Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19993

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

Authors:

Nico Harder↗Daniel Becking↗Karsten Mueller↗Wojciech Samek↗

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

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02.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2603.09276

On Regret Bounds of Thompson Sampling for Bayesian Optimization

Authors:

Shion Takeno↗Shogo Iwazaki↗

arXiv:2603.09276v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study a widely used Bayesian optimization method, Gaussian process Thompson sampling (GP-TS), under the assumption that the objective function is a sample path from a GP. Compared with the GP upper confidence bound (GP-UCB) with established high-probability and expected regret bounds, most analyses of GP-TS have been limited to expected regret. Moreover, whether the recent analyses of GP-UCB for the lenient regret and the improved cumulative regret upper bound can be applied to GP-TS remains unclear. To fill these gaps, this paper shows several regret bounds: (i) a regret lower bound for GP-TS, which implies that GP-TS suffers from a polynomial dependence on $1/\delta$ with probability $\delta$, (ii) an upper bound of the second moment of cumulative regret, which directly suggests an improved regret upper bound on $\delta$, (iii) expected lenient regret upper bounds, and (iv) an improved cumulative regret upper bound on the time horizon $T$. Along the way, we provide several useful lemmas, including a relaxation of the necessary condition from recent analysis to obtain improved regret upper bounds on $T$.

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03.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11231

CFCamo: A Counterfactual Detect-or-Abstain Framework for Camouflaged Object Detection

Authors:

Suhang Li↗Osamu Yoshie↗Yuya Ieiri↗

Vision-language reinforcement learning has recently shown strong target-present localization for camouflaged object detection (COD). Yet localization is only one side of the decision: when the agent faces an ordinary image with no camouflaged target, will it still claim that a camouflaged object exists? Standard COD training and evaluation data are positive-only, so agents optimized under this setting can acquire an over-detect bias, a task-specific form of object hallucination that standard COD evaluation leaves unmeasured. To quantify this target-absent behavior, we construct Counterfactual COD (CF-COD), a paired benchmark that removes the camouflaged target from each held-out COD evaluation image while preserving a plausible background. CF-COD evaluates whether a model detects the target on the original image and abstains on the target-absent counterfactual, summarized by Pair Accuracy (PA). We further introduce CFCamo, a paired counterfactual framework for COD with abstention. For training, CFCamo optimizes a Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct agent with Counterfactual Sequence Policy Optimization (CSPO), which samples paired original-counterfactual rollouts and uses a Counterfactual Paired Reward (CPR) to couple original-image detection with counterfactual abstention. On CAMO-test, CFCamo improves S_alpha by +3.7 pp over the prior RL-based COD baseline; across CF-COD, it reaches 80.0-90.8% PA. Ablations show that removing counterfactual coupling reduces PA to 1.4-5.2% despite strong target-present COD scores, showing that target-present evaluation alone does not characterize detect-or-abstain behavior. Overall, these results indicate that CFCamo improves COD agents by coupling target-present detection with target-absent abstention, rather than merely strengthening target-present localization. Code and data are available at https://github.com/suhang2000/CFCamo.

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04.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19 DOI: HASH:9267e5dd2337c1a7844123940f8ef492

Perturbation Curve models continuous transcriptional response trajectories and improves prediction of genetic modulations

Authors:

Zhong↗wang↗Yang↗Yu↗Qi↗Jiang↗

Single-cell CRISPR screens, Perturb-seq, have revolutionized functional genomics by revealing biological causality. However, although perturbation assignments are typically represented as discrete labels, the cell-level effective strength of perturbations is often continuous and diverse. Current analytical frameworks struggle to decouple the variability in perturbation strength from the diversity of downstream responses. Here, we present Perturbation Curve (PertCurve), a nonlinear, curve-based computational framework that models the trajectories of transcriptomic responses by explicitly incorporating diverse perturbation magnitudes and strengths. By ordering cells by perturbation strength, we demonstrate that PertCurve accurately recapitulates the response magnitudes and reveals the distinct modularity and asynchrony patterns of downstream gene behaviors. These patterns are categorized into archetypes, including proportional, sensitive, and threshold responses. By applying this framework across CRISPRi/a modalities, we identify universal response patterns in viral infection, apoptosis, and proliferation genes, and reveal previously overlooked context-specific regulatory features in cell differentiation. Finally, incorporating PertCurve into perturbation prediction models and evaluation metrics enhances predictive performance, delivering actionable insights for refining established models.

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05.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16885

The Winner Takes It All

Authors:

P. L. Krapivsky↗

arXiv:2606.16885v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The winner-takes-all (WTA) process takes place on an arbitrary graph. There is an agent on each vertex of the graph, and active agents at neighboring vertices play games. In each game, a randomly chosen agent wins, while the loser is eliminated from subsequent games. The games are played at random times; each game finishes instantaneously, and the games cease when each active agent has only losers among its neighbors. On the one-dimensional lattice, the fraction of winners in the final state is $e^{-1}$, and we also determine the fractions $w_j$ of winners who won $j=0, 1, 2$ games. For the WTA process on a segment, we determine statistics of the total number of winners (the average, the variance, and all higher cumulants), the probabilities of reaching the final state with the minimum or maximum number of winners, and establish the behavior near the boundaries. For infinite regular trees with vertices of degree $d$, i.e., Bethe lattices with coordination number $d$, the fraction of winners is $(2/d)^{d/(d-2)}$.

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06.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.06564

HAARES Half-Split Residual Basis Routing for Deep Transformers

Authors:

Kehan Wang↗

arXiv:2606.06564v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Block-level residual routing makes learned residual aggregation practical by routing over block summaries, but each summary compresses an ordered sequence of attention and MLP updates into one cumulative vector. We propose \method{}, a lightweight residual basis router that keeps the cumulative block source and adds one half-split detail basis, computed as the difference between first-half and second-half residual updates. The detail basis is RMS-matched and updated online, exposing coarse intra-block trajectory information without dense sublayer-level routing. Across OpenWebText, cross-domain character-level benchmarks, and BPE-tokenized OpenWebText, the empirical pattern is depth-dependent: gains are small or mixed at shallow depth and most reliable in 48-layer models. In the 201M 48-layer setting, \method{} improves over Block AttnRes across all three seeds, while a 453M two-seed probe shows the same direction. Ablations rule out source duplication, random signed details, fixed detail-source biases, or block-count changes alone. Cost analysis shows that the method is FLOP-light but not wall-clock-free: it adds memory and routing overhead, yet its relative arithmetic cost is amortized as width grows and earlier convergence can reduce time-to-target.

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07.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.12054

Simplicity Suffices for Parameter Noise Injection in Stochastic Gradient Descent

Authors:

Benjamin Leblanc↗Louis-Jacob Lebel↗Teddy Kana↗Richard Kamel↗

arXiv:2606.12054v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Injecting noise into the optimization process is a well-established technique for improving the training and generalization of deep neural networks. Yet, despite the breadth of existing approaches, it remains unclear which design choices truly matter in practice. In this work, we investigate parameter noise injection for stochastic gradient descent, focusing on two key questions: how to efficiently pair each training example with its own perturbation in mini-batch training, and whether sophisticated noise parameterizations or multi-sample gradient averaging yield meaningful gains over simpler alternatives. To address the first question, we leverage a distributional identity for linear layers that allows per-example noise injection without breaking batched computation. To address the second, we systematically compare several diagonal Gaussian parameterizations against an isotropic baseline across varying noise levels on CIFAR100. Our results consistently show that simple, lightweight strategies, isotropic noise with a single perturbed forward pass per update step, recover most of the benefit of more complex schemes. These findings suggest that simplicity suffices for parameter noise injection, and that practitioners need not resort to elaborate perturbation designs to reap the optimization and generalization benefits of noisy SGD.

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08.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2508.09459

RelayFormer: A Unified Local-Global Attention Framework for Scalable Image and Video Manipulation Localization

Authors:

Wen Huang↗Jiarui Yang↗Tao Dai↗Jiawei Li↗Shaoxiong Zhan↗Bin Wang↗Shu-Tao Xia↗

Visual manipulation localization (VML) aims to identify tampered regions in images and videos, a task that has become increasingly challenging with the rise of advanced editing tools. Existing methods face two central issues. The first is resolution diversity. Resizing or padding can distort subtle forensic cues and introduce unnecessary computational cost. The second is the difficulty of extending spatial models for images to spatio-temporal inputs in videos, which often results in maintaining separate architectures for the two data types. To address these challenges, we propose RelayFormer, a unified framework that adapts to varying resolutions and naturally handles both static and temporal visual data. RelayFormer partitions inputs into fixed-size sub-images and introduces Global Local Relay (GLR) tokens that propagate structured context through a relay-based attention mechanism. This design enables efficient exchange of global cues, such as semantic or temporal consistency, while preserving fine-grained manipulation artifacts. Unlike prior approaches that depend on uniform resizing or sparse attention, RelayFormer scales to variable resolutions and video sequences with minimal overhead. Experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate superior performance and strong efficiency, combining resolution adaptivity without interpolation or excessive padding, unified processing for images and videos, and a favorable balance between accuracy and computational cost. Code is available at~\href{https://github.com/WenOOI/RelayFormer}{https://github.com/WenOOI/RelayFormer}.

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09.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2509.00064

OpenTie: Open-vocabulary Sequential Rebar Tying System

Authors:

Sai Fan↗Mingze Liu↗Haozhen Li↗Haobo Liang↗Yixing Yuan↗Yanke Wang↗

Robotic practices on the construction site emerge as an attention-attracting manner owing to their capability of tackling complex challenges, especially in the rebar-involved scenarios. Most of existing products and research are mainly focused on the collection of large amounts of data with model training demands. To fulfill this gap, we propose OpenTie, a 3D training-free rebar tying framework utilizing a RGB-to-point-cloud generation and an open-vocabulary rebar detection on the real-world test. We implement the OpenTie via a robotic arm with a binocular camera and guarantee a high accuracy by applying the prompt-based object detection method on the image filtered by our proposed post-processing procedure for the image-to-point-cloud generation framework. Our pipeline requires no training efforts and outperforms the training-based object detection, i.e., YOLO-based method, with the verification on the real-world sequential rebar tying test. The system is flexible for horizontal and vertical rebar tying tasks and holds the potential application to the real construction site with possibility of commercialization.

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10.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17536

OmniDrive: An LLM-Choreographed Multi-Agent World Model with Unified Latent Co-Compression for Multi-View Driving Video Generation

Authors:

Zijie Meng↗Yufei Liu↗Chengqian Ma↗Zhiyu Li↗Jiyuan Liu↗Wenhua Nie↗Bingcai Wei↗Shuqin Chen↗Weichen Xu↗Jiquan Yuan↗Miao Zhang↗

Generative world models for autonomous driving face two unresolved tensions: heterogeneous control injection, where free-form language, HD-maps, trajectories, and camera poses reside in incompatible representational spaces, and post-hoc cross-view fusion, where per-camera latents fail to encode global 3-D geometry. We trace both to a single root cause: the absence of a shared symbolic interlingua aligning language, geometry, and pixels at the latent-token level. We present DRIVE-CHOREO, an LLM-choreographed multi-agent world model that recasts controllable multi-view video generation as latent choreography. Three Qwen2.5-VL agents - a Director parsing user intent into a structured WorldScript, a Cartographer grounding it into spatially-anchored layout tokens, and an Auditor feeding cross-view critiques back as auxiliary supervision - jointly author a single position-aware token sequence. This sequence is co-compressed with the multi-view video via a view-time permutation that enforces inter-camera geometry within the convolutional receptive field of a 3-D VAE. On nuScenes, DRIVE-CHOREO sets new state-of-the-art multi-view consistency and BEV mAP (21.6) with competitive FVD (45.7); a detector trained purely on our synthetic data gains +2.4 NDS on the real validation split, validating downstream utility.

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11.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19679

LOKI: Memory-Free Null-Space Constrained Lifelong Knowledge Editing

Authors:

Masih Eskandar↗Miquel Sirera Perell\'o↗Stratis Ioannidis↗Jennifer Dy↗

arXiv:2606.19679v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Lifelong knowledge editing aims to efficiently and sequentially update language models over time, as new knowledge becomes available or when the model makes mistakes, while preserving acceptable performance on past knowledge. One unresolved challenge is that existing methods modify a fixed set of layers for all new knowledge samples, reducing flexibility and increasing catastrophic forgetting. Another is requiring access to previous knowledge and extensive pre-processing to obtain data statistics. To address these challenges, we introduce LOKI, a novel approach that uses dynamic layer selection based on the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion and projects gradient updates onto the null-space of the model weights, bypassing the requirement for previous knowledge access. We show that LOKI achieves superior performance to existing approaches across a wide variety of experiments, achieving up to a 14\% improvement in average accuracy.

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12.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12413

AI SciBrief as a Gateway to Research: A Framework for Onboarding Students into New Research Areas

Authors:

Andrei Lazarev↗Dmitrii Sedov↗

Students at all levels of higher education face a significant barrier in the form of information overload, which often paralyzes the initial stages of the research process and suppresses motivation. In response, this article introduces a pedagogical framework that leverages AI SciBrief, a platform powered by a Large Language Model (LLM) designed to automatically generate digests of scientific trends. We describe how this multidisciplinary tool - with initial coverage in finance, medicine, and education - can be integrated into the curriculum to overcome this "entry barrier." The framework provides concrete methodologies for utilizing these digests to facilitate topic selection for term papers, accelerate literature reviews for dissertations, and enable postgraduate students to continuously monitor emerging trends. We conclude that AI SciBrief functions as a "gateway to research" effectively reducing students' cognitive load and empowering them to transition more rapidly from information searching to knowledge creation.

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13.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2505.16120

LLM-Powered AI Agent Systems and Their Applications in Industry

Authors:

Guannan Liang↗Qianqian Tong↗

arXiv:2505.16120v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has reshaped agent systems. Unlike traditional rule-based agents with limited task scope, LLM-powered agents offer greater flexibility, cross-domain reasoning, and natural language interaction. Moreover, with the integration of multi-modal LLMs, current agent systems are highly capable of processing diverse data modalities, including text, images, audio, and structured tabular data, enabling richer and more adaptive real-world behavior. This paper comprehensively examines the evolution of agent systems from the pre-LLM era to current LLM-powered architectures. We categorize agent systems into software-based, physical, and adaptive hybrid systems, highlighting applications across customer service, software development, manufacturing automation, personalized education, financial trading, and healthcare. We further discuss the primary challenges posed by LLM-powered agents, including high inference latency, output uncertainty, lack of evaluation metrics, and security vulnerabilities, and propose potential solutions to mitigate these concerns.

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14.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2507.00783

Generative AI and the future of scientometrics: current topics and future questions

Authors:

Benedetto Lepori↗Jens Peter Andersen↗Karsten Donnay↗

In this paper, we contribute to the debate on generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in scientometrics. We argue that moving from a trial-and-error approach to an explainable and actionable use requires a principled understanding of strengths and weaknesses of GenAI as compared with other techniques and with human judgment. To this end, we introduce a conceptual framework based on the distinction between the semantic dimensions of texts, i.e. the meanings attributed to words, and their pragmatic dimension, i.e. their embedding within communicative situations. We leverage this framework to interpret the results of applications of GenAI in scientometrics and to provide guidance to users. Specifically, we conclude that key parameters to be considered are the nature of the task, the level of granularity of the analysis and whether the goal was descriptive, inferential or evaluative. These parameters lead to different strategies for using GenAI and human-machine integration. Finally, we suggest that, by generating large amounts of scientific language, GenAI might affect textual characteristics used to measure science, such as authors, words, and references. We argue that careful empirical work and theoretical reflection will be essential to remain capable of interpreting the evolving patterns of knowledge production in the age of AI.

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15.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13135

Cascade Classification of Dermoscopic Images of Skin Neoplasms with Controllable Sensitivity and External Clinical Validation

Authors:

Elena S. Kozachok↗Sergey S. Seregin↗Aleksandr V. Kozachok↗Ilya P. Latyshev↗Oleg I. Samovarov↗

Purpose. To compare deep learning architectures and classification schemes for dermoscopic images of skin neoplasms and assess their generalization on transfer from open international datasets to independent clinical datasets of Russian practice. Methods. Four architectures (ViT-B/16, Swin-S, ConvNeXt-S, EfficientNetV2-S) were compared in three schemes: binary (malignant/benign), single-stage four-class (benign, MEL, SCC, BCC), and a two-stage cascade (binary triage, then three-class differentiation MEL/SCC/BCC). All models used ImageNet-pretrained weights and a single augmentation protocol on aggregated open ISIC Archive data, and were evaluated on an internal held-out sample and two clinical datasets (Melanoscope AI mobile system; Sechenov University). Results. Internally the binary stage attains ROC-AUC 0.952-0.966; on Sechenov University it drops to 0.797-0.893, sensitivity to 0.53-0.67, and ECE rises from 0.02 to 0.27-0.39 with underestimation of malignancy, quantifying a generalization gap in ranking and calibration. Paired tests confirm one inter-architecture result on clinical data: the deficit of ViT-B/16 at the binary stage (p

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16.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2602.09689

Model soups need only one ingredient

Authors:

Alireza Abdollahpoorrostam↗Nikolaos Dimitriadis↗Adam Hazimeh↗Pascal Frossard↗

arXiv:2602.09689v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fine-tuning large pre-trained models on a target distribution often improves in-distribution (ID) accuracy, but at the cost of out-of-distribution (OOD) robustness as representations specialize to the fine-tuning data. Weight-space ensembling methods, such as Model Soups, mitigate this effect by averaging multiple checkpoints, but they are computationally prohibitive, requiring the training and storage of dozens of fine-tuned models. In this paper, we introduce MonoSoup, a simple, data-free, hyperparameter-free, post-hoc method that achieves a strong ID-OOD balance using only a single checkpoint. Our method applies Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to each layer's update and decomposes it into high-energy directions that capture task-specific adaptation and low-energy directions that introduce noise but may still encode residual signals useful for robustness. MonoSoup then uses entropy-based effective rank to automatically re-weigh these components with layer-wise coefficients that account for the spectral and geometric structure of the model. Experiments on CLIP models fine-tuned on ImageNet and evaluated under natural distribution shifts, as well as on Qwen language models tested on mathematical reasoning and multiple-choice benchmarks, show that this plug-and-play approach is a practical and effective alternative to multi-checkpoint methods, retaining much of their benefits without their computational overhead.

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17.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20419

Spectral Query-Key Product Weight Steering for Training-Free VLM Hallucination Mitigation

Authors:

Karn Tiwari↗Varnith Chordia↗Prathosh A P↗

Vision-language models (VLMs) often generate fluent but visually unsupported descriptions, especially by mentioning objects absent from the image. We propose QK Product Steering, a data-free, training-free, and zero-inference-cost weight edit for reducing object hallucination. The method directly edits the per-head query-key product, the operator that produces pre-softmax attention logits, by suppressing a small number of dominant singular modes in selected middle layers. The edited product is then mapped back to the query weights through a closed-form query-only update while keeping shared key weights fixed, making the edit compatible with grouped-query attention. We further decompose the QK product into symmetric and antisymmetric components to distinguish mutual content-similarity patterns from directional attention patterns. Across three GQA-based VLMs, QK Product Steering achieves an average relative CHAIR$_s$ reduction of $4.0\%$, while matched random-mode controls show negligible change. Interpretability ablations show that the hallucination signal is specific to dominant QK modes and is primarily localized to the symmetric mutual-attention channel. Overall, QK Product Steering offers a simple alternative to decoding-time mitigation, requiring no additional data, fine-tuning, or inference-time overhead while largely preserving general multimodal capability.

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18.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15307

Adapting Reinforcement Learning with Chain-of-Thought Supervision for Explainable Detection of Hateful and Propagandistic Memes

Authors:

Mohamed Bayan Kmainasi↗Mucahid Kutlu↗Ali Ezzat Shahroor↗Abul Hasnat↗Firoj Alam↗

Hateful and propagandistic memes exploit the interplay between images and text to convey harmful intent that neither modality reveals alone. Although thinking-based multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have advanced vision-language understanding, their application to meme content moderation remains underexplored. We propose a reinforcement learning-based post-training method that improves classification performance and reference-based explanation quality in thinking-based MLLMs via task-specific rewards and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Concretely, we (i) conduct a systematic empirical study of off-the-shelf MLLMs for hateful and propagandistic meme understanding across English and Arabic benchmarks, (ii) extend existing meme datasets with weakly supervised chain-of-thought (CoT) rationales via distillation and multi-LLM fine-grained propaganda annotations, (iii) introduce a GRPO-based objective with thinking-length regularization that jointly optimizes classification accuracy and explanation quality, and (iv) investigate self-supervised GRPO on unlabeled memes using consensus-based pseudo-labels. Experiments on the Hateful Memes and ArMeme benchmarks show that our approach improves over previously reported results on FHM accuracy (up to +2.1%, from 79.9% to 82.0%) and on ArMeme macro-F1 (up to +7.6 points, from 0.536 to 0.612 with explanations; +6.1 compared to the original ArMeme benchmark), while also generating natural-language explanations. On ArMeme, sequence-classification baselines remain stronger in terms of raw accuracy, whereas our approach provides more balanced per-class performance along with explanations. We publicly release our code, data extensions, and evaluation resources.

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19.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19560

Understanding Key Features of Time Series Foundation Models from Epidemic Forecasting

Authors:

Alireza Jafari↗Judy Fox↗Geoffrey C. Fox↗Madhav Marathe↗Aniruddha Adiga↗

arXiv:2606.19560v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Seasonal influenza infects millions of people and causes substantial morbidity and mortality in the United States each year, making accurate short-term forecasting a core public-health need. Reliable forecasts of epidemic time series can inform vaccination timing, hospital staffing, and resource allocation, yet the comparative behavior of modern forecasting architectures on infectious-disease surveillance data remains insufficiently characterized. We address this gap through a systematic evaluation of regional influenza forecasting using influenza-like illness surveillance and influenza-associated hospitalization time series under both temporal and spatial generalization settings for 1-4-week-ahead prediction. We compare classical neural network architectures, numerical transformer-based models, pretrained time series foundation models, and LLM-based forecasting approaches. Across tasks, we demonstrate that a mixture-of-experts model that fuses multiple pretrained forecasters achieves the strongest overall performance, indicating that heterogeneous pretrained representations provide complementary predictive information. Our results further show that numerical transformer-based models produce reliable forecasts, while pretraining provides the largest gains at longer horizons, particularly when the pretraining domain is mechanistically aligned with influenza dynamics. In contrast, LLM-based time series methods underperform relative to numerical forecasters in this setting. Finally, we examine hospitalization information as both an auxiliary covariate and a pretraining source. Hospitalization signals provide complementary improvements in selected settings and clarify when additional surveillance streams enhance the robustness of multi-horizon forecasting. These findings provide actionable guidance on model selection, pretraining strategy, and auxiliary-signal use for influenza preparedness.

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20.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2604.17253

Large Deviations for the Nonlinear Schrödinger Equation with Randomized Quasi-Periodic Initial Data in Higher Dimensions: Subcritical Case

Authors:

Fei Xu↗Yong Li↗

arXiv:2604.17253v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the cubic weakly nonlinear Schrödinger equation with randomized spatially quasi-periodic initial data in higher dimensions. Under a polynomial decay assumption in Fourier space, we establish a Large Deviations Principle for rogue waves in the so-called subcritical time regime. The proof proceeds in two main steps. We first characterize the distribution of the linear solution and establish the corresponding linear large deviations principle. The lower bound is obtained via pointwise estimates, while the upper bound follows from a combination of truncation and probabilistic arguments. {The method used in this step appears to be new; compare with [GGKS23].} We then perform a detailed combinatorial analysis of the Picard iteration, deriving an effective bound for the Duhamel term and thereby establishing the nonlinear large deviations principle.

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21.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2505.18367

Improving Variational Counterdiabatic Driving with Weighted Actions and Computer Algebra

Authors:

Naruo Ohga↗Takuya Hatomura↗

arXiv:2505.18367v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Variational counterdiabatic (CD) driving is a disciplined and widely used method to robustly control quantum many-body systems by mimicking adiabatic processes with high fidelity and reduced duration. Central to this technique is a universal structure of the adiabatic gauge potential (AGP) over a parameterized Hamiltonian. Here, we reveal that introducing a new degree of freedom into the theory of the AGP can significantly improve variational CD driving. Specifically, we find that the algebraic characterization of the AGP is not unique, and we exploit this nonuniqueness to develop the weighted variational method for deriving a refined driving protocol. This approach extends the conventional method in two aspects: it assigns customized weights to matrix elements relevant to specific problems, and it effectively incorporates nonlocal information into local driving coefficients. We also develop an efficient numerical algorithm to compute the refined driving protocol using computer algebra. Our framework is broadly applicable and, in principle, it can replace any previous use of variational CD driving. We demonstrate its practicality by applying it to adiabatic evolution along the ground state of a parameterized Hamiltonian. This proposal outperforms the conventional method in terms of fidelity, as confirmed by extensive numerical simulations on quantum Ising models.

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22.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2604.17805

Ranking Abuse via Strategic Pairwise Data Perturbations

Authors:

Junyi Yao↗Zihao Zheng↗Jiayu Long↗

arXiv:2604.17805v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Pairwise ranking systems based on Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE), such as the Bradley-Terry model, are widely used to aggregate preferences from pairwise comparisons. However, their robustness under strategic data manipulation remains insufficiently understood. In this paper, we study the vulnerability of MLE-based ranking systems to adversarial perturbations. We formulate the manipulation task as a constrained combinatorial optimization problem and propose an Adaptive Subset Selection Attack (ASSA) to efficiently identify high-impact perturbations. Experimental results on both synthetic data and real-world election datasets show that MLE-based rankings exhibit a sharp phase-transition behavior: beyond a small perturbation budget, a limited number of strategic voters can significantly alter the global ranking. In particular, our method consistently outperforms random and greedy baselines under constrained budgets. These findings reveal a fundamental sensitivity of MLE-based ranking mechanisms to structured perturbations and highlight the need for more robust aggregation methods in collective decision-making systems.

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23.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2602.00482

AREAL-DTA: Dynamic Tree Attention for Efficient Reinforcement Learning of Large Language Models

Authors:

Jiarui Zhang↗Yuchen Yang↗Ran Yan↗Zhiyu Mei↗Liyuan Zhang↗Daifeng Li↗Wei Fu↗Jiaxuan Gao↗Shusheng Xu↗Yi Wu↗Binhang Yuan↗

arXiv:2602.00482v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training for large language models (LLMs) is computationally expensive, as it generates many rollout sequences that frequently share long token prefixes. Existing RL frameworks usually process these sequences independently during policy training, i.e., repeatedly recomputing identical prefixes in both the forward and backward passes of policy gradient computation, leading to substantial inefficiencies in computation resources and memory usage. Although prefix sharing naturally induces a tree structure over rollouts, packed tree-mask approaches scale poorly in RL settings. In this paper, we introduce AReaL-DTA, which efficiently exploits prefix sharing in RL training. AReaL-DTA employs a depth-first search (DFS)-based execution strategy that dynamically traverses the rollout prefix tree during both forward and backward computation, materializing only a single root-to-leaf path at a time. To further improve scalability, AReaL-DTA incorporates a load-balanced distributed batching mechanism that dynamically constructs and processes prefix trees across multiple GPUs. On $\tau^2$-bench, AReaL-DTA improves training throughput by up to $8.31\times$ over dense training and up to $1.70\times$ over sparse training. Our code is available at https://github.com/areal-project/AReaL/tree/feat/dta.

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24.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12646

Epistemic Uncertainty Is Not the Reducible Kind

Authors:

Robin Young↗

arXiv:2606.12646v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The standard taxonomy of predictive uncertainty defines epistemic uncertainty as the part removable by collecting more data, while the standard measure identifies it with a mutual-information term. We prove the definition and the measure are extensionally inconsistent. On an explicit construction, the measure assigns all uncertainty to the epistemic class, yet no quantity of training data reduces it. Reducibility is instead a property of the pair (uncertainty, acquisition class), and the dichotomy resolves into three parts: aleatoric, sample-reducible epistemic, and mechanism-reducible epistemic uncertainty. An exact identity for the value of an observation shows that in-distribution data never reduces mechanism-irreducible uncertainty and generically increases it. Ensemble disagreement, the deployed epistemic estimate, tracks the training procedure rather than the epistemic term. It collapses to zero beneath a positive truth under consistent training, and equals hyperparameter-scaled initialization noise under interpolation. A finite-sample falsification test and seed-swept experiments confirm the theory.

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25.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12914

Quantum charge pumping in helical systems: A comparative study of short- and long-range hopping

Authors:

Leila Eslami↗Santanu K. Maiti↗Fatemeh Bourbour↗

arXiv:2606.12914v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Using the Keldysh non-equilibrium Green's function approach, we investigate charge pumping through a single-stranded helical structure described by a tight-binding model that includes either short-range hopping (SRH) or long-range hopping (LRH). While quantum pumping has been studied in various low-dimensional systems, the detailed behavior of the spectral current and the pumped dc current in helical geometries in the presence of higher-order electron hopping (beyond nearest neighbors) has not yet been systematically explored. Here, we focus on the interplay between helicity and extended hopping ranges, analyzing how they jointly control the energy-resolved and dc pumped currents under time-periodic end potentials. For LRH, the pumped dc current exhibits pronounced plateau-like regions as a function of chemical potential when energy levels are sparsely spaced – consistent with adiabatic transport – whereas SRH yields more parameter-sensitive currents without clear plateaus. The plateau stability is controlled by the drive frequency: at higher frequencies, Floquet side-band mixing destroys the plateaus, leading to oscillatory currents. The phase dependence remains nearly sinusoidal, and the current vanishes at zero phase lag, confirming the necessity of out-of-phase potentials. Crucially, in helical systems, the decay exponent $(\ell_c)$ acts as an effective structural parameter that can tune both the magnitude and sign of the pumped current, offering a geometric knob for controlling quantum pumping. Our findings not only fill a gap in the understanding of spectral and pumped currents in helical systems with extended hopping but also provide tools that can be applied to analyze similar phenomena in other chiral or quasi-one-dimensional systems.

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