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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Examining the Cognitive Gap Between Authors and Peer Reviewers on Academic Paper Novelty

Novelty is a crucial metric for assessing the quality of academic papers. Scholars strive to highlight the novel aspects of their work, particularly in the title, abstract, and introduction. Peer review, serving as the gatekeeper of scientific rigor, rigorously evaluates the novelty of papers, yet a cognitive gap may exist between author self-promotion and reviewer evaluation. To investigate this, we analyzed 15,328 academic papers published in Nature Communications from 2016 to 2021, along with their peer-review comments. We found that both reviewers and authors emphasize result-oriented innovation, with reviewers adopting a more comprehensive evaluation perspective. Furthermore, by examining promotional intensity against inherent paper novelty, we found that its effect depends on the paper's actual innovation level. Highly innovative papers benefit from stronger promotional language, receiving more positive evaluations. We also found that promotional language significantly correlates with reviewer disagreement on novelty specifically for papers of moderate innovativeness, whereas it has negligible impact for papers with either very high or very low novelty. This reveals how promotional language operates most prominently in the gray area of academic evaluation.

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

Size Doesn't Matter: Cosine-Scored Sparse Autoencoders

arXiv:2606.15054v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) detect features via inner product, so a feature's activation scales with both its directional alignment and the input's norm. Under BatchTopK, high-norm tokens inflate all pre-activations simultaneously, claiming dictionary slots regardless of content alignment. This matters because sublayer normalization has already discarded the magnitude the score measures, so the encoder detects a quantity the model does not read. We replace the score with a learned blend of cosine similarity and input magnitude, letting the optimizer choose how much norm to use; a per-feature extension lets each feature decide independently. In both regimes, training is free to recover inner product but never does, with no feature ever choosing more than half-magnitude dependence. At matched reconstruction, the cosine encoder learns features that align with human-recognizable concepts far more often than standard, filling dictionary slots that inner product wastes on norm detectors. Loss reweighting that equalizes gradients barely closes the gap, confirming forward-pass score geometry as the lever. The advantage is not universal across tasks or depths, but we believe cosine scoring should be the default for dictionary learning on normalized representations.

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

Neural Bayesian Anomaly Mitigation: A Robust Loss that Doubles as an Unsupervised Contamination Classifier

arXiv:2606.16524v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Engineered robust losses such as Huber, Student-$t$, and generalised cross-entropy make supervised models tolerant of contamination but cannot answer which observations are corrupted. We introduce Neural Bayesian Anomaly Mitigation (NBAM), a general-purpose drop-in loss derived from a Bayesian latent-switch mixture model: the marginal likelihood defines a robust supervised loss, and the associated posterior defines an unsupervised contamination classifier. Like Huber or Student-$t$, NBAM can replace the standard training loss in any supervised pipeline; unlike them, it additionally learns a structured contamination model and returns a calibrated per-sample contamination posterior. A learned input-dependent prior $\pi_\phi(x)$ captures the spatial locality of contamination, so that samples near known corruptions are more likely to be flagged, while an Occam penalty emerges automatically and regularises against over-flagging. On CIFAR-10 with asymmetric label contamination, NBAM recovers the structure of the corruption process without supervision: the contamination posterior separates clean from corrupted samples, and the learned anomaly head identifies the direction of every label-flip pair. Alongside these capabilities, NBAM outperforms the four robust-loss baselines considered here at contamination rates 0.2-0.6.

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

TS-Fault: Benchmarking Time Series Forecasters Against Structural Faults

arXiv:2606.18539v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time series forecasting (TSF) underpins consequential decisions in energy, transportation, finance, and healthcare, yet TSF models are almost universally ranked by a single number (e.g., average error) on clean held-out data, under the implicit assumption that it predicts deployed reliability. However, real faults are not i.i.d noise but structured events with temporal shape, broken cross-variable dependencies, regime change coupled with missingness, and causal propagation across a sensing pipeline. Treating TSF robustness as a data-quality problem, we present TS-Fault, a benchmark that evaluates forecasting models under explicit, parameterized fault scenarios with controllable semantic difficulty. TS-Fault organizes recurring failures into four modes along two orthogonal axes (observation- vs mechanism-level; univariate vs multivariate) and injects each fault into the most prediction-critical window via a unified importance score. This design enables robustness to be tested against the structures models actually rely on, rather than reduced to generic noise sensitivity. We evaluate 21 models across 6 datasets, 4 modes, and 5 difficulty levels under a paired clean/corrupt protocol. The results reveal three findings that contradict common leaderboard intuition: (i) clean-data accuracy anti-correlates with robustness; (ii) clean rankings are preserved under observation-level faults but reshuffled under mechanism-level faults; and (iii) all catastrophic failures occur under mechanism-level faults, with foundation models achieving the highest clean-data accuracy yet exhibiting the greatest fragility. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Ray-zyy/TS-Fault.

05.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-23

How should I respond to race-based exclusion in my lab?

作者:

A researcher in Europe feels left out of their team and held to different standards from their colleagues. How can they challenge exclusion without risking their position? A researcher in Europe feels left out of their team and held to different standards from their colleagues. How can they challenge exclusion without risking their position?

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

Reversible Residual Normalization Alleviates Spatio-Temporal Distribution Shift

arXiv:2604.15838v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Distribution shift severely degrades the performance of deep forecasting models. While this issue is well-studied for individual time series, it remains a significant challenge in the spatio-temporal domain. Effective solutions like instance normalization and its variants can mitigate temporal shifts by standardizing statistics. However, distribution shift on a graph is far more complex, involving not only the drift of individual node series but also heterogeneity across the spatial network where different nodes exhibit distinct statistical properties. To tackle this problem, we propose Reversible Residual Normalization (RRN), a novel framework that performs spatially-aware invertible transformations to address distribution shift in both spatial and temporal dimensions. Our approach integrates graph convolutional operations within invertible residual blocks, enabling adaptive normalization that respects the underlying graph structure while maintaining reversibility. By combining Center Normalization with spectral-constrained graph neural networks, our method captures and normalizes complex Spatio-Temporal relationships in a data-driven manner. The bidirectional nature of our framework allows models to learn in a normalized latent space and recover original distributional properties through inverse transformation, offering a robust and model-agnostic solution for forecasting on dynamic spatio-temporal systems.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Emergent retokenization symmetry in large language models: phenomenology and applications

Tokenization introduces representational redundancy: under a fixed token vocabulary, every byte string admits many valid token encodings, or segmentations, that decode to the same surface string. However, given a prompt, most language model tokenizers break this representational symmetry by returning a canonical segmentation. Training only on canonical segmentations should influence inference behavior, and there is little reason to expect models to respect segmentation symmetry on downstream tasks. We find that this symmetry partially emerges during training. Here, we probe this emergent symmetry through experiments testing token compositional understanding, representation diversity, and task focused benchmark performance. We primarily use retokenization – replacing a prompt's canonical tokenization with an alternative segmentation while preserving its bytes exactly. Relative to other prompt perturbations, retokenization is unusually clean because it isolates segmentation effects without changing syntax, semantics or surface form. We use retokenization to study sensitivity and robustness to semantically identical input representations across pretraining and post-training. Moreover, this partial retokenization symmetry suggests a distinct inference-time sampling axis. While temperature sampling generates diverse outputs from the model using its next-token probability distribution, retokenization generates diversity from the model's internal computations through semantically equivalent input representations. We find that while this retokenization sampling strategy can hurt performance on easy problems, it can also recover solutions that conventional sampling does not find. Overall, our work presents retokenization as a simple yet powerful probe of large language models, shedding light on compositional understanding and prompt sensitivity, and offering a novel sampling strategy.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Probing Semantic Alignment, Lexical Invariance, and Syntactic Influence in LLM Metaphor Processing

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on metaphor detection and interpretation tasks, yet it remains unclear what such behavioral success reveals about metaphor processing. We present a diagnostic analysis that examines the limits of behavioral evidence by probing three complementary dimensions: semantic attribute alignment, lexical invariance, and syntactic sensitivity. Using geometric probing, we assess whether model-generated interpretations align with reference semantic attributes; through context-varying substitution, we analyze the stability of lexical associations between metaphorical and literal expressions; and via controlled syntactic perturbations, we examine sensitivity in metaphor detection. Our analysis reveals that LLM-generated interpretations can exhibit semantic drift relative to reference attributes; stable lexical anchors persist across contextual conditions, potentially supporting conventional metaphors while biasing novel metaphors requiring contextual integration; and detection performance is sensitive to syntactic irregularities. These findings suggest that strong behavioral performance may reflect heterogeneous underlying signals, highlighting the need for caution when interpreting metaphor benchmarks as evidence of robust, integrated semantic understanding.

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

EEG-FM-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for the Systematic Evaluation and Diagnostic Analyses of EEG Foundation Models

arXiv:2508.17742v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Electroencephalography foundation models (EEG-FMs) have advanced brain signal analysis, but the lack of standardized evaluation benchmarks impedes model comparison and scientific progress. Current evaluations rely on inconsistent protocols that render cross-model comparisons unreliable, while a lack of diagnostic analyses obscures the internal mechanisms driving transfer efficiency and scaling behaviors. To address this, we introduce EEG-FM-Bench, a unified system for the standardized evaluation of EEG-FMs. The benchmark integrates 14 datasets across 10 paradigms and incorporates diverse experimental settings, including multiple fine-tuning strategies, task organizations, and classifier configurations, supported by tools for gradient and representation analysis. Our experiments and analysis reveal several critical insights: (1) multi-task learning often acts as a useful regularizer that mitigates overfitting in data-scarce EEG contexts, although negative transfer can arise under specific task paradigms; (2) pre-training efficiency is currently limited by gradient conflicts between reconstruction objectives and downstream tasks; (3) under released checkpoints and a matched downstream protocol, model or data scale alone does not fully explain transfer performance, while objective alignment, adaptation compatibility, and EEG-specific design appear to be important factors. This benchmark enables fair comparison and reproducible analysis, providing a step toward fairer comparison and more interpretable analysis of EEG-FMs. Code is available at https://github.com/xw1216/EEG-FM-Bench.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Cyclic Denoising Reveals Ultrastable Memories in Diffusion Models

We introduce cyclic denoising – repeated forward and reverse diffusion at controlled noise amplitudes – as an extraction attack for image diffusion models. Inspired by random organization in disordered solids, cyclic denoising exposes regions of the learned distribution that are largely inaccessible to standard sampling. The dynamics drive samples toward attractors with a broad stability spectrum. The deepest attractors are ultrastable: they regenerate after near-total corruption and persist through thousands of noising-denoising cycles. Many of these attractors correspond to memorized training images, including stock photographs, brand watermarks, and web-crawl artifacts. The attack requires only sampler-level control, with no gradients, weight inspection, prompts, captions, or prior knowledge of the training data. Unlike generate-and-filter attacks, which rely on large-scale prompted generation and post-hoc similarity or membership-inference filtering, our main protocol is fully unconditioned. We demonstrate the phenomenon in Stable Diffusion v1.4 and in a pixel-space DDPM, showing consistent behavior across latent- and pixel-space diffusion models. Across noise amplitudes, we observe a yielding-like transition: low-amplitude cycling produces trivial absorbing fixed points or limit cycles, while larger amplitudes induce rearrangements, basin hopping, and long-lived trapping in structured memorized attractor basins. We also observe hierarchical partial absorption, prompt-stabilized basins, and cross-initial-condition universality of the recovered attractor set. Our results therefore show that cyclic denoising is both a physics-inspired probe of generative landscapes and a practical tool for memorization auditing, with implications for privacy, copyright compliance, and model fingerprinting.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Impatient Bandits: Optimizing for the Long-Term Without Delay

arXiv:2501.07761v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Increasingly, recommender systems are tasked with improving users' long-term satisfaction. In this context, we study a content exploration task, which we formalize as a bandit problem with delayed rewards. There is an apparent trade-off in choosing the learning signal: waiting for the full reward to become available might take several weeks, slowing the rate of learning, whereas using short-term proxy rewards reflects the actual long-term goal only imperfectly. First, we develop a predictive model of delayed rewards that incorporates all information obtained to date. Rewards as well as shorter-term surrogate outcomes are combined through a Bayesian filter to obtain a probabilistic belief. Second, we devise a bandit algorithm that quickly learns to identify content aligned with long-term success using this new predictive model. We prove a regret bound for our algorithm that depends on the Value of Progressive Feedback, an information-theoretic metric that captures the quality of short-term leading indicators that are observed prior to the long-term reward. We apply our approach to a podcast recommendation problem, where we seek to recommend shows that users engage with repeatedly over two months. We empirically validate that our approach significantly outperforms methods that optimize for short-term proxies or rely solely on delayed rewards, as demonstrated by an A/B test in a recommendation system that serves hundreds of millions of users.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Survival differences and artemisinin resistance in severe malaria among HIV coinfected patients: data from Mozambique

Abstract Background Malaria remains a significant cause of morbidity and mortality, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, where rates of HIV coinfection are high. This study aimed to determine whether Plasmodium falciparum malaria treatment outcomes and rates of antimalarial resistance markers differ according to HIV serostatus in Mozambique. Methodology We conducted an observational study of non-pregnant adults, with and without HIV coinfection, admitted to the Hospital Central de Maputo for treatment of severe malaria. Plasmodium falciparum DNA was extracted from whole blood and sequenced to identify single-nucleotide polymorphisms. Statistical analyses to compare clinical outcomes and rates of nonsynonymous mutations in genes associated with drug resistance were performed in R version 4.2. Results We recruited 149 study participants aged between 18-62 years, 72 (48.3%) were female, and 59 (39.6%) were infected with HIV. Comparing clinical outcomes, we found a significant difference in anemia (hemoglobin

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Mitigating Trotter Errors via Post-Processed Symmetry Restoration

arXiv:2606.20242v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum simulation is a powerful tool for exploring complex quantum many-body systems such as condensed matter physics and gauge theories. Trotterization, which approximates the ideal time evolution operator by decomposing it into a sequence of local gate operations, is one of the most widely used quantum simulation algorithms. However, such Trotterized implementations generally fail to preserve the symmetries of the target Hamiltonian during compilation. As a result, they can drive quantum states out of symmetrically allowed subspaces, leading to unphysical dynamics and symmetry-violating algorithmic errors. In this work, we propose a symmetry-based Trotter error mitigation protocol using classical post-processing. By applying symmetry transformations to the initial state or interleaving them between discrete Trotter layers, and then averaging an ensemble of the resulting measurement outcomes via classical post-processing, our method systematically projects out the symmetry-violating components of the Trotter error while leaving the ideal dynamics unchanged. Importantly, this framework naturally accommodates non-local spatial symmetries and anti-unitary operations such as time reversal, which are difficult or impossible to implement directly with hardware-native quantum gates. We benchmark our protocol on the one-dimensional XY model and the one-dimensional Schwinger model. In the XY model, enforcing reflection symmetry suppresses the leading-order Trotter error, whereas in the Schwinger model, interleaving gauge transformations between Trotter layers enables gauge-twirling effectively to reduce unphysical violations of local Gauss's law. These results demonstrate that symmetry-based post-processing provides a depth-preserving route to substantially improving the fidelity of Trotterized quantum simulations on near-term devices.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Rate-Aware Quantum-Inspired Trajectory Learning for Interference-Limited Multi-UAV Networks

arXiv:2606.25480v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) can provide on-demand, high-capacity connectivity in disaster and normal situation. However, it faces a challenge of curse of dimensionality in trajectory optimization, where interference-limited environments and vast search spaces make real-time coordination computationally expensive. To overcome this challenge, we propose the Rate-Aware Quantum-Annealed Graph Condensation (RA-QAGC) scheme, which combines rate-aware graph abstraction with decentralized reinforcement learning to enable scalable, interference-aware UAV coordination. By identifying high throughput locations and guiding UAV trajectory adaptation toward throughput-optimal regions, RA-QAGC effectively balances network capacity by maintaining quality-of-service (QoS) requirements. Simulation results demonstrate the proposal outperformed over existing schemes by achieving 59.4 Mbps total throughput and 23.9 Mbps priority-user throughput, representing gains of approximately 15% and 34%, respectively, over the baseline schemes.

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

EnvRL: Learn from Environment Dynamics in Agentic Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for training Large Language Models (LLMs) as agents. However, conventional RL methods for long-horizon agentic tasks often struggle with sparse outcome rewards. Intuitively, this overlooks the rich environment dynamics information contained in rollout interaction trajectories. We argue that the interaction experience inherently serves as an implicit supervision signal, reveals the underlying transition mechanisms of the environment, and enables the agent to construct a more accurate internal model of the environment.. Therefore, in this work, we investigate how to leverage this additional signal to improve policy learning. Specifically, we propose EnvRL, a framework that incorporates environment dynamics learning into agentic RL via two auxiliary objectives: state prediction and inverse dynamics. By jointly optimizing with the primary RL objective, we encourage the agent to internalize environment dynamics from its own interaction experience. Extensive experiments on two long-horizon agentic benchmarks demonstrate that EnvRL achieves significant improvements on success-rates over RL-only baselines, e.g., when trained with GRPO, lifting Qwen-2.5-1.5B-Instruct from 72.8% to 77.4% on ALFWorld, and from 56.8% to 67.0% on WebShop.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Study protocol and statistical analysis plan for a randomized controlled trial evaluating the safety and feasibility of the recombinant human platelet-derived growth factor B (rhPDGF-BB)-enhanced collagen plug for complex perianal fistula healing

Background A drug-repurposing-specific phenome-wide association study (PheWAS) demonstrated that patients with a single nucleotide variant that decreases expression of platelet-derived growth factor receptor beta (PDGFR{beta}) have a higher prevalence of fistulas, suggesting that PDGFR{beta} signaling is important for tissue repair. Recombinant human platelet derived growth factor B (rhPDGF) is an FDA-approved protein-based therapeutic that signals through PDGFR{beta} to heal and regenerate cutaneous skin wounds, periodontal tissue, and orthopedic bone with a strong safety profile. We hypothesize that rhPDGF will benefit other conditions identified by PheWAS with a similar physiological mechanism as the existing indications, such as complex perianal fistulas that are ineligible for a fistulotomy. Methods and analysis This prospective, blinded, single-site study aims to enroll 12 participants, randomized at a ratio of 2:1, comparing implantation of rhPDGF-enhanced collagen to routine care procedures, and stratified by fistula etiology, idiopathic versus Crohns disease (CD)-related. The primary outcome of this study will evaluate the technical performance of the rhPDGF-enhanced collagen implant for treatment of complex perianal fistulas as measured by the proportion of participants with successful implantation of the intervention without any intervention-related serious adverse events. The secondary outcomes will assess the preliminary safety and efficacy of the intervention based on all intervention-related adverse events, total fistulas healed, rate of fistula recurrence, and change in patient-reported symptoms. Complex perianal fistulas, idiopathic or CD-related, remain a major clinical challenge in need of new multimodal treatments aimed at tissue repair and regeneration. Pharmaceutical rhPDGF stimulation of PDGFR{beta} signaling promotes healing of skin, bone, and soft tissue. PheWAS revealed fistulas as a novel indication for repurposing rhPDGF. This protocol aims to evaluate the technical performance, preliminary safety and efficacy, and feasibility of rhPDGF-enhanced collagen for healing and remission of complex perianal fistulas. Ethics and dissemination This trial was approved by the Vanderbilt University Medical Center institutional review board (IRB#240585). Results will be submitted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

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

Provably Safe, Yet Scalable Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.14536v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that optimize rewards while satisfying constraints. Predominant approaches rely on soft-constrained policy optimization, which has achieved empirical success but does not provide formal safety guarantees for the learned policy. In contrast, methods with strict guarantees typically rely on explicit certificate functions, whose construction requires the direct synthesis and verification of control-invariant sets, a process that scales poorly with state dimension and often yields overly conservative behavior. In this paper, we present the Provably Safe, yet Scalable RL (PS2-RL) framework, a novel two-phase architecture for learning provably safe policies in a scalable manner, designed to overcome the key bottlenecks of prior methods. Rather than explicitly computing invariant sets, PS2-RL leverages a learned backup policy to forward-integrate the system dynamics, generating an implicit control-invariant set online. In the first phase, the backup policy is trained with our proposed safe-arrival value function, which characterizes the optimal backup policy for invariant-set construction. In the second phase, an RL policy is trained end-to-end through a differentiable projection layer that strictly enforces the safety guarantees induced by the learned backup policy. By maximizing the volume of the implicit control-invariant set in the first phase, the resulting PS2 policy from the second phase is performant and scalable, while maintaining provable safety. Crucially, PS2-RL imposes no restrictions on the underlying RL algorithm and can be plugged into any existing training pipeline. We establish theoretical guarantees for the proposed framework and evaluate it on robotic control tasks with state dimensions up to 10, a regime in which prior provably safe RL methods struggle or become impractical.

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

Large Language Model Agents Are Not Always Faithful Self-Evolvers

Self-evolving large language model (LLM) agents continually improve by accumulating and reusing past experience, yet it remains unclear whether they faithfully rely on that experience to guide their behavior. We present the first systematic investigation of experience faithfulness, the causal dependence of an agent's decisions on the experience it is given, in self-evolving LLM agents. Using controlled causal interventions on both raw and condensed forms of experience, we comprehensively evaluate four representative frameworks across 13 LLM backbones and 9 environments. Our analysis uncovers a striking asymmetry: while agents consistently depend on raw experience, they often disregard or misinterpret condensed experience, even when it is the only experience provided. This gap persists across single- and multi-agent configurations and across backbone scales. We trace its underlying causes to three factors: the semantic limitations of condensed content, internal processing biases that suppress experience, and task regimes where pretrained priors already suffice. These findings challenge prevailing assumptions about self-evolving methods and underscore the need for more faithful and reliable approaches to experience integration.

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

Short-Term-to-Long-Term Memory Transfer for Knowledge Graphs under Partial Observability

arXiv:2605.22142v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning under partial observability requires deciding what information to retain, yet most memory-based approaches do not explicitly model short-term-to-long-term transfer of symbolic observations. We study this transfer process in a temporal knowledge-graph memory setting and cast it as a neuro-symbolic value-based decision problem: for each observed triple, the agent chooses whether to keep or drop it before long-term insertion. To handle variable-sized short-term buffers, we use a per-item Q-learning design with shared parameters and a practical temporal-difference update over matched items across consecutive steps. On the RoomKG benchmark at long-term memory capacity 128, learned transfer decisions outperform symbolic and neural baselines, including symbolic baselines with temporal annotations and history-based LSTM/Transformer baselines. Across transfer-policy ablations, a lightweight local short-term-only variant performs best, and step-level behavior shows that the policy keeps navigation- and query-relevant facts while discarding lower-value candidate facts, supporting explicit and interpretable memory decisions under memory constraints.

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

PrefSQA: Pairwise Preference Prediction for Speech Quality Assessment and the Critical Role of High Quality Datasets

arXiv:2606.19597v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mean opinion scores (MOS) are widely used for speech quality assessment, yet scalar labels are sensitive to rater variability and listening test differences. This introduces labeling noise, which limits the reliability of MOS prediction. Preference prediction reduces this variability as listeners compare signals directly, producing cleaner labels. We study MOS-free preference prediction and propose PrefSQA, which incorporates uncertainty-aware logits, an impairment attention head, and a module based on non-matching-reference comparisons. We use and refine five datasets, including MOS-derived and low-noise simulated sets with matching and non-matching content, experiment with human preference sets, and test on unseen data. Experiments show small improvements on MOS-derived data, while other sets reveal clear improvement over the baselines, highlighting the value of high-quality preference data and demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed method.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Explaining Attention with Program Synthesis

arXiv:2606.19317v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A longstanding goal of research on interpretable deep learning is to replace opaque neural computations with human-meaningful symbolic descriptions. In this paper, we propose an approach for approximating the behavior of components of deep networks with executable programs. We focus on attention heads in transformer language models. For a given head, we first compute its associated attention matrices on a collection of randomly selected training examples. Next, we prompt a pre-trained language model with a summary of these matrices, and instruct it to generate a set of Python programs that can reproduce the associated attention patterns given only text from the input sentence. Finally, we re-rank programs according to how well our final set of programs predict behavior on held-out inputs. We demonstrate that a set of fewer than 1,000 such generated programs can reproduce the attention patterns of heads in GPT-2, TinyLlama-1.1B, and Llama-3B, achieving an average Intersection-over-Union similarity above 75% on TinyStories. Moreover, the best-fit programs can replace neural attention heads without substantially affecting model behavior: replacing 25% of attention heads with programmatic surrogates across the three models incurs only a 16% average perplexity increase, while maintaining performance on a variety of downstream question answering benchmarks. This work contributes a scalable pipeline for reverse-engineering attention heads in transformer models using human-readable, executable code, advancing a path toward symbolic transparency in neural models.

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

Recover Semantics First, Generate Better: Improved Latent Modeling for 3D MRI Reconstruction and Cross-Contrast Synthesis

Multi-contrast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) provides complementary information for clinical diagnosis. However, acquiring all MRI sequences is often time-consuming and costly. Recent generative models perform cross-contrast synthesis to address this issue by inferring absent contrasts from the available ones. Nevertheless, synthesizing 3D MRI presents significant challenges. Due to the massive volume sizes, operating directly in the pixel space is computationally prohibitive; therefore, a common approach is to first compress the 3D volumes into a latent space and subsequently train generative models in that space. We observe that existing compression architectures face several critical issues: they under-preserve long-range anatomical coherence, discard clinically meaningful semantics, and rely on optimization objectives that lead to over-smoothed reconstructions. Ultimately, these shortcomings compromise the performance of subsequent generative models. In this work, we propose a semantics-first latent modeling framework for 3D MRI reconstruction and cross-contrast synthesis. Specifically, we introduce a Latent Harmonization Encoder (LHE) to capture global anatomical dependencies, ensuring coherent volumetric representations. To mitigate semantic degradation during latent compression, we further design a Semantic Recovery Block (SRB) that injects high-level priors from a self-supervised semantic teacher, enhancing contrast-aware separability in the latent space. Additionally, we propose an Anatomy-aware Frequency Loss (AFL) to adaptively preserve diagnostically relevant high-frequency structures. Extensive experiments on two public multi-contrast MRI datasets demonstrate consistent improvements in reconstruction fidelity and cross-contrast synthesis quality. Our code is available at https://github.com/script-Yang/RSF.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Structured Approximations of Measures

arXiv:2310.09149v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the approximation of probability measures in the Wasserstein-$p$ distance by structured classes of approximators, motivated by applications in imaging, machine learning, and physical measurement under sensor constraints. We obtain three sets of results. First, for measures with densities bounded away from zero on a bounded Lipschitz domain $\Omega$, we prove that any approximation scheme for functions in $\mathrm{L}_p(\Omega)$ transfers, with linear rate, to a corresponding approximation scheme for measures in $\mathrm{W}_p(\Omega)$. The argument applies a theorem of Bogovskii on regularity of solutions to the continuity equation in the Benamou-Brenier formulation of optimal transport. We exhibit concrete approximation schemes (polynomials, shift-invariant spaces, cardinal interpolation with radial basis functions, kernel density estimators, and piecewise approximations on nonuniform Voronoi partitions) that fit the framework. As a matter of independent interest, we prove a negative Sobolev lower bound that generalizes existing bounds from $p=2$ to all $p\in(1,\infty)$. We also consider deterministic bounds for discrete approximations to arbitrary measures in terms of the mesh norm of a quasi-uniform set of points. We specialize these bounds to show that compactly supported measures admit a deterministic $N$-term approximation $\mu_N$ such that $\mathrm{W}_p(\mu,\mu_N) = O(N^{-\frac{1}{d}})$ for all $d\geq 1$, which matches the asymptotic optimal quantizer rate. We also extend these results to non-compactly supported measures with appropriate tail decay.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

ARGUS: Stacked Multi-View Identity Mosaic Injection for Subject-Preserving Video Generation

Subject-preserving video generation is not solved by frontal-face similarity alone: a generated person must remain recognizable across motion, large viewpoint changes, expression shifts, occlusion, scale variation, and conflicts among text, first-frame, and identity references. We argue that the central bottleneck is the point-reference paradigm, which collapses identity into a single static observation entangled with pose, accessories, lighting, background, and camera statistics. We introduce Argus, a Wan-based framework centered on Stacked Multi-View Identity Mosaic Injection (SMII). SMII converts MLLM-selected image/video identity evidence into a 3*3 stacked mosaic, synchronizes the mosaic with the current diffusion time, and injects it as negative-time read-only memory in Wan's native token space. This turns identity from an external clean adapter or a single reference image into a compact dynamic distribution. Around SMII, an MLLM Identity Director selects informative identity moments and resolves condition conflicts, while no-cross-pair counterfactual training, Temporal Identity Annealing, and Adaptive Self-Likeness Guidance improve robustness without paired subject-video supervision. We further release HardID-Celeb, a public-figure identity-stress benchmark, and introduce YawScore and OccScore to probe large-yaw and first-frame-occlusion robustness. Argus achieves state-of-the-art results on OpenS2V-Eval Human-Domain, reaching 64.38 Total Score, 71.86 FaceSim, 51.62 NexusScore, and 79.14 NaturalScore. On HardID-Celeb, Argus obtains 76.80 FaceSim and improves YawScore and OccScore by 12.60 and 15.10 points over the strongest baselines, demonstrating that dynamic identity memory and large-scale counterfactual self-supervision are highly effective for subject-preserving video generation.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

ComputeFHE: A Privacy-Preserving General-Purpose Computation Library

Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) enables computations to be performed directly on encrypted data while preserving data confidentiality. However, its practical applications remain limited by high computational costs and development complexity. This paper presents ComputeFHE, an open-source C++ library that facilitates the development of privacy-preserving applications based on the TFHE cryptosystem. The library provides encrypted integer and fixed-point data types together with arithmetic, logical, comparison, conditional, and oblivious array-access operations which allow developers to implement algorithms using a familiar imperative programming paradigm. ComputeFHE supports both conventional TFHE arithmetic based on standard two-input logic gates and an optimized Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU) architecture utilizing FHE-friendly logic primitives. Experimental results demonstrate significant reductions in the number of required bootstrapping operations, achieving performance improvements of up to 3.9x for selected operations. In addition, the library includes a simulation mode that enables testing, debugging, and complexity analysis without performing actual cryptographic computations while providing circuit complexity and bootstrapping costs. Built on top of OpenFHE, ComputeFHE offers a practical and accessible framework for developing and evaluating privacy-preserving algorithms and applications.