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01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Confirmation that bryozoan animals were present during the Cambrian explosion

作者: 未知作者

Bryozoans are marine invertebrates that live in colonies and have long been considered absent from the Cambrian explosion — a rapid evolutionary event that began around 538 million years ago. Newly discovered fossils from the Cambrian period reveal that the bryozoan phylum had already diversified by this time. Fossils of two forms of bryozoans show evidence of soft tissue still preserved inside their mineralized skeletons.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Generalized Schrödinger Bridge on Graphs

arXiv:2602.04675v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Transportation on graphs is a fundamental challenge across many domains, where decisions must respect topological and operational constraints. Despite the need for actionable policies, existing graph-transport methods lack this expressivity. They rely on restrictive assumptions, fail to generalize across sparse topologies, and scale poorly with graph size and time horizon. To address these issues, we introduce Generalized Schrödinger Bridge on Graphs (GSBoG), a novel scalable data-driven framework for learning executable controlled continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC) policies on arbitrary graphs under state cost augmented dynamics. Notably, GSBoG learns trajectory-level policies, avoiding dense global solvers and thereby enhancing scalability. This is achieved via a likelihood optimization approach, satisfying the endpoint marginals, while simultaneously optimizing intermediate behavior under state-dependent running costs. Extensive experimentation on challenging real-world graph topologies shows that GSBoG reliably learns accurate, topology-respecting policies while optimizing application-specific intermediate state costs, highlighting its broad applicability and paving new avenues for cost-aware dynamical transport on general graphs.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Stabilizing the Q-Gradient Field for Policy Smoothness in Actor-Critic Methods

arXiv:2601.22970v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Policies learned via continuous actor-critic methods often exhibit erratic, high-frequency oscillations, making them unsuitable for physical deployment. Current approaches attempt to enforce smoothness by directly regularizing the policy's output. We argue that this approach treats the symptom rather than the cause. In this work, we theoretically establish that policy non-smoothness is fundamentally governed by the differential geometry of the critic. By applying implicit differentiation to the actor-critic objective, we prove that the sensitivity of the optimal policy is bounded by the ratio of the Q-function's mixed-partial derivative (noise sensitivity) to its action-space curvature (signal distinctness). To empirically validate this theoretical insight, we introduce PAVE (Policy-Aware Value-field Equalization), a critic-centric regularization framework that treats the critic as a scalar field and stabilizes its induced action-gradient field. PAVE rectifies the learning signal by minimizing the Q-gradient volatility while preserving local curvature. Experimental results demonstrate that PAVE achieves smoothness comparable to policy-side smoothness regularization methods, while maintaining competitive task performance, without modifying the actor.

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

How to Score Experts for One-Shot MoE Expert Pruning: A Unified Formulation and Selection Principle

arXiv:2606.15716v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models reduce per-token computation through sparse expert activation, yet deployment still requires storing the full expert pool, making one-shot expert pruning a practical approach for reducing memory usage. Although effective, existing criteria are largely heuristic, and no single criterion is universally optimal. Thus, establishing a principle for selecting pruning criteria suited to different deployment objectives remains an important yet largely underexplored problem in one-shot expert pruning. To this end, we introduce a unified formulation for one-shot MoE expert pruning organized around three factors: routing frequency, gate weighting, and activation strength. The formulation yields a criteria selection principle: task-agnostic pruning should favor routed-token-averaged, gate-free activation-based criteria, whereas task-specific pruning can benefit from retaining routing-frequency and gate-weight information. Beyond this principle, the formulation also provides a systematic view of existing heuristic criteria and gives rise to two new task-agnostic criteria, Mean Activation Norm (MAN) and Mean Squared Activation Norm (MSAN). Across four representative MoE models and 16 diverse benchmarks, MAN and MSAN are consistently strong in the task-agnostic setting, obtain the top-two average ranks, and improve average performance by up to 8.8 points over the strongest baseline.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

MultiToP: Learning to Patch Visual Tokens to Mitigate Hallucinations in Video Large Multimodal Models

Video Large Multimodal Models have achieved remarkable progress in video understanding, yet they remain prone to hallucinations, where generated responses are not faithfully supported by the input video. In this paper, we propose MultiToP, a multimodal-context-aware visual token patching framework that mitigates hallucinations by refining unreliable visual tokens before language generation. MultiToP introduces a lightweight Visual Token Patcher to predict token-level replacement distributions and selectively substitute unreliable visual tokens with a dynamic global patch token. To train the patcher effectively, we further propose information-guided rank calibration, which uses answer-conditioned frame-level information cues derived from the backbone to guide token replacement. Combined with ground-truth answer supervision and sparsity regularization, MultiToP enables localized visual evidence refinement without modifying the original model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MultiToP effectively reduces hallucinations on Vript-HAL with negligible inference overhead, improving the F1 scores of Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct by 50.60% over the vanilla model. Meanwhile, MultiToP preserves general video understanding ability, yielding an 18.58% relative accuracy gain on ActivityNet-QA for Video-LLaVA-7B.

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

CaricHarmony: Contrastive Diffusion Paths for Identity-Preserving Caricature Synthesis

Sketch-based caricature synthesis suffers from a fundamental failure mode: when identity and shape conditions are combined in diffusion models, they create destructive interference that causes inevitable collapse toward either bland portraits or unrecognizable distortions. We identify the root cause as condition signal contamination – competing probability distributions in the denoising trajectory that make balanced generation impossible. We present CaricHarmony, the first training-free method that explicitly resolves this contamination through parallel uncontaminated diffusion paths. During inference, we maintain three paths: $\mathcal{P}^{\mathrm{i}}$ (pure identity), $\mathcal{P}^{\mathrm{s}}$ (pure shape), and $\mathcal{P}^{\mathrm{i+s}}$ (harmonized output). Novel energy functions operating on cross-attention features provide gradient guidance that steers $\mathcal{P}^{\mathrm{i+s}}$ toward optimal balance: $\mathcal{E}_{\mathrm{shape}}$ ensures sketch fidelity through layout and semantic alignment, while $\mathcal{E}_{\mathrm{id}}$ employs token-level correspondence matching robust to extreme distortions. Unlike DemoCaricature requiring 70 seconds per-identity fine-tuning or CaricatureBooth constrained to Bezier curves, CaricHarmony accepts any sketch format and generates in under 16 seconds. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance: 0.8615 shape CLIP score (vs. 0.8450) under comparable identity consistency score, with 7.81 overall user preference score (vs. 6.06). Our method fundamentally reconceptualizes the ID-shape conflict as conditioning signal contamination for diffusion models, enabling unprecedented creative control while preserving recognition.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Hyperlipidemia Pharmacotherapy in Skilled Nursing Facilities: A Real-World Evidence Study

Objectives: To estimate hyperlipidemia medication order prevalence and associated variables in U.S. skilled nursing facility (SNF) residents. Design: Retrospective, observational study. Setting and Participants: Electronic Health Record data from 447,080 SNF residents with a hyperlipidemia diagnosis identified in PointClickCare's Life Sciences clinical database (January-April 2025) were reviewed. Methods: The presence and absence of medication orders for hyperlipidemia treatments recommended by the American Heart Association were assessed. Descriptive analyses summarized demographic and clinical characteristics, and a modified Poisson regression model was used to estimate risk ratios for having a medication order, adjusting for demographic, clinical, and facility characteristics. Results: Overall, 83.3% of residents diagnosed with hyperlipidemia had at least one hyperlipidemia medication order. Statins were ordered by 96.2% of active order residents, while other medication classes i.e., omega-3 fatty acids, cholesterol absorption inhibitors, fibrates were less common (

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Semantic Grading of Written Answers in Low-Resource Language Bangla Using a Fine-Tuned Lightweight Language Model

Bangla is among the world's most widely spoken languages, yet it remains underserved in educational NLP research. In many remote and rural regions, access to qualified subject teachers is limited, and written answers are consequently graded largely by hand, restricting timely and consistent feedback. Automatic assessment is challenging because semantically correct responses can vary substantially in surface form. We present a bilingual (Bangla-English) evaluation system designed for low-resource educational settings that prioritizes semantic correctness over lexical overlap. Our approach fine-tunes a lightweight language model to grade each response using the question, reference answer, and student answer, producing a numeric score and concise, context-grounded feedback suitable for classroom deployment. We also construct a synthetic bilingual dataset to enable controlled training and evaluation. Across proprietary and open-source LLMs evaluated under a unified protocol, our QLoRA-tuned Qwen3-8B confirms consistent improvement by producing the most leakage-resistant feedback (RoRa = 0.819) in synthetic evaluation and the strongest agreement with human scores (rho = 0.936, MAE = 0.725) in a dedicated human study.

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

The Proxy Knows Too Much: Sealing LLM API Routers with Attested TEEs

arXiv:2606.16358v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agents increasingly access large language models (LLMs) through API routers. A router terminates the client's transport-layer security session and opens a separate upstream session, so it holds the full interaction in plaintext. This makes the router an application-layer man-in-the-middle: it can rewrite agent tool calls, swap dependencies for typosquatted packages, trigger attacks only under audit-evading conditions, and passively exfiltrate secrets. Existing client-side defenses are evadable. We propose AEGIS, a provider-transparent attested API router whose data path is a client-verified faithful passthrough. AEGISconfines plaintext handling to a small hardware-enclave component while leaving authentication, scheduling, accounting, and management on the untrusted host. The client verifies the enclave before releasing plaintext. The host can neither read nor alter the interaction, and plaintext leaves only toward destinations fixed by the measured image. We show that all four malicious-router attack classes succeed against a plaintext-access baseline and are blocked by AEGIS, including adaptive tests against the same boundary. The trusted path is $851$ lines, carries three provider-native APIs without conversion, and completes every request under real-provider workload and concurrency. In a seeded audit pilot, two commodity coding agents find eight and ten of ten planted invariant violations. The local relay overhead is about six milliseconds per request.

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

Unsupervised Learning for Missing Modalities in Multimodal Learning

arXiv:2606.15743v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper addresses the missing-modality challenge in multi-modal learning by introducing Unsupervised Learning for Missing Modalities in Multi-Modal Learning (UL4M4), a flexible framework that imputes missing feature embeddings in a task-independent manner before supervised prediction. We propose modality-specific normalization and a novel partial-modality distance metric to enable fair clustering of incomplete observations, capturing cross-modal structures while preserving scale-invariance across varying dimensionalities and modality counts. Cluster centers from this unsupervised stage guide an iterative greedy imputation process for any missing modalities during training or inference, supporting arbitrary numbers of modalities and arbitrary missing patterns per sample. The imputation module is lightweight, uses frozen encoders, and decouples from the downstream task, allowing easy integration with any fusion/prediction architecture. Extensive experiments under diverse and highly incomplete regimes demonstrate UL4M4's robustness, achieving, to the best of our knowledge, the first consistent F1-Micro scores above 0.7 on challenging missing configurations even when more than 50\% of modality slots are missing. Results are also stable across cluster sizes and significantly outperform state-of-the-art baselines. Code is available here: https://github.com/h-ismkhan/Multimodal-Learning-with-Missing-Modalities-via-Unsupervised-Learning.

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

In-Domain Supervised Pathology Report Classification: A Reproducible Pipeline from Data Curation to Production-Matched Evaluation

We introduce an in-domain supervised pipeline designed to counter the out-of-distribution performance drop that hampers supervised biomedical NLP models, a problem observed when models trained on pathology reports are moved across cancer registries. Our contribution is a reproducible recipe for training a supervised classifier from routinely collected cancer registry data. It describes how to build the in-domain training set and a production-matched holdout, and to choose operating points that keep the false-negative rate (FNR) very low while keeping reviewer workload manageable. The pipeline standardizes data curation with facility-stratified sampling and separate handling of reports linked to registry cases, and includes a blinded manual audit to estimate positive-case prevalence and label noise. On a 418k-report holdout set, the Kentucky model achieved FNR 0.003 and false-positive rate (FPR) 0.097, improving over the Seattle-trained MOSSAIC OncoID baseline (FNR 0.010, FPR 0.183) and raising F1 from 0.860 to 0.922. In a blinded manual review of 600 reports, estimated positive prevalence declined from 0.500 to 0.398, indicating substantial label noise with errors concentrated in rare primary sites.

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

DC-Motion: Decoupling Semantics and Details via Discrete-Continuous Tokens for Human Motion Generation

Text-to-motion generation requires synthesizing physically realistic dynamics that strictly follow complex and long-horizon textual instructions. Existing approaches rely on homogeneous representation spaces that may fail to capture the hierarchical nature of human motion, with diffusion models struggling at compositional semantic reasoning and AR models sacrificing fine-grained physical details due to quantization. To solve it, we introduce DC-Motion, a factorized generative framework designed to explicitly decouple semantics and details via discrete-continuous tokens. A Discrete-Continuous VAE (DC-VAE) first decomposes motion into discrete tokens for semantics and continuous residuals for fine-grained dynamics. Then, a masked AR model predicts the discrete structure from text, and a lightweight residual diffusion model recovers the continuous physical details. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DC-Motion effectively improves the capability to follow complex instructions. By effectively balancing semantic controllability and physical realism, our approach offers a highly adaptable modeling paradigm for human motion generation. On both HumanML3D and KIT-ML datasets, DC-Motion achieves state-of-the-art performance, delivering the best FID for motion realism and R-precision for text alignment.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Iterating Toward Better Search: A Two-Agent Simulation Framework for Evaluating Agentic Search Architectures in E-Commerce

arXiv:2606.12924v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a modular two-agent simulation framework for evaluating conversational shopping assistant architectures. An independent buyer agent, configured with personas, missions, and patience levels, is paired with an interchangeable responder that integrates with a real e-commerce search API. Holding the buyer constant across experiments enables controlled comparison of responder designs on identical scenarios. Using 2011 conversations across 14 persona buckets, we establish four empirical findings. First, rolling-window memory outperforms intent-extraction memory on all quality metrics while being 35% faster per query. Second, illustrating rapid evidence-driven iteration, a systematic failure analysis of a responder version enables targeted fixes that reduce failure and near-failure rates by 62% across the full dataset. Third, swapping the responder LLM backbone from Gemini~2.5 to Llama~3.3~70B costs 0.16–0.45 points despite identical architecture. Finally, we document systematic philosophical disagreement between frontier LLM judges: Gemini rewards process correctness while Claude demands concrete outcomes, despite using the same evaluation prompt.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Marginal Advantage Accumulation for Memory-Driven Agent Self-Evolution

arXiv:2606.20475v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In batch-style trace distillation, the same memory operation may receive contradictory feedback across different batches. Existing methods lack a cross-batch, operation-level evidence accumulation mechanism, making it impossible to distinguish stably effective operations from accidental hits. This paper formalizes the requirement as two structural conditions, alignability and comparability, and proposes Marginal Advantage Accumulation (MAA). MAA constructs differential signals to make them comparable across batches, accumulates signed evidence per operation via EMA, and ensures cross-batch traceability through semantic identity merging. As a post-processing architecture, MAA achieves the best results in 14 out of 16 settings across 4 benchmarks and 4 target models, consistently outperforming existing batch-level distillation baselines and matching or surpassing online alternatives in most settings, while reducing optimization-phase token consumption by approximately 75%.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Least-Action-Guided Diffusion for Physical Extrapolation

arXiv:2606.11277v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable extrapolation remains a central challenge for generative models in computational physics, because models trained over finite ranges of time, parameters, or geometries may produce physically inconsistent predictions outside the training distribution. We introduce a least-action-principle-guided diffusion, LAPG, a framework that promotes physical consistency during inference rather than relying solely on constraints imposed during training. The method combines a conditional score-based diffusion model with an action-derived physical guidance score. In the first stage, the learned score model generates an in-distribution proposal; in the second, an action-based variational prior refines this proposal toward the target out-of-distribution condition. This formulation turns the principle of least action into a differentiable inference-time correction mechanism and provides an alternative to pointwise residual penalties that often require empirical loss balancing. We evaluate LAPG on representative ordinary- and partial-differential-equation systems, including free fall, conservative and dissipative spring-mass dynamics, interacting point vortices, and potential flow over parameterized airfoils. In temporal, parameter, and geometric extrapolation tests, LAPG reduces phase drift, preserves dissipative decay, captures vortex motion, and improves the lift response of airfoil flows compared with training-time physics-informed baselines.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Diabetes is associated with increased nocturnal respiratory rate

Background and Objective: Diabetes mellitus (DM) causes autonomic neuropathy, which may alter nocturnal respiratory rate (NRR). To test the association between DM and NRR, we analyzed elective polysomnograms of four large observational cohorts. Research Design and Methods: We performed cross-sectional analysis of over 25,000 individuals with polysomnograms (PSGs) from the Sleep Heart Health Study (SHHS), Hispanic Community Health Study/Study of Latinos (HCHS/SOL), Osteoporotic Fractures in Men Study (MrOS), and Wisconsin Sleep Cohort (WSC). Patient-level NRRs were derived from inductance plethysmography waveforms. DM status was determined by self-report, physician diagnosis, medication use, or laboratory values, depending on the cohort. We related DM and NRR (continuous and dichotomized) using logistic regression models and adjusted for potential confounders. Cohort-specific results were combined using random-effects meta-analysis. Results: Meta-analysis of unadjusted models showed a pooled odds ratio (OR) of 1.10 (95% CI:1.04-1.17) for each breath-per-minute (brpm) increase in NRR. This association remained significant after multivariable adjustment (OR:1.06, 95% CI:1.02-1.11). Dichotomized analyses similarly showed higher odds of DM across dichotomization thresholds ranging from 15 to 21 brpm. At a threshold of 18 brpm, the unadjusted pooled OR was 1.77 (95% CI:1.23-2.55, P=0.0022), and the adjusted OR was 1.49 (95% CI:1.10-2.02, P=0.0098). Conclusions: Clinically stable outpatients with elevated NRR have an increased prevalence of DM. Additional studies are needed to investigate whether the mechanism is autonomic neuropathy and whether monitoring NRR can detect early complications of DM.

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

Detecting High-Potential SMEs with Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks

arXiv:2602.19591v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) constitute 99.9% of U.S. businesses and generate 44% of economic activity, yet systematically identifying high-potential SMEs remains an open challenge. We introduce SME-HGT, a Heterogeneous Graph Transformer framework that predicts which SBIR Phase I awardees will advance to Phase II funding using exclusively public data. We construct a heterogeneous graph with 32,268 company nodes, 124 research topic nodes, and 13 government agency nodes connected by approximately 99,000 edges across three semantic relation types. SME-HGT achieves an AUPRC of 0.621 0.003 on a temporally-split test set, outperforming an MLP baseline (0.590 0.002) and R-GCN (0.608 0.013) across five random seeds. At a screening depth of 100 companies, SME-HGT attains 89.6% precision with a 2.14 lift over random selection. Our temporal evaluation protocol prevents information leakage, and our reliance on public data ensures reproducibility. These results demonstrate that relational structure among firms, research topics, and funding agencies provides meaningful signal for SME potential assessment, with implications for policymakers and early-stage investors.

18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Exponential Convengence of DLRA for SDEs

arXiv:2606.15843v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study dynamical orthogonal (DO) approximations of stochastic differential equations and investigate their long-time behaviour. The DO formulation represents the solution by a low-rank decomposition and leads to a coupled system consisting of an evolution equation on the Stiefel manifold and a reduced stochastic process. We establish the well-posedness of the strong DO system and derive quantitative error estimates between the original stochastic differential equation and its low-rank approximation in the Wasserstein distance. Our main contribution is the analysis of invariant probability measures for the DO dynamics. Under suitable dissipativity, Lipschitz continuity, and non-degeneracy assumptions on the coefficients, we prove the existence of an invariant probability measure for the strong DO system. The proof combines uniform moment estimates, a Krylov–Bogoliubov argument for an associated frozen system, and a Kakutani-Fan-Glicksberg fixed-point theorem to recover the self-consistent dynamics. We further show that the induced low-rank process admits an invariant probability measure and discuss the structure of invariant measures through several illustrative examples. These results provide a rigorous foundation for the use of dynamical low-rank approximations in the approximation of long-time statistical properties of stochastic dynamical systems.

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

Enhancing CVRP Solver through LLM-driven Automatic Heuristic Design

arXiv:2602.23092v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP), a fundamental combinatorial optimization challenge, focuses on optimizing fleet operations under vehicle capacity constraints. While extensively studied in operational research, the NP-hard nature of CVRP continues to pose significant computational challenges, particularly for large-scale instances. This study presents AILS-AHD (Adaptive Iterated Local Search with Automatic Heuristic Design), a novel approach that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to revolutionize CVRP solving. Our methodology integrates an evolutionary search framework with LLMs to dynamically generate and optimize ruin heuristics within the AILS method. Additionally, we introduce an LLM-based acceleration mechanism to enhance computational efficiency. Comprehensive experimental evaluations against state-of-the-art solvers, including AILS-II and HGS, demonstrate the superior performance of AILS-AHD across both moderate and large-scale instances. Notably, our approach establishes new best-known solutions for 8 out of 10 instances in the CVRPLib large-scale benchmark, underscoring the potential of LLM-driven heuristic design in advancing the field of vehicle routing optimization.

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

Guava: An Effective and Universal Harness for Embodied Manipulation

arXiv:2606.18363v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language models trained on large-scale vision-language data have demonstrated strong potential for embodied agents. Harnessing models through embodied tools use offers a promising alternative to end-to-end vision-language-action systems by combining high-level reasoning with external modules for perception, planning, and control. However, it remains unclear what makes an effective harness for embodied manipulation, and to what extent such a harness can unlock embodied capabilities in a wide range of reasoning models. In this work, we present Guava, a harness framework for embodied tool use developed through systematic exploration of the design space of agent workflows, action spaces, and observation spaces. Our study identifies three key ingredients for effective embodied agents: iterative perception-reasoning-action loops, semantic action abstractions, and multimodal observations. To understand whether these design principles are universal even to small models, we develop an end-to-end training pipeline that distills embodied manipulation capabilities into a 4B open-source model using fewer than 2K trajectories collected entirely in simulation. Experimental results in both simulation and real-world environments show performance comparable to frontier proprietary models while exhibiting strong generalization to unseen objects, novel instructions, and long-horizon tasks. Results suggest that a well-designed harness can serve as a scalable, model-agnostic interface for embodied manipulation, enabling strong emergent embodied capabilities in compact open-source models with minimal training data.

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

The Data Manifold under the Microscope

arXiv:2606.15760v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A significant gap exists between theory and practice in deep learning. Generalization and approximation error bounds are often derived for simplified models or are too loose to be informative. Many rely on the manifold hypothesis and on geometric regularity such as intrinsic dimension, curvature, and reach. Progress requires insight into data-manifold geometry and suitable benchmarks, yet existing options are polarized: analytic manifolds with known geometry but limited applicability, or real-world datasets where geometry is only coarsely estimable. We introduce a benchmarking framework for studying data geometry. We repurpose and extend dSprites and COIL-20 with additional transformation dimensions and dense, axis-aligned sampling, and pair them with finite-difference estimators that recover curvature, reach, and volume at near-ground-truth accuracy in a regime where general-purpose estimators are unreliable or difficult to deploy. The framework is intended as a controlled testbed, useful as a calibration environment for geometric estimators and a sandbox for probing theoretical assumptions. To illustrate its use, we present two application studies, namely assessing the scaling behavior of the bounds of Genovese et al. and Fefferman et al., and tracking the layer-wise geometry of a $\beta$-VAE, highlighting the behavior of current bounds and the value of controlled benchmarks for guiding and validating future theory. A reference implementation is available at https://github.com/koulakis/manifold-microscope.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

CacheRL:Multi-Turn Tool-Calling Agents via Cached Rollouts and Hybrid Reward

We present CacheRL, a system for training small agent foundation models that achieves 92 percent process accuracy on multi-step tool-calling tasks, approaching GPT-5's 94 percent while requiring 100 times less compute. Our approach addresses three challenges in practical agent training: transferring tool-calling knowledge from large models at scale, enabling reinforcement learning without costly live tool execution, and learning robustly from noisy cached environments. CacheRL introduces three key innovations. First, a hybrid thinking trajectory pipeline augments agent trajectories with LLM-generated reasoning traces, producing training examples that teach models not only what tools to call but also why. Second, the CacheAgentLoop eliminates live execution costs through a three-tier fuzzy cache while preserving trajectory fidelity using token-level masking. Third, a cache-tier-aware reward dynamically adjusts answer-quality weights to avoid penalizing models for cache-induced limitations. Through iterative supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), CacheRL improves Qwen3-4B-Thinking's validation reward from 0.43 to 0.78. On public agentic tool-calling benchmarks, our model achieves competitive performance against frontier models such as GPT-5. Ablation studies show that removing knowledge transfer reduces performance by 41 percent, while cache-aware rewards contribute a 17 percent improvement. Interestingly, reinforcement learning improves training stability but yields limited gains beyond strong supervised fine-tuning, suggesting that data quality and reward design play a more important role than complex optimization methods in building practical small agent models.

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

A nonparametric two-sample test using a parametric integral probability metric

arXiv:2606.16941v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Detecting distributional differences between two independent samples is a fundamental problem in statistics and machine learning. Nonparametric two-sample testing provides a principled framework for determining whether two samples are drawn from the same underlying distribution, without assuming any specific parametric form for the distribution. In this study, we propose a new two-sample test statistic based on a newly introduced integral probability metric (IPM), using a specially designed parametric discriminator class with a single node of a neural network. We show that the resulting test statistic, called PReLU-IPM, is nonparametric and establish theoretical guarantees for the associated two-sample testing procedure, PReLU-TST, including its consistency and asymptotical equivalence to nonparametric IPM-based tests under regularity conditions. By analyzing multiple simulated and real benchmark datasets, we demonstrate that PReLU-TST achieves higher power across a range of alternatives or performs comparably to its competitors, for finite samples.

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

Kalman Linear Attention: Parallel Bayesian Filtering For Efficient Language Modelling and State Tracking

arXiv:2602.10743v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: State-space language models such as Mamba and gated linear attention (GLA) offer linear-complexity, parallelisable alternatives to transformers, but their linear state updates limit expressivity and robust state tracking. We close this gap from a probabilistic angle, casting sequence mixing as exact Bayesian filtering with the Kalman filter as the core primitive. Classical Kalman filters give principled state and uncertainty estimates but are viewed as inherently sequential; we show that reparameterising them in information form turns their updates into an associative scan - so the per-token recurrent update is non-linear (a Möbius/precision recursion) yet remains temporally parallel. The resulting Kalman Linear Attention (KLA) layer is a drop-in sequence mixer that performs time-parallel probabilistic inference, carries an explicit belief-state uncertainty, and is strictly more expressive than GLA-style linear updates at the same computational cost. This expressivity translates directly into stronger state tracking: KLA solves permutation-composition ($A_5$) tasks that linear SSMs and attention cannot, while staying scan-parallel. As a drop-in primitive it also matches or improves on modern SSMs and GLAs across synthetic token-manipulation and zero-shot commonsense benchmarks, and is among the first stacked Bayesian-filtering primitives trained at the billion-token scale.

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

Pareto LoRA: Mitigating Modality Imbalance in Unified Multimodal Models via Pareto-Optimal Gradient Integration

Unified multimodal models (UMMs) have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for integrating multimodal understanding and generation within a single autoregressive transformer. However, during multimodal instruction tuning, these models often exhibit pronounced modality imbalance: language gradients dominate optimization, thus leading to lower image generation quality, especially under parameter-efficient fine-tuning such as LoRA. In this work, we systematically analyze modality imbalance in LoRA-based fine-tuning of UMMs for interleaved text-image generation. We show that vision modality performance degrades substantially more than text modality performance when compared to unimodal counterparts, and that modality-specific gradients can differ by orders of magnitude across various tasks and layers. Motivated by this observation, we reformulate the multimodal instruction tuning as a bi-objective optimization problem and propose Pareto LoRA, a Pareto-optimal gradient integration strategy that balances the text and image objectives by modulating the gradient direction and strength. Experiments on the CoMM benchmark with Emu2 demonstrate that Pareto LoRA consistently improves multimodal generation balance, achieving up to 44.9% gains in perceptual image quality over vanilla LoRA while maintaining comparable text performance.