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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Sphere Packings in Higher Dimension (after Boaz Klartag)

arXiv:2606.13313v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Let $\delta_n^L$ be the maximal density of a lattice sphere packing in the $n$-dimensional Euclidean space. We explain how Boaz Klartag proved the inequality $\delta_n^L \geq c n^2 2^{-n}$ where $c>0$ is a universal constant. In higher dimension, even for non-lattice sphere packings, this new lower bound is a substantial improvement. Klartag's proof uses the probabilistic method in two different ways. The first, very standard, relies on the statistical properties of a uniformly chosen random lattice. The second, completely new, studies the stochastic evolution of an ellipsoid constrained to contain non nonzero lattice points in the interior.

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

TAROT: Task-Adaptive Refinement of LLM-prior Graphs for Few-shot Tabular Learning

arXiv:2606.11640v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Few-shot tabular learning provides a cost-effective approach for real-world applications where annotation is costly and collecting sufficient samples for new tasks is difficult. Existing Traditional and LLM-based methods have demonstrated effectiveness in few-shot scenarios. However, traditional methods need additional training on unlabeled or generated data, which incur significant computational overhead. In addition, LLM-based methods that directly feed raw tabular data into LLMs raise privacy and compliance concerns. More importantly, both paradigms largely overlook the semantic relationships between features, which provide structural and semantic prior for constructing a semantic graph. Semantic graph is essential for modeling meaningful feature interactions in few-shot scenarios. In this paper, we propose TAROT, a GNN-based framework that encodes the structural and semantic prior by constructing and refining a task-adaptive semantic graph from this prior, thereby improving predictive performance in few-shot tabular learning. TAROT first encodes heterogeneous tabular data into unified node semantic representations via a Unified Semantic Tabular Node Encoder (USTNE). Then, it prompts LLMs to infer the semantic relationship between features based on the task description and feature names to construct a semantic graph. To mitigate structural noise introduced by the hallucination of LLMs, TAROT introduces Task-adaptive Semantic Graph Refinement that prunes spurious or task-unrelated edges and adds missing task-related ones, aligning the graph structure with the downstream objective. Finally, a GNN performs message passing over the refined graph to capture task-related semantic dependencies for prediction. Extensive experiments on various few-shot tabular learning benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance of TAROT, establishing it as a state-of-the-art approach in this domain.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever virus transmission: exploring perceptions of human-animal-tick interactions across six districts in Uganda

Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever virus (CCHFV) causes a viral zoonotic disease transmitted through tick bites and direct contact with infected blood or tissue of infected animals. Socio-ecological and behavioural risk factors for CCHFV exposure in Uganda remain poorly understood, which can lead to the omission of key risk factors in quantitative survey design and limit our wider understanding. In this study, we explored human-animal-tick interaction transmission risks in Uganda. We conducted 24 focus group discussions (FGDs) and 31 key-informant interviews (KIIs) across six environmentally and socio-ecologically diverse districts, between October 2023 and March 2024. Study sites were selected using K-prototype analysis, which combined environmental and socio-ecological variables to identify distinct clusters within Uganda. FGDs were conducted separately with groups of community leaders, men, women and teenagers with stratified purposive sampling. Medical doctors, veterinarians, traditional healers, district surveillance officers, and herdsmen were individually interviewed as key informants and purposively sampled. Data were transcribed and translated into English, and analysed thematically using iterative categorisation in NVivo 14. Most participants reported tick bites, some as frequently as every day. Close contact with animals was common, including sleeping next to them in the same building, largely due to concerns about animal theft. Less frequent but notable practices included slaughtering animals for consumption or sacrifice and interactions with wild animals during hunting. Slaughtering and butchering an animal which was sick or had died was reportedly performed by participants in most districts. Plucking and roasting engorged ticks was a practice described in the Kaabong and Arua districts of Northern Uganda. These practices and behaviours highlight potential key risks of CCHFV transmission and underscore the need for future studies to address specific behaviours, to quantify if, and to what extent, they present an exposure risk. Further work should include underlying reasons for the behaviours, which would help ensure that culturally appropriate interventions are targeted.

04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Moment generating function of the tacnode process

作者:

arXiv:2606.17771v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The tacnode process is a universal determinantal point process arising in non-intersecting particle systems and random tiling models. In this paper, we study the generating function for the counting functions of the tacnode process on a union of $m$ intervals, $m\in\mathbb{N}^{+}$. Our first result provides an integral representation for the $m$-point generating function in terms of the Hamiltonian governing a system of $8m+4$ coupled differential equations. Combined with several differential identities for this Hamiltonian, the representation yields the large gap asymptotics, up to and including the constant term. As further applications, we obtain asymptotic formulae for the expectations, variances, and covariances of the counting functions, and establish a central limit theorem for their joint fluctuations. These results extend the previously known $1$-point theory for the tacnode process to the multi-interval setting with multiple discontinuities.

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

Elastic ODYN: Differentiable Optimization for Infeasible Control and Learning in Robotics

arXiv:2606.16564v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robotic systems routinely encounter conflicting objectives, modeling errors, and degenerate contact conditions that render quadratic programs (QPs) infeasible. Yet most optimization solvers and differentiable QP layers assume feasibility, leading to numerical failures, unstable gradients, or solver breakdown when constraints cannot be simultaneously satisfied. We present Elastic ODYN, a primal–dual non-interior-point QP solver that handles infeasibility through smooth squared-$\ell_2$ elastic relaxations. The resulting formulation remains well posed under ill-conditioning and degeneracy, supports warm starting, and converges to closest-to-feasible solutions when no feasible point exists. A lightweight refinement stage recovers physically meaningful dual variables from the elastic solution. Building on this framework, we develop Elastic OdynLayer, a differentiable QP layer with stable gradients under infeasibility, and Elastic OdynSQP, an infeasibility-aware SQP method that resolves inconsistent subproblems and intrinsically infeasible optimal control tasks through selective constraint relaxation. We evaluate the framework on benchmark QPs, singular contact mechanics, differentiable parameter identification, and quadrupedal and humanoid trajectory optimization. Across all settings, Elastic ODYN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art elastic QP solvers in robustness, warm-start performance, and convergence reliability, enabling optimization, simulation, control, and learning beyond the feasibility assumptions of existing methods.

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

3D Consistency Optimization for Self-Supervised Monocular Video Depth Estimation

Reliable monocular video depth estimation is crucial for downstream 3D reasoning and embodied AI in endoscopic navigation. However, existing self-supervised approaches typically treat video frames independently or rely on weak temporal regularization. These methods, lacking a holistic perception of the underlying 3D scene, inevitably suffer from geometrically inconsistent predictions and severe cross-frame drift. To address these limitations, we introduce a new paradigm that recasts sequential video depth estimation as an unconstrained multi-view 3D reconstruction problem, enabling full exploitation of the powerful geometric priors embedded in recent 3D foundation models. The core of our approach is a 3D consistency optimization framework driven by three constraints: image-level photometric rendering, explicit world-coordinate geometric alignment, and multi-scale temporal gradient consistency. Such unified optimization elegantly anchors isolated frames to a globally coherent 3D structure. Our method has been validated in both the self-supervised training scenarios and challenging zero-shot clinical environments. Results show that the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art spatial accuracy, outperforming the frame-based, video-based depth estimators and the multi-view 3D reconstruction baselines.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Free Heavy-Tailed Lunch for Muon: A Theoretical Justification of Empirical Success

arXiv:2606.14560v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Non-Euclidean optimisation methods with matrix-valued updates, such as Muon and Scion, have recently shown strong empirical performance for training Transformer models, yet their theoretical advantages over Euclidean methods remain poorly understood. We address this gap in the heavy-tailed non-convex regime, where stochastic gradients have bounded $p$-th central moments, $p \in (1,2]$. We show that certain non-Euclidean methods achieve optimal sample complexity under stronger stationarity measures, while Euclidean methods incur additional dimension-dependent costs. As a consequence, for $m \times n$ matrices, Muon finds an $\varepsilon$-stationary point in nuclear norm within $\mathcal{O}\left(\min\{m, n\} \frac{\Delta_1 L}{\varepsilon^2} \left(\frac \sigma \varepsilon \right)^{\frac p {p-1}}\right)$ samples, absorbing heavy-tailed noise without extra dimension dependence, unlike Euclidean methods. We further prove this sample complexity, including its dimension dependence, is optimal for all first-order methods under nuclear-norm stationarity. Experiments on large language models support our theory. Surprisingly, our results suggest that other Schatten geometries beyond the spectral geometry of Muon can perform competitively in certain settings.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Prompt Perturbation for Reliable LLM Evaluation over Comparison Graphs

Evaluating large language models (LLMs) is important for understanding their capabilities, comparing competing systems, and supporting the deployment of reliable models in practice. For open-ended tasks, pairwise evaluation has become a popular paradigm, in which two responses to the same prompt are compared and the resulting judgments are aggregated into an overall ranking. A central challenge of this paradigm is intransitivity: the induced comparison outcomes may fail to support any coherent global ranking. For example, one may observe cyclic preferences such as $A \succ B \succ C \succ A$, or inconsistencies involving ties such as $A \equiv B\equiv C\neq A$. Such contradictions make the resulting leaderboard unstable and challenging to interpret. In this paper, we propose a prompt perturbation framework for improving the consistency of pairwise LLM evaluation. Our approach generates perturbed variants of each prompt, uses the resulting comparison graphs to identify and filter out structurally inconsistent comparison patterns, and then applies standard ranking methods to the filtered comparisons. A key feature of the proposed framework is that graph-level structural consistency is incorporated explicitly into the evaluation pipeline before ranking aggregation. This provides a simple and principled way to reduce cyclic inconsistencies and improve the reliability of LLM rankings.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Influence-solvability: a systematic theory of $(1+1)D$ solvability and its application to brickwork circuits

arXiv:2606.12538v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: `Solvable' circuits, such as dual unitaries and its generalisations, have arisen as paradigmatic examples of tractable chaotic non-equilibrium dynamics, both in classical and quantum systems. However, while increasingly more complicated sufficient conditions have been proposed, a systematic theory classifying and understanding general features of solvable circuits is missing. We develop such a theory by introducing influence-solvable circuits, a class of $(1+1)D$ circuits whose influence matrix, which represents the `bath' generated by its own evolution, is given by a uniform MPS with finite bond-dimension $\chi$. This property allows for efficient computation of subsystem dynamics and essentially contains all known examples of solvable circuits. We derive a set of necessary and sufficient local conditions by using a version of the fundamental theorem of MPS for open boundary conditions. Next we apply our theory to brickwork circuits with $\chi=1$ influence-solvability and perform a systematic classification of classical brickwork circuits with local dimension up to $d=3$ and quantum brickwork circuits with $d=2$. Our search reveals new solvable circuits that are not captured by known solvability conditions.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Algebraic Dead Directions in LayerNorm Transformers: A Forward-Pass-Only Diagnostic at LLM Scale

arXiv:2606.19491v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pretrained transformers sit near singular minima of the loss, where the Fisher information metric degenerates along dead directions: directions in parameter space along which the directional Fisher vanishes. Locating such a direction normally needs a forward pass and an eigendecomposition of activations, or a sampling-based complexity estimate; none returns a direction computable from the network's parameters alone. We give one, for LayerNorm transformers. The inverse-scale direction $\gamma^{-1}/\|\gamma^{-1}\|$ of the LayerNorm affine is an exact algebraic kernel of the post-final-norm centred activation covariance, for any input distribution, and induces a corresponding dead direction in parameter space. It is read from the LN scale parameter alone, with no forward or backward pass and no eigensolve: the cheapest dead-direction read, specific to LayerNorm. We test it on $14$ pretrained transformers ($9$ LayerNorm, $5$ RMSNorm; $160$M-$35$B; language and vision objectives). At random initialisation the predicted direction matches the measured bottom singular direction (one forward pass, direct SVD) to four decimal places on $9/9$ LayerNorm models, and is correctly absent on $5/5$ RMSNorm models, which lack the mean-subtraction projector that creates it. On the trained checkpoint the covariance eigenvalue along this direction deepens by ${\sim}10^3\times$ and further dead directions open; the random-init-to-trained gap is a one-forward-pass, per-checkpoint readout of singular structure along the predicted coordinate. Two consequences follow in closed form: the residual stream's smallest singular value is preserved block-to-block on $13/14$ transformers measured on their own input distribution, the one exception (Gemma$4$-$31$B) a genuine dead direction the same read pinpoints; and the kernel direction's presence classifies a transformer's normalisation from the parameters alone.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Impact of the disposable vape ban in Great Britain: a representative interrupted time-series study 2022-2026

Objective: To examine changes in vaping and smoking trends following the announcement and implementation of the disposable vape ban in Great Britain. Design: Interrupted time-series analysis of representative monthly cross-sectional data from the Smoking Toolkit Study. Setting: Great Britain. Participants: 118,946 adults ([≥]16y), including 12,042 young adults (16-24y), surveyed between Jan-2022 and Feb-2026. Main outcome measures: Changes in trends in disposable vape use among vapers, and current vaping and smoking prevalence, using seasonally-adjusted generalised additive models with comparisons against a no-ban counterfactual in which pre-announcement trends continued unchanged. Results: The proportion of vapers mainly using disposable devices began to decline following the announcement of the ban in Jan-2024, with the fall accelerating after implementation in June-2025. By Feb-2026, 5.6% (95%CI 4.6-6.9) of adult vapers and 7.1% (5.1-10.1) of young adult vapers mainly used disposables, compared with 62.0% (53.6-71.8) and 63.6% (52.7-76.7), respectively, under a no-ban counterfactual. Increases in vaping prevalence slowed post-announcement and plateaued post-implementation; by Feb-2026, prevalence was lower than the no-ban counterfactual in adults (13.6% v 18.8%; difference -5.2 percentage points, 95%CI -7.1 to -3.3) and young adults (27.8% v 39.1%; -11.3, -18.6 to -4.1). Declines in smoking prevalence stalled among adults and reversed among young adults post-announcement, before shifting downward again post-implementation; by Feb-2026, smoking prevalence was similar to the no-ban counterfactual in adults (difference +0.9 percentage points, -0.5 to +2.2) but possibly higher in young adults (+3.3, -0.5 to +7.1). Conclusions: The disposable vape ban in Great Britain was associated with substantial changes after both announcement and implementation, including a marked reduction in disposable vape use and a slowing then plateauing of growth in overall vaping prevalence. However, declines in smoking also temporarily slowed–and among young adults, reversed–after the announcement, before downward trends resumed after implementation.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

LSTM-Based Detection of Structural Breaks in Property Insurance Loss Reserving: A Climate-Informed Approach

arXiv:2606.11463v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate loss reserving is foundational to insurer solvency, yet accelerating climate driven catastrophes systematically violate the stability assumptions on which traditional actuarial methods depend. This white paper presents a research program testing whether Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) neural networks can detect and adapt to these structural breaks faster and more accurately than Chain Ladder, Bornhuetter Ferguson, and Cape Cod methods. Using 15 plus years of regulatory development triangle data from Florida and Louisiana, enriched with NOAA hurricane intensity indices and sea surface temperatures, we hypothesize a targeted improvement of 15, 20% in reserve accuracy for catastrophe exposed years, a threshold grounded both in the prior neural network reserving literature and in the formal convergence results developed here. Beyond empirical validation, we develop a theoretical framework grounding LSTM structural break detection in probabilistic terms, providing formal performance guarantees that compensate for the limited number of catastrophe events in the test period. We document the research design, methodology, expected contributions, and a candid assessment of limitations.

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

Multiple Descents in Deep Learning as a Sequence of Order-Chaos Transitions in LSTM Networks

arXiv:2505.20030v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We observe a novel `multiple-descent' phenomenon during the learning process of a recurrent neural network called long-short-term memory (LSTM) networks during its training on real-world task, in which the performance goes through long cycles of up and down trends multiple times after the model is overtrained. By carrying out asymptotic stability analysis of the models, we found that the cycles in performance – indicated by loss function in test data – are closely associated with the phase transition process between order and chaos of the model, and the local optimal training step are consistently at the critical transition point between the two phases. More importantly, the most optimal point of the model usually occurs at the first transition from order to chaos, where the `width' of the `edge of chaos' is often the widest, allowing the best exploration of weight configurations for learning.

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

What Do Safety-Aligned LLMs Learn From Mixed Compliance Demonstrations?

arXiv:2606.20508v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prior work has shown that in-context demonstrations can jailbreak language models, but it remains unclear how models interpret different types of compliance demonstrations. We study this by mixing benign compliance demonstrations (non-harmful request, helpful response) with harmful compliance demonstrations (harmful request, helpful response) and testing three hypotheses about how demonstration composition drives harmful compliance. Across four models, we find that benign and harmful demonstrations are not interchangeable: benign demonstrations can either reduce or increase harmful compliance depending on the model. We further show that preference optimization is the critical training stage that prevents benign demonstrations from increasing harmful compliance, that demonstration ordering exhibits strong recency bias, and that models differ in how refusal interacts with in-context learning: some adopt demonstrated formatting even when refusing, while others override all in-context signals upon refusal. Taken together, this work moves beyond showing that demonstration-based jailbreaking works to characterizing how it works: what models extract from compliance demonstrations depends on demonstration content, ordering, and training methodology.

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

On the Memorization Behavior of LLMs in Generative Recommendation: Observations, Implications, and Training Strategies

arXiv:2606.17276v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative recommendation (GR) has emerged as a promising direction for recommender systems. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly adopted for GR, as their rich pretrained knowledge is expected to help them generalize beyond common user behavior patterns that traditional memorization-oriented baselines can capture. However, existing LLM-based GR works largely ignore LLMs' well-known tendency to memorize, which, if present in LLMs fine-tuned for GR, would restrict their utilization of pretrained knowledge. In this work, we investigate this concern by examining one-hop memorization, where a model recommends items that are direct successors of items in the training data. We show that LLMs do this more than non-LLM-based GR models-in fact, the vast majority of their gains over GR baselines are actually on users whose target items can be predicted through one-hop memorization. We intuit that improving performance on the remaining users requires LLMs to learn richer item-item relations beyond one-hop transitions. To achieve this, we propose IIRG, a novel training strategy that teaches LLMs to capture: (1) collaborative relations derived from item co-occurrences across multiple hops in user sequences, and (2) semantic relations among items with similar themes, both of which can serve as useful recommendation signals. We show that IIRG significantly improves over LLMs trained solely with standard next-item prediction, with especially large gains for users whose test items are not covered by train-time one-hop transitions.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Impact of Out-Migration and Remittances on Food Consumption Outcomes among Rural Households in Tigray, Ethiopia

作者:

This study examines the effects of rural out-migration and remittance inflows on food consumption outcomes among rural households in the Tigray region of Ethiopia. Utilizing household survey data collected from 521 rural households across three distinct Weredas (districts) (Tahtay Maichew, Kola Tembien, and Kilte-awlaelo). A Binary Probit model was employed to identify factors influencing migration decisions, while an Endogenous Switching Regression (ESR) model was used to estimate the impact of migration on food consumption outcomes while controlling for selection bias and unobserved heterogeneity. Food security was measured using the Food Consumption Score (FCS) and dietary diversity indicators. The empirical results reveal that severe food insecurity is widespread, with over 60% of all surveyed households falling into the "Poor" food consumption category. Descriptive baseline comparisons show that migration and remittance transfers marginally shift the raw average FCS upward from 23.86 to 25.48. However, this impact is profoundly nuanced: remittances serve as an immediate consumption-smoothing safety net but run parallel to a "labor-lost" constraint that reduces own-production capacities, forcing households to rely increasingly on market purchases for staple foods. The findings reveal that migration creates short-term labor shortages in agricultural production; however, remittance inflows substantially improve household food consumption frequencies, particularly for pulses, vegetables, and other nutrient-rich foods. After accounting for self-selection bias and unobserved traits, the rigorous ESR estimates indicate that migration increases the Food Consumption Score of participating households by an average Treatment Effect on the Treated (ATT) of 10.75 points, shifting them into more secure dietary tiers. Moreover, remittances help households mitigate the adverse effects of drought and other shocks by relaxing liquidity constraints and supporting both food purchases and agricultural investments. The study recommends establishing target food security safety nets for non-remittance households, promoting scale-appropriate labor-saving agricultural technologies, expanding traditional communal labor-sharing innovations, and boosting irrigation and agricultural input support programs to enhance rural food security and livelihood resilience.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Prediction of immunotherapy response using live tumor fragments from routine clinical biopsies

Functional ex vivo assays using live tumor tissues have demonstrated strong predictive accuracy for response to immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) but are not scalable, requiring manual processing of large resections collected at academic centers. Here, an ex vivo live tumor fragment (LTF) platform was developed using standard-of-care biopsies from 228 patients with suspected malignancy collected across prospective, multicenter observational trials and biobanks. Hierarchical clustering of ICI-mediated changes in cytokine production identified two groups: responders and nonresponders. A binary classifier (elive index) using 8 cytokines achieved an AUC of 0.99 for cluster prediction. elive index correctly predicted clinical benefit in 93% (26/28) of patients (P = 3.2x10-5) and accurately identified 83% (10/12) of objective responders. Critically, elive responders were identified among biomarker-negative patients, highlighting the platform as a scalable approach that complements existing companion diagnostics and expands the population of patients identified to benefit from ICI therapy.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Influcoder: Distilling Decoders' Gradient Influence Rankings into an Encoder for Data Attribution

With the growth of LLMs' (Large Language Models) capabilities, there has been an increasing push to curate high quality datasets by filtering samples in the training data. In general, Data Attribution (DA) methods aim to estimate how individual samples in a training dataset can precondition a model to generate certain outputs. As an example, one might be interested in which samples in the data could be the source of toxic behavior after training the LLM. Many methods quantify this conditioning through the paradigm of influence functions. While methods of this family are effective in its function, they lack the necessary processing speed and storage compactness to be practically implemented on large datasets. We propose a method, Influcoder, as a quick and cost-effective approach to influence-based Data Attribution at scale.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Dual-Domain Equivariant Generative Adversarial Network for Multimodal CT-PET Synthesis

We present a Dual-Domain Equivariant Generative Adversarial Network (DDE-GAN) for multimodal CT-PET image synthesis. Traditional GAN-based approaches often operate solely in the spatial domain and ignore geometric consistency, resulting in limited structural fidelity. DDE-GAN addresses these challenges by jointly learning from both spatial and frequency (Fourier) domains, capturing complementary anatomical and spectral information. Furthermore, rotational equivariance embedded in the physics of the CT and PET measurements are integrated into the loss of both the generator and discriminator to ensure consistent responses under rotations, improving anatomical accuracy. A hierarchical dual-domain training strategy enforces intra- and inter-domain consistency through multi-stage loss functions. Evaluated on the HECKTOR 2022 CT-PET dataset, DDE-GAN achieves superior synthesis quality over baseline models for CT-PET image synthesis. The results demonstrate that combining dual-domain learning with geometric equivariance substantially enhances multimodal image synthesis accuracy and robustness, enabling practical applications in PET completion and data augmentation.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

DF-ExpEnse: Diffusion Filtered Exploration for Sample Efficient Finetuning

arXiv:2606.19656v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A natural recipe for intelligent robotic decision-making is initializing from pretrained generative control policies, which have summarized offline experience, and adapting them to self-collected online experience. We present DF-ExpEnse, an exploration technique that improves the quality of online experience collection, thus increasing finetuning sample-efficiency. DF-ExpEnse leverages the multimodal modeling capabilities of the generative control policy to create an expressive and tractably evaluatable candidate set. It then utilizes an ensemble of critics to identify the action that best balances quality with high exploration interest. In fleet settings, DF-ExpEnse further enables cross-agent communication to facilitate collaborative exploration as a group. DF-ExpEnse can be seamlessly integrated with existing strategies that finetune pretrained generative control policies via reinforcement learning. We experimentally validate consistent sample-efficiency benefits through DF-ExpEnse across a variety of manipulation and locomotion tasks, compared to default finetuning and alternative action selection schemes. Project can be found at https://df-expense.github.io.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

DiskChunGS: Large-Scale 3D Gaussian SLAM Through Chunk-Based Memory Management

Recent advances in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have demonstrated impressive results for novel view synthesis with real-time rendering capabilities. However, integrating 3DGS with SLAM systems faces a fundamental scalability limitation: methods are constrained by GPU memory capacity, restricting reconstruction to small-scale environments. We present DiskChunGS, a scalable 3DGS SLAM system that overcomes this bottleneck through an out-of-core approach that partitions scenes into spatial chunks and maintains only active regions in GPU memory while storing inactive areas on disk. Our architecture integrates seamlessly with existing SLAM frameworks for pose estimation and loop closure, enabling globally consistent reconstruction at scale. We validate DiskChunGS on indoor scenes (Replica, TUM-RGBD), urban driving scenarios (KITTI), and resource-constrained Nvidia Jetson platforms. Our method uniquely completes all 11 KITTI sequences without memory failures while achieving superior visual quality, demonstrating that algorithmic innovation can overcome the memory constraints that have limited previous 3DGS SLAM methods.

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

Virtual Speech Therapist: A Clinician-in-the-Loop AI Speech Therapy Agent for Personalized and Supervised Therapy

This paper develops Virtual Speech Therapist (VST), an intelligent agent-based platform that streamlines stuttering assessment and delivers customized therapy planning through automated and adaptive AI-driven workflows. VST integrates state-of-the-art deep learning-based stuttering classification, and multi-agent large language model (LLM) reasoning to support evidence-based clinical decision-making. The VST begins with the acquisition and feature extraction of patient speech samples, followed by robust classification of stuttering types. Building on these outputs, VST initiates an agentic reasoning process in which specialized LLM agents autonomously generate, critique, and iteratively refine individualized therapy plans. A dedicated critic agent evaluates all generated therapy plans to ensure clinical safety, methodological soundness, and alignment with peer-reviewed evidence and established professional guidelines. The resulting output is a comprehensive, patient-specific therapy draft intended for clinician review. Incorporating clinician feedback, the system then produces a finalized therapy plan suitable for patient delivery, thereby maintaining a clinician-in-the-loop paradigm. Experimental evaluation by expert speech therapists confirms that VST consistently generates high-quality, evidence-based therapy recommendations. These findings demonstrate the system's potential to augment clinical workflows, reduce clinician burden, and improve therapeutic outcomes for individuals with speech impairments. An interactive user interface for the proposed system is available online at: https://vocametrix.com/ai/stuttering-therapy-planning-agent , facilitating real-time stuttering assessment and personalized therapy planning.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Multi-task Learning is Not Enough: Representational Entanglement in Dual-output Second Language Speech Recognition

Second-language (L2) speech recognition often requires transcriptions of pronunciations and intended meanings. Multi-task learning (MTL) is a natural approach because it assumes that shared representations benefit both outputs. However, this paper shows that this assumption does not hold across Korean and English. MTL improves meaning but degrades surface transcription, especially in English, where the degradation scales with surface-meaning divergence measured by Levenshtein edit distance. Encoder analysis links these patterns to encoder-level entanglement, with Korean preserving distinct task representations while English produces nearly identical ones. Cross-task decoder analysis shows that the meaning dual-output decoder adapts with a unique representation, while the surface dual-output decoder remains constrained by the encoder. These findings motivate the design of MTL frameworks that mitigate encoder-level entanglement to reduce surface degradation in dual-output L2 automatic speech recognition.

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

Intermittent time series forecasting: local vs global models

arXiv:2601.14031v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Forecasting intermittent time series, which contain zeros, is a crucial challenge in supply chains as inventory policies require probabilistic forecasts to establish safety levels. Intermittent time series are commonly forecast using local models, trained individually on each time series. In the last years global models, trained on a large collection of time series, have become popular for time series forecasting. Global models are often based on neural networks or gradient boosted trees. We carry out the first study comparing state-of-the-art probabilistic local and global models on intermittent time series. For global models we consider three different distribution heads suitable for intermittent time series: negative binomial, hurdle-shifted negative binomial and Tweedie. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first use of the latter two with neural networks. We perform experiments on five datasets comprising overall more than 40'000 real-world time series. Among global models, TiDE, a simple neural network architecture, achieves the best accuracy; it also consistently outperforms local models and has lower computational requirements. Large global models are instead much more computationally demanding and less accurate. Among the distribution heads, the Tweedie provides the best estimates of the highest quantiles.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Development of a Novel Blood-Based Assay for Brain-Derived Tau and Its Validation in Traumatic Brain Injury

Brain-derived tau (BD-tau) is an emerging blood-based biomarker for neurodegeneration, yet there are currently limited well validated BD-tau assays available for research and clinical use. To enhance access to this vital biomarker for neurological disorders including traumatic brain injury (TBI), we developed a novel blood-based immunoassay for BD-tau on the ultra-sensitive Quanterix HD-X platform using Single Molecule Array technology. Analytical validation assessed dilution linearity, specificity, precision, detection limits, and spike recovery, each recording robust metrics in agreement with international expert recommendations. The assay demonstrated robust validation metrics, achieving between-run stability of 95% when analyzing aliquots from six independent plasma and serum samples across five analytical runs. It also showed strong dilution linearity when diluted four-fold and achieved over 90% recovery when spiked with cerebrospinal fluid. Next, we evaluated the clinical utility of the assay in cohorts of individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI), where strong performances were recorded whether using the 2-step or 3-step assay formats ({rho}= 0.94; p < 0.0001). Furthermore, plasma BD-tau distinguished samples from TBI patients based on time from injury and severity (AUC=0.93). Plasma BD-tau differentiated between favorable and unfavorable functional outcomes in the acute-severe group. Our findings underscore the significant potential of the BD-tau assay as a biomarker for TBI in the severe phase.