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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

AdaTKG: Adaptive Memory for Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning

arXiv:2605.07121v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Temporal knowledge graphs (TKGs) represent time-stamped relational facts and support a wide range of reasoning tasks over evolving events. However, existing methods produce entity representations that are static at the entity level, in that each representation is a function of learned parameters only and retains no trace of the interactions in which the entity has participated. In this paper, we depart from this static view and propose that each entity be modeled as an adaptive process whose representation is refined every time the entity participates in a fact. To this end, we propose AdaTKG, which maintains a per-entity memory that is updated with every observed interaction, with the memory accumulating online and predictions improving as more interactions arrive. Specifically, we instantiate the memory update as a learnable exponential moving average governed by a single shared scalar instead of using learnable parameters for each entity, enabling AdaTKG to handle entities unseen during training. Extensive experiments confirm consistent gains over TKG baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of adaptive memory. Code is available at: https://github.com/seunghan96/AdaTKG

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

TACTFUL: Tactile-Driven Exploration For Object Localization and Identification in Confined Environments

arXiv:2606.24712v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Humans effortlessly locate and identify objects by touch alone, even without vision. In contrast, robotic systems rely heavily on vision and struggle with autonomous tactile exploration and object identification. We present TACTFUL, a vision-free tactile exploration framework that enables a multi-fingered robot to autonomously explore confined workspaces, discover objects through contact, and identify them via tactile reconstruction. Trained entirely on real hardware without simulation, our system learns a single policy that balances global workspace exploration with local surface refinement through a dynamic reward schedule. Our results demonstrate that tactile sensing, when paired with structured learning, can serve as an effective primary modality for object-level reasoning, achieving 77% success with 0.015 m average reconstruction error and outperforming baseline approaches on real-world objects.

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

Scalable Circuit Learning for Interpreting Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.16939v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A prominent research direction in mechanistic interpretability is learning sparse circuits over LLM components to reveal how they jointly produce model behavior. However, raw neurons are polysemantic, making learned circuits hard to interpret. Sparse autoencoder (SAE) features alleviate this, but their high dimensionality makes existing intervention-based circuit learning methods computationally prohibitive. We propose CircuitLasso, a scalable circuit-learning approach based on sparse linear regression. CircuitLasso recovers circuits whose structural accuracy matches that of state-of-the-art intervention-based methods on the benchmark data, at a fraction of the computational cost. For interpretability, CircuitLasso efficiently uncovers relationships among SAE features, showing how human-interpretable semantic features propagate through the model and influence its predictions. Finally, we validate the utility of our learned circuits by leveraging their insights to achieve comparable performance at substantially lower cost on a domain-generalization task.

04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Dimension-free Markov–Bernstein inequalities for product measures

作者:

arXiv:2606.13575v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study dimension-free Markov–Bernstein inequalities for polynomials with respect to product probability measures. In the Gaussian case, for $p\ge4$, we prove that \[ \|\nabla f\|_{L^p(\gamma^n)} \le C(p)d^{\frac12+\theta_p} \|f\|_{L^p(\gamma^n)} \] for every polynomial $f$ of degree at most $d$, where $\theta_p\le \frac{2}{3p}$ and $\theta_p=0$ whenever $p$ is an even integer. Thus, for even integer exponents, we establish the sharp dependence on the degree conjectured by Eskenazis–Ivanisvili. For general $p\ge4$, the estimate improves upon their dimension-free inequality. We also obtain dimension-free Markov–Bernstein inequalities with sharp dependence on the degree for even integer exponents beyond the Gaussian setting. We first prove such estimates for the uniform distribution on the unit cube and then extend them to products of absolutely continuous measures with unimodal densities. Finally, we treat products of one-dimensional Freud measures with densities proportional to $e^{-|t|^{2m}}$.

05.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Scheduling jobs with unknown size distribution in a M/G/1 queue: the shifted empirical Gittins

arXiv:2606.24703v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper we consider a M/G/1 queue for which we want to minimize the expected response time. We show how to compute indices from $n$ samples of the job size distribution such that the corresponding index policy is asymptotically optimal as $n$ grows. This construction is based on a discretization of the bounded support of the job size distribution and a shift of the samples to their nearest discrete point to the right. We show that the Gittins index of the empirical distribution of these shifted samples is close to the Gittins index of the original distribution. This translates to the asymptotic optimality of the corresponding index policy for minimizing the expected response time. Numerical comparison with other approaches further confirm the efficiency of our approach.

06.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Universality for Products of Random Matrices with i.i.d. Entries and the Fuss–Catalan Number

arXiv:2606.14450v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Let \((w_{ij})_{i,j\ge1}\) be a single infinite array of independent identically distributed real- or complex-valued entries of mean zero, variance \(\sigma^2\), and finite fourth moment. Set \(W_n=(w_{ij})_{1\le i,j\le n}\) and \(X_n=n^{-1/2}W_n\). For every fixed \(k\ge1\), we identify the almost sure limiting operator norm of several fixed products built from this family. Define the \(k\)-th freeness coefficient by \[ \gamma_k:=\sqrt{\frac{(k+1)^{k+1}}{k^k}}. \] Then we prove \[ \|X_n^k\|\to\sigma^k\gamma_k \qquad almost surely. \] The same limit holds for products sampled with replacement from any fixed finite pool of independent copies of \(X_n\); in particular, it holds for the product of \(k\) independent copies. Thus, the freeness coefficient captures the non-commuting characteristic between large random matrices %powers and independent or fixed-pool sampled products under the finite fourth moment assumption. The improvement of the classical Bai–Yin-type power estimate from the scale \(\sigma^k(k{+}1)\) to \(\sigma^k \sqrt{k{+}1}\) is a direct corollary of our result. The main technical challenge is to prove the upper bound using a high-moment expansion of %the upper bound is proved by a high-moment expansion of \(\E\Tr((X_n^kX_n^{*k})^m)\). The leading zero-defect trace words are tree-like and are counted by the Fuss–Catalan number \[ F_{k,m}= \frac1{km+1}\binom{(k+1)m}{m}. \] The combinatorial tool helps to devise a defect-sensitive global enumeration: if \(L=km\) and \[ r=(L+1-v)+(L-q), \] then the number of admissible word classes with defect \(r\) is at most \(F_{k,m}(Cm)^{Dr}\). This polynomial-in-\(m\) loss, with degree proportional to the defect, is summable in the logarithmic moment range.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Hybrid Acousto-Optical Double Dressing of a Two-Level System

arXiv:2509.25847v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We experimentally investigate resonance fluorescence from a two-level system in a novel configuration where a strong laser drives an optical Rabi oscillation while an acoustic field parametrically modulates the frequency of the two-level system. We observe emission spectra that deviate markedly from the standard Mollow triplet, including dynamical cancellation of the central peak. A doubly dressed state model incorporating hybridization among the emitter, optical field, and acoustic field captures these features. Guided by this model, we experimentally validate the condition for optimal cooling of acoustic phonons in an emitter-optomechanical system. These results reveal new regimes of strongly driven quantum nonlinear interactions.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Dynamical low-rank methods for the Wigner equation I: separable difference potential

arXiv:2606.24190v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in dynamical low-rank approximation (DLRA) have demonstrated its effectiveness in high-dimensional simulations. However, existing DLRA algorithms still face significant challenges when handling systems that involve complex collision terms, including the pseudo-differential operator ($\Psi$) in the Wigner equation, a representative operator characterized by nonlocality. It is deserving to carry out a series of works to develop the DLRA algorithms for solving the Wigner equation. As the first step in this series of works, we propose an efficient DLRA algorithm for the Wigner equation, using a separable decomposition of the difference potential. We combine this separable assumption with two often-used truncations of $\Psi$, namely $\mathcal{K}$-truncation and $\mathcal{Y}$-truncation, to obtain a kind of separated representation of $\Psi$. Complexity analysis and several challenging experiments, including harmonic oscillators, Gaussian barrier scattering, electron-electron scattering, and a Helium-like system, all of which satisfy the separable assumption, confirm that the proposed DLRA algorithm has significant advantages, achieving a reduction in computational effort by one to two orders of magnitude in both runtime and memory requirements compared to the full-grid approach. It is worth noting that, even in the absence of a predetermined low-rank structure for the solution, DLRA can still serve as a numerical scheme that balances efficiency and accuracy.

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

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

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

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

Track2View: 4D-Consistent Camera-Controlled Video Generation via Paired 3D Point Tracks

Re-rendering an existing video from a novel camera viewpoint requires the output to follow the prescribed camera trajectory while preserving the appearance and dynamics of the original scene across every frame. Existing methods rely on per-frame pose embeddings, noisy point-cloud renderings, or implicit learned correspondences, none of which provides an explicit, temporally continuous link between source and target pixels. We propose Track2View, which conditions a video diffusion transformer on paired 3D point tracks: sparse trajectories of scene points projected into both the source and target camera views. These tracks provide explicit spatiotemporal correspondences that are temporally continuous by construction, encoding what content should appear where and when. At the core of Track2View is a dual-view track conditioner that transfers visual context from source to target view through parameter-free geometric operations and learned temporal aggregation, ensuring generalization to arbitrary camera trajectories without memorizing specific motions. We further introduce a data curation pipeline that extracts one-to-one track correspondences by running a 3D point tracker on temporally concatenated multi-camera view pairs. On a 400-video benchmark spanning static and dynamic scenes, Track2View achieves state-of-the-art results across visual quality, view synchronization, and camera accuracy, reducing rotation error by 30-65% and translation error by 61-72% relative to leading baselines. Project page is available at this https URL: https://qjizhi.github.io/track2view

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

Bridging the Usability Gap: Lessons from Interpreting Studies for Machine Interpreting Design

Machine interpreting (MI), the live, real-time branch of speech translation, has achieved remarkable progress on standard benchmarks, with some systems approaching human parity on textual fidelity. Yet the user experience remains far inferior to interpreter-mediated communication, revealing what we term the accuracy illusion: systems that appear accurate on paper but fail in practice to support smooth, goal-oriented interaction. This paper defines MI as a distinct subfield of speech translation, with its own characteristics and the need for evaluation methods grounded in communicative effectiveness rather than isolated fidelity metrics. Drawing on insights from interpreting studies, we identify critical dimensions of professional interpreting practice that are overlooked by current systems, and consolidate them into three interdependent design priorities for future MI: agency (context-sensitive initiative and repair), grounding (multimodal and discourse-level situational awareness), and experience (adaptive improvement through real interaction). Together, these priorities chart a path toward closing the usability gap and enabling systems that can sustain authentic multilingual communication in real time.

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

Modeling Doppler Shifts in Radial-Velocity Data with Deep Learning toward Earth-mass Exoplanet Detection

arXiv:2606.18464v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Detecting the tiny Doppler shifts induced by Earth-mass planets in stellar radial-velocity measurements remains extremely challenging due to stellar activity. Many deep-learning methods performing well on simulated data remain difficult to apply reliably on real stellar spectra. The aim of this work is to develop a deep-learning framework that generalizes to real, unseen spectra and improves the detectability of Earth-mass planets in radial-velocity data. We train artificial neural networks on HARPS-N solar spectra with injected planetary signals, using physics-motivated spectral representations based on flux and line-formation temperature, together with their velocity gradients. Two training strategies are explored: hold-out testing and cross-validation. Model robustness is enhanced through genetic-algorithm-based hyperparameter optimization, and predictive uncertainty is quantified using Monte Carlo dropout. Our most precise neural network model reliably retrieves, under the cross-validation strategy, the amplitudes, phases, and orbital periods of planetary signals with amplitudes greater than or equal to 25 cm/s and periods between 10 and 550 days. In addition, in all cases tested here, the successfully recovered signals correspond to the most significant peaks in the periodograms of the Doppler-shift predictions. Temperature-based spectral-shell representations consistently outperform flux-based shells. We also release doppleriann, a Python package implementing the proposed framework. Our results demonstrate that combining physically motivated spectral representations with deep learning provides a promising pathway toward the detection of Earth-mass planets in radial-velocity data from real observations, supported by a modeling framework that is both physically grounded and statistically rigorous, incorporating uncertainty quantification and optimized training strategies.

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

Generalized Kullback-Leibler Divergence Loss

In this paper, we delve deeper into the Kullback-Leibler (KL) Divergence loss and mathematically prove that it is equivalent to the Decoupled Kullback-Leibler (DKL) Divergence loss that consists of (1) a weighted Mean Square Error (wMSE) loss and (2) a Cross-Entropy loss incorporating soft labels. Thanks to the decoupled structure of DKL loss, we have identified two areas for improvement. Firstly, we address the limitation of KL loss in scenarios like knowledge distillation by breaking its asymmetric optimization property along with a smoother weight function. This modification effectively alleviates convergence challenges in optimization, particularly for classes with high predicted scores in soft labels. Secondly, we introduce class-wise global information into KL/DKL to reduce bias arising from individual samples. With these two enhancements, we derive the Generalized Kullback-Leibler (GKL) Divergence loss and evaluate its effectiveness by conducting experiments on CIFAR-10/100, ImageNet, and vision-language datasets, focusing on adversarial training, and knowledge distillation tasks. Specifically, we achieve new state-of-the-art adversarial robustness on the public leaderboard – RobustBench and competitive knowledge distillation performance across CIFAR/ImageNet models and CLIP models, demonstrating the substantial practical merits. Our code is available at https://github.com/jiequancui/DKL.

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

A Lightweight Fiducial-Based Pipeline for 3D Hyperspectral Mapping of ex-vivo Lumpectomy Specimens

Hyperspectral Imaging (HSI) is a promising modality for intraoperative assessment of resection margins in Breast-Conserving Surgery (BCS), but its clinical translation requires aligning the inherently 2D spectral information onto the 3D shape of the excised tissue so that suspicious regions can be precisely localized for targeted follow-up. We present a fully automated, calibration-free pipeline that produces a 3D hyperspectral point cloud of an ex-vivo lumpectomy specimen from a set of consumer-camera RGB images and a single top-down HSI acquisition. The 3D geometry is reconstructed with a deep-learning Structure-from-Motion backbone, stabilized in a metric reference frame by a custom bundle adjustment that enforces consistency on the corners of four ArUco markers placed around the specimen. The HSI cube is then registered to the reconstruction without recovering the HSI camera pose: the markers, visible in both modalities, define 16 corner correspondences that drive a planar homography, and 3D coordinates are recovered by lookup on an orthographically rendered depth map. Evaluated on two ex-vivo lumpectomy specimens, the pipeline achieves a median 3D registration error below 1~mm and a 2D reprojection error below 0.02 mm, with a total per-specimen processing time under 4 minutes on accelerated hardware. These results support the feasibility of integrating HSI-guided spatial localization into intraoperative margin assessment workflows for breast-conserving surgery.

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

Ultra Flash: Scaling Real-Time Streaming Video Generation to High Resolutions

While recent autoregressive video diffusion models achieve remarkable streaming quality, they remain confined to low resolutions (e.g., 480P), leaving efficient, scalable, real-time high-resolution video generation a fundamental open challenge. To bridge this gap, we present Ultra Flash, a cascaded streaming framework capable of real-time high-resolution video generation. Ultra Flash achieves ~30 FPS at 1K resolution and ~18 FPS at 2K resolution on a single GPU through three key contributions: (1) an architecture-preserving T2V-to-TV2V super-resolution training paradigm coupled with an AIGC-oriented data degradation pipeline that effectively preserves the generative capability of the base model, enabling enhanced high-resolution detail when cascaded after mainstream low-resolution generative models; (2) a causal streaming latent upsampler paired with a high-resolution decoder, which enhances spatiotemporal coherence while enabling efficient latent spatial scaling and precise high-resolution decoding with negligible computational overhead; and (3) a cascade high-resolution streaming video generation optimization scheme that first performs hybrid-reward-enhanced sparse causalization and single-step distillation of the super-resolution model, then introduces cascaded streaming self-forcing preference optimization with dynamic cache management, jointly enhancing overall coherence, improving quality, and enabling real-time high-resolution streaming video generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Ultra Flash reliably produces ultra-high-resolution streaming video while maintaining state-of-the-art visual quality and superior efficiency. Project Page: https://xin1u.github.io/UltraFlash/

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Bridging the Manifold Gap: Riemannian Residual Line Search for One-Step Image Editing

One-step diffusion editors are fast because they avoid inversion and iterative optimization, but a single transport update must be aggressive enough to realize the target prompt and conservative enough to preserve the source image–and no fixed update strength satisfies both demands across edit types. We treat this tension as a post-hoc candidate-selection problem on top of energy-field transport rather than as a new editing model. Our proposed method, Riemannian Residual Line Search, first builds a stronger edit by estimating the local time curvature of the prompt-delta field and projecting the corrected direction back onto the update norm of the original first-order energy-field transport estimation. It then forms a small residual path from the source image to this strong edit, retains the original first-order output as one candidate, and picks the final image by maximizing target-prompt CLIP alignment. On a 700-sample PIE-Bench++ evaluation across 10 edit type IDs, our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance among current one-step update algorithms.

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

StagePilot: Stage-Level Planning for Long-Horizon Dialogue Simulation in Cybergrooming

Cybergrooming is an evolving threat to youth, requiring proactive educational interventions. We address this by modeling dialogue progression as a structured planning problem over stage-wise interactions. We propose StagePilot, a dialogue framework that separates stage-level planning from response generation, in which the model selects the next stage under constrained transitions and generates responses conditioned on it, enabling coherent and realistic progression. Reinforcement learning is used to learn stage-level policies from offline data, optimizing for both emotional alignment and goal-consistent progression. Our empirical experiments show that StagePilot generates more structured, coherent dialogue trajectories and reduces conversational stagnation compared to baselines; notably, the IQL+AWAC variant reaches the final stage more often while maintaining over 70% positive or neutral responses, yielding a 43% relative improvement.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Blind Dexterous Grasping via Real2Sim2Real Tactile Policy Learning

arXiv:2606.11767v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Blind grasping with a dexterous hand is a crucial manipulation capability. Nevertheless, learning such tactile-only policies for real robots remains challenging due to the tactile sim-to-real gap and the limited expressiveness of sparse tactile signals. To bridge this gap, we propose a framework for tactile-only blind grasping that is deployable on a physical multi-fingered robotic hand. Our approach combines three key components. First, we introduce a Real2Sim tactile calibration pipeline that constructs a contact-calibrated digital-twin simulator capable of reproducing real tactile signals. Second, we improve the expressiveness of sparse tactile observations using a layout-aware tactile encoder, which incorporates sensor-geometry priors through self-supervised pretraining. Third, to improve generalization to unseen objects, we train object-specific reinforcement-learning experts in the calibrated simulator and aggregate their successful grasp trajectories into a tactile-conditioned Diffusion Policy. We evaluate our method on a physical LEAP Hand equipped with distributed tactile sensing across 10 seen and 10 unseen objects. The deployed policy achieves a 27\% real-world grasp success rate across all 20 objects, without real-world grasping demonstrations or visual input. Simulation ablations show that layout-aware tactile pretraining improves grasping performance, while sensing-level evaluations confirm that Real2Sim calibration increases the consistency of tactile contact events between simulation and hardware. Together, these results suggest that contact-event calibration, geometry-aware tactile representation learning, and diffusion-based policy aggregation provide an effective path toward tactile-only blind grasping on real dexterous robotic hands. Project page:Dex-Blind-Grasp.github.io.

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

Bayesian 3D Steerable CNNs: Enabling Equivariance and Uncertainty Quantification Simultaneously

arXiv:2606.15479v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Steerable convolutional neural networks (Steerable-CNNs) guarantee SE(3)-equivariance by parameterizing kernels as linear combinations of steerable basis functions, but their deterministic nature precludes uncertainty quantification - limiting their use in settings where confidence estimates are essential. We propose a Bayesian Steerable-CNN that places posterior distributions over the basis coefficients, yielding stochastic kernels while preserving equivariance exactly. The loss function of the model is obtained via variational inference and minimized by Bayes-by-Backpropagation. The framework admits a decomposition of predictive uncertainty into epistemic and aleatoric components. Empirically, the model attains competitive classification accuracy alongside an expected calibration error of 0.0263 and outperforms its deterministic counterpart by up to 6.17% under distributional shift induced by additive Gaussian noise. Furthermore, we leverage the model's uncertainty estimates to enhance its performance significantly, achieving a notable gain - approximately 4% higher accuracy across 84% of the test dataset. A statistically significant negative correlation between epistemic uncertainty and prediction error confirms that the learned posterior variance is semantically meaningful. The framework unifies Bayesian uncertainty quantification with the inductive bias of equivariant CNNs.

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

DragMesh-2: Physically Plausible Dexterous Hand-Object Interaction with Articulated Objects

Dexterous interaction with articulated objects is important for household, assistive, and humanoid manipulation, where multi-finger hands can provide compliant contact patterns beyond parallel-jaw grasping. However, articulated-object manipulation differs from static-object manipulation: the target part cannot be directly actuated, and its motion must emerge through sustained physical hand–handle contact. This makes the transition from object-centric articulated generation to hand-driven dexterous hand–object interaction non-trivial, since geometric trajectory replay or open-loop execution does not model the contact dynamics required to move the articulated part. Moreover, policies trained only for task completion under fixed dynamics can overfit nominal contact loads, especially without tactile or force feedback, and may degrade when the contact load changes. To address these challenges, we present DragMesh-2, a contact-driven framework for dexterous interaction with articulated objects that extends articulated interaction from object-centric generation to hand-driven dexterous hand–object interaction, where articulated motion must arise through physical contact. We further propose PICA, a physically informed contact-aware training mechanism that injects physical signals into policy learning without tactile or force feedback, improving robustness and task success under changing contact loads. Finally, we conduct systematic evaluation across multiple damping conditions and articulated-object categories to study robustness under contact-load variation, and provide a pure-geometry dexterous interaction resource to support future loco-manipulation and humanoid hand–object interaction research. Across seven GAPartNet objects, DragMesh-2 achieves stronger robustness under contact-load variation than the compared methods while maintaining high task success across damping conditions.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Associations Among Changes in Inflammatory Biomarkers, Pain Intensity, and Health-Related Quality of Life Following a 12-Week Aerobic Exercise Programme in Individuals with Non-Specific Chronic Low Back Pain

Abstract Background: Non-specific chronic low back pain (NSCLBP) is associated with persistent pain, reduced health-related quality of life (HRQoL), and low-grade systemic inflammation. This study examined associations among changes in inflammatory biomarkers, pain intensity, and HRQoL following a 12-week aerobic exercise programme. Methods: This secondary analysis used data from a randomized controlled trial involving 41 participants with NSCLBP (intervention, n = 21; control, n = 20). Participants received either supervised aerobic exercise plus health education or health education alone for 12 weeks. Change scores for tumour necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-), interleukin-6 (IL-6), high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hs-CRP), pain intensity, and HRQoL domains were analysed using correlation and multiple regression analyses. Results: Improvements in IL-6 (r = 0.434, p = 0.005) and hs-CRP (r = 0.444, p = 0.004) were significantly associated with improvements in pain intensity. No significant associations were observed between biomarker changes and HRQoL domains. Treatment allocation was the strongest independent predictor of improvement in physical HRQoL ({beta} = 0.492, p = 0.017) and pain intensity ({beta} = -0.512, p = 0.006). Conclusions: Improvements in IL-6 and hs-CRP were associated with reductions in pain intensity but not with improvements in HRQoL. Treatment allocation was the strongest predictor of clinical improvement, suggesting that mechanisms beyond systemic inflammation may contribute to the benefits of aerobic exercise in NSCLBP. Keywords: non-specific chronic low back pain; aerobic exercise; inflammation; interleukin-6; high-sensitivity C-reactive protein; pain intensity; health-related quality of life.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

CMI-RewardBench: Evaluating Music Reward Models with Compositional Multimodal Instruction

arXiv:2603.00610v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While music generation models have evolved to handle complex multimodal inputs mixing text, lyrics, and reference audio, evaluation mechanisms have lagged behind. In this paper, we bridge this critical gap by establishing a comprehensive ecosystem for music reward modeling under Compositional Multimodal Instruction (CMI), where the generated music may be conditioned on text descriptions, lyrics, and audio prompts. We first introduce CMI-Pref-Pseudo, a large-scale preference dataset comprising 110k pseudo-labeled samples, and CMI-Pref, a high-quality, human-annotated corpus tailored for fine-grained alignment tasks. To unify the evaluation landscape, we propose CMI-RewardBench, a unified benchmark that evaluates music reward models on heterogeneous samples across musicality, text-music alignment, and compositional instruction alignment. Leveraging these resources, we develop CMI reward models (CMI-RMs), a parameter-efficient reward model family capable of processing heterogeneous inputs. We evaluate their correlation with human judgment scores on musicality and alignment on CMI-Pref along with previous datasets. Further experiments demonstrate that CMI-RM not only correlates strongly with human judgments, but also enables effective inference-time scaling via top-k filtering. Code is available at GitHub (https://github.com/Haiwen-Xia/CMI-RewardBench). Model weights: CMI-RM (https://huggingface.co/HaiwenXia/CMI-RM). Datasets: CMI-Pref-Pseudo (https://huggingface.co/datasets/HaiwenXia/cmi-pref-pseudo) and CMI-Pref (https://huggingface.co/datasets/HaiwenXia/cmi-pref)

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Which Sections of a Research Paper Best Reveal Its Research Methods? Evidence from Library and Information Science

Research methods are essential carriers of knowledge contribution in academic papers. Automatic multi-label classification of research methods can support knowledge services such as method retrieval, review generation, and research intelligence analysis. While existing studies primarily rely on titles and abstracts, abstracts often provide only limited methodological information, whereas utilizing full-text content faces challenges related to excessive length and information redundancy. Therefore, this paper proposes a segment combination strategy by partitioning the full-text content according to its physical postion. Using an annotated corpus of 1,954 full-text articles from three representative journals in Library and Information Science (JASIST, LISR, and JDoc), we evaluate the classification performance of various segments and their combinations across multiple models. Experimental results indicate that methodological information is distributed unevenly within the full-text content, with the middle-to-late and final segments exhibiting greater discriminative power. Furthermore, integrating bibliographic metadata with cross-segment combination strategies effectively enhances classification performance.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

MORTAR: Multi-turn Metamorphic Testing for LLM-based Dialogue Systems

With the widespread application of LLM-based dialogue systems in daily life, quality assurance has become more important than ever. Recent research has successfully introduced methods to identify unexpected behaviour in single-turn testing scenarios. However, multi-turn interaction is the common real-world usage of dialogue systems, yet testing methods for such interactions remain underexplored. This is largely due to the oracle problem in multi-turn testing, which continues to pose a significant challenge for dialogue system developers and researchers. In this paper, we propose MORTAR, a metamorphic multi-turn dialogue testing approach, which mitigates the test oracle problem in testing LLM-based dialogue systems. MORTAR formalises the multi-turn testing for dialogue systems, and automates the generation of question-answer dialogue test cases with multiple dialogue-level perturbations and metamorphic relations (MRs). The automated MR matching mechanism allows MORTAR more flexibility and efficiency in metamorphic testing. The proposed approach is fully automated without reliance on LLM judges. In testing six popular LLM-based dialogue systems, MORTAR reaches significantly better effectiveness with over 150\% more bugs revealed per test case when compared to the single-turn metamorphic testing baseline. Regarding the quality of bugs, MORTAR reveals higher-quality bugs in terms of diversity, precision and uniqueness. MORTAR is expected to inspire more multi-turn testing approaches, and assist developers in evaluating the dialogue system performance more comprehensively with constrained test resources and budget.