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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Conservation Laws for Modern Neural Architectures

arXiv:2606.17816v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Understanding gradient descent dynamics is key to explaining the success of over-parameterized models, where implicit bias manifests through conservation laws in gradient flow. While such laws are well understood for linear and ReLU networks, they remain largely unexplored for modern architectures. This work develops a unified framework to characterize conservation laws for contemporary models, including feedforward networks with GELU, SiLU, and SwiGLU activations, multihead attention with sinusoidal and rotary positional encodings, and Mixture-of-Experts architectures under diverse gating designs. Our theoretical findings are supported by experiments that validate the predicted invariants.

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

Exponentially many initializations to avoid barren plateaus

arXiv:2606.18515v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Barren plateaus are stated as an average-case phenomenon: pick an ansatz, initialize it naively, and concentration follows. This has led to the common view that a potential cure for barren plateaus is simply to initialize the parameters more carefully. Here we show that the situation is subtler. We introduce a first-moment framework that gives a simple operator-level diagnostic for when an initialization may escape the fully concentrated barren-plateau fixed point, and for comparing the biases induced by different initialization strategies. Our framework recovers several known initialization schemes such as identity and Gaussian initialization, but also shows that barren-plateau avoidance is highly non-unique. Indeed, many shifted, biased, and non-symmetric parameter distributions can avoid concentration, and these choices need not be equivalent. In fact, our results show that one can generate exponentially many families of inequivalent initialization strategies. Then, our numerics indicate that different first-moment-distinct initializations can lead to different attained minima, suggesting that avoiding barren plateaus via smart initializations can trade the exponential concentration problem for the challenge of selecting the right trainable pocket amongst many options.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

G-IdiomAlign: A Gloss-Pivoted Benchmark for Cross-Lingual Idiom Alignment

Idioms are difficult to transfer across languages due to their non-compositionality and weak surface-form grounding, making literal mappings unreliable. We present G-IdiomAlign, a gloss-pivoted benchmark where each idiom is anchored by an English gloss from Wiktionary. We further construct a high-confidence reference alignment set for reproducible evaluation. G-IdiomAlign supports two protocols: (1) a controlled Multiple-Choice Idiom Equivalence with typed distractors for error attribution; and (2) a Gloss-Contrastive Generation contrasting No-gloss and With-gloss inputs to isolate the effect of an explicit semantic pivot. Across diverse LLMs, a bias to literal translation is a dominant failure mode, especially when the target is a low-resource language. Glosses consistently improve Gloss-Contrastive Generation under an embedding-based semantic proxy, but performance remains modest, indicating substantial headroom in the open output space. Subsequent analysis on Qwen3-8B further suggests that cross-condition differences are concentrated more in attention heads than in layers, while better With-gloss generations coincide with stronger gloss anchoring.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

THE SILENT STRUGGLE: EXPLORING THE EFFECTS OF COMMUNICATION BREAKDOWNS IN HEALTHCARE DELIVERY IN THE NORTHERN REGION OF GHANA

Abstract Effective health communication is central to patient-centred care and improved health outcomes, particularly in culturally diverse healthcare settings. In clinical and assistive practice, communication breakdowns may negatively affect diagnosis, treatment adherence, and preventive care. A qualitative phenomenological design was employed, utilizing Semi-Structured interviews with purposively sampled twenty patients and healthcare professionals from Tamale Teaching Hospital, Yendi Hospital, and Bimbilla Hospital. The researchers adopted Content Analysis as the tool of analysis for the data. The findings of this study revealed that language discrepancies Poor attitudes of healthcare providers hinderer patient openness and the quality treatment. Logistical issues, such as inadequate medicines and medical supplies, resulted in delayed treatment and additional financial burden on patients and their relatives. Cultural and social factors discourage patients from discussing certain health conditions with healthcare providers, leading to delayed treatment. These hurdles adversely impact on treatment and assistive practice, specifically in culturally diverse environment and preventive care. The study recommends training and capacity-building programs for healthcare providers in cultural competence, fostering effective and ethical health communication between patients and healthcare providers, and recruiting professional interpreters to bridge the linguistics gap between patients and providers. Abstract Effective health communication is central to patient-centered care and improved health outcomes, particularly in culturally diverse healthcare settings. In clinical and assistive practice, communication breakdowns may negatively affect diagnosis, treatment adherence, and preventive care. A qualitative phenomenological design was employed, utilizing semi-structured interviews with twenty purposively sampled patients and healthcare professionals from Tamale Teaching Hospital, Yendi Hospital, and Bimbilla Hospital. The researchers adopted content analysis as the tool of analysis for the data. The findings of this study revealed that language discrepancies Poor attitudes of healthcare providers hinder patient openness and quality treatment. Logistical issues, such as inadequate medicines and medical supplies, resulted in delayed treatment and additional financial burden on patients and their relatives. Cultural and social factors discourage patients from discussing certain health conditions with healthcare providers, leading to delayed treatment. These hurdles adversely impact treatment and assistive practice, specifically in culturally diverse environments and preventive care. The study recommends training and capacity-building programs for healthcare providers in cultural competence, fostering effective and ethical health communication between patients and healthcare providers, and recruiting professional interpreters to bridge the linguistics gap between patients and providers.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Magneto-Optical Trapping of a Metal Hydride Molecule

arXiv:2512.22350v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We demonstrate a three-dimensional magneto-optical trap (MOT) of a metal hydride molecule, CaH. We are able to scatter $\sim$$10^{4}$ photons with vibrational loss covered up to vibrational quantum number $\nu=2$. This allows us to laser slow the molecular beam near zero velocity with a "white-light" technique and subsequently load it into a radio-frequency MOT. The MOT contains $230(40)$ molecules, limited by beam source characteristics and predissociative loss of CaH. The temperature of the MOT is below one millikelvin. The predissociative loss mechanism could, in turn, facilitate controlled dissociation of the molecule, offering a possible route to optical trapping of hydrogen atoms for precision spectroscopy.

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

Technical Report for ICRA 2026 GOOSE 2D Fine-Grained Semantic Segmentation Challenge: Leveraging DINOv3 for Robust Outdoor Scene Understanding in Field Robotics

The GOOSE 2D Fine-Grained Semantic Segmentation Challenge at the ICRA 2026 Workshop on Field Robotics evaluates dense semantic segmentation of off-road imagery over a fine-grained taxonomy of 64 classes and 11 evaluated non-void coarse categories. We present the first-place solution to this challenge. Our solution comprises two complementary improvements: (a) a network-level design that combines a self-supervised DINOv3 ViT-L/16 backbone, a ViT-Adapter, and a Mask2Former mask-classification decoder, together with a coarse-category auxiliary loss on the global [CLS] token; and (b) an inference-time aggregation strategy based on multi-scale and horizontal-flip test-time augmentation and an ensemble of the top three checkpoints selected using Codabench scores. Our method achieves an official composite score of 76.57%, consisting of 69.32% fine-class mIoU and 83.81% category-level mIoU, and ranks first on the final phase leaderboard: www.codabench.org/competitions/14257/#/results-tab.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Red-Teaming the Agentic Red-Team

arXiv:2606.24496v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The use of agentic systems to perform offensive security operations has moved from a theoretical possibility to a commoditized capability. However, while the community has focused on creating more and more capable agents, less attention has been allocated to assessing the security of those systems. In this work, we present the first in-depth security analysis of the most widely used agentic systems for offensive security operations. We show that most of these tools share common design flaws that enable an active adversary to exfiltrate API keys, establish persistent footholds, and fully compromise the operator's machine, even when the agent operates inside a sandboxed container. To support our analysis, we introduce a full cyber kill chain for such agentic systems, capturing the progression from initial LLM manipulation to lateral movement, persistence, guardrail bypass, and sandbox escape. Building on our security analysis, we derive a robust architecture for agentic offensive-security tools and propose actionable, broadly applicable design principles that mitigate the disclosed attack paths at the architectural level.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Colab NAS: Obtaining lightweight task-specific convolutional neural networks following Occam's razor

The current trend of applying transfer learning from convolutional neural networks (CNNs) trained on large datasets can be an overkill when the target application is a custom and delimited problem, with enough data to train a network from scratch. On the other hand, the training of custom and lighter CNNs requires expertise, in the from-scratch case, and or high-end resources, as in the case of hardware-aware neural architecture search (HW NAS), limiting access to the technology by non-habitual NN developers. For this reason, we present ColabNAS, an affordable HW NAS technique for producing lightweight task-specific CNNs. Its novel derivative-free search strategy, inspired by Occam's razor, allows to obtain state-of-the-art results on the Visual Wake Word dataset, a standard TinyML benchmark, in just 3.1 GPU hours using free online GPU services such as Google Colaboratory and Kaggle Kernel.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Uncertainty Estimation and Generalization Bounds for Modern Deep Learning

arXiv:2606.13818v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This thesis investigates how Bayesian principles can deepen our understanding of modern deep learning systems. While neural networks achieve remarkable predictive performance, their ability to generalize and to quantify uncertainty remains only partly understood. This thesis approaches this challenge from both methodological and theoretical angles: unifying Bayesian inference, function-space modeling, and large-deviation theory under a common probabilistic perspective. On the methodological side, the thesis introduces the Deep Variational Implicit Process (DVIP), a scalable Bayesian framework that extends implicit processes to deep architectures. Complementing this, two post-hoc methods – the Variational Linearized Laplace Approximation (VaLLA) and the Fixed-Mean Gaussian Process (FMGP) – are proposed to equip pretrained deterministic networks with calibrated uncertainty estimates. The theoretical contributions focus on one of the central open questions in modern machine learning: why do large, over-parameterized neural networks generalize so well? To address this, the thesis develops a unified probabilistic framework that connects three key mechanisms – diversity, smoothness, and stochasticity – within the language of PAC-Bayesian and large-deviation theory.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

UniDexTok: A Unified Dexterous Hand Tokenizer from Real Data

Dexterous hands are essential for fine-grained manipulation, but their hardware designs vary substantially across embodiments. Differences in kinematics, joint definitions, and degrees of freedom make it difficult to define a shared state representation compared with parallel grippers. As a result, dexterous-hand data remains fragmented and difficult to use for joint training. In this work, we propose the Unified Dexterous Hand Model (UDHM), which maps human and robot hand states into a shared 22-DoF semantic interface. Based on UDHM, we introduce UniDexTok, a retargeting-free state tokenizer that learns embodiment-conditioned discrete tokens from standardized real joint states. UniDexTok provides a unified representation for heterogeneous dexterous hands without relying on retargeting or simulation data. Compared with the recent baseline UniHM, UniDexTok reduces MPJAE from 15.63 degrees to 0.16 degrees and MPJPE from 18.51 mm to 0.18 mm, corresponding to error reductions of 98.98% and 99.03%, respectively. These results improve reconstruction from centimeter-scale to sub-millimeter accuracy. Experiments further show that data from other embodiments improves target-embodiment reconstruction accuracy, demonstrating the benefit of cross-embodiment tokenization. UniDexTok also shows strong zero-shot and few-shot reconstruction ability when new dexterous hands are introduced.

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

Emotional regulation improves deep learning-based image classification

arXiv:2606.13081v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Emotion significantly influences cognition, enhancing memory and learning under certain conditions. Drawing on this principle, emotion-augmented deep learning investigates how affective states can improve neural network architectures and learning paradigms, achieving better generalization than non-emotional models. However, existing methods often rely solely on objective neurophysiological factors, neglecting the role of subjectivity in emotion. To bridge this gap, the present study introduces Emotional Regulation, a novel framework for modeling emotion in deep learning through artificial subjective experience. The method employs pre-training based on affective stimuli, balancing non-emotional and emotionally-influenced responses in downstream task optimization. Extensive experimentation was conducted in image classification, pre-training ResNet and ViT architectures on four emotional datasets, using CIFAR-10 and -100 as target benchmarks. Results reveal improvements over the aforementioned backbones, providing evidence of Emotional Regulation as a promising method for defining emotion-augmented deep learning through artificial subjective experience. Furthermore, the proposed approach overcomes the related work in image classification based on CIFAR, revealing Emotional Regulation as the new state-of-the-art in emotion-augmented deep learning for large-scale vision datasets. The study also enforces evidence of the impact of affective states in improving machine learning tasks' optimization, encouraging further investigation on emotion-inspired architectures.

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

Task-Error Residual Learning for Real-Robot Five-Ball Juggling

arXiv:2606.16978v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For residual learning that refines existing behavior, sample efficiency depends on two things: how much information each rollout returns, and how efficiently the learner uses that information. Reinforcement learning's standard scalar reward carries far less information than the directional task error that defines the task. Random exploration further discards whatever information each rollout returns. Through residual learning with directional task-error supervision and a task error model that drives sample selection, we achieve stable three-, four-, and five-ball juggling on anthropomorphic Barrett WAM arms. Despite planning and controlling through a simple, idealized stack, the system converges from the second attempt. The first attempt drops, after which task error decreases monotonically without further failures. In comparison, five-ball juggling typically takes humans years of practice. We compare residual learners across two ternary axes, the directional information in the learning feedback and the commitment of the analytic prior, spanning Newton-style Jacobian updates, Composite Bayesian Optimization, and stochastic search methods. Both axes prove necessary: neither directional feedback nor an informative prior suffices alone, and the simplest method that combines them, a fixed-Jacobian Newton update, is the most reliable. The learned residual tolerates substantial prior misalignment and degraded joint tracking, affecting mainly convergence speed. The bottleneck for residual learning on real robots is therefore the information content of the supervision signal and how the learner uses it, not the accuracy of the surrounding stack. Video documentation of all experiments is available at https://kai-ploeger.com/residual-juggling.

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

Learning aligned EEG representations with subject-specific encoders

arXiv:2606.16462v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cross-subject EEG decoding promises more training data, but it also exposes neural networks to strong inter-subject distribution shifts. We study whether task supervision and architecture alone can learn subject-aligned representations. We replace a shared EEG encoder with subject-specific encoders followed by a common classifier, and compare this hybrid model with standard EEGNet, AttentionBaseNet, and CTNet baselines with Euclidean Alignment (EA) on four motor-imagery datasets. EA improves shared encoders by recentering subject covariances, but the hybrid encoder largely internalises this role: validation-loss curves and latent-distance analyses change little when EA is removed. Subject-specific heads increase class distinctiveness and place each subject close to its own latent manifold, improving most subjects while leaving a method-sensitive subset. These results support subject-specific encoders as a learned alignment mechanism for EEG decoding and identify head selection for unseen subjects as the remaining bottleneck.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Data augmented bootstrap: Unifying confidence interval construction by approximate invariance

arXiv:2606.09049v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose the data augmented bootstrap (DAB), a framework for constructing confidence intervals from approximately invariant transformations of the data. As special cases, DAB recovers popular methods that rely on exact group symmetries, such as conformal prediction, wild bootstrap for Maximum Mean Discrepancy U-statistics and the recently proposed SymmPI. Meanwhile, DAB also recovers the classical bootstrap method, which exploits the dataset's approximate invariance under uniform sampling of data indices as the dataset size grows. For all DAB methods, we establish theoretical coverage results that interpolate between finite-sample and asymptotic guarantees according to the strength of the invariance, and without assuming a group structure. The approximate invariance is measured in the Kolmogorov distance and, for statistics that satisfy Gaussian universality, reduces to conditional mean and variance matching. This allows us to incorporate data augmentation (DA), a widely used machine learning heuristic based on approximate invariances, into known statistical methods. We empirically test the performance of incorporating DA into bootstrap, wild bootstrap and conformal prediction for simulated settings as well as for image, language and scientific data.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Learning When to Sample: Confidence-Aware Selective Sampling for Efficient Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Large language models (LLMs) can achieve strong reasoning performance through chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, yet they often generate unnecessarily long reasoning paths that incur high inference cost. Self-consistency-based approaches push accuracy higher still, but they require sampling and aggregating multiple reasoning trajectories, leading to substantial computational overhead. In this paper, we introduce a confidence-aware selective sampling framework that, at inference time, analyzes a single reasoning trajectory to adaptively determine whether to rely on that trajectory alone or trigger multi-path sampling. The framework uses trajectory-level numeric features and sentence-level linguistic features extracted from reasoning states to guide selective multi-path reasoning. We train it on MedQA and evaluate it in-domain on MedQA and under calibration-only transfer on MathQA, MedMCQA, and MMLU, without further fine-tuning. Experimental results show that the proposed framework maintains comparable performance to full and efficient multi-path reasoning baselines, with accuracy changes of $-0.41 \pm 0.58$ and $-0.31 \pm 0.58$ percentage points, respectively, while reducing token usage by $71.7 \pm 5.0%$ and $36.6 \pm 9.1%$. These findings demonstrate that reasoning trajectories contain rich signals for uncertainty estimation, enabling a simple, transferable mechanism to balance accuracy and efficiency in LLM reasoning.

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

Quantum enhancement and Doppler suppression of Kasevich-Chu atom interferometer with motional squeezing states

arXiv:2606.16632v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hybridization of internal and external atomic degrees of freedom in a Kasevich-Chu interferometer enables the possibility to enhance the sensitivity significantly even under quantum-standard limit. By introducing motional squeezing state as an input, we systematically derive the computational framework of quantum and classical Fisher information of two measurement protocols for arbitrary strength of Doppler effects. Through maximizing the corresponding classical Fisher information, we obtain the optimal control parameters and the corresponding quantum Fisher information. For population measurement, the largest sensitivity can be as large as four times than the semi-classical limit through enlarging the atom coherence length. For joint measurement of population and position, the competition between quantum enhancement and Doppler suppression induces two three behaviors, in one regime, the quantum enhancement dominates even in presence of strong Doppler broadening effects where the sensitivity is significantly enhanced; while in another regime, an optimal squeezing parameter is observed where the classical Fisher information reaches the maximum. Our results clearly demonstrate the robustness of external quantum enhancement against Doppler suppression. Our proposal can be readily applied to gravimeter of mobile platform where decoherence from noise will damage the many-body entanglement of internal spin squeezing.

17.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Stein's method for the matrix normal distribution

arXiv:2601.11422v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This work presents the first systematic development of Stein's method for matrix distributions. We establish the basic essential ingredients of Stein's method for matrix normal approximation: we derive an extended-generator-based Stein identity from a matrix Ornstein-Uhlenbeck diffusion with two-sided scales, provide an explicit semigroup representation for the solution of the Stein equation, and obtain regularity estimates for the solution. The new methodology is demonstrated in three examples: (i) smooth Wasserstein distance bounds to quantify the matrix central limit theorem (a didactic example), (ii) a Wasserstein distance bound for the matrix normal approximation of the centered matrix $T$ distribution, and (iii) a Stein's method-of-moments approach to estimating the row and column covariance factors of the matrix normal, yielding a flexible class of weighted flip-flop Stein estimators that generalize Dutilleul's classical flip-flop algorithm and naturally accommodate row/column importance weights, systematic missingness, and projection onto structured covariance families. The latter two examples are intrinsically matrix-valued and cannot be treated using naive vectorization.

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

Moving Beyond Diversity: Visual Token Pruning as Subspace Reconstruction for Efficient VLMs

Despite their remarkable performance, Vision Language Models (VLMs) incur substantial computational overhead due to the large number of visual tokens. While diversity maximization has become a dominant strategy for token reduction, existing methods rely on cosine-based normalized similarity that discards magnitude information, failing to faithfully approximate the original feature representation and leading to suboptimal performance, particularly on compositional multi-skill reasoning tasks. In this paper, we introduce SPARE, a subspace reconstruction method that reformulates token pruning as a column subset selection problem and explicitly minimizes reconstruction error. By iteratively selecting tokens with large projection residuals, SPARE performs reconstruction-driven pruning beyond angular diversity. Moreover, we reveal a counterintuitive anti-relevance phenomenon: tokens with lower image-text relevance score can better preserve contextual information. Based on this finding, we incorporate anti-relevance into SPARE as an additional selection criterion to promote context-aware token selection. Extensive experiments across multiple VLMs and benchmarks demonstrate that SPARE consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance, with strong gains on compositional tasks. When applied to LLaVA, SPARE removes up to 94% of visual tokens while retaining 95% of the baseline performance, all in a fully training-free manner.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

3D-RFT: Reinforcement Fine-Tuning for Video-based 3D Scene Understanding

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards ( RLVR ) has emerged as a transformative paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models ( LLMs), yet its potential in 3D scene understanding remains under-explored. Existing approaches largely rely on Supervised Fine-Tuning ( SFT), where the token-level cross-entropy loss acts as an indirect proxy for optimization, leading to a misalignment between training objectives and task performances. To bridge this gap, we present Reinforcement Fine-Tuning for Video-based 3D Scene Understanding (3D-RFT ), the first framework to extend RLVR to video-based 3D perception and reasoning. 3D-RFT shifts the paradigm by directly optimizing the model towards evaluation metrics. 3D-RFT first activates 3D-aware Multi-modal Large Language Models ( MLLM s) via SFT, followed by reinforcement fine-tuning using Group Relative Policy Optimization ( GRPO) with strictly verifiable reward functions. We design task-specific reward functions directly from metrics like 3D IoU and F1-Score to provide more effective signals to guide model training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that 3D-RFT-4B achieves state-of-the-art performance on various video-based 3D scene understanding tasks. Notably, 3D-RFT-4B significantly outperforms larger models (e.g., VG LLM-8B) on 3D video detection, 3D visual grounding, and spatial reasoning benchmarks. We further reveal good properties of 3D-RFT such as robust efficacy, and valuable insights into training strategies and data impact. We hope 3D-RFT can serve as a robust and promising paradigm for future development of 3D scene understanding.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Value-order Decomposition for Generalist Anomaly Detection

Industrial anomaly detection suffers from limited data, making cross-domain generalization particularly challenging. Generalist Anomaly Detection (GAD) aims to train a unified model on a source domain that can effectively detect anomalies in unseen target domains. In the initial semantic feature space, strong entanglement between anomalies and object categories or defect types hinders effective generalization across domains. Recent works address this issue by projecting features into a residual space; however, such methods primarily increase cross-domain overlap for normal features, while anomalous features remain specific to object categories, defect types and data domains, leading to poor alignment and generalization. To address this limitation, we propose Value-order Decomposition (VOD), a simple yet effective technique that bridges three types of generalization gaps across object categories, defect types (including real and synthetic defects), and data domains. VOD disentangles and suppresses object-category-, defect-type-, and domain-specific information, promoting alignment within normal and abnormal samples while preserving their separability, thereby enabling robust generalization across the three gaps. Leveraging the strong alignment between real and synthetic defects within the same object, we perform anomaly detection using only normal and synthetic-abnormal reference, and effectively generalize to unseen real defect types. Experiments on diverse industrial and medical benchmarks demonstrate that our method, using a simple cut-and-paste anomaly simulation strategy, achieves strong generalization across the three gaps.

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

MMD-SLAM: Structure-Enhanced Multi-Meta Gaussian Distribution-Guided Visual SLAM

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has significantly boosted novel view synthesis and high-fidelity scene reconstruction, expanding the potential of 3DGS-based Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) methods. However, most existing systems fail to fully exploit the underlying structural information, which limits rendering quality and often leads to inconsistent maps. To address these limitations, we propose MMD-SLAM, a structure-enhanced Visual SLAM framework that leverages the Atlanta World (AW) assumption to guide a Multi-Meta Gaussian representation for photorealistic mapping. First, we introduce a point-line fusion strategy for pose optimization, where 3D line segments are incorporated to improve tracking robustness and provide additional constraints for mapping. Second, we design a Multi-Meta Gaussian representation with dominant directions, explicitly encoding structural priors from the AW hypothesis. Finally, we propose a Gaussian evolution strategy that adapts to scene geometry and incorporates structural cues into global optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that these innovations enable MMD-SLAM to achieve state-of-the-art performance in both tracking accuracy and mapping quality. e.g., our method achieves a 48.56% reduction in ATE RMSE on ScanNet and a 5.71% improvement in PSNR on Replica, compared with MonoGS.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Early-life nutritional environment is associated with late-life cognition in the Health and Retirement Study, a pellagra epidemic natural experiment

Early-life exposures are important to several late-life health outcomes. We sought to study the effect of an in utero nutritional environment and its interaction with Alzheimer's disease (AD) genetic risk on late-life cognitive function. We used a natural experiment created by the pellagra epidemic, a nutritional disease caused by a vitamin B3 deficiency, to evaluate the association between in utero pellagra epidemic exposure and late-life cognitive function in the Health and Retirement Study (N = 18,285). We also evaluated whether the in utero exposure could modify the AD polygenic score's (PGS) effect on cognition. In utero pellagra epidemic exposure was significantly associated with cognition ({beta} = -0.025). However, these effects were not isolated to the prenatal period as exposure during childhood periods also had an effect. The interaction between the in utero exposure and the AD PGS was significant, where the genetic effect on cognition was amplified with increasing (progressively worse) in utero exposure levels. These associations imply that the early-life nutritional environment affects late-life cognitive function and that these effects can modify genetic risk.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

CompressKV: Semantic-Retrieval-Guided KV-Cache Compression for Resource-Efficient Long-Context LLM Inference

arXiv:2606.24467v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-context large language model (LLM) inference is increasingly constrained by the memory footprint and decoding cost of key-value (KV) caches, limiting sustainable deployment on resource-constrained hardware. Existing KV cache eviction methods typically apply heuristic token scoring over all heads in GQA-based LLMs. These methods ignore the different functionalities of attention heads, leading to the eviction of critical tokens and thus degrading the performance of LLMs. To address this issue, we propose CompressKV, a resource-efficient KV-cache compression framework for GQA-based LLMs. Instead of aggregating attention scores from all heads, CompressKV identifies Semantic Retrieval Heads (SRHs) that capture both the initial and final tokens of a prompt and semantically important mid-context evidence, and uses them to select tokens whose KV pairs should be retained. Furthermore, CompressKV allocates cache budgets across layers according to offline estimates of layer-wise eviction error. Experiments on LongBench and Needle-in-a-Haystack show that CompressKV consistently outperforms existing KV-cache eviction methods across memory budgets. Notably, it preserves over 97\% of full-cache performance using only 3\% of the KV cache on LongBench question-answering tasks and achieves 90\% accuracy with just 0.7\% KV storage on Needle-in-a-Haystack. These results demonstrate an improved resource–performance trade-off for long-context LLM inference. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/TUDa-HWAI/CompressKV

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

Beyond Perplexity: UTF-8 Validity in Byte-aware Language Models

Byte-level tokenization enables language models to handle any Unicode input, but models can generate invalid UTF-8 sequences when encountering rare or unseen characters. We investigate the relationship between training scale and UTF-8 generation reliability with a 355M parameter model trained on 80B tokens from a balanced multilingual corpus of English, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. We introduce multiple evaluation protocols that isolate UTF-8 structural validity from language modeling. UTF-8 validity convergence lags perplexity by a roughly a factor of two: perplexity stabilizes after 2.1B tokens, but UTF-8 validity requires 4.2B tokens. In context-free generation, rare characters achieve higher structural validity than common characters, suggesting over-specialization of frequent character representations. Through experiments, we observed that reliable UTF-8 generation is a distinct capability requiring evaluation beyond perplexity.

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

QoS-Aware Token Scheduling and Private Data Valuation for Multi-Modal Agentic Networks

arXiv:2606.15573v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In agentic systems, human-generated data records anchor the value of AI services. Yet cloud compute pipelines centralize processing on remote servers. Data centralization reduces personal data sovereignty and may potentially degrade the quality of service (QoS). Meanwhile, user contributions are diverse in quantity and quality: decentralized records can be biased, noisy, and heterogeneously distributed. To address the data challenge, we study fair token allocation and private data valuation for decentralized and resource-constrained agentic systems. Our approach embeds multi-modal representations in a shared semantic space and releases differentially private (DP) prototypes to preserve utility while reducing semantic leakage. With the DP guarantee, we design a fair token allocation scheme that rewards effective contributions and remains robust to data heterogeneity and AI resource scarcity. Extensive simulations demonstrate improved contribution-based fairness and QoS compared to standard benchmarks. The improved resistance to image reconstruction attacks indicates enhanced privacy for multi-modal personal data.