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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Examining the Cognitive Gap Between Authors and Peer Reviewers on Academic Paper Novelty

Novelty is a crucial metric for assessing the quality of academic papers. Scholars strive to highlight the novel aspects of their work, particularly in the title, abstract, and introduction. Peer review, serving as the gatekeeper of scientific rigor, rigorously evaluates the novelty of papers, yet a cognitive gap may exist between author self-promotion and reviewer evaluation. To investigate this, we analyzed 15,328 academic papers published in Nature Communications from 2016 to 2021, along with their peer-review comments. We found that both reviewers and authors emphasize result-oriented innovation, with reviewers adopting a more comprehensive evaluation perspective. Furthermore, by examining promotional intensity against inherent paper novelty, we found that its effect depends on the paper's actual innovation level. Highly innovative papers benefit from stronger promotional language, receiving more positive evaluations. We also found that promotional language significantly correlates with reviewer disagreement on novelty specifically for papers of moderate innovativeness, whereas it has negligible impact for papers with either very high or very low novelty. This reveals how promotional language operates most prominently in the gray area of academic evaluation.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

VISTA: Video Interaction Spatio-Temporal Analysis Benchmark

Existing benchmarks for Vision-Language Models (VLMs) primarily evaluate spatio-temporal understanding on simple single-action videos, closed attribute sets and restricted entity types, failing to capture the freeform, multi-action interactions between diverse entities which characterize real-world video understanding. Furthermore, the lack of a systematic framework for analyzing model failures across complementary spatio-temporal axes hinders comprehensive evaluation. To address these gaps, we introduce VISTA, a Video Interaction Spatio-Temporal Analysis benchmark designed for open-set, multi-entity and multi-action spatio-temporal understanding in VLMs. VISTA decomposes videos into interpretable entities, their associated actions, and relational dynamics, enabling multi-axis diagnostics and unified assessment of relational, spatial, and temporal understanding. Our benchmark integrates multiple datasets into a single interaction-aware taxonomy and comprises ~12K curated video-query pairs spanning diverse scenes and complexities. We systematically evaluate 11 state-of-the-art VLMs on VISTA, and break down aggregate performance across our taxonomy to reveal shortcomings and pronounced spatio-temporal biases obscured by traditional metrics. By providing detailed, taxonomy-driven diagnostics on a challenging dataset, VISTA offers a nuanced framework to guide advances in model design, pretraining strategies, and evaluation protocols. Overall, VISTA is the first, large-scale, interaction-aware diagnostic benchmark for spatio-temporal understanding in VLMs.

03.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

Evidence for recombination in dengue virus genomes

Recombination is a key driver of RNA virus evolution, yet its extent and evolutionary implications in dengue virus (DENV) remain incompletely understood. We conducted a comprehensive, genome-wide recombination screen across 6,905 complete DENV genomes representing all four serotypes, 82 countries, and eight decades of sampling (1944-2023) retrieved from the Bacterial and Viral Bioinformatics Resource Center. Using seven complementary recombination detection methods implemented in RDP5, we identified 66 recombination events across 53 unique recombinant sequences, of which 29 are newly described. Events included intra-genotypic (n = 18), inter-genotypic (n = 32), and inter-serotypic (n = 16) exchanges spanning 14 genotypes and four continents, with no meaningful serotype-level enrichment (Cramer's V = 0.054). Recombination was concentrated in non-structural genes, most frequently NS3 (19 events), NS5 (17), and NS2 (12), while the capsid gene contained no recombination events, consistent with strong functional constraint. Single-nucleotide polymorphism analyses confirmed low divergence between recombinants and their inferred parents in both recombinant and non-recombinant regions. Phylogenomic analysis of 6,642 sequences revealed that recombinants cluster significantly closer to their major parents (p = 8.9 x 10-6 ) and that their removal does not significantly alter tree topology (p = 0.898), suggesting that the short length of recombinant regions limits phylogenetic conflict. We also introduce RECOSIM, an unsupervised machine-learning tool for recombination detection that achieved higher precision than RDP5 on both simulated (93.4% vs. 80.0%) and empirical (98.1% vs. 39.3%) datasets. Collectively, these results establish recombination as a widespread, pan-serotypic phenomenon in DENV with implications for genomic surveillance, vaccine evaluation, and evolutionary inference.

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

Proprioceptive-visual correspondence enables self-other distinction in humanoid robots

arXiv:2606.13222v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Distinguishing self from others is a prerequisite for social intelligence, yet humanoid robots that increasingly share workspaces with humans still lack this ability. Here we show that a humanoid robot can learn self-other distinction from proprioceptive-visual correspondence, without any identity labels or kinematic models. Once established, this distinction bootstraps a predictive self-model that maps joint configurations to three-dimensional body occupancy, capturing how the robot's body changes with action. In multi-agent scenes involving humans or morphologically identical robots, the system reliably identifies itself, learns a 3D self-model, and supports downstream tasks including target reaching, collision-aware motion planning, and human-to-robot motion retargeting. Together, these results outline a route toward bodily self-representation in robots that act and coordinate alongside others in shared physical environments. Project page: https://euron-zc.github.io/humanoid-self-model/.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Rethinking Global Average Pooling: Your Classifier Is Secretly a Multi-Instance Learner

作者:

Modern image classifiers widely adopt global average pooling (GAP) followed by a linear classification head. This linearity ensures that the image-level logits equal the average of logits obtained by applying the classification head pointwise to the feature grid prior to GAP. Consequently, standard classifiers may inherently retain spatial class evidence that remains recoverable even when the image-level prediction is incorrect. This structure naturally suggests a multiple-instance learning (MIL) interpretation, where an image is viewed as a bag of spatial instances. Within this formulation, we demonstrate that standard classifiers trained with a single label per image can still learn the intended classification task in multi-object scenes. We further exploit this property to decompose image-level logits into a prediction grid, providing a post-hoc diagnostic to extract spatial class evidence that GAP otherwise obscures. Our systematic evaluation reveals that off-the-shelf models consistently recover the ground-truth class within foreground regions. The MIL interpretation further suggests that common classifier failures reflect known limitations of mean aggregation.

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

Movement Primitives in Robotics: A Comprehensive Survey

arXiv:2601.02379v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Biological systems exhibit a continuous stream of movements, consisting of sequential segments, that allow them to perform complex tasks in a creative and versatile fashion. This observation has led researchers towards identifying elementary building blocks of motion known as movement primitives, which are well-suited for generating motor commands in autonomous systems, such as robots. In this survey, we provide an encyclopedic overview of movement primitive approaches and applications in chronological order. Concretely, we present movement primitive frameworks as a way of representing robotic control trajectories acquired through human demonstrations. Within the area of robotics, movement primitives can encode basic motions at the trajectory level, such as how a robot would grasp a cup or the sequence of motions necessary to toss a ball. Furthermore, movement primitives have been developed with the desirable analytical properties of a spring-damper system, probabilistic coupling of multiple demonstrations, using neural networks in high-dimensional systems, and more, to address difficult challenges in robotics. Although movement primitives have widespread application to a variety of fields, the goal of this survey is to inform practitioners on the use of these frameworks in the context of robotics. Specifically, we aim to (i) present a systematic review of major movement primitive frameworks and examine their strengths and weaknesses; (ii) highlight applications that have successfully made use of movement primitives; and (iii) examine open questions and discuss practical challenges when applying movement primitives in robotics.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Web-based education on Metabolism and Obesity is associated with improved lifestyle and health behaviours among Brazilian school teachers

Background: Obesity is a major global public health challenge, and teachers play a critical role in school-based health promotion. This study examined the perceived impact of a web-based educational program on metabolism and obesity delivered to Brazilian school teachers. Methods: This analytical cross-sectional study included 217 teachers who responded to the evaluation questionnaire after attending the course between 2017 and 2022. Statistical analyses included logistic regression and chi-square tests. Findings: Course completion rate was 81.98%, substantially exceeding the 5-15% typical of global MOOCs. However, ethnic disparities were observed: White respondents were 4.95 times more likely to complete the course than Black respondents (p=0.00097) and Brown respondents were 3.05 times more likely (p=0.0268) than Black respondents. Among non-completers, lack of time (64.7%) was the primary barrier. Participation was concentrated in Sao Paulo (77%), with no respondents from three northern states. Perceived difficulty showed a non-significant trend (p=0.0893) where by Black respondents had the lowest predicted difficulty; the most challenging course material was Scientific Content/Reading papers (50%). Completion was strongly associated with applying learned activities in teaching (p

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

Efficient Stochastic Optimisation via Sequential Monte Carlo

arXiv:2601.22003v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The problem of optimising functions with intractable gradients frequently arises in machine learning and statistics, ranging from maximum marginal likelihood estimation procedures to fine-tuning of generative models. Stochastic approximation methods for this class of problems typically require inner sampling loops to obtain (biased) stochastic gradient estimates, which rapidly becomes computationally expensive. In this work, we develop sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) samplers for optimisation of functions with intractable gradients. Our approach replaces expensive inner sampling methods with efficient SMC approximations, which can result in significant computational gains. We establish convergence results for the basic recursions defined by our methodology which SMC samplers approximate. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on the reward-tuning of energy-based models within various settings.

09.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

Morpho-FM: spatial molecular reconstruction from routine H&E histology using transcriptomic foundation-model priors

Routine haematoxylin and eosin (H&E) histology captures tissue architecture at clinical scale, but lacks a direct molecular readout of the transcriptional programmes that organise tumour epithelium, stroma, vasculature and immune compartments. Spatial transcriptomics provides this context, yet cost, workflow complexity and sparse sampling limit routine use. Most existing histology-to-expression models are trained de novo on small paired cohorts and therefore remain weakly constrained when extrapolating from sparse measurements to dense, tissue-wide molecular maps. Here we introduce Morpho-FM, a weakly supervised framework that predicts spatial gene expression from routine H&E whole-slide images by conditioning a pretrained single-cell transcriptomic foundation-model prior on local histological neighbourhoods. A lightweight morphology-to-transcriptome adapter maps cached whole-slide histology features into a transcriptomic decoder, enabling prediction at measured locations, dense full-section reconstruction, and re-aggregation to the original measurement support. Across harmonized prostate cancer benchmarks, Morpho-FM achieved the strongest overall performance among five representative methods, reaching mean per-gene Pearson correlations of 0.286 in rotating single-slide evaluation and 0.298 in multi-slide held-out validation. The framework reproduced this advantage across kidney cancer sections, achieved a mean correlation of 0.210 across 56 directed single-slide evaluations and retained measurable predictive signal after external transfer to clear-cell renal cell carcinoma sections. Controlled ablation analyses identified pretrained transcriptomic initialization as a reproducible source of performance gain exceeding that attributable to changes in the histology feature backbone. Beyond predictive accuracy benchmarks, Morpho-FM recovered ERBB2-enriched tumour compartments, boundary-associated molecular gradients, and annotation-aligned tissue domains across Xenium and HER2ST breast cancer datasets. Together, these results support transcriptomic foundation-model priors as an effective constraint for morphology-conditioned molecular decoding and demonstrate the potential of Morpho-FM to extend spatial transcriptomic insight across routine pathology sections.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

How Do Instructions Shape Speech? Cross-Attention Attribution for Style-Captioned Text-to-Speech

arXiv:2606.20532v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Style-captioned text-to-speech systems use natural language to control voice characteristics, but how individual words influence acoustic output remains unclear. Understanding this is critical for diagnosing failure modes and improving controllability in expressive TTS. We propose cross-attention attribution for speech diffusion models, adapting the DAAM framework to the speech domain for the first time, and apply it to CapSpeech-TTS. Our method extracts per-token heatmaps across 25 layers and 24 ODE steps. We analyze 3,600 (style caption, text transcript) combinations comprising 120 style captions conditioning the generation of 30 text transcripts each, revealing how caption tokens shape waveforms. Results show: (1) style tokens have lower temporal variance than content/function tokens, confirming global conditioning; (2) style attention correlates with F0 and energy; (3) style conditioning peaks in early steps and deep layers; (4) attention entropy reaches its minimum at layer 17, co-occurring with the style importance peak, indicating maximal network selectivity at the most style-critical stage. This is the first study of how natural language influences cross-attention in speech diffusion models

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

Transformer-Based Warm-Starting for Feasible and Optimal Terminal Approach to Tumbling Objects with Space Manipulators

arXiv:2606.17317v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-time trajectory generation for on-orbit robotic servicing is challenging due to the nonlinear coupling between spacecraft bus motion, manipulator dynamics, visibility cone, and trajectory-level safety constraints. This paper studies learning-based warm-starting for sequential convex programming (SCP) in the terminal approach of a space manipulator toward a tumbling target. The proposed framework decomposes the problem into a system center-of-mass translational planning stage and a coupled attitude–manipulator torque-allocation stage, and applies a causal transformer warm-start to the latter, which constitutes the dominant computational bottleneck. Linear and flow matching action decoders are compared under different action-chunking and training dataset sizes, and the resulting warm-starts are evaluated under both cost-optimal and feasibility projection using SCP. Across 300 held-out scenarios, the learned warm-start reduces the second-stage SCP iteration count by up to 28% and the runtime by 23% while preserving the final control-cost distribution. When the learned warm-starts are used for nonconvex feasibility projection, they nearly halve the runtime relative to cost-optimal SCP, while avoiding the catastrophic high-cost tail behavior observed when initialized heuristically. These results indicate that sequence-model warm-starts can improve both the computational efficiency and trajectory robustness of optimization-based terminal guidance for space manipulation.

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

Spatial-Aware Reduction Framework: Towards Efficient and Faithful Visual State Space Models

arXiv:2606.19932v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mamba demonstrates strong efficiency in modeling long visual sequences. However, when token reduction is applied to structurally enhanced Mamba variants, these models exhibit a severe performance collapse. We attribute this degradation to the spatially agnostic nature of existing reduction methods, which violate the two-dimensional structural premise required by the selective scanning mechanism. In this work, we propose STORM, a spatial-aware token reduction framework designed to maintain structural integrity throughout the compression process. STORM reformulates reduction into a structured operation on spatial units, enforcing localized constraints to maintain both grid topology and neighborhood coherence. As a plug-and-play module, STORM equips existing reduction pipelines with explicit spatial awareness without any training. Empirical results demonstrate that STORM achieves state-of-the-art pruning accuracy across diverse vision Mamba backbones under training-free settings. Notably, STORM delivers a substantial accuracy recovery on VMamba, outperforming prior methods by up to 63.3\% in top-1 accuracy. Meanwhile, STORM incurs only a 1.0\% accuracy drop on PlainMamba, achieving performance comparable to ViT.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Breaking the Code: Security Assessment of AI Code Agents Through Systematic Jailbreaking Attacks

arXiv:2510.01359v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Code-capable large language model (LLM) agents are embedded in software engineering workflows where they can read, write, and execute code, raising "jailbreak" stakes beyond text-only settings. Prior evaluations emphasize refusal or harmful-text detection, leaving open whether agents compile and run malicious programs. We present JAWS-Bench (Jailbreaks Across WorkSpaces), a benchmark spanning three escalating workspace regimes mirroring attacker capability: empty (JAWS-0), single-file (JAWS-1), and multi-file (JAWS-M). We pair this with a hierarchical, executable-aware Judge Framework that tests (i) compliance, (ii) attack success, (iii) syntactic correctness, and (iv) runtime executability, to measure deployable harm. Across seven LLM backends from five families, prompt-only attacks in JAWS-0 achieve 61% compliance; 58% are harmful, 52% parse, and 27% run end-to-end. In JAWS-1, compliance reaches ~100% for stronger models with a mean ASR (Attack Success Rate) ~71%; JAWS-M raises mean ASR to ~75%, with 32% runnable attack code. Wrapping an LLM in an agent increases ASR by 1.6$\times$, by overturning initial refusals during planning and tool use. Similar trends hold for OpenHands, SWE-Agent, and OpenAI Codex, suggesting our JAWS-Bench is agent-agnostic. Category analyses identify which attack classes are most vulnerable and deployable, motivating execution-aware defenses and refusal-preserving agent designs.

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

OBCache: Optimal Brain KV Cache Pruning for Efficient Long-Context LLM Inference

Large language models (LLMs) with extended context windows enable powerful applications but impose significant memory overhead, as caching all key-value (KV) states scales linearly with sequence length and batch size. Existing cache eviction methods address this by exploiting attention sparsity, yet they typically rank tokens heuristically using accumulated attention weights without considering their true impact on attention outputs. We propose Optimal Brain Cache (OBCache), a principled framework that formulates cache eviction as a layer-wise structured pruning problem. Building upon the Optimal Brain Damage (OBD) theory, OBCache quantifies token saliency by measuring the perturbation in attention outputs induced by pruning tokens, with closed-form scores derived for isolated keys, isolated values, and joint key-value pairs. Our scores account not only for attention weights but also for information from value states and attention outputs, thereby enhancing existing eviction strategies with output-aware signals. Experiments on LLaMA and Qwen models demonstrate that replacing the heuristic scores in existing works, which estimate token saliency across different query positions, with OBCache's output-aware scores consistently improves long-context accuracy. Code is available at https://github.com/DreamSoul-AI/OBCache.

15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

A tree-free approach to 3D Yang-Mills Langevin dynamic. Analytic estimates and the existence of a model for a regularity structure

arXiv:2605.14616v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Using the multi-index approach to regularity structures due to F. Otto et al., we construct a regularity structure and a model for it associated to the stochastic Langevin equation for the 3D Euclidean Yang-Mills functional. For the model we also obtain global stochastic and global pointwise weighted Besov type estimates which hold almost surely. The model is defined as a limit of a sequence of smooth models introduced with the help of a mollified noise. When the mollification is removed the sequence converges in a certain topology defined with the help of the stochastic estimates. To obtain these results we develop the multi-index approach for systems of equations with vector-valued white noises. This project is motivated by the problem for constructing 3D Euclidean Yang-Mills measure and by the earlier results of the author on the related problem of canonical quantization of the Yang-Mills field on the Minkowski space.

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

Auditing Reward Hackability in Code RL Training Environments

arXiv:2606.16062v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We measure the rate at which code RL environments accept incorrect solutions as correct. On a 49-task sample of SWE-bench Verified, 28.5% of tasks have test suites weak enough that a Docker-verified incorrect patch passes them. On 20 R2E-Gym tasks across 6 repositories, the same pipeline at single-shot exploit generation yields 25.0%. A random-effects meta-analysis over 134 frontier model submissions to SWE-bench Verified finds, within the same human-rated difficulty stratum, model Pass@1 is +14.14 percentage points higher on flagged-hackable tasks than on robust ones (95% CI [+11.80, +16.48]; one-sided p < 10^-6; I^2 = 0%; 123 of 134 models positive). We then describe a procedure for hardening the broken tasks. An inline LLM judge with a Docker gold-sanity gate runs each generated test against the gold solution before the judge is consulted. On the 11 broken tasks in the audit, the gate flags 65 of 105 decisive LLM-generated tests as failing on the gold patch itself, a 61.9% per-augmentation defect rate the LLM judge alone misses. With diversity-biased retry, the loop converges 9 of 11 tasks to a gated upgrade.

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

Camera and LiDAR BEV Fusion for Cooperative 3D Object Detection on TUMTraf V2X

We describe a Camera and LiDAR fusion detector developed for the TUMTraf V2X cooperative 3D object detection track of the DriveX 2026 challenge. The detector fuses three roadside cameras with a fused infrastructure-plus-vehicle point cloud in a shared bird's-eye-view space and predicts boxes through a CenterPoint-style head with a generalized IoU regression loss and an IoU quality re-ranking head. Trained on the provided train and validation splits, the model reaches a 3D mAP of 0.85 on the public Codabench test split. While iterating on the system, we observed that 44 of the 50 test frames are also present in the released train (40) and validation (4) splits with their labels. We therefore conducted two additional studies to quantify how this overlap affects the final score: (1) a finetuning run that oversamples the 44 overlapping frames, reaching 0.89 mAP, and (2) a post-processing run that replaces predictions on those frames with the released ground truth, reaching 0.99 mAP (uploaded to our Codabench account for testing but not published on the leaderboard). All three configurations and their per-class results are reported.

18.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

Folding the unfoldable 2: using AlphaFold and ESMFold to explore spurious proteins

Motivation: Spurious protein sequences, resulting from gene prediction errors, theoretically should not yield folded structures. AlphaFold2 was previously shown to predict short spurious sequences with high pLDDT scores and was therefore unlikely to distinguish between real proteins and spurious proteins which are usually short. We evaluate whether newer structure prediction methods (ESMFold and AlphaFold3) similarly predict short sequences with high pLDDT or if they better discriminate between spurious and real proteins. Results: All three structure prediction methods (ESMFold, AlphaFold2, and AlphaFold3) predict short spurious sequences from AntiFam with unexpectedly high pLDDT scores, however the discrimination between spurious and real proteins improves beyond 100 amino acids. By analysing sequences with disparate pTM and pLDDT scores, we identified two likely spurious shadow ORFs in Swiss-Prot and one potentially non-spurious AntiFam entry. Using the structure prediction scores, we developed a Gaussian Process Model and evaluated its performance on AlphaFold DB, identifying potential spurious proteins at scale. While limited on its own, this model can increase confidence in spurious protein identification when combined with other methods.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

A Benchmark for Omni-Modal Reasoning in Long Videos

Long-form omni-modal video understanding requires integrating vision, speech, and ambient audio with coherent long-context reasoning. Existing video benchmarks often trade off temporal scale, modality coverage, open-ended interaction, and interpretable scoring. To address this gap, we introduce LongShOTBench, a long video understanding benchmark designed around three coupled goals: holistic omni-modal integration, intent-driven open-ended interaction, and rubric-level diagnosis. It builds single- and multi-turn questions from real viewing scenarios, with systematic tasks probing visual, speech, ambient-audio, temporal, and cross-modal reasoning. Each item includes a reference answer and a weighted criterion-level rubric, letting evaluation identify which perceptual facts, temporal links, modality-grounding requirements, and reasoning steps are satisfied or missed. All samples are manually verified to improve grounding, clarity, and rubric reliability. We also introduce LongShOTAgent, a training-free omni-modal evidence-seeking agent coupling full-video preprocessing with targeted retrieval, query-adaptive segment refinement, and explicit claim verification over visual, speech, and non-speech audio evidence. Its iterative search-refine-verify loop exposes intermediate evidence and lets modality-specific specialists re-analyze relevant moments before answering. We evaluate 105 video-capable models spanning open-source omni-modal models, vision-language systems, audio LLMs, agentic pipelines and closed-source APIs. Current MLLMs remain far from saturating LongShOTBench, while our LongShOTAgent is the strongest training-free system, reaching 66.64% overall. By releasing the benchmark, leaderboard, and method, we provide a shared, interpretable testbed for advancing long-form omni-modal video reasoning. Code, data, and the leaderboard are available at https://longshot.cvmbzuai.com/.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Mitigating Heterogeneity-Induced Drift in Hierarchical Sign-Based Federated Learning

arXiv:2602.02355v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Hierarchical federated learning (HFL) is well suited for large-scale wireless and Internet of Things systems, where devices communicate with nearby edge servers before reaching the cloud. In these environments, uplink bandwidth and latency impose strict communication constraints, making aggressive gradient compression essential. One-bit sign-based stochastic gradient descent methods provide an attractive solution in flat federated settings, but their behavior in hierarchical edge–cloud architectures remains insufficiently understood, especially under inter-cluster data heterogeneity. To address this gap, we develop a sign-based HFL framework in which devices transmit binary stochastic-gradient signs to edge servers, edge servers apply majority voting, and the cloud periodically aggregates edge models. Our analysis reveals that inter-cluster heterogeneity induces a persistent bias term in the convergence bound, reflecting the drift of edge models toward local objectives. This term cannot be removed by increasing the number of training rounds or by tuning standard hyperparameters alone. We therefore propose \(\mathtt{DC-HierSignSGD}\), a drift-corrected sign-based HFL algorithm in which devices apply a cloud-assisted gradient correction before taking the sign. We show that this pre-sign correction mitigates the non-vanishing heterogeneity-induced bias while preserving binary device–edge communication during the repeated local sign-update steps. Experiments under severe inter-cluster heterogeneity demonstrate that \(\mathtt{DC-HierSignSGD}\) improves the stability and accuracy of sign-based HFL and achieves performance comparable to full-precision hierarchical SGD with substantially lower device–edge communication.

22.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-22

Stereoretentive decarbonylative C(sp<sup>3</sup>)-C(sp<sup>3</sup>) cross-coupling

作者:

While C(sp3)–C(sp3) bond-forming cross-coupling methods have become more common, stereocontrolled bond-formation remains a challenge,1 despite its importance for drug discovery, where there is a emerging demand for molecules with increased sp3 character.2-4 Enantiospecific cross-coupling approaches would complement advances in enantioselective coupling,5-8 but have been limited to specialized substrates with lower availability5,9 because stereospecific oxidative addition of more abundant chiral alkyl electrophiles is unknown.10 Inspired by the classic, stereoretentive Curtius rearrangement,11 herein we disclose a catalytic strategy that proceeds by an analogous stereoretentive decarbonylation step to form a versatile chiral alkylnickel intermediate from easily-available chiral amino-acid and α-hydroxy-acid derivatives. The chiral alkylnickel intermediates decompose and/or racemize on the order of minutes, but are sufficiently stable to enable stereoretentive cross-electrophile coupling12 with alkyl radicals (derived from alkyl iodides) at relatively low temperature (22-40 °C). This mechanistic strategy provides a straightforward approach to stereocontrolled C(sp3)–C(sp3) bond formation, including diastereomers that are inaccessible by stereoselective radical mechanisms. The “metallo-Curtius” strategy described in this study lays a mechanistic foundation for the development many new stereospecific cross-coupling reactions.

23.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Large deviation principle for friendship-biases in Galton–Watson trees

arXiv:2606.17381v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper we consider the friendship-bias of the vertices in an infinite rooted Galton–Watson tree. The friendship-bias of a vertex is the difference between the average degree of the neighbours of the vertex and the degree of the vertex itself. A vertex is said to be of type $\chi \in S$, with $S = \{-,0,+\}$, when its friendship-bias is, respectively, strictly negative, zero or strictly positive. We consider the fractions $f_l^\chi$ of vertices of type $\chi \in S$ along a random downward path up to branching depth $l \in \mathbb{N}$ and derive a large deviation principle (LDP) for the triple $(f_l^\chi)_{\chi \in S}$ as $l\to\infty$. The branching depth of a vertex counts the number of branchings that occur along the path that connects the vertex to the root of the tree. The rate in the LDP is $l$, while the rate function in the LDP is identified in terms of a variational formula minimising a relative entropy under a linear constraint. We focus on the case of binary branching, for which the rate function is already quite involved. We identify the qualitative properties of the rate function and show how it can be computed numerically. We briefly indicate how to proceed for more general branching and for vertex types along a tree consisting of a finite number of random downward paths. Our paper is the first to consider large deviations of vertex types.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

TileFuse: A Fused Mixed-Precision Kernel Library for Efficient Quantized LLM Inference on AMD NPUs

arXiv:2606.11357v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: With the growing demand for on-device LLM inference, edge SoCs increasingly integrate NPUs to improve performance and energy efficiency under tight power and thermal budgets. However, practical LLM deployment on current client NPUs remains difficult: widely used quantization formats such as AWQ do not map cleanly onto many existing NPU software stacks, which are often proprietary and expose limited low-level control. In this work, we present TileFuse, a close-to-metal mixed-precision kernel library for AMD XDNA2 NPUs that targets transformer linear layers in quantized LLM inference. TileFuse brings practical low-bit formats such as AWQ-style W4A16 and W8A16 directly onto XDNA2, rather than forcing the model to be reshaped around an NPU-specific quantization scheme. TileFuse co-designs weight layout, metadata placement, mixed-precision microkernels, and array-level dataflow. Specifically, it fuses unpacking, dequantization, and GEMM/GEMV execution into a single kernel flow, introduces an interleaved pre-tiling layout that supports GEMM dimensions up to 32K, and redesigns GEMV dataflow to utilize the full 4x8 AIE array. Across kernel-level evaluations, TileFuse improves performance by up to 121.6% for GEMM and 281% for GEMV over full-precision baselines, while delivering more than 2x performance and energy-efficiency gains over strong iGPU baselines on GEMM. In end-to-end LLM experiments on Ryzen AI laptops, TileFuse achieves up to 2.0x lower prefilling latency with more than 64.6% lower energy consumption. Together, these results show that XDNA2 is a practical target for AWQ-style edge LLM inference and that native NPU support for off-the-shelf quantization can make NPUs substantially more usable in real client deployments.

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

Understanding the Behaviors of Environment-aware Information Retrieval

Recent retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approaches have demonstrated strong capability in handling complex queries, yet current research overlooks a critical challenge: different retrievers require fundamentally different query formulation strategies for optimal performance. In this work, we present the first systematic analysis of how LLMs can learn to adapt their query formulation strategies for different retrievers via reinforcement learning (RL). Our empirical study reveals that RL effectively teaches an LLM to tailor its queries to specific retriever characteristics. We discover that different retrievers exhibit surprisingly distinct optimal query styles (e.g., descriptive vs. question-like), suggesting strategies learned for one retriever ineffective for another. We further show that performance can be enhanced by incorporating retriever-specific human guidance and by scaling model size. To facilitate learning over multi-retrieval-step trajectories, we introduce a branching-based rollout technique that improves training stability. Our work provides the first empirical evidence and actionable insights for building truly retriever-aware RAG systems. Code and resources are available at https://github.com/LCO-Embedding/Envs-aware-Information-Retrieval.