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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Entanglement generation between field modes mediated by a fluctuating conducting wall

arXiv:2606.12338v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We consider a movable conducting plate of finite mass, between two fixed ones, whose mechanical degrees of freedom are treated quantum-mechanically and bound to its equilibrium position by a harmonic potential. The movable wall is thus subjected to quantum fluctuations of its position. This creates a system of two sub-cavities separated by the movable fluctuating plate, and two massless one-dimensional scalar fields, one in each sub-cavity. This system is described by an appropriate generalization of the Law Hamiltonian. The presence of the movable wall yields an effective plate-fields interaction, as well as an effective interaction between the field modes. We obtain, at the second order in perturbation theory, the ground state of the interacting system and the reduced density operator of the fields in each sub-cavity by tracing out the wall's degrees of freedom. We calculate the entanglement between two field modes, one in each cavity, by evaluating analytically the negativity; we then evaluate numerically also the total multimode negativity. Our results show that in both cases the fields in the two sub-cavities are entangled, in contrast to the case in which the wall is fixed in space. We discuss the amount of the field entanglement present as a function of relevant physical parameters of the system such as the mass and oscillation frequency of the movable wall, its distance from the fixed walls and the frequencies of the field modes considered.

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

MB-Loc: Multi-planar Bird's-eye-view Localization in outdoor LiDAR scenes

Global LiDAR localization is a fundamental task for autonomous navigation systems. Recent methods perform Scene Coordinate Regression (SCR) and achieve superior accuracy over Absolute Pose Regression (APR) solutions by predicting dense 3D world coordinates. However, SCR approaches introduce two major bottlenecks: severe computational inefficiency from processing raw 3D geometries and significant performance degradation under varying sensor viewpoints. To address these limitations, we present MB-Loc, a lightweight and viewpoint-robust SCR framework. Instead of relying on heavy 3D convolutions, we project the input LiDAR scan into a 2.5D Multi-planar Bird's-Eye View (BEV) representation. By slicing the point-cloud along the Z-axis and mapping signed depths into discrete 2D planes, MB-Loc retains essential 3D geometric structures while exploiting the computational tractability of standard 2D CNNs. To handle the inherent sparsity of outdoor LiDAR, we introduce a KL-regularized latent bottleneck that explicitly models spatial uncertainty without injecting stochastic noise. Finally, to ensure rotation robustness, we apply 3D spatial augmentations prior to planar projection, forcing the network to implicitly learn viewpoint-invariant features. We perform extensive experiments on the publicly available NCLT dataset and demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the current state-of-the-art. Operating at real-time inference speeds, MB-Loc significantly outperforms traditional 3D-SCR architectures in computational efficiency.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

SuperCarver: Texture-Consistent 3D Geometry Super-Resolution for High-Fidelity Surface Detail Generation

Conventional production workflow of high-precision mesh assets necessitates a cumbersome and laborious process of manual sculpting by specialized 3D artists/modelers. The recent years have witnessed remarkable advances in AI-empowered 3D content creation for generating plausible structures and intricate appearances from images or text prompts. However, synthesizing realistic surface details still poses great challenges, and enhancing the geometry fidelity of existing lower-quality 3D meshes (instead of image/text-to-3D generation) remains an open problem. In this paper, we introduce SuperCarver, a 3D geometry super-resolution pipeline for supplementing texture-consistent surface details onto a given coarse mesh. We start by rendering the original textured mesh into the image domain from multiple viewpoints. To achieve detail boosting, we construct a deterministic prior-guided normal diffusion model, which is fine-tuned on a carefully curated dataset of paired detail-lacking and detail-rich normal map renderings. To update mesh surfaces from potentially imperfect normal map predictions, we design a noise-resistant inverse rendering scheme through deformable distance field. Experiments demonstrate that our SuperCarver is capable of generating realistic and expressive surface details depicted by the actual texture appearance, making it a powerful tool to both upgrade historical low-quality 3D assets and reduce the workload of sculpting high-poly meshes.

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

Towards Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models by Refining Textual Embeddings

Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) remain a persistent challenge, often stemming from inadequate integration of visual information during multimodal reasoning. A key cause is the model's over-reliance on textual priors and underutilization of visual cues, leading to outputs that are linguistically fluent but visually inaccurate. For example, given an image of an empty kitchen countertop, an LVLM might hallucinate a "bowl of fruit" or "cup of coffee", relying on language associations rather than visual evidence. Most LVLMs incorporate visual features by appending them to the input stream of a pre-trained LLM and training on large-scale vision-language datasets. Our systematic analysis reveals that this strategy often leads to over-dependence on textual information due to the inherent bias of LLMs towards language-dominant representations. This imbalance skews attention towards the text over visual content, weakening the model's ability to ground outputs in visual inputs. To address this, we propose a simple yet effective visual feature incorporation method that encourages the model to learn visually-informed textual embeddings distinct from those of the base LLM and promotes a more balanced attention distribution. Experimental results across multiple hallucination benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly reduces hallucinations and fosters more balanced multimodal reasoning. Notably, our approach achieves substantial gains, including +9.33% on MMVP-MLLM, +2.99% on POPE-AOKVQA, up to +3.4% on Merlin, and +3% on the hard-data split of HallusionBench.

05.
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.

06.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-17

Why large-scale randomized trials of live-attenuated shingles vaccination for dementia prevention are urgently needed

In my view, we have never had as robust a body of evidence from observational data on an intervention for dementia as we do for live-attenuated shingles vaccination. Both a recent US National Institutes of Health expert workshop and an international expert consensus on Alzheimer’s disease drug repurposing identified large-scale randomized trials of shingles vaccination for dementia prevention as the crucial next step for the field.

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

Training-Free Adversarial Robustness in Computational MRI

Deep learning (DL) methods have become the state-of-the-art for reconstructing sub-sampled magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data. However, studies have shown that these methods are susceptible to small adversarial input perturbations, resulting in major distortions in the output images. Various strategies have been proposed to reduce the effects of these attacks, but they require retraining. In this work, we propose a novel approach for mitigating adversarial attacks on MRI reconstruction models without any retraining. Based on the idea of cyclic measurement consistency, we devise a novel mitigation objective that is minimized in a small ball around the attack input. Results show that our method substantially reduces the impact of adversarial perturbations across different datasets, attack types/strengths and PD-DL networks, and qualitatively and quantitatively outperforms conventional mitigation methods. We also introduce a practically relevant scenario for small adversarial perturbations that models impulse noise in raw data, which relates to herringbone artifacts, and show the applicability of our approach in this setting. Finally, we show our mitigation approach remains effective in two realistic extension scenarios: a blind setup, where the attack strength or algorithm is not known to the user; and an adaptive attack setup, where the attacker has full knowledge of the defense strategy.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Superconductor-"Metal" Transition of One-dimensional Interacting Bosons with Ohmic Quantum Dissipation

arXiv:2605.30746v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The phase diagram of a system of interacting bosons (Cooper pairs) hoping on a one-dimensional (1D) lattice with onsite phase dissipation describing the Josephson tunneling to a nearby diffusive normal-metal electrode is studied. Starting from the system at commensurate lattice filling, it is shown by a combination of analytical techniques that the phase diagram contains two quantum phases: A dissipative Bose-Einstein condensate (D-BEC) or superconductor with long-range phase coherence, and a dissipative Mott insulator (D-Mott) or "metal" with exponentially decaying phase correlations in space and local imaginary-time correlations decaying as the local pairing correlations of the electrode. The D-Mott/metal phase can be described as a 1D array of dissipative boson puddles, weakly coupled by Josephson tunneling. The puddle size roughly corresponds to the length scale beyond which phase slips suppress phase coherence. The dissipative time-dependent Ginsburg-Landau theory phenomenologically used by Sachdev, Werner, and Troyer [Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 92} 237003 (2004)] for the superconductor-metal transition in quasi-1D wires is derived from this microscopic puddle picture. Thus, the criticality of the D-Mott/D-BEC transition is shown to belong to the Wilson-Fisher universality class with dynamical exponent $z\approx 2$. At small doping, the D-Mott/metal phase remains stable due to its finite compressibility, which is computed to leading order in a perturbation expansion of the dissipation strength and the inter-puddle Josephson coupling. At larger doping, using a mapping to a pseudospin chain combined with bosonization, the D-BEC/superconductor phase is the ground state for non-vanishing but arbitrarily small dissipation. Similarities and differences with deconfinement transition of an array 1D bosonic Mott insulators in anisotropic optical lattices are also discussed.

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

SkillsBench: Benchmarking How Well Agent Skills Work Across Diverse Tasks

arXiv:2602.12670v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agent Skills are structured packages of procedural knowledge that augment large language model (LLM) agents at inference time. Despite rapid adoption, there is no standard way to measure whether they actually help. We present SkillsBench, a benchmark whose current inventory contains 87 tasks across 8 domains paired with curated Skills and deterministic verifiers. Our latest aggregate evaluation runs the 87-task benchmark under matched no-Skills and curated-Skills conditions for 18 model-harness configurations. Curated Skills raise the average pass rate from 33.9% to 50.5% (+16.6 percentage points; 25.5% normalized gain), with configuration-level gains ranging from +4.1 to +25.7 pp. Focused Skills with at most three modules outperform larger or exhaustive bundles, and smaller models with Skills can match larger models without them. SkillsBench establishes paired evaluation as the foundation for rigorous measurement of Skill efficacy on agentic, expertise-heavy work.

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

CacheMuon: Using Temporal Preconditioning To Approximate Polar Factor

arXiv:2606.16371v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Muon is an optimizer that computes updates using the polar factor of the momentum matrix and has shown strong empirical performance across a range of training settings. A key component of Muon is the Newton-Schulz iteration used to compute this polar factor. Although this avoids the cost of an exact singular value decomposition, it remains expensive in practice because it is applied at every optimization step. At the same time, the momentum matrix changes smoothly over training, suggesting strong temporal correlation in the corresponding polar factors. In this paper, we exploit this structure and propose CacheMuon, a temporal preconditioning method that reuses information from previous optimization steps to approximate the polar factor at the current step. This reduces redundant orthogonalization computation across iterations. We analyze CacheMuon as an inexact Muon update, with error controlled by fresh-solver error and cache staleness. Empirically, CacheMuon provides a controllable quality-efficiency frontier: conservative thresholds closely match fresh Muon on language-model and vision training while reducing orthogonalization FLOPs, whereas more aggressive thresholds yield larger arithmetic savings at the cost of modest validation-quality degradation.

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

Mitigating Visual Hallucinations in Multimodal Systems through Retrieval-Augmented Reliability-Aware Inference

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in vision-language understanding and natural-language response generation. However, these systems can still produce overconfident predictions and hallucination-like outputs, particularly when the visual evidence is weak, ambiguous, or semantically inconsistent. Most existing approaches focus on improving multimodal representation alignment or retrieval-augmented generation, while providing limited mechanisms to quantify instance-level prediction reliability or identify incorrect visual outputs. This work proposes a retrieval-augmented reliability-aware inference framework for trustworthy multimodal visual understanding. The proposed framework constructs an external visual evidence database using pretrained visual embeddings and nearest-neighbor retrieval over normalized feature representations. Retrieved evidence is used to estimate prediction trustworthiness through multiple reliability indicators, including similarity strength, class-support agreement, evidence margin, entropy-based uncertainty, and an aggregate reliability score. Based on these signals, a decision gate determines whether the system should accept the prediction, answer with caution, or abstain/fallback when evidence is insufficient. A multimodal response-generation layer then produces a final user-facing response conditioned on the reliability decision. Experiments on ImageNet-100 demonstrate that the proposed reliability-aware framework improves accepted prediction accuracy from 85.84\% to 88.88\% at 89.04\% coverage. The hallucination-like accepted wrong-answer rate is reduced from 14.16\% to 11.12\%. These results show that integrating retrieval evidence, reliability estimation, and selective decision gating can improve calibration and reduce overconfident visual errors without retraining large multimodal models.

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

Surflo: Consistent 3D Surface Flow Model with Global State

Geometry is invariant to viewpoint, which makes any collection of images a redundant encoding of a single 3D state. Existing feed-forward reconstruction models fail to exploit this: per-view methods emit overlapping, unaligned pointmaps that grow linearly with input count, while global-latent methods commit to a fixed, low-resolution output. We introduce Surflo, which compresses a variable number of unposed RGB views into K latent tokens-one global state-and decodes oriented 3D surface points by independently transporting them from noise onto the surface via flow matching. This frees the output from any fixed grid or token budget: the same latent yields from a few thousand to a million points in a single forward pass. To suppress the local inconsistencies inherent to independent per-point decoding, an inference-time guidance term correlates nearby points by injecting a photometric gradient during ODE integration. Surflo matches or surpasses feed-forward baselines on surface metrics, runs an order of magnitude faster than optimization-based methods that require hundreds of views, and is the only feed-forward approach to combine a global latent with arbitrary-resolution decoding.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Artemis: Anatomy-Resolved inTervention for Eliminating Multimodal NeuroImage confounderS

arXiv:2606.18287v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal neuroimaging, integrating functional connectivity from fMRI and structural connectivity from DTI, enables non-invasive analysis of brain networks using graph neural networks. However, demographic factors such as age and sex systematically confound the relationship between brain connectivity and clinical outcomes, causing GNNs to exploit spurious shortcuts rather than learning causally invariant representations. While recent causal GNN methods introduce causality at the graph-modeling level, their causal mechanisms remain domain-agnostic without accounting for the real-world confounders inherent in clinical neuroimaging data. Moreover, brain networks are constructed from atlas-based parcellations where each region exhibits distinct sensitivity to demographic factors, necessitating region-aware adjustment. We propose Artemis, a region-level causal framework that bridges this gap with causal intervention at each brain region independently by learning region-specific confounder representations with lightweight parameters. Our adjustment comprehensively utilized the multimodal functional and structural features for graph reasoning as a plug-in module compatible with arbitrary GNN backbones. Experiments on three benchmarks, ADNI for disease diagnosis, OASIS for dementia staging, and HCP for sex classification, demonstrate consistent improvements over representative GNN-based baselines. Multiple supporting experiments further demonstrate statistical significance and neuroscientific interpretability.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

The Long Tail, Not the Front Page: Cold-Start Prediction of Crowd Highlight Salience

A social highlighter's most useful signal – which passages a crowd of readers marks – exists only for documents people have already read. Can the aggregate crowd salience of a document be predicted from its text before its marks accumulate? Prior work on this data found that zero-shot language models recover highlight locations worse than a trivial lead (position) baseline, so we ask whether a model trained on the highlight corpus can beat that baseline. Using a pre-registered ladder of models and a by-document cluster bootstrap, we find a small but robust edge: a logistic ranker over sentence embeddings and positional/contextual features beats the lead baseline by +0.044 average precision (95% CI [+0.029, +0.058]; clears a pre-registered margin delta=0.03 in 97% of resamples, and stable across pipeline re-runs). Two unsupervised extractive baselines (centroid, LexRank-style centrality) lose to lead, and the trained model beats them by +0.108, so the edge is not recovered by generic unsupervised proxies – it reflects learning from real reader marks. In product terms, precision@3 rises from 0.25 to 0.39 (+55% relative) and the model beats lead on 69% of documents. An ablation attributes the edge to the raw embedding (+0.014) and training augmentation (+0.010), each with a positive CI. The edge is not a temporal-generalization failure, and we find no evidence that content drift or near-duplicate leakage explains it. A standardized regression shows the advantage is governed mainly by document popularity (lower popularity, larger edge) and by label reliability. It nearly vanishes only on the most popular content; there it is the lead baseline that strengthens, not the model that weakens. Because our evaluation conditions on documents that eventually accumulated readers, these results are a retrospective cold-start simulation.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

SkillCAT: Contrastive Assessment and Topology-Aware Skill Self-Evolution for LLM Agents

Skill self-evolution methods for LLM agents aim to turn execution trajectories into reusable skill documents, but current pipelines typically learn from one trajectory per task, merge candidate skill patches before checking them, and load the full skill corpus before inference. We propose SkillCAT, a training-free framework that separates this process into three stages. Contrastive Causal Extraction (CCE) samples multiple trajectories for each task and compares same-task success/failure pairs to identify evidence that explains outcome differences. Assessment-Augmented Evolution (AAE) replays each candidate patch on source-task clones and keeps only patches that improve or preserve task outcomes before hierarchical skill patch merging. Topology-Aware Task Execution (TTE) compiles the evolved skills into a routable sub-skill topology, so inference loads only the capability nodes relevant to the task. We evaluate SkillCAT on common agent benchmarks, including SpreadsheetBench, WikiTableQuestions, and DocVQA, and further test cross-model and out-of-distribution generalization. Across these settings, SkillCAT raises the average score over baselines by up to 40.40%, demonstrating reliable skill evolution without model training.

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

ScholarSum: Student-Teacher Abstractive Summarization via Knowledge Graph Reasoning and Reflective Refinement

Abstractive summarization plays a crucial role in enabling efficient understanding of scientific literature, yet it inherently demands both linguistic fluency and factual faithfulness. Existing approaches often fail to reconcile these two requirements. Extractive methods rely on rigid sentence splicing that disrupts macro-level logical coherence, while large language model (LLM)-based generative approaches, despite mastering linguistic fluency, exhibit limited factual consistency. In this work, we propose ScholarSum, a hierarchical reflective graph-based framework that emulates a student-teacher writing process for fluent and faithful scientific summarization. ScholarSum first organizes the document into a hierarchical knowledge graph by segmenting it into semantically coherent units, whose multi-layered community structure captures global logic and macro-level themes. Guided by this global structure, the student generates an initial draft, which is subsequently refined through fine-grained evidence retrieval. To ensure factual consistency, a teacher-like reviewer then iteratively examines the draft, identifies unsupported content, and prompts targeted re-retrieval and rewriting until the summary meets rigorous quality standards. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ScholarSum significantly outperforms previous baselines in terms of both completeness and faithfulness. Our code is available at https://github.com/Xiaoyu-Tao/ScholarSum.

17.
Science (Express) 2026-05-07

Induction of broadly neutralizing HIV antibodies by a two-step mechanism informs vaccine design | Science

作者: 未知作者

A major obstacle confronting HIV-1 vaccine and cure research is the lack of an outbred animal model for rapid and consistent induction of broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs). We designed an epitope-focused simian-human immunodeficiency virus (SHIV.5MUT) that elicited broad and potent V3-glycan-targeted antibodies within a year of infection in 14 of 22 macaques compared with 0 of 14 control animals. SHIV.5MUT elicited bNAbs by a two-step mechanism, inducing an initial wave of V1-directed antibodies that selected for Envs with shortened, hypoglycosylated V1 loops, which in turn primed V3-glycan bNAb precursors. Rhesus bNAbs were immunogenetically and structurally diverse, closely resembling human V3-glycan bNAbs. Env-bNAb coevolution revealed a diverse repertoire of bNAb precursors and the Env variants that matured them, yielding a molecular blueprint for vaccine design.

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

TCHG: Tri-Trust Conditioned Heterogeneous Graph Learning for Reliable Dynamic Trust Prediction

arXiv:2606.16611v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Trust prediction infers latent user-user trust relations and provides important support for social recommendation, fake-review and manipulation detection, and risk identification. Graph neural networks have become a prominent approach to trust prediction because of their ability to learn network structures and complex trust dependencies. However, existing methods often rely on a unified representation of trust signals and do not disentangle heterogeneous trust evidence into separate evidence channels, failing to exploit the distinct roles that different evidence channels should play during trust modeling. To address this gap, this paper argues that trust evidence should not be treated as an undifferentiated input, but should be decomposed and used as functional control factors over graph propagation. We propose TCHG, a tri-trust conditioned heterogeneous graph learning framework that decomposes trust evidence into three channels and assigns them distinct functional roles in propagation: entity reliability governs message admission, interaction-behavior reliability modulates propagation strength, and contextual trust adjusts the propagation mode through context-conditioned operator selection. Since the three evidence channels evolve at different temporal scales, TCHG maintains independent temporal states with non-uniform decay rates to prevent rapidly changing contextual signals from overwriting slowly accumulated entity reliability. It further predicts trust probability and calibrates the output probability, improving predictive confidence under sparse or conflicting evidence. Extensive experiments on multiple public trust datasets show that TCHG achieves effective and reliable trust prediction compared with representative trust prediction and heterogeneous graph baselines.

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

Visual Verification Enables Inference-time Steering and Autonomous Policy Improvement

arXiv:2606.18247v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robots deployed in the real world should learn from their experience and improve over time. This requires a mechanism of practicing and learning from feedback. In this paper, we propose VERITAS, a generator-verifier framework for generalist robot policies for inference-time policy steering and self-improvement. We use a pre-trained generalist robot policy as a ``generator'' and pair it with a gradient-free ``visual verifier'' that evaluates actions at inference time. This framework enables inference-time steering that improves policy performance without additional training. We demonstrate that inference-time verification consistently outperforms vanilla generalists without training on additional demonstration data. Additionally, we demonstrate that the verified rollouts provide effective supervision for offline policy improvement: policies fine-tuned on verified self-generated trajectories achieve consistent performance gains. Notably, we find that post-training with verified rollouts achieves comparable efficiency to expert demonstrations, while requiring no human interventions. Our results highlight inference-time verification as a practical and scalable mechanism for improving robotic policies during deployment.

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

AmchiBias: Measuring Stereotypical Bias in Goan Identity Groups with a Minimal Pair Dataset in English and Konkani

Socio-cultural stereotypical bias is an important consideration in the development and deployment of NLP systems. It is however often considered only at the national level, despite rich subnational socio-cultural structures. We present AmchiBias, the first benchmark for measuring socio-cultural stereotypical bias for the Indian state of Goa with its unique historically multicultural setting. It covers various Goan identity groups and comprises 313 minimal pairs across eight sociodemographic dimensions in both English and Devanagari Konkani. We then evaluate stereotypical bias in five multilingual encoder models on this benchmark. We find near-chance scores in Konkani, reflecting language incompetence for general multilingual models and a lack of Goan cultural competence for Indian language models. Queried in English, models with a stronger Indian language coverage show higher bias for pan-Indian groups than hyperlocal Goan groups. This suggests the English signal reflects pan-Indian pretraining associations rather than genuine Goan cultural knowledge. Our findings highlight a critical gap in low-resource multilingual NLP evaluation for hyperlocal community identities.

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

SketchXplain: Intuitive Visual Explanations of Image Classifiers with Sketches

arXiv:2606.17646v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Saliency map visualizations explain image-based AI predictions by pointing to regions, but these are often unintuitive and semantically unclear, leaving an interpretability gap. We argue that AI explanations should be intuitive – coherent to user knowledge, yet simple and selective to accelerate interpretation. Inspired by artistic drawings, we propose SketchXplain to generate sketch-based visual explanations for intuitive image-based explainable AI (XAI). Combining techniques in saliency maps, concept-bottleneck models, and sketch optimization, SketchXplain integrates saliency to select coherent observation artifacts, concepts for knowledge coherence, cues to represent them, and abstraction for simplicity. Evaluating on face expression recognition, modeling and user studies showed that SketchXplain supported quicker interpretation with more aligned visualizations than saliency maps or simple drawings. Further evaluation on skin lesion diagnosis found that SketchXplain more coherently visualized disease symptoms, better supporting lay diagnosis. Thus, this work illustrates the value of sketches for intuitive, simple, coherent, and quick image-based XAI visualizations.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Pulmonary extracellular vesicles drive alveolar macrophage dysfunction via microRNA transfer in Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome

Background: Alveolar macrophage (AM) dysfunction contributes to Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) pathogenesis. We investigated the role of extracellular vesicles (EVs) in mediating this dysfunction. Methods: Pulmonary EVs were isolated from broncho-alveolar lavage and non-directed bronchial lavage samples of ventilated sepsis patients with and without ARDS, and post-operative control patients via ultracentrifugation. AMs were isolated from lung tissue resections of lobectomy patients. AMs were treated with pooled EVs for 24 hours prior to functional, metabolic and autophagy profiling. EV cargo was profiled via small RNA transcriptomics and proteomics. Mechanistic role of EV microRNAs was assessed via mimic / antagomir transfection. Results: Pulmonary EVs from sepsis patients with ARDS impaired AM efferocytosis, and control EVs had no effect. ARDS EV treatment enhanced AM mitochondrial-linked respiration, but not glycolysis. ARDS EV treatment impaired LC3B-II and LAMP1 expression, indicating dysregulated AM autophagy-lysosomal machinery. Proteomics revealed downregulation of innate immune pathways in ARDS EVs. Transcriptomics revealed enrichment of 24 microRNAs in ARDS EVs; miR-652-3p was the most enriched, validated by RT-qPCR. EV miR-652-3p was associated with 90-day mortality (9.20 vs 0.59 RQ, p=0.0295) and inversely correlated with oxygenation (PaO2/FiO2). AM transfection with miR-652-3p mimic induced similar dysregulation of function and autophagy as ARDS EVs. Transfection of ARDS EVs with antagomirs to miR-652-3p prior to AM treatment partially rescued efferocytosis and autophagy. Conclusions: Targeting EV miR-652-3p may restore alveolar macrophage function and reduce excessive inflammation, thus offering a novel therapeutic strategy for patients with ARDS.

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

GradPower: Powering Gradients for Faster Language Model Pre-Training

arXiv:2505.24275v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose GradPower, a lightweight gradient-transformation technique for accelerating language model pre-training. Given a gradient vector $g=(g_i)_i$, GradPower first applies the elementwise sign-power transformation: $\varphi_p(g)=(sign(g_i)|g_i|^p)_{i}$ for a fixed $p>0$, and then feeds the transformed gradient into a base optimizer. Notably, GradPower requires only a single-line code change and no modifications to the base optimizer's internal logic, including the hyperparameters. When applied to Adam (termed AdamPower), GradPower consistently achieves lower terminal loss across diverse architectures (LLaMA, Qwen2MoE), parameter scales (66M to 2B), datasets (C4, OpenWebText), and learning-rate schedules (cosine, warmup-stable-decay). The most pronounced gains are observed when training modern mixture-of-experts models with warmup-stable-decay schedules. GradPower also integrates seamlessly with other state-of-the-art optimizers, such as Muon, yielding further improvements. Finally, we provide theoretical analyses that reveal the underlying mechanism of GradPower and highlight the influence of gradient noise.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

When Rules Learn: A Self-Evolving Agent for Legal Case Retrieval

arXiv:2606.17220v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Legal case retrieval remains challenging due to the complexity of legal language and the need for precise lexical alignment between queries and relevant cases. Although dense retrieval models have achieved notable progress, empirical studies show that BM25 continues to serve as a strong baseline in this domain. It motivates us to propose a self-evolving framework for rule-driven query rewriting that enhances BM25 without any parameter training. The framework equips an LLM-based agent with an automatic evaluation environment, enabling it to iteratively create rewriting rules, plan validation experiments over rule combinations, and eliminate ineffective rules based on historical feedbacks. We evaluate our method on the Chinese legal case retrieval benchmark LeCaRD-v2. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms non-evolutionary baselines, including human-designed rules and greedy rule selection, particularly when powered by a highcapacity core LLM. We also conduct detailed analyses to investigate the mechanisms underlying self-evolution. Our findings reveal that LLM's capabilities to leverage previous experimental results and its intrinsic knowledge of rule elimination play critical roles in refining the rule set via self-evolution.