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

MeshLoom: Feed-Forward Non-Rigid Registration of Mesh Sequences

We present MeshLoom, a feed-forward registration network that directly reconstructs vertex deformations across mesh sequences. Our approach advances non-rigid registration beyond existing models, which are typically constrained by costly per-instance optimization, narrow object categories, pairwise-only inputs, or merely intermediate outputs. The network is simple and efficient, registering multiple meshes within seconds. At its core lies a topology-aware encoder–decoder design. Specifically, we first introduce a topology-aware point representation that encodes the anchor (reference) mesh's topology into its per-vertex features. This representation strengthens the network's understanding of the anchor-mesh geometry and disambiguates points that are Euclidean-close yet geodesically distant. We then propose a multi-modal encoder that fuses this anchor-mesh representation with complementary cues from each frame, such as shape latents and image features. These multi-source signals are compressed into a compact global motion embedding that captures dense inter-frame correspondence. A lightweight decoder then queries this global embedding with the anchor-mesh point representation, retrieving per-vertex deformations at target timestamps. Through extensive experiments across diverse motions and object categories, we show that MeshLoom achieves state-of-the-art results on non-rigid registration. In addition, we find that our global embedding-then-query paradigm naturally enables the network to generate deformations at intermediate timestamps, which extends MeshLoom to motion interpolation and mesh morphing. Project page: https://meshloom.github.io/ .

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

Rethinking the Role of Efficient Attention in Hybrid Architectures

Modern language models increasingly adopt hybrid architectures that combine full attention with efficient attention modules, such as sliding-window attention (SWA) and recurrent sequence mixers. However, how these efficient modules shape model capabilities remains poorly understood. To address this gap, we conduct a systematic analysis across hybrid architectures from three perspectives: scaling behavior, mechanism analysis, and architecture design. First, from a scaling perspective, we find that efficient-attention design primarily affects how fast long-context capability emerges, while different hybrids eventually converge to comparable long-context performance under sufficient training. Second, mechanistically, we show that long-range retrieval is mainly carried by full attention, whereas efficient attention shapes its optimization trajectory. This explains a counter-intuitive phenomenon we call Large-Window Laziness: larger SWA windows can delay the formation of retrieval heads in full-attention layers. Third, guided by this mechanism, we show that applying NoPE to only the full-attention layers of a small-window SWA hybrid substantially improves long-context performance with negligible impact on short-context performance.

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

STRIDE: Strategic Trajectory Reasoning via Discriminative Estimation for Verifiable Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.15866v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become an effective post-training paradigm for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models. However, existing RLVR methods typically rely on final-answer correctness to assign trajectory-level rewards, providing sparse supervision and treating all tokens uniformly regardless of their actual contribution to reasoning. Although recent studies introduce intermediate signals such as process rewards, high-entropy tokens, and semantic uncertainty, these signals are often not inherently verifiable and may fail to distinguish beneficial strategic patterns from harmful ones. To address this limitation, we propose STRIDE (Strategic Trajectory Reasoning with Discriminative Estimation), a fine-grained RLVR framework that derives strategic reasoning supervision from verifiable outcomes. STRIDE contrasts successful and failed trajectories within each response group to estimate the outcome-discriminative preference of each $n$-gram strategic pattern, and further combines this signal with reasoning saliency entropy to identify decision-relevant strategic patterns. These patterns are assigned differentiated advantage values during RL optimization, enabling more precise credit assignment while preserving the verifiability of RLVR. Extensive experiments demonstrate that STRIDE consistently improves reasoning performance across diverse models, tasks, and extended settings, including VLMs and agent-based systems.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

SPI: Query-Depth-Adaptive Indexing for Streaming RAG in Vector Databases

Vector databases (VecDBs) are increasingly deployed in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines where query processing and document ingestion occur concurrently. The index layer needs to provide low-latency search while incorporating new vectors without frequent global rebuilding. Existing VecDB pipelines typically operate within a uniform representation regime, despite substantial variation in the semantic granularity required across queries. This motivates an index design that supports incremental updates while adapting retrieval depth to query distribution and complexity. We propose Semantic Pyramid Indexing (SPI), a VecDB-layer indexing framework that organizes embeddings into $L$ semantically aligned resolution levels and selects retrieval depth per query via a lightweight uncertainty-aware controller. SPI supports progressive coarse-to-fine ANN search, level-wise streaming insertion without global rebuilds, and distributed execution through LSH partitioning with asynchronous gRPC coordination. Unlike hierarchical ANN structures with fixed traversal rules (e.g., SPANN), SPI adapts resolution at query time while remaining compatible with FAISS and Qdrant backends. On MS MARCO and Natural Questions, SPI achieves competitive Recall@10 with lower latency under the same dense encoder family, yielding a 1.4–2.3$\times$ average retrieval latency reduction under fixed Recall@10 targets relative to comparable approximate-ANN baselines. A prototype scaling study up to 8 nodes shows $6.2\times$ throughput scaling (${\approx}73\%$ efficiency); the 16-node configuration is included for completeness but shows diminishing efficiency. We provide a top-$K$ stability guarantee: queries with sufficient retrieval margin return an identical top-$K$ set at a shallower level. Code and configurations are available at https://github.com/FastLM/SPI_VecDB.

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

MB-Loc: Multi-planar Bird's-eye-view Localization in outdoor LiDAR scenes

Global LiDAR localization is a fundamental task for autonomous navigation systems. Recent methods perform Scene Coordinate Regression (SCR) and achieve superior accuracy over Absolute Pose Regression (APR) solutions by predicting dense 3D world coordinates. However, SCR approaches introduce two major bottlenecks: severe computational inefficiency from processing raw 3D geometries and significant performance degradation under varying sensor viewpoints. To address these limitations, we present MB-Loc, a lightweight and viewpoint-robust SCR framework. Instead of relying on heavy 3D convolutions, we project the input LiDAR scan into a 2.5D Multi-planar Bird's-Eye View (BEV) representation. By slicing the point-cloud along the Z-axis and mapping signed depths into discrete 2D planes, MB-Loc retains essential 3D geometric structures while exploiting the computational tractability of standard 2D CNNs. To handle the inherent sparsity of outdoor LiDAR, we introduce a KL-regularized latent bottleneck that explicitly models spatial uncertainty without injecting stochastic noise. Finally, to ensure rotation robustness, we apply 3D spatial augmentations prior to planar projection, forcing the network to implicitly learn viewpoint-invariant features. We perform extensive experiments on the publicly available NCLT dataset and demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the current state-of-the-art. Operating at real-time inference speeds, MB-Loc significantly outperforms traditional 3D-SCR architectures in computational efficiency.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

CDH13 is associated with cellular viability after exposure to ionizing radiation using genome-wide screening

Background: It is well known that genetic variants contribute to cellular sensitivity to chemotherapeutic agents and ionizing radiation (IR). The aim of this study was to identify single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and genes associated with the spectrum of normal cellular sensitivity of lymphoblastoid cell lines (LCLs) towards ionizing radiation and mitomycin C (MMC). Methods: In a first step, we determined the viability of LCLs established from male participants of the Berlin Aging Study II (BASE-II) aged >=62 years following treatments with increasing doses of IR (n=137 cell lines) or MMC (n=140 cell lines) using the alamarBlue assay. Results from intra-experimental triplicates and three independent experiments for each cell line and treatment were used to calculate the area under the curves (AUCs) representing the specific sensitivity to IR and MMC of each LCL. The data from these experiments were subsequently used as outcomes in genome-wide association studies (GWASs). In addition, we calculated polygenic risk scores (PGS) from UK Biobank GWAS results for four cancer-related phenotypes and assessed the extent to which the variance in the IR and MMC sensitivity is explained by these PGS. Results: The GWAS analyses revealed one variant, rs74728080, located in CDH13 on chromosome 16, to show genome-wide significant (p < 5 x 10-8, beta = 2.81) association with cellular viability after treatment with IR. In the GWAS on MMC sensitivity the most interesting signal was elicited by SNP rs113978558 in an intron of the PLD5 gene on chromosome 1 (p = 9.232 x 10-8; beta = 1.44). Several other SNPs with statistically suggestive (i.e., p < 1 x 10-5) evidence of association with IR or MMC sensitivity were identified. PGSs calculations from GWAS of four cancer-related traits in UKB explained ~5% and ~3% of phenotypic variance in IR- and MMC-induced cell viability, respectively. Conclusion: The genome-wide significant association of rs74728080 with IR sensitivity and the location of this variant in CDH13 is interesting and functionally highly plausible given its known involvement in oxidative-stress response and function as tumor suppressor. Taken together, our novel data suggest that CDH13 may be genuinely involved in regulating cellular IR sensitivity.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

MIMFlow: Integrating Masked Image Modeling with Normalizing Flows for End-to-End Image Generation

Normalizing Flows (NFs) are powerful generative models capable of exact density estimation and sampling. However, their strict invertibility often forces the model to exhaust its capacity on low-level pixel details, hindering the capture of high-level semantic structures. While Masked Image Modeling (MIM) has excelled in representation learning, its integration into generative pipelines has remained largely modular and disjointed. In this paper, we propose MIMFlow, a unified end-to-end framework that jointly optimizes latent semantics, pixel reconstruction, and generative flow. By employing a VAE encoder to infer semantic latent from masked images, MIMFlow achieves a principled decoupling of the generative task: the Normalizing Flow focuses on modeling a simplified, low-frequency semantic manifold, while a specialized decoder handles high-frequency synthesis. This design effectively resolves the inherent capacity bottleneck of NFs, allowing the model to prioritize global structural coherence over redundant noise. Empirical results on ImageNet 256$\times$256 show that MIMFlow-L reaches 71.3\% linear probing accuracy and an FID of 2.50. Despite using only 128 tokens (50\% fewer than standard models), it yields a 32.8\% performance gain over similar-scale NF baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/MCG-NJU/MIMFlow.

08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22

Few-Shot Classification of C. elegans Developmental Stages via Explainable Hierarchical Hyperbolic Graph Embeddings

Automated, accurate, and fast developmental-stage classification of C. elegans from microscopy-based morphological images is essential for aging research, drug screening, and disease modeling. However, it remains challenging due to morphological similarities between stages and the limited annotated data. In this work, we propose HyperDev, a hyperbolic few-shot learning framework that addresses these limitations by directly encoding developmental hierarchies in the embedding space, unlike conventional Euclidean approaches that treat stages as independent classes. HyperDev uses Poincare ball geometry, combined with a biologically informed developmental prior, to naturally represent stage relationships. We introduce our selfcurated C. elegans dataset spanning seven developmental stages (Egg, L1-L4, Adult, Dauer) with extreme class imbalance (6-8 samples per minority class). HyperDev achieves competitive classification accuracy (76.9-88.3%) while providing intrinsic explainability across nine 7-way few-shot evaluation settings. The learned embeddings exhibited strong biological alignment (Pearson r = 0.669, p < 0.001), while significantly outperforming ProtoNet (r = 0.187), MatchingNet (r = 0.235), and RelationNet (r = 0.464). These results establish hyperbolic geometry as a principled approach to explainable few-shot learning in biological imaging, where understanding learned representations is as critical as predictive performance. Clinical Relevance–By enabling explainable, data-efficient developmental staging from scarce samples, HyperDev supports improved phenotype quantification for aging research, disease modeling, and drug screening. Index Terms–Hyperbolic learning, few-shot classification, developmental staging, Caenorhabditis elegans, interpretability, explainability.

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

GitOfThoughts: Version-Controlled Reasoning and Agent Memory You Can Replay, Diff, and Merge

Large language model (LLM) reasoning is ephemeral: chains of thought vanish with the context window, pruned search branches leave no record, and memory buffers cannot be diffed, merged, or audited. Every other complex software process (code, infrastructure, data, experiments) is version-controlled; reasoning is not. We introduce GitOfThoughts, which stores an agent's reasoning tree as a git repository: every scored thought is a commit, scores are notes, outcomes are tags, and retrieval is "git log" over the agent's own history. This makes reasoning replayable, auditable, and mergeable across agents at near-zero engineering cost. We then ask the harder question: does memory, in any substrate, actually improve accuracy? Across five substrates (none, markdown, vector, graph, git), two benchmarks, two model scales, and pre-registered replications, the answer for novel problems is no. No memory format reliably helps, and a promising early result collapsed under its own pre-registered replication. Memory pays only above what we call the copyability threshold: when the retrieved case is a near-duplicate of the current problem (similarity >~ 0.8), accuracy jumps sharply; below it, nothing. The gain is answer retrieval, not method transfer: a 4.5x larger model doubles the near-duplicate payoff yet still cannot extract a transferable method from a worked example. The only general lever we find is test-time sampling. The case for git-as-substrate is therefore auditability, provenance, and mergeability at accuracy parity. We document a retracted result and a refuted hypothesis to model the evaluation standard we hold ourselves to.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Tacit Coordination of Large Language Models

arXiv:2601.22184v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in multi-agent settings that require coordination without communication, from human-AI interaction to safety-critical scenarios. Humans often overcome the absence of communication through focal points: salient solutions that naturally stand out to all participants. We present the first large-scale evaluation of how, when, and why focal points emerge in LLMs, comparing their behaviour with humans across cooperative and competitive games, including realistic search and rescue scenarios, demonstrating when focal points enable effective coordination. Across more than 20 open- and closed-source models, we find that LLMs exhibit a remarkable ability to coordinate without communication, often matching or outperforming humans. However, the same models consistently fail in tasks requiring numerical common sense or culturally nuanced notions of salience. We additionally evaluate simple learning-free strategies that substantially improve coordination both among LLMs and between humans and LLMs. Our results reveal striking coordination capabilities, as well as social limitations in modern LLMs, and offer new insight into the latent notions of salience encoded within them. Our findings caution against assuming that LLMs share humans' cultural and perceptual substrate when deployed in coordination settings.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

MVTrack4Gen: Multi-View Point Tracking as Geometric Supervision for 4D Video Generation

Synthesizing a novel-view video from a monocular reference video along a target camera trajectory requires both geometric consistency and motion fidelity with respect to the reference video. Existing methods based on explicit 3D representations are limited by the accuracy of off-the-shelf reconstruction modules, which often produce inaccurate geometry for dynamic objects in monocular videos. In contrast, camera-conditioning-only methods can achieve high visual quality but often struggle to preserve geometric and motion consistency. In this work, we introduce MVTrack4Gen (Multi-View point Tracking for Novel-View Generation), a motion-aware training framework that leverages multi-view point tracking as an additional geometric and motion supervision signal for camera-conditioning-only novel-view video diffusion models. Our key finding is that specific attention layers encode strong correspondence cues, where query features attend to key features at geometrically corresponding locations across views and over time, and the misalignment of these correspondences causes motion inconsistency. Based on this observation, we route these features into an auxiliary multi-view tracking head and jointly train the diffusion model with a point-tracking objective. By explicitly strengthening these motion-aware correspondences, MVTrack4Gen improves existing models to better follow the motion in the reference view and maintain cross-view geometric consistency. Across diverse benchmarks, our method achieves state-of-the-art geometric consistency and competitive camera accuracy.

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

Morphology-resolved scrambling in a chaotic quantum billiard

arXiv:2606.16865v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chaotic quantum systems can retain spatial memory through scarred eigenstates, but whether these static structures control scrambling remains unclear. This work establishes a morphology-resolved connection between scarred eigenstates and eigenstate-resolved OTOCs in a peanut-shaped quantum billiard. Scalar localisation diagnostics, including differential entropy and continuum participation ratios, detect anomalous concentration but discard spatial architecture. A scale-normalised density overlap, in contrast, directly compares probability density profiles, revealing families of orthogonal eigenstates with nearly identical spatial morphology. Comparing the complete OTOC time traces of these orthogonal eigenstates reveals that morphological recurrence has dynamical content: moderate density overlap yields no universal prediction, whereas strongly recurring morphologies exhibit nearly identical OTOC growth and saturation. Thus, scarred structures act as spatial templates for operator growth, not merely static violations of ergodicity. This morphology-resolved framework turns eigenstate shape into a quantitative predictor of scrambling and provides a scale-controlled diagnostic of weak ergodicity breaking in quantum chaos.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Conformal Risk-Averse Decision Making with Action Conditional Guarantee

arXiv:2606.05551v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reliable decision making pipelines powered by machine learning models require uncertainty quantification (UQ) methods that come with explicit safety guarantees. Conformal prediction provides such UQ by wrapping ML predictions into prediction sets, and recent work by Kiyani et al. (2025b) established that these sets can be translated into optimal risk-averse decision policies – yet only inheriting marginal safety guarantees. We generalize and strengthen their results by (i) introducing action-conditional conformal prediction, which yields safety guarantees conditioned explicitly on each action taken by the decision maker, (ii) showing that action-conditional prediction sets serve as a proxy for the feasible decision space for risk-averse decision makers aiming to optimize action-conditional value-at-risk, and (iii) proposing a principled finite-sample algorithm based on pinball-loss minimization, connecting the framework of Gibbs et al. (2025) to action-conditional guarantees. Experiments on two real-world datasets confirm that our approach significantly improves action-conditional performance over conformal baselines.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Structured Spectral Graph Representation Learning for Multi-label Abnormality Analysis from 3D CT Scans

With the growing volume of CT examinations, there is an increasing demand for automated tools such as organ segmentation, abnormality detection, and report generation to support radiologists in managing their clinical workload. Multi-label classification of 3D Chest CT scans remains a critical yet challenging problem due to the complex spatial relationships inherent in volumetric data and the wide variability of abnormalities. Existing methods based on 3D convolutional neural networks struggle to capture long-range dependencies, while Vision Transformers often require extensive pre-training on large-scale, domain-specific datasets to perform competitively. In this work, we propose a 2.5D alternative by introducing a new graph-based framework that represents 3D CT volumes as structured graphs, where axial slice triplets serve as nodes processed through spectral graph convolution, enabling the model to reason over inter-slice dependencies while maintaining complexity compatible with clinical deployment. Our method, trained and evaluated on 3 datasets from independent institutions, achieves strong cross-dataset generalization, and shows competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art visual encoders. We further conduct comprehensive ablation studies to evaluate the impact of various aggregation strategies, edge-weighting schemes, and graph connectivity patterns. Additionally, we demonstrate the broader applicability of our approach through transfer experiments on automated radiology report generation and abdominal CT data.

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

SMEPilot: Characterizing and Optimizing LLM Inference with Scalable Matrix Extensions

arXiv:2606.16332v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern CPUs increasingly integrate matrix extensions, such as Arm Scalable Matrix Extension (SME), that provide high-throughput matrix execution within the CPU. For LLM inference, however, these units are not a universal replacement for conventional CPU cores: prefill, decode, attention, and KV-cache operations expose different arithmetic intensities, vector behavior, and layout requirements, while SME units and CPU cores still compete for shared memory bandwidth. This paper studies this mismatch through a roofline-based characterization of SME-enabled CPUs and uses the resulting model to guide operator-level execution choices. We present SMEPilot, an LLM inference engine that selects CPU-only, SME-only, or cooperative SME+CPU execution for each operator shape. SMEPilot partitions matrix work across SME and CPU cores at tile granularity, overlaps SME-suitable matrix stages with CPU-suitable vector stages in attention, and maintains layout state so packed tensor representations are reused rather than repeatedly rebuilt on critical paths. Across Llama-3.2-3B, Qwen3-4B, and Qwen3-30BA3B on phone, PC, and server platforms, SMEPilot improves end-to-end inference performance by up to 3.94$\times$.

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

Camera and LiDAR BEV Fusion for Cooperative 3D Object Detection on TUMTraf V2X

We describe a Camera and LiDAR fusion detector developed for the TUMTraf V2X cooperative 3D object detection track of the DriveX 2026 challenge. The detector fuses three roadside cameras with a fused infrastructure-plus-vehicle point cloud in a shared bird's-eye-view space and predicts boxes through a CenterPoint-style head with a generalized IoU regression loss and an IoU quality re-ranking head. Trained on the provided train and validation splits, the model reaches a 3D mAP of 0.85 on the public Codabench test split. While iterating on the system, we observed that 44 of the 50 test frames are also present in the released train (40) and validation (4) splits with their labels. We therefore conducted two additional studies to quantify how this overlap affects the final score: (1) a finetuning run that oversamples the 44 overlapping frames, reaching 0.89 mAP, and (2) a post-processing run that replaces predictions on those frames with the released ground truth, reaching 0.99 mAP (uploaded to our Codabench account for testing but not published on the leaderboard). All three configurations and their per-class results are reported.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Initiation of Superradiance from Different Collective Spin States

arXiv:2606.14949v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Superradiance is an extensive cooperative spontaneous emission phenomenon. Some atomic collective spin states exhibit it. However, distinct initial states differ in their decay dynamics. Dicke states with different numbers of excitations have their peak emission intensity shifted in time depending on the number of excitations. Emission intensity in atomic coherent states depends on their polarization. Some specific states undergo a squeezing controlled crossover, making the emission character dependent on the amount of squeezing in the state. We present detailed results on the superradiant dynamics of a representative selection of Dicke states. For large N, we are able to predict fairly accurately the pulse profile in each case using the mean field approximation, an approach based on the Fokker Planck Equation. We also present results on the intensity correlation function of the emission.

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

A Quantitative Experimental Repeated Measures Study of Training Dynamics in a Small Llama Style Language Model Under a Compute-Aware Token Budget

Authors:

arXiv:2606.13370v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This study examines training dynamics in a small Llama-style language model trained under a fixed, compute-constrained token budget. Rather than evaluating efficiency solely through endpoint performance, the study uses a quantitative experimental repeated measures design to analyze how validation loss, validation perplexity, rolling volatility, backslide behavior, spike behavior, and between-seed variability change across token-based training intervals. Six independent training runs were conducted on a 4.26-million-parameter model using the TinyStories corpus, CPU-based full-precision training, and a target budget of approximately 20 million cumulative training tokens. Metrics were collected across 21 intervals, producing 126 seed-by-interval observations. Repeated measures ANOVA showed statistically significant interval effects for validation loss, validation perplexity, and rolling volatility. Descriptive trajectories revealed rapid early improvement followed by non-monotonic degradation during later training intervals. Mean validation loss decreased from 8.3552 at initialization to 2.7996 near 4 million tokens, but increased to 3.9010 by the final checkpoint. Validation perplexity followed the same pattern, falling sharply early in training before rising later. Derived telemetry further showed recurrent validation-loss backslides and no interval-summary evidence of a stable phase under the predefined criteria. These findings suggest that compute-aware language model evaluation should examine training trajectories rather than endpoint metrics alone. In constrained compute settings, additional token exposure may increase computational cost without producing proportional generalization gains, and interval-level telemetry can reveal instability, regression, and diminishing returns that final metrics may obscure.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

LLM-Driven Extraction of NI-RADS and Imaging Tumor Characteristics to Enhance Oropharyngeal Cancer Survivorship Surveillance

Abstract Purpose Radiologic surveillance is essential for oropharyngeal cancer (OPC) survivors, guiding recurrence detection and follow-up strategies. The Neck Imaging Reporting and Data System provides a standardized framework for post-treatment risk reporting at both the primary tumor site (pNI-RADs) and cervical lymph nodes (nNI-RADS). Comprehensive surveillance additionally requires assessment of disease status, including the primary tumor, nodal involvement, and distant metastases. These clinical results are often embedded as unstructured data within free-text radiology reports. We hypothesized that a large language model (LLM) can reliably extract NI-RADS score criteria and summarize key imaging features from unstructured radiology text, achieving high concordance with expert review. Methods Previously untreated OPC patients who received definitive cancer therapy were identified. Eligible imaging reports included post-treatment head and neck CT, MRI, or FDG PET/CT scans containing narrative and impression text. Examinations lacking narrative or impression text, containing pre-existing NI-RADS annotations, or involving non-surveillance imaging modalities were excluded. A total of 200 reports were randomly selected from 7,076 eligible examinations for manual abstraction using a three-reviewer consensus framework to establish a reference dataset. Using the Palantir Foundry Pipeline Builder, a GPT-5-based LLM was deployed to extract pNI-RADS and nNI-RADS scores, and key imaging features of disease status from these reports. Performance was evaluated using exact agreement and F1-based metrics. Results Agreement for no evidence of disease (score of 1) was 93.3% (126/135; F1 = 0.94) and 90.3% (130/144; F1 = 0.93) for pNI-RADS and nNI-RADS, respectively. For NI-RADS [&ge;]2, exact category agreement was 73.1% (38/52; macro-F1 = 0.75) for pNI-RADS and 64.3% (27/42; macro-F1 = 0.56) for nNI-RADS. Quadratic weighted {kappa} was 0.81 and 0.59, respectively. For post-treatment disease surveillance variables, agreement was 94.9% (149/157; F1 = 0.87) for primary tumor presence, 89.1% (164/184; F1 = 0.87) for nodal disease presence, and 94.7% (126/133; F1 = 0.70) for distant metastasis detection. Specificity was high across disease-status variables (0.95-0.99), with negative predictive values of 0.95 for primary tumor, 0.87 for nodal disease, and 0.99 for distant metastasis. Conclusions Our LLM-based information retrieval and classification approach for radiographic treatment response from unstructured, multidimensional imaging reports achieved high performance for disease exclusion and moderate performance for detecting suspected residual and/or new disease. This pipeline supports scalable and standardized surveillance data capture for longitudinal monitoring, clinical analytics, and survivorship research in head and neck oncology.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Steering Vision-Language Models with Joint Sparse Autoencoders

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have shown promise for analyzing language models, but applying them to vision-language models (VLMs) often yields representations that are difficult to use as controllable cross-modal steering directions. We introduce the Joint Sparse Autoencoder (JSAE), which uses an explicit alignment constraint to jointly factorize sequence-pooled vision and language activations into shared, interpretable image/caption-level features. Applied to LLaVA, JSAE recovers cross-modal features for recognizable concepts (e.g., food and animals). Through bidirectional interventions (additive steering and suppression), we observe a layer-dependent asymmetry under our protocol: additive steering peaks at mid-to-late (pre-output) layers and weakens at both ends, whereas suppression scores remain within a comparable range across all probed layers within statistical noise. Experiments on three VLMs, namely LLaVA-v1.6-Mistral-7B, Llama3-LLaVA-8B, and the MoE-based Qwen3-VL-30B, show related layer-localized effects across architectures. Together, these results suggest that explicitly aligned sparse representations support more controllable intervention-based analysis of multimodal features, within an identifiable layer range, than the unconstrained alternatives tested here.

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

FOCUS: DLLMs Know How to Tame Their Compute Bound

Diffusion Large Language Models (DLLMs) offer a compelling alternative to Auto-Regressive models, but their deployment is constrained by high decoding cost. In this work, we identify a key inefficiency in DLLM decoding: while computation is parallelized over token blocks, only a small subset of tokens is decodable at each diffusion step, causing most compute to be wasted on non-decodable tokens. We further observe a strong correlation between attention-derived token importance and token-wise decoding probability. Based on this insight, we propose FOCUS, an inference system designed for DLLMs. By dynamically focusing computation on decodable tokens and evicting non-decodable ones on-the-fly, FOCUS increases the effective batch size, alleviating compute limitations and enabling scalable throughput. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that FOCUS achieves up to 3.52$\times$ throughput improvement over the production-grade engine LMDeploy in large-batch settings, while preserving or improving generation quality across multiple benchmarks.

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

Federated Causal Inference from Multi-Site Observational Data via Propensity Score Aggregation

arXiv:2505.17961v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Causal inference typically assumes centralized access to individual-level data. Yet, in practice, data are often decentralized across multiple sites, making centralization infeasible due to privacy, logistical, or legal constraints. We address this problem by estimating the Average Treatment Effect (ATE) from decentralized observational data via a Federated Learning (FL) approach, allowing inference through the exchange of aggregate statistics rather than individual-level data. We propose a novel method to estimate propensity scores via a federated weighted average of local scores using Membership Weights (MW), defined as probabilities of site membership conditional on covariates. MW can be flexibly estimated with parametric or non-parametric classification models using standard FL algorithms. The resulting propensity scores are used to construct Federated Inverse Propensity Weighting (Fed-IPW) and Augmented IPW (Fed-AIPW) estimators. In contrast to meta-analysis methods, which fail when any site violates positivity, our approach exploits heterogeneity in treatment assignment across sites to improve overlap. We show that Fed-IPW and Fed-AIPW perform well under site-level heterogeneity in sample sizes, treatment mechanisms, and covariate distributions. Theoretical analysis and experiments on simulated and real-world data demonstrate clear advantages over meta-analysis and related approaches.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

PU-UNet: Stable Multiplicative Interactions for Medical Image Segmentation

arXiv:2606.20035v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many dense prediction networks rely on additive feature transformations and model higher-order feature interactions only implicitly. Product units provide an explicit mechanism for multiplicative feature modeling, but their logarithmic–exponential formulation can cause numerical instability, which has limited their use in deep dense prediction networks. In this work, we propose Product-Unit U-Net (PU-UNet), a residual U-Net that integrates stable product-unit residual blocks into rich low-resolution stages for medical image segmentation. The proposed formulation combines smooth positivity mapping with log-domain clipping, enabling stable multiplicative feature learning with negligible computational overhead. On ISIC 2018, Kvasir-SEG, and BUSI, PU-UNet achieves Dice scores of 0.942, 0.959, and up to 0.925, respectively. Compared with a matched Residual U-Net baseline, PU-UNet consistently improves Dice and IoU while keeping parameters, FLOPs, and inference latency nearly unchanged, and reduces the image-level false-positive rate on normal BUSI cases from 0.077 to zero. Ablation studies suggest that the gains are associated with product-unit interactions, are strongest under low-resolution placement, and benefit from the proposed stabilization design. These results suggest that stable product-unit residual learning can be an effective way to enhance U-Net-style segmentation networks with explicit multiplicative interactions.

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

The Quality-Utility Paradox: Why High-Reward Data Impairs Small Model Mathematical Reasoning

arXiv:2606.16152v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge distillation from powerful reasoning models is widely used to improve Small Language Models (SLMs) on mathematical reasoning, often assuming that traces with higher reward model scores provide more useful supervision. We identify a counterintuitive Quality-Utility Paradox in mathematical reasoning distillation. Data refined or synthesized by a stronger Oracle obtains higher perceived quality according to reward models, yet consistently underperforms traces generated by the SLM itself and selected through rejection sampling across Qwen2.5, LLaMA-3, and DeepSeek families. Our analysis shows that Oracle refinement couples logical repair with distributional drift away from the SLM's native reasoning distribution. This drift increases the learner's adaptation cost and can outweigh the benefit of improved reasoning logic. To test this mechanism, we introduce Style-Aligned Refinement, which preserves the native trajectory of the SLM while retaining logical repair from the Oracle. This intervention lowers adaptation cost and restores downstream utility. These findings suggest that effective mathematical reasoning distillation should jointly optimize perceived solution quality and learner-data compatibility, rather than relying solely on reward-model scores. The datasets and code are available at https://github.com/Dracoqhl/Quality-Utility-Paradox.

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arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

MagPlus: Bridging Micro-to-Regular Facial Expressions through Learnable Magnification

Facial micro-expressions are subtle and short-lived facial movements that provide important cues about genuine human emotions. However, modeling and generating them remains difficult because annotated micro-expression data is limited and the underlying facial motions are extremely weak. Existing micro-expression generation methods therefore often suffer from limited quality, weak robustness, and poor generalization. We propose MagPlus, a transferable micro-expression processing pipeline that connects micro-expression analysis with standard facial animation models. Instead of training a dedicated generator from scratch, MagPlus learns to magnify subtle facial motions into the range of regular facial expressions, transforming micro-expressions into signals that are compatible with existing facial expression processing models. The magnified sequence is then used by a standard facial expression model for tasks such as transfer and synthesis. A complementary DeMagPlus module then restores the generated motion back to realistic micro-expression intensity levels while preserving the synthesized dynamics. We evaluate the framework using four facial animation models: FOMM, FSRT, MetaPortrait, and EmoPortraits. None of these models are trained on micro-expression data. Experiments show that MagPlus-DeMagPlus enables pretrained macro-expression models to generate more realistic micro-expression motion without retraining the backbones.