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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Progress on the Kretschmann-Schlingemann-Werner Conjecture

arXiv:2308.15389v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Given any pair of quantum channels $\Phi_1,\Phi_2$ such that at least one of them has Kraus rank one, as well as any respective Stinespring isometries $V_1,V_2$, we prove that there exists a unitary $U$ on the environment such that $\|V_1-({\bf1}\otimes U)V_2\|_\infty\leq\sqrt{2\|\Phi_1-\Phi_2\|_\diamond}$. Moreover, we provide a simple example which shows that the factor $\sqrt2$ on the right-hand side is optimal, and we conjecture that this inequality holds for every pair of channels.

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

A Decision-Theoretic View of Test-Time Training: When, How Far, and Which Directions to Adapt

arXiv:2606.15569v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Test-time training (TTT) adapts a pretrained model to each prompt via parameter updates, improving accuracy under pretraining-to-test distribution shifts. Yet, its performance often suffers from instability and sensitivity to hyperparameters such as update steps and subspace. We explain this behavior through a decision-theoretic lens, treating TTT as implicit Bayesian inference in the kernel regime. Under a Gaussian process benchmark, we show that TTT reduces prediction error when updates are spectrally matched to the prompt's signal-to-noise ratio and aligned with query-relevant eigen-directions. This perspective underpins the following results: (1) we show when fixed update steps and subspaces fail under distribution shifts, motivating adaptive strategies; (2) we prove that selecting update steps via prompt evidence admits a PAC-Bayes guarantee against overfitting; and (3) we characterize the Bayes-optimal update subspace under a linear-Gaussian correction model, yielding a scoring rule for selecting Transformer blocks and heads. Our theory helps explain the empirical instability of TTT, taking a step toward principled guidance for when, how far, and which directions to adapt.

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

Causal-Privacy Audit Workflow for Synthetic and Distilled Data in Dropout Support

arXiv:2606.15940v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Synthetic and distilled student data are increasingly used to enable privacy-conscious learning analytics, yet their suitability for decision-facing institutional support remains uncertain. In dropout support, generated data must preserve not only predictive utility or distributional resemblance, but also the financial-status evidence used to guide advising, payment-plan assistance, and scholarship-related decisions. Method: This study introduces CaP-Eval, a decision-facing causal-privacy audit workflow for evaluating generated student data under a fixed estimand, timing-aware adjustment design, estimator set, and empirical privacy-governance screen. The workflow compares original, distilled, adversarial synthetic, statistical synthetic, and DPGNet privacy-oriented generated data on predictive utility, treatment-effect fidelity, robustness to alternative estimators, and local training-record proximity. Results: DPGNet and distilled data preserved the original financial-status treatment-effect structure more reliably than the adversarial and Gaussian Copula baselines. DPGNet preserved full direction and rank agreement across epsilon levels; epsilon = 10 produced the smallest non-original IPW and DML deviations, while epsilon = 1 and epsilon = 5 amplified several financial-status contrasts. Distilled data remained highly faithful but retained the strongest local training-record proximity signal. TabularGNet preserved qualitative directions with moderate attenuation, and Gaussian Copula compressed effect magnitudes. Conclusions: Predictive utility, privacy orientation, empirical disclosure signals, and causal fidelity diverged; generated student data require joint audits of direction, magnitude, overlap, and release-governance risk before decision use.

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

SproutRAG: Attention-Guided Tree Search with Progressive Embeddings for Long-Document RAG

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems must balance retrieval granularity with contextual coherence, a challenge that existing methods address through LLM-guided chunking, single-level context expansion, or hierarchical summarization. These approaches variously depend on costly LLM calls during indexing or retrieval, limit context aggregation to a single granularity level, or introduce information loss through summarization. We present SproutRAG, an attention-guided hierarchical RAG framework that addresses this trade-off by organizing sentence-level chunks into progressively larger but semantically coherent units, using learned inter-sentence attention to construct a binary chunking tree. Unlike prior approaches that rely on external LLMs, fixed context expansion, or lossy summarization, SproutRAG learns which attention heads and layers best capture semantic document structure, enabling multi-granularity retrieval without additional LLM calls or compressed summaries. At retrieval time, SproutRAG uses hierarchical beam search to retrieve candidates at multiple granularities, capturing multi-sentence relevance beyond flat retrieval. The framework is trained end-to-end with a joint objective that improves both embeddings and tree structure. Experiments across four benchmarks spanning scientific, legal, and open-domain settings demonstrate that SproutRAG improves information efficiency (IE) by 6.1% on average over the strongest baseline. Code is available on https://github.com/AmirAbaskohi/SproutRAG.

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

CRC-Screen: Certified DNA-Synthesis Hazard Screening Under Taxonomic Shift

作者:

arXiv:2605.00074v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: DNA-synthesis providers screen incoming orders by searching the requested sequence against curated hazard lists. We show that this baseline collapses to a 100% false-flag rate when the hazardous sequence comes from a taxonomic family absent from the reference set: under Conformal Risk Control's certified miss-rate constraint, a low-discrimination signal forces the threshold below the entire test-benign mass. We compose three signals derived from a synthesis order's public annotation: $k$-mer Jaccard similarity to known toxins, the trimmed-mean score of a five-LLM judge panel, and cosine similarity to clustered embedding centroids. Fused under a monotone logistic aggregator and calibrated by Conformal Risk Control, the resulting screener certifies $\mathbb{E}[\mathrm{FNR}] \le \alpha + \mathrm{TV}$, where the additive term is the calibration-to-test distribution shift under family holdout (a certified ceiling of 24-49% across folds). Across ten leave-one-taxonomic-family-out folds at $\alpha=0.05$ on UniProt KW-0800 reviewed toxins, the calibrated screener achieves 0% empirical test miss rate on every fold and 0% test false-flag rate on nine of ten folds. The bound's finite-sample slack $1/(n_{\mathrm{cal}}+1)$ caps the certifiable miss rate at 1.77% on our 200-hazard subsample; reaching procurement-grade $\alpha=10^{-3}$ requires an $18\times$ larger calibration set, which the full reviewed UniProt KW-0800 corpus is large enough to deliver. The binding constraint on certifiable DNA-synthesis screening is calibration data, not algorithms. Code: https://github.com/najmulhasan-code/crc-screen

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

Quantum thermodynamics of the Caldeira-Leggett model with non-equilibrium Gaussian reservoirs

arXiv:2405.00215v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a non-equilibrium version of the Caldeira-Leggett model in which a quantum particle is strongly coupled to a set of engineered reservoirs. The reservoirs are composed by collections of squeezed and displaced thermal modes, in contrast to the standard case in which the modes are assumed to be at equilibrium. The model proves to be very versatile. Strongly displaced/squeezed reservoirs can be used to generate an effective time dependence in the system Hamiltonian and can be identified as sources of pure work. In the case of squeezing, the time dependence is stochastic and breaks the fluctuation-dissipation relation, this can be reconciled with the second law of thermodynamics by correctly accounting for the energy used to generate the initial non-equilibrium conditions. To go beyond the average description and compute the full heat statistics, we treat squeezing and displacement as generalized Hamiltonians on a modified Keldysh contour. As an application of this technique, we show the quantum-classical correspondence between the heat statistics in the non-equilibrium Caldeira-Leggett model and the statistics of a classical Langevin particle under the action of squeezed and displaced colored noises. Finally, we discuss thermodynamic symmetries of the heat generating function, proving a fluctuation theorem for the energy balance and showing that the conservation of energy at the trajectory level emerges in the classical limit.

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

Density Ridge Selective Prediction for LLM and VLM Hallucination Detection under Calibration Label Scarcity

Hallucination detection in large language and vision-language models is increasingly framed as selective prediction, where a detector assigns a confidence score and abstains when confidence is low. Unsupervised sampling detectors (Semantic Entropy) avoid labels but plateau in quality, while supervised probes attain stronger in-distribution scores yet degrade sharply when calibration labels are scarce. We recover the response manifold of an LLM as the density ridge of a kernel density estimate built on a six-dimensional kinematic feature map of hidden state generation trajectories. A test generation is scored by the negated Euclidean distance from its projected feature point to the nearest ridge vertex, yielding a low-dimensional geometric skeleton of the stochastic output distribution. We evaluate against Semantic Entropy, topological methods, and log-probability on six QA benchmarks (HaluEval-QA, TriviaQA, GSM8K, POPE, ScienceQA, A-OKVQA) using eight text and vision LLMs in a deliberately label-scarce protocol ($n_{cal}{=}200$ queries, $N{=}5$ generations). Our ridge-based score beats on AUROC with 5-20 points gain, while demonstrating tempered degradation under calibration-label scarcity.

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

Manifold-Orthogonal Dual-spectrum Extrapolation for Parameterized Physics-Informed Neural Networks

arXiv:2603.13751v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have achieved notable success in modeling dynamical systems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs). To avoid computationally expensive retraining under new physical conditions, parameterized PINNs (P$^2$INNs) commonly adapt pre-trained operators using singular value decomposition (SVD) for out-of-distribution (OOD) regimes. However, SVD-based fine-tuning often suffers from rigid subspace locking and truncation of important high-frequency spectral modes, limiting its ability to capture complex physical transitions. While parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods appear to be promising alternatives, applying conventional adapters such as LoRA to P$^2$INNs introduces a severe Pareto trade-off, as additive updates increase parameter overhead and disrupt the structured physical manifolds inherent in operator representations. To address these limitations, we propose Manifold-Orthogonal Dual-spectrum Extrapolation (MODE), a lightweight micro-architecture designed for physics operator adaptation. MODE decomposes physical evolution into complementary mechanisms including principal-spectrum dense mixing that enables cross-modal energy transfer within frozen orthogonal bases, residual-spectrum awakening that activates high-frequency spectral components through a single trainable scalar, and affine Galilean unlocking that explicitly isolates spatial translation dynamics. Experiments on challenging PDE benchmarks including the 1D Convection–Diffusion–Reaction equation and the 2D Helmholtz equation demonstrate that MODE achieves strong out-of-distribution generalization while preserving the minimal parameter complexity of native SVD and outperforming existing PEFT-based baselines.

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

Beyond Accuracy: Measuring Bias Acknowledgment in Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Responsible AI Evaluation

arXiv:2606.15127v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reasoning models are increasingly used in settings where the final answer is not the only object of review: educational tools may show students intermediate steps, decision-support systems may require human oversight, and audit workflows may inspect traces for misleading or biased input. In such settings, two responses can receive the same final-answer score while differing in whether the trace explicitly flags injected biasing content. Accuracy-only evaluation collapses these cases. We study this gap as a measurement blind spot for responsible evaluation and introduce a minimal trace-level diagnostic with two axes: susceptibility (whether the bias breaks a previously correct answer) and acknowledgment (whether the trace contains a rubric-defined surface reference to the injected content). Across thousands of biased GSM8K trials, GPT-4o and Claude Sonnet~4 have similar susceptibility rates ($1.3\%$ vs.\ $1.2\%$) but substantially different acknowledgment rates ($13.0\%$ vs.\ $75.0\%$) under the same rubric.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

DecNefSimulator: A Modular, Interpretable Framework for Decoded Neurofeedback Simulation Using Generative Models

arXiv:2511.14555v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Decoded Neurofeedback (DecNef) is a promising non-invasive approach to brain modulation with wide-ranging applications in neuromedicine and cognitive neuroscience. However, progress in DecNef research remains constrained by subject-dependent learning variability, reliance on indirect measures to quantify progress, and the high cost and time demands of experimentation. We present DecNefSimulator, a modular and interpretable simulation framework that formalizes DecNef as a machine learning problem. Beyond providing a virtual laboratory, DecNefSimulator enables researchers to model, analyze and understand neurofeedback dynamics. Using latent variable generative models as simulated participants, DecNefSimulator allows direct observation of internal cognitive states and systematic evaluation of how different protocol designs and subject characteristics influence learning. We demonstrate how this approach can (i) reproduce empirical phenomena of DecNef learning, (ii) identify conditions under which DecNef feedback fails to induce learning, and (iii) guide the design of more robust and reliable DecNef protocols in silico before human implementation. In summary, DecNefSimulator bridges computational modeling and cognitive neuroscience, offering a principled foundation for methodological innovation, robust protocol design, and ultimately, a deeper understanding of DecNef-based brain modulation.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

ChatPlanner: A Large Language Model Framework for Personalized Public Transit Routing

arXiv:2606.15315v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Personalized public transit routing in public transit systems remains challenging due to the difficulty of capturing and integrating diverse user preferences into routing algorithms. This paper presents ChatPlanner, a novel framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to enable preference aware public transit routing. Our approach employs fine-tuned LLMs with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to extract routing parameters and interpret nuanced user preferences from natural language queries, subsequently integrating these preferences into the objective function of a public transit routing algorithm. This study designs preference aware datasets incorporating eight personas and five contexts to establish scoring standards for both fine-tuning and RAG. This work conducted three experiments to validate the solutions' feasibility, extraction of routing information and preferences, and solution set quality and completeness. Results demonstrate that ChatPlanner generates feasible solutions reliably. Fine-tuning enforces the required output structure and learns general preference patterns, while RAG provides query-specific context to resolve imprecise or conversational expressions and calibrate continuous scores. The combination of both achieves the highest accuracy in routing information extraction and user preference interpretation. Results based on selected case studies show that by capturing user preferences, ChatPlanner identifies valuable solutions across different dimensions that existing route planners overlook, generating more valuable route alternatives. This research establishes a new paradigm for integrating natural language understanding into transportation optimization.

12.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

A Unified Approach to Beta Moments, Combinatorial Identities, and Random Walks

arXiv:2605.05420v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The study of random walks has increasingly been popular across diverse disciplines such as statistics, mathematics, quantum physics, where they are used to model paths consisting of successive random steps in a mathematical space. A fundamental quantity of interest is the probability that a simple symmetric random walk returns to the origin after 2n steps. In this paper, we develop a unified probabilistic approach that connects the return probabilities in arbitrary dimensions with moment representations. Using this framework, we provide probabilistic proofs of several combinatorial identities involving beta and gamma functions, and derive new combinatorial identities in general dimensions.

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

SheafStain: Sheaf-Theoretic Schrödinger Bridge for Spatially and Biologically Coherent Virtual Staining

Current virtual staining approaches offer the potential for time- and cost-efficient biomarker quantification in cancer diagnostics and prognostics. However, patch-wise inference for gigapixel whole slide images (WSIs) fails to maintain spatial continuity, yielding artifacts that cause catastrophic mismatches with ground-truth images. Although pathology Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) offer rich representations, their self-attention causes varying global contexts to produce inconsistent embeddings for the same physical region. We formalize and validate this ``context contamination'' as a sheaf-theoretic problem where these embeddings form a presheaf that violates the gluing axiom. To address this, we propose SheafStain, a new approach that reinterprets VFM features as sheaf-like sections for spatially and biologically coherent virtual staining. Specifically, SheafStain integrates class and patch tokens into a Schrödinger Bridge framework as sheaf-like sections. While the class token anchors biological consistency, patch tokens form a per-position spatial map. A backbone co-pretrained on Hematoxylin \& Eosin (H\&E) and Immunohistochemistry (IHC) yields non-degenerate cross-stain stalks, so a single VFM feature space supervises both input conditioning and output stain alignment. Departing from prior work that evaluates on isolated $256 \times 256$ patches and either random-crops or resizes the $1024 \times 1024$ ground truth, we translate at $256 \times 256$ and evaluate on the stitched $1024 \times 1024$ outputs across HER2, ER, PR, and Ki-67. SheafStain demonstrates promising results against six prior methods while mitigating patch-boundary stitching artifacts. Code will soon be released.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

REFLEX: Reflective Evolution from LLM Experience

作者:

Large multimodal language models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for guiding evolutionary search toward interpretable programmatic policies. However, existing frameworks rely on a monolithic model call to simultaneously interpret visual behavioral evidence and synthesize corrective code. This diagnosis-repair entanglement creates an opaque feedback loop, obscuring the rationale behind mutations and preventing the retention of algorithmic insights across independent runs. To achieve auditable and efficient policy search, we argue that visual diagnosis must be structurally decoupled from code generation. We present REFLEX, a train-free evolutionary framework that operationalizes this decoupling. In REFLEX, a vision-enabled Critic first distills task-specific behavioral evidence into structured, auditable diagnoses. Subsequently, a text-optimized Actor synthesizes child policies using these diagnoses alongside a persistent, self-evolving Skill Memory of reusable code snippets. This architecture not only provides transparent mutation traces but also enables cross-run programmatic knowledge transfer. Extensive evaluations across control benchmarks (Lunar Lander, Acrobot, Pendulum) and a 36-dimensional antenna array synthesis task demonstrate exceptional sample efficiency. Notably, REFLEX solves Acrobot and Pendulum in under 10 LLM calls and reaches a best Normalized Weighted Score of 1.092 on Lunar Lander, achieving highly competitive final performance while significantly accelerating the early-stage discovery of transparent policies.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Adiabatically-induced Kawaguchi geometry and jerk in quantum-classical systems

arXiv:2606.16037v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Adiabatically eliminating the quantum degrees of freedom in a mixed quantum-classical system produces an effective force in the classical equation of motion. The elimination can be made to any order in the adiabatic parameter, generating a series of higher order forces. By applying a sequence of near-identity unitary transformations to the quantum state, we derive a hierarchy of increasingly accurate effective actions for the classical variables. The third order Euler-Lagrange equation is non-Newtonian as the force depends on the jerk, the third order time derivative of position. We find that the third order terms induce a special kind of Kawaguchi geometry on the space of classical variables. This geometry is characterized by an almost symplectic structure and a differential line element that depends on the acceleration in addition to the velocity. Our results can be used to efficiently capture higher order nonadiabatic effects in molecular dynamics simulations.

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

NARRAS: Edge-Triggered Distributed Inference for CSI-Based Localization in Vehicular IoT Networks

arXiv:2606.11914v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: CSI-based localization with spatially distributed antenna arrays exposes a basic resource trade-off. Each array can provide a rich view of the channel, but forwarding observations from all arrays to a fusion center is wasteful when only a few carry useful information, and the shared uplink supports only a limited number of simultaneous transmissions. We let each array decide locally whether its current observation is worth reporting, subject to a budget on the average number of active transmitters. We refer to this abstraction as Edge-Triggered Distributed Inference (ETDI). It captures a broader class of task-oriented communication problems where resource-constrained devices share an access channel for a common inference task. We instantiate ETDI for CSI-based localization, a common scenario in vehicular IoT networks. Spatially distributed remote antenna arrays (RAAs) encode local channel state information (CSI) from user equipment (UE) transmissions into latent features, and the fusion center estimates the UE position from the subset of reported features. We propose NARRAS, a decentralized reporting policy in which each RAA combines a recurrent summary of its recent observations with a memory of the last latent it transmitted. Training controls an explicit activity budget through differentiable activity penalties and validation-calibrated deterministic thresholds, and uses channel-chart regularization to shape the latent geometry. Experiments show that, at comparable uplink activity, NARRAS improves localization accuracy over learned and heuristic sparse-reporting strategies, while dense full-report models remain useful budget-free references. In low-activity regimes, chart regularization further reduces high-percentile localization errors, suggesting that geometry-aware latent representations are more robust under sparse reporting.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Reliability without Validity: A Systematic, Large-Scale Evaluation of LLM-as-a-Judge Models Across Agreement, Consistency, and Bias

LLM-as-a-Judge has become the dominant evaluation paradigm for language models, but judge validation in practice relies on exact-match agreement, a metric that does not correct for chance and systematically overstates discriminative ability. We present the largest systematic evaluation of LLM-as-a-Judge to date: 21 judges from nine providers across MT-Bench, JudgeBench, and RewardBench, evaluated under three protocols (agreement, consistency, bias audit) over 118 runs and approximately 541,000 individual judgments. Four findings emerge, consistent across the full cohort, including the April 2026 frontier: kappa deflation between exact match and Cohen's kappa is universal (33–41 pp on MT-Bench), judge rankings shift by up to 14 positions across benchmarks, high test–retest reliability (>0.95) coexists with severe position bias (>0.10) in two production-deployed judges (instantiating a consistency–bias paradox), and verbosity bias is small (

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

Right Predictions, Misleading Explanations: On the Vulnerability of Vision-Language Model Explanations

Explanation mechanisms are increasingly used to support transparency and trust in vision-language models (VLMs), particularly in settings where model decisions require human oversight. However, the robustness of these explanations remains insufficiently understood. In this work, we investigate whether explanation heatmaps in VLMs, particularly CLIP-based models, faithfully reflect model reasoning under adversarial conditions. We show that explanation maps can be systematically manipulated while preserving the model's original prediction, revealing a disconnect between predictive behavior and explanation faithfulness. To study this vulnerability, we introduce X-Shift, a novel grey-box attack that perturbs patch-level visual representations to redirect explanation heatmaps toward semantically irrelevant regions without altering the predicted output. Unlike conventional adversarial attacks that aim to induce misclassification, X-Shift specifically targets the integrity of the explanation process itself. The attack operates without modifying model parameters and generalizes across multiple CLIP architectures and explanation methods. We evaluate the proposed approach on ImageNet-1k, MS-COCO, and Flickr30K, demonstrating consistent degradation in explanation alignment under imperceptible perturbations while maintaining prediction stability. Furthermore, standard prediction-oriented adversarial attacks fail to reproduce the same explanation-shifting behavior even under substantially larger perturbation budgets. Our findings highlight a fundamental limitation of current explanation mechanisms in VLMs and raise concerns about their use as reliable indicators of model trustworthiness in high-impact applications.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Beyond Reasoning Gains: Mitigating General-Capability Forgetting in Large Reasoning Models

arXiv:2510.21978v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has delivered impressive gains in mathematical and multimodal reasoning and has become a standard post-training paradigm for contemporary language and vision-language models. However, the RLVR recipe introduces a significant risk of capability regression, in which models forget foundational skills after prolonged training without employing regularization strategies. We empirically confirm this concern, observing that open-source reasoning models suffer performance degradation on core capabilities such as perception and faithfulness. While imposing regularization terms like KL divergence can help prevent deviation from the base model, these terms are computed on the current task and therefore do not guarantee preservation of broader knowledge. Meanwhile, commonly used experience replay across heterogeneous domains makes it nontrivial to decide how much training emphasis each objective should receive. To address this, we propose RECAP-a replay strategy with dynamic objective reweighting for general knowledge preservation. Our reweighting mechanism adapts online using short-horizon signals of convergence and instability, shifting the post-training focus away from saturated objectives and toward underperforming or volatile ones. Our method is end-to-end and readily applicable to existing RLVR pipelines without training additional models or heavy tuning. Extensive experiments on benchmarks using Qwen2.5-VL-3B and Qwen2.5-VL-7B demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which not only preserves general capabilities but also improves reasoning by enabling more flexible trade-offs among in-task rewards.

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

i1: A Simple and Fully Open Recipe for Strong Text-to-Image Models

Diffusion models have consistently driven progress in text-to-image generation. However, it is challenging to attribute recent progress to specific modeling and data choices: state-of-the-art open-weight models provide limited ablations, and do not disclose their training data and full training details. The research community needs fully open (weights, data, and code) models as a foundation for further research; yet existing fully open models still fall significantly short of leading models in performance. In this project, we conduct a systematic investigation of the modeling and data design choices in text-to-image diffusion training and inference with 300+ controlled experiments totaling 700K+ TPU v6e hours. Our experiments highlight several empirical findings (e.g., equal weighting is a strong default for mixing curated datasets) and simple design decisions (e.g., larger text encoder adapters improve performance with minimal added parameters) for training strong models. Guided by these insights, we train i1, a 3B-parameter text-to-image diffusion model using only publicly available datasets. i1 is competitive with leading models on five representative benchmarks (GenEval, DPG, PRISM, CVTG-2K, and LongText), and outperforms the best existing fully open model by 29.5 absolute percentage points on average. We provide the i1 checkpoints, training and inference code, and the data processing pipeline. Together, our findings and the i1 recipe establish a practical foundation for future open research in text-to-image diffusion models. Our code is available at https://github.com/zlab-princeton/i1.

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

Realizing Native INT8 Compute for Diffusion Transformers on Consumer GPUs: A Fused INT8 GEMM Kernel for Ideogram 4.0

arXiv:2606.14598v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training INT8 (W8A8) quantization of diffusion transformers is widely deployed as a speed optimization, yet on consumer Ampere GPUs it is frequently slower than the FP8 and NF4 alternatives it is meant to beat. We trace this to a software artifact: the production "INT8" forward quantizes weights and activations only to immediately dequantize them back to bf16 and run a bf16 matrix multiply, never engaging the GPU's INT8 tensor cores, so the hardware's compute advantage is left entirely unrealized. We close this gap with a single fused Triton INT8 GEMM (int8xint8->int32 on Ampere tensor cores, with per-token x per-channel dequantization and bias folded into the epilogue, autotuned per GEMM shape) dropped into the Ideogram 4.0 diffusion transformer's linear layers in place of the dequantize-to-bf16 path. In the kernel, the int8xint8->int32 accumulation is bit-exact against torch._int_mm and the dequantized output matches the reference at cosine similarity 1.0 with no NaNs, running 2.8-4.2x faster than bf16 per GEMM. End to end it delivers a ~1.1x (~9-10%) speedup at 768px, and at 1024px it generates an image in 156.5 s on a single RTX 3090, faster than the single-card NF4 (164.5 s) and FP8 (172.9 s) baselines, at no measurable quality cost on these point estimates (PickScore/CLIPScore). INT8 thus goes from the slowest variant to the fastest, and 1024px becomes single-GPU feasible. The primary speed criterion (beat FP8, by ~9.5%) is comfortably met; the NF4 margin (~4.9%, single-run n=4) is within run-to-run variance we did not quantify and is best read as consistent with meeting the stretch target. We close with an honest deployment map: the win is specific to consumer Ampere, and on A100 and B200 the same kernel loses to those cards' fast native bf16/FP8 paths.

23.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-21

Novel symptoms associated with eclampsia could improve detection and save lives

by Alice Beardmore-Gray, Andrew Shennan Eclampsia is a life-threatening complication of pre-eclampsia, yet remains difficult to predict. In this Perspective, Alice Beardmore-Gray and Andrew Shennan highlight a recent study that identifies 10 novel prodromal symptoms of eclampsia, with potential to better predict which women are at risk and therefore reduce delays in intervention.

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

Evaluating LLM Personalization via Semantic Constraint Verification

Current evaluation paradigms for Large Language Model (LLM) personalization rely heavily on brittle surface-matching metrics or computationally expensive LLM-as-a-judge protocols, both of which lack interpretability. To address these limitations, we introduce Natural Language Inference Constraint Verification (NLICV), a scalable, semantically invariant framework that maps sentence meanings to truth-condition sets to verify personalization constraints via a Natural Language Inference (NLI) model. Moving beyond binary scoring, NLICV categorizes LLM behaviors into four distinct modes: personalization, generalization, sycophancy, and failure. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NLICV aligns closely with human annotations while drastically reducing the latency and token costs associated with LLM judges (up to 2100 inference speedup). Finally, through an ablation-based procedure, NLICV pinpoints the exact sentences driving the constraint verification, yielding faithful, understandable evidence for its evaluations.

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

Demystifying Variance in Circuit Discovery of LLMs

arXiv:2606.16920v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Circuit discovery is a key technique in mechanistic interpretability to pinpoint the model components that are crucial for performing a given task. Although the current state-of-the-art method (EAP-IG) performs well on the metric of (un)faithfulness, it suffers from substantial variability. This includes resampling variance, where the circuit changes when we probe with a new batch of data from the same distribution; rephrasing variance, where the discovered circuit shifts when the prompts are rephrased; and sample-wise variance, where a circuit with low population unfaithfulness exhibits large fluctuations in unfaithfulness across individual samples. This paper studies the roots of these variances. We demonstrate that CEAP, our new circuit discovery method that improves upon EAP-IG with a theoretical guarantee, can substantially lessen resampling variance. We further show that rephrasing variance arises because prompts with different templates tend to activate different circuits in the model. This leads us to argue that it may be challenging to find a comprehensive circuit that explains and controls the model's behavior on a task, which can be expressed in countless templates, suggesting that LLMs may be inherently hard to steer. We show that sparsity, which has been claimed to form more compact and interpretable task circuits, fails to solve this problem. Regarding sample-wise variance, we argue that it is largely benign: extremely poor unfaithfulness scores often stem from how unfaithfulness is defined, rather than from defects in the measured circuits. We show that the magnitude of unfaithfulness is affected by selective contribution scaling, a neural mechanism that accounts for the extremely poor scores sometimes observed.