finally, we provide systematic and standardized benchmarks across Gym-Locomotion, DeepMind Control Suite, and IsaacLab, offering a rigorous side-by-side comparison of diffusion-based methods and guidance for practitioners to choose proper algorithms based on the application. Our work establishes a clear foundation for understanding and algorithm design, a high-efficiency toolkit for future research in the field, and an algorithmic guideline for practitioners in generative models and robotics. Our code is available at https://github.com/typoverflow/flow-rl.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

When Does Language Matter? Multilingual Instructions Reveal Step-wise Language Sensitivity in Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown strong performance in language-conditioned robotic manipulation, yet their robustness to linguistic variation remains poorly understood. In this work, we present the first systematic multilingual evaluation of VLA models by translating the LIBERO benchmark into ten languages, revealing severe performance degradation under non-English instructions, with success rates dropping by 30-50%. Through fine-grained analysis of task executions, we find that language influence is highly non-uniform across steps: certain steps exhibit strong language dependence and dominate overall task failure, while others are largely language-agnostic. Based on this insight, we propose a step-wise inference-time intervention that aligns representations according to step language sensitivity, substantially improving performance under linguistic variation. Our results indicate that language robustness in VLA models is fundamentally a step-wise control problem, highlighting the importance of temporally structured analysis for reliable embodied agents.

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

Time-Varying Audio Effect Modeling by End-to-End Adversarial Training

arXiv:2512.15313v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep learning has become a standard approach for the modeling of audio effects, yet strictly black-box modeling remains problematic for time-varying systems. Unlike time-invariant effects, training models on devices with internal modulation typically requires the recording or extraction of control signals to ensure the time-alignment required by standard loss functions. This paper introduces a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) framework to model such effects using only input-output audio recordings, without requiring a modulation signal extraction. We propose a convolutional-recurrent architecture trained via a two-stage strategy: an initial adversarial phase allows the model to learn the distribution of the modulation behavior without strict phase constraints, followed by a supervised fine-tuning phase where a State Prediction Network (SPN) estimates the initial internal states required to synchronize the model with the target. Additionally, a new metric based on chirp-train signals is developed to quantify modulation accuracy. Experiments modeling a vintage hardware phaser demonstrate the method's ability to capture time-varying dynamics in a fully black-box context.

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

ProHiFlo: Hierarchical Flow Matching with Functional Guidance for De Novo Protein Generation

De novo protein generation has transformative potential in therapeutic design, enzyme engineering, and synthetic biology. While diffusion-based and flow matching approaches have achieved progress, they typically operate at single resolution and lack mechanisms for incorporating functional constraints. We introduce ProHiFlo, a hierarchical flow matching framework with three innovations: (1) coarse-to-fine generation that models backbone geometry before refining to all-atom coordinates, reducing computational cost while maintaining accuracy; (2) functional guidance leveraging pretrained predictors to steer generation toward desired properties without retraining; (3) adaptive SE(3)-equivariant architecture for efficient multi-scale processing. Experiments on unconditional generation, motif scaffolding, and functional design demonstrate state-ofthe-art performance while requiring 4 fewer sampling steps. On enzyme active site scaffolding, ProHiFlo achieves 58.9% success rate compared to 41.2% for RFDiffusion.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Efficient and simple Gibbs state preparation of the 2D toric code via duality to classical Ising chains

arXiv:2508.00126v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce the notion of polynomial-depth duality transformations, which relates two sets of operator algebras through a conjugation by a poly-depth quantum circuit, and make use of this to construct efficient Gibbs samplers for a variety of interesting quantum Hamiltonians as they are poly-depth dual to classical Hamiltonians. This is for example the case for the 2D toric code, which is demonstrated to be poly-depth dual to two decoupled classical Ising spin chains for any system size, and we give evidence that such dualities hold for a wide class of stabilizer Hamiltonians. Additionally, we extend the above notion of duality to Lindbladians in order to show that mixing times and other quantities such as the spectral gap or the modified logarithmic Sobolev inequality are preserved under duality.

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

Structuring and Tokenizing Distributed User Interest Context for Generative Recommendation

arXiv:2606.20554v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative recommendation is an emerging paradigm that has shown promise in industrial recommendation systems, aiming to predict users' next interactions from their historical behaviors. At the core of generative recommendation lies item tokenization, which bridges item semantics and recommendation models. However, existing methods often struggle to effectively organize and inject complex user-behavioral and item-semantic contexts into recommendation models simultaneously. On the one hand, existing graph-based integration methods, such as graph serialization and graph neural networks, either suffer from scalability issues or exploit only local graph information. On the other hand, existing semantic tokenization methods typically rely on heuristics and lack explicit supervision signals, which may lead to inaccurate or suboptimal semantic representations. To address these limitations in user interest context modeling, we propose G2Rec, a scalable framework that unifies holistic graph-based user co-engagement modeling with semantic tokenization for industrial-scale generative recommendation. Overall, G2Rec enables recommendation models to capture holistic and semantically grounded user interest prototypes without requiring ground-truth user interests, thereby providing more comprehensive and accurate modeling of user behavior contexts in industrial sequential recommendation. Online deployment across product surfaces and extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate the superiority of G2Rec over existing methods.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Accelerating physics-informed neural networks for full waveform inversion using a hybrid quantum-classical finite-basis architecture

arXiv:2606.01110v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Full waveform inversion (FWI) reconstructs heterogeneous material properties from receiver data but remains computationally demanding. Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) and their domain-decomposed variants (FBPINNs) offer a mesh-free alternative but face convergence challenges when representing complex velocity fields. We present a hybrid quantum-classical FBPINN for acoustic FWI, bringing together quantum computing and classical machine learning, in which the decomposed wavefield network and the global velocity network are implemented as classical-to-quantum pipelines terminating in parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs). The PQCs are realized as differentiable JAX statevector simulators, enabling end-to-end automatic differentiation through the classical PINN, the quantum circuit, and the physics-informed loss. On a geophysical anomaly benchmark, the quantum hybrid reaches a lower L1 velocity error than the primary classical FBPINN baseline in approximately 8x fewer training iterations, despite using approximately 33% fewer trainable parameters, and it outperforms all 15 classical hyperparameter variants tested. A second benchmark (checkerboard) demonstrates the generality of the inversion pipeline, confirming that the quantum hybrid architecture can recover structured spatial variations beyond the localized anomaly benchmark. Our framework is broadly applicable to wave-based inverse problems beyond geophysics, including medical ultrasound tomography and non-destructive evaluation.

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

Hybrid ANN-SNN Pipeline with Local Plasticity

arXiv:2606.20151v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work proposes a hybrid ANN-SNN pipeline that effectively leverages the rich embeddings of pretrained artificial neural networks (ANNs) to enable high-performance spiking neural networks (SNNs). The architecture couples a pretrained EfficientNet encoder with a CoLaNET spiking classifier. We convert the encoder's activations into spike trains via rate-coding and train the subsequent SNN classifier using local, biologically inspired learning rules, bypassing end-to-end gradient propagation. This approach achieves 99.09% accuracy on a 64-class ImageNet benchmark, demonstrating performance on par with conventional deep networks. The work presents a biologically plausible and efficient framework for adapting powerful pretrained encoders to downstream spiking neural network tasks.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

DeepForestVisionV2: Ecology-Driven Taxonomy Expansion for Camera-Trap Monitoring in African Tropical Forests

Camera-trap monitoring in African tropical forests increasingly extends beyond closed-canopy interiors to riverbanks, clearings, and park edges. Among available open tools for African forest camera-trap classification, DeepForestVision is the only one providing a matched offline workflow for both photographs and videos, and previous work showed that it outperformed other available baselines on a comparable benchmark. However, it was designed for closed-canopy, ground-level forest interiors and uses a 35-class prediction space that becomes too coarse when deployments encounter arboreal primates, birds, semi-aquatic taxa, or human-associated confounders such as livestock. We present DeepForestVisionV2, an ecology-driven expansion from 35 to 64 prediction classes (61 animal classes plus human, vehicle, and blank) designed to address three recurrent deployment gradients: vertical stratification, scene openness, and anthropogenic interfaces. DeepForestVisionV2 retains the same offline workflow and is trained on 1,535,010 photographs and 243,354 videos from multi-country African tropical-forest projects. Evaluation combines a cross-country cropped-photo validation set, used to assess robustness across sites and camera-trap settings, with three held-out Uganda video benchmarks spanning the targeted gradients. On the validation set, DeepForestVisionV2 reaches 0.86 accuracy, 0.82 macro-F1, and 0.81 balanced accuracy. On the deployment benchmarks, it preserves or improves baseline accuracy despite its harder classification task, while increasing the number of identified taxa from 22 to 29 in forest-interior videos and from 4 to 9 at riverbanks. In the park-edge use case, it raises accuracy from 0.62 to 0.86 and reduces false alarms from 11 to 0. These results show that DeepForestVisionV2 materially improves field utility while preserving robustness across sites, habitats, and camera-trap settings.

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

Agent-based models for the evolution of morphological alternation patterns

Why is the past of English "go" the apparently unrelated "went"? Such alternations are frequent in languages. They neither aid communication nor learnability, yet they can be persistent, surviving over centuries or millennia. We present a multi-agent simulation of the emergence of morphological stem and inflection alternations. Alternate forms arise by phonological changes or, as with "go/went", from lexical alternatives associated with a subset of the population. When an agent 'hears' another agent use a novel form for a slot in the paradigm of a word (say, the past tense of go), they will with some probability adopt that form, possibly spreading its use to other slots in the paradigm that shared the same original form. Thus alternative forms can spread through the population and become entrenched as stem or inflectional marker alternants. Unlike many previous computational studies, our system allows for naturalistic lexical forms, realistic phonological rules, lexicons with hundreds or thousands of entries, and agent populations in the tens or hundreds. It supports several network topologies, diffusion patterns and agent adoption policies. One issue with such simulations is evaluation: how realistic is the resulting morphology compared to those of real languages? We introduce the AI Historical Linguist, a novel Large Language Model-driven system that models a debate between two historical linguists. We use this to compare a set of real language morphologies, disguised morphologies, and experimentally evolved morphologies. The results suggest that among the factors that favor more plausible morphologies are scale-free social networks and random Bernoulli adoption of forms. We also present three case studies modeling attested historical changes, allowing us to test what might have happened if history had been different. All code and data are released.

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

Graph Reinforcement Learning for Calibration-Aware Quantum Circuit Routing

arXiv:2606.12816v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantum circuit routing is a key step in compiling programs for noisy intermediate-scale quantum processors. Routes that appear efficient by standard overhead metrics can still lose fidelity when they pass through poorly calibrated couplers. We study a calibration-aware graph reinforcement-learning router that uses same-day IBM Heron r2 calibration data to choose hardware-edge SWAPs. We train the policy with proximal policy optimization and evaluate it with exact simulated fidelity across nine Munich Quantum Toolkit (MQT) Bench circuits and three calibration snapshots. Across these evaluations, pooled mean exact fidelity is $0.727$, compared with $0.440$ for SABRE-best20 and $0.481$ for target-aware SABRE. Fidelity gains come with higher routed two-qubit counts and are concentrated in the 5q and 8q circuit families; under the fixed tree action graph, all 10q families favor SABRE-best20. Overall, our results show that calibration-aware learned routing can improve fidelity beyond gate-count-driven compilation.

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

ARVO: Atlas of Reproducible Vulnerabilities for Open-Source Software

arXiv:2606.17283v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Achieving reproducibility, quantity, and diversity in vulnerability datasets has long been viewed as an inherent three-way trade-off, where improving one dimension often comes at the cost of the others. In practice, reproducibility has been the dimension most often neglected. This has limited what can be automatically extracted from historical bug datasets, and has reduced their utility for downstream security research. In this work, we propose a method to produce a new security dataset which ensures reproducibility for diverse vulnerabilities at scale by identifying the key obstacles to large-scale bug reproduction and addressing them with general solutions. Using this method, we introduce full reproducibility to the largest open source software vulnerability dataset (OSS-Fuzz) and construct the ARVO dataset (an Atlas of Reproducible Vulnerabilities in Open-source software). ARVO is a large-scale dataset consisting of over 6,100 real-world vulnerabilities across 311 projects. Focusing on reproducibility, ARVO differs from existing datasets by providing each vulnerability in a form that can be consistently rebuilt, triggered, and analyzed across versions. Reproducibility also enables automatic identification of the corresponding patch for each vulnerability and supports direct interaction with vulnerabilities after code changes, capabilities that existing large-scale datasets do not provide. In our evaluation, ARVO successfully reproduces 81% of vulnerabilities and achieves 89.4% accuracy on the located patches. We also discuss ARVO's influence on both upstream practices and downstream security research.

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

Concrete Subspace Learning based Interference Elimination for Multi-task Model Fusion

arXiv:2312.06173v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Merging models fine-tuned from a common, extensively pre-trained large model but specialized for different tasks has been demonstrated as a cheap and scalable strategy to construct a multi-task model that performs well across diverse tasks. Recent research, exemplified by task arithmetic, highlights that this multi-task model can be derived through arithmetic operations on task vectors. Nevertheless, current merging techniques frequently resolve potential conflicts among parameters from task-specific models by evaluating individual attributes, such as the parameters' magnitude or sign, overlooking their collective impact on the overall functionality of the model. In this work, we propose the CONtinuous relaxation of disCRETE (Concrete) subspace learning method to identify a common low-dimensional subspace and utilize its shared information to track the interference problem without sacrificing much performance. Specifically, we model the problem as a bi-level optimization problem and introduce a meta-learning framework to find the Concrete subspace mask through gradient-based techniques. At the upper level, we focus on learning a shared Concrete mask to identify the subspace, while at the inner level, model merging is performed to maximize the performance of the merged model. We conduct extensive experiments on both vision domain and language domain, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. The code is available at https://github.com/tanganke/subspace_fusion

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Be Your Own Teacher: Steering Protein Language Models via Unsupervised Reward Optimization

arXiv:2606.18961v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protein language models (PLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for controllable biomolecular design, yet their post-training adaptation typically relies on costly wet-lab validation or curated preference datasets. To overcome this supervision bottleneck, we introduce unsupervised reward optimization of PLMs, a comprehensive framework for steerable protein generation without ground-truth labels. Our key insight is that task-agnostic rewards, which combine intrinsic model uncertainty with extrinsic semantic consistency informed by protein representation models, exhibit strong correlation with controllability measures across base models and temperature regimes. Building upon this discovery, we propose two offline algorithms: Soft Reward Optimization (SRO) and Binarized Reward Optimization (BRO), which effectively maximize the classical RLHF objective induced by these proxy rewards. Extensive experiments on compositional out-of-distribution prompts demonstrate that both methods significantly outperform competitive baselines (DPO, KTO), while approaching oracle performance across multiple sampling temperatures, model scales and protein families. Moreover, PLMs fine-tuned with unsupervised rewards can achieve consistently higher coverage compared to their base model in pass@k evaluations. By enabling self-improvement of PLMs through their own generated experience, our framework provides a scalable pathway toward controllable biomolecular design in settings where labeled preferences or experimental feedback are scarce or unavailable.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Informative Missingness to Generate Irregular Clinical Time Series

arXiv:2606.17106v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Laboratory tests in electronic health records are collected irregularly, and the absence of a test order can be as informative as the measurement itself. Such missingness reflects clinicians' decisions and patient physiology, making it important to model it directly rather than treat it as a preprocessing artifact. Here we present a diffusion-based approach for generating clinical time series that jointly models laboratory values and their observation patterns using the public Data Analytics Challenge on Missing Data Imputation (DACMI) benchmark derived from MIMIC-III. To preserve realistic sampling, we align chart times into 4-hour intervals and segment admissions into 7-day windows, producing trajectories that pair each lab value with a corresponding observation indicator. Standard transformations and normalization are applied to stabilize training. Our method extends the TimeDiff framework to learn continuous lab values and discrete missingness patterns through complementary diffusion objectives. Experiments show that the generated data closely match real patient trajectories across individual lab distributions and joint value-missingness embeddings, demonstrating that diffusion models can capture clinically meaningful dependencies between patient physiology and clinicians' testing behavior under MNAR-like (missing-not-at-random) missingness. These preliminary results indicate that our model can serve as an initial component toward developing clinical foundation models. By producing synthetic priors that preserve key physiology-missingness relationships, this work motivates the subsequent training of Prior-Data Fitted Networks capable of leveraging informative missingness, which we will investigate in the extended work.

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

Can Agents Distinguish Visually Hard-to-Separate Diseases in a Zero-Shot Setting? A Pilot Study

The rapid progress of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has led to increasing interest in agent-based systems. While most prior work in medical imaging concentrates on automating routine clinical workflows, we study an underexplored yet clinically significant setting: distinguishing visually hard-to-separate diseases in a zero-shot setting. We benchmark representative agents on two imaging-only proxy diagnostic tasks, (1) melanoma vs. atypical nevus and (2) pulmonary edema vs. pneumonia, where visual features are highly confounded despite substantial differences in clinical management. We introduce a multi-agent framework based on contrastive adjudication. Experimental results show improved diagnostic performance (an 11-percentage-point gain in accuracy on dermoscopy data) and reduced unsupported claims on qualitative samples, although overall performance remains insufficient for clinical deployment. We acknowledge the inherent uncertainty in human annotations and the absence of clinical context, which further limit the translation to real-world settings. Within this controlled setting, this pilot study provides preliminary insights into zero-shot agent performance in visually confounded scenarios.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

CASR: A Robust Cyclic Framework for Arbitrary Large-Scale Super-Resolution with Distribution Alignment and Self-Similarity Awareness

Arbitrary-Scale SR (ASISR) remains fundamentally limited by cross-scale distribution shift: once the inference scale leaves the training range, noise, blur, and artifacts accumulate sharply. We revisit this challenge from a cross-scale distribution transition perspective and propose CASR, a simple yet highly efficient cyclic SR framework that reformulates ultra-magnification as a sequence of in-distribution scale transitions. This design ensures stable inference at arbitrary scales while requiring only a single model. CASR tackles two major bottlenecks: distribution drift across iterations and patch-wise diffusion inconsistencies. The proposed SSAM module aligns structural distributions via superpixel aggregation, preventing error accumulation, while SARM module restores high-frequency textures by enforcing correlation-guided consistency and preserving self-similarity structure through correlation alignment. Despite using only a single model, our approach significantly reduces distribution drift, preserves long-range texture consistency, and achieves superior generalization even at extreme magnification.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Searching Neural Architectures for Sensor Nodes on IoT Gateways

arXiv:2505.23939v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper presents an automatic method for the design of Neural Networks (NNs) at the edge, enabling Machine Learning (ML) access even in privacy-sensitive Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The proposed method runs on IoT gateways and designs NNs for connected sensor nodes without sharing the collected data outside the local network, keeping the data in the site of collection. This approach has the potential to enable ML for Healthcare Internet of Things (HIoT) and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), designing hardware-friendly and custom NNs at the edge for personalized healthcare and advanced industrial services such as quality control, predictive maintenance, or fault diagnosis. By preventing data from being disclosed to cloud services, this method safeguards sensitive information, including industrial secrets and personal data. The outcomes of a thorough experimental session confirm that – on the Visual Wake Words dataset – the proposed approach can achieve state-of-the-art results by exploiting a search procedure that runs in less than 10 hours on the Raspberry Pi Zero 2.

22.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-13

On the evolution of the company we keep: Implications for infectious disease modeling

by Joël Mossong Whom we meet shapes how infections spread. Where earlier focus of mathematical epidemiology was on incorporating age, more recent work has begun to reveal the importance of socioeconomic aspects for understanding and managing future epidemics. In this Perspective, Joël Mossong discusses the importance of understanding social contacts and how they have evolved for infectious disease modeling, and the need to factor in additional considerations such as ethic and socioeconomic backgrounds.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

AIMER: Calibration-Free Task-Agnostic MoE Expert Pruning

arXiv:2603.18492v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models increase parameter capacity without proportional per-token computation, yet deployment still requires storing the full expert pool, making expert pruning important for reducing memory and serving overhead. Existing task-agnostic expert-pruning methods are typically calibration-dependent: they estimate expert importance from routing or activation statistics on a calibration set, making pruning decisions sensitive to calibration-data variation while introducing substantial preprocessing cost. We propose AIMER (Absolute mean over root mean square IMportance for Expert Ranking), a simple calibration-free criterion that identifies more distinct experts by capturing the concentration pattern of expert weights, making it well suited for task-agnostic expert pruning. Across 7B to 47B MoE language models with distinct architectures and 16 diverse benchmarks, AIMER consistently delivers stronger capability balance across diverse tasks than existing calibration-free methods. Surprisingly, AIMER also achieves better balance than strong calibration-based expert-pruning baselines calibrated on the widely used task-agnostic C4 corpus, while requiring only 0.22–2.06 seconds to score all experts.

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

From Tokens to Faces: Investigating Discrete Speech Representations for 3D Facial Animation

The choice of speech representation is critical in speech-driven 3D facial animation. Representations differ in what they encode: SSL features emphasize segmental and semantic cues, neural codecs yield latents optimized for acoustic reconstruction, and ASR-style objectives produce label-based spaces. We evaluate four speech representation families for 3D facial synthesis, comparing their facial reconstruction quality across two facial decoders using objective metrics and a perceptual evaluation. We additionally conduct probing analyses that relate tokenized representations to phonetic units and to articulatory deformations. We found that encoding phonetic classes is beneficial for accurate facial animation prediction on both semantic and label-based representations with comparable facial animation quality. From the latter, we introduce an Audio Visual Text-to-Speech (AVTTS) pipeline that leverages, as a shared space, discrete representations to decode speech and 3D facial motion.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Dose-efficient Quantum Phase Estimation in Lossy Optical Interferometry

arXiv:2606.14254v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Optical interferometry is a cornerstone technique for precise phase measurements across various fields. In many applications, for example, biological imaging, it often necessitates stringent limits on light intensity to prevent adverse effects on light-sensitive samples, a condition known as dose-limited regimes. Maximizing the precision per dose is therefore crucial. In quantum metrology, quantum correlations enable high precision in phase estimation while adhering to dose constraints. Nevertheless, photon loss, including absorption by a sample, substantially diminishes the benefits of quantum enhancement in interferometry. In this work, we experimentally investigate a dose-efficient approach to quantum phase estimation using sequential strategies in the presence of loss. Performance of sequential strategies with and without control is evaluated through quantum Fisher information (QFI) per dose. Experimental results show that both sequential strategies exceed the classical limit and outperform the parallel strategy using unbalanced N00N states. Notably, the control-enhanced sequential strategy attains superior QFI per dose, approaching the quantum limit. These results highlight the promise of sequential strategy for imaging and sensing in resource-constrained scenarios, marking a significant step toward practical and efficient quantum metrology in lossy environments.