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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Hermite trace polynomials and chaos decompositions for the Hermitian Brownian motion

arXiv:2207.13180v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: For a non-zero parameter $q$, we define Hermite trace polynomials, which are multivariate polynomials indexed by permutations. We prove several combinatorial properties for them, such as expansions and product formulas. The linear functional determined by these trace polynomials is a state for $q = \frac{1}{N}$ for $N$ a non-zero integer. For such $q$, Hermite trace polynomials of different degrees are orthogonal. The product formulas extend to the closure with respect to the state. The state can be identified with the expectation induced by the $N \times N$ Hermitian Brownian motion. Hermite trace polynomials are martingales for this Brownian motion, while the elements in the closure can be interpreted as stochastic integrals with respect to it. Using the grading on the algebra, we prove several chaos decompositions for such integrals, as well as analyze corresponding creation and annihilation operators. In the univariate, pure trace polynomial case, trace Hermite polynomials can be identified with the Hermite polynomials of matrix argument.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Avatar V: Scaling Video-Reference Avatar Video Generation

Generating avatar videos that are not merely visually similar to a target individual but behaviorally recognizable, faithfully reproducing their talking rhythm, gestural tendencies, and expression dynamics, remains an open challenge. Existing methods predominantly condition on single static images, which provide insufficient identity information and cannot capture dynamic motion traits, while standard pixel-level objectives underserve the perceptually critical facial regions that determine avatar fidelity. We present Avatar V, a production-scale framework that addresses these limitations through video-reference-conditioned identity modeling. Rather than compressing identity into fixed-size embeddings, the model conditions directly on the full token sequence of a reference video, learning to reproduce both static identity attributes (facial geometry, skin texture) and dynamic behavioral patterns (talking rhythm, micro-expressions) through attention over the reference context. We introduce Sparse Reference Attention, an asymmetric mechanism achieving linear-complexity conditioning on arbitrarily long references; a motion representation stream enabling closed-loop talking style transfer; and an identity-aware super-resolution refiner inheriting the full reference conditioning. These are supported by a data engine curating 100M+ training clips from 50M raw videos, and a five-stage training pipeline with flow matching pre-training, personality fine-tuning, two-phase distillation (>10x acceleration), and RLHF alignment, deployed across thousands of GPUs. Avatar V generates 1080p videos of unlimited duration, achieving state-of-the-art identity preservation, lip synchronization, and generation quality on our cross-scene benchmark, consistently outperforming leading systems including Seedance 2.0, Kling O3 Pro, Veo 3.1, and OmniHuman 1.5 in both automated metrics and human evaluation.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Compositional Reasoning Depth Predicts Clinical AI Failure: Empirical Evidence Consistent with Transformer Compositionality Limits in Electronic Health Record Question Answering

作者:

Aggregate accuracy benchmarks conceal a systematic structure in how large language models fail at electronic health record (EHR) question answering: questions requiring more inferential steps produce disproportionately more errors. Motivated by theoretical results on transformer compositionality limits, we introduce a pre-specified hop-count taxonomy – the number of distinct reasoning steps required to answer a clinical question from an EHR – as a principled predictor of model failure. We annotate 313 clinician-generated MedAlign EHR question-answer pairs across four hop levels and evaluate 301 questions in a within-model ablation (claude-sonnet-4-6, zero-shot vs. extended thinking) and cross-architecture replications (gpt-4o and gpt-5.4-2026-03-05, zero-shot). All three models, spanning two providers and two OpenAI generations (GPT-4 and GPT-5), show monotone accuracy decline with hop count: Claude Sonnet zero-shot falls from 30.6% (hop=1) to 17.6% (hop=4) (Cochran-Armitage z=-2.30, p=0.011; OR per hop 0.72, 95% CI [0.56,0.92], p=0.008); GPT-4o replicates this (37.8% to 14.7%; OR 0.58 [0.45,0.75], p

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Resourcefulness of non-classical continuous-variable quantum gates

arXiv:2410.09226v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In continuous-variable quantum computation, identifying key elements that enable a quantum computational advantage is a long-standing issue. Starting from the standard results on the necessity of Wigner negativity, we develop a comprehensive and versatile approach in which the techniques of $(s)$-ordered quasiprobabilities are exploited to provide rigorous statements on the simulability of photonic quantum circuits consisting of previously characterized gates and thereby identifying the contribution of each quantum gate to the potential achievement of quantum computational advantage. This is achieved by means of an analysis of the so-called transfer function, allowing us to highlight the resourcefulness of a gate set. As such this technique can be straightforwardly applied to current continuous-variables quantum circuits, while also constraining the tolerable amount of losses above which any potential quantum advantage can be ruled out. We use $(s)$-ordered quasiprobability distributions on phase-space to capture the non-classical features in the protocol, and focus our technique entirely on the ordering parameter $s$. This allows us to highlight the resourcefulness and robustness to loss of a universal set of unitary gates comprising three distinct Gaussian gates and any non-Gaussian unitary gate, providing important insight on the role of non-Gaussianity.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Curvature-Guided Geometric Representation for Protein-Ligand Binding Affinity Prediction

arXiv:2606.14159v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protein-ligand binding affinity (PLA) prediction is critical in drug discovery. Despite the notable advancements in machine learning-based approaches, existing methods struggle to jointly characterize local geometric organization and globally coordinated cross-molecular interactions, limiting their ability to model complex binding mechanisms. Here, we propose RicciBind, a geometric representation framework that integrates curvature-guided hierarchical structure learning with optimal transport (OT)-based cross-domain alignment to model molecular interactions. Specifically, RicciBind leverages Ricci curvature to capture local interaction tightness within molecular structures, enhancing structural awareness and organizing atomic interactions into curvature-aware hierarchical representations. An OT-based cluster matching mechanism then aligns protein and ligand clusters across heterogeneous domains under geometric constraints, enabling globally consistent correspondences and revealing higher-order interaction patterns beyond local neighborhoods. By coupling curvature-guided structure encoding with OT-driven cross-domain alignment, RicciBind effectively models complex interaction semantics and substantially improves both the accuracy and interpretability of binding affinity prediction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RicciBind achieved superior predictive performance and generalization across PLA benchmarks and virtual screening tasks. Ablation studies further confirmed the essential role of Ricci curvature in enhancing molecular interaction representations.

06.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

Children's DNA Methylation and Family Dynamics in a Congo Basin Subsistence Community: Links with Parental Conflict and Fathers' Caregiving

Family environments may contribute to children's long-term health through biological processes, including epigenetic regulation such as DNA methylation (DNAm). However, most studies in this area focus on Euro-American populations while also rarely including fathering data. The current study investigated children's blood DNAm associations with positive (father caregiving) and negative (parental conflict) family dynamics in a smaller-scale subsistence society living in the Congo Basin rainforest. We measured DNAm from dried blood spots of 54 children (mean age=8.48 years) and conducted three epigenome-wide association studies aimed at discovering differential co-methylated regions (CMRs) associated with family dynamics. Via path models, we investigated the health implications and shared contribution of family factors of the identified CMRs. Differential DNAm associated with family dynamics was localized to genes related to stress, immunology, development, and aging, thus possibly linking to children's physical health and were simultaneously connected to other family factors such as number of siblings. Our findings suggested similarities in biological embedding of family factors across socio-ecologically diverse contexts.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

OpenMedReason: Scientific Reasoning Supervision for Medical Vision-Language Models

High-stakes clinical use of large vision-language models (LVLMs) requires reasoning that is grounded in visual evidence and clinical knowledge, not just correct final answers. We introduce OpenMedReason, a large-scale, open multimodal medical reasoning corpus comprising approximately 450K image-question-answer instances whose reasoning traces are primarily derived from curated biomedical, human-authored scientific articles. OpenMedReason provides high-fidelity supervision beyond synthetic chains of thought, covering diverse medical domain vision modalities such as radiological scans, microscopic images, visible light photographs, charts, and others. We complement it with OpenMedReason-Bench, a held-out benchmark that allows fine-grained evaluation of LVLMs along three complementary axes of capability, including perception, medical knowledge, and rationale, enabling diagnostic evaluation beyond final-answer accuracy. OpenMedReason is a rich training resource that exhibits its effectiveness in both supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement-based alignment. Training with OpenMedReason yields a 20% average improvement in VQA accuracy over the base model and achieves performance within 4.2% of the strongest comparable-scale medical LVLMs. Fine-grained performance analysis confirms that the gains are not concentrated in any single axis: OpenMedReason improves perception, medical knowledge, and rationale jointly, and its reasoning traces are preferred over those of the base model in 86.1% of pairwise comparisons. We release the code and dataset at huggingface.co/datasets/neginb/OpenMedReason.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

EventRadar: Long-Range Visual UAV Discovery through Spatiotemporal Event Sensing

Unauthorized unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) activity around airports, public venues, and other sensitive sites has made protected-airspace monitoring increasingly important. A practical sensing system must search a wide angular region, find small long-range targets, and return both bearing support and UAV-specific evidence before a restricted perimeter is breached. Existing UAV detection paths often rely on spatially organized evidence, such as body extent, silhouette, or track continuity. At long range, however, these cues become difficult to preserve and verify as the target footprint weakens and its image-plane support shrinks. EventRadar follows a complementary cue: propeller-induced temporal periodicity, which recent event-camera sensing studies have shown can reveal UAV-specific motion after appearance becomes weak. We extend this cue to kilometer-scale active sensing with an event-camera prototype. Scene-Anchored Geometry Evidence (SAGE) fuses scanning events with IMU pose to maintain a bearing-indexed scene memory, separating transient candidate support from persistent background clutter. Comb-guided Harmonic-Group Learned Iterative Shrinkage and Thresholding Algorithm (CHG) then treats each candidate as a weak high-rate timing signal and recovers phase-insensitive harmonic evidence with fixed compute. Compared with related event-camera baselines on 700-1500 m UAV event recordings, EventRadar achieves 0.990 mAP$_{.3}$ and 0.949 F1$_{.3}$, reduces FN$_{.3}$ to 0.009, and shows real-time feasibility in prototype profiling.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

HULFSynth : An INR based Super-Resolution and Ultra Low-Field MRI Synthesis via Contrast factor estimation

We present an unsupervised single image bidirectional Magnetic Resonance Image (MRI) synthesizer that synthesizes an Ultra-Low Field (ULF) like image from a High-Field (HF) magnitude image and vice-versa. Unlike existing MRI synthesis models, our approach is inspired by the physics that drives contrast changes between HF and ULF MRIs. Our forward model simulates a HF to ULF transformation by estimating the tissue-type Signal-to-Noise ratio (SNR) values based on target contrast values. For the Super-Resolution task, we used an Implicit Neural Representation (INR) network to synthesize HF image by simultaneously predicting tissue-type segmentations and image intensity without observed HF data. The proposed method is evaluated using synthetic ULF-like data from generated from standard 3T T$_1$-weighted images for qualitative assessments and paired 3T-64mT T$_1$-weighted images for validation experiments. WM-GM contrast improved by 52% in synthetic ULF-like images and 37% in 64mT images. Sensitivity experiments demonstrated the robustness of our forward model to variations in target contrast, noise and initial seeding.

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

Mitigating Heterogeneity-Induced Drift in Hierarchical Sign-Based Federated Learning

arXiv:2602.02355v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Hierarchical federated learning (HFL) is well suited for large-scale wireless and Internet of Things systems, where devices communicate with nearby edge servers before reaching the cloud. In these environments, uplink bandwidth and latency impose strict communication constraints, making aggressive gradient compression essential. One-bit sign-based stochastic gradient descent methods provide an attractive solution in flat federated settings, but their behavior in hierarchical edge–cloud architectures remains insufficiently understood, especially under inter-cluster data heterogeneity. To address this gap, we develop a sign-based HFL framework in which devices transmit binary stochastic-gradient signs to edge servers, edge servers apply majority voting, and the cloud periodically aggregates edge models. Our analysis reveals that inter-cluster heterogeneity induces a persistent bias term in the convergence bound, reflecting the drift of edge models toward local objectives. This term cannot be removed by increasing the number of training rounds or by tuning standard hyperparameters alone. We therefore propose \(\mathtt{DC-HierSignSGD}\), a drift-corrected sign-based HFL algorithm in which devices apply a cloud-assisted gradient correction before taking the sign. We show that this pre-sign correction mitigates the non-vanishing heterogeneity-induced bias while preserving binary device–edge communication during the repeated local sign-update steps. Experiments under severe inter-cluster heterogeneity demonstrate that \(\mathtt{DC-HierSignSGD}\) improves the stability and accuracy of sign-based HFL and achieves performance comparable to full-precision hierarchical SGD with substantially lower device–edge communication.

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

OpenClaw-Skill: Collective Skill Tree Search for Agentic Large Language Models

Equipping Large Language Model (LLM) agents with effective skills is crucial for solving complex tasks in real-world systems like OpenClaw. In this work, we aim to develop a framework that automatically constructs such reusable skills to enhance LLMs in tool use, multi-step reasoning, and dynamic environment interaction. To this end, we propose Collective Skill Tree Search (CSTS), a novel tree-search-based skill construction framework that constructs structured, diverse and generalizable tree of skills. The core idea of CSTS is to leverage collective intelligence to jointly search, identify and compose effective skills via two iterative phases: Collective Skill Node Generation (CSN-Gen) and Collective Skill Node Assessment (CSN-Assess). CSN-Gen exploits collective knowledge from multiple models to explore diverse candidate skills for each subtask, enabling comprehensive skill exploration. CSN-Assess employs multiple models as judges to evaluate and select skill nodes with two scoring mechanisms: (1) collective quality scoring that aggregates independent evaluations to produce a robust estimate of skill effectiveness, and (2) collective transferability scoring that explicitly verifies whether a skill generalizes well across different models. With CSTS, we construct a set of comprehensive tree of skills along with skill-augmented training data, enabling models to effectively learn and utilize skills. Besides, we introduce Collective Skill Reinforcement Learning, which actively selects multiple relevant skills from the tree to broaden solution-space exploration, avoid being trapped by a single skill and its resulting homogeneous or suboptimal solutions. As a result, our trained model, OpenClaw-Skill, exhibits outstanding agentic capabilities in long-horizon planning, tool use and generalization over challenging benchmarks.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Decoupled Motion Representation Learning for Moving Infrared Small Target Detection

Infrared small target detection in dynamic scenes remains challenging due to the highly coupled motions among targets, imaging platforms, and dynamic backgrounds. Existing multi-frame methods usually perform implicit temporal modeling, where coherent background dynamics dominate motion correspondence learning, leading to an inherent trade-off between detection and false alarms. In this work, we observe that background motions exhibit strong global coherence, whereas small targets mainly correspond to sparse local motion anomalies. Moreover, many false-alarm responses maintain high consistency with globally coherent motion patterns, indicating that they mainly originate from coherent background dynamics rather than genuine target motions. Based on these observations, we propose a decoupled motion representation learning framework for moving infrared small target detection. Specifically, an explicit motion branch is introduced to model globally coherent motion dynamics using pretrained optical flow priors, together with a structure-preserving self-supervised adaptation strategy for infrared motion correspondence learning. Meanwhile, an implicit motion branch based on deformable feature alignment is designed to capture target-sensitive local motion anomalies under coherent motion guidance. Furthermore, a coherent-motion-guided local anomaly reasoning module is proposed to identify and suppress coherent-motion-induced false responses during localized motion modeling. Extensive experiments on two challenging infrared small target detection benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches, particularly in dynamic scenes with complex motions, while maintaining favorable inference efficiency.

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

Transfer Learning for FHIR Questionnaire Terminology Binding

Electronic prior authorization workflows require FHIR Questionnaire items to carry LOINC codes, yet most items in the HL7 Da Vinci CDS-Library lack these bindings. We treat this as a retrieval problem: given a Questionnaire item's text, find the correct LOINC code in a pool of 97,314 active codes. We compare six methods (TF-IDF, frozen MiniLM, BioBERT, BioLORD, contrastively fine-tuned MiniLM, and a TF-IDF+GPT reranker) on a 54-item evaluation set spanning three query styles (natural question, medium, and terse). No single method wins on every metric. BioLORD, a frozen encoder pre-trained on biomedical ontology definitions, has the best top-rank accuracy (R@1 = 0.185, MRR = 0.246) despite seeing no task-specific data, while a contrastive fine-tune on raw LHC-Forms pairs takes R@5 (0.389) and R@10 (0.426). A distribution-shift ablation shows why the fine-tune in our main table is not the strongest one: adding GPT-generated paraphrases to the raw pairs drops R@5 from 0.389 to 0.296, so the augmented union underperforms raw-only training on every metric except R@1. Performance peaks at 5k training pairs. Error analysis on BioLORD's R@1 failures shows that wrong-specificity and ambiguous-text cases together account for 59% of errors.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Compressing Image Style Training into a Single Model Forward

Diffusion-based style transfer must balance inference efficiency with stylization fidelity. Adapter-based methods are efficient, but they inject style as an external condition and can either weaken reference-specific appearance or copy reference semantics into the generated image. Optimization-based personalization methods such as LoRA internalize style more effectively, but require a separate training process for every new style. We introduce i2L (image-to-LoRA), a framework that amortizes style LoRA training into a single forward pass. Given one or more reference images, i2L predicts LoRA weights for a text-to-image model, enabling immediate style instantiation without per-style optimization. The architecture combines an image encoder, learnable LoRA queries, and compressed decoding heads that generate adapted matrices. Training on semantically diverse style pairs encourages the predictor to preserve appearance cues while suppressing reference-content copying. Experiments on Z-Image, FLUX.2, and Hidream-O1 show that i2L improves style fidelity, prompt alignment, and perceptual quality over existing baselines. Because i2L produces explicit LoRA weights, it also supports asymmetric classifier-free guidance, multi-reference style fusion, and composition with controllable-generation modules.

15.
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.

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

Data-Driven Dynamic Assortment in Online Platforms: Learning about Two Sides

arXiv:2606.11118v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study a dynamic assortment problem on a two-sided service platform with incomplete information and heterogeneous customers in a discrete-time setting. In each period, a customer arrives seeking service, and the platform chooses an assortment of sellers to display. The customer then proposes a transaction to at most one seller in the assortment according to a multinomial logit choice model. After a fixed number of periods, sellers review the proposals they have received and each chooses at most one customer according to another multinomial logit choice model, after which the cycle repeats. A key challenge is that the platform does not know the choice-model parameters of either customers or sellers in advance. To our knowledge, this is the first study of a dynamic assortment problem in which both sides' choice parameters are unknown. We develop a data-driven algorithm that learns these parameters while optimizing the platform's objective over time. We evaluate performance using regret, which measures revenue loss relative to a clairvoyant benchmark that knows all parameters and customer arrivals in advance. We show that the algorithm's worst-case regret grows polylogarithmically over time, and we derive a matching lower bound, establishing its rate optimality.

17.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Geometric obstructions to Lipschitz transport between weighted Hessian $\mathrm{CD}(\kappa,\infty)$ manifolds

arXiv:2606.11085v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We construct a weighted Riemannian manifold $(\mathbb R^2,g,\mu)$ satisfying $\mathrm{CD}(1/2,\infty)$, the curvature-dimension condition, with the following property: if $\gamma$ denotes a centered Gaussian measure on $\mathbb R^2$, then there is no Lipschitz map $T:(\mathbb R^2,\|\cdot\|) \to (\mathbb R^2,g)$ satisfying $T_\#\gamma=\mu$. Building on this, we prove a Weyl-type asymptotic law for the eigenvalues of the weighted Laplacian $-\Delta_{g,\mu}$ and show that they are asymptotically negligible when compared to the eigenvalues of $-\Delta_{\gamma}$. These results give strong counterexamples to two questions of E. Milman and complement the recent counterexample of Aryan.

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

Safety-Contract Graph Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Network Security Response

arXiv:2606.13832v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous network-security response systems promise to reduce Security Operations Centre (SOC) reaction latency, but reward-only multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) can improve security reward while remaining non-deployable. We present a safety-contract graph MARL framework and instantiate it as ACD$^3$-GAT (Adaptive Constrained Counterfactual Decisioning with a Graph Attention Network encoder), an architecture that separates simulator observations from reusable operational budgets, constrained optimization, graph state encoding, and counterfactual action screening. We evaluate the method in CAGE Challenge 4, where agents operate under budgets for Mean Time to Recover (MTTR), false-positive response, and firewall change-management disruption. Across the benchmark, every unconstrained method violates the SOC downtime budget in 100% of evaluated episodes, with mean downtime proxy costs of 311-430 against a budget of 50. This complements prior CAGE Challenge 4 findings by showing that reward-only learning lacks operational discipline. Constrained MAPPO-GAT (C-MAPPO-GAT) isolates Lagrangian operational-cost control and budget-aware screening, while ACD$^3$-GAT adds budget context, CVaR tail-risk estimation, opponent-belief state, and Graph Counterfactual Risk Propagation (G-CRP). The replicated comparison includes three 200-episode seeds for IPPO, MAPPO-GAT, C-MAPPO-GAT, and ACD$^3$-GAT. C-MAPPO-GAT reduces downtime violation from 100% to 0.3% and mean downtime cost from 355.4 to 15.5 relative to MAPPO-GAT. ACD$^3$-GAT reduces mean downtime cost to 48.2 with a 13.8% violation rate, placing it on the safety-contract frontier rather than at the most conservative compliance point. Topology-seed and coupled adaptive Red-process stress tests preserve this contrast and show lower worst adaptive degradation for safety-constrained policies than reward-only MAPPO-GAT.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Gaze Heads: How VLMs Look at What They Describe

How a vision-language model internally solves the task of describing an image is far from obvious. We find that the model develops a specific mechanism for this: a small set of attention heads in its language-model backbone, which we call gaze heads, whose attention tracks the image region the model is currently describing. We find them with a simple correlation score from a few forward passes, using comic strips as a controlled testbed where narrative order is laid out spatially. These gaze heads do not just track the image tokens being described: redirecting their attention to a chosen region forces the VLM to describe that region instead. A single attention-mask intervention on the top-100 gaze heads, fewer than 9% of all heads, steers the model's answer to any chosen comic panel at 83.1% accuracy, while the same intervention on random heads fails to redirect the answer, and intervening on all heads destroys generation. The same lever also extends to continuous control: switching the gaze target mid-generation makes the model wrap up its current panel description and move to the new one within a few tokens. Beyond comics, the same intervention redirects answers to chosen regions in natural COCO images. The mechanism further recurs across model sizes from 2B to 32B parameters and across other VLM architectures, although some frozen-encoder families show no comparable head set. More broadly, this shows that targeted edits identified through mechanistic analysis can serve as practical inference-time levers for steering multimodal model behavior, without any retraining. Our code, interactive demo, and datasets are available at https://gaze.baulab.info/

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

LoRA-Muon: Spectral Steepest Descent on the Low-Rank Manifold

arXiv:2606.12921v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) significantly reduces compute and memory costs for finetuning Deep Learning models but is often harder to tune than dense training: when using factor-wise optimizers such as AdamW, it is sensitive to initialization choices, its optimal learning rates transfer poorly across ranks, and it often fails to beat dense baselines. We derive LoRA-Muon by applying the Muon optimizer's spectral steepest-descent rule to the low-rank setting. Along with our split weight-decay rule, our main claim is that LoRA-Muon is a good low-rank proxy for full-rank Muon and Shampoo-family optimizers. Its optimal learning rates transfer across rank, width, depth, and factor-rescaling. In our compute-matched TinyShakespeare study, a rank-$2$ proxy recovers the dense best tested learning rate, and a rank-$32$ LoRA-Muon run attains lower mean validation loss than the dense baseline in the seed-averaged sweep. We further show that the Spectron optimizer depends on arbitrary factor scaling, so it would likely be a poor fit when finetuning starts from badly imbalanced factors, and that LoRA-RITE's simplified QR-coordinate core implements the same spectral update. LoRA-Muon computes that update without QR-decomposition and avoids storing second moments, making it more accelerator-friendly and memory-efficient.

21.
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.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Probing Quantum States over Spacetime Through Interferometry

arXiv:2507.19258v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Establishing a notion of the quantum state that applies consistently across space and time could be a crucial step toward formulating a relativistic quantum theory. We give an operational meaning to multipartite quantum states over arbitrary regions in spacetime through a causally agnostic measurement, a measurement scheme that can be consistently implemented independently of the causal relation between the regions. We prove that such measurements can always be implemented with interferometry, also known as the scattering circuit technique, wherein the conventional density operator, the recently developed quantum state over time (QSOT), and the process matrix formalisms smoothly merge. This framework allows for a systematic study of mixed states in the temporal setting, which turn out to be crucial for modeling quantum non-Markovianity. Based on this, we demonstrate that two different ensembles of quantum dynamics can be represented by the same QSOT, indicating that they cannot be distinguished through interferometry. Moreover, our formalism reveals a new type of spatiotemporal correlation between two quantum dynamics that originates from synchronized propagation in time under time-reversal symmetry. We show that quantum systems with such correlation can be utilized as a reference frame to distinguish certain dynamics indistinguishable under time-reversal symmetry.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

MaskWAM: Unifying Mask Prompting and Prediction for World-Action Models

World Action Models (WAMs) present a promising paradigm for robotic control via video prediction. However, current WAMs suffer from fundamental spatial bottlenecks: standard text inputs introduce referential ambiguity in cluttered scenes, while unstructured RGB predictions lack semantic grounding and remain biased by task-irrelevant backgrounds. To overcome these limitations, we introduce MaskWAM, an object-centric world-action model. By jointly integrating masks as both explicit inputs and predictions via a unified Mixture of Transformers (MoT), MaskWAM unlocks robust policy generalization. This design provides two key benefits: (1) predicting future masks yields object-centric semantic supervision that suppresses visual noise, significantly enhancing even standard text-conditioned WAMs; and (2) coupling this predictive supervision with first-frame visual prompts, such as target object masks, establishes a precise spatial anchor that substantially reduces language ambiguity. Crucially, as WAMs are inherently vision-driven architectures, direct mask conditioning yields substantially stronger guidance than text alone, establishing a precise and robust paradigm for manipulating unseen objects. Evaluations on LIBERO, RoboTwin, and real-world tasks demonstrate that MaskWAM significantly outperforms baselines in both language-clear and language-ambiguous tasks.

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

One-Step Generalization Ratio Guided Optimization for Domain Generalization

arXiv:2606.16301v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Domain Generalization (DG) aims to train models that generalize to unseen target domains but often overfit to domain-specific features, known as undesired correlations. Gradient-based DG methods typically guide gradients in a dominant direction but often inadvertently reinforce spurious correlations. Recent work has employed dropout to regularize overconfident parameters, but has not explicitly adjusted gradient alignment or ensured balanced parameter updates. We propose GENIE (Generalization-ENhancing Iterative Equalizer), a novel optimizer that leverages the One-Step Generalization Ratio (OSGR) to quantify each parameter's contribution to loss reduction and assess gradient alignment. By dynamically equalizing OSGR via a preconditioning factor, GENIE prevents a small subset of parameters from dominating optimization, thereby promoting domain-invariant feature learning. Theoretically, GENIE balances convergence contribution and gradient alignment among parameters, achieving higher OSGR while retaining SGD's convergence rate. Empirically, it outperforms existing optimizers and enhances performance when integrated with various DG and single-DG methods.

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

Projection and Quantisation: A Unifying View of Learning to Hash, from Random Projections to the RAG Era

作者:

Approximate nearest-neighbour search underpins large-scale retrieval and retrieval-augmented generation, yet its methods are studied in communities that seldom read one another. We argue that they form one field with three design choices. We develop the projection-quantisation-organisation lens: every method places its projections, places its quantisation thresholds, and organises the resulting codes for search. We test the lens with a reproducible measurement, released as the open BitBudget benchmark, and report three findings. First, the quantisation axis delivers the largest memory savings: a one-bit code with full-precision re-ranking matches uncompressed quality for six of seven embedders, the scanned code one thirty-second of the float's size. Second, the orderings the lens anticipates, including a learned-embedding regime where binary codes overtake an inverted-file product quantiser at a matched byte budget, recur as the embedding is enlarged. Third, given class labels, an eight-byte supervised code more than doubles the retrieval quality of the two-kilobyte task-agnostic float it replaces. We also recast the semantic identifiers of generative retrieval as quantisation codes. The main contribution is a single, tested account of compact-code search, from random projections to the retrieval-augmented era.