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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

An Ontology-Guided Multi-Anchor Graph Retrieval Framework for Traffic Legal Liability Determination

Traffic law liability determination is critical for assigning legal penalties, requiring the simultaneous identification of interdependent statutory provisions across multiple legal dimensions. However, existing retrieval-augmented generation methods suffer from a multi-dimensional retrieval bottleneck: single axis architectures compress complex legal queries into a single pathway, causing interdependent statutory dimensions to be overlooked. To address this, we propose OMAGR, an ontology-guided framework that decomposes queries into ontology-aligned anchors and executes parallel graph retrieval across each dimension, ensuring independent retrieval across dimensions before fusion. To evaluate the proposed method, we created the TrafficLaw-QA dataset, an expert-validated benchmark dataset containing 200 questions and 527 legal provisions. Results show that TrafficOmni-RAG outperforms baselines on Context Precision and Faithfulness metrics. The findings demonstrate that parallel multi-anchor retrieval effectively resolves the multi-dimensional retrieval bottleneck, offering a promising direction for traffic law liability determination research.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Every Act Has Its Price: Compressed Moral Composition in Frontier LLMs

Existing LLM moral benchmarks usually ask which isolated moral act, value, or foundation a model prefers. This is useful but incomplete. Realistic judgments often require a model to combine several moral signals within the same option. We introduce **Moral Trolley Arena**, a two-stage blind ELO benchmark for measuring how LLMs compose moral evidence. The single-scene arena first calibrates individual moral acts from a 229-scenario corpus across five Moral Foundations Theory foundations; the composite arena then combines calibrated acts into two-act moral items over a controlled intensity grid and measures the resulting composite preferences. Across ten frontier models, composite judgments are largely predicted by component act strength, but the relation is consistently compressed rather than simply additive. Models also show non-additive intensity anchoring, bounded foundation-specific residuals after component control, and highly convergent composite preference surfaces across providers. These results suggest that moral audits should measure composition rules for moral evidence, not only rankings over isolated acts.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Avidity of anti-pertussis toxin antibodies is associated with symptomatic Bordetella pertussis infection in a novel controlled human infection model

Background The association between functional antibody responses following Bordetella pertussis infection and symptomatic disease remains unclear. We characterized the maturation of anti-pertussis toxin (PT) IgG avidity after human challenge with B. pertussis and determined its association with symptomatic infection. Methods Healthy adults were intranasally inoculated with live B. pertussis organisms in a controlled human infection model and monitored for development of pertussis symptoms (NCT05136599). Serum samples were collected one day before inoculation and at 14, 28, 56, 180, and 365 days post challenge. Anti PT IgG avidity was tested using a titration of ammonium isothiocyanate (the bond breaking agent) to quantify a wide range of antibody avidities from low to very-high. Associations between covariates and avidity were examined using linear regression models, and high dimensional analyses were used to integrate all data. Findings Anti PT IgG avidity increased in both symptomatic (n=20) and asymptomatic (n=10) participants after the challenge, reached maximum levels at day 56, and then declined through day 365. Symptomatic participants developed significantly higher levels of high- and very high-avidity anti-PT antibodies at 28, 56, 180, and 365 days post-challenge compared with those who remained asymptomatic. In multivariate analyses, symptomatic infection was associated with higher levels of high and very high avidity anti-PT IgG at day180 and365 after challenge. Distinct avidity profiles in symptomatic vs asymptomatic participants emerged at day28 onwards, with the former group having higher levels of antibodies with higher avidities. However, levels of medium-high, high and very high avidity antibodies in symptomatic participants were lower at day 365 after challenge compared to their peak levels. Interpretation Anti-PT IgG avidity was associated with symptomatic B. pertussis infection and thus may serve as a surrogate of clinical disease outcome. These results highlight that antibody avidity provides an additional functional assay besides antibody quantitation to dissect immune responses to pertussis. Further investigation of anti PT IgG avidity should be pursued in natural pertussis outbreaks to determine whether it might be used to differentiate symptomatic from asymptomatic infections for epidemiologic purposes.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Purity and bound energy in ancilla-assisted work extraction

arXiv:2606.19945v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate ancilla-assisted work extraction in quantum batteries from the perspective of bound energy and purity. We show that the bound energy of the reduced system provides a tight upper bound to the daemonic gain and that this bound is saturated for globally pure system–ancilla states. Motivated by this relation, we introduce a purity-based gain that qualitatively predicts the daemonic gain without requiring explicit optimization over measurements. We further introduce a protocol to analyze the role of dissipation and intrinsic interactions on daemonic gain. Under a collective environment, dissipation can dynamically generate and stabilize finite daemonic gain through environment-induced correlations. In interacting systems, level crossings and spectral restructuring strongly modify the attainable gain through their influence on the accessible bound energy. Our results demonstrate that daemonic gain is governed not only by correlations, but also by the spectral structure of the underlying Hamiltonian and information loss captured by bound energy and purity.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Stab-QRAM: A Clifford-Only Quantum Oracle for Affine Boolean Data

arXiv:2509.26494v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Oracle-based quantum algorithms require coherent evaluation of classical functions on superposed inputs, and in fault-tolerant architectures this cost is dominated by non-Clifford gates: generic lookup constructions incur $T$-counts that grow with the data size. Here we show that affine Boolean functions $f(\mathbf{x})=A\mathbf{x}+\mathbf{b}$ over $\mathbb{F}_2$ – the algebraic core of parity checks, linear feedback shift registers, and cipher linear layers – are exactly the functions admitting computational-basis-preserving Clifford oracles, and we develop this correspondence into Stab-QRAM, a compiler mapping a specification $(A,\mathbf{b})$ to an ancilla-free circuit of CNOT and $X$ gates with zero $T$-count. Via K\"{o}nig's edge-coloring theorem, the compiled schedule provably attains the minimum depth for its gate set. Case studies spanning Simon-type oracles, block-encodings of $X$-type coset operators, and syndrome extraction for CSS codes show one compiler serving the algorithm, primitive, and error-correction layers of the quantum stack.

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

Phase-Localized Curation Does Not Help: A Negative Result on Per-Phase Metric Selection for Demonstration Filtering

作者:

arXiv:2606.15064v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Manipulation demonstrations have temporal phase structure, and a natural hypothesis is that demonstration-curation metrics should be applied within phases rather than globally. The idea is to segment each trajectory into phases, score each phase with the metric that is locally most informative, and then aggregate. This follows directly from prior work showing that a single global metric can be the best detector of a defect and yet the worst curator of the resulting policy. We test the per-phase hypothesis on three contact-rich LIBERO pick-and-place tasks with a controlled early-release structural defect, comparing phase-gated curation against the same metrics applied uniformly and against a strong single global metric. Across all three tasks and five random seeds per condition, phase-gated curation is never the best curation strategy, and it is the worst of the three on two of the three tasks (Task 1: 86.0 vs. 92.0 for global; Task 3: 22.7 vs. 48.0 for uniform). We trace the failure to a concrete mechanism. When the defect signal is concentrated in a single phase, rank-aggregating across phases dilutes that signal with uninformative scores from defect-free phases, selecting a worse demonstration subset than simply applying the defect-informative metric everywhere. We further show that the per-phase metric selection does not transfer across tasks, since no phase shares a winning metric between any two tasks, so the selection cannot be reused and must be re-derived per task from a noisy sweep. These results bound a plausible and previously untested method, and they argue that practitioners should prefer identifying a single defect-informative metric over decomposing curation by phase. We release the full pipeline, all metric implementations, and per-seed results.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Simplex-Constrained Sparse Bagging: Transitioning from Uniform Priors to Sparse Posteriors in Ensemble Learning

arXiv:2606.13589v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present Simplex-Constrained Sparse Bagging (SCSB), a mathematically rigorous framework for post-training compression and probability calibration of bootstrap-based bagging ensembles. Standard bagging ensembles (such as Random Forests, Bagged SVMs, and Bagged Neural Networks) assign uniform voting power to all constituent estimators. However, this naive uniform prior ignores the varying local competence of base estimators and contributes to model overconfidence. We formulate ensemble pruning and calibration as a joint optimization problem over the probability simplex by minimizing the Out-Of-Bag (OOB) loss. To induce sparsity, we address the theoretical "L1-simplex paradox" – the mathematical reality that the L1 norm is constant on the simplex and fails to prune – by introducing a concave quadratic penalty. SCSB is model-agnostic and achieves up to 96% ensemble compression, yielding linear inference speedups and superior probability calibration (lowered Expected Calibration Error) while preserving or enhancing generalization accuracy.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Towards Understanding and Measuring COGNITIVE ATROPHY in LLM Behaviour

arXiv:2606.18129v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent incidents involving LLMs used for mental-health support reveal a critical evaluation gap: surface-level safety scores do not capture how models behave across realistic, emotionally sensitive interactions over time. Existing benchmarks measure knowledge, safety, or static response quality, but miss whether LLM interactions help users keep reflecting, coping, and making decisions themselves. We formalize this missing dimension as COGNITIVE ATROPHY, a process-level behavioural measure in AI-mediated mental-health support distinct from safety and helpfulness. To measure it, we introduce COGNITIVE ATROPHY BENCH, a clinically grounded benchmark built from 1,576 fully human-generated counseling conversations, 15,680 turns, and 42,230 responses from five LLMs. Three clinical and neuropsychology experts developed a 20-attribute schema spanning user context, response behaviour, and global risk flags; six trained clinical reviewers applied it with span-grounded evidence, producing 5,324 reviewer judgments. We further introduce the User-Input Risk Index (UIRI), the Cognitive Atrophy Risk Index (ARI), and trajectory summaries. Across five LLMs, models show a consistent moderate-to-high level of atrophy-aligned behaviour across single and multi-turn settings. While models generally respond to overt safety cues, they adapt less reliably when users seek solutions or decisions. The dominant recurring patterns are directive advice, problem-solving, recommendation responses, topic shifts, and forms of validation that may reinforce dependence rather than reflection. Our work makes COGNITIVE ATROPHY measurable and provides a foundation for auditing model behaviour in sensitive LLM conversations.

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

Learning Cardiac Electrophysiology Digital Twins Through Agentic Discovery of Hybrid Structure

arXiv:2606.18154v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Building personalized cardiac electrophysiology (EP) digital twins requires identifying the appropriate model structure for each patient, not merely fitting parameters. Traditional methods rely on experts to manually prescribe hybrid physics-neural architectures, which requires deep domain expertise and does not transfer across patients. Recent works have applied large language models (LLMs) to generate or act as hybrid models. However, despite their promising generalization capacity, these LLM-based methods lack the structural priors needed for stable cardiac simulations. Hence, we propose LEADS, a framework that formulates cardiac EP domain knowledge as a structured action space and utilizes an LLM agent to discover hybrid models. The agent follows an iterative reasoning-and-action loop to select, combine, and refine hybrid models, whilst gradient descent handles parameter fitting. The proposed LEADS designs every candidate model towards physically grounded, interpretable, and numerically stable, while allowing open-ended architectural discovery. We validate LEADS on synthetic data with three ground-truth reaction models and on real cardiac EP data, demonstrating that it outperforms both human-designed hybrid models and other LLM-based hybrid modeling.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Neighborhood socioeconomic status associated with post-stroke cognitive impairment: a retrospective cohort study

Background: Late complications after stroke (LCAS), including cognitive symptoms, impact quality of life and recovery. It is not known if neighborhood-level measures of socioeconomic status (SES) influence LCAS. This study assessed associations between SES measures, including neighborhood income inequality (Gini) and area deprivation index (ADI), and cognitive symptoms after acute ischemic stroke (AIS) in a hospital leveraging active surveillance of LCAS. Methods: This retrospective cohort study included 512 patients hospitalized with AIS at Tufts Medical Center with subsequent follow-up (between zero and three months or between three and twelve months) in the Stroke Clinic from 1/1/2018 - 12/31/2022. Using ZIP code data, patients were characterized as low Gini (low inequality) and high ADI (high deprivation) (Gini = 5) by state medians. These variables were combined, indicating patients who were living in both a low Gini and high ADI neighborhood to evaluate the effects of living in a homogeneously deprived area. There were 206 and 281 patients in the low Gini and high ADI groups respectively. 140 patients lived in a low Gini and high ADI neighborhood. The multivariable logistic analysis assessed the likelihood of cognitive symptoms, adjusting for age, race, ethnicity, sex, NIH Stroke Scale (NIHSS), thrombolysis, active LCAS surveillance, poverty, and ADI-Gini combination. Results: There were no associations between high ADI (OR: 1.03, 95% CI: 0.67 ? 1.57) or low Gini (OR: 1.74, 95% CI: 0.98 ? 3.07) alone and cognitive symptoms after AIS. However, the combined variable demonstrated increased likelihood of cognitive symptoms in the high ADI-low Gini group (OR: 1.82, 95% CI: 1.08 ? 3.06). Conclusions: This study suggests that individuals living in homogeneously deprived neighborhoods report higher likelihood of cognitive symptoms after AIS. Further studies with increased power are needed to investigate the underlying causes of these disparities and to develop interventions to reduce these complications.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Domain Generalizable Adaptation of 3D Vision-Language Models via Regularized Fine-Tuning

Domain adaptation remains a central challenge in 3D vision, especially for multimodal foundation models that align 3D point clouds with visual and textual data. While these models demonstrate strong general capabilities, adapting them to downstream domains with limited data often leads to overfitting and catastrophic forgetting. To address this, we introduce ReFine3D, a regularized fine-tuning framework designed for domain-generalizable tuning of 3D large multimodal models (LMMs). ReFine3D combines selective layer tuning with two targeted regularization strategies: multi-view consistency across augmented point clouds and text diversity through synonym-based prompts generated by large language models. Additionally, we incorporate point-rendered vision supervision and a test-time augmentation mechanism with confidence-based aggregation to further enhance robustness. Extensive experiments across different 3D domain generalization benchmarks show that ReFine3D improves base-to-novel class generalization by 1.36%, cross-dataset transfer by 2.43%, robustness to corruption by 1.80%, and few-shot accuracy by up to 3.11%, outperforming prior state-of-the-art methods with minimal added computational overhead.

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

Discrimination-free Insurance Pricing with Privatized Sensitive Attributes

arXiv:2504.11775v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fairness has become an important concern in insurance pricing as insurers increasingly rely on machine learning models to predict expected losses. At the same time, regulatory and privacy constraints often restrict insurers' ability to access or use sensitive attributes such as gender or race. Recent actuarial research addresses fairness in this context through the concept of the discrimination-free premium, which removes both the direct and indirect effects of sensitive attributes while preserving actuarial consistency. However, implementing this approach typically requires access to the sensitive attributes themselves, which may not be available in practice. This paper studies the estimation of discrimination-free insurance premiums when sensitive attributes are observed only in privatized or noise-perturbed form. We consider a multi-party data setting in which insurers observe non-sensitive attributes and outcomes, while a trusted third party holds privatized sensitive attributes generated through a privacy mechanism. Within this framework, we develop statistical methods for estimating discrimination-free premiums using only the privatized attributes. We study two settings of practical relevance: when the privacy mechanism is known and when its noise level is unknown. For both cases, we establish theoretical guarantees for the proposed estimators. Numerical experiments and empirical applications demonstrate that the proposed approach enables fair insurance pricing while respecting privacy and regulatory constraints.

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

JetParticle-JEPA: An Efficient Self-Supervised Representation Learning method for Jet Tagging in High-Energy Physics

arXiv:2606.14813v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Jet tagging at the Large Hadron Collider increasingly relies on deep learning models trained on massive simulated datasets, leading to high computational costs and limited robustness to detector mismodeling. We introduce JetParticle-JEPA (JP-JEPA), a self-supervised Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture that learns physically meaningful jet representations directly from continuous particle clouds without tokenization or reconstruction of raw inputs. Built on a Particle Transformer backbone, JP-JEPA predicts latent representations of masked particles while preserving fine-grained kinematic correlations. On the JetClass benchmark, JP-JEPA achieves performance comparable to fully supervised state-of-the-art methods on the full dataset, surpasses supervised baselines in low-label regimes, and significantly outperforms existing SSL approaches. On Top Quark and Quark-Gluon Tagging benchmarks, it remains on par with supervised methods. The learned representations also exhibit strong robustness to missing detector information and improved uncertainty behavior, highlighting JP-JEPA as a promising foundation-model framework for robust and data-efficient jet physics at the LHC.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Many-body chirality of topological stabilizer states

arXiv:2606.20472v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A defining feature of chirality is the distinction between a system and its mirror image. Despite extensive experimental observations of chiral phases and theoretical advances, a quantum-information theoretic characterization of chirality based solely on the entanglement structure of many-body quantum states remains elusive. Here, we introduce the notion of many-body chirality by formulating it as an obstruction to transforming a quantum state into its complex conjugate through finite-depth local operations. We rigorously establish many-body chirality for stabilizer realizations of $\mathbb{Z}_d^{(k)}$ anyon theories, proving that complex conjugation can be implemented by local quantum channels if and only if the underlying anyon data are mirror invariant. This reveals forms of chirality that evade conventional diagnostics, including examples with vanishing modular commutator, vanishing chiral central charge, and commuting-projector realizations. We further show that this obstruction is intrinsically four-partite, while invisible to tripartite entanglement structure. Finally, we prove that $\mathbb{Z}_d^{(k)}$ states with $d>2$ possess intrinsic many-body imaginarity: their complex phase structure cannot be removed by finite-depth local unitaries. Remarkably, this includes states that are not many-body chiral.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Geometry-Aware Post-Hoc Uncertainty Quantification in Operator Learning

arXiv:2606.17513v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural operators provide fast surrogates for PDEs but their deterministic predictions limit their use in tasks requiring uncertainty quantification (UQ), especially under geometric variability. Existing approaches primarily model uncertainty in network parameters, largely overlooking the geometry-aware representations learned by the operator itself. We propose REEF-GP (Residual on Embedded Features Gaussian Process), a post-hoc UQ framework that fits a GP to the residuals of a frozen neural operator whose internal embeddings define the kernel feature space. Rather than learning a separate feature map, REEF-GP adapts the operator's intrinsic coordinate-feature representations to construct geometry-aware uncertainties. To ensure stability and scalability on unstructured domains, REEF-GP incorporates spectral-normalized projections, heteroscedastic geometry-aware noise, and efficient subset-based training that avoids restrictive low-rank approximations. Across five PDE benchmarks with varying geometries, REEF-GP preserves predictive accuracy while achieving calibrated uncertainty estimates competitive with deep ensembles but at a fraction of their cost. Our approach remains robust under geometric distribution shift, with uncertainty concentrating in physically meaningful regions (e.g., shock fronts). Our results demonstrate that accurate and scalable post-hoc UQ for neural operators can be achieved directly in their learned feature space, offering a practical alternative to parameter-centric approaches.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

A spectral audit framework reveals task-dependent aperiodic reliance across EEG and ECG deep learning

arXiv:2606.08583v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Deep learning on physiological time series is interpreted through domain-specific features – oscillatory rhythms in EEG, morphological complexes in ECG – yet these signals sit atop a broadband aperiodic 1/f-like envelope that covaries with arousal, age, and pathology. We introduce a spectral audit framework combining aperiodic/periodic decomposition, phase-preserving Fourier interventions, sham controls, and simulation validation. Aperiodic reliance was task-dependent and architecture-general: across six neural architectures, flattening drops exceeded 0.42 balanced-accuracy points for sleep-wake classification, reached 0.07-0.13 for clinical abnormality detection, and remained minimal for motor imagery. Six of seven EEG foundation models showed FDR-significant aperiodic reliance on clinical EEG; age/sex and recording-era controls reduced but did not eliminate the effect. Applying the audit to PTB-XL ECG revealed neural drops of 0.32–0.36 persisting after demographic matching, confirming this confound class extends beyond EEG. Aperiodic controls should become standard for interpretable physiological time-series deep learning.

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

Annealed Entropic Allocation for Ranking and Selection

arXiv:2606.11347v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose Annealed Entropic Allocation, an annealed weighted soft-min framework for sequential budget allocation in ranking and selection. The central idea is to replace the non-smooth maximin large-deviation rate objective with a weighted log-sum-exp surrogate that aggregates challenger-specific pairwise scores through soft-min weights, mitigating hard switching when several challengers are nearly active. To improve finite-budget discrimination, we incorporate the saddlepoint approximation – a sub-exponential correction derived from refined pairwise tail asymptotics. Because these corrections are sub-exponential and the smoothing parameter is annealed to zero, the surrogate preserves the same first-order large-deviation target as the classical maximin formulation. We show that the surrogate converges uniformly to the hard minimum, that the soft-min weights concentrate on the active challengers, and that, under fixed weights, the induced target allocation map is continuous on the simplex interior. Numerical experiments on Gaussian and exponential instances demonstrate competitive performance, especially when multiple challengers are nearly tied.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Metadata-Aware Multi-Prompt Reasoning for Zero-Shot Accident Understanding

In this paper, we address the problem of zero-shot understanding of accidents from surveillance videos by identifying when an impact event occurs, what type of impact it is, and where in the frame it occurs using natural language. We propose a three-stage pipeline that decomposes the accident understanding into when, what, and where. The first stage extracts a short temporal window around the impact using vision-language similarity. In the second stage, we perform metadata-driven multi-prompt reasoning with five complementary views (baseline, motion, geometry, contrast, and tiebreaker) and resolve disagreement via an entropy-gated pairwise adjudicator. Finally, we localize the impact of an open-vocabulary detector queried on the predicted accident type and scene layout, and aggregate detections across keyframes using a score-weighted centroid. Our pipeline achieves a substantial improvement in the harmonic-mean score over a centre-of-frame baseline on the zero-shot ACCIDENT @ CVPR benchmark. We show that decomposing zero-shot video understanding into temporal localization, semantic classification, and spatial grounding enable more reliable reasoning with vision-language models than direct prompting alone.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Provenance-Enhanced Statements in Knowledge Graphs

arXiv:2606.15246v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Provenance-enhanced statements of the form "according to $X$, $\varphi$" are pervasive in contemporary knowledge graphs, especially in domains where graph content primarily represents claims, interpretations, and hypotheses (capta) rather than observer-independent facts (data). Current provenance models can record who asserted what, but they typically treat provenance as semantically neutral, leaving underspecified how attributed claims relate to factual commitment, to one another, and to reasoning. In this paper we introduce DEC, a framework that interprets provenance predicates as indicators of epistemic stance and groups provenance-homogeneous sets of statements into cognitive worlds. Drawing on cognitive modal logics (doxastic, epistemic, and conjectural), DEC characterizes locality, rationality, and controlled permeation between cognitive worlds and a distinguished factual core ("reality"), thereby enabling principled reasoning over attributed content without collapsing disagreements into inconsistencies. We formalize a DEC interpretation for RDF datasets that is conservative over RDF~1.2 semantics, clarify the role of intensionality and identity (including the Superman paradox), and illustrate the approach on common Semantic Web representations (named graphs, quoted triples/RDF-star, and reification). Finally, we describe our prototype DEC reasoner implemented as a Fuseki dataset module, supporting controlled factualisation and explicit detection of disagreements and delusions.

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

Debiasing Without Protected Attributes: Latent Concept Erasure from Textual Profiles

Most fairness research in NLP assumes direct access to protected attributes such as gender, race, or nationality. In practice, however, such information is often unavailable due to privacy constraints, missing metadata, or legal restrictions, even though models may infer it from indirect textual cues. This raises a key question: can debiasing succeed without direct access to sensitive attributes? We propose H-SAL, which performs post-hoc concept and attribute erasure using self-description text as an implicit debiasing signal. To support this setting, we introduce a multi-domain Stack Exchange-based fairness benchmark for helpfulness prediction that includes both explicit and implicit signals, enabling comparison between standard debiasing with protected labels and debiasing without access to sensitive information. Across encoder and decoder-only language models, we find that implicit self-description often matches or outperforms explicit-label-based debiasing. Our results broaden representation-level fairness research and provide a new benchmark for studying debiasing under realistic data constraints.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Who Should Lead Decoding Now? Tracking Reliable Trajectories for Ensembling Masked Diffusion Language Models

Masked Diffusion Language Models (MDLMs) have emerged as a distinct paradigm for sequence generation. As MDLMs become diverse in capabilities and knowledge coverage, an important question is how to combine their knowledge. Toward this, we first investigate the unique decoding dynamics of MDLMs. We find that successful generations exhibit stable confidence dynamics over answer-relevant positions, while unreliable trajectories can often be corrected by injecting promising intermediate states from other models. Guided by this observation, we propose $TIE$ ($T$rajectory-based $I$terative $E$nsembling), a knowledge fusion framework in which MDLMs iteratively identify reliable decoding trajectories and relay them across models. TIE tracks confidence dynamics over answer-relevant positions to determine which model currently follows a more reliable trajectory and selectively transfers partially denoised sequences across models. As the model on the more promising trajectory often changes across denoising steps, TIE allows different models to contribute complementary strengths at different stages of generation. Strong performance across diverse reasoning tasks, along with our analyses, suggests that TIE offers a practical approach to the underexplored problem of MDLM ensembling.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

FreeStyle: Free Control of Style-Content Dual-Reference Generation from Community LoRA Mining

arXiv:2606.20506v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Style-content dual-reference generation aims to synthesize an image that preserves the structure and semantics of a content reference while adopting the style of a separate style reference.Despite recent progress, this setting remains challenging because models must balance content fidelity, style alignment, and instruction following avoiding semantic leakage from the style reference.A key bottleneck is the lack of large-scale triplet data with clean content-style separation and broad long-tail style coverage.In this work, we propose FreeStyle, a scalable dual-reference generation framework based on community LoRA mining.We treat community LoRAs as compositional anchors for style and content, and design a rigorous generation and filtering pipeline to construct large-scale Style-Reference and Content-Reference triplets across multiple base models.To address content leakage, we adopt a two-stage curriculum with stage-specific disentanglement mechanisms: an attention-level enrichment constraint that suppresses style-reference leakage in the style-transfer stage, and a frequency-aware RoPE modulation strategy that targets positional-correspondence-based leakage in the harder dual-reference stage.We also introduce a benchmark covering both style-reference and dual-reference generation, with evaluations on style similarity, content preservation, aesthetics, instruction following, and leakage rejection. The benchmark incorporates a style-invariant Content Alignment Score (CAS) and introduces a calibrated VLM-based Rejection Score for evaluating generation reliability and leakage suppression.Extensive experiments show that our model achieves a strong balance among style alignment, content preservation, and leakage suppression.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

More with LESS – Local Scene Representations for Tactile Imaging

arXiv:2606.14344v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tactile imaging seeks to reconstruct the internal structure of soft objects through touch sensing, with applications in medical diagnosis and robotic manipulation. Recent self-supervised learning approaches have shown promising results, but rely on global, unstructured representations and robot-controlled sensing, limiting generalization and practical use. We propose Local Encoder for Spatial Sensing (LESS), an object-centric tactile representation that exploits the local nature of touch. The tactile scene is modeled as a grid of recurrent encoders with local receptive fields, whose states are fused to reconstruct 2D or 3D images of internal structure. This compositional design enables strong generalization: models trained on single-inclusion phantoms accurately image objects with multiple inclusions and varying sizes. The local structure further supports spatial uncertainty estimation. In addition, we enable hand-held tactile imaging via external pose tracking and human-like palpation data, and extend tactile imaging to full 3D reconstruction.

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

ToaSt: Token Channel Selection and Structured Pruning for Efficient ViT

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have achieved remarkable success across various vision tasks, yet their deployment is often hindered by prohibitive computational costs. While structured weight pruning and token compression have emerged as promising solutions, they suffer from prolonged retraining and inter-layer dependencies that complicate optimization, respectively. We propose ToaSt, a decoupled framework applying specialized strategies to distinct ViT components. We apply coupled head-wise structured pruning to Multi-Head Self-Attention modules, leveraging attention operation characteristics to enhance robustness. For Feed-Forward Networks (over 60% of FLOPs), we introduce Token Channel Selection (TCS), a training-free method that filters redundant noise channels at inference time. Extensive evaluations across nine diverse models, including DeiT, ViT-MAE, and Swin Transformer, demonstrate that ToaSt achieves superior trade-offs between accuracy and efficiency, consistently outperforming existing baselines. On ViT-MAE-Huge, ToaSt achieves 88.52% accuracy (+1.64%p) with 39.4% FLOPs reduction. ToaSt also transfers effectively to diverse downstream tasks (COCO detection, ADE20K segmentation, CIFAR-100 classification), achieving 52.2 versus 51.9 mAP on COCO. Code: github.com/SHANNonLab-HUFS/ToaSt