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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

No classical particle limit for massless quanta

arXiv:2606.14632v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate whether relativistic massless classical particles may emerge as the classical limit of massless quanta. To address this question independently of any specific dynamics, environment, or pointer basis, we develop an axiomatic and purely kinematical framework for the coarse-graining approach. In this formulation, a candidate classical phase space is taken as the outcome space of a POVM subject only to minimal classicality and covariance under the relevant spacetime symmetry group. Applying this framework to the Poincaré group, we prove a no-go theorem for massless particles: the covariance requirement is incompatible with the operational conditions for classicality. The theorem leaves open field-like limits of massless quanta, for example the emergence of electromagnetic or gravitational fields, while ruling out classical massless particles, such as classical photons or gravitons.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Simulation of Non-Markovian Quantum Accelerated Dynamics via Time-Fractional Schrödinger Equation

arXiv:2606.20024v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Time-Fractional Schrödinger Equation (TFSE) is an effective tool for simulating the dynamics of non-Markovian quantum systems. The Quantum Speed Limit (QSL) time characterizes the minimum time required for the evolution of a non-Markovian quantum system. In this paper, Wei's TFSE is employed to simulate the non-Markovian quantum accelerated evolution process in the Resonant Dissipative Jaynes-Cummings (RDJC) model. By solving the QSL time of a time-fractional single-qubit open system, the enhancement mechanism of the system evolution speed induced by the non-Markovian memory effects of the environment is revealed. Further studies show that the optimized acceleration of the system evolution can be achieved by jointly regulating the fractional order, coupling strength, and photon number. Comparative analyses indicate that Wei's TFSE can accurately capture the non-Markovian accelerated dynamical features of the system over the entire fractional order range, whereas Naber's TFSE is applicable only within a limited fractional order interval. In addition, the comparisons of the average simulation time for calculating the dynamical trajectory of the excited-state probability demonstrate that Wei's TFSE has a significant simulation advantage in computational efficiency. Therefore, Wei's TFSE is more accurate and efficient for simulating the accelerated dynamics of non-Markovian quantum systems.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

ModTGCN: Modularity-aware Graph Neural Networks for Text Classification

Graph-based text classification models typically rely on local neighborhood aggregation and overlook global community structure, despite semantic document graphs exhibiting strong class-consistent clustering. Ignoring this can blur class boundaries and lead to over-smoothing. We propose ModTGCN, a modularity-aware graph neural network for text classification that jointly optimizes cross-entropy and a modularity-based auxiliary objective to promote class-coherent document communities while preserving discriminative representations. The modularity term is computed on a document-document similarity graph derived from transformer embeddings (pretrained or fine-tuned). To improve scalability, we decouple the original heterogeneous TextGCN graph into separate document-word and word-word components, achieving 2x-10x faster training. We further study graph construction strategies, label-aware edge reweighting, and supervision choices for modularity optimization. Experiments on five benchmarks show consistent gains, with larger improvements on complex, low homophily datasets such as Ohsumed and 20NG.

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

AI systems out-persuade expert humans

arXiv:2606.16475v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many societal decisions are settled by contests of persuasion. Conversational AI is a powerful new entrant in these contests, but whether it can out-persuade skilled and highly incentivized humans has remained unclear. Here, in a series of four preregistered experiments (n = 18,978 conversations from 6,923 people), we pitted AI systems against a range of human persuaders, including laypeople, winners of a separately preregistered four-round online persuasion tournament, professional canvassers, and world championship debaters. We found that AI systems were reliably more persuasive than expert humans, even when expert humans chose their issues, researched in advance, underwent hours of live, structured practice, and were incentivized with {\pounds}1,000 cash bonuses. In a follow-up study, AI's advantage persisted after experts received a coaching tool that let them practice against the AI that beat them, review their performance history, and see what AI would have said at key moments. We found converging evidence that AI's advantage stemmed from rapidly deploying larger quantities of information: after coaching, expert humans could tie an AI constrained to respond at human speeds and with human-length messages. In a final study, we show that AI's advantage extends to consequential real-world behavior: AI was nearly 3x more effective than professional canvassers from a UK fundraising firm at raising real-money donations to Save the Children. Together, these results establish that frontier AI systems out-persuade expert humans in conversation, with significant implications for political communication.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Unveiling Hierarchical Invariants in Multiphoton Linear Optics

arXiv:2506.12857v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Linear optical networks driven by quantum states of light are important building blocks of photonic quantum technologies. They access large bosonic Hilbert spaces through multiphoton interference. At the same time, their dynamics are generated by single-particle mode transformations, thereby defining a highly structured subset of multiphoton unitaries and setting boundary on linear optics capability. To elucidate this boundary, we reveal an underlying fine-grained symmetry structure that partitions the multiphoton operator space into invariant subspaces and generates a hierarchy of invariants. We experimentally confirm the conservation of high-order invariants and demonstrate their operational utility in characterizing state reachability and the metrological capability of multiphoton probes. Our framework provides a symmetry-based perspective for understanding and harnessing structured multiphoton dynamics across photonic quantum technologies.

06.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

Towards modeling phage therapy

by Rob J. de Boer, Robert Schooley, Alan S. Perelson Patients infected with life-threatening multi-drug resistant (MDR) bacteria have been treated with cocktails of bacteriophages. This is a complicated form of personalized medicine as the phages given to a patient have to be selected beforehand on the basis of their lytic capacity of the infecting bacteria. Because bacteria rapidly become resistant, the evolution of resistance to a diverse cocktail of phages is a complicated dynamical process, during which competing bacterial strains replace one another by accumulating several resistance mechanisms, each of which may involve a fitness cost. As a consequence, it is typically not known why a particular phage therapy succeeded or failed, and how one can optimize the composition of the cocktails to maximize the rate of success. To improve upon this, we extend an existing in vivo-calibrated mouse model into a novel mathematical model for the human situation, and include multiple phages infecting multiple bacterial strains, differing in their resistance to each of the phages. We adjust several parameter estimates of the bacterial model to the human situation, and use the model to describe a successful case of phage therapy involving several cocktails, each containing several phages. In the model, treatment success crucially depended on pretreatment resistance levels, and on the diversity and the timing of the cocktails. Once an appropriate cocktail is found, it is less important to further optimize the infection rates of the phages. Resistant bacterial strains expand rapidly when sensitive strains decline, and the higher the infectivity of the phages, the faster resistant strains expand. Because resistance evolves rapidly, it is best to provide a diverse set of phages right from the start of therapy, i.e., to hit hard and early, and create a high genetic barrier to bacterial resistance.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

StylisticBias: A Few Human Visual Cues Drive Most Social Biases in MLLMs

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly deployed in personally and societally consequential settings, yet the visual cues that shape how these models judge people remain poorly understood. Prior work often compares different (groups of) individuals, making it difficult to separate appearance effects from identity differences. We introduce StylisticBias, a controlled benchmark for evaluating attribute-level social bias in MLLMs. We generate 500 photorealistic base faces and create about 50 single-attribute variations per face, producing about 25K images. This design keeps identity fixed and changes one visual attribute at a time. It lets us measure how specific cues shift model judgments. We evaluate six MLLMs across 25 binary social judgment scenarios. We find that age and body type dominate identity-level effects, while fashion style and other visual cues drive the largest attribute-level shifts. We further find that about 15 attributes account for nearly 80\% of the total variation, showing that bias is concentrated in a small set of visual cues. Sensitivity is strongest in judgments that are semantically aligned with appearance, especially socioeconomic and style-related judgments. We release StylisticBias as a benchmark for fine-grained bias evaluation in multimodal models. Code and dataset: https://github.com/timo-cavelius/StylisticBias and https://hf.co/datasets/shaghayegh/stylistic-bias-dataset.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Approximate quantum error correction theory of non-isometric codes

arXiv:2606.13559v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Non-isometric encoding arises in various important contexts in quantum error correction, most notably in the finite-energy, non-ideal codewords inevitable in experimental realizations of continuous-variable codes, and holographic quantum gravity. In this work, we present a general and systematic theory of non-isometric quantum error-correcting codes. In particular, we employ the approximate quantum error correction framework to quantitatively study the fundamental limitations imposed by non-isometric encodings on the accuracy of quantum error correction and implementation of logical operations. We apply our theory to analyze GKP and tiger codes under energy constraints, and discuss the implications to holography.

09.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Probabilistic representation and classical solutions of wave equations with complex polynomial nonlinearities

arXiv:2606.18919v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We review the probabilistic representation of solutions of wave equations with polynomial nonlinearities in spatial dimensions d=1,2,3 using stochastic branching processes. Under regularity assumptions on the initial data, we derive conditions ensuring the integrability of the corresponding Monte Carlo estimator, and the existence and smoothness of mild and classical solutions. We also present numerical results and comparisons with grid-based algorithms for the solution of nonlinear wave equations.

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

Hardware-Oriented Inference Complexity of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

arXiv:2604.03345v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) have recently emerged as a powerful architecture for various machine learning applications. However, their unique structure raises significant concerns regarding their computational overhead. Existing studies primarily evaluate KAN complexity in terms of Floating-Point Operations (FLOPs) required for GPU-based training and inference. However, in many latency-sensitive and power-constrained deployment scenarios, such as neural network-driven non-linearity mitigation in optical communications or channel state estimation in wireless communications, training is performed offline and dedicated hardware accelerators are preferred over GPUs for inference. Recent hardware implementation studies report KAN complexity using platform-specific resource consumption metrics, such as Look-Up Tables, Flip-Flops, and Block RAMs. However, these metrics require a full hardware design and synthesis stage that limits their utility for early-stage architectural decisions and cross-platform comparisons. To address this, we derive generalized, platform-independent formulae for evaluating the hardware inference complexity of KANs in terms of Real Multiplications (RM), Bit Operations (BOP), and Number of Additions and Bit-Shifts (NABS). We extend our analysis across multiple KAN variants, including B-spline, Gaussian Radial Basis Function (GRBF), Chebyshev, and Fourier KANs. The proposed metrics can be computed directly from the network structure and enable a fair and straightforward inference complexity comparison between KAN and other neural network architectures.

12.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

On the spatio-temporal increments of nonlinear parabolic SPDEs and the open KPZ equation

arXiv:2508.05032v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study spatio-temporal increments of the solutions to nonlinear parabolic SPDEs on a bounded interval with Dirichlet, Neumann, or Robin boundary conditions. We identify the exact local and uniform spatio-temporal moduli of continuity for the sample functions of the solutions. These moduli of continuity results imply the existence of random points in space-time at which spatio-temporal oscillations are exceptionally large. We also establish small-ball probability estimates and Chung-type laws of the iterated logarithm for spatio-temporal increments. Our method yields extension of some of these results to the open KPZ equation on the unit interval with inhomogeneous Neumann boundary conditions. Our key ingredients include new strong local non-determinism results for linear stochastic heat equation under various types of boundary conditions, and detailed estimates for the errors in linearization of spatio-temporal increments of the solution to the nonlinear equation.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Reinforcing Dual-Path Reasoning in Spatial Vision Language Models

Spatial VLMs have made substantial progress in geometric perception, yet complex spatial reasoning requiring multi-step inference over depth, distance, and scene relations remains challenging. Moreover, different spatial queries call for fundamentally different strategies: some are best addressed through purely linguistic, step-by-step deduction, while others require explicit 3D grounding before quantitative inference. We present Dual-Path Spatial Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning for Spatial VLMs (SR-REAL), a unified framework that equips a spatial VLM with two complementary reasoning paths: Language-Only Reasoning (LOR), which performs step-by-step linguistic deduction, and Detect-Then-Reason (DTR), which detects 3D geometric cues (e.g., centers or bounding boxes) via region tokens before explicit geometric inference. SR-REAL begins with a cold-start supervised fine-tuning stage that constructs LOR and DTR chain-of-thought supervision and exposes a region-to-3D interface, followed by RL that optimizes the policy model with accuracy and format rewards; for DTR, a discrete center-based detection reward further refines geometric alignment. Across diverse spatial benchmarks, SR-REAL significantly outperforms spatial VLM baselines: (i) a single RL-trained model supports both reasoning paths, with DTR excelling in region-aware tasks through precise 3D localization and LOR enhancing general spatial reasoning; (ii) jointly training both paths fosters mutual reinforcement; (iii) high-quality, blended cold-start data is crucial for stable RL optimization; and (iv) the model generalizes across datasets and domains without per-task tuning, demonstrating positive transfer between LOR and DTR.

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

Redirecting the Flow: Image Customization through Attention Distribution Shift

Subject-driven image customization aims to generate images that not only follow textual instructions but also preserve the identity of a given reference subject. Existing approaches, including test-time fine-tuning, encoder-based methods, and token competition in shared attention spaces, suffer from limited efficiency, misalignment between extracted reference features and the generative process, and interference from irrelevant information. To address these limitations, we formulate the customization task as a distribution shift induced by incorporating reference images into text-to-image generation, and derive a Conditional Attention Distribution Shift formulation grounded in maximum entropy theory. Building on this formulation, we propose CustomShift, a dual-branch architecture based on Stable Diffusion 3. The Reference-Alignment Branch leverages self-attention between reference images and subject names to achieve layer-wise alignment with latent representations, while the Cross-Guidance Branch integrates textual and reference cues to guide generation. Experiments on the DreamBooth and Custom101 benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving a better balance between semantic fidelity and subject consistency.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Pre-AF 13: An Interpretable Atrial Fibrillation Risk Score Mined from Discharge Reports

Background. Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most prevalent cardiac arrhythmia and a major determinant of prognosis. Established AF risk scores rely on factors (older age, hypertension) nearly ubiquitous among patients with cardiovascular disease (CVD), offering limited stratification in this high-risk group. Most target long-term (5-10 year) rather than medium-term prediction. We developed interpretable ML models predicting AF risk over a 24-month and entire follow-up horizon in CVD patients using routinely collected hospital data. Methods. Single-center retrospective study of electronic health records from the National Research Cardiology Center (Russia) for patients aged >=18 with CVD but without pre-existing AF, hospitalized more than once between January 2012 and May 2019. A custom NLP pipeline transformed unstructured discharge reports into 73 structured features, combining a rule-based parser with transformer-based NER. Using LightAutoML we built a full model (73 features), a simple model (reduced subset), and a linear model for a bedside risk score. Performance was assessed by ROC AUC, compared with CHARGE-AF, C2HEST, MHS, and HAVOC, and interpreted via SHAP. Results. Of 80,576 records from 45,000 patients, 17,562 met inclusion criteria; 1,438 (8.19%) developed AF. The full model reached ROC AUC 0.735 (24-month) and 0.696 (entire follow-up); the simple model was nearly identical (0.725, 0.696). All non-linear models outperformed the four clinical risk scores (ROC AUC 0.53-0.64). The simple model uses 13 features and is named Pre-AF 13. SHAP identified age and left atrial volume as dominant predictors. A linear risk score (Pre-AF 9) stratified observed 24-month AF incidence from ~7% to 36%. Conclusion. Interpretable ML models built from routinely collected EHR data identify high-AF-risk CVD patients, outperforming established clinical risk scores.

16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

MiniFool – Physics-Constraint-Aware Minimizer-Based Adversarial Attacks in Deep Neural Networks

arXiv:2511.01352v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this paper, we present a new algorithm, MiniFool, that implements physics-inspired adversarial attacks for testing neural network-based classification tasks in particle and astroparticle physics. While we initially developed the algorithm for the search for astrophysical tau neutrinos with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, we apply it to further data from other science domains, thus demonstrating its general applicability. Here, we apply the algorithm to the well-known MNIST data set and furthermore, to Open Data data from the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. The algorithm is based on minimizing a cost function that combines a $\chi^2$ based test-statistic with the deviation from the desired target score. The test statistic quantifies the probability of the perturbations applied to the data based on the experimental uncertainties. For our studied use cases, we find that the likelihood of a flipped classification differs for both the initially correctly and incorrectly classified events. When testing changes of the classifications as a function of an attack parameter that scales the experimental uncertainties, the robustness of the network decision can be quantified. Furthermore, this allows testing the robustness of the classification of unlabeled experimental data.

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

Descriptor: Certus Caliber Classification Gunshot Dataset (C3GD)

arXiv:2606.18135v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this work, we introduce the Certus Caliber Classification Gunshot Dataset (C3GD), a publicly accessible data set developed for the analysis of firearm muzzle blast sounds. The dataset aims to provide a wide variety of firearms, calibers, cartridges, microphones, and microphone locations with metadata detailed beyond what is currently otherwise available. It comprises more than 8000 field-collected data points from 28 firearms across 16 calibers. Because data collection in the field is costly, much of the existing research has been done using gunshot audio collected from the internet, which increases the risk of low-quality data and label noise. This dataset is primarily focused on caliber classification, but can also be used for gunshot detection, audio separation, and audio signal processing, providing a diversified and real-world reference. The dataset aims to provide enough diversity to be able to generalize to more real-world applications while also providing enough metadata for detailed academic analysis.

18.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-23

How should I respond to race-based exclusion in my lab?

作者:

A researcher in Europe feels left out of their team and held to different standards from their colleagues. How can they challenge exclusion without risking their position? A researcher in Europe feels left out of their team and held to different standards from their colleagues. How can they challenge exclusion without risking their position?

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

Weight-Space Geometry of Offline Reasoning Training

arXiv:2606.23740v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Offline reinforcement-learning losses (RFT, RIFT, DFT, Offline GRPO, DPO) are widely used to distill reasoning from large teachers into smaller students, and are typically compared on downstream accuracy alone. We ask whether they are mechanistically distinct or converge to a similar weight update. Training six methods (SFT, RFT, DFT, RIFT, Offline GRPO, DPO) on identical math rollouts from a single base model (Qwen3-4B) with attention-only LoRA, we analyze the resulting deltas via cosine similarity, principal-angle subspace analysis, linear mode connectivity, and CKA. We observe: (i) SFT, RFT, and RIFT have nearly colinear weight deltas (cosine >= 0.97, top-1 principal angle ~7 deg median over 144 modules) and comparable GSM8K accuracy (87-88%, n=1319; pairwise McNemar p >= 0.15); (ii) DFT diverges further in direction than any reward-weighted method despite using the same data; (iii) Offline GRPO adds a substantial component orthogonal to the SFT direction (~67% globally, up to ~86% in late layers) while staying in the SFT loss basin; (iv) DPO sits in a near-orthogonal subspace, shows a mode-connectivity barrier, and collapses late-layer CKA to ~0.46. DPO also reaches the highest accuracy in our protocol on both GSM8K (93.5%, McNemar p < 10^-9 vs. each other method) and AIME26 (30.0% vs. 3.3-10.0%); its training uses a 10x smaller learning rate than the others (the standard convention), so the update-norm and accuracy gaps reflect loss-function and optimizer choices jointly, and a learning-rate-matched DPO comparison is left for future work.

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

Page image classifier fine-tuned on century-spanning archives of scanned documents for further content-specific processing

arXiv:2606.07558v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Purpose: Digitization projects in the humanities produce vast, heterogeneous archives of historical documents, making manual sorting impractical at scale. This work addresses the need for an automated system to classify scanned page images based on visual content type - text, tables, and graphics - enabling content-specific downstream processing such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR) or structured data extraction. Methods: An image classification system was developed and evaluated on a dataset of over 48,000 annotated historical page images from century-old Czech archaeological archives, refined through four successive annotation stages with domain-expert review. A Random Forest Classifier baseline was established using hand-crafted image features. Subsequently, deep learning architectures were fine-tuned and compared: Convolutional Neural Networks (EfficientNetV2, RegNetY), Vision and Document Image Transformers (ViT, DiT), and multimodal CLIP models. An 11-category label scheme was designed collaboratively with domain experts and evaluated via five-fold cross-validation. Results: The feature-based baseline achieved approximately 75% accuracy. Fine-tuned CNNs and Transformers substantially outperformed it, with RegNetY-16GF achieving 99.16% and ViT-large 99.12% Top-1 accuracy on the held-out test set. CLIP ViT-B/16 reached 99.14% with optimized text descriptions. Conclusion: Image-only models, particularly RegNetY-16GF, deliver near-perfect classification accuracy and produce consistent labels across 649,508 unlabeled archival pages with over 90% inter-model agreement. Fine-tuned CLIP, despite competitive test-set accuracy, showed under 65% agreement with image-only models on unlabeled data, making it less suitable for deployment. The final models, annotated dataset, and software are publicly available under open-source licenses.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Dimensionality Reduction of QAOA Parameter Space with Kernel PCA for Max-Cut

arXiv:2606.23718v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) is a leading variational algorithm for combinatorial optimization on near term quantum devices. As circuit depth increases, the number of optimization parameters grows, making the search landscape increasingly nonlinear and difficult to optimize. Previous studies have shown that optimal QAOA parameters often lie on a low dimensional manifold that can be approximated using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) at shallow circuit depths. However, the effectiveness of PCA decreases at higher depths because the underlying parameter manifold becomes increasingly nonlinear. In this work, we investigate Kernel Principal Component Analysis (KPCA) with a radial basis function kernel as a nonlinear dimensionality reduction technique for QAOA parameter optimization. The model is trained using 200 graphs from each of 3 graph families, namely Erdos-Renyi, Barabasi-Albert, and Watts-Strogatz, with graph sizes ranging from 7 to 10 nodes. Performance is evaluated on 30 test graphs containing 12 nodes at circuit depths 1, 2, 4, and 8. Experimental results demonstrate that KPCA consistently outperforms PCA at deeper circuit depths across all graph families. At depth 8, KPCA achieves approximation ratios above 0.86, while PCA declines to approximately 0.81 to 0.83. Both methods reduce the number of quantum circuit evaluations by more than 93 percent relative to unrestricted QAOA optimization. These findings suggest that nonlinear kernel methods more effectively capture the structure of the QAOA parameter manifold and provide a practical approach for scaling variational quantum optimization to deeper circuits.

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

Parallel Test-Time Scaling with Multi-Sequence Verifiers

arXiv:2603.03417v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Parallel test-time scaling, which generates multiple candidate solutions for a single problem, is a powerful technique for improving large language model performance. However, it is hindered by two key bottlenecks: accurately selecting the correct solution from the candidate pool, and the high inference latency from generating many full solutions. We argue that both challenges are fundamentally linked to verifier calibration, as a well-calibrated verifier improves answer selection and enables early-stopping strategies to reduce latency. However, existing non-generative verifiers are limited as they score each candidate in isolation, overlooking rich contextual information across the set of candidates. To address this, we introduce the Multi-Sequence Verifier (MSV), a lightweight verifier that predicts each candidate's correctness conditioned on the full sampled set. MSV achieves improved calibration, which directly enhances best-of-N selection performance and empowers a novel early-stopping framework. Across challenging mathematical reasoning benchmarks, MSV improves best-of-64 accuracy by up to 6\% relative to strong baselines, and in the early-stopping setting reaches the same accuracy as baselines with less than half the latency.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Can Scale Save Us From Plasticity Loss in Large Language Models?

arXiv:2606.24752v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The loss of plasticity - the ability of a network to learn new information after having already learned older information - is a fundamental challenge in creating artificial neural networks capable of continual learning. Although this phenomenon has been known for decades, it has mostly been studied in older, relatively small architectures and rarely in natural-language domains. To determine whether loss of plasticity remains a problem in the modern transformer-based LLM paradigm, we study plasticity loss in GPT-style Transformer models trained on a multilingual continual learning problem. Consistent with prior work, we find evidence of plasticity loss across models ranging from 5M to 314M non-embedding parameters, as measured by deterioration on a held-out Vietnamese probing task. We further find that the onset of plasticity loss follows a predictable scaling law, growing sublinearly with model size. These results suggest that larger models may delay the measurable effects of plasticity loss, but that increasing parameter count alone is likely to be insufficient to completely prevent it. We also find evidence of plasticity loss under stationary multilingual training, challenging the view that the phenomenon is exclusive to continual learning with abrupt task changes. Overall, our results suggest that even large Transformer language models trained on natural-language will eventually lose the ability to efficiently adapt to new data after sufficiently long training, in both continual and stationary settings.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

CIAN: Multi-Stage Framework for Event-Enriched Image Captioning via Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Event-enriched image captioning describes not only visible content but also the broader context of events, including timing, location, and participants, capabilities missing in most pixel-bound models. We propose the Contextual Image-Article Narrator (CIAN), a multi-stage framework that enriches captions with external narratives. CIAN retrieves relevant articles using SigLIP, summarizes them to guide a Narrative Generation stage with a LoRA-fine-tuned Qwen model, and applies N-Gram-based Refinement for fluency and coherence. On the OpenEvents-V1 benchmark, CIAN achieves high retrieval performance (mAP 0.979) and improves caption quality, increasing CIDEr from 0.030 to 0.094. These results highlight the effectiveness of retrieval-augmented reasoning combined with linguistic refinement for generating context-aware, human-like captions.