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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Multi-Adapter PPO: A Cross-Attention Enhanced Wavelength Selection Framework for LIBS Quantitative Analysis

arXiv:2606.17476v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) quantitative analysis faces critical challenges in wavelength selection due to high-dimensional spectral data and the fundamental trade-off between prediction accuracy and feature efficiency. This paper presents a novel Multi-Adapter PPO framework that transforms wavelength selection into a reinforcement learning problem, leveraging cross-attention mechanisms and multiple specialized adapters to capture complex spectral relationships. Our approach outperforms traditional Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) by an average of 28.4\% in comprehensive score and 45.2\% in prediction accuracy across steel and coal datasets. The proposed method demonstrates superior performance in balancing prediction accuracy with feature efficiency, achieving state-of-the-art results in LIBS quantitative analysis while maintaining interpretability and computational efficiency. We released our code and dataset here: https://github.com/Hflying/MAPPO

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Classical Explanations in (and of) General Probabilistic Theories

arXiv:2603.05627v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a notion of the ``explanation" of one (generalized) probabilistic model by another as particular kind of span in the category $\Prob$ of probabilistic models and morphisms. We show that explanations compose under a standard pullback construction (notwithstanding that $\Prob$ does not support arbitrary pullbacks). We then show that every locally-finite probabilistic model has a canonical, sharp classical explanation. The construction is functorial, so every locally-finite probabilistic theory has a canonical, sharp classical (though of course, usually non-local) representation.

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

SAFformer:Improving Spiking Transformer via Active Predictive Filtering

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer notable advantages in biological plausibility and energy efficiency, making them promising candidates for building low-power Transformers. However, existing Spiking Transformers largely adhere to a passive reactive paradigm, which struggles to focus on task-relevant information and incurs substantial computational overhead when processing redundant visual data. To overcome this fundamental yet underexplored limitation, we propose SAFformer, a novel Spiking Transformer architecture based on an active predictive filtering paradigm. Inspired by the brain's predictive coding mechanism, SAFformer actively suppresses predictable signals and focuses on salient visual features. Extensive experiments show that SAFformer establishes new state-of-the-art performance on CIFAR-10/100 and CIFAR10-DVS. Remarkably, on ImageNet-1K, it achieves 80.44% Top-1 accuracy with only 26.58M parameters and an energy consumption of 5.88 mJ, demonstrating an exceptional balance between accuracy and efficiency.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

MedP-CLIP: Medical CLIP with Region-Aware Prompt Integration

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has demonstrated outstanding performance in global image understanding and zero-shot transfer through large-scale text-image alignment. However, the core of medical image analysis often lies in the fine-grained understanding of specific anatomical structures or lesion regions. Therefore, precisely comprehending region-of-interest (RoI) information provided by medical professionals or perception models becomes crucial. To address this need, we propose MedP-CLIP, a region-aware medical vision-language model (VLM). MedP-CLIP innovatively integrates medical prior knowledge and designs a feature-level region prompt integration mechanism, enabling it to flexibly respond to various prompt forms (e.g., points, bounding boxes, masks) while maintaining global contextual awareness when focusing on local regions. We pre-train the model on a meticulously constructed large-scale dataset (containing over 6.4 million medical images and 97.3 million region-level annotations), equipping it with cross-disease and cross-modality fine-grained spatial semantic understanding capabilities. Experiments demonstrate that MedP-CLIP significantly outperforms baseline methods in various medical tasks, including zero-shot recognition, interactive segmentation, and empowering multimodal large language models. This model provides a scalable, plug-and-play visual backbone for medical AI, combining holistic image understanding with precise regional analysis.

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

Erased but Not Forgotten: How Backdoors Compromise Concept Erasure

arXiv:2504.21072v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The expansion of text-to-image diffusion models has raised concerns about harmful outputs, from fabricated depictions of public figures to sexually explicit imagery. To mitigate such risks, prior work has proposed concept erasure methods that aim to sever unwanted concepts from the model via fine-tuning, yet it remains unclear whether these approaches truly remove all links to the harmful concept or merely conceal superficial connections. In this work, we reveal a critical vulnerability, the Erasure Evasion Backdoor (EEB): an adversary binds a backdoor trigger to a concept slated for removal, and this malicious link survives subsequent erasure. We show that both black-box and white-box adversaries can instantiate this threat. Across six state-of-the-art erasure methods, including robust ones that explicitly search for alternative representations of the target concept, EEB consistently exposes harmful content: up to 82% success against celebrity-identity unlearning, up to 94% for object erasure, and up to 16 times amplification of explicit-content exposure. While EEB uncovers a blind spot in current erasure methods, it also provides a diagnostic tool for stress-testing future concept erasure techniques.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Short-term relaxation after cervical rotatory manipulation is more closely associated with somatosensory input than cracking sound: a randomized controlled EEG study

Background Cervical rotatory manipulation is commonly used for neck-related symptoms and is often accompanied by a cracking sound. This sound is frequently regarded as a sign of successful manipulation, but whether it contributes substantially to the immediate relaxation response remains unclear. Objective This study examined whether short-term relaxation after cervical rotatory manipulation is more closely related to manipulation-associated sensory input than to the cracking sound cue alone. Methods In this single-session, three-arm, parallel randomized controlled study, 54 healthy volunteers were allocated to cervical rotatory manipulation, sham manipulation, or sham manipulation plus simulated cracking sound. Subjective outcomes were assessed before and after intervention, including positive affect, negative affect, comfort, and satisfaction. Eyes-closed resting-state electroencephalography was recorded before and after intervention. Prespecified neural outcomes included frontal alpha power, frontal alpha/beta ratio, occipital individual alpha frequency, and alpha-band fronto-parietal and fronto-temporal functional connectivity. Results Cervical rotatory manipulation produced greater improvements in positive affect, comfort, and satisfaction than sham manipulation or sham manipulation plus simulated cracking sound, whereas negative affect remained generally stable across groups. These subjective responses were accompanied by short-term electroencephalography changes, particularly in frontal alpha/beta and alpha-band fronto-parietal and fronto-temporal functional connectivity. Changes in frontal alpha/beta ratio were positively associated with changes in positive affect. In contrast, simulated cracking sound alone did not reproduce the full subjective or electroencephalography response observed after real manipulation. Conclusions The immediate relaxation response after cervical rotatory manipulation appears to be more closely related to manipulation-associated sensory input than to the cracking sound cue alone. These findings provide preliminary neurophysiological evidence for distinguishing real manipulation effects from sound-related contextual cues.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Mental Health AI Safety Claims Must Preserve Temporal Evidence

arXiv:2605.08827v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The safety of mental health AI is often judged at the wrong temporal scale. Current evaluations typically score isolated responses, endpoint outcomes, or aggregate dialogue quality, while clinically consequential failures may arise from the order and accumulation of interactions themselves, including delayed escalation, repeated reinforcement, dependency formation, failed repair, and gradual deterioration across turns. This paper argues that this mismatch is not merely a limitation of evaluation coverage but a source of invalid safety conclusions. We introduce Temporal Safety Non-Identifiability, a formal account of why safety properties that depend on sequence, timing, accumulation, or recovery cannot be certified by protocols that discard those features. From this formalization, we develop SCOPE (Safety Claims Over Preserved Evidence) as a general principle for aligning safety claims with the evidence an evaluation actually retains, and instantiate it as SCOPE-MH, a mental-health instantiation of this reporting standard. We operationalize SCOPE-MH through a proof-of-concept on the AnnoMI dataset of expert-annotated motivational interviewing conversations, which reveals mechanisms of failure that per-turn behavior scoring does not represent. We propose SCOPE-MH as a diagnostic complement to existing evaluation infrastructure and argue that evaluation preserving temporal evidence is necessary, not optional, for safety-critical mental health AI deployment.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Humanoid Everyday: A Comprehensive Robotic Dataset for Open-World Humanoid Manipulation

arXiv:2510.08807v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: From loco-motion to dextrous manipulation, humanoid robots have made remarkable strides in demonstrating complex full-body capabilities. However, the majority of current robot learning datasets and benchmarks mainly focus on stationary robot arms, and the few existing humanoid datasets are either confined to fixed environments or limited in task diversity, often lacking human-humanoid interaction and lower-body locomotion. Moreover, there are a few standardized evaluation platforms for benchmarking learning-based policies on humanoid data. In this work, we present Humanoid Everyday, a large-scale and diverse humanoid manipulation dataset characterized by extensive task variety involving dextrous object manipulation, human-humanoid interaction, locomotion-integrated actions, and more. Leveraging a highly efficient human-supervised teleoperation pipeline, Humanoid Everyday aggregates high-quality multimodal sensory data, including RGB, depth, LiDAR, and tactile inputs, together with natural language annotations, comprising 10.3k trajectories and over 3 million frames of data across 260 tasks across 7 broad categories. In addition, we conduct an analysis of representative policy learning methods on our dataset, providing insights into their strengths and limitations across different task categories. For standardized evaluation, we introduce a cloud-based evaluation platform that allows researchers to seamlessly deploy their policies in our controlled setting and receive performance feedback. By releasing Humanoid Everyday along with our policy learning analysis and a standardized cloud-based evaluation platform, we intend to advance research in general-purpose humanoid manipulation and lay the groundwork for more capable and embodied robotic agents in real-world scenarios. Our dataset, data collection code, and cloud evaluation website are made publicly available on our project website.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Vortex: Multi-Modal Fusion System for Intelligent Video Retrieval

This paper presents Vortex, the multimodal video retrieval system developed by our team, FocusOnFun, for the Ho Chi Minh City AI Challenge 2025, designed to advance intelligent multimedia search and temporal reasoning. The system integrates adaptive keyframe extraction, multimodal metadata generation from vision-language and speech models, and a hybrid retrieval strategy that fuses CLIP and SigLIP2 embeddings through Reciprocal Rank Fusion to balance global and fine-grained semantics. To enhance interactivity, Vortex incorporates Rocchio-based relevance feedback and a multi-stage temporal search mechanism for sequential event alignment. Built on Milvus and Elasticsearch, the architecture enables scalable indexing and efficient retrieval. Evaluated in the official competition, our FocusOnFun team's system achieved a score of 79.6/88 (90.5\%) in the Preliminary Round and was further evaluated in the Final Round, achieving an `Excellent' overall performance with `Outstanding' results in the question-answering (QA) task. This demonstrating the complementary strengths of CLIP and SigLIP2 and confirming the effectiveness of the hybrid retrieval approach. The system establishes a robust foundation for future research in intelligent, context-aware, and interactive video retrieval.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Limited Marginal Benefit of Reasoning-Heavy LLM Deployment in ESG Narrative Scoring: A 4-Model Consensus Study on Japanese Listed Firms

arXiv:2606.13693v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated scoring of ESG narrative disclosures with large language models (LLMs) is gaining traction, yet whether reasoning-heavy frontier models add value commensurate with their cost remains empirically unsettled. We evaluate this question on a corpus of ten Japanese listed firms across three rubric axes – quantitative targets, progress-tracking infrastructure, and external-standard alignment – using a four-model consensus design that combines a reasoning-on frontier model with three reasoning-off contemporaries. Across 120 firm x axis x model scores, the pooled mean absolute deviation between the reasoning-on model and each reasoning-off counterpart is 0.38 on a 5-point scale; only 2% of pairwise comparisons reach a two-point deviation, and none exceeds two points. Per-firm cost accounting shows the reasoning-on arm alone costs roughly 5.6x as much as the three-provider reasoning-off ensemble, for outcomes that differ only within small margins. We conclude that in span-based ESG narrative scoring, reasoning-heavy deployment does not materially improve outcomes relative to reasoning-off consensus, while substantially increasing operational cost. We discuss implications for cost-effective ESG auto-scoring pipelines and LLM deployment governance in applied accountability settings. An earlier version of this work is available on SSRN (Abstract ID 6683303).

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

CD-RCM: Generalizable Continuous-Depth Novel View Synthesis for Reflectance Confocal Microscopy

Reflectance confocal microscopy (RCM) provides noninvasive, cellular-resolution "optical biopsies" of human skin in vivo by acquiring en-face images at successive depths, forming a sparse z-stack. Due to optical limitations, these stacks are anisotropic 3D volumes with lateral resolution (0.5 $\mu$m) $\sim$6 times higher compared to axial resolution, which is defined by the optical sectioning (3 $\mu$m), limiting the interpretation of tissue. Our goal is to provide continuous-depth visualization by interpolating intermediate sections and making the 3D volume isotropic. Such a representation permits arbitrary-direction sectioning, including histopathology-like cross-sectional examination, without requiring per-patient optimization. To that end, we introduce the first RCM-specific novel-view synthesis (NVS) approach, CD-RCM, a feedforward model that predicts realistic, unseen depths from sparsely sampled RCM stacks. Classical neural rendering methods focus on reconstruction from surface-level multi-view observations. In contrast to surface-level camera views, RCM can acquire optically sectioned en-face images of tissue beyond the surface up to 200 $\mu$m. However, during visualization of the RCM stacks, observations of the shallower sections (towards the surface) obscure the deeper ones. This unique axial imaging geometry and layer-dependent anatomical organization motivated our development of a tailored architectural and training framework that explicitly accounts for RCM's depth-resolved, occlusive imaging physics. Experiments demonstrate that CD-RCM achieves high-fidelity novel-view synthesis with sub-second inference time.

12.
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

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

Evaluating Interactive 2D Visualization as a Sample Selection Strategy for Biomedical Time-Series Data Annotation

arXiv:2603.26592v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reliable machine-learning models in biomedical settings depend on accurate labels, yet annotating biomedical time-series data remains challenging. Algorithmic sample selection may support annotation, but evidence from studies involving real human annotators is scarce. Consequently, we compare three sample selection methods for annotation: random sampling (RND), farthest-first traversal (FAFT), and a graphical user interface-based method enabling exploration of complementary 2D visualizations (2DVs) of high-dimensional data. We evaluated the methods across four classification tasks in infant motility assessment (IMA) and speech emotion recognition (SER). Twelve annotators, categorized as experts or non-experts, performed data annotation under a limited annotation budget, and post-annotation experiments were conducted to evaluate the sampling methods. Across all classification tasks, 2DV performed best when aggregating labels across annotators. In IMA, 2DV most effectively captured rare classes, but also exhibited greater annotator-to-annotator label distribution variability resulting from the limited annotation budget, decreasing classification performance when models were trained on individual annotators' labels; in these cases, FAFT excelled. For SER, 2DV outperformed the other methods among expert annotators and matched their performance for non-experts in the individual-annotator setting. A failure risk analysis revealed that RND was the safest choice when annotator count or annotator expertise was uncertain, whereas 2DV had the highest risk due to its greater label distribution variability. Furthermore, post-experiment interviews indicated that 2DV made the annotation task more interesting and enjoyable. Overall, 2DV-based sampling appears promising for biomedical time-series data annotation, particularly when the annotation budget is not highly constrained.

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

AI for Maritime Security: Comparative Evaluation of CNN and Vision Transformer Architectures for Maritime Object Detection

This study aims to enhance maritime security by using advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Computer Vision (CV) techniques. For this purpose, it was designed and assessed intelligent object detection systems that can detect the presence of ships on the sea surface under different real-time environments. To achieve this goal, a maritime image dataset with 6,468 images was used, covering different weather conditions like cloudy, foggy, rainy, and sunny environments. Six deep learning architectures were evaluated, including a base Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model, four transfer learning models (Xception, VGG16, MobileNetV2, and EfficientNetV2L), and a Vision Transformer (ViT) model. The models were compared using multiple performance indicators, including accuracy, Type I and Type II errors, model size, and video processing time. The results show that model performance varies depending on computational constraints and deployment conditions. While lightweight architectures are suitable for resource-limited devices, the ViT achieved the best overall performance, reaching 100% accuracy with the lowest error rates and the fastest video processing time. The findings highlight the potential of AI-driven computer vision systems for maritime surveillance, border protection, and autonomous navigation.

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

Wavelength-Multiplexed 2D Beam Steering via a Passive Diffractive Network

We introduce a wavelength-addressable diffractive optical network that transforms illumination wavelength into a high-dimensional control parameter for arbitrarily programmable 2D beam steering. The proposed passive architecture comprises cascaded spatially optimized diffractive layers, jointly designed using deep learning, to rapidly map distinct wavelengths to predefined/desired output angles. Unlike conventional single-layer dispersive optical elements, which are physically restricted to 1D linear mapping, this framework harnesses complex wavefront transformations to utilize the illumination wavelength as an intrinsic addressing key for arbitrary 2D beam steering, eliminating the need for mechanical scanning or electronic phase control. We numerically demonstrate wavelength-controlled beam steering across 625 wavelength channels spanning 400-750 nm, realizing a 25 x 25 array of independently addressable beam positions with subwavelength positioning accuracy and high channel fidelity. Unlike conventional gratings, which constrain wavelength routing to a linear trajectory, the proposed diffractive network performs nonlocal wavefront transformations, enabling arbitrary wavelength-to-angle mappings across a 2D field of view. We further validate the proposed framework experimentally in both the terahertz and visible spectral regimes, demonstrating wavelength-multiplexed beam steering using 3D fabricated passive diffractive layers at terahertz frequencies and phase-only spatial light modulators in the visible spectrum. This wavelength-addressable diffractive architecture establishes a compact and scalable paradigm for high-speed programmable beam steering, with potential applications in optical communications, routing, imaging, sensing, and emerging photonic information-processing systems.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Entanglement Scaling and Problem Structure in Quantum Approximate and Adiabatic Optimization Algorithms

arXiv:2606.19502v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Entanglement is widely regarded as a key resource underlying the power of quantum algorithms and their potential to achieve quantum advantage. With the emergence of variational quantum algorithms, however, questions have arisen regarding how entanglement relates to problem structure and algorithmic performance in near-term quantum applications. Here, we examine this relationship through the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA), a specific class of variational algorithms, applied to the MaxCut problem. We show that suboptimal variational parameter training can significantly modify the observed entanglement profile, obscuring its scaling behavior. By employing a high-performance optimizer, we find empirical evidence that QAOA exhibits entanglement scaling consistent with that of fermionic Gaussian states (up to a scaling factor) across a broad range of MaxCut instances. We further compare these results with adiabatic quantum computation, observing annealing-schedule-dependent entanglement profiles whose scaling behavior differs markedly from that of QAOA. Together, these findings provide new insight into how entanglement manifests in and distinguishes these two algorithmic paradigms, highlighting its connection to both computational performance and application structure.

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

The Reverse Telescoping Coordinate System for Positive Definite Matrices: Geometry, Computation, and Generative Modeling

arXiv:2606.15442v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We design a new unconstrained coordinate system where a $p\times p$ symmetric positive definite (SPD) matrix $\Theta$ is represented by a reverse telescoping map $\Theta(x)=\rm{RT}(x)$, with $x=(v,d,r)\in\mathbb{R}\times\mathbb{R}^{(p-1)}\times\mathbb{R}^{p(p-1)/2}$, representing respectively the log volume or log determinant; and the shape, as encoded by log relative diagonal scales and partial covariances among the nodes. This construction results in important properties not available in other charts, e.g., matrix logarithm, such as Jacobian depending on only the log-determinant. A useful feature of our construction is $x$ contains a lossless symbolic representation of both the matrix and its inverse. Many important computations involving a matrix and its inverse can be performed in $O(p^2)$ in the transformed domain, while it is the rendering of results in matrix forms (on demand) that must incur an $O(p^3)$ cost. Moreover, two unit-determinant matrices in the transformed domain can be joined by a straight line with pathwise unit determinant. For generative modeling, this allows designing a split volume-shape flow model trained by conditional flow matching for transporting the shape over the unit-determinant path, with a separate one-dimensional flow for transporting the volume or the determinant. The forbidding SPD constraint, tamed thus into a powerful guiding force, leads to the surprising insight that it is in some sense easier to design a volume-normalized shape flow for SPD compared to the unconstrained $\mathbb{R}^{p\times p}$, with no intrinsic notion of volume to aid normalization, unlike the determinant of SPD matrices. We apply our construction for up to $p=200$ in generative modeling of SPD matrices on a difficult synthetic bimodal target, and in generating brain connectivity networks by models trained on fMRI data; as well as in intrinsic diffusion on the SPD manifold.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

ANSR-DT: A Neuro-Symbolic Framework for Adaptive and Explainable Digital Twins

arXiv:2501.08561v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Digital twins are increasingly used to monitor and optimize industrial systems, yet many existing frameworks remain difficult to interpret, slow to adapt, and limited in their ability to incorporate explicit domain knowledge. This paper presents ANSR-DT, an adaptive neuro-symbolic framework that unifies temporal anomaly detection, symbolic reasoning, and reinforcement-learning-based decision support within a single digital twin pipeline. ANSR-DT combines a CNN-LSTM model for multivariate pattern recognition with Prolog-based reasoning that converts learned signals into explicit rules, enabling transparent diagnoses and traceable decision paths. A PPO-based adaptation layer further refines operational responses under changing conditions while preserving interpretability. Experiments against 8 baselines show that ANSR-DT delivers competitive predictive performance together with stable rule extraction, scalable symbolic reasoning, and actionable explanations. Additional validation on the Skoltech Anomaly Benchmark (SKAB) further indicates that the framework transfers beyond synthetic settings. These findings position ANSR-DT as a practical foundation for trustworthy, adaptive, and explainable industrial digital twins.

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

EyeTheia: A Lightweight and Accessible Eye-Tracking Toolbox

We introduce EyeTheia, a lightweight and open deep learning pipeline for webcam-based gaze estimation, designed for browser-based experimental platforms and real-world cognitive and clinical research. EyeTheia enables real-time gaze tracking using only a standard laptop webcam, combining MediaPipe-based landmark extraction with a convolutional neural network inspired by iTracker and optional user-specific fine-tuning. We investigate two complementary strategies: adapting a model pretrained on mobile data and training the same architecture from scratch on a desktop-oriented dataset. Validation results on MPIIFaceGaze show comparable performance between both approaches prior to calibration, while lightweight user-specific fine-tuning consistently reduces gaze prediction error. We further evaluate EyeTheia in a realistic Dot-Probe task and compare it to the commercial webcam-based tracker SeeSo SDK. Results indicate strong agreement in left-right gaze allocation during stimulus presentation, despite higher temporal variability. Overall, EyeTheia provides a transparent and extensible solution for low-cost gaze tracking, suitable for scalable and reproducible experimental and clinical studies. The code, trained models, and experimental materials are publicly available.

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

Beyond Predefined Schemas: TRACE-KG for Context-Enriched Knowledge Graph Generation

arXiv:2604.03496v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Knowledge graph generation typically relies either on predefined ontologies or on schema-free extraction. Ontology-driven pipelines enforce consistent typing but require costly schema design and maintenance, whereas schema-free methods often produce fragmented graphs with weak global organization, especially in long technical documents with dense, context-dependent information. We propose TRACE-KG (Text-dRiven schemA for Context-Enriched Knowledge Graphs), a framework that jointly constructs a context-enriched knowledge graph and an induced schema without assuming a predefined ontology. TRACE-KG captures conditional relations through structured qualifiers and organizes entities and relations using a data-driven schema that serves as a reusable semantic scaffold while preserving full traceability to the source evidence. Experiments show that TRACE-KG produces structurally coherent, traceable knowledge graphs and offers a practical alternative to both ontology-driven and schema-free construction pipelines.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Metabolic cost of information processing in Poisson variational autoencoders

arXiv:2602.13421v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Computation in biological systems is fundamentally energy-constrained, yet standard theories of computation treat energy as freely available. Here, we argue that variational free energy minimization under a Poisson assumption offers a principled path toward an energy-aware theory of computation. Our key observation is that the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence term in the Poisson free energy objective becomes proportional to the prior firing rates of model neurons, yielding an emergent metabolic cost term that penalizes high baseline activity. This structure couples an abstract information-theoretic quantity – the *coding rate* – to a concrete biophysical variable – the *firing rate* – which enables a trade-off between coding fidelity and energy expenditure. Such a coupling arises naturally in the Poisson variational autoencoder (P-VAE) – a brain-inspired generative model that encodes inputs as discrete spike counts and recovers a spiking form of *sparse coding* as a special case – but is absent from standard Gaussian VAEs. To demonstrate that this metabolic cost structure is unique to the Poisson formulation, we compare the P-VAE against Grelu-VAE, a Gaussian VAE with ReLU rectification applied to latent samples, which controls for the non-negativity constraint. Across a systematic sweep of the KL term weighting coefficient $\beta$ and latent dimensionality, we find that increasing $\beta$ monotonically increases sparsity and reduces average spiking activity in the P-VAE. In contrast, Grelu-VAE representations remain unchanged, confirming that the effect is specific to Poisson statistics rather than a byproduct of non-negative representations. These results establish Poisson variational inference as a promising foundation for a resource-constrained theory of computation.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

UMA-Split: unimodal aggregation for both English and Mandarin non-autoregressive speech recognition

This paper proposes a unimodal aggregation (UMA) based nonautoregressive model for both English and Mandarin speech recognition. The original UMA explicitly segments and aggregates acoustic frames (with unimodal weights that first monotonically increase and then decrease) of the same text token to learn better representations than regular connectionist temporal classification (CTC). However, it only works well in Mandarin. It struggles with other languages, such as English, for which a single syllable may be tokenized into multiple fine-grained tokens, or a token spans fewer than 3 acoustic frames and fails to form unimodal weights. To address this problem, we propose allowing each UMA-aggregated frame map to multiple tokens, via a simple split module that generates two tokens from each aggregated frame before computing the CTC loss.

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

Implicit Reasoning for Large Language Model-based Generative Recommendation

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted as backbones for Generative Recommendation (GR), promising access to pretrained world knowledge. Yet reliably invoking this knowledge for GR remains poorly understood. A key obstacle is that LLM-based GR typically represents items with Semantic IDs (SIDs), disrupting LLMs' natural-language reasoning interface because these tokens are unseen by the LLM during pretraining. Existing approaches address this with expensive multi-stage pipelines that ground SIDs and elicit explicit rationales, but offer limited insight into when and why each stage is necessary. In this work, we systematically decompose explicit reasoning training pipelines for LLM-based GR, revealing three key limitations: weakened world-knowledge verbalization, misalignment between SID and natural-language token embedding spaces, and sensitivity to rationale quality, all of which hurt explicit reasoning performance. To circumvent these issues, we propose PauseRec, a lightweight implicit reasoning paradigm tailored for GR. PauseRec is exceptionally practical, avoiding costly reasoning trace acquisition and reasoning alignment training, leading to a multitude of benefits: (1) it outperforms standard explicit CoT methods by up to 6.22%, (2) it reduces training cost by up to 65% GPU hours, and (3) it speeds up inference by up to 71.3%. These results position PauseRec as a lightweight alternative to explicit rationale generation, enabling more effective and efficient LLM-based GR.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

A Quantum Encoding of Traveling Salesperson Tours via Route Generation, Cost Phases, and a Reversible Valid-Permutation Oracle

arXiv:2603.21283v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: For a traveling salesperson problem (TSP) of n cities, we present a compact quantum encoding based on a time-register representation of tours. A candidate route is represented as a sequence of n-1 city labels over discrete time steps, with one fixed start city and the remaining cities encoded in binary registers. We describe three ingredients of the construction: uniform route generation over the route register, a reversible validity oracle, and a phase oracle that encodes the total tour cost. The validity oracle checks both that the non-start city labels form a permutation and, for incomplete graphs, that every directed edge used by the route exists. The cost oracle then accumulates the start-edge, intermediate-transition, and return-edge costs into a tour-dependent phase for valid routes. This yields a coherent superposition of candidate routes with feasibility and tour-length information embedded directly in the quantum state. The complete construction uses O(n log n) qubits, while a naive implementation has worst-case elementary-gate complexity O(n^3 log n). The encoding is compatible with amplitude amplification or spectral filtering techniques such as the quantum singular value transform (QSVT) or Grover's algorithm. However, due to the exponentially small fraction of valid tours, the overall complexity remains exponential even when combined with amplitude amplification.