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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

All Eyes on the Workflow: Automated and Efficient Event Discovery from Video Streams

Disciplines such as business process management and process mining aid organizations by discovering insights about processes on the basis of recorded event data. However, an obstacle to process analysis is data multi-modality: for instance, data in video form are not directly interpretable as events. Existing approaches rely on a dictionary of activity label as input, cannot provide frame-by-frame labeling explanations, or rely on superseded computer vision techniques. In this work, we present SnapLog, an approach to extract event data from videos by converting frames to feature vectors using image embeddings and performing temporal segmentation through frame-wise similarity matrices. A generalized few-shot classification is then used to assign labels to the video segments, yielding labeled, timestamped sub-sequences of frames that are interpretable as events. Conventional process mining techniques can be used to analyze the resulting data. We show that our approach produces logs that accurately reflect the process in the videos.

02.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22

Reference-guided immune recovery matching prioritizes traditional Chinese medicine ingredients

Therapeutic prioritization from single-cell transcriptomes requires a target that is closer to treatment response than disease-signature reversal. In immune diseases, post-treatment recovery may follow patient- and cell-type-specific trajectories rather than a simple return along the pretreatment disease axis. We developed ImmuneNavi, a healthy-reference-anchored recovery-matching workflow for ranking traditional Chinese medicine ingredients from paired PBMC data. The workflow maps heterogeneous PBMC cohorts to a common healthy immune coordinate system, constructs patient-cell-type disease and recovery states, and processes ITCM treated-control profiles into a fixed ingredient perturbation bank. Patient and ingredient states are represented in matched gene, pathway and transcription-factor views, allowing the model to combine local transcriptional direction with more stable program-level features. A matcher trained on one paired treatment cohort preserved recovery-aligned ingredient rankings in independent PBMC cohorts without redefining the feature space, candidate set or preprocessing procedure. This provides a reusable transcriptomic pipeline for moving from paired immune-state measurements to prioritized natural-product candidates for experimental follow-up.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Diffusion-based Cumulative Adversarial Purification for Vision Language Models

Vision Language Models (VLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in multimodal understanding, yet their susceptibility to adversarial perturbations poses a significant threat to their reliability in real-world applications. Despite often being imperceptible to humans, these perturbations can drastically alter model outputs, leading to erroneous interpretations and decisions. This paper introduces DiffCAP, a novel diffusion-based purification strategy that can effectively neutralize adversarial corruptions in VLMs. We theoretically establish a provable recovery region in the forward diffusion process and meanwhile quantify the convergence rate of semantic variation with respect to VLMs. These findings manifest that adversarial effects monotonically fade as diffusion unfolds. Guided by this principle, DiffCAP leverages noise injection with a similarity threshold of VLM embeddings as an adaptive criterion, before reverse diffusion restores a clean and reliable representation for VLM inference. Through extensive experiments across six datasets with three VLMs under varying attack strengths in three task scenarios, we show that DiffCAP outperforms existing defense techniques by a substantial margin. Notably, DiffCAP significantly reduces both hyperparameter tuning complexity and the required diffusion time, thereby accelerating the denoising process. Equipped with theorems and empirical support, DiffCAP provides a robust and practical solution for securely deploying VLMs in adversarial environments. The source code is available at https://github.com/JasonFu1998/DiffCAP.

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

The Vision Encoder as a Privacy Boundary: Visual-Token Side Channels in Encoder-Free Vision-Language Models

A vision encoder compresses image pixels into semantic embeddings, implicitly acting as a privacy boundary by preserving semantic content while attenuating pixel-local detail required for exact text recovery. Encoder-free vision-language models (VLMs) remove this boundary by routing image patches directly into the language-model token stream, thereby exposing an architectural privacy attack surface: intermediate visual tokens become a pre-output side channel. Under a token-access adversary, decoders invert visual-token streams from two encoder-free VLMs, Gemma4 and Fuyu, recovering recognizable image structure and readable held-out access codes, whereas matched encoder-based controls localize target regions but recover no exact strings. Within-model ablations show that the operative factor is spatial sampling fidelity of the visual-token grid, especially character-direction sampling density, rather than token or value count. The leakage is not limited to exported tokens: Gemma4 layer-0 key-value cache tensors are directly invertible, placing the side channel within KV caches commonly persisted by production serving stacks for decoding efficiency. The attack survives clutter, realistic document degradation, and zero-shot transfer to public document images, and it resists value-level defenses such as additive noise and quantization. Effective mitigation must therefore reduce spatial sampling, making removal of the vision encoder a first-class privacy decision in VLM deployment.

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

Beyond Uniform Token-Level Trust Region in LLM Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.10968v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become standard for improving LLM reasoning. However, existing PPO-style trust-region mechanisms remain position-agnostic by enforcing uniform thresholds across all tokens independently. This pointwise treatment conflicts with autoregressive generation in two critical ways. First, uniform thresholds ignore autoregressive asymmetry. Early-stage deviations produce compounding sequence-level drift, causing static thresholds to under-regulate early divergence and excessively constrain late-stage exploration. Second, evaluating token-level divergence in isolation overlooks cumulative prefix drift, granting the same divergence allowance regardless of how far the conditioning history has already deviated from the rollout policy. To address this limitation, we propose CPPO (Cumulative Prefix-divergence Policy Optimization), a token-level masking rule that aligns updates with a finite-horizon policy-improvement bound via two coupled mechanisms. First, a position-weighted threshold imposes stricter limits at early positions whose effects persist longer, relaxing constraints for late-stage tokens. Second, a cumulative prefix budget tracks historical deviations, dynamically restricting further token-level deviation to prevent compounding errors along the prefix. Empirically, CPPO enhances training stability and significantly improves reasoning accuracy across various model scales.

07.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Sharp Favard length of random Cantor sets

arXiv:2512.17753v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We show that for a large class of planar $1$-dimensional random fractals $S$, the Favard length $\operatorname{Fav}(S(r))$ of the neighborhood $S(r)$ is comparable to $\log^{-1}(1/r)$, matching a universal lower bound; up to now, this was only known in expectation for a few concrete models. In particular, we show that there exist $1$-Ahlfors regular sets with the fastest possible Favard length decay. For a wide class of planar one-dimensional "grid random fractals", including fractal percolation and its Ahlfors-regular variants, we further show that $\operatorname{Fav}(S(r))/\log(1/r)$ converges almost surely, and we identify the limit explicitly. Furthermore, we prove that for some $1$-dimensional Ahlfors-regular random fractals $S$, the Favard length of $S(r)$ decays instead like $\log\log(1/r)/\log(1/r)$, showing that the $1/\log(1/r)$ decay is not universal among random fractals, as might be expected from previous results.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Magic transfer in quantum spin chains

arXiv:2606.14855v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum communication protocols based on spin chains have been extensively studied, yet their ability to transmit nonstabilizer resources has not been systematically addressed. We investigate the transport of quantum magic in spin chains through the natural dynamics of systems initialized in nonstabilizer states, and quantify the transported resource via the stabilizer norm. We analyze three experimentally feasible state-transfer protocols, ranging from noisy to (quasi-)perfect transfer, including one realizable in trapped-ion platforms. We find that the geometry of the injected state strongly influences transport: states in the lower Bloch hemisphere achieve higher transfer quality, whereas states in the upper hemisphere give rise to an efficient magic transport only beyond a threshold value of the parameter controlling the tendency towards perfect transfer. These features are robust across all protocols and identify the Hamiltonian and state properties that favor high-quality transfer. Moreover, we identify a parameter region, relevant to the initial state preparation, in which the transported magic exceeds the initial encoding, indicating that such spin systems can act as magic-amplification channels. Our results establish the conditions for efficient transport of nonstabilizer resources and demonstrate quantum magic as a sensitive probe of quantum transport beyond population dynamics.

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

M*: A Modular, Extensible, Serving System for Multimodal Models

arXiv:2606.12688v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We are entering a new era of composite model architectures that integrate diverse components such as vision encoders, language backbones, diffusion and flow heads, audio codecs, action generators, and world-model predictors. Such architectures underpin a broad class of multimodal models, including unified multimodal models, omni models, speech-language models, vision-language-action policies, and world models. However, existing model serving frameworks were built on narrow assumptions about model structure, making them ill-suited to accommodate this new architectural diversity. Here we present M*, a universal serving system for efficient serving of composite AI models. M* represents models as dataflow graphs, processing requests spanning diverse modalities and tasks as traversals over these graphs. The core insight is a modular abstraction that supports arbitrary composition of model components, flexible placement onto a physical cluster, and model-agnostic optimizations within a distributed runtime. We call this abstraction the Walk Graph and show how it can concisely capture composite models from a broad range of families. We instantiate M* on representative models and find that it achieves, on average, 20% lower end-to-end latency than vLLM-Omni for text-to-image workloads on BAGEL, while delivering up to 2.9x lower real-time factor and 2.7x higher throughput for text-to-speech workloads on Qwen3-Omni. M* also outperforms the V-JEPA 2-AC rollout baseline for robotic planning by up to 12.5x. Thus, our work paves the road towards more efficient serving of complex models with minimal developer effort.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Investigating Faithfulness in Large Audio Language Models

arXiv:2509.22363v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) integrate audio encoders with pretrained Large Language Models to perform complex multimodal reasoning tasks. While these models can generate Chain-of-Thought (CoT) explanations, the faithfulness of these reasoning chains remains unclear. In this work, we propose a systematic framework to evaluate CoT faithfulness in LALMs with respect to both the input audio and the final model prediction. We define three criteria for audio faithfulness: hallucination-free, holistic, and attentive listening. We also introduce a benchmark based on both audio and CoT interventions to assess faithfulness\footnote{The benchmarking interface and evaluation results are available at https://poonehmousavi.github.io/faithfulness/. Experiments on Audio Flamingo 3 and Qwen2.5-Omni suggest a potential multimodal disconnect: reasoning often aligns with the final prediction but is not always strongly grounded in the audio and can be vulnerable to hallucinations or adversarial perturbations.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Exclusion Statistics as a Thermodynamic Resource in Quantum Heat Engines

arXiv:2606.19310v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The maximum power extractable from a quantum thermoelectric heat engine operating with free fermion carriers is bounded by the universal Whitney limit, $P_{fermion}^{\max} \simeq 0.0321\pi^2 k_B^2(T_L-T_R)^2/h$. We demonstrate that this bound is not fundamental to quantum heat engines but is instead an artifact of fermionic statistics. Within the nonlinear Landauer-B\"{u}ttiker framework, a bosonic working medium yields a strictly enhanced universal maximum power, $P_{boson}^{\max} = (\ln 2)^2\, k_B^2(T_L-T_R)^2/h$, exceeding the fermionic limit by a factor of $(\ln 2)^2/(0.0321\pi^2) \approx 1.52$. We propose magnon transport through a ferromagnetic spin chain as an experimentally viable bosonic realization. Incorporating Haldane fractional exclusion statistics with parameter $g$ provides a continuous interpolation between the bosonic ($g = 0$) and fermionic ($g = 1$) limits, revealing a monotonic enhancement of maximum power for $g < 1$ at reduced bias cost. These results establish quantum statistical exclusion as a previously unrecognized and independently tunable thermodynamic resource, opening performance regimes inaccessible to conventional carrier-engineering approaches.

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

HeatKV: Head-tuned KV-cache Compression for Visual Autoregressive Modeling

Visual Autoregressive (VAR) models have recently demonstrated impressive image generation quality while maintaining low latency. However, they suffer from severe KV-cache memory constraints, often requiring gigabytes of memory per generated image. We introduce HeatKV, a novel compression method that adapts cache allocation in each head based on its attention to previously generated scales. Using a small offline calibration set, the attention heads are ranked according to their attention scores over prior scales. Based on this ranking, we construct a static pruning schedule tailored to a given memory budget. Applied to the Infinity-2B model, HeatKV achieves $2 \times$ higher compression ratio in memory allocation for KV cache compared to existing methods, while maintaining similar or better image fidelity, prompt alignment and human perception score. Our method achieves a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) for VAR model KV-cache compression, showcasing the effectiveness of fine-grained, head-specific cache allocation. Code and calibration script available at https://github.com/arm-research/heatkv.

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

Analytic Torsion and Spectral Gap Capture Persistent-Laplacian Performance

arXiv:2606.16990v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While persistent Laplacians (PL) offer a richer geometric representation of data than persistent homology, utilizing their full eigenspectrum for learning tasks is often hampered by high dimensionality and the ``varying length'' problem across different filtration scales. We propose a compact spectral representation that distills the persistent Laplacian into three mathematically grounded invariants: Betti numbers, the spectral gap, and analytic torsion. Across benchmark datasets including MNIST, QM-3D, and SKEMPI WT, we demonstrate that this reduced feature space captures the essential predictive signal of the full spectrum, and in some cases outperforms it, while significantly reducing computational overhead and preventing the noise introduced by higher-frequency eigenvalues. Our results suggest that these invariants provide a principled, fixed-length interface between spectral geometry and topological learning.

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

Mitigating Disparate Impact of Differentially Private Learning through Bounded Adaptive Clipping

arXiv:2506.01396v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Differential privacy (DP) has become an essential framework for privacy-preserving machine learning. Existing DP learning methods, however, often have disparate impacts on model predictions, e.g., for minority groups. Gradient clipping, which is often used in DP learning, can suppress larger gradients from challenging samples. We show that this problem is amplified by adaptive clipping, which will often shrink the clipping bound to tiny values to match a well-fitting majority, while significantly reducing the accuracy for others. We propose bounded adaptive clipping, which introduces a tunable lower bound to prevent excessive gradient suppression. Our method improves worst-class accuracy by over 10 percentage points on Skewed and Fashion MNIST compared to unbounded adaptive clipping, 7 points compared to Automatic clipping, and 5 points compared to constant clipping. The code is available at https://github.com/TrustworthyMLHelsinki/adaptive-clipping-fairness.

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

Efficient, Robust, and Anti-Collusion Fingerprinting of Image Diffusion Models

Model fingerprinting, embedding user-specific identifiers (fingerprints) into generated outputs, has recently emerged as a popular solution to protect the intellectual property rights (IPR) of generative text-to-image (T2I) models and prevent unauthorized redistribution. In this work, we reveal a previously unexplored systematic vulnerability in existing generative model fingerprinting methods: they lack robustness against collusion attacks, where multiple attackers combine their models to remove or obscure the fingerprints. To address this issue, we take the first step towards a robust fingerprinting method for T2I models with anti-collusion capabilities. The proposed method encodes strings of bits, namely fingerprints, into the coefficients of a personalized normalization module (PNM) incorporated into T2I models, so that fingerprints can be reliably recovered from any generated image. To defend against collusion attacks and prevent unauthorized model redistribution, we introduce an anti-collusion mechanism based on lossless function-invariant parameter transformations. This mechanism significantly degrades the image generation quality of colluded models, making them effectively unusable. Moreover, our method allows developers to efficiently create multiple copies of fingerprinted T2I models by reparameterizing the PNM without the need for retraining. We also introduce a worst-case optimization strategy to improve robustness against model-level attacks. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves high fidelity and robustness across multiple T2I image generation and editing tasks, with fingerprint extraction accuracy exceeding 99.5%. Compared with existing methods, our method demonstrates, for the first time, a notable proactive robustness to collusion attacks by significantly increasing the FID of colluded models.

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

AGE-MIL: Anchor-Guided Evidence Learning for Patient-Level Prediction

Existing computational pathology methods predominantly operate within whole-slide image (WSI)-level multiple instance learning (MIL) paradigms, while patient-level modeling remains underexplored. In routine pathological practice, however, pathologists derive diagnostic and prognostic conclusions by integrating evidence across multiple WSIs rather than relying on any single slide. This discrepancy creates a fundamental misalignment when patient-level supervision is directly imposed on conventional MIL frameworks, often leading to unstable optimization and degraded predictive reliability. To address this issue, we propose Anchor-Guided Evidence MIL (AGE-MIL), a weakly supervised framework for patient-level prediction. AGE-MIL constructs a patient-level anchor from slide representations to capture global pathological context and guide the retrieval and integration of diagnostically relevant local patches, enabling robust patient-level modeling. Patient-level risk is further modeled as an evidence accumulation process, promoting stable optimization under weak supervision. AGE-MIL is evaluated on six clinically relevant patient-level prediction tasks from two independent cohorts. Experimental results show that the proposed framework consistently outperforms eight state-of-the-art MIL methods. Code is available at https://github.com/wodeniua/AGE-MIL.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Combining Retrieval-Augmented Text Generation with LLMs for Reading Content Recommendations

arXiv:2606.14817v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of a system for generating personalized reading content using Large Language Models (LLMs) combined with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). The proposed architecture consists of four modules: Input, RAG, Generation, and Judging and enables users to specify both a question and a target reading content complexity. RAG is employed to retrieve relevant information from the Internet, enriching and grounding the content produced by three modern LLMs: Meta LLaMA 4 Scout, LLaMA 3.1 8B Instant, and Google Gemma2 9B. Reading materials are generated using three prompting strategies (Chain-of-Thought, zero-shot, and few-shot), and the LLM-as-a-Judge module automatically evaluates answer quality and alignment with the desired readability level. Experimental results show that RAG consistently improves system performance across all models and prompting techniques, increasing relevance and particularly groundedness by up to 26-35 percentage points. Overall, the findings demonstrate that the RAG-augmented architecture effectively produces reading content tailored to user queries and desired textual complexity.

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

Continuous Language Diffusion as a Decoder-Interface Problem

Gaussian-corrupted sentence embeddings have no direct linguistic interpretation, yet continuous diffusion language models can generate fluent text from them. We study this puzzle through Embedded Language Flows (ELF) and identify a decoder-basin mechanism: our evidence suggests that denoising becomes reliable when trajectories reach regions where the native decoder can read stable tokens. We introduce a diagnostic protocol for denoisability, semantic recoverability, order sensitivity, decoder compatibility, and trajectory reliability. It exposes failures hidden by scalar metrics: low mean-squared error can discard linguistic content, low perplexity can reflect low-entropy collapse, and clean latent reconstruction can coexist with a narrow decoder basin. A decoder-margin bound explains why token recovery depends on margin and local decoder sensitivity, not latent error alone. Auditing public ELF checkpoints reveals an interface phase diagram: early predictions are weakly readable, mid-trajectory disagreement marks a competition region, and late predictions enter a high-margin decoder basin. Once inside, token realization is surprisingly simple on generated ELF states: frozen T5 (Text-to-Text Transfer Transformer) token-embedding lookup recovers $93$–$96\%$ of native decoder decisions, and a single linear readout reaches $97.9\%$ agreement at 32k samples, leaving an $\approx1.1$–$1.2$ perplexity gap in a structured residual tail. Under conservative held-out gates, a margin rule exits roughly $17$–$28\%$ earlier in denoising steps under an explicit diagnostic monitor. Boundary checks on LangFlow, BitstreamDiffusion, and the Continuous Latent Diffusion Language Model (Cola-DLM) show that the same interface questions remain meaningful when the state object and decoder change. Continuous and latent diffusion language models should therefore be evaluated as representation-decoder systems.

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

Reducing the Complexity of Deep Learning Models for EEG Analysis on Wearable Devices

arXiv:2606.12742v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Wearable healthcare devices are the fastest-growing Internet of Things (IoT) sector. Many automated healthcare services rely on two crucial biological signals, namely ECG and EEG, which reflect the activity of the heart and brain, respectively. Although deep neural networks are considered the primary way to process and analyze these signals, the very tight energy and computational power constraints in wearable devices are far below the computational, energy, and memory bandwidth demands of DNN models, thereby impeding the deployment of deep learning in many practical wearable services. This paper investigates the feasibility of deploying state-of-the-art DNN models in resource-constrained wearable devices. Notably, we explore the trade-off between accuracy and computational complexity of DNNs when parameter quantization and electrode reduction methods are used. Our investigation centers on several state-of-the-art DNN models designed for EEG signal analysis, specifically for detecting epileptic seizures. Our findings demonstrate that, when applied judiciously, these techniques can significantly reduce the complexity of the DNNs under consideration with minimal adverse effects on accuracy. These results reveal the explicit trade-offs between accuracy and complexity reduction encountered when adapting DNN-based online EEG analysis for wearable devices.

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

Functional Gradient Descent with Adaptive Representations

arXiv:2606.16926v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Functional optimization problems are typically solved by optimizing the parameters of a fixed representation, such as a neural network, resulting in highly nonconvex losses that complicate both training and theoretical analysis. An interesting alternative is functional gradient descent (FGD), that is, gradient descent directly in function space, which benefits from strong convergence results and admits a clean theory. However, FGD is difficult to implement in practice because functional gradients are infinite-dimensional, and thus cannot be fully computed nor stored in memory. Existing implementations therefore rely on fixed approximations, which introduce approximation error. We propose a new, theoretically-grounded FGD algorithm that adapts the representation of the functional gradients over the course of optimization. By explicitly incorporating this approximation into the analysis, we establish convergence to a stationary point (for smooth losses) and to a global minimizer (under smoothness + a Polyak-Lojasiewicz-type condition) regardless of our approximations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first implementable FGD method with such guarantees in a general setting. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on regression, numerical solution of PDEs, and modern computer vision. Across settings, our method consistently outperforms both FGD with fixed approximations and neural network baselines in efficiency and accuracy.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

MMD-SLAM: Structure-Enhanced Multi-Meta Gaussian Distribution-Guided Visual SLAM

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has significantly boosted novel view synthesis and high-fidelity scene reconstruction, expanding the potential of 3DGS-based Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) methods. However, most existing systems fail to fully exploit the underlying structural information, which limits rendering quality and often leads to inconsistent maps. To address these limitations, we propose MMD-SLAM, a structure-enhanced Visual SLAM framework that leverages the Atlanta World (AW) assumption to guide a Multi-Meta Gaussian representation for photorealistic mapping. First, we introduce a point-line fusion strategy for pose optimization, where 3D line segments are incorporated to improve tracking robustness and provide additional constraints for mapping. Second, we design a Multi-Meta Gaussian representation with dominant directions, explicitly encoding structural priors from the AW hypothesis. Finally, we propose a Gaussian evolution strategy that adapts to scene geometry and incorporates structural cues into global optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that these innovations enable MMD-SLAM to achieve state-of-the-art performance in both tracking accuracy and mapping quality. e.g., our method achieves a 48.56% reduction in ATE RMSE on ScanNet and a 5.71% improvement in PSNR on Replica, compared with MonoGS.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

PACT: Preserving Anchored Cores in Task-vectors for Model Merging

arXiv:2606.18627v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model merging has emerged as a training-free alternative to multi-task learning, aiming to combine multiple task-specific fine-tuned models into a single multi-task model. Most existing model merging approaches follow the Task Arithmetic paradigm, which decomposes fine-tuned weights into pre-trained parameters and task vectors, and performs merging exclusively in the task-vector space. The effectiveness of this paradigm implicitly relies on the assumption that task-specific knowledge is encoded solely within task vectors. We argue that this assumption generally does not hold due to the intrinsic task preferences of pre-trained models. Specifically, we identify Load-Bearing Wall (LBW) dimensions, namely some task-critical knowledge that remains embedded in the pre-trained weights rather than being fully transferred into task vectors. We characterize LBW dimensions from both scalar-weight and subspace perspectives, thereby covering the major paradigms of existing model merging methods. Our analysis reveals that, by ignoring LBW dimensions, task-vector-based approaches fail to fully resolve task conflicts and may inadvertently damage task-specific knowledge encoded in the pre-trained model, leading to degradation. To address this issue, we propose PACT, which preserves the anchored task-specific cores (i.e., LBW dimensions) within task vectors by aligning their orthogonal complements with the subspace of the pre-trained weights. These aligned subspace components are then removed from the task vectors before applying existing model merging algorithms. Furthermore, we develop an efficient variant based on randomized SVD to improve scalability. PACT can be seamlessly integrated with existing methods. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that PACT consistently enhances mainstream model merging approaches and establishes new state-of-the-art performance.

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

A2D2: Fine-Tuning Any-Length Discrete Diffusion for Adaptive Decoding

arXiv:2606.13565v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Discrete diffusion models offer a simple and stable likelihood-based framework for sequence generation, recently extended to any-length settings via token insertion. Principled reward-guided fine-tuning for any-length discrete diffusion, however, remains largely unexplored. We introduce Fine-Tuning Any-Length Discrete Diffusion for Adaptive Decoding (A2D2), a unified framework for reward-guided fine-tuning of any-length discrete diffusion models via joint optimization of the insertion and unmasking policies together with a quality-based inference schedule. We derive the Radon-Nikodym derivative for the joint insertion-unmasking path measures, enabling theoretically guaranteed convergence to the intractable reward-tilted sequence distribution without requiring target samples. Building on this, we establish unmasking and insertion quality as tractable approaches for minimizing decoding error and introduce the Adaptive Joint Decoding (AJD) loss, which provably yields the optimal path measure that generates the reward-tilted distribution. Empirically, A2D2 improves reward optimization while enhancing generation flexibility and accuracy over prior fixed-length fine-tuning and inference-time guidance methods.

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

Smarter edits? Post-editing with error highlights and translation suggestions

As MT quality increases, interest in enhanced post-editing features such as QE-derived error highlights is growing, yet evidence for their usefulness remains limited. In this work, we explore the usefulness of LLM-derived error highlights and correction suggestions based on automatic post-editing (APE). We conduct a study where professional translators (En-Nl) post-edit translations using APE error highlights and correction suggestions and compare productivity, quality and user experience to regular PE and PE with QE-derived highlights. While no condition yielded productivity or quality gains compared to regular PE, APE highlights were better received than QE-derived highlights, and correction suggestions improved overall user experience.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

A Physics-Inspired Optimizer: Velocity Regularized Adam

arXiv:2505.13196v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce Velocity-Regularized Adam (VRAdam), a physics-inspired optimizer for training deep neural networks that draws on ideas from quartic terms for kinetic energy with its stabilizing effects on various system dynamics. Previous algorithms, including the ubiquitous Adam, operate at the so-called adaptive edge of stability regime during training, leading to rapid oscillations and slowed convergence of loss. However, VRAdam adds a higher order penalty on the learning rate based on the velocity such that the algorithm automatically slows down whenever weight updates become large. In practice, we observe that the effective dynamic learning rate shrinks in high-velocity regimes, and damping oscillations. By combining this velocity-based regularizer for global damping with per-parameter scaling of Adam, we create a powerful hybrid optimizer. For this optimizer, we provide rigorous theoretical analysis of operation at the edge of stability from a physical and control perspective for the momentum. Furthermore, we derive convergence bounds with the rate $\mathcal{O}(\ln(N)/\sqrt{N})$ for a stochastic non convex objective under mild assumptions. We demonstrate that VRAdam exceeds the performance against standard optimizers including AdamW. We benchmark various tasks such as image classification, language modeling, and generative modeling using diverse architectures and training methodologies including Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Transformers, and GFlowNets.