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

Benchmarking Cross-Domain Audio-Visual Deception Detection

Automated deception detection is crucial for assisting humans in accurately assessing truthfulness and identifying deceptive behavior. Conventional contact-based techniques, like polygraph devices, rely on physiological signals to determine the authenticity of an individual's statements. Nevertheless, recent developments in automated deception detection have demonstrated that multimodal features derived from both audio and video modalities may outperform human observers on publicly available datasets. Despite these positive findings, the generalizability of existing audio-visual deception detection approaches across different scenarios remains largely unexplored. To close this gap, we present the first cross-domain audio-visual deception detection benchmark, that enables us to assess how well these methods generalize for use in real-world scenarios. We used widely adopted audio and visual features and different architectures for benchmarking, comparing single-to-single and multi-to-single domain generalization performance. To further exploit the impacts using data from multiple source domains for training, we investigate three types of domain sampling strategies, including domain-simultaneous, domain-alternating, and domain-by-domain for multi-to-single domain generalization evaluation. We also propose an algorithm to enhance the generalization performance by maximizing the gradient inner products between modality encoders, named ``MM-IDGM". Furthermore, we proposed the Attention-Mixer fusion method to improve performance, and we believe that this new cross-domain benchmark will facilitate future research in audio-visual deception detection.

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

Renewable Lasso without Batch-Number Constraints: A Gradient-Enhanced Approach

arXiv:2606.11738v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study online estimation for high-dimensional generalized linear models with streaming data. First, for the non-distributed setting, we propose a gradient-enhanced surrogate loss that approximates the cumulative loss using only historical summaries, which modifies and improves upon the existing renewable estimation approach for the same model in the high-dimensional setting, and removes the batch-number constraint in previous studies. We then extend the method to distributed streaming data under the master-client architecture, where batches are partitioned across sites and only summaries (gradient vectors) are exchanged. Instead of directing applying the popular method of Jordan et al. (2019) to the surrogate quadratic loss, our adjusted approach does not require the clients to compute the full surrogate loss. We derive non-asymptotic error bounds under the high-dimensional scaling, without the stringent constraint on the number of batches in the previous studies. Simulation results under linear and logistic models, together with a real-data application, show improved accuracy over existing renewable estimators.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Agentic Artificial Intelligence for Hospital Readmission Review: A Single-Center Blinded Evaluation and Exploratory Qualitative Analysis

Background: Manual review of 30-day hospital readmissions can identify actionable quality and safety problems, but it is labor-intensive. We developed and evaluated an agentic AI workflow for evidence-grounded readmission review. Materials and methods: We studied adult patients with unplanned 30-day readmission after discharge from a medicine hospitalist service at a single academic health system. An AI agent using a large language model queried a database containing notes, encounters, procedures, laboratory results, and other clinical data, and completed the same structured readmission-review rubric used by physicians. In the primary comparative evaluation, 20 randomly selected readmissions from 2025 were each reviewed by two physicians and the AI system. Blinded physician evaluators rated review quality. After rubric refinement, the AI workflow was applied to 100 recent readmissions in an exploratory expanded-cohort analysis of recurring improvement opportunities. Results: In the primary comparative evaluation, the AI classified 9/20 readmissions (45%) as preventable, compared with 19/40 physician reviews (47.5%). Blinded overall quality ratings were similar for AI and physician reviews (4.35 vs. 4.20 on a 1-5 scale; mean difference 0.15, 95% CI -0.20 to 0.48; p=0.49), as were factuality/support and usefulness/actionability ratings. No AI hallucinations were identified during factuality review. Agreement on preventability and primary readmission category was low for both AI-human and human-human comparisons. The AI system cost $0.23 per chart; physician reviewers took a median of 15 minutes, corresponding to an estimated $42.43 per chart. In the exploratory expanded-cohort analysis, AI-assisted review identified recurring vulnerabilities in post-discharge follow-up plans, incomplete inpatient workups, medication-safety transitions, and indwelling-device transitions. Conclusions: Agentic AI produced readmission reviews with similar blinded quality ratings to physician reviews in this small single-center primary comparative evaluation and supported identification of recurring quality-improvement themes in the exploratory expanded-cohort analysis. Preventability judgments remained variable among both AI and physicians, underscoring the need for human oversight and prospective evaluation before operational use.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Rethinking the Trust Region in LLM Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a cornerstone for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs), with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) serving as the de facto standard algorithm. Despite its ubiquity, we argue that the core ratio clipping mechanism in PPO is structurally ill-suited for the large vocabularies inherent to LLMs. PPO constrains policy updates based on the probability ratio of sampled tokens, which serves as a noisy single-sample Monte Carlo estimate of the true policy divergence. This creates a sub-optimal learning dynamic: updates to low-probability tokens are aggressively over-penalized, while potentially catastrophic shifts in high-probability tokens are under-constrained, leading to training inefficiency and instability. To address this, we propose Divergence Proximal Policy Optimization (DPPO), which substitutes heuristic clipping with a more principled constraint based on a direct estimate of policy divergence (e.g., Total Variation or KL). To avoid huge memory footprint, we introduce the efficient Binary and Top-K approximations to capture the essential divergence with negligible overhead. Extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate that DPPO achieves superior training stability and efficiency compared to existing methods, offering a more robust foundation for RL-based LLM fine-tuning. Our code is available at https://github.com/sail-sg/Stable-RL.

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

Structural Preservation and the Logical Expressiveness of Graph Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.17882v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bridges between graph neural networks (GNNs) and logical formalisms have been established by fixing architectural choices, such as the types of aggregation, combination, and activation functions. These choices define restricted classes of GNNs for which tight correspondences with logical formalisms can be obtained, by showing that logical formulae can be translated into equivalent GNNs and, conversely, that GNNs can be translated into equivalent formulae. In this paper we take a semantic perspective by establishing the logical expressiveness of classes of GNN classifiers that are preserved under structural properties: embeddings (extensions), injective homomorphisms, and homomorphisms. We show that, for each such property, there exists a fragment of graded modal logic characterising the class of GNNs. In particular, preservation under embeddings, injective homomorphisms, and homomorphisms corresponds to existential graded modal logic, its existential-positive fragment, and existential-positive modal logic, respectively. These results characterise the expressiveness of broad classes of GNNs independently of specific architectural choices, but we also show that each of these classes admits a GNN architecture of the same expressiveness. Technically, our approach uses a new well-quasi-order result for trees of bounded height, yielding finite representations of unravelling-invariant classes.

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

AdaTKG: Adaptive Memory for Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning

arXiv:2605.07121v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Temporal knowledge graphs (TKGs) represent time-stamped relational facts and support a wide range of reasoning tasks over evolving events. However, existing methods produce entity representations that are static at the entity level, in that each representation is a function of learned parameters only and retains no trace of the interactions in which the entity has participated. In this paper, we depart from this static view and propose that each entity be modeled as an adaptive process whose representation is refined every time the entity participates in a fact. To this end, we propose AdaTKG, which maintains a per-entity memory that is updated with every observed interaction, with the memory accumulating online and predictions improving as more interactions arrive. Specifically, we instantiate the memory update as a learnable exponential moving average governed by a single shared scalar instead of using learnable parameters for each entity, enabling AdaTKG to handle entities unseen during training. Extensive experiments confirm consistent gains over TKG baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of adaptive memory. Code is available at: https://github.com/seunghan96/AdaTKG

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Scaling-optimal purification of noisy qubit unitary channels

arXiv:2606.12394v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We consider the problem of purifying noisy qubit unitary channels. Given the ability to apply an unknown qubit unitary channel followed by depolarizing noise, we aim to construct a superchannel that purifies the noisy unitary back to the original unknown unitary. We first provide numerical evidence that sequential strategies can strictly outperform parallel strategies when the number of channel uses is finite, highlighting the fundamental distinction from state purification. We then provide a concrete $\mathrm{U}(2)$-covariant parallel protocol based on a novel entanglement-assisted quantum error-correcting code that suppresses the first-order noise strength as $O(1/n)$ with $n$ channel uses and show this scaling is asymptotically optimal in the low-noise regime, even when sequential strategies are allowed.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Global Control with the Tavis-Cummings Interaction

arXiv:2606.12906v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the controllability of a system of qubits under global control, where control pulses act identically on all qubits. Specifically, we consider a collection of qubits identically coupled to a single bosonic mode, or harmonic oscillator, via the Jaynes-Cummings interaction. This collective coupling, known as the Tavis-Cummings (TC) interaction, has been realized in several quantum computing platforms, including superconducting and atomic qubit systems. Although the qubits do not interact directly with one another, they can become entangled through their common coupling to the bosonic mode. We characterize the group of unitaries that can be implemented on the joint Hilbert space of the qubits and bosonic mode using the TC interaction together with a global $z$ field $J_z$, corresponding to identical z rotations on all qubits. We show that for n>2 qubits the set of realizable unitaries is restricted by an "accidental" symmetry of the TC Hamiltonian, distinct from its "standard" U(1) and permutational symmetries. On the other hand, we find that the Hamiltonian $J_z^2$ breaks this accidental symmetry and, together with the TC interaction and $J_z$, achieves semi-universality: it allows the implementation of arbitrary unitaries that respect permutational and U(1) symmetry, up to certain constraints on the center of the group. In a companion paper, we further analyze this remarkable accidental symmetry and show that it can be understood through Schwinger's bosonic model of angular momentum.

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

The Query Channel: Information-Theoretic Limits of Masking-Based Explanations

arXiv:2604.16689v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Masking-based post-hoc explanation methods, such as KernelSHAP and LIME, estimate local feature importance by querying a black-box model under randomized perturbations. This paper formulates this procedure as communication over a query channel, where the latent explanation acts as a message and each masked evaluation is a channel use. Within this framework, the complexity of the explanation is captured by the entropy of the hypothesis class, while the query interface supplies information at a rate determined by an identification capacity per query. We derive a strong converse showing that, if the explanation rate exceeds this capacity, the probability of exact recovery necessarily converges to one in error for any sequence of explainers and decoders. We also prove an achievability result establishing that a sparse maximum-likelihood decoder attains reliable recovery when the rate lies below capacity. A Monte Carlo estimator of mutual information yields a non-asymptotic query benchmark that we use to compare optimal decoding with Lasso- and OLS-based procedures that mirror LIME and KernelSHAP. Experiments reveal a range of query budgets where information theory permits reliable explanations but standard convex surrogates still fail. Finally, we interpret super-pixel resolution and tokenization for neural language models as a source-coding choice that sets the entropy of the explanation and show how Gaussian noise and nonlinear curvature degrade the query channel, induce waterfall and error-floor behavior, and render high-resolution explanations unattainable.

10.
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.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Impact of Antidiabetic Medications on IgG and Plasma Protein N-Glycosylation in Type 2 Diabetes Patients

Introduction. Diabetes is a growing global health challenge, necessitating effective management strategies. Glycosylation, a highly regulated post-translational protein modification, has emerged as a pivotal factor in diabetes pathophysiology. However, the modulation of protein glycosylation by antidiabetic treatment is still largely unknown. This study explored the longitudinal effects of four distinct antidiabetic therapies - metformin, insulin, sodium-glucose cotransporter-2 (SGLT2) inhibitors, and glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1RA) - on plasma protein and immunoglobulin G (IgG) glycosylation in patients with type 2 diabetes (T2D). Research Design and Methods. Plasma protein and IgG N-glycans were enzymatically released, purified and chromatographically profiled in a cohort of 124 patients, examined at four time points, to assess therapy-induced glycan alterations. Linear mixed models adjusting for covariates and multiple testing (FDR

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

From AGI to ASI

arXiv:2606.12683v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Over the last decade, building human-level artificial general intelligence has moved from far-fetched speculation to being a concrete next-decade target for many of the largest AI organisations. Achieving this goal would have profound and far-reaching impacts on human society, which raises many complex questions for the decade ahead. This report investigates how AI itself might continue to develop in a post-AGI world along the continuum of machine intelligence. The endpoint of this continuum, Universal AI, is theoretically well understood, which provides some formal grounding for the main focus of this report: the transition from human-level AGI to artificial general superintelligence, which, intuitively, can be understood as a system that is more intelligent and cognitively capable than large organisations of humans. After characterizing ASI, the report discusses four potential pathways from AGI to ASI: scaling AGI, AI paradigm shifts, recursive improvement, and ASI emerging from large-scale multi-agent collectives. The report then discusses possible frictions and bottlenecks along these pathways. Determining whether the impact of these frictions will be negligible or substantial raises a number of concrete open research questions. Due to large uncertainties for predicting ASI progress, it cannot be ruled out that AI progress might continue to accelerate over the next years. This could imply that the image of a single transformative step change, caused by the introduction of human-level AGI into our society, could be inaccurate. More apt might be the prospect of a series of transformative societal changes caused by AI-enabled progress and breakthroughs across many areas of science and technology. Preparing for this prospect requires a massively interdisciplinary endeavour of global scope and interest.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

A Survey of Reasoning and Agentic Systems in Time Series with Large Language Models

arXiv:2509.11575v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Time series reasoning treats time as a first-class axis and incorporates intermediate evidence directly into the answer. This survey defines the problem and organizes the literature by reasoning topology with three families: direct reasoning in one step, linear chain reasoning with explicit intermediates, and branch-structured reasoning that explores, revises, and aggregates. The topology is crossed with the main objectives of the field, including traditional time series analysis, explanation and understanding, causal inference and decision making, and time series generation, while a compact tag set spans these axes and captures decomposition and verification, ensembling, tool use, knowledge access, multimodality, agent loops, and LLM alignment regimes. Methods and systems are reviewed across domains, showing what each topology enables and where it breaks down in faithfulness or robustness, along with curated datasets, benchmarks, and resources that support study and deployment (https://github.com/blacksnail789521/Time-Series-Reasoning-Survey). Evaluation practices that keep evidence visible and temporally aligned are highlighted, and guidance is distilled on matching topology to uncertainty, grounding with observable artifacts, planning for shift and streaming, and treating cost and latency as design budgets. We emphasize that reasoning structures must balance capacity for grounding and self-correction against computational cost and reproducibility, while future progress will likely depend on benchmarks that tie reasoning quality to utility and on closed-loop testbeds that trade off cost and risk under shift-aware, streaming, and long-horizon settings. Taken together, these directions mark a shift from narrow accuracy toward reliability at scale, enabling systems that not only analyze but also understand, explain, and act on dynamic worlds with traceable evidence and credible outcomes.

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

Quantized Evolution Strategies: High-precision Fine-tuning of Quantized LLMs at Low-precision Cost

arXiv:2602.03120v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) is essential for deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) on memory-constrained devices, yet it renders models static and difficult to fine-tune. Standard fine-tuning paradigms, including Reinforcement Learning (RL), fundamentally rely on backpropagation and continuous weights to compute gradients. Thus they cannot be used on quantized models, where the parameter space is discrete and non-differentiable. While Evolution Strategies (ES) offer a backpropagation-free alternative, optimization of the quantized parameters can still fail due to vanishing or inaccurate gradient estimation. This paper introduces Quantized Evolution Strategies (QES), an optimization paradigm that performs full-parameter fine-tuning directly in the quantized space. QES is based on two innovations: (1) it integrates accumulated error feedback to preserve high-precision weight updating signals, and (2) it utilizes a stateless seed replay to reduce memory usage to low-precision inference levels. QES significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art zeroth-order fine-tuning methods on a variety of tasks, making direct fine-tuning for quantized models possible. It therefore opens up the possibility for scaling up LLMs entirely in the quantized space. The source code is available at https://github.com/dibbla/Quantized-Evolution-Strategies .

15.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

A vast whale necropolis has been found

In the Indian Ocean, a deep-sea area roughly 1,200 kilometres long and 7 kilometres deep was found to harbour an ecological landmark site of whale remains. In the Indian Ocean, a deep-sea area roughly 1,200 kilometres long and 7 kilometres deep was found to harbour an ecological landmark site of whale remains.

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

Natively Unlearnable Large Language Models

Unlearning aims to remove the influence of specific training data sources, but this has proved challenging because the contributions of different sources are entangled within the model. Isolating source contributions to disjoint parameters makes removal easier, though it obstructs joint learning across sources. We propose NULLs (Natively Unlearnable LLMs), a model class that satisfies the two opposing goals of isolating source-specific contributions and learning jointly across sources, by training a set of shared backbone neurons alongside a pool of sparsely activated sinks. During training, information specific to a source naturally concentrates in its sinks while information shared across sources accumulates in the backbone. A source is then unlearned at deployment by disabling its corresponding sinks, with no gradient updates and no access to the retained data. We show that NULLs scales to Wikipedia's ~6M articles, isolating each as an independent source. Unlearning a single article removes knowledge specific to it while preserving facts shared with semantically related articles, closely matching retraining from scratch. We note that unlearning with NULLs is also robust: in a case study of unlearning the Harry Potter books, NULLs resists both adversarial extraction and relearning that reverses post-hoc unlearning. Finally, NULLs preserves general language capabilities, matching a standard transformer on downstream benchmarks. Together, these results suggest that source-level unlearning need not be an afterthought. It can be built natively into LLM training while retaining the benefits of shared representation learning.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

LLM Doesn't Know What It Doesn't Know: Detecting Epistemic Blind Spots via Cross-Model Attribution Divergence on Clinical Tabular Data

arXiv:2606.19509v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to structured clinical data, yet whether they can recognize the limits of their own knowledge on such tasks remains unexplored. We study this question through the lens of cross-model attribution divergence with the goal of reducing epistemic uncertainty for structured tasks, comparing Qwen 2.5 7B and XGBoost on a prediction task via attribution divergence analysis. We report four findings. First, LLM verbalized confidence is epistemically vacuous, it outputs a near-constant (0.856-0.937) regardless of whether accuracy is 49% or 75.3%, tracking prompt format rather than prediction quality. Second, the LLM exhibits an inverse difficulty effect: accuracy drops to 64.8% when XGBoost is 99% correct, but matches XGBoost (73.8% vs. 73.1%) when it is moderately uncertain. Third, few-shot examples and SHAP-derived feature evidence are orthogonal, super-additive interventions: they reduce the Attribution Disagreement Score (ADS) from 1.54 to 0.38 and improve accuracy from 49% to 75.3% without training. Fourth, a cross-model calibrator that determined LLM reliability using attribution divergence signals reduces expected calibration error from 0.254 to 0.080, replacing uninformative verbalized confidence with patient-specific reliability estimates, without accessing model internals or requiring repeated inference. We frame these findings as a cold start problem for LLMs on structured data and outline a path toward genuine epistemic self-awareness.

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

Steering the Noise: Turning Random Perturbations into Effective Descent for Memory-Efficient LLM Fine-Tuning

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) achieves strong performance but is often limited by the memory overhead of backpropagation. Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization avoids this overhead by estimating gradients through forward passes alone, yet it typically converges slowly because random Gaussian perturbations yield high-variance gradient estimates in high-dimensional parameter spaces. In this paper, we propose a plug-and-play framework that turns random perturbations into more effective descent directions. The key idea is to draw a small pool of candidate perturbations, evaluate their loss values, and then select or combine those that are best aligned with the optimization objective. We develop two instantiations of this idea: MeZO-GV, which forms a guiding vector from the contrast between low-loss and high-loss perturbation groups, and MeZO-Greedy, which keeps the single best perturbation within a fixed evaluation budget. We theoretically show that both strategies yield a larger per-step reduction in the objective than standard ZO estimation, leading to improved convergence rates. Experiments on LLMs of different scales and architectures confirm that the proposed methods integrate naturally with existing ZO optimizers and consistently improve convergence speed and task accuracy. On OPT-13B, our approach outperforms all ZO baselines across 11 benchmarks and exceeds gradient-based methods on 9 of them, while retaining the memory efficiency of forward-only optimization.

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

ASTRA: A Scalable Next-Generation ATCO Training Simulator with Autonomous Simpilots

arXiv:2606.18319v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Air Traffic Control Operators (ATCOs) are vital in ensuring the safe, orderly, and efficient flow of air traffic, yet training capacity is constrained by reliance on specialized human trainers known as simpilots, who must role-play both pilots and ATCOs in a simulated airspace. Existing automated solutions rely on Western-centric speech models that perform poorly in Singaporean operational contexts, with off-the-shelf systems exhibiting Word Error Rates (WER) of up to 107.80% on Singaporean-accented aviation speech. We introduce ASTRA, an end-to-end training simulator that automates these simpilot roles through a pipeline that transcribes ATCO speech, interprets instructions, and generates appropriate pilot and ATCO responses using locally adapted voice models. Our fine-tuned Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) pipeline reduces WER to 23.45%, substantially outperforming existing approaches in this domain. Beyond traffic simulation, ASTRA incorporates an AI-assisted performance evaluation framework that assesses trainee radiotelephony communications across accuracy, brevity, and completeness, achieving post-optimization scores of 91.7%, 88.2%, and 86.9%, respectively. Built on open-source foundations such as DSPy and Unsloth, this approach enables scalable, standardized ATCO assessment while reducing instructor workload.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

SproutRAG: Attention-Guided Tree Search with Progressive Embeddings for Long-Document RAG

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems must balance retrieval granularity with contextual coherence, a challenge that existing methods address through LLM-guided chunking, single-level context expansion, or hierarchical summarization. These approaches variously depend on costly LLM calls during indexing or retrieval, limit context aggregation to a single granularity level, or introduce information loss through summarization. We present SproutRAG, an attention-guided hierarchical RAG framework that addresses this trade-off by organizing sentence-level chunks into progressively larger but semantically coherent units, using learned inter-sentence attention to construct a binary chunking tree. Unlike prior approaches that rely on external LLMs, fixed context expansion, or lossy summarization, SproutRAG learns which attention heads and layers best capture semantic document structure, enabling multi-granularity retrieval without additional LLM calls or compressed summaries. At retrieval time, SproutRAG uses hierarchical beam search to retrieve candidates at multiple granularities, capturing multi-sentence relevance beyond flat retrieval. The framework is trained end-to-end with a joint objective that improves both embeddings and tree structure. Experiments across four benchmarks spanning scientific, legal, and open-domain settings demonstrate that SproutRAG improves information efficiency (IE) by 6.1% on average over the strongest baseline. Code is available on https://github.com/AmirAbaskohi/SproutRAG.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

EfficientRollout: System-Aware Self-Speculative Decoding for RL Rollouts

arXiv:2606.18967v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a representative post-training paradigm for LLMs, enabling strong reasoning and agentic capabilities. However, rollout generation remains a dominant latency bottleneck because autoregressive sampling decodes responses sequentially and a small number of long-tailed generations often determine completion time. Speculative decoding (SD) offers a natural way to address this bottleneck, as it is a well-established technique for serving fixed LLMs that reduces latency by rapidly drafting tokens and accepting them through parallel verification while preserving the target-model distribution. However, its practical speedups do not directly carry over to RL rollouts: (i) the evolving target policy makes any fixed drafter increasingly mismatched with the policy's output distribution; and (ii) active batch sizes shrink throughout rollout decoding, shifting decoding from compute-bound to memory-bound regimes where parallel verification can exploit underutilized compute. Therefore, accelerating RL rollouts requires both a drafter that remains effective under long, high-temperature generations from an evolving policy and system-aware use of SD that avoids compute-bound regimes. We present EfficientRollout, a system-aware self-SD framework designed to address this gap for RL rollouts. EfficientRollout induces a quantized drafter from the target model (i.e. self-speculative decoding), keeping it coupled to the evolving policy without separate drafter pretraining or online adaptation. It further coordinates a system-aware SD toggle policy with acceptance-aware draft-length adaptation, enabling speculation only in beneficial regimes while matching the drafting budget to evolving drafter quality. EfficientRollout reduces rollout and end-to-end latency by up to 19.6% and 12.7%, respectively, over an accelerated AR rollout baseline, while preserving final model quality.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Characterizing the Impact of NVFP4 Quantization for Low-Power Edge AI Deployment

arXiv:2606.06527v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Energy-efficient neural-network inference at the edge requires reducing arithmetic cost, memory traffic, computation energy, and storage overhead while maintaining acceptable accuracy. This paper presents an ablation-focused study of NVFP4 quantization for edge-efficient neural networks, with emphasis on the relationship between activation precision, weight precision, block-size scaling, retraining, and model accuracy. NVFP4 activations are represented using 4-bit FP4 data, an FP8 block scale, and an FP32 tensor scale, enabling ultra-low precision inference while preserving activation dynamic range. A block-size ablation over six edge-efficient models shows that block size B = 16 provides a practical accuracy/storage trade-off, requiring only 4.5078 bits per input for N = 4096. A weight precision ablation further shows that FP8 and FP16 weights provide only modest gains over FP4 weights under the same NVFP4 activation path, suggesting that activation quantization and scaling dominate much of the accuracy behavior. To isolate the benefit of the NVFP4 data type, this work compares conventional unscaled FP4 activation inference and NVFP4 activation inference with and without retraining. The results show that conventional FP4 inference collapses accuracy for most compact models, while NVFP4 without retraining already recovers substantial accuracy by restoring activation dynamic range through FP8 block scaling and FP32 tensor scaling. When combined with retraining, NVFP4 achieves the best accuracy across the evaluated models, demonstrating the effectiveness of scaling-aware FP4 (NVFP4) inference. These findings provide general design guidance for hardware-software co-design of low power edge inference across a broad range of accelerator platforms, including GPUs, Tensor Cores, FPGAs, domain-specific AI accelerators, near-memory computing systems, and emerging edge-computing architectures.

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

GRASP: Gradient-Aligned Sequential Parameter Transfer for Memory-Efficient Multi-Source Learning

arXiv:2606.14900v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-source transfer learning faces a fundamental scalability bottleneck: existing approaches require either loading all K source models into memory simultaneously during parameter fusion, requiring O(K) memory, or deploying all models at inference time, making production deployment infeasible. We propose GRASP (Gradient-Aligned Sequential Parameter Transfer), which achieves superior knowledge integration while maintaining O(1) memory consumption through three key innovations: (1) sequential processing that merges one source at a time into an evolving target model, (2) parameter-wise gradient alignment that selectively transfers only parameters whose optimization directions align with the target domain, avoiding negative transfer, and (3) iterative fine-tuning that adapts transferred knowledge before integrating the next source. Extensive experiments across three continual learning benchmarks (Yearbook, CLEAR-10, CLEAR-100) spanning 10 to 108-year temporal distribution shifts and four architectures (1.3M to 25.6M parameters) demonstrate that GRASP achieves 93.5% mean accuracy over all datasets and architectures compared to ensemble method's 71.7% accuracy while requiring only constant memory versus K models for standard multi-source fusion. Critically, GRASP's sequential previously merged models and scales to arbitrarily many sources without memory growth, making it uniquely suitable for resource-constrained deployment and continually evolving source domains.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

UniReason-Med: A Shared Grounded Reasoning Interface for 2D-to-3D Transfer in Medical VQA

We study whether grounded reasoning supervision from abundant 2D medical images can improve 3D medical VQA when both input types are aligned through a common reasoning interface. We introduce UniReason-Med, a single-checkpoint framework that processes either a 2D image or a slice-serialized 3D volume at inference time, generating interleaved textual reasoning and localized visual evidence through shared box syntax, region-token injection, and a common grounded reasoning policy. To train this interface, we construct UniMed-CoT, a 220K instruction-tuning dataset with interleaved textual reasoning and grounded visual evidence, including 170K 2D and 50K 3D samples. Through supervised fine-tuning followed by outcome-level reinforcement learning, UniReason-Med learns to generate grounded reasoning traces without IoU/Dice-based localization rewards during RL. Data-mixture and component ablations show that joint 2D+3D grounded supervision substantially improves 3D reasoning over 3D-only training, while grounding and region-token injection consistently benefit both 2D and 3D tasks. These results suggest that a shared grounded reasoning interface can transfer reasoning structure from 2D images to slice-serialized volumetric medical understanding. The code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/IQuestLab/unireason-med.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

WAM4D: Fast 4D World Action Model via Spatial Register Tokens

World action models (WAMs) have recently shown promise in jointly modeling future observations and executable robot actions. However, most existing WAMs still operate in 2D video or latent spaces, where visually plausible rollouts miss the 3D spatial constraints and occluded contact geometry required for precise manipulation. While geometric foundation models offer strong priors for recovering dense 3D structure and motion from visual observations, forcing WAMs to predict the dense 4D representation introduces costly geometric decoding and slows down causal action generation. To address the trade-off, we present WAM4D, a fast 4D world action model that uses lightweight spatial register tokens as training-time future-depth readouts to transfer pretrained geometric priors into a causal video-action transformer, then removes the register branch for lightweight action inference. To prevent non-causal shortcuts, we further design causal mixture attention for the Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) WAM backbone, defining modality-specific visibility among video, action, and geometry tokens. Comprehensive experiments on RoboTwin 2.0 and challenging real-world manipulation tasks show that WAM4D improves spatial consistency and achieves competitive action prediction while maintaining efficient inference.