Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

探索全球前沿学术脉络

AcademicHub 汇聚顶级期刊与预印本平台的实时文献。定制您的专属科研雷达,利用大语言模型自动生成交叉领域文献分析简报。

01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Quantum correlations in QBism's reconstruction program

arXiv:2606.07485v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: QBism recasts quantum theory as a normative framework for an agent's probability assignments, with the Born rule taking the form of a consistency condition known as the Urgleichung. Motivated by this perspective, qplex theories provide a broader class of probabilistic models in which the sets of valid states and measurements are constrained by QBist-inspired geometric conditions. While qplexes have been extensively studied for single systems, their implications for bipartite correlations remain largely unexplored. In this work, we investigate bipartite correlations in qplex theories by expressing joint expectation values as inner products between suitably defined $C$-vectors. This geometric formulation allows Bell-type inequalities to be studied as optimization problems over qplex-compatible probability assignments. We first analyze the CHSH scenario and show that the shared inner-product structure of the $C$-vectors restricts the maximal value to the Tsirelson bound $2\sqrt{2}$. We then turn to the three-outcome CGLMP inequality $I_{2233}$ and find that the same qplex-derived norm and inner-product constraints allow a violation of up to $\leq 2+2\sqrt(3)/3 \approx 3.1547$ versus the quantum maximum of $\approx 2.8729$, thereby exhibiting super-quantum correlations. These results show that qplex geometry captures enough structure to reproduce an important quantum bound in the two-outcome case, but not enough to recover the full set of quantum correlation constraints. The analysis therefore suggests that additional principles are needed to complete the QBist reconstruction of quantum theory.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

UltraEP: Unleash MoE Training and Inference on Rack-Scale Nodes with Near-Optimal Load Balancing

arXiv:2606.04101v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large-scale expert parallelism (EP) is becoming pivotal for training and serving frontier MoE models, but it also amplifies device-level expert load imbalance into compute stragglers, token all-to-all bottlenecks, and activation-memory spikes. Existing balancers redistribute experts periodically based on historical load, which becomes unreliable for production deployments with non-stationary load patterns. We present UltraEP, the first exact-load, real-time balancer for large-EP MoE training and serving prefill on rack-scale nodes (RSNs). Leveraging the extended scale-up connectivity among dozens of GPUs within RSNs, UltraEP rebalances every microbatch and layer on critical paths, which requires nontrivial co-design of plan solving and expert replication communication to minimize exposed overhead. To this end, UltraEP eagerly reacts to post-gating load with an efficient quota-driven planner, and executes the resulting irregular expert-state transfers with RSN-native persistent tile streaming and relay-based fan-out mitigation. We evaluate UltraEP in a multi-RSN deployment of up to 256 GPUs, using cutting-edge MoE models from 106B to 671B parameters. Averaged across training and serving, UltraEP achieves 94.3% of the force-balanced ideal throughput, delivering 1.49$\times$ improvement over no-balancing, while reducing the final inter-rank imbalance from 1.30$-$4.01 to 1.01$-$1.04.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Navigating Gigapixel Pathology Images with Large Multimodal Models

Recent advances in large multimodal models have allowed for the development of interactive chat models that can converse and reason about pathology whole-slide images (WSIs). However, existing slide-level chat systems are often highly specialized, typically compressing WSIs into fixed slide-level embeddings or relying on multi-component pipelines, which can lose multi-scale detail and limit generalizability beyond the target task. We present GIANT (Gigapixel Image Agent for Navigating Tissue), a simple, training-free approach that lets general-purpose multimodal models navigate WSIs on their own, iteratively selecting multi-magnification crops and aggregating evidence over time. To evaluate generalizability in WSI question answering and to promote reproducibility, we introduce MultiPathQA, a benchmark suite spanning five clinical challenges and 934 questions over 868 unique WSIs. This includes a new set of 128 pathologist-authored multiple-choice questions designed to mirror real diagnostic search and multi-scale reasoning. Using GPT-5, GIANT outperforms models specialized for pathology question answering, achieving state-of-the-art performance on four out of five benchmarks.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

A Finite-Volume Scheme for the Continuum Extrapolation of Lattice Step-Scaling in (2+1)D Hamiltonian U(1) Gauge Theory

arXiv:2606.20029v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose a finite-volume scheme to perform controlled continuum extrapolations of the lattice step-scaling function, a key ingredient for determining the running coupling in a Hamiltonian lattice gauge theory in small volumes. As a testbed, we employ a dual Hamiltonian formulation of pure U(1) gauge theory in (2+1) dimensions and an operator basis that remains efficient toward weak coupling. We describe the implementation of static external charges on the spatial lattice and study, using matrix product states, the resulting confining string, from which we extract the static potential and a force-based renormalized coupling. Using the proposed finite-volume scheme, we demonstrate a stable continuum limit of the step-scaling function on the lattice sizes accessible to present Hamiltonian simulations. The method is readily extendable to other gauge groups and dimensions, providing a pathway toward Hamiltonian step-scaling studies in other theories.

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

Contract-Based Compositional Shielding for Safe Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.14130v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safe coordination problems surface in multi-agent reinforcement learning when global safety cannot be enforced by any agent unilaterally: the admissibility of one agent's action may depend on the dynamics of other agents. Decentralised shields can enforce safety at runtime, but purely factorised permissions often exclude optimal team behaviour that is safe only through coordination. We study deterministic safety guarantees for agents trained and deployed under decentralised execution, recovering team-optimal safe behaviour without centralised runtime control. Agents have a shared global specification $\phi$ in the safety fragment of Linear Temporal Logic ($\mathsf{LTL}_{\mathsf{safe}}$ ), and select among tuples of local $\mathsf{LTL}_{\mathsf{safe}}$ obligations whose conjunction implies the global specification $\phi$. Each agent may rely on the other agents' local obligations as assumptions because the whole contract tuple is certified simultaneously and allows projection into local action masks. At learning time, a non-stationary multi-armed bandit chooses among a library of local $\mathsf{LTL}_{\mathsf{safe}}$ obligations to select the tuple that optimises team reward, all without forgoing end-to-end safety. We evaluate the approach across 6 environments and 15 algorithmic variants.

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

Improving Cross-Format Robustness in Language Models with Multi-Format Training

Large language models often remain sensitive to answer format: a question solved correctly in one form may fail in another semantically equivalent form. To study this gap, we define cross-format robustness as the extent to which a model answers the same underlying question consistently across formats. We then compare full-format training with FormatMix, which expands only a subset of training items into multiple equivalent formats using either random or targeted selection. Across GLM4 and Llama-3.1, multi-format supervision consistently improves both task performance and cross-format robustness, whereas Multiple-choice question (MCQ)-only supervision alone brings little benefit and can even reduce robustness. We further find that expanding only about 30% of the training set into multiple formats often recovers most of the gain from full-format training, and this effect appears across the model families and sizes we study. These results suggest that format diversity, rather than additional supervision alone, is the key driver of robustness. That lightweight multi-format augmentation is a practical way to make LLMs less sensitive to answer format without changing the base model.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Under What Conditions Can a Machine Become Genuinely Creative?

作者:

arXiv:2606.13196v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent AI systems can generate texts, software architectures, hypotheses, designs, and scientific workflows that appear creative. This paper asks under what conditions a machine can become genuinely creative, and how human agency can be preserved within shared cognitive and creative environments. It develops a requirement framework derived from Designics, the science of meaning-bearing intentional change. The paper argues that genuine machine creativity should not be defined by output novelty, current performance, or transient architecture alone. Instead, creativity is understood as the structural transformation of incomplete situations through recursive intervention dynamics. On this view, it depends on ten requirements: environment representation, scoped perception, conflict identification, intervention capability, consequence observation, knowledge and environment update, rescoping, local-to-global unfolding, value-based scoping, and human-AI co-living. These are organized through the three laws of Designics: perception, conflict, and capability. The paper illustrates the computational tractability of these requirements through selected cyber-physical and cyber-biological studies, including recursive element extraction, autonomous mesh generation, and neurophysiological and workload analysis. It then treats open-ended systems, automated discovery frameworks, self-modifying agents, foundation models, and agentic workflows as pressure cases: they demonstrate powerful generative means but do not by themselves establish genuine machine creativity. Finally, the paper argues that proactive AI ethics is internal to genuine machine creativity rather than an after-the-fact filter. Value-based scoping and human-AI co-living must shape how creative machines perceive environments, identify conflicts, select interventions, observe consequences, update knowledge, and rescope future action.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Show, Don't Ask: Generative Visual Disambiguation for Composed Image Retrieval with Turn-Valid Coverage

Composed image retrieval (CIR) uses a reference image and a text modification to search for a target image. However, such queries often describe several possible images rather than one exact target, making the user's intent ambiguous. Recent methods address this by using conformal prediction to estimate ambiguity and by asking users clarifying text questions. However, these methods have two limitations: their coverage guarantee only holds at the first interaction, and text questions are often insufficient for resolving fine-grained visual differences such as appearance, attributes, or viewpoint. We propose CLARA, a clarification framework that resolves ambiguity by showing users a small panel of visual alternatives. Instead of answering text questions, the user simply selects the prototype image closest to the intended target. This provides a direct visual signal and avoids relying on a model to predict the user's answer. To maintain valid conformal guarantees across multiple interaction rounds, CLARA reweights calibration using the likelihood ratio induced by the user's selection. The displayed prototypes are also constrained to represent the current candidate set and are snapped to real corpus images, ensuring that generated images cannot artificially improve coverage. Experiments on open-domain and fashion benchmarks show that CLARA matches single-turn state-of-the-art retrieval performance, maintains nominal coverage across interaction rounds, and finds the intended target in fewer rounds than strong text-question baselines. Its advantage is especially clear when ambiguity involves viewpoint or fine-grained attributes, where visual clarification is more effective than textual questioning.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

A Unified Latent Space Disentanglement VAE Framework with Robust Disentanglement Effectiveness Evaluation

arXiv:2603.11242v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Evaluating and interpreting latent representations, such as variational autoencoders (VAEs), remains a significant challenge for diverse data types, especially when ground-truth generative factors are unknown. To address this, we unify several state-of-the-art disentangled VAE approaches for latent space disentanglement into one framework – bfVAE. To assess the effectiveness of a disentangled VAE model and enhance latent space interpretability, we propose Feature Variance Heterogeneity via Latent Traversal (FVH-LT) and Dirty Block Sparse Regression in Latent Space (DBSR-LS). To ensure robust interpretability of learned latent space, we develop a greedy alignment strategy (GAS) that mitigates label switching and aligns latent dimensions across runs to set the foundation of result aggregation. We also introduce a convenient scalar latent space separation index (LSSI) based on the GAS-aligned outputs of FVH-LT and DBSR-LS to summarize the overall latent structural separation without knowledge of the ground-truth generative factors. We compare bfVAE to five VAE models and validate the effectiveness FVH-LT, DBSR-LS, and LSSI in on seven tabular and image datasets. Under our examined experimental settings, bfVAE provides a more flexible disentanglement framework achieves more favorable overall trade-off between disentanglement and reconstruction than the benchmark VAE models; FVH-LT and DBSR-LS reliably uncover semantically meaningful and domain-relevant latent structures and generally yield consistent results; and LSSI makes an effective quantitative summary of latent structural separation.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Hantavirus Disease in Uruguay: Trends and Mortality Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Introduction: Hantavirus disease is an emerging and potentially severe zoonosis of global distribution. In Uruguay, it is transmitted by rodents inhabiting peridomestic, suburban, and rural areas. Global incidence is estimated at 150,000 to 200,000 cases per year, with up to 300 annual cases in the Americas. Since 1997, Uruguay's Ministry of Public Health (MPH) has monitored Hantavirus cardiopulmonary syndrome (HCPS), the most common clinical presentation in the region. By 2019, a total of 271 cases had been identified in the country, with an estimated mortality rate of nearly 50%. Objectives: To describe the clinical, epidemiological, and occupational characteristics of patients with Hantavirus disease in Uruguay during the pre-pandemic (2018-2019) and pandemic (2020-2021) periods. Methods: A descriptive, cross-sectional, observational study was conducted, including all serologically confirmed cases of Hantavirus infection reported to the MPH between 2018 and 2021. Clinical and demographic data were extracted from the mandatory reporting form for zoonotic diseases. Incidence and case fatality rates were calculated, and factors associated with fatal outcomes were analyzed. Results: A total of 58 confirmed cases were identified between 2018 and 2021. Most patients were male (62%), with a mean age of 36.5 years (SD 16). A decline in incidence was observed during 2020-2021, with no significant change in case fatality. Direct rodent exposure was the most frequently associated risk factor. Montevideo and Canelones were the most affected departments. Renal and pulmonary involvement were significantly associated with mortality. Conclusion: Hantavirus remains a relevant public health concern in Uruguay. Although a decrease in incidence was observed during the COVID-19 pandemic years, case fatality rates remained high. The findings underscore the need for sustained surveillance and early recognition, particularly in urbanizing regions.

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

Robust Neural Tucker Factorization with Bias Correction and Adaptive Initialization

arXiv:2606.16388v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-dimensional incomplete (HDI) tensors are widely used in traffic and climate applications, but sparse observations make accurate completion difficult. The intrinsic non-linear dynamics and non-stationary variations across distinct multi-modal fields severely hinder the efficacy of conventional linear reconstruction frameworks. Neural Tucker factorization provides an effective framework for modeling high-order interactions among tensor modes. By parameterizing underlying structural characteristics into continuous latent spaces, neural representations circumvent the rigid low-rank constraints of classical algebra. However, its performance can still be affected by implementation-level choices, especially parameter initialization and the bias configuration of the final output mapping. Suboptimal initializations frequently lead to variance explosion across the cubically expanded interaction spaces, driving the subsequent non-linear activation boundaries into severe gradient saturation zones, while the omission of a dedicated translation parameter forces interaction weights to implicitly absorb global statistical deviations. This paper proposes a simple yet effective neural Tucker factorization model with Kaiming initialization and bias correction (KaBiN) for HDI tensor completion. The proposed model utilizes Kaiming uniform initialization for the embedding and Tucker linear parameters, and adopts a simple bias correction in output mapping. By elegantly decoupling global mean shifts from local structural representations, the framework provides a highly stable and well-conditioned optimization landscape. Experiments on three real-world HDI tensor datasets show that KaBiN achieves better performance than the original NeuTucF, while introducing minimal computational overhead.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Entangled states are typically incomparable

arXiv:2406.03335v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Consider a bipartite quantum system, where Alice and Bob jointly possess a pure state $|\psi\rangle$. Using local quantum operations on their respective subsystems, and unlimited classical communication, Alice and Bob may be able to transform $|\psi\rangle$ into another state $|\phi\rangle$. Famously, Nielsen's theorem [Phys. Rev. Lett., 1999] provides a necessary and sufficient algebraic criterion for such a transformation to be possible (namely, the local spectrum of $|\phi\rangle$ should majorise the local spectrum of $|\psi\rangle$). In the paper where Nielsen proved this theorem, he conjectured that in the limit of large dimensionality, for almost all pairs of states $|\psi\rangle, |\phi\rangle$ (according to the natural unitary invariant measure) such a transformation is not possible. That is to say, typical pairs of quantum states $|\psi\rangle, |\phi\rangle$ are entangled in fundamentally different ways, that cannot be converted to each other via local operations and classical communication. Via Nielsen's theorem, this conjecture can be equivalently stated as a conjecture about majorisation of spectra of random matrices from the so-called trace-normalised complex Wishart-Laguerre ensemble. Concretely, let $X$ and $Y$ be independent $n \times m$ random matrices whose entries are i.i.d. standard complex Gaussians; then Nielsen's conjecture says that the probability that the spectrum of $X X^\dagger / \operatorname{tr}(X X^\dagger)$ majorises the spectrum of $Y Y^\dagger / \operatorname{tr}(Y Y^\dagger)$ tends to zero as both $n$ and $m$ grow large. We prove this conjecture, and we also confirm some related predictions of Cunden, Facchi, Florio and Gramegna [J. Phys. A., 2020; Phys. Rev. A., 2021].

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Externalizing Research Synthesis and Validation in AI Scientists through a Research Harness

arXiv:2606.18874v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI systems can increasingly automate scientific workflows, but the reasoning that links prior evidence, generated ideas, experiments and final claims often remains implicit inside model inference. Here we introduce Xcientist, a research harness that externalizes research synthesis and experimental validation into inspectable, contract-governed processes. Xcientist organizes literature evidence, idea states, implementation plans, ablation records and repair traces as persistent research artifacts, so that generated mechanisms can be grounded, executed, tested and revised without losing their evidential basis. We identify claim drift as a failure mode of automated research, where runnable artifacts no longer support the mechanism originally claimed. Across training-free memory systems, graph-structured traffic forecasting and multi-scale physics-informed neural networks, Xcientist preserves traceable trajectories from problem formulation to mechanism design, validation and bounded revision. These results suggest that AI scientists should be evaluated not only by their final artifacts, but by whether their synthesis and validation processes remain attributable, inspectable and scientifically accountable.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Multicluster measles outbreak with a substantial proportion of modified cases in Tokyo, Japan, January-May 2026

Tokyo experienced a measles outbreak (260 cases) in early 2026 despite elimination status. Adults aged 20-39 years were most affected, and 38% of cases were modified measles, increasing with prior vaccination. Although incidence rose until April, the effective reproduction number; R(t) fell below 1, consistent with outbreak control. Multiple clusters were identified, but many cases lacked epidemiological links, suggesting that modified measles is less likely to be considered in differential diagnosis. Intensive contact tracing and surveillance contributed to limiting transmission.

16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Efficient Neural Network Model Selection for Few-Class Application Datasets

arXiv:2606.19712v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While much effort has focused on developing and benchmarking high-performance neural networks, less attention has been given to how dataset properties, known to practitioners, can guide efficient model selection. Neural models are typically evaluated on datasets with thousands of classes, yet many real-world applications involve fewer than ten. To address this understudied but common setting, we develop a measure of classification difficulty based on data-side properties and show how it enables more efficient model selection for few-class datasets, where traditional approaches are less effective. We term this phenomenon "few-class distinctiveness". Our metric allows comparison of models and datasets 6 to 29$\times$ faster than repeated training and testing. Leveraging this insight, we extend scaled model families below the smallest published models, achieving greater efficiency at similar accuracy, for example models up to 42% smaller than YOLOv5-nano for a mobile robot task. Targeting resource-constrained applications, we demonstrate few-class model selection across mobile robot, drone, and IoT scenarios, highlighting practical gains in efficiency without sacrificing performance.

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

Spatial-Aware Reduction Framework: Towards Efficient and Faithful Visual State Space Models

arXiv:2606.19932v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mamba demonstrates strong efficiency in modeling long visual sequences. However, when token reduction is applied to structurally enhanced Mamba variants, these models exhibit a severe performance collapse. We attribute this degradation to the spatially agnostic nature of existing reduction methods, which violate the two-dimensional structural premise required by the selective scanning mechanism. In this work, we propose STORM, a spatial-aware token reduction framework designed to maintain structural integrity throughout the compression process. STORM reformulates reduction into a structured operation on spatial units, enforcing localized constraints to maintain both grid topology and neighborhood coherence. As a plug-and-play module, STORM equips existing reduction pipelines with explicit spatial awareness without any training. Empirical results demonstrate that STORM achieves state-of-the-art pruning accuracy across diverse vision Mamba backbones under training-free settings. Notably, STORM delivers a substantial accuracy recovery on VMamba, outperforming prior methods by up to 63.3\% in top-1 accuracy. Meanwhile, STORM incurs only a 1.0\% accuracy drop on PlainMamba, achieving performance comparable to ViT.

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

LIBERO-Occ: Evaluating and Improving Vision-Language-Action Models under Scene-Induced Occlusion via Viewpoint Imagination

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models achieve strong performance on standard manipulation benchmarks, but most evaluations assume that task-relevant objects are fully visible. This assumption often fails in realistic settings, where occlusion makes manipulation partially observable. In this paper, we study scene-induced occlusion as a fundamental challenge for VLA models and introduce LIBERO-Occ, an occlusion-oriented extension of LIBERO. Experiments show that state-of-the-art VLAs suffer substantial performance degradation under occlusion. To address this issue, we propose Viewpoint Imagination (VIM), which generates a complementary view from an occluded primary observation and conditions action prediction on both observed and imagined evidence. VIM improves robustness across task suites, occlusion types, and severity levels without requiring additional cameras at deployment time, suggesting that viewpoint imagination is an promising mechanism for perception completion in partially observable manipulation. Our benchmark and corresponding code are available at: \href{https://github.com/litsh/Libero-Occ}{https://github.com/litsh/Libero-Occ}.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Robust Transformer-Based One-Step Stock Index Forecasting via Shifted Data Augmentation

arXiv:2606.15701v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transformers have shown remarkable success in sequence modeling, yet their direct application to financial time series remains challenging due to noisy signals, short-memory dynamics, and distributional shifts. This paper proposes a modified Transformer architecture for one-step stock index forecasting, combined with advanced learning-rate scheduling and a novel Shifted Data Augmentation (SDA) technique. We evaluate the proposed framework on two benchmark stock index datasets, VN30 and S&P 500. Experimental results demonstrate that cosine annealing with warmup consistently improves forecasting accuracy over the generalized inverse-power scheduler. Furthermore, SDA substantially reduces forecasting errors and run-to-run variability while improving robustness to hyperparameter selection. The combination of cosine annealing scheduling and SDA achieved the best performance on both datasets, indicating that data augmentation can play a more important role than increasing model complexity in Transformer-based financial forecasting. These findings provide a practical and computationally efficient approach for robust stock index forecasting in noisy financial environments.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

An Ethical eValuation Agent (EeVA): Results of a Proof-of-Concept Test on a Prototype Agentic-like Workflow to Assist Ethical Deliberations

arXiv:2606.11218v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Ethical deliberation is often misunderstood as a search for single right or wrong answers, creating difficulties for non-ethically trained personnel who must address ethically laden challenges. We developed EeVA, an agentic-like LLM-based workflow designed to support comparative ethical reflection rather than deliver definitive ethical answers. EeVA was programmed in n8n using three interconnected workflows: starter, worker, and emitter. It evaluated uploaded use cases against 10 ethical frameworks through evaluator and synthesis prompts. Proof-of-concept testing used three published cases from urban mobility, peer-to-peer energy trading, and social-service resource allocation. Across all cases, EeVA produced consistently structured framework-specific evaluations and integrated syntheses. Outputs differentiated between frameworks, identified convergences and divergences, recommended modifications to increase alignment, and highlighted persistent ethical tensions. Syntheses were readable for non-specialists and shifted attention away from simplistic answers toward design conditions, safeguards, and areas where full cross-framework agreement was unlikely. The findings suggest that LLMs can be organised into usable workflows that preserve ethical plurality while helping bridge the communicative gap between ethicists and non-ethically trained personnel. EeVA's value lies not in replacing ethicists or resolving moral disagreement, but in scaffolding structured ethical deliberation. EeVA offers a promising proof of concept for supporting ethical reflection where access to ethics expertise is limited. Further work is needed on reproducibility, human evaluation, user testing, and efficiency before it can be considered a mature tool.

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

KVEraser: Learning to Steer KV Cache for Efficient Localized Context Erasing

Post-hoc context erasing over the KV cache is challenging because a local edit has a global consequence: once a span has been processed, its influence propagates into the cached states of all subsequent tokens. This issue arises naturally in long-context LLM applications, where stale retrieved facts, incorrect tool observations, retracted user preferences, or harmful prompt injections may be identified only after prefill. Exact erasing must then recompute all tokens after the deleted span, making its computational cost depend on suffix length rather than erased-span length. We introduce KVEraser, a learned KV-cache editing method for efficient localized context erasing. Given a processed context and a span to remove, KVEraser replaces only the KV states of the erased interval with learned steering states while reusing the remaining cache unchanged. To learn a transferable erasing mechanism, we build a two-stage training pipeline: generic span-neighbor pre-training teaches the eraser to suppress the influence of the erased span, while task-specific fine-tuning adapts this capability to downstream scenarios. Experiments show that KVEraser nearly matches full recomputation in post-erasure performance on in-domain tasks across 1K–32K context lengths, while its latency increases by only 24% compared with a 17.6x increase for full recomputation. KVEraser also generalizes to unseen long-document QA tasks with harmful factual distractors, achieving the best performance among approximate baselines with a 3–4x speedup over full recomputation.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

StreamKL: Fast and Memory-Efficient KL Divergence for Boosting Attention Distillation

arXiv:2606.20005v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Attention distillation, which trains one attention distribution to match another by minimizing their Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, is widely used in knowledge distillation, model compression, continual learning, and sparse-attention LLM training. However, existing approaches materialize both attention distributions before computing the KL reduction, incurring $O(N_QN_K)$ memory and IO costs that become prohibitive at long context lengths. We present StreamKL, the first fused GPU primitive for attention KL divergence that eliminates this quadratic materialization. StreamKL derives a novel online formulation for the coupled two-distribution KL reduction, enabling a single one-pass forward kernel that streams query-key tiles through on-chip SRAM. For the backward pass, StreamKL recomputes attention probabilities tile-by-tile, avoiding storage of quadratic intermediates. We further design and implement efficient GPU kernels with dedicated optimizations. Experiments show StreamKL delivers up to $43\times$ and $14\times$ speedups over baseline methods in the forward and backward passes, respectively. Most importantly, StreamKL reduces the extra HBM footprint of attention distillation from $O(N_QN_K)$ to $O(1)$, enabling long-context distillation on a single GPU.

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

Exploring Starts Are Not Enough: Counterexamples and a Fix for Monte Carlo Exploring Starts

arXiv:2606.15247v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The asymptotic behaviour of Monte Carlo Exploring Starts (MCES) is a long-standing open question in reinforcement learning, even in the tabular setting. We investigated the convergence properties of tabular MCES by constructing examples in which the algorithm converges to suboptimal solutions. This paper presents new counterexamples for both initial-visit and first-visit MCES and gives a convergence-restoring modification for the initial-visit case. We show that stable suboptimal solutions may exist for initial-visit MCES with sample-average updates even when greedy actions are updated more often than non-greedy actions on average. However, by scaling learning rates inversely to update frequencies on a state-by-state basis, convergence to optimality is guaranteed. Unlike previous uniformisation methods, this modification is applicable to large-scale problems that require approximating the estimated value function. We then extend the example to show that sample-average first-visit MCES may also converge to suboptimal solutions. This largely settles a fundamental open problem and shows that exploring starts alone do not guarantee convergence to optimality. More broadly, these results highlight that convergence depends critically on the relative size and frequency of updates applied to different actions, making the choice of learning rates and the balance between exploration and exploitation central to the analysis of MCES and the implementation of scalable Monte Carlo control methods.

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

Repeated Bilateral Trade: The Quest for Fairness

arXiv:2606.15369v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study repeated bilateral trade from a fairness perspective. At each round, a fresh seller-buyer pair arrives, and the platform posts a price before observing the traders' valuations. Trade occurs only if both agents accept the price. Rather than maximizing only the gain from trade, we consider platforms that seek balanced divisions of the generated surplus. We show that natural fairness desiderata lead to a one-parameter Rawls-to-Nash family of fair-gain objectives, obtained by aggregating the seller's and buyer's net gains through nonpositive Hölder means. Unlike the standard gain-from-trade objective and the Rawlsian fair-gain objective studied in prior work, our proposed objectives induce a new statistical structure in which expected rewards are recovered from threshold feedback through a two-dimensional singular-kernel integral identity. This leads to a nonstandard pure-exploration problem whose natural estimators are rectangular double sums with row-column dependence and singular weights. Assuming independent i.i.d. seller and buyer valuation sequences with arbitrary unknown marginals, we characterize the optimal learning rates for the whole Rawls-to-Nash family of fair-gain objectives, giving matching fixed-confidence sample-complexity and regret bounds up to polylogarithmic factors.