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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

HorusEye: Language as Dynamic Attention for Emergency Visual Analysis

作者:

We introduce HorusEye, Language as Dynamic Attention for Emergency Visual Analysis. Our investigation followed five stages. The first one is benchmarking RefCOCO-Degraded, a dataset of 15,244 images (3,811 base images x 4 conditions: Clean, Fog, Smoke and Thermal) with systematic visual degradation. Through four research questions, we evaluate multiple VLMs (Gemini, Qwen2-VL, BLIP-2, LLaVA, Kosmos-2) across visual grounding the second stage, language feedback recovery the third one, health VQA tasks the fourth, and hallucination analysis the final stage. Our key finding is that language feedback effectiveness is model-dependent: Gemini achieves +47.3% improvement in thermal conditions through iterative language feedback, while Qwen2-VL shows -5.1% degradation under the same protocol. We also identify the 'Thermal Paradox' where cropping strategies that improve RGB performance catastrophically fail in thermal imagery. Furthermore, BLIP-2 uniquely hallucinates more under degradation, making it unsuitable for emergency deployment

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

Physical Atari: A Robust and Accessible Platform for Real-time Reinforcement Learning on Robots

arXiv:2606.19357v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We built a robot called the Robotroller that actuates an Atari CX40+ controller and a device called the Atari Devbox that renders the game frame and the reward signal from the Arcade Learning Environment on a screen. The Robotroller and the Atari Devbox, together with an off-the-shelf camera and a desktop computer, constitute a system that can be used to study reinforcement learning algorithms in the physical world. We call the full system Physical Atari. In this paper, we detail the key decisions that make Physical Atari a robust and accessible platform. To make the system robust, we designed the Robotroller so that all movement is done through bearings, which reduces wear. Additionally, we wrote software that monitors the state of the servos at a high frequency and intervenes to limit stress. To make the system accessible, we used affordable off-the-shelf components and parts that can be manufactured using consumer 3D printers. Physical Atari can be built for under $1,000 and has been used for weeks of non-stop reinforcement learning experiments without any mechanical failures. We used it to validate that reinforcement learning algorithms can learn directly on robots and show that even small distribution shifts between learning and deployment can significantly degrade the performance of policies. Our results underscore the importance of on-device adaptation for strong performance on robots.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Flickering Multi-Armed Bandits

arXiv:2602.17315v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce Flickering Multi-Armed Bandits (FMAB) to model sequential decision-making in environments with changing action availability, where accessibility of the next action is restricted to a subset dependent on the agent's current choice. We formalize these constraints through stochastically evolving graphs where actions are limited to local neighborhoods. This mobility-constrained structure imposes a dual challenge: the statistical requirement of information acquisition and the physical overhead of navigation. We analyze FMAB under i.i.d. Erdős–R'enyi and Edge-Markovian process, proposing a two-phase lazy random walk algorithm for robust exploration. We establish high-probability sublinear regret bounds and prove near-optimality via a matching information-theoretic lower bound. Our results characterize the intrinsic cost of learning under local-move constraints, complemented by a robotic disaster-response simulation.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Multi-Adapter PPO: A Cross-Attention Enhanced Wavelength Selection Framework for LIBS Quantitative Analysis

arXiv:2606.17476v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) quantitative analysis faces critical challenges in wavelength selection due to high-dimensional spectral data and the fundamental trade-off between prediction accuracy and feature efficiency. This paper presents a novel Multi-Adapter PPO framework that transforms wavelength selection into a reinforcement learning problem, leveraging cross-attention mechanisms and multiple specialized adapters to capture complex spectral relationships. Our approach outperforms traditional Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) by an average of 28.4\% in comprehensive score and 45.2\% in prediction accuracy across steel and coal datasets. The proposed method demonstrates superior performance in balancing prediction accuracy with feature efficiency, achieving state-of-the-art results in LIBS quantitative analysis while maintaining interpretability and computational efficiency. We released our code and dataset here: https://github.com/Hflying/MAPPO

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

FAPO: Fully Autonomous Prompt Optimization of Multi-Step LLM Pipelines

arXiv:2606.19605v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-step LLM pipelines fail through interactions among retrieval, reasoning, and formatting steps, so prompt-only optimization can miss bottlenecks in the chain. We present FAPO (Fully Autonomous Prompt Optimization), a framework that lets Claude Code optimize an LLM pipeline inside a standardized codebase. FAPO evaluates a pipeline, inspects intermediate steps, diagnoses failures, proposes scoped changes, and validates variants repeatedly to optimize against a score function. It first tries prompt edits and, only when prompt optimization appears insufficient, changes chain structure within the permitted scope when attribution identifies a structural bottleneck. Across six benchmarks and three task models, FAPO beats the baseline GEPA in 15 of 18 model-benchmark comparisons. In 11 model-benchmark comparisons, FAPO wins with non-overlapping mean $\pm$ trial-standard-deviation ranges, and the mean FAPO-GEPA gain is +14.1 pp. In the six HoVer and IFBench comparisons where prompt-first search escalated to structural changes, FAPO wins all six with a mean gain of +33.8 pp. FAPO also improves performance on security tasks: on CTIBench-RCM, a security CVE-to-CWE task, prompt-only FAPO lifts test accuracy by +4.0 pp on GPT-5, +7.1 pp on Foundation-Sec-8B-Instruct, and +2.0 pp on Foundation-Sec-8B-Reasoning. These results position FAPO as a state-of-the-art pipeline optimization technique for both general-purpose and security-focused tasks.

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

Exploring Information Seeking Agent Consolidation

arXiv:2602.00585v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Information-seeking agents have emerged as a powerful paradigm for knowledge-intensive tasks, yet today's systems remain specialized for the open web, documents, or local knowledge bases, hindering scalable and cross-domain deployment. We present the first systematic empirical study of consolidating these information-seeking agents into a single foundation agentic model. We compare two paradigms – data-level mixing, which trains a unified model on a mixture of datasets, and parameter-level merging, which merges independently trained experts in parameter space – across 3 training scenarios, evaluating 26 representative parameter-level methods on 10 benchmarks. To compare across heterogeneous benchmarks, we introduce a geometric Composite Score and an Imbalance Score that describe overall performance and task skew. Our analysis shows that (i) well-designed parameter-level merging attains parity with data mixing at a fraction of its training cost and is order-agnostic; (ii) parameter-level merging structurally preserves out-of-domain capabilities that data mixing universally forgets; and (iii) cross-scenario stability is strongly tied to consolidation quality. We distil our observations into a method-selection guide and design principles for next-generation merging operators.

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

Architectural Bias in Face Presentation Attack Detection: A Comparative Study of Vision Transformers and Convolutional Neural Networks

Face Presentation Attack Detection (PAD) systems constitute a critical security layer in biometric authentication; however, existing approaches exhibit systematic performance disparities across demographic groups, disproportionately affecting individuals with darker skin tones. This paper presents a comparative empirical investigation of whether Vision Transformer architectures reduce demographic bias in face PAD systems relative to convolutional baselines. Experiments are conducted on the CASIA-SURF Cross-Ethnicity Face Anti-Spoofing (CeFA) dataset. Three architectures are evaluated: a Multimodal ViT-Tiny trained from scratch, a ResNet18 CNN baseline, and a pretrained DeiT-S fine-tuned on CeFA across African, East Asian, and zero-shot Central Asian demographic groups. DeiT-S achieves the highest overall accuracy of 97.27% and the lowest EER of 0.86%, outperforming ResNet18 at 90.15% accuracy. In terms of fairness, DeiT-S reduces the inter-ethnic ACER gap between African and East Asian subjects to 0.13%, compared to 0.75% reported in an LBP-based work [6], representing an 83% reduction. Most notably, while ResNet18 records a BPCER of 10.44% on zero-shot Central Asian subjects, DeiT-S maintains 2.89% on the same unseen group, demonstrating a 3.6x generalization advantage. These results suggest that pretrained Vision Transformers achieve superior PAD accuracy, produce smaller demographic performance gaps, and generalize more equitably across unseen demographic groups, indicating that cross-demographic fairness in PAD may partly be influenced by architectural design.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Structured Representation Learning with Locally Linear Embeddings and Adaptive Feature Fusion

arXiv:2606.18469v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neuroscientific research has revealed that the brain encodes complex behaviors by leveraging structured, low-dimensional manifolds and dynamically fusing multiple sources of information through adaptive gating mechanisms. Inspired by these principles, we propose a novel reinforcement learning (RL) framework that encourages the disentanglement of dynamics-specific and reward-specific features, drawing direct parallels to how neural circuits separate and integrate information for efficient decision-making. Our approach leverages locally linear embeddings (LLEs) to capture the intrinsic, locally linear structure inherent in many environments, mirroring the local smoothness observed in neural population activity, while concurrently deriving reward-specific features through the standard RL objective. An attention mechanism, analogous to cortical gating, adaptively fuses these complementary representations on a per-state basis. Experimental results on benchmark tasks demonstrate that our method, grounded in neuroscientific principles, improves learning efficiency and overall performance compared to conventional RL approaches, highlighting the benefits of explicitly modeling local state structures and adaptive feature selection as observed in biological systems.

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

OBCache: Optimal Brain KV Cache Pruning for Efficient Long-Context LLM Inference

Large language models (LLMs) with extended context windows enable powerful applications but impose significant memory overhead, as caching all key-value (KV) states scales linearly with sequence length and batch size. Existing cache eviction methods address this by exploiting attention sparsity, yet they typically rank tokens heuristically using accumulated attention weights without considering their true impact on attention outputs. We propose Optimal Brain Cache (OBCache), a principled framework that formulates cache eviction as a layer-wise structured pruning problem. Building upon the Optimal Brain Damage (OBD) theory, OBCache quantifies token saliency by measuring the perturbation in attention outputs induced by pruning tokens, with closed-form scores derived for isolated keys, isolated values, and joint key-value pairs. Our scores account not only for attention weights but also for information from value states and attention outputs, thereby enhancing existing eviction strategies with output-aware signals. Experiments on LLaMA and Qwen models demonstrate that replacing the heuristic scores in existing works, which estimate token saliency across different query positions, with OBCache's output-aware scores consistently improves long-context accuracy. Code is available at https://github.com/DreamSoul-AI/OBCache.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

CoRe-MoE: Contrastive Reweighted Mixture of Experts for Multi-Terrain Humanoid Locomotion with Gait Adaptation

arXiv:2606.04718v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Humans primarily rely on walking and running to traverse complex terrains. Similarly, humanoid robots should be able to smoothly transition between walking and running while maintaining natural and stable locomotion. However, unifying gait transition and multi-terrain adaptation within a single policy remains challenging due to gradient interference between tasks and the distribution shift caused by terrain variations. Although Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures can mitigate multi-skill interference, direct joint training often fails to achieve clear expert specialization. To address these challenges, we propose CoRe-MoE, a two-stage reinforcement learning framework that decouples gait generation from terrain adaptation. In the first stage, a stable locomotion policy is learned to produce natural walking and running behaviors with smooth transitions. In the second stage, a terrain-aware MoE branch is introduced, and the gating network is trained with a contrastive objective to learn structured terrain representations and promote expert specialization. The final action is obtained through weighted fusion of the base gait policy and the terrain-aware branch, enabling the policy to preserve stable locomotion while adapting to complex terrains. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms baseline approaches in terms of success rate, locomotion stability, and multi-terrain adaptability. Furthermore, zero-shot deployment on a Unitree G1 humanoid robot validates the effectiveness of our framework, achieving robust walking and running across stairs, slopes, steps, obstacles, and unstructured outdoor terrains while maintaining accurate foothold control and dynamic stability.

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

Low-Burden Data Augmentation for Dysarthric ASR via Zero-Shot Voice Cloning

arXiv:2606.19823v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automatic speech recognition remains unreliable for dysarthric speech due to data scarcity and high inter-speaker variability. While synthetic data can address these gaps, traditional methods often require extensive speaker-specific data, reintroducing the collection bottleneck. We investigate zero-shot voice cloning as a low-burden augmentation strategy, using Higgs Audio V2 to clone speakers in the TORGO dataset. We fine-tune (FT) Whisper-medium on cloned, real, and hybrid data and evaluate on held-out real speech. Compared to the zero-shot (31.62%), Clone FT achieved a competitive 26.00% WER, nearly matching the 24.44% and 25.12% seen with Real and Hybrid FT, respectively. Notably, Clone and Hybrid FT outperform Real FT for moderate-severe speakers. Clone FT achieves the best results (11.45% relative) in cross-corpus evaluation on the SAP-1102. These results suggest that zero-shot cloning provides scalable training data that circumvents the costly data collection bottleneck.

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

DRIVE: Distributional and Retrieval-Augmented Bidding with Value Evaluation

arXiv:2606.14192v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Auto-bidding is a core component of real-time advertising systems, where decisions must optimize long-term performance under budget and cost constraints, while online exploration is prohibitively risky. Offline reinforcement learning and, more recently, Transformer-based sequence modeling have shown promise for learning bidding policies from logged data, but their unimodal and purely parametric formulations often collapse multiple effective bidding strategies into suboptimal averaged actions and perform unreliably under sparse or long-tail traffic. To mitigate these limitations, we propose DRIVE (Distributional and Retrieval-Augmented Bidding with Value Evaluation), a unified Transformer-based framework that decouples candidate action generation from decision making for offline auto-bidding. DRIVE combines distributional action modeling, retrieval-augmented candidate generation from high-quality historical decisions, and value-based evaluation to select the most promising bid at inference time. Extensive experiments on AuctionNet and additional offline reinforcement learning benchmarks demonstrate that DRIVE consistently improves bidding performance and generalizes well across multiple Transformer-based methods.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

How Much Can We Trust LLM Search Agents? Measuring Endorsement Vulnerability to Web Content Manipulation

Large language model (LLM)-based search agents synthesize open-web content into actionable recommendations on behalf of users, creating a risk that attacker-published pages are transformed into endorsed claims. We introduce SearchGEO, a controlled evaluation framework for measuring endorsement corruption in LLM-based web-search agents, combining a web-evidence manipulation pipeline, a five-mode attack taxonomy, and multiple output-level metrics. We evaluate 13 LLM backends on 308 cases each. Results show that vulnerability patterns vary across backends: overall attack success rate (ASR) ranges from 0.0% on Claude-Sonnet-4.6 to 31.4% on Gemini-3-Flash, the strongest attack mode differs by model family, and the same deployment scaffold could amplify or decrease ASR on different backends. An auxiliary agent-skill probe, where endorsement becomes an install command, exposes a sharp split among otherwise robust backends: Claude over-rejects while GPT over-trusts. These findings argue for treating recommendation reliability under adversarial search content as a first-class dimension of backend safety evaluation.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Effective and Low-cost Lane-based Map Localization for Vehicle-Centric Route Generation

Driver-centric route representation plays a vital role in intuitive driving guidance systems. This paper presents OLRA, a low-cost, map-localization-based framework that derives driver-view-aligned routes by matching map-based navigation routes with camera-detected lane markings. This alignment process mutually enhances vehicle localization accuracy and visual route consistency. To bridge the evaluation gap across different paradigms, we introduce practical route evaluation metrics and benchmark OLRA against OpenPilot, a representative direct-generation approach. Experimental results on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate that OLRA outperforms OpenPilot in complex road segments and in route estimation at distance beyond 20 meters, achieving lower overall Euclidean error. This study is expected to promote future research in low-cost, maplocalization-based route generation methods.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Systematic Exploration of 4-Expert Heterogeneous Mixture-of-Experts via Automated Pipeline Search

We present an automated large-scale search pipeline for heterogeneous 4-Expert Mixture-of-Experts (MoE4) architectures within the LEMUR neural network dataset ecosystem. Building on a hand-crafted heterogeneous MoE reference model, we replace manual design with a deterministic code-assembly generator that systematically combines base architecture families drawn from the LEMUR database into MoE4 ensembles, each governed by a convolutional gating network with temperature scaling, mixup augmentation, and cosine-annealed learning rate scheduling. Over a 28-day campaign on an NVIDIA RTX 4090, the pipeline generated 4,463 candidate models across 197 batches, of which 1,021 were evaluated successfully. A critical finding emerged from the campaign: due to alphabetical enumeration via itertools.combinations, the entire explored search space (4.8% of the theoretical 23,751 possible 4-family combinations) is anchored to a single family, AirNet. We characterise this coverage bias precisely, identify the root cause in the generator, and propose a stratified random sampling fix. Within the AirNet anchored scope, ShuffleNet and MobileNetV3 consistently co-produce the highest-accuracy ensembles (mean accuracy up to 0.632), while FractalNet and MNASNet are identified as low-yield families warranting exclusion in future campaigns. The pipeline, analysis artefacts, and corrected generator are released as part of the open-source NNGPT project at https://github.com/ABrain-One/nn-gpt

16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

VGGHeads: 3D Multi Head Alignment with a Large-Scale Synthetic Dataset

Human head detection, keypoint estimation, and 3D head model fitting are essential tasks with many applications. However, traditional real-world datasets often suffer from bias, privacy, and ethical concerns, and they have been recorded in laboratory environments, which makes it difficult for trained models to generalize. Here, we introduce \method – a large-scale synthetic dataset generated with diffusion models for human head detection and 3D mesh estimation. Our dataset comprises over 1 million high-resolution images, each annotated with detailed 3D head meshes, facial landmarks, and bounding boxes. Using this dataset, we introduce a new model architecture capable of simultaneous head detection and head mesh reconstruction from a single image in a single step. Through extensive experimental evaluations, we demonstrate that models trained on our synthetic data achieve strong performance on real images. Furthermore, the versatility of our dataset makes it applicable across a broad spectrum of tasks, offering a general and comprehensive representation of human heads.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Folds of one curve: the superradiant phase diagram of Dicke modes with interacting matter

arXiv:2606.26081v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We give a thermodynamic-limit account of Dicke models with one cavity mode coupled collectively to interacting matter. Integrating out the cavity yields an exact self-consistent functional of the magnetisation $m$, $\tilde e(m) = \lambda m^2/2 + e_mat(\lambda m)$: a classical penalty on the bare-matter energy $e_mat$ in the self-consistent field $h = \lambda m$, with $\lambda = g^2/(2\omega_c)$ the collective coupling. Supplying only that scalar field, the photon creates no phase the matter does not already possess. States holding a minimum form one connected curve, $\lambda(m) = \mu_mat^{-1}(m)/m$, so superradiant first-order transitions are folds of one equation of state not crossings of disjoint sheets, and a fold can straighten into a continuous line. The remaining rules are local, each with a spectral counterpart: onset by the leading singularity of $e_mat$ (a softening polariton), order by one bare response – the Landau quartic, or a divergent susceptibility forcing a Larkin-Pikin (LP) fold. For the Dicke-Ising model the Landau coefficients are exact, giving in closed form the second-order boundary and both zero-quartic fields, one tricritical; a $1/d$ expansion maps all four phases, with the AS-PS transition first order for $d\le d_{uc}=3=4-z$ (LP) and tricritical points in the $(d,\epsilon)$ plane above. At the degenerate quadruple point the matter is a Rydberg-blockade chain, solved by strict-blockade iDMRG: the antiferromagnetic superradiant (AS) phase persists as a finite 1D wedge, first order into the corner. Other magnets: the triangular antiferromagnet keeps a continuous superradiant-superradiant line (3D-XY, no fold forced); the compass chain a BKT-functional onset; the Heisenberg and XX chains, via a conserved operator, a spectrally silent first-order onset; and the Dicke-Heisenberg diagram an exact tricritical point at the saturation corner.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Simulation-Augmented Multi-Step Split Conformal Prediction for Aggregated Forecasts

arXiv:2606.16356v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study uncertainty quantification for aggregated forecasting tasks such as annual totals and year-over-year growth rates. We propose SA-MSCP, a simulation-augmented multi-step split conformal method that generates future paths from cross-validated residuals using a block bootstrap and constructs prediction intervals from empirical quantiles. Experiments show that SA-MSCP improves empirical coverage over a simulated-path baseline for aggregated and growth-rate targets. Our results demonstrate that simulation-enhanced conformal calibration is an effective and general framework for uncertainty quantification in aggregated time-series forecasting.

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

SmartFont: Dynamic Condition Allocation for Few-Shot Font Generation

Few-shot font generation simultaneously requires global structural completeness and fine-grained local style fidelity. Existing methods usually either rely on global content-style modeling, which is robust but imperfectly disentangled, or emphasize component/local modeling, which captures fine details but relies heavily on local priors and reference coverage. We argue that the key challenge is not merely to learn purer conditions, but to organize complementary yet biased global and local conditions through multi-level allocation during generation. To this end, we propose SmartFont, a diffusion-based few-shot font generation framework that combines global content-style generation with weakly supervised local corrective experts. The local branch performs semantic-spatial allocation by learning expert-wise local concepts and semantically meaningful spatial maps under weak component supervision, enabling fine-grained correction without requiring explicit component-conditioned inference. On top of this, a denoising-state condition allocation module adaptively weights global content, global style, and local corrective feature across timesteps and injection blocks. Extensive experiments show that SmartFont achieves better global-local balance, improves glyph quality and local detail fidelity.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Toward Autonomous O-RAN: A Multi-Scale Agentic AI Framework for Real-Time Network Control and Management

arXiv:2602.14117v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Open Radio Access Networks (O-RAN) promise flexible 6G network access through disaggregated, software-driven components and open interfaces, but this programmability also increases operational complexity. Multiple control loops coexist across the service management layer and RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC), while independently developed control applications can interact in unintended ways. In parallel, recent advances in generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) are enabling a shift from isolated AI models toward agentic AI systems that can interpret goals, coordinate multiple models and control functions, and adapt their behavior over time. This article proposes a multi-scale agentic AI framework for O-RAN that organizes RAN intelligence as a coordinated hierarchy across the Non-Real-Time (Non-RT), Near-Real-Time (Near-RT), and Real-Time (RT) control loops: (i) A Large Language Model (LLM) agent in the Non-RT RIC translates operator intent into policies and governs model lifecycles. (ii) Small Language Model (SLM) agents in the Near-RT RIC execute low-latency optimization and can activate, tune, or disable existing control applications; and (iii) Wireless Physical-layer Foundation Model (WPFM) agents near the distributed unit provide fast inference close to the air interface. We describe how these agents cooperate through standardized O-RAN interfaces and telemetry. Using a proof-of-concept implementation built on open-source models, software, and datasets, we demonstrate the proposed agentic approach in two representative scenarios: robust operation under non-stationary conditions and intent-driven slice resource control.

21.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-24

Systematic benchmarking of multi-modal approaches for tumor-naive ctDNA detection and quantification

Longitudinal monitoring of circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) has emerged as a promising framework for characterizing treatment response dynamics in cancer. Scalable tumor-naive approaches for quantifying ctDNA often involve whole-genome sequencing (WGS) or DNA methylation profiling, but their comparative performance and capacity for complementary integration remain poorly understood. Here we systematically benchmarked tumor-naive WGS- and methylation-based ctDNA quantification methods using plasma from 150 patients with colorectal, lung and breast cancer. Using paired high-depth WGS and EM-seq data, we generated 40,000 in silico samples and evaluated detection accuracy, limits of detection (LoD) and quantification (LoQ) across cancer types and sequencing depths (0.1x-30x). We further assessed single- and multimodal method combinations, identifying conditions under which integrated approaches enhance analytical performance for detection and quantification relative to single modalities. This benchmark delineates key performance trade-offs and provides a practical framework to support method development and guide future research applications in ctDNA-based biomarker studies.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Provably Efficient Regularized Online RLHF with Generalized Bilinear Preferences

arXiv:2602.23116v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider the problem of regularized best-response max-regret minimization in online RLHF under general preferences and bandit feedback. While various regularizers are utilized to robustify alignment, known polylogarithmic regret guarantees remain heavily specific to KL. To investigate whether such fast rates extend beyond KL, we adopt the Generalized Bilinear Preference Model (GBPM) – capturing intransitive preferences over $d$-dimensional item-wise features via a rank-$2r$ skew-symmetric matrix – to isolate the impact of generic regularization. Crucially, under GBPM, we prove that the dual gap of any greedy policy is bounded by the squared estimation error, derived using only strong convexity and skew-symmetry. Under a feature coverage assumption, we establish a generic polylogarithmic regret of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\eta d^4 C_{\min}^{-1} (\log T)^2 \wedge d^2 C_{\min}^{-1/2} \sqrt{T})$ with Greedy Sampling, and a dimension-wise improved regret (for well-conditioned arm-sets) of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(C_{\min}^{-2} \sqrt{\eta r T} \wedge r^{1/3} C_{\min}^{-4/3} T^{2/3})$ with Explore-Then-Commit, where $\eta^{-1}$ is the regularization coefficient, $T$ is the time horizon, and $C_{\min}$ is an arm-set dependent quantity. This demonstrates that ``fast'' regrets are not KL-specific, but rather a fundamental consequence of generic strongly convex geometry.

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

Through-Foliage Surface-Temperature Reconstruction for Early Wildfire Detection

We present a method to reconstruct surface temperatures through forest vegetation by combining signal processing and machine learning, enabling fully automated aerial wildfire monitoring with drones for early fire detection. Synthetic aperture (SA) sensing reduces canopy occlusion but introduces thermal blur. To overcome this, we train a visual state space model to recover subtle thermal signals of partially occluded soil and fire hotspots from blurred data. To address limited real-world training data, we generate realistic surface temperature simulations using a latent diffusion model, temperature augmentation, and procedural thermal forest modeling. On simulated datasets, our method reduces RMSE by 2-2.5 versus conventional thermal and uncorrected SA imaging; in field experiments on hotspots, RMSE improved by 12.8-fold and 2.6-fold, respectively. Our approach also generalizes to other thermal signals, including human signatures, capturing morphology and extent – critical where simple thresholding fails – while conventional imaging struggles with partial occlusion.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

HydraHead: From Head-Level Functional Heterogeneity to Specialized Attention Hybridization

The quadratic complexity of attention poses a critical bottleneck for long-context processing, spurring interest in hybrid attention designs. Most open-source hybrid models adopt a layer-wise strategy. Yet, prior work has noted the inherent difficulty of integrating Linear Attention (LA) with Full Attention (FA), suggesting that the design space of attention hybridization remains underexplored. To probe this space, we conduct interpretability analysis and observe that layers exhibit block-wise functional similarity, while individual heads within the same layer display distinct functional specialization despite sharing input features. This head-level heterogeneity suggests that the head dimension provides a natural and principled granularity for fusing heterogeneous attention signals. Building on this insight, we introduce HydraHead, a novel architecture that hybridizes FA and LA along the head axis. HydraHead features two key innovations: (1) an interpretability-driven selection strategy that identifies retrieval-critical heads and preserves FA only for them, and (2) a scale-normalized fusion module that reconciles the distributional gap between FA and LA head outputs. By leveraging a three-stage transfer pipeline with parameter reuse and distillation, we achieve high-performance hybrid models with minimal training overhead. Under a unified training setup, HydraHead outperforms other hybrid designs in long-context tasks while maintaining strong general reasoning. With interpretability-driven head selection, it matches a 3:1 layer-wise hybrid's long-context performance at a 7:1 LA-to-FA ratio. Crucially, trained on only 15B tokens, HydraHead achieves over 69% improvement over the baseline at 512K context length, approaching Qwen3.5, a leading model of comparable size with a native context length of 256K. This highlights the significant scaling potential of head-level hybridization.

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

MiniMax Sparse Attention

arXiv:2606.13392v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Ultra-long-context capability is becoming indispensable for frontier LLMs: agentic workflows, repository-scale code reasoning, and persistent memory all require the model to jointly attend over hundreds of thousands to millions of tokens, yet the quadratic cost of softmax attention makes this untenable at deployment scale. We introduce MiniMax Sparse Attention (MSA), a blockwise sparse attention built upon Grouped Query Attention (GQA). A lightweight Index Branch scores key-value blocks and independently selects a Top-k subset for each GQA group, enabling group-specific sparse retrieval while maintaining efficient block-level execution; the Main Branch then performs exact block-sparse attention over only the selected blocks. Designed around a principle of simplicity and scalability, MSA is deliberately streamlined, making it straightforward to deploy efficiently across a broad range of GPUs. To translate sparsity into practical speedups, we co-design MSA with a GPU execution path that uses exp-free Top-k selection and KV-outer sparse attention to improve tensor-core utilization under block-granular access. On a 109B-parameter model with native multimodal training, MSA performs on par with GQA while reducing per-token attention compute by 28.4x at 1M context. Paired with our co-designed kernel, MSA achieves 14.2x prefill and 7.6x decoding wall-clock speedups on H800. Our inference kernel is available at: https://github.com/MiniMax-AI/MSA. A production-grade natively multimodal model powered by MSA has been publicly released at: https://huggingface.co/MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-M3.