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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

A Low-Regularity Semigroup Sewing Lemma via Quotient Structures

arXiv:2606.16164v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We develop a low-regularity Sewing theory for the semigroup coboundary $\hat\delta=\delta-a$ associated with a strongly continuous semigroup $S$. Unlike the ordinary low-regularity Sewing problem, the semigroup setting has an intrinsic algebraic non-uniqueness below the threshold $1$, in the sense that solutions are canonical only modulo semigroup cocycles. Accordingly, the natural target is a quotient space rather than an increment space. We identify this quotient structure and construct the corresponding semigroup Sewing map. The construction uses a frozen terminal-time transform, which rewrites semigroup defects, for each terminal time, as ordinary low-regularity Sewing problems on a frozen simplex. This reduction, however, does not by itself produce a genuine semigroup increment; the main additional step is to prove that the frozen solution classes are compatible as the terminal time varies and hence assemble into a canonical quotient class for $\hat\delta$. This yields canonical classes for $0

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Multi-domain AD risk burden and plasma biomarkers in cognitively unimpaired adults

Introduction: Alzheimer's disease (AD) pathology accumulates decades before symptom onset, yet how the cumulative effect of genetic, familial, and modifiable lifestyle risk burden jointly affects plasma biomarker levels and trajectories in cognitively unimpaired older adults remains unknown. Methods: We analyzed data from 261 participants in the PREVENT-AD cohort. A composite risk score integrating APOE e4 status, polygenic score, family history, and modifiable/lifestyle risk was examined against six plasma biomarkers using linear regression and linear mixed-effects models. Results: APOE e4 was the strongest predictor of plasma biomarker levels. Higher composite risk burden was associated with elevated ptau181, ptau217, ptau217/Ab42, and GFAP levels, and lower Ab42/40 levels. A higher risk burden was predictive of accelerated ptau181 accumulation. Discussion: Cumulative AD risk burden is broadly associated with plasma biomarker levels and specifically predicts accelerated ptau181 accumulation in cognitively unimpaired older adults, supporting structured composite risk profiling as a framework for AD risk stratification.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

DynamicPTQ: Mitigating Activation Quantization Collapse via Residual-Stream Dynamics

arXiv:2606.12487v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training quantization (PTQ) is essential for efficient large language model inference, but reliably quantizing activations remains challenging when weights, activations, and KV caches are all quantized to 4-bit precision. A key difficulty lies in massive activations, whose extreme values dominate the activation range and amplify quantization errors. State-of-the-art methods mainly mitigate massive activations through transformation-based smoothing, such as orthogonal rotations and affine scaling, but overlook the cross-layer dynamics of the residual stream. In this paper, we show that massive activations emerge and disappear in a phase-wise pattern across network depth, triggering large residual changes. These changes cause newly injected layer-wise updates to dominate the 4-bit quantization scale and weaken historical residual information. To characterize this behavior, we introduce Jump Ratio and Historical Feature SNR. This suggests that static transformation-based smoothing cannot fully resolve dynamic quantization instability caused by cross-layer residual changes. Based on this analysis, we propose DynamicPTQ, a Dynamic Post-Training Quantization policy for phase-aware mixed-precision activation quantization. DynamicPTQ identifies quantization-sensitive layers from residual-stream dynamics and assigns 8-bit activation precision only to these layers, while keeping weights, KV caches, and other activations in 4-bit precision. It can be directly integrated with strong PTQ baselines such as QuaRot, SpinQuant, and FlatQuant. Experiments on LLaMA-2 and LLaMA-3 show that DynamicPTQ consistently improves perplexity and zero-shot QA performance under W4A4KV4 quantization, while achieving 1.05 to 1.07 times throughput improvement with modest memory overhead. These results demonstrate a practical path toward robust low-bit LLM inference.

04.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

VFUSE: Virulent Feature Understanding with Sparse autoEncoders

Generative models have shown remarkable progress in a variety of domains such as protein design, but such power enables the opaque generation of hazardous proteins. In this work, we introduce VFUSE (Virulent Feature Understanding with Sparse autoEncoders), a mechanistic interpretability approach that trains SAEs on diffusion-transformer activations to audit protein models for hazard-aware features. We apply VFUSE to RoseTTAFold3 and RFDiffusion3, popular open-weight models for protein folding and synthesis. We find that for certain blocks, linear probes detect hazardous designs significantly better when fit in the SAE latent space over the original model's representations: improving interpretability without sacrificing model performance. Furthermore, we identify monosemantic features from the SAE that fire only on hazardous designs at up to AUROC 0.84 (q < 10-13).

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

Rethinking the Pointer Loss in Table Structure Recognition: Geometry-Aware Pointer Loss for Spatial Locality

Table Structure Recognition (TSR) using a pointer network achieves impressive results by predicting HTML sequences while aligning tags to detected text (or cell) regions. However, our analysis reveals that when pointer networks fail, 79.6% of errors occur between spatially adjacent cells (Manhattan distance

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

Retrocausal capacity of a quantum channel: Communicating through noisy closed timelike curves

arXiv:2509.08965v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the capacity of a quantum channel for retrocausal communication, where messages are transmitted backward in time, from a sender in the future to a receiver in the past, through a noisy postselected closed timelike curve mathematically represented by the channel. We completely characterize the one-shot retrocausal quantum and classical capacities, and we show that the corresponding asymptotic capacities are equal to the average and sum, respectively, of the channel's max-information and its regularized Doeblin information. This endows these information measures with a novel operational interpretation. Furthermore, our characterization can be generalized beyond quantum channels to all completely positive maps. This imposes information-theoretic limits on transmitting messages via postselected-teleportation-like mechanisms with arbitrary initial- and final-state boundary conditions, including those considered in various black-hole final-state models.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Data Bias Mitigation under Coverage Constraints & The Price of Fairness

arXiv:2606.20461v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine learning models have been shown to exhibit discriminatory outcomes or degraded performance for individuals at the intersection of multiple sensitive attributes, such as race and gender. This stems in part from two interrelated challenges: the lack of principled measures for quantifying bias (potentially intersectional), and insufficient representation of intersectional subgroups in training data. We extend a recent bias mitigation framework to incorporate coverage constraints that enforce sufficient representation across groups, including intersectional subgroups. Since achieving exactly zero bias for all groups may not be data efficient (meaning it may require large amounts of data), our solution trades small approximation errors in bias for greater data efficiency while satisfying coverage constraints. We also formulate bias mitigation as an integer linear program that optimizes over all mitigation strategies, and characterize the price of fairness, the minimum data modification cost, as a function of fairness tolerance. This is essential both for legal compliance, where regulations may mandate specific fairness thresholds, and for data governance, enabling practitioners to make informed trade-offs between bias reduction and data modification (particularly, data purchasing) costs. We evaluate our techniques on publicly available datasets, demonstrating that bias mitigation via our framework preserves predictive accuracy across multiple classifiers, and that coverage constraints, while motivated by statistical considerations, are essential for preserving downstream ML performance.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Fanar-Sadiq: A Multi-Agent Architecture for Grounded Islamic QA

Large language models (LLMs) can answer religious knowledge queries fluently, yet they often hallucinate and misattribute sources, which is especially consequential in Islamic settings where users expect grounding in canonical texts (Qur'an and Hadith) and jurisprudential (fiqh) nuance. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) improves grounding, however, a single retrieve-then-generate pipeline is insufficient for diverse Islamic queries, including verbatim scripture, citation-grounded guidance, and rule-constrained computations such as zakat and inheritance. To address these challenges, we present Fanar-Sadiq, a bilingual Arabic-English Islamic QA system built on a multi-agent, tool-augmented architecture. It is a core component of the Fanar AI platform. Fanar-Sadiq routes Islamic queries to specialized modules within an agentic tool architecture. It supports intent-aware routing, retrieval-grounded fiqh answers with normalized citations and verification traces, exact verse lookup with quotation validation, and deterministic Sunni zakat and inheritance calculators with madhhab-sensitive branching. We evaluate the end-to-end system on public Islamic QA benchmarks and show strong effectiveness and efficiency. It is publicly accessible through an API and Web application and has received over 1.9M accesses in less than a year (https://api.fanar.qa/docs).

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

SCALE: Self-uncertainty Conditioned Adaptive Looking and Execution for Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2602.04208v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for general-purpose robotic control, with test-time scaling (TTS) gaining attention to enhance robustness beyond training. However, existing TTS methods for VLAs require additional training, verifiers, and multiple forward passes, making them impractical for deployment. Moreover, they intervene only at action decoding while keeping visual representations fixed-insufficient under perceptual ambiguity, where reconsidering how to perceive is as important as deciding what to do. To address these limitations, we propose SCALE, a simple inference strategy that jointly modulates visual perception and action based on 'self-uncertainty', inspired by uncertainty-driven exploration in Active Inference theory-requiring no additional training, no verifier, and only a single forward pass. SCALE broadens exploration in both perception and action under high uncertainty, while focusing on exploitation when confident-enabling adaptive execution across varying conditions. Experiments on simulated and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that SCALE improves state-of-the-art VLAs and outperforms existing TTS methods while maintaining single-pass efficiency.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Library-Aware Doubles and Iterative Repair for Large Language Model-Generated Unit Tests in OpenSIL Firmware

arXiv:2606.19725v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Validating changes in low-level C firmware is expensive because unit tests (UTs) are fragile under strict build constraints, where missing headers, unresolved symbols, and dependency mismatches frequently prevent compilation and linking. This study introduces an automated UT authoring workflow for the Open-Source Silicon Initialization Library (openSIL) firmware codebase maintained by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) that reduces manual effort through a large language model (LLM) guided multi-agent pipeline. The workflow combines automated generation of test scaffolds, library-aware creation or reuse of stubs, mocks, and fakes, and an iterative compile-dispatch repair loop driven by build logs and line-coverage feedback. We evaluate the approach using compilation success, repair iterations, dispatch success, and line coverage, with time, cost, and token usage as secondary measures. Across 76 functions under test, the workflow generated compilable UTs for 73 functions. In a configuration without line coverage guidance or retrieval augmentation, mean line coverage reached 73.9%. On a 48-function subset evaluated under both configurations, mean line coverage reached 98.8% with line-coverage guidance alone and reached 94.7% when combined with vector-database retrieval. Results show that automated generation-and-repair pipelines can substantially improve UT creation efficiency and coverage for constrained firmware environments while reducing manual debugging effort.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

The Metric Picks the Winner: Evaluation Choice Flips Model Rankings for Drug-Response Prediction in Unseen Chemistry

arXiv:2606.12639v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Predicting how a cell's transcriptome responds to a drug it has never seen is a core, hard problem in computational cell biology: recent benchmarks show complex models often fail to beat trivial baselines once test compounds are held out by chemistry. We study one cell line and assay, THP-1 cells profiled by DRUG-seq, scored by the active-compound weighted MSE(wMSE) of the VCPI prediction contest. We propose a staged approach: dumb baselines (untreated control and mean training-compound response) that the field keeps failing to beat; non-parametric retrieval (a Tanimoto-weighted average of a held-out compound's nearest training compounds); and a fusion stage combining a frozen chemistry embedding with retrieval-support features to predict the residual over the mean, with an uncertainty head and gene programs. On the released VCPI THP-1 drug-seq data (14,026 training compounds), under a Bemis-Murcko scaffold split, the model ranking inverts depending on the metric. Under an inverse-variance per-gene proxy, a regularized linear regression on Morgan fingerprints appears to win over the deep models, retrieval, and ChemBERTa – the textbook "simple baselines win" result. But under the contest's true active-set metric (per-(gene, compound) Mejia weights, validated against the official scorer; mean baseline 0.535 vs the organizers' 0.507 reference), that reverses: the deep models win, our fusion decoder significantly beats the linear fingerprint baseline (-0.012 wMSE, paired bootstrap p < 10^-4), and the proxy's winner becomes the worst chemistry-aware predictor. Picking the metric picks the winner – to our knowledge the first demonstration on real held-out drug chemistry of the metric-calibration effect established largely on genetic perturbation. We release a reproducible pipeline wired to the official scorer that emits a valid submission over the real 1064 x 12,995 grid.

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

Learning Permutation Distributions via Reflected Diffusion on Ranks

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

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

How reliable are LLMs when it comes to playing dice?

We investigate the probabilistic reasoning capabilities of large language models through a controlled benchmarking study on discrete probability problems. We constructed two datasets, respectively a set of standard exercises and a set of counterintuitive exercises, designed to trigger heuristic reasoning, and evaluated 8 state-of-the-art models, each tested with and without Chain-of-Thought prompting. Models achieve an average accuracy of 0.96 on standard problems but only 0.59 on counterintuitive ones. We further provide empirical evidence of token bias: performance drops by over 20% when canonical formulations are replaced by disguised variants. Embedding misleading suggestions in the prompt reduces performance by up to 34%, with no model proving immune. Taken together, the reported findings suggest that current LLMs are not yet genuine probabilistic reasoners, despite their success in advanced mathematical problems.

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

The More the Merrier: Combining Properties for ABox Abduction under Repair Semantics for ELbot

arXiv:2606.19197v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Abduction is a central approach to explain missing entailments from a knowledge base by providing a hypothesis, that would, if added to the knowledge base, make the missing entailment become true. Abduction under repair semantics has recently been investigated in detail, where several desirable properties and optimality criteria were considered, such as signature-restrictions and minimality in size and of introduced conflicts. Naturally, hypotheses that satisfy more than one of these properties or combine a property with an optimality criterion would be even more desirable for applications. So far, such hypotheses have not been investigated in the literature. In the present paper, we consider the ABox abduction problem for hypotheses satisfying more than one property or additional optimality criteria, for EL_bot under brave and AR semantics. Our main observation is that often requiring additional properties for hypotheses does not lead to an increase of complexity.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

CASR: A Robust Cyclic Framework for Arbitrary Large-Scale Super-Resolution with Distribution Alignment and Self-Similarity Awareness

Arbitrary-Scale SR (ASISR) remains fundamentally limited by cross-scale distribution shift: once the inference scale leaves the training range, noise, blur, and artifacts accumulate sharply. We revisit this challenge from a cross-scale distribution transition perspective and propose CASR, a simple yet highly efficient cyclic SR framework that reformulates ultra-magnification as a sequence of in-distribution scale transitions. This design ensures stable inference at arbitrary scales while requiring only a single model. CASR tackles two major bottlenecks: distribution drift across iterations and patch-wise diffusion inconsistencies. The proposed SSAM module aligns structural distributions via superpixel aggregation, preventing error accumulation, while SARM module restores high-frequency textures by enforcing correlation-guided consistency and preserving self-similarity structure through correlation alignment. Despite using only a single model, our approach significantly reduces distribution drift, preserves long-range texture consistency, and achieves superior generalization even at extreme magnification.

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

VISTA: Scale-Aware Visual Navigation via Action History Conditioning

arXiv:2606.17294v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision Navigation Foundation Models (VNMs) promise end-to-end learned navigation policies capable of zero-shot deployment across diverse embodiments and environments. To maintain generality, many vision-based navigation models predict normalized actions. However, this normalization introduces a critical deployment vulnerability: applying different scaling factors to the same normalized trajectory alters its physical geometry, which degrades navigation performance and increases collision risks. We address this vulnerability by conditioning the model on normalized action histories alongside image observations, providing explicit context on the relationship between the model's predictions and the robot's actual physical displacement. Furthermore, current VNMs often struggle in visually repetitive environments that lack distinct features. To resolve this issue, we integrate a DINOv3 encoder, whose richer representations enable our model to capture both spatial and geometric dimensions between observations. VISTA generalizes robustly to out-of-distribution environments, achieving 100% goal prediction accuracy in zero-shot, real-world deployment in Outdoor, Forest and Office settings, and an average of 95% checkpoints crossed, demonstrating consistent path following in unseen environments.

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

Anything Goes? A Crosslinguistic Study of (Im)possible Language Learning in LMs

Do language models (LMs) offer insights into human language learning? A common argument against this idea is that because their architecture and training paradigm are so vastly different from humans, LMs can learn arbitrary inputs as easily as natural languages. We test this claim by training LMs to model impossible and typologically unattested languages. Unlike previous work, which has focused exclusively on English, we conduct experiments on 12 languages from 4 language families with two newly constructed parallel corpora. Our results show that while GPT-2 small can largely distinguish attested languages from their impossible counterparts, it does not achieve perfect separation between all the attested languages and all the impossible ones. We further test whether GPT-2 small distinguishes typologically attested from unattested languages with different NP orders by manipulating word order based on Greenberg's Universal 20. We find that the model's perplexity scores do not distinguish attested vs. unattested word orders, while its performance on the generalization test does. These findings suggest that LMs exhibit some human-like inductive biases, though these biases are weaker than those found in human learners.

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

Generative AI for Managerial Decision-Making under Ambiguity and Sycophancy

arXiv:2603.03970v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is increasingly being integrated into complex business workflows, fundamentally shifting the boundaries of managerial decision-making. However, the reliability of its strategic advice in ambiguous business contexts remains a critical knowledge gap. To address this gap, this study compares multiple GenAI models in their ability to detect ambiguity, examines whether a systematic ambiguity-resolution process improves response quality, and investigates their susceptibility to sycophantic behavior when confronted with flawed managerial directives. Using a novel four-dimensional business ambiguity taxonomy, we conducted a human-in-the-loop experiment across strategic, tactical, and operational scenarios. The resulting decisions were assessed through a human-validated automated evaluation framework based on agreement, actionability, justification quality, and constraint adherence. The results show that our approach not only distinguishes different types of ambiguity, but also reveals how ambiguity resolution systematically changes model behavior. In particular, resolving ambiguities improved decision quality across all managerial levels, with the strongest gains observed in constraint adherence. The analysis further showed that sycophantic behavior is not uniform across models: some models challenged flawed assumptions, whereas others tended to comply with them. This study contributes to the bounded rationality literature by positioning GenAI as a cognitive scaffold that can detect and resolve ambiguities managers might overlook, while demonstrating that its artificial limitations require human oversight to ensure its reliability as a strategic partner.

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

Quantum-Driven Neuromorphic Computing for Million-Qubit-Scale Workloads

arXiv:2606.12968v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce Apollo, a 10000 node p-qubit neuromorphic processor fabricated in 16 nm mixed signal CMOS and operating fully at room temperature with a typical analog core power envelope of about 0.5 W. Its fundamental element, the p-qubit, is a bistable stochastic unit whose continuous time state fluctuations are driven by integrated quantum entropy units that inject true quantum derived randomness. This enables ultrafast stochastic transitions at low energy while preserving a classical state representation. Apollo combines these p-qubits with a high degree Hyperion 256 interconnect topology, allowing efficient embedding of dense Ising and QUBO problems with substantially reduced minor embedding overhead compared with sparse annealing platforms. We show that, through the Suzuki Trotter correspondence, the equilibrium statistics and annealing dynamics of the p-qubit network reproduce key properties of transverse field quantum annealing without cryogenic cooling, long lived coherence, or microwave control. Beyond device level validation, Apollo is evaluated on a three dimensional spin glass benchmark previously used to study quantum advantage in superconducting annealers. Across 300 disorder realizations, Apollo reaches substantially lower ground state energies than reported cryogenic quantum annealing hardware, while remaining distinct from classical simulated annealing and simulated quantum annealing. A 350 nm release candidate device experimentally validates the core p-qubit dynamics, thermodynamic sampling correctness, and continuous time annealing behavior. These results establish Apollo as a room temperature, industrially scalable platform for quantum driven energy based optimization, probabilistic inference, generative modeling, and hybrid classical quantum workflows.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

A refined thermodynamic analysis of nonsecular master equations

arXiv:2606.13504v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a systematic thermodynamic analysis of nonsecular master equations. We consider master equations resulting either from the partial secular and the geometric-arithmetic approximations, two approximations ensuring the positivity of the system's dynamics when some of its transition frequencies are too small to enable the full secular approximation. Both cause the system to relax towards a steady state which is not the Gibbs state of its bare Hamiltonian. Nonetheless, we build a unified, consistent thermodynamic framework for those dynamics. Starting from a microscopic expression of the second law based on system-environment correlations, we employ a systematic perturbation theory to preserve the positivity of the second law despite the approximations done on the dynamics. We show that, in spite of the weak system-bath coupling, the system-bath interaction energy participates to the energy balance, as well as the Lamb-shift. Those extra contributions give rise to work performed by the system on the bath when the former is out of equilibrium. We compare this microscopic entropy production with the definition based on the contractivity of the reduced system dynamics (Spohn inequality). We show that, unlike for secular master equations, the two entropy production rates differ because of the presence of non-vanishing stationary coherences in the energy eigenbasis. However, in the case of a single thermal bath, the difference is purely transient, and no work can be cyclically extracted from the steady-state despite its non-Gibbs form. Finally, we illustrate our results with a simple example, clarifying and completing the thermodynamic picture of Markovian dynamics in the quantum regime.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

X-REFINE: XAI-based RElevance input-Filtering and archItecture fiNe-tuning for channel Estimation

arXiv:2602.22277v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: AI-native architectures are vital for 6G wireless communications. The black-box nature and high complexity of deep learning models employed in critical applications, such as channel estimation, limit their practical deployment. While perturbation-based eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) solutions offer input filtering, they often neglect internal structural optimization. We propose X-REFINE, an XAI-based framework for joint input-filtering and architecture fine-tuning. By utilizing a decomposition-based, sign-stabilized LRP epsilon rule, X-REFINE backpropagates predictions to derive high-resolution relevance scores for both subcarriers and hidden neurons. This enables a reliable optimization that identifies the most reliable model components. Simulation results demonstrate that X-REFINE achieves a superior performance-complexity-interpretability trade-off compared to the external perturbation-based XAI frameworks, significantly reducing computational complexity while maintaining robust bit error rate (BER) performance.

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

SSD: Spatially Speculative Decoding Accelerates Autoregressive Image Generation

Autoregressive models excel in visual generation by treating images as 1D sequences of discrete tokens, mirroring language modeling. However, this flattening discards the intrinsic 2D spatial locality of visual signals, creating severe computational bottlenecks during inference. We introduce Spatially Speculative Decoding (SSD), a framework that aligns the predictive objective with the natural geometry of images. Rather than predicting only the immediate next token in a 1D sequence, our model simultaneously predicts the adjacent horizontal token and the token directly below it. By capitalizing on this 2D spatial correlation, spatially speculative decoding overcomes the memory wall in visual inference. Our approach accelerates autoregressive image generation by up to 13.3x while maintaining high fidelity on DPG-Bench and GenEval. Our results suggest that respecting the underlying geometry of vision unlocks massive computational efficiencies, paving the way for real-time, high-resolution autoregressive generative models.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

IB-HFN: Information Bottleneck-Driven SAR-Optical Fusion Network for High-Fidelity Cloud Removal

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR)-assisted optical cloud removal aims to recover surface information obscured by clouds in optical remote sensing images by exploiting complementary SAR observations. Existing multimodal fusion methods typically rely on direct spatial concatenation and pixel-wise supervision, which can propagate SAR speckle noise into optical reconstruction and lead to over-smoothed results. To address these limitations, we propose an Information Bottleneck-driven High-Fidelity Network (IB-HFN) for SAR-assisted optical cloud removal. IB-HFN employs a dual-stream backbone to preserve modality-specific representations before deep semantic fusion, thereby mitigating premature cross-modal contamination. At the fusion stage, we introduce a Spatial Information Bottleneck Fusion module that compresses SAR features through a channel-wise variational information bottleneck to suppress unstructured speckle noise. In parallel, a local-global gating mechanism predicts clear-sky regions and routes reliable optical details through a Dirac-initialized skip connection, decoupling noise suppression from texture preservation. We further develop a joint optimization strategy that integrates feature-level bottleneck regularization with image-level constraints on reconstruction accuracy, structural consistency, spectral fidelity, and contrastive sharpness. A dynamic weighting schedule balances these objectives to stabilize training and reduce hazy artifacts. Experiments on the SEN12MS-CR dataset under challenging spatio-temporal splits demonstrate that IB-HFN achieves superior structural preservation and spectral fidelity over existing methods.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Expert in Ultrasound Skills: Feasibility of an IMU-video platform to describe technical profiles during focused cardiac ultrasound. Pilot study

Background: Focused cardiac ultrasound (FoCUS) is operator dependent and requires coordinated probe manipulation, image interpretation and iterative visual feedback. Existing assessment approaches often emphasize final image quality or expert rating. We developed Expert in Ultrasound Skills (EXUS) , a platform that synchronizes transducer-mounted inertial measurement unit (IMU) data with ultrasound video, and evaluated its technical feasibility during FoCUS acquisition. Methods: This observational pilot study included 6 operators performing two repetitions of a four-view FoCUS protocol, yielding 12 analytical sessions and 48 planned acquisitions. Feasibility was defined by acquisition completion, video availability, start/stop events, fused IMU-video windows, temporal coverage, complete human label entries and IMU integrity. A 100-image Likert rating task was used to summarize pairwise inter-rater agreement for still-frame image quality assessment. Results: All 48 planned acquisitions were completed with video, start/stop events, fused windows and complete human label entries. Temporal coverage was at least 90% in 47/48 acquisitions. IMU integrity endpoints exceeded the 80% threshold: 43/48 acquisitions had no extreme IMU-derived artifact, 43/48 had no active-segment IMU restart and 44/48 had no complete motion flatline. Mean pairwise exact agreement for the Likert task was 38.9%, with mean quadratic-weighted Cohen's kappa of 0.564. Post hoc profiles varied across duration, visual quality, mechanical load and motor efficiency. Conclusions: EXUS was technically feasible for synchronized IMU-video capture during FoCUS. The pilot supports multimodal acquisition data as a way to describe technical profiles and generate formative feedback hypotheses, but the post hoc indices are not validated competency measures. Keywords: focused cardiac ultrasound; point-of-care ultrasound; inertial measurement unit; medical education; deliberate practice