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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Fully Quantum Algorithm for the 1-dimensional linear Lattice Boltzmann Method

arXiv:2606.16514v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A fully quantum algorithm for solving the one-dimensional linear advection-diffusion equation using the Lattice Boltzmann method as a numerical procedure is presented in this work. We start by presenting a state of the art of the current usage of quantum algorithms for solving ordinary and partial differential equations. We then describe two algorithms for the one-dimensional Lattice Boltzmann method with two degrees of freedom. The first one is an existing hybrid quantum-classical algorithm with measurements at each time step, and the second one is our improved version, viz. a fully quantum algorithm where only one measurement is needed at the end of the algorithm. The fully quantum algorithm is first executed on a quantum simulator and then compared with a classical approach. Subsequently, the fully quantum algorithm is run on a quantum system with 133 qubits to investigate the effect of noise and the depth of the circuit on the output state. We find fluctuations in the final result due to the decoherence noise of the qubits.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

ScaleToT: Generalizing Structured LLM Reasoning for Billion-Scale Low-Activity User Modeling

arXiv:2606.24605v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate user modeling often depends on rich interaction histories, which are unavailable for billions of low-activity users. Large Language Models (LLMs) can infer latent user states from static profiles, but this reasoning becomes unreliable when profiles are sparse, and applying an LLM to billions of users is prohibitively expensive. We present ScaleToT, which learns structured reasoning from a small LLM-processed subset and extends it to the broader low-activity user population. To improve reasoning reliability, ScaleToT constructs typed user-state chains with a bounded entropy-guided Tree-of-Thought (ToT) refinement procedure. To make this structured reasoning usable from sparse profiles, the teacher-curated chains are used to train a student model on static profiles through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and Outcome-Driven Segment-Aware Implicit Reward Policy Optimization (OSIPO). ScaleToT then transfers the student's reasoning representations to a lightweight profile encoder, providing shared reasoning signals for the remaining users without LLM inference. We evaluate ScaleToT on lifetime value (LTV) prediction in a billion-scale advertising deployment. A randomized online A/B test increased LT30 by 6.738\%, while offline reasoning covered only 7.32\% of the potential population, greatly reducing compute cost compared with full-population reasoning.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

LARE: Low-Attention Region Encoding for Text-Image Retrieval

Image retrieval in crowded scenes is particularly challenging due to the salience bias of conventional visual encoders, which tend to focus on dominant objects while neglecting low-attention regions that are often crucial for fine-grained retrieval. We propose LARE (Low-Attention Region Encoding), a framework that explicitly models these overlooked regions. LARE adopts a dual-encoding strategy that encodes low-attention regions of an image and the full image in parallel, leading to more diverse and informative image embeddings. To evaluate image retrieval performance in challenging crowded scenes, we introduce Dense-Set, a challenging subset derived from COCO and Flickr30K. In this subset, images are re-captioned to provide richer descriptions of low-attention or previously overlooked regions. This dataset highlights the limitations of existing retrieval models and enables a more rigorous evaluation under densely crowded scene conditions. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework improves retrieval performance by preserving subtle, non-dominant visual cues within the shared latent space.

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

ttda704 at SemEval-2026 Task 4: Modeling Narrative Structures via Pseudonymization and Multi-View Sentence Alignment

We present our approach to SemEval 2026 Task 4: Narrative Story Similarity and Narrative Representation Learning. Our solution uses contrastive learning with fine-tuned sentence transformers to capture narrative similarity across abstract themes, course of action, and outcomes. We develop two pipelines: (Track A) a single-view method that encodes full narratives with smart layer freezing to reduce overfitting, and (Track B) a multi-view method that models theme, plot, and outcome with view-specific projection heads and self-supervised alignment. Both pipelines build on sentence-transformers models and are trained with contrastive loss on synthetic data. The code is available at the following GitHub repository: https://github.com/dinhthienan33/SemEval2026-Task4-ttda704.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Sensing Intelligence as a Trainable Metamaterial Property

arXiv:2605.23967v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In biological systems, sensing is not performed by the brain alone: the body deforms, vibrates, and filters external stimuli before they are transduced into neural signals. In engineered systems, this processing burden is placed largely on electronics and computation, while the mechanical body is usually designed only for strength and stability. Here, we present sensing intelligence as a trainable property of the body. We show that the geometry of a metamaterial can be optimized to reshape external stimuli into internal signals that are easier for a neural network to interpret. Rather than hand-designing this physical preprocessing, we let the neural network train its own body for sensing by backpropagating the sensing loss to the body's design parameters through differentiable simulation. Across numerical and experimental sensing scenarios, the optimized body improves sensing accuracy by up to fivefold or reduces the number of required electronic sensors by nearly an order of magnitude.

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

MolSight: Molecular Property Prediction with Images

Every molecule ever synthesised can be drawn as a 2D skeletal diagram, yet in modern property prediction this universally available representation has received less focus in favour of molecular graphs, 3D conformers, or billion-parameter language models, each imposing its own computational and data-engineering overhead. We present $MolSight$, the first systematic large-scale study of vision-based Molecular Property Prediction (MPP). Using 10 vision architectures, 7 pre-training strategies, and $2\,M$ molecule images, we evaluate performance across 10 downstream tasks spanning physical-property regression, drug-discovery classification, and quantum-chemistry prediction. To account for the wide variation in structural complexity across pre-training molecules, we further propose a $chemistry-informed curriculum$: five structural complexity descriptors partition the corpus into five tiers of increasing chemical difficulty, consistently outperforming non-curriculum baselines. We show that a single rendered bond-line image, processed by a vision encoder, is sufficient for competitive molecular property prediction, i.e. $chemical insight from sight alone$. The best curriculum-trained configuration achieves the top result on $5 of 10$ benchmarks and top two on $all 10$, at $$80$\times$ lower$$ FLOPs than the nearest multi-modal competitor.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Detecting undisclosed LLM-generated content in parliamentary texts

In this paper, we evaluate the extent of undisclosed LLM-generated content in texts from the parliaments of the United Kingdom and Sweden. In many areas, such as in journalism or in academic writing, there are often requirements to clearly disclose whether AI tools, such as LLMs, have been used. In the case of parliamentary texts, the guidelines on disclosure of AI use are more vague. However, in order to maintain transparency and retain public trust, it is generally recommended that parliamentarians should state whether or not they have used AI when writing texts, such as parliamentary motions. Here, we train an interpretable (glass-box) text classifier using pre-LLM parliamentary texts and LLM-generated versions of such texts. We then apply the classifier to a test set containing recent parliamentary texts, finding a steady increase in undisclosed LLM use, in both parliaments, from 2022 onwards.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Ensembling Sparse Autoencoders

arXiv:2505.16077v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are used to decompose neural network activations into human-interpretable features. Typically, features learned by a single SAE are used for downstream applications. However, it has recently been shown that a single SAE captures only a limited subset of features that can be extracted from the activation space. Motivated by this limitation, we introduce and formalize SAE ensembles. Furthermore, we propose to ensemble multiple SAEs through naive bagging and boosting. In naive bagging, SAEs trained with different weight initializations are ensembled, whereas in boosting SAEs sequentially trained to minimize the residual error are ensembled. Theoretically, naive bagging and boosting are justified as approaches to reduce reconstruction error. Empirically, we evaluate our ensemble approaches with three settings of language models and SAE architectures. Our empirical results demonstrate that, compared to an expanded SAE that matches the number of features in the ensemble, ensembling SAEs improves the reconstruction of language model activations along with SAE stability. Additionally, on downstream tasks such as concept detection and spurious correlation removal, SAE ensembles achieve better performance, showing improved practical utility.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Study protocol: Feasibility and clinical implications of real-time cerebral autoregulation monitoring in major noncardiac surgery with the Medtronic Cotrending algorithm (AUTOREGULATE-NONCARDIAC-COTRENDING)

Background: Perioperative hypotension is associated with postoperative organ injury. However, trials of hypotension avoidance have not found meaningful improvements in postoperative cardiovascular, renal, neurological or functional outcomes. One possible explanation is that organ perfusion depends on patients individual autoregulatory ranges. Hence, technology enabling monitoring of the autoregulatory status of vital organs, e.g. the brain, could provide a physiologic basis for personalising of blood pressure targets. However, current established methodologies for monitoring cerebral autoregulation in noncardiac surgery, e.g. the cerebral oximetry index (COx), are limited by performance and usability. The Medtronic Cotrending algorithm has been developed to provide automated, near real-time assessment of cerebral autoregulation. While feasibility was demonstrated in cardiac surgery, its applicability in major noncardiac surgery remains unknown. This study aims to evaluate the technical feasibility and clinical implications of Cotrending-based cerebral autoregulation monitoring in major noncardiac surgery. Objectives: Primary objective: To evaluate the technical feasibility of using the Medtronic Cotrending algorithm to monitor intraoperative cerebral autoregulation in real-time during major noncardiac surgery, drawing comparisons to the COx algorithm. Secondary objectives: to investigate the potential clinical implications of Cotrending-based cerebral autoregulation monitoring. Design: Single-centre, prospective cohort study. Setting: Swiss tertiary care centre Patients: Patients enrolled in AUTOREGULATE-NONCARDIAC who were monitored intraoperatively with the Medtronic INVOS(TM) 5100 near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) system. Outcomes: Technical feasibility outcomes include success rate of determination of the lower limit of cerebral autoregulation, intraoperative uptime, time to first estimate of the lower limit of cerebral autoregulation, sensitivity to external factors and to data artefacts; agreement of Cotrending-derived lower limit of cerebral autoregulation with COx-derived lower limit of cerebral autoregulation. Conclusions: N/A Trial registration: Clinicaltrials.gov NCT07630129

10.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-24

RNabel-A Standalone Software Tool for Annotating Tandem Mass Spectra of Modified Ribonucleic Acids

Ribonucleic acid (RNA) modifications, with over 170 identified types, play diverse roles in cellular processes. The past decade has witnessed surging demand for accurate identification and localization of RNA modifications in both endogenous and synthetic therapeutic RNAs. With accurate spectral annotation for RNA, tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) can meet this demand. Here we present RNabel, a user-friendly software tool for in-depth annotation of MS/MS spectra of RNA oligonucleotides. RNabel considers a full set of backbone-cleavage ions (a, b, c, d, a-B, w, x, y, z) in which the ribonucleotide unit could be A, U, C, G, Y (pseudouridine), or I (Inosine). Additionally, RNabel considers 196 modifications on the base, the phosphoribose linkage, the 5' or the 3' terminus, or detachment of a sub-nucleotide fragment as a neutral or charged group. Users can create new components if needed, including ribonucleotides, modifications, neutral or charged groups that could detach from a ribonucleotide. RNabel efficiently processes large datasets in four acceptable formats including .mgf, .raw, .txt from msConvert, and RNabel batch files. Multiple statistical metrics are provided for quality assessment of spectral annotation. To accelerate RNA modification analysis, RNabel is made freely available for Mac and Windows users at https://github.com/songge1111/RNabel/releases.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Image Super-Resolution (x4): Methods and Results

This paper presents the NTIRE 2025 image super-resolution ($\times$4) challenge, one of the associated competitions of the 10th NTIRE Workshop at CVPR 2025. The challenge aims to recover high-resolution (HR) images from low-resolution (LR) counterparts generated through bicubic downsampling with a $\times$4 scaling factor. The objective is to develop effective network designs or solutions that achieve state-of-the-art SR performance. To reflect the dual objectives of image SR research, the challenge includes two sub-tracks: (1) a restoration track, emphasizes pixel-wise accuracy and ranks submissions based on PSNR; (2) a perceptual track, focuses on visual realism and ranks results by a perceptual score. A total of 286 participants registered for the competition, with 25 teams submitting valid entries. This report summarizes the challenge design, datasets, evaluation protocol, the main results, and methods of each team. The challenge serves as a benchmark to advance the state of the art and foster progress in image SR.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Communication-Efficient Distributed Training for Collaborative Flat Optima Recovery in Deep Learning

arXiv:2507.20424v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study centralized distributed data parallel training of deep neural networks (DNNs), aiming to improve the trade-off between communication efficiency and model performance of the local gradient methods. To this end, we revisit the flat-minima hypothesis, which suggests that models with better generalization tend to lie in flatter regions of the loss landscape. We introduce a simple, yet effective, sharpness measure, Inverse Mean Valley, and demonstrate its strong correlation with the generalization gap of DNNs. We incorporate an efficient relaxation of this measure into the distributed training objective as a lightweight regularizer that encourages workers to collaboratively seek wide minima. The regularizer exerts a pushing force that counteracts the consensus step pulling the workers together, giving rise to the Distributed Pull-Push Force (DPPF) algorithm. Empirically, we show that DPPF outperforms other communication-efficient approaches and achieves better generalization performance than local gradient methods and synchronous gradient averaging, while maintaining communication efficiency. In addition, our loss landscape visualizations confirm the ability of DPPF to locate flatter minima. On the theoretical side, we show that DPPF guides workers to span flat valleys, with the final valley width governed by the interplay between push and pull strengths, and that its pull-push dynamics is self-stabilizing. We further provide generalization guarantees linked to the valley width and prove convergence in the non-convex setting.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

MirrorCheck: Efficient Adversarial Defense for Vision-Language Models

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly susceptible to sophisticated adversarial attacks, including adaptive strategies specifically designed to bypass existing defenses. To address this vulnerability, we propose MirrorCheck, a robust and model-agnostic detection framework that operates effectively in both unimodal and multimodal settings. MirrorCheck leverages Text-to-Image (T2I) models to regenerate visual content from captions produced by the target model and assesses semantic consistency by comparing feature-space embeddings between the original and synthesized images. To enhance robustness against adaptive attacks, MirrorCheck introduces a stochastic defense strategy that randomly selects T2I generators and image encoders from a diverse model zoo. Additionally, we incorporate a novel One-Time-Use (OTU) perturbation applied to the selected encoder embeddings, regulated by a scaling factor, which decreases the effectiveness of adaptive attacks. Extensive experiments across multiple threat scenarios demonstrate that MirrorCheck consistently outperforms baseline methods, and maintains its utility even under strong adaptive adversarial conditions.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Mapping abstraction and metacognition onto distinct transdiagnostic symptom profiles

Transdiagnostic psychiatric research on reward-guided learning has largely focused on simple associative processes, leaving it unclear whether or how higher-level processes are disrupted. Here, we studied how abstraction, the ability to extract relevant features from complex information, and metacognition, the ability to monitor and evaluate one's own mental processes, map onto specific transdiagnostic dimensions. Using an online sample (N = 249), we examined associations between these processes and three cross-culturally robust transdiagnostic dimensions derived from a large existing dataset (N = 19,505): Compulsive hypersensitivity, Social withdrawal, and Addictive behaviours. Computational modelling of an abstract representation learning task with confidence judgments revealed that Compulsive hypersensitivity was negatively associated with both abstraction ability (pboot = 0.003) and metacognitive sensitivity (pboot = 0.005), while Social withdrawal was positively associated with metacognitive sensitivity alone (pboot = 0.002). Moreover, transdiagnostic dimensions revealed more coherent associations with higher-order cognition than symptom-level analyses, highlighting the added value of examining psychopathology at the factor rather than the symptom level. These findings portray a hierarchical view of cognitive dysfunctions in psychopathology and point to representational and metacognitive processes as potential targets for transdiagnostic intervention.

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

Detecting Hidden ML Training With Zero-Overhead Telemetry

arXiv:2606.19262v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hardware-enabled monitoring of GPU workloads underpins many proposals for AI compute governance, but if developers can defeat monitoring mechanisms, such schemes are unworkable. We evaluate the adversarial robustness of GPU workload classification using only zero-overhead, privacy-preserving NVML telemetry: content-agnostic signals that observe physical effects of computation without accessing model weights, training data, or hyperparameters. Across 5 rounds of monitor-evader iteration, we evaluate 20 evasion strategy families on 9 GPU models spanning 4 architecture generations. We develop a classifier that achieves 98.2% binary accuracy at identifying training workloads across the whole corpus, and 43-87% accuracy against the most challenging unexpected workloads even when they are adversarially disguised.

16.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

TAB-PO: Preference Optimization with a Token-Level Adaptive Barrier for Token-Critical Structured Generation

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is an effective and widely adopted approach for offline alignment but is poorly matched to ontology-driven structured prediction, where preferred and rejected JSON objects often differ in only a few schema-defining tokens. In this low-edit-distance regime, sequence-level DPO spreads gradient mass across non-critical serialization tokens (gradient dilution) and can reduce likelihood on rare, under-confident preferred schema tokens (token erosion). To address these limitations, we first develop a confusion-aware preference-construction strategy that augments expert-curated ambiguity patterns with empirical structured-error modes estimated from validation-set SFT predictions, synthesizing minimally perturbed, schema-valid negatives that focus preference learning on realistic ontology-level decision errors. We then introduce Token-Adaptive Barrier Preference Optimization (TAB-PO), a post-SFT objective for token-critical structured generation. TAB-PO adds a confidence-gated token-level barrier that applies supervised anchoring to under-confident schema tokens. On the public SciERC scientific information extraction task, evaluated with Llama/Qwen models from 1.5B to 70B, TAB-PO improves ontology-critical semantic-label and relational-linking metrics over SFT by 11.59% on average, wins 100% of comparisons against the strongest token-level and sequence-level DPO variants on these metrics, and surpasses leading frontier models by 14.71%, while delivering strong gains in textual grounding.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

MoReBench: Evaluating Procedural and Pluralistic Moral Reasoning in Language Models, More than Outcomes

As AI systems progress, we rely more on them to make decisions with us and for us. To ensure that such decisions are aligned with human values, it is imperative for us to understand not only what decisions they make but also how they come to those decisions. Reasoning language models, which provide both final responses and (partially transparent) intermediate thinking traces, present a timely opportunity to study AI procedural reasoning. Unlike math and code problems which often have objectively correct answers, moral dilemmas are an excellent testbed for process-focused evaluation because they allow for multiple defensible conclusions. To do so, we present MoReBench: 1,000 moral scenarios, each paired with a set of rubric criteria that experts consider essential to include (or avoid) when reasoning about the scenarios. MoReBench contains over 23 thousand criteria including identifying moral considerations, weighing trade-offs, and giving actionable recommendations to cover cases on AI advising humans moral decisions as well as making moral decisions autonomously. Separately, we curate MoReBench-Theory: 150 examples to test whether AI can reason under five major frameworks in normative ethics. Our results show that scaling laws and existing benchmarks on math, code, and scientific reasoning tasks fail to predict models' abilities to perform moral reasoning. Models also show partiality towards specific moral frameworks (e.g., Benthamite Act Utilitarianism and Kantian Deontology), which might be side effects of popular training paradigms. Together, these benchmarks advance process-focused reasoning evaluation towards safer and more transparent AI.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Contaminated Collaboration: Measuring Gender Bias Transfer in LLM-Assisted Student Writing

Gender bias in LLMs has been studied extensively in model outputs, with biased prompts shown to amplify stereotyped generations. Whether such bias propagates into text produced by humans who use these systems, however, remains underexplored. We investigate whether gender bias in an LLM writing assistant transfers into career plan essays written by students. We first verify that a gender-biased prompt induces gender-differentiated language in LLM-generated essays, while a neutral prompt does not. We then recruited participants (N = 123) in a controlled environment to write career plan essays for paired biographical profiles differing only in gender under three conditions: no AI assistance, neutral LLM assistance, or gender-biased LLM assistance. Students in the biased condition produced essays with a significantly larger agentic gap and more gender-stereotypic occupation suggestions than those in the control and neutral conditions. Our results also reveal that this bias transfer is asymmetric: agency is suppressed in female-target essays while male-target writing remains largely unaffected. Our findings highlight the risk of bias propagation in AI-assisted writing, calling for fairness-aware design in educational AI tools.

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

World Models in Pieces: Structural Certification for General Agents

arXiv:2606.24842v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In the big-world regime, agents cannot be universally capable and their ability is inevitably specialized across a world model in pieces. Consequently, standard uniform guarantees fail to distinguish between the understanding of critical bottlenecks and irrelevant failures. We first formalize this limitation by proving that general agents are not universal, rendering standard worst-case analysis uninformative. To overcome this, we introduce structural certification, a transition-local framework that maps bounded goal-conditioned performance to entry-wise guarantees on the agent's internal world model. Our main contribution is constructive. We provide algorithms that filter specific transitions using deep compositional goals and prove that a general agent on these goals has a structural world model with a $\mathcal{O}(1/n) + \mathcal{O}(\delta)$ error bound. Conversely, this bound is tight in the small-$\delta$ regime, whose existence is explicitly guaranteed by our certification. These results enable the certifiable deployment of general agents by localizing the specific transitions where long-horizon planning is reliable.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

MixTeX: Data-Efficient LaTeX OCR via Synthetic Pretraining and Limited Fine-Tuning

LaTeX OCR converts scientific document images into editable LaTeX code. Existing systems rely on large paired datasets, which are costly to collect and limited for low-resource languages. This paper presents MIXTEX, a data-efficient system using synthetic pretraining without real LaTeX sources. Unlike Nougat that depends on arXiv datasets, we generate training data by randomly pairing grammatical Wikipedia text with LaTeX formulas, requiring only syntactic correctness. This eliminates dependency on real document collections, enables scalable data generation (120M tokens), and supports low-resource languages. Following synthetic pretraining, adaptation requires only 400 real samples. Evaluation on a 977-sample benchmark with printed and handwritten English and Chinese shows that this two-stage strategy outperforms methods trained on large real datasets while requiring less human effort and computation. Data, code, and models are publicly available.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

CacheWeaver: Cache-Aware Evidence Ordering for Efficient Grounded RAG Inference

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) improves factual grounding, but it also lengthens prompts and raises prefill cost. Prefix caching in serving engines such as vLLM reduces this cost only when requests share the same token prefix. In grounded generation, however, adjacent queries may retrieve overlapping evidence in different orders, so set overlap does not become reusable prefix overlap. We present CacheWeaver, a lightweight prompt-layer method for cache-aware evidence ordering. The method keeps a prefix tree over recently served evidence sequences and uses a greedy walk to place the most reusable prefix first, while leaving the serving engine and retrieved evidence set unchanged. Across three vLLM configurations, the method lowers median time-to-first-token (TTFT) by about 20-33 percent relative to retrieval-order prefix caching, without hurting answer quality in our QA tests. The greedy policy reaches 97.5 percent of the median TTFT gain from oracle ordering, indicating that most reusable prefix locality can be recovered by a simple scheduling layer between retrieval and inference.

22.
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.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Demystifying Hidden-State Recurrence: Switchable Latent Reasoning with On-Policy Reinforcement Learning

Latent chain-of-thought compresses reasoning by replacing visible reasoning traces with continuous hidden-state recurrence, but existing formulations are difficult to optimize with standard on-policy reinforcement learning (RL) and hard to interpret causally. Our key insight is that a single pair of explicit boundary tokens can address both issues at once: discrete entry and exit anchors make the latent block compatible with standard on-policy RL, and the same anchors offer a natural foothold for mechanistic analysis. Motivated by this, we propose SWITCH, a switchable latent reasoning framework. The model emits to enter latent mode and to exit. Because the boundaries are ordinary discrete tokens, the GRPO policy ratio is well-defined at every decision point. The same anchors also expose the latent steps to direct probing and causal intervention. We train the model with a visible-to-latent curriculum and a Switch-GRPO objective that propagates gradients through recurrent latent computation. SWITCH consistently outperforms prior hidden-state-recurrence latent reasoning approaches at similar scale. Mechanistic analysis through the boundary tokens further reveals three findings: (i) is a sharply localised, learned switching policy rather than a stylistic artefact; (ii) the latent step it opens performs problem-specific, causally important computation rather than acting as an inert placeholder; and (iii) that computation is concentrated at a single hidden-state transition on entry. Together, these results show that hidden-state-recurrence latent reasoning is both RL-trainable and open to direct mechanistic analysis, including of how on-policy RL itself improves the model from the inside.

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

Flood Mapping from RGB imagery using a Vision Foundation Model

Timely, high-resolution maps of flood extent around settlements are essential for emergency response and damage assessment. We consider airborne RGB imagery for flood mapping as it can be collected rapidly at low cost. To produce flood maps, deep learning models for water segmentation are often used. CNN based and small vision transformer models are used. However, they need much data for adaptation to a change of scenery, i.e., another flooding event. Vision foundation models or large vision transformers are known to generalize across domains. Recently, foundation models for Earth observation became available. They are pretrained on satellite data, whose spatial resolution, viewing geometry, and radiometry differ from nadir RGB imagery. Thus, adaptation is required. We investigate how a satellite-pretrained Earth observation foundation model can be adapted to centimeter-scale floodwater mapping from RGB imagery. Specifically, we fine-tune a model we call Prithvi-2.0-UPN consisting of the Prithvi-EO-2.0-600M Vision Transformer combined with a UPerNet decoder for binary water segmentation on two RGB datasets (BlessemFlood21, NeuenahrFlood). In a first experiment we observe that Prithvi-2.0-UPN reaches state-of-the-art results on BlessemFlood21 and NeuenahrFlood, when trained on their datasets. In a second experiment we show that Prithvi-2.0-UPN performs better than state-of-the-art baseline models for transfer to a new flood event (trained on BlessemFlood21, tested on NeuenahrFlood) in a zero-shot setting. However, the performance indicates room for improvement. In this respect, we investigate in a third experiment how performance improves when further fine-tuning the models with small shares of NeuenahrFlood training data: Prithvi-2.0-UPN improves the fastest and reaches almost the performance level when fully trained on NeuenahrFlood, indicating transfer capabilities.

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

Onsager-Machlup Posterior Transport for Deep Gaussian Processes

arXiv:2605.23434v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Approximate inference over inducing variables is the central computational bottleneck of Deep Gaussian Processes (DGPs). Existing methods either fit an explicit density $q_\phi(\bU)$ by an ELBO (DSVI, IPVI, DDVI, DBVI) or sample by MCMC (SGHMC). We instead frame DGP inference as posterior transport: learn a deterministic sampler that maps a tractable reference measure to posterior-relevant inducing variables, regularised by a path prior derived from the Doob-bridged reference diffusion. Our realisation, OM-Path (formally FBVI-bridge-Path), uses Song's probability-flow ODE applied to DBVI's Doob-bridged forward SDE; the reference drift is closed-form from the bridge marginal coefficients (no score matching) and the path regulariser is the Onsager–Machlup action. At the finite-$\epsilon$ value used at training, the objective is the negative log unnormalised density of a tempered Doob-bridge path posterior, and Theorem 1 identifies it with the same posterior's small-noise MAP path via the Freidlin–Wentzell LDP. Two strict path-space ELBO variants on the same bridge backbone (FFJORD log-det; OM-regularised CNF) are derived as ablations. Under a matched-seed paired Wilcoxon test against DBVI on seven UCI regression benchmarks, OM-Path delivers statistically significant wins on the two largest datasets (power: $p\!=\!0.014$, NLL $\mathbf{0.012}$ matching the DSVI baseline of $0.017$; protein: $p\!=\!0.002$, RMSE $\mathbf{0.716}$ vs.\ $0.764$, NLL $\mathbf{1.086}$ vs.\ $1.149$), statistical ties on yacht / qsar, and concedes boston / energy / concrete to DBVI on small-$N$ noisy data. The strict-ELBO variants do not clear DBVI on any UCI metric: in this regime, reducing the variance of the path objective dominates exact-density tracking.