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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

OmniRetarget: Interaction-Preserving Data Generation for Humanoid Whole-Body Loco-Manipulation and Scene Interaction

arXiv:2509.26633v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A dominant paradigm for teaching humanoid robots complex skills is to retarget human motions as kinematic references to train reinforcement learning (RL) policies. However, existing retargeting pipelines often struggle with the significant embodiment gap between humans and robots, producing physically implausible artifacts like foot-skating and penetration. More importantly, common retargeting methods neglect the rich human-object and human-environment interactions essential for expressive locomotion and loco-manipulation. To address this, we introduce OmniRetarget, an interaction-preserving data generation engine based on an interaction mesh that explicitly models and preserves the crucial spatial and contact relationships between an agent, the terrain, and manipulated objects. By minimizing the Laplacian deformation between the human and robot meshes while enforcing kinematic constraints, OmniRetarget generates kinematically feasible trajectories. Moreover, preserving task-relevant interactions enables efficient data augmentation, from a single demonstration to different robot embodiments, terrains, and object configurations. We comprehensively evaluate OmniRetarget by retargeting motions from OMOMO, LAFAN1, and our in-house MoCap datasets, generating over 8-hour trajectories that achieve better kinematic constraint satisfaction and contact preservation than widely used baselines. Such high-quality data enables proprioceptive RL policies to successfully execute long-horizon (up to 30 seconds) parkour and loco-manipulation skills on a Unitree G1 humanoid, trained with only 5 reward terms and simple domain randomization shared by all tasks, without any learning curriculum.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Learning task-specific subspaces via interventional post-training of speech foundation models

Speech foundation models, pre-trained on large corpora of unlabelled speech data, produce general-purpose representations which are useful across tasks. However, these representations encode information about salient speech variables in a distributed manner, while downstream speech tasks rely on only some of this variability. In this work, we propose a post-training refinement approach using interventional contrastive learning. By leveraging an interventional dataset and multi-part contrastive loss, we learn a transformation from the entangled representation space of speech foundation models into separate content and speaker subspaces. We evaluate the learnt representations on speaker verification and keyword spotting tasks, showing improved out-of-domain speaker verification performance and evidence that speaker and content information are separated across the learned subspaces.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

A Robust Strontium Tweezer Apparatus for Quantum Computing

arXiv:2601.16564v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Neutral atoms for quantum computing applications show promise in terms of scalability and connectivity. We demonstrate the realization of a versatile apparatus capable of stochastically loading a 5x5 array of optical tweezers with single $^{88}$Sr atoms featuring flexible magnetic field control and excellent optical access. A custom-designed oven, spin-flip Zeeman slower, and deflection stage produce a controlled flux of Sr directed to the science chamber. In the science chamber, featuring a vacuum pressure of $3 \times 10^{-11}$ mbar, the Sr is cooled using two laser cooling stages, resulting in $\sim 3 \times 10^5$ atoms at a temperature of 5(1) $\mu$K. The optical tweezers feature a $1/e^2$ waist of 0.81(2) $\mu$m, and loaded atoms can be imaged with a fidelity of $\sim 0.997$ and a survival probability of $0.99^{+0.01}_{-0.02}$. The atomic array presented here forms the core of a full-stack quantum computing processor targeted for quantum chemistry computational problems.

04.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

Integrative Transfer Network: Deep Transfer Learning Across Populations and Prediction Targets

作者:

Large-scale clinical and biomedical datasets increasingly contain both diverse subgroup attributes (e.g., demographic or clinical subgroups) and multiple prediction targets. Although various machine learning approaches can address subgroup differences or multi-target prediction, they often consider these aspects independently rather than jointly. To more effectively capture the shared and subgroup-specific information in such complex datasets, we propose the Integrative Transfer Network (ITN), a deep neural network designed to leverage data across subgroups and multiple related outcomes simultaneously. In extensive experiments, including time-to-event and classification tasks where demographic subgroups and multiple disease endpoints are prevalent, ITN demonstrates consistent improvements in subgroup-specific prediction by borrowing strength from other subgroups and outcomes. We envision ITN as a unified framework for learning from heterogeneous datasets where subgroup-specific insights are critical.

05.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-21

Machine learning evaluation of gene expression-based ALS subtypes across brain and blood tissues

The clinical and molecular heterogeneity observed in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) presents a challenge for diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment. RNA sequencing of post-mortem brain samples from ALS patients has identified several subtypes with distinct molecular signatures. We sought to evaluate these subtypes across diverse tissues and datasets and assess the feasibility of supervised machine learning models for sample classification. Unsupervised clustering and pathway analysis were performed to confirm the presence of ALS subtypes in motor cortex samples. Three machine learning strategies were then used to create models based on post-mortem motor cortex expression data of 112 people with ALS from the London Neurodegenerative Diseases Brain Bank. These models were subsequently improved through feature selection and evaluated in independent cohorts from motor cortex (n = 257, NYGC ALS Consortium) and blood (n = 96, Macquarie University Neurodegenerative Disease Biobank) samples. Multi-class linear discriminant analysis (LDA) models were then used for subtype classification. Clustering of ALS post-mortem motor cortex samples confirmed the presence of three subtypes: neuroinflammation (ALS-Neu), extracellular matrix organisation and muscle contraction (ALS-OxA), and synaptic and neuropeptide signalling (ALS-SNs). Among all machine learning strategies, random forests produced the most accurate and stable models for binary classification (~93% accuracy across the three subtypes). After feature selection, random forest models were able to classify samples from an independent post-mortem motor cortex cohort in their respective subtypes (AUC of ~0.98 across the three subtypes). When these models were evaluated in blood using LDA, we found consistent clustering patterns, with samples aligning in the same subtype regions of the post-mortem motor cortex samples, with ALS-SNs being the subtype in which samples were classified with the highest confidence (LDA class probability ~86%). Moreover, classification for this subtype improved when blood samples were collected closer to death. Our findings support the presence of three gene expression-based ALS subtypes in motor cortex samples and the utility of machine learning strategies for subtype classification. We also observed that the subtypes identified in the brain partially match those in the blood, with samples from the late stages of the disease more likely to be correctly predicted into the ALS-SNs cluster. This suggests a longitudinal effect in subtype identification that requires further investigation.

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

Did You Forget What I Asked? Prospective Memory Failures in Large Language Models

作者:

Large language models often fail to satisfy formatting instructions when they must simultaneously perform demanding tasks. We study this behaviour through a prospective memory inspired lens from cognitive psychology, using a controlled paradigm that combines verifiable formatting constraints with benchmark tasks of increasing complexity. Across three model families and over 8,000 prompts, compliance drops by 2-21% under concurrent task load. Vulnerability is highly type-dependent: terminal constraints (requiring action at the response boundary) degrade most, with drops up to 50%, while avoidance constraints remain comparatively robust. A salience-enhanced format (explicit instruction framing plus a trailing reminder) recovers much of the lost compliance, restoring performance to 90-100% in many settings. Interference is bidirectional: formatting constraints can also reduce task accuracy, with one model's GSM8K accuracy dropping from 93% to 27%. In additional stacking experiments, joint compliance declines sharply as constraints accumulate. All results use deterministic programmatic checkers without an LLM-as-judge component on publicly available datasets.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Sample from What You See: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Diffusion Bridge with Observation-Embedded Stochastic Differential Equation

arXiv:2512.07212v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Imitation learning with diffusion models has advanced robotic control by capturing the multi-modal action distributions. However, existing methods typically treat observations only as high-level conditions to the denoising network, rather than integrating them into the stochastic dynamics of the diffusion process itself. As a result, the sampling is forced to begin from random noise, weakening the coupling between perception and control and often yielding suboptimal performance. We propose BridgePolicy, a generative visuomotor policy that directly integrates observations into the stochastic dynamics via a diffusion-bridge formulation. By constructing an observation-informed trajectory, BridgePolicy enables sampling to start from a rich and informative prior rather than random noise, substantially improving precision and reliability in control. A key difficulty is that diffusion bridge normally connects distributions of matched dimensionality, while robotic observations are heterogeneous and not naturally aligned with actions. To overcome this, we introduce a semantic aligner to unify the visual and state inputs and align the observations with action representations, making diffusion bridge applicable to heterogeneous robot data. Extensive experiments across 52 simulation tasks on three benchmarks and 5 real-world tasks demonstrate that BridgePolicy consistently outperforms state-of-the-art generative policies. Our code is available at https://jianghcsr.github.io/BridgePolicy_page/.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Feature-Space Planes Searcher: A Universal Domain Adaptation Framework for Interpretability and Computational Efficiency

Domain shift, characterized by degraded model performance during transition from labeled source domains to unlabeled target domains, poses a persistent challenge for deploying deep learning systems. Current unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) methods predominantly rely on fine-tuning feature extractors - an approach limited by inefficiency, reduced interpretability, and poor scalability to modern architectures. Our analysis reveals that models pretrained on large-scale data exhibit domain-invariant geometric patterns in their feature space, characterized by intra-class clustering and inter-class separation, thereby preserving transferable discriminative structures. These findings indicate that domain shifts primarily manifest as boundary misalignment rather than feature degradation. Unlike fine-tuning entire pre-trained models - which risks introducing unpredictable feature distortions - we propose the Feature-space Planes Searcher (FPS): a novel domain adaptation framework that optimizes decision boundaries by leveraging these geometric patterns while keeping the feature encoder frozen. This streamlined approach enables interpretative analysis of adaptation while substantially reducing memory and computational costs through offline feature extraction, permitting full-dataset optimization in a single computation cycle. Evaluations on public benchmarks demonstrate that FPS achieves competitive or superior performance to state-of-the-art methods. FPS scales efficiently with multimodal large models and shows versatility across diverse domains including protein structure prediction, remote sensing classification, and earthquake detection. We anticipate FPS will provide a simple, effective, and generalizable paradigm for transfer learning, particularly in domain adaptation tasks. .

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Classification of Astronomical Spectra Using PCA-Compressed Flux and Inverse-Variance Features

arXiv:2606.13978v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper evaluates a signal-processing and supervised-learning pipeline for classifying SDSS DR17 astronomical spectra into stars, galaxies, and quasars. Each spectrum is represented by its measured flux and inverse-variance information, combining spectral shape with a wavelength-dependent reliability profile. After resampling onto a common logarithmic wavelength grid, the flux and inverse-variance vectors are standardized and separately compressed using principal component analysis. The resulting components are concatenated and used to train several classifiers. The best performance was obtained with the LightGBM gradient-boosting classifier, reaching $94.6\%$ accuracy and $92.1\%$ balanced accuracy on the test set.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Reasoning as Pattern Matching: Shared Mechanisms in Human and LLM Everyday Reasoning

arXiv:2606.13607v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When large language models (LLMs) fail to generalize or make haphazard errors in reasoning, it is often taken as evidence that LLMs are not truly reasoning, but rather performing a kind of pattern matching. The implication is that people's behavior does not exhibit the same types of failures because human reasoning uses principled and abstract world models. We evaluate human participants and 25 LLMs on their ability to engage in common-sense reasoning about a variety of everyday situations and observe similar patterns of errors in both people and models. We then identify the set of attention heads driving LLM responses and find that these heads implement a form of pattern-matching. These attention heads allow us to predict seemingly inexplicable reasoning errors in people caused by ostensibly irrelevant prompt details. Taken together, our results suggest that everyday causal reasoning in people and LLMs is more consistent with a form of pattern-matching than with abstract world models.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Federated Learning for Feature Generalization with Convex Constraints

arXiv:2606.14416v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Federated learning (FL) often struggles with generalization due to heterogeneous client data. Local models are prone to overfitting their local data distributions, and even transferable features can be distorted during aggregation. To address these challenges, we propose FedCONST, an approach that adaptively modulates update magnitudes based on the parameter strength of the global model. This prevents over-emphasizing well-learned parameters while reinforcing underdeveloped ones. Specifically, FedCONST employs linear convex constraints to ensure training stability and preserve locally learned generalization capabilities during aggregation. A Gradient Signal to Noise Ratio (GSNR) analysis further validates the effectiveness of FedCONST in enhancing feature transferability and robustness. As a result, FedCONST effectively aligns local and global objectives, mitigating overfitting and promoting stronger generalization across diverse FL environments, achieving state-of-the-art performance.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Characterization of Gaussian Universality Breakdown in High-Dimensional Empirical Risk Minimization

arXiv:2604.03146v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study high-dimensional convex empirical risk minimization (ERM) under general non-Gaussian data designs. By heuristically extending the Convex Gaussian Min-Max Theorem (CGMT) to non-Gaussian settings, we derive an asymptotic min-max characterization of key statistics, enabling approximation of the mean $\mu_{\hat{\theta}}$ and covariance $C_{\hat{\theta}}$ of the ERM estimator $\hat{\theta}$. Specifically, under a concentration assumption on the data matrix and standard regularity conditions on the loss and regularizer, we show that for a test covariate $x$ independent of the training data, the projection $\hat{\theta}^\top x$ approximately follows the convolution of the generally non-Gaussian distribution of $\mu_{\hat{\theta}}^\top x$ with an independent centered Gaussian variable of variance $\mathrm{tr}(C_{\hat{\theta}} \mathbb{E}[xx^\top])$. This result clarifies the scope and limits of Gaussian universality for ERMs. Additionally, we prove that any $\mathcal{C}^2$ regularizer is asymptotically equivalent to a quadratic form determined solely by its Hessian at zero and gradient at $\mu_{\hat{\theta}}$. Numerical simulations across diverse losses and models are provided to validate our theoretical predictions and qualitative insights.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

SciText2Eq: Assessing LLMs for Explainable Equation Generation for Scientific Creativity

arXiv:2606.16003v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This work investigates the ability of large language models (LLMs) to generate mathematical equations from scientific texts. Prior work faces challenges in unstructured grounding, multi-equation dependency, and humanaligned evaluation. To this end, we construct a dataset of AI research papers, pairing contextual passages with ground-truth equations and variable descriptions. We develop an explainable equation generation workflow and evaluate it across diverse open- and closed-source LLM backbones. We introduce an evaluation protocol combining automatic metrics, LLM-based rubrics, and human judgments to assess accuracy, explainability, and human-LLM alignment. Results indicate that LLMs perform moderately on lexical- and syntactic-based similarity, while struggling with semantic accuracy. Comparisons between LLM-based evaluations and human judgments reveal limited alignment, highlighting challenges in using LLMs to assess equation quality. These findings offer insights for improving equation generation models and developing more reliable evaluation methods for scientific text. We provide code and data for reproducibility.

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

IndustryBench-MIPU: Benchmarking Multi-Image Attribute Value Extraction for Industrial Products

Industrial products such as valves and circuit breakers are defined by dense technical specifications that govern procurement, compatibility, and safety across supply chains. These specifications are scattered across multiple heterogeneous product images, including specification tables, nameplates, and technical drawings, yet whether Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) can reliably recover them remains underexplored. To fill this gap, we introduce IndustryBench-MIPU, the first large-scale benchmark for multi-image industrial product understanding, built around structured attribute extraction – recovering property-value pairs from product images. This task jointly probes text recognition on specification tables and nameplates, visual reasoning over technical drawings, domain knowledge to decode industrial terminology, and cross-image evidence integration to assemble scattered specifications. Concretely, the benchmark comprises 4,559 products across 27,652 images with 103,703 annotations spanning 18 industrial categories, constructed through multi-model consensus and three-tier quality assurance. Evaluating nine MLLMs under both single-image and product-level multi-image settings reveals a stark completeness gap: models achieve high precision (86–94%) but the best recovers only 49.9% of product-level attributes; moving from single-image to multi-image extraction costs 15–34 percentage points of recall. Multi-image completeness, not single-image accuracy, is the core bottleneck. Dataset and code are publicly available.

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

Towards Leveraging AutoML for Sustainable Deep Learning: A Multi-Objective HPO Approach on Deep Shift Neural Networks

arXiv:2404.01965v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep Learning (DL) has advanced various fields by extracting complex patterns from large datasets. However, the computational demands of DL models pose environmental and resource challenges. Deep shift neural networks (DSNNs) offer a solution by leveraging shift operations to reduce computational complexity at inference. Following the insights from standard DNNs, we are interested in leveraging the full potential of DSNNs by means of AutoML techniques. We study the impact of hyperparameter optimization (HPO) to maximize DSNN performance while minimizing resource consumption. Since this combines multi-objective (MO) optimization with accuracy and energy consumption as potentially complementary objectives, we propose to combine state-of-the-art multi-fidelity (MF) HPO with multi-objective optimization. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, resulting in models with over 80\% in accuracy and low computational cost. Overall, our method accelerates efficient model development while enabling sustainable AI applications.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

The Magic Barrier before Thermalization

arXiv:2510.11681v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate the time dependence of anti-flatness in the entanglement spectrum, a measure for non-stabilizerness and lower bound for non-local quantum magic resource, on a subsystem of a linear SU(2) plaquette chain during thermalization. Tracing the time evolution of a large number of initial states, we find that the anti-flatness exhibits a barrier-like maximum during the time period when the entanglement entropy of the subsystem grows rapidly from the initial value to the microcanonical entropy. The location of the peak is strongly correlated with the time when the entanglement exhibits the strongest growth. This behavior is found for generic highly excited initial computational basis states and persists for coupling constants across the ergodic regime, revealing a universal structure of the entanglement spectrum during thermalization. We conclude that quantitative simulations of thermalization for nonabelian gauge theories require quantum computing. We speculate that this property generalizes to other quantum chaotic systems, a conjecture supported by analogous behavior observed in real-time simulations of the mixed-field Ising model.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

TokenRatio: Principled Token-Level Preference Optimization via Ratio Matching

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a widely used RL-free method for aligning language models from pairwise preferences, but it models preferences over full sequences even though generation is driven by per-token decisions. Existing token-level extensions typically decompose a sequence-level Bradley-Terry objective across timesteps, leaving per-prefix (state-wise) optimality implicit. We study how to recover token-level preference optimality using only standard sequence-level pairwise comparisons. We introduce Token-level Bregman Preference Optimization (TBPO), which posits a token-level Bradley-Terry preference model over next-token actions conditioned on the prefix, and derive a Bregman-divergence density-ratio matching objective that generalizes the logistic/DPO loss while preserving the optimal policy induced by the token-level model and maintaining DPO-like simplicity. We introduce two instantiations: TBPO-Q, which explicitly learns a lightweight state baseline, and TBPO-A, which removes the baseline through advantage normalization. Across instruction following, helpfulness/harmlessness, and summarization benchmarks, TBPO improves alignment quality and training stability and increases output diversity relative to strong sequence-level and token-level baselines.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

RAMEN: Resolution-Adjustable Multimodal Encoder for Earth Observation

Earth observation (EO) data spans a wide range of spatial, spectral, and temporal resolutions, from high-resolution optical imagery to low resolution multispectral products or radar time series. While recent foundation models have improved multimodal integration for learning meaningful representations, they often expect fixed input resolutions or are based on sensor-specific encoders limiting generalization across heterogeneous EO modalities. To overcome these limitations we introduce RAMEN, a resolution-adjustable multimodal encoder that learns a shared visual representation across EO data in a fully sensor-agnostic manner. RAMEN treats the modality and spatial and temporal resolutions as key input data features, enabling coherent analysis across modalities within a unified latent space. Its main methodological contribution is to define spatial resolution as a controllable output parameter, giving users direct control over the desired level of detail at inference and allowing explicit trade-offs between spatial precision and computational cost. We train a single, unified transformer encoder reconstructing masked multimodal EO data drawn from diverse sources, ensuring generalization across sensors and resolutions. Once pretrained, RAMEN transfers effectively to both known and unseen sensor configurations and outperforms larger state-of-the-art models on the community-standard PANGAEA benchmark, containing various multi-sensor and multi-resolution downstream tasks. Our code and pretrained model are available at https://github.com/nicolashoudre/RAMEN.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Verbatim Chunks Beat Extracted Artifacts: A Controlled Ablation of Memory Representations for Long LLM Conversations

作者:

A growing class of conversational-memory systems compresses dialogue history into structured artifacts – extracted facts, decisions, or events – on the premise that distilled structure retrieves better than raw text. We test this premise with a controlled ablation: within one fixed retrieval-rerank-reasoning pipeline, we swap only the stored representation – LLM-extracted typed artifacts versus verbatim conversation chunks – holding the model, retriever, reranker, and judge constant. Verbatim chunks win by 15.9 points on LoCoMo (43.9% vs. 28.0%) and 22.0 points on LongMemEval-S (67.4% vs. 45.4%); a 1-hop semantic graph does not recover the gap, and five confound controls reproduce the effect. The mechanism is lossy distillation: extraction discards verbatim detail that chunks retain for free, and the extracted-artifact pipeline never beats naive RAG in overall accuracy. Concurrent positive results with near-verbatim, provenance-preserving units fit the same account: retrieval accuracy tracks how far the representation departs from the source. For the extraction designs we test, structured memory should augment verbatim text rather than replace it: a chunks $\cup$ artifacts union store matches chunks on both benchmarks while artifacts alone forfeit the gap. Code and data: https://github.com/tao-hpu/cog-canvas

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

A Composite Activation Function for Learning Stable Binary Representations

arXiv:2605.11558v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Activation functions play a central role in neural networks by shaping internal representations. Recently, learning binary activation representations has attracted significant attention due to their advantages in computational and memory efficiency, as well as interpretability. However, training neural networks with Heaviside activations remains challenging, as their non-differentiability obstructs standard gradient-based optimization. In this paper, we propose Heavy Tailed Activation Function (HTAF), a smooth approximation to the Heaviside function that enables stable training with gradient-based optimization. We construct HTAF as a sigmoid hyperbolic tangent composite function and theoretically show that it maintains a large gradient mass around zero inputs while exhibiting slower gradient decay in the tail regions. We show that Spiking Neural Networks, Binary Neural Networks and Deep Heaviside neural Networks can be trained stably using HTAF with gradient-based optimization. Finally, we introduce Implicit Concept Bottleneck Models (ICBMs), an interpretable image model that leverages HTAF to induce discrete feature representations. Extensive experiments across various architectures and image datasets demonstrate that ICBM enables stable discretization while achieving prediction performance comparable to or better than standard models.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Induced Resource Theories and Harvesting via Quantum Probes

arXiv:2606.17287v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We consider scenarios in which a quantum system with a well-defined resource theory is used as a probe to interact with an environment, such as a quantum field, for which a resource-theoretic description is absent or incomplete. We clarify if and how the harvesting of a resource in the probe can tell us about the state of the environment. This is particularly ambiguous when the probe-environment interaction is not a free operation, or the concept of such free operations cannot be defined altogether. We propose a framework and precise conditions under which it becomes possible to interpret resource generation on the probe as evidence of resources in the environment, thereby introducing an effective notion of resources for the latter. Our results clarify in which sense resources can be said to be harvested from the environment and provide a systematic way to analyse such processes beyond fully controlled resource-theoretic settings. More generally, this work may provide a step towards a more general understanding of the interplay of different quantum resources.

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

Beyond task performance: Decoding bioacoustic embeddings with speech features

arXiv:2606.14662v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pretrained audio embeddings are standard in bioacoustics, yet little is known about which acoustic features these models encode, nor which are useful for a given task. This hinders transparency and limits extension to rare species or data-scarce domains. Here we reveal which speech-like features are encoded in bioacoustic representations. Using the 88~eGeMAPS features across six taxonomic groups, we apply linear and nonlinear regression probes to quantify which acoustic properties each model captures. Results confirm a ``no free lunch'' pattern: no single model captures the full feature space. A concatenated embedding achieves the highest performance, suggesting complementary acoustic space coverage across models. Loudness features are best encoded ($R^2 = 0.76$) while F0 is hardest to recover ($R^2 = 0.33$). By cross-referencing recoverability with per-species feature salience (NMI), we derive data-driven model selection guidance for bioacoustics.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

SSD: Spatially Speculative Decoding Accelerates Autoregressive Image Generation

Autoregressive models excel in visual generation by treating images as 1D sequences of discrete tokens, mirroring language modeling. However, this flattening discards the intrinsic 2D spatial locality of visual signals, creating severe computational bottlenecks during inference. We introduce Spatially Speculative Decoding (SSD), a framework that aligns the predictive objective with the natural geometry of images. Rather than predicting only the immediate next token in a 1D sequence, our model simultaneously predicts the adjacent horizontal token and the token directly below it. By capitalizing on this 2D spatial correlation, spatially speculative decoding overcomes the memory wall in visual inference. Our approach accelerates autoregressive image generation by up to 13.3x while maintaining high fidelity on DPG-Bench and GenEval. Our results suggest that respecting the underlying geometry of vision unlocks massive computational efficiencies, paving the way for real-time, high-resolution autoregressive generative models.

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

Phonikud: Overcoming Phonetic Underspecification for Hebrew Text-To-Speech

Text-to-speech (TTS) for Modern Hebrew is challenged by the language's orthographic complexity, with existing solutions ignoring underspecified phonetic features such as stress. We present a framework for more phonetically accurate Hebrew TTS with four contributions: (1) Phonikud, an open-source Hebrew grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) system that outputs fully-specified International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcriptions, designed by augmenting a base diacritizer. (2) The ILSpeech corpus of paired Hebrew audio, text, and expert IPA annotations. (3) A benchmark for the previously unmeasured task of Hebrew G2P conversion. (4) Hebrew audio-to-IPA models capturing previously disregarded phonetic details for automatic TTS evaluation. Our results show that Phonikud more accurately predicts Hebrew phonemes than prior methods, and that small, local TTS models with phonetic input from Phonikud approach large proprietary systems. We release our code, data, and models at https://phonikud.github.io.