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

ZeSTA: Zero-Shot TTS Augmentation with Domain-Conditioned Training for Data-Efficient Personalized Speech Synthesis

arXiv:2603.04219v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We investigate the use of zero-shot text-to-speech (ZS-TTS) as a data augmentation source for low-resource personalized speech synthesis. While synthetic augmentation can provide linguistically rich and phonetically diverse speech, naively mixing large amounts of synthetic speech with limited real recordings often leads to speaker similarity degradation during fine-tuning. To address this issue, we propose ZeSTA, a simple domain-conditioned training framework that distinguishes real and synthetic speech via a lightweight domain embedding, combined with real-data oversampling to stabilize adaptation under extremely limited target data, without modifying the base architecture. Experiments on LibriTTS and an in-house dataset with two ZS-TTS sources demonstrate that our approach improves speaker similarity over naive synthetic augmentation while preserving intelligibility and perceptual quality. Audio samples are available on our web page.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Scaling Adaptive Depth with Norm-Agnostic Residual Networks

arXiv:2606.16112v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Residual architectures are ubiquitous in deep learning, but they suffer from a subtle structural limitation: the norm of the residual stream can grow rapidly with depth. As a result, updates from later layers become small relative to the accumulated residual state. This reduces their impact on the representation and limits the benefits of scaling models in depth. To address this, we introduce NAG, a norm-agnostic residual architecture that separates magnitude from directional information in the residual stream, preserving meaningful layer contributions throughout depth and preventing later updates from being systematically suppressed by residual-norm growth. Importantly, NAG introduces only a negligible number of additional parameters and relies on simple operations that are easily kernel-fusible, preserving training efficiency in practice. We show that this architecture outperforms baseline Transformers, with gains that increase substantially as depth grows, enabling effective training of much deeper models. The norm-agnostic formulation also leads to an interpretable Mixture-of-Depths (MoD) mechanism that adaptively skips both attention and MLP layers. Beyond serving as a post-training accuracy-compute tradeoff, this mechanism can be used as a pretraining-time scaling strategy: under iso-FLOP training, compute saved by reducing per-token forward-pass cost can be reinvested into training on more tokens while keeping the total parameter count and KV-cache budget fixed. In our experiments, moderate Mixture-of-Depths rates of approximately 20%-25% match full-depth baseline performance under equal training compute while substantially reducing the number of executed layer parameters and forward-pass FLOPs. These results identify sparsity in depth as a new scaling axis for fixed-compute training, enabling very deep yet FLOP-efficient models.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

When Plausible Is Not Realistic: Evaluating Human Mobility in LLM-Based Urban Simulation

LLM-based generative agents are increasingly used in urban simulators, yet it remains unclear whether they reproduce empirically realistic human mobility patterns or merely generate plausible mobility narratives. We introduce a validation framework for evaluating the mobility of generative agents of LLM-based urban simulators against real-world mobility data. For this, we use mobility laws, temporal rhythms, network motifs, semantic activity transitions, and behavioral mobility profiles. Using datasets from the Greater Paris region and Shanghai, we evaluate AgentSociety and CitySim across multiple dimensions of mobility realism. Our analysis reveals a substantial gap between narrative plausibility and empirical mobility realism. Although the simulators capture some high-level semantic activity distributions, they struggle to reproduce core spatial and temporal constraints, including realistic trip-length distributions, origin-destination flows, dwell times, and transition dynamics. We further observe that realistic mobility diversity is unstable across default prompting configurations and may require explicit profile-aware initialization. To support reproducible evaluation, we also contribute scalable and open LLM-driven infrastructure for regional-scale map generation, observability-enhanced simulation, mobility-metric computation, and traffic simulation. Our findings highlight the need for rigorous empirical validation of LLM-based urban simulators and provide practical tools for building more realistic and reproducible urban simulation systems.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Recurrence After Hepatic Hydatid Cyst Surgery: Scolicidal Agent Application Technique and the Effect of Cystopiliary Fistula

Objective: This study aimed to evaluate long-term outcomes in patients who underwent surgical treatment for hepatic hydatid cyst (HCC) disease and, in particular, to investigate the effect of scolicidal agent (SA) application method and the presence of cystobiliary fistula (CBF) on the development of recurrence. Materials and Methods: This single-center, retrospective study included 197 patients who underwent surgical treatment for HCC disease. Hypertonic saline was used as SA in all patients and was classified as intracystic or pericystic application according to the application method. The presence of CBF was evaluated according to intraoperative and postoperative findings. Patients were followed for 86 months, and the development of recurrence was identified by radiological methods. Comparisons were made between the groups with and without recurrence in terms of SA application method and the presence of CBF. Results: The median age of the patients was 38 years, and the median follow-up period was 86 months. SA application was performed into the cyst in 51.3% of the patients and around the cyst in 48.7%. The presence of CBF was detected in 49.7% of the patients. No statistically significant difference was found between the recurrent and non-recurrent groups in terms of SA application method (p = 0.344). Similarly, no significant relationship was found between the presence of CBF and the development of recurrence (p = 0.721). Conclusion: This study showed that the SA application method and the presence of CBF are not determinants of recurrence in HCC disease. It is thought that recurrence rates can be kept low with appropriate surgical technique and effective biliary tract management.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

JanusMesh: Fast and Zero-Shot 3D Visual Illusion Generation via Cross-Space Denoising

Creating 3D visual illusions, a single 3D mesh that reveals entirely different semantics from various viewing angles, is a fascinating but tough challenge. Existing optimization-based methods are slow and can produce oversaturated colors. In contrast, naive stitching approaches fail to produce geometrically coherent objects. This results in visible unnatural seams and semantic leaks. In this paper, we present a fast and training-free framework for generating text-driven 3D visual illusions. Our approach decouples the generation into two stages. First, we propose a cross-space dual-branch denoising process. This process dynamically decodes 3D latents into voxel space for CLIP-guided orientation alignment and Signed Distance Field (SDF) blending, which ensures seamless geometric fusion. Second, we introduce a view-conditioned texture synthesis module that projects and aggregates view-specific 2D diffusion priors onto the fused geometry. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method generates highly realistic, dual-semantic 3D illusions in just 3-5 minutes. It significantly outperforms existing methods in geometric integrity, semantic recognizability, and efficiency. Project page: https://siang1105.github.io/JanusMesh.github.io/

06.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Reimagining machine vision with optical computing

作者: 未知作者

A general-purpose artificial-intelligence vision system for use in image-sensing devices has been developed by embedding fundamentals of core computer-vision operations into a light-manipulating planar material called an optical metasurface. A prototype enables accurate, real-time perception and processing across diverse tasks, suggesting that this could be a solution for rapid, low-energy, on-device vision intelligence. A specialized ‘metasurface’ can preprocess incoming scene information on image-generating devices.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Hyperleukocytosis and outcomes in pediatric B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia: A report from the REDIAL Consortium

Hyperleukocytosis (white blood cell [WBC] count >100 000/uL) at diagnosis is an important prognostic risk factor in pediatric acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), though its significance with contemporary therapy is unclear. We analyzed 1 826 pediatric ALL patients from a multi-institution cohort to determine whether hyperleukocytosis independently predicts outcomes using multivariable Cox proportional hazard modeling. Hyperleukocytosis occurred in 211 patients (12%), with 121 having B-ALL, and showed no prognostic significance in T-ALL patients. In B-ALL, 5-year event-free survival (EFS) was 65% versus 89% for non-hyperleukocytosis patients, and overall survival (OS) was 78% versus 93%. After adjustment for age, cytogenetic risk, central nervous system disease status, and treatment site, hyperleukocytosis remained an independent predictor of end-of-induction minimal residual disease (MRD) positivity (odds ratio 2.53 [95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.71-3.94; p

08.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Mitochondria tethered to the nucleus secure its energy supply

Direct interactions between the cell’s powerhouses and nuclear pores might channel energy straight into the nucleus, fuelling cell division and differentiation. Direct interactions between the cell’s powerhouses and nuclear pores might channel energy straight into the nucleus, fuelling cell division and differentiation.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Overcoming State Inertia in Full-Duplex Spoken Language Models via Activation Steering

Full-duplex spoken language models (FD-SLMs) enable seamless speech interaction by allowing models to listen and speak simultaneously, yet the internal mechanism by which they coordinate listening and speaking remains underexplored. We analyze the predictive behavior encoded in FD-SLM hidden representations and find that they exhibit stream-specific predictive patterns: during listening, they preferentially predict the incoming user stream, whereas during speaking, they preferentially predict the model output stream. Building on this observation, we show that FD-SLMs dynamically modulate their internal predictive focus between two states: a generative state aligned with model output generation and a perceptive state aligned with incoming user input. However, this modulation can lag behind abrupt changes in conversational context. During user interruptions, the model remains transiently biased toward the generative state before transitioning into the perceptive state, causing it to miss the beginning of the incoming input. We term this delayed internal transition state inertia. To quantify its downstream impact, we introduce the Zero-Buffer Benchmark (ZBB), a diagnostic benchmark for evaluating immediate interruption comprehension when user speech begins abruptly. We evaluate this setting using response correctness and initial-word occurrence rate (IWOR). Finally, we mitigate state inertia through activation steering with a perception vector, a training-free intervention with little additional computational overhead. Across multiple state-of-the-art FD-SLMs, activation steering substantially improves interruption handling; for example, on PersonaPlex, it improves correctness from 28% to 45% and IWOR from 40% to 72% without any fine-tuning.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Code Correctness Signals in LLM Hidden States: Pre-Generation Probing and Repair Geometry

arXiv:2606.14530v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models encode rich information in their hidden states. This work asks whether code correctness is legible in the hidden states of Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507, before it generates and as it repairs a failed attempt, studied on 444 LiveCodeBench tasks. It reports two findings connected by a single confound-control tool: residualization. First, the correctness of the model's first-attempt code is linearly decodable from the prompt-final hidden state, with a leakage-free held-out AUC of 0.931 +/- 0.008 across 50 outer splits. After the linear effect of prompt length is removed from each hidden state dimension, the probe still reaches 0.911 +/- 0.010, well above a prompt-length baseline of 0.754 +/- 0.014. Second, on 236 cleaned cases where the model attempts to repair a failed first attempt, the hidden state shift from the failing attempt to its repair carries a statistically detectable contrastive direction, significant on both a magnitude and a split-half test against label-shuffled nulls. This direction does not survive a conditional residualization against repair-context covariates that differ between successful and failed repairs, marking it as a correlate of repair success driven by the repair context rather than an isolated repair-comprehension feature. The probe layer is selected by nested cross-validation, and the same residualization approach that upholds the pre-generation correctness result overturns the repair-direction interpretation. The contribution is as much methodological as empirical: a diagnostic honest enough to report a negative result alongside a positive one.

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

Detecting High-Potential SMEs with Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks

arXiv:2602.19591v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) constitute 99.9% of U.S. businesses and generate 44% of economic activity, yet systematically identifying high-potential SMEs remains an open challenge. We introduce SME-HGT, a Heterogeneous Graph Transformer framework that predicts which SBIR Phase I awardees will advance to Phase II funding using exclusively public data. We construct a heterogeneous graph with 32,268 company nodes, 124 research topic nodes, and 13 government agency nodes connected by approximately 99,000 edges across three semantic relation types. SME-HGT achieves an AUPRC of 0.621 0.003 on a temporally-split test set, outperforming an MLP baseline (0.590 0.002) and R-GCN (0.608 0.013) across five random seeds. At a screening depth of 100 companies, SME-HGT attains 89.6% precision with a 2.14 lift over random selection. Our temporal evaluation protocol prevents information leakage, and our reliance on public data ensures reproducibility. These results demonstrate that relational structure among firms, research topics, and funding agencies provides meaningful signal for SME potential assessment, with implications for policymakers and early-stage investors.

12.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-20

Systematic Evaluation of Feature Representations for Cancer-Associated sORF Prediction in Non-coding RNA

Short open reading frames (sORFs) within non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) have arisen as a hidden layer of gene regulation, encoding small peptides that represent a new class of cancer regulators with diagnostic and therapeutic potential. However, inferring associations between sORFs to specific cancer types remains challenging and requires computational approaches for accurate prediction. Recently, the CoraL framework introduced the first computational approach for predicting cancer-associated peptides, focusing primarily on model architecture while overlooking how feature extraction strategies influence predictive accuracy. We present a systematic evaluation of machine learning models and feature extraction approaches to predict cancer-associated sORFs across 15 cancer types. We benchmarked seven traditional machine learning algorithms combined with three feature extraction methods: k-mer frequency, Word2Vec embeddings, and genomic language model (gLM)-based embeddings. To our knowledge, this is the first study applying gLM-derived embeddings to the prediction of cancer-associated sORFs in ncRNA. Our results show that traditional machine learning models with appropriate feature extraction outperform the CoraL baseline across all cancer types, achieving up to 10% higher accuracy in some of the 15 evaluated datasets. Interestingly, k-mer features consistently outperformed gLM embeddings without fine-tuning, suggesting that local sequence composition may provide more discriminative information for this task and that pre-trained genomic representations may require task-specific adaptation to fully capture these patterns. Additionally, we observed that the way sequences are tokenized, such as the k-mer length, can affect performance: longer fragments (e.g., k=7) sometimes reduced accuracy for Random Forest but had a smaller effect on MLP. Our findings suggest that appropriate feature engineering can provide greater improvements than increasing model complexity.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Rare Coding Variants Reveal Distinct Genetic Architectures Across Multidimensional Sleep Phenotypes

Sleep and circadian traits have been widely studied using common variants, but the contribution of rare coding variation remains unclear. We analyzed rare coding variants in 397,065 whole-exome sequenced UK Biobank participants across 36 sleep phenotypes from self-report, diagnoses, sleep medication use and accelerometry, and meta-analyzed results with 171,536 whole-genome sequenced All of Us participants of diverse ancestries, with replication in the Mass General Brigham Biobank (N = 31,275). We identified 260 genes associated with sleep phenotypes, including novel associations with sleep medication use in 29 genes and 24 out of 29 have not previously been reported with any sleep phenotypes. We observed modest but significant rare variant heritability and strong genetic correlations between sleep medication use, insomnia and fatigue. Temporal gene expression trajectory analyses indicate that genes associated with self-reported sleep traits show constant high prenatal expression, whereas genes linked to sleep medication phenotypes exhibit peak expression in the late prenatal period. These findings highlight distinct biological mechanisms captured by different measurement sources of sleep phenotypes and reveal rare-variant-informed targets for therapeutic discovery.

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

SDS-LoRA: Overcoming Anisotropic Gradient Scaling in Low-Rank Adaptation

arXiv:2606.16454v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) enables efficient adaptation of large pre-trained models to downstream tasks by parameterizing weight updates with low-rank matrices. In this paper, we investigate the limitations of the LoRA parameterization from a geometric perspective. Specifically, we show that when a full fine-tuning gradient is backpropagated to the low-rank matrices, it undergoes anisotropic scaling driven by their singular values. We argue that this phenomenon is undesirable because it distorts the full fine-tuning gradient by skewing it toward dominant singular directions while suppressing others. Our analyses demonstrate that anisotropic gradient scaling reduces the effective rank of the low-rank matrices' gradients and results in suboptimal alignment between the full fine-tuning gradient and its low-rank approximation in LoRA, thereby exacerbating the gap to full fine-tuning. To address these limitations, we propose a new low-rank parameterization, SDS-LoRA, which structurally decouples singular values from the backward pass. Our method ensures that the full fine-tuning gradient backpropagates only through the orthonormal bases of the low-rank matrices' subspaces, independent of their scales. Convergence analysis demonstrates that while LoRA's convergence rate degrades with the condition number of the low-rank matrices, SDS-LoRA remains independent of it. Experimental results across natural language and vision benchmarks show that SDS-LoRA improves loss convergence and reduces the gap to full fine-tuning, significantly enhancing adaptation performance.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Reconstruction of detector error model for quantum error correction

arXiv:2606.16288v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fault-tolerant quantum computing fundamentally relies on the accurate characterization of circuit-level noise to optimize decoding algorithms. However, extracting complex multi-body error correlations remains challenging. Contemporary greedy inference algorithms can suffer from statistical distortion, discarding true physical mechanisms while introducing many unphysical false positives. Here, we introduce the Correlation-Analysis-based Hypergraph Reconstruction (CAHR) algorithm, a globally consistent framework to invert experimental syndrome statistics directly into discrete physical hypergraphs. By coupling exact algebraic correlation equations with a top-down concurrent-pruning strategy, CAHR recovers the fault topology without false positives for both $d=5$ rotated surface codes and dense 8-body 2D color codes in our benchmark settings. Furthermore, we show that exact continuous parameter extraction in dense codes is limited by a variance cascade, where absolute statistical variance accumulates linearly from high- to low-degree mechanisms. This motivates a two-stage inference paradigm: utilizing CAHR to extract the fault topology, followed by continuous probability optimization. This provides a practical approach for characterizing and decoding highly correlated noise in realistic quantum hardware.

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

Bridging Creative Intent and Visual Quality: Creator-Driven Recurrent Video Generation with Agentic Feedback Loops

Generative AI has made content creation increasingly accessible, but many AI-generated videos lack narrative coherence and creative direction, issues that become more substantial at longer durations. Unlike coding, where AI generation benefits from reliable feedback and techniques such as recurrent self-improvement, video generation requires subjective feedback about plot, scenes, and narrative, which naturally motivates approaches that incorporate human creative direction. We introduce CHIEF, a human-AI co-creation video generation framework that places the creator at the center of human-in-the-loop iterative video refinement, and supports them by providing automatic subjective feedback. The creator incorporates their creative direction by driving each iteration, while their revisions are incorporated by a specialized refiner agent. The feedback loop is generated by persona-conditioned multimodal LLMs that watch generated videos and produce subjective critique from the audience perspectives, providing feedback that self-evaluation alone cannot capture. To test the effectiveness of our proposed framework, we work with high school and college students with no prior filmmaking experience to create videos, from short 1-minute videos to a complete short 10-minute film with a complicated plot.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Locally Acting Grover Mixers for Constraint-Preserving QAOA

arXiv:2606.11530v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Grover mixer quantum alternating operator ansatz (GM-QAOA) employs the Grover mixer to confine the quantum evolution to the feasible subspace defined by the problem. Its mixing unitary, however, requires a global multi-controlled phase-shift gate acting on all qubits, resulting in substantial circuit overhead on near-term quantum devices. In this work, we propose locally acting Grover mixers tailored to initial states that admit a product structure over disjoint qubit subsystems, which may be obtained by encoding only a subset of problem constraints into the initial state preparation. The proposed method preserves the search space defined by the initial state while significantly lowering implementation cost, as the global multi-controlled phase-shift gate is replaced with local operations on disjoint subsystems. Numerical simulations on the exact-cover problem and the traveling salesman problem (TSP) demonstrate that the proposed method achieves convergence behavior comparable to that of the original GM-QAOA, while using shallower circuits with fewer gates. We further compare two constraint encoding strategies for the TSP, encoding only a subset of constraints versus all constraints into the initial state preparation, and show that the former combined with the proposed mixer yields markedly more compact circuits at the point where comparable solution quality is achieved.

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

Attribution-Guided and Coverage-Maximized Pruning for Structural MoE Compression

arXiv:2606.18304v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models scale compute efficiently, yet remain expensive to deploy due to their substantial memory footprint and inference overhead. Prior compression methods mainly operate at the expert level, either removing entire experts or ranking experts by coarse-grained importance scores. However, such expert-wise decisions are often too coarse to capture fine-grained redundancy, leading to misallocated pruning budgets and limited compression. To address this problem, we observe that information within MoE experts is highly concentrated in a small subset of channels, leaving substantial redundancy even in experts deemed important. Based on this observation, we propose a structural pruning framework tailored for MoE models. Our method reformulates prune-ratio allocation as a channel-score coverage maximization problem and solves it efficiently using an attribution-based approximation. Experiments on DeepSeek and Qwen MoE models show that our method preserves model accuracy under 50% or 25% structured pruning when combined with 4-bit quantization. On Qwen3-30B-A3B, our approach reduces memory footprint by 5.27$\times$ and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across diverse benchmarks.

19.
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.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Benchmark of quantum algorithms for ground state preparation in the presence of noise

arXiv:2606.20551v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We compare the performance of representative cooling, adiabatic, and optimization algorithms for ground-state preparation in the presence of noise. Using an exactly solvable family of quadratic fermionic Hamiltonians subject to depolarizing noise, we derive the scaling of the achievable relative energy as a function of the noise rate and support these results with numerical simulations. The Hamiltonian exhibits two phases, separated by a quantum phase transition. As expected, the performance of the different algorithms depends on the phase: adiabatic evolution is favorable in the trivial phase, while a multi-frequency cooling algorithm, as proposed in [1], becomes competitive or superior in the topological phase, where gap-closing limits adiabatic protocols. We further present numerical results for the quantum approximate optimization algorithm [2], showing that it performs competitively with cooling in the trivial phase but is typically outperformed in the topological regime. Finally, we show that for this model the cooling protocol exhibits enhanced robustness to parameter imperfections, highlighting its potential advantage for realistic implementations of noisy quantum state preparation. The analytical approach developed here, in conjunction with numerical validation, establishes an extendable approach to benchmarking ground-state preparation algorithms.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Slots, Transitions, Loops: Learning Composable World Models for ARC

ARC tests in-context rule induction: given a few input-output demonstrations, a model must infer the hidden rule and apply it to a new query. While many approaches express ARC rules through language, code, or symbolic programs, ARC itself is visual-symbolic: rules appear as grid transitions over objects, colors, shapes, and spatial relations. We introduce Loop-OWM, an object-centric world-modeling architecture that learns these rules as composable transitions over structured states. It combines color-prototype slots, demonstration-conditioned task summaries, and a looped transition model with dense propagation and slot-conditioned correction. On both ARC-1 and ARC-2, Loop-OWM outperforms non-looped and looped baselines with comparable or fewer parameters. These results suggest that ARC rules can be learned not only as language descriptions or searched programs, but also as transitions over visual-symbolic world states.

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

Mathematical perspective on genetic algorithms with optimization guided operators

arXiv:2606.12279v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent work in ML applies genetic algorithms at inference time to iteratively improve solutions to optimization problems. The basic mutation and recombination operators involved are qualitatively different from those studied classically. Mutations are no longer random; an ML algorithm mutates a solution with the goal of improving an objective. Similarly, recombination is not based on random collages of parent solutions. Instead, it is an ML optimization-based operator whose goal is to synthesize improved solutions from its inputs. Thus, these mutation and recombination operators are more likely to improve the objective, but their computational cost is much higher. We introduce a general model of genetic algorithms and formulating optimization in this model as a query-complexity problem, using the language of reinforcement learning. We then study specialized models. We show that some optimization problems require generation, mutation, and recombination to be solved. We then obtain qualitatively tight algorithms for a family of problems within this framework that captures the nontrivial role of diversity in the solution pool, a key feature of practical ML genetic algorithms.

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

Training-Free Adversarial Robustness in Computational MRI

Deep learning (DL) methods have become the state-of-the-art for reconstructing sub-sampled magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data. However, studies have shown that these methods are susceptible to small adversarial input perturbations, resulting in major distortions in the output images. Various strategies have been proposed to reduce the effects of these attacks, but they require retraining. In this work, we propose a novel approach for mitigating adversarial attacks on MRI reconstruction models without any retraining. Based on the idea of cyclic measurement consistency, we devise a novel mitigation objective that is minimized in a small ball around the attack input. Results show that our method substantially reduces the impact of adversarial perturbations across different datasets, attack types/strengths and PD-DL networks, and qualitatively and quantitatively outperforms conventional mitigation methods. We also introduce a practically relevant scenario for small adversarial perturbations that models impulse noise in raw data, which relates to herringbone artifacts, and show the applicability of our approach in this setting. Finally, we show our mitigation approach remains effective in two realistic extension scenarios: a blind setup, where the attack strength or algorithm is not known to the user; and an adaptive attack setup, where the attacker has full knowledge of the defense strategy.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Do We Still Need Humans in the Loop? Comparing Human and LLM Annotation in Active Learning for Hostility Detection

Instruction-tuned LLMs can annotate thousands of instances at low cost. This raises two questions for active learning (AL): can LLM labels replace human labels within the AL loop, and does AL remain necessary when entire corpora can be cheaply labeled? We investigate both on a new dataset of 277,902 German political TikTok comments (25,974 LLM-labeled, 5,000 human-annotated), comparing LLM and human annotation across seven conditions, four encoders, and 10 random seeds. Under a two-question interface that mirrors the human annotation task, LLM annotation at scale outperforms human-supervised classifiers at roughly one-tenth the cost (\$28 for GPT-5.2 Batch API vs. \$316 for Prolific). The advantage holds for both a closed-source (GPT-5.2) and an open-weight (Qwen3.5-122B-10B) LLM, is robust under soft-label evaluation, and is unlocked specifically by the two-question decomposition; a holistic single-prompt baseline only ties with human supervision. AL provides no reliable advantage over random sampling under either LLM annotator. However, error structure varies sharply: only GPT-5.2 under the two-question interface produces classifiers with near-human FP/FN balance, while other LLM variants over-flag border-control and economic competition discourse. We release the dataset and code.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Can Vision-Language Models See the Vital Signs? Benchmarking and Fine-Tuning for Intraoperative Monitor Reading

Background Vital-sign deterioration is a leading contributor to preventable perioperative death, yet manual monitor reading is intermittent, error-prone, and subject to alarm fatigue. Automating this perceptual step could enable continuous surveillance, but existing solutions depend on device-specific hardware integration or cloud-hosted vision-language models (VLMs), which raise privacy, cost, and connectivity barriers in resource-limited healthcare facilities. Methods We constructed a benchmark of 200 in-the-wild intraoperative monitor photographs (spanning multiple vendors, angles, and illumination conditions) annotated for eight vital-sign parameters: heart rate, SpO2, ETCO2, respiratory rate, systolic/diastolic/mean blood pressure, and temperature. We evaluated an optical character recognition (OCR)-based pipeline, nine instruction-tuned VLMs (four commercial, five open-weight ranging from [≤]4B to 31B parameters) under two prompting regimes, and a compact open model (Qwen3.5-9B) adapted via low-rank fine-tuning (LoRA, 0.46% of parameters updated). Results Under a domain-aware prompt, frontier VLMs reached 0.98-0.997 exact-match accuracy zero-shot, whereas the OCR pipeline and [≤]4B model scored approximately 0.20 lower, defining a 9B-class usable floor. LoRA fine-tuning Qwen3.5-9B on 80-120 images raised accuracy from 0.953 to 0.994 (statistically indistinguishable from the best commercial model) and reduced the critical-error rate fivefold (0.0313 [->] 0.0063). Ablations showed that performance saturated at 80 training images and rank-8 adapters. Conclusion Monitor reading is a solved perception problem for VLMs above the 9B scale. A lightweight fine-tuned open model achieves frontier accuracy while running entirely on local hardware, preserving data privacy, offline capability, and near-zero marginal cost. Residual errors stem from blood-pressure source ambiguity and are addressable with explicit disambiguation logic.