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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

DYNA-PRUNER: Input-Adaptive Data-Model Co-Pruning for Efficient and Scalable Spatio-Temporal Media Prediction

Spatio-temporal prediction supports radar/satellite nowcasting and city-scale traffic monitoring, but modern models are often too expensive for real-time deployment. This stems from a mismatch between dense computation and strong input-dependent redundancy (e.g., calm seas or clear skies). To enable automated, resource-aware architecture optimization in scalable media analysis, we propose Dyna-Pruner, an end-to-end framework for input-dependent co-pruning of data and model structure. A shared-importance synchronization mechanism generates coupled masks that prune redundant regions and their corresponding computational units (e.g., convolutional filters), yielding per-sample sparse sub-networks at inference time. Experiments on WeatherBench, SEVIR, and TaxiBJ show seamless integration with CNN, RNN, and Transformer backbones, reducing FLOPs by up to $70\%$ and achieving a $2.5\times$ speedup on NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin with negligible accuracy loss ($

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Comparative Evaluation of Pretrained Large Language Models for Suicide Risk Prediction from Clinical Notes in U.S. Veterans

Background: Suicide remains a significant and potentially preventable cause of death among United States veterans. Predictive models based on structured electronic health record (EHR) data, including the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs' Recovery Engagement and Coordination for Health-Veterans Enhanced Treatment (REACH-VET) program, aim to identify individuals at elevated risk for enhanced monitoring and follow-up. Increasing evidence suggests that unstructured clinical narratives contain additional psychosocial information that may enhance risk prediction when analyzed using natural language processing (NLP). However, optimal approaches for representing clinical text remain uncertain. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) enable contextual text representations that capture complex semantic relationships beyond traditional lexical methods. Methods: We compared the predictive performance of pretrained LLMs with classical bag-of-words (BoW) representations for suicide risk prediction using clinical notes from 27,241 veterans receiving care in the Veterans Health Administration. Patients were stratified by REACH-VET risk tier (low, moderate, high), and models were evaluated across prediction windows defined by note look-back periods (

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

All Smoke, No Alarm: Oracle Signals in Agent-Authored Test Code

arXiv:2606.18168v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Software practitioners increasingly use AI coding agents that generate test code alongside production code in open source pull requests (PRs). Recent studies report more than 932,000 agent-authored PRs across more than 116,000 repositories, yet whether their test files contain meaningful verification logic remains underexplored. Test files lacking explicit assertions execute code without verifying behavior, so quality gates based on test-file presence overestimate verification strength. The goal of this paper is to help practitioners assess the verification strength of agent-authored patches by characterizing oracle signals and their link to merge outcomes and review effort. We conduct an empirical study of 86,156 test-file patches from 33,596 agent-authored PRs across 2,807 GitHub repositories produced by five coding agents: OpenAI Codex, GitHub Copilot, Devin, Cursor, and Claude Code. A qualitative analysis of 384 stratified patches informs a syntactic taxonomy of eight oracle signal categories. Applied at scale, 80.2% of test patches contain weak or no explicit oracle signals. While raw merge rates are lower for strong-oracle PRs, a regression analysis adjusting for agent, PR size, repository popularity, task type, and language shows strong oracles significantly improve merge likelihood (OR = 1.28, p < 0.001). Our findings suggest that test file counts substantially overestimate verification strength and that practitioners can adopt oracle-aware quality checks to more accurately evaluate agent-authored contributions.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Near-Optimal Stochastic Linear Bandits with Delay

arXiv:2606.16656v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study stochastic linear bandits with delayed feedback under several delay models and establish near-optimal regret guarantees. Our results identify when delayed linear bandits exhibit the same qualitative behavior as multi-armed bandits (MAB), and when the linear structure creates fundamentally new challenges. Specifically, (1) for loss-independent delays, where the delay does not depend on the realized loss (but potentially depends on the arm), we show that delays incur only an additive regret penalty. Under stochastic delays, this penalty scales with the expected delay, while under adversarial delays, it scales with the maximum number of outstanding observations. Notably, both delay penalties are dimension-free, improving upon the state-of-the-art results; (2) for loss-dependent delays, we show that linear bandits are substantially harder than MAB: unlike in MAB, we prove matching (up to log factors) upper and lower bounds in linear bandits, whose delay penalty depends on the square root of the dimension. (3) for the delay-as-payoff model, a special case of loss-dependent delay, we show that the optimal MAB guarantee, which depends only on the delay of the optimal arm, is also unattainable in linear bandits. Together, these results provide a sharp characterization of how delayed feedback interacts with linear generalization.

05.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22

HTS-Oracle X: AI-Guided Prospective Discovery of Small Molecule Immune Checkpoint Binders

Targeting immune checkpoint protein-protein interactions (PPIs) using small molecules remains limited by the shallow, featureless binding surfaces of co-stimulatory and co-inhibitory receptors and the characteristically low hit rates of conventional high-throughput screening against these interfaces. Here we report HTS-Oracle X, a multimodal deep learning platform that integrates bidirectional cross-attention fusion of ChemBERTa SMILES embeddings with extended RDKit descriptors, trains on continuous biophysical binding signals rather than binary labels, and employs Monte Carlo Dropout uncertainty quantification for uncertainty-adjusted compound selection. Trained on 45,760 Dianthus TRIC-screened compounds per target under scaffold-aware cross-validation, HTS-Oracle X was applied prospectively to a 100,160-compound Enamine library against CD28, TIM-3, and VISTA. From 150 model-selected compounds, 45 dose-response confirmed binders were identified (30.0% overall hit rate), yielding enrichment factors of 234-408x over experimentally established random prospective baselines and 16 sub-micromolar hits. The top hits, HX-CD28-1 (KD = 233 nM), HX-TIM3-1 (KD = 249 nM), and HX-VISTA-1 (KD = 345 nM), demonstrated on-target functional activity in immune cell and tumor co-culture assays. HTS-Oracle X represents a scalable AI-guided framework for small molecule discovery against non-enzymatic immune checkpoint targets.

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

Learning Sparse Latent Predictive Foundation Model for Multimodal Neuroimaging

Brain MRIs are routinely acquired as multiple complementary sequences with unique contrast weighting, including T1-weighed imaging (T1w) anatomic and fluid-sensitive T2-weighted (T2w) contrasts. However, methods for learning unified representations across the multitude of MRI contrast mechanisms at health-system scale are lacking. In this study, we introduce Neuro-JEPA, a sparse multimodal neuroimaging foundation model that combines a latent predictive objective with a Mixture-of-Experts architecture to encode brain MRI across core T1w, T2w, and fluid-suppressed FLAIR imaging (FLAIR). We further provide a systematic methodological study of architectural, masking, objective, and sparsity design choices beneficial for robust neuroimaging multimodal representation learning. Neuro-JEPA was pretrained on 1,551,862 scans from 428,647 studies after modality-specific preprocessing with data curation across three core structural brain MRI sequences. We evaluated the learned representations across clinical and research settings, including 25 tasks from three health systems: NYU Langone, NYU Long Island, and Massachusetts General Hospital, and 22 tasks from 12 public datasets, covering unimodal, multimodal and cross-domain evaluation configurations. Across these benchmarks, existing neuroimaging foundation models showed inconsistent gains over a simple convolutional neural network (CNN) baseline, whereas Neuro-JEPA achieved stronger and more consistent performance across all evaluated settings. These results establish a scalable methodological framework for multimodal neuroimaging representation learning and highlight the need for foundation model evaluation protocols that include simple baselines, clinically heterogeneous cohorts and controlled multimodal comparisons.

07.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-08

DDI_single: Single-Sequence-Based Protein Domain Assembly

Authors:

Domains are the basic units of protein structure and function. Appropriate inter-domain organization is critical to enable cooperative execution of multiple related functions. It is thus a crucial step to determine the full-length structure of multi-domain proteins for the purpose of elucidating their functions and designing new drugs to regulate these functions. Existing structure prediction algorithms are generally better at solving the internal conformation of domains, rather than modeling the relative positions between domains. To address the challenge of accurately determining multi-domain protein conformations, we develop a single-sequence-based domain assembly algorithm called DDI_single. DDI_single directly extracts features from the amino acid sequence using the protein language model ESM-1b, and accurately predicts the interactions between residue pairs of structural domains through a novel gated cross-attention module, thus achieving the correct assembly of structural domains. With the knowledge of domain definition, DDI_single achieves more than 20% higher accuracy in the task of predicting the relative distances of residue pairs between domains than that of the single-sequence-based structure prediction algorithm trRosettaX_single. When assembling domains with known spatial conformations, DDI_single correctly assembles 74.4% of the samples in the test set (TM-score>0.5). When assembling domains with unknown spatial conformations, in cases where the internal spatial conformations of domains are correctly modeled, DDI_single correctly assembles 73.9% of the samples.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Automated Byzantine-Resilient Clustered Decentralized Federated Learning for Battery Intelligence in Connected EVs

arXiv:2605.21115v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for managing electric vehicle (EV) battery data in intelligent transportation systems (ITS), enabling privacy-preserving tasks such as anomaly detection and capacity estimation. However, most existing frameworks rely on centralized aggregation schemes, which pose critical limitations in terms of security and trust. To address these challenges, we propose ABC-DFL, an automated Byzantine-resilient clustered decentralized federated learning (C-DFL) framework for connected EVs. The proposed incentive-driven C-DFL system replaces the central server with an open-permissioned blockchain, featuring a new dynamic Quorum Byzantine Fault Tolerance (QBFT) protocol and an oracle-based aggregation layer, to enhance trust, security, and automation. At the core of ABC-DFL lies FLECA (Filtered Layered Enhanced Clustering Aggregation), a robust hierarchical aggregation protocol that mitigates Byzantine attacks by having each EV filter malicious updates using an adaptive threshold based on deviations from its reference model update. Oracle nodes, responsible for inter-group aggregation, employ robust clustering to isolate and aggregate model updates from trustworthy EV groups. Comprehensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that FLECA matches FedProx convergence under benign conditions and significantly outperforms existing defenses with attack impact scores below 0.10 in adaptive adversarial scenarios. Furthermore, several learning experiments with multitask models confirm the effectiveness and fairness of the incentive mechanism. Finally, on-chain and off-chain benchmarks validate the practicality of ABC-DFL.

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

The Benchmark Illusion: Pruned LLMs Can Pass Multiple Choice but Fail to Answer

Compressing large language models reduces memory use and inference cost, but it can also create failures that standard benchmarks miss. A pruned model may still perform well on multiple-choice evaluations, yet fail to answer the same question in open generation. We ask what pruning changes: does it erase the correct answer, or does it make the answer harder to produce as the top output? We study this question with multilingual question answering, tracking the same questions before and after pruning. We find a benchmark illusion. Under high-sparsity pruning, especially Wanda, models often fail in greedy open generation while still selecting the correct answer under multiple-choice scoring. In these recognition-only errors, the answer is usually not gone, but demoted: it often reappears with beam search, sampling, or one in-context example. Overall, multiple-choice benchmarks can overstate the usability of compressed LLMs, creating an evaluation blind spot. Compressed models should be tested on what they can produce, not only on what they can recognize.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

LLM-as-an-Investigator: Evidence-First Reasoning for Robust Interactive Problem Diagnosis

arXiv:2606.13220v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as interactive assistants for technical problem solving. However, when users provide incomplete descriptions or plausible but unverified explanations, LLMs may prematurely align with these assumptions and propose solutions before collecting sufficient evidence. We refer to this behavior as user-driven sycophancy: the tendency of an LLM to reinforce a user-provided hypothesis instead of testing alternative explanations. This paper introduces LLM-as-an-Investigator, an evidence-first agentic AI methodology for robust problem diagnosis. The approach is implemented through a Solution Investigator Agent, which estimates the ambiguity of an initial problem description, generates candidate hypotheses, asks targeted clarification questions, and updates hypothesis probabilities after each answer. Rather than producing an immediate response, the agent continues the investigation until the evidence makes one candidate explanation stronger than the alternatives. To evaluate the approach, we build a benchmark from solved technical forum threads in mechanical, electrical, and hydraulic domains. We use a three-agent evaluation pipeline in which a Problem-Solution Extractor Agent converts solved threads into structured cases, a Ground-Truth Evaluator Agent simulates the user while hiding the known solution, and the tested assistant attempts to recover the solution through dialogue. The experiments compare standard assistants, reasoning-oriented LLMs, and the proposed investigator-based model across LLM backbones. In addition to diagnostic accuracy, we analyze how standard assistants follow misleading user hypotheses in diagnostic cases. The results show that the proposed approach identifies the problem more accurately than direct prompting and reasoning-only baselines, while its evidence-first protocol helps reduce user-induced conversational bias.

11.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-17

DNA-binding specificity recognition from predicted homologous protein-DNA structures

Predicting protein DNA-binding specificity is essential for understanding gene regulation and disease mechanisms. Existing deep learning methods typically infer specificity from a single protein-DNA complex structure, which limits their ability to capture the diverse geometric patterns underlying protein-DNA recognition. Homologous protein-DNA interfaces provide complementary structural evidence and richer geometric features related to interatomic interactions. To address the limited diversity and coverage of experimentally determined complexes, we constructed a large-scale library of predicted homologous protein-DNA complex structures. Building on this resource, we propose HomoDSP, a template-retrieval-based framework for accurate DNA-binding specificity prediction. Benchmark evaluations and validation on newly released JASPAR 2026 samples indicate that HomoDSP outperforms existing methods in both accuracy and generalization, with particularly substantial gains on high-error samples. Moreover, this performance is largely retained when AlphaFold3-predicted complex structures are used as input. Template- and residue-level interpretability analyses suggest that HomoDSP improves prediction by focusing on DNA-affinity residues across multiple homologous templates. Finally, universal Protein Binding Microarrays evaluations on AI-designed DNA-binding proteins show that HomoDSP rescues a baseline failure mode in which the baseline method produces incorrect predictions because of training-set bias. Together, these results support the use of homologous template interfaces as informative structural priors for decoding protein DNA-binding specificity.

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

Bag of Dims: Training-Free Mechanistic Interpretability via Dimension-Level Sign Patterns

arXiv:2606.12629v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We show that the standard basis of transformer hidden states already provides a training-free, architecture-general feature basis. Individual dimensions encode semantic content via their signs and confidence via their magnitudes, functioning as independent binary registers. We validate this Bag of Dims framework across three model families (Qwen 3.5-4B, Gemma 3-4B, Mistral 7B) through four progressive experiments. Sign patterns alone carry predictive content: replacing all magnitudes with unity achieves 72-93% top-5 next-token accuracy through the LM head, and pure Hamming scoring without any decoder reaches 80-90% top-4096. These sign patterns organize into semantic features: using a single-token type cache (one forward pass per vocabulary token, no context), we discover 175 categories via per-dimension sign consistency (mean AUC 0.80) from 50 anchors with zero training. A trained probe adds only +0.018 AUC and converges to axis-aligned weights, confirming negligible cross-dimension structure. This structure extends to attention: all 175 categories remain discoverable in K and V projections. On the write side, static FFN weight inspection links 20% of features to individual writer neurons (>0.70 agreement; random controls: 0%), with top-200 neuron coalitions achieving >0.70 agreement on 99.9% of prototypes via majority vote. Fully unsupervised discovery (random seeds, no labels) scales to 1500 features at 100% yield and 99% sparsity across all three models, with pairwise MI of 0.0014 bits confirming low inter-dimension coupling. These results establish that the standard basis already suffices for feature reading throughout the transformer compute pathway, requiring no training, no optimization, and no GPU-days beyond a single forward pass per vocabulary token.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

SAGE: Stochastic Prompt Optimization via Agent-Guided Exploration

Context engineering has emerged as a primary lever for improving AI systems without parameter updates. Recent work showing that textual gradients do not function as real gradients motivates treating automatic prompt optimization (APO) as black-box search. We introduce SPO (Stochastic Prompt Optimization), a framework for stochastic search over prompt space, and compare three strategies of increasing sophistication: error-informed random search, a genetic algorithm with evolutionary operators, and SAGE (SPO via Agent-Guided Exploration), a multi-agent pipeline with diagnostic code execution. Across three benchmarks, no single strategy dominates; effectiveness depends on the interaction of landscape structure with error type. We further deploy SAGE on a mental-health chatbot under a continuous optimization paradigm, where it compounds eight cycles of individually-noisy A/B tests into a statistically robust gain in next-day retention. We argue that coupling qualitative diagnosis with quantitative validation is what makes agentic optimization effective for open-ended task-oriented dialogue.

14.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

In situ nanocrystal confinement for efficient blue perovskite LEDs

Authors:

Metal halide perovskites have emerged as promising semiconductors for light-emitting diodes (LEDs) owing to their excellent luminescence properties1. However, their performance remains limited, primarily owing to the inherent contradiction between ‘high crystallinity’ and ‘small size’ in the in situ synthesis of perovskite nanocrystals on substrates. Here we report efficient blue perovskite LEDs (PeLEDs) achieved via in situ polymerization-driven nanocrystal confinement to synthesize perovskite films composed of high-quality nanocrystals. The in situ-formed polymer network imposes nanoscale spatial constraints during perovskite nanocrystal growth, enabling nanocrystals with small sizes and a high photoluminescence quantum yield of 83%. Furthermore, polymerizable monomers with sufficient coordination sites allow a prolonged lattice rearrangement of perovskite clusters, promoting the crystallinity of the nanocrystals. The synthesized perovskite nanocrystals are utilized in the fabrication of PeLEDs, resulting in an external quantum efficiency of 21.8% at 491 nm, which is among the highest performances in blue PeLEDs. This work simultaneously controls the thermal dynamics of perovskite crystallization and organic ligand reactions, which helps to advance understanding of the effect of ligand engineering on nanocrystal synthesis, benefiting the development of efficient PeLEDs and other optoelectronic technologies. Efficient blue perovskite light-emitting diodes with an external quantum efficiency of 21.8% are achieved through in situ polymerization-driven nanocrystal confinement.

15.
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

16.
Science (Express) 2026-06-11

Laser phase plate improves structure determination of small proteins by cryo-EM | Science

Authors: Unknown Author

Phase plates can in principle overcome the poor image contrast in electron cryo–microscopy (cryo-EM) and the resulting limits on the structural reconstruction of small proteins. However, previous designs have been unstable and compromised the high-resolution signal. They have thus been unable to surpass results achieved by standard cryo-EM. Here, we show that the laser phase plate (LPP), installed in a custom, modern Titan Krios microscope, enhances the resolution in single-particle reconstruction of small proteins by improving specimen-motion correction, recovery of information from the early frames, as well as particle visualization, 3D classification, and alignment. These advances use standard defocus ranges and reconstruction procedures, but open the door to LPP-tailored protocols offering further improvements by leveraging the LPP demonstrated here.

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

When Do Data-Driven Systems Exhibit the Capability to Infer?

arXiv:2606.11769v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The European AI Act is the first comprehensive regulation of artificial intelligence (AI), setting out extensive obligations, particularly for so-called high-risk and general-purpose AI systems. A key distinguishing feature of AI systems under the AI Act is the capability to infer. Since the AI Act does not clearly define what inference is, there is a gray area for certain data-driven systems. A specific example is credit scoring systems, which are listed by Annex III of the AI Act. At the same time, however, these are often implemented using statistical models for which it is unclear whether they have the capability to infer and thus fall under the AI definition of the AI Act at all. Motivated by statistical learning theory, this work develops a framework for grading different levels of the capability to infer. Based on the AI Act and the Commission Guidelines on the definition of an artificial intelligence system, we analyze which levels constitute sufficient capability to infer within the meaning of the AI Act and where further regulatory clarity is needed. We illustrate the framework by creating two realistic credit scoring workflows and show whether and where inference occurs in them. Our analysis illustrates that not only individual models but the entire data processing workflow must be considered. It also shows that the involvement of human experts during development can have significant influence on the capability to infer. Code can be found at https://github.com/fraunhofer-iais/inference-framework-creditscorecards.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Operator Learning for efficient Quantum Computation

arXiv:2606.20184v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: An efficient implementation of quantum algorithms is often hindered by the lack of efficient primitives for operators and state preparation. This limits both the ability of near-term quantum hardware to simulate complex problems and the potential of fault-tolerant algorithms to achieve practical quantum advantage. To address this, we propose a full-stack variational framework that transforms arbitrary operators to compact quantum circuits. The resulting variational circuits can be tailored to the connectivity and long-range interaction of the target hardware. The learning process employs backpropagation together with a cost function that efficiently optimizes unitary operators and non-unitary – dense or sparse – operators using only a single ancilla qubit for block encoding. Additionally, we introduce a regularization term that reduces the approximation error. The approach is validated for both quantum mechanical and engineering applications. In the former case, we learn propagators that arise in native quantum problems – such as quantum simulation and quantum chemistry – and achieve improved resource scaling in comparison to standard Suzuki-Trotter expansions. In the latter case, we demonstrate the approach's ability to implement the second-order central finite difference approximation of the Laplace operator – relevant for solving partial differential equations – while improving upon current error metrics. The final example deals with learning a dense, non-unitary operator that arises in the analysis of inviscid potential flow around an airfoil. This universality of the framework opens the door for solving general problems beyond prototypical engineering and quantum applications.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

A Variational Framework for LLM Generator-Regulator Games

Authors:

arXiv:2606.18424v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper develops a variational framework for regulated language generation. Starting from autoregressive token sampling, we derive the induced distribution over complete messages and relate it to an entropy-regularized Gibbs law. Regulation is modeled as an optimal discriminator whose convex-dual value is an f-divergence, and the generator-regulator interaction is formulated as a saddle-point problem. The framework applies to moderation, censorship, AI deception detection, compliance auditing, phishing defense, and manipulation control, where regulation concerns a distribution over possible messages rather than a single output. The equilibrium clarifies the tradeoff among utility, entropy, regulatory alignment, and finite-length detectability. Two finite-vocabulary case studies, censorship filtering and phishing defense, illustrate how the theory can be evaluated through utility, entropy, divergence, receiver-side scores, and detection probability.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

HilDA: Hierarchical Distillation with Diffusion for Advancing Self-Supervised LiDAR Pre-trainin

arXiv:2606.20189v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Leveraging Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) for camera-to-LiDAR knowledge distillation offers a promising solution to the scarcity of annotated data needed to represent the immense geometric and kinematic diversity of real-world autonomous driving (AD). However, current approaches typically treat VFMs as black-box teachers, relying exclusively on frame-wise feature similarity. Consequently, they do not fully exploit the teacher's layer-wise semantic structure and global context, as well as the rich spatiotemporal information inherent in LiDAR sequences. We propose HilDA, a self-supervised pretraining framework for LiDAR backbones that better captures the semantic what and geometric where needed for driving tasks. HilDA combines hierarchical distillation comprising multi-layer distillation for progressive semantic alignment and global context distillation for scene-level semantics, with a temporal occupancy diffusion objective promoting spatiotemporal consistency. Models pre-trained with HilDA achieve state-of-the-art results on cross-modal distillation benchmarks and outperform models trained via prior distillation approaches on 3D object detection, scene flow, and semantic occupancy prediction. Code available at: https://maxiuw.github.io/hilda.

21.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Integrated expectile-based measures of inequality

arXiv:2606.12333v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Expectiles provide a class of asymmetric location functionals that incorporate the magnitude of deviations and admit a natural geometric interpretation. Building on their structural consistency with the convex stochastic order, this paper introduces a family of integrated expectile functionals for measuring risk, dispersion, and inequality. The proposed functionals admit analytical representations as integrals of expectiles across asymmetry levels. For a distinguished subclass of these constructions, a geometric representation is available: the resulting quantities can be expressed as weighted areas of star-shaped sets encoding the distributional asymmetry of a random variable. This approach yields a new class of expectile-based inequality indices, constituting a natural counterpart to classical Gini-type measures while preserving desirable monotonicity and consistency properties. Empirical counterparts are derived in closed form and admit explicit decompositions over finite samples. The framework extends naturally to multivariate settings through directional expectile constructions, leading to measures capable of capturing genuinely joint forms of multivariate dispersion and inequality.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Detecting Sensitive Personal Information in Japanese Pre-Training Corpora for Large Language Models

Sensitive personal information can appear in large-scale pre-training corpora for large language models (LLMs). Detecting and filtering such information is therefore essential to ensure compliance with privacy regulations and prevent unintended information leakage. However, in contrast to English and other languages, research into sensitive personal information has been limited in the Japanese language. In this study, we focus on sensitive personal data defined as special care-required personal information (SCPI) under Japan's Act on the Protection of Personal Information (APPI). We construct an SCPI dataset using LLM-based annotation and train machine learning models to rapidly detect SCPI in text. As a result, our SCPI classifier can effectively identify information related to SCPI. This study is the first to explore SCPI detection in Japanese text corpora, highlighting the challenges of accurate detection.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Heteroskedastic Signals in Budgeted LLM Verification: Structural Heterogeneity Limits Optimization Gains

Authors:

arXiv:2606.15841v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) systems increasingly use uncertainty signals to allocate limited computation across verification, test-time scaling, tool execution, and other selective-compute decisions. Such policies rely on a global signal comparability assumption: equal scores should carry comparable decision value across inputs. Using budgeted verification as a controlled diagnostic setting, we identify a failure mode of this assumption: uncertainty quality is heteroskedastic across cost strata, with some regions exhibiting near-random discriminability despite concentrating many errors. Under an explicit local model, we characterize the resulting distortion of global allocation and show that its upper bound scales with cross-stratum signal-quality dispersion. We separate weak signals, optimization instability, and structural heterogeneity through a controlled intervention hierarchy: Threshold, MP-Adapt, MP-Strat, and a deliberately simple cost-stratified thresholding intervention (CST). Across MBPP and MATH using Qwen3-8B, LLaMA3-8B, and GPT-4o-mini, global online adaptation yields inconsistent gains over static thresholding; MP-Strat partially recovers performance, while CST improves hit rate by up to 17 percentage points in strongly heterogeneous settings without gradient updates. These results identify structural heterogeneity, rather than optimizer weakness alone, as the primary bottleneck in the observed settings. More broadly, misaligned feedback structure cannot always be repaired by stronger optimization.

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

Best Arm Identification with Minimal Regret

arXiv:2409.18909v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Motivated by real-world applications that necessitate responsible experimentation, we introduce the problem of best arm identification (BAI) with minimal regret. This variant of the multi-armed bandit problem elegantly amalgamates two of its most ubiquitous objectives: regret minimization and BAI. More precisely, the agent's goal is to identify the best arm with a prescribed confidence level $\delta$, while minimizing the cumulative regret up to the stopping time. Focusing on single-parameter exponential families of distributions, we leverage information-theoretic techniques to establish an instance-dependent lower bound on the expected cumulative regret. Moreover, we present an impossibility result that underscores the tension between cumulative regret and sample complexity in fixed-confidence BAI. Complementarily, we design and analyze the Double KL-UCB algorithm, which achieves asymptotic optimality as the confidence level tends to zero. Notably, this algorithm employs two distinct confidence bounds to guide arm selection in a randomized manner. Our findings elucidate a fresh perspective on the inherent connections between regret minimization and BAI.