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01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-09

How ice forms is a mystery — now scientists are cracking the case

Theories about how ice crystals grow in cooling liquids are wildly inaccurate when compared with experimental data, but studies are starting to illuminate the earliest moments in freezing. Theories about how ice crystals grow in cooling liquids are wildly inaccurate when compared with experimental data, but studies are starting to illuminate the earliest moments in freezing.

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

The Curse and Blessing of Mean Bias in FP4-Quantized LLM Training

arXiv:2603.10444v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: FP4 training promises substantial memory and compute savings for large language models, but remains fragile because blockwise quantization is dictated by extreme activation magnitudes, which inflate dynamic range and compress long-tail signals. We identify a counterintuitive source of this failure: dominant activation outliers are not merely arbitrary sparse events, but are largely induced by a coherent rank-one mean bias, whose direction aligns with the leading anisotropic spectral component. This mean component strengthens during training, is amplified and reshaped by attention and FFN operators, and increasingly dominates top activation magnitudes. Crucially, this discovery reveals that a seemingly complex outlier-suppression problem admits a truly simple solution: isolate the coherent mean before quantization. We therefore propose Averis, a mean-residual splitting quantization method that separates the mean component using only reductions and elementwise subtractions before FP4 quantization. Across Qwen3 0.6B Dense trained on 100B tokens and Qwen3 7B A1.5B MoE trained on 50B tokens, Averis enables robust W4A4G4 FP4 training, reducing BF16 loss gaps to 1.19%/0.81% versus 2.05%/1.10% for NVIDIA's recently released Hadamard-based outlier-smoothing method, while limiting downstream gaps to 0.89/0.71 points. With only 2.20% end-to-end overhead over vanilla NVFP4, about 30% of NVIDIA's Hadamard-based design, Averis provides a hardware-efficient path to stable low-bit LLM training. Complementary to Hadamard, Averis further reduces the Qwen3-0.6B loss and downstream gaps to 0.94% and 0.73 points when combined. Code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/averis-504D.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Libra: Efficient Resource Management for Agentic RL Post-Training

arXiv:2606.03077v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a standard post-training paradigm for shaping large language models (LLMs) into capable agents. In agentic RL, the rollout stage generates trajectories while invoking tools, producing long-tailed and non-stationary workloads that expose two fundamental challenges in resource management. First, due to the long-tail distribution, a small fraction of trajectories dominates rollout makespan. Second, rollout and training are subject to cross-stage imbalance, as they exhibit strong asymmetry in compute patterns, memory demands, and sensitivity to sequence length. Compounding this asymmetry, the sequence length distribution drifts continuously as the policy evolves, rendering any static resource split progressively suboptimal. We present Libra, a resource management system to address both challenges via two core mechanisms. The first is a global resource planner that jointly optimizes GPU allocation across rollout and training clusters. It leverages an elastic hybrid pool to enable lightweight, non-blocking worker reallocation between stages. The second is a causality-driven multi-level feedback queue (C-MLFQ) scheduler, which routes requests to heterogeneous rollout buckets based on causal signals derived from tool-return outcomes, rather than relying on fragile length predictions. Evaluated on 48 A800 GPUs, Libra achieves up to 3.0x higher throughput and converges up to 2.5x faster in reward compared to the baselines.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Amortized mean-shift interacting particles

arXiv:2606.15871v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Bayesian inference for inverse problems is run to evaluate integrals – posterior expectations, tail probabilities, and risks – across a stream of observations. The standard estimate averages the integrand over posterior samples, a Monte-Carlo average whose error decays only as the square root of the sample size, so accuracy demands many samples – prohibitive when each one calls a partial-differential-equation forward model. Mean-shift interacting particles need far fewer: they return a small set of signed-weight nodes – a deterministic quadrature whose weighted averages estimate those integrals. Finding the nodes, however, is a per-observation optimization that, in its most accurate form, reads the posterior score at every step – returning the cost it meant to save. We introduce amortized mean-shift interacting particles, a learned map that emits the weighted nodes from an observation and a few posterior samples in a single forward pass. Training asks only for joint parameter-observation samples and a posterior to draw from – a conditional normalizing flow, an empirical conditional, or any reference the user can sample – and the map learns to integrate that posterior from samples alone, evaluating neither its density nor its score. Once trained, it generalizes to unseen observations and integrands at any node budget and improves on independent samples in two ways: by reweighting them, provably no worse than the equal weights of Monte-Carlo; and by moving them, which empirically lowers it further. Across closed-form, sampled, learned, and physics-based posteriors – up to a thousand-coefficient groundwater field – it integrates more accurately than the same number of samples at every budget, and a posterior-whitened, dimension-aware kernel removes the high-dimensional wall. The result is a Pareto improvement on Monte-Carlo integration, not a competitor to drawing more samples.

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

Persistent Homology as a Theory of Emergent Structure

作者:

arXiv:2507.03065v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Why do some macroscopic structures remain identifiable even though their microscopic constituents continually change? Vortices persist while fluid parcels turn over, neural memories persist while spikes and synapses fluctuate, and institutions persist while individuals enter and leave. We propose a scale-relative answer: an emergent property is a persistent nontrivial homology class $[z]\in H_p=\ker\partial_p/\im\partial_{p+1}$, a macro-feature that is closed but not exact across a filtration of descriptions. This identification turns emergence into a measurement problem. Persistent bars detect stable macro-features, and we introduce a contractive-similarity (CS) graph operator to supply scaffold spectral gaps that predict robustness. Hodge decomposition separates harmonic macro-scaffold from exact and co-exact micro-flow; and functorial condensation explains when one level's emergent class becomes a unit for the next. The resulting scaffold-flow framework expresses six familiar signatures of emergence (i.e., inevitability, coherence, irreducibility, complementarity, robustness, and hierarchy) within one mathematical language. It also yields falsifiable predictions across atmospheric, neural, and social systems: genuine emergent structures should persist across filtrations, remain spectrally stable, respond disproportionately to harmonic interventions, and require timescale separation for hierarchical autonomy.

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

Tacit Coordination of Large Language Models

arXiv:2601.22184v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in multi-agent settings that require coordination without communication, from human-AI interaction to safety-critical scenarios. Humans often overcome the absence of communication through focal points: salient solutions that naturally stand out to all participants. We present the first large-scale evaluation of how, when, and why focal points emerge in LLMs, comparing their behaviour with humans across cooperative and competitive games, including realistic search and rescue scenarios, demonstrating when focal points enable effective coordination. Across more than 20 open- and closed-source models, we find that LLMs exhibit a remarkable ability to coordinate without communication, often matching or outperforming humans. However, the same models consistently fail in tasks requiring numerical common sense or culturally nuanced notions of salience. We additionally evaluate simple learning-free strategies that substantially improve coordination both among LLMs and between humans and LLMs. Our results reveal striking coordination capabilities, as well as social limitations in modern LLMs, and offer new insight into the latent notions of salience encoded within them. Our findings caution against assuming that LLMs share humans' cultural and perceptual substrate when deployed in coordination settings.

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

Self-Supervised Learning as Discrete Communication

Most self-supervised learning (SSL) methods learn continuous visual representations by aligning different views of the same input, offering limited control over how information is structured across representation dimensions. In this work, we frame visual self-supervised learning as a discrete communication process between a teacher and a student network, where semantic information is transmitted through a fixed-capacity binary channel. Rather than aligning continuous features, the student predicts multi-label binary messages produced by the teacher. Discrete agreement is enforced through an element-wise binary cross-entropy objective, while a coding-rate regularization term encourages effective utilization of the constrained channel, promoting structured representations. We further show that periodically reinitializing the projection head strengthens this effect by encouraging embeddings that remain predictive across multiple discrete encodings. Extensive experiments demonstrate consistent improvements over continuous agreement baselines on image classification, retrieval, and dense visual prediction tasks, as well as under domain shift through self-supervised adaptation. Beyond backbone representations, we analyze the learned binary codes and show that they form a compact and informative discrete language, capturing semantic factors reusable across classes.

08.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Mapping the neuronal building blocks of human language with language models

作者:

Humans can convey new and highly diverse information through language. This ability to form and combine words into elaborate phrases and sentences enables us to express inexhaustible meanings and is fundamental to human cognition1–5. However, understanding the microscopic cellular building blocks and cortical landscape that precisely underlie human language has remained a challenge. Here we used wide-scale single-neuronal recordings combined with natural language processing models to identify fine-grained linguistic representations across the human frontotemporal cortex during language production. We find that, whereas certain neurons represented the detailed grammatical relationships between words or their parts of speech, others tracked the sentences’ higher-order syntactic structure, their phrase transitions and sequence. Collectively, these neurons reliably captured the words’ syntactic and semantic properties but also dynamically incorporated their specific sentence contexts, therefore enabling them to encode information combinatorially and at highly granular levels of detail. We show how these cell populations were locally organized and how their microscale representations differed from that of their wider field potential patterns. We also show how these neurons were distributed broadly across the frontotemporal cortex, but how their ability to encode linguistic information was left-lateralized and varied between cortical regions. Together, these findings identify some of the most basic cellular building blocks by which linguistic information is encoded in humans and begin to define the cortical landscape of language at a combined micro (cellular), meso (local population) and macro (regional) scale. Wide-scale recordings reveal neurons in the human brain that encode fundamental components of language such as the grammatical relationships between words, their parts of speech and the higher-order syntactic structure of phrases and sentences.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

SkillMoV: Mixture-of-View Routing with Prototype-Conditioned Gating for Unified Multi-View Proficiency Estimation

Estimating human proficiency from video is a key challenge for automated skill assessment, with applications in sports coaching, music pedagogy, surgical training, and workplace learning. Existing approaches often focus on individual scenarios or rely on shared multi-view aggregation, limiting their ability to adapt to heterogeneous camera viewpoints and activity domains. We introduce SkillMoV, a unified, parameter-efficient framework for multi-scenario proficiency estimation from synchronized multi-view video. At its core, SkillMoV introduces a Mixture-of-View Projector (MoVP), which adapts the mixture-of-experts paradigm to camera-specific view features. MoVP is composed of four stages: (i) a Mixture-of-View soft router with twelve expert MLPs that learns view-dependent expert preferences without camera-identity supervision; (ii) cross-view attention to align synchronized cameras; (iii) learnable prototype anchoring to condition the representation on class-level reference vectors; and (iv) a prototype-conditioned gated projection that produces the final skill embedding. We evaluate SkillMoV on EgoExo4D across six skill domains and three separately trained view configurations: Ego, Exos, and Ego+Exos. SkillMoV reaches 50.17% overall accuracy in the Exos setting with a single model trained jointly across all scenarios, surpassing the strongest reported Exos result among the compared methods by 3.57 percentage points. In Ego+Exos, SkillMoV remains close to the best reported result in that setting (47.63% versus 48.20%). Ablations on the selected Exos configuration validate each component: MoV routing contributes +6.61 pp over attentive aggregation, cross-view attention +4.92 pp, prototype anchoring +4.07 pp, and stochastic view dropout +3.90 pp. Through LoRA adaptation, SkillMoV trains only 23.32% of its parameters and adds limited measured overhead relative to a LoRA-only baseline.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Non-Autoregressive Minimum Bayes' Risk Decoding for Fast Speech Recognition

Non-autoregressive (NAR) decoding generates output tokens in parallel, making speech recognition faster than autoregressive decoding, which generates them sequentially from left to right. However, the recognition performance is degraded because NAR decoding cannot resolve uncertainty by conditioning on previously generated tokens. To address this issue, we propose a novel NAR decoding framework based on minimum Bayes' risk (MBR) decoding, termed NAR-MBR decoding, that maximizes the expected utility calculated from samples drawn from the output probability of an NAR model rather than maximizing the output probability. Notably, by leveraging the nature of NAR models, multiple samples are obtained efficiently with a single forward computation. Our experiments across LibriSpeech, Switchboard, AMI, and web presentation corpus demonstrated that our NAR-MBR decoding outperformed previous NAR decoding and ran faster than AR decoding.

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

Policy-driven Conformal Prediction for Trustworthy QoT Estimation

arXiv:2606.12501v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose Conformal QoT, a policy-driven framework that combines statistically guaranteed QoT estimation with operational decision policies, enabling reliable lightpath-feasibility predictions under domain shift and improving accuracy from 92\% to 99.6\% on open datasets.

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

The Accountability Paradox: How Platform API Restrictions Undermine AI Transparency Mandates

arXiv:2505.11577v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent application programming interface (API) restrictions on major social media platforms challenge compliance with the EU Digital Services Act [20], which mandates data access for algorithmic transparency. We develop a structured audit framework to assess the growing misalignment between regulatory requirements and platform implementations. Our comparative analysis of X/Twitter, Reddit, TikTok, and Meta identifies critical ``audit blind-spots'' where platform content moderation and algorithmic amplification remain inaccessible to independent verification. Our findings reveal an ``accountability paradox'': as platforms increasingly rely on AI systems, they simultaneously restrict the capacity for independent oversight. We propose targeted policy interventions aligned with the AI Risk Management Framework of the National Institute of Standards and Technology [80], emphasizing federated access models and enhanced regulatory enforcement.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Near-Optimal Learning of Local Lindbladians

arXiv:2606.20535v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the problem of learning local Lindbladians from black-box access to the physical evolution, and the goal is to estimate all Hamiltonian and dissipative coefficients. We give an algorithm built directly from finite-time channel probes, which runs the unknown evolution for short times, estimates the corresponding Pauli transfer matrices from classical shadows, and converts these estimates into Lindbladian coefficients by stable local Fourier inversions. For fixed locality and bounded dissipative site degree, the uses of the dynamical evolution and total evolution time scale as $\widetilde{O}(\Lambda^2/\varepsilon^2)$ and $\widetilde{O}(\Lambda/\varepsilon^2)$ respectively, in the local dynamical strength bound $\Lambda$ and target accuracy $\varepsilon$, with only logarithmic dependence on the number of qubits. The algorithm is non-adaptive, uses no ancillas, and uses only random product states as inputs followed by random Pauli measurements. The method does not require knowing the support of the Lindbladian in advance. We complement the algorithm with matching lower bounds, showing that the learning algorithm is near-optimal both in physical dynamics accesses and in total evolution time. We construct a single-qubit dephasing Lindbladian family that already requires $\Omega(\Lambda^2/\varepsilon^2)$ channel uses and $\Omega(\Lambda/\varepsilon^2)$ total evolution time, even for adaptive algorithms with arbitrary ancillas and measurements. In particular, the lower bounds imply that the Heisenberg-limited scaling achievable for Hamiltonian learning is information-theoretically impossible once dissipative coefficients must be estimated.

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

AdaTKG: Adaptive Memory for Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning

arXiv:2605.07121v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Temporal knowledge graphs (TKGs) represent time-stamped relational facts and support a wide range of reasoning tasks over evolving events. However, existing methods produce entity representations that are static at the entity level, in that each representation is a function of learned parameters only and retains no trace of the interactions in which the entity has participated. In this paper, we depart from this static view and propose that each entity be modeled as an adaptive process whose representation is refined every time the entity participates in a fact. To this end, we propose AdaTKG, which maintains a per-entity memory that is updated with every observed interaction, with the memory accumulating online and predictions improving as more interactions arrive. Specifically, we instantiate the memory update as a learnable exponential moving average governed by a single shared scalar instead of using learnable parameters for each entity, enabling AdaTKG to handle entities unseen during training. Extensive experiments confirm consistent gains over TKG baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of adaptive memory. Code is available at: https://github.com/seunghan96/AdaTKG

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

Zero-Shot Cross-City Generalization in End-to-End Autonomous Driving: Self-Supervised versus Supervised Representations

End-to-end autonomous driving models are typically trained on multi-city datasets using supervised ImageNet-pretrained backbones, yet their ability to generalize to unseen cities remains largely unexamined. When training and evaluation data are geographically mixed, models may implicitly rely on city-specific cues, masking failure modes that would occur under real-world domain shifts when generalizing to new locations. In this work, we formulate zero-shot cross-city transfer as a controlled representation-level stress test for end-to-end autonomous driving and ask how visual pretraining affects transfer behavior under geographic domain shift. We conduct a comprehensive study by integrating self-supervised backbones I-JEPA, DINOv2, and MAE into planning frameworks. We evaluate performance under strict geographic splits on nuScenes in the open-loop setting and on NAVSIM in the closed-loop evaluation protocol. Our experiments reveal a substantial generalization gap when transferring models across cities with different road topologies, traffic conventions, and visual environments. In open-loop evaluation, a supervised backbone exhibits severe degradation when transferring between cities, yet some domain-specific self-supervised methods can substantially reduce both displacement and collision degradation. In closed-loop evaluation, self-supervised pretraining improves average out-of-distribution PDMS in several single-city training settings. Our results provide empirical evidence that representation learning influences the robustness of cross-city planning and motivate zero-shot geographic transfer as an important stress test for evaluating end-to-end autonomous driving systems.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

On the significance of Wigner's Friend in contexts beyond quantum foundations

arXiv:2402.08727v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: There has been a surge of recent interest in the Wigner's Friend paradox, sparking several novel thought experiments and no-go theorems. The main narrative has been that Wigner's Friend highlights a counterintuitive feature that is unique to quantum theory, and which is closely related to the quantum measurement problem. Here, we challenge this view. We argue that the gist of the Wigner's Friend paradox can be reproduced without assuming quantum physics, and that it underlies a much broader class of enigmas in the foundations of physics and philosophy. To show this, we first consider several recently proposed Extended Wigner's Friend scenarios, and demonstrate that some of their implications for the absoluteness of observations can be reproduced by classical thought experiments that involve the duplication of agents. Crucially, some of these classical scenarios are technologically much easier to implement than their quantum counterparts. Then, we argue that the essential structural ingredient of all these scenarios is a feature that we call "Restriction A": that a physical theory cannot give us a probabilistic description of the observations of all agents. Finally, we argue that this difficulty is at the core of other puzzles in the foundations of physics and philosophy, and demonstrate this explicitly for cosmology's Boltzmann brain problem. Our analysis suggests that Wigner's Friend should be studied in a larger context, addressing a frontier of human knowledge beyond quantum foundations: to obtain reliable predictions for experiments in which these predictions can be privately but not intersubjectively verified.

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

Cosmological Pseudo-Entropy

arXiv:2606.15227v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study pseudo entropy $\mathcal{S}$, a recent generalization of entanglement entropy, for scalar cosmological perturbations in de Sitter space with sound speed $0.024 \leq c_s \leq 1$, and in expanding and contracting FLRW backgrounds with varying equation-of-state parameter $w$. In de Sitter space, $\mathrm{Re}(\mathcal{S})$ grows after horizon exit while $c_s$ controls its onset and saturates at late times. A similar saturation occurs in expanding-accelerating and contracting-decelerating backgrounds. In contrast, expanding-decelerating and contracting-accelerating backgrounds show large early-time $\mathrm{Re}(\mathcal{S})$ followed by oscillations after horizon re-entry. This happens because while the squeezing freezes, the squeezing angle doesn't. Unlike entanglement entropy, pseudo entropy possesses an imaginary part, $\mathrm{Im}(\mathcal{S})$, as well, which can encode the relative phase. $\mathrm{Im}(\mathcal{S})$ decays to zero in de Sitter and expanding-accelerating cases, but forms dense sub-Hubble oscillation bands in expanding-decelerating and contracting-accelerating backgrounds. Compared with entanglement entropy, Krylov complexity, and Nielsen circuit complexity, pseudo entropy captures otherwise hidden phase information; in the unsaturated regime, its slope is $\sqrt{2}$ times that of Nielsen complexity. Unlike circuit complexity, whose saturation bound is $w$-independent, pseudo entropy is sensitive to $w$ during the transition regime, making it a finer information theoretic diagnostic of cosmological dynamics.

19.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-01

BeetleAtlas 2: An enhanced <i>Tribolium castaneum</i> web resource for tissue and developmental transcriptomics allowing refinement of gene predictions

by David P. Leader, Muhammad T. Naseem, Janina L. Rinke, Kenneth Veland Halberg BeetleAtlas is an online resource for tissue- and stage-specific transcriptomics in the red flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum. On updating from the original Tcas5.2 genome assembly to the more recent improved icTriCast1.1 genome assembly it became evident that there were major discrepancies between the gene models of the two genome annotations in use: the OGS3 and the NCBI gene sets. As neither was clearly superior we implemented a new design in BeetleAtlas 2 (beetleatlas.org) comprising two parallel ‘modes’ — one incorporating results using the NCBI gene models and a second incorporating those using the OGS3 gene models. This allows direct comparison where equivalent gene models exist: 50–57% of cases. To aid resolution of discrepancies between the two gene model sets and verification of results, gene models are linked to a custom visualization of RNA-seq read coverage of the genome in the UCSC Genome Browser. This displays reads from 22 tissues and life stages superimposed on the icTriCast1.1 genome assembly. Reference tracks show the NCBI gene models, the OGS3 gene models after translation of their coordinates from the Tcas5.2 assembly, and 1050 discontinued NCBI gene models from the previous assembly after a similar transfer of coordinates. We document various situations in which distinct patterns of expression of the tissues can be used to confirm and extend correlations between the two gene sets, resolve discrepancies between them, make corrections and identify putative genes or exons absent from the current gene sets. BeetleAtlas 2 allows those involved in Tribolium research to avoid the pitfalls inherent in incorrect gene models when planning experiments on specific genes and interpreting the results. It also demonstrates how BeetleAtlas 2 might play an important role in establishing a revised gene set for Tribolium castaneum in the future.

20.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-08

Fifty years since a simple equation described the chaos of biology

An exploration of chaos theory in population dynamics showed that unpredictable systems can often be modelled using surprisingly simple mathematics. An exploration of chaos theory in population dynamics showed that unpredictable systems can often be modelled using surprisingly simple mathematics.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Spectral DPPs via NEPv: A Scalable Continuous Relaxation of Determinantal MAP for Diversity-Aware Data Selection

arXiv:2606.19411v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Selecting a small, diverse, high-quality subset from a massive pool of candidates is a recurring primitive in modern machine learning – data curation and coreset selection for training and fine-tuning large models, active-learning batch acquisition, prompt and exemplar selection for in-context learning, retrieval diversification, and experimental design. Determinantal Point Processes (\operatorname{DPP} s) give a principled, well-calibrated notion of diversity for this task, but their MAP objective – pick a size-$k$ subset $S$ maximizing $\logdet(L_S)$ – is NP-hard, and the standard greedy and sampling algorithms scale superlinearly in the ground-set size $n$. This cost is prohibitive precisely in the data-centric regime where diversity matters most, where $n$ ranges over millions to billions of candidate examples, features, or embeddings. We recast \operatorname{DPP}-MAP as a continuous optimization problem over the Stiefel manifold, and show that its first-order optimality conditions form a Nonlinear Eigenvalue Problem with eigenvector dependency (\operatorname{NEP}v) of a previously unstudied form. This \operatorname{NEP}v\ admits a self-consistent field (\operatorname{SCF}) iteration with a spectral-gap-based local contraction guarantee, giving a principled iterative solver where the diversity objective drives an eigenvector-dependent operator. The resulting algorithm, \OurMethod, requires only matrix-vector products with the kernel and runs in time $O\!\big((ndk+nk^2)\,t\big)$ for a small number of iterations $t$, scaling near-linearly in $n$ and integrating directly with low-rank and feature-map kernels common in ML. This paper focuses on the relaxation, solver, and scaling analysis; full real-data benchmarking is left to a planned empirical study.

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

Exposing the Unsaid: Visualizing Hidden LLM Bias through Stochastic Path Aggregation

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit representational and syntactic biases that are difficult to evaluate due to the stochastic nature of text generation. Standard auditing methods rely on a single output inspection or static automated metrics. These approaches obscure the underlying probability distributions and fail to capture biases hidden in lower-probability generation branches. This paper introduces TreeTracer, a visual analytics tool designed to evaluate LLM bias through aggregated comparison. Using a systematic perturbation analysis pipeline, the tool replaces ontology-defined terms in each input prompt, aggregates hundreds of stochastic generations into a syntax-aligned hierarchical structure, and then performs classification-aware node merging with an auxiliary language model. The resulting structure is visualized through a custom Sankey diagram. By juxtaposing two ontology-driven trees, the workspace enables direct comparison between semantic contexts and supports systematic bias detection. Because any visualization reflects only a subset of the model's learned behavior, the system further applies contrastive inference to compute and directly display counterfactual token probabilities across contexts, reducing the risk of misinterpreting the presence of bias. We validate the workspace through case studies comparing an unaligned baseline model GPT-2 XL against the constitutionally aligned Apertus models. The visual aggregation successfully exposes hidden representational harms, such as counterfactual pronoun suppression and conversational marginalization of individuals. A preliminary user study confirms that the aggregated comparative interface reduces cognitive load and effectively supports analysts in detecting systemic biases.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Text-Vision Co-Instructed Image Editing

Existing image editing methods can be generally categorized into textual instruction-based and visual prompt-based ones. Textual instructions are semantically expressive, but are limited by the coarse granularity of spatial control of the editing results. In contrast, visual prompts such as drag and point can provide precise spatial guidance, but are limited by the inherent ambiguity in semantic intent. To unify the strength of textual and visual prompts, we present Text-Vision Co-Instructed Image Editing, which jointly models textual instructions as semantic intent and sparse visual instructions as spatial guidance, aiming to achieve precise and intent-faithful image manipulation. To this end, we first construct a textual-visual instruction paired dataset with more than 23K samples derived from dynamic videos, enabling aligned supervision for cross-modal instruction. We then propose TV-Edit, a Textual-Visual instruction unified Editing framework to contextualize drag or point-based visual instructions with image-text semantics and lift them into semantic-aware control representations for pretrained editing backbones. By integrating semantic intent and spatial constraints, TV-Edit leads to more precise spatial control, less instruction ambiguity, and stronger structural consistency than text-only or drag-based alternatives. Finally, we establish TV-Edit-Bench, a deliberately designed benchmark to evaluate semantic faithfulness, spatial alignment, and visual consistency with ground-truth references and controlled textual-visual variations for reliable assessment. Our experiments across multiple editing backbones demonstrate that TV-Edit consistently yields more precise and intent-faithful edits, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art instruction-based and drag-based baselines.

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

MagpieTTS-LF: Inference-Time Long-Form Speech Generation Without Training on Long-Form data

arXiv:2606.18485v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems achieve remarkable quality on short utterances but long-form speech generation shows prosodic drift, speaker inconsistencies and sentence boundary artifacts. Existing approaches either compress sequences, increase context length or naively concatenate independently synthesized chunks. We present an inference-time approach called MagpieTTS-LF that enables MagpieTTS to produce coherent long-form speech without model retraining. Our method introduces three key innovations: (1) soft attention priors to guide monotonic alignment while preserving past and future context; (2) a stateful inference algorithm that maintains context across sentence chunks, ensuring prosodic continuity; (3) history-aware text encoding that uses past text for discourse-level prosodic planning. Experiments on long texts show significant improvements in long-range intelligibility, prosodic coherence, speaker consistency, and boundary naturalness compared to other baselines.

25.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

Heterogeneous suppressive effect of <i>Wolbachia</i> incompatible insect technique coupled with sterile insect technique across time and historical <i>Ae. aegypti</i> abundance - using distributional synthetic controls

作者:

by Yichen Zhai, Chia-Chen Chang, Zhiyong Xi, Cheong Huat Tan, Lee Ching Ng, Jue Tao Lim Background Biological control tools such as Wolbachia incompatible-insect technique, are a promising class of interventions to modify and suppress Aedes aegypti mosquitoes to reduce risk of Aedes-borne diseases. Due to the spatial nature of the intervention, intervention effects can be spatio-temporally heterogeneous. Yet, most evaluations of field-based technologies rely on average treatment effects, which preclude characterization and understanding of treatment effect heterogeneities and the factors influencing it. Methods Here, we developed a causal inference framework using distributional synthetic controls to explicitly account for spatio-temporal trap-level mosquito abundance data to ascertain the entomological efficacy of Wolbachia in suppressing Ae. aegypti abundance. This method is able to construct counterfactual distributions of intervened areas, provide detailed comparisons to actual distributions and quantify treatment effects of the intervention on mosquito abundance over different quantiles. By employing our framework to trap-level mosquito abundance data from 57,990 unique mosquito traps routinely maintained and measured twice a week, and a large-scale field trial of Wolbachia incompatible-insect technique coupled with sterile insect technique (IIT-SIT) in Singapore, we (1) quantified heterogeneous treatment effects for IIT-SIT across the time-since-intervention, over the traps’ historical mosquito abundance, over calendar time, (2) quantified whether elimination of wild-type Aedes aegypti was possible in intervention locations and (3) addressed if suppressive effects in spillover locations adjacent to directly intervened locations were heterogeneous. Results IIT-SIT interventions led to a strong suppressive effect on adult Aedes aegypti abundance. From the onset of intervention in directly treated locations, sector-specific intervention effectiveness (IE) ranged from 24.04% in the earliest treatment period, and reached 86.08% in the latest treatment period. Raw reductions in aegypti abundance were also found to increase over time as sectors were intervened over longer time periods. In spillover sectors, IE was lower in magnitude and more variable, but average IE reached a maximum of 78.08% in 2-years post-treatment. Wolbachia interventions also led to an increase in the percentage of traps recording no mosquitoes from 6.8% at the start of intervention to 33.01% 124-weeks post-intervention. We found that IE was higher in sectors with lower historical mosquito abundance. However, IE converged across sectors with different historical mosquito abundance as intervention time increased. Conclusion This study revealed spatial heterogeneities in suppressing wild-type female Ae. aegypti by IIT-SIT and provided strong evidence that IIT-SIT can drastically suppress wild-type Ae. aegypti populations despite heterogeneous treatment effects over time.