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

Bayesian Tensor Decomposition with Diffusion Model Prior

arXiv:2606.03212v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Low-rank tensor decomposition (TD) is usually effective on clean, fully observed data, but it often degrades under severe missingness or noise. Low-rankness is itself a useful but limited structural prior, and additional handcrafted priors (e.g., sparsity or smoothness) still fall short of capturing the rich statistics of real-world data. To compensate for this weak inductive bias under heavy corruption, one would like to inject a learned, data-driven prior; however, the state-of-the-art diffusion models are not readily compatible with current TD and tractable posterior inference. To address these challenges, we introduce DiffBCP, a hybrid-prior Bayesian CP decomposition framework that couples a cumulative shrinkage process prior over the CP factors for automatic rank selection with an off-the-shelf pre-trained diffusion model as an implicit data prior on the reconstructed tensor. To make posterior inference tractable despite the coupling among the likelihood, low-rank constraint, and diffusion prior, we develop a split Gibbs sampler: CP factors admit conjugate updates, while the diffusion block is sampled via low-rank-guided denoising. A noise-adaptive coupling schedule further reduces sensitivity to hand-tuned annealing. Experiments on image inpainting and denoising, including high-resolution out-of-distribution images, show consistent gains over Bayesian, nonlinear, and plug-and-play TD baselines.

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

Understanding helpfulness and harmless tension in reward models

Reward models are a key component of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), aligning language models toward both helpful and harmless behaviour. However, the internal mechanisms underlying these objectives and their conflicts remain poorly understood. We study alignment tension in reward models trained under helpfulness-only, harmlessness-only, and mixed-objective settings. We find that mixed-objective models often underperform single-objective models, indicating interference between objectives. Using activation-based methods, we identify neurons associated with each objective and study their functional roles via targeted ablations. We find that these neurons causally support their corresponding objectives while often negatively affecting the opposing one. We find that a substantial proportion of neurons are shared between helpfulness and harmlessness, and that these shared neurons exert a disproportionate influence on model behaviour, contributing to alignment tension. Additionally, our results provide insights and mechanistic interpretation into how alignment objectives are represented in reward models and why multi-objective alignment remains challenging, motivating future work on disentangled and controllable alignment methods.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Vaccine introductions in the WHO African Region, 2023-26: a country-level ecological analysis by Gavi eligibility and conflict-affected status

Background. The Immunization Agenda 2030 (IA2030) tracks new and underused vaccine introduction as an access metric, and its mid-term review calls for stronger country ownership, prioritisation, data use and tailored support in conflict-affected and resource-constrained settings; however, national launch status does not measure recurrent financing, implementation, safety or equity. We examined how recent vaccine-introduction activity was distributed across the WHO African Region. Methods. We conducted a descriptive country-level ecological analysis of all 47 Member States from January 2023 to June 2026. The country was the unit of analysis and contributed one cumulative, unweighted count of nationally endorsed vaccine-introduction and programme-change events. Counts were linked to Gavi eligibility, World Bank FY26 conflict-affected status, broader fragile and conflict-affected situation status in sensitivity analysis, and concurrent system-performance indicators, and modelled with Poisson regression using HC1 robust standard errors. Two Expanded Programme on Immunization (EPI) manager survey waves were summarised at country level. Reporting followed STROBE and RECORD. Results. Seventy-two events were recorded across 38 of 47 Member States: 48 new-antigen introductions, 20 dose or schedule expansions and four combination-vaccine introductions; malaria vaccines accounted for 21. Gavi-eligible conflict-affected countries averaged 2.50 events per country versus 1.27 in both comparison groups. Gavi-eligible conflict-affected status was associated with a higher count (incidence rate ratio [IRR] 1.97, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.38-2.81; p

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

AI-Assisted Longitudinal Analyses of Environmental and Psychosocial Determinants of Subjective Cognitive Difficulties

作者:

Short-term environmental exposures have been linked to cognitive and behavioral outcomes, although many reported associations may reflect broader geographic and contextual differences. Using longitudinal data from the All of Us Research Program (2018–2024), we linked daily weather and air-pollution exposures to repeated attention-related and subjective cognitive outcomes. Associations were evaluated using pooled, fixed-effects, lagged, and event-study analyses. Additional machine-learning analyses were conducted to explore potential heterogeneity and latent psychosocial structure. Replication analyses were performed using the 2024 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS). Several environmental exposure measures showed small associations with cognitive outcomes in pooled analyses, but most attenuated substantially after accounting for within-location temporal variation. Mediation, sensitivity, and machine-learning analyses yielded similar conclusions. In contrast, mental-health burden, loneliness, and social functioning were consistently associated with subjective cognitive difficulty and exhibited substantially larger effect sizes than environmental exposures. Similar patterns were observed in BRFSS. Exploratory AI-assisted analyses yielded findings broadly consistent with the primary longitudinal analyses. These findings suggest that short-term environmental perturbations may have limited associations with cognitive outcomes after accounting for within-location variation, whereas psychosocial factors appear to be more consistently associated with subjective cognitive burden.

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

Findings of the MAGMaR 2026 Shared Task

This overview paper presents the results of the shared task for the second workshop on Multimodal Augmented Generation via Multimodal Retrieval (MAGMaR). In this shared task participants submitted systems focused on either (i) video retrieval or (ii) grounded generation of articles given retrieved videos. Teams could submit to either task. For the retrieval task, we had 2 participating teams that submitted a total of 17 systems – all of which beat a baseline derived from the winner of last year's shared task. On the generation side, we had 4 teams submit 16 systems. All teams had at least one generated report that was labeled the best by a human annotator.

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

Smooth time-dependent control of dipolar Bose-Einstein condensates

arXiv:2606.20507v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We consider protocols for control of dipolar Bose-Einstein condensates where the critical role is played by the long-range anisotropic interatomic magnetic dipole-dipole interaction. The phase diagram of such a condensate has been explored theoretically and experimentally with certain values of the interatomic scattering length corresponding to superfluid and supersolid phases, where supersolidity appears as a modulation in the ground state density. Preparation of this modulated ground state is challenging, since excitations appear as a result of a finite-time evolution required to produce qualitative changes in the wavefunction density. To solve this problem we consider the time-dependent control of a dipolar Bose-Einstein condensate using shortcuts to adiabaticity techniques, concentrating on design of the time-dependent scattering length, a parameter of the system easily tunable by contemporary experiments. The first technique is the variational approach based on the Euler-Lagrange equations for a separable ansatz describing the evolution of the superfluid state. Secondly, we study the transition from superfluid to supersolid using a direct optimization protocol. We discuss the fidelity of the developed protocols in terms of the evolution time.

07.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-20

A network approach to DNA methylation clocks

Biological age predicts health and lifespan better than chronological age, but remains difficult to measure. One leading molecular proxy for biological age is DNA methylation, which underlies age predictors known as "clocks". These clocks use penalized linear regression to predict chronological age from methylation levels using selected cytosine–guanine pairs (CpGs) along DNA. Although they predict chronological age within a few years and track mortality risk, there are several issues. Different clocks share a vanishingly small number of CpG sites, many of which show weak associations with age. Also, the clocks often do not transfer across methylation array platforms. This paper takes a network approach to better understand these issues. By using 12 public datasets from human blood, we build a co-methylation network of the sites that show the strongest age correlation. After pruning weak links, we find that it has a small number of large modules of covarying CpGs surrounded by many small modules and singleton sites. These modules are biologically interpretable, as they are associated with CpG island contexts and enriched for distinct Gene Ontology functions. We also map five established clocks onto this network (Horvath, Hannum, AltumAge, Skin & Blood, and Han) and find that they select some CpGs from the same module. This suggests that they are more similar than they appear. The network structure also suggests new ways to build clocks. A simple clock that retains one CpG per module matches the performance of established clocks. A second one, built from module-level principal components, outperforms all five established clocks in three validation cohorts and is transferable across array platforms (Illumina Infinium Methylation 450K or EPIC arrays). Overall, the network perspective shifts attention from individual CpG sites to modules of covarying sites. This perspective helps explain why DNA methylation clocks perform so well despite their differences and provides a more systematic approach for developing the next generation of aging biomarkers.

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

SICI: A Semantic-Pragmatic Complexity Index Reveals Regime Shifts in LLM Stance Detection

Prompt-based LLMs are increasingly used for stance detection, but harder examples are not always repaired by clearer instructions, reasoning prompts, retrieval, or debate. We introduce SICI (Stance Inference Complexity Index), a seven-dimensional diagnostic measure of the semantic-pragmatic burden imposed by a target–text pair. Across SemEval-2016 and VAST, SICI predicts LLM accuracy better than surface proxies and shows substantial cross-scorer reliability ($\alpha=0.771$). More importantly, LLM errors change regime as SICI increases: low-complexity examples invite over-attribution, especially Against predictions; intermediate examples form an unstable boundary; and high-complexity examples rapidly concentrate on None. This phase-transition-like structure persists across GPT-3.5, GPT-4o-mini, DeepSeek-V3, and GPT-4o, although stronger models move the boundaries. A 15-method intervention study further shows that prompting, retrieval, and debate often shift models along the attribution–abstention axis rather than removing the high-complexity bottleneck.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Theory of the correlated quantum Zeno effect in a monitored qubit dimer

arXiv:2503.22846v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We theoretically investigate the stochastic dynamics of two qubits subject to one- and two-site correlated continuous weak measurements. When measurements dominate over the local unitary evolution, the system's dynamics is constrained and part of the physical Hilbert space becomes inaccessible: a typical signature of the Quantum Zeno (QZ) effect. In this work, we show how the competition between these two measurement processes give rise to two distinct QZ regimes, we dubbed standard and correlated, characterised by a different topology of the allowed region of the physical Hilbert space being a simply and non-simply connected domain, respectively. We develop a theory based on a stochastic Gutzwiller ansatz for the wavefunction that is able to capture the structure of the phase diagram. Finally we show how the two QZ regimes are intimately connected to the topology of the flow of the underlying non-Hermitian Hamiltonian governing the no-click evolution.

10.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

A unified smoothing framework for protein domain bigram model

Biomolecular sequences can be represented as strings over an alphabet, an analogy that has motivated many applications of computational linguistic techniques to biological problems. However, such methods must be adapted to the characteristic scale and organization of biomolecular data. Here, we consider the problem of bigram smoothing for multidomain protein architectures, where domain bigram frequency data is extremely sparse and differs from textual data in alphabet size, string length distribution, the relationship between bigram and unigram frequencies, tandem repeat lengths, and the distribution of domain adjacencies. Moreover, some domain combinations are unobserved because they are biologically incompatible, others because the data are incomplete. A smoothing method that distinguishes these two cases is required. We propose a unified smoothing framework based on interpolation that can be tuned to accommodate different bigram data characteristics. Within this framework, we design specific model variants suited to protein domain bigram data: these assign low adjusted counts to pairs that are likely incompatible, while making appropriate adjustments for undersampled pairs. We demonstrate empirically that this approach distinguishes the two cases while preserving the characteristic signatures of multidomain data.

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

Testing the problem of time with cold atoms

arXiv:2509.07745v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We realize a cold-atom system to quantitatively test relational constructions of time. A well-isolated atomic Bose-Einstein condensate evolves in a conservative trap that is partitioned by a thin optical barrier into an observed and unobserved sector, with negligible dissipation on the experimental timescale. Motivated by relational-time approaches discussed in the Wheeler-DeWitt framework, we ask whether the dynamics of the observed sector can be ordered using only internal degrees of freedom. To this end, we construct an entropic time from an experimentally defined coarse-grained entropy, and demonstrate that it can robustly order the events in the observed sector across repeated cycles of expansion and recollapse. We finally derive an effective Schroedinger equation parameterized by this internal time and show that it is able to reproduce the measured evolution. These results establish a controlled experimental setting in which relational-time constructions can be quantitatively tested.

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

Handling Feature Heterogeneity with Learnable Graph Patches

arXiv:2606.17667v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In recent years, the rapid development of foundation models and graph pre-training technologies has spurred increasing interest in constructing a universal pre-trained graph model or Graph Foundation Model (GFM). However, a significant challenge is that existing models are unable to address feature heterogeneity in graph data without textual information, which hinders the transferability of graph models across different datasets. To bridge this gap, we propose the concept of learnable graph patches, which we regard as the smallest semantic units of any graph data. We decompose the graph into learnable graph patches by unfolding the node features and constructing corresponding patch structures separately. We then design a framework that mines transferable information from graph data across domains. Specifically, after extracting graph patches, we propose a patch encoder to extract knowledge from each unit and a patch aggregator to learn how the units are combined into a whole. Due to its domain-agnostic nature, the model can be applied to downstream data across different domains. Furthermore, we analyze the connection between our method and existing graph models, as well as the transferability of the node embeddings it generates. Empirically, our method not only achieves the capability to use multi-domain graphs for pre-training, but also shows enhanced performance across various downstream datasets and tasks. Moreover, we observe consistent improvement in downstream performance as the volume of pre-training data increases.

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

Efficient Neural Network Model Selection for Few-Class Application Datasets

arXiv:2606.19712v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While much effort has focused on developing and benchmarking high-performance neural networks, less attention has been given to how dataset properties, known to practitioners, can guide efficient model selection. Neural models are typically evaluated on datasets with thousands of classes, yet many real-world applications involve fewer than ten. To address this understudied but common setting, we develop a measure of classification difficulty based on data-side properties and show how it enables more efficient model selection for few-class datasets, where traditional approaches are less effective. We term this phenomenon "few-class distinctiveness". Our metric allows comparison of models and datasets 6 to 29$\times$ faster than repeated training and testing. Leveraging this insight, we extend scaled model families below the smallest published models, achieving greater efficiency at similar accuracy, for example models up to 42% smaller than YOLOv5-nano for a mobile robot task. Targeting resource-constrained applications, we demonstrate few-class model selection across mobile robot, drone, and IoT scenarios, highlighting practical gains in efficiency without sacrificing performance.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Confidence Calibration for Multimodal LLMs: An Empirical Study through Medical VQA

arXiv:2606.19950v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show great potential in medical tasks, but their elicited confidence often misaligns with actual accuracy, potentially leading to misdiagnosis or overlooking correct advice. This study presents the first comprehensive analysis of the relationship between accuracy and confidence in medical MLLMs. It proposes a novel method that combines Multi-Strategy Fusion-Based Interrogation (MS-FBI) with auxiliary expert LLM assessment, aiming to improve confidence calibration in Medical Visual Question Answering (VQA). Experiments demonstrate that our method reduces the Expected Calibration Error (ECE) by an average of 40\% across three Medical VQA datasets, significantly enhancing MLLMs' reliability. The findings highlight the importance of domain-specific calibration for MLLMs in healthcare, offering a more trustworthy solution for AI-assisted diagnosis.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

scLLM-DSC: LLM-Knowledge Enhanced Cross-Modal Deep Structural Clustering for Single-Cell RNA Sequencing

arXiv:2606.13007v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Clustering is fundamental to scRNA-seq analysis, serving as a cornerstone for identifying cell populations and resolving tissue heterogeneity. However, existing methods focus on mining numerical statistical patterns, suffering from semantic agnosticism by neglecting the intrinsic biological functions encoded by genes. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promising semantic capabilities, their direct adaptation to cell clustering is hindered by the structural mismatch between generative pre-training objectives and discriminative downstream tasks. To bridge this gap, we propose scLLM-DSC, a novel LLM-Knowledge Enhanced Cross-Modal Deep Structural Clustering framework. Diverging from data-driven paradigms, scLLM-DSC establishes a semantically-grounded representation by synergizing two views: a Knowledge-Driven Semantic View derived from NCBI gene priors and contextualized Cell2Sentence embeddings, and a Structure-Aware Topological View extracted via a graph-guided encoder. Crucially, we introduce a cross-modal contrastive alignment mechanism to enforce consistency between biological semantics and transcriptomic features within a unified latent space. Extensive benchmarks demonstrate that scLLM-DSC significantly outperforms eleven state-of-the-art baselines in clustering accuracy.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

SkillJuror: Measuring How Agent Skill Organization Changes Runtime Behavior

arXiv:2606.11543v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent Skills augment large language model (LLM) agents with procedural knowledge at inference time, but current benchmarks rarely distinguish what a Skill says from how it is organized. We study this distinction through Progressive Disclosure, where a concise root file points agents to supporting resources on demand, and compare it with a normalized flat baseline. We present SkillJuror, a framework for evaluating Skill writing paradigms through semantically controlled variants, matched multi-trial evaluations, and trajectory evidence while holding task knowledge fixed. In an 82-task SkillsBench study, Progressive Disclosure changes runtime behavior before aggregate outcomes: distinct Skill resources touched per trajectory rise from 1.18 to 3.85, and effective uptake events rise from 1.33 to 3.92. It also yields 17 additional verifier-passing trials out of 410 matched trials (+4.1%) over the normalized flat baseline. The benefit is task-dependent. Progressive Disclosure helps when supporting resources guide implementation, checking, or repair, but is weaker when success hinges on exact output conventions, numerical thresholds, or long artifact-generation pipelines. These results show that Skill organization is not mere presentation: it can change how agents search and apply procedural knowledge, while outcome gains depend on whether the exposed resources are actionable for the task. Code is available at https://github.com/zhiyuchen-ai/skill-juror.

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

SHARD: Safe and Helpful Alignment via Self-Reframing Distillation

Large language models often struggle with sensitive prompts. They may refuse outright, provide generic safety boilerplate, or fail to address the user's legitimate informational needs that can be answered safely. We introduce SHARD, a self-reframing distillation method to improve safe-helpfulness. It first rewrites sensitive prompts to surface benign intent using philosophical guidelines, then reframes its original responses into safe, more helpful ones, and finally fine-tunes the model on its self-reframed responses. Across DNA and the English subset of LINGUASAFE, SHARD improves helpfulness for most model families while preserving safety. It also remains competitive with distillation from a larger teacher model, suggesting that models can internalize safe and helpful behavior elicited from their own. Warning: This paper contains content that may be offensive or harmful.

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

CRAG: Can 3D Generative Models Help 3D Assembly?

Most existing 3D assembly methods treat the problem as pure pose estimation, rearranging observed parts via rigid transformations. In contrast, human assembly naturally couples structural reasoning with holistic shape inference. Inspired by this intuition, we reformulate 3D assembly as a joint problem of assembly and generation. We show that these two processes are mutually reinforcing: assembly provides part-level structural priors for generation, while generation injects holistic shape context that resolves ambiguities in assembly. Unlike prior methods that cannot synthesize missing geometry, we propose CRAG, which simultaneously generates plausible complete shapes and predicts poses for input parts. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across in-the-wild objects with diverse geometries, varying part counts, and missing pieces. Project Page: https://ai4ce.github.io/CRAG/

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

A Survey of Reasoning and Agentic Systems in Time Series with Large Language Models

arXiv:2509.11575v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Time series reasoning treats time as a first-class axis and incorporates intermediate evidence directly into the answer. This survey defines the problem and organizes the literature by reasoning topology with three families: direct reasoning in one step, linear chain reasoning with explicit intermediates, and branch-structured reasoning that explores, revises, and aggregates. The topology is crossed with the main objectives of the field, including traditional time series analysis, explanation and understanding, causal inference and decision making, and time series generation, while a compact tag set spans these axes and captures decomposition and verification, ensembling, tool use, knowledge access, multimodality, agent loops, and LLM alignment regimes. Methods and systems are reviewed across domains, showing what each topology enables and where it breaks down in faithfulness or robustness, along with curated datasets, benchmarks, and resources that support study and deployment (https://github.com/blacksnail789521/Time-Series-Reasoning-Survey). Evaluation practices that keep evidence visible and temporally aligned are highlighted, and guidance is distilled on matching topology to uncertainty, grounding with observable artifacts, planning for shift and streaming, and treating cost and latency as design budgets. We emphasize that reasoning structures must balance capacity for grounding and self-correction against computational cost and reproducibility, while future progress will likely depend on benchmarks that tie reasoning quality to utility and on closed-loop testbeds that trade off cost and risk under shift-aware, streaming, and long-horizon settings. Taken together, these directions mark a shift from narrow accuracy toward reliability at scale, enabling systems that not only analyze but also understand, explain, and act on dynamic worlds with traceable evidence and credible outcomes.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Within-host pathogen population diversity predicts treatment response in tuberculosis

Background: Tuberculosis (TB) treatment outcomes remain suboptimal, and standard clinical diagnostics cannot reliably identify patients at high risk of treatment failure or relapse at the time of diagnosis. While within-host Mycobacterium tuberculosis genetic diversity is hypothesized to reflect the viable bacterial burden and adaptive capacity of the infection, its clinical prognostic value remains unknown. Methods: We conducted a prospective cohort study of 364 patients with newly diagnosed, rifampicin-susceptible pulmonary TB in South Africa. Patients received standard 6-month therapy and were monitored for up to two years to ascertain composite unfavorable outcomes (treatment failure, death, or relapse). To accurately detect low-frequency (unfixed) genetic variants and eliminate reference bias artifacts, we mapped medium to high depth short-read sequences against matched, patient-specific long-read assemblies. The association between baseline pathogen genetic diversity and clinical outcomes was evaluated using multivariable Cox proportional-hazards models. Results: After bioinformatic filtering, true unfixed variants were relatively rare but significantly enriched in genes mediating pathogen adaptation and drug tolerance, including transporter proteins and two-component regulatory systems. Within-host bacterial genetic diversity (i.e., the total number of unfixed variants) ranged from 0-20, with a median of 1 per patient. In survival analysis adjusting for known clinical risk factors–including HIV status, prior TB, baseline smear positivity, and radiographic lung involvement–baseline within-host genetic diversity emerged as a strong, independent predictor of unfavorable treatment outcomes. For patients with greater than 3 unfixed variants at diagnosis, each increase of 5 unfixed variants was associated with more than double the risk of a composite unfavorable outcome (adjusted Hazard Ratio, 2.36; 95% CI, 1.27 to 4.39; p=0.007). Conclusions: Baseline within-host pathogen genetic diversity is an independent predictor of unfavorable TB treatment outcomes. As sequencing becomes increasingly integrated into routine diagnostics, quantifying unfixed variants is an accessible approach that promises to risk-stratify patients and guide the duration of individualized regimens.

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

HGCN(O): A Self-Tuning GCN HyperModel Toolkit for Outcome Prediction in Event-Sequence Data

arXiv:2507.22524v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose HGCN(O), a self-tuning toolkit using Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) models for event sequence prediction. Featuring four GCN architectures (O-GCN, T-GCN, TP-GCN, TE-GCN) across the GCNConv and GraphConv layers, our toolkit integrates multiple graph representations of event sequences with different choices of node- and graph-level attributes and in temporal dependencies via edge weights, optimising prediction accuracy and stability for balanced and unbalanced datasets. Extensive experiments show that GCNConv models excel on unbalanced data, while all models perform consistently on balanced data. Experiments also confirm the superior performance of HGCN(O) over traditional approaches. Applications include Predictive Business Process Monitoring (PBPM), which predicts future events or states of a business process based on event logs.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Arbitrary control over multimode wave propagation for machine learning

arXiv:2402.17750v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Controlled multimode wave propagation can enable more space-efficient photonic processors than architectures based on discrete components connected by single-mode waveguides. Instead of defining discrete elements, one can sculpt the continuous substrate of a photonic processor to perform computations through multimode interference in two dimensions. Here we designed and demonstrated a device with a refractive index that can be rapidly reprogrammed across space, allowing arbitrary control of wave propagation. The device, a two-dimensional programmable waveguide, uses parallel electro-optic modulation of the refractive index of a slab waveguide with about $10^4$ programmable spatial degrees of freedom. We implemented neural network inference on benchmark tasks with up to $49$-dimensional vectors in a single pass, without digital pre-processing or post-processing. Theoretical and numerical analyses further indicated that two-dimensional programmable waveguides may offer not only a constant-factor reduction in device area but also a scaling benefit, with the area required growing as $N^{1.5}$ rather than $N^2$.

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

Evidence of Layered Positional and Directional Constraints in the Voynich Manuscript: Implications for Cipher-Like Structure

The Voynich Manuscript (VMS) exhibits a script of uncertain origin whose grapheme sequences have resisted linguistic analysis. We present a systematic analysis of its grapheme sequences, revealing two complementary structural layers: a character-level right-to-left optimization in word-internal sequences and a left-to-right dependency at word boundaries, a directional dissociation not observed in any of our four comparison languages (English, French, Hebrew, Arabic). We further evaluate two classes of structured generator against a four-signature joint criterion: a parametric slot-based generator and a Cardan grille implementing Rugg's (2004) gibberish hypothesis. Across their full tested parameter spaces, neither class reproduces all four signatures simultaneously. While these results do not rule out generator classes we have not tested, they provide the first quantitative benchmarks against which any future generative or cryptanalytic model of the VMS can be evaluated, and they suggest that the VMS exhibits cipher-like structural constraints that are difficult to reproduce from simple positional or frequency-based mechanisms alone.

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

Fine-Tuning a 7B Advisor on Free-Tier GPUs: An Adapter-Handoff Recipe and a Synthetic-Data Reliability Caution

arXiv:2504.15610v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fine-tuning a 7B language model for specialized advising is attractive in resource-constrained settings, but multi-epoch runs routinely exceed the wall-clock limits of the free-tier GPUs (Kaggle, Colab) such users rely on. We report two things. First, a practical recipe: a three-epoch QLoRA fine-tune of Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3 (4-bit NF4, LoRA rank 16, via Unsloth) completed across two free-tier 16 GB GPUs (Tesla P100 then T4) by checkpointing only the small LoRA adapter (41.9M parameters) and resuming on the second machine. Adapter-only handoff is sufficient – optimizer and scheduler state need not be transferred – so the binding constraint is per-step VRAM and per-session wall-clock, not aggregate compute. Second, and more importantly, an honest evaluation that returns a cautionary result. On a blind held-out comparison against the un-fine-tuned base model, the fine-tuned model scored higher on similarity to the synthetic training distribution (BERTScore F1 +0.063, a fidelity not quality signal) but lower on advising quality: a blind LLM-as-judge preferred the base model on 46% of prompts versus 18%, and a source-verified factuality audit found four confident errors from the fine-tuned model on policy-sensitive topics against zero for the base. Auditing the training data with the same method, we find this is not a fine-tuning artifact: each audited error is already present in the Gemini-generated training answers, and a random-sample audit finds verifiable errors in a sizable fraction of responses (28-40%; single-judge, n=40). The data is therefore sufficient to account for the errors, which we attribute to the synthetic-data pipeline rather than the adapter-handoff method. We release the dataset, adapter, cross-GPU notebooks, and full evaluation harness so every result reproduces on a single 16 GB GPU.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Efficient Rationale-based Retrieval: On-policy Distillation from Generative Rerankers based on JEPA

Unlike traditional fact-based retrieval, rationale-based retrieval typically necessitates cross-encoding of query-document pairs using large language models, incurring substantial computational costs. To address this limitation, we propose Rabtriever, which independently encodes queries and documents, while providing comparable cross query-document comprehension capabilities to rerankers. We start from training a LLM-based generative reranker, which puts the document prior to the query and prompts the LLM to generate the relevance score by log probabilities. We then employ it as the teacher of an on-policy distillation framework, with Rabtriever as the student to reconstruct the teacher's contextual-aware query embedding. To achieve this effect, Rabtriever is first initialized from the teacher, with parameters frozen. The Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) paradigm is then adopted, which integrates a lightweight, trainable predictor between LLM layers and heads, projecting the query embedding into a new hidden space, with the document embedding as the latent vector. JEPA then minimizes the distribution difference between this projected embedding and the teacher embedding. To strengthen the sampling efficiency of on-policy distillation, we also add an auxiliary loss on the reverse KL of LLM logits, to reshape the student's logit distribution. Rabtriever optimizes the teacher's quadratic complexity on the document length to linear, verified both theoretically and empirically. Experiments show that Rabtriever outperforms different retriever baselines across diverse rationale-based tasks, including empathetic conversations and robotic manipulations, with minor accuracy degradation from the reranker. Rabtriever also generalizes well on traditional retrieval benchmarks such as MS MARCO and BEIR, with comparable performance to the best retriever baseline.