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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Supporting people to access social security payments through the Special Rules for End of Life: a qualitative study of the perspectives of patients, carers and health care professionals

Background: People living with terminal illness face a double financial burden from additional costs and loss of earning for themselves and their carers. Social security benefits are intended to help alleviate some of this financial pressure, and in the UK and other countries people are eligible for fast-tracked access to financial support via the Special Rules for End of Life. One in 3 people who are eligible miss out on this support, yet there is limited evidence on the reasons for this take-up deficit. Objectives: The aim of this study is to understand the barriers and facilitators to claiming benefits for terminally ill people from the perspectives of patients, carers, and health care professionals. Methods: This is a qualitative study combining i) focus groups with healthcare professionals recruited via professional networks and social media, and ii) interviews with patients and carers recruited in hospital and hospice settings. We analysed the data using Practical Thematic Analysis Results: Fifty-five multidisciplinary healthcare professionals participated in 11 focus groups, and we interviewed 10 patients and carers. We constructed five descriptive themes to summarise the data: Navigating priorities and uncertainty; positive impacts alongside a sense of shame and stigma; talking about money, difficulties and dividends; everybodys, yet nobodys, responsibility; and sticking points in the system. Conclusion: The themes reveal several challenges that may contribute to people not taking up this financial support. However, discussions about access to benefits were also seen as a core part of holistic care, a positive way to offer support and a gateway to other discussions about end-of-life care preferences and decisions. Recommendations for policy and practice include evaluating the adoption of a diagnostic rather than a prognostic eligibility criteria, integrating discussions about benefits into existing processes such as advance care planning, and improving education and support for clinicians.

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

FlowMo-WM: A World Model with Object Momentum and Hidden Ambient Drift

arXiv:2606.13817v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: World models in robot learning predict future states from visual observations and actions, enabling agents to reason about the consequences of their controls. However, many action-conditioned models are evaluated in settings where motion is dominated by immediate control, whereas aquatic surface vehicles and other real-world objects continue moving under inertia and are displaced by hidden ambient drift, such as water currents or wind. We propose FlowMo-WM, an end-to-end trainable visual world model that infers object-centric motion state and a predictive long-history context associated with hidden drift from image-action histories without direct supervision of flow fields. FlowMo-WM factorizes image-action history into a short-history latent state, trained to summarize object-centric motion, and a longer-history context, trained to summarize slowly varying exogenous influences. A zero-context residual transition separates action-conditioned base dynamics from context-dependent drift effects during latent rollout. In simulated aquatic surface-vehicle environments with diverse hidden flows, disturbances, and randomized vehicle dynamics, FlowMo-WM improves long-horizon rollout accuracy over representative action-conditioned latent world models. Prediction-time context ablations, in which the inferred context is zeroed or shuffled during rollout, show that the ambient context is important for stable prediction under hidden drift, while frozen linear probes characterize information encoded in the learned factors.

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

High-Fidelity Video Compression based on Invertible Neural Transform and Implicit Conditioning

Learning-based video compression has recently achieved competitive rate-distortion performance compared to conventional video codecs. However, most existing methods rely on non-invertible analysis-synthesis transforms, with reconstruction quality subject to both quantization and transform approximation errors. This limitation becomes particularly restrictive at higher quality points, where quantization errors are small and transform-induced distortion dominates. To address this, we propose InnVC, an Invertible neural network based Video Codec for wide-range and high-fidelity compression. The core idea is to preserve an invertible main transform path prior to quantization, while injecting content-adaptive context through a compact implicit conditioning field. This decouples strongly correlated video content from harder-to-model fine details, allowing different components to specialize in complementary reconstruction tasks for more efficient compression. To further improve compressibility, we introduce a scheduled masking strategy that progressively concentrates informative content into fewer latent channels for more effective entropy coding. Experiments on the UVG and MCL-JCV benchmarks show that InnVC achieves strong compression performance over a broad quality range, being particularly effective in the high-quality regime, yielding BD-rate reductions of 21.66% in PSNR and 46.06% in MS-SSIM relative to x265 on UVG. To the best of our knowledge, InnVC is the first neural video codec covers operating poins from low bitrate to high fidelity within a single architecture scale, spanning more than 20 dB in PSNR.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

A Quantum Algorithm for Random Number Generation

arXiv:2606.13034v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a quantum algorithm for random number generation that achieves a provable quadratic speedup over classical Markov chain mixing, building on the Diaconis-Shahshahani Fourier analysis of the top-to-random card shuffle. The algorithm integrates three quantum primitives into a unified mixing circuit: the Quantum Fourier Transform (QFT), which diagonalizes the Markov transition operator; controlled phase rotations, which encode the shuffle eigenvalue spectrum; and the Grover diffusion operator, which acts as a quantum analogue of the Aldous-Diaconis strong uniform stopping time by reflecting amplitudes about their mean at each iteration. For an n-qubit register, the mixing time is O(\sqrt{n \log n}) iterations. Extending to m qudits of local dimension d reduces this to O(\sqrt{\log_d N}) iterations, where N = d^m, compared to the classical O(n \log n) bound. The qudit formulation further reduces QFT circuit depth from O(\log^2 N) to O(\log_d^2 N) gates per layer by encoding the same N-state space using m = \log_d N subsystems instead of \log_2 N qubits. We validate both variants on IBM superconducting hardware.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

The Pound-Drever-Hall Method for Superconducting-Qubit Readout

arXiv:2512.03138v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Scaling quantum computers to large sizes requires the implementation of many parallel qubit readouts. Here we present an ultrastable superconducting-qubit readout method using the multi-tone self-phase-referenced Pound-Drever-Hall (PDH) technique, originally developed for use with optical cavities. In this work, we benchmark PDH readout of a single transmon qubit, using room-temperature heterodyne detection of all tones to reconstruct the PDH signal. We demonstrate that PDH qubit readout is insensitive to microwave phase drift, displaying $0.73^\circ$ phase stability over 2 hours, and capable of single-shot readout in the presence of phase errors exceeding the phase shift induced by the qubit state. We show that the PDH sideband tones do not cause unwanted measurement-induced state transitions for a transmon qubit, leading to a potential signal enhancement of at least $14$~dB.

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

Self-Evolving Vision-Language Models for Image Quality Assessment via Voting and Ranking

Improving vision-language models (VLMs) in the post-training stage typically relies on supervised fine-tuning or reinforcement learning, methods that necessitate costly, human-annotated data. While self-supervised techniques have proven effective for enhancing reasoning capabilities, their application to perceptual domains such as image quality assessment (IQA) remains largely unexplored. In this work, we introduce EvoQuality, a novel framework that enables a VLM to autonomously refine its quality perception capabilities without any ground-truth labels. EvoQuality adapts the principle of self-consistency to the ranking-based nature of IQA. It generates pseudo-labels by performing pairwise majority voting on the VLM's own outputs to establish a consensus on relative quality. These pseudo-rankings are then formulated into a fidelity reward that guides the model's iterative evolution through group relative policy optimization (GRPO). By iteratively leveraging its own predictions, EvoQuality progressively refines the VLM's perceptual capability. Extensive experiments show that EvoQuality boosts the base VLM's zero-shot performance by 31.8% on PLCC across diverse IQA benchmarks. Remarkably, despite being entirely self-supervised, EvoQuality achieves performance that is competitive with, or even surpasses, state-of-the-art supervised VLM-based IQA models, outperforming these models on 5 out of 7 IQA benchmarks. Furthermore, the framework demonstrates significant flexibility, allowing it to be stacked with pre-trained IQA models to bolster generalization on unseen datasets. Codes and checkpoints will be available at https://github.com/bytedance/EvoQuality.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

ArtNet: A JEPA-Like Articulatory Predictive Framework for Robust Zero-Shot Phoneme Recognition

arXiv:2606.16595v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Zero-shot cross-lingual phoneme recognition is often hindered by the fragility of direct acoustic-to-symbol mapping, which is susceptible to language-specific variations. Echoing joint-embedding predictive architecture (JEPA) work in vision, we propose ArtNet, a framework that explores a structured feature prediction task based on articulatory features to enhance acoustic robustness. Specifically, ArtNet integrates an articulatory predictor, designed to extract universal articulatory representations from self-supervised learning (SSL) features, with a variational information bottleneck (VIB) to suppress language-specific variations. Experiments on seven unseen languages demonstrate that ArtNet, particularly when synergized with the proposed vector-space inventory alignment (VSIA) strategy, significantly outperforms competitive baselines, achieving a 20.56\% relative reduction in phoneme error rate (PER) and 7.01\% in phoneme feature error rate (PFER).

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

Optimizing Lithium Production Decisions under Geological, Demand, and Pricing Uncertainties: A POMDP Framework for Multi-Objective Decision Making

arXiv:2606.18598v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Decision making in lithium production is challenging, whether from an investor's perspective or a strategic production standpoint. Determining which mines to open and when to open them involves not only geological and price uncertainties, but also complexities around the choice of extraction method, from direct lithium extraction to hard rock mining. Prior work explored models of this problem and different methods to optimize mining decisions; these models did not account for uncertainty in pricing, uncertainty in demand, or different mining technologies to extract lithium. Incorporating different pricing models and extraction technology into these models enables more robust strategies for determining not only when and where to open a mine, but also which method of production to pursue. We frame the problem as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) and solve using belief state planning methods to get optimal decision making. In our study, we show that POMDP solvers outperform human inspired heuristics by dynamically adapting to shifting lithium price regimes (static, linear, exponential, and stochastic) through belief state planning and explicit uncertainty management. By optimally sequencing exploration, production, and technology choice, the framework achieves higher demand fulfillment and more balanced economic environmental outcomes over the projects lifetime in all different pricing and deposit scenarios.

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

Assessing Predictive Models for Fairness Based on Movement Patterns

arXiv:2605.23234v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Assessing the spatial fairness of predictive models involves establishing whether they are statistically penalizing (favoring) individuals associated with certain geographical locations. Literature on this topic makes the fundamental assumption that each individual is assigned to a single geographical location (e.g., place of residence). However, fairness with respect to the set of locations where one has been, i.e., their movement patterns over different regions, also matters when fairness is considered. Consequently, we argue that it is necessary to generalize the notion of spatial fairness to also include movement patterns, leading to the novel problem of assessing predictive models for fairness relative to the movements of individuals. To deal with this problem, we propose an approach that first associates the movements of individuals to certain geographic regions, considering multiple spatial partitions with different resolutions and alignments, and then employs a suitable spatial scan statistic to assess whether a predictive model is fair based on movement patterns. In the experimental evaluation, we study the performance of our approach over thousands of synthetic unfair datasets, showing that it is effective at detecting this new type of unfairness and at retrieving the set of objects treated unfairly, while localization performance exhibits a consistent multi-resolution trade-off.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

LUCID: Learning Embodiment-Agnostic Intent Models from Unstructured Human Videos for Scalable Dexterous Robot Skill Acquisition

arXiv:2606.11628v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The most widely-adopted robot learning pipelines today learn skills from robot demonstrations or structured human data, which are expensive to collect and tied to specific embodiments. In contrast, unstructured human videos provide a scalable alternative. They contain diverse manipulation demonstrations across objects, scenes, and strategies, but are not directly connected to robot action. We propose LUCID, a two-stage framework that learns task intent from unstructured human videos drawn from internet-scale datasets and learns robot control in massively-parallel simulation. The intent model predicts short-horizon intent (what should happen next in the scene) from the current observation in closed loop. An embodiment-specific sensorimotor policy converts this intent into robot actions. The intent interface is shared across controllers, so the same intent model can be applied to different embodiments, from our primary dexterous hand to a parallel-jaw gripper. We evaluate LUCID on five real-world manipulation tasks: stirring, wiping, and binning supervised by only internet video, with zero-shot transfer to novel scenes and object instances; and push-T and cable routing supervised by 1 hr each of self-collected smartphone video. Project page: https://lucid-robot.github.io/.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Contagion Networks: Evaluator Bias Propagation in Multi-Agent LLM Systems

作者:

arXiv:2606.20493v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When large language models serve as evaluators in multi-agent systems, their systematic evaluation biases propagate through the agent network. We introduce Contagion Networks, a formal framework for measuring how evaluator biases spread across interacting LLM agents. In a controlled 3-agent experiment using DeepSeek-chat with three distinct evaluator bias profiles (structured, balanced, evidence-based), we measure the Cross-Agent Contagion Matrix Gamma_3 and find that evaluator biases consistently propagate between agents (gamma in [0.157, 0.352]), even within the same underlying model. We identify three propagation regimes governed by the spectral radius rho(Gamma_N), and demonstrate that homogeneous-model agents produce contagion coefficients 3-5x weaker than cross-model coefficients observed in prior work (MM-EPC: gamma approx 0.85-1.3), placing them in the suppression regime. We show that increasing evaluator committee size from k=1 to k=3 reduces effective contagion by 72.4%, providing an actionable mitigation strategy. We release the open-source Contagion Network experimental framework.

12.
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.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Beyond Dark Knowledge: Mixup-Based Distillation for Reliable Predictions

Knowledge Distillation (KD) and mixup have proven effective at inducing smoothness in class boundaries; KD captures inherent class relationships in probability distributions, and mixup enforces them through convex combinations of inputs. Their interaction, however, remains poorly understood, particularly when mixup is applied only during student training. In this setting, the teacher is queried on inputs drawn from a vicinal distribution it never saw during training, a controlled mismatch whose effect on knowledge transfer has not been characterised. We show that this mismatch causes the teacher's supervisory signal to be dominated by distributional confusion rather than inter-class structure. Despite it, the student does not merely imitate the teacher: it independently acquires greater linearity in the vicinal region, a structural property that the teacher lacks, and goes beyond dark-knowledge transfer. KD with mixup consistently improves student accuracy and reduces overconfidence by an order of magnitude relative to the baseline, across CIFAR and ImageNet with varying-capacity teachers. Crucially, calibration propagates from teacher to student independently of accuracy transfer, and temperature scaling governs a measurable accuracy-calibration trade-off that becomes more pronounced under vicinal training. These results reframe mixup distillation not as a degraded version of standard KD, but as a richer transfer channel that simultaneously shapes discriminative performance, uncertainty estimation, and representational geometry.

14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

A 0-1 Law for Multifractal Spectra via the HGDS Scale Derivative

arXiv:2606.15850v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove that the multifractal spectrum D(h,omega) of a stochastic process is almost surely deterministic under a scale decorrelation condition on the HGDS scale derivative. The key difficulty is that the pointwise Hölder exponent lives in the germ sigma-algebra, where classical 0-1 laws do not reach. We get around this by working with the geometry accumulation integral G_Lambda, which is a genuine Lebesgue integral over scales and concentrates almost surely. The boundary case – log-correlated fields – is sharp: the variance summability condition fails exactly there.

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

PACT: Preserving Anchored Cores in Task-vectors for Model Merging

arXiv:2606.18627v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model merging has emerged as a training-free alternative to multi-task learning, aiming to combine multiple task-specific fine-tuned models into a single multi-task model. Most existing model merging approaches follow the Task Arithmetic paradigm, which decomposes fine-tuned weights into pre-trained parameters and task vectors, and performs merging exclusively in the task-vector space. The effectiveness of this paradigm implicitly relies on the assumption that task-specific knowledge is encoded solely within task vectors. We argue that this assumption generally does not hold due to the intrinsic task preferences of pre-trained models. Specifically, we identify Load-Bearing Wall (LBW) dimensions, namely some task-critical knowledge that remains embedded in the pre-trained weights rather than being fully transferred into task vectors. We characterize LBW dimensions from both scalar-weight and subspace perspectives, thereby covering the major paradigms of existing model merging methods. Our analysis reveals that, by ignoring LBW dimensions, task-vector-based approaches fail to fully resolve task conflicts and may inadvertently damage task-specific knowledge encoded in the pre-trained model, leading to degradation. To address this issue, we propose PACT, which preserves the anchored task-specific cores (i.e., LBW dimensions) within task vectors by aligning their orthogonal complements with the subspace of the pre-trained weights. These aligned subspace components are then removed from the task vectors before applying existing model merging algorithms. Furthermore, we develop an efficient variant based on randomized SVD to improve scalability. PACT can be seamlessly integrated with existing methods. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that PACT consistently enhances mainstream model merging approaches and establishes new state-of-the-art performance.

16.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15

Biological meaning in protein embedding space is resolution-dependent

Protein language model embeddings are increasingly used to organise biological sequences, yet how biological meaning is encoded within embedding neighbourhoods remains poorly understood. Using two independent hierarchical enzyme systems, carbohydrate-active enzymes and peptidases, we investigated how biological interpretation changes across embedding organisations aligned to different levels of biological hierarchy. Different embedding organisations give rise to distinct neighbourhood semantics. When aligned to membership-boundary resolution, embeddings robustly separated artefacts and unrelated proteins from members of the target category. However, embeddings aligned to functional-grouping resolution maintained compositional neighbourhood structure for multi-domain proteins spanning more than one functional or catalytic group. Finally, embeddings aligned to local-family resolution recovered compact family-like neighbourhoods, including families withheld from training, while weakening broader membership-boundary and functional-grouping relationships. Moreover, embeddings optimised toward the same level of biological organisation retain different biological relationships depending on optimisation trajectory employed. Together, our results show that proximity in protein embedding space has no fixed biological interpretation. Instead, biological meaning emerges across embedding resolutions through selective preservation of different forms of biological organisation.

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

Retrieve, Don't Retrain: Extending Vision Language Action Models to New Tasks at Test Time

arXiv:2606.15631v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Extending a vision-language-action (VLA) policy to a new task typically requires task-specific teleoperated demonstrations and per-task fine-tuning, making adaptation costly in both data collection and compute. In this paper, we show that this target-side per-task adaptation cost can be replaced by retrieval. Our retrieval-augmented policy is trained once on paired demonstrations from the target embodiment (query) and a cheaper embodiment (pool, e.g., human-hand video), then frozen. New tasks are added at deployment by appending pool-side demonstrations to a retrieval pool. The frozen policy conditions on retrieved trajectories at every control step, so new tasks are absorbed by indexing data rather than updating parameters. Fine-tuning is needed only to take on a new, unseen embodiment, not for each new task. We show that retrieval improves policies beyond a specific backbone, including standard VLA policies, but its effect is especially pronounced in Cosmos Policy, a video-generation-based world-action model (WAM). In this setting, retrieval supplies coarse task progression, while the WAM's future-image objective provides an additional visual consistency signal that strengthens the retrieval-conditioned actions. On PushT, we study how retrieval provides a reusable high-level motion prior for cross-embodiment generalization to unseen goal angles, while on RoboTwin 2.0 our method outperforms cross-embodiment baselines on unseen tasks, and we additionally demonstrate the method on a real robot.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Spectrally Corrected Polynomial Approximation for Quantum Singular Value Transformation

arXiv:2603.03998v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum Singular Value Transformation (QSVT) provides a unified framework for applying polynomial functions to the singular values of a block-encoded matrix. QSVT prepares a state proportional to $\bA^{-1}\bb$ with circuit depth $O(d\cdot\mathrm{polylog}(N))$, where $d$ is the polynomial degree of the $1/x$ approximation and $N$ is the size of $\bA$. Current polynomial approximation methods are over the continuous interval $[a,1]$, giving $d = O(\sqrt{\kap}\log(1/\varepsilon))$, and make no use of any properties of $\bA$. We observe here that QSVT solution accuracy depends only on the polynomial accuracy at the eigenvalues of $\bA$. When all $N$ eigenvalues are known exactly, a pure spectral polynomial $p_{S}$ can interpolate $1/x$ at these eigenvalues and achieve unit fidelity at reduced degree. But its practical applicability is limited. To address this, we propose a spectral correction that exploits prior knowledge of $K$ eigenvalues of $\bA$. Given any base polynomial $p_0$, such as Remez, of degree $d_0$, a $K\times K$ linear system enforces exact interpolation of $1/x$ only at these $K$ eigenvalues without increasing $d_0$. The spectrally corrected polynomial $p_{SC}$ preserves the continuous error profile between eigenvalues and inherits the parity of $p_0$. QSVT experiments on the 1D Poisson equation demonstrate up to a $5\times$ reduction in circuit depth relative to the base polynomial, at unit fidelity and improved compliance error. The correction is agnostic to the choice of base polynomial and robust to eigenvalue perturbations up to $10\%$ relative error. Extension to the 2D Poisson equation suggests that correcting a small fraction of the spectrum may suffice to achieve fidelity above $0.999$.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Three multimodal large language models fail at clinically actionable breast pathology in three different directions

Background. Breast cancer treatment depends on histopathological features, such as grade and receptor-defined subtype; however, specialist pathologist access is constrained when the workforce is limited. Commercial multimodal large language models (MLLMs) accept hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) image tiles through paid interfaces without local hardware or fine-tuning. However, prior pathology evaluations addressed only coarse tasks. Whether they reach treatment-determining accuracy and whether vendors agree remain unclear. Methods. We aimed to evaluate three vendor-designated flagship MLLMs (Claude Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 2.5 Pro, GPT-5.5) in 427 invasive breast cancer cases. Each case went to all three with identical H&E tiles and prompts, and the subtype was inferred in the second call. The reference was an institutional sign-out report of an immunohistochemistry-derived subtype. We calculated the concordance, sensitivity, specificity, Cohen's kappa, and pairwise McNemar and Bowker tests. Findings. Claude ranked highest by raw histologic-type concordance but lowest by kappa, classifying all 23 lobular and seven micropapillary carcinomas as invasive breast carcinoma of no special type. The models anchored the Nottingham grade to three modal grades. None of the models reliably identified human epidermal growth factor receptor 2-positive disease. The failure direction was vendor-specific: Claude and GPT-5.5 were under-detected, whereas Gemini was over-called. Twelve prompt variants (4,056 calls) did not recover sensitivity. Interpretation. No current commercial MLLM reaches deployment-ready accuracy for any treatment-determining feature of breast pathology. As each vendor fails in its own fixed direction, changing vendors alters the type of error rather than removing it; therefore, the value of these models is assistive rather than autonomous. At USD 0.20-0.50 per case, they may serve as supervised draft generators that leave the diagnosis with the pathologist.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Structure-aware Knowledge-guided Heterogeneous Mamba for Zygomaticomaxillary Suture Assessment

The Zygomaticomaxillary Suture is a key circummaxillary structure that connects the zygomatic bone and the maxilla, which serves as a primary site of resistance during maxillary advancement, and its maturation status directly influences the timing and efficacy of orthopedic interventions. However, accurate staging of ZMS maturation remains challenging due to subtle high-frequency transitions in suture lines and the global semantic ambiguity between adjacent stages. To address this, we present the first public ZMS dataset, comprising 3,790 ZMS images covering the entire age range from 4 to 24 years. Based on this dataset, we propose SKMamba, a Structure-aware and Knowledge-guided Mamba-based multi-modal framework for automated ZMS maturation assessment. SKMamba adopts a decoupled dual-path architecture that mimics the hierarchical diagnostic process used by experienced orthodontists. We first introduce an Implicit Edge Extractor (IEE), which leverages structural pre-training to reduce trabecular noise and accentuate sutural boundaries. Complementarily, a Cross-Modal Semantic Alignment (CSA) module is designed to incorporate anatomical descriptions from a large language model (LLM). This module helps align local morphological cues with global semantic descriptions while ensuring that objective morphological evidence remains the primary basis for decisions. Extensive experiments on our ZMS dataset demonstrate that SKMamba achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing methods. Code is available at https://github.com/galaxygxq1116/SKMamba.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Do Time Series Foundation Model Benchmarks Hide Regime-Dependent Failures? Evidence from Traffic Speed Forecasting

arXiv:2606.18367v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Standard benchmarks evaluate time series foundation models (TSFMs) using aggregate metrics, but these can mask severe failures in critical operating regimes. We introduce regime-stratified evaluation and apply it to three TSFMs on two standard traffic speed benchmarks. Traffic exhibits abrupt regime switching between free-flow and congested states, producing bimodal speed distributions during transitions. When we stratify by traffic regime, both accuracy and prediction-interval coverage degrade sharply during transitions: transition-regime MAE reaches 11 mph (versus 3 mph overall), and empirical coverage of 90% prediction intervals drops as low as 55%. These failures are invisible in aggregate metrics because free-flow observations dominate the sample. A simple historical conditional baseline (sampling from per-sensor training distributions) achieves better transition coverage than any TSFM, but has far worse overall accuracy. We propose bimodal mixture augmentation (BMA), a post-hoc method that combines TSFM forecasts with historical distributional knowledge, approaching the historical baseline's transition coverage while preserving the TSFM's accuracy. Our results suggest that TSFM benchmarks should incorporate regime-aware evaluation to surface failures that aggregate metrics hide.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Instrumental and Proximal Causal Inference with Gaussian Processes

arXiv:2603.02159v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Instrumental variable (IV) and proximal causal learning (Proxy) methods are central frameworks for causal inference in the presence of unobserved confounding. Despite substantial methodological advances, existing approaches rarely provide reliable epistemic uncertainty (EU) quantification. We address this gap through a Deconditional Gaussian Process (DGP) framework for uncertainty-aware causal learning. Our formulation recovers popular kernel estimators as the posterior mean, ensuring predictive precision, while the posterior variance yields principled and well-calibrated EU. Moreover, the probabilistic structure enables systematic model selection via marginal log-likelihood optimization. Empirical results demonstrate strong predictive performance alongside informative EU quantification, evaluated via empirical coverage frequencies and decision-aware accuracy rejection curves. Together, our approach provides a unified, practical solution for causal inference under unobserved confounding with reliable uncertainty.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Dango: A Strictly L1-Only Large Language Model for Studying Second Language Acquisition

We introduce Dango, a 1.8B-parameter large language model designed for controlled studies of L1-to-L2 (Japanese-to-English) transfer in second language acquisition (SLA). While previous studies have explored SLA in language models, they have predominantly relied on smaller or non-decoder models, limiting their ability to generate open-ended text and reducing their suitability as practical L2 simulators. We identify a key challenge when scaling models to this size: L2 contamination within the "monolingual" pretraining corpus used for L1 acquisition. To address this, we propose a filtering method to reduce premature exposure to English while preserving realistic, minimal exposure. We then fine-tune the model on LLM-generated L2-learning lessons to simulate the L2 acquisition process. Our evaluations confirm that Dango develops human-like L2 production patterns, outperforming both unfiltered and standard multilingual baselines. We release the model, data, and code to facilitate reproducible computational SLA research and learner-facing applications.

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

Shifting-based Optimizable Linear Relaxations for General Activation Functions

arXiv:2606.20292v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The use of neural networks (NNs) is rapidly increasing, including in safety- and security-critical domains. To provide formal guarantees about NN behavior, many verification methods rely on optimizable linear relaxations of activation functions. However, existing techniques depend on hand-crafted relaxations for each activation function. Extension to state-of-the-art activation functions therefore requires substantial manual effort. In contrast, our approach SLiR (Shifting-based Linear Relaxations) is broadly applicable, requiring only a Lipschitz constant or a set of critical points. SLiR parameterizes relaxations by their slope and computes the corresponding offset via a shifting procedure that ensures sound upper and lower bounds over the input domain, enabling efficient optimization while maintaining correctness. Our experiments show that SLiR produces tight relaxations across a wide range of practical activation functions and enables verification of up to 7.8x more properties compared to state-of-the-art methods.

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

Lius: Translation Model Based Instructional Lingustic Using Continual Instruction Tuning In Kupang Malay

Large Language Models (LLMs) offer new potential for translation tasks but often experience performance degradation when handling low-resource languages. To address this limitation, we propose an approach for fine-tuning LLMs on a low-resource language, Kupang Malay. Our approach involves designing a set of instructions by leveraging explicit lexical and semantic features from a bilingual dictionary, and introducing Continual Instruction Tuning (CIT), a training paradigm that enables iterative instruction-based training. Experimental results demonstrate that our model, named Lius, yields notable improvements over standard instruction-tuned models by outperforming 4-6 points, and surpassing both Neural Machine Translation (NMT) and Multilingual LLM models by 10-13 points on several evaluation metrics. These findings highlight the potential of our approach to mitigate the reliance on large-scale parallel data in low-resource language translation.