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

WorkBench Revisited: Workplace Agents Two Years On

作者:

The best agent on WorkBench in March 2024, GPT-4, completed 43% of tasks and took an unintended harmful action, such as emailing the wrong person, on 26% of them. We re-visit the benchmark in June 2026 and find that the best agent to date, Claude Opus 4.8, completes 89% and takes an unintended harmful action on 2.5%. Aside from this considerable progress in frontier agent performance, three things stand out. First, capability and safety go together on WorkBench rather than trade off, so the models that finish the most tasks also do the least unintended damage. Second, while several classes of error have been totally eliminated, frontier models still make some basic mistakes that occasionally result in irreversible harm, such as sending an email to the wrong person. Third, the rise of open-weight models has drastically lowered costs for a performance level that was previously only accessible to proprietary models, while frontier costs have stayed relatively stable. We release an updated version of the benchmark with data and code quality improvements, new model scores, and analysis of agent progress on WorkBench since 2024.

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

Hierarchical Advantage Weighting for Online RL Fine-Tuning of VLAs from Sparse Episode Outcomes

arXiv:2606.17043v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When pretrained VLA policies are fine-tuned through online RL, each rollout episode produces only a single binary outcome (success or failure), yet the actor update requires per-transition supervision. Existing approaches commonly reduce this sparse outcome to a single scalar reward or advantage signal, which conflates distinct forms of transition-level feedback and provides limited guidance once basic task success becomes achievable. First, a single scalar signal conflates the two objectives of viability and efficiency; once basic success is achieved, the binary label provides no gradient to distinguish efficient completions from slow ones. Second, real-world rollouts mix autonomous and intervention segments; naively assigning episode outcomes across these boundaries introduces incorrect credit assignment. To address these issues, we propose Hierarchical Advantage-Weighted Behavior Cloning (HABC), which trains separate critic heads for these two objectives on different data subsets and combines their outputs with a state-adaptive balance. A state-adaptive gate $g_t$ merges their one-step advantages, prioritizing viability when success is uncertain and shifting to efficiency only when viability is high, and converts the result into per-transition weights on the actor loss. Intervention-aware credit assignment further restricts outcome labels to segments executed by the current policy, preventing supervision from leaking across intervention boundaries. In real-robot experiments on three contact-rich bimanual tasks, HABC raises success from supervised fine-tuning (SFT) baselines of 36%, 44%, and 12% to 92%, 88%, and 38%.

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

The BD-LSC Dataset: Facilitating the Benchmarking of Models for Lexical Semantic Change Detection in Slang and Standard Usage

Automatic semantic change detection aims to identify how word meanings shift over time, offering insights into both linguistic and societal change. Despite recent progress in computational lexical semantic change (LSC), existing benchmarks and methods struggle to capture bi-directional semantic change, particularly cases where words simultaneously gain and lose senses. This problem is especially challenging for words that have both slang and standard meanings. To address these gaps, we introduce two complementary benchmark datasets. The Bi-Directional Lexical Semantic Change (BD-LSC) dataset captures sense gain, sense loss, and stability across three time periods, enabling the study of complex semantic trajectories. The SlangTrack Word Sense Disambiguation (ST-WSD) dataset provides fine-grained, instance-level sense annotations for words combining slang and standard usages, supporting systematic benchmarking of WSD and semantic change detection models. Using these benchmarks, we systematically evaluate models across different methodological families: unsupervised clustering using contextualised embeddings, supervised machine learning, transformer-based models, and state-of-the-art large language models. Among the evaluated systems, the few-shot GPT-4o model achieved the strongest aggregate performance on Exact Sense Match (ESM) and multi-label accuracy; however, Macro-F1 scores near 0.5 across all systems show that rare slang senses remain difficult, which we identify as the central open challenge.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Activation- and Influence-Aware Ranks (AIR): Function-Preserving SVD Compression for LLMs

arXiv:2606.19993v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present Activation- and Influence-Aware Ranks (AIR), an SVD-based LLM compression framework that guides each weight matrix's low-rank approximation with a backward-signal influence metric. Starting from the activation-aware optimum of SVD-LLM(W), AIR runs a single closed-form alternating least squares (ALS) sweep that integrates influence element-wise under a monotone-descent guarantee. AIR is layer-local and composes orthogonally with end-to-end methods: alone it exceeds ACIP, and AIR+LoRA outperforms it further. AIR improves perplexity over SVD-LLM(W) by >18% at

05.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Lethal plague outbreaks in Lake Baikal hunter-gatherers 5,500 years ago

Plague is among the most devastating diseases in human history1. However, early strains of the plague-causing bacterium Yersinia pestis lacked virulence factors that are required for the bubonic form until around 3,800 years ago2,3. Consequently, the morbidity and mortality of early plague strains remain unclear. Here we describe early plague strains that are associated with two phases of outbreaks among mid-Holocene hunter-gatherers near Lake Baikal in southeast Siberia, beginning from about 5,500 years ago. These outbreaks occur across four hunter-gatherer cemeteries, with a 39% detection rate for plague infection. By reconstructing kinship pedigrees, we show that small familial groups were affected, consistent with human-to-human spread of disease, and that the first outbreak occurred within a single generation. The infections appear to have resulted in acute mortality, especially among children (aged 8 to 11 years). We further note functional differences, including in the ypm superantigen locus, which is also present in present day Yersinia pseudotuberculosis. The new strains diverge ancestrally to known Y. pestis and constrain the timing of its emergence, indicating that this happened before approximately 5,700 years ago. These findings show that plague outbreaks happened earlier than previously thought and were indeed lethal. We contend that the occurrence of outbreaks among mid-Holocene hunter-gatherer communities well outside the sphere of Late Neolithic Europe challenges the notion that higher population densities and lifestyle changes during the Neolithic agricultural transition were prerequisites for plague epidemics. Analyses of ancient DNA from hunter-gatherers near Lake Baikal in southeast Siberia around 5,500 years ago indicate that highly virulent Yersinia pestis emerged earlier than previously estimated, far from the next known cases of infection in Late Neolithic Europe.

06.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

The 1/4-phenomenon of placement probabilities of tilings in the Aztec diamond

arXiv:2512.08377v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We consider domino tilings of the Aztec diamond. Using the Domino Shuffling algorithm introduced by Elkies, Kuperberg, Larsen, and Propp in arXiv:math/9201305, we are able to generate domino tilings uniformly at random. In this paper, we investigate the probability of finding a domino at a specific position in such a random tiling. We prove that this placement probability is always equal to $1/4$ plus a rational function, whose shape depends on the location of the domino, multiplied by a position-independent factor that involves only the size of the diamond. This result leads to significantly more compact explicit counting formulas compared to previous findings. As a direct application, we derive explicit counting formulas for the domino tilings of Aztec diamonds with $2\times 2$-square holes at arbitrary positions.

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

Visual Place Recognition in Forests with Depth-Aware Distillation

Visual place recognition in natural forest environments remains challenging due to repetitive vegetation, weak structural cues, and significant appearance variation across traversals. To address this limitation, this paper proposes a lightweight depth-aware distillation framework that injects geometric cues into a DINOv2-based place recognition model, while maintaining its pre-trained descriptor space. Evaluated on the recent WildCross benchmark, the proposed approach yields gains over an appearance-only counterpart, providing robustness to appearance variations. These results demonstrate the importance of depth as a strong complementary modality for place recognition in natural environments and identify depth-aware distillation as a promising direction for more robust forest perception.

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

AI4SLT: Empirical Processes in Lean 4 for Formal Statistical Learning Theory

We present the first comprehensive Lean 4 formalization of statistical learning theory (SLT) grounded in empirical process theory. Our en-to-end formal infrastructure implement the missing contents in latest Lean library, including a complete development of Gaussian Lipschitz concentration, Dudley's entropy integral theorem for sub-Gaussian processes, and an application to least-squares (sparse) regression with a sharp rate. The project was carried out using a human-AI collaborative workflow, in which humans design proof strategies and AI agents execute tactical proof construction, leading to the human-verified Lean 4 toolbox for SLT. Beyond implementation, the formalization process exposes and resolves implicit assumptions and missing details in standard SLT textbooks, enforcing a granular, line-by-line understanding of the theory. This work establishes a reusable formal foundation and opens the door for future developments in machine learning theory. The code is provided in https://github.com/YuanheZ/lean-stat-learning-theory.

09.
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.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Neural ensemble Kalman filter: Data assimilation for compressible flows with shocks

arXiv:2602.23461v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Data assimilation (DA) for compressible flows with shocks is challenging because many classical DA methods generate spurious oscillations and nonphysical features near uncertain shocks. We focus here on the ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF). We show that the poor performance of the EnKF may be attributed to the bimodal forecast distribution that can arise in the vicinity of an uncertain shock location; this violates the assumptions underpinning the EnKF, which assume a forecast which is close to Gaussian. To address this issue we introduce the new neural EnKF. The basic idea is to systematically embed neural function approximations within ensemble DA by mapping the forecast ensemble of shocked flows to the parameter space (weights and biases) of a deep neural network (NN) and to subsequently perform DA in that space. The nonlinear mapping encodes sharp and smooth flow features in an ensemble of NN parameters. Neural EnKF updates are therefore well-behaved only if the NN parameters vary smoothly within the neural representation of the forecast ensemble. We show that such a smooth variation of network parameters can be enforced via physics-informed transfer learning, and demonstrate that in so-doing the neural EnKF avoids the spurious oscillations and nonphysical features that plague the EnKF. The applicability of the neural EnKF is demonstrated through a series of systematic numerical experiments with the inviscid Burgers' equation, the Sod shock tube, and a two-dimensional blast wave.

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

Edit3DGS: Unified Framework for Dynamic Head Editing via 2D Instruction-Guided Diffusion and 3D Gaussian Splatting

We present Edit3DGS, a unified framework for dynamic 3D head editing that integrates 2D instruction-guided diffusion with 3D Gaussian splatting. Unlike prior approaches that separately address frame-based edits or static 3D reconstruction, our method couples semantic controllability in the image domain with photorealistic, temporally consistent 3D representations. Given an input video, editable facial regions are masked and modified using a text-conditioned diffusion model to support fine-grained operations such as expression transformation, attribute modification, and appearance refinement. The edited frames are then aggregated through 3D Gaussian splatting to produce a coherent, high-fidelity avatar that preserves both identity and motion dynamics. To enforce consistency, Edit3DGS incorporates multi-view batch editing and lightweight inpainting strategies that recover lost expressions across timesteps. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework enables controllable, artifact-free head editing with smooth temporal transitions, offering practical applications in virtual avatars, immersive communication, film production, and interactive media.

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

MADAR: An Address-Free Processor

arXiv:2606.15535v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In a modern processor, computing is the cheap part. Most of its area and energy go to addressing – moving operands to and from a register file and cache, and running the tags, ports, miss queues, and bypass networks that find a value where it was left. MADAR deletes that machinery by abolishing the address. All state circulates in rings of slots that advance one position per clock; instructions and data ride in the same slots; a value is named by its place in an orbit – a \rp{} coordinate – not by an address; a fixed station computes when a circulating instruction sweeps past its operands, on a schedule set at compile time; and a hierarchy of rings of increasing period replaces the cache hierarchy, movement between them scheduled rather than triggered by a miss. No prior circulating-store, dataflow, or statically scheduled machine combines all four of these. We define the execution model, validate it in a cycle-accurate register-transfer-level implementation, show it compilable – a constructive scheduler emits programs cross-checked against the implementation – and price it with a first-order energy model. The payoff is clearest for AI acceleration: the multiply-accumulate at the heart of every matmul and convolution compiles to a streaming form whose energy per operation stays flat as the reduction grows, and the operand reuse that makes matrix multiplication efficient is carried by the ring-period hierarchy – the memory hierarchy doing by rotation what a cache does by tags. MADAR is a new design point for any computation whose data movement is known before the program runs.

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

Central Limit Theorems for Stochastic Gradient Descent Quantile Estimators

arXiv:2503.02178v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper develops asymptotic theory for quantile estimation via stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with a constant learning rate. The quantile loss function is neither smooth nor strongly convex. Beyond conventional perspectives and techniques, we view quantile SGD iteration as an irreducible, periodic, and positive recurrent Markov chain, which cyclically converges to its unique stationary distribution regardless of the arbitrarily fixed initialization. To derive the exact form of the stationary distribution, we analyze the structure of its characteristic function by exploiting the stationary equation. We also derive tight bounds for its moment generating function (MGF) and tail probabilities. Synthesizing the aforementioned approaches, we prove that the centered and standardized stationary distribution converges to a Gaussian distribution as the learning rate $\eta\rightarrow0$. This finding provides the first central limit theorem (CLT)-type theoretical guarantees for the quantile SGD estimator with constant learning rates. We further propose a recursive algorithm to construct confidence intervals of the estimators with statistical guarantees. Numerical studies demonstrate the effective finite-sample performance of the online estimator and inference procedure. The theoretical tools developed in this study are of independent interest for investigating general SGD algorithms formulated as Markov chains, particularly in non-strongly convex and non-smooth settings.

14.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-21

DeepCDS: Ab initio coding sequence prediction in prokaryotic short reads

Accurate coding sequence prediction in short prokaryotic metagenomic reads remains challenging due to sequence fragmentation, unknown sequence origins, and sequencing errors. Here we introduce DeepCDS, a deep learning-based ab initio coding sequence predictor trained on short prokaryotic sequences with and without simulated Illumina-like sequencing errors. DeepCDS integrates ESM-2 protein language model embeddings with nucleotide-level information to predict complete and fragmented coding sequence regions. Benchmarking on 215 phylogenetically diverse prokaryotic organisms demonstrates that DeepCDS consistently outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in coding sequence detection, start and stop codon localization, and robustness to different sequencing error profiles, while remaining operational at shorter sequence lengths than existing tools support. These findings demonstrate that protein language models capture distinct signals relevant for nucleotide-level coding sequence detection, especially at very short lengths. Ultimately, DeepCDS may help uncover the functional potential of the vast microbial diversity that remains genomically uncharacterized.

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

Visual-OPSD: Cross-Modal On-Policy Self-Distillation for Efficient Unified Multimodal Reasoning

Unified multimodal models (UMMs) interleave generated ''visual thoughts'' (VTs) with text reasoning to improve spatial tasks. This incurs roughly an order-of-magnitude inference cost from multi-step diffusion. We find this cost yields limited direct benefit. On ThinkMorph, removing or noising VTs barely changes accuracy across nine benchmarks. Once rendered, attention concentrates on the VT regardless of content. Yet a KL diagnostic shows that conditioning on a privileged VT trace shifts the model's completion distribution. This suggests the generation pathway encodes useful reasoning beyond the rendered pixels. Motivated by this gap, we propose Visual On-Policy Self-Distillation(Visual-OPSD). Teacher and student share identical weights but differ in context: the teacher sees privileged VTs while the student sees only the question. Token-level JSD distillation on on-policy student trajectories transfers the teacher's reasoning to a text-only student. Across nine benchmarks, Visual-OPSD improves over its generative teacher by $+3.40$pp with $14.3\times$ speedup (10.0s vs. 142.8s per sample) and outperforms same-scale VLMs by $+63.83$pp on VSP. A Gaussian-noise control ($+0.40$pp vs. $+10.28$pp for real VTs) and $58.4\%$ closure of the KL gap confirm that gains come from the semantic content of the generation pathway.

16.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

CacheWeaver: Cache-Aware Evidence Ordering for Efficient Grounded RAG Inference

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) improves factual grounding, but it also lengthens prompts and raises prefill cost. Prefix caching in serving engines such as vLLM reduces this cost only when requests share the same token prefix. In grounded generation, however, adjacent queries may retrieve overlapping evidence in different orders, so set overlap does not become reusable prefix overlap. We present CacheWeaver, a lightweight prompt-layer method for cache-aware evidence ordering. The method keeps a prefix tree over recently served evidence sequences and uses a greedy walk to place the most reusable prefix first, while leaving the serving engine and retrieved evidence set unchanged. Across three vLLM configurations, the method lowers median time-to-first-token (TTFT) by about 20-33 percent relative to retrieval-order prefix caching, without hurting answer quality in our QA tests. The greedy policy reaches 97.5 percent of the median TTFT gain from oracle ordering, indicating that most reusable prefix locality can be recovered by a simple scheduling layer between retrieval and inference.

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

Can News Predict the Market? Limits of Zero-Shot Financial NLP and the Role of Explainable AI

Can financial news reliably predict short-term stock movements? Despite advances in large language models, this question remains unresolved. We revisit this problem using a zero-shot natural language processing framework, investigating whether models can extract actionable signals from financial news without domain-specific training. We design a structured pipeline that combines zero-shot natural language inference with temporal aggregation, explicitly modelling recency and event-dependent impact horizons when integrating information across articles. To address the need for transparency in high-stakes settings, we introduce a multi-layered explainability framework that links predictions to token-level, article-level, and aggregate evidence, and produces grounded natural language rationales. Across multiple models and prediction horizons, we find that zero-shot approaches consistently fail to outperform simple baselines, with particularly weak performance on negative movements, suggesting deeper structural limitations in mapping news sentiment to short-term price dynamics. However, explainability signals reliably distinguish between trustworthy and unreliable predictions, offering practical value even when accuracy is limited. These findings highlight the limits of zero-shot financial NLP and motivate a shift toward decision-support systems that prioritise transparency and uncertainty awareness. Code: https://github.com/alimert05/zero-shot-stock-xai

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

UniTemp: Unlocking Video Generation in Any Temporal Order via Bidirectional Distillation

Autoregressive video diffusion models have emerged as a promising approach for long video generation, achieving strong performance in streaming settings. However, existing methods are restricted to forward temporal generation, whereas practical video creation often requires flexible generation order, e.g., conditioning on future context to extend backward, or on both past and future context for inbetween generation. We bridge this gap by training an autoregressive model that supports generation in arbitrary temporal directions. A key technical challenge arises from the Causal 3D VAE widely used in video diffusion models, which encodes latents strictly conditioned on past context. While suited for forward generation, this causal structure causes inter-block discontinuities when generation proceeds backward. To address this, we introduce blockwise anchor latents, a set of auxiliary latents that restore the missing past context at block boundaries during backward generation. Built on this design, we propose UniTemp, a bidirectional distillation framework that trains a single autoregressive student model for any-direction video generation. At inference time, UniTemp conditions on arbitrary past and/or future frames, improving controllability for both bidirectional and inbetween generation. Experiments show that UniTemp maintains competitive performance on short and long video generation compared to forward-only methods, while enabling diverse workflows such as bidirectional video extension, inbetween generation, looping video generation, scene transition, and visual story generation. Project website: https://lzhangbj.github.io/projects/unitemp/

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

MedRLM: Recursive Multimodal Health Intelligence for Long-Context Clinical Reasoning, Sensor-Guided Screening, Evidence-Grounded Decision Support, and Community-to-Tertiary Referral Optimization

Real-world clinical decision support requires reasoning over heterogeneous and longitudinal patient information rather than answering isolated medical questions. However, current medical large language models and retrieval-augmented generation systems often rely on single-step prompting or retrieval, which can be fragile when clinical evidence is distributed across long electronic health records, medical images, sensor streams, guidelines, and referral constraints. This paper proposes MedRLM, a Recursive Multimodal Health Intelligence framework for long-context clinical reasoning, sensor-guided screening, and community-to-tertiary referral support. Instead of compressing all patient information into one prompt, MedRLM treats the patient case as an external clinical environment that can be recursively inspected, decomposed, retrieved, verified, and synthesized. The framework coordinates specialized agents for clinical text, longitudinal EHR, medical imaging, physiological sensor signals, guideline retrieval, uncertainty auditing, and referral planning. It further introduces a Clinical Evidence Graph Memory to connect patient-specific observations with retrieved evidence, standardized definitions, sensor-derived biomarkers, and referral criteria. A sensor-guided recursive triggering mechanism activates deeper reasoning when abnormal physiological or behavioral patterns are detected, while uncertainty-gated refinement supports clinician review for high-risk or low-confidence cases. We also outline a real-data evaluation design using public and credentialed clinical datasets spanning EHR, radiology, ECG, ICU time series, and referral-proxy outcomes. MedRLM aims to move medical AI from static question answering toward auditable, multimodal, and workflow-aware clinical decision support.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Optimizing Incomplete, Large-Scale and Sparse Multi-Graph Matching in Bioimaging

Multi-graph matching is a fundamental problem in computer vision. Our work is motivated by a challenging application in bioimaging, where dozens or even hundreds of 3D microscopy images of worms must be brought into correspondence. Existing datasets do not cover this large-scale regime, and virtually all existing methods are inapplicable because they assume a complete or dense problem setting. To support further research, our first contribution is a new large-scale dataset based on problem instances from bioimaging. Our second contribution is a comprehensive analysis of the two main multi-graph matching paradigms: direct and permutation synchronization-based formulations. We argue, in part by proof, that practical large-scale methods must explicitly address problem sparsity and incompleteness. Since standard permutation synchronization approaches fail in this setting, we further introduce a sparse permutation synchronization paradigm. Our final contribution is GREEDA, a general method for sparse and incomplete problems that can be instantiated across cost orders and paradigms. While our paper focuses on objective functions up to quadratic order, GREEDA is inherently generalizable to arbitrary orders. On larger, sparse instances, GREEDA outperforms competing methods in both objective value and runtime. For example, for moderately-sized problems based on 30 worm images GREEDA produces a high-quality solution within 2 minutes, whereas competitors require at least half an hour and yield far worse results. On smaller dense problems, GREEDA remains on par with leading methods while being an order of magnitude faster.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Socioeconomic inequalities in smoking prevalence and intensity in Germany: A repeated cross-sectional analysis from 1998 to 2024

Background: Smoking inequalities by socioeconomic status have widened consistently in Germany, but sex-specific trends after 2013 and inequalities in daily cigarette consumption among smokers (intensity) are unknown. We analyzed trends in absolute and relative socioeconomic inequalities in smoking prevalence and intensity among German adults across three decades. Methods: We used 14 waves (1998-2024) of population-representative cross-sectional data from the German Socio-Economic Panel to estimate sex-specific trends in smoking prevalence and intensity in adults aged 25-64. Inequalities were quantified across strata of education, occupation, and equivalized household income using the absolute and relative concentration index with 95% bootstrap confidence intervals. Results: Overall smoking prevalence declined from 35.05% (CI: [33.90%, 36.20%] in 1998 to 22.19% (CI: [21.15%, 23.24%]) in 2024, and mean intensity from 17.49 (CI: [17.09,17.90]) to 13.33 (CI: [12.88, 13.79]) cigarettes/day. Over this period sex-differences in both outcomes narrowed almost completely. Absolute and relative inequalities in smoking prevalence widened across all SES dimensions, particularly for education and occupation. By 2024, inequalities were larger among women than men driven by a stagnating or rising smoking prevalence among low-SES women at least until 2018 alongside continued declines in higher-SES women and for men. Inequalities in smoking intensity, particularly related to income, were generally smaller than those in prevalence. Conclusion: Socioeconomic smoking inequalities in Germany widened from 1998 to 2024 primarily driven by reductions among higher-SES groups and increases in low-SES women. However, recent reductions in low-SES women may indicate a new phase in the smoking epidemic. Health equity considerations should be integrated into a targeted German tobacco control strategy.

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

Plug-and-Adapt: Multimodal Coreference Resolution at First Sight with a Pretrained Alignment Model

Visual information helps resolve ambiguity in coreference resolution, leading to notable performance gains. However, existing Multi-modal Coreference Resolution (MCR) methods require training with (partially) annotated data from the target dataset before they can be applied, preventing their direct usability and raising concerns about generalization. While Vision-Language Large Models (VLLMs) with billions of parameters offer promising zero-shot capabilities, they remain largely inaccessible. Their massive size limits deployability, and many are only accessible through paid APIs. In this paper, we propose a plug-and-adapt method that strategically adapts a carefully pre-trained alignment model for immediate use in MCR tasks, designed to eliminate the need for training on scarce benchmark datasets or relying on resource-intensive VLLMs. Specifically, we first pre-train a fine-grained alignment model between textual and visual contextual information using vision-language alignment datasets. We then repurpose the alignment model to MCR through similarity aggregation by fusing visual and categorical cues with evidence theory, thereby enhancing effectiveness. Experiments on the Coreference Image Narratives (CIN) benchmark dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, achieving a 5.31\% and 2.12\% improvement in CoNLL F1 over SOTA dedicated methods and popular VLLMs, respectively. We further evaluate our method on a masked CIN dataset for robustness testing and on a specially constructed VCR-MCR dataset for generalization assessment, with results confirming both capabilities.

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

Small Experiments, Cheaper Decisions: A Case Study in Staged Promotion for Micro-Pretraining

Short pretraining runs can reduce experimental cost, but they can also over-promote configurations that only look strong at tiny budgets. We study an auditable staged-promotion protocol for a fixed micro-pretraining runner on two heterogeneous host blocks: Windows A100 and Linux L40S. Starting from twelve prior-screened configurations, we use staged budgets of 2 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 60 minutes, and 12 hours, with frozen promotion rules before expensive continuations. The early screens are intentionally treated as unstable: the 5- and 10-minute rankings are host-sensitive, and the eventual 12-hour top-ranked condition is not the mean-best condition at the replicated 10-minute gate. Because seed ranges differ across stages, these changes are operational promotion evidence, not within-seed curves. A replicated 60-minute gate keeps the Staged Factorial Screening bridge reference in the promoted set, where it ranks first in all four 60-minute host-seed cells. In the final 12-hour confirmation package, the bridge condition ranks first in all four host-seed cells across two seeds; the greedy comparator does not meet the frozen 0.010 val_bpb near-equivalence rule; and the cheaper d8/ar48 (depth-8, aspect-48) sentinel does not meet the frozen 0.020 mean-gap rule. The executed 12-hour branch spends 144 GPU-hours, and the full staged protocol records 169.2 training GPU-hours including screening stages. Continuing all four 60-minute candidates would spend 192 GPU-hours, while continuing all nine replicated 10-minute candidates would spend 432 GPU-hours. The latter numbers are accounting counterfactuals for unrun continuations, not evidence that skipped candidates could not have overtaken the reference. The result is a bounded cost-allocation finding, not a claim of global optimality, capacity-normalized superiority, or superiority over adaptive hyperparameter optimization methods.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Knowledge Graph Enhanced Memory-Augmented Retrieval for Long Context Modeling

Long-context language modeling requires not only extending context windows but maintaining coherent understanding of entity states and relationships across thousands of tokens – a challenge that semantic similarity alone cannot address. KGERMAR addresses this by constructing dynamic, context-specific knowledge graphs from input text during inference, enabling domain-adaptive retrieval that leverages both semantic similarity and explicit entity relationships. The framework performs real-time entity and relation extraction to build contextual knowledge graphs, then integrates graph-structural embeddings with textual semantics through a multi-component memory architecture. Three memory banks – contextual, semantic, and structural – are maintained with retrieval signals fused via learned weights to capture both surface-level semantics and deeper relational patterns. Evaluated on SlimPajama (84.7K training examples), WikiText-103 (4,358 examples), PG-19 (100 examples), and Proof-pile (46.3K examples), KGERMAR achieves up to 8.5\% lower perplexity and 2–2.5x better memory efficiency than memory-augmented baselines across context lengths from 1K to 32K tokens, with superior in-context learning performance across five NLU tasks. The dynamic knowledge graph construction approach advances memory-augmented language modeling by enabling domain-specific knowledge representation that adapts to input contexts rather than relying on fixed knowledge bases.

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

Range-Aware Bayesian Optimization for Discovering Diverse Designs within Target Property Windows

arXiv:2606.11574v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In many materials and product design problems, desirable candidates exhibit properties that fall within an acceptable range rather than achieve a single optimum. Recovering multiple, distinct solutions that satisfy such specifications is also practically valuable, as some candidates may be preferred for reasons of cost, processability, or robustness that are difficult to encode directly in an objective function. Here, we develop a range-aware Bayesian optimization (BO) framework in which the acquisition function directly scores the posterior probability that a candidate satisfies a target range. The framework naturally extends to parallel pursuit of multiple distinct specifications over a shared candidate space. Across benchmark tasks, range-aware acquisition consistently recovers larger and more diverse sets of valid designs than standard BO baselines and recent goal-seeking methods. Its utility is further demonstrated in two practically motivated design case studies involving optimizing reaction conditions for polymer synthesis and sequence-defined oligomer discovery for prescribed optical absorption bands, supported by quantum chemical calculations. These results suggest that range-aware BO can provide a practical and sample-efficient foundation for specification-driven design, particularly when design flexibility and solution diversity are important considerations.