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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Substantia Nigra and Subthalamic Nucleus Deep Brain Stimulation Exert Opposing Effects on Novelty Recognition in Parkinson's Disease

Episodic memory plays a critical role in supporting adaptive behavior; however, whether it can be causally regulated in humans via deep subcortical stimulation remains unclear. In the present study, we investigated the differential effects of substantia nigra (SN) and subthalamic nucleus (STN) stimulation on episodic memory, as well as the underlying mechanisms of its associated brain networks, using a recognition memory task combined with concurrent functional magnetic resonance imaging in patients with Parkinson's disease. SN-DBS increased recognition sensitivity and reduced false alarms at both frequencies, whereas 10 Hz STN-DBS reduced sensitivity and increased false alarms. Functional connectivity analyses in the absence of DBS stimulation identified a false recognition-related network linking nigral, pallidal, subthalamic, medial temporal, frontal, and occipital regions. SN-DBS-related false alarm reduction tracked modulation of this circuit and was marked by its baseline vulnerability state. These behavioral effects mapped onto target-dependent parieto-occipital and SN-visual retrieval pathways, supporting a model in which DBS bidirectionally regulates recognition memory through target- and frequency-dependent subcortical-cortical circuits.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Performance of family history-based colorectal cancer screening criteria by race and age at diagnosis in the Disparities and Cancer Epidemiology (DANCE) study

Importance: Family history (FH) and age are the primary criteria employed for early colorectal cancer (CRC) risk stratification. We evaluated how well these criteria identify individuals diagnosed with CRC across age and racial groups. Objective: To evaluate the performance of FH and age based screening criteria for identifying individuals with CRC, with attention to differences by race and age at diagnosis. Design, Setting, and Participants: This case control and case only analysis used data from the Disparities and Cancer Epidemiology (DANCE) cohort, a population based study of invasive CRC cases diagnosed from 2013 to 2022, recruited through the Metropolitan Detroit Cancer Surveillance System and the Louisiana Tumor Registry. Analyses included 1,158 non-Hispanic Black (NHB) and non-Hispanic White (NHW) CRC cases and 1,434 cancer-free controls from the Inflammation Health and Lung Epidemiology (INHALE) study, enrolled from the same Detroit catchment area. Data were analyzed in 2025. Exposures: Self reported cancer FH among first-degree (FD) relatives and grandparents, summarized into three FH-based screening criteria: at least one FD relative with CRC (colon early-screening criterion), any FH of Lynch syndrome related cancers, and meeting NCCN criteria for Lynch syndrome genetic testing. Main Outcomes and Measures: Proportion of cases meeting each FH based screening criterion stratified by race and age at diagnosis (

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Steady-state entanglement of spin qubits mediated by nonreciprocal and chiral magnons

arXiv:2509.13094v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose a hybrid quantum system in which a magnet supporting non-reciprocal magnons, chiral magnons, or both mediates the dissipative and unidirectional coupling of spin qubits. By driving the qubits, the steady state of this qubit-qubit coupling scheme becomes the maximally entangled Bell state. We devise a protocol where the system converges to this entangled state and benchmark it including qubit decay and dephasing. The protocol is numerically tested on a hybrid system consisting of nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers coupled to magnon surface modes of an yttrium iron garnet (YIG) film. We show that the dephasing time of the NV centers forms the bottleneck for achieving the entanglement of NV centers separated by a distance within the magnon coherence length. Our findings identify the key technological requirements and demonstrate a viable route toward steady-state entanglement of solid-state spins over distances of several microns using magnonic quantum networks, expanding the toolbox of magnonics for quantum information purposes.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Universal Crossovers of Stabilizer Entropy Beyond Criticality

arXiv:2606.13810v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Stabilizer Rényi entropy has emerged as a probe of nonstabilizerness in quantum many-body systems, but its scaling structure beyond critical points remains poorly understood compared with entanglement entropy. Recent field-theory approaches indicate that stabilizer entropy contains universal critical data and boundary-sensitive terms, raising the question of how these structures extend into massive and crossover regimes. We address this problem for a broad class of finite-range spin chains at Rényi index one-half. We derive exact finite-size formulas for both full periodic chains and finite intervals of the infinite chain, making the universal crossover from critical to noncritical behavior analytically accessible. In periodic geometry, the entropy obeys a volume law away from criticality and exhibits a universal finite-size crossover controlled by the competition between system size and correlation length. We also show that the large-scale SRE density develops a cusp across the field-tuned critical line, while the XX endpoint is governed by a distinct scaling regime associated with the saturation point. In the subsystem geometry, the interval entropy separates bulk critical behavior from boundary contributions generated by the way the finite region cuts the infinite chain. The crossover from critical to massive behavior is then encoded in boundary constants and universal functions controlled by the correlation length. Through exact stabilizer-entropy correspondences, the scaling theory extends to internal XY reductions, Finite-range spin chains, and Cluster–Ising representatives. Our results provide an exact lattice benchmark for the emerging QFT description of stabilizer entropy beyond isolated conformal points.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

''Circumstantial Determinants'': An Efficient Approach to Reaching People in Need of HIV Prevention?

HIV prevention and testing programmes primarily reach people who self-refer or attend routine health services. Higher-risk individuals are missed if they are healthy, under-estimate their risk of infection or under-report sexual risk-behaviours. We assess a new approach to address limitations in existing programmes by targeting HIV services on ''Circumstantial Determinants'' (CDs) of HIV risk - the social circumstances, settings, and norms associated with behaviours that increase risk of HIV acquisition. Data on potential CDs and sexual behaviour were collected in a population survey in Zimbabwe in 2018/19 (N=9141). HIV-negative individuals reporting [≥] 1 sexual risk-behaviours were defined as the 'priority population' for HIV prevention. For each sex, six circumstantial determinants were associated with being in the priority population (aOR [≥] 1.30; p [≤] 0.01). Reach and efficiency of CDs (and combinations) were calculated; ROC curve algorithms evaluated their ability to identify priority population membership; and HIV prevention condom cascades were compared between CD-defined priority population subgroups. Example findings include that targeting men at bars and beerhalls could reach 48.5% of the priority population and 25.1% of lower-risk men. These percentages increase to 77.1% and 53.7% if men with poor mental health, no religious affiliation, negative social capital, or living on agricultural estates are also targeted. Targeting women with poor mental health could reach 32.0% of the priority population and 21.3% of lower-risk women. Targeting additional circumstantial determinants increases these percentages to 54.1% and 37.5%, respectively. Cascade barriers to condom use differed between CD-defined subgroups. The Circumstantial Determinants approach demonstrates proof-of-concept potential to strengthen HIV prevention services.

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

Evaluating Factual Density in Multi-Source RAG: A Study in Medical AI Accuracy

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is the current industry standard for grounding AI in real-world facts. Traditional retrieval methods rely on keyword matching and topic proximity, ranking content based on how closely it sounds like the user's query. What they do not measure is how many verified facts the content actually contains. This structural gap, termed the Expert Blindness Effect, causes standard RAG pipelines to consistently bury high-density factual evidence in favor of lexically dominant text on the same topic. To address this gap, this paper introduces Factual Density (FD*), a novel retrieval optimization signal that measures the proportion of verified atomic claims relative to total token count. Using the NexusAgentics Ghost Audit preprocessing pipeline, raw text is scored for factual specificity using probabilistic factuality analysis to filter content before corpus ingestion. An initial formulation introduced a severe document-length confound (Pearson R = -0.8636, p = 2.27e-07). Implementing Z-score normalization within length bins resolved this bias, validating FD* as a length-independent density signal (p = 0.0749). Evaluated against the HealthFC benchmark (750 health claims labeled Supported, Refuted, or No Evidence by medical experts), FD*-optimized retrieval was the only condition to achieve 100% systematic review saturation in top-5 results, surfacing Cochrane evidence that standard cosine similarity ranked outside the top ten. Ground truth verification confirmed 25 mappings across seven HealthFC-supported claims. While full statistical validation across n=50 queries remains future work due to constraints on corpus-benchmark alignment, these findings establish factual density reranking as a low-cost, high-impact intervention for improving factual precision in health RAG architectures.

07.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Optimal Sparsification of Gaussian Processes

arXiv:2606.19763v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove an optimal dimension-free sparsification theorem for suprema of centered Gaussian processes. Given a bounded set $T\subseteq\mathbb{R}^n$, we show that the supremum of the canonical Gaussian process on $T$ can be $L^2$-approximated by the supremum of a shifted subprocess indexed by only $\exp(O(1/\varepsilon^2))$ points, with error at most $\varepsilon$ times the Gaussian width of $T$. In particular, the size of the approximating process is independent of both the ambient dimension and the cardinality of the original index set. This improves a recent sparsification theorem of De, Nadimpalli, O'Donnell, and Servedio (2026) by an exponential factor, and we show that the dependence on $\varepsilon$ is tight up to constants in the exponent. As consequences, we obtain an exponentially improved junta theorem for norms over Gaussian space and sharpen results on learning, property testing, and polyhedral approximation of convex sets under the Gaussian measure. The proof is based on an interpolation argument that combines Sudakov's minoration with the Brascamp–Lieb inequality.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

TabKD: Tabular Knowledge Distillation through Interaction Diversity of Learned Feature Bins

arXiv:2603.15481v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Data-free knowledge distillation enables model compression without original training data, critical for privacy-sensitive tabular domains. However, existing methods does not perform well on tabular data because they do not explicitly address feature interactions, the fundamental way tabular models encode predictive knowledge. We identify interaction diversity, systematic coverage of feature combinations, as an essential requirement for effective tabular distillation. To operationalize this insight, we propose TabKD, which learns adaptive feature bins aligned with teacher decision boundaries, then generates synthetic queries that maximize pairwise interaction coverage. Across 4 benchmark datasets and 4 teacher architectures, TabKD achieves highest student-teacher agreement in 14 out of 16 configurations, outperforming 5 state-of-the-art baselines. We further show that interaction coverage strongly correlates with distillation quality, validating our core hypothesis. Our work establishes interaction-focused exploration as a principled framework for tabular model extraction.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Leadership as Coordination Control: Behavioral Signatures and the Recovery-Advantage Boundary in Multi-Agent LLM Teams

Authors:

Team science holds that leadership is contingent: it helps only under specific conditions, and capable, autonomous teams may need none at all. We ask the analogous question for multi-agent LLM teams: under what measurable conditions does process-level coordination control add value, and do those conditions match what team science predicts? We use behavioral signatures (majority lock-in, exploration, recovery from an incorrect round-0 consensus) and per-action ablations, clean because each controller is an explicit action set, not a monolithic prompt. We operationalize three classical leadership styles (transactional, transformational, situational) as controllers over a shared action vocabulary (explore, revise, accept, synthesize). A matched controller with the same actions but an arbitrary rule recovers no better than majority voting, so the theory-derived rule, not the vocabulary, does the work. Across four task regimes and three open-weight model families, no controller dominates by accuracy, as the contingency view predicts: transactional control matches a shared round-0 vote on all 12 (model, regime) combinations to within 1.3pp, and gains appear only on the one combination where the round-0 majority is unreliable (llama-4-scout social; situational +8pp over flat). A recovery-advantage account, tested with four boundary probes, says a controller beats plain interaction only where the round-0 majority is unreliable, the task is recoverable, and undirected interaction does not already repair it. These regions map onto contingency theory (leadership substitutes, path-goal redundancy, the situational readiness gap), so a largely null accuracy result is what the theory predicts, not a failure of the controllers. We read process-level coordination control as a contingency to be measured and theory-mapped, not a leaderboard to be topped.

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

From Architecture to Output: Structural Origins of Hallucination in Large Language Models and the Amplifying Role of Data

arXiv:2606.07537v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models hallucinate–producing fluent, confident, factually wrong outputs–with a consistency that persists across generations and scales. Existing taxonomies classify hallucination by output type, distinguishing intrinsic from extrinsic failures and faithfulness from factuality divergence. These frameworks are descriptively rigorous but do not identify which internal mechanism produced a given instance. This paper analyses hallucination as a structural consequence of three architectural decisions that together form a compound failure system. Self-attention's co-occurrence learning substitutes statistical proximity for semantic meaning and produces entity confusion, fact misattribution, and semantic drift. The maximum likelihood estimation training objective optimises next-token probability without factual constraint, rewarding statistically plausible outputs regardless of their truth value. Autoregressive decoding's permanent left-to-right commitment under exposure bias ensures that a single wrong token cascades forward through the entire output sequence without revision. Dataset pathologies–long-tail deficiencies, training bias, and synthetic pollution–amplify these vulnerabilities but do not independently cause them. We make three contributions. First, we map each mechanism to a specific output category in the Alansari and Luqman taxonomy, locating intrinsic hallucination in self-attention, extrinsic hallucination in MLE, and logical inconsistency in autoregressive decoding. Second, we show that each commonly cited dataset pathology exploits one of these mechanisms rather than originating hallucination independently. Third, we identify the diagnostic limitation of output-type-only classification and contrast it with inference-layer mitigation approaches.

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

Unintended Effects of Geographic Conditioning in Large Language Models

Modern conversational AI systems frequently rely on user metadata to localize responses, yet the unintended regional biases introduced by this hidden context remain poorly understood. In this work, we evaluate location leakage: the phenomenon where a model generates geographic references despite receiving a geographically neutral user prompt. Across both creative writing and open-ended Q&A prompts, even state-of-the-art LLMs systematically favor region-specific outputs when exposed to location metadata, with leakage spiking by up to 793 times above baseline (e.g., from 0.04% to 31.7% for Llama 3.1-8B, and 21.3% and 8.8% for Qwen3-8B and Claude Sonnet 4.6, respectively). Our analysis further shows a novel structural conditioning effect: replacing the injected location with the placeholder "Unknown" still elevates leakage by up to 72 times above baseline, demonstrating that the user profile frame itself, independent of any geographic content, acts as a generative conditioning signal.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Multi-Granular Attention-Driven Reinforcement Learning Framework for Web Intelligent Enhancement Systems

arXiv:2606.19690v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: From the past few years, web intelligent enhancement systems increasingly rely on heterogeneous and dynamic web data to deliver personalized, context-aware services. However, traditional machine learning, deep learning, and reinforcement learning models often struggle with semantic understanding, adaptability, and scalability in continuously evolving web environments. In this research, a Multi-Granular Attention-based Reinforcement Web Intelligent Enhancement System (MGAR-WIES) is proposed to address the challenges by integrating semantic graph modeling, attention mechanisms, and adaptive reinforcement learning. Initially, heterogeneous web data comprising structured, semi-structured and unstructured sources are collected and preprocessed for generating unified feature representations. These representations are transformed into a dynamic semantic graph, where entities and their relationships are modeled by using graph embeddings enhanced by attention mechanisms for capturing both local relevance and global contextual dependencies. Subsequently, an adaptive multi-agent reinforcement learning strategy leverages the attention-aware semantic states to optimize personalized web actions like content recommendation, navigation optimization, and service adaptation. Finally, the continuous online feedback is further integrated to update graph representations and learning policies in real time by ensuring sustained adaptability and performance. The proposed MGAR-WIES acheived better results in terms of accuracy (80%) when compared with existing approaches.

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

Reason, Then Re-reason: Cross-view Revisiting Improves Spatial Reasoning

Spatial reasoning from egocentric videos is inherently challenging because the observable evidence is constrained by the camera trajectory. Existing methods rely on single-turn inference, forcing models to resolve geometric ambiguity through semantic priors rather than verifiable evidence. We argue that spatial reasoning should be revisitable: conclusions formed under limited evidence should remain open to revision when complementary viewpoints become available. Building on this insight, we propose Reason, then Re-reason (ReRe), a training-free, inference-time framework with two phases: in the Reason Phase, an MLLM forms a spatial hypothesis from the original video; in the Re-reason Phase, it verifies or revises the hypothesis by observing a synthesized novel-view video. To enable effective cross-view revisiting, we design a Geometry-to-Video pipeline that renders strategically complementary novel views from predicted 3D geometry. These views feature an elevated, oblique perspective with scene-spanning coverage, while preserving the MLLM's native video interface without architectural modifications. Extensive evaluations on VSI-Bench and STI-Bench demonstrate that ReRe substantially boosts open-source MLLMs to rival proprietary state-of-the-art performance. Project page: https://zhenjiemao.github.io/ReRe/

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Adv-TGD: Adversarial Text-Guided Diffusion for Face Recognition Impersonation Attacks

The widespread adoption of face recognition (FR) technologies raises serious privacy concerns, as facial data can be exploited without consent. To address this challenge, we propose Adv-TGD, a generative adversarial attack framework that synthesizes photorealistic faces capable of impersonating target identities and deceiving face recognition systems. Built upon Stable Diffusion, Adv-TGD performs per-sample LoRA fine-tuning conditioned on concise textual prompts to generate natural yet adversarially manipulated identities. Unlike conventional identity-attack approaches, our method optimizes lightweight cross-attention adapters for each source-target pair within a single-step denoising process. Latent blending is constrained by a face-local heatmap mask to ensure spatially precise identity manipulation while preserving non-sensitive regions. We introduce a composite objective that integrates masked epsilon-MSE reconstruction, thresholded identity divergence in FR embedding space, directional feature alignment, and source-similarity suppression to balance adversarial attack and visual realism. Optionally, LLaVA-generated attribute prompts enhance fine-grained semantic details without reintroducing identity cues. Under the black-box evaluation protocol, Adv-TGD attains an average attack success rate (ASR) of 85.90% across IR152, IRSE50, MobileFace, and FaceNet, surpassing the semantic SOTA baseline Adv-CPG by +6.25 points, diffusion-based makeup method DiffAIM by +3 points, and noise-based P3-Mask by +16 points. Despite its strong attack efficacy, Adv-TGD preserves high visual fidelity (PSNR = 27.15 dB, SSIM = 0.981). Furthermore, we demonstrate the flexibility of our framework by successfully extending it to in-the-wild datasets (LADN), general object classification (ImageNet), and transformer-based diffusion models (FLUX.1).

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

The Journal of Prompt-Engineered (Moral) Philosophy Or: Why AI-Assisted Ethics Research Requires Process Transparency

Authors:

arXiv:2511.08639v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Existing AI disclosure mandates in scholarship require that AI assistance be reported but leave transparency philosophically unspecified: they fix the duty without explaining what the duty serves. We argue that ethical inquiry is essentially contested at two independent levels – about what it is, and about what it demands of the inquirer – defeating output-only evaluation and welfare-economic dismissal of the transparency question, and, by extension, reproducibility framings imported from the empirical sciences. The transparency duty is grounded instead in agent-integrity: the legibility, before a community of inquiry, of the identity-constituting commitments that the author's mode of philosophising expresses. Because the standards for evaluating such work are not communally settled, the achievable goal for transparency is not evaluation against agreed criteria but tracking – accumulating the evidentiary record that lets each tradition assess the work on its own terms and makes future normative judgments possible. We develop a documentation-adequacy framework that operationalises Meaningful Human Control through five transparency elements – declaration, navigation, documentation account, process documentation, and development records – demonstrated by the paper itself, whose full documentation record is archived at a persistent identifier. The framework is a first iteration subject to revision, not a settled standard.

16.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-14

TopoMIL: Topology Improves Multiple Instance Learning in Diagnostic Microscopic Images

Microscopic images of cells and tissues are central to disease diagnosis. In computational pathology, multiple instance learning (MIL) has emerged as a key paradigm for analyzing numerous images within a single patient sample. While the representative distribution of cells in a sample is important for diagnosis, existing MIL frameworks largely overlook it. We introduce TopoMIL, a framework that extracts the representative topological structure of the sample and integrates it into the MIL classifier. Three topological representations are assessed, each with distinct advantages and computational costs. We evaluate TopoMIL on four histopathology and cytomorphology datasets, each presenting unique challenges. Integrating the sample's topological information into MIL enhances classification across average, max, attention-based, and transformer pooling, yielding AUCROC gains of 3.3%, 4.2%, 5.9%, and 0.5%, respectively, with moderate computational cost. Our work underscores the potential of TopoMIL as a scalable extension to existing morphology-based models in computational pathology.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Quantizing Time-Series Models As Dynamical Systems: Trajectory-Based Quantization Sensitivity Score

arXiv:2606.13300v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce the Trajectory-based Quantization Sensitivity Score (TQS), a metric that reframes post-training quantization (PTQ) through the lens of dynamical-systems stability. By modeling the network's rollout as a discrete-time dynamical system, TQS characterizes how quantization-induced errors propagate and amplify over the rollout horizon. Unlike conventional PTQ methods, where sensitivity analysis is often coupled to the quantization procedure, TQS enables a priori sensitivity estimation decoupled from quantizer selection and bit-width assignment. This separation allows for quantization budget planning even for black-box or compiled networks with fused operators. Building on this, we present TQS-PTQ, a flexible mixed-precision framework that requires no calibration data or costly second-order approximations. Our experiments show that a dynamical-systems perspective provides a robust, high-performing pathway for low-precision deployment in resource-constrained settings.

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

How Post-Training Shapes Biological Reasoning Models

arXiv:2606.16517v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scientific reasoning models for biology combine language models with foundation models trained on multimodal biological data, including DNA, RNA, and proteins. These models are built through post-training, yet how each stage shapes reasoning and generalization remains poorly understood. We study when post-training improves performance and when it induces over-specialization. Across genomics, transcriptomics, and proteins, we train and evaluate more than 100 biological reasoning models under controlled variation in backbone, continued pre-training (CPT), supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and reinforcement learning (RL), measuring both in-domain (ID) and out-of-domain (OOD) performance. We find that each post-training stage reshapes generalization in a distinct way rather than contributing uniform gains. CPT improves downstream performance by aligning models with biological language. SFT consistently increases ID performance but causes OOD performance to peak early and decline as models fit the training distribution. RL, when applied to strong SFT checkpoints with aligned rewards, improves OOD performance and partially recovers generalization. These results show that biological reasoning does not improve monotonically with additional supervision or compute. Instead, performance depends on how training stages are composed. Under fixed post-training budgets, the strongest ID-OOD trade-off comes from brief SFT, larger RL allocations, and asymmetric adaptation capacity across stages.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Exploring Exotic Spin-Dependent Interactions Beyond the Standard Model: Theoretical Foundations and Experimental Investigations

arXiv:2606.13318v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: New interactions mediated by novel particles propose solutions to several important questions in modern physics. Axions serve as examples of such particles; they are lightweight and interact weakly with ordinary matter. This category of particles, including those similar to axions-termed Axion-Like Particles (ALPs)-arises from diverse theoretical frameworks, such as the Peccei-Quinn mechanism addressing the strong CP problem, string theory, and spontaneous supersymmetry breaking. Given their light mass and weak coupling, ALPs are also possible candidates for cold dark matter. Introducing these new interactions mediated by novel particles not only tackles several challenges in modern physics but also raises a crucial question: Are there undiscovered interactions beyond the Standard Model? Many of the interactions predicted by these theories are spin-dependent, which is the primary focus of this review. In this review, we first outline the theoretical foundations for investigating exotic spin-dependent interactions, highlighting their importance in various models beyond the Standard Model. We examine the potential roles of new lightweight particles in mediating these interactions, which may enhance our understanding of dark matter. Relevant formulas derived from theoretical models are included to support experimental investigations. Following this theoretical framework, we conduct a detailed review of recent experimental efforts to detect these exotic interactions. A systematic review of current constraints on these interactions is presented, along with an assessment of various detection approaches.

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

Assessing Reliability of Symbol Detection in Concept Bottleneck Models

Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) are a relevant tool for explainable Artificial Intelligence because they make their predictions through human-interpretable symbols. However, high task accuracy does not guarantee that these symbols are detected faithfully: jointly trained CBMs may encode task-specific shortcuts in the bottleneck, making their explanations unreliable. In this paper, we study concept-detection reliability by swapping independently trained concept detectors and classification heads that share the same symbolic vocabulary. We use the resulting performance degradation, concept-level metrics, and symbol-wise uncertainty estimates to identify concepts that are especially prone to spurious firing. Finally, we propose a reliability-aware training strategy in which a shared concept detector is optimized with multiple classification heads and penalized for relying on globally or instance-wise unreliable symbols. On CUB-200-2011 with full concept supervision, detectors and heads are almost freely interchangeable (swap drop below one accuracy point, relative retention above $99\%$, and no concept detected below chance), whereas on a controlled synthetic task we show that, as the concept-supervision weight is reduced, models keep near-perfect task accuracy while swapped accuracy and agreement with the ground-truth concepts collapse to chance. Our reliability-aware training substantially mitigates this leakage, roughly doubling swap accuracy in the leaky regime.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Tangram: Unlocking Non-Uniform KV Cache Compression for Efficient Multi-turn LLM Serving

arXiv:2606.06302v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-turn LLM serving accumulates dialogue history whose Key-Value (KV) cache grows with every turn and every user, quickly exceeding the model weights themselves and making memory – not compute – the binding constraint on throughput. Non-uniform KV compression, which allocates heterogeneous budgets across attention heads, preserves accuracy far better than uniform schemes, yet remains impractical: modern serving stacks assume identical KV lengths across heads, so heterogeneity traps freed memory as page fragmentation, spends up to 25% of prefill time reclaiming scattered pages, and skews GPU workloads that inflate decode latency by up to $1.7\times$ or burn 15–20% of each decode step on re-planning. We observe that this heterogeneity need not be discovered at runtime: head-wise retention follows a two-level structural regularity – an input-invariant head ranking with narrowly bounded per-head ratios – that can be calibrated offline from as few as 50 samples. Building on this insight, we present Tangram, a serving framework that statically resolves what prior systems handle dynamically: Budget Reservation fixes each head's post-compression footprint at scheduling time, eliminating page reclamation; Ragged Paging clusters similar-budget heads into independent page tables, turning fragmentation into reclaimable memory; and Ahead-of-Time Load Balancing precomputes balanced GPU partitions with zero runtime planning. Implemented on vLLM, Tangram serves as a drop-in substrate for existing non-uniform compression methods, matching their accuracy while improving end-to-end throughput by up to $2.6\times$ over the full-KV baseline. Our implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/aiha-lab/TANGRAM.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Enhanced Low-Density Region Exploration in Classifier-Guided Diffusion Models Through Modified Reverse Diffusion Sampling

arXiv:2606.13347v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion models have emerged as state-of-the-art generative models for high-fidelity image synthesis, particularly in their classifier-free guided and classifier-guided forms. However, standard classifier guidance concentrates probability mass around high-density class mean, leading to poor coverage of rare samples in the tails of the class-conditional distributions. Recent work on diffusion-based tail sampling mitigates this by training an additional low-density-seeking classifier with a synthetic-vs-real discriminator, at the cost of additional networks and training. In parallel, a number of samplers and distillation techniques accelerate or refine diffusion sampling, but do not explicitly address long-tail coverage. We propose a purely sampling-time, density-aware extension of classifier-guided conditional diffusion model that targets low-density regions without any additional training. We have applied guidance at noisy images not on predicted noise like most diffusion models. Starting from a pretrained conditional diffusion model and classifier on ImageNet, we modify the guided reverse dynamics by steering trajectories toward low-confidence regions via the modified classifier gradient, and at each time step, we also guide the sampling process toward the predicted real image. 1st guidance helps explore low-probability samples, and 2nd guidance helps to generate samples to be close to the real data manifold. The proposed sampler consistently improves ADM model recall at 64x64 resolution while maintaining a comparable FID, and with a 256x256 ADM model, we showed the results visually with different combinations of both guidance. We also showed that standard ADM classifier guidance, combined with predicted real image guidance, helps generate high perceptual quality samples with a 256x256 ADM model on ImageNet.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Gaussian Mixture Attention: Linear-Time Sequence Mixing via Probabilistic Latent Routing

arXiv:2606.18283v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The dense token-to-token interaction pattern of standard dot-product attention remains a central bottleneck in scaling Transformer architectures to long contexts. We introduce Gaussian Mixture Attention (GMA), a probabilistic attention-style sequence mixer that replaces explicit pairwise query–key comparison with routing through $K$ learned Gaussian mixture components. Queries and keys are mapped to posterior responsibility vectors over a shared latent routing space; their overlap defines an implicit responsibility-space affinity, while values are written into and read from a $K$-slot latent memory. By exploiting the associativity of matrix multiplication, GMA avoids materializing the induced $N\times N$ affinity matrix and instead uses two responsibility matrices whose dominant activation storage scales as $\mathcal{O}(NK)$ rather than $\mathcal{O}(N^2)$ for fixed $K$. We formulate bidirectional and causal variants of GMA, provide an end-to-end differentiable parameterization of the Gaussian mixture components, and analyze its responsibility-modulated gradient structure, constrained non-negative low-rank affinity interpretation, and local routing stability. Empirically, GMA exhibits the intended fixed-$K$ linear memory scaling and is competitive with attention-style baselines on long-context classification, while causal GMA improves over tested linear/random-feature attention variants on WikiText-103 but remains behind optimized causal SDPA and Mamba in the current implementation. Analysis of learned responsibilities further shows broad component usage and moderate alignment with surface-form token categories, supporting GMA as a probabilistic, interpretable, fixed-$K$ linear-time attention-style alternative rather than a universal replacement for optimized softmax attention or state-space models.

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

Learning Permutation Distributions via Reflected Diffusion on Ranks

arXiv:2603.17353v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The finite symmetric group S_n provides a natural domain for permutations, yet learning probability distributions on S_n is challenging due to its factorially growing size and discrete, non-Euclidean structure. Recent permutation diffusion methods define forward noising via shuffle-based random walks (e.g., riffle shuffles) and learn reverse transitions with Plackett-Luce (PL) variants, but the resulting trajectories can be abrupt and increasingly hard to denoise as n grows. We propose Soft-Rank Diffusion, a discrete diffusion framework that replaces shuffle-based corruption with a structured soft-rank forward process: we lift permutations to a continuous latent representation of order by relaxing discrete ranks into soft ranks, yielding smoother and more tractable trajectories. For the reverse process, we introduce contextualized generalized Plackett-Luce (cGPL) denoisers that generalize prior PL-style parameterizations and improve expressivity for sequential decision structures. Experiments on sorting and combinatorial optimization benchmarks show that Soft-Rank Diffusion consistently outperforms prior diffusion baselines, with particularly strong gains in long-sequence and intrinsically sequential settings.