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01.
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 $0.999$.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

GraphInfer-Bench: Benchmarking LLM's Inference Capability on Graphs

Graph analysis underlies many applications whose answers cannot be looked up in a single record or retrieved along a path: laundering rings, drug repurposing, user preference, and scientific theme are all inferred from a node together with its neighbourhood. We introduce GraphInfer-Bench, a benchmark for whether LLMs can perform this graph inference: producing an open-ended answer that no single node supports and no path retrieves. Existing graph-QA protocols cannot test this capability: algorithm simulation, node classification, single-node description, KG-QA, and GraphRAG all admit answers retrievable from one node or along a path. GraphInfer-Bench defines five tasks along Description (what a region is) and Comparison (how regions differ), each constructed so the ground truth lives in no single node. The release contains 42,000 samples across six real-world graphs, produced automatically and screened by a four-layer quality-control protocol. We evaluate four method families against the same tasks: graph-token alignment models, zero-shot frontier closed-source LLMs, Graph2Text supervised fine-tuning, and plain GNNs as a structural reference. No method family closes the gap. Graph-token alignment partially handles description tasks (relational, theme) but collapses on comparison tasks. Frontier LLMs lead on outlier detection and community partition among LLM-based methods but lag on masked-node prediction. Graph2Text SFT is the strongest LLM-based method on the description side yet falls behind frontier LLMs on comparison. Across every task, plain GNNs match or beat the strongest LLM-based row, with the largest margin on community detection. GraphInfer-Bench surfaces graph inference as an open capability gap rather than a property of any one architecture.

03.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-04

Beyond associations: Navigating the safety of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) in early pregnancy

by Andrew S. C. Yuen, Kenneth K. C. Man Pain and fever in pregnancy require treatment, but fetal safety concerns complicate analgesic choice. A recent PLOS Medicine study presents new evidence on the safety of first-trimester NSAID use and congenital malformation risk, but interpreting findings across studies is challenging. In this Perspective, Kenneth Man and Andrew Yuen highlight a recent PLOS Medicine study that presents new evidence on the safety of first-trimester NSAID use and congenital malformation risk, but discuss why interpreting findings across studies is challenging.

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

Latent Gaussian Splatting for 4D Panoptic Occupancy Tracking

arXiv:2602.23172v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Capturing 4D spatiotemporal scene structure is crucial for the safe and reliable operation of robots in dynamic environments. However, existing approaches typically address only part of the problem: they either provide coarse geometric tracking via bounding boxes or detailed 3D occupancy estimates that lack explicit temporal association and instance-level reasoning. In this work, we present Latent Gaussian Splatting (LaGS) for 4D Panoptic Occupancy Tracking (4D-POT). We revisit the underlying representation and model 3D features as a sparse set of feature-bearing Gaussians. These act as dynamic, volume-oriented keypoints that enable spatially continuous, distance-weighted aggregation of multi-view features before being splatted into a voxel grid for decoding. This point-centric formulation enables flexible, data-dependent receptive fields and long-range spatial interactions that are difficult to capture with local and dense voxel-based operators. A hierarchical Gaussian representation further enables multi-scale reasoning by combining global context from coarse super-points with fine-grained detail from higher-resolution streams. Extensive experiments on Occ3D nuScenes and Waymo demonstrate state-of-the-art performance for 4D-POT. We provide code and models at https://lags.cs.uni-freiburg.de/.

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

The Wrong Kind of Right: Quantifying and Localizing Misfired Alignment in LLMs

Warning: This paper studies stereotypes and biases, and contains potentially disturbing examples, used for illustration purposes only. Our findings should not be interpreted as an argument against alignment. Instead, this paper highlights the need for principled approaches to more advanced alignment. Alignment aims to ensure that large language models (LLMs) behave safely and reliably, including by avoiding unsafe inferences. However, we show that such safety-oriented behaviors can misfire: models may reject warranted conclusions even when they are explicitly supported by context. We call this failure mode misfired alignment, where alignment-induced changes cause LLMs to override explicit evidence. To quantify this phenomenon, specifically on stereotype-related alignment, we introduce VETO, a benchmark consisting of 2,032 BBQ-derived contrastive pairs, and define a new metric, Misfired Alignment Rate (MAR), which measures on a 0 to 100 scale how often a model fails on a stereotype-related question but succeeds on its contrastive counterpart. We benchmark 25 LLMs on VETO, and show that all LLMs, including the most recent ones, exhibit non-trivial (4.7 to 18.9%) MARs while all human participants achieve 0.0% MAR. Controlled priming experiments further show that alignment-induced cues can substantially amplify MAR across LLMs, indicating that these failures are not merely artifacts of individual examples but can be induced by safety-related framing. Mechanistic analyses on open-weight LLMs reveal late-layer suppression of evidence-supported answers, and comparisons between instruct and base LLMs suggest that this suppression emerges after instruction training. These findings show that current alignment methods can overgeneralize surface-level safety cues, to the point of overriding objective evidence, motivating more work on alignment objectives that better preserve contextual grounding.

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

Tensor network compression using fluid dynamics as a testbed: Analytical foundations in one dimension

arXiv:2606.17064v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: High performance computers produce extreme-scale data sets that require sampling or compression if they are to be used to their full potential. Existing data compression techniques typically exploit features such as sparsity in the data, homogeneity in the data, or {\it a priori} knowledge of what subsets of data are of most interest. Fluid dynamics data in general do not exhibit these features and so are attractive test beds for generic compression techniques that are objective, robust, and tuneable with respect to information lost due to compression. Presented here is a method based on tensor networks, specifically matrix product states or tensor trains, that meets these requirements. The method is demonstrated for compression in one-dimension and is extensible to higher dimensionality. Lossless compression is demonstrated for random Fourier series for sufficiently high bond dimension of the tensor network, with the memory required to store the tensor network scaling directly proportional to the bond dimension. The lossy compression exhibited at lower bond dimension can be well within the relative error of many fluid simulations. The compression algorithm is tested for the time evolution of Burger's equation with excellent results. We additionally demonstrate the capability to perform computations in the compressed form through a tensor network periodic convolution that can be orders of magnitude faster than using fast Fourier transforms and the convolution theorem. In addition to being an attractive method for working with data sets generated by existing computers, the tensor network methods utilised are directly translatable to the emerging paradigm of quantum computing.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

FedBiCross: Personalized One-Shot Federated Learning on Medical Images

arXiv:2601.01901v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Data-free knowledge distillation-based one-shot federated learning (OSFL) trains a model in a single communication round without sharing raw data, making OSFL attractive for privacy-sensitive medical applications. However, existing methods aggregate predictions from all clients to form a global teacher. Under non-IID data, conflicting predictions dilute each other during averaging, yielding less informative soft labels that weaken distillation. We propose FedBiCross, a personalized OSFL framework with three stages: (1) clustering clients by model output similarity to form coherent sub-ensembles, (2) bi-level cross-cluster optimization that learns adaptive weights to selectively leverage beneficial cross-cluster knowledge while suppressing negative transfer, and (3) personalized distillation for client-specific adaptation. Experiments on four medical image datasets demonstrate that FedBiCross consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across different non-IID degrees.

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

Projected random forests and conformal prediction of circular data

arXiv:2410.24145v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We apply conformal prediction techniques to regression problems with circular responses, producing prediction sets with adaptive arc length and finite-sample coverage guarantees for any circular predictive model under the assumption of data exchangeability. Leveraging the high performance of existing predictive models designed for linear responses, we analyze a general projection procedure that converts any linear-response regression model into one suitable for circular responses. When random forests are used as base models in this projection procedure, we leverage the random forest out-of-bag mechanism to eliminate the need for a separate calibration sample in the construction of prediction sets. On synthetic and real datasets, the resulting projected random forest model produces more efficient out-of-bag conformal prediction sets, with shorter median arc length, than the split conformal prediction sets generated by two existing alternative models.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Evaluation Sovereignty in Metadata-Driven Classification: A Multi-Track Framework for Weakly Supervised Information Systems

arXiv:2606.13436v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluation in machine learning is typically treated as a neutral measurement process. However, in operational information systems, evaluation outcomes are often conditioned by the processes used to generate labels. This paper does not seek to improve classification performance. Instead, it examines the validity of performance measurement under differing label-authority regimes. This issue is particularly relevant in large-scale metadata-driven systems, where labels are often incomplete, inconsistent, or weakly supervised. We introduce evaluation sovereignty, defined as the degree to which performance metrics are independent of label authority and supervision regime, and propose a multi-track evaluation framework that systematically varies training and evaluation label sources. Using hierarchical multi-label classification on large-scale scientific metadata, we demonstrate that models exhibiting strong performance under operational ("silver") evaluation degrade substantially under independent ("gold") evaluation, particularly for fine-grained classification. For example, Micro-F1 decreases from approximately 0.54 to 0.03. Notably, ranking-based metrics remain above baseline, revealing a divergence between latent model signal and classification validity. These findings suggest that commonly reported performance metrics may reflect alignment with labeling processes rather than true predictive capability. We therefore reconceptualize evaluation validity as a system-level property shaped by label governance and provide a practical methodology for auditing intelligent systems operating under weak supervision.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Epidemiology of Cervical Precancerous Lesions: Prevalence and Predictors from Pap Smear Screening in Hawassa City Hospitals, Sidama Region, Ethiopia. Institutional-Based Cross-sectional Study

Background: Cervical cancer is the fourth most common cancer in women worldwide and remains a major public health challenge. In Ethiopia, it is the second leading cause of cancer deaths, with around 8,000 new cases and 6,000 deaths each year. Region?specific data on the prevalence and predictors of precancerous lesions remain scarce, yet such information is vital for guiding targeted reproductive health strategies. This study therefore examined the prevalence and predictors of cervical precancerous lesions among women aged 21-60 years undergoing Pap smear screening in public hospitals in Hawassa City, Sidama Region. Methods: An institution-based cross-sectional study was conducted among 241 women attending Pap smear screening at public hospitals in Hawassa City from March to August 2025. Sociodemographic and clinical data were collected via interviews and medical records. Lesions were classified based on the standardized international framework for reporting cervical cytology results from Pap smears per the Bethesda system. Multivariable logistic regression identified predictors p

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

Conformal Bayes under Label Shift: Post-Hoc Calibration vs. In-Training Adaptation

arXiv:2606.11865v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Conformal Bayes combines Bayesian posterior predictives with conformal calibration to produce prediction sets that are both statistically valid and geometrically efficient. We study conformal Bayes under label shift from a unified perspective, identifying two complementary approaches that restore nominal target-domain coverage through importance-weighted conformal calibration but operate through independent mechanisms. Post-hoc calibration tilts the posterior predictive toward the target domain and corrects the conformal threshold via an importance-weighted quantile, leaving the parameter posterior unchanged. In-training adaptation tilts the parameter posterior itself to the target domain, producing a corrected predictive whose highest predictive density region serves as the highest predictive density (HPD) based prediction set under the fitted target predictive; efficiency is model-dependent and does not imply finite-sample conditional optimality. Two controlled experiments show that in an unbiased training regime both strategies achieve valid coverage equally, while in a lead-optimization regime in-training adaptation acts as a debiasing operator, reducing interval width at unchanged coverage.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Experimental realization of the complete seven-phase Anderson-localization landscape

arXiv:2606.14825v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Anderson localization has evolved far beyond the conventional dichotomy between extended and localized states. Modern localization theory predicts a complete transport hierarchy comprising extended, critical, and localized phases together with all coexistence phases among them, forming a seven-phase Anderson-localization landscape. Despite its fundamental importance, this hierarchy has never been experimentally realized within a single system. Here we realize the complete seven-phase Anderson-localization landscape in a one-dimensional Floquet photonic lattice. By engineering quasiperiodic hopping profiles containing inhomogeneously distributed hopping zeros, we generate critical states and enable their coexistence with extended and localized sectors. The resulting transport regimes are directly resolved through their distinct spatiotemporal dynamics, including ballistic expansion, confined critical oscillations, and persistent localization. We observe all seven phases, including the elusive triply coexisting extended-critical-localized phase, and experimentally track the phase transitions connecting them. Our results establish the first complete experimental map of the Anderson-localization landscape and provide a unified platform for investigating mobility edges, multifractality, and programmable coherent transport.

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

Small LLMs: Pruning vs. Training from Scratch

Pruning promises a shortcut to strong small language models. In this work, we examine this promise by pruning Llama-3.1-8B at pruning ratios of 0.5–0.8 with six methods spanning depth, width, and sparse granularities, under two controlled token-matched settings. (1) With the same training token budget, pruned initialization consistently outperforms random initialization. This shows that the parent model provides a strong starting point, although the advantage narrows as the training token budget grows and as the pruning ratio rises, nearly vanishing at the highest pruning ratio we study. (2) When training from scratch is instead given the full token budget consumed by the whole pipeline, pruning at finer granularities still retains an advantage, while coarser structured pruning can be matched or surpassed. This suggests that the parent model transfers knowledge that additional training tokens alone cannot fully recover, but only at fine granularity. Taken together, our results yield a clear recommendation: with a large pretrained model in hand and a limited training token budget, pruning is better than training from scratch; when the training budget is not limited, training from scratch can be competitive for coarser pruning, so a large pretrained parent is not always necessary.

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

A unified complexity bound for logconcave sampling

arXiv:2606.12694v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We give a simple, unified, and nearly tight bound for sampling arbitrary logconcave distributions from a warm start using the In-and-Out algorithm along with exponential lifting. The main new ingredient in the analysis is an improved bound on the Poincaré constant of a lifted distribution. As a consequence, the resulting convergence rate is nearly tight for both constrained settings (e.g., Gaussian restricted to a convex body) and well-conditioned settings (e.g., strongly logconcave and smooth densities).

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

Approximate Next Policy Sampling: Replacing Conservative Target Policy Updates in Deep RL

arXiv:2605.05481v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We revisit a classic "chicken-and-egg" problem in reinforcement learning: to safely improve a policy, the value function must be accurate on the state-visitation distribution of the updated policy. That distribution over states is unknown and cannot be sampled for the purposes of training the value function. Conservative updates solve this problem, but at the cost of shrinking the policy update. This paper explores an alternative solution, Approximate Next Policy Sampling (ANPS), which addresses the problem by modifying the training distribution rather than constraining the policy update. ANPS is satisfied if the distribution of the training data approximates that of the next policy. To demonstrate the feasibility and efficacy of ANPS, we introduce Stable Value Approximate Policy Iteration (SV-API). SV-API modifies the standard approximate policy iteration loop to hold the target policy fixed while an iteratively updated behavioral policy gathers relevant experience. It only commits to a new policy once a convergence criterion has been met. If certain stability criteria are met, the update is guaranteed to be safe; otherwise, it remains no less safe than standard approximate policy iteration. Applying SV-API to PPO yields Stable Value PPO (SV-PPO), which matches or improves performance on high-dimensional discrete (Atari) and continuous control benchmarks while executing substantially larger target policy updates. These results demonstrate the viability of ANPS as a new solution to this classic challenge in RL.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Multiple Topological Haldane Phases for Symmetry-Protected Quantum Information Processing

arXiv:2606.12685v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Symmetry-protected topological phases have attracted significant interest at the fundamental level and as a potential platform for quantum information processing, owing to their protected edge states and resilience to perturbations. Applying these features for practical and efficient quantum computation is highly desirable, but remains an open challenge. Here, we demonstrate the partitioning into multiple independent Haldane phase subsystems of a single spin-1/2 ladder system and propose this as a scalable architecture for gate-based quantum computation, which takes advantage of the symmetry-protected topological order. We encode qubits in the two topological states of the $S^{z}=0$ sector of each subsystem. Finite-size effects, typically viewed as detrimental, instead provide a controllable energy splitting that enables single-qubit rotations using only local magnetic fields. An Ising-type interaction between neighboring subsystem edges generates entangling gates, enabling universal quantum computation driven by two control parameters that are easily accessible experimentally. Our results demonstrate how symmetry-protected topological phases can be directly harnessed for circuit-model quantum computation in realistic systems.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

DrivingAgent: Design and Scheduling Agents for Autonomous Driving Systems

Many autonomous driving systems are increasingly incorporating foundation models to improve generalization and handle long-tail scenarios. However, this trend introduces two key challenges: (i) the manual and labor-intensive process of designing and integrating new models, and (ii) the lack of intelligent, dynamic scheduling mechanisms to meet strict real-time constraints. While Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents offer a promising avenue for automation, existing frameworks are ill-suited for autonomous driving. Specifically, they fail to distinguish between the fundamentally different requirements of system design and real-time scheduling, treat modules as opaque black boxes, and are not designed for continuous operation. To address these limitations, we propose DrivingAgent, a novel agent framework tailored to the dual challenges of autonomous driving system design and scheduling. In the design phase, DrivingAgent automates module development by interpreting system architecture, generating code, and validating modules via super-network training. In the scheduling phase, it employs a lightweight LLM trained with reinforcement learning to dynamically orchestrate system modules in real time, supported by a structured memory that integrates long-term storage with timestamped short-term context. Experimental results demonstrate that DrivingAgent achieves a superior speed–accuracy trade-off on both the nuScenes and Bench2Drive benchmarks.

18.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-08

Apitegromab for lean mass preservation during tirzepatide-induced weight loss: a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled phase 2 trial

Loss of lean mass in proportion to total weight loss is observed with incretin mimetic therapies such as tirzepatide and has the potential to adversely affect health and function. Apitegromab is an investigational, fully human monoclonal antibody that selectively inhibits myostatin activation and is, thereby, capable of increasing muscle mass. In the randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled phase 2 EMBRAZE study, adults with overweight or obesity (n = 102) were randomized 1:1 to receive tirzepatide plus apitegromab (10 mg kg−1) or tirzepatide plus placebo. At week 24, apitegromab resulted in a least square mean (80% confidence interval (CI)) of 1.9 (1.2−2.7) kg less lean mass loss than placebo (P = 0.001), despite similar total body weight loss between groups, representing a 54.9% retention of lean mass relative to placebo. In participants receiving apitegromab, trough concentrations of apitegromab and total latent myostatin, a pharmacodynamic marker, both increased over time and reached a plateau after approximately 16 weeks. Incidence of adverse events (AEs) (% (95% CI)) was generally similar across apitegromab-treated participants and placebo-treated participants, with 39 of 51 (76% (63−86%)) and 36 of 51 (71% (57−81%)) participants experiencing an AE, respectively. Serious adverse events (SAEs) were balanced and experienced by one of 51 (2% (0−10%)) participants in each arm. In summary, this proof-of-concept study demonstrated that selective targeting of myostatin by apitegromab was well tolerated and effective in preserving lean mass when combined with tirzepatide. ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT06445075 . In the phase 2 EMBRAZE study, participants receiving tirzepatide and apitegromab lost less lean mass compared to participants receiving tirzepatide and placebo.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Uncertainty Is Not a Safety Net for Clinical VQA, but Can It Anticipate Model Failure?

Safe deployment of clinical vision-language models (VLMs) requires reliable uncertainty estimation (UE): a signal indicating when predictions should be trusted or escalated to a clinician. We test whether current UE methods actually deliver this signal. Benchmarking 8 methods across 12 VLMs on clinical visual question-answering (VQA), we find that UE quality is not an intrinsic property of the UE method: it tracks model accuracy, degrading precisely where the model performance is weakest, and therefore where reliability is most needed. When we stress-test models by hiding the correct option among the multiple-choice answers (NOTA perturbations), accuracy collapses while uncertainty barely changes, leaving models systematically miscalibrated. Yet, we find that uncertainty on the unperturbed input reliably anticipates which predictions will collapse under NOTA, indicating that UE in current VLMs carries diagnostic information about model fragility. Our results position UE as a diagnostic tool for identifying fragile predictions and motivate perturbation-based evaluation as a path toward safe clinical deployment.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Coherent Dark State Formation of a Lead-Vacancy Spin Qubit in Diamond

arXiv:2605.27841v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A lead-vacancy (PbV) center in diamond exhibits coherent emission above the liquid helium temperature, making it highly attractive for quantum network applications. Here, we report the magneto-optical and spin properties of PbV centers in diamond. We record a spin lifetime of 12 ms at 7.5 K under large off-axis magnetic field. Furthermore, we observe formation of the coherent dark state by coherent population trapping and estimate a spin dephasing time of 177 ns at 6.5 K. This work demonstrates the outstanding thermal robustness of the PbV spin compared to other group-IV centers above 4 K.

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

A Unified Definition of Hallucination: It's The World Model, Stupid!

Despite numerous attempts at mitigation since the inception of language models, hallucinations remain a persistent problem even in today's frontier LLMs. Why is this? We review existing definitions of hallucination and fold them into a single, unified definition wherein prior definitions are subsumed. We argue that hallucination can be unified by defining it as simply inaccurate (internal) world modeling, in a form where it is observable to the user. For example, stating a fact which contradicts a knowledge base OR producing a summary which contradicts the source. By varying the reference world model and conflict policy, our framework unifies prior definitions. We argue that this unified view is useful because it forces evaluations to clarify their assumed reference "world", distinguishes true hallucinations from planning or reward errors, and provides a common language for comparison across benchmarks and discussion of mitigation strategies. Building on this definition, we also connect our framework to HalluWorld, a complementary benchmark that instantiates fully specified reference world models for stress-testing model hallucinations.

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

Zero-Inflated Gaussian Distributions Enable Parameter-Space Sparsity in Estimation-of-Distribution Algorithms

arXiv:2606.19369v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Estimation-of-distribution algorithms (EDAs) are a powerful class of evolutionary methods for black-box optimization, especially when little is known about the structure of the objective. Whereas classical evolutionary algorithms rely on hand-designed mutation and crossover operators, hard to devise for unknown problem structures, and a source of bias, EDAs sidestep operator design entirely: they fit a probability distribution to the best individuals and sample the next generation from it. EDAs are well established on continuous parameter spaces, but they have not previously been generalized to sparse ones, in which most coefficients of a good solution are exactly zero. Existing sparse black-box optimizers therefore reintroduce exactly what EDAs were designed to avoid: hand-crafted sparsity operators, bi-level schemes alternating between support set and active values, zeroing thresholds, and other baked-in assumptions. We close this gap by proposing multivariate zero-inflated Gaussian (ZIG) distributions as EDA sampling laws. A latent Gaussian model with separate indicator and value dimensions represents sparsity patterns, correlations among active parameters, and the interactions between the two, so sparsity patterns and active values are optimized jointly, hierarchy-free. We show that the latent parameters of this model are identifiable from observed samples, unlike in the missing-data settings where related constructions originate, and introduce practical amortized inversion-based estimators for them. The estimators accurately recover latent correlation structures, and on the Lunar Lander benchmark the resulting ZIG-EDA converges faster and reaches higher final returns than a dense Gaussian EDA, a hand-crafted sparse evolutionary algorithm, and an ad-hoc sparse EDA, while finding controllers with only a small fraction of parameters active.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

CheckMIABench: Firm Foundations For Membership Inference Attacks on Language Models

arXiv:2606.17464v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Membership inference attacks (MIAs) are a canonical way to assess a machine learning model's privacy properties. Although several attempts have been made to evaluate MIAs on language models, the extant literature has suffered numerous difficulties in constructing clean evaluations to test new techniques. In particular, subtle distribution shifts between member and non-member sets can undermine the statistical validity of MIAs; recent work has underscored this by showing that "blind" methods with no access to the underlying model can perform far better than published methods on the same benchmarks. This paper constructs a benchmark for principled evaluation of MIAs against LLMs, by leveraging the insight that training data before and after a fixed point during training are drawn from the same distribution. Therefore, all open-source models with intermediate checkpoints and public training data can be converted into MIA testbeds. We apply our framework to a half-dozen published attacks on the Pythia and OLMo family of models, from 70M to 7B parameters. To facilitate further privacy research, we open-source a modular library for designing and implementing attacks in this setting: https://github.com/safr-ai-lab/pandora_llm.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Do as I Do: Dexterous Manipulation Data from Everyday Human Videos

How can we scalably generate data for robotic manipulation, especially on human-like platforms such as dexterous multi-fingered hands? Learning from human videos has recently emerged as a likely answer to this question. However, difficulties in estimating hand-object interaction and crossing the human-to-robot embodiment gap have hindered the adoption of abundant monocular RGB-only human videos as the primary source of robot manipulation data. In this work, we present DO AS I DO, an algorithm to reconstruct and retarget monocular RGB human videos to multi-fingered dexterous robotic hands. DO AS I DO reconstructs hand-object interactions from various egocentric and exocentric in-the-wild video sources. The algorithm then retargets these hand-object interaction estimates into a sequence of actions executable in the real world, yielding robot-complete manipulation data from disparate human videos. Overall, DO AS I DO outperforms previous state of the art in estimating hand-object interactions and extracting dexterous manipulation trajectories from RGB videos, as we show in experiments on datasets with ground truths and on a dataset of video clips collected online. Our experiments enable us to propose an efficacy playbook for practitioners collecting human data for manipulation.

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

StereoGeo: an end-to-end stereo camera calibration method

In this work, we propose StereoGeo, an end-to-end network-based approach for stereo camera calibration. Our method estimates the focal lengths and gravity directions of the left and right cameras, as well as the relative extrinsic transformation relating them. Existing methods often rely on calibration patterns in structured environments or address only a single camera configuration, being limited to either intrinsic or extrinsic estimation, and depending on a multi-view setups. StereoGeo extends the GeoCalib algorithm, integrating deep neural network feature extraction with a differentiable optimizer. Extensive experiments on real-world benchmarks demonstrate that StereoGeo achieves competitive performance for intrinsic calibration and provides accurate stereo extrinsic estimation, outperforming existing methods that are limited to monocular settings. The dataset used in this work is partially publicly available at https://github.com/meddourimane/StereoGeo-dataset.