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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

JourneyFormer: Encoding Airbnb Guest Journey with Sequence Modeling

arXiv:2606.19108v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sequence modeling has become increasingly popular in recommendation and ranking algorithms, owing to its capacity to model users' historical behaviors and infer user intentions. Despite its theoretical simplicity, the practical deployment of a sequence model in production is non-trivial due to complexity of the sequence and sparse labels. For example, in Airbnb, guest sequences are often long, exploratory and complex, and we focus on booking labels, which are sparse. As such, we are often required to make various design decisions regarding data and modeling to strike a balance between effectiveness and scalability. This work delved into these production challenges and deployed JourneyFormer, a sequence modeling solution for search ranking at Airbnb. We detail crucial design considerations, covering aspects such as guest event selection, ID embeddings, model architecture, and label attribution. Additionally, we describe several tailored strategies to accelerate model training and inference. JourneyFormer has been successfully deployed within Airbnb's production, where its effectiveness and impact have been evidenced not only by improved offline ranking metrics but also by significant gains in key business metrics through online A/B testing across 2 production surfaces.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Grids Often Outperform Implicit Neural Representations at Compressing Dense Signals

Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) have recently shown impressive results, but their fundamental capacity, implicit biases, and scaling behavior remain poorly understood. We investigate the performance of diverse INRs across a suite of 2D and 3D real and synthetic signals with varying effective bandwidth, as well as both overfitting and generalization tasks including tomography, super-resolution, and denoising. By stratifying performance according to model size as well as signal type and bandwidth, our results shed light on how different INR and grid representations allocate their capacity. We find that, for many tasks involving dense signals, a simple regularized grid with interpolation trains faster and to higher or comparable quality than any INR with the same number of parameters. We also find limited settings – namely fitting binary signals such as shape contours – where INRs outperform grids, to guide future development and use of INRs towards the most advantageous applications.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

When Does Routing Become Interpretable? Causal Probes on Block Attention Residuals

arXiv:2606.13168v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Block Attention Residuals (Block AttnRes) by replace fixed additive residuals with a learned softmax over earlier depth-source representations, surfacing cross-layer routing as an inspectable tensor in the forward pass. This is a tempting interpretability target: information flow normally inferred indirectly is now directly observable. We ask whether such exposure suffices for mechanistic interpretation. We probe two same-scale ($0.6$B) Block AttnRes checkpoints under identical routing-ablation interventions: a vanilla Qwen3 inference-wrapped through a deterministic recency-bias schedule that the codebase admits as a routing-equivalent loading path, and a Block AttnRes Qwen3 trained from scratch with routing as part of optimisation. The wrapped baseline's routing weights are content-independent and reproduce the schedule's analytic prediction. The trained AttnRes checkpoint instead exhibits three localised routing motifs: an embedding-source pathway through early-layer MLP, a current-state pathway through early-layer attention and MLP, and an older-history pathway through late-layer attention. Beyond this stratification, we find a sharp dissociation between average routing mass and causal importance: in both sublayers, the largest mass slice is not the largest causal contribution, and one source family carries appreciable mass with no detectable causal role under intervention. Architectural exposure of routing is therefore necessary but not sufficient for mechanistic interpretation: structured depth routing emerges only when routing has been part of training, and even then, descriptive routing summaries should be treated as candidate hypotheses to be tested by causal interventions, not as evidence of mechanism in their own right.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Categorical Robustness Assessment for Machine Learning based Network Intrusion Detection Systems

arXiv:2606.12075v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) heavily utlize Machine Learning (ML) but ML models can be manipulated via adversarial attacks. These attacks add carefully crafted perturbations to network traffic data that leads to misclassifications. While prior work has demonstrated adversarial vulnerabilities in isolated settings, systematic cross-architecture as well as class and category of attack based comparisons under controlled attack conditions remain limited, leaving practitioners without clear guidance on which models to deploy in adversarial environments. This paper asks a simple question: what type of classifier architectures actually hold up when attackers try to manipulate the systems? We put three popular architectures through their paces: a 1D Convolutional Neural Network, a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network, and a Random Forest (RF) ensemble. Using the ACI-IoT-2023 dataset (over 1.2 million samples spanning 12 attack types), we subject each model with FGSM and PGD adversarial attacks, which apply gradient-based perturbations in normalized feature space consistent with established adversarial ML evaluation protocols, at perturbation budgets ranging from $\epsilon=0.01$ to $\epsilon=0.1$. Surprisingly, Random Forest achieved near-perfect baseline accuracy (99.98\%), yet collapsed catastrophically under attack, dropping 73 percentage points at the smallest perturbation we tested. CNN, on the other hand, retained 95.5\% accuracy at $\epsilon=0.01$ and degraded gracefully as perturbations increased. LSTM fell somewhere in between. These findings flip the conventional wisdom where high baseline accuracy means nothing if a model shatters at the first sign of adversarial pressure. For practitioners deploying intrusion detection in adversarial environments, we recommend CNN-based architectures and provide scenario-specific deployment guidance.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Learned JPEG Compression for DNN Vision

JPEG, a lossy image compression technique designed for human viewers, has maintained its dominance for decades. However, in the era of artificial intelligence (AI), a substantial portion of image data, often compressed by JPEG, is and will continue to be consumed by deep neural networks (DNNs) instead of humans, thus creating a need to optimize JPEG for DNN inference performance. To this end, we propose learned JPEG compression for DNN vision (J4D), a novel training framework for determining JPEG encoding parameters to minimize compression rate while maximizing DNN inference performance. The major challenge of solving this optimization problem lies in representing the JPEG codec and compression rate in closed form. By incorporating a differentiable soft quantizer based on a probabilistic quantization scheme, we not only obtain a differentiable proxy for the JPEG codec, but are also able to compute the entropy of the coded source analytically, which is a close estimate of the actual compression rate. Equipped with both the differentiable JPEG codec and the information-theoretic rate estimator, we are then able to solve the aforementioned optimization problem with backpropagation. After training, the learned encoding parameters will be subsequently used in actual JPEG encoding based on probabilistic quantization. Extensive experimental results across multiple datasets and DNN architectures demonstrate that J4D consistently and significantly outperforms the default JPEG and other competitive JPEG codecs optimized for DNNs. Notably, compared to the default JPEG, J4D achieves an increase in accuracy by as much as 11.60% at the same rate, or a reduction of compression rate up to 80.05% at the same accuracy. Additionally, with the help of J4D, we show the potential to design universal JPEG encoding parameters for various DNN architectures for the first time.

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

Tensor-based second-order causal discovery

arXiv:2606.18074v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Causal discovery seeks to uncover the causal dependencies among variables. For this purpose, we propose an algorithm called Tensor-based Second-order Causal Discovery (TSCD). Its input is a tensor obtained from the covariance matrices of observational and interventional data. Assuming the causal dependencies follow a linear structural equation model on a directed acyclic graph (DAG), TSCD outputs the DAG and the functions on its edges, requiring only that the noise variables are uncorrelated. We also implement a version of the approach for nonlinear models. Our focus on second-order statistics (via the covariance matrices) is motivated by their statistical and computational efficiency relative to higher-order moments, their identifiability relative to first-order statistics, and that they work regardless of whether the variables are Gaussian. We show that TSCD has identifiable causal order and parameters from a number of interventions that is logarithmic in the number of variables. Experiments show that TSCD is robust to noise, competitive with existing methods, and scales to hundreds of variables.

07.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Quenched and Annealed CLTs for the one-periodic Aztec diamond in random environment

arXiv:2510.11846v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the asymptotic behavior of random dimer coverings of the one-periodic Aztec diamond in random environment. We investigate quenched limit theorems for the height function and we extend annealed limit theorems that were recently studied in [arXiv:2507.08560]. We consider more general choices of random edge weights (independence is not assumed) and we distinguish two cases where the random edge weights satisfy the Central Limit Theorem (CLT) under different scalings. For both cases, we prove convergence to the Gaussian Free Field for the quenched fluctuations. For the annealed version, it had been shown in [arXiv:2507.08560], that Gaussian Free Field fluctuations can be dominated by the much larger fluctuations of the random environment. To access quenched fluctuations we analyze the Schur process with random parameters in a way that allows to prove the annealed CLT for the height function for non i.i.d. weights. We consider specific examples where we determine the asymptotic fluctuations.

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

On the Limitations of Ray-Tracing for Learning-Based RF Tasks in Urban Environments

arXiv:2507.19653v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the realism of Sionna v1.0.2 ray-tracing for outdoor cellular links in central Rome. We use a real measurement set of 1,664 user-equipments (UEs) and six nominal base-station (BS) sites. Using these fixed positions we systematically vary the main simulation parameters, including path depth, diffuse/specular/refraction flags, carrier frequency, as well as antenna's properties like its altitude, radiation pattern, and orientation. Simulator fidelity is scored for each base station via Spearman correlation between measured and simulated powers, and by a fingerprint-based k-nearest-neighbor localization algorithm using RSSI-based fingerprints. Across all experiments, solver hyper-parameters are having immaterial effect on the chosen metrics. On the contrary, antenna locations and orientations prove decisive. By simple greedy optimization we improve the Spearman correlation by 5% to 130% for various base stations, while kNN-based localization error using only simulated data as reference points is decreased by one-third on real-world samples, while staying twice higher than the error with purely real data. Precise geometry and credible antenna models are therefore necessary but not sufficient; faithfully capturing the residual urban noise remains an open challenge for transferable, high-fidelity outdoor RF simulation.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Discovering Novel intracranial EEG Biomarkers of Seizure Generating Tissue through Time-Frequency Analysis

Objective: EEG biomarkers for seizure-generating tissue have historically been identified visually, which lacks objectivity and limits utility of automated approaches. For example, high frequency oscillations and interictal epileptiform discharges were promising markers to improve surgical outcomes for refractory epilepsy, but low specificity has hindered clinical implementation, and automated algorithms have not improved this. Methods: We developed Intracranial EEG Pattern Identification and Categorization, an automated, data-driven time-frequency framework for EEG biomarker discovery. It detects transient high-power intracranial EEG waveforms (1-500 Hz) and characterizes them using eight features. In seizure-free patients, waveforms occurring predominantly in resected intracranial EEG channels are candidate biomarkers. Results: In retrospective data from 14 seizure-free post-surgical patients from University of California, Los Angeles, we identified 9 waveform categories strongly associated with resected intracranial EEG channels. These included beta, gamma, and ripple band bursts, sometimes co-occurring with interictal epileptiform discharges; however, many were visually imperceptible in the broadband EEG. Using a support vector machine, we generated a unified classification metric based on these waveforms and tested it on 87 seizure-free subjects from Detroit Medical Center. This metric achieved higher area under the precision-recall curve than six state-of-the-art benchmark algorithms (p

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

Comparing Human Gaze and Vision-Language Model Attention in Safety-Relevant Environments

Human visual attention plays an important role in how people perceive and respond to environments containing potential risks. This study investigates whether large vision-language models can identify the same regions of a scene that attract human attention in safety-relevant environments. Eye-tracking data were collected from ten participants viewing 33 scene images representing environments with varying levels of potential risk using Pupil Invisible wearable glasses. Gaze coordinates were mapped onto stimulus images to generate population-averaged human gaze heatmaps. In parallel, GPT-4o was prompted through the OpenAI Vision Application Programming Interface (API) to generate spatial predictions of visual attention, which were converted into saliency maps for comparison with human gaze patterns. Spatial alignment between human gaze heatmaps and model-generated saliency maps was evaluated using four complementary metrics: Pearson correlation (r = 0.515 +- 0.117), Normalised Scanpath Saliency (NSS = 0.988 +- 0.323), Kullback-Leibler divergence (KL = 1.766 +- 0.844), and Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve using the Judd formulation (AUC-Judd = 0.806 +- 0.076). A cross-model comparison with Gemini Pro, Gemini Flash, and Claude showed that all models exceeded the AUC-Judd chance baseline of 0.5 and achieved positive NSS scores. Gemini Pro demonstrated the strongest spatial localisation according to three of the four metrics, whereas GPT-4o produced the closest distributional match to human attention as measured by KL divergence. These findings suggest that large vision-language models can identify regions that broadly correspond to where humans direct visual attention in safety-relevant scenes without requiring eye-tracking training data. The results highlight the potential of vision-language models as a scalable tool for approximating human attentional patterns.

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

Vision-language models for chest radiography do not always need the image

Medical vision-language models report strong chest radiograph accuracy, and this is increasingly read as evidence that they use the image. That inference is unsafe: a model exploiting finding-name priors scores like one that reads the scan, and no standard benchmark separates them. We introduce a causal audit that intervenes on the image, occluding the relevant region, occluding an irrelevant one, and swapping in another patient's same-label scan, and combines three behavioral metrics to test whether a correct answer depends on the image. Across nine systems, a text-only model with no image access reaches within 5.7 accuracy points of the best multimodal one, and a 119-billion-parameter multimodal model is statistically indistinguishable from a 7-billion text-only baseline. The audit splits the cohort into three models that ignore the image, one that is unstable, and five that use it selectively, for a subset of findings; the categories hold across a second dataset, resolution, and prompt phrasing. Against board-certified radiologists, a text-only model is statistically indistinguishable from a radiologist's accuracy while grounding at zero, whereas the image-using models ground at radiologist-comparable rates. Reported confidence flags ungrounded answers only when a model uses the image. Grounding audits, not accuracy, should gate clinical deployment.

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

Lean4Agent: Formal Modeling and Verification for Agent Workflow and Trajectory

arXiv:2606.06523v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Equipping Large Language Models (LLMs) to execute reliable multi-step workflows has become a central challenge in artificial intelligence. Despite recent advances in LLMs' agentic capabilities, most agent systems still lack formal methods for specifying, verifying, and debugging their workflow and execution trajectories. This challenge mirrors a long-standing problem in mathematics, where the ambiguity of natural languages (NLs) motivates the development of formal languages (FLs). Inspired by this paradigm, we propose **Lean4Agent**, to the best of our knowledge, the first framework that uses Lean4, a dependent-type FL to model and verify agent behavior. **Lean4Agent** launches **FormalAgentLib**, an extensible Lean4 library for formally modeling and verifying agent workflows' semantic consistency under explicit assumptions, and enabling localization of execution-time failures revealed by trajectories. Building on **FormalAgentLib**, we further develop **LeanEvolve**, which applies results in **FormalAgentLib** to revise workflows to enhance its capability. Extensive experiments on a hard problem subset of SWE-Bench-Verified and a subset of ELAIP-Bench across 5 leading LLMs indicate that the verification-passing workflows outperform the failing ones by an average of **11.94%**, and **LeanEvolve** further improves SWE performance by **7.47%** on average. Furthermore, **Lean4Agent** establishes a foundation for a new field of using expressive dependent-type FL to formally model and verify agent behavior.

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Experimentation for Different Scheduling Policies on Queues: Mixed Differences-in-Q Estimators Based on Little's Law

arXiv:2605.29641v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In data centers, tasks are dispatched to various servers to evenly distribute the workload. When a data center considers implementing a new scheduling algorithm, it typically conducts an A/B test prior to deployment to assess the real-world impact of this new method. However, a straightforward A/B test might be interfered with so-called ``Markovian'' interference. We utilized the Differences-in-Q estimator, as developed by Farias et al. (2022), and introduced mixed Differences-in-Q estimators grounded in Little's Law. We show that our A/B testing methods significantly reduce bias and variance when testing various scheduling policies. Extensive simulations were conducted under scenarios like non-stationary arrival rates, heterogeneous service rates, and communication delays. These simulations highlight the robustness and efficacy of our A/B testing approach.

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

KATANA: A Fast, Low-Power Mapping of Kalman Filters onto Edge NPUs for Real-Time Tracking

arXiv:2606.14992v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: State estimation is the closed-loop core of every real-time tracking system, from radar surveillance and counter-UAV defense to autonomous driving and robotics. These deployments run on edge platforms, where defense systems mount on vehicles and drones, and civilian pipelines live on cars and handheld devices. Here, every additional watt of compute erodes mission duration or operational range. Two hard constraints follow: each new measurement must be fused before the next control cycle, and the total compute must fit within a strict battery and thermal power envelope. The Linear and Extended Kalman Filters (LKF, EKF) are dominant estimators on these systems, but today they execute almost exclusively on CPUs, which serialize multi-object tracking (MOT) updates, or on custom FPGA/ASIC accelerators that lengthen design cycles. Contemporary AI-PC SoCs, like the Intel Core Ultra Series 1 and 2, integrate a low-power, data-parallel Neural Processing Unit (NPU). We therefore ask whether the Kalman filter can be mapped onto this existing matrix engine to meet real-time and low-power budgets simultaneously, avoiding a dedicated accelerator and keeping the CPU and GPU free for primary workloads. We present KATANA, an NPU-aware optimization framework delivering the first end-to-end mapping of the LKF and EKF onto a commercial NPU, alongside a cross-platform characterization on shipping AI-PC silicon. KATANA applies three algebraic graph rewrites: subtract-to-add reformulation via a precomputed negative-projection matrix H_neg, static-shape tensor fusion, and block-diagonal batched parallelization, ensuring 100% of operations execute on the DPU matrix engine. On the Series 2, the optimized batched EKF reaches 223.35 FPS at 13.43 W active power, and the LKF reaches 408.73 FPS at 14.05 W, delivering up to a 97.9% reduction in dynamic energy versus the CPU implementation.

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

Granularity-Regulated Adaptive Computational Efficiency for Optimal Verification in Test-Time Scaling

Test-time scaling (TTS) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for improving the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs) by investing additional compute at inference time. A central component of TTS is the verifier, which selects or scores candidate solutions to guide the search process. While prior work has explored the benefit of verification, a fundamental question remains underexplored: what is the optimal granularity of verification under a given compute budget? Coarse-grained outcome reward models (ORMs) and fine-grained process reward models (PRMs) represent two extremes, yet neither alone achieves compute-optimality across all regimes. In this paper, we establish a unified theoretical framework, called GRACE (\underline{G}ranularity-\underline{R}egulated \underline{A}daptive \underline{C}omputational \underline{E}fficiency), that characterizes the optimal verification granularity as an explicit function of problem difficulty, verifier accuracy, and compute budget. We prove that there exists a phase transition: fine-grained verification dominates when either the compute budget is large or the problem is hard, whereas coarse-grained verification is preferred in the low-budget, easy-problem regime. Our theory unifies Best-of-$N$, beam search, and step-level MCTS within a single Pareto-optimality framework, and motivates an adaptive granularity strategy that provably achieves the compute-performance Pareto frontier. Empirical results on MATH-500, GSM8K, and AIME benchmarks corroborate all four theoretical claims, with our adaptive strategy outperforming fixed-granularity baselines by up to 3.1\% accuracy at matched compute.

16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

InfantFace: Detecting infant faces in neonatal clinical environments

Reliable localisation of the neonatal face is the first step for several video-camera based non-contact assessments such as pain and distress related facial expression analysis, pain scoring, cardiorespiratory signal extraction and cessation of breathing alerts. However, major challenges persist in neonatal clinical environments. Cluttered backgrounds, illumination changes and poor lighting conditions can reduce the accuracy of face detection models. Clinical interventions, monitoring equipment and, in some cases, medical devices can obstruct the face, making visual assessment difficult. We propose a one-stage YOLOv11m-based model tailored for face detection of infants in neonatal clinical environments. We combined multiple publicly available datasets (VGGFace2, CelebA, FDDB, WIDER FACE) to train and evaluate our proposed model. We then fine-tuned our model on a neonatal research dataset involving 228 videos from 114 recording sessions of 113 independent infants. Before fine-tuning, our model achieved an AP50 of 0.87, surpassing the performance of three state-of-the-art general face detectors. Performance improved further to an AP50 of 0.96 after clinical-domain adaptation. Evaluating face detection performance across different datasets remains a challenge due to the lack of publicly available neonatal datasets. Prioritising the creation of such datasets, while upholding appropriate privacy safeguards and ethical standards in their creation and use, would greatly support further progress in this field.

17.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Geometry of critical discrete structures: long-range percolation on the hierarchical lattice and the discrete torus

arXiv:2509.09589v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Consider (a) balls $\Lambda_n$ of growing volumes in the $d$-dimensional hierarchical lattice, and (b) the $d$-dimensional discrete torus $\mathbb{T}_n^d$ on $n^d$ vertices. Place edges independently between each pair of vertices $x\neq y\in\Lambda_n$ or $\mathbb{T}_n^d$ with probability $1-\exp(-\beta J(x, y) )$ where $J(x, y) \asymp \| x-y \|^{-\alpha}$ for some $0

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Non-negative Matrix Factorisation with Topological Regularisation

arXiv:2606.17531v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the learning of interpretable bases in non-negative matrix factorisation (NMF) by regularising the topology of the learned basis functions. Our approach is motivated by the observation that many data modalities can be viewed as non-negative functions on a structured domain, where the quality of a basis is intrinsically linked to its topology. However, naive methods for incorporating the topology of the support are often hindered by discreteness and threshold dependence, rendering them unsuitable for continuous optimisation. We address these challenges by employing persistent homology as a stable, threshold-free topological quantifier and by designing topological scores that integrate into the NMF objective as regularisers. The resulting framework encompasses spatially coherent image components, periodic time-series structures, and clique-like graph signals within a unified modelling language.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Information Gap and Feasibility-Aware Inference in Binomial Logistic Mixtures

arXiv:2606.15665v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper studies the information gap between mixture detection and label recovery in binomial logistic mixtures. Standard likelihood-based criteria such as the Bayesian information criterion (BIC) can detect the presence of two components, but this does not guarantee that the corresponding labels are recoverable. We show that this gap is intrinsic to binomial logistic mixtures with a fixed number of trials: observed-data evidence for mixture structure and per-observation information for label recovery have different local orders in the component separation, and only the former accumulates with the sample size. As a result, there exists a detectable-but-unrecoverable regime in which BIC selects two components while the posterior labels remain essentially uninformative. To address this issue, we propose two feasibility-aware inference procedures: a recoverability-aware BIC with a posterior-entropy penalty and an entropy-regularized estimator that mitigates the tendency of the maximum likelihood estimator to produce overly separated components and overly concentrated posterior responsibilities. Numerical experiments confirm the predicted gap and demonstrate that the proposed methods avoid misleading component selections and improve the calibration of posterior label probabilities.

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

Optimizing LLM Inference: Fluid-Guided Online Scheduling with Memory Constraints

arXiv:2504.11320v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models now serve millions of users daily, with providers incurring costs exceeding $700,000 per day. Each request requires token-by-token inference, making GPU scheduling central to latency, capacity, and cost. The difficulty is endogenous memory growth: generated tokens expand the Key-Value (KV) cache, and overflow can evict in-progress requests and waste prior computation. We formulate inference as a multi-stage online scheduling problem with endogenous memory growth, linear iteration times, and GPU-resident KV-cache constraints. We introduce a fluid model that characterizes equilibrium batch composition, memory requirement, and stability region. Guided by the fluid model, we design WAIT (Waiting for Accumulated Inference Threshold), a threshold-based admission rule for known output lengths, and Nested WAIT, which extends the rule to unknown output lengths by regulating how requests advance across decode-stage segments. Both algorithms approximate the fluid benchmark asymptotically under the stated memory conditions. Nested WAIT uses an additional safety buffer of moderate scale to hedge against memory-overflow-induced evictions under unknown output lengths. In Vidur simulations configured for Llama-2-7B on an A100 GPU, with supplemental real-GPU validation reported in the appendix, the policies enlarge the empirically observed stable operating range relative to widely used baseline algorithms and reduce latency especially in near-overloaded and overloaded regimes.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

TSA: Temporal Slot Activation for Persistent Object-Centric Video Representation

Unsupervised video object-centric learning aims to decompose dynamic scenes into temporally persistent entity representations. Existing recurrent video slot-attention methods propagate a fixed set of slots across frames, but typically assume unconditional slot propagation: every slot is updated and decoded at every frame, regardless of whether its corresponding object is visible. We show that this design violates a basic lifecycle requirement for persistent slots: when an object is absent or fully occluded, its slot should preserve its previous state and avoid explaining unrelated visible content. Instead, unconditional propagation creates two failure pathways: update-induced state drift, where current-frame evidence overwrites the absent object's representation, and decoder-induced reconstruction interference, where the inactive slot remains coupled to reconstruction through decoder attention. We propose Temporal Slot Activation (TSA), a mechanism that learns a per-slot, per-frame activation score $\alpha_{k,t} \in (0, 1)$ without visibility supervision. TSA uses this activation as a shared latent control variable for slot lifecycle modeling. When a slot is inactive, TSA anchors its state to the previous slot via activation-gated updating and suppresses its decoder participation through an activation-dependent additive bias on attention logits before softmax normalization. This jointly reduces state drift and reconstruction-driven interference. To improve decisions under partial occlusion and gradual reappearance, TSA further conditions activation prediction on a per-slot temporal memory produced by a Temporal Context Encoder. We evaluate TSA on MOVi-C/E, YT-VIS, and OVIS benchmarks using both standard and tracking-based metrics (FG-ARI, mBO, IDF1, HOTA). TSA consistently improves object decomposition and temporal identity preservation, with large gains on long, heavily occluded videos.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Fourier analysis of quantum neural network with non-linear data embedding

arXiv:2606.14206v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fourier analysis has become a crucial tool for understanding the expressivity of Variational Quantum Circuit (VQC) models, as well as an important indicator of barren plateaus (BP). While existing literature has only studied angle-embedded VQCs in a noiseless environment, here we develop the Fourier analysis of VQCs with non-linear data embedding, with particular focus on amplitude embedding, which provides a naturally compact encoding scheme. We first investigate a subtle difference in the domain of input features within amplitude embedding that leads to a distinct expressivity of the zero-frequency Fourier coefficient. By assuming that the ensemble of unitaries generated from the parameter space forms at least a 2-design with respect to the unitary group, we derive, via Weingarten calculus, that the mean of the Fourier coefficients is concentrated at zero, and the variance scales at an exponentially decaying order with respect to the multi-dimensional frequency magnitude. When a noise channel with unitary Kraus operators and probabilities $\{p_k\}$ is taken into account, the variance is further suppressed by a factor $\left(\sum_k p_k^2\right)^{Q}

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

The MAMA-MIA Challenge: Advancing Generalizability and Fairness in Breast MRI Tumor Segmentation and Treatment Response Prediction

arXiv:2603.01250v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Breast cancer is the most frequently diagnosed malignancy among women worldwide and a leading cause of cancer-related mortality. Dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging plays a central role in tumor characterization and treatment monitoring, particularly in patients receiving neoadjuvant chemotherapy. However, existing artificial intelligence models for breast magnetic resonance imaging are typically developed and evaluated using heterogeneous datasets, study populations, and assessment protocols, making direct comparison difficult and limiting understanding of model robustness across institutions and clinically relevant patient subgroups. The MAMA-MIA Challenge was designed to address these challenges by providing a standardized benchmark for the joint evaluation of primary tumor segmentation and prediction of pathologic complete response using pre-treatment magnetic resonance imaging only. The training cohort comprised 1,506 patients from multiple institutions in the United States, while evaluation was conducted on an external test set of 574 patients from three independent European centers to assess cross-continental and cross-institutional generalization. A unified scoring framework combined predictive performance with subgroup consistency across age, menopausal status, and breast density. Twenty-six international teams participated in the final evaluation phase. Results demonstrate substantial performance variability under a common external evaluation framework and reveal trade-offs between overall accuracy and subgroup fairness. The challenge provides standardized datasets, evaluation protocols, and public resources to promote the development of robust and equitable artificial intelligence systems for breast cancer imaging.

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

LiFT: Local Search via Linear Programming for Overfitting-Controlled Transformers

This paper proposes a Linear Programming (LP)-based local search framework for fine-tuning pretrained transformer models with explicit control against overfitting. The approach formulates transformer fine-tuning as a bilevel optimization-based regularization problem, in which model parameters and regularization hyperparameters are jointly updated. Information collected during initial warm-up iterations, including validation gradients and training Hessian information, is used to construct a local descent direction by solving an LP that minimizes a scaled directional derivative while preserving training optimality. This validation-aware descent direction enables focused local updates of both parameters and regularization hyperparameters, reducing overfitting without requiring repeated full retraining cycles. The resulting method, termed Linear Programming-based Fine-Tuning (LiFT) for transformers, differs from conventional fine-tuning by systematically identifying task-specific updates rather than relying on heuristic or grid-based hyperparameter selection. Experiments on GPT-2 Small fine-tuned on WikiText-2 demonstrate that LiFT enables effective adaptation through selective tuning of transformer blocks and regularization parameters, yielding consistent improvements in test perplexity across multiple layer configurations and regularization settings, with particularly pronounced gains in overfitting-prone scenarios. Beyond empirical performance, LiFT establishes a principled connection between transformer fine-tuning, bilevel optimization, local search, and regularization theory.

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

The Power of Test-Time Training for Approximate Sampling

arXiv:2606.11437v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Efficiently sampling from a complex probability distribution is a fundamental problem which has become increasingly pertinent in recent years with the rise of generative AI, as sophisticated sampling procedures from LLMs have been proposed to solve challenging reasoning problems. The efficacy of such sampling algorithms is limited, however, by the relationship between the LLM and the particular sampling task at hand, which has motivated the framework of test-time training (TTT). TTT works by updating a model's weights in response to partial generations and reward feedback received at inference time, thus adapting to the particular problem. In this work, we propose a formalization for TTT as the problem of producing a sample from a given probability measure $\mu^\star$ belonging to a known class ${F}$ of distributions, given an oracle $\hat \mu$ which yields approximate density estimates for $\mu^\star$. This is closely related to the problem of reducing sampling to approximate counting studied in seminal works of Jerrum, Valiant & Vazirani (1986) and Jerrum & Sinclair (1989): namely, when ${F}$ is the class of all distributions, it coincides exactly with the aforementioned counting-to-sampling reduction. In this paper, we first show a quadratic lower bound on the query complexity of sampling from $\mu^\star$ given query access to $\hat \mu$ (for sufficiently large classes ${F}$), thus showing that the random walk approach proposed by Jerrum & Sinclair (1989) and refined by Hayes & Sinclair (2010), is optimal. This answers an open question posed by Hayes & Sinclair. We then show that this lower bound can be circumvented if the size of ${F}$ is bounded appropriately. As we discuss, this latter result can be viewed as an abstraction of TTT, and thus represents a starting point for the development of a principled theoretical framework for TTT.