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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

BayLing-Duplex: Native Full-Duplex Speech Dialogue with a Single Autoregressive LLM

Real-time, full-duplex speech interaction is a key feature of next-generation spoken chatbots, allowing the model to listen and speak at the same time and to handle natural phenomena such as overlap, hesitation, and barge-in. Existing speech language models (SpeechLMs) such as LLaMA-Omni and GLM-4-Voice are still turn-based and rely on an external Voice Activity Detection (VAD) module to mark the end of the user's turn, which fundamentally limits their interactive ability. In this paper, we introduce BayLing-Duplex, a native full-duplex SpeechLM where a single autoregressive LLM decides when to listen, when to speak, and when to stop, with no auxiliary turn-taking module. The design adds only a few special tokens to the standard vocabulary, so it transfers across LLMs and reuses existing training and serving stacks with no architectural adaptation. Starting from the public GLM-4-Voice checkpoint and using only 400K full-duplex samples for fine-tuning followed by a lightweight DPO stage, BayLing-Duplex reaches 92% turn-taking success and 100% interruption success on InstructS2S-Eval, while improving the speech-response score from 2.17 to 3.39 over Moshi. BayLing-Duplex also matches or surpasses its turn-based counterpart on Llama Questions, Web Questions, and Alpaca-Eval, showing that simultaneous listen-and-speak modeling does not sacrifice response quality.

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

Regulating the Machine Contributor: Governance and Policy Alignment in Open Source

arXiv:2606.14594v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI-assisted software development has moved from line-level autocomplete to agents that can plan changes, edit files, and submit pull requests with limited human supervision. Open-source software, however, evolves through a process designed for humans: contributor agreements, codes of conduct, and review norms all assume a legally accountable person who can attest to provenance and answer reviewer questions. Autonomous and semi-autonomous AI contributors strain those assumptions, and the 2025-2026 record of agent-driven incidents, AI-generated nuisance volume, and platform-level shutdowns shows that the gap is operationally consequential. Several open-source organisations have responded with contribution policies, but the result is fragmented, and its alignment with emerging AI governance frameworks (EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF with the UC Berkeley Agentic AI Profile, ISO/IEC 42001 and 23894) is unmapped at the contribution level. We compare policies across six organisations (SymPy, LLVM, matplotlib, OpenInfra, the Apache Software Foundation, and the Linux Foundation) using Most-Similar Systems Design with indicator-based coding and process tracing for SymPy and LLVM. From this we derive a six-dimensional taxonomy (disclosure, responsibility, human oversight, licensing, enforcement, maintainer workload), an ordinal Policy Maturity Score, and a mapping of documented agent incidents onto the dimensions each policy fails to govern. Aligning the dimensions with the regulatory frameworks above identifies overlapping gaps neither side currently closes, and we close by sketching the shape of a harmonised tiered framework and the empirical evaluation needed to calibrate it.

03.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-06

Pathways of emergency care for severely ill children in Nigerian and Ugandan hospitals: A process mapping study

作者:

by Rami Subhi, Abiodun Sogbesan, Dan Muramuzi, Mikael Burhin, Ayobami A. Bakare, Adegoke G. Falade, Freddy E. Kitutu, Freddie Ssengooba, Carina King, Sumit Kane, Belinda Dawson-McClaren, Hamish R. Graham, the MOXY-Implementation Research Collaboration Background Child mortality remains high in countries with weak emergency care systems. Facility organisation for paediatric emergency care is heterogeneous and under-described. We examined how hospitals in Uganda and Nigeria are organised to deliver emergency care for neonates and children. Methods and findings We conducted a qualitative, multi-method study in 26 purposively selected secondary and tertiary facilities in Uganda and Nigeria from October 2023 to December 2024. Embedded researchers documented patient pathways, resources for care, and care processes for severely ill children (

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

OLaPh: Optimal Language Phonemizer

Phonemization is a critical component in text-to-speech synthesis. Traditional approaches rely on deterministic transformations and lexica, while neural methods offer potential for higher generalization on out-of-vocabulary (OOV) terms. We introduce OLaPh (Optimal Language Phonemizer), a hybrid framework that integrates extensive multilingual lexica with advanced NLP techniques and a statistical subword segmentation function. Evaluations on the WikiPron benchmark show OLaPh significantly outperforms established baselines in overall accuracy and maintains robustness on OOV data through advanced fallback mechanisms. To further explore neural generalization, we utilize the framework to synthesize a high-consistency training corpus for an instruction-tuned Large Language Model (LLM). While the deterministic framework remains more accurate overall, the LLM demonstrates strong generalization, matching or partly exceeding the framework's performance. This suggests that the LLM successfully internalized phonetic intuitions from the synthetic data that transcend the framework's capabilities. Together, these tools provide a comprehensive, open-source resource for multilingual grapheme-to-phoneme conversion (G2P) research.

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

High-Fidelity Video Compression based on Invertible Neural Transform and Implicit Conditioning

Learning-based video compression has recently achieved competitive rate-distortion performance compared to conventional video codecs. However, most existing methods rely on non-invertible analysis-synthesis transforms, with reconstruction quality subject to both quantization and transform approximation errors. This limitation becomes particularly restrictive at higher quality points, where quantization errors are small and transform-induced distortion dominates. To address this, we propose InnVC, an Invertible neural network based Video Codec for wide-range and high-fidelity compression. The core idea is to preserve an invertible main transform path prior to quantization, while injecting content-adaptive context through a compact implicit conditioning field. This decouples strongly correlated video content from harder-to-model fine details, allowing different components to specialize in complementary reconstruction tasks for more efficient compression. To further improve compressibility, we introduce a scheduled masking strategy that progressively concentrates informative content into fewer latent channels for more effective entropy coding. Experiments on the UVG and MCL-JCV benchmarks show that InnVC achieves strong compression performance over a broad quality range, being particularly effective in the high-quality regime, yielding BD-rate reductions of 21.66% in PSNR and 46.06% in MS-SSIM relative to x265 on UVG. To the best of our knowledge, InnVC is the first neural video codec covers operating poins from low bitrate to high fidelity within a single architecture scale, spanning more than 20 dB in PSNR.

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

Differentiable Packing of Irregular 3D Objects with Adaptive Container Estimation

Most existing approaches either fix the container in advance or optimize only a single container dimension through an outer search loop, leaving the remaining dimensions as a manual tuning problem. We present a differentiable packing framework that jointly optimizes all 6N object pose parameters and all three container side lengths inside a single gradient-based loop. The formulation combines six physics-inspired, differentiable loss terms computed directly on triangle meshes through axis-aligned bounding-box proxies. An adaptive squeezing mechanism periodically tightens the container whenever the overlap loss falls below a pair-count-scaled threshold, producing a large initial drop in container volume, followed by small refinements. All pairwise computations are written in tensor-broadcasting form, giving a 3.4 to 54 times speedup over a reference loop-based implementation. The pipeline is implemented in Python and PyTorch, with no physics engine, FFT library, or convex decomposition. On multiple object categories, the method produces containers that are 11 to 32 percent smaller than time-matched DBLF and simulated-annealing baselines at N =100, while running in under 4 minutes per instance on a single consumer GPU.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Synthetic Counteradaptation: A Principle of Human-AI Co-evolution

arXiv:2606.15503v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we introduce the concept of synthetic counteradaptation, a process where human and AI systems co-evolve by adapting to each other's strategies and behaviors. Synthetic counteradaptation occurs when AI systems develop novel strategies or social protocols, prompting humans to extract insights and adapt their own behaviors in response, leading to the emergence of new agent interaction dynamics. To illustrate these dynamics, we analyze examples from various contexts, including the game of Go, mixed-motive social interactions, and geopolitical simulations. By exploring these cases, we demonstrate how synthetic counteradaptation provides a framework for understanding the recursive and co-evolutionary nature of human-AI interactions in multi-agent environments.

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

Characterizing Narrative Content in Web-scale LLM Pretraining Data

The narrative composition of web-scale LLM pretraining corpora remains largely unexplored even though narrative is a fundamental mode of human communication. We present the first fine-grained study of narrative features in Dolma, a 3-trillion-token open pretraining corpus. Drawing on narrative theory, we design a framework spanning three core narrative elements (agency, setting, and events) operationalized as 11 interpretable dimensions. After sampling and annotating a diverse set of 400 passages, we finetune and validate NarraBERT, a RoBERTa-based model for fine-grained narrative prediction. We apply NarraBERT to 3M passages, resulting in a new dataset, NarraDolma. We find (i) narrative structure is measurable at scale across extremely heterogeneous data, (ii) we uncover a continuous, multidimensional narrative structure underlying web text, and (iii) narrative qualities are unequally distributed across pretraining sources and topics in ways that current curation practices neither measure nor account for. Our framework, dataset, and analyses provide a foundation for understanding how narrative qualities are distributed in LLM pretraining data and for studying how data composition affects narrative reasoning tasks. We publicly release NarraDolma and NarraBERT.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

KAN-MLP-Mixer: A comprehensive investigation of the usage of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) for improving IMU-based Human Activity Recognition

arXiv:2605.19031v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) have demonstrated an exceptional ability to learn complex functions on clean, low-dimensional data but struggle to maintain performance on noisy and imperfect real-world datasets. In contrast, conventional multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) are far more tolerant to noise and computationally efficient. Replacing all MLP components with KANs in HAR models often degrades accuracy and computation efficiency, highlighting an open challenge: how to combine KANs' precision with MLPs' noise robustness and efficiency. To address this, we systematically explore various placements of KAN modules within deep HAR networks and propose a hybrid architecture that strategically synergizes the strengths of both paradigms, which uses a KAN-based input embedding layer, retains MLP layers for intermediate feature mixing, and introduces a specialized LarctanKAN module for final activity classification. Across eight public HAR datasets, the hybrid KAN-MLP model achieves an average macro F1 score relative improvement of 5.33\% compared pure-MLP model, significantly outperforming standalone KAN and MLP baselines. Furthermore, integrating this hybrid strategy into other state-of-the-art HAR architectures consistently boosts their performance. Our findings demonstrate that a carefully orchestrated combination of KAN, MLP, or other conventional neural components yields more robust and accurate HAR models for real-world wearable sensing environments.

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

MVM-IOD: An Industrial Object-Centric Benchmark Dataset for the Evaluation of 3D Reconstruction Methods

3D object reconstruction, and camera pose estimation in industrial applications are challenging tasks, as errors are costly while the computation time is often limited. The complexity of typical industrial objects further complicates these tasks. Most of the existing datasets in this context do not depict realistic industrial scenarios. Therefore, we introduce the Machine Vision Metrology Industrial Object Dataset (MVM-IOD). Images of typical industrial objects are captured systematically, by moving a camera, mounted at the end effector of an industrial robot arm, on a hemisphere around the objects. MVM-IOD contains reference camera poses and reference 3D point clouds, the acquired RGB images of 9 objects and 2 background choices resulting in 18 scenes, which allows evaluation of all image based methods that compute a 3D reconstruction, camera poses, or novel views of a scene. Based on MVM-IOD, we extensively evaluate current SOTA 3D reconstruction and camera pose estimation methods, such as Structure from Motion, Multi-View Stereo, recent feed forward methods (Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer, {\pi}3), and 2D Gaussian Splatting and report our findings as a baseline for future research. The experiments show that capture setups like ours generate out-of distribution images for feed forward methods, leading to suboptimal point clouds and camera poses. However, these out-of-distribution images can be shifted closer to the training distribution by applying simple preprocessing steps. Consequently, in certain industrial applications, feed forward methods should be used with caution.

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

Capacity-Constrained Online Convex Optimization with Delayed Feedback

arXiv:2606.11711v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Online learning with delayed feedback typically assumes that the learner can track all pending rounds until their feedback arrives. In practice, tracking resources are finite, and feedback from untracked rounds is permanently lost. In this paper, we study delayed online convex optimization (OCO) under a hard capacity constraint, where at most $C$ pending rounds can be tracked at any time. To model delay information, we introduce a semi-clairvoyant model that refines the clairvoyant assumption from prior work: rather than requiring delays to be known at prediction time, the learner observes delay expirations online, consistent with the classical unconstrained delayed setting. Our approach proceeds via a reduction to a novel ``delayed and weighted'' OCO problem, using a scheduler that randomizes tracking decisions and importance-weights the resulting observations. For this base problem, we propose and analyze Delayed-Weighted FTRL and its bandit analogue, establishing regret bounds that explicitly characterize the interaction between time-varying weights and delayed feedback. Combining these base learners with our schedulers yields the first regret guarantees for capacity-constrained OCO under convex and strongly convex losses, for both first-order and bandit feedback. For first-order feedback, capacity $C = \Omega(\log T)$ suffices to recover standard delayed OCO rates up to logarithmic factors. For bandit feedback, the regret rates are modulated by powers of $(1 + \sigma_{max}/C)$, where $\sigma_{max}$ is the maximum number of pending observations at any time. This allows the regret bound to degrade gracefully when $C < \sigma_{max}$, while remaining sublinear.

12.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Molecular basis of polyadenylated RNA fate determination in the nucleus

作者:

Eukaryotic genomes generate a plethora of polyadenylated (pA+) RNAs1,2, which are packaged into ribonucleoprotein particles (RNPs). To ensure faithful gene expression, functional pA+ RNPs, including protein-coding RNPs, are exported to the cytoplasm, whereas transcripts within non-functional pA+ RNPs are degraded in the nucleus1–4. How cells distinguish these opposing fates remains unknown. The DExD-box ATPase UAP56 (also known as DDX39B) is a central component of functional pA+ RNPs, and promotes their docking to the nuclear pore complex-anchored TREX-25,6, which triggers transcript release from UAP56 to facilitate export7. Here we reveal that the poly(A) tail exosome targeting (PAXT) connection8 binds a TREX-2-like module, which releases pA+ RNAs from UAP56 for decay by the nuclear exosome. The core of this module consists of a LENG8–PCID2–SEM1 trimer, which we show is structurally and biochemically equivalent to the central GANP–PCID2–SEM1 trimer of TREX-2. Mutagenesis and transcriptomic data demonstrate that the nuclear fate of pA+ RNPs is governed by the contending actions of nucleoplasmic PAXT and nuclear pore complex-associated TREX-2, which interpret RNA-bound UAP56 as a signal for RNA decay or export, respectively. As RNA targets of PAXT are generally short and intron-poor, we propose an overall model for pA+ RNP fate determination whereby the distinct sub-nuclear localizations of PAXT and TREX-2 govern the degradation of short non-functional pA+ RNAs while allowing export of their longer and functional counterparts. Biochemical, structural&nbsp;and cell biological analyses reveal that UAP56 (DDX39B) assembles with a TREX-2–like module&nbsp;that redirects non-functional polyadenylated RNAs from export to degradation.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

A graph neural network surrogate model for mesh-based crashworthiness prediction of vehicle panel components

arXiv:2503.17386v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Crashworthiness is a key performance measure in the design of safety-critical vehicle panel components such as B-pillars. Finite element (FE) simulations are widely used to evaluate crash responses but remain computationally expensive for large-scale, nonlinear impact scenarios, particularly when integrated into iterative design and optimisation processes. Although machine learning-based surrogate models have been developed for rapid crashworthiness analysis, they exhibit limitations in detailed representation of complex 3-dimensional components. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as a promising solution for processing data with complex structures. However, existing GNN models often lack sufficient accuracy and computational efficiency to meet industrial demands. This paper proposes Recurrent Graph U-Net (ReGUNet), a graph-based surrogate model for crashworthiness analysis of vehicle panel components. By representing FE meshes in graph form, the model naturally accommodates complex irregular structural geometries. Its hierarchical architecture improves computational efficiency and accuracy, while the introduction of recurrence enhances stability of temporal predictions over multiple time steps. A side-impact case study of hot-stamped steel B-pillars with varying geometries is used to generate training dataset. The trained model demonstrates high accuracy in predicting the dynamic deformation behaviour and crashworthiness indicators of previously unseen component designs. ReGUNet achieves over a 52% reduction in the average deformation prediction error relative to baseline methods, together with markedly improved computational efficiency. ReGUNet provides rapid and reliable crashworthiness assessments, which in turn accelerates the design cycle of vehicle panel components.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen correlations between mechanical oscillators revealed through SU(1,1) interferometry

arXiv:2606.18202v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum correlations are essential for achieving quantum advantage in computing, communication and sensing. Moreover, their observation challenges and constrains our fundamental understanding of nature. Mechanical oscillators in the quantum regime provide an appealing platform for preparing and investigating quantum correlations at macroscopic scales. Despite substantial progress, however, continuous-variable quantum correlations stronger than entanglement have not yet been observed in this macroscopic regime. Here, we report the experimental observation of continuous-variable Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen correlations between two spatially-separated mechanical oscillators with an effective mass of $\sim 16 \,\mu g$ each. This is achieved by coupling them to a superconducting qubit which allows for engineering a two-mode squeezing interaction when parametrically driven. Crucially, we show that this interaction can be used to witness quantum correlations through the realization of a mechanical SU(1,1) interferometer. Our results expand the toolbox of operations in circuit quantum acoustodynamics and demonstrate that quantum correlations stronger than entanglement can also be observed in macroscopic systems, thereby shedding light on the boundary between quantum and classical regimes.

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

Detecting Lookahead Bias in LLM Forecasts

arXiv:2512.23847v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We develop a statistical procedure to detect lookahead bias in economic forecasts generated by large language models (LLMs). Using a date-only recall query for a firm-date pair, we estimate the probability that the LLM has internalized information about the realized outcome, a statistic we term Lookahead Propensity (LAP). LAP is materially positive throughout the in-sample period and collapses essentially to zero right after the training-data cutoff. We show that a positive interaction between LAP and the LLM forecast in an accuracy regression indicates lookahead-bias contamination, and apply the test to two forecasting tasks: news headlines predicting stock returns and earnings call transcripts predicting capital expenditures. In both applications, the LLM forecast's predictive power is amplified on high-LAP firm-date pairs, and the interaction loses significance on post-training-cutoff samples. Our test provides a cost-efficient, diagnostic tool for assessing the validity and reliability of LLM-generated forecasts.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Using visual biofeedback to reduce step length error at fast walking speeds is feasible after stroke

Background and Purpose: Walking after stroke is often characterized by persistent biomechanical impairments and reduced walking capacity. While visual biofeedback can improve gait mechanics and fast walking can enhance capacity, it is unclear whether individuals post-stroke can effectively use biofeedback at higher walking speeds to address both deficits simultaneously. This study examined the effects of walking speed on the ability of participants with chronic stroke to reduce step length (SL) errors using visual biofeedback. Methods: Sixteen individuals with chronic stroke walked on a treadmill at slow, self-selected, and fast speeds with and without visual SL biofeedback. Absolute SL error relative to individualized targets was calculated for paretic and non-paretic limbs. Linear mixed-effects models with piecewise linear splines assessed the effects of speed, limb, and feedback condition. Post hoc comparisons were performed for significant interactions. Results: At lower speeds, increasing speed reduced SL error in both limbs (p < 0.001). At higher speeds, the effects of speed were dependent on limb and condition (p < 0.001). Paretic SL error increased with speed without feedback but remained stable with feedback (p < 0.001). Non-paretic SL error decreased with speed regardless of condition. SL error was greater in the paretic limb overall (p < 0.001). Discussion and Conclusions: Fast walking alone did not reduce paretic SL errors. Participants with chronic stroke can effectively use visual biofeedback to reduce paretic SL errors at higher speeds, supporting its integration into high-intensity gait training to simultaneously treat biomechanical impairments and walking capacity deficits after stroke.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

HiST: A Hierarchical Sparse Transformer for Cross-Modal Spatial Transcriptomics Modeling

Spatial transcriptomics (ST) links gene expression with tissue morphology but remains expensive and low-throughput, motivating surrogates that infer expression from routine histology. Whole-slide H&E-to-ST inference pairs a gigapixel image with gene measurements at a sparse, irregular set of locations, making multiscale modeling challenging without incurring dense-grid overhead or quadratic token mixing. We propose HiST, a hierarchical sparse transformer that treats measured locations as a lattice-indexed sparse field and builds a dyadic encoder–decoder directly on the active tissue footprint. HiST combines sparse window attention for local geometric correspondence with resolution-changing operators for rapid multiscale context integration. For a fixed window size, the dominant runtime and memory scale with the number of observed locations rather than the dense slide area. To mitigate slide-specific acquisition variation, HiST adds a bottlenecked global conditioning pathway via a slide calibration token that summarizes slide-level context and conditions local representations. On a multi-organ benchmark spanning diverse tissues and acquisition sources, HiST improves predictive performance over recent baselines while reducing runtime and peak memory.

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

Learning Cardiac Electrophysiology Digital Twins Through Agentic Discovery of Hybrid Structure

arXiv:2606.18154v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Building personalized cardiac electrophysiology (EP) digital twins requires identifying the appropriate model structure for each patient, not merely fitting parameters. Traditional methods rely on experts to manually prescribe hybrid physics-neural architectures, which requires deep domain expertise and does not transfer across patients. Recent works have applied large language models (LLMs) to generate or act as hybrid models. However, despite their promising generalization capacity, these LLM-based methods lack the structural priors needed for stable cardiac simulations. Hence, we propose LEADS, a framework that formulates cardiac EP domain knowledge as a structured action space and utilizes an LLM agent to discover hybrid models. The agent follows an iterative reasoning-and-action loop to select, combine, and refine hybrid models, whilst gradient descent handles parameter fitting. The proposed LEADS designs every candidate model towards physically grounded, interpretable, and numerically stable, while allowing open-ended architectural discovery. We validate LEADS on synthetic data with three ground-truth reaction models and on real cardiac EP data, demonstrating that it outperforms both human-designed hybrid models and other LLM-based hybrid modeling.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

VQE as Initial State Preparation for QPE on Heisenberg Spin-Glass Hamiltonians

arXiv:2606.15061v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum Phase Estimation (QPE) is the quantum algorithmic workhorse for computing ground state energies of quantum Hamiltonians with quantum computers. Ground state energy calculation of physical systems is perhaps the most promising use case for quantum computing in terms of scientific and commercial value with a plausible path to outperformance of classical alternatives. This path, however, hinges on the availability of initial states for QPE with significant overlap with the true ground state. Using extensive (classical) numerical computations, we study whether the NISQ-era algorithm VQE (Variational Quantum Eigensolver) could be used to efficiently prepare high-overlap states of disordered fully-connected anisotropic Heisenberg spin glass quantum Hamiltonians with up to $15$ qubits. We find that (i) – consistent with widely held, but rarely numerically illustrated beliefs – VQE is generally unable to efficiently converge to the ground state for our Hamiltonians, which is a well-known issue with VQE due to a variety of factors including vanishing gradients and local minima; (ii) low energy states do not necessarily have large ground-state overlap, but there is typically a correlation between the two measures; (iii) adding more than three layers to the VQE ansatz neither improves overlap nor the energies found; and (iv) the best-found overlap scaling as a function of the Hamiltonian system size is not strongly exponentially decreasing, suggesting potential for VQE to be a heuristic state preparation algorithm for QPE.

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

Scaling Adaptive Depth with Norm-Agnostic Residual Networks

arXiv:2606.16112v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Residual architectures are ubiquitous in deep learning, but they suffer from a subtle structural limitation: the norm of the residual stream can grow rapidly with depth. As a result, updates from later layers become small relative to the accumulated residual state. This reduces their impact on the representation and limits the benefits of scaling models in depth. To address this, we introduce NAG, a norm-agnostic residual architecture that separates magnitude from directional information in the residual stream, preserving meaningful layer contributions throughout depth and preventing later updates from being systematically suppressed by residual-norm growth. Importantly, NAG introduces only a negligible number of additional parameters and relies on simple operations that are easily kernel-fusible, preserving training efficiency in practice. We show that this architecture outperforms baseline Transformers, with gains that increase substantially as depth grows, enabling effective training of much deeper models. The norm-agnostic formulation also leads to an interpretable Mixture-of-Depths (MoD) mechanism that adaptively skips both attention and MLP layers. Beyond serving as a post-training accuracy-compute tradeoff, this mechanism can be used as a pretraining-time scaling strategy: under iso-FLOP training, compute saved by reducing per-token forward-pass cost can be reinvested into training on more tokens while keeping the total parameter count and KV-cache budget fixed. In our experiments, moderate Mixture-of-Depths rates of approximately 20%-25% match full-depth baseline performance under equal training compute while substantially reducing the number of executed layer parameters and forward-pass FLOPs. These results identify sparsity in depth as a new scaling axis for fixed-compute training, enabling very deep yet FLOP-efficient models.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

A Penalty Approach for Differentiation Through Black-Box Quadratic Programming Solvers

arXiv:2602.14154v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Differentiating through the solution of a quadratic program (QP) is a central problem in differentiable optimization. Most existing approaches differentiate through the Karush–Kuhn–Tucker (KKT) system, but their computational cost and numerical robustness can degrade at scale. To address these limitations, we propose dXPP, a penalty-based differentiation framework that decouples QP solving from differentiation. In the solving step (forward pass), dXPP is solver-agnostic and can leverage any black-box QP solver. In the differentiation step (backward pass), we map the solution to a smooth approximate penalty problem and implicitly differentiate through it, requiring only the solution of a much smaller linear system in the primal variables. This approach bypasses the difficulties inherent in explicit KKT differentiation and significantly improves computational efficiency and robustness. We evaluate dXPP on various tasks, including randomly generated QPs, large-scale sparse projection problems, and a real-world multi-period portfolio optimization task. Empirical results demonstrate that dXPP is competitive with KKT-based differentiation methods and achieves substantial speedups on large-scale problems. Our implementation is open source and available at https://github.com/mmmmmmlinghu/dXPP.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

"We don't complain; it's just part of being a woman": frequency, knowledge, and sociocultural beliefs about dysmenorrhoea in a South African university cohort

Introduction Dysmenorrhoea is highly prevalent globally and interferes with engagement in education, work, social participation, and quality of life. Although evidence suggests that sociocultural beliefs influence how menstrual pain is understood and managed, relatively little research has explored dysmenorrhoea-related knowledge and beliefs within South Africa. This study aimed to (1) determine the frequency of dysmenorrhoea, (2) assess dysmenorrhoea-related knowledge and compare knowledge between menstruating and non-menstruating individuals, and (3) explore commonly held generational, cultural, and religious beliefs related to dysmenorrhoea in a South African university cohort. Methods We analysed data collected as part of a cross-sectional survey conducted among staff and students at a South African university. Participants completed demographic questions, items assessing dysmenorrhoea-related knowledge, and an adapted Working Ability, Location, Intensity, Days of Pain, Dysmenorrhoea (WaLIDD) questionnaire. Participants were also invited to provide free-text responses describing generational, cultural, and religious beliefs about dysmenorrhoea. Quantitative data were analysed descriptively and compared between menstruating and non-menstruating participants. Free-text responses were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Results A total of 863 participants completed the survey, including 578 current or past menstruators. The frequency (95%CI) of dysmenorrhoea was 75.4% (71.7-78.9). Most participants were classified as having moderate (53%) or severe (31%) dysmenorrhoea on the WaLIDD scale. Awareness of dysmenorrhoea was higher among participants who had menstruated than among those who had never menstruated (80.4% vs 55.3%, p

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

ProductConsistency: Improving Product Identity Preservation in Instruction-Based Image Editing via SFT and RL

Recent advances in instruction-based image editing have enabled models to perform complex visual edits from natural language instructions. However, in product-centric scenarios where preserving product features, branding, and textual elements are critical, current open and closed source models often struggle to maintain this fine-grained object identity. This issue is further compounded by the lack of datasets for instruction-based product image editing with text fidelity constraints, leaving it largely treated as an implicit capability of instruction-based image editing models. In this work, we introduce the ProductConsistency dataset which is designed to improve product-centric image editing. Our approach includes a supervised fine-tuning (SFT) dataset of 87k samples for product editing, a reinforcement learning (RL) dataset with 869 unique product images, and a new benchmark dataset, the ProductConsistency Benchmark, to allow rigorous and standardized evaluation of editing models. To guide RL training, we propose a Cyclic Consistency reward that enforces semantic preservation of product identity by using caption similarity between the original product description and captions generated from the edited image. We fine-tune both Qwen-Image-Edit-2511 and Flux.1-Kontext-dev using our dataset and demonstrate consistent improvements over baseline models in OCR and Perceptual metrics, and MLLM-based evaluations as well, indicating stronger product consistency, text rendering, and overall visual quality; with the Qwen-Image-Edit-2511 model achieving a 5x reduction in the character error rate. The code and pipeline is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ProductConsistency-6FCC/README.md

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

UltraQuant: 4-bit KV Caching for Context-Heavy Agents

arXiv:2606.20474v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Context-heavy agents place unusual pressure on the key-value (KV) cache: long prefixes are reused across many short turns, while concurrency determines whether the serving system can keep GPUs utilized. We study 4-bit KV-cache compression for this setting, using TurboQuant-style rotation and codebook quantization as a quality anchor and vLLM FP8 KV caching as the deployment anchor. We report three contributions. First, we frame 4-bit KV caching around multi-round agent workloads where task quality, cache residency, and serving throughput must be measured jointly. Second, we describe the practical design choices needed to make the 4-bit path robust, including asymmetric K/V treatment, Walsh-Hadamard rotation, QJL removal, and block-scale variants. Third, we present serving optimizations on AMD GPUs, including optimized decode-attention kernels and UltraQuant, an FP4 approximation path that uses FP8 queries, FP4 KV tensors, UE8M0 group scales, and native scaled-MFMA support on CDNA4. On a long-context, multi-turn agentic workload, UltraQuant cuts P50 time-to-first-token by 3.47x in the cache-pressured late rounds (2.3x across all rounds) and raises output throughput by 1.63x over the FP8 KV baseline.

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

Trusting Right Predictions for Wrong Reasons: A LIME Based Analysis of Deep Learning Interpretability in Lung Cancer Diagnosis

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related mortality, with approximately 2.5 million new cases and 1.8 million deaths annually, making reliable diagnosis a clinical priority. Although deep learning models have achieved strong performance in lung cancer classification, evaluation has largely focused on predictive accuracy, leaving their decision-making processes insufficiently examined. This study compares three architecturally distinct models: a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), a pretrained ResNet50, and a Vision Transformer (ViT), trained on the IQ-OTH/NCCD lung cancer CT dataset. Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME) were applied to investigate model reasoning. In addition to standard performance metrics, a dual-correlation framework was introduced to measure both prediction agreement and explanation agreement across model pairs. All three models achieved strong classification performance, with ResNet50 attaining 98.61% accuracy, CNN 97.91%, and ViT 93.75%, while all achieved ROC-AUC scores of 0.99. Prediction correlations exceeded 0.99 across all model pairs, indicating highly consistent outputs. However, LIME explanation correlations remained below 0.26, revealing substantial differences in the image regions used to reach those predictions. Analysis of misclassified samples further identified a consistent spatial pattern: incorrect predictions were associated with attention outside the lung parenchyma, whereas correct predictions focused primarily within lung regions. These findings demonstrate that prediction agreement is a poor proxy for reasoning consistency, and that interpretability evaluation must be treated as an independent validation criterion alongside predictive performance in clinical AI systems.