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Semantic Grading of Written Answers in Low-Resource Language Bangla Using a Fine-Tuned Lightweight Language Model
Bangla is among the world's most widely spoken languages, yet it remains underserved in educational NLP research. In many remote and rural regions, access to qualified subject teachers is limited, and written answers are consequently graded largely by hand, restricting timely and consistent feedback. Automatic assessment is challenging because semantically correct responses can vary substantially in surface form. We present a bilingual (Bangla-English) evaluation system designed for low-resource educational settings that prioritizes semantic correctness over lexical overlap. Our approach fine-tunes a lightweight language model to grade each response using the question, reference answer, and student answer, producing a numeric score and concise, context-grounded feedback suitable for classroom deployment. We also construct a synthetic bilingual dataset to enable controlled training and evaluation. Across proprietary and open-source LLMs evaluated under a unified protocol, our QLoRA-tuned Qwen3-8B confirms consistent improvement by producing the most leakage-resistant feedback (RoRa = 0.819) in synthetic evaluation and the strongest agreement with human scores (rho = 0.936, MAE = 0.725) in a dedicated human study.
Price of metric universality in vector quantization is at most 0.11 bit
arXiv:2602.05790v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fast computation of a matrix product $W^\top X$ is a workhorse of modern LLMs. To make their deployment more efficient, a popular approach is that of using a low-precision approximation $\widehat W$ in place of true $W$ (``weight-only quantization''). Information theory demonstrates that an optimal algorithm for reducing precision of $W$ depends on the (second order) statistics of $X$ and requires a careful alignment of vector quantization codebook with PCA directions of $X$ (a process known as ``waterfilling allocation''). Dependence of the codebook on statistics of $X$, however, is highly impractical. This paper proves that there exist a universal codebook that is simultaneously near-optimal for all possible statistics of $X$, in the sense of being at least as good as an $X$-adapted waterfilling codebook with rate reduced by 0.11 bit per dimension in the case when $W$ is Gaussian. Such universal codebook would be an ideal candidate for the low-precision storage format, a topic of active modern research, but alas the existence proof is non-constructive. Equivalently, our result shows existence of a net in $\mathbb{R}^n$ that is a nearly-optimal covering of a sphere simultaneously with respect to all Hilbert norms.
ArogyaSutra: A Multi-Agent Framework for Multimodal Medical Reasoning in Indic Languages
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown promising reasoning capabilities in general domains, yet their performance remains limited in specialized settings such as healthcare, especially in multilingual and low-resource scenarios. This gap is critical in regions like rural India, where patients often express complex medical queries in native Indic languages and rely on multimodal inputs such as medical images. Existing English-centric MLLMs struggle to support such use cases, limiting equitable access to AI-driven healthcare assistance. To address this challenge, we introduce ArogyaBodha, a large-scale multilingual multimodal medical question-answer dataset constructed from eight heterogeneous sources, covering 31 body systems, six imaging modalities, and 21 clinical domains across English and seven major Indian languages. We further propose ArogyaSutra, an actor-critic-based multi-agent framework that integrates tool grounding with dual-memory mechanisms for step-wise, reasoning-aware decision making, and uses stored actor-critic simulation trajectories for distillation. Experiments show that our dataset and framework improve multilingual medical reasoning accuracy across all Indic languages, with ablations validating the contribution of each component. The source code and dataset are available at: https://iitp-cse.github.io/ ArogyaSutra/
Fiery data hint that controlled forest fires benefit human health
Analysis of wildfire in California suggests a net reduction in exposure to blaze-related air pollution. Analysis of wildfire in California suggests a net reduction in exposure to blaze-related air pollution.
Beyond LoRA: Is Sparsity-Induced Adaptation Better?
arXiv:2606.13767v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) and its variants provide a memory- and compute-efficient alternative to full fine-tuning of pre-trained models. However, questions remain about the comparative generalizability of these approaches and how the structural restrictions on low-rank updates preserve effective adaptation performance. We present a historical framing, covering the past (full fine-tuning and original LoRA), the present (different variants of LoRA), and propose simpler, cheaper, parameter-efficient extensions by inducing sparsity within existing LoRA variants: Cheap LoRA (cLA), training a single low-rank factor with the other fixed (deterministically or, in its randomized variant, stochastically), and the chained circulant variant, ${c}^3$LA. We frame cLA as a structured instance of asymmetric LoRA, serving as a controlled column-subspace restriction of full fine-tuning. We derive information-theoretic generalization error bounds for these variants, marking one of the first endeavors in this area. Empirically, we evaluate 11 fine-tuning methods across 10 pre-trained models and 14 datasets, analyzing the fine-tuned models' performance and generalization using tools such as loss landscapes and spectral analysis. Despite the sensitivity of fine-tuned models to the pre-trained model, datasets, and other factors, our study suggests that restricting LoRA-based PEFT methods' adaptation to a sparse, structured column space remains competitive across tasks with their parameter-matched baselines while reducing up to 10% training time and peak GPU memory up to 15%, even with a naïve, non-optimized, sparse implementation. Our theoretical and empirical generalization measures provide a more consistent and principled approach to their cost-effective adaptation than commonly used analytical tools. Overview and code are available at: https://elicaden.github.io/Beyond_LoRA/.
ADAPT: An Autonomous Forklift for Construction Site Operation
Efficient material logistics play a critical role in controlling costs and schedules in the construction industry. However, manual material handling remains prone to inefficiencies, delays, and safety risks. Autonomous forklifts offer a promising solution to streamline on-site logistics, reducing reliance on human operators and mitigating labor shortages. This paper presents the development and evaluation of ADAPT (Autonomous Dynamic All-terrain Pallet Transporter), a fully autonomous off-road forklift designed for construction environments. Unlike structured warehouse settings, construction sites pose significant challenges, including dynamic obstacles, unstructured terrain, and varying weather conditions. To address these challenges, our system integrates AI-driven perception techniques with traditional approaches for decision making, planning, and control, enabling reliable operation in complex environments. We validate the system through extensive real-world testing, comparing its continuous performance against an experienced human operator across various weather conditions. Our findings demonstrate that autonomous outdoor forklifts can operate near human-level performance, offering a viable path toward safer and more efficient construction logistics.
Universal Manipulation Exoskeleton: Learning Compliant Whole-body Policies with Real-time Torque Feedback
arXiv:2606.14218v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For robots to work safely in household environments, they need to be compliant and react to torque and force feedback during contact. However, the majority of existing data collection pipelines still lack the ability to capture force and torque data for learning active compliant policies. In this paper, we present Universal Manipulation Exoskeleton (UME), an upper-limb exoskeleton that provides real-time haptic torque feedback while recording whole-arm configurations and joint torque signals for teleoperation. With transparent torque feedback, human operators can even unsheathe kinematically constrained objects while blindfolded. UME is low-cost, lightweight, and portable. Equipped with an embedded IMU, it enables teleoperation for mobile manipulation. With our proposed universal retargeting algorithm, UME can teleoperate a range of robots, including the 7DoF OpenArm, 7DoF Franka, and 6DoF X-ARM. We demonstrate that this combination of capabilities enables learning bimanual, whole-body, and active compliant policies that operate effectively in highly constrained spaces. The learned robust autonomous policies achieve high success rates across a variety of tasks, including long-horizon mobile manipulation, force-mediated box flipping, visually occluded box pushing, and space-constrained tabletop manipulation. Videos, code, and additional information can be found at https://ume-exo.github.io.
EyeMVP: OCT-Informed Fundus Representation Learning via Paired CFP–OCT Pretraining
Color fundus photography (CFP) is the mainstay for large-scale retinal screening, yet its diagnostic capacity is constrained by the lack of depth-resolved structural information. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) provides cross-sectional retinal anatomy, but is less accessible in population-level screening. Here, we present EyeMVP, a cross-modal retinal foundation model that uses paired CFP–OCT pretraining to learn OCT-informed CFP representations. EyeMVP is pretrained on 674,893 strict same-eye same-day paired CFP–OCT image triples from 112,642 patients across eight hospitals in China. The model uses cross-modal masked reconstruction to enrich CFP representations with OCT-associated supervision, while requiring only CFP images at inference. To accommodate the non-aligned imaging geometry between en-face CFP and cross-sectional OCT, EyeMVP combines source-constrained cross-attention with CFP-derived structural masks. Across 16 downstream tasks, including classification, segmentation, few-shot adaptation, and cross-modal retrieval, EyeMVP outperforms representative retinal foundation models and shows consistent gains on tasks involving macular and optic nerve structure. For CFP-challenging macular diseases, EyeMVP achieves an AUROC of 0.948 for macular edema (vs.~0.852 for EyeCLIP) and 0.825 for myopic macular schisis. In an exploratory reader study, EyeMVP exceeds junior and intermediate ophthalmologist groups but does not reach senior ophthalmologist performance on macular edema, while showing numerically higher balanced accuracy than all reader groups on myopic macular schisis. These results suggest that pixel-level cross-modal reconstruction can enrich CFP representations with OCT-associated supervision, providing a practical route toward stronger CFP-based retinal analysis in screening settings.
Not All Skills Help: Measuring and Repairing Agent Knowledge
LLM agents can improve without weight updates by accumulating natural-language skills from experience, but current systems entrust every decision about which skills to keep and how to apply them to LLM judgment alone. We argue that this conflates two distinct roles: generating a skill from experience is a creative act that judgment handles well, while deciding whether that skill actually helps requires empirical evidence across many tasks. Measuring per-skill causal contributions via randomized masking, we find that skill libraries exhibit pervasive causal heterogeneity: individual skills routinely help on some task types while hurting on others, yet their opposing effects cancel in aggregate, making them invisible to global curation methods. We propose ASSAY, a framework that separates generation from curation: it computes a per-skill causal attribution on a small development set, restructures the library offline, and suppresses skills with negative predicted effect for each test task. Across seven base models spanning four providers and two benchmarks (AppWorld and tau-bench), ASSAY consistently improves over prior skill-curation approaches. On AppWorld's hardest split, DeepSeek-V3 achieves 69.3% task-goal completion (47.4% relative improvement), a new state of the art among all published methods including weight-tuned approaches. On tau-bench retail, GPT-4.1 improves by 8.7% relative, advancing past o4-mini, o1, and GPT-4.5 on the public leaderboard without any weight modification. Ablation traces the dominant gain to per-task masking, confirming that the bottleneck is matching skills to tasks at inference time, not removing bad skills globally. Code is available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/assay.
A Survey of On-Policy Distillation for Large Language Models
As Large Language Models continue to grow in both capability and cost, transferring frontier capabilities into smaller, deployable students has become an important engineering problem, and knowledge distillation remains a common technique for this transfer. The prevailing recipe in industrial pipelines, static imitation of teacher-generated text, carries a structural weakness that grows more severe as tasks become longer and more reasoning-intensive. Because the student is trained on flawless teacher prefixes but generates its own at inference, small errors tend to accumulate into trajectories it has rarely been trained to recover from, and the resulting exposure bias has been shown to scale roughly with the square of sequence length. On-Policy Distillation reorganizes the training loop around this observation by having the teacher provide feedback on what the student actually produces, with the goal of reducing the compounding term toward linear and reframing distillation as an iterative correction process rather than single-pass imitation. The resulting literature has expanded along divergence design, reward-guided optimization, and self-play, yet contributions remain scattered across the knowledge distillation, RLHF, and imitation learning communities without a unified treatment. This survey provides such a treatment. We formalize OPD as f-divergence minimization over student-sampled trajectories, organize the field along three design axes (what to optimize, where the signal comes from, and how to stabilize training in practice), and consolidate success conditions, recurring failure modes, and the connection between OPD and KL-constrained reinforcement learning. We close with open problems that emerge from this synthesis, including distillation scaling laws, uncertainty-aware feedback, agent-level distillation, and the growing overlap between knowledge distillation and RL.
Foundation model-based tool for automated ulcerative colitis histology scoring demonstrates non-inferiority to pathologists across multiple scoring indices
In clinical trials for ulcerative colitis (UC), pathologists assess disease severity through standardized histological indices, including the Geboes Score, Robarts Histopathology Index (RHI), and Nancy Histologic Index (NHI). Despite strong associations with clinical outcomes, histologic scoring suffers from inter- and intra-reader variability, and consensus criteria for histologic remission remain uncertain. Through a consortium approach, we developed an artificial intelligence-based measurement (AIM) tool for scoring histology in UC mucosal biopsies (AIM-HI UC). This model, trained on a large dataset of UC biopsies (N=10,230), utilizes additive multiple instance learning models leveraging PLUTO, a pathology foundation model, that predict each of the Geboes subgrades, from which the Geboes grade-level score, RHI, and NHI can be calculated. Evaluation of this model on a standalone verification set including clinical trial specimens established algorithm non-inferiority and/or superiority relative to standard qualified pathologists through comparison of algorithm-consensus and pathologist-consensus agreement metrics (non-inferior if difference >-0.1, superior if difference >0, inclusive of confidence intervals). AIM-HI UC was determined to be non-inferior to pathologists (N=3) for the prediction of all seven Geboes subgrades, grade-level Geboes, RHI, NHI, histologic improvement (GS
Entanglement-Rank Duality in Quadratic Phase Quantum States
arXiv:2605.05167v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Absolutely maximally entangled (AME) states are fundamental resources in quantum information theory, yet their construction and certification remain a nontrivial problem. Within the family of quadratic phase quantum states, defined by symmetric matrices $P$ over finite fields $\mathbb{F}_{p^m}$, we show that the Rank-Purity Duality $\operatorname{Tr}(\rho_S^2) = |\mathbb{F}|^{-\operatorname{rk}_{\mathbb{F}}(P_{S,\bar{S}})}$ follows from additive character orthogonality and holds over all $\mathbb{F}_{p^m}$, yielding a polynomial-time AME certification criterion. For square-free dimensions $d = p_1\cdots p_r$, the Chinese Remainder Theorem induces a prime-field factorisation. This implies additivity of Rényi-2 entropy and yields sharp obstruction criteria that rule out cases such as $\operatorname{AME}(4,6)$ and constrain the open case $\operatorname{AME}(8,6)$. As a proof of concept, we construct an explicit $\operatorname{AME}(17,10001)$ state, certified across all $65{,}535$ bipartitions, demonstrating that the framework scales to large systems and previously inaccessible local dimensions.
Closest Accessible Symmetry reduction: a tool for Hamiltonian interpolation analysis
arXiv:2606.18161v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce a framework for analysing the spectrum of Hamiltonian interpolations without heavily relying on discretising the interpolation parameter. The method is based on the concept of accessible symmetries: a problem-class-dependent family of certifiable reflections that induce bipartitions of the Hilbert space. At each step, the interpolation Hamiltonian is projected onto the sectors of the accessible symmetry that is closest to being satisfied, yielding a hierarchy of weakly coupled pseudo-eigenspaces together with explicit residual couplings between them. We show that this representation captures qualitative signatures of quantum phase transitions, provides estimates of their location, and offers insights into their nature. The quality of the approximation is controlled by the compatibility between the accessible symmetry family and the problem instance. Although motivated in spirit by adiabatic quantum computation, our approach applies more broadly to the study of Hamiltonian phase diagrams, providing a new perspective on the spectral reorganisation of many-body quantum systems.
Residual-Space Evolutionary Optimization via Flow-based Generative Models
arXiv:2606.20084v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Data editing with generative methods typically requires differentiable objectives and gradient-based search. However, these assumptions break down in flow-based settings, where edits are performed through forward and backward integration and often involve non-differentiable or black-box objectives. We introduce residual-space evolutionary optimization, a model-agnostic framework that addresses this gap by combining flow-based generative editing with evolutionary algorithms. Building on the observation that conditional flow matching (CFM) can disentangle condition-controlled factors from instance-specific residuals, our framework directly operates in residual space and separates two complementary search regimes: self-pollination performs local exploitation through feature-preserving residual refinement, and cross-pollination promotes broader exploration by recombining residuals across heterogeneous samples. As a proof of concept, we validate on MorphoMNIST, a benchmark dataset for counterfactual generation, and on crystal data, demonstrating that this exploration–exploitation decomposition provides a useful mechanism for balancing target alignment, instance preservation, and diversity, and extends beyond images to real-world scientific domains.
Environmental “knees” and “wiggles” as strong stabilizers of species’ range limits set by interspecific competition
by Farshad Shirani, Benjamin G. Freeman Whether interspecific competition is a major contributing factor to setting species’ range limits has been debated for a long time. Theoretical studies have proposed that the interactions between interspecific competition and disruptive gene flow along an environmental gradient can halt range expansion of ecologically similar species where they meet. However, the stability of such range limits has not been well addressed. We use a deterministic mathematical model of adaptive range evolution over a continuous habitat to show that the range limits set by interspecific competition are unlikely to be evolutionarily stable if the environmental optima for fitness-related traits vary (almost) linearly in space. That is, in a linear environment without a dispersal barrier or a third (or more) species, the range borders formed between two competing species constantly move towards the weaker species. We demonstrate that environmental nonlinearities such as “knees” and “wiggles”—wherein an isolated sharp change or a step-like change occurs in the steepness of a trait optimum—can strongly stabilize competitively formed range limits. The stabilization mechanism relies on the contrast that such nonlinearities create in the level of disruptive gene flow to the peripheral population of each species, and succeeds when an additional process, such as Allee effects, prevents the establishment of an infinitesimal population in the presence of an abundant competitor. We show that the stability of the range limits at these nonlinearities is robust against moderate environmental disturbances. Whether strong disturbances such as rapid high-amplitude climate changes can destabilize such range limits depends on how the competitive dominance of the species changes across the nonlinearity. Therefore, our findings underscore the importance of assessing species’ competitive ability when predicting responses to climate change, and identify geographic regions where established range limits are likely to persist as well as regions where shifting limits may eventually stabilize.
SafeClawBench: Separating Semantic, Audit-Evidence, and Sandbox Harm in Tool-Using LLM Agents
arXiv:2606.18356v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tool-using language-model agents introduce security failures that go beyond unsafe text: they can disclose protected objects, write persistent memory, send messages, modify databases, or trigger harmful code and tool effects. Existing evaluations often collapse these stages into a single attack success rate, making it difficult to tell whether a model merely agreed with an attacker or actually produced observable harm. We introduce SafeClawBench, a staged benchmark for tool-using agent security with 600 controlled adversarial tasks across six attack families: direct and indirect prompt injection, tool-return injection, memory poisoning, memory extraction, and ambiguity-driven unsafe inference. SafeClawBench reports three separate endpoints: semantic attack acceptance, audit-visible harm evidence, and sandbox-observed tool/state harm. Evaluating five agent endpoints under four prompt-level policies, we find that these endpoints capture different failure modes. Without additional prompt protection, semantic failure rates vary widely across models, from 9.0% to 44.2%. Audited harm evidence is narrower than semantic failure, and under a separate executable protocol some matched task identities produce sandbox harm despite passing the Semantic Core call: in a 12,000-row matched analysis, 291 of 347 observed sandbox harms occur in rows that pass the semantic check. Prompt policies change endpoint outcomes, but their effects depend on both model and protocol. SafeClawBench provides a reproducible framework for comparing agent models and prompt-policy conditions without conflating textual compliance, evidence-supported harm, and executable state changes. The open-source dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/sairights/safeclawbench.
Matrix Product States for Modulated Symmetries: SPT, LSM, and Beyond
arXiv:2603.19189v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Matrix product states (MPS) provide a powerful framework for characterizing one-dimensional symmetry-protected topological (SPT) phases of matter and for formulating Lieb-Schultz-Mattis (LSM)-type constraints. Here we generalize the MPS formalism to translationally invariant systems with general modulated symmetries. We show that the standard symmetry "push-through" condition for conventional global symmetry must be revised to account for symmetry modulation, and we derive the appropriate generalized condition. Using this generalized push-through structure, we classify one-dimensional SPT phases with modulated symmetries and formulate LSM-type constraints within the same MPS-based framework.
Validation of a Smartphone-Image-Based Computer-Vision Model for Lean Mass and Body Fat Estimation Against Dual-Energy X-ray Absorptiometry
Introduction Body composition, rather than body weight alone, is an increasingly important health metric, and preservation of lean mass has become a central concern in obesity treatment, aging, and chronic disease management. Dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) provides accurate assessment of fat and lean tissue, but its cost and logistical requirements limit repeated measurement. Computer-vision approaches show promise for estimating adiposity from smartphone images, but lean-mass estimation remains less established. Methods We evaluated a computer-vision body composition model, applied to consumer-grade smartphone photographs, against DXA in a held-out validation sample of 195 adults from an ongoing cross-sectional study. Body fat percentage and total lean mass percentage were co-primary outcomes; for total lean mass percentage, an image-only configuration (no added covariates) was pre-specified as primary. Agreement was quantified using Lin's concordance correlation coefficient (CCC) as the lead statistic, with Pearson correlation, mean absolute error, root mean square error, mean bias, and Bland-Altman limits of agreement. In secondary analyses, appendicular lean mass and total lean mass percentage were each estimated with and without routine anthropometric and demographic inputs (body weight, height, age, and sex). Results Total lean mass percentage agreed with DXA from image features alone (CCC 0.916). Body fat percentage, estimated with routine inputs added, agreed at least as closely (CCC 0.930). Adding routine inputs barely changed agreement for total lean mass percentage but markedly improved it for appendicular lean mass, an absolute quantity that scales with body size. Conclusions A smartphone-image-based model estimated both body fat and lean mass with strong agreement to DXA, with lean mass percentage from image features alone. The approach needs no fixed equipment or ionizing radiation. Whether it can track change over time, including in incretin-based weight loss where lean mass preservation is a concern, was not assessed in this cross-sectional study.
Zero-Shot Captioning for Cultural Heritage: Automated Image Analysis of Traditional Indonesian Clothing
This paper presents Custom ZeroCLIP, a retrieval-augmented vision-language framework for zero-shot captioning of Indonesian traditional garments. The dataset contains 3,800 expert-annotated images from all 38 Indonesian provinces. Using a province-level inductive zero-shot protocol, the model is trained on 24 seen provinces, validated on 6 seen provinces, and evaluated on 8 unseen provinces. The framework combines a frozen CLIP ViT-B/32 image encoder, a CLIP text encoder, a BERT text encoder, and an LSTM caption decoder. During inference, unseen-province labels and captions are unavailable, and retrieval uses only captions from training provinces. No unseen-province image, label, or caption is used during training, validation, or retrieval-bank construction. Custom ZeroCLIP achieves a CLIPScore of 0.8536, BLEU-4 of 0.3342, and METEOR of 0.4859, outperforming existing baselines. Ablation results show that retrieval improves cultural vocabulary recovery with a 19.3\% METEOR gain, while human evaluation confirms stronger cultural accuracy and fluency. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of retrieval-augmented domain adaptation for culturally grounded caption generation in low-resource heritage settings. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/AnugrahAidinYotolembah/Traditional-Indonesian-Clothing-Captioning-Dataset.
Notation Matters: A Benchmark Study of Token-Optimized Formats in Agentic AI Systems
Large language models in Agentic AI systems consume tool schemas and execution results and emit tool invocations as structured data. The default language for that exchange, JSON, was designed for application-to-application interchange rather than token efficiency, so its structural elements impose substantial token overhead. Recent work proposes token-optimized alternatives such as TOON (Token-Oriented Object Notation) and TRON (Token Reduced Object Notation) as more compact replacements, but these formats have been evaluated only on isolated comprehension or generation tasks. Whether their token reductions hold inside end-to-end agentic loops therefore remains an open question. We evaluate TOON and TRON on four agentic benchmarks (BFCL, MCPToolBenchPP, MCP-Universe, StableToolBench) and five open-weight LLMs, decoupling input compression from output compression to measure comprehension and generation independently. TRON reduces tokens by up to 27% with accuracy within 14pp of the JSON baseline. TOON achieves up to 18% reduction at a similar 9pp accuracy cost, but additionally cascades on multi-turn parsing failures and collapses parallel tool-call output for most models. The code is available at: https://github.com/lkutschka/notation-matters
BAFIS: Dataset + Framework to assess occupational Bias and Human Preference in modern Text-to-image Models
Generative artificial intelligence has the potential to improve productivity and transform the production of creative content. However, existing research indicates that image generation models are significantly influenced by biases. This work investigates the inherent biases and language-induced biases present in text-to-image models within the context of occupation-related image generation, complementing established metrics with human preference feedback. We present a comprehensive evaluation of five current text-to-image models: Midjourney v6.1, Stable Diffusion 3 Medium, DALL-E 3, Playground v2.5, and FLUX.1-dev , focusing on gender and ethnicity bias, image quality, and prompt alignment. To facilitate this evaluation, we developed the "Battle-Arena for Fair Image Synthesis" (BAFIS), a platform designed to collect human feedback on bias in generated images. Furthermore, we created a dataset comprising 21,140 synthetic images generated using multilingual prompts, which serves as a basis for our analysis. We further place our results within a broader social context by comparing them to official statistics from the German Federal Employment Agency. Our findings reveal systematic biases in text-to-image models, with established evaluation metrics in partial correlation with subjective user ratings. Thus, our research emphasizes the need for including human preferences to develop fairer and more inclusive text-to-image models.
Beyond Uniform Tokens: Adaptive Compression for Time Series Language Models
Large language models (LLMs) have enabled time series (TS) analysis by jointly modeling numerical observations and textual context through a shared token interface. However, TS tokens and prompt tokens exhibit fundamentally different information structures, making uniform token processing inefficient. In this paper, we study token efficiency in TS language modeling from an asymmetric-token perspective. We show that TS tokens have highly uneven spectral contributions, where many tokens share redundant frequency patterns while a small subset preserves critical temporal evidence. We also observe that prompt-token influence attenuates with model depth, suggesting that full prompt retention across all layers is unnecessary. Based on these findings, we develop an adaptive token budgeting framework that compresses TS tokens via frequency-domain structure and progressively reduces prompt tokens across layers. Experiments across forecasting, classification, imputation, and anomaly detection demonstrate up to 7.68$\times$ inference acceleration and performance gains in 78\% of evaluated settings, showing the effectiveness of asymmetric token compression for scalable TS foundation models.
Hierarchical ODE: Learning Continuous-Time Physical Prototypes for Early Link Failure Detection
arXiv:2606.14284v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Time series prototype learning is fundamentally challenged by observational ambiguity. Discrete architectures fail to resolve this, as they lack the capacity to decouple stochastic noise from continuous dynamics. Furthermore, rigid closed-set assumptions fail to capture unseen diversity. To address these limitations, we propose a hierarchical ordinary differential equation clustering network, which utilizes neural ordinary differential equation to model latent state evolution as a continuous integral curve. This formulation enforces temporal continuity to effectively disentangle smooth feature trends from stochastic noise, while our adaptive hierarchical mechanism autonomously determines the appropriate number of prototypes without rigid prior constraints. Validated on the early link failure detection task with irregularly sampled time series, the proposed method effectively extracts underlying physical prototypes, thereby enabling robust failure detection. Our code is available at https://github.com/NJ-LNN/Hierarchical-ODE.
Trust the Right Teacher: Quality-Aware Self-Distillation for GUI Grounding
arXiv:2606.18101v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Graphical user interface (GUI) grounding requires vision-language models (VLMs) to identify small target elements in high-resolution screenshots and predict precise screen coordinates. On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) is a promising post-training approach for this coordinate-sensitive task, since it provides dense token-level teacher signals beyond hard coordinate labels. However, naive OPSD is not well suited to GUI grounding: OPSD evaluates the teacher on student-generated prefixes, the quality of coordinate-token teacher signals can degrade when the prefix has already deviated from the target coordinate, leading to unreliable teacher signal. To mitigate this, We propose quality-aware self-distillation for VLM-based GUI grounding, which improves coordinate-token teacher-signal quality through soft correctness-aware gating and teacher-probability scaling. The soft correctness-aware gate checks whether the teacher's current coordinate-token prediction can still be completed into the ground-truth box under the student-generated prefix. If not, the corresponding teacher signal is down-weighted. Teacher-probability scaling then uses the teacher's confidence as a lightweight factor to further calibrate the strength of the gated supervision. A key empirical finding is that neither component alone improves overall performance, whereas combining them consistently improves performance. This suggests that the two mechanisms play complementary roles: correctness-aware gating suppresses unreliable coordinate-token supervision, while teacher-probability scaling calibrates the strength of the remaining signals. Experiments across six GUI grounding benchmarks show that our method consistently improves the base model and outperforms strong baselines.