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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

The Clinical Characteristics and mortality outcomes of Atrial fibrillation complicating Heart failure with reduced ejection fraction: A prospective study from South Africa

Background: A growing burden of cardiovascular risk factors has raised cardiovascular disease-related mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), driving higher prevalence of heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF) and its complication with atrial fibrillation (AF). No prospective study has examined AF's clinical impact on HFrEF in SSA. Aim: To determine AF prevalence in HFrEF, describe HFrEF-AF clinical characteristics, and determine AF's impact on mortality. Methods: In this prospective observational study at a tertiary hospital in Johannesburg, 136 HFrEF patients were enrolled and categorised as HFrEF- SR (sinus rhythm) or HFrEF-AF. Baseline clinical characteristics and biochemistry were recorded. Comprehensive echocardiography including left atrial strain by 2D speckle-tracking was performed. Median follow-up was 30.6 months. Results: AF was present in 28 patients (21%). The mean age was 58.7 {+/-} 14.9 years (52.9% male) and differed between groups (p < 0.001). Hypertensive heart disease was the leading cause of HFrEF (36%). Compared with SR, HFrEF-AF patients had poorer health status (KCCQ 27 [16-43] vs 45 [32-60], p < 0.001) and lower left atrial strain (26.2 {+/-} 11.3%, p < 0.001). Guideline-directed medical therapy was suboptimal in the AF group: anticoagulation use was higher than SR (60% vs 9.5%, p < 0.001) but overall inadequate; HFrEF-AF patients received lower median doses of carvedilol (15.6 mg vs 25 mg, p = 0.002) and enalapril (10 mg vs 20 mg, p = 0.004), and fewer received spironolactone (50% vs 75.3%, p = 0.013). Survival was significantly lower in HFrEF-AF (0.41 [0.22-0.61]) versus SR (0.73 [0.61-0.82], p < 0.001). Independent predictors of mortality included prior stroke, lower TAPSE and KCCQ, and higher E/e' and heart rate. Conclusion: AF is common among HFrEF patients in this SSA cohort (though lower than in high-income countries) and associates with worse clinical status, suboptimal therapy, and higher mortality.

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

Mutual Distillation of Dual-Foundation Models for Semi-Supervised PET/CT Segmentation

Organ segmentation from PET/CT is critical for quantitative analysis and radiotherapy planning in oncology. To ease the high annotation cost of PET/CT segmentation, semi-supervised learning (SSL) provides a practical and effective solution for developing deep models with limited labeled data. Recent developments in visual foundation models have demonstrated remarkable adaptability with improved efficiency. In this work, we propose a mutual distillation framework that seamlessly exploits both structural and functional foundation models, which act as modality-specific generalists for distilling knowledge from structural CT and metabolic PET imaging. By bridging the gap between the task-specific precision of student models and the segmentation priors of generalist foundation models, we propose MuDuo, a mutual distillation framework that synergistically leverages SAM-Med3D for CT and SegAnyPET for PET to distill their knowledge into a lightweight student network. Our approach eliminates the need for manual prompts while maximizing the utility of unlabeled data for automatic segmentation, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the AutoPET dataset with only 5 labeled cases. Our source code is available at https://github.com/Wu-beining/MuDuo.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Weighted Random Dot Product Graphs

arXiv:2505.03649v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modeling of intricate relational patterns has become a cornerstone of contemporary statistical research and related data science fields. Networks, represented as graphs, offer a natural framework for this analysis. This paper extends the Random Dot Product Graph (RDPG) model to accommodate weighted graphs, markedly broadening the model's scope to scenarios where edges exhibit heterogeneous weight distributions. We propose a nonparametric weighted (W)RDPG model that assigns a sequence of latent positions to each node. Inner products of these nodal vectors specify the moments of their incident edge weights' distribution via moment-generating functions. In this way, and unlike prior art, the WRDPG can discriminate between weight distributions that share the same mean but differ in other higher-order moments. We derive statistical guarantees for an estimator of the nodal's latent positions adapted from the workhorse adjacency spectral embedding, establishing its consistency and asymptotic normality. We also contribute a generative framework that enables sampling of graphs that adhere to a (prescribed or data-fitted) WRDPG, facilitating, e.g., the analysis and testing of observed graph metrics using judicious reference distributions. The paper is organized to formalize the model's definition, the estimation (or nodal embedding) process and its guarantees, as well as the methodologies for generating weighted graphs, all complemented by illustrative and reproducible examples showcasing the WRDPG's effectiveness in various network analytic applications.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Learning Patient-Specific Disease Dynamics with Latent Flow Matching for Longitudinal Imaging Generation

Understanding disease progression is a central clinical challenge with direct implications for early diagnosis and personalized treatment. While recent generative approaches have attempted to model progression, key mismatches remain: disease dynamics are inherently continuous and monotonic, yet latent representations are often scattered, lacking semantic structure, and diffusion-based models disrupt continuity with random denoising process. In this work, we propose to treat the disease dynamic as a velocity field and leverage Flow Matching (FM) to align the temporal evolution of patient data. Unlike prior methods, it captures the intrinsic dynamic of disease, making the progression more interpretable. However, a key challenge remains: in latent space, Auto-Encoders (AEs) do not guarantee alignment across patients or correlation with clinical-severity indicators (e.g., age and disease conditions). To address this, we propose to learn patient-specific latent alignment, which enforces patient trajectories to lie along a specific axis, with magnitude increasing monotonically with disease severity. This leads to a consistent and semantically meaningful latent space. Together, we present $\Delta$-LFM, a framework for modeling patient-specific latent progression with flow matching. Across three longitudinal MRI benchmarks, $\Delta$-LFM demonstrates strong empirical performance and, more importantly, offers a new framework for interpreting and visualizing disease dynamics.

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

Sample-Efficient Hypergradient Estimation for Decentralized Bi-Level Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2603.14867v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Many strategic decision-making problems, such as environment design for warehouse robots, can be naturally formulated as bi-level reinforcement learning (RL), where a leader agent optimizes its objective while a follower solves a Markov decision process (MDP) conditioned on the leader's decisions. In many situations, a fundamental challenge arises when the leader cannot intervene in the follower's optimization process; it can only observe the optimization outcome. We address this decentralized setting by deriving the hypergradient of the leader's objective, i.e., the gradient of the leader's strategy that accounts for changes in the follower's optimal policy. Unlike prior hypergradient-based methods that require extensive data for repeated state visits or rely on gradient estimators whose complexity can increase substantially with the high-dimensional leader's decision space, we leverage the Boltzmann covariance trick to derive an alternative hypergradient formulation. This enables efficient hypergradient estimation solely from interaction samples, even when the leader's decision space is high-dimensional. Additionally, to our knowledge, this is the first method that enables hypergradient-based optimization for 2-player Markov games in decentralized settings. Experiments highlight the impact of hypergradient updates and demonstrate our method's effectiveness in both discrete and continuous state tasks.

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

Synthetic Homes: A Multimodal Generative AI Pipeline for Residential Building Data Generation under Data Scarcity

arXiv:2509.09794v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Computational models have emerged as powerful tools for multi-scale energy modeling research at the building and urban scale, supporting data-driven analysis across building and urban energy systems. However, these models require large amounts of building parameter data that is often inaccessible, expensive to collect, or subject to privacy constraints. We introduce a modular, multimodal generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) framework that integrates image, tabular, and simulation-based components and produces synthetic residential building datasets from publicly available county records and images, and present an end-to-end pipeline instantiating this framework. To reduce typical Large Language Model (LLM) challenges, we evaluate our model's components using occlusion-based visual focus analysis. Our analysis demonstrates that our selected vision-language model achieves greater visual focus than a GPT-based alternative for building image processing. We also assess realism of our results against a national reference dataset, finding that our synthetic data overlaps more than 95% for three of the four selected variables. This work reduces dependence on costly or restricted data sources, lowering barriers to building-scale energy research and Machine Learning (ML)-driven urban energy modeling, and therefore enabling scalable downstream tasks such as energy modeling, retrofit analysis, and urban-scale simulation under data scarcity.

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

In-Context Learning Is Provably Bayesian Inference: A Generalization Theory for Meta-Learning

arXiv:2510.10981v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper develops a finite-sample statistical theory for in-context learning (ICL), analyzed within a meta-learning framework that accommodates mixtures of diverse task types. We introduce a principled risk decomposition that separates the total ICL risk into two orthogonal components: Bayes Gap and Posterior Variance. The Bayes Gap quantifies how well the trained model approximates the Bayes-optimal in-context predictor. For a uniform-attention Transformer, we derive a non-asymptotic upper bound on this gap, which explicitly clarifies the dependence on the number of pretraining prompts and their context length. The Posterior Variance is a model-independent risk representing the intrinsic task uncertainty. Our key finding is that this term is determined solely by the difficulty of the true underlying task, while the uncertainty arising from the task mixture vanishes exponentially fast with only a few in-context examples. Together, these results provide a unified view of ICL: the Transformer selects the optimal meta-algorithm during pretraining and rapidly converges to the optimal algorithm for the true task at test time.

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Re-evaluating the Cross-Sectional Prevalence of Severe Age-Related Hearing Loss Using Extreme Value Statistics

作者:

Standard demographic models of age-related hearing loss (presbycusis) predominantly utilize symmetric functions, such as log-normal distributions for age-binned thresholds and 4-parameter logistic curves for prevalence estimates. While these models capture early-to-moderate degradation effectively, they structurally struggle to characterize the heavy tails associated with severe clinical impairment. In this study, we present a statistical critique using a secondary analysis of the historical Medical Research Council (MRC) National Study of Hearing (1980-1986) dataset. By applying Generalized Extreme Value (GEV) distribution theory, we demonstrate that as severity increases, the underlying statistical geometry of hearing loss shifts. The asymmetric, heavy-tailed GEV distribution provides a parsimonious description of severe impairment, requiring fewer parameters than standard symmetric models. However, we explicitly acknowledge that utilizing static population data to infer progression introduces an ecological fallacy. Furthermore, the dataset's historical nature embeds unquantified generational cohort effects. We conclude that while extreme value statistics offer a compelling mathematical framework for modeling the variance of severe presbycusis, true longitudinal datasets are required to isolate physiological degradation from historical cohort variance.

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

SkillChain: Closing the Loop on Skill Evolution for Image-Based E-Commerce AI Assistants

Image-based AI assistants are now deployed at production scale on e-commerce platforms, where a single uploaded image can trigger fundamentally different user intents: product search, style recommendation, visual encyclopedia, or utility tool calls, each demanding its own response format, tool invocation, and domain knowledge. Without per-intent behavioral constraints, LLM-based systems conflate these heterogeneous modes and fall short of domain quality standards, while the breadth and dynamism of the intent space render manual engineering infeasible. To address this, we present SkillChain, which closes the production feedback loop on Skill evolution, automating the lifecycle of Skills through three stages: Skill Creator for bootstrapping from task specs and trajectories, Route Optimizer for routing alignment, and Body Refiner for iterative Skill Body refinement via dual-path LLM-Judge evaluation. Deployed on a production-scale e-commerce image assistant, SkillChain substantially improves aggregate response quality, with the strongest gains on structural compliance and content quality; a one-week online A/B experiment further confirms significant gains in user engagement, content consumption, and long-term retention.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

From Content to Knowledge: Lightning Fast Long-Video Understanding with Neural Knowledge Representations

We propose a new paradigm for long video understanding by treating a long video as a Neural Knowledge Representation (NKR). NKR represents video contents neither as a stream of tokens nor pre-organized databases, but as an individual small portion of network weights attached to the VLM backbone. The NKR weights are optimized to encapsulate the video's semantic content via a novel Agentic Knowledge Distillation (AKD) process, where an agent automatically synthesizes dense descriptions and question-answer pairs to distill the video's knowledge into the NKR. While AKD serves as a comprehensive, one-time encoding phase, the resulting NKR transforms the video into a portable, reusable asset. At inference, the lightweight NKR is mounted onto a frozen Vision-Language Model (VLM), enabling direct, query-based understanding without reloading or re-encoding the original video. This approach decouples video length from inference cost, offering high amortized efficiency for multi-turn video understanding. Experiments on the LVBench benchmark show our method achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art approaches while reducing end-to-end latency by over two orders of magnitude, opening new possibilities for interactive long-video understanding.

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

Quantum Error Correction Codes for Truncated SU(2) Lattice Gauge Theories

作者:

arXiv:2511.13721v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We construct two quantum error correction codes for pure SU(2) lattice gauge theory in the electric basis truncated at the electric flux $j_max=1/2$, which are applicable on quasi-1D plaquette chains, 2D honeycomb and 3D triamond and hyperhoneycomb lattices. The first code converts Gauss's law at each vertex into a stabilizer while the second only uses half of the vertices and is locally the carbon code. Both codes are able to correct single-qubit errors. The electric and magnetic terms in the SU(2) Hamiltonian are expressed in terms of logical gates in both codes. The logical-gate Hamiltonian in the first code exactly matches the spin Hamiltonian for gauge singlet states found in previous work.

12.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Measurement of reactor neutrino oscillation with the first JUNO data

Neutrino oscillations (see refs. 1,2 and references therein), a quantum effect manifesting at macroscopic scales, are governed by lepton flavour mixing angles and neutrino mass-squared differences3 that are fundamental parameters of particle physics, representing phenomena beyond the Standard Model. Precision measurements of these parameters are essential for testing the completeness of the three-flavour framework, determining the mass ordering of neutrinos and probing possible new physics. The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO)4 is a 20-ktonne liquid-scintillator detector located 52.5 km from multiple reactor cores, designed to resolve the interference pattern of reactor neutrinos with sub-percent precision5,6. Here we report, using the first 59.1 days of data collected since detector completion in August 2025, the first simultaneous high-precision determination of two neutrino oscillation parameters, $${\sin }^{2}{\theta }_{12}=0.3092\,\pm \,0.0087$$ and $$\Delta {m}_{21}^{2}=(7.50\,\pm \,0.12)\times 1{0}^{-5}\,{\mathrm{eV}}^{2}$$ for the normal mass ordering scenario, improving the precision by a factor of 1.6 relative to the combination of all previous measurements. These results advance the basic understanding of neutrinos, validate the design of the detector and indicate the readiness of JUNO for resolving the neutrino mass ordering with a larger dataset. The rapid achievement with a short exposure highlights the potential of JUNO to push the frontiers of precision neutrino physics and paves the way for its broad scientific programme. The first data of the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory deliver high-precision neutrino oscillation parameters, improving measurements and demonstrating readiness to determine neutrino mass ordering.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Latent Confounded Causal Discovery via Lie Bracket Geometry

arXiv:2606.19610v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent work on Kan-Do-Calculus (KDC) has established that the boundary between passive observation and active intervention in causal inference is a category-theoretic bi-adjunction, with interventions modeled by left Kan extensions and conditioning by right Kan extensions. This paper introduces two causal discovery algorithms under latent confounding, building on the information-geometric and categorical consequences of KDC. In smooth statistical settings, Radon-Nikodym derivatives between observational and interventional measures induce local causal vector fields; failures of these fields to close under Lie brackets become computable Frobenius residuals, which we interpret as witnesses of failed visible integrability and possible latent or unmodeled structure. Our first algorithm, BRIDGE (Bracket Residuals for Interventional Discovery and Geometric Estimation), combines an interventional density or Radon-Nikodym-ratio engine with a geometric screen that proposes a high-recall family of admissible arrows, identifies non-closing visible pairs as latent-obstruction candidates, and passes the reduced family to downstream score-based or differentiable discovery routines. The second algorithmic contribution, Spectral Kan-Do Flow Matching (SKFM), learns amortized intervention fields and factors latent curvature spectrally, exposing the direct Lie-space endpoint toward which BRIDGE points. A detailed set of experiments show that both algorithms are capable of discovering causal models with latent confounders while collapsing the super-exponential space of possible DAGs by many orders of magnitude. This paper introduces a new paradigm in causal discovery, where latent structure is inferred directly from the geometry of intervention-induced flows.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Gefen: Optimized Stochastic Optimizer

AdamW is a default optimizer for modern deep learning, but its first and second moment states add roughly two parameter-sized buffers to training memory. We propose Gefen, a memory-efficient optimizer that automatically shares second-moment estimates across parameter blocks and quantizes the first moment using a learned codebook, thereby reducing AdamW's memory footprint by ~8x while maintaining the same performance, corresponding to a reduction of 6.5 GiB per billion parameters. The method is motivated by a theoretical result showing that large mixed Hessian entries constrain the ratio of squared gradients toward one, suggesting that Hessian-aligned parameters are natural candidates for sharing second-moment statistics. Since computing Hessians is impractical at scale, Gefen infers block structure from the initial squared gradients, requiring no architecture-specific metadata or hyperparameters beyond AdamW defaults. Gefen learns an exact histogram-based dynamic-programming quantization codebook and reuses the same blocks for first-moment scaling. Across diverse experiments, Gefen achieves the lowest peak optimizer memory among the compared AdamW-like methods while maintaining AdamW-level performance. In FSDP and DDP training, the reduced memory footprint enables larger microbatches and improves throughput significantly over AdamW, providing a practical drop-in replacement with lower memory usage that can increase throughput and enable training larger models or using larger batch sizes. We provide the complete Python implementation, including fused CUDA kernels at https://github.com/ndvbd/Gefen

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

UniTemp: Unlocking Video Generation in Any Temporal Order via Bidirectional Distillation

Autoregressive video diffusion models have emerged as a promising approach for long video generation, achieving strong performance in streaming settings. However, existing methods are restricted to forward temporal generation, whereas practical video creation often requires flexible generation order, e.g., conditioning on future context to extend backward, or on both past and future context for inbetween generation. We bridge this gap by training an autoregressive model that supports generation in arbitrary temporal directions. A key technical challenge arises from the Causal 3D VAE widely used in video diffusion models, which encodes latents strictly conditioned on past context. While suited for forward generation, this causal structure causes inter-block discontinuities when generation proceeds backward. To address this, we introduce blockwise anchor latents, a set of auxiliary latents that restore the missing past context at block boundaries during backward generation. Built on this design, we propose UniTemp, a bidirectional distillation framework that trains a single autoregressive student model for any-direction video generation. At inference time, UniTemp conditions on arbitrary past and/or future frames, improving controllability for both bidirectional and inbetween generation. Experiments show that UniTemp maintains competitive performance on short and long video generation compared to forward-only methods, while enabling diverse workflows such as bidirectional video extension, inbetween generation, looping video generation, scene transition, and visual story generation. Project website: https://lzhangbj.github.io/projects/unitemp/

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

The Faithfulness Gap: Certifying Semantic Equivalence Between Natural-Language and Formal Mathematical Statements

arXiv:2606.16541v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autoformalization, translating natural-language mathematics into formal proof assistants, is bottlenecked not by translation fluency but by faithfulness: a formal statement can typecheck and be provable, yet still encode a different theorem than the source intended. We introduce Bidirectional Provability Fingerprinting (\bpf{}), a framework that certifies faithfulness by characterizing each candidate through its forward and backward consequence neighborhoods in the ambient theory and matching these against probes derived from the natural-language statement. We further introduce four novel components: (i) Counterfactual Probe Generation (\cpg{}), a contrastive procedure that synthesizes probes targeting specific drift directions; (ii) the Equivalence Spectrum, a continuous faithfulness score that replaces brittle binary verdicts; (iii) Adaptive Probe Budget Allocation (\apba{}), an information-theoretic budget router; and (iv) Faithfulness-Guided Decoding (\fgd{}), which uses \bpf{} signals as a reward during autoformalization. We prove a drift detection theorem and a PAC-faithfulness result establishing that the equivalence class of a natural language statement is learnable from $\mathcal{O}(\log(1/\delta)/\varepsilon)$ probes under mild assumptions. We release \driftbench{}, a benchmark of $2{,}183$ NL/Lean~4 pairs with controlled drift labels across six subfields of mathlib4. \bpf{}\,+\,\cpg{} detects $89.6\%$ of drifted formalizations at a $3.0\%$ false-positive rate-against $41.2\%$ for typecheck and $63.3\%$ for LLM-judge baselines, and \fgd{} reduces the rate at which a state-of-the-art autoformalizer emits drifted statements by $47\%$. https://pmlrbd.github.io/BPF/

17.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Critical spectral behavior and large deviations for geometric $\alpha$-stable processes

arXiv:2606.17501v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we study the Schrödinger-type operator associated with geometric stable processes on $\mathbb{R}^{d}$, especially the differentiability of spectral function. Let $\mathcal{H}$ be the generator of the geometric stable process and $\mu$ a smooth measure on $\mathbb{R}^{d}$. Then the spectral function $C(\theta)$ is defined as $C(\theta) = -\inf \sigma(-\mathcal{H} - \theta \mu)$, where $\sigma(\mathcal{A})$ denotes the spectrum of $\mathcal{A}$ and $\theta$ is a real parameter. Since the geometric stable process exhibits severe local singularities in its Lévy measure, its transition semigroup lacks ultracontractivity, which invalidates classical methods for proving the differentiability. To overcome this obstacle, we use the compact embedding of the extended Dirichlet space into $L^2(\mu)$. As a primary application of this differentiability, we establish a large deviation principle for a positive continuous additive functional associated with the smooth measure $\mu$.

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

Bag of Dims: Training-Free Mechanistic Interpretability via Dimension-Level Sign Patterns

arXiv:2606.12629v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We show that the standard basis of transformer hidden states already provides a training-free, architecture-general feature basis. Individual dimensions encode semantic content via their signs and confidence via their magnitudes, functioning as independent binary registers. We validate this Bag of Dims framework across three model families (Qwen 3.5-4B, Gemma 3-4B, Mistral 7B) through four progressive experiments. Sign patterns alone carry predictive content: replacing all magnitudes with unity achieves 72-93% top-5 next-token accuracy through the LM head, and pure Hamming scoring without any decoder reaches 80-90% top-4096. These sign patterns organize into semantic features: using a single-token type cache (one forward pass per vocabulary token, no context), we discover 175 categories via per-dimension sign consistency (mean AUC 0.80) from 50 anchors with zero training. A trained probe adds only +0.018 AUC and converges to axis-aligned weights, confirming negligible cross-dimension structure. This structure extends to attention: all 175 categories remain discoverable in K and V projections. On the write side, static FFN weight inspection links 20% of features to individual writer neurons (>0.70 agreement; random controls: 0%), with top-200 neuron coalitions achieving >0.70 agreement on 99.9% of prototypes via majority vote. Fully unsupervised discovery (random seeds, no labels) scales to 1500 features at 100% yield and 99% sparsity across all three models, with pairwise MI of 0.0014 bits confirming low inter-dimension coupling. These results establish that the standard basis already suffices for feature reading throughout the transformer compute pathway, requiring no training, no optimization, and no GPU-days beyond a single forward pass per vocabulary token.

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

FedBiCross: Personalized One-Shot Federated Learning on Medical Images

arXiv:2601.01901v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Data-free knowledge distillation-based one-shot federated learning (OSFL) trains a model in a single communication round without sharing raw data, making OSFL attractive for privacy-sensitive medical applications. However, existing methods aggregate predictions from all clients to form a global teacher. Under non-IID data, conflicting predictions dilute each other during averaging, yielding less informative soft labels that weaken distillation. We propose FedBiCross, a personalized OSFL framework with three stages: (1) clustering clients by model output similarity to form coherent sub-ensembles, (2) bi-level cross-cluster optimization that learns adaptive weights to selectively leverage beneficial cross-cluster knowledge while suppressing negative transfer, and (3) personalized distillation for client-specific adaptation. Experiments on four medical image datasets demonstrate that FedBiCross consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across different non-IID degrees.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Through the PRISM: Preference Representation in Intermediate States of Video Diffusion Models

Evaluating video generation with clean, pixel-based reward models disconnects evaluation from the noisy diffusion process and incurs massive VAE decoding costs. In this paper, we challenge this paradigm by asking a fundamental question: Can a powerful video generator inherently discriminate preferences directly from noisy latents? To answer this, we introduce PRISM (Preference Representation in Intermediate States of Diffusion Models). PRISM employs a lightweight Query-based Aggregation head with a frozen video diffusion backbone to decode preference signals from noisy latents. Surprisingly, PRISM not only achieves SOTA preference accuracy but also unlocks strong noise-robustness, which enables early-stage Best-of-$N$ sampling. This allows for filtering suboptimal candidates at the very beginning of denoising, drastically reducing computation while boosting video quality. We also reveal a strong positive correlation between a backbone's generative performance and its inherent evaluative power, enabling self-improving video backbones.

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

Sex-based Network-Specific Differences in Connectomes: A Krakencoder-Based Analysis

This study examines how deficiencies in one brain connectome modality propagate to the other, using the Krakencoder as a simulation framework. Structural and functional connectomes from 702 healthy participants in the Human Connectome Project were analyzed, with the impact of each of the Yeo-7 functional networks assessed separately. Seven scenarios were considered, each involving the removal of a single network while the remaining networks were preserved. The resulting perturbations in cross-modal predictions were quantified using three complementary metrics: KL divergence on eigenvalue spectra, Frobenius norm, and Wasserstein distance. In addition, the persistence of sex-specific information within the predicted connectomes was evaluated. Across all metrics and both prediction directions, the Default Mode Network produced the largest perturbations, whereas the Somatomotor network yielded the smallest. Sex differences in network-level perturbation signatures were subtle, with the best result being an accuracy of 66.09% from connectomes predicted under network-removal conditions. In contrast, connectomes predicted from intact inputs achieved substantially higher sex classification accuracy, reaching up to 84.76%. These findings confirm that full predicted connectomes retain considerably more sex-discriminative information than perturbation-derived signatures alone.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Understanding Scam Trends and Rail Paths from Reddit Self-Disclosure Narratives

Online scam behavior is inherently multi-stage, and the lifecycle includes temporally ordered rails and events rather than isolated signals. Existing works analyze characteristics of scam types and rails, but they do not track scam trends across years. Moreover, the work on the relations between rails is hampered due to the lack of open-source datasets with annotations and coverage of different scam types. To address these gaps, we build a dataset to analyze the yearly trend of scam characteristics and rail paths using Reddit self-disclosure narratives from 2023 to 2025. We collect 21,304 posts from scam-related subreddits with at least one rail among identity, communication, platform, and payment for trend analysis by heuristic annotation. Then, we label 1,800 posts containing explicit or recoverable scam chains by an LLM-assisted method for scam path analysis. The method is evaluated with human annotation. Lastly, we run a topic model on the comments of the posts to analyze the community support behavior. The results reveal that scam processes are predominantly multi-rail. Across years, different scam types and rail components dominate. Different scam types vary systematically in path complexity. Reddit support behaviors have become more detailed over time. This work supports synthetic scam chain data simulation and AI-related scam risk assessment, though findings may not generalise to other platforms.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Learning QoE from Packet-Level Measurements in Encrypted Video Conferencing Traffic

The quality of the user experience has become one of the most important aspects in todays world, as it directly influences individuals willingness to continue using or abandon a product or service. In this context, video conferencing applications (VCAs), which experienced widespread adoption following the COVID-19 pandemic, must deliver excellent performance to remain competitive in an increasingly crowded market. Although content providers (CPs) such as Zoom, WhatsApp, Telegram, and Google Meet can assess conversation quality by comparing transmitted and received data. The widespread use of end-to-end encryption in VCAs makes quality-of-experience (QoE) evaluation by internet service providers (ISPs) far more challenging. Since ISPs do not have access to the encrypted content, they must rely on passive measurements of unencrypted traffic characteristics on the data path. In this work, we present a simple yet effective QoE prediction framework based on an almost stock convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture that uses only the packet sizes extracted from the communication between two participants in a video conferencing (VC) call to predict two QoE metrics: BRISQUE and MOS. The proposed framework is simple, easy to implement, and does not require high-end computational resources, yet it provides superior prediction performance, as shown in our experiments on two custom datasets collected from WhatsApp and Zoom, which achieve substantial improvements over previous models for the QoE prediction task.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Continual Quadruped Robots Coordination via Semantic Skill Discovery

arXiv:2606.08102v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multi-quadruped coordination has attracted increasing attention due to its enhanced payload capacity, broader contact coverage, and improved adaptability to challenging tasks. Existing methods for multi-quadruped manipulation typically focus on predefined or closed task families, often relying on multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) to train task-specific coordination policies. However, such methods struggle in open-ended continual learning settings, where tasks arrive sequentially and robots are expected to acquire new coordination skills while reusing previously learned ones without catastrophic forgetting. To address this challenge, we propose Conquer, a semantic skill-library framework that formulates continual multi-quadruped coordination as a retrieve-adapt-update process. First, to accommodate varying team sizes across tasks, we design a team-structured Self-Allies-Goal (SAG) backbone that supports variable-cardinality robot teams by explicitly modeling each robot's own state, teammate context, and task goal. For each incoming task, Conquer constructs a task-level semantic descriptor from pre-execution information and retrieves a relevant skill from the library for adaptation. After successful execution, Conquer updates the skill library by extracting trajectory-level semantic descriptors and organizing them according to semantic distance, thereby enabling continual skill accumulation and cross-task knowledge transfer. Simulation experiments show that Conquer achieves a final average success rate of 95.6%, demonstrating strong forward transfer and negligible catastrophic forgetting. Real-world rollouts on Unitree Go2 teams further validate the deployment feasibility of Conquer for practical multi-quadruped coordination. Simulation and real-robot demonstration videos are available at: https://conquer-project.pages.dev/.

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

Top-Theta Attention: Sparsifying Transformers by Compensated Thresholding

We present Top-Theta (Top-$\theta$) Attention, a training-free method for sparsifying transformer attention during inference. Our key insight is that static, per-head thresholds can be calibrated to retain the desired constant number of significant elements per attention row. This approach enables content-based sparsity without retraining, and it remains robust across data domains. We further introduce compensation techniques to preserve accuracy under aggressive sparsification, establishing attention thresholding as a practical and principled alternative to top-k attention. We provide extensive evaluation on natural language processing tasks, showing that Top-$\theta$ achieves 3-10x reduction in V-cache usage and up to 10x fewer attention elements during inference while degrading no more than 1% in accuracy.