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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Improve Large Language Model Systems with User Logs

Scaling training data and model parameters has long driven progress in large language models (LLMs), but this paradigm is increasingly constrained by the scarcity of high-quality data and diminishing returns from rising computational costs. As a result, recent work is increasing the focus on continual learning from real-world deployment, where user interaction logs provide a rich source of authentic human feedback and procedural knowledge. However, learning from user logs is challenging due to their unstructured and noisy nature. Vanilla LLM systems often struggle to distinguish useful feedback signals from noisy user behavior, and the disparity between user log collection and model optimization (e.g., the off-policy optimization problem) further strengthens the problem. To this end, we propose UNO (User log-driveN Optimization), a unified framework for improving LLM systems (LLMsys) with user logs. UNO first distills logs into semi-structured rules and preference pairs, then employs query-and-feedback-driven clustering to manage data heterogeneity, and finally quantifies the cognitive gap between the model's prior knowledge and the log data. This assessment guides the LLMsys to adaptively filter out noisy feedback and construct different modules for primary and reflective experiences extracted from user logs, thereby improving future responses. Extensive experiments show that UNO achieves state-of-the-art effectiveness and efficiency, significantly outperforming Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and memory-based baselines. We have open-sourced our code at https://github.com/bebr2/UNO .

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Prediction-Powered Causal Inference by Automatic Debiased Machine Learning and Semi-Supervised Riesz Regression

arXiv:2606.12892v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This study investigates semiparametric efficient estimation of causal and structural parameters in a semi-supervised setting. In our setting, unlabeled auxiliary regressors are available in addition to labeled observations consisting of outcomes and regressors. Our goal is to construct estimators of causal and structural parameters whose asymptotic variances are smaller than those of estimators constructed using only labeled data. We refer to this framework as prediction-powered causal inference (PPCI). We first derive the efficient influence function and the efficiency bound, which imply that the use of auxiliary regressors can attain a smaller asymptotic variance than the efficiency bound attainable from labeled observations alone. Then, by combining the efficient influence function with the debiased machine learning (DML) framework, we propose methods that we call DML-PPCI. If we construct an estimating-equation estimator, we refer to the method as EE-DML-PPCI; if we construct a targeted-learning estimator, we refer to the method as TMLE-DML-PPCI. The asymptotic variances of both estimators match our derived efficiency bound. In the construction of the estimators, estimation of the efficient influence function plays an important role. In our study, the efficient influence function is also a Neyman orthogonal score, which depends on the Riesz representer and the regression function. For Riesz representer estimation, we develop semi-supervised generalized Riesz regression with convergence rate guarantees.

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

Rotational Symmetry based Object Pose Estimation from Point Clouds in the Absence of Known 3D Models

Object pose estimation is crucial to many industrial applications, with one example being automated spray painting using a robot. However, confidentiality concerns often limit access to high-quality 3D models, posing a significant challenge for point-cloud-based pose estimation. In such scenarios, rotational symmetry, a readily accessible characteristic of many industrial objects, can provide valuable prior information to facilitate pose estimation.In this paper, we propose a method that leverages the rotational symmetry commonly found in industrial objects to address the challenge caused by the absence of 3D models. The object pose is jointly estimated with point cloud refinement through an iterative optimization process. This optimization relies on a rotational symmetry constraint loss. To construct this loss, each 3D point is rotated according to the currently estimated pose, and multiple correspondences are identified using nearest-neighbor search by exploiting the rotational symmetry property. These correspondences are then used to compute the rotational symmetry constraint loss, which iteratively refines both the pose and the point cloud.By explicitly incorporating rotational symmetry into the optimization process, the proposed method achieves robust pose estimation and generalizes well across diverse object types. The proposed method is evaluated on a dataset specifically created for point clouds without known 3D models, consisting of four categories of synthetic objects and one real wheel hub collected from a production line. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves performance comparable to methods that rely on known 3D models.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Shift Variant Image Degradation and Restoration Using Singular Value Decomposition

Shift-variant image degradation is frequently encountered in practical imaging systems where the point spread function (PSF) varies across the image field due to motion, optical aberrations, atmospheric turbulence, or sensor-related effects. Unlike shift-invariant, shift-variant degradation presents significant challenges for image restoration because the degradation process cannot be represented by a single convolution kernel. This paper proposes a singular value decomposition (SVD)-based framework for restoring images degraded by shift-variant motion blur. The proposed approach determines the contribution of small singular values using a singular-value energy retention criterion. Specifically, the number of small singular values is selected based on a specified percentage of cumulative singular-value energy, providing a systematic approach for controlling noise amplification while preserving useful image information. The degradation model is formulated using a position-dependent PSF represented by a shift-variant imaging operator. Three representative one dimensional shift-variant motion PSFs are considered: bidirectional linear motion, Gaussian motion, and simple harmonic motion. The image degradation process is modeled as a linear system, and SVD is employed to analyze and invert the corresponding degradation operator. The singular-value representation provides insight into the ill-conditioned nature of the restoration problem and enables the development of stable inversion techniques. The proposed SVD-based restoration algorithm is applied to three degraded images. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in recovering image details and reducing blur artifacts under different motion models.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Manga109-v2026: Revisiting Manga109 Annotations for Modern Manga Understanding

Manga is a culturally distinctive multimodal medium and one of the most influential forms of Japanese popular culture. As AI systems increasingly target manga understanding, OCR, and translation, Manga109 has become a foundational dataset for manga-related AI research. However, the current Manga109 dataset contains inaccurate transcriptions and coarse annotations, which do not align well with modern OCR and multimodal manga understanding tasks. In this work, we revisit the dialogue text annotations of Manga109 and identify five categories of annotation issues, including inaccurate transcriptions, missing text regions, overlapping dialogue and onomatopoeia, and under-segmented speech balloons. To address these issues, we combine OCR-based issue detection and manual revision to construct Manga109-v2026, revising approximately 29,000 dialogue annotations. Our revisions better align Manga109 with modern OCR and multimodal manga understanding systems while preserving expressive structures characteristic of manga.

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

Deep Unfolded Latent Optimally Partitioned-l2/l1 Networks for Data-driven Block-Sparse Recovery

arXiv:2606.12740v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The convex Latent Optimal Partition (LOP)-l2/l1 approach enables block-sparse signal recovery with unknown partitions but relies on manual hyperparameter tuning. Additionally, numerical instability in differentiating its proximal operator prevents its automatic parameter tuning via Deep Unfolding (DU). To address these limitations, we propose two architectures: a stable framework utilizing implicit differentiation and a flexible variant leveraging Deep Weight Factorization (DWF). The DWF-based approach also supports nonconvex smooth data fidelity terms. Numerical experiments demonstrate that DU-LOP-l2/l1 yields competitive performance and high resilience against impulsive noise.

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

Robust Privacy: Inference-Stage Privacy through Certified Robustness

arXiv:2601.17360v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: An adversary observing a model's released prediction can infer sensitive attributes of the queried input, or even reconstruct representatives of the model's training data. The inference interface thus acts as a side channel for privacy leakage. We introduce Robust Privacy (RP), an inference-stage privacy notion inspired by certified robustness: if a model's prediction is provably invariant within a radius-R neighborhood around an input x with confidence at least $1-\alpha$, then x enjoys $(R,\alpha)$-Robust Privacy, under which we prove that any adversary observing the released prediction has at most $\alpha/2$ advantage in distinguishing x from any input within distance R of x. Building on RP, we formalize Robust Attribute Privacy (RAP), an attribute-level privacy notion that characterizes the set of sensitive-attribute values that remain compatible with a released prediction. On a classification task, RP increases the median length of the RAP-compatible inference interval from 23.50 to 29.96, reducing attribute-inference precision. Model inversion attacks, often treated as a training-stage threat, in fact rely on fine-grained signals leaked through the inference interface; RP masks these signals at the inference stage, reducing attack success rate (ASR) from 73% to 4% on a black-box inversion attack. This direct targeting of the leakage channel enables RP to dominate DP-SGD and randomized response in the privacy-utility tradeoff space: RP retains 98.4% accuracy at 21% ASR, whereas DP-SGD must drop accuracy to 61.7% to reach a comparable ASR. Across both experiments, increasing the smoothing sample size N strengthens privacy and improves utility together. Finally, we examine model distillation as a scope boundary and show that RP mitigates attribute-level and instance-level inference-stage privacy leakage, but not function-level extraction through model distillation.

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

When, Where, and How: Adaptive Binning for Tabular Self-Supervised Learning

arXiv:2606.19827v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Medical tabular data are ubiquitous in clinical research, but deep learning for tables remains underexplored because reliable labels often require costly expert adjudication, even though structured clinical variables are routinely available in tabular form. Self-supervised learning can leverage these unlabeled tables, and recent binning-based pretexts offer a promising inductive bias, but existing objectives fix a single global quantile discretization and apply feature-agnostic supervision. We propose Adaptive Binning, a training-adaptive discretization pretext for tabular SSL that couples discretization to learning through a feature-wise coarse-to-fine curriculum. Motivated by the spectral bias of neural networks and the principles of curriculum learning, our method progressively refines discretization per feature upon plateau detection and selects representation-aware splits to jointly improve value-space concentration and representation-space coherence. A heterogeneity-aware objective unifies categorical reconstruction with ordinal supervision for numerical features, and experiments on public medical tabular datasets under unified evaluation protocols show consistent gains for linear probing and fine-tuning without dataset-specific discretization tuning. We further introduce a medical tabular SSL benchmark with standardized protocols to support reproducible progress in this underexplored domain. Our code is available at https://github.com/labhai/Adaptive-Binning.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Recover Semantics First, Generate Better: Improved Latent Modeling for 3D MRI Reconstruction and Cross-Contrast Synthesis

Multi-contrast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) provides complementary information for clinical diagnosis. However, acquiring all MRI sequences is often time-consuming and costly. Recent generative models perform cross-contrast synthesis to address this issue by inferring absent contrasts from the available ones. Nevertheless, synthesizing 3D MRI presents significant challenges. Due to the massive volume sizes, operating directly in the pixel space is computationally prohibitive; therefore, a common approach is to first compress the 3D volumes into a latent space and subsequently train generative models in that space. We observe that existing compression architectures face several critical issues: they under-preserve long-range anatomical coherence, discard clinically meaningful semantics, and rely on optimization objectives that lead to over-smoothed reconstructions. Ultimately, these shortcomings compromise the performance of subsequent generative models. In this work, we propose a semantics-first latent modeling framework for 3D MRI reconstruction and cross-contrast synthesis. Specifically, we introduce a Latent Harmonization Encoder (LHE) to capture global anatomical dependencies, ensuring coherent volumetric representations. To mitigate semantic degradation during latent compression, we further design a Semantic Recovery Block (SRB) that injects high-level priors from a self-supervised semantic teacher, enhancing contrast-aware separability in the latent space. Additionally, we propose an Anatomy-aware Frequency Loss (AFL) to adaptively preserve diagnostically relevant high-frequency structures. Extensive experiments on two public multi-contrast MRI datasets demonstrate consistent improvements in reconstruction fidelity and cross-contrast synthesis quality. Our code is available at https://github.com/script-Yang/RSF.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Modelling the decadal expansion of West Nile virus in Italy: the role of climatic, anthropogenic, and macroecological drivers

Abstract BACKGROUND West Nile virus (WNV) is a growing health burden in Italy. Anticipating human infection risk is hampered by the pathogen's complex ecology, highlighting the need for comprehensive early-warning tools. AIM We aimed to model municipal-level WNV risk in Italy and characterize its decadal expansion in Italy, providing a comprehensive ecological understanding of viral emergence. METHODS We applied a machine learning framework to annual human WNV case data from 2014 to 2024. The model integrated a suite of environmental, socio-economic, and macroecological predictors to generate risk projections. We evaluated the model's performance through multiple validation settings. We also performed an anticipation test for the 2025 epidemic season, using 2024 environmental data to assess the model's predictive accuracy against observed 2025 human cases. RESULTS Our model achieved robust performance (True Skill Statistic > 0.4) and captured WNV progressive expansion from 184 predicted positive municipalities in 2014 to 2,012 in 2024 (an 11-fold increase in 11 years). Seasonal minimum temperature was the primary risk driver, followed by monitoring year and population density, indicating active spatial spread. Environmental suitability consistently preceded clinical detection. Municipalities with cases in 2023-2024 exhibited significantly higher predicted suitability during 2018-2022 than those without cases (average risk 0.58 vs 0.20). Our model successfully identified emerging risk hotspots along the Adriatic coast and southern Italy before the official human spillover of 2025. CONCLUSION Embedding macroecological drivers into WNV risk modelling provides an improved understanding of drivers of rapid WNV expansion. Our model enables proactive risk mapping, surveillance efforts, and targeted public health measures.

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

LLM Doesn't Know What It Doesn't Know: Detecting Epistemic Blind Spots via Cross-Model Attribution Divergence on Clinical Tabular Data

arXiv:2606.19509v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to structured clinical data, yet whether they can recognize the limits of their own knowledge on such tasks remains unexplored. We study this question through the lens of cross-model attribution divergence with the goal of reducing epistemic uncertainty for structured tasks, comparing Qwen 2.5 7B and XGBoost on a prediction task via attribution divergence analysis. We report four findings. First, LLM verbalized confidence is epistemically vacuous, it outputs a near-constant (0.856-0.937) regardless of whether accuracy is 49% or 75.3%, tracking prompt format rather than prediction quality. Second, the LLM exhibits an inverse difficulty effect: accuracy drops to 64.8% when XGBoost is 99% correct, but matches XGBoost (73.8% vs. 73.1%) when it is moderately uncertain. Third, few-shot examples and SHAP-derived feature evidence are orthogonal, super-additive interventions: they reduce the Attribution Disagreement Score (ADS) from 1.54 to 0.38 and improve accuracy from 49% to 75.3% without training. Fourth, a cross-model calibrator that determined LLM reliability using attribution divergence signals reduces expected calibration error from 0.254 to 0.080, replacing uninformative verbalized confidence with patient-specific reliability estimates, without accessing model internals or requiring repeated inference. We frame these findings as a cold start problem for LLMs on structured data and outline a path toward genuine epistemic self-awareness.

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

PiDA: Phonetically-Informed Data Augmentation for Robust Vietnamese Speech Translation

Cascaded speech translation (ST) systems suffer from error propagation when Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) outputs incorrect transcripts. We present the first systematic categorization of ASR errors for Vietnamese ST, classifying substitution errors by phonetic cause and quantifying their impact on downstream Neural Machine Translation (NMT) performance using Linear Mixed-Effects Modelling. We confirm that most ASR substitution errors arise from phonetic confusions rather than random noise, and that these phonetic errors significantly degrade ST quality. Motivated by this finding, we propose Phonetically-Informed Data Augmentation (PiDA), which generates ASR-like corruptions by substituting words with phonetically similar alternatives using phonetic word embeddings. Fine-tuning on a PiDA-augmented version of FLEURS Vietnamese-English improves translation of erroneous ASR outputs (up to +2.04 BLEU over standard fine-tuning) while also slightly improving clean-text performance.

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

"Is This Not Enough?": Asymmetries in Institutional Accountability and Collective Sensemaking in the Case of Canada's Algorithmic Visa Triage System

arXiv:2606.13071v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper examines how algorithmic accountability in Canada's visa system is articulated institutionally and experienced by applicants across borders. We analyzed Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC)'s Algorithmic Impact Assessment (AIA) for the temporary resident visa (TRV) triage system using the algorithmic decision-making adapted for the public sector (ADMAPS) framework and analyzed Reddit discussions among applicants using a mixed-methods approach. We show that while institutional artifacts emphasize transparency, procedural safeguards, and bounded impacts, applicants engage in collective sensemaking to interpret opaque decisions, often relying on peer knowledge amid uncertainty. We identify three asymmetries between how institutional accountability is structured and how people perceive the process: epistemic asymmetry in access to decision logic, jurisdictional asymmetry in exposure shaped by geopolitical positioning, and temporal–relational asymmetry in how waiting and uncertainty are experienced. We emphasize why it is important to shift attention from institutional design to the uneven distribution of experiences with public-sector algorithmic governance. Together, these contributions demonstrate how algorithmic governance systems in the context of transnational migration produce structured asymmetries not captured by institutional disclosure frameworks, and how extending ADMAPS can account for those uneven translations of accountability.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Does Mixture-of-Experts Actually Help Inference on Consumer and Edge Hardware? An Empirical Study

arXiv:2606.21428v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models are often described as ideal for resource-constrained inference. Each token activates only a small subset of experts, so the per-token compute cost, in floating-point operations (FLOPs), resembles that of a much smaller dense model. Whether that FLOP advantage survives in practice is far less clear. We ask whether MoE models actually run faster and cheaper than comparable dense models on consumer-grade and edge hardware. We benchmark OLMoE-1B-7B (1.3 B active of 6.9 B total) against three dense baselines on an Apple M2 Pro and an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano 8 GB through \texttt{llama.cpp}, measuring throughput, memory, and on-device energy. The answer is device-dependent: OLMoE's active-parameter advantage is only partly realised on the laptop (~10% behind the same-active Llama-3.2-1B) and erodes on the edge device (~31% behind, at 2.1$\times$ the energy per token, with peak memory at the 8 GB ceiling). Patching \texttt{llama.cpp} to time the decode graph node-by-node shows routing accounts for under 9% of MoE-block compute on the cleaner edge backend, so the gap reflects total-parameter memory footprint, expert dispatch, and KV-cache pressure rather than routing. The implication is that on bandwidth-bound edge hardware, inference cost tracks total parameters, not active ones, and sparse activation does not buy back what the device is constrained on. These findings are bounded to one MoE model at this parameter scale and two devices, and we release the full measurement harness and per-run data.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Human-centred design approaches to health facility design: Evidence from perinatal care settings in Ethiopia and Bangladesh

While significant progress has been made in perinatal outcomes over recent decades in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), maternal and newborn quality improvement initiatives often fail to account for the spatial conditions in which they are implemented. Health systems are increasingly deploying evidence-based care models into built environments that are not optimally structured to meet the needs of its patient population. As the principal users, patients and health care workers can offer pragmatic insights about improving these structural designs. Our objective was to gather insights from patients, providers, and companions about how the physical design of their health facilities influenced their experience receiving or delivering perinatal care. We conducted a prospective observational study using a human-centred design (HCD) approach to analyse perceptions of the quality of perinatal care across two low resource settings: Ethiopia and Bangladesh. Using engagement and assessment tools, we conducted interviews, focus groups, facility walk-throughs, co-design workshops, and infrastructural assessments with patients, companions, providers, and Ministry of Health representatives. Descriptive statistics and thematic analysis were used to identify key learnings and develop recommendations. Across both countries, participants identified the need for facility layouts that better support privacy, mobility during labour, alternative birth positions, companion involvement, cultural and religious practices, sanitation, and provider visibility. Based on these insights, we developed six recommendations to better align health facility infrastructure with maternal and newborn care delivery needs. Our findings suggest that investments in health facility infrastructure may improve care experiences and help enable respectful, safe, and evidence-based maternal and newborn care. Alongside targeted spatial improvements, government authorities responsible for health facility planning should incorporate participatory design processes to ensure infrastructure reflects the needs of patients, companions, and providers and supports high-quality care delivery.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Efficient Simulation of Szegedy Quantum Walk Formulations and Algorithms

arXiv:2606.14226v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum walks provide a versatile framework for quantum algorithms across a wide range of applications. We develop efficient classical simulation methods for Szegedy quantum walks that avoid explicit construction of the full unitary evolution operator. Unlike previous approaches restricted to a particular walk formulation, our framework is built from fundamental update and reflection operators, enabling the simulation of a broader class of Szegedy walk formulations. We further extend these methods to phase-estimation-based algorithms coupled to the walk, including implementations suitable for large sparse graphs. The resulting methods achieve optimal $O(N^2)$ complexity for dense graphs with $N$ nodes. For sparse graphs, the computational cost scales linearly with the number of edges, which is $O(N)$ in many cases. We implement the framework in the Python package SQWLib and illustrate its capabilities through simulations of representative algorithms, including quantum simulated annealing and quantum search on graphs. These results provide a practical tool for studying Szegedy-walk-based algorithms numerically beyond purely analytical treatments.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Auto-exploration for online reinforcement learning

arXiv:2512.06244v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The exploration-exploitation dilemma in reinforcement learning (RL) is a fundamental challenge to efficient RL algorithms. Existing algorithms for finite state and action discounted RL problems address this by assuming sufficient exploration over both state and action spaces. However, this yields non-implementable algorithms and sub-optimal performance. To resolve these limitations, we introduce a new class of methods with auto-exploration, or methods that automatically explore both state and action spaces. Auto-exploration can be applied in both the tabular and linear function approximation setting. Under algorithm-independent assumptions on the existence of an exploring optimal policy, both settings attain $O(\epsilon^{-2})$ sample complexity to solve to $\epsilon$ error. These complexities are novel since they avoid algorithm-dependent parameters seen in prior works, which may be arbitrarily large. The methods are also simple to implement because they are parameter-free. We achieve these results by integrating auto-exploration into policy mirror descent to avoid the (unknown) stationary distribution seen in prior art. In the tabular setting, we introduce a dynamic exploration time with a data-driven stopping time, while for linear function approximation we propose a new sampling distribution based on the discounted visitation distribution that covers a more general class of Markov chains.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Lower Complexity Bounds for Nonconvex-Strongly-Convex Bilevel Optimization with First-Order Oracles

作者:

arXiv:2511.19656v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Although upper bound guarantees for bilevel optimization have been widely studied, progress on lower bounds has been limited due to the complexity of the bilevel structure. In this work, we focus on the smooth nonconvex-strongly-convex setting and develop new hard instances that yield nontrivial lower bounds under deterministic and stochastic first-order oracle models. In the deterministic case, we prove that any first-order zero-respecting algorithm requires at least $\Omega(\kappa^{3/2}\epsilon^{-2})$ oracle calls to find an $\epsilon$-accurate stationary point, improving the optimal lower bounds known for single-level nonconvex optimization and for nonconvex-strongly-convex min-max problems. In the stochastic case, we show that at least $\Omega(\kappa^{5/2}\epsilon^{-4})$ stochastic oracle calls are necessary, again strengthening the best known bounds in related settings. Our results expose substantial gaps between current upper and lower bounds for bilevel optimization and suggest that even simplified regimes, such as those with quadratic lower-level objectives, warrant further investigation toward understanding the optimal complexity of bilevel optimization under standard first-order oracles.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

LLM Parameters for Math Across Languages: Shared or Separate?

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit substantial cross-lingual variation in mathematical reasoning performance, but it remains unclear whether these differences reflect language-specific parameters or a shared mechanism that manifests differently by language. We present a cross-lingual mechanistic analysis of mathematical reasoning in LLMs, enabling us to localize and compare model parameters that support mathematical reasoning across languages. We find that the extracted math-associated parameters exhibit partial cross-lingual overlap, with the strongest overlap concentrated in intermediate model layers. We further observe that English consistently produces the largest set of math-relevant parameters, whereas lower-resource languages reveal smaller sets of relevant parameters. These results suggest that math-related behavior in multilingual LLMs is neither fully language-invariant nor fully language-specific, but instead exhibits partial cross-lingual parameter overlap with systematic language-dependent differences.

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

OpenLID-v3: Improving the Precision of Closely Related Language Identification – An Experience Report

Language identification (LID) is an essential step in building high-quality multilingual datasets from web data. Existing LID tools (such as OpenLID or GlotLID) often struggle to identify closely related languages and to distinguish valid natural language from noise, which contaminates language-specific subsets, especially for low-resource languages. In this work we extend the OpenLID classifier by adding more training data, merging problematic language variant clusters, and introducing a special label for marking noise. We call this extended system OpenLID-v3 and evaluate it against GlotLID on multiple benchmarks. During development, we focus on three groups of closely related languages (Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian; Romance varieties of Northern Italy and Southern France; and Scandinavian languages) and contribute new evaluation datasets where existing ones are inadequate. We find that ensemble approaches improve precision but also substantially reduce coverage for low-resource languages. OpenLID-v3 is available on https://huggingface.co/HPLT/OpenLID-v3.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

An Empirical Study of Many-Shot In-Context Learning for Machine Translation of Low-Resource Languages

In-context learning (ICL) allows large language models (LLMs) to adapt to new tasks from a few examples, making it promising for languages underrepresented in pre-training. Recent work on many-shot ICL suggests that modern LLMs can further benefit from larger ICL examples enabled by their long context windows. However, such gains depend on careful example selection, and the inference cost can be prohibitive for low-resource language communities. In this paper, we present an empirical study of many-shot ICL for machine translation from English into ten truly low-resource languages recently added to FLORES+. We analyze the effects of retrieving more informative examples, using out-of-domain data, and ordering examples by length. Our findings show that many-shot ICL becomes more effective as the number of examples increases. More importantly, we show that BM25-based retrieval substantially improves data efficiency: 50 retrieved examples roughly match 250 many-shot examples, while 250 retrieved examples perform similarly to 1,000 many-shot examples. We further show that ICL provides additional gains on top of fine-tuning.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

TRAP: Benchmark for Task-completion and Resistance to Active Privacy-extraction

arXiv:2606.18996v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agents are increasingly deployed in document-intensive workflows where sensitive private information is not an edge case but a routine input, e.g., an agent booking a flight needs passport numbers. In such settings, the agent must use private information to complete tasks accurately while never exposing it in its responses, because it cannot verify who is actually at the keyboard. These two obligations are in fundamental tension. A model capable enough to use private information for task completion can, by the same capability, be induced to reveal it. To evaluate the trade-off of task accuracy and privacy leakage, we introduce Task-completion and Resistance to Active Privacy-extraction (TRAP). Each scenario includes a document containing private information, a task query that requires the agent to invoke the correct tool using private fields, and an attack query that attempts to elicit the same information in natural language. Evaluating 22 models spanning frontier proprietary and open-source models at multiple scales, we find that all model families exhibit non-trivial leakage, and that instruction-following ability correlates with leakage rate. Existing prompt-based defenses reduce leakage but at significant cost to task accuracy. Prompt optimization fails to escape this trade-off. We demonstrate that this failure is not incidental. For any softmax-based model, no soft-constraint defense, e.g., prompt-based defenses, can jointly achieve high task success with zero leakage probability. Motivated by this impossibility result, we propose structural private field isolation, which replaces private fields with hash keys before they reach the model. This approach largely prevents leakage while keeping task accuracy.

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

ConTex: Reformulating Counterfactual Generation For Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.18049v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Decision-making with deep learning-based time series forecasting requires not only accurate predictions but also actionable insights. However, current architectures do not inherently provide such information. Specifically, guidance is needed on how current conditions must be modified to shift from a predicted outcome to a desired future scenario. Counterfactual explanations provide a natural framework for this task, as they represent minimal input changes that alter the model's prediction, indicating when and how intervention is required. Existing approaches rely on instance-wise optimization, leading to inconsistency across instances, high computational costs, and limited applicability in real-time settings. To address these limitations, we reformulate counterfactual generation for time series forecasting as the problem of learning a globally consistent intervention strategy, allowing counterfactuals to be generated through a single shared function. We propose Counterfactual Time Series Explanations (ConTex), a model-agnostic, decomposed architecture comprising a temporal context encoder and a conditional encoder, followed by two heads that capture interventions in terms of temporal relevance and modification strength. This structure overcomes the instability and inconsistency of instance-based approaches by producing targeted, interpretable interventions across time and feature dimensions in a single forward pass, making it suitable for real-time applications. Across multiple forecasting architectures and benchmark datasets, ConTex achieves state-of-the-art validity while generating sparse counterfactuals that minimize the number of necessary interventions. Additionally, our approach reduces computational cost by at least 12-36x compared to instance-wise generation and supports real-time inference at approximately 0.007 seconds.

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

MEAL: A Benchmark for Continual Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2506.14990v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Benchmarks play a central role in reinforcement learning (RL) research, yet their computational constraints often shape what is studied. Despite the motivation of lifelong learning, most continual RL papers consider only 3-10 sequential tasks, as CPU-bound environments make longer sequences impractical. Meanwhile, continual learning in cooperative multi-agent settings remains largely unexplored. To address these gaps, we introduce MEAL (Multi-agent Environments for Adaptive Learning), the first benchmark for continual multi-agent RL. By leveraging JAX and GPU acceleration, MEAL enables training on sequences of 100 tasks in a few hours on a single GPU. We find that long task sequences reveal failure modes that do not appear at smaller scales.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Attention Sinks in Diffusion Transformers: A Causal Analysis

Attention sinks – tokens that receive disproportionate attention mass – are assumed to be functionally important in autoregressive language models, but their role in diffusion transformers remains unclear. We present a causal analysis in text-to-image diffusion, dynamically identifying dominant attention recipients per timestep and suppressing them via paired, training-free interventions on the score and value paths. Across 553 GenEval prompts on Stable Diffusion~3 (with SDXL corroboration), removing these sinks does not degrade text-image alignment (CLIP-T) or preference proxies (ImageReward, HPS-v2) at $k{=}1$; only under stronger interventions ($k\!\geq\!10$) does HPS-v2 exhibit a metric-dependent boundary, while CLIP-T remains robust throughout. The perceptual shifts induced by suppression are nonetheless sink-specific – $\sim\!6\times$ larger than equal-budget random masking – revealing an empirical dissociation between trajectory-level perturbation and semantic alignment in diffusion transformers. \footnote{Code available at https://github.com/wfz666/ICML26-attention-sink.}