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

MoDiCoL: A Modular Diagnostic Continual Learning Dataset for Robust Speech Recognition

Modern Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems have made remarkable progress on standard benchmarks, yet performance gaps have emerged under real-world distribution shifts, caused by recording conditions, accents, speech impairments, and noise. Existing datasets and benchmarks typically isolate these factors, which overlooks their co-occurrence in real-world applications. In this paper, we argue that model robustness can be treated as a dynamic capability that continually develops, and we introduce MoDiCoL, a Modular Diagnostic Continual Learning dataset designed for controlled analysis of linguistic content, speaker characteristics, and acoustic environments. Furthermore, we propose a real-world-inspired continual learning curriculum to simulate incremental updates and study how robustness is acquired, transferred, and forgotten. We evaluate three continual learning strategies and provide detailed insights into robustness under evolving conditions.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Facial Affect Analysis for Service-Oriented Systems: Advances, Challenges, and Future Visions

Facial Affect Analysis (FAA) is evolving from a stand-alone recognition task into a reusable perception capability for Service-Oriented Software Ecosystems (SoSE). This paper preserves the FAA methodological core while reframing recent advances through systems-engineering requirements for composable and dependable services. We review representative progress in static and dynamic expression analysis, action-unit and micro-expression modeling, and modern CNN, Transformer, graph, and hybrid architectures, then interpret these advances by their operational fit in edge, cloud, and hybrid service pipelines. The synthesis emphasizes SoSE concerns that determine deployability: service contracts for uncertainty-aware outputs, latency and availability envelopes, lifecycle monitoring and recalibration, governance-aware integration, and interoperability across independently evolving components. Our analysis shows that benchmark gains alone are insufficient for SoSE readiness; robustness under shift, intervention stability, fairness, privacy posture, and runtime guarantees are equally critical. We conclude with a roadmap for treating FAA as an operational service component with explicit interfaces, measurable quality attributes, and accountable lifecycle management.

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

Interpolation between Convolution and Attention via K-Nearest Neighbors

作者:

The shift from Convolutional Neural Networks to Transformers has reshaped computer vision, yet these two architectural families are typically viewed as fundamentally distinct. Convolutional Neural Networks are defined by spatially local convolution operations, while Transformers rely on global self-attention. We argue that convolution and self-attention, despite their apparent differences, can be unified within a single k-nearest neighbor aggregation framework. The critical insight is that both operations are special cases of neighbor selection and weighted aggregation. Convolution selects neighbors by spatial proximity while self-attention selects by feature similarity, revealing that they lie on a continuous spectrum rather than representing categorically different computations. We introduce Convolutional Nearest Neighbors (ConvNN), a unified framework that formalizes this connection. ConvNN exactly recovers standard and depthwise convolution by restricting neighbor selection to normalized spatial coordinates, and exactly recovers self-attention and its sparse variants, including KVT-attention, by replacing spatial proximity with scaled dot-product similarity. Beyond these special cases, ConvNN serves as a drop-in replacement for both convolution and attention layers, enabling systematic exploration of the intermediate spectrum between local and global aggregation through configurable similarity functions, neighbor selection strategies, positional encodings, and aggregation kernels.

04.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-23

Parental body mass index and offspring childhood body size and eating behaviour: A structural equation modelling analysis in the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study

作者:

by Tom A. Bond, Tom A. McAdams, Nicole M. Warrington, Laurie J. Hannigan, Espen Moen Eilertsen, Ziada Ayorech, Fartein A. Torvik, George Davey Smith, Deborah A. Lawlor, Eivind Ystrom, Alexandra Havdahl, David M. Evans Background The intergenerational transmission of obesity-related traits could propagate an accelerating cycle of obesity, if parental adiposity causally influences offspring adiposity. The extent to which intergenerational obesity associations are due to such causal effects, as opposed to genetic confounding (inheritance), is unclear. We aimed to establish whether associations between parental peri-pregnancy body mass index (BMI) and offspring birth weight (BW), BMI until 8 years of age, and 8-year-old eating behaviour are due to genetic confounding. Methods and findings Data were from the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study, a prospective population-based birth cohort born between 1999 and 2009 at 50 out of 52 hospital maternity units in Norway. We compared the strength of the associations of maternal pre-pregnancy BMI versus paternal BMI during pregnancy, with offspring outcomes including birth weight and BMI assessed between age 6 months and 8 years of age, and appetite-related eating behaviour traits assessed at age 8 years via the Child Eating Behaviour Questionnaire (CEBQ), adjusting for potential confounders including parity, parental/grandparental language group and parental age, smoking, education and income). We then used an extended children of twins structural equation model (SEM) to quantify the extent to which associations were due to genetic confounding. Up to 85,866 children (51.3% male) were included in linear regression models, whereas SEM models included up to 50,999 children. Maternal BMI was more strongly associated than paternal BMI with offspring BW, but the maternal-paternal difference decreased for offspring BMI after birth. Greater parental BMI was associated with obesity-related offspring eating behaviours. SEM results indicated that genetic confounding did not explain the association between parental BMI and offspring BW, but explained the majority of the association with offspring BMI from 6 months onwards. For 8-year BMI, genetic confounding explained 79% (95% CI [62, 95]; p = 1.9 × 10−12) of the covariance with maternal BMI and 94% (95% CI [72, 113]; p = 2.7 × 10−14) of the covariance with paternal BMI. Limitations of this study include selective recruitment and attrition, potential bias due to parental assortative mating, and that findings may not generalise beyond high-income country settings with high obesity prevalence. Conclusions We found strong evidence that parent–child BMI associations may primarily be due to genetic confounding. When considered alongside prior evidence, this finding may argue against a strong causal effect of maternal or paternal adiposity on childhood adiposity via intrauterine or periconceptional mechanisms.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

NaturalFlow: Reducing Disruptive Pauses for Natural Speech Flow in Simultaneous Speech-to-Speech Translation

Simultaneous speech-to-speech translation aims to enable near-real-time communication by minimizing latency, offering a compelling, real-time alternative to the high latency of consecutive translation. However, the excessive pursuit of low latency often results in fragmented chunk-wise speech. Consequently, listeners are subjected to an unnatural acoustic flow punctuated by frequent pauses, which could increase their cognitive load. To bridge this gap, we introduce a fluency-aware optimization framework designed to discover the sweet spot between the low-latency benefits of simultaneous translation and the natural flow of consecutive translation. Our framework minimizes inter-chunk silences by leveraging model-internal signals, including linguistic diversity and induced temporal variability in speech durations. Experiments on short- and long-form benchmarks show that our framework produces natural speech flow while maintaining competitive latency and translation quality.

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

YeasierAgent: Agentic Social Sandbox as a Canvas for Intent-Driven Creation of Platform-Agnostic Symbiotic Agent-Native Applications

作者:

arXiv:2606.13722v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper introduces YeasierAgent, an application-building paradigm based on symbiotic agents, narrative worlds, and scene-aware interaction. It challenges the conventional device-coupled model of software by redefining applications as collaborative spaces among users, agents, and worlds. We present a system architecture that achieves two primary contributions: (1) enabling the rapid, cross-platform construction of agent-native applications by utilizing platform-agnostic interactive units (agents, scenes, dialogue) rather than fixed graphical layouts; and (2) unifying the emotional companionship and practical tool execution attributes of intelligent agents within a single experiential sandbox. By integrating automated generation, user-created worlds, and spatial multi-agent collaboration, YeasierAgent formalizes the category of Symbiotic Agent-Native Applications, demonstrating a shift from isolated, tool-specific chatbots toward cohesive, socially embedded computational environments.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

When Context Returns: Toward Robust Internalization in On-Policy Distillation

arXiv:2606.11627v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent work has shown that on-policy distillation can internalize privileged context, such as system prompts or task hints, into a student model so that the context is no longer needed at inference time. Although this approach successfully improves the student's no-context performance, we identify an interesting and previously unstudied phenomenon: in many settings, reintroducing the original privileged context to the distilled student actually degrades its performance, even on instances it already solves correctly without context. We term this context-induced degradation and argue that robust internalization demands not only matching the teacher's context-conditioned behavior, but also remaining stable when the context is reintroduced, a property we call context removability. Motivated by this observation, we propose a lightweight consistency regularizer that first anchors the student's no-context output via stop-gradient, then penalizes the context-conditioned output for deviating from it via forward KL divergence. This simple addition requires only one extra forward pass per training step, yet it effectively mitigates context-induced degradation and, in many cases, even improves no-context performance. Across 12 configurations spanning diverse domains and model families, our method improves context-conditioned accuracy in the majority of settings, reduces context-induced harm in 11 out of 12 settings, and effectively eliminates response-length inflation. A mechanistic case study further confirms that context removability is achieved at the representation level, with hidden states remaining nearly identical regardless of whether the context is present.

08.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-04

Comparative impacts and cost-effectiveness of tuberculosis systematic screening strategies in prisons in Brazil, Colombia, and Peru: A mathematical modeling study

作者:

by Yiran E. Liu, José Victor Bortolotto Bampi, Ronan F. Arthur, Argita D. Salindri, Caroline Busatto, Pedro Avedillo Jiménez, Daniele Maria Pelissari, Fernanda Dockhorn Costa Johansen, Robert Arana-Narvaez, Alvaro Fernando Moreno Roca, Wilfredo Santos Solís Tupes, Esther Mori Jiu, Christian Alfredo Moreno Roca, Erika Albertina Abregú Contreras, Valentina Antonieta Alarcón Guizado, Julián Trujillo Trujillo, Belkys Marcelino, Mónica Alonso Gonzalez, Mayra Cecilia Córdova Ayllon, Ted Cohen, Moises A. Huaman, Jeremy D. Goldhaber-Fiebert, Julio Croda, Jason R. Andrews Background Incarceration is a leading driver of tuberculosis in Latin America. Systematic screening in prisons may reduce tuberculosis burden, but optimal strategies and cost-effectiveness remain uncertain. We examined the population-wide health impacts and cost-effectiveness of systematic screening in prisons in Brazil, Colombia, and Peru, comparing different timepoints, frequencies, and screening algorithms. Methods and findings Using dynamic transmission models calibrated to Brazil, Colombia, and Peru, we simulated annual or biannual (twice-yearly) prison-wide screening, alone or combined with entry and exit screening from 2026 to 2035. We evaluated four algorithms: (1) symptom screening, (2) chest X-ray with computer-aided detection (CXR-CAD), (3) symptoms and CXR-CAD (follow-up testing if either is positive), and (4) GeneXpert Ultra (Xpert) with pooled sputum. Individuals screening positive then received individual Xpert. We projected impacts on within-prison and population-level tuberculosis incidence in 2035, along with discounted costs (2023 US dollars) and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs). Model projections showed that combined entry, exit, and biannual screening with CXR-CAD was highly impactful and cost-effective across countries, reducing tuberculosis incidence by 61%–87% in prisons and 18%–28% population-wide. Compared to only biannual CXR-CAD (the next best strategy), the incremental cost per DALY averted of adding entry and exit screening was $2,984 (Brazil), $2,925 (Colombia), and $645 (Peru). Adding symptom screening to CXR-CAD marginally increased benefit and was only cost-effective in Peru’s higher-incidence prisons. Biannual screening alone remained cost-effective at prison incidence levels well below national averages, as well as at far lower willingness-to-pay thresholds. In settings without CXR-CAD, pooled Xpert was an impactful, cost-effective alternative. Key limitations include the model’s simplified representation of tuberculosis disease states and lack of stratification by age, gender/sex, HIV, or drug resistance. Conclusions These modeling results support immediate national-level adoption of prison-wide tuberculosis screening twice-yearly and at entry and exit, using CXR-CAD or pooled Xpert.

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

Masked Neural Detection for Constrained Channel Coding in Molecular Communication

arXiv:2606.12489v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Molecular communication (MC) suffers from severe diffusion memory because molecules released for one symbol may arrive during later symbols. Neural sequence detectors, especially sliding bidirectional recurrent neural networks (SBRNNs), can substantially outperform threshold detectors in such channels. This raises a central question for MC channel coding: does a code whose advantage was established under threshold detection retain it when both coded and uncoded transmission are evaluated with neural detection? This letter answers this question for run-length-limited ISI-mitigation (RLIM) codes, a class of constrained codes previously shown to provide large BER gains in MC. Across the tested operating points, the best RLIM-SBRNN receiver beats the best uncoded receiver, chosen between threshold and SBRNN detection, in $46$ of $59$ cases, with a mean gain of $10.36\times$ over those wins. We also propose an RLIM-tailored training mask for compact SBRNN detectors, improving the unmasked RLIM-SBRNN in $227$ of $236$ comparisons with $3.267\times$ mean gain when masking is beneficial. Finally, the compact masked RLIM-SBRNN is competitive with channel-state-aware MLSE despite using no channel knowledge.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Neither Parallel Nor Sequential: How DiffusionGemma Actually Commits Tokens

arXiv:2606.14620v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open diffusion language models are marketed as parallel, non-autoregressive decoders, yet the order in which a shipped checkpoint actually commits its tokens is almost never measured. We instrument DiffusionGemma 26B, a masked discrete-diffusion mixture-of-experts model built on Gemma 4, hooking its sampler's accept step to record which canvas positions commit, when, and at what confidence. Across a 686-prompt, six-regime probe suite we find that its decoding is neither parallel nor block-autoregressive: it follows a partial left-to-right commit bias whose apparent strength depends almost entirely on the granularity at which you look. Order is weak token by token and strengthens smoothly as the analysis is coarsened, so the model's "block size" turns out to be an artifact of the measuring ruler rather than the architecture. The model commits in large simultaneous batches, leaving much of the within-batch order genuinely undefined rather than merely unobserved. The behaviour is regime-dependent: structured JSON is committed in essentially arbitrary order, and a position's commit confidence tracks correctness on mathematical reasoning but carries no signal on factual recall. Commitment is aggressive, finishing in a short late burst well inside the step budget, while task accuracy matches the model's autoregressive Gemma-4 sibling. Beyond these findings, our central contribution is methodological: measuring decoding order honestly demands handling trailing-EOS padding, within-regime confounding, commit non-monotonicity, block-size sensitivity, and large commit-batch ties, each of which can otherwise manufacture a decoding-order result that is not really there.

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

CisTransCell: Single-Cell Perturbation Prediction via Gene Function, Regulatory Control, and Cellular Context

arXiv:2606.13713v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Predicting cellular transcriptional responses to genetic perturbations is a central problem in single-cell biology, especially in the zero-shot setting where the perturbed gene or gene combination is unseen during training. A major difficulty is that perturbation effects are not determined by expression state alone: they depend on how the perturbed gene product influences other genes and proteins, how those downstream factors act on cis-regulatory elements, and which regulatory programs are active in the current cell state. To better capture this biological complexity, we propose CisTransCell, a cell-conditioned multi-modal framework for single-cell perturbation prediction that augments each gene with two complementary priors: a regulatory-sequence prior that captures how the gene is controlled, and a coding-sequence prior that captures what the gene product does. By integrating these priors with cellular expression state, CisTransCell models perturbation response as a cascade from gene function to regulatory control to downstream transcriptional change. Experiments on benchmark single-cell perturbation datasets show that CisTransCell achieves strong performance in zero-shot perturbation prediction.

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

GEN-Guard: Correcting Generalization Failures for Deployable Federated Surgical AI

Federated Learning (FL) in surgical video AI enables collaborative model training without sharing sensitive data. However, standard evaluation practices - selecting the "best" global model based only on validation data from participating hospitals - can lead to suboptimal deployment choices. We identify this critical failure mode as performance leakage, where the selected model overfits internal federation data and fails to generalize to unseen institutions. We propose GEN-Guard, a practical post-hoc framework to detect and correct generalization failures in federated surgical AI. It integrates Generalization Detection via Client-Blocked Evaluation (CBE), which validates performance on isolated client distributions to prevent performance leakage, and Generalization Correction through Disagreement-Aware Distillation (DAD), which learns adaptive feature-level corrections for cross-institutional robustness. Both components operate after standard FL convergence while providing robust support for zero-shot adaptation to unseen environments. We first quantify the severity of performance leakage, observing Model Selection Failures (MSFs) exceeding 80% under standard evaluation. GEN-Guard is evaluated on two multi-center clinical challenges: surgical phase recognition in laparoscopic cholecystectomy and polyp segmentation in colonoscopy. Across both datasets, GEN-Guard consistently corrects these failures, improving in-federation F1 scores by up to 2 points, unseen-institution performance by up to 3 points, and worst-case institutional performance by 3-9 points. Performance leakage represents a systematic and previously under-recognized risk in federated surgical AI. GEN-Guard provides a practical solution for detecting and correcting such failures. By improving cross-institutional robustness and zero-shot generalization, it strengthens the reliability of FL for real-world surgical deployment.

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

FairGen: Preference-Aligned Diffusion for Demographically Equitable Medical Image Synthesis

Medical imaging is central to modern diagnostics, and artificial intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly used to support image-based analysis by improving efficiency, accuracy, and access to care. However, inequities in healthcare access and differential disease prevalence create severe demographic imbalances in clinical image data. Such imbalances are compounded by the fact that diseases can manifest with distinct features across demographic groups, rendering certain phenotypic presentations naturally rare. AI models trained on such imbalanced data risk perpetuating diagnostic bias and widening healthcare disparities. Here we introduce FairGen, a fairness-aware diffusion framework that synthesizes demographically balanced medical images while preserving pathology-relevant visual features. By embedding physician-aligned preferences into the generation process, FairGen improves subgroup coverage during synthesis and downstream classification. Applied to dermatology, radiology, and neuroimaging benchmark tasks, FairGen achieves fairness improvements of 95.9% for skin images, 80.0% for chest radiography, and 35.2% for brain MRI, while maintaining competitive diagnostic accuracy relative to models trained on original clinical data. Clinician-facing expert review and external validation on independent cohorts further support that these gains extend beyond standard fidelity metrics and are not confined to the original in-distribution datasets.

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

Pruning via Causal Attribution Preserves Reasoning Performance in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) excel at multi-step reasoning but incur substantial inference cost. We introduce Causal Attribution Pruning (CAP), a training-free method that identifies critical attention heads by measuring their causal impact on reasoning tasks and uses these head-level scores to guide fine-grained weight pruning. For each attention head, CAP estimates the expected performance degradation when the head is masked during forward passes on a small calibration set of reasoning problems. These causal scores are then converted into weight-level importance values for the corresponding projection matrices. Unlike magnitude-only or activation-based criteria, CAP's interventional measurement directly captures each head's functional contribution, yielding relative accuracy gains of up to 61% over Wanda on ARC-Challenge at 20% sparsity. We evaluate CAP on GSM8K, StrategyQA, and ARC-Challenge using Llama-3-8B-Instruct and Mistral-7B-Instruct at 10%, 20%, and 50% sparsity. At moderate sparsity (10-20%), CAP improves over Wanda in most model-benchmark configurations. with especially large gains on ARC-Challenge for Llama-3. Our results suggest that attention-head-level causal attribution can better preserve reasoning performance on downstream benchmarks than correlational pruning criteria at equivalent sparsity, while remaining limited by coarse MLP attribution at 50% sparsity.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

CyberEvolver: Structured Self-Evolution for Cybersecurity Agents On the Fly

arXiv:2605.26195v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: LLM-based agents are increasingly used for cybersecurity tasks, but most existing systems rely on fixed, human-designed scaffolds that struggle to adapt across diverse targets and failure modes. We introduce \textsc{CyberEvolver}, a self-evolving cybersecurity agent framework that iteratively revises its own scaffold based on experience from failed execution attempts. Self-evolution in cybersecurity is challenging because the space of possible scaffold changes is largely unstructured, execution feedback is sparse and often obscured by the environment, and low-diversity updates can cause errors to compound over repeated iterations. \textsc{CyberEvolver} addresses these challenges with a four-layer evolvable agent architecture that decomposes scaffold optimization into structured components, a trace-to-diagnosis mechanism that converts noisy execution logs into actionable revision signals, and a population-based beam search strategy that preserves diverse agent variants during evolution. We evaluate \textsc{CyberEvolver} on CTF challenges, vulnerability exploitation, and penetration-testing tasks using four open-source LLMs. Across these settings, \textsc{CyberEvolver} improves the seed agent's success rate by $13.6$\,\% on average, and outperforms six human-designed cybersecurity agents as well as two self-improvement methods adapted from other domains. These results suggest that scaffold self-evolution is a promising direction for building adaptive LLM agents for security testing.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Development of an Open-Access Action Observation Video Library for Upper Limb Motor Rehabilitation

Background: Occupational therapists can improve stroke survivors hand and arm movement and participation in daily activities through action observation (AO). AO involves watching another persons hand or arm complete a movement or task. While research generally supports the use of AO with stroke survivors, there are limited AO videos are available to occupational therapists which makes applying AO challenging. Objective: The purpose of this work is to develop structured and widely accessible tool to support access to AO for stroke survivors, occupational therapists, and researchers. Methods: To develop an AO video library for stroke rehabilitation, functional and non-functional upper limb task deficits were first identified through clinical observations and clinician interviews to establish a prioritized list of daily activities. In collaboration with media production specialists, healthy adult volunteers were recruited and filmed performing these tasks from both first- and third-person perspectives. The recorded videos were then systematically edited, enhanced with instructional title slides, and distributed via a public YouTube channel for clinical application and a categorized digital repository for research purposes. Results: Initial assessments revealed a complete lack of familiarity, awareness, and utilization of AO resources among local occupational therapists, despite high perceived clinical utility. To address this gap, a final library of 150 tasks was established, resulting in the production of 419 finalized, standardized videos featuring six healthy volunteers. For clinical application, these videos were hosted on a free, public YouTube channel organized into 18 functional playlists, while a parallel set was structured into distinct movement categories for research repository storage. Conclusion: By providing a structured and highly accessible tool, this repository enables clinicians, researchers, and caregivers to readily implement evidence-based action observation interventions in both clinical and home settings.

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

Replay What Matters: Off-Policy Replay for Efficient LLM Reinforcement Unlearning

LLM unlearning has emerged as a cost-effective alternative to full retraining for removing hazardous knowledge from pretrained models while preserving general utility. Recent RL-based methods such as RULE reformulate unlearning as learning a refusal behavior, but their on-policy optimization repeatedly samples from the same forget and retain/boundary prompts throughout training. We identify a critical inefficiency in this process: easy cases quickly converge and provide little useful gradient signal, while hard cases near the forget/retain boundary continue to produce low-reward rollouts that are discarded after a single use. To address this issue, we propose ReRULE, an off-policy replay enhancement for reinforcement unlearning. ReRULE stores low-reward hard-case rollout groups in a replay buffer during early GRPO training and reuses them in later stages through importance-sampled off-policy updates, redirecting computation toward boundary cases that still require learning. Theoretically, we show that ReRULE yields a tighter hard-case convergence bound than pure on-policy RULE. Empirically, ReRULE improves MUSE-Books Retain Quality from 46.3 to 56.2 while adding only 5–11% training time across benchmarks. Its limited improvement on the simpler TOFU setting further supports the intended conditional behavior: replay is most beneficial when the hard/easy disparity is pronounced.

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

Uncertainty Estimation for Molecular Diffusion Models

arXiv:2606.13451v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion models have seen wide adoption for 3D molecular generation, yet they offer no principled signal of when a generated molecule is likely to be of low quality. We propose a post-hoc method for estimating per-sample uncertainty in pretrained molecular diffusion models. Building on a Laplace approximation of the denoising network, we measure the variability of the noise prediction across the generation trajectory. Empirically, we show that the resulting uncertainty score is informative of sample quality, exhibiting a negative correlation with established sample-level quality metrics. We further study how the proposed uncertainty score can be used to filter generated samples, improving model performance via test-time scaling.

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

Cascade Classification of Dermoscopic Images of Skin Neoplasms with Controllable Sensitivity and External Clinical Validation

Purpose. To compare deep learning architectures and classification schemes for dermoscopic images of skin neoplasms and assess their generalization on transfer from open international datasets to independent clinical datasets of Russian practice. Methods. Four architectures (ViT-B/16, Swin-S, ConvNeXt-S, EfficientNetV2-S) were compared in three schemes: binary (malignant/benign), single-stage four-class (benign, MEL, SCC, BCC), and a two-stage cascade (binary triage, then three-class differentiation MEL/SCC/BCC). All models used ImageNet-pretrained weights and a single augmentation protocol on aggregated open ISIC Archive data, and were evaluated on an internal held-out sample and two clinical datasets (Melanoscope AI mobile system; Sechenov University). Results. Internally the binary stage attains ROC-AUC 0.952-0.966; on Sechenov University it drops to 0.797-0.893, sensitivity to 0.53-0.67, and ECE rises from 0.02 to 0.27-0.39 with underestimation of malignancy, quantifying a generalization gap in ranking and calibration. Paired tests confirm one inter-architecture result on clinical data: the deficit of ViT-B/16 at the binary stage (p

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Synchronization of Quasi-Particle Excitations in a Quantum Gas with Cavity-Mediated Interactions

arXiv:2504.17731v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Driven-dissipative quantum systems can undergo transitions from stationary to dynamical phases, reflecting the emergence of collective non-equilibrium behavior. We study such a transition in a Bose-Einstein condensate coupled to an optical cavity and develop a cavity-assisted Bragg spectroscopy technique to resolve its collective modes. We observe dissipation-induced synchronization at the quasiparticle level, where two roton-like modes coalesce at an exceptional point. This reveals how dissipation microscopically drives collective dynamics and signals a precursor to a dynamical phase transition.

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

Are you speaking my languages? On spoken language adherence in multimodal LLMs

While Large Language Model (LLM) based Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) enables seamless multilingual use, models often misidentify the output language, compromising transcription fidelity and downstream application quality. To preserve flexibility and code-switching capabilities, we propose a soft prompting approach that hints at potential spoken languages without strictly constraining the output. We formally define this challenge as a lack of language adherence, introduce a novel metric to quantify violations, and evaluate three mitigation strategies: (1) zero-shot prompting for robust guidance under uncertainty, (2) supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to improve prompt adherence, and (3) Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to enforce adherence during decoding. We present a comparative analysis of these methods across multiple languages, evaluating effectiveness in reducing the language violation while maintaining overall ASR performance. Finally, we discuss trade-offs to guide strategy selection under various compute constraints.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

LASA: A Weak Supervision Method for Open-Vocabulary Scene Sketch Semantic Segmentation

Open-vocabulary scene sketch semantic segmentation aims to assign dense semantic labels to sparse line drawings based on flexible category vocabularies specified at inference time, without relying on pixel-level annotations during training. Unlike natural images, sketches lack texture and color cues, making semantic understanding heavily dependent on stroke layout and spatial configuration, a challenge that renders single-layer vision-language features inherently unstable. Our key observation is that attention maps from different Vision Transformer layers encode complementary spatial cues: shallow layers capture global structural layouts, while deeper layers focus on local stroke intersections and object parts. This suggests that cross-layer aggregation provides a more robust structural prior than any individual layer alone. Leveraging this insight, we propose a structure-aware framework built upon Layer-wise Accumulated Structural Attention (LASA), which aggregates multi-layer attention to guide hierarchical semantic alignment under weak supervision and refine predictions during inference. Experiments on FS-COCO, SFSD, and FrISS show that LASA improves mIoU by $+3.43$, $+8.01$, and $+15.74$ over the prior weakly supervised baselines, demonstrating consistent gains in both segmentation accuracy and spatial coherence. Our source code will be made publicly available.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

A Resource for Enthymeme Detection in Controversial Political Discourse

Enthymemes, arguments with unstated premises or conclusions, are pervasive in persuasive discourse, yet their annotation remains notoriously subjective. We present a resource of 1,482 tweets from politically controversial discourse, annotated by five annotators for the presence of enthymemes and their argument structure, designed to study label variation. We first revisit the definition of enthymemes and propose annotation guidelines anchored in Walton's argumentation schemes, offering a structured and constrained approach that nonetheless preserves room for the interpretive nature of the task. This contrasts with past resources, which tend to eliminate disagreement, obscuring its sources and preventing investigation of its potential benefits for model performance. We further propose a complexity analysis of the task, identifying where annotation imposes high cognitive load and may give rise to inconsistent annotation. Our preliminary experiments show that models trained on annotator disagreement outperform models trained on hard majority-vote labels. We close by reflecting on how structural openness in enthymeme definitions and guidelines enables the study of variation in subjective inferential processes for future resources and downstream NLP applications concerned with human inference.

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

LiveStarPro: Proactive Streaming Video Understanding with Hierarchical Memory for Long-Horizon Streams

Despite the remarkable progress of Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs), current online architectures still struggle to simultaneously process continuous video streams, decide autonomously when to respond, and preserve long-horizon contextual memory. These obstacles undermine real-time responsiveness and cause severe forgetting throughout prolonged interactions. In this work, we introduce LiveStarPro, a live streaming assistant that is designed for proactive video understanding over long-horizon streams. The design of LiveStarPro rests on three complementary components. The first component is Streaming Verification Decoding (SVeD), an inference framework that identifies the appropriate response timing through single-pass perplexity verification, thereby eliminating the dependency on explicit silence tokens. The second component is Streaming Causal Attention Masks (SCAM), a training strategy that enforces incremental video-language alignment over variable-length streams. The third component is Tree-Structured Hierarchical Memory (TSHM), a recursive memory architecture that organizes evicted historical information into event chains and consequently enables efficient retrieval from effectively unbounded video streams. To facilitate a comprehensive evaluation under realistic online conditions, we further present OmniStarPro, a large-scale benchmark that spans 15 diverse real-world scenarios and that extends to hour-scale streams for the assessment of long-term recall. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LiveStarPro consistently surpasses existing methods, attaining a 28.9% improvement in semantic correctness and an 18.2% reduction in timing error, while its streaming key-value cache further yields a 1.58x inference speedup over the same model without caching. The model and the code are publicly available at https://github.com/sotayang/LiveStarPro.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Beyond LoRA: Is Sparsity-Induced Adaptation Better?

arXiv:2606.13767v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) and its variants provide a memory- and compute-efficient alternative to full fine-tuning of pre-trained models. However, questions remain about the comparative generalizability of these approaches and how the structural restrictions on low-rank updates preserve effective adaptation performance. We present a historical framing, covering the past (full fine-tuning and original LoRA), the present (different variants of LoRA), and propose simpler, cheaper, parameter-efficient extensions by inducing sparsity within existing LoRA variants: Cheap LoRA (cLA), training a single low-rank factor with the other fixed (deterministically or, in its randomized variant, stochastically), and the chained circulant variant, ${c}^3$LA. We frame cLA as a structured instance of asymmetric LoRA, serving as a controlled column-subspace restriction of full fine-tuning. We derive information-theoretic generalization error bounds for these variants, marking one of the first endeavors in this area. Empirically, we evaluate 11 fine-tuning methods across 10 pre-trained models and 14 datasets, analyzing the fine-tuned models' performance and generalization using tools such as loss landscapes and spectral analysis. Despite the sensitivity of fine-tuned models to the pre-trained model, datasets, and other factors, our study suggests that restricting LoRA-based PEFT methods' adaptation to a sparse, structured column space remains competitive across tasks with their parameter-matched baselines while reducing up to 10% training time and peak GPU memory up to 15%, even with a naïve, non-optimized, sparse implementation. Our theoretical and empirical generalization measures provide a more consistent and principled approach to their cost-effective adaptation than commonly used analytical tools. Overview and code are available at: https://elicaden.github.io/Beyond_LoRA/.