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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Fermions are fundamentally more nonlocal than Bosons

arXiv:2606.12363v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bell's theorem shows that entangled quantum particles can exhibit correlations that classical particles cannot reproduce without an additional nonlocal resource, such as communication. In this sense, quantum particles are fundamentally more nonlocal than classical ones, and entanglement becomes unavoidable in physics. Here we prove the analogous result within quantum theory itself: indistinguishable fermions transmitted through a quantum network can generate correlations that distinguishable particles or indistinguishable bosons cannot reproduce without additional communication. In the same sense, fermions are fundamentally more nonlocal than bosons or distinguishable particles, motivating fermionic anticommutation and indistinguishability as unavoidable operational resources. Our result further implies that fermions can strictly surpass all qubit-based protocols for certain distributed computing tasks, demonstrating that a complete understanding of information processing requires going beyond qubits to fermionic information carriers - febits.

02.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-06

Pathways of emergency care for severely ill children in Nigerian and Ugandan hospitals: A process mapping study

作者:

by Rami Subhi, Abiodun Sogbesan, Dan Muramuzi, Mikael Burhin, Ayobami A. Bakare, Adegoke G. Falade, Freddy E. Kitutu, Freddie Ssengooba, Carina King, Sumit Kane, Belinda Dawson-McClaren, Hamish R. Graham, the MOXY-Implementation Research Collaboration Background Child mortality remains high in countries with weak emergency care systems. Facility organisation for paediatric emergency care is heterogeneous and under-described. We examined how hospitals in Uganda and Nigeria are organised to deliver emergency care for neonates and children. Methods and findings We conducted a qualitative, multi-method study in 26 purposively selected secondary and tertiary facilities in Uganda and Nigeria from October 2023 to December 2024. Embedded researchers documented patient pathways, resources for care, and care processes for severely ill children (

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Which Pairs to Compare for LLM Post-Training?

arXiv:2606.19607v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Preference-based post-training has become a central paradigm for aligning language models. A common data-collection strategy is to generate a small set of completions for each prompt and label the resulting comparison pairs. However, human preference labels are often much more expensive than generating additional completions, suggesting a different use of the same labeling budget: generate a larger pool of completions, but label only the most informative comparison pairs. This paper studies which pairs should be compared in preference-based post-training. We formulate comparison curation as a sampling-design problem and evaluate designs by the quality of the final policy under the preference-based post-training objective. We instantiate this framework for Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), analyzing how the choice of labeled pairs propagates through DPO training to downstream policy performance. Our main results provide matching upper and lower bounds on the post-training optimality gap of the DPO-trained policy. The bounds show that comparison selection affects downstream performance through a single design-dependent information matrix, which links label allocation to parameter estimation error and policy suboptimality. This yields an explicit optimization criterion for budgeted comparison curation and motivates practical sampling designs for selecting informative pairs from large generated completion pools. Experiments on synthetic settings and language-model post-training benchmarks show that the proposed designs consistently improve sample efficiency over common comparison-selection heuristics.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Test-Time Adaptation in Optical Coherence Tomography Using Trajectory-Aligned Time-Independent Flow

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is essential in ophthalmology, but inconsistent image quality especially in low-cost devices hinders automated analysis. To address this, we introduce a flow-matching-based test-time adaptation method that generates high-quality surrogate images from noisy inputs. Typically, domain gaps between test and training data cause pixel distribution mismatches during the denoising process. We overcome this by matching the test image's histogram to synthetic reference trajectories, successfully aligning the input with expected distributions. Additionally, we remove the network's time conditioning to account for slight deviations in real-world noise distributions. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in segmenting critical biomarkers for two stages of Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD). Code is available: https://github.com/Veit21/tta-flow.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

The Reverse Telescoping Coordinate System for Positive Definite Matrices: Geometry, Computation, and Generative Modeling

arXiv:2606.15442v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We design a new unconstrained coordinate system where a $p\times p$ symmetric positive definite (SPD) matrix $\Theta$ is represented by a reverse telescoping map $\Theta(x)=\rm{RT}(x)$, with $x=(v,d,r)\in\mathbb{R}\times\mathbb{R}^{(p-1)}\times\mathbb{R}^{p(p-1)/2}$, representing respectively the log volume or log determinant; and the shape, as encoded by log relative diagonal scales and partial covariances among the nodes. This construction results in important properties not available in other charts, e.g., matrix logarithm, such as Jacobian depending on only the log-determinant. A useful feature of our construction is $x$ contains a lossless symbolic representation of both the matrix and its inverse. Many important computations involving a matrix and its inverse can be performed in $O(p^2)$ in the transformed domain, while it is the rendering of results in matrix forms (on demand) that must incur an $O(p^3)$ cost. Moreover, two unit-determinant matrices in the transformed domain can be joined by a straight line with pathwise unit determinant. For generative modeling, this allows designing a split volume-shape flow model trained by conditional flow matching for transporting the shape over the unit-determinant path, with a separate one-dimensional flow for transporting the volume or the determinant. The forbidding SPD constraint, tamed thus into a powerful guiding force, leads to the surprising insight that it is in some sense easier to design a volume-normalized shape flow for SPD compared to the unconstrained $\mathbb{R}^{p\times p}$, with no intrinsic notion of volume to aid normalization, unlike the determinant of SPD matrices. We apply our construction for up to $p=200$ in generative modeling of SPD matrices on a difficult synthetic bimodal target, and in generating brain connectivity networks by models trained on fMRI data; as well as in intrinsic diffusion on the SPD manifold.

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

Dimension-Free Convergence of Discrete Diffusion Models: Adjoint Equations Induce the Right Space

arXiv:2605.17232v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Discrete diffusion has become a leading framework for generative modeling in various applications including language, vision, and biology. Existing convergence theory, however, exhibits fundamental limitations. KL-based analyses diverge under singular priors such as the masked distribution, while bounds in total variation (TV) depend on the state space size $S$ and become vacuous for modern language tasks, where vocabularies contain hundreds of thousands of tokens. We develop a unified adjoint-equation-based framework that establishes dimension-free convergence guarantees in any integral probability metric (IPM). To the best of our knowledge, our bounds are the first to be entirely free of $S$ and applicable to both masked and uniform priors. Importantly, our theory relies only on a single standard rate-matrix regularity assumption and applies to general priors. Five novel techniques drive our improvements: working in the space of observables via adjoint equations rather than directly with probability measures, a regularity analysis that yields bounds on any IPM, a coupling argument that removes $S$-dependence under uniform transitions, and score-marginal cancellation and exit-routing techniques that remove $S$-dependence under masked transitions. Our framework thus sharply departs from prior analyses and avoids the shortcomings of pathspace-KL and existing TV-based approaches. Beyond convergence bounds, our framework provides a versatile toolkit for further theoretical study of discrete diffusion models, including principled choices of loss functions and dimension-free step complexity.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Mitigating Content Shift and Hallucination in GenAI Image Editing via Structural Refinement

Generative AI (GenAI) image editors, such as Nano Banana, produce visually compelling results for retouching tasks, enabling non-experts to edit images through text prompts alone. However, the generative nature of these models often introduces spatial misalignment, texture distortion, and content hallucination, all of which are detrimental to downstream workflows that require pixel-level fidelity. We identify a problem setting we call "structure-preserving GenAI fusion" for black-box GenAI image retouching: retain the perceptual enhancements of a GenAI output while enforcing structural faithfulness to the original input image. To address this problem, we propose a post-processing framework that fuses an input image with its GenAI-enhanced counterpart by first establishing coarse spatial and photometric correspondences, then performing a fusion stage that transfers desired enhancements while suppressing hallucinated content. In the absence of direct prior work in this setting, we evaluate our framework against representative methods from photorealistic style transfer and image fusion. Our experiments demonstrate that our method better preserves aesthetic quality while maintaining pixel-level structural consistency and the input resolution.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Clifford disentanglers for entanglement reduction in molecular electronic structure simulations

arXiv:2606.12056v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Entanglement is a key bottleneck limiting the efficiency of tensor-network and quantum simulations of molecular electronic structures. Here, we systematically assess and extend Clifford disentanglers as a structure-preserving approach to entanglement reduction: they can modify the entanglement structure of qubit wavefunctions while retaining the Pauli-string form of qubit Hamiltonians. To enable a practical search over Clifford transformations, we classify Clifford operators by their action on the Schmidt spectrum across a bipartition, reducing the two- and four-qubit search spaces to 20 and 91392 representatives, respectively. Embedded in an iterative Clifford-augmented matrix product state framework, these transformations reduce the energy errors at fixed bond dimension for the molecular test cases studied and mitigate the dependence on orbital orderings and fermion-to-qubit mappings. We further show that Clifford disentanglers can also benefit quantum simulations such as the shallow-circuit variational quantum eigensolver calculations. Together, these results establish Clifford disentanglers as a useful structure-preserving entanglement-engineering tool for tensor-network and quantum simulations of molecular electronic structure, while also clarifying their correlation dependence and motivating future developments.

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

Towards Scalable Customization and Deployment of Multi-Agent Systems for Enterprise Applications

Large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems demonstrate strong performance on complex reasoning and task execution, enabling broad enterprise applications. However, production deployment remains challenging due to domain-specific customization requirements and high latency and inference costs in agentic workflows. We propose a unified framework for customization and efficient deployment of multi-agent systems in real-world settings. The first stage, Agentic Model Customization, combines continual pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, and preference optimization to adapt a compact model to specialized domains while retaining strong agentic capabilities. The second stage, Inference Optimization, integrates speculative decoding and FP8 quantization with targeted calibration to enable cost-efficient serving with minimal quality loss. Across enterprise workloads, our framework enables rapid domain adaptation and achieves a 4.48x speedup in throughput while maintaining performance and improving robustness on long-tail scenarios.

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

Null-Space Diffusion Distillation Unlocks Speed, Fidelity and Realism in Lensless Imaging

Lensless imaging reconstructs scenes from highly multiplexed measurements, resulting in a severely ill-posed inverse problem. In this work, we identify a fundamental trade-off between measurement consistency, perceptual quality, and inference speed across lensless reconstruction paradigms. Traditional methods favor consistency but produce perceptually degraded results, supervised approaches achieve high-quality reconstructions with fast inference but may violate physical constraints, and diffusion-prior methods achieve high perceptual quality and consistency–particularly when structured constraints such as range-null decomposition are used–but remain slow due to iterative sampling. Motivated by this observation, we propose Null-Space Diffusion Distillation (NSDD), a single-pass reconstruction model that distills structured diffusion-prior inference into an efficient feed-forward network. NSDD learns to produce high-quality reconstructions that preserve measurement consistency while avoiding costly iterative sampling. Experimental results demonstrate that NSDD achieves perceptual quality and consistency competitive with diffusion-prior methods, while providing significantly faster inference and offering a favorable balance across all three objectives. Furthermore, ablation experiments show that distilling the range–null decomposition improves reconstruction quality and robustness over unstructured full-reconstruction distillation, including on unseen real scenes. These results highlight the potential of structure-aware distillation for efficient lensless imaging. Code is available at github.com/JRCSAVSN/NullSpaceDiffusionDistillation.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

X-OPD: Cross-Modal On-Policy Distillation for Capability Alignment in Speech LLMs

While the shift from cascaded dialogue systems to end-to-end (E2E) speech Large Language Models (LLMs) improves latency and paralinguistic modeling, E2E models often exhibit a significant performance degradation compared to their text-based counterparts. The standard Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) training methods fail to close this gap. To address this, we propose X-OPD, a novel Cross-Modal On-Policy Distillation framework designed to systematically align the capabilities of Speech LLMs to their text-based counterparts. X-OPD enables the Speech LLM to explore its own distribution via on-policy rollouts, where a text-based teacher model evaluates these trajectories and provides token-level feedback, effectively distilling teacher's capabilities into student's multi-modal representations. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that X-OPD significantly narrows the gap in complex tasks while preserving the model's inherent capabilities.

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

SDFLoRA: Selective Decoupled Federated LoRA for Privacy-preserving Fine-tuning with Heterogeneous Clients

arXiv:2601.11219v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Federated learning (FL) for large language models (LLMs) has attracted increasing attention as a privacy-preserving approach for adapting models over distributed data, where parameter-efficient methods such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) are widely adopted to reduce communication and memory costs. However, practical deployments often exhibit rank and data heterogeneity: clients operate under different low-rank budgets and data distributions, making direct aggregation of LoRA updates biased and unstable. Existing approaches either enforce a unified rank or align heterogeneous updates into a single shared subspace, which tends to mix transferable and client-specific directions and consequently undermines personalization. Moreover, under differential privacy (DP), perturbing such structurally mixed updates injects noise into directions that should remain purely local, leading to unnecessary utility degradation. To address these issues, we propose Selective Decoupled Federated LoRA (SDFLoRA), a structure-aware LoRA framework that decouples each client update into a shared component for aggregation and a private component that preserves client-specific semantics. Only the shared component participates in subspace alignment, while the private component remains local and uncommunicated, making the training DP-compatible and stabilizing aggregation under rank heterogeneity. By injecting noise only into the aggregated shareable update, this approach avoids perturbations to local directions and improves the utility-privacy trade-off. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that SDFLoRA outperforms federated LoRA baselines and achieves a strong utility-privacy trade-off.

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

AURA: Active-Response Attribution under Treatment Ambiguity in Bacterial Cytological Profiling

When a bacterial sample is exposed to several antibiotics, not every applied drug necessarily acts: if the organism is resistant to one of them, that drug leaves no morphological trace. The clinically meaningful quantity is therefore not which antibiotics were applied, but which ones were active. We show that these two are sharply decoupled in real E. coli microscopy - naively assuming the applied combination equals the active one is correct only about 37% of the time - yet existing computational tools are ill-suited to recovering the active set. Forward perturbation models such as scGen, CPA, and IMPA are designed to predict appearance from treatment, not the reverse, and inverting them degrades sharply; discriminative image classifiers tend to memorise strain- and batch-specific texture and fail to transfer across experimental replicates. We introduce AURA, which reframes the task as constrained, energy-based inverse attribution. Its central inductive bias is that the active set must be a subset of the applied set; this collapses the candidate space and lets AURA infer the active subset of applied antibiotics by decomposing residual morphology into antibiotic response atoms and selecting the subset with the lowest reconstruction energy, using no strain label at test time. AURA-E adds evidence-aware abstention, withholding a prediction when candidate explanations remain near-equally plausible. On cross-replicate transfer in an E. coli cytological profiling dataset, AURA recovers the active antibiotic combination with 95.47% exact-match accuracy.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Low-Burden LLM-Based Preference Learning: Personalizing Assistive Robots from Natural Language Feedback for Users with Paralysis

arXiv:2604.01463v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Physically Assistive Robots require personalized behaviors to ensure user safety and comfort. However, traditional preference learning methods, like exhaustive pairwise comparisons, cause substantial physical and cognitive fatigue for users with severe motor impairments. To solve this, we propose a low-burden, offline framework that translates unstructured natural language feedback directly into deterministic robotic control policies. To safely bridge the gap between ambiguous human speech and robotic code, our pipeline uses Large Language Models (LLMs) grounded in the Occupational Therapy Practice Framework. This clinical reasoning decodes subjective user reactions into explicit physical and psychological needs, which are then mapped into transparent decision trees. Before deployment, an automated "LLM-as-a-Judge" verifies the code's structural safety. We validated this system in a simulated meal preparation study with 10 adults with paralysis. Results show our natural language approach significantly reduces user workload compared to traditional baselines. Additionally, occupational therapists confirmed the generated policies are safe and accurately reflect user preferences.

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

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

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

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Vascular Phenotyping in Parkinson's Disease: Diabetes Mellitus Operationalizes a Microvascular Metabolic Syndrome Cluster Across PPMI Diagnostic Cohorts

Background: Diabetes mellitus elevates Parkinson's disease (PD) risk, via hypothesized cerebrovascular mediation. Whether the diabetes/prediabetes vascular-risk phenotype concentrates in cardiometabolic risk or macrovascular events across prodromal and clinically diagnosed PD remains unresolved. Objectives: To quantify the vascular-risk burden associated with diabetes/prediabetes across the PPMI diagnostic cohorts to test whether this association differs by cohort. Methods: Cross-sectional analysis of 413 PPMI participants (76 healthy controls, 145 prodromal PD, 192 clinically diagnosed PD) examined diabetes/prediabetes (n = 73) and seven vascular risk factors. The Vascular Burden Score (0 to 7) was a priori partitioned into microvascular and macrovascular sub-scores. Modified Poisson regression estimated adjusted prevalence ratios (aPR), adjusted for age, sex, and body mass index. A cohort-by-diabetes interaction tested cross-cohort consistency. Sensitivity analyses incorporated nigral diffusion tensor imaging (PD-risk biomarker) and FreeSurfer white matter hypointensity volume (cerebrovascular marker). Results: Diabetes/prediabetes elevated Vascular Burden Score ({beta} = 0.53, 95% CI 0.29 to 0.77, p < 0.001) versus non-diabetic participants, with a non-significant cohort-by-diabetes interaction (F = 0.29, p = 0.747). Three microvascular factors survived false discovery rate correction: obesity (aPR 2.28), hypertension (aPR 1.60), and hyperlipidemia (aPR 1.45). Macrovascular events showed no diabetic amplification ({beta} = -0.06, p = 0.25). In the imaging-phenotyped subset, Vascular Burden Score components contributed classifier variance distinct from nigral microstructure. Conclusions: Diabetes/prediabetes operationalize a microvascular cluster stable across prodromal and idiopathic PD. Cardiometabolic phenotyping may complement established PD-risk biomarkers (dopamine transporter SPECT, nigral diffusion), pending longitudinal validation linking vascular phenotype to dopaminergic markers.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

ToaSt: Token Channel Selection and Structured Pruning for Efficient ViT

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have achieved remarkable success across various vision tasks, yet their deployment is often hindered by prohibitive computational costs. While structured weight pruning and token compression have emerged as promising solutions, they suffer from prolonged retraining and inter-layer dependencies that complicate optimization, respectively. We propose ToaSt, a decoupled framework applying specialized strategies to distinct ViT components. We apply coupled head-wise structured pruning to Multi-Head Self-Attention modules, leveraging attention operation characteristics to enhance robustness. For Feed-Forward Networks (over 60% of FLOPs), we introduce Token Channel Selection (TCS), a training-free method that filters redundant noise channels at inference time. Extensive evaluations across nine diverse models, including DeiT, ViT-MAE, and Swin Transformer, demonstrate that ToaSt achieves superior trade-offs between accuracy and efficiency, consistently outperforming existing baselines. On ViT-MAE-Huge, ToaSt achieves 88.52% accuracy (+1.64%p) with 39.4% FLOPs reduction. ToaSt also transfers effectively to diverse downstream tasks (COCO detection, ADE20K segmentation, CIFAR-100 classification), achieving 52.2 versus 51.9 mAP on COCO. Code: github.com/SHANNonLab-HUFS/ToaSt

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

PragReST: Self-Reinforcing Counterfactual Reasoning for Pragmatic Language Understanding

Natural language understanding often depends on meanings that are implied rather than explicitly stated, requiring pragmatic reasoning. Despite strong performance on math and logical reasoning, large language models (LLMs) still struggle with making pragmatic inferences, often choosing literal interpretations. To improve LLM pragmatic reasoning, we introduce PragReST, a self-supervised framework that constructs pragmatic QA data, generates counterfactual reasoning traces, and trains models to internalize them through supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, without human-labeled training data or distillation from a stronger teacher. Across four pragmatic benchmarks (PragMega, Ludwig, MetoQA, and AltPrag), PragReST improves over backbone models, task-specific pragmatic tuning baselines, and non-counterfactual variants of the same pipeline. On accuracy-based benchmarks, PragReST improves over the instruct backbone by 5.37 and 5.50% (absolute) for Qwen3-8B and Qwen3-14B, respectively. Our error analysis and ablations underscore the importance of counterfactual reasoning: PragReST primarily reduces errors caused by failures to contrast observed utterances with plausible alternatives, and removing counterfactual reasoning substantially reduces performance. Moreover, our training preserves out-of-domain performance on general-knowledge and mathematical reasoning benchmarks.

19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

On McDiarmid's Inequality under Dependence via Approximate Tensorization of Entropy

arXiv:2606.12720v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We argue that dependent versions of McDiarmid's inequality are a useful but underutilized tool in mathematical statistics, learning theory and theoretical computer science. To make this point, we first highlight that approximate tensorization of entropy (ATE) implies McDiarmid's via the Entropy Method. Second, we derive McDiarmid's inequality for non-isotropic Gaussian random vectors $X \sim \mathcal N(\mu, \Sigma)$ through ATE with a constant of the order of the condition number of $\Sigma$. We both independently obtain this ATE through a simple application of stochastic localization and also discuss how a more general ATE for the Gibbs sampler due to Ascolani et al., 2026 generalizes McDiarmid's-like concentration to strongly log-concave and log-smooth probability measures. We then apply the resulting concentration inequalities to resolve a question on the concentration of $\operatorname{sign}(X)$ posed by Simone Bombari, investigate Erdős-Rényi graphs under dependence and prove a Dvoretzky-Kiefer-Wolfowitz-type inequality for observations from a joint measure fulfilling ATE and continuous marginal CDFs. For the class of strongly log-concave and log-smooth measures, this result improves upon a prior Dvoretzky-Kiefer-Wolfowitz-type inequality for non-i.i.d. observations due to Bobkov and Götze, 2010, by establishing the expected $1/\sqrt{n}$-rate of convergence under weak dependence instead of $n^{-1/3}$.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

ALAS: An Automatic Latent Alignment Score for Audio Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) are extended into Speech-LLMs, and the quality of the audio–text alignment they learn affects most downstream Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) behavior. Yet despite a growth of fusion strategies, there is no standard way to measure how well a Speech-LLM internally binds audio frames to text tokens. We introduce ALAS (Automatic Latent Alignment Score), a model and task-agnostic metric that probes the LLM's per-layer hidden states, scoring the cross-modal cosine similarity between audio and text representations against a Whisper-derived reference. ALAS needs only a frozen forward pass and an off-the-shelf ASR reference, with no training or fitted classifier, and is calibrated to an interpretable uniform baseline comparable across tasks. Applying ALAS to four open-source Speech-LLMs (AF3, Qwen2-Audio, Qwen-Omni, SALMONN) across emotion recognition (IEMOCAP), open-ended SQA (LibriSQA), and multi-choice audio understanding (MMAU-speech), we find that the depth and strength of alignment reflect each model's audio-encoder design and the acoustic-versus-semantic demands of the task, and that ALAS tracks but does not duplicate task accuracy, exposing models that score well without genuinely grounding in the audio. We release ALAS as an open-source library so that practitioners can probe their own Speech-LLMs or try it on new tasks.

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

Large Language Models as Optimizers: A Survey of Direct vs. Tool-Augmented Approaches and Their Performance Frontiers

arXiv:2606.15577v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly involved in complex mathematical optimization, even if the pragmatic user who triggers them is unaware of it. After all, many real-world problems reduce to the search for better or the best solutions. The field of LLM-as-optimizer has three paradigms: direct optimization, tool-augmented optimization, and tool-creating optimization. Direct optimization uses iterative prompting and heuristic generation to navigate solution spaces. Tool-augmented optimization translates natural language problems into formal specifications and orchestrates external solvers. Tool-creating optimization goes further, using LLMs to discover reusable algorithms or heuristics that can be deployed at zero marginal LLM cost. We describe current performance frontiers based on the benchmarks from the literature. We identify the critical reasoning gap in current architectures and argue for trade-offs between the future potential of direct optimization and the auditability of tool-augmented optimization. Even future, more powerful models might opt for tool-making to improve operational efficiency for repetitive families of problems.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

GB-LSR: A Fast Local Spectral Image Representation with a Single Global Bandwidth for Continuous Reconstruction and Super-Resolution

arXiv:2606.19617v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present GB-LSR (Global-Bandwidth Local Spectral Representation), a fixed-grid local spectral representation for continuous image reconstruction. The image domain is partitioned into non-overlapping square patches, each carrying coefficients for a truncated Fourier basis predicted from shared convolutional-encoder features. A single trainable scalar bandwidth is shared globally across all patches and images, and reconstruction at any continuous coordinate is a fixed-size basis contraction whose cost is independent of image size. We study three bandwidth-handling variants: a trainable global scalar (main), a fixed global scalar, and a per-patch bandwidth field. On a standardized native-reconstruction benchmark across Kodak, Set14, and Urban100, the main variant outperforms matched-budget amortized LIIF / LTE / WIRE re-implementations by 2.8-3.6 dB PSNR and 0.11-0.15 LPIPS, while running at roughly one-quarter of the slowest baseline's inference cost. The single global scalar suffices empirically: per-patch adaptive-bandwidth alternatives do not improve over it on either a closed-form locality diagnostic or an end-to-end ablation. In a separate arbitrary-scale super-resolution (ASR) extension, GB-LSR achieves competitive PSNR-Y under a canonical-style SR protocol and runs 1.44x faster than LIIF-RDN and 3.25x faster than LTE-SwinIR at x4; within the same extension, a variant trained and evaluated without 4-corner local-ensemble averaging gives a 1.77x speedup with 35% lower peak memory and negligible PSNR change, while additionally widening the RDN encoder from 64 to 96 channels gives a small positive PSNR shift with a 1.58x speedup and 31% lower peak memory. Native-reconstruction claims are scoped to the matched-budget amortized protocol, and ASR claims are scoped to a separate canonical-style SR protocol.

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

Evaluating Interactive 2D Visualization as a Sample Selection Strategy for Biomedical Time-Series Data Annotation

arXiv:2603.26592v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reliable machine-learning models in biomedical settings depend on accurate labels, yet annotating biomedical time-series data remains challenging. Algorithmic sample selection may support annotation, but evidence from studies involving real human annotators is scarce. Consequently, we compare three sample selection methods for annotation: random sampling (RND), farthest-first traversal (FAFT), and a graphical user interface-based method enabling exploration of complementary 2D visualizations (2DVs) of high-dimensional data. We evaluated the methods across four classification tasks in infant motility assessment (IMA) and speech emotion recognition (SER). Twelve annotators, categorized as experts or non-experts, performed data annotation under a limited annotation budget, and post-annotation experiments were conducted to evaluate the sampling methods. Across all classification tasks, 2DV performed best when aggregating labels across annotators. In IMA, 2DV most effectively captured rare classes, but also exhibited greater annotator-to-annotator label distribution variability resulting from the limited annotation budget, decreasing classification performance when models were trained on individual annotators' labels; in these cases, FAFT excelled. For SER, 2DV outperformed the other methods among expert annotators and matched their performance for non-experts in the individual-annotator setting. A failure risk analysis revealed that RND was the safest choice when annotator count or annotator expertise was uncertain, whereas 2DV had the highest risk due to its greater label distribution variability. Furthermore, post-experiment interviews indicated that 2DV made the annotation task more interesting and enjoyable. Overall, 2DV-based sampling appears promising for biomedical time-series data annotation, particularly when the annotation budget is not highly constrained.

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

Sample from What You See: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Diffusion Bridge with Observation-Embedded Stochastic Differential Equation

arXiv:2512.07212v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Imitation learning with diffusion models has advanced robotic control by capturing the multi-modal action distributions. However, existing methods typically treat observations only as high-level conditions to the denoising network, rather than integrating them into the stochastic dynamics of the diffusion process itself. As a result, the sampling is forced to begin from random noise, weakening the coupling between perception and control and often yielding suboptimal performance. We propose BridgePolicy, a generative visuomotor policy that directly integrates observations into the stochastic dynamics via a diffusion-bridge formulation. By constructing an observation-informed trajectory, BridgePolicy enables sampling to start from a rich and informative prior rather than random noise, substantially improving precision and reliability in control. A key difficulty is that diffusion bridge normally connects distributions of matched dimensionality, while robotic observations are heterogeneous and not naturally aligned with actions. To overcome this, we introduce a semantic aligner to unify the visual and state inputs and align the observations with action representations, making diffusion bridge applicable to heterogeneous robot data. Extensive experiments across 52 simulation tasks on three benchmarks and 5 real-world tasks demonstrate that BridgePolicy consistently outperforms state-of-the-art generative policies. Our code is available at https://jianghcsr.github.io/BridgePolicy_page/.

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

It's About Time: Temporal References in Emergent Communication

Emergent communication enables agents to develop bespoke languages that improve communication efficiency. Despite the known importance of temporal structure in natural language, there is no existing evidence of temporal references in emergent communication. This paper addresses this gap, by exploring how agents communicate about temporal relationships. We analyse three potential factors for the emergence of temporal references: environmental, external, and architectural. Our experiments demonstrate that altering the loss function is insufficient for temporal references to emerge; rather, architectural changes are necessary. A minimal change in agent architecture, using a different batching method, allows the emergence of temporal references. This modified design is compared with the standard architecture in a temporal referential games environment, which emphasises temporal relationships. The analysis shows that over 95% of the agents with the modified batching method develop temporal references, without changes to their loss function. We consider temporal referencing necessary for future improvements to the agents' communication efficiency, enabling future agents to use a closer to optimal coding as compared to purely compositional languages. These insights provide the basis for incorporation of temporal references into other emergent communication settings, and investigation of other aspects of language.