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

CAOA – Completion-Assisted Object-CAD Alignment

Accurately aligning CAD models to their corresponding objects in indoor RGB-D scans is a central challenge in 3D semantic reconstruction. The task requires estimating a 9-Degree-of-Freedom (DoF) pose-position, rotation, and scale along three axes-but is hindered by noisy and incomplete scans, as well as segmentation errors that cause geometric distortions. We present Completion-Assisted Object-CAD Alignment (CAOA), a method that integrates a semantically and contextually aware point cloud completion module with a symmetry-aware relative pose estimation algorithm, enabling precise alignment of CAD models to scanned objects. Existing completion methods are typically trained and evaluated on synthetic datasets, which often fail to generalize to real-world scans. To bridge this gap, we introduce a synthetic data generation strategy tailored to indoor scenes, significantly reducing the synthetic-to-real domain gap-validated through quantitative comparisons with widely used completion datasets. In addition, we release S2C-Completion, an expert-annotated dataset of over 8,500 object-CAD pairs from Scan2CAD, created for real-world indoor single-object completion and intended as a new benchmark for this task. For object-CAD alignment, we incorporate symmetry information via a symmetry-aware loss, improving robustness to symmetric ambiguities. On the Scan2CAD benchmark, CAOA achieves a 17% accuracy improvement over state-of-the-art methods.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Dealing with locality in QAOA

arXiv:2606.14447v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Shallow-depth QAOA on sparse, high-diameter MaxCut instances faces a locality bottleneck: at depth \(p\), local observables can depend only on a bounded neighborhood of the circuit interaction graph. We propose a transport-augmented QAOA that keeps the MaxCut cost Hamiltonian unchanged but enriches the mixer with optimized, unweighted shortcut couplings (scheduled \(XX+YY\)) to collapse the effective interaction-graph diameter. Using exact finite-depth support recursions, we relate optimal shortcut placement to bounded-diameter graph augmentation, and show in benchmarks that (unlike ma-QAOA) performance becomes effectively size-invariant once the diameter is reduced. For bipartite families (base diameter 4), reducing the interaction path to \(d=1\) raises the ensemble-averaged approximation ratio from 0.7378 (ma-QAOA) to 0.9767 at \(p=1\) (\(\sigma=0.0251\), nine system sizes); on random trees (base diameter 10), at \(p=2\) it improves from 0.9226 to 0.9997 (\(\sigma=0.0001\)).

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

Few-Shot Resampling for Scalable Statistically-Sound Data Mining

arXiv:2606.11235v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A key step in knowledge discovery is the evaluation of data mining results. In several applications, including pattern mining, graph analysis, and others, this step includes the evaluation of the statistical significance of the results, to avoid spurious discoveries due only to noise or random fluctuations in the data. While specialized procedures have been developed for some specific applications, resampling-based approaches are widely used, in particular for complex analyses where analytical results cannot be derived. However, current resampling-based approaches require the generation and analysis of thousands of resampled datasets, and are therefore impractical for large datasets or computationally intensive analyses. In this paper, we introduce FewRS, a simple and effective resampling-based approach to assess the statistical significance of data mining results with rigorous guarantees on the probability of false discoveries. Our approach can be used in every situation where resampling-based approaches are applied. FewRS builds on our derivation of a novel bound to the supremum deviation of test statistics representing the quality of data mining results. We prove that FewRS needs to generate and analyze an extremely small number of resampled datasets, leading to a highly scalable approach with wide applicability. We test our approach on common tasks such as pattern mining and network analysis. In all cases, our approach results in a reduction of up to two orders of magnitude in running time compared to the state of the art, while preserving high statistical power, enabling the statistical validation of data mining results on large-scale real-world datasets.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

VISUALSKILL: Multimodal Skills for Computer-Use Agents

Computer-use agents (CUAs) approach human-level performance on standardised benchmarks but still struggle on long-horizon tasks and unseen software. Existing skill libraries address this with reusable skills, but represent the skill artifact as text only, despite the visual nature of GUI interaction. We propose VISUALSKILL: a hierarchical multimodal skill, tailored to each target application and organised as a central index over per-topic files, which the agent consumes through a load_topic MCP tool that fetches the relevant topic's text and figures on demand. We construct each skill with a two-stage pipeline that combines authored documentation with live-application UI exploration. On two CUA benchmarks, CUA-World and OSExpert-Eval, a Claude Code CLI agent backed by Claude Opus 4.6 reaches an average score of 0.456 with VISUALSKILL, a +15.3 point absolute lift over the no-skill baseline (0.303). Against a matched text-only skill that is generated from the same source content and differs from VISUALSKILL only in modality, VISUALSKILL yields a further +8.3 point absolute gain over the matched text-only skill (0.373 vs. 0.456), providing direct evidence that retaining visual figures in the skill artifact, rather than verbalizing them away, helps the agent both identify UI elements and verify workflow state after each action. Our code is available at https://github.com/XMHZZ2018/VisualSkills.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Progressive Knowledge-Guided Large Language Model Framework for Bearing Fault Diagnosis

Vibration-based bearing fault diagnosis requires resolving three interrelated measurement challenges, including the trade-off between global statistical feature efficiency and local transient signal fidelity, insufficient traceability of measurement features to underlying fault physics, and ineffective multi-source measurement information fusion across diagnostic scales. This paper presents a progressive physics-guided multi-scale vibration signal processing framework that addresses all three challenges within a unified diagnostic pipeline. An 81-dimensional measurement descriptor, derived from bearing kinematic theory and characteristic defect frequencies, establishes a physically traceable feature space enabling real-time fault screening at approximately 20 ms per sample. A fault-adaptive signal segmentation mechanism then directs analytical attention toward fault-relevant waveform regions guided by physics-based priors, without manual feature engineering. Structured fault mechanism knowledge is further encoded implicitly in model parameters during training, enabling autonomous multi-scale measurement fusion without external knowledge dependencies at inference. Validated on four public benchmark datasets under diverse operating conditions, the framework achieves 98.49% diagnostic accuracy with a 12.6-fold reduction in computational cost relative to signal-level baselines. Interpretability analysis confirms that diagnostic feature activations align with established bearing fault mechanics, supporting measurement traceability in safety-critical industrial systems.

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

Sphere Packings in Higher Dimension (after Boaz Klartag)

arXiv:2606.13313v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Let $\delta_n^L$ be the maximal density of a lattice sphere packing in the $n$-dimensional Euclidean space. We explain how Boaz Klartag proved the inequality $\delta_n^L \geq c n^2 2^{-n}$ where $c>0$ is a universal constant. In higher dimension, even for non-lattice sphere packings, this new lower bound is a substantial improvement. Klartag's proof uses the probabilistic method in two different ways. The first, very standard, relies on the statistical properties of a uniformly chosen random lattice. The second, completely new, studies the stochastic evolution of an ellipsoid constrained to contain non nonzero lattice points in the interior.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

MedicalAgentsBench for Complex Medical Reasoning: Comparing Internalized Reasoning Models versus Externalized Agent-based Frameworks

Complex medical reasoning requires integrating heterogeneous clinical evidence across multiple inference steps. Large language models (LLMs) now approach this through two routes: internalized reasoning and externalized agent scaffolding (frameworks that decompose problems collaboratively amongst multiple LLMs). To determine whether these routes are exclusive or complementary, we introduce MedicalAgentsBench, a filtered benchmark of 862 complex clinical questions drawn from the union of eight medical datasets via difficulty-aware curation and contamination screening. Evaluating three internalized reasoning models (DeepSeek-R1, o1-mini, and o3-mini), seven base models, and nine externalized agent-based methods, we find that internalized and externalized approaches each independently improve performance, and that their benefits compound: the highest accuracy is achieved by layering agent workflows onto an internalized reasoning model (i.e., o3-mini + MDAgents with 35.1%). Pareto analysis shows this combination dominates the cost-performance frontier; moreover, lightweight optimization on inexpensive models offers an entry point for resource-constrained settings. Our benchmark is at https://github.com/gersteinlab/MedicalAgentsBench.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Re-evaluating Confidence Remasking in Masked Diffusion Language Models

arXiv:2606.12232v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Masked diffusion language models (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a competitive alternative to autoregressive language models, with the promise of faster inference via parallel token generation. A notable limitation of the masked formulation, however, is that once a token has been unmasked it can no longer be revised, leaving dLLMs vulnerable to early sampling mistakes. To address this, a growing body of work has sought to extend masked dLLMs with self-correcting (remasking) capabilities. One appealing subset of these methods does so in a training-free, post-hoc manner based on token confidences, with encouraging early reported results. In this work, we revisit the empirical evaluation of a representative post-hoc remasking method, WINO [Hong et al., 2026], and find that under standard decoding settings (shorter block lengths) it brings little-to-no benefit over confidence-based unmasking alone [Wu et al., 2025]. Extending the evaluation to non-greedy decoding, we find that while confidence-based remasking can mitigate errors introduced by increased stochasticity to some extent, it also exacerbates the diversity collapse previously reported for confidence-based unmasking. Overall, our results show that the benefits of post-hoc confidence-based remasking are highly setting-dependent, underscoring the need for a more comprehensive evaluation framework.

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

Stable and Steerable Sparse Autoencoders with Weight Regularization

arXiv:2603.04198v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used to extract human-interpretable features from neural network activations, but their learned features can vary substantially across random seeds and training choices. To improve stability, we studied weight regularization by adding L1 or L2 penalties on encoder and decoder weights, and evaluate how regularization interacts with common SAE training defaults. On MNIST, we observe that L2 weight regularization produces a core of highly aligned features and, when combined with tied initialization and unit-norm decoder constraints, it dramatically increases cross-seed feature consistency. For TopK SAEs trained on language model activations (Pythia-70M-deduped), adding a small L2 weight penalty increased the fraction of features shared across three random seeds and roughly doubles steering success rates, while leaving the mean of automated interpretability scores essentially unchanged. Finally, in the regularized setting, activation steering success becomes better predicted by auto-interpretability scores, suggesting that regularization can align text-based feature explanations with functional controllability.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Free-Placement Optimization of Ground Station Locations for Low-Earth Orbit Satellites

arXiv:2606.12667v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rapidly expanding low Earth orbit satellite constellations are placing increasing demands on terrestrial ground networks, motivating the development of more efficient ground station network designs. Current approaches select sites from predefined locations, limiting optimization to existing infrastructure and constraining performance. In contrast, free-placement optimization operates over a continuous spatial domain on Earth, broadening the search space and allowing higher-throughput configurations at the cost of potentially requiring new infrastructure deployment. In this work, we introduce SCORE (Sequential Cyclic Optimization via Refinement & Evaluation), a two-stage free-placement method for ground station design. SCORE combines sequential coordinate selection with cyclic refinement to manage high-dimensionality, non-convexity, and local minima that challenge global optimizers. We benchmark SCORE against one-shot methods such as differential evolution (DE) and integer programming approaches using locations from Kongsberg Satellite Services and the World Teleport Association. Tests across two commercial Earth observation constellations (Capella Space and ICEYE) and one synthetic Walker-Star constellation show that SCORE requires up to 5x fewer function evaluations to converge relative to DE while improving downlink throughput by up to 13%. Compared to fixed-site methods, unconstrained SCORE achieves up to 15% greater total downlink, establishing a strong empirical performance benchmark for flexible placement; infrastructure-constrained SCORE retains over 92% of this gain while restricting placement to within proximity of existing fiber and power infrastructure. We also explore trade-offs between expanding existing stations and deploying new sites, informing future ground network design for operational constellations.

11.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15

RepGene: Toward a Unified Gene Representation Space Robust to Missing Biological Views

Genes can be described through multiple heterogeneous biological views, including genomic sequence, transcript sequence, protein sequence, textual knowledge, and single-cell expression context, yet existing gene embeddings remain largely modality-specific and difficult to compare or reuse when many views are unavailable. We study a narrower but practically important question: whether pretrained embeddings from these distinct sources can be organized into a shared gene representation interface that remains usable under severe missing-modality conditions. To investigate this question, we introduce RepGene, a lightweight single-branch framework that combines modality adapters, a shared encoder, presence-aware fusion, and self-supervised cross-view objectives to map five biological views into one latent space. Our goal is not to claim a new multimodal learning principle or to establish superiority over all simpler fusion strategies, but to provide an initial technical instantiation for testing whether such a shared interface is feasible in a fixed-feature setting. Under a two-stage protocol in which RepGene is trained self-supervised on frozen upstream embeddings and evaluated by downstream linear probing, we find preliminary evidence that the learned representation is broadly competitive in the full-modality setting and remains informative when only partial modality subsets are observed at inference time. The strongest signal in our study is robustness under missing views: average performance changes are often limited when one modality is removed, and even single-view inference remains non-trivial in the evaluated benchmark regime.These results do not resolve unified biological representation learning, and they should be interpreted in light of incomplete simple-fusion baselines, limited architectural ablation, benchmark dependence, and possible upstream feature exposure. We therefore position RepGene as a feasibility study and a starting point for stronger comparisons, broader benchmarks, and leakage-aware validation.

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

Characterizing Narrative Content in Web-scale LLM Pretraining Data

The narrative composition of web-scale LLM pretraining corpora remains largely unexplored even though narrative is a fundamental mode of human communication. We present the first fine-grained study of narrative features in Dolma, a 3-trillion-token open pretraining corpus. Drawing on narrative theory, we design a framework spanning three core narrative elements (agency, setting, and events) operationalized as 11 interpretable dimensions. After sampling and annotating a diverse set of 400 passages, we finetune and validate NarraBERT, a RoBERTa-based model for fine-grained narrative prediction. We apply NarraBERT to 3M passages, resulting in a new dataset, NarraDolma. We find (i) narrative structure is measurable at scale across extremely heterogeneous data, (ii) we uncover a continuous, multidimensional narrative structure underlying web text, and (iii) narrative qualities are unequally distributed across pretraining sources and topics in ways that current curation practices neither measure nor account for. Our framework, dataset, and analyses provide a foundation for understanding how narrative qualities are distributed in LLM pretraining data and for studying how data composition affects narrative reasoning tasks. We publicly release NarraDolma and NarraBERT.

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

A Pathwise Approach to the Strong Feller Property and Irreducibility of Nonlinear Branching Processes

arXiv:2606.24821v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the strong Feller property and irreducibility for continuous-state nonlinear branching processes defined as solutions to stochastic differential equations with jumps. Due to boundary degeneracy and discontinuous jump coefficients, classical methods do not apply. We develop a pathwise approach combining state-dependent time change, truncated auxiliary processes, and localized coupling to establish these two properties. As applications, we obtain exponential convergence to a unique quasi-stationary distribution in the absorbing case, and uniform exponential ergodicity in the non-absorbing case. This pathwise approach is flexible and can be adapted to a broader class of jump-diffusions without relying on specific coefficient structures.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Rolling Stock Planning Using the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm

arXiv:2606.11383v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Rolling stock planning is a complex optimization problem in railway management that involves assigning physical trains to scheduled trips while minimizing operational costs. In this work, we address a specific instance of this problem featuring 190 trips over two days, subject to constraints such as mandatory maintenance stops. We reformulate the problem as a Maximum-Weight Independent Set (MWIS) problem on a graph where nodes represent feasible train cycles. To handle the computational complexity of the large search space, we propose a hybrid divide-and-conquer algorithm. This approach iteratively selects subgraphs and solves the MWIS problem using various solvers, including exact classical methods and the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA). We evaluate the algorithm's performance by comparing these methods and analyzing the scaling with respect to subgraph size, with QAOA assessed through both classical simulation and execution on a quantum device (IQM Emerald). Our results indicate that increasing the subgraph size generally improves solution quality, demonstrating that the hybrid framework can effectively bridge the gap between polynomial-time approximate solvers and exponential-time exact methods.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

HumanScale: Egocentric Human Video Can Outperform Real-Robot Data for Embodied Pretraining

Embodied foundation models are expected to benefit from data scaling like large language models, but face a much tighter data bottleneck. Teleoperated real-robot trajectories remain the dominant pretraining source due to their precise action supervision and embodiment alignment, yet their scalability is limited by high collection cost, acquisition difficulty, and low behavioral and environmental diversity. These limitations have sparked interest in egocentric human video as a scalable, substantially lower-cost, and more diverse alternative for embodied model pretraining. However, its effectiveness compared to teleoperated real-robot data remains underexplored. To address this question, we conduct a systematic study comparing egocentric human video and teleoperated real-robot trajectories as pretraining data sources for embodied foundation models, under fixed post-training and validation protocols. Surprisingly, we find that egocentric data, when processed through a carefully designed filtering and labeling pipeline, is not merely a viable substitute for model pretraining but can lead to superior performance. With the same amount of pretraining data, models pretrained on egocentric data achieve a 24% lower validation loss on real-robot action prediction, as well as 52.5% and 90% higher success rates on in-distribution and out-of-distribution real-robot task execution, respectively. This finding verifies a scalable paradigm for embodied foundation models: pretrain on egocentric human video to learn diverse world representations, then adapt with a small amount of labeled real-robot data for action-space alignment. We hope this study encourages broader exploration of egocentric data and offers guidance for data quality assessment before costly robot data collection.

16.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-06

Pathways of emergency care for severely ill children in Nigerian and Ugandan hospitals: A process mapping study

作者:

by Rami Subhi, Abiodun Sogbesan, Dan Muramuzi, Mikael Burhin, Ayobami A. Bakare, Adegoke G. Falade, Freddy E. Kitutu, Freddie Ssengooba, Carina King, Sumit Kane, Belinda Dawson-McClaren, Hamish R. Graham, the MOXY-Implementation Research Collaboration Background Child mortality remains high in countries with weak emergency care systems. Facility organisation for paediatric emergency care is heterogeneous and under-described. We examined how hospitals in Uganda and Nigeria are organised to deliver emergency care for neonates and children. Methods and findings We conducted a qualitative, multi-method study in 26 purposively selected secondary and tertiary facilities in Uganda and Nigeria from October 2023 to December 2024. Embedded researchers documented patient pathways, resources for care, and care processes for severely ill children (

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

SceneCompleter: Dense 3D Scene Completion for Generative Novel View Synthesis

Generative models have shown great promise for novel view synthesis (NVS) by leveraging strong image generation priors. However, existing approaches typically follow a 2D inpainting paradigm, first completing missing image regions and then performing 3D reconstruction. This strategy often causes geometry distortion and appearance drift, as 2D inpainting models cannot reliably infer the underlying 3D structure required for cross-view consistent generation. In this paper, we propose SceneCompleter, a geometry-aware framework that reformulates generative NVS as dense 3D scene completion. Instead of hallucinating isolated 2D views, SceneCompleter jointly completes geometry and appearance through a geometry-appearance dual-stream diffusion model in a spatially aligned RGBD latent space. To provide holistic scene context, we further introduce a Scene Embedder that conditions generation on global semantic and stylistic information from reference images. The completed RGBD predictions are then aligned and integrated into an expandable 3D scene representation, enabling iterative and coherent scene completion. Extensive experiments on in-domain and out-of-distribution datasets demonstrate that SceneCompleter produces visually plausible and geometrically consistent novel views across diverse scenarios. Project Page: https://chen-wl20.github.io/SceneCompleter

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

CoVR-R:Reason-Aware Composed Video Retrieval

Composed Video Retrieval (CoVR) aims to find a target video given a reference video and a textual modification. Prior work assumes the modification text fully specifies the visual changes, overlooking after-effects and implicit consequences (e.g., motion, state transitions, viewpoint or duration cues) that emerge from the edit. We argue that successful CoVR requires reasoning about these after-effects. We introduce a reasoning-first, zero-shot approach that leverages large multimodal models to (i) infer causal and temporal consequences implied by the edit, and (ii) align the resulting reasoned queries to candidate videos without task-specific finetuning. To evaluate reasoning in CoVR, we also propose CoVR-Reason, a benchmark that pairs each (reference, edit, target) triplet with structured internal reasoning traces and challenging distractors that require predicting after-effects rather than keyword matching. Experiments show that our zero-shot method outperforms strong retrieval baselines on recall at K and particularly excels on implicit-effect subsets. Our automatic and human analysis confirm higher step consistency and effect factuality in our retrieved results. Our findings show that incorporating reasoning into general-purpose multimodal models enables effective CoVR by explicitly accounting for causal and temporal after-effects. This reduces dependence on task-specific supervision, improves generalization to challenging implicit-effect cases, and enhances interpretability of retrieval outcomes. These results point toward a scalable and principled framework for explainable video search. The model, code, and benchmark are available at https://github.com/mbzuai-oryx/CoVR-R.

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

Mechanisms of Introspective Awareness

arXiv:2603.21396v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent work has shown that LLMs can sometimes detect when steering vectors are injected into their residual stream and identify the injected concept – a phenomenon termed "introspective awareness." We investigate the mechanisms underlying this capability in open-weights models. First, we find that it is behaviorally robust: models detect injected steering vectors at moderate rates with 0% false positives across diverse prompts and dialogue formats. Notably, this capability emerges specifically from post-training; we show that preference optimization algorithms like DPO can elicit it, but standard supervised finetuning does not. We provide evidence that detection cannot be explained by simple linear association between certain steering vectors and directions promoting affirmative responses. We trace the detection mechanism to a two-stage circuit in which "evidence carrier" features in early post-injection layers detect perturbations monotonically along diverse directions, suppressing downstream "gate" features that implement a default negative response. This circuit is absent in base models and robust to refusal ablation. Identification of injected concepts relies on largely distinct later-layer mechanisms that only weakly overlap with those involved in detection. Finally, we show that introspective capability is substantially underelicited: ablating refusal directions improves detection by +53%, and a trained bias vector improves it by +75% on held-out concepts, both without meaningfully increasing false positives. Our results suggest that this introspective awareness of injected concepts is robust and mechanistically nontrivial, and could be substantially amplified in future models. Code: https://github.com/safety-research/introspection-mechanisms.

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

Reentrant value fields as delayed coupled reaction-diffusion systems on finite graphs

arXiv:2605.03940v4 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We describe a dynamical system in which a symbolic field is coupled to a geometric field via a bipartite Hilbert-Schmidt kernel. The system is fully described by a retarded functional differential equation (RFDE) on the history space, subject to Lipschitz and small gain conditions. We show that the RFDE is well-posed under constant input and that it admits a compact global attractor. The principal subsystem $(H_L, X_R, P)$, which is comprised of the two primary fields as well as an executive field, is shown to be globally stable independent of delay, provided that the interfield coupling satisfies $C_{\mathcal{K}}^2

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

HeatKV: Head-tuned KV-cache Compression for Visual Autoregressive Modeling

Visual Autoregressive (VAR) models have recently demonstrated impressive image generation quality while maintaining low latency. However, they suffer from severe KV-cache memory constraints, often requiring gigabytes of memory per generated image. We introduce HeatKV, a novel compression method that adapts cache allocation in each head based on its attention to previously generated scales. Using a small offline calibration set, the attention heads are ranked according to their attention scores over prior scales. Based on this ranking, we construct a static pruning schedule tailored to a given memory budget. Applied to the Infinity-2B model, HeatKV achieves $2 \times$ higher compression ratio in memory allocation for KV cache compared to existing methods, while maintaining similar or better image fidelity, prompt alignment and human perception score. Our method achieves a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) for VAR model KV-cache compression, showcasing the effectiveness of fine-grained, head-specific cache allocation. Code and calibration script available at https://github.com/arm-research/heatkv.

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

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

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

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

Maximin Relative Improvement: Fair Learning as a Bargaining Problem

arXiv:2602.04155v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: When deploying a single predictor across multiple subpopulations, we propose a fundamentally different approach: interpreting group fairness as a bargaining problem among subpopulations. This game-theoretic perspective reveals that existing robust optimization methods such as minimizing worst-group loss or regret correspond to classical bargaining solutions and embody different fairness principles. We propose relative improvement, the ratio of actual risk reduction to potential reduction from a baseline predictor, which recovers the Kalai-Smorodinsky solution. Unlike absolute-scale methods that may not be comparable when groups have different potential predictability, relative improvement provides axiomatic justification including scale invariance and individual monotonicity. We establish finite-sample convergence guarantees under mild conditions.

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

On the Geometry and Optimization of Polynomial Convolutional Networks

arXiv:2410.00722v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study convolutional neural networks with monomial activation functions. Specifically, we prove that their parameterization map is regular and is an isomorphism almost everywhere, up to rescaling the filters. By leveraging on tools from algebraic geometry, we explore the geometric properties of the image in function space of this map - typically referred to as neuromanifold. In particular, we compute the dimension and the degree of the neuromanifold, which measure the expressivity of the model, and describe its singularities. Moreover, for a generic large dataset, we derive an explicit formula that quantifies the number of critical points arising in the optimization of a regression loss.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Output Vector Editing for Memorization Mitigation in Large Language Models

Large language models memorize and reproduce sequences from their training data, creating privacy, copyright, and security risks. Existing neuron-level mitigation methods equate editing with zeroing out neuron activations, but the activation only controls whether a neuron engages; the output vector is what writes to the residual stream and, through superposition, encodes multiple features. We propose output vector editing, a constrained-optimization weight edit that locates a small set of MLP neurons responsible for a memorized continuation and minimally modifies their output vectors to introduce a distractor in vocabulary space, redirecting their residual-stream contributions while leaving activations unchanged. Evaluating on four models from 360M to 7B parameters (SmolLM-360M, OLMo-1B, OLMo-7B, Llama2-7B), we center on OLMo-7B (whose open weights and pretraining corpus enable systematic mining) and mine 6831 memorized sequences, achieving up to 87.9% suppression. The 2.7$\times$ gap over zero ablation on the same located neurons shows the suppression comes from the output-vector edit, not localization alone. Four edit modes span a spectrum from aggressive suppression to minimal redirection; in ensemble they cover 96.5% of memorized sequences, while our recommended single-mode configuration reaches 81.5% with no catastrophic locality failures. We further identify a mechanistic boundary at ${\sim}14%$ of sequences unreachable by MLP-only editing; while these failures are not attention-driven overall, ablating the top contributing attention heads recovers 60–64% of them, with stronger recovery on continuations that copy tokens from the prefix, positioning attention as a complementary fallback rather than a primary mechanism. Edit mode ordering and the success-locality trade-off transfer across all four models, with success rates scaling with model size rather than family.