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01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

Long-sought chemical inhibitors of β-arrestin proteins

作者: 未知作者

Proteins called β-arrestins regulate signalling through members of the G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) superfamily. Small molecules that bind directly to the β-arrestins and inhibit their activities are the first chemical tools to probe their biology, opening avenues for transducer-targeted, pathway-specific GPCR therapeutics. Three small molecules disrupt the engagement of β-arrestins with G-protein-coupled receptor proteins.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

EERLoss: A Novel Loss Function for Training Deep Biometric Models. A Case Study in Keystroke Dynamics

Deep learning approaches to biometric verification are commonly trained by optimizing indirect objectives, creating a misalignment between the optimization process and the primary evaluation metric, typically the Equal Error Rate (EER). This paper introduces EERLoss: a subdifferentiable, arbitrarily accurate approximation to EER for training deep biometric models. Furthermore, this framework has the potential to be adapted to optimize any specific operating point on the DET curve, enhancing its generalizability. To validate this approach, EERLoss is evaluated on a particularly demanding behavioral biometric modality: keystroke dynamics verification. This task is characterized by its high intra-class and low inter-class variability. Experiments are conducted on the large-scale KVC-onGoing benchmark, incorporating data from over 185,000 subjects across different scenarios. A comprehensive ablation study initially demonstrates the superiority of EERLoss in comparison to existing state-of-the-art loss functions. It also converges substantially faster compared to other losses, reducing the overall training cost. Additionally, a comparison is made between the proposed loss and the KVC-winning architecture by re-training it with EERLoss, demonstrating that the proposed approach significantly outperforms the original SoTA, achieving a relative EER reduction of up to approx. 30\%. This improvement on a challenging, large-scale benchmark validates the effectiveness of EERLoss as a task-aligned training objective specifically suited for high-variance biometric traits.

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

DDTNet: Degradation Disentanglement and Transfer Network for Test-Time All-in-One De-weathering Adaptation

All-in-one adverse weather image restoration aims to remove multiple degradations, such as rain, haze, and snow, using a single unified model. Despite their broad applicability, existing methods typically compromise performance, delivering balanced but suboptimal results for individual degradation types. This issue becomes more pronounced when a domain gap exists between training and testing data. Motivated by the observation that modeling degradation patterns is more feasible than recovering clean content, we propose the Degradation Disentanglement and Transfer Network (DDTNet), which focuses specifically on degradation transfer. By disentangling degradation patterns from target-domain degraded images and transferring them to source domain clean images, DDTNet generates domain-adaptive paired training data. These pairs are then used to fine-tune restoration models, significantly enhancing their adaptability across diverse weather conditions and domains. The core of DDTNet is the Degradation Disentanglement Module (DDM), which comprises Degradation Coupled Attention (DCA) to capture both general and weather-specific features, thereby enabling effective disentanglement and transfer of degradation patterns. Experimental results demonstrate that DDTNet significantly and consistently improves existing all-in-one models across real-world deraining, desnowing, and dehazing datasets.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Clusters are All You Need: Pre-Training the Tsetlin Machine with Semantic Clusters from Language Models for Interpretability

Pre-trained language models such as BERT achieve strong text classification performance but lack transparency, limiting their use in high-stakes settings. The Tsetlin Machine (TM) offers fully interpretable, clause-based reasoning but captures little semantic information, and prior attempts to bridge the two rely on static word embeddings that miss contextual meaning. We propose a semantic pre-training framework that transfers knowledge from a pre-trained language model into a TM without using embeddings. Text samples are grouped into semantically coherent clusters with K-means or Top2Vec, and the resulting cluster-sample pairs pre-train a non-negated TM with enhanced Type I feedback. The TM thereby learns interpretable semantic keywords that are fine-tuned on downstream tasks. Across five datasets, our method substantially outperforms vanilla and embedding-based TMs and reaches performance competitive with BERT while remaining interpretable.

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

M4FC: a Multimodal, Multilingual, Multicultural, Multitask Real-World Fact-Checking Dataset

Existing real-world datasets for multimodal fact-checking have multiple limitations: they contain few instances, cover on only one or two languages, focus only on one task, or rely on external news article sets for sourcing true claims. To address these shortcomings, we introduce M4FC, a new real-world dataset comprising 4,982 images paired with 6,980 claims. The images, verified by professional fact-checkers from 22 organizations, represent a diverse range of cultural and geographic contexts. Each claim is available in one or two out of ten languages. M4FC spans six multimodal fact-checking tasks: visual claim extraction, claimant intent prediction, fake image detection, image contextualization, location verification, and verdict prediction. We provide baseline results for all tasks and analyze how combining intermediate tasks affects verdict prediction performance. We make our dataset and code publicly available.

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

Model-agnostic Mitigation Strategies of Data Imbalance for Regression

arXiv:2506.01486v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Data imbalance persists as a pervasive challenge in regression tasks, introducing bias in model performance and undermining predictive reliability. This is particularly detrimental in applications aimed at predicting rare events that fall outside of the domain of the bulk of the training data. In this study, we review the current state-of-the-art regarding sampling-based methods and cost-sensitive learning. Additionally, we propose novel approaches to mitigate model bias. To better assess the importance of data, we introduce the density-distance and density-ratio relevance functions, which effectively integrate empirical frequency of data with domain-specific preferences, offering enhanced interpretability for end-users. Furthermore, we present advanced mitigation techniques (cSMOGN and crbSMOGN), which build upon and improve existing sampling methods. In a quantitative evaluation, we benchmark state-of-the-art methods on 10 synthetic and 42 real-world datasets, using neural networks, XGBoosting trees and Random Forest models. Our analysis shows that while most strategies improve performance on rare samples, they degrade it on frequent ones. The trade-off becomes larger the more the performance on rare samples is increased. However, to reduce this effect we demonstrate that constructing an ensemble of models – one trained with imbalance mitigation and another without – can be used. The key findings underscore the superior performance of our novel crbSMOGN sampling technique with the density-ratio relevance function for neural networks, outperforming state-of-the-art methods.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Augmenting Dysarthric Speech Severity Assessment with MOS Supervision

arXiv:2606.18645v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dysarthria is a speech disorder marked by reduced intelligibility and communicative effectiveness. Automatic utterance-level assessment of dysarthric speech can support scalable speech monitoring and therapy-related analysis. Yet training such systems is bottlenecked by the scarcity of clinically annotated dysarthric speech. This work proposes to augment dysarthric speech assessment using data from speech synthesis evaluations, specifically human-annotated utterances with Mean Opinion Score (MOS) labels from the QualiSpeech corpus. Experiments show that fine-tuning on speech synthesis assessment data consistently improves performance on both intelligibility and naturalness prediction, while joint training yields gains primarily on naturalness. These results suggest that synthesis artifacts and dysarthric speech share perceptual commonalities, and speech synthesis evaluation corpora offer a practical augmentation source that reduces reliance on scarce clinical annotations.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Geometry-Preserving in 3D Gaussian Splatting for LiDAR-Camera Extrinsic Calibration

Accurate LiDAR-camera calibration is essential for robust multi-modal perception. Targetless approaches avoid manual setup but remain limited by the scarcity of discriminative cross-modal features. Recent methods address this by reconstructing the scene within a differentiable model, enabling extrinsic optimization through dense photometric supervision. Among these, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has been widely adopted as a geometric proxy that bridges LiDAR and camera within a single differentiable framework. However, since 3DGS was originally designed for novel view synthesis, existing methods tend to prioritize rendering quality, causing the proxy geometry to drift from the true LiDAR structure. We propose a framework that preserves the metric geometry of the Gaussian proxy by aggregating multi-view LiDAR observations for dense depth supervision and blocking photometric gradients from updating the Gaussian spatial parameters. We validate our method on public driving datasets, where it consistently outperforms existing targetless methods in calibration accuracy.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Intrinsic spectral structure of bipartite nonlocal magic resource

arXiv:2606.24368v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bipartite nonlocal magic resource (BNMR) quantifies the irreducible nonstabilizerness residing in bipartite entanglement, yet its evaluation is intractable due to the full Hilbert space optimization. Here, we introduce a canonical encoding framework that exactly confines the BNMR of an arbitrary bipartite pure state within a minimal encoding core. This dimension reduction proves that pure-state BNMR is an intrinsic function of the nonzero Schmidt spectrum, extending its invariance from local unitary transformations to local isometries. Leveraging this spectral link, we derive the leading quadratic response of BNMR under spectral perturbations around its zeros. We apply this quadratic response to Haar-random states, deriving and numerically validating the BNMR profile: its distribution is sharply localized at the symmetric bipartition and exponentially suppressed toward asymmetric cuts, in stark contrast to the broadening Page curve of entanglement. Finally, we provide a closed-form expression for the BNMR of Schmidt rank-2 states, uncovering a hierarchy collapse in generalized GHZ states where bipartite and global nonlocal magic resources coincide exactly.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Geometrical fairness in graph neural networks

arXiv:2606.17684v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Graph-based learning methods have become increasingly prominent due to their strong performance across diverse applications. Among these, recent frameworks grounded in diffusion processes provide a unifying perspective that extends traditional graph neural network formulations while addressing limitations of standard message-passing mechanisms. Despite these advances, concerns remain regarding the fairness of such models, as they may propagate or amplify biases present in the data. In this work, we introduce a fairness-aware adaptation of graph-based diffusion by modifying the underlying Laplacian operator. Our approach incorporates multiple complementary transformations, including subspace projections, spectral adjustments, and frequency-based filtering, to mitigate bias-related components. Leveraging the intrinsic smoothing properties of graph diffusion, we provide a principled analysis of the resulting behavior and establish theoretical insights into fairness properties. We evaluate the proposed framework on both synthetic and real-world datasets, demonstrating that it achieves competitive performance while improving fairness metrics with limited additional computational cost.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

A Privacy-Preserving Framework Using Remote Data Science for Inter-Institutional Student Retention Prediction

arXiv:2606.12845v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This study explores privacy-preserving machine learning (PPML) techniques using the PySyft platform to enable collaborative prediction of student retention between institutions. We developed a remote data science (RDS) framework with a semi-air-gapped architecture consisting of high-side and low-side servers, allowing researchers from three universities to build predictive models on sensitive student data without direct data access. Using historical data from a small private university (N=720), we evaluated three synthetic data generation approaches and validated the framework through inter-institutional collaboration. The results demonstrate consistent classification performance across institutions (Macro F1: 0.690–0.695) while maintaining strict Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) compliance. We also propose Data-Type-Aware Templates, a novel synthetic data method that prioritizes privacy over distributional fidelity. Our findings confirm that RDS-based PPML is technically feasible for educational settings and offers a practical alternative to federated learning for small-scale inter-institutional collaborations. The code is available at https://github.com/jtfields/NAIRR240195-Privacy-Preserving-Machine-Learning.

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

GeoRanker: Distance-Aware Ranking for Worldwide Image Geolocalization

Worldwide image geolocalization-the task of predicting GPS coordinates from images taken anywhere on Earth-poses a fundamental challenge due to the vast diversity in visual content across regions. While recent approaches adopt a two-stage pipeline of retrieving candidates and selecting the best match, they typically rely on simplistic similarity heuristics and point-wise supervision, failing to model spatial relationships among candidates. In this paper, we propose GeoRanker, a distance-aware ranking framework that leverages large vision-language models to jointly encode query-candidate interactions and predict geographic proximity. In addition, we introduce a multi-order distance loss that ranks both absolute and relative distances, enabling the model to reason over structured spatial relationships. To support this, we curate GeoRanking, the first dataset explicitly designed for geographic ranking tasks with multimodal candidate information. GeoRanker achieves state-of-the-art results on two well-established benchmarks (IM2GPS3K and YFCC4K), significantly outperforming current best methods.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Multi-entropy in random tensor networks

arXiv:2606.04470v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the evaluation of Rényi multi-entropies $S^{(q)}_n$ in Random Tensor Network (RTN) states in the large bond-dimension limit. For the case of Rényi index $n=2$ and arbitrary number of parties $q$, we prove that that multi-entropies are determined by minimal multiway cuts through the network. When the minimal multiway cut is degenerate, we characterize the full minimizer set via compatible families of minimal cuts and give a criterion for all minimizers to come from ordinary cut partitions. For $n=2$, this gives a natural generalization of the minimal cut description of bipartite entanglement to multipartite systems with arbitrarily many parties. For the case of integer $n>2$, we show that the minimal multiway cut conjecture is in general not true by providing explicit counter examples for both the single random tensor and for the network built from isometric tilings. We discuss the implication for our results on the multipartite entanglement structures in RTN and holography.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Mask-Based Breath Sampling for Detection of Pseudomonas aeruginosa in Adults with Cystic Fibrosis and Bronchiectasis

Background: Monitoring Pseudomonas aeruginosa (P. aeruginosa) infection in people with cystic fibrosis (pwCF) is essential for early detection, targeted treatment, and prevention of chronification. Sputum culture is the current standard, yet many patients, particularly those receiving CFTR modulator therapy, struggle to expectorate sputum. Microbial aerosols from the respiratory tract offer a non-invasive alternative. This proof-of-principle study assessed the accuracy and feasibility of the AveloMask, a novel breath aerosol collection kit paired with qPCR detection. Methods: Adult pwCF and bronchiectasis patients attending routine monitoring visits and healthy controls were enrolled in a cross-sectional study. Participants wore the mask for 30 minutes, followed by 20 instructed coughs. Mask filters were tested with a triplex qPCR assay targeting P. aeruginosa specific ecfX and gyrB, and human RPP30 as an endogenous control. Accuracy was evaluated using a composite reference standard (sputum culture and PCR). Results: Of 25 patients enrolled, 23 were included in the analyses. Sensitivity was 12/19 (63.2%) for breath qPCR versus 15/19 (78.9%) for sputum culture. Breath qPCR missed 5 cases detected by sputum culture but detected 2 sputum culture-negative/qPCR-positive cases. Specificity of breath qPCR was 100% in 4 patients and 15 healthy controls. RPP30 was detected in all mask samples. AveloMask was perceived as easy to use, with many patients preferring it over sputum collection. Discussion: Mask-based breath collection demonstrated promising diagnostic accuracy for detection of P. aeruginosa. Breath sampling may complement or partially substitute sputum-based diagnostics, especially in patients unable to expectorate. Further studies are needed to define its clinical role.

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

Can We Stop Malicious AI? KILLBENCH: A Benchmark for External AI Kill Switch Feasibility

arXiv:2511.13725v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Malicious AI causing harm to humans is not just a Hollywood fantasy. Indeed, as highly capable models such as Claude Mythos emerge and agent systems like OpenClaw rapidly spread, the question of how to stop an AI that acts maliciously – whether by design or by accident – has become urgent. To address this, we propose Killbench, a benchmark for evaluating the Killswitch: a mechanism that halts a malicious AI's in-progress behavior using only external signals. Targeting web agents – the most widely deployed agent domain – Killbench evaluates a range of Kill Switch methods that halt a maliciously operating agent without any access to its internal parameters or the surrounding malicious AI's system, relying solely on external inputs. The benchmark comprises four malicious AI's agent configurations (including an uncensored LLM Agent), 8 harmful scenarios, and malicious prompts constructed from 10 distinct jailbreak patterns. We further construct four External AI Kill Switch defense methods and evaluate them on Grok-4.3, GPT-5.2, Gemma4, Qwen3.6 and Qwen3.5-uncensored, contributing an empirical instrument toward the feasibility of External AI Kill Switches against malicious AI and to the study of AI corrigibility.

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

Global Ease of Living Index: a machine learning framework for longitudinal analysis of major economies

arXiv:2502.06866v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The drastic changes in the global economy, geopolitical conditions, and disruptions such as the COVID-19 pandemic have impacted the cost of living and quality of life. It is essential to comprehend the long-term implications of the cost of living and quality of life in major economies. A transparent and comprehensive living index must include multiple dimensions of living conditions. In this study, we present an approach to quantifying the quality of life through the Global Ease of Living Index that combines various socio-economic and infrastructural factors into a single composite score. Our index utilises economic indicators that define living standards, which could help in targeted interventions to improve specific areas. We present a machine learning framework to address missing data for certain economic indicators in specific countries. We then curate and update the data and use a dimensionality reduction approach (Principal Component Analysis and Factor Analysis) to create the Ease of Living Index for major economies since 1970. Our work significantly adds to the literature by offering a practical tool for policymakers to identify areas needing improvement, such as healthcare systems, employment opportunities, and public safety. Our approach with open data and code can be easily reproduced and applied to various contexts, providing transparency and accessibility for ongoing research and policy development in quality-of-life assessment.

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

User as Engram: Internalizing Per-User Memory as Local Parametric Edits

作者:

arXiv:2606.19172v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Personal memory in a language model is two problems: content and reasoning skill. The brain keeps the two apart (a sparse, local engram in the hippocampus for each episode, a slow neocortex for the shared skills that interpret it), so a new fact need not overwrite everything else. Most personalization today keeps a user's facts outside the weights, in a natural-language memory file or a retrieval index. When facts are written into the model instead, the standard recipe is the per-user LoRA adapter, which does the opposite of the brain, folding content and skill into one global weight delta. Writing a user's facts as a LoRA contaminates text unrelated to them; writing the same facts as local Engram rows leaves it mathematically untouched, resulting in a roughly 33,000x smaller memory footprint. We therefore propose User as Engram: store a user's content as surgical edits to the hash-keyed memory table of an Engram model, and carry the reasoning skill in one shared adapter. This layered design matches per-user LoRA's direct recall while delivering 5.6x higher indirect-reasoning accuracy on average, and never makes a single user worse at reasoning than the untouched base. The edit is a glass box: writing a fact switches on its lookup at exactly the trigger, adds the value the answer needs, leaves every other position unchanged to the last bit, and fails if written into the wrong layer. Because different users' facts land in disjoint hash slots, their edits compose: many users live in one shared table at once, stacking additively and losslessly, where a per-user LoRA, a single global weight delta, admits only one. Upon retrieval, a per-user Engram table does not grow with the population the retriever must search, so past ~100 facts it overtakes a retrieval pipeline on a 2.5x larger model.

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

Random Grover Search

arXiv:2606.11759v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Grover's algorithm achieves a quadratic speedup for unstructured search given a global oracle for the target set. In many applications, however, the target set is specified as the intersection of multiple constraint sets. Constructing a global oracle for the intersection can be costly, whereas the individual constraint oracles are often much simpler to implement. We study a randomized Grover search algorithm that directly uses these constraint oracles. At each iteration, one of the corresponding Grover operators is selected at random. For the two-operator case with uniform sampling, we prove that the success probability approaches one after \[ \Theta \left(\frac\pi4\sqrt{\frac{N}{r}}\right) \] iterations, where $r$ is the size of the intersection. Thus, the algorithm achieves the same asymptotic query complexity as standard Grover search but without requiring a global oracle. We then generalize the analysis to arbitrary sampling distributions and an arbitrary number of Grover operators through an auxiliary operator that approximates the expected Grover evolution, while retaining the same asymptotic complexity. We further show that highly biased sampling distributions can still achieve near-unit success probability, enabling cheaper Grover operators to be used more frequently. Finally, we prove asymptotic optimality and support the theoretical results with numerical simulations.

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

GENIE: A Fine-Grained Measure for Novelty

Large Language Models have consistently demonstrated a lack of creativity and diversity across tasks. Prior work has focused on addressing whether models are capable of generating creative outputs. Here, we aim to consider novelty and investigate what makes model-generated content novel or not novel in a task-specific manner. We propose a fine-grained evaluation metric GENIE to measure the novelty of responses along task-specific features with respect to a population of responses. We show that unlike GENIE, holistic metrics struggle to capture the high-dimensionality of novelty and do not provide insight on which properties they target. Finally, we use GENIE to measure the effectiveness of mitigation methods that address creativity to better understand where these methods can improve novelty.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Omni-Perception Policy Optimization for Multimodal Emotion Reasoning

arXiv:2606.25325v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We find that current emotion-oriented Omni-MLLMs still lack reliable omni-modal perception: they (i) underutilize multimodal cues in their reasoning trajectories and (ii) exhibit unfaithful behavior, often hallucinating modality-specific statements from other modalities. Building on these insights, we propose OPPO (Omni-Perception Policy Optimization), a reinforcement learning framework that explicitly optimizes multimodal perception. First, an Omni-Perception Reward decomposes ground-truth reasoning into fine-grained visual, acoustic, and emotion cues and rewards trajectories that semantically recover these cues. Second, an Omni-Perception Loss compares the policy under full and unimodally masked inputs, applying a KL penalty only to modality-specific evidence tokens to suppress cross-modal hallucination. We further introduce MEP-Bench, a diagnostic benchmark that quantifies utilization and faithfulness. Experiments show that OPPO achieves state-of-the-art performance on MER-UniBench and MME-Emotion, while substantially improving utilization and faithfulness scores on MEP-Bench, highlighting the importance of sufficient and faithful omni perception for multimodal emotion reasoning.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Genome-wide association and multi-omics functional screens reveal the genetic architecture of foveal development

Foveal hypoplasia causes visual impairment across congenital eye disorders, yet the genetic programmes governing foveal development remain poorly characterised and no tractable model exists for foveal disease. In the first genome-wide association study of foveal hypoplasia, we identified 42 sentinel variants mapping to 54 effector genes supported by >= 2 criteria from a variant-to-gene framework incorporating developmental multi-omics. Disruption of six effector genes using mutant lines and CRISPR knockouts in the zebrafish high acuity zone recapitulates structural, functional, and ultrastructural hallmarks of foveal hypoplasia, establishing the first vertebrate disease model. Integration with human foetal single-cell and spatial transcriptomics reveals two temporal waves of effector gene expression and identifies Muller glia as critical mediators of foveal patterning. Phenome-wide analyses reveal foveal variants are pleiotropic with refractive, lenticular, and metabolic traits, connecting foveal development to anterior segment and systemic disease biology. These findings should inform mechanistic studies of macular disease.

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

Notes2Skills: From Lab Notebooks to Certainty-Aware Scientific Agent Skills

Scientific discovery workflows usually contain and rely heavily on lab notes, where researchers record observations, interpret uncertain results, and plan follow-up experiments. Such informative lab notes preserve evolving scientific reasoning and author uncertainty, rather than polished final results exhibited in publications, providing a valuable opportunity for AI to engage in scientific exploration at a more comprehensive and deeper level. However, most prior work on scientific text focuses on papers, protocols, or structured databases, leaving informal laboratory notes underexplored as inputs to AI agents for science. This gap matters because lab notes often intermingle validated observations, tentative judgments, and possible experimental next steps within the same passage. If these signals are conflated, an AI agent may mistake uncertain scientific judgments for confirmed conclusions or executable actions. To this end, we present Notes2Skills, a two-stage framework for turning lab notebooks into verifiable skills for scientific AI agents while preserving the author's certainty. Across seven conditions and three wet-lab sessions, Notes2Skills is the only configuration that neither mistakes uncertain notes for firm instructions nor discards firm ones. We show that certainty preservation is the missing piece between lab notebooks and reliable agent skills, opening a path toward safer AI co-scientist systems.

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

A Comparative Study of Pretrained Transformer Models for Quranic ASR: Speech Representations, Label Formats, and Dataset Composition

arXiv:2606.19747v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quran Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) aims to convert Quranic recitation into text, enabling applications such as aided memorisation tools and Quranic search engines. However, existing ASR models often exhibit high Word Error Rates (WER) on user-recited verses and lack full coverage of the Quranic corpus. This paper presents a systematic empirical study of domain-specific fine-tuning of pretrained Transformer-based models for Quranic ASR, using advanced speech feature extraction methods: Wav2Vec2.0, HuBERT, and XLS-R. These models apply self-supervised learning by masking portions of input audio and using Transformer architectures to learn context-aware speech features. The pretrained models are fine-tuned on a filtered Quranic dataset exceeding 870 hours of professional and user recitations. Through comprehensive ablation studies across feature extractors, output label formats, training strategies, and clip durations, we identify the key factors that affect transcription accuracy in this domain. Our best-performing configuration achieves a WER of 0.08 on the EveryAyah subset and 0.11 on the combined EveryAyah+Tarteel setting, representing roughly a five-percentage-point gain over the Citrinet baseline (WER = 0.163) while reducing combined-model training time from 140 hours to 40 hours. Arabic text without diacritics yields the best fine-tuning results, and Wav2Vec2-XLSR-53 provides the strongest overall representation. Future work includes improving dataset quality and developing phoneme-aware models to extract deeper speech feature representations for Tajweed-sensitive applications.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Steering the Noise: Turning Random Perturbations into Effective Descent for Memory-Efficient LLM Fine-Tuning

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) achieves strong performance but is often limited by the memory overhead of backpropagation. Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization avoids this overhead by estimating gradients through forward passes alone, yet it typically converges slowly because random Gaussian perturbations yield high-variance gradient estimates in high-dimensional parameter spaces. In this paper, we propose a plug-and-play framework that turns random perturbations into more effective descent directions. The key idea is to draw a small pool of candidate perturbations, evaluate their loss values, and then select or combine those that are best aligned with the optimization objective. We develop two instantiations of this idea: MeZO-GV, which forms a guiding vector from the contrast between low-loss and high-loss perturbation groups, and MeZO-Greedy, which keeps the single best perturbation within a fixed evaluation budget. We theoretically show that both strategies yield a larger per-step reduction in the objective than standard ZO estimation, leading to improved convergence rates. Experiments on LLMs of different scales and architectures confirm that the proposed methods integrate naturally with existing ZO optimizers and consistently improve convergence speed and task accuracy. On OPT-13B, our approach outperforms all ZO baselines across 11 benchmarks and exceeds gradient-based methods on 9 of them, while retaining the memory efficiency of forward-only optimization.

25.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Well-posedness of stochastic parabolic equations with gradient nonlinearities and applications to phase-field models

作者:

arXiv:2606.15425v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study well-posedness of stochastic parabolic equations with gradient nonlinearities. Our analysis is based on recent maximal-regularity frameworks for nonlinear stochastic parabolic equations in critical spaces. We extend the existing results by controlling drift and noise coefficient separately. This way we can allow for less regular driving noise in case of subcritical dispersion coefficients. Our approach, based on gluings of local solutions, moreover implies new continuation criteria. We then apply our existence result and the continuation criteria to show global well-posedness of phase-field models of moving boundary problems.