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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Toward 360-Degree Indoor Panorama Editing via Tuning-Free Diffusion Model with Refocusing Cross-Attention

Zero-shot text-guided diffusion has significantly advanced image editing; however, its practical usability remains constrained by three persistent challenges: prompt brittleness that requires meticulous prompt engineering, spillover edits that unintentionally affect non-target regions, and failures on small or cluttered objects caused by limited fine-grained supervision in training data. We propose FocusDiff (Target-Aware Refocusing for Tuning-Free Diffusion Editing), a tuning-free framework for precise and region-specific image manipulation based on refocusing cross-attention. Given a target region obtained through automated segmentation or manual selection, FocusDiff applies selective blurring to non-edit areas to guide attention toward the masked region while accurately transferring the object's identity, structure, and appearance to the edited output. Integrated context-preserving modules further ensure background fidelity and global coherence, enabling accurate edits from simple text prompts in a single pass. We also extend FocusDiff to 360-degree indoor panorama editing and demonstrate its effectiveness within virtual reality environments. Extensive experiments on our localized editing benchmark LIMB, comprising 30 multi-object images and 100 annotated examples including challenging small-object cases, show that FocusDiff outperforms existing zero-shot editors in text-image alignment and background preservation, achieving superior precision, photorealism, and usability. The project page is available at https://vdkhoi20.github.io/FocusDiff.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Extraction of Glaucoma Diagnosis, Type, and Severity from Clinical Notes using Secure Cloud-based Large Language Models

Purpose: To evaluate the performance of secure cloud-based large language models (LLMs) in extracting glaucoma diagnosis, type, and severity from free-text clinical notes in the electronic health record (EHR). Design: Retrospective chart review analysis. Participants: 1,250 subjects from the Bascom Palmer Ophthalmic Repository. Methods: Clinical notes of glaucoma-related encounters between 2014 and 2024 were extracted from the Bascom Palmer Ophthalmic Repository. Two fellowship-trained glaucoma specialists annotated clinical notes for glaucoma presence, type, and severity at the eye level. The dataset was split into development (10%), validation (10%), and test (80%) sets. Development and validation sets were used for prompt engineering and refinement, and the held-out test set was used for evaluation. Five LLMs (Claude Opus 4.6, DeepSeek-V3.2, GPT-5.2, Grok 4.1, and Qwen3.6-35B-A3B) were accessed via Azure AI Foundry within HIPAA-compliant containers. Model performance was assessed using standard metrics. Clinician-entered ICD-10 codes were also compared with adjudicated labels. Main Outcome Measures: Gwet AC1, accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and F1-score. Results: Inter-grader agreement was high for glaucoma detection (Gwet AC1= 0.930 (95% CI: 0.917-0.945), type classification (Gwet AC1= 0.917 (95% CI: 0.904-0.930), and severity staging (Gwet AC1= 0.901 (95% CI: 0.884-0.916). For glaucoma diagnosis, LLMs demonstrated high overall accuracy, with Claude achieving 97.5%, DeepSeek 96.0%, GPT 96.2%, Grok 94.4%, and Qwen 95.5%. F1 scores for glaucoma detection ranged from 95.4% to 98.9% across models. For glaucoma type classification, accuracies were 97.1%, 94.2%, 94.2%, 94.0%, and 94.4% for Claude, DeepSeek, GPT, Grok, and Qwen, respectively. F1 scores for the most prevalent type (POAG) ranged from 96.3% to 98.9%. For severity staging, accuracies were 95.0%, 94.8%, 94.5%, 94.0%, and 95.2%, respectively, with F1 scores ranging from 89.7% to 96.3% across severity categories and models. ICD-10 codes demonstrated substantially lower performance for type and severity staging, with overall accuracies of 89.2% and 58.5%, respectively. Conclusions: Secure cloud-based LLMs accurately extracted glaucoma diagnosis, type, and severity information from free-text ophthalmology notes, achieving performance approaching expert clinician adjudication while substantially outperforming ICD-based phenotyping approaches, particularly for disease severity classification. These findings demonstrate the potential of LLMs to transform unstructured clinical documentation into scalable, research-ready phenotypic data for large-scale glaucoma cohort development and EHR-based ophthalmic research.

03.
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.

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

TechRAG: Evidence-Gated Multimodal Agentic RAG for Technical Literature Reasoning

arXiv:2606.01613v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper presents an agentic multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework for domain-specific literature reasoning, instantiated on a curated corpus of several thousand papers in intelligent tires, vehicle dynamics, vehicle control, sensing, estimation, and machine learning. Unlike conventional single-pass RAG systems, the proposed architecture uses an autonomous, evidence-gated pipeline that classifies query intent, generates separate text and visual query rewrites, performs hybrid text retrieval with FAISS and BM25 followed by cross-encoder reranking, expands evidence through graph-guided chunk traversal over a Neo4j knowledge graph, and retrieves visual document evidence using ColSmol late-interaction embeddings with MUVERA fixed-dimensional encoding, approximate nearest-neighbor search, and MaxSim reranking. The framework scores evidence sufficiency using a 100-point rubric with hybrid rule-based/LLM review, retries retrieval through drift-guarded reformulation, searches external academic databases through optimize–search–vet loops, merges and deduplicates multimodal evidence, verifies citation integrity, and generates cited answers through Planner, Researcher, Writer, and Critic agents with self-correcting revision. Key contributions include: (i) a scalable multimodal retrieval architecture combining text, graph, and visual evidence over 40,000 document pages; (ii) an interpretable evidence sufficiency and retry mechanism; (iii) a multi-agent generation pipeline with evidence mapping and critic-driven revision; (iv) a domain knowledge graph with LLM-based entity extraction, OpenAlex author validation, and intra-corpus citation resolution; and (v) a route-dependent external search architecture for targeted literature expansion. The result is a practical, evidence-gated, multimodal agentic RAG architecture for technical reasoning over specialized research corpora.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Quantum Information Geometry of Multicomponent Superconducting Fluctuation Transport

arXiv:2606.15928v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantum geometry underlies many electronic responses, but its transport signatures have so far been established mainly for pure single-particle Bloch states. Whether collective many-body fluctuations possess a measurable quantum geometry remains largely unexplored. Here we show that superconducting fluctuation transport provides a direct probe of quantum information geometry in collective many-body matter. Starting from a multicomponent time-dependent Ginzburg-Landau theory in the Gaussian fluctuation regime, we identify the equilibrium density matrix of fluctuating Cooper pairs as the static pair propagator, which defines a positive mixed-state manifold in momentum space. The geometry of this manifold is directly measurable through paraconductivity: the longitudinal paraconductivity is governed by the quantum Fisher information of superconducting fluctuation modes, while the fluctuational anomalous Hall effect is governed by the mean Uhlmann curvature, the mixed-state counterpart of Berry curvature. This correspondence further yields geometric bounds between these two transport components, with no direct analogue in normal electronic transport. Applied to chiral superconducting fluctuations in quarter-metal systems motivated by rhombohedral multilayer graphene, a symmetry-allowed Lifshitz invariant generates finite mean Uhlmann curvature and logarithmically enhances the anomalous Hall conductivity above the critical temperature. Our results establish collective superconducting fluctuations as an experimentally accessible transport probe of mixed-state quantum information geometry.

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

Time-spectral control of accidental coincidences in daylight entanglement-based free-space QKD

arXiv:2606.17365v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Daylight entanglement-based free-space quantum key distribution (QKD) is limited by accidental coincidences from receiver-admitted background light. We develop and experimentally validate a receiver-level framework linking receiver bandwidth, accepted temporal width, and background-noise density to Bob singles, sifted-key rate, error rate, and quantum bit error rate (QBER) in telecom-wavelength BBM92 QKD. Indoor sweeps show that useful sifted counts saturate near the source-matched bandwidth, whereas broader bandwidth or higher background mainly increases accidental contamination. Increasing the accepted temporal width leaves Bob singles nearly unchanged but directly raises QBER by enlarging the random-overlap probability. A two-dimensional design map shows that the temporal-window margin contracts rapidly with increasing background-to-signal ratio, while the bandwidth margin remains comparatively broad near source-matched filtering. A 10 m rooftop daylight experiment demonstrates operation in the predicted low-accidental regime, yielding a mean sifted-key rate of 2,811 cps and a mean QBER of 4.43%.

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

Hard or Just Unreached? Diagnosing the Sampling Blind Spot in Math-Reasoning Difficulty Estimation

arXiv:2606.19636v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Math and science reasoning benchmarks rely on pass@k, the fraction of sampled chains that reach gold, as the canonical per-example difficulty signal. The same signal drives RL with verifiable rewards, math data curation, synthetic curricula, and verifier training. We show this proxy has a persistent blind spot on its hardest stratum: on the eight free-form math cells we test (GSM8K and MATH across four open-weight models), 10.3-22.9% of the examples that no sampling seed solves in six tries are instead solved at matched compute by a six-chain deterministic regime. These are greedy decoding plus five cheap residual-stream perturbations applied via activation grafting, while greedy alone solves at most 6% on these math cells. Recovery scales with the additional budget, across perturbations whose mechanistic distinctness we verify across all twelve cells (cross-kind fix-set Jaccard

08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

Infectious Disease Forecasting via Physics-Informed Machine Learning

Infectious disease transmission evolves as a dynamic process shaped by biological mechanisms, population behavior, and intervention policies, yet public health responses are often driven by lagging indicators. Accurate short- and long-term disease forecasting is essential for the timely deployment of intervention strategies, healthcare capacity planning, and uncertainty-aware, risk-informed decision-making. To address this challenge, three broad classes of forecasting models have traditionally been used: statistical, machine learning, and mechanistic approaches. However, each of these modeling paradigms faces fundamental limitations. In particular, traditional statistical models often lack the flexibility needed to capture complex disease dynamics, machine learning approaches require large, high-quality data streams, and mechanistic models are notoriously difficult to calibrate. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel physics-informed machine learning (PIML) framework for forecasting infectious disease dynamics. Our approach simultaneously forecasts new case and hospitalization counts, along with other key epidemiological quantities such as the time-varying reproduction number. This is achieved through the design of a machine learning model and estimation strategy regularized by a system of differential equations that encode disease dynamics of the SIHR model, thereby bridging the gap between purely data-driven and mechanistic models. We demonstrate the proposed methodology through in-depth numerical studies and an application to COVID-19 data collected in the state of South Carolina.

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

EDEN: A Large-Scale Corpus of Clinical Notes for Italian

We present EDEN (Emergency Department Electronic Notes), a new and unique large-scale corpus of clinical notes produced in Emergency Departments of Italian hospitals. The corpus, in its current version, is composed of approximately 4 million clinical notes fully anonymized, covering diverse phases of patient care during the stay in the emergency department. In addition, a subset of about six thousand notes has been manually annotated by clinical experts through a structured Case Report Form (CRF) containing 132 items relevant for two patient situations in emergency departments, dyspnea and loss of consciousness. Items may assume numerical values (e.g., for blood saturation), categorical (e.g., for level of consciousness ), binary (e.g., for presence of traumas), and mixed value types. The annotation process involved multiple clinicians and underwent iterative revision to resolve ambiguities in item formulation, resulting in a richly structured (although high imbalanced) resource. The dataset aims to fill a relevant gap of data able to support both the development and the use of Large Language Models in concrete medical applications. We describe the data collection protocol, the on-site anonymisation pipeline, corpus statistics, and the annotation scheme. Finally, we propose CRF-filling as a novel structured information extraction benchmark, and provide zero-shot baseline resulting from Gemma-27B and MedGemma-27B. To the best of our knowledge, the EDEN dataset is the largest freely available corpus of clinical notes existing for the Italian language.

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

MetaboNet-Bench: A Multi-modal Benchmark for Glucose Forecasting in Type 1 Diabetes

arXiv:2606.18640v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Glucose forecasting algorithms are an important aspect of glycemic control management in type 1 diabetes. So far, the research community has developed numerous algorithms and models for forecasting. However, it is well-recognized that the lack of standardized model performance evaluation benchmarks makes fair comparison difficult and hinders further innovation, and thus benchmark standardization is in urgent need. Furthermore, many published glucose forecasting algorithms are limited to CGM data alone, ignoring other multimodal signals such as insulin dosing and carbohydrate intake. Here, we introduce MetaboNet-Bench, a benchmark for multimodal glucose forecasting for patients with type 1 diabetes that provides an extensible open-source evaluation framework for comparison of glucose forecasting algorithms that leverage glucose, insulin, and carbohydrate data. We then demonstrate its utility by benchmarking several recently published glucose forecasting models and a custom multimodal time-series model, representing different model architectures. The results show that the benefit of adding data modalities is conditioned on the complexity of the model and that incorporating more clinical metrics helps identify meaningful gaps to fill for future research.

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

How do Self-Supervised Remote Sensing Vision Models Transfer to Downstream Tasks?

Self-supervised geospatial foundation models (GeoFMs) learn transferable representations from remote sensing data, but their downstream behavior is difficult to characterize. We study six representative GeoFMs spanning joint-embedding, reconstruction, and multimodal pretraining families, and evaluate transfer across classification, regression, and segmentation benchmarks under different label availability and downstream pipelines. We find that model rankings change across tasks and adaptation settings. Layerwise probing shows that, in most cases, task-relevant information is more accessible in intermediate transformer blocks compared to final-layer embeddings, and that GeoFMs exhibit distinct depthwise profiles. In segmentation case studies on PASTIS and Sen1Floods11, downstream adaptation settings such as decoder design and fine-tuning can be as impactful as the choice of GeoFM, and standard dense-prediction heads may be poorly aligned with how GeoFMs organize information over depth. Finally, CKA analysis on case studies shows that fine-tuning does not rewrite GeoFMs uniformly across depth, and the strongest changes are localized to the first linear layer of the MLP in ViT blocks. These results help explain why GeoFM rankings shift across benchmarks and motivate more representation-aware evaluation and adaptation strategies.

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

Mitigating Simplicity Bias in OOD Detection through Object Co-occurrence Analysis

arXiv:2605.07821v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is crucial for ensuring the reliability of deep learning models. Existing methods mostly focus on regular entangled representations to discriminate in-distribution (ID) and OOD data, neglecting the rich contextual information within images. This issue is particularly challenging for detecting near-OOD, as models with simplicity bias struggle to learn discriminative features in disentangled representations. The human visual system can use the co-occurrence of objects in the natural environment to facilitate scene understanding. Inspired by this, we propose an Object-Centric OOD detection framework that learns to capture Object CO-occurrence (OCO) patterns within images. The proposed method introduces a new OOD detection paradigm that understands object co-occurrence within an image by predicting disentangled representations for the test sample, then adaptively divides patterns into three scenarios based on object co-occurrence patterns observed in ID training data, and finally performs OOD detection in a divide-and-conquer manner. By doing so, OCO can distinguish near-OOD by considering the semantic contextual relationships present in their images, avoiding the tendency to focus solely on simple, easily learnable regions. We evaluate OCO through experiments across challenging and full-spectrum OOD settings, demonstrating competitive results and confirming its ability to address both semantic and covariate shifts. Code is released at https://github.com/Michael-McQueen/OCO.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Trade-offs in Medical LLM Adaptation: An Empirical Study in French QA

The development of large language models (LLMs) has led to an increased focus on their adaptation to specialized domains and languages, yet the effectiveness of domain adaptation strategies remains unclear. We present a study of medical domain adaptation using French medical question-answering (QA) as a case study. We compare continual pretraining (CPT), supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and their combination across three model families, multiple sizes, and three initialization types, explicitly disentangling adaptation effects from base model choice. We evaluate both multiple-choice (MCQA) and open-ended QA (OEQA) under greedy and constrained decoding using automatic metrics and LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation. For MCQA, CPT+SFT most often achieves the best scores, but gains over SFT are small and frequently not statistically significant, making SFT a strong and cost-effective default. For OEQA, CPT consistently improves overlap-based metrics, while SFT often degrades generation quality; instruction tuning and CPT+SFT are preferred by LLM-based evaluation. Cross-lingual experiments further show effective transfer from French adaptation to English benchmarks. Overall, we provide practical guidelines for selecting adaptation strategies under computational constraints.

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

Beyond task performance: Decoding bioacoustic embeddings with speech features

arXiv:2606.14662v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pretrained audio embeddings are standard in bioacoustics, yet little is known about which acoustic features these models encode, nor which are useful for a given task. This hinders transparency and limits extension to rare species or data-scarce domains. Here we reveal which speech-like features are encoded in bioacoustic representations. Using the 88~eGeMAPS features across six taxonomic groups, we apply linear and nonlinear regression probes to quantify which acoustic properties each model captures. Results confirm a ``no free lunch'' pattern: no single model captures the full feature space. A concatenated embedding achieves the highest performance, suggesting complementary acoustic space coverage across models. Loudness features are best encoded ($R^2 = 0.76$) while F0 is hardest to recover ($R^2 = 0.33$). By cross-referencing recoverability with per-species feature salience (NMI), we derive data-driven model selection guidance for bioacoustics.

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

Data augmented bootstrap: Unifying confidence interval construction by approximate invariance

arXiv:2606.09049v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose the data augmented bootstrap (DAB), a framework for constructing confidence intervals from approximately invariant transformations of the data. As special cases, DAB recovers popular methods that rely on exact group symmetries, such as conformal prediction, wild bootstrap for Maximum Mean Discrepancy U-statistics and the recently proposed SymmPI. Meanwhile, DAB also recovers the classical bootstrap method, which exploits the dataset's approximate invariance under uniform sampling of data indices as the dataset size grows. For all DAB methods, we establish theoretical coverage results that interpolate between finite-sample and asymptotic guarantees according to the strength of the invariance, and without assuming a group structure. The approximate invariance is measured in the Kolmogorov distance and, for statistics that satisfy Gaussian universality, reduces to conditional mean and variance matching. This allows us to incorporate data augmentation (DA), a widely used machine learning heuristic based on approximate invariances, into known statistical methods. We empirically test the performance of incorporating DA into bootstrap, wild bootstrap and conformal prediction for simulated settings as well as for image, language and scientific data.

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

HMR-Net: Hierarchical Modular Routing for Cross-Domain Object Detection in Aerial Images

Despite advances in object detection, aerial imagery remains a challenging domain, as models often fail to generalize across variations in spatial resolution, scene composition, and semantic label coverage. Differences in geographic context, sensor characteristics, and object distributions across datasets limit the capacity of conventional models to learn consistent and transferable representations. Shared methods trained on such data tend to impose a unified representation across fundamentally different domains, resulting in poor performance on region-specific content and less flexibility when dealing with novel object categories. To address this, we propose a novel modular learning framework that enables structured specialization in aerial detection. Our method introduces a hierarchical routing mechanism with two levels of modularity: a domain routing layer that uses latent geographic embeddings to assign inputs to domain-specialized expert modules, and a scene routing mechanism that allocates image subregions to scene-specific expert modules. This allows our method to specialize across datasets and within complex scenes. Additionally, the framework contains a conditional expert module that uses external semantic information (e.g., category names or textual descriptions) to enable detection of novel object categories during inference, without the need for retraining or fine-tuning. By moving beyond monolithic representations, our method provides an adaptive framework for remote sensing object detection. Comprehensive evaluations on four datasets highlight improvements in multi-dataset generalization, region-level specialization, and open-category detection.

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

CoRe-MoE: Contrastive Reweighted Mixture of Experts for Multi-Terrain Humanoid Locomotion with Gait Adaptation

arXiv:2606.04718v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Humans primarily rely on walking and running to traverse complex terrains. Similarly, humanoid robots should be able to smoothly transition between walking and running while maintaining natural and stable locomotion. However, unifying gait transition and multi-terrain adaptation within a single policy remains challenging due to gradient interference between tasks and the distribution shift caused by terrain variations. Although Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures can mitigate multi-skill interference, direct joint training often fails to achieve clear expert specialization. To address these challenges, we propose CoRe-MoE, a two-stage reinforcement learning framework that decouples gait generation from terrain adaptation. In the first stage, a stable locomotion policy is learned to produce natural walking and running behaviors with smooth transitions. In the second stage, a terrain-aware MoE branch is introduced, and the gating network is trained with a contrastive objective to learn structured terrain representations and promote expert specialization. The final action is obtained through weighted fusion of the base gait policy and the terrain-aware branch, enabling the policy to preserve stable locomotion while adapting to complex terrains. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms baseline approaches in terms of success rate, locomotion stability, and multi-terrain adaptability. Furthermore, zero-shot deployment on a Unitree G1 humanoid robot validates the effectiveness of our framework, achieving robust walking and running across stairs, slopes, steps, obstacles, and unstructured outdoor terrains while maintaining accurate foothold control and dynamic stability.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Frequency-Division Multiplexed CV-QKD System

arXiv:2603.20718v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose a frequency-division multiplexed (FDM) continuous-variable quantum key distribution (CV-QKD) system with enhanced spectral efficiency through optimized channel spacing of low-symbol-rate signals. A four-channel 10-Mbaud FDM-CV-QKD system was experimentally demonstrated using Gaussian modulation, a transmitted local oscillator, and homodyne detection. Despite the inter-channel interference, under a finite-size scenario (m=1.25x10^6), the system achieved a 3.6-fold back-to-back secret key rate gain and outperformed the single-channel frequency-upconverted signal up to 26.8 km.

19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Formation of clusters and coarsening in weakly interacting diffusions

arXiv:2510.17629v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper studies the clustering behavior of weakly interacting diffusions under the influence of sufficiently localized attractive interaction potentials on the one-dimensional torus. We describe how this clustering behavior is closely related to the presence of discontinuous phase transitions in the mean-field PDE. For local attractive interactions, we employ a new variant of the strict Riesz rearrangement inequality to prove that all global minimizers of the free energy are either uniform or single-cluster states, in the sense that they are symmetrically decreasing. We analyze different timescales for the particle system and the mean-field (McKean-Vlasov) PDE, arguing that while the particle system can exhibit coarsening by both coalescence and diffusive mass exchange between clusters, the clusters in the mean-field PDE are unable to move and coarsening occurs via the mass exchange of clusters. By introducing a new model for this mass exchange, we argue that the PDE exhibits dynamical metastability. We conclude by presenting careful numerical experiments that demonstrate the validity of our model.

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

BALTO: Balanced Token-Level Policy Optimization for Hallucination Mitigation

Hallucinations remain a major obstacle to deploying large language models (LLMs) in knowledge-intensive settings, where generated responses must be faithfully grounded in provided evidence. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising direction for hallucination mitigation, but response-level faithfulness rewards suffer from a granularity mismatch: localized hallucinations can cause supported content to receive spurious penalties. Although recent work introduces fine-grained feedback such as claim-level verification and token-level rewards, unbalanced credit assignment can still induce length, verbosity, or optimization-noise biases. We propose BALTO, a Balanced Token-level Policy Optimization framework for hallucination mitigation. BALTO extracts checkable factual claims, verifies them against the reference context, and projects claim-level judgments to token-level labels. A balanced token-level credit assignment mechanism is introduced into the framework. This design redistributes probability mass from unsupported content toward faithful content, rather than suppressing the entire response. We systematically analyze the limitations of response-level rewards from a theoretical standpoint, and prove BALTO's advantages in training stability and optimization efficiency for hallucination mitigation. Experiments on ConFiQA, RAGTruth, and FinLLM-Eval show that BALTO achieves the highest faithfulness across all six model–benchmark settings and consistently outperforms existing post-training baselines in Q-Score, demonstrating a stronger faithfulness–informativeness trade-off.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

A Model-Driven Approach for Developing Families of Reinforcement Learning Environments

arXiv:2606.20324v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Virtual training environments are software-intensive systems in which reinforcement learning (RL) agents learn, adapt, and demonstrate meaningful behavior. Virtual training environments offer a safe and cost-efficient alternative to training agents in real-world settings. However, to converge, most realistic RL problems require training in multiple, mostly similar but slightly different environments - i.e., families of environment variants. The typical development process of environment families is a labor-intensive and error-prone manual endeavor that does not scale well. To alleviate these issues, in this paper, we propose a model-driven approach for developing families of RL training environments. To obtain the family of environments, we develop an approach and prototype tool. In our approach, a hybrid genetic algorithm - a combination of population-based global search and heuristic local search - generates environment families. Mutations and constraints are expressed as model transformations and are operationalized into a search process by a state-of-the-art model transformation engine. We demonstrate the soundness of our approach in a wildfire mitigation scenario and curriculum learning - a particular learning paradigm that relies on environment families.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

AQ4SViT: An Automated Quantization Framework with Search Gating Policy for Compressing Spiking Vision Transformers

arXiv:2606.15523v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spiking Vision Transformers (SViTs) have emerged as alternative low-power ViT models, but their large sizes hinder their deployments on resource-constrained embedded AI systems. To address this, state-of-the-art works proposed quantization techniques to compress SViT models, but their manual, human-guided approach needs a huge design time and power/energy consumption to find the appropriate quantization setting for each given network, making this approach not scalable for quantizing multiple networks. Toward this, we propose AQ4SViT, a novel automated quantization framework for SViTs that can provide quick quantization settings with good trade-offs between accuracy and memory. To achieve this, AQ4SViT employs the following key ideas: quantization search strategy that evaluates the quantization setting candidates while considering the accuracy constraint; and search gating policy that quickly evaluates and selects promising quantization candidates by leveraging membrane potential drift as a performance proxy. In the search gating policy, AQSViT employs two search algorithm variants to provide trade-off options: Greedy search, which performs fast but may lead to local optima; and Beam search, which performs slower but has better performance in finding global optima selection due to a wider search space. Experimental results show that AQ4SViT-Greedy quickly finds the appropriate quantization settings, achieving up to 6.6x faster search time and up to 82.5% memory saving compared to the state-of-the-art; while AQ4SViT-Beam further reduces the memory footprint by up to 90% compared to the state-of-the-art, but with 4.5x longer search time; all these results are obtained while maintaining high accuracy within 1.5% from the original/non-quantized models on the ImageNet dataset. These results highlight that AQ4SViT framework offers advancements toward SViT deployments on embedded AI systems.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Sparsity, Superposition, and Forgetting: A Mechanistic Study of Representation Retention in Continual Learning

arXiv:2606.20431v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continual learning (CL) systems often forget previously acquired knowledge, yet the mechanisms driving forgetting remain hard to isolate in practice because real datasets entangle many factors. We present a controlled, toy-world framework that makes these mechanisms observable and testable. Using a synthetic generator-separator pipeline, we define ground-truth latent features, build tasks with tunable sparsity and overlap, and introduce measurable quantities for representation strength and superposition (directional overlap among features). We then study retention dynamics-the temporal change of representation strength by fitting sparse dynamical relations (via SINDy) between retention, superposition, and exposure history. A complementary task-level analysis based on effective rank characterizes how representational capacity is allocated across tasks. Our controlled experiments yield three takeaways. (1) Superposition tends to increase over time with transient dips at task boundaries, suggesting boundary-specific interference rather than steady drift. (2) Higher feature sparsity induces more superposition yet does not inevitably cause forgetting; when representations remain strong, forgetting can be reduced despite overlap. (3) Task-level effective rank grows with sparsity, indicating broader capacity usage under sparse regimes. Together, these results nuance the common intuition that more superposition leads to more forgetting by showing that overlap interacts with representation strength and capacity allocation. Our toy analysis provides falsifiable hypotheses and diagnostic tools for CL.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Induced Resource Theories and Harvesting via Quantum Probes

arXiv:2606.17287v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We consider scenarios in which a quantum system with a well-defined resource theory is used as a probe to interact with an environment, such as a quantum field, for which a resource-theoretic description is absent or incomplete. We clarify if and how the harvesting of a resource in the probe can tell us about the state of the environment. This is particularly ambiguous when the probe-environment interaction is not a free operation, or the concept of such free operations cannot be defined altogether. We propose a framework and precise conditions under which it becomes possible to interpret resource generation on the probe as evidence of resources in the environment, thereby introducing an effective notion of resources for the latter. Our results clarify in which sense resources can be said to be harvested from the environment and provide a systematic way to analyse such processes beyond fully controlled resource-theoretic settings. More generally, this work may provide a step towards a more general understanding of the interplay of different quantum resources.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Reinforcement Learning with Action-Triggered Observations

arXiv:2510.02149v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce Action-Triggered Sporadically Traceable Markov Decision Processes (ATST-MDPs), a reinforcement learning framework for partial observability in which full state observations occur stochastically at each step, with probability determined by the chosen action. We derive Bellman equations tailored to this setting and establish the existence of an optimal policy. Exploiting the fact that sporadic observations reveal the full state, we provide an equivalent formulation in which agents commit to action-sequences between consecutive observations. Under the linear MDP assumption, we show that the value function over such action-sequences admits a linear representation in a finite-dimensional feature map, enabling standard regression-based methods. As an application, we derive ATST-LSVI-UCB, an optimistic algorithm achieving regret $\widetilde{O}(\sqrt{Kd^3(1-\gamma)^{-3}})$ for episodic learning with geometrically distributed horizons, where $K$ is the number of episodes, $d$ the feature dimension, and $\gamma$ the discount factor (episode continuation probability), matching the known rate for linear MDPs with full observability.