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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Generalised simultaneous transmission of arbitrary quantum states and classical information

arXiv:2606.03181v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present a protocol which allows for arbitrary optical quantum states to simultaneously carry and transmit classical data, without sacrificing the integrity of either the quantum or classical information. Our scheme encodes classical information via displacements in the phase space prior to transmission and retrieves each classical symbol via a Gaussian continuous-variable teleportation. The original quantum state is then restored by guessing the the original displacement and performing the appropriate inverse operation. In the limit of sufficiently high classical signal and high squeezing, we show that our scheme is capable of perfectly reconstructing both the input classical signal and the input quantum state without loss of coherence. An example is given in terms of the transmission of a dual-rail Bell state.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Edit3DGS: Unified Framework for Dynamic Head Editing via 2D Instruction-Guided Diffusion and 3D Gaussian Splatting

We present Edit3DGS, a unified framework for dynamic 3D head editing that integrates 2D instruction-guided diffusion with 3D Gaussian splatting. Unlike prior approaches that separately address frame-based edits or static 3D reconstruction, our method couples semantic controllability in the image domain with photorealistic, temporally consistent 3D representations. Given an input video, editable facial regions are masked and modified using a text-conditioned diffusion model to support fine-grained operations such as expression transformation, attribute modification, and appearance refinement. The edited frames are then aggregated through 3D Gaussian splatting to produce a coherent, high-fidelity avatar that preserves both identity and motion dynamics. To enforce consistency, Edit3DGS incorporates multi-view batch editing and lightweight inpainting strategies that recover lost expressions across timesteps. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework enables controllable, artifact-free head editing with smooth temporal transitions, offering practical applications in virtual avatars, immersive communication, film production, and interactive media.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Differential Determinants of Past Behavior and Future Intention Regarding Voluntary Blood Donation: A Cross-Sectional Study of Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices in Qingdao, China

Background A persistent gap between motivation and action threatens voluntary blood supply. This study examined the publics knowledge, attitudes, and practices (KAP) regarding blood donation, with a particular focus on identifying the different determinants of past blood donation behavior and future willingness to donate. Methods Convenience sampling was used to conduct a cross-sectional survey among 1,058 eligible people in Qingdao, China, between July and November 2025. Data were collected via a self-designed KAP questionnaire. To find independent characteristics linked to previous behavior and future intention, respectively, multivariable binary logistic regression was used. Results Overall, 37.0% of participants (n=391) had a lifetime donation history, while 39.2% (n=415) intended to donate in the next 12 months. Past behavior was positively associated with older age (36-45 years: OR=6.84; 95% CI: 3.21-14.58), higher education (OR=2.06; 95% CI: 1.33-3.17), and interpersonal interaction channels (OR=1.45; 95% CI: 1.01-2.09) but hindered by safety concerns (OR=0.23; 95% CI: 0.16-0.34). Conversely, future intention was positively correlated with male sex (OR=1.69; 95% CI: 1.24-2.29), prior donation history (OR=2.69; 95% CI: 1.87-3.86), having family members or friends in need of blood (OR=2.75; 95% CI: 1.96-3.85), and traditional media exposure (OR=3.33; 95% CI: 2.18-5.10). Higher education was adversely correlated with future intention (OR=0.55; 95% CI: 0.38-0.79). Conclusion There is a substantial disparity between donation motivation and action. The determinants of past behavior and future intention are asymmetric, suggesting that stage-specific interventions are required, using social mobilization for initiating first-time donations, while employing family reciprocity and authoritative communication to sustain long-term engagement.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Black-Box Assisted Regression: Phase Transitions and Minimax Optimality

作者:

arXiv:2606.25743v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Foundation models are often used as fixed black-box predictors for downstream tasks with limited labeled data, but their predictions may be biased and unsafe to trust blindly. We study this setting through black-box assisted nonparametric regression: a learner observes labeled samples and can query a fixed predictor $f_0$, while the target $f^*$ is close to $f_0$ in $L_2(P_X)$ up to an unknown radius $\delta$. We give a finite-sample minimax characterization showing a phase transition at $\delta_c(n) \asymp n^{-\beta/(2\beta+d)}$, with leading risk $\min\{\delta^2, n^{-2\beta/(2\beta+d)}\}$. We then analyze a Safe Residual Estimator: it learns a correction around $f_0$, initializes the residual head at zero so the initial predictor equals $f_0$, and uses holdout selection to revert to $f_0$ when the learned correction is not supported by validation data. Here, "safe" means avoiding negative transfer, i.e., performing worse than the black-box predictor alone. The estimator matches the leading minimax term up to an additive validation-selection cost. Synthetic regression experiments verify the predicted phase transition, while CIFAR-100 with CLIP and AG News with Qwen3-8B provide practice-facing evidence that the same residual-correction tradeoff is useful beyond the formal squared-loss regression setting.

05.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

SPARQ-MI leverages end-to-end spatial single-cell analysis of the tumor microenvironment

Detailed spatial analysis of the tumor micro-environment (TME) through multiplexed fluorescence imaging requires quantitative image-processing and data-analysis methods. While data-preprocessing down to segmentation of individual cells is captured by available methods, statistical analysis of single-cell features is compromised by the uneven noise distribution especially in complex tissues such as the TME, as well as by labor-intensive manual cell-type annotation and region segmentation. Here, we present SPARQ-MI (Spatial Phenotyping, Architecture Reconstruction and Quantification from Multiplexed Imaging) for streamlined spatial single-cell analysis, along with a tissue microarray PhenoCycler data-set with 37 fluorescent channels from melanoma patients under immunotherapy. We demonstrate that SPARQ-MI enables robust reconstruction of the cellular and spatial composition in this and other tissue types. Our analysis reveals associations of the cell-state and spatial location of CD8 T cells with response to immunotherapy. Overall, SPARQ-MI allows for quantitative analysis of complex fluorescence histology samples under minimal user input, and accounting for spatially uneven coverage of antibody signals, setting the stage for quantitative analysis of clinical samples.

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

AC-ODM: Actor–Critic Online Data Mixing for Sample-Efficient LLM Pretraining

arXiv:2505.23878v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Optimizing pretraining data composition is pivotal for LLM generalization. While dynamic mixing outperforms static strategies by capturing evolving training dynamics, current methods fail to reconcile computational efficiency with sample efficiency and structural flexibility for diverse pipelines.We introduce Actor–Critic Online Data Mixing (AC-ODM), which approaches data mixing from a reinforcement learning perspective with a parameterized policy that we theoretically prove to act as a dynamic linear surrogate maximizing the constructive interference of gradients. To enhance practical flexibility, AC-ODM supports two operational modes: (i) a proxy mode for fixed, pre-prepared corpora, where a policy learned on a small model is transferred to a larger target; and (ii) a non-proxy mode for direct end-to-end training from scratch without priors. Empirically, AC-ODM significantly outperforms prior methods in convergence speed and downstream accuracy across various architectures. On Pythia-1B, it reaches optimal validation perplexity using up to 66% fewer training steps than competitive baselines, delivering a 27.5% relative improvement in MMLU accuracy and a 2.23 x higher pass@1 on HumanEval, all while incurring a virtually negligible (0.4%) per-step wall-clock increase and only 2% additional memory overhead. Code is available at https://github.com/DANG-ai/AC-ODM.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

TCIA Radiology Image Processing for AI and Radiomics

We developed a standardized, reproducible preprocessing framework for computed tomography (CT) imaging data from multi-institutional repositories such The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA), enabling consistent radiomics and artificial intelligence (AI) analyses. Imaging data from TCGA-KIRC patients available on TCIA were used as a representative heterogeneous dataset characterized by variation in acquisition protocols, inconsistent metadata, and differing image quality. The proposed modular pipeline includes series filtering, DICOM-to-NIfTI conversion, orientation harmonization to a canonical coordinate system, voxel spacing normalization, intensity clipping and normalization, segmentation integration, and metadata validation, and is implemented in a reproducible, notebook-based framework compatible with common radiomics and deep learning workflows. This pipeline standardizes imaging data into analysis-ready volumes with consistent geometry, intensity distributions, and spatial alignment, reducing non-biological variability that can adversely affect radiomic feature stability and model performance. The modular design enables task-specific adaptation of individual preprocessing steps while maintaining overall consistency. Although demonstrated on TCIA, this framework is generalizable to other heterogeneous imaging datasets and provides a foundation for robust, large-scale computational imaging studies.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Learning to Distort: Weakly-Supervised Image Quality Transfer for Prostate DWI Correction

Single-shot echo-planar prostate diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) is frequently complicated by geometric distortions, which impact the ability to derive reliable diagnoses from such images. Developing automated correction methods is challenged by the absence of paired distorted and undistorted clinical scans. In this paper, we first propose a novel weakly-supervised image quality transfer (IQT) framework from undistorted to distorted images that utilizes image quality assessment (IQA) signals to supervise the transfer process. Unlike traditional methods that require expensive, voxel-wise paired data or resort to developing unpaired algorithms, our approach utilizes image-level quality labels (here, distorted vs. undistorted) to establish latent quality prototypes within a pre-trained feature space. Recognizing that simulating realistic distortions is more reliable than direct unpaired correction, we describe a weakly-supervised prototype flow matching algorithm to explicitly regularize generative trajectories towards distorted prototypes, producing realistic susceptibility artifacts that mimic clinical degradations. By synthesizing these realistic pairs, we enable a second IQT model to be trained in the forward direction for distortion correction. Experimental results demonstrate that our generated images successfully mimic the diagnostic interference of real-world artifacts, which leads to more capable distortion correction IQT models. In addition to qualitative comparisons, we also conduct exhaustive quantitative evaluations that compare our approach with existing unpaired approaches (e.g., CycleGAN, UNIT-DDPM, and OT-FM) - as either forward or reverse alternatives - by assessing clinical downstream task performance in PI-RADS and Gleason score classification, using both in-distribution and external data sets.

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

Adaptive Domain Models: Bayesian Evolution, Warm Rotation, and Principled Training for Geometric and Neuromorphic AI

arXiv:2603.18104v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Prevailing AI training assumes reverse-mode automatic differentiation over IEEE-754 arithmetic. The memory overhead of training relative to inference, optimizer complexity, and structural degradation of geometric properties through training are consequences of this arithmetic substrate. This paper develops an alternative training architecture grounded in three prior results: the Dimensional Type System and Deterministic Memory Management framework (Haynes 2026), which establishes stack-eligible gradient allocation and exact quire accumulation as design-time verifiable properties; the Program Hypergraph (Haynes 2026), which establishes grade preservation through geometric algebra computations as a type-level invariant; and the b-posit bounded-regime design (Jonnalagadda et al. 2025), which makes posit arithmetic tractable across hardware targets conventionally considered inference-only. Their composition enables depth-independent training memory bounded to approximately twice the inference footprint, grade-preserving weight updates, and exact gradient accumulation, applicable uniformly to loss-function-optimized and spike-timing-dependent neuromorphic models. We introduce *Bayesian distillation*, a mechanism by which the latent prior structure of a general-purpose model is extracted through the ADM training regime, resolving the data-scarcity bootstrapping problem for domain-specific training. For deployment, we introduce *warm rotation*, an operational pattern in which an updated model transitions into an active inference pathway without service interruption, with correctness formalized through PHG certificates and signed version records. The result is a class of domain-specific AI systems that are smaller and more precise than general-purpose models, continuously adaptive, verifiably correct with respect to the physical structure of their domains, and initializable from existing models.

10.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Diffuse Interface Energies with Microscopic Heterogeneities II: Rare Events

arXiv:2606.17968v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We analyze Allen-Cahn functionals with stationary ergodic coefficients in the regime where the length scale $\delta$ of the heterogeneities is much smaller (microscopic) than the interface width $\epsilon$ (mesoscopic). In a companion paper, we show that if the ratio $\epsilon^{-1} \delta$ vanishes fast enough as $\epsilon \to 0$, then the functionals converge to an effective surface energy where the energy density is determined by homogenization effects originating at microscopic scales. Here we prove that if the ratio $\epsilon^{-1} \delta $ vanishes too slowly, the limit of the functional may actually be smaller than this homogenized energy. We refer to this as the rare events regime. In the case of the random checkerboard in dimension one, we use large deviations techniques to give a complete description of the rare events regime, showing that the limiting energy depends in a nontrivial way on the limit of $\epsilon^{-1} \delta | \log \epsilon |$. We further construct, in any dimension, examples of random media in which rare events become relevant at algebraic scales $\delta \approx \epsilon^{1 + \alpha}$ for an arbitrary $\alpha > 0$, as well as almost periodic examples in which atypical configurations play the same role as rare events.

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

MentalMARBERT: Domain-Adaptive Pre-training and Two-Stage Fine-Tuning for Arabic Mental Health Disorders Detection

Detecting mental health disorders from Arabic social media text remains challenging due to dialectal variation, informal language, limited high-quality annotated resources, and severe class imbalance. While English mental health natural language processing (NLP) has progressed substantially, Arabic multi-class disorder classification remains insufficiently studied. This study proposes a two-phase framework for Arabic mental health text classification. In phase 1, three Arabic pre-trained language models, AraBERT, CAMeLBERT, and MARBERT, undergo Domain-Adaptive and Task-Adaptive Pretraining (DAPT and TAPT) using a large-scale corpus of unlabeled Arabic mental health tweets. The adapted models are evaluated under a unified protocol to identify the most effective backbone model. In phase 2, the selected model is assessed across four configurations combining single-stage and hierarchical two-stage classification architectures with full fine-tuning and Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). To support this study, we constructed a novel annotated Arabic mental health dataset comprising 50,670 tweets across six categories, with strong inter annotator agreement (Krippendorff's Alpha = 0.733, average pairwise agreement = 0.797). Experimental results show that the domain-adapted MARBERT (MentalMARBERT) achieves statistically significant improvements over baseline models in both accuracy and macro-F1. The hierarchical two-stage architecture combined with full fine-tuning achieves the best overall performance, reaching a macro-F1 of 0.861 and an accuracy of 0.877. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of domain-specific adaptive pretraining and hierarchical classification for Arabic mental health disorder detection.

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

Predicting Immune Biomarkers with MultiModal Mixture-of-Expert Pathology Foundation Models Empowers Precision Oncology

Predicting immune biomarkers associated with the tumor immune microenvironment (TIME) is critical for advancing precision oncology, yet existing approaches are largely limited to single image modalities and suffer from insufficient resolution and incomplete utilization of complementary clinical and biological information. Here we introduce MixTIME, a multimodal foundation model that leverages a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture to integrate pathology foundation models trained across distinct modalities: image only (UNIv2), image text (CONCHv1.5), and image transcriptomic (STPath) representations for pixel-level and slide-level prediction of multiplex immunofluorescence (mIF) protein expression from hematoxylin and eosin (HE) whole-slide images. MixTIME employs a learnable router to dynamically weight expert contributions and is trained with a distribution- and tendency-aware loss function. Benchmarked on two datasets of different scales, MixTIME achieves state-of-the-art performance across 17 protein markers as measured by correlation metrics. The predicted mIF profiles substantially enhance downstream tasks, including spatial domain identification, survival prediction, and AI-assisted pathology report generation validated by expert pathologists from multiple institutes across the world. Furthermore, MixTIME enables longitudinal tracking of protein expression dynamics across clinical time points and reveals protein gene interaction patterns linked to drug resistance and immune suppression in tumor microenvironments. Collectively, MixTIME provides a scalable framework for multimodal biomarker discovery and clinical translation in computational pathology.

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

Dynamic Free-Rider Detection in Federated Learning via Simulated Attack Patterns

arXiv:2604.04611v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Federated learning (FL) enables multiple clients to collaboratively train a global model by aggregating local updates without sharing private data. However, FL often faces the challenge of free-riders, clients who submit fake model parameters without performing actual training to obtain the global model without contributing. Chen et al. proposed a free-rider detection method based on the weight evolving frequency (WEF) of model parameters. This detection approach is a leading candidate for practical free-rider detection methods, as it requires neither a proxy dataset nor pre-training. Nevertheless, it struggles to detect ``dynamic'' free-riders who behave honestly in early rounds and later switch to free-riding, particularly under global-model-mimicking attacks such as the delta weight attack and our newly proposed adaptive WEF-camouflage attack. In this paper, we propose a novel detection method S2-WEF that simulates the WEF patterns of potential global-model-based attacks on the server side using previously broadcasted global models, and identifies clients whose submitted WEF patterns resemble the simulated ones. To handle a variety of free-rider attack strategies, S2-WEF further combines this simulation-based similarity score with a deviation score computed from mutual comparisons among submitted WEFs, and separates benign and free-rider clients by two-dimensional clustering and per-score classification. This method enables dynamic detection of clients that transition into free-riders during training without proxy datasets or pre-training. We conduct extensive experiments across three datasets and five attack types, demonstrating that S2-WEF achieves higher robustness than existing approaches.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

TerraBench: Can Agents Reason Over Heterogeneous Earth-System Data?

arXiv:2606.13148v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Climate and environmental decision-making increasingly requires reasoning across heterogeneous inputs, including gridded physical data, satellite imagery, geospatial context, and simulator outputs. Weather and climate foundation models can forecast well, but do not reason interactively in language, while large language models (LLMs) reason in language but cannot operate directly on high-dimensional Earth-system data. As a result, real scientific workflows in Earth-science remain underserved. We introduce TerraBench, a benchmark for grounded Earth-science reasoning, built on TerraAgent, a ReAct-style executable framework that interleaves reasoning, tool calls, and observations to couple LLM planning with scientific tools for environmental retrieval, geospatial processing, simulation, and artifact-backed computation. TerraBench unifies analysis of Earth observation imagery, gridded data, GIS reasoning and simulation in a single executable interface, whereas prior benchmarks isolate these capabilities into narrow individual tasks. It is also the first in this space to pair process-level tool-use metrics with tolerance-aware numeric scoring. The benchmark comprises 403 extensive agentic tasks across three tracks (Fundamentals, Simulator-Grounded, and Document-Grounded Verification) and eight application domains with 24,500 verified execution steps. These results indicate that reliable Earth-science agents must go beyond tool access to coordinate heterogeneous workflows, parameterize tools precisely, and preserve artifact provenance.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

SycoEval-EM: Sycophancy Evaluation of Large Language Models in Simulated Clinical Encounters for Emergency Care

arXiv:2601.16529v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) deployed in clinical decision support may acquiesce to patient requests for care that conflicts with evidence-based guidelines. We developed SycoEval-EM, a multi-agent simulation framework to evaluate LLM robustness to adversarial patient persuasion in emergency medicine. Across 19 contemporary LLMs and 1,425 simulated clinical encounters spanning three Choosing Wisely scenarios, acquiescence rates ranged from 0% to 100%, revealing a bimodal distribution. Seven models maintained near-perfect guideline adherence, while six acquiesced in the majority of encounters. Vulnerability varied substantially across clinical scenarios. Acquiescence was highest for CT imaging requests, intermediate for antibiotic prescriptions for sinusitis, and lowest for opioid prescriptions for acute back pain. Model scale, recency, and performance on static medical benchmarks did not consistently predict robustness. All five persuasion tactics produced similar acquiescence rates, with no statistically significant differences after correction for multiple comparisons, suggesting a generalized susceptibility rather than tactic-specific weaknesses. LLM-as-judge evaluation was validated against two independent physician raters across 95 matched conversations and demonstrated near-perfect agreement for the primary outcome of acquiescence (Cohens kappa = 0.957). These findings indicate that static medical benchmarks are insufficient to predict safety performance under sustained social pressure and support incorporating multi-turn adversarial testing into clinical AI evaluation. Notably, two models achieved perfect guideline adherence across all encounters, demonstrating that robustness to patient pressure is attainable without sacrificing effective clinical communication.

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

KANEL\'E: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks for Efficient LUT-based Evaluation

arXiv:2512.12850v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Low-latency, resource-efficient neural network inference on FPGAs is essential for applications demanding real-time capability and low power. Lookup table (LUT)-based neural networks are a common solution, combining strong representational power with efficient FPGA implementation. In this work, we introduce KANEL\'E, a framework that exploits the unique properties of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) for FPGA deployment. Unlike traditional multilayer perceptrons (MLPs), KANs employ learnable one-dimensional splines with fixed domains as edge activations, a structure naturally suited to discretization and efficient LUT mapping. We present the first systematic design flow for implementing KANs on FPGAs, co-optimizing training with quantization and pruning to enable compact, high-throughput, and low-latency KAN architectures. Our results demonstrate up to a 2700x speedup and orders of magnitude resource savings compared to prior KAN-on-FPGA approaches. Moreover, KANEL\'E matches or surpasses other LUT-based architectures on widely used benchmarks, particularly for tasks involving symbolic or physical formulas, while balancing resource usage across FPGA hardware. Finally, we showcase the versatility of the framework by extending it to real-time, power-efficient control systems.

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

What Intermediate Layers Know: Detecting Jailbreaks from Entropy Dynamics

Jailbreak attacks reveal a persistent weakness in aligned Large Language Models: carefully crafted prompts can elicit policy-violating responses despite safety training. While most defenses operate at the prompt or output level, it remains unclear how harmful intent is encoded within the model's internal representations. We investigate this question by analyzing token-level predictive entropy trajectories across layers of a frozen LLM using the logit lens. We find that static aggregate statistics of prompt-level entropy (e.g., mean, variance) carry little discriminative signal, whereas features capturing how entropy evolves across token positions, such as monotonic rank-based trend scores, are substantially more informative. Importantly, this signal is not uniform across model depth: it is concentrated in intermediate layers and degrades at the final layer, indicating that jailbreak-relevant structure is most pronounced in mid-network representations rather than at the output head. Across multiple models (Llama, Qwen, Gemma) and adversarial benchmarks, these entropy dynamics provide architecture-consistent separation without additional training. Together, our findings show that jailbreak behavior is reflected in structured intermediate uncertainty dynamics, clarifying both which entropy-derived features encode harmful intent and where in the network that signal is most pronounced.

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

Denoising Score Matching with Random Features: Insights on Diffusion Models from Precise Learning Curves

arXiv:2502.00336v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We theoretically investigate the phenomena of generalization and memorization in diffusion models. Empirical studies suggest that these phenomena are influenced by model complexity and the size of the training dataset. In our experiments, we further observe that the number of noise samples per data sample ($m$) used during Denoising Score Matching (DSM) plays a significant and non-trivial role. We capture these behaviors and shed insights into their mechanisms by deriving asymptotically precise expressions for test and train errors of DSM under a simple theoretical setting. The score function is parameterized by random features neural networks, with the target distribution being $d$-dimensional Gaussian. We operate in a regime where the dimension $d$, number of data samples $n$, and number of features $p$ tend to infinity while keeping the ratios $\psi_n=\frac{n}{d}$ and $\psi_p=\frac{p}{d}$ fixed. By characterizing the test and train errors, we identify regimes of generalization and memorization as a function of $\psi_n,\psi_p$, and $m$. Our theoretical findings are consistent with the empirical observations.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Edges Before Embeddings: A Confidence-Aware Blur Gate for Vision-Language Pipelines

Production vision pipelines silently degrade on blurry input, wasting compute on downstream OCR, retrieval, and vision-language model (VLM) calls that cannot recover a usable output. We present MagikaDocumentFromPixel, a lightweight, CPU-friendly image quality gate that classifies a single image as sharp, blurred, or uncertain in roughly 7 ms on a single CPU core. The contributions are (i) a recipe selected from a 46-configuration, 8-sweep empirical search that isolates input resolution as the dominant lever and shows architecture capacity only pays off at >= 384 px; (ii) a confidence-aware routing formalism grounded in classical selective prediction; (iii) the Edge Prior Module (EPM), a Laplacian-magnitude auxiliary input channel that gives the network direct access to the spectral evidence that classical blur heuristics rely on and that lifts test F1 by +1.3 points in a matched-env comparison; and (iv) an observation that the gate is one instance of a recurring design pattern that appears independently in Magika content-type detection, risk-controlled OCR with VLMs, and DocVLM. The final recipe MobileNetV3-Large with the EPM trained at 384x384 on paired GoPro Large frames, evaluated with 5-scale test-time augmentation reaches F1 = 0.9803 (AUC 0.9989) with a 17 MB ONNX artifact, improving over our fixed-scale baseline on the same hardware (F1 = 0.9672) by +1.31 points. We are explicit about limitations: results are on a single motion-blur distribution, numbers are from a single seed, and calibration is qualitative rather than measured.

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

Dropout Neural Network Training Viewed from a Percolation Perspective

arXiv:2512.13853v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this work, we investigate the existence and effect of percolation in training deep Neural Networks (NNs) with dropout. Dropout methods are regularisation techniques for training NNs, first introduced by G. Hinton et al. (2012). These methods temporarily remove connections in the NN, randomly at each stage of training, and update the remaining subnetwork with Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). The process of removing connections from a network at random is similar to percolation, a paradigm model of statistical physics. If dropout were to remove enough connections such that there is no path between the input and output of the NN, then the NN could not make predictions informed by the data. We study new percolation models that mimic dropout in NNs and characterise the relationship between network topology and this path problem. The theory shows the existence of a percolative effect in dropout. We also show that this percolative effect can cause a breakdown when training NNs without biases with dropout; and we argue heuristically that this breakdown extends to NNs with biases.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

TWLA: Achieving Ternary Weights and Low-Bit Activations for LLMs via Post-Training Quantization

arXiv:2606.13054v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit exceptional general language processing capabilities, but their memory and compute costs hinder deployment. Ternarization has emerged as a promising compression technique, offering significant reductions in model size and inference complexity. However, existing methods struggle with heavy-tailed activation distributions and therefore keep activations in high precision, fundamentally limiting end-to-end inference acceleration. To overcome this limitation, we propose TWLA, a post-training quantization (PTQ) framework that achieves 1.58-bit weight compression and 4-bit activation quantization while maintaining high accuracy. TWLA comprises three components: (1) Euclidean-to-Manifold Asymmetric Ternary Quantizer (E2M-ATQ) minimizes layer-output error under weight ternarization via a two-stage optimization from Euclidean initialization to manifold relocation; (2) Kronecker Orthogonal Tri-Modal Shaping (KOTMS) applies a Kronecker-structured orthogonal rotation to reshape weights into ternary-friendly tri-modal distributions, while the shared rotation statistically suppresses activation outliers; and (3) Inter-Layer Aware Activation Mixed Precision (ILA-AMP) explicitly introduces adjacent-layer second-order interaction costs in bit allocation and jointly optimizes for the layer-wise disparity of activation quantization gains induced by the shared orthogonal transform, preventing cascades triggered by a few weak layers. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TWLA maintains high accuracy under W1.58A4, while delivering significant inference acceleration. The code is available at .

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

Position: Align AI to Our Aspirations, Not Our Flaws

arXiv:2606.13755v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We argue that aligning AI to aggregated human preferences is the wrong target. With current technology, one can train AIs to share the values of a Silicon Valley techno-optimist, a degrowth environmentalist, a national-conservative culture warrior, a single-party state cadre, or a devout religious traditionalist. We should not. Human values produce societies that thrive or fail on the merits of those values - from failed states and extreme inequality to declining happiness, political polarization, and government dysfunction in the world's wealthiest democracies. The pluralistic-alignment program correctly diagnoses that there is no single "humanity" to align with, but is dangerous if taken as the main directive. We argue that AI should be trained to a non-negotiable floor of objective alignment goals - competence, bounded by the constraints of factual accuracy, honesty, and lawfulness and that pluralism belongs at the surface (language, register, conventions, missing-context defaults) and across the wide band of legitimate value tradeoffs that respect the floor, but not at the level of values that violate it. We highlight the empirical reality of unfiltered pluralistic values, propose four commitments as a constructive alternative, and engage six credible objections: commercial pressure and practical feasibility, democratic legitimacy, regulatory compliance, over-reliance on institutionalist explanations, the charge that the floor itself is culturally laden, and the limits of Coherent Extrapolated Volition.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Position: Stop Anthropomorphizing Intermediate Tokens as Reasoning/Thinking Traces!

arXiv:2504.09762v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Intermediate token generation (ITG), where a model produces output before the solution, has become a standard method to improve the performance of language models on reasoning tasks. These intermediate tokens have been called \say{reasoning traces} or even \say{thinking traces} – implicitly anthropomorphizing the traces, and implying that these traces resemble steps a human might take when solving a challenging problem, and as such can provide an interpretable window into the operation of the model's thinking process to the end user. In this position paper, we present evidence that this anthropomorphization isn't a harmless metaphor, and instead is quite dangerous – it confuses the nature of these models and how to use them effectively, and leads to questionable research. We call on the community to avoid such anthropomorphization of intermediate tokens.