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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Grey- and white-matter resilience to tau, cognition and sex in Alzheimer's disease

INTRODUCTION: Brain resilience to tau has been mainly studied in relation to grey matter, while its role in white matter remains unclear in Alzheimer's disease (AD). Sex may moderate associations between brain resilience and cognition. METHODS: We analyzed medial temporal lobe tau PET SUVR, entorhinal cortical thickness, cingulum-hippocampal mean diffusivity, and cognition in 205 amyloid-positive individuals from ADNI. Associations between grey- and white-matter resilience to tau and cognitive performance or decline were examined using linear and mixed-effects models, including sex interactions and stratified analyses. RESULTS: Higher grey-matter resilience to tau related to better cross-sectional memory and language performance (p

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

DLWM: Diverse Latent World Models for Efficient Multimodal Reasoning

Reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have improved considerably in recent years. Existing approaches typically rely on explicit chain-of-thought or continuous latent-space trajectories to enhance multi-step reasoning. However, these methods generally assume that an input admits a single latent interpretation and unfold reasoning along a fixed path or under a uniform computation budget. In real-world multimodal settings, visual observations are often subject to occlusion, blur, viewpoint variation, or semantic ambiguity, giving rise to multiple plausible interpretations. A uniform reasoning strategy not only limits the model's ability to explore multiple hypotheses but also incurs high memory usage and rollout cost. We present DLWM (Diverse Latent World Models), a multimodal reasoning framework that combines latent-space reasoning with reinforcement learning. First, we construct a set of diverse latent world hypotheses in continuous latent space, each capturing a different plausible interpretation of the visual input, and unfold latent reasoning independently on each hypothesis. An orthogonality-based diversity regularizer explicitly prevents hypothesis collapse. Second, we formulate the latent reasoning process as a resource-constrained sequential decision problem and introduce a resource-aware reinforcement learning policy that adaptively allocates computation across hypotheses, dynamically deciding whether to expand, terminate, or merge reasoning paths, thereby substantially reducing memory footprint and improving rollout efficiency. Experiments on multiple multimodal reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that DLWM outperforms existing methods by 2-5 points in accuracy while reducing memory usage by 24%.

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

Cordyceps: Covert Control Attacks on LLMs via Data Poisoning

arXiv:2605.26595v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are often fine-tuned on uncurated text datasets that adversaries can poison. Existing poisoning attacks primarily rely on fixed trigger phrases that defenses such as outlier detection, clean-data regularization, or online monitoring can neutralize. In this paper, we propose a data poisoning method that teaches an LLM an information hiding scheme reliably and stealthily through semantic associations between shared knowledge such as facts or concepts and attacker-chosen phrases. The induced hiding scheme can encode and decode arbitrary malicious instructions, thus revealing a new and subtle poisoning-induced vulnerability: covert control attacks. We precisely characterize covert control attacks and evaluate them across $5$ LLMs, $3$ backdoor defenses, and $4$ prompt injection defenses. With a small poisoned fraction, covert control attacks outperform heuristic-based prompt injection attacks in average attack success rate by about $40\%$ relative to clean fine-tuned models. They also circumvent defenses based on detection and fine-tuning, maintaining up to $93\%$ attack success rate after backdoor defenses and up to $98\%$ after prompt injection defenses.

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

Learning to Refine Hidden States for Reliable LLM Reasoning

arXiv:2606.17524v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models show strong reasoning ability, but their internal reasoning process can remain unstable in complex multi-step settings, where early hidden-state errors may propagate to incorrect predictions. We propose ReLAR, a reinforcement-guided latent refinement framework that iteratively updates hidden representations before decoding. ReLAR maintains a compact latent reasoning state and uses learned depth and action controllers to adaptively determine both the number and direction of refinement steps. The controllers are trained with a policy gradient objective based on step-wise likelihood improvement, enabling efficient input-dependent reasoning without explicit chain-of-thought generation. Experiments on medical, mathematical, multi-hop reasoning, and open-ended generation benchmarks show that ReLAR improves accuracy, generation quality, and reasoning stability with substantially lower inference overhead than explicit reasoning baselines.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

When Does Streaming Tool Use Help? Characterizing Tool-Intent Stabilization in Streaming Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Streaming Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Streaming RAG) reduces user-perceived latency by issuing tool queries in parallel with ongoing user input, before the utterance is complete. Reported gains are aggregate, yet the mechanism's benefit is fundamentally query-intrinsic: speculation can only help when the correct tool query becomes determinable before the user stops speaking or typing. We isolate and measure this property – tool-intent stabilization, the point in the input stream at which a speculative query's retrieval converges to the answer-bearing result. On the CRAG benchmark (1371 validation questions) we (i) measure the distribution of stabilization, (ii) derive a model-agnostic bound H on the portion of tool latency that can be hidden behind the user's remaining input, as a function of tool latency L and input cadence {\delta}, (iii) validate against a working streaming pipeline that realized savings meet or exceed this bound, and (iv) identify which query properties predict early versus late stabilization. The study requires no model training and runs on commodity CPU hardware. We find that at a realistic operating point (L=600ms, {\delta}=3w/s, {\theta}=0.8), 73.9% of queries across the full benchmark admit substantial latency hiding – a blended figure that mixes sufficiency stabilization on the 21.3% of questions where gold evidence is verbatim-present and BM25-retrievable (95.2% streamable on this favorable slice) with a grounding-free top-1-settling fallback on the remainder. On the favorable slice, {\phi}_suf is bracketed to [0.26, 0.281] by exact and relaxed grounding – both early. Question type produces a significant but coarse early/late split (Kruskal-Wallis p=0.017, epsilon^2=0.04), directly informing when a learned speculative trigger is worth its cost.

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

Candidate overtone shear horizontal SAW resonators in thin-film lithium niobate for intermodal acousto-optic modulation

arXiv:2606.12853v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The merits of thin-film surface acoustic wave (SAW) devices are pivotal to develop the high-performance intermodal acousto-optic modulators. In this work, we have proposed shear-horizontal (SH) SAW resonators for anticipated intermodal acousto-optic modulation on the thin-film lithium niobate platform. Through optimization of the cut angle of LN films, the SAW wavelength, and the thickness of interdigital transducer (IDT) electrodes, the calculated acousto-optic overlap factors utilizing SH0 modes are improved by more than an order of magnitude compared with those of Rayleigh modes. Furthermore, we have fabricated and characterized three kinds of proof-of-principle SH0 mode devices without/with grating reflectors. The electromechanical coupling coefficients (keff^2) and quality factors (Q) in the overtone resonators with grating reflectors are systematically evaluated, featuring the highest Q of 843 with the compromised keff^2 of 0.96%-4.72%. The results reveal that the temperature coefficients of frequency (TCF) of Rayleigh modes vary across various overtones, whereas the SH0 modes exhibit TCFs in the range of 32.3-68.9 ppm/C. Our fabricated SH0-mode overtone resonators demonstrate the capability of operating at power levels up to 29 dBm without electrode damage, offering a promising paradigm for robust and high-efficiency intermodal acousto-optic modulators with potential applications in integrated optical signal processing, microwave photonics,and quantum information technologies.

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

Object Tokens as a Bridge Between Segmentation and Visual Question Answering in Robotic Surgery

Visual Question Answering (VQA) in robotic surgery, referred to as surgical VQA, requires high-level understanding of complex surgical scenes and the integration of visual perception with language reasoning, with the potential to support surgical training and intraoperative decision-making. Recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown promising performance through parameter-efficient fine-tuning; however, most existing approaches rely on coarse visual grounding, typically limited to bounding boxes, which fails to capture the fine-grained spatial structure of surgical objects. In this work, we propose a unified framework that jointly performs pixel-level segmentation and visual question answering within a single framework. Our approach integrates a VLM with a Segment Anything Model (SAM)-based decoder and represents scene elements as object tokens generated by the VLM. These object tokens guide answer prediction and are further projected to the SAM-based decoder to produce segmentation masks. By optimizing the object token embeddings through both segmentation and question answering objectives, the model learns spatially grounded representations that enhance visual reasoning while providing explicit pixel-level grounding. We evaluate the proposed method on the private RAMIE (Robot-Assisted Minimally Invasive Esophagectomy) dataset and the public EndoVis18 dataset, where it consistently outperforms baseline methods for surgical VQA. These results demonstrate that incorporating context-aware object tokens into vision-language models improves fine-grained surgical scene understanding.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Finetuning Vision-Language-Action Models Requires Fewer Layers Than You Think

arXiv:2606.20246v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models pre-trained on massive video-robot datasets have revolutionized robotic manipulation, yet their multi-billion parameter architectures impose prohibitive computational burdens during downstream fine-tuning and real-time inference. In this work, we reveal a highly non-trivial architectural characteristic of these continuous control foundation policies (e.g., pi_0, GR00T-N1.5): despite being trained on diverse physical trajectories, they exhibit severe layer-wise representational redundancy. To exploit this, we introduce a structural compression pipeline that is entirely training-free, bypassing the need of existing methods to load full-scale models to learn optimized token reductions or dynamic layer selectors. Instead, using only a single forward pass via Centered Kernel Alignment to identify redundant layer features, we remove twin layers to permanently compress the model depth by up to 50% across both the VLM backbone and the continuous control policy head. Downstream fine-tuning of this streamlined architecture yields a dual acceleration benefit: a 40-50% reduction in training time and up to 30% faster real-time inference, while matching or exceeding full-scale base model performance. We comprehensively validate our method across three simulation benchmarks (LIBERO, RoboCasa, SimplerEnv) and 10 diverse real-world manipulation tasks across 4 unique robotic embodiments. These results prove that advanced VLAs require significantly fewer layers than previously assumed, offering a highly compute-efficient paradigm for scalable robot learning.

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

Dual-Uncertainty Guided Policy Learning for Multimodal Reasoning

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has advanced reasoning capabilities in multimodal large language models. However, existing methods typically treat visual inputs as deterministic, overlooking the perceptual ambiguity inherent to the visual modality. Consequently, they fail to distinguish whether a model's uncertainty stems from complex reasoning or ambiguous perception, preventing the targeted allocation of exploration or learning signals. To address this gap, we introduce DUPL, a dual-uncertainty guided policy learning approach for multimodal RLVR that quantifies and leverages both perceptual uncertainty (via symmetric KL divergence) and output uncertainty (via policy entropy) to guide policy updates. By establishing an uncertainty-driven feedback loop and employing a dynamic branch prioritization mechanism, DUPL recalibrates the policy advantage to focus learning on states with high perceptual or decisional ambiguity, enabling effective targeted exploration beyond passive data augmentation. Evaluated on diverse multimodal reasoning benchmarks spanning mathematical and general domains, DUPL achieves solid gains. It improves Qwen2.5-VL accuracy by up to $12.3%$ (3B) and $7.9%$ (7B), and Qwen3-VL-Instruct by up to $10.7%$ (4B) and $12.4%$ (8B), consistently outperforming GRPO, while seamlessly generalizing to alternative algorithms (DAPO, $+6.5%$ avg) and architectures (LLaVA-OneVision-1.5, $+4.7%$ avg). These results demonstrate that DUPL is an effective and generalizable approach for multimodal RLVR.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

E-mem: Multi-agent based Episodic Context Reconstruction for LLM Agent Memory

arXiv:2601.21714v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The evolution of Large Language Model (LLM) agents towards System~2 reasoning, characterized by deliberative, high-precision problem-solving, requires maintaining rigorous logical integrity over extended horizons. However, prevalent memory preprocessing paradigms suffer from destructive de-contextualization. By compressing complex sequential dependencies into pre-defined structures (e.g., embeddings or graphs), these methods sever the contextual integrity essential for deep reasoning. To address this, we propose E-mem, a framework shifting from Memory Preprocessing to Episodic Context Reconstruction. Inspired by biological engrams, E-mem employs a heterogeneous hierarchical architecture where multiple assistant agents maintain uncompressed memory contexts, while a central master agent orchestrates global planning. Unlike passive retrieval, our mechanism empowers assistants to locally reason within activated segments, extracting context-aware evidence before aggregation. Evaluations on the LoCoMo benchmark demonstrate that E-mem achieves over 54\% F1, surpassing the state-of-the-art GAM by 7.75\%, while reducing token cost by over 70\%.

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

MP3: Multi-Period Pattern Pre-training forSpatio-Temporal Forecasting

arXiv:2606.13119v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spatio-Temporal forecasting is crucial in diverse fields, such as transportation, climate, and energy. Urban spatio-temporal data exhibits temporal mirage: similar short-window inputs have divergent future trends, and vice versa. Existing spatio-temporal graph neural networks (STGNNs) cannot effectively identify such mirages. We argue that the core reason lies in the short-window inputs that have incomplete period observation, heterogeneous global spatial correlation, and cross-period superposition causality. To bridge this gap, we develop a novel Multi- Period Pattern Pre-training (MP3), a plug-and-play pre-training plugin for distinguishing temporal mirages. MP3 presents two core innovations: (1) The multi-period pattern learning is designed to learn multi-period patterns from long time series. Specifically, multi-period temporal modeling leverages edge convolution to identify different multi-period patterns. Multi-period spatial modeling uses a bottleneck project and a global memory bank to capture heterogeneous global spatial relations efficiently. Cross-period pattern interaction employs a causality-enhanced Transformer to capture dependencies across different period patterns. (2) This plugin can seamlessly integrate into existing STGNN backbones to strengthen their forecasting performance. The experiment on five STGNN baselines across five real-world datasets (including a large-scale dataset CA) verify the effectiveness, superior scalability and strong adaptability of MP3, which brings consistent and robust performance improvements across all evaluated baselines. On average, MP3 reduces the MAE 4.7% and the RMSE 5.0%. The code can be available at https://github.com/YAN-outlook/MP3.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Does the method matter? Evaluating the effectiveness, efficiency and ease of hearing-aid gain self-adjustment

In conventional hearing-aid personalisation, clinicians cannot hear what their patients hear, and patients cannot often reliably detect or describe what they hear. Self-adjustment avoids this issue but requires user controls that adjust hearing-aid signal processing parameters to be effective, efficient and easy. In this study, we explored (a) the roles of interface complexity and stimulus type in the self-adjustment of hearing-aid gain, and (b) how well individuals can adjust one sound to match another to assess the same interfaces and stimuli. Adult hearing-aid users with mild to moderate symmetrical sensorineural hearing loss repeatedly adjusted the gain (a) to their preference from individual prescription (n = 41) and (b) to match their previous preferences from a random starting point (n = 32) using three interfaces representing different bass/mid/treble configurations and three stimuli (music, speech and speech-in-noise). The large interindividual variability in self-adjusted gains clustered into three patterns of deviation from initial prescription: increased relative bass, overall gain reduction, and close to initial prescription. There were no substantial effects of interface nor stimulus on self-adjustment reliability (median {sigma} = 2.8 dB), whereas absolute sound-matching error increased with increasing interface complexity and centre frequency. Neither individual matching accuracy nor questionnaire responses predicted either self-adjusted gains or reliability. Overall, these results show that many - but not all - hearing-aid users can adjust gains with reasonable reliability, and while it can be difficult to predict the behaviour from the individual, the individual applies a similar self-adjustment behaviour across different interfaces and stimuli.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Efficient upsampling for tensor-network and quantum-state encoded functions

arXiv:2601.03885v2 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Both tensor trains (TTs) and quantum states provide compressed representations of grid-structured data with potentially exponential compression power. We present a unified framework for upsampling data encoded in vector amplitudes, with efficient realizations in both classical TT and quantum settings. Starting from an \(n\)-core TT or an \(n\)-qubit state on a coarse grid with \(2^n\) points, the construction produces an \((n+m)\)-core TT or \((n+m)\)-qubit state on a finer grid with \(2^{n+m}\) points. In the TT setting, it supports interpolation, quasi-interpolation, augmentation, and synthesis through efficient low-rank contractions, with the added \(m\) cores retaining constant rank. For function-value encodings, the resulting interpolation satisfies an \(\ell^2\)-error bound independent of the number of added grid points, achieves exponential compression at fixed accuracy, and has a logarithmic complexity in the number of grid points. In the quantum setting, the refined state is prepared by a \(\mathrm{poly}(n,m)\)-size circuit using \(\log(p+1)\) ancillas, where \(p\) controls the smoothness of the quasi-interpolant; the corresponding error scales quadratically with the initial grid spacing. We validate our framework for tensor networks in one-, two-, and three-dimensional examples, including functions, derivatives, airfoil masks, and synthetic random fields such as three-dimensional turbulence. In particular, fractal fields can be generated directly in TT format with logarithmic memory and runtime. These results open a practical route to multiscale solvers, generative models, and geometry-aware algorithms on tensor-network and quantum platforms, with potential applications in scientific simulation, imaging, and real-time graphics.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Cardiac positronium lifetime in human PET: a reproducible right-left ventricular contrast that is not explained by blood oxygenation

Background. Ortho-positronium (o-Ps) lifetime, now measurable in vivo on long-axial-field-of-view (LAFOV) PET/CT, has been proposed as a biomarker of tissue oxygenation and hypoxia. Because o-Ps lifetime is dominated by tissue free-volume structure while the oxygen- specific contribution is small, whether an in-vivo lifetime contrast reflects oxygenation rather than anatomy is an open, identifiability-limited question. Aim. To test the oxygenation hypothesis directly using the heart's natural arterial/venous oxygenation contrast, with a built-in anatomical control. Methods. We re-analysed a public [82Rb]Cl human cardiac LAFOV PET/CT dataset (5.30 x 10^8 evaluated three-photon events). Per-compartment o-Ps lifetimes were extracted with a background-plus-two-component exponentially-modified-Gaussian (EMG) model. The list-mode to image mapping and right/left ventricle (RV/LV) identity were established lifetime-free (the mapping reproduces the provider's reconstructed image at block-correlation 0.998 and wins a joint multi-organ alignment panel). We applied a confound battery: registration stress test, blood-core vs wall, lung-air and wall-myocardium partial-volume, tissue density; and a structure/position-matched control (pulmonary artery, deoxygenated, vs aorta, oxygenated). An isotope-matched 82Rb uniform-quartz reference bounded the instrument's positional behaviour. All results were produced by two independent analysis pipelines. Results. RV o-Ps lifetime exceeded LV by delta tau = +0.304 ns (RV 1.700 +/- 0.172, LV 1.396 +/- 0.130 ns; about 1.4 sigma), in the oxygen-expected direction; the contrast was stable across +/-16 mm registration perturbation (sign preserved in 100% of 342 shifts) and resided in the blood core, not the wall. However, the matched-vessel control was null: pulmonary artery minus aorta = -0.011 +/- 0.344 ns. Lung-air and wall-myocardium partial-volume were disfavoured, and the effect fell within the isotope-matched 82Rb instrumental positional envelope (about 0.1-0.35 ns over 40 mm in uniform material). Conclusion. On this single subject, the cardiac o-Ps lifetime contrast does not provide a clean readout of blood oxygenation: an oxygenation effect of the observed (about 0.3 ns) magnitude is ruled out by the matched control, while a small physiological effect cannot be excluded. We provide a reusable confound-control battery for evaluating future in-vivo o-Ps oxygenation claims. Multi-subject replication with anatomy decoupled from oxygenation is required.

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

Seeing Is Not Screening: Multimodal Hidden Instruction Attacks on Agent Skill Scanners

Agent skills are emerging as an important attack surface in LLM-based systems. Through an empirical study of existing skill scanners, we find that current defenses primarily rely on textual descriptions, manifests, and source code as the main signals for security analysis, which can leave visually conveyed malicious intent insufficiently examined. This creates a practical blind spot: harmful operational instructions hidden in images may bypass scanning while still being recoverable by multimodal agents during deployment. To systematically investigate this threat, we propose SkillCamo, a document-mediated multimodal instruction attack that conceals malicious instructions within images bundled with a skill while rewriting the surrounding documentation to naturally reference those images as part of the normal workflow. Thus, the attack does not rely on the image alone, but on the joint interpretation of textual guidance and visual payload at execution time. To defend against such attacks, we further propose ExecScan, an execution-grounded multimodal scanning module that performs intent extraction, behavior reconstruction, abuse assessment, and deliberative execution simulation over skill artifacts. ExecScan jointly analyzes documentation, code, referenced resources, and visual content to recover hidden instructions, reconstruct executable behavior chains, and identify downstream risks such as exfiltration, destruction, persistence, deception, and privilege escalation. Extensive experiments show that image-hidden malicious instructions challenge existing skill scanners, while ExecScan can improve the skill scanning performance.

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

Variational Consensus Monte Carlo for Bayesian Mixture

arXiv:2606.19643v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Motivated by the privacy, sensitivity and sharing limitations of health data, we present a comprehensive pipeline for inference of Bayesian mixture models within a federated learning setting, i.e. when data cannot be fully shared or pooled across compute nodes. We adopt a Consensus Monte Carlo (CMC) approach, in which an MCMC algorithm is run independently within each data silo to estimate local posterior distributions, which are then aggregated to approximate the posterior over the full data. The variational CMC approach of Rabinovich, Angelino and Jordan (2015) [1] frames the aggregation step as a variational inference problem, but their application to mixtures assumes the number of clusters and key mixture parameters to be known. Our main methodological contributions are: (i) an extension of variational CMC to over-fitted Bayesian mixture models that infer the number of clusters and all model parameters, without requiring conjugacy; (ii) novel cluster-matching algorithms suitable for cross-silo settings in which not every cluster appears in each local dataset; (iii) a number of inference strategies for the aggregation step, matched to different federated learning constraints; and (iv) guidelines for choosing among these in practice. A comprehensive simulation study validates the framework and allows us to compare to state-of-the-art federated learning alternatives. Notably, we show that when the composition of local datasets reflects the underlying clustering structure in the data, our approach can recover small clusters with greater accuracy than standard MCMC applied to the pooled data. We illustrate the framework on large-scale electronic health record data, identifying multi-morbidity patterns in a British geriatric population.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

GrowLoop: Self-Evolving Conversation Evaluation Seeded by Human

With the rapid advancement of large language models, evaluating human-likeness in open-ended conversation has become increasingly important. However, human-likeness is a form of tacit knowledge that humans perceive intuitively, yet the underlying criteria resist explicit formulation. Human judgments vary widely, with strong agreement on some cases and legitimate disagreement on others. Meanwhile, the criteria behind human judgments remain implicit, leaving no clear basis for constructing cases. Further, what counts as human-likeness is not static, but evolving with model capability and human expectations. Despite progress in evaluation methods such as expert-authored benchmarks, Reward Models, and self-evolving benchmarks, none addresses all three challenges simultaneously. Therefore, we propose GrowLoop, a self-evolving conversation evaluation system that continuously adapts as models advance and scenarios shift. Starting from minimal human seed annotations, LLM agents iteratively extract and refine evaluation rubrics through Heuristic Learning. Human-AI agreement is required where annotators converge, while only plausibility is expected where they diverge. Moreover, the Rubric-Case co-evolution mechanism enables continuous evolution. When the evaluation target shifts, new human seeds expand the system's coverage accordingly. When applied to human-likeness evaluation in open-ended conversation, the AI judge guided by these rubrics not only substantially outperforms existing methods in alignment with human judgments, but also uncovers issues that annotators overlook. The resulting benchmark effectively discriminates models across capability tiers and reveals where they fall short, while generalizing to new scenarios and adapting as models advance. Our work shifts the benchmarking paradigm from manual updates or difficulty scaling to comprehensive, continuous self-evolution.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Variational autoencoders with latent high-dimensional steady geometric flows for dynamics

arXiv:2410.10137v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We develop Riemannian approaches to variational autoencoders (VAEs) for PDE-type ambient data with regularizing geometric latent dynamics, which we refer to as VAE-DLM, or VAEs with dynamical latent manifolds. We redevelop the VAE framework such that manifold geometries, subject to our geometric flow, embedded in Euclidean space are learned in the intermediary latent space developed by encoders and decoders. By tailoring the geometric flow in which the latent space evolves, we induce latent geometric properties of our choosing, which are reflected in empirical performance. We reformulate the traditional evidence lower bound (ELBO) loss with a considerate choice of prior. We develop a linear geometric flow with a steady-state regularizing term. This flow requires only automatic differentiation of one time derivative, and can be solved in moderately high dimensions in a physics-informed approach, allowing more expressive latent representations. We discuss how this flow can be formulated as a gradient flow, and maintains entropy away from metric singularity. This, along with an eigenvalue penalization condition, helps ensure the manifold is sufficiently large in measure, nondegenerate, and a canonical geometry, which contribute to a robust representation. Our methods focus on the modified multi-layer perceptron architecture with tanh activations for the manifold encoder-decoder. We demonstrate, on our datasets of interest, our methods perform at least as well as the traditional VAE, and oftentimes better. Our methods can outperform this and a VAE endowed with our proposed architecture, frequently reducing out-of-distribution (OOD) error between 15% to 35% on select datasets. We highlight our method on ambient PDEs whose solutions maintain minimal variation in late times. We provide empirical justification towards how we can improve robust learning for external dynamics with VAEs.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Mental Health AI Safety Claims Must Preserve Temporal Evidence

arXiv:2605.08827v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The safety of mental health AI is often judged at the wrong temporal scale. Current evaluations typically score isolated responses, endpoint outcomes, or aggregate dialogue quality, while clinically consequential failures may arise from the order and accumulation of interactions themselves, including delayed escalation, repeated reinforcement, dependency formation, failed repair, and gradual deterioration across turns. This paper argues that this mismatch is not merely a limitation of evaluation coverage but a source of invalid safety conclusions. We introduce Temporal Safety Non-Identifiability, a formal account of why safety properties that depend on sequence, timing, accumulation, or recovery cannot be certified by protocols that discard those features. From this formalization, we develop SCOPE (Safety Claims Over Preserved Evidence) as a general principle for aligning safety claims with the evidence an evaluation actually retains, and instantiate it as SCOPE-MH, a mental-health instantiation of this reporting standard. We operationalize SCOPE-MH through a proof-of-concept on the AnnoMI dataset of expert-annotated motivational interviewing conversations, which reveals mechanisms of failure that per-turn behavior scoring does not represent. We propose SCOPE-MH as a diagnostic complement to existing evaluation infrastructure and argue that evaluation preserving temporal evidence is necessary, not optional, for safety-critical mental health AI deployment.

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

Exact Federated Continual Unlearning for Ridge Heads on Frozen Foundation Models

arXiv:2603.12977v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Foundation models are commonly deployed as frozen feature extractors with a small trainable head to adapt to private, user-generated data in federated settings. The ``right to be forgotten'' requires removing the influence of specific samples or users from the trained model on demand. Existing federated unlearning methods target general deep models and rely on approximate reconstruction or selective retraining, making exactness costly or elusive. We study this problem in a practically relevant but under-explored regime: a frozen foundation model with a ridge-regression head. The exact optimum depends on the data only through two additive sufficient statistics, which we turn into a communication protocol supporting an arbitrary stream of add and delete requests via fixed-size messages. The server maintains a head that is, in exact arithmetic, pointwise identical to centralized retraining after every request. We provide deterministic retrain-equivalence guarantees, order and partition invariance, two server-side variants, and a Bayesian certificate of zero KL divergence. Experiments on four benchmarks confirm the guarantees: both variants match centralized ridge retraining to within $10^{-9}$ relative Frobenius error and complete each request at orders-of-magnitude lower cost than federated retraining baselines.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Quality Improvement Based Implementation and Evaluation of a Decision Aid for Patients with Nephrolithiasis

Introduction Patients with nephrolithiasis face challenges in making a high-quality, preference sensitive decision. Our prior work established feasibility and patient acceptance of a software-based decision aid (DA). The objectives for this study were to identify implementation strategies for the DA in routine care and determine whether DA implementation enhances decisional quality for patients. Methods New nephrolithiasis patients were recruited from the institution Medical Center from June 2018 to April 2024 to receive a software-based pre-visit DA that measured care preferences and used decision analysis to rank treatments. The RE-AIM framework and Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycles were used to improve implementation outcomes. Patients completed survey instruments evaluating decisional conflict, shared decision-making, care satisfaction, and treatment choice following their provider visit. These metrics were compared in the DA cohort (n=81) to those in a usual care cohort (n=78) with Wilcoxon rank-sum and Chi-square (or Fishers exact) tests. Results Implementation data revealed sustained reach and progressive improvement in fidelity. The DA cohort reported higher decisional quality relative to controls (p=0.003) and reported greater support/advice to make a choice (p=0.005). The DA cohort more often discussed options with their doctor (87.5% vs 69.2%, p=0.005) and were more likely to be promoters of their provider (p

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

Volterra Generative Models

arXiv:2606.18071v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Score-based diffusion models typically use Brownian perturbations, which provide tractable reverse-time dynamics but impose memoryless noising. We introduce Volterra generative models, a continuous-time score-based framework whose forward process injects path-dependent noise through fractional kernels. To handle the non-Markovian and non-semimartingale dynamics, we construct finite-dimensional Markovian lifts using Gaussian quadrature in both regimes and a hybrid finite-difference exponential approximation in the smooth regime. We prove squared error bounds, derive an augmented linear-Gaussian forward process, and show that the learning can remain data-dimensional by considering residual states and analytic auxiliary Gaussian scores. We also identify covariance and reverse-time degeneracies caused by shared Brownian factors and signed smooth-regime weights. The degeneracy motivates stabilized conditioning and, for stiff larger lifts, a Gaussian-bridge reconstruction sampler. Experiments on MNIST and CIFAR-10 show that persistent fractional perturbations with small Markovian lifts can improve score-based generation on MNIST and provide a promising extension to natural images, while the bridge sampler provides a stability mechanism for larger lifts.

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

Disentangling Hallucinations: Orthogonal Semantic Projection for Robust Interpretability

As Vision-Language Models are increasingly deployed in safety-critical applications, the trustworthiness of their explanations becomes crucial. Explainable AI (XAI) methods for Vision-Language Models often suffer from semantic hallucination, where attribution maps highlight prominent image regions even when prompted with incorrect text descriptions (e.g., highlighting a dog when prompted ``cat''). Although this problem is widespread, a formal mathematical analysis of XAI methods and CLIP embeddings is largely missing in the literature. We demonstrate that this phenomenon is not specific to a single architecture but is a fundamental consequence of Linear Semantic Leakage in high-dimensional embedding spaces. We propose a unified theoretical framework, Linear Semantic Attribution (LSA), which generalizes across discriminative methods. We introduce OSP, a geometric intervention that utilizes the residual property of OMP to disentangle unique semantic signals from shared concepts. We prove theoretically and demonstrate empirically that OSP minimizes hallucination by orthogonalizing the query vector against distractor concepts, rendering the attribution model blind to shared features while preserving fidelity for correct prompts. Our code is available at: https://github.com/emirhanbilgic/Orthogonal-Semantic-Projection

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Sensor Configuration Matters: A Systematic Evaluation of Multimodal SLAM on Quadruped Robots

Autonomous navigation of quadrupedal robots in diverse environments fundamentally relies on resilient Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). While visual-inertial SLAM has matured across wheeled, handheld, and aerial platforms, a critical evaluation gap remains regarding how hardware-level sensor configurations affect performance under the aggressive dynamics of legged locomotion. Quadrupeds introduce distinct embodiment-induced sensory challenges, including foot-impact shocks, high-frequency mechanical vibrations, and rapid angular rotations, which degrade standard perception pipelines. To address this gap, we present a systematic evaluation of state-of-the-art visual, visual-inertial, and LiDAR-visual-inertial SLAM methods using the GrandTour dataset recorded on an ANYmal D quadruped. We isolate and quantify the impacts of camera modalities, shutter techniques, and inertial sensor tiers, analyzing their trade-offs across localization accuracy, algorithmic robustness, and computational resource utilization. Our empirical findings demonstrate that hardware selection has substantial influence on system resilience: stereo configurations consistently outperform monocular and RGB-D modalities, global shutter cameras significantly mitigate motion-induced tracking failures compared to rolling shutter cameras, and, crucially, standard inertial integration can degrade the performance of primarily vision-based frameworks under harsh legged locomotion. These insights additionally offer concrete design guidelines for tailoring custom sensor payloads to achieve dependable perception on agile legged systems.