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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Efficient, Robust, and Anti-Collusion Fingerprinting of Image Diffusion Models

Model fingerprinting, embedding user-specific identifiers (fingerprints) into generated outputs, has recently emerged as a popular solution to protect the intellectual property rights (IPR) of generative text-to-image (T2I) models and prevent unauthorized redistribution. In this work, we reveal a previously unexplored systematic vulnerability in existing generative model fingerprinting methods: they lack robustness against collusion attacks, where multiple attackers combine their models to remove or obscure the fingerprints. To address this issue, we take the first step towards a robust fingerprinting method for T2I models with anti-collusion capabilities. The proposed method encodes strings of bits, namely fingerprints, into the coefficients of a personalized normalization module (PNM) incorporated into T2I models, so that fingerprints can be reliably recovered from any generated image. To defend against collusion attacks and prevent unauthorized model redistribution, we introduce an anti-collusion mechanism based on lossless function-invariant parameter transformations. This mechanism significantly degrades the image generation quality of colluded models, making them effectively unusable. Moreover, our method allows developers to efficiently create multiple copies of fingerprinted T2I models by reparameterizing the PNM without the need for retraining. We also introduce a worst-case optimization strategy to improve robustness against model-level attacks. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves high fidelity and robustness across multiple T2I image generation and editing tasks, with fingerprint extraction accuracy exceeding 99.5%. Compared with existing methods, our method demonstrates, for the first time, a notable proactive robustness to collusion attacks by significantly increasing the FID of colluded models.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

DailyReport: An Open-ended Benchmark for Evaluating Search Agents on Daily Search Tasks

arXiv:2606.12871v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Search Agents (SAs) typically leverage large language models (LLMs) to support complex information-seeking tasks by autonomously exploring web sources and synthesizing information into comprehensive responses. For SAs evaluation, prior benchmarks mainly focus on specialized tasks that are unlikely to arise in real-world user scenarios. Moreover, their reliance on coarse task-level rubrics often limits evaluation interpretability. To bridge this gap, we introduce DailyReport, an open-ended benchmark to evaluate SA capabilities on daily search tasks. It contains 150 open-ended tasks with 3,546 associated rubrics, capturing widely discussed and timely information demands of real-world users. Each task is decomposed into subtasks and evaluated with cascade rubrics across disentangled dimensions. Through cascade performance attribution and user-centric aggregation, we derive highly interpretable scores for each dimension, along with a user preference score. Our results on 17 agentic systems show that current systems still fall short of users' expectations. To facilitate future research, our dataset and code are made publicly available at https://github.com/AGI-Eval-Official/DailyReport.

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

CRAX: Fast Safe Reinforcement Learning Benchmarking

arXiv:2606.20376v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safety is a core concern for deploying reinforcement learning (RL) agents in real-world domains such as robotics and autonomous driving. While benchmarks have been central to progress in RL, existing safety benchmarks with high-fidelity 3D physics remain computationally slow, limiting large-scale experimentation and rapid prototyping. To address this gap, we propose CRAX (Constrained RL Accelerated with JAX). Built on top of the MuJoCo XLA (MJX) physics engine with realistic 3D dynamics, CRAX leverages vectorized operations and hardware acceleration, yielding up to ~100x speedups over comparable CPU-based safety benchmarks. The benchmark features six environment suites and three agent-specific tasks, each spanning three difficulty levels. Evaluating six popular safe RL methods shows that no single approach dominates across all tasks, and reveals the trade-offs between performance and safety. We find that curriculum learning across difficulty levels and safety transfer can improve performance over direct training in harder settings.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

BrainWorld: A Structural-Prior-Conditioned Generative Model for Whole-Brain 4D fMRI Dynamics

Whole-brain 4D fMRI generation is valuable for modeling functional brain dynamics, yet existing fMRI foundation models mainly target representation learning and downstream prediction rather than conditional predictive generation. We introduce BrainWorld, a structural-prior-conditioned generative model for whole-brain 4D fMRI dynamics. BrainWorld uses sMRI as subject-level anatomical context to guide future fMRI generation, integrating structural information into the denoising process rather than treating it as a parallel modality. Evaluated on 22 datasets spanning diverse cohorts and brain states, BrainWorld generates stable 4D fMRI trajectories up to 400 frames, improves downstream performance through generated-example augmentation, and learns transferable multimodal representations that outperform baselines. Together, these results establish BrainWorld as a condition-aware generative framework for long-horizon brain dynamics modeling and multimodal representation learning.

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

SketchKeyAnime: Reference-anchored Sparse Key-Sketch Animation Synthesis

Traditional animation production relies heavily on manual drawing and iterative refinement, particularly for key-pose design, in-betweening, and character coloring. While existing animation and video generation methods have made notable progress, they typically depend on RGB boundary frames, dense frame-wise conditions, or complete sketch sequences, limiting their applicability under low-cost input conditions. We present SketchKeyAnime, a video diffusion framework for generating structurally controllable, appearance-consistent, and temporally coherent animations from sparse key-sketch inputs. Given a single reference RGB image and a few temporally indexed key sketches, SketchKeyAnime introduces a dual-branch conditioning mechanism to encode local geometric constraints alongside semantic-temporal context. It leverages Sketch Cross Attention to fuse reference image and sketch conditions with learnable gating, and incorporates an Adaptive Weighted Loss to strengthen supervision on key-sketch frames and line-art regions. Experimental results on the Aesthetic subset of Sakuga-42M show that our approach consistently outperforms representative animation interpolation and sketch-guided generation baselines. Compared to the best-performing baseline, SketchKeyAnime reduces EDMD by 31.9\% and FVD by 9.5\%, demonstrating superior sketch fidelity and temporal coherence, while achieving the best overall performance across most quantitative metrics. These results validate the proposed framework and highlight its potential for low-cost, highly controllable animation creation.

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

Fourier Features Let Agents Learn High Precision Policies with Imitation Learning

arXiv:2606.12334v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-precision robotic manipulation requires fine-grained spatial reasoning that is often difficult to achieve with RGB-only policies due to depth ambiguity and perspective scale issues. Policies that leverage 3D information directly, such as those based on point clouds, offer a stronger geometric prior over purely image-based ones, yet their performance remains highly task-dependent. We hypothesize that this discrepancy may be due to the spectral bias of neural networks towards learning low frequency functions, which especially affects architectures conditioned on slow-moving Cartesian features. We thus propose to map point clouds from Cartesian space into high-dimensional Fourier space, effectively equipping the point cloud encoder with direct access to high-frequency features. We experimentally validate the use of Fourier features on challenging manipulation tasks from the RoboCasa and ManiSkill3 benchmarks and on a real robot setup. Despite their simplicity, we find that Fourier features provide significant benefits across diverse encoder architectures and benchmarks and are robust across hyperparameters. Our results indicate that Fourier features let policies leverage geometric details more effectively than Cartesian features, showing their potential as a general-purpose tool for point cloud-based imitation learning. We provide source code and videos on our project page: https://fourier-il.github.io/fourier-il

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

LEPO: Latent Reasoning Policy Optimization for Large Language Models

arXiv:2604.17892v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recently, latent reasoning has been introduced into large language models (LLMs) to leverage rich information within a continuous space. However, without stochastic sampling, these methods inevitably collapse to deterministic inference, failing to discover diverse reasoning paths. To bridge the gap, we inject controllable stochasticity into latent reasoning via Gumbel-Softmax, restoring LLMs' exploratory capacity and enhancing their compatibility with Reinforcement Learning (RL). Building on this, we propose \underline{L}atent R\underline{e}asoning \underline{P}olicy \underline{O}ptimization~(LEPO), a novel framework that applies RL directly to continuous latent representations. Specifically, in rollout stage, LEPO maintains stochasticity to enable diverse trajectory sampling, while in optimization stage, LEPO constructs a unified gradient estimation for both latent representations and discrete tokens. Extensive experiments show that LEPO significantly outperforms existing RL methods for discrete and latent reasoning.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Quality Perceptions and Intended Engagement in Response to AI-Generated and AI-Assisted News

arXiv:2409.03500v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) in news production raises important questions about how audiences perceive and respond to AI-generated journalism. This preregistered survey experiment (N = 599, German-speaking Switzerland) examines (i) perceptions of article quality (measured as credibility, readability, and expertise) across news excerpts that were human-written, AI-assisted, or fully AI-generated, and (ii) self-reported intentions to engage following disclosure of AI involvement. Participants rated two short news excerpts before learning how they had been produced. Articles across all conditions were evaluated similarly in perceived quality. After disclosure, participants in the AI-assisted and AI-generated conditions reported a higher willingness to continue reading their assigned articles compared to the control group, but future willingness to read AI-generated news did not differ across conditions. Overall, the findings suggest that readers assess AI-generated and human-written news comparably in quality, while disclosure of AI use can momentarily increase curiosity or interest without yet changing longer-term reading intentions.

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

Decompose Sparsely Where You Should, Absorb Densely Where You Should No

arXiv:2606.14040v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are typically trained to reconstruct the entire residual stream through a sparse dictionary, implicitly assuming that all activation content is amenable to sparse, monosemantic decomposition. We question this assumption and hypothesize that activations contain a low-rank, dense component that is computationally important to the model yet inherently unsuitable for sparse representation, which serves as a major source of the persistent dense latents widely observed in trained SAEs. To test this, we add a small rank-$r$ linear bottleneck in parallel with standard SAEs (BatchTopK and Matryoshka), allowing dense structure to be absorbed before sparse reconstruction. On Gemma-2-2B layer 12, a rank-24 bottleneck reduces dense latent count by up to 84\% while improving sparse probing and targeted probe perturbation on both architectures at matched sparsity. The absorbed component is (i) structurally identifiable as the top principal components and outlier dimensions; (ii) causally necessary, with removing it raising next-token cross-entropy by 7.5$\times$, far exceeding the 2.8$\times$ from removing the geometrically near-identical top-24 PCA directions; and (iii) redundantly encoded by sparse dictionaries, with ablating 787 maximally aligned sparse features raising cross-entropy by only 2.9$\times$ and ablating 2,048 topic-aligned features leaving MMLU topic classification virtually unchanged, whereas removing the scaffold drops it from 98.7\% to chance. Together, our findings identify a compact, semantically informative and causally important component of residual stream activations (which we term a computational scaffold) that standard sparse dictionaries represent inefficiently, suggesting that the scope of sparsity-based interpretability methods warrants careful re-examination.

10.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Gen Z scepticism towards AI is a wake-up call — universities must take it seriously

Authors:

The challenge for universities is not adopting artificial intelligence, but doing so in ways that the current generation of students can trust. The challenge for universities is not adopting artificial intelligence, but doing so in ways that the current generation of students can trust.

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

CoVR-R:Reason-Aware Composed Video Retrieval

Composed Video Retrieval (CoVR) aims to find a target video given a reference video and a textual modification. Prior work assumes the modification text fully specifies the visual changes, overlooking after-effects and implicit consequences (e.g., motion, state transitions, viewpoint or duration cues) that emerge from the edit. We argue that successful CoVR requires reasoning about these after-effects. We introduce a reasoning-first, zero-shot approach that leverages large multimodal models to (i) infer causal and temporal consequences implied by the edit, and (ii) align the resulting reasoned queries to candidate videos without task-specific finetuning. To evaluate reasoning in CoVR, we also propose CoVR-Reason, a benchmark that pairs each (reference, edit, target) triplet with structured internal reasoning traces and challenging distractors that require predicting after-effects rather than keyword matching. Experiments show that our zero-shot method outperforms strong retrieval baselines on recall at K and particularly excels on implicit-effect subsets. Our automatic and human analysis confirm higher step consistency and effect factuality in our retrieved results. Our findings show that incorporating reasoning into general-purpose multimodal models enables effective CoVR by explicitly accounting for causal and temporal after-effects. This reduces dependence on task-specific supervision, improves generalization to challenging implicit-effect cases, and enhances interpretability of retrieval outcomes. These results point toward a scalable and principled framework for explainable video search. The model, code, and benchmark are available at https://github.com/mbzuai-oryx/CoVR-R.

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

Improving low-resource ASR using bilingual fine-tuning with language identification: a cross-linguistic evaluation

This study explores how bilingual fine-tuning affects automatic speech recognition (ASR) in low-resource languages. We evaluate this method across nine linguistically and geographically diverse language pairs, covering a range of language families and writing systems. To distinguish the two languages, during training, we pre-pend each input text with a language identification token. At inference, the model jointly predicts both the language and transcription from the speech input alone. As texts for which the language is incorrectly determined show low ASR performance, we also conduct a follow-up experiment in which the language identification token is provided both during training and inference. Our results show that bilingual fine-tuning can be beneficial when language identification accuracy is high, and that in cases where language identification performance is low, including the language identification token at inference helps to improve ASR performance.

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

Free-Placement Optimization of Ground Station Locations for Low-Earth Orbit Satellites

arXiv:2606.12667v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rapidly expanding low Earth orbit satellite constellations are placing increasing demands on terrestrial ground networks, motivating the development of more efficient ground station network designs. Current approaches select sites from predefined locations, limiting optimization to existing infrastructure and constraining performance. In contrast, free-placement optimization operates over a continuous spatial domain on Earth, broadening the search space and allowing higher-throughput configurations at the cost of potentially requiring new infrastructure deployment. In this work, we introduce SCORE (Sequential Cyclic Optimization via Refinement & Evaluation), a two-stage free-placement method for ground station design. SCORE combines sequential coordinate selection with cyclic refinement to manage high-dimensionality, non-convexity, and local minima that challenge global optimizers. We benchmark SCORE against one-shot methods such as differential evolution (DE) and integer programming approaches using locations from Kongsberg Satellite Services and the World Teleport Association. Tests across two commercial Earth observation constellations (Capella Space and ICEYE) and one synthetic Walker-Star constellation show that SCORE requires up to 5x fewer function evaluations to converge relative to DE while improving downlink throughput by up to 13%. Compared to fixed-site methods, unconstrained SCORE achieves up to 15% greater total downlink, establishing a strong empirical performance benchmark for flexible placement; infrastructure-constrained SCORE retains over 92% of this gain while restricting placement to within proximity of existing fiber and power infrastructure. We also explore trade-offs between expanding existing stations and deploying new sites, informing future ground network design for operational constellations.

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

Towards UAV Image Dehazing: A UAV Atmospheric Scattering Model, Benchmark, and Geometry-Aware Deep Unfolding Network

In UAV applications, haze significantly obscures distant details and weaken structural information, hindering the recovery of details. Current UAV scenarios still face two key challenges: (i) paired hazy/clean images from the real world are unobtainable, while the classical atmospheric scattering model is inadequate for modeling the spatially non-uniform haze in UAV imagery; (ii) existing dehazing methods struggle to remove the heavy haze accumulated in the upper regions of UAV images. To address these issues, we first propose a UAV Atmospheric Scattering Model (UASM), which explicitly incorporates flight altitude, viewing pitch, and extinction to characterize the non-uniform haze distribution in UAV imaging. Based on UASM, we develop a physics-driven dehazing framework, termed Geometry-aware Proximal Deep Unfolding Network (GP-DUN). Specifically, GP-DUN consists of three key modules: a Latent Geometry Estimator (LGE) that infers transmittance consistent with UAV imaging geometry, a Geometry-aware Gradient Descent Module (GeoGDM) that embeds UASM into the data-fidelity term and performs physics-consistent closed-form updates, and an Pooling-Expert Proximal Mapping Module (PE-PMM) that learns an implicit prior to restore textures and structures beyond the capability of explicit physical modeling. In addition, we further construct UASM-HazeSet, which provides controllable paired synthetic data together with 2,285 real UAV haze images for testing. Extensive experiments show that GP-DUN consistently outperforms existing methods on both UASM-HazeSet and real UAV haze benchmarks.

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

Learning-Infused Formal Reasoning: From Contract Synthesis to Artifact Reuse and Formal Semantics

arXiv:2602.02881v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper articulates a long-term research vision for formal methods at the intersection with artificial intelligence, outlining multiple conceptual and technical dimensions and reporting on our ongoing work toward realising this vision. It advances a forward-looking perspective on the next generation of formal methods based on the integration of automated contract synthesis, semantic artifact reuse, and refinement-based theory. We argue that future verification systems must builds towards individual correctness proofs toward a cumulative, knowledge-driven paradigm in which specifications, contracts, and proofs are continuously synthesised and transferred across systems. To support this shift, we outline a hybrid framework combining large language models with graph-based representations to enable scalable semantic matching and principled reuse of verification artifacts. Learning-based components provide semantic guidance across heterogeneous notations and abstraction levels, while symbolic matching ensures formal soundness. Grounded in compositional reasoning, this vision points toward verification ecosystems that evolve systematically, leveraging past verification efforts to accelerate future assurance.

16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

On the Stability of Nonlinear Dynamics in GD and SGD: Beyond Quadratic Potentials

arXiv:2602.14789v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The dynamical stability of the iterates during training plays a key role in determining the minima obtained by optimization algorithms. For example, stable solutions of gradient descent (GD) correspond to flat minima, which have been associated with favorable features. While prior work often relies on linearization to determine stability, it remains unclear whether linearized dynamics faithfully capture the full nonlinear behavior. Recent work has shown that GD may stably oscillate near a linearly unstable minimum and still converge once the step size decays, indicating that linear analysis can be misleading. In this work, we explicitly study the effect of nonlinear terms. Specifically, we derive an exact criterion for stable oscillations of GD near minima in the multivariate setting. Our condition depends on high-order derivatives, generalizing existing results. Extending the analysis to stochastic gradient descent (SGD), we show that nonlinear dynamics can diverge in expectation even if a single batch is unstable. This implies that stability can be dictated by a single batch that oscillates unstably, rather than an average effect, as linear analysis suggests. Finally, we prove that if all batches are linearly stable, the nonlinear dynamics of SGD are stable in expectation.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Womens intentions and motivations towards health behaviour change before pregnancy: a cross-sectional survey of pregnant women in Australia

Introduction: The preconception period (i.e. the weeks and months before pregnancy) is a critical window during which parental health behaviours can influence pregnancy outcomes and the childs long-term health. Modifiable factors such as nutrition, physical activity, substance use, and environmental exposures play a key role, yet womens ability to adopt and sustain healthy behaviours is shaped by complex psychological, social and environmental influences. This study applies the Theory of Planned Behaviour to identify the beliefs underpinning womens preconception behaviours, with the aim of informing support for effective and sustained health behaviour change. Methods: An Australian national retrospective cross-sectional survey of pregnant women (18-49 years), recruited through social media platforms. The 92-item survey captured respondent socio-demographics, pregnancy status and health conditions, health behaviours, and beliefs regarding preconception health behaviours. Respondents level of pregnancy planning was categorised using the London Measure of Unplanned Pregnancy (LMUP). Items regarding preconception beliefs were structured in accordance with the Theory of Planned Behaviour, with a focus on regular exercise, healthy diet, and alcohol avoidance. These beliefs variables were analysed using structured equation modelling to identify paths between latent variables and the items used to estimate each concept. Results: The study was completed by 430 pregnant women of whom 72.7% had a planned pregnancy. Most had a partner, were university educated and in good health. Structural equation modelling showed intention strongly predicted exercise ({beta}=0.65), healthy diet ({beta}=0.54) and alcohol avoidance ({beta}=0.64). Perceived control and partner norms influenced intentions, whereas health professional norms had limited effect. Positive beliefs were associated with folate supplement use and smoking cessation. Conclusion: These findings highlight intention as a key driver of preconception health behaviours, with perceived control and partner influences playing a more significant role than individual beliefs or health professional input. Effective interventions should therefore address structural barriers and actively involve partners, while respecting womens autonomy. Overall, couples-focused, multi-level strategies are likely essential to support meaningful and sustained preconception health behaviour change.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Creative Collision: Directorial Persona Steering and Competition in Large Language Models

Activation steering has emerged as a powerful tool for shaping the behaviour of large language models at inference time, yet most prior work injects a single semantic direction into the residual stream. We study the richer setting in which two semantically opposing steering vectors are superimposed – a regime we call Creative Collision. Concretely, we construct directorial persona vectors for Steven Spielberg (optimistic, redemptive moral valence) and Martin Scorsese (dark, morally ambiguous) via mean-difference activation contrast on curated screenplay-derived corpora, then interpolate between them with a scalar mixing parameter $\alpha \in [0,1]$ and a steering coefficient $\lambda$. Across five evaluation axes – moral valence, generation coherence, surface style, directional dominance, and vector geometry – three principal findings emerge: (i)~Spielberg's representational signature exhibits robust directional dominance, suppressing Scorsese's moral influence across almost the entire interpolation range; (ii)~intermediate collision points paradoxically improve generation coherence relative to pure single-director steering at high $\lambda$; and (iii)~both personas localise maximally to layer~28 of a 40-layer decoder-only transformer, revealing a shared moral-tone substrate. These results illuminate the geometry of competing semantic directions in transformer residual streams and have direct implications for controllable creative generation and value-aligned narrative synthesis.

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

Pass@K Policy Optimization: Solving Harder Reinforcement Learning Problems

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms sample multiple n>1 solution attempts for each problem and reward them independently. This optimizes for pass@1 performance and prioritizes the strength of isolated samples at the expense of the diversity and collective utility of sets of samples. This under-utilizes the sampling capacity, limiting exploration and eventual improvement on harder examples. As a fix, we propose Pass-at-k Policy Optimization (PKPO), a transformation on the final rewards which leads to direct optimization of pass@k performance, thus optimizing for sets of samples that maximize reward when considered jointly. Our contribution is to derive novel low variance unbiased estimators for pass@k and its gradient, in both the binary and continuous reward settings. We show optimization with our estimators reduces to standard RL with rewards that have been jointly transformed by a stable and efficient transformation function. While previous efforts are restricted to k=n, ours is the first to enable robust optimization of pass@k for any arbitrary k

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Prevalence and Clinical Impact of Pathogenic Variants in Cardiomyopathy Genes Among Individuals with Cardiac Conduction Disorders

Importance: Cardiac conduction disorders have traditionally been regarded as a secondary manifestation of underlying structural heart diseases. However, isolated conduction disorders may precede the onset of heart failure (HF) suggesting shared mechanisms. Objective: To evaluate the prevalence and clinical significance of pathogenic/likely pathogenic (P/LP) rare variants in cardiomyopathy genes among individuals with conduction disorders. Design, Setting, and Participants: Biobank analysis of 192,834 participants with whole genome sequence data from Vanderbilt's BioVU and 353,092 participants from the All of Us Research Program (AoU). Participants with primary conduction disorder (left bundle branch block [LBBB], right bundle branch block [RBBB], high-grade atrioventricular block [AVB]) were identified after excluding secondary causes. Exposures: P/LP variants in cardiomyopathy genes. Main Outcomes and Measures: Primary outcome was P/LP carrier status by age and HF status. Secondary outcomes included incident HF and composite ventricular arrhythmias/sudden cardiac death/mortality (VA/SCD/mortality). Results: Among 16,959 participants with conduction disorders in BioVU and 13,442 in AoU, 432 (2.6%) and 206 (1.5%) were P/LP carriers, respectively. Conduction disorder was independently associated with carrier status (BioVU p

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

DPRM: A Plug-in Doob h transform-induced Token-Ordering Module for Diffusion Language Models

arXiv:2604.24357v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion language models generate without a fixed left-to-right order, leaving token ordering as a central algorithmic choice. Existing systems mainly use random masking or confidence-driven ordering, which respectively suffer from train–test mismatch and myopic exploration. We introduce DPRM (Doob -transform Process Reward Model), a plug-in token-ordering module that keeps the host architecture, denoising objective and supervision unchanged, and modifies only the ordering policy. DPRM starts from confidence-driven ordering and gradually shifts to process-reward-guided ordering through online estimates. We characterize the exact DPRM policy as a reward-tilted Gibbs reveal law, prove convergence of its stagewise Soft-BoN approximation, show that the online bucketized controller tracks the exact DPRM score at empirical-Bernstein rates, and establish a sample-complexity advantage under tractable optimization assumptions. Across nine hosts covering language reasoning, test-time scaling, protein, single-cell, molecular, DNA, text-to-image generation, and VQA, DPRM order variants improve several language, DNA, and multimodal settings while also identifying boundary cases where confidence-only ordering or task-specific utilities are preferable. Code is available at: https://github.com/DakeBU/DPRM-DLLM

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

Learning from almost nothing: How neural networks survive heavy input corruption

arXiv:2606.11319v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning from imperfect data is a central theme in machine learning, connecting practical questions of robustness to fundamental questions of learnability. Here we examine attribute noise: learning from corrupted inputs while keeping the labels intact, a setting that has received considerably less analytical attention than its label-noise counterpart. We consider two types of corruption models: additive noise and replacement noise. Through experiments with multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) on corrupted classification datasets, we find that neural networks remain robust, maintaining well-above-chance accuracy even when inputs are >90% corrupted – far beyond human recognition. To understand this robustness, we analyze infinite-width networks in the heavy-corruption regime using a mean-field-inspired approach and derive a leading-order decision rule for the classification outcome: the network implements a prototype rule, the nearest-class-mean, assigning each test point to the class whose training-set average it most closely resembles. This leading-order decision rule is universal across a broad range of MLP architectures, holding for any depth, as well as a wide class of activation functions and noise distributions. The same centroid mechanism closely matches finite-width network behavior in our experiments and provides an interpretable and analytically tractable account of why learning can succeed even when individual training examples carry almost no signal.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

FastMix: Fast Data Mixture Optimization via Gradient Descent

arXiv:2606.14971v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While large and diverse datasets have driven recent advances in large models, identifying the optimal data mixture for pre-training and post-training remains a significant open problem. We address this challenge with FASTMIX, a novel framework that automates data mixture discovery while training only a single proxy model. Instead of relying on predefined heuristics or resource-intensive simulations, FASTMIX jointly optimizes mixture coefficients and model parameters, substantially improving efficiency and scalability over prior approaches. At the core of FASTMIX is a reformulation of mixture selection as a bilevel optimization problem. Under this reformulation, we show that optimizing mixture ratios is mathematically equivalent to assigning per-source loss weights under uniform source sampling. This embeds the mixture coefficients directly into the differentiable iterative optimization objective, enabling efficient, gradient-based optimization of both mixture and model. To solve the optimization problem, FASTMIX implements an approximate iterative optimization procedure, alternating between (i) updating model parameters on data sampled according to current mixture ratios (inner loop) and (ii) updating mixture ratios based on validation feedback (outer loop). Across pre- and post-training, FASTMIX outperforms baselines while drastically reducing search cost. Code (https://github.com/hrtan/fastmix)

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

Scale-Invariant Neural Network Optimization: Norm Geometry and Heavy-Tailed Noise

arXiv:2605.18528v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A growing lesson from neural network optimization is that optimizer design should respect how the model is parametrized. The layerwise input-output structure of neural networks motivates scale-invariant optimizers, such as Muon and Scion, whose updates also support hyperparameter transfer. At the same time, stochastic gradient noise in deep learning is often far from sub-Gaussian and may exhibit heavy tails. These observations have shaped recent algorithmic principles for training neural networks, yet their joint theoretical consequences are underexplored. In particular, it remains unclear what dimension dependence is unavoidable for gradient-based methods given the problem class is defined by input-output norm and under heavy-tailed noise, and whether higher-order smoothness can accelerate training. We study these questions through nonconvex smooth stochastic optimization over $\mathbb R^{m\times n}$ equipped with general norms and under $p^\mathrm{th}$-moment heavy-tailed noise, where the goal is to achieve an $\epsilon$-stationary point in the dual norm. Our first contribution is a dimension-dependent lower bound: when $\frac{\max\{m,n\}}{(\min\{m,n\})^2}$ is large enough, any gradient-based method requires $\Omega(\min\{m, n\}\epsilon^{-\frac{3p-2}{p-1}})$ oracles for the problem class defined by the spectral norm, which is a common input-output norm. We prove that a scale-invariant Scion method with the spectral norm can achieve the matching upper bound of $O(\min\{m, n\}\epsilon^{-\frac{3p-2}{p-1}})$. To exploit higher-order smoothness, we propose a transported Scion method and improve the bound to $O(\min\{m, n\}\epsilon^{-\frac{5p-3}{2p-2}})$ when the Hessian is Lipschitz. Finally, we incorporate heuristics into our transported method and evaluate it across multiple architectures and model sizes, demonstrating its flexibility and compatibility with neural network training.

25.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

Ten simple rules for making the supplement increase your paper’s impact

Authors:

by Volker Grimm, Uta Berger, Stefano Mammola Have you ever lost hours navigating supplementary materials—clicking between the main text and dozens of auxiliary files only to encounter broken links, illegible figures, and undefined variables and acronyms? If so, you’re not alone. What should support scientific communication has instead become an obstacle: supplementary information (SI) increasingly suffers from inconsistent formatting, poor accessibility, and fragmented organization that impedes rather than advances understanding. This is disheartening since the SI, if used effectively, has the power to enhance transparency, credibility, and reproducibility of research. Therefore, we propose 10 simple rules to help authors design SI that genuinely increase the impact of their research. The rules emphasize treating SI with the same care as the main text, using it strategically to support the scientific narrative while preserving clarity and focus. Key recommendations include creating a single, well-structured, self-contained SI master document; ensuring explicit cross-referencing between the main text and SI; making SI machine-readable; and avoiding the misuse of SI as a substitute for proper data repositories. We also highlight the importance of creativity in choosing appropriate formats and strict adherence to journal-specific guidelines. Finally, when available, we advocate the use of standardized templates to improve consistency, readability, and reuse across studies. By following these rules, authors can substantially increase the scientific impact of their work while at the same time contributing to more sustainable research practices.