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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Entity Resolution via Batched Oracle Queries

arXiv:2606.24407v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We consider an oracle that processes a limited batch of records at a time and clusters those that refer to the same real-world entity. We study how to interrogate such an oracle to resolve entities in a dataset whose size is far larger than a single batch, and where no batch is guaranteed to contain all records of any given entity. We aim at a pay-as-you-go approach, to have full control over the costs (the number of oracle consults), while achieving the highest possible recall at every step. We formally cast this problem as batched entity resolution, prove that selecting optimal batches is NP-hard, and provide an optimal solution under a natural condition on entity sizes. Finally, we evaluate our approach on six datasets and show its superiority over state-of-the-art baselines.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Wearable-Grade Lead Reduction Disproportionately Degrades ECG AI Performance in Elderly Patients: Evidence from PTB-XL and MIT-BIH

Consumer wearable devices increasingly use single-lead electrocardiograms (ECGs) for cardiac monitoring, but these signals contain substantially less spatial information than the clinical 12-lead standard. Whether this reduction dispro- portionately affects older adults, who often present with more complex cardiac conditions, remains poorly understood. In this study, we evaluated the impact of lead reduction on AI-ECG diagnostic performance across age groups. A 1D resid- ual neural network was trained on 21,091 PTB-XL ECG recordings spanning five diagnostic superclasses and assessed using 12-, 6-, 2-, and 1-lead configurations. Under the full 12-lead setting, model accuracy declined from 84.5% in patients younger than 40 years to 66.2% in patients aged 75 years or older. Progressive lead reduction further widened this gap. Under the 1-lead configuration, accuracy decreased by 14.1 percentage points in the 75+ group but by only 0.4 percent- age points in the

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Quantum Cinema: An Interactive Cinematic Exploration of Quantum Computing Hardware via Generative World Models

arXiv:2606.17102v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantum computing promises transformative advances across science and industry, yet the physical hardware that enables these computations remains invisible to the public: quantum processors operate inside sealed dilution refrigerators at temperatures near absolute zero, making direct observation impossible. This "imagination gap" between quantum computing's growing societal impact and the public's ability to visualize it represents a significant barrier to quantum literacy and workforce development. We present Quantum Cinema, an open-source, browser-based interactive application that closes this gap by transforming invisible quantum hardware into explorable, cinematic experiences using generative world models. Quantum Cinema guides users through a four-act narrative – from the foundational Nobel Prize-winning science of quantum entanglement, through curated video introductions to three major quantum computing architectures (trapped-ion, neutral-atom, and superconducting systems), into immersive three-dimensional generative worlds that make invisible quantum phenomena observable, and finally to interactive radar-chart comparisons grounded in real quantum device specifications. All three-dimensional environments are generated using WorldLabs' generative world model platform and are scientifically grounded in curated metrics from Amazon Web Services (AWS) Braket quantum hardware. Quantum Cinema requires no installation, no specialized hardware, and no quantum computing background. It is designed to serve two distinct communities: scholars and developers seeking to replicate or extend the platform, and educators, researchers, and science communicators seeking an intuitive tool for explaining quantum hardware to diverse audiences. This paper describes the system architecture, the generative world model pipeline, use cases for both communities, and directions for future work.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Judging to Improve: A De-biased VLM-as-3D-Judge Protocol for Single-Image 3D Generation

arXiv:2606.20364v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A companion study established a de-biased, cross-model VLM-as-3D-judge that reliably ranks single-image-to-3D mesh quality where cheap geometry and CLIP proxies fall short. This paper asks: can that judge's preferences specialize a strong open generator, TRELLIS, on one asset class (furniture), cheaply and without human labels? Taking the judge from ranking to optimization is where the work lives. Pushing a VLM judge into the training and evaluation loop exposes failure modes ranking never triggered, so our contribution is an optimization-grade hardening of the judge: a training judge (Qwen2.5-VL-7B) held distinct from an evaluation judge (InternVL3-8B) to break circularity; position-bias correction; and fixes for three failure modes (image overload, geometry-hiding splat renders, and reference-free judging that rewards clean-but-wrong outputs), with calibration evidence (clear-gap win-rate 0.83-1.0; base-vs-base ~0.5). Using this protocol as an independent evaluator, and working only from public models and data with lightweight parameter-efficient adaptation, we find our methods match the strong base rather than exceed it. Independent base samples carry essentially no learnable preference (0.94 order-flip rate), so signal must be engineered by quality-contrastive construction. Across six adaptation methods, two input regimes, and a severity sweep, the most targeted - conditioner repair under severe degradation - reaches parity (0.50) with the base, while no method clears the >=65% win-rate target. The result is mechanistic: clean inputs saturate the judge, flow-DIT fine-tuning washes out through the sampler, and conditioning repair is the locus that moves geometry. Win-rates are directional at n=8 objects. Matching a strong public-data base with cheap adaptation is itself informative: exceeding it needs more than lightweight PEFT on public data, and the judge protocol is reusable.

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

GraphPO: Graph-based Policy Optimization for Reasoning Models

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become a standard paradigm for enhancing the capability of large reasoning models. RLVR typically samples responses independently and optimizes the policy using from final answers. This paradigm has two limitations. First, independently responses often contain similar intermediate reasoning steps, causing redundant exploration and wasted computation. Second, sparse final-answer rewards make it hard to identify useful steps. Tree-based methods partly address this problem by sharing prefixes and comparing branches from the same prefix to provide fine-grained signals. However, tree branches are still expanded independently. When different branches reach similar reasoning states, they cannot share information and repeat similar exploration. Moreover, tree-based methods ignore such dispersion and only perform local comparisons within separate branches, which can lead to higher variance in advantage estimation. To address this challenge, we propose GraphPO (Graph-based Policy Optimization), a novel RL framework that represents rollouts as a directed acyclic graph, with reasoning steps as edges and semantic states summarized from the reasoning paths as nodes. GraphPO merges semantically equivalent reasoning paths into equivalence classes, allowing them to share suffixes and reallocating budget away from redundant expansions to diverse exploration. Furthermore, we assign efficiency advantages to incoming edges and correctness advantages to outgoing edges, thereby improving inference efficiency while deriving process supervision from outcome. Theory shows that GraphPO reduces advantage-estimation variance and enhances reasoning efficiency. Experiments on three LLMs across reasoning and agentic search benchmarks show that GraphPO consistently outperforms chain- and tree-based baselines with the same token budgets or response budgets.

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

Exploring Extrinsic and Intrinsic Properties for Effective Reasoning with Code Interpreter

Reasoning with a Code Interpreter (CI) has emerged as an effective paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) through executable computation and iterative verification. Despite its growing adoption, the behavioral properties underlying effective code reasoning remain largely underexplored. In this work, we investigate code reasoning from two distinct perspectives inspired by prior studies of natural language reasoning: extrinsic properties, represented by crucial tokens, and intrinsic properties, represented by code-specific cognitive behaviors. Across multiple LLMs, we find that stronger CI reasoning models consistently exhibit a higher prevalence of crucial tokens and cognitive behaviors, particularly verification, backtracking, and backward chaining. Building on these observations, we examine how these properties can be leveraged during both inference and training. At inference time, appending code-specific crucial tokens improves performance on several reasoning capabilities, including mathematical, ordering, and optimization, while yielding limited benefits elsewhere. At training time, augmenting a state-of-the-art framework with code-specific cognitive behaviors improves supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning performance in two of three evaluated models. Further analysis shows that these behaviors reduce overthinking in incorrect responses and improve token efficiency, while also revealing factors that limit gains in a certain model. Our findings provide the first systematic characterization of effective reasoning with CI and demonstrate both the potential and limitations of leveraging key properties to improve CI-based reasoning.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Planted-Solution Pauli Hamiltonians as a Quantum Benchmarking Primitive

arXiv:2606.11455v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce a construction of Pauli Hamiltonians with exactly known ground-state energies, intended as reference instances for ground-state energy estimation algorithms. The construction embeds a planted block-product state as the simultaneous ground state of a sum of frustration-free local clauses on overlapping supports, exposes the resulting model only as a polynomial-size linear combination of Pauli operators, and admits optional Clifford conjugation that preserves the spectrum. The framework subsumes classical planted constraint-satisfaction problems as a diagonal special case, providing a direct embedding channel through which classical hardness properties can be inherited. Open-source software, certification keys, and example instances are made publicly available.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

The Impossibility of Eliciting Latent Knowledge

arXiv:2606.12268v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Advanced AI systems have extensive knowledge of their environments; in fact, their knowledge may (far) exceed that of their developers or users. Consequently, a desirable property for an AI system is that it is honest – that it accurately reports its beliefs about the world. Designing an AI system to be honest may be difficult, especially if we want to ask it questions about latent variables in the environment – variables which are hidden from the human interacting with it. This gives rise to the problem of eliciting latent knowledge (ELK): the problem of training an AI agent to honestly report its beliefs. In this paper, we make ELK formally precise using Causal Influence Diagrams (CIDs). CIDs can be used to describe the relationship between an agent's training environment and its subjective representation of the world. We use CIDs to formalise the distinction between observable and latent variables, to specify what exactly it means for an agent to be honest, and to formally define goal misgeneralisation. We show that, under certain circumstances, developers can incentivise an agent to honestly answer questions by providing correct feedback during training. However, a natural, but undesirable, way for an agent to generalise is to provide answers which humans would evaluate as true, rather than honest answers. We prove an impossibility theorem stating: There is no feedback-based training strategy that depends only on agent behaviour and with certainty produces an honest agent, even if feedback is perfect during training.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

p-PSO: A Penalized Particle Swarm Optimization Technique for Finding D-Optimal Designs with Mixed Factors in Generalized Linear Models

arXiv:2606.15962v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Finding D-optimal designs for generalized linear models (GLMs) is challenging due to the dependence of the Fisher information matrix on unknown parameters and the lack of closed-form solutions, particularly when input factors include both discrete and continuous variables. Although classical algorithms and recent metaheuristic approaches have offered partial solutions, there remains a need for robust and computationally efficient methods. In this paper, we propose a penalized Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) approach, named $p$-PSO. Here we introduce a new, general-purpose penalty formulation for constrained optimization and demonstrate its effectiveness in optimal design problems. The formulation is algorithm-agnostic and applicable to a broad class of black-box optimization methods. Results show that the method is highly efficient, with its primary contribution being a penalty formulation that enables the direct use of an off-the-shelf PSO algorithm and extends naturally to more general constrained optimization tasks.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

MetaResearcher: Scaling Deep Research via Self-Reflective Reinforcement Learning in Adversarial Virtual Environments

arXiv:2606.19893v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep research agents have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in autonomous information gathering and synthesis, yet their training remains constrained by the static nature of simulated environments, the limits of fact-retrieval-only task designs, and the inefficiency of outcome-based reinforcement learning. In this work, we propose MetaResearcher, a novel framework that scales deep research agent training across four synergistic dimensions. First, we introduce an Evolving Virtual World that injects temporal dynamics and adversarial misinformation into the training environment, forcing agents to develop source credibility assessment and temporal conflict resolution skills. Second, we design Discovery-Oriented Tasks – including hypothesis generation and contradiction resolution – that transcend simple fact retrieval and push agents toward genuine research behaviors. Third, we propose a Self-Reflective Meta-Reward mechanism within the GRPO framework that jointly optimizes for answer correctness, search path efficiency, reflection depth, and tool call diversity, directly addressing the repetitive action loop problem observed in prior work. Fourth, we introduce a Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Swarm architecture comprising specialized Scout, Filter, and Synthesizer models that learn collaborative research strategies through coordinated reinforcement learning. Built upon the LiteResearcher infrastructure, MetaResearcher requires zero marginal API cost for training while targeting substantial improvements in both benchmark performance (GAIA, Xbench-DS) and epistemic robustness under adversarial conditions. We present the complete framework design, training methodology, and planned experimental validation.

11.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-11

Microglia at a key inflection point in Alzheimer’s disease

作者: 未知作者

We analyzed brains from octogenarians and cognitively resilient centenarians to understand why some individuals with substantial Alzheimer’s disease pathology develop dementia whereas others remain cognitively intact. Spatial transcriptomics revealed gene expression changes in discrete tissue domains surrounding amyloid plaques and tau pathology that distinguish early, clinically silent, disease from later stages associated with cognitive decline.

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

A Theory of Saddle Escape in Deep Nonlinear Networks

arXiv:2605.01288v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In deep networks with small initialization, training exhibits long plateaus separated by sharp feature-acquisition transitions. Whereas shallow nonlinear networks and deep linear networks are well studied, extending these analyses to deep nonlinear networks remains challenging. We derive an exact identity for the imbalance of Frobenius norms of layer weight matrices that holds for any smooth activation and any differentiable loss and use this to classify activation functions into four universality classes. On the permutation-symmetric submanifold, the identity combines with an approximate balance law to reduce the full matrix flow to a scalar ODE, giving a critical-depth escape time law $\tau_\star = \Theta(\varepsilon^{-(r-2)})$ governed by the number $r$ of layers at the bottleneck scale rather than the total depth $L$. We find that this same $r-2$ exponent is recovered under He-normal initialization with $r$ bottleneck layers rescaled by $\varepsilon$, where the symmetry manifold is preserved by the flow but not attracting. We find close agreement between our theory and numerical simulations.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Beyond Logprobs: A Multi-Signal Confidence Engine for LLM-Based Document Field Extraction

作者:

In high-stakes document processing pipelines, including financial reconciliation, compliance verification, and procurement automation, an LLM extraction that is silently wrong is more dangerous than one that is visibly absent. The central challenge is not extraction accuracy alone but reliable confidence estimation: knowing, field by field, whether an extraction can be trusted for automation or deferred to human review. Token-level log-probabilities, verbalized confidence, and multi-sample self-consistency all collapse toward all-positive behaviour at practical thresholds, offering no reliable separation between trustworthy and untrustworthy extractions. We present ExtractConf, a cross-domain, field-agnostic confidence engine that grounds confidence estimation in two structurally different readings of the same document. A field-guided Hunter call extracts each field under schema-slot completion pressure; a document-guided Mapper call scans holistically and surfaces values grounded in document content. This asymmetry yields different failure modes: Hunter hallucinates values for absent fields, while Mapper misses visually non-salient ones. Their disagreement is independently informative. ExtractConf fuses cross-call disagreement, LLM-internal uncertainty, OCR, image quality, and spatial layout into a classifier requiring no domain-specific rules or retraining. On DocILE (55-field invoices, 26% failure rate), it achieves 0.928 ROC AUC and reduces selective prediction risk by 70% over logprob-mean. At 80% coverage, accuracy reaches 99.1%, enabling a practical human-in-the-loop workflow. Zero-shot transfer to CORD receipts achieves 0.858 AUC; lightweight Lasso recalibration reduces ECE by 89% and Brier by 43%, confirming the signals generalise across document domains.

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

Hellinger Multimodal Variational Autoencoders

arXiv:2601.06572v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal variational autoencoders (VAEs) are widely used for weakly supervised generative learning with multiple modalities. Predominant methods aggregate unimodal inference distributions using either a product of experts (PoE), a mixture of experts (MoE), or their combinations to approximate the joint posterior. In this work, we revisit multimodal inference through the lens of probabilistic opinion pooling, an optimization-based approach. We start from Hölder pooling with $\alpha=0.5$, which corresponds to the unique symmetric member of the $\alpha-divergence$ family, and derive a moment-matching approximation, termed Hellinger. We then leverage such an approximation to propose HELVAE, a multimodal VAE that avoids sub-sampling, yielding an efficient yet effective model that: (i) learns more expressive latent representations as additional modalities are observed; and (ii) empirically achieves better trade-offs between generative coherence and quality, outperforming state-of-the-art multimodal VAE models.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

From Imitation to Alignment: Human-Preference Flow Policies for Long-Horizon Sidewalk Navigation

arXiv:2606.12603v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous long-horizon sidewalk navigation is essential for micro-mobility applications such as robotic food delivery and assistive electronic wheelchairs. Unlike autonomous driving on the road, long-horizon sidewalk navigation requires precise maneuvering through unpredictable sidewalk terrains and pedestrians, with a lightweight perception stack as minimal as a single monocular RGB camera. While imitation learning (IL) from demonstrations offers a practical solution, the resulting autopilot policy often suffers from compounding errors, a lack of social compliance on sidewalks, and deficiencies in counterfactual reasoning to handle complex situations. To address these challenges, we introduce FlowPilot, a mapless navigation policy that achieves robust and efficient long-horizon navigation performance using only a monocular RGB camera. We first propose to use anchored flow matching as an action representation for policy pre-training on large-scale robot fleet data and to capture the diverse, complex, multimodal distribution of sidewalk navigation behaviors. To bridge the gap between imitation and alignment, we further design a human-in-the-loop preference learning scheme to tune the policy on a small amount of human intervention data. It strengthens the model's counterfactual reasoning and social compliance on sidewalks. We evaluate FlowPilot through extensive simulation and real-world experiments in diverse sidewalk environments. FlowPilot achieves 42% success rate and 66% route completion in simulation, while FlowPilot-HP further improves real-world robustness and social compliance, reducing IR by 40.0% and NIR by 52.1% relative to the base model.

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

Urban Heat MiniCubes: An AI-Ready dataset for urban heat research

arXiv:2606.11534v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Urban heat is amplified by impermeable surfaces and heterogeneous built environments, yet street-level variability remains difficult to quantify because multi-sensor observations are rarely available in consistent, analysis-ready form at the necessary spatiotemporal scales. We present "Urban Heat MiniCubes," a publicly available, FAIR-oriented dataset designed for machine learning applications in urban heat research. The dataset provides harmonized 90 x 90 km gridded data cubes for 48 cities in the Western Hemisphere spanning 2022-2023, with variables reprojected and collocated to a common grid to reduce preprocessing (e.g., reprojection, resampling, and spatiotemporal alignment). Urban Heat MiniCubes includes two complementary modalities: (i) higher-spatial-resolution, lower-frequency observations from Landsat 8/9 (e.g., surface reflectances) and Sentinel-1 (e.g., synthetic aperture radar backscatter), and (ii) higher-temporal-frequency, coarser observations from GOES-R (e.g., longwave infrared brightness temperatures) and a microwave land surface temperature product. We document variables and metadata and provide technical assessment using inter-variable analyses and autoencoder-based reconstruction-error summaries across pixel classes (e.g., water and cloud). Potential use cases and limitations are also discussed.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

MIRAGE: Runtime Scheduling for Multi-Vector Image Retrieval with Hierarchical Decomposition

To effectively leverage user-specific data, retrieval augmented generation (RAG) is employed in multimodal large language model (MLLM) applications. However, conventional retrieval approaches often suffer from limited retrieval accuracy. Recent advances in multi-vector retrieval (MVR) improve accuracy by decomposing queries and matching against segmented images. They still suffer from sub-optimal accuracy and efficiency, overlooking alignment between the query and varying image objects and redundant fine-grained image segments. In this work, we present an efficient scheduling framework for image retrieval - MIRAGE. First, we introduce a novel hierarchical paradigm, employing multiple intermediate granularities for varying image objects to enhance alignment. Second, we minimize redundancy in retrieval by leveraging cross-hierarchy similarity consistency and hierarchy sparsity to minimize unnecessary matching computation. Furthermore, we configure parameters for each dataset automatically for practicality across diverse scenarios. Our empirical study shows that, MIRAGE not only achieves substantial accuracy improvements but also reduces computation by up to 3.5 times over the existing MVR system.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Asymmetric quantum steering harvested near a Lorentz-violating BTZ black hole

arXiv:2606.12766v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We investigate the harvesting of quantum steering and its directional asymmetry between two Unruh-DeWitt detectors in a Lorentz-violating BTZ black hole spacetime. Since the detectors are located at different radial positions outside the black hole, they experience inequivalent local environments induced by gravitational redshift, causing Alice to undergo stronger effective thermal noise than Bob. Remarkably, we uncover a counterintuitive phenomenon in which the detector subjected to a higher effective temperature exhibits stronger steerability than the other one, revealing a nontrivial inversion of thermal intuition in curved spacetime. Furthermore, quantum steering survives only within a finite window of detector energy gaps and reaches its maximum within an optimal regime. We find that Lorentz violation suppresses steering most strongly near this optimal energy gap, indicating an enhanced sensitivity of maximal correlation extraction to symmetry breaking effects. Our results demonstrate that Lorentz violation acts as a geometric constraint on the quantum information capacity of spacetime, simultaneously restricting both the strength and the directionality of quantum correlations.

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

Bridging Distribution Shift and AI Safety: Conceptual and Methodological Synergies

arXiv:2505.22829v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper bridges distribution shift and AI safety through a comprehensive analysis of their conceptual and methodological synergies. While prior discussions often focus on narrow cases or informal analogies, we establish two types connections between specific causes of distribution shift and fine-grained AI safety issues: (1) methods addressing a specific shift type can help achieve corresponding safety goals, or (2) certain shifts and safety issues can be formally reduced to each other, enabling mutual adaptation of their methods. Our findings provide a unified perspective that encourages deeper integration between distribution shift and AI safety research.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Class-Incremental Motion Forecasting

arXiv:2603.09420v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Motion forecasting enables autonomous vehicles to anticipate scene evolution by predicting the future trajectories of dynamic agents. However, existing approaches typically assume a closed-world setting with a fixed object taxonomy and access to high-quality perception, limiting their applicability in the real world where perception is imperfect, and new object classes may emerge over time. In this work, we introduce class-incremental motion forecasting, a novel setting in which new object classes are sequentially introduced over time and future object trajectories are predicted directly from camera images. We propose the first end-to-end framework for this setting, which adapts to newly introduced classes while mitigating catastrophic forgetting of previously learned ones. Our method generates motion forecasting pseudo-labels for known classes and matches them with 2D instance masks from an open-vocabulary segmentation model. This 3D-to-2D keypoint voting mechanism filters inconsistent and overconfident predictions, while a query feature variance-based replay strategy samples informative past sequences to preserve prior knowledge. Extensive evaluations on nuScenes and Argoverse 2 show that our approach successfully preserves performance on known classes while effectively adapting to novel ones. We further demonstrate zero-shot transfer to real-world driving and show that the framework extends naturally to open- and closed-loop end-to-end class-incremental planning on nuScenes and NeuroNCAP. Code and models will be made publicly available at https://omen.cs.uni-freiburg.de.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

PRISM: Prosody-Integrated Multi-Agent Reasoning Framework for Empathetic Spoken Dialogue

Empathetic spoken dialogue systems require not only semantically appropriate responses but also emotionally aligned prosodic expression. However, cascade pipelines often discard acoustic cues during speech-to-text conversion, while end-to-end speech models lack interpretable control over emotion and knowledge integration. To address these challenges, we propose PRISM, a multi-agent framework for empathetic spoken dialogue that decouples speech perception, response generation, and speech synthesis into coordinated components. PRISM introduces a prosody-to-language translation mechanism to stabilize large language model reasoning and enables on-demand invocation of external knowledge tools for empathetic dialogue generation. Experimental results demonstrate that PRISM achieves consistent improvements in empathy, prosodic appropriateness, and text response generation quality across objective and subjective metrics. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Bxzfrm/PRISM.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Mix-QVLA: Task-Evidence-Aware Mixed-Precision Quantization of Vision-Language-Action Models

We propose Mix-QVLA, a task-evidence-aware mixed-precision PTQ framework for VLA models. Mix-QVLA anchors each quantized variant to the full-precision action-token reference decision and evaluates whether quantization preserves task-relevant evidence across key VLA functional boundaries. It computes normalized gradient-weighted task-evidence maps from boundary activations and compares full-precision and quantized maps using evidence-mass and attribution-distribution distortion, capturing changes in both the strength and allocation of decision-supporting evidence. A soft-bottleneck objective aggregates boundary-level degradation into layer-wise sensitivity scores. Mix-QVLA further models sensitivity throughout task execution, capturing phase-dependent shifts in layer importance rather than assuming a fixed sensitivity profile. The resulting evidence- and time-aware scores guide mixed-precision bit allocation under model-size and BitOps budgets. Extensive evaluations on OpenVLA-style policies show that Mix-QVLA improves the accuracy-efficiency trade-off of low-bit VLA deployment. On LIBERO, Mix-QVLA reduces OpenVLA-OFT memory from 15.4 GB to 4.1 GB, retains 96.3 average success compared with 97.1 for the BF16 model, and achieves a 1.52x inference speedup.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Sex-specific multimorbidity clusters and all-cause mortality in relatively healthy older adults: findings from the ASPREE cohort

Background: Multimorbidity is common in older adults, but sex differences in chronic condition clustering remain unclear. This study explored multimorbidity clusters and their associations with all-cause mortality among community-dwelling adults aged 70 years and over. Methods: This was a secondary analysis of data from 16,095 Australian ASPREE participants aged at least 70 years without prior dementia or cardiovascular disease. Fifteen baseline chronic conditions were grouped using latent class analysis (LCA). Observed-to-expected (O/E) ratios characterised conditions over-represented within clusters, and Cox proportional hazards models assessed associations with all-cause mortality. Results: Among 16,095 participants (mean age 74 years), 88.3% had multimorbidity at baseline; 4,217 deaths occurred over a median follow-up of 10.85 years. Five clusters were identified overall: hypertension and dyslipidemia (52.1%), gout and metabolic (14.4%), depressive symptoms, osteoporosis and frailty (10.0%), anaemia and kidney disease (10.2%), and hypotension, thyroid disorder and past cancer (13.3%). Sex-stratified analyses revealed three clusters in males and four in females. The frailty, depressive symptoms and osteoporosis cluster was associated with higher mortality in both sexes (aHR 1.56 [95% CI 1.40-1.73] in males; 1.68 [1.49-1.89] in females). Higher mortality was also observed for the metabolic, gout and kidney disease cluster in males (aHR 1.63 [1.47-1.81]) and the gout, anaemia and kidney disease cluster in females (aHR 1.96 [1.74-2.21]). Conclusions: Distinct multimorbidity clusters differed by sex and were associated with increased all-cause mortality. These findings may support risk stratification, targeted screening, and more person-centred management of older adults with multimorbidity.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Decoupling local classicality from classical explainability: A noncontextual model for bilocal classical theory and a locally-classical but contextual theory

arXiv:2511.19266v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We construct an ontological model for the theory known as bilocal classical theory doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.102.052216. To our knowledge, this is only the second time that an ontological model has been constructed for an entire theory, rather than just for some particular scenarios within a theory. This result refutes a conjecture from doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.102.052216 which suggested that there might be no local-realist ontological model for bilocal classical theory. Moreover, it is the first time that an ontological model has been constructed for a theory that fails to be locally tomographic, showing that the assumption of local tomography underpinning the structure theorem in doi.org/10.22331/q-2024-03-14-1283 is a genuine limitation of the theorem. This demonstrates that in general there is no tension between failures of local tomography and classical explainability (i.e., generalised noncontextuality). In fact, bilocal classical theory is in many ways more simply understood via the underlying ontological model than it is within its original formulation (much as how odd-dimensional stabiliser subtheories can be more simply understood via Spekkens' toy theory). Furthermore, this result naturally leads to the question, does every locally-classical theory admit of an ontological model? By constructing a concrete counterexample, we show that this is not the case. Our findings demonstrate that there is no straightforward relationship between theories being locally-classical, and them being classically-explainable. This shows that the fundamental status of compositional properties (such as local tomography) is not a technical side-issue, but a central and unavoidable question for a coherent understanding even of classicality itself.

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

GEMSS: A Variational Bayesian Method for Discovering Multiple Sparse Solutions in Classification and Regression Problems

arXiv:2602.08913v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: High-dimensional, underdetermined and highly correlated systems are common in data science practice, especially when analyzing physical measurements. In such settings, feature selection poses a fundamental challenge because multiple distinct sparse subsets may explain the response equally well. Their identification is crucial not only for predictive modeling but also for generating domain-specific insights into the underlying mechanisms. Yet, conventional methods typically isolate a single solution, obscuring the full spectrum of plausible explanations. This work introduces GEMSS (Gaussian Ensemble for Multiple Sparse Solutions), a variational algorithm designed to simultaneously discover multiple, diverse sparse feature combinations. The method employs a structured spike-and-slab prior for sparsity, a mixture of Gaussians to approximate the intractable multimodal posterior, and a Jaccard-based penalty to further control solution diversity. A single objective function is optimized via stochastic gradient descent. The method is tested on 128 comprehensive experiments by a novel benchmarking framework designed to generate artificial problems with multiple sparse solutions of equal predictive properties. This allows us to measure the retrieval of ground truth features rather than only evaluating predictive performance – characteristics more fitting to our practical needs. A comparative analysis shows that GEMSS consistently outperforms five prominent feature selection methods adapted through the ALFESE framework. Finally, we demonstrate practical usability through 3 challenging real-world datasets from metabolomics and physical chemistry: GEMSS successfully isolates multiple distinct yet quality solutions. GEMSS is available as a PyPI package 'gemss'. The corresponding repository github.com/kat-er-ina/gemss/ includes the full codebase and a free, no-code application GEMSS Explorer.