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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Reinforcement-aware Knowledge Distillation for LLM Reasoning

arXiv:2602.22495v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training has recently driven major gains in long chain-of-thought reasoning large language models (LLMs), but the high inference cost of such models motivates distillation into smaller students. Most existing knowledge distillation (KD) methods are designed for supervised fine-tuning (SFT), relying on fixed teacher traces or teacher-student Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence-based regularization. When combined with RL, these approaches often suffer from distribution mismatch and objective interference: teacher supervision may not align with the student's evolving rollout distribution, and the KL regularizer can compete with reward maximization and require careful loss balancing. To address these issues, we propose RL-aware distillation (RLAD), which performs selective imitation during RL – guiding the student toward the teacher only when it improves the current policy update. Our core component, Trust Region Ratio Distillation (TRRD), replaces the teacher-student KL regularizer with a PPO/GRPO-style likelihood-ratio objective anchored to a teacher–old-policy mixture, yielding advantage-aware, trust-region-bounded distillation on student rollouts and naturally balancing exploration, exploitation, and imitation. Across diverse logic reasoning and math benchmarks, RLAD consistently outperforms offline distillation, standard GRPO, and KL-based on-policy teacher-student knowledge distillation.

02.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

Accelerating String Comparison in RLZ Compressed Sequences via LCE Jumps

Relative Lempel-Ziv (RLZ) is an effective compression method for large, repetitive collections; however, the fundamental primitives required to elevate it from a passive archival format to a tractable representation for compressed construction have yet to be fully established. In this paper, we introduce an algorithmic framework for structurally comparing and lexicographically sorting sequences of RLZ factors. We characterize when direct factor comparisons are necessary and when they can be bypassed using RLZ specific shortcuts. We further introduce a method for extending truncated factors into right-maximal matches, enabling the recovery of matching statistics from the RLZ parse. Experimentally, RLZ sorting achieved speedups of up to 3.93x over character-based sorting. Together, these results advance the use of the RLZ format as a foundation for compressed construction.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

The algebra of Krom logic programs

arXiv:2606.15719v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper investigates the algebraic structure of Krom logic programs, consisting only of facts and rules with at most one body atom. We show that sequential composition endows the class of Krom programs with a natural monoid structure and that this structure admits rich algebraic extensions to Krom seminearrings, Krom quemirings, Krom-Conway seminearrings, and Krom-Conway omegaseminearrings. Furthermore, we establish explicit generating sets and canonical decompositions, study the associated ${}^\omega$-operator, characterize the Kleene star in graph-theoretic terms, and relate finite Krom monoids to transformation monoids and finite-state automata. These results provide new connections between logic programming, algebraic automata theory, and algebraic graph theory.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Adaptive generative moment matching networks for improved learning of dependence structures

arXiv:2508.21531v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: An adaptive bandwidth selection procedure for the mixture kernel in the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) for fitting generative moment matching networks (GMMNs) is introduced, and improved learning of copula random number generators is demonstrated. Based on the relative error of the training loss, the number of kernels is increased during training; additionally, the relative error of the validation loss is used as an early stopping criterion. While training time remains similar, adaptively training GMMNs (AGMMNs) significantly increases training performance, which is shown based on validation MMD trajectories, samples and validation MMD values. Superiority of AGMMNs over GMMNs and parametric copula models is also demonstrated in terms of three applications. First, convergence rates of estimators based on quasi-random versus pseudo-random samples from copulas are investigated in dimensions as large as 100 for the first time. Second, replicated validation MMDs, as well as Monte Carlo and quasi-Monte Carlo applications demonstrate the improved training of AGMMNs for a copula model implied by the 50 constituents of the S&P 500 index after deGARCHing. Last, both the latter dataset and 50 constituents of the FTSE 100 are used to demonstrate that the improved training of AGMMNs indeed translates to an improved model prediction.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

CRAG: Can 3D Generative Models Help 3D Assembly?

Most existing 3D assembly methods treat the problem as pure pose estimation, rearranging observed parts via rigid transformations. In contrast, human assembly naturally couples structural reasoning with holistic shape inference. Inspired by this intuition, we reformulate 3D assembly as a joint problem of assembly and generation. We show that these two processes are mutually reinforcing: assembly provides part-level structural priors for generation, while generation injects holistic shape context that resolves ambiguities in assembly. Unlike prior methods that cannot synthesize missing geometry, we propose CRAG, which simultaneously generates plausible complete shapes and predicts poses for input parts. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across in-the-wild objects with diverse geometries, varying part counts, and missing pieces. Project Page: https://ai4ce.github.io/CRAG/

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

WorldLines: Benchmarking and Modeling Long-Horizon Stateful Embodied Agents

arXiv:2606.18847v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To assist humans over extended periods in real homes, embodied agents must remember user routines, world states, and past interactions. Existing long-term memory benchmarks mainly evaluate language-centric retrieval and question answering, while embodied benchmarks often focus on short-horizon task execution without testing long-term memory use in dynamic environments. We introduce WorldLines, a project-driven benchmark for long-horizon embodied household assistance. It constructs temporally extended household traces with dialogues, actions, execution feedback, object and device state changes, and converts them into evidence-linked samples for Memory QA and Embodied Task Planning. We further propose ObsMem, an observer-grounded memory framework that maintains visibility-aware memories and action-native state trails for state-aware decisions. Experiments reveal persistent challenges in partial observability, overwritten world states, and translating long-term memory into embodied plans, while ObsMem offers a stronger reference architecture for this setting.

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

Single-Round Clustered Federated Learning via Data Collaboration Analysis for Non-IID Data

arXiv:2601.09304v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) enables distributed learning across multiple clients without sharing raw data. When statistical heterogeneity across clients is severe, Clustered Federated Learning (CFL) can im-prove performance by grouping similar clients and training cluster-wise models. However, most CFL approaches rely on multiple communication rounds for cluster estimation and model updates, which limits their practicality under tight constraints on communication rounds. We propose Data Collaboration-based Clustered Federated Learning (DC-CFL), a single-round framework that completes both client clustering and cluster-wise learning, using only the information shared in DC analysis. DC-CFL quantifies inter-client similarity via total variation distance between label distributions, estimates clusters using hierarchical clustering, and performs cluster-wise learning via DC analysis. Experiments on multiple open datasets under representative non-IID conditions show that DC-CFL achieves accuracy comparable to multi-round baselines while requiring only one communication round. These results indicate that DC-CFL is a practical alternative for collaborative AI model development when multiple communication rounds are impractical. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/souta-suga/DC-CFL.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Free Energy Heuristics: Fast-And-Frugal Cognition as Active Inference Under Uncertain Precision

作者:

Chain-of-thought (CoT) improves large language models' performance in math and symbolic reasoning. But on planning, contested ethics, and tasks where the model cannot check itself, more reasoning makes things worse. Both effects are documented; what has been missing is a principled account of which property decides the outcome. We argue it is meta-uncertainty: how unsure the model is about the reliability of its own evidence. When that uncertainty is high, extra reasoning stops adding signal and starts manufacturing false confidence. We prove that the policy minimizing expected free energy under uncertain precision stops integrating cues after a finite number of high-validity ones when the precision prior is heavy-tailed (Theorem 2.6.1), and under a Descending Dominance condition, is sample-wise identical to take-the-best (Theorem 2.7.4). Fast-and-frugal heuristics and active inference are, then, two descriptions of the same computation. The prediction is that on high-meta-uncertainty items, longer CoT should degrade accuracy. We score the regime per item (simulate-and-recover rho > 0.96), build FEH-79, a benchmark of Knightian frames with matched controls, and run a pre-registered study across seven models (five open-weight 3B-32B, two frontier), five CoT lengths, and 7,875 responses. The gate, fixed before any data, required a negative interaction with posterior probability above 0.95 and an accuracy drop of more than 6 points. It held. The high-regime drop is 17.3 points (95% CI [7.7, 25.5]); matched items with definite answers show no cost. The effect is regime-dependent: decisive in capable mid-to-large models, directional in the two frontier systems, absent-to-reversed in the weakest. The framework answers when CoT helps and unifies the Bayesian and fast-and-frugal traditions: less-is-more effects are evidence about the meta-uncertainty regime, not against Bayesian cognition.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Attosecond Path Qubits in High-Harmonic Generation: Classical Dephasing and Trace-Out Decoherence

arXiv:2606.20372v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: High-harmonic generation (HHG) is governed by interference between electron trajectories. We propose that the dominant short and long trajectories define an experimentally addressable two-level subsystem: an attosecond path qubit (APQ). We formulate a trajectory-resolved density matrix to identify two distinct coherence-loss mechanisms: classical dephasing from ensemble averaging and quantum decoherence arising from the trace-out of unobserved degrees of freedom. By investigating shot-to-shot fluctuations and unresolved transverse momentum, we demonstrate that while dephasing suppresses coherence through averaging, the ``trace-out'' channel produces mixed states even for fixed driving parameters. We explore how these mechanisms modify APQ purity and show that mode selection and conditioning provide operational routes to isolate them. These results establish a reduced-state framework for diagnosing coherence loss in HHG and for engineering trajectory-based quantum states in attosecond interferometry.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Sensitivity of polaron-molecule observables to MDR/GUP-like ultraviolet deformations at low energies via quantum computing

arXiv:2606.14479v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We show that impurity many-body observables can display enhanced sensitivity to ultraviolet deformations of generalized-uncertainty-principle and modified-dispersion-relation type at accessible energy scales. Using a deformed polaron-molecule Hamiltonian constructed to preserve the infrared sector, we quantify the impact of such deformations on spectral and Ramsey observables and implement the corresponding dynamics in a controlled quantum computing setting. We identify regimes near the polaron-molecule crossover where small ultraviolet deformations are strongly amplified, leading to experimentally resolvable changes in quasiparticle properties and spectral response. Our results establish a concrete sensitivity-based route to low-energy quantum-gravity phenomenology in a well-defined many-body platform and delimit the validity of the effective description. Furthermore, we report experimental validation on the QRed superconducting quantum processor (BSC-CNS).

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Rethinking Robust Adversarial Concept Erasure in Diffusion Models

Concept erasure aims to selectively unlearning undesirable content in diffusion models (DMs) to reduce the risk of sensitive content generation. As a novel paradigm in concept erasure, most existing methods employ adversarial training to identify and suppress target concepts, thus reducing the likelihood of sensitive outputs. However, these methods often neglect the specificity of adversarial training in DMs, resulting in only partial mitigation. In this work, we investigate and quantify this specificity from the perspective of concept space, i.e., can adversarial samples truly fit the target concept space? We observe that existing methods neglect the role of conceptual semantics when generating adversarial samples, resulting in ineffective fitting of concept spaces. This oversight leads to the following issues: 1) when there are few adversarial samples, they fail to comprehensively cover the object concept; 2) conversely, they will disrupt other target concept spaces. Motivated by the analysis of these findings, we introduce S-GRACE (Semantics-Guided Robust Adversarial Concept Erasure), which grace leveraging semantic guidance within the concept space to generate adversarial samples and perform erasure training. Experiments conducted with seven state-of-the-art methods and three adversarial prompt generation strategies across various DM unlearning scenarios demonstrate that S-GRACE significantly improves erasure performance 26%, better preserves non-target concepts, and reduces training time by 90%. Our code is available at https://github.com/Qhong-522/S-GRACE.

13.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-13

Contribution of nosocomial transmission to <i>Klebsiella pneumoniae</i> neonatal sepsis in Africa and South Asia: An observational study of infection clusters inferred from pathogen genomics and temporal data

by Erkison Ewomazino Odih, Jabir A. Abdulahi, Anne V. Amulele, Matthew Bates, Eva Heinz, Weiming Hu, Kajal Jain, Rindidzani Magobo, Courtney P. Olwagen, John M. Tembo, Tolbert Sonda, Jonathan Strysko, Caroline C. Tigoi, Kyle Bittinger, Jennifer Cornick, Ebenezer Foster-Nyarko, Wilson Gumbi, Steven M. Jones, Chileshe L. Musyani, Carolyn M. McGann, Ahmed M. Moustafa, Patrick Musicha, James C. L. Mwansa, Moreka L. Ndumba, Thomas D. Stanton, Donwilliams O. Omuoyo, Oliver Pearse, Laura T. Phillips, Paul J. Planet, Charlene M. C. Rodrigues, Fatou Secka, Kirsty Sands, Erin Theiller, Allan M. Zuza, Sulagna Basu, Grace J. Chan, Kenneth C. Iregbu, Jean-Baptiste Mazarati, Semaria Solomon Alemayehu, Timothy R. Walsh, Rabaab Zahra, Angela Dramowski, Sombo Fwoloshi, Appiah-Korang Labi, Lola Madrid, Noah Obeng-Nkrumah, David Ojok, Boaz D. Wadugu, Andrew C. Whitelaw, Anudita Bhargava, Atul Jindal, Ramesh K. Agarwal, Alexander M. Aiken, James A. Berkley, Susan E. Coffin, Nicholas A. Feasey, Nelesh P. Govender, Davidson H. Hamer, Shabir A. Madhi, Mari Jeeva Sankar, Kelly L. Wyres, Kathryn E. Holt Background Klebsiella pneumoniae is the leading cause of sepsis among neonates in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in Africa and Asia, contributing substantially to the overall burden of antimicrobial-resistant infections and mortality among neonates globally. Pathogen sequencing has been used to investigate case clusters and confirm nosocomial transmission in a small number of neonatal units. Here we utilise pathogen sequence data to estimate the fraction of K. pneumoniae neonatal sepsis attributable to nosocomial transmission in African and South Asian countries. Methods and findings We estimated the proportion of invasive K. pneumoniae disease involved in nosocomial transmission clusters in a given neonatal unit, using single-linkage clustering based on pairwise temporal and genetic distances estimated from bacterial whole-genome sequences aggregated from 10 contributing studies. Analysing 1,523 K. pneumoniae isolates from 27 units in 13 countries in Africa and South Asia between 2013 and 2023, we inferred 156 nosocomial transmission clusters, ranging from 2 to 188 neonates each (83 of the clusters comprised ≥3 cases). Overall, we estimated that 1,035 neonatal infections (68.0%) were part of nosocomial transmission clusters. Excluding the first infection in each cluster as a potential index case, we estimate at least 879 (57.7%) infections were acquired via nosocomial transmission. Sensitivity analyses showed that results were robust to the choice of genetic distance estimation methods and thresholds used to define clusters, and cluster estimates were stable over temporal distance thresholds ranging from 2 to 8 weeks. Isolates were mostly extended-spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL) producers (90.9%) and included 172 multi-locus sequence types (STs). Fourteen STs, including several globally recognised multidrug-resistant lineages, were associated with transmission clusters at multiple units, and these were collectively responsible for two-thirds of all infections. Carriage of carbapenemase genes (adjusted odds ratio, aOR = 2.08 [95% confidence interval, CI: 1.04, 4.14]; p = 0.04) and ESBL genes (aOR = 2.48 [95% CI: 1.26, 4.90]; p = 0.006) were significantly positively associated with transmission in a logistic regression model with site as a covariate. Limitations of this study include the lack of sufficient clinical data to allow high-resolution investigation of transmission dynamics and lack of facility-level data to investigate contributors to the observed differences in transmission burden across sites. Conclusions Nosocomial transmission contributes to a substantial proportion of K. pneumoniae sepsis in neonatal care units in Africa and South Asia. Reducing transmission within these settings through improved infection prevention and control and other measures could substantially reduce the neonatal sepsis burden. A high burden of transmission clusters is associated with the same drug-resistant lineages that are recognised as high-risk clones associated with hospital outbreaks in high-income countries, indicating global connectivity of the antimicrobial-resistant pathogen population.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Asynchronous Decentralized Federated Learning over Lossy Wireless Links via Reception- and Age-Aware Aggregation

arXiv:2606.10774v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Decentralized Federated Learning(DFL) enables collaborative model training across wireless edge nodes, including IoT deployments, autonomous vehicles, UAV swarms, and satellite constellations. Operating over lossy wireless links under constraints, these systems cannot rely on retransmissions, so model parameters must be accepted as partial chunks, leading to two key failure modes, which are selection bias, where poor-quality links are systematically under-represented in gossip aggregation, and update staleness, where asynchronous nodes contribute outdated models. We prove that classical gossip aggregation introduces irreducible selection bias proportional to the link-loss rate. We propose DFL-AA (Decentralized Federated Learning with Adaptive AoI-weighted Aggregation), which corrects selection bias using Inverse Probability Weighting (IPW) with online channel estimation and mitigates staleness via Age-of-Information (AoI) decay without requiring a global clock. We prove that DFL-AA removes link-quality distortion in expectation and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across varying loss rates and heterogeneous channel conditions on fixed directed topologies.

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

Generalized Discrete Diffusion with Self-Correction

arXiv:2603.02230v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Self-correction is an effective technique for maintaining parallel sampling in discrete diffusion models with minimal performance degradation. Prior work has explored self-correction at inference time or during post-training; however, such approaches often suffer from limited generalization and may impair reasoning performance. GIDD pioneers pretraining-based self-correction via a multi-step BERT-style uniform-absorbing objective. However, GIDD relies on a continuous interpolation-based pipeline with opaque interactions between uniform transitions and absorbing masks, which complicates hyperparameter tuning and hinders practical performance. In this work, we propose a Self-Correcting Discrete Diffusion (SCDD) model to reformulate pretrained self-correction with explicit state transitions and learn directly in discrete time. Our framework also simplifies the training noise schedule, eliminates a redundant remasking step, and relies exclusively on uniform transitions to learn self-correction. Experiments at the GPT-2 scale demonstrate that our method enables more efficient parallel decoding while preserving generation quality.

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

$\mu_0$: A Scalable 3D Interaction-Trace World Model

World models that capture how actions induce physical change enable scalable robot learning without reliance on embodiment-specific action labels. Pixel-space video models provide broad visual priors but expend model capacity on dense appearance reconstruction, while direct action models require embodiment-specific labels that hinder scalability. We present $\mu_0$, a scalable world model based on 3D traces. Rather than predicting dense pixels or directly modeling actions, $\mu_0$ forecasts smooth 3D trajectories for salient interaction points such as objects, tools, hands, and contact regions, yielding a compact, embodiment-agnostic motion interface. To enable training from diverse video sources, our TraceExtract system automatically extracts 3D supervision by selecting keypoints, constructing globally aligned traces, and associating motion segments with hierarchical language captions. This TraceExtract supervision pretrains $\mu_0$ by combining a pretrained vision-language backbone with a modular trace expert, which represents each query via B-spline control points and predicts future traces. Experiments show that $\mu_0$ outperforms baselines in both 2D and 3D trace prediction, including trace prediction models and tokenized VLM methods. Because $\mu_0$ is frozen and reusable, it can be paired with action experts for downstream robot embodiments. Despite action-free pretraining, the resulting trace-conditioned policies achieve performance competitive with VLA models pretrained with action supervision, such as $\pi_0$. These results establish 3D traces as a scalable and transferable representation for cross-embodiment manipulation.

17.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Two-component exciton condensates in an electron–hole bilayer

作者:

Macroscopic quantum coherence emerges when bosons condense into a Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC)1–5. Excitons are a long-sought solid-state route to high-temperature BECs with strong interactions, electrical tunability and potentially multicomponent spinor order, but conclusive evidence for equilibrium condensation has remained elusive. Here we report evidence for two-component exciton BECs in MoSe2/hBN/WSe2 electron–hole bilayers6–9 by probing the spin–valley susceptibility of constituent electrons and holes. This heterostructure hosts equilibrium exciton fluids with four spin–valley flavours. Magneto-optical spectroscopy in a dilution refrigerator reveals three exciton condensate phases with distinct flavour polarizations. At zero magnetic field, the many-body ground state is a coherent superposition of two condensed intravalley exciton flavours. Under a magnetic field, the intravalley exciton condensate first switches to a two-component intervalley condensate through a first-order quantum phase transition at a weak critical field and then turns into a fully polarized single-component condensate at high fields. The condensate signatures form a dome in density–temperature space, persisting up to approximately 1.8 K. Our results establish van der Waals electron–hole bilayers as a versatile platform for strongly interacting, multicomponent exciton BECs. Macroscopic quantum coherence arises in two-component exciton Bose–Einstein condensates within MoSe2/hBN/WSe2 electron–hole bilayers, exhibiting distinct spin–valley polarized phases, quantum phase transitions under magnetic fields and stable condensate behaviour up to approximately 1.8 K.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Online Learning for Supervisory Switching Control

arXiv:2603.14762v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study supervisory switching control for partially-observed linear dynamical systems. The objective is to identify and deploy a suitable controller for the unknown system by periodically selecting among a collection of $N$ candidate controllers, some of which may destabilize the underlying system. While classical estimator-based supervisory control guarantees asymptotic stability, it lacks quantitative finite-time performance bounds. Conversely, current non-asymptotic methods in both online learning and system identification require restrictive assumptions that are incompatible in a control setting, such as system stability, which preclude testing potentially unstable controllers. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel, non-asymptotic analysis of supervisory control that adapts multi-armed bandit algorithms to a control-theoretic setting. The proposed data-driven algorithm evaluates candidate controllers via scoring criteria that leverage system observability to isolate the effects of state history, enabling both detection of destabilizing controllers and accurate system identification. We present two algorithmic variants with dimension-free, finite-time guarantees, where each identifies the matching controller in $O(N \log^2 N)$ steps, while simultaneously achieving finite $L_2$-gain with respect to system disturbances.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

From 2D Yang-Mills to Calogero-Sutherland via a colored particle

arXiv:2606.13388v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study Yang-Mills theory coupled to a particle on a cylinder, where gauge invariance and compactness reduce the dynamics to a finite dimensional quantum system. In the Abelian case, this yields a model equivalent to the Landau problem on a torus, with a degenerate ground state structure. We generalize this construction to non-Abelian gauge groups and show that, for SU(N), the system reduces to a one dimensional quantum many body problem with a singular Calogero-Sutherland-type interaction.

20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Approximation Properties of Evolutionary Dynamics in Continuous-Time Finite State Space Games

arXiv:2606.11193v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This thesis studies the convergence of finite-population stochastic evolutionary dynamics to their deterministic mean-field limit in continuous-time finite state space games. We first develop refined ergodic theorems for Markov chains with a single positive-recurrent class, guaranteeing the existence of a unique invariant distribution and almost-sure convergence of time averages. Next, we prove that the mean-field model, described by a system of Lipschitz-continuous ordinary differential equations, admits a unique solution that depends continuously on its initial condition and that constitutes the almost-sure limit for the empirical distributions with fixed policy. Furthermore, we show that every Mixed Stationary Nash Equilibrium of the mean-field game is approximated by a Nash equilibrium of the corresponding $N$-player game within an error $\epsilon$ for sufficiently large $N$. We finally demonstrate, by Kurtz's theorem, that the empirical state-policy distribution converges in probability to the mean-field trajectory. Numerical simulations conducted in MATLAB confirm the theoretical $\mathcal{O}(N^{-1/2})$ convergence rate in both models across a range of population sizes.

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

PrefSQA: Pairwise Preference Prediction for Speech Quality Assessment and the Critical Role of High Quality Datasets

arXiv:2606.19597v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mean opinion scores (MOS) are widely used for speech quality assessment, yet scalar labels are sensitive to rater variability and listening test differences. This introduces labeling noise, which limits the reliability of MOS prediction. Preference prediction reduces this variability as listeners compare signals directly, producing cleaner labels. We study MOS-free preference prediction and propose PrefSQA, which incorporates uncertainty-aware logits, an impairment attention head, and a module based on non-matching-reference comparisons. We use and refine five datasets, including MOS-derived and low-noise simulated sets with matching and non-matching content, experiment with human preference sets, and test on unseen data. Experiments show small improvements on MOS-derived data, while other sets reveal clear improvement over the baselines, highlighting the value of high-quality preference data and demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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

On the Redundancy of Timestep Embeddings in Diffusion Models

arXiv:2606.20416v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion models rely heavily on explicit timestep embeddings to modulate the denoising process across various noise scales. In this work, we challenge the necessity of these temporal signals by analyzing their impact on U-Net and Diffusion Transformer architectures. Beyond empirical evidence, we provide a theoretical framework demonstrating that, under certain conditions, the global minimizer of the diffusion training objective can be achieved without explicit timestep conditioning. Our findings reveal a surprising robustness when timestep embeddings are completely removed. Extensive ablation studies on the CelebA and CIFAR-10 datasets show that these time-agnostic models can maintain high structural fidelity and even surpass their conditioned counterparts in competitive metrics, including FID, precision, and recall. Our analysis suggests these architectures can implicitly infer noise scales from the corrupted input under specific assumptions, rendering explicit temporal conditioning redundant. This study challenges long-standing temporal conditioning paradigms and paves the way for more efficient and structurally focused generative architectures.

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

Hierarchical Consistency Learning for Test-time Adaptation in Camouflage Perception

Camouflaged object detection (COD) aims to localize targets that exhibit minimal perceptual differences from backgrounds through physical attributes. Existing methods, constrained by the static train-then-freeze paradigm, suffer from domain rigidity and annotation dependency, limiting their adaptability to scene variations and unseen camouflage patterns. To overcome these, we propose the hierarchical consistency learning (HCL) framework, which integrates test-time adaptation for dynamic representation recalibration. Specifically, we design the hierarchical representation reconstruction (HRR) to alleviate feature entanglement by synergizing spatial reconstruction with dual-stream frequency-domain decomposition, enhancing robustness against appearance homogenization. The pixel and spectrum inference provide structural and contextual priors. We further introduce task affinity guidance (TAG) to propagate knowledge across branches via channel-wise affinity, aligning local discriminative cues and mitigating semantic drift. To ensure semantic invariance, we formulate the prototype consistency calibration (PCC), which aggregates region features into compact prototypes and establishes prototype-feature similarity. This imposes implicit and hierarchical constraints that bridge task and representation gaps. Extensive experiments across four camouflaged and four underwater object benchmarks, under three degradation settings, demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, highlighting its robustness and generalization under distribution shifts.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Measuring Control-Plane Openness in Near-Term Quantum Computing: A Rubric, Its Validation, and an Application to Thirteen Vendor Stacks

arXiv:2605.15233v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Public access to pulse-level and control-electronics interfaces in commercial quantum computing has bifurcated. This paper proposes a six-axis rubric for measuring control-plane openness, the layer between gate-level circuit specification and physical control electronics, defined operationally so that the same evidence produces the same grade across vendors. The rubric is validated three ways: a blinded re-grading pass, thirty-nine days after the evidence cutoff, that tests whether the cited evidence and the level definitions alone reproduce the recorded grades; a boundary-case methodology that fixes where each level begins and ends; and a published grading protocol that lets others reproduce and contest any cell. We establish that the rubric measures change rather than describing a snapshot by comparing the catalog against the documented control plane before the February 2025 removal of pulse-level access from IBM hardware, and reporting the cells that moved. The rubric is applied to thirteen commercial vendors across superconducting, trapped-ion, neutral-atom, and photonic modalities as of May 1, 2026, as its first application, and one of the three harms the rubric is designed to detect is demonstrated through a reproduction-access audit of five pre-2025 IBM Qiskit Pulse experiments against the access available on current hardware, carried through to a client-side structural port of the audit's selected target to Rigetti Quil-T. The catalog ships as a separate machine-readable artifact under CC-BY-4.0 with per-cell source URLs (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20163276). The catalog readings will change as vendor policies shift; the rubric is the contribution that survives them.

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

Clustering Node Attributed Networks with Graph Neural Networks and Self Learning

arXiv:2606.13444v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Graph clustering - partitioning the node set of a graph into disjoint subsets that reflect some latent information - is a fundamental problem as it finds applications in a myriad of different scenarios. While this classic problem has been tackled for decades by different communities, a recent variation of the problem driven by real data considers the scenario where nodes have attributes that are also informative. This has triggered novel methods that simultaneously leverage network information (edges) and node information (attributed) in the design of novel clustering algorithms. This work proposes a novel framework that builds on prior works that have applied graph neural networks (GNN) to graph clustering. The proposed framework operates in rounds of self learning in a fully unsupervised setting. In each round, a GNN generates representations for nodes that are used to cluster the nodes. This clustering influences the graph used to generate the node representation in the next round. Moreover, a context graph built in each round using the original graph is used to generate the node representations. Empirical results show that the proposed methodology extracts information from both network edges and node attributes in synthetic data, outperforming algorithms focused solely on the network or attributes when neither are very informative. Multiple rounds of learning also improve the performance and always outperforms a long single round of training (i.e., classic GNN graph clustering). When considering real datasets, empirical results indicate that the proposed methodology is competitive to state-of-the-art methods when cluster sizes are balanced.