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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

DVANet: Degradation-aware Visual-prior Alignment Network for Image Restoration

All-in-One image restoration aims to develop a unified restoration framework for handling diverse degradation types. Existing end-to-end methods usually regard the restoration process as a black-box mapping, lacking an explicit optimization interpretation. Although deep unfolding provides an interpretable iterative modeling paradigm for image restoration, existing methods mostly rely on fixed degradation assumptions or predefined degradation information, making them difficult to adapt to unified restoration requirements under complex degradations and locally damaged content. This limitation restricts their performance in degradation suppression and structural detail recovery. To address these issues, this paper proposes DVANet, a deep unfolding network inspired by the half-quadratic splitting optimization algorithm, which formulates unified image restoration under complex degradations as a collaborative unfolding process between degradation-aware observation consistency and visual-prior-guided reconstruction. Specifically, in the degradation-aware observation consistency branch, a degradation representation module is employed to extract global degradation attributes and local degradation cues, and degradation-conditioned mapping is used to enhance the model's adaptability to different degradation types. In the visual-prior-guided reconstruction branch, DINOv3 is introduced to provide structural and semantic information as hierarchical visual priors, thereby complementing the missing structural information in damaged regions and improving detail recovery. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DVANet achieves superior or competitive performance on multi-scenario degradation and cross-domain image restoration tasks, showing favorable degradation adaptability and generalization ability.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Referral pathways, ETAT triage acuity, and inpatient outcomes among children presenting to a national tertiary paediatric emergency unit in Ghana: a prospective cohort study

Emergency referral systems in sub-Saharan Africa are fragmented, and children reaching tertiary facilities through different referral pathways often arrive in advanced clinical states. Prospective data simultaneously characterising referral patterns, triage acuity at presentation, diagnostic case mix, and inpatient mortality at a national tertiary paediatric emergency unit are lacking from West Africa. This prospective cohort study enrolled 675 consecutively presenting children aged one month to 12 years at the Paediatric Emergency Unit of Korle Bu Teaching Hospital, Accra, Ghana, from February to December 2019. The primary outcome was all-cause inpatient mortality. Key variables collected included referral status and facility tier, Emergency Triage Assessment and Treatment (ETAT) triage category, ICD-10 diagnostic classification, Oyedeji socioeconomic classification, and time from symptom onset to PEU registration. Crude odds ratios were computed for all candidate predictors. Multivariable logistic regression was conducted using complete case analysis (n = 613). Of 675 children, 63.0% (n = 425) were referred from another health facility; referred children had higher ETAT emergency triage category rates than self-presenting children (32.7% vs 27.6%, p < 0.001). Overall inpatient mortality was 9.9% (67/675). Mortality varied by referral source: 16.7% among secondary/regional hospital referrals, 11.0% among lower-tier facility referrals (district, municipal, CHAG, polyclinic, private, health centre, and maternity home facilities combined, n = 356), 7.6% among self-presenting children, and 7.4% among tertiary referrals. Overall, 30.8% of children were classified as ETAT emergencies on arrival, with case fatility rate of 21.6%. The three most common diagnostic domains were respiratory conditions (17.2%), blood and haematological disorders (17.0%), and digestive presentations (16.4%). Inpatient mortality was highest in neoplastic disease (33.3%, n = 30) and circulatory presentations (31.0%, n = 29). In the primary multivariable analysis (n = 613, 51 events; events-per-variable ratio 4.2), no referral tier was independently associated with inpatient mortality after adjustment. Referral from secondary/regional hospitals showed a borderline non-significant association (adjusted odds ratio 3.09, 95% CI 0.96 to 9.90, p = 0.058). School going children (60-119 months) had higher odds of inpatient death than infants (adjusted odds ratio 5.56, 95% CI 1.16 to 26.53, p = 0.032), as did adolescents (adjusted odds ratio 10.01, 95% CI 2.15 to 46.69, p = 0.003). ETAT emergency category and lower socioeconomic status were not independently significant in this model. A pre-specified sensitivity analysis using the full analytic cohort (n = 674, events-per-variable ratio 6.7) with collapsed referral categories did not confirm any referral tier association; ETAT emergency category and lower SES were independently associated in the sensitivity model. All multivariable estimates should be regarded as exploratory. This prospective cohort provides simultaneous characterisation of referral patterns, ETAT triage acuity, diagnostic case mix, and inpatient mortality at a national tertiary paediatric emergency unit in West Africa. The referral-mortality gradient and high ETAT emergency category proportion document the severity of illness arriving through different referral pathways at this facility. The association between secondary/regional hospital referral and inpatient mortality is hypothesis-generating and requires replication in an adequately powered multicentre study before any service-level conclusions can be drawn.

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

The Linguistics Olympiads: Towards a New Corpus for Linguistics Research?

Linguistics olympiad problems (LOPs) are a category of self-sufficient puzzles consisting of a scaled-down corpus representative of certain linguistic phenomena, from which the solver must deduce a primitive set of rules of the language and then translate a new set of elements. The linguistics olympiads (LOs) have become a worldwide phenomenon with 43 different territories taking part in the International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL) 2025. While the typology and solving strategies of LOPs have been analysed, their scientific facet and connections to academic linguistics have yet to be explored. LOPs are directly connected to many linguistic fields, e.g., linguistic typology, linguistic relativity, and linguistics fieldwork. Recently, LOPs have become a research focus as benchmarks for large language models, thus highlighting their usefulness in computational linguistics. Nevertheless, they have not yet been integrated into mainstream linguistics research. This paper attempts to open new directions of including this particular type of puzzle in academic research by offering a structured evaluation of LOPs as linguistic data sources and proposes criteria for their responsible use in academic research. Starting from a set of over 1800 LOPs, this study critically examines the potential of LOPs as a novel corpus for linguistics research by discussing their strengths and limitations as tools, as well as the areas of linguistics into which these problems could fit. This work forms the foundation for a broader initiative aimed at bridging the gap between LOs and academic linguistics, by establishing a robust theoretical framework for LOPs.

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

Attention Sinks in Diffusion Transformers: A Causal Analysis

Attention sinks – tokens that receive disproportionate attention mass – are assumed to be functionally important in autoregressive language models, but their role in diffusion transformers remains unclear. We present a causal analysis in text-to-image diffusion, dynamically identifying dominant attention recipients per timestep and suppressing them via paired, training-free interventions on the score and value paths. Across 553 GenEval prompts on Stable Diffusion~3 (with SDXL corroboration), removing these sinks does not degrade text-image alignment (CLIP-T) or preference proxies (ImageReward, HPS-v2) at $k{=}1$; only under stronger interventions ($k\!\geq\!10$) does HPS-v2 exhibit a metric-dependent boundary, while CLIP-T remains robust throughout. The perceptual shifts induced by suppression are nonetheless sink-specific – $\sim\!6\times$ larger than equal-budget random masking – revealing an empirical dissociation between trajectory-level perturbation and semantic alignment in diffusion transformers. \footnote{Code available at https://github.com/wfz666/ICML26-attention-sink.}

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

MemPO: Self-Memory Policy Optimization for Long-Horizon Agents

arXiv:2603.00680v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Long-horizon agents face the challenge of growing context size during interaction with environment, which degrades the performance and stability. Existing methods typically introduce the external memory module and look up the relevant information from the stored memory, which prevents the model itself from proactively managing its memory content and aligning with the agent's overarching task objectives. To address these limitations, we propose the self-memory policy optimization algorithm (MemPO), which enables the agent (policy model) to autonomously summarize and manage their memory during interaction with environment. By improving the credit assignment mechanism based on memory effectiveness, the policy model can selectively retain crucial information, significantly reducing token consumption while preserving task performance. Extensive experiments and analyses confirm that MemPO achieves absolute F1 score gains of 25.98 over the base model and 7.1 over the previous SOTA baseline, while reducing token usage by 67.58% and 73.12%. The code is released at https://github.com/TheNewBeeKing/MemPO.

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

SAFE-Cascade: Cost-Adaptive Vision-Language Routing for Chart Question Answering

Vision-language models (VLMs) are powerful for chart question answering, but invoking a VLM for every query can be unnecessarily expensive when many questions are answerable from OCR text and lightweight language reasoning. We demonstrate SAFE-Cascade, an interactive system for cost-adaptive chart question answering. Given a chart image and a natural-language question, SAFE-Cascade first extracts chart text with OCR, obtains a provisional answer from a text-only language model, and then uses a learned router to decide whether to accept the text answer or escalate to a VLM. The demo exposes this decision process to users: OCR evidence, text-only answer, routing probability, escalation decision, final answer, estimated cost, and estimated latency are shown side by side. SAFE-Cascade is designed as a transparent interface for understanding when visual grounding is actually needed. Users can upload or select charts, ask questions, inspect the evidence used by each pathway, compare text-only and VLM answers, and adjust the escalation threshold to explore the accuracy-cost frontier. The system is implemented with Azure Document Intelligence for OCR, gpt-5-mini as the text-only model, gemini-2.5-flash-image as the VLM, and a Random Forest router trained on inference-time features. On a held-out ChartQA test split of 375 examples from a 2,500-example experiment, SAFE-Cascade achieves 69.1% unified accuracy with 73.1% VLM invocation, compared with 67.7% accuracy and 100% VLM invocation for the full-VLM baseline. The observed +1.4 percentage-point difference is statistically uncertain, so we interpret SAFE-Cascade as matching full-VLM performance while reducing VLM calls by 26.9% and estimated cost by 9.3%. The demonstration shows how selective modality routing can make multimodal knowledge systems more transparent, tunable, and cost-aware.

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

Replay What Matters: Off-Policy Replay for Efficient LLM Reinforcement Unlearning

LLM unlearning has emerged as a cost-effective alternative to full retraining for removing hazardous knowledge from pretrained models while preserving general utility. Recent RL-based methods such as RULE reformulate unlearning as learning a refusal behavior, but their on-policy optimization repeatedly samples from the same forget and retain/boundary prompts throughout training. We identify a critical inefficiency in this process: easy cases quickly converge and provide little useful gradient signal, while hard cases near the forget/retain boundary continue to produce low-reward rollouts that are discarded after a single use. To address this issue, we propose ReRULE, an off-policy replay enhancement for reinforcement unlearning. ReRULE stores low-reward hard-case rollout groups in a replay buffer during early GRPO training and reuses them in later stages through importance-sampled off-policy updates, redirecting computation toward boundary cases that still require learning. Theoretically, we show that ReRULE yields a tighter hard-case convergence bound than pure on-policy RULE. Empirically, ReRULE improves MUSE-Books Retain Quality from 46.3 to 56.2 while adding only 5–11% training time across benchmarks. Its limited improvement on the simpler TOFU setting further supports the intended conditional behavior: replay is most beneficial when the hard/easy disparity is pronounced.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Cavity-enhanced superconducting response in an underdoped cuprate

arXiv:2606.18084v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Superconductors carry electrical current without resistance when paired electrons condense into a coherent macroscopic quantum state. In underdoped cuprates, evidence suggests that pairing-related correlations and superconducting fluctuations can survive above the temperature at which global coherence is lost, pointing to phase fluctuations as a key limitation on superconductivity in this regime. Motivated by recent demonstrations of cavity-modified collective states in quantum materials, we investigate whether superconducting coherence can be stabilized by engineering the electromagnetic environment of the superconductor. We study an underdoped YBa$_2$Cu$_3$O$_{7-\delta}$ thin film in a tunable terahertz cavity formed with a semi-transparent gold mirror. From temperature-dependent terahertz transmission measurements, we find that the cavity enhances the superconducting response below the critical temperature, with an increase of the inferred superfluid weight. The effect becomes more pronounced at smaller cavity lengths and is accompanied by an upward shift of the superconducting onset temperature. Calculations based on a cavity-coupled model for phase-fluctuating superconductors capture these trends and support an interpretation in terms of cavity-enhanced phase stiffness. These results showcase the potential of cavity engineering for designing emergent functionalities in correlated systems.

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

Best Arm Identification with Minimal Regret

arXiv:2409.18909v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Motivated by real-world applications that necessitate responsible experimentation, we introduce the problem of best arm identification (BAI) with minimal regret. This variant of the multi-armed bandit problem elegantly amalgamates two of its most ubiquitous objectives: regret minimization and BAI. More precisely, the agent's goal is to identify the best arm with a prescribed confidence level $\delta$, while minimizing the cumulative regret up to the stopping time. Focusing on single-parameter exponential families of distributions, we leverage information-theoretic techniques to establish an instance-dependent lower bound on the expected cumulative regret. Moreover, we present an impossibility result that underscores the tension between cumulative regret and sample complexity in fixed-confidence BAI. Complementarily, we design and analyze the Double KL-UCB algorithm, which achieves asymptotic optimality as the confidence level tends to zero. Notably, this algorithm employs two distinct confidence bounds to guide arm selection in a randomized manner. Our findings elucidate a fresh perspective on the inherent connections between regret minimization and BAI.

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

Fourier Features Let Agents Learn High Precision Policies with Imitation Learning

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

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

Beyond Averaging in John Ellipsoid Approximation: High-Accuracy Algorithms in the Leverage-Score Model

arXiv:2606.20082v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The John ellipsoid of a symmetric polytope $P=\{\mathbf{x}\in\mathbb{R}^d:\|\mathbf{A}\mathbf{x}\|_\infty\le1\}$, $\mathbf{A}\in\mathbb{R}^{n\times d}$, is computed by a long line of leverage-score algorithms, from Cohen, Cousins, Lee and Yang (COLT 2019) to its successors [WY24, CLS+25], all reaching a $(1+\varepsilon)$-approximation in $\Theta(\varepsilon^{-1}\log(n/d))$ iterations. We separate this complexity into three costs the modern line conflates (certification, identification, and accuracy) and locate the historical $\varepsilon^{-1}$ in the first alone. In the equivalent D-optimal-design form $\min_{\mathbf{p}\in\Delta_n}-\log\det(\sum_i p_i\mathbf{a}_i\mathbf{a}_i^\top)$, the leverage-score oracle is exactly the first-order oracle and the $(1+\varepsilon)$-John guarantee the Frank-Wolfe gap $g(\mathbf{p})\le\varepsilon d$; through this dictionary the costs come apart. The $\varepsilon^{-1}$ is a certification artifact: the uniform average of the iterates, the certificate used throughout the line, has gap exactly $\Theta(1/T)$, however cheap each iteration is made. Pointed instead at the last iterate the same oracle is fast: a warm-started accelerated method reaches the guarantee in $C(\mathbf{A})+O(\sqrt{\kappa}\log(1/\varepsilon))$ queries after an $\varepsilon$-independent setup $C(\mathbf{A})$, and once the optimal face is identified the facial problem is an unconstrained self-concordant minimization whose Hessian the oracle recovers exactly, so damped Newton needs only $O(\log\log(1/\varepsilon))$ steps, for a total of $C(\mathbf{A})+O(d^2\log\log(1/\varepsilon))$ queries. The accuracy dependence is thus doubly logarithmic after an $\varepsilon$-independent, condition-dependent setup; the open problem is the remaining identification cost (a condition-free bound on reaching the optimal face) and lower bounds. Accuracy is not the obstruction.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

CacheMuon: Using Temporal Preconditioning To Approximate Polar Factor

arXiv:2606.16371v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Muon is an optimizer that computes updates using the polar factor of the momentum matrix and has shown strong empirical performance across a range of training settings. A key component of Muon is the Newton-Schulz iteration used to compute this polar factor. Although this avoids the cost of an exact singular value decomposition, it remains expensive in practice because it is applied at every optimization step. At the same time, the momentum matrix changes smoothly over training, suggesting strong temporal correlation in the corresponding polar factors. In this paper, we exploit this structure and propose CacheMuon, a temporal preconditioning method that reuses information from previous optimization steps to approximate the polar factor at the current step. This reduces redundant orthogonalization computation across iterations. We analyze CacheMuon as an inexact Muon update, with error controlled by fresh-solver error and cache staleness. Empirically, CacheMuon provides a controllable quality-efficiency frontier: conservative thresholds closely match fresh Muon on language-model and vision training while reducing orthogonalization FLOPs, whereas more aggressive thresholds yield larger arithmetic savings at the cost of modest validation-quality degradation.

14.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-17

An Integrated Framework for Transcriptomic Characterization and Lorentzian Hyperbolic Visualization of a High-Risk Topological Branch in Alzheimer's Disease

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a highly heterogeneous brain disorder in which molecular alterations vary across brain regions, disease stages, and patient subgroups. This study introduces an integrated analytical framework for characterizing transcriptomic variation associated with a high-risk topological branch, which was identified based on Lorentz distance in postmortem Brodmann area 36 samples from the Mount Sinai Brain Bank cohort, where over 70% of samples were in Braak stages V-VI. The framework integrates weighted gene co-expression network analysis, repeated stability-based differential expression analysis, network-level gene filtering, Gene Ontology enrichment, and nested stratified cross-validation to evaluate whether topological branch-associated genes capture biologically meaningful signals and carry predictive information for high-Braak group status. The identified gene sets were functionally enriched for neuronal development, neuron projection organization, synaptic signaling, vesicle fusion, and regulated synaptic release, suggesting that the high-risk topological branch reflects biologically relevant transcriptomic programs linked to neurodegenerative progression. Nested cross-validation further showed that the selected genes achieved measurable internal predictive performance for distinguishing high-Braak samples. As a second methodological contribution, we introduced a Lorentzian hyperbolic variant of t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (Lorentz t-SNE) to explore latent non-Euclidean structure in transcriptomic data. This method embeds samples in hyperbolic space, providing an alternative to Euclidean embeddings for representing hierarchical or nonlinear structures. Compared with conventional Euclidean embeddings, the proposed Lorentz t-SNE revealed a more localized organization of high-Braak samples. Together, these results demonstrate the utility of the proposed analytical framework and Lorentz t-SNE for investigating heterogeneous, potentially non-Euclidean organization in AD transcriptomes.

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

MM++: Unsupervised Scale-Invariant Multilayer OOD Detection via Top-K Gated Feature Fusion

We introduce MM++ (Multilayer Mahalanobis++), a fully unsupervised, strictly post-hoc, and scale-invariant framework for Out-of-Distribution (OOD) detection. To address the trade-off between scale invariance and hierarchical expressivity, MM++ constructs a principled joint feature space. It first identifies discriminative intermediate layers by measuring entropy density drops, which mark the boundaries of sharp semantic compression. By fusing these selected layers with the terminal representation, the framework captures latent cross-layer correlations while mitigating early-layer noise. Crucially, a Ledoit-Wolf regularized tied covariance matrix stabilizes this unified space, enabling reliable distance estimation. Requiring no auxiliary OOD data, classifier fine-tuning, or architectural modifications, MM++ delivers robust performance across distinct architectures for both near- and far-OOD detection.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

A refined thermodynamic analysis of nonsecular master equations

arXiv:2606.13504v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a systematic thermodynamic analysis of nonsecular master equations. We consider master equations resulting either from the partial secular and the geometric-arithmetic approximations, two approximations ensuring the positivity of the system's dynamics when some of its transition frequencies are too small to enable the full secular approximation. Both cause the system to relax towards a steady state which is not the Gibbs state of its bare Hamiltonian. Nonetheless, we build a unified, consistent thermodynamic framework for those dynamics. Starting from a microscopic expression of the second law based on system-environment correlations, we employ a systematic perturbation theory to preserve the positivity of the second law despite the approximations done on the dynamics. We show that, in spite of the weak system-bath coupling, the system-bath interaction energy participates to the energy balance, as well as the Lamb-shift. Those extra contributions give rise to work performed by the system on the bath when the former is out of equilibrium. We compare this microscopic entropy production with the definition based on the contractivity of the reduced system dynamics (Spohn inequality). We show that, unlike for secular master equations, the two entropy production rates differ because of the presence of non-vanishing stationary coherences in the energy eigenbasis. However, in the case of a single thermal bath, the difference is purely transient, and no work can be cyclically extracted from the steady-state despite its non-Gibbs form. Finally, we illustrate our results with a simple example, clarifying and completing the thermodynamic picture of Markovian dynamics in the quantum regime.

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

From Affect Prediction to Affect Forecasting: Evidence for Distinct Information Sources in Longitudinal Text

Modeling dimensional affect in longitudinal text requires distinguishing current affect estimation from future affective change forecasting. Existing approaches often treat each text as an independent observation and apply similar assumptions to both tasks, without testing whether they rely on different information sources. This paper investigates that distinction using longitudinal self-reported ecological essays and feeling-word entries. We propose the Trait–State Affective Prediction (TSAP) framework and its temporal extension E-TSAP for per-text valence and arousal prediction, evaluated on a held-out prediction test set of 1,737 entries from 91 users. We further propose the Affective Change Forecaster Hybrid (ACF-Hybrid) for next-step affective change forecasting, evaluated on a held-out forecasting test set of 46 users. For prediction, E-TSAP achieves composite Pearson correlations of 0.670 for valence and 0.449 for arousal. For forecasting, textual representations perform worse than compact numeric trajectory baselines: the text-inclusive model achieves only r=0.316 for valence and r=0.284 for arousal, whereas a simple prior-state baseline reaches r=0.615 and r=0.670, respectively. ACF-Hybrid, using dimension-specific numeric trajectory features, achieves r=0.659 for valence and $r=0.658$ for arousal. These results show that textual semantics support current affect prediction, whereas future affective change is better captured through prior numeric trajectory dynamics.

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

Multiple Descents in Deep Learning as a Sequence of Order-Chaos Transitions in LSTM Networks

arXiv:2505.20030v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We observe a novel `multiple-descent' phenomenon during the learning process of a recurrent neural network called long-short-term memory (LSTM) networks during its training on real-world task, in which the performance goes through long cycles of up and down trends multiple times after the model is overtrained. By carrying out asymptotic stability analysis of the models, we found that the cycles in performance – indicated by loss function in test data – are closely associated with the phase transition process between order and chaos of the model, and the local optimal training step are consistently at the critical transition point between the two phases. More importantly, the most optimal point of the model usually occurs at the first transition from order to chaos, where the `width' of the `edge of chaos' is often the widest, allowing the best exploration of weight configurations for learning.

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

Bridging Passive and Active: Enhancing Conversation Starter Recommendation via Active Expression Modeling

Large Language Model (LLM)-driven conversational search is shifting information retrieval from reactive keyword matching to proactive, open-ended dialogues. In this context, Conversation Starters are widely deployed to provide personalized query recommendations that help users initiate dialogues. Conventionally, recommending these starters relies on a closed "exposure-click" loop. Yet, this feedback loop mechanism traps the system in an echo chamber where, compounded by data sparsity, it fails to capture the dynamic nature of conversational search intents shaped by the open world. As a result, the system skews towards popular but generic suggestions. In this work, we uncover an untapped paradigm shift to shatter this harmful feedback loop: harnessing user "free will" through active user expressions. Unlike traditional recommendations, conversational search empowers users to bypass menus entirely through manually typed queries. The open-world intents in active queries hold the key to breaking this loop. However, incorporating them is non-trivial: (1) there exists an inherent distribution shift between active queries and formulated starters. (2) Furthermore, the "non-ID-able" nature of open text renders traditional item-based popularity statistics ineffective for large-scale industrial streaming training. To this end, we propose Passive-Active Bridge (PA-Bridge), a novel framework that employs an adversarial distribution aligner to bridge the distributional gap between passively recommended starters and active expressions. Moreover, we introduce a semantic discretizer to enable the deployment of popularity debiasing algorithms. Online A/B tests on our platform, demonstrate that PA-Bridge significantly boosts the Feature Penetration Rate by 0.54% and User Active Days by 0.04%.

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

Deep Learning in Seismic Interpretation: Federated Advances in Salt Dome Segmentation

Salt-dome delineation is a critical, high-impact task in subsurface geological interpretation, driving decisions in hydrocarbon exploration, reservoir modeling, and drilling safety. While convolutional encoder-decoder architectures have delivered significant improvements in automated salt segmentation, their widespread application is severely limited by data sovereignty concerns, dataset bias, and the scarcity of labeled seismic volumes. This paper introduces FedSaltNet, a Federated Learning (FL) framework explicitly engineered for robust, generalizable, and privacy preserving salt-dome segmentation. We couple a lightweight Small U-Net backbone, chosen for its efficiency and regularization properties with a novel Foreground-Weighted (FG-WEIGHTED) aggregation strategy designed to tackle domain-specific class imbalance. Through an extensive comparative study emulating non-IID conditions across four diverse seismic datasets (TGS, SEAM, F3, GBS), we demonstrate two critical findings: The FG-WEIGHTED algorithm effectively mitigates data heterogeneity, yielding a 4.0% relative improvement in Intersection over Union (IoU) over the best conventional FL method. The simple U-Net architecture proved essential, outperforming the higher capacity ResNet-18 U-Net variant by 166% in average IoU, underscoring the necessity of architectural simplicity in data-constrained federated environments. FedSaltNet provides a validated, high-performance solution that establishes the viability of federated deep learning for collaborative, next-generation subsurface interpretation.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Beyond Uniform Token-Level Trust Region in LLM Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.10968v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become standard for improving LLM reasoning. However, existing PPO-style trust-region mechanisms remain position-agnostic by enforcing uniform thresholds across all tokens independently. This pointwise treatment conflicts with autoregressive generation in two critical ways. First, uniform thresholds ignore autoregressive asymmetry. Early-stage deviations produce compounding sequence-level drift, causing static thresholds to under-regulate early divergence and excessively constrain late-stage exploration. Second, evaluating token-level divergence in isolation overlooks cumulative prefix drift, granting the same divergence allowance regardless of how far the conditioning history has already deviated from the rollout policy. To address this limitation, we propose CPPO (Cumulative Prefix-divergence Policy Optimization), a token-level masking rule that aligns updates with a finite-horizon policy-improvement bound via two coupled mechanisms. First, a position-weighted threshold imposes stricter limits at early positions whose effects persist longer, relaxing constraints for late-stage tokens. Second, a cumulative prefix budget tracks historical deviations, dynamically restricting further token-level deviation to prevent compounding errors along the prefix. Empirically, CPPO enhances training stability and significantly improves reasoning accuracy across various model scales.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Million-scale multimodal pollen microscopy with expert-guided foundation models

Automated pollen identification from microscopy remains a bottleneck in aerobiology, palaeoecology and biodiversity monitoring, because scalable systems must generalise across specimen preparation, scanner settings and geographic origins while retaining palynological interpretability. To address this gap, we present a million-scale multimodal pollen microscopy resource, Pollen AI Atlas, assembled from pure-species whole-slide bright-field images spanning four geographic origins, four scanner settings and 46 taxon labels across 31 botanical families. Seeded by one manually selected exemplar per source slide, token-level mining and filtering produced 1,511,390 released grain detections with 99.6\% proposal precision in expert-curated test regions. Each detection was paired with machine-generated grain-level morphological captions from five open-weight vision-language models, guided by expert-verified palynological anchors, yielding structured descriptions of aperture systems, wall ornamentation, shape and size. Among the evaluated models, Gemma4 provided the most controlled primary caption set, combining tight length control, no leakage and the strongest text-retrieval performance. Baseline benchmarks with frozen visual features reached 88.16\% top-1 accuracy, while cross-regional retrieval showed that caption-derived text embeddings remained robust when image similarity degraded (mAP@20 0.811 versus 0.262). Released data, annotations, captions, splits, code, and weights provide a benchmark for pollen recognition, cross-regional domain adaptation and domain-specific multimodal microscopy learning.

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

WorkBench Revisited: Workplace Agents Two Years On

作者:

The best agent on WorkBench in March 2024, GPT-4, completed 43% of tasks and took an unintended harmful action, such as emailing the wrong person, on 26% of them. We re-visit the benchmark in June 2026 and find that the best agent to date, Claude Opus 4.8, completes 89% and takes an unintended harmful action on 2.5%. Aside from this considerable progress in frontier agent performance, three things stand out. First, capability and safety go together on WorkBench rather than trade off, so the models that finish the most tasks also do the least unintended damage. Second, while several classes of error have been totally eliminated, frontier models still make some basic mistakes that occasionally result in irreversible harm, such as sending an email to the wrong person. Third, the rise of open-weight models has drastically lowered costs for a performance level that was previously only accessible to proprietary models, while frontier costs have stayed relatively stable. We release an updated version of the benchmark with data and code quality improvements, new model scores, and analysis of agent progress on WorkBench since 2024.

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

Calibrating Decision Robustness via Inverse Conformal Risk Control

arXiv:2510.07750v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Robust optimization safeguards decisions against uncertainty by optimizing against worst-case scenarios, yet their effectiveness hinges on a prespecified robustness level that is often chosen ad hoc, leading to either insufficient protection or overly conservative and costly solutions. Recent approaches using conformal prediction construct data-driven uncertainty sets with finite-sample coverage guarantees, but they still fix coverage targets a priori and offer little guidance for selecting robustness levels. We propose a new framework that provides distribution-free, finite-sample guarantees on both miscoverage and regret for any family of robust predict-then-optimize policies. Our method constructs valid estimators that trace out the miscoverage–regret Pareto frontier, enabling decision-makers to reliably evaluate and calibrate robustness levels according to their cost–risk preferences. The framework is simple to implement, broadly applicable across classical optimization formulations, and achieves sharper finite-sample performance. This paper offers a principled data-driven methodology for guiding robustness selection and empowers practitioners to balance robustness and conservativeness in high-stakes decision-making.

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

AIPatient Arena: EHR-grounded evaluation of large language models in end-to-end clinical consultation workflows

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly considered for use in clinical consultation tasks, yet most medical evaluations remain static, single-turn, or narrowly outcome-based, limiting their ability to reflect the sequential, uncertain, and interactive nature of real-world care. Here, we propose AIPatient Arena, an EHRs-grounded evaluation framework for assessing the clinical utility of LLMs across eight dimensions of clinical competence. The framework integrates EHR data into patient-specific knowledge graphs, enabling multi-turn physician-patient interactions. We applied AIPatient Arena on a primary cohort of 437 patients and two out-of-distribution validation cohorts of 119 and 67 patients. We observe that LLMs performed well in medical interview questioning skills (QS; mean scores, 4.43-4.99/5), ethical and professional conduct (ET; 4.38-4.93/5), and clarity and transparency of clinical explanations (EX; 3.80-4.72/5). Performance was moderate in information integration (II; 3.19-4.21/5) and medication safety and justification (MS; 3.13-3.78/5), but persistent weaknesses were observed in handling of ambiguous patient responses (HR; 2.57-3.32/5), information coverage (IC; 2.08-3.02/5), and diagnostic accuracy and reasoning (Dx; 2.63-3.55/5). Process-based evaluation revealed recurrent interaction failures, including repetitive questioning, omission of past medical history, and inadequate handling of uncertainty. Richer conversational context improved diagnostic reasoning but yielded limited gains in treatment planning. These findings indicate that final-answer accuracy alone is insufficient for evaluating clinical readiness and highlight the importance of assessing how models gather, interpret, and communicate information throughout a consultation. AIPatient Arena provides an EHR-grounded framework for workflow-oriented pre-deployment evaluation of medical LLMs.