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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

G-Loss: Graph-Guided Fine-Tuning of Language Models

Traditional loss functions, including cross-entropy, contrastive, triplet, and su pervised contrastive losses, used for fine-tuning pre-trained language models such as BERT, operate only within local neighborhoods and fail to account for the global semantic structure. We present G-Loss, a graph-guided loss function that incorporates semi-supervised label propagation to use structural relationships within the embedding manifold. G-Loss builds a document-similarity graph that captures global semantic relationships, thereby guiding the model to learn more discriminative and robust embeddings. We evaluate G-Loss on five benchmark datasets covering key downstream classification tasks: MR (sentiment analysis), R8 and R52 (topic categorization), Ohsumed (medical document classification), and 20NG (news categorization). In the majority of experimental setups, G-Loss converges faster and produces semantically coherent embedding spaces, resulting in higher classification accuracy than models fine-tuned with traditional loss functions.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Minimum Distance Summaries for Robust Neural Posterior Estimation

arXiv:2602.09161v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Simulation-based inference (SBI) enables amortized Bayesian inference by first training a neural posterior estimator (NPE) on prior-simulator pairs, typically through low-dimensional summary statistics, which can then be cheaply reused for fast inference by querying it on new test observations. Because NPE is estimated under the training data distribution, it is susceptible to misspecification when observations deviate from the training distribution. Many robust SBI approaches address this by modifying NPE training or introducing error models, coupling robustness to the inference network and compromising amortization and modularity. We introduce minimum-distance summaries, a plug-in robust NPE method that adapts queried test-time summaries independently of the pretrained NPE. Leveraging the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) as a distance between observed data and a summary-conditional predictive distribution, the adapted summary inherits strong robustness properties from the MMD. We demonstrate that the algorithm can be implemented efficiently with random Fourier feature approximations, yielding a lightweight, model-free test-time adaptation procedure. We provide theoretical guarantees for the robustness of our algorithm and empirically evaluate it on a range of synthetic and real-world tasks, demonstrating substantial robustness gains with minimal additional overhead.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Learning Coordinated Preference for Multi-Objective Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.14693v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cooperative multi-objective multi-agent reinforcement learning (MOMARL) models team decision making under multiple, potentially conflicting objectives. In this setting, conflicts arise not only across objectives but also across agents with different observations, roles, and contributions. We propose Preference Coordinated Multi-agent Policy Optimization (PCMA), which learns coordinated agent-specific preferences to enable complementary trade-offs among agents. Theoretically, we formulate cooperative MOMARL as a team-optimal game and show that, under suitable conditions, preference diversity can induce team improvement through a first-order improvement decomposition. Experiments on multiple cooperative MOMA environments and a practical traffic-control scenario show that PCMA improves both performance and trade-off coordination.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Learning the Context of Errors: Black-Box Online Adaptation of Time Series Foundation Models

arXiv:2606.14222v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The rapid evolution of Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) has advanced zero-shot forecasting across diverse domains. Inspired by the current form of Large Language Models, future TSFMs may be offered as commercialized, closed-source API services. However, many existing online adaptation methods still rely on white-box access for parameter fine-tuning or gradient backpropagation. This paradigm mismatch raises a question: In black-box online adaptation for TSFMs, what should we learn? We answer this with an insight: the predictive errors of the base model are conditioned on both the input and output of the base model (i.e., the context of errors). To validate this insight, we propose ORCA (Online Residual Contextual Adaptation). We conduct extensive experiments across 5 state-of-the-art TSFMs and 8 datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Furthermore, through ablation studies, we quantitatively analyze the impact of different adapter learning hypotheses on the final adaptation performance in black-box online adaptation. Code available at https://github.com/Fifthky/ORCA.

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

PSyGenTAB: A Privacy-Preserving Framework for Synthetic Clinical Tabular Data Generation via Constrained Optimization

arXiv:2606.18518v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The development of medical AI is constrained by limited access to high-quality clinical data due to institutional silos and strict privacy regulations such as HIPAA and GDPR. Synthetic data generation offers a potential solution, but existing methods lack principled mechanisms to explicitly manage the privacy-utility trade-off, often degrading clinically meaningful patterns or risking patient re-identification. We present PSyGenTAB, a privacy-preserving generative framework that formulates synthetic healthcare data generation as a constrained optimization problem solved using the Augmented Lagrangian Method. By embedding configurable privacy constraints directly into model training, PSyGenTAB enforces minimum privacy thresholds while maximizing clinical data utility. Across multiple clinically motivated benchmarks, PSyGenTAB preserves inter-feature clinical relationships and minority-class diagnostic patterns essential for reliable health AI. Downstream evaluation using Train-on-Synthetic, Test-on-Real and Train-on-Real, Test-on-Synthetic protocols shows that models trained on synthetic data achieve performance comparable to those trained on real patient records. Privacy auditing further demonstrates reduced exact record reproduction and strong resilience to membership inference attacks. These results establish PSyGenTAB as a principled framework for balancing privacy protection and clinical utility in synthetic healthcare data, supporting secure cross-institutional AI development.

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

Exact Linear Attention

作者:

arXiv:2605.18848v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper introduces Exact Linear Attention (ELA), a mechanism that achieves linear computational complexity for Transformer attention by exploiting the exact decomposition property of kernel functions, thereby eliminating approximation error. We identify and address two key limitations of prior linear attention – gradient explosion and token attention dilution – by imposing kernel constraints that ensure non-negativity, discriminability, and geometric interpretability. Several kernel functions are proposed, including the Hadamard Exp Kernel, Summation Squared Euclidean Distance Kernel, and Subtraction Squared Euclidean Distance Kernel, each tailored for specific attention behaviors. Beyond the core attention formulation, the paper presents three engineering innovations: (1) a Hyper-Link structure that replaces traditional residual connections to mitigate gradient degradation; (2) a Memory Lobe module based on bidirectional linear attention, which captures "transformation flow" across layers to implement qualitative memory and an implicit reinforcement learning paradigm; and (3) a routing-score-based bias mechanism for Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) to improve interpretability and semantic alignment. Experimental results demonstrate that ELA achieves up to 6x faster decoding speed and 75% reduction in KV cache memory usage compared to full attention, while maintaining comparable or superior training performance. The proposed memory module accelerates convergence and enhances generalization. Furthermore, we extend the linear attention principle to vision models, yielding YOLO-LAT, which attains up to 4.3x GPU inference speedup and 7.9x parameter reduction with competitive detection accuracy. These results underline the broad applicability of exact linear attention for scaling Transformer models to ultra-long sequences and efficient visual tasks.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

GCH1 p.Ser80Asn Confers Risk for Parkinson's Disease in East Asian Populations

Introduction: GCH1 has been implicated in Parkinson's disease (PD), but its risks variants and associations are not well defined. Objectives: To investigate the clinical relevance and PD risk associated with the GCH1 p.Ser80Asn variant. Methods: We first identified a segregating GCH1 p.Ser80Asn variant in a Malaysian Chinese PD family via whole genome sequencing (WGS). We assessed its risk association using multi-ancestry WGS data from the Global Parkinson's Genetics Program (GP2) (n=22,372PD vs n=8,826Controls) and meta-analysis of East Asian (EAS) cohorts (n=4,712PD vs 38,733Controls). Clinico-demographic details of affected variant carriers were collated. Results: The GCH1 p.Ser80Asn variant was enriched in GP2 EAS PD populations (n=9/2,757; 0.33%) but not detected in other ancestries. Meta-analysis revealed increased PD risk in EAS populations (odds ratio:5.1; 95%CI:2.3-10.7; p=2.89x10-5). Affected carriers (mean age at onset:56.3+-12.5 years) had additional occurrence of dystonia, while dementia was rare. Conclusions: The GCH1 p.Ser80Asn variant is a rare, EAS-enriched risk variant for PD.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Contactless Respiratory Monitoring on Heterogeneous Mobile Robots: A Multimodal Edge-Computing Framework

Respiratory-rate (RR) monitoring is a critical component of remote triage and victim assessment in emergency response, disaster recovery, and infectious-disease scenarios, where minimizing physical contact can reduce responder risk and improve operational safety. However, field deployment of contactless RR monitoring remains challenging due to variable illumination, posture changes, platform heterogeneity, and the impracticality of wearable sensors in hazardous environments. In this paper, we present a modality-adaptive contactless RR monitoring framework for heterogeneous mobile robots with onboard edge computing. The proposed system combines brightness-adaptive sensor selection across RGB, thermal, near-infrared (NIR), and low-light cameras, keypoint-guided chest ROI extraction for posture-robust monitoring, and a signal-quality-index (SQI)-based filtering mechanism for reliable respiratory estimation. We implement and evaluate the framework on three robotic platforms spanning quadruped and wheeled locomotion and multiple edge-computing architectures. Experiments conducted across diverse lighting conditions, subject poses, and robot-to-subject distances demonstrate that the framework generalizes across platforms without per-platform algorithmic retuning, while revealing modality-specific operational boundaries. RGB provides the broadest coverage up to 8m, NIR remains effective up to 6m, thermal is reliable only at short range, and low-light sensing supports monitoring in complete darkness up to 8m. Overall, the results demonstrate the feasibility of multimodal contactless RR monitoring on mobile robots and support its use as a foundation for autonomous triage and victim assessment in hazardous search-and-rescue settings.

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

Stochastic Expectation Maximization for Robust State-Space Radio Interferometric Imaging

arXiv:2606.23944v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: State–space models provide a flexible framework for analyzing dynamical systems, yet they often rely on Gaussian assumptions that fail to capture heavy-tailed or outlier-prone measurement noise. We propose a robust estimation scheme for linear state–space models subject to compound-Gaussian noise, as encountered for instance in radio interferometry affected by radio-frequency interference (RFI). The method relies on a Stochastic Approximation Expectation–Maximization (SAEM) algorithm in which the standard E-step is replaced by Monte Carlo sampling of the latent states and noise texture through closed-form Gibbs updates, enabling tractable inference despite the heavy-tailed likelihood. Numerical experiments show that the proposed method significantly improves reconstruction fidelity and robustness to RFI, outperforming a Gaussian EM algorithm and even an oracle RTS smoother. These results highlight the benefits of heavy-tailed state–space modeling and SAEM-based inference in interference-dominated imaging scenarios.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

RWGBench: Evaluating Scholarly Positioning in Related Work Generation

arXiv:2606.24894v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models have shown strong fluency in scientific writing, yet the evaluation of related work generation (RWG) remains limited. Existing RWG evaluations largely inherit summarization-oriented metrics, using lexical or semantic similarity to reference sections as proxies for quality. However, related work writing is fundamentally a citation-level scholarly positioning task: it requires selecting, organizing, and framing prior work to clarify how a target paper relates to, differs from, and contributes beyond existing research.As a result, models may generate coherent and semantically-relevant text while exhibiting academically critical failures, such as inappropriate citation selection or misplaced references, that conventional metrics do not capture.To this end, we introduce RWGBench, a benchmark that evaluates RWG from the perspective of citation decision-making rather than text similarity. RWGBench is constructed from a large-scale collection of 40,108 computer science papers and a retrieval corpus of 1.09 million documents, with a carefully curated test set comprising 100 papers and their corresponding published related work sections.We propose a multi-dimensional evaluation framework that assesses citation selection, contextual appropriateness, organization, and discourse structure.Experiments reveal systematic limitations in current systems that are obscured by standard evaluations, while Oracle studies further disentangle retrieval-level and generation-level bottlenecks. Human evaluation further shows that our citation-centric metrics align substantially better with expert judgment than surface-level text metrics. RWGBench offers a citation-centric testbed for developing and evaluating related work generation systems that are better aligned with scholarly writing practices.

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

BrainDINO: A Brain MRI Foundation Model for Generalizable Clinical Representation Learning

Brain MRI underpins a wide range of neuroscientific and clinical applications, yet most learning-based methods remain task-specific and require substantial labeled data. Here we show that a single self-supervised representation can generalize across heterogeneous brain MRI endpoints. We trained BrainDINO, a self-distilled foundation model, on approximately 6.6 million unlabeled axial slices from 20 datasets encompassing broad variation in population, disease, and acquisition setting. Using a frozen encoder with lightweight task heads, BrainDINO supported transfer across tumor segmentation, neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental conditions classification, brain age estimation, post-stroke temporal prediction, molecular status prediction, MRI sequence classification, and survival modeling. Across tasks and supervision regimes, BrainDINO consistently equaled or exceeded natural-image and MRI-specific self-supervised baselines, with particularly strong advantages under label scarcity. Representation analyses further showed anatomically organized and pathology-sensitive feature structure in the absence of task-specific supervision. Our findings indicate that large-scale slice-wise self-supervised learning can yield a unified brain MRI representation that supports diverse neuroimaging tasks without volumetric pretraining or full-network fine-tuning, establishing a scalable foundation for robust and data-efficient brain imaging analysis. Code is available at https://github.com/mclwu22/BrainDINO

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Balalaika: Data-Centric, Prosody-Aware Annotation Pipeline for Russian Speech

We introduce Balalaika, an open-source, data-centric pipeline for processing audio and producing prosody-aware annotations. It combines semantic VAD for context-preserving segmentation, multi-ASR ensembling with ROVER consensus decoding, while retaining optional word-level timestamps, followed by automatic quality and speaker-purity filtering. The text is further enriched with punctuation restoration, lexical stress and "\textipa{e}/\textipa{\H{e}}" normalization, and IPA phonemes. Using Balalaika, we build a 5.1k-hour multi-source Russian corpus with rich annotations, and show consistent gains under equalized training budgets for both speech denoising and TTS; ablations confirm complementary benefits of stress and punctuation and improved synthesis with stricter MOS filtering. The datasets are publicly available at \href{https://huggingface.co/collections/lab260/balalaika-dataset}{\underline{HuggingFace}}

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

COVID-19 containment policies and hyperglycemia in pregnancy: correlation with the Stringency Index in a nationwide Belgian cohort

Background During the COVID-19 pandemic, gestational diabetes (GD) prevalence showed variable changes across regions, with most reporting increases and others decreases; however, its association with perinatal outcomes in Belgium remains unknown. We aimed to compare the prevalence of hyperglycemia in pregnancy (HIP) in 2020 versus 2019 and examined the correlation between HIP prevalence and pandemic-related restrictions measured by the Stringency Index (SI) and evaluate neonatal weight percentiles changes. Methods: We included all singleton live births in Belgium in 2019 and 2020 from Belgian birth registry data. We compared monthly proportions of HIP prevalence and Small for gestational age (SGA) and Large for gestional age (LGA) newborns in 2019 and 2020. Crude and adjusted odds ratios (ORs, aORs) were estimated with logistic and multinomial regression. The Spearman correlation coefficient was used to assess the correlation between the monthly average SI and the monthly aORs of HIP. Results: For deliveries from January to June 2020, no significant differences in HIP prevalence were observed compared with 2019. From July to December 2020, there was a significant increase in HIP, with peaks in July (GD screening in April) (aOR 1.41, 1.26-1.58) and November (GD screening in August) (aOR 1.33, 95% CI 1.18-1.49). There was no significant change in neonatal weight percentiles. The Spearman correlation coefficient between the SI and HIP aORs was 0.86 (p = 0.02). Conclusion During the pandemic, we observed an increase in the prevalence of HIP, compared to 2019, without a measurable impact on LGA or SGA newborns. The aOR of HIP in a given month was strongly correlated with the corresponding SI.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Active Quantum Reservoir Engineering: Using a Qubit to Manipulate its Environment

arXiv:2505.16898v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum reservoir engineering leverages dissipative processes to achieve desired behavior, with applications ranging from entanglement generation to quantum error correction. Therein, a structured environment acts as an entropy sink for the system and no time-dependent control over the system is required. We develop a theoretical framework for active reservoir engineering, where time-dependent control over a quantum system is used to manipulate its environment. In this case, the system may act as an entropy sink for the environment. Our framwork captures the dynamical interplay between system and environment, and provides an intuitive picture of how finite-size effects and system-environment correlations allow for manipulating the environment by repeated initialization of the quantum system. We illustrate our results with two examples: a superconducting qubit coupled to an environment of two-level systems and a semiconducting quantum dot coupled to nuclear spins. In both scenarios, we find qualitative agreement with previous experimental results, illustrating how active control can unlock new functionalities in open quantum systems.

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

Best Arm Identification with Minimal Regret

arXiv:2409.18909v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Motivated by real-world applications that necessitate responsible experimentation, we introduce the problem of best arm identification (BAI) with minimal regret. This variant of the multi-armed bandit problem elegantly amalgamates two of its most ubiquitous objectives: regret minimization and BAI. More precisely, the agent's goal is to identify the best arm with a prescribed confidence level $\delta$, while minimizing the cumulative regret up to the stopping time. Focusing on single-parameter exponential families of distributions, we leverage information-theoretic techniques to establish an instance-dependent lower bound on the expected cumulative regret. Moreover, we present an impossibility result that underscores the tension between cumulative regret and sample complexity in fixed-confidence BAI. Complementarily, we design and analyze the Double KL-UCB algorithm, which achieves asymptotic optimality as the confidence level tends to zero. Notably, this algorithm employs two distinct confidence bounds to guide arm selection in a randomized manner. Our findings elucidate a fresh perspective on the inherent connections between regret minimization and BAI.

16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

GeoIMO: Geometry-Driven Independent Motion Classification for Event Cameras

Existing automotive event datasets rely on appearance-based annotations from frame pipelines, making them poorly suited for motion-aware event perception. We present a geometry-driven, annotation-free framework that classifies detected objects as static or independently moving by exploiting ego-motion structure directly from the event stream. A Focus of Expansion model with yaw compensation estimates global background motion, while objects are labeled as moving when local motion deviates from this prediction, as quantified by a scale-invariant residual. Temporal stabilization improves robustness across consecutive event windows. The method requires no learning, no manual motion labels, and works with any input bounding boxes. Experiments on MVSEC and the Prophesee 1 Megapixel Automotive Detection dataset demonstrate consistent performance across diverse driving scenarios, with yaw compensation improving results during turns and a simple translational local model offering a favorable accuracy-efficiency trade-off.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Quantum-enabled active matter at the atomic scale

arXiv:2606.24615v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Active matter comprises particles that extract energy from their local environment and convert it into motion. Although active particles have been miniaturized down to the nanoscale, realizing activity at the fundamentally smaller scale of individual atoms remains an open challenge, where quantum effects become increasingly relevant. Here, we experimentally demonstrate that individual Cs-133 atoms confined in an optical dipole trap extract energy from an ultracold bath of Rb-87 atoms via quantum-mechanical spin interactions and convert it into active motion. We quantitatively reproduce the resulting dynamics using a parameter-free active Langevin model derived from kinetic theory and support it with event-driven Monte Carlo collision simulations. The microscopic origin of activity is identified as quantum spin exchange, which transfers discrete internal spin energy into kinetic motion. Our work establishes a quantum-enabled route to active matter at the fundamental size limit of single atoms and opens perspectives for exploring the interplay of activity, quantum physics, and mesoscopic non-equilibrium thermodynamics.

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

Greedy Coordinate Diffusion: Effective and Semantically Coherent Adversarial Attacks via Diffusion Guidance

arXiv:2606.15531v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fine-tuning aligned language models on benign tasks (e.g. math tutoring) systematically breaks safety guardrails, even when training data contains no harmful content. While mechanistic approaches have shed light on where alignment resides in model weights, they do not by provide a general formal framework for deriving guarantees about when fine-tuning degrades it – leaving the field without principled tools for predicting or preventing alignment collapse. We develop a local geometric framework through geometric analysis of parameter-space trajectories and apply it to understand the fragility of alignment in fine-tuning. While first-order analysis suggests orthogonal updates are safe, we prove this is illusory: the curvature of the fine-tuning loss induces second-order acceleration that can induce second-order drift into alignment-sensitive regions. We formalize a construct of our framework as the Alignment Instability Condition (AIC), three geometric properties that, when present, are sufficient to guarantee degradation. Our main result proves quartic onset of alignment degradation along gradient-flow trajectories, determined by how sharply alignment depends on specific parameters and how strongly tasks couple to these parameters. These findings yield formal sufficient conditions under which static first-order protection can fail under gradient descent. We further empirically validate the framework's foundations, showing that the Fisher Information Matrix provides a proxy for the degree of safety degradation across diverse fine-tuning.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Diabetes and the Life-Course: Evidence from Panel Data and Electronic Health Records

Incidence of type 2 diabetes is increasing at ages when education, work, family, and financial transitions are taking place, yet we lack robust evidence of whether earlier treatment changes life-course outcomes and over which time span this takes place. This paper uses the medical cutoff for diabetes diagnosis (HbA1c of 6.5 percent) as a natural experiment to study the effects of diabetes treatment using electronic health records (EHR) and panel data. This paper has three main findings. First, using EHR data, we find that there is a sharp increase in the probability of both diagnosis of diabetes and prescription when the HbA1c equals 6.5 percent. Second, we find that treating diabetes reduces HbA1c levels, weight, BMI, and blood pressure and increases the amount of care received, proxied by the number of HbA1c tests. Both the diagnosis and a prescription are independently able to produce positive changes in metabolic health, although a prescription is more effective in this regard. Third, we conclude that treating diabetes does not have a significant effect on life-course outcomes for a cohort of young Americans aged 24-32, although it does result in a reduction in HbA1c levels that are seen even eight years after the intervention. Taken together, these findings suggest that receiving a diagnosis and prescription are both effective treatments for diabetes, but they do not translate to significant alterations in the lives of young adults in the medium-term.

20.
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.

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

Equity with Efficiency: An Empirical Study of Tokenizers for Multilingual Large Language Models

Multilingual large language models (LLMs) depend on subword tokenization to bridge discrete text and continuous neural representation. State-of-the-art multilingual LLMs often use Byte-level Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) tokenizers that structurally favor high-resource languages and Latin scripts. For speakers of underrepresented languages, particularly those across Southeast Asia, this bias inflates inference costs and widens cross-lingual capability gaps. We present the first systematic comparison of equitable tokenizers on a unified benchmark spanning 11 Southeast Asian languages. Beyond tokenizer-level analysis of compression efficiency and cross-lingual equity, we assess downstream task performance through controlled 1.5B-parameter language model training using the same training data. Our results show that Parity-aware BPE lies on the Pareto frontier of the efficiency-equity trade-off, achieving strong compression parity at competitive cost. Morphology-Driven Byte Encoding delivers the best semantic reasoning performance through morphologically richer representations, albeit at a higher computational expense. Byte Latent Transformer underperforms on downstream tasks, possibly because its architectural assumptions misalign with the constraints of limited low-resource training data. Together, our findings demonstrate that cross-lingual fairness and tokenization efficiency are not fundamentally at odds, and offer practical guidance for designing equitable multilingual models.

22.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-25

Selection principles for quasi-stationary distributions and reinforcement processes

arXiv:2606.25857v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Let \(P\) be a sub-Markov matrix on a finite set \(S\), representing the transition probabilities of a Markov chain on \(S\) absorbed at a cemetery point \(\partial\notin S\). We consider a reinforced process \((X_n,\mu_n)\) defined as follows: \((X_n)\) behaves like a chain with kernel \(P\) until it dies, and when it dies at time \(n\), it is instantaneously ``resurrected'' at a point sampled according to its weighted past occupation measure \[ \mu_n = \frac1{W_n} \left( w_0\mu_0+\sum_{k=1}^n w_k\delta_{X_k} \right), \qquad W_n=\sum_{k=0}^n w_k, \] where the positive weights $w_k$ satisfy certain technical assumptions, a typical example being given by $w_k = k^q$, with $q\geq -1$. When \(P\) is irreducible, the behaviour of \((\mu_n)\) is well understood [AFP], [bansaye2022non]: it converges almost surely toward the unique quasi-stationary distribution (QSD) of \(P\). The purpose of this paper is to investigate the general situation where \(P\) is not irreducible. Under generic assumptions on \(P\), there are finitely many QSDs. We prove that the asymptotic selection depends on the summability of the inverse cumulative weights \(1/W_n\). If \[ \sum_{n\geq0}\frac1{W_n}=\infty, \] then \((\mu_n)\) almost surely converges toward the QSD associated with the largest Perron value. If instead \[ \sum_{n\geq0}\frac1{W_n}0\).

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Semantic Flip: Synthetic OOD Generation for Robust Refusal in Embodied Question Answering and Spatial Localization

Detecting unanswerable user queries remains essential for the reliable deployment of real-world embodied agents. However, modern vision-language models (VLMs) often generate overly confident answers even when the available visual memory cannot support the query. Such overconfidence poses various task-dependent risks. The agent may provide misleading information to the user in Embodied Question Answering and select an arbitrary coordinate and physically guide the user there in spatial reasoning for navigation. Despite these high stakes, only a few prior studies directly address when and how an embodied VLM should respond with "I do not know." This work proposes Semantic Flip, a simple yet effective framework that synthesizes auxiliary out-of-distribution (OOD) samples for embodied refusal without requiring external OOD annotations. The key idea is to independently transform the query and video memory to construct auxiliary OOD pairs that lack sufficient visual grounding. These synthesized pairs enable training a lightweight rejection module on top of a frozen pretrained VLM. The module attaches to any existing VLM-based pipeline without retraining the underlying model. Across two complementary benchmarks, Semantic Flip consistently outperforms strong prompting baselines. This work also introduces SpaceReject, a new refusal benchmark for spatial localization with deliberately unanswerable queries over long video memory, where Semantic Flip achieves an $F_1$ score of 0.9559. The source codes and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/ndb796/SemanticFlip.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Population-scale genomics reveals divergent pathogenicity of variant classes across paralogous collagen IV genes

Monoallelic pathogenic or likely pathogenic variants in COL4A3 and COL4A4 occur in approximately 1 in 106 individuals, yet whether these paralogous genes confer equivalent pathogenicity for the same variant classes has not been tested at population scale. Using whole-genome sequencing data from the UK Biobank (UKB; n = 500,000), with replication in the All of Us Research Program (n = 414,000), we performed per-variant association testing, gene-based collapsing analyses and phenome-wide association studies (PheWAS) across haematuria, proteinuria and chronic kidney disease. We identified 64 COL4A3 and 92 COL4A4 rare variants significantly associated with haematuria or proteinuria, generating a quantitative allelic series for clinical variant interpretation. Glycine substitutions within collagenous domains conferred similar risks in both genes. In contrast, truncating and non-collagenous domain (NC1) missense variants were strongly associated with haematuria and proteinuria in COL4A4 carriers but showed substantially attenuated or absent associations in COL4A3 carriers despite comparable carrier frequencies and predicted pathogenicity scores. These findings were independently replicated in All of Us. Genome-wide association analysis identified the COL4A3/COL4A4 locus as the dominant genetic determinant of haematuria, with the signal attributable to the aggregate effects of rare coding variants and no evidence of independent common variant or trans-acting modifier effects. These findings demonstrate substantial gene-specific differences in tolerance to truncating and NC1 variants between COL4A3 and COL4A4, challenging assumptions of equivalent pathogenicity across paralogous collagen IV genes. Gene identity and not variant class alone, should inform risk stratification, variant interpretation and genetic counselling in individuals carrying collagen IV risk genotypes.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Paying to Know: Micro-Transaction Markets for Verified Product Information in Agentic E-Commerce

Commercial NLP treats the shopping chatbot as a recommender or a conversion tool: its job is to match a user to a catalogue entry and close a sale. We argue that the arrival of agent-native micro-payment rails (e.g., x402, AP2) changes what is scarce. When the buyer is an autonomous agent that can investigate exhaustively, the bottleneck is no longer matching products but acquiring trustworthy, decision-relevant information about them. We envision agentic e-commerce as a micro-transaction market for verified information: buyer agents spend fractions of a cent to progressively unlock seller- and reviewer-supplied data – service histories, third-party test reports, bills of materials, audited sales and support metrics – paid for a la carte under a freemium model, with reviewer trust scored reputationally. We sketch the architecture of such a market and argue that it rewards genuine product quality and yields truer competition than ranking-based storefronts. We then translate the vision into concrete NLP problems – cost-optimal information acquisition, data pricing and negotiation, real-time entity resolution, grounded value exchange, and privacy-preserving persona modelling – and argue that these, not chat fluency, deserve the field's attention.