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01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-08

Daily briefing: Human embryo genomes precisely altered

作者:

The use of ‘base editing’ to precisely tweak human embryos has divided researchers. Plus, the number of lives saved by less-polluting cars in China and how to tip the world towards a sustainable future. The use of ‘base editing’ to precisely tweak human embryos has divided researchers. Plus, the number of lives saved by less-polluting cars in China and how to tip the world towards a sustainable future.

02.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-13

On the evolution of the company we keep: Implications for infectious disease modeling

by Joël Mossong Whom we meet shapes how infections spread. Where earlier focus of mathematical epidemiology was on incorporating age, more recent work has begun to reveal the importance of socioeconomic aspects for understanding and managing future epidemics. In this Perspective, Joël Mossong discusses the importance of understanding social contacts and how they have evolved for infectious disease modeling, and the need to factor in additional considerations such as ethic and socioeconomic backgrounds.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Optimal Decoding of Small Codes by Density Matrix Propagation

arXiv:2606.14455v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate and efficient decoding is a crucial component for achieving fault-tolerant quantum computing. Realistic circuit-level noise introduces temporal correlations and degeneracy, making optimal (maximum-likelihood) decoding computationally intractable in general. As a result, practical decoders rely on heuristic approximations, and it is generally difficult to quantify how suboptimal they are, as this strongly depends on the code and noise model considered. In this work, we study the accuracy of practical decoding algorithms under circuit-level noise by comparing them against a maximum likelihood decoding benchmark. Our approach propagates the density matrix through the full memory experiment and computes the optimal decoding decision for each syndrome history. We introduce pruning techniques with rigorous bounds, allowing us to access larger numbers of syndrome-extraction rounds. We apply this framework to small instances of the repetition code and a cellular automaton code, and benchmark minimum-weight perfect matching (MWPM), belief propagation with ordered statistics decoding (BP+OSD), Tesseract, and Planar decoders against optimal decoding. While standard decoders remain close to optimal for the repetition code, we find significant deviations for the cellular automaton code, with BP+OSD deteriorating already in experimentally relevant noise regimes. Moreover, the pruning method developed here highlights that, at low physical error rates, only a narrow fraction of syndrome histories contributes significantly to the logical error rate.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Benchmarking LLMs' Mathematical Reasoning with Unseen Random Variables Questions

Recent studies have raised significant concerns regarding the reliability of current mathematics benchmarks, highlighting issues such as simplistic design and potential data contamination. Consequently, developing a reliable benchmark that effectively evaluates large language models' (LLMs) genuine capabilities in mathematical reasoning remains a critical challenge. To address these concerns, we propose RV-Bench, a novel evaluation methodology for Benchmarking LLMs with Random Variables in mathematical reasoning. Specifically, we build question-generating functions to produce random variable questions (RVQs), whose background content mirrors original benchmark problems, but with randomized variable combinations, rendering them "unseen" to LLMs. Models must completely understand the inherent question pattern to correctly answer RVQs with diverse variable combinations. Thus, an LLM's genuine reasoning capability is reflected through its accuracy and robustness on RV-Bench. We conducted extensive experiments on over 30 representative LLMs across more than 1,000 RVQs. Our findings propose that LLMs exhibit a proficiency imbalance between encountered and ``unseen'' data distributions. Furthermore, RV-Bench reveals that proficiency generalization across similar mathematical reasoning tasks is limited, but we verified it can still be effectively elicited through test-time scaling.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

PEC-Home: Interpretation of Progressively Elliptical Commands in Smart Homes

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have empowered home assistants with natural language interaction capabilities. However, current assistants overlook the progressive omission that occurs in human dialogue as shared context accumulates, leading to more elliptical expressions for efficient communication. Thus, current assistants still struggle to interpret such elliptical expressions accurately, which limits their effectiveness in real-world applications. In practical smart home scenarios, assistants face two major challenges caused by elliptical commands: (1) referential ambiguity caused by different environmental expectations among multiple users; and (2) intention ambiguity resulting from user preferences that evolve over time or change with the environment. To address these challenges, we introduce PEC-Home, the first simulated home dataset specifically designed for interpreting progressively elliptical commands in smart homes. Extensive experiments on various LLMs, including GPT-4o, show that existing home assistants struggle to execute user-intended operations based solely on elliptical commands. Even when equipped with tools for storing and retrieving user dialogue history, execution accuracy remains below that achieved with complete commands.}.

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

CausalT5k: Diagnosing Refusal and Failure Modes in Trustworthy Causal Reasoning Across Causal Rungs

arXiv:2602.08939v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models increasingly produce fluent causal explanations, yet they often fail in ways aggregate accuracy cannot diagnose: confusing association with intervention, abandoning correct judgments under pressure, over-refusing valid claims, or answering when evidence is underdetermined. We introduce CTK, a diagnostic benchmark of 5,147 cases and growing, across 10 domains and all three levels of Pearl's Ladder of Causation. Unlike benchmarks that only score correctness, CTK reveals why a model failed by annotating causal rung, trap type, pressure sensitivity, refusal quality, and Utility-Safety tradeoffs. Its Sheep/Wolf taxonomy separates valid causal designs from inferential traps; paired neutral/pressure variants measure sycophantic drift through Bad Flip Rate; and Wise Refusal fields test whether a model identifies the missing information needed before endorsing a claim. CTK exposes failure modes hidden by aggregate accuracy: the Skepticism Trap, Rung Collapse under scaling, pressure-induced drift, Detection-Correction gaps, and counterfactual error modes. Rather than prescribing a correction method, it provides the diagnostic substrate for studying causal-reasoning failure profiles.

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

Direct Fisher Score Estimation for Likelihood Maximization

arXiv:2506.06542v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the problem of likelihood maximization when the likelihood function is intractable but model simulations are readily available. We propose a sequential, gradient-based optimization method that directly models the Fisher score based on a local score matching technique which uses simulations from a localized region around each parameter iterate. By employing a linear parameterization to the surrogate score model, our technique admits a closed-form, least-squares solution. This approach yields a fast, flexible, and efficient approximation to the Fisher score, effectively smoothing the likelihood objective and mitigating the challenges posed by complex likelihood landscapes. We provide theoretical guarantees for our score estimator, including bounds on the bias introduced by the smoothing. Empirical results on a range of synthetic and real-world problems demonstrate the superior performance of our method compared to existing benchmarks.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

GIST-CMTF: Goal-State Inference for Causal Minimal Tool Filtering in LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.16813v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tool-augmented LLM agents rely on runtime filtering to decide which tools should be visible at each step. Causal Minimal Tool Filtering (CMTF) reduces tool-choice confusion by exposing only the next causally necessary tool frontier, but it assumes that the user request has already been mapped to a symbolic goal state. In practice, requests such as "handle my appointment" or "take care of this email" may correspond to multiple possible goals. This creates wrong-goal execution, where an agent follows a valid causal tool path for an unintended objective. We introduce GIST-CMTF, a goal-state inference layer that predicts candidate symbolic goals over the same state-transition vocabulary used by CMTF, estimates ambiguity, and either applies CMTF or exposes clarification as a causal action that produces missing goal or state variables. We evaluate GIST-CMTF across seven model backends, six filtering methods, and 120 controlled tool-use tasks. GIST-CMTF achieves 97.0% task success, compared with 80.1% for top-goal CMTF and 82.9% for semantic-goal CMTF. It reduces wrong-goal execution from 19.4% under top-goal CMTF to 2.5%, while preserving the one-tool exposure of causal filtering and using substantially fewer tokens than all-tools exposure. These results suggest that reliable tool-augmented agents should validate goal state, not only tool relevance, before exposing external actions.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Distributional Biases in Post-Training: A Markovian Analysis of Reasoning Trajectories

arXiv:2511.07368v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Foundation models exhibit broad knowledge but limited task-specific reasoning, motivating post-training strategies such as RL with verifiable rewards (RLVR) and test-time scaling (TTS). While recent work highlights the role of exploration in improving pass@K, empirical evidence points to a paradox: RLVR and ORM/PRM typically reinforce existing paths rather than expanding the reasoning scope, raising the question of why exploration helps if no new patterns emerge. To reconcile this paradox, we adopt the perspective of Kim et al. (2025), viewing easy (e.g., simplifying a fraction) versus hard (e.g., discovering the some symmetry) reasoning steps as low versus high probability Markov transitions. In this tractable model, pretraining corresponds to tree-graph discovering, while post-training corresponds to CoT reweighting. We provably show that, both RLVR and ORM/PRM would favor heavily to several high-probability paths, and thereby forget rare-but-crucial CoTs. Building on this, we further prove that exploration strategies such as rejecting easy instances and KL regularization help preserve rare CoTs. Empirical simulations corroborate our theoretical results.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

StarOR: Synergizing Tree Search and Test-Time Reinforcement Learning for Optimization Modeling

arXiv:2606.15197v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Optimization modeling is inherently hierarchical, requiring a precise sequence of symbolic commitments. Traditional learning-based automated optimization modeling methods improve modeling policies through large-scale annotated or curated training data, but are costly to adapt to new problem distributions. Meanwhile, one-shot generation remains brittle in hierarchical modeling, where early symbolic errors can propagate into invalid formulations. Test-time scaling offers a promising alternative by enabling structural exploration with additional instance-level computation; however, existing search-based methods typically rely on a fixed policy, causing repeated rollouts to inherit similar modeling biases and providing limited credit assignment for intermediate decisions. To address these limitations, we propose StarOR, a synergistic search-and-adaptation framework that couples MCTS with Test-Time Reinforcement Learning for optimization modeling. StarOR decomposes the modeling process into four stages and updates a transient LoRA adapter via GRPO at each non-terminal node. By using MCTS-generated siblings as local comparison sets, StarOR transforms search-time exploration into instance-specific policy refinement. Moreover, an unsupervised multi-faceted reward system provides fine-grained feedback for intermediate formulation decisions without ground-truth labels. Experiments across five optimization benchmarks show that StarOR achieves state-of-the-art performance even with a 4B backbone, outperforming existing methods and the frontier LLMs.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

STAR-NT: Spatiotemporal Acceleration of Real-Time Neural Transparency Rendering

arXiv:2606.16747v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural order-independent transparency delivers high-quality rendering of overlapping transparent surfaces, but its geometry passes and network input generation remain costly, particularly on mobile and legacy hardware. We present a spatiotemporal acceleration framework that exploits spatial and temporal coherence to reduce this overhead while preserving visual quality. Spatially, we use adaptive quadtree-based screen-space subdivision to scale geometry pass resolution according to local color variance. Temporally, selected frames reuse the previous transparency result through depth-based reprojection instead of full rendering. Together, these optimizations reduce rendering cost and integrate efficiently into existing real-time rendering pipelines.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Automated Byzantine-Resilient Clustered Decentralized Federated Learning for Battery Intelligence in Connected EVs

arXiv:2605.21115v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for managing electric vehicle (EV) battery data in intelligent transportation systems (ITS), enabling privacy-preserving tasks such as anomaly detection and capacity estimation. However, most existing frameworks rely on centralized aggregation schemes, which pose critical limitations in terms of security and trust. To address these challenges, we propose ABC-DFL, an automated Byzantine-resilient clustered decentralized federated learning (C-DFL) framework for connected EVs. The proposed incentive-driven C-DFL system replaces the central server with an open-permissioned blockchain, featuring a new dynamic Quorum Byzantine Fault Tolerance (QBFT) protocol and an oracle-based aggregation layer, to enhance trust, security, and automation. At the core of ABC-DFL lies FLECA (Filtered Layered Enhanced Clustering Aggregation), a robust hierarchical aggregation protocol that mitigates Byzantine attacks by having each EV filter malicious updates using an adaptive threshold based on deviations from its reference model update. Oracle nodes, responsible for inter-group aggregation, employ robust clustering to isolate and aggregate model updates from trustworthy EV groups. Comprehensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that FLECA matches FedProx convergence under benign conditions and significantly outperforms existing defenses with attack impact scores below 0.10 in adaptive adversarial scenarios. Furthermore, several learning experiments with multitask models confirm the effectiveness and fairness of the incentive mechanism. Finally, on-chain and off-chain benchmarks validate the practicality of ABC-DFL.

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

ProPlay: Procedural World Models for Self-Evolving LLM Agents

Self-evolving agents are expected to improve through interaction without external supervision, but this remains difficult in partially observable environments where agents must explore actively, learn from limited feedback, and decide when to trust prior experience. Existing LLM-agent methods often rely on memory or planning modules, yet they rarely close the loop between them to continually refine an internal understanding of environment dynamics. We introduce ProPlay, a procedural world model that supports procedure-level preplay, where agents can rehearse future procedural paths using the learned world knowledge. Rather than representing experience as isolated rules or low-level action constraints, ProPlay abstracts successful trajectories into procedures and organizes them in a procedure graph that captures causal transitions among task stages. Each transition is associated with a reliability record embedding to estimate its task-specific contribution from past outcomes. Before each episode, ProPlay simulates future procedural trajectories over known graph structures as structured soft guidance; after execution, it refines the graph using environment feedback. Experiments on public benchmarks show that ProPlay consistently improves environment understanding and self-evolution capability over strong baselines. Our code has been released in https://github.com/antman9914/proplay.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Bridging Geographic Bias in Urban Streetscape Inference via Lifelong Learning with Visual-Semantic Pivoting

作者:

Visual perception of urban streetscapes underpins evidence-based decisions in landscape planning, public health, and place-making. Yet models trained on a few well-photographed metropolises systematically misjudge underrepresented districts, propagating geographic bias into downstream policy. We address this gap with HVSP-LL, a lifelong learning framework that couples a stratified visual-semantic pivoting module with an equity-aware rehearsal mechanism. The pivoting module organises landscape concepts along a three-tier ontology (macro structure, meso composition, micro element) and aligns image features to learnable semantic anchors at each tier, providing transferable representations that resist distributional drift. The lifelong adaptation component sequentially absorbs new urban regions while constraining inter-region perception gaps through a worst-region sample-reweighting objective and a structurally-aware exemplar buffer. We evaluate HVSP-LL on a panoramic streetscape benchmark assembled from twelve cities across four continents and seven perceptual dimensions. The framework attains 0.834 Spearman correlation on the held-out city sequence, an absolute 6.1 point improvement over the strongest continual baseline, and shrinks the inter-city perception gap to 0.094 – a 38% reduction relative to the strongest continual baseline (0.151) and a 57% reduction relative to a representative regularisation baseline (0.218). Ablations confirm that each tier of the pivoting hierarchy contributes monotonically, and the equity-aware rehearsal converts mean backward transfer from -0.038 (without retention) to +0.013, eliminating catastrophic forgetting on the held-out sequence. Our results indicate that hierarchical anchoring is a practical pathway toward geographically equitable streetscape inference at city scale.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Bridging data-driven priors via the score function for posterior sampling – Comparative review and experimental study

arXiv:2606.14800v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper reviews how a diverse set of popular data-driven priors commonly used in Bayesian inverse problems can be unified through their respective score functions. By framing these priors under this common perspective, we show that they can benefit from their straightfoward and effective integration into a recently proposed sampling algorithm. The applicability of this common framework is illustrated by considering several data-driven priors, namely regularization-by-denoising, normalizing flow-based priors, score-based generative models, and convex-ridge regularizers. For these four particular priors, the performance of the method is evaluated when conducting image inpainting and single image super-resolution. These results, as well as those obtained when restoring real images acquired in a geological context, demonstrate the efficiency of the method. This unified framework proves versatile enough to handle any posterior distribution defined by a broad class of score function-based priors, beyond the specific cases considered in this paper.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Can Vision-Language Models See the Vital Signs? Benchmarking and Fine-Tuning for Intraoperative Monitor Reading

Background Vital-sign deterioration is a leading contributor to preventable perioperative death, yet manual monitor reading is intermittent, error-prone, and subject to alarm fatigue. Automating this perceptual step could enable continuous surveillance, but existing solutions depend on device-specific hardware integration or cloud-hosted vision-language models (VLMs), which raise privacy, cost, and connectivity barriers in resource-limited healthcare facilities. Methods We constructed a benchmark of 200 in-the-wild intraoperative monitor photographs (spanning multiple vendors, angles, and illumination conditions) annotated for eight vital-sign parameters: heart rate, SpO2, ETCO2, respiratory rate, systolic/diastolic/mean blood pressure, and temperature. We evaluated an optical character recognition (OCR)-based pipeline, nine instruction-tuned VLMs (four commercial, five open-weight ranging from [≤]4B to 31B parameters) under two prompting regimes, and a compact open model (Qwen3.5-9B) adapted via low-rank fine-tuning (LoRA, 0.46% of parameters updated). Results Under a domain-aware prompt, frontier VLMs reached 0.98-0.997 exact-match accuracy zero-shot, whereas the OCR pipeline and [≤]4B model scored approximately 0.20 lower, defining a 9B-class usable floor. LoRA fine-tuning Qwen3.5-9B on 80-120 images raised accuracy from 0.953 to 0.994 (statistically indistinguishable from the best commercial model) and reduced the critical-error rate fivefold (0.0313 [->] 0.0063). Ablations showed that performance saturated at 80 training images and rank-8 adapters. Conclusion Monitor reading is a solved perception problem for VLMs above the 9B scale. A lightweight fine-tuned open model achieves frontier accuracy while running entirely on local hardware, preserving data privacy, offline capability, and near-zero marginal cost. Residual errors stem from blood-pressure source ambiguity and are addressable with explicit disambiguation logic.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

HyMaTE: A Hybrid Mamba and Transformer Model for EHR Representation Learning

arXiv:2509.24118v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Electronic health Records (EHRs) have become a cornerstone in modern-day healthcare. They are a crucial part for analyzing the progression of patient health; however, their complexity, characterized by long, multivariate sequences, sparsity, and missing values poses significant challenges in traditional deep learning modeling. While Transformer-based models have demonstrated success in modeling EHR data and predicting clinical outcomes, their quadratic computational complexity and limited context length hinder their efficiency and practical applications. On the other hand, State Space Models (SSMs) like Mamba present a promising alternative offering linear-time sequence modeling and improved efficiency for handling long sequences, but focus mostly on mixing sequence-level information rather than channel-level data. To overcome these challenges, we propose HyMaTE (A Hybrid Mamba and Transformer Model for EHR Representation Learning), a novel hybrid model tailored for representing longitudinal data, combining the strengths of SSMs with advanced attention mechanisms. By testing the model on predictive tasks on multiple clinical datasets, we demonstrate HyMaTE's ability to capture an effective, richer, and more nuanced unified representation of EHR data. Additionally, the interpretability of the outcomes achieved by self-attention illustrates the effectiveness of our model as a scalable and generalizable solution for real-world healthcare applications. Codes are available at: https://github.com/healthylaife/HyMaTE.

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

Insulin4RL: Real-Time Insulin Management in the Intensive Care Unit for Offline Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.19481v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning (ORL) offers the potential to improve the quality of clinical decision-making using historical electronic health record (EHR) data. Current training and evaluative practices in this field rely heavily on EHR datasets that have been temporally discretised into fixed, regular time intervals. Discretisation creates fictional representations of complex clinical scenarios and compromises the generalisability of retrospective model evaluations. In this paper, we introduce Insulin4RL, a healthcare ORL dataset featuring naturally irregular inputs and actions from real clinical trajectories. Derived from MIMIC-IV, Insulin4RL comprises over 375,000 labelled decisions across 12,209 patients requiring insulin infusion titration in the Intensive Care Unit. The dataset can thus be used for research into ORL model performance under realistic clinical sampling assumptions. We provide a description of the dataset's structure and characteristics, baseline performance metrics using model-free offline reinforcement learning, and a standardised evaluation protocol using fitted Q-evaluation. We conclude with suggested areas for future research that could be addressed using this resource.

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

SMT-AD: a scalable quantum-inspired anomaly detection approach

arXiv:2604.06265v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum-inspired tensor networks algorithms have shown to be effective and efficient models for machine learning tasks, including anomaly detection. Here, we propose a highly parallelizable quantum-inspired approach which we call SMT-AD from Superposition of Multiresolution Tensors for Anomaly Detection. It is based upon the superposition of bond-dimension-1 matrix product operators to transform the input data with Fourier-assisted feature embedding, where the number of learnable parameters grows linearly with feature size, embedding resolutions, and the number of additional components in the matrix product operators structure. We demonstrate successful anomaly detection when applied to standard datasets, including credit card transactions, and find that, even with minimal configurations, it achieves competitive performance against established anomaly detection baselines. Furthermore, it provides a straightforward way to reduce the weight of the model and even improve the performance by highlighting the most relevant input features.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Reinforcement Learning for Neural Model Editing

作者:

Editing pretrained neural networks requires specialized algorithms tailored to specific objectives. Designing such algorithms is often time-consuming and demands significant effort. We present an exploratory framework that formulates neural model editing as a reinforcement learning problem, where agents modify models using reward feedback. We introduce two environments: MaskWorld, where agents scale weights multiplicatively, and ShiftWorld, where agents apply additive weight updates. The reward function combines a utility-preservation objective with a task-specific editing objective, enabling agents to learn targeted modifications while maintaining overall model performance. We evaluate the framework on bias mitigation in text classification and machine unlearning in image classification, both of which traditionally rely on specialized algorithms. Our results show that the learned policies reduce forget set accuracy to nearly 0% while preserving over 90% retain set accuracy on the unlearning task. In the bias mitigation setting, the learned policies improve bias-related performance by more than 5% while maintaining general classification utility. Our findings show that neural model editing can be cast as a reinforcement learning problem, allowing editing policies to be learned from reward feedback rather than manually engineered for each task.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

AIMER: Calibration-Free Task-Agnostic MoE Expert Pruning

arXiv:2603.18492v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models increase parameter capacity without proportional per-token computation, yet deployment still requires storing the full expert pool, making expert pruning important for reducing memory and serving overhead. Existing task-agnostic expert-pruning methods are typically calibration-dependent: they estimate expert importance from routing or activation statistics on a calibration set, making pruning decisions sensitive to calibration-data variation while introducing substantial preprocessing cost. We propose AIMER (Absolute mean over root mean square IMportance for Expert Ranking), a simple calibration-free criterion that identifies more distinct experts by capturing the concentration pattern of expert weights, making it well suited for task-agnostic expert pruning. Across 7B to 47B MoE language models with distinct architectures and 16 diverse benchmarks, AIMER consistently delivers stronger capability balance across diverse tasks than existing calibration-free methods. Surprisingly, AIMER also achieves better balance than strong calibration-based expert-pruning baselines calibrated on the widely used task-agnostic C4 corpus, while requiring only 0.22–2.06 seconds to score all experts.

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

SierpinskiCam: Camera-Controlled Video Retaking with Sierpinski Triangle Pattern Cues

Generating novel renderings of a scene along user-defined camera trajectories from a single monocular video, dubbed video retaking, is a compelling but difficult problem in content creation and visual effects. Existing geometry-guided approaches reconstruct a 4D representation from the source video and render it along the target trajectory to condition video diffusion models. However, this guidance degrades as the target camera departs from the source trajectory, leaving newly revealed regions sparse or entirely missing. We propose SierpinskiCam, which addresses this limitation by augmenting geometry-based guidance with Sierpinski dome texture cues that contains rich trackable features even under large viewpoint changes. We further introduce a reference video conditioning mechanism that appends source-video tokens to the target-token sequence and separates the two streams with negative RoPE indices, enabling appearance grounding without architectural modification or per-video adaptation. Extensive experiments show that SierpinskiCam achieves significant gains in camera controllability, geometric consistency, and video quality across diverse and challenging retaking scenarios. Project page: https://hyelinnam.github.io/SierpinskiCam/.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Optimizing Lithium Production Decisions under Geological, Demand, and Pricing Uncertainties: A POMDP Framework for Multi-Objective Decision Making

arXiv:2606.18598v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Decision making in lithium production is challenging, whether from an investor's perspective or a strategic production standpoint. Determining which mines to open and when to open them involves not only geological and price uncertainties, but also complexities around the choice of extraction method, from direct lithium extraction to hard rock mining. Prior work explored models of this problem and different methods to optimize mining decisions; these models did not account for uncertainty in pricing, uncertainty in demand, or different mining technologies to extract lithium. Incorporating different pricing models and extraction technology into these models enables more robust strategies for determining not only when and where to open a mine, but also which method of production to pursue. We frame the problem as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) and solve using belief state planning methods to get optimal decision making. In our study, we show that POMDP solvers outperform human inspired heuristics by dynamically adapting to shifting lithium price regimes (static, linear, exponential, and stochastic) through belief state planning and explicit uncertainty management. By optimally sequencing exploration, production, and technology choice, the framework achieves higher demand fulfillment and more balanced economic environmental outcomes over the projects lifetime in all different pricing and deposit scenarios.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

From Memorization to Parameter Interference: How Overtraining Experts Harms Model Merging

arXiv:2506.14126v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern deep learning is increasingly characterized by the use of open-weight foundation models that can be fine-tuned on specialized datasets. This has led to a proliferation of expert models and adapters, often shared via platforms like HuggingFace and AdapterHub. Model merging has recently emerged as an effective way to leverage these existing resources, enabling the composition of capabilities from different model checkpoints. A natural pipeline has thus formed to harness the benefits of transfer learning and amortize sunk training costs: models are pre-trained on general data, fine-tuned on specific tasks, and then multiple checkpoints are merged to obtain a more capable model. A prevailing assumption is that improvements at one stage of this pipeline propagate downstream, leading to gains at subsequent steps. In this work, we challenge that assumption by examining how expert fine-tuning affects model merging. We show that long fine-tuning of experts that optimizes for their individual performance leads to degraded merging performance across vision and language modalities, multiple model scales, and both fully fine-tuned and LoRA-adapted models. We trace this degradation to the memorization of a small set of difficult examples that dominate late fine-tuning steps. This causes negative parameter interference and encodes knowledge that is forgotten during merging. Finally, we demonstrate that task-dependent aggressive early stopping strategies can significantly improve model merging performance.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Timing of S. aureus-related mortality in a large randomized clinical trial: Implications for future study design

Background: Longer follow-up periods in clinical trials for S. aureus bacteremia (SAB) may capture unrelated deaths, adding random noise that risks biasing trial results towards the null. Objective: To evaluate the timing and infection-relatedness of deaths within a large SAB clinical trial platform. Design: Blinded duplicate adjudication of trial deaths using a modified 7-point Likert-Scale. A third reviewer settled disagreements. Setting: 37 Canadian hospitals participating in the S. aureus Network Adaptive Platform (SNAP) Trial. Participants: 1515 adult patients recruited to SNAP between February 2022 and May 2026. Measurements: Timing and relatedness of 90-day deaths categorized as at least possibly SAB-related not likely to be SAB-related. Optimal follow-up cut-off was determined using Youden's index and graphically. Results: 247 deaths occurred; 97 (39.3%) were adjudicated as at least possibly SAB-related and 150 (60.7%) as not likely related. For probably/definitely related deaths, interrater agreement was 85.0% (Gwet's AC 0.73, substantial); for at least possibly related, it was 77.3% (Gwet's AC 0.55, moderate). Median survival was significantly shorter for SAB-related deaths (12 vs. 30.5 days; difference: 19 days earlier, 95% CI: 12-26, p