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

Graph Regularized Non-negative Reduced Biquaternion Matrix Factorization for Color Image Recognition

Non-negative reduced biquaternion matrix factorization (NRBMF) uses the product of reduced biquaternion (RB) matrices to incorporate the non-negativity constraints of color image pixels into the factorization process. However, NRBMF mainly focuses on reconstruction accuracy and does not explicitly exploit the local geometric structure of image data, which may limit the discriminative ability of the obtained low-dimensional coefficient representations. To address this issue, we propose a graph regularized non-negative reduced biquaternion matrix factorization (GNRBMF) model for color image recognition. The proposed model incorporates a graph Laplacian regularizer into the reduced biquaternion coefficient matrix, encouraging nearby samples in the original space to have similar coefficient representations. Meanwhile, GNRBMF retains the non-negativity property of NRBMF in the reduced biquaternion algebra. To solve the optimization problem, a component-wise alternating projected gradient algorithm is derived, and its convergence properties are analyzed. Experimental results on three color image datasets show that the proposed GNRBMF model achieves competitive or superior recognition performance compared with several methods in most tested settings.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

LLM agent safety, multi-turn red-teaming, jailbreak benchmarks, adversarial robustness, safety-critical systems

arXiv:2606.20408v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly proposed as supervisory components for safety-critical systems, yet their robustness under sustained, adaptive adversarial pressure remains poorly characterized. We present NRT-Bench, a benchmark for multi-turn red-teaming of LLM agents acting as operators of a safety-critical system, instantiated in a simulated nuclear power plant control room. A five-role operator team, each backed by a configurable LLM, runs a plant governed by six critical safety functions (CSFs), while adversaries inject messages over four channels in bounded multi-turn sessions with per-turn feedback. Harm is an objective signal rather than LLM-judged text: a run terminates the moment any CSF is lost, attributed to the causing message. Evaluating four frontier operator models under a fixed-attack paired-replay protocol, we find that adaptive multi-turn attacks reliably push the operator team past a safety limit: across the four models, between 8.7% and 12.1% of attack sessions end with the plant losing a critical safety function. Although the four models look almost equally robust by this aggregate rate, their failures barely overlap: of $149$ sessions, none defeat all four models while a third defeat at least one, so vulnerabilities are nearly disjoint across models rather than nested. The effect of added defences is strongly model-dependent: the same guardrail stack or safety-advisor agent that lowers attack success for one model can raise it for another. We release the simulation venue, attack dataset, and replay tooling for reproducible safety evaluation of LLM agents.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Moderating Illicit Online Image Promotion for Unsafe User-Generated Content Games Using Large Vision-Language Models

Online user generated content games (UGCGs) are increasingly popular among children and adolescents for social interaction and more creative online entertainment. However, they pose a heightened risk of exposure to explicit content, raising growing concerns for the online safety of children and adolescents. Despite these concerns, few studies have addressed the issue of illicit image-based promotions of unsafe UGCGs on social media, which can inadvertently attract young users. This challenge arises from the difficulty of obtaining comprehensive training data for UGCG images and the unique nature of these images, which differ from traditional unsafe content. In this work, we take the first step towards studying the threat of illicit promotions of unsafe UGCGs. We collect a real-world dataset comprising 2,924 images that display diverse sexually explicit and violent content used to promote UGCGs by their game creators. Our in-depth studies reveal a new understanding of this problem and the urgent need for automatically flagging illicit UGCG promotions. We additionally create a cutting-edge system, UGCG-Guard, designed to aid social media platforms in effectively identifying images used for illicit UGCG promotions. This system leverages recently introduced large vision-language models (VLMs) and employs a novel conditional prompting strategy for zero-shot domain adaptation, along with chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning for contextual identification. UGCG-Guard achieves outstanding results, with an accuracy rate of 94% in detecting these images used for the illicit promotion of such games in real-world scenarios.

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

HiLo-Token: Input-Adaptive High-Low Frequency Token Compression for Efficient Image Editing

Creative image editing tools, such as Photoshop's Remove or Generative Fill buttons, are central to everyday customer use and account for a major share of traffic in Photoshop and Lightroom. However, current generative AI models face significant latency challenges, which become even more pronounced when transitioning from convolution-based U-Nets to Diffusion Transformers (DiTs). In our evaluation on hundreds of representative image editing samples spanning a wide range of mask ratios, the DiT module alone accounts for an average of 73% of the total model latency, even after being distilled from 50 timesteps down to 8 timesteps. To tackle this challenge, we propose $HiLo-Token$, an input-adaptive token compression framework that allocates more token budget to high-frequency, rich-context regions while assigning fewer tokens to low-frequency areas. Specifically, for the editing region specified by the user mask, we retain all tokens within a dilated mask to preserve strong locality and contextual relevance. Outside the editing region, we introduce a simple yet effective high-frequency token selection strategy based on spatial frequency to capture important local details, while using tokens from a 16x downsampled image to represent low-frequency components and preserve the blurry but global structure. Extensive experiments on production-level evaluation data validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, achieving 3.13x, 2.59x, and 1.67x DiT speedups on A100-80GB for image editing tasks across small, medium, and large mask ratio categories with average ratios of 6.38%, 15.92%, and 35.36%, respectively, without any regression in generation quality.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

When Poison Fails After Retrieval: Revisiting Corpus Poisoning under Chunking and Reranking Pipelines

arXiv:2606.11265v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are vulnerable to corpus poisoning attacks that manipulate downstream model outputs through malicious knowledge injection. Existing studies mainly evaluate poisoning under simplified retrieval settings, overlooking practical RAG pipelines involving document chunking, dense retrieval, reranking, and grounded generation. In this paper, we revisit corpus poisoning under realistic multi-stage retrieval pipelines and show that many existing attacks substantially degrade after reranking despite achieving high retrieval-stage relevance. We identify retrieval granularity mismatch as a key reason for this failure: document-level adversarial signals are often fragmented during chunking, while rerankers favor locally coherent and answer-bearing passages rather than globally optimized semantic similarity. Based on this observation, we propose Chunk-aware and Rerank-Consistent Poisoning (CRCP), a poisoning framework that jointly optimizes retrieval relevance, reranker consistency, and chunk-boundary robustness. CRCP explicitly models chunking transformations during optimization to generate locally self-contained adversarial passages that remain effective under varying chunking configurations. Experiments on standard RAG benchmarks with multiple retrievers and rerankers show that existing poisoning methods are highly sensitive to chunk size and reranking strategies, whereas CRCP achieves substantially higher attack success rates and stronger robustness across realistic retrieval pipelines. Our findings highlight an important realism gap in current RAG security evaluation and suggest that poisoning in modern RAG systems should be studied as a multi-stage retrieval consistency problem rather than a retrieval-only problem.

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

Skeleton Sparsification and Densification Scale-Spaces

The Hamilton-Jacobi skeleton, also known as the medial axis, is a powerful shape descriptor that represents binary objects in terms of the centres of maximal inscribed discs. Despite its broad applicability, the medial axis suffers from sensitivity to noise: Minor boundary variations can lead to disproportionately large and undesirable expansions of the skeleton. Classical pruning methods mitigate this shortcoming by systematically removing extraneous skeletal branches. This sequential simplification of skeletons resembles the principle of sparsification scale-spaces that embed images into a family of reconstructions from increasingly sparse pixel representations. We combine both worlds by introducing skeletonisation scale-spaces: They leverage sparsification of the medial axis to achieve hierarchical simplification of shapes. Unlike conventional pruning, our framework inherently satisfies key scale-space properties such as hierarchical architecture, controllable simplification, and equivariance to geometric transformations. We provide a rigorous theoretical foundation in both continuous and discrete formulations and extend the concept further with densification. By growing the skeleton successively instead of shrinking it, we allow inverse progression from coarse to fine scales. Densification scale-spaces can even reach beyond the original skeleton to produce overcomplete shape representations with relevancy for practical applications. Through proof-of-concept experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework for practical tasks including robust skeletonisation, shape compression, and stiffness enhancement for additive manufacturing.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

PRISM: Prosody-Integrated Multi-Agent Reasoning Framework for Empathetic Spoken Dialogue

Empathetic spoken dialogue systems require not only semantically appropriate responses but also emotionally aligned prosodic expression. However, cascade pipelines often discard acoustic cues during speech-to-text conversion, while end-to-end speech models lack interpretable control over emotion and knowledge integration. To address these challenges, we propose PRISM, a multi-agent framework for empathetic spoken dialogue that decouples speech perception, response generation, and speech synthesis into coordinated components. PRISM introduces a prosody-to-language translation mechanism to stabilize large language model reasoning and enables on-demand invocation of external knowledge tools for empathetic dialogue generation. Experimental results demonstrate that PRISM achieves consistent improvements in empathy, prosodic appropriateness, and text response generation quality across objective and subjective metrics. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Bxzfrm/PRISM.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Mod-Guide: An LLM-based Content Moderation Feedback System to Address Insensitive Speech toward Indigenous Ethnic and Religious Minority Communities

arXiv:2606.13397v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language operates as a mechanism of both marginalization and resistance, especially for minority communities navigating insensitive and harmful speech online. As content moderation increasingly depends on large language models (LLMs), concerns arise about whether these systems can recognize culturally insensitive speech-language that disregards or marginalizes the cultural and religious perspectives of historically underrepresented communities, often through implicit erasure, misrepresentation, or normative framing, rather than overt hostility. Focusing on Bangladesh's Hindu and Chakma communities – the country's largest religious and Indigenous ethnic minorities, respectively – this paper investigates the epistemic limits of LLM-based moderation systems and explores methods for incorporating minority perspectives. We co-created a culturally grounded corpus of insensitive speech with community members and integrated their narratives into moderation pipelines using retrieval augmented generation (RAG). Our tool, Mod-Guide, improves LLM sensitivity to minority viewpoints by leveraging contextual cues derived from lived experience. Through mixed-method evaluations involving both minority and majority participants, we demonstrate that RAG-enhanced moderation responses are more contextually accurate and perceived differently across ethnic lines. This work advances research in human-computer interaction, AI ethics, and social computing by foregrounding restorative justice and hermeneutical inclusion in the design of content moderation systems.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Distill Once, Adapt Life-Long: Exploring Dataset Distillation for Continual Test-Time Adaptation

Continual Test-Time Adaptation (CTTA) aims to maintain model performance under evolving target domains by adapting online without labeled data. However, practical deployments often cannot retain the source dataset due to privacy or licensing constraints, and purely source-free CTTA methods tend to become unstable under long-term distribution shift, suffering from compounding self-training errors and catastrophic forgetting. We introduce DO-ALL (Distill Once, Adapt Life-Long), a plug-and-play framework that revisits source information in a compact and privacy-conscious form via Dataset Distillation (DD). Before deployment, DO-ALL performs DD to produce a small set of synthetic distilled anchors that summarize the source distribution. During adaptation, each target sample is matched with its most semantically aligned anchor, which provides a stable reference for various CTTA via source replay, representation alignment, and manifold-smoothing regularization. DO-ALL can be seamlessly integrated into existing CTTA algorithms, consistently improving long-term robustness across CIFAR100-C, ImageNet-C, and the CCC benchmark. This demonstrates the potential of leveraging DD to enable stable and continuous adaptation without retaining raw source data. The code is available at https://github.com/blue-531/DOALL.

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

Learning with Simulators: No Regret in a Computationally Bounded World

arXiv:2606.13576v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding the minimal assumptions necessary for generalization is the fundamental question in learning theory. Unfortunately, most results rely heavily on independence (or some proxy thereof) of the data-generating process, while results for strongly dependent data are far more limited. Towards addressing this gap, we introduce the framework of simulatable processes, where the learner has access to a simulator that approximates the distribution generating the data (which may be an arbitrarily complex and dependent process). Surprisingly, given access to such a simulator, we show that we can recover the same learning guarantees as in the classical setting with independent data, namely, error bounds that depend on the VC dimension. Further, we use this framework to study the power of conditional sampling and show strict statistical and computational advantages in this setting. As a highlight of our framework, we exhibit a single algorithm that simultaneously learns any given VC class under all processes samplable in bounded polynomial time, with regret controlled by the time-bounded Kolmogorov complexity of the process. This provides a significant conceptual broadening of the classical PAC model.

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

Nonlocal Bayesian Modeling of Continuous Spatio-Temporal Dynamics

arXiv:2606.14313v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-world spatio-temporal forecasting must handle irregular time points, spatially sparse observations, and the need for uncertainty quantification. This setting is often further compounded by nonlocal interactions (long-range spatial coupling). Modeling continuous-space, continuous-time nonlocal dynamics naturally leads to infinite-dimensional integro-differential equations (IDEs), making principled Bayesian inference intractable. We propose the NonLocal Bayesian Spatio-Temporal model (NLBST), a hierarchical Bayesian framework for continuous spatio-temporal fields that learns explicit nonlocal coupling while retaining tractable inference. NLBST represents the latent field via a coordinate-based spatial basis expansion and models the coefficient process with a continuous-time ODE whose learnable linear operator corresponds to a Galerkin reduction of a nonlocal IDE; a Neural ODE residual captures additional nonlinear dynamics. A linear-Gaussian observation model enables Kalman-style sequential updates under missing and irregular observations, while the spatial basis representation enables inductive prediction at unmeasured locations without retraining. Global parameters are learned via variational inference, and uncertainty is handled through a Bayesian hierarchy. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate strong forecasting and spatial generalization with well-calibrated uncertainty, yielding substantial gains over baselines in strongly nonlocal and partially observed regimes.

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

A Two-Phase Stability Study of LLM Judges and Bar Council Examiners on Thai Bar-Exam Free-Form Essays

Free-form legal essay evaluation in NLP treats expert inter-rater stability as a single ceiling number, and treats LLM-judge agreement with that ceiling as evidence of judge stability. We test both assumptions on the Thai bar examination through an identical-inputs protocol: three Bar Council-trained examiners (A, B, C) and a 26-LLM judge panel score the same 15 cross-graded answers from the same four inputs (question, official Bar Council grading regulation, gold answer, candidate answer). The headline finding is asymmetric. On 10 of 15 cells where the rubric prescribes both axes, all 29 raters converge in a tight band: panel agreement is universal. On the remaining 5 cells where the rubric does not prescribe how to grade a correct final answer that omits a decisive statutory citation, the human panel splits between two coherent readings (B/C majority at the upper rubric band, score 6-8; A minority at the lower band, score 1-2). The LLM judge population does not split symmetrically: 22 of 26 LLMs score in or near B/C's contested band, 3 sit in the regulation-silent middle gap, and only 1 (GPT-5.4 Nano) approaches A's band without consistently scoring within it. Zero LLMs in our 26-judge panel reproduce the minority human reading on the contested cells. The B/C-direction cluster spans every model size, vendor, and price tier we tested. An instrumented three-LLM anchor sub-panel (Claude 4.6 Opus, Gemini 3.1 Pro, GPT-5.4 Pro) carries determinism probes, input ablations, and bootstrap CIs, and reaches anchor panel $\alpha = 0.77$ on the 15 cells against human-panel $\alpha = 0.36$. The high LLM-panel $\alpha$ reflects systematic convergence on the majority reading rather than balanced reproduction of both readings; a benchmark that selects its LLM judge by maximising agreement with a human reference panel will inherit this asymmetry by construction.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

SuCo: Sufficiency-guided Continuous Adaptive Reasoning

Despite remarkable performance on complex tasks, Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) often generate excessively long Chain-of-Thoughts (CoT), inflating computational costs even for simple queries. Existing efforts to mitigate this inefficiency typically rely on discrete reasoning modes or fixed budget tiers, lacking a principled criterion of when reasoning is sufficient. In this work, we introduce Minimal Sufficient CoT (MSC), defined as the shortest prefix of a CoT trajectory which is adequate for producing the correct answer. We empirically show that MSC not only reduces reasoning tokens, but also improves accuracy across difficulty levels. Building on MSC, we propose Sufficiency-guided Continuous Adaptive Reasoning (SuCo), a two-stage training framework for autonomous reasoning control along a continuous spectrum. In stage 1, MSC-Aligned Fine-Tuning (MFT) constructs MSC data using problem-adaptive sufficiency thresholds that naturally scale with question difficulty, then fine-tunes the model to internalize concise yet sufficient reasoning patterns. In stage 2, Sufficiency-Aware Policy Optimization (SAPO) further optimizes the model through reinforcement learning with dynamic complexity tracking and sufficiency-aware rewards that penalize both over- and under-thinking. Extensive experiments across mathematics, code, and science benchmarks show that SuCo consistently achieves improvements in both accuracy and reasoning efficiency.

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

Privacy from Symmetry: Orthogonally Equivariant Transformers for LLM Inference

arXiv:2606.16461v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Running large language models locally is often impractical, pushing inference on sensitive text to third-party providers. Split inference partially mitigates this by keeping tokens on the client and sending only hidden representations, but these representations can still be recovered via nearest-neighbor search against the public embedding table. We propose an orthogonal obfuscation procedure in which the client multiplies embeddings by a secret orthogonal matrix before transmission. To enable correct inference under arbitrary rotations, we introduce ConjFormer, a transformer variant that is exactly $\mathrm{O}(d)$-equivariant via a lightweight normalization change (scalar RMSNorm) together with blockwise orthogonal conjugation of all linear weights. As a result, the server performs the full forward pass entirely in the rotated basis and never observes unrotated hidden states. Experiments on GPT-2 and Llama 3.2 1B models fine-tuned on PubMed show that orthogonal obfuscation eliminates direct cosine nearest-neighbor inversion and reduces token recovery from over 35% top-10 to at most 1.3%, while increasing perplexity by only 0.4% after fine-tuning. These results indicate that enforcing symmetry at the architectural level can provide a practical defense for privacy-preserving LLM inference without noise injection or heavy cryptographic machinery.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Unlocking Diffusion Hierarchies: Adaptive Timestep Selection for Zero-Shot Segmentation

Zero-shot segmentation has recently shown notable improvement by leveraging the rich visual priors in large-scale text-to-image diffusion models, such as Stable Diffusion. However, current diffusion-based methods often face limitations due to the trade-off between spatial resolution and contextual information, as well as their reliance on a single static timestep for feature extraction. To overcome these challenges, our work introduces two key advancements. First, our Contextual Similarity Maps fuse high-resolution attention maps with rich U-Net encoder features, providing both fine-grained and robust per-pixel representations. Second, we identify an emergent hierarchical semantic progression within the denoising process of various diffusion models: representations transition from part-level abstractions at earlier timesteps to object-level abstractions at later stages. Leveraging this insight, we introduce a mechanism to adaptively select the optimal timestep for each pixel. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing zero-shot segmentation baselines, validating the efficacy of combining contextual features with dynamic, hierarchical timestep selection.

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

RAGPPI: RAG Benchmark for Protein-Protein Interactions in Drug Discovery

Retrieving the biological impacts of protein-protein interactions (PPIs) is essential for target identification (Target ID) in drug development. Given the vast number of proteins involved, this process remains time-consuming and challenging. Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) frameworks have supported Target ID; however, no benchmark currently exists for identifying the biological impacts of PPIs. To bridge this gap, we introduce the RAG Benchmark for PPIs (RAGPPI), a factual question-answer benchmark of 4,420 question-answer pairs that focus on the potential biological impacts of PPIs. Through interviews with experts, we identified criteria for a benchmark dataset, such as a type of QA and source. We built a gold-standard dataset (500 QA pairs) through expert-driven data annotation. We developed an ensemble auto-evaluation LLM that incorporates expert labeling characteristics, average fact-abstract similarity (F1), and low-similarity fact counts (F2), enabling the construction of a silver-standard dataset (3,720 QA pairs). We are committed to maintaining RAGPPI as a resource to support the research community in advancing RAG systems for drug discovery QA solutions.

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

Electromagnetic Wightman functions and vacuum densities for a brane intersecting the AdS boundary

arXiv:2604.17583v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We investigate the combined effects of a brane intersecting the AdS boundary and background gravitational field on the local characteristics of the electromagnetic vacuum. Two types of boundary conditions on the brane are considered, which are higher-dimensional generalizations of the perfect electric (PEC) and perfect magnetic (PMC) boundary conditions in Maxwell's electrodynamics. The brane-induced contributions to the Wightman functions of the vector potential and field tensor are explicitly extracted. Simple expressions in terms of elementary functions are provided. The behavior of the vacuum expectation values (VEVs) is mimicked by a scalar field with a negative effective mass squared determined by the radius of the AdS spacetime. The expectation values of the electric and magnetic fields squares and of the energy-momentum tensor are investigated as local characteristics of the vacuum state. The brane-induced contributions to these VEVs have opposite signs for the PEC and PMC conditions. For the PMC condition, this contribution is negative for the electric field squared and positive for the magnetic field squared. The VEV of the energy-momentum tensor has a nonzero off-diagonal component. The brane-induced vacuum energy density is positive for PMC condition, whereas the normal and parallel stresses change sign as functions of the distance from the brane. Unlike the problem involving a planar boundary in the Minkowski bulk, the vacuum energy-momentum tensor does not vanish in (3+1)-dimensional AdS spacetime.

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

Examining the Limits of Word2Vec with Toki Pona

Word2Vec's effectiveness at generating semantic embeddings has been widely validated, yet it has been tested almost exclusively on languages with large vocabulary inventories. This study examines whether Word2Vec can successfully capture semantic relationships within an extremely reduced vocabulary using data from Toki Pona, a constructed language with approximately 130 words. We sourced 1.4 million sentences (7.95 million tokens) from the Toki Pona community for training. Approximately 23% of sentences in the corpus contain non-Toki Pona tokens such as named entities, loanwords, and neologisms. To investigate whether this linguistic noise enhances or hinders performance – a topic rarely addressed in word embedding literature – we trained two distinct models: one retaining these incidental tokens and another filtering them out completely. Evaluation was conducted using quantitative methods measuring word proximity to semantic category centroids, automated silhouette scores via agglomerative clustering, and qualitative analysis utilizing representational similarity matrices compared against English. The results indicate that while sparse, non-core tokens do not affect the relative structure of the learned embeddings, they actually draw similar words closer together in the vector space. Importantly, Word2Vec's effectiveness depends more on distributional patterns than lexicon size even at this extreme lower bound.

19.
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/.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Reassessing Instrument Strength in Two-Sample Mendelian Randomization Analysis

Mendelian randomization (MR) analysis is widely used to estimate causal relationships between risk factors and outcomes of interest. Two-sample MR approaches have gained increasing attention in genetic epidemiology due to the growing availability of Genome-Wide Association Study (GWAS) summary statistics from public databases. A critical step in two-sample MR is the selection of genetic variants as instrumental variables (IVs). Although genome-wide significant variants are typically preferred, the inclusion of variants with weaker association p-values is considered, as they may potentially improve power through an increased instrument number of instruments, while they may introduce weak instrument bias and attenuate effect estimates towards the null. Our simulation results show that even modest levels of pleiotropy substantially increase the variability of causal effect estimates, while the inclusion of weak IVs does not substantially affect the direction and variability of causal effect estimates in most cases. In real data analyses, we used two released versions of FinnGen GWAS summary statistics with different sample sizes as exposure GWASs to assess the influence of weak IVs. Here, the inclusion of IVs with higher exposure-association p-values resulted in weakened estimated effect sizes, particularly when the exposure GWAS sample size was small. These findings suggest that incorporating weak IVs is reasonable when the exposure GWAS sample size is large, but it poses a risk of falsely concluding null associations when the exposure GWAS sample size is small.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Post-Selection Probability and Fidelity of Bidirectional Teleportation

arXiv:2606.17251v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding the scrambling of quantum information is central to many areas of quantum physics, including quantum thermalization, entanglement growth, and quantum information processing. Insights from these studies have, in turn, inspired the development of novel quantum protocols and algorithms. Recently, a bidirectional teleportation protocol was proposed to implement a digital SWAP operation between qubits by leveraging chaotic Hamiltonian evolution combined with measurement and post-selection. In this work, we provide a comprehensive study of two central quantities that characterize the protocol, the post-selection probability and the fidelity, taking into account possible errors in time-reversed dynamics. We show that these quantities can be expressed in terms of standard diagnostics in quantum dynamics, including the Loschmidt echo and its subsystem variant. The results unveil (1) the initial-state dependence of the fidelity and (2) the stability of the post-selection probability in integrable models. Our findings offer practical guidance for the implementation of the protocol on realistic quantum devices.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

MeshPad: Interactive Sketch-Conditioned Artist-Reminiscent Mesh Generation and Editing

We introduce MeshPad, a generative approach that creates 3D meshes from sketch inputs. Building on recent advances in artist-reminiscent triangle mesh generation, our approach addresses the need for interactive mesh creation. To this end, we focus on enabling consistent edits by decomposing editing into 'deletion' of regions of a mesh, followed by 'addition' of new mesh geometry. Both operations are invoked by simple user edits of a sketch image, facilitating an iterative content creation process and enabling the construction of complex 3D meshes. Our approach is based on a triangle sequence-based mesh representation, exploiting a large Transformer model for mesh triangle addition and deletion. In order to perform edits interactively, we introduce a vertex-aligned speculative prediction strategy on top of our additive mesh generator. This speculator predicts multiple output tokens corresponding to a vertex, thus significantly reducing the computational cost of inference and accelerating the editing process, making it possible to execute each editing step in only a few seconds. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that MeshPad outperforms state-of-the-art sketch-conditioned mesh generation methods, achieving more than 22% mesh quality improvement in Chamfer distance, and being preferred by 90% of participants in perceptual evaluations.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Direct/adaptive-mixture phase-gradient learning for neural-network quantum states with complex phase structure

arXiv:2606.13912v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural-network quantum states (NQS) are a leading variational tool for quantum many-body physics, yet their optimization is fragile whenever the ground state carries a non-trivial sign or complex phase structure, a situation generic to gauge fields, broken time-reversal symmetry, and fermionic statistics. We trace this fragility to the stochastic estimator of the phase gradient rather than to network expressiveness. The phase sector of the Monte Carlo energy gradient is a noisy score-function estimator; differentiating the local energy instead yields a direct estimator that is unbiased for the same phase force, has far lower variance, and requires only a separated amplitude–phase ansatz. Demonstrated on a 100-site flux ladder, a small network trained this way reaches $0.89\%$ median error, where tuned standard baselines plateau at $1.8\%$ and wider or deeper standard-gradient networks degrade from $8.4\%$ to $24.6\%$. The advantage carries over to chiral XXX chains: the direct estimator again converges to a markedly lower error than the standard one, across $\alpha$ and size; it grows with flux and vanishes in zero-flux controls. An adaptive-mixture of the two estimators is provably never worse in variance than the better endpoint at the optimal mixing coefficient, with seed-resolved diagnostics tracing much of the gain to eliminating failed runs. Estimator design thus emerges as a first-class lever for complex-valued neural quantum states.

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

NeuralMUSIC: A Hybrid Neural-Subspace Framework for Robot Sound Source Localization

arXiv:2606.18664v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reliable sound source localization is fundamental to robot audition, enabling autonomous robots to perceive spatial cues and operate effectively in dynamic environments. Classical methods such as Multiple Signal Classification (MUSIC) offer strong theoretical foundations but degrade under low signal-to-noise ratios. While deep learning-based approaches achieve promising performance, they often struggle with limited generalization across conditions. To address these challenges, we propose NeuralMUSIC, a hybrid neural-subspace framework for robotic sound source localization. Specifically, a neural network first estimates the spatial covariance matrix from multichannel microphone observations. The predicted covariance is then integrated into a classical MUSIC pipeline with eigenvalue decomposition (EVD) and pseudo-spectrum computation, followed by a Frequency Attention Fusion (FAF) module to produce the final DOA estimates. To improve data efficiency, we further introduce a Self-supervised Spatial Correlation Learning (SSCL) strategy that leverages unlabeled acoustic data to capture spatial structure. Extensive experiments across different robotic tasks demonstrate that NeuralMUSIC achieves competitive localization accuracy while exhibiting improved robustness and cross-domain generalization.