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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Cross-Dataset, Age, and Gender Generalization: A Comprehensive Analysis of Fine-Tuning Strategies for Low-Resource Children's ASR

arXiv:2606.19791v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The challenge associated with recognizing dysarthric speech primarily arises from pronounced acoustic variability attributed to impaired articulatory precision. Past research has demonstrated improved recognition through the use of hybrid DNN/HMM sequence discriminative training. This paper presents a comprehensive investigation of various combinations of acoustic features tailored to different Acoustic Models, offering suitable feature selections for each. The incorporation of Pitch features notably improved recognition performance, especially for sentence recognition tasks involving dysarthric speech. Through a systematic examination of the TORGO database, we have demonstrated the potential to enhance the performance of the state-of-the-art Factorized Time Delay Neural Network (F-TDNN) model for recognizing dysarthric speech. Our methods, implemented with the F-TDNN model, resulted in a 4.65\% relative improvement in isolated word recognition and a 4.63\% relative improvement in sentence recognition for dysarthric speech, compared to previous research. This improvement effectively compensates for speech variability, attributable to our deliberate selection of the number of overlapping frames between consecutive training example chunks.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Evaluating Deep-Learning Based Quantification of Breast Arterial Calcification on Mammography for Cardiovascular Risk Assessment

Purpose: To develop and evaluate a deep learning model for automated quantification of breast arterial calcification (BAC) on screening mammography and to assess whether AI-derived BAC burden predicts major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE) in women. Methods: In this retrospective study, 202,006 women who underwent screening mammography without history of MACE were included. A BAC segmentation model was trained on an expert-annotated dataset using a multi-task U-Net with a ResNet-18 encoder to detect and segment BAC. BAC burden was quantified as area (mm{superscript 2}) from model-generated masks using DICOM pixel spacing and categorized by tertiles into low, intermediate, and high. The PREVENT score and incident MACE were identified from electronic health records. Cox proportional hazards models were developed to evaluate AI-derived BAC burden and PREVENT score alone, and combined models for 5 - and 10-year cardiovascular risk prediction. Results: Among 202,006 women (mean age 54.8{+/-}11.7 years), 23.1% had AI-detected BAC, and 7,701 (3.8%) developed incident MACE during a median follow - up of 7.5 years. On the geographically held-out test set, the BAC model achieved an AUROC of 0.97, Dice score of 0.6678, and Pearson correlation of 0.961 between AI-derived and manually annotated BAC burden. BAC burden increased with age and was higher among women who developed MACE. Five - year MACE incidence increased across BAC categories from 1.5% in women without BAC to 6.9% in those with high BAC burden. BAC burden alone showed modest prediction of MACE, with 5-year and 10-year AUROCs of 0.661 and 0.650, respectively, while PREVENT achieved AUROCs of 0.781 and 0.771. Adding BAC to PREVENT produced minimal improvement in discrimination. Conclusion: Deep learning-based BAC quantification from routine mammography is feasible, accurate, and associated with future cardiovascular risk. Although BAC added little to PREVENT for overall discrimination, it may serve as a scalable opportunistic imaging biomarker to identify women at elevated cardiovascular risk and support preventive care.

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

Entropy Estimation in Multi-Qutrit Systems via Variational and Classical Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.20504v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a systematic study of von Neumann entropy estimation in multi-qutrit quantum systems using two complementary approaches: variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) and classical convolutional neural networks (CNNs), evaluated using an ideal (noise-free) quantum simulator. For systems up to three qutrits, we construct and evaluate 11 hardware-efficient SU(3)-inspired ansatzes. A parameter sweep shows that estimation accuracy is primarily determined by the number of trainable parameters, provided sufficient entanglement is present. Based on this study, we fix the parameter count to approximately 120 for subsequent experiments, observing that increasing entangling-gate counts beyond a threshold yields only marginal improvements. For larger systems (two to five qutrits), we use a CNN trained on measurement outcomes from tensor-product mutually unbiased bases. The model achieves accurate and stable predictions and exhibits a systematic improvement in performance with system size, with the highest errors for two-qutrit systems and the lowest for five-qutrit systems. Notably, using only 12.5% of the measurements required for full state tomography is sufficient to reach 90th-percentile absolute errors of approximately 0.13-0.16 nats for both four- and five-qutrit systems. The CNN model is also robust to shot noise and generalizes well to out-of-distribution states. Overall, within the simulated settings studied here, our results indicate a transition in practical methods: VQAs are effective for small systems, while CNN-based estimators offer improved scalability and robustness for larger qutrit systems.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Quantile-Free Uncertainty Quantification in Graph Neural Networks

arXiv:2605.04847v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Uncertainty quantification (UQ) in graph neural networks (GNNs) is crucial in high-stakes domains but remains a significant challenge. In graph settings, message passing often relies on strong assumptions such as exchangeability, which are rarely satisfied in practice, and achieving reliable UQ typically requires costly resampling or post-hoc calibration. To address these issues, we introduce Quantile-free Prediction Interval GNN (QpiGNN), a framework that builds on quantile regression (QR) to enable GNN-based UQ by directly optimizing coverage and interval width without requiring quantile inputs or post-processing. QpiGNN employs a dual-head architecture that decouples prediction and uncertainty, and is trained with label-only supervision through a quantile-free joint loss. This design allows efficient training and yields robust prediction intervals, with theoretical guarantees of asymptotic coverage and near-optimal width under mild assumptions. Experiments on 19 synthetic and real-world benchmarks show QpiGNN achieves average 22% higher coverage and 50% narrower intervals than baselines, while ensuring efficiency and robustness to noise and structural shifts.

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

Localizing Credit at the Divergence: Path-Conditioned Self-Distillation for LLM Reasoning

arXiv:2606.15576v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards assigns a single scalar to each rollout, leaving token-level credit assignment underspecified in long reasoning traces. On-policy self-distillation addresses this by letting the same model act as a teacher conditioned on privileged information, producing a dense per-token signal. But the common choice of a ground-truth answer is only an endpoint cue: on terse-answer tasks, the teacher falls silent at the intermediate positions where path-level guidance matters most. We propose Hindsight Self-Distillation (HSD), which conditions the teacher on a successful peer rollout drawn from the current training group. Such a peer is an exact sample from the success-conditioned policy, requiring no additional sampled rollouts. By providing a full successful continuation rather than only the final answer, the resulting credit signal concentrates at the divergence position between a failed rollout and a successful peer. Across Qwen3-8B and Qwen3-32B on math and code benchmarks, HSD obtains the best result against GRPO variants and on-policy distillation baselines, with the largest gains on terse-answer tasks such as AIME.

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

From Sparse Features to Trustworthy Proxies: Certifying SAE-Based Interpretability

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are increasingly used to extract interpretable features from language models (LMs), yet a central question remains: when can an SAE-based explanation be treated as a faithful view of an underlying frozen LM We study this through a post-hoc generalization framework that certifies the LM via a sparse proxy, obtained by replacing a native hidden activation with its pretrained SAE reconstruction. Our framework derives an upper bound on the base model's expected risk using four measurable quantities: proxy risk, SAE reconstruction gap, concept-pool mismatch, and sparse complexity. We interpret this certificate as an operational criterion for explanatory faithfulness. In particular, a non-vacuous bound indicates that the extracted sparse features retain meaningful predictive information, while small reconstruction and mismatch errors indicate that the proxy remains behaviorally close to the original model. Empirically, we show that the bound becomes non-vacuous on GPT-2 Small, Gemma-2B, and Llama-3-8B at practical sample sizes. A detailed layerwise analysis of Llama-3-8B reveals a strong depth dependence, with later layers becoming much easier to certify, associated with both stronger local fidelity and weaker downstream error amplification. Finally, through feature-shuffling ablations, we show that the decomposition distinguishes genuine semantic alignment from mere statistical sparsity, providing a useful diagnostic for when SAE-based explanations become less reliable.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Disentangling Perception and Reasoning in Multimodal LLMs via Reward Design

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has driven major gains in LLM reasoning, and it is intuitive to assume this recipe will transfer well to multimodal models. However, multimodal models do two things: first, perceive what is in an image, then reason about what it implies. Because these stages are graded jointly, it is hard to tell how much room reasoning alone has to grow. We study this on algorithmic visual puzzles, where both components are necessary and show that perception, not reasoning, is the binding constraint. Replacing images with simple textual descriptions raises performance by over 20 points on average for Claude models. We then evaluate six reward designs aimed at inducing visual grounding during reasoning without chain-of-thought supervision. Training Qwen-2.5-VL-7B with GRPO, reward design induces long, structured reasoning with self-reflection and visual references, yielding a 5.56-point gain over the base model. These gains are, however, uneven; no single reward improves all categories, and rewards with verifiable accuracy signals trade out-of-domain transfer for in-domain accuracy. These results point to perception-aware reward design as a path forward, so that signals correct perception at its source rather than the reasoning that inherits its errors.

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

Compositional Skill Routing for LLM Agents: Decompose, Retrieve, and Compose

作者:

LLM agents increasingly rely on external skills – reusable tool specifications – but real-world tasks often require composing multiple skills, not just selecting one. We formalize this as the Compositional Skill Routing problem: given a complex user query and a large skill library, decompose the query into atomic sub-tasks, retrieve the appropriate skill for each sub-task, and compose an executable plan. We present SkillWeaver, a decompose-retrieve-compose framework combining an LLM task decomposer, a bi-encoder skill retriever with FAISS indexing, and a dependency-aware DAG planner. To support evaluation, we introduce CompSkillBench, a benchmark of 300 compositional queries over 2,209 real MCP server skills spanning 24 functional categories, sourced from the public MCP ecosystem. Our experiments reveal that task decomposition quality is the primary bottleneck: standard LLM decomposition reaches only 34.2% category recall at the step level. To address this, we propose Iterative Skill-Aware Decomposition (SAD), a retrieval-augmented feedback loop that iteratively aligns decomposition with available skills. SAD improves decomposition accuracy from 51.0% to 67.7% (+32.7%, Wilcoxon p < 10^-6) in a single iteration; DA-conditioned analysis confirms that correct granularity is the prerequisite for effective retrieval (CatR@1 rises from 34% to 41% when DA=1). SkillWeaver reduces context window consumption by over 99%, and transfer experiments confirm generalization (+35.6% relative DA gain even when target categories are absent from the retrieval pool).

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Native Active Perception as Reasoning for Omni-Modal Understanding

Passive models for long video understanding typically rely on a "watch-it-all" paradigm, processing frames uniformly regardless of query difficulty, causing computational cost to grow with video duration. Although interactive frameworks have emerged, they often rely on global pre-scanning, and their context cost still scales with video length. We propose OmniAgent, the first native omni-modal agent that formulates video understanding as a POMDP-based iterative Observation-Thought-Action cycle. OmniAgent executes on-demand actions to selectively distill audio-visual cues into a persistent textual memory, effectively decoupling reasoning complexity from raw video duration. To operationalize this, we introduce (1) Agentic Supervised Fine-Tuning to bootstrap native active perception via best-of-N trajectory synthesis with dual-stage quality control, and (2) Agentic Reinforcement Learning with TAURA (Turn-aware Adaptive Uncertainty Rescaled Advantage), which leverages turn-level entropy to steer credit assignment toward pivotal discovery turns. Crucially, OmniAgent exhibits positive test-time scaling, where performance improves as the number of reasoning turns increases, validating the efficacy of active perception. Empirical results across ten benchmarks (e.g., VideoMME, LVBench) demonstrate that OmniAgent achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source models. Notably, on LVBench, our 7B agent outperforms the 10$\times$ larger Qwen2.5-VL-72B (50.5% vs. 47.3%).

10.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

An Analytical Methodology for Quantifying Airspace Conflict Rate and Complexity

arXiv:2606.14897v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Air traffic growth, advanced air mobility, and increasingly autonomous operations are driving the need for scalable and adaptive airspace design methodologies. Central to this challenge is quantifying how traffic flow structure and demand, governed in part by airspace geometry, influence conflict generation and operational complexity. This paper presents an analytical framework for computing conflict rate and conflict probability in structured airspace using stochastic flow models. Traffic streams are modeled as renewal processes with prescribed inter-arrival time distributions, while interactions between flows are captured through geometry-dependent minimum spacing constraints at merges and crossings. Within this formulation, closed-form upper bounds on the expected conflict rate and conflict probability per aircraft are derived as functions of flow configuration and demand. These metrics are interpreted as complementary measures of airspace complexity, reflecting controller workload and per-aircraft operational risk. The methodology is applied to representative hexagonal cell geometries with varying routing structures and flow distributions. Results reveal non-monotonic tradeoffs between routing flexibility, capacity, and conflict generation, with intermediate flow configurations outperforming both highly constrained and highly distributed cases. The proposed framework provides a tractable tool for evaluating airspace design alternatives and complexity-informed traffic management strategies.

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

GEMS: Geometric Constraints Enable Multi-Semantic Superposition in LLMs

作者:

Activation steering controls model behavior by modifying intermediate hidden states at inference time without retraining. Existing methods handle only single-direction injection; when multiple semantic directions are superposed without constraints, the model collapses. We show that this collapse decomposes into two independently acting sources: distributional deviation, where additive perturbations accumulate in norm across layers and drive activations outside the training distribution, and directional interference, where non-orthogonal semantic vectors mutually dampen when superposed. These two sources define the design constraints that any training-free multi-directional intervention must address. As one instantiation of these principles, we propose GEMS, a training-free method that maps each source to a corresponding geometric constraint: norm-preserving weighted superposition and targeted attention-pathway injection for distributional deviation, and real-time orthogonalization for directional interference. On GSM8K, injecting three concurrent non-mathematical directions preserves accuracy at 98% (baseline 92%), while unconstrained addition collapses to 4%; on Wikitext-2, the same injection incurs only 2.2% PPL increase. Component ablation isolates the causal role of each constraint, and layer-level probes confirm that orthogonalized signals survive the FFN pathway and reach the output distribution with semantic specificity. Qualitative steering effects transfer across architectures from 3B to 31B.

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

ARROW: Augmented Replay for RObust World models

arXiv:2603.11395v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continual reinforcement learning challenges agents to acquire new skills while retaining previously learned ones with the goal of improving performance in both past and future tasks. Most existing approaches rely on model-free methods with replay buffers to mitigate catastrophic forgetting; however, these solutions often face significant scalability challenges due to large memory demands. Drawing inspiration from neuroscience, where the brain replays experiences to a predictive World Model rather than directly to the policy, we present ARROW (Augmented Replay for RObust World models), a model-based continual RL algorithm that extends DreamerV3 with a memory-efficient, distribution-matching replay buffer. Unlike standard fixed-size FIFO buffers, ARROW maintains two complementary buffers: a short-term buffer for recent experiences and a long-term buffer that preserves task diversity through intelligent sampling. We evaluate ARROW on two challenging continual RL settings: Tasks without shared structure (Atari), and tasks with shared structure, where knowledge transfer is possible (Procgen CoinRun variants). Compared to model-free and model-based baselines with replay buffers of the same-size, ARROW demonstrates substantially less forgetting on tasks without shared structure, while maintaining comparable forward transfer. Our findings highlight the potential of model-based RL and bio-inspired approaches for continual reinforcement learning, warranting further research.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Contactless 3D Human Body Measurement Using Depth Cameras for Smart Health Monitoring

Contactless body measurement technologies are becoming increasingly significant for smart health monitoring, digital health applications, and remote patient assessment. Traditional anthropometric measurements typically necessitate physical contact and trained personnel, which may constrain scalability in remote healthcare settings. In this study, we introduce a depth camera-based framework for estimating human body measurements utilizing 3D point cloud data. An Orbbec Astra 2 depth camera was employed to capture RGB images, depth maps, and 3D point clouds of participants. The captured point cloud was processed using Python-based tools, including Open3D, NumPy, and OpenCV, to segment the human body from the background. Key anthropometric measurements, such as height and arm span, were computed. The measurements were obtained through a combination of spatial filtering and landmark selection on the 3D point cloud, followed by the projection of the computed measurements onto the corresponding RGB image using camera intrinsic parameters. In addition to linear measurements, the approximate body volume and visible surface area were estimated using voxel-based occupancy analysis and mesh-based surface reconstruction methods. The experimental results from a single depth capture demonstrated that accurate body measurements and geometric estimates could be obtained from depth camera data without physical contact. This study provides a foundation for future real-time systems that integrate depth sensing with intelligent health monitoring and generative AI models for smart healthcare applications.

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

cAPM: Continual AI-Assisted Pace-Mapping with Active Learning

arXiv:2606.19373v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Ventricular tachycardia is a life-threatening rhythm disorder and a major cause of sudden cardiac death. Pace-mapping is a clinical procedure for identifying the intervention target during catheter ablation of VT. It requires clinicians to pace different sites in the ventricles and rapidly interpret the resulting electrocardiograms to determine where to pace next or whether a target site has been identified. Active learning AI models have been proposed to guide clinicians to the next pacing site, showing promise in reducing the number of pacing sites and improving the efficiency of pace-mapping. Existing methods require retraining each target without the ability to transfer knowledge across multiple VTs within the same patient or across patients. We introduce cAPM for continuous AI-assisted pace-mapping to capture and transfer knowledge accumulated from past pace-mapping data to reduce the number of pace-mapping data needed for future target VTs. This is made possible by a task-agnostic surrogate neural network that learns the mapping from pacing sites to 12-lead ECG morphology, an active-learning strategy that refines this surrogate model by selecting the most informative pacing site for each target, and a continual learning strategy to do so sequentially while retaining knowledge from prior targets. Evaluated on an in-silico testbed consisting of sequentially-presented localization tasks across different physiological conditions and ventricular geometries, cAPM with and without replay of past data samples achieved an 81% probability of localizing within clinical tolerance (5 mm accuracy) using 4.5 pace-mapping sites, compared to the state-of-the-art active-learning method achieving 38% probability using 13.7 pacing sites. These results provide a strong basis for preparing cAPM towards in-vivo preclinical and clinical studies where it can be used to guide pace-mapping.

15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Sub-Riemannian spectral distance

arXiv:2606.12804v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study eigenvalues and eigenfunctions of the ``div-grad type" sub-Laplacian with respect to Popp's volume on a compact equiregular sub-Riemannian manifold $M$. Since Popp's volume is canonically determined by the sub-Riemannian structure of $M$, the spetra of the sub-Laplacian carry geometric meanings. In this paper, we first embed $M$ into the Hilbert space of square-summable sequences using eigenfunctions and then define a spectral distance between two compact equiregular sub-Riemannian manifolds. Our result is a sub-Riemannian analogue of Berard-Besson-Gallot's classical work in the Riemannian case.

16.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12

The Geometry of Allostery: A Laplacian Minor Hierarchy for Many-Body Protein Communication

Quantifying how cooperative, many-body relationships drive allostery in protein networks remains a major challenge. To address this, we develop the Laplacian minor hierarchy, a mathematical framework that characterizes the geometric invariants of a protein network. Lower-order minors yield standard metrics including the partition function and effective distances, whereas higher-order minors define novel topological measures: cooperation indices, each bounded between zero and one, that characterize pathway correlations at increasing levels of complexity, the third-order minor determines whether allosteric pathways are correlated or uncorrelated, and the fourth-order minor quantifies how distinct pathways communicate through intermediary residues. We apply this framework to analyze the evolutionary adaptation of the PSD95pdz3 domain from Class I to Class II ligand specificity via mutations G330T and H372A. The cooperation index demonstrates a distinct evolutionary hierarchy: the G330T mutation establishes distributed pathway couplings that the H372A mutation subsequently exploits, whereas H372A alone produces minimal global changes. Furthermore, the fourth-order analysis identifies His317 as a critical intermediary node bridging the class-switching (330-372) and class-bridging (330-400) allosteric pathways. These results demonstrate that allosteric dependencies emerge only when mutations accumulate in specific combinations, with a hierarchical organization of pathways structured around position 330 and intermediary nodes His317 and Phe400. Rather than predicting allosteric mechanisms, this framework provides a mechanistic explanation for why and how allostery emerges during protein evolution.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

A Theory of Training Profit-Optimal LLMs

arXiv:2605.16430v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Scaling LLMs requires tremendous computational resources, and recent advances in AI have gone hand in hand with massive amounts of capital expenditure. While it is established that scaling up LLMs reliably increases model quality (quantified in terms of loss or downstream evaluations), it is unclear how these quality improvements translate to potential revenue, and whether revenue increases would offset costs of larger-scale training and inference. In this work, we develop an economic model for characterizing the rational behavior of an LLM training firm by combining scaling laws with microeconomic theory. Under our model of firm behavior, LLM quality can be increased with more parameters and training tokens, leading to more potential adoption by consumers, who each have a quality threshold for using the LLM. On the other hand, additional parameters and training tokens both incur additional costs. We analyze the profit maximization problem for this model under compute-bound and data-bound regimes. In the compute-bound regime, optimal model size and token budget track hardware efficiency $E$ (FLOPs/\$) at a near-linear rate; total training cost then scales sub-quadratically in $E$. Data efficiency improvements incentivize larger models and training expenditure. When we are limited to $D$ data, profit-optimal training expenditure scales as $D^2/E$, i.e, increase with data and decreases with hardware efficiency (as well as data efficiency). Finally, we analyze practical trends in training expenditure: current trends are consistent with our most permissive model variants in the compute-bound regime, but are not profit-optimal in the data-bound regime or assuming hardware advances will stall. Overall, our results provide a theory of profit-optimal LLM training, providing a foundation for engaging critically with industry statements and supporting long-term economic decision making.

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

Learning What to Remember: Observability-Safe Memory Retention via Constrained Optimization for Long-Horizon Language Agents

arXiv:2606.10616v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Long-horizon language agents accumulate observations, reasoning traces, and retrieved facts that exceed their finite context windows, making memory retention a fundamental resource-allocation problem. Existing memory systems improve management through heuristic scoring, retrieval optimization, or learned compression, but largely treat retention as a local decision problem and do not explicitly model its long-term consequences under realistic observability constraints. To fill this gap, we formulate memory retention as a constrained stochastic optimization problem with explicit budget feasibility, evidence utility, and delayed costs including miss penalties, reacquisition delays, and stale-information risk. We then propose OSL-MR (Observability-Safe Learning for Memory Retention), a novel framework that enforces a strict separation between online-observable features and offline-available supervision (OAS). OSL-MR combines an evidence learner trained from realized evidence supervision with a Mixed-Score heuristic that serves both as a deployable online-safe baseline and as a structured inductive prior for learning. The resulting policy learns query-conditioned evidence value directly from interaction data while remaining deployable under the same observability constraints. Experiments on LOCOMO and LongMemEval show that OSL-MR consistently outperforms recency-based methods, Generative Agents-style scoring, and other heuristic baselines, particularly under tight memory budgets. The Mixed-Score prior further improves precision while preserving recall, and sensitivity analysis demonstrates robustness across a wide range of cost configurations.

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

LM-SPT: LM-Aligned Semantic Distillation for Speech Tokenization

With the rapid progress of speech language models (SLMs), discrete speech tokens have emerged as a core interface between speech and text, enabling unified modeling across modalities. Recent speech tokenization approaches aim to isolate semantic information from low-level acoustics to better align with language models (LMs). In particular, previous methods use self-supervised learning (SSL) teachers such as HuBERT to extract semantic representations, which are then distilled into a semantic quantizer to suppress acoustic redundancy as well as capture content-related latent structures. However, these tokenizers often operate at relatively high frame rates, producing token sequences significantly longer than their textual counterparts and hindering seamless integration with pretrained LMs. Although recent methods attempt to reduce the token rate by applying uniform average pooling to SSL features, this can over-smooth content-bearing regions and dilute the structural information, thereby potentially limiting the LM alignment. To address this, we propose LM-SPT, an LM-aligned speech tokenization method based on semantic speech-resynthesis distillation. Instead of directly matching teacher and student features via pooling, LM-SPT resynthesizes speech from semantic tokens only and minimizes the discrepancy between representations extracted from the original and resynthesized waveforms using a frozen, LM-aligned speech encoder. This indirect supervision avoids rigid temporal alignment and encourages dedicated semantic units that are more semantically aligned with LMs under reduced frame rates. Experimental results show that the proposed LM-SPT consistently outperforms previous semantic-enhanced speech tokenizers when applied to SLMs for the tasks of automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech, even without compromising the speech reconstruction fidelity at the codec level.

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

Augmenting Molecular Language Models with Local $n$-gram Memory

Transformer-based language models for SMILES strings suffer from a locality gap: standard character-level tokenization fragments chemically meaningful motifs, forcing models to repeatedly learn local syntax at the expense of long-range dependencies. To address this without disrupting standard tokenizers, we propose MolGram, which integrates a conditional $n$-gram memory module into molecular language models. MolGram maps local string patterns to learned embeddings via scalable hash lookups and dynamically injects this regional context into hidden states. Evaluations across three tasks, including unconditional molecule generation, forward reaction prediction, and single-step retrosynthesis, show that MolGram consistently improves performance. Crucially, our analyses demonstrate that MolGram outperforms baselines with 3$\times$ more parameters, establishing explicit local pattern memory as a highly efficient inductive bias.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Multi-Source Cybersecurity Logs: An ATT&CK-Labeled Dataset and SLM Evaluation

arXiv:2606.18190v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-stage cyberattacks span system, network, and browser logs. Detecting them requires correlating events across all three sources. Machine learning methods can learn these cross-source patterns, but they need labeled multi-source data. Existing public datasets fall short. Network-only datasets such as CICIDS and UNSW-NB15 miss host and browser activity. Host-focused datasets such as LMDG and CICAPT-IIoT lack browser telemetry. ATLAS includes all three sources but labels events only as malicious or benign, without MITRE Adversarial Tactics, Techniques, and Common Knowledge (ATT&CK) technique granularity. No public dataset combines all three sources with per-entry ATT&CK technique labels. We close the gap by building a multi-source log dataset of 870 sessions (70 attack, 800 benign) and approximately 2.3 million events. We captured system, network, and browser activity simultaneously on Windows endpoints. We labeled malicious events with ATT&CK technique IDs, covering 12 tactics and 53 techniques. We generated all attack data using real tools, including Remote Access Trojan (RAT), Command and Control (C2) tunnels, and cloud exfiltration. To demonstrate learnability, we fine-tuned three Small Language Models (SLMs) (Qwen2.5-1.5B, Llama-3.2-3B, Phi-4-Mini) using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). We compared each against its base variant across ten metrics on two tasks: chunk classification and ATT&CK technique identification. Fine-tuning improved every model on every metric. Chunk classification accuracy rose from approximately 8% in the base variants to between 90% and 97% after fine-tuning. Technique identification remained challenging, with the best exact-match accuracy at 42%, although high partial-match scores show the models captured most of the underlying reasoning.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Optimal Spatio-Temporal Decoupling for Bayesian Conformal Prediction

arXiv:2605.00432v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Online conformal prediction must balance fast adaptation to distribution shift against stable coverage: feedback-driven methods react quickly but become volatile, while strongly discounted Bayesian methods lag and inflate intervals at tight coverage. We introduce State-Adaptive Bayesian Conformal Prediction (SA-BCP), which forms the predictive quantile as a gated convex combination of long-term temporal inertia and local spatial evidence from a kernel density estimate, controlled by a single interpretable evidence threshold $K$. We establish three results: (i) asymptotic marginal validity of the resulting intervals; (ii) a closed-form expression for the MSE-optimal threshold, $K^*_{\mathrm{MSE}}=\alpha(1-\alpha)/M^{\mathcal{T}}$, trading the coverage-indicator (Bernoulli) variance against the temporal structural bias $M^{\mathcal{T}}$; and (iii) a rolling-origin procedure for selecting $K$ online – consistent under stationarity, with $O(\sqrt{T\log N})$ regret against the best fixed $K$ and, for a segmented variant, a sublinear dynamic-regret bound under bounded drift. Across four financial-volatility and weather datasets, three target coverage levels, and eight baselines (including the strongest recent conditional-quantile methods, SPCI and KOWCPI), SA-BCP attains at-or-above-nominal coverage in most settings while producing substantially sharper intervals – up to roughly $3\times$ lower Winkler score than discounted Bayesian CP at the tightest coverage – and a coverage-matched audit confirms these efficiency gains are not an artifact of under-coverage. We disclose one principal limitation: a volatility-specialized conformal-GARCH competitor remains more efficient on its home volatility-base series, though it does not transfer across domains.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Metabolic cost of information processing in Poisson variational autoencoders

arXiv:2602.13421v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Computation in biological systems is fundamentally energy-constrained, yet standard theories of computation treat energy as freely available. Here, we argue that variational free energy minimization under a Poisson assumption offers a principled path toward an energy-aware theory of computation. Our key observation is that the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence term in the Poisson free energy objective becomes proportional to the prior firing rates of model neurons, yielding an emergent metabolic cost term that penalizes high baseline activity. This structure couples an abstract information-theoretic quantity – the *coding rate* – to a concrete biophysical variable – the *firing rate* – which enables a trade-off between coding fidelity and energy expenditure. Such a coupling arises naturally in the Poisson variational autoencoder (P-VAE) – a brain-inspired generative model that encodes inputs as discrete spike counts and recovers a spiking form of *sparse coding* as a special case – but is absent from standard Gaussian VAEs. To demonstrate that this metabolic cost structure is unique to the Poisson formulation, we compare the P-VAE against Grelu-VAE, a Gaussian VAE with ReLU rectification applied to latent samples, which controls for the non-negativity constraint. Across a systematic sweep of the KL term weighting coefficient $\beta$ and latent dimensionality, we find that increasing $\beta$ monotonically increases sparsity and reduces average spiking activity in the P-VAE. In contrast, Grelu-VAE representations remain unchanged, confirming that the effect is specific to Poisson statistics rather than a byproduct of non-negative representations. These results establish Poisson variational inference as a promising foundation for a resource-constrained theory of computation.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Within-host pathogen population diversity predicts treatment response in tuberculosis

Background: Tuberculosis (TB) treatment outcomes remain suboptimal, and standard clinical diagnostics cannot reliably identify patients at high risk of treatment failure or relapse at the time of diagnosis. While within-host Mycobacterium tuberculosis genetic diversity is hypothesized to reflect the viable bacterial burden and adaptive capacity of the infection, its clinical prognostic value remains unknown. Methods: We conducted a prospective cohort study of 364 patients with newly diagnosed, rifampicin-susceptible pulmonary TB in South Africa. Patients received standard 6-month therapy and were monitored for up to two years to ascertain composite unfavorable outcomes (treatment failure, death, or relapse). To accurately detect low-frequency (unfixed) genetic variants and eliminate reference bias artifacts, we mapped medium to high depth short-read sequences against matched, patient-specific long-read assemblies. The association between baseline pathogen genetic diversity and clinical outcomes was evaluated using multivariable Cox proportional-hazards models. Results: After bioinformatic filtering, true unfixed variants were relatively rare but significantly enriched in genes mediating pathogen adaptation and drug tolerance, including transporter proteins and two-component regulatory systems. Within-host bacterial genetic diversity (i.e., the total number of unfixed variants) ranged from 0-20, with a median of 1 per patient. In survival analysis adjusting for known clinical risk factors–including HIV status, prior TB, baseline smear positivity, and radiographic lung involvement–baseline within-host genetic diversity emerged as a strong, independent predictor of unfavorable treatment outcomes. For patients with greater than 3 unfixed variants at diagnosis, each increase of 5 unfixed variants was associated with more than double the risk of a composite unfavorable outcome (adjusted Hazard Ratio, 2.36; 95% CI, 1.27 to 4.39; p=0.007). Conclusions: Baseline within-host pathogen genetic diversity is an independent predictor of unfavorable TB treatment outcomes. As sequencing becomes increasingly integrated into routine diagnostics, quantifying unfixed variants is an accessible approach that promises to risk-stratify patients and guide the duration of individualized regimens.

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arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Would you still call this Dax? Novel Visual References in VLMs and Humans

Vision-language models (VLMs), like human learners, are frequently exposed to new visual concepts, but how they map novel visual references to language after exposure remains largely underexplored, particularly when those references contradict prior knowledge from pre-training. To study this, we present the Novel Visual References Dataset (NVRD): 19,176 images spanning 90 visual concepts across different levels of visual novelty, each with up to 20 increasingly perturbed versions of the original object to probe generalization. Unlike prior work on visual augmentations of familiar concepts, NVRD comprises entirely novel, open-ended stimuli constructed from scratch, mirroring how humans encounter genuinely new concepts. We evaluate 3 open- and 2 closed-source models alongside 2,400 human judgments for direct human-model comparison, and find that (i) models struggle to acquire novel concepts in-context when they contradict prior knowledge, and (ii) while models and humans show correlated sensitivity to visual perturbations, models significantly overgeneralize, extending learned labels to stimuli that humans reject. We contribute NVRD as a corpus and benchmark for research on visual concept learning in both humans and machines.