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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Complete entanglement detection using polynomial invariants

arXiv:2606.16712v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing methods for deciding whether a bipartite quantum state is separable or entangled typically fall into one of two categories: they are either complete but require access to an explicit density matrix followed by numerical optimization, or they can be evaluated directly by measuring the quantum system but are incomplete, in the sense that they cannot detect all forms of entanglement. In this work, we overcome both limitations in a unified framework. First, we bypass numerical optimization by deriving separability criteria in the form of universal bounds on tensor powers of separable states. We prove that these bounds are complete: every entangled state violates them for sufficiently large tensor powers. Second, we explicitly construct a corresponding complete family of nonlinear entanglement witnesses, which can detect all forms of entanglement without requiring an explicit density matrix. The witnesses we construct are moreover basis-independent, in the sense that they are invariant under conjugation by local unitaries. Altogether, our results expand the toolbox for entanglement detection in arbitrary local dimensions in a manifestly invariant way.

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

Constraining the outputs of ReLU neural networks

arXiv:2508.03867v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce a class of algebraic varieties naturally associated with ReLU neural networks, arising from the piecewise linear structure of their outputs across activation regions in input space, and the piecewise multilinear structure in parameter space. By analyzing the rank constraints on the network outputs within each activation region, we derive polynomial equations that characterize the functions representable by the network. We further investigate conditions under which these varieties attain their expected dimension, providing insight into the expressive and structural properties of ReLU networks.

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

HRIR-Former: Grid-Free Time-Domain Reconstruction of Head-Related Impulse Responses with a Spatially Encoded Transformer

arXiv:2603.27998v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Individualized head-related impulse responses (HRIRs) enable binaural rendering, but dense per-listener measurements are costly. We address HRIR spatial up-sampling from sparse per-listener measurements: given a few measured HRIRs for a listener, predict HRIRs at unmeasured target directions. Prior learning methods often work in the frequency domain, rely on minimum-phase assumptions or separate timing models, and use a fixed direction grid, which can degrade temporal fidelity and spatial continuity. We propose HRIR-Former, a time-domain, grid-free binaural Transformer for reconstructing HRIRs at arbitrary directions from sparse inputs. It uses sinusoidal spatial features, a Conv1D refinement module, and auxiliary interaural time difference (ITD) and interaural level difference (ILD) heads. On SONICOM, it improves normalized mean squared error (NMSE), cosine distance, and ITD/ILD errors over prior methods; ablations validate modules and show minimum-phase preprocessing is unnecessary.

04.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Fast formation to reinforce lithium-rich cathodes

作者:

Formation in lithium-ion battery manufacturing typically involves low-rate charge–discharge cycles to establish stable electrode–electrolyte interfaces—a time-consuming process1–4. Here, our findings on lithium-rich layered oxide cathodes challenge the necessity of conventional formation, which can even shorten battery lifespan. Fast formation, on the other hand, reduces production cost and enhances capacity and stability. Multiscale synchrotron-based techniques show that residual lithium ions after the initial charge are critical for subsequent structural evolution and cycling performance. Deep lithium de-intercalation causes severe structural degradation and capacity loss due to the inherently fragile lithium-deficient matrix. By contrast, the residual lithium ions from fast formation enhance reversibility through a self-pinning effect, preventing pernicious lattice deformation and reinforcing the ion-storage framework. Adjusting the initial charge current density from 0.2 C to 2 C improves reversible capacity by 20% and extends cycle life by more than 36%. This approach can also be extended to other electrode systems, providing insights for more-efficient battery production. Fast formation in lithium-ion batteries outperforms conventional slow formation, lowering costs and improving battery capacity, stability and cycle life, offering broader application to electrode systems.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

T2MM: An LLM Supported Architecture For Inquiry-Based Modeling

Model Construction is a foundational practice in science learning that relies on visualization and interactivity. Large Language Models, increasingly augmented with multimodal capabilities, have been integrated in education contexts to support learning. However, these tools lack visual interactivity that is required by some learning contexts. We introduce Text to Multimodal Model (T2MM), a robust, dynamic LLM supported architecture that assists in model construction within the open inquiry ecology-based modeling software Virtual Experimental Research Assistant (VERA). T2MM accounts for the current context of the learner's model and creates interactive models, rather than static images, enabling the model to remain responsive to manual adjustment. To measure technical feasibility, we evaluate T2MM through a custom procedurally generated dataset of natural language learner modeling requests and target models within the VERA system. T2MM outperforms a baseline model generation architecture implemented through LLM-supported full code generation, common in the literature, across all measured success metrics. Our contribution not only outlines LLM integration into a inquiry-based learning modeling tool, but also describes a possible architecture through which more interactive multimodal LLM tools can be created.

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

VikingMem: A Memory Base Management System for Stateful LLM-based Applications

arXiv:2605.29640v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models have revolutionized interactive applications; however, their finite context windows pose a critical data management challenge for maintaining stateful, long-term interactions. Existing memory approaches often rely on simplistic extraction methods that lead to incomplete memories or use rigid, single-purpose memory extraction prompts tailored to a single use case, such as chatbots. Consequently, they lack generalizability and perform poorly across diverse downstream tasks. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Memory Base, a novel data management paradigm for managing the persistent state of long-term interactions. It is characterized by three core principles: selective extraction of high-value memories from raw information streams; inherent statefulness and evolution, where memory content is progressively summarized, corrected, and temporally weighted to prioritize recent interactions; and a generalizable abstraction paradigm designed for robust transferability across diverse applications, including education, recommendation, and agent memory. Building on this foundation, we present VikingMem, an end-to-end Memory Base Management System implemented on the VikingDB vector engine. VikingMem materializes this paradigm through interconnected event and entity abstractions. It features event-centric memory extraction to selectively handle complex information streams, while entities are dynamically updated by events to achieve stateful evolution. Using temporal compression via a topic-wise timeline and time-weighted recall, the system progressively produces high-level summary memories, prioritizes recent items, and compresses and fades older ones. Extensive evaluations on long-term memory benchmarks demonstrate that VikingMem outperformes baselines by up to 30% in memory retrieval effectiveness while maintaining the low latency essential for interactive applications.

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

LLM-Powered Virtual Population for Demand Simulation and Pricing

We develop an LLM-powered virtual population model that simulates demand for pricing decisions, in settings where products are described by rich unstructured information, such as text descriptions and images, and where decision makers need not only mean-demand predictions but also uncertainty estimates for counterfactual prices. Our model represents exposed customers as draws from a finite mixture of customer personas. For each persona, product, and candidate price, an LLM elicits a persona-level purchase probability using both structured persona information and unstructured product information. These probabilities are aggregated through calibrated mixture weights to form a predictive distribution of aggregate demand. The resulting simulator can evaluate counterfactual prices under various pricing objectives, including expected revenue and risk-aware criteria such as conditional value at risk. We test the framework on an online H&M fashion dataset with product descriptions and images. The calibrated LLM-based simulator achieves the best overall predictive performance among the models considered, and supports sample-efficient pricing decisions. Our framework provides a practical way to use LLMs as demand simulators for products with limited historical demand data but rich product information. By producing a full predictive demand distribution rather than only a point forecast, it enables managers to compare candidate prices, quantify demand uncertainty, and choose prices that target either average-case revenue or risk-aware objectives.

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

Dummy Backdoor as a Defense: Removing Unknown Backdoors via Shared Internal Mechanisms for Generative LLMs

Backdoor attacks pose a serious threat to the safety and reliability of Large Language Models (LLMs), as they cause models to behave normally on clean inputs while producing attacker-specified responses when hidden triggers are present. Removing such unknown backdoors is particularly challenging when the defender does not know the backdoor attack types or the internal mechanisms formed through backdoor training. In this work, we propose a simple but effective backdoor removal method based on shared internal mechanisms across different backdoors. First, we show that different backdoors with the same task (attack objective) induce similar trigger-activated changes in the internal activations. Motivated by this observation, our method intentionally embeds a backdoor with a known trigger (dummy backdoor) and then removes it through further fine-tuning on dummy-triggered inputs paired with clean responses. Since the dummy backdoor and the unknown backdoor can rely on shared internal mechanisms, removing the dummy backdoor also reduces the effect of the unknown backdoor. We evaluate our method on three backdoor attack types across multiple model families. Experimental results show that our method substantially reduces the attack success rate of the unknown backdoor while preserving model utility, outperforming representative existing defense methods in both backdoor removal effectiveness and utility preservation. These findings suggest that a defender-controllable backdoor can serve as a helpful proxy for mitigating unknown backdoors in generative LLMs.

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

MambaH-Fit: Rethinking Hyper-surface Fitting-based Point Cloud Normal Estimation via State Space Modelling

We present MambaH-Fit, a state space modelling framework tailored for hyper-surface fitting-based point cloud normal estimation. Existing normal estimation methods often fall short in modelling fine-grained geometric structures, thereby limiting the accuracy of the predicted normals. Recently, state space models (SSMs), particularly Mamba, have demonstrated strong modelling capability by capturing long-range dependencies with linear complexity and inspired adaptations to point cloud processing. However, existing Mamba-based approaches primarily focus on understanding global shape structures, leaving the modelling of local, fine-grained geometric details largely under-explored. To address the issues above, we first introduce an Attention-driven Hierarchical Feature Fusion (AHFF) scheme to adaptively fuse multi-scale point cloud patch features, significantly enhancing geometric context learning in local point cloud neighbourhoods. Building upon this, we further propose Patch-wise State Space Model (PSSM) that models point cloud patches as implicit hyper-surfaces via state dynamics, enabling effective fine-grained geometric understanding for normal prediction. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that our method outperforms existing ones in terms of accuracy, robustness, and flexibility. Ablation studies further validate the contribution of the proposed components.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Closing the Approximation Gap in Simulation-free Latent SDEs

arXiv:2606.16138v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recovering dynamical systems from noisy observations is a recurring challenge across scientific domains, including neuroscience and physics. Latent stochastic differential equations (SDEs) address this by modeling the system as an unobserved state that evolves according to a learnable SDE and generates the observations. Variational inference (VI) provides a tractable objective for fitting latent SDEs. Traditional VI algorithms evaluate this objective by numerical simulation over a time discretization, trading fidelity for computational cost. A recent class of algorithms, simulation-free VI, sidesteps this tradeoff by parameterizing the posterior through its instantaneous marginals rather than its drift. In this work, we show that the efficiency of existing simulation-free VI algorithms comes at a price: their parameterizations restrict the approximate posterior to a subset of the SDEs available to simulation-based methods, degrading posterior inference and parameter learning. We propose Helmholtz-SDE, a simulation-free VI algorithm that closes this gap by optimizing over path laws compatible with a prescribed collection of marginals. Helmholtz-SDE recovers dynamics more faithfully than prior simulation-free methods, with the largest gains under high posterior uncertainty. It further matches the performance of simulation-based VI at a fraction of the runtime.

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

Are Online Skill and Memory Modules Always Worth Their Tokens? A Budget-Constrained Study of Web Agents

Online web agents often augment a base actor with memory, workflow, or skill modules. These modules can improve performance, but they also consume test-time tokens, a cost rarely reported alongside the actor's inference cost. We study online augmentation, where this overhead is paid on every task, and re-evaluate its benefits under a fixed total inference budget. We compare AWM, ASI, and ReasoningBank with a token-matched vanilla baseline that uses the same budget for additional actor steps. Across three WebArena domains and three models, Gemini 3 Flash, GPT-5.4-mini, and Qwen 3.6-27B, the vanilla baseline matches or surpasses all three augmentation methods in aggregate success rate while often using fewer total tokens. We observe a similar trend on WorkArena-L1 with Qwen 3.6-27B, indicating that the effect extends to enterprise knowledge-work tasks. Our results suggest that skills and workflow memory can be useful in specific domains, but their apparent gains often vanish against a budget-matched actor. We further show that run-to-run variance materially affects outcomes and should be reported as a core evaluation criterion for online web agents.

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

Prefill Awareness in Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.12747v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safety-relevant studies of language models, including alignment and jailbreaking evaluations and AI control protocols, often rely on prefilling model outputs. If AI models can recognize and act on the fact their prior assistant messages have been inserted or edited, the effectiveness and validity of these methods could be compromised. We investigate whether frontier language models can distinguish between tampered and untampered assistant-side context, a capability we call prefill awareness. To do so, we construct a binary preference benchmark across three prefill mechanisms, filtering for cases where models show consistent stances. We find that frontier models show substantial prefill awareness: Claude Opus 4.5 detects prefills opposing its preferences in 9-35% of cases with a 0% false positive rate when prompted; additionally, models often revert towards baseline behavior without explicitly reporting that the prefill was foreign. Controlled ablations later also show that detection and resistance rely on different cues, where stylistic mismatch mainly affects whether models flag a prefill as foreign, while preference mismatch mainly affects whether they revert toward their baseline answer. We also examine more realistic agentic settings such as misalignment-continuation evaluations and SWE-bench trajectories, where frontier models sometimes disavow prefilled assistant turns in ways that depend strongly on dataset, task success, and hidden formatting artifacts. Our results indicate that prefill awareness is already a substantial confound for some prefill-based methods. We recommend that model developers track this capability in frontier systems.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Global Ease of Living Index: a machine learning framework for longitudinal analysis of major economies

arXiv:2502.06866v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The drastic changes in the global economy, geopolitical conditions, and disruptions such as the COVID-19 pandemic have impacted the cost of living and quality of life. It is essential to comprehend the long-term implications of the cost of living and quality of life in major economies. A transparent and comprehensive living index must include multiple dimensions of living conditions. In this study, we present an approach to quantifying the quality of life through the Global Ease of Living Index that combines various socio-economic and infrastructural factors into a single composite score. Our index utilises economic indicators that define living standards, which could help in targeted interventions to improve specific areas. We present a machine learning framework to address missing data for certain economic indicators in specific countries. We then curate and update the data and use a dimensionality reduction approach (Principal Component Analysis and Factor Analysis) to create the Ease of Living Index for major economies since 1970. Our work significantly adds to the literature by offering a practical tool for policymakers to identify areas needing improvement, such as healthcare systems, employment opportunities, and public safety. Our approach with open data and code can be easily reproduced and applied to various contexts, providing transparency and accessibility for ongoing research and policy development in quality-of-life assessment.

14.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

AutoZyme: An Autonomous Agentic Framework to Optimize Bioinformatics Software

Performance bottlenecks in widely used genomics and bioinformatics software present a substantial and growing burden as biological datasets continue to increase in size and number. Relieving these bottlenecks relies largely on expert manual optimization and therefore remains difficult to scale. Here we present AutoZyme, an agentic framework for scientific software optimization. Given a target function, AutoZyme builds benchmarks, identifies bottlenecks, and iteratively tests code changes, retaining only those that improve runtime while preserving output. We evaluated AutoZyme on 45 functions, improving runtime without substantial memory increases in over 95% of cases considered. Across 38 functions from Seurat, Scanpy and related packages in genomics and bioinformatics, AutoZyme reduced runtime by a median of 8.52-fold, with the largest reductions exceeding 676-fold. The optimized functions are distributed through AutoZyme-Library as drop-in replacements for existing analysis pipelines. We also release AutoZyme as a reusable framework for optimizing additional user-specified packages and functions.

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

DVANet: Degradation-aware Visual-prior Alignment Network for Image Restoration

All-in-One image restoration aims to develop a unified restoration framework for handling diverse degradation types. Existing end-to-end methods usually regard the restoration process as a black-box mapping, lacking an explicit optimization interpretation. Although deep unfolding provides an interpretable iterative modeling paradigm for image restoration, existing methods mostly rely on fixed degradation assumptions or predefined degradation information, making them difficult to adapt to unified restoration requirements under complex degradations and locally damaged content. This limitation restricts their performance in degradation suppression and structural detail recovery. To address these issues, this paper proposes DVANet, a deep unfolding network inspired by the half-quadratic splitting optimization algorithm, which formulates unified image restoration under complex degradations as a collaborative unfolding process between degradation-aware observation consistency and visual-prior-guided reconstruction. Specifically, in the degradation-aware observation consistency branch, a degradation representation module is employed to extract global degradation attributes and local degradation cues, and degradation-conditioned mapping is used to enhance the model's adaptability to different degradation types. In the visual-prior-guided reconstruction branch, DINOv3 is introduced to provide structural and semantic information as hierarchical visual priors, thereby complementing the missing structural information in damaged regions and improving detail recovery. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DVANet achieves superior or competitive performance on multi-scenario degradation and cross-domain image restoration tasks, showing favorable degradation adaptability and generalization ability.

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

JADE: Expert-Grounded Dynamic Evaluation for Open-Ended Professional Tasks

arXiv:2602.06486v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Evaluating agentic AI on open-ended professional tasks faces a fundamental dilemma between rigor and flexibility. Static rubrics provide rigorous, reproducible assessment but fail to accommodate diverse valid response strategies, while LLM-as-a-judge approaches adapt to individual responses yet suffer from instability and bias. Human experts address this dilemma by combining domain-grounded principles with dynamic, claim-level assessment. Inspired by this process, we propose JADE, a two-layer evaluation framework. Layer 1 encodes expert knowledge as a predefined set of evaluation skills, providing stable evaluation criteria. Layer 2 performs report-specific, claim-level evaluation to flexibly assess diverse reasoning strategies, with evidence-dependency gating to invalidate conclusions built on refuted claims. Experiments on BizBench show that JADE improves evaluation stability and reveals critical agent failure modes missed by holistic LLM-based evaluators. We further demonstrate strong alignment with expert-authored rubrics and effective transfer to HealthBench and DR.BENCH, covering medical and 10-domain professional evaluation settings. Code and data are available at https://github.com/smiling-world/JADE.

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

RaLMPH: Reliability-aware Learning for Multi-Pathologist Harmonization in Whole-Slide Image Classification

Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) is a standard paradigm for Whole-Slide Image (WSI) analysis and has achieved strong results in computational pathology. However, most MIL pipelines assume a single "gold" label per slide, which conflicts with clinical practice where substantial inter-pathologist variability is common. Existing multi-annotator learning and label-refinement methods typically estimate global annotator reliability or rely on single-instance assumptions, making them poorly suited to MIL and to localized diagnostic contexts where experts disagree. We propose RaLMPH (Reliability-aware Learning for Multi-Pathologist Harmonization), a MIL-based label reconciliation framework for WSIs annotated by multiple pathologists. RaLMPH introduces a reliability field that jointly models (i) local neighborhood structure in WSI feature space and (ii) expert uncertainty (entropy), enabling per-sample identification of trustworthy reference neighborhoods. Leveraging this field, RaLMPH performs sample-wise local annotator ranking to select reliable opinions per slide and applies an adaptive gating mechanism to fuse labels conditioned on local reliability. Experiments on a clinical WSI dataset with labels from six pathologists, as well as controlled simulated benchmarks, show that RaLMPH consistently outperforms existing approaches. Further analyses clarify how our reliability-aware mechanism improves label reconciliation and downstream MIL performance.

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

Distill Once, Adapt Life-Long: Exploring Dataset Distillation for Continual Test-Time Adaptation

Continual Test-Time Adaptation (CTTA) aims to maintain model performance under evolving target domains by adapting online without labeled data. However, practical deployments often cannot retain the source dataset due to privacy or licensing constraints, and purely source-free CTTA methods tend to become unstable under long-term distribution shift, suffering from compounding self-training errors and catastrophic forgetting. We introduce DO-ALL (Distill Once, Adapt Life-Long), a plug-and-play framework that revisits source information in a compact and privacy-conscious form via Dataset Distillation (DD). Before deployment, DO-ALL performs DD to produce a small set of synthetic distilled anchors that summarize the source distribution. During adaptation, each target sample is matched with its most semantically aligned anchor, which provides a stable reference for various CTTA via source replay, representation alignment, and manifold-smoothing regularization. DO-ALL can be seamlessly integrated into existing CTTA algorithms, consistently improving long-term robustness across CIFAR100-C, ImageNet-C, and the CCC benchmark. This demonstrates the potential of leveraging DD to enable stable and continuous adaptation without retaining raw source data. The code is available at https://github.com/blue-531/DOALL.

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

HadBalance: A Plug-and-Play Unified Global Geometric Prior Framework for Generalizable Biomedical Segmentation

Precise biomedical image segmentation is crucial for clinical diagnosis. Geometric cues (e.g., boundary, shape, and topology) can improve structural consistency, yet most are task-specific and lack a unified geometric foundation that generalizes across organs and modalities. We are motivated by the observation that several medical segmentation targets can be approximated as globally near-convex shapes. A convex region is one in which any two interior points can be connected by a line segment entirely contained within the region. In practice, medical targets may exhibit small local concavities or boundary irregularities; we refer to such globally convex-like shapes as near-convex. Motivated by this, we derive Hadwiger Shape Priors from Hadwiger's theorem as an interpretable global regularizer using three 2D measures: area A, perimeter P, and Euler characteristic chi, enabling transfer across organs and modalities. However, because medical datasets are shape-heterogeneous, enforcing near-convex priors uniformly can over-regularize non-convex anatomy with significant concavities, washing out concavities and fine details and degrading segmentation accuracy. To address this challenge, we propose Conflict-Aware Objective Balancing (CAOB), which integrates shape priors with segmentation in a gradient-aware manner. For each prior, CAOB removes only the gradient component that conflicts with segmentation while preserving the remaining aligned component, and adaptively regulates objective influences to prevent prior dominance. This enables stable use of shape priors on shape-heterogeneous data without erasing genuine concavities or fine structural details. We call this plug-and-play framework HadBalance.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

ERQA-Plus: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Reasoning in Embodied AI

Generalist embodied agents require more than object recognition: they must reason about spatial relations, actions, procedures, human intentions, environmental constraints, and commonsense consequences from situated visual observations. Yet existing visual and embodied question answering benchmarks often provide limited control over the reasoning dependencies being tested, making it difficult to distinguish grounded embodied reasoning from shortcut-driven visual or linguistic pattern matching. We present ERQA-Plus, a diagnostic benchmark for reasoning in embodied AI. ERQA-Plus contains 1,766 question-answer instances grounded in 711 robot-centric images and organized according to a structured taxonomy spanning perceptual, action-centric, social-interaction, navigation-environmental, and contextual commonsense reasoning. The dataset is constructed using a multi-stage generation and validation pipeline that combines taxonomy-guided question generation, automatic quality judging, iterative revision, and human assessment to improve visual grounding, answer validity, and reasoning quality. We benchmark representative general-purpose vision-language models and embodied models, including LLaVA-NeXT-8B, Prismatic-7B, MiniCPM-V-4.5-8B, Qwen3-VL, RoboRefer-8B, and RoboBrain2.5-8B. Although the strongest model, Qwen3-VL-32B, achieves 83.4% overall accuracy and 61.4 SBERT score, category-level results reveal persistent weaknesses in spatial reasoning, procedural reasoning, event prediction, and intention inference. ERQA-Plus therefore provides a fine-grained evaluation framework for measuring not only whether embodied agents answer correctly, but also which forms of embodied reasoning they can and cannot perform reliably. The dataset is available https://huggingface.co/datasets/huggingdas/erqa-plus and the project page at https://github.com/LUNAProject22/erqa-plus.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Training-free sparse attention based on cumulative energy filtering

Sparse attention accelerates Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) for video generation by computing only the important tokens while skipping the rest. The token selection strategy is key to balancing sparsity and accuracy. We formulate the token filtering process as a dual-goal optimization problem: maximizing sparsity and minimizing accuracy degradation. Existing algorithms cannot fulfill both objectives simultaneously. For example, Top-p only considers the accuracy constraint, while Top-k maintains a fixed computational budget but loosens the accuracy constraint. This paper demonstrates that maintaining a fixed recall rate is sufficient for ensuring accuracy, whereas a fixed threshold is suboptimal for reducing computational cost. Therefore, we propose a dynamic thresholding scheme to improve sparsity while maintaining the same level of accuracy. Furthermore, our algorithm is deeply integrated with Flash Attention (FA), eliminating the need for any additional masking computation overhead. Experimental results on Wan 2.2 validate that, compared to the BLASST algorithm which is also integrated with FA, our dynamic thresholding strategy enhances sparsity from 61.42\% to 82\% with a VBench metric drop of less than 5\%. This results in an approximate 15\% in attention computation and a $1.61\times$ increase in computational efficiency, which is 1.18x higher than that of BLASST.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

When Does Language Matter? Multilingual Instructions Reveal Step-wise Language Sensitivity in Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown strong performance in language-conditioned robotic manipulation, yet their robustness to linguistic variation remains poorly understood. In this work, we present the first systematic multilingual evaluation of VLA models by translating the LIBERO benchmark into ten languages, revealing severe performance degradation under non-English instructions, with success rates dropping by 30-50%. Through fine-grained analysis of task executions, we find that language influence is highly non-uniform across steps: certain steps exhibit strong language dependence and dominate overall task failure, while others are largely language-agnostic. Based on this insight, we propose a step-wise inference-time intervention that aligns representations according to step language sensitivity, substantially improving performance under linguistic variation. Our results indicate that language robustness in VLA models is fundamentally a step-wise control problem, highlighting the importance of temporally structured analysis for reliable embodied agents.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Fractured Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Inference-time scaling techniques have significantly bolstered the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by harnessing additional computational effort at inference without retraining. Similarly, Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting and its extension, Long CoT, improve accuracy by generating rich intermediate reasoning trajectories, but these approaches incur substantial token costs that impede their deployment in latency-sensitive settings. In this work, we first show that truncated CoT, which stops reasoning before completion and directly generates the final answer, often matches the full CoT sampling while using dramatically fewer tokens. Building on this insight, we introduce Fractured Sampling, a unified inference-time strategy that interpolates between full CoT and solution-only sampling along three orthogonal axes: (1) the number of reasoning trajectories, (2) the number of final solutions per trajectory, and (3) the depth at which reasoning traces are truncated. Through extensive experiments on five diverse reasoning benchmarks and several model scales, we demonstrate that Fractured Sampling consistently achieves superior accuracy-cost trade-offs, yielding steep log-linear scaling gains in Pass@k versus token budget. Our analysis reveals how to allocate computation across these dimensions to maximize performance, paving the way for more efficient and scalable LLM reasoning. Code is available at https://github.com/BaohaoLiao/frac-cot.

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

Semantic Grading of Written Answers in Low-Resource Language Bangla Using a Fine-Tuned Lightweight Language Model

Bangla is among the world's most widely spoken languages, yet it remains underserved in educational NLP research. In many remote and rural regions, access to qualified subject teachers is limited, and written answers are consequently graded largely by hand, restricting timely and consistent feedback. Automatic assessment is challenging because semantically correct responses can vary substantially in surface form. We present a bilingual (Bangla-English) evaluation system designed for low-resource educational settings that prioritizes semantic correctness over lexical overlap. Our approach fine-tunes a lightweight language model to grade each response using the question, reference answer, and student answer, producing a numeric score and concise, context-grounded feedback suitable for classroom deployment. We also construct a synthetic bilingual dataset to enable controlled training and evaluation. Across proprietary and open-source LLMs evaluated under a unified protocol, our QLoRA-tuned Qwen3-8B confirms consistent improvement by producing the most leakage-resistant feedback (RoRa = 0.819) in synthetic evaluation and the strongest agreement with human scores (rho = 0.936, MAE = 0.725) in a dedicated human study.

25.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Large deviation principle for friendship-biases in Galton–Watson trees

arXiv:2606.17381v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper we consider the friendship-bias of the vertices in an infinite rooted Galton–Watson tree. The friendship-bias of a vertex is the difference between the average degree of the neighbours of the vertex and the degree of the vertex itself. A vertex is said to be of type $\chi \in S$, with $S = \{-,0,+\}$, when its friendship-bias is, respectively, strictly negative, zero or strictly positive. We consider the fractions $f_l^\chi$ of vertices of type $\chi \in S$ along a random downward path up to branching depth $l \in \mathbb{N}$ and derive a large deviation principle (LDP) for the triple $(f_l^\chi)_{\chi \in S}$ as $l\to\infty$. The branching depth of a vertex counts the number of branchings that occur along the path that connects the vertex to the root of the tree. The rate in the LDP is $l$, while the rate function in the LDP is identified in terms of a variational formula minimising a relative entropy under a linear constraint. We focus on the case of binary branching, for which the rate function is already quite involved. We identify the qualitative properties of the rate function and show how it can be computed numerically. We briefly indicate how to proceed for more general branching and for vertex types along a tree consisting of a finite number of random downward paths. Our paper is the first to consider large deviations of vertex types.