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

Edit3DGS: Unified Framework for Dynamic Head Editing via 2D Instruction-Guided Diffusion and 3D Gaussian Splatting

We present Edit3DGS, a unified framework for dynamic 3D head editing that integrates 2D instruction-guided diffusion with 3D Gaussian splatting. Unlike prior approaches that separately address frame-based edits or static 3D reconstruction, our method couples semantic controllability in the image domain with photorealistic, temporally consistent 3D representations. Given an input video, editable facial regions are masked and modified using a text-conditioned diffusion model to support fine-grained operations such as expression transformation, attribute modification, and appearance refinement. The edited frames are then aggregated through 3D Gaussian splatting to produce a coherent, high-fidelity avatar that preserves both identity and motion dynamics. To enforce consistency, Edit3DGS incorporates multi-view batch editing and lightweight inpainting strategies that recover lost expressions across timesteps. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework enables controllable, artifact-free head editing with smooth temporal transitions, offering practical applications in virtual avatars, immersive communication, film production, and interactive media.

02.
Science (Express) 2026-05-21

Nodeless superconducting gap and electron-boson coupling in (La,Pr,Sm)3Ni2O7 films | Science

Authors: Unknown Author

The discovery of superconductivity in Ruddlesden-Popper (RP) bilayer nickelate films under ambient pressure provides an opportunity to directly investigate electronic energy scales of the superconducting state and the pairing mechanism. We report angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy measurements of superconducting (La,Pr,Sm) 3 Ni 2 O 7 thin films by developing an ultra-high vacuum cryogenic sample quenching and transfer technique. A superconducting gap of ~18 meV with coherence peaks is observed along the Brillouin zone diagonal. The finite gap persists across the entire Brillouin zone, revealing the absence of gap nodes. A kink is observed in the energy-momentum dispersion at ~70 meV below Fermi level, indicating an electron-boson coupling. The simultaneous observation of a nodeless superconducting gap and electron-boson coupling provides insight into the pairing symmetry and gluing mechanism in RP bilayer nickelates.

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

Fluently Lying: Adversarial Robustness Can Be Substrate-Dependent

The primary tools used to monitor and defend object detectors under adversarial attack assume that when accuracy degrades, detection count drops in tandem. This coupling was assumed, not measured. We report a counterexample observed on a single model: under standard PGD, EMS-YOLO, a spiking neural network (SNN) object detector, retains more than 70% of its detections while mAP collapses from 0.528 to 0.042. We term this count-preserving accuracy collapse Quality Corruption (QC), to distinguish it from the suppression that dominates untargeted evaluation. Across four SNN architectures and two threat models (l-infinity and l-2), QC appears only in one of the four detectors tested (EMS-YOLO). On this model, all five standard defense components fail to detect or mitigate QC, suggesting the defense ecosystem may rely on a shared assumption calibrated on a single substrate. These results provide, to our knowledge, the first evidence that adversarial failure modes can be substrate-dependent.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Coherent Control of an Embedded Bound State Without a Spectral Gap

Authors:

arXiv:2606.17685v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bound states in the continuum (BICs) can confine photonic excitations in open systems without conventional cavities or band gaps, making them natural candidates for long-lived quantum storage and single-photon control. Their use is limited, however, by two obstacles: they are dark to incident photons, and they lack spectral-gap protection from the surrounding continuum. We overcome both limitations in a giant atom coupled to a one-dimensional waveguide using two temporal control knobs. Atomic-frequency modulation breaks and restores the destructive-interference condition, enabling deterministic capture and release of mode-matched single photons. Coupling modulation instead preserves the BIC condition while tuning the atomic and photonic weights of the stored state. A key result is that this embedded state can nevertheless be controlled adiabatically despite the absence of a spectral gap, with an intrinsic leakage probability linear in the ramp rate. By separating radiative access from BIC-preserving deformation, the protocol turns a dark BIC into a single-photon memory whose fidelity is set by the intrinsic continuum-induced leakage law, providing a route to embedded-state control in open photonic platforms.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

eCNNTO: A Highly Generalizable ConvNet for Accelerating Topology Optimization

arXiv:2606.19921v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This work proposes an element-based Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to accelerate density-based Topology Optimization (TO), termed eCNNTO. TO generally undergoes a large number of iterations, where finite element analysis is performed in every iteration, leading to the efficiency bottleneck especially when dense meshes are used to achieve high-resolution designs. To address this limitation, eCNNTO is proposed to build upon Kallioras et al. (2020), where a Deep Belief Network (DBN) was trained for every element to predict its near-optimal density from its early history, thereby skipping the great majority of iterations and significantly accelerating the TO procedure. However, the method lacks spatial correlations among neighboring elements and may lead to disconnected features in the final structure. The proposed method employs CNN with residual connections to address this issue. On top of it, a novel training strategy is introduced to further enhance the optimization efficiency, where the training dataset consists of the final stage density histories rather than early ones. This change can also help reduce the required training data size. eCNNTO requires only a small dataset to train and yet it can be generalized to problems with largely different boundary conditions, loading cases, design domain geometries, mesh resolutions, as well as non-design domains. In the end, the generalization capabilities and efficiency of eCNNTO are demonstrated through a variety of examples in two and three dimensions, achieving up to 90% and 97% reduction of iterations, respectively.

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

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

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

07.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

The $K$-th nearest neighbor random walk on a Poisson point process gets trapped

arXiv:2606.11271v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The $K$-th nearest neighbor random walk $(X_n)_{n \geq 0}$ on a homogeneous Poisson point process $\chi$ on $\R^d$ ($d\geq 1$), starts at the origin and at each step picks its next Poisson point among its closest neighbors according to i.i.d. labels having the same distribution as $K$. Our main result (Theorem 1) states that the number of Poisson points visited by $(X_n)_{n \geq 0}$ admits an exponential decay whenever the random variable $K$ has a bounded support (BS). In particular, the $K$-th nearest neighbor random walk visits finitely many Poisson points if and only if $K$ satisfies Assumption (BS). To prove it, we introduce the key notion of pioneer point which allows us to deal with the region of $\R^d$ already explored by $(X_n)_{n \geq 0}$. Still under Assumption (BS), we also prove an exponential decay for the Euclidean length of the trajectory performed by $(X_n)_{n \geq 0}$ (Theorem 2). Finally, and quite surprisingly, we exhibit an example of label distribution with bounded support for which the $K$-th nearest neighbor random walk discovers new Poisson points after a number of steps whose tail distribution is at least polynomial (Theorem 3).

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Demonstration of Exponential Quantum Speedup with Constant-Depth Compiled Circuits for Simon's Problem

arXiv:2604.27457v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We demonstrate exponential algorithmic quantum speedup for a restricted-Hamming-weight version of Simon's problem, in which the hidden string $b$ is promised to satisfy $HW(b)\le w$ for a Hamming-weight cutoff $w$, on present-day superconducting quantum processors. We introduce a hardware-aware compilation strategy that reduces the quantum part of each Simon query circuit to constant depth. The resulting compiled circuits have $O(1)$ depth, require only linear nearest-neighbor connectivity, map directly onto common device layouts, and avoid additional routing and SWAP overhead. Implemented on IBM's $156$-qubit Boston and $120$-qubit Miami processors, these circuits achieve sufficient fidelity to exhibit algorithmic quantum speedup without error suppression. Using the number-of-queries-to-solution (NTS) metric, we observe exponential speedup over the classical lower-bound benchmark for all restricted-Hamming-weight cutoffs $w\ge 4$ on Boston and across low-to-intermediate Hamming-weight cutoffs on Miami; at higher Hamming-weight cutoffs on Miami, we still observe polynomial speedup. The same construction also enables unrestricted instances of Simon's problem, corresponding to $w=n$ for problem size $n$, over the finite problem-size ranges for which our NTS computation is feasible; in this regime, the observed scaling advantage is not limited to the restricted-Hamming-weight setting. These results show that careful hardware-aware compilation can make quantum speedup experimentally accessible for a canonical hidden-subgroup problem in the NISQ regime.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

The Algebra of Units: From Buckingham's Pi-grec Theorem to Latent-Variable Learning

arXiv:2606.16737v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Engineers often measure many quantities-speed, pressure, temperature, length-expressed in different physical units. The Buckingham Pi-grec theorem states that these variables can always be combined into a smaller set of dimensionless numbers whose values fully determine the system's behaviour. Identifying the appropriate dimensionless groups has traditionally required expert knowledge and physical insight. This paper shows that they can instead be discovered automatically from data, without prior knowledge of the governing physics. The key observation is that, after logarithmic transformation, measurements collected under different scalings of the same system lie on a low-dimensional manifold whose geometry is determined by the underlying dimensionless groups. Singular value decomposition (SVD) identifies this manifold directly from data. A subsequent search over integer-exponent combinations recovers candidate dimensionless quantities, while a repeating-variable filter retains only those constructed from the machine's characteristic scales. This procedure recovers familiar engineering groups, including the flow coefficient, head coefficient, and Mach number, while excluding equivalent but less interpretable alternatives. The method is demonstrated on a synthetic compressor dataset containing 16,000 measurements. Starting from raw dimensional variables and no physics input, it recovers the correct dimensionless groups to numerical precision and reproduces the compressor performance map with an error below 0.01%. More broadly, the work reveals a close connection between classical dimensional analysis and modern data-driven learning. Both rely on the same underlying algebraic structure, suggesting new approaches for building physical models that are simultaneously interpretable, scalable, and data-efficient.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

RefGC-SR$^2$: Reference-guided Generated Content Super-Resolution and Refinement

Reference-guided generation (e.g., object compositing, customization) has progressed rapidly, yet current pipelines share a fundamental limitation: the object-centric high-resolution reference image (HRRI) provided by users is downsampled to a fixed low-resolution (LR) before being fed into the model, so the fine-grained details are discarded before the output is even produced. In addition, the generation step then introduces its own artifacts (e.g., identity distortion) on top of this loss. Existing reference-guided generated content refinement (RefGCR) methods can correct some of these artifacts but still operate in the LR domain; reference-guided super-resolution (RefSR) methods recover resolution but assume natural-image degradations and ignore the artifact distribution of generative pipelines. To address both gaps in a single formulation, we introduce a new task: reference-guided generated content super-resolution-refinement (RefGC-SR$^2$), where the original HRRI is reused at the post-processing stage to recover lost details, refine generative artifacts, and upscale the output simultaneously. We construct the first real-world triplet data generation pipeline for this RefGC-SR$^2$ task, training a diptych-conditioned generator to synthesize paired low-quality anchors that public pretrained models cannot provide. We further present a frequency-aware diffusion transformer model for RefGC-SR$^2$ that selectively injects fine details from the HRRI while removing generative artifacts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our RefGC-SR$^2$ model successfully (i) refines the object identity faithfully with respect to the reference, and (ii) recovers high-resolution details, so that the final result is significantly higher quality and practically more usable compared to existing RefGCR and RefSR baselines.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Non-Hermitian skin effect induced by spatial noncommutativity

arXiv:2606.12961v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In all known schemes for the non-Hermitian skin effect, the non-Hermitian ingredient that drives the skin localization, whether asymmetric hopping or gain and loss, is invariably introduced by hand as an independent model parameter along the skin direction. Here we show that when two spatial coordinates do not commute, the skin effect can break free of this paradigm: a gain-loss potential applied along one coordinate automatically generates non-reciprocity along the other through the coordinate noncommutativity, driving all eigenstates to pile up exponentially at a boundary. We term this phenomenon the noncommutative skin effect. The inverse skin length is proportional to the noncommutativity parameter and is given by an analytic formula, exact in the thermodynamic limit and verified by exact diagonalization of lattice models; the reflection symmetry of the imaginary potential furnishes an exact criterion for the presence or absence of the effect, valid rigorously for finite-size systems. For a sinusoidal imaginary potential, the skin direction of all eigenstates flips collectively at parameter points fixed purely by geometry. Because the flip point is independent of the potential strength, the reversal constitutes a zero-crossing measurement scheme intrinsically robust against systematic errors, from which the noncommutativity parameter can be extracted directly. The qualitative transition of the eigenstates from uniform to exponentially localized renders the effect a nonperturbative probe of spatial noncommutativity, and the Peierls-phase structure of its lattice model is in principle accessible to cold-atom synthetic dimensions, photonic resonators, and topolectrical circuits.

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

FlowEdit: Associative Memory for Lifelong Pronunciation Adaptation in Flow-Matching TTS

arXiv:2606.20518v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Flow-matching text-to-speech systems achieve remarkable zero-shot quality but remain static after deployment: pronunciation errors on out-of-vocabulary proper nouns persist unless the model is retrained. We introduce FlowEdit, a life-long adaptation framework for frozen flow-matching TTS that learns pronunciation corrections as latent conditioning edits rather than weight updates. When corrective feedback is provided, FlowEdit optimizes a token-level perturbation in the text embedding space, then stores the correction in a Modern Hopfield Network serving as content-addressable episodic memory. At inference, corrections are retrieved via soft attention with a similarity gate, enabling fuzzy morphological matching. On our curated benchmark of 312 multilingual proper nouns across 18 language families, FlowEdit reduces target-word Phoneme Error Rate by 92.7% relative to the zero-shot baseline while maintaining identical general-speech quality. Corrections complete in approximately 15 seconds on a single GPU.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Localizing Anchoring Pathways in Language Models

Irrelevant numbers in a prompt can shift language model judgments, producing anchoring effects in numerical reasoning. We study where this anchor-sensitive signal is carried inside language models using a controlled multiple-choice setup with shared answer options. We define a logit-difference metric comparing the correct answer option with the answer option corresponding to the anchor, and validate that it tracks behavioral anchoring. Using attribution-based circuit localization on 7B–8B Qwen and Llama base and instruction-tuned models, we find that edge-level methods recover this signal more faithfully than node-level methods. Low- and high-anchor circuits transfer strongly within a model, suggesting shared pathway structure across anchor direction. However, sparse transfer across base and instruction-tuned variants is less reliable, indicating that post-training changes which pathways matter most. Overall, our results provide a mechanistic account of how anchoring-related decision signals are carried inside language models.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Beyond Native Success: Auditing Deployment-Interface Exposure of CLIP Backdoors

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training models are widely reused across downstream interfaces, including feature extraction, retrieval, reranking, and selection. Existing CLIP backdoor, however, usually validate attacks on a small attack-native task, leaving unclear whether the same poisoned checkpoint remains exposed, weakens, or becomes not applicable when reused through other interfaces. We introduce DIFE, a Deployment-Interface Footprint Evaluation framework that audits backdoored CLIP checkpoints across deployment interfaces. DIFE makes various evaluations comparable by specifying each interface's component readout, trigger channel, target event, reference condition, and metric. DIFE also introduces effective-footprint diagnosis to identify the reusable CLIP component or component combination that carries exposure and explains where risk transfers. Auditing reproduced CLIP backdoors with DIFE reveals a structured landscape: native success is not a checkpoint-level risk certificate, exposure follows component footprints, text-side poisoning does not yield textual-encoder control, and some coupled attacks remain mechanism-bound. This audit reveals a import gapin existing CLIP backdoors: a textual encoder that itself becomes a reusable carrier of adversarial behavior. We therefore introduce BadTextTower to fill this gap. BadTextTower produces strong text-conditioned retrieval, reranking, and selection exposure while leaving visual-only reuse nearly clean.

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

Towards CONUS-Wide ML-Augmented Conceptually-Interpretable Modeling of Catchment-Scale Precipitation-Storage-Runoff Dynamics

arXiv:2510.02605v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While many modern studies are dedicated to ML-based large-sample hydrologic modeling, these efforts have not necessarily translated into predictive improvements that are grounded in enhanced physical-conceptual understanding. Here, we report on a CONUS-wide large-sample study (spanning diverse hydro-geo-climatic conditions) using ML-augmented physically-interpretable catchment-scale models of varying complexity based in the Mass-Conserving Perceptron (MCP). Results were evaluated using attribute masks such as snow regime, forest cover, and climate zone. Our results indicate the importance of selecting model architectures of appropriate model complexity based on how process dominance varies with hydrological regime. Benchmark comparisons show that physically-interpretable mass-conserving MCP-based models can achieve performance comparable to data-based models based in the Long Short-Term Memory network (LSTM) architecture. Overall, this study highlights the potential of a theory-informed, physically grounded approach to large-sample hydrology, with emphasis on mechanistic understanding and the development of parsimonious and interpretable model architectures, thereby laying the foundation for future models of everywhere that architecturally encode information about spatially- and temporally-varying process dominance.

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

ST-DiffEye: Diffusion-based Continuous Gaze Generation via Joint Scanpath-Trajectory Modeling

We study the problem of human gaze modeling, which aims to generate the gaze patterns a viewer produces while observing a visual stimulus. Gaze is primarily captured through two modalities: continuous eye-tracking trajectories, which describe fine-grained motion dynamics, and discrete scanpaths, which describe high-level fixation structure. Because gaze varies substantially across viewers and trials, we treat this variability as a defining property rather than noise and model gaze as a stochastic generative process. Existing generative gaze models supervise on only one of these two representations in isolation. We hypothesize that trajectories and scanpaths describe gaze at complementary scales and are jointly informative during training, and test this hypothesis through ST-DiffEye, a joint trajectory-scanpath diffusion framework that couples both modalities by concatenating them as an additional raw input channel, requiring no architectural overhead beyond an input and output channel expansion. We further introduce a principled evaluation framework based on the Continuous Ranked Probability Score (CRPS), which generalizes any existing sequence similarity metric into a proper scoring rule that jointly assesses the accuracy and diversity of generated gaze. Experiments on task-driven visual search, covering both target-present and target-absent scenarios, and on free-viewing benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. These results, along with detailed ablations, confirm the benefit of joint modeling and the value of distribution-aware evaluation in capturing the intrinsic variability of human gaze. Project webpage: https://st-diffeye.github.io/

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Reliability and construct validity of the Technology Device Interference Scale in a sample of children and parents

There is increasing interest in parent-child technoference: the interference with personal interactions caused by technology devices. This study examined the reliability and construct validity of the Technology Device Interference Scale (TDIS) to measure technoference in a sample of Canadian parents and children. Parents (n=883) and children (n=376) were recruited from clinical and community settings and completed the TDIS for their own and family member technoference over three timepoints (T1=2023, T2=2024, T3=2025). TDIS internal consistency, test-retest reliability, and construct validity were assessed using Cronbachs alpha, intraclass correlation coefficient, and confirmatory factor analysis, respectively. The TDIS showed good internal consistency and adequate to good construct validity when used by children to report on their own technoference (all >.70; CFI>.95, TLI>.95, RMSEA.70; CFI>.95, TLI>.90, RMSEA[≤].11). The TDIS had low to acceptable internal consistency and poor model fit for parent report of their own technoference ( range: .63 - .66; CFI

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

Conflict-Aware Retriever Editing for Knowledge Injection Attacks on LLM-Based RAG Systems

arXiv:2606.18310v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Injecting malicious knowledge into retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems can manipulate retrieved evidence and mislead downstream generation, posing a serious security threat for AI applications. Existing RAG injection attacks mainly rely on manipulating external knowledge bases, such as crafting malicious corpus. However, the synthetic text crafted by such data-centric methods could be detectable, leading to the failure of attacks. Beyond corpus manipulation, open-source retrievers are increasingly exposing RAG systems to model-centric attacks. In this paper, we propose conflict-aware retriever editing, i.e., CAREATTACK, a model-centric retriever attack framework for malicious knowledge injection in RAG. Specifically, CAREATTACK consists two stages of conflict-aware retriever editing and attack-preserving anchor repair. Conflict-aware retriever editing adapts efficient closed-form parameter editing to the dense retrieval model, promoting malicious knowledge above benign competing passages and resolving potential parameter conflicts through graph-based conflict detection and parameter editing projection. Then, attack-preserving anchor repair performs lightweight calibration on the edited retriever to further eliminate the impact on non-target prompts while preserving the attack effectiveness for target prompts. We instantiate CAREATTACK on Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B and BGE-M3, and conduct evaluation on three benchmark datasets. Experimental results demonstrate our method substantially promote malicious passages into the retrieved knowledge of RAG systems and can perform attacks for batches of target prompts and passages, given the access of retrieval model parameters. Since most RAG systems are built upon open-source retrieval models, this work reveals a practical attack surface in RAG systems. Codes are public accessible at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CareAttack-3F1C.

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

Sparse positive maps on qutrits with exact nondecomposability thresholds and PPT-entanglement transitions

arXiv:2606.19765v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study a family of sparse positive maps on qutrits for which positivity, decomposability, and PPT entanglement can all be analysed explicitly. The block structure of the associated Choi matrices reduces positivity to a Hermitian biquadratic form and leads to exact positivity boundaries for three representative parametric families. For the same families we determine the exact transition between decomposable and non-decomposable maps and construct associated PPT states of two classes. The first consists of witness-adapted deformations naturally tied to the non-decomposability analysis. The second consists of analytically tractable families whose full PPT-entangled branch is detected by fixed positive maps, yielding exact thresholds between separability and bound entanglement. For the trace-preserving subclass, we further compare positivity with a recent eigenvalue bound for 2-positive maps, thereby making the gap between positivity and higher-order positivity fully explicit within this family.

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

Quantized Evolution Strategies: High-precision Fine-tuning of Quantized LLMs at Low-precision Cost

arXiv:2602.03120v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) is essential for deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) on memory-constrained devices, yet it renders models static and difficult to fine-tune. Standard fine-tuning paradigms, including Reinforcement Learning (RL), fundamentally rely on backpropagation and continuous weights to compute gradients. Thus they cannot be used on quantized models, where the parameter space is discrete and non-differentiable. While Evolution Strategies (ES) offer a backpropagation-free alternative, optimization of the quantized parameters can still fail due to vanishing or inaccurate gradient estimation. This paper introduces Quantized Evolution Strategies (QES), an optimization paradigm that performs full-parameter fine-tuning directly in the quantized space. QES is based on two innovations: (1) it integrates accumulated error feedback to preserve high-precision weight updating signals, and (2) it utilizes a stateless seed replay to reduce memory usage to low-precision inference levels. QES significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art zeroth-order fine-tuning methods on a variety of tasks, making direct fine-tuning for quantized models possible. It therefore opens up the possibility for scaling up LLMs entirely in the quantized space. The source code is available at https://github.com/dibbla/Quantized-Evolution-Strategies .

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

U$^2$Mamba: A Two-level Nested U-structure Mamba for Salient Object Detection

Mamba-based models have emerged as a promising alternative for salient object detection (SOD), offering significant advantages in modeling long sequences. However, existing models often fail to explore contextual information and the depth of the entire architecture. This paper introduces U$^2$Mamba, a powerful and innovative U-structured network for salient object detection. We propose multiscale Mamba U-blocks (MMUBs) that enhance the model depth to improve local feature extraction capabilities. Our newly developed nested U-structure, incorporating MMUBs, enables the network to integrate various receptive fields from shallow and deep layers, thereby collecting richer contextual information and longer-range data without being constrained by resolution. Instead of using the traditional deep supervision scheme and top-level supervised training, we propose a hierarchical training supervision method where the loss is computed at each level during the training process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that U$^2$Mamba achieves highly competitive performance against state-of-the-art methods. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/JL021/U2Mamba}.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Noise-Driven Exploration and Transient Freezing Select Flat Minima in Stochastic Gradient Descent

arXiv:2601.10962v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is central to deep learning, yet the dynamical origin of its preference for flatter, more generalizable solutions remains unclear. Here, by analyzing SGD learning dynamics, we identify a nonequilibrium mechanism that governs solution selection during training. Numerical experiments reveal a transient exploratory phase in which SGD trajectories repeatedly escape sharp valleys and migrate toward flatter regions of the loss landscape before becoming confined to a final basin. Using a tractable physical model, we show that SGD noise reshapes the loss landscape into an effective potential that preferentially stabilizes flat solutions. We further uncover a transient freezing mechanism: as training progresses, the flattening landscape suppresses transitions between competing valleys. Stronger SGD noise delays this freezing transition, prolonging the exploratory phase and thereby increasing the probability of convergence to flatter minima. Together, these results provide a unified physical framework connecting learning dynamics, loss-landscape geometry, and generalization, and suggest guiding principles for the design of more effective optimization algorithms.

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

Bioacoustic Geolocation: Species Sounds as Geographic Signals

arXiv:2505.18726v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Can we determine someone's geographic location solely from the sounds they hear? Are acoustic signals enough to localize within a country, state, or even city? In this work, we tackle the challenge of global-scale audio geolocation, with a particular focus on wildlife and natural sounds. We posit that bioacoustic signals contain informative geolocation cues because of well-defined geographic ranges of species. To test this hypothesis, we benchmark image geolocation and soundscape mapping methods, design oracles and species-centric baselines, and propose a hybrid approach that combines species range prediction with retrieval-based geolocation. We further ask whether geolocation improves with species-diverse recordings and spatiotemporal aggregation across neighboring samples. Finally, we extend our study to multimodal geolocation with case studies from movies that combine both audio and visual content. Our results highlight the potential of incorporating bioacoustic signals into geospatial tasks, motivating future work on species recognition and audio geolocation.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Generative AI and the future of scientometrics: current topics and future questions

In this paper, we contribute to the debate on generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in scientometrics. We argue that moving from a trial-and-error approach to an explainable and actionable use requires a principled understanding of strengths and weaknesses of GenAI as compared with other techniques and with human judgment. To this end, we introduce a conceptual framework based on the distinction between the semantic dimensions of texts, i.e. the meanings attributed to words, and their pragmatic dimension, i.e. their embedding within communicative situations. We leverage this framework to interpret the results of applications of GenAI in scientometrics and to provide guidance to users. Specifically, we conclude that key parameters to be considered are the nature of the task, the level of granularity of the analysis and whether the goal was descriptive, inferential or evaluative. These parameters lead to different strategies for using GenAI and human-machine integration. Finally, we suggest that, by generating large amounts of scientific language, GenAI might affect textual characteristics used to measure science, such as authors, words, and references. We argue that careful empirical work and theoretical reflection will be essential to remain capable of interpreting the evolving patterns of knowledge production in the age of AI.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

JE-IRT: A Geometric Lens on LLM Abilities through Joint Embedding Item Response Theory

Standard LLM evaluation practices compress diverse abilities into single scores, obscuring their inherently multidimensional nature. We present JE-IRT, a geometric item-response framework that embeds both LLMs and questions in a shared space. For question embeddings, the direction encodes semantics and the norm encodes difficulty, while correctness on each question is determined by the geometric interaction between the model and question embeddings. This geometry replaces a global ranking of LLMs with topical specialization and enables smooth variation across related questions. Building on this framework, our experimental results reveal that out-of-distribution behavior can be explained through directional alignment, and that larger norms consistently indicate harder questions. Moreover, JE-IRT naturally supports generalization: once the space is learned, new LLMs are added by fitting a single embedding. The learned space further reveals an LLM-internal taxonomy that only partially aligns with human-defined subject categories. We also show that simple linear probes of the embedding space recover cross-subject ability directions, such as an arithmetic axis that highlights quantitatively demanding questions in seemingly distant subjects like virology and global facts. JE-IRT thus establishes a unified and interpretable geometric lens that connects LLM abilities with the structure of questions, offering a distinctive perspective on model evaluation and generalization.