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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Uniform-in-time error estimates for McKean-Vlasov SDEs with common noise and stochastic algorithms

arXiv:2606.14170v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work, by construct an asymptotic coupling by reflection, we first explore the uniform-in-time estimate on probability distance for two measure-valued processes induced by a McKean-Vlasov SDE with common noise and an interacting particle system, where the drift terms are dissipative merely in the long distance. As direct applications of this estimate, we establish the uniform-in-time error estimates for the numerical solutions derived via backward/tamed/adaptive Euler-Maruyama methods. Moreover, as another direct application, the uniform-in-time conditional propagation of chaos is quantified.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Stealthy World Model Manipulation via Data Poisoning

arXiv:2606.18697v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model-based learning agents use learned world models to predict future states, plan actions, and adapt to new environments. However, the process of updating world models from collected experience creates a training-time attack surface: adversarially poisoned fine-tuning trajectories can manipulate the learned dynamics and thereby corrupt downstream planning. In this paper, we propose SWAAP, the first two-stage data poisoning framework for learned world models. In the first stage, SWAAP identifies a harmful target world model that induces low-return behavior under planning while remaining close to clean dynamics, using first-order bilevel optimization enabled by a transition-gradient theorem. In the second stage, SWAAP realizes this target through stealth-constrained gradient matching, modifying only a limited fraction of fine-tuning transition targets so that the induced training gradients steer the victim model toward the adversarial target, while a prediction-error regularizer encourages the poisoned targets to remain close to the world model's natural approximation error. To assess attack stealthiness, we evaluate defenses and detectability across three stages of the poisoning pipeline: pre-training detection of poisoned transitions, robust training during fine-tuning, and test-time monitoring of the resulting world model. Across diverse continuous-control tasks, SWAAP causes substantial performance degradation while keeping poisoned transitions close to clean data and evading the evaluated non-adaptive residual/CUSUM/TRIM-style defenses. These results reveal a practical vulnerability in world-model adaptation pipelines and highlight the need for robustness methods that protect both world-model training data and learned dynamics.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

DP-Hype: Federated Differentially Private Hyperparameter Search

arXiv:2510.04902v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Tuning hyperparameters in federated machine learning can substantially impact model performance. When hyperparameters are tuned on sensitive data, privacy becomes an important challenge and to this end, differential privacy has emerged as the de facto standard for provable privacy. A standard setting in federated learning is that clients agree on a shared setup, i.e., find a compromise from a set of hyperparameters, like a model's learning rate. Yet, prior work on privacy-preserving hyperparameter tuning is tailored to specific learning tasks, does not account for the privacy leakage of aggregated results, or offers a sub-optimal privacy-utility trade-off. In this work, we present our algorithm DP-Hype, which performs a federated and privacy-preserving hyperparameter search by conducting a federated voting based on local hyperparameter evaluations of clients. In this way, DP-Hype selects hyperparameters that lead to a compromise supported by a majority of clients, while maintaining scalability and independence from specific learning tasks. We prove that DP-Hype preserves the strong notion of differential privacy called client-level differential privacy and, importantly, show that its privacy guarantees do not depend on the number of hyperparameters. We also provide bounds on its utility guarantees, that is, the probability of finding good hyperparameters, and implement DP-Hype as a submodule in the popular Flower framework for federated machine learning. In addition, we evaluate performance on multiple benchmark data sets in iid as well as multiple non-iid settings and demonstrate high utility of DP-Hype even under small privacy budgets.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

An Angular-Temporal Interaction Network for Light Field Object Tracking in Low-Light Scenes

High-quality 4D light field representation with efficient angular feature modeling is crucial for scene perception, as it can provide discriminative spatial-angular cues to identify moving targets. However, recent developments still struggle to deliver reliable angular modeling in the temporal domain, particularly in complex low-light scenes. In this paper, we propose a novel light field epipolar-plane structure image (ESI) representation that explicitly defines the geometric structure within the light field. By capitalizing on the abrupt changes in the angles of light rays within the epipolar plane, this representation can enhance visual expression in low-light scenes and reduce redundancy in high-dimensional light fields. We further propose an angular-temporal interaction network (ATINet) for light field object tracking that learns angular-aware representations from the geometric structural cues and angular-temporal interaction cues of light fields. Furthermore, ATINet can also be optimized in a self-supervised manner to enhance the geometric feature interaction across the temporal domain. Finally, we introduce a large-scale light field low-light dataset for object tracking. Extensive experimentation demonstrates that ATINet achieves state-of-the-art performance in single object tracking. Furthermore, we extend the proposed method to multiple object tracking, which also shows the effectiveness of high-quality light field angular-temporal modeling.

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

TreeGRNG: Binary Tree Gaussian Random Number Generator for Efficient Probabilistic AI Hardware

arXiv:2606.16599v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) offer opportunities for greatly enhancing the trustworthiness of conventional neural networks by monitoring the uncertainties in decision-making. A significant drawback for BNN inference at the extreme edge, however, is the imperative need to incorporate Gaussian Random Number Generators (GRNG) within each neuron. State-of-the-art GRNG algorithms heavily depend on multiple arithmetic operations and the use of extensive look-up tables, posing significant implementation challenges for ultra-low power hardware implementations. To overcome this, this paper presents an innovative binary tree random number generator (TreeGRNG) allowing the use of ultra-low-cost constant comparators instead of arithmetic units. We further enhance the TreeGRNG proposal with a set of hardware-aware optimizations exploiting the Gaussian properties. The optimized TreeGRNG surpasses the State-of-the-Art (SoTA) in terms of distribution accuracy while achieving a 3.7$\times$ reduction in energy per sample and boosting the throughput per unit area by 5.8$\times$. Moreover, our TreeGRNG proposal possesses a distinct advantage over the current SoTA in terms of flexibility, as it easily enables designers to adjust the shape of the sampled probability distribution, extending beyond the capabilities of traditional GRNGs, opening the horizon towards future probabilistic AI designs. The TreeGRNG design is available open-source in the link

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Geometric Erasure by Contrastive Velocity Matching in Rectified Flows

arXiv:2606.00140v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While the rapid adoption of multimodal generative models offers immense potential, it has also increased the risks of harmful content synthesis, deepfakes, and copyright infringements. To address these challenges, concept erasure has emerged as a prospective safeguard. However, as the field gradually transitions from U-Net-based diffusion models to Rectified Flow Transformers, erasure research has struggled to keep pace. In this work, we introduce GEM, a simple but highly effective erasure framework for Rectified Flow models. As part of our contribution, we establish a principled bridge between trajectory-based unlearning grounded in Generative Flow Networks and classic teacher-guided erasure: we translate trajectory-based signals into a teacher-guided flow-matching setup that unifies the strengths of both paradigms. Concretely, a teacher provides complementary attraction and repulsion signals that we combine into a single geometric guidance objective, yielding targeted suppression of unwanted concepts while preserving benign generation.

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

Real-Time Execution with Autoregressive Policies

arXiv:2606.13355v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-time execution, enabled by asynchronous inference that ensures both smooth action trajectories and fast reactivity, is critical for realistic deployments of large-scale Vision-Language-Action models. However, recent work on real-time execution primarily focuses on variants of diffusion policies, even though it is more critical for autoregressive policies given their slower rollout speed in synchronous inference. In contrast, we demonstrate that autoregressive policies can achieve real-time execution by adjusting the tokenization horizon and applying constrained decoding, thereby guaranteeing strict latency bounds that enable multi-trajectory decoding to maximize performance. Across simulated and real-world environments, we find that the autoregressive policy consistently outperforms its equivalent-level flow-matching policy counterpart while achieving significantly improved task completion speeds from synchronous inference. Coupled with the inherent advantages of autoregressive policies, such as faster convergence and better generalizability in instruction-following, these results confirm that autoregressive policies can remain a competitive policy type supporting real-time execution.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Geometric bias in eigenspace perturbation under random heterogeneous noise

arXiv:2606.11263v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spectral methods rely fundamentally on the stability of principal eigenspaces under random perturbations. Classically, this stability is quantified by the Davis-Kahan and Wedin theorems, which bound the eigenspace error using the operator norm of the noise and the relevant spectral gaps. While these worst-case bounds are sharp for arbitrary deterministic perturbations, they can be wasteful in the low-rank signal-plus-random-noise setting, as they fail to capture the fine-grained interaction between the signal geometry and the noise distribution. In this paper, we study the spectral perturbation of signal-plus-noise matrices corrupted by sparse, random noise with an arbitrary, inhomogeneous variance profile. We demonstrate that under heterogeneous noise variances, the empirical eigenvectors suffer a systematic, deterministic geometric bias that is entirely invisible to classical perturbation bounds. By leveraging the Quadratic Vector Equation (QVE) and establishing fine-grained isotropic local laws, we derive near-optimal, non-asymptotic perturbation bounds for the leading eigenspaces in the operator and $2\to\infty$ norms. The bounds separate the usual signal-to-noise contribution, stochastic fluctuations, and structured geometric bias terms determined by the alignment between the signal eigenspaces and the row-wise variance profile.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Lowest order Carleman linearization for low Reynolds long-term behaviour of fluid flow simulations

arXiv:2605.23380v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: It is shown that the lowest (second) order truncation of the Carleman linearization of the fluid equations (C2) recovers the late stage of the evolution, namely the steady-state solution, although to a decreasing degree of accuracy at increasing Reynolds number. This asymptotic property is first proved analytically for the decaying logistic with external forcing and then shown to hold to a significant degree of accuracy also for the more complex case of two-dimensional Kolmogorov-like fluid flow at low Reynolds numbers, below $Re \sim 10$. This time-asymptotic property may open interesting prospects for the quantum simulation of low-Reynolds steady-state fluid flows.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Trainable Quantum Channels as Computational Primitives for Quantum Learning

arXiv:2606.15808v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Variational quantum learning is traditionally constrained to unitary dynamics, often treating quantum channels as detrimental noise. In this work, we reformulate the quantum channels as trainable computational primitives and establish a non-unitary quantum machine learning framework grounded in open-system dynamics. We demonstrate that the outputs of channel-enhanced quantum models form a structured superposition of multiple functional components. Each component is governed by an effective observable whose spectrum can be adaptively modulated during training, a significant departure from the spectral invariance in unitary transformations. Moreover, the proposed framework generalizes conventional unitary quantum models by retaining them as a special case while introducing additional non-unitary degrees of freedom. Furthermore, we reveal that trainable quantum channels enrich the optimization geometry through ensemble-averaged gradient and additional optimization directions induced by the Kraus operators. Empirical evaluations on classification tasks using trainable amplitude-damping and phase-damping channels confirm enhanced optimization dynamics and predictive performance. Our work provides a principled approach for leveraging quantum channels as trainable resources and advances the design of high-performance quantum learning architectures.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Hybrid Iterative Neural Low-Regularity Integrator for Nonlinear Dispersive Equations

arXiv:2605.04853v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose HIN-LRI, a hybrid framework that augments a classical numerical solver with a neural operator trained to correct the solver's structured truncation error. A base low-regularity integrator provides a consistent first-order approximation to nonlinear dispersive PDEs, while a lightweight neural network, operating on a low-dimensional latent manifold, learns the residual defect that analytical methods cannot close. An explicit time-step scaling on the neural correction ensures that its Lipschitz contribution remains $\mathcal{O}(\tau)$, yielding a Gronwall stability factor bounded uniformly in the step size and independent of the spatial resolution. The network is trained end-to-end through a solver-in-the-loop objective that unrolls the full iteration and penalises trajectory error in a Bourgain-type norm, aligning learning with multi-step solver dynamics rather than isolated one-step targets. Under stated assumptions, the global error satisfies $C(\varepsilon_{net}+\delta)\,\tau^\gamma\ln(1/\tau)$, where $\varepsilon_{net}$ measures the network approximation quality and $\delta$ the training shortfall. Experiments on three dispersive benchmarks with rough data show that HIN-LRI improves accuracy over analytical integrators, splitting methods, and neural PDE surrogates, with stable spatial refinement, effective out-of-distribution transfer, and modest online overhead.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Gaussian DP for Reporting Differential Privacy Guarantees in Machine Learning

arXiv:2503.10945v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Current practices for reporting differential privacy (DP) guarantees for machine learning (ML) algorithms such as DP-SGD provide an incomplete and potentially misleading picture. For instance, if only a single $(\varepsilon, \delta)$ is known about a mechanism, standard analyses show that there could exist highly accurate inference attacks against training data records, when, upon a more careful analysis, such accurate attacks do not exist for most practical mechanisms. In this position paper, we argue that using _non-asymptotic_ Gaussian Differential Privacy (GDP) as the primary means of communicating DP guarantees in ML avoids these potential downsides. Using two recent developments in the DP literature: (i) open-source numerical accountants capable of computing the privacy profile and $f$-DP curves of DP-SGD to arbitrary accuracy, and (ii) a decision-theoretic metric over DP representations, we show how to provide non-asymptotic bounds on GDP using numerical accountants, and show that GDP can capture the entire privacy profile of DP-SGD and related algorithms with virtually no error, as quantified by the metric. To support our claims, we investigate the privacy profiles of state-of-the-art DP large-scale image classification, and the TopDown algorithm for the U.S. Decennial Census, observing that GDP fits their profiles remarkably well in all cases. We conclude with a discussion on the strengths and weaknesses of this approach, and discuss which other privacy mechanisms could benefit from GDP.

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

HY-WU (Part I): An Extensible Functional Neural Memory Framework and An Instantiation in Text-Guided Image Editing

Foundation models are transitioning from offline predictors to deployed systems expected to operate over long time horizons. In real deployments, objectives are not fixed: domains drift, user preferences evolve, and new tasks appear after the model has shipped. This elevates continual learning and instant personalization from optional features to core architectural requirements. Yet most adaptation pipelines still follow a static weight paradigm: after training (or after any adaptation step), inference executes a single parameter vector regardless of user intent, domain, or instance-specific constraints. This treats the trained or adapted model as a single point in parameter space. In heterogeneous and continually evolving regimes, distinct objectives can induce separated feasible regions over parameters, forcing any single shared update into compromise, interference, or overspecialization. As a result, continual learning and personalization are often implemented as repeated overwriting of shared weights, risking degradation of previously learned behaviors. We propose HY-WU (Weight Unleashing), a memory-first adaptation framework that shifts adaptation pressure away from overwriting a single shared parameter point. HY-WU implements functional (operator-level) memory as a neural module: a generator that synthesizes weight updates on-the-fly from the instance condition, yielding instance-specific operators without test-time optimization.

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

Mask, Sample, Revise: A Revisable CTMC Inference Stack for Guided Discrete Flow Matching Text-to-Speech

arXiv:2606.13989v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent alignment-free non-autoregressive (NAR) text-to-speech (TTS) models formulate synthesis as a conditional infilling task, bypassing explicit duration predictors and external aligners. When speech is represented with neural codec tokens, the infilling problem becomes discrete, making Discrete Flow Matching (DFM), a Continuous-Time Markov Chain (CTMC) framework for discrete generation, a natural fit. However, inference-time control for stable low-step conditional infilling remains underexplored. We propose Mask, Sample, Revise, an inference-time CTMC stack for alignment-free DFM-TTS. The stack combines predictor-free guidance to strengthen text conditioning, prompt-matched conditional coupling to align the probability path with the acoustic prompt, and SC-ReMask, a schedule-constrained remasking mechanism that introduces token-to-mask transitions so early de-masking decisions can be revised. These components require no post-hoc fine-tuning and operate in a single tau-leaping sampler. Controlled ablations show that this stack improves intelligibility and robustness in the low-NFE prompted setting, outperforming unguided and guidance-only samplers with substantially more steps.

16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

LooseControlVideo: Directorial Video Control using Spatial Blocking

Precise 3D spatial orchestration in text-to-video generation remains a significant challenge, particularly for multi-object scenes where semantic layout and temporal dynamics are often entangled. While existing depth-conditioned models achieve good structural fidelity, they necessitate dense, frame-accurate guidance that is labor-intensive to author for dynamic events involving deformable objects. We present LooseControlVideo, a framework that enables intuitive and expressive control by using sparse, oriented 3D boxes as a "blocking" proxy. This allows users to author high-level layout and trajectory while leveraging a video generative model to generate realistic occlusions, dynamics and interactions. We achieve this by fine-tuning a Wan 2.2 backbone on a video dataset annotated with DNOCS, a novel encoding for 3D size, orientation and depth-ordered occlusions. Furthermore, our method allows for localized refinement, such as adjusting a jump trajectory or adding an interaction, with minimal disruption to the global scene context. Extensive evaluations on the nuScenes, HO-3D, and BEHAVE benchmarks demonstrate that LooseControlVideo significantly outperforms existing 2D-box and flow-based baselines. Our findings indicate a 1.2x to 3x improvement in Trajectory Error; 2x improvement in Rigid Motion Consistency; and a 1.5x to 2x increase in Occlusion Accuracy over current state-of-the-art layout-conditioned models, demonstrating that oriented 3D primitives provide good geometric prior for complex, multi-agent video authoring.

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

Analyzing Visual Aircraft Representations with Sparse Autoencoders

Vision models can achieve strong performance on classification tasks, but the internal representations supporting their predictions are often difficult to interpret. This work investigates whether sparse autoencoders can decompose intermediate representations of a vision model into interpretable features. We train a ConvNeXt classifier on the FGVC-Aircraft dataset, extract spatial activations from its final feature stage, and train a sparse autoencoder on these activations. The learned sparse features are analyzed using top-activating image patches, activation strength, and class selectivity. Qualitative visual inspection reveals that several features correspond to recognizable aircraft structures and visual patterns. We evaluate a subset of selected features using input-space and feature-space ablations, measuring how blurring image patches and suppressing sparse features affect class logits, classification margins, and prediction confidence. The results suggest that sparse autoencoders can reveal partially interpretable, class-relevant visual features associated with aircraft recognition, while also exposing limitations such as polysemanticity and coarse spatial localization.

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

DynamicPTQ: Mitigating Activation Quantization Collapse via Residual-Stream Dynamics

arXiv:2606.12487v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training quantization (PTQ) is essential for efficient large language model inference, but reliably quantizing activations remains challenging when weights, activations, and KV caches are all quantized to 4-bit precision. A key difficulty lies in massive activations, whose extreme values dominate the activation range and amplify quantization errors. State-of-the-art methods mainly mitigate massive activations through transformation-based smoothing, such as orthogonal rotations and affine scaling, but overlook the cross-layer dynamics of the residual stream. In this paper, we show that massive activations emerge and disappear in a phase-wise pattern across network depth, triggering large residual changes. These changes cause newly injected layer-wise updates to dominate the 4-bit quantization scale and weaken historical residual information. To characterize this behavior, we introduce Jump Ratio and Historical Feature SNR. This suggests that static transformation-based smoothing cannot fully resolve dynamic quantization instability caused by cross-layer residual changes. Based on this analysis, we propose DynamicPTQ, a Dynamic Post-Training Quantization policy for phase-aware mixed-precision activation quantization. DynamicPTQ identifies quantization-sensitive layers from residual-stream dynamics and assigns 8-bit activation precision only to these layers, while keeping weights, KV caches, and other activations in 4-bit precision. It can be directly integrated with strong PTQ baselines such as QuaRot, SpinQuant, and FlatQuant. Experiments on LLaMA-2 and LLaMA-3 show that DynamicPTQ consistently improves perplexity and zero-shot QA performance under W4A4KV4 quantization, while achieving 1.05 to 1.07 times throughput improvement with modest memory overhead. These results demonstrate a practical path toward robust low-bit LLM inference.

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

Closing the Social-Semantic Gap: SPSD for Edge-Based Prompt Compression in Cloud LLM Inference

arXiv:2606.19364v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The prefill stage of Large Language Model (LLM) inference is a growing contributor to cloud-scale energy cost. Many consumer-support and conversational prompts contain social scaffolding: politeness markers, apologetic preamble, repetition, and rapport-building language that is important for human communication but carries low marginal information for machine reasoning. We call this discrepancy the Social-Semantic Gap. We present SPSD (Sentiment Preserving Semantic Distillation), an edge-based pipeline that compresses user prompts using a 4-bit quantised Small Language Model before transmission to a cloud-deployed LLM. Evaluation on a 248-prompt corpus using Gemma-2-2B-Instruct (Q4_K_M) as the SLM and Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct as the cloud evaluation model yields a mean input token saving of 99.9 tokens per distilled call, with all 146 distilled calls yielding positive savings. Response quality, assessed by blind LLM-as-judge scoring across 121 pairs, is non-inferior to the raw path within a pre-specified 1-point margin on a 15-point rubric; the judge awarded 43 percent ties, 28 percent distilled wins, and 29 percent raw wins. Cosine similarity is mixed: mean 0.682, median 0.712, with 54.1 percent of pairs above the 0.70 reference threshold. Safety-critical domains are conservatively routed to passthrough via rule-based gates. Per-call net energy saving is estimated at 70-270 uWh under stated assumptions. SPSD shows that on-device prompt distillation can reduce cloud LLM input-token cost while preserving response quality within a practical non-inferiority margin.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Sensory Restoration via Brain-Computer Interfaces: A Unified 2 x 2 Framework and Convergence Roadmap

arXiv:2606.15091v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Millions of individuals worldwide suffer from sensory and communication deficits caused by neurodegenerative diseases, stroke, or trauma. Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) offer a promising avenue for sensory and motor restoration. However, the scientific literature remains highly fragmented between invasive neuroprosthetics and non-invasive electrophysiological decoders, with a lack of consistent terminology and comparison metrics. This chapter proposes a unified 2 x 2 framework categorizing BCIs along two axes: degree of invasiveness (invasive vs. non-invasive) and signal direction (afferent sensory-IN vs. efferent sensory-OUT). We define and distinguish the paradigms of restoration, substitution, and augmentation. Furthermore, we outline a structural roadmap for the convergence of these modalities over near-, medium-, and long-term horizons, focusing on physical limits and the integrative role of machine learning foundation models.

21.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-21

Novel symptoms associated with eclampsia could improve detection and save lives

by Alice Beardmore-Gray, Andrew Shennan Eclampsia is a life-threatening complication of pre-eclampsia, yet remains difficult to predict. In this Perspective, Alice Beardmore-Gray and Andrew Shennan highlight a recent study that identifies 10 novel prodromal symptoms of eclampsia, with potential to better predict which women are at risk and therefore reduce delays in intervention.

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

STARE: Surprisal-Guided Token-Level Advantage Reweighting for Policy Entropy Stability

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards algorithms like GRPO have emerged as the dominant post-training paradigm for complex reasoning in LLMs, yet commonly suffer from policy entropy collapse during training. We conduct a first-order gradient analysis of token-level entropy dynamics under GRPO and identify a token-level credit assignment mismatch: the per-token entropy variation decomposes into the product of the trajectory-level advantage and an entropy sensitivity function over the next-token distribution, yielding an advantage-surprisal four-quadrant structure and a near-criticality property. Motivated by it, we propose STARE (Surprisal-guided Token-level Advantage Reweighting for policy Entropy stability), which identifies entropy-critical token subsets via batch-internal surprisal quantiles, selectively reweights their effective advantages, and incorporates a target-entropy closed-loop gate for stable entropy regulation. Across model scales from 1.5B to 32B and three task families (Short CoT, Long CoT, and Multi-Turn Tool Use), STARE sustains stable RL training over thousands of steps while maintaining policy entropy within the target band. On AIME24 and AIME25, STARE outperforms DAPO and other competitive baselines by 4%-8% in average accuracy, with reflection tokens and response length growing in tandem, indicating sustained exploration-exploitation balance that further unlocks RL training potential.Code is available at https://github.com/hp-luo/STARE.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Plasma proteomics reveals clinical and mechanistic heterogeneity among individuals who develop coronary artery disease

BACKGROUND: Individuals who develop coronary artery disease (CAD) are clinically and mechanistically heterogeneous, and understanding this variation is crucial for precise risk stratification and tailored interventions. However, the molecular mechanisms that connect these two kinds of heterogeneity remain unclear, limiting progress toward biologically grounded risk stratification and targeted interventions. Here, we investigated the heterogeneity of individuals who develop CAD by leveraging plasma proteomic signatures, placed individuals along continuous metabolic gradients and revealed the molecular programs underlying these patterns, thereby linking mechanistic variation to clinical heterogeneity. METHODS AND RESULTS: From 42,803 UK Biobank participants, including 3,713 individuals who developed CAD within 10 years (incident CAD), we first identified a 320-protein panel from 2,923 baseline proteins that improved prediction of incident CAD beyond clinical risk scores. Using reverse graph embedding, we reduced the proteomic data to two dimensions and mapped each incident case onto the resulting two-dimensional latent proteomic space. These proteomic dimensions show significant associations with cardiometabolic and kidney-related clinical markers. The patterns were replicated in the EPIC-Norfolk study. Phenome-wide Cox regression analyses further linked these proteomic dimensions to 10-year incidence rates for various diseases, including type 2 diabetes, obesity, and chronic kidney disease (CKD). Furthermore, adding the proteomic dimensions to clinical variable-based Cox regression model improved prediction of 10-year incidence of CKD and other diseases, demonstrating the value of proteomic dimensions beyond conventional clinical risk factors. Moreover, individuals with prevalent CAD (diagnosed before proteomic sampling) exhibited high, metabolically adverse dimension values, indicating that these axes capture cumulative metabolic burden. Pathway enrichment analyses implicated altered extracellular matrix organization and immune programs among the proteins contributing to the proteomic dimensions. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings demonstrate that plasma proteomic signatures can dissect the heterogeneity of individuals who develop CAD in continuous phenotypic gradients, improve prediction of CAD and comorbidities, and map underlying biological mechanisms.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Self-Evolving Visual Questioner

Vision-language models (VLMs) are typically trained as passive answerers, while their ability to actively ask diverse, non-trivial, visual-centric and grounded questions remains underexplored. Existing visual questioners' performance is bottlenecked by the availability of high-quality training data or the cost of curating them. We show that a VLM can continuously improve itself as a visual questioner without any external supervision. We propose a self-evolving framework that uses a VLM itself as both a proposer and a filter to produce harder, more informative, and visual-centric questions, while maintaining their exploration diversity to avoid training collapse. These questions are then used to train the VLM in both questioner and answerer modes. To evaluate the questioner, we introduce an agentic protocol that assesses questions along perception, reasoning, and diversity dimensions. Experiments across various backbone VLMs show that our method substantially enhances the quality and substantially expands the difficulty boundary of autonomous question generation. Under the same budget, our self-supervision is more effective than training on the static source data. Moreover, the self-evolving questioner remains a competitive or even better answerer.

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

Entity Labels Are Not Entity Signals: A Framework for Observable Relevance in Document Re-Ranking

Entity-aware document retrieval uses query-associated entities as ranking signals, assuming that semantically relevant entities are also useful retrieval signals. We show this assumption is insufficient- and explain why. Unlike terms, which are ground-truth observations, entity links are hypotheses produced by an imperfect linker: an entity can be topically central yet provide no discriminative signal if the linker fires indiscriminately across relevant and non-relevant documents. We formalize this as a distinction between Conceptual Entity Relevance (CER)- whether an entity is topically related to a query- and Observable Entity Relevance (OER)- whether its observed presence in a collection discriminates relevant from non-relevant documents. Across four collections and annotation sources including human entity judgments, CER and OER exhibit near-chance agreement ($\kappa \approx 0$), while OER operationalizations agree substantially ($\kappa \approx 0.5$), confirming CER as the systematic outlier. CER-based supervision selects topically plausible but weakly discriminative entities, pruning fewer than 4% of non-relevant documents on some collections. Aligning supervision with OER improves non-relevant pruning by up to 10x and open-world MAP by 0.051 over BM25. Our findings motivate a shift from conceptual to observable notions of entity relevance in entity-aware retrieval.