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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

An AI Security Agent for University ACMIS: Multi-Vector Threat Detection and Automated Response

arXiv:2606.08270v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: University Academic Management Information Systems (ACMIS) are high-value targets for a wide spectrum of security threats including brute-force login attacks, payment fraud, privilege escalation, insider data theft, and academic integrity violations. Traditional rule-based intrusion detection systems are inadequate because many malicious activities are structurally indistinguishable from normal operations. This paper presents an AI-based security agent for ACMIS that combines supervised anomaly detection, behavioural analytics, and a natural language processing chatbot for secure password recovery. The agent monitors five operational layers: authentication, authorisation, financial transactions, user behaviour, and system health, and responds through a four-tier risk escalation framework. A modular architecture allows the core engine to be extended to other institutional systems. Experiments on a simulated ACMIS event log dataset of 147,922 sessions demonstrate a threat detection macro-average F1 of 0.966, compared to 0.156 for a rule-based baseline and 0.836 for a sequence-only (LSTM) baseline, with end-to-end critical-tier automated response latency under 1 ms on a single-node prototype. The integrated recovery chatbot achieves 97.1 percent identity verification accuracy and an 87.3 percent mass-reset attack detection rate with zero false positives on legitimate high volume recovery periods.

02.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Asymptotics of the number of labelled connected sparse multitype graphs

arXiv:2606.17912v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the asymptotic enumeration of labelled connected multitype graphs in the sparse regime, where both the number of vertices and edges grow linearly and the excess is proportional to the size of the graph. Extending the classical theory of connected graph enumeration to the multitype setting, we consider graphs with prescribed numbers of vertices of each type and prescribed edge counts between each pair of types. Our approach is probabilistic and relies on the theory of inhomogeneous random graphs. In particular, we exploit large-deviation principles and asymptotic estimates for connectedness probabilities to relate the counting problem to the emergence of giant components in suitably tuned supercritical random graphs. From large deviation asymptotics of connected components of inhomogeneous random graphs, we recognize that a connected graph with a given edge statistics corresponds to the (unique) giant component of larger inhomogeneous random graph with a suitably chosen connection kernel. This correspondence allows us to derive the leading exponential asymptotics for the number of connected multitype graphs with fixed type profile and edge matrix. The resulting formula generalizes the asymptotic enumeration results of Bender, Canfield, and McKay for connected sparse graphs to the multitype framework. More broadly, the paper illustrates how probabilistic techniques can provide transparent and effective tools for addressing new combinatorial enumeration problems.

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

Harnessing cortical geometry, wiring, and function as inductive biases for recurrent neural networks

arXiv:2606.14975v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: How the wiring and functional organization of cortex shape recurrent computation remains a central question in both neuroscience and machine learning. Here, we leverage data released through the Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks (MICrONS) program–a functional connectomics resource spanning multiple areas of mouse visual cortex, in which dense calcium imaging is co-registered with high-resolution electron microscopy reconstruction from the same animal–to build biologically grounded recurrent neural networks. Using neuronal spatial coordinates, anatomical connectivity, and function-derived relationships from nearly 12,000 coregistered excitatory neurons, we initialize recurrent weights and impose communication-aware spatial constraints during learning. Across three cognitive decision-making tasks, networks constrained by cortical structure and function consistently outperform baseline and partially constrained models. Functional weight initialization provides the largest gain, while real spatial embedding yields robust additional improvements across conditions. These biologically grounded networks also develop low-entropy, modular, and small-world organization, and retain strong performance even when recurrence is restricted to positive weights. Together, our results show that the machinery of cortex–its geometry, wiring, and functional structure–can be harnessed as a powerful inductive basis for building recurrent networks that learn more effectively while converging toward key organizational principles of biological computation.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

HairLRM: Strand-based Hair Modeling via Large Reconstruction Models

The fundamental limitation of traditional strand-based modeling is not simply data scarcity, but the ill-posedness of inferring complex 3D fields from 2D imagery without structural constraints. This unconstrained regression leads to catastrophic failures in resolving both global occlusion (e.g., in ponytails) and local directionality (e.g., in curls), resulting in over-smoothed, plausible-but-incorrect geometries. To resolve this, we integrate the strong geometric priors of Large Reconstruction Models (LRMs) into the strand generation pipeline. Using the LRM mesh as a structural anchor, we employ a novel Dual Orientation AutoEncoder to lift coarse geometry into high-fidelity strands. By resolving vector field singularities through latent-space optimization and surface-guided refinement, our method effectively disentangles complex topological structures, setting a new benchmark for robustness and accuracy in hair reconstruction.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Variational Consensus Monte Carlo for Bayesian Mixture

arXiv:2606.19643v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Motivated by the privacy, sensitivity and sharing limitations of health data, we present a comprehensive pipeline for inference of Bayesian mixture models within a federated learning setting, i.e. when data cannot be fully shared or pooled across compute nodes. We adopt a Consensus Monte Carlo (CMC) approach, in which an MCMC algorithm is run independently within each data silo to estimate local posterior distributions, which are then aggregated to approximate the posterior over the full data. The variational CMC approach of Rabinovich, Angelino and Jordan (2015) [1] frames the aggregation step as a variational inference problem, but their application to mixtures assumes the number of clusters and key mixture parameters to be known. Our main methodological contributions are: (i) an extension of variational CMC to over-fitted Bayesian mixture models that infer the number of clusters and all model parameters, without requiring conjugacy; (ii) novel cluster-matching algorithms suitable for cross-silo settings in which not every cluster appears in each local dataset; (iii) a number of inference strategies for the aggregation step, matched to different federated learning constraints; and (iv) guidelines for choosing among these in practice. A comprehensive simulation study validates the framework and allows us to compare to state-of-the-art federated learning alternatives. Notably, we show that when the composition of local datasets reflects the underlying clustering structure in the data, our approach can recover small clusters with greater accuracy than standard MCMC applied to the pooled data. We illustrate the framework on large-scale electronic health record data, identifying multi-morbidity patterns in a British geriatric population.

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

Generative Molecular Design with Steerable and Granular Synthesizability Control

arXiv:2505.08774v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Designing molecules that are both property-optimal and readily synthesizable is a central challenge in drug discovery. Existing works that do consider synthesizability can jointly output predicted synthesis routes for generated molecules. However, there has been minimal attention in addressing the ease of synthesis and with flexibility to incorporate desired reaction constraints. On the other hand, virtual screening searches for commercially available compounds, but imposes challenges when scaling to ultra-large (billion-size and beyond) chemical spaces. Here, we propose a generative design framework that unifies synthesis-constrained molecular design and ultra-large-scale virtual screening through steerable and granular synthesizability control. Generated molecules satisfy arbitrary multi-parameter optimization objectives with predicted synthesis routes satisfying mix-and-match constraints: including or avoiding certain reactions, incorporating specific building blocks, and minimizing synthesis route length. In an end-to-end in-house campaign targeting BRD4, we designed molecules synthesizable with specific selected reactions and building blocks, synthesized all six selected compounds, and identified two micromolar binders. We further demonstrate that reaction control enables efficient navigation of ultra-large make-on-demand chemical spaces to identify property-optimal candidates. By applying our framework to Chemspace's Freedom 4.0 make-on-demand space (142 billion molecules), we generated ~320k molecules (0.00023% of the library) on a single consumer-grade GPU (with only 8 GB GPU memory) and identified a micromolar Wee1 binder amongst 60 synthesized candidates. The single unified framework thus enables generating novel synthesizable molecules and retrieving catalogue-ready candidates, offering a flexible solution to mitigating the synthesizability bottleneck.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

A ribbon ZX calculus for gauge theory

arXiv:2606.13551v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: ZX calculus provides a graphical formalism for reasoning about quantum processes, built from two interacting Frobenius algebras associated with the Z and X bases of a qubit. While it has found widespread application in quantum information and computing, its relationship to quantum field theory has only recently begun to be explored. In this work, we further develop this connection by providing a generalization of ZX calculus to two-dimensional Yang Mills theory with a compact gauge group. The key observation is that both frameworks can be organized around the Hopf Frobenius algebraic structure associated with a group algebra, which can in turn be described by the diagrammatics of two dimensional topological quantum field theory. Given the well known relationship between gauge theory and gravity in two and three dimensions, our work paves the way for applications of ZX to low dimensional gravity.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

A comparative and critical study of EEGNet for fNIRS-driven cognitive load classification

arXiv:2606.16160v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurately classifying cognitive load from functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) signals remains a significant challenge due to temporal variability, inter-subject differences, and sensitivity to preprocessing choices. This study provides a comprehensive evaluation of EEGNet for fNIRS-based cognitive load classification by systematically examining the effects of temporal segmentation strategies (overlapping vs. non-overlapping), window lengths (10s, 20s, 30s), feature extraction methods (Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Fast Independent Component Analysis (FastICA)), learning rate configurations (fixed and adaptive), and evaluation protocols (random split vs. subject-independent (SI)). Results from random-split experiments show that overlapping segmentation, combined with smaller fixed learning rates (0.01-0.001), yields the highest accuracies, due to temporal redundancy and dense sampling of hemodynamic transitions. However, SI evaluation reveals a substantial drop in accuracy, demonstrating limited generalization to unseen participants. Under SI evaluation, non-overlapping segmentation outperformed overlapping windows, with the best accuracy of 56.11% achieved using PCA features with a 20-second window and a 0.1 learning rate. These findings indicate that eliminating temporal redundancy helps the model learn more robust and generalizable representations of cognitive load across individuals. Although adaptive learning rate strategy improved training stability, it did not surpass the performance of optimally selected fixed learning rates. The study highlights the critical role of segmentation strategy and learning rate selection in improving model generalization and identifies methodological considerations essential for developing reliable, real-time, and SI cognitive load classification systems using fNIRS.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Architectural Wisdom: A Framework for Governing Optimization in AI Systems

arXiv:2606.16319v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern AI systems exhibit structural failures that capability scaling alone does not reliably fix: they optimize under-specified objectives with no architectural mechanism to question whether the objective should be optimized at all. Engagement maximization can amplify harmful pathways; tool-using agents can commit irreversible actions; preference-trained language models can become sycophantic. We argue that this failure is a wisdom problem, not an intelligence problem. We use "wisdom" in a deliberately architectural sense, not as a claim about virtue, consciousness, or moral omniscience. Intelligence accepts a goal and optimizes within it; wisdom interrogates whether the goal should be optimized at all. The two are separable architectural properties. We propose architectural wisdom as a corrigible objective-governance layer above the optimization substrate. The layer makes three structural commitments explicit and nondegenerate before any action: temporal horizon, relational boundary, and irreversibility. It is realized by four components (Structural Utility Transform, Moral Admissibility Interface, Arbitration and Escalation Controller, Value Revision Channel) that compute a six-coordinate wisdom tuple over horizon, relational coverage, irreversibility, admissibility, value revision, and auditability. We motivate the architecture by eight cases drawn from contemporary AI failures, secular wisdom traditions, and hard ethical situations, and defend the distinction against the intelligence-completeness thesis using goal-questioning over goal-taking, Bostrom's orthogonality, structural separation in our exemplar cases, and persistent failure modes despite capability scaling. The framework is the conceptual contract for a larger architecture whose formal specifications and empirical validation are developed in subsequent work.

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

teasr: training-efficient any-step diffusion transformer for real-world image super-resolution

Diffusion models excel in Real-World Image Super-Resolution (Real-ISR) due to their powerful generative priors but suffer from slow iterative sampling. Although existing one-step distillation methods accelerate inference, they typically require auxiliary teacher models that inflate training memory and restrict scalability to large-scale architectures. Furthermore, these fixed-step models lack the flexibility to trade off speed for quality. In this paper, we propose TEASR, a training-efficient any-step diffusion framework for Real-ISR that enables both one-step and multi-step restoration within a unified model. Our key idea is to perform self-adversarial distillation within a single diffusion model, eliminating the need for auxiliary teachers or discriminators. Specifically, we propose a timestep-aware rectification strategy that stabilizes one-step generation across noise levels. These two designs further enables the distillation of 20B-parameter diffusion models on a single GPU, significantly improving training efficiency. Moreover, we introduce a dual-branch diffusion transformer with decoupled timestep condition to separate the current noise state and the denoising target to enhance sampling quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TEASR supports seamless any-step sampling and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across multiple datasets.

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

TopoHR: Hierarchical Centerline Representation for Cyclic Topology Reasoning in Driving Scenes with Point-to-Instance Relations

Topology reasoning is crucial for autonomous driving. Current methods primarily focus on instance-level learning for centerline detection, followed by a sequential module for topology reasoning that relies on simplified MLP layers. Moreover, they often neglect the importance of point-to-instance (P2I) relationships in topology reasoning. To address these limitations, we present TopoHR (Topological Hierarchical Representation), a novel end-to-end framework that establishes cyclic interaction between centerline detection and topology reasoning, allowing them to iteratively enhance each other. Specifically, we introduce a hierarchical centerline representation including point queries, instance queries, and semantic representations. These multi-level features are seamlessly integrated and fused within a hierarchical centerline decoder. Furthermore, we design a hierarchical topology reasoning module that captures both fine-grained P2I relationships and global instance-to-instance (I2I) connections within a unified architecture. With these novel components, TopoHR ensures accurate and robust topology reasoning. On the OpenLane-V2 benchmark, TopoHR refreshes state-of-the-art performance with significant improvements. Notably, compared with previous best results, TopoHR achieves +3.8 in $\mathrm{DET}_{l}$, +5.4 in $\mathrm{TOP}_{ll}$ on $subset_A$ and +11.0 in $\mathrm{DET}_{l}$, +7.9 in $\mathrm{TOP}_{ll}$ on $subset_B$, validating the effectiveness of the proposed components. The code will be shared publicly at https://github.com/Yifeng-Bai/TopoHR.git.

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

SPRI: SVD-Partitioned Residual Initialization for Data-Constrained MoE Upcycling

arXiv:2606.16456v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models enable efficient scaling, but training them from scratch remains prohibitively expensive. MoE upcycling mitigates this cost by converting pretrained dense models into sparse MoE models. However, existing upcycling methods typically rely on large-scale continued training and often perform poorly under data-constrained supervised adaptation, due to either homogeneous experts or overly disruptive perturbations to pretrained parameters. In this setting, effective upcycling must leverage pretrained weight structure while introducing sufficient diversity among routed experts. To this end, we propose SVD-Partitioned Residual Initialization (SPRI), which distributes SVD-partitioned residuals derived from pretrained feed-forward network (FFN) weights across routed experts, introducing controlled expert diversity grounded in pretrained spectral structure. We further introduce a two-stage training strategy to improve adaptation stability. We evaluate SPRI on multilingual speech-to-text translation, where limited supervised data challenges MoE upcycling and multiple target languages provide natural routing heterogeneity. On CoVoST2 across 15 En-to-XX directions, SPRI improves average BLEU and COMET over fully fine-tuned dense models by 2.58 and 3.32 points, respectively, and outperforms the prior best MoE upcycling baseline by 3.39 BLEU and 4.34 COMET points.

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

Mechanistic Analysis of Catastrophic Forgetting in Large Language Models During Continual Fine-tuning

Sequential fine-tuning of Large Language Models (LLMs) adaptation to target tasks often triggers catastrophic forgetting, where the acquisition of novel target skills degrades ancestral capabilities. This paper presents a systematic comparative study of catastrophic forgetting across twenty premier models representing the state-of-the-art in mid-2026. We categorize our investigation into two primary research lines: (i) a behavioral and semantic output drift analysis of ten leading closed-source models (including Claude Fable 5, GPT-5.5 High, and Gemini 3.5 Flash), and (ii) a deep mechanistic interpretation of ten prominent open-weight architectures (such as DeepSeek-V4-Pro, Llama 4 Maverick, and Qwen 3.6-27B). Through weight-space trajectory tracking, Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA), and routing gate drift calculations in Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) layers, we localize the neural circuits highly susceptible to parameter overwriting. Our findings indicate that early-layer attention heads exhibit systemic entropic dispersion, while mid-to-deep feed-forward networks (or sparse expert blocks) suffer localized representation collapse. Informed by these insights, we introduce Low-Rank Circuit Projection (LRCP), a subspace-regularized training intervention. Empirical evaluations show that LRCP successfully mitigates up to 94.2% of ancestral capabilities in open-weight configurations and matches the adaptation velocity of standard PEFT baselines.

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

Detecting and Mitigating DDoS Attacks with AI: A Survey

arXiv:2503.17867v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Distributed Denial of Service attacks represent an active cybersecurity research problem. Recent research shifted from static rule-based defenses towards AI-based detection and mitigation. This comprehensive survey covers several key topics. Preeminently, state-of-the-art AI detection methods are discussed. An in-depth taxonomy based on manual expert hierarchies and an AI-generated dendrogram are provided, thus settling DDoS categorization ambiguities. An important discussion on available datasets follows, covering data format options and their role in training AI detection methods together with adversarial training and examples augmentation. Beyond detection, AI based mitigation techniques are surveyed as well. Finally, multiple open research directions are proposed.

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

INDEQS: Informed Neural controlled Differential EQuationS

arXiv:2606.19138v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural Controlled Differential Equations (NCDE) provide a powerful continuous-time framework for forecasting time series, but standard graph-based extensions typically learn spatial structure purely from data, even in settings where a directed graph structure is known a priori. We introduce Informed Neural controlled Differential EQuationS (INDEQS), a graph-based NCDE forecasting method that incorporates prior knowledge of a directed graph at distinct architectural positions. INDEQS separates inner mixing of hidden states across graph nodes from outer mixing between vector field and control, and offers both a lightweight graph-constrained variant and a more expressive variant, learning additional graph connections from data via adaptive graph convolutions. To systematically study when graph informedness is beneficial in forecasting, we devise a continuous advection simulation on directed graphs, yielding synthetic spatio-temporal datasets with known ground-truth flow structure. We then evaluate INDEQS on two real-world tasks: river discharge forecasting on a hydrological network and traffic flow prediction on PeMS08. Across these synthetic and real-world benchmarks, outer informedness consistently improves mean absolute error over an uninformed NCDE with comparable parameter count, particularly on larger graphs, while inner informedness offers a more parameter-efficient alternative when strict adherence to a known adjacency is desired. A comparison of discrete convolutional and continuous-time decoders further shows that continuous decoders yield better accuracy and greater temporal flexibility on real-world tasks. An implementation of INDEQS and the advection simulation is available at https://github.com/Mitchi1/indeqs.

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

Learning the generating functional for variance reduction in lattice QCD

arXiv:2606.15986v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The generating functional in quantum field theory provides the natural framework for constructing correlation functions as derivatives with respect to source operators. We present a methodology that leverages machine-learned normalizing flows to reduce the variance of arbitrary $N$-point correlation functions of bosonic operators in lattice gauge field theory calculations by encoding a representation of the generating functional. We show that it is possible to systematically approach noiseless estimators of correlation functions in this framework. We demonstrate this methodology with applications to calculations of glueball correlation functions and Wilson loops in Quantum Chromodynamics and Yang-Mills theory. The results show up to three orders of magnitude variance reduction.

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

Fast Speech Foundation Model Distillation Using Interleaved Stacking

Distilling a large speech foundation model (SFM) into an efficient student model has been successfully applied to low-resource environments. Although distillation reduces inference latency, it requires an additional student model training. However, the training efficiency of SFM distillation remains underexplored. In this work, we explore training acceleration of SFM distillation to speed up model deployment. We examine the potential of stacking, in which the model depth is progressively increased through training until the target model depth is reached. While existing stacking methods improve training speed, they suffer from performance degradation. To handle this limitation, we propose interleaved stacking, a novel stacking method that consistently preserves layer position throughout the stacking process. This property is particularly critical in SFMs, in which each layer encodes distinct layer-specific knowledge. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed method on SUPERB.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

MAWARITH: A Dataset and Benchmark for Legal Inheritance Reasoning with LLMs

Islamic inheritance law is challenging for large language models because solving inheritance cases requires complex, structured, multi-step reasoning and the correct application of juristic rules to compute heirs' shares. We introduce MAWARITH, a large-scale annotated dataset of 12,500 Arabic inheritance cases for training and evaluating models on the full reasoning chain: (i) identifying eligible heirs, (ii) applying blocking (\d{hajb}) and allocation rules, and (iii) computing exact inheritance shares. To the best of our knowledge, MAWARITH is the first Arabic corpus and benchmark designed for end-to-end Islamic inheritance reasoning. Unlike prior datasets that restrict inheritance case solving to multiple-choice questions, MAWARITH supports the full reasoning chain and provides step-by-step solutions with justifications grounded in classical juristic sources and established inheritance rules, as well as exact share calculations. This enables models to learn how to generate detailed, step-by-step responses to user queries that reflect real-world Islamic inheritance cases. To evaluate models beyond final-answer accuracy, we propose MIR-E (Mawarith Inheritance Reasoning Evaluation), a weighted multi-stage metric that scores key reasoning stages and captures error propagation across the pipeline. We evaluate six large language models in a zero-shot setting. A commercial model achieves about 90\%, whereas all evaluated open-source models remain below 50\%. Our error analysis identifies recurring failure patterns, including scenario misinterpretation, errors in heir identification, errors in share allocation, and missing or incorrect application of key inheritance rules such as \textquotesingle awl and radd. The MAWARITH dataset is publicly available at https://gitlab.com/nlpresearcher/mawarith.

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

A Prototypical Signature Approach for Writer-Independent Offline Signature Verification

Offline handwritten signature verification aims to distinguish genuine from forged signatures using static images. Since real forgeries are rarely available, negative samples are usually randomly drawn from genuine signatures of other users to create training data. However, this random selection often lacks diversity, increases redundancy, and escalates computational cost, leading to inefficient training. We propose a data-driven strategy to generate diverse, informative negative samples using prototypical signatures, which are compact, non-identifiable summaries of genuine signature features. Based on the experiments results, we conclude that (i) prototypical signatures yield more informative negative samples, improving the detection of skilled forgeries; (ii) the proposed approach is backbone-agnostic, showing robustness across architectures; and (iii) when combined with a primal-form linear SVM, it serves as an alternative to RBF-based models while significantly improving scalability and computational efficiency. Implementation of the method is available at https://github.com/kdmoura/proto_hsv.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

ANEForge: Python for direct computation on the Apple Neural Engine

arXiv:2606.17090v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: ANEForge is a Python package that programs the Apple Neural Engine (ANE), the fixed-function neural accelerator on every recent Apple device, directly and without CoreML. In production the engine is reachable only through CoreML, which treats it as a scheduling option: no configuration requires the ANE, and a model can silently run on the CPU or GPU instead. ANEForge compiles a lazy tensor graph, built from 58 fused operators and 19 native bridge operators, into a single ANE program. The program is dispatched through the same ANE daemon and kernel-driver stack as Apple's internal framework. Beyond inference, the package reaches the engine's native fused attention, streams int8, int4, and sparse weights, keeps decoder and optimizer state resident across steps, and runs the forward pass, backward pass, and optimizer update of training on the engine. A small fused program completes a call in about 90us, near the engine's 70us per-program dispatch floor, and a pretrained ResNet-18 forward runs end-to-end in 0.33ms. ResNet-18, a sentence encoder, and a Vision Transformer run end-to-end against framework references, and a Stable Diffusion U-Net validates its forward pass. ANEForge targets Apple Silicon under macOS 14 and later. Each release is verified against a recorded macOS and ANE-compiler version.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Attention Sinks in Diffusion Transformers: A Causal Analysis

Attention sinks – tokens that receive disproportionate attention mass – are assumed to be functionally important in autoregressive language models, but their role in diffusion transformers remains unclear. We present a causal analysis in text-to-image diffusion, dynamically identifying dominant attention recipients per timestep and suppressing them via paired, training-free interventions on the score and value paths. Across 553 GenEval prompts on Stable Diffusion~3 (with SDXL corroboration), removing these sinks does not degrade text-image alignment (CLIP-T) or preference proxies (ImageReward, HPS-v2) at $k{=}1$; only under stronger interventions ($k\!\geq\!10$) does HPS-v2 exhibit a metric-dependent boundary, while CLIP-T remains robust throughout. The perceptual shifts induced by suppression are nonetheless sink-specific – $\sim\!6\times$ larger than equal-budget random masking – revealing an empirical dissociation between trajectory-level perturbation and semantic alignment in diffusion transformers. \footnote{Code available at https://github.com/wfz666/ICML26-attention-sink.}

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

TimeVista: Exploring and Exploiting Vision-Language Models as Judges for Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.16173v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-quality time series forecasting is pivotal for real-world decision-making. However, traditional point-wise metrics often fail to reveal complex temporal patterns and align poorly with human intuitive preferences. While the ''LLM-as-a-Judge'' paradigm has revolutionized text evaluation by providing flexible, human-aligned judgment, its application to time series remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we leverage Vision-Language Models (VLMs) as judges for time series forecasting, harnessing their ability to comprehend time series plots grounded in textual information. Specifically, we propose a novel framework integrating micro- and macro-level judgments informed by contextual information to evaluate time series forecasting. To this end, we introduce TimeVista, a comprehensive VLM-as-a-Judge benchmark comprising 5563 time series samples paired with detailed evaluation rubrics. Extensive meta-evaluations demonstrate that VLMs are highly reliable judges, achieving significantly higher consistency with human preferences than conventional metrics. Building upon our benchmark, we comprehensively assess recent Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) under the VLM-as-a-Judge paradigm. Our results demonstrate that VLMs serve as robust and interpretable judges, providing a comprehensive, human-aligned standard for evaluating time series models.

23.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Model-independent upper bounds for the prices of Bermudan options with convex payoffs

arXiv:2503.13328v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Suppose $\mu$ and $\nu$ are probability measures on $\mathbb{R}$ satisfying $\mu \leq_{cx} \nu$. Let $a$ and $b$ be convex functions on $\mathbb{R}$ with $a \geq b \geq 0$. We are interested in finding $$\sup_{\mathbf{M}} \sup_{\tau} \mathbb{E}^{\mathbf{M}} \left[ a(X) I_{ \{ \tau = 1 \} } + b(Y) I_{ \{ \tau = 2 \} } \right] $$ where the first supremum is taken over consistent models $\mathbf{M}$ (i.e., filtered probability spaces $(\Omega, \mathbf{F}, \mathbb{F}, \mathbb{P})$ such that $Z=(z,Z_1,Z_2)=(\int_{\mathbb{R}} x \mu(dx) = \int_{\mathbb{R}} y \nu(dy), X, Y)$ is a $(\mathbb{F},\mathbb{P})$ martingale, where $X$ has law $\mu$ and $Y$ has law $\nu$ under $\mathbb{P}$) and $\tau$ in the second supremum is a $(\mathbb{F},\mathbb{P})$-stopping time taking values in $\{1,2\}$. Our contributions are first to characterise and simplify the dual problem, and second to completely solve the problem under some structural assumptions on the measures $\mu$ and $\nu$ (namely that $\mu$ and $\nu$ are absolutely continuous probability measures that satisfy the Dispersion Assumption). A key finding is that the canonical set-up in which the filtration is that generated by $Z$ is not rich enough to define an optimal model and additional randomisation is required. This holds even though the marginal laws $\mu$ and $\nu$ are atom-free. The problem has an interpretation of finding the robust, or model-free, no-arbitrage bound on the price of a Bermudan option with two possible exercise dates, given the prices of co-maturing European options.

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

AP-GRPO: Anchor-Gated Phonetic Alignment with Policy Optimization for Pathological Speech Reconstruction

arXiv:2606.15540v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pathological speech from patients with neurodegenerative and neuromotor disorders is often acoustically distorted and linguistically fragmented, making pathological speech reconstruction necessary to recover intended textual content from distorted and incomplete speech recordings. Crucially, such recordings are rarely uniformly degraded: some words or short phrases remain reliable and can serve as audible anchors for reconstructing the corrupted surrounding content. We introduce Anchor-gated Phonetic Group Relative Policy Optimization (AP-GRPO), a GRPO framework with phonetic reward that aligns speech language models (SLMs) through audible-anchor preservation and inter-anchor phonetic compatibility to the original speech signal. AP-GRPO consists of: (i) an anchor-gated reward that matches reliable audible anchors in clear regions; and (ii) an inter-anchor phonetic alignment reward that evaluates whether recovered contents are phonetically supported by the corresponding corrupted inter-anchor speech span. Across four disease conditions, AP-GRPO improves faithful speech reconstruction, and the learned anchor constraint automatically adapts to each condition and thus reveals interpretable disease-specific profiles: conditions with severe articulatory degradation require stronger anchor enforcement, whereas milder impairment or linguistically impaired conditions rely more on phonetic alignment for inter-anchor recovery.

25.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-12

Placenta accreta spectrum in the 21st century: Challenging dogma and redefining disorder

by Eric Jauniaux, Helena C. Bartels, Yalda Afshar Placenta accreta spectrum (PAS) is a serious pregnancy complication caused by abnormal placental attachment to the uterus. In this Perspective, Eric Jauniaux and colleagues discuss emerging evidence that challenges our long-held pathophysiological understanding of PAS, and argue that a critical reassessment of definition, diagnosis, and management is overdue. In this Perspective, Jonathan Evans and colleagues discuss why restricting access to joint replacement surgery based on BMI alone is not supported by evidence, and highlight how such rest rictions risk exacerbating stigma, inequity and avoidable harm to those who would benefit from surgery.