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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Towards practical PDMP sampling: Metropolis adjustments, locally adaptive step-sizes, and NUTS-based time lengths

arXiv:2503.11479v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Piecewise-Deterministic Markov Processes (PDMPs) hold significant promise for sampling from complex probability distributions. However, their practical implementation is hindered by the need to compute model-specific bounds. Conversely, while Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) offers a generally efficient approach to sampling, its inability to adaptively tune step sizes impedes its performance when sampling complex distributions like funnels. To address these limitations, we introduce three innovative concepts: (a) a Metropolis-adjusted approximation for PDMP simulation that eliminates the need for explicit bounds without compromising the invariant measure, (b) an adaptive step size mechanism compatible with the Metropolis correction, and (c) a No U-Turn Sampler (NUTS)-inspired scheme for dynamically selecting path lengths in PDMPs. These three ideas can be seamlessly integrated into a single, `doubly-adaptive' PDMP sampler with favourable robustness and efficiency properties.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Interpreting Neural Combinatorial Optimization via Evolving Programmatic Bottlenecks

arXiv:2606.19741v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) achieves strong performance, yet its black-box nature remains a key roadblock to deployment and scientific diagnosis. Standard interpretability tools, such as Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs), are ill-equipped for NCO, whose decisions are dynamic, state-dependent, and lack proper concept vocabulary definition. To close this gap, we introduce Evolving Programmatic Bottlenecks (EPB), to our knowledge, the first framework for interpreting NCO policies by distilling black-box NCO models into human-readable program portfolios. EPB employs an LLM to autonomously evolve a bank of programs, where each program's per-step action distribution serves as the bottleneck. EPB works through an iterative framework: Block I fixes program bank capacity and introduces a hybrid textual-numerical gradient descent scheme that couples numerical gradients for student router updates and textual gradients for LLM-based program revision; Block II dynamically adapts bank capacity via fault-targeted expansion and redundancy pruning. Extensive experiments demonstrate EPB's effectiveness and broad applicability, where the distilled program portfolios largely match original performance. EPB also reveals that NCO behavior shifts across optimization stages and can be approximated as a composition of classic heuristic variants. Our work advances interpretable NCO and establishes EPB as a promising tool for interpreting sequential decision-making models.

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

Aligned but Stereotypical? How System Prompts Shape Demographic Bias in LLM-Based Text-to-Image Models

Text-to-image (T2I) systems increasingly rely on Large Language Model (LLM)-based text conditioning to interpret and expand user prompts. While this improves prompt understanding and text-image alignment, we find that it can also introduce implicit demographic assumptions, even when demographic attributes are unspecified. To systematically investigate this behavior across varying levels of prompt ambiguity and complexity, we construct a comprehensive benchmark covering diverse prompt settings. Evaluations on eight recent T2I models show that LLM-based systems consistently exhibit stronger demographic skew than non-LLM-based baselines. We further analyze system prompts, a component unique to LLM-based T2I systems that guides prompt interpretation and expansion. Our analyses show that these instructions strongly influence text embeddings, which subsequently leads to biased image generations. Motivated by these findings, we propose FairPro, a training-free debiasing framework that adaptively generates fairness-aware instructions while preserving user intent. Experiments demonstrate that FairPro substantially reduces demographic disparities while maintaining prompt fidelity.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Dissociative recombination and ion-pair formation in $\mathrm{HeH^+}$ isotopologues: A time-dependent wave-packet study including rotational coupling

arXiv:2606.11352v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a comprehensive theoretical investigation of dissociative recombination (DR) and resonant ion-pair (RIP) formation in $\mathrm{HeH^+}$ isotopologues using time-dependent wave-packet propagation methods. Nuclear dynamics are treated on a set of 23 coupled electronic states, including $^2\Sigma$, $^2\Pi$, and $^2\Delta$ symmetries, in both adiabatic and strictly diabatic representations, with rotational couplings explicitly included. Reaction cross sections are computed over collision energies ranging from 0 to 50 eV. The results reveal that inclusion of a large manifold of resonant states and rotational couplings significantly enhances the DR cross section relative to earlier theoretical studies. In the diabatic representation, $^2\Sigma$ states dominate the recombination dynamics, while in the adiabatic representation, $^2\Pi$ and $^2\Delta$ states contribute significantly at low collision energies. For RIP formation, two different diabatization schemes yield systematically larger cross sections than previous models, highlighting the sensitivity of ion-pair production to electronic coupling structure. Isotopic effects are examined, showing a clear inverse dependence of cross section magnitude on reduced mass. The present results underscore the importance of multi-state coupling and nonadiabatic effects in accurately describing electron-molecule collision processes in primordial and astrophysical plasmas.

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

Open Materials Generation with Inference-Time Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2602.00424v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Continuous-time generative models for crystalline materials enable inverse materials design by learning to predict stable crystal structures, but incorporating explicit target properties into the generative process remains challenging. Policy-gradient reinforcement learning (RL) provides a principled mechanism for aligning generative models with downstream objectives but typically requires access to the score, which has prevented its application to flow-based models that learn only velocity fields. We introduce Open Materials Generation with Inference-time Reinforcement Learning (OMatG-IRL), a policy-gradient RL framework that operates directly on the learned velocity fields and eliminates the need for the explicit computation of the score. OMatG-IRL leverages stochastic perturbations of the underlying generation dynamics preserving the baseline performance of the pretrained generative model while enabling exploration and policy-gradient estimation at inference time. Using OMatG-IRL, we present the first application of RL to crystal structure prediction (CSP). Our method enables effective reinforcement of an energy-based objective while preserving diversity through composition conditioning, and it achieves performance competitive with score-based RL approaches. Finally, we show that OMatG-IRL can learn time-dependent velocity-annealing schedules, enabling accurate CSP with order-of-magnitude improvements in sampling efficiency and, correspondingly, reduction in generation time. The OMatG-IRL code is included in a new release of the Open Materials Generation (OMatG) framework available at https://github.com/FERMat-ML/OMatG.

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

BioArtlas: Computational Clustering of Multi-Dimensional Complexity in Bioart

arXiv:2511.19162v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Bioart brings living material into artistic practice, where a single work can be at once an aesthetic object, a scientific instrument, and an ethical provocation. Traditional categories sort such works along one axis at a time, which flattens the very hybridity that defines the field and leaves curators no way to compare works across many dimensions together. I introduce BioArtlas, a computational atlas that represents each bioartwork along many curated dimensions at once and organizes the field by conceptual similarity rather than by medium or chronology. My method embeds the keywords of all 81 works on each of thirteen interpretive axes, groups related concepts into a shared codebook that tames inconsistent terminology, and then searches systematically for a clustering that is both statistically clean and interpretable. Among the methods that place every work on the map, agglomerative clustering separates the field far more cleanly than the usual k-means baseline (silhouette 0.664 versus 0.483), whereas density-based methods reach higher scores only by discarding most of the corpus as noise. By separating rigorous analysis from public storytelling, BioArtlas turns the tangled complexity of bioart into a navigable landscape, openly available as an interactive interface (https://www.bioartlas.com) and dataset (https://github.com/joonhyungbae/BioArtlas).

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

A Training-Free Mixture-of-Agents Framework for Multi-Document Summarization using LLMs and Knowledge Graphs

Multi-Document Summarization (MDS) plays a critical role in distilling essential information from collections of textual data. Existing approaches often struggle to capture complex inter-document relationships, rely heavily on large amounts of labeled data for supervised training, or exhibit limited generalization across domains and languages. To address these limitations, we present a training-free mixture-of-agents framework for MDS that leverages the complementary strengths of large language models (LLMs) and knowledge graphs. Our approach decomposes summarization into specialized agent tasks: extractive selection, knowledge-aware abstraction, and iterative refinement, each operating without task-specific fine-tuning. We unify their outputs using a multi-perspective consistency mechanism guided by LLMs. Experiments across four datasets in English and Vietnamese demonstrate state-of-the-art or competitive performance, validating the effectiveness and adaptability of our modular design.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Fine-Grained Open-Vocabulary Object Detection with Fined-Grained Prompts: Task, Dataset and Benchmark

Open-vocabulary detectors are proposed to locate and recognize objects in novel classes. However, variations in vision-aware language vocabulary data used for open-vocabulary learning can lead to unfair and unreliable evaluations. Recent evaluation methods have attempted to address this issue by incorporating object properties or adding locations and characteristics to the captions. Nevertheless, since these properties and locations depend on the specific details of the images instead of classes, detectors can not make accurate predictions without precise descriptions provided through human annotation. This paper introduces 3F-OVD, a novel task that extends supervised fine-grained object detection to the open-vocabulary setting. Our task is intuitive and challenging, requiring a deep understanding of Fine-grained captions and careful attention to Fine-grained details in images in order to accurately detect Fine-grained objects. Additionally, due to the scarcity of qualified fine-grained object detection datasets, we have created a new dataset, NEU-171K, tailored for both supervised and open-vocabulary settings. We benchmark state-of-the-art object detectors on our dataset for both settings. Furthermore, we propose a simple yet effective post-processing technique. Our data, annotations and codes are available at https://github.com/tengerye/3FOVD.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Reference-Driven Multi-Speaker Audio Scene Generation from In-the-Wild Priors

Existing multi-speaker dialogue systems bind speakers to utterances through structured supervision: per-turn tags, multi-stream transcriptions, or learnable speaker embeddings. These systems operate within speech-only pipelines that produce clean vocal sequences without the ambient texture of real conversations. We take a different approach. Our method, ScenA, conditions a text-to-audio flow-matching foundation model, pretrained on large-scale in-the-wild data, directly on multiple reference voices and a free-form natural language prompt that describes an entire multi-speaker audio scene. Leveraging such a foundational model allows us to inherit its capacity for natural, non-studio audio: background noise, room acoustics, overlapping dialogue, and spontaneous paralinguistic events, while adding multi-speaker control without any per-turn structure. Concretely, reference latents are concatenated into the model's token sequence and distinguished by lightweight identity-aware positional encodings. However, we identify a critical obstacle to this approach: the Reference Shortcut. During training under standard noise schedules, the model can identify the matching reference by acoustic similarity to the noisy target, bypassing the text prompt entirely. We address this with a high-noise-biased timestep distribution that forces the model to rely on the text prompt for speaker assignment. We evaluate ScenA on the CoVoMix2-Dialogue benchmark, showing that it outperforms existing multi-speaker systems on speaker-binding metrics while generating rich conversational audio with overlapping speech, emotional vocalizations, and ambient sound. Our results demonstrate the advantage of using a general-purpose audio model conditioned on a free-form scene description, rather than passing structured dialog scripts through a speech-only pipeline.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Cardiac rhythm development: A wearable device index of risk for physical and mental illness in adolescence

Objective. The autonomic nervous system, which regulates cardiac rhythm, undergoes pronounced maturation across adolescence. How cardiac rhythm develops over this period, however, and whether individual differences in its development forecast mental and physical illness, remain open questions. We used three waves of Fitbit data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study to characterize the developmental trajectory of the cardiac rhythm and to test whether variation in that trajectory predicts onset of psychopathology and cardiometabolic disease. Methods. 8,301 adolescents contributed 242,811 valid Fitbit wear days across Waves 2 (Mage=12), 4 (Mage=14), and 6 (Mage=16). Cosinor mixed-effects models yielded three rhythm parameters per session: mesor (24-hour mean), amplitude (diurnal swing), and acrophase (peak timing). We first characterized age- and sex-specific trajectories, cross-wave stability, and factors shaping the rhythm. We then used parallel-process latent growth models to test whether within-person changes in rhythm tracked symptom trajectories, and hierarchical logistic models to test whether rhythm parameters predicted the first clinical onset of psychopathology and of obesity and hypertension. Results. The cardiac rhythm changed substantially across adolescence: mesor decreased, amplitude flattened, and acrophase shifted later. Within-person change in the rhythm tracked change in blood pressure, BMI, and trajectories of depression and ADHD symptoms. Higher mesor predicted incident onset of all five outcomes controlling for demographics, baseline symptoms, and behavior (ORs 1.36-1.54); amplitude, acrophase, and rhythm instability conferred additional risk. Conclusions. The 24-hour cardiac rhythm is a passively measurable substrate of adolescent autonomic development that indexes transdiagnostic risk for psychiatric and cardiometabolic illness.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Leave-One-Out-, Bootstrap- and Cross-Conformal Anomaly Detectors

arXiv:2402.16388v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The need for uncertainty quantification in anomaly detection systems has become increasingly important. In this context, effectively controlling Type I error rates without inflating Type II error rates in these systems can build trust and reduce costs associated with false discoveries. The field of conformal anomaly detection emerges as a promising approach for providing respective statistical and finite-sample validity guarantees through model calibration. However, reliance on calibration data imposes practical limitations, especially in low-data regimes. In this work, we formally define and evaluate leave-one-out-, bootstrap-, and cross-conformal methods for conformal anomaly detection, building on methods from the field of conformal prediction. Looking beyond the classical split-conformal approach, we show that derived methods for calculating resampling-conformal $p$-values offer a practical compromise between the data efficiency of full-conformal (transductive) approaches and the computational efficiency of split-conformal (inductive) methods. We validate derived methods and quantify their improvements for a range of one-class classifiers and datasets.

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

Relatively Smart: A New Approach for Instance-Optimal Learning

arXiv:2603.01346v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We revisit the framework of Smart PAC learning, which seeks supervised learners which compete with semi-supervised learners that are provided full knowledge of the marginal distribution on unlabeled data. Prior work has shown that such marginal-by-marginal guarantees are possible for "most" marginals, with respect to an arbitrary fixed and known measure, but not more generally. We discover that this failure can be attributed to an "indistinguishability" phenomenon: There are marginals which cannot be statistically distinguished from other marginals that require different learning approaches. In such settings, semi-supervised learning cannot certify its guarantees from unlabeled data, rendering them arguably non-actionable. We propose relatively smart learning, a new framework which demands that a supervised learner compete only with the best "certifiable" semi-supervised guarantee. We show that such modest relaxation suffices to bypass the impossibility results from prior work. In the distribution-free setting, we show that the One-Inclusion Graph learner is relatively smart up to squaring the sample complexity, and show that no supervised learning algorithm can do better. For distribution-family settings, we show that relatively smart learning can be impossible or can require idiosyncratic learning approaches, and its difficulty can be non-monotone in the inclusion order on distribution families.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Hardy and Cabello Arguments in Spatial and Temporal Frauchiger-Renner Scenarios

arXiv:2606.15467v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate Hardy- and Cabello-type logical structures within spatial and temporal extensions of the Frauchiger–Renner (FR) framework, embedding these constructions directly into the FR multi-observer architecture. In the spatial multi-observer scenario, both Hardy and Cabello contradictions arise, with the Cabello construction yielding the stronger violation,$\(\Delta_Cabello^{\max}=0.1078\)$, which exceeds the maximal Hardy probability $\(P_{H}^{\max}=\frac{5\sqrt{5}-11}{2}\approx 0.09017\)$. We then develop a sequential temporal FR protocol based on coherent multi-observer measurements performed on a single spin-$\tfrac12$ system. In this temporal setting, the Hardy contradiction disappears identically due to dynamical constraints imposed by sequential state updates, whereas a finite Cabello-type violation survives, \(\Delta_Cabello^{\max}\approx 0.0674\). Our results establish a fundamental structural distinction between spatial entanglement and temporal multi-observer correlations in FR-type logical scenarios, and demonstrate that certain observer-independent description failures persist even without spacelike separation.

14.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Pillbox: A Leakage-Aware Foundation-Model Predictor and Lineage-Ceiling Diagnostic for Cancer Drug Response

We present Pillbox, a predictor whose pipeline is audited against the six Asiaee leakage modes with the one residual pathway shown by per-fold ablation to be non-load-bearing on hard splits. Our model combines CpGPT methylation embeddings, CLAMP drug embeddings, and per-fold-fit gene-expression principal components which are fused by Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM)-conditioned graph attention on the STRING v12 protein-protein interaction graph. Then we alpha-ensemble the model against a histogram-based gradient boosting regressor baseline. On GDSC GSE68379 (987 cell lines, 375 drugs) across seeds 42, 7, and 123, the ensemble reaches test R-Squared of 0.78, 0.77, and 0.76 on random, histology-blind, and site-blind splits respectively, with cell-aware lifts above the drug-mean floor of +0.054, +0.060, and +0.037. As a quantitative diagnostic for feature-stack saturation we propose the cross-architecture residual correlation, calibrated against a same-architecture-different-initialization control. On histology-blind splits the cross-architecture value of 0.939 falls short of the same-architecture ceiling of 0.974 by approximately 0.03 in residual correlation, a gap we interpret as the headroom available to architecture choice on top of the current foundation-model representation and consistent with the long-established observation that tissue lineage dominates cell-line drug response. We integrated curated mutation, methylation, and drug-target-expression channels, but these do not improve prediction once foundation-model embeddings are in place. Cross-screen validation against PRISM matches the GDSC-to-PRISM measurement reproducibility ceiling within 0.01 Spearman.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

From inverse problems to neural operators: prediction, mechanism, and generalization of data-driven models

作者:

arXiv:2606.08956v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Scientists have historically relied on mathematical models based on differential equations to relate system inputs – forces, fluxes, or heat sources – to outputs, such as displacement, velocity, concentration, and temperature. These models rely on deep domain knowledge to determine the form of the governing differential equation, which is then calibrated with data by solving an inverse problem. In recent years, the field of Scientific Machine Learning has introduced a variety of alternative modeling strategies for physical systems. A method called Sparse Identification of Nonlinear Dynamics learns the governing equation as a sparse linear combination of terms in a user-defined library. Neural Ordinary Differential Equations construct the governing equation by taking in the state and its derivatives at the input layer of a neural network. Entirely foregoing the modeling framework of differential equations, neural operators directly learn a non-linear mapping between the system inputs and outputs. From inverse problems to neural operators, all of these modeling strategies can be conceptualized as data-driven machinery to predict a system's response over a range of inputs. It is then natural to wonder how exactly these various strategies relate to each other, and whether they can be neatly taxonomized. Drawing from the philosophical literature on scientific models, we argue that many model types have a common structure, differing only in the assumed model class of the input-output relation they define. Connecting to philosophical ideas on mechanism, and arguing that data from physical systems arises from solutions to parsimonious differential equations, we propose that only certain models are capable of mechanism discovery, and thus generalization. Our analysis is intended to unite apparently disparate modeling strategies and provide insight into their appropriate use cases.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Image-based deep learning for emergency electrocardiogram classification

Automated electrocardiogram analysis has advanced largely through digital waveforms, yet many emergency-care workflows rely on ECGs available only as printed tracings, scanned reports, PDFs or mobile photographs. We developed an image-based deep learning system for emergency ECG classification and evaluated it in InCor-EMG, an expert-adjudicated dataset of 18,519 emergency ECGs spanning 12 ECG categories, with labels from 19 cardiologists. On the held-out test set, the final ConvNeXt ensemble achieved a macro F1-score of 0.807 (95% CI, 0.788-0.825), compared with 0.820 (95% CI, 0.805-0.832) for annotating cardiologists, and higher F1-scores than Mortara Veritas in most evaluated categories. Performance was associated more strongly with inter-reader agreement than with training sample size and remained informative across scanned and photographed ECGs, with supportive performance in model-enriched temporal and heterogeneous public-image evaluations. These findings support ECG image classification when digital waveforms are unavailable.

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

PROTECT-90: A Fault Dataset for Power System Protection

arXiv:2606.24298v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The increasing interest in data-driven methods for power system protection is accompanied by a lack of standardized, publicly available high-voltage waveform datasets that enable transparent and reproducible evaluation. To address this gap, this paper introduces the PROTECT-90 dataset, an open electromagnetic transient (EMT)-simulated reference benchmark for high-voltage fault studies with consistent digital-fault-recorder-like measurements, publicly released with this work. The dataset comprises 9,022 physically consistent short-circuit simulation episodes generated on a standardized 90 kV double-line topology with systematically documented domain randomization of grid operating points, line parameters, and fault conditions. For each episode, synchronized three-phase voltage and current waveforms are recorded at eight measurement locations and released together with structured, machine-readable metadata describing fault type, fault location, inception time, and operating conditions. All modeling assumptions, parameter ranges, and data-generation procedures are explicitly documented to ensure transparency and cross-study comparability. By combining physically grounded EMT simulation, balanced scenario coverage, and open accessibility, PROTECT-90 establishes a standardized foundation for reproducible benchmarking of protection-oriented signal processing and learning-based methods.

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

Refusal Beyond a Single Direction: A Preliminary Comparison of Diff-in-Means and INLP

arXiv:2606.13720v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Arditi et al. (2024) has shown that refusal in safety fine-tuned chat models is mediated by a single linear direction in the residual stream, recoverable by a difference-in-means (DiM) of harmful and harmless activations. We compare DiM-based interventions (activation addition and directional ablation) with two interventions derived from Iterative Nullspace Projection (INLP) – nullspace projection and counterfactual flipping – on five open-weight chat models, asking whether INLP can match DiM at steering refusal and whether its richer parameterisation yields more tweakable interventions. INLP counterfactual flipping is competitive with DiM directional ablation on refusal suppression, while nullspace projection is consistently weaker. Restricting INLP to the leading directions of the extracted subspace preserves most of the suppression effect at near-baseline perplexity, giving a tunable capability. Geometrically, the two INLP interventions land in qualitatively different regions of activation space: nullspace projection collapses transformed activations between the harmful and harmless clusters, while counterfactual flipping moves them into the opposite cluster, suggesting that the model encodes the absence of a concept differently from its opposite – an intriguing distinction that warrants further investigation in future work.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

The Target ALS Global Natural History Study: Cross-platform proteomics to accelerate biofluid biomarker and drug target discovery in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a fatal, rapidly progressive neurodegenerative disease of motor neurons for which therapeutics are limited. Improved biomarkers are imperative to improve patient care and therapeutic development. Here, we employed 35-plex isobaric tandem mass tag labeling based on isobutyl-proline reporter group (TMTpro) to perform unbiased proteomic analysis of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and plasma from control (n= 28, n= 31) and sporadic ALS (sALS) (n= 39, n= 41), from the Target ALS Global Natural History Study (TALS GNHS). We identified 2,875 proteins in CSF and 1,118 proteins in plasma and identified known and novel differentially expressed proteins (DEPs) between controls and sALS, some of which were orthogonally validated using immunoassay. Comparison of TMTpro-MS and Olink proximity extension assay proteomics revealed common and non-overlapping differentially expressed proteins illustrating strengths unique to each platform. This initial cross-sectional proteomic study of biofluids from the TALS GNHS, with unrestricted availability of study results to the research community, highlights the potential of this resource as a potent platform for ALS biomarker discovery.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Avatar V: Scaling Video-Reference Avatar Video Generation

Generating avatar videos that are not merely visually similar to a target individual but behaviorally recognizable, faithfully reproducing their talking rhythm, gestural tendencies, and expression dynamics, remains an open challenge. Existing methods predominantly condition on single static images, which provide insufficient identity information and cannot capture dynamic motion traits, while standard pixel-level objectives underserve the perceptually critical facial regions that determine avatar fidelity. We present Avatar V, a production-scale framework that addresses these limitations through video-reference-conditioned identity modeling. Rather than compressing identity into fixed-size embeddings, the model conditions directly on the full token sequence of a reference video, learning to reproduce both static identity attributes (facial geometry, skin texture) and dynamic behavioral patterns (talking rhythm, micro-expressions) through attention over the reference context. We introduce Sparse Reference Attention, an asymmetric mechanism achieving linear-complexity conditioning on arbitrarily long references; a motion representation stream enabling closed-loop talking style transfer; and an identity-aware super-resolution refiner inheriting the full reference conditioning. These are supported by a data engine curating 100M+ training clips from 50M raw videos, and a five-stage training pipeline with flow matching pre-training, personality fine-tuning, two-phase distillation (>10x acceleration), and RLHF alignment, deployed across thousands of GPUs. Avatar V generates 1080p videos of unlimited duration, achieving state-of-the-art identity preservation, lip synchronization, and generation quality on our cross-scene benchmark, consistently outperforming leading systems including Seedance 2.0, Kling O3 Pro, Veo 3.1, and OmniHuman 1.5 in both automated metrics and human evaluation.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

SILAGE: Memory-Efficient, Full-Gradient-Free Nonconvex Optimization for Nested Finite Sums

arXiv:2606.15832v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Empirical risk minimization on massive datasets naturally exhibits a nested double finite-sum structure, where $N=nm$ total samples are logically or physically partitioned into $n$ blocks of size $m$ (e.g., in pooled data silos, out-of-core learning, or deliberate stratification). While variance-reduced methods achieve optimal oracle complexities for nonconvex objectives, they suffer from severe scaling bottlenecks in this centralized regime. Recursive estimators, such as PAGE, require periodic global full-gradient refreshes over all $nm$ samples, which are computationally expensive. Conversely, single-loop methods, such as SILVER, avoid such refreshes but require an impractical $\mathcal{O}(nm)$ memory footprint to store a control variate for every sample. In this paper, we propose SILAGE, a variance-reduced algorithm that addresses this trade-off. By actively exploiting the double-sum structure, SILAGE eliminates periodic global full-gradient refreshes over all $nm$ components (evaluating at most one local group gradient per iteration) while requiring only $\mathcal{O}(n)$ memory. Furthermore, we provide a tight convergence analysis that avoids pessimistic worst-case Lipschitz constants. Instead, SILAGE's complexity natively adapts to the underlying data geometry via nested functional similarities: across-group ($\delta_1$) and within-group ($\delta_2$) heterogeneity. Our results improve existing state-of-the-art bounds in several practically relevant regimes.

23.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Gene ancestries reveal diverse microbial associations during eukaryogenesis

The origin of eukaryotes remains a central enigma in biology1. Continuing debates agree on the pivotal role of a symbiosis between an alphaproteobacterium and an Asgard archaeon2,3. However, the nature, timing and contributions of other potential bacterial partners4–6 and the role of interactions with viruses7–9 remain contentious. To address these questions, we used advanced phylogenomic approaches and comprehensive datasets spanning the known diversity of cellular life and viruses. Our analysis provided a revised reconstruction of the last eukaryotic common ancestor (LECA) proteome, in which we traced the phylogenetic origin of each protein family. We found compelling evidence for multiple waves of horizontal gene transfer from diverse bacterial donors, with some likely to have preceded mitochondrial endosymbiosis. We inferred plausible traits of the major donors and their functional contributions to the LECA. Our findings support a contribution of horizontal gene transfers to shaping the proteomes of pre-LECA ancestors and suggest a facilitating role of Nucleocytoviricota viruses. Taken together, our results suggest that ancient eukaryotes may have originated within complex microbial ecosystems through a succession of diverse associations that left a footprint of horizontally transferred genes. Phylogenomic reconstruction of the proteome of the last eukaryotic common ancestor sheds light on the origin of eukaryotes, indicating an important role of horizontal transfer of genes from diverse bacterial and viral donors.

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

MemRefine: LLM-Guided Compression for Long-Term Agent Memory

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly expected to operate over long-term interactions, where information from past dialogues must be preserved and recalled to support future tasks. However, as interactions accumulate, the memory store grows without bound and fills with redundant entries that inflate storage cost and degrade retrieval by crowding out the most useful evidence. Furthermore, this is especially limiting on resource-constrained platforms with hard memory budgets, motivating us to formulate storage-budgeted memory management, the task of keeping an already constructed memory store within a fixed budget while preserving information useful for future interactions. To this end, we then propose MemRefine, an LLM-guided framework that, since surface similarity poorly reflects factual value, uses similarity only to propose candidate pairs and defers delete, merge, and preserve decisions to an LLM judge based on factual content, iterating until the budget is met. Across multiple memory frameworks and long-term conversation benchmarks, MemRefine consistently meets target budgets while preserving downstream performance and outperforming rule-based baselines under tight budgets.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Correct When Paired, Wrong When Split: Decoupling and Editing Modality-Specific Neurons in MLLMs

Although Knowledge Editing provides an efficient mechanism for updating the knowledge of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), we find that current paradigms still suffer from an important yet remain underexplored issue : editing decoupling failure, where entity-related knowledge can be updated when the model is triggered by multimodal inputs (text–image query pairs), however, it often reverts to outdated pre-edit facts when the paired inputs are split into unimodal ones. Our in-depth empirical analysis reveals that the entity knowledge in MLLMs is not stored as a unified representation, but is instead distributed across disentangled modality-specific pathways. As a result, updates biased toward multimodal queries fail to propagate effectively to unimodal circuits. To bridge this gap, we propose DECODE, which explicitly disentangles and localizes modality-specific neuron groups for targeted knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DECODE consistently achieves effective knowledge updates under different modality triggers, thereby mitigating editing decoupling failures.