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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Wild3R: Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting from Unconstrained Sparse Photo Collection

Feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) removes the need for time-consuming per-scene optimization required by traditional 3DGS. However, existing feed-forward approaches struggle with real-world photo collections that include diverse lighting conditions and transient objects. In this paper, we present Wild3R, a feed-forward approach for unconstrained sparse photo collections. The main bottleneck is the lack of training data that provides multiple viewpoints, a variety of illuminations, and transient variations necessary for learning robust scene representations. To address this, we introduce the WildCity dataset, which comprises 200 scenes, 170 lighting conditions, and transient objects, resulting in 337,500 images in total. By leveraging the dataset, our model learns appearance consistency across viewpoints conditioned on reference views, while removing transient content. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing feed-forward approaches and achieves results competitive with prior per-scene optimization-based methods.

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

X-Tokenizer: A Multimodal Action Tokenizer for Vision-Language-Action Pretraining

Modern Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models must bridge pretrained vision-language reasoning and precise continuous robot control. Existing action tokenizers discretize actions primarily for reconstruction, producing codes that preserve motion geometry but provide only weak semantic supervision to the backbone. We therefore formulate action tokenization not as mere compression, but as semantic interface learning between multimodal reasoning and executable control. To this end, we introduce X-Tokenizer, a lightweight encoder-Semantic Residual Quantization (SRQ)-decoder architecture that provides a shared action interface across diverse robotic arm embodiments. Its key component, SRQ, imposes an asymmetric structure on residual vector quantization: the first level is trained with Masked Action Modeling (MAM) to form a discrete action language that captures coarse motion intent, while deeper levels remain reconstruction-oriented residuals that preserve fine-grained details. To further align action tokens with multimodal semantics, X-Tokenizer is pretrained with contrastive alignment to the representation space of a pretrained foundation model and with next-frame vision-language feature prediction. Pretrained on 2.4M trajectories (2.0B action frames), a single frozen X-Tokenizer plugs into a mixed discrete-continuous VLA as a representation-shaping supervision signal. X-Tokenizer achieves top real-world aggregate and strong RoboTwin 2.0 simulation results. Outperforming FAST in multimodal grounding (+13.5%) and long-horizon tasks (+8.25), it shows that action tokenizers serve as semantic interfaces for VLA pretraining beyond mere action compression.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Stubborn: A Streamlined and Unified Reinforcement Learning Framework for Robust Motion Tracking and Fall Recovery for Humanoids

arXiv:2606.12814v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent reinforcement learning approaches have shown great promise in improving humanoid motion tracking performance and achieving fall recovery under disturbances. However, most existing works treat motion tracking and fall recovery as different tasks and require multi-stage training with specialized recovery rewards and/or separate recovery policies. Moreover, existing reinforcement learning-based methods often terminate training episodes immediately after severe tracking failures, limiting recovery-oriented exploration in unstable or fallen states. To address the above issues, we propose Stubborn, a streamlined and unified reinforcement learning framework to achieve robust humanoid motion tracking and fall recovery. Specifically, Stubborn uses an asymmetric Actor-Critic architecture and consists of three major components. First, a yaw-aligned tracking representation is adopted to reduce sensitivity to global drift and heading disturbances while preserving gravity-related balance information. Second, we introduce a Bernoulli-based probabilistic termination mechanism that enables the policy to encourage exploration of fall-recovery behaviors under varying failure modes. Third, we propose a probabilistic termination and tracking-error-driven strategy that dynamically reshapes the sampling distribution based on tracking performance, increasing the training efficiency for difficult motion segments and unstable states. Extensive comparisons with SOTA methods and ablation studies show that Stubborn achieved competitive performance, and the proposed probabilistic termination mechanism and adaptive sampling strategy contributed to the performance and robustness gains. For real-world demonstrations, please refer to https://aislab-sustech.github.io/Stubborn/.

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

BALTO: Balanced Token-Level Policy Optimization for Hallucination Mitigation

Hallucinations remain a major obstacle to deploying large language models (LLMs) in knowledge-intensive settings, where generated responses must be faithfully grounded in provided evidence. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising direction for hallucination mitigation, but response-level faithfulness rewards suffer from a granularity mismatch: localized hallucinations can cause supported content to receive spurious penalties. Although recent work introduces fine-grained feedback such as claim-level verification and token-level rewards, unbalanced credit assignment can still induce length, verbosity, or optimization-noise biases. We propose BALTO, a Balanced Token-level Policy Optimization framework for hallucination mitigation. BALTO extracts checkable factual claims, verifies them against the reference context, and projects claim-level judgments to token-level labels. A balanced token-level credit assignment mechanism is introduced into the framework. This design redistributes probability mass from unsupported content toward faithful content, rather than suppressing the entire response. We systematically analyze the limitations of response-level rewards from a theoretical standpoint, and prove BALTO's advantages in training stability and optimization efficiency for hallucination mitigation. Experiments on ConFiQA, RAGTruth, and FinLLM-Eval show that BALTO achieves the highest faithfulness across all six model–benchmark settings and consistently outperforms existing post-training baselines in Q-Score, demonstrating a stronger faithfulness–informativeness trade-off.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Energy Use of AI Inference, Efficiency Pathways, and Test-Time Scaling

arXiv:2509.20241v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As AI inference scales to billions of queries, estimates of per-query energy use are increasingly important for capacity planning, efficiency interventions, and policy. Yet many public estimates assume non-production settings, leading to systematic overestimation. We introduce a bottom-up framework estimating inference energy from token throughput, node power, and overhead under large-scale deployment assumptions. For frontier-scale models (>200B parameters) on H100 nodes, we estimate a median energy of 0.31 Wh/query (IQR 0.16-0.60), indicating widely cited estimates are overstated by 4-20x. In test-time scaling scenarios 15x longer than typical queries, the median energy rises 13x to 3.91 Wh (IQR 2.15-7.05). Across models, serving systems, and hardware, we estimate 8-20x line-of-sight energy reductions. At datacenter scale, serving 1 billion queries/day requires 0.7 GWh; if 10% are long queries, demand rises to 1.7 GWh/day. With efficiency interventions, it falls to 0.8 GWh/day, mitigating the energy impact of test-time scaling.

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

HyperTool: Beyond Step-Wise Tool Calls for Tool-Augmented Agents

Tool-augmented LLM agents commonly rely on step-wise atomic tool calls, where each invocation, observation, and value transfer is exposed in the main reasoning trace. This creates an execution-granularity mismatch: locally deterministic tool workflows are unfolded into repeated model-visible decisions, consuming context and forcing the model to manage low-level dataflow in the trace. We introduce HyperTool, a unified executable MCP-style tool interface that changes the model-visible unit of tool execution. A model invokes HyperTool with a code block that can call existing tools through their original schemas, manipulate returned values, and pass intermediate results locally, folding deterministic tool subroutines into a single outer call. To train models to use this interface, we synthesize HyperTool-format trajectories from cross-tool compositional tasks and verify them in real MCP environments. On MCP-Universe, HyperTool improves average accuracy from 15.69\% to 35.29\% on Qwen3-32B and from 9.93\% to 33.33\% on Qwen3-8B, and surpass GPT-OSS and Kimi-k2.5 on average accuracy, showing that our HyperTool can substantially improve multi-step tool use.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Augmenting Dysarthric Speech Severity Assessment with MOS Supervision

arXiv:2606.18645v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dysarthria is a speech disorder marked by reduced intelligibility and communicative effectiveness. Automatic utterance-level assessment of dysarthric speech can support scalable speech monitoring and therapy-related analysis. Yet training such systems is bottlenecked by the scarcity of clinically annotated dysarthric speech. This work proposes to augment dysarthric speech assessment using data from speech synthesis evaluations, specifically human-annotated utterances with Mean Opinion Score (MOS) labels from the QualiSpeech corpus. Experiments show that fine-tuning on speech synthesis assessment data consistently improves performance on both intelligibility and naturalness prediction, while joint training yields gains primarily on naturalness. These results suggest that synthesis artifacts and dysarthric speech share perceptual commonalities, and speech synthesis evaluation corpora offer a practical augmentation source that reduces reliance on scarce clinical annotations.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Ultra-Low-Rate Information Reconciliation: Repetition Coding or Dedicated Codes?

arXiv:2606.23726v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We compare repetition-based ultra-low-rate information reconciliation with dedicated ultra-low-rate codes for CV-QKD. Repetition coding offers a favorable performance-complexity trade-off, incurring only a moderate error-rate penalty while reducing decoding complexity by $2\times$, making it attractive for implementation-constrained systems.

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

A specialized reasoning large language model for accelerating rare disease diagnosis: a randomized AI physician assistance trial

Rare diseases affect millions of individuals worldwide, yet timely diagnosis remains a major public health challenge due to scarcity of specialized clinical expertise. While large language models (LLMs) show promise to support rare disease diagnosis, current models are constrained by insufficient clinical deployability, limited clinically grounded evidence, and scarcity of training data. Here we present RaDaR (Rare Disease navigatoR), an open-source, compact reasoning LLM (32B parameters) for rare disease diagnosis. RaDaR was trained with 49,170 publicly available free-text cases and 104,666 synthetic cases with reasoning-enhanced training. RaDaR showed the strongest performance among evaluated open-source models, including the 671B DeepSeek-R1, across public benchmarks and four external validation centers. In a retrospective cohort, RaDaR prioritized the final diagnosis before documented clinical suspicion in 61.06 percent of cases, corresponding to a potential lead time of 1.87 months and 50.18 percent of the within-center interval. In a randomized physician-assistance trial, RaDaR assistance improved physicians' rare-disease diagnostic accuracy by 21.44 percentage points compared with internet search alone. Synthetic-data ablations suggested that phenotype-anchored narratives provide useful training signal for long-tail rare diseases, with a monotonic scaling trend within the tested data range. Together, RaDaR and its development and validation framework provide a deployable rare-disease reasoning model and a reproducible development framework for diagnostic AI under data scarcity.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Weisfeiler Lehman Test on Combinatorial Complexes: Generalized Expressive Power of Topological Neural Networks

arXiv:2605.00725v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Topological neural networks have emerged as effective tools for modeling higher-order relational structures beyond pairwise graphs, including hypergraphs, simplicial complexes, and cell complexes. However, existing Weisfeiler-Leman type expressivity analyses are typically developed on different structural domains and rely on domain-specific neighborhood systems, making their expressive powers difficult to compare within a common formalism. In this paper, we introduce the Combinatorial Complex Weisfeiler-Leman (CCWL) framework, a unified expressive power refinement defined on combinatorial complexes. By exploiting the ability of combinatorial complexes to represent both set-type relations and part-whole hierarchies, CCWL performs topological color refinement through four structural neighborhoods: boundary, co-boundary, lower adjacency, and upper adjacency. We show that, under specified lifting maps, CCWL can simulate several domain-specific WL-type refinements, thereby providing a common theoretical baseline for analyzing topological message passing. We further study the neighborhood sufficiency problem and prove that, under explicit coverage conditions, a reduced refinement using only lower- and upper-adjacent bridge information preserves the distinguishing power of the full four-neighborhood CCWL refinement. Guided by this theoretical result, we instantiate the reduced refinement as the Combinatorial Complex Isomorphism Network (CCIN). Experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that CCIN achieves competitive performance against representative graph and topological neural network baselines. Ablation studies and resource-efficiency analyses further support the effectiveness of the proposed lower/upper-neighborhood design.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

The most discriminable quantum states in the multicopy regime

arXiv:2604.26927v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This work investigates which sets of quantum states give rise to the highest achievable success probability in minimum-error state discrimination if multiple copies of the unknown state are given. Specifically, we consider uniformly distributed ensembles of the form $\left\{\frac{1}{N},\rho_i^{\otimes k}\right\}_{i=1}^N$, where $N$ states in dimension $d$ are provided in $k$ identical copies, and derive universal limits in this scenario. For pure state ensembles, we prove that whenever $N$ is large enough to support a state $k$-design, these designs will exactly give rise to the maximally discriminable sets. We further show that when $N$ exceeds the size required for a $k$-design, mixed states can outperform all pure state ensembles. We then recognise that the problem of most discriminable classical states in the multi-copy regime is in one-to-one correspondence to the concept of the multiplicative Bayes capacity of independent uses of classical channels, a concept that emerges naturally in the context of classical information leakage. This connection allows us to completely solve the classical analogue of our problem when $N\geq \binom{d + k - 1}{k}$, and to prove that quantum systems offer a quadratic advantage (in number of copies $k$) over classical ones. Then, we prove that this classical over quantum advantage is strongly reduced when one is restricted to real quantum states, more precisely, when $N \geq k + 1$, pure real qubits only offer a constant advantage over classical bits. Finally, we introduce computational techniques to find sets of most discriminable ensembles and to obtain rigorous universal upper bounds on the maximal success probability for multi-copy state discrimination in cases that are analytically intractable.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Sustainability assessment using multimodal AI agents

arXiv:2507.17012v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reducing the rapidly growing environmental impact of the computing industry requires assessing the emissions of electronics at scale. However, a traditional life cycle assessment (LCA) of an electronic device, which maps materials and processes to environmental impacts, often requires proprietary or unavailable data. Here, we reimagine conventional sustainability assessment by introducing a multimodal multi-agent AI system that emulates the collaborative process between LCA professionals and stakeholders (such as product managers and engineers) to automatically estimate the carbon footprint of electronic devices. The agents iteratively construct a complete life-cycle inventory by leveraging a structured data abstraction and software tools that mine information from the public internet, including repair communities and government regulatory databases. This reduces data gaps and data collection from weeks or months of expert time to under one minute. The system can calculate carbon footprint within 19% of expert LCAs with zero proprietary data (typical of the variation between human LCAs). We also show that by encoding domain-specific knowledge, environmental impact estimation can be reframed as a data-driven prediction task, in which both unknown products and emission factors are represented as weighted combinations of similar ones with known emissions.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

What Is the Optimal Timing and Frequency of Workload-Matched Postprandial Physical Activity Breaks? A Randomized Controlled Crossover Study of Cardiometabolic and Cognitive Responses During Sedentary Behavior

Purpose Postprandial sedentary behavior is associated with negative health effects and constitutes a large part of daily life in modern society. This study investigated how the timing of physical activity after eating influences glucose levels, cerebral and muscle oxygenation, cognitive performance, and well-being during subsequent sitting. Methods In a four-armed randomized crossover trial, healthy adults consumed four standardized meals separated by 48-hour washout periods. Each meal was followed by 2 hours of sitting combined, in random order, with one of four interventions: (1) sitting only, (2) 15 minutes of moderate intensity cycling immediately after eating, (3) 15 minutes of cycling 20 minutes after eating, or (4) three workload-matched five-minute cycling bouts during sitting. Interstitial glucose (continuous glucose monitoring), cerebral and muscle oxygenation (Functional near infrared spectroscopy), cognitive performance (Stroop test), heart rate, blood pressure, and subjective ratings were assessed every 30 minutes. Data were analyzed using repeated-measures ANOVA. Results Twenty participants (mean age 27.1{+/-}10.3 years, 12 females) completed the study. Cycling immediately after eating reduced mean glucose levels during postprandial sitting, while both 15-minute cycling bouts increased cerebral oxygenation. All active conditions enhanced muscle oxygenation. Heart rate and arousal increased with delayed cycling and active breaks. No effects were observed for blood pressure, cognitive performance, focus, or well-being. Conclusion A short bout of physical activity immediately after eating reduces postprandial hyperglycemia and improves brain oxygenation during sitting, whereas delayed activity and brief breaks increase physiological activation without cognitive or perceptual benefits.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

No-Free-Fairness: Fundamental Limits and Trade-offs in Learning Systems

作者:

arXiv:2606.17810v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper, we establish a set of theoretical impossibility results, termed the No-Free-Fairness theorems, that identify three fundamental sources of disparity in learning systems. First, we show that when a task exhibits irreducible cost on a subgroup, any decision rule must trade off overall performance with disparity, yielding an inherent fairness–cost frontier. Second, we prove that even in ideal, noise-free settings where a perfectly fair and accurate solution exists, finite-sample learning alone induces nontrivial subgroup disparity, ruling out distribution-free fairness guarantees. More seriously, enforcing strict relative fairness creates a statistical bottleneck: achieving low cost may require exponentially many samples. Third, we show that limitations of the model class can independently induce disparity: if the model cannot represent accurate solutions for a subgroup, fairness remains unattainable regardless of data or training procedure. Overall, these results demonstrate that unfairness is not solely a consequence of biased data or suboptimal optimization, but arises from the intrinsic structure of decision problems, the constraints of finite data, and the expressivity of models. Our framework applies broadly beyond standard supervised learning, and suggests that achieving fairness requires explicit trade-offs and should be treated as a core design consideration.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Conversational Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Precision Oncology Reveals Context-Specific TGFβ and JAK/STAT Alterations in Pancreatic Cancer

Background: Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is characterized by extensive molecular complexity, profound stromal remodeling, and limited responsiveness to systemic therapies. Although gemcitabine-based regimens remain widely utilized, the molecular pathways that influence treatment-associated biological variation are incompletely understood. The TGF{beta} and JAK/STAT signaling networks are recognized regulators of tumor progression, immune modulation, and therapeutic resistance; however, their genomic architecture in clinically stratified PDAC populations remains poorly defined. Methods: We employed a conversational artificial intelligence-driven analytical framework to investigate TGF{beta} and JAK/STAT pathway alterations in a cohort of 184 PDAC patients. Clinical and molecular data were integrated to generate age- and treatment-stratified cohorts, enabling pathway-level and gene-level analyses according to gemcitabine exposure. Findings generated through AI-assisted interrogation were subsequently evaluated using conventional statistical approaches. Results: TGF{beta} pathway alterations were identified in approximately one-quarter to one-third of tumors across clinical subgroups and demonstrated relatively stable frequencies regardless of age at diagnosis or gemcitabine treatment status. Gene-level analyses revealed that pathway disruption was predominantly driven by recurrent alterations in SMAD4, with additional low-frequency events involving TGFBR1 and TGFBR2. Notably, TGFBR2 mutations were significantly more frequent among late-onset PDAC patients receiving gemcitabine compared with untreated late-onset patients (8.8% vs. 1.4%; p = 0.04), suggesting a potential treatment-associated enrichment. In contrast, JAK/STAT pathway alterations were rare throughout the cohort, with only isolated mutations observed in pathway components including JAK1, JAK2, JAK3, STAT1, STAT3, and related regulatory genes. No significant differences in JAK/STAT alteration frequencies were identified according to age or treatment exposure. Conclusions: TGF{beta} and JAK/STAT pathways exhibit distinct genomic architectures in PDAC. TGF{beta} pathway disruption represents a recurrent feature of disease biology, largely driven by SMAD4 alterations, while TGFBR2 enrichment in gemcitabine-treated late-onset tumors suggests a potential context-specific association worthy of further investigation. Conversely, genomic alterations within the JAK/STAT pathway are uncommon, indicating that pathway activity may be regulated predominantly through non-genomic mechanisms. These findings demonstrate the utility of conversational artificial intelligence agents for rapid, scalable, and clinically contextualized pathway interrogation and support future studies integrating multi-omic data to refine precision medicine strategies in PDAC.

16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Fast Human Attention Prediction for Fixation-guided Active Perception in Autonomous Navigation

Human visual attention relies on structured scanpaths to efficiently process scenes, yet instilling this behavior into robot autonomy is in its infancy and hindered by the high,computational costs of existing predictive models. To address this, we introduce GazeLNN, a computationally lightweight,scanpath prediction model that leverages Liquid Neural Networks as its recurrent engine and employs MobileNetV3 for feature extraction. Operating auto-regressively, the architecture predicts sequential fixation heatmaps conditioned on the current visual stimulus and fixation history. Despite requiring only 0.61 GFLOPs, GazeLNN achieves state-of-the-art performance on the MIT Low Resolution dataset achieving 0.47 ScanMatch score. It outperforms existing recurrent baselines across diverse evaluation metrics, while reducing computational costs by 99.40% and accelerating inference by up to six times. To investigate the role of human attention modeling in robot autonomy and demonstrate the practical utility of this highly efficient architecture, we integrate GazeLNN into an active camera-robot control policy trained via Reinforcement Learning. This integration enables human-fixation-guided perception during autonomous navigation, validated through successful real-world deployments on an aerial robot.

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

CATCH-ME if you RAG: a dataset of Contextually Annotated multi-Turn Counterspeech against Hate and Misinformation Exchanges

Online hate speech and misinformation frequently overlap, yet NLP research has mainly treated them in isolation. While LLMs represent a scalable solution for assisting humans in the generation of counterspeech for both threats, zero-shot models frequently generate repetitive and vague responses, underscoring the need for high-quality examples to steer model generation. However, existing counterspeech datasets against the overlap of hate and misinformation are scarce and limited to single-turn English dialogues, while real-life interactions span across multiple turns and languages. To bridge this gap, we introduce the first large-scale, expert-curated, multilingual dataset of dialogues tackling the intersection of hate and misinformation. To ensure factual grounding, the dialogues are also anchored in verified external knowledge (i.e., fact-checking articles and NGO reports) and include document- and chunk-level span annotations, making it directly applicable for RAG systems. Covering five languages and targeting hate directed at seven marginalized groups, this novel resource enables the training and evaluation of more persuasive, factually grounded counterspeech models.

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

Self-Adaptive Scale Handling for Forecasting Time Series with Scale Heterogeneity

arXiv:2606.20010v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current time series forecasting (TSF) research predominantly focuses on scale-homogeneous data, where different time series share similar numerical magnitude ranges. However, in real-world industrial scenarios such as financial product sales, different time series often differ by orders of magnitude (scale heterogeneity). Since these series share similar temporal patterns, joint modeling is desirable for better data utilization, yet existing scaling methods either compress low-scale signals (global normalization) or destroy semantic discriminability and amplify inverse-scaling errors (window-based scaling). This paper proposes a self-Adaptive Scale-handling (AS) module that learns adaptive scale factors tailored to each input, preserving semantic discriminability while reducing inverse-scaling errors. AS consists of Scale Calibrating (SC), which calibrates prior mean scaling factors through neural networks, and Scaling Selection (SS), which decides whether to apply calibration or retain the original factor, avoiding over-calibration. Experiments on real-world fund sales datasets from Ant Fortune and Alipay show that AS seamlessly integrates into popular TSF models and consistently improves their performance. The code and dataset are available at the link https://github.com/Meteor-Stars/ASTSF.

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

Weight-Space Geometry of Offline Reasoning Training

arXiv:2606.23740v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Offline reinforcement-learning losses (RFT, RIFT, DFT, Offline GRPO, DPO) are widely used to distill reasoning from large teachers into smaller students, and are typically compared on downstream accuracy alone. We ask whether they are mechanistically distinct or converge to a similar weight update. Training six methods (SFT, RFT, DFT, RIFT, Offline GRPO, DPO) on identical math rollouts from a single base model (Qwen3-4B) with attention-only LoRA, we analyze the resulting deltas via cosine similarity, principal-angle subspace analysis, linear mode connectivity, and CKA. We observe: (i) SFT, RFT, and RIFT have nearly colinear weight deltas (cosine >= 0.97, top-1 principal angle ~7 deg median over 144 modules) and comparable GSM8K accuracy (87-88%, n=1319; pairwise McNemar p >= 0.15); (ii) DFT diverges further in direction than any reward-weighted method despite using the same data; (iii) Offline GRPO adds a substantial component orthogonal to the SFT direction (~67% globally, up to ~86% in late layers) while staying in the SFT loss basin; (iv) DPO sits in a near-orthogonal subspace, shows a mode-connectivity barrier, and collapses late-layer CKA to ~0.46. DPO also reaches the highest accuracy in our protocol on both GSM8K (93.5%, McNemar p < 10^-9 vs. each other method) and AIME26 (30.0% vs. 3.3-10.0%); its training uses a 10x smaller learning rate than the others (the standard convention), so the update-norm and accuracy gaps reflect loss-function and optimizer choices jointly, and a learning-rate-matched DPO comparison is left for future work.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Association of Digoxin Use at Norwood Discharge with Fontan Completion: A Study from the Pediatric Heart Network Public Dataset

Background: Digoxin use after the Norwood procedure has been associated with improved interstage survival in hypoplastic left heart syndrome and related conditions. Whether this benefit translates into improved longer-term outcomes through staged palliation remains unknown. We aimed to determine the association of digoxin use at Norwood discharge with transplant-free survival and Fontan completion. Methods: We conducted a retrospective cohort study using the Pediatric Heart Network (PHN) Single Ventricle Reconstruction trial public dataset, including 549 infants enrolled at 15 North American centers between 2005 and 2008. Competing risk analysis was used to evaluate Fontan completion and Cox regression to assess death or transplantation within 6 years after the Norwood procedure. Mixed-effects models compared pre-Fontan hemodynamic and echocardiographic right ventricular indices between patients treated with and without digoxin after accounting for center clustering and adjustment for sex, shunt type, heart failure medications at Norwood discharge, and census block poverty level. Results: The 6-year cumulative incidence of Fontan completion was higher among patients discharged on digoxin than among those not receiving digoxin (82% vs 71%; p = 0.013). Competing-risk analysis accounting for death and transplant demonstrated a greater likelihood of Fontan completion among digoxin users (aHR 1.31; 95%CI 1.09-1.58; p = 0.005), without significant difference in the hazard of death or transplant (aHR 0.78; 95%CI 0.53-1.15; p = 0.208). No significant differences in pre-Fontan hemodynamic or echocardiographic indices were observed between groups. Initiation of digoxin post Stage II procedure was not associated with improved survival or likelihood to complete Fontan. Conclusion: Digoxin use at the time of Norwood discharge was associated with a 30% greater likelihood of Fontan completion by 6 years, without accompanying improvement in transplant-free survival. These findings extend prior observations of improved interstage outcomes associated with digoxin use and suggest that treatment may facilitate progression through staged palliation.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

XAI-Grounded Explanation Generation for Speech Deepfake Detection with Training-Free Multimodal Large Language Models

Speech deepfake detection (SDD) systems require trustworthy explanations for reliable decision-making. Existing explanation ways mainly fall into two categories. Traditional explainable AI (XAI), such as gradient-based attribution, produces low-level attribution signals tightly coupled with model decisions, and harder to be understood by human than natural language explanations. Meanwhile, large language model (LLM)-based explanation generation often produces generic and ungrounded descriptions due to the lack of heuristic evidence and task-specific supervision, stemming from limited grounded explanation datasets for SDD. We therefore propose a training-free explanation framework that integrates XAI evidence with multimodal LLMs to generate grounded and specific explanations. Using the PartialSpoof dataset, we construct a grounded explanation dataset and show that methods with XAI increase inside accuracy by over 45\%, verified through human evaluation and faithfulness checks.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

From Open Waters to Enclosed Cabins: ProteusVPR for Cross-Scene Visual Place Recognition in Maritime Perception and Cabin Inspection

Autonomous robotic inspection in maritime environments presents unique challenges for Visual Place Recognition (VPR) due to cross-scene perceptual shifts. Robots navigating ship-borne environments must transition between visually distinct domains: open decks with sparse textures and severe illumination changes, and enclosed cabins with repetitive structures and high visual ambiguity. Existing VPR methods, designed primarily for urban or indoor scenes, fail to generalize reliably across these starkly different scenarios. To address this, we propose ProteusVPR, a two-stage retrieval-refinement framework. The first stage employs any standard VPR model for initial image retrieval. The second stage introduces a geometric-visual estimation network that fuses the retrieved image with two temporally preceding frames, incorporating geometric descriptors, a local affine coordinate system, and camera azimuth encoding to achieve precise localization. To support this task, we introduce the XHZ dataset, an 8K-panoramic ship-borne dataset collected from an operational vessel, featuring multi-floor cabin structures, deck transition zones, and strict query-database separation for rigorous evaluation. Extensive experiments on the XHZ dataset demonstrate that ProteusVPR consistently improves the localization accuracy across multiple VPR backbones, reducing mean localization error by over 60\% on average and that ProteusVPR offers an effective and robust solution for precise visual localization in challenging, cross-scene maritime environments.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Temporally Consistent Graph Q-Networks for Intelligent Network Control

arXiv:2606.13848v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mobile networks continue to grow in complexity and next generation networks are expected to support both increasing traffic loads and more diverse services. As network complexity rises, optimizing antenna parameters under dynamic or changing objectives becomes increasingly challenging. We propose a novel multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithm for high-level control and orchestration of mobile networks. The Temporally Consistent Graph Q-Network (TC-GQN) algorithm learns a self-predicting representation of the whole network that is task-independent and aggregates information from all base-stations. A graph neural network is trained using a global reward function to assign coordinated local actions based on the learned encoding of the global network state. We evaluate the algorithm in a simulated environment to orchestrate an energy-saving feature across multiple sectors and multiple carriers under different quality of service (QoS) constraints. The proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art graph-based baselines and a competitive rule-based controller by improving hardware sleep time while maintaining QoS. Moreover, the learned representation enables rapid adaptation to changing intents.

24.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-23

Model-based inference of gene expression noise from single-cell RNA-sequencing data

The heterogeneity of expression levels among genetically identical cells, termed gene expression noise, is a property of the gene expression process whose importance in the biology of organisms and their evolution is increasingly recognized. Measuring gene expression noise requires single-cell expression data, as obtained from single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNASeq). Its estimation, however, is challenging owing to (i) the presence of technical noise in addition to biological noise, and (ii) the heterogeneity of cell types in the sampled population. We propose a maximum-likelihood framework to infer biological noise from scRNASeq data, while accounting for technical noise, dropout probabilities, and distinct cell sequencing depths. We demonstrate the parameter identifiability using simulations and that the resulting noise estimates are uncorrelated from the mean gene expression, and therefore do not need extra correction in downstream analyses, easing intra- and inter- genome comparisons. Using two technical replicates of scRNASeq data from the wild yeast *Saccharomyces paradoxus*, we show that expression noise can be inferred in a reproducible manner.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

MiniPIC: Flexible Position-Independent Caching in <100LOC

Retrieval-augmented and agentic workloads repeatedly prefill recurring predictable structured inputs (which we call "spans") such as documents and code files. Yet, prefix caching in engines such as vLLM cannot reuse their KV entries unless they share identical prefixes with another request, while Position-Independent Caching (PIC) implementations within production-grade inference servers typically either require substantial server code changes or keep KV state outside the server, incurring host-to-device transfer overhead. We present Minimalistic PIC (MiniPIC): a minimal, flexible and fast vLLM design built from two ingredients: positional-encoding-free KV cache and user-controlled cache-reuse primitives. MiniPIC stores unrotated K vectors in the KV cache, applies RoPE to K tiles inside attention using per-request logical positions, and exposes three user-facing and token-level primitives: block-aligned padding, span separator (SSep), and prompt depend (PDep), that modify hashing behavior and effective block-level causal attention structure. With fewer than 100 lines of core-engine changes plus a custom attention backend, these primitives are sufficient to realize multiple PIC methods, including Block-Attention, EPIC, and Prompt Cache, within the same running vLLM instance, while natively integrating with KV cache CPU offload implementations. On 2WikiMultihopQA, MiniPIC with interleaved scheduling improves prefill throughput by 49% over baseline vLLM, reduces cached-span time-to-first-token by up to two orders of magnitude, preserves the linear prefill scaling of uncached spans, and incurs only 5.7% worst-case overhead.