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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

International Consensus Guideline on Management of Genitourinary Adverse Events Associated with Prostate Cancer Radiotherapy

Purpose/Objective: Genitourinary (GU) adverse events (AEs) are common during and after pelvic radiation therapy (RT) for prostate cancer and can substantially impact quality of life. We convened an international committee to establish consensus in the prevention, mitigation, and management of radiation-related acute and late GU AEs, as there are no relevant evidence-based consensus guidelines to inform treating providers. Materials/Methods: A systematic evidence review focused on mitigation and management of radiation-related acute and late GU AEs was performed in PubMed, Embase and Cochrane. The following topics were addressed: management of acute GU AEs in the intact and post-operative settings; RT techniques; bladder outlet obstruction procedures; and indications for urology referral or hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBO). Evidence-based consensus recommendations were developed using a Delphi process. We highlight the current state of evidence and evidence gaps worthy of future study. Results: Consensus was reached for 31 key questions. For management of lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS), most evidence comes from trials in patients without cancer and not undergoing RT. A consensus algorithm for medical management of acute GU AEs was developed with the following highlights: (a) alpha blockers as 1st-line for obstructive symptoms in the intact setting, (b) anti-spasmodics as 1st -line for irritative symptoms in the intact setting, and (c) anti-spasmodics as 1st -line in the post-operative setting. The consensus algorithm provides an ordered list of medications to offer if 1st -line options afford inadequate relief. For RT fractionation, randomized clinical trial (RCT) data are available. 40% of panelists rarely or never use standard fractionation over moderate hypofractionation for patients with baseline LUTS, but most consider moderate hypofractionation over SBRT for AUA IPSS > 15. For patients with severe obstructive LUTS (most commonly AUA IPSS >20), the panel recommends a prophylactic bladder outlet obstruction procedure and, if obstructive symptoms improve, consideration of moderate hypofractionation or SBRT, based on retrospective data. There is one RCT supporting use of HBO for late radiation cystitis. Conclusions: The consensus guideline synthesizes available evidence and expert opinion across key clinical decision points to provide practical guidance in the prevention, mitigation, and management of radiation-related acute and late GU AEs in prostate cancer RT. Envisioned as a living document with periodic updates, this guideline serves as a resource for practicing radiation oncologists by outlining expert-derived consensus recommendations of evidence-based care in areas where high-quality data is limited.

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

Learning Fair Pareto-Optimal Policies in Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.18111v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fairness is an important aspect of decision-making in multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL), where policies must ensure both optimality and equity across multiple, potentially conflicting objectives. While single-policy MORL methods can learn fair policies for fixed user preferences using welfare functions such as the generalized Gini welfare function (GGF), they fail to provide the diverse set of policies necessary for dynamic or unknown user preferences. To address this limitation, we formalize the fair optimization problem in multi-policy MORL, where the goal is to learn a set of Pareto-optimal policies that ensure fairness across all possible user preferences. Our key technical contributions are threefold: (1) We show that for concave, piecewise-linear welfare functions (e.g., GGF), fair policies remain in the convex coverage set (CCS), which is an approximated Pareto front for linear scalarization. (2) We demonstrate that non-stationary policies, augmented with accrued reward histories, and stochastic policies improve fairness by dynamically adapting to historical inequities. (3) We propose three novel algorithms, which include integrating GGF with multi-policy multi-objective Q-Learning (MOQL), state-augmented multi-policy MOQL for learning non-statoinary policies, and its novel extension for learning stochastic policies. We evaluate our algorithms across various domains and compare our methods against the state-of-the-art MORL baselines. The empirical results show that our methods learn a set of fair policies that accommodate different user preferences.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Closing the Reflection Gap: A Free Calibration Bonus for Agentic RL

作者:

arXiv:2606.14211v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLMs are increasingly deployed as agents that interact with external environments and observe feedback such as execution results, error messages, and tool outputs. A well-functioning agent should be able to leverage this feedback to accurately assess its own performance. Yet we find a persistent reflection gap: LLM agents tend to mis-assess their own outputs after observing concrete environment feedback – even for questions they correctly answered – and standard RL barely helps due to a credit-assignment mismatch. To close this gap, we propose RefGRPO, a simple yet effective fix that augments standard RL algorithms with two key ingredients: a free calibration bonus computed by contrasting the agent's own reflection with the actual outcome (requiring no additional reward model, LLM judge, or external annotation), and a dynamic schedule on its coefficient. Compared to standard RL baselines, our method simultaneously improves reflection calibration (e.g., reduces underconfidence rate $44.4\% \to 7.7\%$) and task accuracy (e.g., $75.1\% \to 76.5\%$) on text-to-SQL across five benchmarks. The resulting calibrated reflection turns the agent into its own verifier grounded in environment feedback, which further enables (i) better self-improvement that uses reflections as pseudo-rewards without outcome supervision, and (ii) more effective test-time selective prediction by committing only to rollouts flagged as correct.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

DiffCold: A Diffusion-based Generative Model for Cold-Start Item Recommendation

arXiv:2606.12245v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cold-start item recommendation remains a persistent challenge in real-world systems due to the absence of interaction histories. While prior models attempt to bridge this gap using item content features, they universally suffer from the seesaw dilemma: enhancing performance for cold items inevitably degrades performance for warm items, and vice versa. We identify that this dilemma stems from a fundamental distributional disparity: warm item embeddings occupy a complex ``behavioral manifold" shaped by rich interaction signals, whereas cold item embeddings are constrained to a ``semantic manifold" derived solely from auxiliary content. Existing methods often force a rigid mapping between these inconsistent spaces, causing the model to sacrifice the precision of warm representations to accommodate cold ones. To address this, we propose DiffCold, a diffusion-based generative model that unifies warm and cold representations. Unlike GANs or VAEs, DiffCold leverages conditional diffusion to reconstruct warm item embeddings from content, preserving the underlying manifold structure without degradation. We further tailor this paradigm with two specific designs: a Retrieval-enhanced Aggregator that initializes generation using semantically similar warm items to bypass inefficient noise, and a Simulation-based Representation Alignment module that enforces distribution consistency between generated and real embeddings via contrastive learning. Experiments on three benchmarks confirm that DiffCold resolves the seesaw dilemma, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art methods across all metrics.

05.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Molecular basis of polyadenylated RNA fate determination in the nucleus

作者:

Eukaryotic genomes generate a plethora of polyadenylated (pA+) RNAs1,2, which are packaged into ribonucleoprotein particles (RNPs). To ensure faithful gene expression, functional pA+ RNPs, including protein-coding RNPs, are exported to the cytoplasm, whereas transcripts within non-functional pA+ RNPs are degraded in the nucleus1–4. How cells distinguish these opposing fates remains unknown. The DExD-box ATPase UAP56 (also known as DDX39B) is a central component of functional pA+ RNPs, and promotes their docking to the nuclear pore complex-anchored TREX-25,6, which triggers transcript release from UAP56 to facilitate export7. Here we reveal that the poly(A) tail exosome targeting (PAXT) connection8 binds a TREX-2-like module, which releases pA+ RNAs from UAP56 for decay by the nuclear exosome. The core of this module consists of a LENG8–PCID2–SEM1 trimer, which we show is structurally and biochemically equivalent to the central GANP–PCID2–SEM1 trimer of TREX-2. Mutagenesis and transcriptomic data demonstrate that the nuclear fate of pA+ RNPs is governed by the contending actions of nucleoplasmic PAXT and nuclear pore complex-associated TREX-2, which interpret RNA-bound UAP56 as a signal for RNA decay or export, respectively. As RNA targets of PAXT are generally short and intron-poor, we propose an overall model for pA+ RNP fate determination whereby the distinct sub-nuclear localizations of PAXT and TREX-2 govern the degradation of short non-functional pA+ RNAs while allowing export of their longer and functional counterparts. Biochemical, structural and cell biological analyses reveal that UAP56 (DDX39B) assembles with a TREX-2–like module that redirects non-functional polyadenylated RNAs from export to degradation.

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

An Embodied Simulation Platform, Benchmark, and Data-Efficient Augmentation Framework for Wet-Lab Robotics

arXiv:2606.12936v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Wet-lab robots can improve the reproducibility, throughput, and safety of biomedical experiments, but scaling their learning requires customizable simulators for safe and reproducible task generation, open editable laboratory assets, and efficient pipelines that turn limited demonstrations into usable training data. We present Pipette, an embodied simulation platform, benchmark, and data-efficient augmentation framework for wet-lab robot learning. Pipette releases over 43 open-source and re-editable wet-lab assets, together with an extensible asset-building pipeline. A key component of Pipette is its simulation-based data augmentation pipeline, replaying human demonstrations in simulation, applies lighting, camera, speed, and action perturbations, and filters generated episodes with automatic task success checks, rapidly expanding usable training data from limited manual demonstrations. We further introduce an 11-task wet-lab embodied benchmark covering sample handling, culture-ware manipulation, device operation, and precision placement. With only 30 demonstrations per task, ACT achieves 65.5% average success rate, while simulation augmentation improves SmolVLA from 44.1% to 74.7% and {\pi}0 from 40.4% to 46.5%, validating the effectiveness of Pipette for data-efficient VLA training and evaluation. Pipette also supports natural-language-driven scene construction and task registration, lowering the barrier for non-expert users to define new wet-lab robotic tasks.

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

K-Prism: A Knowledge-Guided and Prompt Integrated Universal Medical Image Segmentation Model

Medical image segmentation is fundamental to clinical decision-making, yet existing models remain fragmented. They are usually trained on single knowledge sources and specific to individual tasks, modalities, or organs. This fragmentation contrasts sharply with clinical practice, where experts seamlessly integrate diverse knowledge: anatomical priors from training, exemplar-based reasoning from reference cases, and iterative refinement through real-time interaction. We present $K-Prism$, a unified segmentation framework that mirrors this clinical flexibility by systematically integrating three knowledge paradigms: (i) $semantic priors$ learned from annotated datasets, (ii) $in-context knowledge$ from few-shot reference examples, and (iii) $interactive feedback$ from user inputs like clicks or scribbles. Our key insight is that these heterogeneous knowledge sources can be encoded into a dual-prompt representation: 1-D sparse prompts defining $what$ to segment and 2-D dense prompts indicating $where$ to attend, which are then dynamically routed through a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) decoder. This design enables flexible switching between paradigms and joint training across diverse tasks without architectural modifications. Comprehensive experiments on 18 public datasets spanning diverse modalities (CT, MRI, X-ray, pathology, ultrasound, etc.) demonstrate that K-Prism achieves state-of-the-art performance across semantic, in-context, and interactive segmentation settings.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

LLM4RTL: Tool-Assisted LLM for RTL Generation

arXiv:2606.15500v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have facilitated impressive progress in software engineering, code generation, tooling, and systems. Concurrently, a significant body of research has developed which explores a growing variety of methods and systems for applying LLMs to hardware and chip design (e.g., systems for RTL code generation based on functional description). However, when it comes to open Verilog/RTL code-generation, we need high-quality training samples to build specialized and more effective LLM systems through fine-tuning or low-rank adaptation. Here, we propose a ``judge-renew-check-renew-check'' (JRCRC) pipeline which updates a current public dataset using a hierarchy of state-of-the-art commercial LLM models differing in their costs and capabilities in RTL code generation. This approach achieves a cost-effective mechanism for filtering and refining code-generation samples into a higher-quality training dataset. Our experiments also identify some common weaknesses of LLMs in rule-based reasoning and logic, and consequently, in RTL code-generation. Having identified these weaknesses, we develop an architecture for incorporating pre-processing tools to dynamically assist the LLMs in inferring logical relationships from tabular data formats. With our tools-assisted architecture for RTL code generation, we achieve significant overall performance gains in the VerilogEval benchmark and outperform many state-of-the-art methods. Our LLM4RTL system achieves performance comparable to that of GPT-4O using a significantly much smaller LLM.

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

Dual-Uncertainty Guided Policy Learning for Multimodal Reasoning

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has advanced reasoning capabilities in multimodal large language models. However, existing methods typically treat visual inputs as deterministic, overlooking the perceptual ambiguity inherent to the visual modality. Consequently, they fail to distinguish whether a model's uncertainty stems from complex reasoning or ambiguous perception, preventing the targeted allocation of exploration or learning signals. To address this gap, we introduce DUPL, a dual-uncertainty guided policy learning approach for multimodal RLVR that quantifies and leverages both perceptual uncertainty (via symmetric KL divergence) and output uncertainty (via policy entropy) to guide policy updates. By establishing an uncertainty-driven feedback loop and employing a dynamic branch prioritization mechanism, DUPL recalibrates the policy advantage to focus learning on states with high perceptual or decisional ambiguity, enabling effective targeted exploration beyond passive data augmentation. Evaluated on diverse multimodal reasoning benchmarks spanning mathematical and general domains, DUPL achieves solid gains. It improves Qwen2.5-VL accuracy by up to $12.3%$ (3B) and $7.9%$ (7B), and Qwen3-VL-Instruct by up to $10.7%$ (4B) and $12.4%$ (8B), consistently outperforming GRPO, while seamlessly generalizing to alternative algorithms (DAPO, $+6.5%$ avg) and architectures (LLaVA-OneVision-1.5, $+4.7%$ avg). These results demonstrate that DUPL is an effective and generalizable approach for multimodal RLVR.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Beyond Reward Engineering: A Data Recipe for Long-Context Reinforcement Learning

Long-context reasoning is an essential capability for large language models, particularly when they are deployed as autonomous agents that must reason over lengthy trajectories. Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently emerged as a dominant paradigm for improving this ability, yet existing work largely focuses on reward engineering while diverse training data remains scarce. We revisit this problem from a data-centric perspective and show that a simple yet effective data recipe alone, paired with a minimal outcome-based GRPO setup, suffices to substantially improve long-context reasoning. Our recipe targets three complementary task families – retrieval, multi-evidence synthesis, and reasoning – for which we construct and curate eight datasets totaling ~14K examples. Experiments on three models (Qwen3-4B/8B/30B-A3B) yield average gains of +7.2/+3.2/+6.4 points across seven long-context benchmarks, surpassing prior RL training sets. We further demonstrate that these gains transfer to agentic tasks, where continuing RL training on an agent-tuned model with our data recipe improves GAIA by +4.8 and BrowseComp by +7.0 points. We will release our datasets to facilitate future research.

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

Mathematical Basis for Analyzing Superconducting Phase Transitions Using Catastrophe Theory

arXiv:2606.11810v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We establish a rigorous mathematical bridge from quantum many-body path integrals to the cusp catastrophe model by Lyapunov-Schmidt reduction, which provides a theoretical foundation for analyzing superconducting phase transition using the catastrophe theory. First, it is proved that, near the critical point the infinite-dimensional effective action is diffeomorphic to a finite-dimensional catastrophe. Secondly, starting from Ginzburg-Landau free energy functional, the Euler-Lagrange partial differential equation can be reduced to the cusp catastrophe model. Thirdly, the fermionic imaginary-time path integral to the cusp catastrophe is derived through the Hubbard-Stratonovich transformation, Matsubara frequency expansion, and Grassmann algebra. Furthermore, we connect this framework with the adsorption potential theory we proposed, elucidating the catastrophic topological nature of the electron pairing mechanism in high-temperature superconductivity. The precise microscopic derivation of the adsorption potential from first-principles electronic structure calculations would strengthen the predictive power of the theory.

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

AdaSTORM: Scaling LLM Reasoning on Dynamic Graphs via Adaptive Spatio-Temporal Multi-Agent Collaboration

arXiv:2606.16328v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable potential in dynamic graph reasoning, but suffer from a scaling bottleneck: current models can only handle graphs with tens of nodes, constrained by exponential reasoning overhead and finite context windows. While multi-agent systems (MAS) offer collective reasoning and topology-aware orchestration, capabilities naturally suited for graph-structured tasks, their application to dynamic graphs remains unexplored. This paper presents Scaling LLM Reasoning on Dynamic Graphs via Adaptive Spatio-Temporal Multi-Agent Collaboration (AdaSTORM), a framework that reformulates large-scale dynamic graph reasoning into two stages: (i) Adaptive Partitioning, partitioning large-scale dynamic graphs into subregions that match the model's reasoning capacity while minimizing inference cost; and (ii) Collaborative Reasoning, aligning graph partition topologies with a spatio-temporal decoupled multi-agent architecture. AdaSTORM is the first multi-agent framework tailored for dynamic graph reasoning. Extensive experiments show that AdaSTORM successfully breaks through the scaling bottleneck, scaling reasoning to thousand-node graphs with over 90% accuracy across several large-scale dynamic graph settings without external tools, significantly outperforms seven competitive baselines. Furthermore, it achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on existing benchmarks and generalizes robustly to real-world datasets. The source code is available at: https://github.com/irisorchid107/AdaSTORM/.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

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

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

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

SAM-Deep-EIoU: Selective Mask Propagation for Multi-Object Tracking

Multi-object tracking has a heavy-tailed difficulty distribution: most frames are easy for a lightweight base tracker, while a small fraction are intrinsically hard. Video object segmentation (VOS) models can often preserve identity through the hard frames where the base tracker fails, but they are much more expensive in compute and memory. We propose selective mask propagation, a tracking algorithm that dispatches from a base tracker to a VOS model only on windows where an assignment-uncertainty signal fires. The base tracker's output is modified only when the VOS model makes a confident prediction that contradicts the base tracker's identity assignment; weak or inconclusive predictions preserve the base output. The method is training-free, treats both the base tracker and the VOS model as black boxes, and can benefit from replacing the VOS component with a more capable model. On DanceTrack, selective mask propagation improves three different base trackers. On SportsMOT, where identity preservation is central to sports analytics, SAM3-Deep-EIoU with global track association achieves state-of-the-art performance on the benchmark with 86.8 HOTA.

15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

(Non)-hyperuniformity of perturbed lattices

arXiv:2405.19881v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We ask whether a stationary lattice in dimension $d$ whose points are shifted by identically distributed but possibly dependent perturbations remains hyperuniform. When $d = 1$ or $2$, we show that it is the case when the perturbations have a finite $d$-moment, and that this condition is sharp. When $d \geq 3$, we construct arbitrarily small perturbations such that the resulting point process is not hyperuniform. As a side remark of independent interest, we exhibit hyperuniform processes with arbitrarily slow decay of their number variance.

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

Beyond Benchmarks: Continuous Edge Inference for Fine-Grained Roadside Perception

Continuous AI inference on resource-constrained edge hardware introduces deployment effects that are largely invisible to conventional benchmark evaluation, including temporal instability in streaming video, thermal throttling under sustained load, and workload-dependent performance variability. We present Edge-TSR, a deployment-oriented continuous edge inference system for sustained roadside perception on the NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano. Edge-TSR integrates detection, tracking, fine-grained classification, and a lightweight track-aware temporal stabilization mechanism that improves streaming inference consistency with negligible computational overhead. Our central finding is that benchmark-centric evaluation systematically overstates deployed edge inference performance. Across three state-of-the-art baselines, we observe consistent 20-30% relative degradation when transitioning from static-image evaluation to real-world streaming deployment. Edge-TSR addresses this gap through temporal inference stabilization, recovering up to 10.16% classification accuracy over per-frame inference baselines while maintaining sustained real-time performance under continuous operation. We evaluate the complete system under diverse real-world deployment conditions, jointly characterizing inference quality, latency, throughput, and thermal behavior during long-duration operation. A 55-minute vehicular deployment over a 26 km route demonstrates sustained operation at 16.18 FPS within safe thermal limits on a single embedded device without cloud offload. Our findings show that deployment-aware evaluation and temporal inference stabilization are necessary components of continuously operating edge AI systems intended for real-world sensing deployments. We release a sample annotated streaming video evaluation dataset and full system implementation to support reproducible deployment-centric evaluation.

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

Learning Augmented Exact Exponential Algorithms

arXiv:2606.18807v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The field of learning-augmented algorithms has demonstrated that machine-learned predictions can bypass worst-case lower bounds across a wide range of problems. So far, however, the focus has been almost exclusively on polynomial-time algorithms, where predictions improve competitive ratios, approximation guarantees, or running times. In this paper, we raise the question of whether predictions can push the frontier of exact exponential-time algorithms for NP-hard problems. We answer this question affirmatively by proposing a general approach that augments an entire family of state-of-the-art exact algorithms for a variety of subset selection problems. We show that a noisy predictor that is only marginally better than random guessing suffices to provably reduce the search space, and that the resulting runtime speedup scales smoothly with the prediction quality. Importantly, our algorithms require only pairwise independence of predictions or, alternatively, do not require the knowledge of the predictor's accuracy - both strictly weaker and more realistic settings than typically assumed.

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

Allocating Human Oversight in AI-Enabled Analytics

arXiv:2604.12497v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Organizations increasingly deploy AI as a low-cost prediction layer in customer-facing decision processes, including demand sensing, service-quality monitoring, product testing, and market research, but AI-generated signals are unevenly reliable across tasks, products, and customer segments. Firms therefore still need scarce human validation (labels, audits, survey responses, or follow-up measurements) to anchor AI outputs to ground truth. Because human ground truth is itself noisy, varying across labelers and even across repeated judgments, the firm must collect and average several human labels per task, which makes human validation costly. We study how to allocate a limited human-validation budget across many AI-assisted tasks when reliability is heterogeneous and unknown before deployment. We cast this within tuned prediction-powered inference. Each human label both sharpens the AI-assisted estimate and reveals the task's rectification difficulty, the variance that remains after the AI prediction is optimally used as a control variate. If difficulties were known, the optimal allocation would follow a Neyman square-root rule; because they are unknown, we propose a policy based on upper confidence bounds that learns them online and steers validation toward tasks where AI is least reliable. We prove that the policy's terminal efficiency loss relative to the oracle allocation vanishes as the budget grows. In synthetic experiments and a real digital-twin survey with 68 tasks and over 2000 respondents, it closes most of the gap to the oracle when reliability is heterogeneous, outperforming uniform and epsilon-greedy allocation; on the survey data it also outperforms explore-then-commit pilot designs and cuts uniform's 10–12% gap to 2–6%. The value of AI depends not only on model accuracy but also on the operational policy that targets human oversight where AI errors matter most.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

PACT: Preserving Anchored Cores in Task-vectors for Model Merging

arXiv:2606.18627v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model merging has emerged as a training-free alternative to multi-task learning, aiming to combine multiple task-specific fine-tuned models into a single multi-task model. Most existing model merging approaches follow the Task Arithmetic paradigm, which decomposes fine-tuned weights into pre-trained parameters and task vectors, and performs merging exclusively in the task-vector space. The effectiveness of this paradigm implicitly relies on the assumption that task-specific knowledge is encoded solely within task vectors. We argue that this assumption generally does not hold due to the intrinsic task preferences of pre-trained models. Specifically, we identify Load-Bearing Wall (LBW) dimensions, namely some task-critical knowledge that remains embedded in the pre-trained weights rather than being fully transferred into task vectors. We characterize LBW dimensions from both scalar-weight and subspace perspectives, thereby covering the major paradigms of existing model merging methods. Our analysis reveals that, by ignoring LBW dimensions, task-vector-based approaches fail to fully resolve task conflicts and may inadvertently damage task-specific knowledge encoded in the pre-trained model, leading to degradation. To address this issue, we propose PACT, which preserves the anchored task-specific cores (i.e., LBW dimensions) within task vectors by aligning their orthogonal complements with the subspace of the pre-trained weights. These aligned subspace components are then removed from the task vectors before applying existing model merging algorithms. Furthermore, we develop an efficient variant based on randomized SVD to improve scalability. PACT can be seamlessly integrated with existing methods. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that PACT consistently enhances mainstream model merging approaches and establishes new state-of-the-art performance.

20.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-08

Statistics of cortical representational drift can enable robust readout

by Charles Micou, Timothy O’Leary Representational drift of fixed stimuli, learned tasks and familiar environments is observed in many brain areas, leading to reconfiguration of population codes over days to weeks. This raises the question of whether downstream brain regions employ mechanisms to track changes in population activity and thus preserve the fidelity of the information they extract. We show that the statistical properties of drift have a significant impact on such mechanisms. Over an extended period, a net change in population tuning due to drift can arise from an accumulation of small changes distributed across the population, or via abrupt jumps that affect smaller subsets of cells at each time point. We demonstrate that an adaptive readout can exploit the heavy-tailed statistics of abrupt jumps to maintain a more stable readout using a simple inference mechanism. Using experimental data, we investigate the extent to which heavy-tailed drift statistics are observed during representational drift in the posterior parietal cortex and visual cortex. We find that experimentally measured drift does not conform to a Gaussian random walk. Instead, we find sudden jumps in neural tuning that would be advantageous for a downstream observer adapting to changes in representation. These observations motivate future study to determine whether adaptive decoding mechanisms exist in the brain and to determine the physiological mechanisms that shape the statistics of representational drift.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

SDVDiag: Multimodal Causal Discovery for Online Diagnosis in Software-defined Vehicles

arXiv:2606.15559v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The transition toward software-defined vehicles concentrates an increasing share of vehicle functionality into distributed software services, where failures propagate through service dependencies and the surface symptom is often several causal hops away from the underlying defect. Existing approaches to causal root-cause analysis in such systems address this only partially: they typically reason over a single observability modality and operate in an offline, operator-driven mode that does not match the demands of continuous vehicle operation. This paper presents SDVDiag, a multimodal causal-discovery pipeline that fuses log-based and metric-based service representations into a shared embedding space before graph construction, coupled with an anomaly-driven trigger that converts the diagnostic platform from a manually operated batch tool into a continuously running online system. Evaluation on an Autonomous Valet Parking testbed shows that the multimodal pipeline produces sparser causal graphs than a metrics-only baseline (134 vs. 182 edges on average) and consistently outperforms it in edge-weighted reward against an expert knowledge graph at every stage of human-feedback refinement, showing a 2.4-fold improvement over the baseline after 60 feedback queries. An end-to-end fault-injection scenario further demonstrates that the integrated trigger correctly recovers a true root cause located two causal hops upstream of the observable symptom.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Seeing Before Reasoning: Decoupling Perception and Reasoning for Shortcut-Resilient Multimodal On-Policy Self-Distillation

On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) trains a model on its own rollouts and uses a frozen copy to provide dense token-level targets conditioned on a reference target. This works well for LLM reasoning, but a direct extension to multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can create a shortcut: the privileged target may guide tokens mainly based on the text reference target rather than the image. We propose ViGOS, a visually grounded OPSD framework for MLLM post-training. The student first writes a visual description and then reasons toward the final answer. For valid rollouts, an image-only perception teacher supervises the description, while a privileged reasoning teacher supervises the reasoning and final answer on the same student prefix. A reference teacher is used only for invalid rollouts to recover the output format. Across general vision-language, expert reasoning, visual math, spatial grounding, and visual-language-prior benchmarks, ViGOS keeps the main benefits of OPSD and improves image-grounded behavior in shortcut-prone settings.

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

Natively Unlearnable Large Language Models

Unlearning aims to remove the influence of specific training data sources, but this has proved challenging because the contributions of different sources are entangled within the model. Isolating source contributions to disjoint parameters makes removal easier, though it obstructs joint learning across sources. We propose NULLs (Natively Unlearnable LLMs), a model class that satisfies the two opposing goals of isolating source-specific contributions and learning jointly across sources, by training a set of shared backbone neurons alongside a pool of sparsely activated sinks. During training, information specific to a source naturally concentrates in its sinks while information shared across sources accumulates in the backbone. A source is then unlearned at deployment by disabling its corresponding sinks, with no gradient updates and no access to the retained data. We show that NULLs scales to Wikipedia's ~6M articles, isolating each as an independent source. Unlearning a single article removes knowledge specific to it while preserving facts shared with semantically related articles, closely matching retraining from scratch. We note that unlearning with NULLs is also robust: in a case study of unlearning the Harry Potter books, NULLs resists both adversarial extraction and relearning that reverses post-hoc unlearning. Finally, NULLs preserves general language capabilities, matching a standard transformer on downstream benchmarks. Together, these results suggest that source-level unlearning need not be an afterthought. It can be built natively into LLM training while retaining the benefits of shared representation learning.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Experimental Characterization and Modeling of Measurement-Induced State-Transitions in a Fluxonium Superconducting Qubit

arXiv:2606.17866v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Superconducting qubits are most often measured using dispersive readout, which, ideally, implements a projective quantum non-demolition (QND) measurement. While a larger readout drive can increase the signal and, thus, reduce discrimination errors in the readout, strong microwave drives may also cause non-QND errors by driving the qubit to a state outside the computational subspace. In this work, we experimentally characterize measurement-induced state transitions (MIST) in a fluxonium qubit over its full external flux range. We further numerically calculate the MIST errors, and find that the theory accurately predicts eleven experimentally identified regions with increased MIST. In addition to transitions to higher fluxonium levels, we also find that, at certain flux points, MIST errors are dominated by transitions that include the transmission-line-like array modes of the fluxonium's superinductor. The excellent match between theory and experiment validates that the models accurately predict the occurrence of MIST in these systems, and further highlights the influence of array modes in fluxonium readout.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Loss Landscape Poisoning: Targeted Extraction of Unseen Training Data from LLMs

arXiv:2606.17110v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models are increasingly trained on proprietary or sensitive data, from private healthcare and financial records to user conversations containing secrets. Ensuring the privacy of such data against extraction attacks has become a central concern. In this paper, we ask whether an attacker who can poison a portion of the training data can facilitate the leakage of a separate target record they have no access to. We answer in the affirmative and show that such leakage can be induced by a poisoning mechanism that reshapes the model's local loss landscape around the target completion. Our key insight is that poisoning to create a sharp loss minimum at the target, surrounded by elevated loss on nearby alternatives, forces the model to memorize the target as the unique low-loss solution in its neighborhood. The attack requires no architectural changes, and generalizes across centralized and federated learning settings. We demonstrate that the attack amplifies privacy leakage across language (up to 100% successful extraction), and vision-language models (up 90% successful extraction). We show that the attack is thwarted when the model is trained to be differentially private. However, we introduce a new attack that directly probes the loss landscape bypassing even differential privacy defenses.