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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Breaking the bicycle frame: Coset-based quantum LDPC codes

arXiv:2606.17268v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generalizing the construction of two-block group algebra (2BGA) codes, we introduce a family of two-block quantum LDPC codes constructed using the action of a group on the cosets of its subgroup. This replaces the regular group actions of the earlier two-block constructions and significantly expands the search space, yielding new quantum LDPC codes outside the 2BGA family. Through a computer search, we identify several new quantum LDPC codes, including weight-6 codes with parameters $[[48,8,6]]$, $[[96,8,10]]$, and $[[224,12,16]]$, as well as weight-8 codes with parameters $[[84,16,8]]$, $[[112,16,10]]$, $[[128,16,12]]$, and $[[168,16,15]]$. Furthermore, we introduce a maximally packed syndrome extraction schedule of depth $w+2$, including initialization and measurement steps, for any code with a maximum stabilizer weight of $w$ from our family. Under a standard circuit-level noise model, our codes, when decoded using BP-OSD, perform competitively with BB codes, achieving thresholds of $\approx0.65\%$ for the weight-6 family and $\approx0.35\%$ for the weight-8 family. Finally, we introduce a group-theoretic framework to generate sequences of graph-based covers of 2BGA codes, recovering and extending recent results on code constructions of this type.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

A Learning Method with Gap-Aware Generation for Heterogeneous DAG Scheduling

arXiv:2603.23249v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Efficient scheduling of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) is a core problem in large-scale data-intensive computing systems, where query plans, data-processing workloads, and computation graphs consist of dependent tasks competing for limited heterogeneous resource pools. In practice, achieving high-performance execution requires schedulers to adapt across environments with varying resource pools and task types, while generating schedules under tight runtime budgets. We propose WeCAN, an end-to-end reinforcement learning framework for heterogeneous DAG scheduling that addresses task-pool compatibility coefficients and generation-induced optimality gaps. It adopts a two-stage single-pass design: a single forward pass produces task-pool scores and global parameters, followed by a generation map that constructs schedules without repeated network calls. Its weighted cross-attention encoder models task-pool interactions gated by compatibility coefficients, and is size-agnostic to environment fluctuations. Moreover, widely used list-scheduling maps can incur generation-induced optimality gaps from restricted reachability. We introduce an order-space analysis that characterizes the reachable set of generation maps via feasible schedule orders, explains the mechanism behind generation-induced gaps, and yields sufficient conditions for gap elimination. Guided by these conditions, we design a skip-extended realization with an analytically parameterized decreasing skip rule, which enlarges the reachable order set while preserving single-pass efficiency. Experiments on real-world TPC-H query DAGs, resource-intensive workload datasets, and ML-compiler computation graphs demonstrate improved makespan over strong baselines, with inference time comparable to classical heuristics and faster than multi-round neural schedulers.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

VIA-SD: Verification via Intra-Model Routing for Speculative Decoding

Speculative decoding (SD) addresses the high inference costs of LLMs by having lightweight drafters generate candidates for large verifiers to validate in parallel. Existing draft-verify methods use binary decisions: accept or fully recompute. Yet we find that many rejected tokens can be verified correctly by a slim submodel derived from the full verifier via intra-model routing, instead of the full verifier. This motivates our slim-verifier to handle tokens requiring moderate verification resources, reducing expensive large-model calls. We propose Verification via Intra-Model Routing for Speculative Decoding (VIA-SD), a multi-tier framework using a routed slim-verifier. Draft tokens are processed hierarchically: direct acceptance for high-confidence cases, slim-verifier regeneration for medium-confidence cases, and full-model verification for uncertain cases. Across four representative tasks and multiple model families, VIA-SD reduces rejection rates by 0.10-0.22 and delivers 10-20% speedups over strong SD baselines, while achieving 2.5-3x acceleration over non-drafting decoding. Moreover, VIA-SD is compatible with existing SD frameworks without modifying their training procedures. Our results suggest multi-tier SD as a general paradigm for scalable and efficient LLM inference. Project page: https://zju-xyc.github.io/VIA-SD-Project-Page/

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Cancer care disruption during the COVID-19 pandemic in Ontario, Canada: A sequential mixed-methods study

Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic profoundly disrupted healthcare delivery worldwide, with cancer care among the most affected services. Prior studies documented delays in referrals, reduced specialist access, and increased provider burden. However, the extent to which these experiences were reflected at the system level remains unclear. Objective To document cancer care experiences and examine whether these experiences were reflected in population-level health system indicators across Ontario, Canada. Methods We used an exploratory sequential mixed-methods design. Qualitative data were collected through focus groups and semi-structured interviews with 32 participants, including patients with cancer (n=8), caregivers (n=5), healthcare providers (n=14), and decision-makers (n=5) across two hospital settings in Ontario, Canada. Emergent themes informed the development of quantitative indicators. We then conducted a retrospective population-based analysis of linked administrative health databases for cancer patients in Ontario (n=87,786) to assess the prevalence of identified themes. Results Four themes emerged: (I) delays in diagnosis and screening; (II) disrupted access to primary care; (III) barriers to specialist and mental health services; and (IV) fragmented care for patients with multimorbidity. Quantitative findings corroborated major themes. Screening rates declined for cervical (64.8% to 57.5%) and breast cancer (64.5% to 57.2%). While in-person primary care shifted almost entirely to virtual modalities (8.5% to 95.4%), overall visit volumes remained stable. Specialist care showed uneven patterns, with increased oncology visits but declines in cardiology and mental health services. Patients with multiple comorbidities experienced the largest reductions in non-oncology specialist care. Conclusion The pandemic disrupted key components of cancer care, particularly screening, access to certain specialist services, and care for patients with complex needs. Integrating qualitative and quantitative evidence highlights areas of system vulnerability and underscores the need for coordinated, resilient cancer care capable of maintaining essential services during future crises.

05.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Marked random graphs with given degree sequence: large deviations on the local topology

arXiv:2401.00351v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate the behavior of the empirical neighborhood distribution of marked graphs in the framework of local weak convergence. Here we extend known results by considering uniform random graphs with given degree sequences and i.i.d. marks on half-edges and vertices. We establish a large deviation principle for such families of empirical measures. The proof builds on Bordenave and Caputo's seminal 2015 paper, and Delgosha and Anantharam's 2019 introduction of BC entropy, relying on combinatorial lemmas that allow one to construct suitable approximations of measures supported on marked trees. Possible applications of these results are in the study of interacting diffusions on top of random graphs.

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

SPARK: Security Knowledge Priming and Representation-Guided Knowledge Activation for LLM-based Secure Code Generation

arXiv:2606.16244v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models routinely generate code with exploitable security flaws. Prior literature attributes this limitation to a lack of security expertise, steering current defense mechanisms toward heavy fine-tuning or external knowledge retrieval, which introduces significant computational overhead and data bias through redundant code examples. Contrary to this view, we argue that pretraining corpora are already rich in security material. The bottleneck is activation: without an explicit and brief cue, statistical pressure toward common training-distribution patterns suppresses the model's safety-relevant representations. We present SPARK, an inference-time security harness that activates this latent knowledge without any retraining. The harness has two parts. Component~I retrieves a few of the relevant Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) entries for each coding task and appends a short structured cue to the prompt; this alone is enough to surface the model's existing security representations. Component~II adds a precomputed token bias to the logits at every decoding step. We obtain the bias by projecting a safe-direction vector, the unit difference between the mean safe and mean unsafe last-layer hidden states, through the language model head. The bias is computed once offline; applying it costs a single vector addition per generated token. We evaluate SPARK on 9 open-source models across C++, Java, and Python, and compare with 7 baselines spanning fine-tuning and retrieval-augmented methods. SPARK matches or improves on the best baseline in every setting while preserving HumanEval utility. We further test Component~I in a black-box setting on 7 of today's strongest models, including Claude, DeepSeek, and GPT, demonstrating the bottleneck of insecure code generation and the improvements enabled by our method.

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

PCA-Enhanced Adaptive NVAR Framework for High-Resolution Sea Surface Temperature Forecasting in the East Sea

arXiv:2606.12141v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate forecasting of sea surface temperature (SST) in regional seas such as the East Sea is crucial for monitoring marine ecosystems, assessing climate risks, managing fisheries, and conducting naval operations. Traditional numerical ocean models provide reliable predictions but are computationally expensive and often unsuitable for real-time forecasting. Many deep learning methods also struggle with high-dimensional spatiotemporal ocean data and experience error accumulation over longer forecasting periods. This study builds on our previously proposed Adaptive Next-Generation Reservoir Computing (Adaptive NVAR) framework, initially introduced and tested on synthetic dynamical systems, and extends it to ocean forecasting. We present a reduced-order forecasting framework that combines Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) with Adaptive NVAR to predict SST dynamics in the East Sea. SST fields are compressed into a low-dimensional representation using SVD, which extracts dominant modes of ocean variability. Adaptive NVAR models the temporal evolution of these latent states, and the predicted states are reconstructed into SST forecasts. We evaluate the framework using regional ocean datasets and compare it with the standard NG-RC/NVAR. Results show that Adaptive NVAR consistently achieves lower forecasting errors across multiple prediction horizons. In addition, SVD reduces computational complexity, resulting in a fast and scalable framework suitable for real-time ocean forecasting.

08.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

Dietary cholesterol activates a Ral-dependent pathway driving LDLR turnover

作者:

Metabolism of the hepatic low-density lipoprotein receptor (LDLR) is a key determinant of cholesterol homeostasis1,2. The molecular switches that coordinate LDLR trafficking and turnover in response to nutritional cues, including high dietary cholesterol, remain poorly defined3–6. Here we identify a new pathway regulated by Ral GTPases that links extracellular cholesterol signals to the intracellular trafficking machinery controlling LDLR turnover. Chronic dietary cholesterol activates the Ral proteins by increasing RAS activity, routing LDLR to lysosomes for degradation and inhibiting its recycling independently of transcriptional regulation or PCSK9. Constitutive activation of Ral via RalGAPB deletion or overexpression of constitutively active Ral mutants in hepatocytes reduces LDLR levels and impairs cholesterol clearance. Ral engages the endocytic RalBP1–REPS1 complex to promote LDLR internalization and lysosomal routing, where LDLR is degraded by the lysosomal protease cathepsin A (CTSA). Ral activation directs CTSA towards lysosomes for maturation while limiting its secretion, further promoting LDLR degradation in lysosomes. Genetic variants in this pathway significantly associate with altered cholesterol in humans. Pharmacological inhibition of CTSA activity increases hepatic LDLR function and improves cholesterol clearance, offering a potential new therapeutic strategy for hypercholesterolaemia and cardiovascular disease. Chronic dietary cholesterol activates Ral GTPases, which promote LDLR internalization and lysosomal degradation through RalBP1–REPS1 and CTSA, thereby reducing cholesterol clearance, whereas CTSA inhibition restores LDLR function and may offer a therapeutic strategy for cardiovascular disease.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Model selection with proper scoring rules on data sets of time series

arXiv:2606.24715v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We consider the problem of model selection between probabilistic models on data sets of time series. Chosen a proper scoring rule, we denote by the term score the average value of the scoring rule on the test of an individual time series. For model selection, we need aggregating the values of the scores across multiple time series. Three summary statistics are commonly used for model selection: mean score, median score, and mean rank. Results in previous papers show that these statistics can yield conflicting decisions; we show how the conflicting conclusions are due to the skewness of the distribution of scores. We also show that as the test set of each time series of the data set increases, the different model selection criteria progressively converge to the same conclusion. However, for short tests sets, only the mean score identifies the true model as the best. We illustrate these phenomena with an analysis on intermittent time series, including the data set of the M5 competition, where we underline the importance of having a large test set. In such experiments, we further notice that model selection based on mean ranks remains unchanged using different scaling factors.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Unclonable Encryption in the Haar Random Oracle Model

arXiv:2603.11437v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We construct unclonable encryption (UE) in the Haar random oracle model, where all parties have query access to $U,U^\dagger,U^*,U^T$ for a Haar random unitary $U$. Our scheme satisfies the standard notion of unclonable indistinguishability security, supports reuse of the secret key, and can encrypt arbitrary-length messages. That is, we give the first evidence that (reusable) UE, which requires computational assumptions, exists in "microcrypt", a world where one-way functions may not exist. As one of our central technical contributions, we build on the recently introduced path recording framework to prove a natural ``unitary reprogramming lemma'', which may be of independent interest.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

GrowthHacker: Automated Off-Policy Evaluation Optimization Using Code-Modifying LLM Agents

With data-driven development now widely adopted, online A/B testing is an established method for measuring the effects of new technologies. However, deploying online experiments demands resources for design, implementation, and deployment, and may negatively impact users (e.g., unsafe or unethical outcomes) while requiring weeks of data collection. To address this, the growing research area of off-policy evaluation (OPE), or offline A/B testing, assesses new technologies offline using previously collected logged data. OPE is also a fundamental problem in reinforcement learning and is important where online testing is expensive or risky, such as healthcare, recommender systems, education, and robotics. Despite advances in code-generation large language models (LLMs) and agentic workflows, little is known about whether and how LLMs and LLM-based agents can automatically optimize OPE implementations. We propose GrowthHacker, a benchmark that evaluates baseline LLMs and LLM-based agents on large-scale public datasets. GrowthHacker autonomously and iteratively modifies code, runs OPE, and uses the metrics to guide subsequent optimization. We evaluate methods on Open Bandit Pipeline (OBP) and Scope-RL, and develop a two_agent framework that addresses limitations of existing frameworks while reducing complexity. Across both libraries, two_agent shows the highest reliability (98.1%-100% success rate) and positive-outcome rate (78%), with a median improvement of 4.4% among positive outcomes; CrewAI achieves the highest average improvement (37.9%) and is the only framework with zero extreme-value failures. AutoGen and Default each reach 65% positive-outcome rates. These results establish the feasibility of using LLM-based agents as automated "growth hackers" to continuously improve OPE systems, with implications for scaling data-driven decision-making where manual optimization is expensive.

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

Toward General Digraph Contrastive Learning: A Dual Spatial Perspective

arXiv:2510.16311v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) has emerged as a powerful tool for extracting consistent representations from graphs, independent of labeled information. However, existing methods predominantly focus on undirected graphs, disregarding the pivotal directional information that is fundamental and indispensable in real-world networks (e.g., social networks and recommendations).In this paper, we introduce S2-DiGCL, a novel framework that emphasizes spatial insights from complex and real domain perspectives for directed graph (digraph) contrastive learning. From the complex-domain perspective, S2-DiGCL introduces personalized perturbations into the magnetic Laplacian to adaptively modulate edge phases and directional semantics. From the real-domain perspective, it employs a path-based subgraph augmentation strategy to capture fine-grained local asymmetries and topological dependencies. By jointly leveraging these two complementary spatial views, S2-DiGCL constructs high-quality positive and negative samples, leading to more general and robust digraph contrastive learning. Extensive experiments on 7 real-world digraph datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach, achieving SOTA performance with 4.41% improvement in node classification and 4.34% in link prediction under both supervised and unsupervised settings.

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

Contrastive-Difference CKA Reveals Concept-Specific Structural Alignment Across Language Model Architectures

作者:

Do different LLM architectures encode high-level concepts in structurally compatible ways? We systematically characterize a geometric-functional universality dissociation: across multiple concept domains and architectural families, moderate geometric convergence coexists with near-perfect functional transfer. Using contrastive-difference CKA (CKA_Delta), a training-free diagnostic that computes kernel alignment on per-sample contrastive differences, we isolate concept-specific convergence from generic similarity – achieving significant discrimination where standard CKA cannot. The dissociation replicates across all six concept domains we test (five with p =70B models. We position CKA_Delta as a practical regime classifier and architectural outlier detector (Gemma: d = 1.08, AUC = 0.79) rather than an absolute transfer-accuracy predictor, providing a training-free diagnostic for cross-architecture concept monitoring.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

On Aligning Hierarchical Standardized Embedding for Audio-visual Generalized Zero-shot Learning

Audio-visual Generalized Zero-shot Learning (AV-GZSL) is a challenging task that aims to classify both seen and unseen objects or scenes by integrating data from audio and visual modalities. Recent studies primarily focus on fusing or aligning audio and visual features to generate more informative audio-visual embeddings. Also, aligning the audio-visual and textual features of most existing methods relies solely on the optimization objectives. However, those methods neglect the inherent distributional and structural differences between audio-visual and textual modalities. To address this limitation, we propose a method termed Aligning Hierarchical Standardized Embedding (AHSE), which enables hierarchical alignment of standardized audio-visual and textual embeddings within a shared embedding space. Specifically, we first apply Z-score standardization to the fused audio-visual and textual embeddings to reduce distributional mismatches. We then introduce a hierarchical alignment strategy that minimizes discrepancies at the semantic, class, and batch levels, thereby constructing a more robust and well-structured embedding space. This strategy not only preserves semantic and inter-class relationships but also maintains spatial consistency within each batch. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets: VGGSound-GZSL, UCF-GZSL, and ActivityNet-GZSL, demonstrate that AHSE achieves competitive performance in zero-shot learning.

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

UniTemp: Unlocking Video Generation in Any Temporal Order via Bidirectional Distillation

Autoregressive video diffusion models have emerged as a promising approach for long video generation, achieving strong performance in streaming settings. However, existing methods are restricted to forward temporal generation, whereas practical video creation often requires flexible generation order, e.g., conditioning on future context to extend backward, or on both past and future context for inbetween generation. We bridge this gap by training an autoregressive model that supports generation in arbitrary temporal directions. A key technical challenge arises from the Causal 3D VAE widely used in video diffusion models, which encodes latents strictly conditioned on past context. While suited for forward generation, this causal structure causes inter-block discontinuities when generation proceeds backward. To address this, we introduce blockwise anchor latents, a set of auxiliary latents that restore the missing past context at block boundaries during backward generation. Built on this design, we propose UniTemp, a bidirectional distillation framework that trains a single autoregressive student model for any-direction video generation. At inference time, UniTemp conditions on arbitrary past and/or future frames, improving controllability for both bidirectional and inbetween generation. Experiments show that UniTemp maintains competitive performance on short and long video generation compared to forward-only methods, while enabling diverse workflows such as bidirectional video extension, inbetween generation, looping video generation, scene transition, and visual story generation. Project website: https://lzhangbj.github.io/projects/unitemp/

16.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-20

Seed variation impacts clustering stability in Single-Cell RNA-Seq and can be mitigated by StAbility-BasEd-Reassignment (SABER)

Single-cell RNA-seq clustering is commonly treated as reproducible once a random seed is fixed, yet the choice of seed itself may alter cell assignments and downstream interpretation. We systematically quantified seed-induced clustering variability by running Louvain and Leiden clustering across 100 seeds in Seurat and Scanpy on 28 single-cell RNA-seq datasets from the Human Cell Atlas and IMMUcan. Using Element-Centric Consistency, we found that seed choice affected a substantial fraction of cells, with Scanpy showing more unstable assignments than Seurat on average, 40.46% versus 26.78% unstable cells, respectively. This increased stability came at a marked computational cost: Seurat required approximately 19-fold higher median memory than Scanpy. Seed-dependent clustering variability also propagated to cell-type annotation, particularly among transcriptionally related populations including macrophage/monocyte, endothelial/epithelial and T/NK cell states. To mitigate this instability, we developed StAbility-BasEd Reassignment (SABER), a Scanpy-based framework that identifies seed-sensitive cells across repeated clusterings and reassigns them to stable cluster cores using cosine similarity. SABER improved clustering quality while preserving annotation concordance and reduced median memory usage 3.5-fold compared with Seurat-Louvain. Our results identify seed choice as an underappreciated source of variability in single-cell analysis and provide a scalable strategy to improve clustering robustness.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Personalizing Suicide Risk Assessment: Machine Learning Extraction of Cross-Modal Interactions Between Psychosocial and Demographic Factors in Veterans

Background: Veterans face an elevated risk of suicide compared to the general population, motivating national efforts to develop predictive models that can guide proactive care. Current models used by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) rely primarily on structured electronic health record (EHR) data, though clinical notes contain rich contextual information that can be quantified using natural language processing (NLP) to derive psychosocial variables that may improve risk detection. Machine learning methods, particularly classification and regression trees (CART), can also uncover interactions between clinical and psychosocial variables, enabling identification of patient characteristics that modify suicide risk factors. However, integrating structured and unstructured data presents challenges because NLP features often greatly outnumber traditional clinical variables, potentially biasing interaction discovery. In prior work, we addressed this imbalance by introducing a weighted CART framework that balances structured variables with NLP-derived psychosocial features from semantic lexicons (SEANCE). While effective, semantic approaches summarize language into predefined constructs and may overlook important lexical variation present in clinical narratives. Methods: In this study, we extend that framework by replacing semantic features with a high-dimensional bag-of-words (BoW) representation of clinical notes and by evaluating models across cohorts defined by structured suicide risk stratification (low, medium, high) and varying temporal lookback windows. Using a cohort of 27,241 veterans, we analyzed clinical documentation collected up to 30, 90, or 270 days prior to death (or a matched index date for controls), enabling temporally flexible risk modeling. XGBoost models were trained to balance structured and unstructured features and identify cross-modal interactions between textual and clinical variables. Results: When incorporated into generalized linear models, these interactions improved predictive performance, particularly among low- and medium-risk patients, and substantially reduced the performance gap between interpretable and more complex models. Notably, the BoW representation outperformed our prior semantic index-based approach. Discussion and Conclusions: Together, these findings demonstrate the utility of interpretable NLP methods for uncovering clinically meaningful interactions between psychosocial and demographic factors in suicide risk and establish a strong benchmark for future deep learning approaches aimed at capturing richer contextual and temporal information from clinical narratives.

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

Explaining RhythmFormer: A Systematic XAI Analysis of Periodic Sparse Attention for Remote Photoplethysmography

Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) transformers achieve low heart-rate error on benchmarks, yet their decisions remain opaque–a growing concern as rPPG moves toward clinical heart rate estimation. Existing rPPG XAI is dominated by qualitative heatmap inspection without quantitative faithfulness metrics or physiology-grounded validation, leaving a gap between visual plausibility and auditable evidence. We address this gap. First, we adapt four attribution methods (raw attention, rollout, flow, Beyond Intuition) to RhythmFormer's bi-level routing attention with top-$k$ selection. Second, we introduce a skin coverage metric quantifying how much attribution mass falls on skin regions. Third, we adapt the SaCo faithfulness coefficient from its original classification setting to rPPG regression by using the MAE between original and perturbed predicted rPPG waveforms as the perturbation impact. Applying these tools, we quantify a multi-hop leakage effect under sparse top-$k$ routing: attention rollout and flow almost completely restores the connections that individual refined-attention layers explicitly set to zero. Beyond Intuition mitigates this via its value-projection-weighted rollout and gradient-supported mask, attaining the highest median refined skin coverage ($0.83$ vs. $0.57$ for vanilla rollout) and faithfulness ($F=0.92$) among the evaluated methods on UBFC-rPPG. Validation across diverse datasets and model variants is needed. A case study on a low-SaCo outlier further shows all four methods recovering consistently once an artefactual region is replaced, suggesting consistent SaCo behavior across attribution families in this illustrative case. Together, these metrics move XAI for rPPG toward auditable numerical evidence about spatial alignment and perturbation faithfulness, i.e. trustworthy rPPG XAI.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Correct When Paired, Wrong When Split: Decoupling and Editing Modality-Specific Neurons in MLLMs

Although Knowledge Editing provides an efficient mechanism for updating the knowledge of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), we find that current paradigms still suffer from an important yet remain underexplored issue : editing decoupling failure, where entity-related knowledge can be updated when the model is triggered by multimodal inputs (text–image query pairs), however, it often reverts to outdated pre-edit facts when the paired inputs are split into unimodal ones. Our in-depth empirical analysis reveals that the entity knowledge in MLLMs is not stored as a unified representation, but is instead distributed across disentangled modality-specific pathways. As a result, updates biased toward multimodal queries fail to propagate effectively to unimodal circuits. To bridge this gap, we propose DECODE, which explicitly disentangles and localizes modality-specific neuron groups for targeted knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DECODE consistently achieves effective knowledge updates under different modality triggers, thereby mitigating editing decoupling failures.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

FUSE: Frequency-domain Unification and Spectral Energy Alignment for Multi-modal Object Re-Identification

Despite significant progress in multi-modal Re-Identification (ReID), existing methods tend to emphasize low-frequency cues. Consequently, they focus on attributes such as color, illumination, and coarse appearance, while overlooking mid and high-frequency structures that encode geometric, textural, and identity-discriminative details. This imbalance leads to incomplete spectral representations and unstable cross-modal alignment. To overcome these limitations, we introduce FUSE, a frequency-domain framework that reformulates multi-modal ReID as a two-stage process of spectral disentanglement and energy alignment. The proposed Spectral Decomposition Module (SDM) adaptively partitions features into low, mid, and high-frequency subspaces, enabling hierarchical spectral modeling. The Cross-Modal Alignment Module (CAM) further enforces energy alignment and subspace complementarity across modalities via frequency-consistency regularization. In addition, FUSE incorporates learnable frequency modulation to enhance robustness under varying illumination and heterogeneous sensor conditions. Extensive experiments on RGBNT201, RGBNT100, and MSVR310 show that FUSE achieves 9.1\% mAP and 9.5\% Rank-1 improvements, establishing an interpretable frequency-domain paradigm for multi-modal representation learning.

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

CustomX: Unified Character, Action, and Scene Customization in Video World Models

Recent advances in world models have greatly enhanced interactive environment simulation. Existing methods mainly fall into two categories: (1) static world generation models, which construct 3D environments without active agents, and (2) controllable-entity models, which allow a single entity to perform limited actions in an otherwise uncontrollable environment. In this work, we introduce CustomX, leveraging the realism and structural grounding of static world generation while extending controllable-entity models to support user-specified characters capable of performing open-ended actions. Users can provide a 3DGS scene and a character, then use natural language to direct the character to perform diverse behaviors, ranging from basic locomotion to object-centric interactions, while freely exploring the environment. CustomX synthesizes temporally coherent video clips that preserve visual fidelity with the provided scene and character, formulated as a conditional autoregressive video generation problem. Built upon a pre-trained video generator, our training strategy significantly enhances motion dynamics while maintaining generalization across actions and characters. Our evaluation covers a broad range of aspects, including visual quality, character consistency, action controllability, and long-horizon coherence.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Be My Tutor: On-Policy Co-Distillation for Mutual LLM Improvement via Peer Feedback

We study multi-domain LLM training in which two models, each stronger in a different domain, co-evolve by tutoring each other through on-policy feedback. Unlike one-way distillation or single-model fine-tuning, our goal is mutual Pareto improvement: each model improves across domains without losing its original strength. To this end, we propose On-Policy Co-Distillation (OPCoD), where each student's self-distillation is conditioned on its own correct rollout and feedback from its peer. To make feedback exchange effective, OPCoD uses cognizance-based gating to decide when to give feedback and feedback anchoring to ground feedback in the problem. On Science Q\&A tasks, OPCoD consistently outperforms baselines and achieves Pareto improvement across all evaluated domain pairs and students.

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

Group-Sparse Matrix Factorization for Transfer Learning of Word Embeddings

Unstructured text provides decision-makers with a rich data source in many domains, ranging from product reviews in retail to nursing notes in healthcare. To leverage this information, words are typically translated into word embeddings – vectors that encode the semantic relationships between words – through unsupervised learning algorithms such as matrix factorization. However, learning word embeddings from new domains with limited training data can be challenging, because the meaning/usage may be different in the new domain, e.g., the word ``positive'' typically has positive sentiment, but often has negative sentiment in medical notes since it may imply that a patient tested positive for a disease. In practice, we expect that only a small number of domain-specific words may have new meanings. We propose an intuitive two-stage estimator that exploits this structure via a group-sparse penalty to efficiently transfer learn domain-specific word embeddings by combining large-scale text corpora (such as Wikipedia) with limited domain-specific text data. We bound the generalization error of our transfer learning estimator, proving that it can achieve high accuracy with substantially less domain-specific data when only a small number of embeddings are altered between domains. Furthermore, we prove that all local minima identified by our nonconvex objective function are statistically indistinguishable from the global minimum under standard regularization conditions, implying that our estimator can be computed efficiently. Our results provide the first bounds on group-sparse matrix factorization, which may be of independent interest. We empirically evaluate our approach compared to state-of-the-art fine-tuning heuristics from natural language processing.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

SDE-Driven Spatio-Temporal Hypergraph Neural Networks for Irregular Longitudinal fMRI Connectome Modeling in Alzheimer's Disease

arXiv:2603.20452v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Longitudinal neuroimaging is essential for modeling disease progression in Alzheimer's disease (AD), yet irregular sampling and missing visits pose substantial challenges for learning reliable temporal representations. To address this challenge, we propose SDE-HGNN, a stochastic differential equation (SDE)-driven spatio-temporal hypergraph neural network for irregular longitudinal fMRI connectome modeling. The framework first employs an SDE-based reconstruction module to recover continuous latent trajectories from irregular observations. Based on these reconstructed representations, dynamic hypergraphs are constructed to capture higher-order interactions among brain regions over time. To further model temporal evolution, hypergraph convolution parameters evolve through SDE-controlled recurrent dynamics conditioned on inter-visit intervals, enabling disease-stage-adaptive connectivity modeling. We also incorporate a sparsity-based importance learning mechanism to identify salient brain regions and discriminative connectivity patterns. Extensive experiments on the OASIS-3 and ADNI cohorts demonstrate consistent improvements over state-of-the-art graph and hypergraph baselines in AD progression prediction. The source code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SDE-HGNN-017F.

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

ECM Contracts: Contract-Aware, Versioned, and Governable Capability Interfaces for Embodied Agents

arXiv:2604.13097v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Embodied agents increasingly rely on modular capabilities that are installed, upgraded, composed, and governed at runtime, yet the interfaces between these modules are specified only at the level of message types, so integration failures surface only during execution. We present ECM Contracts, a contract-based interface model for embodied capability modules. Unlike conventional interfaces that specify only input and output types, ECM Contracts encode six dimensions of embodied execution: functional signature, behavioral assumptions, resource requirements, permission boundaries, recovery semantics, and version compatibility. On this model we build a compatibility framework that checks installation, composition, and upgrade before deployment, and a release discipline of version-aware compatibility classes and upgrade gates. We evaluate the prototype by predicting real, independently documented integration failures in the ROS ecosystem: contracts are reconstructed blind from each module's published interface, scored by a checker frozen before reconstruction against bugs from third-party datasets, and confirmed in live runtime execution. Contract checking predicts 56% and 72% of these documented failures across two substrates, against at most 17% for the strongest type and quality-of-service baselines, with the advantage statistically significant and zero false positives on matched-good controls. The resource and version dimensions carry most of this margin; the behavioral dimension adds little beyond the middleware's quality-of-service check, and we report the permission and recovery dimensions as forward-looking. Stable embodied software ecosystems require not just modular packaging but explicit contracts connecting composition, governance, and evolution.