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

Integral Formulation of QENDy for Robust Nonlinear System Identification

arXiv:2606.11629v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This manuscript proposes an integral formulation of the newly defined quadratic embedding method for identifying nonlinear systems (QENDy). In the original algorithm, trajectory data points along with their time derivatives are used. Methods for calculating time derivatives make the algorithm sensitive to noise. Our integral formulation does not use the time derivatives. This results in a more robust method to learn the dynamics.

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

Policy Regret for Embedding Model Routing: Contextual Bandits with Low-Rank Experts

arXiv:2606.14929v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern recommendation systems increasingly rely on dynamically routing diverse queries to multiple embedding models. Despite its practical significance, this problem remains poorly understood under realistic conditions like adversarial queries, bandit feedback, and limited observability of models. We formalize embedding model routing as an adversarial contextual linear bandit with low-rank experts, where contexts are queries, actions are items, and experts are the embedding models working on low-rank latent representation spaces. We first establish that standard regret notions suffer from structural misspecification or statistical intractability, and we identify a log-quadratic policy class that is expressive enough to capture query-dependent model routing, yet structured enough to allow efficient online learning. Second, we propose a policy gradient algorithm called Hypentropy Policy Gradient (HPG). It provably adapts to the unknown low-rank structure under incomplete information and attains $\tilde{\mathcal O}(s\sqrt{M T})$ linearized policy regret – where $s, M$, and $T$ are the intrinsic rank of the experts, the number of models, and the number of rounds – thus avoiding a curse of dimensionality. Finally, we also provide an computationally efficient and parameter-free implementation of HPG.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Strategic Non-Shareability of Quantum Correlations

作者:

arXiv:2605.25516v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Correlations distributed by a mediator can be useful for coordination but vulnerable to inheritance by a colluder. We formalize the obstruction to such inheritance as a source-certified resource theory of strategic non-shareability. The free objects are symmetrically extendible sources, the free operations are shareability-preserving maps, and the trace distance to the free set is a faithful convex monotone. For Werner and isotropic sources in arbitrary local dimension, the resource has the exact form $D_m=c(d)(p-p_m^{*})_{+}$, with $p_m^{*}$ the Johnson–Viola shareability threshold. For qubit Werner sources, tomographically complete Pauli measurements yield the exact one-colluder capacity\[ C^tomo_1(p)=\frac{1}{12}\Bigl[(3p-1)-\sqrt{(3p+1)(1-p)}\,\Bigr]_{+}.\] We prove that this anti-collusion resource is independent of Bellnonlocality: the Bell and shareability orderings cross, so some Bell-nonlocal states are strictly less collusion-resistant than Bell-local ones. Finally, we give an aligned Pauli coordination game whose observed behaviour has a local hidden-variable model for every visibility, making device-independent certification empty, while source-certified quantum anti-collusion is positive exactly above the extendibility threshold. These results identify symmetric non-extendibility, rather than Bell nonlocality, as the boundary of source-certified collusion resistance.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Large-scale proteomics and timing of hypertensive disorders of pregnancy

Background: Hypertensive disorders of pregnancy (HDP) may first be diagnosed antepartum, during labor, or postpartum. We utilized untargeted large-scale proteomics to identify pathways associated with HDP based on timing of onset. Methods: We performed a nested case-control study comparing differential protein expression, from the SomaScan 7K platform, based on timing of onset of HDP versus controls (referent) using first-trimester samples from the NuMoM2b-Heart Health Study, a multi-site cohort that followed nulliparous individuals from the first trimester. Associations of proteins with timing of onset of HDP, adjusted for co-variates, were assessed using logistic regression q value-based false discovery rates and pathway enrichment and differential expression analysis were conducted. Results: Of 1628 individuals included, 678 had HDP, of which 67% manifested antepartum (AP), 29% intrapartum (IP), and 3% postpartum (PP). After adjusting for co-variates, compared to controls, 698 proteins, 39 proteins, and 144 proteins were differentially expressed in those with HDP according to AP, IP, PP onset, respectively. There was little overlap in individual protein expression based on timing of HDP. Pathway enrichment and graphical summary analyses suggested distinct processes. Specifically, there was downregulation of angiogenic proteins in AP HDP, downregulation of immune-related proteins in IP HDP, and upregulation of complement activation promoting fibrotic changes leading to cardiac dysfunction in PP HDP. Conclusion: There are differences in first-trimester protein expression based on whether HDP first manifests AP, IP or PP. This raises the possibility that there may be distinct mechanistic phenotypes that could uniquely inform diagnostic and therapeutic targets for HDP.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

ReAge3D: Re-Aging 3D Faces with View Consistency

We present a novel framework for realistic and controllable 3D face re-aging which produces highly detailed, identity-preserving results. Existing 3D editing methods, while effective for coarse semantic changes, are not well suited for re-aging, as even small inconsistencies across re-aged 2D views can lead to over-smoothing of subtle but perceptually important age-related details. To address this challenge, we first introduce a 2D diffusion-based re-aging model, DiffReaging, trained on synthetically generated image pairs. We further propose a center-out editing propagation strategy that leverages this re-aging model to reconstruct multi-view-consistent re-aged images. Specifically, starting from a re-aged frontal pivot view, we reconstruct the remaining views through warping and our proposed Masked-DiffReaging process. By injecting existing content at every step of the diffusion process, Masked-DiffReaging ensures that the reconstructed regions remain coherent with existing pixels. The resulting consistent set of re-aged views supervises the optimization of the re-aged 3D representation. Our method outperforms existing 3D editing techniques both visually and quantitatively, enabling smooth, fine-grained control over age transformations in 3D face models.

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

Overcoming Labelled Data Scarcity for Defect Classification in Scanning Tunneling Microscopy

arXiv:2506.01678v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM) is a powerful technique for imaging surfaces with atomic resolution, providing insight into physical and chemical processes at the level of single atoms and molecules. A regular task of STM image analysis is the identification and labelling of features of interest against a uniform background. Performing this manually is a labour-intensive task, requiring significant human effort. To reduce this burden, we propose an automated approach to the segmentation of STM images that uses both few-shot learning and unsupervised learning. Our technique offers greater flexibility compared to previous supervised methods; it removes the requirement for large manually annotated datasets and is thus easier to adapt to an unseen surface while still maintaining a high accuracy. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by using it to recognise atomic features on three distinct surfaces: Si(001), Ge(001), and TiO$_2$(110), including adsorbed AsH$_3$ molecules on the silicon and germanium surfaces. Our model exhibits strong generalisation capabilities, and following initial training, can be adapted to unseen surfaces with as few as one additional labelled data point. This work is a significant step towards efficient and material-agnostic, automatic segmentation of STM images.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

ClaimFlow: Tracing the Evolution of Scientific Claims in NLP

Scientific papers advance $claims$ that later work supports, extends, or sometimes refutes. Yet existing methods for citation and claim analysis capture only fragments of this dialogue. In this work, we make these interactions explicit at the level of individual scientific claims. We introduce $\texttt{ClaimFlow}$, a claim-centric view of the NLP literature, built from $1{,}617$ ACL Anthology papers $(1979 - 2025)$ that are manually annotated with $5{,}689$ claims and $4{,}871$ cross-paper claim relations, indicating whether a citing paper $\texttt{supports}$, $\texttt{extends}$, $\texttt{qualifies}$, $\texttt{refutes}$, or references a cited claim as $\texttt{background}$. Building on $\texttt{ClaimFlow}$, we define a new task – $Claim Relation Classification$ – which requires models to infer the scientific stance toward a cited claim from the text and citation context. Evaluating neural models and large language models on this task, we report baseline performance of $0.81$ macro-F1, suggesting that the task is tractable while leaving room for improvement. We then scale this framework to $\sim$$13k$ NLP papers to study claim evolution across decades of NLP research. We show that $63.5\%$ claims are never reused; only $11.1\%$ are ever challenged. Widely propagated claims are more often $reshaped$ through qualification and extension than supported or refuted. Overall, $\texttt{ClaimFlow}$ offers a lens for examining how ideas shift and mature within NLP.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Dark state spectroscopy in nonlinear waveguide quantum electrodynamics

arXiv:2606.11997v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum systems face a fundamental trade-off: they must remain decoupled from the environment to maintain long coherence times, yet they require interactions with the environment to be accessible for measurement. As a prime example, emitter arrays coupled to waveguides facilitate collective modes that, owing to interference, can suppress radiation into the waveguide. While complete destructive interference creates perfectly dark states with infinite lifetimes, their inherent decoupling makes them unmeasurable in standard waveguide quantum electrodynamics. Consequently, current approaches must rely on system non-idealities that permit measurement but limit the coherence times. In this work, we lift this limitation by proposing the use of weakly squeezed light generated in \{chi}(2) nonlinear waveguides for the spectroscopy of completely dark states. We show that the fluorescence spectrum probes transitions between the dressed dark states of the emitter array. This work paves the way towards the measurement and control of dark states, with applications for robust quantum memories, computation, and communication.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Beyond Uniform Tokens: Adaptive Compression for Time Series Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have enabled time series (TS) analysis by jointly modeling numerical observations and textual context through a shared token interface. However, TS tokens and prompt tokens exhibit fundamentally different information structures, making uniform token processing inefficient. In this paper, we study token efficiency in TS language modeling from an asymmetric-token perspective. We show that TS tokens have highly uneven spectral contributions, where many tokens share redundant frequency patterns while a small subset preserves critical temporal evidence. We also observe that prompt-token influence attenuates with model depth, suggesting that full prompt retention across all layers is unnecessary. Based on these findings, we develop an adaptive token budgeting framework that compresses TS tokens via frequency-domain structure and progressively reduces prompt tokens across layers. Experiments across forecasting, classification, imputation, and anomaly detection demonstrate up to 7.68$\times$ inference acceleration and performance gains in 78\% of evaluated settings, showing the effectiveness of asymmetric token compression for scalable TS foundation models.

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

TetherCache: Stabilizing Autoregressive Long-Form Video Generation with Gated Recall and Trusted Alignment

Autoregressive video diffusion models provide a natural formulation for streaming and variable-length video generation by conditioning newly generated frames on previously generated content. However, extending these models to minute-level generation remains challenging: the limited KV-cache budget prevents the model from retaining the full history, while repeatedly conditioning on self-generated frames induces a context distribution shift that accumulates over time, leading to visual artifacts, quality degradation, and temporal drift. In this paper, we propose TetherCache, a training-free and plug-and-play cache management strategy for drift-resistant long video generation. TetherCache organizes the cache into sink, memory, and recent regions, and introduces two complementary mechanisms. First, GRAB (Gated Recall with Attention-Diversity Balancing) selects long-range memory frames using a gated score that combines attention-based relevance with temporal diversity, preserving informative yet diverse historical context under a fixed cache budget. Second, TAME (Trusted Alignment via Memory Editing) lightly edits newly recalled memory tokens by aligning their statistics to a trusted context distribution, reducing the pollution caused by drifted historical features. Built on Self-Forcing, TetherCache consistently improves long-video generation quality on VBench-Long across 30s, 60s, and 240s settings. In particular, for 240s generation, it substantially improves overall and semantic scores while reducing quality drift from 7.84 to 1.33, demonstrating its effectiveness for stable long-horizon autoregressive video diffusion.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Disentangling Hallucinations: Orthogonal Semantic Projection for Robust Interpretability

As Vision-Language Models are increasingly deployed in safety-critical applications, the trustworthiness of their explanations becomes crucial. Explainable AI (XAI) methods for Vision-Language Models often suffer from semantic hallucination, where attribution maps highlight prominent image regions even when prompted with incorrect text descriptions (e.g., highlighting a dog when prompted ``cat''). Although this problem is widespread, a formal mathematical analysis of XAI methods and CLIP embeddings is largely missing in the literature. We demonstrate that this phenomenon is not specific to a single architecture but is a fundamental consequence of Linear Semantic Leakage in high-dimensional embedding spaces. We propose a unified theoretical framework, Linear Semantic Attribution (LSA), which generalizes across discriminative methods. We introduce OSP, a geometric intervention that utilizes the residual property of OMP to disentangle unique semantic signals from shared concepts. We prove theoretically and demonstrate empirically that OSP minimizes hallucination by orthogonalizing the query vector against distractor concepts, rendering the attribution model blind to shared features while preserving fidelity for correct prompts. Our code is available at: https://github.com/emirhanbilgic/Orthogonal-Semantic-Projection

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

FATE: Pillar Encoding and Frequency-Aware Training for Event-Based Object Detection

Event cameras are bio-inspired sensors that asynchronously capture logarithmic intensity changes, offering inherent advantages in high-speed and high-dynamic-range scenarios. However, the sparse and asynchronous nature of event streams poses a fundamental challenge for modern deep learning architectures. To enable compatibility with standard models, most existing approaches partition the accumulation window into fixed temporal sub-bins. While effective for spatial processing, this internal discretization discards fine-grained temporal structure and constrains inference to the low temporal frequencies imposed by training supervision. To address this limitation, we propose FATE, a unified framework built upon a novel Pillar Encoding (PE). While operating over discrete macro-accumulation windows dictated by the target frequency, PE avoids internal temporal sub-binning. It organizes events into spatial pillars and approximates their intra-window evolution via projection onto a continuous-time orthogonal polynomial basis. This formulation yields an L2-optimal representation that retains rich temporal dynamics in a dense pseudo-image, mitigating information loss under sparse event conditions. To fully leverage this representation, we introduce Frequency-Aware Training (FAT), a soft mean-teacher curriculum that generates temporally dense pseudo-labels, effectively bridging the mismatch between low-frequency supervision and high-frequency inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FATE generalizes across architectural paradigms and consistently outperforms strong baselines. It enables robust object detection at high temporal resolutions up to 200 Hz, while incurring minimal overhead in parameter count and inference latency

13.
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.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

UoU: A Universal Fingerprint Foundation Model Based on Large-Scale Unsupervised Learning

Fingerprint recognition is still dominated by task-specific pipelines, where enhancement, structural parsing, alignment, and matching are optimized in isolation. Although effective in narrow settings, this design limits representation reuse across sensors, qualities, and downstream applications. We therefore present UoU, short for ``a Universal fingerprint foundation model based on large-scale Unsupervised learning,'' which reframes fingerprint feature extraction as a domain-specific foundation-model problem. UoU is organized around a multi-level representation hierarchy spanning image restoration, structural fields, semantic tokens, point-level biometric entities, and compact global descriptors. Its training recipe combines a supervised cold start on precise annotations, large-scale weakly supervised refinement, and large-scale unsupervised consolidation, with the latter two stages iterated during large-scale training so that weak supervision broadens semantic coverage while unsupervised learning stabilizes correspondences, invariances, and representation geometry. Rather than treating fingerprint imagery as generic texture, UoU exploits domain-specific symmetries and intermediate structure, including orientation flow, periodic ridge patterns, sparse biometric entities, and spatial equivariance. The framework is intentionally architecture-agnostic: while the present study includes an initial transformer-based structured-prediction instantiation, the broader design supports multi-task learning, scalable model configurations, and downstream specialization for matching, alignment, enhancement, registration, and related fingerprint applications. This paper presents the technical motivation, system design, and validation protocol of UoU, and part of the baseline implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/XiongjunGuan/UoU.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

A Cryogenic Uniaxial Strain Cell for Quantum Devices

arXiv:2606.11485v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mechanical strain is a powerful resource for tuning quantum systems, but existing piezoelectric strain cells are generally optimized for fragile, high-aspect-ratio single crystals rather than the thick, square-profile chips typical of semiconductor quantum devices. Furthermore, adapting these cells for qubits requires accommodating dense RF and DC wiring while maintaining strict electrical isolation from high-voltage piezo actuators. Here, we present a piezoelectric uniaxial strain cell designed to homogeneously strain thick, square-profile substrates. We introduce a highly symmetric dual-chip loading configuration that effectively suppresses flexural deformation and shear stress. The cell integrates a high-density RF/DC interposer to support standard wire bonding and encloses the actuators in a grounded Faraday cage to prevent unwanted Stark shifts in the device layer. Finite element simulations confirm that combining stiff actuators with this symmetric mounting drastically improves strain homogeneity. Finally, we validate the apparatus experimentally by applying uniaxial strain to a 200 $\mu$m thick silicon die. Surface strain measurements demonstrate an applied strain of 215 $\mu\epsilon$ for 200 V applied piezo bias.

16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Frames2LoRA: Parametric Video Internalization for Vision-Language Models

Processing video in vision-language models is expensive: each frame occupies hundreds of tokens, and inference cost scales with every frame and every repeated query. We introduce Frames2LoRA, a method for parametric video internalization. A perceiver hypernetwork reads the intermediate representations produced layer-by-layer as a frozen VLM encodes a video, and generates a Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) adapter in a single forward pass. Unlike standard LoRA fine-tuning, which requires iterative gradient updates, Frames2LoRA predicts these weights directly from the video. Trained for SmolVLM2 500M and 2.2B on video summarization and captioning, Frames2LoRA enables the same frozen VLM to answer queries from the adapter alone, with zero visual tokens in its context at query time. Frames2LoRA is statistically non-inferior and equivalent to direct video-in-context inference across all five captioning benchmarks at both model scales, and across seven of eight video question answering benchmark-scale pairings. Although trained only on 12 frames at 384px, it remains stable up to 1,024 frames and 1024px, where direct video-in-context inference often degenerates. Across this sweep, it reduces answer-time visual-token load by up to 1,500x and query TTFT by 6-80x, while preserving video-faithful outputs. We also find that independently generated adapters for non-overlapping video segments can compose in rank space, suggesting a path toward chunked long-video internalization.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Sensitivity of polaron-molecule observables to MDR/GUP-like ultraviolet deformations at low energies via quantum computing

arXiv:2606.14479v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We show that impurity many-body observables can display enhanced sensitivity to ultraviolet deformations of generalized-uncertainty-principle and modified-dispersion-relation type at accessible energy scales. Using a deformed polaron-molecule Hamiltonian constructed to preserve the infrared sector, we quantify the impact of such deformations on spectral and Ramsey observables and implement the corresponding dynamics in a controlled quantum computing setting. We identify regimes near the polaron-molecule crossover where small ultraviolet deformations are strongly amplified, leading to experimentally resolvable changes in quasiparticle properties and spectral response. Our results establish a concrete sensitivity-based route to low-energy quantum-gravity phenomenology in a well-defined many-body platform and delimit the validity of the effective description. Furthermore, we report experimental validation on the QRed superconducting quantum processor (BSC-CNS).

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

Fully Distributed Multi-View 3D Tracking in Real-Time

Multi-camera tracking with overlapping fields of view typically relies on centralized fusion, which creates computational bottlenecks that prevent deployment at scale. We present MV3DT, a fully distributed framework for real-time multi-view 3D tracking that achieves accurate identity propagation and occlusion recovery through peer-to-peer coordination, eliminating the need for central aggregation. Each camera node executes a lightweight modular pipeline comprising monocular 3D perception, distributed multi-view association, and collaborative fusion via lightweight messaging. MV3DT achieves 94.3% IDF1 and 93.3% MOTA on WILDTRACK, competitive with state-of-the-art centralized methods, while demonstrating superior scalability by sustaining 30 FPS on 100 cameras with less than 10 ms inter-camera latency and only 2.2% communication overhead. MV3DT operates in a zero-shot regime given camera calibrations, requiring no scene-specific learning and making it directly deployable in new environments. These results establish MV3DT as a practical solution for real-time multi-view tracking in large-scale overlapping camera networks.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

A Randomized, Controlled, Double Blind Clinical Study to Evaluate Use of Hydron Alkaline Ionised Water (HAIW) in Healthy Participants

Background and Objectives: Alkaline Ionized Water (AIW) is considered among the highest quality healthy drinking water worldwide and is widely discussed for its various health benefits. Hydron Alkaline Ionized Water (HAIW) is produced through electrolysis, resulting in a stable pH of approximately 9.5 with a negative Oxidation Reduction Potential (ORP), making it an antioxidant beverage. The objective of this study was to evaluate the safety of HAIW and its effects on digestion, sleep, energy, and overall quality of life in healthy participants compared to Packaged Drinking Water (PDW). Materials and Methods: A randomized, controlled, double blind, prospective clinical study was conducted in which a total of 24 healthy participants between the age group of 21 to 40 years were randomized in a 1:1 ratio to either HAIW Group or Packaged Drinking Water Group with equal gender distribution. Participants were hospitalized for 7 days and asked to consume at least 3 litres of the assigned water daily. Primary outcomes were safety-related laboratory parameters and adverse event monitoring. Secondary outcomes included assessment of digestion (appetite, digestion, bowel habits), urine parameters, sleep quality, freshness after waking, fatigue, energy/stamina/strength, quality of life, and global assessment Results: All 24 participants completed the study with no dropouts. Baseline demographics were comparable between the two groups. Assessment of primary safety-related laboratory parameters including Complete Blood count, liver function tests, renal function tests, blood sugar, Electrocardiogram and serum electrolytes showed non-significant change from baseline to 7 days and remained within normal limits in both groups, with non-significant difference between groups (p>0.05). HAIW showed significantly better improvement in appetite, digestion, and bowel habits from Day 2 onwards compared to Packaged drinking water. Sleep quality and freshness after waking up showed significant improvement from Day 3 and Day 2 respectively in the HAIW and PDW group, with significantly better improvement in HAIW group. Fatigue scores showed significant reduction at Day 6 and 7 in both groups with non-significant difference between groups. A total of 5 adverse events were reported (3 in HAIW, 2 in PDW), all unrelated to study products and were mild in nature. Global assessment showed excellent to good overall safety and tolerability in both groups. Conclusion: HAIW was well tolerated by all participants without any adverse effects. All laboratory safety parameters remained within normal range. HAIW demonstrated significant improvements in digestive function (appetite, digestion, bowel habits), sleep quality, and freshness after waking as compared to PDW. The study concludes that HAIW can be safely consumed. HAIW improves digestive and sleep-related functions.

20.
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.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Global Ease of Living Index: a machine learning framework for longitudinal analysis of major economies

arXiv:2502.06866v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The drastic changes in the global economy, geopolitical conditions, and disruptions such as the COVID-19 pandemic have impacted the cost of living and quality of life. It is essential to comprehend the long-term implications of the cost of living and quality of life in major economies. A transparent and comprehensive living index must include multiple dimensions of living conditions. In this study, we present an approach to quantifying the quality of life through the Global Ease of Living Index that combines various socio-economic and infrastructural factors into a single composite score. Our index utilises economic indicators that define living standards, which could help in targeted interventions to improve specific areas. We present a machine learning framework to address missing data for certain economic indicators in specific countries. We then curate and update the data and use a dimensionality reduction approach (Principal Component Analysis and Factor Analysis) to create the Ease of Living Index for major economies since 1970. Our work significantly adds to the literature by offering a practical tool for policymakers to identify areas needing improvement, such as healthcare systems, employment opportunities, and public safety. Our approach with open data and code can be easily reproduced and applied to various contexts, providing transparency and accessibility for ongoing research and policy development in quality-of-life assessment.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Stochastic Thermodynamics and SDE-based Generative Models

作者:

arXiv:2606.18290v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: SDE-based generative models, including diffusion models and the Schrödinger bridge, have found broad applications in signal processing tasks such as speech enhancement, image restoration, and time-series generation. This note presents a modeling framework for such models within the context of stochastic thermodynamics. The main results of this note are trajectory-level definitions of work, heat, and entropy production, along with a generalized Jarzynski identity and a second-law-like inequality. The proposed framework extends the original Jarzynski setup to accommodate time-dependent bath temperature and nonconservative driving forces. This thermodynamic perspective may deepen our understanding of diffusion models and the Schrödinger bridge from a nonequilibrium statistical mechanics viewpoint.

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

Assessing Predictive Models for Fairness Based on Movement Patterns

arXiv:2605.23234v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Assessing the spatial fairness of predictive models involves establishing whether they are statistically penalizing (favoring) individuals associated with certain geographical locations. Literature on this topic makes the fundamental assumption that each individual is assigned to a single geographical location (e.g., place of residence). However, fairness with respect to the set of locations where one has been, i.e., their movement patterns over different regions, also matters when fairness is considered. Consequently, we argue that it is necessary to generalize the notion of spatial fairness to also include movement patterns, leading to the novel problem of assessing predictive models for fairness relative to the movements of individuals. To deal with this problem, we propose an approach that first associates the movements of individuals to certain geographic regions, considering multiple spatial partitions with different resolutions and alignments, and then employs a suitable spatial scan statistic to assess whether a predictive model is fair based on movement patterns. In the experimental evaluation, we study the performance of our approach over thousands of synthetic unfair datasets, showing that it is effective at detecting this new type of unfairness and at retrieving the set of objects treated unfairly, while localization performance exhibits a consistent multi-resolution trade-off.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Continuous Audio Thinking for Large Audio Language Models

Large audio language models (LALMs) have shown impressive capabilities on diverse audio understanding tasks, ranging from speech transcription to music analysis. However, because LALMs are typically trained to produce text-aligned responses, their hidden states are progressively shaped for text generation rather than for preserving acoustic information. As a result, the diverse acoustic content that audio carries, such as phonetic detail, prosody, sound events, affect, and pitch, is lost along the way and difficult to leverage in the response. We introduce Continuous Audio Thinking (CoAT), a framework that equips audio language models with a continuous latent workspace for organizing acoustic information prior to response generation, grounded by distillation from audio experts. Within the thinking space, the model can utilize the rich acoustic information provided by expert distillation when generating its response. Furthermore, the proposed continuous thinking block can be processed in a single prefill, so CoAT does not require additional autoregressive decoding cost over the baseline. Across three LALMs, Qwen2-Audio, Qwen2.5-Omni-7B, and Audio Flamingo~3, performance gains on a broad benchmark suite spanning audio reasoning, audio understanding, music classification, speech emotion, and speech transcription demonstrate the effectiveness of CoAT. Further analysis confirms that the auxiliary supervision propagates from the thinking positions to the model's textual responses.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

The Structural Attention Tax: How Retrieval Format Hijacks In-Context Learning Independent of Content

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems inject external knowledge to improve LLM outputs, yet the format of injected content – distinct from its semantic relevance – can independently distort the model's attention distribution. We identify and formalise a phenomenon we term the structural attention tax: knowledge graph (KG) triples, due to their relational delimiters and repeated slot patterns, capture 2-3x more attention per token than semantically equivalent natural-language text ($\hat{o}$(KG) $\approx$ 0.70 vs. $\hat{o}$(neutral) $\approx$ 0.25), compressing demonstration attention by up to 42% – regardless of whether the triples are relevant or noise. We develop a formal framework decomposing attention scores into semantic and structural components (Eq. 2), derive a compression bound (Proposition 1) connecting token-level format bias to demonstration attention loss, and show that the structural term governs how much attention is diverted while the semantic term governs whether this helps or hurts. This decoupling reveals two orthogonal axes for improving retrieval-augmented ICL: optimising retrieval quality (semantic axis) and reducing format-driven attention capture (structural axis). Empirically, across two model families (Mistral-7B, LLaMA-3-8B) and three QA benchmarks, we observe that source-task alignment dominates: task-matched BM25 retrieval achieves 58-62% on HotpotQA vs. ConceptNet's 25-27%, a >30 pp gap that dwarfs all gating strategies ($\leq$2 pp). We derive five structure-aware mitigation strategies from the framework, ranging from zero-cost prompt modifications to training-time regularisation; format flattening (S3) is validated by both accuracy and attention-level evidence from a verbalized-triple control, while structural dispersal (S1) yields mixed results that illuminate the challenges of format-level intervention.