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

Risk Stratification for ICU Delirium using Pervasive Ambient Sensing Information

arXiv:2606.19292v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Delirium is a common and serious complication in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), associated with increased morbidity, prolonged hospital stays, and higher healthcare costs. Despite its prevalence, early prediction and prevention remain challenging. Environmental factors such as ambient sound and light may influence the onset of delirium, yet they are often overlooked in risk assessments. In this study, we examined whether light intensity and sound pressure levels can independently predict delirium across multiple prediction horizons. We evaluated four efficient sequential neural network models on data collected from 9 ICUs across 309 patients to predict delirium for 10 prediction-window sizes. We reported feature importance and direction of influence using Shapley Additive Explanations analysis. The convolutional model achieved the strongest discrimination, with AUC = 0.80 on sound data and on combined data. Sound features were the dominant predictors overall. Integrating sound with light improved short-term ($

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Distributionally Robust Set Representation Learning Under Inference-Time Element Corruption

arXiv:2605.30089v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Standard Set Representation Learning methods typically excel on curated data but often overlook the challenge of inference-time element corruption. This refers to scenarios where deployed models encounter element-level degradations, such as outliers or missing components, that may distort set representation and degrade performance. We propose SW-DRSO, a distributionally robust optimization framework tailored for sets. Rather than minimizing loss solely on observed training data, SW-DRSO optimizes a tractable surrogate of the worst-case expected loss over a family of plausible inference-time variations. We introduce a barycentric adversary that approximates the intractable search over corrupted sets by a differentiable training-time optimization over simplex weights. Extensive experiments across four tasks demonstrate that SW-DRSO effectively enhances robustness against corruption while maintaining high overall performance.

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

Generative models for decision-making under distributional shift

arXiv:2604.04342v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many data-driven decision problems are formulated using a nominal distribution estimated from historical data, while performance is ultimately determined by a deployment distribution that may be shifted, context-dependent, partially observed, or stress-induced. This tutorial presents modern generative models, particularly flow- and score-based methods, as mathematical tools for constructing decision-relevant distributions. From an operations research perspective, their primary value lies not in unconstrained sample synthesis but in representing and transforming distributions through transport maps, velocity fields, score fields, and guided stochastic dynamics. We present a unified framework based on pushforward maps, continuity, Fokker-Planck equations, Wasserstein geometry, and optimization in probability space. Within this framework, generative models can be used to learn nominal uncertainty, construct stressed or least-favorable distributions for robustness, and produce conditional or posterior distributions under side information and partial observation. We also highlight representative theoretical guarantees, including forward-reverse convergence for iterative flow models, first-order minimax analysis in transport-map space, and error-transfer bounds for posterior sampling with generative priors. The tutorial provides a principled introduction to using generative models for scenario generation, robust decision-making, uncertainty quantification, and related problems under distributional shift.

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

Fusing Transferred Priors and Physics-based Decomposition for Underwater Image Enhancement

The underwater images are captured within diverse water-medium conditions, leading to complex degradation, including color bias, low contrast, and blur effect. Recently, learning-based methods have demonstrated their potential for underwater image enhancement (UIE). However, most of the previous work focus on the training strategy or network design to make the enhanced result aligned well with the labels in datasets, ignoring that the labels are selected from the enhanced results of previous UIE methods and these pseudo-labels are noisy. Consequently, the performance of their models is not satisfactory to a certain extent. However, collecting the true labels of the underwater images is challenging. In this work, we propose a transfer learning-based UIE that does not require underwater images to have paired noisy or true labels for learning. Instead, the UIE task is first divided into global color correction, haze removal, and background noise suppression following the underwater physics. Then multiple types of prior from other vision tasks are leveraged as cross-domain supervision in each step. In this way, a novel UIE is available via transfer learning, and the physics-aligned UIE decomposition provides theoretical soundness. Qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our proposal based on physics and priors fusion achieves SOTA performance in the UIE task and effectively boosts downstream vision tasks, significantly outperforming benchmark methods. Project repo: https://github.com/Haru2022/P2-UIE.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

InfoPO: Information-Driven Policy Optimization for User-Centric Agents

arXiv:2603.00656v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Real-world user requests to LLM agents are often underspecified. Agents must interact to acquire missing information and make correct downstream decisions. However, current multi-turn GRPO-based methods often rely on trajectory-level reward computation, which leads to credit assignment problems and insufficient advantage signals within rollout groups. A feasible approach is to identify valuable interaction turns at a fine granularity to drive more targeted learning. To address this, we introduce InfoPO (Information-Driven Policy Optimization), which frames multi-turn interaction as a process of active uncertainty reduction and computes an information-gain reward that credits turns whose feedback measurably changes the agent's subsequent action distribution compared to a masked-feedback counterfactual. It then combines this signal with task outcomes via an adaptive variance-gated fusion to identify information importance while maintaining task-oriented goal direction. Across diverse tasks, including intent clarification, collaborative coding, and tool-augmented decision making, InfoPO consistently outperforms prompting and multi-turn RL baselines. It also demonstrates robustness under user simulator shifts and generalizes effectively to environment-interactive tasks. Overall, InfoPO provides a principled and scalable mechanism for optimizing complex agent-user collaboration. Code is available at https://github.com/kfq20/InfoPO.

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

Average entropy of Bogoliubov-Kubo-Mori random state ensemble

arXiv:2606.17960v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Random states play a foundational role in different branches of modern quantum science. In this work, we study a recently proposed random state ensemble induced from von Neumann entropy through the Bogoliubov-Kubo-Mori (BKM) metric. In particular, we derive an exact yet explicit formula of average entanglement entropy over BKM ensemble. In obtaining the formula, we only make use of properties of normalization constant of the ensemble in the absence of its correlation kernel, contrary to average entropy computation of other ensembles. This new framework paves the way for calculating higher-order cumulants of BKM ensemble beyond the average.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Select and Improve: Understanding the Mechanics of Post-Training for Reasoning

arXiv:2606.13125v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning has rapidly emerged as a key component in the training of reasoning and coding models, yet it remains poorly understood from a mechanistic perspective. We study how and through what underlying processes capabilities are acquired or enhanced via reinforcement learning post-training. Our analysis, based on controlled math reasoning experiments with Qwen-2.5-1.5B, reveals two core mechanisms: strategy selection and strategy improvement. Our results highlight the role of SFT data and reinforcement learning data in activating these mechanisms, in particular showing how supervising the model on diverse reasoning strategies can enable strategy selection and how increasing difficulty in reinforcement learning data can enable strategy improvement. Taken together, our results provide mechanistic insight into RL training and suggest practical interventions to continue scaling reasoning capabilities.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

From Static Inference to Dynamic Interaction: A Survey of Streaming Large Language Models

Standard Large Language Models (LLMs) are predominantly designed for static inference with pre-defined inputs, which limits their applicability in dynamic, real-time scenarios. To address this gap, the streaming LLM paradigm has emerged. However, existing definitions of streaming LLMs remain fragmented, conflating streaming generation, streaming inputs, and interactive streaming architectures, while a systematic taxonomy is still lacking. This paper provides a comprehensive overview and analysis of streaming LLMs. First, we establish a unified definition of streaming LLMs based on data flow and dynamic interaction to clarify existing ambiguities. Building on this definition, we propose a systematic taxonomy of current streaming LLMs and conduct an in-depth discussion on their underlying methodologies. Furthermore, we explore the applications of streaming LLMs in real-world scenarios and outline promising research directions to support ongoing advances in streaming intelligence. We maintain a continuously updated repository of relevant papers at https://github.com/EIT-NLP/Awesome-Streaming-LLMs.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

From Benchmarks to Skills: Low-Rank Factors for LLM Evaluation

Current evaluations of large language models (LLMs) rely heavily on a growing collection of benchmarks and on aggregate benchmark scores, yet it remains unclear what this comparison actually captures, and what these scores reveal about models' underlying capabilities. Here, we propose a new paradigm for LLM evaluation, by asking whether benchmark performance reflects many independent abilities, or rather relies on a small number of shared dimensions. To answer this, we apply Factor Analysis (FA) to a massive performance matrix of LLMs versus benchmarks \((60\times44)\) revealing an intrinsically low-rank structure of that matrix. That is, a small number of latent factors captures most of the structure in the full task space. This low-rank geometry reveals substantial redundancy across existing tasks and explains why many benchmarks appear to be measuring overlapping abilities. We further show that these latent factors correspond to coherent, skill-like, dimensions of LLM behavior. Leveraging this latent skill-space, we deliver three practical tools for LLM evaluation and downstream users: (i)~identifying redundant tasks, (ii)~profiling new models using a small subset of tasks, and (iii)~selecting models aligned with desired skill profiles. Our method provides a solid alternative to the de-facto standard of a single aggregate score, and establishes an interpretable and practical framework for understanding and benchmarking LLM core capabilities.

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

UXBench: Measuring the Actionability of LLM-Generated UX Critiques

arXiv:2606.16262v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as UX judges that inspect interfaces, diagnose usability problems, and propose repairs. Yet no controlled benchmark measures whether the resulting critiques are reliable and actionable across heterogeneous product surfaces. We introduce UXBench, a benchmark for evaluating LLMs as interaction-grounded UX judges. UXBench comprises local-first runnable web fixtures spanning ten product-surface families, paired with coverage-gated browser exploration that forces models to collect interaction evidence before reporting. Each judge model produces a structured UX report over seven rubric dimensions; report quality is measured by whether a fixed downstream repair agent can improve the interface based on the critique. We evaluate eight frontier models under both an automated repair-lift protocol and a blind human validation study. Results show that UX judging is neither saturated nor one dimensional: models differ meaningfully in report actionability, exhibit distinct rubric-level repair signatures, vary in fixture-level reliability, and trade leadership across surface categories

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

Snyk VulnBench JS 1.0: Can LLMs Find the Same Bugs Twice?

arXiv:2606.15762v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We ran 300 repeated vulnerability-finding scans to measure how repeatable agentic large language model (LLM) security review is on the same JavaScript code, prompt, and benchmark harness. The headline result is that LLM security findings were unevenly repeatable: reference-matched findings were stable, but extra model reports varied heavily from run to run. Across 250 model runs, 80 of 161 unique unmatched findings appeared in only one of five identical repetitions, while only 22 appeared in all five. By contrast, when Claude matched a Snyk Code reference finding, the behavior was much more stable: 134 of 158 unique reference-matched findings appeared in all five repetitions. The benchmark also shows complementarity. Models consistently found familiar, high-signal exploit shapes, and in one case surfaced a likely Snyk Code product gap. Snyk Code static application security testing (SAST) was deterministic and better at systematically enumerating repeated data-flow sinks. The results support combining agentic LLM review with deterministic SAST rather than treating either technique as a replacement for the other.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

The Internet of Agentic AI: Communication, Coordination, and Collective Intelligence at Scale

作者:

arXiv:2606.12835v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid emergence of autonomous AI agents is transforming artificial intelligence from isolated model inference into distributed systems of reasoning, communication, and action. This paper develops the vision of the Internet of Agentic AI (IoAI): an open ecosystem in which heterogeneous agents discover one another, negotiate responsibilities, exchange context, invoke tools, and execute workflows across cloud, edge, device, organizational, and cyber-physical environments. We synthesize foundations from single-agent agentic AI, multi-agent systems, distributed computing, communication networks, game theory, and security engineering to characterize the architectures and mechanisms required for scalable agent ecosystems. The paper examines agent deployment models, workflow lifecycles, communication protocols, interoperability layers, resource-management challenges, and trust architectures, with case studies in adaptive manufacturing and distributed operational coordination. The resulting framework highlights the central research challenges of controlled emergence, semantic interoperability, secure identity, incentive-compatible coordination, resource-aware orchestration, and governance for large-scale networks of autonomous agents.

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

Machine-learning-based multipoint optimization of fluidic injection parameters for improving nozzle performance

arXiv:2409.12707v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fluidic injection offers a promising solution to improve the performance of the overexpanded single expansion ramp nozzles (SERNs) during vehicle acceleration. However, determining the injection parameters that yield the best overall performance across multiple nozzle operating conditions remains a challenge. The gradient-based optimization method requires gradients of injection parameters at each design point, which can lead to high computational costs when using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. This paper uses a pretrained neural network to replace CFD during optimization, enabling quick calculation of the nozzle flow field at multiple design points. Considering the physical characteristics of the nozzle flow field, a prior-based prediction strategy is adopted to enhance the model's accuracy. In addition, the neural network's back-propagation algorithm computes gradients quickly by running the computation only once, thereby greatly reducing gradient computation time compared to the finite difference method. As a test case, the average nozzle thrust coefficient of an SERN at seven design points is optimized, resulting in a 1.14\% improvement. The time cost is greatly reduced compared with traditional optimization methods, even when the time required to establish the training database is included.

15.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15

SMLMFlow: Improving Structural Resolution in Single Molecule Localization Microscopy with Flow Matching

While Single Molecule Localization Microscopy (SMLM) aims to generate precise coordinates of molecular targets in cells, the resulting point clouds are inherently blurred by additive noise sources across the experimental, imaging, and processing workflow. This blurring often limits SMLM's ability to accurately quantify complex assembled structures required to address biological issues, despite reported localization precision down to a couple of nanometers. Here, we present SMLMFlow, a machine learning framework for improving structural resolution in SMLM datasets that combines a graph neural network and a hierarchical transformer with flow matching. We show that SMLMFlow improves structural resolution and downstream quantification across different structures, including filaments and protein nano-clusters, and generalizes to new unseen photophysics models.

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

RECTOR: Masked Region-Channel-Temporal Modeling for Affective and Cognitive Representation Learning

arXiv:2606.15278v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Affective and cognitive disorders manifest as distributed, time-varying brain network dynamics across regions, channels, and time, challenging robust representation learning from EEG/sEEG for clinical diagnosis. We propose RECTOR (Masked Region-Channel-Temporal Modeling), an end-to-end self-supervised framework that unifies joint region-channel-temporal representation learning beyond fixed anatomical priors. At its core, RECTOR-SA is a hierarchical, block-sparse self-attention induced by Adaptive Functional Partitioning that evolves region structures from static anatomical definitions to adaptive functional regions. The self-supervision is driven by Masked Topology and Representation Learning, which jointly optimizes three complementary objectives: Masked Predictive Modeling, Topological Structure Modeling, and Cross-View Consistency. Across diverse benchmarks, RECTOR sets a new state-of-the-art in EEG emotion recognition and sEEG task-engagement classification. Crucially, its strong robustness to missing channels and cross-montage generalization underscores its potential for large-scale pre-training on heterogeneous EEG/sEEG, providing interpretable insights at both region and channel levels.

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

A Minimal Model of Bounded Trade-Off Screening in Multi-Attribute Choice

arXiv:2606.13201v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Human decision-making often involves choosing between multi-attribute alternatives, yet classical models assume fully compensatory utility aggregation despite evidence that people reject options with poor performance on critical attributes. We propose a bounded trade-off reasoning framework in which decisions are governed by a screening process that evaluates the balance between gains and losses across attributes. The model introduces a trade-off tolerance parameter that controls acceptable imbalance and can vary across contexts. Through simulation, we show that this mechanism produces preference patterns that differ from standard utility-based models and captures context-dependent variation in trade-off behavior. These results establish bounded trade-off screening as a plausible computational mechanism for multi-attribute choice and generate testable predictions for future behavioral studies.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

A Stationarity-and-Coupling Criterion for Training-Free Time-Lagged Spectral Embeddings of Multivariate Time Series

arXiv:2606.13823v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study training-free fixed-length descriptors for multivariate time series and ask not merely whether such a descriptor performs well, but when it can be expected to work at all. Our object of study is $D(\tau)$, built from a time-lagged correlation matrix truncated at the Marchenko-Pastur edge so that only signal-bearing eigenvalues survive and classified by cosine similarity to class centroids with zero learned parameters. The central contribution is not the descriptor but a falsifiable applicability criterion for it. Working from a stationary Gaussian VAR(1) model, we argue that $D(\tau)$ separates two classes when the signals are approximately stationary and the class information lives in their cross-channel temporal coupling rather than in marginal per-channel power. We derive, semi-formally, three consequences: a distinguishability condition, why the static ($\tau=0$) covariance collapses to chance, and why a stationary but power-discriminated paradigm defeats the descriptor. The criterion is operational: a two-part pre-flight test – an augmented Dickey-Fuller stationarity check and a power-baseline saturation check – predicts applicability before any training. We validate both halves on a mixed assortment. On four paradigms that satisfy the criterion (Sleep-EDF, BCI-IV-2a, MIT-BIH, ESC-50) the descriptor is competitive with strong baselines at a fraction of their cost, reaching $88.5\pm4.5\%$ under 20-subject leave-one-subject-out on Sleep-EDF on a single CPU thread. On three that violate it – non-stationary ERPs, and financial-volatility and wearable-stress regimes that are power-discriminated – it fails exactly as the pre-flight predicts, and these negatives are the more informative half. We are explicit that $D(\tau)$ is not the most accurate representation; its value is a compact, training-free embedding whose domain of validity is known in advance.

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

Renewable Lasso without Batch-Number Constraints: A Gradient-Enhanced Approach

arXiv:2606.11738v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study online estimation for high-dimensional generalized linear models with streaming data. First, for the non-distributed setting, we propose a gradient-enhanced surrogate loss that approximates the cumulative loss using only historical summaries, which modifies and improves upon the existing renewable estimation approach for the same model in the high-dimensional setting, and removes the batch-number constraint in previous studies. We then extend the method to distributed streaming data under the master-client architecture, where batches are partitioned across sites and only summaries (gradient vectors) are exchanged. Instead of directing applying the popular method of Jordan et al. (2019) to the surrogate quadratic loss, our adjusted approach does not require the clients to compute the full surrogate loss. We derive non-asymptotic error bounds under the high-dimensional scaling, without the stringent constraint on the number of batches in the previous studies. Simulation results under linear and logistic models, together with a real-data application, show improved accuracy over existing renewable estimators.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Hölder++: Improving the Quality-Coherence Trade-off in Multimodal VAEs

arXiv:2606.13381v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing approaches for multimodal variational autoencoders (VAEs) face a trade-off between generative quality and coherence-i.e., they struggle to generate realistic and diverse samples that, at the same time, are semantically consistent across modalities. A recent work shows that using a simple approximation to Hölder pooling as an aggregation method improves coherence over the SOTA MMVAE+, despite assuming a single shared representation across all modalities. Yet, it slightly compromises sample diversity. Inspired by this insight, we propose Hölder++, a novel multimodal VAE that improves the generative quality-coherence trade-off through: (i) the first implementation of Hölder pooling without any approximation for multimodal VAEs; (ii) an extended architecture that models distinct shared and private (i.e., modality-specific) representations (Hölder+); and (iii) hierarchical inference that further enhances the disentanglement between the shared and private representations (Hölder++). Our experiments corroborate that Hölder++ consistently improves the generative quality-coherence trade-off, yields more structured latent spaces, and learns shared representations that are informative for downstream tasks.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Utility-Constrained Policy Optimization

arXiv:2606.14029v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Constrained MDPs (CMDPs) are a widely adopted framework for incorporating safety into RL agents; however, the framework does not support risk-sensitive constraints. This can be problematic: For example, CMDPs allow for optimal solutions that, in order to satisfy the risk-neutral constraints, mix infrequent catastrophic behaviors and frequent, overly conservative ones. Moreover, prior empirical results suggest that enforcing stricter, risk-sensitive constraints can improve performance even under risk-neutral evaluation. The natural framework to incorporate risk-sensitive constraints is utility-constrained MDPs (UCMDPs), but no practical solutions for this problem existed. In this work, we introduce a simple yet powerful methodology for UCMDPs and constrained RL. Besides allowing for risk-sensitive constraints, our framework does not require us to fix constraint limits in advance of training the agent, provided that a sensible range is known. This increases policy flexibility and, in practice, allows for adjustments to these limits at no extra training cost. Besides benefiting from the generality of the framework, our agent shows strong performance in practice, consistently matching or outperforming existing baselines in several Safety Gymnasium benchmark tasks.

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

EnvRL: Learn from Environment Dynamics in Agentic Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for training Large Language Models (LLMs) as agents. However, conventional RL methods for long-horizon agentic tasks often struggle with sparse outcome rewards. Intuitively, this overlooks the rich environment dynamics information contained in rollout interaction trajectories. We argue that the interaction experience inherently serves as an implicit supervision signal, reveals the underlying transition mechanisms of the environment, and enables the agent to construct a more accurate internal model of the environment.. Therefore, in this work, we investigate how to leverage this additional signal to improve policy learning. Specifically, we propose EnvRL, a framework that incorporates environment dynamics learning into agentic RL via two auxiliary objectives: state prediction and inverse dynamics. By jointly optimizing with the primary RL objective, we encourage the agent to internalize environment dynamics from its own interaction experience. Extensive experiments on two long-horizon agentic benchmarks demonstrate that EnvRL achieves significant improvements on success-rates over RL-only baselines, e.g., when trained with GRPO, lifting Qwen-2.5-1.5B-Instruct from 72.8% to 77.4% on ALFWorld, and from 56.8% to 67.0% on WebShop.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Understanding Cross-Modal Contributions in Continual Vision-Language Models: A Theoretical Perspective

Continual vision-language models are commonly addressed through sequential fine-tuning; however, although this paradigm enables adaptation to new environments (tasks), it inherently emphasizes the contribution of previously learned environments (tasks) at the expense of the stability required to preserve previously acquired knowledge. While existing approaches have adequately studied continual learning and catastrophic forgetting in vision-language models (VLMs), the theoretical understanding of modality-specific contributions across a sequence of environments remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we present a new theoretical perspective to understand the cross-modal (vision-language) contributions to consecutive environments. We empirically evaluate our theoretical findings on large VLMs and demonstrate their effectiveness in capturing environment-level cross-modal contributions. Our analysis provides deeper insights into continual VLMs, highlighting their contribution robustness to varying task orders and inter-task similarities, and their improved generalization performance.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Quantum Global Variational Learning for Quantum Error Correction

arXiv:2606.08592v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Efficient quantum error correction is essential for the advancement of quantum computing. We propose a quantum neural network with a global structure that reduces the number of unitary matrices required in quantum circuits. This approach resulted in a 97% reduction in training time and up to a 25% improvement in the training completion rate, ultimately achieving a 100% success rate in training while surpassing the error correction performance reported in previous studies. In addition, we demonstrated the enhanced robustness of quantum error correction against internal network noise. Moreover, the fidelity of quantum error correction under internal network noise increased by up to 15% due to the reduced computational load.

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

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

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