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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Percolation phase transition on planar spin systems

arXiv:2105.13314v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this article we study the continuity and sharpness of the phase transition for percolation models defined on top of planar spin systems. The two examples that we treat in detail concern the Glauber dynamics for the Ising model and a Dynamic Bootstrap process. For both of these models we prove that their phase transition is continuous and sharp, providing also quantitative estimates on the two point connectivity. The techniques that we develop in this work can be applied to a variety of different percolation models based on spin-flip dynamics. We also discuss some of the problems that can be tackled in a similar fashion.

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

CARE: Competence-Aware Reward Shaping for Adaptive Reasoning Length in Video-MLLMs

In multimodal video reasoning, reinforcement learning-based methods typically rely on simplistic and inflexible reasoning-length control strategies that fail to adapt to the model's evolving competence. This mismatch may suppress necessary exploration at early stages, while encouraging redundant reasoning and inefficient decoding once the model becomes more competent. In this paper, we propose CARE, a competence-aware reward shaping framework for adaptive reasoning length optimization in multimodal reasoning. Specifically, CARE maintains a smoothed competence estimate via an exponential moving average of pass rates, and uses it to route training into progressive stages that shift the reward preference from exploration-oriented long-form reasoning to efficiency-oriented concise reasoning. To avoid conflating verbosity with intrinsic task complexity, CARE further normalizes reasoning effort with batch-level statistics, and introduces a posterior amplifier to strengthen reward signals for unexpectedly strong performance on historically difficult samples. The proposed mechanism is seamlessly integrated into the GRPO training pipeline and incurs no additional inference-time overhead. Extensive experiments on multiple video reasoning and general video understanding benchmarks demonstrate that CARE consistently improves reasoning accuracy, stabilizes reinforcement learning, and significantly enhances token efficiency. Moreover, CARE exhibits a characteristic inverted-U trajectory of reasoning length during training, and yields shorter yet more informative reasoning traces at convergence, indicating effective adaptive allocation of reasoning budget. We provide the source code for our proposed CARE framework and experiments at https://github.com/1Pansy/Video-CARE.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Configurable Clinical Information Extraction with Agentic RAG: What Works, What Breaks, and Why

arXiv:2606.19602v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Patient contexts span hundreds of heterogeneous documents and thousands of structured data points, yet the document-level metadata that AI systems need for retrieval and triage is absent or incomplete. Standard retrieval-augmented generation fails on this data, mishandling temporal reasoning, cross-document dependencies, and missing metadata. We deploy ACIE (Agentic Clinical Information Extraction) at University Medicine Essen: an on-premise agentic RAG pipeline that reasons over complete patient contexts and grounds every answer in source passages for clinician verification. We quantify the metadata gap, trace the architectural decisions it shaped, and evaluate extraction alongside an independent retrospective lymphoma registry study, in which nuclear-medicine physicians verify every extracted value against its cited sources. Across 7,326 judgments, clinicians accepted 96.5\% of extractions, with per-type acceptance ranging from 80\% to 99\%.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Speech-Driven End-to-End Language Discrimination towards Chinese Dialects

Language discrimination among similar languages, varieties, and dialects is a challenging natural language processing task. The traditional text-driven focus leads to poor results. In this paper, we explore the effectiveness of speech-driven features towards language discrimination among Chinese dialects. First, we systematically explore the appropriateness of speech-driven MFCC features towards CNN-based language discrimination. Then, we design an end-to-end speech recognition model based on HMM-DNN to predict Chinese dialect words. We adopt attention to extract the discriminative words related to different Chinese dialects. Finally, through a CNN, we combine the word-level embedding and the MFCC-based features. Evaluation of two benchmark Chinese dialect corpora shows the appropriateness and effectiveness of the proposed speech-driven approach to fine-grained Chinese dialect discrimination compared to the state-of-the-art methods.

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

SCR-Guided Difficulty-Aware Optimization for Infrared Small Target Detection

Infrared small target detection remains challenging due to severe background clutter, low contrast, and weak spatial responses where geometric overlap alone is insufficient to characterize detection quality. In this work, we propose REEM (Reweighted Explicit-visibility Enhanced Modulation), a lightweight SCR-guided difficulty-aware optimization framework that incorporates Signal-to-Clutter Ratio (SCR) as a physically meaningful visibility prior during training. Instead of modifying the network architecture or directly optimizing SCR, REEM computes a ground-truth local SCR from the input image and applies a differentiable modulation to the soft-IoU learning signal, emphasizing low-visibility targets while preserving stable optimization and identical inference behavior. REEM is integrated into a U-Net-based MSHNet without introducing additional parameters, architectural modifications, or inference-time overhead. Extensive experiments demonstrate consistent improvements over the baseline, achieving higher IoU and detection probability (Pd) together with substantially reduced false alarms (FA), particularly under challenging low-visibility conditions. These results suggest that SCR-guided difficulty-aware optimization provides an effective and physically grounded complement to conventional overlap-based objectives for infrared small target detection. The code is available at https://github. com/yall-in-one/Reemm.

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

Wavelength-Multiplexed 2D Beam Steering via a Passive Diffractive Network

We introduce a wavelength-addressable diffractive optical network that transforms illumination wavelength into a high-dimensional control parameter for arbitrarily programmable 2D beam steering. The proposed passive architecture comprises cascaded spatially optimized diffractive layers, jointly designed using deep learning, to rapidly map distinct wavelengths to predefined/desired output angles. Unlike conventional single-layer dispersive optical elements, which are physically restricted to 1D linear mapping, this framework harnesses complex wavefront transformations to utilize the illumination wavelength as an intrinsic addressing key for arbitrary 2D beam steering, eliminating the need for mechanical scanning or electronic phase control. We numerically demonstrate wavelength-controlled beam steering across 625 wavelength channels spanning 400-750 nm, realizing a 25 x 25 array of independently addressable beam positions with subwavelength positioning accuracy and high channel fidelity. Unlike conventional gratings, which constrain wavelength routing to a linear trajectory, the proposed diffractive network performs nonlocal wavefront transformations, enabling arbitrary wavelength-to-angle mappings across a 2D field of view. We further validate the proposed framework experimentally in both the terahertz and visible spectral regimes, demonstrating wavelength-multiplexed beam steering using 3D fabricated passive diffractive layers at terahertz frequencies and phase-only spatial light modulators in the visible spectrum. This wavelength-addressable diffractive architecture establishes a compact and scalable paradigm for high-speed programmable beam steering, with potential applications in optical communications, routing, imaging, sensing, and emerging photonic information-processing systems.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Geometry-Preserving Encoder/Decoder in Latent Generative Models

arXiv:2501.09876v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Generative modeling aims to generate new data samples that resemble a given dataset. When using diffusion models for this task, one of the main challenges is solving the problem in the input space, which tends to be very high-dimensional. To address this, recent approaches solve diffusion models in the latent space through an encoder that maps from the data space to a lower-dimensional latent space, improving training efficiency and achieving state-of-the-art results. The variational autoencoder (VAE) is the most commonly used encoder/decoder framework in this domain, known for its ability to learn latent representations and generate data samples. In this paper, we introduce a novel encoder/decoder framework with theoretical properties distinct from those of the VAE, specifically designed to preserve the geometric structure of the data distribution. We demonstrate the significant advantages of this geometry-preserving encoder in the training process of both the encoder and decoder. Additionally, we provide theoretical results proving convergence of the training process, including convergence guarantees for encoder training, and results showing faster convergence of decoder training when using the geometry-preserving encoder.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Modality-Aware Feature Matching in Visual and Vision-Language Applications: A Comprehensive Survey

Feature matching is a cornerstone task in computer vision, essential for applications such as image retrieval, stereo matching, 3D reconstruction, and SLAM. This survey comprehensively reviews modality-based feature matching, exploring traditional handcrafted methods and emphasizing contemporary deep learning approaches across various modalities, including RGB images, depth images, 3D point clouds, LiDAR scans, medical images, and vision-language interactions. Traditional methods, leveraging detectors like Harris corners and descriptors such as SIFT and ORB, demonstrate robustness under moderate intra-modality variations but struggle with significant modality gaps. Contemporary deep learning-based methods, exemplified by detector-free strategies like CNN-based SuperPoint and transformer-based LoFTR, substantially improve robustness and adaptability across modalities. We highlight modality-aware advancements, such as geometric and depth-specific descriptors for depth images, sparse and dense learning methods for 3D point clouds, attention-enhanced neural networks for LiDAR scans, and specialized solutions like the MIND descriptor for complex medical image matching. Cross-modal applications, particularly in medical image registration and vision-language tasks, underscore the evolution of feature matching to handle increasingly diverse data interactions.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

EQPO: Equitable Group Relative Policy Optimization for Clinical Reasoning

arXiv:2510.19893v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Medical AI systems demonstrated impressive diagnostic performance, yet they routinely show uneven accuracy across demographic groups, disadvantaging underrepresented populations. Although multimodal reasoning foundation models have pushed clinical diagnosis forward, reinforcement learning-based post-training tends to absorb and magnify the biases present in majority-dominated training corpora. We propose Equitable Group Relative Policy Optimization (EQPO), a hierarchical reinforcement learning method that encourages balanced learning across heterogeneous clinical populations by adaptively reweighting samples according to subgroup representation, task difficulty, and data source. As demographic annotations are frequently missing in real-world clinical data, EQPO additionally applies unsupervised clustering to recover latent subpopulations when they are unavailable. On 7 diagnostic benchmarks covering 5 modalities (X-ray, CT, dermoscopy, mammography, ultrasound), EQPO reduces F1 standard deviation by 43.9% and the maximum cross-group F1 gap by 42.7% on QoQ-Med3-8B over vanilla GRPO, and narrows predictive parity gaps by 27.2% on MedGemma-4B over bias-mitigated RL baselines while raising F1 by 12.5% even without any demographic labels. Examining the training trajectory shows that EQPO steadily improves fairness over the course of optimization, in contrast to baseline methods whose fairness degrades as training proceeds, and the discovered implicit groups remain stable and align with masked demographic attributes. We further release EquiMedGemma-4B and EquiQoQ-Med3-8B, equitability-aware clinical VLLMs that attain state-of-the-art accuracy with markedly smaller demographic gaps.

10.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Benchmarking attention-based methods for vision transformers' interpretability in retinal fundus imaging

Deep learning models based on Vision Transformers (ViTs) have shown strong performance in retinal fundus imaging, but their interpretability remains poorly understood. In particular, attention-based attribution methods are widely used to explain ViT predictions, despite limited evaluation of their faithfulness and biological relevance in medical imaging. Here, we systematically benchmark four attention-based interpretability methods for RETFound, a retinal ViT-based foundation model, that we previously fine-tuned to predict 17 retinal vascular phenotypes from UK Biobank fundus images1. We compare raw attention, attention rollout, gradient-weighted attention rollout, and Chefer's hybrid relevance-based method using both qualitative visualisation and quantitative evaluation frameworks. To assess attribution faithfulness, we perform perturbation-based deletion and insertion experiments, quantifying changes in model predictions as highly attended image regions are progressively removed or restored. To evaluate biological specificity, we run structure-aware analyses combining attribution maps with vessel segmentation and artery-vein labels through the Relative ratio of Attention Intensity (RAI) metric. Across models, attribution maps differed substantially depending on the selected interpretability method, highlighting the need for rigorous quantitative evaluation. Among the evaluated approaches, gradient-weighted attention rollout consistently achieved the strongest perturbation performance and produced attribution maps most closely aligned with the anatomical definition of the predicted retinal traits. Furthermore, vessel-type specific models systematically concentrate attention on the corresponding vascular structures despite being trained using only a single scalar value per image as supervision. These findings demonstrate that attention-based attribution methods capture biologically meaningful vascular representations, while also revealing method-dependent variability in attribution behaviour. This work provides a quantitative framework for evaluating interpretability methods in medical imaging with annotated segmentation and contributes toward more transparent and biologically grounded medical AI systems.

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

AnnotateAnything: Automatic Annotation of 3D Assets for Robot Manipulation

Simulation enables scalable robot data collection, but raw 3D assets provide only geometry, lacking the semantic, interactive, and physical knowledge needed to specify where and how robots should act. In this work, we present AnnotateAnything, a general automatic annotation framework that converts passive 3D assets into manipulation-ready assets with structured, diverse, and executable manipulation labels. AnnotateAnything is built around two complementary pipelines. First, a unified visual-language annotation pipeline using vision-language reasoning to infer object semantics, interaction constraints, and 3D-grounded cues, providing human-prior guidance for identifying meaningful interaction regions. Second, a fully automatic and massively parallel physics annotation pipeline grounds these priors in each asset's geometry and physical constraints through candidate generation, geometry optimization and trajectory generation. This pipeline produces diverse and executable action annotations, including grasp poses, dexterous contacts, articulation waypoints, insertion directions, hanging affordances, and navigation targets. Using the generated annotations, we further build an asynchronous parallel simulation data-collection system across diverse objects, tasks, and robot embodiments. Experiments demonstrate that AnnotateAnything achieves superior annotation efficiency, data-collection efficiency, and task success rates over existing annotation and data-generation pipelines, while also supporting downstream tasks such as affordance detection, robotic VQA, and visual instruction finetuning. We provide project materials on the project page and plan to release the full code, annotations, and benchmark to facilitate future research. Videos, code, demo assets, and annotations are provided in supplementary materials Project page: https://tourmaline-caramel-169490.netlify.app.

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

Loss Landscape Diagnosis for Gradient-Based Gray-Scott System Inversion: Disentangling the Roles of PINN Components

作者:

arXiv:2606.11258v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Gradient-based inversion of reaction-diffusion systems is typically approached via surrogate models or physics-informed neural networks (PINNs), while the most direct route, backpropagation through the PDE's structure itself, has largely been avoided. We pursue this direct route as a diagnostic probe, backpropagating a steady-state loss through unrolled Gray-Scott simulation to recover its parameters, with no surrogate or neural-network augmentation. Optimization fails to converge, and plotting the landscape directly locates the failure in its geometry – flat plateaus with no gradient signal, bounded by sharp cliffs that align with bifurcation boundaries – a structure that recurs across loss functions and is inherited however the gradients are routed to parameters. Reading this minimal setup as an ablation of PINN, we disentangle each component's role: with the neural network fixed, the residual loss is quadratic in the PDE parameters and yields a smooth landscape, so it alone already avoids the pathology, by implicitly encoding the full PDE dynamics across all initial conditions. The neural network, for its part, cannot repair an ill-posed parameter subspace, and so serves only to complete the observed data – a division of labor not previously made explicit. These findings carry concrete design implications for PINN-type methods and a broader heuristic on when added dimensions actually help.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Multi-Sensor Fusion for UAV Classification Based on Feature Maps of Image and Radar Data

arXiv:2410.16089v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The unique cost, flexibility, speed, and efficiency of modern UAVs make them an attractive choice in many applications in contemporary society. This, however, causes an ever-increasing number of reported malicious or accidental incidents, rendering the need for the development of UAV detection and classification mechanisms essential. We propose a methodology for developing a system that fuses already processed multi-sensor data into a new Deep Neural Network to increase its classification accuracy towards UAV detection. The DNN model fuses high-level features extracted from individual object detection and classification models associated with thermal, optronic, and radar data. Additionally, emphasis is given to the model's Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based architecture that combines the features of the three sensor modalities by stacking the extracted image features of the thermal and optronic sensor achieving higher classification accuracy than each sensor alone.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

LiteOdyssey: A Lightweight Reasoning AI Agent for Interpretable Rare-Disease Diagnosis

arXiv:2606.16149v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most medical AI systems improve by scaling additional machinery: more fine-tuning data, more agents, and/or larger retrieval databases. In rare-disease diagnosis, however, such scaling can produce systems that are difficult to deploy, audit, and maintain. We asked whether state-of-the-art diagnostic performance could instead be achieved by extending the reasoning chain of a single AI agent: guiding it with a diagnostic policy, developed through human-AI collaboration and augmenting with freely available biomedical tools. We introduce LiteOdyssey, a lightweight rare-disease diagnostic framework that guides reasoning language model through a clinical genetics workflow. This framework was developed through Policy Iteration with Human Feedback (PIHF) and uses dynamic access to public biomedical tools. On two challenging benchmarks that provide only patient clinical features, LiteOdyssey achieved state-of-the-art performance, with an overall disease Recall@1 of 59.3% over the combined 1,243 cases of LIRICAL (n = 370) and the PhenoPacket Store (n = 873). Both benchmarks have a high proportion of ultra-rare disease (a prevalence below 1 in 1,000,000, with ultra-rare shares of approximately 45% and 52.8%, respectively). On the more difficult PhenoPacket subset, where causal diseases were not mapped to Orphanet in our rarity-mapping pipeline, LiteOdyssey achieved 60.7% Recall@1, compared with 10.7% for the same baseline model (GPT-5.4) without tools. This performance was achieved without fine-tuning, multi-agent ensembles, or a large case-retrieval database. Gains were also observed in the following: on cases never seen during development, on a private cohort of real-world rare disease patients, and on a smaller open-weights model. LiteOdyssey suggests a path toward rare-disease AI systems that are accurate, easier to deploy, and more transparent for physician review.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Electrical signatures of divergent connectivity in the human subgenual cingulate cortex

Background: Major depressive disorder remains a leading cause of disability. While subgenual cingulate cortex (sgCC) deep brain stimulation (DBS) shows promise for medically refractory depression, clinical outcomes have been heterogeneous, suggesting that individual differences in neural circuitry engagement may critically influence therapeutic efficacy. We aimed to define the electrophysiological signatures of sgCC efferent connectivity using single-pulse electrical stimulation (SPES) with intracranial stereo-EEG (sEEG) to inform rational targeting and physiological biomarkers for sgCC-DBS. Methods: In four patients undergoing clinically indicated sEEG for seizure mapping, SPES was delivered through sgCC pairs, while distributed brain stimulation-evoked potentials (BSEPs) were recorded across cortical and subcortical sites. Responses were characterized using Canonical Response Parameterization to extract reproducible waveforms and per-trial reliability. Results: sgCC stimulation elicited reproducible, spatially organized BSEPs across frontal, limbic, and paralimbic networks, aligning with known anatomical pathways. Frontal recruitment featured robust, lateralized orbitofrontal activation favoring the ipsilateral central, medial OFC and bilateral ventromedial prefrontal responses. Limbic effects demonstrated bilateral cingulate activation with stronger ipsilateral recruitment and lateralized amygdala and hippocampal responses. Paralimbic engagement included insular responses with subject-specific anterior predominance and bi-hemispheric temporal-polar slow-wave deflections. Conclusion: These findings provide direct electrophysiological evidence of distributed, lateralized sgCC divergent network connectivity in the human brain, offering physiologic confirmation of its role in affective circuitry. The observed topography and laterality have direct applications for sgCC-DBS targeting and implicate BSEP signatures as candidate biomarkers to guide patient-specific therapy.

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

Robustness without Wrinkles: Parallel Simulation and Robust MPC for Certified Deformable Manipulation

arXiv:2606.14188v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present CORD-SLS, a real-time control method for safe deformable object manipulation, with a focus on ropes and cloth. At its core is a GPU-parallel differentiable simulator with contact smoothing which enables efficient gradient-based planning through intermittent contact. To robustly satisfy constraints under model and sensing uncertainty, we develop a real-time, GPU-parallel output-feedback robust model predictive control (MPC) algorithm that plans with this simulator. We further show that the simulator accelerates model-based RL for training neural manipulation policies. To improve real-world robustness, we use conformal prediction to calibrate visual-feedback and perception-error bounds for MPC, producing reachable tubes that enable high-probability safe control. We evaluate CORD-SLS on high-dimensional, contact-rich rope and cloth manipulation tasks in simulation and hardware, including obstacle avoidance, routing, folding, and smoothing. Across settings, CORD-SLS achieves millisecond-speed planning, exceeding baselines in safety, speed, and task success.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Multi-Field Hybrid Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Maritime Accident Root Cause Analysis

arXiv:2606.13249v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Maritime accident adjudication reports contain critical tribunal findings for root cause analysis (RCA), yet retrieving relevant precedents and drafting consistent reports from decades of records remains labor-intensive. This paper proposes a multi-field hybrid retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework for automated maritime RCA, utilizing a comprehensive dataset of 13,329 Korea Maritime Safety Tribunal (KMST) reports (1971-2025). We transform raw adjudications into a structured knowledge base of "incident cards", indexing three distinct fields-Summary, Causes, and Disposition-alongside a hierarchical L1/L2 cause taxonomy. Our retrieval strategy employs a field-aware hybrid approach, fusing sparse and dense rankings via Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF). Given the lack of large-scale expert relevance labels, we evaluate retrieval performance using ceiling-normalized recall and nDCG based on a metadata-derived proxy relevance score. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed retrieval significantly outperforms baseline methods, improving NormRecall@100 from 0.18 to 0.55. Furthermore, grounding the generator on the retrieved precedents enhances RCA generation quality over an LLM-only baseline, increasing the LLM-as-a-judge score from 3.34 to 3.72. These findings suggest that field-aware RAG can substantially streamline maritime safety investigation workflows by enabling faster precedent search and more consistent, evidence-based RCA drafting.

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

Learning a Sampling-Free Variational DNN Plugin from Tiny Training Sets to Refine OOD Segmentation With Uncertainty Estimation

Deep neural networks (DNNs) frequently fail to generalize to out-of-distribution (OOD) medical images because of variations in scanners and acquisition protocols. Retraining DNN models to address these distribution shifts is often impractical due to the high cost of acquiring and annotating new medical datasets. To address this, we introduce VarDeepPCA, a novel lightweight variational DNN framework designed to restore/refine degraded segmentation maps by leveraging intrinsic geometric priors. Unlike existing approaches that require target-domain data or extensive pre-training, our VarDeepPCA explicitly learns a distribution of valid anatomical geometries using only small in-distribution (ID) datasets. Theoretically, our novel variational learning framework leverages a reinterpretation of the softmax mapping to implicitly perform exact distribution modeling, thereby enabling computationally efficient, sampling-free learning and inference. This also enables VarDeepPCA to provide uncertainty estimates associated with its restored segmentation maps. We empirically validate our framework across 4 distinct clinical applications, using 14 publicly available datasets, involving segmentation of the myocardium, neuroretinal rim, prostate, and fetal head. Comparisons against 15 existing methods demonstrate that VarDeepPCA consistently restores segmentation maps produced by the existing methods on OOD data to (i) significantly improve anatomical plausibility of geometries and clinical utility of the segmentations, and (ii) significantly reduce errors, without needing any more training data than that used by existing methods.

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

Redirecting the Flow: Image Customization through Attention Distribution Shift

Subject-driven image customization aims to generate images that not only follow textual instructions but also preserve the identity of a given reference subject. Existing approaches, including test-time fine-tuning, encoder-based methods, and token competition in shared attention spaces, suffer from limited efficiency, misalignment between extracted reference features and the generative process, and interference from irrelevant information. To address these limitations, we formulate the customization task as a distribution shift induced by incorporating reference images into text-to-image generation, and derive a Conditional Attention Distribution Shift formulation grounded in maximum entropy theory. Building on this formulation, we propose CustomShift, a dual-branch architecture based on Stable Diffusion 3. The Reference-Alignment Branch leverages self-attention between reference images and subject names to achieve layer-wise alignment with latent representations, while the Cross-Guidance Branch integrates textual and reference cues to guide generation. Experiments on the DreamBooth and Custom101 benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving a better balance between semantic fidelity and subject consistency.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

From Memorization to Creation: Evaluating the Cognitive Depth of LLM-Generated Educational Questions

arXiv:2606.18257v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While LLMs show promise in automating educational content creation, their ability to generate questions that stimulate higher-order thinking remains understudied. This work evaluates six widely-used LLMs through a Bloom's Taxonomy lens, focusing on their capacity to transcend rote memorization and achieve cognitive leaps. Using a hybrid human–AI evaluation protocol, we generate and analyze 20{,}700 questions across computer science, K–12 math, and social-science domains. Key contributions include: (1) a fine-grained prompting strategy that reduces question repetitiveness by 24.45\% for Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, and increases the proportion of higher-order cognitive level outputs by 11.53\% for InternLM3-8B-Instruct; (2) quantitative metrics for cognitive shift intensity (CogShift) and category drift, revealing InternLM3's superior performance in multi-level transitions; (3) an interpretability analysis revealing metric-level correlations that enhance the transparency of Chain-of-Thought prompting. Our findings highlight the importance of cognitive-aware prompt design and provide benchmarks for deploying LLMs in personalized learning systems.

21.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

DeePEn - A Depth sensitive benchmark for Protein Engineering

Recent progress in modeling techniques and high-throughput screening has significantly enhanced the accessibility of protein engineering. Nevertheless, further progress gets hindered by the lack of robust benchmarks that capture the practical challenges for real-world protein engineering. Here, we introduced DeePEn, a Depth-sensitive benchmark for Protein Engineering that quantifies a models generalization capabilities when predicting protein fitness at increasing mutational distance from the wildtype or training data. We defined distance as the number of simultaneous point mutations, i.e., single amino acid variants (SAVs), moving from wild-type to mutant (edit distance in computer science jargon). Specifically selecting four deep mutational scanning (DMS) datasets with sufficient multi-mutation data points from ProteinGym, we assessed recent predictive models, including general and biophysics-informed protein Language Models (pLMs), and a non-transformer neural network. Our results highlight how the performance of all models deteriorates with increasing mutational distance and that no single metric sufficiently captures the diverse requirements of protein engineering. To overcome these shortcomings, DeePEn provides a readily available resource for multi-metric benchmarking that focuses on the prediction of distant variants.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Breaking the Ice: Analyzing Cold Start Latency in vLLM

arXiv:2606.07362v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As scalable inference services become popular, the cold start latency of an inference engine becomes important. Today, vLLM has evolved into the de facto inference engine of choice for many inference workloads. Although popular, due to its complexity and rapid evolution, there has not been a systematic study of its startup latency. With major architectural innovations such as the V1 API and the introduction of torch.compile, this paper presents the first detailed performance characterization of vLLM startup latency. We break down the startup process into six foundational steps and demonstrate that it is predominantly CPU bound. Each step exhibits consistent and interpretable scaling trends with respect to model-level and system-level parameters, enabling fine-grained attribution of latency sources. Building on these insights, we develop a lightweight analytical model that accurately predicts vLLM startup latency for a given hardware configuration, providing actionable guidance for resource planning in large-scale inference environments. All benchmarking datasets, analysis tools, and prediction scripts are open sourced at https://github.com/upb-cn/vllm-startup-profiler.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

SpikF-GO: Spiking Fourier Graph Operators for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.13901v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have emerged as an energy-efficient alternative to conventional neural networks, demonstrating strong performance in computer vision and robotics. More recently, SNNs have been applied to time series forecasting (TSF), with methods exploring spiking temporal backbones, spike-compatible positional encodings, Fourier-domain processing, and redesigned neuron dynamics. However, existing SNN forecasting approaches process variables independently, lacking explicit mechanisms for modeling inter-variable dependencies. This is a critical limitation in multivariate settings, where cross-variable correlations carry substantial predictive information. We propose Spiking Fourier Graph Operators (SpikF-GO), which addresses this gap by combining a hypervariate graph formulation in which every scalar observation becomes a graph node with spike-driven spectral processing. SpikF-GO introduces a Hard Concrete frequency gate for learnable sparse frequency selection and a Complex LIF gate that applies independent spiking neurons to real and imaginary Fourier components, preserving binary, event-driven computation throughout the spectral domain. We further present a variant incorporating Central Pattern Generator-based positional encodings for stronger long-range temporal modeling. Evaluated on eight benchmarks under a unified experimental protocol, SpikF-GO achieves the best average rank among all SNN methods and outperforms its ANN counterpart, FourierGNN, at reduced energy cost. SpikF-GO maintains competitive accuracy even at substantially smaller embedding dimensions, thereby achieving significant energy reductions. To our knowledge, this is among the first works to bring graph-based multivariate modeling into the spiking domain for TSF and the first to provide a unified comparison across SNN forecasting architectures under a common experimental protocol.

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

UltraEP: Unleash MoE Training and Inference on Rack-Scale Nodes with Near-Optimal Load Balancing

arXiv:2606.04101v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large-scale expert parallelism (EP) is becoming pivotal for training and serving frontier MoE models, but it also amplifies device-level expert load imbalance into compute stragglers, token all-to-all bottlenecks, and activation-memory spikes. Existing balancers redistribute experts periodically based on historical load, which becomes unreliable for production deployments with non-stationary load patterns. We present UltraEP, the first exact-load, real-time balancer for large-EP MoE training and serving prefill on rack-scale nodes (RSNs). Leveraging the extended scale-up connectivity among dozens of GPUs within RSNs, UltraEP rebalances every microbatch and layer on critical paths, which requires nontrivial co-design of plan solving and expert replication communication to minimize exposed overhead. To this end, UltraEP eagerly reacts to post-gating load with an efficient quota-driven planner, and executes the resulting irregular expert-state transfers with RSN-native persistent tile streaming and relay-based fan-out mitigation. We evaluate UltraEP in a multi-RSN deployment of up to 256 GPUs, using cutting-edge MoE models from 106B to 671B parameters. Averaged across training and serving, UltraEP achieves 94.3% of the force-balanced ideal throughput, delivering 1.49$\times$ improvement over no-balancing, while reducing the final inter-rank imbalance from 1.30$-$4.01 to 1.01$-$1.04.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

When Do LLMs Reason? A Dynamical Systems View via Entropy Phase Transitions

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has become the default strategy for enhancing LLM capabilities, yet its application raises a fundamental question: when is explicit reasoning actually beneficial? Empirical evidence reveals a striking paradox: CoT often provides marginal or even negative gains on factual and open-ended tasks while multiplying token consumption. In this work, we show that LLM reasoning is not a static property of tasks or models, but a dynamic decoding state that emerges during generation. Through systematic analysis, we find early-stage entropy dynamics provide a reliable signal of this state: tasks benefiting from CoT exhibit consistent entropy reduction, while others display unstable or increasing patterns. This behavior can be interpreted as a phase-transition-like shift from a high-entropy exploratory regime to a low-entropy structured reasoning regime. Based on these insights, we propose EDRM (Entropy Dynamics-based Reasoning Manifold), a lightweight and training-free routing framework that leverages early decoding entropy to adaptively select inference strategies. EDRM embeds entropy trajectories into a compact and interpretable manifold representation, enabling both zero-shot deployment and fine-grained instance-level adaptation. Across 15 benchmarks and 4 LLMs of varying scales and architectures, EDRM consistently outperforms static baselines. At the dataset level, EDRM achieves 41–55\% token reduction while improving accuracy with as few as 50 calibration samples. At the instance level, it further improves accuracy by up to 4.7\% while maintaining 27–45\% token savings. These results suggest that reasoning should be invoked selectively rather than by default, and demonstrate the effectiveness of entropy-driven decoding control for efficient and adaptive LLM inference.